And fled to Canada
[I wonder if people think they are in iraq fighting to protect this kind of behavior on the part of the government. Probably not. I doubt anyone knows about it at all.]
Assemblyman Mountjoy's bill, AB 1424, will ensure that other parents do not suffer the same torment as Diane Booth, an East Bay mother. Ms. Booth lost her son Vincent in a battle over forced drugging. In 1999, school officials told her that the boy, then 7, suffered from ADHD, and they demanded that she allow Vincent to be drugged. When Ms. Booth refused, she was put on the list of child abusers and her son was forced into an institution where he was drugged and physically abused, she said.
Ms. Booth contrived to get her son back and fled to Canada with him. They were tracked down there. Vincent was sent back to an institution and his mother was jailed. She was released after several months, penniless. Rather than face more time in jail, she again fled to Canada, this time without her son. In fact, she has not been allowed to even communicate with him.
http://adhd-report.com/biopsychiatry/bio_35.html
[In a way this is a good idea, but in a way it is not as well. This like “It’s cold in here, I think I’ll turn on the AC. Now it’s too cold, better turn on the heat, now it’s too hot, better turn up the AC, etc.”
Wouldn’t it be better to just back off the problem in the first place instead of piling more problems on top trying to find some kind of elusive balance?]
US-based West End Laboratories, the research arm of LDC Security, has developed a special RFID tag zapper designed to kill the RFID chip preventing readers from performing unwanted scanning and tracking of people or goods.
http://www.rense.com/general63/zapper.htm
http://www.tagzapper.com/
American special agents were so concerned about the activities of Britain's leading animal rights extremists that they tapped their phones and intercepted their emails over a six-month period as part of a covert surveillance operation.
According to documents filed in a US court, between November 2002 and the following April the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) made a series of applications to judges that allowed it to monitor conversations between the UK leaders of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (Shac), the group that campaigns to close the Cambridgeshire-based animal research firm Huntingdon Life Sciences, and their US counterparts.
http://www.rense.com/general63/fbii.htm
Mercury is an extremely toxic environmental pollutant that has entered our food system to an alarming extent. It is labeled a neurotoxin because it damages the nervous system, the brain and the spinal cord. Those at greatest risk are fetuses and young children because their nervous systems are still developing. They are many times more sensitive to mercury than adults. Overexposure to mercury may cause a child to be late in beginning to walk and talk, permanent damage to motor functions, and any number of lifelong learning problems.
While no one would ever call George Bush environment-friendly, one might have expected that his professed belief in the sanctity of life, particularly that of the unborn, would have made him more than just a bit concerned about the toxic effects of mercury on human fetuses. But not so.
...
Recall George Bush’s now infamous midnight flight to Washington to sign the bill that allowed the federal government to intervene in the Terri Schiavo matter. So much for his and the Republican Party’s commitment to states’ rights. It would be a sweet irony indeed if states’ rights became George Bush’s Waterloo. Here in California there is optimism that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger will see his “Terminator” mission and do the right thing on mercury pollution.
http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1053
A mutilated Aberdeen Angus heifer was found on March 24, 2005 in the town of Coronel Suarez, province of Buenos Aires (Argentina). The carcass was reported along Provincial Highway No. 85, on the shoulder.
The 3 month old animal, weighing some 100 kg. was missing its tongue and presented incisions in its anus and genitals, with a total absence of the uterus and a burst right eyeball.
http://www.rense.com/general63/argg.htm
[I heard someone on the radio call the Pope “John Paul the Great” as well.]
A mystic on the whole is misunderstood and more often berated. Bishop Joseph A. Galante offers this assessment: “I came away from those times with a conviction that our Holy Father is truly a mystic. His relationship with the Lord is so total and consuming that to be in his presence when he is at prayer enables one to experience the presence of God.” Is it any wonder that a union with divine authority is a force that the evil predators of world despotism fear the most? The implication of preaching social justice in a world planned around individual servitude is at the core of the realpolitik culture war. A reality that one cannot see is a strength that cannot be destroyed. Worldly force cannot defeat spiritual conviction.
http://batr.org/view/040405.html
American business is facing yet another major scandal involving more accounting shenanigans.
But, this scandal has the potential to cause tsunami-sized damage: It involves a highly respected insurance company, American International Group (AIG) - which is part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average - which has now admitted to $1.7 billion in improper accounting. And, it has enveloped some legends in the financial arena: Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, forced out as chairman of AIG, and Warren Buffet, the Omaha stock market guru, who will be questioned about his
possible involvement.
Because AIG is so massive and important to the financial world, regulators will have to tread carefully. The company's main business is providing reinsurance, that is, it insures insurance companies. This helps the industry to spread its risk among many large and financially sound companies so a single event does not become a financial disaster for one company
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0401/p03s01-usju.html
Oil prices raced to a new all-time peak on Monday, climbing toward $58 a barrel as OPEC signaled it would discuss a second output rise to try to quell the market's relentless rally.
U.S. light crude hit a record $57.79 a barrel, surpassing Friday's high of $57.70, which was triggered by a forecast that prices could spike above $100 due to robust global demand and tight spare capacity.
At 10:01 p.m. EDT Sunday, U.S. crude was up 19 cents at $57.46.
"I would have thought prices would struggle to go much higher. The market fundamentals suggest lower prices," said Mark Pervan, an analyst with Daiwa Securities in Melbourne.
"I think they will struggle to get over $60 in the next couple of weeks -- that is a big psychological barrier."
http://www.rense.com/general63/oilhit.htm
Volunteers for an effort to patrol the Mexican border reported their first sighting of suspected illegal immigrants, resulting in 18 arrests, authorities said Sunday.
Participants in the Minuteman Project spotted the migrants Saturday near Naco as the volunteers were surveying the border to familiarize themselves with area. When agents arrived, they apprehended 18 people, Border Patrol spokesman Andy Adame said.
"You observe them, report them and get out of the way," said Mike McGarry, a spokesman for the project, which begins Monday and is to continue for a month.
http://www.rense.com/general63/ood.htm
A tsunami in the Bristol Channel could have caused the deaths of up to 2,000 people in one of Britain's greatest natural disasters, experts have said.
