Riddled with errors
Elephant herd rescues antelope from KZN Boma
April 08 2003 at 12:36PM
A conservation team were left baffled when 11 elephants arrived at their camp in Empangeni, Zululand to rescue a herd of antelope who were being held in a boma.
Conservationist Lawrence Anthony said on Tuesday that a private game capture company had been working on the Thula Thula Exclusive Private Game Reserve capturing antelope that were to be relocated for a breeding programme.
Shortly before relocation the antelope were being housed in a boma enclosure.
The team were settling in for the night when a herd of 11 elephants approached the boma, he said.
'Onlookers realised this was not a mission for free food, but actually a rescue'"The herd circled the enclosure while the capture team watched warily, thinking the herd were after lucerne being used to feed the antelope," Lawrence said.
"This went on for quite a while until the herd seemed to back off from the boma perimeter fence."
The herd's matriarch, named Nana, approached the enclosure gates and began tampering with the metal latches holding the gates closed.
She carefully undid all the latches with her trunk, swung the gate open and stood back with her herd.
"At this stage the onlookers realised this was not a mission for free food, but actually a rescue," said Lawrence.
The herd watched the antelope leave the boma and dart off before they walked off into the night.
Thula Thula resident Ecologist Brendon Whittington-Jones said: "Elephant are naturally inquisitive, but this behaviour is certainly most unusual and cannot be explained in scientific terms". - Sapa
http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/News/0,6119,2-7-1442_1344710,00.html
A lioness in Kenya has adopted another baby oryx - her third in as many months, game wardens at the northern Samburu National Park have reported.
The lioness is said to allow a female oryx several minutes each day to feed the new-born calf.
The last calf was killed while she was sleeping
The oryx would normally represent a tasty meal to a lion, but this is not the first time the lioness has placed a calf under her protection.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1905363.stm
[These are some photos I found of what they call “mountaintop removal mining”. This is where a minig company wants to get at a little bit of coal that is near the top of a mountain, typically in W.Va.
What they do is blow up the top of the mountain and shovel the slag over the side into the adjoining valley, daming up any rivers that might in there, then they scrape out the coal, and off they go to the next mountain, leaving a trail of Soviet style environmental destruction behind them.]
Unable to bear the house-shaking noise and dust from blasting and the psychological toll from the destruction of their beloved forests and streams, the husband and wife who own this Lincoln County, W.Va. home have very reluctantly sold their property to Arch Coal, operator of the Hobet 21 mountaintop removal coal mine. The husband used to teach school for a small community up a miles-long valley that was nearby. The people were driven out of their community as the surface mine approached. That valley is now buried under hundreds of millions of tons of former mountain top.
http://www.ohvec.org/galleries/mountaintop_removal/007/
http://www.ohvec.org/galleries/mountaintop_removal/007/69.html
Almost heaven, West Virginia,
Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River.
Life is old there, older than the trees,
Younger than the mountains, growin' like a breeze.
Country Roads, take me home,
To the place I belong:
West Virginia, mountain momma,
Take me home, country roads.
http://www.cowboylyrics.com/lyrics/denver-john/take-me-home-country-roads-11297.html
The US dollar is facing an imminent collapse and the global economy will suffer a "catastrophe" when it is rejected as the currency for trade, former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad said in remarks published yesterday.
Mahathir, who famously ignored International Monetary Fund (IMF) advice and instead chose to peg his country's ringgit to the US dollar during the Asian financial crisis, said a standard gold currency was now the best alternative for world trade. The dollar was retaining some value because of fears of a global economic catastrophe if it was rejected, he told a conference of some 650 chief executives from 30 countries at a conference in Kota Kinabalu on Borneo island on Tuesday, The Star newspaper reported.
"But the catastrophe will come one day because even the most powerful country in the world cannot repay loans amounting to US$7 trillion," Mahathir said.
http://www.rense.com/general63/dlr.htm
[That unanimous approval will come back to haunt them.]
The World Bank Thursday named Paul Wolfowitz its next president despite misgivings about the deputy U.S. defense secretary's "neoconservative" ideology and enthusiastic promotion of the war in Iraq.
The World Bank board, which is dominated by the United States, Europe and Japan, unanimously agreed on the controversial figure as the successor to James Wolfensohn, 71.
http://www.rense.com/general63/woldf.htm
Now there is a new cluster of illness linked to rural schools in the same Badilla district. This has produced another significant investigative response, but these investigations fail to identify the etiological agent, which is an increasing cause for concern.
http://www.rense.com/general63/mdrmt.htm
The case fatality rate for Marburg appears to be 100%. Although media coverage has increased in recent weeks, along with the record number of Marburg deaths in Angola, there has been no mention of any discharged patients. An accurate case fatality rate is based on known outcomes, and would be the ratio of the deaths relative to the number of deaths plus discharges. Tallies, such as the one above, include the recently diagnosed patients, who may be alive, but have not been discharged. Since there are no reported discharges, most or all of those hospitalized will probably die.
http://www.rense.com/general63/mrmt.htm
[I think this is a bad idea because now they are irradiating the embryos or the reproductive cells before they ever even get into the womb. There is nothing to dampen the dose of radiation these embryos will get form the RFID reader. It is true the amount of radiation might be very small, but so is the embryo or egg or whatever, and if you are doing this rpeatedly, every time you move something from one place to another, that could make for a big cumulative dose.
