Previous Stories

Researchers Invent Antenna for Light
Friday, September 17, 2004

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Researchers said on Friday they have invented an antenna that captures visible light in much the same way that radio antennas capture radio waves. They say the device, using tiny carbon nanotubes, might serve as the basis for an optical television or for converting solar energy into electricity once properly developed. Radio and television signals are captured using antennas close to the size of the wavelength of broadcast radiation. These are often huge -- thus the need for tall antennas. In a receiver, the wave excites electrons into meaningful currents, which are amplified and tuned to carry sound and pictures.

But light is carried by photons -- tiny packages that have the properties of waves and particles. They are visible because cells in the eye capture them, but no one had been able to make a device small enough to act as an antenna. Yang Wang and colleagues at Boston College used carbon nanotubes, which are microscopic structures built out of carbon atoms. The tubes are aligned randomly.

The light excites miniature electrical currents, they write in the latest issue of the journal Applied Physics Letters. A visible-light antenna might work by receiving a television signal superimposed onto a laser beam sent down an optical fiber, the researchers said. This technology may improve the efficiency and quality of television signals. Or it could be used as the basis of an efficient solar energy device that turns incoming light into an electrical charge to be stored in a capacitor, they said.

Sound  / Light / Fusion Anomaly  

Evidence showing that nuclear fusion can occur in a beaker of liquid excited by sound waves, has produced a new flurry of press activity reminiscent of that around the 1989 announcement by Pons and Fleischmann that they had achieved fusion in an electrochemical cell. The new evidence, reporting on experiments by a team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is reported in an March 8, 2002 article in Science magazine that was released yesterday. As then, the prevailing popular delusions about what science is dominate the discussion, even by the scientists themselves.

As the announcement of the 1989 cold fusion anomaly came under attack from lying establishment physicists, discussion unfortunately, degenerated into practical arguments over whether or not, and how soon, a cold-fusion cell in every basement could replace the gas furnace or oil burner.

Whether the results announced in the 8 March Science article, ``Evidence for Nuclear Emissions During Acoustic Cavitation,'' prove sound or not, we are reminded again that scientific progress can result only from the posing and resolution of true paradoxes in the mind of an experimental investigator. The important subject in this case is sonoluminescence, the emission of pulses of blue light from the collapse of air bubbles in a liquid that has been excited by sound waves, first studied in Germany in 1934. How a light wave could be produced by a sound wave was the unsolved paradox.

In the Oak Ridge experiments, the hydrogen in acetone (C-3 H-6 O), the principal ingredient in nail polish remover, is replaced by the heavier deuterium isotope. Sound waves are passed through the liquid at the same time as a pulse of high energy neutrons. It is hypothesized that the acoustic bubbles which form, then collapse so fast that not only is light produced, but the deuterium is somehow caused to undergo nuclear fusion. The evidence for this is in the excess of neutrons and tritium, a heavier isotope of hydrogen, detected in the solution. The amounts are very small, however, and the existence of the effect is being challenged.

Work on the sonoluminescence anomaly was revived in the U.S. in the 1980s. As reported in the Winter 1991 issue of 21st Century Science & Technology it began when Prof. Tom Erber, a specialist in the Navier-Stokes and other nonlinear equations which are used to attempt to describe the the way fluids behave, was posed the question: Where does the light term come in in the Navier-Stokes equation? In other words, how does sonoluminescence occur? An interview with Erber's student, Seth Putterman, who had been researching sonoluminescence at UCLA, describes the process in the Winter 1991 issue of 21st Century.

The Navier-Stokes equations are one of a variety of attempts to model viscous liquids, somewhat in the way that James Clerk Maxwell attempted to describe an ether by a mechanical model. The underlying problem is that the questions connected with the paradoxical nature of light, which Fresnel had picked up from the work of Huygens and Leibniz, and the paradoxical nature of the interaction of the atom and electrodynamic propagation that arose out of the work of Ampére, Gauss, Weber, and Riemann, have not been solved, but rather swept under the rug. That is the real significance of the just reported work at Oak Ridge.
Laurence Hecht

 

strange space signal 

Thu 2 Sep 2004 
JAMES REYNOLDS 
SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT 

AMATEUR radio hams are usually excited by the faint buzz of a distant shortwave station, but a group of scientists believe they have received a message from extra-terrestrials. Astronomers think that a signal picked up by a radio telescope last year shows the highest probability yet that ET’s family may have returned his call. In February 2003, scientists involved in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) pointed the huge radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, at about 200 sections of the sky. Unexplained radio signals had been detected twice by the same telescope in these areas and scientists were trying to confirm the findings. It may sound fanciful, but a report in the journal NewScientist reveals how the team has now finished analysing the data, and all the signals seem to have disappeared - except for one which has got stronger. Detected on three separate occasions, the signal is "an enigma", say researchers. 

