Al Jazzera
A state Senate committee approved a proposal Tuesday to put a serial number on every handgun bullet made or sold in California.
http://www.rense.com/general64/sera.htm
Climate scientists armed with new data from the ocean depths and from space satellites have found that Earth is absorbing much more heat than it is giving off, which they say validates computer projections of global warming.
Lead scientist James Hansen, a prominent NASA climatologist, described the findings on the planet's out-of-balance energy exchange as a "smoking gun" that should dispel doubts about forecasts of climate change. A European climate expert called it a valuable contribution to climate research
http://www.rense.com/general64/nnss.htm
A priest in charge of bringing Polish pilgrims to the Vatican was a secret communist informer during the era of Pope John Paul II, it has been alleged.
Father Konrad Stanislaw Hejmo, 69, was said to have collaborated with the secret services in communist Poland during the 1980s.
The allegations have been made by a Polish institute investigating Nazi and communist crimes in Poland.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4490581.stm
Swedish investigators are baffled by a mysterious illness affecting over 400 children of asylum-seekers, mostly from former Soviet and Yugoslav states, who fall into a deep depression and lose the will to live.
The government presented its first study of the so-called "apathetic children" on Wednesday, after King Carl XVI Gustav added his voice to a chorus of concern from charities, church groups and politicians who want them protected from deportation.
"It is dreadful what is happening to these poor children," the Swedish king told reporters.
The condition is known as Pervasive Refusal Syndrome and can be life-threatening. It affects boys and girls of all ages, but mostly aged 8-15, who refuse to speak, move, eat or drink for days or many months, and must be drip-fed to keep them alive.
Virtually unknown before 2000, the condition has been seen on a large scale only in Sweden. But the researchers ruled out that the children were faking their condition.
http://www.rense.com/general64/sick.htm
[It would be interesting to know if these nuerons are stunted or missing in socio-paths.]
Since their discovery, mirror neurons have been implicated in a broad range of phenomena, including certain mental disorders. Mirror neurons may help cognitive scientists explain how children develop a theory of mind (ToM), which is a child's understanding that others have minds similar to their own. Doing so may help shed light on autism, in which this type of understanding is often missing.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7656021/
A farmer is at his “wits’ end” after a mystery gunman shot dead newborn lambs on his farm for the third time in a fortnight.
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=4467217
[I bet this has something to do with echelon or an allied project.]
They have seen their cars' remote-controlled locking systems go berserk meaning many motorists have been locked out of their own vehicles.
And to add to their fury, the cars' alarms are going off day and night apparently for no reason.
http://www.thisislocallondon.co.uk/news/weird/display.var.591273.0.alarming_behaviour.php
Eight months ago, Huseyin Yousuf was looking forward to retiring from his successful dry cleaning business in Norbury, now the 72-year-old is blind in one eye and facing months of painful recovery after a horrific acid attack.
Huseyin, known as Joe, was blinded in one eye and received terrible burns after a man walked into his business and threw a bottle of acid over him.
Seven months after the unprovoked attack and with no leads from investigating officers Joe's family is offering a £5,000 reward to catch the person responsible.
http://www.thisislocallondon.co.uk/display.var.591489.0.acid_attack_on_norbury_man.php
At an FDA hearing on the safety of psychotropic drugs on Feb 2, 2004, dozens of tortured parents testified that their children had committed suicide or other violent acts after being prescribed the same drugs that are being marketed in the Bush-backed pharmaceutical industry schemes aimed at recruiting the nations 52 million school children as customers.
In July 2003, the Bush appointed New Freedoms Commission on Mental Health (NFC) recommended screening all children for mental illness and designated TeenScreen as a model program to ensure that every student receives a mental health check-up before finishing high school.
The NFC also has a preferred drug program in place modeled after the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP), that lists what drugs are to be used on children found to be mentally ill.
The list contains every drug that people complained about at the FDA hearing, including Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Wellbutron, Zyban, Remeron, Serzone, Effexor, Buspar, Risperdal, Zyprexa, Seroqual, Geodone, Depakote, Adderall, and Prozac.
http://www.rense.com/general64/ssru.htm
There has recently been a marked decrease in the export of U.S. arms, especially military aircraft, to the world market, and the war in Iraq is to blame, Sergei Chemezov, the director general of Rosoboronexport, Russia’s military exporter, said in an interview to the Red Star newspaper published Thursday.
http://mosnews.com/news/2005/04/28/usarmsforecast.shtml
School nurses treating sexual infections and offering alcohol and drug addiction services said yesterday that many children have dangerously amoral attitudes to relationships and high-risk habits such as drug taking and alcohol abuse.
