http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/member.php?u=8645 A social site powered by it's members en H.Atakan KOC www.sonkonu.com 60 http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=32537 Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:41:53 GMT
Visit: http://www.aftershockforums.com]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=32537 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=22387 Fri, 19 Dec 2008 09:41:49 GMT
http://theironcurtain.tk/

Will be .com shortly.

File exchange includes free software, games, etc.

Request a file, program, game.

Weapons & Armor.

Explosives.

Enjoy.]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=22387 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8823 Tue, 25 Mar 2008 17:20:44 GMT
The BMD-4M is the latest modification of an armored combat vehicle that can be para-dropped to provide firepower and support for airborne troops. It features a new chassis, a digital fire control system and a set of high-precision weaponry, including a 100-mm gun.

"Following the final test results a decision will be made when the production of the vehicle [BMD-4M] will begin," Mikhail Bolotin, the president of Concern Tractor Plants (KTZ) said.

He said that in line with the state arms procurement program, the Russian Airborne Troops will receive several hundred BMD-4Ms until 2015.

The 13-ton vehicle has a crew of two and can carry six paratroopers.

"The capacity of our plants allows us to assemble up to 3,000 vehicles per year," Bolotin said, adding that the company had received about 1,000 unconfirmed export orders.

The Airborne Troops are considered the most capable mobile assault forces in Russia. Various estimates put the current personnel at about 48,000 troops deployed in four divisions and a brigade.

According to Russia's military reform plans, the Airborne Troops will be fully manned with professional soldiers by 2011.

Source: http://www.en.rian.ru/russia/20080321/101903920.html]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8823 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8660 Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:57:01 GMT
Beyond 2008, working with "best-case" and "realistic-moderate" scenarios, they project the Iraq and Afghan wars, including long-term U.S. military occupations of those countries, will cost the U.S. budget between $1.7 trillion and $2.7 trillion — or more — by 2017.

Interest on money borrowed to pay those costs could alone add $816 billion to that bottom line, they say.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has done its own projections and comes in lower, forecasting a cumulative cost by 2017 of $1.2 trillion to $1.7 trillion for the two wars, with Iraq generally accounting for three-quarters of the costs.

Variations in such estimates stem from the sliding scales of assumptions, scenarios and budget items that are counted. But whatever the estimate, the cost will be huge, the auditors of the Government Accountability Office say.

In a Jan. 30 report to Congress, the GAO observed that the U.S. will be committing "significant" future resources to the wars, "requiring decision makers to consider difficult trade-offs as the nation faces an increasing long-range fiscal challenge."

These numbers don't include the war's cost to the rest of the world. In Iraq itself, the 2003 U.S.-led invasion — with its devastating air bombardments — and the looting and arson that followed, severely damaged electricity and other utilities, the oil industry, countless factories, hospitals, schools and other underpinnings of an economy.

No one has tried to calculate the economic damage done to Iraq, said spokesman Niels Buenemann of the International Monetary Fund, which closely tracks national economies. But millions of Iraqis have been left without jobs, and hundreds of thousands of professionals, managers and other middle-class citizens have fled the country.

In their book, "The Three Trillion Dollar War," Stiglitz, of Columbia University, and Bilmes, of Harvard, report the two wars will have cost the U.S. budget $845 billion in 2007 dollars by next Sept. 30, end of fiscal year 2008, assuming Congress fully funds Bush administration requests. That counts not just military operations, but embassy costs, reconstruction and other war-related expenses.

That total far surpasses the $670 billion in 2007 dollars the Congressional Research Service says was the U.S. price tag for the 12-year Vietnam War.

Although American military and Iraqi civilian casualties have declined in recent months, the rate of spending has shot up. A fully funded 2008 war budget will be 155 percent higher than 2004's, the CBO reports.

The reasons are numerous: the "surge" of additional U.S. units into Iraq; rising fuel costs; fattened bonuses to attract re-enlistments; and particularly the need to "reset," that is, repair or replace worn-out, destroyed or damaged military equipment. Almost $17 billion is appropriated this year for advanced armored vehicles to protect troops against roadside bombs.

Looking ahead, both the CBO and Stiglitz-Bilmes construct two scenarios, one in which U.S. troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan drop sharply and early — to 30,000 by late 2009 for the CBO, and to 55,000 by 2012 for Stiglitz-Bilmes — and a second in which the drawdown is more gradual.

Significantly, the two studies view different time frames, the CBO calculating possible costs met in the next 10 years, while Stiglitz and Bilmes also include costs incurred during that period but paid for later, such as equipment replaced in post-2017 budgets.

This factor figures most in the category of veterans' medical care and disability payments, where the CBO foresees $9 billion to $13 billion in costs by 2017. Stiglitz and Bilmes, meanwhile, project $422 billion to $717 billion in costs over the lifetime of soldiers who by 2017 are wounded or otherwise mentally or physically disabled by the wars.

"The CBO is only looking 10 years out on everything," Bilmes noted in an interview.

For its part, a CBO critique suggested that Bilmes and Stiglitz might be overstating the expense of treating veterans' brain injuries, a costly category.

The two economists say their calculations are conservative, because they don't encompass many "hidden" items in the U.S. budget. Their basic projections also exclude the potentially huge debt-service cost — on which CBO approximately agrees — and the cost to the U.S. economy of global oil prices that have quadrupled since 2003, an increase analysts blame partly on the Iraq upheaval.

Estimating all economic and social costs might push the U.S. war bill up toward $5 trillion by 2017, they say.

Their book already figures in the stay-or-leave debate over Iraq.

When Stiglitz testified on Feb. 28 before the congressional Joint Economic Committee, the ranking Republican, New Jersey's Rep. Jim Saxton, complained that such projections are too imprecise to help determine relative costs and benefits of the Iraq war.

Saxton said a rapid U.S. pullout could lead to full-scale civil war and Iranian domination of Iraq, "enormous costs" that he said should be weighed in any calculation."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080310/...MSBxdd5X5vaA8F]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8660 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8624 Fri, 07 Mar 2008 20:12:08 GMT
The "incision history" that carved out a canyon that has 277 miles of river, measures up to 18 miles wide and a mile deep, has been disputed in part because some of the more common methods for dating the geological event don't reach back more than about one million to three million years ago.

Now, Dr Victor Polyak and Dr Yemane Asmerom of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and colleagues report in the journal Science how they have used improvements in methods to date cave formations, relying on the way certain isotopes of uranium gradually decay, via other elements, to lead.

They determined the ages of the canyon's mammillaries or "cave clouds" - carbonate deposits that form at or near the water table level. By tracking the deposits that marked the position of the water, they conclude that the canyon is oldest on its western end and opened up steadily to the east through erosion.

The eastern part of the canyon was cut at a much faster rate than the western part, so the eastern canyon was probably completely cut through in five to six million years.

The timing may not be too surprising to geologists, but the new study places the dates on a firm footing for the first time, showing how it took up to 17 million years to carve its course downward through the 1-mile depth of the canyon.

Attempts to estimate the rate valleys are carved out go back at least to the British geologist Archibald Geikie who in the 1880s guestimated it was about one foot in 1,200 years, which is in the mid-range of the new data for the Grand Canyon.

Yesterday, arcs of water unleashed from a dam coursed through the canyon in a 60 hour flood meant to mimic the natural ones that used to nourish the ecosystem by spreading sediment.

More than 300,000 gallons of water per second were released from Lake Powell above the dam near the Arizona-Utah border, enough water to fill New York City's Empire State Building in 20 minutes.

The water level in the Grand Canyon rose 2 feet to 15 feet in some places. After the flood ends in the next day or so officials hope the water will leave behind sediment and restore sandbars as it goes back to normal levels. Officials have flooded the canyon twice before, in 1996 and 2004.

The construction of the dam in 1963 put an end to the cycle of spring floods that would naturally flush out the river. It encouraged non-native fish to thrive while accelerating the extinction of four native fish species.

Before the dam was built in 1963, the river was warm and muddy, and natural flooding built up sandbars that are essential to native plant and fish species. The river is now cool and clear, its sediment blocked by the dam.

The change helped speed the extinction of the four fish species and push two others, including the endangered humpback chub, near the edge.

Shrinking beaches have led to the loss of half the camping sites in the canyon in the past decade. Since Glen Canyon Dam was built, 98 per cent of the sediment carried by the Colorado River has been lost, Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent Steve Martin said.

But he said one flood was not enough. Martin says manmade floods need to occur every time there's enough sediment to do so - about every one to two years depending on Arizona's volatile monsoon season. "The science is really clear that's what we need to do."

The Grand Canyon Trust, a Flagstaff-based group that has been critical of the federal Bureau of Reclamation's management of the dam, also is calling for more regular high flows.

Scientists will document habitat changes, the effects of higher water flows and determine how backwater habitats are used by the chub and other fish."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...icanyon106.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8624 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8623 Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:56:48 GMT
For NASA, however, the launch of the Jules Verne Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) also highlights a stark reality: In 2 1/2 years, just as the station gets fully assembled, the United States will no longer have any spacecraft of its own capable of carrying astronauts and cargo to the station, in which roughly $100 billion is being invested. The three space shuttles will be retired by then, because of their high cost and questionable safety, and NASA will have nothing ready to replace them until 2015 at the earliest.

For five years or more, the United States will be dependent on the technology of others to reach the station, which American taxpayers largely paid for. To complicate things further, the only nation now capable of flying humans to the station is Russia, giving it a strong bargaining position to decide what it wants to charge for the flights at a time when U.S.-Russian relations are becoming increasingly testy.

In addition, some fear the price will be paid not only in billions of dollars but also in lost American prestige and lost leverage on the Russians when it comes to issues such as aiding Iran with its nuclear program.

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin calls the situation his "greatest regret and greatest concern." For most of the five-year gap, he said, "we will be largely dependent on the Russians, and that is terrible place for the United States to be. I'm worried, and many others are worried."

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), chairman of the subcommittee that oversees NASA, went further. "This is a very serious betrayal of American interests," he said. "This will be the first time since Sputnik when the United States will not have a significant space superiority. I remain dumbfounded that we've allowed this serious threat to our national security to develop."

The White House, Congress and the space community have known for years that the gap was looming, but there were always other priorities.

Those most involved with the issue say that its seriousness will become more glaring this summer, when negotiations with Russia begin and Congress is likely to debate whether to grant a waiver to the law that prohibits certain kinds of commerce with nations that support the Iranian or North Korean nuclear program.

Griffin has testified that while the waiver is essential, it is "unseemly, simply unseemly, for the United States -- the world's leading power and leading space power -- to be reduced to purchasing services like this. It affects, in my view, how we are seen in the world, and not for the better."

NASA's budget calls for spending $2.6 billion for transportation to the space station between fiscal 2009 and 2013. As it stands now, much of that would go to the Russians.

With that prospect ahead, Griffin told Nelson's committee last week that he is working with the fledgling private rocket company SpaceX to speed its efforts to build a private spacecraft that can take over some of the work of ferrying astronauts into space. Both Nelson and Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) had recommended that NASA formally push ahead with that effort.

But SpaceX, while eager to do the work, has not successfully orbited even a cargo spacecraft, let alone one designed to the much higher standards needed for human flight. Nonetheless, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said in a telephone interview that his company might have a manned spacecraft capability by the end of 2011 if NASA exercises its option under a 2006 agreement to provide cargo service. With that go-ahead, SpaceX would put its manned rocket program into high gear, he said.

"Is there a risk that we won't succeed? Yes, there is," said Musk, co-founder of the PayPal online payment system. "But if the United States doesn't provide any competition to the Russians, then they have a monopoly on crew transport to the station and they can dictate their terms. Do taxpayers really want all that money to go to Russia, rather than to an American company with American workers?"

In his testimony, Griffin said he is inclined to exercise the human spaceflight option, but he also said he very much doubts that SpaceX will have a spacecraft ready for astronauts by 2012.

The gap in American capability to reach the space station is the result of factors including the 2003 breakup of the space shuttle Columbia, the subsequent decision to retire the three remaining shuttles by September 2010 and the lack of additional funds to quickly build a replacement.

NASA has let contracts to design and test a new-generation rocket and crew capsule, but it has had to go slowly because of the high cost of operating the shuttles, which are the only spacecraft able to carry large components to the still-incomplete space station. Griffin has testified that the replacement spacecraft could be ready in 2013 rather than 2015 if the agency had an additional $2 billion, but the administration has not asked for the funding.

Last year, the White House opposed a bill passed by the Senate to give NASA an additional $1 billion to make up for some of the costs incurred after Columbia broke apart -- a step similar to one taken after the Challenger disaster in 1986.

"What we have here is an agency that has been given a lot to do but has been starved for funds," Nelson said. "I think the gap is largely due to the administration's refusal to give NASA the funds it needs. And now we'll be forced to give billions to the Russians because we didn't spend millions before. It's the worst of all worlds."

Griffin, a strong advocate for manned spaceflight and a loyal member of the administration, said that past Congresses and administrations let the manned space program atrophy and that it took President Bush's 2004 "vision" for human travel to the moon and Mars to rejuvenate the program.

Still, many see Bush as having limited interest in space. Not only have NASA budgets remained tight, but Bush never visited the Johnson Space Center in Houston during his six years as governor of Texas, and as president he visited once, for a memorial service for the lost Columbia astronauts.

The European spacecraft scheduled for launch tomorrow night is the first of six cargo-carrying flights by Arianespace, a public-private company, in exchange for NASA ferrying a large European lab to the station on the shuttle. Chairman and chief executive Jean-Yves Le Gall said in an interview last week that the company would like to play a larger role in supplying the space station, but it is waiting for its first successful launch before pressing its case.

The European Union is scheduled to decide in November whether to enter the field of human spaceflight, potentially joining the club that so far includes only the United States, Russia and China.

Le Gall acknowledged that the ATV -- which is the size of a London double-decker bus -- is now more expensive to build and operate than its Russian competitors, but he said that may change if Russia becomes the sole carrier. Nonetheless, the Europeans face a number of obstacles in selling their space transport services to NASA, including buy-American provisions that favor homegrown companies such as SpaceX.

"We believe we can be an important part of the solution for the space station and counterbalance to the Russians, if we are given a chance," Le Gall said.

Despite the broad concern over NASA's future dependence on Russia, Griffin said the agency's experience with its most important space station partner has been good. The Russians helped astronauts stranded on the space station after the Columbia breakup, and they have continued to provide crew and cargo transport services -- currently as part of a $780 million, multiyear contract.

Griffin also said a new deal with the Russians has to be signed by early next year. The Russians, he said, need a three-year lead time to build a sufficient quantity of their expendable, but very dependable, Soyuz and Progress spacecraft."

Source:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?hpid=topnews]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8623 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8600 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 19:58:06 GMT
Source:http://abcnews.go.com/International/...4398670&page=2]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8600 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8590 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 02:03:01 GMT
The chemical acrylamide is found in a wide range of fried and baked foods - from bread to coffee and breakfast cereals - and a recent report suggests it may increase the risk of postmenopausal womb cancer and ovarian cancer.

The new study shows that soaking potatoes before frying can dramatically reduce the formation of acrylamide.

The lead author, Dr Rachel Burch, from Leatherhead Food International, said: "There has been much research done by the food industry looking at reducing acrylamide in products but less so on foods cooked at home and we wanted to explore ways of reducing the level of acrylamide in home cooking."

The study, published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, found that washing raw chips, soaking them for 30 minutes and soaking them for two hours reduced the formation of acrylamide by up to 23 per cent, 38 per cent and 48 per cent respectively but only if they were fried to a lighter colour.

Baked, fried and roasted food should be cooked to golden yellow rather than nut brown, and consumers should avoid overcooked foods and cut intake of crisps, chips, and other high-acrylamide foods, according to the conclusions of a recent £5million EU study.

The three-year project recommended eating home-cooked meals, which contain much less acrylamide than processed products.

The chemical forms in carbohydrate-rich foods when asparagine, a naturally occurring amino acid, is heated above 120C.

Levels of asparagine differ between potato varieties, so it is possible to cut intake by selecting low asparagine varieties.

Acrylamide levels are generally higher in wholemeal products than those made from white flour, but the team stresses wholemeal food does offer other health benefits."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...scipots106.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8590 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8589 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 01:54:55 GMT
But unlike the old Soviet Union, the Pentagon can't quite cite a clear and present danger. So it's pointing to China's secretiveness as justification for assuming the worst. "The lack of transparency in China's military and security affairs poses risks to stability by increasing the potential for misunderstanding and miscalculation," the report said. "This situation will naturally lead to hedging against the unknown." The Pentagon adds that China spent up to $139 billion on its military, up to three times its declared budget (but only about a quarter of the Pentagon's). "The real story is the continuing development, the continuing modernization, the continuing acquisition of capabilities and the corresponding and unfortunate lack of understanding, lack of transparency about the intentions behind those and the way they're going to be deployed," David Sedney, deputy assistant secretary of defense for east Asia, said Monday at a press conference on the China report.

The Pentagon study is certain to be used as ammunition by the China bashers in Congress. "By 2010 China will have almost twice the number of submarines — not the same capability, but almost twice the number of submarines — as the United States," Rep. Tom Allen, D-Maine, warned at a recent House Budget Committee hearing. Senator James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, said at a recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that during the 1990s, Beijing's military procurement "increased by 1,000 percent."

While the report's existence owes much to that Washington ice cream cone, there is cause for concern. While China remains pre-occupied by Taiwan, its navy and air force are increasingly expanding their reach in ways that suggest it is flexing its military might beyond that island, which mainland China regards as a rebel province. Last year, Beijing tested an anti-satellite weapon and Pentagon officials believe it has been behind hacker attacks on Pentagon computer systems. The report says China's long-range strategic missile force — capable of hitting the U.S. — continues to grow, as does its arsenal of ship-killing cruise missiles.

Yet all this comes even as military-to-military relations are improving. Of course, there was nowhere to go but up after the U.S. mistakenly bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, and after China forced a U.S. Navy spy plane to land on China's Hainan Island in 2001 and held its 24-person crew for 11 days. Admiral Timothy Keating, chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, said that relations were improving during his recent visit to Beijing. "We're getting to know these guys," he said. But he stressed the need for the Chinese to be more open concerning their future military plans and intentions.

The two nations took a step in that direction last week, when the Pentagon and Chinese military agreed to create a hot line — similar to the link between Washington and Moscow during the Cold War — so military leaders can communicate and keep small crises from ballooning into big ones. But setting it up was a long and protracted process. Keating said trying to get in touch with his Chinese counterparts has been as difficult as getting in touch with New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. "Sometimes you get him, sometimes you don't," Keating said. "It's as tough to get these guys as it is Steinbrenner." The hot line, defense officials say, should be up and running in a couple of weeks."

Source:http://www.time.com/time/world/artic...719321,00.html]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8589 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8586 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 01:39:18 GMT
Good Friends, based in South Korea, said the 13 women and two men were shot on a b***** in the north-eastern town of Onseong two weeks ago.

The aid group said those executed had been trying to get economic help from relatives already in China.

Tens of thousands of North Koreans are thought to be in hiding in China.

In a newsletter, Good Friends said residents who witnessed the shooting were shocked at the harshness of the punishment. Some were crying at the scene, it reported.

The group quoted a woman as saying: "Everyone is anxious about a lack of food. The shooting has made people angry."

'Shot as a warning'

A local North Korean official is also quoted in the newsletter.

"It has become a daily routine for a few residents to disappear and illegally cross the border to visit relatives in China," he is reported as saying.

"We shot them to send a warning to people over this."

There has been no official word from North Korea on the executions and South Korea's Unification Ministry said it could not confirm the report.

Acute food shortages have led to thousands of North Koreans fleeing their ho***and through China.

Food aid

Many hope to make their way to South Korea - the Unification Ministry in Seoul says more than 12,000 North Koreans have fled to the south since the 1950-53 Korean War.

Others cross the border into China with the intention of returning with food supplies.

North Korea received hundreds of thousands of tonnes of food aid last year, more than half of it from Seoul.

An unusually dry and mild winter has raised fears of worse shortages to come."

Source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7279996.stm]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8586 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8585 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 01:34:37 GMT
The nonbinding, symbolic measure, passed in Brattleboro and Marlboro in a state known for taking liberal positions on national issues, instructs town police to "extradite them to other authorities that may reasonably contend to prosecute them."

Vermont, home to maple syrup and picture-postcard views, is known for its liberal politics.

State lawmakers have passed nonbinding resolutions to end the war in Iraq and impeach Bush and Cheney, and several towns have also passed resolutions of impeachment. None of them have caught on in Washington.

Bush has never visited the state as president, though he has spent vacations at his family compound in nearby Maine.

Roughly 12,000 people live in Brattleboro, located on the Connecticut River in the state's southeastern corner. Nearby Marlboro has a population of roughly 1,000."

Source:http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...54699420080305]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8585 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8575 Wed, 05 Mar 2008 19:25:51 GMT
Italian researchers want to exhume his body for DNA tests to find the cause of the blindness that afflicted him.

They also want to confirm whether the body that shares his grave is that of Galileo's beloved daughter.

Galileo fell foul of the religious authorities of the day when he argued that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

For that he was accused of heresy and condemned to see out his life under house arrest at his villa in the hills outside Florence.

Supportive letters

Researchers in Florence want to exhume the two bodies from the city's Basilica of the Holy Cross but the rector of the basilica is having none of it - describing the plan as disrespectful.

For his part, the man leading the bid to exhume the remains, Prof Paulo Galluzzi, says the tests could prove if the other body is that of Galileo's daughter, Sister ***** Celeste.

Her letters to her father sustained him in later life and formed the basis of a bestselling book a few years ago.

To locate the remains of someone who played an important part in the life of one of history's greatest scientists is a serious, humanitarian task, Prof Galluzzi told the BBC."

Source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7280148.stm]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8575 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8566 Wed, 05 Mar 2008 04:23:29 GMT
Professor Maurizio Seracini said he will use a revolutionary new technology to discover whether the fresco, which has not been seen since 1563, lies behind a wall in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio.

"This is an incredibly important moment," he said on Tuesday.

Prof. Seracini, who is mentioned in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, has been searching for the Battle of Anghiari for over 30 years.

He believes it was deliberately hidden by Giorgio Vasari, the artist and art historian, in order to preserve it.

The Battle of Anghiari was commissioned in 1503 after Piero de Medici was deposed as ruler of Florence and the city was briefly proclaimed a republic.

According to Vasari, there was a "public decree" that Leonardo should paint something to mark the republic and was granted a space in the Hall of the Five Hundred in the Palazzo Vecchio.

The fresco, which is three times the size of Leonardo's Last Supper wall painting in Milan, was described by Benvenuto Cellini, the sculptor, as a "ground-breaking masterpiece".

Several preparatory sketches and copies of it still exist.

However, the Medicis returned to power in the 1560s and Vasari was told to renovate the hall and to cover up Leonardo' work.

He painted a new fresco in its place, the Battle of Marciano.

"I am sure that Vasari could not bring himself to destroy Da Vinci's finest work" said Prof. Seracini.

Instead, he said, Vasari built a new wall in front of the fresco, leaving a gap of between one and three centimetres to preserve it.

Prof. Seracini said Vasari had left a small clue at the very top of his new work, a flag bearing the inscription: "He who seeks shall find".

The flag is invisible from floor level. Until now, it has been impossible to "see" behind the second wall.

However, Prof. Seracini said he would use "neutron analysis" to detect certain colours, since the paints used by Vasari and Leonardo differed.

Leonardo used mineral-based paints, while Vasari painted with oils. The neutrons will be fired through the wall and the rays that bounce back should reveal if there is any paint on the back wall.

Prof. Seracini's specially-designed machine cost £450,000 and the £750,000 total cost of the project has been funded by Loel Guinness, a scion of the brewing family.

The work will begin in October and be finished by January.

"Leonardo kept a lot of lists. We have the chemical compositions of the paints. We are looking for an intense blue, made with lapis lazuli, in particular," said Prof. Seracini.

Prof. Seracini's most famous discoveries include the hand of another artist in Da Vinci's Adoration of the Magi."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...eonardo104.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8566 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8565 Wed, 05 Mar 2008 03:50:34 GMT
Officials announced this year's military budget on the eve of the opening of the National People's Congress, the country's rubber-stamp parliament, which meets for two weeks each year.

The headline figure will go up from 350 billion to 417.8 billion yuan (£30 billion), a rise of 19.4 per cent.

A spokesman said the rise still left China's budget trailing middle-ranking western powers such as Britain and France, let alone America, and the military preparations were solely "defensive" in nature.

But a few hours before he spoke, the Pentagon released its annual report on the state of China's military preparedness, in which it estimated that total expenditure on the People's Liberation Army at about double the official level.

It claimed China had the most active programme to buy and develop ballistic missiles of any country in the world and was "developing capabilities" for use in conflicts over resources and disputed territories.

Jiang Enzhu, the congress spokesman, defended the increase in spending. He said the total represented a much lower proportion of the economy than in the US or Britain.

But he did not shy away from threatening Taiwan, the target of much of the military's planning, that Beijing was "fully prepared to repulse any adventurous activities" - na***y, any attempt formally to declare independence.

In a separate speech, President Hu Jintao balanced an offer of talks with Taiwan - immediately rejected as they would depend on accepting that the island was part of "one China" - with a warning that its leaders were pursuing policies that were a "threat to peace and stability".

The Pentagon report said there were about 1,000 missiles on the Chinese coast opposite Taiwan, a number growing by 100 a year.

China was also rapidly modernising its ballistic missile arsenal in all ranges, it added. That arsenal will soon include an anti-ship ballistic missile with a range of 1,000 miles.

The report also referred to repeated claims from both the United States and other western countries, including Britain, of "intrusions" into computer networks that appear to originate from China.

Analysts believe that in some ways the threat of conflict in the Far East has lessened in the last three years, as Beijing has toned down its rhetoric about Taiwan.

This parliamentary session will also feature the downgrading of the post of defence minister - always a serving general.

The replacement for the current minister, due to retire, will not have the post's traditional seat in the Politburo.

Nevertheless, as China's power and influence continue to increase, it is touching nerves in other countries that have long-unresolved disputes with Beijing.

These include several south-east Asian countries that, like Beijing, claim sovereignty over a variety of islands in the South China Sea.

India is also anxious about border disputes with China.

"China's expanding and improving military capabilities are changing east Asian military balances," the report said. "Improvements in China's strategic capabilities have implications beyond the Asia-Pacific region."

The Chinese authorities denounced the Pentagon report as a "distortion of the facts" and urged the United States to "drop its Cold War mentality".

- 2.3 million regular forces
# How the forces add up

- 1.5 million reserves

- 1 million armed police

Army

- 8,000 tanks

- 4,000 armoured personnel vehicles

- 25,000 artillery pieces

Navy

- 75 principal surface ships, including 11 destroyers and 16 frigates

- 55 submarines

- 50 landing ships

- 50-60 coastal patrol vessels

Air Force

- 2,300 combat aircraft

- 450 transport aircraft

- 90-100 special mission aircraft

Missiles

- 100 intermediate/long range ballistic missiles

- 16-24 intercontinental ballistic missiles

Nuclear forces

- 400 warheads, made up of 250 "strategic" and 150 "tactical" warheads

Sources: US Department of Defence, sinodefence.com, Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI.org)

2,300,000 regular forces

1,500,000reserves

8,000 tanks

25,000artillery pieces

75 principal surface ships, including

11 destroyers and 16 frigates

55submarines 2,300 combat aircraft

400 nuclear warheads"

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.../wchina105.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8565 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8562 Wed, 05 Mar 2008 03:02:43 GMT
The 18,000-year-old remains found on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2004 made headlines around the planet when it was claimed they represent a primitive species of human, dubbed Homo florensis, but another Australian team has concluded that their small stature and their primitive features can be explained by iodine deficiency.

The traditional stories of local people about what some call the "hobbits" may be an ancient memory of an otherwise forgotten time when cretins - a term that actually has a precise medical meaning - were a common part of the human population on Flores, says the team from RMIT University and the University of Western Australia.

Dr Peter Obendorf and Dr Ben Keffor, with the University of Western Australia's Emeritus Professor Charles Oxnard, outline their ideas in the Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences.

Dr Obendorf says comparisons of the fossils with modern bones suggested that they were actually human, with their small stature and distinctive features the result of a condition related to severe iodine deficiency.

"Dwarf cretinism is the result of severe iodine deficiency in pregnancy in combination with a number of other environmental factors.".

"Dwarf cretins grow not much more than one metre and their bones have distinctive characteristics very similar to those of the Flores hobbits. Our research suggests these fossils are not a new species but rather the remains of human hunter-gatherers that suffered from this condition."

Dwarf cretinism is caused by destruction of the thyroid gland of the developing child during pregnancy and is called myxedematous endemic cretinism, he adds, explaining that the stories about people they called Ebu Gogo - Ebu meaning grandmother and Gogo meaning 'he who eats anything'- fit this explanation.

"The oral tradition seems to be particularly consistent with cretinism, because it indicates that the 'ebu gogo' had many of the characteristics of dwarf cretins including their pot bellies, and that they were born of normal mothers," he says.

Professor Oxnard says most people who had studied the Flores fossils were looking at genetics and heredity to account for their distinctive features.

"Almost all the people who have looked at these fossils have been coming from an evolutionary perspective," he said. "Our idea is that this was an environmentally-caused problem."

Ever since the hobbits were found by an Australian team in the Liang Bua Cave there has been debate whether or not the bones were actually from pygmies - even today there are pygmies on the island - and not a new species of human that lived between 120,000 and 10,000 years ago.

Another suggestion is that they suffered from microcephaly, a disorder that limits brain growth, or had a gene for a rare growth condition, MOPD II, that causes small brain and body size but near-normal intelligence.

The new conclusions are disputed by the team that found the hobbit. Prof Richard "Bert" Roberts of the University of Wollongong tells the Telegraph: "I'd be very surprised if it could explain ALL of the unusual anatomical features of H. floresiensis.

"For example, do all (or even any) dwarf cretins have the distinctive wrist bones of the hobbit? As with previous such objections to the proposed 'new species' tag for the hobbit, the fact that dwarf cretins can be as short in stature as the hobbits, and share a few physical resemblances is not enough in my book.

"The devil will lie in the detail, so a detailed comparative analysis is required.

"I would also be surprised if a group of dim-witted and stunted humans could have eked out a living on Flores for at least 80,000 years by hunting half-tonne elephants and giant carnivorous lizards.

"Remember, the known period of existence of the hobbits stretches from at least 95,000 years ago to as recently as 12,000 years ago. That's a great many generations - which, if the authors of the present study are correct, stretches back to a time when modern humans are generally thought not even to have left Africa."

Prof Peter Brown at the University of New England, another one of the original team that discovered the hobbit, adds: "The conclusions in this paper are not supported by the facts. The authors have not examined the original fossil, have little and no experience with fossil hominids and depend upon data obtained by others."

Prof Colin Groves, at the Australian National University, Canberra, was even more dismissive: "I regret to say that this paper cannot be regarded as a contribution to our understanding of the Flores hominin.

"Many of the claims lack evidence (that is, they are sheer speculation), some even fly in the face of the evidence. I am very sorry indeed to see serious scientists involved in such a travesty."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...ihobbit105.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8562 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8561 Wed, 05 Mar 2008 03:01:39 GMT
American scientists have programmed a computer to rate attractiveness using factors such as the golden ratio, a proportion that has been used by artists and architects since antiquity because it is aesthetically pleasing.

Females really are the fairer sex - rated more attractive by both men and women - according to the study by the team from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, which has devised an objective way to measure facial attractiveness, which gives reasonable agreement with what people think.

They also found a smaller chin and nose, a larger distance between the eyes and smaller mouth width were deemed desirable traits for females.

For men, the face being divided into equal vertical thirds was attractive, as well as the symmetry of the upper tips of the lips and the nose. Symmetry was also a factor, though not as important as the ratios.

The work confirms the emerging view of scientists that the appreciation of beauty has a deep-seated biological explanation: the face of an intended Valentine or date gives a profound insight into whether our true love will efficiently pass our genes on to future generations.

The study, published in the journal Pattern Recognition, required 36 participants (18 male and 18 female) to rate 232 images of full-frontal views of Caucasian faces on a 10-point attractiveness scale.

The researchers then took the results to compute attractiveness, paying close attention to how men and women rated the faces.

They also worked to identify which features tended to be present on an attractive face, measuring various landmarks such as the forehead height, nose length and width, distance between eyes, mouth width and face width.

Dr Kendra Schmid explained how they used "several golden ratios" and the body of rules used in art - "neoclassical canons" - for hundreds of years and more recently by plastic surgeons. to predict attractiveness, though they did not use other known "beauty factors" such as age, skin texture, and expression.

The study shows that as the ratio of the length of the face to the width of the face gets closer to the golden ratio, both male and female images were viewed as more attractive, for example.

There was good agreement between actual scorings of beauty and predictions, so that they were 8.48 and 8.00, respectively, for Meg Ryan, 8.36 and 7.72 for Britney Spears, 7.33 and 6.88 for Keanu Reeves, and 7.17 and 6.99 for Jude Law.

"It is really quite remarkable that something as complex as attractiveness can be modelled so accurately by using only the geometry of the face," she tells The Daily Telegraph.

Results revealed that men and women generally agree on overall attractiveness, but males tend to give higher scores than females.

Additionally, female faces were rated higher by both sexes, suggesting that feminine traits overall are viewed as more attractive.

"They are perceived by people as being more attractive (again recall we are dealing only with the geometry of the face)," says Dr Schmid.

The approach used in this study demonstrates that geometry can be effective in predicting the attractiveness of a face and the team hopes to track changes in perceptions of beauty down the ages. "Golden ratios appear in nature and are also used in art and architecture to provide beauty and balance," she says.

"Certain aspects of the face appearing in these defined proportions do have a relationship with its attractiveness; whether the relationship of these with the perceived attractiveness of a face is due to the eyes being trained to view these proportions as attractive or whether it is something 'hard-wired' in the human brain is something that needs further research," she adds.

Dr Anthony Little of the University of Stirling, who does research on facial attraction, comments: "Given people do agree on who is and isn't attractive, it is unsurprising that facial measurements predict attractiveness judgements. Different people must to some extent use the same cues, such as large eyes in womens faces, to base thier judgements on."

But he adds: " We must be careful in putting faith in golden ratio's to predict attractiveness given the huge numbers of ratios that can be computed from facial measurements.

"It is unlikey there is a simple formula for attractiveness in faces. Much research suggests that people do like different things in faces and while there may be traits we all agree on there is room for individual differences and for beauty to be partly in the eye of the beholder.

