Rice touts 'most serious' Mideast peace efforts in years

Israel and Palestinian negotiators are involved in the most serious effort in "many, many years" to try to end the Mideast conflict, said U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Monday.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice meets Monday with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. "Frankly, it's time for the establishment of a Palestinian state and it's time for Israel to live in the security that is going to come with a peaceful and democratic neighbor," Rice said.

A day after meeting with Israeli leaders, Rice met in the West Bank with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and said she's pushing both sides to work "intensely" toward agreeing on a "serious, substantive and concrete" framework for a November peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland. During a joint news conference with Rice, Abbas indicated his negotiators have already agreed on some issues with Israel, but he did not specify which ones.

"The Palestinian and Israeli delegations have started the work in order to prepare the document," said Abbas. "And certainly before we go to Washington this document will be ready. Moderate Arab nations have not yet said they would attend the conference, according to The Associated Press. No date has been announced for the conference.

Rice described both sides as working with "great seriousness" and "great commitment" to avoid a conference that might prove fruitless. "We quite frankly have better things to do than invite people to Annapolis for a photo op," Rice said. "The very senior people that they have appointed to lead these delegations suggest to me that this is the most serious effort to try to end this conflict in many, many years," she said. Abbas said negotiators from both sides are working on a joint document "that would set the parameters and the foundations of the settlement of final status issues" such as Jerusalem, borders, settlements and refugees.

He said Palestinian negotiators are up against a fixed deadline and are "working very intensively and making every effort" to make the conference succeed. Both sides have been at odds over how specific the statement should be. The Palestinians seek an explicit timetable for final status issues and the Israelis prefer more general wording. The Associated Press reported on Sunday that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told his Cabinet he didn't regard the joint declaration of principles to be a prerequisite for the conference.

Rice said Monday that Palestinian concerns are a key part to ending the conflict, but the concerns don't necessarily need to be detailed in the framework agreement. "They're not going to try to solve everything in this November document, but it does need to be a serious, substantive and concrete document that can demonstrate that there is a way forward," she said.
The November conference "has to trigger the negotiations on the final status agreement," Rice said. That agreement with Israel "must involve looking to improve the lives of Palestinians economically, to improve the lives of the Palestinians in terms of movement and access." Rice said the United States "sees the establishment of a Palestinian state and a two-state solution as absolutely essential for the future, not just of Palestinians and Israelis but also for the Middle East and indeed to American interests."

Where are the Armored vehicles?

The Pentagon will fall far short of its goal of sending 3,500 lifesaving armored vehicles to Iraq by the end of the year. Instead, officials expect to send about 1,500.

Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said Wednesday that while defense officials still believe contractors will build about 3,900 of the mine-resistant, armor-protected vehicles by year's end, it will take longer for the military to fully equip them and ship them to Iraq.

"Production is on pace, the issue is delivery," he said, adding that the lag is a disappointment and the Defense Department is still committed to getting as many of the vehicles to the war as quickly as possible.

The vehicles — known as MRAPs — have a special V-shaped hull that provides greater protection against roadside bombs. According to the military, no troops have been killed while riding in one.

Once the MRAPs are built, the military installs necessary military equipment — such as radios and radar — then sends them to Iraq. Right now that process is taking about 50 days, but officials hope to shorten that to a little more than a month.

Still, Morrell said that many of the MRAPs produced in November and December won't get to Iraq before the end of the year. He said getting 3,500 to the forces in Iraq by year's end was an "ambitious goal" but the revised estimate of 1,500 is more realistic now.

Currently many of the MRAPs are being flown to the Middle East, in an effort to get them into Iraq more quickly. But as production rates increase, the Pentagon is likely to send them by ship — which takes longer but is less expensive and can deliver many more at one time.

The contractors are Stewart and Stevenson Tactical Vehicle System LP, a division of Armor Holdings Inc.; BAE Systems Plc; Force Protection Industries Inc.; General Dynamics Corp.; and Navistar International Corp.'s subsidiary International Military and Government LLC.

Earlier this year, production was a problem in the Pentagon's struggle to get more MRAPs to Iraq. In a late June report, the Defense Department's inspector general found that the Pentagon awarded contracts for the vehicles to companies that failed to produce them on time, despite knowing that there were other contractors who could have supplied some more quickly. Force Protection Industries was one of the companies in the report noted for delays.

The report concluded that those earlier problems "resulted in increased risk to the lives of soldiers."

United Nations inspectors have verified that North Korea has shut down its sole functioning nuclear reactor, the chief of the watchdog agency said Monday, confirming the isolated country had taken its first step in nearly five years to halt production of atomic weapons.

South Korea sent more oil to the North on Monday to reward its compliance with an international disarmament agreement.

"Our inspectors are there. They verified the shutting down of the reactor yesterday," said Mohamed ElBaradei, chief of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency.

"The process has been going quite well and we have had good cooperation from North Korea. It's a good step in the right direction," ElBaradei said in Bangkok, where he was to attend an event sponsored by Thailand's Ministry of Science.

South Korean Unification Minister Lee Jae-joung said a second shipment of oil departed Monday for the North on a ship. A first shipment that arrived Saturday — prompting the North to follow through on its pledge to shut the reactor — has been completely offloaded, Lee said at a meeting with U.S. nuclear envoy Christopher Hill.

The two shipments are part of 50,000 tons of oil that the North will receive for the reactor shutdown. Under a February agreement at international arms talks, North Korea will receive a total equivalent of 1 million tons of oil for dismantling its nuclear programs.

A North Korean diplomat said Sunday that his country was willing to discuss disclosing the full extent of its nuclear programs as well as disabling them as long as the U.S. removed all sanctions against the impoverished country.

Hill said Monday during his meeting with Lee that Washington moving to remove the North's pariah status would depend on the North's continued compliance with its disarmament promises.

"With complete denuclearization, everything is going to be possible," Hill said.

The North said it shut down the reactor, which generates plutonium for atomic bombs, on Saturday. It was the first on-the-ground achievement toward scaling back the country's nuclear ambitions since an international standoff began in late 2002.

The North's Foreign Ministry said Sunday that further progress on disarmament would depend "on what practical measures the U.S. and Japan, in particular, will take to roll back their hostile policies toward" North Korea. North Korea wants normal relations with both countries.

The ministry noted that North Korea acted to shut down its nuclear reactor even before receiving all 50,000 tons of oil, adding that was "a manifestation of its good faith toward the agreement," according to a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

Still, North Korea emphasized Sunday that it did not view the oil as aid and that the U.N. inspectors' activities were restricted in scope.

"The provision of substitute energy including heavy oil is by no means 'aid' in the form of charity but compensation for the (North's) suspension of its nuclear facilities and the activities of the IAEA in (Yongbyon) are not 'inspection' but limited to verification and monitoring," the ministry said.

North Korea is set to participate in a renewed session of six-party disarmament talks this week in Beijing along with China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the U.S.

Hill, a U.S. assistant secretary of state, has said the negotiations would focus on a "work plan and a timeframe" for how disarmament would proceed, adding he planned to meet his North Korean counterpart Tuesday ahead of the formal start of talks.

Man says he captured Loch Ness on film

The Loch Ness monster is back — and there's video. A man has captured what Nessie watchers say is possible footage of the supposed mythical creature beneath Scotland's most mysterious lake.

"I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw this jet black thing, about 45 feet long, moving fairly fast in the water," said Gordon Holmes, the 55-year-old a lab technician from Shipley, Yorkshire, who took the video Saturday.

Nessie watcher and marine biologist Adrian Shine viewed the video and hoped to properly analyze it in the coming months.

"I see myself as a skeptical interpreter of what happens in the loch, but I do keep an open mind about these things and there is no doubt this is some of the best footage I have seen," said Shine, of the Loch Ness 2000 center in Drumnadrochit, on the shores of the lake.

Holmes said whatever it was moved at about 6 mph and kept a fairly straight course.

"My initial thought is it could be a very big eel, they have serpent-like features and they may explain all the sightings in Loch Ness over the years."

Loch Ness is surrounded by myth. It's the largest inland body of water in Britain, and at about 750 feet to the bottom, it's even deeper than the North Sea.

"There are a number of possible explanations to the sightings in the loch. It could be some biological creature, it could just be the waves of the loch or it could some psychological phenomenon in as much as we see what we want to see," Shine said.

While many sightings can be attributed to a drop of the local whisky, legends of Scottish monsters date back to one of the founders of the Christian church in Scotland, St. Columba, who wrote of them in about 565 A.D.

More recently, there have been more than 4,000 purported Nessie sightings since she was first caught on camera by a surgeon on vacation in the 1930s.

Since then, the faithful have speculated about it is a completely unknown species, a sturgeon — even though they have not been native to Scotland's waters for many years — or even a last surviving dinosaur.

Real or imagined, Nessie has long been a Scottish emblem. She has been the muse for cuddly toys and immortalized on T-shirts and posters showing her classic three-humped image.

The Orion Nebula

The nebula's outermost layers of gas and dust appear as a grayish veil. The grayish-colored gas that forms a prominent curve from lower left to upper right can be thought of as the "rim" of a giant carved bowl. Descending into the bowl, we encounter a plateau-like region (reddish in color).
The bright central cavern takes us deeper yet. Called the Trapezium, it is the home of the four most massive stars in Orion. The light unleashed by these stars is carving a cavity around them and disrupting the growth of less massive stars.

What's in a name?
It is called “Orion” for its location and “Nebula” because it is a cloud of gas and dust. The nebula resides along a spiral arm of the Milky Way, in the middle of the sword region of the constellation Orion, the Hunter.

Orion the Hunter: The constellationthat containsthe nebula

Constellations are imaginary pictures in the sky that ancient civilizations created. By linking together the brightest stars that appear close to each other, they formed geometric patterns that represented features of gods, heroes, animals, and mythological creatures.
Often, ancient people created myths or stories about why these creatures appear in the sky. The constellation tales not only provided amusement but also helped the ancient astronomers remember the positions of the stars. Orion is one of the constellations that can be seen in the Northern Hemisphere’s winter sky.
Above and to the left of the bright central cavity is another smaller, bright region being sculpted by a young, massive star at its core.

Eggs will raise your cholesterol

Avoid eggs. Drink 8 glasses of water a day. Eating carbs will make you fat. Nutritional advice such as this has been touted for years -- but is it accurate?
Not necessarily, according to Wendy Repovich, an exercise physiologist at Eastern Washington University in Cheyenne, Washington, who did her best to dispel several common nutrition misconceptions during an American College of Sports Medicine-sponsored health and fitness summit held recently in Dallas.
"Eating eggs will raise your cholesterol." This myth started because egg yolks have the most concentrated amount of cholesterol in any food, Repovich told Reuters Health. However, when eaten in moderation, eggs do not contain enough cholesterol to pose health risks, she said.

"Most people avoid eggs and probably if they have any kind of cardiovascular risk their physicians tell them to avoid eggs," Repovich said. "But really, there aren't a whole lot of studies that show that one or two eggs a day really make a difference to cholesterol levels."

"Eating carbohydrates makes you fat" is another myth. Cutting carbs from the diet may help a person shed pounds due to water loss from a decrease in carbohydrate stores, Repovich said, but eating carbs in moderation does not directly lead to weight gain.

Here's another myth. "Drink 8 glasses of water a day." Repovich said people need to replace water lost through breathing, urinating, sweating each day -- but that doesn't necessarily total 64 ounces of water.

"I see an awful lot of people carrying bottled water around," Repovich said. "I think people are still under the impression that they have to drink 8 glasses of water a day, but most people don't realize they get water from other sources in the diet."

And too much water can be harmful, Repovich warned, leading possibly to an imbalance in the body of sodium, a condition called hyponatremia.

It's also a myth, Repovich said, that everyone needs vitamin supplements, although she admits to popping a multivitamin each morning. People who eat a variety of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, along with moderate amounts of a variety of low-fat dairy and protein and the right quantity of calories, probably don't need a vitamin supplement, she said.

"But for the most part, we don't eat the way we should so probably a simple multivitamin is good for most people," Repovich said.

Britons cheer sailors' freedom

Iran abruptly announced Wednesday that it would release 15 British sailors and marines after days of low-key British diplomacy, international pressure and U.S. moves helped defuse the crisis.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced the decision, calling it a "gift to the British people" for Easter and claiming that Britain had promised not to stray into Iranian waters again.

The 15 were to fly home today. In London, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said his government's "measured approach, firm but calm, not negotiating but not confronting either," led to freedom for the 15. They were seized at gunpoint in disputed Persian Gulf waters March 23.

At a news conference Wednesday in Tehran, Ahmadinejad pinned a medal on the Revolutionary Guard commander who seized the British, then announced they would go free and were being "pardoned." He said Iran received a letter from Britain pledging its forces would not re-enter Iranian waters.

The British Foreign Office declined to release the note. It has said its crew was in Iraqi waters when captured.

The end of the crisis came as the U.S. military announced it might permit an Iranian envoy to visit five Iranians in U.S. custody in Iraq since Jan. 11. Monday, an Iranian diplomat abducted in Baghdad by uniformed gunmen Feb. 4 was released. The United States had denied any role in that incident.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said, "We're pleased that these people have the prospect of being reunited with their families, but there have been no quid pro quos from the United States."

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, in a telephone interview from Baghdad, also denied a link but conceded "the timing is interesting." He said Iraq has asked U.S. forces to release the five Iranians, who he said were processing travel permits for Iraqis to visit Iran and holding security talks with Iraqi Kurdish officials. Zebari said Iran would be reluctant to take part in an upcoming meeting on stabilizing Iraq unless the five were freed.