Health professionals addressing the Royal College of Nursing's annual congress reported dramatic rises in sex among the young, including alarming new trends such as "daisy chaining" - where groups of teenagers indulge in a variety of sexual activities.
http://www.rense.com/general64/climsate.htm
A leading Russian scientist has claimed that the sarcophagus entombing Chernobyl's broken nuclear reactor is dangerously degraded and he warned that its collapse could cause a catastrophe on the same scale as the original accident almost 20 years ago
http://www.rense.com/general64/dang.htm
[I would sya at this point the Zimbabweans are in the running for stupidest people on Earth.]
Zimbabwe's national parks have been ordered to work with rural district councils to begin the wholesale slaughter of big game. National park rangers said they had already shot 10 elephants in the past week. The meat was barbecued at festivities to mark 25 years of independence. Four of the animals were reportedly shot in view of tourists near Lake Kariba, the largest man-made lake in Africa and a major wildlife haven.
http://www.rense.com/general64/mugg.htm
[I wonder if this coud be related to the electromagnetic effects in England? Also recall the bridge in England or Scotland that was causing dogs to jump off to their deaths a little while back.]
Hundreds of toads have begun to explode near a lake in the town of Låsby in Mid-Jutland. According to reports, the toads climb on to land, swell to up to three times their normal size, and burst, casting their innards up to one metre in the air. A similar phenomenon has also been reported in the German city of Hamburg, where authorities report that over 1000 toads are dead.
Experts are at a loss to explain what is causing the toads' painful deaths, which primarily take place between two and three a.m.
http://www.rense.com/general64/dcs.htm
[What happened to all those people who lost their jobsi nt he dot-com bust? Surely they have not evaporated?]
The United States should remove visa limits to allow more skilled foreign citizens to work at U.S. companies if it wants to remain a leader in technology, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said on Wednesday.
Microsoft is having a hard time finding skilled workers within the United States, and the lack of H-1B visas for skilled workers is only making the situation worse, Gates said in a panel discussion at the Library of Congress.
"The whole idea of the H-1B visa thing is, don't let too many smart people come into the country. The whole thing doesn't make sense," Gates said.
Gates echoed the concerns of other business and education leaders who warn that the United States must improve science education and boost spending on research and development to avoid falling behind India, China and other countries that are rapidly gaining ground.
http://www.rense.com/general64/tecvi.htm
The protective ozone layer over the Arctic has thinned this winter to the lowest levels since records began, alarming scientists who believed it had begun to heal.
The increased loss of ozone allows more harmful ultraviolet light to reach the earth's surface, making children and outdoor enthusiasts such as skiers more vulnerable to skin cancer - a disease which is already dramatically increasing.
Scientists yesterday reinforced the warning that people going out in the sun this summer should protect themselves with creams and hats.
Research by Cambridge University shows that it is not increased pollution but a side effect of climate change that is making ozone depletion worse. At high altitudes, 50% of the protective layer had been destroyed.
The research has dashed hopes that the ozone layer was on the mend. Since the winter of 1999-2000, when depletion was almost as bad, scientists had believed an improvement was under way as pollution was reduced. But they now believe it could be another 50 years before the problem is solved.
http://www.rense.com/general64/dde.htm
Sunday, April 24th marked the 90th anniversary of the first genocide of the twentieth century: the Turkish government’s slaughter of over a million unarmed Armenians. The key word is "unarmed."
The Turks got away with it under the cover of wartime. They suffered no greater postwar reprisals for this act of genocide than if they had not conducted mass murder of a peaceful people.
Other governments soon took note of this fact. It seemed like such a convenient international precedent.
Seventy-nine years after that genocide began, Hotel Rwanda opened for business.
The Hutus also got away with it. Ironically, at least a decade before – I wish I could remember the date – Harper’s ran an article predicting this genocide for this reason: the Hutus had machine guns. The Tutsis didn’t. The article was written as a kind of parable, not a politically specific forecast. I remember reading it at the time and thinking, "If I were a Tutsi, I’d emigrate."
It did not pay to be a civilian in the twentieth century. The odds were against you
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north367.html
Belgian doctors sent an Iraqi girl home on Thursday after treating her for leg wounds caused by a bomb during the U.S. invasion -- and sent the 51,570 euro ($66,650) bill to the U.S. embassy.
ADVERTISEMENT
"We haven't heard from them yet," said Bert De Belder, coordinator of the humanitarian agency Medical Aid for Third World which brought the girl to Belgium.
"I'm curious to know their reaction," he told Reuters. "We're giving them 10 days to respond ... I don't think they will pay it."
The girl, 15-year-old Hiba Kassim, smiled to reporters as she waited for her flight to Jordan to meet her father.
"Thank you, Belgium," she said.
