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"You get America out of Iraq and
Israel out of Palestine and you'll stop the terrorism."
- Cindy Sheehan |
P I C T U R E
O F T H E D A Y |
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© Pierre-Paul Feyte |
Donald Hunt
November 21, 2005
Gold closed at 486.40 dollars an ounce on Friday, up 3.5% from $470.00 for the week. The dollar closed at 0.8495 euros Friday, down 0.4% from 0.8531 the previous Friday. The euro, then, closed at 1.1772 dollars, up from $1.1722 the week before. Gold in euros, then, would be 413.18 euros an ounce, up 3.0% from 400.96 at the previous Friday’s close. Oil closed at $57.21 a barrel, down 0.6% from $57.53 the week before. Oil in euros would be 48.60 euros a barrel, down 1.0% from 49.08 the week before. The gold/oil ratio closed at 8.50, up 4.0% from 8.17 at the previous Friday’s close. In the U.S. stock market, the Dow closed at 10,766.33 on Friday, up 0.8% from 10,686.04 for the week. The NASDAQ closed at 2,227.07 up 1.1% from 2,202.47 the Friday before. The yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note was 4.50% down seven basis points from 4.57 at the previous week’s close.
Except for the continued rise in gold, it was again a pretty good week for the U.S. imperial economy with oil down, stocks up and the dollar preserving recent gains against the euro. On the other hand, there are more and more troubling reports in the mainstream media about housing and the triple deficits. Fear and pessimism regarding the future compete with a somewhat prosperous present to give an eerie air of unreality about the U.S. economy. A quote from the new Flashman book by George MacDonald Fraser sums it up:
You can always tell when something is coming to an end. You know, by the way events are shaping, that it can’t last much longer, but you think there are still a few days or weeks to go . . . and that’s the moment when it finishes with a sudden bang that you didn’t expect.
This week USA today ran the following article on the front page. Note the disaster metaphor:
A ‘fiscal hurricane’ on the horizon
By Richard Wolf, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — The comptroller general of the United States is explaining over eggs how the nation’s finances are going to hell.
“We face a demographic tsunami” that “will never recede,” David Walker tells a group of reporters. He runs through a long list of fiscal challenges, led by the imminent retirement of the baby boomers, whose promised Medicare and Social Security benefits will swamp the federal budget in coming decades.
The breakfast conversation remains somber for most of an hour. Then one reporter smiles and asks, “Aren’t you depressed in the morning?”
Sadly, it’s no laughing matter. To hear Walker, the nation’s top auditor, tell it, the United States can be likened to Rome before the fall of the empire. Its financial condition is “worse than advertised,” he says. It has a “broken business model.” It faces deficits in its budget, its balance of payments, its savings — and its leadership.
Walker’s not the only one saying it. As Congress and the White House struggle to trim up to $50 billion from the federal budget over five years — just 3% of the $1.6 trillion in deficits projected for that period — budget experts say the nation soon could face its worst fiscal crisis since at least 1983, when Social Security bordered on bankruptcy.
Without major spending cuts, tax increases or both, the national debt will grow more than $3 trillion through 2010, to $11.2 trillion — nearly $38,000 for every man, woman and child. The interest alone would cost $561 billion in 2010, the same as the Pentagon.
From the political left and right, budget watchdogs are warning of fiscal trouble:
•Douglas Holtz-Eakin, director of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, dispassionately arms 535 members of Congress with his agency’s stark projections. Barring action, he admits to being “terrified” about the budget deficit in coming decades. That’s when an aging population, health care inflation and advanced medical technology will create a perfect storm of spiraling costs.
•Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, sees a future of unfunded promises, trade imbalances, too few workers and too many retirees. She envisions a stock market dive, lost assets and a lower standard of living.
•Kent Conrad, a Democratic senator from North Dakota, points to the nation’s $7.9 trillion debt, rising by about $600 billion a year. That, he notes, is before the baby boom retires. “We’re not preparing for what we all know is to come,” he says. “We’re all sleepwalking through this period.”
•Stuart Butler of the conservative Heritage Foundation projects a period from now until 2050 in which tax revenue stays stable as a share of the economy but Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security spending soars. To avoid big tax increases, he says the government has to “renegotiate” the social contracts it made with its citizens.
•Alice Rivlin and Isabel Sawhill of the centrist Brookings Institution put their pessimism into a book titled Restoring Fiscal Sanity. Rivlin, who became the first director of the Congressional Budget Office in 1974, says it will take an “economic scare” such as the 1987 stock market crash to spur action. Sawhill likens the growing gulf between what the government spends and takes in to a “Category 6 fiscal hurricane.”
‘The Fiscal Wake-Up Tour’ They are the preachers of doom and gloom. Liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, they are trying to be heard above the ka-ching of the cash register as it tallies the cost of government benefits and tax cuts, Iraq and Hurricane Katrina. To raise their profile in recent months, several have traveled together to places such as Richmond, Va., and Minneapolis for what they call a “Fiscal Wake-Up Tour.”
Leon Panetta, former White House budget director and chief of staff to President Clinton, calls them “disciples of balanced budgets. ... And at some point, they’ll be proven right.”
So USA today is telling us we need to expect much less from government. Here’s the New York Times, in an article about the impact of General Motors’s problems on a forty-nine year old auto worker’s family, telling us not to expect anything from corporations:
For a G.M. Family, the American Dream Vanishes
By Danny Hakim
Flint, Mich. - Four generations of the Roy family relied on General Motors for their prosperity.
Over more than seven decades, the company’s wages bought the Roys homes, cars and once-unimaginable comforts, while G.M.’s enviable medical and pension benefits have kept them secure in their retirements.
But the G.M. That was once an unassailable symbol of the nation’s industrial might is a shadow of its former self, and the post-World War II promise of blue-collar factory work being a secure path to the American dream has faded with it.
After a long slide, it now looks like the end of an era. “General Motors, when I got in there, it was like I’d died and went to heaven,” said Jerry Roy, 49 – who started at G.M. In 1977 and now works on an assembly line at a plant operated by Delphi, the bankrupt former G.M. Parts unit that was spun off in 1999.
When Mr. Roy was hired at G.M., nearly three decades ago, his salary more than doubled from his job at a local supermarket. He traded in his five-year-old Buick for a new Chevy and since then he has done well enough to buy a pleasant house on a lake near Flint.
But now he faces the prospect of either losing his job or accepting a sharp pay cut. And for those coming after him, “it’s just sad that it’s ending, that it looks like this,” he said. In his hometown, he added, “all these places that used to be factories are now just parking lots.”
Those factories supported the Roy family for generations.
Jerry’s great-grandfather, John Westley Roy, came to Michigan from Missouri in 1931, in the depths of the Depression. He built a home five blocks north of a plant operated by General Motors’ AC Delco division and worked there for a decade before he was injured and retired to a farm.
Mr. Roy’s grandfather, Edward, worked at the Delco plant during the war, when it was converted into a machine-gun plant: he would tell a story about a day one of the guns came off a mount and began shooting holes in the wall of a cafeteria.
Mr. Roy’s father, Gerald, started at G.M.’s Fisher Body unit in 1951, was laid off after a year and a half, and then got a job in 1954 at AC Delco. Gerald’s sister, uncle and future wife, Delores, worked at the plant.
The elder Mr. Roy remembers the 1950’s and ‘60’s as a golden era, when everything seemed possible.
“There were three shifts – they worked around the clock,” he said of the AC Delco plant, adding, “you’d go in there and you couldn’t even hardly walk.”
Buoyed by such prosperity, the auto industry was the pioneer in advancing what became the American model for the social contract between workers and their employees – from the $5 a day Henry Ford offered workers in 1914 to the all-inclusive health care and pension benefits that became a mainstay of the vast expansion of the middle class in the second half of the 20th century.
In many ways, it was not the government but Detroit and other major industries, at the prodding of their unions, that created the American-style social safety net, and helped foster the shared prosperity that is now fracturing.
“The days when blue-collar work could be passed on down the family line, those days are over,” said Gary N. Chaison, a professor of labor relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. “Where you did have automobile plants, it was always looked at as an elite job. It was hard work, but good, steady work, with wonderful benefits and good solid pay, and you were in the upper middle class.”
Now, with G.M. And other domestic automakers and suppliers fighting to survive brutal global competition, Detroit is planning to cut even more manufacturing jobs. At the same time, the industry is moving to rewrite or even tear up its labor contracts in a bid to turn itself around by drastically reducing both wages and benefits. Today, Mr. Roy and Gerald, 71, who once helped him get his job, are both preparing to make sacrifices.
…Not only is the company seeking to cut two-thirds of its 34,000 hourly workers in the United States, it wants to cut wages to as little as $10 an hour from as much as $30.
…Delphi is also seeking major cuts in the health care and pension benefits of retirees, though under the terms of the spinoff of Delphi, G.M. Would have to assume much of those costs, setting up a further quandary because simply dumping troubles on G.M., its largest customer, is not necessarily palatable to Delphi or the union.
Delphi plans as well to do more of what it has been doing since its spin-off, by continuing to shift thousands of jobs overseas. An internal memo obtained earlier in November by The Detroit News listed the Flint plant where Jerry Roy works among factories intended for closing. Delphi has called the memo incomplete and preliminary.
Delphi puts the choices facing Detroit and its workers in starkest relief. G.M., at least so far, has sought a more compromising approach, in large part because automakers face slightly less-onerous competitive dynamics than their suppliers. In early November , U.A.W. Members reluctantly agreed to allow the company to shave $15 billion, or nearly 20 percent, from its retiree health care liability. The elder Mr. Roy and other retirees will now be required to pay monthly premiums, deductibles and co-payments for medical services for the first time, with costs of as much as $752 a year. For his part, Gerald Roy is more worried for his son Jerry than himself. “What worries me the most, or bothers me the most, is him working for 28 years for G.M. And he might lose his retirement,” he said. But the Roys are the lucky ones. Gerald and his wife, Delores, another G.M. Retiree, are healthy and not on medication, and their son is single and does not have any children. They are both aware that the good life that auto work has afforded their family for four generations, and for hundreds of thousands of other families in Michigan and elsewhere across the country, is ending. Indeed, others face more difficult times. “We’re going to have to make a choice between what bill to pay, whether to go to the doctor,” said Larry Mathews, who works at the same Delphi plant as Mr. Roy and is also the editor of The Sparkler, a paper for plant workers. If the pay cuts go through, Mr. Mathews said he would no longer be able to afford his son’s college tuition. “I know I’m going to have to call my son at Central Michigan and tell him to come home,” he said. “I bet those executives don’t have to make those calls.” Like Gerald Roy, Mr. Mathews’s father retired from G.M. At a time when the bond between the company and its workers was still strong. Mr. Mathews’s father died from an asbestos-related illness stemming from his plant work. Even so, Mr. Mathews said his father, who became ill in his late seventies, refused to sue. “He said, ‘This place paid for everything I got today; I’m not going to sue them now,’ “ Mr. Mathews recalled. But now, Mr. Mathews makes clear that he has no desire for his own son to continue the family tradition. …Not that anyone has much chance of getting a job at these companies anymore. Wages are less important because the industry is so much more efficient than it used to be and has already cut so many jobs. G.M. Plans to cut its blue-collar work force even further, though, to 86,000 Americans nationwide by the end of 2008, about the same number of people it once employed in Flint alone in the 1970’s. At its peak, G.M. Employed more than 600,000 Americans. “Frankly in our business, the progress in improving productivity has been dramatic,” Mr. Wagoner said. “Over a 10-year period, we have gone from a ballpark of 40-plus hours a vehicle in assembly to 20-plus hours a vehicle.” Benefits are another matter. G.M. Pays about $1,500 per car assembled in the United States for health care, more than it spends on steel.