So far, explanations have included conjecture that it could be generated by a previously unknown astronomical phenomenon, or may even be something far more pedestrian, such as an artefact on the telescope itself interfering with measurements. But the astronomy team says that it also happens to be the best candidate yet for a contact by intelligent aliens in the six-year history of the SETI@home project, which uses programmes running as screen-savers on millions of personal computers worldwide to sift through signals picked up by the Arecibo telescope. 

Dr Dan Wertheimer, a radio astronomer at the University of California (Berkeley) and the chief scientist for the project, said: "It is the most interesting signal from SETI@home. We are not jumping up and down, but we are continuing to observe it." Named SHGb02+14a, the possible alien communication has a frequency of about 1420 megahertz - one of the main frequencies at which hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, readily absorbs and emits energy. Some astronomers have suggested that aliens trying to announce their presence would be likely to transmit at this frequency, and SETI researchers regularly scan this part of the radio spectrum. The unexplained signal appears to be emanating from a point between the constellations of Pisces and Aries, where there is no obvious star or planetary system within 1,000 light years, and the transmission is also very faint. Dr Eric Korpela, of the research team, said: "We are looking for something that screams out ‘artificial’. This just doesn’t do that, but it could be because it is distant." So far, the telescope has managed to pick up the signal for only about a minute in total, which is not sufficient for astronomers to analyse it fully. Dr Korpela believes that it is unlikely the "message" is the result of any obvious radio interference or noise, and it does not resemble any known astronomical object. Others, however, are more sceptical, saying the current lack of explanation does not mean that it could only have been produced by aliens. Dr Jocelyn Bell Burnell, of the University of Bath, said: "It may be a natural phenomenon of a previously undreamed-of kind - like I stumbled over." 

It was Dr Bell Burnell who, in 1967, observed a pulsed radio signal which the research team at the time believed was from extra-terrestrials, but which later was confirmed as the first sighting ever of a spinning collapsed star. Other questions arise over the signal’s frequency, which oscillates by between eight and 37 hertz a second. Paul Horowitz, a Harvard University astronomer who looks for alien signals using optical telescopes, believes that the drift in the signal makes it "fishy". David Anderson, the director of the SETI@home project, is also sceptical but curious about the signal. He told NewScientist: "It is unlikely to be real, but we will definitely continue to observe it." Meanwhile, a new analysis of interstellar communications claims that, rather than sending radio signals, aliens would find it far more efficient to send a "message in a bottle". Scientists at Rutgers University in New Jersey claim that beaming a radio signal that can be detected 10,000 light years away would demand a million billion times as much energy as just shooting out matter on which the data is inscribed.

9/11 VIDEO SHOCKS SACRAMENTO CITIZENS

NewsWithViews.com

A new 9-11 video was screened last night in Sacramento, California, leaving the audience stunned. '911 in Plane Site' is basically presented in two parts. The first segment is 52 minutes and designed for showing on television with the balance of a one hour time slot reserved for commercials. Part II continues with more film and analysis. This video is digitally mastered making details sharp and clear. 

'911 in Plane Site' presents actual film from that fateful day and careful analysis focusing on the Pentagon and the two World Trade Center buildings. By slowing down the actual news feeds that day from networks like CNN, FOX, the BBC and others, what you see is quite different from what most people saw in "real time" that day. Live footage from the Pentagon and what was missed by most because of the smoke and confusion was captured up close by the media. Following the showing, a retired vet remarked, "How did we miss this all this time? I've seen media clips of the front of that building [the Pentagon] many times, but I wasn't really seeing what was there. I feel sick." 