Doctors brought Kassim to Belgium last year to try to save her left ankle, seriously injured by a cluster bomb that also killed her brother in Baghdad in 2003
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&ncid=564&e=12&u=/nm/20050428/ts_nm/iraq_belgium_dc
What matters is that MPs were not made aware of - to put it politely - the progression of his thinking. When Goldsmith sat in the cabinet seat vacated hours earlier by Robin Cook, he was asked by the Prime Minister to make a presentation of the legal case for invasion. Blair did not invite questions before the Attorney was thanked for his contribution and left.
http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=633998
Our statistical analysis of their coverage, however, showed that there was startling disparity in how deaths were reported, depending on the ethnicity of the victim.
For example, we found that in 2004, at a time when 8 Israeli children and 176 Palestinian children were killed – a ratio of 1 to 22 – Times headlines and lead paragraphs reported on Israeli children’s deaths at a rate almost seven times greater than Palestinian children’s deaths.
A one-month sub-study indicated that this disparity grew even larger when the entire article was analyzed, with Israeli children’s deaths mentioned (through repetitions of deaths reported on previous days) at a rate ten times greater than Palestinian children’s deaths.
...
Such patterns of distortion gave readers the impression that equal numbers of people on both sides were being killed – or that more Israelis were being killed – when the reality is that Palestinians have always been killed in far greater numbers. In particular, we found that Times stories so often repeated reports of Israeli children’s deaths that in some periods they were reporting on Israeli deaths at a rate of 400 percent.
http://www.counterpunch.org/weir04252005.html
[This is the same man who was fingered asn an iranian spy a few months ago. Before thathe lied to get us to invade Iraq. before that he embezzled an amount of money from Jordan equal to 3% of their entire yearly GDP.]
Iraq failed to name an oil minister for its new government on Thursday and controversial politician Ahmad Chalabi was appointed actingminister of an industry plagued by sabotage attacks and uncertainty.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&ncid=564&e=17&u=/nm/20050428/ts_nm/iraq_government_oil_dc_1
In this context Zoellick's trip, which was covered by a small group of US journalists, was illuminating. The deputy secretary of state had to travel to this "liberated" city in a Black Hawk helicopter flying low over palm trees to avoid being shot down. He wore a flak jacket under his suit even though Falluja's streets were largely deserted. His convoy of eight armoured vehicles went "so quickly past an open-air bakery reopened with a US-provided micro-loan that workers tossing dough could be glanced only in the blink of an eye," as the Washington Post reported. "Blasted husks of buildings still line block after block," the journalist added.
Meeting hand-picked Iraqis in a US base, Zoellick was bombarded with complaints about the pace of US reconstruction aid and frequent intimidation of citizens by American soldiers. Although a state department factsheet claimed 95% of residents had water in their homes, Falluja's mayor said it was contaminated by sewage and unsafe.
...
Justin Alexander, a volunteer for Christian Peacemaker Teams, recently found hundreds living in tents in the grounds of their homes, or in a single patched-up room. A strict system of identity cards blocks access to anyone whose papers give a birthplace outside Falluja, so long-term residents born elsewhere cannot go home. "Fallujans feel the remnants of their city have been turned into a giant prison," he reports.
http://www.rense.com/general64/dest.htm
[How does a weapon that essentially allows you to shoot around corners help you minimize collateral damage if you don’t also have something that allows you to see around corners?]
The XM25 is ideal for urban combat. It puts precision firepower in the hands of the soldier, allowing them to eliminate threats without causing significant collateral damage.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/miltech-05c.html
[An ideal weapon for the hands of Satanists.]
However, such "earth-penetrating" nuclear weapons cannot go deep enough to avoid massive casualties at ground level, and they could still kill up to a million people or more if used in heavily populated areas, said the committee that wrote the report.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/nuclear-doctrine-05n.html
The issue affects far more than Rutan's ability to sign a contract with Virgin. Other firms, including a group in Dubai, have expressed interest in buying spaceships, he said.
"We have wrestled with this problem in terms of technology transfer to Virgin Atlantic for about five months now, and it has been difficult," he explained, adding that he has been discouraging foreign sales until a routine personal-spaceflight industry
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/spacetravel-05y.html
* In 1998, a study conducted jointly by statisticians from the U.S. Department of Justice and the University of Cambridge in England found that most crime is now worse in England than in the United States.
