Re-Improved Colbert transcript (now with complete text of Colbert-Thomas video!)
by
FrederickSun Apr 30, 2006 at 11:04:01 AM PDT
I've taken the existing transcripts I've seen of Stephen Colbert's brilliant monologue at the White House Correspondents Dinner, and the actual footage (complete video available at
Democratic Underground), and edited the transcripts (correcting spelling and punctuation, adding mistakenly omitted words, etc.) to produce the following improved transcript. I have now also transcribed all of Colbert's Press Secretary "audition video." Continue below the fold with me.
Frederick's diary STEPHEN COLBERT: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Before I begin, I've been asked to make an announcement. Whoever parked 14 black bulletproof S.U.V.'s out front, could you please move them? They are blocking in 14 other black bulletproof S.U.V.'s and they need to get out.
Wow. Wow, what an honor. The White House correspondents' dinner. To actually sit here, at the same table with my hero, George W. Bush, to be this close to the man. I feel like I'm dreaming. Somebody pinch me. You know what? I'm a pretty sound sleeper -- that may not be enough. Somebody shoot me in the face. Is he really not here tonight? Dammit. The one guy who could have helped.
By the way, before I get started, if anybody needs anything else at their tables, just speak slowly and clearly into your table numbers. Somebody from the NSA will be right over with a cocktail. Mark Smith, ladies and gentlemen of the press corps, Madame First Lady, Mr. President, my name is Stephen Colbert and tonight it's my privilege to celebrate this president. We're not so different, he and I. We get it. We're not brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We're not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say I did look it up, and that's not true. That's cause you looked it up in a book.
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Turkey Refuses U.S. Request To Allow Attack On Iran From Turkish Base
Report: Turkey won’t let U.S. attack Iran from its land
By
YNetNews04/30/06 "YNetNews" -- -- Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said Sunday that his country refused a request from the United States to attack Iran from its Air Force base in Incirlik, despite the U.S. offer of a nuclear reactor, according to a report in Al Biyan.
In an interview for the United Arab Emirates newspaper, Gul noted that America’s efforts to attack Iran are “imaginary” and that Turkey’s stance is “strategic” and refuses the use of its land for any belligerent activity against neighboring countries. (Roee Nahmias)
LINK
Oliver Morgan and Heather Stewart
Sunday April 30, 2006
The Observer
The growing international crisis over Iran's nuclear programme could trigger a catastrophic oil price spike, sending crude prices over $100 a barrel, senior Wall Street analysts are warning.
With prices already at around $72 a barrel, such an increase could mean drivers facing prices of 110p a litre on forecourts, according the the Petrol Retailers Association. Last week Lord Browne, chief executive of BP, warned that prices could rise to £1 as he unveiled bumper $5.27bn profits for the first quarter.
Shell is also expected to announce close to record numbers next week, with analysts expecting profits around $5.57bn, driven largely by the oil price.
A single political shock could be enough to send oil markets into panic, said Adam Sieminski, senior energy economist at Deutsche Bank in New York. 'If we have one more big problem we are going to have triple-digit oil prices.' Sieminski points to confrontation with Iran, a worsening of the situation in Iraq or a recurrence of devastating hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico as potential catalysts for a major rise.
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DENVER -- State health officials said the bubonic plague has been detected in animals in six Colorado counties, including in 10 cats that may have been infected through hunting and eating infected rodents.
John Pape is an epidemiologist with the state health department. He said that cats present a concern because pets that become severely ill could transmit the disease directly to their owners. Dogs and cats also could bring infected fleas into the home.
Counties that have detected the plague include Archuleta, Larimer, La Plata, Mesa, Montezuma and San Miguel.
Bubonic plague was detected in animals throughout the state last year and in three humans. Since being first documented in Colorado in 1957, nine people have died from the plague.
It usually takes from two to six days for plague to incubate, according to health officials. Typical symptoms include sudden onset of fever and chills, severe headache, muscle aches, nausea, vomiting and a general feeling of systemic illness. Lymph node pain and swelling is a suggestive symptom of bubonic plague.
By Ali Sultan
April 30, 2006
HUNDREDS of dead dolphins have been washed up along the shore of a popular tourist destination on Zanzibar's northern coast, and scientists have ruled out poisoning.
It was not immediately clear what killed the 400 dolphins, whose carcasses were strewn along a four-kilometre stretch of Nungwi, said Narriman Jidawi, a marine biologist at the Institute of Marine Science in Zanzibar.
The public were warned against eating the dolphins' meat.
The bottleneck dolphins, which live in deep offshore waters, had empty stomachs, meaning they could have been disoriented and were swimming for some time to reoriente themselves. They did not starve to death and were not poisoned, Mr Jidawi said.
In the United States, experts were investigating the possibility that sonar from US submarines could have been responsible for a similar incident in Marathon, Florida, where 68 deep-water dolphins stranded themselves in March last year.
A US Navy taskforce patrols the East Africa coast as part of counter-terrorism operations.
The deaths are a blow to tourism in Zanzibar, where thousands of visitors go to watch and swim with dolphins.
House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Ill., center, gets out of a Hydrogen Alternative Fueled automobile, left, as he prepares to board his SUV, which uses gasoline, after holding a new conference at a local gas station in Washington, Thursday, April 27, 2006 to discuss the recent rise in gas prices. Hastert and other members of Congress drove off in the Hydrogen-Fueled cars only to switch to their official cars to drive back the few block back to the U.S. Capitol. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
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Stephen Battersby
New Scientist Print Edition
15 April 2006
IS EUROPE'S central-heating system about to break down, causing climate chaos around the world? Late last year, oceanographers reported a sudden and shocking slowdown in the currents of the North Atlantic, a critical part of the vast system of ocean circulation that influences temperatures and weather around the world. A shutdown could cause famine in south Asia, kill off the Amazon rainforest and plunge western Europe into a mini ice age.
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Science Matters
David Suzuki
Monday April 24, 2006
Tillsonburg News — Climate change just won't go away, will it? Like a bad penny, it just keeps turning up.
That shouldn't be surprising, since it's a problem of our own making. But what is surprising is that scientists continue to be perplexed at actual observed changes on the planet - changes that seem to be happening much more quickly than expected.