One particular interview that brought gasps from the audience and many looking around with shock etched on their faces was an interview conducted - live at the time - by FOX News. This intense interview with Mark Burnback, an employee of FOX News, contains the following narrative, paraphrased: Burnback was close to the path of the second plane and had a good long look at what he describes was not a commercial airliner. The plane that hit the second tower had no windows, Burnback was very clear about that. The plane had some kind of blue logo on the front near the nose and looked like a cargo plane. This point was driven to the viewer several times along with the comment from this FOX employee that "this plane wasn't from around here or anything you'd see take off from the airport." 

Other footage includes several women who had a very clear view watching the second plane hit were yelling, "That wasn't American Airlines....It wasn't American Airlines going into the building." These interviews were played that morning once on FOX News, never to be replayed again, despite the massive saturation and repetition by the media for many days to come. 

Other extremely disturbing segments of this video are the clear, slow motion shots of the second plane going into the towers which show a flash right before the nose of the plane hits the building and a pod attached to the bottom of the plane. This strange flash is clearly recorded from four different angles from four different cameras. While there is only one known piece of film showing the first plane hitting the first tower, in slow motion one can clearly see - as with the second plane - a flash from the nose section right before impact. What caused this? 

This video raises extremely disturbing questions about the planes that hit the Pentagon and the World Trade Centers, but no conclusions or accusations are made by the commentator. To date, only one piece of film has been released by DoD of the front of the Pentagon. The question raised in the video is where is all the other film footage from the Pentagon? The heart beat of America's military and security, with a building and perimeter loaded with cameras, but no film for the public to view of events as they unfolded except from one camera? 

According to the producers, the purpose of '911 in Plane Site' is to demonstrate that Americans saw one thing that morning that was so shocking, so horrific and so massive, the finer details weren't really being picked up. The producer reinforces to the viewer that after one broadcast of many very controversial interviews live on the spot, these particular interviews were never broadcast again, i.e. firefighters on the spot talking about the explosions and bombs inside the towers. Since 9-11, it has been reported that "Building Seven" collapsed because of the two World Trade Center towers collapsing. However, the footage on this video tells a different story and raises more questions. 

'911 in Plane Site,' produced by Power Hour Productions (to order video, call: 800-955-0116), leaves one with many questions as demonstrated by a very upset senior citizen who requested her last name be withheld. Mary asked, "If these weren't commercial airliners, where are those flights? Where are the passengers? My, God what really happened that day?" Indeed, this seemed to be the biggest question expressed by viewers after the lights came back on, but for which there were no answers. Some viewers were visibly upset, angry and "want damn answers" from the Bush Administration. Others just walked out the door in silence. One upset man commented on the way out of the viewing, "It's time to get this on PBS and every investigative news program on TV. We need answers." 

LEADING EDGE RESEARCH RECOMMENDED! THE DVD HAS 10 Minutes Extra Material. 

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BUT ....

The WTC "Mystery Explosion" Video Hoax
(as featured in In Plane Site)

Brian Salter
questionsquestions.net
8 September 2004

[Update, 13 September: I have now received confirmation from someone who spoke personally with Dave von Kleist at the 9/11 conference in New York last Saturday, that von Kleist has acknowledged that this video was a hoax. A new version of the DVD is in production and this part will presumedly be corrected. Note, however, that there appears to be no notification of this retraction at the In Plane Site website yet.]

[Update, 10 September: I have been informed that the producers of In Plane Site have recently already acknowledged that the "mystery explosion" claim is false. I am glad to hear this, although unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any easily visibly notification of this retraction at their website, 911inplanesite.com. I will check into this and update this page again as necessary...

Update #2: A previous debunking, on Jim Hoffman's site, has been brought to my attention: http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/wtc6_5.html]

 SOURCE (with photos): http://www.questionsquestions.net/WTC/hoax.html

 

 

FBI Suspects Israel Has Spy In Pentagon -- CBS News
8-27-04

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The FBI believes there is an Israeli spy at the very highest level of the Pentagon, CBS News reported on Friday. The network said federal agents believed the spy may have been in a position to influence Bush administration policy on Iran and Iraq. "The FBI has a full-fledged espionage investigation under way and is about to ... roll up someone agents believe has been spying for ... Israel," the network reported. 

Depleted uranium: Dirty bombs, dirty missiles, dirty bullets
A death sentence here and abroad
by Leuren Moret 
8/25/04

“Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.” - Henry Kissinger, quoted in “Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed Its Own POW’s in Vietnam”

Vietnam was a chemical war for oil, permanently contaminating large regions and countries downriver with Agent Orange, and environmentally the most devastating war in world history. But since 1991, the U.S. has staged four nuclear wars using depleted uranium weaponry, which, like Agent Orange, meets the U.S. government definition of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Vast regions in the Middle East and Central Asia have been permanently contaminated with radiation. 