It says “The advisory group will need to be satisfied that such an RFID system would not significantly heat up an embryo, or cause other as-yet-unknown problems. Troup's research team at the University of Liverpool, together with researchers at the University of Manchester, will be carrying out more work looking at the effect of radio waves on mouse embryos. Lansdowne says his team will be measuring the field strength from the RFID tags when the embryos are being worked on, and comparing this with background levels of radio waves.” But I wonder how well they will check that? Why not stick witht he barcode system? ]
Now, in a bid to stop such mistakes happening again, the UK's regulatory body, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) is considering labelling all embryos, eggs and sperm with barcodes or electronic ID tags. The idea, discussed at the HFEA's annual conference in London last month, is that an alarm will sound if the wrong eggs and sperm are brought close to one another, for instance, or if a doctor attempts to collect the wrong embryo to implant into a mother-to-be.
...
The electronic tags, known as RFID tags, work in a similar way. They can be placed on the bottom of a dish containing an embryo, and are activated by radio waves which transmit across a clinic's designated work areas. When activated, RFID tags respond by transmitting a unique ID code. "If the samples don't match [the patient], or you bring together two things that shouldn't be in the same work area, the alarms will sound," Troup says.
http://www.rense.com/general63/sprm.htm
The advisory group will need to be satisfied that such an RFID system would not significantly heat up an embryo, or cause other as-yet-unknown problems. Troup's research team at the University of Liverpool, together with researchers at the University of Manchester, will be carrying out more work looking at the effect of radio waves on mouse embryos. Lansdowne says his team will be measuring the field strength from the RFID tags when the embryos are being worked on, and comparing this with background levels of radio waves.
http://www.capitalnews9.com/content/top_stories/default.asp?ArID=124640
A leading investment bank has warned oil could hit $US105 per barrel, which would spread ruin through the US stock market, analysts said overnight. Since the start of the year, oil has risen more than 25 per cent to near $US56 a barrel. Overnight, Goldman Sachs issued research saying oil markets have entered a "super-spike" period that could see prices go as high as $US105.
http://www.rense.com/general63/oill.htm
The first case of chronic wasting disease outside the U.S. Midwest or Rocky Mountain region was confirmed in a white-tailed deer in New York State, the state’s agriculture department said on Thursday.
advertisement
Chronic wasting disease, which is not believed to harm humans, is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, part of a family of central nervous system diseases that include scrapie and mad cow disease.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7349409/
This work suggests "micro-organisms could be transported [via meteorites] from a planet where life is ending to a planet where favourable conditions for its re-birth are encountered," write the authors in a study to be published in July in the Astrophysical Journal.
http://www.rense.com/general63/habo.htm
A new U.S. Army troop transport vehicle in Iraq has many defects, putting soldiers at risk from rocket-propelled grenades and raising questions about its $11 billion cost, The Washington Post reported in its Thursday edition.
The vehicle is known as the Stryker, which is made by General Dynamics Corp., according to the newspaper, which said it reviewed a classified study by the Army in December.
http://www.rense.com/general63/ceh.htm
Increasing numbers of children in Iraq do not have enough food to eat and more than a quarter are chronically undernourished, a UN report says.
Malnutrition rates in children under five have almost doubled since the US-led intervention - to nearly 8% by the end of last year, it says.
The report was prepared for the annual meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva.
It also expressed concern over North Korea and Sudan's Darfur province
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/033105Z.shtml
Korb, assistant secretary defense for manpower from 1981 through 1985, said the current rotation is unfair to the "patriotic" men and women who volunteered for military service and are stuck on a cycle in and out of Iraq. Since only a tiny segment of the populace is sacrificing, there is no political pressure to change the system, he said.
"If you had a draft right now, I think you'd be out of Iraq," Korb said.
The American society "hasn't gotten the message that we're at war," agreed Carter.
"Those at peril are completely divorced from those in power," said Mark Shields, a syndicated columnist and TV commentator who moderated the symposium. "It's 'Patriotism Lite' -- you put a sticker on your SUV."
http://www.rense.com/general63/drft.htm
[More weird, science fiction-y crimes from China.]
Last March, two students in Chongqing fell asleep on a railway track after an all-night internet session, and a 31-year old Legend of Mir addict reportedly dropped dead after a 20-hour session. Many of the crimes are related to the thefts of virtual possessions.
Hard-core players invest so much time and money into building a powerful online character that the loss or theft of a virtual identity prompts some to take violent action
http://www.rense.com/general63/craze.htm
Photo from Canadian seal hunt.
http://www.planetark.com/envpicstory.cfm/newsid/30173
Planet Earth stands on the cusp of disaster and people should no longer take it for granted that their children and grandchildren will survive in the environmentally degraded world of the 21st century. This is not the doom-laden talk of green activists but the considered opinion of 1,300 leading scientists from 95 countries who will today publish a detailed assessment of the state of the world at the start of the new millennium.
http://www.rense.com/general63/brink.htm
In 1984, while working as charge nurse in the intensive care unit, a 20-year-old man asked me, "Can you give my mother enough morphine to let her sleep away?" I was horrified. "I can not kill your mother," I responded. That was only the beginning. Recently, an 80-year-old was admitted to the emergency room and the physician said, "LET'S DEHYDRATE HER"; one more patient was sentenced to die in hospice with NO TERMINAL DIAGNOSIS and once again, THE LIVING WILL determined the death of a 70-year-old man regardless of how he pleaded to live. I can no longer remain silent.