For centuries, it has been thought that the great flood of January 1607 was caused by high tides and severe storms.
It is estimated 200 square miles (520 sq km) of land in south Wales and south west England were covered by water.
In a BBC Timewatch programme, two experts have argued a tsunami could have caused the devastation.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/4397679.stm
[In the book Neuromancer, one of the background bits of the future is that all the horses have been wiped out by some kind of horse plague.]
Maryland agriculture officials quarantined a Howard County horse farm for 10 days after three horses recently died of an unknown illness, reported WBAL-TV in Baltimore.
The only people allowed to see the horses at a farm in Columbia have to wear full-body protective suits.
Maryland's acting state veterinarian said the horse farm quarantine will probably only last a few more days.
The Columbia Horse Center has canceled its spring camp for kids due to the quarantine.
http://www.nbc4.com/health/4333566/detail.html
n physics, the plasmon is the quasiparticle resulting from the quantization of plasma oscillations, which are density waves of the charge carriers in a conducting medium such as a metal, semiconductor, or plasma. Plasmons are longitudinal excitations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmon
A problem holding back the progress of computing is that with mismatched capacities and sizes, the two technologies are hard to combine in a circuit. Researchers can cobble them together, but a single technology that has the capacity of photonics and the smallness of electronics would be the best bridge of all. A new research group in Stanford's School of Engineering is pioneering just such a technology—plasmonics.
Surface plasmons are density waves of electrons—picture bunches of electrons passing a point regularly—along the surface of a metal. Plasmons have the same frequencies and electromagnetic fields as light, but their sub-wavelength size means they take up less space. Plasmonics, then, is the technology of transmitting these light-like waves along nanoscale wires.
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/march16/plasmon-031605.html
Speaking to a breakfast of business leaders in Boston, House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi unveiled his plan for disposing of state land by establishing a new fast-track permitting process. According to DiMasi, state agencies would take over the permitting process and provide the land, ìessential infrastructureî, and freedom from state excise taxes for a five year period. In exchange, the corporate recipients would agree to locate at least 100-125 new jobs on the site.
Allowing businesses to take control of the properties without investing their own capital would represent a significant state subsidy for the large corporations who could qualify. According to an article in the Boston Globe, ìDiMasi has not determined whether the land would be leased to companies at market rate or whether they would get a discount
http://masschc.org/story.php?id=182
Macromedia is committed to providing you with options to control Flash content and Flash applications. The Macromedia Flash Player Settings Manager lets you manage global privacy settings, storage settings, security settings, and automatic notification settings, using the following panels:
• To require that all websites ask your permission before using your camera or microphone, or to prevent any website from accessing your camera or microphone, you use the Global Privacy Settings Panel.
• To specify the amount of disk space that websites you haven't yet visited can use to store information on your computer, or to prevent websites you haven't yet visited from storing information on your computer, you use the Global Storage Settings Panel.
• To specify if certain websites are allowed to access information on other websites, you use the Global Security Settings Panel.
• To specify if and how often Flash Player should check for updated versions, you use the Global Notifications Settings Panel.
• To view or change the privacy settings for websites you have already visited, you use the Website Privacy Settings Panel.
• To view or change the storage settings for websites you have already visited, or to delete information that any or all websites have already stored on your computer, you use the Website Storage Settings Panel.
http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager.html
United Virtualities is offering online marketers and publishers technology that attempts to undermine the growing trend among consumers to delete cookies planted in their computers.
The New York company on Thursday unveiled what it calls PIE, or persistent identification element, a technology that's uploaded to a browser and restores deleted cookies. In addition, PIE, which can't be easily removed, can also act as a cookie backup, since it contains the same information.
Cookies are small files often uploaded to people's computers as they visit websites run by retailers, entertainment companies, newspapers and other businesses. The text files contain information that's used to track visitors' behavior, or to offer visitors products or services based on information gathered during previous visits, a process called personalization. In addition, cookie-gathered information is often pivotal for advertising campaigns and e-mail marketing.
...
United Virtualities's PIE helps combat this consumer behavior by leveraging a feature in Flash MX called local shared objects. Flash MX is a Macromedia Inc. application for developing multimedia Web content, user interfaces and Web applications. The technology runs on a Flash Player that the company says is deployed on 98 percent of Internet-capable computers.
...
Mookie Tanembaum, founder and chief executive of United Virtualities, says the company is trying to help consumers by preventing them from deleting cookies that help website operators deliver better services.
"The user is not proficient enough in technology to know if the cookie is good or bad, or how it works," Tanembaum said.
http://www.internetweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=160400749
All we did was register a forum (which has now been taken down by the service provider, but we have a backup) and fill it with fictional posts by fictional Toothing ’sceners. A week later, we had what appeared to be a vibrant UK Toothing community all ready to roll, and I sent the link off to Gizmodo, a gadget blog. They reported it (you can see that first story here, with a credit at the end to ‘S’, my super-subtle pseudonym). Everyone else linked to / blogged / ripped off their story. Things started to roll, and we became a ludicrous, implausible meme. In turn, that brought Real People to our forum. Others created forums for their localities - Sweden, Denmark, Italy, whatever.
Outlets that fell for it include Wired, Reuters, the BBC, and on and on. As "Toothy" says, "We kept a record at the start of where we were mentioned, but there were soon too many to record in full. There are hundreds of tiny anecdotes, though. I had to write Penthouse-letters-page style sexual adventure stories for a full page article and interview in The Telegraph.
http://www.hanasiana.com/archives/000324.html
Pat knew his Crusader castles. "When you besieged them, the only way to get inside was by pushing timber under the foundations and setting fire to the wood. When they turned to ash, the walls came tumbling down. The defenders didn't throw boiling oil from the ramparts. They threw sand on to the attackers. The sand would get inside their armour and start to burn them until they were in too much pain to fight. But it's the same thing here in Tripoli as in the little castle. You can hardly see the city through the arrow slits. It's another - bigger - prison."