More than steel? How terrible! I would hope they pay more for employee health care than they do for steel. Notice they don’t say, “for a little more than what they spend on steel, a basic commodity, they are able to provide health care for all their employees and retirees.”
Even with the coming cuts for retirees, the elder Mr. Roy is not concerned; he is actually more worried about paying heating bills for the large house he built two years ago, abutting woods just outside Flint. …But his son Jerry, knowing that his job may disappear and that his pay is likely to shrink no matter where he ends up, faces much greater uncertainty. “What can you do?” Jerry asked. “People survive somehow, regardless of what happens. I mean, it’s sad, I could cry all night, but I’ll figure out a way to get by – somehow.”
Turning to Europe, whenever a country has the misfortune to be ruled by a “grand coalition” the one benefit is that the mask of there being any real political “opposition” in a bourgeois democracy is taken off. In Germany, where, in recent elections, a majority voted against any cutbacks in social benefits, a grand coalition has been imposed on the country for the purpose of ramming through anti-labor measures under the cover of “competition” and “efficiency.”
German coalition government accord: a declaration of war on working people By Dietmar Henning 19 November 2005 On November 14 the party congresses of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU), who make up Germany’s new “grand coalition” government, voted in favour of an agreement that had been made public just two days previously. It is titled: “Together for Germany—with courage and humanity.” Its contents represent a declaration of war on working people—in both an economic and political sense. Both the SPD and CDU/CSU rejected initial criticism of the accord by referring to the “compromises” which had to be made. This was how it had to be in a grand coalition, they claimed. The election result allowed no other possibility. This is an outright lie. In the coalition accord, two parties which lost support in the election have agreed to the type of right-wing, antisocial program that was clearly rejected on September 18 by the large majority of German voters.
… Next year the coalition plans to radically transform the German system of health and nursing insurance. Both sides want to “impartially” examine the different models. They have already agreed amongst themselves, however, that in the future private insurance provision will play an increasing role in the German insurance system. Labour policy The thrust of the coalition accord is most clearly to be seen in its labour policy. The initial period of a employer-employee relationship is to be extended to two years. This represents a major step towards a “hire and fire” jobs system whereby in these first two years the employer can terminate an employee’s job with two weeks’ notice and without having to provide a reason. As the document suggests, all those elements in the field of employment policy which are “ineffective and inefficient will be abolished.” …All in all, the SPD and right-wing union parties want to save €4 billion annually from unemployment allowances which, they claim, have “gotten out of control.” Parental support for their older children is to be cut and the considerable cuts in unemployment payments are to take place as part of a campaign against alleged “abuse” of the payments system. The recent brochure produced by the outgoing economic and employment minister Wolfgang Clement (SPD) “against abuse, spongers and self-service in the welfare state,” in which the unemployed are referred to as “parasites”—language also used by the Nazis against its opponents—is to be the ideological basis for this campaign against the most deprived social layers. Measures giving the authorities the right to check the data of unemployed persons—via pension savings, health insurance companies and banks—to determine “cases of abuse” are to be intensified and such checks can be carried out four times annually. According to the plans of the grand coalition, the unemployed are to be transformed into an enormous army of cheap labour lacking any basic rights. New measures will expand the field of cheap wage work. Unemployed Germans will be forced to replace low-wage workers from eastern Europe who currently assist with the asparagus or fruit harvest. …An Intensified “Agenda 2010” The policy of the grand coalition which emerges is an intensified version of the Agenda 2010 introduced by the coalition government of the SPD and Green Party, led by chancellor Gerhard Schröder, that has just been voted out of office—i.e., a huge redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich. …The coalition accord officially departs from the conception that politics can regulate fundamental social issues and secure the elementary needs of the population. There is no attempt to make the case that the grand coalition can address and overcome Germany’s most pressing social problem—mass unemployment. The agreement is exclusively concerned with the reorganisation of the state budget in the interests of big business. There is not a trace of the postwar social reformist doctrine which argued that capitalism or the free-market economy was capable of reconciling opposed social interests. The words “social free-market economy” appear just once in the 191-page contract—in the heading “The right politics for a social free-market economy.” In an insightful commentary on the agreement, the Süddeutsche Zeitung noted: “The political pragmatism, which here comes to light and which will probably characterise the future government, follows a logic which is equally paradoxical and full of consequences.... Every policy which dedicates itself to the economic and social crisis can in the foreseeable future only be an organisation of asymmetries. No political prescription will be able to prevent the ever dramatic gap between circumstances of income and wealth, no one is capable of stopping the increasing fragmentation of society, never mind the asymmetries between rich and poor countries, which is the source for the enormous worldwide pressure for redistribution.” This represents a rejection of any form of democracy. If “the ever dramatic gap between circumstances of income and wealth” cannot be remedied then there is also no basis for the maintenance of democracy. Such politics can only be implemented with authoritarian forms of rule. It is no coincidence that Germany’s recent early election to the Bundestag was arranged as a sort of state putsch—following pressure from business groups and through abuse of the constitution. The declaration of war on the working population contained in the coalition agreement is the direct result of this illegitimate early election. Armament of the state and the dismantling of democratic rights The grand coalition is itself very conscious of the potential impact of its plans and is preparing accordingly for coming confrontations with the population. Democratic rights are being restricted and the state apparatus beefed up. Germany’s security and police services are to be expanded. In this respect the new government can draw on the antidemocratic measures introduced by the SPD-Green government and its interior minister, Otto Schily (SPD). The anti-terror laws introduced after the attacks of September 11 2001, have been re-examined and, as the contract indicates, will be expanded. …The use of German armed forces for domestic purposes is assured. Here, however, the coalitionists are waiting for an appropriate judgement by the Federal Constitutional Court. If Germany’s highest court decides in favour of the domestic use of the army, then moves will immediately be made to change the German constitution, which currently prevents such a development. Germany’s leading police authority, the Federal Criminal Investigation Office, is to be allowed to enforce so-called preventive anti-terror measures, which activity until now was the province of Germany’s regional state police. German legal circles are also involved in these changes, which include the introduction of a controversial regulation allowing the judiciary to award reduced sentences to criminals who implicate others. In 1999 a SPD-Green party government refused to renew this measure, which was originally introduced in the 1970s by the state in its campaign against Red Army anarchists.
Now those from the SPD involved in the coalition negotiations have thrown their constitutional doubts to the wind and agreed to the reintroduction of the regulation. In light of the youth rebellion currently taking place in France one feature of the coalition agreement is particularly remarkable. Not only can the psychologically ill and incurable sexual criminals be locked up in “preventive detention,” i.e., with no time limit on their detention; the SPD and CDU/CSU union politicians have decided to expand this barbaric regulation to young people: “A condition for its imposition [indefinite detention] will be based on the special danger represented by the culprit.” In fact, this ruling opens floodgates that will be hard to close, allowing the state to lock away juvenile offenders for years or even decades.
This is frightening. German business seems to have taken control of the country and pushed it, against the will of the people, into the arms of the U.S./Neocon, global capital, cheap-labor alliance. Similar moves are afoot in France where riots conveniently broke out across the country leading to the resuscitation of the political fortunes of a previously discredited tool of the neocons, Nicholas Sarkozy. This is similar to how political reaction was begun in the United States in the late nineteen sixties, when riots were ignited (it now appears that the sparks that ignited those riots were struck by agent provocateurs—you can see the civil rights leaders of the time laughing ruefully about that now in PBS documentaries) leading to the ascendance of the previously discredited Richard Nixon. We even have Jean-Marie LePen playing George Wallace to Sarkozy’s Nixon:
France’s state of emergency—Sarkozy threatens mass deportations By Antoine Lerougetel 12 November 2005 Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the neo-fascist National Front, who received 18 percent of the vote in the runoff for the presidency in 2002, has enthusiastically endorsed Sarkozy’s actions. He said that he was “very appreciative of the permanent tribute being paid to [him] by Messrs Villiers [Philippe de Villiers, ultra-conservative Catholic monarchist] and Sarkozy, by taking up the slogans and the proposals of the National Front, and thus braving official monolithic thinking.” Sarkozy has gained the ascendancy over the old Gaullists round Chirac, and wrested the chairmanship of the party from the president’s supporters through extreme law-and-order and anti-labour policies and calculatedly insulting denunciations of the youth of the council estates. His harsh crackdown on illegal immigrants has also been a means of attempting to poach Le Pen’s supporters. As the youth riots flared up, he faced criticism from the Chirac-Villepin camp for having provoked the youth by referring to them as “scum” and “gangrene.” …By imposing a state of emergency, the French ruling elite has moved toward police-state measures. It recognizes that reducing the living standards and rights of workers to make French big business competitive on the globalised world market requires assaulting democratic rights and legal niceties.
All over the formerly at least relatively “free world,” measures have been put in place to allow for indefinite detention, the military to be used for domestic pacification, controls on movements of people and goods in “emergencies,” and to weaken worker rights and strengthen corporate powers at the same time as wealth is being funneled upwards to a wealthy super-elite. Why is this happening so fast, right now?
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By JPOST.COM STAFF
The Elaph Arab media website reported on Sunday that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of the al-Qaida in Iraq terror group, may have been killed in Iraq on Sunday afternoon when eight terrorists blew themselves up in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.
The unconfirmed report claimed that the explosions occurred while coalition forces surrounded the house in which al-Zarqawi was hiding. American and Iraqi forces are looking into the report.
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Saturday 17 September 2005
Al-Qaida's leader in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is dead but Washington continues to use him as a bogeyman to justify a prolonged military occupation, an Iraqi Shia cleric says in an interview.
Sheikh Jawad al-Kalesi, the imam of the al-Kadhimiyah mosque in Baghdad, told France's Le Monde newspaper on Friday: "I don't think that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi exists as such. He's simply an invention by the occupiers to divide the people."
Al-Kalesi claimed that al-Zarqawi was killed in the Kurdish northern region of Iraq at the beginning of the US-led war on the country as he was meeting with members of the Ansar Al-Islam group affiliated to al-Qaida.
"His family in Jordan even held a ceremony after his death. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is therefore a ploy used by the Americans, an excuse to continue the occupation. It's a pretext so they don't leave Iraq."
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Wayne Madsen Report – November 18, 2005
Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that "Al Qaeda" is not really a terrorist group but a database of international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Courtesy of World Affairs, a journal based in New Delhi, WMR can bring you an important excerpt from an Apr.-Jun. 2004 article by Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence.
"I first heard about Al-Qaida while I was attending the Command and Staff course in Jordan. I was a French officer at that time and the French Armed Forces had close contacts and cooperation with Jordan . . .
"Two of my Jordanian colleagues were experts in computers. They were air defense officers. Using computer science slang, they introduced a series of jokes about students' punishment.
"For example, when one of us was late at the bus stop to leave the Staff College, the two officers used to tell us: 'You'll be noted in 'Q eidat il-Maaloomaat' which meant 'You'll be logged in the information database.' Meaning 'You will receive a warning . . .' If the case was more severe, they would used to talk about 'Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.' Meaning 'the decision database.' It meant 'you will be punished.' For the worst cases they used to speak of logging in 'Al Qaida.' [...]
"The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the 'devil' only in order to drive the 'TV watcher' to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making money."
