The dollar slumped against the yen

A man widely reported to have been the 'mastermind' behind the London attacks by slipping into Britain was an innocent Pakistani who happened to have a similar name to that of someone suspected to be an al-Qa'ida leader
http://www.rense.com/general67/mistak.htm

A cluster of BSE is being investigated by scientists who fear that contaminated feed is still being given to British cattle, nearly 10 years after it was banned.
 
The cluster involving three young cows born long after the 1996 ban on contaminated feed is believed to have been found on a dairy farm in England. It is only the second such cluster of young BSE cases.
http://www.rense.com/general67/feed.htm

A new Canadian study that found pedophiles have a strong tendency to be left-handed could help change decades of thinking about such sexual deviants -- and lead to new ways of combating the problem, says one of the researchers behind it.
 
Most experts have theorized that pedophiles are motivated by psycho-social factors such as their early upbringing or sexual history, and treatment has responded accordingly.
 
But the study published this month in Archives of Sexual Behaviour indicates there is a strong neurological factor, perhaps triggered by birth defects, that one day might be prevented.
http://www.rense.com/general67/left.htm

Here's the key quotation: -- "A couple of weeks ago, the British press reported that Her Majesty's cabinet is considering a plan to ration energy consumption. The immediate reason for implementing such a system is to reduce the UK 's emission of greenhouse gases as required by the Kyoto Treaty. The plan's authors, however, claim that if the proposal works, it will deal equally well with equitably allocating dwindling energy supplies caused by peak oil."
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/071805_rationing.shtml

-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing - that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack- but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.
http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news_news&Number=293807275#Post293807275

China's military put its new guided missile destroyers on display last week, disclosing its two new warships that are equipped with Aegis-type battle management systems.

Two new Luyang II guided missile destroyers are part of China's naval builduup.

The two Luyang II guided missile destroyers are Beijing's first Aegis-type ships. The ships are currently undergoing sea trials.

U.S. intelligence officials say China stole the technology for the Aegis battle management system by setting up a front company in the United States that became a subcontractor for the Aegis system manufacturer.
http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/05/front2453572.990277778.html

An Army report says that the majority of the American soldiers in Iraq reported morale problems, with psychological stress weighing heavily specially among National Guard and Reserve troops.

Fifty-four per cent of the U.S. occupying soldiers in Iraq, questioned as part of an Army survey, stated that morale in their individual units was either "low" or "very low".
http://www.aljazeera.com/me.asp?service_ID=9256

US INVESTIGATORS, including CIA agents, will be allowed interrogate Irish citizens on Irish soil in total secrecy, under an agreement signed between Ireland and the US last week.

Suspects will also have to give testimony and allow property to be searched and seized even if what the suspect is accused of is not a crime in Ireland.
http://www.irishexaminer.com/pport/web/ireland/Full_Story/did-sg46g7Ks0cvBEsg7OWirIStPSk.asp

SYRIA said today its border troops had been fired on by US and Iraqi forces and accused Washington, London and Baghdad of lack of cooperation in preventing insurgents infiltrating into Iraq.
It was the first time Syria, which has a 600km desert border with Iraq, had reported cases of US troops firing on its forces.

The Foreign Ministry told heads of diplomatic missions in Damascus in a letter obtained by Reuters that Syrian border troops had been subject to attacks "not only by infiltrators and smugglers but by the Iraqi and American forces"
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,16011506-23109,00.html

Key points
• 28,000 pacemakers worldwide suffering quality control problem
• Seals can degrade, causing moisture to build up and the pacemaker to fail
• Many fitted with device face difficult decision on how best to proceed
http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1659522005

The N.Y.P.D. turns out to have some advantages, when it comes to counterterrorism work, over the federal agencies traditionally responsible for doing it. For instance, in the languages considered critical to counterterror work today—Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, and so on—the N.Y.P.D. has deeper resources than the Feds. That’s partly because New York is a city of immigrants. When the police department’s leaders decided, in the wake of the September 11th attacks, to get serious about doing counterterrorism—to start doing it at a level, certainly, that no American city had ever attempted—they looked into the rank and file and found there a wealth of language expertise. There were literally thousands of officers, many of them originally from the Middle East, who were native-level speakers of dozens of foreign languages. A lot of those people were writing parking tickets—and a lot of them were ready to get into something more challenging. The N.Y.P.D.’s employment-application form now lists sixty languages that the department is interested in.

Another structural advantage that the N.Y.P.D. has is simply its size—it’s almost twice the size of the F.B.I., for instance. Paradoxically, the N.Y.P.D. seems to be far more nimble, institutionally, than its federal counterparts. The Administration’s efforts to reform our national-security agencies since the catastrophic failures that allowed the 9/11 attacks to succeed—I’m talking about the creation of the Homeland Security Department, as well as the attempts to radically restructure both the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.—have been, so far, a disheartening spectacle. You start to wonder if we’re dealing with bureaucracies that are so dysfunctional they’re simply impervious to reform. The reorganization of the N.Y.P.D., by contrast, has been fast, fairly smooth, and basically self-driven. You get the sense that the N.Y.P.D., big as it is, can practically turn on a dime. David Cohen, who is the N.Y.P.D.’s Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence, spent thirty-five years at the C.I.A.—he rose to become director of operations there—and he told me, “The N.Y.P.D. is on a hair trigger. The air gap between information and action is the shortest I’ve ever experienced.” He said that he and Kelly started talking about stationing N.Y.P.D. officers overseas, but when he, Cohen, tried to bring up the idea, which he thought was pretty interesting, the following week, Kelly cut him off by saying, “Didn’t we already decide that?” In virtually no time, the N.Y.P.D. had detectives stationed in France, Britain, Israel, Canada, and Singapore, filing daily reports. It wasn’t as if there was any blueprint for these kinds of deployments. It simply got done.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/articles/050725on_onlineonly01


The dollar slumped against the yen in heavy trading on Thursday after China abandoned its dollar peg in favor of a basket of currencies to manage the yuan.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/21/AR2005072100922.html