Your life may be in danger if you are admitted to a hospital, especially if you are over 65 or have a chronic illness or a disability. The elderly are frequently dying three days after being admitted to the hospital. Some attribute it to "old age syndrome" while others admit that overdosing is all too common. Euthanasia is not legal but it is being practiced.
Last year the New England Journal of Medicine reported that 1 in 5 critical care nurses admit to having hastened the death of the terminally ill! I believe the percentage is much higher. I have worked with nurses who even admit to overdosing their parents. No one knows the exact euthanasia rate in the United States, however Dr. Dolan from the University of Minnesota states that 40 percent of all reported deaths is probably a conservative estimation. If this is true then the United States is executing euthanasia at a higher percentage rate than the Netherlands where it is also illegal but widely practiced.
...
Difficult to believe? Well it was for our prolife lawyer until his mother-in-law was admitted to a hospital several months later for a stroke. She became "unresponsive" and "comatose" a few days after her admission. The neurologist wrote an order to transfer her to hospice refusing an I.V. and tube feeding staring "this is the most compassionate treatment." Remembering my story, our lawyer requested the removal of all narcotics and demanded an I.V. and tube feeding. This infuriated the neurologist. He began to accuse the family of being uncompassionate and inhumane. To prove his point he began a neurological assessment on the patient. Just then she opened her eyes and pulling the physician's necktie, forced his face to hers and said very clearly "Give me some water!" It was obvious that she was awake, alert and orientated. He angrily cancelled the transfer to hospice and ordered a tube feeding and intravenous. Several weeks later she was discharged and was exercising on the treadmill! She escaped the death sentence. Unfortunately many others like my grandmother have not. A stroke does not make you terminal but not receiving food and water does!
http://www.rense.com/general63/euth.htm
Spain's socialist Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, has been forced to defend a decision to sell arms worth Euro1.3bn (£900m) to the left-wing Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, in a deal condemned by the opposition as "a monstrous error".
In Spain's biggest arms deal for many years, its arms factories will supply 10 C-295 transport planes, four coastal patrol corvettes and four smaller coastguard patrol boats to Mr Chavez's army. Mr Zapatero said the vehicles would be used to monitor coastlines, combat terrorism and drug traffickers, and mount rescue operations during natural disasters. The deal was announced by the Spanish Prime Minister during a visit to Venezuela yesterday when he also met fellow left-wing leaders from Colombia and Brazil.
http://www.rense.com/general63/chavez.htm
[I remember watching an episode of Scientific American seveal years ago. It was on this subject of controlling things for people who were paralyzed or whatever. One of the things they showed was a guy who had a kind of headband that had sensors in it that could read the signals form the brain, and it showed him steering a sail boat with his thoughts.
Now if you could steer a sailboat a few years ago with a headband, why do you need brain surgery to be able to turn a light switch on and off?]
A severely paralysed man has become the first person to be fitted with a brain implant that allows him to control everyday objects by thought alone.
Matthew Nagle, 25, was left paralysed from the neck down after a vicious knife attack in 2001. He uses a wheelchair and is unable to breathe without a respirator, and doctors say he has no chance of regaining the use of his limbs
http://www.rense.com/general63/chdd.htm
The robbers who cleaned out Qader Yusifi, a Kabul moneychanger, were swift and single-minded. Within minutes they burst into his home, locked his wife and children into a bathroom, and stole away with £6,000 - his entire working capital.
But they were no ordinary thieves, said Mr Qader, hunched over a gaslight after yet another power cut in his rundown, Soviet-built apartment block.
The masked robbers wore green military fatigues, brandished AK-47 guns and, according to neighbours, escaped in a Toyota Landcruiser with tinted windows - vehicle of choice for Afghan army commanders, former Mujahideen fighters and senior government officials.
"I am 100% sure they were military," he said. And there was little hope of police collaring the culprits. "The police are working with the thieves, I am sure."
http://www.rense.com/general63/sweeps.htm
A special committee found no evidence that professors at Columbia University made anti-Semitic statements to intimidate Jewish students in classes, according to a university report released Thursday.
But the five-member panel did identify one instance in which a professor "exceeded commonly accepted bounds" of behavior when he angrily implied a student should leave his classroom after she defended Israel's conduct toward Palestinians.
http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/story.asp?section=Breaking&storyId=1012180&tw=wn_wire_story
[Now didn’t everyone say this would happen? And isn’t it happening?]
Police in Malaysia are hunting for members of a violent gang who chopped off a car owner's finger to get round the vehicle's hi-tech security system.
The car, a Mercedes S-class, was protected by a fingerprint recognition system.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4396831.stm
[This will do wonders for the economy I am sure.]
The European Commission has proposed sanctions on a range of US goods as punishment for the US failure to repeal the Byrd Amendment anti-dumping law.
The Byrd Amendment permits US firms to benefit from anti-dumping fees gained from foreign companies considered to be selling items too cheaply.