"For example, some research suggestions we are attracted to the traits of our parents and simple predictions from measurements cannot address such subtleties of preference."

And Dr Ben Jones of the University of Aberdeen, who is also engaged in the pursuit of beauty, adds: "While geometry may well be important for some aspects of attraction, it's very unlikely to tell the whole story.

"For example, studies showing that women are attracted to different types of men at different points in their menstrual cycles are hard to explain if attractiveness is simply about geometry."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...sciface105.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8561 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8553 Tue, 04 Mar 2008 23:08:05 GMT
In the UK we could hear any day that a patient has been chosen to become the world's first recipient of a full face transplant.

This has received full approval from all the necessary ethics committees - although it remains unclear when it might take place - or indeed if a patient has even been found.

But whether this operation is days or years away, there is still fierce debate as to whether we really are ready for the cultural and medical implications of transferring a key part of someone's identity from a dead body to a living person.

Who am I?

In fact, for all the concerns about switching identity or "trading faces", those who treated Isabelle Dinoire note that she looks neither like the woman she was prior to being savaged by a dog, nor the dead woman whose face she inherited.

"The patient was very strong before the transplant and very sure of herself when she saw looked in the mirror immediately afterwards," Professor Bernard Devauchelle, who led the operation, told a conference in London aimed at addressing the continuing public discomfort around the issue.

"The transplant was very rapidly integrated into her life - it became a part of who she was."

French doctors have subsequently carried out two more such operations, and have the ethical authorisation to perform five more.

But even now, three operations on and with tangible benefits to those who had lived with horrific disfiguration, the criticism in France from some quarters has yet to abate.

The doctors stand accused of a number of ethical crimes - but one in particular stands out: transplantation is no longer a life-saving necessity, but has been transformed into a question of aesthetics.

This is a charge with which Dr Raj Persaud, a consultant psychiatrist at the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley hospitals, appears to sympathise.

"What is the cause of the suffering: is it society, or is it the face? Is not the real kernel of the problem society at large and its inability to see past that face?" he says.

"In essence doctors are doing a very peculiar thing. They are taking fit bodies and making them ill."

Becoming sick

The long-term medical implications of face transplantation are as yet unknown - but there is little doubt that while the immense psychological burden of disfigurement may be at least partially alleviated, there are other significant risks to someone who is in every other respect healthy.

Ms Dinoire has had two "incidents", when her body's immune system tried to reject the foreign tissue, but so far immunosuppressive drugs are working.

But these drugs - which all transplant patients need to prevent their bodies rejecting the new organ - carry their own side-effects.

Diabetes and osteoporosis are among the consequences of medication which can also lead to renal failure, cardiac arrest, and increasingly, it is believed, cancer.

"What we are seeing as these patients live longer is that they are perhaps three times more likely to develop cancer than the general, age-matched population," said Professor Peter Morris, transplant specialist at the Royal College of Surgeons.

Skin cancer is among the most common. While it is generally seen as one of the most treatable forms of the disease, in the transplant population it "can be quite virulent and spread to other parts of the body much more rapidly", he said.

These risks may be acceptable ones to someone who, without a transplant, will die - and may be equally acceptable to someone whose disfiguration is causing them immense distress.

"But patients need to be aware of these risks, and at present the risk/benefit ratio is impossible to determine," he said. "What's clear at any rate is that these procedures cannot be done without immense psychological and psychiatric input."

Growing faces

There is hope that a number of these thorny ethical and medical issues can be overcome by "growing" a new face, rather than depending on a dead donor.

Using the patients own bone and tissue in reconstruction is one line of inquiry, but the work is still at an early stage.

Stem cells are also a key avenue. But while scientists can grow the complex components of the face individually, combining them into a custom-made, multi-layered face is another question.

"You wouldn't have the problems of rejection, you'd have better control over appearance, and ethically it would be much easier," says Francis Hughes, professor of periodontology at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry.

"But it is a lengthy process involving many stages - and at present it is still just an aspiration."

Source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7277582.stm]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8553 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8540 Tue, 04 Mar 2008 06:48:16 GMT
A former FBI agent told The FBI at 100 series the gang tried to reach Jagger's home in Long Island, New York, by sea, but a storm almost sank their boat.

He said the singer had become a target in a dispute over security at concerts.

Presenter Tom Mangold said the FBI, who only learned of the plot afterwards, regarded it as a "serious attempt".

It is not clear whether Jagger was informed of the plot and his spokesman declined to comment.

The row with the gang began after the death of a teenage fan at a free gig at Altamont Speedway in California.

The Hells Angels were hired by Jagger to work as security at the concert, but were subsequently fired after the incident.

"They were going to kill him in retribution for his firing their security forces," former FBI agent Mark Young told the documentary.

"Their plan involved making entry onto his Long Island property, going by boat.

"As they gathered the weaponry and their forces to go out on Long Island Sound, a storm rolled up, which nearly sunk the watercraft that they were in, and they escaped with their own lives.

"They never went back and reinstituted the plan."

The programme will be broadcast on 11 March at 1545 GMT. "

Source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7274829.stm]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8540 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8539 Tue, 04 Mar 2008 06:42:08 GMT
Codenamed Reynard it aims to recognise "normal" behaviour in online worlds and home in on anomalous activity.

It is likely to develop tools and techniques for intelligence officers who are hunting terrorists and terror groups on the net or in virtual worlds.

The project was welcomed by experts tracking terror groups using the net to organise or carry out attacks.

Growing threat

Brief details about Reynard came to light in a report sent to the US Congress by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) - which co-ordinates the work of US intelligence agencies.

In that report, which talked about the data mining efforts undertaken by the ODNI, Reynard was described as: "a seedling effort to study the emerging phenomenon of social (particularly terrorist) dynamics in virtual worlds and large-scale online games and their implications for the intelligence community".

Using publicly available data Reynard researchers will carry out observational studies to establish "baseline normative behaviors".

Once these are identified, Reynard will "then apply the lessons learned to determine the feasibility of automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world".

"It's a positive step," said Andrew Cochran, founder and co-chairman of the Counterterrorism Foundation. "For a number of years we were behind in chasing jihadists' presence on the net and detecting it."

"That's a very sensible step at the moment," said Roderick Jones, a vice president of Concentric Solutions and a former special branch officer. "Just to feel their way around them and work out what new intelligence collection methods might be required to deal with this threat, because you won't be able to use traditional law enforcement methods."

New worlds

A senior intelligence officer at the ODNI said Reynard was in its very early stages and it was too soon to say which online worlds it would be studying. He added that any work on it would be purely for research rather than "operational" purposes.

"I think its highly unlikely terrorists would use things like Second Life or World of Warcraft as they do not have the necessary security," said Mr Jones.

"Terrorist use of the internet at the moment relies on password protected forums," he added.

Said Mr Cochran: "All of the major terrorist treatises have been distributed through the internet so taking it to a virtual world with multi-player role games is really an easy step."

It was inevitable that terror groups would make greater use of the internet and the possibilities that virtual spaces offered them, said Mr Jones.

"There's more a chance of things like Jihad worlds coming online in the next five years I think," he said.

The visual richness of virtual worlds made them good places to educate recruits about techniques, said Mr Jones.

Attack pattern

"We can see groups emerging in cyber spaces and virtual communities that would be wholly virtual," he said. "They would organise and radicalise in virtual worlds and attack using cyber methods without becoming a real world presence in any real way."

Many groups were likely to use the expertise and skills they learn in virtual worlds to target key net systems.

Ken Silva, chief technology officer for Verisign which oversees some of the net's core address books, said such an attack could be "devastating".

"We see a continuing growth in the amount of horsepower in the attacks that are directed at infrastructure servers," said Mr Silva.

"We are seeing a large shift from attacks that are directed at individual websites," he said. "The sophistication is getting a little smarter and they are attacking the infrastructure pieces behind them..., which is typically in most production environments the least invested in."

Some of the basic systems of the net, such as the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) which helps data reach its intended destination, were open to attack.

An accidental misconfiguration of BGP in some routers in Pakistan caused the recent problems with YouTube which left many people unable to reach the video site.

"BGP is essentially a relatively unprotected protocol and is seriously vulnerable to disruption," he said. "Should that happen, it could take a very long time to correct that situation."

"This has to be fought at every level," he said."

Source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7274377.stm]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8539 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8538 Tue, 04 Mar 2008 06:39:13 GMT
The file released to Britain's National Archives catalogs the frustrations of MI5 handlers as they tried to prevent the astrologer, Louis de Wohl, from publicly embarrassing high-ranking intelligence and military officers.

"I have never liked Louis de Wohl — he strikes me as a charlatan and an imposter," reads the first line in the astrologer's file. The letter is typical and appeared to be signed by Dick White, who went on to become the head of Britain's domestic spy agency, MI5, in the 1950s.

That view didn't keep de Wohl from winning a temporary rank as a British army captain. He was sent by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who did not believe in astrology, to the U.S. to persuade Americans that the Nazis would lose within months if they entered the war.

When de Wohl's services were no longer needed, intelligence agents puzzled over how to get rid of the man who called himself Britain's state seer, the declassified documents show.

De Wohl was born in Berlin in 1903 and fled to Britain in 1935 to avoid Nazi persecution for being part Jewish. His wife, Alexandra, fled to Santiago, Chile, where she claimed to be a Romanian princess and was known as "La Baronessa."

In London, de Wohl claimed variously to be a Hungarian nobleman, the nephew of an Austrian conductor, the grandson of a British banking magnate and a relative of the Lord Mayor of London. His break came, he wrote in a later book, during a dinner at the Spanish Embassy, when a Spanish duchess asked de Wohl to reveal Hitler's horoscope to Britain's foreign secretary, Lord Halifax.

Sir Charles Hambro, the head of Britain's Special Operations Executive, soon hired de Wohl as part of his network of agents across Europe.

The government rented the astrologer a hotel apartment on London's exclusive Park Lane. There, de Wohl wrote horoscopes for Allied and Nazi leaders on paper with the letterhead "Psychological Research Bureau."

But de Wohl's predictions were often vague. His December 1942 prediction read: "The German astrologers must pray that enemy action does not force the Fueher into making important decisions within the first eight days of the month (of July), as this would lead to great disaster."

Agents complained de Wohl's flamboyant demeanor was destroying their carefully constructed cover story that his apartment was paid for by a wealthy female patron and that his special operations liaison officer was a mistress. Agents also complained of his boasting about connections to the War Office and Naval Command.

His task in the U.S. was to counter a convention of pro-German astrologers that had predicted Hitler would win the war. Billing himself as "The Modern Nostradamus," de Wohl proclaimed the stars showed the opposite — that Hitler would lose.

Ultimately it was Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, that brought the U.S. into the war — not de Wohl's assurances that President Franklin Roosevelt had a stunning horoscope.

His services no longer needed, de Wohl was called back to London in February 1942. He returned to find his hotel apartment stripped bare and his "department" disbanded.

According to the released MI5 correspondence, senior officers offered a number of proposals on how to "dispose" of de Wohl, including interning him in a camp or moving him to a remote corner of the country. Two other options are blanked out.

Deciding de Wohl was potentially damaging the reputation of his employers, MI5 decided to keep him happy and continue to employ him.

But even Hambro had tired of the astrologer.

"I have no doubt if I checked up his successes, I would see that he had more than an equal number of failures, but I have not the inclination nor the time to do so," Hambro wrote."

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080304/...vMQPk85eVvaA8F]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8538 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8537 Tue, 04 Mar 2008 06:37:20 GMT
Military spending in 2008 will reach 417.8 billion yuan (57.2 billion dollars at the end-2007 exchange rate), a spokesman for China's parliament told reporters ahead of the legislature's annual session beginning Wednesday.

Jiang Enzhu said the rise, following a similar increase in 2007, was moderate, with the spending coming off a low base and helping to boost soldiers' pay packets as well as beef up the military's high-tech capabilities.

"In recent years the Chinese government has moderately increased its spending on national defence on the basis of sustained, steady and fast economic growth and rapid build-up of government revenues," Jiang said.

"These increases were of a compensatory nature to make up for the weak defence foundation."

Jiang said China's military spending was just 1.4 percent of its gross domestic product last year, compared with 4.6 percent in the United States and three percent in Britain.

On Monday, the Pentagon expressed concern about China's growing military might, saying a lack of transparency posed risks to regional and international stability.

A Pentagon report said China's military spending in 2007 was more than double Beijing's official budgeted figure of 45 billion dollars.

In an immediate reaction to the announcement in Beijing, Japan also warned that the international community was concerned about a lack of transparency in China's military.

Jiang indicated that 2007 spending was higher than originally budgeted, but not by the extent the United States claimed.

He said the 17.6-percent rise in 2008 was based on the actual spending of 2007. But based on the originally publicised budget, the increase was just over 19 percent.

The Pentagon also raised concerns over China's development of cruise and ballistic missiles capable of striking aircraft carriers and other warships at sea, and its testing of an anti-satellite weapon in January last year.

The report further pointed to numerous cyber intrusions into US and other computer networks around the world over the past year, apparently from within China.

"China's expanding and improving military capabilities are changing East Asian military balances; improvements in China's strategic capabilities have implications beyond the Asia-Pacific region," the Pentagon report said.

The US deputy assistant defence secretary for East Asian affairs, David Sedney, said US officials did not know what China's true aims were in the military sphere.

"I think the biggest thing for people to be concerned about, really, is the fact that we don't have that kind of strategic understanding of the Chinese intentions," Sedney said.

"And that leads to uncertainty."

Jiang identified four main areas where the increased funds would be directed in 2008.

Soldiers and officers would be given pay rises and the quality of their meals would be improved.

More money would also be spent on oil supplies, amid surging global fuel prices.

The third area was a more general "spending on public programmes and training to keep pace with the needs of the military."

"And fourth, to modestly increase spending on armaments to enhance the military's ability to conduct defensive operations under IT-based conditions," Jiang said.

China's parliament, the National People's Congress, will formally endorse the 2008 budget during its annual session, which will last until March 18."

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080304...UxN3aZEbtvaA8F]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8537 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8536 Tue, 04 Mar 2008 06:33:08 GMT
But Colombia quickly struck back, revealing what it said were incriminating documents seized from the rebel camp that suggest its neighbors have been secretly supporting the leftist rebels' deadly insurgency.

And in a tit-for-tat move, Venezuela later displayed the laptop of a slain drug trafficker, which it said contained information implicating Colombia's national police chief in the cocaine trade.

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa piled on the pressure saying Colombia's killing of the rebel leader Raul Reyes Saturday had scuttled talks between his government and the guerrillas to free 12 rebel-held hostages, including French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt and three U.S. defense contractors.

"I'm sorry to tell you that the conversation were pretty advanced to free 12 hostages, including Ingrid Betancourt, in Ecuador," said Correa in a televised address. "All of this was frustrated by the war-mongering, authoritarian hands" of the Colombian government.

Colombia's national police chief stood by its attack that killed Reyes, and said that documents recovered from his laptop showed Venezuela's leftist government recently paid $300 million to the rebels, among other financial and political ties that date back years, and that high-level meetings have been held between rebels and Ecuadorean officials.

And this shocker: Colombia says some documents suggest the rebels have bought and sold uranium.

"When they mention negotiations for 50 kilos of uranium this means that the FARC are taking big steps in the world of terrorism to become a global aggressor. We're not talking of domestic guerrilla but transnational terrorism," Gen. Oscar Naranjo said at an explosive news conference.

Naranjo didn't give any details on when, where or from whom the uranium was allegedly bought. He provided no proof of the payment and wouldn't release copies of the documents, which he said are "tremendously revelatory" and are being examined with the help of U.S. experts.

Both Venezuela and Ecuador dismissed his allegations as lies. They expelled Colombia's top diplomats and recalled their own. Correa planned to visit five Latin American countries starting Tuesday to defend his decision to break off diplomatic relations, accusing Colombia of being an enemy of peace and lying about the nature of the raid.

Colombia said military commandos, tracking Reyes through an informant, were fired upon from Ecuadorean territory. But Correa said Colombia deliberately carried out the strike beyond its borders, and that the rebels were "bombed and massacred as they slept, using precision technology."

Both Venezuela and Ecuador also began reinforcing their borders, mobilizing troops and tanks as Chavez warned that another Colombian attack could spark a wider South American war.

Venezuelan National Guard troops and customs authorities suspended new imports and exports at the busiest border crossings. One Colombian police commander, Col. Ivan Florez, told the AP that all vehicles with Colombian license plates were being turned away from a key border crossing.

Maintaining trade with Colombia, essential to Venezuela's economy, is one of many factors weighing against outright war. But the bellicose rhetoric has worried Latin American leaders. The presidents of Chile, Mexico and Brazil offered to mediate, and an emergency session of the Organization of American States was scheduled for Tuesday in Washington.

State Department spokesman Tom Casey said the United States supports Colombia's right to defend itself against the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and called for dialogue.

Colombian officials have long complained that rebels take refuge in Ecuador and Venezuela. But Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos said Monday that his government isn't moving any troops and "we have the situation under control."

The rebels, who have been fighting for more than four decades for a more equitable distribution of wealth in Colombia, fund themselves largely through the cocaine trade, while holding hundreds of kidnapped hostages for ransom and political ends. The drug trafficking and kidnappings haven't helped their reputation, which is why both Correa and Chavez have denied supporting them.

Killed in the bombing were Reyes, the FARC's top spokesman, and 20 other guerrillas. Ecuador recovered 19 bodies and three wounded female rebels, including a Mexican philosophy student. By then, Colombian soldiers had already carried out the cadavers of Reyes and another rebel, along with three laptops containing the sensitive documents.

Indignant, Chavez said "they wanted to show off the trophy" and called it "cowardly murder, all of it coldly calculated."

"This could be the start of a war in South America," Chavez said.

But Naranjo said laptops show Venezuela's growing responsibility for the conflict.

The $300 million payment was mentioned in a Feb. 14 message in Reyes laptop, along with documents suggesting rebels discussed a possible arms transfer from Venezuela, and revealing close ties between Manuel "Sureshot" Marulanda, the top FARC leader, and Venezuela's government.

He quoted one message from Marulanda to Chavez saying "We will always be ready, in the case of gringo aggression, to provide our modest knowledge in defense of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela."

"This implies more than cozying up, but an armed alliance between the FARC and the Venezuelan government," Naranjo said.

Naranjo said other documents show deepening ties between the rebels and Correa. Ecuador acknowledged that its internal security minister, Gustavo Larrea, met with a FARC emissary but said the intent was strictly humanitarian — to seek the release of hostages held by the rebel group.

Still another document in Reyes' laptop suggests the rebels sent Chavez money when he was jailed in 1992 for leading a coup attempt, Naranjo said. At the time, he was plotting the comeback that eventually led to his election as president in 1998.

"A note recovered from Raul Reyes speaks of how grateful Chavez was for the 100 million pesos (about US$150,000 at the time) ... delivered to Chavez when he was in prison," Naranjo said, without giving any more details.

Venezuelan late Monday countered by displaying its own seized laptop in Caracas, saying it holds incriminating information tying Naranjo to drug traffickers.

Venezuelan Justice Minister Ramon Rodriguez Chacin said this laptop, belonging to Colombian drug lord Wilber Varela, who was found slain in Venezuela in January, held "important information and notes from the drug traffickers which involve General Oscar Naranjo in drug trafficking."

Rodriguez, who is Chavez's top law enforcement official, said both Naranjo and his brother, who is imprisoned in Germany on drug charges, have links to traffickers."

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080304/...uWq3qw2LhvaA8F]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8536 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8534 Tue, 04 Mar 2008 03:27:08 GMT
Denied weapons and defense technology from the West, China was almost totally reliant on Russia for the hardware it needed to jump-start an ambitious military buildup. And while the Russian economy teetered in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, huge orders from China helped keep a once-mighty defense industry afloat.

But powerful new forces, including a fear in Moscow of renewed rivalry with its neighbor and a desire in Beijing to become more self-reliant, have led both sides to re-evaluate this trade.

After orders peaked at more than $2 billion a year early in this decade, Chinese arms deals with Russia shrank to almost nothing in 2006, and no major new contracts are in the pipeline, according to Russian, Chinese and U.S. defense experts.

"We are in a strategic pause," said Ruslan Pukhov, an expert on the Russian military and director of the Center for the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a Moscow-based research institute specializing in the arms trade. "The Chinese and Russians are like long-term lovers who are thinking, 'Shall we continue to share this bed?' "

A halt or slowdown in Russian arms deliveries could hamper the Chinese drive to modernize its military. It would also increase pressure on the Chinese arms industry to innovate. Some Western and Russian military experts say they believe that despite decades of intensive effort, Chinese arms makers are still struggling to master the advanced engineering skills needed to build important hardware.

In China, there is confidence that these problems will be solved. "The Russians can maintain their lead for a certain period, but eventually we will catch up," said Shen Dingli, an international affairs analyst at Fudan University in Shanghai. "China will be a formidable technological competitor to anybody."

In the meantime, Russia - which, with its economy booming, is no longer dependent on arms sales to China - is concentrating on managing a complex relationship with its increasingly powerful neighbor, analysts say.

Longstanding Chinese claims on territory in the Russian Far East, competition for energy and water resources and illegal migration from China underscore the potential for tension between the two countries. And while they continue to enjoy warm ties, some Russians point to the Chinese-Soviet split that culminated with border clashes in 1969 as a reminder that friction could return.

"Russians feel genuinely concerned, in the medium to longer term, that Russian and Chinese interests may collide again," said Alexey Muraviev, a strategic affairs analyst at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia. "There is this debate about whether we should arm the Chinese when they may eventually use them against us."

Some Chinese analysts suggest that Russia, the world's second-ranked arms supplier behind the United States, is also concerned about the threat of competition from the Chinese defense industry.

"We want to buy better-quality weapons, but they refuse," Shen said. "If I was Russian, I would do the same thing. We are a country that is very capable of using their technology to build our own versions and competing with them."

Neither country publishes comprehensive figures on weapons shipments. But drawing on some announced deals, press reports and private monitoring of arms transfers, Russian analysts estimate that arms deliveries to China from 1992 to 2006 were valued at $26 billion.

Total Russian arms exports over that period were estimated at more than $58 billion.

With a Western embargo on arms sales to China having been in place since the Tiananmen killings in 1989, it was these weapons from Russia that allowed the People's Liberation Army to reduce a yawning gap in technology and firepower with other regional powers, including Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. With sustained, double-digit annual increases in defense spending, China is increasingly seen as a potential rival to the United States, the dominant military power in East Asia.

But Beijing has become increasingly reluctant to rely so heavily on imported weapons, experts say.

From the outset of its dealings with Russian military factories in the early 1990s, China has insisted on technology transfer as part of its long-term plan to modernize its domestic arms industry.

Moscow has certainly complied with some of those demands. It has allowed the licensed assembly of fighter aircraft and other weapons in China. Experts say there is also evidence of considerable, ongoing Russian technology transfer in the design of indigenously built Chinese military aircraft, space launch vehicles, submarines, surface warships and other hardware. Mostly, however, China has taken delivery of complete weapons or assembly kits.

Arms trade monitors including the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute have tracked what amounts to a huge transfer of military capability to China since 1992.

The biggest ticket items over that period have been four Sovremenny-class destroyers armed with supersonic anti-ship missiles, 12 Kilo-class submarines and about 285 advanced fighters and strike jets from the Sukhoi family of aircraft, according to Russian arms trade monitors and the Stockholm institute.

Some experts suggest deals have tapered off because these and other shipments saturated the market. "In 2006 there were no especially large Chinese arms agreements with Russia, possibly because the Chinese military is focused on absorbing and integrating previous arms purchases from Russia into its force structure," a U.S. Congressional Research Service security analyst, Richard Grimmett, wrote in a report late last year.

Even so, experts agree that China wants a different relationship.

"The principle challenge for Russia is that China no longer wants to buy completed weapons and platforms," Muraviev said.

Experts say recent negotiations on big contracts to supply advanced fighters have effectively stalled, with Beijing insisting that Russian makers grant licenses that would allow production of sophisticated aircraft in China. And the Chinese Army is less interested in the superseded or under-gunned Soviet-era hardware that has accounted for the bulk of imports. "They were happy with this in the 1990s, but now they are starting to demand more technology transfers," Pukhov said.

Chinese experts say the army wants access to the most advanced Russian weaponry, including strategic bombers, tanks, attack helicopters and manufacturing technology for high-performance aircraft engines.

In a sign of tension in the military relationship, China last year suspended or deferred some big-ticket deals in a dispute over costs, including orders for 34 IL-78 transport aircraft and 4 IL-78 airborne tankers worth a combined $1.05 billion, according to analysts and reports in the Russian military press.

Regular, high-level negotiations between the two governments on arms sales have also been put on hold, analysts say.

In the meantime, some defense experts say the domestic Chinese arms industry has made strides towards self-reliance. "While China still imports a host of systems from Russia and other partners to fill critical gaps in the short term, Chinese defense manufacturers increasingly are becoming able to develop indigenous systems with new capabilities," the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission said in a November report to the U.S. Congress.

A decade ago, as military spending shriveled, a slump in orders from China would have been disastrous for Russian arms makers. That is no longer the case, with the Russian economy growing at 8.1 per cent on the back of rising energy and commodity exports, according to official economic statistics.

With Moscow running a budget surplus, there are orders in the pipeline to supply the Russian military with hardware that until recently could only be sold abroad. And overall arms exports remain buoyant, particularly to India, a long-term client that Moscow views with far less suspicion than China.

Russia has also signed lucrative arms deals with new customers including Algeria and Venezuela in recent years.

Sergei Chemzov, a senior government official responsible for arms sales, said Russia exported weapons worth $7 billion in 2007, and this was expected to increase to $7.5 billion in 2008, the state-run RIA Novosti news agency reported in December.

To add to Beijing's frustration, some of the Russian transfers to India include weapons and technology that Moscow refuses to supply to China. Moscow and New Delhi agreed to begin the joint development of a new, so-called fifth-generation fighter, the Russian government announced in October.

This aircraft would be a potential rival in performance to the U.S. F-22 Raptor, defense analysts say.

India also agreed last year to buy another 40 Su-30MKI fighters from Russia for $1.5 billion in addition to an earlier order for 140 of these aircraft. Some military experts say this versatile, twin-engined jet is probably the best fighter and strike aircraft in the world. But Russia has not offered it to China. And Moscow is offering to sell India its latest fighter, the MiG-35.

In nuclear submarine technology, Russia has also been more generous with India than with China, naval experts say.

Still, with the Western arms embargo on China still in place, most analysts expect that Moscow and Beijing will eventually negotiate compromises that clear the way for future contracts.

"Russia still provides what the U.S. and the EU will not supply," said Muraviev."

Source:http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/...rms.php?page=2]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8534 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8517 Mon, 03 Mar 2008 02:30:11 GMT
"KINGSTON, Jamaica - Jamaica is considering the legalization of marijuana, a drug revered by members of the island's large Rastafarian population who say smoking it is part of their religion.

A seven-member government commission has been researching possible changes to the Caribbean nation's anti-drug laws, which some police complain are clogging courts and jails with marijuana-related cases, a government official said Friday.

"We have discussed it, and we are preparing a report to present to the prime minister," said Deputy Prime Minister Kenneth Baugh.

In 2003, a government commission recommended legalizing marijuana in small amounts for personal use. But lawmakers never acted, saying legalization might entail loss of their country's U.S. anti-drug certification. Countries that lose it face economic sanctions.

A U.S. State Department report Friday said that Jamaica is the largest producer of marijuana in the Caribbean and a major hub for drugs bound for the United States.

Members of the Rastafarian movement, which emerged in Jamaica in the 1930s out of anger over the oppression of blacks, have long lobbied for the legalization of the drug that they say brings them closer to the divine.

There are an estimated 700,000 Rastafarians in the world, most of them among Jamaica's 2.6 million people."

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080301/...MQBu4o4o1vaA8F]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8517 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8516 Mon, 03 Mar 2008 02:28:28 GMT
Denouncing Colombia's killing of the rebel commander in a cross-border raid into Ecuador, Chavez said Venezuela will respond militarily if Colombia violates its border. He ordered Venezuela's embassy in Bogota closed.

"Mr. Defense Minister, move 10 battalions to the border with Colombia for me, immediately — tank battalions. Deploy the air force," Chavez said during his weekly TV and radio program. "We don't want war, but we aren't going to permit the U.S. empire, which is the master (of Colombia) ... to come divide us."

Chavez called Colombian President Alvaro Uribe "a criminal," and branded his government a "terrorist state," likening it to Israel for its U.S.-backed attacks on militants.

Colombian officials have long complained that Ecuador's military does not control its sparsely populated border, allowing rebels to take refuge on its territory. The same holds true for Venezuela, where rebel deserters say the guerrillas routinely rest, train, obtain medical care and smuggle drugs.

Chavez denies that his country provides refuge to the FARC.

In protest of Colombia's raid, Ecuador recalled its ambassador from Bogota but said commercial ties would remain unaffected. A spokesman for Uribe, Cesar Mauricio Velasquez, announced Sunday that Colombia would apologize to Ecuador for the military incursion on its territory.

Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, said the rebels were "bombed and massacred as they slept, using precision technology." He said Colombia's military violated Ecuador's airspace and that the camp bombed was 1.2 miles from the border.

Ecuadorean soldiers recovered the bodies of 15 rebels in their jungle camp, and found three wounded guerrillas.

Lt. Col. Jose Nunez told reporters in the remote village of Angostura, where the bodies were found, that officials determined there were two bomb attacks on the camp early Saturday.

Before the Ecuadoreans arrived, Colombian commandos removed the cadavers of Reyes and one other rebel.

Chavez called the raid "cowardly murder, all of it coldly calculated."

"This could be the start of a war in South America," Chavez said. He warned Uribe: "If it occurs to you to do this in Venezuela, President Uribe, I'll send some Sukhois" — Russian warplanes recently bought by Venezuela.

He called Uribe a "lapdog" of Washington, saying "Dracula's fangs (are) are covered in blood."

Neither Colombia's foreign minister nor the country's military leadership would comment on Chavez's actions when asked by reporters on Sunday in Bogota as they departed a funeral for the lone Colombian soldier killed in Saturday's raid.

Chavez has increasingly revealed his sympathies for the FARC. In January, Chavez asked that it be struck from lists of terrorist groups internationally.

His Sunday announcement pushes tense relations with Colombia to a new nadir, though cross-border trade, worth some US$5 billion (euro3 billion) annually, has not yet been seriously affected.

It could not be determined whether troops had yet been mobilized for the border. Chavez did not specify how many he was sending. A Venezuelan battalion traditionally has roughly 600 soldiers.

The peasant-based FARC has been fighting Colombia's government for more than four decades, seeking a more equitable distribution of wealth. It funds itself largely through the cocaine trade and kidnaps for ransom and political ends.

Reyes was the FARC's key interlocutor with journalists and with foreign governments trying to mediate in the conflict, and thus the member of its leadership most vulnerable to being located, though eavesdropping or other intelligence.

In Texas, U.S. National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said of Chavez's latest moves: "This is an odd reaction by Venezuela to Colombia's efforts against the FARC, a terrorist organization that continues to hold Colombians, Americans and others hostage."

Colombia did not deny it attacked the FARC on Ecuadorean soil.

Its defense minister, Juan Manuel Santos, said Colombian commandos, tracking Reyes through an informant, first bombed a camp on the Colombian side of the Ecuadorean border. He said the troops came under fire from across the border in Ecuador and encountered Reyes' body when they overran that camp.

How exactly Reyes was killed was not immediately clear.

In a statement, Colombia said FARC "terrorists" including Reyes "have had the custom of killing in Colombia and taking refuge in the territory of neigh*****g countries."

After observing a moment of silence during his program Sunday in honor of the slain rebels, he praised Reyes as "a true revolutionary," recalling meeting the former trade union leader in Brazil in 1995.

Chavez called Uribe's government "the Israel of Latin America," criticizing the Jewish state's military strikes on Palestinian militants.

"We aren't going to permit Colombia to become the Israel of these lands," he declared. "We have to liberate Colombia" from U.S. dominance, he added.

Colombia and Venezuela have been locked in a diplomatic crisis since Uribe sought in November to halt Chavez's efforts to mediate a prisoner swap. The FARC has since freed six hostages to delegates of Chavez, including four released last week.

The FARC has demanded that a safe zone be created in Colombia to negotiate a swap of some 40 high-value captives, including former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and three U.S. defense contractors, for hundreds of imprisoned guerrillas."

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080303/...3hdSnLJ8VvaA8F]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8516 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8514 Sun, 02 Mar 2008 22:06:11 GMT
Exit polls suggested his support could ultimately reach almost 70 per cent, making the election the most one-sided in Russia's post-Soviet history.

With around 16 per cent of polling stations reporting, the Kremlin approved candidate had 64.6 percent of the vote, far ahead of his nearest rival, veteran Communist Gennady Zyuganov.

The outcome of the election had never really been in doubt with the only three alternatives to Mr Medvedev being widely viewed as unelectable.

Even so Russians queued dutifully outside polling stations in driving rain that ***ted the winter snow and covered Moscow in a layer of ankle-deep brown sludge.

For Kremlin critics, the gloom seemed to be a manifestation of God's disapproval of the voting process although Mr Putin and his acolyte tried to spin it to their advantage.

"It's raining," Mr Putin said in brief comments after casting his ballot. "That's a good omen."

"Spring has come," declared Mr Medvedev after voting with his wife in central Moscow.

With western observers boycotting the poll in protest at Kremlin restrictions, human rights activists spoke of fears that state authorities would rig the vote.

Factory workers, teachers and other professionals claim they have been threatened with the sack if they failed to participate.

As in Soviet times there were reports that officials from companies and institutions were at polling stations to ensure that their colleagues had cast their votes.

The Kremlin is understood to want both turn out and Mr Medvedev's share of the vote to measure about 70 percent.

Many voters came of their own volition, however, either lured by children's concerts and the sale of cheap food at polling stations or because they genuinely supported Mr Medvedev because of his close ties to the outgoing president.

"We are tired of being weak," said Yuri Dubinin, a 39-year-old businessman, after voting in the southeastern Moscow suburb of Zhulebino. "I think Medvedev will be even stronger than Putin."

Mr Putin will formally hand over power to his successor in early May, and will continue to rule in the meantime as arguably the most powerful lame duck of modern times.

Once his protégé assumes his office, Mr Putin will return as prime minister and many believe he will remain the true power in the land.

