MAPLEWOOD - The man who leaked thousands of pages of top secret documents to the media in 1971 to expose the U.S. government's handling of the Vietnam War warned Saturday that another terrorist attack could permanently damage civil liberties.

Daniel Ellsberg, the former U.S. intelligence official responsible for leaking the so-called Pentagon Papers to The New York Times and 18 other newspapers, told an audience of about 400 that the Bush administration most likely would respond to any terror attack on U.S. soil by severely restricting freedom of the press and the individual's right to speak out.

"In a time of fear, I believe that the majority of the American people will cling to authority," Ellsberg told the gathering at Columbia High School for New Jersey Peace Action's annual luncheon.

"And if there is another terror attack," Ellsberg added sarcastically, "I believe the president will get what he wants. And what he wants is a new Patriot Act, one that will make the current Patriot Act look like the Bill of Rights."

The Patriot Act, originally passed by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, is up for renewal.

To combat terrorism, it gave law enforcement leeway into probing the private lives of Americans - allowing for easier wiretaps, incarceration without charges, monitoring of computer use and even checking on books borrowed from libraries. Some members of Congress expressed alarm recently that the FBI had initiated 30,000 investigations of private e-mail accounts last year.

Now the Patriot Act is up for renewal, and the Bush administration is seeking even tougher measures. Ellsberg, 74, said he worries that with the Iraq war at a stalemate, a terrorist attack on American soil was "not just possible, but highly likely." Were that to happen, Ellsberg predicted that Bush would respond by escalating the war on terror - possibly to include military action against Syria or Iran - while pushing for harsher restrictions against dissent at home.

Ellsberg said that as part of Patriot Act revisions, Bush most likely would push for an Official Secrets Act - one that would make it a crime for whistle-blowers to reveal government secrets to the public. And he added, such a ban probably would apply to journalists as well.

Ellsberg worked as an analyst for the RAND Corp. in the 1960s, which conducted a huge study of U.S. policy in Vietnam. That study, which was top secret and eventually numbered 7,000 pages, is the story of what went wrong in Vietnam. Once leaked to The Times, the document became known as the Pentagon Papers, and it told of the official lies by the Johnson and Nixon administrations that the war in Vietnam was winnable.

The Nixon administration tried to prevent publication of the Pentagon Papers, but the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the public's right to know. Ellsberg eventually stood trial for leaking official secrets, but the government eventually dropped the case.

Ellsberg said Saturday that he had grave doubts he would enjoy the same freedom today.

"I don't think the current Supreme Court would see it that way," he told the audience. He added that should an Official Secrets Act be adopted, "leaks would be a thing of the past."

He drew parallels between the Valerie Plame affair and the beginning of the Vietnam War. Plame was outed as a CIA agent after her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador, said the Bush administration lied about the reason for the invasion of Iraq. Wilson disputed the administration's claim that Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase uranium from Niger to make nuclear weapons.

Ellsberg pointed out that the government said the Johnson administration also lied about the second Gulf of Tonkin incident on Aug. 2, 1964. At the time, President Lyndon Johnson claimed that a U.S. destroyer had been attacked by a North Vietnamese patrol boat in the Gulf of Tonkin, but Ellsberg said the incident never happened.

Ellsberg said that like Vietnam, America was in for a long war in Iraq, one that could possibly spread around the Middle East. "There are other wars ahead, and a long way to go," he said.

Members of the audience gave Ellsberg a standing ovation at the end of his hourlong presentation. As he hurried out the door to catch a train, attendees were left to contemplate what to do after the applause died down.

"I felt terrified by what he said," said Zella Geltman of West Orange. "What can we do to save ourselves?"

Eleanor Mason of Morris Plains said the best thing to do is keep speaking out. "We are patriotic Americans, and we don't want war," she said. "We need to keep saying this until the government is forced to listen to us."

Ellsberg is scheduled to speak at 3:30 p.m. Monday at Ramapo College in Mahwah and at 12:30 p.m. Tuesday at Wiliam Paterson University in Wayne.

Having exposed the EU’s intentions regarding data retention in a news article on Slyck, it comes as little surprise to hear that similar moves are afoot in the USA. Intelligence agencies already have full access to ISPs in those countries participating in the Echelon electronic spying network (Australia, Canada, the UK and the USA), and these latest measures are intended to extend similar powers to a wide range of other agencies.

This latest move has arisen in response to representations made by the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency out of concern that emerging technologies “were making it increasingly difficult for law enforcement agencies to execute authorized surveillance”. As a consequence, the US communications governing body, the Federal Communications Commission issued a final Order effective Monday November 14th compelling all broadband Internet service providers and many Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, companies to include backdoors allowing police and many other enforcement agencies to directly eavesdrop on their customers by April 2007.

Curiously the deadline for consultation also ends this Monday, which happens to be the very day the 59 page Order becomes effective. The FCC acknowledge that this is confusing and say that they will be issuing further directives in forthcoming months to clarify issues such as P2P voice communications (as apart from VoIP) and whether educational establishments are considered ISPs in their own rights. ISPs will have 18 months from November 14th to fully comply.

This move supplements and updates the 11 year old Communications Alliance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which dealt with the issue of wiretapping on telecommunications carriers, and addresses the concern that emerging technologies such as VoIP, IM and Emails all lie outside the scope of existing legislation.

Clearly VoIP is causing great consternation to government agencies, as highlighted by Deputy Assistant Attorney General Laura Parsky when emotively addressing a Senate panel on homeland security issues back in June stating "It is even more critical today than (when CALEA was enacted in) 1994 that advances in communications technology (do) not provide a haven for criminal activity and an undetectable means of death and destruction".

Two separate legal challenges have been mounted by EFF, trade group CompTel , VoIP provider Pulver.com, The Center for Technology & Democracy and the Electronic Privacy Information in alliance, with the American Council for Education mounting a parallel challenge. Preliminary hearings are imminent.

In the meantime Douglas Sullivan of Verizon has been reported as saying that they have been working with vendors over the issue of compliant systems for several years, although he expressed concern at the cost implications and how it will operate. Brian Dietz of the National Cable and Television Association is also reported as having said that his members have been working with the FBI in anticipation of this legislation for some time.

Coming on top of our report that the EU now plans to compel all ISPs throughout Europe to keep records of internet activity for 12 months, with telephone records being retained for "at least" 6 months, this is a troubling – if not entirely unpredicted - development for those living in the USA.

The Iraqi government has begun an investigation into the alleged abuse of more than 170 prisoners who were found locked in an interior ministry bunker in Baghdad, many of them beaten and malnourished and some apparently brutally tortured.

US troops who were searching for a missing teenage boy discovered the detainees on Sunday night during a raid. They were found in an underground cell near an interior ministry bunker in Jadiriya, in middle of the city. "I was informed that there were 173 detainees held at an interior ministry prison and they appear to be malnourished," prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari said. "There is talk that they were subjected to torture," he said.

Earlier a deputy interior minister put the number of prisoners at 161 and said he was stunned by their treatment. "They were being treated in an inappropriate way ... they were being abused," Hussein Kamal told Reuters.

"I've never seen such a situation like this during the past two years in Baghdad. This is the worst," he told CNN. "I saw signs of physical abuse by brutal beating, one or two detainees were paralysed and some had their skin peeled off."

US military sources said troops were shocked when they came across the prisoners, some of whom showed the marks of beatings and looked like they had not been fed well for weeks. "It's not what we expected, we were looking for a 15-year-old boy," a soldier from the US 3rd Infantry Division, the Baghdad-based force which conducted the raid, told Reuters.

Reports received by the Guardian from sources in Baghdad said there were rumours that mutilated corpses and torture instruments had also been found at the underground bunker, including bodies with electric drill holes in their heads.

Mohsen Abdul-Hamid, the head of the country's largest Sunni political party, told the Associated Press he had personally spoken to Mr Jaafari and other government officials about torture at interior ministry detention centres, including the one where the detainees were found. But, he said, the government routinely dismissed his complaints, calling the prisoners "former regime elements."

"According to our knowledge, regrettably, all the detainees were Sunnis," said Mr Abdul-Hamid, head of the Iraqi Islamic Party. "In order to search for a terrorist, they used to detain hundreds of innocent people and torture them brutally."

Most insurgents are Sunni Arabs, who were dominant under Saddam Hussein's regime but lost power after he was ousted. The interior ministry is controlled by Shias, and Sunni leaders have accused Shia dominated security forces of detaining, torturing and killing hundreds of Sunnis simply because of their religious affiliation. Mr Jaafari, who is a Shia, said one of his deputies will be heading the investigating committee, which will include some ministers and is due to finish its work within two weeks. "They should investigate how this happened and how it reached this point," Mr Jaafari said.

Meanwhile in Washington two Iraqi businessmen detained by US forces in 2003 have claimed soldiers threw them into a cage of lions, pretended to be executing them, and carried out other acts of torture during months in captivity.

Sherzad Khalid, 35, and Thahe Sabbar, 37, are suing defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other US officials in a federal court in Washington. They said they had been abused because they could not tell their captors where Saddam Hussein was hiding, and knew nothing about weapons of mass destruction.

"That was a terrifying moment for me," Mr Khalid told the Washington Post on Monday, describing how three times he was shoved into a lions' cage at a presidential palace in Baghdad, and then soldiers lined him up for a mock execution. "I was wondering if it could be real that the American army would act this way."

Speaking at a press conference yesterday, Mr Rumsfeld said their accounts sounded "far fetched" and said it was common for detainees to make up allegations of torture. However, the army said it was looking into the claims.

The revelation about the mostly Sunni Arab detainees by Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari was deeply embarrassing to the government as critics in the United States and Britain question the U.S. strategy for building democracy in a land wracked by insurgency, terrorism and sectarian tension.

"I was informed that there were 173 detainees held at an Interior Ministry prison and they appear to be malnourished," al-Jaafari said of Sunday's raid at a detention center in the fashionable Jadriyah district. "There is also some talk that they were subjected to some kind of torture."

One detainee had been crippled by polio and others suffered "different wounds," the deputy interior minister, Maj. Gen. Hussein Kamal, said without elaboration.

Al-Jaafari, a Shiite, promised a full investigation and punishment for anyone found guilty of torture.

In Washington, a State Department spokesman said the Bush administration found the reports troubling.

"We don't practice torture, and we don't believe that others should practice torture," said the spokesman, Adam Ereli.

"We think that there should be an investigation and those who are responsible should be held accountable."

But the head of Iraq's largest Sunni political party said he had spoken to al-Jaafari and other government officials about torture at Interior Ministry detention centers, including the one where the detainees were found.

Mohsen Abdul-Hamid, leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, said the government routinely dismissed his complaints, calling the prisoners "former regime elements," meaning
Saddam Hussein loyalists.

U.S. Brig. Gen. Karl Horst, who commanded the troops in Sunday's raid, said American and Iraqi forces plan to carry out checks at every Interior Ministry detention facility in Baghdad, the Los Angeles Times reported. It was not immediately clear why U.S. forces chose to move in on Sunday.

Comment: It isn't? Well, it might have something to do with this story of "Iraqi torture" drawing attention away from the fact that the Pentagon admitted using white phosphorous in Iraq...

