The links will open a new window. To return to this page, simply close the new window.

 

 

The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.
Allan Bloom The Closing of the American Mind

"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it." - Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. --Voltaire--

Faith of consciousness is freedom
Faith of feeling is weakness
Faith of body is stupidity.
Love of consciousness evokes the same in response
Love of feeling evokes the opposite
Love of the body depends only on type and polarity.
Hope of consciousness is strength
Hope of feeling is slavery
Hope of body is disease. [Gurdjieff]

Life is religion. Life experiences reflect how one interacts with God. Those who are asleep are those of little faith in terms of their interaction with the creation. Some people think that the world exists for them to overcome or ignore or shut out. For those individuals, the worlds will cease. They will become exactly what they give to life. They will become merely a dream in the "past." People who pay strict attention to objective reality right and left, become the reality of the "Future." [Cassiopaea 09-28-02]

 

May 1, 2003 Today's edition of Brought to You by The Bush Junta, Produced and Directed by the CIA, based on an original script by Henry Kissinger, with a cast of billions....The "Greatest Shew on Earth," no doubt, and if you don't have a good sense of humor, don't read this page! It is designed to reveal the "unseen." If you can't stand the heat of Objective Reality, get out of the kitchen!

Children trapped in Turkish quake- Turkish rescue workers battled last night to find 84 children buried under the rubble of a school boarding house that collapsed during an earthquake which killed more than 100 people. Rescue workers toiling under floodlights pulled out at least one child still alive and three corpses during the early part of the night as the number of children confirmed dead reached 21. One teacher was also killed. Ninety-three children had been saved and 84 remained unaccounted for, according to a megaphone announcement at the scene last night. The shabbily built dormitory block near the city of Bingol, 430 miles (690 km) east of the capital Ankara, was just one of more than two dozen large buildings destroyed by a morning quake measuring 6.4 on the Richter scale. Terrified parents kept up a vigil, wailing and praying. "My dead son, let me be sacrificed instead," sobbed Cevriye Bartir, mother of missing 15-year-old Sinan, as she sat on the step of a fire engine and sang a Kurdish mourning song.

New sub-atomic particle confounds theory- A sub-atomic particle predicted to exist by physicists has been detected for the first time in a particle accelerator in California - but its properties do not fit with theory. The particle, called Ds (2317), was discovered in the debris of collisions between other sub-atomic particles. But it has baffled and intrigued the 500 physicists working on the project. They think the particle belongs to a family of eight particles known as the charm-strange mesons. Four of them have been found so far, all precisely fulfilling the theorists' predictions. But the mass of the newly found Ds particle is significantly smaller than expected, casting doubt on current theories of the nature of matter. The discrepancy means physicists are confronted with a particle they predicted but cannot explain, says the University of Pisa's Marcello Giorgi, leader of the international BaBar project that made the discovery. "This has never happened before," he says. "It is very, very exciting"

May Day protests take place across Europe- There were angry scenes in European cities today as protesters took to the streets to vent anti-American anger as part of the worldwide May Day demonstrations. In Athens, thousands of protesters burned flags and chanted antiwar slogans outside the US embassy. At least 7,000 people joined the demonstration through the city centre, where hundreds of riot police guarded the embassy and other sites. There were no reports of clashes. But trouble flared in Berlin, where 29 riot police were injured by rock-throwing demonstrators in the early hours of today, ahead of the main marches through the city.

A Berlin police spokesman said the violence erupted shortly before midnight in a park in the eastern district of Prenzlauer Berg. He said demonstrators threw rocks, bottles and even shot fireworks at the helmet-clad police. A number of people at a nearby open air concert were also injured. A total of 97 people were detained, police said, during violence that lasted several hours. There were a further 74 arrests in Hamburg following scuffles with police at a protest by about 500 people. There were also violent incidents in Madrid and bloodshed in Istanbul, where Turkish riot police moved in to break up an unauthorised march, arresting 40 people.