The World Trade Organisation ruled it illegal more than a year ago.
The Commission said US paper, farm goods, textiles and machinery would face an extra 15% duty from May 1.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4396905.stm
Freddie Mac (FRE.N: Quote, Profile, Research) , the second-largest U.S. home financing company that is pushing to emerge from a scandal-marked era, on Thursday posted a more than 40 percent drop in 2004 net income as the value of contracts used to hedge against interest rate changes fell.
Freddie earned $2.8 billion, or $3.78 per diluted share, in 2004, compared with $4.8 billion, or $6.68 per share, in 2003.
The mortgage funder blamed the steep drop in net income on losses related to derivatives. But Freddie said that while its derivatives can lead to big earnings swings, the instruments remain important in managing interest rate risk.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=businessNews&storyID=8048124
About 40 percent of the 700 Oregon National Guardsmen who just returned from Iraq and Afghanistan are unemployed, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
Some didn't have jobs before they were deployed; other members of the 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry, which arrived home last week lost their jobs while they were on active duty.
Their numbers are far bleaker than Oregon's overall unemployment rate, which stands at about 6.4 percent.
http://www.gazettetimes.com/articles/2005/03/31/news/oregon/thusta01.txt
A computer glitch caused Miami-Dade County's electronic voting machines to throw out hundreds of ballots in a special election and raised questions about votes in five other municipal elections, officials said.
The problem came to light when officials noticed a high number of undervotes in the March 8 election, which asked voters to decide whether they backed slot machines at tracks and jai alai frontons. Undervotes are ballots with no recorded votes.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-331vote,0,5730719.story?coll=sfla-home-headlines
Scientific Analysis Suggests US Presidential Vote Counts May Have Been Altered
8 comment(s).
Scientific Analysis Suggests Presidential Vote Counts May Have Been Altered Group of University Professors Urges Investigation of 2004 Election
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Exit_Polls_2004_Edison-Mitofsky.pdf US Count Votes March 31st , 2005
Officially, President Bush won November’s election by 2.5%, yet exit polls showed Kerry winning by 3% [1] . According to a report to be released today by a group of university statisticians, the odds of a discrepancy this large between the national exit poll and election results happening by accident are close to 1 in a million.
In other words, by random chance alone, it could not have happened. But it did.
Two alternatives remain. Either something was wrong with the exit polling, or something was wrong with the vote count.
Exit polls have been used to verify the integrity of elections in the Ukraine, in Latin America, in Germany, and elsewhere. Yet in November 2004, the U.S. exit poll discrepancy was much more than normal exit poll error (and similar to that of the invalid Ukraine election.[2]
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=5637
The dollar fell against the euro and yen after government reports showed U.S. jobless claims rose and inflation held steady, a sign the Federal Reserve may not need to raise interest rates as much as some traders expected.
Fewer U.S. rate increases may lower demand for the dollar among investors seeking to benefit from a widening in the gap with Europe. The European Central Bank has kept its main rate at 2 percent since 2003 as the Fed lifted its target seven times, to 2.75 percent. Today's report showed U.S. claims for unemployment benefits rose to the highest since January.
``This jobless claims number took people by surprise,'' a day before the U.S. March employment report, said Chris Melendez, president of currency hedge fund Tempest Asset Management in Newport Beach, California. ``That's making the dollar a little more unattractive.''
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=a2eMMVbkSqCk&refer=top_world_news
[You hear that? “Refusal to take direction” gets you 50,000 volts.]
Jay Saddington said he wanted only to get to his home at Log College Drive and Bristol Road and that he didn't do anything wrong.
Police claim the father and son repeatedly used expletives and refused to cooperate with officers. At one point, police used a stun gun, a weapon that delivers a 50,000-volt shock, to subdue the elder Saddington.
"I'm a fairly respectable citizen, and they treated me like I was a bank robber or killer," Saddington said. "I was really bent out of shape about this whole thing."
Warwick police Chief Joseph Costello said many people who had to wait in traffic during the motorcade were frustrated. "We had more than a few people shouting expletives [about Cheney]. It's something we kind of expected and something you have to take in stride," Costello said.
"But what happened [with the Saddingtons] went beyond yelling. It was refusal to take direction."
http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/113-03302005-469705.html
During her first trip to South Asia as US secretary of state in mid-March, one of Condoleezza Rice’s top priorities was to pressure India and Pakistan to abandon plans for a major gas pipeline from Iran. While the project promises significant benefits for both countries, it cuts across the Bush administration’s aggressive campaign of economic isolation and military threats against Tehran.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/mar2005/rice-m31.shtml
[Precisely what were the intelligence successes in Pakistan? Was it letting Osama bin laden slip through our fingers at Tora Bora and escape to Pakistan? Was it the way Pakistan set up an international nuclear weapons technology export center? ]
U.S. intelligence agencies were "dead wrong" in their prewar assessments of Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and today know "disturbingly little" about the capabilities and intentions of other potential adversaries such as Iran and North Korea, a presidential commission reported yesterday.
While praising intelligence successes in Libya and Pakistan, the commission's report offered a withering critique of the government's collection of information leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, calling its data "either worthless or misleading" and its analysis "riddled with errors," resulting in one of the "most damaging intelligence failures in recent American history."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15184-2005Mar31.html
April 08 2003 at 12:36PM
A conservation team were left baffled when 11 elephants arrived at their camp in Empangeni, Zululand to rescue a herd of antelope who were being held in a boma.
