Earths.net

http://ens-news.com/ens/aug2002/2002-08-02-02.html

"We Cover the Earth For You"

WEST NILE VIRUS CLAIMS FOUR LIVES IN LOUISIANA

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana, August 2, 2002 (ENS) - Four Louisiana citizens are dead and 54 others are sick with the mosquito borne West Nile virus which now has spread to every part of the watery state, health officials said today. The deaths were caused by encephalitis, an infection of the brain caused by West Nile virus.

SIX YOUNG LEADERS WALK IN BROWER'S FOOTSTEPS

SAN FRANCISCO, California, August 2, 2002 - Six young environmental and community leaders from across the United States have been chosen by Earth Island Institute to receive the 2002 Brower Youth Awards. Awardees were chosen from applicants whose work embodies the principles of conservation, preservation and restoration, what Earth Island Institute founder the late David Brower called "CPR for the Earth."

http://ens-news.com/ens/aug2002/2002-08-02-01.html

EPA REFUSES TO DELAY DIESEL RULE

By Cat Lazaroff

WASHINGTON, DC, August 2, 2002 (ENS) - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has denied requests by manufacturers to delay strict new standards for emissions from diesel engines. On Thursday, the agency finalized a rule establishing monetary penalties for any manufacturers unable to meet the new standards in model year 2004 and beyond.

http://ens-news.com/ens/aug2002/2002-08-02-06.asp

ENVIRONMENT NEWS SERVICE AMERISCAN: AUGUST 2, 2002

SENATE CONFIRMS EPA ENFORCEMENT LEADER

FAST TRACK BILL HEADED FOR BUSH'S SIGNATURE

SENATORS SLAM BUSH'S CLEAR SKIES PLAN

SEWAGE SLUDGE LINKED TO ILLNESSES

STUDY FINDS ETHANOL PRODUCTION ENERGY EFFICIENT

HYBRID BUSES CALLED CLEANER, MORE EFFICIENT

ENDANGERED RABBITS RELEASED INTO THE WILD

METRO RIDERS LEARN ABOUT PESTICIDES, CLEAN AIR

http://ens-news.com/ens/aug2002/2002-08-02-09.asp

8/3/02
2:25:58 PM

Starved For Food, Zimbabwe Rejects U.S. Biotech Corn

by Rick Weiss, The Washington Post, July 31, 2002; Page A12

Thousands of tons of U.S. emergency food aid destined for crisis-stricken Zimbabwe has been diverted to other countries, and a new shipload may be diverted within days, because the donations include genetically modified corn that the Zimbabwean government does not want to accept.

The image of a nation on the brink of starvation turning down food because it has been genetically engineered has reignited a long-smoldering scientific and political controversy over the risks and benefits of gene-altered food.

Some biotech advocates are criticizing the Zimbabwean government for balking at the humanitarian assistance, saying President Robert Mugabe seems to care more about his political independence than his citizens' lives. About half of Zimbabwe's 12 million residents are on the verge of famine because of drought and political mismanagement, according to the United Nations.

But other scientists and economists say the troubled African nation has good reason to reject the engineered kernels. If some of the corn seeds are sown instead of eaten, the resulting plants will produce gene-altered pollen that will blow about and contaminate surrounding fields.

That could render much of the corn grown in Zimbabwe -- a nation that in most years is a major exporter -- unshippable to nations in Europe and elsewhere that restrict imports of bioengineered food, because of environmental and health concerns.

The United States could save lives and avert a potential ecological crisis by paying to have the corn kernels milled before they enter Zimbabwe, several experts said this week. But relief officials said U.S. food agencies typically don't cover milling expenses, which are estimated at $25 per metric ton -- a significant expense for a nation so poor.

That response has fueled suspicion among some observers in the United States and Africa that Washington is using the food crisis to get U.S. gene-altered products established in a corner of the world that has largely resisted them.

"The U.S. is using its power to impose its view that modified maize is not a danger," said Carol Thompson, a political economist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, who has spent much of the past 10 years in Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe and five other southern African nations -- Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland and Zambia -- face widespread food shortages after two years of drought and floods. The U.N. World Food Program has said the region will need 1 million metric tons of food aid in the next few months. Only a fraction of that amount has been promised by donors so far.

The first shipload of U.S. food aid for Zimbabwe -- a landlocked nation that is the hardest hit of the affected countries --arrived at a Tanzanian port in June. It was carrying about 10,000 metric tons of corn from the U.S. Agency for Interna-tional Development (USAID).

But the corn, which in Africa is known as maize and is valued by agencies at about $95 a metric ton, was not welcome. Like most corn stores in the United States, the shipment was a mix of conventional varieties and high-tech kernels bearing bacterial genes to protect against insect pests.

The Zimbabwean government, which for decades has supported the development of corn varieties suited to local ecosystems, is concerned not only about genetic contamination, but also about intellectual property issues. Pending changes in international trade rules, backed by the United States, could preclude farmers from saving the patented seeds from biotech harvests for replanting in following years, a practice vital to many subsistence farmers who cannot afford to buy new seed every year.

"If these crops get in, then farmers basically lose their rights to their own agricultural resources," said Carole Collins, senior policy analyst for the Washington-based Africa Faith and Justice Network.

Moreover, some European countries want to ban imports of cattle that have been fed engineered corn, posing another potential trade problem for Zimbabwe if engineered kernels were to swamp the country.

When notified of the June shipment, officials told the United Nations that, although the country was not absolutely rejecting the aid, it preferred that the corn be milled first so no seeds could be planted.

That response got to the U.N. two days after World Food Program officials decided to unload the kernels and ship them to Malawi, said Judith Lewis, the program's regional director for southern and eastern Africa. Malawi is among the poorest of southern African nations and does not have a firm policy on gene-altered food.

Now a second ship of Zimbabwe-bound U.S. corn has arrived, this time in the South African port of Durban. It includes 17,500 metric tons of corn kernels, and USAID wants a decision from Zimbabwe by tomorrow, Lewis said. Zimbabwean officials discussed their options yesterday without reaching a decision, and were scheduled to have further meetings today.

USAID representatives have expressed frustration with this and previous situations like it. When India balked over a humanitarian shipment of gene-altered food, one U.S. official was quoted as saying, "Beggars can't be choosers."

At a news conference in Johannesburg on Friday, Roger Winter, USAID's assistant administrator for humanitarian assistance, suggested that Zimbabwe had little choice if it wanted to feed its people. "We have no substitute for that maize. That maize is what's available," he said.

Indeed, very little nonengineered corn is segregated from high-tech varieties during the U.S. harvest, and that portion sells at a premium to organic food processors and others.

Per Pinstrup-Andersen, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute, a Washington-based non-governmental organization, said Zimbabwe was using the food to play politics.

"I think the Zimbabwe government is using this to show its muscle against the United States and other Western countries because of the criticism the president has been receiving from outside," Pinstrup-Andersen said, referring to widespread criticism of Mugabe's recent land-reform policies and accusations of government cronyism. "I think it is irresponsible. . . unless they know they can get enough food from elsewhere that is not genetically modified."

Mugabe has said he is being prudent. "We fight the present drought with our eyes clearly set on the future of the agricultural sector, which is the mainstay of our economy," he told Zimbabwe's parliament on July 23. "We dare not endanger its future through misplaced decisions based on acts of either desperation or expediency."

Neil E. Harl, a professor of economics at Iowa State University, agreed that much was at stake. "Pollen drift is a real problem, especially with maize," Harl said. "It places these countries in an extremely difficult position."

He and several other experts recommended that the United States pay for milling costs. "It is highly unethical not to just cover the costs for milling," said Thompson, the Arizona professor. "Tell me how much it costs to drop one bomb on Afghanistan. Who is starving whom here?"

Asked if people were going "too far" by saying that gene-altered humanitarian exports were part of a strategy to spread the crops around the world, Harl said: "I'm not sure that is going too far." U.S. government and biotech representatives vehemently denied any such collusion. "I don't think there is any justification to make claims like that," said Rob Horsch, director of global technology transfer for Monsanto, the St. Louis biotech giant that owns the rights to many biotech crop varieties. Although the company has used private detectives to identify and prosecute U.S. and Canadian farmers it suspects of saving patented seeds, that policy would be adapted to accommodate local traditions in other countries, Horsch said.

USAID officials also rejected the notion that they were strong-arming Zimbabwe or had any agenda other than feeding the needy.

With food shortages increasing every day, some U.S. officials said late yesterday that they believed Zimbabwe was on the verge of accepting the corn.

8/2/02
11:02:46 PM

Guardian Unlimited Observer

by Ed Vulliamy in New York for The Observer, July 28, 2002

Open warfare has broken out between the White House and Capitol Hill over President George Bush's most controversial nomination to date to the bench of American high courts.

The nomination of a politically loyal judiciary is the singular way in which US Presidents outlive their terms, leaving an imprint on the nation in the form of judges who can sit on the bench making law for life -- and the Bush White House intends Judge Priscilla Owen from Texas to be one such judge.

Bush has intervened to back Owen, and her campaign is being managed - as they all have since her Texas days - by Karl Rove, long-time political organiser for the Bush family and now White House chief adviser.

The Democrat-controlled Senate, however, is fighting her nomination to the powerful fifth circuit Appeals Court, the tier beneath the US Supreme Court.

Senators and a host of organisations petitioning their judiciary committee say Owen has used the bench to advance a a zealous right-wing ideology, contesting the right to abortion and favouring big oil and energy companies, including the disgraced Enron, which has been one of her -- and the President's -- biggest financial backers.

They are in turn accused by the White House of detonating a 'judicial crisis'.

The committee's chairman, Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, particularly demanded that the White House 'look into' Owen's Enron connection, after being passed a report by a research group, Texans for Public Justice, detailing the firm's contributions, after which she ruled in their and other donors' interests many times.

In one instance she wrote an opinion overturning another court, exempting Enron from paying school taxes. The director of another group, Nan Aron of the Alliance for Justice, said: 'Mention her name and people say "Oh, Judge Enron".'

'I would just say,' said Texans for Public Justice's Craig McDonald, 'that as far as those of us who have watched Priscilla Owen, Karl Rove and George W. Bush for a lot of years are concerned, this is the one that deserves to be controversial. This is not a Texas fight or a fifth circuit fight; this is a struggle to determine whether a political operative, Karl Rove, and his crew are going to determine the make-up of the federal courts'.

So far as some senators are concerned, the most controversial rulings Owen made in Texas were in about a dozen cases concerning abortion, and a legal obligation that minors receive parental consent before terminating a pregnancy.

Those rulings have made abortion an issue for the first time in the selection of a high court judge. Although the right to abortion is enshrined in US law, its eventual abolition is one of Rove's dearest causes. He recently addressed the Christian Conservative Family Research Council, saying: 'We need to find ways to win this war.'

In the Texas courts, a girl can appeal against the obligation if she can show that telling her parents might harm her, as happened in most Texas cases. But Owen, dissenting, ruled throughout that the question was not whether telling parents would harm the child, but having the abortion at all.

Minors, she said, should have to demonstrate to the court 'that philosophic, social, moral and religious arguments can be brought to bear' on abortions, in addition to those enshrined into law, which concern mainly health risks.

'It was nothing to do with telling parents,' said McDonald, 'she was trying to stop these minors from having an abortion, which is something very different.'

Herein lies a twist to Owen's nomination. One of her cheerleaders on Capitol Hill last week was White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. He joined the Texas Supreme Court when Bush was state Governor, then was elevated to Washington and tipped to be the next judge to take a seat on the bench of the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court.

And yet, when Owen was overruled in trying to stop an abortion in 2000, even her colleague on the bench, Gonzales, protested that to follow her lead 'would be an unconscionable act of judicial activism'.

A legal watchdog, People for the American Way, argues that Owen indulges in 'activist' lawmaking which establishes law rather than interpret it. 'President Bush has said he wants judges who will interpret the law, not make it,' said the group's director, Ralph Neas. 'In Priscilla Owen, he has found the exact opposite.'

8/2/02
10:57:17 PM

The Nation

The American Constitution at the very beginning of the Republic sought above all to guard the country against reckless, ill-considered recourse to war. It required a declaration by the legislative branch, and gave Congress the power over appropriations even during wartime.

And yet, here we are, poised on the slippery precipice of a pre-emptive war with Iraq, without even the benefit of meaningful public debate.

Read Richard Falk's powerful editorial for more:

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020819&s=falk

Falk's piece, published in the just-released August 19/26 issue of The Nation, rightly insists that a real public debate is needed not only to revitalize representative democracy but to head off an unnecessary war likely to bring widespread death and destruction.

In the latest installment of his Nation Online feature, John Nichols examines the only forum where the issue of Iraq has been meaningfully examined by our government -- this past week's Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on whether the US could, should or would want to launch a military attack on Iraq with the purpose of deposing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Nichols shows that the hearings, despite being far less revealing or comprehensive than the moment demands, nonetheless showed that there is little consensus, even among the US policy-making establishment, on how large a threat Saddam Hussein poses to the US, and how to best counter that threat.

For the full report, check out:

http://www.thenation.com/thebeat/index.mhtml?bid=1&pid=89

Also, read Dilip Hiro's look at how and why Iraq is successfully wooing its regional neighbors, available now at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020819&s=hiro

And, don't miss the lead editorial from the July 8, 2002 issue of The Nation, which made the case against war with Iraq, currently available at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020708&s=editors

8/2/02
7:47:36 PM

DAILY GRIST

http://www.greenpeaceusa.org/features/wssd.htm

BELUGA WAILS

Bad news for wealthy gourmets: By the end of this year, beluga caviar, the king of pricey delicacies, could be illegal fare in the United States. Earlier this week, the government proposed protecting the beluga sturgeon under the Endangered Species Act, following legal action against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services by the Natural Resources Defense Council. The sturgeon, which is found in the Caspian and Black Seas, is in danger of extinction from overfishing, illegal harvesting, and loss of natural habitat. The U.S. consumes the vast majority (80 percent) of beluga caviar, which can sell for a whopping $500 per pound. Ellen Pikitch, director of marine programs for the World Conservation Society, praised the proposal to protect the beluga sturgeon, adding, "There are no quick fixes that could remedy this dire situation."

straight to the source: MSNBC.com, 01 Aug 2002 <http://www.gristmagazine.com/forward.pl?forward_id=322>

do good: Take action to boost dwindling fish stocks <http://www.gristmagazine.com/dogood/oceans.asp?source=daily#fisheries>

CUT THE CROP

Concerned that experimental genetically modified (GM) crops could contaminate their unaltered counterparts and creep into the nation's food supply, the White House has drafted new rules to protect consumers and avoid costly and disruptive food recalls. The rules, which were written by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, propose preliminary crop-safety assessments before beginning large field trials of GM crops. The assessments, which would not be mandatory, would determine whether the crop was toxic or capable of causing allergic reactions. If the crop appeared safe, then low levels of GM contamination in the food supply would not be a basis for recalls -- or, the government hopes, for the rejection of U.S. food exports by other countries. The biotech industry welcomed the proposals, but the Center for Food Safety, a Washington, D.C., organization that opposes GM foods, expressed concern that the rules were just designed to bail out companies should contamination occur.

straight to the source: New York Times, Andrew Pollack, 02 Aug 2002 <http://www.gristmagazine.com/forward.pl?forward_id=323>

do good: Take action to fight Frankenfoods <http://www.gristmagazine.com/dogood/food.asp?source=daily#frankenfood>

SIGNING OF THE TIMES

In a sign of the increasing political importance of environmental issues, close to half of the U.S. Senate called on the Bush administration yesterday to postpone implementing proposed changes to the New Source Review rules under the Clean Air Act, pending a complete analysis of the potential impact on air quality and public health. A letter signed by 44 senators and directed to U.S. EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman noted "serious concerns that the changes could allow more air pollution -- causing more asthma, more heart and lung problems, and more premature deaths." The list of senators included three moderate Republicans and at least six Democrats involved in tight reelection campaigns. The New Source Review rules currently require utility owners to install state-of-the-art pollution-control equipment when upgrading power plants and refineries.

straight to the source: Eric Pianin, Washington Post, 02 Aug 2002 <http://www.gristmagazine.com/forward.pl?forward_id=324>

only in Grist: Dear Christie ... 10 Reasons to stay the course -- in a confidential memo, President Bush tells EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman what's on his mind -- satire in our opinions section <http://www.gristmagazine.com/imho/imho040901.stm?source=daily>

do good: Take action to preserve the Clean Air Act <http://www.gristmagazine.com/dogood/air.asp?source=daily#grandfather>

TWO GREEN PEAS IN A POD

It's a rare day when Greenpeace and the Bush administration see eye to eye, but the environmental organization is siding with the White House in a fight against mahogany importers. Seven such importers have sued the administration for holding up 12 shipments of Brazilian mahogany, which have been stranded on U.S. docks since last winter due to concerns that they may violate Brazilian tax law or a 1975 international treaty on trade in wild animals and plants. The White House says holding up the shipment is a sign of its commitment to ending illegal logging around the globe. Reacting to the general surprise at the unusual alliance, Greenpeace forests campaigner Scott Paul said, "Despite popular opinion, we are nonpartisan and we do call them as we see them."

straight to the source: San Francisco Chronicle, Associated Press, John Heilprin, 01 Aug 2002 <http://www.gristmagazine.com/forward.pl?forward_id=325>

only Grist: Take the mahogany and run -- a cartoon by Suzy Becker <http://www.gristmagazine.com/ha/ha052802.asp?source=daily>

do good: Take action to ask for that new couch in "sustainable" <http://www.gristmagazine.com/dogood/consumption.asp?source=daily#ethanallen>

TIPPING THE SCALES

A government-commissioned study has concluded that escapes from fish farms in Scotland pose a "major threat" to the nation's wild fish population. According to Friends of the Earth, about 1 million salmon have escaped from Scottish fish farms in the last five years. If just 1 percent of the farmed population escapes each year, the government report says, wild stocks will suffer severe losses in genetic variability and be overwhelmed. The study also looked at other environmental effects of fish farms, such as the impact on the ocean and marine life of nutrients and chemicals used on the farms. But industry defenders called the findings "inconclusive" and said the risks associated with salmon farming are insignificant compared to the employment gains, export increases, and dietary improvements that it provides. The report comes two weeks after an international aquaculture conference held in Edinburgh sounded similar warnings about fish farms.

straight to the source: BBC News, 02 Aug 2002 <http://www.gristmagazine.com/forward.pl?forward_id=326>

8/2/02
7:44:48 PM

Greenpeace's Positive Energy

July 29 - August 5, 2002

Time for Greenpeace's CLEAN ENERGY NOW! campaign's weekly good news update!

Inside this edition:

- SustainUS Wins a Bet with President Bush

- Greenpeace Activist Tells All

- The Kill Zone

SustainUS Wins a Bet with President Bush

Remember the bet that youth across the nation were waging with President Bush? SustainUS, a network of students and youth groups dedicated to sustainable development, waged a bet with President Bush that the nation's young people could collectively conserve 20,000 tons of carbon dioxide by July 31st. They won the bet by 1800 tons!

Now that the bet is won, President Bush should go to Jo'burg and attend the World Summit on Sustainable Development this August in South Africa, accompanied by U.S. youth delegates who will sharing their visions of a sustainable future.

To read more about the winners,

go to: http://www.sustainus.org

To learn about Greenpeace's Youth Delegation to the WSSD, go to:

Greenpeace Activist Tells All

The day in the life of Greenpeace Clean Energy Now! Campaigner Kristin Casper is featured in this week's Grist Magazine. Her daily entries tell the story of her life living and working for a clean energy future. Her grassroots work extends from local issues in California, to working with a national youth delegation that will be sending a strong message to the White House - "Bush: Don't Burn Our Planet."

To here what Kristin has to say, go to:

http://www.gristmagazine.com

The Kill Zone

Are you living in the shadow of a nuclear reactor zone? This week, Greenpeace unveiled its zip code nuclear indicator zone, where you type in your zip code and find out how close you are to high-risk areas. Don't you wish this indicator were for clean energy zones instead? Type in your zip code and take action in your nuclear reactor kill zone to demand clean energy!

To find out how close you are to a nuclear reactor, go to: http://www.greenpeaceusa.org/nuclear/locator.htm

The "Positive Energy" newsletter and our web site, http://www.cleanenergynow.org, will give you good news about ways to achieve clean air, climate justice, and renewable energy solutions to our ongoing energy crisis.

Want to do more? Become a Greenpeace member today! To give online, go to:

https://www.greenpeaceusa.org/join2/cen.htm

8/2/02
7:38:33 PM

George W. Bush Channels George Orwell

by Daniel Kurtzman, July 28, 2002

Here's a question for constitutional scholars: Can a sitting president be charged with plagiarism?

As President Bush wages his war against terrorism and moves to create a huge homeland security apparatus, he appears to be borrowing heavily, if not ripping off ideas outright, from George Orwell. The work in question is "1984, " the prophetic novel about a government that controls the masses by spreading propaganda, cracking down on subversive thought and altering history to suit its needs. It was intended to be read as a warning about the evils of totalitarianism -- not a how-to manual.

Granted, we're a long way from resembling the kind of authoritarian state Orwell depicted, but some of the similarities are starting to get a bit eerie.

PERMANENT WAR

In "1984," the state remained perpetually at war against a vague and ever- changing enemy. The war took place largely in the abstract, but it served as a convenient vehicle to fuel hatred, nurture fear and justify the regime's autocratic practices.

Bush's war against terrorism has become almost as amorphous. Although we are told the president's resolve is steady and the mission clear, we seem to know less and less about the enemy we are fighting. What began as a war against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda quickly morphed into a war against Afghanistan, followed by dire warnings about an "Axis of Evil," the targeting of terrorists in some 50 to 60 countries, and now the beginnings of a major campaign against Iraq. Exactly what will constitute success in this war remains unclear, but the one thing the Bush administration has made certain is that the war will continue "indefinitely."

MINISTRY OF TRUTH

Serving as the propaganda arm of the ruling party in "1984," the Ministry of Truth not only spread lies to suit its strategic goals, but constantly rewrote and falsified history. It is a practice that has become increasingly commonplace in the Bush White House, where presidential transcripts are routinely sanitized to remove the president's gaffes, accounts of intelligence warnings prior to Sept. 11 get spottier with each retelling, and the facts surrounding Bush's past financial dealings are subject to continual revision.

The Bush administration has been surprisingly up front about its intentions of propagating falsehoods. In February, for example, the Pentagon announced a plan to create an Office of Strategic Influence to provide false news and information abroad to help manipulate public opinion and further its military objectives. Following a public outcry, the Pentagon said it would close the office -- news that would have sounded more convincing had it not come from a place that just announced it was planning to spread misinformation.

INFALLIBLE LEADER

An omnipresent and all-powerful leader, Big Brother commanded the total, unquestioning support of the people. He was both adored and feared, and no one dared speak out against him, lest they be met by the wrath of the state.

President Bush may not be as menacing a figure, but he has hardly concealed his desire for greater powers. Never mind that he has mentioned -- on no fewer than three occasions -- how much easier things would be if he were dictator. By abandoning many of the checks and balances established in the Constitution to keep any one branch of government from becoming too powerful, Bush has already achieved the greatest expansion of executive powers since Nixon. His approval ratings remain remarkably high, and his minions have worked hard to cultivate an image of infallibility. Nowhere was that more apparent than during a recent commencement address Bush gave at Ohio State, where students were threatened with arrest and expulsion if they protested the speech. They were ordered to give him a "thunderous ovation," and they did.

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING

The ever-watchful eye of Big Brother kept constant tabs on the citizens of Orwell's totalitarian state, using two-way telescreens to monitor people's every move while simultaneously broadcasting party propaganda.

While that technology may not have arrived yet, public video surveillance has become all the rage in law enforcement, with cameras being deployed everywhere from sporting events to public beaches. The Bush administration has also announced plans to recruit millions of Americans to form a corps of citizen spies who will serve as "extra eyes and ears for law enforcement," reporting any suspicious activity as part of a program dubbed Operation TIPS --

Terrorism Information and Prevention System.

And thanks to the hastily passed USA Patriot Act, the Justice Department has sweeping new powers to monitor phone conversations, Internet usage, business transactions and library reading records. Best of all, law enforcement need not be burdened any longer with such inconveniences as probable cause.