Take ice, for example. It's disappearing. No big surprise, given warming trends over the past several decades. But ice is proving to be more sensitive to temperature change than scientists predicted. Some of the world's largest ice sheets are now on the move and it could mean dramatic rises in sea level over the next 100 years.
While much of the Canadian news about disappearing ice has centred on the Arctic ice pack in the Far North, that ice is already in the water. Its melting will not affect sea levels. Only ice melting off land can do that,
and recent studies show two of the biggest land-based ice sheets, Antarctica and Greenland, are indeed melting.
In Greenland, one study looked at glacial earthquakes associated with glacial flow. It found that seismic activity increased somewhat in the late 1990s, but by 2002 "icequakes" were becoming increasingly common. Last year, Greenland had as many of these events as the combined total between 1993 and 1996.
And the ice isn't just shaking - it's moving. Studies have also found that Greenland's glaciers, which naturally creep along at a glacial pace, have in some cases more than doubled in speed. Just five years ago, the Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier marched into the ocean at a rate of six kilometres a year. In 2005, it moved more than 13 kilometres, sending vast amounts of fresh water and giant icebergs into the sea.
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10:30 24 April 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Kimm Groshong
Astronomers will soon be treated to a close-up celestial show, with a fragmenting comet streaming across the sky in more than 30 chunks. Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 has been breaking up since 1995, but between 12 and 14 May will come closer to the Earth than any comet since 1983.
Fortunately no threat is posed to Earth since, even at its closest, the nearest of the pieces will be twenty times more distant than the Moon.
But astronomers around the world will take advantage of the relatively close pass. The Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes will join with dozens of ground-based facilities for the observation campaign. And scientists expect the brightest comet pieces to be visible through binoculars and possibly, faintly, to the naked eye.
By studying the materials exposed by the break-up, astronomers hope to learn more about the interior of comets, where pristine ingredients from the solar system's earliest days are thought to be preserved. For that reason, some astronomers view the event as a free version of NASA's comet-busting Deep Impact mission.
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Reseau Voltaire
18 April 2006
The oil trade is uneasy about the increasing impossibility of reinvesting the petrodollars they are accumulating, whereas the bank world is pondering over the dollar's real value. A downturn in trade has just begun on the stock exchanges of the Gulf, even as the Asian Development Bank was warning its members against a possible collapse of the US currency. What if the dollar was really no longer anything but fiat money?
For several months a lively debate has been developing within international financial circles: is the dollar so overvalued as to be at risk of a brutal collapse, on the order of 15 to 40% depending on the commentator? The controversy is kept alive by a disputed rumour whereby some oil contracts might be on the verge of being converted from dollars into euros. This, in turn, would spawn a depreciation of the US currency.
Until now, official statements on this issue seemed to belong to the realm of psychological warfare between rival powers. As such, they were subject to question.
But suddenly, on March 28th, 2006, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) chose to put its credibility at stake among its members by issuing a memo advising them to be ready for a collapse of the dollar.
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Here is another interesting blog post from Laura-Knight Jadczyk's blog Postcards from the Edge of Reality-- some eye-opening observations on Jeff Rense and associates
Lately, it sure looks like the whole Alternative News and 911 Truth movement is being subjected to the Ponerization process (being twisted to become an agent for Evil), so perhaps now would be a good time to take a look at how that process develops. First, a little background.
There is a current
discussion on our Forum that was begun by a certain Dimitris following the publication of an editorial about Jeff Rense. Dimitris declared, quite self-righteously, that publishing such an editorial identified us clearly as "agents of cointelpro." Here is the article that we published that aroused the ire of Dimitris:
by Anders
I have been looking at Rense's website for the last two years and gathered from Laura's research, that he most likely, whether consciously or not, is an asset of Cointelpro. The website gives the image of having no limits on what they will put up and yet there are some glaring omissions.
One of these omissions is in regards to birdflu. The site is like a birdflu central with daily updates on birdflu occurring all over the planet. There has NOT BEEN one article in respect to the likelihood that Birdflu is a HOAX.
ANOTHER omission is in regard to drastic climate changes, METEORS, the many recent meteor sightings and the many recent discoveries of impact crater from meteors around the world. The signs website has an excellent supplement on Meteors found
here:
The last omission that I will mention here is in regard to the Signs website and the pentagon Strike video, which considering the fact that 500+million people have seen it, SHOULD feature on Rense's lefthand column as a permanent feature and a permanent link to the Producers thereof, namely SOTT.
One can look at this from the point of view of what is of paramount importance for the PTB, and what they don’t want the populace to see. If indeed it is true, that rense is an arm of COINTELPRO, then the important things are the things omitted from the site, some of which I mentioned above. It follows, that NOTHING that appears on Rense is important at all. It is only for keeping the population distracted!
Facts are: 1) the US is spending as if there is no tomorrow and as though they will never ever have to pay the money back.
2) The speed with which the US is implementing a world clamp down and a control on the populace is without parallel in modern history.
3) There is hardly an attempt at disguising their fascist march for world domination as though they know, that they will not be held accountable ever.
4) There is a lack of exposure of the lies of the US from OTHER NATIONS, who have intelligence services with satellite surveillance and who surely knows what is going on.
5) The US is using Depleted Uranium in the Middle East and other places indiscriminantly, as though the consequences of radiation of vast areas (including Europe and the US) is of no concern.
Talking to a friend about this, the question that was brought up was why don't they want the populace to ponder the possibility of cataclysmic earthchanges in the very near future, if they are happy to entertain the notion of perpetual war or economic megabust or whatever else is on Rense.
One answer that we came up with is this.
If the PTB have been given advance notice of an imminent comet strike (such as the cyclical comet strike with a cycle of 3600 years as mentioned by Laura), then it would be important for the PTB to vector the attention of the populace into all kinds of areas of no real importance.
WHY you might ask?
IF the populace knew that the world would be impacted by a massive cataclysm in say april year 2009 then
1) the populace would not be as easily controlled.
2) They would probably reevaluate their life and maybe not go to work.
3) The world economy would collapse, but in a NONLINEAR FASHION, in other words not when the PTB plans to pull it.