According to a U.S. military statement released after the five were detained in January, the Iranians are members of the elite Quds Force of Iran's Revolutionary Guards and were involved in providing deadly explosives to Iraqi Shiite militias.

Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said the case is under "continuous review" and the United States is considering Zebari's request to allow an Iranian official to visit the five detainees. Garver said the five have been visited by a delegation from the International Red Cross that included an Iranian.

Iran's capture of the British sailors and marines was in part a reaction to the U.S. arrests of the suspected Guards members and the abduction of Iranian diplomat Jalal Sarafi in Baghdad, said Geoffrey Kemp, a Middle East expert at the Nixon Center, a think tank in Washington.

Kemp said the Tehran regime "milked this for all it was worth" and decided to release the British to avoid giving the United States and the Europeans reason to increase pressure against Iran over its nuclear program.

The United Nations Security Council has penalized Iran for its refusal to halt efforts to enrich uranium. European countries limit financial ties with the Islamic regime.

Seizing the British "damaged the prestige of Iran for ordinary people in Western countries," said Mohsen Sazegara, a founder of the Revolutionary Guards who is a dissident living in the USA.

Gary Sick, who was White House national security adviser during the hostage crisis in 1979-81 when Iran held 52 Americans for 444 days, said Iran will pay "a very heavy price" for a short-term tactical victory.

"The image of Iran as an unreliable power has been reinforced," he said. "The normal reaction to someone straying a mile into your waters is not to arrest him and hold him hostage and put him on television."

The seizure was controversial in Iran, where Ahmadinejad has been criticized for being too confrontational. "Tehran announced that it is ready to solve the British sailors' problem through negotiations and diplomacy," wrote an Iranian newspaper, Kargozaran, in an editorial Wednesday. "This, however, could have happened sooner to prevent the crisis from extending to the international community."

Levitating high-speed trains, super-efficient power generators and ultra-powerful supercomputers would become commonplace thanks to a new breed of materials known as high temperature superconductors (HTSC).

"The breakthroughs in superconductivity bring us to the threshold of a new age," said President Regan. "It's our task to herald in that new age with a rush."

But 20 years on, the new world does not seem to have arrived. So what happened?

Early promise

Superconductivity was first discovered in 1911 by researchers at the University of Leiden who used solid mercury in their experiments. Superconductors have no electrical resistance, so unlike conventional conductors they allow an electric current to flow through without any loss.

Drs Mueller and Bednorz were awarded the Nobel prize in 1987


The 'Woodstock of Physics'

At the start, the phenomenon was only seen in materials cooled close to absolute zero, which according to theory is the state of zero heat energy. Three-quarters of a century later, the highest temperature achieved for the onset of superconductivity, the so-called transition temperature, was a frigid 23 Kelvin (-250C). This allowed scientists to exploit the phenomenon in specialist applications such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanners and high energy physics particle colliders, cooled by liquid helium. But more day-to-day applications, such as replacing the electricity grid with superconducting wires, remained impossible without materials able to operate at higher temperatures.

Closer to zero

The breakthrough came in 1986. Two IBM researchers, Georg Bednorz and Alex Mueller, discovered a new family of ceramic superconductors, known as the copper oxide perovskites, that operated at 35K (-238C) The work was rapidly followed up Paul Chu, of the University of Houston, who discovered materials operating at 93K (-182C)
The material was not as simple as we originally thought

Paul Chu
The discovery meant that superconductors had entered the temperature range of liquid nitrogen (77K, -196C), an abundant and well understood coolant.

"All of a sudden everything was different," said Professor Chu. "There was a euphoric feeling. People in the field thought nothing was impossible."

The discovery prompted a huge gathering of physicists in New York to discuss the breakthrough, a meeting later called the "Woodstock of Physics".

Precise structure

But large-scale commercialisation of the technology would prove more difficult.
"The material was not as simple as we originally thought," said Professor Chu.

One of the first commercial uses of superconductors was MRI scanners
Despite an intensive two-decade search, the underlying mechanism of superconductivity in the ceramics is still disputed. In addition, their exact structure, requiring ultra-thin layers of different elements stacked on top of each other, means they are very difficult and expensive to manufacture. "Atomically, you have to line them up very precisely in order for the supercurrent to flow," explained Professor Chu. This, coupled with the fact that ceramics are brittle and difficult to turn into flexible wires and films, meant that prospects for immediate exploitation were not good.

"I think the expectations were a little unrealistic," said Dr Dennis Newns of IBM.

"The typical time it takes from inventing a new concept to application is 20 years," he said. "And that is exactly what we have seen."

Cool running

Companies in Japan, Europe, China, South Korea and the US are forging ahead with applications. In the US, American Superconductor has developed a way to "bend the unbendable", creating HTSC wires that can carry 150 times more electricity than the equivalent copper cables.

"Twenty years ago you would see people making ceramic fibres and trying to bend them and it was like a dry stick of spaghetti," said Greg Yurek, CEO and founder of the company.


HTS wire is much more compact than its copper equivalent

To get around this brittleness, the company embeds up to 85 tiny filaments of superconducting ceramic in a ribbon of metal 4.4mm (0.17 inches) wide. "Think of optical fibres," said Dr Yurek. "If you have a rod of glass and you whack it on your desk it will shatter. "Drop down to a fine optical fibre and it becomes flexible - it's the same principle here." The company also produces wires with a coating of the ceramic just one micron (millionth of a metre) thick on a metal alloy. Both are cooled by a sheath of liquid nitrogen. Short sections of the wires have already been installed in Columbus, Ohio, and a further half-mile of cable will soon be laid on Long Island, New York. In the short term, longer stretches of the supercooled cable will be difficult to install, as it requires an infrastructure to pump liquid nitrogen around the grid. But Dr Yurek believes that it will not be long before other firms start to offer utility companies these cryogenic services.

"This is the model they have used in the MRI industry to guarantee the cold," he said.

Shrinking motors

The company also promotes its HTSC wires for other advanced applications.
Central Japan Railways uses coils of it for their superconducting experimental magnetic levitation (maglev) train.

Japan's maglev set the world speed record for the technology

American Superconductor has also developed an electric motor using coils of superconducting wire for use in the next generation of US Navy destroyers. Electric motors are used by most commercial cruise liners, but are typically very bulky.

Using HTSC technology dramatically shrinks their size and also increases their efficiency.
The company is just about to start testing its latest 36.5-megawatt engine that is cooled by off-the-shelf liquid helium refrigerators and weighs 75 tonnes. By comparison, an engine based on copper wires would weigh 300 tonnes.

"That's great for cruise ships and the navy, because they can use that space for other things like passenger cabins or munitions," said Dr Yurek.

"New age"

Experimentally, things have also moved on. New superconductors have been found. For example, a new mercury-based compound has a transition temperature of 134K (-139C) "When we applied pressure we raised it up to 164K (-109C) - that's a record," said Professor Chu. "Of course from an application point of view, it's hopeless."
I think we're on a launching pad here and we're now ready to take off

Greg Yurek
However, other experimental work raises the possibility of discovering room temperature superconductors that would require no exotic cooling equipment.
A new theory, outlined in a paper in the journal Nature Physics by Dr Newns and his IBM colleague Dr Chang Tsuei, seeks to explain the elusive mechanism of superconductivity in the class of ceramics discovered in 1986. "We don't see any fundamental limits," said Dr Tsuei.
"If someone discovered a room-temperature superconductor tomorrow that fits with what is outlined by our theory, we wouldn't be surprised at all," added Dr Newns.

This kind of optimism, seen for the first time in the mid-1980s, now seems to be deserved.
There has been a crescendo of research, while at the same time the first commercial HTSC products are rolling out of factories.

According to Dr Yurek, this is a sign that the new age promised by Ronald Reagan is finally here.
"I think we're on a launching pad here and we're now ready to take off," he said.

Judge mocked over Anna Nicole case

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - From the state that brought you the hanging chad, now comes the crying judge. Some members of the bar and other court-watchers are cringing over the way Judge Larry Seidlin wept — no, sobbed — on live, national TV as he announced a ruling Thursday in the dispute over where Anna Nicole Smith should be buried.
Some are accusing the brash former New York cab driver of showboating for the cameras, or worse, auditioning for his own courtroom TV show, with his one-liners, his personal asides, and his smart-alecky Bronx delivery during the six-day hearing.

They say that he let the hearing drag on way too long, that he made inappropriate jokes for a dispute over a body, that he acted as if it were all about him.

"He's like Judge Judy's wacky little brother," legal analyst Jefrey Toobin quipped on CNN.

The New York Post called him a "Weepy Wacko," while the Daily News asked, "How Low Can This Judge Go?" and referred to him as "Blubbering Seidlin." One of the Miami's most celebrated defense attorneys, Roy Black, said of the circus-like scene in Seidlin's courtroom: "I sort of think it gives circuses a bad name."

Black said he was torn between being entertained as a spectator and being horrified as a legal professional.

"I thought he was one of the most entertaining things I had ever seen. He could be a TV judge. He could be a stand-up comic. However, I think he makes a horrible judge," Black said. "He doesn't follow any of the rules or procedures."

In court, the 56-year-old Seidlin talked about his wife and divulged the minutiae of his days, mentioning his morning swim and the tuna sandwich he was having when assigned the case. He called Dr. Joshua Perper, the medical examiner, "Dr. Pepper." Lawyers became known by their home states of "Texas" or "California." The hearing often became a free-for-all, with the various parties talking at the same time.

On the last day of the hearing, Seidlin cut witnesses off altogether. From the bench, he freely aired his thoughts, including "I feel for you, Mama" to Smith's mother. And just when everyone was ready for testimony to spill into one final day, he issued his ruling.

In the end, though, Black said he agreed with Seidlin's tearful ruling that custody of Smith's body go to the court-appointed lawyer representing her 5-month-old baby, Dannielynn, and he said he thought the judge's emotions were genuine.

"I believe that he sincerely tried to do the right thing," he said. "But while the end result is correct, it made a mockery of the system of justice."

The baby's lawyer ultimately decided to have Smith buried in the Bahamas, which was what Seidlin had fervently wished for from the bench. That decision represented a defeat for Smith's mother, Virgie Arthur, who wanted to bury the starlet in her native Texas.

One of Arthur's attorneys, John O'Quinn, said of the judge: "The entire nation was watching him and so he wanted to do the most bizarre thing he could."

John Thompson, a Coral Gables lawyer, said Seidlin made a mockery of the judicial process.

"If this is how a Circuit Court judge is supposed to act," he said, "then the Florida Supreme Court should issue an order directing that henceforth sitting judges can wear not just robes but rather opt for the clownish outfit of a carnival barker."

Seidlin declined to comment Friday, saying it wouldn't be appropriate. His only hope might be that the whole thing will eventually go away.

"You're all done with me," he said as he prepared to make his ruling Thursday. "I'm not going to talk about this case ever again."

At one point earlier this week, Seidlin rejected some of the characterizations of his courtroom: "There's no circus here, my friend."

Seidlin does have his admirers, too, including the attorneys for Larry Birkhead, one of at least two men who claim to be the father of Smith's baby.

"Sometimes lightening up a little helps everyone relax," said one, Susan Brown.

Eve Preminger, a former New York judge, said Seidlin could have curtailed his comments and held back his feelings, but he shouldn't be criticized so intensely for it.

"I just don't think it's the worst sin a judge could commit," she said. "I'd rather have an overemotional judge who cares than a mean judge who doesn't. We judges are so concerned with our dignity that sometimes we lose sight of the human issues."

How Rain and Snow Form

Not all raindrops are what you might think. Most of them, in fact, are never seen. Or, at least, they aren't seen until the very end of their life cycle.
Though a cloud might look like a giant cotton ball, it is actually made up of tiny ice crystals or water droplets that have condensed (turned from vapor to water) around even tinier bits of dust. Near the tops of clouds, even in summer, most of these little "raindrops" are ice rather than water, because it's so cold at the higher altitudes.
Clouds are often created when two different types of air masses run into each other -- a warm air mass and a cold air mass. Typically, the warm air gets pushed up over the cold air.
As warm air rises, condensation occurs; the air cools to a point where it will condense from the gas state into a water state. The rising air pulls the drop up, where it may freeze. All the while, more water is condensing onto it (or freezing onto it, a process called sublimation). So the drop gets bigger.

Finally, the updraft dies out and/or the drop is heavy enough to fall. When it falls, it may or may not turn from ice back into water. And it may get caught in another updraft and go through the whole cycle again. When this happens, the raindrop (or ice pellet) can get very large. This is how strong storms (where the air is going up and down rapidly and violently) create those huge raindrops or huge hailstones.
Eventually, the raindrop or hunk of ice is large enough that gravity overcomes whatever updrafts are in the system, and the raindrop, or whatever it has become, falls to Earth.
On the way down, it may melt or freeze, which determines what we finally call it when it hits the ground.

Car industry facing 18% CO2 cut

Transport produced 28% of the EU's CO2 emissions in 2004The European Commission is proposing forcing carmakers to make an 18% cut in CO2 emissions from new cars by 2012.
A spokesman said the commission was aiming for a 25% cut in car emissions overall, with the "bulk of the effort" coming from better motor technology.
The rest of the cut is expected to be achieved by measures such as greater use of biofuels and better tyres.
Details of the plan, which has divided the commission, are being unveiled on Wednesday after a two-week delay.
Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas had wanted to oblige carmakers to achieve the full 25% emissions cut alone, but ran into strong opposition from the German car industry and Industry Commissioner Guenter Verheugen.
Missed targets
Industry sources say Mr Dimas's proposal would have pushed up the cost of a new car by 2,500 euros (£1,640), though other studies suggested the increase would be as low as 600 euros (£400).