Conservationist Lawrence Anthony said on Tuesday that a private game capture company had been working on the Thula Thula Exclusive Private Game Reserve capturing antelope that were to be relocated for a breeding programme.
Shortly before relocation the antelope were being housed in a boma enclosure.
The team were settling in for the night when a herd of 11 elephants approached the boma, he said.
'Onlookers realised this was not a mission for free food, but actually a rescue'"The herd circled the enclosure while the capture team watched warily, thinking the herd were after lucerne being used to feed the antelope," Lawrence said.
"This went on for quite a while until the herd seemed to back off from the boma perimeter fence."
The herd's matriarch, named Nana, approached the enclosure gates and began tampering with the metal latches holding the gates closed.
She carefully undid all the latches with her trunk, swung the gate open and stood back with her herd.
"At this stage the onlookers realised this was not a mission for free food, but actually a rescue," said Lawrence.
The herd watched the antelope leave the boma and dart off before they walked off into the night.
Thula Thula resident Ecologist Brendon Whittington-Jones said: "Elephant are naturally inquisitive, but this behaviour is certainly most unusual and cannot be explained in scientific terms". - Sapa
http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/News/0,6119,2-7-1442_1344710,00.html
A lioness in Kenya has adopted another baby oryx - her third in as many months, game wardens at the northern Samburu National Park have reported.
The lioness is said to allow a female oryx several minutes each day to feed the new-born calf.
The last calf was killed while she was sleeping
The oryx would normally represent a tasty meal to a lion, but this is not the first time the lioness has placed a calf under her protection.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1905363.stm
[These are some photos I found of what they call “mountaintop removal mining”. This is where a minig company wants to get at a little bit of coal that is near the top of a mountain, typically in W.Va.
What they do is blow up the top of the mountain and shovel the slag over the side into the adjoining valley, daming up any rivers that might in there, then they scrape out the coal, and off they go to the next mountain, leaving a trail of Soviet style environmental destruction behind them.]
Unable to bear the house-shaking noise and dust from blasting and the psychological toll from the destruction of their beloved forests and streams, the husband and wife who own this Lincoln County, W.Va. home have very reluctantly sold their property to Arch Coal, operator of the Hobet 21 mountaintop removal coal mine. The husband used to teach school for a small community up a miles-long valley that was nearby. The people were driven out of their community as the surface mine approached. That valley is now buried under hundreds of millions of tons of former mountain top.
http://www.ohvec.org/galleries/mountaintop_removal/007/
http://www.ohvec.org/galleries/mountaintop_removal/007/69.html
Almost heaven, West Virginia,
Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River.
Life is old there, older than the trees,
Younger than the mountains, growin' like a breeze.
Country Roads, take me home,
To the place I belong:
West Virginia, mountain momma,
Take me home, country roads.
http://www.cowboylyrics.com/lyrics/denver-john/take-me-home-country-roads-11297.html
The US dollar is facing an imminent collapse and the global economy will suffer a "catastrophe" when it is rejected as the currency for trade, former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad said in remarks published yesterday.
Mahathir, who famously ignored International Monetary Fund (IMF) advice and instead chose to peg his country's ringgit to the US dollar during the Asian financial crisis, said a standard gold currency was now the best alternative for world trade. The dollar was retaining some value because of fears of a global economic catastrophe if it was rejected, he told a conference of some 650 chief executives from 30 countries at a conference in Kota Kinabalu on Borneo island on Tuesday, The Star newspaper reported.
"But the catastrophe will come one day because even the most powerful country in the world cannot repay loans amounting to US$7 trillion," Mahathir said.
http://www.rense.com/general63/dlr.htm
[That unanimous approval will come back to haunt them.]
The World Bank Thursday named Paul Wolfowitz its next president despite misgivings about the deputy U.S. defense secretary's "neoconservative" ideology and enthusiastic promotion of the war in Iraq.
The World Bank board, which is dominated by the United States, Europe and Japan, unanimously agreed on the controversial figure as the successor to James Wolfensohn, 71.
http://www.rense.com/general63/woldf.htm
Now there is a new cluster of illness linked to rural schools in the same Badilla district. This has produced another significant investigative response, but these investigations fail to identify the etiological agent, which is an increasing cause for concern.
http://www.rense.com/general63/mdrmt.htm
The case fatality rate for Marburg appears to be 100%. Although media coverage has increased in recent weeks, along with the record number of Marburg deaths in Angola, there has been no mention of any discharged patients. An accurate case fatality rate is based on known outcomes, and would be the ratio of the deaths relative to the number of deaths plus discharges. Tallies, such as the one above, include the recently diagnosed patients, who may be alive, but have not been discharged. Since there are no reported discharges, most or all of those hospitalized will probably die.
http://www.rense.com/general63/mrmt.htm
[I think this is a bad idea because now they are irradiating the embryos or the reproductive cells before they ever even get into the womb. There is nothing to dampen the dose of radiation these embryos will get form the RFID reader. It is true the amount of radiation might be very small, but so is the embryo or egg or whatever, and if you are doing this rpeatedly, every time you move something from one place to another, that could make for a big cumulative dose.
