- Signs of the Times Archive for Thu, 15 Mar 2007 -



Sections on today's Signs Page:

SOTT Focus

No new articles.


Best of the Web
Fake Congressional Opposition to War

Stephen Lendman
sjlendman.blogspot.com
2007-03-15 08:44:00

The US electorate sent a clear, unequivocal message in the November mid-term elections. End the Iraq war and bring home the troops. Many supporting war in the 109th Congress lost out to more moderate voices taking over their seats because voters want change and expect new faces to deliver starting with the top issue on voters' minds in recent polls - Iraq. A majority of the public demands it, protests and heated rhetoric continue building over it, and the Congress is about to disappoint again proving getting into war is easy but even an act of Congress can't get us out because doing nothing is less risky than taking a stand against the prevailing view in Washington.

Comment on this SOTT Focus

U.S. Emulates Stalinist Russia with "Show Trials" at Guantanamo

By Stephen Soldz
Psyche, Science, and Society
2007-03-15 07:59:00

©Signs of the Times
Stalin with three of his Bolshevik comrades, who later became his victims - Rykov, Kamenev, Zinoviev.


In Stalinist Russia it was common for political prisoners, after a suitable period of detention, to miraculously "confess" to all kinds of crimes. Of course, such practices were common during the Inquisition as well.

The United States is showing that it's now a torture power to be reckoned with. No second-rate torture for us. We've now mastered the art of getting the desired "confessions," as needed for the 6:00 News. Witness the "confession" of Khalid Sheik Mohammed:

"I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z," Mohammed told a panel of military officers through a personal representative, who read off a list of 31 terrorist acts that were either carried out or planned but not executed. According to transcripts released by Defense Department officials last night, Mohammed later spoke in broken English and Arabic, saying, "For sure, I'm American enemies."


Comment on this SOTT Focus


U.S. News
Bush Hit-Woman Behind Prosecutor Firings Has Long History of Purges to Protect Bush


Greg Palast
2007-03-14 17:18:00

The Mister Big behind the scandal of George Bush's firing of US Attorneys is not a 'mister' at all. The House Judiciary Committee has released White House emails indicating that the political operative who ordered the hit on prosecutors too honest for their own good was Harriet Miers, one-time legal counsel to the President.

But this is not the first time that Miers has fired investigators to protect Mr. Bush.

Comment on this SOTT Focus

Flashback: Israel's secret American servants; We, the People vs. Zionism

Anisa Abd el Fattah
Mediamonitors
2007-03-15 16:35:00

"The "neo-conservative" cloak worn by Zionists in the US is designed to bring legitimacy to a political, economic and social ideology called Zionism that is repugnant to most people who are not Jewish, and also to a growing number of Jews."

Comment on this SOTT Focus

Media Fight Request to Close Parts of Israel Lobbyists' Trial

Jerry Markon
Washington Post
2007-03-15 13:18:00

Defense lawyers and media organizations are objecting to what they say is a government effort to bar the public from the upcoming trial of two pro-Israel lobbyists charged with violating U.S. espionage laws.


A group of media organizations, which includes The Washington Post, filed a motion late Tuesday criticizing "the government's apparent request to close" the trial of Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman. A federal judge in Alexandria had set a hearing on the motion for today, but it was unclear late yesterday whether the hearing would be held.


Comment on this SOTT Focus

Elevator Explodes Near Boston; 2 Killed


The Guardian
2007-03-15 11:05:00

An elevator exploded in an office building Wednesday, and authorities began investigating it as a murder-suicide after they found the bodies of a man and woman inside.


Essex District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett said the deaths in downtown Lynn, near Boston, appeared to be a ''domestic violence situation by use of an incendiary device.''


Two people were taken to hospitals with minor injuries, police said.


Witnesses said a man pulled a woman into the elevator, The Daily Item of Lynn reported. Shortly afterward, an explosion engulfed the elevator, police said.


Comment on this SOTT Focus

4 killed in NYC shootout; motive unknown


Associated Press
2007-03-15 11:02:00

A gunman with a fake beard and carrying 100 rounds of ammunition fatally shot a pizzeria employee and two unarmed volunteer police officers in trendy Greenwich Village before other officers shot him to death, the mayor said Thursday.