Not everyone who supported Mr Medvedev did so with enthusiasm.

"We don't exactly have a big choice," said Irina, a television journalist. "Medvedev is better than the communists and the others. He doesn't have his own opinion but he is clever."

"Putin has been good in terms of Russia's economic development and winning international respect for the country. But the country is not as democratic as it once was."

Mr Medvedev had not bothered to campaign in the election. But state television, heavily censored by the government, lavished praise on him while ignoring his competitors.

Genuine opposition candidates were forbidden from running.

Flashes of the repression that now pervades daily life were in evidence throughout Moscow. Convoys of army trucks filled with soldiers drove down half-empty streets.

At a polling station in the suburb of Sokol, police threatened accredited Daily Telegraph reporters talking to voters in legitimately designated locations. "It is forbidden to ask questions," one officer said.

A man in a dark suit and overcoat listened in on conversations."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...wrussia102.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8514 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8486 Sat, 01 Mar 2008 01:51:21 GMT
The researchers at Kobe University in western Japan said calculations using computer simulations led them to conclude it was only a matter of time before the mysterious "Planet X" was found.

"Because of the very cold temperature, its surface would be covered with ice, icy ammonia and methane," Kobe University professor Tadashi Mukai, the lead researcher, told AFP.

The study by Mukai and researcher Patryk Lykawka will be published in the April issue of the US-based Astronomical Journal.

"The possibility is high that a yet unknown, planet-class celestial body, measuring 30 percent to 70 percent of the Earth's mass, exists in the outer edges of the solar system," said a summary of the research released by Kobe University.

"If research is conducted on a wide scale, the planet is likely to be discovered in less than 10 years," it said.

Planet X -- so called by scientists as it is yet unfound -- would have an oblong elliptical solar orbit and circle the sun every thousand years, the team said, estimating its radius was 15 to 26 billion kilometres.

The study comes two years after school textbooks had to be rewritten when Pluto was booted out of the list of planets.

Pluto was discovered by the American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 in the so-called Kuiper belt, a chain of icy debris in the outer reaches of the solar system.

In 2006, nearly a decade after Tombaugh's death, the International Astronomical Union ruled the celestial body was merely a dwarf planet in the cluttered Kuiper belt.

The astronomers said Pluto's oblong orbit overlapped with that of Neptune, excluding it from being a planet. It defined the solar system as consisting solely of the classical set of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

The team noted that more than 1,100 celestial bodies have been found in the outer reaches of the solar system since the mid-1990s.

"But it would be the first time to discover a celestial body of this size, which is much larger than Pluto," Mukai said.

The researchers set up a theoretical model looking at how the remote area of the solar system would have evolved over the past four billion years.

"In coming up with an explanation for the celestial bodies, we thought it would be most natural to assume the existence of a yet unknown planet," Mukai said.

"Based on our hypothesis, we calculated how debris moved over the past four billion years. The result matched the actual movement of the celestial bodies we can observe now," he said.

He was hopeful about research by Kobe University, the University of Hawaii and Taiwan's National Central University.

"We are expecting that the ongoing joint celestial observation project will eventually discover Planet X," Mukai said."

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080228...qQQ9Tqn3VvaA8F]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8486 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8483 Fri, 29 Feb 2008 23:40:24 GMT
Since the days of Charles Darwin, scientists have maintained that the domesticated chicken derives from the red jungle fowl, which was first raised in captivity in Asia five millennia ago.

But an in depth study of chicken legs has overturned this idea, revealing that the origins of this bird are much more complicated.

The genetic study has revealed why foods like corn give chickens yellow legs, demonstrating that though the great Darwin was right about many things, his view on the origins of the chicken was not entirely correct.

The study, published in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics, reveals the DNA variant that is responsible for yellow skin in billions of chickens raised worldwide.

The problem came when the researchers looked for the yellow-skin gene in the red junglefowl. They only found the genetic variant that codes for white skin.

More surprisingly, when they looked at the identical stretch of DNA in wild species such as red, grey, green, and Ceylon junglefowl they discovered that the sequence found in grey junglefowl was closest to yellow-skinned domestic chickens.

This discovery indicates that though chickens are indeed primarily derived from red junglefowls, at some point after chickens were first domesticated, they interbred with grey junglefowls which resulted in the incorporation of the gene that turned their legs a pleasing yellow colour.

Dr Greger Larson, who works at Uppsala University and at Durham University, says: "Darwin recognised the importance of studying domestic animals as a model of evolution and this insight has proved enormously influential.

"The ironic thing is that he believed that dogs were hybrids of several wild ancestors but that chickens only had one, and he was wrong on both counts." (Dogs are descended solely from the grey wolf.)

Yellow colouring comes from pigments found in feed called carotenoids: the more of these pigments, the more yellow the legs. The gene in question codes for an enzyme that degrades carotenoids into a colourless form, releasing Vitamin A.

But while white-skinned chickens make this enzyme in skin, yellow-skinned chickens do not, allowing the carotenoids to accumulate and produce yellow colouring. Interestingly, the gene functions normally in other tissues, so it is only their legs that go saffron yellow.

"This is a beautiful demonstration of how important regulatory mutations are for evolutionary changes" says Prof Leif Andersson, leader of the research team that includes Jonas Eriksson.

"What we are interested in knowing now is why yellow skin in chickens is so ubiquitous. It could have been that yellow skin was perceived to be a marker of health or size or egg production, or it could just be that yellow skin was fun to look at.

"We're really not sure. Furthermore, the gene we have identified may be important for carotenoid-based pigmentation in other species like the pink colour of the flamingo; the yellow legs of many birds of prey including eagles, falcons and hawks; the pink muscles of salmon, and even skin colour in humans."

The study was funded by the European Molecular Biology Organization, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning and the Swedish Research Council."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...chicken129.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8483 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8473 Fri, 29 Feb 2008 03:55:07 GMT
It was precisely 20 years ago that I wrote a book that became a sensation. A Brief History of Time sold more than 10 million copies - something I mention not in order to brag, but because it underlines the deep fascination we all seem to share about how our universe works.

How can we understand what we see around us? Is it arbitrary, or is there a grand design? Do we still need a God? Two decades on, my need to find answers to the fundamental questions about our existence remains undiminished.

Physicists love to explain how our universe arose and how it works. We understand enormous amounts about it. But when we are asked how it all came to be, we don't have one single answer - at least not yet.

There are two attitudes you can take. One is that God chose how the universe began, for reasons we could never understand.

At a conference on cosmology at the Vatican, the Pope told the delegates that it was OK to study the universe after it began; however, they should not enquire into the beginning itself, because that was the moment of creation and the work of God.

I was glad he didn't realise I had already presented a paper at the conference investigating precisely that issue: I didn't fancy the thought of being handed over to the Inquisition like Galileo.

My life's work has been to unify the theories of the very large (general relativity, a theory of gravity) and the very small (quantum theory) into a "theory of everything" called quantum gravity.

Only then can we answer the more challenging questions, such as why we are here, and where we come from.

I thought, when I wrote A Brief History of Time, that we would one day know the mind of God: indeed, I gave the odds as 50/50 that a theory of everything would emerge by the millennium.

But although we made a lot of progress, our ultimate goal still seems about the same distance away. I have revised my expectations downwards: I still think there's a good chance of finding the theory by the end of the century, but there's rather more of this one left.

Physics has, of course, made fabulous advances in the last 20 years. By colliding particles at the kinds of energies that would have been around at the Big Bang, we have unified three of the four forces: electromagnetics, and the weak and strong nuclear forces.

Yet gravity still refuses to be tamed - and to do so in a collider would require incredibly high amounts of energy, far beyond the capacity of any machine we have built.

Admittedly, my recent experience of weightlessness in a "zero gravity" flight demonstrates how well we understand gravity on a human scale, thanks in part to Einstein's theory of general relativity.

But although general relativity makes a prediction that the universe was once infinitely small, it loses the ability to describe the universe when it was tiny.

If we want to know what happened when the universe began, we need to have a theory that can describe gravity at a very small scale: as it affects individual particles. That is where quantum mechanics comes in.

By applying quantum mechanics to the edge of black holes, I was able to able to revolutionise our understanding of them. My work on this began with a Eureka moment I had while getting into bed in 1970.

At the very tiny level described by quantum mechanics, our universe is like a crazy dance of waves, tangoing to a myriad beats. Particles appear and disappear at random. And at this level, nothing is certain, not even existence.

Even in a vacuum, a pair of particles can pop into being, a normal particle with its antiparticle twin, exist for a short time, and then annihilate each other.

What, I wondered, would happen to these particles, and the twin anti-particles that are created alongside them, at the edge of a black hole? These are often thought of as being regions of space into which matter, light and energy fall and disappear.

But I discovered that when a particle-antiparticle pair appears for a moment, one of the pair falls into the black hole while the other escapes.

In other words, black holes are not completely black: they emit radiation, now known, rather gratifyingly, as Hawking radiation. This carries energy away from the black hole, meaning that it will gradually shrink and then disappear in a final explosive outburst.

Although my discovery explains why black holes have to give off thermal radiation, it came as a complete surprise at the time: at first, I thought I must have made a mistake. But it marked one step towards merging relativity and quantum theory into a new theory, that of quantum gravity.

Now, to expand our understanding further, we need to bring quantum mechanics into the heart of the black hole.

And when we do so, we need to make sure that it fits together with the other laws we have discovered during my lifetime that appear to govern the universe, and why they seem to be finely adjusted to allow life.

A problem here is that four dimensions - three of space and one of time - are not enough for such a theory of everything to work. One promising approach that gets round this is string theory, in which strings are one-dimensional extended objects and ripples on them are interpreted as particles.

This is the only candidate for a theory of everything that fits into a certain way of ordering the universe - a symmetry - that physicists believe exists, but have not yet observed. (If it is not found, we will have to think again.)

Under string theory, the three dimensions we see could actually be a membrane ("brane") floating, like a bubble, in a space of half a dozen dimensions.

Brane worlds and large extra dimensions could be detected by the next generation of particle accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider that is about to go into operation near Geneva. This would make quantum gravity an experimental science.

Would it let us find out where we came from and where we are going? I am tempted to say that science is about ever-expanding horizons, and that new discoveries only help us to frame questions in more and more accurate ways.

However, there is more to the answer than that. We once thought we were at the centre of the universe. Then we thought the sun was. Eventually we realised we were perching on the edge of one of billions of galaxies.

Soon, we may have to humbly accept that our three dimensional universe is one of many.

I am confident that we will resolve these questions: indeed, I think the years ahead will be a golden age of discovery. But I am not so sure we will all be around to enjoy it. I think we are acting with reckless indifference to our future on Planet Earth.

At the moment we have nowhere else to go, but in the long run the human race should not have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. I just hope we can avoid

A BRIEF HISTORY OF PROFESSOR STEPHEN HAWKING

1942 Born in Oxford on January 8, 300 years to the day after the death of Galileo.

1963 Is diagnosed with motor neurone disease, which affects nerves controlling muscles, and given two years to live. He takes to listening to Wagner.

1965 Becomes captivated by Roger (now Sir Roger) Penrose's research on relativity, which showed how a massive star can burn out and collapse to form a black hole so incredibly dense that it traps light itself.

1979 Takes up the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, once held by Sir Isaac Newton, at Camb***** University.

1988 Publication of A Brief History of Time makes him the world's most famous scientist.

2006 Paralysis makes Hawking give up using a handswitch; now, his only way of communicating is by a switch triggered by twitching one muscle in his cheek. He can write three words per minute, since he has to laboriously select each word, and even each letter.

2007 Flies in a zero gravity flight to feel what it is like to be weightless and publishes George's Secret Key to the Universe, a guide to the cosmos for children, with his daughter Lucy.

2009 Plans to be on the first commercial flight into space.
# 'Stephen Hawking: Master of the Universe' will be broadcast by Channel 4 on Monday at 9pm, and repeated the following week. It will be available on DVD from March 17."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...126.xml&page=3]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8473 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8471 Fri, 29 Feb 2008 01:43:41 GMT
The 23-year-old Prince, who is third in line to the throne, has spent the past 10 weeks with the lives of British troops in his hands in his key role as a battlefield air controller.

He has been operating only 500 yards from enemy positions, calling in air strikes and carrying out surveillance of Taliban fighters in Helmand province. His military base has come under mortar and machine gun attack five times every day.

In the heat of battle it has been Prince Harry, an officer in the Household Cavalry, who would give final clearance for air strikes on Taliban targets. Three British troops have been killed since he arrived in the war zone.

Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, and Gen Sir Richard Dannatt, the Chief of the General Staff, last night led the tributes to the Prince, who they described as an "exemplary" soldier.

However, news of his deployment ignited a diplomatic row, as Sir Richard condemned Australian, German and American websites for exposing the Prince's secret role.

The British media, in conjunction with the Ministry of Defence (MoD), had agreed not to report anything, for the Prince's protection, until he had safely returned. But with his cover blown, a decision will be taken today on whether to withdraw the Prince six weeks early.

There are fears he could become a prime target for the Taliban now they know he is fighting against them, which would also endanger the lives of his comrades.

Even when he is back in Britain, the Prince's personal protection will have to be reviewed, as he concedes al-Qa'eda terrorists will now be looking to assassinate him.

Sir Richard said: "I am very disappointed that foreign websites have decided to run this story without consulting us. This is in stark contrast to the highly responsible attitude of the whole of the UK print and broadcast media."

The officer was full of praise for Prince Harry's service on the front line. The last member of the Royal Family to take part in a war was the Duke of York, who flew helicopters for the Royal Navy during the Falklands conflict in 1982.

"What the last two months have shown is that it is perfectly possible for Prince Harry to be employed just the same as other Army officers of his rank and experience. His conduct on operations in Afghanistan has been exemplary," said Sir Richard. "He has been fully involved in operations and has run the same risks as everyone else in his battlegroup. In common with all of his generation in the Army today, he is a credit to the nation."

The Prince had been posted to Afghanistan to work at a remote British desert outpost in the south of the province, close to the Pakistan border.

Within days of his arrival - 10 days before Christmas - he was ordered forward to the semi-deserted town of Garmsir alongside an attachment of Gurkha troops.

The British base and the Taliban trenches are separated by a First World War-style No Man's Land.

After the crushing disappointment of being refused permission to serve in Iraq in early 2007 - a move which nearly triggered the Prince's resignation from the Army - the deployment to Afghanistan was cloaked in the utmost secrecy. Even some senior generals were not informed.

The Prince, a Second Lieutenant in the Household Cavalry, had been told he could serve in Iraq as a tank commander, but the decision was rescinded because the MoD feared his presence would lead to a surge in the number of attacks on British troops in Basra.

His role in Afghanistan has put him at the centre of the fight against the Taliban, working round the clock from a fortified operations room where he can track enemy movements. He also had to set co-ordinates for bomb drops. The role brought him into regular contact with British, American, French and Dutch pilots. But none of them knew they were talking to a member of the British Royal Family because he was operating under his call sign "Widow Six Seven".

The decision to deploy the Prince was reached in December, after Sir Richard had consulted the Prime Minister, the Queen and the Prince of Wales.

It was the Queen who broke the news to her grandson that he could fulfil his dream of serving his country. "All my wishes have come true, I managed to get the job done," the Prince said, speaking from his camp known as Forward Operating Base Delhi.

In an interview before he left for Afghanistan, Prince Harry said the posting would give him his first taste of a normal life. He received a letter at the base from his brother, Prince William, who said that their mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, would have been proud of her youngest son.

Prince Harry said: "Hopefully, she would be proud. She would be looking down, having a giggle about the stupid things that I have been doing like going left when I should have gone right."

Mr Brown led the tributes last night. He said: "Prince Harry has been an exemplary soldier and is serving with dedication in the finest traditions of our Armed Forces. The whole of Britain will be proud of the outstanding service he is giving. I want to thank Prince Harry and all of our service personnel for their contribution and service."

David Cameron, the Conservative leader, said: "Like all the troops currently fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, Harry has been incredibly brave.

"He has pursued his desire to get on the front line and serve his country with huge determination and courage."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.../nharry129.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8471 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8466 Thu, 28 Feb 2008 22:15:04 GMT
Gen. Nikolai Solovtsov said the weapons would be deployed in the European part of Russia adding, "the SMF will receive 11 up-to-date Topol-M ICBMs in two versions [silo and mobile-launched]."

The missile (NATO reporting name SS-27), with a range of about 7,000 miles (11,000 kms), is said to be immune to any current and future U.S. ABM defense. It is capable of making evasive maneuvers to avoid a kill using terminal phase interceptors, and carries targeting countermeasures and decoys.

It is also shielded against radiation, electromagnetic pulse, nuclear blasts, and is designed to survive a hit from any form of laser technology.

Gen. Solovtsov earlier said that Topol-M systems would be equipped with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRV) in the next two or three years.

Russia, which now operates around 50 Topol-Ms, resumed strategic bomber patrol flights over the Pacific, Atlantic, and Arctic oceans last August, following an order signed by President Putin.

In a speech on February 8, Putin blamed the West for unleashing a new international arms race."

Source:http://en.rian.ru/russia/20080227/100186983.html]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8466 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8451 Thu, 28 Feb 2008 01:12:31 GMT
The two caverns underneath Haut de la Garenne, measuring 12ft by 12ft, were bricked up many years ago and filled in with soil, rock and clay.

Detectives investigating claims of systematic child abuse over the last six decades on the island have spent three days concentrating on the area after a sniffer dog indicated he had picked up a scent.

Alleged victims in the inquiry told police the cellar was a place where they were abused and described the lay-out in detail.

When the search team punched a 3ft hole through the ceiling of the first chamber, what they found matched the description given by former residents.

But they soon realised there was a second adjoining room of a similar size, which was also bricked up.

Police also found a bathtub attached to the floor of the first cellar.

The sniffer dog, which is trained to detect human remains, barked furiously when it was allowed into the underground cavern - reacting exactly the same way it had before they discovered a child's skull on Saturday.

Today's breakthrough, eight days after specialist teams started searching the former home on the east of the island, looks likely to confirm the worst fears of police - who indicated earlier in the week that the bodies of up to seven children could be found.

Deputy Chief Officer Lenny Harper, leading the investigation, said: "We've been able to sent our forensic examiner in there for a very brief quick look.

"We have also put the dog into the part of the cellar we gained access to and we've had an extre***y strong reaction.

"Whilst I'm confident that the dog has found something, there could be an innocent explanation for what he has found.

"The forensic expert who went in thinks there was another room of exactly the same size that appears to have been bricked up as well.

"It looks as if it is going to be a long job and our archeologist and anthropologist will spend some considerable time sifting through."

Police had to suspend their search of the area for 24 hours this week while a structural engineer assessed the risk of the building collapsing. There were fears that the walls could crumble, destroying potentially crucial evidence.

Haut de la Garenne, which was converted into a youth hostel four years ago, is at the centre of one of Britain's biggest child abuse scandals.

More than 160 alleged victims of sexual, physical and psychological abuse have come forward since police publicly launched their investigation into abuse on the island last November.

The inquiry, which has drawn up a list of 40 suspects, intensified last weekend with the discovery of human remains and now more than 200 people have contacted the authorities. There are fears that as many as seven bodies may be found.

Builders working on the refurbishment of the property in 2004 claimed they had found shackles and canes in a cellar.

Mr Harper insisted no such items had been found at this stage, but said: "We are making urgent enquiries to find if those shackles still exist."

He said there appeared to be two concrete floors on the first cellar, which does not appear on any plans the police possess.

Describing the painstaking search, he said: "The working conditions are pretty unpleasant, it is thick with dust, there is a lot of debris and it is pretty uncomfortable. We have to sift through an awful lot of rubble."

One of the two marquees erected next to the building is already filled with material which will have to be forensically examined and analysed.

With the discovery of a second chamber, Mr Harper said he expected the search phase of the investigation to take several more weeks.

The discovery came as police reopened an investigation into claims of sexual and physical abuse at a children's home on the mainland, in light of the Jersey investigation.

Hampshire Police said it was making inquiries after a man came forward with claims concerning the former Children's Cottage Home in Portsmouth.

A total of 21 men and women have previously told detectives that they suffered physical and sexual abuse at the Children's Cottage Home in Cosham, mostly in the 1950s.

A 10-month police investigation was closed in 1996 without any charges because 17 of the suspects had died and it was decided there was not enough evidence to prosecute the remaining three."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...njersey527.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8451 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8444 Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22:33:05 GMT
The area's mayor, Hans-Peter Haustein, and a man who believes he found the coordinates for the buried booty in a notebook among his deceased father's belongings, maintain that a scan of the spot has revealed that a large quantity of metal is about 20 meters below the surface.

They believe it to be either gold or silver, based on the scan with a sophisticated metal detector.

A drilling company began *****g pilot holes at one-yard intervals trying to find the entrance of the cavern, about 100 yards from the Czech border in the eastern German state of Saxony. Once it is found, the searchers are to snake a camera down into the enclosure to determine exactly what they have found.

"It can't be iron," Haustein said as work progressed at the site. "The computer readout clearly indicates gold."

By late afternoon, however, the most excitement for a crowd of onlookers from the tiny settlement was a short-lived geyser of water that shot up as one of the holes was drilled.

Haustein — an amateur treasure hunter who is also a member of Germany's parliament for the opposition Free Democratic Party — said the process could take several days.

Haustein has been working with Christian Hanisch, who found the notebook in the belongings of his father, a former Luftwaffe radio operator who died last year.

Haustein said last week that he was convinced they had found the storied Amber Room treasure but later acknowledged that, while there could be "cultural treasures" in the cavern, such as paintings or amber paneling, they are not things that show up with a metal detector.

The Amber Room — named for magnificent wall panels of golden-brown amber — was stolen by the Nazis from a palace outside St. Petersburg during World War II and has never been recovered in its entirety.

Experts have been skeptical of Haustein's claim, pointing out that stories of the Amber Room surface regularly, only to be proved wrong, and that the Amber Room had no significant amounts of gold or silver in it."

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080226/...dIOYVcHdpvaA8F]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8444 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8434 Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:19:22 GMT
Other than helping to identify the victims of a tsunami, terrorist attack or other disaster, the new method could also find other uses, such as tracking down the source of tumours in the body or even studying how organs are regenerated.

The age measurement method comes as an unusual byproduct of atomic weapons tests that took place in the atmosphere half a century ago. The carbon isotope that the explosions produced has declined year by year, providing a kind of watch to determine a victim's birth dates by looking into the lens of the eye

Now, by measuring the amount of the carbon isotope C-14 trapped in the eye lens, scientists at the Universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus report in the journal PloS One that they can now establish, with relatively high precision, when a person was born, a useful tool for forensic scientists with which to date an unidentified body.

The reason that the isotope level can be used this way is that it is incorporated into the body in the first two years of life to build tiny transparent proteins, which allow light to pass through the eye so that we can see.

These special proteins, known as lens crystallines, remain essentially unchanged for the rest of our lives and is the only tissue in the human body apart from dental ena*** to remain unchanged throughout life.

By comparing the yearly record of the content of the C-14 in the atmosphere with the content of C-14 in the lens crystallines of the eye, scientists can accurately date a person's year of birth - providing they are born after 1950.

The technique uses a nuclear particle accelerator to determine the amount of C-14 in as little as one milligram - thousandth of a gram - of lens tissue and will be valid for a minimum of a century, until the Carbon-14 in the atmosphere finally returns to normal levels.

The method may also offer scientists a more precise means of dating bodies than checking the C-14 content in teeth, since teeth take between six and eight years to develop.

Associate Professor Niels Lynnerup from the Department of Forensic Sciences explains that this method, which he says is "extre***y accurate, almost to the precise year of birth" also has other applications:

"We think that carbon dating of proteins and other molecules in the body could be used to study when certain tissues are generated or regenerated. This could, for example, be applied to cancer tissue and cancer cells.

"Calculating the amount of C-14 in these tissues could tell us when the cancerous tissue is formed and this could further our understanding of such diseases"

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...scidead125.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8434 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8420 Sun, 24 Feb 2008 00:09:49 GMT
"Rockefeller Predicted "Event" To Trigger War Eleven Months Before 9/11

Hollywood director and documentary film maker Aaron Russo, currently receiving a wave of plaudits for his latest release, America: From Freedom to Fascism, told The Alex Jones Show that Nicholas Rockefeller had personally assured him there was going to be an "event" that would trigger the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq eleven months before 9/11 took place.

Saying he had been approached many times by the Rockefellers and other members of the CFR elite in an attempt to recruit him, Russo recalled a conversation that would come home to roost on September 11, 2001.

"Here's what I do know first hand - I know that about eleven months to a year before 9/11 ever happened I was talking to my Rockefeller friend (Nicholas Rockefeller) and he said to me 'Aaron there's gonna be an event' and he never told me what the event was going to be - I'm not sure he knew what the event was going to be I don't know that he knew that," said Russo.

Russo related how Rockefeller knew precisely what the event would lead to and which countries would be militarily targeted by the elite.

"He just said there's gonna be an event and out of that event we're gonna invade Afghanistan so we can run pipelines through the Caspian sea, we can go into Iraq to take the oil and establish bases in the middle east and to make the middle east part of the new world order and we're going to go after Venezuela - that's what's going to come out of this event."

"Eleven months to a year later that's what happened....he certainly knew that something was going to happen."

"In my relationships with some of these people I can tell you that it's as evil as it really gets - this is it - this is the game," stated Russo - also relating how members of the elite were routinely obsessed by creating a world identification society where people had to carry ID cards and prove who they were at all times.

Rockefeller also told Russo that the elite families created and financed the women's lib movement so they could tax another half of the population and so that the children would be trained by them in government schools rather than in the context of the family unit.

Russo also sounded off on 9/11, openly airing his view for the first time that it was a complete inside job.

"People know that 9/11 was an inside job," said Russo, "look what they did here in America, look at 9/11, look what they did - they killed thousands of Americans - people jumping out of windows from a hundred floors up - they don't care," said the director.

"There's no way that Building 7 came down without a controlled demolition, it takes weeks to do the controlled demolition, they couldn't have done it in a few hours like Larry Silverstein said - it blows the whole game - concrete doesn't turn to powder unless its exploded."

"We all know that 9/11 was a fraud - an inside job," concluded Russo."

Source:http://www.propagandamatrix.com/arti...rpredicted.htm

Open up your minds a little and really think about these things.]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8420 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8414 Sat, 23 Feb 2008 18:17:12 GMT
Russia: Kosovo and the Asymmetry of Perceptions

Kosovo appears to be an archaic topic. The Yugoslavian question was a 1990s issue, while the Kosovo issue has appeared to be one of those conflicts that never quite goes away but isn’t regarded very seriously by the international community. You hear about it but you don’t care about it. However, Kosovo is getting very serious again.

The United States and Europe appear committed to making Kosovo, now a province of Serbia, an independent state. Of course, Serbia opposes this, but more important, so does Russia. Russia opposed the original conflict, but at that point it was weak and its wishes were irrelevant. Russia opposes independence for Kosovo now, and it is far from the weak state it was in 1999 — and is not likely to take this quietly. Kosovo’s potential as a flash point between Russia and the West makes it important again. Let’s therefore review the action to this point.

In 1999, NATO, led by the United States, conducted a 60-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia and its main component, Serbia. The issue was the charge that Yugoslavia was sponsoring the mass murder of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, just as it had against Bosnian Muslims. The campaign aimed to force the Yugoslav army out of Kosovo while allowing a NATO force to occupy and administer the province.

Two strands led to this action. The first was the fear that the demonstrable atrocities committed by Serbs in Bosnia were being repeated in Kosovo. The second was the general feeling dominant in the 1990s that the international community’s primary task was dealing with rogue states behaving in ways that violated international norms. In other words, it was assumed that there was a general international consensus on how the world should look, that the United States was the leader of this international consensus and that there was no power that could threaten the United States or the unity of the vision. There were only weak, isolated rogue states that had to be dealt with. There was no real risk attached to these operations. Yugoslavia was identified as one of those rogue states. The United States, without the United Nations but with the backing of most European countries, dealt with it.

There was no question that Serbs committed massive atrocities in Bosnia, and that Bosnians and Croats carried out massive atrocities against Serbs. These atrocities occurred in the context of Yugoslavia’s explosion after the end of the Cold War. Yugoslavia had been part of an arc running from the Danube to the Hindu Kush, frozen into place by the Cold War. Muslims had been divided by the line, with some living in the former Soviet Union but most on the other side. The Yugoslav state consisted of Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Muslims; it was communist but anti-Soviet and cooperated with the United States. It was an artificial state imposed on multiple nationalities by the victors of World War I and held in place after World War II by the force field created by U.S.-Soviet power. When the Soviets fell, the force field collapsed and Yugoslavia detonated, followed later by the rest of the arc.

The NATO mission, then, was to stabilize the western end of this arc, Yugoslavia. The strategy was to abolish the multinational state created after World War I and replace it with a series of nation-states — such as Slovenia and Macedonia — built around a coherent national unit. This would stabilize Yugoslavia. The problem with this plan was that each nation-state would contain substantial ethnic minorities, regardless of attempts to redraw the borders. Thus, Bosnia contains Serbs. But the theory was that small states overwhelmingly consisting of one nationality could remain stable in the face of ethnic diversity so long as there was a dominant nation — unlike Yugoslavia, where there was no central national grouping.

So NATO decided to re-engineer the Balkans much as they were re-engineered after World War I. NATO and the United States got caught in a weird intellectual trap. On the one hand, there was an absolute consensus that the post-World War II borders of Europe were sacrosanct. If that wasn’t the case, then Hungarians living in Romanian Transylvania might want to rejoin Hungary, Turkish regions of Cyprus might want to join Turkey, Germany might want to reclaim Silesia and Northern Ireland might want to secede from the United Kingdom. All hell could break loose, and one of the ways Europe avoided hell after 1945 was a cardinal rule: No borders would shift.

The re-engineering of Yugoslavia was not seen as changing borders. Rather, it was seen as eliminating a completely artificial state and freeing genuine nations to have their own states. But it was assumed that the historic borders of those states could not be changed merely because of the presence of other ethnic groups concentrated in a region. So the desire of Bosnian Serbs to join Serbia was rejected, both because of the atrocious behavior of the Bosnian Serbs and because it would have shifted the historic borders of Bosnia. If all of this seems a bit tortured, please recall the hubris of the West in the 1990s. Anything was possible, including re-engineering the land of the south Slavs, as Yugoslavia’s name translates in English.

In all of this, Serbia was seen as the problem. Rather than viewing Yugoslavia as a general failed project, Serbia was seen not so much as part of the failure but as an intrinsically egregious actor that had to be treated differently than the rest, given its behavior, particularly against the Bosnians. When it appeared that the Serbs were repeating their actions in Kosovo against Albanian Muslims in 1999, the United States and other NATO allies felt they had to intervene.

In fact, the level of atrocities in Kosovo never approached what happened in Bosnia, nor what the Clinton administration said was going on before and during the war. At one point, it was said that hundreds of thousands of men were missing, and later that 10,000 had been killed and bodies were being dissolved in acid. The post-war analysis never revealed any atrocities on this order of magnitude. But that was not the point. The point was that the United States had shifted to a post-Cold War attitude, and that since there were no real threats against the United States, the primary mission of foreign policy was dealing with minor rogue states, preventing genocide and re-engineering unstable regions. People have sought explanations for the Kosovo war in vast and complex conspiracies. The fact is that the motivation was a complex web of domestic political concerns and a genuine belief that the primary mission was to improve the world.

The United States dealt with its concerns over Kosovo by conducting a 60-day bombing campaign designed to force Yugoslavia to withdraw from Kosovo and allow NATO forces in. The Yugoslav government, effectively the same as the Serbian government by then, showed remarkable resilience, and the air campaign was not nearly as effective as the air forces had hoped. The United States needed a war-ending strategy. This is where the Russians came in.

Russia was weak and ineffective, but it was Serbia’s only major ally. The United States prevailed on the Russians to initiate diplomatic contacts and persuade the Serbs that their position was isolated and hopeless. The carrot was that the United States agreed that Russian peacekeeping troops would participate in Kosovo. This was crucial for the Serbians, as it seemed to guarantee the interests of Serbia in Kosovo, as well as the rights of Serbs living in Kosovo. The deal brokered by the Russians called for a withdrawal of the Serbian army from Kosovo and entry into Kosovo of a joint NATO-Russian force, with the Russians guaranteeing that Kosovo would remain part of Serbia.

This ended the war, but the Russians were never permitted — let alone encouraged — to take their role in Serbia. The Russians were excluded from the Kosovo Force (KFOR) decision-making process and were isolated from NATO’s main force. When Russian troops took control of the airport in Pristina in Kosovo at the end of the war, they were surrounded by NATO troops.

In effect, NATO and the United States reneged on their agreement with Russia. Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the Russian Foreign Ministry caved in the face of this reneging, leaving the Russian military — which had ordered the Kosovo intervention — hanging. In 1999, this was a fairly risk-free move by the West. The Russians were in no position to act.

The degree to which Yeltsin’s humiliation in Kosovo led to the rise of Vladimir Putin is not fully understood. Putin represented a faction in the intelligence-military community that regarded Kosovo as the last straw. There were, of course, other important factors leading to the rise of Putin, but the Russian perception that the United States had double-crossed them in an act of supreme contempt was a significant factor. Putin came to office committed to regaining Russian intellectual influence after Yeltsin’s inertia.

The current decision by the United States and some European countries to grant independence to Kosovo must be viewed in this context. First, it is the only case in Yugoslavia in which borders are to shift because of the presence of a minority. Second, it continues the policy of re-engineering Yugoslavia. Third, it proceeds without either a U.N. or NATO mandate, as an action supported by independent nations — including the United States and Germany. Finally, it flies in the face of Russian wishes.]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8414 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8382 Thu, 21 Feb 2008 21:51:06 GMT
Meanwhile Russia has launched another space freighter, Progress, to the International Space Station from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. It's scheduled to dock with the orbiting station to deliver food, equipment and other supplies in two days' time.

Russia’s Yury Malenchenko and U.S. astronauts Peggy Whitson and Daniel Tani are currently working onboard the ISS."

Source:http://russiatoday.ru/scitech/news/20524]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8382 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8381 Thu, 21 Feb 2008 21:50:12 GMT
Putin was accompanied on the visit by presidential candidate, First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.

It's planned that the centre will integrate management and design with production and testing.

It's hoped it will make Russian planes more competitive and win 15 % of the world market, which would mean building almost 6,000 new civil and military planes by 2025.

