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U.S. News
Injured soldiers in limbo
Michael Gilbert
The News Tribune
2007-03-25 01:00:00
The Army is rethinking the way it evaluates wounded and injured soldiers who are no longer fit for duty because of post-traumatic stress disorder and certain other conditions.
But a board at Fort Lewis continues to move soldiers with those medical problems through the Army's disability assessment system, even though the new guidelines have yet to be published, according to attorneys who represent soldiers.
In effect, soldiers must argue their case without knowing the rules by which the board will size up their injuries, say the three Army lawyers who represent soldiers before the Fort Lewis Physical Evaluation Board, or PEB.
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Something's Illegal -- Gonzales aide to invoke Fifth Amendment
MSNBC
2007-03-26 16:16:00
WASHINGTON - Monica Goodling, a Justice Department official involved in the firings of federal prosecutors, will refuse to answer questions at upcoming Senate hearings, citing Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, her lawyer said Monday.
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Tomgram: Americans in the Opinion Polls, Not in the Streets
Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com
2007-03-25 13:27:00
Demobilizing America
Outsourcing Action in an Imperial World
Excuse me if, at 62, and well into my second era of protest against yet another distant, disastrous, and disabling American war, I express a little confusion. Was it actually like this in Rome while the legions were off fighting on the German frontiers? Was this the way it felt in London while the imperial forces conducted their frontier wars in Afghanistan, or Paris when the Foreign Legion was holding down North Africa? Was this how it felt in Washington when Douglas MacArthur's father was suppressing the Filipinos and General Jacob Smith was turning the island of Samar into a "howling wilderness"? Is this the way it usually feels in the heartlands of great empires until the barbarians actually do come knocking at the gates?
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Culture of Fear: Terrorized by 'War on Terror'
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Washington Post
2007-03-26 11:34:00
The "war on terror" has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration's elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America's psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.
The damage these three words have done -- a classic self-inflicted wound -- is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves. The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare -- political intimidation through the killing of unarmed non-combatants.
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School Sued Because of Socks
Associated Content
2007-03-26 11:24:00
A lawsuit has been filed against the Napa Valley Unified School District and Redwood Middle School because of a pair of socks.
The case began when fourteen-year-old Toni Kay Scott did not follow the school's strict dress code. As a result of her misconduct the young girl was forced to enter a school suspension programme called Students With Attitude Problems.
The offence perpetrated by Toni Kay Scott was the wearing of socks that had the Winnie the Pooh character, Tigger on them as well as wearing a brown shirt with pink trim and a denim skirt. When her offence was discovered, Toni Kay Scott was taken by a uniformed police officer, to the principle's office.
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Couple Tries Selling Kid for Cash, Car
ABC / AP
2007-03-26 10:25:00
A Kentucky couple is charged with trying to sell a 15-month-old girl for three-thousand dollars and a SUV.
A Daviess County Sheriff's lieutenant says 32-year-old Charles Hope Junior and 26-year-old Amber Revlett allegedly planned to use the money to pay off his fines for previous criminal charges.
Hope tells the Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer that he wasn't trying to sell his girlfriend's little girl. He says the two women he's accused of trying to sell the baby to were just trying to get the child for themselves.
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UK & Euro-Asian News
Russia allocates $380 million for its global navigation system Glonass in 2007
RIA Novosti
2007-03-26 10:18:00
Russia has earmarked 9.88 billion rubles ($380 million) for its global navigation system Glonass program in 2007, the Russian space agency said Monday.
Glonass is a Russian version of the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS), which is designed for both military and civilian use, and allows users to identify their positions in real time. The system can also be used in geological prospecting.
"A total of 24.4 billion rubles ($938 million) has been earmarked from the federal budget for the federal space program in 2007, and 9.88 billion rubles for Glonass," said Anatoly Perminov, head of the Federal Space Agency.
In 2006, the figures were 23 billion rubles and 4.72 billion, respectively.
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Rush for anti-youth squealer
Lucy Ward
Mail and Guardian
2007-03-26 10:01:00
A black box emitting a high-pitched pulsing sound designed to deter loitering teenagers is being used in thousands of sites around Britain just a year after its launch, prompting warnings from civil liberties campaigners that it is a "sonic weapon" that could be illegal.
The Mosquito device, whose high-frequency shriek is audible only to those under 25, has been bought by police, local councils, shops and even private home owners to tackle concerns over groups of young people congregating and causing disruption.