In Bulgaria, about 5,000 supporters of the opposition Socialist party gathered for a protest calling on the conservative government to resign for what they said was its failure to improve the country's dismal living standards. There were more peaceful scenes in Moscow, where thousands of people across the country gathered for May Day marches and rallies reminiscent of the Soviet era. Under sunny skies, the Federation of Independent Trade Unions and the pro-presidential United Russia party held rallies in the Russian capital. Marchers demanded an increase in wages, higher student stipends and improved social services.

During Soviet times, tens of thousands of Russians would flood Red Square when May 1 was one of the most important dates on the ceremonial calendar to mark their solidarity with workers around the world. However, opinion polls showed that for most in modern-day Russia, the day was being celebrated primarily as a day off work, to be spent catching up with friends and family. Russia's Public Opinion Foundation found that only 4% of Russians planned to participate in marches or rallies this year. China was forced to cancel its week-long International Workers celebration, one of the biggest events in the nation's calendar, due to fears over the spread of the Sars virus. In South Korea, however, celebrations went ahead as normal, with tens of thousands of red flag-waving workers filling the streets of Seoul.

In Cyprus, people from both sides of the line that divides the Greek and Turkish-speaking communities celebrated May Day together for the first time in 30 years. Amid jubilant scenes, the demonstrators urged Turkey to end the occupation of northern Cyprus and called for a reunification of the island. The celebrations became possible as tens of thousands of people continued to cross the border after Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash lifted a ban on Turkish Cypriots visiting across the United Nations buffer zone splitting the island.

A boy hurls a sandal at a US Jeep. "Sandaled" Soldiers open fire on unarmed crowd, killing 2 and wounding 15- A boy hurls a sandal at a US Jeep. "Sandaled" Soldiers open fire on unarmed crowd, killing 2 and wounding 15.They had been whipped into a frenzy by religious leaders. The crowd were facing down a military compound of tanks and machine-gun posts. The youngster had apparently lobbed his shoe at the jeep - with a M2 heavy machine gun post on the back - as it drove past in a convoy of other vehicles. A soldier operating the weapon suddenly ducked, raised it on its pivot then pressed his thumb on the trigger. Mirror photographer Julian Andrews and I were standing about six feet from the vehicle when the first shots rang out, without warning. We dived for cover under the compound wall as troops within the crowd opened fire. The convoy accelerated away from the scene. Iraqis in the line of fire dived for cover, hugging the dust to escape being hit.
We could hear the bullets screaming over our heads. Explosions of sand erupted from the ground - if the rounds failed to hit a demonstrator first. Seconds later the shooting stopped and the screaming and wailing began. One of the dead, a young man, lay face up, half his head missing, first black blood, then red spilling into the dirt.

French concessions on Iraq met by US threats- France’s latest concession to US militarism—an offer to suspend UN sanctions against Iraq—has provoked only more threats and intimidation from senior officials in the Bush administration. This reaction, a continuation of the bullying tactics employed against Paris since it began opposing the US-led war against Iraq in the UN Security Council, leaves no doubt as to how Washington intends to run European, and indeed international, affairs in the coming period. It is working to split Europe, seeking to isolate and humiliate any state that tries to assert its independence from US policy. Weeks of French statements applauding US military successes in Iraq and attempts by Paris to mend Franco-American relations carried no weight with administration officials and their conservative Republicans advisers. On April 21, Bush administration officials held a meeting to discuss US options for punishing France. National Security Administration and State Department officials attended, as well as two influential hawks on Vice President Richard Cheney’s staff, I. Lewis Libby and Eric Edelman.

But where are Saddam’s WMDs, Putin mocks Blair- President Putin scuppered Tony Blair’s efforts to repair Anglo-Russian relations after the Iraq war by challenging him and President Bush to uncover weapons of mass destruction to justify the conflict. The Prime Minister suffered a second blow from the anti-war axis when France and Germany backed plans for a European defence force independent of Nato.

By embracing US unilateralism, Tony Blair has finally killed off his European vocation- So it has finally come to this. I never thought I'd see the day. For us pro-Europeans, despair beckons. For the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Sun, Murdoch, Duncan Smith, and every frothing Europhobe throughout the land, it must be a moment to savour. Blair has failed spectacularly in Europe. The dream of a lasting reconciliation between Britain and the EU lies shattered at our feet. Like Major before him, Blair promised so much and achieved so little. Far from anchoring this country in the heart of Europe, the ties to our European hinterland are being tested to destruction.