THOUGHT POLICE

Charged with eradicating dissent and ferreting out resistance, the ever- present Thought Police described in "1984" carefully monitored all unorthodox or potentially subversive thoughts. The Bush administration is not prosecuting thought crime yet, but members have been quick to question the patriotism of anyone who dares criticize their handling of the war on terrorism or homeland defense. Take, for example, the way Attorney General John Ashcroft answered critics of his anti-terrorism measures, saying that opponents of the administration "only aid terrorists" and "give ammunition to America's enemies. "

Even more ominous was the stern warning White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer sent to Americans after Bill Maher, host of the now defunct "Politically Incorrect," called past U.S. military actions "cowardly." Said Fleischer, "There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that; there never is."

What would it take to turn America into the kind of society that Orwell warned about, a society that envisions war as peace, freedom as slavery and ignorance as strength? Would it happen overnight, or would it involve a gradual erosion of freedoms with the people's consent?

Because we are a nation at war -- as we are constantly reminded -- most Americans say they are willing to sacrifice many of our freedoms in return for the promise of greater security. We have been asked to put our blind faith in government and most of us have done so with patriotic fervor. But when the government abuses that trust and begins to stamp out the freedom of dissent that is the hallmark of a democratic society, can there be any turning back?

So powerful was the state's control over people's minds in "1984" that, eventually, everyone came to love Big Brother. Perhaps in time we all will, too.

Daniel Kurtzman is a San Francisco writer and former Washington political correspondent.

Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2002/07/28/IN244190.DTL

8/2/02
7:35:33 PM

The Virtues of Promiscuity

by Sally Lehrman, AlterNet July 22, 2002

"Slutty" behavior is good for the species. That is the conclusion of a new wave of research on the evolutionary drives behind sexuality and parenting.

Women everywhere have been selflessly engaging in trysts outside of matrimony. And they have been doing it for a good long time and for excellent reasons. Anthropologists say female promiscuity binds communities closer together and improves the gene pool.

More than 20 tribal societies accept the principle that a child could, and ideally ought to, have more than one father, according to Pennsylvania anthropologist Stephen Beckerman. "As one looks, it begins to crop up in a lot of places," says Beckerman, who has reviewed dozens of reports on tribes from South America, New Guinea, Polynesia and India as co-editor of the newly released book, "Cultures of Multiple Fathers."

Less than 50 years ago, Canela women, who live in Amazonian Brazil, enjoyed the delights of as many as 40 men one after another in festive rituals. When it was time to have a child, they'd select their favorite dozen or so lovers to help their husband with the all-important task. Even today, when the dalliances of married Barí ladies in Columbia and Venezuela result in a child, they proudly announce the long list of probable fathers.

In other words, the much-touted evolutionary bargain of female fidelity for food -- trotted out by evolutionary psychologists with maddening regularity --just doesn't hold up.

"This model of the death-do-us-part, missionary-position couple is just a tiny part of human history," says anthropologist Kristen Hawkes, who has spent years studying the foraging habits of the Aché, a Paraguayan people, and the North Tanzanaian tribe Hadza, who also celebrate a rich love life. "The patterns of human sexuality are so much more variable."

American college students still learn that human society is based on the age-old economic contract between the sexes: Men hunt and women raise children. Fathers provide meat for the family, and in exchange, moms offer fidelity and the guarantee of paternity. While men -- who produce millions of sperm -- are inveterate philanderers, gals, stuck with relatively few eggs that require a significant investment, tend to be choosy and coy. Men therefore are biologically prone to spreading their seed far and wide, while women focus on finding the perfect pop.

"This evidence is a real thumb in the eye for that view," says Beckerman.

Anthropologists claim, good judgment aside, evolution has nudged women a bit toward promiscuity and sexual adventure. In all well-studied primates, females exhibit a polyandrous tendency when given the opportunity to stray. Some who cheat appear to be more fertile, and the offspring of most are more likely to survive. Fooling around appears to have helped our ancestral mothers equip their little ones for success -- the sexual equivalent of reading to them every night or enrolling them in the after-school chess club.

"Women tend to do things that are associated with the welfare of their kids," Hawkes says.

In contrast to the sex-for-food model, multiple and various sexual pairings have little to do with adding to the larder in the groups Hawkes studies. The average Hadza hunter, who can only bring in a big game carcass once a month, has to share his kill with everyone. His wife and kids just have to get in line. Extra mates add a little genetic diversity. But Hawkes says females likely hook up with multiple males for safety more than any other benefit -- a mother's strong emotional bonds with more than one fellow provide an extra protective hand in times of danger.

An economic incentive promotes female infidelity in Barí society. All of the Barí children who had more than one father were more likely to survive into adulthood, fortified by small gifts of fish and game in times of scarcity. Multiple dads also help ensure a child's health. Since a father is necessary to blow tobacco smoke over the little one's body if he or she falls ill, the more potential volunteers the better.

Elderly Barí ladies chuckle and nudge each other as they talk about a lifetime of lovers. But the pleasure wasn't only their own. The men benefited, too. It turns out Barí males can't count on a very long life. The Venezuelan tribe suffers from bouts of malaria and tuberculosis and, until 1960, was repeatedly attacked by landowners, oil companies, and homesteaders in the region. Most of the victims have been reproductive-age males. "You know that if you die, there's some other man who has a residual obligation to care for at least one of your children," Beckerman explains. "So looking the other way or even giving your blessing when your wife takes a lover is the only insurance you can buy."

Even evolutionary psychologists, stout defenders of the meat-for-fidelity model, are beginning to acknowledge the benefits of women's "slutty" behavior. University of Texas psychologist David Buss gives the most credit to what he terms "mate insurance," a backup replacement in case the male partner doesn't survive.

Social approval of infidelity does not, however, imply a corresponding devaluation of marriage. "They're very, very faithful," says Beckerman's co-author Paul Valentine about the Curripaco, who live on the border between Columbia and Venezuela. The tribe believes that conception is a process that requires a lot of work, and the men are quick to take credit for their joint labors. "They say, 'Hey, this is really hard work having a baby,'" Valentine says. "And they really put on a smug look."

Physiological data supports the theory that women have been sleeping around for centuries. For starters, men have evolved to compete in their partner's reproductive tract. Human males have large testicles that manufacture plenty of semen, especially when they reunite with their wives after separation. Their sperm includes coil-tailed versions that block instead of carry the ball. Females cooperate when they want to -- more often with their lovers than with their mates, according to one study. Women retain slightly more sperm after orgasm, and in the throes of excitement may even draw the virgin swimmers up through the cervix and into the uterus, according to British sexologist R. Robin Baker.

Still, David Buss places most of the blame for all this wanderlust on the guys. Bottom line, sperm are cheap and eggs are expensive, he says. He cites his own 1993 studies of college undergraduates. Women said they'd like maybe up to five partners in a lifetime. Men in various surveys ranged from 18 up to 1,000. Sure, both sexes have one-night stands. Both also can mate for life. But men tend toward variety and women will most often stay true to the stable, dependable provider, Buss claims. "Women typically have high standards in either case; men are willing to go down to the tenth percentile (for short-term partners), as long as she can mumble," he says.

Anthropologists are not so sure. Some say today's emphasis on female monogamy may have more to do with socio-economic trends than evolutionary instincts.

Extramarital trysts were a way of life for the Canela -- until the encroachment of outsiders. "Multiple lovers, that's just part of the life. It's recreation, just like races and running. It's all done in the spirit of joy and fun," says William Crocker of the Smithsonian Institution, who has studied the Brazilian tribe since 1957. When a woman got pregnant with her husband, she would go out to find as many as five more "fathers" for her fetus. Since every bit of semen was believed to contribute to the baby, a dedicated mom looked for a variety of desirable traits in her lovers: sexual skills, good looks, oratory talents, top-notch singing abilities -- and naturally, a good provider.

Crocker says the Canela's sexual customs began to disappear after the arrival of traders, who brought in material goods such as machetes, axes, pots and pans, introducing the idea of exclusive ownership. The missionaries came next. The evangelists, who arrived in the early 1970s, translated the Bible into Canelan and did their part to discourage the tribe's sexual intimacy.

The pattern is repeating itself with the Barí as missionaries import rural Catholic values. Beckerman says, "I suppose it doesn't mean there's any less fooling around, it's just that the fathers don't take responsibility for it and the mothers don't admit it."

Modern relationships are not all that different. High infidelity, remarriage and divorce rates may have less to do with modernity than with our collective sexual past. "It makes the variation we're seeing in modern society so much more understandable," Hawkes says.

If the anthropologists are right, monogamy may well be counter-evolutionary or an adaptation to modern life. Or perhaps the nuclear family has always been more of an ideal than a reality.

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13648

8/2/02
7:32:01 PM

SciTech Daily Review

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_baldwin073002.asp

A black box for your car: Event data recorders could make cars safer -- and tell accident investigators what really happened

Thar they blow!: Gentle giants? A new revival of an old theory suggests that male sperm whales may butt heads over females

http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues02/aug02/phenomena.html

The humble potato could protect women from a common sexually transmitted virus that causes almost all cases of cervical cancer

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/-/1/hi/health/2166010.stm

The world's first flight test of a scramjet engine, conducted over the Australian outback, appears to have gone well, University of Queensland officials report

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/hyshot_020730.html

The idea that growth can be good is anathema to most environmentalists. Yet that's exactly the argument made by William McDonough and Michael Braungart in Cradle to Cradle

http://www.gristmagazine.com/books/books072502.asp

To escape the shadow of his famous physicist father, George Dyson started building kayaks. He is now a well respected academic and author in his own right

http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinterview.jsp?id=ns23538

Strong institutional leadership, ongoing self assessment, and comprehensive training in ethics are critical to fostering a climate in which scientific research integrity can flourish, concludes a US report

http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/325/7357/182/c

The virtues of promiscuity: The latest anthropological research shows that female infidelity is good for the family, the community, and even the gene pool

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13648

8/2/02
7:29:25 PM

UTNE WEB WATCH

The Best of the Alternative Web

THE VIRTUES OF PROMISCUITY

by Sally Lehrman, AlterNet

-- Women who "fool around" get some respect, thanks to a new finding in sexuality research.

POWER SHIFT: LOOKING FOR LEADERSHIP ON CLIMATE CHANGE

by Various, Grist

-- Who needs Bush's support on global warming when a grassroots activist network enacts local climate change initiatives, corporations cut greenhouse gas emissions and schools build green dorms?

SELF-PUBLISHING STIGMA IS PERISHING

by M.J. Rose, Wired

-- Traditionally, self-published authors have a hard time getting picked up by publishing houses, but in the last 18 months, more than three dozen self-published novels have been picked up.

Links to the above articles: http://www.utne.com/webwatch

8/2/02
7:27:26 PM

"Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last you create what you will."

George Bernard Shaw the Irish-born British playwright, Nobel Prize winner

8/2/02
7:26:21 PM

AlterNet Headlines

http://www.alternet.org

BOMB SADDAM, SAVE THE G.O.P.

William Rivers Pitt, TruthOut.com

Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter claims the impending American war against Iraq isn't about terrorism, it's about the November elections.

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13710

PEDDLING 9-11: GET YER TRAGEDY HERE!

Craig Williams, AlterNet

In little more than a month, we'll again be buried in the rubble of maudlin, insincere, profit-making reminders of last September.

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13713

THE COLLAPSE OF CREDIBILITY

Barbara Ehrenreich, The Progressive

When the powerful begin to act irresponsibly, it's the responsibility of the rest of us to take their power away.

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13657

THE NORTHERN SNAKEHEAD: CAN A BAD FISH TASTE GOOD?

Kate Silver, Las Vegas Weekly

A predatory fish that has invaded a nine-acre Maryland pond attacks humans, has the head of a snake and the body of a fish -- and tastes like chicken.

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13728

A WORLD AWASH IN HORMONES

Lynn Landes, AlterNet

The recent scandal over hormone therapy is just a scratch on the surface compared to the synthetic hormones found in our water supply, food, and consumer goods.

*In EnviroHealth: http://www.alternet.org/?IssueAreaID=18

CURBING THE CEO CULT

William Greider, The Nation

Forget the SEC -- is William Lerach America's top corporate crime fighter? One thing is clear, the aggressive, opportunistic trial lawyer strikes fear into the hearts of CEOs.

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13667

GEORGE BUSH CHANNELS GEORGE ORWELL

Daniel Kurtzman, AlterNet

Somebody needs to inform the president that 1984 is a warning against totalitarianism -- not a how-to manual.

*In Rights & Liberties: http://www.alternet.org/?IssueAreaID=33

THE REAL MINORITY REPORT

Tehama Lopez, Tolerance.org

Steven Spielberg's 2054 America is strangely devoid of minorities. It's a case of Hollywood writing race right out of the future.

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13747

Greed: The Ugly American Pastime

Marty Jezer, AlterNet

Greed threatens to cut the 2002 major league baseball season short as players and owners go head-to-head over the bottom line.

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13745

Romancing the Coconut

Sharon Lerner, Village Voice

An array of spiritual guides, coaches and renegade romantic consultants are doing their damnedest to help fix your love life.

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13729

Friday Media Roundtable

Talk about the week's media coverage with journalists from The Nation, the Web, and the National Association of Black Journalists on Friday's Working Assets Radio. Listen online from 10-11amPT/1-2pmET, or call in: 866-798-TALK.

http://www.workingassetsradio.com

8/2/02
7:22:57 PM

Planet Ark World Environment News

US says Zimbabwe prepared for possible GM maize - ZIMBABWE http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17141/story.htm

Nebraska Cooper nuke future brightens after agreements - USA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17137/story.htm

No delay for US rules for clean diesel engines - EPA - USA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17145/story.htm

US Senate Democrats attack Bush environment record - USA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17139/story.htm

Senators vow to ease US rules to snuff forest fires - USA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17131/story.htm

NY Government reviews nuclear plants' emergency plans - USA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17135/story.htm

NYC mayor opts to ship trash by barge, protect air - USA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17134/story.htm

Atlantic sharks coming closer to shore - researchers - USA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17132/story.htm

World heading for warmest year yet - UK Met Office - UK http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17146/story.htm

Fast food scraps threaten rat plague - UK group - UK http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17133/story.htm

US to fund Eastern Siberia oil, gas fields study - RUSSIA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17136/story.htm

Romania crude oil spill flows towards Danube - ROMANIA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17144/story.htm

French McDonald's trasher leaves jail in fighting mood - FRANCE http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17142/story.htm

Home of Canadian animal activist raided for US - CANADA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17140/story.htm

Quebec, Newfoundland agree on huge power project - CANADA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17138/story.htm

Grounded Barrier Reef bulkship seen stuck for days - AUSTRALIA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17143/story.htm

ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS PICTURES:

JAPAN: Prairie Dog Lies Flat on Pavement to Try to Cool Off From Tokyo Heat Wave http://www.planetark.org/envpicstory.cfm/newsid/17150

Baby Beluga Whale Swims with Mother at Vancouver Aquarium - CANADA http://www.planetark.org/envpicstory.cfm/newsid/17147

CHILE: People Overlooking Santiago Covered in Smog Cloud http://www.planetark.org/envpicstory.cfm/newsid/17148

RUSSIA: People Walk Through Moscow's Red Square Which is Shrouded in a Haze Created by Smoke from Forest Fires http://www.planetark.org/envpicstory.cfm/newsid/17149

8/2/02
7:21:24 PM

Waldorf Puts the U in UFO

What was that bright light in Maryland's sky???

WTOPNEWS.com, 07-27-02

WTOP has learned that residents near Andrews Air Force base were shaken from their beds early Friday morning by some strange activity in the air.

"Incredible. Absolutely incredible" is what Renny Rogers of Waldorf calls it. Just before two in the morning, Rogers says he saw a large blue ball of light streaking across the sky. But it was the military jets that really startled him.

"(The jets) were right on its tail. As the thing would move, a jet was right behind it," Rogers recalls.

He is not the only one who saw it. Several people called WTOP Radio reporting seeing a bright blue or orange ball moving very fast, being chased by jets. Rogers says there was no smoke coming from the object, no flashing lights, and says it was smooth, and eerily silent. The Air National Guard confirms they scrambled the 113th squadron. Spokesman Sheldon Smith says they are investigating and in contact with NORAD. WTOP Radio, 2002

http://wtopnews.com/news/newsdetail.cfm?newsid=584517

8/2/02
7:14:13 PM

West Sees Glittering Prizes Ahead in Giant Oilfields

Published July 11, 2002 in the Times of London

by Michael Theodoulou in Nicosia and Roland Watson

THE removal of President Saddam Hussein would open Iraq's rich new oilfields to Western bidders and bring the prospect of lessening dependence on Saudi oil. No other country offers such untapped oilfields whose exploitation could lessen tensions over the Western presence in Saudi Arabia.

After Kuwait's liberation by US-led forces in 1991, America monopolized the postwar deals, but the need to win international support for an invasion is unlikely to see a repeat.

Russia, in particular, and France and China all permanent members of the United Nations Security Council have high hopes of prizing promises of contracts in a liberated Iraq from a United States that may need their political support.

President Bush has used the War on Terror to press his case for drilling in a protected Arctic refuge, but predicted reserves in Alaska are dwarfed by the oilwells of the Gulf.Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that the issue for the US was as much the security of the Gulf as access to particular oilfields.

"You are looking down the line to a world in 2020 when reliance on Gulf oil will have more than doubled. The security of the Gulf is an absolutely critical issue."

Gerald Butt, Gulf editor of the Middle East Economic Survey, said: "The removal of Saddam is, in effect, the removal of the last threat to the free flow of oil from the Gulf as a whole."

Iraq has oil reserves of 112billion barrels, second only to Saudi Arabia, which has some 265billion barrels. Iraqi reserves are seven times those of the combined UK and Norwegian sectors of the North Sea. But the prize for oil companies could be even greater. Iraq estimates that its eventual reserves could be as high as 220billion barrels.

Three giant southern fields - Majnoon, West Qurna and Nahr Umar have the capacity to produce as much as Kuwait. The first two could each equal Qatar's production of 700,000 barrels a day. "There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world. Its the big prize," Mr Butt said.

Extraction costs in these giant onshore fields, where development has been held up by more than two decades of war and sanctions, would also be among the lowest in the world. Provided that the US can ensure stability in a post-Saddam Iraq, it would take five years, at most, to develop the oilfields and Iraq's prewar capacity of three million barrels a day could reach seven or eight million, industry experts said.

However, regime change in Baghdad will be of little value to international oil companies unless it is followed by a stable Iraq with a strong central government. Companies cant go in unless there is peace. To develop Majnoon, you need two to three billion dollars and you don't invest that kind of money without stability, one industry analyst said.

Related article: White House Acts to Shed Arrogant Image New PR Office to Sell Bush Policies and War on Terror Published on Wednesday, July 31, 2002 in the Guardian of London

Posted: http://commondreams.org/headlines02/0731-02.htm

Related Article: "Iraqi weapons 'a growing threat'" from BBC News - 1 August, 2002, 02:32 GMT 03:32 UK

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2163183.stm

8/2/02
7:00:14 PM

DAILY GRIST

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/08.02A.bush.Qs.htm

FISH STYX

In Ohio, what you don't know can hurt you: The state has just cut a program that warned the public about consuming pollution-tainted fish. In the past, the state EPA and Department of Natural Resources collected fish samples and tested them for pesticides, mercury, and other toxic chemicals; the resulting information was then assessed by the state Health Department for its effects on humans and Ohioans were alerted of possible dangers. Now, fish samples will still be collected and tested, but the fish-consumption advisory program has been abolished to save the Health Department $100,000 per year. Although Michigan drastically reduced its advisory program this year, Ohio is the first Great Lakes state to fully terminate its program. According to the state Health Department website, health effects from eating contaminated fish caught in the state can include birth defects and mental and physical retardation in newborns.

straight to the source: Cleveland Plain Dealer, John C. Kuehner, 31 Jul 2002 <http://www.gristmagazine.com/forward.pl?forward_id=316>

TOTALLY TRASHED

Every day, New Yorkers generate about 11,000 tons of residential trash. Ever since former Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) shut down the city's only operating landfill, Fresh Kills, the city has been plagued by the question of what to do with its garbage. For the last year, trash has been hauled on trucks to incinerators and out-of-state landfills. Now Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R) has a new plan: to adapt out-of-use waterfront stations in each of the city's five boroughs so that garbage can be taken off trucks, packed into containers, and carried away by barge. The plan leaves a lot of questions unanswered -- such as, carried away to where? -- but it would meet Bloomberg's goal of reducing the truck traffic that clogs the city streets, damages its roads, and pollutes its air. Bloomberg hopes to have the plan in place within two years, even though he has still not offered an estimate of how much it would cost. "We are not going to continue to give our kids lung diseases, no matter what the cost is," the mayor said. "That's the bottom line."

straight to the source: New York Times, Michael Cooper, 01 Aug 2002 <http://www.gristmagazine.com/forward.pl?forward_id=317>

CRUISE CONTROL

Norwegian Cruise Line, the fourth-largest cruise company in the world, will pay a $1.5 million fine for illegally dumping oil and untreated wastewater into the ocean, and subsequently lying about its actions. The company kept a false logbook and for three years lied to the Coast Guard about unlawful discharges off the coast of Florida; it was caught when a fired employee blew the whistle to the U.S. EPA, but no one knows how much pollution the cruise line dumped into the ocean. The fine, which includes $500,000 for environmental projects in Florida, is part of a federal crackdown on ocean polluters and marks the seventh environmental conviction against a cruise line. Norwegian got off easy compared to some others; Royal Caribbean, for example, has paid a total of $27 million in fines. But hard times might not be over for the company; shortly after the fine was announced, the state of Alaska, which successfully sued Royal Caribbean, said it would investigate whether Norwegian committed illegal activity in state waters.

straight to the source: San Francisco Chronicle, Associated Press, Catherine Wilson, 01 Aug 2002 <http://www.gristmagazine.com/forward.pl?forward_id=318>

straight to the source: Anchorage Daily News, Paula Dobbyn, 01 Aug 2002 <http://www.gristmagazine.com/forward.pl?forward_id=319>

only in Grist: Cruisin' for a bruisin' -- a week in the life of Kira Schmidt, Bluewater Network <http://www.gristmagazine.com/week/schmidt072800.stm?source=daily>

OH, WHAT A BAD FEELING

Toyota has been getting a lot of kudos recently for its low-emissions hybrid vehicle, the Prius -- but the car company increased its carbon emissions in the U.S. during the 1990s more than any other major automaker in the country, according to a report released this week by Environmental Defense. The group said Toyota increased its CO2 emissions by a whopping 72 percent from 1990 to 2000, mainly because of the dramatic growth in the company's U.S. sales over the decade and its production of more and bigger SUVs and pickups. General Motors, the world's largest automaker, topped the Environmental Defense bad-guy list by spewing 6.7 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere per year. Next were Ford (5.6 million tons) and DaimlerChrysler (4.1 million tons). If there's a silver lining, it's that Toyota plans to introduce more hybrid models into the U.S. market in January, possibly including a gas-electric SUV or minivan.

straight to the source: Los Angeles Times, Terril Yue Jones, 31 Jul 2002 <http://www.gristmagazine.com/forward.pl?forward_id=320>

only in Grist: The Toyota Prius sounds great, but why is it so hard to get one? -- by Edward Flattau <http://www.gristmagazine.com/imho/imho101800.stm?source=daily>

COAL SHOULDER

Interior Secretary Gale Norton was snubbed today by seven West Virginia environmental groups, which declined an invitation to meet with her to discuss statewide mining issues. Norton initially offered to set aside a half-hour with the groups, coinciding with her visit to the state on the 25th anniversary of the Federal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. Prior to her appointment as Interior secretary, Norton opposed the act, arguing that it was unconstitutional for the federal government to regulate strip mining. The West Virginia citizens groups say that poor federal enforcement of the act is benefiting coal companies at the expense of human and environmental health. When the offer of a half-hour meeting was rebuked, the Interior Department proposed a two-hour slot, but the groups still declined, suggesting Norton schedule a trip when she had time to visit coalfield residents in their homes and see the damage caused by large mining operations.

straight to the source: Charleston Gazette, Ken Ward, Jr., 01 Aug 2002 <http://www.gristmagazine.com/forward.pl?forward_id=321>

8/2/02
6:54:39 PM

t r u t h o u t | 08.02

Bush Faces Questions on Offshore Affiliates

Bush Accused of Cutting Down Corporate Reform

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/08.02B.bush.accusd.htm

Questions on Halliburton Deal Under Cheney

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/08.02C.cheney.halli.htm

Berlin, Paris Reject Iraq Attack Without UN Mandate

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/08.02D.berlin.paris.htm

Plan for Drug Benefits Stalls in Senate, Deep Ideological Differences

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/08.02E.senate.drugs.htm

Economic Growth Slowed Sharply in the 2nd Quarter

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/08.02F.gro.slo.htm

Nearly 5 Million Uninsured Children are Eligible for Help

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/08.02G.child.care.htm

8/2/02
6:51:44 PM

ENVIRONMENT NEWS SERVICE

http://ens-news.com/ens/jul2002/2002-07-31-05.asp

HUNDREDS DIE IN ASIA FLOODS, MILLIONS HOMELESS

BEIJING, China, July 31, 2002 (ENS) - Unusually early floods across 25 Chinese provinces claimed 793 lives and left more than 20,000 of the nation's poorest people homeless. The Red Cross Society of China has activated emergency crews to move water, blankets and food to the affected areas.

