DisasterNews.net
June 24, 2005 BALTIMORE --
The rate of strain building up in the New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ) is similar to other seismic zones in the country. That announcement came Wednesday in a study by scientists from the University of Memphis Center for Earthquake Research and Information (CERI). The study was detailed in the journal Nature.According to study member Dr. Michael Ellis, this new research overturns previous studies that claimed otherwise."The most important point is that for the first time, these results confirm what the geological evidence has been showing for decades now "- that strain is accumulating," said Ellis, a geology professor at the university and program director of land use dynamics for the National Science Foundation."Earlier results did not confirm this, so earlier people suggested that the seismic hazard there should be reduced" -- we can throw that out the window now and move on."The NMSZ is named for the small town of New Madrid, MO, where three devastating magnitude 8 earthquakes struck in the winter of 1811-1812. The quakes were felt in 27 states and as far away as Boston and Charleston, S.C. According to witness accounts in journals and newspapers from the time, the ground rolled in waves and sections of the earth sank or rose. Thousands of aftershocks also plagued the region during the winter as well.Seismologists estimate the 1811-1812 earthquakes were felt strongly over 50,000 square miles and moderately across nearly one million square miles. By comparison, the historic San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was felt moderately over 60,000 square miles.Full Story Signs Of The Times
24 June 2005
Scientists warn that New Zealand is at risk of a massive earthquake, perhaps within the next 10 years. It was not a matter of if, but when, said Dr Kelvin Berryman, principal scientist at the Institute of Geology and Nuclear Sciences. While New Zealand had been "relatively quiet" in terms of earthquakes in the last 40 years, it was likely something major could happen soon, he said. "People think Japan and the United States are the most at risk and where earthquakes seem to happen most," Berryman said.
"New Zealand is in the Pacific plate boundary and part of the Pacific rim of fire, and just as much at risk. "We have alternate corners of the country where the plates are going under each other, which could lead to a megathrust earthquake."
A megathrust earthquake is a destructive quake that occurs where tectonic plates subduct. After the Boxing Day earthquake and resulting Asian tsunami, the Cabinet had asked scientists for a re-evaluation of New Zealand's tsunami risk. Results of this were not yet available, but Berryman said it could result in a major rethink of the risks. Earthquakes tended to come in clusters and New Zealand had six earthquakes of more than magnitude 7.0 in 13 years during the 1920s and 1930s, he said. AdvertisementAdvertisement"I would not be surprised if we moved into a cluster situation over the next decade," Berryman said.
Scientists believed that the big quake would probably start with the rupture of the South Island's alpine fault. When this happened, the resulting quake was likely to be bigger than any to have hit the country since European occupation. The consensus was that it would have a magnitude of 8.0 on the Richter scale and be capable of causing huge destruction.
Many people had predicted Wellington would have the next major earthquake, said Berryman. Monitoring had shown strain building up in faultlines in many areas, especially those where it had been hundreds of thousands of years since the last quake. The east coast from East Cape to Kaikoura was a subduction zone - an area at risk of extensive movement - as was the south-west of the South Island.
Why aren't the media screaming about the latest proofs of Bush's war scams? Don't you know? By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
This is the white-hot question right now gushing forth from many on the Left, from progressive blogs and liberal patriots and blue staters and angry anti-Bushers alike, and it is like a plea, a rallying call, an indignant stomp of deep frustration. It is this:Why are major American media not swarming all over the Downing Street Memos thing? Why is the entire nation not just appalled and disgusted and aghast at finding seemingly irrefutable proofs about what we all already knew, which is that BushCo planned to invade Iraq long before 9/11 and needed to find a way to justify it?And, we now know, he was even willing to go so far as to rig the intelligence and "fix the facts" and screw the U.S. economy and screw any sort of exit strategy and screw the potential for lost lives and let's just blindly stomp on in there and bomb the living crap outta Saddam despite the undeniable pre-Iraq evidence that Saddam had zero WMDs and that his nuclear program was "effectively frozen," and despite how BushCo and the CIA and FBI and DOD and the Clinton administration and your grandma all knew it?This is what the infamous Downing Street Memos allegedly contain, more undeniable proofs in the form of meeting notes with higher-ups in Britain and the U.S., talking about the supposedly "dire" threat of WMDs and nailing Iraq well before Bush was handed the tragic and morose political gift of 9/11 to leverage and whore and turn into his own personal Jesus.Full Story Here
Last Updated Thu, 16 Jun 2005 22:04:17 EDTCBC News
Senior Democrats are calling for a full investigation into a memo that appears to accuse U.S. President George W. Bush of misleading Americans into backing the war with Iraq.Bush has always maintained that "the use of force has been and remains our last resort."But the memo, called the Downing Street Memo, could be the first documentary proof that Bush deceived the American people.