In yet another example of what happens to those who challenge the system, in December 2001, Maj. Pierre-Henri Bunel was convicted by a secret French military court of passing classified documents that identified potential NATO bombing targets in Serbia to a Serbian agent during the Kosovo war in 1998. Bunel's case was transferred from a civilian court to keep the details of the case classified. Bunel's character witnesses and psychologists notwithstanding, the system "got him" for telling the truth about Al Qaeda and who has actually been behind the terrorist attacks commonly blamed on that group. It is noteworthy that that Yugoslav government, the government with whom Bunel was asserted by the French government to have shared information, claimed that Albanian and Bosnian guerrillas in the Balkans were being backed by elements of "Al Qaeda."
We now know that these guerrillas were being backed by money provided by the Bosnian Defense Fund, an entity established as a special fund at Bush-influenced Riggs Bank and directed by Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.
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UPI
Nov 21, 2005, 15:25 GMT
BERLIN, Germany -- German intelligence officials say the Bush administration ignored warnings about the intelligence given by the Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball.
The Los Angeles Times interviewed five senior German officials with the Federal Intelligence Service, who described Curveball's information as vague and the defector as unbalanced. The officials say the Bush administration and the CIA were warned about his unreliability and exaggerated his claims.
'This was not substantial evidence,' one official said. 'We made clear we could not verify the things he said.'
President George W. Bush used Curveball's intelligence to say that Saddam Hussein had seven mobile poison gas factories. Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations in February 2003 also depended heavily on Curveball.
One of the officials described Curveball as 'not a stable, psychologically stable guy.'
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By TERENCE HUNT
AP White House Correspondent
Sunday, November 20, 2005
BEIJING, China -- After fiercely defending his Iraq policy across Asia, President Bush abruptly toned down his attack on war critics Sunday and said there was nothing unpatriotic about opposing his strategy.
"People should feel comfortable about expressing their opinions about Iraq," Bush said, three days after agreeing with Vice President Dick Cheney that the critics were "reprehensible."
The president also praised Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., as "a fine man" and a strong supporter of the military despite the congressman's call for troop withdrawal as soon as possible.
Bush brought up the growing Iraq debate when he met reporters after inconclusive talks with President Hu Jintao about friction in U.S.-China relations. Bush ran into stiff resistance from the Chinese to his call for expanding religious freedom and human rights.
He also reported no breakthroughs toward reducing China's massive trade surplus, overhauling its currency system or protecting intellectual property rights.
The president took satisfaction simply in the fact that Hu mentioned human rights when the two leaders made joint statements to the press. "Those who watch China closely would say that maybe a decade ago, a leader wouldn't have uttered those comments," Bush said. "He talked about democracy."
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice complained that "we've certainly not seen the progress that we would expect" on a months-old U.S. request for action by China on specific human rights cases. Bush said the U.S. had presented a list of "dissidents that we believe are unfairly imprisoned."
China was the most anticipated stop on Bush's weeklong visit, which has included Japan and South Korea.
Bush flies home on Monday after a four-hour stop in Mongolia, the first ever by an American president. The brief visit is a reward for Mongolia's pursuit of democracy and support for the U.S. fight against terrorism.
The president packed a lot into his Beijing visit.
In a country where the practice of religion is harshly restricted, Bush worshipped at a church and complimented the preacher on her sermon. He went mountain bike-riding with six young athletes vying for spots on China's Olympic team. "How do you say, 'Take it easy on the old man,'" Bush joked.
When a reporter suggested Bush had seemed unenthusiastic in his joint appearance with Hu, the president responded, "Have you ever heard of jet lag?"
Thousands of miles from home, Bush and other White House officials have not let a day go by without a tough counterattack against Democratic critics of the president's Iraq policies. But the president replaced the no-holds-barred approach with a softer tone Sunday.
"I heard somebody say, 'Well, maybe so-and-so is not patriotic because they disagree with my position.' I totally reject that thought," Bush said.
"This is not an issue of who's patriotic and who's not patriotic," he said. "It's an issue of an honest, open debate about the way forward in Iraq."
The Iraq war has undercut Americans' confidence in Bush's credibility and his response to terrorism and has helped drop his approval rating to the lowest point of his presidency. Nearly 2,100 members of the U.S. military have died since the Iraq war began in March 2003.
Bush came to the defense of Murtha, the hawkish congressman who has been denounced by Republicans for advocating withdrawal. Bush's own spokesman had compared the combat-decorated Vietnam veteran to war critic-movie producer Michael Moore and suggested Murtha was counseling surrender to terrorists.
On Sunday, Bush called Murtha a "fine man and a good man."
"I know the decision to call for the immediate withdrawal of our troops by Congressman Murtha was done in a careful and thoughtful way," the president said. "I disagree with his position."
Murtha told NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday he hoped the administration would take his proposal seriously and the president would "get a few of us to the White House and talk to us about this very difficult problem which the whole nation wants to solve with a bipartisan manner."
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By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 21, 2005
Pentagon officials say they are increasingly worried that Washington's political fight over the Iraq war will dampen what has been high morale among troops fighting a tenacious and deadly enemy.
Commanders are telling Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that ground troops do not understand the generally negative press that their missions receive, despite what they consider significant achievements in rebuilding Iraq and instilling democracy.
The commanders also worry about the public's declining support for the mission and what may be a growing movement inside the Democratic Party to advocate troop withdrawal from Iraq.
"They say morale is very high," said a senior Pentagon official of reports filed by commanders with Washington. "But they relate comments from troops asking, 'What the heck is going on back here' and why America isn't seeing the progress they are making or appreciating the mission the way those on the ground there do. My take is that they are wondering if America is still behind them."
Mr. Rumsfeld appeared on several Sunday talk shows yesterday to express concern about the effects of the political discussion on U.S. forces.
"We also have to understand that our words have effects," he said on "Fox News Sunday." "Put yourself in the shoes of a soldier who thinks that we're going to pull out precipitously or immediately, as some people have proposed. Obviously, they have to wonder whether what they're doing makes sense if that's the idea, if that's the debate."
He repeated similar words on other shows, saying on CBS' "Face the Nation" that war critics should "think about the troops that are there and how it sounds to them." He also exhorted the audience on ABC's "This Week" to "put yourself in the shoes of the American soldiers."
But Lawrence Di Rita, spokesman for Mr. Rumsfeld, said commanders are not telling the Pentagon that morale is sinking, although they have long-standing concerns about the press. [...]
The political fight over Iraq has heated up in recent weeks as the White House says Democrats who supported ousting dictator Saddam Hussein essentially saw the same intelligence relied on by President Clinton, when he ordered bombing of Iraq in 1998, and by Mr. Bush. No major stocks of banned weapons of mass destruction (WMD) have been found since the 2003 invasion.
But Democrats are not only questioning the war because of the failure to find banned weapons.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, has labeled the war a "grotesque mistake." [...]
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Bob Drogin and John Goetz
Special to The Morning Call
BERLIN, November 20, 2005
Informant's handlers say they repeatedly warned of unreliability.
The German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction say that the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims before the Iraq war.
Five senior officials from Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, said in interviews with the Los Angeles Times that they warned U.S. intelligence authorities that the source, an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.
According to the Germans, President Bush mischaracterized Curveball's information when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons. Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also misstated Curveball's claims in his pre-war presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, the Germans said.
Curveballs German handlers for the last six years said his information was often vague, mostly second-hand and impossible to confirm.
"This was not substantial evidence," said a senior German intelligence official. "We made clear we could not verify the things he said."
The German authorities, speaking about the case for the first time, also said that their informant suffered from emotional and mental problems. "He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy," said a BND official who supervised the case. "He is not a completely normal person," agreed a BND analyst.
Curveball was the chief source of inaccurate pre-war U.S. claims that Baghdad had a biological weapons arsenal, a commission appointed by President Bush reported earlier this year. U.S. investigators did not interview Curveball, who still insists his story was true, or the German officials who handle his case.
The German account emerges as Washington is engaged in a political battle over pre-war intelligence. The White House lashed out last week at Senate Democrats and other critics who allege the administration manipulated intelligence to go to war. Democrats have forced the Senate intelligence committee to resume a long-stalled inquiry. Democrats in the House are calling for a similar inquiry.
An investigation by the Times based on interviews since May with about 30 current and former intelligence officials in the U.S., Germany, England, Iraq and the United Nations shows that U.S. bungling in the Curveball case was far worse than official reports have disclosed.
The White House, for example, ignored evidence that United Nations weapons inspectors disproved virtually all of Curveball's accounts before the war. President Bush and his aides issued increasingly dire warnings about Iraq's germ weapons as the invasion neared, even though intelligence from Curveball had not changed.
At the Central Intelligence Agency, senior officials embraced Curveball's claims even though they could not verify them or interview him until a year after the invasion. They ignored multiple warnings about his reliability, punished in-house critics who provided proof that he had lied and refused to admit error until May 2004, 14 months after invasion.
After the CIA vouched for Curveball's information, President Bush warned in his State of the Union Speech in January 2003 that Iraq had "mobile biological weapons labs" designed to produce "germ warfare agents." The next month, Bush said in a radio address and a statement that Iraq "has at least seven mobile factories" for germ warfare.
Curveball told his German handlers, however, that he had assembled equipment on only one truck and had heard second-hand about other sites. Moreover, he could not identify what the equipment was designed to produce.
''His information to us was very vague,'' said the senior German intelligence official. ''He could not say if these things functioned, if they worked.''
David Kay, who headed the CIA's post-invasion search for illicit weapons, said Curveball's accounts were maddeningly murky. "He was not in charge of trucks or production," Kay said. "He had nothing to do with actual production of biological agent. He never saw them actually produce agent."
Powell also highlighted Curveball's "eyewitness" account when he warned the U.N. Security Council on the eve of war that Iraq's trucks could brew enough weapons-grade microbes "in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people."
The BND supervisor said he was aghast when he watched Powell misstate Curveball's information as a justification for war.
"We were shocked," the German official said. "Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not proven. … It was not hard intelligence."
In a telephone interview, Powell said CIA director George J. Tenet and his top deputies personally assured him before the Feb. 5, 2003, speech that intelligence on the mobile labs was "solid." Since then, Powell said, the case "has totally blown up in our faces."
Powell said no one warned him that veterans in the CIA's clandestine division, including the European division chief, had voiced growing doubts to supervisors about Curveball's credibility.
"This is one we really pressed on, really spent a lot of time on," Powell recalled. "We knew how important it was."
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By LARA SUKHTIAN
Associated Press
Sunday November 20, 2005 6:31 pm
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - A top U.S. Air Force general said Sunday that reports of civilian casualties in Iraq as a result of American military action were exaggerated.
"I would tell you first off I don't believe most of it and I am very much aware that some of that has been staged," said Lt. Gen. Walter E. Buchanan III, Commander of the 9th U.S. Air Force and U.S. Central Command Air Forces. [...]
The general said bombing operations near the Syrian border had intensified recently.
"That is true especially as you go out toward the Syrian border. There are many operations there to counter the insurgent activity and interdict those that are trying to use the Syrian border as an entry point into Iraq," he said.
Buchanan said the United States had no evidence that Syria was involved in the infiltration of insurgents in Iraq.
"Our only concern with Syria is the number of terrorists infiltrating through porous borders with Iraq," he said.
Buchanan also disputed reports that the U.S. military was using white phosphorous against civilians in Iraq.
"It is purely used as a marking round, not as a weapon. It marks the target so it becomes very clear," he said.
Pentagon officials acknowledged Tuesday that U.S. troops used white phosphorous as a weapon against insurgent strongholds during the battle of Fallujah in November 2004. At the same time, they denied an Italian television news report that the spontaneously flammable material had been used against civilians.