4) The people, from journalist to military officials might not continue to compromise their souls (if they have one) for their masters in order to pay their mortgage/lifestyle unless they are also promised salvation in an underground bunker, which is doubtful.
The PTB including other world leaders (The C's mentions that the world government has been a reality for a long time) would have been promised a safe haven, most likely in some deep underground bunker or a rapture for the religious minded. This would explain why they go about things as though never to be held accountable.
Building of underground cities requires massive amounts of money, tunnel workers and industries related to the building thereof. A collapse before time of the world economy would severely hamper the effort of the PTB in creating a safe haven. If not, then maybe an angry and cheated population whose attention were not distracted on bogus terrorists and like things, would hamper the PTB. Donald Hunt mentions the issue of crowd control and possible riots in todays economic report
here Dolan, as many others, mentions in a recent interview extensive tunneling going on in America. He mentions a quote from Rumsfeld of a black budget of 2.6 trillion dollars in 2001. The interview that I heard thanks to the Signs forum is found here: http://www.keyholepublishing.com/
Whether the above answer is THE ANSWER or just part of the answer is open for pondering, but the fact is that certain things are omitted from Rense and that in itself raises obvious questions. I would, as mentioned above, seriously doubt that any of the things mentioned on Rense is of any real importance, other than seeing where the PTB wants our attention directed.
As it happens, there are a LOT of questions that ought to be asked about Jeff Rense and Co and most of them are outlined in said
forum discussion, so the reader might want to check it out for all the juicy details.
The thing is, something really creepy is going on right before our eyes and we need to sit up and pay attention here!
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Underground plumbing system moves water hundreds of miles
Updated: 1:23 p.m. ET April 19, 2006
LONDON - Rivers as big as the Thames in England that may connect subglacial lakes have been found deep under the Antarctic ice, scientists said Wednesday.
British researchers who discovered the plumbing system that moves water hundreds of miles said it challenges the notion that the lakes under the Antarctic ice evolved independently and could support pristine ancient life.
"Previously, it was thought water moves underneath the ice by very slow seepage," said Professor Duncan Wingham of University College London, who headed the research team. "But this new data shows that, every so often, the lakes beneath the ice pop off like champagne corks, releasing floods that travel very long distances."
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GREENPEACE VS. THE UNITED NATIONS
The Chernobyl Body Count Controversy
Greenpeace on Tuesday released a report claiming the death toll from Chernobyl is many times higher than a 2005 UN estimate. But is the report based on "bad science" as critics claim? By Charles Hawley and Stefan Schmitt
more...
April 19, 2006
Germany Agrees to Open Holocaust Archive
By Charles Hawley in Berlin
In a dramatic policy reversal, Germany on Tuesday announced it would work toward opening the vast Holocaust archives stored in a small, central German village. Some 17 million individual fates may soon be open to historians and the public.
For years, the United States, France, Poland and a number of other countries have been trying to convince Germany to consent to the opening of the so-called "Holocaust Archives" stored in the north-central German town of Bad Arolsen. Citing privacy concerns and fears of lawsuits, however, the German government had consistently refused. The 30 to 50 million documents -- compiled by the Nazis during World War II and outlining the personal fates of 17 million Holocaust and forced labor victims -- remained off limits to scholars and historians.
But on Tuesday, Germany changed its mind. At a press conference at the US Holocaust Museum, German Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries said that Berlin would work with Washington to make the archives public. A number of details remain to be worked out, but Zypries said the process should not take more than six months.
"We still have negotiations to do," US special envoy for Holocaust issues Edward B. O'Donnell told the Associated Press. "Our goal is to reach an agreement as soon as possible."
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By Mark Biskeborn, Interventionmag.com
“To state the matter bluntly, Americans in our own time have fallen prey to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force. To a degree without precedent in U.S. history, Americans have come to define the nation’s strength and well-being in terms of military preparedness, military actions, and the fostering of, or nostalgia for, military ideals.”
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Wed Apr 19, 2006 1:11 PM BST14
By David Ljunggren
RESOLUTE BAY, Nunavut (Reuters) - Even in one of the remotest, coldest and most inhospitable parts of Canada's High Arctic, you cannot escape the signs of global warming.
Polar bears hang around on land longer than they used to, waiting for ice to freeze. The eternal night which blankets the region for three months is less dark, thanks to warmer air reflecting more sunlight from the south. Animal species that the local Inuit aboriginal population had never heard of are now appearing.
"Last year someone saw a mosquito," said a bemused Paul Attagootak, a hunter living in the hamlet of Resolute Bay some 2,100 miles northwest of Ottawa and 555 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
"Things getting warmer is not good for the animals, which are our food. We still eat them. We worry about them," he told Reuters as temperatures hovered around zero degrees Fahrenheit (minus 18 degrees Celsius) well above the seasonal average.
The entire life of the Inuit -- formerly called Eskimos -- is based on the cold. A rapid increase in temperatures could be cataclysmic as prey disappears and ice becomes treacherous.
PERMAFROST CRUMBLES
In recent years there have been drastic signs of climate change in the southern part of Canada's Arctic, where melting ice in Hudson Bay threatens the survival of local polar bears.
Buildings in the port town of Tuktoyaktuk -- on the Arctic Ocean, close to Canada's northern border with Alaska -- are crumbling into the sea as the permafrost dissolves. Remote aboriginal communities are in distress because winter ice roads, needed to truck in supplies, are turning to water.
And now there are signs of change in Resolute Bay, where 250 people live in Canada's second-most northerly town.
"The most striking thing is that the wind doesn't bite any more. It used to take pieces of skin off you," said Wayne Davidson, who runs the local weather monitoring station and has lived in Resolute Bay since 1985.
"The weather here was brutal, probably the coldest, meanest toughest cold weather you could find," he said. But, he said, there have been enormous changes in the temperature. The mean temperature in March was minus 13.4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 25.2 degrees Celsius) compared with the average of minus 24.2 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 31.2 degrees Celsius) from 1947 to 1991.
"All months are warmer by between 3 and 6 degrees (Celsius). This is beyond the usual variations," said Davidson. "We're in a total transition ... it's a one-way street right now."
U.S. scientists said in September that the Arctic ice was now the smallest it had been for a century, driven by rising temperatures that many experts believe is linked to emissions of greenhouse gases by humans.