During a forum organized by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee held to investigate the implications of the memo, Rep. John Conyers said the document "means that more than 1,600 brave Americans and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis would have have lost their lives for a lie."
"Quite frankly, the evidence that appears to be building up points to whether or not the president has deliberately misled Congress to make the most important decision a president has to make, going to war," said Rep. Charles Rangel.The memo is based on a briefing given to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top security advisers in July 2002, eight months before the war.Labelled "top secret," the memo summarizes a report from Richard Dearlove, the head of British intelligence, who had just met senior Bush officials in Washington.The memo says: "Military action was now seen as inevitable."
That "Terrorism and WMD [weapons of mass destruction]" would be used to justify the war.
But, the memo says, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."Neither Bush nor Blair has challenged the authenticity of the Downing Street Memo. But earlier this month both said it is wrong."The facts were not being fixed in any shape or form," said Blair.
"Somebody said we had made up our mind to use military force to deal with Saddam [Hussein]," said Bush. "There is nothing further from the truth. My conversation with the prime minister was how we can do this peacefully."A separate document says Blair pressured Bush to take his case to the United Nations to give a legal justification for the war.
Michael Smith, the reporter for the Sunday Times who obtained the leaked memos, said that was a brilliant case of misdirection."The whole business about going to the UN is not to avert war, but actually to get an excuse to carry out war. And I think that's the killer document for me."At the hearing, Democrats called for a congressional investigation and some witnesses said Bush may have to be impeached.
"It is a high crime to engage in a conspiracy to deceive and mislead the American people about the basis for taking the nation to war," said constitutional lawyer John Bonifaz.The U.S. media have given scant coverage to the Downing Street Memo, so it may not have much of an impact in Washington.
On Thursday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan dismissed the allegation in the Downing Street Memo. He said the Democrats were "simply trying to rehash old debates that have already been addressed. And our focus is not on the past. It's on the future and working to make sure we succeed in Iraq."But what is having an impact is the surging number of American soldiers killed or wounded in Iraq. New poll numbers now show that most Americans feel the war wasn't worth fighting.LINK
Pass this article around.... things are getting even more interestingWord Trade Tower 'Controlled DemolitionMER Editorial MIDDLEEAST.ORG - Washington - 15 June:
MER has never before published this story, this 'conspiracy theory' if you will. Though under much pressure over the years to do so we always held back and never published anything about this 'possibility'...until today that is. But now the fact that a ranking former Bush Administration official, in fact the man who was the top government economist in the Labor Department on 11 September 2001, has now gone public saying 9/11 may have been a historic hoax and the World Trade Towers were 'most likely' destroyed by a 'controlled demolition', causes us to reconsider. This is far too important to simply dismiss at this point. At the least we conclude this story now deserves far more attention that it has gotten in recent days with nearly the entire corporate media focused on Michael Jackson and various frivolities while this paragraph -- published this week on the UPI wire from Washington in fact -- has hardly had any attention:
A former Bush team member during his first administration is now voicing serious doubts about the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9-11. Former chief economist for the Department of Labor during President George W. Bush's first term Morgan Reynolds comments that the official story about the collapse of the WTC is "bogus" and that it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7. Reynolds, who also served as director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas and is now professor emeritus at Texas A&M University said, "If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an 'inside job' and a government attack on America would be compelling." Reynolds commented from his Texas A&M office, "It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a scientific debate over the cause of the collapse of the twin towers and building 7. If the official wisdom on the collapses is wrong, as I believe it is, then policy based on such erroneous engineering analysis is not likely to be correct either. The government's collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapse of the three buildings." MER CALLS FOR UNPRECEDENTEDINTERNATIONAL MEDIA INVESTIGATIONWe think an unprecedented international press investigation is now called for to match this unprecedented historical situation -- one totally independent of all governments, intelligence agencies, and pressure groups; and one bringing together a coalition of major international media from various political and national dispositions. What happened is a totally modern-day sui generis event with the greatest of history-changing consequences. Taking place so soon after Ariel Sharon came to power in Israel, and the Bush/Cheney Administration put so many former Israeli-Jewish lobby 'Neocons' in key power positions throughout Washington was suspicious from the start. But in the past we thought these suspicions had more to do with what the U.S. and Israeli governments really knew in advance, and what steps they were fast preparing to take whenever they had the excuse to do so regardless of the actual facts. But now we have to add to the larger picture that there is quite a long history of major political/military deceptions and hoaxes originating both with the Israelis and from Washington. To mention just a few that history has so far unraveled includes the sinkings of the Maine and the Lusitania, the Lavon Affair, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the deceptions behind the 1967, 1982 and Gulf Wars, the Iraq-Kuwait-US invasion, the 'Oslo Peace Process', and most recently the 'Stealth Assassination' of Yasser Arafat after the assassinations of the senior Hamas leadership. Add to this historical brew quite a few other very suspicious developments that have come to light including the jubilant Israelis caught after photographing the WTC's collapse, all the unexplained developments in Lebanon, the blatant lies and cons surrounding the Iraq invasion including Colin Powel's testimony before the Security Council, and looking ahead at the moment the considerable preparations to take down Iran one way or another. And so we conclude that such an unprecedented situation on top of such already proven lies and deceptions dateline Washington, London, and Israel, all call for an unprecedented coalition of credible major media from many countries to come together for a White Paper investigation of 9/11 focusing on the following specific issues:1) What really happened on 9/11 and who knew what in advance?2) Had the U.S. government prepared in advance to exploit such an event as 9/11, whether the full story is now known or not, in order to pursue geostrategic goals decided upon in advance regardless of the actual facts of the situation?3) What is known about the behind-the-scenes contacts and coordination between the U.S. and Israeli governments, and the crucial role played by the leading American Jewish Neocons who held key power and intelligence positions in Washington at the time of 9/11?
Important comments about this issue here
Geophysicist charts wave heights from Northwest to BajaDavid Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
Monday, June 13, 2005
If a giant magnitude 9 earthquake strikes someday along the coast of the Pacific Northwest, or if, against all odds, an errant asteroid plunges into the ocean many miles off California, a monstrous tsunami could drown low-lying lands all up and down the continent's western edge -- and now a UC Santa Cruz scientist has calculated the sweep of such an event.Spurred by the tragedy of December's great Sumatra quake and the hundreds of thousands of deaths claimed by the waves that swept across the Indian Ocean, geophysicist Steven Ward has estimated the heights that a similar quake-spawned tsunami would reach, running up along the shores from British Columbia as far south as the tip of Baja California.