The British government said Wednesday its military uses white phosphorous in Iraq but only to lay smoke screens.
Use of white phosphorous is not banned but is covered by Protocol III of the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons. The protocol prohibits use of the substance as an incendiary weapon against civilian populations and in air attacks against military forces in civilian areas.
The United States is not a signatory to the convention. Britain is.
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November 20, 2005
American Lebanese Coordination Council
Syracuse, New York- Speaking before students and faculty at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University on Thursday November 17, 05, the Director of Public Diplomacy for Middle Eastern and MEPI Affairs at USAID the Honorable Walid Maalouf reflected the latest attitude of the US government towards Syria by publicly demanding regime change in Syria—an unprecedented demand by any US official.
Mr. Maalouf criticized Assad for failing to address internal reform desperately needed to the Syrian people instead of meddling in other countries affairs noting: "Instead of speaking about social and political reform in Syria and new economic opportunities for the Syrian people, 15 out of 18 pages of his speech were about regional politics and his interference in other countries’ affairs…"
Mr. Maalouf asserted: "Today Syria’s Ba’ath is not a regional power and to our knowledge no one in Iraq, the Palestinian Territories, or Lebanon has appointed President Bashar Al-Assad as their spokesman. The time has come for change in Syria." Mr. Maalouf concluded: "There will be no stability in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Territories until Syria’s Ba’ath is restrained by the international community from attempting to destabilize the region through the use of tactics that no one is buying anymore… The Assad Ba’ath is like the Saddam Ba’ath –enough is enough –freedom and democracy for the Syrian people from the Ba’ath regime is a must."
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21.11.2005
MosNews
The volumes of exports by Russian military industrial complex have increased by 15 times over the last three years, state arms export agency Rosoboronexport reported on the eve of MILIPOL Paris-2005 exhibition set to open in French capital on Tuesday, Nov. 22.
“Over the last three years the volumes of exports of military hardware, produced by Russian military-industrial complex, to foreign partners have increased 15-fold,” said the representative of state agency’s press service. He also added that the number of orders has increase by 1.5 times, and the product range and geography of deliveries of special arms have expanded considerably.
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By Eric Silver in Jerusalem
21 November 2005
Ariel Sharon threw Israeli politics into turmoil last night by deciding to leave the Likud and run for re-election as prime minister at the head of a new centre party committed to a compromise peace on his terms with the Palestinisan.
He told his closest allies this was the most difficult decision he had made in his 32-year political career. Mr Sharon himself welded the Likud from four right-wing parties in 1973. He is expected to go to President Moshe Katsav today and call for elections in the New Year.
One of his advisers said shortly after midnight local time: "He thought this was the right thing to do for the country. He believes that the Likud party can no longer fulfill its historical role in running the country with responsibility."
The decision came as no surprise, but Mr Sharon had kept the nation guessing. He let it be known that he was breaking away from Likud hours after Labour, under its new leader, Amir Peretz, voted to leave the ruling coalition.
In retrospect, the die was cast earlier this month when rebel Likud MPs vetoed his choice of two new ministers when they came up for statutory endorsement in the Knesset. The dissidents made it clear that they had not forgiven him for evacuating Jewish settlements from Gaza and the northern West Bank in August.
Mr Sharon calculated that even in the new parliament, they would make it impossible for him to govern at the head of the Likud. He is committed to implementing the international roadmap for peace, provided the Palestinians deliver their side of the bargain. He knows this will entail territorial concessions on the West Bank. One of his aides predicted that the rebels would not even let him evacuate illegal settlement outposts, as required.
Despite his 77 years, Mr Sharon is determined to fight on. He is convinced that he will form the next government, with or without the Likud. Weekend opinion polls suggested it would be a close call. A survey in the mass-circulation Yediot Aharonot showed him tying with Labour, with each winning 28 seats in the 120-member house, if he ran as the head of a new party.
Even if he comes out on top, his adviser acknowledged that he will have a hard job putting together a government.
At least 14 Likud ministers and MPs are expected to defect with Mr Sharon. There is also speculation some Labour opponents may join them. The Prime Minister made a pitch at yesterday's cabinet meeting for Shimon Peres, defeated by Mr Peretz for the Labour leadership two weeks ago, to come on board. "Shimon," he told Mr Peres, who at 82 is still reluctant to reach for his pipe and slippers, "this is only the beginning of our work together. I won't let you abandon the missions you are destined for. I will call on your assistance in the future." Mr Peres did not attend last night's Labour central committee meeting.
Mr Sharon's confidants heralded last night's decision as the start of " a political earthquake that will register nine on the Richter scale." Shimon Shiffer, a political commentator, forecast in Yediot Aharonot yesterday that it would start a reshuffling of the cards unprecedented in Israel's 57-year history. "The right," he wrote, "will rally around the ideal of Greater Israel; the centre under Sharon will rally around territorial compromise; and the left will be left to its own fate under Amir Peretz."
The Likud coalition
By Tom Pettifor
* The Likud Party was formed from four conservative parties Gahal, Free Centre, State Party and Eretz Yisrael in the run-up to the 1973 elections. Likud, Hebrew for unity, quickly became the country's conservative party.
* The uniting idea behind its formation was the belief that the territories occupied in the Six Day War of 1967 (Sinai, Gaza Strip, West Bank and Golan Heights) should be incorporated into Israel.
* The party operated as a coalition of its factions led by Menachem Begin, its first leader, until 1988 when they formally dissolved and Likud became a unitary political party.
* Mr Begin became Likud's first Prime Minister in 1977. Ariel Sharon, elected in March 2001, is the fourth, following Yitzhak Shamir (elected 1983) and Benjamin Netanyahu (elected 1996).
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By DAVID BAUDER
AP Television Writer
Sun Nov 20,11:33 PM ET
NEW YORK - The body count in prime-time television these days rivals that of a war zone. The popularity of CBS' "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," its spinoffs, imitators and other crime or supernatural shows has made network TV home to an astonishing amount of blood 'n' guts, which has attracted little notice due to a preoccupation with sex.
During the last week of September, there were 63 dead bodies visible during prime time on the six broadcast networks. That's up sharply from the 27 bodies counted during the same week in 2004.
This year, channel surfers in that one week could spot:
- The lead character in Fox's "Bones" discovering a badly decomposed body hanging in a tree, crows picking on the remains. The maggot-covered head falls off and lands in Bones' hands.
- A man preparing dinner on the WB's "Supernatural" when his sink suddenly fills with water. He reaches in and something grabs him, pulls his head in the water and drowns him.
- On CBS' "CSI: NY," a man falling after trying to climb the outside of a skyscraper. He hits a ledge, and a large chunk of bloody flesh falls to the street.
- A driver speeding up to hit a woman coming out of the clinic on NBC's "Inconceivable." She's shown hitting the windshield, flying through the air and lying on the ground with blood dripping from her mouth and nose.
- The victim of an auto-erotic asphyxiation on CBS' "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation."
Then there's the gunshot victim with blood spurting from his chest, the man screaming as he's being burned alive, the murdered woman whose eyes had been removed and eyelids stitched shut and the medical examiner using pliers to pull a diamond from a dead man's chest.
You get the idea.
"The whole name of the game in television is holding attention," said Martin Kaplan, professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communication. "Ever since we were creatures on the savannah, fear, sex and novelty were things that made our heads jerk."
The reign of "CSI" as television's most popular show is clearly the leading factor in the trend. CBS, in particular, keeps putting new crime-oriented dramas on the air and the public keeps lapping them up.
"I think one of the drawing cards of 'CSI' is that it is depicted very real and sort of gross," said David Janollari, WB entertainment president. "It's part of why the audience comes to see it."
Television must compete for attention with movies, where the effects can be even more graphic, he said.
"Gore is not a goal in and of itself," said Peter Liguori, Fox entertainment president. "Accurate storytelling is. When you look at a show like 'Bones,' Bones is a real-life forensic psychologist. This is what she sees on a daily basis when she's called in to solve a case."
Liguori, who has children ages 11 and 14, said he knows "CSI" is not appropriate for most kids. But he said it's up to parents to monitor and decide what their children should watch.
"All of the media executives are going to pay a lot more attention to what's making them money," said David Walsh, head of the National Institute on Media and the Family. "Their job performance is not going to include 'What do parents think of what you're doing?' Their job performance is going to be based on 'How much money did you make?'"
Fifteen years ago when he first started talking about the influence of media violence on young people, Walsh said, he had to convince parents it was an issue worth being concerned about. Now he said they need no convincing.
Still, it's an increasingly lonely effort.
The prime-time body count was compiled, after a request from The Associated Press, by the Parents Television Council, a watchdog group that keeps tapes of network programming.
Yet the PTC, which frequently files complaints with the
Federal Communications Commission about network fare, admits that its focus has primarily been on sex, not gore. One reason is that there's no government agency concerned with these issues, said Melissa Caldwell, the PTC's research director.
The council prefers to steer advertisers away from programming it disapproves of, but hasn't started any campaign against a broadcaster for violent content this season. The closest it came was a protest this month about an episode of CBS' "NCIS" where a stripper had her throat cut, primarily because it was shown before 9 p.m.
Americans "seem to have more of a taste for violence, unfortunately, so it's a little bit more difficult to get people worked up over it," Caldwell said.
Both the National Coalition on Television Violence and the National Alliance for Non-Violent Programming were active in the 1990s. The impact of blood 'n' guts in the media was a big issue then. But now each organization is largely defunct, their funds dried up.
The current body count hasn't gone unnoticed by former leaders of these groups, although one noted an interesting twist brought on by the popularity of forensics shows.
"One of our arguments used to be that they showed the violence without the effects," said Mary Ann Banta, former board member of the National Coalition on Television Violence. "Now they are showing the effects without the violence."
That's still upsetting, she said.
How much televised gore affects people has been the subject of countless studies but hasn't — perhaps can't — be answered definitively.
"The most difficult issue here is desensitization," said Whitney Vanderwerff, former head of the National Alliance for Non-Violent Programming. "People have become so accustomed to this that it no longer registers.
"But," she maintains, "it does to kids."
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CNN
Monday, November 21, 2005
TACOMA, Washington -- A man accused of taking hostages and shooting six people at a shopping mall Sunday sent a cell-phone text message warning about his rampage to his ex-girlfriend, she said Monday.
The woman, Tiffany Robison, said shooting suspect Dominick Maldonado sent the message Sunday morning, six months after they broke up.
"He sent me one text message saying that the world is going to feel his anger, feel his pain, that today is the day he's going to be heard," she told CNN's "American Morning."
Police said a man with a semiautomatic rifle opened fire on people inside the Tacoma Mall on Sunday afternoon and then barricaded himself in a music store, taking three employees hostage.
Maldonado, 20, is being held at the Pierce County Jail, according to its Web site, on six counts of felony assault and three counts of felony kidnapping.
Five of the six shooting victims had minor injuries, said Jon Lendosky, Tacoma's deputy fire chief. Todd Kelley, a spokesman for Tacoma General Hospital, said one person arrived in critical condition.
In addition to the text messages, Robison said Maldonado called her from the mall's Sam Goody music store while he was holding hostages.
"He's like, 'I'm crazy, I'm crazy ... I gotta let you go, I'm on the other line with the police,' and that was the end of that," she said.
Robison said Maldonado also apologized for being rude to her recently and said he really cared about her.
Tacoma police spokesman Mark Fulghum said the suspect was taken into custody after negotiations and the hostages were unharmed.
Robison said that Maldonado had had some problems in his life and that about a year ago, he began to talk about "doing something stupid."