Key McVeigh Witness Testimony Questioned Ten days before Timothy McVeigh was executed, lawyers for FBI lab employees sent an urgent letter to the attention of Attorney General John Ashcroft alleging that a key prosecution witness in the Oklahoma City bombing trial might have given false testimony about forensic evidence. The allegations involving Steven Burmeister, now the FBI lab's chief of scientific analysis, were never turned over to McVeigh or the trial court, though they surfaced as the judge was considering whether to delay his execution because the government withheld evidence. The letter, however, was recently turned over to bombing conspirator Terry Nichols who faces another trial on Oklahoma state murder charges. "Material evidence presented by the government in the OKBOMB prosecution through the testimony of Mr. Burmeister appears to be false, misleading and potentially fabricated," said the June 1, 2001, letter to Ashcroft obtained by The Associated Press. The lawyers represented several FBI lab employees, including one who sued after being fired.

Parallel Universes - Not just a staple of science fiction, other universes are a direct implication of cosmological observations. Is there a copy of you reading this article? A person who is not you but who lives on a planet called Earth, with misty mountains, fertile fields and sprawling cities, in a solar system with eight other planets? The life of this person has been identical to yours in every respect. But perhaps he or she now decides to put down this article without finishing it, while you read on. The idea of such an alter ego seems strange and implausible, but it looks as if we will just have to live with it, because it is supported by astronomical observations.

The simplest and most popular cosmological model today predicts that you have a twin in a galaxy about 10 to the 1028 meters from here. This distance is so large that it is beyond astronomical, but that does not make your doppelgänger any less real. The estimate is derived from elementary probability and does not even assume speculative modern physics, merely that space is infinite (or at least sufficiently large) in size and almost uniformly filled with matter, as observations indicate. In infinite space, even the most unlikely events must take place somewhere. There are infinitely many other inhabited planets, including not just one but infinitely many that have people with the same appearance, name and memories as you, who play out every possible permutation of your life choices.

Worms found alive in Columbia wreckage - Thousands of worms from an experiment aboard the space shuttle Columbia have been found alive in the wreckage. The worms, each only slightly bigger than a pinhead, survived the re-entry that caused the craft to disintegrate. All seven astronauts were killed in the crash on February 1. Recovery workers found a container holding the worms in debris in Texas several weeks ago but only opened it this week. Some of the worms, known as C elegans, are believed to have been from the flight and others are their offspring. "To my knowledge, these are the only live experiments that have been located and identified," said a Nasa spokesman. The space agency is experimenting with the worms because they can survive in extreme conditions by going into stasis, or shutting down their systems. They were supposed to have been examined and unloaded from Columbia within hours of landing. Dr Fred Sack, at Ohio State University, who organised the experiment, said: "It's pretty astonishing to get the possibility of data after all that has happened. We never expected it. We expected a molten mass."

 

April 30, 2003 Today's edition of Brought to You by The Bush Junta, Produced and Directed by the CIA, based on an original script by Henry Kissinger, with a cast of billions....The "Greatest Shew on Earth," no doubt, and if you don't have a good sense of humor, don't read this page! It is designed to reveal the "unseen." If you can't stand the heat of Objective Reality, get out of the kitchen!

France, Germany deepen UK rift - Europe's anti-war camp risked new tensions with Britain and the US yesterday by establishing a joint military headquarters that could operate separately from Nato. President Jacques Chirac of France and Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, insisted their decision was not directed against Nato, which expressed its "concern". The initiative was immediately dismissed by the US, which said Europe needed more forces and equipment, not more headquarters. With emotions still running high, Guy Verhofstadt, the Belgian prime minister and host of the brief but controversial Brussels summit, said he wanted to strengthen Nato's "European pillar".