And so I sat on the cold stone floor and stared through a loophole and, sure enough, I could see only a single minaret and a few square metres of roadway. I was in darkness. Just as the Crusaders who built this fortress must have been in darkness.
Indeed, Raymond de Saint-Gilles spent years besieging the city, looking down in anger from his great fortress, built on the "Pilgrim's Mountain", at the stout burghers of Tripoli who were constantly re-supplied by boat from Egypt. Raymond himself died in the castle, facing the city he dreamed of capturing but could not live to enter.
And of course, far to the east, in the ancient land of Mesopotamia, there stand today equally stout if less aesthetic barricades around another great occupying army. The castles of the Americans are made of pre-stressed concrete and steel but they serve the same purpose and doom those who built them to live in prisons.
From the "Green Zone" in the centre of Baghdad, the US authorities and their Iraqi satellites can see little of the city and country they claim to govern. Sleeping around the gloomy republican palace of Saddam Hussein, they can stare over the parapets or peek through the machine-gun embrasures on the perimeter wall - but that is as much as most will ever see of Iraq.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8448.htm
A judge investigating vote-rigging in Birmingham's local elections has ruled there was widespread fraud and has ordered new elections.
Election Commissioner Richard Mawrey QC upheld allegations of postal fraud relating to six seats won by Labour in the ballot of 10 June last year.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/4406575.stm
It's a distant memory for most of the country, but President Bush's campaign swing through Southern Oregon is fresh for hotel owners still waiting to get paid nearly $19,000 for expenses incurred by the administration last fall.
Three hotels, including the Rogue Regency, the Red Lion and the Jacksonville Inn, report they have been waiting almost six months for bills generated mostly by the U.S. Secret Service during President Bush's whirlwind tour through Jackson County, according to an article by the Mail Tribune newspaper.
Owed $3,332.72, the Red Lion Hotel in Medford sent a letter on March 28 to the president at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
The letter written by the hotel's accountant Kirsten Yunuba Stephens, said: "My question to you: Is this how you help balance the budget at the White House by ripping off retailers in the towns you visit? If that is the case please do not come back to the Rogue Valley."
A White House representative said the hotels should direct their inquiries to the Secret Service rather than the president.
Secret Service spokesman Jim Mackin apologized for delays in getting payment to Rogue Valley hotels. "If we haven't paid it we should have paid it," he said.
He added that any hotels in the area that have not been paid should contact his office immediately. "If they are sure they are all our rooms, these are things we can work out tomorrow," he said Thursday.
Mackin attributed the delays to the Secret Service's transition to a new payment system. "We are certainly experiencing some growing pains with the new system," he said.
The Rogue Regency has been waiting for payment of $15,000 owed by both the president's and Sen. John Edward's campaigns -- the bulk of which was incurred by the Bush entourage.
http://www.kptv.com/Global/story.asp?S=3155404
They do not believe in peace talks. They do not want to share the land. They are well armed and are carrying out increasingly violent attacks, even targeting innocent civilians. They are members of Israel's militant far right, and they are threatening to become Israel's next big problem.
In "Israel's Next War?" airing Tuesday, April 5, at 9 P.M. on PBS (check local listings), FRONTLINE goes deep inside the world of militant Jewish radicals who pose a grave new threat to Israeli security and, potentially, to the region. "The dream of these extremists"—to blow up the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, one of the most important holy sites in the Muslim world—"should give us sleepless nights," says former Israeli Security Chief Avi Dichter. "Jewish terror is liable to create a serious strategic threat that will turn the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a conflict between thirteen million Jews and a billion Muslims all over the world."
...
Mike Guzofsky, a transplanted New Yorker and leading Kahanist, is convinced that the very people who are now painted as extremists will one day be viewed as heroes. "I think the day will come when the secret service and the government will look for Jews who are willing to risk their lives and go into Arab villages and kick them out, kill them... and we have thousands of civilians with the military know-how to instigate a mega-attack against Arabs.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/press/2311.html
Want someone else's Social Security number?
It's $35 at www.secret-info.com. It's $45 at www.Iinfosearch.com, where users can also sign up for a report containing an individual's credit-card charges, as well as an e-mail with other "tips, secrets & spy info!" The Web site Gum-shoes.com promises that "if the information is out there, our licensed investigators can find it."
Although Social Security numbers are one of the most powerful pieces of personal information an identity thief can possess, they remain widely available and inexpensive despite public outcry and the threat of a congressional crackdown after breaches at large information brokers.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23686-2005Apr3.html
[I agree with the second comment. Even if the planet Earth were literally made of oil and coal, there is no way we could breathe if we burned it all up for one thing, let alone any othe damage it might to do the environment.]
More than a mile below the choppy Gulf of Mexico waters lies a vast, untapped source of energy. Locked in mysterious crystals, the sediment beneath the seabed holds enough natural gas to fuel America's energy-guzzling society for decades, or to bring about sufficient climate change to melt the planet's glaciers and cause catastrophic flooding, depending on whom you talk to.
No prizes for guessing the US government's preferred line. This week it will dispatch a drilling vessel to the region, on a mission to bring this virtually inexhaustible new supply of fossil fuel to power stations within a decade.
...
He added: "We already have enough fossil fuel in the world that, if burnt, will ruin the world's climate. Rather than look for more, we need to keep the oil, gas and coal we already know about underground and develop alternative sources of energy, principally renewables."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/story/0,12996,1451582,00.html
We will look back fondly at the time petrol was a mere $1.30 a litre.
Sounds like a conspiracy theory, doesn't it. But there are way too many reputable scientists sounding the alarm for it to be mere conjecture.
Professor Geoff Kearsley from Otago University: "Oil scarcity has the capacity to devastate our economy, physically isolate us in ways not seen since before World War II and to transform our daily lives. It is already past the time when this should be our primary national concern."
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=466&ObjectID=10118237
The new chief executive of embattled insurer American International Group yesterday admitted that employees of the company had been found trying to destroy documents as he sought to allay concerns over the ever-expanding inquiries into the business.