COSMIC RAYS HELP RESOLVE GLOBAL WARMING PUZZLE

ALBANY, New York, July 31, 2002 (ENS) - For the first time, researchers have evidence that interstellar cosmic rays could be the missing link that would explain why increases in Earth surface temperatures observed over the past 20 years, known as global warming, exist simultaneously with unchanging temperatures of the low atmosphere.

http://ens-news.com/ens/jul2002/2002-07-31-01.asp

CAMBODIA PROTECTS FORESTED MOUNTAINS, RARE ANIMALS

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia, July 31, 2002 (ESN) - One million acres of pristine wilderness, inhabited by tigers, elephants and bears, has been officially protected by the Cambodian government, with financial and conservation support from six U.S. and international organizations.

http://ens-news.com/ens/jul2002/2002-07-31-02.asp

ENVIRONMENT NEWS SERVICE AMERISCAN: JULY 31, 2002

FIREFIGHTING CHOPPER CRASH KILLS PILOT

LAKE OKEECHOBEE LAWSUIT FILED TO LIMIT POLLUTANTS

ENTIRE PILOT WHALE POD DIES OFF CAPE COD

CRABS, FISH DIE WITHOUT OXYGEN IN OREGON WATERS

BELUGA STURGEON CONSIDERED FOR ENDANGERED LISTING

YUCCA MOUNTAIN VOLCANIC HAZARD GREATER THAN THOUGHT

http://ens-news.com/ens/jul2002/2002-07-31-09.asp

8/2/02
6:50:20 PM

MoJournal

http://www.motherjones.com/

Free thinking, non-conforming, investigative reporting

Volume I, Issue 31 July 31, 2002

A seemingly endless string of corporate scandals is forcing President Bush to perform political gymnastics in an effort to distance himself from his business-friendly past. As Todd Gitlin notes in his monthly column, the nation's Republicans "are being forced to restate their political earnings." But Gitlin has warning for anyone satisfied by the president's discomfort or pleased that Republicans may have to pay a political price come November: "Corruption can sink governments, but it doesn't necessarily float reform." Arguing that the current atmosphere in Washington is more conducive to real reform than at any time in recent memory, Gitlin says Americans must take advantage of the opportunity and pursue a meaningful overhaul of corporate governance rules -- an overhaul which could dramatically change the ways in which companies behave.

http://click.topica.com/maaasQPaaS0AZa4pkFbb/

Will Tacy Editor, MotherJones.com

Solar Living Center, August 24th and 25th, Hopland (90 miles N. of S.F). Keynotes Paul Hawken, Amy Goodman, & David Freeman. Music by Michael Franti, Todd Snider and others. Workshops, exhibitors, kidstuff, etc $10 in advance- Ticketmaster

For more information,

http://click.topica.com/maaasQPaaS0A1a4pkFbb/

WEB EXCLUSIVES

Opinion - Making the Most of a Scandal - The ongoing corporate scandals represent a unique opportunity to pursue real reform -- an opportunity many on the left seem to be ignoring as they exult over President Bush's discomfort.

http://click.topica.com/maaasQPaaS0A2a4pkFbb/

Cartoon - A Better Use for TIPS - America clearly wants Congress to crack down on crooked CEO's. Maybe there's a use for the Bush administration's controversial TIPS program, after all.

http://click.topica.com/maaasQPaaS0Bha4pkFbb/

Updates - Seeking Data on the Drug War's Child Casualties; A Toxic Burden; 7-Up No Longer Laughing; Breaking Up the Bakassi Boys

http://click.topica.com/maaasQPaaS0A4a4pkFbb/

Daily Briefing - Abdullah Steps Up; Hope Floats in Korea; Feds Need a Web Workshop; Bush Losing Credibility at Home;... and Abroad; Clinton's Staying Power

http://click.topica.com/maaasQPaaS0A5a4pkFbb/

A Thirst for Justice - Plenty of activists have protested US Border Patrol tactics which force undocumented migrants to consider crossing remote, arid areas along the Mexican border. Reverend Robin Hoover has actually done something about it.

http://click.topica.com/maaasQPaaS0A6a4pkFbb/

8/2/02
6:48:10 PM

How Americans Have Changed

by Joe Sobran - joe@sobran.com

Most Americans assume that the Civil War settled forever the question whether a state may secede from the Union. I suppose it shouldn't surprise us that the majority of human beings think a question of principle can be settled by raw force. How often we say of foreigners that "the only thing those people respect is power!" Maybe it's true of us too.

But it wasn't true of the men who wrote and adopted the U.S. Constitution. Even THE FEDERALIST PAPERS, written to promote ratification of the Constitution and a stronger Union, foresaw the possibility that the states might have to reclaim their independence -- even, if necessary, by making war on the Federal Government.

What makes this remarkable is that the two chief authors of THE FEDERALIST, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, would have preferred an even stronger Union than the Constitution prescribed. They were by no means champions of states' rights.

Yet in Federalist No. 28, Hamilton wrote that "usurpations of the national rulers" -- that is, the Federal Government -- might give the people of the separate states no choice but to exercise "that original right of self-defense, which is paramount to all positive forms of government." How? By taking "arms" and organizing like "independent nations." Obviously a state that was at war with the Federal Government would have seceded from the Union. Self-defense presupposes secession.

In Federalist No. 29 Hamilton used the phrase "a well regulated militia," which would be included in the Second Amendment. One purpose of the state militias, and of "the right of the people to keep and bear arms," was to enable the states to resist tyranny -- Federal tyranny. In other words, the Second Amendment was meant to put teeth in the right of secession!

Hamilton thought the state militias would be more than a match for any Federal forces; he didn't foresee the modern weapons that would make Federal power as overwhelming as it is today.

But the principle remains, even if it now seems pretty useless: the American people have the right to resist Federal usurpation by any just means, including reclaiming their independence.

Madison offered a similar argument in Federalist No. 46. The states would have the power to meet "ambitious encroachments of the Federal Government" with "resistance" and "a trial of force," just as they had recently done against Great Britain. Among other things, they had "the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation."

Like Hamilton, Madison contended that the states had the strength to prevail in a war with the Federal Government. In fact both men, eager to secure ratification for the Constitution, ridiculed the notion that the Federal Government could win! How times have changed. How Americans have changed.

In her book AMERICAN SCRIPTURE, Pauline Meier reminds us that several of the American colonies --Virginia, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Maryland --issued their own separate declarations of independence, long since forgotten in the shadow of the great Declaration of July 4. But these "other" declarations show that each state regarded itself as a "free and independent" entity, not as a subordinate part of a "union" or "nation." These words were not yet in use.

All this shows once more that Abraham Lincoln was being both unhistorical and illogical in his claim that "the Union is older than the states." July 4 announced 13 "free and independent states," not Lincoln's monolithic "new nation," from which, he insisted, no state could ever secede.

Lincoln proved to be exactly the sort of "national ruler" Hamilton and Madison said could never defeat the states. But defeat them he did. He did so in large part by convincing many Northerners that his skewed version of American history and the Constitution was the true one. And those who couldn't be convinced could always be arrested. Lincoln's Constitution was what is now called a "living document" -- one whose meaning can be changed at the convenience of the rulers.

Clearly Lincoln was out of touch with "the Fathers" he so often invoked. He had never read or digested THE FEDERALIST PAPERS, let alone the other side of the great ratification debate; the terms of that debate were pretty much a foreign language to him. He himself admitted that his knowledge of history was meager. How tragic that most Americans still accept as gospel his deeply defective account of their history.

Source: http://www.sobran.com/columns/020618.shtml

8/2/02
6:44:20 PM

World Bank to Resume Financing of Rainforest Destruction

July 2002, By Forests.org, Inc., http://forests.org/

TAKE ACTION: http://forests.org/emailaction/bank.htm

The World Bank has released its long awaited draft policy on forests. The proposed policy threatens most of the world's remaining forests with environmentally damaging industrial forest management financed by taxpayers through the World Bank. It severely weakens the existing Operational (OP) Policy on Forests of 1993. Environmental group pressure led to the current policy that bans Bank funding of logging in primary moist tropical forests. Over the past several years, the World Bank has aggressively sought to resume financing of "sustainable forest management" activities in the World's dwindling primary forests, particularly in the tropics. This would require revision of the Bank's existing forest policy.

The proposed new policy opens the door to financing of large scale timber export and carbon sequestration projects, emphasizing market forces and marketing arrangements to address deforestation. However, there is no evidence that commercial scaled sustainable forest management can be effective in promoting environmentally sound and socially equitable development. The Bank's new proposed policy fails to address the powerful forces of globalization and economic liberalization, as well as poor governance, the main causes of deforestation according to the World Bank itself.

The Bank has spearheaded failed tropical timber industry reform efforts for over a decade; failing miserably to reform commercial logging in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Kenya, Cameroon and elsewhere. The Bank's forest conservation policy approach continues to be based upon the false premise that commercial logging in primary forests is ecologically sustainable. This is patently false. Turning the Bank loose to "integrate forests into sustainable economic development" will guarantee the demise of the World's remaining large natural primary and old-growth forests. The Bank seeks to sustain foreign exchange revenues and timber yields rather than natural ecological processes and patterns.

The proposed policy allows extractive investments by the Bank in all types of forests except those Bank bureaucrats deem to be "critical forests". Participatory mechanisms to define such forests are not part of the plan. Instead of proposing clear and strong new safeguards to protect the world's forests, the proposed policy refers to seven other existing World Bank 'Safeguard Policies' as a means to protect ecosystems and livelihoods of forest-dependent peoples.

The draft policy was developed through years of consultation with others. Yet the result flies in the face of demands of civil society and ignores most of the advice given to the Bank by its own Technical Advisory Group. It appears the Bank carried out a very costly and time-consuming exercise to justify the adoption of a policy that had already been decided upon beforehand.

The proposed policy shows little potential to promote forest conservation. Any revision of the Bank's current forest policy must not allow any financing of commercial scale logging or forest management in any of the World's remaining primary forests. The Bank needs binding policy for each sector (i.e. roads, agricultural plantations, mining, etc.) in regards to forest conservation. The Bank's structural adjustment lending must be reformed to eliminate massive negative impacts upon forests and other ecosystems. Please edit and send the following letter at:

http://forests.org/emailaction/bank.htm

Dear Mr. Wolfensohn and World Bank Board members,

I am writing to strongly condemn the World Bank's current draft operational policy (OP) on Forests. The policy mistakenly emphasizes large-scale commercial development of primary and other forests as a means to achieve forest conservation and poverty alleviation. The Bank President and Board have been poorly served by their advisors: at this critical juncture in global forest conservation, there is no justification for Bank subsidies for rainforest destruction.

The draft OP is a non-policy in that it relies on other existing or future World Bank policies to address the most critical issues pertaining to the world's forests and their peoples. It fails to represent a safeguard policy in any meaningful sense. The draft OP ignores the findings of the Bank's Operations Evaluation Department (OED) as well as inputs received during the lengthy public consultation process. The current policy is seriously flawed for the following reasons:

1) Industrial Logging - the draft OP lifts the ban on direct investment in large-scale industrial logging which is a central feature of the 1993 Forest Policy. According to the draft OP, Bank investments in industrial forestry will halt destructive practices. There is no evidence that large-scale logging particularly in primary forests - can be conducted in an environmentally sustainable and socially beneficial manner. Little emphasis is given to community-based and other smaller-scale eco-forestry management initiatives, which would not require a change of the 1993 Forest Policy.

2) Structural Adjustment the policy fails to address the critical issue of how such lending impacts forests. Causes of deforestation that lie outside the forest sector such as poorly conceived economic policies, Bank sectoral lending and poor governance practices are ignored by the draft OP.

3) Protection of Forest Ecosystems - the draft OP does not protect forests, relying instead on the Bank's Operational Policy on Natural Habitats (OP 4.04) whose effectiveness has never been evaluated. Global ecological sustainability requires that most of the World's remaining primary forests are strictly protected or managed by local peoples using certified eco-forestry practices.

4) Forest-Dependent People - the draft OP does not secure land tenure for indigenous peoples or other forest dependent communities, though problems in this area are a leading cause of forest degradation and deforestation.

5) Applicability of OP to the World Bank Group - one of the central recommendations emerging out of the consultation process was that the Bank's new Forest Policy should also be applicable to IFC and MIGA operations.

The proposed policy will not promote forest conservation. Given serious flaws in the Bank's proposed Forest Policy, I ask that a new draft safeguard policy on forests be prepared in line with recommendations already made by the public and by the Bank's own technical advisors. Resumption of financing of commercial scale logging in any of the World's remaining primary forests must not be allowed. The Bank needs binding policy for each sector in regards to forestry. The Bank's structural adjustment lending must be reformed to eliminate its massive negative impacts upon forests and other ecosystems.

The perception of significant improvements in the Bank's environmental record is threatened by this seriously flawed proposal. It would be a serious error for the Bank to subsidize global forest diminishment and deforestation. I insist that any new Bank policy in regard to forest conservation be limited to forest protection and small-scale eco-forestry, or else leave the current policy in effect. I and others will not tolerate this proposed policy, and will loudly protest its further development and implementation.

Sincerely,

This alert is largely based on the Statement released by the World Rainforest Movement, the Forest Peoples Programme and Environmental Defense at:

http://www.wrm.org.uy/statements/WB.html

8/2/02
6:42:04 PM

Teak poachers are killing off great forests of Indonesia

July 06, 2001

BANGSRI, Indonesia - The last of central Java's great teakwood forests ends up in places like this, a place filled with the whine of buzz saws and the burr of electric sanders, a place like Abdul Jambari's garden-furniture workshop.

"This is for export," Jambari says, stroking the finely polished arm of an auburn-grained folding chair. "It's the best teak, what we call class A." And because his order book is full, a month or two from now, for about $100, Jambari's chair will sit on a patio or deck somewhere in the United States or Europe.

But that chair and the 4,000 others that are part of Jambari's latest export shipment have left behind a swath of utter devastation, one of thousands that afflict this archipelago and spell the end of the majestic forests that once blanketed Indonesia. Their disappearance also means the extinction of innumerable animal and plant species indigenous to this country.

"We are facing a cataclysm," said Togu Manurung, the director of Forest Watch Indonesia, an environmental organization. The tropical forests of Indonesia, one-tenth of the world's total, have fallen victim in part to the virtual collapse of political authority in this southeast Asian nation of a thousand islands and more than 200 million people. The toppling three years ago of the regime of President Suharto, a close U.S. ally whose three-decade rule often ruthlessly imposed order, has been followed by widespread violent upheaval, including multiple secessionist movements. In this chaotic atmosphere, illegal logging has gone unchecked.

In an unpublished report, the World Bank found that all the lowland forests in one of the country's largest islands, Sumatra ("forest that is usually the richest source of timber and which carries the highest biodiversity") will be extinct before 2005, and in Kalimantan, the island formerly known as Borneo, by 2010. Swamp forests, according to the report, will disappear five years later. In the past decade, the rate of Indonesia's deforestation has accelerated from 2.47 million acres annually, to 4.2 million acres.

Based on an analysis of satellite photos of Indonesia's forests, the report, written by Derek Holmes, a consultant to the World Bank, contends that unless the government acts immediately to stop rampant illegal logging, "the only extensive forests that will remain in Sumatra, Kalimantan and Sulawesi in the second decade of the new millennium will be the low-stature forests of the mountains."

For people like Manurung, there is little evidence that the government, in disarray over the impending impeachment of President Abdurrahman Wahid and beset by waves of bloody sectarian and ethnic conflict, is capable of slowing the destruction of the forests.

"Illegal logging is going on everywhere," he said. "Lots of people are involved. Lots of these people have connections - high-ranking officials, members of parliament, the army, police, local officials."

Even national parks are being logged at a frenetic pace. On Kalimantan, the Tanjung Puting National Park, designated by the United Nations as a "Biosphere Reserve," a term bestowed on lands of exceptional plant and animal diversity, is being systematically and illegally logged, according to reports by Forest Watch and another environmental group, Telepak Indonesia, as well as Indonesia's Ministry of Forestry and Estate Crops.

Suripto, the former secretary general of the forestry ministry (like many Indonesians, he goes by only one name) charged last year that lumber companies and sawmills owned by a member of parliament were illegally processing ramin logs, the most valuable tree in the national park whose blond, straight-grained wood is used extensively in furniture, wood moldings, blinds and pool cues. Despite his findings, which followed an extensive investigation, the logging has continued and the member of parliament, Abdul Raysid, remains untouched by the law. He did not respond to repeated messages left at his office at the Tanjung Lingga Group, his logging and lumber-processing company.

So extensive is Raysid's influence in the area that the first chairman of a commission intended to oversee the management and conservation of the Tanjung Puting National Park was Raysid's brother.

"You must understand that people like Raysid are like Robin Hood in their localities," said Manurung, of Forest Watch. "They put a lot of money into their communities, and they have a lot of support from local people. So when government investigators, or investigators from groups like ours, go to the park to check on logging, there are gangs that try to intimidate us. Some people have been beaten up."

Most of the timber plundered from the national park and from Indonesia's other forests winds up in China or Europe, as well as the United States, according to environmental groups here.

In Bangsri, a nub of land protruding from the northern rim of central Java, local officials maintain that a breakdown of law and authority has fueled the surge in illegal logging, and with it, the end of the forests here. A battered two-lane macadam road meanders over hills and into valleys, past scrub land, tentative fields of corn and vast scars of rust-colored earth. Everywhere, stumps of what were once towering teak trees pepper the landscape.

"In 1999, this was all forest," said Rahmat Wijaya, the district manager for the state logging company, Perhutani, his hand sweeping across a barren vista stretching toward distant hills. "That year, thousands of people came and cut down the trees, local people and people from outside, both. The last tree was taken in November 2000. There was nothing we could do."

Private logging was not permitted in Bangsri, Wijaya said, only managed logging by the state company. But Suharto was compelled by mass protests to step down in May 1998, and with him went the authoritarian regime that had kept everyone in line. Under Suharto, logging was big business, but it was a business confined to the president's cronies, particularly Mohamad "Bob" Hasan, who was granted the most extensive logging concessions in the country. Hasan is now in prison for corruption, and the collapse of the Suharto regime was soon followed by a huge upsurge in illegal logging.

In one field, Wijaya pointed to motley rows of 4-foot-high broad-leaf teak saplings. "We have never tried to replant teak trees before," he explained, "but we are trying now. This is the first time. It takes 60 years to grow a teak tree. I will not be here when these are grown, if they survive."

Not far from where the teak forests used to be, H.M. Sugito sat, somewhat disconsolately, on a massive mahogany log at his lumber yard. "It's true," he said, surveying piles of teak logs and a scattering of 8-footlong mahogany tree trunks. "We have no more forests here. They're all gone. So now, I have to get my logs from elsewhere, from other places in Indonesia."

Asked if the teak logs in his roadside yard were legally cut, he shrugged. "When people bring logs here, we buy them," he said, a price list for his logs dangling from his fingers. "Why ask questions?"

At his yard, a teak log slightly over 6 feetlong and a foot in diameter sells for $290; the huge mahogany logs, 8 feetlong and nearly 3 feet in width, go for $445.

To Manurung of Forest Watch, such practices explain why his country's forests are vanishing. "You have to remember that the total capacity of the wood-processing industry and the pulp and paper processing industry is 80 million cubic meters," said. "Legal logging produces 17 million cubic meters. So you can see that there is a huge gap between supply and demand. And that gap is made up from illegal logging."

8/2/02
6:40:11 PM

Confronting the Nuclear Nightmare

NOTE FROM JEAN: After reading in the July's issue of National Geographic "Nuclear Waste - Seeking Solutions" I found it important to feature some material from it here...

"America's Nuclear Waste The production of nuclear power in the United States has resulted in a staggering amount of lethal waste. Despite the cleanup of many smaller sites, a mind-boggling amount of nuclear waste awaits safe disposal. What are your concerns about nuclear waste?"

Check their info at

http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0207/feature1/index.html

HERE IS AN EXCERPT:

The search for permanent solutions heats up as tons of highly radioactive sludge, spent fuel, and contaminated soil pile up around the nation.

World War II was still being fought in the Pacific during the first week of August 1945, a time when my father and I were vacationing in Atlantic City, New Jersey, eating soft-shell crabs and lazing by the ocean. In a games arcade I fed nickels to a toy machine gun and fired at Japanese Zero fighters flitting across a screen. On the boardwalk, rifles shouldered, platoons of United States soldiers marched and sang: The Stars and Stripes will fly over Tokyo, Fly over Tokyo, fly over Tokyo, The Stars and Stripes will fly over Tokyo, When the 991st gets there. . . .

One morning my dad showed me a newspaper with red headlines that said a huge bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later another bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered. The bombs were so big that the boys of the 991st wouldn't have to go to Tokyo after all.

The strong nuclear force, the binding energy that makes atomic nuclei the most tightfisted entities in all creation, had been sundered, unleashing enormous power-the equivalent of 15,000 tons (13,600 metric tons) of TNT in the Hiroshima bomb-as well as a race to create bigger weapons. Seven years later our first hydrogen device, code-named Mike, yielded a blast equal to 10.4 million tons (9.4 million metric tons) of TNT. Mike would have leveled all five boroughs of New York City.

By the mid-1960s, the height of the Cold War, the U.S. had stockpiled around 32,000 nuclear warheads, as well as mountains of radioactive garbage from the production of plutonium for these weapons. Just one kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, of plutonium required around a thousand tons of uranium ore. Generated from uranium bombarded by neutrons in a nuclear reactor, the plutonium was later separated from the uranium in hellish baths of acids and solvents still awaiting disposal.

A long deferred cleanup is now under way at 114 of the nation's nuclear facilities, which encompass an acreage equivalent to Rhode Island and Delaware combined. Many smaller sites, the easy ones, have been cleansed, but the big challenges remain. What's to be done with 52,000 tons (47,000 metric tons) of dangerously radioactive spent fuel from commercial and defense nuclear reactors? With 91 million gallons (345 million liters) of high-level waste left over from plutonium processing, scores of tons of plutonium, more than half a million tons of depleted uranium, millions of cubic feet of contaminated tools, metal scraps, clothing, oils, solvents, and other waste? And with some 265 million tons (240 million metric tons) of tailings from milling uranium ore-less than half stabilized-littering landscapes?

Get the whole story in the pages of National Geographic magazine.