Both Putin and Medvedev inspected latest state-of-the-art planes such as the new Sukhoi jet fighter, the SU-35, and a Tupolev airliner.

And, lo and behold, Putin was in the pilot's seat with Medvedev as co-pilot - for now."

Source:http://russiatoday.ru/scitech/news/21159]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8381 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8376 Thu, 21 Feb 2008 19:08:43 GMT
The DNA of European-Americans appears to carry proportionately more harmful genetic changes than that of African-Americans, because they emerged from a smaller and less diverse population.

The study of 35 people, published in Nature by a team led by Prof Carlos Bustamante of Cornell University, New York State, shows that the proportion of single letter spelling variations in the human genetic code that are probably harmful and unique to that particular population are significantly higher in the European-Americans (16 per cent) than in the African-American sample (12 percent) his team analysed.

"What is happening at an individual level will vary tremendously within and among populations," stressses Prof Bustamante, explaining that the effect can only be seen in the population level and it is not known how these deleterious mutations affects disease risk.

His team speculates that this is a consequence of a "bottleneck" - a huge decline in numbers - that Europeans experienced at about the time of the migration out of Africa, around 45,000 years ago.

"What we may be seeing is a 'population genetic echo' of the founding of Europe," says Prof Bustamante, and senior co-author with Prof Andrew Clark.

Because the founder population of Europeans was much smaller, they today have a higher proportion of harmful genetic mutations, which would have been diluted without the bottleneck, an effect that was only thought to affect small populations before this study.

Like astronomers who build ever-larger telescopes to peer deeper into space, population geneticists are probing the human genetic code in unprecedented detail, confirming our origns in Africa, where today the most genetically diverse range of people reside.

The work underlines why the scientific establishment recoiled at the claim by DNA pioneer James Watson that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really".

The furore led the Nobel laureate to abandon a recent book tour of Britain and the studies published in the journal Nature show why it was meaningless to talk about "Africa" in a discussion of the genetics of intelligence, since the continent has the biggest variation of DNA on the planet, reflecting how it was the cradle of humankind and that the DNA of its inhabitants has evolved and changed there the longest.

In a second study in Nature, this time of 485 people, University of Michigan's Prof Noah Rosenberg and colleagues, led by Andrew Singleton at the National Institute on Aging, Bethesda, outline how human genetic diversity decreases as distance from Africa increases.

People of African descent are more genetically diverse than Middle Easterners, who are more diverse than Asians and Europeans. Native Americans possess the least-diverse genomes. As a result, searching for disease-causing genes should require the fewest number of genetic markers among Native Americans and the greatest number of markers among Africans.

The patterns revealed by the new study support the idea that humans originated in Africa, then spread into the Middle East, followed by Europe and Asia, the Pacific Islands, and finally to the Americas.

They report more examples of a recently discovered type of human genetic variation, known as a copy-number variant or CNV.

They found 507 previously unknown CNVs, which are large chunks of DNA - up to 1,000,000 consecutive "letters" of the genetic alphabet - that are either repeated or deleted entirely from a person's genome. Various diseases can be triggered by an abnormal gain or loss in the number of gene copies.

While previous studies have found that broad-scale geographic ancestry could be successfully traced, the new results indicate "it's becoming increasingly possible to use genomics to refine the geographic position of an individual's ancestors with more and more precision," Prof Rosenberg adds."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...imutate121.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8376 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8363 Wed, 20 Feb 2008 18:46:30 GMT
In an unprecedented move, Sir Richard Dearlove stepped out of the shadows to publicly defend the secretive agency which normally never comments on allegations made against it.

Sir Richard, the most senior spy ever to give evidence in a British court room, was MI6 Director of Operations at the time the princess, her boyfriend Dodi Fayed and driver Henri Paul died in a Paris car crash in August 1997.

He served as the head of the agency, known as "C", from 1999 to 2004.

Sir Richard told the inquest he felt the allegation of MI6 involvement in the princess’s death was a "very personal one" because he was responsible for all the agency’s activities at the time and would have known "everything" that was going on.

The inquest heard that under the laws governing MI6 provision was made for "lethal force" to be used but only with Government authorisation in times of emergency or crisis which caused danger to the UK or its citizens.

Sir Richard said lethal force had never been authorised in his 38-year career at MI6. He specifically denied a suggestion, made previously by former MI6 agent Richard Tomlinson, that the agency had plotted to assassinate Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

He also denied an accusation, first made by former MI5 officer David Shayler, that there had been a plot to kill Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi.

Sir Richard described how MI6 would require authorisation from the Foreign Secretary to carry out any operation that would involve breaking the law, such as bugging or assassination, even if the act was being carried out abroad.

Ian Burnett QC, for the coroner, said: "Are you able to confirm from your own knowledge that no authorisation was sought in respect of any activities concerning Princess Diana?" Sir Richard replied: "I can absolutely confirm that."

Sir Richard gave evidence two days after Mohamed Fayed, Dodi’s father, alleged that his son and the princess were murdered by MI6 on the orders of the Duke of Edinburgh, Tony Blair and the Prince of Wales.

Sir Richard said he was on holiday in the US at the time but was kept in "secure telephone connection" with the office and there was no operation against the princess, including bugging or eavesdropping.

Asked whether an agent in Paris could have been "freelancing" he said that was "inconceivable".

It was "an impossibility" that an assassination could have been carried out by a rogue element within MI6, he said.

He described the suggestion that the Duke was able to direct MI6 operationally from Balmoral and engage the French State in a cover-up as "mischievous and fanciful".

His relationship with MI6 was "absolutely nothing of substance" and he had visited the agency’s headquarters only once or twice as the consort of the Queen.

To the suggestion the Duke was an active operational member of MI6, Sir Richard said: "It’s utterly ridiculous and the same is true of Prince Charles"

Mr Burnett said: "It’s suggested Prince Philip and the intelligence agencies really ran this country and we are not a Parliamentary democracy at all - you in fact ran the country."

Sir Richard said: "I don’t want to be flippant, I’m tempted to say I’m flattered, but once again this is such an absurd allegation it’s difficult to deal with - an allegation that’s so absurd it’s completely off the map."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.../ndiana320.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8363 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8354 Wed, 20 Feb 2008 06:29:25 GMT
Responding to the 81-year-old president's decision to step down, Mr Bush, who is on an official visit to Rwanda, said a "democratic transition" should now begin.

Yet observers believe that Castro's presumed successor, his 76-year-old brother, Raul, will not reform Cuba's one-party state. Nor is there any realistic chance of America lifting the trade embargo it has enforced on the island for 47 years.

But Raul may gradually reform Cuba's economy and move towards the "Chinese model" of economic liberalism in a one-party state.

Castro chose an official newspaper in Havana to announce that he would formally resign on Sunday. The Communist leader had intestinal surgery in 2006 and has already handed over effective power to his brother.

"It would betray my conscience to take up a responsibility that requires mobility and total devotion, that I am not in a physical condition to offer," he said in the statement.

Castro earned his place in history as a global symbol of anti-Americanism. After leading a guerrilla war for six years, he overthrew Cuba's dictator, Fulgencio Batista, and seized power in 1959.

El comandante, as he styled himself, was hated by thousands of Cuban exiles who fled to Florida. He helped to bring the world to the brink of nuclear war in 1962 when he allowed the Soviet Union to station missiles in his country.

Later, he sent thousands of troops to fight for Marxist regimes in Ethiopia and Angola. He banned opposition parties and locked up dissidents or forced them to flee.

At least 58 prisoners of conscience are in Cuba's jails, according to Amnesty International.

The Cuban National Assembly is expected to elect Raul as president on Sunday.

On the streets of Havana, one 69-year-old woman said of Castro's announcement: "It's a shame that Fidel is going out of the game. For me, he will always be in the heart of the Cubans."

Other Cubans seemed relieved. "This just had to happen," said Orestes, 23, an engineering student. "When a person gets old, they have to allow the young generation to lead the country."

The first to hear the news were the few people who have access to the internet, which is tightly controlled in Cuba. But as television and radio announced Castro's departure, small groups gathered, talking more freely than usual.

One elderly woman, who asked not to be named, said: "What has happened today is the Cuban liberation. I hope that everything will change now."

Pedro Pablo Alvarez, a dissident who was freed last weekend after five years in prison, told the BBC that Raul was a "more pragmatic man", adding: "The first thing Cubans need is economic change."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...castro1319.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8354 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8347 Tue, 19 Feb 2008 22:28:34 GMT
His billion-dollar submarine — the Navy’s newest twist on underwater warfare — is hovering just below the surface off the Pacific island of Guam as a submersible disappears into the dark waters, carrying a team of commandos.

The Ohio is the first of a new class of submarine created in a conversion from 1970s vessels by trading nuclear-tipped ICBMs for conventional cruise missiles and a contingent of commandos ready to be launched onto virtually any shore through reworked missile tubes — against conventional forces or terrorists.

The sub’s cruise across the Pacific comes as China builds its submarine fleet into the region’s largest as part of the bulking up of its military. The voyage is the Ohio’s first deployment since the makeover, and Hale is in the odd position of showing the ship off.

It’s odd because the sub is all about stealth.

Hale can’t talk about where the ship is going. The aft end of the ship, where the nuclear power plant is located, is off limits. The leader of the SEAL commando contingent aboard can’t be named, and the commandos themselves can’t be photographed in any way that shows their faces.

But, over the next few months, the Ohio will be making a very public statement, training intensively in some of the world’s most crowded and contested waters and joining in exercises with America’s Asian allies. Instead of hiding them, the Ohio will be showcasing its abilities to elude detection and operate too deeply and quickly to be tracked.

Then it will likely do what it does best — vanish.

“Submarines are the original stealth platform,” Hale told the Associated Press, the only news agency allowed on board. “Submarine forces have always viewed the Pacific as a very important strategic area ... it’s certainly grown in importance in the last 10 years.”

Just about every country with a coastline in Asia wants or has subs.

China, Japan, Australia, India, Malaysia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Singapore, Bangladesh and South and North Korea either now have or are planning to acquire them.

Most don’t pose much of a threat to the more advanced American fleet. But that is changing.

While Russia continues to be a factor, China now has the biggest submarine fleet in the region, with nearly 60. The U.S. has upped its presence in the Pacific, and now has more ships — and more subs — in this part of the world than in the Atlantic.

But they are still outnumbered.

“There are many challenges in the Pacific,” Hale said. “China is certainly one of them, but it is not the only one.”

China’s subs are mainly diesel-powered, meaning they must come up for air more frequently than U.S. nuclear-powered vessels, and their crews are not thought to be as well trained as American submariners, who spend several months at a time at sea.

China’s fleet is also highly focused on patrolling its own coastal waters and on dealing with potential hostilities over Taiwan, rather than with “projecting force,” or trying to control faraway shipping lanes.

But its long-term goals remain opaque.

In 2006, a Chinese sub shocked the Navy by surfacing within torpedo range of the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk near the Japanese island of Okinawa. Beijing claimed the sub was in international waters and was not “stalking” the carrier, which was taking part in a naval exercise.

The growing rivalry was underscored in November, when Beijing refused a scheduled port call by the Kitty Hawk’s battle group to Hong Kong, forcing thousands of sailors to spend Thanksgiving at sea. In January, however, China allowed a visit to the port by another U.S. Navy vessel.

Washington has repeatedly expressed concern that China is pouring money into expanding its forces. Beijing increased its military budget by nearly 18 percent to about $45 billion last year, the largest annual hike in more than a decade, and U.S. officials think actual spending is greater.

The Chinese, meanwhile, are closely watching to see how U.S. concern translates into changes in the U.S. Navy. When the Ohio, which is based in Bangor, Wash., docked at Guam last month, China’s official Xinhua news agency called the submarine a “warehouse of explosives” and a “devil of deterrence.”

“If the Ohio turns west from Guam, it would need only hours to travel to the coastal waters of many Asian nations,” it said. “The U.S. Navy believes the power of the cruise missile-armed nuclear submarine will be tremendous in a future war.”

That is exactly what the Navy wants China and others to think, and why the Ohio is in the Pacific.

“The advanced capabilities that we have brought to this ship make it a premier front-line submarine,” said the Ohio’s executive officer, Lt. Commander Al Ventura. “This has taken the submarine force to a whole new level.”

The Ohio has both vast firepower and the ability to deploy quickly to wherever it’s needed.

It has 24 launch tubes, 15 of which have been fitted for multiple Tomahawks — more than 100 in total. That’s more than were launched in the entire first Gulf War. From an offshore position in the Pacific, it could strike Pyongyang, North Korea. From the Indian Ocean, it could hit anywhere in Afghanistan.

The switch to conventional missiles is a concept borne of necessity.

Under a 1992 disarmament treaty, the Navy had to give up four of its 18 “boomers,” huge submarines that have for decades served as mobile launch platforms for long-range nuclear missiles and were primary players in the Cold War game of cat-and-mouse between Washington and Moscow.

Instead of scrapping the ships, however, the Navy converted them. The nuclear weapons were replaced with conventional Tomahawk guided missiles and several of the launch tubes refitted to deploy the Navy SEALs in submersible boats.

Because of the sheer size of the sub — it’s 560 feet long — it has more room for its 160-member crew and dozens of commandos than an attack submarine. While still cramped and claustrophobic, sailors have bigger beds and several places for working out, which the SEALs do constantly.

Among the SEALs, stealth remains a way of life.

In a wardroom just yards from the Tomahawk missile tubes, the head of the SEAL contingent agreed to be interviewed, but only if he wasn’t identified or photographed, lest he or his family be tracked down by terrorists, for whom killing a SEAL would be a major propaganda coup.

“We go places,” he said. “Let’s just leave it at that.”

While near Guam, the SEALs conducted operations simulating an undersea launch in their submersible and a landing to assess a fictitious terrorist threat. Guam was dubbed “Backwateria” and the terrorists called the “Al-Shakur.” The names of the terrorist leaders were taken from a popular TV cartoon.

The island could just as well have been Taiwan, or the shores of North Korea.

The SEAL commander said the simulations were not aimed at any particular country.

Still, he said, it’s not just idle training.

“This capability has been used before, and it will probably be used again,” he said."

Source:http://www.navytimes.com/news/2008/0...tealth_080216/]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8347 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8339 Mon, 18 Feb 2008 21:45:11 GMT
Researchers found chemicals released when including petrol and other fuels are burnt weaken the heart's ability to pump effectively and can lead to irregular heart beats.

Dr John Incardona, a biologist and toxicologist at the West Coast Centre for Oceans and Human Health, in Seattle, said his research suggested millions of people living in large cities are effectively "breathing an aerosolised oil spill".

Dr Incardona showed in animal experiments that compounds released during fossil fuels combustion called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) caused fluid to build up, causing arrhythmia - heart beat abnormalities that can increase the risk of strokes.

He said: "The available data suggests that these PAHs are present in burning oil in levels high enough to result in pharmacologically active levels in the human blood stream.

"Once in the bloodstream, they are likely to be toxic to the human heart, and should be considered prime suspects for the health effects of urban air. In essence, people in big cities are breathing an aerosolized oil spill.

"A physician who knowingly gave an aerosolised particle toxin to a patient with coronary artery disease or congestive heart failure would probably be sued for malpractice. But the air in our cities is doing just that to millions every day unknowingly."

The harmful effects of large PAHs were first identified during the 18th century when British surgeon Sir Percivall Pott observed skin cancers were more common in workers exposed to a lot of chimney soot, such as chimney sweeps. Compounds in coal tar was later linked to other cancer.

It is only more recently that concerns have been raised over smaller PAH compounds.

Following the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, exposure to even low levels of these chemicals led to high rates of deformities in herring and salmon embryos. They developed edema - a build up of excess fluid - around the heart. However the health effects of these chemicals on humans have been unclear.

Dr Incardona and colleagues exposed zebrafish embryos to the most abundant PAHs found in oil and petrol, and found that smaller PAHs caused the developing heart to beat more weakly and with an abnormal rhythm. A failure to pump properly caused fluid build-up.

Dr Incardona, who presented his research at the Annual Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference in Boston, added: "It turns out that fish hearts even in the embryo function more like human hearts than even mice or rats, the usual test animals in human health studies.

"Every time your burn something you generate PAHs. The smaller PAHs have been largely ignored because they are not carcinogenic.

"Here is this relative mystery of how air pollution could possibly start a heart arrhythmia in humans. This is a very simple hypothesis and I think these compounds need to be looked at as a source of cardiovascular impacts of air pollution."

Peter Weissberg, Medical Director of the British Heart Foundation, said: "It is a long way to extrapolate from something shown in the development of zebrafish to something that would affect healthy adult human beings.

"It is, however, an interesting study. It suggests that these chemicals, in large enough doses, clearly have an important effect on developmental chemical interactions in the heart."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...scipoll118.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8339 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8336 Mon, 18 Feb 2008 18:54:05 GMT
A group of astronomers has identified the presence of warm dust around 20 per cent of young stars similar to our sun, making them candidates for the formation of Earth-like rocky planets.

They used Nasa's Spitzer space telescope to study the evolution of the gas and dust around groups of stars in our Milky Way galaxy with masses similar to our sun.

These were sorted by age, from young stars which formed just three to 10 million years ago, to stars one to three billion years old. The Sun is approximately 4.6 billion years old.

The researchers compared the results with what is known about how our solar system looked at these earlier stages of its evolution.

Spitzer can be used to measure the temperature of dust around a star from its infrared emissions.

"Warm" dust, at between -280ºF and 80ºF, is believed to be a natural outcome of rocky planet formation from the collision and merger of small lumps of debris.

This process is believed to eventually result in large rocky bodies being assembled into asteroids, moons and planets.

Theoretical models and data from meteors suggest the Earth formed over a period of between 10 and 50 million years from the collision of smaller rocky bodies.

The astronomers observed emissions indicating the presence of warm dust around 20 per cent of the younger stars the studied.

They presented their results yesterday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference in Boston.

Most planetary scientists believe that the most likely location of life in other star systems is the so-called "goldilocks zone" - the orbital band where water, seen as a vital precursor for life, can exist as a liquid.

Dr Michael Meyer, of the University of Arizona in Tucson, said: "An optimistic scenario would suggest that the biggest, most massive disks would undergo the runaway collision process first and assemble their planets quickly.

"That's what we could be seeing in the youngest stars. Their disks live hard and die young, shining brightly early on, then fading.

"However smaller, less massive disks will light up later. Planet formation in this case is delayed because there are fewer particles to collide with each other."

New ground-based and space telescopes, such as the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) due to be completed in northern Chile by 2016, could shed more light on how common rocky planets are and capture the first image of an Earth-like planet orbiting a distant star."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...iplanet118.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8336 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8335 Mon, 18 Feb 2008 18:51:57 GMT
Astronomers believe there are large numbers of both rocky planets and gas giants in the Oort Cloud, a vast cloud of comets approximately five trillion miles away - some 50,000 times the distance from Earth to the Sun.

Nasa scientists said some of them could have warm oceans in their interiors, opening up the possibility of the presence of extraterrestrial life.

Computer modelling and other astronomical clues suggest it may contain around 1,000 small planetary bodies, some of which may be the size of the Earth and Mars or larger.

Dr Alan Stern, a Nasa expert on the outer solar system described "forensic evidence" for the existence of large numbers of undiscovered planets in the Oort Cloud at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference in Boston.

Dr Stern said the angle of Uranus's rotation suggested it had been struck by an object three to five times the mass of Earth at some time in its history.

He said: "If you calculate how likely that was if there was only one such object around, you find that the probability is nil.

"In fact there ought to have been several dozen of these three to five Earth mass class objects around in order to make that event probable.

"Where have they gone? Computer models show us that they were probably scattered to the Oort Cloud, and we will eventually find them."

Hardly any sunlight penetrates the region, making any planets there invisible to ordinary telescopes. Only powerful instruments that can detect the faintest infrared signals would have any chance of finding them.

The Oort Cloud planets are believed to have formed in a zone between the terrestrial such as the Earth and Mars and the gas giants like include Jupiter and Saturn.

They would then have been thrown to the edge of the solar system by the gravitational pull of the gas giants. Dr Stern said: "We should expect that the majority of them will be rocky bodies with icy coatings, but the largest ones may well have large gaseous envelopes.

"We may very well have miniature gas giants, or super-Earth gas giants, orbiting out there. It's still to be seen, and I think the discoveries will be very exciting and very enlightening."

He added that it was possible that some of the planets had warm liquid water oceans beneath their icy surfaces, like the one believed to exist on Jupiter's moon Europa.

Heated by forces from gravitational forces or radioactive energy, these could provide conditions suitable for life.

Dr Stern added: "I think our views of where we can have biology are also evolving. It may turn out that 100 years from now the text books actually say that most abodes of life are in the interiors of planets in the far reaches of solar systems. We're really in a new age of discovery."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...cisolar118.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8335 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8311 Fri, 15 Feb 2008 18:24:10 GMT
Astronomers have identified two new planets orbiting a star about half the size of our sun some 5,000 light-years away.

The system, called OGLE-2006-BLG-109L, resembles a slightly scaled down version of our Solar system because the two gas giant planets are similar sizes relative to their star as Jupiter and Saturn are to our sun.

The smaller planet is roughly twice as far from its star as the larger one, just as Saturn is about twice as far from the sun as Jupiter.

Planetary scientists who discovered them believe there could be rocky planets, like Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, closer to the star.

Of around 250 planets so far discovered only 25 are known to be in systems with multiple planets.

The discovery of OGLE-2006-BLG-109L, highlighted in the journal Science, has excited astronomers because it suggests there could be large numbers of other planetary systems which take a similar form to our own.

Researchers searching for extraterrestrial life generally assume the most likely locations will be rocky planets in the so-called "habitable zone" - the region of a planetary system in which temperatures would allow water to remain in liquid form.

Keith Horne, Professor of Astronomy at St Andrews University, said: "Here we have a system where the two largest planets are similar to the two largest in our own system.

"This is something of a surprise. It may indicate that planetary systems like our own are relatively common.

"Once we know that planets similar to Earth are common, it is straightforward to go ahead on finding them and investigating whether these harbour any forms of life."

The newly discovered system was identified by a world-wide network of 11 telescopes, including the UK's Liverpool Telescope on the Canary Islands.

It was found through the use of gravitational microlensing - a method that takes advantage of the tendency of light rays to bend as they pass close to large objects such as stars.

The gravity of the intervening object warps surrounding space and magnifies light from objects in the background.

The technique was first proposed by Albert Einstein. For it to work, a star must pass almost directly between the observer and the planet or star being observed.

Scott Gaudi, assistant professor of astronomy at Ohio State University, said: "Theorists have wondered whether gas giants in other solar systems would form in the same way as ours did. This system seems to answer in the affirmative."

Dr Martin Dominik, also of the University of St Andrews, said: "While most planetary systems around other stars substantially differ from the Solar system, a series of recent detections have brought us closer and closer to home.

"Sooner rather than later, someone can be expected to discover an Earth-mass planet orbiting a star other than the sun - and it could be us."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...iplanet114.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8311 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8298 Thu, 14 Feb 2008 02:06:27 GMT
On Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the indictment of a former Boeing engineer for passing sensitive information about the U.S. space program to the Chinese government. According to the indictment, Dongfan Chung, a 72-year-old California man who worked for Boeing until September 2006, gave China documents relating to military aircraft and rocket technology, as well as technical information about the U.S. Space Shuttle.

U.S. officials say the Chung case is part of a pattern of escalating espionage by China. "We're seeing this on all fronts," says Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the Justice Department's National Security Division. Since October 2006, the Justice Department has prosecuted more than a dozen high-profile cases involving China, including industrial espionage and the illegal export of military technology. In an unrelated case also announced Monday, a Defense Department employee was arrested in Virginia for passing classified information about the sale of U.S. military technology to Taiwan to alleged Chinese agents.

The scale of Chung's alleged espionage is startling. According to the Justice Department, Chung may have been providing trade secrets to Chinese aerospace companies and government agents since 1979, when he was an engineer at Rockwell International, a company acquired by Boeing in 1996. He worked for Boeing until his retirement in March 2003, and continued to work as a contractor for the company until September 2006. The indictment alleges that Chung gave China documents relating to the B-1 bomber and the Delta IV rocket, which is used to lift heavy payloads into space, as well as information on an advanced antenna array intended for the Space Shuttle.

According to the indictment, Chinese officials gave Chung a shopping list of information to acquire for them. In one instance, Chung said that he would send documents through an official in China's San Francisco consulate. In another, a Chinese contact suggested he route information through a man named Chi Mak, a naturalized U.S. citizen who also worked as an engineer in California and who was convicted last year of attempting to provide China with information on an advanced naval propulsion system.

The indictment charges that Chung was a willing participant. "Having been a Chinese compatriot for over thirty years and being proud of the achievements by the people's efforts for the motherland, I am regretful for not contributing anything," Chung allegedly wrote in an undated letter to one of his mainland contacts.

China's manned space program, codenamed Project 921, is indeed a matter of considerable national pride for a country that sees space exploration as confirmation of superpower status. China is pouring substantial resources into space research, according to Dean Cheng, an Asian affairs specialist at the U.S.-based Center for Naval Analysis. With a budget estimated at up to $2 billion a year, China's space program is roughly comparable to Japan's. Later this year, China plans to launch its third manned space mission - a prelude to a possible lunar foray by 2024. With U.S. President George W. Bush vowing to return American astronauts to the moon by 2020, some competition is perhaps inevitable.

China's space program lags far behind that of the U.S., of course. "They're basically recreating the Apollo missions 50 years on," says Joan Johnson-Freese, chair of the National Security Studies Department at the U.S. Naval War College and an expert on China's space development. "It's a tortoise and hare race. They're happy plodding along slowly and creating this perception of a space race."

But there may be more at stake than national honor. Some analysts say that China's attempts to access American space technology are less about boosting its space program than upgrading its military. China is already focusing on space as a potential battlefield. A recent Pentagon estimate of China's military capabilities said that China is investing heavily in anti-satellite weaponry. In January 2007, China demonstrated that it was able to destroy orbiting satellites when it brought down one its own weather satellites with a missile.

China clearly recognizes the significance of this capability. In 2005, a Chinese military officer wrote in the book "Joint Space War Campaigns", put out by the National Defense University, that a "shock and awe strike" on satellites "will shake the structure of the opponent's operations system of organization and will create huge psychological impact on the opponent's policymakers." Such a strike could hypothetically allow China to counterbalance technologically superior U.S. forces, which rely heavily on satellites for battlefield data. China is still decades away from challenging the U.S. in space. But U.S. officials worry espionage may be bringing China a little closer to doing so here on Earth."

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/thenews...S48sPkfXNvaA8F]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8298 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8297 Thu, 14 Feb 2008 02:01:32 GMT
Cells can be made immune to attack by the viruses that cause these and other diseases, say researchers at McGill University,Canada, who believe that drugs can be developed to have this effect in people too.

Their process to boost immunity involved knocking out two genes in mice that repress production of the protein interferon, the cell's first line of defence against viruses.

The study was conducted by Dr Rodney Colina, Dr Mauro Costa-Mattioli and Dr Nahum Sonenberg, with colleagues at l'Institut de Recherches Cliniques de Montréal and the Ottawa Health Research Institute and the findings are published in the journal Nature.

Without these genes, the mouse cells produced much higher levels of interferon, which effectively blocked viruses from reproducing. The researchers tested the process on influenza virus, encephalomyocarditis virus, vesicular stomatitis virus and Sindbis virus.

"People have been worried for years about potential new viral pandemics, such as avian influenzas," Dr Sonenberg says. "If we might now have the means to develop a new therapy to fight flu, the potential is huge."

Interferon, in particular the type 1 interferons, suppress the ability of the virus to spread and are regulated by a protein called Irf7 which in turn is regulated by "repressor" genes called 4E-BP1 and 4E-BP2.

"In a sense, it's quite a simple story," Dr Costa-Mattioli explains. "When you get rid of the repressors, you have more of the key protein Irf7 present, which induces an anti-viral state in the cell. You're basically removing the brakes."

The researchers detected no abnormalities or negative side-effects resulting from enhanced interferon production in the mice. In people, interferon has side effects, which are flu-like, and can be severe if high doses are administered for long periods of time. "However, for life threatening infections this is acceptable," says Dr Sonenberg.

Although the process of knocking out genes is not possible in humans the team is optimistic that drugs will be able to achieve the same effect. "That's a very exciting idea." Dr Costa-Mattioli says. "We don't have that yet, but it's the obvious next step."

Viruses are linked with cancer, notably cervical and liver cancers, raising the prospect that the same drugs could have protective effects.

However, Dr Sonenberg tells The Daily Telegraph: "this will require a prophylactic use of the drug for long times, and given the unknown risks of using such a drug for long times it would not be a good idea."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai.../scidef113.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8297 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8290 Wed, 13 Feb 2008 23:27:37 GMT
Onthe morning of 9 February 2004, The New York Times carried an exclusive and alarming story. The paper's Baghdad correspondent, Dexter Filkins, reported that US officials had obtained a 17-page letter, believed to have been written by the notorious terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi to the "inner circle" of al-Qa'ida's leadership, urging them to accept that the best way to beat US forces in Iraq was effectively to start a civil war.

The letter argued that al-Qa'ida, which is a Sunni network, should attack the Shia population of Iraq: "It is the only way to prolong the duration of the fight between the infidels and us. If we succeed in dragging them into a sectarian war, this will awaken the sleepy Sunnis."

Later that day, at a regular US press briefing in Baghdad, US General Mark Kimmitt dealt with a string of questions about The New York Times report: "We believe the report and the document is credible, and we take the report seriously... It is clearly a plan on the part of outsiders to come in to this country and spark civil war, create sectarian violence, try to expose fissures in this society." The story went on to news agency wires and, within 24 hours, it was running around the world.

There is very good reason to believe that that letter was a fake – and a significant one because there is equally good reason to believe that it was one product among many from a new machinery of propaganda which has been created by the United States and its allies since the terrorist attacks of September 2001.

For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it.

The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work reflects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our news. I've spent the last two years researching a book about falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media.

The "Zarqawi letter" which made it on to the front page of The New York Times in February 2004 was one of a sequence of highly suspect documents which were said to have been written either by or to Zarqawi and which were fed into news media.

This material is being generated, in part, by intelligence agencies who continue to work without effective oversight; and also by a new and essentially benign structure of "strategic communications" which was originally designed by doves in the Pentagon and Nato who wanted to use subtle and non-violent tactics to deal with Islamist terrorism but whose efforts are poorly regulated and badly supervised with the result that some of its practitioners are breaking loose and engaging in the black arts of propaganda.

Like the new propaganda machine as a whole, the Zarqawi story was born in the high tension after the attacks of September 2001. At that time, he was a painful thorn in the side of the Jordanian authorities, an Islamist radical who was determined to overthrow the royal family. But he was nothing to do with al-Q'aida. Indeed, he had specifically rejected attempts by Bin Laden to recruit him, because he was not interested in targeting the West.

Nevertheless, when US intelligence battered on the doors of allied governments in search of information about al-Q'aida, the Jordanian authorities – anxious to please the Americans and perhaps keen to make life more difficult for their native enemy – threw up his name along with other suspects. Soon he started to show up as a minor figure in US news stories – stories which were factually weak, often contradictory and already using the Jordanians as a tool of political convenience.

Then, on 7 October 2002, for the first time, somebody referred to him on the record. In a nationally televised speech in Cincinnati, President George Bush spoke of "high-level contacts" between al-Q'aida and Iraq and said: "Some al-Q'aida leaders who fled Afghanistan, went to Iraq. These include one very senior al-Q'aida leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks."

This coincided with a crucial vote in Congress in which the president was seeking authority to use military force against Iraq. Bush never named the man he was referring to but, as the Los Angeles Times among many others soon reported: "In a speech [on] Monday, Bush referred to a senior member of al-Q'aida who received medical treatment in Iraq. US officials said yesterday that was Abu al Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian, who lost a leg during the US war in Afghanistan."

Even now, Zarqawi was a footnote, not a headline, but the flow of stories about him finally broke through and flooded the global media on 5 February 2003, when the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, addressed the UN Security Council, arguing that Iraq must be invaded: first, to stop its development of weapons of mass destruction; and second, to break its ties with al-Q'aida.

Powell claimed that "Iraq today harbours a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al Zarqawi"; that Zarqawi's base in Iraq was a camp for "poison and explosive training"; that he was "an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Q'aida lieutenants"; that he "fought in the Afghan war more than a decade ago"; that "Zarqawi and his network have plotted terrorist actions against countries, including France, Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany and Russia".

Courtesy of post-war Senate intelligence inquiries; evidence disclosed in several European trials; and the courageous work of a handful of journalists who broke away from the pack, we now know that every single one of those statements was entirely false. But that didn't matter: it was a big story. News organisations sucked it in and regurgitated it for their trusting consumers.

So, who exactly is producing fiction for the media? Who wrote the Zarqawi letters? Who created the fantasy story about Osama bin Laden using a network of subterranean bases in Afghanistan, complete with offices, dormitories, arms depots, electricity and ventilation systems? Who fed the media with tales of the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, suffering brain seizures and sitting in stationery cars turning the wheel and making a noise like an engine? Who came up with the idea that Iranian ayatollahs have been encouraging sex with animals and girls of only nine?

Some of this comes from freelance political agitators. It was an Iranian opposition group, for example, which was behind the story that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was jailing people for texting each other jokes about him. And notoriously it was Iraqi exiles who supplied the global media with a dirty stream of disinformation about Saddam Hussein.

But clearly a great deal of this carries the fingerprints of officialdom. The Pentagon has now designated "information operations" as its fifth "core competency" alongside land, sea, air and special forces. Since October 2006, every brigade, division and corps in the US military has had its own "psyop" element producing output for local media. This military activity is linked to the State Department's campaign of "public diplomacy" which includes funding radio stations and news websites. In Britain, the Directorate of Targeting and Information Operations in the Ministry of Defence works with specialists from 15 UK psyops, based at the Defence Intelligence and Security School at Chicksands in Bedfordshire.

In the case of British intelligence, you can see this combination of reckless propaganda and failure of oversight at work in the case of Operation Mass Appeal. This was exposed by the former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter, who describes in his book, Iraq Confidential, how, in London in June 1998, he was introduced to two "black propaganda specialists" from MI6 who wanted him to give them material which they could spread through "editors and writers who work with us from time to time".

