Calvalcade of Coincidence

[Amen to this.]
I fear that we have hit the bottom in our military men and women.
Lower level officers are now afraid to report atrocities for fear
that they will lose their rank, men are afraid to admit they are
shot, women are afraid to report rape, when they report rape they
are told it was their fault!
What has this man's army come to? Have we totally lost our honor? To
be a military man in this army means to be immoral, a liar, to
accuse the innocent and to not grieve for killing women and children.

This is not the military or the country I served. The men running
our government at this time are either mad or totally immoral and
have not place in this world as leaders. That is why they must turn
out such people as Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, Mattis and Abizaid and
bring in some new leadership who better represents what we are as a
nation.
http://www.corvusworld.com/getoutnow.htm

[I have to tell you as a religious type person, this really offends me. God doesn’t do things in the kind of assinine, half-baked way things have been coming off with our recent invasions. These debacles have all the finger prints of mortal folly.]
President†Bush†says†he†is†not†taking†credit†for†the†freedom†movement†taking†place†in†the†Middle†East.†Nor†is†he†giving†the†credit†to†the†US.†President†Bush†says†he†credits†God,†not†his†administration†or†America,†for†the†spread†of†freedom†there.

The†president†said†this†as†part†of†his†weeklong†campaign†for†Syria†to†withdraw†it†troops†from†Lebanon,†saying†his†administration†wants†an†immediate†withdrawal.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=4§ion=0&article=59917&d=5&m=3&y=2005


Moscow's weather has been catching people off guard recently: snow in spring, a flood in summer, a hurricane closer to fall, sun in winter.

Russians thrive on their four seasons, but Moscow's mayor doesn't like surprises.

To ensure it doesn't rain on his parade on City Day, Mayor Yuri Luzhkov dispatches cloud-seeding planes to the skies.

Now he's taking accountability to new heights -- proposing fining the city-funded weathermen when their forecasts are wrong.

"The situation is crazy, just crazy," he told his Cabinet. "They say lah, lah, lah, we can do the job, we always do. If instead, we get -- excuse my non-parliamentary parlance -- crap, they should pay a fine."
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/03/02/moscow.weather/index.html

Adventurer Steve Fossett landed in Kansas Thursday completing an epic 23,000-mile solo, non-stop flight around the earth without refueling.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/aerospace-4zf.html

[Just $4B to make something so useful. Meanwhile the war in Iraq has cost probably 10 times that much to no useful end.]
Two aerospace consortia have been retained to bid on operating the European satellite navigation system Galileo, a 20-year deal worth three billion euros (four billion dollars), the EU commission said Tuesday.
http://www.spacedaily.com/2005/050301193822.daibzi9o.html

iNavSat, a consortium led by the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS), has been chosen to operate the European Union's new satellite navigation system Galileo, the daily Die Welt reported on Tuesday
http://www.spacedaily.com/2005/050301083351.2smfzh8d.html

Police on the Indonesian resort island of Bali are hard-pressed to explain the sudden proliferation of white markings at hundreds of temples across the deeply superstitious Hindu island.

Local residents view the signs as a divine warning.
http://www.spacedaily.com/2005/050302020341.iap37kz6.html

The world's airlines must make cuts of 12 percent in nitrogen oxide emissions blamed for depleting the ozone layer, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) said Tuesday.

The pact, adopted unanimously among the 36-member council of the UN body, comes amid growing concern that the expansion of budget airlines and global air travel poses serious environmental risks.
http://www.spacedaily.com/2005/050302185554.bjk2nlr4.html

[I think NASA should be de-funded and replaced by a more focussed organization or family of organizations. If it were up to me there would be a big main organization dedicated to colonizing the solar system. Then there could be a couple of smaller, independent organizations for say launching satellites, and conducting orbital missions. As it is now NASA has become a 2,000 pound dog in the manger. They don’t want to do anything, but they don’t want anyone else doing anything either.]
NASA officials have claimed they performed a risk analysis before deciding to cancel the last space-shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, but no such analysis was ever done.

Worse, sources told UPI's Space Watch that NASA also has ignored at least one proposal to reduce the risk of sending a shuttle crew to Hubble -- in order to justify its decision.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/hubble-05j.html

A few years ago, NASA researcher Watson Gregg published a study showing that tiny free-floating ocean plants called phytoplankton had declined in abundance globally by 6 percent between the 1980s and 1990s. A new study by Gregg and his co-authors suggests that trend may not be continuing, and new patterns are taking place.