* "You are more likely to be mugged in England than in the United States," stated the Reuters news agency in summarizing the study. "The rate of robbery is now 1.4 times higher in England and Wales than in the United States, and the British burglary rate is nearly double America's."6 The murder rate in the United States is reportedly higher than in England, but according to the DOJ study, "the difference between the [murder rates in the] two countries has narrowed over the past 16 years."7
* The United Nations confirmed these results in 2000 when it reported that the crime rate in England is higher than the crime rates of 16 other industrialized nations, including the United States.8
http://www.gunowners.org/sk0703.htm
The trial judges correctly dismissed both complaints. In a carefully reasoned Memorandum Opinion, Judge Hannon based his decision in No. 79-6 on "the fundamental principle that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen." See p. 4, infra. The duty to provide public services is owed to the public at large, and, absent a special relationship between the police and an individual, no specific legal duty exists. Holding that no special relationship existed between the police and appellants in No. 79-6, Judge Hannon concluded that no specific legal duty existed. We hold that Judge Hannon was correct and adopt the relevant portions of his opinion. Those portions appear in the following Appendix.[fn1]
http://www.gunowners.org/sk0503.htm
Los Angeles riots -- USA Today reported that many of the people rushing to gun stores during the 1992 riots were "lifelong gun-control advocates, running to buy an item they thought they'd never need." Ironically, they were outraged to discover they had to wait 15 days to buy a gun for self-defense.
http://www.gunowners.org/sk0406.htm
Professional Jewish leaders demand obeisance to a vision of Jews as helpless and passive by nature -- childlike victims toward whom the entire world, not just the perpetrators of the Holocaust, owes groveling remorse. They preach that our entire nation is populated by similar victims whose sufferings give them an unquestionable moral claim -- victims of poverty, disease, racism, government funding cuts, ignorance, sexism, violence, and a whole host of newly discovered inequities and inequalities.
And they invariably propose one balm to heal all miseries: government. And more government. Government unbound, unlimited, unhindered.
http://www.jpfo.org/alert20010903.htm
The Iraqi insurgency is just as strong now as it was one year ago, the most senior US military officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers has admitted.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0427-09.htm
ronically, the CPB was created to shield PBS from political pressure, just as PBS was intended to address the "needs of unserved and underserved audiences." One can hardly argue that the WSJ edit page or Tucker Carlson fit into that category. "To find the same combination of conviction, partisanship and ideological extremism on the far left," wrote my colleague Eric Alterman, "A network would need to convene a 'roundtable' featuring Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Vanessa Redgrave and Fidel Castro."
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0427-33.htm
Why isn't Bush being more strongly criticized for inviting Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah to his ranch on Monday?
If ever there was an existing medieval theocracy that fits the definition, it's the Saudi monarchy. It is the most fundamentalist country in the world, period. The monarchy is unaccountable to its people. Women have an almost total absence of basic rights. Immigrant workers are grossly abused. A visit I made to the country in 2002 as part of a group of journalists confirmed some of this firsthand for me.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0427-31.htm
[This dosn’t sound quite right to me. The guy sort of claims to be supporting the Minuteman Projct, but I think he is really trying to do something else. At first glanceit looks like he is just trying to shoehorn his pet project to strangle the US war machine in on top of the Minuteman people, but I think this is really something else. I am not aware of anyone in America, outside of this one guy, who doesn’t want foreigners to continue shovelling money into this country as fast as they can. I think this might be a kind of flase flag type thing to make either the Minuteman people sound bad, or to make the anti-war people sound bad, or possibly something else. But this just sounds to me like somehow he is trying to put one over on people.]
Consider some migrant laborers who travel the U.S. Mexican border. They have been meeting a new force there. It goes by the name of the Minuteman Project, comprised of volunteers. The MP's mission is to defend the U.S. border. Soon the MP will expand its mission from intercepting foreign workers to slowing foreign capital. This money has been flooding into the U.S. below the political radar screen of public sentiment. The time for financial flood control is here, according to the MP. Its mission creep is striking fear into the hearts of overseas investors whose excess cash has been funding the American nation's federal deficit.
Of course, mounting a financial defense of Uncle Sam won't be easy. The MP must understand that. Taking on foreign labor is one thing. Confronting foreign capital is another. Foreigners who perform low-wage labor that profits U.S. employers from Wal-Mart to California agribusiness have names and faces. They breathe, eat, laugh and speak. By contrast, foreign lenders are faceless and nameless. Their surplus capital is mobile and invisible. Clearly, what we have is an "identity" issue.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0424-25.htm
"In 1991," sneers former terror czar Richard Clarke in his book "Against All Enemies," "Qatari police cars that were escorting my motorcade managed to crash into each other in a city with almost no traffic."
Today, the city is bursting with rush-hour traffic and a construction boom, thanks to the vision and guile of its ruler/emir, Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani, who not only hosts the largest U.S. regional military base outside of Iraq (which spawned the Coalition Media Center during the invasion of Iraq), but earlier patronized Al-Jazeera in 1996 and serves as its chairman.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0426-34.htm
http://www.rense.com/general64/sera.htm
Climate scientists armed with new data from the ocean depths and from space satellites have found that Earth is absorbing much more heat than it is giving off, which they say validates computer projections of global warming.