"We're going to hit every single one of them, every single one of them," the Times quoted Horst as saying.

Sunni politicians have been complaining of torture, abuse and arbitrary arrest by special commandos of the Shiite-controlled Interior Ministry since the current government took power last April.

Sunnis have also accused the ministry of being behind "death squads," rumored to be made up of former members of Shiite militias, which target Sunnis in reprisal for the killings of Shiites by Sunni Arab insurgents. Interior Minister Bayn Jabr has denied any role in such killings.

Kamal, the deputy interior minister, was quoted by CNN as saying the skin of some of the detainees in the Baghdad center had peeled off parts of their bodies. He later declined to confirm the allegation to The Associated Press.

Sunni Arab complaints have taken on new urgency because of American efforts to encourage a big Sunni turnout in the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections in hopes of undermining Sunni support for the insurgency. In recent days, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan have all visited Iraq to promote Sunni participation. [...]

U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, have expressed their "deep concern" over the condition of the detainees "at the highest level" of the Iraqi government, a U.S. Embassy statement said.

"We agree with Iraq's leaders that the mistreatment of detainees is a serious matter and totally unacceptable," the statement added.

But the case also raises troubling questions about the training and discipline of Iraqi security forces, which Washington hopes can assume a greater role in fighting the insurgents so that U.S. and other international troops can begin to go home.

Interior Ministry commandos, who are separate from the Iraqi army, spearhead the Iraqi government's campaign against the insurgency. Those commandos arrested more than 300 suspects last week in Diyala province after attacks on police checkpoints and a truck bomb that killed about 20 people in a Shiite village.

Many Sunnis fear that methods used by the Interior Ministry forces — known by fearsome names such as the Scorpions and the Wolf Brigade — are setting the stage for sectarian war.

"In order to search for one terrorist, they detain hundreds of innocent people and torture them brutally," Sunni politician Abdul-Hamid said. [...]

Amnesty International welcomed al-Jaafari's decision to order an investigation but urged him to expand the probe to include all allegations of torture. Amnesty also asked him to make the results public. In Geneva, the International Committee of the Red Cross said it was unaware of the detention center but wanted to learn more.

In a report Monday, the U.N. mission in Iraq warned about detention conditions in Iraq. The report said 23,394 people were in detention in Iraq, including 11,559 held by multinational forces.

"There is an urgent need to provide remedy to lengthy internment for reasons of security without adequate judicial oversight," the report said.

Announcing the launch of a "pilot stage" for GMES, the commission stressed its "user-friendly" application in guiding relief work after disasters or providing real-time images of forest fires or oil spills.

But a commission statement also acknowledged that GMES would play a key role in the "implementation, review and monitoring of EU policies," including watching for agriculture and fisheries fraud and boosting "internal security."

In addition, officials hope GMES will support the European Union's first steps toward becoming a military power. It will "provide authorities with necessary elements for a European Security and Defense Policy," the commission said.

The commission in Brussels will identify and develop uses for GMES. The management of the satellites will be under the European Space Agency (ESA), which pools the space resources of 15 EU member states, plus Norway and Switzerland.

U.S. politicians are suspicious of the ESA's "Galileo" project, a 30-satellite global navigation system designed to improve on the Pentagon-controlled Global Positioning System.

The European Union's invitation to China to become a major investor only increased U.S. concern.

Gregor Kreuzhuber, the commission's spokesman for industry policy, described GMES as "a little brother for Galileo, a sort of satellite system where you can better monitor what is happening on our planet."

GMES is intended to exploit assets belonging to EU nations. National governments would retain control over their satellites, Mr. Kreuzhuber said.

Harmonizing the use of national assets in space should mean that Europe does not need to launch a full set of new satellites, though the plan could require some EU spacecraft.

With the ESA, the commission has spent $267 million on preparatory work, and expects the whole project to cost $2.67 billion between 2006 and 2013. Funding is to come from the commission, national governments, and private defense and space firms.

Clarke, the home secretary, "has today decided to order the extradition of Babar Ahmad to the United States in order to face trial on terror offences," the Home Office said in a statement to AFP.

"As is right and proper the home secretary has given full consideration to complex representations that have been made on Mr. Ahmad's behalf but is satisfied that the conditions for his extradition have been met," it said.

In May, a court in London gave the green light for Ahmad's extradition and Clarke finally took the decision after having extended the amount of time needed to take it.

The extradition moves earlier sparked outrage among Muslim groups, who branded it a "travesty of justice".

Previous hearings had been told that Ahmad could be at risk of the death penalty if sent to the United States and transferred to military jurisdiction, such as Guantanamo Bay.

His defence team had also argued that he could be subject to Special Administrative Measures, rendering him liable to solitary confinement, restricting access to correspondence, and monitoring of contact with his lawyers.

But following a diplomatic note from the US Embassy in London, and the prosecutor's undertaking at a previous hearing, Senior District Judge Timothy Workman allowed the American extradition request.

Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a Pentagon spokesman, said that while white phosphorous is most frequently used to mark targets or obscure a position, it was used at times in Fallujah as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants.

"It was not used against civilians," Venable said.

The spokesman referred reporters to an article in the March-April 2005 edition of the Army's Field Artillery magazine, an official publication, in which veterans of the Fallujah fight spelled out their use of white phosphorous and other weapons. The authors used the shorthand "WP" in referring to white phosphorous.

"WP proved to be an effective and versatile munition," the authors wrote. "We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE (high explosive)" munitions.

"We fired 'shake and bake' missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out."

The authors added, in citing lessons for future urban battles, that fire-support teams should have used another type of smoke bomb for screening missions in Fallujah "and saved our WP for lethal missions."

The battle for Fallujah was the most intense and deadly fight of the war, after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003. The city, about 35 miles west of Baghdad on the Euphrates River, was a key insurgent stronghold. The authors of the "after action" report said they encountered few civilians in their area of operations.

Italian communists held a sit-in Monday in front of the U.S. Embassy in Rome to protest the reported use by American troops of white phosphorous. Italy's state-run RAI24 news television aired a documentary last week alleging the U.S. used white phosphorous shells in a "massive and indiscriminate way" against civilians during the Fallujah offensive.

The State Department, in response, initially denied that U.S. troops had used white phosphorous against enemy forces. "They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters."

The department later said its statement had been incorrect.

Comment: In other words, they lied. So, what else are they lying about??

"There is a great deal of misinformation feeding on itself about U.S. forces allegedly using 'outlawed' weapons in Fallujah," the department said. "The facts are that U.S. forces are not using any illegal weapons in Fallujah or anywhere else in Iraq."

Venable said white phosphorous shells are a standard weapon used by field artillery units and are not banned by any international weapons convention to which the U.S. is a signatory.

White phosphorous is a colorless-to-yellow translucent wax-like substance with a pungent, garlic-like smell. The form used by the military ignites once it is exposed to oxygen, producing such heat that it bursts into a yellow flame and produces a dense white smoke. It can cause painful burn injuries to exposed human flesh.

The soldier, who has only been identified as "Captain R", was charged with relatively minor offences for the killing of Iman al-Hams who was shot 17 times as she ventured near an Israeli army post near Rafah refugee camp in Gaza a year ago.

The manner of Iman's killing, and the revelation of a tape recording in which the captain is warned that she was just a child who was "scared to death", made the shooting one of the most controversial since the Palestinian intifada erupted five years ago even though hundreds of other children have also died.

After the verdict, Iman's father, Samir al-Hams, said the army never intended to hold the soldier accountable.

"They did not charge him with Iman's murder, only with small offences, and now they say he is innocent of those even though he shot my daughter so many times," he said. "This was the cold-blooded murder of a girl. The soldier murdered her once and the court has murdered her again. What is the message? They are telling their soldiers to kill Palestinian children."

The military court cleared the soldier of illegal use of his weapon, conduct unbecoming an officer and perverting the course of justice by asking soldiers under his command to alter their accounts of the incident.

Capt R's lawyers argued that the "confirmation of the kill" after a suspect is shot was a standard Israeli military practice to eliminate terrorist threats.

Following the verdict, Capt R burst into tears, turned to the public benches and said: "I told you I was innocent."

The army's official account said that Iman was shot for crossing into a security zone carrying her schoolbag which soldiers feared might contain a bomb. It is still not known why the girl ventured into the area but witnesses described her as at least 100 yards from the military post which was in any case well protected.

A recording of radio exchanges between Capt R and his troops obtained by Israeli television revealed that from the beginning soldiers identified Iman as a child.

In the recording, a soldier in a watchtower radioed a colleague in the army post's operations room and describes Iman as "a little girl" who was "scared to death". After soldiers first opened fire, she dropped her schoolbag which was then hit by several bullets establishing that it did not contain explosive. At that point she was no longer carrying the bag and, the tape revealed, was heading away from the army post when she was shot.

Although the military speculated that Iman might have been trying to "lure" the soldiers out of their base so they could be attacked by accomplices, Capt R made the decision to lead some of his troops into the open. Shortly afterwards he can be heard on the recording saying that he has shot the girl and, believing her dead, then "confirmed the kill".

"I and another soldier ... are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill ... Receive a situation report. We fired and killed her ... I also confirmed the kill. Over," he said.

Palestinian witnesses said they saw the captain shoot Iman twice in the head, walk away, turn back and fire a stream of bullets into her body.

On the tape, Capt R then "clarifies" to the soldiers under his command why he killed Iman: "This is commander. Anything that's mobile, that moves in the [security] zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed."

At no point did the Israeli troops come under attack.

The prosecution case was damaged when a soldier who initially said he had seen Capt R point his weapon at the girl's body and open fire later told the court he had fabricated the story.

Capt R claimed that he had not fired the shots at the girl but near her. However, Dr Mohammed al-Hams, who inspected the child's body at Rafah hospital, counted numerous wounds. "She has at least 17 bullets in several parts of the body, all along the chest, hands, arms, legs," he told the Guardian shortly afterwards. "The bullets were large and shot from a close distance. The most serious injuries were to her head. She had three bullets in the head. One bullet was shot from the right side of the face beside the ear. It had a big impact on the whole face."

The army's initial investigation concluded that the captain had "not acted unethically". But after some of the soldiers under his command went to the Israeli press to give a different version, the military police launched a separate investigation after which he was charged.

Capt R claimed that the soldiers under his command were out to get him because they are Jewish and he is Druze.

The transcript

The following is a recording of a three-way conversation that took place between a soldier in a watchtower, an army operations room and Capt R, who shot the girl

From the watchtower "It's a little girl. She's running defensively eastward." "Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?" "A girl about 10, she's behind the embankment, scared to death." "I think that one of the positions took her out." "I and another soldier ... are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill ... Receive a situation report. We fired and killed her ... I also confirmed the kill. Over."

From the operations room "Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?"

Watchtower "A girl about 10, she's behind the embankment, scared to death."

A few minutes later, Iman is shot from one of the army posts

Watchtower "I think that one of the positions took her out."

Captain R "I and another soldier ... are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill ... Receive a situation report. We fired and killed her ... I also confirmed the kill. Over."

