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Signs Editorials
Editorial: The True Identity of Fulcanelli and The Da Vinci Code
by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
February 19, 2005
At the present time, when millions of people have read the Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown, it seems that the awareness that man's true history has been hidden is growing apace with the thirst for the truth. In my book, The Secret History of the World, I deal with many branches of the "hidden stream" of knowledge that have periodically emerged into the world during recorded history as the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Orphic Tradition, Gnosticism, Gurdjieff's Fourth Way or "Esoteric Christianity," Catharism, which went underground as the stories of the Holy Grail and Alchemy, etc, linking them to the most ancient traditions from pre-history, including Siberian Shamanism, the "Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy," as Mircea Eliade refers to the matter.
Thus, it
is only fair that I warn the reader that this series of remarks will be
comprehensible only to individuals well versed in studies of esoteric
history and comparative religions, including Gnosticism, Sufism,
the Holy Grail, Alchemy, (particularly the mysteries surrounding
Fulcanelli), and hermeticism in general. This article plunges directly
and immediately into the great mystery. Those who are immersed in Fourth
Way Work and who have actually begun to "see" will also recognize
the deeper implications of Gurdjieff's work.
For the novice,
wishing to gain a foundational understanding, to avoid the glaring misrepresentations
of such populist works as The Da Vinci Code, please refer to my
other articles: The Grail Quest,
particularly the sections that discuss Alchemy
and Saint Germain, The Fulcanelli Phenomenon,
Rennes-le-Chateau and the Accursed Treasure,
The Priory of Sion, and The
Ark of the Covenant and the Temple of Solomon. Further reading would
include Truth Or Lies, Jupiter,
Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, and the Return of the Mongols, and Commentary
on Boris Mouravieff's Gnosis.
Click Here to read the entire article with photos
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Editorial: The Grail Quest and The Destiny of Man
Series by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
The Quest for the Holy Grail has been the subject of innumerable books, essays, movies, scholarly papers, and assorted other treatments since its formal delineation in the twelfth century AD; its popularity has not diminished one bit in almost 800 years. It is an utterly fascinating subject with something for everyone! There are kings and queens; there is loyalty and betrayal; there are gallant knights coming to the rescue of damsels in distress; evil monsters; cryptic clues to an elusive mystery that can "save the world;" and a whole host of major and minor characters sure to excite the senses, delight the mind, and feed the soul!
When one seriously begins to examine all of this literature, the complicated approaches of the various works and their contradictory results, one tends to hesitate to add anything to so vast a body of erudite composition. There is almost nothing that hasn't been said or written about it from one perspective or another.
The present writer was always attracted to the stories of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. This was only natural, considering my patronymic of birth: Knight. Thus, a great many books on the subject were read and digested at a very early age. But, my general opinion of them was that they were fantasies or children's stories. There was no "real" grail; it was just a pretty tale. They were nice to read and imagine in times of idleness, but I felt that I needed to get about the REAL work of "finding God." I didn't realize that, in a very real sense this is the true nature of the Grail quest.
In any event, I concentrated many years on this "finding God" business. For me it was as essential a thing to do as it was necessary to breathe.
I started in pretty basic ways: believing nothing, testing everything; and over the years I gradually worked my way through the hard sciences to the "soft" sciences to the "para-sciences." I analyzed and categorized everything as I went and, at the "end," I thought I had pretty well run the gamut. My categories were more varied and extensive than those of many people, but they were categories nonetheless - and I was pretty satisfied with them. At the end, I had more or less reconciled myself to never really knowing God except through "mind" - in a sense that is broader than "thinking" and includes transcendant emotional states - and mind was, after all, as far as I could see, the beginning and end point of everything. Cogito ergo sum. And because I think, I feel. That was all we could know.
And that is where matters rested until the events described in Amazing Grace (available from Amazon.com). It was through the interaction with "myself in the future" that the most important clues began to manifest. I will be presenting many of these clues and the discoveries they pointed to as we go along. But just for the moment, let me highlight one of the more interesting "break-throughs."
Click here to read the Grail Series
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Editorial: A War of Nerves
by Lisa Guliani
WingTV.net
June 1, 2006
On May 31, 2006 at 4:30 pm I received an unexpected phone call from Patsy Smullin, owner of KOBI-TV Channel 5 in Medford, Oregon. If you read my latest article entitled, Jeff Rense: A Reinvention of What?, then you know that Patsy Smullin is Jeff Rense's former employer. This was our third conversation in a weeks' time, and regrettably it wasn't as cordial as our previous exchanges.
Ms. Smullin began the conversation by asking, "Have you heard from the Eugene attorney yet?" She sounded extremely nervous and agitated and her voice was shaking.
I responded with, "An attorney; for what? No, I haven't heard from anybody. What is this about?"
Smullin was having great difficulty expressing herself, and I was trying to put together the gist of what she was attempting (but unable) to say.
Smullin: You called me asking for Jeff Rense's dates of employment and I had to do a lot of work to get that information for you. I had to go into another building to get that information for you."
Me: "Yes, and I thank you. But what are you talking about now? What attorney? I don't understand what you mean."
Smullin: "You need to remove those two sentences from your article."
Me: "Which sentences?"
Smullin: "The ones about Jeff Rense being a compulsive liar, and about him not being known for his honesty. You need to remove those."
Me: "Why should I remove them? I didn't misquote you at all. I wrote down exactly what you said. I have it in my notes. You knew I was writing an article."
Smullin: (in a low voice): "That's not the way I remember it." (A pause, then excitedly) "You don't seem to understand. I'm trying to help you."
Me: "No, I don't understand, because you haven't told me what you're talking about. That's not the way you remember it? We just spoke YESTERDAY. What are you saying? Are you now suddenly denying that you made those comments? Are you calling me a liar? I wrote exactly what you told me." No response to my questions. (Another pause.)
Smullin: "I'm saying you need to be very careful. I can't say anymore."
Me: "I need to be careful? Careful of what? Are you saying somebody's going to sue me? If so; for what ... for quoting you?"
Smullin: "No, no. I really can't say anymore. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have called, I'm sorry. I can't say anymore." Click.
Well, well, well; isn't this interesting? Patsy Smullin seemed frightened - not at all the way she had sounded during our first two conversations. Previously, she'd sounded upbeat, friendly and more at ease. We'd had two very pleasant phone conversations; one on Friday, May 26, 2006 and the second on Tuesday, May 30, 2006. Ms. Smullin was indeed very helpful in providing the requested dates of employment as I'd requested. She was also quick to respond to my questions, and related recollections of Jeff Rense, her former employee.
At this point, I'd like to be very clear: Patsy Smullin knew perfectly well why I had contacted her. I fully identified myself right from the start, both with her secretary/assistant and to her personally. It is not my tendency to beat around the bush with people, so I told her that I'm an independent freelance writer and the purpose for my call was fact checking. In addition, I laid it out in no uncertain terms (within the first two minutes of our initial contact on May 26, 2006) that I was working on an article about Jeff Rense, and that this fact-checking was necessary in order to verify some information contained in online bios referencing his previous broadcast journalism career.
Let's get this straight: Nobody forced Ms. Smullin to return my phone messages, to respond to my inquiries, or to answer any single question posed to her. Nobody tricked her, lied to her, or twisted her arm to do any of the above, and no one made her call on May 30th to provide me with the dates of Jeff Rense's previous term of employment at KOBI-TV. She did these things of her own free will. To be honest, I didn't expect her to call me back at all. I suspect that others in her position simply would not.
Moreover, I quoted Smullin's responses precisely, as in verbatim-word-for-word regarding every single statement attributed to her in my article. Any and all of those comments she did make, voluntarily, and without embellishment, exaggeration or assistance from me.
Apparently, 24 hours after my article hit the Internet, "Somebody" had a real problem with the fact that I talked to Patsy Smullin. It is my distinct impression that "Somebody" wasn't expecting this particular connection to happen. Surprise, surprise, Jeff. "Somebody" was undoubtedly blindsided by this piece - and I'm telling you right now, it wasn't Patsy Smullin. My impression is that Smullin is a very nice lady, and someone is trying to intimidate her based upon this peculiar phone call I've just described "for the record".
Thus far, I have not been contacted by the aforementioned "Eugene attorney," but if this does happen, I'll certainly apprise everyone of the situation. I'm a little amused at how little time it took for "Somebody" to completely unravel and start throwing their weight around behind the scenes over this latest article I've written. I'll give you three guesses as to who is driving the intimidation machine. Nah, this one's a no-brainer. Make that one guess. Question: Is this how Jeff Rense intends to respond to my article? By putting the "thumb" on people? Fine, Jeff. If that's how you want to play, then so be it.
Just so everybody; and particularly "Somebody" knows: I stand behind every single word written in my article - completely, and 110%. Furthermore, I do not intend to remove anything, including and particularly, the two sentences in which I quoted Patsy Smullin during our conversations. The two sentences that allegedly needed removal addressed the "honesty" of Jeff Rense and were the personal opinion of someone who actually knew him, as related to me over the course of two separate phone discussions. Patsy Smullin's statements were quoted by me accurately, verbatim, and in their proper context; and it should be noted that she would be considered a very credible source of information.
Let it be known that I have never once in my life removed or retracted truthful information from any of my articles, and I am not going to be intimidated into such a cowardly act now by anybody, including a convoy of legal guns from Eugene, Oregon. I stand by EVERY SINGLE WORD in that piece. Patsy Smullin should be commended for telling the truth. Maybe the monkey should get off her back. She didn't write the article. I did.
Message to Jeff Rense: You know exactly where I am and how to contact me. So, if you've got something to say to me, then be a man and do it directly, if you have the cajones. Unlike you, I don't cower in shadows, wear wigs to disguise my identity, or put the squeeze on people - whether overtly or behind the scenes. Furthermore, it is not in my nature to shrink from cowards, hypocrites, liars, bullies, or from truth. I confront each of these squarely head-on, and will most certainly not shrink from the likes of you or any of your "legal thugs". One would hope you're adult enough to do the same.
I do not - and never will - fear the truth. Interestingly enough, it appears that you do. If you want to come after someone, well, here I am.
It's your move.
Original
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Wooly Bully
Marines to Face Charges in Iraqi's Death
By SETH HETTENA
AP
June 1, 2006
SAN DIEGO - Military prosecutors plan to file murder, kidnapping and conspiracy charges against seven Marines and a Navy corpsman in the shooting death of an Iraqi man in April, a defense lawyer said Thursday.
The eight men are being held in the brig at Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base north of San Diego, said Jeremiah Sullivan III, who represents one of the men.
The men served in Iraq with the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, and are members of the battalion's Kilo Company. The highest-ranking among them is a staff sergeant.
Sullivan said he learned from Marine Corps attorneys that the charges have been drafted and official charging documents could be given to the men as early as Friday.