Lead scientist James Hansen, a prominent NASA climatologist, described the findings on the planet's out-of-balance energy exchange as a "smoking gun" that should dispel doubts about forecasts of climate change. A European climate expert called it a valuable contribution to climate research
http://www.rense.com/general64/nnss.htm
A priest in charge of bringing Polish pilgrims to the Vatican was a secret communist informer during the era of Pope John Paul II, it has been alleged.
Father Konrad Stanislaw Hejmo, 69, was said to have collaborated with the secret services in communist Poland during the 1980s.
The allegations have been made by a Polish institute investigating Nazi and communist crimes in Poland.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4490581.stm
Swedish investigators are baffled by a mysterious illness affecting over 400 children of asylum-seekers, mostly from former Soviet and Yugoslav states, who fall into a deep depression and lose the will to live.
The government presented its first study of the so-called "apathetic children" on Wednesday, after King Carl XVI Gustav added his voice to a chorus of concern from charities, church groups and politicians who want them protected from deportation.
"It is dreadful what is happening to these poor children," the Swedish king told reporters.
The condition is known as Pervasive Refusal Syndrome and can be life-threatening. It affects boys and girls of all ages, but mostly aged 8-15, who refuse to speak, move, eat or drink for days or many months, and must be drip-fed to keep them alive.
Virtually unknown before 2000, the condition has been seen on a large scale only in Sweden. But the researchers ruled out that the children were faking their condition.
http://www.rense.com/general64/sick.htm
[It would be interesting to know if these nuerons are stunted or missing in socio-paths.]
Since their discovery, mirror neurons have been implicated in a broad range of phenomena, including certain mental disorders. Mirror neurons may help cognitive scientists explain how children develop a theory of mind (ToM), which is a child's understanding that others have minds similar to their own. Doing so may help shed light on autism, in which this type of understanding is often missing.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7656021/
A farmer is at his “wits’ end” after a mystery gunman shot dead newborn lambs on his farm for the third time in a fortnight.
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=4467217
[I bet this has something to do with echelon or an allied project.]
They have seen their cars' remote-controlled locking systems go berserk meaning many motorists have been locked out of their own vehicles.
And to add to their fury, the cars' alarms are going off day and night apparently for no reason.
http://www.thisislocallondon.co.uk/news/weird/display.var.591273.0.alarming_behaviour.php
Eight months ago, Huseyin Yousuf was looking forward to retiring from his successful dry cleaning business in Norbury, now the 72-year-old is blind in one eye and facing months of painful recovery after a horrific acid attack.
Huseyin, known as Joe, was blinded in one eye and received terrible burns after a man walked into his business and threw a bottle of acid over him.
Seven months after the unprovoked attack and with no leads from investigating officers Joe's family is offering a £5,000 reward to catch the person responsible.
http://www.thisislocallondon.co.uk/display.var.591489.0.acid_attack_on_norbury_man.php
At an FDA hearing on the safety of psychotropic drugs on Feb 2, 2004, dozens of tortured parents testified that their children had committed suicide or other violent acts after being prescribed the same drugs that are being marketed in the Bush-backed pharmaceutical industry schemes aimed at recruiting the nations 52 million school children as customers.
In July 2003, the Bush appointed New Freedoms Commission on Mental Health (NFC) recommended screening all children for mental illness and designated TeenScreen as a model program to ensure that every student receives a mental health check-up before finishing high school.
The NFC also has a preferred drug program in place modeled after the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP), that lists what drugs are to be used on children found to be mentally ill.
The list contains every drug that people complained about at the FDA hearing, including Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Wellbutron, Zyban, Remeron, Serzone, Effexor, Buspar, Risperdal, Zyprexa, Seroqual, Geodone, Depakote, Adderall, and Prozac.
http://www.rense.com/general64/ssru.htm
There has recently been a marked decrease in the export of U.S. arms, especially military aircraft, to the world market, and the war in Iraq is to blame, Sergei Chemezov, the director general of Rosoboronexport, Russia’s military exporter, said in an interview to the Red Star newspaper published Thursday.
http://mosnews.com/news/2005/04/28/usarmsforecast.shtml
School nurses treating sexual infections and offering alcohol and drug addiction services said yesterday that many children have dangerously amoral attitudes to relationships and high-risk habits such as drug taking and alcohol abuse.