It says “The advisory group will need to be satisfied that such an RFID system would not significantly heat up an embryo, or cause other as-yet-unknown problems. Troup's research team at the University of Liverpool, together with researchers at the University of Manchester, will be carrying out more work looking at the effect of radio waves on mouse embryos. Lansdowne says his team will be measuring the field strength from the RFID tags when the embryos are being worked on, and comparing this with background levels of radio waves.” But I wonder how well they will check that? Why not stick witht he barcode system? ]
Now, in a bid to stop such mistakes happening again, the UK's regulatory body, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) is considering labelling all embryos, eggs and sperm with barcodes or electronic ID tags. The idea, discussed at the HFEA's annual conference in London last month, is that an alarm will sound if the wrong eggs and sperm are brought close to one another, for instance, or if a doctor attempts to collect the wrong embryo to implant into a mother-to-be.
...
The electronic tags, known as RFID tags, work in a similar way. They can be placed on the bottom of a dish containing an embryo, and are activated by radio waves which transmit across a clinic's designated work areas. When activated, RFID tags respond by transmitting a unique ID code. "If the samples don't match [the patient], or you bring together two things that shouldn't be in the same work area, the alarms will sound," Troup says.
http://www.rense.com/general63/sprm.htm
The advisory group will need to be satisfied that such an RFID system would not significantly heat up an embryo, or cause other as-yet-unknown problems. Troup's research team at the University of Liverpool, together with researchers at the University of Manchester, will be carrying out more work looking at the effect of radio waves on mouse embryos. Lansdowne says his team will be measuring the field strength from the RFID tags when the embryos are being worked on, and comparing this with background levels of radio waves.
http://www.capitalnews9.com/content/top_stories/default.asp?ArID=124640
A leading investment bank has warned oil could hit $US105 per barrel, which would spread ruin through the US stock market, analysts said overnight. Since the start of the year, oil has risen more than 25 per cent to near $US56 a barrel. Overnight, Goldman Sachs issued research saying oil markets have entered a "super-spike" period that could see prices go as high as $US105.
http://www.rense.com/general63/oill.htm
The first case of chronic wasting disease outside the U.S. Midwest or Rocky Mountain region was confirmed in a white-tailed deer in New York State, the state’s agriculture department said on Thursday.
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Chronic wasting disease, which is not believed to harm humans, is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, part of a family of central nervous system diseases that include scrapie and mad cow disease.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7349409/
This work suggests "micro-organisms could be transported [via meteorites] from a planet where life is ending to a planet where favourable conditions for its re-birth are encountered," write the authors in a study to be published in July in the Astrophysical Journal.
http://www.rense.com/general63/habo.htm
A new U.S. Army troop transport vehicle in Iraq has many defects, putting soldiers at risk from rocket-propelled grenades and raising questions about its $11 billion cost, The Washington Post reported in its Thursday edition.
The vehicle is known as the Stryker, which is made by General Dynamics Corp., according to the newspaper, which said it reviewed a classified study by the Army in December.
http://www.rense.com/general63/ceh.htm
Increasing numbers of children in Iraq do not have enough food to eat and more than a quarter are chronically undernourished, a UN report says.
Malnutrition rates in children under five have almost doubled since the US-led intervention - to nearly 8% by the end of last year, it says.
The report was prepared for the annual meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva.
It also expressed concern over North Korea and Sudan's Darfur province
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/033105Z.shtml
Korb, assistant secretary defense for manpower from 1981 through 1985, said the current rotation is unfair to the "patriotic" men and women who volunteered for military service and are stuck on a cycle in and out of Iraq. Since only a tiny segment of the populace is sacrificing, there is no political pressure to change the system, he said.
"If you had a draft right now, I think you'd be out of Iraq," Korb said.
The American society "hasn't gotten the message that we're at war," agreed Carter.
"Those at peril are completely divorced from those in power," said Mark Shields, a syndicated columnist and TV commentator who moderated the symposium. "It's 'Patriotism Lite' -- you put a sticker on your SUV."
http://www.rense.com/general63/drft.htm
[More weird, science fiction-y crimes from China.]
Last March, two students in Chongqing fell asleep on a railway track after an all-night internet session, and a 31-year old Legend of Mir addict reportedly dropped dead after a 20-hour session. Many of the crimes are related to the thefts of virtual possessions.
Hard-core players invest so much time and money into building a powerful online character that the loss or theft of a virtual identity prompts some to take violent action
http://www.rense.com/general63/craze.htm
Photo from Canadian seal hunt.
http://www.planetark.com/envpicstory.cfm/newsid/30173
Planet Earth stands on the cusp of disaster and people should no longer take it for granted that their children and grandchildren will survive in the environmentally degraded world of the 21st century. This is not the doom-laden talk of green activists but the considered opinion of 1,300 leading scientists from 95 countries who will today publish a detailed assessment of the state of the world at the start of the new millennium.
http://www.rense.com/general63/brink.htm
In 1984, while working as charge nurse in the intensive care unit, a 20-year-old man asked me, "Can you give my mother enough morphine to let her sleep away?" I was horrified. "I can not kill your mother," I responded. That was only the beginning. Recently, an 80-year-old was admitted to the emergency room and the physician said, "LET'S DEHYDRATE HER"; one more patient was sentenced to die in hospice with NO TERMINAL DIAGNOSIS and once again, THE LIVING WILL determined the death of a 70-year-old man regardless of how he pleaded to live. I can no longer remain silent.