Less than 18 months after the device, produced by Wales-based firm Compound Security, went into production, 3 300 have been sold -- 70% of them in the United Kingdom.
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China leader to embark on Russian visit to step up economic ties
RIA Novosti
2007-03-26 04:45:00
China's leader begins a three-day official visit to Moscow Monday to talk energy deals, mutual investment and international issues.
In an interview published in the Chinese media ahead of the visit Hu Jintao said "partnership and strategic cooperation" between China and Russia had entered "a new development phase."
Trade between the two fast-growing nations increased 43% in 2006 to $28.64 billion, according to Russia's customs authorities, with energy and military hardware dominating Russia's exports to the Asian giant.
Last year Russian oil exports hit 15 million metric tons (110.25 million bbl), with over 11 million (80.85 million bbl) transported by rail. Energy-hungry China is also looking to a 4,700-kilometer (2,920-mile) pipeline being built which will pump up to 1.6 million barrels per day of crude from Siberia to Russia's Far East, a project that is also of interest to Japan.
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Around the World
Smoking while driving banned in Indian capital
Reuters
2007-03-26 11:29:00
Smoking while driving was banned in the Indian capital on Monday in an attempt to reduce the hundreds of deaths from road accidents in the city annually.
The Delhi High Court ruled that those caught smoking behind the wheel will be fined 500 rupees ($10).
Almost two thousand people are killed on the city's roads with over eight thousand accidents every year, according to the Delhi Traffic Police.
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Key US ally 'helped Colombian traffickers'
Sibylla Brodzinsky in Bogotá and Rory Carroll, Latin America
The Guardian
2007-03-26 10:57:00
The CIA has obtained evidence that the head of Colombia's army, a key US ally in Latin America, has collaborated with right-wing paramilitaries and drug traffickers.
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Chavez lays out collective property plan
CHRISTOPHER TOOTHAKER
Associated Press
2007-03-25 22:59:00
CARACAS, Venezuela - President Hugo Chavez said Sunday that his administration plans to create "collective property" as part of sweeping reforms toward socialism, and that officials would move to seize control of large ranches and redistribute lands deemed "idle."
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Big Brother
Hi-tech 'threat' to private life
BBC
2007-03-26 12:09:00
Bombs triggered by the presence of people with specific biometric traits may soon be feasible, warns a report.
Written by the Royal Academy of Engineering, the report looks at how technology is eroding personal privacy.
It shows how abuse of technology can expose people to harm by, for instance, terrorists crafting bombs that use the biometric data stored on passports to target specific nationalities.
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Bill permits audio taping on school buses
Tim Grant
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
2007-03-26 12:07:00
Video can settle disputes over who's causing trouble on school buses, but it has its limitations.
"The kids could be swearing at the bus driver or other kids, or even be telling the driver they'll kill them," said Chuck Ray, a bus driver for Woodland Hills School District. "I've heard the word 'kill' several times."
Foul language and verbal intimidation are against school rules, but audio taping someone without permission is against state law when the person has a reasonable expectation of privacy.
That is often interpreted to apply to children riding school buses to and from school. That means that, although many school buses already have video cameras to monitor activities, they cannot record sound.
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Fascist State: Terror Database Has Quadrupled In Four Years
Karen DeYoung
Washington Post
2007-03-26 09:39:00
Each day, thousands of pieces of intelligence information from around the world -- field reports, captured documents, news from foreign allies and sometimes idle gossip -- arrive in a computer-filled office in McLean, where analysts feed them into the nation's central list of terrorists and terrorism suspects.
Called TIDE, for Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, the list is a storehouse for data about individuals that the intelligence community believes might harm the United States. It is the wellspring for watch lists distributed to airlines, law enforcement, border posts and U.S. consulates, created to close one of the key intelligence gaps revealed after Sept. 11, 2001: the failure of federal agencies to share what they knew about al-Qaeda operatives.
But in addressing one problem, TIDE has spawned others. Ballooning from fewer than 100,000 files in 2003 to about 435,000, the growing database threatens to overwhelm the people who manage it. "The single biggest worry that I have is long-term quality control," said Russ Travers, in charge of TIDE at the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean. "Where am I going to be, where is my successor going to be, five years down the road?"
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Connecticut school play on Iraq banned - too anti-war
Alison Leigh Cowan
New York Times
2007-03-24 16:46:00
Student productions at Wilton High School range from splashy musicals like last year's "West Side Story," performed in the state-of-the-art, $10 million auditorium, to weightier works like Arthur Miller's "Crucible," on stage last fall in the school's smaller theater.