Authorities were investigating why David Gavin, 32, went into a pizzeria around 9 p.m. Wednesday, asked for a menu and then shot an employee 15 times in the back before fleeing, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.


A neighborhood resident, Tina Lourenko, said she saw the gunman and recognized him as a former employee of the pizzeria.


Comment on this SOTT Focus

House overturns Bush order on presidential papers secrecy

By Peter Szekely
Reuters
2007-03-15 10:17:00

WASHINGTON - Brushing aside a veto threat, the House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to overturn a 2001 order by President George W. Bush that lets former presidents keep their papers secret indefinitely.

The measure, which drew bipartisan support and passed by a veto-busting 333-93 margin, was among White House-opposed bills the House passed that would widen access to government information and protect government whistleblowers.

"Today, Congress took an important step toward restoring openness and transparency in government," House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman said.

The presidential papers bill nullifies a November 2001 order, criticized by historians, in which Bush allowed the White House or a former president to block release of a former president's papers and put the onus on researchers to show a "specific need" for many types of records.

Comment on this SOTT Focus


UK & Euro-Asian News
Anti-feminism is sweeping Germany


der Spiegel
2007-03-15 17:53:00

The anonymous letter makes for heartbreaking reading. "Dragging myself from job to job, I used to feel so useless. I wanted to be special but didn't know how -- I was neither fish nor flesh." For this angst-ridden career woman, salvation finally came in the full-bellied shape of motherhood. "With my husband and daughter at my side, I'm so happy and free now," she proclaims.

Comment on this SOTT Focus

Quizzed.. The chef & nurse

John Coles
The Sun
2007-03-15 10:59:00

Cops are investigating seven "suspicious" deaths at an old people's home, it was revealed yesterday.


The couple who run the home, Rachel Baker, 45 - a registered nurse - and her chef husband Leigh, 48, were arrested after 97-year-old Lucy Cox died on New Year's Day.


Worried relatives called in police, who are treating Mrs Cox's death as an "unlawful killing".


A source told The Sun the Bakers had been arrested on suspicion of administering a poisonous substance.


Detectives are also probing the deaths of SIX other residents at the Parkfields Residential Care Home in Butleigh, Somerset, dating back to July 2004.


And care chiefs are investigating the alleged failure of the home's owners to properly notify the authorities about the deaths of a further six people.


An inquest into Mrs Cox's death has been opened and adjourned pending further inquiries.


It is understood that there were no inquests into the other six suspicious deaths.


But the source added: "There has been further investigation at the home, jointly with the Commission for Social Care Inspection, and that's why more deaths are now the subject of the investigation.


Comment on this SOTT Focus

CPS decision not to prosecute Richard Tomlinson under the Official Secrets Act 1989


CPS Press Release
2007-03-15 10:57:00

The Crown Prosecution Service has informed the Metropolitan Police that it has decided not to prosecute Richard Tomlinson, a member of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) between 1991 and 1995, for alleged offences committed under the Official Secrets Act 1989. The CPS has also decided not to prosecute alleged offences of blackmail in relation to threats to disclose information.


The CPS decided that in respect of some of the alleged offences there is not a realistic prospect of conviction. In those cases where there is a realistic prospect of conviction, the CPS, informed by the views of the SIS, has decided that it would not be in the public interest to prosecute.


The allegations against Mr Tomlinson were that, on various dates between 1998 and 2002, and then in 2005, 2006 and 2007, in breach of S.1(1) of the Official Secrets Act 1989, he made, without any lawful authority, various disclosures of information relating, or purporting to relate, to security and intelligence which was in his possession by virtue of his position as a member of the SIS. These disclosures were made variously in newspapers, a book and on the internet. It was also alleged that he had committed offences of blackmail by threatening to make further disclosures if the Metropolitan Police did not return to him computer equipment legitimately seized from him in France in 2006.


Comment on this SOTT Focus

£20bn for Trident: Blair needs Conservatives to get WMD bill through


BBC
2007-03-14 21:43:00

The government has won Commons support for plans to renew the UK's nuclear submarine system, despite a large rebellion by Labour MPs.