No end to CO2 fight
Carmakers fail green test
Reports from Brussels say the commission will propose a package of measures designed to bring emissions from the average new car down to 120g of CO2 per kilometre by 2012 - 25% below the 2005 level of 162g/km.
Carmakers would be responsible for getting emissions down to 130g/km through the use of better car technology, under the commission proposal.
Increased use of biofuels, better tyres and measures to ensure drivers change gear at the right time would help to save the extra 10g/km.
European carmakers agreed in 1998 to aim for average emissions of 140g/km by 2008/9, but are no longer expected to meet this target.
The EU originally wanted to get emissions under 120g/km by 2005, but the deadline slipped to 2012.
The commission last week announced proposals designed to increase the use of biofuels, and to reduce the amount of CO2 emitted in the production of fuels.
'No justification'
The European car industry says consumers have so far shown little interest in cars with smaller engines and lower emissions.
Now they have failed to do the job they agreed to do, it makes no sense to let them off the hook
Aat PeterseTransport and Environment
Brussels presses for greener fuels It also says there are more cost-efficient ways of reducing transport emissions than introducing costly new technology, such as reducing traffic congestion and changing driver behaviour.
But Aat Peterse of the environmental group Transport and Environment said there was no justification for abandoning the 120g/km target, which car manufacturers had known about for 10 years.
"Now they have failed to do the job they agreed to do, it makes no sense to let them off the hook," he added.
Transport is the only sector in Europe that has shown dramatic increases in CO2 emissions over the last 15 years.
The car industry has made huge improvements in engine efficiency, but the power, size and weight have cars have also increased rapidly.
As a result, CO2 emissions have only fallen by 23g/km from the 1995 level of 185g/km.
Legislation on the basis of Wednesday's proposal is unlikely to be drafted until 2008.

Vulcan: The Planet

Alas, poor Pluto. Demoted last year to dwarf planet status -- not really a planet after all. At least its "day in the sun" lasted for 75 years. We bid it a fond farewell as we pluck it out of the solar system mobile from our fourth-grade science project. Now consider the tragic story of Vulcan. It began its life in 1859 as a calculus equation when French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier tried to account for Mercury's deviation from its predicted orbit. Was it caused by a new planet? After all, Neptune was discovered this way. Over the years, scientists and amateur astronomers joined in the search for the hypothetical planet, but Mercury's proximity to the sun made it difficult to view. Was it just a sunspot or an asteroid? It was a moot point by 1915 when Einstein announced his General Theory of Relativity. It neatly explained the wibble in Mercury's wobble and later viewings during an eclipse confirmed it. There was no planet Vulcan. Ah, fleeting fame!

Saddam Hussein executed for war crimes

Saddam Hussein' the shotgun-waving dictator who ruled Iraq with a remorseless brutality for a quarter-century and was driven from power by a U.S.-led war that left his country in shambles, was taken to the gallows clutching a Quran and hanged Saturday.
In Baghdad's Shiite enclave of Sadr City, people danced in the streets while others fired guns in the air to celebrate the former dictator's death. The government did not impose a round-the-clock curfew as it did last month when Saddam was convicted to thwart any surge in retaliatory violence.
It was a grim end for the 69-year-old leader who had vexed three U.S. presidents. Despite his ouster, Washington, its allies and the new Iraqi leaders remain mired in a fight to quell a stubborn insurgency by Saddam loyalists and a vicious sectarian conflict.
President Bush' called Saddam's execution "the kind of justice he denied the victims of his brutal regime."

UN passes Iran nuclear sanctions

The resolution achieved rare unanimous support
The United Nations Security Council has unanimously voted to impose sanctions against Iran over its failure to halt uranium enrichment.
The sanctions ban the supply of nuclear-related technology and materials and impose an asset freeze on key individuals and companies. The US representative warned that Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons would make it less, not more, secure. Iran says its programme is for peaceful purposes and has vowed to continue. If necessary, we will not hesitate to return to this body if Iran does not take further steps to comply. The resolution demands that Tehran end all uranium enrichment work, which can produce fuel for nuclear plants as well as for bombs.

The vote by the 15-member council took place exactly two months after Britain, France and Germany first introduced a draft resolution proposing sanctions.
The draft resolution was amended several times after objections from both the Russians and Chinese. But after parts of the resolution were watered down, both Russia and China - who have close financial ties with Iran - backed the proposals. The resolution, under Chapter Seven of Article 41 of the UN Charter, makes enforcement obligatory but limits action to non-military measures. But acting US ambassador to the UN, Alejandro Wolff, said the resolution sent a strong warning that there would be serious repercussions to Iran's continued defiance of the international community.
"If necessary, we will not hesitate to return to this body if Iran does not take further steps to comply," Mr Wolff said.

'Strong message'
Iran's foreign ministry spokesman, Mohammad Ali Hosseini, condemned the resolution as illegal.
He told state-run television that the decision "cannot affect or limit Iran's peaceful nuclear activities but will discredit the decisions of the Security Council, whose power is deteriorating."
Hours before the vote, US President George W Bush spoke to Russia's Vladimir Putin and discussed the issue, agreeing on the importance of a unified stance.
In a statement before the Security Council, Russia's ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, emphasised that the resolution did not authorise the use of force. But he said the sanctions sent a "strong message" to Iran about the need to comply with the UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The text was watered down to take account of Russian concerns over such provisions as a freeze on the assets abroad of specific Iranian individuals and organisations. Russia is building a nuclear power station in Iran and China has significant oil interests there. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has threatened to reconsider relations with those countries which support sanctions.

New bird flu outbreak in Vietnam

Bird flu has killed 42 people in Vietnam since 2003 (Source: WHO)
Vietnam has confirmed a lethal H5N1 bird flu outbreak among its domestic poultry in the south of the country.
Some 5,500 ducks and 500 chickens have died in the last two weeks in two provinces on the Mekong Delta, health ministry officials said.

The government said there was "an extremely high risk" of it spreading widely in the delta region.

Vietnam has been free of human cases of bird flu for a year, following a large culling and vaccination drive.

In the latest cases, all the poultry found dead were hatched illegally in the provinces of Ca Mau and Bac Lieu, health officials said.

"The risk of bird flu widely spreading in the Mekong delta is extremely high because farmers have thrown dead poultry into water channels for a long time," the Animal Health Department said in a report.

Bird flu first arrived in the Mekong delta in late 2003 and has since killed 42 people in the country.

As of 29 November 2006, the World Health Organization confirmed 258 cases of H5N1 in humans worldwide, leading to 154 deaths.

Study: Fewer inmates on death row in '05

Fewer prison inmates were moved to death row in 2005, according to a federal study that shows one more person was executed than in the year before.
Four states — California, Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania — held half of the 3,254 inmates awaiting execution at the end of 2005, the study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics showed. There were 37 death row inmates in federal prisons at that time.

Sixteen states executed 60 prisoners last year, one more inmate than in 2004

Overall, however, the number of inmates on death row on Dec. 31, 2005, or the number of inmates moved there during the year dipped.

Among the findings by the Justice Department agency:

•128 inmates were moved to death row in 2005, the third consecutive year with a decline in year-long totals. It was the lowest number of prisoners put on death row since 1973.

•Sixty-six fewer inmates were on death row at the end of 2005 than in 2004. That was a decrease for the fifth straight year and about a 10% drop since Dec. 31, 2000, when there were 3,601 death row prisoners nationwide.

The Justice Department data, the most recent available, confirmed similar trends over the past five years as identified by Amnesty International USA, which opposes the death penalty.

Sue Gunawardena-Vaughn, director of the group's Program to Abolish the Death Penalty, said the drop in part reflects the public's squeamishness in approving executions for people who ultimately may be found innocent.

Since 1973, when watchdog groups began keeping track, 123 death row inmates have been cleared of crimes that had earned them death sentences.

Juries "don't want to be culpable for possibly putting an innocent person to death," Gunawardena-Vaughn said.

Moreover, because of lengthy trials and inevitable years of appeals in capital murder cases, the death penalty is expensive and "dilutes very, very crucial resources — many of which could be put toward more policing or mental health programs," she said.

As of the beginning of this month, 52 inmates have been executed so far in 2006, according to data provided by the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center.

Thirty-eight states and the federal government allow juries to consider the death penalty in the most heinous criminal cases. All states except Nebraska allow lethal injection in executions. Inmates in Nebraska and eight other states can be electrocuted. Additionally, three states allow death by hanging, another three by firing squad and four by lethal gas.

At the end of last year, 56% of death row inmates were white and 42% were black, the Justice Department study reported. Women accounted for 2% of those people facing execution.

The orbiting Discovery crew started the meticulous inspection of the shuttle's heat shield on Sunday, looking for any possible damage from liftoff.
Mission specialist Nicholas Patrick maneuvered the shuttle's 50-foot robotic arm and similarly long boom with cameras and sensors as the exam began on the spacecraft's right wing.
thorough sweep will examine the wings and nose cap for chips and other damage from foam, a procedure made mandatory after the deadly Columbia accident in 2003. The survey began 3:08 p.m. and was expected to last 5 1/2 hours.
During tests late Saturday, the robotic arm's latching mechanism was not working automatically, so Patrick manually ordered the arm to grasp the boom. Otherwise, the inspection was without incident. Engineers are examining the camera images in real time and also will review them in greater detail later on.
Preliminary radar reports from Discovery's launch showed nothing of concern, NASA spokesman Kyle Herring said.
Meanwhile, the other crewmembers checked on the spacesuits that will be used during the mission's three spacewalks.
Discovery fired its engines Sunday to raise its altitude to 216 miles above Earth, nearly level with the international space station, where it will dock Monday afternoon.
Then the real work begins.
The first spacewalk on the 12-day mission will involve installing an $11 million addition to the space lab, while the second and third will be for rewiring the station from its temporary power system to the permanent one. The solar power arrays that were brought up during the last mission will be used for the first time after that reconfiguration is complete.
Discovery's crew will bring home one of the space station's three crewmembers, German astronaut Thomas Reiter of the European Space Agency. American astronaut Sunita "Suni" Williams will replace him, staying for six months.
Robert Curbeam will spacewalk three times. Other crewmembers are commander Mark Polansky, pilot William Oefelein, and mission specialists Patrick, Williams, Joan Higginbotham and the European Space Agency's Christer Fuglesang, the first Swede in space.
Five of Discovery's astronauts, including Patrick, are first-timers to space.
They woke up on their first morning in zero gravity to a transmission from Houston of The Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun," an allusion by flight control to how the shuttle lit up the nighttime sky during its ascent Saturday.
"Good morning, Discovery. We especially want to thank you for the burst of sunshine you brought into our lives last night. It was an awesome launch," Shannon Lucid from Mission Control radioed up to the crew.
"It was pretty great for all of us, too," Polansky responded.
NASA had required daytime launches for the first three flights after Columbia, but now feels comfortable with the improvements made since then.
The Columbia disintegrated while re-entering the atmosphere, killing the crewmembers.

The Iraqi president on Sunday sharply criticized the bipartisan U.S. report calling for a new approach to the war, saying it contained dangerous recommendations that would undermine his country's sovereignty and were "an insult to the people of Iraq."

President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd and one of the staunchest U.S. supporters within the Iraqi leadership, also said U.S. training of Iraq's army and police had gone "from failure to failure."

He criticized the recommendation by the Iraq Study Group calling for increasing the number of U.S. troops embedded with Iraqi units to train Iraq's forces from 3,000 to 4,000 currently to 10,000 to 20,000.

"It is not respecting the desire of the Iraqi people to control its army and to be able to rearm and train Iraqi forces under the leadership of the Iraqi government," he said during an interview with several reporters in his office in Baghdad.

Talabani was the most senior government official to take a stand against the report, which has also come under sharp criticism from American conservatives who claim it amounts to a veiled surrender in the war against terror.

Outgoing Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, in a surprise farewell visit to U.S. troops in Iraq this weekend, said the consequences of the war's failure would be "unacceptable."

"We feel great urgency to protect the American people from another 9/11 or a 9/11 times two or three. At the same time, we need to have the patience to see this task through to success. The consequences of failure are unacceptable," Rumsfeld said at al-Asad air base in western Iraq. "The enemy must be defeated."

Talabani said the Iraqi government planned to send a letter to President Bush "expressing our views about the main issues" in the report. He would not elaborate.

"I believe that President George Bush is a brave and committed man and he is adamant to support the Iraqi government until they've reached success," Talabani said. He said setting conditions was "an insult to the people of Iraq."

Talabani's criticism of U.S. training was directed at a key part of the study group's recommendation, which called for accelerated training of Iraqi forces and the withdrawal of most U.S. combat troops by the first quarter of 2008.

Some U.S. military experts have expressed concern that Iraqi forces will not be ready to assume full responsibility for the fighting by then. However, opposition to the war is rising within the United States, increasing pressure on Bush to shift strategy.

A roadside bomb killed one U.S. soldier and wounded another Sunday west of Baghdad, the military said. The death raised to 43 the number of troops who have died this month and pushed the total U.S. military death toll to 2,931 since the war started nearly four years ago.

Talabani said the 2008 date was realistic if the Iraqi government is given more responsibility for security.

"If we can agree with the U.S. government to give us the right of organizing, training, arming our armed forces, it will be possible in 2008 (for U.S.-led forces) to start to leave Iraq and to go back home," he said.

"If you read this report, one would think that it is written for a young, small colony that they are imposing these conditions on," Talabani said. "We are a sovereign country."

He also pointed to the report's call for the approval of a law that would allow thousands of officials from Saddam Hussein's ousted Baath party to return to their jobs.