Separately, another group of five Marines in Kilo Company, including a lieutenant who commanded the platoon, are under investigation for injuring a suspect in their custody, according to a defense attorney who has been contacted by the family of one of the Marines. He spoke Thursday only on condition of anonymity because he has not taken on the case.
The Iraqi man was killed west of Baghdad on April 26. His death was unrelated to the shootings of as many as two dozen civilians in the western Iraqi city of Haditha. The Pentagon is investigating troops from the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment in that case.
The Marine Corps and Pentagon spokesmen have refused to comment on any aspect of the Iraqi's death since an investigation was announced May 24.
However, a Pentagon official said Thursday that charges are expected to be brought "very soon." The official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to discuss charges before they are filed, could not confirm the specific counts.
Sullivan said the eight men are being held in solitary confinement.
"There's concern about the publicity of Haditha having a detrimental impact on the case," he said. "My concern is that the whole politics of this. There's an assumption that these guys are guilty before there's been an opportunity for a thorough, impartial investigation."
Under military law, after charges are served defendants have the right to an Article 32 hearing, the military equivalent of a civilian grand jury investigation.
An investigating officer presides over the hearing and makes a recommendation to the Marine general who directed the investigation. The general has the final say whether to order a court-martial and what charges, if any, the defendants will face.
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'Please stop the American troops killing any more people'
Reaction
Michael Howard Irbil
Friday June 2, 2006
The Guardian
Reaction
The news that US soldiers are to be investigated for the alleged killing of civilians in Haditha six months ago has done little to allay the scepticism of many ordinary Iraqis.
Thaer Juma, a lawyer and director of a non-government organisation in Baghdad, said: "These crimes are happening every day in [the western Iraqi cities of] Haditha and Ramadi, but the international community knows nothing about them because there are media blackouts on the operations, and there are no international humanitarian NGOs to record these transgressions."
Omar Saed, 55, a university lecturer in Baghdad, said: "We'd like to send a brief letter to all the world: 'Please stop the American troops killing any more people.' We need full cooperation from all to help us avoid any more incidents like what happened in Haditha and Ramadi and all the [other] Iraqi cities."
Omar al-Hadi, a businessman in Baghdad's affluent Mansour district, said: "Why are the Americans making a big deal of this now? Don't they know how many thousands of Iraqis have died at the hands of the foreign forces, the terrorists and the militias, and how nothing is ever done about it - apart from occasional expressions of regret?"
Hussein al-Jassim, a baker in the capital's Karrada district, said: "I don't care who was responsible - the Americans or the terrorists. All I know is their deaths and all the deaths are for nothing.
"Iraq was finished the minute Saddam took over, and then the minute the Americans thought they could come and save us from him."
Reports of the killings at Haditha had been circulating since March but the reaction of Iraqi politicians and the media had been relatively muted. And it was not until Tuesday that the new Iraqi prime minister chose to comment. "We emphasise that our forces, that multinational forces, will respect human rights, the rights of the Iraqi citizen," Nouri al-Maliki said in an interview with the BBC.
But Mahmood Talib, a Haditha trader who moved to Baghdad a year ago, said: "Weekly, the American troops and the terrorists surprise us by aggressive operations against our people in the Sunni triangle."
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Troops told Geneva rules don't apply to Taliban
PAUL KORING
The Globe and Mail
May 31, 2006
WASHINGTON - Canadian troops in Afghanistan have been told the Geneva Conventions and Canadian regulations regarding the rights of prisoners of war don't apply to Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters captured on the battlefield.
That decision strips detainees of key rights and protections under the rules of war, including the right to be released at the end of the conflict and not to be held criminally liable for lawful combat.
"The whole purpose of those regulations is to know if Geneva applies," said Amir Attaran, a law professor at the University of Ottawa who has been pressing the Defence Department for details of its detainee policy for months.
The 1991 Canadian regulations - developed during the Persian Gulf war - included provisions to hold tribunals to determine a detainee's status under Geneva if there is any doubt.
Captured fighters don't deserve these rights because this isn't a war between countries, says Lieutenant-General Michel Gauthier, who commands the Canadian Expeditionary Forces Command and thus oversees all Canadian Forces deployed abroad.
"They are not entitled to prisoner-of-war status but they are entitled to prisoner-of-war treatment," he said, asserting that all detainees are humanely treated.
"The regulations apply in an armed conflict between states, and what's happening in Afghanistan is not an armed conflict between states. And therefore there is no basis for making a determination of individuals being prisoners of war," he said.
Since Ottawa first sent fighting forces to Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the government has said that anyone captured by Canadian Forces is treated humanely. For years, detainees were quickly turned over to the U.S. military. But, since last December, a new agreement with Kabul means Canadian troops now turn detainees over to the Afghan military, a move some have criticized because of the Afghans' uneven record of observing human rights.
The decision to ignore the regulations without a legal test of whether detainees in Afghanistan are entitled to PoW status puts Canada "in a very odd situation. It's completely irregular," Prof. Attaran says.
He believes the government's position that Geneva doesn't apply may be correct but it needs to be tested in court.
According to Canada's Prisoner-of-War Status Determination Regulations, "the commanding officer of a unit or other element of the Canadian Forces shall ensure that each detainee is screened as soon as practicable after being taken into custody to determine whether or not the detainee is entitled to prisoner-of-war status."
Last updated before Ottawa sent a field hospital to Saudi Arabia in the middle of the Persian Gulf war, the regulations are designed to make sure Canadian soldiers understand and correctly apply the 1949 Geneva Conventions with respect to detainees.
But Canada, following the Bush administration's lead in the United States, had decreed that there are no lawful combatants among the enemy in the current conflict and no screening was required.
Gen. Gauthier concedes that the change in policy could open the door to criminal charges being laid against Taliban fighters.
If a captured enemy fighter is implicated in killing a Canadian soldier - for instance, the Taliban fighter who launched the rocket-propelled grenade that killed Captain Nichola Goddard on May 17 - Ottawa might order him charged with murder and tried.
"I would seek guidance that clearly would come from outside the Defence Department if we wished to pursue this any further from a prosecutorial basis," the general said.
The change aligns Canada's position on the criminal culpability for battlefield violence with that of the United States. Omar Khadr, the only Canadian held at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is charged with murder for allegedly throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. Special Forces soldier.
Canada has provided few details on the fate of detainees its forces have handed over to U.S. authorities since 2002; neither the number nor the names have been made public. All the government has said is that none are currently at Guantanamo Bay. But it's unknown whether they have been released, or are being held at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan or in secret prisons in Eastern Europe.
Similar secrecy cloaks what happens to detainees handed over to Afghan authorities by Canadian Forces fighting in Kandahar province. Gen. Gauthier indicated such transfers occur regularly, if not daily then several times a week. But no numbers are publicly available.
"Our default setting is transfer," he said. "We haven't held anybody for more than a few hours and we would prefer not to."
Canadian troops do screen detainees - determining on the spot whether a captive poses a threat and should be handed over to the Afghan authorities or should be freed. Gen. Gauthier said the decision to release those not considered dangerous happens routinely. Both decisions are checked up the chain of command, he said.
Prof. Attaran says the military's policy on transfers doesn't absolve Canada if detainees are then mistreated, tortured or killed.
He argues that if the government wants to be involved in this conflict, then it should take responsibility for those its soldiers detain, at least until a court or tribunal determines it can properly transfer them.
"It seems like they want to treat them as though they are radioactive," he said.
But Gen. Gauthier said there is no risk that ordinary soldiers or junior officers could face war-crimes charges, even if detainees handed over to the Afghans were tortured or killed.
"Our intention certainly isn't to leave junior folks hanging out to dry at all on this," he said. "We are on firm legal ground we have no worries about the possibility of prosecution or allegations of criminal wrongdoing for having transferred detainees."
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Bush Links Energized Enron
Robert Scheer
Truthdig.com
05.31.2006
The Bush family consistently acted to put Enron and its longtime CEO, Ken Lay, into a position to rip off investors and taxpayers. Why is the mass media ignoring that fact now that Lay has been convicted in arguably the most egregious example of white-collar fraud in U.S. history?
Until he hooked up with the Bushes, Lay was just another mid-level energy trader complaining endlessly about being hemmed in by onerous government regulations and those terrible consumer lawyers who prevent free market hustlers from doing their thing. But after he and his company became top supporters of the Bushes -- eventually giving $3 million in total to various Bush electoral campaigns and the Republican Party -- doors opened for them in a big way. In particular, once Bush the father got rid of key energy industry regulations, Lay was a made man and Enron's fortunes soared.
This program of corporate welfare led Lay to dub the first President Bush "the energy president" in a column supporting his reelection because "just six months after George Bush became president, he directed ... the development of a new energy strategy," which, in effect, compelled local utility companies to carry Enron electricity on their wires. It was, Lay crowed, "the most ambitious and sweeping energy plan ever proposed."
Another huge gift from the first Bush regime came in the form of a ruling by Wendy Gramm, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, that permitted Enron to trade in energy derivatives, making possible the company's exponential growth. Five weeks after that ruling, Gramm resigned and joined the Enron board of directors, serving on its subsequently much criticized audit committee. Six years later, Gramm's husband, U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), further enabled Enron greed by pushing through additional anti-regulation legislation.
A long list of members of George H.W. Bush's Cabinet and inner circle, including Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Commerce Secretary Robert A. Mosbacher, went to work for Enron after his 1992 defeat. An even greater number of Enron officials returned the favor by joining the George W. Bush administration in 2001 shortly before the Enron scandal exploded.
The close connections between President Bush and Lay began when they both worked on the 1992 Bush père presidential reelection campaign. In fact, a long paper trail of their friendly and collaborative correspondence has been made public through Freedom of Information Act requests. "Dear Ken, one of the sad things about old friends is that they seem to be getting older -- just like you!" wrote then-Texas Gov. Bush in April 1997. "Thank goodness you have such a young beautiful wife." In Lay's typed responses -- some are handwritten -- he sometimes crossed out Bush's formal titles to scrawl a friendly "George," emphasizing their personal history before he urged the governor to, for example, help Enron secure foreign energy contracts with regimes in Romania and Uzbekistan, or called for so-called tort reform designed to protect corporations from lawsuits.
Typical was Bush's role in Enron lobbying of Pennsylvania's governor to permit Enron to enter his state's energy market. As Lay wrote in a letter dated Oct. 7, 1997: "I very much appreciated your call to Gov. Tom Ridge a few days ago. I am certain that will have a positive impact on the way he and others in Pennsylvania view our proposal." After the Enron crash, Bush attempted to distance himself from the "Bush pioneer," who had sent more than $2 million in Enron funds George W.'s way, as well as supplying him with the Enron company jet on at least eight occasions. "I have not met with him personally," Bush said after the scandal broke.