And what about our soldiers? Terry Jemison of the Department of Veterans Affairs reported this week to the American Free Press that “Gulf-era veterans” now on medical disability since 1991 number 518,739, with only 7,035 reported wounded in Iraq in that same 14-year period.

This week the American Free Press dropped a “dirty bomb” on the Pentagon by reporting that eight out of 20 men who served in one unit in the 2003 U.S. military offensive in Iraq now have malignancies. That means that 40 percent of the soldiers in that unit have developed malignancies in just 16 months. 

Since these soldiers were exposed to vaccines and depleted uranium (DU) only, this is strong evidence for researchers and scientists working on this issue, that DU is the definitive cause of Gulf War Syndrome. Vaccines are not known to cause cancer. One of the first published researchers on Gulf War Syndrome, who also served in 1991 in Iraq, Dr. Andras Korényi-Both, is in agreement with Barbara Goodno from the Department of Defense’s Deployment Health Support Directorate, that in this war soldiers were not exposed to chemicals, pesticides, bioagents or other suspect causes this time to confuse the issue. 

This powerful new evidence is blowing holes in the cover-up perpetrated by the Pentagon and three presidential administrations ever since DU was first used in 1991 in the Persian Gulf War. Fourteen years after the introduction of DU on the battlefield in 1991, the long-term effects have revealed that DU is a death sentence and very nasty stuff.

Scientists studying the biological effects of uranium in the 1960s reported that it targets the DNA. Marion Fulk, a nuclear physical chemist retired from the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab and formerly involved with the Manhattan Project, interprets the new and rapid malignancies in soldiers from the 2003 war as “spectacular … and a matter of concern.” 

This evidence shows that of the three effects which DU has on biological systems - radiation, chemical and particulate – the particulate effect from nano-size particles is the most dominant one immediately after exposure and targets the Master Code in the DNA. This is bad news, but it explains why DU causes a myriad of diseases which are difficult to define. 

In simple words, DU “trashes the body.” When asked if the main purpose for using it was for destroying things and killing people, Fulk was more specific: “I would say that it is the perfect weapon for killing lots of people.”

Soldiers developing malignancies so quickly since 2003 can be expected to develop multiple cancers from independent causes. This phenomenon has been reported by doctors in hospitals treating civilians following NATO bombing with DU in Yugoslavia in 1998-1999 and the U.S. military invasion of Iraq using DU for the first time in 1991. Medical experts report that this phenomenon of multiple malignancies from unrelated causes has been unknown until now and is a new syndrome associated with internal DU exposure. 

Just 467 U.S. personnel were wounded in the three-week Persian Gulf War in 1990-1991. Out of 580,400 soldiers who served in Gulf War I, 11,000 are dead, and by 2000 there were 325,000 on permanent medical disability. This astounding number of disabled vets means that a decade later, 56 percent of those soldiers who served now have medical problems. 

The number of disabled vets reported up to 2000 has been increasing by 43,000 every year. Brad Flohr of the Department of Veterans Affairs told American Free Press that he believes there are more disabled vets now than even after World War II.

They brought it home

Not only were soldiers exposed to DU on and off the battlefields, but they brought it home. DU in the semen of soldiers internally contaminated their wives, partners and girlfriends. Tragically, some women in their 20s and 30s who were sexual partners of exposed soldiers developed endometriosis and were forced to have hysterectomies because of health problems. 

In a group of 251 soldiers from a study group in Mississippi who had all had normal babies before the Gulf War, 67 percent of their post-war babies were born with severe birth defects. They were born with missing legs, arms, organs or eyes or had immune system and blood diseases. In some veterans’ families now, the only normal or healthy members of the family are the children born before the war. 

The Department of Veterans Affairs has stated that they do not keep records of birth defects occurring in families of veterans.

How did they hide it?

Before a new weapons system can be used, it must be fully tested. The blueprint for depleted uranium weapons is a 1943 declassified document from the Manhattan Project. 

Harvard President and physicist James B. Conant, who developed poison gas in World War I, was brought into the Manhattan Project by the father of presidential candidate John Kerry. Kerry’s father served at a high level in the Manhattan Project and was a CIA agent. 