Timothy H. Canty, the principal of Wilton High School in Wilton, Conn., canceled the production, saying it lacked context and political balance.
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Axis of Evil
Rocket hits Baghdad Green Zone, shakes U.S. embassy
Staff
Reuters
2007-03-26 16:32:00
BAGHDAD - A rocket landed in Baghdad's heavily fortified international Green Zone on Monday, rocking the U.S. embassy but causing no casualties, witnesses said.
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PA official blames settlers for death of Palestinian shepherd
Haaretz / Reuters
2007-03-26 11:20:00
A Palestinian shepherd has been stabbed to death outside the West Bank town of Aqraba, a Palestinian official said on Monday. Jawdat Bani-Jaber, mayor of Aqraba, accused West Bank settlers of being behind the killing.
The shepherd disappeared with his flock of sheep late on Sunday night and his body was found on Monday in a valley outside of Aqraba, south of the West Bank city of Nablus.
"I charge the Israeli settlers with the killing," Bani-Jaber said. "I also blame the Israeli army because several incidents have taken place in Aqraba and the army provides no protection to farmers."
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Israeli officer sells weapons to terrorists in Iraq
Press TV
2007-03-26 07:57:00
Ma'ariv Daily has reported that an Israeli retired officer sells weapons to terrorist groups in Iraq.
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Roadside bombs kill 5 U.S. soldiers
Kim Gamel
Associated Press
2007-03-26 03:09:00
BAGHDAD - Roadside bombs killed five U.S. soldiers in Iraq on Sunday, including four in a single strike in a volatile province northeast of the capital, the military said.
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Sean Penn Letter to the President...Four and a Half Years Later
Sean Penn
Information Clearing House
2007-03-25 02:37:00
Four and a half years ago, I addressed the issue of war in an open letter to our President. Today I would like to again speak to him and his, directly. Mr. President, Mr. Cheney, Ms. Rice et al: Indeed America has a rich history of greatness -indeed, America is still today a devastating military.
And because, in the absence of a competent or brave Congress, of a mobilized citizenry, that level of power lies in your hands, it is you who have misused it to become our country's and our constitution's most devastating enemy. You have broken our country and our hearts. The needless blood on your hands, and therefore, on our own, is drowning the freedom, the security, and the dream that America might have been, once healed of and awakened by, the tragedy of September 11, 2001.
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Middle East Madness
22 March 07: Knesset extends racist entry law for another year
B'Tselem
2007-03-26 14:36:00
Today [22 March 2007], the Knesset extended for fifteen months the validity of the racist Nationality and Entry into Israel (Temporary Order) Law, which prevents family unification of residents of East Jerusalem and citizens of Israel married to Palestinians who are residents of the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. The extension follows the High Court of Justice's rejection last year of the petition filed by Adalah and the Association for Civil Rights to invalidate the statute. In addition, the Knesset expanded the application of the law to include a category "dangerous countries," containing Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran, whose citizens are denied family unification under the provisions of the statute.
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Mottaki: Iran not to give up demands under any sanction, threat
Islamic Republic News Agency
2007-03-26 14:31:00
Mottaki said Saturday that no sanction or threat can make the Iranian nation retreat from its legal and legitimate demands.
"The world must know - and it does - that even the harshest political and economic sanctions or other threats are far too weak to coerce the Iranian nation to retreat from their legal and legitimate demands," said Mottaki in an address to the UN Security Council following issuance of a second anti-Iran resolution by the Council.
The full text of the Minister's statement is as follows:
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FM: UNSC resolutions do not even reflect views of its 15 members
Islamic Republic News Agency
2007-03-26 14:22:00
Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said that the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions do not even reflect the views of the Council's own 15 members.
The remark was part of Mottaki's speech at the UNSC meeting at the UN headquarters in New York on Saturday night.
"This is because most of them were not thoroughly informed about, let alone engaged in, the discussions held in secret meetings where only a few, among them non-members of the Council, decide for the whole Security Council," he added.
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CIA,Mossad abducting more top Iranian officers
Ibrahim Karagul
BBC World Monitoring/Turkish newspaper Yeni Safak
2007-03-26 14:24:00
The abduction of very important figures in the Iranian Armed Forces hierarchy one by one in addition to Askari give credibility to predictions that similar operations are going to continue.