Meanwhile, sectarian violence raged on the streets of Baghdad on Sunday, with a fresh outburst of retaliatory attacks and clashes between Shiites and Sunnis. At least 83 people were killed or found dead throughout the country, including 59 bullet-riddled bodies that turned up in Baghdad.

Late Saturday, gunmen attacked two Shiite homes in western Baghdad, killing nine men and seriously wounding another, police said. Nobody claimed responsibility for the attack, which police said occurred in the mostly Sunni Arab al-Jihad neighborhood, but it apparently was in retaliation for a bold assault earlier in the day against Sunnis.

Witnesses said Shiite militiamen entered a Sunni enclave in Hurriyah — a predominantly Shiite neighborhood — after Sunnis warned the few Shiites living there to leave or be killed. Heavy machine gun fire was heard on Saturday and three columns of black smoke rose into the sky, the witnesses said on condition of anonymity, also out of concern for their own safety.

Baghdad has been suffering from a series of attacks aimed at driving Sunnis or Shiites out of neighborhoods of the capital where they form a minority. Omar Abdul-Sattar, a member of the Sunni Arab Iraqi Islamic Party, said Sunday that an organized effort was under way in Hurriyah to force Sunnis out, and he accused Iraq's Shiite-led government of doing little to stop the violence.

Abdul-Sattar claimed that during the past five months, more than 300 Sunni families have been displaced from Hurriyah, more than 100 Sunnis killed and 200 wounded, and at least five Sunni mosques burned, along with houses and shops.

Clashes also erupted between Sunni and Shiite militants in Baghdad's mixed western Amil district, a policeman said. One Shiite militiaman was killed and six people — five Sunnis and one Shiite — were wounded, the officer said on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk to the media.

The fighting ended with U.S. and Iraqi forces rushing to the area to contain it, he said.

Rumsfeld, casually dressed in a gray jacket and an open-collar shirt, traveled to several different U.S. bases in the country on Sunday, shaking hands and joking with troops.

"For the past six years, I have had the opportunity and, I would say, the privilege, to serve with the greatest military on the face of the Earth," Rumsfeld said to more than 1,200 soldiers and Marines at al-Asad, a sprawling air base in western Anbar province, an insurgent stronghold.

Rumsfeld did not meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki during his visit. He kept the trip low-profile, with his office declining to discuss his itinerary or schedule in detail for security reasons. He returned to Washington Sunday night, Pentagon spokesman Eric Ruff said.

Key Republican joins Dems opposing Bolton nomination

This is probably not what President Bush had in mind when he stressed bipartisanship after the Democratic Party's midterm elections sweep.

A key Senate Republican has joined Democrats in opposing one of Bush's initiatives for the lame-duck Congress: John Bolton's nomination as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

With leaders from both parties promising a new bipartisan Washington, Bush began efforts to get two of his most controversial decisions approved before the Democrats take over.

Along with Bolton's nomination, Bush said he would like to move forward on legislation to retroactively authorize the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program.

Bush said he would like to see action on both issues before year's end. The Democratic-controlled Congress begins its term in January.

But Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee, who was defeated in this week's election, said he would block Bolton's nomination.

Chafee, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters that he did not believe Bolton's nomination would move forward without his support.

"The American people have spoken out against the president's agenda on a number of fronts, and presumably one of those is on foreign policy," the Rhode Island moderate told The Associated Press.

"And at this late stage in my term, I'm not going to endorse something the American people have spoke out against."

The committee, dominated 10-8 by Republicans, requires a majority vote to send the nomination to the Senate floor. A tie would be the same as a no vote.

After failing to get a Senate vote for Bolton's nomination, Bush made the appointment in August 2005 during a Congressional recess. (Full story)

Bolton's appointment will expire in January unless the Senate confirms him, and the probable next chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee says approval is unlikely.

"I see no point in considering Mr. Bolton's nomination again in the Foreign Relations Committee because, regardless of what happens there, he is unlikely to be considered by the full Senate," said Democratic Sen. Joe Biden, who is set to become the committee's chairman and control the agenda in January.

Last year Democrats launched a heated debate about Bolton as they blocked a vote on his nomination.

They complained he gave the Senate false information when he failed to note on a questionnaire that he had been questioned by the department's inspector general as part of a joint inquiry by the State Department and CIA into allegations that Iraq attempted to obtain uranium from Niger in Africa.

The State Department acknowledged the error in Bolton's statement.

Also, Sen. George Voinovich, an Ohio Republican, took to the floor and read a list of complaints by Bolton's subordinates who said he had a reputation of bullying his colleagues, taking facts out of context and exaggerating intelligence.

Carl Ford, the former chief of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, called Bolton "a quintessential kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy" and a "serial abuser" of subordinates.

Bush to meet with Reid, Durbin
The president Thursday also outlined some other issues he'd like to see Congress address before year's end, and had lunch with the likely new speaker of the House of Representatives, California Democrat Rep. Nancy Pelosi. (Transcript)

Among those issues are the Terrorist Surveillance Act of 2006, bipartisan energy legislation, trade legislation, a federal spending bill and an agreement with India on civilian nuclear technology.

The Terrorist Surveillance Act is likely to face stiff opposition in the Senate and House, and has drawn objections from members of both parties.

In August, a federal judge in Michigan declared the program unconstitutional. That ruling was appealed, but Justice Department officials do not expect a ruling until next year.

The legislation would authorize the NSA to eavesdrop on phone calls between people in the United States and suspected terrorists overseas without a court order.

Aides to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales indicated he is likely to be making public appearances to push for passage in coming days.

Before his lunch date with Pelosi, Bush lined up his Cabinet for a photo opportunity and spoke to reporters about a meeting he has scheduled Friday with two Democrats who will lead the Senate come January -- Sens. Harry Reid of Nevada and Richard Durbin of Illinois. (Watch Bush's plans for Congress before GOP cedes control -- 3:10 )

"We'll discuss the way forward for our country, and I'm going to tell them what I just told our Cabinet. It is our responsibility to put the elections behind us and work together on the great issues facing America," Bush said.

"The American people expect us to rise above partisan differences, and my administration will do its part."

At a news conference celebrating his party's return to control in the Senate, Durbin on Thursday vowed: "We can come together on a bipartisan basis to solve the real problems facing our country."

But he also dismissed the president's plans for the lame-duck Congress, the AP reported.

"For a Republican Congress to have gone forward for two years and produced so little, and then for the president to come up with a huge agenda for the next two weeks, you have to ask him, 'Why didn't you use some of the time you spent arguing on some less important issues before?'" Durbin said.

Ed Bradley of '60 Minutes' dies of leukemia

Ed Bradley, the longtime "60 Minutes" correspondent whose probing questions and deceptively relaxed interviewing manner graced some of that show's most notable reports, has died. He was 65.

Bradley died Thursday at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital of leukemia, according to staff members at the CBS program.

Bradley joined "60 Minutes" during the 1981-82 season after two years as White House correspondent for CBS News and three years at "CBS Reports." His reporting over the years won him a Peabody Award, 19 Emmys and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, among many others. He was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Association of Black Journalists.

His most recent Emmy was for a segment about the reopening of the 1950s racial murder case of Emmett Till in Mississippi.

Katie Couric, in announcing the death of Bradley on CBS, described him as "smooth, cool, a great reporter, beloved and respected by all of his colleagues here at CBS News." (Watch as Couric gives the details of Bradley's death -- 1:22 )

"Bradley could cover any kind of a story," said Bradley's "60 Minutes" colleague Mike Wallace, singling out a profile of Lena Horne as "one of the most entertaining profiles I've ever seen."

"He traveled the world. He was in the White House. Bradley was just a damn good reporter," Wallace said.

CNN correspondent and former CBS reporter John Roberts said the newsman was "always a person you could sit down with and he could keep you intrigued for hours at a time with the stories he could tell."

Roberts called Bradley a "first-rate" journalist.

"He clearly was a field reporter," said Howard Kurtz, media reporter for The Washington Post. "He did not want to be chained to a desk." Kurtz also hosts CNN's "Reliable Sources."

"He was somebody who liked being out there on the story, whether it was in the Vietnam War or whether it was doing investigative work or bringing alive the plight of families who were dealing with illnesses or violence or other issues he covered," Kurtz added. (Watch Kurtz share his thoughts on Bradley -- 3:42 )

'You can be anything you want, kid'
Bradley was known for his thoughtful, mellifluous voice and often laid-back approach, a style that often prompted unexpected emotion in his subjects.

In 2000, he conducted the only television interview with condemned Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who described his anger and bitterness after fighting in the Gulf War. Three years later, Bradley interviewed Michael Jackson, who said he had been "manhandled" when arrested on child molestation charges a few weeks earlier.

Roberts, who said he didn't know about Bradley's illness, described his former co-worker's excitement and awe at being able to interview heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali after the boxer put him off for a while.

Bradley told Roberts he felt Ali was playing a kind of game with him.

According to Roberts, Bradley told him, "He [Ali] said he didn't want to talk. Maybe today, maybe not today. I don't know."

"Bradley told me Ali had this twinkle in his eye that said, 'Yes, I do want to talk to you. I just want to do it on my own time.' And I think for Ed, that was probably one of the most memorable interviews that he's ever done."

Bradley, a great music lover, also interviewed Miles Davis, Lena Horne and Paul Simon, among other performers. He once moonlighted as a disc jockey, earning $1.50 an hour spinning records while working as a teacher by day. In his later years, he hosted the radio show "Jazz at Lincoln Center."

"The idea that I could go to a station and open the cabinet doors of what we called the library and pull out music present and past and play what I liked to play, music I liked to hear, and that there were people out there listening to my taste in music -- man, it just didn't get better than that," he told the online publication All About Jazz in 2004.

Bradley was born June 22, 1941. He grew up in a tough section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he once recalled that his parents worked 20-hour days at two jobs apiece, according to The Associated Press. "I was told, 'You can be anything you want, kid,' " he once told an interviewer. "When you hear that often enough, you believe it."

Bradley began his career in radio at WDAS in his hometown in 1963. In 1967, he moved to New York and radio station WCBS, and then joined CBS News as a stringer in the Paris, France, bureau in 1971.

After a stint in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnam, he came to Washington in 1974. He covered Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign in 1976, then became CBS' first African-American White House correspondent.

CNN's David Fitzpatrick, a former CBS producer who worked with Bradley, said there were tears in the halls of CBS News after word came of his passing.

"He was gracious," Fitzpatrick said. "He would always have a smile."

Bradley is survived by his wife, Patricia Blanchet.

House clerk warned GOP about Foley years ago

Former House Clerk Jeff Trandahl repeatedly raised red flags about former Rep. Mark Foley years before GOP leaders said they knew about Foley's inappropriate conduct with pages, sources said.
Trandahl's lawyers said he is scheduled to testify Thursday before the House Ethics Committee, which is investigating the Foley case.
Two sources close to Trandahl told CNN that he had been monitoring Foley's interaction with pages after being told of troubling behavior by the congressman in the House cloakroom and elsewhere. Trandahl took his concerns to Kirk Fordham, Foley's former chief of staff, many times, the sources said.
Fordham testified last week that he warned House Speaker Dennis Hastert's chief of staff, Scott Palmer, at least three years ago about Foley's conduct, according to a source familiar with Fordham's version of events.
Palmer has denied Fordham's account.
Foley resigned September 29 after details of alleged sexually explicit instant messages to teenage boys who had served as Capitol Hill pages became public.
Trandahl, who was House clerk from 1998 to 2005, oversaw the page program and had day-to-day authority over the teens. Former colleagues describe him as a by-the-book manager who took his job seriously.
A friend, Craig Shniderman, told CNN that if Trandahl was aware of something improper, he would have reported it.
"Jeff is a guy who always does the right thing," Shniderman said. "He lives by the truth. He lives by one truth. He's not a man that tells different stories to different people."
Also slated to go before the committee Thursday is House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, who said earlier this month that Hastert had told him the concerns about Foley had been "taken care of."
Page's sponsor testifies
Rep. Rodney Alexander, the congressman who warned House leaders about Foley's e-mails to a teenage boy from his district, testified before the Ethics Committee on Wednesday.
The Louisiana Republican said he wants to know who else knew about Foley's behavior.
Alexander spent about three hours testifying about Foley's contacts with teenage pages and how the chamber's Republican leadership handled concerns about Foley.
"We told them what we know, when we knew it, and what we did about it, and we are looking forward and hoping that the committee will talk to others," Alexander said. "It's quite apparent from some of the reports out there that there are many people that know what we know and have known it for a lot longer period of time than we've known."
Alexander has said his office warned House leaders in 2005 about non-explicit but "overly friendly" e-mails Foley sent to a boy Alexander sponsored as a page. That has led to investigations by the House Ethics Committee and the Justice Department.
The heads-up from Alexander's office also resulted in a private rebuke of Foley from Trandahl and Illinois Rep. John Shimkus, the Republican chairman of the House Page Board.
Alexander's constituent reported receiving e-mail from Foley in late 2005, according to an account released by Hastert's office after the scandal broke. The e-mails, which the boy called "sick," included Foley's request for a picture and a question about what he wanted for his birthday.
"The pages from the past that have come forward now with testimony, you know, I'd like to know who their member of Congress was," Alexander said. "Who sponsored them? What did they know? Why didn't they reveal if they knew anything? So, there are some very important questions that the committee has yet to get answers to."
Both Alexander and the boy's family have said that they wanted the contact to stop but did not want the issue made public. Alexander said Wednesday that the boy was not aware of the more explicit instant messages to other teens, and he said the teen's parents "have been almost physically sick about the attention that he's gotten unfairly."
"We just look forward to the committee continuing their investigation, and hopefully this will come to a conclusion and we can move on with other things," he said.