Tony Blair had said it was "essential" the UK began the £20bn plan to renew Trident as soon as possible.

Comment on this SOTT Focus


Around the World
Mugabe tells critics to 'go hang'


BBC
2007-03-15 17:40:00

Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe has said Western critics of his rule can "go hang", in response to accusations of mistreatment of opposition leaders.

Comment on this SOTT Focus


Big Brother
Google to stop holding search records

Dan Sabbagh
The Times
2007-03-14 17:31:00

Google has announced a plan to stop holding search records that could be linked to individuals for more than two years, in an effort to clean up its Big Brother reputation.

The internet giant had previously kept billions of search records for unspecified period - widely thought to be indefinitely - building up a massive database of private information for unclear internal purposes.

Comment on this SOTT Focus

Propaganda: Chertoff warns of Web of terrorism

By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
2007-03-15 17:27:00

Radical Islamists are using the Internet to recruit homegrown terrorists in the U.S., Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told a Senate panel yesterday.

"I don't think it's necessary to send radical recruiters into the United States, and I think there's a risk to doing that," Mr. Chertoff told the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

Comment on this SOTT Focus

Deliberately Misleading Info: Web censorship spreading globally (except for "Free World" contries of course)


Financial News
2007-03-15 11:09:00

Internet censorship is spreading rapidly, being practised by about two dozen countries and applied to a far wider range of online information and applications, according to research by a transatlantic group of academics.


The warning comes a week after a Turkish court ordered the blocking of YouTube to silence offensive comments about Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, marking the most visible attack yet on a website that has been widely adopted around the world.


A recent six-month investigation into whether 40 countries use censorship shows the practice is spreading, with new countries learning from experienced practitioners such as China and benefiting from technological improvements.


Comment on this SOTT Focus


Axis of Evil
GSS: Israeli-Arabs are Existential Danger to Israel

Hillel Fendel
Israel National News
2007-03-15 15:41:00

An internal Shabak document says Israel's Arabs are a long-range strategic danger to Israel's character and very existence.

Though many believe that Iran is currently Israel's greatest danger, the General Secret Service believes that the worst threat may actually come from within. An internal General Security Service document says that Israel's Arab population is a "genuine long-range danger to the Jewish character and very existence of the State of Israel."

Comment on this SOTT Focus

Just like the Nazis vis a vis the Jews: Israel made Egyptian POWs dig their own graves then shot them

Linda S. Heard
Gulf News
2007-03-15 13:25:00

A documentary produced by Israeli filmmaker Ron Edelist alleging that 250 Egyptian prisoners of war were massacred by Israeli commandos during the 1967 War has infuriated every level of Egyptian society.

Some Egyptian lawmakers are so incensed they are calling for an end to the Camp David Treaty. Anwar Esmat Sadat, a nephew of the former Egyptian president wants a freeze on exports to Israel and an end to the Israel-Egyptian "QIZ" agreement.

Comment on this SOTT Focus

Alleged Khalid Shaikh confession is U.S provocation against Muslims sez Russia rights activist


RIA Novosti
2007-03-15 11:34:00

An alleged confession by a prisoner in U.S. custody for terrorism could cause a wave of Islamophobia worldwide, a Russian human rights activist said Thursday.


Earlier in March, at a Guantanamo Bay hearing, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed confessed to masterminding the September 11th terrorist attacks, the Richard Reid shoe bombing attempt to blow up an airliner, the Bali nightclub bombing in Indonesia, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and other failed attacks - a total of 29 terrorist acts.


"This is a major provocation. I believe it is the work of U.S. special services, targeted against Muslims," said Kamildzhan Kalandarov, chairman of the Al-Khak [Justice] all-Russian public organization.


Comment on this SOTT Focus

Psychopathic Babble: We're Not Making It Worse


Sky News
2007-03-15 10:45:00

Tony Blair has told Sky News the western world should stop apologising for trying to do the "right thing" in Iraq.


The Prime Minister told Sky's Political Editor Adam Boulton that terrorism will never be defeated otherwise.


Mr Blair said: "We should be there to fight those people when what they are trying to do is destroy by terrorism the chance by people to get a democracy.