Originally from

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Yucca-Mountain-Reax.html

Nevada Vows to Continue Nukes Fight (9 July, 2002)

LAS VEGAS (AP) -- After a 20-year losing battle to stop the government from burying the nation's nuclear waste in Nevada, opponents of the Yucca Mountain project promised Tuesday to press on. Others said it was time to give up and bargain. (...) The first shipments from 39 states are due to begin arriving in 2010. The site is being designed to house 77,000 tons of spent commercial, industrial and military nuclear fuel. The material will remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years. CLIP

Nuclear Waste, Terror And Intrigue - The Industry That Promised Energy

http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/4582

No one has solved the nuclear industry's most intractable problem: how to safely dispose of the 40,000 metric tons of highly-radioactive wastes the industry has produced to date, nor the estimated 65,000 tons that will soon come. (...) Even under the most optimistic forecasts, Yucca won't be ready to accept waste until 2010. Critics think 2015 or 2020 is more realistic. Transporting tens of thousands of tons of spent fuel to Yucca raises an unprecedented nuclear safety challenge. The wastes have to be transported by barge, truck, and train from nearly 100 locations, most of them more than 1,000 miles from Yucca Mountain. Given the possibility of transportation accidents or terrorist attack, anti-nuclear activists have dubbed them "mobile Chernobyls." But even if Yucca is approved, built, and safely filled with nuclear waste, the industry's waste problem will still remain unsolved. Yucca Mountain will have a maximum capacity of 77,000 tons of high-level waste. Even if no new nuclear plants are built, existing plants will produce about 105,000 metric tons of wastes by the end of their lifetimes, according to DOE's Allen Benson. They will produce even more if, as the Bush administration has proposed, reactors receive extensions of their operating licenses. The industry is pushing hard for a new generation of nuclear power stations, highlighting their alleged environmental benefits. The industry association touts nuclear as "the clean air energy" because it doesn't contribute to global warming, acid rain, or smog. Their friends in the White House are helping; the president's energy policy calls for constructing new nuclear plants and extending the lives of those still in operation. But in Maine, and around the nation, indulging in a new generation of nuclear reactors seems unwise when the hangover from the first round hasn't passed. "Before we even talk about additional nuclear power plants this issue needs to be solved," says Wiscasset's state senator Marge Kilkelly. "This is an issue that we're leaving to our kids and grandkids, and simply adding more to it is giving them an outrageous burden." Published: Jun 25 2002

Mobile Chernobyl? MapScience.org Tracks Nuclear Waste Through Everytown, USA

http://www.tompaine.com/op_ads/opad.cfm/ID/5883

If Yucca Mountain opens as scheduled, 77,000 tons of waste must travel American highways or railroads to get there. The potential for a serious accident has opponents calling the transport plan "Mobile Chernobyl."

See also:

The Bush Cabal: Turning the USA into a Banana Republic (July 15)

http://www.almartinraw.com/column63.html

7/31/02
2:23:31 PM

Bush's Messy War is Courting Total Disaster

By William Rivers Pitt

Tuesday, 30 July, 2002

At the same time Americans were celebrating what is left of their freedoms on the Fourth of July, civilians in the Uruzgan Province of Afghanistan were burying women and children massacred by U.S. forces during a wedding ceremony. According to reports, 48 civilians were killed and 100 more were wounded when Air Force attack aircraft swooped down and strafed the wedding with bombs and cannon fire.

The simple fact is bad enough. This disaster is no secret in Afghanistan and the rest of the Muslim world. The deaths of these innocents has undoubtedly birthed new would-be terrorists who will someday seek to die for the privilege of seeing Americans die. Our bombs and bullets have done marvelous recruiting work for Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

A preliminary United Nations report on its investigation of that attack is said to have found evidence of an attempted coverup by American forces of the attack. Shrapnel, bullets and bloodstains were removed from the scene. Civilian women at the site are reported to have been bound at the hands by our forces while the evidence was removed and destroyed. The massacre of civilians was horrific. The fact that we tried to cover it up is monstrous.

So it goes with Mr. Bush's war on terrorism. The fight in Afghanistan is far from over, as evidenced by recent attacks upon our troops in the Khost region. Several major media outlets reported some days ago that some of our troops were in fact killed, a claim the Pentagon vehemently denied. The UN report of American efforts to cover up the facts of the wedding massacre make such denials difficult to believe.

While American troops and Afghan civilians continue to bleed, Bush is shopping around for a new battlefront. Momentum is building across our national political landscape for a war with Iraq. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will hold hearings beginning Wednesday, July 31st, to explore the threat to America represented by Saddam Hussein. It is unlikely that any politician will stand up and ask the central questions - Where is the evidence that Hussein poses a threat? If he has weapons of mass destruction and we know it, why didn't we go to war against him months ago? Thanks to this cowardice, the Committee hearings will be little more than a rubber stamp for conflict. It seems all too likely that our forces will soon be engaged in Iraq.

The fallout from this conflict will be enormous. American troops will die, unless we engage in antiseptic aerial bombardment that will utterly fail to dislodge Hussein or his purported weapons. Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians will die no matter how we decide to wage the war. If America decides, in pure Bush unilateralist action, to wage war without the blessings of the international community or a United Nations mandate, our prestige on the world stage will be annihilated.

Worse, war in Iraq will drive the Middle East into a state of utter chaos. Reports from the British Foreign Affairs office paint a picture of a teetering Saudi Arabia on the brink of collapse. Infighting between the ruling Prince Abdullah and pro-Al Qaeda members of his royal family, fueled by Abdullah's pro-Western stance, has led observers to wonder how long this American ally within the House of Saud can stay on the throne. Popular uprisings against Abdullah have added fuel to this fire.

An American attack upon Iraq could very easily be the spark that ignites a terrible conflagration. If Prince Abdullah falls to an uprising exacerbated by our conflict in the region, the Saudi oil fields will come under the control of fanatics loyal to Al Qaeda's cause. This is precisely what Osama bin Laden wanted - the oil. Were this to happen, it is certain that Bush would commit our forces to defeating the insurgents. American war in the land of Mecca and Medina would precipitate a global crisis that would make the events of September 11th seem tame by comparison.

With the fight in Afghanistan still unfinished, with no evidence on the table to make the case that Saddam Hussein poses a threat to America, and with the terrifying implications of chaos in the Mideast if we do go to war there, why on earth would Bush and his people want to push towards battle?

In all likelihood, the answer lies within the geometry of the voting booth and the American marketplace. The Congressional midterm elections will be taking place in 99 days. Instability in the stock market, combined with reports of massive corporate fraud and mounting evidence that Bush and Cheney behaved like Lay and Fastow, augmented by a war on terror that does not seem to be getting anything done, has stripped the GOP of anything to run on in their respective races. By most reports, Republicans are facing an electoral wipeout to rival the Gingrich Revolution of 1994. A splendid little war, combined with the inevitable demands for patriotism, would serve to create Bush coattails where none currently exist.

Beyond that lies a motivation that is chilling in its inception. Larry Kudlow, a market analyst for CNBC, put forth the proposition in a column published on July 28th that war in Iraq is necessary to save the stock market. The article is entitled, 'Taking Back the Market - By Force.'

"The shock therapy of decisive war," opined Kudlow, "will elevate the stock market by a couple thousand points. We will know that our businesses will stay open, that our families will be safe and that our future will be unlimited. The world will be righted in this life-and-death struggle to preserve our values and our civilization."

If thinking such as this is mirrored within the Bush administration, and all indicators point to the sad fact that this is indeed the case, there will be little left of our civilization. The world will burn, the markets will crumble, and many more innocents will die. This war, already a mess on so many levels, flirts with Armageddon.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/07.31A.wrp.messy.htm

See also:

US accused of airstrike cover-up (July 29)

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-368297,00.html

AMERICAN forces may have breached human rights and then removed evidence

7/31/02
2:22:05 PM

Bush and Blair Agree to Terms for Iraq Attack

Tony Blair has privately told George Bush that Britain will support an American attack on Iraq if Saddam Hussein refuses to accept resumed UN weapons inspections. President Bush's "understanding", based on conversations with the prime minister, is that he can count on Mr Blair, according to well-placed Bush administration officials.

The agreement between the leaders comes as diplomatic, military and intelligence sources revealed details of a new plan for the invasion of Iraq, which could take place sooner than had previously been presumed. The plan involves a slimmed-down force of around 50,000 troops, which could be deployed within a matter of days.

It had been widely assumed that the US could not deploy sufficient numbers of troops needed for the task before the end of this year at the earliest. Now senior officials are saying a sudden military strike could be launched as soon as October.

Boeing and other US companies are working round the clock, producing satellite-guided "smart" bombs that would be used in huge air strikes to accompany any ground invasion. Although no plan of attack has yet been finalized, Mr Blair has already offered "in principle" to lend full British military and diplomatic backing for an assault.

CLIP

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,764197,00.html

---

See also:

The Coming October War in Iraq (24 July)

"As a guy who was part of the first Gulf War," said Ritter, who indeed served under Schwarzkopf in that conflict, "when you deploy that much military power forward - disrupting their training cycles, disrupting their operational cycles, disrupting everything, spending a lot of money - it is very difficult to pull them back without using them." "You got 20,000 Marines forward deployed in October," said Ritter, "you better expect war in October." (...) According to Ritter, there is no justification in fact, national security, international law or basic morality to justify this coming war with Iraq. In fact, when asked pointedly what the mid-October scheduling of this conflict has to do with the midterm Congressional elections that will follow a few weeks later, he replied, simply, "Everything." "This is not about the security of the United States," said this card-carrying Republican while pounding the lectern. "This is about domestic American politics. The national security of the United States of America has been hijacked by a handful of neo-conservatives who are using their position of authority to pursue their own ideologically-driven political ambitions. The day we go to war for that reason is the day we have failed collectively as a nation.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/07.25A.wrp.iraq.htm

Drop plans to attack Saddam, Tehran tells US (July 24)

Iran's president, Mohammad Khatami, warned the US yesterday to abandon its plans to attack Iraq and denounced what Tehran believes is a calculated Bush administration campaign to provoke mass insurrection in Iran. (...) Mr Khatami's remarks raised the possibility that a US military attack on Iraq could trigger a regional conflagration, drawing in Iran and possibly even Israel, Iran's sworn enemy. The reformist Iranian leader, who is engaged in a long-running battle at home with conservative opponents, spoke as officials in Washington suggested a significant hardening of US policy on Iran. The officials indicated that the Bush administration has decided to drop the policy of engagement supported by Britain, the EU and former US president Bill Clinton, and instead adopt a more confrontational approach, including open encouragement of anti-government forces in Iran. CLIP

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,762148,00.html

Special Report on Iraq

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/0,2759,423009,00.html

Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq

http://www.cam.ac.uk/societies/casi/

"If the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under-five in the country as a whole during the eight year period 1991 to 1998"

- Unicef, 12 August 1999 - http://www.unicef.org/newsline/99pr29.htm

"We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral."

- Denis Halliday, after resigning as first UN Assistant Secretary General and Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, The Independent, 15 October 1998

http://www.cam.ac.uk/societies/casi/halliday/index.html

CASI's July 2002 newsletter - all the latest information on the UN

sanctions regime, international developments, Iraq in British politics, and campaigns on Iraq.

http://www.cam.ac.uk/societies/casi/newslet/july02.pdf

7/31/02
2:19:16 PM

George And Dick's Amazing Corporate Misadventures

Has the avalanche of corporate revelations left your head spinning? Investigative journalist Stephen Pizzo offers a cheat sheet to scandals plaguing the White House.

(...) As the world's largest capitalist economy staggers under a cascade of corporate fraud, its two top leaders find themselves rendered ineffectual by of reports of their own alleged corporate malfeasance. The allegations now facing former executives of Enron, WorldCom, Quest, Xerox, et al, bear more than a passing similarity to the behavior of both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney during their days as corporate executives. The recent blizzard of corporate revelations has left investor's minds (and guts) churning. What is it exactly that Bush and Cheney did that makes them part of the problem rather than part of a solution? Here's a cheat-sheet you can bring to your next game of Not-So-Trivial Pursuits:

Harken Energy:

- 1986: At the time Bush's oil company Spectrum 7, was facing bankruptcy. The only real asset it had was the name of the sitting vice president on its door. Rescue came in the form of Harken Energy. Harken absorbed Spectrum and Bush received Harken stock. He also won a lucrative consulting contract, liberal stock options and a seat on Harken's board.

- 1987: With its new high-profile director in place Harken proceeded with a $25 million stock offering underwritten by a Little Rock, Arkansas, brokerage house, Stephens, Inc.

- 1987-89: Despite the fact that Harken experienced multi-million losses year after year, Bush was granted $180,375 in unsecured company loans --loans that were later "forgiven." In all during Bush's tenure on Harken's board the company approved over $341,000 in loans to directors and officers all of which were later forgiven.

- 1989: Harken faced the prospect of having to report year-end losses of $13.4 million. So, the company arranges -- and the board approves -- a sham sale of Harken subsidiary, Aloha Petroleum, to a group of Harken insiders. The company sells 80% of Aloha to the group, which pays for it with a $7.9 million loan from Harken. This manufactured "profit" allows Harken to reduce its reported losses for 1989 to a less shocking $3.3 million.

- 1990: In January Harken shocks the oil industry with the news that the little money-losing Texas company had beat Amoco and won an exclusive contract to drill for oil in the Gulf nation of Bahrain. Harken's stock jumps in price. The deal came at a critical moment for Harken. The company was broke. Worse than broke, it owned over $150 million to banks. Harken's board had formed a restructuring committee on which Bush was assigned to sit. The restructuring committee would work with outside consultants from Smith Barney to plumb the depths of Harken's troubles and come up with solutions.

That June, Bush found his own solution by unloading the bulk of his Harken stock -- 212,140 shares -- reaping $848,560. Bush did filed SEC Form 144 --"Intention to Sell" before his sale. What he failed to do was follow up with the required SEC Form 4, which provides the SEC with the critical information needed to determine whether or not a company insider traded on public or non-public information.

Form 4 provides the SEC with two critical pieces of information -- how much and when -- exactly how many shares did Bush sell and the exact date of the sale. Instead of filing his Form 4 by the 10th of the month following the sale, as SEC rules require, Bush waited 8 months before filing the form. A lot of water had gone under the bridge by then. Harken's restructuring committee's report had been made public showing the company lost $23 million. Bush's sale on June 22, 1990, occurred several weeks before that news was made public.

In 1991 the SEC was asked to look into Bush's tardy filing and the SEC ordered Harken to reverse the sham sale of Aloha Petroleum. Harken restated its 1989 earnings to show a $13.4 million loss. At time of the SEC inquiry into Bush's insider trading charge, James A. Doty was the SEC's General Counsel. Doty now says he recused himself from the probe. But, the investigation was quickly closed without ever interviewing Bush or any other Harken director.

Dick Cheney and Halliburton

CLIP - I recommend you go read the rest of this revealing investigative

article at http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=2988

Source: http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=2988

See also:

Harken Stock Sale Timeline

This chart shows that, in June 1990 when Bush sold his Harken stock he did so after Harken's audit committee learned the company would suffer a $23 million loss but before those findings were made public two months later. Bush sat on Harken's audit committee.

http://www.thedailyenron.com/documents/stockprice.jpeg

Documents Held Hostages: Day 446 July 30, 2002

Florida Recount Funded by Enron/Halliburton The Bush/Cheney 2000 campaign waited until the last day - July 15, 2002 -to file papers showing just who paid for the Florida recount efforts that landed them in the White House. Americans now know that two corporate scofflaws, Enron and Halliburton, played key roles in the Bush/Cheney victory. And, in Florida it seems another Jeb Bush business deal has surfaced - and it ain't pretty.

http://www.thedailyenron.com/

HERE IS AN EXCERPT:

According to papers filed with the IRS on July 15, nearly $14 million magically poured into the Bush/Cheney Florida recount effort - four times the amount raised by the Gore/Lieberman camp. The money flowed in so fast, and in such enormous chunks, that Bush campaign officials - unaccustomed to Bush's perennial good fortune - were dumbfounded. "I think we were a little bit stunned by the amount we received," Benjamin Ginsberg, a Bush attorney for the recount, told USA Today. According to IRS documents, the Bush campaign took in $13.8 million, most in large contributions. Listed among those large contributors were Bush and Cheney's two most reliable genies -Enron and Halliburton. While the Gore/Lieberman campaign filed its IRS disclosures of their Florida recount expenditures months ago, the Bush's recount fund filed the required forms at the very last moment allowed by law. July 15 was the final day of an IRS amnesty program for groups that hadn't already complied with the law. CLIP "Eighteen months after the election, we find that the (Bush) administration literally flew into office on the Enron corporate jet," said Jennifer Palmieri, press secretary for the Democratic National Committee. "The administration's close ties with unscrupulous corporations like Enron and Halliburton prevent it from showing real leadership on corporate reform."

http://www.thedailyenron.com/documents/20020730085550-68379.asp

Sen. Clinton: Supreme Court 'Installed' Bush

``In addition to installing an American president, the current Supreme Court has invalidated federal laws at the most astounding rate in our nation's history,'' Clinton said to applause and laughter.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/07.26A.clinton.sc.htm

Hush Money for Halliburton? Administration's Economic C-Team

The Bush administration figured this would be a good time to award Halliburton Corp. a new defense contract. (...) Both the timing and circumstances surrounding the choice of Brown & Root are raising eyebrows.

http://www.thedailyenron.com/documents/20020729082640-13097.asp

Bush: Corporate Confidence Man

http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=2989

The War on Terrorism's Gravy Train

Cheney's Former Company Wins Afghanistan War Contracts

http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=2471

7/31/02
2:08:25 PM

Kiss My Posse Comitatus

Kinky sexual position? New vodka drink?

No, just another old law Dubya wants to poke at in the name of fear

by Mark Morford, The San Francisco Chronicle, July 24, 2002

Of course they sneak the more diabolical stuff under your radar when they know you're too busy watching your WorldCom stock tank and your AOL stock tank and all those thick snickering gold-plated megaconglomerate CEOs smirk and shirk and declare bankruptcy and get their financial wrists slapped and do zero jail time and then get invited to Dubya's ranch for ribs and a new Cabinet post.

It's called the Posse Comitatus Act, it's being quietly bandied about in the White House and among top military brass, and it's got nothing to do with a tub of warm margarine and some carefully placed tongues at some sort of delightful SF fetish orgy. But it should.

It's actually a Reconstruction-era law (circa 1878) that absolutely goddamn right prohibits any division of the U.S. military -- whether Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines -- from becoming involved in arrests and seizures and conflicts -- any aspect of domestic law enforcement, actually. As it should be.

In other words, the Posse Comitatus Act means the Army can't march in and arrest you for, say, growing medical pot in your basement, Marines can't be sent in to crack skulls at a WTO protest, the president can't call in clandestine patrols of masked Green Berets to shove burning tires around the bodies of liberal hecklers at a GOP/Exxon pep rally. Among other limitations.

And it's been obvious and freedom ensuring and clearly enforced for well over 100 years because, well, we aren't Stalinist Russia, and we aren't insane, and most of us are well aware that an overzealous military empowered with such draconian authority is essentially what every sociopathic fist-clenched dictator from Marcos to Hitler used to gain power and maintain control and hack away at the very soul of humanity and pick up their personal dry cleaning on the nation's tab.

And now, yes, the U.S. is reconsidering the original law.

It's true. "A complete re-thinking" of Posse Comitatus, as ordered by Geedubya and as scowled over by oddly neckless Homeland Security overlord Tom Ridge and as endorsed by two prominent military-drunk Democrats no less, because it's a new world order and icky terrorists are afoot and you never know what sort of chaos looms and you should be very very afraid, they say, oh please be afraid, otherwise this sort of thing won't work at all.

Because apparently it's just not enough to re-arm our nuclear arsenal and engage the country in an endless indefinable budget-reaming war and detain immigrants for no reason, scour your email and scan your shoes at the airport.

Oh dear no no no, say the powers that be -- we aren't really considering giving the military any such freedom-crushing control, wouldn't even think of allowing the federal government to be suddenly armed with such despotic authority over you swarthy and increasingly war-wary citizens including you obvious evildoers sporting terrifying airport-paralyzing belt buckles. No no no. Well, maybe a little.

They are considering it. They are re-thinking the military's role in policing domestic affairs. Because as we all know it is a time of forced paranoia and false terrorist warnings and of increasingly obvious co-opting of 9/11 for oil and powermongering and political gain on both sides of the aisle. And you know what that means. Exactly: The government does whatever the hell it wants, calls it anti-terrorism, and please repress your deep cringing.

And hey while everyone's still scared and while everyone's scrambling to get the hell out of the stock market why not sneak a peek at some old well-established laws to see if we can't reach just a tiny bit further into the orifices of your personal life, only if we absolutely have to which, gosh sorry, it looks like we do, just a little, this won¹t hurt a bit, oops sorry was that your sense of decency and outrage? Let's just snip that right off.

There is of course negligible chance that the government will actually overhaul Posse Comitatus to allow the Air Force to bust up your rave and confiscate your porn collection and arrest your Pakistani neighbor for selling bootleg flags.

There is almost zero chance that Congress would stand for anything remotely close to this; the country is just not quite dumb or culturally numbed enough to allow them to ream this sort of thing through without enormous outcry and voter disapproval and much hurling of patriotic tomatoes.

But they are considering it. And perhaps this should be frightening enough. They are digging it out and dusting it off and poking their forked tongues into its crevices, re-examining how to better police the nation and crack your skull if necessary and keep you in check and make sure everyone's extra-super lockdown safe or else.

Thoughts for the author? email him at: mailto:mmorford@sfgate.com

Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly email column and newsletter.

Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters

Source: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2002/07/24/notes072402.DTL&nl=fix

7/31/02
2:02:19 PM

Bush's Push for a Secret Government

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft are the Four Horsemen of Autocracy, passionate practitioners of secretive, executive government. (...) There's the secret government that Bush established; the constant refusal to release public records, including the administration's contacts with Enron and Halliburton; Bush's attempts to hide his father's presidential records and his own gubernatorial papers from public view; the secret war on terrorism, complete with secret arrests and closed military tribunals; the decision to hide the results of the Pentagon's Star Wars missile tests; the refusal to make public the SEC investigative files on Bush's slippery stock deal with Harken Energy Inc. And now there's Bush's plan for a massive Homeland Security Department, creating a new domestic police agency with sweeping powers. This bureaucracy will have more armed federal agents with arrest power than any other branch of government. Yet George W.'s plan would shroud the Homeland agency's actions in secrecy -- he wants to exempt it from both the Freedom of Information Act and the Whistleblower Protection Act. CLIP

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13642

Are we headed toward martial law?

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/07.26B.martial.law.htm

Rumsfeld May Quit Pentagon to Take on Top Homeland Role

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/07.27B.rums.may.Q.htm

THE SECRET SHADOW GOVERNMENT: A STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS

http://truedemocracy.net/td3/shadow/s01.html

Kiss My Posse Comitatus

This law absolutely goddamn right prohibits any division of the U.S. military -- whether Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines -- from becoming involved in arrests and seizures and conflicts -- any aspect of domestic law enforcement. And now, yes, the U.S. is reconsidering the original law.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2002/07/24/notes072402.DTL&nl=fix

Bush Disapproval at Pre-Attack Level

http://www.msnbc.com/news/784014.asp

As Ex-Security Chief Testifies he was Tortured to Lie

MILOSEVIC "TRIAL" BLOWS UP IN HAGUE PROSECUTOR'S FACE!

http://emperors-clothes.com/milo/rade.htm

7/31/02
2:00:05 PM

"Our Constitution does not allow anyone but Congress to declare "War", and the lives of our sons and daughters must not be sacrificed for political posturing, nor used to draw the curtain of darkness over the misdeeds of this administration."