She said when she learned what happened, she initially was shocked and upset.
"I just think that he had something going on," she said, "and it all built up and finally he did what he did."
Bret Strickler, who said he was Maldonado's best friend, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer he received a similar text message while Maldonado was holding the hostages, The Associated Press reported.
Inside the mall Sunday, Stacy Wilson, 29, heard a popping noise and turned around, the AP reported. "I saw the gunman randomly shooting. I ran with a group of women to Victoria's Secret," Wilson told the AP. She told the AP they crouched behind a wall in the store, and when the shooting stopped, an employee ran out and closed a security gate at the front.
Wilson said she heard 15 to 20 shots, according to the AP.
"He was walking backward and shooting. I couldn't see his face," she told the AP. "Everyone was running and screaming."
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Last Updated Sun, 20 Nov 2005 21:29:28 EST
CBC News
A man began firing an assault rifle in a shopping mall in Washington state, injuring at least six people and taking several hostages before police made an arrest.
Witnesses said a young man fired up to 20 shots, apparently randomly, as he stepped backward through the Tacoma Mall, located a few kilometres from downtown Tacoma.
The shooting, shortly after noon on Sunday, sent shoppers and store workers fleeing for cover.
The man then retreated into a music store, taking three people hostage, reports said.
A suspect was taken into custody several hours later without any further shots being fired, said a Tacoma Police spokesperson, Mark Fulghum.
Fulghum said the suspect was in his 20s but didn't give his name or many other details.
The motivation for the shooting wasn't immediately known.
Hospital and police officials said six people were wounded, one critically.
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Reuters
Sun Nov 20, 8:55 AM ET
BEIJING - Irked by a reporter who told him he seemed to be "off his game" at a Beijing public appearance, President George W. Bush sought to make a hasty exit from a news conference but was thwarted by locked doors.
At the end of a day of meetings with Chinese President
Hu Jintao and other Chinese officials, Bush held a session with a small group of U.S. reporters and spoke at length about issues like religious freedom, Iraq and the Chinese currency.
The final reporter he critiqued Bush's performance earlier in the day when he stood next to Hu in the Great Hall of the People on Tiananmen Square to deliver a statement.
"Respectfully, sir -- you know we're always respectful -- in your statement this morning with President Hu, you seemed a little off your game, you seemed to hurry through your statement. There was a lack of enthusiasm. Was something bothering you?" he asked.
"Have you ever heard of jet lag?" Bush responded. "Well, good. That answers your question."
The president then recited a list of things of that he viewed as positive developments from his Beijing meetings, including co-operation on North Korean nuclear disarmament and the ability to have "frank discussions" with his Chinese counterpart.
When the reporter asked for "a very quick follow-up", Bush cut him off by thanking the press corps and telling the reporter "No you may not," as he strode towards a set of double doors leading out of the room.
The only problem was that they were locked.
"I was trying to escape. Obviously, it didn't work," Bush quipped, facing reporters again until an aide rescued him by pointing to him towards the correct door.
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03/14/2002
USA Today
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — The Army is hunting for a new military uniform that can make soldiers nearly invisible, grant superhuman strength and provide instant medical care.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is up for the task.
The school said Wednesday it has been awarded a five-year, $50 million dollar grant to develop the armor, which could detect threats and protect against projectiles and biological or chemical weapons.
"We're not there yet, but it's not science fiction," said Ned Thomas, director of the MIT-affiliated Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.
All this would be achieved by developing particle-sized materials and devices — called "nanotechnology" — nestled into the uniform's fabric.
Supercharged shoes could release energy when soldiers jump, propelling them over a 20-foot wall. Micoreactors could detect bleeding and apply pressure. Light-deflecting material could make the suit blend in with surroundings.
MIT's research centers had been working on nanotechnology ideas long before getting involved with the Army, but not with military applications in mind. But the groundwork has been laid for revolutionary advances, Thomas said.
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Macon Telegraph (GA)
via Media Awareness Project
TIFTON - Move over, drug-sniffing dogs.
Make way for the wasps.
With just a wisp of scent, these tiny Georgia insects can identify not only drugs, but crop pests, explosives, diseases and dead bodies.
They are far more versatile than drug dogs, which cost thousands of dollars to train and usually work with only one person. Tifton scientists say they will cost pennies per thousand to rear and can learn a scent in 30 seconds.
Joe Lewis, a research entomologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's research service, has been studying how the wasps can be used by farmers, police, anti-terrorism officials and doctors.
Glen Rains, an associate professor of biological engineering at the University of Georgia, recently developed a "wasp hound" to monitor the insects' responses.
"You can't put them on a string and let them kind of fly along beside you," Lewis joked.
The wasp hound consists of a 2-inch round Plexiglas cartridge in a container with a light and camera.
About five of the quarter-inch wasps wander around the cartridge until they smell the scent they were trained to recognize. They congregate where it enters. The device is hooked to a laptop, which graphs the intensity of the wasps' response.
Eventually, Rains hopes to analyze individual wasp movements until smells can be tracked to their source - maybe even using a robot the wasps steer with their movement.
The parasitic wasps have evolved a fine-tuned sense of smell to locate the caterpillars in which they lay their eggs, Rains said. ( The wasps sting only caterpillars, not people. )
Lewis and other researchers discovered in 1990 that a plant attacked by the caterpillar releases an odor that tells the wasp where to find the caterpillars. The wasps lay their eggs in the caterpillars, which die but serve as incubators and food for the wasp larvae.
"This helped us really understand this espionage game between the wasp and the caterpillar," Lewis said. "The plant sends out the secret messages: 'Hey, Good Guy! I'm under attack! Come and help me!' "
Eventually Lewis discovered that all plants use scent to send out specific messages to different insects, like calling up a particular friend for help. They know which "number" to call based on which disease or pest threatens them.
Without genetic alterations, the wasps can be trained to answer any of these calls after three 10-second exposures while feeding or egg-laying, Lewis said. When wasps smell it again, they display feeding or attack behavior.
The idea was originally developed to help farmers, although it has taken some almost science-fiction-style twists during the years. The U.S. Department of Defense asked Lewis' team to study whether the wasps could be used like drug dogs.
"We at first kind of put them off," he said. "Their vision was to release these in an airport and they'd kind of hover over the drugs."
Although that was a bit far-fetched, the wasps could be trained to recognize marijuana, perhaps with enough precision to identify where it was grown. Wasps can also learn bomb-related odors and nerve gas, Lewis said.
But the wasps will probably be used first in farming. Rains said he expects to start using the wasp hound next year to find root worms, called nematodes, that attack cotton underground.
"One use we envision is to put the ( wasp hound ) on a tractor and go across the field and monitor for new diseases or bioterrorism," Lewis said. It could also be used to zero in on which areas need to be treated with pesticide or fungicide, Gains said.
"It sounds wonderful if it would work," said Chuck Ellis, Dooly County Extension agent. "I'm not going to discount it, because anything that saves money or will allow farmers to produce a higher quality crop, we've got to consider."
The wasps can even pinpoint a cancer-causing toxin sometimes contaminating peanuts, Rains said. Peanuts tainted by the toxin can only be used for animal feed and bring two-thirds their potential price, Rains said.
"Sampling now is very imprecise," he said. "With this you could sample the air above the peanuts, and it would be more representative of the whole load of peanuts."
The wasps could be used to fight cancer even more directly. Dogs have already been trained to "smell" skin cancer on a patient, and wasps could do the same, Lewis said.
"We don't understand how this works because our best machinery can't even pick this up," he said.
The wasps have been trained to locate dead bodies by recognizing the smell of decomposition compounds, said Jeffery Tomberlin, assistant professor and extension specialist at Texas A&M University.
Police searching for a body could mark off a grid and take soil samples from each section. The wasps could be exposed to these one at a time in a lab, Tomberlin said.
Their reaction can direct police where to dig.
Soil samples could be collected and analyzed in a day, in a process less cumbersome than the current method of X-raying wide swaths of ground, he said.
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By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
November 20, 2005 Op-Ed Columnist
New York Times
TAMA, Sudan - So who killed 2-year-old Zahra Abdullah for belonging to the Fur tribe?
At one level, the answer is simple: The murderers were members of the janjaweed militia that stormed into this mud-brick village in the South Darfur region at dawn four weeks ago on horses, camels and trucks. Zahra's mother, Fatima Omar Adam, woke to gunfire and smoke and knew at once what was happening.
She jumped up from her sleeping mat and put Zahra on her back, then grabbed the hands of her two older children and raced out of her thatch-roof hut with her husband.
Some of the marauders were right outside. They yanked Zahra from Ms. Fatima's back and began bludgeoning her on the ground in front of her shrieking mother and sister. Then the men began beating Ms. Fatima and the other two children, so she grabbed them and fled - and the men returned to beating the life out of Zahra.
At another level, responsibility belongs to the Sudanese government, which armed the janjaweed and gave them license to slaughter and rape members of several African tribes, including the Fur.
Then some responsibility attaches to the rebels in Darfur. They claim to be representing the tribes being ethnically cleansed, but they have been fighting each other instead of negotiating a peace with the government that would end the bloodbath.
And finally, responsibility belongs to the international community - to you and me - for acquiescing in yet another genocide.
Tama is just the latest of many hundreds of villages that have been methodically destroyed in the killing fields of Darfur over the last two years. Ms. Fatima sat on the ground and told me her story - which was confirmed by other eyewitnesses - in a dull, choked monotone, as she described her guilt at leaving her child to die.
"Zahra was on the ground, and they were beating her with sticks, but I ran away," she said. Her 4-year-old son, Adam, was also beaten badly but survived. A 9-year-old daughter, Khadija, has only minor injuries but she told me that she had constant nightmares about the janjaweed.
At least Ms. Fatima knows what happened to her daughter. A neighbor, Aisha Yagoub Abdurahman, is beside herself because she says she saw her 10-year-old son Adil carried off by the janjaweed. He is still missing, and everyone knows that the janjaweed regularly enslave children like him, using them as servants or sexual playthings. In all, 37 people were killed in Tama, and another 12 are missing.
The survivors fled five miles to another village that had been abandoned after being attacked by the janjaweed a year earlier. Now the survivors are terrified, and they surrounded me to ask for advice about how to stay alive.
None of them dared accompany me back to Tama, which is an eerie ghost town, doors hanging off hinges and pots and sandals strewn about. The only inhabitants I saw in Tama were camels, which are now using the village as a pasture - and which the villagers say belong to the janjaweed. On the road back, I saw a group of six janjaweed, one displaying his rifle.
Darfur is just the latest chapter in a sorry history of repeated inaction in the face of genocide, from that of Armenians, through the Holocaust, to the slaughter of Cambodians, Bosnians and Rwandans. If we had acted more resolutely last year, then Zahra would probably still be alive.
Attacks on villages like Tama occur regularly. Over the last week, one tribe called the Falata, backed and armed by the Sudanese government, has burned villages belonging to the Masalit tribe south of here. Dozens of bodies are said to be lying unclaimed on the ground.
President Bush, where are you? You emphasize your willingness to speak bluntly about evil, but you barely let the word Darfur pass your lips. The central lesson of the history of genocide is that the essential starting point of any response is to bellow moral outrage - but instead, Mr. President, you're whispering.
In a later column, I'll talk more specifically about actions we should take, and it's true that this is a complex mess without easy solutions. But for starters we need a dose of moral clarity. For all the myriad complexities of Darfur, what history will remember is that this is where little girls were bashed to death in front of their parents because of their tribe - and because the world couldn't be bothered to notice.