"We're not making it worse, they [the terrorists] are making it worse...


Comment on this SOTT Focus

Flashback: Hersh: children raped at Abu Ghraib


BoingBoing
2007-03-15 09:10:00

Thursday, July 15, 2004

From Daily Kos' partial transcript of a video (link to REAL stream) of Seymour Hersh speaking at an ACLU event. Hesays the US government has videotapes of children being raped at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.


Comment on this SOTT Focus

Flashback: U.S. Prosecutors Claim Guantanamo Trials Rigged

By NEIL A. LEWIS
NY Times
2005-08-01 09:20:00

As the Pentagon was making its final preparations to begin war crimes trials against four detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, two senior prosecutors complained in confidential messages last year that the trial system had been secretly arranged to improve the chance of conviction and to deprive defendants of material that could prove their innocence.

The electronic messages, obtained by The New York Times, reveal a bitter dispute within the military legal community over the fairness of the system at a time when the Bush administration and the Pentagon were eager to have the military commissions, the first for the United States since the aftermath of World War II, be seen as just at home and abroad.

Comment on this SOTT Focus


Middle East Madness
Pentagon report describes 'civil war' - end of '06 was most violent 3-month period since '03

By Lolita C. Baldor
Associated Press
2007-03-15 17:56:00

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. military for the first time Wednesday said in a new report that some of the violence in Iraq can be described as a civil war.

In its bleakest assessment of the war to date, a quarterly Pentagon report said October through December of last year was the most violent three-month period since 2003. Attacks and casualties suffered by coalition and Iraqi forces and civilians were higher than in any other similar time span, it said.

Comment on this SOTT Focus

Knesset adopts Holocaust Denial

Gideon Alon
Haaretz
2007-03-15 17:17:00

The Knesset decided yesterday to shelve a proposal for a parliamentary discussion on the Armenian genocide, in compliance with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's request.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni had also asked for a removal of MK Haim Oron's (Meretz) proposal from the agenda of the Knesset Education, Culture, and Sports Committee. She said the discussion might destabilize diplomatic relations with Turkey, which denies responsibility for the death of nearly 1 million Armenians during World War I.

Comment on this SOTT Focus

Israeli admits beating rabbi for attending Holocaust conference in Iran

Anon.
AP/International Herald Tribune
2007-03-15 17:15:00

An anti-Zionist rabbi who attended a conference in Iran that questioned the Holocaust said Wednesday he was beaten while in Poland by Jews furious at him for his actions.

Moishe Arye Friedman, who lives in Vienna, Austria, was attacked last Friday in Lezajsk, a small town in southeastern Poland. His attackers included Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, a member of the Israeli humanitarian group ZAKA, and two others, Friedman said in a telephone interview.

Meshi-Zahav, an orthodox Israeli Jew, confirmed to The Associated Press in a brief telephone interview from Jerusalem that he had been among Friedman's attackers.

Comment on this SOTT Focus

UNESCO to call for immediate halt to Temple Mount dig

Shlomo Shamir and Amiram Barkat
Haaretz
2007-03-15 15:35:00

The special UN team investigating the excavations near the Temple Mount in Jerusalem has determined that the works carried out by Israel comply with international standards for culturally significant sites. However, the report includes a call on Israel to halt excavation, which caused disappointment in the Foreign Ministry.

Comment on this SOTT Focus

Egyptian FM demands Israel probe alleged 1967 POW killings

Anon.
AP
2007-03-15 15:39:00

Egypt's foreign minister said on Tuesday he has demanded Israel investigate the alleged killings of Egyptian prisoners of war during the 1967 Six Day War, in comments that appeared to be an attempt to diffuse a public uproar over his earlier remarks which were decried here as too lenient toward Israel.

Comment on this SOTT Focus

Iran president calls U.N. resolution "torn paper"

Parisa Hafezi
Reuters
2007-03-15 09:50:00

TEHRAN - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Thursday dismissed any new U.N. sanctions resolution as "a torn piece of paper" that would not stop Tehran's nuclear work, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Comment on this SOTT Focus


The Loan Gunmen
Record foreclosures hit mortgage lenders

Noelle Knox
USA Today
2007-03-15 01:08:00

The reason many mortgage lenders are in trouble became alarmingly clear Tuesday. The Mortgage Bankers Association said more than 2.1 million Americans with a home loan missed at least one payment at the end of last year - and the rate of new foreclosures hit a record.