A CLAIM OF HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS TO THE UNITED NATIONS - VERSUS THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT- The United States Government (hereinafter referred to as US Government) is being charged by the Plaintiff (hereinafter referred to as Americans for Human Rights (AHR)) with violations of international human rights against the country and people of Iraq.

The Secrets of September 11- The White House is battling to keep a report on the terror attacks secret. Does the 2004 election have anything to do with it? Even as White House political aides plot a 2004 campaign plan designed to capitalize on the emotions and issues raised by the September 11 terror attacks, administration officials are waging a behind-the-scenes battle to restrict public disclosure of key events relating to the attacks.

American Navy 'helped Venezuelan coup' The UK daily broadsheet, The Guardian's investigative reporter Duncan Campbell ... reporting from Los Angeles ... says that the United States of America had been considering a coup d'etat to overthrow the elected Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez Frias since June 2001, according to former US intelligence officer Wayne Madsen. Campbell's report, originally published a year ago but given very little play in the opposition-controlled Venezuelan print & broadcast media, also highlights allegations that that the US Navy aided the abortive Venezuelan coup on April 11 with intelligence from its vessels in the Caribbean ... Campbell says "evidence is also emerging of US financial backing for key participants in the coup."

"You will drink your Coca-Cola and you will LIKE IT! This is AMERIKA!" - Vera Kieren, a teacher at the Deutsche Schule, said it happened when her husband told a convenience store cashier recently that their daughter did not drink Coca-Cola. "The cashier said, 'But she does live in this country, doesn't she?' " said Kieren, who moved to Alamogordo with her family three years ago from Baden-Baden, in southwestern Germany. "It's been a bit tense for us with the issues in Iraq," Kieren said, surprised at the implication that any right-thinking parents in the United States would have their children drinking Coca-Coca.

Coca-Cola promotes drink with 'swastika' robots- A Coca-Cola promotion in Hong Kong featuring a robot adorned with 'swastikas' has been condemned. Rabbi Yakkov Kermaier, of Ohel Leah Synagogue, says it is probably an honest mistake, but he's called toy sets featuring the "Robocon" characters unacceptable. One character, the robot-like "Robowaru," has two swastikas on its chest and can be bought in the UK for around £2.60 with any purchase of six bottles of Coke.

Goodbye to Saddam City- It was not a bad day for Saddam City, so far as it goes. A neighbourly dispute sent a bullet tearing through the gut and pelvic bones of a 12-year-old. A junior Shia cleric with a wisp of a beard roamed a hospital, hectoring female nurses and doctors to wear hijab, while the director at Baghdad Medical College pondered whether to use his last remaining cylinder of oxygen to operate on an eight-year-old boy, or wait to see what other miseries the morning would bring. Outside, goats fed on mounds of rubbish, and gunfire crackled in the alleys between the low, mean houses. "Maybe they are celebrating because the electricity came back on," said a passer-by. "Maybe this is good shooting."

Fire Shuts Down NY Indian Point Nuclear Plant- Both units at Entergy Nuclear's 1,978 megawatt (MW) Indian Point nuclear plant in New York were shut by early Tuesday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said in its power reactor status report. The company told the NRC in an events report the 951 MW unit 2 automatically tripped ``possibly due to the loss of output breakers'' at about 4:45 p.m. EDT time on Monday, while the company manually tripped the 1,027 MW unit 3 due to a fire in the high pressure turbine at about 3:13 a.m. Tuesday morning. The company said the fire in unit 3 was at a height 53 feet in the turbine building and lasted about 47 minutes. No additional information was available on what damage the fire might have caused.

FOX Cancels Columnist John Kaminski Appearance- Jon Constantino Fox News producer - "Uh, sorry to tell you, John, but we've decided to have you on another night. We'll call you to tell you when it is." This is the second time they've done this to me. What I will say when and if they call back I do not know. I feel strongly that the public needs to be talking more about this, and that 9/11 is the key to beginning a genuine reform of the American political system. If this does not happen, I feel we will slide further into a police-state situation, and our Constitutional rights, which already have been severely diminished, will disappear altogether.