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AP
Sun Nov 20, 6:52 PM ET
HOUSTON - The largest branch of North American Judaism voted on Sunday to oppose Samuel Alito's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.
More than 2,000 delegates of the Union for Reform Judaism adopted a resolution saying Alito would "shift the ideological balance of the Supreme Court on matters of core concern to the reform movement" on abortion rights, women's rights, civil rights and the scope of federal power.
The vote came at the closing session of the group's biennial convention, which was held in Houston Wednesday through Sunday.
During a debate before the vote, Jeff Wasserstein, a former law clerk for Alito and a self-described liberal Democrat, argued in favor of Alito's nomination, while Elliot Mincberg, vice president of People for the American Way, argued against it.
The Union for Reform Judaism represents about 900 synagogues in North America with an estimated membership of 1.5 million. Of the three major streams of U.S. Judaism — Orthodox and Conservative are the others — it is the only one that sanctions gay ordination and supports civil marriage for same-gender couples.
The Senate Judiciary Committee plans confirmation hearings on Alito's nomination in January.
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Reuters
Sat Nov 19,10:16 PM ET
TOKYO - Japanese electronics maker Pioneer Corp. plans to cut 10 percent of its domestic work force, or about 1,000 jobs, and scale down its DVD recorder business to shore up its struggling operations, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun business daily said on Sunday.
Pioneer in March unveiled a plan to cut 2,000 jobs, but said most of the cuts will come from overseas.
President Keneo Ito and Chairman Kanya Matsumoto will step down to take responsibility, and Executive Vice President Tamihiko Sudo will become new president in December, the newspaper said.
Pioneer's restructuring steps, which the paper said are set to be approved at a board of directors' meeting on Monday, would come on the heels of turnaround measures by another consumer electronics company Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd. (6764.T).
Sanyo said on Friday it planned to raise up to 300 billion yen by issuing new shares to Goldman Sachs and others to strengthen its weak capital base, while downsizing its chip and home appliance divisions.
Among major Japanese consumer electronics makers, Pioneer, Sanyo and Sony Corp. are all forecasting red ink this year, unable to keep up with tumbling prices of key products such as flat-panel TVs and DVD recorders.
There is a chance that Pioneer's latest restructuring steps will push it deeper in the red than its forecast in October of a net loss of 24 billion yen, the newspaper said.
Pioneer officials were not immediately available for comment. [...]
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Last Updated Mon, 21 Nov 2005 11:26:52 EST
CBC News
General Motors plants in Oshawa and St. Catharines, Ont., will shut down as the automaker announced closures at 12 North American facilities and 30,000 job cuts on Monday.
GM (NYSE:GM) chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner said the third shift at GM Canada's Number 1 plant in Oshawa, where the Chevrolet Monte Carlo and Impala models are built, will be cancelled in the second half of 2006, while the Number 2 plant will be closed in 2008. The Number 2 plant currently builds the Pontiac Grand Prix and the Buick LaCrosse/Allure models, which are scheduled to be phased out in 2008.
GM chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner.
Speaking in Detroit, Wagoner also said the St. Catharines powertrain plant on Ontario Street West will cease production in 2008.
The closures mean about 3,880 jobs will be lost in Canada. The Oshawa Number 2 plant closure will mean 2,750 jobs will go, while 1,000 jobs will be lost with the end of the third shift at Oshawa Number One plant.
Closure of the powertrain plant in St. Catharines will cost about 130 jobs.
General Motors had about 20,000 employees in Canada prior to the latest cuts.
In the United States, the following assembly plants will be closed:
- Oklahoma City, Okla., in early 2006.
- Lansing, Mich., in mid-2006.
- Spring Hill, Tenn., at the end of 2006.
- Doraville, Ga., in 2008.
The third shift at the company's Moraine, Ohio, assembly plant will be cut in 2006.
Other GM plants affected by the cuts include:
- The Lansing, Mich., metal centre closing in 2006.
- The Pittsburg, Pa., metal centre ending production in 2007.
- A parts distribution centre in Portland, Ore., shutting in 2006.
- A parts distribution centre in St. Louis, Mo., which will be converting to a collision centre in 2006.
- A parts processing centre in Ypsilanti, Mich., closing in 2007.
- One additional parts processing centre, to be named later, shutting in 2007.
- The Flint, Mich., North 3800 engine facility ceasing production in 2008.
GM facing production glut
Wagoner said the closures and shutdowns will cut the company's annual production capacity by one million vehicles to 4.2 million unit a year by 2008.
GM's plants were reported to be operating at 85 per cent capacity, well below the plants of its Asian competitors.
Faced with falling demand and market share, and over-capacity at its manufacturing facilities, Wagoner said GM needed to make cuts.
"These actions are necessary for GM to get its costs in line with our major global competitors," Wagoner told employees.
"In short, they are an essential part of our plan to return our North American operations to profitability as soon as possible," he said.
Wagoner said Monday that GM is aiming to cut its costs by about $7 billion US by the end of 2006. That goal is about $1 billion US higher than its previous target.
GM lost almost $4 billion US through the first nine months of this year as it struggled to cope with its myriad of problems, which include high costs for labour, pensions and health care.
The company's struggles have prompted rumours that GM might file for bankruptcy, but Wagoner told employees last week that the company had no such plans.
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Monday November 21, 2005
The Guardian
Ray Kurzweil has enormous faith in science. He takes 250 dietary supplements every day. He is sure computers will make him much, much cleverer within decades. He won't rule out being able to live for ever. Even if medical technology cannot prevent the life passing from his body, he thinks there is a good chance he will be able to secure immortality by downloading the contents of his enhanced brain before he dies.
What is more, he says, his predictions have tended to come true. "You can predict certain aspects of the future. It turns out that certain things are remarkably predictable. Measures of IT - price, performance, capacity - in many different fields, follow very smooth evolutionary progressions. So if you ask me what the price or performance of computers will be in 2010 or how much it will cost to sequence base pairs of DNA in 2012, I can give you a figure and it's likely to be accurate. The Age of Intelligent Machines, which I wrote in the 1980s, has hundreds of predictions about the 90s and they've worked out quite well."
Although he has written some of the defining texts of modern futurology, Kurzweil is not just a theorist: he has decades of experience as an inventor. As a schoolboy he created a computer that could write music in the style of the great classical composers. As an adult, he invented the first flat-bed scanner, and a device that translated text in to speech, to help blind people read. There is much, much more.
His current big idea is "the singularity", an idea first proposed by computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, and expounded by Kurzweil in his new book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. The nub of Kurzweil's argument is that technology is evolving so quickly that in the near future humans and computers will, in effect, meld to create a hybrid, bio-mechanical life form that will extend our capacities unimaginably.
"By 2020, $1,000 (£581) worth of computer will equal the processing power of the human brain," he says. "By the late 2020s, we'll have reverse-engineered human brains."
What form will the computer take by the middle of the century: a kind of superhuman clone or just a terrific prosthesis? "I would lean more towards the prosthesis side. Not a prosthetic device that just fixes problems, like a wooden leg, but something that allows us to expand our capabilities, because we're going to merge with this technology. By 2030, we will have achieved machinery that equals and exceeds human intelligence but we're going to combine with these machines rather than just competing with them. These machines will be inserted into our bodies, via nano-technology. They'll go inside our brains through the capillaries and enlarge human intelligence."
It sounds creepily wonderful. But will humans have the political and social structures to accommodate and control these super-enhancing technologies? Look at the problems that stem-cell research is currently having in America, for example.
"That's completely insignificant," he replies. "I support stem-cell research and oppose the government restrictions, but nobody can say that this is having any significant impact on the flow of scientific progress. Ultimately, we don't want to use embryonic stem-cells anyway. Not because of any ethical and political issues. If I want artificial heart cells, or if I want pancreatic cells, it will be done from my own DNA and there'll be an inexhaustible supply. These barriers are stones in the river. The science just flows around them."
OK. But what if the bad guys get hold of the technology? Does that possibility keep Kurzweil awake at night?
"I've been concerned about that for many years," he concedes. "But you can't just relinquish these technologies. And you can't ban them. It would deprive humanity of profound benefits and it wouldn't work. In fact it would make the dangers worse by driving the technologies underground, where they would be even less controlled. But we do need to put more stones on the defensive side of the scale and invest more in developing defensive technology. The main danger we have right now is the ability of some bio-terrorist engineering a brand new type of virus that would be very dangerous. Bill Joy and I had an op-ed piece in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago criticising the publication of the genome of the 1918 avian virus on the web. We do have to be careful."
Kurzweil has plenty of critics. Some are horrified by his vision of a future that doesn't seem to need humans. Others suggest his predictions are based on assertion rather than evidence. Some, such as Steven Pinker, argue that Kurzweil has oversimplified evolution by wrongly claiming it to be a pursuit of greater intellectual complexity and applying it to technology.
"It is truly an evolutionary process," Kurzweil insists. "You have different niches and technology competes for them. The better ones survive and the weaker ones go to the wall. Technology evolves in a virtually straight line. The first important point is that we can make accurate predictions and I've been doing that for several decades now. The other important point is the exponential rate at which technology is moving under what I call the Law of Accelerating Return. It's not just Moore's Law."
Kurzweil is referring to the observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented and would continue to do so, a key foundation of Kuzweil's thinking.
"It's not just computers. In 1989, only one ten-thousandth of the genome was mapped. Sceptics said there's no way you're gonna do this by the turn of the century. Ten years later they were still sceptical because we'd only succeeded in collecting 2% of the genome. But doubling every year brings surprising results and the project was done in time. It took us 15 years to sequence HIV - a huge project - now we can sequence Sars in 31 days and we sequence other viruses in a week."
All this is moving towards "the singularity", is it? "Yes. Consider how important computers and IT are already. Then go on to consider that the power of these technologies will grow by a factor of a billion in 25 years. And it'll be another factor of a billion by the time we get to 2045".
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By John Heilprin
Associated Press
November 17, 2005
WASHINGTON — DuPont Co. hid studies showing the risks of a Teflon-related chemical used to line candy wrappers, pizza boxes, microwave popcorn bags and hundreds of other food containers, according to internal company documents and a former employee.
The chemical Zonyl can rub off the liner and get into food. Once in a person's body, it can break down into perfluorooctanoic acid and its salts, known as PFOA, a related chemical used in the making of Teflon-coated cookware.
The Environmental Protection Agency has been trying to decide whether to classify PFOA as a "likely" human carcinogen. The Food and Drug Administration, in a letter released Wednesday evening by DuPont, said it was continuing to monitor the safety of PFOA chemicals in food.
The DuPont documents were made public Wednesday by the Environmental Working Group, a research and advocacy organization.
At the same time, a former DuPont chemical engineer, Glenn Evers, told reporters at a news conference at EWG's office that the company long suppressed its studies on the chemical.
"They are toxic," Evers said of the PFOA chemicals. "They get into human blood. And they are also in every one of you. Your loved ones, your fellow citizens."
From 1981 to 2002, Evers helped DuPont develop new products. He lost his job in 2002 in what DuPont described as a company restructuring.
Evers had a different view: "It is my belief DuPont pushed me out of the company" because he started raising concerns about the chemicals' safety.
Evers said he decided to talk publicly about the PFOA problem after filing a civil suit against DuPont this month in a Delaware court. Evers' aim is mainly to "set the record straight" about the chemical and his own career, said Herb Feuerhake, Evers' lawyer.
But Evers said he also hoped to influence the outcome of an EPA hearing later this month on whether DuPont had withheld from EPA the study on PFOA and possible birth defects. The company could be fined millions of dollars.