Conant was chair of the S-1 Poison Gas Committee, which recommended developing poison gas weapons from the radioactive trash of the atomic bomb project in World War II. At that time, it was known that radioactive materials dispersed in bombs from the air, from land vehicles or on the battlefield produced very fine radioactive dust which would penetrate all protective clothing, any gas mask or filter or the skin. By contaminating the lungs and blood, it could kill or cause illness very quickly. 

They also recommended it as a permanent terrain contaminant, which could be used to destroy populations by contaminating water supplies and agricultural land with the radioactive dust.

The first DU weapons system was developed for the Navy in 1968, and DU weapons were given to and used by Israel in 1973 under U.S. supervision in the Yom Kippur war against the Arabs. 

The Phalanx weapons system, using DU, was tested on the USS Bigelow out of Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in 1977, and DU weapons have been sold by the U.S. to 29 countries. 

Military research report summaries detail the testing of DU from 1974-1999 at military testing grounds, bombing and gunnery ranges and at civilian labs under contract. Today 42 states are contaminated with DU from manufacture, testing and deployment. 

Women living around these facilities have reported increases in endometriosis, birth defects in babies, leukemia in children and cancers and other diseases in adults. Thousands of tons of DU weapons tested for decades by the Navy on four bombing and gunnery ranges around Fallon, Nevada, is no doubt the cause of the fastest growing leukemia cluster in the U.S. over the past decade. The military denies that DU is the cause.

The medical profession has been active in the cover-up - just as they were in hiding the effects from the American public - of low level radiation from atmospheric testing and nuclear power plants. A medical doctor in Northern California reported being trained by the Pentagon with other doctors, months before the 2003 war started, to diagnose and treat soldiers returning from the 2003 war for mental problems only. 

Medical professionals in hospitals and facilities treating returning soldiers were threatened with $10,000 fines if they talked about the soldiers or their medical problems. They were also threatened with jail. 

Reporters have also been prevented access to more than 14,000 medically evacuated soldiers flown nightly since the 2003 war in C-150s from Germany who are brought to Walter Reed Hospital near Washington, D.C.

Dr. Robert Gould, former president of the Bay Area chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), has contacted three medical doctors since February 2004, after I had been invited to speak about DU. Dr. Katharine Thomasson, president of the Oregon chapter of the PSR, informed me that Dr. Gould had contacted her and tried to convince her to cancel her invitation for me to speak about DU at Portland State University on April 12. Although I was able to do a presentation, Dr. Thomasson told me I could only talk about DU in Oregon “and nothing overseas … nothing political.” 

Dr. Gould also contacted and discouraged Dr. Ross Wilcox in Toronto, Canada, from inviting me to speak to Physicians for Global Survival (PGS), the Canadian equivalent of PSR, several months later. When that didn’t work, he contacted Dr. Allan Connoly, the Canadian national president of PGS, who was able to cancel my invitation and nearly succeeded in preventing Dr. Wilcox, his own member, from showing photos and presenting details on civilians suffering from DU exposure and cancer provided to him by doctors in southern Iraq. 

Dr. Janette Sherman, a former and long-standing member of PSR, reported that she finally quit some time after being invited to lunch by a new PSR executive administrator. After the woman had pumped Dr. Sherman for information all through lunch about her position on key issues, the woman informed Dr. Sherman that her last job had been with the CIA.

How was the truth about DU hidden from military personnel serving in successive DU wars? Before his tragic death, Sen. Paul Wellstone informed Joyce Riley, R.N., B.S.N., executive director of the American Gulf War Veterans Association, that 95 percent of Gulf War veterans had been recycled out of the military by 1995. Any of those continuing in military service were isolated from each other, preventing critical information being transferred to new troops. The “next DU war” had already been planned, and those planning it wanted “no skunk at the garden party.”

The US has a dirty (DU) little (CIA) secret

A new book just published at the American Free Press by Michael Collins Piper, “The High Priests of War: The Secret History of How America’s Neo-Conservative Trotskyites Came to Power and Orchestrated the War Against Iraq as the First Step in Their Drive for Global Empire,” details the early plans for a war against the Arab world by Henry Kissinger and the neo-cons in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That just happens to coincide with getting the DU “show on the road” and the oil crisis in the Middle East, which caused concern not only to President Nixon. The British had been plotting and scheming for control of the oil in Iraq for decades since first using poison gas on the Iraqis and Kurds in 1912.