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PA minister accuses Olmert, Peretz of war crimes
Ali Waked
Ynet News
2007-03-24 14:21:00
In press conference presenting documentation of IDF violence against Palestinians, Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti demands Israeli leaders be tried for war crimes
Palestinian Information Minister Dr. Mustafa Barghouti demanded that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz be tried for war crimes.
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Taliban says will target German troops - report
Reuters
2007-03-26 12:47:00
BERLIN - German troops in Afghanistan, who so far have been largely spared the deadly attacks which are becoming commonplace in the southern regions, will be targeted by the Taliban, one of its top leaders said in an interview.
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The Loan Gunmen
Barclays banker's pay revealed
Jill Treanor
The Guardian
2007-03-26 19:00:00
Barclays lifted the lid on the wealth of board director Bob Diamond today by revealing he took home more than £27m last year and sits on shares in the ambitious high street bank worth £65m.
In addition, the American banker is in line for a further £14.8m this year if a three-year performance pay plan achieves its goal.
He could also be awarded shares worth £13m if the bank reaches its performance targets.
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Flashback: Barclays' millions help to prop up Mugabe regime
The Guardian
2007-01-28 08:30:00
Three British firms provide key finance, allowing the Zimbabwe leader to defy world condemnation
Barclays bank is helping to bankroll President Robert Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe, providing millions of pounds of support for his vilified land reforms, The Observer can reveal. Mugabe's opponents describe the bank's activities as a 'disgrace' and an 'insult' to the millions who have suffered human rights abuses.
Barclays is the most high-profile of three British-based financial institutions, which, in total, have provided more than $1bn in direct and indirect funding to Mugabe's administration. The other two companies are Standard Chartered Bank and the insurance firm Old Mutual. According to influential newsletter Africa Confidential, that first disclosed the Barclays' loans, the British organisations provide an economic lifeline keeping Mugabe's regime afloat.
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U.S. Foreclosure Filings Rise 12 Percent in February
Bob Ivry
Bloomberg
2007-03-26 12:38:00
U.S. foreclosure filings last month jumped 12 percent compared with a year ago as homeowners struggled with declining home values and higher adjustable mortgage rates.
More than 130,000 homes entered foreclosure last month, according to a report from RealtyTrac, an online listing of foreclosed properties. That's the second-highest since RealtyTrac began collecting data in January 2005.
The worst housing slump in more than a decade is pushing down home prices and hampering the ability of owners to refinance their mortgages. Borrowers with poor or incomplete credit are also vulnerable to mortgages that are resetting at higher rates than introductory or so-called teaser rates.
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Oil Price Spikes Again
Sky News
2007-03-26 09:49:00
The price of crude oil has gone up to its highest level so far in 2007 amid the heightened tensions surrounding Iran.
It is pushing towards $64 a barrel in New York - and signs are it will increase even further.
The problem surrounds Tehran's refusal to halt its nuclear programme despite the sanctions brought in by the UN.
The latest developments have renewed market concerns that the world's fourth-largest oil exporter could one day cut its exports in retaliation.
Iran's capture of 15 British naval personnel in the Gulf last week has also heightened worries.
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The Living Planet
Tsunami Hits Northeast Somalia, Three Missing
Bernama
2007-03-26 12:11:00
MOGADISHU, (Bernama) -- A tsunami hit the coast of the self-autonomous region of Puntland in northeast Somalia, a local official confirmed on Monday, saying three people are missing and presumed dead.
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Global Warming Prophet: Al Gore's Faith Is Bad Science
Michael Barone
National Ledger
2007-03-26 10:49:00
Al Gore likes to present himself as a tribune of science, warning the world of imminent danger. But he is more like an Old Testament prophet, calling on us to bewail our wrongful conduct and to go and sin no more. He starts off with the science. The world's climate, he reports, is getting warmer. This accurate report is, however, not set in historic context. World climate has grown warmer and cooler at various times in history. Climate change is not some unique historic event. It is the way the world works.
Not this time, Gore says. What's different is that climate change is being driven by human activity -- to wit, increasing carbon dioxide emissions. Which means, he says, that we have to sharply reduce those emissions. But what the scientists tell us is that some proportion of climate change is caused by human activity and some proportion by natural causes -- and that they can only estimate what those proportions are. The estimates they have produced have varied sharply. The climate change models that have been developed don't account for events of the recent past, much less predict with precision events in the future.