In a letter to shareholders, British-born Martin Sullivan said: "AIG recently became aware of efforts to remove documents and information from its Bermuda building without permission. AIG immediately brought these incidents to the attention of the relevant authorities. One individual in Bermuda was terminated for failure to co-operate with AIG's review and several other employees have resigned."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2005/04/05/cnaig05.xml&menuId=242&sSheet=/money/2005/04/05/ixcity.html
[Now the FBI supposedly works for us, or at least we pay their bills. Why is it that when we the employers wantt o know something about what they are doing all of a sudden it is a big hullaballoo and basically their answer always turns out to be “No, you can’t know that.”?]
A federal judge has rejected a lawsuit seeking to force the FBI to release more records from its investigation into the crash of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island nearly a decade ago.
Judge Michael A. Ponsor ruled Tuesday in favor of the FBI in a lawsuit filed by a Massachusetts man who has questioned the government's account of the crash.
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--flight800skeptics0331mar31,0,7506836.story?coll=ny-region-apnewyork
Ottawa will impose the tax on U.S. live swine, cigarettes, oysters and certain specialty fish starting May 1, a statement from International Trade Minister Jim Peterson said. "For the last four years, Canada and a number of other countries have repeatedly urged the United States to repeal the Byrd Amendment," Mr. Peterson said. "Retaliation is not our preferred option, but it is a necessary action. International trade rules must be respected.
http://www.truthabouttrade.org/article.asp?id=3621
[I don’t understand why these so-called scientists think sex would have been a “taboo subject” during the stone age, which depending on how you measured it, maybe have lasted for up to 50,000 years.
Sex has gone from being a taboo to non-taboo subject in the US in like 20 or 30 years. How in the world can they make any kind of blanket statement all about the longest technological age that man has ever lived through- the stone age. Even if the stone age was only 100 years long I seriously doubt the content of their taboos would have been static over that whole period.]
"This is such an interesting discovery," said Dr Sträuble, "as these figurines are not stylistic, but realistic. They open up a gateway for historians and anthropologists to discuss whether sex really was a taboo subject in the stone age."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/germany/article/0,2763,1451509,00.html
[unfortuantely, this article doesn’t tell us what they think the definition of Judaism is which makes the activity of Jewish groups illegal.]
The petition uses quotations from an abridged guide to Jewish law, the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, to support its contention that Judaism is “an extremist and racist ethnicity that hates non-Jews”.
The signatories — including former army generals, artists and an unnamed former international chess champion — argue that this definition of Judaism makes the activity of Jewish groups illegal, according to the radio.
http://www.mosnews.com/news/2005/04/04/haarezletter.shtml
[I bet this was not ont he TV news.]
The more television 4-year-old children watch the more likely they are to become bullies later on in school, a U.S. study said Monday.
At the same time, children whose parents read to them, take them on outings and just generally pay attention to them are less likely to become bullies, said the report from the University of Washington.
http://www.rense.com/general63/bully.htm
The most chilling aspect of the debate swirling around the EPA's new rules on airborne mercury is what's not being debated.
The dispute erupted when The Washington Post revealed that the EPA buried the results of a Harvard University study it had commissioned. The study sought to determine the public-health benefits likely to result from a reduction in the levels of mercury emitted by coal-fired power plants. Mercury is a persistent neurotoxin that causes brain and nerve damage as well as behavioral changes. Released into the atmosphere, it accumulates in rivers, lakes and oceans, concentrating in the fish we then eat. According to the National Academy of Sciences, at least 60,000 newborns each year could be at risk for learning and developmental problems as a result of mercury exposure in utero.
The Harvard team, working with an EPA scientist, calculated that the stringent regulation of mercury emissions would generate health savings 100 times greater than what the new EPA report claims. The argument has rapidly devolved to one in which dueling bean-counters quibble over the details of a cost-benefit analysis. To wit: If the mercury controls would generate a $5 billion per year health payoff, the EPA might consider them. If they only add up to $50 million, well, it's just not worth what it would cost industry to clean up their plants at anything better than a glacial pace.
But there's something missing in this debate.
Absent from all the focus on number-crunching is any critical questioning of the commodification of life itself, and of its logical extension: the weighing of human life against profits.
I searched the Post article for some mention of the human cost of mercury poisoning--expressed in human terms. What of the anguish suffered by the mother who gives birth to a deformed baby, the extra burdens of raising a child with ADD, the lifelong challenges and discrimination faced by the developmentally disabled?
I searched in vain.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0404-20.htm
The World Health Organization (WHO) says Marburg Virus has sickened 140 people in Angola and killed 132, most of them young children. International health organizations are rushing personnel and equipment to the war-ravaged country to stem the epidemic. Still, WHO experts told National Public Radio (NPR)'s Richard Knox that they expect the Marburg toll to get much larger.
http://www.rense.com/general63/anomolousdeadlymarburg.htm
The 1,000 people promised by the Minuteman Project's organizers ended up at just 480, the organization said. Reporters who attended their inaugural rallies outside two Border Patrol stations in Cochise County, south of Tucson, said there were 150.
A few groups of volunteers "patrol" would be too grand a word for it eventually fanned out along the border on Saturday and Sunday, and one alerted the Border Patrol to suspected illegals. But mostly, media crews were left staring at each other, wondering what the fuss was about. When news of the Pope's death hit the South-west at lunchtime on Saturday, several journalists were called home, as the airwaves were bombarded instead with a non-stop diet of mourning and remembrance. As Ray Borne, the mayor of the border town of Douglas, told reporters: "This is a monster created by the media. But by Tuesday it's going to fizzle out."
Cochise County has been the scene of clashes over immigration before, with a rash of shootings of Mexicans causing outrage three years ago.
The Minuteman Project was the brainchild of a retired accountant from southern California, teaming up with a local anti-immigration activist called Chris Simcox.