Your life may be in danger if you are admitted to a hospital, especially if you are over 65 or have a chronic illness or a disability. The elderly are frequently dying three days after being admitted to the hospital. Some attribute it to "old age syndrome" while others admit that overdosing is all too common. Euthanasia is not legal but it is being practiced.
Last year the New England Journal of Medicine reported that 1 in 5 critical care nurses admit to having hastened the death of the terminally ill! I believe the percentage is much higher. I have worked with nurses who even admit to overdosing their parents. No one knows the exact euthanasia rate in the United States, however Dr. Dolan from the University of Minnesota states that 40 percent of all reported deaths is probably a conservative estimation. If this is true then the United States is executing euthanasia at a higher percentage rate than the Netherlands where it is also illegal but widely practiced.
...
Difficult to believe? Well it was for our prolife lawyer until his mother-in-law was admitted to a hospital several months later for a stroke. She became "unresponsive" and "comatose" a few days after her admission. The neurologist wrote an order to transfer her to hospice refusing an I.V. and tube feeding staring "this is the most compassionate treatment." Remembering my story, our lawyer requested the removal of all narcotics and demanded an I.V. and tube feeding. This infuriated the neurologist. He began to accuse the family of being uncompassionate and inhumane. To prove his point he began a neurological assessment on the patient. Just then she opened her eyes and pulling the physician's necktie, forced his face to hers and said very clearly "Give me some water!" It was obvious that she was awake, alert and orientated. He angrily cancelled the transfer to hospice and ordered a tube feeding and intravenous. Several weeks later she was discharged and was exercising on the treadmill! She escaped the death sentence. Unfortunately many others like my grandmother have not. A stroke does not make you terminal but not receiving food and water does!
http://www.rense.com/general63/euth.htm
Spain's socialist Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, has been forced to defend a decision to sell arms worth Euro1.3bn (£900m) to the left-wing Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, in a deal condemned by the opposition as "a monstrous error".
In Spain's biggest arms deal for many years, its arms factories will supply 10 C-295 transport planes, four coastal patrol corvettes and four smaller coastguard patrol boats to Mr Chavez's army. Mr Zapatero said the vehicles would be used to monitor coastlines, combat terrorism and drug traffickers, and mount rescue operations during natural disasters. The deal was announced by the Spanish Prime Minister during a visit to Venezuela yesterday when he also met fellow left-wing leaders from Colombia and Brazil.
http://www.rense.com/general63/chavez.htm
[I remember watching an episode of Scientific American seveal years ago. It was on this subject of controlling things for people who were paralyzed or whatever. One of the things they showed was a guy who had a kind of headband that had sensors in it that could read the signals form the brain, and it showed him steering a sail boat with his thoughts.
Now if you could steer a sailboat a few years ago with a headband, why do you need brain surgery to be able to turn a light switch on and off?]
A severely paralysed man has become the first person to be fitted with a brain implant that allows him to control everyday objects by thought alone.
Matthew Nagle, 25, was left paralysed from the neck down after a vicious knife attack in 2001. He uses a wheelchair and is unable to breathe without a respirator, and doctors say he has no chance of regaining the use of his limbs
http://www.rense.com/general63/chdd.htm
The robbers who cleaned out Qader Yusifi, a Kabul moneychanger, were swift and single-minded. Within minutes they burst into his home, locked his wife and children into a bathroom, and stole away with £6,000 - his entire working capital.
But they were no ordinary thieves, said Mr Qader, hunched over a gaslight after yet another power cut in his rundown, Soviet-built apartment block.
The masked robbers wore green military fatigues, brandished AK-47 guns and, according to neighbours, escaped in a Toyota Landcruiser with tinted windows - vehicle of choice for Afghan army commanders, former Mujahideen fighters and senior government officials.
"I am 100% sure they were military," he said. And there was little hope of police collaring the culprits. "The police are working with the thieves, I am sure."
http://www.rense.com/general63/sweeps.htm
A special committee found no evidence that professors at Columbia University made anti-Semitic statements to intimidate Jewish students in classes, according to a university report released Thursday.
But the five-member panel did identify one instance in which a professor "exceeded commonly accepted bounds" of behavior when he angrily implied a student should leave his classroom after she defended Israel's conduct toward Palestinians.
http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/story.asp?section=Breaking&storyId=1012180&tw=wn_wire_story
[Now didn’t everyone say this would happen? And isn’t it happening?]
Police in Malaysia are hunting for members of a violent gang who chopped off a car owner's finger to get round the vehicle's hi-tech security system.
The car, a Mercedes S-class, was protected by a fingerprint recognition system.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4396831.stm
[This will do wonders for the economy I am sure.]
The European Commission has proposed sanctions on a range of US goods as punishment for the US failure to repeal the Byrd Amendment anti-dumping law.
The Byrd Amendment permits US firms to benefit from anti-dumping fees gained from foreign companies considered to be selling items too cheaply.
The World Trade Organisation ruled it illegal more than a year ago.