Taken from "The War for Votes"

http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/02/07/27_votes.html

7/31/02
1:58:28 PM

Here's what's new at GNN.tv:

1. Paradigm Shift: Best-selling author (The Chalice and the Blade) Riane Eisler breaks down the 'dominator' paradigm in this new CoIntel feature:

http://www.guerrillanews.com/globalization/cointel/567.html

2. War in October: Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter says everything we are being told about Iraq is a lie:

http://www.guerrillanews.com/war_on_terrorism/doc622.html

3. Our Guerrillas of the Week aren't afraid of anybody...

http://www.guerrillanews.com/corporate_crime/doc624.html

4. Stephen Marshall reports on his trip to Brazil and the workshop which produced a new GNN video in 9 days... and in a foreign language:

http://www.guerrillanews.com/bunker/west/doc625.html

Have a peaceful end of summer.

love and (r)evolution,

GNN

7/31/02
1:57:18 PM

SciTech Daily Review

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992589

Whether or not you believe in the paranormal may depend largely on your brain chemistry

Remember your vitamins! Then again, it seems that with a few exceptions you might as well forget them

http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/325/7357/173

The fossilised remains of prehistoric giant marsupial lions, the world's biggest kangaroo and a wombat the size of a small car have been discovered in caves in Western Australia

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/2160732.stm

Sesame Street is trying hard to teach kids another valuable lesson, by taking the radical step of introducing an HIV-positive Muppet to the South African version of the programme

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13637

A storm in a test tube: If a white couple gives birth to black twins following fertility treatment, what business is it of the courts, asks Barbara Hewson

http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/00000006D99C.htm

The half-life of ununoctium was disappointingly brief: a mere three years between its discovery (or creation) and its removal from the Periodic Table under a cloud of scientific misconduct charges

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/23/science/23ESSA.html

7/31/02
1:54:50 PM

UTNE WEB WATCH

The Best of the Alternative Web

FREEDOM TO SHAME

by Bruce Schimmel, City Paper

-- Now public shame through an invasion of privacy is being added to the arsenal of anti-abortionists.

THE ETHICS OF EATING

by Rich Heffern, National Catholic Reporter

-- Mass food production has not only robbed our food of its flavor, it has taken its very life.

THE PAJAMA PARTY THAT FAILED

by Shannon James, Independent Women's Forum

-- The Oxygen network promised women a "breath of fresh air." So why does it resemble a stale, on-air shopping mall?

Links to the above articles: http://www.utne.com/webwatch

7/31/02
1:53:22 PM

Planet Ark World Environment News

WHO issues dengue fever warning - SWITZERLAND http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17102/story.htm

US proposes pollution cuts for motorcycles, boats - USA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17085/story.htm

US Northeast utilities urge energy conservation - USA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17092/story.htm

Monsanto says its shifting strategy on GM wheat - USA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17091/story.htm

Group of pilot whales stranded off Cape Cod, 8 die - USA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17084/story.htm

GM to sell fuel cells for emergency backup - USA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17088/story.htm

Bush sends Congress plan for clean power plants - USA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17083/story.htm

Ford talks to Toyota on hybrid vehicles - WSJ - USA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17089/story.htm

FEATURE - US weapons arsenal becomes wildlife refuge - USA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17095/story.htm

INTERVIEW - Envoy says earth summit back from the brink - UK http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17094/story.htm

Agent Orange victims need urgent help, experts say - SWEDEN http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17087/story.htm

Italian police probe GM soy food labelling - ITALY http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17097/story.htm

Japan cuts price of whale meat from hunts - report - JAPAN http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17099/story.htm

Finnish study links pollution with heart disease - FINLAND http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17093/story.htm

Chinese bears beg for cola in dog days of summer - CHINA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17098/story.htm

China sentences four in radioactive material theft - CHINA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17103/story.htm

Cambodia adopts law to fight illegal logging - CAMBODIA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17090/story.htm

Brazil exports organic cocoa to Switzerland - BRAZIL http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17086/story.htm

Coal bulkship still stuck near Great Barrier Reef - AUSTRALIA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17100/story.htm

ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS PICTURES:

USA: Rescuer Cradles Head of one of 55 Beached Whales on Cape Cod http://www.planetark.org/envpicstory.cfm/newsid/17105

USA: Baby Elephant Seeks Shade at the National Zoo http://www.planetark.org/envpicstory.cfm/newsid/17104

7/31/02
1:51:42 PM

THE WEEKLY SPIN, Wednesday, July 31, 2002

sponsored by PR WATCH

http://www.prwatch.org

The Weekly Spin features selected news summaries with links to further information about current public relations campaigns. It is emailed free each Wednesday to subscribers. Feel free to forward this message to others.

THIS WEEK'S NEWS

1. So Many Scandals, So Little Time

2. The War for Ideas and Ideals

3. Bush Creates "Office of Global Communications"

4. Intimidation in Guatemala

5. US Needs More PR To Counter "Arrogant" Image

6. Judicial Watch's "PR Stunt"

7. More Junk from the Junkman

8. Ethical Help for WorldCom

9. "Restoring Trust" the DOD Way

1. SO MANY SCANDALS, SO LITTLE TIME

"With the avalanche of corporate accounting scandals that have rocked the markets recently, it's getting hard to keep track of them all--but our Corporate Scandal Sheet does the job," boasts Forbes magazine. "Here we'll follow accounting imbroglios only--avoiding insider-trading allegations like those plaguing ImClone, since chronicling every corporate transgression would simply be impractical."

http://www.forbes.com/home/2002/07/25/accountingtracker.html

2. THE WAR FOR IDEAS AND IDEALS

"The biotechnology industry and more specifically the agrobiotechnology sector just don't get it. They and their PR and communications consultants believe that risk theory holds the key understanding and managing opposition to biotechnology," self-described corporate activist and ePublic Relations president Ross S. Irvine writes. "If industry would open its eyes and cast a wider gaze it would find a much more fruitful avenue of study to understand biotech opponents and how they work. ... The biotechnology industry can learn much from activists but it needs a dramatic change of mind. First, it must admit that it's in a conflict. Second, it must face the fact that in a conflict there are winners and losers. Third, it must acknowledge that while it's pleasant to talk about win-win scenarios and building 'relationships' with critics, activists are pursuing absolute victory."

http://www.epublicrelations.org/PRWarIdeas.html

3. BUSH CREATES "OFFICE OF GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS"

The Bush administration has decided to create a permanent, fully staffed "Office of Global Communications" to "coordinate the administration's foreign policy message and supervise America's image abroad, according to senior officials," writes Karen DeYoung. The office will allow the White House "to exert more control over what has become one of the hottest areas of government and private-sector initiatives since Sept. 11. Known as 'public diplomacy,' it attempts to address the question President Bush posed in his speech to Congress the week after the terrorist attacks: 'Why do they hate us?'"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18822-2002Jul29.html

4. INTIMIDATION IN GUATEMALA

Guatemala remains of the most horrifying legacies of the work of Edward Bernays, the legendary "father of public relations." On behalf of the United Fruit company, Bernays orchestrated the propaganda behind a military coup that overthrew Guatemala's elected government, ushering in decades of tyranny under regimes whose brutality rivaled the Nazis as they condemned hundreds of thousands of people (mostly members of the country's impoverished Maya Indian majority) to dislocation, torture and death. Kevin Sullivan reports that this legacy continues today, as human rights activists "face increasing death threats and other forms of intimidation aimed at preventing exposure of atrocities committed during the country's 36-year civil war."

More web links related to this story are available at:

http://www.prwatch.org/spin/July_2002.html#1027828801

SOURCE: Washington Post, July 28, 2002

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10616-2002Jul27

5. US NEEDS MORE PR TO COUNTER "ARROGANT" IMAGE

"The United States is doing a poor job of countering growing anti-American sentiment overseas and must revamp the way it promotes its foreign policies abroad, the Council on Foreign Relations contends," the New York Times writes. "In a report to be released this week, the council asserts that many countries, in particular predominantly Islamic ones, see the United States as 'arrogant, self-indulgent, hypocritical, inattentive and unwilling or unable to engage in cross-cultural dialogue.' ... The [report's] recommendations include: expanding the use of political campaign techniques, including polling, to shape attitudes toward the United States; establishing a White House unit to coordinate efforts, headed by a senior adviser to the president; and creating an independent Corporation for Public Diplomacy, modeled after the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to develop programs to communicate American messages overseas."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/29/international/29INFO.html

6. JUDICIAL WATCH'S "PR STUNT"

The White House allegedly threatened a Judicial Watch process server with arrest while he was trying to provide legal notification of a lawsuit to Vice President Dick Cheney. The conservative organization Judicial Watch has brought a lawsuit against Cheney for fraudulent accounting practices at Halliburton Corporation while Cheney was the company's chief executive. AP reports Cheney's communications counselor Mary Matalin called Judicial Watch's announcement about the process server a "PR stunt," saying that the lawsuit should have been delivered to Cheney's private attorney, Terrence O'Donnell of the Washington law firm Williams & Connolly. But Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton told Reuters, "You don't serve lawsuits on lawyers, you serve them on defendants." Judicial Watch says it has successfully served lawsuits on Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton while they were in the White House.

SOURCE: Associated Press, July 26, 2002; Reuters, July 26, 2002

More web links related to this story are available at:

http://www.prwatch.org/spin/July_2002.html#1027656001

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGAWIEQK44D.html

7. MORE JUNK FROM THE JUNKMAN

PR Watch has exposed the antics of Steven ("the Junkman") Milloy more times than we can stand to remember, as he flacks for the tobacco industry, speaks up for asbestos, and attacks environmentalists as "terrorists" and "fear profiteers." Nowadays he writes a column for Fox News, where he is helping publicize a PR stunt concocted by the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), an industry front group that is threatening to sue Whole Foods for baking bread which (like all bread) contains trace carcinogens that ACSH says are harmless. (Milloy and ACSH haven't always been this chummy. ACSH director Elizabeth Whelan, who disagrees with Milloy's defense of secondhand cigarette smoke, once accused him of "junking all science.")

SOURCE: Fox "News" Channel, July 26, 2002

More web links related to this story are available at:

http://www.prwatch.org/spin/July_2002.html#1027656000

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,58760,00.html

8. ETHICAL HELP FOR WORLDCOM

The APCO PR firm, which is currently representing WorldCom in its ongoing bankruptcy scandal, has hired Tim Croasdaile as a senior vice president. Croasdaile formerly chaired the National Investor Relations Institute's ethics committee. He should fit right in at APCO, which has worked previously to set up deceptive front groups for clients such as the tobacco industry and Russian robber baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

SOURCE: O'Dwyer's PR Daily, July 25, 2002

More web links related to this story are available at:

http://www.prwatch.org/spin/July_2002.html#1027569600

http://www.odwyerpr.com/0725apco.htm

9. "RESTORING TRUST" THE DOD WAY

In a feature article "Restoring Trust," PR Week talked to PR experts about restoring confidence in the business world. "American corporations have to understand that the best thing they can do right now is to communicate: completely, honestly, transparently, and often," Notre Dame University business professor James O'Rourke told PR Week. "If more CEOs sounded like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in their briefings, we'd all be better off. If things aren't good, say so and explain what you're going to do about it. If they're fine, tell us the good news, and explain how it got that way," O'Rourke said.

SOURCE: PR Week, July 22, 2002

7/31/02
1:39:20 PM

ENVIRONMENT NEWS SERVICE

http://ens-news.com/ens/jul2002/2002-07-30-03.asp

"We Cover the Earth For You"

WORLD SUMMIT ATTRACTS 106 LEADERS, NOT USA

NEW YORK, New York, July 30, 2002 (ENS) - Leaders of 106 countries have officially indicated that they will attend the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development set for Johannesburg, South Africa from August 26 to September 4, the UN announced today.

BUSH INTRODUCES CLEAR SKIES LEGISLATION

http://ens-news.com/ens/jul2002/2002-07-30-07.asp

LONGLEAF PINE PLANTATION BECOMES PRESERVE

NEW YORK, New York, July 30, 2002 (ENS) - One of the world's last stretches of longleaf pine forest will now be managed, and eventually owned, by The Nature Conservancy, the New York based Greentree Foundation announced Monday. The private foundation, created by the late Mrs. John Hay Whitney, chose the Conservancy to manage the 5,200 acre Greenwood Plantation in Georgia, considered one of the most biologically diverse privately held properties in the southeastern United States.

For full text and graphics visit:

http://ens-news.com/ens/jul2002/2002-07-30-06.asp

ANALYSIS: RESTRUCTURING TAXES TO SHELTER THE EARTH

By Bernie Fischlowitz-Roberts

WASHINGTON, DC, July 30, 2002 (ENS) - Many countries have implemented taxes on environmentally destructive products and activities while simultaneously reducing taxes on income. The scale of tax shifting has been relatively small so far, accounting for only three percent of tax revenues worldwide. It is increasingly clear, however, that countries are recognizing the power of tax restructuring to reach environmental goals.

For full text and graphics visit:

http://ens-news.com/ens/jul2002/2002-07-30-02.asp

ENVIRONMENT NEWS SERVICE AMERISCAN: JULY 30, 2002

AIR POLLUTION LINKED TO HEART DAMAGE FROM EXERCISE

NEW REPORT HIGHLIGHTS SUCCESSFUL TRAFFIC PLANS

FOUR NEW YORKERS GUILTY OF ASBESTOS CRIMES

LOS ANGELES SPENDS MILLIONS TO SLASH EMISSIONS

BLACK CARP MAY BE BANNED

MISSOURI FISH KILL COST $3.3 MILLION

NASA SENSORS COULD DETECT UTILITY LEAKS

PARK MANAGER HONORED FOR BLOCKING DRILLING

For full text and graphics visit:

http://ens-news.com/ens/jul2002/2002-07-30-09.asp

7/31/02
1:36:42 PM

Peace and Justice Forces Rally to McKinney

by Frances M. Beal

AIPAC, the American Israel Political Affairs Committee is tasting blood with the defeat of Earl Hilliard in Alabama. The U.S. Congressman had enraged the Zionist lobbying group by often voting against legislation that one-sidedly favored Israel and introducing a bill to drop sanctions against Libya and Iraq.

AIPAC is now aiming its big financial and political fangs at Cynthia McKinney from Georgia's 4th congressional district. She faces a primary runoff on August 20th, which for all intents and purposes, determines the general election with an overwhelmingly Democrat constituency. Her stance on a balanced Mid East policy and her outspoken criticism of the Israeli occupation army has enraged AIPAC and it has arranged for hundreds of thousands of dollars to be poured into her opponent's campaign coffers.

McKinney's Black female opponent is a former Judge who was appointed by Sen. Zell Miller, a Georgia democrat who initially appointed this Jonetta come lately to the bench. He has joined the AIPAC chorus with an unprecedented assault on Democratic Party colleague McKinney. Thus, AIPAC is joined in this all-sided assault by the local and national apparatus of the Democratic Party because of McKinney's views on peace, human rights and civil liberties.

The question posed sharply is whether progressives will permit AIPAC and the Dixiecrats to foist Israeli policy on voters as the defining issue for the mainly Black district in the Atlanta suburb McKinney represents. More importantly, will they tolerate AIPAC to further subvert 37 years of struggle to implement the 1965 Voting Rights Act by its use of the discriminatory campaign financing laws to oust an African American woman whose outstanding performance on a peace and justice agenda has earned her the hatred of the racists and the war mongers.

Months of slanderous assaults have been directed at this first African American congresswoman from Georgia, including labeling her a "loony" for suggesting that the Bush Administration be investigated for what it may or may not have known and failed to act upon about the tragic events of September 11th. Even though she has been vindicated by subsequent exposures, the attacks on McKinney's "intemperate remarks" continue unabated.

Black politicians, however, are beginning to feel threatened by outside support of Black stooges and have begun to mobilize on behalf of McKinney, the first African American female elected to the U.S. Congress from Georgia. The Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials (GABEO) unanimously adopted a resolution on June 22nd accusing Zell Miller of "scurrilous comments" and demanded that he repair his relations with the Black community by offering McKinney "the same respect given to other elected leaders in the state of Georgia."

The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, on the other hand, has been unrelenting in it attempts to discredit McKinney. "[She] has shown herself to be a fringe lunatic, well outside the congressional mainstream," writes Cynthia Tucker in a typical commentary. She asserts that McKinney is "incapable of aiding any cause," and exhibiting an astonishing level of hypocrisy writes, "The plight of the Palestinians and their desire for an independent homeland is a serious cause deserving of thoughtful, mainstream advocates. Hilliard wasn't one and neither is McKinney."

The problem with Tucker's own "intemperate remarks" is that there are no "thoughtful, mainstream advocates" prepared to take up the defense of Palestinian sovereign rights. But there are others, and they are determined to build a financial and political fight back to protect the outspoken advocate that is not afraid of AIPAC's vilification nor its financial war chests.

Nevertheless, spirit and courage alone do not win campaigns in the year 2002. It takes grassroots organizing combined with financial support -lots and lots of financial support. A national grassroots campaign to provide Cynthia McKinney with the necessary funds to fend off AIPAC's blood lust has emerged from coast to coast. Peace and justice forces nationwide are combining with local Black political organizations to draw a line in the sand.

Noting, "We must stand by those who stand by us," CAIR-PAC, a Moslem based group has called for its members to "step forward" and donate to McKinney's campaign. "Her victory will also give strength to those other members of Congress who also want to vote their conscience on issues relating to the Middle East" CAIR-PAC concludes. Other Arab American groups are also soliciting their members for financial support for her re-election efforts.

Typical of the peace forces galvanizing support is: Just Peace Contacts, which includes many Jewish activists. They have set an ambitious goal. "Through our networks across the country of Jews, Arabs, Christians and others active in the struggle for Justice in Israel and Palestine, we ought to be able to raise $100,000 by August 1," they say.

Lastly, a variety of Black websites and free thinkers like The Konformist are also carrying calls for financial assistance as are scores of listserves of racial justice and peace advocates.

The irony here is that Hilliard's defeat in Alabama may very well have provided the impetus for Cynthia McKinney to amass the financial means necessary to push back AIPAC's reactionary assault on Black political power in Georgia and on a congressional peace advocate nationwide.

Frances M. Beal is a political columnist for the San Francisco Bayview newspaper and national secretary of the Black Radical Congress. Contact fmbeal@igc.org

For Cynthia McKinney's Congressional Web Site, see:

http://www.house.gov/mckinney/welcome.htm

7/31/02
1:35:03 PM

Massive Worldwide Whale Beachings

The following was sent to a Stop LFAS Worldwide Network:

This message will read like an itinerary because there's quite a lot going on and I don't want to ignore a detail which might later prove to be important. Throughout yesterday evening I was receiving calls and emails regarding yesterday's whale strandings. Thanks go out to those of you who contacted me and took the time to offer everyone a greater glimpse as to what's going on. Certainly, I am sure that some of you who are involved in large and well sponsored environmental organizations have been kept busy with these events.

First, let's begin with the ironic twist of the day. While multiple whale strandings were occurring, the NRDC was in Federal Court doing it's best to stop LWAD. (How about that for a dramatic backdrop? ) "The NRDC is demanding that the testing program -- known as "LWAD," short for Littoral Warfare Advanced Development -- be stopped until a full-blown environmental review can be done, and environmental guidelines for LWAD can be set. The government is arguing, in turn, that it already is taking extraordinary measures to protect marine life, and that the NRDC's case should be dismissed."

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,54077,00.html

And of course, there is a second irony which revolves around last week's decision by National Marine Fisheries Service to approve the US Navy's permit to kill marine life with SURTASS LFA Sonar. Because of that decision, I've been receiving a great many speculative remarks about the likelihood that the whales could be stranding due to a sonar incident. However, at this point, we have no knowledge of any such sonar events or deployments. We do have multiple strandings all kicking-in around the same time. (Don't let the international dateline confuse the point... they all hit ground around roughly the same time.)

The following stranding incidents have been reported in the news:

1. Monday - July 29, 2002

A Beaked whale was found dead off Faial and was taken to the University of Azores in Horta for Necropsy....probably a Sowerbys

2. Monday - July 29, 2002

DENNIS, Mass. (AP) - More than 50 pilot whales beached themselves on a stretch of Cape Cod sand Monday and nine of them died before vacationers and other volunteers could push the animals back out to deeper water in a feverish rescue effort. While pilot whale strandings are not considered to be rare, the event coincides with other ill-reported incidents of US Navy exercises which included bombings north of Cape Cod earlier this summer & coincides with the discovery of a blown-to-bits baby right whale there as well as the recent stranding on Nantucket of a Sperm whale.

3. Tuesday - July 30, 2002

SYDNEY - A pod of 54 whales died after washing up on a remote stretch of beach near the Great Australian Bight, conservation officials said. Western Australian Conservations and Land Management (CALM) workers said they feared the carcasses - weighing up to five tonnes each -would be devoured by sharks before a mass grave could be dug along Tooregullup Beach, on the Indian Ocean southeast of Perth. These were False Killer Whales which are found worldwide in tropical and temperate waters. They favour deep water but occasionally come close to the beach.

4. Tuesday - July 30. 2002

EASTHAM, Mass. About 40 pilot whales became stranded on a Cape Cod beach Tuesday, just one day after volunteers pushed them back out to sea from another beach. The development is "pretty bad news" and may be a sign the whales are dying, an expert said. The small black whales, which had been tagged on Monday before being freed from Chapin Beach in Dennis, were found stuck in shallow water Tuesday morning about 25 miles to the east. 5. Tuesday - July 30, 2002

The Nando Times has a map of the area where the strandings occurred on both Monday and Tuesday on Cape Cod.

http://www.nandotimes.com/healthscience/story/482900p-3856776c.html

The Washington Post has an aerial photo of the rescuers trying to work with the whales. I'm sure it was very thoughtful of the press to totally freak out the whales with their helicopter.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20618-2002Jul30.html

CNN is running the story of the second day of strandings on Cape Cod with even more aerial photographs.

http://europe.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/07/30/whales.beached.again/index.html

Additionally, the story is running in these news sources:

Massachusetts Whales Stranded Again, Likely to Die - Reuters

http://reuters.com/news.jhtml?type=science

Rescued Pilot Whales Trapped Again - Discovery Channel

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-1915811,00.html

Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 13:00:44 -0700 Subject: [stoplfas] LFA comments as sent from a Contributor Reply-To: stoplfas@yahoogroups.com

The author's name of this following commentary wanted to kept anonymous.

Regardless of what we might wish to see in the following article, the Navy has basically weaseled into position for carte blanc operation of LFAS. They no longer have to sneak. They are no longer in "test mode". They no longer have to keep the duration brief. They no longer have to keep the volume down. For FIVE YEARS. You mentioned checking the proximity of the squid event to the Cape Cod whale event. This may not matter. You have already seen what this thing can do in "test mode" from a single transmitter at low power. Now the leash is off. There is nothing to stop them from running LFAS at inconceivable volume from a global network of transmitters already in place.

Back in a grade school, a semi tractor once parked outside my classroom with its diesel engine idling. The idle speed was particularly slow and the truck emitted a peculiar subsonic vibration, concentrated within the structure of the school building, the classroom, whatever, which produced rising discomfort, dissociation, and irritability throughout the class. Everyone became more and more upset, angry, and panicked. My bodily functions seemed to be working just fine yet, just to point out the effect on my breathing, it felt as if someone else was breathing, or as if the air I was taking in had no effect. It was nearly impossible to think. The teacher was beginning to lose his battle to suppress the strangeness, so it was especially difficult to convince him to get someone to move that truck.

Once it was moved, the symptoms vanished. This single source was likely oscillating at around 15-20 Hz, at very LOW volume, and through the air. LFAS operates near the 7 Hz "frequency of death" (which in itself can be fatal even at very low volume -- reference Gavreau's research), at a volume similar to a 747 at full thrust, through dense water, from multiple sources. It is a sound which penetrates where most manmade noises do not. I seriously believe they know not what they do. Given the superior acoustic conductivity of water, and ignoring the added effects of salinity and super compression in the deep, and given the harmonics which can develop from the persistent application of the correct stimulus, killing every living thing in the ocean may only be the beginning.

I have read that the walls of Jericho did not break upon the first blast of the trumpets. While you are unlikely to shatter a crystal wine glass by singing, you can certainly do so with the correct pure tone. The crystal doesn't shatter immediately -- you have to wait a bit for the harmonics to build. LFAS operates at frequencies akin to those of earthquakes; and it does so in a medium which is intimately bound, like no other, to the Earth's crust. Now THAT is what I call "national security".

Flyby Notes: Most of the mainstream commentaries have made no mention of the recent pro-LFAS ruling, nor of this sonar's history of causing disorientation and harm to whales. This raises suspicion. If you choose to lobby on the disclosure for this issue, please consider demanding a medical autopsy by those from the Woods Hole Institute, to examine if any hemorrhaging can be detected, as in other whale Beachings from the harm of the Navy's use of low frequency active sonar. Since they plan to use it in 80% of the oceans, and simultaneous beachings were reported, suspicions remain strong.