Mr Simcox has a record of talking more loudly than his actions would warrant. In 2002, he founded a group called Civil Homeland Defense in Tombstone and told the media he was training 600 volunteers to patrol the border. Only a handful showed up
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0404-08.htm
Assemblyman Mountjoy's bill, AB 1424, will ensure that other parents do not suffer the same torment as Diane Booth, an East Bay mother. Ms. Booth lost her son Vincent in a battle over forced drugging. In 1999, school officials told her that the boy, then 7, suffered from ADHD, and they demanded that she allow Vincent to be drugged. When Ms. Booth refused, she was put on the list of child abusers and her son was forced into an institution where he was drugged and physically abused, she said.
Ms. Booth contrived to get her son back and fled to Canada with him. They were tracked down there. Vincent was sent back to an institution and his mother was jailed. She was released after several months, penniless. Rather than face more time in jail, she again fled to Canada, this time without her son. In fact, she has not been allowed to even communicate with him.
http://adhd-report.com/biopsychiatry/bio_35.html
[In a way this is a good idea, but in a way it is not as well. This like “It’s cold in here, I think I’ll turn on the AC. Now it’s too cold, better turn on the heat, now it’s too hot, better turn up the AC, etc.”
Wouldn’t it be better to just back off the problem in the first place instead of piling more problems on top trying to find some kind of elusive balance?]
US-based West End Laboratories, the research arm of LDC Security, has developed a special RFID tag zapper designed to kill the RFID chip preventing readers from performing unwanted scanning and tracking of people or goods.
http://www.rense.com/general63/zapper.htm
http://www.tagzapper.com/
American special agents were so concerned about the activities of Britain's leading animal rights extremists that they tapped their phones and intercepted their emails over a six-month period as part of a covert surveillance operation.
According to documents filed in a US court, between November 2002 and the following April the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) made a series of applications to judges that allowed it to monitor conversations between the UK leaders of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (Shac), the group that campaigns to close the Cambridgeshire-based animal research firm Huntingdon Life Sciences, and their US counterparts.
http://www.rense.com/general63/fbii.htm
Mercury is an extremely toxic environmental pollutant that has entered our food system to an alarming extent. It is labeled a neurotoxin because it damages the nervous system, the brain and the spinal cord. Those at greatest risk are fetuses and young children because their nervous systems are still developing. They are many times more sensitive to mercury than adults. Overexposure to mercury may cause a child to be late in beginning to walk and talk, permanent damage to motor functions, and any number of lifelong learning problems.
While no one would ever call George Bush environment-friendly, one might have expected that his professed belief in the sanctity of life, particularly that of the unborn, would have made him more than just a bit concerned about the toxic effects of mercury on human fetuses. But not so.
...
Recall George Bush’s now infamous midnight flight to Washington to sign the bill that allowed the federal government to intervene in the Terri Schiavo matter. So much for his and the Republican Party’s commitment to states’ rights. It would be a sweet irony indeed if states’ rights became George Bush’s Waterloo. Here in California there is optimism that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger will see his “Terminator” mission and do the right thing on mercury pollution.
http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1053
A mutilated Aberdeen Angus heifer was found on March 24, 2005 in the town of Coronel Suarez, province of Buenos Aires (Argentina). The carcass was reported along Provincial Highway No. 85, on the shoulder.
The 3 month old animal, weighing some 100 kg. was missing its tongue and presented incisions in its anus and genitals, with a total absence of the uterus and a burst right eyeball.
http://www.rense.com/general63/argg.htm
[I heard someone on the radio call the Pope “John Paul the Great” as well.]
A mystic on the whole is misunderstood and more often berated. Bishop Joseph A. Galante offers this assessment: “I came away from those times with a conviction that our Holy Father is truly a mystic. His relationship with the Lord is so total and consuming that to be in his presence when he is at prayer enables one to experience the presence of God.” Is it any wonder that a union with divine authority is a force that the evil predators of world despotism fear the most? The implication of preaching social justice in a world planned around individual servitude is at the core of the realpolitik culture war. A reality that one cannot see is a strength that cannot be destroyed. Worldly force cannot defeat spiritual conviction.
http://batr.org/view/040405.html
American business is facing yet another major scandal involving more accounting shenanigans.
But, this scandal has the potential to cause tsunami-sized damage: It involves a highly respected insurance company, American International Group (AIG) - which is part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average - which has now admitted to $1.7 billion in improper accounting. And, it has enveloped some legends in the financial arena: Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, forced out as chairman of AIG, and Warren Buffet, the Omaha stock market guru, who will be questioned about his
possible involvement.
Because AIG is so massive and important to the financial world, regulators will have to tread carefully. The company's main business is providing reinsurance, that is, it insures insurance companies. This helps the industry to spread its risk among many large and financially sound companies so a single event does not become a financial disaster for one company
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0401/p03s01-usju.html
Oil prices raced to a new all-time peak on Monday, climbing toward $58 a barrel as OPEC signaled it would discuss a second output rise to try to quell the market's relentless rally.
U.S. light crude hit a record $57.79 a barrel, surpassing Friday's high of $57.70, which was triggered by a forecast that prices could spike above $100 due to robust global demand and tight spare capacity.
At 10:01 p.m. EDT Sunday, U.S. crude was up 19 cents at $57.46.
"I would have thought prices would struggle to go much higher. The market fundamentals suggest lower prices," said Mark Pervan, an analyst with Daiwa Securities in Melbourne.
"I think they will struggle to get over $60 in the next couple of weeks -- that is a big psychological barrier."
http://www.rense.com/general63/oilhit.htm
Volunteers for an effort to patrol the Mexican border reported their first sighting of suspected illegal immigrants, resulting in 18 arrests, authorities said Sunday.
Participants in the Minuteman Project spotted the migrants Saturday near Naco as the volunteers were surveying the border to familiarize themselves with area. When agents arrived, they apprehended 18 people, Border Patrol spokesman Andy Adame said.
"You observe them, report them and get out of the way," said Mike McGarry, a spokesman for the project, which begins Monday and is to continue for a month.
http://www.rense.com/general63/ood.htm
A tsunami in the Bristol Channel could have caused the deaths of up to 2,000 people in one of Britain's greatest natural disasters, experts have said.