U.S. Troops Fire on Iraq Protesters Again - U.S. Troops in Iraq Fire on Anti-American Protesters Again; 2 Killed, 14 Wounded, Official Says U.S. troops opened fire on anti-American demonstrators for the second time this week as Iraqis marched Wednesday to protest the previous shooting. The city's mayor said two people were killed and 14 wounded in the clash.

Iraqis killed in Falluja protest - Thirteen Iraqis were reportedly killed when US forces opened fire on demonstrators on Monday night in the Iraqi town of Falluja. There are conflicting reports as to what happened in the town, which lies 50 kilometres (35 miles) west of Baghdad.

NTSB releases report on Sen. Wellstone's crash - A faulty landing beacon at the Eveleth airport cannot fully explain why the plane carrying Sen. Paul Wellstone crashed last year, killing him and seven others, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. Pilots flying a simulator meant to duplicate conditions near the northern Minnesota airport at the time of the October 25 crash were able to safely land, according to the NTSB report released Tuesday. Two days after the accident, investigators announced the beacon was "slightly out of tolerance." Between October 26 and December 23, about a dozen test flights were performed to determine the beacon's culpability. Those tests indicated that the closer the planes came to the airport, the more accurate the signal became. Previous NTSB reports have noted that the pilots were flying below recommended speeds on the plane's final approach to the airport, raising the possibility of pilot error as the cause. No date has been set for the final report on the crash that killed Wellstone, his wife, daughter, three campaign aides and the two pilots.

Filthy Money and SARS- After the United States and Britain were shown to be providing bogus and plagiarized "intelligence" documents to the UN Security Council that supposedly "proved" Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction program, the world's media is now being fed a steady stream of captured Iraqi "intelligence" documents from the rubble of Iraq's Mukhabarat intelligence headquarters. Comment: Disease carrying money. What a great way to shift to a totally plastic moneyed system, especially if paper carries such "deadly" diseases as SARS

10,000 people quarantined in Beijing over SARS fears- Last Update: 30/04/2003 05:48 10,000 people quarantined in Beijing over SARS fears By News Agencies Beijing has cordoned off two more residential buildings to try to contain the deadly SARS virus, bringing the number of people quarantined in the capital to nearly 10,000, state media said Wednesday. One building was in the heart of Beijing while the other was in a northern suburb, the Beijing Youth Daily said, citing a notice from a city government working group on SARS. That brought the number of officially quarantined buildings in Beijing to six, including dormitories at a major hospital and three universities, the newspaper said.

Iraqi "intelligence documents" likely planted- After the United States and Britain were shown to be providing bogus and plagiarized "intelligence" documents to the UN Security Council that supposedly "proved" Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction program, the world's media is now being fed a steady stream of captured Iraqi "intelligence" documents from the rubble of Iraq's Mukhabarat intelligence headquarters.

The problem with these documents is that they are being provided by the U.S. military to a few reporters working for a very suspect newspaper, London's Daily Telegraph (affectionately known as the Daily Torygraph" by those who understand the paper's right-wing slant). The Telegraph's April 27 Sunday edition reported that its correspondent in Baghdad, Inigo Gilmore, had been invited into the intelligence headquarters by U.S. troops and miraculously "found" amid the rubble a document indicating that Iraq invited Osama bin Laden to visit Iraq in March 1998. Gilmore also reported that the CIA had been through the building several times before he found the document. Gilmore added that the CIA must have "missed" the document in their prior searches, an astounding claim since the CIA must have been intimately familiar with the building from their previous intelligence links with the Mukhabarat dating from the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.

Iraqi volunteer: Magnetic waves protected US tanks- Trembling with fear for his life after an extraordinary bitter war experience along side the now- defeated Iraqi forces, Arab volunteers find it hard to speak up their mind.

But, the 20 year-old Khaled was rather fed up not to reveal a lot from haunting memories he had formed while bracing to defend the Arab Islamic country against the U.S-British forces in the blistering firepower unleashed on March 20.