Health professionals addressing the Royal College of Nursing's annual congress reported dramatic rises in sex among the young, including alarming new trends such as "daisy chaining" - where groups of teenagers indulge in a variety of sexual activities.
http://www.rense.com/general64/climsate.htm
A leading Russian scientist has claimed that the sarcophagus entombing Chernobyl's broken nuclear reactor is dangerously degraded and he warned that its collapse could cause a catastrophe on the same scale as the original accident almost 20 years ago
http://www.rense.com/general64/dang.htm
[I would sya at this point the Zimbabweans are in the running for stupidest people on Earth.]
Zimbabwe's national parks have been ordered to work with rural district councils to begin the wholesale slaughter of big game. National park rangers said they had already shot 10 elephants in the past week. The meat was barbecued at festivities to mark 25 years of independence. Four of the animals were reportedly shot in view of tourists near Lake Kariba, the largest man-made lake in Africa and a major wildlife haven.
http://www.rense.com/general64/mugg.htm
[I wonder if this coud be related to the electromagnetic effects in England? Also recall the bridge in England or Scotland that was causing dogs to jump off to their deaths a little while back.]
Hundreds of toads have begun to explode near a lake in the town of Låsby in Mid-Jutland. According to reports, the toads climb on to land, swell to up to three times their normal size, and burst, casting their innards up to one metre in the air. A similar phenomenon has also been reported in the German city of Hamburg, where authorities report that over 1000 toads are dead.
Experts are at a loss to explain what is causing the toads' painful deaths, which primarily take place between two and three a.m.
http://www.rense.com/general64/dcs.htm
[What happened to all those people who lost their jobsi nt he dot-com bust? Surely they have not evaporated?]
The United States should remove visa limits to allow more skilled foreign citizens to work at U.S. companies if it wants to remain a leader in technology, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said on Wednesday.
Microsoft is having a hard time finding skilled workers within the United States, and the lack of H-1B visas for skilled workers is only making the situation worse, Gates said in a panel discussion at the Library of Congress.
"The whole idea of the H-1B visa thing is, don't let too many smart people come into the country. The whole thing doesn't make sense," Gates said.
Gates echoed the concerns of other business and education leaders who warn that the United States must improve science education and boost spending on research and development to avoid falling behind India, China and other countries that are rapidly gaining ground.
http://www.rense.com/general64/tecvi.htm
The protective ozone layer over the Arctic has thinned this winter to the lowest levels since records began, alarming scientists who believed it had begun to heal.
The increased loss of ozone allows more harmful ultraviolet light to reach the earth's surface, making children and outdoor enthusiasts such as skiers more vulnerable to skin cancer - a disease which is already dramatically increasing.
Scientists yesterday reinforced the warning that people going out in the sun this summer should protect themselves with creams and hats.
Research by Cambridge University shows that it is not increased pollution but a side effect of climate change that is making ozone depletion worse. At high altitudes, 50% of the protective layer had been destroyed.
The research has dashed hopes that the ozone layer was on the mend. Since the winter of 1999-2000, when depletion was almost as bad, scientists had believed an improvement was under way as pollution was reduced. But they now believe it could be another 50 years before the problem is solved.
http://www.rense.com/general64/dde.htm
Sunday, April 24th marked the 90th anniversary of the first genocide of the twentieth century: the Turkish government’s slaughter of over a million unarmed Armenians. The key word is "unarmed."
The Turks got away with it under the cover of wartime. They suffered no greater postwar reprisals for this act of genocide than if they had not conducted mass murder of a peaceful people.
Other governments soon took note of this fact. It seemed like such a convenient international precedent.
Seventy-nine years after that genocide began, Hotel Rwanda opened for business.
The Hutus also got away with it. Ironically, at least a decade before – I wish I could remember the date – Harper’s ran an article predicting this genocide for this reason: the Hutus had machine guns. The Tutsis didn’t. The article was written as a kind of parable, not a politically specific forecast. I remember reading it at the time and thinking, "If I were a Tutsi, I’d emigrate."
It did not pay to be a civilian in the twentieth century. The odds were against you
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north367.html
Belgian doctors sent an Iraqi girl home on Thursday after treating her for leg wounds caused by a bomb during the U.S. invasion -- and sent the 51,570 euro ($66,650) bill to the U.S. embassy.
ADVERTISEMENT
"We haven't heard from them yet," said Bert De Belder, coordinator of the humanitarian agency Medical Aid for Third World which brought the girl to Belgium.
"I'm curious to know their reaction," he told Reuters. "We're giving them 10 days to respond ... I don't think they will pay it."
The girl, 15-year-old Hiba Kassim, smiled to reporters as she waited for her flight to Jordan to meet her father.
"Thank you, Belgium," she said.