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Czech leader Klaus fights global warming "religion"
Jan Lopatka
Reuters
2007-03-26 05:25:00
Czech President Vaclav Klaus said on Wednesday that fighting global warming has turned into a a "religion" that replaced the ideology of communism and threatens to clip basic freedoms.
The right-wing president, a free-market champion, wrote to the U.S. Congress that adopting tough environmental policies to fight climate change would have destructive impact on national economies.
"Communism has been replaced by the threat of an ambitious environmentalism," Klaus wrote in response to questions from the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Energy and Commerce.
The U.S. House Subcommittee for Energy and Air Quality was due to hold a hearing on climate on Wednesday with former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore, who sees global warming as a key challenge, and Danish sceptic Bjorn Lomborg, who says governments should focus on fight disease and hunger instead.
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Health & Wellness
The No Shampoo challenge
Richard Glover
The Sydney Morning Herald
2007-03-26 13:29:00
The "challenge" is an experiment I'm conducting on my radio show, using myself as a human guinea pig. A few weeks back I interviewed the British writer and former Tory MP Matthew Parris. Parris hasn't washed his hair with shampoo for 15 years. He believes the whole shampoo industry is an expensive hoax. If you stop using shampoo, your hair will become increasingly lank, lifeless and greasy for about six weeks, after which it will fight back and achieve its own natural balance. Or so he claims.
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Throw out your shampoo
Matthew Parris
The Times Online
2007-03-26 13:01:00
If you want hair as fluffy as mine, the solution is staring you in the face
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Obese Aussies get big ambulances
BBC
2007-03-26 12:42:00
Australia's obesity crisis has forced health officials to revamp their fleet of ambulances to cope with a sharp rise in overweight patients.
Super-sized vehicles have been introduced and new air ambulances will be remodelled to carry heavier people.
Studies estimate that 67% of Australian men and over half of all women aged over 25 are overweight or obese.
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Our big brain still prefers to do one thing at a time
Steve Lohr
San Jose Mercury News
2007-03-26 11:03:00
Confident multi-taskers of the world, could we have your attention?
Think you can juggle phone calls, e-mail, instant messages and computer work to get more done in a time-starved world?
Several research reports, both recently published and not yet published, provide evidence of the limits of multi-tasking. The findings, according to neuroscientists, psychologists and management professors, suggest many people would be wise to curb their multi-tasking behavior when working in an office, studying or driving a car.
These experts have some basic advice. Check e-mail messages once an hour, at most. Listening to soothing background music while studying may improve concentration. But other distractions - most songs with lyrics, instant messaging, television shows - hamper performance. Driving while talking on a cell phone, even with a hands-free headset, is a bad idea.
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Are You Right Eyed Or Left Eyed?
Science Daily
2007-03-26 10:34:00
A person has two hands, two legs, two eyes, two cerebral hemispheres. But it is only at first sight that a human being is a symmetric creature. Firstly, we have a leading hand, the right one with the majority of people, secondly, we have a leading eye. Thirdly, the brain is functionally asymmetric: the left hemisphere (with the right-handers) is mainly connected with abstract-logical thinking and to a larger extent - with speech, the right hemisphere - with image sensitivity.
Coming back to eyes, the right eye is the leading one among the two thirds of people, and the left one among one third of people. Special tests have been developed to determine this. Do these individual differences influence the visual information perception process, for example, perception of texts, on the left and on the right? Investigations carried out at the Institute of Cognitive Neurology of the Modern University for the Humanities will help to answer this question.
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Toddlers engage in 'emotional eavesdropping' to guide their behavior
Joel Schwarz
EurekAlert
2007-03-26 10:28:00
Little children never cease to amaze. University of Washington researchers have found that 18-month-old toddlers engage in what they call "emotional eavesdropping" by listening and watching emotional reactions directed by one adult to another and then using this emotional information to shape their own behavior.
Writing in the March-April issue of the journal Child Development, which is being published today, Betty Repacholi and Andrew Meltzoff of the UW Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences say the research indicates infants understand other people's emotional states at a very young age.
"This may be a precursor to 'reading' other people's minds by understanding their emotional and psychological states," said Repacholi, an assistant professor of psychology.
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Science & Technology
Why the Greeks could hear plays from the back row
Philip Ball
Science
2007-03-26 11:14:00
The wonderful acoustics for which the ancient Greek theatre of Epidaurus is renowned may come from exploiting complex acoustic physics, new research shows.