After EWG tracked down Evers -- who had provided expert, unpaid testimony in two lawsuits against DuPont -- the 47-year-old Delaware resident said he talked it over with his priest, who told him, "`You can't dance with the devil.'"
DuPont denied allegations that PFOA posed a health risk, saying the Food and Drug Administration had approved the products for consumers.
Now the punch line: Clinical case studies shows that, among other symptoms, Aspartame ingestion results in "mind fog", feeling "unreal", poor memory, confusion, anxiety, irritability, depression, mania, and slurred speech. [Neurology 1994]
Alcohol-related brain damage is not helped by chugging formaldehyde. James Turner, consumer protection lawyer and author of The Chemical Feast learned that an Oct. 1980 FDA inquiry found that the formaldehyde formed by Aspartame actually eats microscopic holes and triggers tumors in the brain.
That finding banned Aspartame from the food supply. But three months later, Searle CEO Donald Rumsfeld told that pharma giant's sales staff he would get Aspartame approved pronto. The next month, the FDA commissioner was replaced by Dr. Arthur Hayes. In Nov. 1983 the FDA approved aspartame for soft drinks. Under fire for accepting corporate bribes, Hayes went to work for Searle's public-relations firm. Searle lawyer Robert Shapiro coined the name NutraSweet. Monsanto bought Searle. Rumsfeld received $12 million for his help. Shapiro now heads Monsanto. [...]
"These products are safe for consumer use," the company said in a statement. "FDA has approved these materials for consumer use since the late 1960s, and DuPont has always complied with all FDA regulations and standards regarding these products."
The company said Evers "had little if any direct involvement in PFOA issues while employed at DuPont. ... Evers expressed a wide range of personal opinions that are inaccurate, counter to FDA's findings, and which DuPont strongly disputes."
The environmental group on Wednesday gave the FDA and the EPA copies of DuPont-sponsored internal studies indicating higher dangers from Zonyl than the government knew, including its ability to migrate into the food.
One of the documents, a 1987 memo, cites laboratory tests showing the chemical came off paper coating and leached into foods at levels three times higher than the FDA limit set in 1967. Another document, a 1973 Dupont study in which rats and dogs were fed Zonyl for 90 days, said both types of animals had anemia and damage to their kidneys and livers; the dogs had higher cholesterol levels.
"What makes this worse is that DuPont knew at that time that Zonyl breakdown-products, such as PFOA, in food were very persistent in the environment and were contaminating human blood, including the fetal cord blood of babies born to DuPont female employees," EWG Senior Vice President Richard Wiles wrote to FDA and EPA officials.
Wiles asked the agencies to determine whether DuPont should be penalized for withholding the studies. Last year, based on another DuPont document that the environmental group obtained, EPA alleged the company had repeatedly failed over a 20-year period to submit required data about PFOA. The document referred to a study that suggested possible links between PFOA and birth defects in infants.
EPA spokeswoman Eryn Witcher said Wednesday the agency "has an extensive effort under way to determine the sources of PFOA, how the public is being exposed, and whether these exposures pose a potential health risk."
Evers' decision to go public with his concerns may have already had an impact.
In August, he told a Mississippi court that all three of DuPont's U.S. plants were releasing "massive amounts" of dioxin -- a class of organic chemicals that EPA studies have shown pose a possible cancer risk in humans. In that case, an oyster fisherman who claimed dioxin from a DuPont plant caused his rare blood cancer was awarded $14 million in actual damages and his wife received $1.5 million.
He also testified last year in a West Virginia case in which DuPont agreed to a $107.6 million settlement of a class-action suit. Residents around a plant near Parkersburg, W.Va., had said that PFOA contaminated their drinking water supplies. DuPont also remains the target of another class-action suit over PFOA seeking $5 billion.
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November 21 2005 at 02:07AM
Sydney - The northern Australian city of Darwin was rocked by an offshore earthquake on Monday but there were no reports of injuries or damage.
Geoscience Australia duty seismologist Cvetan Sinadinovski said a tremor was felt after the 5.3 magnitude quake hit 500km north-west of Darwin.
"People would have felt this earthquake up to 500km away from the epicentre, and we have heard numerous reports of residents in the Darwin area having felt the effects of the event," Dr Sinadinovski said.
The Bureau of Meteorology's Darwin office was also shaken by the earthquake.
"I felt the building sway and some of the monitors shook a little," the bureau's Billy Lynch told Australia's AAP news agency.
"We are on the third floor of a three-storey building."
Dr Sinadinovski said the biggest earthquake to strike the region, in 1998, had a magnitude of 6.9.
"This event is an inter-plate earthquake that occurs when the Australian and Asian plates collide," he said.
"This is a dynamic process which is a result of the movement of the tectonic plates which form the Earth's crust." - Sapa-dpa
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By FREDDY CUEVAS
Associated Press
Sun Nov 20, 7:13 PM ET
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras - Tropical Storm Gamma weakened into a tropical depression Sunday and drifted off Honduras after torrential downpours lashed the Central American coast, killing 14 people — including a young family of four.
Gamma, the 24th named storm of an already record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season, was expected to dissipate over the next day and was likely to miss Florida altogether. But the storm was expected to bring steady rain to northern Honduras and central Cuba as it becomes less organized, according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami.
Gamma's maximum sustained winds decreased to 35 mph — below the 39 mph to be considered a tropical storm, the hurricane center said. Its center was located about 85 miles north of the Honduran city of Limon and it was meandering north.
Forecasters said Gamma's projected path would carry it south of Jamaica by Wednesday, but forecasters said it might not even be a tropical cyclone by then.
Gamma had 45 mph winds and torrential downpours when it deluged Honduras on Saturday. Its remnants killed a 48-year-old man and an 8-year-old boy Sunday in Batalla, 250 miles northeast of the capital, Tegucigalpa, bringing the death toll in that country to 11, authorities said. There were no details on how the man and boy died. Authorities were searching for 15 people reported missing.
The government said the storm destroyed 48 homes, damaged 264 and forced more than 11,000 people to evacuate. [...]
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Last Updated Sun, 20 Nov 2005 21:53:29 EST
CBC News
Indonesia says preliminary tests show a 35-year-old man has died of the H5N1 virus of bird flu, the country's health ministry said on Monday.
The results had still to be confirmed by a Hong Kong laboratory affiliated with the World Health Organization.
If confirmed, the man would be the eighth person known to have died of bird flu in Indonesia. Two other bird flu deaths were reported earlier in the week.
There have been four positive cases where patients survived.
The ministry's director general of disease control, Nyoman Kandun, told Reuters news agency on Sunday that it wasn't clear whether the man in the latest suspected victim had contact with dead chickens.
The highly pathogenic H5N1 strain is endemic in poultry in parts of Asia, where it has killed more than 60 people and led to the cull of millions of birds.
Outbreaks spread in China
On Sunday, China reported its 16th and 17th bird flu outbreaks, this time among poultry in a central province and the country's far west.
China has reported new bird flu outbreaks in poultry almost daily, despite an effort launched last week to vaccinate all of the country's 14 billion chickens, ducks and other farm birds.
Experts say migrating geese and other wild birds probably are spreading the virus.
They fear H5N1 could mutate into a form that passes easily among people, just like human influenza. If it does, millions of people could die because they would have no immunity.
Most human bird flu cases in Asia have been blamed on direct or indirect contact with infected chickens.
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Robin McKie, science editor
Sunday November 20, 2005
The Observer
Global warming hits Himalayas
Nawa Jigtar was working in the village of Ghat, in Nepal, when the sound of crashing sent him rushing out of his home. He emerged to see his herd of cattle being swept away by a wall of water.
Jigtar and his fellow villagers were able to scramble to safety. They were lucky: 'If it had come at night, none of us would have survived.'
Ghat was destroyed when a lake, high in the Himalayas, burst its banks. Swollen with glacier meltwaters, its walls of rock and ice had suddenly disintegrated. Several million cubic metres of water crashed down the mountain.
When Ghat was destroyed, in 1985, such incidents were rare - but not any more. Last week, scientists revealed that there has been a tenfold jump in such catastrophes in the past two decades, the result of global warming. Himalayan glacier lakes are filling up with more and more melted ice and 24 of them are now poised to burst their banks in Bhutan, with a similar number at risk in Nepal.
But that is just the beginning, a report in Nature said last week. Future disasters around the Himalayas will include 'floods, droughts, land erosion, biodiversity loss and changes in rainfall and the monsoon'. [...]
'A glacier lake catastrophe happened once in a decade 50 years ago,' said UK geologist John Reynolds, whose company advises Nepal. 'Five years ago, they were happening every three years. By 2010, a glacial lake catastrophe will happen every year.'
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BY MARK MINTON
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
Bunch said he had spotted a meteor himself the other evening. It streaked across the sky while he was smoking a cigarette on his porch. Bunch, the breed of smalltown banker who wears overalls and rides a Harley-Davidson, has come to view such phenomena with new appreciation.
KINGSTON — When Steve Arnold heard that grapefruitsized meteorites were pelting a Chicago suburb two years ago, he rushed to the scene and stayed 44 days, meticulously plotting strike points and sweeping streets curb to curb with a detector fashioned from a magnet and broomstick.
He got some funny looks, but he left with 113 meteorites.
In the deserts of Oman on a similar excursion, Arnold and wife, Qynne, bounced over the sands in a Jeep looking for cosmic treasures. “We’d see a black spot on the horizon, and it would either be camel poop or a meteorite,” Arnold said. They scooped up 151 of the rocks.
Of the 6.4 billion people who live on Earth, no more than two dozen are full-time meteorite hunters. Arnold, 39, of Kingston, has been one since 1990, earning enough to finance his adventures and to sustain a rustic lifestyle for his family.
He has sold some nice rocks. But the big scores — such as six-figure chunks of the moon or Mars — have always eluded him.
Until last month.
Arnold was dragging an 8-foot-wide custom metal detector over a Kansas wheat field when a sustained screech blared through his headphones. Seven feet down, there it was: the 1,400-pound mass of rock and metal that is the largest meteorite of its kind discovered in the world.
Arnold hauled it to the Ozarks last week in his 1973 Ford Ranger. The meteorite, shaped like a jellybean and roughly the size of an engine block, hunkered in the bed, a mottled chunk of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
The discovery has already earned Arnold a degree of fame: appearances on the Today show and Discovery Channel Canada as well as wide circulation on the news wires. He also has new notoriety around Kingston, a Madison County town whose downtown includes the tiny bank made famous by Bill Clinton’s Whitewater venture.
“Congratulations, Mr. Rich and Famous,” the banker Gary Bunch greeted Arnold on the square Wednesday.
Bunch said he had spotted a meteor himself the other evening. It streaked across the sky while he was smoking a cigarette on his porch. Bunch, the breed of smalltown banker who wears overalls and rides a Harley-Davidson, has come to view such phenomena with new appreciation.
“I got interested in it since the rich and famous got involved,” he said.
The meteorite business can have its rewards, but job security is not one. A risky enterprise, it is peopled by a band of fiercely competitive entrepreneurs willing to instantly fly someplace they have never been before — with no more to go on than a news report or hot rumor.
“I’ve lost thousands of dollars chasing nothing,” said Matt Morgan, a competitor based in Denver. “When you get there, it turns out to be a piece of lava or something like that.”
But the lure of money falling from the sky is so tantalizing that meteor hunters quickly converge when there is news of a fall. The 2003 Park Forest, Ill., meteor shower was the rare event in which a major metropolitan area was hit by hundreds of meteorites. About 100 professionals and hobbyists followed.