What Bush left out was not only his hundreds of personal encounters with Lay before he assumed the presidency but, more important, Lay's key role in drafting the Bush administration's energy policy. Lay met with energy task force chairman Dick Cheney at least six times. It was Lay who submitted a key memo opposing price caps in response to the energy crisis in California that Enron had helped engineer. Lay was also instrumental in the abrupt dismissal of Curtis Hebert Jr. as Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman. The neutered FERC later conveniently refused California's loud pleas for help.
So far, California has recouped some of the billions in taxpayer and pension funds it lost, and several of Enron's top dogs are looking at hard time. Perhaps, after this November, if the opposition party can retake at least one branch of government, the connections between these corporate criminals and their buddy in the White House can be more fully investigated as well.
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Proposal to Implant Tracking Chips in Immigrants
By Bill Christensen
LiveScience.com
31 May 2006
Scott Silverman, Chairman of the Board of VeriChip Corporation, has proposed implanting the company's RFID tracking tags in immigrant and guest workers. He made the statement on national television on May 16.
Silverman was being interviewed on "Fox & Friends." Responding to the Bush administration's call to know "who is in our country and why they are here," he proposed using VeriChip RFID implants to register workers at the border, and then verify their identities in the workplace. He added, "We have talked to many people in Washington about using it...."
The VeriChip is a very small Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag about the size of a large grain of rice. It can be injected directly into the body; a special coating on the casing helps the VeriChip bond with living tissue and stay in place. A special RFID reader broadcasts a signal, and the antenna in the VeriChip draws power from the signal and sends its data. The VeriChip is a passive RFID tag; since it does not require a battery, it has a virtually unlimited life span.
RFID tags have long been used to identify animals in a variety of settings; livestock, laboratory animals and pets have been "chipped" for decades. Privacy advocates have long expressed concerns about this technology being used in human beings.
In a related story, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe allegedly remarked that microchips could be used to track seasonal workers to visiting U.S. senators Jeff Sessions (Alabama) and Arlen Specter (Pennsylvania). "President Uribe said he would consider having Colombian workers have microchips implanted in their bodies before they are permitted to enter the US for seasonal work," Specter told Congress on April 25. [...]
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World facing a wave of forced evictions: UN housing rights expert
AFP
Thu Jun 1, 2006
GENEVA - The international community must stop turning a blind eye to a wave of forced evictions of shanty-town dwellers around the world caused by prestige construction projects, a United Nations human rights monitor said.
Miloon Kothari, the UN's watchdog on housing rights, said he was deeply concerned by a rising tide of slum clearance which was worsening the situation for millions of the poorest people despite being presented as urban improvement.
"We're seeing an unprecedented wave of evictions across the world," Kothari told journalists.
"We're talking about millions," he said.
"Not because of armed conflict, not because of ethnic conflict, not because of other forms of displacement, but because of so-called development-based projects and plans."
"It's a situation that's grave enough to require global attention. Unfortunately it does not get the kind of attention that armed conflict, ethnic conflict or refugee situations get," he said.
Kothari, a Indian architect and specialist on land rights who reports to the UN's top human rights body, has repeatedly spoken out against evictions in a string of countries.
He said there is a common pattern of human rights abuse involved: residents are rarely consulted or even informed about plans, there is little or no search for alternatives to demolitions, and police and private security firms use violence and intimidation with impunity.
Kothari raised the alarm a year ago about a campaign in Zimbabwe which saw 700,000 people driven from their slums in what the government billed as a necessary urban clean-up.
Today, many of the victims are today still homeless or badly-housed, but the issue has dropped out of the spotlight, Kothari complained.
"The international community, after a flurry of activity last year, seems to have forgotten the people of Zimbabwe," he said.
"There is a silence at the highest levels of the United Nations, there is a silence from bilateral donors, there is a deafening silence from senior African leaders including Mbeki from South Africa and Obasanjo from Nigeria, and there's a shocking silence even from influential individuals like Nelson Mandela."
Kothari's recent targets have included: a highway project in the Pakistani megacity of Karachi which could eventually leave 250,000 shanty-town dwellers homeless and a ongoing urban renewal programme in Mumbai, India, that has razed the homes of an estimated 350,000 people.
They also included other programmes affecting hundreds of thousands of people in Angola, Cambodia and the Philippines.
"We're seeing the formation of apartheid cities all over the world," said Kothari, as a result of efforts to drive the poor from what has often turned into prime urban real estate, particularly in countries which are emerging from conflict.
"I think that is a very grave portent for the future because it will certainly lead to more conflict," he said.
Kothari has spotlighted the impact on rural residents of high-profile dam construction projects in China and India.
The developed world is also at fault -- and not just because of its investments or aid which can end up being used for development projects that hurt the poor -- Kothari said.
He pointed to expulsions of Roma communities in Russia, as well as the evictions from and demolition of public housing in Canada and the United States.
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Auditors fault missile defense plans
By Andrea Shalal-Esa
Reuters
Thu Jun 1, 2006
WASHINGTON - The United States has spent about $91 billion since the mid-1980s to defend against enemy ballistic missiles, but it has no clear criteria for deciding to use the system and its operational costs remain unclear, the
Government Accountability Office said on Thursday.
The missile defense system, which the Bush administration had hoped to have ready by 2004, is designed to help protect the United States against missiles that could carry nuclear, chemical or germ warheads.
The GAO, the non-partisan, investigative arm of Congress, urged the Pentagon to draw up standards that each component and the overall ballistic missile defense system must meet before they can be used, just as other major weapons programs do.
It also recommended that the Department of Defense (DOD) set up a new structure to identify all the costs of operating the missile defense system, some of which are now being funded with research money, and report them to Congress.
Underscoring the cost and significance of the program to U.S. national defense, GAO suggested that lawmakers pass legislation requiring the Pentagon to actually act on its recommendations.
GAO said that was needed because Pentagon officials agreed or partially agreed with its recommendations, but did not say if they planned to adopt the changes.
"Without the ability to identify and assess total ballistic missile defense operational costs, neither DOD nor Congress has complete information to make funding and trade-off decisions among competing priorities," the report said.
The Bush administration asked Congress for $10.4 billion in fiscal 2007 for all missile defenses, up from about $8.8 billion for the current year.
Combined spending on missile defense projects remained the costliest item in the defense budget.
Missile Defense Agency Director Lt. Gen. Henry Obering in March said U.S. efforts to develop a layered defense against enemy missiles had "turned a major corner" after two interceptor tests failed in late 2004 and early 2005.
Military commanders have not yet determined it is ready.
John Isaacs, a critic of the missile defense system, said the GAO report was the latest in a string of critical reviews by various watchdog agencies. All see "serious deficiencies" with the program, he said.
"They're spending a lot of money, but no one has an idea of what it will do and ... whether it will work," said Isaacs at the Council for a Livable World.
Even Republican Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, a key member of the House Armed Services Committee, recently said he feared the missile defense program would become a billpayer for other unfunded weapons programs, Isaacs said.
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Picture me rolling
Tanigaki: Currencies alone can't solve imbalances
Reuters
Thu Jun 1, 2006
TOKYO - Japanese Finance Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki said on Friday countries should not rely just on currencies to address global imbalances.
"To rely only on currencies is not the right path to take," Tanigaki told a news conference. "Each country should focus on structural reforms, and (the G7 countries) have agreed on that."
He also said high oil prices and their impact on the global economy are likely to be a topic for discussion at a meeting of the Group of Eight finance chiefs in St. Petersburg on June 9-10.
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Oil prices rise above $71 a barrel
AP
June 2, 2006
WASHINGTON - Oil prices jumped by more than $1 a barrel on Friday after it was reported that eight foreigners working on a drilling rig off the coast of Nigeria had been kidnapped, reigniting concerns about the stability of supplies flowing from the oil-rich African nation.
Analysts said anxiety over Iran's nuclear ambitions continued to support crude futures. U.S. data showing gasoline demand on the rise at the start of the summer driving season and a refinery snag in Texas also added strength to the rally.
Light sweet crude for July delivery on the New York Mercantile Exchange rose $1.26 to $71.60 a barrel. In London, Brent crude traded on the ICE Futures exchange gained 50 cents to $69.89 per barrel.
Nymex gasoline futures gained more than 4 cents to $2.17 a gallon.
The kidnapped workers, six British, one American and one Canadian, were aboard the drilling rig Bulford Dolphin when it was attacked during the night, Olsen Energy ASA, the rig's Norwegian owner, said in a news release.
The company said Nigerian and other authorities were working to resolve the situation, and drilling from the rig has been suspended.
Nigerian militants have blown up oil pipelines and kidnapped foreign oil workers to press their demands for local control of oil revenues by inhabitants of the oil-producing south, who feel cheated out of the wealth produced in their backyards.
The violence in Nigeria has led to the shut-in of more than 500,000 barrels per day, though new production in other areas has offset much of that loss, analysts say.
Still, the threat of output disruptions looms and it is exacerbated by the fact that the world's oil producers have less than 2 million barrels per day of spare production capacity that could be called upon in an emergency. Global consumption is expected to average roughly 85 million barrels per day in 2006.
On Wednesday, the United States said it was ready to join talks with Iran over its disputed nuclear program on the condition that Iran first suspend enrichment activities. However, Iran's foreign minister Manouchehr Muttaki on Thursday rejected any conditions for talks.
Some traders took the development as a cooling off of tensions between Washington and Tehran, but analysts said the market remained concerned about the possibility of disruptions to supply out of
OPEC's second-largest producer.
"There is no resolution over the issue and so the situation will continue to support high prices," said Victor Shum, energy analyst with Purvin & Gertz in Singapore.
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries decided, as expected, on Thursday to leave its output quotas steady at 28 million barrels a day. Most cartel members are already producing all they can to take advantage of high prices, though oil ministers said they are watching the global economy closely for any signs of weakness, hinting that a pullback in production was possible later in the year.
While global oil demand is growing more slowly than usual, it is still strong. The Energy Department reported Thursday that U.S. gasoline demand over the past four weeks was up nearly 1 percent compared with the same time last year.
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May job growth much weaker than expected
Reuters
June 2, 2006
WASHINGTON - U.S. employers added only 75,000 new workers to their payrolls last month, far fewer than expected and the weakest gain since hurricane-depressed October, but the unemployment rate slipped to a five-year low of 4.6 percent, the Labor Department said on Friday.
Outside of the drop in the unemployment rate, however, the overall tone of the jobs report, which showed employment growth slowing for the third straight month, was weaker than economists had expected.
Average hourly earnings edged up just 1 cent, or 0.1 percent, the length of the average workweek dropped back from a 3-1/2 year high struck in April, and the job growth for the prior two months was revised down by a net 37,000.
The report could sooth inflation fears on Wall Street and lead financial markets to trim bets that the U.S.