You can reach your US Congressional representative via 202-224-3121, and other contact information can be found at

http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/index.html

For more on LFAS reported in Flyby News, see:

http://www.flybynews.com/cgi-local/newspro/viewnews.cgi?newsid948385848,37113,m

7/31/02
1:26:44 PM

The War on Freedom

"Democracies demand transparency; dictatorships demand deception."

The War on Freedom

How and Why America was Attacked September 11, 2001

by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

http://waronfreedom.mediamonitors.net/index.html

reviewed by Carol Brouillet

http://www.communitycurrency.org/9-11.html

This book, on many levels, is a miracle, not unlike the mysterious process of Birth, and revives our collective aspirations for Hope, Peace, Justice, Joy and Life to prevail against those in power who scream for War. Piercing the smoke and mirrors of propaganda, misinformation, the largest psychological "Special Operation" ever pulled on humanity, the book calmly, carefully, meticulously examines the facts, the evidence of the crime of the century, and documents the clear need for a real, open, public inquiry of 9-11.

Much of the C.I.A.'s budget is devoted to controlling the public mind, for there is no greater threat, today, to the powers that be, than an informed American public. Enormous resources have been squandered to distract, mislead, deflect, frighten attention from a deep understanding of the events of September 11th, what actually happened, why it happened, who has benefited, and who is paying the price. Outside the U.S., the veil is perhaps easier to see through, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed has the advantage of distance, living in England. He also has drawn from his work on the history and development of the conflict in Afghanistan, and the rich insights of others, freely scattered across the Internet, to pull together a clear, coherent understanding of the geopolitics of a war that had been planned for many, many years.

He lays bare the hypocrisy and deception of the U.S.'s policy in Afghanistan, from luring the Russians into the "Afghan trap" to propelling the Taliban into power, to the installation of a "foothold in Central Asia" from which new geo-political alliances have emerged, as well as an "interim government," friendly to multi-national oil interests.

Under the deluge of theories and facts about 9-11, Ahmed focuses on the key issues- the evolution of the Afghan crisis since before the Soviet invasion, the strategic design behind the U.S. war plans, foreknowledge of "the terrorist attacks," the collapse of Standard Operating Procedures on 9-11, the American ties with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, the Saudi Connection, the U.S. Pakistani Alliance, and the I.S.I. (Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence), the "New War;"- Power and Profit, at Home and Abroad.

Ahmed's evidence and analysis are very compelling -- the U.S.'s role in creating Al Qaeda, how the U.S. funds, trains, supports Al Qaeda (and terrorism) where convenient, and uses them as an excuse for military intervention in other regions (when convenient), the blatant elevation of the "security interests of multi-national oil interests" above the interests of humans living in the U.S. or other countries, the financial links between the Bush family and the Bin Laden family, and the ISI Director-General Mahmoud Ahmed's role in last September's drama.

Lt. General Mahmoud Ahmad was in the U.S. meeting with top U.S. officials before and during the attacks. At the urging of the U.S., he was later sent to Afghanistan to "demand that the Taliban hand over Bin Laden without conditions or face certain war." When it was revealed that Mahmoud Ahmad had ordered his aide, Ahmad Umar Sheikh, to wire $100,000. to "WTC hijacker Mohammed Atta" from Pakistan, and confirmed by the F.B.I., the U.S. sought ISI Director-General Mahmoud Ahmed's removal from his position, but did not investigate or, in any way, try to hold him responsible for his role in the attacks.

Last winter, our awareness of this information, prompted many of us, peace and human rights activists, to march on our senators and congresswoman to demand a Congressional Inquiry of 9-11, and to get out in the streets, to demonstrate, raise these issues publicly, and to expose the fraudulent nature of the "War." I spoke to television reporters, journalists, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Norman Solomon who doubted "the credibility of my information and analysis." Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, has done what I have not found time to do, patiently document the evidence, compile multiple references from many different sources, including the Congressional Records, analyze it in a dispassionate way, allowing readers to make their own judgements. From his examination of what he believes to be the key facts, he concludes that-

"The virtually unhindered expansion of the American Empire is simultaneously and systemically eroding the very values that America claims to stand for. Throughout the West and beyond, civil liberties, basic freedoms and human rights are being curtailed in the name of fighting terrorism, while military interventions with nuclear implications are being planned to pursue brute strategic and economic interests, at the expense of indigenous populations--- and for the benefit of corporate elites. Under U.S. leadership, it seems that the entire world is moving towards a situation of global apartheid governed by the Western-based international institutions of what is fast becoming a global police state, administered by the powerful for their own profit."

He dedicates the book to the innocent civilians murdered in the terrorist attacks on September 11th, their families, their friends, and to all the other victims of terrorism around the world, including those killed, injured and starving in Afghanistan. By understanding the role of the state in creating "terrorists" and "terrorist attacks" to further their interests and the interests of multinational corporations, we are in a better position to stop "terrorism" at its roots.

In the lengthy Afterward, publisher John Leonard, takes a broader historical look at the "deceptions" perpetuated by governments to justify their wars, and at the more controversial areas of inquiry into what actually happened. Leonard makes a good case that the "War on Terrorism" should be recognized as a "War of Terrorism." The War on Terrorism needs to be redefined; the big lie needs to be countered by the simple truth.

The clash of "civilizations" is a "smokescreen" for a clash of "worldviews." There are those who believe in Bush, capitalism, the integrity of corporations and their ordained right to govern the world they own, the evil of any who "oppose them," and then there are those who believe in- the goodness of humanity, human rights, freedom, peace, justice, the interdependence of humanity with the web of Life. Will the forces of "Fear and Greed" triumph over the desire for "Peace, Life, Freedom?" We are all part of the public mind; will we allow it to obscure Truth, embrace Denial, be frightened into Obedience? Or can we play our part to further the cause of Truth, Peace, Justice, Freedom by helping to raise consciousness on the most critical issues of our time. Will we hold those in power accountable for their actions, and their crimes against humanity? Process must match purpose; democracies demand transparency; dictatorships demand deception. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed and John Leonard have given us an invaluable tool to cast light upon the darkest secrets of our time, in this powerful book- The War on Freedom, now it is up to us, to get out the message to the world, especially to the people of the United States and the legislators who are supposed to serve them.

The War on Freedom

How and Why America was Attacked September 11, 2001

by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

http://waronfreedom.mediamonitors.net/index.html

reviewed by Carol Brouillet

http://www.communitycurrency.org/9-11.html

7/31/02
1:24:09 PM

Dear WildAlert subscriber,

The National Park Service, after a long process, has decided to keep motor vehicles out of Salt Creek Canyon, one of Canyonlands National Park's most fragile riparian zones. The decision is precisely the right one and took a good deal of courage. But off-road vehicle groups and local governments are likely to pull out all the stops to reverse it. We need to let the National Park Service know how strongly we support its Salt Creek decision.

Please take action by August 12 to help ensure that the Park Service's decision survives.

http://www.wilderness.org/takeaction/?step=2&item=1766

BACKGROUND

Salt Creek rises in the Abajo Mountains of southeastern Utah and flows through a portion of Canyonlands National Park where it joins the Colorado River. Along with the Colorado and the Green River, Salt Creek is an important source of perennial water in the desert of Canyonlands National Park and it creates and supports a major riparian ecosystem. 50 to 80 percent of bird species (including the endangered Mexican spotted owl) rely on these thin, green riparian ribbons that cover less than one percent of arid western land. Salt Creek also gives its name to an archaeological district, which has the densest concentration of archeological sites in the park.

For years, the park permitted off-road vehicles to travel an 8.2-mile stretch of the canyon between Horse and Arch Canyon. In driving the route, vehicles had to cross the stream 60 times. The park's 1998 Backcountry Management Plan proposed leaving the route open, even though the agency's own analyses documented the environmental damage from this motor vehicle use. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance sued to force the closure of Salt Creek to motor vehicles and a federal district court agreed. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision on an appeal by off-road vehicle groups and sent the proposed closure back to the district court for additional review. It is still there today.

Meanwhile, the National Park Service adopted new national standards that prohibit actions that impair park resources and values. Those tougher management standards led Canyonlands National Park to reassess the question of motorized use of Salt Creek. From that process emerged the park's "preferred alternative:" closure of the route. This closure will end the damage in the delicate riparian zone and allow the corridor to repair itself; anything less would allow the destruction to continue. Nearly 200 miles of motorized routes exist in Canyonlands National Park. Off-road enthusiasts can live without this 8.2 mile section of Salt Creek. And the rich riparian zone can live without them.

TAKE ACTION

The Superintendent of Canyonlands will face enormous pressure over this decision. Please let him know how much you appreciate the Salt Creek closure and how strongly you support it. The deadline for comments is Monday, Aug. 12, 2002. You can take action from our website at:

http://www.wilderness.org/takeaction/?step=2&item=1766

Or you can write him directly. Attached is a sample letter. Please feel free to borrow from it for your own comments. But if you've first-hand experience of Salt Creek Canyon, Angel Arch or Canyonlands National Park generally, please mention it in your comments. Thank you for helping end the damage along Salt Creek!

Alford J. Banta, Superintendent Canyonlands National park 2282 South West Resource Blvd. Moab, UT 84532

Dear Superintendent Banta:

Your decision to close Middle Salt Creek in Canyonlands National Park to motorized vehicles is welcome news and I appreciate the chance to comment on it. I enthusiastically support this decision to protect Salt Creek from additional motor vehicle damage.

This decision, set out in the preferred alternative in the Middle Salt Creek Canyon Access Plan, is the only one that can meet the declared objective of that plan. Only if you close Salt Creek above the Peekaboo campsite will you end the impairment of park resources and values that Park Service itself has so well documented along this route.

To traverse the 8.2 mile route in Salt Creek, off-road vehicles crossed the stream an astonishing 60 times, damaging streambanks, soil and riparian habitat with each crossing-and often spilling motor fluids into the stream when their machines failed. That sort of damage is unconscionable anywhere on public lands but most especially in one of our great national parks. And even with the closure of Salt Creek, off-road enthusiasts will still have in the range of 200 miles of routes in Canyonlands available to them.

The preferred alternative also provides the best protection of what is perhaps the park's richest archaeological concentration, the Salt Creek Archaeological District.

The Access Plan's preferred alternative carefully protects hiking, horseback and pack animal access to popular Angel Arch. Indeed, nothing in the preferred alternative will substantially restrict the public's opportunity to enjoy Canyonlands and it does much to ensure that the experience will be there, intact, for the generations that follow us.

Again, my thanks for your decision to protect the remarkable resources of Canyonlands National Park.

Sincerely,

For a full list of Action Items, visit

http://www.wilderness.org/whatcan/takeaction.htm

7/31/02
1:22:27 PM

Dear friend of 9-11Peace,

The Bush Administration is planning a war on Iraq. Troop deployments indicate that it could come in October; a "surprise attack" could come even sooner. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is holding hearings this week to determine whether a military campaign to oust Saddam Hussein is necessary, but they appear to be a whitewash -- none of the people asked to testify are likely to argue against a war. Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other top officials continue to hone a war plan that will require up to a quarter million troops.

The Bush Administration contends that a war on Iraq is needed because Saddam Hussein possesses or is intent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction. But former Marine and UNSCOM weapons inspector Scott Ritter argues that the war is a product of domestic politics; along with other UN officials he maintains that Iraq's major weapons have been successfully eradicated. In response to questions about the basis for an Iraq campaign from our NATO allies, Secretary Rumsfeld replied that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." These are hardly solid grounds on which to wage a war that will likely:

Cost thousands of American soldiers' lives; Kill many more Iraqi civilians, both through direct combat and through the eradication of crucial infrastructure; Further destabilize the Middle East; Alienate America's closest allies, almost all of whom (except Great Britain) oppose an attack; Commit the military to a three-to-five year stay while Iraq rebuilds; and Cost in the tens of billions in taxpayer dollars.

The Senate hearings may be the last public forum in which serious questions can be raised about this upcoming conflict. Please call your Senators at the numbers below. Make sure each staffer you talk to knows that you're a constituent, and that you understand the Senate has begun hearings on Iraq. State your deep concern and ask your questions. Ask if you will be receiving a written response from your Senator. Here are some sample questions. Your own words are always best.

What is the concrete evidence that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction? How long will American troops be in Iraq? What's the objective? What's the plan to get out?

Do the State Department and Secretary of State Colin Powell support this war? What about the top military brass?

Why don't our allies support this war?

If we attack, will Iraq find new allies in the region?

How many Americans will die in such a war? Iraqis?

How much money will such a war cost?

Why is America now attacking without explicit provocation?

President Bush is seen by people in other countries as pursuing a strange vendetta. Is the Bush administration pulling our country into a family grudge match?

You can reach your Senators at:

Senator Bob Graham DC Phone: 202-224-3041 Local Phone: 305-536-7293

Senator Bill Nelson DC Phone: 202-224-5274 Local Phone: 850-942-8415

You can also call the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Their numbers are:

Chair Joseph Biden (D-DE) 202-224-5042

Ranking Member Jesse Helms (R-NC) 202-224-6342

Barbara Boxer (D-CA) 202-224-3553

Christopher Dodd (D-CT) 202-224-2823

Bill Nelson (D-FL) 202-224-5274

Richard Lugar (R-IN) 202-224-4814

Sam Brownback (R-KS) 202-224-6521

John Kerry (D-MA) 202-224-2742

Paul Sarbanes (D-MD) 202-224-4524

Paul Wellstone (D-MN) 202-224-5641

Chuck Hagel (R-NE) 202-224-4224

Robert Torricelli (D-NJ) 202-224-3224

Gordon Smith (R-OR) 202-224-3753

Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) 202-224-2921

Bill Frist (R-TN) 202-224-4944

George Allen (R-VA) 202-224-4024

Russ Feingold (D-WI) 202-224-5323

John Rockefeller (D-WV) 202-224-6472

Michael Enzi (R-WY) 202-224-3424

7/31/02
1:17:50 PM

House Bill Could Shut Down File Sharing

A California Democrat introduced a bill Thursday that would make sharing of copyrighted files illegal, and would indemnify copyright holders from taking whatever actions they chose to prevent the sharing of those files.

http://eletters1.ziffdavis.com/cgi-bin10/flo?y=eRTg0Ey4RZ0HX60pDN0Ag

7/30/02
7:44:05 PM

The Indisputable Science of Global Warming

The Climes They Are A-Changin'

by Mike Romoth, The Village Voice, July 31 - August 6, 2002

Not to suspect that a dirty little word lies at the center of the controversy spawned by the most recent Bush administration document on climate change. In the June EPA policy paper "Climate Action Report 2002," the government admitted that climate change is not only real but getting worse, that human activities are the most likely cause, and that the negative consequences are real and dangerous, a clear and present threat. This dirty little word may have been the reason conservative leaders have privately pressed to have EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman fired from her position—for producing a document that provides the most realistic, scientifically accurate picture of the problem available from current research. This dirty little word may be the main reason President Bush is eternally trying to distance himself from this itchy environmental problem, this foreign cause touted by Russians, Europeans, and Japanese. The word: liability.

In terms of scale, the climate change issue will make any sort of environmental liability lawsuit filed in national or international courts to date seem like tarts and gingerbread. Human pressures on the global climate—what scientists call anthropogenic forcings—represent a problem orders of magnitude larger than the impacts of even the most notorious environmental catastrophes of modern times—the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, or even the disaster at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, which suffocated 10,000 people in their beds.The Netherlands faces undeniable threats from rising seas, and Bangladesh will not survive. Symptoms are already apparent in the daily headlines—islands in the South Pacific abandoned by their residents as their ground water turns salty; Connecticut-size bergs calving off the antarctic ice mass; record floods in Europe followed by more record floods. Across northern India this year, record-breaking heat storms arrived before the monsoon, raising the temperature to 123 degrees in the shade—so hot that the birds were dropping dead from the trees. Exactly as the scientists have been warning. And much earlier than most had expected, save those branded doomsayers only a few years ago. Considered in this context, the EPA document may represent the most important mea culpa of all time. The line between an "act of God" and an "action of Man" has just become significantly more blurry, with all the associated legal implications.

And then there's that sticky bit. Things are only going to get worse. Expert opinion varies widely on the time frame for the most dramatic impacts. It could be next week—certain important factors may hang on a hair trigger. Record-breaking fires, droughts, and floods have already become annual events around the nation. It could be in a decade. Agreement is nearly universal that current trends will continue to worsen. It probably will occur within the century. This fact is largely accepted as a given even under many of the more benign scenarios for a changing climate. What is abundantly clear in the science of the matter is that we as a society are at the beginning of a long journey.

The science of climate change begins with the geological record of the paleoclimate—records of past sea-level changes, telltale signs of the cycle of glaciation and retreat, firestorm signatures carved into the skin of the earth over tens of thousands of years. Data from Greenland ice cores and sediment samples collected from bogs around the globe. Pollen records maintained over the millennia. Tree rings counting back thousand-year records of rain and drought. Geology, biology, ecology, and chemistry all working together to create a picture of the climatological history of the planet—a turbulent history marked by mass extinctions, sudden and dramatic changes in sea level, large-scale migrations of forests, storms to dwarf any of the minor maelstroms recorded in the human histories.

Today, networks of sampling buoys monitor sea surface temperatures, floating along gridworks mapping the oceans of the world. Satellite eyes peep down on cloud cover, identifying and enumerating the gases in the atmospheric column that runs from outer space to surface Earth. Global maps made to shift with time mark the changes in water resources, rivers running dry before they reach the ocean, the disappearance of the Aral Sea. In nightside snapshots, with each passing year, the ring of Amazon fires eats closer to the heart of darkness—the unconquered lands. Pollutant plumes emitted by each city on Earth stretch for tens of miles, forming confluent rivers of contaminants that flow in the winds, crossing ocean-scale distances to poison the remotest sites on anyone's map.

Over the course of the past decade, many interests have entered the melee of debate on the issue of ongoing anthropogenic climate change. Energy companies arguing that nuclear power is the only acceptable answer. Advocates of wind power, sun power, wave power, volcano power. Oil producers. Automobile manufacturers. Coal men. The stakes involved in the debate over climate change do not come any higher. The largest industries of humankind, energy and transportation, are directly implicated. Virtually every activity in the life of the global, modern-day consumer is involved. Many natural responses to the changes we cause act only to exacerbate the problem—for example, the recent thaw of northern permafrost exposed a new source of greenhouse emissions. In the media, conventional scientific thinking is denounced as extremist, while members of the smoke-'em-if-you-got-'em school of scientific inquiry are awarded the chairmanships of well-heeled think tanks and lobbying empires to quibble, to hem and haw, to delay and filibuster.

However, as the Bush administration discovered, scientific theories have a way of proving themselves, regardless of whether policy makers and corporate heads believe them or not. And the daily news is beginning to heap ample evidence that the unequaled hubris at the core of this ever expanding, all-consuming 21st-century technotopia has stirred forces that are well beyond any sort of normal climatic fluctuation or temporary readjustment of weather patterns. One cannot wish away elementary thermodynamics, basic geophysics, fundamental biology, or essential fluid dynamics.

Already we have seen the unfolding of many of the events described by some of the climate change "extremists"—massive wind storms that pummel Europe, leading to hundreds of deaths, and the destruction of millions of acres of established forest. Unusual winter tornados ripping through the U.S. Latin America struck by storms that killed tens of thousands and destroyed decades of infrastructure over the course of a few days. Entire nations sinking into famine as unprecedented droughts choke crops in the fields. Record-breaking floods becoming annual events in mainland China. The permafrost under northern Europe beginning to melt from under vast regions that have not known a real thaw for tens of thousands of years. These are the milestones many experts consider symptoms of problems that can only grow worse as the Leviathan Climate gains more thermal momentum, growing more turbulent, more unpredictable as established climatic patterns change and shift.

Even some of the largest energy corporations on Earth have begun to accept the science of climate change, quietly withdrawing their support for rabidly anti-climate-change PR campaigns and beginning to trumpet their investment in renewable fuels. The response from the international insurance industry has been as mercenary as would be expected. Many large insurers have begun advising industrial clients with facilities in low-lying coastal regions to begin armoring their plants with systems of protective dikes and coastal constructions. The need for action is no longer questioned by the wise investor.

The uncertainties and confusion over climate change bear comparison to a series of scientific discoveries and theories that culminated in one of the highlights of the end of the 19th century: the discovery of radiation. The scientists who first worked with radioactive materials knew they were onto something, but they were working in the dark—manipulating and adjusting their notions to suit anecdotal evidence. When a researcher suffered burns to his leg from a vial of radium carried in his trouser pocket, scientists discovered that there was some danger involved in handling these new types of materials. Rapid commercialization of the technology led to the development of fluoroscopes, which allowed customers in shoe stores to examine the bones of their feet with live-action viewing devices—subjecting even passersby to massive doses of radiation. Health drinks were concocted that contained uranium, the new wonder of wonders and miracle cure-all. In beauty shops, women with excess facial hair could have their faces bathed in X rays until the hair fell out. Only years later, as the cancers began twisting the jaws of women around the country, did the public become aware of how dangerous radiation could be—and that was years too late for anyone to wish away their troubles.

And despite the occasional media attention to climate change, real responses and actions remain fairly hard to come by even among countries that support the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, aimed at limiting human emissions of greenhouse gases. Most national governments face significant economic obstacles to the implementation of the guidelines, with no nation currently on track to achieve compliance. Continuous growth of national economies is absolutely mandatory for survival in the highly competitive markets evolving under current trends toward globalization. Economic growth is linked directly to energy consumption and higher emissions of greenhouse gases. Emission limits for individual nations under Kyoto are set at 5 percent below those of 1990, but in virtually every country on Earth, economic growth has raised emissions to well above those ancient figures. Compliance with Kyoto would entail substantial shifts in the largest national economies, with the U.S. taking the biggest hit of all as the biggest polluter of all.

As a result, most national governments have failed to establish the aggressive regulations needed to achieve the greenhouse emissions reductions required for real progress. Even in nations that have attempted to take the lead on climate change, enforcement of lofty policy initiatives has proved a nearly impossible task. In the single remaining superpower on Earth and the confirmed largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the sitting administration blindly refuses to have anything to do with climate change. Its recommendation? Pretend the problem does not exist. Act as though the science is not valid. We'll all adapt. You know . . . somehow.

In the long term, the symptoms of the disease will become pronounced enough to convince even the most reluctant Americans that climate change is not some sort of flim-flam invented by a bunch of grant-greedy eco-kooks. Perhaps some sort of limit should be established for the level of destruction we will allow before action is taken on climate change. The destruction of agriculture in California, say, or the permanent loss of New Orleans, Miami, and a few other coastal cities by the year 2050. Of course, by the time these limits have been reached, the time to do anything about the climate problem will have long passed. The Leviathan Climate will have awakened then, and there will be no apologizing to the grandchildren or turning back. No amount of money will prove sufficient. No amount of spin doctoring will be able to stem the mounting losses. Issues of liability will become moot as the planetwide catastrophe gathers steam.

Recent data obtained from the tens of thousands of monitoring buoys networked across the world's oceans have underscored the critical role played by a phenomenon known as the Thermohaline Circulation—a massive conveyor belt of heated water carried from the tropics to the northern latitudes via the currents of the Atlantic Ocean. Some researchers believe that this current system may be the trigger that initiates the cycles of glaciation, the ice age trigger. Certain evidence suggests that this circulation may be extremely sensitive to changes, shutting down in response to minor pressures. Other evidence suggests that the thermohaline may be disrupted by the formation of a large lens of freshwater sitting atop the saline waters of the oceans around Greenland and Iceland. Such a lens is currently forming in the North Atlantic as a result of the melting of glaciers and ice sheets in the north. There is no way of currently knowing or predicting what may come next.

However, given the consensus for action on climate change expressed by the majority of the other industrialized nations, the U.S. will find itself in an increasingly difficult position as the lone holdout against responsible and progressive action on the climate problem. Already, international accord on the Kyoto Protocol in the absence of U.S. support signals a shift in the post-Cold War paradigm that has dominated the international political arena for a decade. The Kyoto agreement was formulated based on a fundamental tenet of democratic public law, the concept of the commons—property belonging in equal measure to all citizens for all time. Leadership on this issue must value the hard commitments required of democratic thinking, and not simply trot out the term to justify the current mania for saber rattling. Perhaps "superpower" status is no longer a given for any individual nation. Radical backlash against U.S. policy, or rather lack of policy, on the climate change problem can only be expected to grow as the symptomatic evidence grows, as the record-breaking storms unleash their fury, as the droughts consume the harvests of dozens of nations, as the rivers either flood beyond all parallel or run dry as a bone, as coastal regions lose their war against the encroaching sea. Not the stuff of science fiction. The stuff of Science.