“It’s about the only meteorite chase I’ve been on where there was a Red Lobster in the middle of the search area,” said Mike Farmer, a professional from Tucson, Ariz. “Usually, you’re in Africa, and you’re getting rotten goat meat.”
The same year, a gaggle convened in New Orleans, where a 40-pound meteorite had crashed through a house near the Superdome. The rock smashed an antique desk, penetrated the upstairs floor and slammed into the bathroom below, narrowly missing the commode, according to Farmer, who eventually won the competition to acquire the rock.
THE METEORITE MARKET
In 1998, Arnold beat him and others to the spot where a meteor crashed down near a basketball court in Monahans, Texas, where seven boys were playing. The police confiscated the rock, which had fallen in two chunks.
Arnold, first on the scene, represented the boys as a broker. He “kind of shamed the city into not taking this away,” said Arthur Ehlmann, the Texas Christian University emeritus geology professor who followed the dispute from his perch as curator of the university’s Oscar E. Monnig Meteorite Gallery.
In the end, Ehlmann said, the city kept the chunk that landed on a city street. The boys got the other, and Arnold made a commission when he sold it for them for about $20,000.
Arnold also brokers exchanges for museums, including the one at Fort Worth’s Texas Christian, which is home to about 1,200 meteorites, including a 100-pounder that Ehlmann keeps under his desk.
Demand for meteorites is fed not only by scientists, but collectors fascinated to own an extraterrestrial object that has rocketed through space at 50,000 miles an hour.
Dealers could not say how much the market is worth. In Denver, Morgan said his own sales hit about $500,000 last year.
Pallasites such as Arnold’s 1,400-pounder are rare, accounting for only about 1 percent of known meteorites, dealers say. Prized for the nickel-iron and olivine crystals that form them, pallasites are often cut into slices, polished to a shine and sold as art objects or in jewelry.
Arnold’s rock is “oriented,” meaning that it didn’t tumble as it entered Earth’s atmosphere, and thus has a rounded “nose cone.”
It is hard to say what the rock might be worth. Arnold is willing to speculate about “seven figures,” and fellow dealers, perhaps hoping for a spillover effect from such a sale, are quick to agree.
But the biggest sum that has been reported for a meteorite to date is about a quarter of a million dollars, Arnold said, and rocks from the moon or Mars have commanded the highest prices.
RUN, DON’T WALK, TO KANSAS
Slices of pallasite from the same Kansas meteorite fall have gone for about $4 a gram, dealers said. Assuming enough demand to sell the whole 1,400-pound monolith slice by slice, that would make the meteorite worth $2.5 million.
It’s an other-worldly figure. But Arnold is loathe to even discuss slicing the stone. Because of its size and nose cone, he said its highest value is as is.
Arnold found his prize on a farm in Kiowa County, between Wichita and Dodge City, a site well-known among meteorite hunters. The Brenham meteorite that landed there, named for the township where it landed, exploded overhead centuries ago, scattering more than 3 tons of fragments, according to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The museum owns some of the Brenham specimens, as does the Field Museum in Chicago.
But most hunters left the Brenham zone for tapped-out decades ago.
In his research, however, Arnold discovered something — he won’t say what — that convinced him they were wrong.
He told it to Phil Mani, a San Antonio geologist and oil and gas attorney who collects meteorites. Mani was quickly persuaded. He agreed to bankroll a hunt.
“I suggested that he hurry run, not walk — to Kansas,” Mani said. But first the treasure hunters needed the permission of the landowners. They also needed to somehow acquire legal rights for stones they might find.
“So we did what’s probably never been done in the history of the world before,” Arnold said. “We made a meteorite lease.”
The pair currently hold the meteor rights to 2,000 acres of Kansas farmland. The leases give the landowner a percentage of any sales. Still, some of the locals thought it was all a little strange, Mani acknowledged.
“The notary was looking at us like, ‘Hey, these boys from out of town are giving away free money.’”
‘KING OF THE PALLASITES’
With planting time fast approaching, Arnold set to work immediately in a 320-acre wheat field with his ATV-powered metal detector, which rides over the ground on a plastic frame with wheels and is sensitive to about 15 feet.
“I got a lot of hits,” Arnold said. “On wagon wheels. Horse shoes. Pliers. Linchpins. A whole lot of linchpins — a whole museum display. A coyote trap.
“I found a really neat ring for a bull’s nose.”
He stopped about every 100 feet to dig in the clay soil and see what his detector was registering.
The rock was 7 feet deep, nose down.
Arnold hoisted it with a backhoe and hauled it to a nearby grain-elevator scale: 1,430 pounds, plus or minus 20.
He has been in the aggressivemarketing phase ever since, hoping to build interest and attract a buyer.
On worldrecordmeteorite .com, the “official website of the world’s largest oriented pallasite,” he describes it as “one of the most valuable meteorite finds ever made in the United States” and of “historic and scientific importance.”
“We’re coining it ‘the King of the Pallasites,’” Arnold said Wednesday. The King of the Pallasites was bound for a friend’s body shop in Tulsa on Thursday, for an unusual radio cross-promotion marrying the astral and the accidental.
Then it was headed for an undisclosed location in Texas, to be overseen by Mani, who said he has “several tens of thousands of dollars” invested in the venture.
Mani believes a museum will be the best destination in the end for the meteorite.
Meanwhile, Arnold has work to do on the farms in Kansas, where he has bought a second house as a base for his prospecting.
“Who knows?” Mani said. “Maybe we’ll find something better. Something bigger.”
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Last Updated: Monday, 21 November 2005, 13:07 GMT
BBC
A character in Charles Dickens' Bleak House burns to death without any apparent reason. Human spontaneous combustion is a belief which has been around for centuries but does it really exist?
Viewers following Andrew Davies's adaptation of Charles Dickens' Bleak House on BBC One have just seen the dreadful moment when alcoholic Krook - played sinisterly by Johnny Vegas - finds his gin warming his stomach more than usual, and suddenly bursts into flames.
As his charred remains are found, Dickens lets the awful scene unfold: "Here is a small burnt patch of flooring; here is the tinder from a little bundle of burnt paper, but not so light as usual, seeming to be steeped in something; and here is - is it the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it coal? Oh, horror, he IS here!"
Dickens is unequivocal in ascribing the death to spontaneous human combustion (SHC), the alleged burning of a person's body with no identifiable source of ignition. "It is the same death eternally - inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only - Spontaneous Combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died," he writes.
When the story was first published, Dickens was accused of legitimising superstitious nonsense and there was a minor uproar. But the author responded by saying he had researched the subject and knew of about 30 cases. "I have no need to observe that I do not wilfully or negligently mislead my readers and that before I wrote that description I took pains to investigate the subject," he wrote in the preface to the second edition.
It is thought part of his source was a collection of cases published in 1763, 90 years before Bleak House, by Frenchman Jonas Dupont.
So is spontaneous human combustion something of fact or fiction?
Modern cases have usually come about when police and fire investigators have found burned corpses but no burned furniture. Bafflement at how a body can be reduced almost to ashes, which requires temperatures of about 3,000 degrees, without any of the rest of the room being affected has driven some of the theories.
One of the most notable cases was Mary Reeser who was found in her home in 1951, reduced to a pile of ashes save her shrunken skull and her left foot which was entirely intact. Damage to the flat in Florida was small, only soot on the ceiling and walls.
The police report claimed the 67-year-old widow's dressing gown had caught fire, perhaps due to a cigarette, although no flame source or accelerant was found.
Wick effect
In 1982, SHC was offered as a cause of death at the inquest into the death of Jean Saffin, 62. Relatives said they saw her burst into flames in her north London home but coroner Dr John Burton said there was "no such thing" as SHC and recorded an open verdict.
The human body is mostly water and its only properties which burn readily are fat tissue and methane gas, so the possibilities of SHC appear remote. But supporters of the theory have offered alcoholism, divine intervention, obesity and static electricity as explanations.
In 1998 the BBC programme QED investigated and used a dead pig to try and present a scientific explanation called the "wick effect".
The clothes are the wick and the fat surrounding a person is the fuel source which burns slowly, like a candle, for five to 10 hours.
This theory can account for the state of the remains but it does not explain the absence of any initial flame or accelerant, both of which were required for the experiment on the pig. To compound the mystery, many of the victims in the alleged cases did not try and escape and remained seated throughout.
But Home Office pathologist Professor Michael Green thought the SHC theory had been debunked.
"The way the body burns - the so-called wick effect - seems to me and to my colleagues to be the most scientifically credible hypothesis," he said.
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Last Updated: Monday, 21 November 2005, 11:10 GMT
BBC
A French woman has admitted attempting to open an aeroplane door mid-flight so that she could smoke a cigarette.
Sandrine Helene Sellies, 34, who has a fear of flying, had drunk alcohol and taken sleeping tablets ahead of the flight from Hong Kong to Brisbane.
She was seen on the Cathay Pacific plane walking towards a door with an unlit cigarette and a lighter.
She then began tampering with the emergency exit until she was stopped by a flight attendant.
Defence lawyer Helen Shilton said her client had no memory of what had happened on the flight on Saturday, and that she had a history of sleepwalking.
She pleaded guilty to endangering the safety of an aircraft at Brisbane Magistrates Court and was given a 12-month A$1,000 (£429) good behaviour bond - she will forfeit the money if she commits another offence.
The French tourist was at the start of a three-week holiday in Australia with her husband.
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SOTT
November 21, 2005
Two disciples of a Sufi Mystic were walking in the garden of the Master. They were both smokers and wanted to seek the permission of the Master to smoke. They both went to the Master and the next day in the garden one finds the other smoking away.
The other one was furious: "But he refused to me. Look at the injustice!"
The smoker asks "What did you ask the Master?"
The other replied "I asked can I smoke while meditating. What did you ask?"
The smoker replied "I asked can I meditate while smoking?"
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On the fourth
anniversary of the September 11th attacks, Laura Knight-Jadczyk
announced the availability of her latest book:
In the years since the 9/11 attacks, dozens of books
have sought to explore the truth behind the official
version of events that day - yet to date, none of
these publications has provided a satisfactory answer
as to WHY the attacks occurred and who was ultimately
responsible for carrying them out.
Taking a broad, millennia-long perspective, Laura
Knight-Jadczyk's 9/11:
The Ultimate Truth uncovers the true nature of
the ruling elite on our planet and presents new and
ground-breaking insights into just how the 9/11 attacks
played out.
9/11: The Ultimate
Truth makes a strong case for the idea that September
11, 2001 marked the moment when our planet entered
the final phase of a diabolical plan that has been
many, many years in the making. It is a plan developed
and nurtured by successive generations of ruthless
individuals who relentlessly exploit the negative
aspects of basic human nature to entrap humanity as
a whole in endless wars and suffering in order to
keep us confused and distracted to the reality of
the man behind the curtain.
Drawing on historical and genealogical sources, Knight-Jadczyk
eloquently links the 9/11 event to the modern-day
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She also cites the clear
evidence that our planet undergoes periodic natural
cataclysms, a cycle that has arguably brought humanity
to the brink of destruction in the present day.
For its no nonsense style in cutting to the core
of the issue and its sheer audacity in refusing to
be swayed or distracted by the morass of disinformation
that has been employed by the Powers that Be to cover
their tracks, 9/11:
The Ultimate Truth can rightly claim to be THE
definitive book on 9/11 - and what that fateful day's
true implications are for the future of mankind.
Published by Red Pill Press
Order the book today at our bookstore. |
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