Experts say the Arctic is warming more quickly than the rest of the planet because as the dark ground and seas are exposed by the sun's rays, they absorb heat faster than reflective snow and ice.
POLAR BEARS
For the inhabitants of Resolute Bay, this can have dangerous consequences, since the local polar bears have to bide their time on land before they can walk out onto the ice.
"There is quite a lot of change in the bears' behavior. They hang around a lot longer than they usually have," said Tabitha Mullin, a local conservation officer.
"Once in a while they'll kill the dogs tied up by the beach," she said.
For now, the polar bear population in the High Arctic numbers more than 10,000 and is still relatively healthy.
"A lot of time you see mothers with two cubs (the norm). Very rarely do you see them with just one cub," said Mullin, forced indoors by a blizzard which cut visibility to two yards (meters) and closed down the hamlet.
The warmer temperatures mean there is increased moisture in the air, which results in more frequent storms.
"We're seeing more snowfall, not just blowing snow. In the olden days it might rain just once during the summer. Now it happens all the time. It's awful," said Mullin.
In December the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC), which represents all northern aboriginals, launched a legal petition against the United States, claiming that its greenhouse gas emissions harmed Inuit human rights. Washington pulled out of the Kyoto accord on climate change in 2001.
Some predict the Arctic waterways could be ice free in summer as early as 2015, which would severely curb the ability of the Inuit to hunt.
"We're an adaptable people but adaptation has its limitations," ICC chair Sheila Watt-Clouthier told Reuters, saying the Inuit would continue urging the world to cut emissions of greenhouse gases.
"We're not going to be powerless victims over this issue of climate change ... Science is indicating that we still have about a 10- to 15-year window of opportunity," she said.
The U.S. administration has shifted its position and now agrees that human activity worsens climate change.
This still leaves a few experts who say the gradual warming of the Earth is caused mostly by natural cycles and that human activities have a moderate impact at best.
Far from the war of words down south, the inhabitants of the High Arctic ponder another mystery. Many people say the air is noticeably brighter in the sunless winter months.
Davidson says this is because a blanket of warmer air higher up is acting as a conduit for the light from the south.
"If it keeps on being this warm, the world will change completely," he said.
"When I hear people say there is no such thing as global warming, I find them totally appalling."
WASHINGTON - White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove gave up some of his responsibilities and White House press secretary Scott McClellan announced his resignation Wednesday, continuing a shake-up in
President Bush's administration that has already yielded a new chief of staff.
Rove is giving up oversight of policy development to focus more on politics with the approach of the fall midterm elections.
Just over a year ago, Rove was promoted to deputy chief of staff in charge of most White House policy coordination. That new portfolio came on top of his title as senior adviser and role of chief policy aide to Bush.
But now, the job of deputy chief of staff for policy is being given to Joel Kaplan, the deputy budget director.
The move signals a broad effort to rearrange and reinvigorate Bush's staff by new chief of staff Joshua Bolten. Bolten moved into his position last week; Kaplan was his No. 2 person at the Office of Management and Budget.
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Mon Apr 17, 1:59 PM ET
EIN GEDI, Israel (AFP) - The Dead Sea is dying, with the world's saltiest water body threatened by a lack of fresh water and an increasingly tense political situation, environmentalists have warned.
he bare, sun-baked landscape around the Dead Sea -- the lowest point on earth which is bordered by
Israel, Jordan and the
West Bank -- has since Biblical times been fed by the Jordan river's fresh water.
But that has been systematically diverted for agricultural and hydroelectric projects, while an evaporation basin for farming world-famous Dead Sea minerals has lowered the water level by one metre (three feet) a year for the past two decades.
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17.04.06
Two US explorers plan to start a four-month summer expedition to the North Pole next month to gather information on the habitat of an animal they believe could be the first victim of global warming - the polar bear.
Lonnie Dupre and Eric Larsen plan to travel 1770km by foot and canoe over the Arctic Ocean to test the depth and density of the ice in summer in a mission sponsored by Greenpeace, the environmental group said.
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AFP
Mon Apr 17, 2:12 AM ET
MOSCOW - Prince Albert II of Monaco reached the North Pole after a four-day journey by huskies over the frozen land, warning that the Arctic exploration offered a grim view of the effects of global warming.
Speaking to AFP after his arrival, he described the effects of global warming as evident at the top of the world: near the pole some open channels were hardly frozen and the ice was retreating north.
"We must try to find solutions, with scientists obviously, but also at the individual level," Albert, 48, said.
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By Andrew Bomford
BBC News, Lake Chad
Fisherman on Lake Chad
Lake Chad has shrunk from 15,000 to 500 sq miles in 40 years
One of the world's great lakes is disappearing. Lake Chad - shared by Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, and Niger - has receded to less than 20% of its former volume. Global warming is being blamed, as well as water extraction.
The land is parched dry and dusty but the first hint that there is water comes with the growing numbers of Caltropis dotting the landscape.
These strange, twisted plants have deep tap roots, and where they grow water is usually not far away.
But it did not seem very close as we left the scruffy town of Baga in a battered four-wheel drive jeep, lurching from rut to rut across what was once the lake bed itself.
Just 30 years ago, water covered the whole area. Baga was a waterfront town. Now it is stranded many miles from the lake as the land around it becomes desert. The Sahara is moving southwards.
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By Neil Mackay
15 September 2002: A SECRET blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure 'regime change' even before he took power in January 2001.
The blueprint, uncovered by the Sunday Herald, for the creation of a 'global Pax Americana' was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice- president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), George W Bush's younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff).
The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says: 'The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.'
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by Rick Bass
With a little help from some friends, a rare and magnificent beast makes a comeback.
It is the oldest desert in the world, a garden of burned and blackened-red basalt that spilled out of the earth 130 million years ago in southwest Africa, hardening to form the arid landscape of Namibia, the driest country south of the Sahara.