Capt R then "clarifies" why he killed Iman

"This is commander. Anything that's mobile, that moves in the zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed. Over."

Same day the bombings occurred, Reuters news agency said explosives were "placed in a false ceiling" of the Radisson hotel, hinting at the possibility that the attackers, now said to be Iraqis, would have required serious cover of the sort enjoyed by a state intelligence service working in tandem with Jordanian intelligence.

According to a former cabinet minister, since Jordan is "a police state with a democratic facade," placing bombs in such a busy hotel would have been a very difficult and almost impossible operation without the government complicity.

The ceiling story was dismissed by the Jordanian police who introduced instead the four Iraqi bombers scenario later in the day on November 9, stated Uruknet.

The next day everything was prepared. On November 10, the mythical Abu Mus’ab Al Zarqawi posted a messaged on a notorious website (as usual) claiming responsibility for the bombings in the "moderate Arab nation" that "has fought a long-running battle against Islamic 'extremists' opposed to its 1994 peace deal with Israel," stated the Associated Press.

Same day, thousands "of Jordanians rallied in the capital and other cities shouting 'Burn in hell, Abu Musab Al Zarqawi!'"

Now, with the ceiling story dismissed and the evacuation of the Israelis prior to the attack story all but extinguished, "we are told these al-Zarqawi militants included a "husband and wife team" and they "carried out the Amman attacks with explosive belts after carefully staking out the hotels for a month," according to The Associated Press. The “suicide bombers” story was cooked up to cover up the real crime.

Abu Mus’ab Al Zarqawi was declared dead after the U.S. forces occupied Afghanistan- But biased media outlets brought him back to life in Iraq, carrying bomb attacks that usually kill civilians, including women and children, rather than Americans, who should be Al Zarqawi’s real enemies, according to Arab2000 website.

The "husband and wife team" scenario was introduced with the aim of telling us that the Iraqi resistance is brutal, cold-hearted, and inhuman. "It was believed to be the first time a married couple has carried out such attack. The couple bombed the Days Inn after the woman "chose to accompany her husband to his martyrdom,' the statement, allegedly from Al Zarqawi, said."

It’s been revealed that Jordanian security forces evacuated a number of Israelis from Radisson SAS hotel hours before the attack took place, apparently due to a specific security alert. They were escorted back to Israel.

The Foreign Ministry asserted that no Israelis were injured in the attacks, although there is usually a number of Israeli businessman and tourists in Amman, including in the hotels hit Wednesday.

Those who remained in the hotel were only Arabs who were attending a wedding party and some Palestinian high ranking officials as well as Chinese military personnel.

"In its latest statement, Al Qaeda said the bombings were carried out in response to 'the conspiracy against the Sunnis,' referring to the Muslim Arab group favored under Saddam Hussein's regime and now believed to form the core of the Iraqi insurgency." But this is against logic; the Sunnis form nearly 92% of the Jordanians, so attacking them to defend Iraq’s Sunnis is simply nonsensical.

Uruknet suggests that Amman’s attacks were carried out by seasoned experts, particularly from Mossad, with the complicity of Jordan’s intelligence and America’s CIA, in an attempt to shift the support from average Sunni Jordanians for the Sunni resistance in Iraq.

And according to Arab2000, the real target of the attacks was the Palestinians and the Chinese, including “students” from China’s University of National Defense and members of a delegation invited by the Royal Jordanian National Defense College on an academic exchange program.

It was reported those Chinese “students”, over 40 years old, were at the hotel to meet with the Palestinian officials.

The Chinese government is known for its support to the Palestinian cause. In November 2004, the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao stated that “The restoration of the Palestinian people’s legitimate rights, including the right to statehood, should be the primary objective of the efforts to resolve the Middle Ease issue.”

The Israeli Prime Minister's son Omri, a Knesset member, was on the brink of ending his political career after being convicted on charges arising out of the funding of his father's 1999 party leadership campaign.

Sharon Jnr earlier entered a plea bargain admitting charges of keeping false corporate records, providing false testimony, and violating political fundraising laws. He is not expected to be sentenced until the end of the year, and after his guilty plea is expected to pay a penalty much less severe than the maximum five-year prison sentence.

The conviction could bring political funding and corruption further up the agenda in a general election which likely to take place next spring. But the guilty plea by Sharon means that he is likely to bear the full brunt of the charges of illegal funding of the campaign which secured his father the Likud leadership.According to the indictment, Omri Sharon received around £730,000 in campaign contributions from corporations in Israel and abroad between July 1999 and February 2000 - a figure which the prosecution said exceeds the funding caps.

The Knesset member and close lieutenant of his father is accused of transferring the money into a specially created company called Annex Research. The campaign allegedly paid most suppliers and service providers through Annex Research rather than through the Sharon camp's official bank account.

The one shadow still hanging over the Prime Minister himself is a continuing investigation into payments by the South Africa-based businessman Cyril Kern which were allegedly made to cover the cost of repayment of illegal campaign contributions. The investigation is said to be progressing very slowly.

The original indictment, issued on 28 August, accuses Sharon of fraudulent registration of corporate documents, lying under oath and breach of corporate trust. Sharon's defence lawyer, Dan Scheinman, said during the hearing: "It was important for Omri to confess and assume full responsibility for his actions." But he added: "The political fundraising law is a law that cannot be abided by. It represents a trap for everyone who wishes to participate in the elections."

Kojo Annan, the son of the UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, yesterday accepted substantial undisclosed damages from Times Newspapers Ltd over a claim that he was involved in negotiations to sell Iraqi oil.

Mr Annan had brought high court libel proceedings over a story published in the Sunday Times in January 2005 which alleged that he had admitted to a friend his involvement in negotiations to sell 2m barrels of Iraqi oil to a Moroccan company. In September a UN independent inquiry into oil-for-food found no evidence of Kojo Annan's participation in the negotiation.

All the hullabaloo surrounding the resignation of David Blunkett and all the hysteria around the defeat of the 90-day-detention clause have been drenched in gossipy speculation about Tony Blair's political future. I wonder, though, if the tendency towards analysing the power plays, set pieces and personal integrity of Westminster and its actors is actually obscuring the real reason why Blair's third term now looks so rocky. Can it be that Blair has at last lost faith in his own guiding principles? Has Blair simply stopped being a moderniser?

It is rumoured that the Green Paper on welfare form, promised in the Queen's Speech during the first six months of this Parliament, is now going to be quietly shunted back to some time next year. The practical reason for this is that John Hutton has only just taken over as the minister for Work and Pensions, and can't possibly turn round an important document such as this one in a matter of weeks. The political reason is that Blair fears that, having "tasted blood", the rebels on his back benches will now ensure that the Government's "radical reforms" won't get through.

The real reason, perhaps, is that Blair is no longer interested in the complex challenges of welfare reform. There was a time when New Labour's rule was to carrot-and-stick people back to work. It was the carrots that carried the left of the party and also the huge swaths of the electorate who had become sickened and disgusted by Thatcherism. The carrots were the really radical part of New Labour's radical reforms, the bit that stopped them being conservative and retrograde.

What are these "radical reforms", though, that Blair is said to want? The leak of the cross letter he scribbled to Blunkett in the run-up to the latter's resignation, over which the men were said to be at loggerheads, had no trace at all of a modernising agenda. Instead, Blair's ideas were entirely conservative. They were, as the welfare wonks put it, "negative activation policies".

Blair demanded incapacity benefit payments be cut to the bone, that employers should be given the right of appeal against an employee who was signed off as sick by a doctor, and that doctors writing many such notes should be audited and named and shamed as if they deserved to be put in the 21st-century stocks. He requested, too, the stepping up of means- testing for the better-off disabled, and that those on benefits should be paid partly in vouchers, redeemable only against job-training schemes.

Not a word of this tirade chimes with the avowed aims of the Department for Work and Pensions, which continues to espouse the idea that citizens should be coaxed towards work in a welfare system that is designed to "help people to help themselves by offering a ladder to self-reliance and self-determination, not merely a safety net in time of need".

This has so far been the humanising guide to government welfare policy. There can be much criticism of how some of it has been implemented - tax credits are too often a complicated and inaccessible way of means-testing wealth redistribution, while overly targeting benefits tends to leave out whole swaths of the population, such as the poor and single, whose plight is ignored in the semi-successful rush to "lift children out of poverty".

A lot can still be done with this progressive agenda, though. There are plenty of ideas around that will fit in with this programme, that have not yet been implemented. Indeed, the trouble with Blair's welfare reforms is mainly that the progressive ones have been too quiet and cautious (like parenting classes) while the regressive ones have been too bluntly unhelpful and highly publicised (like Asbos). Blair's idea, of cutting incapacity benefit so that it equals Jobseeker's Allowance, clearly punishes those genuinely unable to work along with those who might need more of an incentive to work. Blair's impatience may derive from the fact that, after years of reform, Britain still has one of the lowest rates of employment for the disabled - as well as single mothers - in Europe.

But the observation of Scope, the charity representing people with cerebral palsy, is that people are frightened of risking going back to work in case they lose their benefit. It favours the adoption of a lengthy period of "permitted work" that can be undertaken without losing the right to return to incapacity benefit. The department favours six months, while the charity suggests two years is about right. It makes, among other salient points, the very good one that a chunk of time encourages employers to make the investment they may need to in catering for the needs of disabled people.

While the disabled are clearly a group who need and deserve the advocacy of a strong welfare state, many people, including Blair apparently, now have the idea that the large bills of the welfare state are mainly going into the pockets of scroungers and ne'er-do-wells. Certainly, there is a significant element in the country of people who do not balance their "rights and responsibilities". But it is dangerous to structure policy around these people, rather than designing it to suit the needs of the people it is there to support.

The main reasons for increased demand for welfare services are common across Europe. They include the changes brought about by globalisation, ageing populations, changes in job patterns, in people's expectations of government and in the structure of family life. The radical approach would be firmly and fairly responsive to these changing patterns, not to tailor programmes simply to deter those suspected of abusing them. As has been seen only too well at the Child Support Agency, with its amazing 70 per cent rate of failure to collect payment, the Government is at its least successful when it sticks to a punitive, coercive approach.

After all, it is the punitive, coercive approach that got us into trouble in the first place. The reason Britain faces such intractable social exclusion is in no small part due to the fact that the huge new populations of socially excluded people created in the 1980s are now entrenched in their exclusion unto the third generation.

All this was clearly apparent to New Labour when it came into power. The sad fact is, I suppose, that Blair has gradually lost touch with that unhappy reality. What John Hutton ought to be doing, in his Green Paper, is steering Blair back towards the modernising agenda, and concentrating on developing further systems that will give the best possible support to those who can help themselves, and the most supportive acceptance to those who clearly can't. Only this approach, honest and positive, straight and empowering, can leave the poor, hated minority of true lead-swingers and real dodgy-dealers exposed for what they are.

"Saddam is gone. It's a good thing, but I don't agree with what was done, " Clinton told students at the American University of Dubai.

"It was a big mistake. The American government made several errors ... one of which is how easy it would be to get rid of Saddam and how hard it would be to unite the country."

Clinton did however say that the United States had done some good things in Iraq: the removal of Saddam, the ratification of a new constitution, and the holding of parliamentary elections.