Doctors brought Kassim to Belgium last year to try to save her left ankle, seriously injured by a cluster bomb that also killed her brother in Baghdad in 2003
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&ncid=564&e=12&u=/nm/20050428/ts_nm/iraq_belgium_dc
What matters is that MPs were not made aware of - to put it politely - the progression of his thinking. When Goldsmith sat in the cabinet seat vacated hours earlier by Robin Cook, he was asked by the Prime Minister to make a presentation of the legal case for invasion. Blair did not invite questions before the Attorney was thanked for his contribution and left.
http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=633998
Our statistical analysis of their coverage, however, showed that there was startling disparity in how deaths were reported, depending on the ethnicity of the victim.
For example, we found that in 2004, at a time when 8 Israeli children and 176 Palestinian children were killed – a ratio of 1 to 22 – Times headlines and lead paragraphs reported on Israeli children’s deaths at a rate almost seven times greater than Palestinian children’s deaths.
A one-month sub-study indicated that this disparity grew even larger when the entire article was analyzed, with Israeli children’s deaths mentioned (through repetitions of deaths reported on previous days) at a rate ten times greater than Palestinian children’s deaths.
...
Such patterns of distortion gave readers the impression that equal numbers of people on both sides were being killed – or that more Israelis were being killed – when the reality is that Palestinians have always been killed in far greater numbers. In particular, we found that Times stories so often repeated reports of Israeli children’s deaths that in some periods they were reporting on Israeli deaths at a rate of 400 percent.
http://www.counterpunch.org/weir04252005.html
[This is the same man who was fingered asn an iranian spy a few months ago. Before thathe lied to get us to invade Iraq. before that he embezzled an amount of money from Jordan equal to 3% of their entire yearly GDP.]
Iraq failed to name an oil minister for its new government on Thursday and controversial politician Ahmad Chalabi was appointed actingminister of an industry plagued by sabotage attacks and uncertainty.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&ncid=564&e=17&u=/nm/20050428/ts_nm/iraq_government_oil_dc_1
In this context Zoellick's trip, which was covered by a small group of US journalists, was illuminating. The deputy secretary of state had to travel to this "liberated" city in a Black Hawk helicopter flying low over palm trees to avoid being shot down. He wore a flak jacket under his suit even though Falluja's streets were largely deserted. His convoy of eight armoured vehicles went "so quickly past an open-air bakery reopened with a US-provided micro-loan that workers tossing dough could be glanced only in the blink of an eye," as the Washington Post reported. "Blasted husks of buildings still line block after block," the journalist added.
Meeting hand-picked Iraqis in a US base, Zoellick was bombarded with complaints about the pace of US reconstruction aid and frequent intimidation of citizens by American soldiers. Although a state department factsheet claimed 95% of residents had water in their homes, Falluja's mayor said it was contaminated by sewage and unsafe.
...
Justin Alexander, a volunteer for Christian Peacemaker Teams, recently found hundreds living in tents in the grounds of their homes, or in a single patched-up room. A strict system of identity cards blocks access to anyone whose papers give a birthplace outside Falluja, so long-term residents born elsewhere cannot go home. "Fallujans feel the remnants of their city have been turned into a giant prison," he reports.
http://www.rense.com/general64/dest.htm
[How does a weapon that essentially allows you to shoot around corners help you minimize collateral damage if you don’t also have something that allows you to see around corners?]
The XM25 is ideal for urban combat. It puts precision firepower in the hands of the soldier, allowing them to eliminate threats without causing significant collateral damage.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/miltech-05c.html
[An ideal weapon for the hands of Satanists.]
However, such "earth-penetrating" nuclear weapons cannot go deep enough to avoid massive casualties at ground level, and they could still kill up to a million people or more if used in heavily populated areas, said the committee that wrote the report.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/nuclear-doctrine-05n.html
The issue affects far more than Rutan's ability to sign a contract with Virgin. Other firms, including a group in Dubai, have expressed interest in buying spaceships, he said.
"We have wrestled with this problem in terms of technology transfer to Virgin Atlantic for about five months now, and it has been difficult," he explained, adding that he has been discouraging foreign sales until a routine personal-spaceflight industry
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/spacetravel-05y.html
* In 1998, a study conducted jointly by statisticians from the U.S. Department of Justice and the University of Cambridge in England found that most crime is now worse in England than in the United States.