The book details the creation of the neo-cons by their “godfather” and Trotsky lover Irving Kristol, who pushed for a “war against terrorism” long before 9/11 and was lavishly funded for years by the CIA. His son, William Kristol, is one of the most influential men in the United States. 

Both are public relations men for the Israeli lobby’s neo-conservative network, with strong ties to Rupert Murdoch. Kissinger also has ties to this network and the Carlyle Group, who, one could say, have facilitated these omnicidal wars beginning from the time former President Bush took office. It would be easy to say that we are recycling World Wars I and II, with the same faces.

When I asked Vietnam Special Ops Green Beret Capt. John McCarthy, who could have devised this omnicidal plan to use DU to destroy the genetic code and genetic future of large populations of Arabs and Moslems in the Middle East and Central Asia - just coincidentally the areas where most of the world’s oil deposits are located - he replied: “It has all the handprints of Henry Kissinger.” 

In Zbignew Brzezinski’s book “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives,” the map of the Eurasian chessboard includes four regions strategic to U.S. foreign policy. The “South” region corresponds precisely to the regions now contaminated permanently with radiation from U.S. bombs, missiles and bullets made with thousands of tons of DU. 

A Japanese professor, Dr. K. Yagasaki, has calculated that 800 tons of DU is the atomicity equivalent of 83,000 Nagasaki bombs. The U.S. has used more DU since 1991 than the atomicity equivalent of 400,000 Nagasaki bombs. Four nuclear wars indeed, and 10 times the amount of radiation released into the atmosphere from atmospheric testing!

No wonder our soldiers, their families and the people of the Middle East, Yugoslavia and Central Asia are sick. But as Henry Kissinger said after Vietnam when our soldiers came home ill from Agent Orange, “Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used for foreign policy.” 

Unfortunately, more and more of those soldiers are men and women with brown skin. And unfortunately, the DU radioactive dust will be carried around the world and deposited in our environments just as the “smog of war” from the 1991 Gulf War was found in deposits in South America, the Himalayas and Hawaii. 

In June 2003, the World Health Organization announced in a press release that global cancer rates will increase 50 percent by 2020. What else do they know that they aren’t telling us? I know that depleted uranium is a death sentence … for all of us. We will all die in silent ways.

To learn more

Sources used in this story that readers are encouraged to consult: 

American Free Press four-part series on DU by Christopher Bollyn. Part I: “Depleted Uranium: U.S. Commits War Crime Against Iraq, Humanity,” www.americanfreepress.net/depleted_uranium.html; Part II: “Cancer Epidemic Caused by U.S. WMD: MD Says Depleted Uranium Definitively Linked,” www.americanfreepress.net/html/cancer_epidemic_.html

August 2004 World Affairs Journal. Leuren Moret: “Depleted Uranium: The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War,” www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2004/DU-Trojan-Horse1jul04.htm

August 2004 Coastal Post Online. Carol Sterrit: “Marin Depleted Uranium Resolution Heats Up – GI’s Will Come Home To A Slow Death,” www.coastalpost.com/04/08/01 

World Depleted Uranium Weapons Conference, Hamburg, Germany, October 16-19, 2004: www.worlduraniumweaponsconference.de/speakers/speakers.htm

International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan. Written opinion of Judge Niloufer Baghwat: www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/Afghanistan-Criminal-Tribunal10mar04.htm

“Discounted Casualties: The Human Cost of Nuclear War” by Akira Tashiro, foreword by Leuren Moret, www.chugoku-np.co.jp/abom/uran/index_e.html

Leuren Moret is a geoscientist who has worked around the world on radiation issues, educating citizens, the media, members of parliaments and Congress and other officials. She became a whistleblower in 1991 at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab after experiencing major science fraud on the Yucca Mountain Project.  

Revealed - Food Companies 
Knew Products Were Addictive 
08/17/2004 

Multinational food companies have known for years of research that suggests many of their products trigger chemical reactions in the brain which lead people to overeat, The Telegraph can reveal. Scientists working for Nestle and Unilever have been quietly investigating how certain foods, such as chocolate biscuits, burgers and snacks, make people binge-eat, thereby fuelling obesity. The companies insist that there is no proof that the foods create bio-chemical reactions that make people eat too much. They are not yet prepared to issue consumer warnings or change the nature of the products. 