Sheehan also plans to revive her protest near President Bush's Texas ranch during Thanksgiving week, despite new county ordinances banning roadside camping.

Sheehan and other anti-war activists arrested with her Sept. 26 in Washington conducted a news conference in front of the federal courthouse Wednesday before heading to a court appearance on the misdemeanor charge.

Sheehan, whose 24-year-old son Casey was killed while serving in Iraq last year, said "2,062 people have been killed as of today in this monstrosity."

She and more than 300 others were arrested as they gathered near an entrance to the White House grounds. Each carried a board bearing the name of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq.

The arrests outside the White House concluded a weekend of protests that drew over 100,000 anti-war activists, and a smaller group of counterprotesters. It was the largest anti-war demonstration since the Vietnam War.

Those arrested got $50 tickets and authorities charged them with protesting without a permit. All were released.

In Texas next week, Sheehan and at least a dozen supporters are prepared to be arrested as they return to the makeshift campsite along the road leading to Bush's ranch, where he is expected to spend the holiday.

"It is critical for our democracy that we continue to ask the same questions that Cindy Sheehan asked this summer: What is the noble cause for the war with Iraq, and at what point do we say enough bloodshed has happened?" Hadi Jawad, co-founder of the Crawford Peace House, said Tuesday. [...]

"We have unsustainable defense spending," said McCain, a chief proponent of military acquisition reform.

"Refurbishment or replacement sooner than planned is putting further pressure on DOD's investment accounts. We cannot sustain the number of weapons programs that are in the program of record."

The Arizona Republican said the Defense Department spent $291 billion on the top five weapons systems in 2000 but the top five weapons systems in 2005 cost nearly $550 billion. One of those top five systems, the FA-22, has seen unit costs increase almost 190 percent," he said.

The Pentagon's budget for 2006 was $441 billion with a $50 billion fund to pay for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, which cost a combined $5.5 billion a month.

On Monday, Tucker Carlson welcomed Brigham Young University Professor Steven Jones to the 'Situation.' Jones, a professor of physics, believes that the hijackers may not have brought down the towers by themselves.

To read an excerpt of their conversation, continue to the text below. To watch the video, click on the "Launch" button to the right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, just sum up this-obviously your theory, just the one sentence that I just explained, in the intro, contradicts what we all think we know about how these towers collapsed. Quickly sum up your explanation for what's happened.

STEVEN JONES, BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY: ... What I'm doing, Tucker, is presenting evidence, but it's a hypothesis to be tested. That's a big difference from a conclusion, and so I just wanted to clarify that. But to sum up that I have looked at the official reports by FEMA, and so on... regarding the collapse of-yes, of these buildings. ...

I'd like to look at the collapse of building seven in just a minute. It was not even hit by a jet. So we'll look at that one.

CARLSON: The two towers. The explanation has been that the fire inside was so intense that it weakened the structural steel and that each floor collapsed down upon the next in a pancake fashion, and they imploded in on themselves. That's essentially, I think, what people think.

JONES: Yes, that's basically it, yes. And so what I've done is to analyze these reports.

I would like to do a little experiment with you, Tucker, if I could. I sent out a video clip of the collapse of Building seven, because most people haven't actually seen that one, and that's the crux of the argument.

CARLSON: Can you sum up very quickly the argument for us? You believe there were explosives in the buildings planted by someone, detonated?

JONES: Well, yes.

CARLSON: Is that correct?

JONES: ... There are two hypotheses here. One is fire and damage caused all three buildings to collapse.

CARLSON: OK.

JONES: The other is that explosives in the buildings may have caused the collapse. And so, then we analyze and see which fits the data better, and I've done that in my 25-page paper.

CARLSON: I want to read you a quote from the 'Deseret Morning News,' a paper in Utah, from you. I'm quoting now.

"It is quite plausible that explosives were pre-planted in all three buildings and set off after the two plane crashes, which are actually a diversion tactic. Muslims are probably not to blame for bringing down the World Trade Center buildings after all."

That's, I would think, pretty offensive to a lot of the people listening. Do you have any evidence for that?

JONES: Well, not-not to the Muslims, I might say.

CARLSON: Well, that's good.

JONES: I have a lot of e-mails.

CARLSON: I'm sure your writings greeted with just glee in Islamabad, and Peshawar and places like that. But for Americans.

JONES: Well, I haven't received notes from there, but just good people. I have Muslim friends. Let me read, for example, but I'm not going to let you off the hook. I really want to do this experiment with you.

CARLSON: We don't have a lot of time for experiments, Professor. But if you could just ... give us one thing to hold onto. How-you make these claims, or appear to make these claims ...

JONES: Tucker, sure, sure. Let's start with the collapse of Building seven. Can you roll the video clip that I sent to you?

CARLSON: OK. I am not sure if we can, but that is the World Trade Center. It's smaller than the other two it was not hit by a plane.

JONES: Let's try.

CARLSON: Of course, it collapsed.

JONES: Right. It's 47 stories.

CARLSON: That's right.

JONES: Twenty-four steel columns in the center.

CARLSON: Right.

JONES: Trusses, asymmetrically supported. Now, I can't see what you're seeing. Are we rolling that?

CARLSON: No. We just see the building. And just so our viewers know, the explanation that I think is conventional is that there was a large tank of diesel fuel stored in the lower level of that, which caught fire, and the resulting fire collapsed the building.

JONES: Well, that's basically it, yes, but as we read in the FEMA report, it says here, and I put this in my paper, of course. "The best hypothesis, which is the only one they looked at, fire, has only a low probability of occurrence. Further investigation analyses are needed to resolve this issue, and I agree with that."

CARLSON: OK.

JONES: But they admit there's only a low probability, and if you look at the collapse, you see what I have studied is the fall time, the symmetry, the fact that it first dips in the middle. That's called the kink. Which is very characteristic, of course, of controlled demolition.

CARLSON: Professor, I am sorry that we are out of time ...

JONES: Whoa, one other thing I want to mention.

CARLSON: Ok. If you can hit it - hit it quickly.

JONES: OK. All right. Here we go. Molten metal in the basements of all three buildings.

CARLSON: Right.

JONES: And yet all scientists now reasonably agree that the fires were not sufficiently hot to melt the steel, so what is this molten metal? It's direct evidence for the use of high-temperature explosives, such as thermite, which produces molten iron as an end product.

CARLSON: OK.

JONES: It's very short time, but people will read the paper, then I talk about the molten metal, the symmetry of the collapse, and the weaknesses and inadequacies of the fire hypothesis.

CARLSON: Professor, we are going to have to leave it to our viewers who are interested enough to follow up to do just that. We appreciate you coming on, even if I don't understand your theories, we appreciate you trying to explain them. Thanks.

The EU's plan is to set up a system for the registration, evaluation and authorisation of chemicals (REACH) under which companies have to register all chemicals used and provide information about them and potential hazards.

The new rules, which have been under discussion for over two years, would also clamp down on the use of animals to test new chemicals.

But the chemicals industry has been lobbying lawmakers hard for rules that are not too strict, warning jobs are on the line, while ecologists are pushing for tough regulations to protect consumers and the environment.

"Chemicals and raw materials are vital for the EU economy," said business leaders' federation UNICE, pointing out that Europe produces 28 percent of the world's chemicals, with an industry turnover of 360 billion euros. [...]

Britain, which currently holds the EU's six-month rotating presidency, had hoped to secure a deal from EU governments by the end of November.

But that attempt was put on hold after incoming German chancellor Angela Merkel's new government asked for a delay to allow the new government in Berlin to study the dossier. [...]

But discordant voices remained in the EU assembly.

"If the agreement reached by (the parliament's main parties) is voted through, we risk getting legislation that would be a major setback for the environment and for people's health,"said leftist MEP Jonas Sjostedt of Sweden.

Environmental group Friends of the Earth underlined their opposition with a protest outside the Strasbourg parliament, featuring 100 garden gnomes.

"Don't dwarf REACH," said a banner. "After the intense lobbying of the chemicals industry, REACH as it stands today is nothing but a vague reminder of its original form," said the group's Aleksandra Kordecka.

A summit focusing on narrowing the digital divide between rich and poor residents and countries opened Wednesday with an agreement of sorts on who will maintain ultimate oversight of the Internet and the flow of information, commerce and dissent.

The World Summit on the Information Society had been overshadowed by a lingering, if not vocal, struggle about overseeing the domain names and technical issues that make the Internet work and keep people from Pakistan to Canada surfing Web sites in the search for information, news and buying and selling.

Negotiators from more than 100 countries agreed late Tuesday to leave the United States in charge of the Internet's addressing system, averting a U.S.-EU showdown at this week's U.N. technology summit.

U.S. officials said early Wednesday that instead of transferring management of the system to an international body such as the United Nations, an international forum would be created to address concerns. The forum, however, would have no binding authority.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce Michael D. Gallagher, however, said the deal means the United States will leave day-to-day management to the private sector, through a quasi-independent organization called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN.

The onus now lies with the developing world to bring in not just opinions, but investment to expand the Internet to their benefit, he said.

Speaking to reporters, David Gross, the U.S. State Department's top official on Internet policy, said that despite the U.S. hand in ICANN, Internet governance was not the provenance of one specific country.

"The term ... is quite broad, it is very inclusive," he said, trying to dismiss claims that the U.S. is holding onto its position as the arbiter of the Internet.

Negotiators have met since Sunday to reach a deal ahead of the U.N. World Summit on the Information Society, which starts Wednesday. World leaders are expected to ratify a declaration incorporating the deal during the summit, which ends Friday.

However, other leaders were scheduled to attend, including Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, Senegal's Abdulaye Wade and Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was due to fly to the summit Wednesday, organizers said.

The summit was originally conceived to address the digital divide _ the gap between information haves and have-nots _ by raising both consciousness and funds for projects.

Instead, it has centered largely around Internet governance: oversight of the main computers that control traffic on the Internet by acting as its master directories so Web browsers and e-mail programs can find other computers.

The accord reached late Tuesday also called for the establishment of a new international group to give more countries a stronger say in how the Internet works, including the issue of making domain names _ currently done in the Latin languages _ into other languages, such as Chinese, Urdu and Arabic.

Under the terms of the compromise, the new group, the Internet Governance Forum, would start operating next year with its first meeting opened by Annan. Beyond bringing its stakeholders to the table to discuss the issues affecting the Internet, and its use, it won't have ultimate authority.

Viviane Reding, the EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media, said the agreement paved the way for better Internet governance.

"This agreement was possible because of the strong belief of all democratic nations that enhanced international cooperation is the best way to make progress towards guaranteeing the freedom of the Internet around the globe and also to enhance transparency and accountability in decisions affecting the architecture of the Web," she said.

It's known as the "Great Firewall of China" to the rest of the world, but to the Chinese government it's the "Golden Shield". China's internet filtering system, the most sophisticated and extensive in the world according to a recent report by Harvard Law School, is in the front line of the Chinese authorities' attempts to maintain control of an increasingly fractious society by preventing the spread of political dissent. But blocking websites such as Amnesty International, or ones that relate to the banned Falun Gong movement, or Tibetan independence, is just one part of the government's efforts to control Chinese cyberspace.