* "You are more likely to be mugged in England than in the United States," stated the Reuters news agency in summarizing the study. "The rate of robbery is now 1.4 times higher in England and Wales than in the United States, and the British burglary rate is nearly double America's."6 The murder rate in the United States is reportedly higher than in England, but according to the DOJ study, "the difference between the [murder rates in the] two countries has narrowed over the past 16 years."7
* The United Nations confirmed these results in 2000 when it reported that the crime rate in England is higher than the crime rates of 16 other industrialized nations, including the United States.8
http://www.gunowners.org/sk0703.htm
The trial judges correctly dismissed both complaints. In a carefully reasoned Memorandum Opinion, Judge Hannon based his decision in No. 79-6 on "the fundamental principle that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen." See p. 4, infra. The duty to provide public services is owed to the public at large, and, absent a special relationship between the police and an individual, no specific legal duty exists. Holding that no special relationship existed between the police and appellants in No. 79-6, Judge Hannon concluded that no specific legal duty existed. We hold that Judge Hannon was correct and adopt the relevant portions of his opinion. Those portions appear in the following Appendix.[fn1]
http://www.gunowners.org/sk0503.htm
Los Angeles riots -- USA Today reported that many of the people rushing to gun stores during the 1992 riots were "lifelong gun-control advocates, running to buy an item they thought they'd never need." Ironically, they were outraged to discover they had to wait 15 days to buy a gun for self-defense.
http://www.gunowners.org/sk0406.htm
Professional Jewish leaders demand obeisance to a vision of Jews as helpless and passive by nature -- childlike victims toward whom the entire world, not just the perpetrators of the Holocaust, owes groveling remorse. They preach that our entire nation is populated by similar victims whose sufferings give them an unquestionable moral claim -- victims of poverty, disease, racism, government funding cuts, ignorance, sexism, violence, and a whole host of newly discovered inequities and inequalities.
And they invariably propose one balm to heal all miseries: government. And more government. Government unbound, unlimited, unhindered.
http://www.jpfo.org/alert20010903.htm
The Iraqi insurgency is just as strong now as it was one year ago, the most senior US military officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers has admitted.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0427-09.htm
ronically, the CPB was created to shield PBS from political pressure, just as PBS was intended to address the "needs of unserved and underserved audiences." One can hardly argue that the WSJ edit page or Tucker Carlson fit into that category. "To find the same combination of conviction, partisanship and ideological extremism on the far left," wrote my colleague Eric Alterman, "A network would need to convene a 'roundtable' featuring Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Vanessa Redgrave and Fidel Castro."
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0427-33.htm
Why isn't Bush being more strongly criticized for inviting Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah to his ranch on Monday?
If ever there was an existing medieval theocracy that fits the definition, it's the Saudi monarchy. It is the most fundamentalist country in the world, period. The monarchy is unaccountable to its people. Women have an almost total absence of basic rights. Immigrant workers are grossly abused. A visit I made to the country in 2002 as part of a group of journalists confirmed some of this firsthand for me.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0427-31.htm
[This dosn’t sound quite right to me. The guy sort of claims to be supporting the Minuteman Projct, but I think he is really trying to do something else. At first glanceit looks like he is just trying to shoehorn his pet project to strangle the US war machine in on top of the Minuteman people, but I think this is really something else. I am not aware of anyone in America, outside of this one guy, who doesn’t want foreigners to continue shovelling money into this country as fast as they can. I think this might be a kind of flase flag type thing to make either the Minuteman people sound bad, or to make the anti-war people sound bad, or possibly something else. But this just sounds to me like somehow he is trying to put one over on people.]
Consider some migrant laborers who travel the U.S. Mexican border. They have been meeting a new force there. It goes by the name of the Minuteman Project, comprised of volunteers. The MP's mission is to defend the U.S. border. Soon the MP will expand its mission from intercepting foreign workers to slowing foreign capital. This money has been flooding into the U.S. below the political radar screen of public sentiment. The time for financial flood control is here, according to the MP. Its mission creep is striking fear into the hearts of overseas investors whose excess cash has been funding the American nation's federal deficit.
Of course, mounting a financial defense of Uncle Sam won't be easy. The MP must understand that. Taking on foreign labor is one thing. Confronting foreign capital is another. Foreigners who perform low-wage labor that profits U.S. employers from Wal-Mart to California agribusiness have names and faces. They breathe, eat, laugh and speak. By contrast, foreign lenders are faceless and nameless. Their surplus capital is mobile and invisible. Clearly, what we have is an "identity" issue.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0424-25.htm
"In 1991," sneers former terror czar Richard Clarke in his book "Against All Enemies," "Qatari police cars that were escorting my motorcade managed to crash into each other in a city with almost no traffic."
Today, the city is bursting with rush-hour traffic and a construction boom, thanks to the vision and guile of its ruler/emir, Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani, who not only hosts the largest U.S. regional military base outside of Iraq (which spawned the Coalition Media Center during the invasion of Iraq), but earlier patronized Al-Jazeera in 1996 and serves as its chairman.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0426-34.htm
posted by abu nakba at 4/29/2005 06:59:00 PM
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