In interviews for Flat Earth News, Ritter described how, between December 1997 and June 1998, he had three meetings with MI6 officers who wanted him to give them raw intelligence reports on Iraqi arms procurement. The significance of these reports was that they were all unconfirmed and so none was being used in assessing Iraqi activity. Yet MI6 was happy to use them to plant stories in the media. Beyond that, there is worrying evidence that, when Lord Butler asked MI6 about this during his inquiry into intelligence around the invasion of Iraq, MI6 lied to him.

Ultimately, the US has run into trouble with its propaganda in Iraq, particularly with its use of the Zarqawi story. In May 2006, when yet another of his alleged letters was handed out to reporters in the Combined Press Information Centre in Baghdad, finally it was widely regarded as suspect and ignored by just about every single media outlet.

Arguably, even worse than this loss of credibility, according to British defence sources, the US campaign on Zarqawi eventually succeeded in creating its own reality. By elevating him from his position as one fighter among a mass of conflicting groups, the US campaign to "villainise Zarqawi" glamorised him with its enemy audience, making it easier for him to raise funds, to attract "unsponsored" foreign fighters, to make alliances with Sunni Iraqis and to score huge impact with his own media manoeuvres. Finally, in December 2004, Osama bin Laden gave in to this constructed reality, buried his differences with the Jordanian and declared him the leader of al-Q'aida's resistance to the American occupation."

Source:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/me...ws-780672.html]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8290 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8249 Sun, 10 Feb 2008 03:17:43 GMT
With each additional hour of sleep, the risk of a child being overweight or obese drops by nine per cent, concludes a study of studies by a team at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, published in the journal Obesity.

"Our analysis of the data shows a clear association between sleep duration and the risk for overweight or obesity in children. The risk declined with more sleep," says Dr Youfa Wang, senior author. The association between increased sleep and reduced obesity risk was strongest in boys.

"Desirable sleep behaviour may be an important low cost means for preventing childhood obesity and should be considered in future intervention studies. Our findings may also have important implications in societies where children do not have adequate sleep due to the pressure for academic excellence and where the prevalence of obesity is rising, such as in many East Asian countries."

"The influence of sleep quality on obesity risk is another important area where future research is needed," adds Dr Xiaoli Chen, lead author of the study, which reviewed 17 published studies on sleep duration and childhood obesity.

The recommended amount of daily sleep varied between studies and with children's age. It is recommended that children under age five should sleep for 11 hours or more per day, children age 5 to 10 should sleep for 10 hours or more per day, and children over age 10 should sleep at least 9 hours per day.

The results of the analysis showed that children with the shortest sleep duration had a 92 per cent higher risk of being overweight or obese compared to children with longer sleep duration. For children under age five, shortest sleep duration meant fewer than nine hours of sleep per day.

For children ages five to 10 it meant fewer than eight hours of sleep per day and less than seven hours of sleep per day for children over 10.

One analysis of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents And Children in the Nineties, which tracked 13,000 British children as they grew up, concluded that poor sleep at 30 months predicts obesity at the age of seven years.

The effect of chronic sleep deprivation on the brain's food-seeking circuitry is what seems to be influencing obesity as well as raising the risk of insulin resistance, diabetes and heart disease."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...cisleep108.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8249 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8205 Wed, 06 Feb 2008 23:20:14 GMT
Physicists around the world are excitedly awaiting the start up of the £4.65 billion Large Hadron Collider, LHC - the most powerful atom-smasher ever built - which is supposed to shed new light on the particles and forces at work in the cosmos and reproduce conditions that date to near the Big Bang of creation.

Prof Irina Aref'eva and Dr Igor Volovich, mathematical physicists at the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow believe that the vast experiment at CERN, the European particle physics centre near Geneva in Switzerland, may turn out to be the world's first time machine, reports New Scientist.

The debut in early summer could provide a landmark because travelling into the past is only possible - if it is possible at all - as far back as the point of creation of the first time machine.

That means 2008 could become "Year Zero" for temporal travel, they argue.

Time travel was born when Albert Einstein's colleague, Kurt Gödel, used Einstein's theory of relativity to show that travel into the past was possible.

Ever since he unveiled this idea in 1949, eminent physicists have argued against time travel because it undermines ideas of cause and effect to create paradoxes: a time traveller could go back to kill his grandfather so that he is never born in the first place.

But, sixty years later, there is still no fundamental reason why time travellers cannot put historians out of business.

But the Russians argue that when the energies of the LHC are concentrated into a subatomic particle - a trillionth the size of a mosquito - they can do strange things to the fabric of the universe, which is a blend of space and time that scientists called spacetime.

While Earth's gravity produces gentle distortions in spacetime the LHC energy can distort time so much that it loops back on itself. These loops are known to physicists as "closed ti***ike curves" and they ought, at least in theory, to allow us to revisit some past moment.

The scheme chimes with one laid out in 1988, when Prof Kip Thorne and colleagues at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, showed that wormholes, or tunnels through spacetime, would allow time travel, a scheme popularised by Carl Sagan in his novel - made into a film - Contact.

Prof Aref'eva and Dr Volovich believe the LHC could create wormholes and so allow a form of time travel. "We realised that closed ti***ike curves and wormholes could also be a result of collisions of particles," Prof Aref'eva says.

There are still plenty of obstacles for the likes of Dr Who, however. Not least of them is the fact that these are mini wormholes, so only subatomic particles are small enough to travel through them.

They tell The Daily Telegraph that whether subatomic time travel in the LHC would open the doors for human scale time travellers "is a deep and interesting question" but stress that "these problems, and many others as well, require further investigations."

Probably the best we can hope for is that the LHC may show a signature of the wormholes' existence, Dr Volovich says. If some of the energy from collisions in the LHC goes missing, it could be because the collisions created particles that have travelled into a wormhole and through time.

One sticking point until now for wormhole concepts is finding an exotic kind of material capable of keeping the maw of the wormhole open for time travel.

Dark energy - a mysterious antigravity force that is thought to pervade the universe - could, they say, be just what is needed to keep the entrance to a wormhole open, at least according to one family of ideas about its nature, where it is called phantom energy.

If a blend of colliding particles and phantom energy does create a wormhole in Geneva this year, an advanced civilisation could find it in their history books, pinpoint the moment, and take advantage of their technology to pay us a visit.

"The observational evidence still allows for phantom energy," says Robert Caldwell, a physicist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. "As for Aref'eva and Volovich's speculation that the LHC will produce the stuff of time machines - ugh!"

A leading scientist who believes that time travel may be possible, Prof David Deutsch of Oxford University, comments: "It's speculative in the extreme, but not cranky. For various reasons I don't think the mechanism they propose would work (i.e. provide a pathway for messages from the future) even if their speculations are true."

Dr Brian Cox of the University of Manchester adds: "The energies of billions of cosmic rays that have been hitting the Earth's atmosphere for five billion years far exceed those we will create at the LHC, so by this logic time travellers should be here already. If these wormholes appear I will personally eat the hat I was given for my first birthday before I received it."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...scitime106.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8205 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8199 Tue, 05 Feb 2008 18:16:42 GMT
The survival rate for lung cancer in Britain is dismal but now new hope is raised by a vaccine against a protein found in cancer cells that produces an anti tumour immune response.

A study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a team headed by the international Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in New York suggests that the vaccine might keep cancer recurrence at bay for years with simple booster shots appearing to restimulate the anti tumour immune response.

Patients with non-small cell lung cancer that had been removed by surgery were treated with this experimental vaccine, based on a protein from the cancer, also known as an Antigen-Specific Cancer Immunotherapeutic (ASCI), in a clinical study conducted by GlaxoSmithKline last year.

The reduction of around 27 per cent in the relative risk of cancer recurrence in the trial on 182 patients was so encouraging that GlaxoSmithKline launched the largest ever clinical trial in lung cancer, called the MAGRIT study, on 2,200 patients.

This type of vaccine is therapeutic, not preventative, and would likely be given post-surgery to prevent tumour recurrence and perhaps cancer spread.

"The vaccine could be given to all patients deemed suitable for surgery, so the same maxim of "early diagnosis, better results" will still apply," said an insitute spokesman. "We think it will work best when the bulk of the tumour is removed. So a patient with a late diagnosis with multiple tumours would probably not be a good candidate."

This particular vaccine may also work in head and neck cancer, bladder cancer and ***anoma.

According to LICR's Dr Sacha Gnjatic, the senior author, the way that the immune system can remember the cancer marker, a long 'immunological memory' against a cancer protein called MAGE-A3, is exactly what cancer immunologists are hoping to see.

"Vaccines against infectious diseases induce immunological responses that typically last for years, and ideally we want a cancer vaccine that does the same thing. We previously learned that our vaccine could stimulate an immune response recognising a protein found in lung cancer cells but we did not know how long the response lasted.

We now know that this vaccine induces strong and persistent immunity over several years, which can be further 'boosted' with additional vaccination."

This was confirmed in human trials. Booster shots, given two years after the first cycle of vaccinations, not only reactivated the initial immune response in patients who received the priming vaccination, it also diversified the types of immune cells specific for the cancer protein.

"We've not only kept the immune system interested, we've also got it to more broadly recognise the protein that marks the cell as being a cancer cell."

However, one of the team, Dr. Lloyd Old, says that one puzzle was that they were not able to activate an anticancer response in the patients who had only received the cancer protein initially, even when boosted with an adjuvant, a chemical that stimulates the immune system in a general way, and the other component, the 'tumor antigen' - in this case, the MAGE-A3 antigen - which directs the immune response specifically against the cancer cell.

Side-effects from the vaccine shots included mild pain, redness and swelling at the injection site, and mild fever, fatigue and muscle pain.

Last month, another clinical trial by the institute showed that a cancer vaccine based on another tumour molecule NY-ESO-1 stimulated an immune response in women with ovarian cancer. And a similar vaccine - for advanced ***anoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer - is currently being tested by the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in a phase II trial in Australia and 12 sites in the UK. Those results are expected early next year.

"We welcome this new development as a broader range of treatments for lung cancer is desperately needed," says Dr Noemi Eiser, honorary medical director of the British Lung Foundation. "Lung cancer is still the poor relation of all cancers when it comes to research funding, despite the fact it is the UK's biggest cancer killer claiming over 36,000 lives each year."

Dr Julie Sharp, Cancer Research UK's science information manager, says: "Research into therapeutic cancer vaccines is now starting to show real promise, and these are exciting results.

"Although we're still some way off a cancer vaccine that can be used routinely, this research will help scientists to improve the effectiveness of vaccines currently in development. A number of our scientists are exploring the potential of vaccines to treat cancer and the results of several large-scale clinical trials will show if this approach really can be used effectively in the clinic."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...icancer104.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8199 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8198 Tue, 05 Feb 2008 18:15:27 GMT
Evidence that humans will evolve to shrug off diseases such as type 2 diabetes and obesity has emerged.

A survey of the human genetic code has shown that our resistance to malaria, diabetes and other diseases is changing in response to our environment.

Dr Llu�*s Quintana-Murci of the Institut Pasteur, Paris, and colleagues analysed more than 2.8 million single letter spelling mistakes in the human genetic code to distinguish the usual random changes over the last 60,000 years from those that seem to be occurring in response to the environment, when a genetic mutation gives people an advantage over their peers.

People are surprisingly similar at the DNA level and the work "abolishes the idea of race" he says.

But when it comes to the few differences, those showing the strongest signature of this effect, called positive selection, are involved in skin pigmentation and hair development, as is already obvious from how white people live in darker climates. "You do not need genetics to know this, but it shows our method works."

In the journal Nature Genetics the team reports that several traits are sometimes linked to the same gene, so that when people in the Far East evolved a different version of a gene called EDAR to sweat differently, the same gene gave them much denser hair and changed their teeth too, an effect he calls "hitchhiking."

Genes that protect against disease are also evolving. For example, one called CR1 helps to cut the severity of malaria attacks and is now present in eight Africans in every ten, yet is absent elsewhere, a novel finding.

Several genes, such as ENPP1, are involved in the regulation of the hormone insulin and in metabolic syndrome - a combination of adult diabetes and obesity. These are present in 90 per cent of non-Africans and their relative absence could explain why African Americans are particularly at risk of obesity and high blood pressure.

The work suggests they are adapted to an African environment and have not adapted to an American lifestyle. "They have not had the time to readapt," says Dr Quintana-Murci.

Prof Steve Jones of University College London comments: "They have shown that man was once more like other animals than we might like to imagine, for Nature imposed her rules on us in the same way as she did on rats or flies.

"There are three great eras of history; the age of disaster, when we were killed by cold or sabre-toothed tigers, the age of disease - the epidemics which began with farming - and the age of decay, in which most of the developed world now lives, and dies of old age.

"DNA now shows how much we were moulded by the force of natural selection during first two; but my guess is that in future, now that we nearly all survive for long enough to pass on our genes, much less will happen. Perhaps you can ask me again in ten thousand years."

An earlier study by a team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist Prof John Hawks suggested that humankind has evolved more rapidly in the past 5,000 years, at a rate roughly 100 times higher than any other period of human evolution.

This work counters a common theory that human evolution has slowed to a crawl or even stopped in modern humans, since in modern society the survivors no longer have to be the fittest."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...scievol105.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8198 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8197 Tue, 05 Feb 2008 17:58:22 GMT
The discovery that "resistance training" such as weightlifting is as significant in helping obese people to shed pounds as "endurance training", such as running, has been made with mice genetically altered to be strong and muscular.

The team that made the find is now looking for signalling factors produced by muscle that could play a role in weight loss, since they might represent new targets for drugs that mimic the benefits of weight training for the treatment of obesity and diabetes as well as muscle wasting disorders.

The discovery, which also suggests why ageing makes it harder to lose weight, builds upon the fact that there are two types of muscle fibre.

Endurance training such as running increases the amount of type I muscle fibres, linked with endurance, while resistance training such as weightlifting increases type II muscle fibres that help us pick up heavy loads, and quickly.

Now, using genetically altered mice, a team at Boston University reports in the journal Cell Metabolism that an increase in type II muscle mass linked with pumping iron can reduce body fat which in turn reduces overall body mass and risk of adult diabetes

The team used a genetic trick in obese mice that caused the mice's muscles to bulk up with type II muscle as though they had been lifting weights and found that the "genetically reprogrammed" mice, as well as being stronger, lost fat and showed other signs of metabolic improvement throughout the body, such as less fatty livers.

What's more, those benefits were seen even though the mice continued eating a diet high in both fat and sugar and didn't increase their physical activity at all.

"We've shown that type II muscle does more than allow you to pick up heavy objects," says Prof Kenneth Walsh of Boston University School of Medicine, who developed the "MyoMouse". "It is also important in controlling whole-body metabolism."

"Resistance training builds the white meat," Prof Walsh says, referring to the relatively mitochondria-poor type II muscle. "There is some evidence it's good for you, but it's not immediately clear why. Now, we've provided a scientific rationale."

"These findings indicate that type II muscle has a previously unappreciated role in regulating whole-body metabolism through its ability to alter the metabolic properties of remote tissues," the researchers concluded.

"These data also suggest that strength training, in addition to the widely prescribed therapy of endurance training, may be of particular benefit to overweight individuals."

The study also sheds new light on middle age spread and sag. "Beyond the age of 30, humans lose approximately six lbs of muscle mass per decade. Surprisingly, ageing individuals predominantly lose type II muscle.

"Thus a 50 year old may be relatively good at playing tennis or jogging because type I muscle is preserved, but a measurement of grip strength or core body strength could show appreciable declines," explains Prof Walsh. Therefore, this new study suggests that the loss of type II muscle contributes to the development of obesity and diabetes as we age.

The team suspects that the beneficial effects of muscle growth seen in the MyoMouse are controlled by the production and secretion of a variety of signalling factors. Prof Walsh and his colleagues are currently identifying the novel proteins in muscle that communicate with other tissues.

These new proteins, referred to as "myokines" from the Greek words "muscle" and "motion," may represent new targets for therapies that mimic the benefits of weight training for the treatment of obesity and diabetes as well as muscle wasting disorders.

"The work shows that boosting muscles in "at-risk" human populations may prove to be critical weapons in the fight against obesity and obesity-related co-morbidities including diabetes, heart disease, stroke, hypertension, and cancer," say Brooke Harrison and Leslie Leinwand of the University of Colorado at Boulder in a commentary.

Obesity rates in the UK have quadrupled over the past 25 years. In England alone, 22 per cent of men and 23 per cent of women were classified as obese in 2002, according to figures from the Economic and Social Research Council. A total of 43 per cent of men and 34 per cent of women met the lesser criteria for being overweight."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...scitrim105.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8197 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8170 Sat, 02 Feb 2008 20:30:14 GMT
One is to protect its industrial base, which has raised the expectations of so many millions of its people, from those same global winds of change as the credit crunch turns them into more of a gale.

The second is to employ its savings to project its influence and allow it to become more than a low-cost base for other nations' manufacturers.

Both needs met neatly when BHP announced its bid for Rio Tinto.

With profit margins wafer thin in much of its manufacturing industry, China's companies fear the rises in raw material costs, for which its own insatiable demand is partly responsible.

In one sense, which company moved in to try to stop the takeover was not important. Most heavy industrial companies with the financial muscle for major purchases abroad remained state-controlled, with majority shares held by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC), the world's richest quango.

But Chinalco, the world's fourth-largest aluminium company, has been on a buying spree in recent years and already has interests in Australia, Africa and South-East Asia. "Rio Tinto is an international multi-metal mining company, which fits with our development goals," said Lu Youqing, its vice-president.

The stake it is buying in Rio Tinto is already the biggest single foreign purchase by a Chinese company, and while it follows in a path well-trodden by other resource-seekers, particularly the state oil and gas firms, its increased ambition is a clue to another concern of the Communist Party.

It is currently fighting further international demands to strengthen its currency as its trade surpluses and foreign exchange reserves - to say nothing of its inflation rates - grow ever higher, while at the same time preventing too fast a slowdown in the economy as exports to debt-ridden America fall.

Soaking up some of those reserves in foreign purchases takes some of the pressure off - and, finally, establishes China's industrialists, and not just its hundreds of millions of workers, as players on the world stage.

As they indicated yesterday, the Chinese would probably prefer not to have to make an outright takeover bid for a giant like Rio Tinto.

"Tao Guang Yang Hui" - "hide brightness, nourish obscurity" - was the best-known strategic maxim of former leader Deng Xiaoping, and there is still a dislike in Beijing of attracting "Chinese takeaway" headlines.

But a blocking stake, or a break-up that left it holding a number of smaller but well-placed pieces of the pie, would suit its mid-term tactics very well. By Richard Spencer in Beijing

Chinalco
State-owned Aluminium Corp of China, or Chinalco as it is known, is China’s biggest maker of aluminium. It listed in 2001 and last year it made profit of $3bn on revenues of $18.4bn. The company, which has been expanding outside aluminium, wants to apply to list in the Fortune Global 500.

Alcoa
US-based Alcoa, the world’s third-largest aluminium company, has been seeking to regain investor confidence after losing the battle for Alcan to Rio Tinto. Chief executive Alain Belda expects global demand for aluminium will rise as much as 10pc this year."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/mai...affdrv07053100]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8170 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8169 Sat, 02 Feb 2008 20:27:17 GMT
Yet even as she teeters on the brink of disaster, the troubled Britney Spears is doing more than most to prop up the equally faltering US economy.

The pop star, who was sectioned last week in Los Angeles, allegedly for her own safety, is an industrial powerhouse, pumping an estimated $120 million (£60 million) a year into the economy at least, and is indirectly responsible for even more.

The magazine Portfolio calculates that while Spears personally rakes in $9 million a year, what it calls the Britney Industrial Complex – all the associated economic activity that surrounds her – generates on average 13 times as much for those who feed off her.

A court has awarded her father, James, control of her affairs while she is in hospital.

“The Britney economy is the equivalent of a company that employs tens of thousands of people. She’s a goldmine,” said Portfolio writer Duff McDonald, a former investment banker with Goldman Sachs.

Among those who have cashed in are Elizabeth Arden, the cosmetics company, which has sold nearly $100 million worth of fragrances in Spears’s name, and Jive Records, which has made $400 million from the 83 million albums sold since she burst on to the scene in 1999.

Tour promoters and concert venues have pulled in $150 million from her various tours

. Spears, 26, can pocket up to $400,000 per appearance just to show her face at an event like a nightclub opening.

She has also fuelled an estimated boom of $75 million a year for the media, with celebrity magazines reporting sales increases of up to 33 per cent when they put her face on the cover.

The paparazzi who follow her every move – from shopping expeditions and trips to fast-food joints to more explosive public ***tdowns – pocket a further $4 million from picture sales.

Last week journalists and photographers massed outside her home once again as she was whisked to hospital for psychiatric checks for the second time in a month.

Yahoo! reports that Spears, whose hit of last year, Piece of Me includes the lyrics, “I’m still an exceptional earner, You want a piece of me?”, has topped its internet search rankings for six of the last seven years. Searches of her name increased by 60 per cent last year.

“Whether she’s shaving her head or battling for custody of her children, Britney seems to grow more fascinating and, to some people, more lucrative every time she stumbles,” Mr McDonald said.

“As one leg of the Britney economy declines, say record sales, another increases, like her paparazzi value. She appears recession-proof.”

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...britney302.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8169 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8166 Sat, 02 Feb 2008 17:48:25 GMT
The glamorous 29-year-old died from head injuries after clinging on to the door handle of the Cheyenne and being dragged along the street at high speed as the car screeched away.

"She suffered serious injuries and died at the scene," said a police spokesman.


Police believe that she was killed in a random carjacking and was not the victim of an attack based on her work for wealthy high-profile Russian clients.

Loginova ran an agency for female bodyguards, some trained by the ex-KGB, to give discreet protection to Moscow's billionaires and their wives and mistresses.


n a recent magazine interview, she insisted that she and her team of glamorous bodyguards gave better protection than the more traditional beefy male security men.

"I do think that a girl should be a girl, not a Terminator," she said. She posed semi-naked for a Moscow men's magazine to make it clear that she was feminine as well as good with a gun.

She was highly respected for her bodyguard skills. "A normal man gets sick and tired of male bodyguards around him all the time," she said.

"In addition, many restaurants now do not allow a guard inside. They can come in and check everything but then they are asked to wait in the lobby.

"In contrast, you can take female bodyguards inside, she will sit down at the table and nobody would guess that she's a weapon herself - and can react appropriately in any dangerous situation."

She spoke of a recent carjacking incident in Moscow.

"I got out, locked the car and at that moment a man ran up and squeezed my hand with keys. I reacted immediately with a Jujitsu move, bending back his hand and hitting his face with my elbow.

"He did not expect such a reaction. The next moment, I took out my handgun but a Honda car passed by and he jumped in."

Last year, 50 Porsche cars were stolen in Moscow, including 12 within the last two months. Only three were ever found."

Source:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/liv...n_page_id=1811]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8166 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8165 Sat, 02 Feb 2008 17:38:50 GMT
"The General Staff and the main combat training department of the Russian Armed Forces are deciding how we will configure the troops," said Lt. Gen. Vladimir Shamanov, who heads the Armed Forces combat training directorate.

The general did not indicate whether the troops in the Kaliningrad Region, Russia's Baltic exclave which borders on Poland, will be substantially reinforced.

The United States is planning to deploy 10 missile interceptors in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic to avert possible strikes from "rogue" states, such as Iran.

Russia has fervently opposed Washington's plans, saying the European shield would destroy the strategic military balance and threaten Russia's national interests.

Shamanov also said over 230 billion rubles ($9.4 billion) had been allocated for Armed Forces combat training in 2008."

Source:http://en.rian.ru/russia/20080130/98031412.html]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8165 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8151 Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:10:34 GMT
Their venture illuminates Nazism's occult roots--and neo-Nazi links to a present-day regime that many rightwing radicals increasingly regard as a center and symbol of anti-Western struggle.

The proposed expedition also serves as a disturbing reminder of the violent legacy and dangerous appeal of a tangled collection of quasi-spiritual and pseudo-academic theories and beliefs.

As if to further highlight historical parallels, the expedition reportedly plans to follow in the footsteps of Nazi archaeologists and SS officers who explored parts of Matto Grosso during the Second World War. That expedition is thought to have been inspired by earlier German expeditions, including one in the 1920s and one in the early 1900s that was organized and paid for by the Krupp armaments company.

The deranged German fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, is known to have been obsessed with occult theories concerning the purported existence of a vast, underground tunnel network reaching from the region and other Brazilian and South American areas to a mythical utopia thought to lie beneath the Himalayan mountains of Tibet.

Belief in the subterranean city-state, known as Agarta or Shambhala, is based on Tibetan Buddhist traditions that also inspired the 1933 novel "Lost Horizon" by British author James Hilton. The book and subsequent film adaptations described a hidden earthly paradise called Shangri-La.

Crazy as it seems, Hitler's Nazis supposedly sought to make contact with Agarta by finding an entrance to the tunnel system leading to it. In addition to the Brazilian expedition, they sent seven expeditions to Tibet, the most famous of which is now best known through the feature film Seven Years in Tibet that was particularly popular among followers of "New Age" philosophy.

Though it might not be hooked on lost tunnels or subterranean cities, the new Nazi expedition is apparently based on another lunatic fringe notion with disturbing New Age appeal--that a "master race" of Atlanteans once dominated the world and left evidence of their civilization in Tibet, Egypt, and South America. Hence, the neo-Nazi interest in lost cities.

The Atlantis theory comes from Ariosophy, a so-called Aryan centered philosophy that influenced Nazism. The founder of Ariosophy, Adolf Josef Lanz, who called himself Lanz von Liebenfels, was a professional Austrian anti-Semite and former monk who advocated forced sterilization of "inferior races." His doctrine, also known as Theozoology, or Ario-Christianity, was an offshoot of a kind of New Age religion of its day, called Theosophy.

A cult-like, 19th century mystical movement, Theosophy was founded by a notorious Russian-born adventuress, author, and phony medium, Helena Blavatsky, and her spiritualist lover, an American lawyer named Henry Olcott. A racist and an anti-Semite who incorporated the swastika in her movement's seal, Blavatsky argued that humanity had descended from a series of seven "Root Races," identifyng the fifth and supposedly superior one the Aryan race, which, she claimed, came from Atlantis. Some modern humans, such as indigenous Africans and Australians, she argued, were actually semi- or sub-human.

Her ideas influenced, among others, Savitri Devi (born Maximiani Portas), a French woman who emigrated to India during he 1930s, where she blended a philosophy of white supremacy and Hinduism and became a fanatic Hitler admirer, living out the war years in anticipation of a Nazi victory. In the 1960s, she emerged as a cult figure for neo-Nazis--"Hitler's guru," in the words of the German-Canadian Holocaust-denying publisher Ernest Zundel. Zundel, who republished and distributed Devi's out-of-print, 1958 book, "The Lightning and the Sun," is involved in the neo-Nazi-Iranian axis, which is itself the brainchild of an aging Nazi convert to Islam, the mysterious Swiss banker and ex-journalist, Ahmed Huber.

A quest for Shambhala (Agarta) led Blavatsky to South America. She claimed to have partially explored the secret, subterranean tunnels connecting the continent with Asia by entering the passages in Peru and Brazil. The story has become a staple of neo-Nazi Internet sites and books about so-called ancient mysteries, including works produced and published by Zundel and allegedly financed by Huber, whose home boasts portraits of Hitler and Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini.

Back to Iran. The Islamist regime of Iran's Hitler-admiring President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as previously reported, has supported, encouraged and provided safe haven for numerous neo-Nazi groups, while sponsoring international events aimed at denying and ridiculing the Holocaust, and threatening to destroy Israel and drive the United States from the Middle East.

The Iranian-neo-Nazi axis recalls the wartime penetration of Iran by Gestapo and German military intelligence officers and the pro-Nazi leanings of Iran's monarch at the time, Reza Pahlavi. (In contrast with Reza Shah, his son, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who was overthrown by Khomeini, was a US ally and friend of Israel and Iran's Jewish community.)

Persians have long used the term Aryan to describe the Indo-European origins of their language. Starting in the early 19th century, German romanticists popularized the notion of an "Aryan" Indo-Nordic race. They promoted study of Sanskrit, a classical language of India, and liturgical language of Hinduism and Buddhism, in opposition to Hebrew and other Semitic languages, and a theory of Asia, not the Middle East, as the cradle of civilization.

The idea for Persia's 1935 name change to Iran--"Land of the Aryans"--was supposedly suggested by Tehran's ambassador to Germany, who came under the influence of Hitler's trusted banker, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht"

Source:http://chinaconfidential.blogspot.co...ng-for_13.html]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8151 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8150 Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:09:38 GMT
Iran's axis with the Third Reich began during the prewar years, when it welcomed Nazi Gestapo agents and other operatives to Tehran, allowing them to use the city as a base for Middle East agitation against the British and the region's Jews.

Key among these German agents was Fritz Grobba, Berlin's envoy to the Middle East, who was often called "the German Lawrence," because he promised a Pan-Islamic state stretching from Casablanca to Tehran.

Relations between Berlin and Tehran were strong from the moment Hitler came to power in 1933. At that time, Reza Shah Pahlavi's nation was known as Persia. The shah became a stalwart admirer of Hitler, Nazism and the concept of the Aryan master race. He also sought the Reich's help in reducing British petro-political domination.

So intense was the shah's identification with the Third Reich that in 1935 he renamed his ancient country "Iran," which in Farsi means Aryan and refers to the Proto-Indo-European lineage that Nazi racial theorists and Persian ethnologists cherished.

The idea for the name change was suggested by the Iranian ambassador to Germany, who came under the influence of Hitler's trusted banker, Hjalmar Schacht. From that point, all Iranians were constantly reminded that their country shared a common bond with the Nazi regime.

Shortly after World War II broke out in 1939, the Mufti of Jerusalem crafted a strategic alliance with Hitler to exchange Iraqi oil for active Arab and Islamic participation in the murder of Jews in the Mideast and Eastern Europe. This was predicated on support for a pan-Arab state and Arab control over Palestine.

During the war years, Iran became a haven for Gestapo agents. It was from Iran that the seeds of the abortive 1941 pro-Nazi coup in Baghdad were planted. After Churchill's forces booted the Nazis out of Iraq in June 1941, German aircrews supporting Nazi bombers escaped across Iraq's northern border back into Iran.

Likewise, the mufti of Jerusalem was spirited across the border to Tehran, where he continued to call for the destruction of the Jews and the defeat of the British.

His venomous rhetoric filled the newspapers and radio broadcasts in Tehran. The mufti was a vocal opponent of allowing Jewish refugees to be transported or ransomed into Jewish Palestine. Instead, he wanted them shipped to the gas chambers of Poland.

In the summer of 1941, the mufti, with the support of key Iranian military and government leaders, advocated implementing in Iran what had failed months earlier in Iraq. The plan once again was for a total diversion of oil from the Allies to the Nazis, in exchange for the accelerated destruction of the Jews in Eastern Europe and the Nazis' support for an Arab state. Through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., Iran had already been supplying Hitler's forces in occupied Czechoslovakia and Austria.

Now, the mufti agitated to cut off the British and the Allies completely and supply Germany in its push against Russia.

In October 1941, British, USSR other allied forces invaded Iran to break up the Iran-Nazi alliance. Pro-Nazi generals and ministers were arrested, and the shah's son was installed in power. The mufti scampered into the Italian embassy, where he shaved his beard and dyed his hair. In this disguise, he was allowed to leave the country along with the rest of the Italian delegation.

Once the mufti relocated permanently to Berlin, where he established his own Reich-supported "bureau," he was given airtime on Radio Berlin. From Berlin and other fascist capitals in Europe, the mufti continued to agitate for international Jewish destruction, as well as a pan-Islamic alliance with the Nazi regime.

He called upon all Muslims to "kill the Jews wherever you see them." In Tehran's marketplace, it was common to see placards that declared, "In heaven, Allah is your master. On Earth, it is Adolf Hitler."

When the mufti raised three divisions of Islamic Waffen SS to undertake cruel operations in Bosnia, among the 30,000 killers were some volunteer contingents from Iran. Iranian Nazis, along with the other Muslim Waffen SS, operated under the direct supervision of Heinrich Himmler and were responsible for barbarous actions against Jews and others in Bosnia. Recruitment for the murderous "Handschar Divisions" was done openly in Iran.

Iran and its leaders were not only aware of the Holocaust, they played both sides. The country offered overland escape routes for refugee Jews fleeing Nazi persecution to Israel -- and later fleeing postwar Iraqi fascist persecution -- but only in exchange for extortionate passage fees.

Thousands of Jews journeyed to Israel via Iran both during the Holocaust and during the years after the fall of Hitler, when Arab leaders, especially in Iraq, tried to continue Germany's anti-Jewish program. Iran profited handso***y.

Since the shah's downfall, Iran has become a center for organized international Holocaust denial and has helped elevate the endeavor from fringe hate speech to a state-approved pseudo-intellectual debate.

In international forums and on state-controlled radio, Iranian university experts and journalists help validate the revisionist views that Jews were never gassed or murdered in great numbers during the Holocaust.

Indeed, Iran has become a refuge for the biggest names in European Holocaust denial. When in 2000, revisionist author Jürgen Graf was sentenced in Switzerland to 15 months in prison for Holocaust falsification, Graf fled to Tehran "at the invitation of a group of Iranian scholars and university professors who are sympathetic to Holocaust revisionism," according to the Institute for Historical Review, a denial clearinghouse.

What's more, in May 2000, Iran's embassy in Vienna granted asylum to Austrian Holocaust denier Wolfgang Fröhlich, who testified as a so-called expert witness during Graf's 1998 trial. This saved Fröhlich from Austria's severe anti-Holocaust denial statutes. Fröhlich argued that evidence proved no Jews were killed by Zyklon B gassing.

Earlier, about 600 journalists and 160 members of the Iranian parliament signed petitions supporting French revisionist Roger Garaudy, who was fined $40,000 by French authorities for his book claiming the Holocaust was a myth. When Garaudy landed in Iran, the country's supreme spiritual leader, Ayatollah Sayyad Khamenei, granted him an audience and lauded his work.

Iran has played a leading role in the Holocaust drama and now tries to deny it. That should be very hard in a nation that was named for Hitler's master race."

Source:http://www.bankingonbaghdad.com/arch...nicle20060108/]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8150 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8142 Fri, 01 Feb 2008 01:49:00 GMT
Scientists believe they have tracked down the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans on the planet today.

“Originally, we all had brown eyes”, said Prof Hans Eiberg from the University of Copenhagen, who led the team.

Blue eye colour most likely originated from the near east area or northwest part of the Black Sea region, where the great agriculture migration to the northern part of Europe took place in the Neolithic periods about six–10,000 years ago.