A small army of technocrats, numbering up to 40,000, is employed to watch over China's 100 million-plus internet users, or "netizens", the second-largest internet population in the world after the US. They have been bolstered by a raft of new regulations introduced earlier this year that restrict what websites and bulletin boards can talk about or report.

In March, the Ministry Of Culture, which is responsible for overseeing the internet, told all websites to register with the authorities or face being fined, or closed down, while in September the most extensive restrictions yet were announced. The new laws prohibit the inciting of "illegal" assemblies online, the publication of anything that destroys the country's unity, as well as ordering blogs to "be directed to serving the people and socialism".

"Cyber-dissidents" such asShi Tao, a journalist sentenced to 10 years in prison in April for circulating an e-mail containing an account of a meeting with pro-democracy campaigners, have become victims of the authorities' desire to control what people can access on the internet.

But the main targets of the government's crackdown are the myriad blogs and the Chinese-language online forums such as Tianya Community, Yannan Forum and Xicihutong. Not only do they spread the news that is not reported by official news agencies such as Xinhua, but they offer a national perspective on current events.

Most print and TV media in China are local, so before the internet people had little idea what was going on outside the areas in which they lived. News of the massacre in Tiananmen Square in June 1989 did not reach much of China for months, but now news of local protests is disseminated nationwide.

"If something happens in Guangzhou, people in Beijing will hear about it quickly," says Chen Chanfeng, deputy dean of Beijing University's School of Journalism and Communications. "What the internet does in China is help form public opinion very quickly."

There is a problem with the structure of Wikipedia. The basic problem is that no one, neither the Trustees of Wikimedia Foundation, nor the volunteers who are connected with Wikipedia, consider themselves responsible for the content. If you don't believe me, then carefully read Wikipedia's disclaimer.

At the same time that no one claims responsibility, there are two unique characteristics of Wikipedia that can be very damaging to a person, corporation, or group. The first is that anyone can edit an article, and there is no guarantee that any article you read has not been edited maliciously, and remains uncorrected in that state, at the precise time that you access that article.

On November 9, 2005, a childish prankster edited the Wikipedia article on Norway's prime minister. The IP address of the perpetrator came from a regional network in southern Norway that services a large number of schools. The most serious of the several changes is seen here in the last sentence, taken from MSN's cache copy:

It took Wikipedia 22.5 hours to detect and correct this prank. Meanwhile, an unknown number of surfers downloaded and saved the page. It ranks number one in MSN, Google, and Yahoo for a search on the prime minister's name.

The problem with Wikipedia is that this sort of occurrence is built into the system. Vandalism is commonplace. The major variable is the length of time between the crime and its detection. If you click on a Wikipedia entry, are you looking at a vandalized article, or a corrected article? No one knows, and no one is responsible when a vandal remains undetected.

Now then, how would you, if you were a Google critic, like to have your very own article in Wikipedia? Keep in mind that the teenagers who think Wikipedia is cool tend to be the same teenagers who think Google is cool. What are the chances that the article on you will get sabotaged? When it is, how quickly will it get corrected? Place your bets.

The second unique characteristic is that Wikipedia articles, and in some cases even the free-for-all "talk" discussions behind the articles, rank very highly in the major search engines. This means that Wikipedia's potential for inflicting damage is amplified by several orders of magnitude.

As someone who has been jostling with Wikipedia administrators for several weeks, I am very interested in whom I should sue if I wanted to sue. This assumes, of course, that I've decided I've been clearly libeled by Wikipedia's article on me, and/or the discussion page attached to it. At the moment, this is an intellectual interest of mine, and I am not currently claiming that I have been libeled. This could change very quickly. I maintain that I qualify as a "private person," which means that I do not have to show that the article about me is maliciously untrue. The bar for private persons is lower for a finding of libel, as compared to public persons. I also believe that if I ever succeed in a libel case, the fact that the article on me ranks very well in the big search engines will convince the jury to award damages.

Why did I put up the information about administrators on this page? Simply because if I ever decide that I have cause to sue, I'm not sure who should be sued. The first step, it seems to me, would be to seek a subpoena for log information from Wikimedia Foundation. Administrators and editors who are involved, but who cannot otherwise be identified, could be traced through their IP addresses in the Wikipedia logs. If a court decides that a subpoena for these addresses is in order, then it would also support a subpoena for more information from the Internet service providers behind those IP addresses.

If there is a clear case of libel, I don't believe a court would decide that no one is responsible. If Wikimedia Foundation, and the specific editors and administrators who either inserted the libelous information, or failed to delete it, are all not responsible for the libel, then that would make the libel something akin to an act of God. The Wikimedia process doesn't quite qualify as God, as far as I can tell, although it apparently sees itself as approaching that status someday soon.

Wikipedia does not even comes close to qualifying as a service provider under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. For one thing, this is not a copyright issue. For another, Wikipedia develops its own information, and its editors put their own spin on the information, and choose which sources to cite, and delete information they feel is inappropriate. By way of contrast, Google, for example, merely makes a faithful cache copy of whatever they find elsewhere, and passes along this copy or ranks it alongside similar material. The two situations are entirely different. No one associated with Wikipedia should assume that the law protects them the same way it protects Google. And no one should assume that the EFF will come running to Wikipedia's defense in a libel case.

I think a probable outcome in court would place most of the blame on Wikimedia Foundation itself. The very structure of Wikipedia is geared toward maximum anonymity and minimum accountability. The Foundation is facilitating and implicitly encouraging situations such as the one in which I find myself. I think the case against the Foundation would be stronger than the case against individual administrators and/or editors, based on the fact that the potential for libel is ingrained within the Wikipedia process.

But I really don't know. What I do know is that the editors and administrators feel that they are untouchable, and the Wikimedia Foundation also feels that it is untouchable because it has a disclaimer. This is not a satisfactory situation for Wikipedia in the long run. If push comes to shove, it will not prevail in a court of law.

I'm hopeful that this controversy over the article on me will help clarify the need for improvements in Wikipedia's structure. There needs to be a greater degree of accountability in the structure, even at the expense of everyone's freedom to anonymously edit anything forever.

The privacy issues interest me even more than the libel issue. Unfortunately, the laws on privacy are less clear, and discussions on privacy will not be as focused. In Florida, where Wikipedia is located, there is an invasion of privacy statute that might apply in this case, even assuming that everything in the article is true. At issue would be the public disclosure of truthful private information that a reasonable person would find objectionable. Would a reasonable person find Wikipedia's mention of facts about my 1960s activism objectionable? Not at the moment, hopefully, and yet it wouldn't take much for this situation to change. Another act of terrorism on U.S. soil, followed by a stronger version of the U.S. Patriot Act, and "reasonable" people might feel that I should, once again, be watched by the FBI, CIA, and local police the way I was in the 1960s. Does Wikipedia consider issues such as this? Of course not — information wants to be free, and nothing must stand in its way.

A greater degree of accountability in the Wikipedia structure, as discussed above, would also be the very first step toward resolving the privacy problem. For me, the two issues stem from a common problem, and both share the same first step toward a solution.

This two-page site will eventually become a larger site that examines the phenomenon of Wikipedia. We are interested in them because they have a massive, unearned influence on what passes for reliable information. Search engines rank their pages near the top. While Wikipedia itself does not run ads, they are the most-scraped site on the web. Scrapers need content — any content will do — in order to carry ads from Google and other advertisers. This entire effect is turning Wikipedia into a generator of spam. It is primarily Google's fault, since Wikipedia might find it difficult to address the issue of scraping even if they wanted to. Google doesn't care; their ad money comes right off the top.

For example, it did not take long, using the Google and Yahoo engines, to find 52 different domains that scraped Wikipedia's page on rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. Interestingly, Google listed more than four times the number of duplicate scrapes than Yahoo. This could be related to the fact that 83 percent of these scraped pages carry ads — almost always ads from Google. Some of these scrapes are template-generated across different domains, suggesting that they are created by programs. At that point zombie PCs might be dispatched to click on the ads.

Jimmy Wales, the man behind Wikipedia, probably approves of this practice. After he made a fortune in futures trading, he started up Bomis.com in the mid-1990s. Bomis was one of the first sites to scrape the ad-free Open Directory Project, and turn it into a huge mass of paid links and ads, mixed together with porn.

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the
sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." — Jimmy Wales, July 2004

Another problem is that most of the administrators at Wikipedia prefer to exercise their police functions anonymously. The process itself is open, but the identities of the administrators are usually cloaked behind a username and a Gmail address. (Gmail does not show an originating IP address in the email headers, which means that you cannot geolocate the originator, or even know whether one administrator is really a different person than another administrator.) If an admin has a political or personal agenda, he can do a fair amount of damage with the special editing tools available to him. The victim may not even find out that this is happening until it's too late. From Wikipedia, the material is spread like a virus by search engines and other scrapers, and the damage is amplified by orders of magnitude. There is no recourse for the victim, and no one can be held accountable. Once it's all over the web, no one has the power to put it back into the bottle.

This is an open letter that was written to Jimmy Wales. For more information on the context of this letter, see Google Watch.

Public Information Research, Inc.
PO Box 680635
San Antonio, TX 78268-0635

October 16, 2005

Mr. Jimmy Wales
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
200 2nd Avenue South, #358
St. Petersburg FL 33701-4313

Dear Mr. Wales:

I sent you an email a couple of hours ago requesting deletion of the article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Brandt and am following that email with this fax. I ask that this page be permanently deleted. It was started as a stub by SlimVirgin on September 28, apparently acting as an authorized agent of Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. This anonymous person started the stub without my knowledge, and cited sources for information on me without vetting these sources.

She and I went back and forth on this piece for several days, and she reverted me more than once. In the end, I remained unsatisfied with my ability to influence this article about me, particularly with respect to the sources cited. At this point I renewed my original request to have the entire thing deleted.

Since I sent my email to you, she put it into delete status. She says that she was able to do this because she and I were the only two who contributed to the piece, and we both agreed to the deletion. She also says that any other admins can undo this speedy deletion if they add an edit.

I am asking you to insure that no other admins can undo the deletion. I presume that you and the directors of Wikimedia Foundation are legally responsible for the actions of your anonymous administrators.

I consider this entire episode a privacy violation. My only interest in trying to shape the article was to determine how much power I had to address this situation short of a deletion. I am now satisfied that I lack sufficient power, and ask that it remain deleted permanently.