Why is this important? Well, the tiny ocean plants help regulate our atmosphere and the health of our oceans. Phytoplankton produce half of the oxygen generated by plants on Eart
http://www.spacemart.com/news/eo-05y.html

Singapore will introduce biometric passports to citizens in October, the government said Thursday, ensuring Singaporeans will continue to be allowed visa-free entry into the United States.

Home Affairs Minister Wong Kan Seng told parliament the new passport, which will contain the holder's unique facial and fingerprint information, is part of the city-state's efforts to tighten security against terrorist threats.
http://www.spacedaily.com/2005/050303094519.ska8t9e2.html

[I bet you this is some kind of planned or unplanned electromagnetic effect, maybe from a new cell phone tower or something like that. Maybe it resonates or interferes with something in the bridge or something like that.]
But can it have affected Dumbarton so badly that even the dogs have lost the will to live?
Animal experts admitted yesterday they had no explanation for a spate of what appear to be canine suicides – all from the same spot.
At least five dogs have jumped to their deaths from a bridge over a burn at Overtoun House in the past six months.
http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/34553.html

The head of Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guards has warned that 190,000 US troops stationed close to the Islamic republic could be targetted if Iran were attacked, a report said Wednesday.

"More than 190,000 members of American forces are scattered in Afghanistan and Iraq. If the US carries out its threats against Iran, they nust know that all these forces will be within our reach," Yahya Rahim Safavi told the ultra-hardline Ya Lessarat newspaper.
http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050302112226.vkg8el8p.html

[The best way to avoid getting a missile dropped on your head is to have no one WANT to drop a missile on your head. Then no matter how many missiles there are, or what kind they are, it doesn’t matter, because the people with them are not going to shoot them at you.

Impossible you say? Is anyone planning on dropping missiles on the Dominican Republic? Or Costa Rica? Or even Brazil? Probably not. They’re missiles defense is minding their own business.]
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said Tuesday that Moscow was creating a nuclear weapon capable of thwarting any defense system in the world, Interfax news agency reported.

"There is not now and will not be any defense from such missiles," the news agency quoted Ivanov as saying.

It was not immediately clear what type of weapon Ivanov was referring to. He has however said in the past that Russia's future nuclear defenses will be based on the mobile, Topol-M rocket.
http://www.spacewar.com/news/nuclear-doctrine-05i.html

Big Brother is on the march. A plan to subject all children to mental health screening is underway, and the pharmaceutical firms are gearing up for bigger sales of psychotropic drugs.
 
Like most liberal, big-spending ideas, this one was slipped into the law under cover of soft semantics. Its genesis was the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health (NFCMH), created by President George W. Bush in 2002.
 
The NFCMH recommends "routine and comprehensive" testing and mental health screening for every child in America, including preschoolers. Bush has instructed 25 federal agencies to develop a plan to implement the commission's recommendations.
...
Parental rights are unclear or nonexistent under these mental health screening programs. What are the rights of youth and parents to refuse or opt out of such screening? Will they face coercion and threats of removal from school, or child neglect charges, if they refuse privacy-invading interrogations or unproved medications? How will a child remove a stigmatizing label from his records?
 
A Columbia University pilot project for screening students, called TeenScreen, resulted in one-third of the subjects being flagged as "positive" for mental health problems. Half of those were turned over for mental health treatment. If that is a preview of what would happen when 52 million public school students are screened, it would mean hanging a libelous label on 17 million American children and forcibly putting 8 million children into the hands of the psychiatric/pharmaceutical industry.
http://www.rense.com/general63/medi.htm

The most recent bill introduced in the U.S. Senate (S. 3) is aimed at liability protection of drugs and vaccines and to prevent state legislation to ban Thimerosal (mercury) in vaccines. This bill is worse than the Eli Lilly provision of the Homeland Security Act and is a direct "gift" to the pharmaceutical companies. The pharmaceutical industry gave almost $45 million in campaign contributions for Presidential and Congressional elections since 2002 (www.opensecrets.org) and the health care/pharmaceutical industry has over 600 lobbyists in Washington, D.C. alone. If constituents do not weigh in on this horrendous bill, the American people will suffer; having their civil rights violated and state autonomy will be compromised. It is an insult to every state elected official and every American.
http://www.rense.com/general63/vacc.htm