For centuries, it has been thought that the great flood of January 1607 was caused by high tides and severe storms.
It is estimated 200 square miles (520 sq km) of land in south Wales and south west England were covered by water.
In a BBC Timewatch programme, two experts have argued a tsunami could have caused the devastation.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/4397679.stm
[In the book Neuromancer, one of the background bits of the future is that all the horses have been wiped out by some kind of horse plague.]
Maryland agriculture officials quarantined a Howard County horse farm for 10 days after three horses recently died of an unknown illness, reported WBAL-TV in Baltimore.
The only people allowed to see the horses at a farm in Columbia have to wear full-body protective suits.
Maryland's acting state veterinarian said the horse farm quarantine will probably only last a few more days.
The Columbia Horse Center has canceled its spring camp for kids due to the quarantine.
http://www.nbc4.com/health/4333566/detail.html
n physics, the plasmon is the quasiparticle resulting from the quantization of plasma oscillations, which are density waves of the charge carriers in a conducting medium such as a metal, semiconductor, or plasma. Plasmons are longitudinal excitations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmon
A problem holding back the progress of computing is that with mismatched capacities and sizes, the two technologies are hard to combine in a circuit. Researchers can cobble them together, but a single technology that has the capacity of photonics and the smallness of electronics would be the best bridge of all. A new research group in Stanford's School of Engineering is pioneering just such a technology—plasmonics.
Surface plasmons are density waves of electrons—picture bunches of electrons passing a point regularly—along the surface of a metal. Plasmons have the same frequencies and electromagnetic fields as light, but their sub-wavelength size means they take up less space. Plasmonics, then, is the technology of transmitting these light-like waves along nanoscale wires.
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/march16/plasmon-031605.html
Speaking to a breakfast of business leaders in Boston, House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi unveiled his plan for disposing of state land by establishing a new fast-track permitting process. According to DiMasi, state agencies would take over the permitting process and provide the land, ìessential infrastructureî, and freedom from state excise taxes for a five year period. In exchange, the corporate recipients would agree to locate at least 100-125 new jobs on the site.
Allowing businesses to take control of the properties without investing their own capital would represent a significant state subsidy for the large corporations who could qualify. According to an article in the Boston Globe, ìDiMasi has not determined whether the land would be leased to companies at market rate or whether they would get a discount
http://masschc.org/story.php?id=182
Macromedia is committed to providing you with options to control Flash content and Flash applications. The Macromedia Flash Player Settings Manager lets you manage global privacy settings, storage settings, security settings, and automatic notification settings, using the following panels:
• To require that all websites ask your permission before using your camera or microphone, or to prevent any website from accessing your camera or microphone, you use the Global Privacy Settings Panel.
• To specify the amount of disk space that websites you haven't yet visited can use to store information on your computer, or to prevent websites you haven't yet visited from storing information on your computer, you use the Global Storage Settings Panel.
• To specify if certain websites are allowed to access information on other websites, you use the Global Security Settings Panel.
• To specify if and how often Flash Player should check for updated versions, you use the Global Notifications Settings Panel.
• To view or change the privacy settings for websites you have already visited, you use the Website Privacy Settings Panel.
• To view or change the storage settings for websites you have already visited, or to delete information that any or all websites have already stored on your computer, you use the Website Storage Settings Panel.
http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager.html
United Virtualities is offering online marketers and publishers technology that attempts to undermine the growing trend among consumers to delete cookies planted in their computers.
The New York company on Thursday unveiled what it calls PIE, or persistent identification element, a technology that's uploaded to a browser and restores deleted cookies. In addition, PIE, which can't be easily removed, can also act as a cookie backup, since it contains the same information.
Cookies are small files often uploaded to people's computers as they visit websites run by retailers, entertainment companies, newspapers and other businesses. The text files contain information that's used to track visitors' behavior, or to offer visitors products or services based on information gathered during previous visits, a process called personalization. In addition, cookie-gathered information is often pivotal for advertising campaigns and e-mail marketing.
...
United Virtualities's PIE helps combat this consumer behavior by leveraging a feature in Flash MX called local shared objects. Flash MX is a Macromedia Inc. application for developing multimedia Web content, user interfaces and Web applications. The technology runs on a Flash Player that the company says is deployed on 98 percent of Internet-capable computers.
...
Mookie Tanembaum, founder and chief executive of United Virtualities, says the company is trying to help consumers by preventing them from deleting cookies that help website operators deliver better services.
"The user is not proficient enough in technology to know if the cookie is good or bad, or how it works," Tanembaum said.
http://www.internetweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=160400749
All we did was register a forum (which has now been taken down by the service provider, but we have a backup) and fill it with fictional posts by fictional Toothing ’sceners. A week later, we had what appeared to be a vibrant UK Toothing community all ready to roll, and I sent the link off to Gizmodo, a gadget blog. They reported it (you can see that first story here, with a credit at the end to ‘S’, my super-subtle pseudonym). Everyone else linked to / blogged / ripped off their story. Things started to roll, and we became a ludicrous, implausible meme. In turn, that brought Real People to our forum. Others created forums for their localities - Sweden, Denmark, Italy, whatever.
Outlets that fell for it include Wired, Reuters, the BBC, and on and on. As "Toothy" says, "We kept a record at the start of where we were mentioned, but there were soon too many to record in full. There are hundreds of tiny anecdotes, though. I had to write Penthouse-letters-page style sexual adventure stories for a full page article and interview in The Telegraph.
http://www.hanasiana.com/archives/000324.html
Pat knew his Crusader castles. "When you besieged them, the only way to get inside was by pushing timber under the foundations and setting fire to the wood. When they turned to ash, the walls came tumbling down. The defenders didn't throw boiling oil from the ramparts. They threw sand on to the attackers. The sand would get inside their armour and start to burn them until they were in too much pain to fight. But it's the same thing here in Tripoli as in the little castle. You can hardly see the city through the arrow slits. It's another - bigger - prison."