Sincerely,

Daniel Brandt
President

In a follow-up email to Mr. Wales, it was pointed out that SlimVirgin had an agenda before she began the stub on Daniel Brandt. Since Brandt was not notified of the stub posted on September 28, 2005, and knew almost nothing about Wikipedia, and had never heard of SlimVirgin, it was fortunate that he accidentally saw the stub on a search engine. This was just two weeks later, which meant that there was still time before it began spreading uncontrollably on the web. Soon he discovered that SlimVirgin was not as neutral as she pretended, and asked for a complete deletion. Here are some earlier comments from SlimVirgin:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Chip_Berlet/Archive_1

"Daniel Brandt is not a reputable source. He is an extreme leftwing activist and conspiracy theorist. He soaks up any material people send to him so long as it suits his ideology and incorporates it into Namebase. He's the author of Google Watch. Slim 21:57, Dec 28, 2004 (UTC)"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:John_Train_Salon

"Weed, I removed Daniel Brandt. He's not a credible source, not a journalist, and seems to write only for his own website i.e. he's a blogger. It's not appropriate to use someone's personal website as a source. There's no evidence that Roy Godson is an intelligence operative and the weasel catch-all phrase "representatives from intelligence-linked funding sources" is typical Brandt and typical LaRouche. This article is turning into an EIR piece. People are being associated with other people they once stood next to for 10 minutes etc. Please stop or this issue will have to go back to the ArbCom, with all the work for all of us that will entail.... Others should chip in with what they think of Daniel Brandt as a source. I know he wouldn't be used by mainstream journalists unless they checked his information independently, which isn't to say they wouldn't use him to point them in a certain direction. My main concern about Brandt is that he self-publishes. The few things I believe he published in the 80s were in outlets with little, if any, editorial oversight. Herschel, do you know whether he has published anywhere reputable; or whether he is quoted in the mainstream press? I know he's been quoted a bit regarding Google Watch, but it's not clear it's taken seriously. We can't use information from people who only self-publish on their websites, otherwise any of us could start up a website today then quote ourselves in Wikipedia. (Not that this would surprise me, mind you.) Slim 05:51, Jan 6, 2005 (UTC)"

On the basis of this evidence, Jimmy Wales should have apologized and revoked SlimVirgin's administrative privileges. Instead, he praised her and scolded Brandt, the victim. Even if there had been a sincere consensus among all involved for the article in question, Brandt would have needed to check in frequently to make sure that the article wasn't changed by other anonymous, hostile editors. This is a fundamental weakness in the Wikipedia development model.

Articles in Wikipedia are supposed to be neutral in tone, and assertions are supposed to be backed up with citations. What's happening is that any collection of citations that appears balanced is all that anybody expects. If the title or snippet in a link itself contributes to this impression, then the full text is not researched by anyone. No one has time for that. Just grab a few catchy snippets from Google and slap them at the end of the Wikipedia article. It's a full-circle dance: garbage in, garbage out, garbage back in. A few cycles of this, and it all turns into a big, stinking heap.

Wikipedia is a potential menace to anyone who values privacy. It needs to be watched closely.

Halloween update: It's back!

Brandt posted this at Inside Google on October 31.

Initially the article was deleted because SlimVirgin, the administrator who created the stub on September 28, and I agreed to a speedy deletion, after we worked together on the piece for several days. That was my initial request when I first complained to SlimVirgin — either delete the whole thing or lose those two biased links on me. We finally agreed to this deletion when I discovered that she was previously biased against me, based on independent evidence going back months that had nothing to do with Google. She also refused in the end to relent on one of the two links. Jimmy Wales was made aware that we had deleted the article, but he declined to intervene. He did defend SlimVirgin as one of his best editors, and scolded me for reverting two links on Google-Watch, and restored them, and said, "Don't do that again." SlimVirgin warned me that she didn't have the power to keep the article on me deleted if another administrator decided to resurrect it.

Then Mr. Philipp Lenssen waltzes into the picture. He is not a neutral party, as the link that I objected to most has been happily cited by him on his blog more than once. I consider him to be a "Google-lapdog blogger." SlimVirgin has properly recused herself from any editing on the resurrected version of the article, which is quite different from the one that she and I abandoned. It is much more amateurish, by an order of magnitude. I'll say one thing in SlimVirgin's favor — she's a brilliant editor and writer when she is truly neutral.

Lenssen got one of the secret-police Wikipedia administrators to undelete the piece. This secret policeman is named Canderson7. I asked him for his real name and he scolded me for making a legal threat, citing one of the alphabet-soup of Wikipedia acronyms that pointed to some paragraph on implicit legal threats. All I did was politely ask for his real name and location "for legal reasons." Anyway, Canderson7 did his thing and went away. Now Lenssen and other editors (everyone except me, of course) are free to violate my privacy and play games with the facts.

Believe it or not, Lenssen's position is that I don't have the right to touch any articles that mention me, but he has the right to spin like crazy, and add gratuitous links that defame me, and generally turn the whole article into an unfortunate joke. This piece of crap will be number one on all engines within a few months in a search for my name. It will follow me for the rest of my life.

I want it deleted, and I need your support. Even if SlimVirgin and I had arrived at an agreement, the entire structure of Wikipedia, with which I am now somewhat familiar for the first time, means that any Tom, Dick and Philipp can come along and pervert the piece. That's why I want a complete deletion. That's the most important thing for me.

Along the way, I'd also like accountability for the anonymous editors and administrators who lurk at Wikipedia. I should be able to know who SlimVirgin and Canderson7 are, for example. I don't think even Jimmy knows who most of his anonymous administrators are. This opens up Wikipedia to infiltration by agents of corporations, governments, or cults. It's a flaw in the structure.

And finally, I believe that articles on living persons should be generated in such a way that the person is notified, if at all possible, that the article is under development, and has the right to demand minimal standards of evidence to back up assertions made in the article. SlimVirgin had contact information for me but did not notify me of the initial stub she started — I found out by accident.

Wikipedia has a NPOV (neutral point of view) policy that simply means you should have a footnote handy. But that's all — any footnote from any blogger or forum anywhere on the web is all you need. No one expects anyone at Wikipedia to dig deeper.

Wikipedia is fine if you like trivia. It's great for things that no one cares about. But it goes too far when it sets amateur editors and anonymous administrators loose on the reputations of others.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), in charge of the relief effort, has paid evacuees some $274m (£159m) since hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Almost 54,000 families are still living in hotels and motels in Texas, Louisiana, Georgia and Mississippi.

Fema wants people to move to temporary accommodation before finding new homes.

"There are still too many people living in hotel rooms, and we want to help them get into longer-term homes before the holidays," said David Paulson, acting director of Fema.

"Those affected by the storms should have the opportunity to become self-reliant again and reclaim some normalcy in their lives."

From 1 December, most families staying in hotels will either have to pay the bills themselves or cover the costs with Fema housing aid.

'Great concern'

Not all Katrina and Rita evacuees will be affected by the decision.

A total of 12,338 families being housed in hotels in Louisiana and Mississippi can stay until 7 January.

The decision will be most keenly felt in Texas and Georgia, where almost 28,000 hotel rooms are occupied by families.

Texas Governor Rick Parry stressed that evacuees must take personal responsibility for their welfare and housing.

"However, my great concern is that there is still no long-term housing plan for the hundreds of thousands of Katrina victims who lost everything - including their homes - as a result of the storm," he added.

Comment: Uh, there is no long-term housing plan? Hey, long-term planning, that smacks of communism! Duh market'll take care of it!

New stage

Housing evacuees in hotels was the second stage in Fema's programme to rehouse the victims of Katrina and Rita.

Just 2,941 people remain in emergency shelters, down from a high of 321,000 after the storms, a Fema official said.

The agency is also consolidating housing aid and voucher schemes designed to help evacuees meet accommodation costs.

Voucher schemes will end on 1 March and housing aid will be sent directly to those who qualify.

Hurricane Katrina made landfall on 29 August, with Hurricane Rita sweeping through the Gulf coast on 24 September.

Arnulfo Martinez recalls seeing lots of hombres del ejercito standing at attention. Though he was living on the Belle Chasse Naval Base near New Orleans when President Bush spoke there on Oct. 11, he didn't understand anything the ruddy man in the rolled-up sleeves was saying to the troops. Martinez, 16, speaks no English; his mother tongue is Zapotec. He had left the cornfields of Oaxaca, Mexico, four weeks earlier for the promise that he would make $8 an hour, plus room and board, while working for a subcontractor of KBR, a wholly owned subsidiary of Halliburton that was awarded a major contract by the Bush administration for disaster relief work. The job was helping to clean up a Gulf Coast naval base in the region devastated by Hurricane Katrina. "I was cleaning up the base, picking up branches and doing other work," Martinez said, speaking to me in broken Spanish.

Even if the Oaxacan teenager had understood Bush when he urged Americans that day to "help somebody find shelter or help somebody find food," he couldn't have known that he'd soon need similar help himself. But three weeks after arriving at the naval base from Texas, Martinez's boss, Karen Tovar, a job broker from North Carolina who hired workers for a KBR subcontractor called United Disaster Relief, booted him from the base and left him homeless, hungry and without money.

"They gave us two meals a day and sometimes only one," Martinez said.

He says that Tovar "kicked us off the base," forcing him and other cleanup workers -- many of them Mexican and undocumented -- to sleep on the streets of New Orleans. According to Martinez, they were not paid for three weeks of work. An immigrant rights group recently filed complaints with the Department of Labor on behalf of Martinez and 73 other workers allegedly owed more than $56,000 by Tovar. Tovar claims that she let the workers go because she was not paid by her own bosses at United Disaster Relief. In turn, UDR manager Zachary Johnson, who declined to be interviewed for this story, told the Washington Post on Nov. 4 that his company had not been paid by KBR for two months.

Wherever the buck may stop along the chain of subcontractors, Martinez is stuck at the short end of it -- and his situation is typical among many workers hired by subcontractors of KBR (formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root) to clean and rebuild Belle Chasse and other Gulf Coast military bases. Immigrants rights groups and activists like Bill Chandler, president of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, estimate that hundreds of undocumented workers are on the Gulf Coast military bases, a claim that the military and Halliburton/KBR deny -- even after the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency turned up undocumented workers in a raid of the Belle Chasse facility last month. Visits to the naval bases and dozens of interviews by Salon confirm that undocumented workers are in the facilities. Still, tracing the line from unpaid undocumented workers to their multibillion-dollar employers is a daunting task. A shadowy labyrinth of contractors, subcontractors and job brokers, overseen by no single agency, have created a no man's land where nobody seems to be accountable for the hiring -- and abuse -- of these workers.

Right after Katrina barreled through the Gulf Coast, the Bush administration relaxed labor standards, creating conditions for rampant abuse, according to union leaders and civil rights advocates. Bush suspended the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires employers to pay "prevailing wages" for labor used to fulfill government contracts. The administration also waived the requirement for contractors rebuilding the Gulf Coast to provide valid I-9 employment eligibility forms completed by their workers. These moves allowed Halliburton/KBR and its subcontractors to hire undocumented workers and pay them meager wages (regardless of what wages the workers may have otherwise been promised). The two policies have recently been reversed in the face of sharp political pressure: Bush reinstated the Davis-Bacon Act on Nov. 3, while the Department of Homeland Security reinstated the I-9 requirements in late October, noting that it would once again "exercise prosecutorial discretion" of employers in violation "on a case-by-case basis." But critics say Bush's policies have already allowed extensive profiteering beneath layers of legal and political cover.

Halliburton/KBR, which enjoys an array of federal contracts in the United States, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has long drawn criticism for its proximity to Vice President Dick Cheney, formerly Halliburton's CEO. Halliburton/KBR spokesperson Melissa Norcross declined to respond directly to allegations about undocumented workers in the Gulf. "In performing work for the U.S. government, KBR uses its government-approved procurement system to source and retain qualified subcontractors," she said in an e-mail. "KBR's subcontractors are required to comply with all applicable labor laws and provisions when performing this work."