Comment on this SOTT Focus

U.S. Subprime Mortgage Delinquencies at 4-Year High

Sharon L. Crenson and Kathleen M. Howley
Bloomberg
2007-03-14 17:02:00

March 13 -- U.S. subprime borrowers fell behind on their mortgages at the highest rate in four years in the fourth quarter and foreclosures begun on all types of home loans rose to an all-time high, the Mortgage Bankers Association said.


Comment on this SOTT Focus

Halliburton to hire 13,000 amid move to Dubai


Associated Press
2007-03-14 20:49:00

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - Halliburton plans to hire more than 13,000 new workers this year in the U.S. and elsewhere as it splits its headquarters between Houston and Dubai, an executive said in a memo obtained by the Associated Press on Wednesday.

The oil service firm's announcement this week that its chief executive officer, Dave Lesar, would lead the company from a new headquarters in the Arab Gulf state raised an outcry among some in the United States.

Comment on this SOTT Focus

Record US trade deficit in 2006


BBC
2007-03-14 15:59:00

The US current account deficit jumped by 8.2% to a record $856.6bn (£444bn) in 2006, official figures show.

The rise, the fifth consecutive annual increase in the deficit, came despite a smaller trade imbalance in the final three months of 2006.

Comment on this SOTT Focus


The Living Planet
Low temperatures put Anchorage on path to coldest March on record


Anchorage Daily News
2007-03-15 17:51:00

ANCHORAGE -- Perhaps instead of "Big Wild Life," Anchorage should consider the motto "Really Really Cold." The city has seen unseasonably frosty temperatures for an unusually long period, according to the National Weather Service.

Comment on this SOTT Focus

U.S. Winter Temperature Near Average - Global december-february temperature warmest on record


noaa
2007-03-15 17:47:00

The December 2006-February 2007 winter season temperature was marked by periods of unusually warm and cold conditions in the U.S., but the overall seasonal temperature was near average, according to scientists at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. Precipitation was above average in much of the center of the nation while large parts of the East, Southeast, and Southwest were drier than average. The global temperature was the warmest on record for the December-February three-month period.

Comment on this SOTT Focus

Winter Warmest on Record Worldwide (Not exactly true, it turns out)

By Randolph E. Schmid
Associated Press
2007-03-15 17:43:00

WASHINGTON -- This winter was the warmest on record worldwide, the government said Thursday in the latest worrisome report focusing on changing climate.

The report comes just over a month after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said global warming is very likely caused by human actions and is so severe it will continue for centuries.

Comment on this SOTT Focus

Freak Mideast snow shuts schools in Israel


Agence France Presse
2007-03-15 16:58:00

Snow blanketed much of Jordan on Thursday, briefly whited out road signs in Jerusalem as freak weather created high waves in Egypt's Red Sea and forced four ports to close.

Comment on this SOTT Focus

Potent Snowstorm heading for Northeast US


AccuWeather
2007-03-15 16:00:00

State College, PA - Proof that winter is not officially over will be provided this weekend as cold air from Canada and a storm system moving out of Texas join forces on Friday, creating a powerful late-winter snowstorm in the Northeast.

The advancing cold front that put an end to the early taste of spring in the upper Plains and Midwest has moved through the Great Lakes today.

A storm system riding along the front has spread rain and a wintry mix of precipitation from the Midwest to the Maritimes in a prelude to the main event that will begin late Friday.

Comment on this SOTT Focus

Giant cold water eddy off Sydney lowers sea level


Reuters/Scientific American
2007-03-15 11:38:00

Australian oceanographers have discovered a giant cold water eddy off Sydney which has lowered sea levels almost one meter and impacted a major ocean current.


The eddy, which has diameter of about 200 km (120 miles) and reaches to depth of 1 km (1,100 yards), lies about 100 km (60 miles) off Sydney, said Australia's peak scientific body, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO).