Sad McCartney pleads for privacy

Former Beatle Paul McCartney has defended himself against allegations of mistreatment allegedly made by his estranged wife, former model Heather Mills.
The couple is in divorce proceedings.
"Since the breakdown of his marriage, Sir Paul McCartney has maintained his silence in not commenting on the media stories, believing that it was best for all concerned, particularly his children, for there to be some dignity in what is a private matter," the musician's spokesman, Paul Freundlich, said in a written statement.
"Our client would very much like to respond in public and in detail to the allegations made recently against him by his wife and published in the press but he recognizes, on advice, that the only correct forum for his response to the allegations made against him is in the current divorce proceedings. Our client will be defending these allegations vigorously and appropriately.
"Our client is saddened by the breakdown of his marriage and requests that his family is allowed to conduct their personal affairs out of the media spotlight for the sake of everybody involved."
The charges were published in the British tabloid Daily Mail and the Evening Standard, which described them as extracts from court documents filed by the former model.
The law firm representing Heather Mills McCartney told CNN that court documents had been filed, but it would not say whether the documents cited by the newspapers were legitimate. CNN has not been able to determine their authenticity.
The couple has a 2-year-old daughter.
The 64-year-old musician has won 13 Grammy Awards and one Academy Award.
He and Heather Mills, 38, married four years ago. They announced their separation in May.
People Magazine has estimated McCartney's worth at more than $1.6 billion.
He has said he did not ask Mills to sign a prenuptial agreement because he thought it would be "unromantic."
The musician's first wife, Linda McCartney, died of breast cancer in 1998.

A federal judge on Tuesday delayed next week's execution of cult leader Jeffrey Lundgren to allow him to join a lawsuit by five other death row inmates challenging the state's use of lethal injection.
In his request to join the lawsuit, Lundgren, 56, said he is at even greater risk of experiencing pain and suffering during the procedure than other inmates because he is overweight and diabetic.
Similar lawsuits filed in several states have led to the halting of executions in Missouri, Delaware and New Jersey.
Opponents have argued that the use of the lethal injection is unconstitutionally cruel and painful and that the procedure is often carried out without specifically trained medical personnel present.
But Ohio's method of lethal injection came under national scrutiny by death penalty opponents in May after problems slowed the execution of another inmate who was a former intravenous drug user and the vein the execution team chose collapsed as the chemicals started flowing.
While Judge Gregory Frost issued an order temporarily delaying Lundgren's execution, he said it appears to him that potential flaws with Ohio's execution process could easily be corrected.
"Thus, any delay in carrying out Lundgren's execution should and can be minimal," Frost said.
State Attorney General Jim Petro will appeal the ruling to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, said spokesman Mark Anthony.
Lundgren's sentence stems from a conviction for the fatal shooting of a family of five in 1989. The family, which included three children, were killed while they stood in a pit dug inside his barn in northeast Ohio.
Lundgren formed a cult after he was dismissed in 1987 as a lay minister of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, now known as the Community of Christ.
He said passages in the Bible told him to kill the family. Several witnesses said the family was not as enthusiastic about the cult as Lundgren would have liked.
The family he killed had moved from Missouri in 1987 to follow Lundgren's teachings.
Frost's decision allows Lundgren to join a 2004 lawsuit brought by death row inmate Richard Cooey, convicted of the rape and murder of two University of Akron students in 1986.
Cooey argues that the way chemicals used in lethal injection are administered makes the process painful enough to amount to cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the constitution.
Four other inmates had previously joined the lawsuit.

Ford puts Aston Martin up for sale

Aston Martin, the icon of luxury sports cars made famous in James Bond movies, has been put up for sale by the struggling Ford Motor Co., the company said Thursday.
Ford said in a statement that it is exploring the sale of all or part of the British-based carmaker, in part to raise capital for its other brands.
British-based Aston Martin makes about 5,000 cars a year. They cost upward of $100,000 each.
"As part of our ongoing strategic review, we have determined that Aston Martin may be an attractive opportunity to raise capital and generate value," Bill Ford, the automaker's chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.
He said the Aston Martin's dealer network, design and size are different from other Ford brands and the most logical choice for possible sale.
Ford said no decisions have been made about its other luxury car brands, which include Jaguar, Land Rover and Volvo.
"We continue to be encouraged by Jaguar's progress and by the strength and consumer appeal of the Jaguar, Land Rover and Volvo product lineups" Bill Ford said.
But Ford spokesman Tom Hoyt said that doesn't mean the company won't sell the brands.
"We're still taking a look at all aspects of the business, as Bill Ford has said. Everything's on the table," Hoyt said.
Ford shares rose 10 cents to close at $8.37 on the New York Stock Exchange.
Aston Martin has its headquarters, research and production facilities in Gaydon, England. Last month the company celebrated production of its 30,000th car.
Ford bought 75 percent of the company in 1987 and acquired full ownership in 1994, Hoyt said. In 1992, the company made only 46 vehicles, he said, but it now makes about 5,000 cars per year.
He declined to reveal a potential sales price.
Kip Penniman, an analyst with KDP Investment Advisors in Montpelier, Vt., said any sale of Aston Martin would be more about Ford trying to focus on its core brands rather than raising capital.
"They're certainly not desperate for capital," he said. "I think what they're trying to do is pare down their product portfolio so they can achieve a better focus on the brands that are their mainstays."
At the end of June, Ford reported having $23.6 billion in cash.
Penniman said Ford does not report Aston Martin earnings separately from its own, so it would be difficult to judge how much the company contributes to Ford's bottom line. But the amount would be "immaterial," he said.
The sale makes sense because Aston Martin vehicles have unique platforms and don't share many features with other Ford vehicles, Penniman said. The downside is that a lot of technology comes from development of high-end vehicles, he said.
Aston Martin models sell for $110,000 to $175,000 in the United States.
In Britain, Dave Osborne, the Transport and General Workers Union's national secretary for the car industry, said the union's priority remains safeguarding members' jobs while the future for Aston Martin is under review.
"We understand that consideration of the sale of Aston Martin is part of Ford's strategic review, where all options are on the table but no decisions have yet been made," he said. "Aston Martin is an iconic brand and is rightly prized by Ford."
In July, Ford pledged to speed up and possibly deepen its North American turnaround plan.
Dearborn-based Ford's "Way Forward" plan, launched in January, calls for shedding 25,000 to 30,000 jobs and closing 14 plants by 2012 to help return its North American automotive operations to profitability.
The company may offer buyouts and early retirement packages to more of its production workers to reduce its hourly work force, and it also is considering sale of its credit arm.
Details on further cuts are expected after a September 14 board meeting

Australia-China uranium trade

Australian uranium exports to China could begin early next year, with Australia expected to capture about one third of the growing Chinese uranium market, a government official said Monday.
John Carlson, director-general of the Australian Safeguards and Nonproliferation Office, said government-to-government agreements to allow the export of Australian uranium to China should be ratified by the end of this year.
He said no commercial contracts had yet been signed between Australian miners and Chinese nuclear generators.
"In principle, we could have uranium going to China in the first half of next year," Carlson told a government committee that is investigating the trade agreements.
Carlson said he expected China would diversify its suppliers so that it would not become too dependent on a single country.
But Australia, which has 40 percent of the world's known uranium reserves, could expect to be supplying a third of the 8,000 tons of uranium a year that Beijing expects to be using to fuel its nuclear power generation by 2020, he said.
At current spot prices, that would be worth about Aust. $250 million ($192 million) a year, he said.
"It would be a reasonable objective for Australia to secure around a third of the Chinese market," Carlson said.
"In excess of 2,500 tons of uranium a year, that would be a reasonable expectation for us to be exporting to China," he added.
Carlson said he was confident the trade agreements would meet Australia's conditions that Australian uranium would only be used for power generation and would not be put to any military use.

The Wrong Battle in Pakistan

There are dangerous international terrorists hiding out in the mountain caves of Pakistan. But 79-year-old Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, the Baluch tribal leader, politician and rebel, was not one of them.
Now Mr. Bugti is dead and the impoverished but energy-rich province of Baluchistan is in an uproar after an ill-explained military operation last month. After a week of contradictory government statements, the only things now clear are that Mr. Bugti’s body was buried in the rubble of his blown-up mountain hideout, and that antigovernment fury in the restive province is at a new pitch of intensity.
The last thing Pakistan needs is an upsurge in violence and repression in Baluchistan. That would only be a distraction from far more important challenges, like developing a chronically underachieving economy; restoring a ravished democracy; and placing a dangerous nuclear weapons establishment, including exports of bomb-related technology, under firm and reliable civilian control.
And there are far more crucial things that Pakistan’s military could be doing than hunting down Mr. Bugti and his followers. For example, it could finally seal its scandalously porous border with Afghanistan, making it much harder for the Taliban to infiltrate into that country the fighters killing American, NATO and Afghan soldiers. It could permanently shut down the Pakistan-based Kashmiri terrorist groups that have survived past crackdowns by reopening under new names, with little interference from Pakistani authorities. Not least, it could make a more serious effort to find and arrest Osama bin Laden, widely believed to have spent much of the past four and a half years on Pakistani soil.
Any of these efforts would stir up opposition in one part or another of the Pakistani military, the only constituency that Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, ever really cares about. So long as elections are brazenly rigged, opposition parties are banned and Washington’s uncritical support remains guaranteed, General Musharraf has little incentive to take up any of these vital challenges.
When General Musharraf comes to the United States, he loves to be lauded as a leader in the war on terrorism. Back home, his government too often acts like a garden-variety military dictatorship.

Tsunami boosts illegal Indonesia logging

LAM KABEUE, Indonesia - The rebels of Aceh are trading their guns for chain saws and cashing in on a logging binge that is jeopardizing the future of the world's third largest tropical forest reserves.It's a cruel conjunction of good news and bad news: The rebellion is over, but peace has opened previously inaccessible virgin forests to illegal logging. Meanwhile, 130,000 homes destroyed by the tsunami of December 2004 need replacing, and demand for timber is almost insatiable.
"Everyone is getting into the logging business," says Taydin, 25, who spent five years fighting a guerrilla war against the Indonesian army in Aceh's jungles on the island of Sumatra.
When peace took hold last year, Taydin found himself unemployed and desperate for cash. So he joined dozens of other former rebels who are cutting down prized 100-year-old Meranti and Semantuk trees.
He says he has no permit to cut wood, and bribes police to let him transport it to the provincial capital, Banda Aceh. "People have no work, so selling the wood is a good way to make money," said Taydin, who, like many Indonesians, goes by one name.
Indonesia, whose tropical forest reserves are the world's largest after the Amazon and the Congo basin, has lost around 40 percent of its canopy to loggers in the last 50 years.
At this rate of deforestation — an area the size of New Jersey lost each year — lowland trees of Sumatra and the neighboring island of Borneo will disappear by 2010, according to Friends of the Earth and the World Wildlife Fund or WWF.
Aceh was largely protected during a decades-long separatist insurgency, with logging primarily limited to rebels and rogue elements within the military. But last year's peace deal opened up previously inaccessible virgin forests.
Local and international aid groups that rushed here after the earthquake and tsunami are in a bind, having to balance the need to build quickly against their duty to use legal timber.
Several have been caught buying from illegal sources while others have had to redesign homes with less wood or delay construction while seeking legitimate supplies.
With commercial logging outlawed in Aceh since 2001, most have turned to other parts of Indonesia for lumber, a strategy criticized by the WWF since up to 70 percent of Indonesia timber is protected. It says agencies should import wood instead, but so far only four have done so.
"They talk about respecting environmental values and ensuring long-term effectiveness of their projects," said Ralph Ashton of the WWF, which has donated two shipments of imported timber, with a third due this month.
"But a lot of agencies are getting timber from unsustainable sources," he said.
Some logging occurs in the Leuser and Ulu Masen ecosystems, which have some of the richest rain forests in Southeast Asia and are home to endangered rhinos, elephants, tigers and orangutans.
If the practice continues, "animals will lose their habitat and we expect to see increased conflict between humans and wildlife," said Ilarius Wibisono, whose group, Fauna & Flora International, monitors the 1.85 million-acre Ulu Masen forest.
"It's already happening," he said. "We had one tiger killed by villagers in Montasik because it ate their livestock."
The coastal village of Lhoong is typical of the transformation taking places in many mountain hamlets, where villagers have joined former rebels in logging illegally, sometimes with the tacit approval of local authorities.
Once considered too dangerous because of the war, it is now alive with the buzz of chain saws. Men load timber they admit is illegal into trucks.
"Before, no one dared go to the mountains," said Aini, 26, a villager who like many Indonesians goes by one name. As she talked with a reporter, a steady stream of loggers passed by on a dirt road lined with piles of freshly cut wood.
"We warn them about the negative effects of logging," she said, "but it's all about the money."
Leuser International Foundation, in a report this year, said at least 120,000 metric tons of illegal Leuser logs were trucked to the port city of Medan in 2005. Some were then transported across Sumatra to the tsunami-hit coast and sold to aid groups, it said.
Among those accused of using illegal wood to build homes or fishing boats is a Turkish organization, International Brotherhood and Solidarity Association, which said it did so unwittingly, and Medecins Sans Frontieres Belgium.
"We got timber from a supplier whom we thought was kosher," MSF Belgium's Erwin van't Land told The Associated Press.
"In all honesty, in that emergency we didn't have the resources to determine where the supplier would get the wood from," he said. "When we were told that some of the wood was potentially from illegal logging, we were already quite far into the boat project."
International aid agencies say compliance can be difficult, given an Indonesian system where timber documents are sometimes forged and officials bribed.
Complicating matters further, few aid groups have the experts on staff to navigate the system and inspect mills to make sure their suppliers are legal, especially when they are rushing to alleviate a disaster.
"Obtaining timber is not complex, but if you haven't planned appropriately and don't have the expertise, the simplest answer is just to go out and buy the timber in front of you," the WWF's Ashton said.
Aceh reconstruction requires an estimated 1.4 million cubic feet of lumber, and with more than 100 agencies building homes, some have had to wait weeks for delivery. Even the
United Nations' has had shipments held up by paperwork disputes with the government.
Lumber prices, too, have jumped significantly, forcing some agencies to scale back reconstruction plans.
CARE International said it stopped buying from Aceh in May and has suspended construction of 1,400 homes because it hasn't found a legitimate supplier outside the province.
"The international community has to be pragmatic," CARE's Rossella Bartoloni said. Legal timber sources are essential, she said, "But we can't allow the lack of one construction material to stop communities from starting their new lives."