Federal Reserve will raise interest rates for the 17th consecutive time when policy-makers gather later this month.
Market economists had been expecting a gain of about 175,000 jobs, although some had trimmed their forecasts this week after other data suggested a little more softness. In addition, earnings were expected to move up a stiffer 0.3 percent.
The mild gain in average hourly earnings pulled down the 12-month rise in worker pay to 3.7 percent from 3.8 percent in April.
The drop in the unemployment rate, which slipped from April's 4.7 percent to reach its lowest point since July 2001, was unexpected.
A loss of 27,000 retail jobs and 14,000 factory jobs weighed on the overall May nonfarm payroll count. Construction payrolls edged up by a meager 1,000 workers.
The length of the workweek slipped back to 33.8 hours from 33.9 hours in April, the longest since September 2002.
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Extra $92 mln sought for Exxon Valdez spill
By Chris Baltimore
Reuters
Thu Jun 1, 2006
WASHINGTON - The U.S. government on Thursday said it will pursue $92 million in extra damage claims against Exxon Mobil Corp. for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, the worst in U.S. history.
Four U.S. agencies including the Justice Department and the state of Alaska say it will cost that much more to clean up lingering environmental damage from when the Exxon Valdez supertanker ran aground in Alaska's Prince William Sound and spilled about 11 million gallons of crude oil.
Irving, Texas-based Exxon Mobil, the world's largest publicly traded oil company, has already paid $900 million in a 1991 civil settlement.
But a "reopener" provision in the deal allowed the government to seek up to $100 million extra for unforeseen damages. Exxon reported a $36 billion profit last year.
The government sent the new cleanup plan to Exxon on Thursday. If Exxon refuses to pay, the government faces a September 1 deadline to file an official claim in court.
Exxon will study the government's request but "nothing we have seen so far ... indicates that this request for further funding from Exxon is justified," company spokesman Mark Boudreax said in a statement.
Exxon agrees that there are "small pockets" of lingering oil, but those are limited to less than two-tenths of 1 percent of the Prince William Sound shoreline, Boudreax said.
"There is no scientific evidence that this oil ... could cause damage to any population or species," he said.
Trustees overseeing Exxon's previous $900 million payment still have about $145 million on hand and that money should be used for additional cleanup, he said.
But government studies done since 2001 have found that there is still oil residue left just below the surface of Alaska's beaches from the spill.
"After extensive review it is clear that populations and habitat within the oil spill area have suffered substantial and unanticipated injuries that are attributable to the Exxon Valdez oil spill," said Alaska Attorney General David Marquez.
Marquez said he was disappointed by Exxon's initial comments. "I hope they will take a long and serious look at our proposal," he said.
Crude oil from the grounded Exxon tanker spread to 1,087 miles of coastline, including the Chugach National Forest, three national parks, four national wildlife refuges and five state parks.
Oil from the spill killed about 250,000 marine birds, 2,800 sea otters, and wreaked havoc on shellfish, mussels and killer whales, according to government estimates.
Exxon is still fighting about $5 billion in punitive damages from the spill in a civil case brought by about 32,000 fishermen, Alaska natives and property owners. That case is still pending in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
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NYSE to buy Euronext for $10 billion
By Megan Davies
Reuters
June 2, 2006
NEW YORK - NYSE Group Inc. struck a deal to buy European bourse operator Euronext for 7.78 billion euros ($9.96 billion), beating out rival bidder Deutsche Boerse AG and putting it on track to create the first transatlantic stock exchange.
Termed a merger of equals by the pair, the new company will be called NYSE Euronext and will have U.S. headquarters in New York, international headquarters in Paris and Amsterdam and its derivatives business located in London. NYSE's CEO John Thain will be chief executive of the combined group.
Pressure has been building on stock exchanges globally to combine to cut costs and increase execution speed. But despite consolidation within Europe and the United States, there has not so far been a major deal linking exchanges in both continents.
The race kicked off earlier this year when Nasdaq Stock Market Inc., the No. 2 U.S. equities exchange, bid for the London Stock Exchange, which was rebuffed. It has since built a stake of more than 25 percent in the LSE, but under U.K. takeover rules it cannot launch a takeover bid for six months.
Under the terms of Thursday's deal, Euronext shareholders will have the right to exchange each of their shares for 0.98 NYSE Euronext shares and 21.32 euros cash. Based on Thursday's close, the deal values Euronext at 7.78 billion euros.
Euronext will also pay a previously announced extraordinary distribution of 3 euros per share.
The companies said NYSE Euronext would have a market capitalization of about 15 billion euros ($20 billion), putting it ahead of futures mart Chicago Mercantile Exchange Holdings Inc., currently the U.S.'s biggest publicly-traded exchange valued at about $15 billion.
WHERE NEXT FOR DEUTSCHE BOERSE?
The NYSE unveiled its proposed offer for Euronext on May 22, but faced a competing cash-and-share proposal from Deutsche Boerse worth around 8.6 billion euros that day. Euronext executives favored the NYSE deal.
Deutsche Boerse was not immediately available for comment on Thursday about what its next move might be.
Jan Michiel Hessels, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Euronext, who will be chairman of the new company, said in a statement that Euronext's Supervisory and Management Boards had gone through an "extensive process of identifying the best consolidation opportunity for our shareholders, issuers, and users, and we strongly believe NYSE is the best partner."
Thain said in a statement: "A partnership with Euronext fulfills our shared vision of building a truly global marketplace with great breadth of product and geographic reach that will benefit all investors, issuers, and our shareholders and stakeholders."
Thain said earlier on Thursday at the NYSE's first annual shareholder meeting -- it became a public company in March -- that a definitive agreement with Euronext would not stop the Paris-based exchange from entertaining other offers.
He also said a deal with Euronext could take six months to complete amid regulatory hurdles and possible competition from other bids, but said regulators in the United States and France were supportive of a potential NYSE/Euronext tie-up.
In an e-mailed statement, SEC Chairman Christopher Cox said: "We are working with our counterparts in Paris and Amsterdam to establish a cooperative approach to the type of combination being proposed. We have every expectation that a transaction can take place that will benefit investors in all of the affected countries."
NYSE and Euronext said on Thursday they expect to generate pre-tax annual cost and revenue synergies of 295 million euros ($375 million) through the deal.
NYSE shares closed 4 percent higher at $62.45. Euronext rose 2.8 percent to 68.90 euros.
Earlier on Thursday, it emerged that the CEO of NYSE's arch-rival Nasdaq, Bob Greifeld, on Wednesday held a meeting with the chief executive of the LSE, Clara Furse, according to people close to the matter -- although they said that takeover talks were not on the agenda.
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French market heats up for solar power
AFP
June 1, 2006
PARIS - The market for solar water heaters in Europe grew by 18 percent in 2005 compared with 2004 measured by installed equipment, according to provisional figures published on Thursday by Tecsol, a French consultancy that monitors the solar energy market.
A total of 14 million square metres of solar panels for water heaters were operating in Europe at the end of last year, a rise of 18 percent or 1.9 million square metres over 2004.
Germany is by far the biggest market, accounting for 5.6 million square metres, although France saw the biggest year-on-year gain - an increase of 134 percent in 2005 over 2004.
Solar heaters are tanks, usually placed on roofs, that use
solar energy to heat pipes that contain water or a convective fluid whose heat is then transferred to water.
The heated water is used for baths, showers or swimming pools.
The surge in European sales coincided with a sharp rise last year in prices for fossil fuels, coupled to a boost in tax incentives in many countries for energy conservation.
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Oh, that's not right
Wealthy woman accused of swiping baby
AP
June 2, 2006
LOS ANGELES - Police say a wealthy woman kidnapped a 7-week-old baby after the infant's teenage mother refused a $6,000 offer for the child. Annette Pinkard, a 47-year-old real estate professional from the Dallas area, was being held in Texas along with her cousin, Sylvia Nunn, 53.
Authorities say the women saw the baby, Devon Calloway, with his 17-year-old mother at a store last month and offered to buy the child. Dominique Calloway said she refused their offer but let the women drive her home.
Two days later, the women returned, and when Calloway allowed them to hold Devon, they took the baby a drove off, authorities said.
Pinkard's attorney, Scottie Allen, disputed that account, saying Calloway agreed to let the boy go and even signed a form relinquishing her parental rights.
He said his client and Nunn, who lives in Compton, came across Devon's 2-year-old sister "unaccompanied and running around outside." They found the mother, went home with her to a fetid duplex and offered to adopt both children, he said.
Pinkard was "scared to death" when she learned about the kidnapping investigation while driving back to Texas with Devon, he said. He said she had planned to return to California to apply to a court for adoption.
Dominique Calloway denied allowing her baby to be taken.
"I didn't sign no papers. They lie," she said.
Pinkard and Nunn are charged with one count each of kidnapping and child stealing, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney's office. They were arrested May 24.
Los Angeles Police Detective Maria Rivas said other mothers, also black and poor, had come forward to say that Pinkard had previously tried to buy their babies.
Pinkard had been convicted of forgery in 2000, which her attorney acknowledged. Nunn's attorney said his client also has a criminal record but not an extremely serious one.
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Ark's Quantum Quirks
Ark
Signs of the Times
June 2, 2006
Probability 1/2
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Duck X-ray reveals 'alien head'
AP
Thu Jun 1, 2006
CORDELIA, Calif. - The International Bird Rescue Research Center in Cordelia plans to raise funds with an unusual duck X-ray. The bird came in with a broken wing, but when Marie Travers, assistant manager of the center, radiographed the duck, she was stunned to see a very clear image of what appeared to be the face, or head, of an extraterrestrial alien in the bird's stomach.
"Marie looked at it and all she could say was 'unbelievable,'" said Karen Benzel, public affairs director for the rescue center, which has been rescuing sick and injured birds for more than three decades.
Unfortunately, the duck died quickly and quietly of its injuries.
Initial reports from the center claimed the cause of the alien face was never determined, but Benzel said she was still awaiting results of a necropsy.
Either way, the center has come up with a way to turn its alien encounter into a fundraiser for the center. It will auction off the X-ray on eBay.
The one-of-a-kind image, which measures 17-by-14 inches, will be sold along with a certificate of authenticity. All proceeds will go toward funding the center's rehabilitation programs.
The auction begins Sunday.
Click here to see the X-ray
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For Younger Readers, Blogs Neck and Neck With Newspaper Web Sites
By Greg Sandoval
CNET News.com
June 1, 2006
Explosive college basketball coach Bobby Knight once summed up his views on journalists, and in doing so may have unintentionally explained why newspapers are struggling to deal with Internet bloggers.
"All of us learn to write in the second grade," Knight said while the coach at Indiana University, according to a 1983 story in the Washington Post. "Most of us go on to greater things."