Black rhinos blossomed from African ground some four million years ago. Maybe this difference -- the 126-million-year wait between the two events -- is how long it takes to construct from dust and wind and a dab of rain, and from that other, last thing, spirit, a rhino. There is no other flowering of which I am aware, no iris nor orchid, as convoluted and specific and fantastically beautiful as the rhino, no pollinating moth whose desire is as elegantly fitted to its flower as the black rhino is to the landscape of northwest Namibia, known as the Kunene region.
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OKLAHOMA CITY (Reuters) - A man in the Oklahoma town of Purcell has been arrested on suspicion of murdering the 10-year-old daughter of his neighbour and planning to eat her body, police said on Saturday.
Kevin Underwood, 26, was arrested on Friday in the murder of Jamie Rose Bolin, who was reported missing after she failed to return home on Wednesday from a public library in Purcell, 36 miles (58 km) south of Oklahoma City.
"Regarding a potential motive, this appears to have been part of a plan to kidnap a person, rape them, torture them, kill them, cut off their head, drain the body of blood, rape the corpse, eat the corpse, then dispose of the organs and bones," Purcell Police Chief David Tompkins told a news conference.
Underwood was among many Purcell residents who participated in a search for Bolin, but police said he acted strangely when pulled over at a Highway Patrol checkpoint.
Police found the girl's body after Underwood, who lived upstairs from Bolin and her father in an apartment complex, allowed them to search his apartment.
He confessed to the murder after investigators found a plastic tub in his closet that had been taped shut, according to an affidavit released by Purcell Police.
"At that time Mr. Underwood stated 'go ahead and arrest me. She is in there. I chopped her up,'" the affidavit said.
Based on interviews with Underwood and files found on his computer, investigators said it appeared that Underwood had planned to eat the body.
McClain County District Attorney, Tim Kuykendall, said he would file a first-degree murder charge against Underwood on Monday and seek the death penalty.
In addition to finding the girl's bicycle dismantled and stowed under Underwood's bed, police found "a decorative dagger believed to be used in an attempt to cut off the victim's head, a hacksaw, duct tape, meat tenderizer, skewers, and a duffle bag."
Once again, Molly tells it like it is:
The latest development to which the only appropriate response is, "Huh," is the news that the "mobile weapons labs" introduced to us by President Bush before the war as conclusive evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were not evidence -- conclusive or otherwise -- of WMD and were not, in fact, mobile weapons labs.
The only thing new here is the news that George W. Bush likely knew a couple of days before he talked about them in public that the Defense Intelligence Agency had found they were not mobile weapons labs.
OK, given everything we already know about the lies before the war, this is not particularly startling -- although I do think it's long past time we stopped referring to the campaign of disinformation and false information that we were fed as anything but lies. No, the startling and funny part of the "mobile weapons lab" lie is the administration's defense of it, which is so batty it's an instant classic.
According to White House spokesman Scott McClellan, the DIA report debunking the "weapons labs" is "a complex intelligence white paper and it's ... one derived from highly classified information (and) takes a substantial amount of time to coordinate and to run through a declassification process."
If I understand what McClellan is saying, Bush leaked bad information from a classified intelligence report because there wasn't enough time for the contradictory DIA report to go through a declassification process. All of which would make more sense if we hadn't just gone through this Valerie Plame episode, where the White House says if the president leaked it, then it's legal to leak it. No problem, the president can declassify at will, they said. I don't know about you, but none of it is becoming clearer for me. Does anyone understand why we have to bomb Iran yet?
LINK
I don't think anyone is surprised by this. Rumsfeld sez "I won't go!"
Peter Baker and Josh WhiteWashington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, April 15, 2006; Page A01
President Bush interrupted his Easter vacation yesterday to offer an unequivocal vote of confidence in Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, in a move aimed at countering a growing wave of criticism from retired generals calling for the Pentagon chief to resign over his leadership of the Iraq war.
In an unusual statement issued from Camp David, where he had already retired for the weekend, Bush stepped directly into the debate over Rumsfeld's performance to offer his "strong support" and make it clear he will keep the embattled defense secretary. Rumsfeld separately declared that he will not go.
Full story
Well well...look at this.Came across this post on Anti Cointelpro and DisinformationWho is JJ Hurtak?
To kick off this ambitious project, let us have a look at Don JJ Hurtak, the guy who started the whole “Keys of Enoch” deal and garnered such followers as the young
Don Bernard “Drunvalo” Perona. Now a fully fledged psychic mafia Don in his own right.
Don James J "J.J." Hurtak's published bio says:
"J.J. Hurtak, Ph.D., Ph.D., M.Th. is a social scientist and futurist who studied at the University of California and the University of Minnesota."
Now, certainly he does not say that his degrees came from the University of California and the University of Minnesota... he only says he has degrees, followed by the names of two universities where he "studied." However, certainly, a reader would assume from this juxtaposition that his degrees came from those universities.
The fact is that his PhD is in social science and his other PhD in History and Oriental Studies, were obtained from the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Mexico.
Regarding Hurtak's claims to have been at the Uni of California in 1973, we find the following.
The Book of Knowledge: The Keys of Enoch® (1973, 1975, 1977) makes the correlation that this Divine Name was the key behind the transcription code of chemical letters which develops the human body. In 1973 while at the University of California, Hurtak came to understand that there was a connection between the series of linguistic and genetic associations in the spelling of God’s name in the biblical Hebrew (YHVH).
http://www.keysofenoch.org/html/academy_learning_session__dna.html
Hurtak’s bio claims:
"He worked with Dr. Thich Tien-An, Vietnamese Buddhist scholar in establishing the curriculum of studies at the Graduate School of Buddhism, Los Angeles, as well as working with the microfilming of the Tibetan canon in Nepal and India."
Apparently Dr. Thich Thien-An died in 1980. Here is a link with a brief overview of his life in which you will find no reference to Hurtak.
http://www.urbandharma.org/ibmc/ibmc2/suto.htmlread more
This is from "The Omnipotent Poobah speaks!" LOL!Since
our recent post about generals speaking out on Rummy's gross incompetence, several other generals have joined the group bitch-slap. The generals' say Rummy is arrogant, ignorant of military doctrine and tradition, and apt to
decide poorly at critical moments. While the recent comments haven't dwelled much on Rumsfeld's "restructuring" of the military, it's well-known that he gets a bad rap from them on that score as well.