European satellite launched into orbit

MOSCOW - A Russian booster rocket successfully launched a European telecommunications satellite early Saturday, 10 days after another rocket carrying 18 satellites crashed after launch.
The Proton-M rocket carrying the Hot Bird 8 satellite was launched from Russia's main space facility in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, and put the satellite into orbit, said Russian Federal Space Agency spokesman Igor Panarin.
"We are happy with the successful launch that once again has proven the Proton rocket's reliability," Panarin told The Associated Press.
The previous Russian commercial satellite launch on July 26 failed when a Dnepr rocket crashed shortly after blastoff. Kazakhstan, concerned that the crashed rocket's fuel was causing pollution, banned further launches of Dneprs until the cause of the crash is determined.
The 4.9-ton Hot Bird 8 satellite, built by EADS Space for Eutelsat Communications, is the largest communications satellite yet orbited by the Paris-based company. It will provide television and radio broadcasting across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
Eutelsat said in a statement that it had established signal acquisition from the satellite. The satellite will enter commercial service in October, it said.

After 10 years, few believe life on Mars

It was a science fiction fantasy come true: Ten years ago this summer,
At a Washington, D.C., news conference, scientists showed magnified pictures of a four-pound Martian meteorite riddled with wormy blobs that looked like bacterial colonies. The researchers explained how they had pried numerous clues from the rock, all strongly supporting their contention that microscopic creatures once occupied its nooks and crannies.
It was arguably the space agency's most imagination-gripping moment since Apollo. Space buffs and NASA officials said that it just might be the scientific discovery of the century.
"If the results are verified," the late Carl Sagan pronounced, "it is a turning point in human history."
Ten years later, the results have not been verified. Skeptics have found non-biological explanations for every piece of evidence that was presented on Aug. 6, 1996. And though they still vigorously defend their claim, the NASA scientists who advanced it now stand alone in their belief.
"We certainly have not convinced the community, and that's been a little bit disappointing," said David McKay, a NASA biochemist and leader of the team that started the scientific episode.
But even though the majority of his colleagues don't buy his "life on Mars" theory — McKay's own brother, also a NASA scientist, is one of his most prominent critics — many say they respect him and greatly appreciate his efforts.
The announcement and the technical paper that followed it practically created exobiology, the scientific field that investigates the potential for life on other planets.
"Without that paper I wouldn't be working in this field," said Martin Fisk, a marine geologist who studies how bacteria survive under the sea floor, partly because their harsh environment may resemble that of extraterrestrial life.
Debating the claim has helped researchers develop standards that will eventually prove useful for evaluating the presence of life in other Martian meteorites or a sample from the red planet. It has given the scientific community ideas about exactly where on the planet they would most like to scoop up a sample, should they ever get to retrieve one.
And it is undeniable that McKay and his colleagues have drawn attention to what is — whether it contains evidence of life or not — a very interesting rock.
The rock in question was discovered in Antarctica, where rocks that fall from the heavens are easy to spot on the icy glacial plains. Its name, ALH84001, indicates that it was the first meteorite found during the 1984 research season in the Allan Hills, an especially meteorite-rich area in the Trans-Antarctic Mountains.
At first ALH84001 was misclassified, so it wasn't until 1993 that researchers even realized the rock came from Mars. That was interesting enough, because at the time fewer than a dozen Martian meteorites were known to science.
But ALH84001 also turned out to be much more ancient than the other known Martian meteorites. At 4.5 billion years old, it dates from a period of Martian history when liquid water — a requirement for the presence of life — probably existed at the now barren planet's surface.
It made sense to ask: Could there be fossils of ancient Martian microbes, or maybe traces of them, preserved in the cracks and pore spaces of ALH84001?
The NASA scientists proffered four reasons to support their view that the answer to that question is "Yes."
First, chemical analysis showed that the meteorite contained a variety of organic molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs. PAHs can be produced by biological processes, and that's what McKay and his colleagues argued. But they are also commonly found in asteroids, comets and meteorites, not to mention the Antarctic ice where ALH84001 is estimated to have lain for 13,000 years. For that reason, skeptics immediately dismissed the importance of PAHs in the Martian meteorite.
A second line of evidence — that the elongated blobs in the electron microscope images could be fossils of ancient Martian bacteria — was also rejected pretty quickly by most scientists.
The problem was, those blobs were much smaller than any bacteria that have ever been observed on Earth. A National Research Council panel concluded in 1998 that the blobs were 100 to 1,000 times too small to be free-living organisms because they couldn't have held all the proteins, DNA and other molecules necessary for even the simplest metabolic processes.
You could argue that perhaps Martian life evolved a more compact biochemistry, or that the blobs shriveled as they fossilized. At one point McKay and the other NASA scientists suggested the blobs might be pieces of larger organisms.
"That was only mentioned once or twice and never brought up again," said Allan Treiman, a geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.
The two other lines of evidence survived longer. Both revolved around minerals sprinkled through the meteorite that could have been produced by microbes.
The first mineral, carbonate, is typically formed on earth by the remains of living organisms that make shells and other skeletal parts out of minerals they extract from seawater. Some of those organisms can be quite tiny. So finding carbonate in ALH84001 could indicate the presence of ancient microbes in the rock.
The story is similar for magnetite, the other mineral of interest in ALH84001. Some bacteria produce extraordinarily small and pure magnetite crystals, then align the magnetic grains to make a microscopic compass needle that helps them navigate.
The bacteria don't use their internal compasses to find north; they use them to tell up from down. Earth's spherical shape means that a compass needle in either hemisphere points at least somewhat downward, so the magnetite grains help the microbes sense where they are with respect to the planet's surface.
Some of the most evolutionarily ancient bacteria on Earth produce magnetite, McKay and his colleagues pointed out. Perhaps ancient Martian microbes did as well; at least some of the magnetite grains in ALH84001 share the shape, small size and remarkable purity of those produced by bacteria on Earth.
Of all the lines of evidence presented by the NASA scientists, it was the magnetite grains that proved most provocative. They were embedded in the carbonate along with other iron-containing minerals in such an unusual arrangement that something out of the ordinary must have put them there — could it have been alive?
"The shape of the magnetite grains is still rather distinctive," McKay said. "If it were found on Earth it would be a very strong biosignature."
For years McKay and his detractors argued about how distinctive the magnetite grains in ALH84001 are, and whether a non-biological process could have produced them. Certainly nobody had ever produced similar magnetite grains in the laboratory.
Then somebody did. In 2001 a second team of NASA scientists, including McKay's brother Gordon and a consultant to the space agency named D.C. Golden, managed to cook up a batch of magnetite grains very similar to the ones in ALH84001. Golden and Gordon McKay were also able to incorporate the magnetite grains into balls of carbonate like the ones David McKay and his colleagues described in 1996.
"He got a little testy about the results we were getting," said Gordon McKay, whose office is down the hall from his brother's. "What we have shown is that it is possible to form these things inorganically."
What's more, their laboratory method simulated conditions ALH84001 is known to have experienced during its time on Mars.
Yet David McKay insists his brother's team has not accurately described the synthetic crystals' shape, and that they aren't sufficiently similar to the ones found in ALH84001. He also suggests that the purity of the magnetite crystals stems not from the lab process itself, but from using unrealistically pure raw materials as a starting point.
Most of the scientific community doesn't buy those arguments.
"Personally I don't understand why (Gordon McKay's and) Golden's work hasn't just been the final word on it," said Treiman, the Lunar and Planetary Institute geologist.
Now David McKay has added another meteorite to the mix. At a March scientific meeting he presented microscopic images of the Nakhla meteorite, another Martian specimen. The pictures resemble pits that terrestrial bacteria create as they literally eat the volcanic rock of the sea floor.
"When I first saw it I was really struck by the similarity," said marine geologist Fisk, who is a professor at Oregon State University.
So far the scientific community hasn't shown much interest in David McKay's analysis of the Nakhla meteorite, partly because it dates from a more recent period of Martian history when the planet was just as frigid and inhospitable to life as it is today. In fact all of the 30-some Martian meteorites now known to science, with the exception of ALH84001, are probably too young to have contained living organisms.
But new Martian meteorites turn up almost every year. Eventually, another 4.5 billion-year-old piece of the red planet is going to be discovered.
"Sooner or later we're going to get another old rock," said Massachusetts Institute of Technology geophysicist Benjamin Weiss.
And when that happens, the talk about life on Mars will begin anew.

Power plants feel the heat

So, is the power back on yet in Maugansville? And to think, they laughed at you for buying that generator in preparation for Y2K. Well, who's laughing now?
Maugansville residents I talked to said they had a bad feeling about the situation when they basically heard people from the power company walking around saying, "Anyone know where we can get our hands on some poles?"
Last week's storm knocked down about a half-dozen of them, which were replaced with gazelle-like speed at the rate of about one every six hours. That led folks in the area to consider planting a forest of pine trees so next time they'll be better prepared.
It should scare you that a thunderstorm was able to knock out electricity for a day and a half. Because I don't think the squirrels are going to take this lying down. They fancy themselves to be to power outages what Uri Geller is to bending spoons, and I doubt they will be too happy about playing second banana to a cold front.
I always thought it was touching the way the linemen would always strive to protect our feelings by trying to save us from the knowledge that - in spite of our inconvenience - an animal had lost its life in the explosion.
A transformer would blow and everybody in the neighborhood would be standing around asking what the problem was and they would say "oh, we don't know" at the same time they're telescoping a fiberglass pole up to the powerpack to remove the flash-fried carcass from the insulators.

But even with our squirrels and storms, we can take comfort in the fact that we are not California, where they are on the edge of blackouts because - I hope you are sitting down for this - it is hot this summer.
Weirdest thing, it gets hot in the summer. It gets hot every summer. In fact, free of charge, I will give you this forecast: Summer, 2007: hot. Summer 2008: hot. Summer 2009: hot. Summer 2739: hot.
I am a genius at this. How do I see into the future and know that summers are going to be hot? I can't really say. It must be a gift.
A gift that no one in politics or the power industry seems to have, since every summer when it gets hot they seem flabbergasted that this wasn't finally the year that a July passed without the temperature getting above 72.
No, they always seem to be unprepared that people are using their air conditioners. They say it is "unseasonably hot." And that makes a difference. Surely, we all know a lot of people who do not use their air conditioners if it's 99 degrees, but if it hits 102, well, a man can only stand so much.
What I think we need is a huge government public-relations campaign like it did during the energy crunch in the '70s. You know, make it real for the people. Instead of Jimmy Carter in front of the cameras symbolically wearing a sweater, you could have Jennifer Garner symbolically wearing nothing.
For people who think humor is easy, this last joke was a lot harder than it seemed. Being a pop-culture ignorant, I had to visit the Web to find an actress, and I needed one with a she-sounding name in case other pop-culture ignorants were reading this. What I found were a bunch of first names like Drew, Reese, Uma, Charlize, Milla, Sigourney, Halle, Rosario and Portia.
These aren't girls' names, these are pastas.
"Waiter, could I have a dish of the rosario on the side in an alfredo sauce?"
"I can give you the milla with an alfredo, but the rosario only comes with a portia sauce."
"Do you get sigourneys with that?"
"We're out. But the halles are good. They're like umas, but they're drizzled with charlize."
I mean with Marilyn Monroe you knew where you stood, but Reese?
And I can only assume these are given names. Stars change their names all the time, and you can see why Alphonso D'Abruzzo would rather be Alan Alda or Issur Danielovitch would switch to Kirk Douglas. But who would go out of their way to choose "Uma?" That's one you change your name from.
There's something going on though, because to be a Hollywood star these days you would appear to need a weird name. Of course, it could just be a California thing.
Maybe it's the heat.