"We need to know what the tsunami dangers are along any coastal area," Ward says, "and as our instruments and technology and modeling techniques improve, so we can refine our ability to forecast what might happen."Using knowledge gleaned from evidence of a magnitude 9 quake in the Cascadia subduction zone some 300 years ago, the behavior of last December's Sumatra quake, careful scrutiny of detailed ocean bottom data all along the Pacific Coast and what he calls "the laws of water physics," Ward has created a hazard map that shows what may happen should another major quake hit the same area in the future. The Cascadia zone is a region where the eastern edge of a great undersea slab of the Earth's crust, called the Juan de Fuca Plate, is continually diving beneath the west edge of the North American Plate and thrusting the continental side of the crust upward.To model the event's effects, Ward assumes that in a huge quake on the Cascadia subduction zone, the two crustal plates would abruptly slip apart vertically by at least 50 feet in three successive blocks from south to north, generating a 9.2 magnitude quake. Aside from enormous quake damage on land for hundreds of miles, Ward estimates the resulting tsunami would pile a wave more than 20 feet high crashing onto the Oregon-Washington coast, inundating Seattle and the entire Puget Sound region as well as Portland and the mouth of the Columbia River.Crescent City in California's Del Norte County -- where a smaller tsunami killed 11 people in 1964 after a magnitude 9 Alaska quake -- would see a wave of more than 11 feet, and the tsunami sweeping the coast at the Golden Gate and Monterey Bay would be more than 10 feet . At Santa Barbara, Ward calculates, the wave height would be 6.5 feet, and smaller waves would crash against the shore as far south as the tip of Baja California."These calculations are still rough," Ward concedes, "but they do indicate a level of danger that needs to be considered."The evidence of the great temblor 300 years ago was discovered along the coast of Washington and Oregon by Brian Atwater, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist in Seattle. And Japanese scientists deciphering old tsunami records in their coastal towns calculated that the event had sent a major wave speeding across the Pacific in 10 hours to damage many coastal villages on Honshu, Japan's main island.Another giant earthquake is nearly a certainty in the unstable coastal regions of Oregon and Washington, but many scientists are also considering the effect of an event that would have no precedent in recorded history -- and have concluded that an even greater tsunami might be generated if an asteroid were ever to plunge into the ocean off the West CoastLink to full story
AP6/11/2005 4:28 AM RENO -
Security contractors were heckled, humiliated and physically abused by U.S. Marines in Iraq while jailed for 72 hours with insurgents, one of the detainees said Friday."We were being held with terrorists," says Mat Raiche, an ex-Marine detained by current Marines in Iraq as a contractor."It was disbelief the whole time. I couldn't believe what was happening," said Matt Raiche, 34, an ex-Marine who was one of 16 American and three Iraqi contractors detained at Camp Fallujah last month."I just found it crazy that we were being held with terrorists, that we were put in the same facility with them," he told The Associated Press in an interview at his lawyer's office. "They were calling us a rogue mercenary team."Defense officials disclosed on Thursday that the security guards for Charlotte, N.C.-based Zapata Engineering were detained for three days after they fired from trucks and SUVs on Iraqi civilian cars and U.S. forces in Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad.The military has denied the contractors were abused. No charges have been filed against any of the contractors, who the military said were separated from suspected insurgents.Company president Manuel Zapata said the only shot fired by his workers was a warning blast after they noticed a vehicle following them.
Raiche, of Dayton, Nev., said the contractors were stopped and taken into custody on May 28. He said a Marine told him that shots had been fired, and Raiche told him, "It wasn't us."Raiche said several of the contractors were interrogated before they were released June 1 with no official explanation for their detention.
Raiche said guards intimidated the detainees with dogs, made them strip and told them to wear towels over their heads when they went to the restroom so insurgents in the facility would not recognize and harm them, Raiche said.One of his colleagues was slammed to the ground by a guard, he said.
"His head bounced off the asphalt." Raiche said. "He told me he heard one guard say to another, 'If he moves, let the dog loose.'"
Raiche said his colleague told him that a guard then reached down and "squeezed his testicles so hard he could barely move."link to full story
(SPX) Jun 05, 2005 Fairbanks AK - Continued arctic warming may be causing a decrease in the number and size of Arctic lakes. The issue is the subject of a paper published in the June 3 issue of the journal "Science."
The paper, titled, "Disappearing Arctic Lakes" is the result of a comparison of satellite data taken of Siberia in the early 1970s to data from 1997-2004. Researchers, including Larry Hinzman with the Water and Environmental Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, tracked changes of more than 10,000 large lakes over 200,000 square miles.