With the number of pissed off generals at six and counting, the
Error-in-Chief now feels the need to defend his SecDef. His
statement of solidarity with Rummy was the usual corn-fed mix of platitude and humble thanks. Something along the lines of, "He's just what we need at a time like this. He has served his country well and I have complete confidence in his abilities". But. what wasn't said will come from the White House any day now, "Rummy, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out."
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By Melonyce McAfee
Posted Thursday, April 13, 2006, at 6:17 PM ET
Another retired general has called for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's resignation, and many bloggers concur. Bloggers are also commenting on Zacarias Moussaoui's testimony and the United flight 93 tapes. Finally, a South Park episode has prompted cries of "censorship!"
General Discontent: Retired Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste
denounced Donald Rumsfeld's leadership style and suggested that he step down to improve relations between the government and the military.
"That these proud military men would openly speak such things, even if they did wait to retire first, is the rough equivalent of, 'Sir, bite me. I'm not going to take your asshattedness anymore,' "
quips the liberal Omnipotent Poobah. "So......do you think Rumsfeld will leave his job for 'family reasons' and then receive from President Bush the Presidential Medal of Freedom?"
asks administration critic Truth Hunter at What Happened to My Country?
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By Mathew K. Kiel
9 April, 2006
Signs of the TimesMost Americans now live downwind or downwater, no matter in how seemingly rural, remote and pristine an environment, from a major source of toxic levels of air and/or water pollution that is directly and adversely affecting their physical health. These pollution levels were nowhere near so life threatening just a bit more than five short years ago, back when the EPA was still alive, well, and enforcing the clean air and clean water standards. But over five years of deliberately unleashing almost unrestrained environmental pollution from all sources have rendered almost every last square mile of the continental U.S. a hazardous wasteland filled with toxic particulates, vapors and soups.
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By Matthew L. Wald
The New York Times
Friday 17 March 2006
Washington - With power cleaner than coal and cheaper than natural gas, the nuclear industry, 20 years past its last meltdown, thinks it is ready for its second act: its first new reactor orders since the 1970's.
But there is a catch. The public's acceptance of new reactors depends in part on the performance of the old ones, and lately several of those have been discovered to be leaking radioactive water into the ground.
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By Cindy Sheehan
t r u t h o u t
04/11/06
I am so tired of the Rovian, heartless, and ignorant smear machine attacking me and my family at every turn of my back.
The latest abomination in their scrutiny of my life is the fact that Casey has no "tombstone." As if it were anybody's business but Casey's family. I am sure every last person who has a problem with this has buried a child and they know what we are going through.
I am being smeared because I have a new car and I have "blown" through "$250,000.00" dollars of Casey's insurance money. I am sure that they have ready access to my bank accounts, too. I know I am writing this to compassionate people who would rather focus on an administration who lies, tortures, kills innocent people using conventional and chemical weapons, spies on its citizens without due process, and is treacherous in outing a CIA operative for petty high school-like revenge, thereby endangering her, her family, and her fellow CIA agents. If it weren't for these criminals, my son wouldn't need a tombstone.
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It's always about the money..
By Erich Wiedemann
Global warming isn't necessarily the catastrophe it's made out to be -- at least not for multinational oil companies. Shrinking ice caps would reveal the Arctic's massive energy sources and shorten tanker routes by thousands of miles.
Ice-cap melting may be bad news for the
polar bears in ManitobaCanada, but it is great news for Pat Broe of Denver. When the ice melts in the Arctic, the polar predators have to search for new hunting grounds or starve -- but Broe doesn't mind. He figures global warming will make him around $100 million a year.
His friends laughed at him when he bought the run-down port in Churchill -- a tiny outpost of a thousand souls on the Hudson Bay. What could he possibly want with a harbor in one of the most deserted places on the planet that's frozen over a big chunk of the year?
Wait and see, said Broe. He only paid a symbolic price of seven dollars -- not a bad price for a port. He knew that time was on his side. Temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere are rising twice as fast as in the southern half. The summers are getting longer and the pack ice is getting thinner. By 2015 the North Pole is expected to be navigable for normal ships six months out of the year. It's then that a golden age will dawn upon Churchill.
Via Arctic waterways, an oil tanker only needs a week to make it from the Russian port city Murmansk on the Barents Sea to the east coast of Canada. That's only half the time it takes from Abu Dhabi on the Persian Gulf to Galveston, Texas. And from Churchill to Chicago on the Hudson Bay Railway, it's not much further than from Texas to the Windy City. Tankers from Venezuela to Japan can even save some 12,000 kilometers (7,500 miles) by traveling over the pole.
Of course, with rising ocean temperatures comes an increased danger of icebergs, but at least the Arctic oil fields aren't in a region plagued by political instability. No suicide bombers, no kidnappings, no explosions. What risk there is up north, is nothing big oil companies aren't happy to take on.
The first cargo likely to be transported via the Northwest Passage is Russian oil from Siberia destined for North America. The melting ice will also make it easier to get to oil and natural gas fields that are still blocked by pack ice.
The Arctic is a giant treasure trove for energy multinationals. A quarter of the world's oil and gas reserves are estimated to be hidden underneath its rapidly shrinking ice. At current market values they would be worth $1.5 to $2 trillion. There are even proven oil deposits at the North Pole itself.
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The effect of carbon dioxide on cold-water corals is much like osteoporosis in humans.
By Philip Bethge
The greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is acidifying the oceans. The first victims could be cold-water coral, which are believed to populate the edges of all continental shelves. Another endangered species is the plankton in the open oceans -- the basic building block of the marine food chain.
The Skagerrak strait is a gray body of water in March. But under the waves, at a depth of 100 meters (328 feet), an underwater Garden of Eden is growing.
Whitish hard corals glint in the beam of the headlights of the Jago, a research submersible. Rosefish and bibs flit by. The coral reefs are home to sea stars, sea urchins, sea squirts, long-legged crabs and yellowish sponges.
Ulf Riebesell sits directly within the Jago's viewing dome, in front of pilot Jürgen Schauer, so that he can study the reef more closely. After a three-hour dive, Riebesell, a researcher at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences (IFM-Geomar) at the University of Kiel in the German Baltic Sea city, is completely captivated. "Some of the underground mountains down there are completely covered with magnificent coral branches," raves Riebesell. "The view is simply overwhelming."