And as all the proponents of action on these issues agree, the Kyoto Protocol is really nothing more than a symbolic gesture, a nod to the fact that future agreements will be required, that more extensive regulations will be established, and that the problem has only begun to be addressed. Responsible and mature leadership will be required to guide nations around the globe through the admittedly difficult adjustments that will be expected of each and every citizen, every local government office, and all levels of the federal government of each nation on Earth. Unfortunately, for an alarming number of Americans, the "environment" has been reduced to the strip of lawn and the manicured shrubs they pass on the way from the parking lot to their climate-controlled office buildings, or between their climate-controlled automobiles and their climate-controlled homes.

A serious tremor in the accepted order of things would arise from the multinational imposition of economic sanctions against the U.S. for failure to comply with the regulatory regime to be established under Kyoto. The most obvious medicines for the problem, such as aggressive energy conservation and protection of forested regions, are direct threats to the de facto capitalist economic principle of infinite economic growth to meet ever increasing demand in a world of infinite space and resources. Humanity, as a species, has reached a time in its evolution when it must begin to consider its own limits—beyond race, beyond economic politics, beyond any form of enlightened thinking of the past. The Bush administration is right on one thing: Adaptation is the only answer to these new realities. Rigid ways of thinking, old ways of thinking, no longer apply. A new paradigm is needed, at the very root of the culture. Those who fail to bend will be broken. The science of the matter will see to that.

Source: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0231/romoth.php

7/30/02
7:18:33 PM

Public Citizen issued the following press releases today:

1) Medical Malpractice Premiums Not Only Rates to Increase, State Survey Shows; Other Types of Insurance Have Risen Too

2) Study of Built-in Child Safety Seats is First Step in Closing Safety Gap Statement by Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook

July 30, 2002

Medical Malpractice Premiums Not Only Rates to Increase, State Survey Shows; Other Types of Insurance Have Risen Too

Insurance Companies' Poor Investments and Bad Decisions - Not Litigation -Caused Premium Increases

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The focus of Senate Republican leaders and President Bush on rising medical malpractice insurance premiums is misguided because insurance premiums for homeowners, car and health insurance have also increased at about the same rate, according to a Public Citizen state-by-state study released today.

The study contends that doctors are victims of insurance companies that made bad investment and pricing decisions - rather than lawyers representing victims of medical malpractice. The study analyzes insurance rates in 21 states, showing that rate hikes are common in many types of insurance.

Public Citizen released the study and several fact sheets, and sent a letter to members of the U.S. Senate urging them to oppose an amendment offered by U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that would strip medical malpractice victims of their state-based rights to seek full compensation for deaths and injuries caused by malpractice. The amendment would not only insulate doctors from full accountability, it would also protect HMOs, hospitals, nursing homes and even drug and medical device companies for deaths and injuries caused by malpractice and defective products.

"In the wake of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and other corporate scandals, it is outrageous that Congress is debating legislation that would reduce corporate accountability to the tens of thousands of people who are killed and injured by medical malpractice every year," said Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen. "It would be a terrible injustice to blame the 80,000 Americans who die each year from medical negligence - and the many thousands more who are injured - for industry practices."

"Blaming rising malpractice premiums on a litigation 'crisis' is a smokescreen by the insurance industry to cover for the industry's investment losses and price gouging," said Frank Clemente, director of Public Citizen's Congress Watch. "Nothing is happening with medical malpractice premiums that isn't happening in other insurance arenas."

The states included in the study are Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

The research shows that medical malpractice insurance premiums for the riskiest specialties increased 10 percent from 2000 to 2001. Auto insurance premiums increased 8.4 percent, homeowners insurance premiums increased 8 percent and health insurance premiums increased 11 percent in that year.

Further, the number of claims per 100 doctors has remained surprisingly constant over the years. And the average medical malpractice payment for all claims closed was virtually flat from 1991 ($29,093) to 1996 ($29,504).

"Limiting patients' rights to sue would not reduce health care costs," Clemente said. "The attempt to cut victims' rights is yet another way the administration and Republicans in Congress are trying to help out their big business friends."

For a copy of the report, go to

http://www.citizen.org/documents/insuranceratehikes.pdf

To read the letter, go to

http://www.citizen.org/congress/civjus/patients/medmal/articles.cfm?ID=8100

For a related fact sheet, visit

http://www.citizen.org/congress/civjus/patients/medmal/articles.cfm?ID=8071

xoxox

July 30, 2002

Study of Built-in Child Safety Seats is First Step in Closing Safety Gap

Statement by Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook

The Senate Appropriations Committee has taken an important step to protect young children in automobile crashes by requiring the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to compare the benefits of built-in child restraints to those of adult lap and shoulder belts or ill-fitting booster seats. Children between the ages of 4 and 8 have for too long been unnecessarily vulnerable in crashes - too large for traditional booster seats and too small for adult seatbelts.

We applaud the Senate Appropriations Committee for providing funding for this essential study to begin to close this safety gap. We also very much appreciate the work of Autumn Skeen, Dr. Martha Bidez and Beth Ebel who wrote letters to Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) promoting Anton's law, a federal child safety measure. Since Skeen's 4-year-old son Anton died in a rollover crash in 1996, she has been a tireless advocate for child safety.

Poorly fitting restraints and a lack of federal regulations led to hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries in the past decade that should not have occurred. In the 1990s, the number of children aged 4 to 8 who were killed while wearing adult safety belts or booster seats that were not designed to fit them nearly doubled, according to a federal study, while the number of fatalities for children under age 4 - restrained in booster seats that did fit and are regulated by the federal government - went down. We first raised this issue in a report this spring, The Forgotten Child: The Failure of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers to Protect 4- to 8-year-olds in Crashes. It is on the Web at www.citizen.org/documents/auto3.pdf.

The comprehensive study of restraint systems must address the safety and fit for the child, vehicle compatibility with different makes and models, and ease of use. Any safety standard that results from this study must apply child - not adult - injury criteria for all forms of child safety seats in all types of crashes.

This federal study is a step forward, but the end result must be the mandatory installation of integrated child seating systems, with five-point belts, in all new cars. Auto manufacturers have acknowledged that these are the safest restraint systems. Every child should have that protection.

Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C.

For more information, please visit http://www.citizen.org

7/30/02
7:15:37 PM

IT IS CRITICAL THAT WE ACT NOW ON THIS -- PLEASE USE & PASS ON !!

Demand the Senate pass the Roemer/Smith Amendment calling for a full independent inquiry into 9-11, including FAA, DOD, etc., and requiring TWO FAMILY MEMBERS OF 9-11 VICTIMS TO BE ON THE PANEL. Nearly 30 courageous Republicans crossed over to thwart Bush/Cheney's BIZARRE attempts to block a full 9-11 inquiry. We MUST support their courage. It would be unconscionable for the US Senate to deny 9-11 victims families and THE AMERICAN PEOPLE this full 9-11 inquiry. (Roosevelt had 10 independent inquiries after Pearl Harbor).

This is A CRITICAL MOMENT IN HISTORY. By taking a few minutes and emailing the Senators with the above demand YOU CAN HAVE A PROFOUND IMPACT on the future of America and the world. ALSO, please telephone as many of the key senators as you can, and if you have a fax machine fax them. LASTLY, and very importantly, FORWARD THIS ACTION APPEAL AS FAR, WIDE AND FAST AS YOU CAN.

BELOW: 1) Key Senators Phone numbers, 2) Emails for Senate Democrats (plus John McCain), 3) Fax numbers.

U.S. Senate Conferees:

Kennedy (D-MA) 617/565-3170 Boston

Dodd (D-CT) 860/258-6940 Wethersfield

Harkin (D-IA) 515/284-4574 Des Moines

Mikulski (D-MD) 410/962-4510 Baltimore

Jeffords (I-VT) 802/223-5273 Montpelier

Bingaman (D-NM) 505/988-6647 Santa Fe; 505/346-6601 Albuquerque

Wellstone (D-MN) 651/645-0323 St. Paul

Murray (D-WA) 206/553-5545 Seattle; 509/624-9515 Spokane

Reed (D-RI) 401/943-3100 Cranston

Edwards (D-NC) 919/856-4245 Raleigh

Clinton (D-NY) 518/431-0120 Albany

Lieberman (D-CT) 860/549-8463 Hartford

Bayh (D-IN) 317/554-0750 Indianapolis

Gregg (R-NH) 603/225-7115 Concord

Frist (R-TN) 615/352-9411 Nashville; 901/683-191 Memphis

Enzi (R-WY) 307/772-2477 Cheyenne; 307/739-9507 Jackson

Hutchinson (R-AR) 501/324-6336 Little Rock

Warner (R-VA) 804/771-2579 Richmond

Bond (R-MO) 314/725-4484 St. Louis

Roberts (R-KS) 785/295-2745 Topeka

Collins (R-ME) 207/622-8414 Augusta

Sessions (R-AL) 205/731-1500 Birmingham; 334/265-9507 Montgomery

DeWine (R-OH) 614/469-5186 Columbus

Allard (R-CO) 719/643-6071 Colorado Springs

Ensign (R-WY) 775/686-5770 Reno

SENATE BELOW:

John_McCain@McCain.senate.gov, senator@akaka.senate.gov, senator@biden.senate.gov, senator_bingaman@bingaman.senate.gov, senator@breaux.senate.gov, senator_byrd@byrd.senate.gov, senator_carnahan@carnahan.senate.gov, senator@clinton.senate.gov, senator@conrad.senate.gov, senator@dodd.senate.gov, senator@dorgan.senate.gov, dick@durbin.senate.gov, russell_feingold@feingold.senate.gov, senator@feinstein.senate.gov, bob_graham@graham.senate.gov, tom_harkin@harkin.senate.gov, vermont@jeffords.senate.gov, tim@johnson.senate.gov, senator@kennedy.senate.gov, john_kerry@kerry.senate.gov, senator_kohl@kohl.senate.gov, senator_leahy@leahy.senate.gov, senator@levin.senate.gov, blanche_lincoln@lincoln.senate.gov, senator@mikulski.senate.gov, senator_murray@murray.senate.gov, senator@billnelson.senate.gov, jack@reed.senate.gov, senator@rockefeller.senate.gov, senator@schumer.senate.gov, senator@stabenow.senate.gov, senator_torricelli@torricelli.senate.gov

7/30/02
7:13:47 PM

Clear DayThe Disclosure Project is a nonprofit research project working to fully disclose the facts about UFOs, extraterrestrial intelligence, and classified advanced energy and propulsion systems. We have over 400 government, military, and intelligence community witnesses testifying to their direct, personal, first hand experience with UFOs, ETs, ET technology, and the cover-up that keeps this information secret.

http://www.disclosureproject.org/index.htm

7/30/02
7:11:09 PM

DAILY GRIST

http://www.aclu.org/action/dcvouchers107.html

TO MAKE A LAWN STORY SHORT

Drum roll, please. It's time for more environmental advice from Umbra Fisk, Grist Research Assistant II and environmental advice expert extraordinaire. In her latest column, Umbra takes on the topic of pesticides: in clothing, in agriculture, on lawns. She tackles the metaphorically thorny question of why grass has become a suburban social obligation, and the literally thorny question of the most environmentally friendly way to weed your garden. Pick up pearls of wisdom from Our Lady of the Stacks, only on the Grist Magazine website.

only in Grist: Too clothes for comfort -- sage advice on eco-lawn care, toxics in textiles, and more -- in Ask Umbra <http://www.gristmagazine.com/ask/ask073002.asp?source=daily>

WHEEZY RIDERS

Motorcycles and gas-powered recreational boats could become substantially cleaner if emissions cuts proposed by the Bush administration late last week are enacted. The proposals call for halving emissions from motorcycles (which are, on average, 20 times more polluting per mile than a new car) and reducing boat emissions by 80 percent. The new standards would take effect in 2006 and 2008, respectively. Currently, motorcycles and boats account for 12 percent of hydrocarbon emissions and 3 percent of carbon monoxide emissions from mobile sources. According to U.S. EPA Administrator Christie Whitman, the new standards would have clean air gains equivalent to reducing pollution from 9.4 million cars per year. Environmentalists praised the move as a step in the right direction, but had been hoping to see emissions cuts for motorcycles of up to 90 percent.

straight to the source: MSNBC.com, Reuters, 29 Jul 2002 <http://www.gristmagazine.com/forward.pl?forward_id=310>

CHARMS TO SOOTHE THE SAVAGE BREAST

Ten years ago, a group of women headed to Washington, D.C., from their homes in Long Island, N.Y., to demand answers from the government about why so many women from their area were afflicted with breast cancer. Ultimately, the energy, dedication, and political savvy of those women rocketed the Long Island breast cancer story into the national spotlight and mobilized a movement to look for environmental causes of the disease. By far their most impressive success was a 1993 federal law securing about $30 million in funding from the National Cancer Institute to study pollution and breast cancer in Nassau and Suffolk counties, through what became known as the Long Island Breast Cancer Study Project. A decade later, according to a three-day series in Newsday, the project is way behind schedule and has yielded little information, leaving scientists, women's health advocates, and environmental activists equally frustrated.

straight to the source: Long Island Newsday, Dan Fagin, 28 Jul 2002 <http://www.gristmagazine.com/forward.pl?forward_id=311>

straight to the source: Long Island Newsday, Dan Fagin, 29 Jul 2002 <http://www.gristmagazine.com/forward.pl?forward_id=312>

straight to the source: Long Island Newsday, Dan Fagin, 30 Jul 2002 <http://www.gristmagazine.com/forward.pl?forward_id=313>

HANFORD AND STUNS

Oregon officials and anti-nuclear activists are taking aim at the draft assessment of the federal government's plan to ship thousands of truckloads of radioactive nuclear waste through Oregon to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state. The draft environmental impact statement by the U.S. Energy Department estimates that the environmental effects of transporting the waste "are relatively small and would not be expected to contribute substantially to cumulative impacts of other activities at Hanford or in the surrounding region." But Oregon nuclear safety officials beg to differ, saying the agency's report lacked the science to back up those claims. For example, the document does not specify the exact kinds of material that would be shipped to Hanford, nor the exact volumes, and it relies on outdated general estimates of nationwide impacts from shipping nuclear waste, rather than looking at circumstances specific to Oregon, such as trucking waste over treacherous mountain passes.

straight to the source: Portland Oregonian, Andy Dworkin, 30 Jul 2002 <http://www.gristmagazine.com/forward.pl?forward_id=314>

SPACE GOES COAST TO COAST

Living on the coast is often a lose-lose situation -- beaches erode, and big storms take out pricey homes -- but that hasn't seemed to quench the thirst for development along the Florida shoreline. Rather than discouraging beachfront development to protect property owners and the environment alike, state laws and practices promote such development and leave taxpayers to foot the bill for rebuilding eroded beaches. Since 1978, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection has approved almost 5,000 permits to build on land subject to erosion, and denied just 52. Similar development and spending patterns -- coastal construction approved by the state followed by taxpayer-subsidized beach rebuilding -- appear in virtually every state with a coastline. In the past 79 years, beach replenishment along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts has cost the nation about $3.6 billion in 2002 dollars, or about $1 million per mile of open shore in those regions.

straight to the source: USA Today, Gannett News Service, Paige St. John and Larry Wheeler, 29 Jul 2002 <http://www.gristmagazine.com/forward.pl?forward_id=315>

do good: Take action to protect the Jersey shore <http://www.gristmagazine.com/dogood/oceans.asp?source=daily#jersey>

7/30/02
2:12:00 PM

TO: ACLU Action Network Members

FR: Angela Colaiuta, National Field Organizer

DT: 7-30-02

In a decision issued last month, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Cleveland's school voucher program even though 96 percent of the students participating in the program used the vouchers to attend religious school. The battle over vouchers is now turning to Congress, which is expected to soon debate the fate of these misguided programs.

Specifically, House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) has introduced the "District of Columbia Student Opportunity Scholarship Act," HR 5033. This troubling legislation would divert $45 million in public funds over five years to fund transportation, tuition and fees at private and religious schools in the District of Columbia.

This program would offer only the illusion of "choice" for the vast majority of DC public school students. At best, it would increase the opportunities of a handful of children that will be carefully selected by private schools that have the luxury of deciding who they want to admit, all while funneling much-needed funds away from public schools.

Take action! You can learn more about the latest battle in the vouchers war and send a FREE FAX to your member of Congress from our action alert at:

Help Strengthen the ACLU's Voice in Congress... Click Below to Become a Card-Carrying Member today!

http://www.aclu.org/action/joinaclu.html

7/30/02
2:08:12 PM

Bush Official: One More Terror Attack On US, Goodbye Civil Rights

by Chris Floyd, Global Eye -- Strange Fruit, July 26, 2002

"By their fruits ye shall know them." And by their nuts as well.

The acorns of any presidential administration never fall very far from the tree --thus, the remarks made last week by one of George W. Bush's appointees to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission give us a pretty fair indication of what the future will look like if the Regime's seeds of tyranny ever come to full flower.

Bush emissary Peter Kirsanow told a Detroit crowd last week that America could "forget about civil rights" if there is another terrorist attack on the United States by "the same ethnic group that attacked the World Trade Center," the Detroit Free Press reports.

What's more, such heathen devilry would cause the righteous folk in the Homeland to rise up and demand that the Regime chuck every last Arab-American into a concentration camp, Commissioner Kirsanow proclaimed.

Kirsanow -- one of Bush's many prank appointments, a "Civil Rights" commissioner who has spent his career opposing civil rights programs -- said that he wasn't advocating an Auschwitz for Arabs, you understand. He was just saying that the public outcry for one would be almost impossible for the Bush administration to withstand. (And you know they'd try really, really hard, too.)

"Nobody will be crying in their beer if there are more stops, more detentions, more profiling," Kirsanow told the crowd -- which was made up largely of Arab-Americans, who came to protest the ongoing, unconstitutional detention of Arabs without formal charges being carried out by Bush's biggest joke appointment: Attorney General John Jesus Jehovah Ashcroft.

In fact, not only will there be a dearth of salt in the old hops, there will also be "a groundswell of public opinion to banish civil rights" altogether if al-Qaida comes a-callin' again, Kirsanow said.

Therefore, citizens should just accept the Regime's police-state measures and stop bellyaching about the "perceived erosion of civil rights," the commissar huffed. Otherwise, it'll be camps, curfews and kangaroo courts for the whole damn country.

Let's connect the dots -- or gather up the nuts -- shall we? As Harper's reports, Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney, tells us that "the prospects of a future attack are almost certain; not if, but when." Bush's FBI director, Robert Mueller, tells us: "There will be another terrorist attack. We will not be able to stop it." Bush's warlord, Donald Rumsfeld, tells us: "It is only a matter of time." And now Bush's point man on constitutional protection tells us -- openly -- that we can "forget about civil rights" when this unstoppable and absolutely certain new terrorist attack finally occurs.

So where does that leave the future of liberty in the land of the free? Dangling on a noose from a tall Texas tree, that's where.

Magna Force

But Bush is just an amateur when it comes to gutting age-old civil rights. Sure, he's busy stripping away constitutional safeguards that have stood for more than 225 years, but over in Tony Blair's own benighted isle of Blighty, they're putting the axe to the Magna Carta itself -- 800 years of legal protections against the power of the state, flushed down the loo in a trice!

Last week, Blair's "New Labour" (i.e., Old Tory in Nicer Shirts) government announced a sweeping "reform" of the British criminal justice system, with draconian measures far beyond the dreams of Maggie the Merciless -- or even murderous King John himself.

The proposed overhaul abolishes protections against "double jeopardy" -- being tried for the same crime more than once -- and does away with the right to trial by jury in some cases, The Independent reports. These were rights wrested from King John and set down in the Magna Carta in 1215. They are, as the paper notes, part of the cornerstone of Western jurisprudence, which has for centuries been guided by this ideal: that justice should be prejudiced in favor of the rights of the individual against the vast, untrammeled power of the state.

Now the Nicer Shirts will allow defendants to be relentlessly persecuted by the state, tried over and over again until the desired verdict is reached. You can never again be "proven innocent" of a crime, however malicious or sloppy the charges. They can always come back for another go at you.

The "reform" will also allow judges to try "complex cases" of criminal fraud and "risky" cases against mobsters without bothering with those pesky juries -- a plan provoking much glee in corporate boardrooms and Mafia hangouts (often one and the same place these days, of course). The wiseguys know it's much easier to corrupt one judge than 12 jurors.

What's more, judges will now be allowed to reveal any past convictions of a defendant on trial in a new case -- a heavy thumb tilting the scales toward conviction, especially in the many cases based on circumstantial evidence.

British justice once seemed an enlightened counterweight to more primitive concepts of law, which vested all rights and power in the state and left individuals to the mercies -- tender or otherwise -- of arbitrary rulers. It sought to hedge in the corrupting nature of power with safeguards that stood between the accused and the great engines of coercion embodied in the state.

But it takes courage and wisdom to uphold such an ideal, to transcend our monkey-brain urges toward herd and hierarchy. And the leaders of the West are plainly losing their nerve -- and their senses -- in the headlong flight from individual liberty now infecting the "civilized" world.

Nice shirts, though.

http://www.tmtmetropolis.ru/stories/2002/07/26/120.html

7/30/02
2:03:38 PM

t r u t h o u t | 07.31

William Rivers Pitt | Bush's Messy War is Courting Total Disaster

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/07.31A.wrp.messy.htm

Pentagon Holds Largest-Ever Exercise To Prepare For Future Warfighting

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/07.31B.war.exercise.htm

Profound Effect on U.S. Economy Seen in a War on Iraq

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/07.31C.war.econo.htm

Cheney, Himself Under Investigation, Promises Corporate Crackdown

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/07.31D.cheney.htm

Merrill Replaced Research Analyst Who Upset Enron

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/07.31E.merrill.enron.htm

Paul Krugman | Our Banana Republics

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/07.31F.krug.banana.htm

Anti-Terror War Fading As Midterm Election Issue

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/07.31G.terror.fade.htm

7/30/02
1:47:18 PM

UAF Glaciologists' Findings Published In Science

Submitted by Vicki Daniels, July 18, 2002, Phone: 907 474.5823

Glaciologists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute have used a laser measuring device to reveal that many Alaska glaciers are melting dramatically. Their findings were published in the journal, "Science" on July 19, 2002.

Keith Echelmeyer and his co-authors, Anthony Arendt, Will Harrison, Craig Lingle and Virginia Valentine have monitored about one-fifth of all Alaska glaciers. Many have melted at an incredible rate since the 1950s, and the rate of volume loss has doubled since the early 1990s. Former mountains of ice have become relative molehills in the last four decades.

"Most glaciers have thinned several hundred feet at low elevations in the last 40 years and about 60 feet at higher elevations," Echelmeyer said.

Geophysical Institute co-authors Echelmeyer, Arendt, Harrison, Lingle, Valentine and glaciologists Sandy Zirnheld and Reggie Muskett have calculated that Alaska glaciers are responsible for at least 9 percent of the global sea-level rise during the past century, and Alaska's glaciers raise the level of Earth's oceans by more than one-tenth of a millimeter each year. This is roughly equivalent to the melting that occurs on the massive Greenland ice sheet. These new observations show that the contribution of Alaska's glaciers to global sea-level rise is far more dramatic than scientists thought.

Researchers measured the volume loss on Alaska' glaciers by checking glacier elevation and volume data on U.S. Geological Survey maps from the 1950s.

In the early 1990s, Echelmeyer, who is also a pilot, teamed with other institute scientists, electronic technicians and machinists to create a laser altimetry system to measure the elevation of glaciers. By flying over glaciers with the system mounted in the belly of his plane, Echelmeyer is able to determine glacier elevations along his flight path. Echelmeyer has flown over glaciers from the Brooks Range to Washington state with his laser measuring device.