In a small but startling preliminary new study, Texas researchers have found that after just three months, every one of a dozen children treated for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) with the drug methylphenidate experienced a threefold increase in levels of chromosome abnormalitiesóoccurrences associated with increased risks of cancer and other adverse health effects.
http://www.rense.com/general63/chrom.htm

[If the Japanese keep on like this they will just get pushed up next to the Ainu and someone else will come and take over their country.]
The list of solutions is short and complicated. The most obvious -- opening Japan to more immigration -- is enormously controversial in a society that is 98.8 percent ethnically homogeneous and, in many respects, still markedly xenophobic. Some farmers in Nishiki who have failed to find Japanese women willing to live traditional lives in rural villages have sought brides in China instead. But village officials said several of the Chinese women fled after they failed to win the acceptance of their new in-laws.

Although it is a national problem, depopulation is most severe in rural areas such as Nishiki, a proud farming and forestry town 248 miles north of Tokyo where the population peaked at 9,180 in 1956. Over the years, families left Nishiki, seeking better fortunes in Japanese cities. The population stabilized in the 1980s, but the birthrate began declining in the 1990s.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2548-2005Mar2?language=printer

[The OKC bombing.]
http://www.forteantimes.com/articles/189_whitenoise1.shtml

Bradley Smith says that the freewheeling days of political blogging and online punditry are over.

In just a few months, he warns, bloggers and news organizations could risk the wrath of the federal government if they improperly link to a campaign's Web site. Even forwarding a political candidate's press release to a mailing list, depending on the details, could be punished by fines.

Smith should know. He's one of the six commissioners at the Federal Election Commission, which is beginning the perilous process of extending a controversial 2002 campaign finance law to the Internet.

In 2002, the FEC exempted the Internet by a 4-2 vote, but U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly last fall overturned that decision. "The commission's exclusion of Internet communications from the coordinated communications regulation severely undermines" the campaign finance law's purposes, Kollar-Kotelly wrote.
http://news.com.com/The%20coming%20crackdown%20on%20blogging/2008-1028_3-5597079.html?tag=sas.email

Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it.

What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

U.S. Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan issued one of his toughest warnings yet to Congress yesterday about the danger of letting the country's giant budget deficits persist, saying "the consequences for the U.S. economy of doing nothing could be severe."
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1109803811510&call_pageid=970599119419

The Padilla Ruling Is a Victory for Freedom
by Jacob G. Hornberger, March 2, 2005

As I have been writing for the past two years, it is impossible to overstate the importance of the Jose Padilla case. The power assumed by the U.S. military and the Bush administration in the Padilla case constitutes what is arguably the most ominous and dangerous threat to the freedom of the American people in our lifetime. Fortunately, this past Monday a U.S. district court in South Carolina put the quietus to the assumption and exercise of such power. The court’s ruling was a major victory for freedom, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the rule of law. Unfortunately, however, the government is appealing, hoping to overturn the district court’s judgment.

(Underscoring the vital importance The Future of Freedom Foundation has placed on the Padilla case and the threat that it poses to the American people, we have published more than 40 original articles and commentaries on Padilla since his arrest and we have linked to countless editorials and op-eds on Padilla from other publications in our FFF Email Update. A list of FFF’s orginal articles and commentaries is posted at the end of this article. )
...
But make no mistake about it: If the Pentagon’s power to arrest Americans for terrorism and punish them without federal court interference is upheld by the courts, the floodgates will be open to omnipotent military power in America. American life will never be the same again. Life will be transformed by such power in ways unimaginable. No one will be safe from military arrest, including newspaper editors, government critics, and dissidents. Any person — any person — deemed to be an “enemy combatant” and taken into military custody will have no recourse to avoid punishment, except for the “good faith” of the Pentagon, the government organization that is responsible for plunging this nation into one of the most shameful torture, sex abuse, rape, and murder scandals in its history, not to mention the resulting cover-up.
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0503a.asp

A federal investigation into an alleged $180 million bribery scandal in Nigeria involving a Halliburton Co. subsidiary and other companies has expanded to examine whether former employees may have illegally coordinated bidding on other foreign construction projects as early as the mid-1980s, long before Halliburton acquired the subsidiary.
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/050302/halliburton_nigeria_2.html

[Indeed, indeed.]
"Mom, there's this test we're supposed to take tomorrow," my daughter told me one night last year, "but I have a funny feeling about it. Our guidance counselor came in and said that the school would be giving all juniors a special career-aptitude test, to show us where our talents are. It sounded good, but then a military recruiter came in and said that this test, called the ASVAB, could help us choose the best career path.