With bloggers and newspaper Web sites attracting about equal numbers of readers in the 18-to-24 age bracket, newspapers have been trying to attract more readers from that demographic by adding blogs to their list of online offerings.
Blogs written by so-called citizen journalists are increasingly challenging newspapers for readers. According to a recent study by Forrester Research, blogs and newspaper Web sites now have the same audience share--about 17 percent--among Internet users between the ages of 18 and 24.
"Newspapers still have a larger overall audience," says Charlene Li, a Forrester analyst. "But blogs are catching up quickly."
Initially caught off guard by blogs, newspapers and old-guard news agencies are now racing to present their own. So far, the results have been mixed. While papers such as the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman are using blogs to give readers a news voice they never had before, other papers like the Washington Post are struggling with everything from charges of plagiarism in their blogs to being labeled with the word every editor dreads--boring.
Last week, the Associated Press, the century-old news agency, signed a cross-marketing deal with Technorati, a search-engine for blog postings. Technorati agreed to scan for blogs that include links to AP stories. The search engine will then create a Web page where it will display the blogs in addition to original AP stories.
The deal follows similar agreements between Technorati and Washington Post Co., owner of the Washington Post and Newsweek magazine.
Also in recent weeks, the Arizona Republic, Des Moines Register and San Jose Mercury News were among a group of publishers that signed up for BlogBurst, a blog syndication service. Under the terms of the agreement, newspapers can publish any of the more than 1,500 blogs featured by the service.
The Austin (Texas) American-Statesman rounds out the newspaper's travel coverage with one of BlogBurst's travel blogs. Jim Debth, who manages the Statesman's Web site, said connecting with a paper's readers now means including their voice. Besides BlogBurst, which is operated by Austin-based Pluck, The American-Statesman also offers tools on its Web site that enable readers to create their own blogs, which can then be posted on the paper's Web site.
Since starting the latter service last September, the newspaper has seen readers create 875 blogs, which are recording about 2,500 page views a day, according to Debth. He acknowledges that the blogs have yet to attract huge audiences, but the point is to offer readers a chance to connect with likeminded folks.
"The idea behind this is to create more of a community," Debth said. "You create community and you'll increase traffic and loyalty."
Ethical stumbles, journalistic detritus
Publishing content produced by nonprofessionals comes after scores of newspapers asked their own editorial staffs to write blogs. At many publications, the results were mixed. In March, the Washington Post was heavily criticized for hiring Ben Domenech, a former Bush administration aide, to write a blog for Washingtonpost.com without doing more to check his writing credentials.
Three days after hiring Domenech, the 24-year-old resigned amid charges that he plagiarized material he had written for other publications. Domenech denied that he knowingly committed plagiarism, the Post reported.
The Los Angeles Times, meanwhile, announced recently that it was discontinuing the column and Internet blog of Michael Hiltzik, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, because he posted comments on his blog and other online sites under assumed names. The newspaper said that while Hiltzik did not commit any ethical violations or print any inaccuracies, he violated the Times' policy of writing under pseudonyms.
Another hurdle for newspapers is making sure that their blogs don't bore readers, said Patrick Williams, managing editor of the Dallas Observer, a weekly publication. He says that too often newspaper blogs are filled with leftovers from stories too long to fit in the paper that day.
"They're filled with all the news not fit for print," Williams wrote. "They're a place where writers go when reporting is just too hard. Let us pray...that blogs can go back to what they should be: teenagers and college students talking about sex and music."
Despite his distaste for news blogs, Williams says he values news and he believes that news stories are what drive the need for blogs and not the other way around.
"If I were the king of journalism, I'd force newspapers to stop publishing for a month," Williams said. "Then let's see what would happen to blogs. Facts have to be the basis of opinion at some point. And if a blogger is collecting facts, then at what point does the publication cease being a blog and become an Internet news site?"
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Brigadier catches Nine off guard
The Sydney Morning Herald
May 30, 2006
An Australian military commander has tried to ensure truth does not become a casualty of conflict in East Timor, but embarrassed a TV network in the process.
Australian commander in East Timor Brigadier Michael Slater appeared this morning in a live cross from Dili to the Nine Network's Today show, with helmeted and heavily armed Australian soldiers standing behind him.
He was pressed by Today host Jessica Rowe about whether Dili really was as safe as the Australian military claimed, given the presence of armed soldiers at his shoulder.
Pausing briefly, Brig Slater replied: "Jessica I feel quite safe, yes, but not because I've got these armed soldiers behind me that were put there by your stage manager here to make it look good."
"I don't need these guys here."
"It is not safe on the streets, as it is back home in Sydney or Brisbane - no it's not, if it was we wouldn't be here. But things are getting better every day."
Rowe apologised, saying she didn't realise the guards had been placed specifically for the interview.
But Rowe ran into more trouble when she persisted with her line of questioning, and referred to footage of looting and violence.
Brig Slater told her the pictures were a "couple of days old".
TV rival the Seven Network gleefully circulated grabs of the interview this morning, enjoying an element of revenge after Nine's taunting over its exclusive interview with the Beaconsfield mine survivors.
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Saturn's Moon Did Cosmic Flop
By Robert Roy Britt
Space.com
31 May 2006
Saturn's moon Enceladus might have rolled over on its side sometime in the past, a suggestion that would account for a strange finding made by the Cassini spacecraft.
The moon has a hot spot at its south pole, an area of low density where water vapor shoots into space, Cassini discovered. Heat from within is likely created by the varying tugs of Saturn's gravity as Enceladus' distance from the giant planet changes during the course of its orbit.
But why is there a hot spot only at the south pole?
"When we saw the Cassini results, we were surprised that this hot spot was located at the pole," said Francis Nimmo of the University of California, Santa Cruz. "So we set out to explain how it could end up at the pole if it didn't start there."
Remember Weebles? They wobble but the don't fall down? A similar imbalance seems to have caused Enceladus' cosmic flop, but with a twist.
in the June 1 issue of the journal Nature, Nimmo and colleagues explain that hot material from within Enceladus welled up in one location. Hot material expands and is less dense.
Like all rotating bodies, the moon would be more stable if low-density areas were at the poles and regions of high density were at the equator. So the moon reoriented itself in that manner, the thinking goes.
There is a way to possibly confirm that the moon flipped. Its former leading hemisphere should have had more impact craters than the trailing hemisphere. If it flipped 90 degrees, the pattern of craters now present would reveal as much.
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AOL suffering e-mail glitch
By Greg Sandoval
CNET News.com
June 1, 2006
AOL e-mail users were prevented from sending or receiving most of their e-mail for at least three hours Thursday morning, the online portal said.
"An e-mail software issue started to cause delays in the sending and receiving of AOL e-mails for our members and AOL.com users, said company spokesman Nicholas Graham. "We are in the process of implementing a fix and investigating its cause."
Graham said all the e-mail will eventually be delivered once the glitch is corrected. Meanwhile, some users will receive messages intermittently. However, Graham couldn't say when the software problem might be completely fixed.
"We're working hard on it right now," he said.
E-mail has been a source of public relations setbacks for AOL over the past few months. In April, the company was accused of blocking e-mail in an attempt to thwart the circulation of a petition against the company's certified e-mail program. The company blamed the blockage of e-mail on a glitch.
Opponents of the program, which requires marketers to pay to ensure delivery of e-mail messages, argue that the payment is an "e-mail tax." AOL has said that the service helps prevent spam.
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Virus cruise passengers speak of 'holiday from hell'
The Daily Mail
2nd June 2006
More than 1,700 Britons got off a cruise ship today after "a holiday from hell" saw some passengers stuck in their cabin with a virus.
The Sea Princess, part of the Princess Cruises fleet, left Southampton for a seven-night European tour last Saturday.
A virus affected about 200 passengers and the ship was forced to cancel its planned visit to Lisbon.
The vessel docked in her home port of Southampton, Hampshire, this morning, one day ahead of schedule.
Passenger Philip Wilson, 50, said: "It was a holiday from hell. That's not even describing it. It was worse than that."
Mr Wilson, his wife Suzanne, 44, 15-year-old daughter Emily and 12-year-old son James all went down with suspected norovirus.
Mr Wilson, from Radstock, near Bath, said the ship's staff could not cope as many of the crew also fell ill.
"It was just a nightmare," he said.
"The World Health Organisation recommend 48-hour isolation but they released me after 24 hours and told me to go back into circulation.
"My wife then went down with it after 24 hours and they isolated her for 48 hours. They told me they didn't think it was serious at first to keep us isolated for 48 hours."
He added: "The ship became under-staffed. It was obvious crew members were sick. Our cabin steward was sick, the nurse admitted she was sick.
"It was quite obvious that they just couldn't cope with the situation at all and that's what forced them to make the decision to come back early."
Mr Wilson said: "They never told any passengers that they had norovirus on the previous cruise.
"The captain then told everyone. He said 'We tried to disinfect the ship in Southampton and obviously we didn't do a good enough job'. He said that over the Tannoy to all the passengers."
Mr Wilson said: "How would you feel if you had paid £2,000 for a cruise and spent seven days in a cabin with very limited food and drink? "It was like being in a prison cell, except prisoners get treated better."
He said he wanted a full refund for the cruise but Carnival has offered all passengers a refund of 30% off the cruise fare and a £150 per person voucher towards a future cruise with Princess.
A spokeswoman for parent company Carnival UK said passengers suffered from acute gastroenteritis, with the illness strongly suspected to be the highly-contagious norovirus.
They were told to stay in their cabins to avoid further spread of the illness. Eight people were still affected by the virus.
The ship will be disinfected over the next 30 hours and Sea Princess will sail as scheduled on her next cruise departing Southampton tomorrow at 5pm, Carnival said.
A Carnival spokeswoman said: "We brought the ship in 24 hours early so we could sanitise the ship and eradicate the illness to stop the spread to future passengers."
In a statement, the company added: "The number of cases increased during the early part of the cruise. However, due to our extensive disinfection efforts during the sailing, the case numbers have dramatically decreased."
Passengers were being helped with their onward travel arrangements and a customer services team was at the terminal.
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The penguins made me do it
Police: 7 killed in Indianapolis home
By CHARLES WILSON
Associated Press
June 2, 2006
INDIANAPOLIS - Seven family members, including three children, were shot to death in their home on the city's east side, and police said Friday they were seeking two suspects.
The children, ages 5, 8 and 11, were found in a bed late Thursday, while the adults were found throughout the home, police said.
Indianapolis Police Chief Michael Spears said authorities were seeking Desmond Turner, 28, of Indianapolis, for questioning. Another suspect who was not identified also was being sought.
Deputy Chief Tim Foley said Turner had a history of arrests on charges including assault with bodily fluids and had served more than a year for a gun violation.
Police identified the adult victims as Emma Valdez, 46; her husband, Alberto Covarrubias, 56; Flora Alderran, 22, Valdez' daughter; and Magno Aldarran, 29, Flora's husband.