Riebesell and his fellow researchers have spent the last few weeks visiting this fairytale-like coral garden in the region where the North Sea and the Baltic Sea meet, only a few nautical miles off the coast of Norway. The reason for their expedition on board the Alkor, a research ship, is that the habitat on the sea floor, which has hardly been studied, is deeply imperilled.
"Cold-water corals could be the first organisms to fall victim to the acidification of the oceans," says Riebesell, whose dire prediction is supported by a study that appeared earlier this week in the professional journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment -- a publication of the Ecological Society of America. In the study (link is in PDF format), experts working with John Guinotte at the Marine Conservation Biology Institute in Bellevue, Washington report that 70 percent of the current habitat of coral branches may no longer be suitable for these organisms by as early as the end of this century.
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Arutz Sheva
22:26 Apr 05, '06
A small tornado ripped across the western Galilee Tuesday evening. Hail the size of golf balls also fell in the region. Scores were hospitalized. Freak stormy weather across Israel continues.
The tornado touched down during a hailstorm in the Acco region, striking the Arab villages of Julis, Fassouta and Jedaideh. Hail as big as ping-pong balls was reported as far away as Nahariya. In southern Israel, sandstorms reduced visibility to less than three feet.
Nine foot waves were reported on the Red Sea in Eilat, with telephone and cellular service knocked out for the entire city. The highways through the Negev were also covered completely by several inches of sand.
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by Sarah Baxter
April 10, 2006
The Sunday Times - 2006-04-09
It is seven o’clock in the morning eastern standard time when the news comes through to Americans at their breakfast tables. President George W Bush will shortly be addressing the nation live from the Oval Office. Moments later he is on air, announcing in a sombre drawl that Iran’s nuclear sites have been struck during the night by American bombers.
“You can see the shape of the speech the president will give,” said Richard Perle, a leading American neo-conservative. “He will cite the Iranians’ past pattern of deception, their support for terrorism and the unacceptable menace the nation would present if it had nuclear weapons.
“The attack would be over before anybody knew what had happened. The only question would be what the Iranians might do in retaliation.”
Sounds far-fetched? Think again. The unthinkable, or what Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, described only a few weeks ago as “inconceivable”, is now being actively planned in the Pentagon.
White House insiders say that Bush and Dick Cheney, his hawkish vice-president, have made up their minds to resolve the Iranian crisis before they leave office in three years’ time.
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Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb?
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Issue of 2006-04-17
Posted 2006-04-10
The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.
American and European intelligence agencies, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.), agree that Iran is intent on developing the capability to produce nuclear weapons. But there are widely differing estimates of how long that will take, and whether diplomacy, sanctions, or military action is the best way to prevent it. Iran insists that its research is for peaceful use only, in keeping with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that it will not be delayed or deterred.
There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush’s ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change. Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence official said. “That’s the name they’re using. They say, ‘Will Iran get a strategic weapon and threaten another world war?’ ”
A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was “absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb” if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do “what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,” and “that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”
One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”
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By Markus Becker
A British research team has observed some of the biggest sea swells ever measured. A whole series of giant waves hammered into their ship that were so big, according to computer models used to set safety standards for ships and oil rigs, they shouldn't even exist.
When the RRS Discovery set out to sea, the crew was expecting stormy weather. Meteorologists had predicted a violent storm, and the scientists -- a team from Britain's National Oceanography Center -- wanted to observe it from up close. What they ended up experiencing went far beyond anything they could have imagined -- and could have cost them their lives.
Near the island of Rockall, 250 kilometers (155 miles) west of Scotland, enormous waves came racing toward the vessel. When they checked their measuring instruments later, the scientists discovered that the tallest of these monster waves had hit nearly 30 meters (98 feet) at wind force 9. And it didn't come alone. "We were shaken up these waves for 12 hours," said Naomi Holliday, the leader of the expedition. Entire sets of giant waves hammered the ship.
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Sat Apr 8, 2:24 AM ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The administration of
President George W. Bush is planning a massive bombing campaign against
Iran, including use of bunker-buster nuclear bombs to destroy a key Iranian suspected nuclear weapons facility, The New Yorker magazine has reported in its April 17 issue.
The article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said that Bush and others in the White House have come to view Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a potential Adolf Hitler.
"That's the name they're using," the report quoted a former senior intelligence official as saying.
A senior unnamed
Pentagon adviser is quoted in the article as saying that "this White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war."
The former intelligence officials depicts planning as "enormous," "hectic" and "operational," Hersh writes.
One former defense official said the military planning was premised on a belief that "a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government," The New Yorker pointed out.
In recent weeks, the president has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of the House of Representatives, including at least one Democrat, the report said.
One of the options under consideration involves the possible use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, to insure the destruction of Iran's main centrifuge plant at Natanz, Hersh writes.
But the former senior intelligence official said the attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the military, and some officers have talked about resigning after an attempt to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans in Iran failed, according to the report.
"There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries," the magazine quotes the Pentagon adviser as saying.
The adviser warned that bombing Iran could provoke "a chain reaction" of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world and might also reignite Hezbollah."If we go, the southern half of
Iraq will light up like a candle," the adviser is quoted as telling The New Yorker.
Sean Markey
for
National Geographic NewsApril 6, 2006
Caribbean coral reefs are dying from disease at an alarming rate, according to scientists who monitor the ocean ecosystems.
Researchers say they have yet to gauge the full extent of the die-off. But at monitoring sites in the U.S. Virgin Islands more than 90 percent of the coral suffered bleaching.
Caribbean coral was weakened by unprecedented bleaching events following record warm water temperatures last year.
Bleaching occurs when heat stress causes corals to expel their symbiotic, food-producing algae known as zooxanthellae, turning the reef's skeleton ghostly white.
While coral can recover from bleaching events, many weakened Caribbean reefs are now succumbing to a fatal coral disease known as white plague.
Average water temperatures in the eastern Caribbean last September were the highest they have been in a century, said Mark Eakin of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Coral reefs in the Caribbean experienced more heat stress in 2005 than the past 20 years combined, said Eakin, who coordinates NOAA's Coral Reef Watch satellite monitoring program.