"He said, 'any personal information will be kept strictly confidential.' I asked if the military would keep our names and numbers, and he just repeated that it's 'confidential.' That was when I knew something was wrong – why make such a big deal about getting our personal information, unless that's the point of the whole thing?"

Indeed.
...
Kids are so much easier than mature adults to dupe with glorious words of manhood, honor, sacrifice, and heroism. That's why the military is focusing so heavily on getting them at school, where their parents can't see what's going on.
http://www.antiwar.com/whitehurst/?articleid=5049


The House on Wednesday approved a job-training bill that would allow faith-based organizations receiving federal funds to consider a person's religious beliefs in making employment decisions.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2026&ncid=2026&e=4&u=/latimests/20050303/ts_latimes/houseoksbillonfaithbasedjobs

[Now people in England will be able to enjoy all the fun of living under the repressive military regime in Burma without ever leaving home. Thanks Tony!]
The government's anti-terrorism plans, which will be discussed by the Lords this week, include a number of proposals to monitor the behaviour of suspected terrorists such as "house arrest". But how would the plans work in practice?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4308033.stm


Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan on Thursday embraced the notion of overhauling the nation's tax system and said that some form of a consumption tax - such as a national sales tax - could spur greater economic growth.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20050303/D88JI49G0.html

[I like how the CHinese get their information about the US human rights situation from USA Today.]
Following is the full text of the Human Rights Record of the United States in 2004, released by the Information office of China's State Council Thursday.

    The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2004 

    By the Information Office of the State Council of the People's Republic of China

    March 3, 2005

    In 2004 the atrocity of US troops abusing Iraqi POWs exposed the dark side of human rights performance of the United States. The scandal shocked the humanity and was condemned by the international community. It is quite ironic that on Feb. 28 of this year, the State Department of the United States once again posed as the "the world human rights police" and released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2004. As in previousyears, the reports pointed fingers at human rights situation in more than 190 countries and regions (including China) but kept silent on the US misdeeds in this field. Therefore, the world people have to probe the human rights record behind the Statue of Liberty in the United States.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-03/03/content_2642607.htm

Snow-covered palm trees in the Mediterranean, travel chaos on the continent and a rise in heating costs are the results of an unusual European cold snap.

Airports in Paris and Amsterdam, where cancellations have stranded thousands of passengers, struggled with icy runways and heavy delays on Thursday as a result of the heavy late winter conditions. Four people died in a small plane crash in Italy.
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/29817/story.htm

Brian Joiner wishes he could "just get over it."

He wishes he could ignore the thousands of reported voting irregularities that occurred in the Nov. 2 election, accept the fact that George W. is going to be around another four years and just hope that we haven't created even more enemies or fallen even deeper into debt by the time 2008 rolls around.

"I'm sure the Republicans would like me to forget all that stuff, just like they wanted everyone to forget all the strange things that happened in the 2000 election," the retired 67-year-old UW-Madison statistics professor said this week.

Well, sorry guys, but he can't.

There were, Joiner says, too many things that occurred on Nov. 2 that "still don't smell right." He can't just pretend everything is rosy, he says, when he reads that Steven Freeman, a respected University of Pennsylvania professor, says the odds of the exit polls in the critical states of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania all being so far off were about 662,000 to 1.


[Good old Jefferson, relying on reason and actual facts. Unfortunately, that kind of thinking has no place in modern day America.]
Anybody who asserted that the Ten Commandments were the basis of American or British law was, Jefferson said, mistakenly believing a document put forth by Massachusetts and British Puritan zealots which was "a manifest forgery."

The reason was simple, Jefferson said. British common law, on which much American law was based, existed before Christianity had arrived in England.

"Sir Matthew Hale [a conservative advocate for church/state "cooperation"] lays it down in these words," wrote Jefferson to Cooper: "'Christianity is parcel of the laws of England.'"