The children were identified as Luis Aldarran, 5, Flora Alderran's son; and Alberto Covarrubias, 11, and David Covarrubias, 8 or 9.
Officers were called to the home in a residential neighborhood near the Indiana Women's Prison about 10 p.m. when someone reported shots being fired. Officers arrived to find a young woman screaming that her mother had been shot, police Sgt. Steve Staletovich said.
Dozens of police officers blocked off streets in the neighborhood Thursday and were talking to the numerous residents who were watching from nearby yards in a steady rain. A wind chime hung in one window and an iron security door stood open as officers passed in and out.
Police continued to canvass the neighborhood Friday morning.
"We haven't seen anything like this in Indianapolis in recent memory," Deputy Mayor Steve Campbell said. "The IPD folks are saying you have to go back 20, 30 years to find anything like this."
Police said they did not believe the slayings were random but would not discuss a possible motive. They said there was no history of police runs to the home apart from one to check on an alarm.
Foley said it appeared the weapon used was an assault rifle but said it was not necessarily an automatic weapon. There was no indication the slayings were gang-related, he said.
Evan Lewis, whose mother lives next door to the shooting scene, said he was visiting friends who live on the block and went outside when he heard screaming.
Neighbors said the area had declined in recent years and that drug crimes and muggings had become common.
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Four Pakistani soldiers die in suicide car-bombing
AFP
Fri June 2, 2006
MIRANSHAH, Pakistan - Four Pakistani soldiers were killed and eight wounded in a suicide car-bombing in a troubled tribal region near the Afghan border, officials said.
Two militants also died in the blast targeting two military vehicles from a convoy which had stopped to deal with mechanical problems in the tribal North Waziristan region.
"It was a suicide attack," a security official said.
The injured soldiers have been taken to a military hospital nearby, he said.
Pakistan has deployed 80,000 troops on its porous border with Afghanistan to hunt militants who sneaked into tribal regions after Afghanistan's Taliban regime was toppled by US-led forces in late 2001.
Friday's attack at Bacca Khel village was the second suicide bombing in the area within a week.
On Sunday a soldier and a policeman were killed and three paramilitary soldiers were injured when a car exploded at a checkpoint, officials said.
The lone occupant of the vehicle also died in the blast in Datta Khel, 24 kilometers (15 miles) west of Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan.
A man claiming to be a spokesman for pro-Taliban militants in the region said it was a suicide attack and threatened further violence against troops in the region.
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Man Shot During London Anti-Terror Raid
By JENNIFER QUINN
Associated Press
Jun 02, 2006
LONDON - Police shot a man during a raid in east London early Friday and later arrested him on suspicion of terrorism.
Neighbors said police quietly swooped down on a racially mixed neighborhood before dawn and surrounded the home of a man, his wife and their four teenage children. They described seeing a man wearing a bloodstained T-shirt being carried out of the house.
Metropolitan Police said the wounded man is suspected of instigating, preparing, and committing terrorist acts. Another man was arrested in the raid but police did not say on what grounds.
The terror suspect was taken to a hospital, but his injuries were not life-threatening, police said. Two other people in the house during the raid were treated at the hospital and released. It was not clear what they were treated for.
"An examination of the officers' firearms confirms that a single shot was discharged in circumstances which are currently under investigation," said Deborah Glass of the Independent Police Complaints Commission. She declined to say whether the shooting victim had been armed.
Dimple Hirani, 21, who lives nearby, said she saw "loads of police and loads of vans." The police had special uniforms, gloves and equipment, she said.
Police said raid came after consultations with biochemical experts.
Shopkeeper Salim Mala, 42, said the streets were sealed off when he arrived for work and plain-clothes police and officers wearing protective suits were combing the area.
He described the residents as a mixture of Bengalis, Pakistanis, eastern Europeans and Britons.
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Dog handler convicted of Abu Ghraib abuse
By DAVID DISHNEAU
Associated Press
Fri June 2, 2006
FORT MEADE, Md. - The abuse of Abu Ghraib prisoners undermines U.S. efforts to bring democracy to Iraq, an Army prosecutor told a military jury tasked with sentencing a dog handler for using his animal to torment a detainee.
Army Sgt. Santos A. Cardona was convicted Thursday of dereliction of duty and aggravated assault for allowing his Belgian shepherd to bark within inches of a prisoner's face. Sentencing deliberations were scheduled to resume Friday.
Cardona became the 11th soldier convicted of crimes stemming from the abuse of inmates at the prison in late 2003 and early 2004. He faces a maximum penalty of 3 1/2 years in prison, a dishonorable discharge and forfeiture of all pay and allowances.
During a two-hour sentencing hearing Thursday, prosecutor Maj. Matthew Miller recommended confinement of 12 months and a bad conduct discharge. Cardona's military lawyer, Capt. Kirsten M. Mayer, asked for no prison time and a return to duty.
Miller said abuse of prisoners hurts the war on terrorism by damaging America's image.
"You can win all kinds of battles and end up losing the whole dang war basically for boneheaded decisions and misjudgments," he told the jury.
But Mayer said Miller was exaggerating.
"What we have here is a soldier who let his dog get too close to a detainee, and the dog barked," she told the panel.
Cardona was acquitted of other serious charges he faced, including unlawfully having his dog bite a detainee, conspiring with another dog handler to frighten prisoners into soiling themselves and lying to investigators about the alleged game.
He was convicted of allowing his dog to bark within inches of the face of a kneeling detainee, Kamel Miza'l Nayil, in December 2003 at the request of another soldier who wasn't an interrogator.
Prosecutors portrayed Cardona as part of a small group of corrupt soldiers who enjoyed tormenting prisoners.
But Cardona's civilian defense lawyer, Harvey J. Volzer, said his client did what his training and senior officers demanded: protect fellow soldiers and scare inmates.
Although none of the offenses was alleged to have occurred during interrogations, Cardona's defense team focused on interrogation policies, including three memos issued in a month's time by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, then commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.
The memos authorized harsher interrogation techniques such as stress positions, sleep deprivation and dogs at Abu Ghraib - but only with written authorization.
The changing policies confounded Col. Thomas M. Pappas, an intelligence officer who assumed the prison's management in late 2003. Pappas was reprimanded last year for approving a request to use dogs in an interrogation without Sanchez' approval - something Pappas testified he believed at the time the policy allowed.
"We were all confused at one time or another," Pappas testified.
Comment: And what was Cardona's sentence? He was demoted and ordered to perform 90 days of hard labor.
Justice will not be done until the leaders in the White House and Pentagon are brought to justice for ordering the abuse.
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At least 11 killed in new Somalia fighting as elders press truce
by Ali Musa Abdi
AFP
Fri Jun 2, 2006
MOGADISHU - At least 11 people were killed and dozens wounded as fighters with a US-backed warlord alliance battled suspected Islamic gunmen outside the lawless Somali capital, witnesses said.
As elders pressed for a truce in Mogadishu, alliance members attacked a group believed to have defected to the Islamists in Balad, about 30 kilometers (19 miles) north of the city, where clashes erupted on Thursday, they said.
Residents said the fighting involved gunmen loyal to warlord Musa Sudi Yalahow, a leading member of the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT) and those of a former ally-turned-rival, Moalim Ashi.
"The alliance killed nine rival fighters belonging to Ashi and lost two," said one resident, who saw the engagement unfold but declined to give his name for security concerns.
The new fatalities brought to at least 89 the death toll from the latest round of fighting between the two sides that began last week and have seen the Islamists make steady gains in territory.
Gunmen loyal to Mogadishu's 11 Islamic courts have moved into Balad over the past several days to cut off the alliance's key supply route to the town of Jowhar, about 90 kilometers (55 miles) north of the capital.
Mogadishu proper was tense but relatively calm on Friday, although the two sides were reinforcing positions even as elders scurried to secure an elusive ceasefire.
"We are contacting both sides involved in the conflict and they say they want peace, but to the contrary, the commanders are preparing themselves for war," said mediator Ali Hassan.
"If this dangerous trend continues, Mogadishu will be very bad and the situation will get out of control," he told AFP.
Witnesses said the factions deployed hundreds of reinforcements and scores of machine gun-mounted pick-ups in volatile areas in and around northern and southern Mogadishu, where the most intense violence has been centered.
And, there were fears that Muslim calls for mass anti-alliance and anti-US demonstrations after Friday's prayers could spark fresh clashes, they said.
The new fatalities in Balad brought the death toll from three months of battles to 327 with more than 1,500 wounded, many of them civilians, and on Friday the two sides traded blame for the violence.
The ARPCT was set up in February with US support to curb the growing influence of Mogadishu's 11 Islamic courts and track down extremists and foreign fighters, including Al-Qaeda members, they are allegedly harboring.
The courts, which have declared a holy war against the alliance, deny the accusations and claim the warlords are fighting for the "enemy of Islam."
"We are loved by the community, but we are also under constant attack by uncouth elements paid by the enemy of Islam," said a senior Islamist official. But ARPCT spokesman Hussein Gutale Raghe blamed the courts for starting the fighting in a bid to impose Sharia law across the war-shattered nation.
"The Islamic court leaders who started this fighting, represent nobody in Somalia," he said. "They are funded and supported by foreign fighters. They are not spreading the message of Allah, but a message of hatred."
Somalia has been without a functioning central authority since 1991 and its largely powerless transitional government has blamed both the alliance and the United States for the fighting.
The United States denies responsibility for the clashes although it has refused to confirm or deny its support for the ARPCT.
But US officials and informed Somali sources have told AFP that Washington has given money to the ARPCT, one of several groups it is working with to curb what it says is a growing threat from radical Islamists in Somalia.
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The Clearstream net tightens around EADS informant
AFP
June 2, 2006
PARIS - Jean-Louis Gergorin, a former EADS executive and ally of the French prime minister, is under judicial investigation in the dirty tricks scandal rocking the government, sources close to the case said Friday.
A former associate of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, the 60-year-old foreign affairs expert, who resigned last month as a vice-president of the European defence company EADS, is the first to face charges in the case.
After a late-night judicial hearing, Gergorin, who had been in custody near Paris since Tuesday, was placed under investigation - one step short of indictment - for making false accusations and forgery.
He was granted 80,000-euro bail after a judge denied a prosecution request for him to be jailed.
Gergorin has admitted that in 2004 he sent a French judge a list of alleged account-holders at the Clearstream bank of Luxembourg, sparking a complex scandal which escalated into an affair of state.
He told investigators he had acted without informing Villepin - who has been accused of seeking to exploit the lists to harm his arch-rival Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.
The Clearstream letters named a string of French businessmen and politicians including Sarakozy as having received illegal commissions from a defence contract via the bank.
The letters turned out to be bogus and Sarkozy believes he was the victim of a smear campaign ahead of the 2007 presidential elections in which he is a leading candidate.