"This was the most devastating bleaching event that we've seen in the Caribbean," he said.
Record Bleaching
Jeff Miller, a National Park Service fisheries biologist based at Virgin Islands National Park in St. John, says the bleaching episode is the most extensive he's seen in 21 years of marine studies.
In Panama 70 percent of the corals at monitoring sites showed signs of bleaching, according to NOAA.
In Mexico 40 percent showed bleaching, while in Texas coral bleaching at sample sites ranged from 35 to 100 percent.
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Forrest M. Mims III
Citizen Scientist
There is always something special about science meetings. The 109th meeting of the Texas Academy of Science at Lamar University in Beaumont on 3-5 March 2006 was especially exciting for me, because a student and his professor presented the results of a DNA study I suggested to them last year. How fulfilling to see the baldcypress ( Taxodium distichum ) leaves we collected last summer and my tree ring photographs transformed into a first class scientific presentation that's nearly ready to submit to a scientific journal (Brian Iken and Dr. Deanna McCullough, "Bald Cypress of the Texas Hill Country: Taxonomically Unique?" 109th Meeting of the Texas Academy of Science Program and Abstracts, Poster P59, p. 84, 2006).
But there was a gravely disturbing side to that otherwise scientifically significant meeting, for I watched in amazement as a few hundred members of the Texas Academy of Science rose to their feet and gave a standing ovation to a speech that enthusiastically advocated the elimination of 90 percent of Earth's population by airborne Ebola. The speech was given by Dr. Eric R. Pianka (Fig. 1), the University of Texas evolutionary ecologist and lizard expert who the Academy named the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist.
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AFP
Sun Apr 2, 8:37 AM ET
BEIJING - Over 400 students at a university in central China's Henan province were hospitalized with high fevers linked to an unknown flu virus, state press and a school official have said.
The outbreak began on March 26 when 22 students were hospitalized with high fevers, Xinhua news agency said.
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Evacuations have begun in Western Alaska, where rising sea levels will soon wipe out an Eskimo village. House by house, the Alaskan Eskimo village of Shishmaref is falling into the ocean. Shishmaref sits on an island a quarter of a mile across and two and a half miles long. Its 600 people are moving. They call themselves the first refugees of global warming. "It's like an ice cube with a bunch of houses on it, sitting on the beach. If it stays really cold, these houses can sit there forever, but if it warms just a little bit, the ice cube starts to melt, and the houses start to shift," said Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology. National Geographic reports global temperatures could rise as much as 10 degrees by the end of the century. The 1990s were the warmest decade since record keeping began in the 1800s. In just the past 50 years, temperatures in parts of Russia, Canada and Alaska have increased as much as 7 degrees. The hard sea ice that once protected Shishmaref has begun to melt, making the village more vulnerable to giant storms and waves, Field said. Many scientists say what's happening shows the power of global warming.
"These communities are like canaries in a mine," said Patricia Cochran of the Alaska Native Science Commission. "What happens here will happen to rest of the world." But some critics say Alaska is just one fragile spot and not necessarily a sign of a larger global warming phenomenon. "The damage from the small little village is from waves coming off ocean not necessarily the lack of ice," said Jan Null of Golden Gate Weather Services. "There's some talk that it's because there's not as much ice, there's more wave action, but there may've been more storms in recent years." Some scientists say they expect the north to warm faster than the rest of the world, but it's hard to predict what that will mean for Californians. "The global projections now say we might have global average warming of 3 to 10 degrees," Field said. "Shishmaref already has warmed 7 degrees. In California, we might see more. We might see less." What experts don't know is how much of the temperature change is caused by nature and how much by human pollution.
In the latest series of bombings in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa since January, five bombs exploded over a six-hour period March 27. The first blast occurred on a minibus in southern Addis Ababa's Kirkos district at 9:45 a.m. local time, killing at least one person and injuring three.
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Joe Quinn
Signs of the Times
31/03/2006
The Israeli government claims that it is "expecting more Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade suicide attacks in the coming weeks", and with the Israeli government's uncanny ability to predict 'Palestinian suicide attacks' being trumped only by Palestinian militant's ability to provide them at the most opportune time for Israel, the Israeli government can be very confident that such attacks will occur at the right time.
Consider the new and improved Katyusha rocket, allegedly of Iranian origin, that was fired into Israel from the main Gaza border crossing a couple of days ago on Israeli election day. This new rocket has twice the reach of the previous Kassam rocket (12 miles instead of six), yet like its predecessor, the Katyusha, is utterly ineffective most of the time, failing even to explode never mind hit its target on most occasions. Despite this, "Palestinian terrorists" of "Islamic Jihad" appear quite happy to continue to use such ineffective attacks on the Israeli enemy and provide the IDF with the excuse to destroy what is left of the soul of Gaza strip and West Bank citizens. Indeed, not only do such impotent attacks directly cause the deaths of innocent Palestinian civilians, but they also provide the Israeli government with all the justification and international backing it needs to refuse to give an inch on the militants demands of a separate Palestinian state. The obvious and most pressing question therefore is, who ARE these idiot "Palestinian militants" who seem so determined to make life as unbearable as possible for their own people and thwart any chance of the Palestinian dream of peace in their own land?
Let me explain how it works.
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SEATTLE, March 31 (UPI) -- Testing by U.S. scientists finds that the Pacific Ocean is getting warmer and more acidic, while the amount of oxygen is decreasing.
Scientists with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and the University of Washington say the ocean is becoming increasingly acidic because of its absorption of carbon dioxide, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported Friday.
"You don't have to believe in climate change to believe that this is happening," said Joanie Kleypas, an oceanographer with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a non-profit organization based in Boulder, Colo. "Acidification is more frightening than a lot of the climate change issues."
Carbon dioxide is a byproduct of burning fossil fuels and in the past 200 years, the ocean has absorbed about half of what's been released into the atmosphere, the scientists say.
The pH of the saltwater has dropped 0.025 units since the early 1990s, the pH scale is exponential, so a one-unit drop is a 10-fold decrease, therefore the new measurement puts the ocean on track for a dramatic decline by the end of the century, the scientists say.