“That is my best guess,” he said. “It could be the northern part of Afghanistan.”

The mutation affected a gene called OCA2 and “literally 'turned off' the ability to produce brown eyes”, he says.

OCA2 is involved in the production of ***anin, the pigment that gives colour to hair, eyes and skin.

The mutation in the adjacent gene does not switch off the OCA gene entirely but limits its action, reducing the production of ***anin in the iris of the eye – “diluting” brown eyes to blue.

If the OCA2 gene had been completely turned off, those who inherited this mutation would be without ***anin in their hair, eyes or skin colour - albino.

For the study, Prof Eiberg’s team examined DNA in blue-eyed individuals in countries as diverse as Jordan, India, Denmark and Turkey.

His findings are the latest in a decade of genetic research, which began in 1996, when Prof Eiberg first implicated the OCA2 gene as being one of those responsible for eye colour.

“They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA. From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor,” said Prof Eiberg, who reports the work in the journal Human Genetics."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...scieyes130.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8142 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8141 Fri, 01 Feb 2008 01:43:24 GMT
Tests are under way on diabetics of SRT501, an improved formulation of resveratrol, a wine chemical, that could lead to a family of new drugs with powerful effects against the diseases of ageing as well as adult diabetes, the developed world's fastest-growing degenerative disease.

The drug targets SIRT1, the founding member of the human sirtuin family of enzymes which control the ageing process. Now two teams report in the journal Nature how SIRT1 plays a role in tumour growth.

The American groups, respectively led by Drs Junjie Chen of Yale University and Wei Gu of Columbia University and their colleagues, have discovered that another protein, named DBC1, acts as a regulator of SIRT: lower levels help damaged cells to self destruct and higher ones make cells susceptible to damage to a process called oxidative stress.

Although this suggests that drugs such as SRT501 could promote tumour growth in some circumstances, Dr Chen said that more research needs to be done to confirm this. "This assmption really needs to be studied."

And tests by the developers of SIRT1, the American company Sirtris suggest the drug does have anticancer effects. Prof David Sinclair, who pioneered the SRT501 work at Harvard Medical School, comments: "Genetic upregulation of SIRT1 suppresses cancer in the gold standard mouse. There are over 50 published in vitro and in vivo papers showing that SIRT1 activation improves cancer.

"Based on the data, Sirtris is planning to initiate a trial in cancer with SIRT1 activators in patients in either the US or Europe or both in the first half of 2008.," he adds.

The SIRT1 drugs emerged from research to understand why all species live longer on a calorie-restricted diet. So long as there is adequate nutrition, cutting calories by 40 per cent prolongs lifespan by 50 per cent or more in yeast, mice, rats and every other species so far tested."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...sciwine130.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8141 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8140 Fri, 01 Feb 2008 01:39:49 GMT
Scientists have been documenting significant changes in water flow in the western United States for the past 50 years. Now it has been found that to 60 percent of the changes in river flow, snow pack and winter air temperatures in the region during this period can be attributed to human-caused climate change.

Dr Tim Barnett of the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues conclude that for the inhabitants, from Seattle to Los Angeles, the results "are not good news" and call for immediate action to secure future supplies.

And they point out in the journal Science that the rest of the world must also plan for other major shifts in this most crucial resource of all: while water availability will increase substantially in northern Eurasia, Alaska, Canada and some tropical regions, it will decrease substantially in southern Europe, the Middle East, southern Africa and southwestern North America.

Already, the changes of the past half-century on America's west coast have meant less snow pack and more rain in the mountains, rivers that run dry by summer, and overall drier summers in the region.

The new analysis of these water flow trends within global and regional climate computer models suggests that most of the trends can be explained by climate change related to human-produced greenhouse gases and aerosols.

The past is no longer a reliable base on which to plan the future of water management, says another study. "With the climate changing, past years aren't necessarily representative of the future any more," concludes co-author of another Science paper, Prof Dennis Lettenmaier, University of Washington.

Global spending on water infrastructure is currently more than $500 billion per year but in America managers in federal, state and local agencies have operated on the premise that historical patterns could be counted on to continue.

But human-induced changes to Earth's climate have begun to shift the averages and the extremes for rainfall, snowfall, evaporation and stream flows, the authors write. The old way of doing business is dead, they conclude.

Even with an aggressive reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, warming will persist and global water patterns will continue to show "never-before-seen behaviour."

Many of the world's poorest regions could face severe crop losses in the next two decades because of climate change, according to a third study in the journal by researchers at Stanford University. "The majority of the world's one billion poor depend on agriculture for their livelihoods," said lead author Dr David Lobell. "Unfortunately, agriculture is also the human enterprise most vulnerable to changes in climate."

In the study, the researchers focused on 12 regions where a large share of the world's malnourished populations reside, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, including much of Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and Central and South America. Analysis reveals two hunger hotspots where climate impacts look particularly dire: Southern Africa and South Asia.

"We were surprised by how much and how soon these regions could suffer if we don't adapt," says study co-author Marshall Burke. "For example, our study suggests that Southern Africa could lose more than 30 percent of its main crop, maize, in the next two decades, with possibly devastating implications for hunger in the region."

Potential losses in South Asia are also significant, he added, with projected losses of 10 percent or more for many regional staples, including millet, maize and rice. "For poor farmers on the margin of survival, these losses could really be crushing," Burke says."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...ciwater131.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8140 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8139 Fri, 01 Feb 2008 01:37:53 GMT
Some believe the right ingredients for life made their way from outer space. Darwin thought it emerged in a "warm little pond" and others have looked for answers on the sea floor.

Now evidence to back the latter submarine idea has emerged from the "Lost City" which lies at a depth of 2,600 feet, where creamy white to grey spires, pinnacles and 18 storey chimneys teem with microscopic marine life, as a volcanic system on the Atlantic sea floor that gradually pushes America and Britain apart.

The temperature and composition of fluids from a group of underwater hot springs there that are heated by the slow cooling of the underlying rocks, called a hydrothermal vent field, are similar to those predicted to have occurred during the early years of life on Earth.

Today, a team reports that hydrocarbons - the stuffy of oil and gas and molecules critical to life - are routinely being generated by the simple chemical interaction of seawater with the rocks under the Lost City in the mid-Atlantic.

Being able to produce building blocks of life makes these sites, which are found in the world's oceans, even stronger contenders as places where life might have originated on Earth, according to Dr Giora Proskurowski and Prof Deborah Kelley, two authors of a paper in the journal Science.

Hydrocarbons, molecules with various combinations of hydrogen and carbon atoms, are key to cellular life. For instance, cell walls can be built from simple hydrocarbon chains and amino acids are short hydrocarbon chains hooked up with nitrogen, oxygen or sulphur atoms.

"The generation of hydrocarbons was the very first step, otherwise Earth would have remained lifeless," says Dr Proskurowski.

An analysis has ruled out a living origin for the hydrocarbons, which are the stuff of oil and gas reserves which, in turn, formed from the remains of prehistoric marine plants and animals that sank to the sea bed. But in the case of the Lost City, the ultimate source of the hydrocarbons is non living.

"The detection of these organic building blocks from a non-biological source is possible evidence in our quest to understand the origin of life on this planet and other solar bodies," Proskurowski says.

Could this mean the world's reserves of oil and gas have been underestimated, chiming with an idea popularised by the scientist Thomas Gold that non living geological processes can make petroleum? "I'd speculate that petroleum accumulation at Lost City-type deep sea system is unlikely," says Proskurowski.

The Lost City hydrothermal vent field is about 2,300 miles east of Florida, on the Mid-Atlantic *****. Microorganisms there thrive in alkaline vent fluids, some nearly as caustic as liquid drain cleaner. This contrasts to the previously studied black-smoker vents where organisms have adjusted to acidic water.

Lost City microbes dine on methane and hydrogen instead of the carbon dioxide that is the key energy source for life at black-smoker vents.

The towering structures of the Lost City are nearly pure carbonate, the same material as limestone in caves. The structures drape the cliffs at Lost City and range from the size of tiny toadstools to the 18-story column, named Poseidon, that dwarfs most known black smoker vents by at least 100 feet.

The field was named Lost City in part because it is on top of a submerged mountain named Atlantis and was discovered by chance during an expedition on board the research vessel Atlantis."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...scilost131.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8139 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8137 Fri, 01 Feb 2008 01:20:50 GMT
Smokers, heavy drinkers, the obese and the elderly should be barred from receiving some operations, according to doctors, with most saying the health service cannot afford to provide free care to everyone.

Fertility treatment and "social" abortions are also on the list of procedures that many doctors say should not be funded by the state.

The findings of a survey conducted by Doctor magazine sparked a fierce row last night, with the British Medical Association and campaign groups describing the recommendations from family and hospital doctors as "out*rageous" and "disgraceful".

About one in 10 hospitals already deny some surgery to obese patients and smokers, with restrictions most common in hospitals battling debt.

Managers defend the policies because of the higher risk of complications on the operating table for unfit patients. But critics believe that patients are being denied care simply to save money.

The Government announced plans last week to offer fat people cash incentives to diet and exercise as part of a desperate strategy to steer Britain off a course that will otherwise see half the population dangerously overweight by 2050.

Obesity costs the British taxpayer £7 billion a year. Overweight people are more likely to contract diabetes, cancer and heart disease, and to require replacement joints or stomach-stapling operations.

Meanwhile, £1.7 billion is spent treating diseases caused by smoking, such as lung cancer, bronchitis and emphysema, with a similar sum spent by the NHS on alcohol problems. Cases of cirrhosis have tripled over the past decade.

Among the survey of 870 family and hospital doctors, almost 60 per cent said the NHS could not provide full healthcare to everyone and that some individuals should pay for services.

One in three said that elderly patients should not be given free treatment if it were unlikely to do them good for long. Half thought that smokers should be denied a heart bypass, while a quarter believed that the obese should be denied hip replacements.

Tony Calland, chairman of the BMA's ethics committee, said it would be "outrageous" to limit care on age grounds. Age Concern called the doctors' views "disgraceful".

Gordon Brown promised this month that a new NHS constitution would set out people's "responsibilities" as well as their rights, a move interpreted as meaning restric*tions on patients who bring health problems on themselves. The only sanction threatened so far, however, is to send patients to the bottom of the waiting list if they miss appointments.

The survey found that medical professionals wanted to go much further in denying care to patients who do not look after their bodies.

Ninety-four per cent said that an alcoholic who refused to stop drinking should not be allowed a liver transplant, while one in five said taxpayers should not pay for "social abortions" and fertility treatment.

Paul Mason, a GP in Portland, Dorset, said there were good clinical reasons for denying surgery to some patients. "The issue is: how much responsibility do people take for their health?" he said.

"If an alcoholic is going to drink themselves to death then that is really sad, but if he gets the liver transplant that is denied to someone else who could have got the chance of life then that is a tragedy." He said the case of George Best, who drank himself to death in 2005, three years after a liver transplant, had damaged the argument that drinkers deserved a second chance.

However, Roger Williams, who carried out the 2002 transplant on the former footballer, said doctors could never be sure if an alcoholic would return to drinking, although most would expect a detailed psychological assessment of patients, who would be required to abstain for six months before surgery.

Prof Williams said: "Less than five per cent of alcoholics who have a transplant return to serious drinking. George was one of them. It is actually a pretty successful rate. I think the judgment these doctors are making is nothing to do with the clinical reasons for limiting such operations and purely a moral decision."

Katherine Murphy, from the Patients' Association, said it would be wrong to deny treatment because of a "lifestyle" factor. "The decision taken by the doctor has to be the best clinical one, and it has to be taken individually. It is morally wrong to deny care on any other grounds," she said.

Responding to the survey's findings on the treatment of the elderly, Dr Calland, of the BMA, said: "If a patient of 90 needs a hip operation they should get one. Yes, they might peg out any time, but it's not our job to play God."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.../27/nhs127.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8137 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8136 Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:46:24 GMT


According to the Mail on Sunday, the sighting came after alien hunters spent "years" scouring NASA images for evidence of little green men before unearthing this example.

In fact, the Red Planet's first confirmed inhabitant features in this panorama snapped by Spirit back in November last year. We've marked the approximate position of the extraterrestrial with an arrow:



And before you all going running off to the NASA website to get the highest-res snap possible, here's our Martian as seen in the biggest file we could find - the 133 meg tiff.



Source:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/22/life_on_mars/]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8136 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8135 Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:41:39 GMT
According to the Office of Naval Research, which is in charge of the project, the electric cannon will deliver over ten megajoules of energy in one shot. The ONR say this is "a power level never before achieved" by a railgun, and already represents significantly more poke than a normal five-inch naval gun can put behind its shells.

The designers hope in future to get the technology up to 64 megajoule muzzle-energy levels, able to shoot hypervelocity projectiles at a blistering Mach 7 and strike targets two hundred miles away - still going at Mach 5 - with pinpoint precision.

The US navy is interested in the kit for a number of reasons. For one, its next generation warships are expected to use electric drive systems, meaning that they will be have 80 megawatts or more on hand. If this power can be used to put violence onto the enemy as well as driving the ship, that's good news for logistics and supply. The only ammo you need is solid shot with guidance fins; there's no need for tons of high-explosive warheads and low-explosive chemical propellants for regular shells and missiles. These are replaced by nice simple fuel for the ship's engines.

The lack of exploding warheads could offer a chance to deliver more surgical strikes, too. They could take out a single vehicle from far out at sea, perhaps, rather than pulverising a whole area like present-day cruise missiles. This kind of thing is very trendy nowadays in military circles, though the problem of getting the right vehicle remains a tricky one.

Furthermore, even the ritziest missiles struggle to get above Mach 3-4, especially over any distance; thus the railgun slugs would be quicker to arrive when bombarding shore targets. They might also be good for shooting down fast-moving flying things.

Indeed, if the cannon could aim quickly enough and the hyper-bullets could steer well enough in flight, lighter-calibre weapons might tip the balance of naval warfare back in favour of surface craft. Ever since the Battle of Midway, sailors have reluctantly been forced to accept that aircraft win sea battles, not ships. But railguns might demote aircraft carriers from their current big-dog naval status and bring in electric dreadnoughts as the capital ships of tomorrow, able to sweep the skies of pesky aircraft or missiles as soon as they dared show themselves above the horizon.

It's easy to see why navies like the idea of electric hypercannons, then. But there are a lot of problems to be overcome. For one, the gun barrel tends to come apart after just a few shots. For another, packing a steady hundred-megawatt supply down into ultra-brief 64 megajoule pulses isn't simple."

Source:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01...rsonic_cannon/]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8135 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8133 Thu, 31 Jan 2008 23:11:55 GMT
Twenty-one boxes containing 7,000 seed samples from 36 African nations were sent by the Nigeria-based International Institute of Tropical Agriculture.

The final leg of the journey will take the seeds to the remote Arctic Island.

The vault is intended to act as insurance so that food production can be restarted anywhere on Earth after a regional or global catastrophe.

Built deep inside a mountain, the structure will eventually house a vast collection of seeds; safeguarding world crops against possible future disasters including nuclear wars and dangerous climate change.

The temperature inside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault will drop to -18C (0F) in order to preserve the seeds.

The Norwegian government is paying the $9m (£4.5m) construction costs of the vault, which will have enough space to house 4.5 million seed samples.

The seeds, weighing 330kg (730lb), are made up of varieties of domesticated and wild cowpea, maize, soybean and bambara groundnut.

"The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture genebank houses the world's largest collection of cowpeas, with over 15,000 unique varieties from 88 countries around the world," said Dr Dominique Dumet, the institute's genebank manager.

During January, other national seed banks supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) began packing and shipping duplicate collections that will be stored at Svalbard.

These included collections from Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Mexico, Peru, the Philippines and Syria.

Collectively, CGIAR centres maintain 600,000 plant varieties in crop genebanks in a global effort to conserve agricultural biodiversity.

The collection and maintenance of the seeds is being co-ordinated by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which has responsibility of ensuring the "conservation of crop diversity in perpetuity".

"The seed vault is the perfect place for keeping seeds safe for centuries," said Cary Fowler, the Trust's executive director.

"At these temperatures, seeds for important crops like wheat, barley and peas can last for up to 1,000 years."

The seed vault has been built 120m (390ft) inside a mountain on Spitsbergen, one of four islands that make up Svalbard.

The site, roughly 1,000km (600 miles) north of mainland Norway, was chosen as the location for the vault because it was very remote and it also offered the level of stability required for the long-term project.

The vault is scheduled to be formally opened on 26 February."

Source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7217821.stm]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8133 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8132 Thu, 31 Jan 2008 23:06:18 GMT
The government is trying to convince people the situation is under control - praising officials and naming three men who died as "revolutionary martyrs".

But forecasters are warning of more snow and urging people not to travel.

The bad weather has affected millions of Chinese keen to return to their home villages over the New Year holiday.

Dozens are thought to have died as much of the country endures one of its harshest winters for half a century.

Scuffles and frustration

Communist Party official Chen Xiwen warned of a serious impact on crop production in the south of the country.

"The impact on fresh vegetables and on fruit in some places has been catastrophic," he said.

"If it heads northward, then the impact on the whole year's grain production will be noticeable."

Analysts say the destruction of crops will drive up food prices and fuel inflation, which has already risen rapidly over the past year.

Meanwhile, officials have been working hard to ensure the public that they are in control of the situation.

State television showed images of army troops working to clear snow, while newspapers published tales of workers' bravery amid the freeze.

Three electricians were proclaimed revolutionary martyrs after they died trying to clear snow and ice from power lines in Hunan province.

And on Wednesday, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visited travellers stranded in the southern city of Guangzhou to apologise for the delays.

More than half a million people, many of them migrant workers, have been unable to leave the city for the Lunar New Year holiday because of a blocked train line.

Scuffles were reported as frustrated travellers fought for seats on the few trains that did depart from the station.

Some travellers were unconvinced by Mr Wen's visit.

"It's nice to know that the state is thinking about us, but I am not optimistic," one would-be traveller, Quan, told Reuters news agency.

Power outages

The snowstorms, which began on 10 January, have affected nearly 80 million people across 14 provinces in the centre and south of the country.

By the end of Tuesday, at least 38 people had been killed in snow-related accidents such as house collapses and falls, the Ministry of Civil Affairs said, and more have died in traffic accidents.

In some areas, people are already experiencing shortages of food as the weather delays deliveries of key commodities.

More than a dozen provinces have also been hit by blackouts due to missed coal deliveries for power stations and rising demand amid the cold.

Half a million troops have been deployed to help the relief effort. The army is also distributing quilts and padded coats.

Some trains and roads are now moving again, but at least 12 national highways in southern and central regions remain blocked.

Services on the key Guangzhou-Beijing line were unlikely to return to normal for several days, officials said.

Mr Zheng said that with temperatures unlikely to rise, people should stay at home.

"For the sake of their safety, and relieving the stress on transport, I advise migrant workers to stay in the cities where they work," he told China Daily."

Source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7219092.stm]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8132 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8131 Thu, 31 Jan 2008 23:04:05 GMT
Until now, Beijing had denied there had been any fatalities on the building sites being readied for this August's Games.

Officials said the families of the dead workers had been compensated.

Games organisers last week dismissed a report in a British newspaper that at least 10 workers had died building the main Olympic venue.

Officials now say two workers died at the National Stadium in Beijing.

Ding Zhenkuan, deputy chief of the Chinese capital's Municipal Bureau of Work Safety, said they were among six workers who had died over five years.

There was also one serious injury and three lighter injuries, he added.

The Sunday Times reported that the authorities had tried to cover up the deaths of 10 workers at the 90,000-seat main venue, which is also known as the "birds' nest".

China's work safety record is poor - more than 100,000 people die every year in workplace incidents.

The admission came as Beijing unveiled the venue for the Games swimming and diving events.

The BBC's Daniel Griffiths discovered some problems at the opening ceremony of the National Aquatic Centre.

He noticed cracks running along the length of two of the diving platforms.

Officials told reporters everything would be fixed before the event began.

Since construction began in 2003, organisers have built or refurbished 37 venues for the Games, 31 of them in Beijing."

Source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7213399.stm]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8131 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8130 Thu, 31 Jan 2008 23:02:03 GMT
Using a series of new, specially-built prisons, the Saudi authorities are currently re-educating several thousand young men who would otherwise be tempted to attack Western and other targets around the region.

Building a whole network of new prisons is rarely a sign of a happy society. But in Saudi Arabia the authorities believe they are achieving a success rate of more than 70% in turning potential al-Qaeda militants away from violent jihad.

Across the country they have been constructing new, purpose-built prison wings to house thousands of mostly young Saudi men and steer them away from their radical beliefs.

The programme, which was conceived in the aftermath of a wave of al-Qaeda attacks in Saudi Arabia, has global implications.

Most of the 9/11 hijackers were originally Saudi nationals and US commanders in Iraq believe that Saudi jihadists make up the largest contingent of foreign fighters there.

Unlike in Yemen, which has a similar but far less successful programme, the Saudi jihadist rehabilitation programme is run by the country's powerful ministry of interior, under the direction of Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef, a son of the interior minister.

Its officials have the power to send the most fanatical criminals to a high-security jail, or to offer others a second chance of a new life in mainstream Saudi society.

Once they have completed their deradicalisation programme in one of the new jails, former jihadists can be offered government help in starting a business, securing a job, a car, or even a wife.

According to Dr Mustafa Alani, director of security at the Gulf Research Centre, "around 3,000 jihadists are being targeted under the scheme".

"They are not the real hardliners but they are still members of al-Qaeda-inspired cells who could otherwise become fighters."

Dr Alani says that a similar scheme in Yemen has largely failed, with 70% of supposedly reformed jihadists who were released getting re-arrested for terrorist offences. In Saudi Arabia, he says, the re-arrest figure is just 5-7%.

At its core, the programme aims to convince jihadists that theirs is what the Saudi authorities call a "deviant" form of Islam.

To this end, inmates must sit through a series of religious and theological lectures conducted by scholars, clerics and psychologists.

The message they are given is that violent jihad is only permissible in Islam if it has the approval of the state and the authority of the jihadist's parents. Going off to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, they are told, was permissible but going to fight in Iraq today is not.

Not everyone approves of the scheme. US counter-terrorism officials worry that those released - including former inmates of Guantanamo Bay - will simply go on to plan new attacks.

Saudi resentment

An earlier jihadist leader, Abdulaziz al-Muqrin, was released prematurely from a Saudi prison and went on to become al-Qaeda's new leader in the country, conducting a violent campaign before he was killed in a shootout with police in 2004.

Conversely, some Saudis resent what they see as a favoured status afforded to those who were on the cusp of becoming violent criminals.

And Dr Saad al-Faqih from the London-based Saudi opposition group Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia argues that the programme forces a government interpretation of Islam onto inmates with no room for debate.

Dr Faqih, who believes that the Saudi government is holding around 12,000 jihadi prisoners, says: "There is no way you can have a scientific study of how successful this programme is."

Source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7220797.stm]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8130 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8129 Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:59:30 GMT
At age 24, she learned a shocking truth that helped explain her unease and set her on an agonizing search for an identity snatched away from her the day she was born.

Russell is among thousands of Australian Aborigines who were forcibly removed from their families under policies that lasted for decades until 1970, leaving deep scars on countless lives and the nation's psyche.

Australia's government said Wednesday it would formally apologize to the so-called "stolen generations" as the first item of business of the new Parliament, on Feb 13.

The issue has divided Australians for decades, and an apology would be a crucial step toward righting injustices many blame for the marginalized existence of Australia's original inhabitants — its poorest and most deprived citizens.

"It's not going to bring back my life," Russell, 72, told The Associated Press Wednesday at her home on Sydney's outskirts. "It's not going to bring back my mum. It's not going to take away the abuse that I had to endure when I was growing up."

"But at least it's a start."

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, elected last November and whose pledge to apologize overturns a decade of refusals by his predecessor, has ruled out paying compensation. But he says he is determined to help all Aborigines achieve better health, education and living standards.

"This is about getting the symbolic covenant, if you like, between indigenous and non-indigenous Australia right and then moving on," Rudd said this week.

Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin said Wednesday the apology would "be made on behalf of the Australian government and does not attribute guilt to the current generation of Australian people."

Her statement reflects the lingering concerns of many Australians that they should not be made responsible for mistakes by their forebears.

Aborigines — 450,000 among Australia's population of 21 million — are the country's poorest ethnic group and are most likely to be jailed, unemployed and illiterate. Their life expectancy is 17 years shorter than other Australians.

From 1910 until 1970, some 100,000 mostly mixed-blood Aboriginal children were taken from their parents under state and federal laws that argued the race was doomed and that integrating the children was a humane alternative.

An inquiry by the national Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission concluded in 1997 that many stolen generation children suffered long-term psychological effects stemming from their loss of family and culture. It recommended that state and federal authorities apologize and pay compensation to those who were removed. All state governments have apologized, but the question of compensation was left to the federal government.

Then-Prime Minister John Howard steadfastly refused to apologize or pay compensation, saying his government should not be held responsible for past policies.

Although the last laws granting authorities the power to take Aboriginal children from their families were abolished in 1970, many Aborigines say statistics show the government is still far more likely to take Aboriginal children into foster care than white children.

Last summer, the government passed a package of bills to fight what it said was rampant child abuse among Aborigines in the Northern Territory, fueled by widespread alcoholism, unemployment and poverty. The legislation, which included a controversial plan to take control of some Aboriginal lands, was condemned by critics as a racist attack on indigenous rights.

Aboriginal leaders generally welcomed Wednesday's pledge to issue a formal apology.

"Older people thought they would never live to see this day," said Christine King, whose group the Stolen Generations Alliance was consulted by the government about the apology.

Others still want compensation. Michael Mansell of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Center wants the government to set aside $882 million for compensation.

Russell grew up in Sydney with parents of Scottish and Irish backgrounds. She says her father beat her and sexually abused her. Russell's mother once scolded her for bringing an Aboriginal girl home to play, calling them "dirty" people.

She recalls having vivid dreams of an Aboriginal woman who sat on a rock and said, "Come back to your culture." Confused by the dream then, she now believes it was her ancestors beckoning her.

For Russell, the first hard evidence that she was adopted came after her mother died in 1959 and her aunt sent a letter saying she did not belong in the family and was no longer welcome.

She began scouring hospital records, birth and marriage registries and even shipping logs to try to discover her true identity, but clues were few.

In the mid-1990s, changes to the law made it easier for adopted children to access birth records and Russell discovered her true heritage: She was born to a 13-year-old Aboriginal girl named Joyce Russell, from whose arms she was taken on the day of her birth on Sept. 4, 1935.

A group called Link-Up, established to reunite families of the stolen generations, helped Russell trace her birth mother to a nursing home in Easton, Pa., and a nervous reunion between mother and daughter was finally arranged in 2001.

"I was trying to be really strong and not cry," Russell recalled. "It was a bit of a shock when they brought her up because the resemblance between me and her was really strong. She kept grabbing my hand, she kept walking with me everywhere. She wouldn't let me out of her sight."

At first the elderly woman didn't realize who the younger woman was, and welfare workers asked gently probing questions to try to prompt her memory, mentioning Mari Russell's birth date and the hospital she was born in.

"She started crying, and then she got so angry and she was sobbing," Russell said. "She said `I had a baby girl and they took her away from me. Why did they do that? Why did they do that?'"

"I said to her, 'It's OK mum, I'm that little girl.'"

Russell spent two weeks with her mother in Pennsylvania. Joyce Russell died last month at the age of 84, and her daughter was bringing her ashes home for burial.

For Russell, the apology is a positive step but will never replace what she and so many others lost.

"We missed out on our culture, our language, our history," she said. "You can never get back those lost years, you just can't."

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080130/...JHITQAkAVvaA8F]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8129 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8128 Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:58:14 GMT
"An electromagnetic survey revealed the existence in the Karanis region of a network of walls and roads similar to those constructed during the Greco-Roman period," the council's chief Zahi Hawwas said.

The remnants of the city are "still buried beneath the sand and the details of this discovery will be revealed in due course," Hawwas said.

"The artefacts consist of the remains of walls and houses in terracotta or dressed limestone as well as a large quantity of pottery and the foundations of ovens and grain stores," he added.

The remains date back to the Neolithic period between 5,200 and 4,500 BC.

The local director of antiquities, Ahmed Abdel Alim, said the site was just seven kilometres (four miles) from Fayyum lake and would probably have lain at the water's edge at the time it was inhabited."

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080129...JHITQAlQVvaA8F]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8128 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8127 Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:57:05 GMT
Frederick William Boyle, 58, of the ***bourne suburb of Carrum Downs, faces a charge of murder, which he denies.

Boyle is alleged to have shot his wife Edwina Boyle in the head, dismembered her, and hidden her body.

"He put her body in a 44-gallon drum and kept it for 20 years," prosecutor Gavin Silbert told the Victorian Supreme Court on the first day of the trial.

Edwina Boyle disappeared in October 1983, Silbert told the court, and her husband claimed at the time she had run off with a truck driver called Ray.

He did not report her missing and informed relatives in England not to be surprised if they did not hear from her at Christmas that year.

But in 2006, while cleaning up, his son-in-law Michael Hegarty decided to cut open the drum, which had been kept at the family home for many years.

Prosecutors said he had asked for 14 years what was in the drum and had been told it contained glue for carpet laying.

Silbert said the son-in-law found a bag containing a skull, a leg bone and part of a pelvis inside. The bones were later identified as those of Edwina Boyle, and a post-mortem showed she died of a bullet wound to the head.

The prosecution said Boyle's mistress, Virginia Gissara, moved into the family home the day after his wife disappeared.

Defence lawyer Jane Dixon said her client did not dispute that he had falsely claimed his wife left him, nor that she was murdered, only that he was not the one who killed her.

Boyle had no motive to kill her, whereas others "may have had an opportunity to do so," Dixon told the court.

The couple married in 1972 and migrated from Britain later that year. They had two daughters, the court heard.

The trial continues."

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080131...JHITQAjAVvaA8F]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8127 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8126 Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:55:31 GMT
"Basically, we're still trying to put together the pieces about why they were outside," said Sgt. Brad Kaeding of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, noting alcohol was involved.

"The only person who would know that would be the father of the children, and I'm not sure he's been able to provide an adequate explanation for that at this point," Kaeding said.

The man, who local media identified as Christopher Pauchay, 25, left his home on the Yellow Quill First Nation Indian reserve near Kelvington, Saskatchewan, at 12:30 a.m. local time on Tuesday. Temperatures that night dipped below -35 degrees Celsius (-31 degrees Fahrenheit), meaning exposed skin could freeze in minutes.

Pauchay arrived at a neighbor's home about four hours later with severe frostbite and hypothermia, and was taken to hospital, Kaeding said.

That afternoon, he asked about his children, which prompted police to search for them, quickly finding Santana, age 1. The next day they found her sister Kaydence, 3.

An autopsy will be done on Friday, Kaeding said.

Pauchay's sister, Bernita Pauchay, told the Globe and Mail newspaper he was home with the children when he became worried about Santana, and tried to walk to her nearby house.

"He remembers carrying both of the babies, but he was so intoxicated he doesn't really remember anything else," she is quoted by the newspaper.

More than 2,500 km (1,600 miles) across the country, another baby, believed to be around eight months old, was found abandoned in the freezing cold stairwell of a Toronto parking garage on Wednesday.

With the exception of a number of scratches and bruises, the baby is described by officials as healthy, and is in hospital for observation.

Toronto police are seeking the public's help in finding the baby's parents and have surveillance video of a man or woman in a green Ford Escort, model years 1997 to 2000, entering and exiting the area at around the time the incident occurred."

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080131/...JHITQAggVvaA8F]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8126 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8125 Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:54:25 GMT
Solid demand for liquid crystal display TVs and digital cameras also helped results, the Japanese electronics and entertainment company said, which brought the world Walkman portable players and "Spider-Man" movies.

Sony Corp. raised its full year forecast through March 31 only narrowly to 340 billion yen ($3.20 billion) from an earlier 330 billion yen ($3.10 billion), and kept its sales forecast unchanged at 8.980 trillion yen ($84.40 billion).

Tokyo-based Sony also cut its PlayStation 3 fiscal 2007 sales forecast to 9.5 million machines. It had previously expected to sell 11 million PS3 consoles during that period.

Sony sold 4.9 million PS3 machine during the latest quarter for a total of 10.5 million machines sold since it went on sale late 2006.

Japanese rival Nintendo Co. has already sold more than 20 million Wii machines worldwide, wooing newcomers, including women and the elderly, with "Wii Fit," "Wii Sports" and other hit games. Microsoft Corp. has sold 17.7 million of its competing Xbox 360 consoles. Wii and PS3 went on sale about the same time, a year after the launch of the Xbox 360.

The big recovery came in its game unit, which had been losing money on launch costs for the PlayStation 3, the successor to the hit PlayStation 2.

The PlayStation 3 machine itself was still a money-loser but the losses had been trimmed and the machine was expected to start producing profit in the fiscal year starting in April.

Sony's overall profit for the three months ended Dec. 31 climbed to 200.2 billion yen ($1.88 billion) from 159.9 billion yen the same period the previous year.

Quarterly sales gained 9.6 percent from a year earlier to 2.859 trillion yen ($26.87 billion).

Profitability at Sony's core electronics business declined for the quarter as plunging gadget prices offset better sales for Bravia LCD TVs, Vaio personal computers and digital cameras, according to Sony.

Similarly, Japanese rival Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., which makes Panasonic brand products, also reported robust results for three months ended Dec. 31 on strong sales of appliances and digital audiovisual products.

Panasonic's quarterly profit rose 46 percent to 115.2 billion yen ($1.08 billion), and the 4 percent drop in sales on year to 2.34 trillion yen ($22.02 billion) was due to Victor Company of Japan's change in status from subsidiary to affiliate.

Sony's sales and profitability in its movies division both fell because of a dearth of theater hits comparable to "Casino Royale" and "Pursuit of Happyness" of the previous year.

Equity-related income edged up 9 percent on year. Such gains reflect the performance of Sony's cell phone joint venture Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB, where handset sales for the quarter soared 18 percent on year to 30.8 million cell phones.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment also fared well with best-selling albums such as Alicia Keys' "As I Am," Celine Dion's "Taking Chances" and Carrie Underwood's "Carnival Ride."

Also boosting investment-related income was Sony's liquid crystal display joint venture with Samsung Electronics Co.

Sony's financial services operations, including an insurer and online bank, racked up a loss because of the recent slide in Tokyo stocks. Share prices have languished after the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis surfaced last year.