The investigation to pin down the poison-pen at the origin of the letters has led in recent months to searches at EADS and its subsidiary Airbus, as well as at the French defence ministry and the offices of the secret services.
According to his lawyer, Gergorin refused to reveal the identity of the "secret source" who provided him with the data.
His former colleage at EADS Imad Lahoud - a computer expert widely believed to be the source in question - has been summoned for questioning by the national fraud squad DNIF on Wednesday, sources close to the case said.
Gergorin - who denies having fabricated the lists - says he initially sent them to a French judge probing illegal commissions paid in the sale of French warships to Taiwan in order to ensure they would be fully investigated.
He continued to affirm through his lawyer on Friday that he believed they could be genuine and deserved a more thorough investigation.
"This is a man who remains convinced that the Clearstream affair is a real case, and that the lists correspond to a reality," said his lawyer Paul-Albert Iweins.
The centre-right government has been badly shaken by weeks of claims and counterclaims, fuelled by judicial leaks to the media, exposing a fratricidal battle between its two top figures, Villepin and Sarkozy.
Villepin had to fight off calls for his resignation after being accused of asking a spy chief - on President Jacques Chirac's orders - to secretly check whether the claims against Sarkozy were true. Both Chirac and Villepin deny the accusation.
Retired spymaster Philippe Rondot - whose leaked testimony has implicated both the president and prime minister - was escorted by police before investigating magistrates for further questioning last week but refused to answer their questions.
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Scorchio!
By 2020, kiss the snows of Kilimanjaro goodbye
By Michael Kanellos
CNET News.com
May 23, 2006
BERKELEY, Calif.--There are a lot of projections about global warming, and almost all of them are scary.
Scientists who've studied the issue now almost unanimously agree that the ocean levels will likely rise at least a half a meter by 2100, and possibly more if current temperature trends and energy use continue, according to John Harte, professor of energy and resources at the University of California, Berkeley, speaking at the U.S.-China Symposium on Climate Change taking place at the school this week.
The half-meter rise in sea levels, caused by a 3 to 5 degree increase in average global temperature, will lead to the loss of a few small island nations and severe impacts for places like Hong Kong. More intense and longer heat waves will lead to larger death counts than those seen in Europe during the summer in the past few years, Harte predicted. Polar bears will likely die off as their habitat vanishes.
"By 2020, the snows of Kilimanjaro could be no more," he added.
And that's the good news, he pointed out. A broad consensus of scientists also believe the world will experience increased intensity of hurricanes, reduced crop yields and a rash of major fires. More data is needed on these projections, however.
Under more dire projections, tropical diseases like malaria could spread to more developed parts of the globe as temperatures climb, he added. Mass extinction of species on par with what happened prehistorically could occur as animals fail to keep pace with climate change.
Solar power and biofuels could help curb greenhouse gases and temperature increases, but some change is likely unavoidable. Carbon dioxide doesn't leave the atmosphere quickly, and swapping out current industrial technology will take time, noted Inez Fung, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a lab operated by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy.
The ecological chain reaction is also difficult to reverse. The melting of glaciers means darker earth, which absorbs more sunlight, which in turn accelerates the melting of the glaciers. Similarly, warming leads to less rainfall in certain regions. This can lead to forest fires and more warming carbon dioxide.
Today, carbon dioxide exists in a concentration of about 380 parts per million in the atmosphere, Fung said. The Earth's atmosphere had a carbon dioxide level of 275 parts per million prior to the industrial revolution.
If carbon dioxide levels remained constant for the century, a near impossible best case scenario, the temperature will rise about 2 degrees Celsius, said Fung. If normal consumption trends continue and substantial changes aren't made with regard to fossil fuel use, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will rise to 580 parts per million, she said. That in turn would lead to a rise in global temperatures of about 3 to 5 degrees Celsius.
Quadrupling emissions would raise temperatures in the U.S. by 6 to 10 degrees Celsius on average and create dire problems, said Steve Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley lab.
"Six to 10 degrees is the difference between the temperature today and the temperature of the deepest ice age," Chu said.
Even though solar energy is gaining momentum, and policy leaders even in China have begun to create programs to curb pollution, fossil fuels aren't going away. Several companies have already committed to building new coal plants over the next 25 years. If technology to sequester the carbon dioxide that comes out of these plants underground isn't developed, these new plants will spew 145 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere.
That's as much as humanity put into the air through coal between 1750 and 2000, said David Hawkins of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
"We can do it if we store the carbon in geologic formations," he said. "Conventional coal plants cannot effectively capture it."
While much of the global warming debate has taken place among scientists, businesses are already looking at ways to calculate the risks of rising warming, added Gary Guzy, senior vice president at Marsh USA, which advises insurers on the future risks.
"If you are about to build a hydroelectric dam, you want to think about the long-term impact on the snow pack," Guzy said.
If the sea levels rise 6 meters, possible under some models, everything south of Ft. Meyers in Florida along with the Orlando-Daytona corridor will be underwater, Guzy added.
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Wildfire destroys 4 buildings in Arizona
AP
June 2, 2006
SEDONA, Ariz. - Firefighters battled a 1,500-acre wildfire Friday that had burned at least four buildings and forced the evacuation of about 30 homes near this scenic northern Arizona town.
Investigators said early Friday that the fire appeared to have been started by sparks from the grinder of a fencing company that was working on a fence post Thursday afternoon.
U.S. Forest Service officials said the company could be held responsible for some of the cost of fighting the blaze.
Thirty homes out of about 200 in the Pine Valley subdivision near the Village of Oak Creek were evacuated because of the fire, which quickly grew from 40 acres. Some homeowners were allowed to return midmorning Friday.
"It could have been much worse," said Sedona Fire District Chief Matt Shobert. "Once it hit the forest, it took off."
Two homes, a small shed and an outbuilding burned before the fire moved into the wilderness Thursday night, Shobert said.
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Head of France's nuclear watchdog 'lied over Chernobyl fallout'
By John Lichfield in Paris
The Independent
02 June 2006
Twenty years after the explosion at the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in the Ukraine, the legal fallout has just reached France.
Professor Pierre Pellerin, who was the head of France's nuclear safety watchdog 20 years ago, has been formally accused of deliberately concealing the seriousness of contamination of parts of the French countryside from the French people.
An investigation is continuing into the responsibilities of politicians in the alleged cover-up, including the role of Jacques Chirac, who was the prime minister. But for the time being, anti-nuclear campaigners and a group of 500 thyroid cancer sufferers are celebrating a first victory in a marathon legal campaign.
Professor Pellerin, now 82, has been placed under formal investigation for "aggravated deception", but a potentially more serious accusation of causing "involuntary bodily harm" was dropped on Wednesday.
At the time of the explosion at the Chernobyl reactor on 26 April 1986, the professor was head of the agency, attached to the Health Ministry, which reported on risks to health. As the "cloud" of contamination passed over France between 30 April and 5 May that year, Professor Pellerin issued a series of reassuring statements. He published low average findings of radiation across whole regions. Campaigners have long protested that this deliberately concealed the fact that there were pockets of contamination which suffered high rainfall as the Chernobyl cloud moved westwards.
In a four-hour interrogation by a judge on Wednesday, Professor Pellerin said that he had issued accurate and balanced information to the public. The investigation is likely to continue for several years and the case may never come to trial.
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UN says quake relief could take six months
AFP
Friday June 2, 2006
As thousands of Indonesian earthquake survivors held their first prayers since the disaster, the United Nations warned the relief effort could take up to six months.
The faithful crammed into mosques or lined up in the scorching sun for weekly prayers across the area where more than 6,200 people were killed, and many said they believed the catastrophe was a warning from God.
"We want to make peace inside by praying and being closer to God," said local merchant Iskak, 40, at a mosque in the village of Giwangan on the southern outskirts of Yogyakarta, the main city in the quake zone.
"The earthquake is because God would like to give a warning to people, that it is the fault of humankind."
In Jati-Wonokromo in hard-hit Bantul district south of the city, others prayed under makeshift canopies because their mosques had been razed in the disaster.
"I feel that my life is more valuable because my life has been given to me by God. I feel much closer to God and I can face the situation in a more peaceful way," said Sukasdi, a 51-year-old police officer.
As the call to prayer sounded across Central Java, hospitals remained overwhelmed and some survivors spent a seventh day awaiting badly needed food and medicines.
The United Nations said aid was moving more freely but that the emergency response was far from over.
"The height of the emergency phase will continue, I would expect, for another week to two weeks, and at the most be completed in a month," Charlie Higgins, the UN's area humanitarian coordinator in Java, told reporters.
The UN plan was "to continue relief in one form or another for up to six months," Higgins said.
"By the end of that six months, you could consider that we would be into the recovery process. Certainly this transition (to the recovery phase) will occur fairly quickly in this emergency."
Saturday's 6.3-magnitude quake killed at least 6,234 people, injured some 46,000 and damaged or destroyed more than 139,000 homes across large swathes of Central Java and Yogyakarta provinces.
As area hospitals spilled over with patients, Georg Petersen, the World Health Organization (WHO) country representative in Indonesia, warned that the threat of infection and disease was growing.
"The risk of infectious diseases has increased and there needs to be a surveillance system in place and a reporting system," he said.
Aid efforts were being hindered by looters, a disaster relief official said.
The official from the government's National Coordinating Board for Disaster Management said increasingly impatient Indonesians were resorting to "stupid acts" in the wake of the disaster.
"If there are trucks with only civilians guarding them, then they will stop and extort bags of rice and boxes of noodles," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
"Right now it's the people who are living near the roads who are getting all the goods. Once you go inside the villages, inside the small roads, there are places that have nothing," he said.
A semblance of normality resumed in some parts of the quake zone as shops reopened and traumatised students went back to classes.
But authorities said more than 1,200 schools had been too badly damaged to hold lessons.
"Whatever the disaster is like, education should never stop. So we're trying our best in this emergency situation to keep the schools running," said Sugito, who heads the education office for Yogyakarta province.
"The most urgent thing we have to do is deal with the trauma among teachers as well as students," he told AFP in an interview.
"We're all sad. We can't study any more," said 16-year-old Ari Katoni, one of an estimated 250,000 students without a school.
"We were supposed to have started yesterday, but it was delayed."
As nearby Mount Merapi volcano spewed lava and heat clouds for a seventh consecutive day since the quake, aid workers said authorities were ready to help villagers living on the slopes if it erupted.
"The government has most certainly not lost sight of this. It's not been forgotten at all," said the UN's Higgins.
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53 dead as early monsoon hits India
AFP
Friday June 2, 2006
The death toll from lightning strikes and powerful storms has risen to 53 as annual summer monsoon rains tore through India ahead of schedule, authorities said.