"Iraqi officials took us after putting down our names to a camp to the west of Baghdad," Khaled began his story directly with an inescapable feeling of discretion. "We hailed from Tunisia, Algeria, Comoros, Morocco; but with a clear common determination to struggle on to bitter end and even embrace death to expel the Americans from the Arab land," the youth added with a glistening eyes as if giving a lustrous reflection of a hoped- for victory that turned away with the downfall of Baghdad with less- than-expected scant resistance.

"But they were well-equipped with the sophisticated weapons, we got the old rusty ones," Khaled said of the Saddam's Fedayeen widely touted as the most loyalists of Saddam Hussein. He echoed a similar conspiracy theory explanation of the fall of Baghdad told by Arab volunteers safely returning to their homeland and others who believed that the Iraqi capital should not have crumbled in such fast a way while other smaller and even less fortified areas in the country put up more resistance. "They pushed us forward to the battlefield with only two or three days of training," Khaled recalled, noting that the first battle in which he joined engaging the U.S. forces in the strategic Saddam International Airport on the edge of the Iraqi capital.

"On Friday, April 4, we were given three Rocket-propelled grenades each and backed by a guard carrying a Kalashnikov. But when fighting began we found that our weapons did not hit the U.S. tanks or any of their armored vehicles," Khaled knew the cause, apparently after it was a bit late. "We found that the U.S. tanks were encircled by magnetic waves that encounter any enemy fire and send fire on them to no avail, no wonder 13 of our members returned although counted 55 before the battle" Another volunteer has told an IslamOnline.net reporter the battle claimed the lives of 700 volunteers as the Iraqi regular forces pulled out of the area in large and organized numbers and donned civilian clothes.

But Khaled was as careful as possible not to level accusations against any one. But kept a similar extent of wonder and suspicion. "We asked them for weapons, but they answered with `we have no orders'" Khaled remembered with grieve how the Arab volunteers were pushed into the frontlines of the battle while the reportedly steadfast Iraqi Republican Guard units moved to the rear. Further to their dismay, Arab volunteers were mostly kept in tunnels for days without ammunitions to face the invading forces or even enough foodstuffs to survive.

"We were forced to descend into tunnels, and soon the American forces opened their reserve of shells which found a return of fire from the ant-aircraft ground defenses nearby," Khaled said, fighting back his tears. But he remembered how the Arab volunteers put up stiff resistance in the Airport battle. "A Saudi volunteer managed to blast a U.S. armored vehicle with an RPG, and soon the American ground forces left the airport after we damaged their military equipment," Khaled recounted with a sigh of relief that only preceded a storm.

"Suddenly the U.S warplanes flew overhead and parachuted other larger groups of soldiers who opened intensive fire on us along other fire shot at us from other directions," "I saw my colleagues burning to death, and the Republican Guard officers came to us and asked for withdrawal without even transferring those of us who were injured in the battle," Many other volunteers saw thousands of Iraqi soldiers, dressed in civvies, abandoning their barracks allegedly under orders from their "command". A large number of Arab volunteers are reportedly still inside Iraq, making up some of the most determined holdouts in the fight against the U.S.-led forces. Whether they are still alive or not remained a controversial question.

In Baghdad on Thursday, April 18, U.S. Marines cleared out two mosques after determining that fighters from other Arab countries were inside. Days before the breakout of war, Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan announced that thousands of Arab volunteers seeking martyrdom were flocking to Iraq in droves. The Iraqi embassy in Berlin had said before the aggression that "some volunteers" -- Egyptians, Lebanese, Moroccans and Palestinians -- had obtained visas to fight in Iraq, and that some Iraqis had returned home for that purpose. While it is difficult to confirm these figures, reports have come in from Cairo to Stockholm of Arabs volunteering to join in defending Iraq. Iraq's state-run television later said an estimated 4,000 fighters had arrived in the country. The withdrawal of the Iraqi army from towns and barracks a mystry not only to Arab volunteers but also to many people world-wide. Some volunteers stood witness to such pull-outs in Mosul while they were heading for the Syrian borders.