However, scientists working for the industry have said manufacturers fear they have created foods that undermine the body's abilities to control intake and are battling to find a solution. "We have created a bio-chemical monster," one said. 

The revelation will be seized on by those who allege that the food industry has been reckless. More than 300 million people worldwide are now deemed clinically obese, with an estimated 2.5 million dying each year as a result of being overweight. In Britain, more than one in five adults is obese - triple the figure of 20 years ago. Early in 2003 America's leading fast-food chains, including McDonald's and Burger King, were warned of possible legal action from obese people following research on mice and rats suggesting that fast food could trigger overeating. It is now clear that the industry has known for years of similar results from research on humans. 

One scientist who acts as a consultant to food manufacturers said: "They are aware that they have been too successful in creating food that some people just can't say no to. It's an enormous problem." 

The overeating effect is thought to be triggered by opioids, chemicals which produce a desire to eat more while reducing the "sated" feeling that normally kills appetite. Research being studied by the industry shows that although the effect is only short-lived, it can have a dramatic effect on food intake. According to a recent review of 20 years of research by scientists at the University of Sussex, when release of opioids was blocked using drugs, intake among human volunteers fell by 21 per cent. The effect was even larger among obese people, whose intake fell by 33 per cent. 

Further research also suggests that the opioids effect is strongest with products that involve combinations of foods which are typically high in fat and carbohydrates. These combinations are routinely used to boost the so-called palatability of products, with chocolate being added to cereals and biscuits, cheese added to savoury snacks, and buns with a high sugar content being used for hamburgers and cheeseburgers. 

The industry has long sought to drive up the palatability of its products. Now, however, it is becoming clear that palatability reflects the effect food has on the brain. Dr Martin Yeomans, of the University of Sussex, a leading authority on opioids, said: "I am confident that opioids play a role in food intake."  Dr Yeomans presented the latest evidence linking palatability to over-eating at a scientific meeting this week which is sponsored by leading food companies, including Nestle, the world's largest, and Unilever. 

A spokesman for Nestle in Vevey, Switzerland, confirmed that the company has been studying the role of palatability and opioids in food intake for many years. He said: "We have projects currently running to investigate this and other aspects of obesity and the company will make all necessary changes when there is significant scientific evidence to support such action." However, the company did not consider the evidence strong enough to require action: "We have to be certain that there are no unexpected negative aspects." Unilever, which owns the Knorr, Birds Eye and Ragu brands, is also investigating the links. At the 2003 conference in Groningen, Holland, scientists presented strategies for dealing with the issue, including greater consumer education and labelling. 

The findings about the effects of opioids were seized on yesterday by Prof John Banzhaf of George Washington University, Washington DC, who played a key role in the billion-dollar lawsuits against tobacco companies during the 1990s. During the 1990s, evidence emerged that the industry had manipulated cigarettes' content to enhance their addictive nature. In 1998, the industry reached a settlement with 46 American state governments totalling $206 billion. 

Prof Banzhaf described the food industry's knowledge of possible links between high-calorie food and over-eating by humans as "astounding". "This would seem to constitute failure to disclose a material fact - information that might sway the decision of consumers, had they known about it," he said.  While there is no suggestion that the food industry knowingly manipulates its products to boost over-consumption, Prof Banzhaf said there were parallels with the case against the tobacco industry. "They said smokers smoke for the taste, and it had nothing to do with the brain. It sounds to me that we have something very similar here." 

Court rules California student poem not criminal 
07/22/2004 20:19 
RTR 

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A California teenager who frightened fellow high school students by showing them threatening poems he had written did not commit a crime, the California Supreme Court ruled Thursday. 

Student George T., who signed his work Julius AKA Angel, shared poems with several female students in 2001 when he was 15 years old at a San Jose school. 

"I am Dark, Destructive, & Dangerous," one of his poems read. "I slap on my face of happiness but inside I am evil!! For I can be the next kid to bring guns to kill students at school. So parents watch your children cuz I'm BACK!!" 

After a student complained, police went to the teenager's home. When they asked if there were any weapons present, they were given a handgun and a rifle. 