He and the other glaciologists compared his measurements of glacier elevation with those on maps and found that about 85 percent of the Alaska glaciers they measured had lost vast portions of their mass between the 1950s and the 1990s.

By flying identical flight paths over some of these glaciers from the early 1990s to 2001, the researchers discovered that most were thinning at double the rates they did in the 40 years before.

A few Alaska glaciers are bucking the trend by getting larger, but most are melting rapidly.

Columbia Glacier in Prince William Sound and Bering Glacier in the St. Elias Mountains are two glaciers losing ice at an alarming rate: during the past decade, Columbia has shrunk by an average of about 24 feet per year along the length of the glacier; Bering has lost more than 10 feet per year.

Echelmeyer is hesitant to say these recent changes are the result of a warmer climate because he feels one decade is not long enough to tell the complete story.

He points out that tidewater glaciers, such as Columbia, are less affected by climate change because of the ocean's effect on the face of the glacier and its foundation.

Smaller mountain glaciers, such as McCall Glacier in the Brooks Range or glaciers near Seward and Juneau, are better indicators of climate change because they are not connected to a large body of water.

Echelmeyer has mapped more than 100 glaciers, sizing up Alaska's ice from McCall Glacier in the Brooks Range to Salmon Glacier near Hyder, in Southeast Alaska. While the debate about a warmer world and its effects on glacial melt and sea level continues, glaciologists at the Geophysical Institute will continue their measurements and calculations to obtain an even more complete picture of how Alaska glaciers are changing.

NOTE TO EDITORS: Photographs and video clips are available electronically through the AAAS Office of Public Programs at 202 326.6440 or scipak@aaas.org. Quicktime video clips and audio interviews in a format for broadcast can be found at:

ftp://www.uaf.edu/pub/univrel/glacier

CNN television coverage can be viewed at:

ftp://www.uaf.edu/pub/univrel/glacier/CNNcoverage

CONTACT: Anthony Arendt, Geophysical Institute Glaciologists and co-author at 907 474.7146 or Vicki Daniels Geophysical Institute Public Relations Public Specialist at 907 474.5823 or vicki@gi.alaska.edu.

For more information contact: newsroom@uaf.edu.

Source: http://www.uaf.edu/news/headlines/20020718105556.html

7/30/02
1:39:11 PM

SciTech Daily Review

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/30/science/physical/30ENTR.html

Australian research has shown that a small patch of disorder can momentarily lurch into order, akin to Humpty Dumpty's magically putting himself back together again (registration required)

Scientists have revealed the secret of cuddles: our skin has a special network of nerves that stimulate a pleasurable emotional response to stroking.

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992598

A firefly glow can help scientists track the spread of prostate cancer, and could provide the basis for improved treatment of the disease

http://www.scientificamerican.com

The tangled web chokes on video, audio, and giant data files. But designers are working to coax extra speed from this creaky network

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/nycu/tech/articles/020422/22internet.htm

Beyond the rubber bullet: The US military's effort to create nonlethal weapons that hurt but don't kill has set off its own fire storm

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,322588,00.html

A plaintive wail is rising from the hallways of US universities' science and engineering departments: where have all the graduate students gone?

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0725/p25s01-cogn.html

7/30/02
1:35:37 PM

"Proof" - Homeland Securty was planned way before 9/11!

http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495&article=31316

National Security Presidential Directives [NSPD] George W. Bush Administration

In the new Bush Administration, the directives that are used to promulgate Presidential decisions on national security matters are designated National Security Presidential Directives (NSPDs).

As discussed in NSPD 1, this new category of directives replaces both the Presidential Decision Directives and the Presidential Review Directives of the previous Administration. Unless other otherwise indicated, however, past Directives remain in effect until they are superseded.

The first directive, dated 13 February 2001, was formally approved for release by the National Security Council staff on 13 March 2001.

Membership of the National Security Council (What authority gives them approval power over Congress and/or Judiciary?)

http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/

Quote from: National Security Presidential Directives - NSPD-1 - Dated: Feb. 13, 2001

[snip] "Proliferation, Counterproliferation, and Homeland Defense (by the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs);" [snip]

SUBJECT: Organization of the National Security Council System This document is the first in a series of National Security Presidential Directives. National Security Presidential Directives shall replace both Presidential Decision Directives and Presidential Review Directives as an instrument for communicating presidential decisions about the national security policies of the United States. GO HERE TO READ FULL TEXT OF NSPD-1

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nspd/nspd-1.htm

We now have six - secret NSPD's National Security Presidential Directive

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nspd/index.html

On October 29, 2001, President Bush issued the first of a new series of Homeland Security Presidential Directives (HSPDs) governing homeland security policy. Homeland Security Presidential Directive - (Now 3)

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nspd/index.html

PROTECTING AMERICA'S CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURES: PDD 63

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/pdd-63.htm

http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495&article=31295

Presidential Decision Directives [PDD] Clinton Administration 1993-2000

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/pdd/index.html

What is the National Infrastructure Protection Center? - Miami FBI On May 22, 1998, President Clinton signed into policy, Presidential Decision Directive 63, which mandates that the National Infrastructure Protection Center, also known as NIPC, assures the continuity and viability of our country's Critical Infrastructures

http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495&article=31308

http://www.fbi.gov/contact/fo/mb/cfraud.htm

I prefer terrorism to tyranny

http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495&article=31279

You can conclude from these NSPD's that we have lost the authority of the three Branches of Government. The Judicial Branch and the Congressional Branch now have no authority over the Executive Branch. Three Branches of Government

http://www.voteutah.org/learning/government/three_branches.html

If these conclusions are in fact, "FACT"! We do indeed have TYRANNY!

NOW WHAT?

"A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, no question about it." --George Walker Bush, July 26, 2000

http://www.greatdreams.com/security.htm

http://www.turnyourbackonbush.com/index_post.html

Are Americans Ready to Crown a King?

By Chuck Baldwin - chuck@chuckbaldwinlive.com

http://www.covenantnews.com/baldwin020726.htm

The Spy Who Reads Your Meter

Ashcroft's Plan To Turn Your Neighbors Into Snoops

http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495&article=31300

`In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.' Without Justice, their is JUST_US!

http://disc.server.com/Indices/149495.html

APFN CONTENTS PAGE:

http://www.apfn.org/old/apfncont.htm

911: THE ROAD TO TYRANNY -- WATCH THE ENTIRE FILM ONLINE

http://64.245.24.77/Alex/alex_jones.html

911 - Attack on America

http://www.apfn.org/apfn/wtc.htm

Find elected officials, including the president, members of Congress, governors, state legislators, local officials, and more.

http://congress.org/congressorg/dbq/officials/

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."

Theodore Roosevelt

http://www.turnyourbackonbush.com/

"When the Goverment fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government there is tyranny"

Thomas Jefferson

http://disc.server.com/Indices/149495.html

7/30/02
1:31:16 PM

ENVIRONMENT NEWS SERVICE

http://ens-news.com/ens/jul2002/2002-07-29-06.asp

STATE ENVIRONMENTAL AGENCIES FACE BUDGET CUTS

WASHINGTON, DC, July 29, 2002 (ENS) - State environmental agencies around the United States are facing a second straight year of budget cuts, finds a new study by the Environmental Council of the States. Seventy-five percent of the states responding to the group's survey reported a drop in funding for programs aimed at reducing pollution and protecting clean air and water.

CALIFORNIA FIRE KILLS THREE, 14 DEAD THIS SEASON

YREKA, California, July 29, 2002 (ENS) - A Lassen National Forest engine crew was involved in a single vehicle accident Sunday while assigned to the Stanza fire near Happy Camp, California. Three crew members died in the crash, bringing the number of firefighters killed this season to 14.

http://ens-news.com/ens/jul2002/2002-07-29-04.asp

ZAMBIA TO ACCEPT U.S. TRANSGENIC FOOD AID

By Singy Hanyona

LUSAKA, Zambia, July 29, 2002 (ENS) - Zambia is expected to import genetically modified maize (corn) from the United States to feed its 2.3 million starving citizens, according to the Biotechnology Trust of Africa, a regional charitable trust. Zambia has decided not to follow in the footsteps of hungry Zimbabwe, which two months ago rejected 10,000 metric tons of genetically modified maize from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

http://ens-news.com/ens/jul2002/2002-07-29-01.asp

ENVIRONMENT NEWS SERVICE AMERISCAN: JULY 29, 2002

HOUSE APPROVES FAST TRACK BILL

CAMPFIRE STARTED FIRE THREATENS GIANT SEQUOIAS

NINE STRANDED WHALES DIE ON CAPE COD

NATIONAL BOTTLE RECYCLING BILL INTRODUCED

HEAVIER VEHICLES NOT ALWAYS SAFER

GEOTHERMAL POWER PROMOTED IN NEVADA

TORNADO SEASONS SPAWNS FEW TWISTERS

ANTARCTIC GLACIER OFFERS CLIMATE CHANGE CLUES

http://ens-news.com/ens/jul2002/2002-07-29-09.asp

7/30/02
1:22:08 PM

AlterNet Headlines

http://www.alternet.org

THE UNIMPORTANCE OF BEING COLIN POWELL

Jim Lobe, AlterNet

Colin Powell has lost virtually every major policy battle to the most reckless, single-minded members of the administration. So why does he stay?

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13708

THE LITTLE GUY TAKES IT ON THE CHIN -- AND IN THE WALLET

Arianna Huffington, AlterNet

Corporate America's most notorious continue to enjoy the high life while the victims of their pillage watch their savings slip away.

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13704

ERODING HOPES FOR A KINDER, GENTLER DRUG POLICY

Ethan A. Nadelmann, AlterNet

Recent actions by the Bush Administration have destroyed any hope for an end to the punitive war on drugs that emphasizes punishment over treatment.

*In DrugReporter: http://www.alternet.org/?IssueAreaID=17

MEET THE METROSEXUAL

Mark Simpson, Salon He's well dressed, narcissistic and bun-obsessed. But don't call him gay.

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13690

CLINIC CRISIS

Eleanor J. Bader, In These Times

Thanks to federal funding, anti-choice "crisis pregnancy centers" -- whose staff routinely miseducates patients on abortion -- are on the rise.

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13702

BUSH LOVES ORPHANS EVERYWHERE

David Corn, AlterNet

Bush may be rahrahing domestic adoption, but he's creating more orphans worldwide with rightwing policies.

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13691

A 12-STEP PROGRAM FOR MEDIA DEMOCRACY

Jeffrey Chester and Gary Larson, The Nation Never before have we had such immense technological power to communicate at our disposal -- power that we can use, share, or lose.

*In MediaCulture: http://www.alternet.org/?IssueAreaID=19

Hayden on Port Huron

Political activist Tom Hayden and columnist E.J. Dionne discuss the state of our democracy 40 years after the Port Huron Statement on Tuesday's Working Assets Radio with Laura Flanders. Listen online from 10-11amPT/1-2pmET, or call in: 866-798-TALK.

http://www.workingassetsradio.com

7/30/02
1:17:19 PM

Planet Ark World Environment News

British organic farmers profits at risk - farm study - UK http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17076/story.htm

FEATURE - South African sugar farmers ease environmental impact - SOUTH AFRICA

http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17070/story.htm

The Earth Summit opens in Johannesburg on August 26 - SOUTH AFRICA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17075/story.htm

FEATURE - South Africa summit risks worsening North-South rift - NORWAY http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17078/story.htm

Olympics-Beijing picks U.S. firm's design for Olympic park - CHINA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17077/story.htm

FEATURE - Political climate cools for fight on global warming - BELGIUM http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17072/story.htm

Pod of 54 whales die on Australian coastline - AUSTRALIA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17071/story.htm

World's most mined country to sign ban treaty - AFGHANISTAN http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17073/story.htm

Afghans to host landmine conference as toll rises - AFGHANISTAN http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17074/story.htm

ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS PICTURES:

SINGAPORE: A Snakehead Fish Moves Along the Ground at a Fish Farm in Singapore

http://www.planetark.org/envpicstory.cfm/newsid/17080

JAPAN: Baby Monkey Clings onto Its Mother as They Swim at Kyoto Zoo http://www.planetark.org/envpicstory.cfm/newsid/17079

PHILIPPINES: Greenpeace Members Protests in Manila http://www.planetark.org/envpicstory.cfm/newsid/17081

UK: Animal Rights Demonstrators Call For the Closure of Huntingdon Life Sciences Laboratory http://www.planetark.org/envpicstory.cfm/newsid/17082

7/29/02
6:29:29 PM

Greenpeace USA July 2002 Newsletter:

What's new and noteworthy at www.greenpeaceusa.org

Vote for Chemical Safety Bill is First Step in Preventing Chemical Terrorism

True Food Road Show Wraps Up in Boston

Urge Martha to Go Independent of PVC This Summer

Esso Doesn't Like Our Parody of Their Logo- Will They Like Yours?

Vote for Chemical Safety Bill is First Step in Preventing Chemical Terrorism

On July 25th, the 19-0 vote in favor of the Chemical Security Act was a breakthrough in the prevention of catastrophic attacks on U.S. chemical facilities.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), more than 120 chemical facilities in the U.S. each threaten a million or more nearby residents.

This legislation will give the U.S. chemical industry a strong incentive to consider using many safer alternatives which are already on the market.

Thanks go to the 4,042 of you who gave your input on this important issue through our online action center.

Find out more, http://www.greenpeaceusa.org/features/chemical_terror.htm

True Food Road Show Wraps Up in Boston

Last week, Greenpeace, along with Clean Water Action, completed their "True Food Road Show" tour of New England's Shaw's supermarkets in Boston.

Shaw's commits to using non-GMO ingredients in England, but not in New England or anywhere else in the U.S.

Greenpeace revealed this double standard to Shaw's Star market customers in New England, and urged store managers to give New England what England has: non-genetically engineered food.

Find out more from Greenpeace's True Food Now website at:

http://www.truefoodnow.org/inside_scoop/archives/072302_star_protest.html

Urge Martha to Go Independent of PVC This Summer

Summer is here, so start up the grill and bring out the picnic gear. But watch out, some of your favorite tablecloths, beverage containers and lawn furniture from the Martha Stewart Everyday line could be PVC.

PVC (polyvinyl chloride or vinyl) is the most damaging plastic to human health and the environment, and the largest source of the cancer-causing chemical, dioxin.

Find out more,

http://www.greenpeaceusa.org/toxics/martha.htm

Esso Doesn't Like Our Parody of Their Logo- Will They Like Yours?

ExxonMobil's European division, Esso France, succeeded in censoring a parody of their logo on the Internet.

Greenpeace France had used the parody of the Esso logo on its French website, and has since been ordered to remove it. Esso says the logo damages Esso's reputation, but they don't want to talk about the content of the site or the REAL causes of the problem with their reputation.

Find out more at,

http://www.stopexxonmobil.org

Esso clearly doesn't like our parody logo. Are you feeling creative? How about entering our "Design a New Esso Logo" competition? See if you can create a new logo for Esso that reflects the true climate-criminal nature of the company.

Find out how at,

http://act.greenpeace.org/1027510006/index_html

View the best ones we've seen so far,

http://www.stopesso.org/static/logos.html

Want to do more? Become a Greenpeace member today! To give online, go to:

https://www.greenpeaceusa.org/join2/list.htm

7/29/02
6:26:44 PM

Organic Farmers 'Face Cash Crisis'

by BBC, July 29, 2002

The Soil Association wants payments for organic farmers. Britain's organic farmers are facing a cash crisis that could close down the UK market, according to a new survey.

Research by the National Farmers' Union claims one in three organic farmers is losing money. Its publication comes on the day the government announces its Organic Action Plan for England in an effort to improve the organic market.

"The message coming out of our report is clear - organic production in Britain is at risk" Ben Gill, NFU. The 21-point plan, drawn up following the publication of the Curry report into sustainable farming, includes substantially increased premiums and a commitment from supermarkets to work towards increasing British farmers' share of the organic market.

Campaigners for organic food and farming have described the plan as "a huge and significant step forward". The demand for organic produce has increased exponentially in recent years, but about 70% of the produce in supermarkets is imported, compared with 30% for conventionally farmed food.

Survival

The action plan commits the government to raising premiums for organic farmers who produce the same goods as those we import most of - cereals, fruit and vegetables.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has set aside £5m over five years to support research in the organic sector, to start next year.

But the NFU's latest Organic Farming report shows that producers have been left fighting for survival alongside traditional farmers.

Most organic produce in the UK is imported

The report shows that while the amount of land in organic production in the UK rose by a third last year, the number of organic farmers making a loss has almost doubled in the past five years.

NFU President Ben Gill said it was vital that the government recognised the value of home-grown organic production, its needs, and the development of the sector.

"The UK is more dependent on imported organic produce than any other European country, with imports currently accounting for 75% of total sales," he said.

"Farmers, quite rightly, fear that this together with falling returns on organic produce is undermining the future sustainability of the domestic market."

Ongoing payments

The Soil Association agreed that drastic action was needed but welcomed the government's plan as a major breakthrough.

A spokesman said: "Retailers must ensure that a fair price is paid and reduce the level of imported food.

"The opportunities to further expand organic farming are as real as they were five years ago with sales of organic food, and the number of farmers going into conversion, rising annually."

But he said ongoing payments to organic farmers should be introduced as soon as possible as UK producers are not entitled to the same payments available to organic farmers in most European countries.

The Soil Association added that the demand for UK organic food could be increased by encouraging schools, hospitals and other public bodies to source organic food.

Defra will also be doing its bit by serving organic food in the department's canteen on a trial basis.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2157954.stm

7/29/02
6:20:21 PM

t r u t h o u t | 07.30

Clinton Rips White House, Rejects Blame Claim

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/07.30A.clinton.bush.htm

US Accused of Afghan Airstrike Cover-Up

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/07.30B.afghan.cover.htm

Boston Mob Informant Scandal Involved Highest Levels of FBI, Documents Show

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/07.30C.mob.fbi.htm

Against a Backdrop of Funerals, Hopeful Hints in Mideast

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/07.30D.hope.mid.e.htm

Sen. Lieberman Assails Bush Homeland Security Control Demand

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/07.30E.libe.bush.htm

Blair Warned: Iraq Attack 'Illegal'

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/07.30F.blair.iraq.htm

Britons Left in Jail Amid Fears That Saudi Arabia Could Fall to Al-Qaeda

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/07.30G.saudi.AlQ.htm

7/29/02
6:15:19 PM

DAILY GRIST

YEAH, BABY

To Marlene Sandberg, "changing diapers" means something different from just putting a clean Huggies on baby. Sandberg, who is Swedish, is working to change not just individual diapers but the whole product. In the mid-1990s, after reading that every Swedish baby produces a half-ton of dirty diapers per year (which then persists in landfills long past when the baby has babies of its own), she left her job as a corporate lawyer to invent an environmentally friendly diaper. Now the company she founded, Naty AB, is making tentative inroads into a highly competitive field, where woman are (oddly) scarce and the competition is entrenched. Her Nature Boy & Girl diapers are more than 70 percent biodegradable, and they are made with less plastic and other synthetics than regular diapers. Some environmentalists have praised her product, while others still have concerns. Cloth-diaper advocate Maeve Murphy of the London-based Women's Environmental Network said, "[T]his is still a single-use product that gets thrown away, and as such, it's a waste of resources."

straight to the source: New York Times, Sarah Lyall, 27 Jul 2002 <http://www.gristmagazine.com/forward.pl?forward_id=305>

GIVE THOSE RANCHERS A HAND

In an unusual shake-up of traditional alliances, ranchers and environmentalists are banding together in Colorado to fight a common enemy: urban sprawl. In Custer County, at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, three conservation groups and six ranchers have signed a covenant limiting the kind of development permissible on the land -- no trophy homes, no golf courses, no condominiums. The result? An 11,000-acre swath of green that will ensure that ranchers still have the wide-open lands they need for their cattle, while also guaranteeing that subdivisions and other signs of creeping suburbia will be kept at bay. The Custer County deal is the largest and most ambitious of a recent flurry of alliances between ranchers and enviros in an effort to protect the open spaces of the West.

straight to the source: Christian Science Monitor, Todd Wilkinson, 29 Jul 2002 <http://www.gristmagazine.com/forward.pl?forward_id=306>

do good: Support an anti-sprawl bill <http://www.gristmagazine.com/dogood/land.asp#character>

ZOO ZOO ZOOMA ZOOM

Sure, that little kitten at the animal rescue shelter is cute, but have you ever considered an orangutan? Hopefully not -- but far too many people have, fueling an illegal primate market in Nigeria, the country that conservationists say does the most trade in endangered species on the African continent. The animals are brought to market by poachers, then purchased by affluent customers who want them for public and private zoos worldwide. Along with primates, Nigerian poachers sell other highly endangered animals -- fish eagles, desert foxes, gray parrots. A baby chimp costs about $500, and even extraordinarily rare gorillas can be bought for the right price (about $200,000). Nigeria is a signatory of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, but that hasn't stopped traffickers from hawking animals in Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.

straight to the source: Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, Glenn McKenzie, 28 Jul 2002 <http://www.gristmagazine.com/forward.pl?forward_id=307>

MICHIGAN SEEMS LIKE A NIGHTMARE TO ME NOW

It's about 2,000 miles from Michigan to California -- and about a world away. Linked by market forces (California is the nation's biggest car market, Michigan the nation's biggest car manufacturer) but separated by cultural chasms, the relationship between the two states has always been rocky. Now, in the wake of last week's landmark Golden State legislation to limit carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles, the two states are more at odds than ever. "There's more than a little concern among the car companies about how bad the relationship with California has gotten. There needs to be a stand-down, but the more we want to talk, the more radical and out of control they get," said one Detroit industry executive. Meanwhile, many Californians, noting the popularity of gas-guzzling SUVs and the even more profligate Hummers, say it's the industry that's out of control.

straight to the source: New York Times, Danny Hakim, 28 Jul 2002 <http://www.gristmagazine.com/forward.pl?forward_id=308>

ONION JACK

Times are so bad for organic farmers in the United Kingdom that the whole market for organic foods could collapse, according to research published today by the National Farmers Union. According to the data, one in three organic farms in Great Britain is losing money. If there is hope, it lies in the Organic Action Plan for England, a national effort to improve the market for organically grown goods that was also unveiled today. The 21-point plan includes substantial government financial assistance and a commitment from supermarkets to increase British farmers' share of the organic market. The latter is a critical component because, although the demand for organic produce in the U.K. has grown dramatically in recent years, about 70 percent of such produce sold in supermarkets is imported (compared with just 30 percent for conventionally grown produce). That makes the U.K. more dependent on imported organics than any other European country.

straight to the source: BBC News, 29 Jul 2002 <http://www.gristmagazine.com/forward.pl?forward_id=309>

7/29/02
6:03:55 PM

We would like to remind you of this upcoming event.

Meria With Dr. Helen Caldicott

Date: Wednesday, July 31, 2002

Time: 10:00AM - 11:00AM MDT (GMT-06:00)

Two Year Anniversary of the Meria Heller Show. I proudly interview Dr.Helen Caldicott, pediatrician and activist, one of the most influential women on the planet. She founded the Cystic Fibrosis Clinic at the Adelaide Childrens Hospital in 1975 and was on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School from 1975-1980. Founded Physicians for Social Responsibility; nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1985; the Nobel committee awarded the Peace Prize to the umbrella group she helped formulate, Intl. Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. She has written several books, but today we discuss her latest and most important "The New Nuclear Danger, George W. Bush's Military-Industrial Complex". Not to be missed!!!

http://www.Meria.net

7/29/02
6:01:33 PM

UTNE WEB WATCH

The Best of the Alternative Web

THE GREEN MACHINE

by Rebecca Atkinson, THIS Magazine

-- The "eco-rv" community proves that green living is possible for anyone.

TRUE CONFESSIONS

by Margaret Talbot, The Atlantic

-- Two simple ways to avoid wrongful convictions could put fewer innocent people to death.

THE COMING OCTOBER WAR IN IRAQ

by William Rivers Pitt, Truth Out

-- Bush's warmongering for Iraq has more to do with the midterm Congressional elections than a biological or nucluear threat.

Links to the above articles: http://www.utne.com/webwatch

7/29/02
5:47:53 PM

SciTech Daily Review