And so I sat on the cold stone floor and stared through a loophole and, sure enough, I could see only a single minaret and a few square metres of roadway. I was in darkness. Just as the Crusaders who built this fortress must have been in darkness.
Indeed, Raymond de Saint-Gilles spent years besieging the city, looking down in anger from his great fortress, built on the "Pilgrim's Mountain", at the stout burghers of Tripoli who were constantly re-supplied by boat from Egypt. Raymond himself died in the castle, facing the city he dreamed of capturing but could not live to enter.
And of course, far to the east, in the ancient land of Mesopotamia, there stand today equally stout if less aesthetic barricades around another great occupying army. The castles of the Americans are made of pre-stressed concrete and steel but they serve the same purpose and doom those who built them to live in prisons.
From the "Green Zone" in the centre of Baghdad, the US authorities and their Iraqi satellites can see little of the city and country they claim to govern. Sleeping around the gloomy republican palace of Saddam Hussein, they can stare over the parapets or peek through the machine-gun embrasures on the perimeter wall - but that is as much as most will ever see of Iraq.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8448.htm
A judge investigating vote-rigging in Birmingham's local elections has ruled there was widespread fraud and has ordered new elections.
Election Commissioner Richard Mawrey QC upheld allegations of postal fraud relating to six seats won by Labour in the ballot of 10 June last year.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/4406575.stm
It's a distant memory for most of the country, but President Bush's campaign swing through Southern Oregon is fresh for hotel owners still waiting to get paid nearly $19,000 for expenses incurred by the administration last fall.
Three hotels, including the Rogue Regency, the Red Lion and the Jacksonville Inn, report they have been waiting almost six months for bills generated mostly by the U.S. Secret Service during President Bush's whirlwind tour through Jackson County, according to an article by the Mail Tribune newspaper.
Owed $3,332.72, the Red Lion Hotel in Medford sent a letter on March 28 to the president at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
The letter written by the hotel's accountant Kirsten Yunuba Stephens, said: "My question to you: Is this how you help balance the budget at the White House by ripping off retailers in the towns you visit? If that is the case please do not come back to the Rogue Valley."
A White House representative said the hotels should direct their inquiries to the Secret Service rather than the president.
Secret Service spokesman Jim Mackin apologized for delays in getting payment to Rogue Valley hotels. "If we haven't paid it we should have paid it," he said.
He added that any hotels in the area that have not been paid should contact his office immediately. "If they are sure they are all our rooms, these are things we can work out tomorrow," he said Thursday.
Mackin attributed the delays to the Secret Service's transition to a new payment system. "We are certainly experiencing some growing pains with the new system," he said.
The Rogue Regency has been waiting for payment of $15,000 owed by both the president's and Sen. John Edward's campaigns -- the bulk of which was incurred by the Bush entourage.
http://www.kptv.com/Global/story.asp?S=3155404
They do not believe in peace talks. They do not want to share the land. They are well armed and are carrying out increasingly violent attacks, even targeting innocent civilians. They are members of Israel's militant far right, and they are threatening to become Israel's next big problem.
In "Israel's Next War?" airing Tuesday, April 5, at 9 P.M. on PBS (check local listings), FRONTLINE goes deep inside the world of militant Jewish radicals who pose a grave new threat to Israeli security and, potentially, to the region. "The dream of these extremists"—to blow up the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, one of the most important holy sites in the Muslim world—"should give us sleepless nights," says former Israeli Security Chief Avi Dichter. "Jewish terror is liable to create a serious strategic threat that will turn the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a conflict between thirteen million Jews and a billion Muslims all over the world."
...
Mike Guzofsky, a transplanted New Yorker and leading Kahanist, is convinced that the very people who are now painted as extremists will one day be viewed as heroes. "I think the day will come when the secret service and the government will look for Jews who are willing to risk their lives and go into Arab villages and kick them out, kill them... and we have thousands of civilians with the military know-how to instigate a mega-attack against Arabs.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/press/2311.html
Want someone else's Social Security number?
It's $35 at www.secret-info.com. It's $45 at www.Iinfosearch.com, where users can also sign up for a report containing an individual's credit-card charges, as well as an e-mail with other "tips, secrets & spy info!" The Web site Gum-shoes.com promises that "if the information is out there, our licensed investigators can find it."
Although Social Security numbers are one of the most powerful pieces of personal information an identity thief can possess, they remain widely available and inexpensive despite public outcry and the threat of a congressional crackdown after breaches at large information brokers.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23686-2005Apr3.html
[I agree with the second comment. Even if the planet Earth were literally made of oil and coal, there is no way we could breathe if we burned it all up for one thing, let alone any othe damage it might to do the environment.]
More than a mile below the choppy Gulf of Mexico waters lies a vast, untapped source of energy. Locked in mysterious crystals, the sediment beneath the seabed holds enough natural gas to fuel America's energy-guzzling society for decades, or to bring about sufficient climate change to melt the planet's glaciers and cause catastrophic flooding, depending on whom you talk to.
No prizes for guessing the US government's preferred line. This week it will dispatch a drilling vessel to the region, on a mission to bring this virtually inexhaustible new supply of fossil fuel to power stations within a decade.
...
He added: "We already have enough fossil fuel in the world that, if burnt, will ruin the world's climate. Rather than look for more, we need to keep the oil, gas and coal we already know about underground and develop alternative sources of energy, principally renewables."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/story/0,12996,1451582,00.html
We will look back fondly at the time petrol was a mere $1.30 a litre.
Sounds like a conspiracy theory, doesn't it. But there are way too many reputable scientists sounding the alarm for it to be mere conjecture.
Professor Geoff Kearsley from Otago University: "Oil scarcity has the capacity to devastate our economy, physically isolate us in ways not seen since before World War II and to transform our daily lives. It is already past the time when this should be our primary national concern."
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=466&ObjectID=10118237
The new chief executive of embattled insurer American International Group yesterday admitted that employees of the company had been found trying to destroy documents as he sought to allay concerns over the ever-expanding inquiries into the business.