But, Jefferson rebuts in his letter, it couldn't be. Just looking at the timeline of English history demonstrated it was impossible:

"But Christianity was not introduced till the seventh century; the conversion of the first Christian king of the Heptarchy having taken place about the year 598, and that of the last about 686. Here, then, was a space of two hundred years, during which the common law was in existence, and Christianity no part of it...."

Not only was Christianity - or Judaism, or the Ten Commandments - not a part of the foundation of British and American common law, Jefferson noted, but those who were suggesting it was were promoting a lie that any person familiar with the commonly-known history of England would recognize as absurd.

"We might as well say that the Newtonian system of philosophy is a part of the common law, as that the Christian religion is," wrote Jefferson. "...In truth, the alliance between Church and State in England has ever made their judges accomplices in the frauds of the clergy; and even bolder than they are."
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0303-30.htm

[That’s about 26 attacks per day around the country, and about 22 fatalities per day around the country. I seem to recall the population of Iraq is supposed to be around 25M, so if you were an Iraqi your chanes of dying on any given day in February would have been about one in a million. If that were the US the same ratio would have been something like 250 or 300 people killed during February.]

One security analysis showed 727 insurgent attacks of one sort or another in February, with 627 people killed, including 42 members of the Multi-National Force, 213 Iraqi security personnel, and 329 civilians.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4317103.stm

A nun who spent the past 18 months in prison for defacing a missile site in a peace protest is scheduled to be released Friday, but she may face another confrontation with prosecutors for refusing to pay $3,000 in restitution.
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-nuns-missile-silo,0,6520773.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines

Good news! Good news! Good news! The military is re-instating 70-year-olds in its efforts to staff the troops needed in the Iraq-Afghanistan theater.

By raising the age of eligibility for military service a whole generation of patriots can participate in military service, rather than being relegated to merely championing it from afar for the young.

And so in the spirit of Rush Limbaugh’s suggestion for an All-Women’s Amazon Brigade, I hereby suggest the formation of a Super Macho Patriot Brigade.

What are the qualifications for the Super Macho Patriot Brigade? Candidates must 1) be a vocal advocate of current US military operations, 2) be over age 40, 3) have not served in the military in their youth – which is to say did everything imaginable to avoid service during the Vietnam or other war era, and 4) earn an above average, very comfortable living substantially in part by championing service in the Iraq War.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig4/cox3.html

Dr. John Caulfield thought it had to be a mistake when the Army asked him to return to active duty. After all, he's 70 years old and had already retired - twice. He left the Army in 1980 and private practice two years ago.

"My first reaction was disbelief," Caulfield said. "It never occurred to me that they would call a 70-year-old."

In fact, he was so sure it was an error that he ignored the postcards and telephone messages asking if he would be willing to volunteer for active duty to "backfill" somewhere on the East Coast, Europe or Hawaii. That would be OK, he thought. It would release active duty oral surgeons from those areas to go to combat zones in Iraq or Afghanistan.

But then the orders came for him to go to Afghanistan.
http://www.marionstar.com/news/stories/20041211/localnews/1731211.html

Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena was freed by her captors on Friday but U.S. forces in Iraq (news - web sites) mistakenly opened fire on the convoy taking her to safety, wounding her and killing an Italian secret service agent.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, one of President Bush (news - web sites)'s staunchest supporters in Iraq, immediately summoned the American ambassador, demanding explanations and declaring someone had to take responsibility.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&ncid=578&e=1&u=/nm/20050304/ts_nm/iraq_dc

The population of Palestinians living in Israel, the Occupied Gaza Strip, Occupied East Jerusalem and rest of the Occupied West Bank combined now exceeds the number of Israeli Jews, a U.S. government report has revealed.

The Palestinian population stands at over 5.3 million while the Jewish population stands at 5.2 million.

The figures come from the U.S. State Department's annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2004. The report provided population figures for each of these territorial units separately but failed to connect all the dots to arrive at the explosive new demographic reality that an Israeli Jewish minority now rules over a larger number of Palestinians living between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

The section on Israel and the Occupied Territories states that the population of Israel stands at 6.8 million, of whom 5.2 million are Jews, 1.3 million Arabs and another 290,000 are other minorities. The Arabs who are citizens of Israel are Palestinians who are survivors and descendants of those Palestinians who were not forced out of the country or fled when Israel was created.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3649.shtml

[I’ve been doing this blog for like a week, and it’s already over-run with coincidences.]
Ukraine's former interior minister has been found dead in an apparent suicide on the day he was to be questioned about the killing of an opposition-minded journalist, officials said.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/03/04/ukraine/index.html

While Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez attends to the inauguration ceremony of Uruguay"s leftist leader, Tabare Vazquez, in Montevideo, his Armed Forces are closely watching the unexpected presence of several US battleships near country's western coastline. On Monday, Venezuela's Navy commander, Armando Laguna, made the announcement during an interview on state TV but opted not to accuse Washington directly of any provocation.