Sony shares gained 3.6 percent in Tokyo to 5,220 yen ($49.06). Earnings were announced after trading ended."

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080131/...JHITQAeQVvaA8F]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8125 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8124 Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:52:19 GMT
Polls show most Israelis want Olmert to resign, and a hard-line opposition leader demanded that he leave office.

But Olmert showed no signs of backing down Thursday at a meeting of his Kadima party. His hold on power appears firm, with his main coalition partner unlikely to pull out of the government for fear of losing the majority to the hawkish Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud in the elections that would likely result.

That gives Olmert some room to pursue the Palestinian peace treaty he pledged to try to broker by the end of the year.

Netanyahu on Thursday demanded Olmert's resignation. "He refuses to take responsibility, he refuses to display personal integrity or leadership and refuses to do what the overwhelming majority of the public expect him to do," Netanyahu said.

A poll published Thursday by the Maagar Mohot agency found 60 percent of Israelis thought Olmert should resign, while 19 percent thought he should remain in office. The poll questioned 474 Israelis and had a margin of error of 4.5 percentage points.

A poll in the Maariv daily had similar findings.

But Olmert's party and allies are sticking by him after concluding that doing otherwise could mean being voted out of office themselves.

Former prime minister Ehud Barak, the head of Labor, had said he would remove Olmert's main partner from the coalition if Olmert did not resign after the Winograd Commission's final report was issued this week.

That would remove Olmert's parliamentary majority and probably force an election.

But polls indicate that if elections were held now, Olmert's centrist Kadima and the dovish Labor would both lose strength, handing victory to Likud.

Barak now says he will study the report and act in the best interests of the nation.

The politicians who had called for Olmert's resignation last year after a scathing interim report by the commission either lined up behind him Thursday or reserved judgment.

Olmert's main party rival, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, backed away from her demand then that Olmert resign.

"We should act to implement the conclusions of the report and continue to push forward with the peace process," she said at the party meeting.

An election leading to a Netanyahu victory would likely put an end to hopes for a quick Israeli-Palestinian peace accord, hopes that are slim in the best of circumstances. Netanyahu opposes concessions to the Palestinians for peace.

The final report released by the commission Wednesday pointed to "serious failings and shortcomings in the decision-making processes and staff work in the political and the military levels" in the 34-day conflict. Olmert had pledged to bring home two captured soldiers and crush Hezbollah, but neither goal was accomplished.

Olmert said he would implement the findings of the report, which stopped short of blaming him personally for the 2006 war in Lebanon widely seen by Isarelis as a debacle.

"We will continue to deal with the corrections and the processes that we must undergo. It's possible to say that some of them are already under way," Olmert said Thursday.

Next week the Israeli parliament will debate the commission's report, parliament spokesman Giora Pordes said. Olmert is expected to speak, his office said."

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080131/...JHITQAVAVvaA8F]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8124 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8123 Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:49:47 GMT
Overall, the Bush budget will exceed $3 trillion, this official said. The deficit is expected to reach about $400 billion for this year and next.

Bush on Monday will present his proposed budget for the new fiscal year to Congress, where it's unlikely to gain much traction in the midst of a presidential campaign. The president has promised a plan that would erase the budget deficit by 2012 if his policies are followed.

To that end, Bush will propose nearly $178 billion in savings from Medicare over five years_ nearly triple what he proposed last year. Much of the savings would come from freezing reimbursement rates for most health care providers for three years. An additional $17 billion would come from the Medicaid program, the state-federal partnership that provides health coverage to the poor.

The budget for most domestic programs funded by Congress will look similar to last year's, according to the official, from the Office of Management and Budget.

"It's a very small increase," he said. "Very small."

A second administration official said domestic discretionary spending would increase by less than 1 percent under Bush's proposal.

Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the budget has not yet been released

In his State of the Union address Monday, Bush said his budget envisioned a surplus in 2012. "American families have to balance their budgets, and so should their government," he said.

The federal government is expected to spend about $650 billion on Medicare and Medicaid in 2008. It represents more than $1 out of every $5 spent by the federal government.

The OMB official said the president views the budget as a final opportunity to slow the growth of entitlement programs but recognizes that Congress probably won't go along.

He said spending on Medicare would increase under Bush's new budget, but not as quickly as had been expected. "Medicare will grow at 5 percent. It just won't grow over 7 percent," he said.

Savings also would come by charging wealthier people higher monthly premiums for Medicare's drug program.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said the Bush budget would project the 10-year cost of the program, from 2008 to 2017, at $915 billion. That's $117 billion less than what had been forecast last summer. The agency attributed the lower estimate to smaller increases in the cost of medicines, and better deals negotiated between insurers and drug manufacturers.

The agency said 25.4 million people were now enrolled in a Medicare drug plan.

Bush last year asked Congress for nearly $65 billion in Medicare savings over five years. Congress refused to go along.

Independent experts have warned that the government needs to address the rising cost of health care for businesses to stay competitive and for the government to be able to pay for other important programs in the decades ahead.

"In fact, if there is one thing that could bankrupt America, it's runaway health care costs. We must not allow that to happen," David M. Walker, the U.S. comptroller general, told lawmakers Tuesday during a congressional hearing.

But Democrats said Bush's budget targets the wrong health care providers for cuts. They said insurers subsidized to provide Medicare coverage are being overpaid.

"The president is proposing to once again slash health care coverage for seniors and low-income working Americans," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said. "The president's cuts are exactly the wrong medicine when the cost of health care and the number of uninsured continue to rise and families are feeling economically insecure."

Health care providers said the president's recommendations would make it harder for them to meet expenses, which would continue to rise as a result of inflation, even as their reimbursement rates were frozen.

"That level of reduction is so outrageous that it will be summarily rejected by members of both parties in Congress," said Tom Nickels, senior vice president of federal relations for the American Hospital Association. "I don't think it will be taken seriously."

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080131/...JHdeIAMyms0NUE]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8123 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8122 Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:48:56 GMT
Al-Libi was a key link between the Taliban and al-Qaida and was one of the Americans' 12 most-wanted men with a bounty of $200,000 on his head.

"He was martyred with a group of his brothers in the land of Muslim Pakistan," said the Web site, which frequently carries announcements from militant groups. "Though we are sad for his loss, he left a legacy that will inflame the enemy nation and religion."

The statement included al-Libi's picture. In an earlier announcement on the same site, a banner appeared in a section reserved for affiliated militant groups and not open to public posting.

"We congratulate the Islamic nation for the martyrdom of the sheik, the lion, Abu Laith al-Libi," it said.

Before the postings, there had been reports of an attack on militants in a Pakistani village. Pakistani intelligence officials and local residents said a missile hit a compound about 2.5 miles outside Mir Ali in North Waziristan late Monday or early Tuesday, destroying the facility.

Residents said they were not allowed to approach the site of the blast and the Pakistan government and military said they did not know who fired the missile. Local officials said foreigners were targeted in the attack.

One intelligence official in the area, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the bodies of those killed were badly mangled by the force of the explosion and it was difficult to identify them. The official estimated 12 people were killed, including Arabs, Turkemen from central Asia and local Taliban members.

Two top officials of Pakistan's Interior Ministry said they could not confirm al-Libi's death and were still trying to gather details on the missile strike. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the attack.

A knowledgeable Western official said that "it appears at this point that al-Libi has met his demise," but declined to talk about the circumstances. "It was a major success in taking one of the top terrorists in the world off the street," the official said. He added that the death occurred "within the last few days."

U.S.-led coalition and NATO-led force in Afghanistan could not confirm al-Libi's death. An official with the NATO-led force said they were picking up some signals from the Web, but could not confirm whether al-Libi was dead.

"There is no confirmation from our side," said a NATO official in Kabul on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the issue.

Pakistani counterterrorism officials say he was an al-Qaida spokesman and commander in eastern Afghanistan.

The U.S. says al-Libi — whose name means "the Libyan" in Arabic — was likely behind the February 2007 bombing at the U.S. base at Bagram in Afghanistan during a visit by Cheney. The attack killed 23 people but Cheney was deep inside the sprawling base and was not hurt.

The bombing added to the impression that Western forces and the shaky government of President Hamid Karzai are vulnerable to assault by Taliban and al-Qaida militants.

Al-Libi also led an al-Qaida training camp and appeared in a number of al-Qaida Internet videos.

Maj. Chris Belcher, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan, said last year that al-Libi was a guerrilla fighter "knowledgeable about how to conduct suicide bombing missions and how to inflict the most civilian casualties." He had probably directed "one or more terror training camps," Belcher said.

Belcher said al-Libi had been the subject of "especially close focus" by U.S. intelligence since 2005, when U.S. forces destroyed a militant training camp believed set up by al-Libi in the eastern Afghan province of Khost. That was an admission that terror camps continued to operate on Afghan soil since the Taliban regime's ouster more than five years ago.

Belcher described al-Libi as "transient," moving where he thinks he can count on support.

"Terrorists like al-Libi use the rugged terrain of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to conceal themselves while they plan violent insurgent activities. Our sources indicate that Abu Laith al-Libi favors tribal regions, including North Waziristan," Belcher said.

North Waziristan is a lawless enclave in neigh*****g Pakistan where last year the Pakistani government reached a peace deal with pro-Taliban militants. U.S. officials have since expressed concern that al-Qaida could be regrouping in Pakistan's border zone.

Mir Ali is the second largest town in North Waziristan and has a strong presence of foreign militants, mostly Uzbeks with links to al-Qaida who fled to Pakistan's tribal regions after the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 2001.

A Pakistani intelligence official said that al-Libi had stayed until late 2003 in the North Waziristan village of Norak, about three miles outside Mir Ali, where he had several compounds. Norak is about nine miles from where the missile struck this week.

Al-Libi shifted inside Afghanistan after he took charge of al-Qaida operations on both sides of the border area, but retained links with Norak, the official said."

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080131/...JHdeIAOCms0NUE]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8122 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8095 Mon, 28 Jan 2008 01:44:55 GMT
The bear - named Voytek - was adopted in the Middle East by Polish troops in 1943, becoming much more than a mascot.

The large animal even helped their armed forces to carry ammunition at the Battle of Monte Cassino.

Voytek - known as the Soldier Bear - later lived near Hutton in the Borders and ended his days at Edinburgh Zoo.

He was found wandering in the hills of Iran by Polish soldiers in 1943.

They adopted him and as he grew he was trained to carry heavy mortar rounds.

When Polish forces were deployed to Europe the only way to take the bear with them was to "enlist" him.

So he was given a name, rank and number and took part in the Italian campaign.

He saw action at Monte Cassino before being billeted - along with about 3,000 other Polish troops - at the army camp in the Scottish Borders.

The soldiers who were stationed with him say that he was easy to get along with.

"He was just like a dog - nobody was scared of him," said Polish veteran Augustyn Karolewski, who still lives near the site of the camp.

"He liked a cigarette, he liked a bottle of beer - he drank a bottle of beer like any man."

When the troops were demobilised, Voytek spent his last days at Edinburgh Zoo.

Mr Karolewski went back to see him on a couple of occasions and found he still responded to the Polish language.

"I went to Edinburgh Zoo once or twice when Voytek was there," he said.

"And as soon as I mentioned his name he would sit on his backside and shake his head wanting a cigarette.

"It wasn't easy to throw a cigarette to him - all the attempts I made until he eventually got one."

Voytek was a major attraction at the zoo until his death in 1963.

Eyemouth High School teacher Garry Paulin is now writing a new book, telling the bear's remarkable story.

'Totally amazing'

Local campaigner Aileen Orr would like to see a memorial created at Holyrood to the bear she says was part of both the community and the area's history.

She first heard about Voytek as a child from her grandfather, who served with the King's Own Scottish Borderers.

"I thought he had made it up to be quite honest but it was only when I got married and came here that I knew in fact he was here, Voytek was here," she said.

"When I heard from the community that so few people knew about him I began to actually research the facts.

"It is just amazing, the story is totally amazing."

Source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/s...nd/7208505.stm]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8095 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8061 Thu, 24 Jan 2008 21:04:29 GMT
The announcement did little to satisfy residents of Texas dairy country who swear that what they saw in the sky Jan. 8 was no airplane. Some said it even bolstered their claims, because several people reported seeing at least two fighter jets chasing an object.

"This supports our story that there was UFO activity in that area," said Kenneth Cherry, the Texas director of the Mutual UFO Network, which took more than 50 reports from locals at a meeting last weekend. "I find it curious that it took them two weeks to 'fess up. I think they're feeling the heat from the publicity."

Officials at the Joint Reserve Base Naval Air Station in Fort Worth initially said none of their planes had been in the area, but on Wednesday they said 10 F-16s were there that day. The officials said they were mistaken and wanted to set the record straight "in the interest of public awareness."

Maj. Karl Lewis, a spokesman for the 301st Fighter Wing at the base, declined to comment on the nature of the military training or say whether it took place on other days.

Lewis had said earlier this month that residents might have seen an illusion caused by two commercial airplanes and reflections from the setting sun. On Wednesday, he said he should not have speculated about the reported sightings.

From well-respected business owners to a county constable, several dozen people say they saw a flying object that was larger, quieter, faster and lower to the ground than an airplane. They also said its lights changed configuration, unlike those of a plane.

"I guarantee that what we saw was not a civilian aircraft," Steve Allen, a pilot and freight company owner, said Wednesday.

The planes' training area in the Brownwood Military Operating Area includes Stephenville's Erath County, but Allen said it does not include the airspace where he saw the object. Also, Jan. 8 was not the only day sightings were reported.

Anne Frazor, who owns a fabric store in Stephenville, about 70 miles southwest of Fort Worth, said many in town have seen military aircraft zoom overhead from time to time as part of training operations. But she said that wasn't what she saw Jan. 8.

"I couldn't begin to say what it was, but to me it wasn't planes," Frazor said.

Since the reported sightings two weeks ago, the 17,000-resident city is having fun with the international publicity. Some high-schoolers made T-shirts depicting a flying saucer beaming up a cow with the messages: "Stephenville: the new Roswell" and "They're here for the milk!" Several stores put new messages on their marquees, including "Aliens welcome."

This week Tarleton State University is even hosting a lecture by a UFO researcher on the U.S. government's secret response to UFOs, based on previously classified documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

The U.S. Air Force says it has not investigated UFO sightings since 1969 when it ended Project Blue Book, which examined more than 12,600 reported UFO sightings - including 700 that were never explained. That program started a few months after the 1947 crash near Roswell, N.M., of an aircraft the government said was a top-secret weather balloon but others have claimed was an alien spacecraft.

"What we want is the government to admit there are UFOs and what they know about them," Cherry said."

Source:http://www.military.com/NewsContent/...0.html?wh=news]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8061 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8060 Thu, 24 Jan 2008 20:59:34 GMT
The space between them is no-man's land - one mile of barren tarmac, bracketed by barriers.

Though passports may be presented at both checkpoints, this is no official frontier.

It is, rather, a frozen frontline, where the unfinished business of secession still sometimes sparks gunfights.

Beyond the Russian checkpoint lies the town of Tskhinvali, the seat of South Ossetia's separatist government.

For more than 15 years, the South Ossetians have been saying they are independent of Georgia. No other country sees them that way, though Moscow has sent aid and troops to patrol the de facto border with Georgia.

Although Georgia vows to recover the region, any major military manoeuvre would invite a direct confrontation with Russian troops.

The result is a stalemate that has survived, skirmishes aside, for more than a decade.

Now however, the creation of a new nation far away is threatening to rekindle conflict in the Caucasus.

The Serbian province of Kosovo is widely expected to declare independence in the coming weeks.

Though officially still part of Serbia, Kosovo has been administered by the UN since a 1999 Nato bombing campaign ejected Serb forces accused of a brutal crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatism.

The province's ethnic Albanian majority now wants independence. Their demand has the conditional backing of the US and EU, but is opposed by Serbia and its traditional ally, Russia.

Moscow has warned that independence for Kosovo could have a domino effect on breakaway regions of the former Soviet Union.

If the West recognises Kosovo, some Russian politicians say they could respond by offering recognition to allies in other "frozen conflicts", particularly the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

A question of precedent

As fellow separatists, the South Ossetians admit Kosovo's drive for sovereignty could also work in their favour.

But they cannot afford to be too enthusiastic about it. Moscow opposes Kosovan independence and the South Ossetians are careful not to contradict the nation on which they rely so heavily.

South Ossetian "foreign minister" Murat Djioev says he expects independence for Kosovo - if achieved - to boost his government's quest for recognition.

A compact man with a bushy moustache, he speaks proudly of his government but is bitter about the world's refusal to work with it.

"If the Western powers recognise Kosovo, it will set an example for unrecognised republics elsewhere," he says.

"If other countries then say they still don't recognise us, we will say it is a double standard."

However, Mr Djioev also downplays the similarities between Kosovo and South Ossetia, arguing that his government's claim to independence has greater legitimacy.

"We've had our own independent state for 18 years and we've had our own path to independence. We're not looking at Kosovo's precedent when we're talking about South Ossetia," he says.

And he avoids the suggestion that he is advocating independence for Kosovo - a stance that would place him at odds with Moscow.

Ultimately, he says, what happens to Kosovans "is their own business".

"If we are trying to get independence ourselves, we cannot say any other people cannot get independence."

Dina Alborova, who works for a non-governmental agency in Tskhinvali, has visited Kosovo.

She says she is broadly in favour of independence for Kosovo, "because most people I met there were in favour of it".

"We don't understand why the international community says yes to Kosovo and no to us. They say it won't be a precedent, but I believe it will."

Rival administration

A South Ossetian leader who is backed by Georgia also rejects the comparison with Kosovo - but for reasons different from Mr Djioev's.

"The international community at large is prepared to recognise Kosovo's independence," says Dmitry Sanakoev, the head of a group of enclaves within South Ossetia that remain under Georgian control.

"If South Ossetia declared independence, only Russia would recognise it. The international community would have nothing to do with it."

Mr Sanakoev says recognition from Russia would turn South Ossetia into the local equivalent of northern Cyprus - a region only recognised as a state by its sponsor, Turkey.

Georgians fear a South Ossetia recognised only by Russia could effectively become an extension of it.

Many South Ossetians already have dual Georgian-Russian citizenship, much to Georgia's anger.

For the time being, Mr Sanakoev is seeking to build a rival administration in the parts of South Ossetia that remain under Georgian control.

He is a burly man, with an expansive manner - a former fighter and politician from Tskhvinvali who crossed the frontline.

His new, heavily-guarded office is only a few kilometres from his old home.

Through him, the government in Tbilisi hopes to entice other South Ossetians to join Georgia.

Total independence

In Tskhinvali, however, Mr Sanakoev is seen as a traitor and his administration a sham. Events in Kosovo are unlikely to soften this view.

Georgia has said South Ossetia can have broad autonomy, as long as it cedes control of its foreign policy and borders to Tbilisi - an offer similar to that made by Serbia in relation to Kosovo.

But as with Kosovo, so with South Ossetia - the separatists want nothing short of total independence.

"We cannot go back to the past," says "foreign minister" Djioev. "That's impossible."

Yet there is a chapter from South Ossetia's history that Mr Djioev still yearns for. Asked if he regrets the collapse of communism, he grows wistful.

"Under the Soviet Union, we had peace and stability," he says. "Its break-up brought us only war and suffering. How can that be a good thing?"

Source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7205622.stm]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8060 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8059 Thu, 24 Jan 2008 20:57:24 GMT
"There are some procedures we need to respect and some consultations," he told reporters after meeting EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana in Brussels.

Kosovo is still technically a southern province of Serbia, which strongly opposes its independence.

EU states have asked Kosovo's leadership to wait before a civilian mission can take over from the UN.

A police and judicial staff of about 1,800 is being prepared to work in tandem with the existing Nato force that went into Kosovo in 1999.

'Pandora's box'

The future status of Kosovo is also an important issue in the Serbian presidential election, which goes to a second round early next month.

The BBC's Oana Lungescu says the EU wants Hashim Thaci to delay declaring independence until the election is over.

A European Commission spokeswoman earlier declined to discuss a date.

"We are in a very sensitive political context in which it is better to resort to diplomatic means than to public statements," she said.

In his comments to reporters, Mr Thaci repeated earlier statements that a declaration would be made in co-ordination with the European Union and the United States.

Russia insists any change in Kosovo's status must have the backing of Belgrade as well as Pristina.

Moscow's new ambassador to Nato, Dmitry Rogozin, has called on Serbia to resist Western recognition of independence for Kosovo, saying it could open a "Pandora's box".

Source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7207266.stm]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8059 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8057 Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:11:57 GMT
The Canadian military has earmarked $220 million to build a new base for the Joint Task Force 2 counter-terrorism unit, with plans calling for the secretive formation to move out of Ottawa sometime after 2010.
Defence Construction Canada, a Crown corporation that handles the Defence Department's building needs, is asking for "expressions of interest" from contractors and consultants for the development of what it calls a multi-functional training and administrative campus.
The new facility is to be in "Eastern Ontario," with the specific location considered secret at this point, according to the information provided so far to construction and engineering contractors. But Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Rick Hillier has recommended to cabinet that JTF2's new base be located at Canadian Forces Base Trenton.
Public Works and Government Services Canada has already purchased three properties adjacent to CFB Trenton for the Defence Department.
Those total just under 130 hectares. Another 270 hectares are also being looked at for purchase.
"It's a number of properties that we're continuing to negotiate with," said Public Works spokeswoman Meeta Bhimani.
Contractors have been told the new site will consist of indoor and outdoor training areas, storage and maintenance facilities, residence and food service buildings, a swimming pool and recreation centre, and a shooting range. It still hasn't been decided whether a single building or a number of facilities will be needed to house the 600-strong unit.
The Defence Department would not comment yesterday on the new training facility.
JTF2 is currently located at Dwyer Hill and Franktown roads, but the unit has outgrown the 80-hectare location.
A decade ago, JTF2's officers warned the senior military leadership that the site was too small and told them the force should relocate.
In 2005, Lt.-Gen. Marc Dumais acknowledged to the Senate defence committee that the Dwyer Hill base was "bursting at the seams" and a larger base was needed.
Military commanders don't want to proceed with the move until after the Vancouver Olympics in 2010, since any relocation is expected to be disruptive. JTF2 and other units of the Canadian Special Operations Forces Command are going to have key security roles during the Olympics, but details aren't being released. At the same time, the design and construction of the new site will take several years.
Contractors working on the site, including the project manager, architect, structural engineer, food services facility designer and a number of others, will be required to have a government secret-level clearance.
Expressions of interest from contractors are to be submitted by Feb. 5. They were given some details about the new site during a meeting Jan. 11 in Ottawa.
Positioning JTF2 at CFB Trenton, one of the country's main military airbases, allows the unit immediate access to aircraft for domestic and overseas missions. It is also an ideal location because another unit in the special operations command, the Canadian Joint Incident Response Unit, which deals with nuclear, biological and chemical incidents, is already located there. JTF2 works closely with that unit on counter-terrorism exercises.
Over the years, JTF2's presence at Dwyer Hill has upset some area residents, who have complained about loud helicopter flights and the noise of gunfire and explosions from the training base. Those complaints subsided after the unit made an effort to deal with the problems residents had identified.
David Western is the president of the Heron Lake Community Association, which represents about 38 homeowners just east of the base.
He said the JTF2 forces have been great neighbours -- at least since an agreement was reached about five years ago.
"These are people who blow things up and make loud noises," said Mr. Western. "That doesn't necessarily sit well with a quiet residential community."
ut the agreement the base made with the residents set out rules preventing late-night training and shooting exercises, said Mr. Western. Also, if there are going to be any loud noises the residents are advised in advance.
"It has worked very, very well and they have been very conscientious," he said.
Still, some residents continue to voice concerns that the base has created excessive traffic, resulting in delays and lineups at times along Franktown and Dwyer Hill roads.
Brenda Defrias, 43, who lives about a kilometre away from the base, said her biggest concern is what will be done with the land once JTF2 leaves.
"We knew we were going to be secluded when we bought the land," she said. "We didn't want to live in a subdivision."
The future of the Dwyer Hill base is still unclear, but it is expected it will continue to be used as a training centre for civilian police organizations and the RCMP or another branch of the Defence Department."]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8057 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8056 Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:06:24 GMT
The fleet of Russian warships, supported by fighter jets and the bombers, engaged in Russia’s biggest naval exercises since the end of the Cold War.

The war games close to two Nato member states were the most forceful reminder to date of President Putin’s determination to flex Russia’s military muscles as relations with the West have deteriorated. The navy boasted that they were Russia’s largest Atlantic exercises since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Nato F16 and Tornado jets tracked two strategic “Blackjack” bombers as they approached the Bay of Biscay to test-fire missiles. A Russian navy spokesman said that SU33 fighterswould make training runs alongside them from the flagship Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier.

The Admiral Kuznetsov is leading a carrier strike group of 11 vessels backed by 47 aircraft that began exercises in the Mediterranean before moving to the Atlantic.

A naval spokesman said: “This is the biggest exercise of its kind in the area since Soviet times.” All the warships and aircraft, which are drawn from Russia’s Northern and Black Sea fleets, were carrying full combat ammunition loads. Long-range “Bear” bombers, ordered by Mr Putin to resume round-the-clock missions in August for the first time in 15 years, will join the exercises today alongside Tu22M3 Backfire strategic bombers and airborne early warning aircraft.

Colonel Aleksandr Drobyshevsky, an aide to the commander-in-chief of the Russian Air Force, said: “The air force is taking a very active part in the exercises.”

Captain Igor Dygalo, assistant to the navy commander-in-chief, said: “The Russia Navy’s carrier strike group has arrived to the assigned region in the Atlantic and aircraft based on the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier will soon take off for their training mission.”

Captain Dygalo reported that the Moskva battleship had successfully hit a target with a Bazalt supersonic cruise missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead over a range of 350 miles. He said: “The missile system used for launches has no match in performance terms.” Vice-Admiral Nikolai Maksimov, who is heading the task force, has said that its tour of duty is aimed at restoring Russia’s naval presence “in key operational areas of the world’s oceans”.

The Ministry of Defence and its counterparts in Europe were informed about the exercises a month ago.

Pavel Felgengauer, one of Russia’s leading defence analysts, told The Times that the display of power was much less impressive than it appeared. Russia’s navy was so depleted that perhaps only 30 out of 300 vessels could go to sea at any time.

“They have put them all together and sent them to the Atlantic. This is just an attempt to show the flag before the presidential elections and to tell people at home that Putin’s eight years have restored Russia’s imperial greatness,” he said. “The Admiral Kuznetsov is due to go in for repairs when it returns home. There are two tugs with it now because everybody understands that it could go bust at any moment.”

The exercises are taking place in an atmosphere of growing friction between Russia and the West, however, as Mr Putin adopts an increasingly belligerent stance in disputes over independence for Kosovo, Iran’s nuclear ambitions and American plans for a missile defence shield in Eastern Europe.

In a further sign of assertiveness, last week the Kremlin ordered the revival of Soviet-era military parades in Red Square. The latest Topol-M nuclear missiles will join a tank parade on May 9, marking victory over Nazi Germany, for the first time since 1990.

Flush with money from oil and gas sales, Russia has embarked on a rearmament programme and will spend $189 billion (£96.3 billion) to upgrade half of the army and navy’s equipment by 2015. Defence spending has quadrupled since Mr Putin came to power in 2000. It will rise by 16.3 per cent this year to $36.8 billion (£18.8 billion) and to $45.5 billion (£23.2 billion) by 2010.

Some analysts say that Mr Putin’s sabre-rattling is part of domestic politics to project an image of strength for voters and bolster support for his chosen successor, Dmitri Medvedev, in the presidential election on March 2."

Source:http://timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/wo...cle3234607.ece]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8056 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8055 Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:03:50 GMT
These systems were, until recently, deployed near Minsk as part of Belarus's operational air-defence configuration, and include command-guided Fakel 5V55K missiles (with a range of 47 km) and the baseline 5V55R semi-active radar and Track Via Missile (TVM) guided missile (range 75 km).

Defence industrial sources in Belarus told Jane's that although the value of the contract has yet to be finalised, Belarusian negotiators are asking for USD140 million for the two systems (including parts, maintenance and training). The sources noted that while that figure is considered high for older S-300PT systems (the S-300PT entered Soviet service as far back as 1978), the inflated price reflects an awareness of Iran's urgent requirement for such systems and its consequent willingness to pay well, enhanced by the intense international scrutiny placed on Tehran's efforts to acquire missile technologies and the country's difficulty to fast-track acquisition of such systems from other sources.

Further, the price also reflects the risk involved for Minsk in releasing such systems to Tehran - particularly in its political relations with Moscow.

The sources confirmed that after the contract is finalised, the S-300PT systems would be transferred from Belarus to Iran in semi-knocked down (SKD) condition aboard a number of cargo aircraft. These flights will fall within the framework of the many regular flights (including military aircraft) between Iran and Belarus, and will include the transfer of spare system parts as required by Iran."

Source:http://www.janes.com/news/defence/id...0117_1_n.shtml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8055 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8054 Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:56:24 GMT
A joint United States report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the US Institute for Peace has also revealed that China has "contingency plans" in the event of North Korea's implosion. The report, entitled 'Keeping an Eye on an Unruly Neighbor', said that China was prepared to "take the initiative" and had a military strategy for securing North Korea's "loose nukes" should Kim Jong-Il's rule fail.

Any apocalyptic scenario has to be taken with a grain of salt; in 1997 the Central Intelligence Agency predicted the collapse of North Korea within five years. However, there are reasons for the heightened levels of concern; in particular, the recent actions of Kim Jong-Il and other North Korean officials are being interpreted as signs that the regime is nearing its end.

Tellingly, the 'Dear Leader' is in the process of moving financial resources to ensure that his assets are portable should he have to go into exile, according to some sources.

The centrally controlled economy has also now ceased to function and the food distribution system is near breaking point. With loyalty to the regime at an all-time low, another sign of trouble is the regime's diminishing ability to prevent people from leaving the country."

Source:http://www.janes.com/news/security/c...0124_1_n.shtml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8054 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8053 Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:54:05 GMT
Speaking at a conference on “The Future of Armoured Warfare” in London on the 30th May, IDR's Pentagon correspondent Leland Ness explained that US Army tests involving firing trials on 25 T-72A1 and 12 T-72B1 tanks (each fitted with Kontakt-5 explosive reactive armour [ERA]) had confirmed NATO tests done on other former Soviet tanks left behind in Germany after the end of the Cold War. The tests showed that the ERA and composite Armour of the T-72s was incredibly resilient to 1980s NATO anti-tank weapons.

In contrast to the original, or 'light', type of ERA which is effective only against shaped charge jets, the 'heavy' Kontakt-5 ERA is also effective against the long-rod penetrators of APFSDS tank gun projectiles, anti-tank missiles, and anti-armour rotary cannons. Explosive reactive armour was valued by the Soviet Union and its now-independent component states since the 1970s, and almost every tank in the eastern-European military inventory today has either been manufactured to use ERA or had ERA tiles added to it, including even the T-55 and T-62 tanks built forty to fifty years ago, but still used today by reserve units.

"During the tests we used only the weapons which existed with NATO armies during the last decade of the Cold War to determine how effective such weapons would have been against these examples of modern Soviet tank design. Our results were completely unexpected. When fitted to the T-72A1 and B1 the 'heavy' ERA made them immune to the DU (Depleted Uranium) penetrators of the M829A1 APFSDS (used by the 120 mm guns of the Cold War era US M1 Abrams tanks), which are among the most formidable of current tank gun projectiles. We also tested the 30mm GAU-8 Avenger (the gun of the A-10 Thunderbolt II Strike Plane), the 30mm M320 (the gun of the AH-64 Apache Attack Helicopter) and a range of standard NATO Anti Tank Guided Missiles – all with the same result of no penetration or effective destruction of the test vehicles. The combined protection of the standard armour and the ERA gives the Tanks a level of protection equal to our own. The myth of Soviet inferiority in this sector of arms production that has been perpetuated by the failure of downgraded T-72 export tanks in the Gulf Wars has, finally, been laid to rest. The results of these tests show that if a NATO/Warsaw Pact confrontation had erupted in Europe, the Soviets would have had parity (or perhaps even superiority) in armour” – U.S. Army Spokesperson at the show.

Newer KE penetrators have been designed since the Cold War to defeat the Kontakt-5 (although Kontakt-5 has been improved as well). As a response the Russian Army has produced a new type of ERA, “Relikt”, which is claimed to be two to three times as effective as Kontakt-5 and completely impenetrable against modern Western warheads.

Despite the collapse of the USSR, the Russian Tank industry has managed to maintain itself and its expertise in armour production, resulting in modern designs (such as the T-90, the T-95 and mysterious Black Eagle) to replace the, surprisingly, still effective Soviet era tanks. These tests will do much to discount the argument of the “Lion of Babylon” (the ineffective Iraqi version of the T-72M) and export quality tanks being compared to the more sophisticated and upgraded versions which existed in the Soviet military’s best Tank formations and continue to be developed in a resurgent Russian military industrial complex."

Source:http://idr.janes.com/public/idr/weap...quipment.shtml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8053 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8041 Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:45:34 GMT
Asked whether Washington was about to remove Pyongyang from the group, which exposes the Stalinist country to sanctions, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino replied: "No."

"Right now where we are is waiting on the North Koreans to provide a complete and accurate declaration of their nuclear activities," which had been due by December 31 under a February 2007 deal, said Perino.

Removing North Korea, added to the list after the 1987 bombing of a Korean Air Lines flight, is premature "to say the least," she said one day after a top US official implied that Pyongyang had met the criteria for removal.

The State Department's coordinator for counter-terrorism, Dell Dailey, told a group of reporters on Tuesday that North Korea appeared to have met the requirements for being taken off the list, the Washington Post reported.

"You go back six months, you see if there's been any visible support or material support. We don't see that with North Korea. You also ask them to give an affirmation that they will not do things in the future," the Post cited him as saying. "It appears that North Korea has complied with those criteria."

The State Department, which also includes Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria on the list, says that North Korea is not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the 1987 bombing.

North Korea agreed in a 2007 landmark six-party treaty to disable its main atomic facilities, but it missed the December 31 deadline to give a full declaration of all its nuclear programs.

In response to the disablement and declaration, the negotiating partners -- South Korea, the US, China, Japan and Russia -- were to supply one million tons of fuel oil or equivalent energy aid.

The United States was also to start the process of removing the North from its terrorism list, which blocks access to bilateral economic aid and loans from international financial institutions.

But Japanese officials and groups have urged Washington not to take Pyongyang off the list until it provides a full accounting of abductions of Japanese citizens, purportedly to train its spies.