Seventeen more deaths were reported since late Thursday night in three Indian states on top of the 36 people who died earlier in the week.
Lightning killed three people while three others died overnight after gusting winds wrecked homes at Allahabad, in northern Uttar Pradesh, police spokesman Manish Awasthi told AFP in the state capital Lucknow.
Thirty-two of the deaths have been reported from Uttar Pradesh since May 18 when the monsoon hit India's Andaman archipelago and then swirled up the west coast states of Kerala, Maharashtra and Gujarat.
In Gujarat's Narmada, Dahod and Sabarkanta districts, six people were killed and four sustained burns in lightning strikes while two teenagers died in Ahmedabad as the first monsoon rains lashed the state Thursday, police said.
Gujarat alerted disaster management units to possible floods as the local meteorological department warned of heavy rains in coming days.
The Press Trust of India (PTI) reported three rain-related deaths in the southern Indian state of Kerala, where the monsoon arrived a week earlier than usual but has already left a trail of destruction.
The Kerala coastguard was searching for the second straight day Friday for two missing boats with 22 fishermen aboard, PTI said.
In Mumbai, the early monsoon caused travel chaos this week and brought back memories of last year's devastating floods that left 400 dead.
Municipal workers fanned out across the city to clear clogged drains and gutters blamed for the flooding.
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Everybody's singin "la la la lala"
Oliver Stone to make Chávez film
Reuters, Caracas
Tuesday May 23, 2006
Hugo Chávez has announced that director Oliver Stone is planning to make a film of the attempt to oust the Venezuelan president in 2002. US officials deny Mr Chávez's claim that American officials were behind the botched coup.
Oscar-winner Stone, who in 2003 directed Comandante, a documentary of his meeting with Fidel Castro, the Cuban president and Chávez ally, is teaming up with British producer John Daly, Mr Chávez said. He added that they would announce the film at the Cannes festival.
An alliance of politicians and dissident military officers took power on April 12 2002, after reports that Mr Chávez resigned when people were killed at an opposition march. He insists he never resigned, and he was put back in power on April 14.
The coup has been a theme in Mr Chávez's war of words with Washington.
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Ky. lieutenant gov. refuses to resign
By JOE BIESK
Associated Press
Thu Jun 1, 2006
Summary: Kentucky's governor, under indictment in a state hiring scandal, asked Lt. Gov. Steve Pence to resign after Pence announced he would not run for re-election with the governor next year. Pence said Thursday he had declined the request to step down.
Fletcher, Kentucky's first Republican governor since 1971, is facing misdemeanor charges alleging he broke state law by rewarding political supporters with protected state jobs after he took office in 2003. Last summer, he issued a blanket pardon for anyone in his administration who might face charges in the probe - except himself.
FRANKFORT, Ky. - Kentucky's governor, under indictment in a state hiring scandal, asked Lt. Gov. Steve Pence to resign after Pence announced he would not run for re-election with the governor next year. Pence said Thursday he had declined the request to step down.
"The lieutenant governor's office does not belong to me, nor to the governor. I temporarily occupy it," said Pence, a former U.S. attorney with a reputation as a corruption fighter. "The citizens elected me for four years to occupy that office, and my inclination is to serve my entire term."
Governor's spokesman Brett Hall said Pence had "left the door open" to run for governor after telling the governor he would not seek re-election.
"There's still honor left in this business called politics," Hall said.
Fletcher, vacationing in Florida, released a written statement Thursday, saying Pence "has his own separate agenda from this administration."
"He is entitled to that. However, any administration functions best when everyone works together," Fletcher said, insisting that he called for Pence's resignation because it is "in the best interest of Kentucky."
Pence announced Wednesday that he would leave the lieutenant governor's office after his term expires next year.
He would not say if the hiring investigation weighed in that decision, though he did say: "I believe it's held the commonwealth back more than anything on things that could have been done."
"The conversation I had with the governor is a private one and I won't get into all the details of that," Pence said. "But I did tell him that I did not have any plans at this point to run for governor or any other office. But I have to face the reality that circumstances may change."
Fletcher, Kentucky's first Republican governor since 1971, is facing misdemeanor charges alleging he broke state law by rewarding political supporters with protected state jobs after he took office in 2003. Last summer, he issued a blanket pardon for anyone in his administration who might face charges in the probe - except himself.
This is not the first time Fletcher has called for a resignation and was snubbed. Last September, Fletcher asked for the resignation of Kentucky Republican Party Chairman Darrell Brock. Brock and party leaders ignored the request.
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Educators promote weighing students
By JILL ZEMAN
Associated Press
Thu Jun 1, 2006
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - It's been two years since Arkansas schools started sending letters home to parents with their kids' report cards - letters telling them if their children were fat.
Plenty of parents weren't happy. But a lot of them did something about it.
Suddenly there were more visits to the pediatrician for talks about weight problems. Fitness class attendance is up. Diet pill use by high-schoolers is down.
And more states are following Arkansas' lead, including California, Florida and Pennsylvania, which have adopted similar programs.
Dr. Karen Young, medical director for the pediatric fitness clinic at Arkansas Children's Hospital, told of a mother upset when she got word from school that her child was overweight. The mother wanted a second opinion from Young, but in the meantime, she cut sweets from the family diet and slimmed the child down before the appointment.
"Even though she was upset with the letter and felt it was wrong, she still changed the family's lifestyle," Young said. "A lot of positive things have come out of those letters."
The letters record each child's body-mass index, the same weight-height formula used to calculate adult obesity. The first batch went out in the 2003-04 school year.
Across the state 57 percent of doctors said they had at least one parent bring in their child's letter from the school for discussion during the last school year.
Young said she's had more visits from parents seeking help for the entire family.
"I don't care what size their siblings are or their parents, everyone in the family should eat healthy and exercise," she said. "What's good for them is good for everybody."
A local TV news report on Young's clinic led Marsha Simon-Younger to enroll her 11-year-old daughter Nasirah in fitness classes. Since Nasirah joined this spring, she's felt better and is eating healthier, her mother said.
"At first, my daughter was really reluctant to go because she thought of it as a fat camp," said Simon-Younger. But once Nasirah arrived, she saw a friend from church and Girl Scouts and felt at ease.
"She has more self-esteem," and she tries different foods, the mother said. "Sometimes we might fall off the wagon, but we get right back on."
It's still a little early to see big results from the state's weigh-in program. After the first year, the percentage of overweight schoolchildren remained where it was at the start - 38 percent.
"We think probably, since there's been no change, that's probably good news," said Jim Raczynski, dean of the College of Public Health at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. "We may have stopped the increase."
And the state has found that most parents and children are comfortable with the weigh-in program - 71 percent of parents and 61 percent of adolescents, according to a survey.
"Once they realized we didn't hand (the letters) to kids to wave around the schoolyard ... a lot of the original concerns were alleviated," said Gov. Mike Huckabee, who has championed healthy diets after dropping more than 100 pounds himself. "This was not an invasive procedure where a child is asked to lift a shirt and be pinched with calipers."
Raczynski noted that only a tiny percentage of parents - 6 percent - have put their overweight children on diets that aren't medically supervised.
Schools are reacting, too. Following state Board of Education guidelines, schools in the last two years have banned using food as a reward, are offering more fruits and vegetables on lunch menus, have removed deep fryers and increased low-fat and low-sugar drinks and snacks.
Huckabee and former President
Bill Clinton - known for his Big Mac excursions while Arkansas governor - helped announce this year that soft drink manufacturers had voluntarily agreed to remove sugary sodas from school vending machines.
Childhood obesity, Huckabee said, is "a real serious health and economic issue."
Arkansas' effort provides a scientific baseline to look for progress. Over time, "we'll honestly be able to know if this is something that has lasting value."
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Russia's Putin removes chief prosecutor
By Christian Lowe
Reuters
Fri Jun 2, 2006
MOSCOW - Russian President Vladimir Putin removed his hawkish chief prosecutor on Friday in what analysts said was a tactical victory for moderates over hardliners in a Kremlin power struggle.
Prosecutor-General Vladimir Ustinov, who played a key role in prosecuting Mikhail Khodorkovsky, billionaire founder of the YUKOS oil firm, was removed from his post by the upper house of parliament acting on a request from Putin.
Officials said Ustinov -- linked to the so-called "siloviki" hardliners -- had himself asked to be relieved of his duties but no detailed explanation was offered.
"This decision (to remove Ustinov) is technical in nature, there is no politics involved here," said Sergei Mironov, the speaker of the upper house.
But analysts linked the move to a turf war between the "siloviki" -- a group of officials with security or military backgrounds who favor tough central rule -- and a more liberal faction led by First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.
"(Ustinov's removal) is the latest skirmish in the battle inside Putin's entourage," said analyst Stanislav Belkovsky. "In this case Medvedev has delivered a serious blow (to the rival faction)."
The rivalry between the factions has intensified because Putin, limited by law to two terms, has to step down in 2008. The factions are competing to have their candidate anointed as Putin's heir apparent, say the analysts.
Ustinov, a 53-year-old who squeezes his burly frame into a bright blue prosecutor's uniform, became a household name in Russia when his office oversaw Khodorkovsky's prosecution on fraud and tax evasion charges.
Once Russia's richest man, the tycoon is serving eight years in a Siberian prison.
The campaign against Khordokovsky and his company alarmed markets and prompted concerns that the Kremlin was using the judicial system to bring down its opponents.
POSSIBLE REPLACEMENTS
Russian news agencies floated two names as possible successors to Ustinov -- Dmitry Kozak and Alexander Konovalov.
A tough-talking former Kremlin chief of staff close to Putin, Kozak is in charge of bringing order to the violent North Caucasus region. Konovalov, a former prosecutor, is Putin's envoy to the Volga region.
Other analysts linked Ustinov's departure to a drive by Putin to clamp down on corruption.
Putin told his subordinates in a speech last month they had to redouble their efforts to stamp out graft. The prosecutor's office, which initiates prosecutions, is likely to play a central role in any anti-corruption campaign.
Several senior officials in Ustinov's office were sacked in a purge of law enforcement agencies two days after Putin's speech.
Ustinov's son is married to the daughter of Igor Sechin, Putin's deputy chief of staff who is seen by many observers as the leader of the "siloviki" faction.
Ustinov served as chief prosecutor for over six years -- as long as Putin has been in power. Last year the upper house voted him another five years in office on Putin's recommendation.
Ustinov's tough rhetoric on crime and corruption has drawn protests from human rights groups.
After the September 2004 Beslan hostage siege in which 330 people died -- half of them children -- he said that in future Russian forces could put pressure on hostage-takers by seizing their relatives.
Russian financial markets were unchanged on the news of Ustinov's departure.
The move does not mean a change in policy or a softening of the Kremlin's tough line on law and order, Russian news agencies quoted Kremlin officials as saying.
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Peru set for polls that could