House vote Slaps

News Organizations

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The House on Thursday approved a Republican-crafted resolution condemning news organizations for revealing a covert government program to track terrorist financing, saying the disclosure had "placed the lives of Americans in danger."
The resolution, passed 227-183 on a largely party-line vote, did not specifically name the news organizations, but it was aimed at The New York Times and other news media that last week reported on a secret CIA-Treasury program to track millions of financial records in search of terrorists.
Most Democrats opposed the measure, protesting language in it that asserts that the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program was "rooted in sound legal authority" and that members of Congress had been appropriately briefed on the program.
While the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal also carried stories on the program, Republicans singled out The New York Times.
"The recent front-page story in the aforementioned New York Times cut the legs out from under this program," said the Financial Services Committee chairman, Rep. Michael Oxley, R-Ohio. "Now the terrorists are well-informed of the details of our methods and will find other ways to move money outside of the formal financial system."
The administration and the 9/11 Commission "went to The New York Times and asked them in the interest of national security not to release the details of this program," said Rep. Peter King, R-New York, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee. "They went ahead and did it anyway."
The Times has defended its reporting, saying publication has served America's public interest. Its executive editor, Bill Keller, said in a statement after the House passed the resolution that the paper took seriously the risks of reporting on intelligence.
"We have on many occasions withheld information when lives were at stake," Keller said. "However, the administration simply did not make a convincing case that describing our efforts to monitor international banking presented such a danger. Indeed, the administration itself has talked publicly and repeatedly about its successes in the area of financial surveillance."
The resolution "condemns the unauthorized disclosure of classified information" and "expects the cooperation of all news media organizations in protecting the lives of Americans and the capability of the government to identify, disrupt and capture terrorists by not disclosing classified intelligence programs such as the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program."
Democrats reacted angrily to the GOP majority's refusal to allow them to offer an alternative that would also have expressed concerns about the unauthorized leak of classified information but would have left out language defending the legality of the program.
"What you have done is to hijack the virtually unanimous support for tracking terrorist financing into an endorsement of the way the Bush administration has conducted itself," said Rep. Barney Frank, D-Massachusetts, author of the alternative.
"It is a campaign document," said Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California.
"There's never been any oversight of the program," she said. "You are asking us to vote on something that we absolutely cannot attest to."

Is the Press Endangering the Nation?

The tension between liberty and security is as old as the Republic—and as new as the latest high-tech listening device. In wartime, that tension very often plays itself out as a battle between the White House and the press. It is doing so again now. The script is ever the same: the White House asserts it is the protector of our security; the press maintains it is the guardian of our liberty. n The stories in the New York Times and other newspapers about the government's highly classified program to monitor bank records have provoked outrage from the White House. President George W. Bush called them "disgraceful" and said the revelations caused "great harm" to America.
Vice President Dick Cheney said the press had "made the job of defending against further terrorist attacks more difficult." I do not know if they are right. What I do know is that Presidents in wartime assert that their constitutional responsibility for national security trumps any issue of civil liberties. Often that has meant trampling on them. From John Adams' Sedition Act to Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus to Woodrow Wilson's draconian Espionage Act to F.D.R.'s internment of American citizens of Japanese descent, Presidents have constitutionally overreached. Last week's Supreme Court decision in the Hamdan case suggested that Bush had too—although his actions hardly compare with the examples above. When the press runs a story the White House claims is harmful to security, the word disloyalty inevitably creeps into the conversation. The line between dissent and disloyalty, between harmful revelations and vital ones, is murky. Often we never really know. But I would argue that the judicious questioning of the conduct and morality of war is the furthest thing from disloyalty: it is an expression of deep patriotism and the essence of responsible citizenship.
Very often in our history, that task has fallen to the press. From the publication of the Pentagon papers and the Watergate probe to Time's recent revelations about the tragedy at Haditha, our job is to speak truth to power. It is a messy process, and we have not always succeeded.
The framers guarded the freedom of the press in the First Amendment to make sure the press had the freedom to question the government. Jefferson and Madison believed that democracy could easily descend into tyranny and a vigorous press was necessary to prevent our leaders from getting too full of themselves.
There's not an editor in America who didn't wonder what he or she would have done in the case of the National Security Agency spying story and the recent Treasury revelations. It's impossible to say unless you had all the information before you and could hear the case the government made against publishing. But I believe the moral calculus of whether or not to publish is a basic one: Does the potential harm to public security outweigh the likely benefit to the public interest? If it does, hold fire. Attempting to answer that question isn't easy, but that's our responsibility not only as journalists but also as citizens.
This sometimes bitter crossfire between the government and the press is not a bad thing. In fact, such a rough-and-tumble debate is at the heart of American democracy, a 218-year-old seesaw over competing values that will and should continue for as long as we are a nation. But I would urge you to listen closely to that debate. The government's assertion that it must be unhindered in protecting our security can camouflage the desire to increase Executive power, while the press's cry of the public's right to know can mask a quest for competitive advantage or a hidden animus. Neither the need to protect our security nor the public's right to know is a blank check. So listen carefully because, after all, you are the judge. It is the people themselves who are the makers of their own government. "The best test of truth," as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote, "is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market."

What is gene testing?
How does it work?

Gene tests (also called DNA-based tests), the newest and most sophisticated of the techniques used to test for genetic disorders, involve direct examination of the DNA molecule itself. Other genetic tests include biochemical tests for such gene products as enzymes and other proteins and for microscopic examination of stained or fluorescent chromosomes. Genetic tests are used for several reasons, including:
carrier screening, which involves identifying unaffected individuals who carry one copy of a gene for a disease that requires two copies for the disease to be expressed
preimplantation genetic diagnosis (see the side bar, Screening Embryos for Disease)
prenatal diagnostic testing
newborn screening
presymptomatic testing for predicting adult-onset disorders such as Huntington's disease
presymptomatic testing for estimating the risk of developing adult-onset cancers and Alzheimer's disease
confirmational diagnosis of a symptomatic individual
forensic/identity testing
Screening Embryos for Disease
Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is a test that screens for genetic flaws among embryos used in in vitro fertilization. With PGD, DNA samples from embryos created in-vitro by the combination of a mother's egg and a father's sperm are analyzed for gene abnormalities that can cause disorders. Fertility specialists can use the results of this analysis to select only mutation-free embryos for implantation into the mother's uterus.
Before PGD, couples at higher risks for conceiving a child with a particular disorder would have to initiate the pregnancy and then undergo chorionic villus sampling in the first trimester or amniocentesis in the second trimester to test the fetus for the presence of disease. If the fetus tested positive for the disorder, the couple would be faced with the dilemma of whether or not to terminate the pregnancy. With PGD, couples are much more likely to have healthy babies, Although PGD has been practiced for years, only a few specialized centers worldwide offer this procedure.
In gene tests, scientists scan a patient's DNA sample for mutated sequences. A DNA sample can be obtained from any tissue, including blood. For some types of gene tests, researchers design short pieces of DNA called probes, whose sequences are complementary to the mutated sequences. These probes will seek their complement among the three billion base pairs of an individual's genome. If the mutated sequence is present in the patient's genome, the probe will bind to it and flag the mutation. Another type of DNA testing involves comparing the sequence of DNA bases in a patient's gene to a normal version of the gene. Cost of testing can range from hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on the sizes of the genes and the numbers of mutations tested.
What are some of the pros and cons of gene testing?
Gene testing already has dramatically improved lives. Some tests are used to clarify a diagnosis and direct a physician toward appropriate treatments, while others allow families to avoid having children with devastating diseases or identify people at high risk for conditions that may be preventable. Aggressive monitoring for and removal of colon growths in those inheriting a gene for familial adenomatous polyposis, for example, has saved many lives. On the horizon is a gene test that will provide doctors with a simple diagnostic test for a common iron-storage disease, transforming it from a usually fatal condition to a treatable one.
Commercialized gene tests for adult-onset disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and some cancers are the subject of most of the debate over gene testing. These tests are targeted to healthy (presymptomatic) people who are identified as being at high risk because of a strong family medical history for the disorder. The tests give only a probability for developing the disorder. One of the most serious limitations of these susceptibility tests is the difficulty in interpreting a positive result because some people who carry a disease-associated mutation never develop the disease. Scientists believe that these mutations may work together with other, unknown mutations or with environmental factors to cause disease.
A limitation of all medical testing is the possibility for laboratory errors. These might be due to sample misidentification, contamination of the chemicals used for testing, or other factors.
Many in the medical establishment feel that uncertainties surrounding test interpretation, the current lack of available medical options for these diseases, the tests' potential for provoking anxiety, and risks for discrimination and social stigmatization could outweigh the benefits of testing.
For more information, see:
Genes, Dreams, and Reality: The Promises and Risks of the New Genetics - Article from Judicature.
What Can the New Gene Tests Tell Us? - Article from the Judges' Journal of the American Bar Association. Dangerous
Legacies: New Genetic Tests Provide Fresh Grounds for Discrimination
--an article from U.S. News online -->If
I had a gene test, what would I have and who would I tell? --an article
from the Lancet -->
Bridging the Gap Between Life Insurer and Consumer in the Genetic Testing Era - Article from the Indiana Law Journal.
For what diseases are gene tests available?
Currently, more than 900 genetic tests are available from testing laboratories. Some gene tests available in the past few years from clinical genetics laboratories appear below. Test names and a description of the diseases or symptoms are in parentheses. Susceptibility tests, noted by an asterisk, provide only an estimated risk for developing the disorder. Contact GeneTests for comprehensive information on test availability and genetic testing facilities.Some Currently Available DNA-Based Gene Tests
Alpha-1-antitrypsin deficiency (AAT; emphysema and liver disease)
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS; Lou Gehrig's Disease; progressive motor function loss leading to paralysis and death)
Alzheimer's disease* (APOE; late-onset variety of senile dementia)
Ataxia telangiectasia (AT; progressive brain disorder resulting in loss of muscle control and cancers)
Gaucher disease (GD; enlarged liver and spleen, bone degeneration)
Inherited breast and ovarian cancer* (BRCA 1 and 2; early-onset tumors of breasts and ovaries)
Hereditary nonpolyposis colon cancer* (CA; early-onset tumors of colon and sometimes other organs)
Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT; loss of feeling in ends of limbs)
Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH; hormone deficiency; ambiguous genitalia and male pseudohermaphroditism)
Cystic fibrosis (CF; disease of lung and pancreas resulting in thick mucous accumulations and chronic infections)
Duchenne muscular dystrophy/Becker muscular dystrophy (DMD; severe to mild muscle wasting, deterioration, weakness)
Dystonia (DYT; muscle rigidity, repetitive twisting movements)
Fanconi anemia, group C (FA; anemia, leukemia, skeletal deformities)
Factor V-Leiden (FVL; blood-clotting disorder)
Fragile X syndrome (FRAX; leading cause of inherited mental retardation)
Hemophilia A and B (HEMA and HEMB; bleeding disorders)
Hereditary Hemochromatosis (HFE; excess iron storage disorder)
Huntington's disease (HD; usually midlife onset; progressive, lethal, degenerative neurological disease)
Myotonic dystrophy (MD; progressive muscle weakness; most common form of adult muscular dystrophy)
Neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1; multiple benign nervous system tumors that can be disfiguring; cancers)
Phenylketonuria (PKU; progressive mental retardation due to missing enzyme; correctable by diet)
Adult Polycystic Kidney Disease (APKD; kidney failure and liver disease)
Prader Willi/Angelman syndromes (PW/A; decreased motor skills, cognitive impairment, early death)
Sickle cell disease (SS; blood cell disorder; chronic pain and infections)
Spinocerebellar ataxia, type 1 (SCA1; involuntary muscle movements, reflex disorders, explosive speech)
Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA; severe, usually lethal progressive muscle-wasting disorder in children)
Thalassemias (THAL; anemias - reduced red blood cell levels)
Tay-Sachs Disease (TS; fatal neurological disease of early childhood; seizures, paralysis) [3/99]
Is genetic testing regulated?
Currently in the United States, no regulations are in place for evaluating the accuracy and reliability of genetic testing. Most genetic tests developed by laboratories are categorized as services, which the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not regulate. Only a few states have established some regulatory guidelines. This lack of government oversight is particularly troublesome in light of the fact that a handful of companies have started marketing test kits directly to the public. Some of these companies make dubious claims about how the kits not only test for disease but also serve as tools for customizing medicine, vitamins, and foods to each individual's genetic makeup. Another fear is that individuals who purchase such kits will not seek out genetic counseling to help them interpret results and make the best possible decisions regarding their personal welfare. More information on these questionable test kits is available from Dubious Genetic Testing, an online report provided by Quackwatch. For a brief overview of the current regulatory environment for genetic testing, see the Oversight of Genetic Testing, a Genetics Brief from the National Conference of State Legislatures.

wHaT Is FeMiNiSm??

introduction to feminism

What is feminism? feminists, or individualist feminists, say that the feminist slogan "a woman's body, a woman's right" should extend to every peaceful choice a woman can make.
feminists believe that freedom and diversity benefit women, whether or not the choices that particular women make are politically correct. They respect all sexual choices, from motherhood to porn.
As the cost of freedom, feminists accept personal responsibility for their own lives. They do not look to government for privileges any more than they would accept government abuse. feminists want legal equality, and they offer the same respect to men.
In short, feminism calls for freedom, choice, and personal responsibility.How is ifeminism different? In recent years, feminism has come to be associated with anger toward men who, as a class, are viewed as the political enemy. Some feminists have attacked the sexual choices of adult women who enjoy consuming and posing for pornography. Many feminists have called for the government to impose affirmative action policies and speech codes. Other feminists even want to ban new reproductive technologies that offer hope to infertile women.
Ifeminism turns the old stereotype of feminism on its head. Pornography and prostitution? Let women do what they want to with their own bodies. Verbal sexual harassment? If women want an equal right to explore their own sexuality, they risk encountering the offensive sexual attitudes of others. Affirmative action? You cannot create equality with men by embedding gender privilege for women into the law.
Freedom and choice do not threaten women. Government and orthodoxy do. A new generation faces the millennium. They deserve a new feminist paradigm that celebrates the diversity of their choices and the wonders that technology can offer to them.

Is Not Quitting

A Reason

Enough To Celebrate?