Victoria Cintra is the Gulf Coast outreach organizer for Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, which recently partnered with relief agency Oxfam America to help immigrant workers displaced by Katrina. She says KBR is exposing undocumented workers like Martinez to unethical and illegal treatment, even though they are supposed to be paid with federal Katrina-recovery dollars to clean and rebuild high-security facilities like the one President Bush recently visited. Cintra is one of several people fighting to recover the wages owed the workers: She drives her beat-up, chocolate-colored car across the swamps, damaged roads and broken bridges of the Gulf Coast to track down contractors and subcontractors. With yellow legal pad in hand, she and other advocates document abuses taking place at Belle Chasse, the Naval Construction Battalion Center at the Seabee naval base in Gulfport, Miss., and other military installations.

I was with Cintra when she received phone calls from several Latino workers who complained they were denied, under threat of deportation, the right to leave the base at Belle Chasse. Cintra also took me along on visits to squalid trailer parks -- like the one at Arlington Heights in Gulfport -- where up to 19 unpaid, unfed and undocumented KBR site workers inhabited a single trailer for $70 per person, per week. Workers there and on the bases complained of suffering from diarrhea, sprained ankles, cuts and bruises, and other injuries sustained on the KBR sites -- where they received no medical assistance, despite being close to medical facilities on the same bases they were cleaning and helping rebuild.

Still, DataQuick Information Services released a report Tuesday showing Southern California's housing market remained strong in October. A total of 28,489 homes were sold during the month — a roughly 10% drop from September, but a 1% gain from a year ago.

“The big question is still whether... the real estate market will end this cycle with a crash or with a soft landing,” says DataQuick President Marshall Prentice, calling the latter outcome more likely.

The NAR said Phoenix had the most robust price gains in the third quarter of 2005: The median home price soared 55.2% to $268,000 from the same period in 2004. In Orlando, home prices rose 44.8% to a median $261,300, while Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Fla., saw a 42.5% price gain to $277,600.

Median prices ranged from $72,800 in Danville, Ill., to $721,900 in San Francisco. Elmira, N.Y., and Decatur, Ill., were also among the least expensive markets, while Anaheim, Calif., Honolulu and San Diego ranked with San Francisco as the priciest.

Six areas had small price drops during the period, though the Realtors said the weakness was concentrated in lower-priced cities with large inventories of unsold homes, a weak job market or both.

The housing market has been a main economic driver, buoying the job market and boosting consumer spending as owners have extracted hundreds of billions in equity. High Frequency Economics says that even a slowdown to more traditional rates of home construction could shave 2 percentage points off annual economic growth, now running at a 3.8% pace.

Comment: Several QFS members recently commented on this latest move by the Fed:

I guess that means they can really crank up the printing presses, as if they haven't already overdone it. I'd say we will be looking at hyper inflation by summer time.

Another member responded:

Glad you brought this up actually because I was thinking about trying to anticipate what hyperinflation will actually mean to us, in the practical sense, over the coming months. We discussed this to some extent last year and so perhaps now would be a good time to think about it again.

Mark had posted some writings on how hyperinflation effected the lives of those in Germany in the 1920's. What I got out of it was that those who invested in gold managed to acheive some level of security (ie. the waiter who was tipped with gold coins later faired better then the restaraunt owner). That point has been made fairly clear.

Then there was something Laura had posted which suggested that investing in 'capital,' or 'durable goods' (ie. hardware, appliances, machinary needed in good working order), was something best done before hyperinflation hits, for obvious reasons. I think this was the main point but please correct me if I'm wrong about this.

We also mentioned that having a little silver may also be a good investment. Being a prescious metal, it's value is likely to go up as well. It may also be easier to exchange since a one ounce coin is worth (currently) about $10.00 US.

Researchers looked at what would happen if a comparable extreme-heat event settled on five major U.S. cities, learning that not only would the country experience massive blackouts, but thousands of people could die. In New York alone, the number of deaths would increase to nearly 3,000 in a single summer.

"That would literally double the number of excess deaths over the next hottest summer in the last 40 years in New York," said study leader Laurence Kalkstein, senior research fellow at the University of Delaware's Center for Climatic Research.

Already deadly

History shows that heat waves are deadlier than hurricanes or tornadoes. And studies have indicated that extreme weather events will become more common with global warming.

The warming is underway. With temperatures up to 30 percent higher than the seasonal average over the past few decades in most of Europe, the summer of 2003 was one of the hottest in centuries. Scientists expect 2005 to set a modern record for the warmest average global temperature. Leading computer models show continued warming for at least several decades, even if greenhouse gas emissions are curbed, with only wild schemes proposed to put the brakes on.

Urban areas are particularly vulnerable, because dark asphalt and rooftops absorb more solar radiation than natural landscapes, raising nighttime temperatures by as much as five degrees, according to NASA studies.

In order to see the effects of extreme heat events on the United States, the researchers developed models to simulate scenarios analogous to that of Europe's for heat-sensitive urban areas.

"We tried to take the Paris heat wave in 2003 and transpose it onto the climate of five different cities," Kalkstein said. The cities: Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C.

The results were not cool.

In the nation's capital, there were 11 days with temperatures at or above 105 degrees in the virtual scenario. St. Louis reached an all-time maximum of 116. New York and Philadelphia each broke all-time highs for four days. In Detroit the mercury set all-time records twice.

The total simulated excess deaths were more than five times the historical summer average, with New York and St. Louis showing the highest numbers. This the researchers attribute to size and city structures.

"New York is much bigger and clearly will have more deaths than cities like Washington and Detroit," Kalkstein said. "The second thing is that [a place such as] New York is a very sensitive city with a lot of high-rises and buildings that are sensitive to extreme heat." [...]

"We heard a weird sound coming through, kind of a whistle," said Penny Leonard, 37, who sought shelter in the basement of a hospital Tuesday in the western Kentucky town of Madisonville. "I thank God I'm safe."

Meteorologists said a cold front moving rapidly east collided with warm, unstable air from the south on Tuesday to produce the thunderstorms that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes, spawning funnel clouds and tornadoes in parts of Missouri, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois and Tennessee.

There were preliminary reports of at least 35 tornadoes, the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center said on its website.

It was the third outbreak of twisters this month. One tornado on Nov. 6 killed 23 people in southern Indiana, and nine tornadoes struck Iowa on Saturday, killing one woman.

Roofs of homes were caved in and entire buildings were blown off foundations in parts of Madisonville on Tuesday.

One storm-related death was reported in Madisonville, but details weren't available, said Lori King, public information officer for the Marshall County Emergency Management Services. Twenty-two people were treated for injuries, said Jayne Barton, a spokeswoman for the Regional Medical Center in Madisonville.

Along with tornadoes, thunderstorms in Indiana produced wind of more than 160 kilometres an hour and as much as five centimetres of rain, causing scattered flooding, said meteorologist Jason Puma at the weather service in Indianapolis.

A teenager was killed when her car went out of control on a flooded road and overturned east of Indianapolis.

In Tennessee, Henry County's emergency officials had to scramble for shelter when their office was struck by a tornado.

The Henry County Medical Center treated 13 people and admitted two with non-life-threatening injuries.

In Tennessee's Montgomery County, four mobile homes, a camper and two houses were destroyed at Cunningham, just south of Clarksville.

"It looks like a war zone," said Ted Denny, spokesman for the Montgomery County Sheriff's Department.

At the colder northern end of the storm system, snow fell across parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan on Wednesday. homes, a camper and two houses were destroyed at Cunningham, just south of Clarksville.

"It looks like a war zone," said Ted Denny, spokesman for the Montgomery County Sheriff's Department.

At the colder northern end of the storm system, snow fell across parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan on Wednesday. At least three people were killed in crashes on slippery Minnesota roads on Tuesday, police said.

The National Weather Service issued tornado watches and warnings for the Evansville area, as well as parts of Tennessee, Missouri, eastern Arkansas, southern Illinois and western sections of Kentucky.

A funnel cloud was sighted in Clay City in central Indiana but apparently remained aloft. Two funnel clouds were also reported in southern Illinois, but there were no immediate reports of damage.

In western Tennessee, a funnel cloud reportedly touched down, damaging an undetermined number of buildings in Henry and Weakley counties.

"Numerous homes there were damaged, some completely destroyed," said Faye Scott, spokeswoman for the Henry County Sheriff's Department. "It's major destruction."

Tom Cooper, police chief in Paris, Tenn., told Nashville television station WSMV that 15 to 20 people suffered minor injuries from flying debris in the community about 85 miles west of Nashville.

The National Weather Service could not immediately confirm the tornado.

Flood warnings also were posted as more than 6 inches of rain fell in parts of the Ohio River Valley.

Meteorologists said a cold front moving east and colliding with warm, unstable air was producing severe thunderstorms across the central Mississippi and lower Ohio valleys.

Dan Spaeth, a weather service forecaster, said Tuesday's conditions were similar to those that produced the tornado on Nov. 6 that caused 41 miles of damage from Kentucky into the Evansville area and killed 23 people.

The most severe damage on Nov. 6 was in a mobile home park on the eastern edge of Evansville where 19 of the victims were killed. Four other people were killed in neighboring Warrick County.

Elsewhere in the Midwest, nine tornadoes swept across central Iowa on Saturday, killing one woman.

Though severe thunderstorms and tornados are not uncommon in the fall, Spaeth said the strength of storm systems that have produced recent tornadoes suggests severe weather ahead.

"It's not usually as widespread or frequent," he said. "But if it happens once, it can happen again."

Some residents of the area, near the town of Pasto, told local media they were reluctant to leave their farms and livestock despite increased seismic activity recorded by the Colombian Institute of Geology and Mines.

"I always have a packed suitcase ready, a flashlight and a radio," said local resident Aida Vallejo, who declined to heed the government's recommendation to immediately evacuate.

Galeras had a small gas and ash eruption a year ago that started forest fires but caused no injuries. An eruption of the volcano in 1993 killed at least 10 people.

IT WILL be a verdict of truly biblical proportions. For 40 days Judge John Jones presided over the intelligent design trial in Pennsylvania and now he aims to decide by 1 January whether teaching ID in US science classes alongside evolution violates the constitutional ban on religious indoctrination in schools.

Eleven parents brought the case last June after objecting to the Dover High School Board's decision compelling pupils to learn about ID, the theory that the complexity of life is best explained by an unidentified supernatural creator. Lawyers for the parents sought to prove that ID is a thinly veiled attempt to repackage biblical creationism as a scientific theory, so if taught would violate the American constitution (see New Scientist, 29 October, p 6).

"We proved two key points," said Steve Harvey, an attorney for the parents. "First, that the board of education had a specifically religious purpose in enacting its policy, and second, that ID is not a scientific theory or science at all. It's a religious concept."

Harvey told New Scientist that if the judge finds for the parents, the verdict would set a precedent undermining the case for teaching ID in schools elsewhere in the US.