In a letter to shareholders, British-born Martin Sullivan said: "AIG recently became aware of efforts to remove documents and information from its Bermuda building without permission. AIG immediately brought these incidents to the attention of the relevant authorities. One individual in Bermuda was terminated for failure to co-operate with AIG's review and several other employees have resigned."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2005/04/05/cnaig05.xml&menuId=242&sSheet=/money/2005/04/05/ixcity.html
[Now the FBI supposedly works for us, or at least we pay their bills. Why is it that when we the employers wantt o know something about what they are doing all of a sudden it is a big hullaballoo and basically their answer always turns out to be “No, you can’t know that.”?]
A federal judge has rejected a lawsuit seeking to force the FBI to release more records from its investigation into the crash of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island nearly a decade ago.
Judge Michael A. Ponsor ruled Tuesday in favor of the FBI in a lawsuit filed by a Massachusetts man who has questioned the government's account of the crash.
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--flight800skeptics0331mar31,0,7506836.story?coll=ny-region-apnewyork
Ottawa will impose the tax on U.S. live swine, cigarettes, oysters and certain specialty fish starting May 1, a statement from International Trade Minister Jim Peterson said. "For the last four years, Canada and a number of other countries have repeatedly urged the United States to repeal the Byrd Amendment," Mr. Peterson said. "Retaliation is not our preferred option, but it is a necessary action. International trade rules must be respected.
http://www.truthabouttrade.org/article.asp?id=3621
[I don’t understand why these so-called scientists think sex would have been a “taboo subject” during the stone age, which depending on how you measured it, maybe have lasted for up to 50,000 years.
Sex has gone from being a taboo to non-taboo subject in the US in like 20 or 30 years. How in the world can they make any kind of blanket statement all about the longest technological age that man has ever lived through- the stone age. Even if the stone age was only 100 years long I seriously doubt the content of their taboos would have been static over that whole period.]
"This is such an interesting discovery," said Dr Sträuble, "as these figurines are not stylistic, but realistic. They open up a gateway for historians and anthropologists to discuss whether sex really was a taboo subject in the stone age."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/germany/article/0,2763,1451509,00.html
[unfortuantely, this article doesn’t tell us what they think the definition of Judaism is which makes the activity of Jewish groups illegal.]
The petition uses quotations from an abridged guide to Jewish law, the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, to support its contention that Judaism is “an extremist and racist ethnicity that hates non-Jews”.
The signatories — including former army generals, artists and an unnamed former international chess champion — argue that this definition of Judaism makes the activity of Jewish groups illegal, according to the radio.
http://www.mosnews.com/news/2005/04/04/haarezletter.shtml
[I bet this was not ont he TV news.]
The more television 4-year-old children watch the more likely they are to become bullies later on in school, a U.S. study said Monday.
At the same time, children whose parents read to them, take them on outings and just generally pay attention to them are less likely to become bullies, said the report from the University of Washington.
http://www.rense.com/general63/bully.htm
The most chilling aspect of the debate swirling around the EPA's new rules on airborne mercury is what's not being debated.
The dispute erupted when The Washington Post revealed that the EPA buried the results of a Harvard University study it had commissioned. The study sought to determine the public-health benefits likely to result from a reduction in the levels of mercury emitted by coal-fired power plants. Mercury is a persistent neurotoxin that causes brain and nerve damage as well as behavioral changes. Released into the atmosphere, it accumulates in rivers, lakes and oceans, concentrating in the fish we then eat. According to the National Academy of Sciences, at least 60,000 newborns each year could be at risk for learning and developmental problems as a result of mercury exposure in utero.
The Harvard team, working with an EPA scientist, calculated that the stringent regulation of mercury emissions would generate health savings 100 times greater than what the new EPA report claims. The argument has rapidly devolved to one in which dueling bean-counters quibble over the details of a cost-benefit analysis. To wit: If the mercury controls would generate a $5 billion per year health payoff, the EPA might consider them. If they only add up to $50 million, well, it's just not worth what it would cost industry to clean up their plants at anything better than a glacial pace.
But there's something missing in this debate.
Absent from all the focus on number-crunching is any critical questioning of the commodification of life itself, and of its logical extension: the weighing of human life against profits.
I searched the Post article for some mention of the human cost of mercury poisoning--expressed in human terms. What of the anguish suffered by the mother who gives birth to a deformed baby, the extra burdens of raising a child with ADD, the lifelong challenges and discrimination faced by the developmentally disabled?
I searched in vain.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0404-20.htm
The World Health Organization (WHO) says Marburg Virus has sickened 140 people in Angola and killed 132, most of them young children. International health organizations are rushing personnel and equipment to the war-ravaged country to stem the epidemic. Still, WHO experts told National Public Radio (NPR)'s Richard Knox that they expect the Marburg toll to get much larger.
http://www.rense.com/general63/anomolousdeadlymarburg.htm
The 1,000 people promised by the Minuteman Project's organizers ended up at just 480, the organization said. Reporters who attended their inaugural rallies outside two Border Patrol stations in Cochise County, south of Tucson, said there were 150.
A few groups of volunteers "patrol" would be too grand a word for it eventually fanned out along the border on Saturday and Sunday, and one alerted the Border Patrol to suspected illegals. But mostly, media crews were left staring at each other, wondering what the fuss was about. When news of the Pope's death hit the South-west at lunchtime on Saturday, several journalists were called home, as the airwaves were bombarded instead with a non-stop diet of mourning and remembrance. As Ray Borne, the mayor of the border town of Douglas, told reporters: "This is a monster created by the media. But by Tuesday it's going to fizzle out."
Cochise County has been the scene of clashes over immigration before, with a rash of shootings of Mexicans causing outrage three years ago.
The Minuteman Project was the brainchild of a retired accountant from southern California, teaming up with a local anti-immigration activist called Chris Simcox.
Mr Simcox has a record of talking more loudly than his actions would warrant. In 2002, he founded a group called Civil Homeland Defense in Tombstone and told the media he was training 600 volunteers to patrol the border. Only a handful showed up
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0404-08.htm
posted by abu nakba at 4/04/2005 08:31:00 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home