The theatre, discovered under a layer of earth on the Peloponnese peninsula in 1881 and excavated, has the classic semicircular shape of a Greek amphitheatre, with 34 rows of stone seats (to which the Romans added a further 21).
Its acoustics are extraordinary: a performer standing on the open-air stage can be heard in the back rows almost 60 metres away. Architects and archaeologists have long speculated about what makes the sound transmit so well.
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Quantum physics: It's all about me, me, me, isn't it?
Dan Vergano
USA Today
2007-03-26 11:12:00
Biologists and other scientists have long expressed amusement, and gritted their teeth, when they encounter the persistent contention by particle physicists that they alone pursue science in its most pure state. "Particle physics is the most fundamental area of science in that its goal is to reduce the wonderful diversity and complexity of our universe to a few simple mathematical laws," wrote the noted physicists Sylvester James Gates, Jr. and Warren Siegel, two decades ago, expressing a truism often shared by those in their discipline.
What's worse for the long-suffering biologists, physics has long started reaching into others' fields, spawning disciplines such as biophysics, and even taken on subjects such as sociology, the far reaches of messy "soft" sciences.
But maybe the physicists have it backwards, suggests one well-known biologist, embryonic stem cell scientist Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology, writing in the current issue of The American Scholar, a quarterly brought to you by the folks at Phi Beta Kappa. Maybe the world is the product of one aspect of biology, the mind, and not the other way around, he argues. "As we have seen, the world appears to be designed for life not just at the microscopic scale of the atom, but at the level of the universe itself," Lanza writes. What if, Lanza asks, this means that instead of infinitesimally tiny particles creating space and time (and making life possible), "the brain can really create physical reality."
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Live in the Matrix: Surreal campaigns as French politics go virtual
Sudip Kar-Gupta
Scientific American / Reuters
2007-03-26 10:35:00
French political debate is shifting from Left Bank cafes and being teleported into cyberspace.
Instead of agreeing to disagree over a glass of kir, many French youths are sending their ideas flying through the computer-animated world of Second Life.
"In here, you can see French people expressing themselves as they ought to, instead of being the hypocrites they often are in real life," said an avatar, or computer image, of what appeared to be a woman using the Second Life moniker of Hayahaya Milo.
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Cosmic Bullets Pierce Space Cloud
Space.com
2007-03-26 10:05:00
Astronomers just got their most detailed look yet at supersonic "bullets" of gas piercing through dense clouds of hydrogen gas in the Orion Nebula.
Each bullet [image] is about ten times the size of Pluto's orbit around the Sun and travels through the clouds at up to 250 miles (400 kilometers) per second - or about a thousand times faster than the speed of sound.
The bulk of both the bullets and the surrounding gas cloud [image] consists of molecular hydrogen. The tip of each bullet is packed with iron atoms that are heated by friction and glow bright blue in the new image, taken by the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii.
As the bullets plow through the clouds, they leave behind tubular orange wakes, each about a fifth of a light-year long. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).
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Scientists Propose Interspecies Cloning
PAUL ELIAS
AP Biotechnology Writer
2007-03-25 18:04:00
SAN FRANCISCO - It was nearly a decade ago that Jose Cibelli plugged his own DNA into a cow's egg in a novel cloning attempt that was condemned as unethical by President Clinton and landed the Michigan State University researcher in a mess of controversy.
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Our Haunted Planet
Bob Taylor Forester, whose claim to have been attacked by a UFO at Livingston sparked a police investigation, is dead
The Daily Telegraph
2007-03-26 14:09:00
BOB TAYLOR, who has died aged 88, sparked a police enquiry after claiming he had been attacked by a UFO; the case remains unique in British history as the only example of an alien sighting becoming the subject of a criminal investigation.
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Don't Panic! Lighten Up!
Satire: Scientists To Invent Some New Things
The Spoof
2007-03-26 10:56:00
A team of scientists - including a selection of boffins and eggheads - are to invent some totally new things by the year 8005. Amongst the things to be invented are a car which can run on used beard-clippings, a telescope able to see into the human mind and a box for keeping atoms in.
Prof. Brainstorm Quantum of The University Of Europe, a leading expert on knowledge, explained "we are working on some devices which will be able to do things which can't be done now. At this very moment, a group of us are experimenting with at least five contraptions and a gizmo, and hope to have a working model of a sort of machine up and running by next year. Maybe."
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