Chinese reef blasts send waves down Mekong river - For half a century Kamtan Inkaew had never fallen from his thin wooden fishing boat into the mighty Mekong river. Then he was tipped into its swirling currents twice in one week. "They saw me near the shore, but didn't even try to change direction," the 71-year-old Thai fisherman said. "The Chinese ship passed so close, the waves were big enough to rock my boat and sink it. The engine was very expensive to fix and then a few days later the same thing happened again." Kamtan's anger, and his fear that a dozen 500-tonne Chinese ships could soon be forging down the Mekong river each day are shared by many villagers in the "golden triangle" region where the borders of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar meet. They say a Chinese-funded project to use explosives to smash rocky reefs and shoals on the Mekong river to let ships navigate between the southern Chinese town of Simao and Luang Prabang in northern Laos is destroying fish stocks and eroding populated river banks. And local farmers complain markets are getting flooded by cheap Chinese agricultural products.

A Mysterious ‘Ice Circle’ Discovered in NE USA The ‘Crop Circle’ Like Phenomenon Continues in 2003- On March 11th 2003 an ‘Ice Circle’, or ‘Ice Ring’, appeared in a private residents’ back yard pond in Norwalk, Connecticut, USA. Precisely etched into thin ice, ‘about 1/4 inch thick’, the mysterious circle was reported to measure about 25 feet 9 inches in diameter. It formed during the night, in a section of a tributary that feeds the Silvermine River in Norwalk, and amazingly, touched one side of the pond wall! Discovered by the owner at about 6:00am, after night temperatures fell ‘to about 16’ degrees Farenheidt, the circle remained frozen until later that afternoon, melting only after most of the ice around it had disappeared. No trees overhung the Ice Circle, and nothing unusual was reportedly heard or seen by the residents, or neighbours, in association with its creation.

Could Your Car Be Spying On You? - Shocked. Completely surprised," she says. Like many cars, Adrianne's has a black box - similar to those in airplanes-- that keeps track of her driving. "What you do in your own car you think is private. To be told that you're being recorded, it's an invasion of privacy." As many as 40 million cars on the road today have "black boxes." These event data recorders monitor airbag activity. But some models also track your speed, when you hit the brakes and if you're wearing your seatbelt. Some only activate right before a crash. Others monitor constantly but re-record information every five seconds... David Sobel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center says most drivers have no idea they're being recorded.

Gilgamesh tomb believed found - Archaeologists in Iraq believe they may have found the lost tomb of King Gilgamesh -- the subject of the oldest "book" in history. Gilgamesh was believed to be two-thirds god, one-third human The Epic Of Gilgamesh -- written by a Middle Eastern scholar 2,500 years before the birth of Christ -- commemorated the life of the ruler of the city of Uruk, from which Iraq gets its name. Now, a German-led expedition has discovered what is thought to be the entire city of Uruk -- including, where the Euphrates once flowed, the last resting place of its famous King. "I don't want to say definitely it was the grave of King Gilgamesh, but it looks very similar to that described in the epic," Jorg Fassbinder, of the Bavarian department of Historical Monuments in Munich, told the BBC World Service's Science in Action programme.

Magnetic In the book -- actually a set of inscribed clay tablets -- Gilgamesh was described as having been buried under the Euphrates, in a tomb apparently constructed when the waters of the ancient river parted following his death. "We found just outside the city an area in the middle of the former Euphrates river the remains of such a building which could be interpreted as a burial," Mr Fassbinder said. He said the amazing discovery of the ancient city under the Iraqi desert had been made possible by modern technology. "By differences in magnetisation in the soil, you can look into the ground," Mr Fassbinder added. "The difference between mudbricks and sediments in the Euphrates river gives a very detailed structure." This creates a magnetogram, which is then digitally mapped, effectively giving a town plan of Uruk. 'Venice in the desert' "The most surprising thing was that we found structures already described by Gilgamesh," Mr Fassbinder stated. "We covered more than 100 hectares. We have found garden structures and field structures as described in the epic, and we found Babylonian houses." But he said the most astonishing find was an incredibly sophisticated system of canals. "Very clearly, we can see in the canals some structures showing that flooding destroyed some houses, which means it was a highly developed system. "[It was] like Venice in the desert."