On a lighter note, the defendants' attorney noted that the final day was the fortieth, and asked the judge whether this was deliberate. The court collapsed in laughter when the judge replied: "Not by design".

Meditating does more than just feel good and calm you down, it makes you perform better – and alters the structure of your brain, researchers have found.

People who meditate say the practice restores their energy, and some claim they need less sleep as a result. Many studies have reported that the brain works differently during meditation – brainwave patterns change and neuronal firing patterns synchronise. But whether meditation actually brings any of the restorative benefits of sleep has remained largely unexplored.

So Bruce O’Hara and colleagues at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, US, decided to investigate. They used a well-established “psychomotor vigilance task”, which has long been used to quantify the effects of sleepiness on mental acuity. The test involves staring at an LCD screen and pressing a button as soon as an image pops up. Typically, people take 200 to 300 milliseconds to respond, but sleep-deprived people take much longer, and sometimes miss the stimulus altogether.

Ten volunteers were tested before and after 40 minutes of either sleep, meditation, reading or light conversation, with all subjects trying all conditions. The 40-minute nap was known to improve performance (after an hour or so to recover from grogginess). But what astonished the researchers was that meditation was the only intervention that immediately led to superior performance, despite none of the volunteers being experienced at meditation.

“Every single subject showed improvement,” says O’Hara. The improvement was even more dramatic after a night without sleep. But, he admits: “Why it improves performance, we do not know.” The team is now studying experienced meditators, who spend several hours each day in practice.
Brain builder

What effect meditating has on the structure of the brain has also been a matter of some debate. Now Sara Lazar at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, US, and colleagues have used MRI to compare 15 meditators, with experience ranging from 1 to 30 years, and 15 non-meditators.

They found that meditating actually increases the thickness of the cortex in areas involved in attention and sensory processing, such as the prefrontal cortex and the right anterior insula.

“You are exercising it while you meditate, and it gets bigger,” she says. The finding is in line with studies showing that accomplished musicians, athletes and linguists all have thickening in relevant areas of the cortex. It is further evidence, says Lazar, that yogis “aren’t just sitting there doing nothing".

The growth of the cortex is not due to the growth of new neurons, she points out, but results from wider blood vessels, more supporting structures such as glia and astrocytes, and increased branching and connections.

The new studies were presented at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, in Washington DC, US.

A 12-year-old girl in central Hunan province and a 24-year-old female poultry worker in Anhui province in the east have both died of the virus, said Roy Wadia, a World Health Organization spokesman in Beijing.

China’s official Xinhua news agency said the Health Ministry had confirmed two human cases of avian flu in Hunan and one in Anhui, but provided no additional details.

The third confirmed infection was the Hunan girl’s nine-year-old brother, who has since recovered, Wadia said. Chinese and WHO experts had been reviewing the children’s cases because of a bird flu outbreak among poultry in their village.

Chinese officials initially said the two children and a teacher who also fell ill in their village had tested negative for bird flu.

The announcement marks China’s first human cases of the H5N1 virus that has killed at least 64 people in Asia since 2003.

A day earlier, China announced an ambitious plan to vaccinate its entire poultry stock — 14 billion fowl — against bird flu following 11 outbreaks in poultry over the last month. Details were not given.

Northeastern China’s Liaoning province ordered all farm birds vaccinated early this month, said Fu Jingwu, deputy director of the provincial Animal Health Supervision and Management Bureau.

“All the poultry that’s supposed to be vaccinated has been vaccinated — 320 million birds,” Fu said.

The province has also destroyed more than 10 million chickens, ducks and other birds.

Meanwhile, government ministers at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in Busan, South Korea, urged more regional and international information-sharing and response systems to combat the bird flu threat.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged governments to improve communications and to encourage the private sector to help prepare for outbreaks before they happen.

“New global pandemics, like avian influenza, require new, concerted action,” she told APEC trade and foreign ministers. “We must increase the transparency of our political systems. We need to improve our ability to communicate accurate, relevant information quickly to the international community, and we must encourage our private sector to help us prepare for outbreaks before they happen.”

Comment: That's a good onen Condi! Governments need to be more transparent!

In Indonesia, visiting European Union Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou warned that the country must intensify its bird flu fight and that the government must follow through with action.

He said the country has to devise and implement a detailed plan — from ways to monitor hundreds of millions of backyard chickens to guidelines for slaughtering and vaccinating them.

“It will not be an easy task,” said Kyprianou. “Indonesia will need foreign assistance ... we can help but we can’t do it for them.”

Also Wednesday, Vietnamese authorities reported bird flu outbreaks in three more provinces — northern Vinh Phuc and Son La and central Quang Ngai — bringing to 12 the number of cities and provinces affected in the latest wave, which began about a month ago.

Vietnam is in middle of an aggressive campaign to cull all poultry in most of Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. The government is paying farmers about half the market value, and any birds found alive in the cities’ main urban areas after Monday will be killed without compensation, authorities have said.

In Taiwan, officials on Wednesday expressed doubt about British tests that found the H5N1 virus in a group of finch-like birds imported from the island.

Taiwan’s top animal health official, Watson Sung, said tests at the farm that supplied the birds had found no evidence of the virus. Taiwan will send a delegation to Britain to clear up the situation, Sung said.

Also Wednesday, Australia’s most populous state, New South Wales, detailed plans to cope with a possible flu pandemic.

State political leader Premier Maurice Iemma said community halls and even sports fields would be pressed into action as places to isolate human flu victims, and hospitals would cancel non-urgent procedures.

And another bright object seen hovering over West Swansea in January of this year is also being put down as a UFO.

However, Julie Monk of the Ministry of Defence's Directorate of Air Staff made it clear a UFO classification simply meant no rational explanation for a sighting could be found, not that it was extra-terrestrial in origin.

MoD figures show 28 reports of UFO sightings in Wales in the past three years cannot be explained.

The close encounters include a black object hovering over Rhyl, a flying disc over Newport and a spinning craft with legs spotted in the skies above Rhondda.

The figures, released under the Freedom of Information Act, show that there were seven sightings in 2002, eight in 2003, four in 2004 and nine so far this year.

Whitehall-based Mrs Monk said, "The MoD examines any reports of UFOs it receives solely to establish whether what was seen might have some defence significance.

"That is, whether there is any evidence the UK's airspace might have been compromised by an unauthorised aircraft.

"Unless there is evidence of a potential threat to the UK from some external source, and to date no UFO report has revealed such evidence, we do not attempt to identify the precise nature of each sighting."

Mrs Monk said rational explanations could be found for such sightings but it would be "an inappropriate use of defence resources" to go into great depth on each report.

Instead, a number of the reports are simply classed as UFOs and a database of sightings in Wales has now been built up from 2002 onwards.

Because of the large number of reports before 2002, the MoD says the cost of examining, logging and placing them all on a database would be too expensive.

The MoD holds reports of UFOs in Wales going back 25 years.

Cardiff-based UFO researcher Chris Fowler said, "There are credible sightings of unidentified objects in the sky.

"Either these are our craft, which means we've got technology far more powerful than the ones most of us know about, or else they're somebody else's. I don't know more than that."

There have been a number of UFO watching groups in Wales including the Welsh Federation of Independent Ufologists.

The strangest report given to the federation involved a family travelling by car to the Great Orme on November 10, 1997.

They could not account for several "lost" hours when they suddenly became aware of resuming their journey, according to investigator Margaret Fry.

She was told of their account by a friend of the family.

Margaret says the couple and their children where driving on the Bodfair/Landernog road when they found their car engulfed by a purple triangular craft.

The next thing they remember is the purple craft had gone.

She said, "But they could not account for considerable hours of time lost.

"The father was having trouble afterwards with a top molar tooth and he had to go to the dentist.

"A black unknown object fell out while he was at the dentist ... but he had no fillings."

There was a raft of "cigar-shaped object" sightings in Pembrokeshire in the 1970s which prompted an RAF inquiry.

And in January 1974 there were reports a spacecraft "as big as the Albert Hall" landed in the Berwyn Mountains.

Last year, Alison Moore, 26, took footage of a floating disc in the sky above her Trehafod, Rhondda, home.

Although astronomer Mark Griffiths said "it could have been Venus" he said the incident deserved further investigation.

Bill Brooks
Date: Sat, November 12, 2005 7:15 am
To: webmaster@rense.com

Rense.com --

Don't know quite what to make of this....was out with the wife in La'ie Observation Point . I didn't notice this at first until I started working with the review of all of the pictures we took that day. The pictures are digital and un-tampered with. At first I thought it was just a single peculiarity but as you can see there are 3 of them all on the same trajectory coming from an earthly direction at a 45 degree angle. I know you get hundreds of these but just thought I would send this up. Perhaps there is a very logical explanation but it struck me as odd that all three seem to have telemetry in the angle of ascent. As you may know, Oahu is chock full of military bases, although none in the immediate area.

Place: La'ie Lookout Point, NorthShore Oahu Hawaii
Date: November 11, 2005
Time: Appx 3:30 PM
Weather: Slightly overcast but clear
Camera: Olympus Digital Camedia 2.1 MegaPixel Auto-Focus Auto-Exposure
Orientation: South to North (guestimate..could be wrong)

Thanks

---

Bill,

Thanks for this terrific submission. At first glance, we thought perhaps it was sunlight piercing through holes the clouds, but close inspection reveals the sun is clearly to the far right, not behind the clouds dead ahead in your shot. We found one additional, faint anomalous object also at the same angle, apparently one considerably more distant from the others on the right side of the photo. This almost certainly tells us these are really there, in various levels of depth of field. If this is a digital defect, its one we've never come across before. The "tracers" seem to indicate these objects were moving at tremendous speed, which might explain why you didn't even see them when taking the photograph.
-ed

A Falcon One rocket was to lift the ashes of Doohan, who played engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott aboard the fictional Starship Enterprise, into space next month but the launch has been delayed at least until February, organizers said Tuesday.

"They had an engine test they didn't like so they will do another month of testing," Charles Chafer of Space Services Inc. told AFP.

Unlike Scotty, who told Captain James T. Kirk in a Scottish accent, "She'll launch on time and she'll be ready," the US Department of Defense engineers involved with the rocket mission needed more time to sort out engine problems, Chafer said.

The "Explorers Flight" launch in California was to follow the launch of an identical rocket this month in the Marshall Islands.

Concerns about an engine on the rocket in the Marshall Islands prompted the additional testing, throwing off the schedule for the originally planned California launch in December, Chafer said.

"We want to fly," Chafer said. "But, this will give us the opportunity to accept some additional participants for the ride."

The Explorers Flight was already billed by Space Services as the largest ever memorial spaceflight, with 168 participants from eight countries aboard.

Doohan, who died in July at the age of 85, had asked that his ashes be launched into the final frontier following his death.

Canadian-born Doohan played engineer Montgomery Scott in the original "Star Trek" television series that started in 1966 and spawned a decades-long cult following of the show.

Doohan immortalized the starship's engineer, a pragmatically blunt bear of a man who repeatedly managed miraculous repairs while crew members dealt with the adversities and adventures of "space, the final frontier".

Space Services, a Texas-based company, has rocketed the remains of "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry and 1960s drug guru Timothy Leary into the firmament.