Laguna said that the Venezuelan Navy detected several foreign vessels 75 kilometers northeast of the ParaguanÄ Peninsula in western Venezuela. According to Laguna, the presence of U.S. military ships near Venezuela is part of their "routine manoeuvres", and told people not to be alarmed. What, in fact, concerned Venezuelan officials is that Washington did not announce the manoeuvre as it has traditionally been doing it.
http://english.pravda.ru/world/20/91/368/15052_Venezuela.html

Fearing airstrikes, Iran is using reenforced materials and tunneling deep underground to store nuclear components - measures meant to make the facility resistant to "bunker busters" and other special weaponry, diplomats said Thursday.
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journalgazette/11041822.htm

World Trade Organisation appeal judges on Thursday upheld a ruling declaring illegal billions of dollars in subsidies to US cotton farmers.

Trade experts and development campaigners said the decision was likely to intensify pressure on the US and the European Union to cut farm subsidies in the current round of global trade talks, a central demand of developing nations.

A WTO panel in September backed a complaint by Brazil that US cotton subsidies violated fair trade rules by depressing world prices and breaching WTO subsidy limits.
...
Richard Mills, spokesman for the US trade representative's office, said.

“We will study the report carefully and work closely with Congress and our farm community on our next steps.”
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/e8033ae8-8c2a-11d9-a895-00000e2511c8.html

There is a concerted right-wing effort to clamp down on liberal academics in the US. The attacks on M. Shahid Alam and Ward Churchill serve distinct notice that free-speech rights may be constitutionally protected on paper, but those rights are fragile.

The assault on free speech is not confined to the US. Canadian security bills enacted following 9-11 have severely curtailed freedoms enjoyed by Canadians. Several Muslim Canadians have been rounded up along with one infamous historical revisionist.
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/petersen02272005/


A United Nations' report released this week says nuclear and hazardous wastes dumped on Somalia's shores had been scattered by the recent Asian tsunami and are now infecting Somalis in coastal areas.
 
A spokesman for the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), Nick Nuttall, told VOA that for the past 15 years or so, European companies and others have used Somalia as a dumping ground for a wide array of nuclear and hazardous wastes.
 
"There's uranium radioactive waste, there's leads, there's heavy metals like cadmium and mercury, there's industrial wastes, and there's hospital wastes, chemical wastes, you name it,î he said. ìIt's not rocket science to know why they're doing it because of the instability there."
 
Mr. Nuttall said, on average, it cost European companies $2.50 per ton to dump the wastes on Somalia's beaches rather than $250 a ton to dispose of the wastes in Europe.
http://www.rense.com/general63/unwar.htm

Depleted Uranium Fact Sheet
http://www.rense.com/general63/mme.htm

The tribunals have been used in NAFTA disputes for only a few years, but the complaints they have handled have already had many repercussions, including these:

• The Canadian government lifted restrictions on manufacturing an ethanol-based gasoline additive that it considered hazardous after an American manufacturer said that the ban hurt its business.

• A tribunal ordered Mexico to pay an American company $16.7 million after finding that local environmental laws prohibiting a toxic- waste-processing plant that the company was building were tantamount to expropriation.

• A Canadian-based funeral company is asking the United States government for $725 million in compensation after a Mississippi jury found the company guilty in 1995 of trying to put a local funeral home out of business, and levied $500 million in damages. The company contends that the jury sought to punish it because it is foreign. If the tribunal awards compensation, critics say, all jury awards involving foreign investors may be challenged.

• United Parcel Service, the package-delivery company, has filed a complaint contending that the very existence of the publicly financed Canadian postal system represents unfair competition that conflicts with Canada's obligations under NAFTA. Critics worry that if the tribunal upholds the U.P.S. claim, government participation in any service that competes with the private sector will be threatened.
http://www.mindfully.org/WTO/NAFTA-Powerful-Secret.htm