"This is the first paper that demonstrates that the changes we are seeing in Alaskan lakes in response to a warming climate is also occurring in Siberia," said Hinzman, who has also compared satellite data of tundra ponds on the Seward Peninsula near Council, Alaska and found that the surface pond area there had decreased over the last 50 years.
In this latest study, comparing data from 1973 with findings from 1997-98, the total number of large lakes decreased by around 11 percent. While many did not disappear completely they shrank significantly. The overall loss of lake surface area was a loss of approximately 6 percent. In addition, 125 lakes vanished completely and are now re-vegetated. [...]
Signs Of The Times
By Mark Morford,
SF Gate ColumnistFriday, June 3, 2005
Know what real men do? They admit their mistakes. Know what real people do in times of great stress and strife and economic downturn? They seek help, understand they don't know all the answers, realize they might not've been asking the right questions in the first place.Know what great leaders, great nations do at times of war and fracture and massive bludgeoning debt? All of the above, all the time, with great intelligence and humility and grace and awareness and shared humanity. Or they die.But not BushCo. This is the hilarious thing. This is the appalling thing, still. How can this man remain so blindly, staggeringly resolute? How can he be so appallingly ignorant of fact, of truth, of evidence, of deep thought? In short, what the hell is wrong with George W. Bush?Here it is, another bumbling, barely articulate press conference by Dubya, one of few he ever gives because he clearly hates the things and is deeply troubled by them, hates reporters who ask complicated questions and hates people who dare doubt his simple mindset, his effectiveness, his policies, his lopsided myopic one-way black/white good/evil worldview.Bush hates press conferences because he can't speak extemporaneously and can't form a complete sentence without mashing up the language like a five-year-old and can't express a complex idea to save his life and somewhere deep down, he knows it, and he knows we know it, and it makes him mumble and stutter and wish he could be somewhere else, anywhere else, like sittin' on the back porch in Texas eatin' ribs and dreamin' 'bout baseball. Ahhh, there now. That's better.
But here he is, instead, stuck like a pinned bug in the Rose Garden, struggling to answer tricky, multisyllabic questions from the godforsaken press. Go ahead, read the Q&A, linked above. It's sort of staggering. It's also very impressive, in a soul-stabbing, nauseating way.Bush is, to be sure and in a word, unyielding. Determined. Immovable. Also, deeply confused. Myopic as hell. Frighteningly narrow minded. Weirdly random. Childish in a way that would make any good parent seriously question whether it might be time to get their child some Ritalin and an emetic.Unlike you or me or any human anywhere who happens to be in possession of humility or subtlety of mind, Bush, to this day, admits zero mistakes. He refuses help, rejects suggestions that everything is not dandy and swell. He is confounded by questions that dare suggest he might be somewhat inept, or failing. And he absolutely insists that America exists in some sort of bizarre utopian vacuum, isolated and virtuous and towering like a mad hobbled king over our enemies and allies alike.He is, in other words, our downfall.Link to full story
JOHANNESBURG - More than a fifth of the planet's bird species face extinction as humans venture further into their habitats and introduce alien predators, an environmental group said on Wednesday.
While there have been some success stories of species that reappeared or recovered, the overall situation of the world's birds is worsening, BirdLife International said in its annual assessment of the feathered fauna.
"The total number (of bird species) considered to be threatened with extinction is now 1,212, which when combined with the number of near threatened species gives a total of exactly 2,000 species in trouble -- more than a fifth of the planet's remaining 9,775 species," BirdLife said.
Several species from Europe appear in the list for the first time, including the European roller, for which key populations in Turkey and European Russia have declined markedly.
BirdLife, a global alliance of conservation groups, said 179 species were categorised as critically endangered, the highest level of threat. They include the Azores bullfinch, one of Europe's rarest songbirds that has fewer than 300 left. [...]Signs Of The Times