A juvenile court and a later appeals court found the student guilty of threatening two students, but the state Supreme Court overturned the ruling, saying the works constituted creative expression protected in the First Amendment. 

"We conclude that the ambiguous nature of the poem, along with the circumstances surrounding its dissemination, fail to establish that the poem constituted a criminal threat," the state's highest court wrote. 

In its decision the court reprinted two of the poems, complete with spelling errors, and provided an unusual literary review. 

"These lines convey the protagonist's feelings about the students around him and describe his envy over how happy and intelligent they appear to be, with opportunities he does not have," Justice Carlos Moreno wrote at one point in analyzing the lines of poetry. 

"Of course, exactly what the poem means is open to varying interpretations because a poem may mean different things to different readers. As a medium of expression, a poem is inherently ambiguous." 

The court wrote that U.S. school shootings in recent years had heightened security concerns but still backed the student's right to engage in creative expression. 

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War on Terror Criticized for Lack of Focus 
Shift From 'Generic Evil' Sought 
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 23, 2004; Page A22 

The Sept. 11 commission report offers a broad critique of a central tenet of the Bush administration's foreign policy -- that the attacks have required a "war on terrorism." The report argues that the notion of fighting an enemy called "terrorism" is too diffuse and vague to be effective. Strikingly, the report makes no reference to the invasion of Iraq as being part of the war on terrorism, a frequent assertion of President Bush and his top aides. 

"The first phase of our post-9/11 efforts rightly included military action to topple the Taliban and pursue al Qaeda. This work continues," the report said. "But long-term success demands the use of all elements of national power: diplomacy, intelligence, covert action, law enforcement, economic policy, foreign aid, public diplomacy, and homeland defense. If we favor one tool while neglecting others, we leave ourselves vulnerable and weaken our national effort." 

In addition to making anticipated findings on the 2001 plot and recommendations for homeland security, the commission offered a series of foreign policy prescriptions to correct what it suggests is an unbalanced global strategy. The effort is to shift the government away from focusing on what the report calls a "generic evil," and toward a more precise definition of the threat. 

The report argues that the nation's enemy consists of two parts: al Qaeda -- a stateless network of terrorists that is "weakened but continues to pose a grave threat" -- and a radical ideological movement in the Islamic world that "is gathering and will menace Americans and American interests long after" Osama bin Laden is gone. 

Thus, the report said, U.S. strategy must focus on dismantling al Qaeda and prevailing over the ideology that fosters Islamist terrorism. 

Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a largely secular state. The report notes that a failed Iraq in the wake of the U.S. invasion could become "breeding grounds for attacks against Americans at home." 

The report identifies six areas that it says could be bases for terrorists -- areas with rugged terrain and weak governments -- that it says should be a particular focus of U.S. policy. The report also makes specific recommendations about U.S. policy toward three key Islamic states -- Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia -- with the biggest shift in policy recommended for U.S.-Saudi relations. 

The report faulted the failure of Saudi and U.S. leaders to talk openly about the close relationship at the top levels of government, and for allowing the relationship to be defined mostly by oil. "As a result, neither the U.S. nor the Saudi people appreciated all the dimensions of the bilateral relationship," the report said. 

The report, which cited former president Bill Clinton for providing the commission with a "perceptive analysis" of the struggle faced by the kingdom's rulers, recommended that the U.S. push the often repressive society to undertake political and economic reforms, including greater tolerance and cultural respect. 

Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry has attacked Saudi Arabia on the campaign trail, and lately Bush has been more blunt about the need for the Saudis to embrace reforms. 

On Afghanistan, the report offers a mixed view of the administration's efforts there. The report notes that the administration paid "relatively little attention" to rebuilding Afghanistan at first but the policy shifted in 2003. The report urged that the United States continue to make a long-term commitment to a stable Afghanistan. 

The report sidestepped whether the invasion of Iraq affected the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan. 

The report strongly supports the Bush administration's approach toward Pakistan, including its support of President Pervez Musharraf after he broke with the Taliban government in Afghanistan following the Sept. 11 attacks. Though Musharraf grabbed power in a bloodless coup and has thwarted democracy, the report said he "represents the best hope for stability in Pakistan and Afghanistan." 

The report urged that the United States must stand for individual educational and economic opportunity and not associate as closely with repressive governments. "America's policy choices have consequences," the report said. ". . . those choices must be integrated with America's message of opportunity to the Arab and Muslim world."