The CSIRO said the eddy was so powerful it had pushed out to sea the strong East Australian Current, popularised in the hit Hollywood animation "Finding Nemo" and used by sailors in the Sydney-Hobart race down the east coast of Australia.


Shipping traffic and fishing have not been affected.


Comment on this SOTT Focus


Health & Wellness
Common Chemicals May be Feeding Obesity Epidemic

Amanda Gardner
HealthDay
2007-03-15 14:24:00

Exposure to a class of chemicals commonly found in soap and plastics could be fueling the obesity epidemic by contributing to abdominal obesity and insulin resistance in men, a new study suggests.

Comment on this SOTT Focus

Human Perceptual Learning As a Two-stage Process


Science Daily
2007-03-15 11:49:00

Using advanced brain imaging techniques, researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center have watched how humans use both lower and higher brain processes to learn novel tasks, an advance they say may help speed up the teaching of new skills as well as offer strategies to retrain people with perceptual deficits due to autism.


In the March 15 issue of Neuron, the research team provides the first human evidence for a two-stage model of how a person learns to place objects into categories discerning, for example, that a green apple, and not a green tennis ball, belongs to "food." They describe it as a complex interplay between neurons that process stimulus shape ("bottom-up") and more sophisticated brain areas that discriminate between these shapes to categorize and "label" that information ("top-down").


Comment on this SOTT Focus

Schizophrenia Much More Common In Certain Localities


Science Daily
2007-03-15 11:46:00

Research by the World Health Organization (WHO) has suggested that the course and symptomatic expression of schizophrenia is relatively more benign in developing societies.


However, a new study from Current Anthropology challenges this assumption, comparing biological and cultural indicators of schizophrenia in urban, Western societies with study data from the island of Palau, which has one of the highest rates of schizophrenia diagnosis in the world today.


"A 1% average worldwide population prevalence of schizophrenia is routinely interpreted in the medical literature as implying a uniform distribution," write Roger J. Sullivan (California State University, Sacramento), John S. Allen (University of Southern California), and Karen L. Nero (University of Canterbury, New Zealand). "In this sense, the 1% figure is a myth that conceals considerable variability in actual prevalence between settings."


Comment on this SOTT Focus

Level of communication governs how opinions evolve in social networks


Daily India/ New Scientist
2007-03-15 11:29:00

Boffins in Europe have developed a computer model that shows how opinions evolve in social networks.


And, the scientific analysis showed that the key to forming opinions lay in how well people can communicate with each other.


As a part of their experiment, researchers led by physicist Renaud Lambiotte of the University of Liege in Belgium used two groups of people.


After initially isolating the two groups from each other, they were gradually brought into contact.


The researchers found that though initially the two groups continued to form opinions independently, when communication gradually increased between them, the final opinions of the two groups were always identical.


Comment on this SOTT Focus

CDC's Vaccine Committee Whitewashed Toxic Vaccine Component, Says National Autism Association (NAA)


Medical News Today
2007-03-15 10:06:00

Parents and health advocates are expressing outrage over the recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) that pregnant women, infants and children continue to be exposed to mercury contained in the flu vaccine despite recommendations from the Institute of Medicine that mercury not be injected into these sensitive populations since 2001.



Comment on this SOTT Focus

Propaganda! The Genetics of Nicotine Addiction

By Jennifer Chu
technologyreview.com
2007-03-15 10:07:00

Researchers at the University of Iowa have identified certain genetic profiles that may be linked to a person's risk for developing nicotine addiction and other psychological behaviors. Using a genome-wide scan, scientists analyzed blood samples from smokers versus nonsmokers and found similar genetic patterns among smokers that may one day be used as a genetic test to determine who may be more vulnerable to nicotine addiction.

Comment on this SOTT Focus


Science & Technology
US coalition seeks to phase out incandescent light bulbs

Mark Clayton
Christian Science Monitor
2007-03-15 14:09:00

If the plan to replace incandescent light bulbs takes hold, the phaseout could save enough energy to eliminate the need to build 80 of the 150 or so coal-fired power plants now planned nationwide, it is estimated.