Pyongyang media in recent days has criticized Washington for failing to start the process.

Earlier Wednesday, a pro-Pyongyang newspaper said North Korea was willing to become nuclear-free if the United States honored its commitments in return.

The comments in the Choson Sinbo, published in Japan by a pro-Pyongyang organization, were the latest in a series accusing Washington of failing to live up to its commitments under a six-nation disarmament pact.

"The DPRK (North Korea) has a firm resolution to denuclearize the Korean peninsula. The key is whether the US and other parties are implementing their duties," said the website of the paper, which normally reflects official thinking.

"The DPRK will continue to fulfill what it is supposed to do, in accordance with the action-for-action principle, when the US carries out its duty."

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080123...DrtE9.HhNvaA8F]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8041 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8040 Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:44:16 GMT
Police said it was the first time they have found a safe house linked to the cartel in the capital city.

"Yes, the cartel is operating here in Mexico City," said Edgar Millan, top commander of Mexico's national federal police, at a news conference following pre-dawn raids on two houses in southern Mexico City. Eight men were arrested in one raid and three in the other.

Millan said the men, whose identities were not released, were part of three cartel "commando" groups that may have been preparing attacks in response to a federal crackdown on drug trafficking.

President Felipe Calderon has sent thousands of soldiers into states throughout Mexico to combat drug gangs battling for territory and for control over corrupt local police forces.

The suspects were lined up in the homes' spacious living rooms and presented to reporters alongside caches of seized weapons, including 20 fragmentation grenades, automatic weapons, rifles, and materials presumably intended for constructing a drug lab.

Police also found 40 bulletproof vests, eight of which bore the initials FEDA, which Millan said was likely a Spanish acronym for "Arturo's Special Forces." Authorities also found an unspecified amount of cash in one of the homes.

Arturo Beltran Leyva is one of five brothers believed to be top lieutenants of the Sinaloa drug cartel, based in the northwestern Mexican state of the same name. A second brother, Alfredo Beltran Leyva, was arrested early Monday in the Sinaloa capital of Culiacan with two suitcases containing $900,000, an assault rifle, a luxury SUV and 11 expensive watches, the army said.

The U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Tony Garza, praised Monday's arrest as "a significant victory."

Army Gen. Luis Arturo Oliver Cen said the arrested Beltran Leyva commanded two groups of hit men for the cartel, whose reach extends from the northwestern state of Sonora to the southern state of Oaxaca. He was allegedly in charge of transporting drugs, bribing officials and laundering money for the cartel, which is led by Mexico's most-wanted drug lord, Joaquin Guzman.

Guzman escaped from federal prison in 2001 in a laundry cart after bribing guards.

Also Tuesday, Mexico state police said they had detained four men in Valle de Bravo, 90 miles west of Mexico City. Mexican newspaper El Universal reported the four were suspected Zetas, former military men-turned hit men for the Gulf cartel. It was not immediately clear if their arrest was connected with reports of a violent shootout between agents and gunmen in Valle de Bravo Tuesday afternoon.

Alfredo Beltran Leyva's arrest follows two weeks of bloody confrontations along the U.S.-Mexico border between federal agents and gunmen suspected of working for the Arellano Felix and Gulf cartels, rivals of the Sinaloa.

In the border state of Tamaulipas, across from Texas, dozens of soldiers in armored cars surrounded the police stations in Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros and Reynosa on Tuesday to check whether the police officers' weapons, radios and phones were connected to crimes.

No arrests were reported and officers were allowed back on the streets.

Soldiers also randomly stopped cars in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, in search of assailants who shot and wounded a state police chief on Monday night. The attack came the day after a Juarez police captain was shot to death in his patrol car.

Also Monday, gunmen firing from a car shot and killed Judge Ernesto Palacios in a suburb of the northern Mexican city of Monterrey, police said. He had been overseeing the trial of two alleged hit men arrested in 2005."

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080123/...QIWJb4P6xvaA8F]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8040 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8039 Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:42:52 GMT
EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana planned to meet with Iran's senior nuclear negotiator later Wednesday in talks that would probably address the new draft resolution, European Union officials said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the draft encourages countries to be vigilant in their dealings with Iran to prevent the illegal transfer of nuclear material, but it "does not foresee any harsh sanctions."

"It calls for countries to be vigilant while maintaining trade and economic and transport and other ties with Iran so that they are not used for the transfer of forbidden nuclear material," he said at a news conference a day after the draft was approved by the five permanent Security Council members and Germany.

These terms "will be enforced until the International Atomic Energy Agency's concerns are resolved," Lavrov said, referring to the U.N.'s nuclear monitoring agency.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dismissed new sanctions as irrelevant.

"From our point of view, the issue is over. The issuance of a new resolution won't have any impact on the behavior of the Iranian nation," the official IRNA news agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.

Iran has condemned as illegal two previous resolutions that ordered a ban on the supply of specified materials and technology that could contribute to Iran's nuclear and missile programs. Those sanctions also imposed an asset freeze on key Iranian companies and individuals named by the U.N.

Jalili, Iran's top nuclear negotiator, said the country would continue with its civilian nuclear program.

"We have been committed to our obligations and did a lot of things beyond our obligations, but we also insist on our rights," Jalili said from Brussels, Belgium, where he was meeting with members of the European Parliament. "We need 20,000 Megawatts of nuclear electricity and for this we have to build 20 nuclear power plants."

Jalili will meet with Solana late Wednesday, the first talks the two have had since November, when 18 months of negotiations collapsed after Solana failed to persuade Jalili to suspend Iran's development of its nuclear program.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said his government has responded to 70 percent of the IAEA's questions about its nuclear activities and that its ongoing cooperation with the U.N. watchdog would remove the need for further sanctions.

The new draft was not publicly released and details of its content were sketchy.

After the text was agreed upon during talks in Berlin on Tuesday, U.S. and European diplomats said it bolstered existing sanctions, notably asset freezes and travel bans on Iranian officials. But they disagreed on whether it contained new measures.

The draft was described as a sign of international resolve that Iran should not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons and unity on the need to press the country into suspending uranium enrichment, a process that can produce material needed to make an atomic bomb. Iran says it aims to use the technology only for generating power.

U.S. officials said Tuesday's agreement showed that international concern about Iran was not dampened by a U.S. intelligence report in December that determined the Iranian government had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said she had not seen the language of the U.N. resolution.

"What this action does say to the Iranians is that the P5-plus-one remains committed to making sure that Iran does not move forward to have a nuclear weapon," she said, referring to the five Security Council powers and Germany.

The U.S. had been pushing for sweeping new sanctions, mirroring unilateral measures it imposed last year on select Iranian banks and elements of Iran's military. But Russia and China, which along with some European nations have significant investments in Iran, had balked.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said the draft resolution included "on the one hand, sanctions, new and precise sanctions, and there is encouragement toward dialogue."

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080123/...ZR1MBs5BRvaA8F]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8039 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8038 Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:41:37 GMT ADVERTISEMENT

"You continue to see a handful of buyers come in, but they're quickly overwhelmed by the sellers," said Todd Salamone, vice president of research at Schaeffer's Investment Research in Cincinnati.

In afternoon trading, the Dow was down 32.35, or 0.27 percent, at 11,938.84, shortly after bobbing into positive territory."

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080123/...TUsVulrUCs0NUE]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8038 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8037 Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:39:22 GMT
The BBC's Syed Shoaib Hasan asks if Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is really that secure.

A report last year recommended that the US send in special forces to help "secure the Pakistani nuclear arsenal".

Pakistan's foreign office dismissed the report as "outlandish musings", insisting there was no danger of the country's strategic assets falling into the wrong hands.

At the moment, few believe Islamists could take power in Pakistan.

But there has been huge concern over Pakistan's nuclear facilities since 2004.

That was when the "father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb", AQ Khan, confessed to leaking nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya.

He received a presidential pardon and has since been under house arrest. Pakistan's government says he has revealed the full extent of his activities.

'US actively planning'

Nevertheless, one leading nuclear expert in Pakistan, Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy, says the US is right to have worries.

"The US has been actively planning contingency measures as Pakistan's nuclear weapons are and will remain a major concern."

Estimates of the number of weapons Pakistan has vary from 40 to more than 100 warheads.

Once upon a time, the received wisdom was that Pakistan needed three bombs, to attack Delhi, Mumbai and Calcutta in neighbouring nuclear rival, India.

Dr Hoodbhoy says more weapons means more people having access to the weapons facilities.

But he believes the actual weapons are safe.

"As far as the weapons themselves are concerned, I don't believe they can be obtained by fundamentalist groups like al-Qaeda.

"The days of smuggling centrifuges out of Kahuta [Pakistan's main nuclear research facility] ended with AQ Khan."

Another nuclear expert, Brig Shaukat Qadir, agrees on that point.

"Pakistan's nuclear weapons are only as much at risk as those of the US or India," he says.

"There are differing layers of security and everyone is checked and double checked while entering and leaving the facility."

US assistance

According to Brig Qadir, even highly trained troops would find it almost impossible to storm Pakistan's nuclear facilities.

"In the first place there is the secrecy surrounding the actual weapons storage and development facilities," he says.

"For example, while everybody talks about Kahuta, it is no longer the main facility."

Then, he says, the way the nuclear facilities were built makes penetration nearly impossible. Facilities like Kahuta are built hundreds of feet underground.

Dr Hoodbhoy agrees that Pakistan has taken steps to increase the safety of its nuclear weapons. These include sending personnel who guard the facilities for training in the US.

Even so, he says the country's nuclear weapons security is "not foolproof".

"Even though the weapons themselves are secure, that is not as true of the fissile material."

He believes small amounts of enriched uranium or plutonium could be smuggled out of Pakistan's nuclear facilities.

"You need about 25kg to make a device the size of [that used at] Hiroshima," he says, adding that making the actual bomb is relatively easy.

"It is getting the weapons grade material which requires industrial facilities."

Brig Qadir disagrees: "Everybody understands the fissile material is the main component... do you really think it will be as readily available as that?

"Both the weapons and the fissile material are accorded the same level of security. The material, therefore has the same chance of being stolen as the weapons."

Bin Laden 'meeting'

Dr Hoodbhoy says there is another worry.

"A renegade, or set of renegade Pakistan nuclear scientists could help al-Qaeda or another such group develop a device," he says.

"There are people within [the Pakistani establishment] who still believe that force is the only answer to our troubles."

Some observers recall what is referred to as a one-off meeting in local intelligence circles that took place in Afghanistan in the summer of 2001.

Among those said to have been at the Kandahar meeting were several Pakistanis, including a recently retired top nuclear weapons scientist.

Also reportedly present was al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, who is said to have been intensely interested in how to acquire nuclear weapons.

Bin Laden heard that making the bomb was relatively simple, one witness later told officials.

Obtaining weapons grade uranium ore or plutonium was the problem, he was reportedly told.

At that point came a query that still worries Western security experts.

Bin Laden is reported to have asked: What if we already had the ore?

'Taken seriously'

After the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US, all the Pakistanis said to have attended the meeting were questioned by Pakistani and US security agents.

Some were released, some remain in custody. Details of the investigation were never made public.

"I know some of the scenarios I have talked about seem outlandish," says Dr Hoodbhoy.

"But for the sake of Pakistan, and everyone else, they should be taken seriously - if 9/11 can happen, so can this."

Source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7190033.stm]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8037 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8036 Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:34:31 GMT
“Homey Airport” now appears as the official name for a certain air base near a certain dry lake bed in Nevada, according to reports in the Web site of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, as well as the Daily Aviator blog and others. New editions of flight planning software and civilian aviators’ GPS gear lists the name and the official designation “KXTA” — which online wags have speculated stands for “extraterrestrial airport.” (The “k” designation indicates only that the field is in the U.S., according to the Federal Aviation Administration.)

Capt. Jessica Martin, a spokeswoman for Nellis Air Force Base, which sits 85 miles south of Homey Airport and is responsible for the airspace and any ground facilities, said that “we already know about the designation, but it doesn’t have any effect on operations at the base.”

Martin said she didn’t know the origin of the name “Homey Airport.”

Featured in movies, TV shows and video games, Area 51 is likely the most famous top-secret facility in the world and a favorite component of UFO and military conspiracy theories.

The Department of Defense didn’t even acknowledge the base existed until 1994, when former base employees sued the government and claimed they’d been poisoned by hazardous materials used at the base for research into stealth technology.

Although the base and its work have long been highly classified, many of the aircraft tested there through the years are publicly familiar: the U2 and SR-71 Blackbird spy planes and the F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter all flew first off the long runways and dry lakebeds at Groom Lake.

Some enthusiasts believe that work continues there today on advanced aircraft — including unmanned aerial vehicles, high-speed reconnaissance craft and even high-altitude blimps — though alien conspiracy buffs also speculate that Area 51’s high profile has forced officials to move much of the top-secret stuff to the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah."

Source:http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/20...wname_080122w/]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=8036 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=7849 Sat, 05 Jan 2008 22:57:56 GMT
Children were demanding $600 or else they would kill Edna, his beloved beagle mix. Whiting listened in horror to what sounded like the jingle of Edna's collar, and an animal yelping in pain. He agreed to pay the ransom.

"You don't understand, mister," a boy replied. "I want to kill your dog anyway."

What happened to Edna remains a mystery, but Philadelphia police have charged a 15-year-old with harassment, terroristic threats, theft by extortion and other counts for allegedly calling Whiting. Police have yet to find the dog.

Authorities gave no immediate explanation for how they traced the call.

"I've had tears today a couple of times. I don't see any happy news in this," a heartbroken Whiting said Friday. "I don't have a dog coming back, apparently." He also said he believes at least two children were involved.

Edna had been Whiting's constant companion for more than 10 years. The 57-year-old employee of the University of Pennsylvania's archaeology museum described Edna as a gentle dog that loved children and had been a therapy animal at nursing homes and hospitals.

Edna vanished on Halloween, after Whiting and the dog walked from his home in Philadelphia to a friend's house. Whiting thinks she slipped out into the unfamiliar neighborhood while the door was open for trick-or-treaters.

Frantic, he looked for hours, then printed up "Missing Dog" posters and plastered them around the neighborhood. The posters contained his cell phone number and offered a $500 reward.

Ten days after the dog disappeared, Whiting received the midnight call on his cell phone from a youth who demanded $600. Then a younger boy got on the phone and apparently began abusing an animal.

Whiting said he didn't recognize the yelps, since he had never heard Edna hurt before, but detected the sound of her collar, which had numerous tags and "jangled like a charm bracelet."

He begged them not to hurt the dog, and simultaneously dialed police from his land line.

Whiting went to a police station in the middle of the night to make a report. When he returned home a few hours later, his land line rang almost immediately. "We killed your dog," the voice said. "It's dead."

Whiting began to believe the children really did have Edna, since the land line phone number was only on the dog's tags, not the poster.

"I became hysterical," he said. "I started to tremble."

Police worked for weeks on tracing the calls, whose numbers came up as unavailable on Whiting's Caller ID. Publicity led to an outpouring of support for Whiting and rage against the perpetrators; rewards were offered by animal advocacy groups.

On Dec. 30, police arrested the 15-year-old, who was released to his family for a hearing Jan. 31."

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080105/...0SOzjKbEVvzwcF]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=7849 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=7848 Sat, 05 Jan 2008 22:55:48 GMT
Thousands of homes and businesses had been blacked out in California, Oregon and Washington and thousands of residents had been told to leave their homes in mudslide-prone areas of Southern California. The mandatory evacuation orders were later lifted, though residents were urged to stay away from their homes.

Avalanche warnings were posted for the backcountry of the central Sierra Nevada and flash flood warnings were in effect for many areas of Southern California, where large swaths of hillsides had been denuded by the fall's wildfires.

Remote sensors and ski areas in the high Sierra Nevada had recorded up to 5 feet since Friday morning, and the west side of the Lake Tahoe Basin already had 4 to 5 feet by Friday night, the National Weather Service office in Reno, Nev., said Saturday.

Rain and wind from the third storm in as many days arrived in California's capital before the last one finished dumping snow in the mountains.

As much as 9 feet of snow was possible in the Sierra by Sunday. "Attempting to travel in the Sierra will put your life at risk," the weather service warned.

East of the Sierra in Nevada's Lyon County, a levee broke early Saturday along an agricultural canal, spilling water as much as 3 feet deep into the town of Fernley and stranding about 3,500 people, authorities said. Rescuers used school buses, boats and helicopters to take people to shelters.

No injuries were reported.

The Fernley area had gotten heavy rain on Friday plus snow, but a canal official said rodents burrowing in the canal's earthen banks might have started the break.

Flights were grounded Friday and trucks overturned in Northern California as wind gusted to 80 mph during the second wave of the arctic storm that has sent trees crashing onto houses, cars and roads. The National Weather Service recorded gusts up to 165 mph on mountaintops northwest of Lake Tahoe on Friday.

"If you take the wind gusts, the snowfall and all of it together, it's definitely one of the biggest storms we've experienced in a number of years," said weather service meteorologist Scott McGuire.

Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski declared a state of emergency for Umatilla County because of wind damage.

As the storm moved east, whiteout conditions and up to 4 feet of snow were forecast in the Colorado mountain. High wind overturned a tractor-trailer rig in Colorado Springs, briefly closing Interstate 25. Later, multiple accidents closed eastbound I-70 just east of Vail.

At least one death was blamed on the storm, a woman killed by a falling tree in Oregon.

In the south, residents of Orange County canyons that were stripped by wildfires last fall — making them susceptible to mudslides — nervously watched weather reports to learn when they might be hit by the fierce wind and heavy downpours forecast for the area.

About 3,000 people in four canyons had been told to leave their homes by 7 p.m. Friday, Orange County fire Capt. Mike Blawn said.

However, there was no indication how many obeyed, and mandatory evacuation orders were later lifted. "We have been hearing that very small percentage of them actually evacuated," Battalion Chief Kris Concepcion said.

In one of the four canyons, Modjeska, thick mud coated roads Saturday as Gene Corona, 72, wore hip boots and a raincoat as he used a shovel to repair erosion in a channel he had dug to carry water away from his home.

"I made the rounds last night, every hour on the hour, whenever stuff started breaking through," he said. "I saved my house. It's my home, and insurance doesn't cover mudslides."

Flash flood warnings were in effect Saturday for broad swaths of Southern California.

In the Sierra Nevada, the California Department of Transportation said Interstate 80, the main east-west link between Northern California and Nevada, was reopened Saturday, but tire chains were mandatory on a 60-mile stretch. While the highway was shut down during the night, the Red Cross set up a 200-bed shelter in Truckee for stranded motorists.

More than 450,000 homes and businesses from the Bay Area to the Central Valley were in the dark early Saturday, down from more than 1.6 million the day before. It could be days before all the lights are back on, Pacific Gas & Electric officials said."

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080105/...r2dmiNQcGs0NUE]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=7848 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=7817 Wed, 02 Jan 2008 00:56:16 GMT By Bradley Brooks - The Associated Press
Posted : Tuesday Jan 1, 2008 9:08:07 EST

BAGHDAD — The second half of 2007 saw violence drop dramatically in Iraq, but the progress came at a high price: The year was the deadliest for the U.S. military since the 2003 invasion, with 899 troops killed.

That said, U.S. combat deaths in Iraq declined for the seventh consecutive month and hit their lowest monthly total since February 2004, according to Pentagon casualty records.

As of Sunday, 14 U.S. troops have been killed in combat in December. Six more died in non-combat-related incidents. The last month in which fewer than 20 U.S. troops were killed in combat was February 2004, when 12 troops were killed.

American commanders and diplomats, however, said the battlefield gains against insurgents such as al-Qaida in Iraq offer only a partial picture of where the country stands as the war moves toward its five-year mark in March.

“We’re focusing our energy on building on what coalition and Iraqi troopers have accomplished in 2007,” Army Gen. David Petraeus told a group of western journalists on Saturday. “Success will not, however, be akin to flipping on a light switch. It will emerge slowly and fitfully, with reverses as well as advances, accumulating fewer bad days and gradually more good days.”

Two critical shifts that boosted U.S.-led forces in 2007 — a self-imposed cease-fire by a main Shiite militia and a grass-roots Sunni revolt against extremists — could still unravel unless serious unity efforts are made by the Iraqi government.

Of the more than 70,000 fighters in these Sunni awakening councils, only 20 percent are expected to be absorbed into the Iraqi security forces. The rest are to receive job training through a joint $300 million program Iraqi and American officials are creating.

That program is in its beginning stages and there are few details about how it will be carried out, but analysts say it must succeed or the Sunni fighters who do not join Iraq’s military may sell their services to the insurgents.

“How lasting a phenomenon that will be and how Iran will define and play its role in Iraq in 2008 I think is going to be very important to the long-term future of the country,” said U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker.

The arc of progress played out in the raw statistics of U.S. casualties.

American military deaths peaked in May with 126 troops killed. It was then that the U.S. began ramping up its attacks against insurgent strongholds, leading to increased clashes in Baghdad and other key areas across central Iraq.

The 899 deaths in 2007 surpassed the previously highest death toll in 2004, when 850 U.S. troops were killed.

Army Col. Steven Boylan, a spokesman for the U.S.-led forces in Iraq, was cautious about drawing conclusions.

“We’re not even close to declaring any kind of victories,” Boylan said. “There is still a lot of hard work ahead. We know, based on the enemy that we are facing, they can and do conduct what people call ‘spectacular attacks,’ which can inflict significant casualties.”

The current U.S. strategy involves shifting forces to small outposts in violent areas and winning the cooperation of local Iraqis. Fifty of these outposts exist in Baghdad alone, Boylan said.

U.S. force levels are scheduled to drop to their previous level of 130,000 troops by July 2008, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said more troops could be withdrawn from Iraq if violence levels continue to drop.

The influx of some 30,000 U.S. troops, which began in June, met one of its important goals: to allow the Iraqi government to focus on questions of governance instead of dealing only with security.

James Carafano, a security expert with the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington, D.C., likened the increase in troops to the Marshall Plan that largely rebuilt Europe after World War II and demonstrated U.S. commitment to that continent.

“I think the surge made that statement to Iraqis,” Carafano said. “Here’s America, fighting an unpopular war and things aren’t going so well and we turn around and send more troops in. To the good guys and the bad guys, it was a reaffirmation that Americans aren’t going to walk away from this.”

But the Pentagon, meanwhile, will increasingly look to the uneven Iraqi security forces to carry the load in 2008 as demands for an American exit strategy grow sharper during the U.S. presidential election year.

Iran also remains a major wild card. U.S. officials believe the neigh*****g country has helped quiet Iraq by reducing its flow of suspected aid to Shiite fighters, including materials needed for deadly roadside bombs.

Allies are also cutting forces. Britain, the main U.S. coalition partner in Iraq, is gradually drawing down its troops. Poland and Australia are contemplating full-scale withdrawals in the coming year.

Source:http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/20...psyear_080101/]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=7817 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=7816 Wed, 02 Jan 2008 00:54:25 GMT By Patrick Winn - Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday Jan 1, 2008 9:06:33 EST

Their numbers are few. Their profile is small. But few groups of women have proven more deadly or destructive than Air Force women flying and fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Defense Department restrictions prohibit all services from placing women in direct ground combat. But Air Force women have been cleared to fight from the air in fighter jets, bombers and gunships since the mid-1990s. The current wars have been a proving ground of sorts for Air Force women in extended combat roles, dispelling any old-fashioned notion that women lack the skills to kill.

Female fighters, like their male counterparts, have also paid with their lives. Five Air Force women have died in the two wars. All told, the two wars have claimed the lives of 104 female service members, according to the Defense Department.

Air Force women with combat-centric careers describe a straight-up meritocracy — not a boys’ club — where gender fades away and respect is pegged to performance. Women remain a marginal presence in these jobs, although their numbers have increased since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

“If you’re new to the system, you prove yourself whether you’re male or female,” said Master Sgt. Kimberly Sulipeck, who has flown an estimated 450 hours on AC-130H gunships in Afghanistan.

As a sensor operator, she’s targeted and eliminated more than 150 enemy combatants, according to her bio. “I’m just one of the guys,” Sulipeck said.

“You do your job, do it right, and that’s the way it goes.”

And she’s not the only one with a story to tell.
Angel of death

Her gunship cruised low and loud over northeastern Afghanistan, a mix of milkshake-brown flatlands, grassy valleys and boulder-strewn mountain slopes. On Capt. Allison Black’s monitor aboard an AC-130H Spectre, the region below was a flickering sea of night-vision green.

It was mid-November 2001. As an evaluator-navigator with the Air Force’s 1st Special Operations Group, Black was plotting routes, communicating with ground forces and identifying targets in the darkness below. Just days before, the Afghan capital of Kabul had fallen to light-and-lean Special Forces teams relying on Air Force fighter jet and gunship strikes. They were aided with intelligence from the Northern Alliance — Afghans with their own vendetta against the Taliban.

Now the target was a smallish province along the northern border. Bearded American soldiers, relying on the Northern Alliance’s knowledge of local terrain and Taliban habits, were moving covertly through the surrounding hills on horseback.

For weeks, the Army detachment had lived with Northern Alliance Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, a hulking and prickly haired war veteran thrilled to watch American air power cripple his Taliban foes.

Just 16 hours after Black landed at Karshi-Kanabad Air Base in neigh*****g Uzbekistan, she had been shuttled to her first-ever combat mission. It was off to a choppy start. Although the crew had successfully destroyed a bank of rocket launchers and several Taliban trucks, they were forced to evade anti-aircraft fire that pelted the Spectre’s steel belly.

“All they needed was a high-caliber [anti-aircraft] system to present a problem,” Black said. “We were definitely on edge.”

Dented but intact, the gunship flew on. Operational Detachment Alpha 595, from the Army’s 5th Special Forces Group, lit up Black’s radio as her plane neared its encampment. With Dostum’s help, the troops had learned of a nearby safe house packed with more than 200 Taliban and al-Qaida fighters.

Black began to chart the course. When her voice crackled over the soldiers’ field radios, Dostum was delightedly incredulous. A woman? Sent to kill the Taliban? “He couldn’t believe it,” Black said. “He thought it was the funniest thing.”

The Spectre neared and its cannons erupted. Unaccustomed to the Gatling gun’s mechanized snarl, the fighters confused the airstrike with a ground assault. Militants scattered into the fields, seeking cover in ditches and vehicles, although Black could see their heat-signature silhouettes from her console by the cockpit.

Dostum, hidden with the Army detachment several miles away, said the Taliban also believed a high-powered laser pointer used by Spectre operators to identify ground targets — a “sparkle,” in Air Force spec ops speak — was a death ray that turned everything it touched to flames.

As the hailstorm of munitions continued, Dostum grabbed his walkie-talkie, switched to the Taliban’s unsecured frequency and relayed to them the sound of Black’s chatter coming through Army radio.

He used the female pilot’s voice to taunt them as they bled.

“He said, ‘America is so determined, they bring their women to kill the Taliban. You’re so pathetic,’” Black said. “‘It’s the angel of death raining fire upon you.’” After circling the safe house environs many times — striking militants after they’d regroup in threes and fours — the Spectre had just enough fuel to return to Uzbekistan. The crew had expended all of its ammunition: 400 rounds of 40mm cannon shot and 100 rounds of 105mm Howitzer rounds. Black contacted an incoming gunship sent to finish off the remaining militants with a fresh load of ammo.

In those few hours, Black had become the first female AC-130H navigator to shoot in combat. Six years later, she’s a combat-medal-wearing mother to two sons, ages 6 months and 2 years, and she expects to return to Afghanistan in early 2008. She estimates the total number of human targets eliminated on that first tour at more than 250 enemies.

“I’m so proud to represent women, and proud to represent the gunship community, but it’s very humbling,” she said. “Here I am, Captain Black, getting all this attention for something myself and 12 other folks did.”

Although her gender was used to rile the Taliban, Black said it’s never proven a liability with her crew. “I never have to worry about it,” she said. “Everybody I care about knows who I am. They know what Allison Black is about.”
Shock and awe

Seen from the glorious heights of Maj. ***issa May’s F-16 cockpit, Baghdad fell beautifully.

It was nighttime and the exploding artillery burst and glowed like a fireworks display.

“It was the whole ground war,” she said. “But way up there, it was serene and quiet.”

These were Operation Iraqi Freedom’s early days, before Saddam Hussein’s anti-air capabilities were fully known. May’s three-month deployment to Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia was slated to end in January 2003. But her tour was extended indefinitely.

With the rest of America, she and others in the 14th Fighter Squadron restlessly watched the buildup to war on cable news.

“There was a sense of excitement ... and a fear of the unknown,” said May, a 1995 Air Force Academy graduate. “Now, we’re going to cross that line into Baghdad. So are they going to shoot at us? Are there things we don’t know about?” May, whose call sign SHOCK — or “Scarlet-Headed Ovulating Commie Killer” — hints at her strawberry-blond curls, finally got orders to cross the southern Iraqi no-fly zone in April. The Army was penetrating the city, which was ringed with Saddam’s surface-to-air missile sites. May’s four-ship formation would hit the sites with slender, supersonic AGM-88 anti-radiation missiles, allowing bomber jets to strike Baghdad safely.]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=7816 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=7774 Fri, 28 Dec 2007 22:27:34 GMT
A deluge 8,000 years ago in what are now the Balkans is believed by some to have given rise to the biblical story. It is being seen as a model for the social upheaval that may result from sea-level rises caused by climate change.

The research, led by Chris Turney, a geologist at the University of Exeter, found that as early farmers from the Balkans travelled west because of the flooding, their culture replaced that of the hunter-gatherer tribes that they encountered. As they settled around Italy and France, they established farming communities, which eventually led to the growth of villages, towns and cities.

“People living in what is now southeast Europe must have felt as though the whole world had flooded,” Professor Turney said. “This could well have been the origin of the Noah’s Ark story. Entire coastal communities would have been displaced, forcing people to migrate in their thousands.”

Those most affected by the flooding would have lived on low-lying land around the shores of the Black Sea. Professor Turney said that the rise in sea level 8,000 years ago is roughly in line with that expected between now and the end of the century.

“It’s quite a sobering thought,” he said. “Something of the order of 145 million people are living within a metre of sea level today. This research shows how rising sea levels can cause massive social change. Eight thousand years on, are we any better placed to deal with rising sea levels?”

Before the flood, the early farmers seemed disinclined to migrate. “They didn’t expand any further across Europe,” Professor Turney said. “It looks like they just stopped.”

The flood occurred at the end of the last Ice Age when the Laurentide ice sheet covering much of North America collapsed, releasing vast amounts of water and increasing global sea levels by up to 1.4 metres.

As the sea rose, it breached a ***** across the Bosphorus in Turkey, that dammed the Mediterranean and had, up to that time, cut off the Black Sea, which was a freshwater lake. Over 34 years the Black Sea filled and overflowed.

Scientists from Britain and Australia simulated the Mediterranean and Black Sea shorelines before and after the sea-level rise. The research, published today in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, estimates that almost 73,000 square kilometres (28,000 square miles) of land would have been lost, displacing 145,000 people."

Source:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle2896439.ece]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=7774 Politics BlackZodiac> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=7773 Fri, 28 Dec 2007 22:15:58 GMT
It is where presents - game consoles, laptops, mobile phones - come to die.

It is also where they are reborn. In this giant scrap-yard, so dangerously polluted that its children are being clinically poisoned, the electronic objects of desire, a million tons of them a year, are broken apart, ***ted down, and washed in acid to be recycled into a new flood of imports for Christmas future.

Now the British Environmental Agency says that despite a ban on exports of electronic waste to China, unscrupulous middle men are using a loophole in the law intended to encourage recycling to dump more goods in places like Guiyu, where labour costs are low and environmental controls weak.

E-waste is delivered to "civic amenity sites", which can sell it on for recycling at home.

"Operators are visited by what we would call waste tourists," said John Burns, the Environmental Agency enforcement manager.

"They will buy in bulk and ship it abroad ostensibly as second-hand goods for resale but in fact for breaking up."

The effects, particularly of breaking up circuit boards, are clear within minutes of arriving in Guiyu, a town five hours' drive north-east of Hong Kong.

The s***l of scorched metal and burned plastic hangs over the town.

The source is immediately obvious. Inside and outside the shack-like workshops that line the streets, men and women sit burning circuit boards over coal fires. Wang Qing, a 39-year-old mother of two, sits for 10 or 12 hours a day, 30 days a month, over the flame, ***ting the solder that sticks the electronic components to the circuit boards.

With a knife, she scrapes them into baskets on one side and dumps the singed boards on the other. A thick cloud of toxic smoke envelopes her face.

"I get head-aches all the time, and suffer a lot of colds," she said. She said she didn't like to wear face-masks and her boss did not insist.

Her wages drew her a thousand miles from her home in central China. She earns about £100 a month, a decent salary in China. In other workshops, many family-run, children help out during their lunch breaks and holidays.

In the streets, piles of scrap mount up, while effluent fills the black streams that criss-cross the town and in which residents still rely for daily tasks such as washing. Much of this comes from the acid baths in which components are washed either to remove surplus metal, or to break them down further.

The price of metals found in the components, including gold and copper, has risen hugely in recent years, meaning good profits can be had from extracting them.

But according to local academics, the families, while making money, are also paying a frightening price. A study at nearby Shantou University found that of 165 children aged between one and six in Guiyu, 135 - 82 per cent - had clinical lead poisoning, which can cause brain damage.

The problem is not new. The Daily Telegraph first visited Guiyu seven years ago, and since then the European Union has banned exports of E-waste.

But alongside the familiar brand-names, such as ATI and Intel, The Daily Telegraph found evidence of the continuing trade, which is also supposed to be banned by China itself.

Labels showed bundles had been sent from EU countries such as Austria as well as from America, where, despite campaigns, the trade is still legal.

Hong Kong's environmental protection department said that the city had so far this year stopped 116 container loads of electronic waste being illegally imported, up from 70 all last year, though none was from Britain.

That does not mean the trade is not happening. Britain prosecuted two companies this year caught trying to export electric waste illegally. One was fined just £3,000, another £9,000.

Guiyu is not China's only recycling city. Further south is Panyu, which specialises in plastic bags.

Further north is Taizhou, which takes plastic bottles, and ***ts them down into pellets.

And Guiyu has branched out into other products too. Outside one warehouse were piles of bits of cars. "We specialise in Audis and Land Rover," the owner said.

Even the biggest Christmas presents end up in Guiyu."

Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...eaguiyu127.xml]]> http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php?t=7773 Politics BlackZodiac>