Now that the Memorial Day weekend is behind us, and students begin their annual summer "medication vacation", the time is right to ask what it really means to graduate from high school these days. I don't think it means what it used to in years gone by. Not by a long shot.
I stood in line at Target, and couldn't help but stretch my ears over into the next checkout lane. It appeared a young mother was telling one of her sons that, "Look Adam. Your sister IS graduating from high school, she's just UNABLE to pass the graduation TESTS." Interestingly, there was no desperation, remorse, or anger in the mother's voice. She had just resigned herself to the false mindset that her daughter was unable to completely earn a high school diploma, even though four years have passed by.
I was just about to checkout of the line myself when I heard this mother say something that made the hair on my neck stand at attention. She turned back to her son and said, "Thank God for special education, or else your sister might never leave high school. Come on, help me checkout this stuff for her GRADUATION PARTY."
I walked out of Target with my new Sara Evans CD, and didn't know whether to laugh out loud or cry out loud. A bunch of questions started burning a hole in my brain, but one question kept beating itself against my brain. The question? Here goes:
Is not quitting a reason enough to celebrate?
You see, in the real world - it isn't. The elimination of standards, the posturing and pandering, and the sick joke that is in fact special education in this country, poses a serious threat to young adults functioning properly in the adult world. I just can't understand what good parents and educators think special education does for students, especially those students who are old enough to drive and vote!
Both Republicans and Democrats have not done enough to truly reform special education. The best reform special education could ever get is being wiped off the face of the Earth. Something is seriously wrong when high school students and their parents are allowed to obtain the watered down education that special education delivers, when there is nothing objectively wrong with them. A special education diploma is meaningless in the real world, the adult world. A GED actually means much more.
Here's why. When a high school student obtains a special education diploma because they were unable, (read: unwilling), to pass graduation tests time after time after time after time, they are admitting there must be something subjectively wrong with them. Something that paints them into a corner of having a mental disorder. How else do you think high school students obtain special education services? Their parents and their educators sign off on an Individualized Education Program, (IEP), which in effect is a statement showing the student has a mental disorder.
This is terribly wrong. I bet you anything the young mother standing in line at Target chose not to study with her daughter. Television was probably more important and higher up on the family values scale than providing good parenting and discipline. I bet you anything the young mother, and any parent for that matter who doesn't mind their child being in special education, had no idea what it means to not pass four basic 50 question plus graduation tests. Basic knowledge. Nothing new. Just "passing" the tests would be evidence enough that you didn't take up space for four long years.
When you have no basic standards for your child educationally, you're not teaching them what it means to eventually be independent. When you celebrate merely not quitting, you leave nothing meaningful to accomplish. To dream of. To take pride in. To stand shoulder to shoulder with your peers and know that even during rough patches, yes, I deserve my high school diploma. Special education law and waivers for graduation tests, along with "willing" parents are preventing high school students from actually having the skills needed to be adults.
I completely understand that high school students are nervous about graduation tests. I completely understand that some students are going to fail portions of the test before passing the whole thing. I completely understand that a high school student is not defined alone by having passed the graduation tests or not. High school students, and all students for that matter, need more than rote learning to properly flourish.
However, what I don't understand, and find completely disgusting, is the fear mongering around graduation tests and the rush to get high school students into (or possibly make a return visit) into special education so they can "physically" leave the high school they have been sitting in for four years. God knows, they have not been there "mentally" if they have failed the graduation tests over and over and over again. There is no excuse to fail these basic knowledge tests when free tutoring is available. Not to mention answer books from guidance counselors! Not to mention on-line practice tests! Not to mention parents, friends, and other relatives ready and willing to help out!
So, you can blame President Bush all you want for the No Child Left Behind Act, but when there is a clear connection to dumping high school students in special education and failing the graduation tests forever on end, it might be time to stop playing politics. It might be time to look yourself in the mirror, and take your son or daughter with you, and ask: Do we really having anything to celebrate after failing so miserably for four long years?
To celebrate not quitting attending high school for four straight years on the same level as celebrating having earned a normal high school diploma, is a hard slap in the face to all other students and their parents who put education first. And television a distant last to ensure as the time came to enter the real world, their little Johnny or Jane would be ready.
What else was there to expect after four long years, anyway?

Reasons why
the Death Penalty
................... .does NOT work ....

Earlier this year, in an unexpected move, the Baltimore City Council suspended all executions, and granted a temporary stay for all 17 inmates on death row in the Baltimore City Jail. The Maryland Legislature in Annapolis is considering House Bill 388, which would put a temporary stay on executions in order for a study funded by Gov. Glendening to examine the death penalty in the state. This was clearly inspired by the Illinois Governor's bold move to put a hold on all execution in his state. He cited the over a dozen death row cases that have been since overturned by new evidence, and the substandard legal defense offered by court appointed lawyers in many of these cases.
I wholeheartedly support these two actions, and I call for a nationwide stay on all executions, leading to eventual abolition of the death penalty. Not just because the death penalty is inherently wrong, which is a difficult point to debate, steeped in personal and religious views, but because the death penalty doesn't work.
The reasons for the death penalty are all very vague: striking fear in criminals, having the punishment fit the crime, giving a sense of justice to the victims' families, and so forth. Unfortunately, the last thing on a criminal's often deranged mind is consequence, and certainly no discernible effect has been made on crime rates (which instead are tied to economics and drug enforcement tactics only). As for the appropriateness of the punishment, or the Biblical "eye for an eye" justification, let me reiterate that the same Bible calls for forgiveness and compassion, even for murderers, in the New Testament, the book that nearly all western Christian thought is based on. I have also heard misguided arguments about cost and efficiency. But after appeals and the extra cost and burden to the court system, it would be far more cost effective to keep a prisoner alive for several hundred years than to kill him. The most emotional argument, and therefore the one that no one wants to touch, is the feeling of "justice" that families are meant to derive from the killing of the convicted murderer of their loved one. Besides confusing "vengeance" and anger with "justice," we cannot allow ourselves to kill in order to gain psychological benefit. Why don't we then engage in a little pre-executive torture, perhaps even by the hands of the victim's families? Under the "vengeance" argument, this is not inconceivable. In fact, many families of victims do not support the death penalty and have spoken out against it, even contacted the convicted. This is increased, of course, in the kind of dubious convictions that are common in death penalty cases.
But even these reasons do not get at the most basic wrongs of the death penalty: The fact that in practice, in the real world, the death penalty doesn't work. It is racist, it is classist, it is fallible. All of these claims are factual in basis.
Far more black men sit on death row than white men, and not because they commit more violent crime. Black violence against white is by far the most common of death row inmate crimes, far disproportional to actual statistics. Even though whites and blacks are victimized in roughly equal numbers by violent crime, over 82% of death penalty convictions have been in cases of white victims. In fact, black on white crime is 11 times more likely to result in the death penalty than white on black, and this reflects percentages, not sheer numbers. Further exasperating the problem is the fact that the legal defense of poor black men is most often performed by underpaid court appointed lawyers who receive no gain for winning a case. The prosecution, however, most often has the disposal of the city's best lawyers, and the public pressure to convict in such cases often forces the prosecution to deliver. Lawyer often use their "preemptive challenge" to remove black jurors from juries, a clearly racist practice. The example of Illinois too clearly shows this example; court-appointed lawyers showing up drunk to court, not drafting a defense until the day before court, and never consulting the accused. The United States has overturned 68 death penalty convictions since 1970, and other incorrect verdicts may have gone unnoticed.
Now think of those statistics throughout history. 350 executed since 1970, with 3,500 on death row right now. Last year, we executed more people than any other country except China. We have executed 30 mentally impaired prisoners. Over 100 countries have abolished the death penalty as outdated and barbaric, and view our continued use as such. Even the American Bar Association no longer supports it. In the next three years, while Governor Glendening's study is pending, five more inmates are set to die. All the victims are white, and all but one of the inmates are black.
Even if Illinois is an extreme example of judiciary missteps, the final result is clear: Some of the inmates on death row are innocent. We, as a society, have killed and are planning to kill innocent people, because of errors, because they could not afford decent legal representation. That makes us murderers, all of us, not only of other guilty murders, but of innocent people.
And what's more, though many innocent people may be incarcerated right now, they still have a chance of clearing their name someday, when new evidence emerges. The death penalty, of course, is forever. We cannot take it back. If executions hadn't been granted stays in Illinois, how many more innocents would have died?
It is not as if we are setting anyone free by abolishing the death penalty. In cases when the death penalty is considered, life without parole should be the alternative, and usually is. Condemning someone to be confined to the prison environment for the rest of their lives, be it five, ten, or eighty years, is no light punishment.
There is no basis for execution in the Constitution; in fact, the amendment against "cruel and unusual punishment" might easily seem to outlaw the often botched electrocutions and lethal injections. And our own Thomas Jefferson once said of our defendant favoring court system, "It is better to set 100 guilty men free then to imprison one innocent man." It frightens and saddens me to think how many innocents may have died in states like Texas, where executions are sped up, and appeals are routinely denied.
In the final analysis, the death penalty, whether you believe in its theoretical morality, does not work in practice. And until we can be absolutely sure in every single case, we cannot continue to kill. People are not perfect, and the court system is less so, and this has been shown time and time again. How many more innocents will die for an idea that only works in theory?

Poverty Facts -- WARNING!! The Truth Hurts

Half the world — nearly three billion people — live on less than two dollars a day.

The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the poorest 48 nations (i.e. a quarter of the world’s countries) is less than the wealth of the world’s three richest people combined.

Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names. Less than one per cent of what the world spent every year on weapons was needed to put every child into school by the year 2000 and yet it didn't happen.

51 percent of the world’s 100 hundred wealthiest bodies are corporations.

The wealthiest nation on Earth has the widest gap between rich and poor of any industrialized nation. The poorer the country, the more likely it is that debt repayments are being extracted directly from people who neither contracted the loans nor received any of the money.


20% of the population in the developed nations, consume 86% of the world’s goods. The top fifth of the world’s people in the richest countries enjoy 82% of the expanding export trade and 68% of foreign direct investment — the bottom fifth, barely more than 1%.


In 1960, the 20% of the world’s people in the richest countries had 30 times the income of the poorest 20% — in 1997, 74 times as much.


“The lives of 1.7 million children will be needlessly lost this year [2006] because world governments have failed to reduce poverty levels” The developing world now spends $13 on debt repayment for every $1 it receives in grants. A few hundred millionaires now own as much wealth as the world’s poorest 2.5 billion people.
“The 48 poorest countries account for less than 0.4 per cent of global exports.”

“The combined wealth of the world’s 200 richest people hit $1 trillion in 1999; the combined incomes of the 582 million people living in the 43 least developed countries is $146 billion.”
“Of all human rights failures today, those in economic and social areas affect by far the larger number and are the most widespread across the world’s nations and large numbers of people.”

“Approximately 790 million people in the developing world are still chronically undernourished, almost two-thirds of whom reside in Asia and the Pacific.”


According to UNICEF, 30,000 children die each day due to poverty. And they “die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.”
That is about 210,000 children each week, or just under 11 million children under five years of age, each year.

For economic growth and almost all of the other indicators, the last 20 years [of the current form of globalization, from 1986 - 2006] have shown a very clear decline in progress as compared with the previous two decades [1960 - 1980]. For each indicator, countries were divided into five roughly equal groups, according to what level the countries had achieved by the start of the period (1960 or 1980). Among the findings:
Growth: The fall in economic growth rates was most pronounced and across the board for all groups or countries.
Life Expectancy: Progress in life expectancy was also reduced for 4 out of the 5 groups of countries, with the exception of the highest group (life expectancy 69-76 years).
Infant and Child Mortality: Progress in reducing infant mortality was also considerably slower during the period of globalization (1980-1998) than over the previous two decades.
Education and literacy: Progress in education also slowed during the period of globalization.

“Today, across the world, 1.3 billion people live on less than one dollar a day; 3 billion live on under two dollars a day; 1.3 billion have no access to clean water; 3 billion have no access to sanitation; 2 billion have no access to electricity.”

The richest 50 million people in Europe and North America have the same income as 2.7 billion poor people. “The slice of the cake taken by 1% is the same size as that handed to the poorest 57%.”

The world’s 497 billionaires in 2001 registered a combined wealth of $1.54 trillion, well over the combined gross national products of all the nations of sub-Saharan Africa ($929.3 billion) or those of the oil-rich regions of the Middle East and North Africa ($1.34 trillion). It is also greater than the combined incomes of the poorest half of humanity.

A mere 12 percent of the world’s population uses 85 percent of its water, and these 12 percent do not live in the Third World.
Consider the global priorities in spending in 1998
Global Priority
$U.S. Billions
Cosmetics in the United States
8
Ice cream in Europe
11
Perfumes in Europe and the United States
12
Pet foods in Europe and the United States
17
Business entertainment in Japan
35
Cigarettes in Europe
50
Alcoholic drinks in Europe
105
Narcotics drugs in the world
400
Military spending in the world
780
And compare that to what was estimated as additional costs to achieve universal access to basic social services in all developing countries:
Global Priority
$U.S. Billions
Basic education for all
6
Water and sanitation for all
9
Reproductive health for all women
12
Basic health and nutrition
13
Number of children in the world
2.2 billion
Number in poverty
1 billion (every second child)
Shelter, safe water and health
For the 1.9 billion children from the developing world, there are:
640 million without adequate shelter (1 in 3)
400 million with no access to safe water (1 in 5)
270 million with no access to health services (1 in 7)
Children out of education worldwide
121 million
Survival for children
Worldwide,
10.6 million died in 2003 before they reached the age of 5 (same as children population in France, Germany, Greece and Italy)
1.4 million die each year from lack of access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation
Health of children
Worldwide,
2.2 million children die each year because they are not immunized
15 million children orphaned due to HIV/AIDS (similar to the total children population in Germany or United Kingdom)

The total wealth of the top 8.3 million people around the world “rose 8.2 percent to $30.8 trillion in 2004, giving them control of nearly a quarter of the world’s financial assets.”
In other words, about 0.13% of the world’s population controlled 25% of the world’s assets in 2004.