The Commission said US paper, farm goods, textiles and machinery would face an extra 15% duty from May 1.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4396905.stm
Freddie Mac (FRE.N: Quote, Profile, Research) , the second-largest U.S. home financing company that is pushing to emerge from a scandal-marked era, on Thursday posted a more than 40 percent drop in 2004 net income as the value of contracts used to hedge against interest rate changes fell.
Freddie earned $2.8 billion, or $3.78 per diluted share, in 2004, compared with $4.8 billion, or $6.68 per share, in 2003.
The mortgage funder blamed the steep drop in net income on losses related to derivatives. But Freddie said that while its derivatives can lead to big earnings swings, the instruments remain important in managing interest rate risk.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=businessNews&storyID=8048124
About 40 percent of the 700 Oregon National Guardsmen who just returned from Iraq and Afghanistan are unemployed, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
Some didn't have jobs before they were deployed; other members of the 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry, which arrived home last week lost their jobs while they were on active duty.
Their numbers are far bleaker than Oregon's overall unemployment rate, which stands at about 6.4 percent.
http://www.gazettetimes.com/articles/2005/03/31/news/oregon/thusta01.txt
A computer glitch caused Miami-Dade County's electronic voting machines to throw out hundreds of ballots in a special election and raised questions about votes in five other municipal elections, officials said.
The problem came to light when officials noticed a high number of undervotes in the March 8 election, which asked voters to decide whether they backed slot machines at tracks and jai alai frontons. Undervotes are ballots with no recorded votes.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-331vote,0,5730719.story?coll=sfla-home-headlines
Scientific Analysis Suggests US Presidential Vote Counts May Have Been Altered
8 comment(s).
Scientific Analysis Suggests Presidential Vote Counts May Have Been Altered Group of University Professors Urges Investigation of 2004 Election
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Exit_Polls_2004_Edison-Mitofsky.pdf US Count Votes March 31st , 2005
Officially, President Bush won November’s election by 2.5%, yet exit polls showed Kerry winning by 3% [1] . According to a report to be released today by a group of university statisticians, the odds of a discrepancy this large between the national exit poll and election results happening by accident are close to 1 in a million.
In other words, by random chance alone, it could not have happened. But it did.
Two alternatives remain. Either something was wrong with the exit polling, or something was wrong with the vote count.
Exit polls have been used to verify the integrity of elections in the Ukraine, in Latin America, in Germany, and elsewhere. Yet in November 2004, the U.S. exit poll discrepancy was much more than normal exit poll error (and similar to that of the invalid Ukraine election.[2]
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=5637
The dollar fell against the euro and yen after government reports showed U.S. jobless claims rose and inflation held steady, a sign the Federal Reserve may not need to raise interest rates as much as some traders expected.
Fewer U.S. rate increases may lower demand for the dollar among investors seeking to benefit from a widening in the gap with Europe. The European Central Bank has kept its main rate at 2 percent since 2003 as the Fed lifted its target seven times, to 2.75 percent. Today's report showed U.S. claims for unemployment benefits rose to the highest since January.
``This jobless claims number took people by surprise,'' a day before the U.S. March employment report, said Chris Melendez, president of currency hedge fund Tempest Asset Management in Newport Beach, California. ``That's making the dollar a little more unattractive.''
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=a2eMMVbkSqCk&refer=top_world_news
[You hear that? “Refusal to take direction” gets you 50,000 volts.]
Jay Saddington said he wanted only to get to his home at Log College Drive and Bristol Road and that he didn't do anything wrong.
Police claim the father and son repeatedly used expletives and refused to cooperate with officers. At one point, police used a stun gun, a weapon that delivers a 50,000-volt shock, to subdue the elder Saddington.
"I'm a fairly respectable citizen, and they treated me like I was a bank robber or killer," Saddington said. "I was really bent out of shape about this whole thing."
Warwick police Chief Joseph Costello said many people who had to wait in traffic during the motorcade were frustrated. "We had more than a few people shouting expletives [about Cheney]. It's something we kind of expected and something you have to take in stride," Costello said.
"But what happened [with the Saddingtons] went beyond yelling. It was refusal to take direction."
http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/113-03302005-469705.html
During her first trip to South Asia as US secretary of state in mid-March, one of Condoleezza Rice’s top priorities was to pressure India and Pakistan to abandon plans for a major gas pipeline from Iran. While the project promises significant benefits for both countries, it cuts across the Bush administration’s aggressive campaign of economic isolation and military threats against Tehran.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/mar2005/rice-m31.shtml
[Precisely what were the intelligence successes in Pakistan? Was it letting Osama bin laden slip through our fingers at Tora Bora and escape to Pakistan? Was it the way Pakistan set up an international nuclear weapons technology export center? ]
U.S. intelligence agencies were "dead wrong" in their prewar assessments of Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and today know "disturbingly little" about the capabilities and intentions of other potential adversaries such as Iran and North Korea, a presidential commission reported yesterday.
While praising intelligence successes in Libya and Pakistan, the commission's report offered a withering critique of the government's collection of information leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, calling its data "either worthless or misleading" and its analysis "riddled with errors," resulting in one of the "most damaging intelligence failures in recent American history."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15184-2005Mar31.html
posted by abu nakba at 4/01/2005 06:55:00 AM
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