Comment on this SOTT Focus

Physicists watch the "birth, life and death of a photon"

Hamish Johnston
PhysicsWeb
2007-03-15 11:26:00

Physicists in France are the first to watch single photons appear spontaneously, live a brief life, and then vanish into thin air. The experiment is the best realization so far of "quantum non-demolition" (QND) measurements on single photons, whereby the presence of a photon is determined without destroying it. As well as providing an elegant demonstration of quantum mechanics, the researchers also believe that the technique could be exploited in quantum information systems.


Detecting a photon usually involves absorbing the photon - and ultimately destroying it - in a photodetector. However, it is sometimes possible to make a measurement in a much gentler manner, leaving the system in more or less the same state as was measured. Such QND measurements have become commonplace for large systems like atoms - which can be probed gently using photons. But photons are much more delicate than atoms, which makes QND very difficult.


Comment on this SOTT Focus

Icy Disaster in the Kuiper Belt

Govert Schilling
ScienceNOW Daily News
2007-03-15 08:56:00

A rogue ball of ice as big as Pennsylvania smashes into an Alaska-sized dwarf planet, spewing debris across the solar system and furnishing the planet with two new moons. Although it could be a disaster scene from a sci-fi movie, the event actually took place in the outer realms of our solar system a few billion years ago. "It's just a spectacular story," says planetary scientist Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, whose team has discovered the fragments of the cosmic catastrophe. What's more, the find sheds new light on the early history of our solar system.

©NASA/ESA/HST
Computer model of 2003 EL61 and its two moons.



Comment on this SOTT Focus

Finding what's left after the killer comet

Maureen Moses
The Daily Aztec
2007-03-15 08:36:00

The comet that killed the dinosaurs opened the evolutionary door for one of Earth's most diverse groups of creatures: mammals. David Archibald, Ph.D., a professor of evolutionary biology at San Diego State, has made this transition from dinosaurs to mammals his expertise.

Archibald studies early mammalian fossils and is trying to constrain the origins of the phylum to which humans belong. His research has taken him around the world in search of the remains of terrestrial creatures.

Comment on this SOTT Focus


Our Haunted Planet
Family sees meteorite hit ground

Michael Power
YorkRegion.com
2007-03-15 12:26:00

What Richard Yip-Chuck saw fall into a farmer's field Sunday evening looked like a long, white ball with orange sparks shooting off the back.
The Holland Landing resident was driving along Hwy. 7 with his wife, Ele, and sons Kyle, 12, and 10-year-old Dylan, when they saw what looked like a fireball plummet to earth.

"There were sparks coming out of the back," Mr. Yip-Chuck said. "It was wild."

Comment on this SOTT Focus

Meteor shower not cause of Wolverine school closure


Gaylord Herald Times
2007-03-14 20:01:00

WOLVERINE - Despite the rumors, Monday's decision to cancel classes at Wolverine Community Schools was not because of a Sunday night meteor shower.

School Supt. Susan Denise said the closure was due to a number of icy back roads, nothing quite as spectacular as meteors falling from the sky.

Comment on this SOTT Focus


Don't Panic! Lighten Up!
Area Pagan Dreading Big Family Vernal Equinox Celebration (Satire)

Staff
The Onion
2007-03-12 19:19:00

MEDFORD, OR - Despite evidence that the planets are aligned in his favor, local pagan Jeff Birch, 27, said Monday that he would "rather have a peaceful weekend at home" than attend his family's Vernal Equinox celebration on March 21.

"I realize it's supposed to be a festive time of conception and new growth in the womb of Mother Earth and all," Birch said. "But I just know that within an hour of arriving, things will get so bad that I'll be reverting to my 12-year-old self, hiding in the rec room downstairs, wearing my Iroquois false face mask and fingering my runes for comfort. It's not worth it."

Comment on this SOTT Focus

The Secret

Staff
The Onion
2007-03-14 19:14:00

The Secret - the new self-help book and DVD that purports to channel ancient wisdom and claims that if you ask the universe for something, it will be delivered - has become a nationwide phenomenon. Here are some of the book's tips:



Comment on this SOTT Focus



Remember, we need your help to collect information on what is going on in your part of the world!
Send your article suggestions to: sott(at)signs-of-the-times.org

Click here to return to the Signs of the Times Archive

Click here for today's Signs Page