Ice Shelf Breaks Off In Arctic

Ice Shelf Breaks Off In Arctic
CBS TORONTO, Dec. 29, 2006
(AP) A giant ice shelf has snapped free from an island south of the North Pole, scientists said Thursday, citing climate change as a "major" reason for the event. The Ayles Ice Shelf — 41 square miles of it — broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 500 miles south of the North Pole in the Canadian Arctic. Scientists discovered the event by using satellite imagery. Within one hour of breaking free, the shelf had formed as a new ice island, leaving a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake. Warwick Vincent of Laval University, who studies Arctic conditions, traveled to the newly formed ice island and was amazed at the sight. "This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are losing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years," Vincent said. "We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead." The ice shelf was one of six major shelves remaining in Canada's Arctic. They are packed with ancient ice that is more than 3,000 years old. They float on the sea but are connected to land. Some scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in Canada in 30 years and that climate change was a major element. "It is consistent with climate change," Vincent said, adding that the remaining ice shelves are 90 percent smaller than when they were first discovered in 1906. "We aren't able to connect all of the dots ... but unusually warm temperatures definitely played a major role." Laurie Weir, who monitors ice conditions for the Canadian Ice Service, was poring over satellite images in 2005 when she noticed that the shelf had split and separated. Weir notified Luke Copland, head of the new global ice lab at the University of Ottawa, who initiated an effort to find out what happened. Using U.S. and Canadian satellite images, as well as seismic data — the event registered on earthquake monitors 155 miles away — Copland discovered that the ice shelf collapsed in the early afternoon of Aug. 13, 2005. Copland said the speed with which climate change has effected the ice shelves has surprised scientists. "Even 10 years ago scientists assumed that when global warming changes occur that it would happen gradually so that perhaps we expected these ice shelves just to melt away quite slowly," he said. Derek Mueller, a polar researcher with Vincent's team, said the ice shelves get weaker as temperatures rise. He visited Ellesmere Island in 2002 and noticed that another ice shelf had cracked in half. "We're losing our ice shelves and this a feature of the landscape that is in danger of disappearing altogether from Canada," Mueller said. Within days of breaking free, the Ayles Ice Shelf drifted about 30 miles offshore before freezing into the sea ice. A spring thaw may bring another concern: that warm temperatures will release the new ice island from its Arctic grip, making it an enormous hazard for ships. "Over the next few years this ice island could drift into populated shipping routes," Weir said. By Rob Gillies©MMVI The Associated Press.

China's Hu calls for powerful, combat-ready navy

Resource Wars Prep

China's Hu calls for powerful, combat-ready navy

Thu 28 Dec 2006
A Chinese naval guard stands beside a guided missile destroyer at the Ngong Shuen Chau Naval Base in Hong Kong April 30, 2004. Chinese president and commander-in-chief Hu Jintao urged the building of a powerful navy that is prepared "at any time" for military struggle, state media reported on Thursday. REUTERS/Kin Cheung
BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese president and commander-in-chief Hu Jintao urged the building of a powerful navy that is prepared "at any time" for military struggle, state media reported on Thursday.

At a meeting of delegates to a Communist Party meeting of the navy on Wednesday, Hu said China, whose military build-up has been a source of friction with the United States, was a major maritime country whose naval capability must be improved.

"We should strive to build a powerful navy that adapts to the needs of our military's historical mission in this new century and at this new stage," he said in comments splashed on the front pages of the party mouthpiece People's Daily and the People's Liberation Army Daily. "We should make sound preparations for military struggles and ensure that the forces can effectively carry out missions at any time," said Hu, pictured in green military garb for the occasion.

China's naval expansion includes a growing submarine fleet and new ships with "blue water" capability, fuelling fears in the United States that its military could alter the balance of power in Asia with consequences for Taiwan.

China has said it would attack if the self-ruled island that Beijing claims as its own formally declares independence.

Analysts say China sees a stronger navy as a way to secure energy supplies and seaborne trade routes to help ease security fears over supplies of resources and oil it needs to feed its booming economy.

Hu also called for the "strict management of the navy according to law", a possible reference to a scandal in which a vice admiral was jailed for life on a charge of embezzlement.

Wang Shouye was convicted by a military court earlier this month, Hong Kong's Wen Wei Po reported, making him the most senior Chinese military officer to be jailed for corruption.

Earlier this year, Wang was sacked as navy deputy commander for bad morals and using his position to demand and accept bribes and violate laws and discipline, the report said.

Reuters 2006. This article: http://news.scotsman.com/latest_international.cfm?id=1921212006 Last updated: 28-Dec-06 06:13 GMT

Across Africa, a Sense That U.S. Power Isn’t So Super

"which critics say propped up one corrupt dictator after another under the rationale of containing Communism" .... how widespread are multinational corporate and world governments SOP/M.O. with the ensuing sweatshops, starvation and poverty?

Across Africa, a Sense That U.S. Power Isn’t So Super
December 24, 2006 NYT - The World

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN MOGADISHU, Somalia
THE rally was supposed to be against Ethiopia, Somalia’s neighbor and historic archenemy, which in the past few weeks had sent troops streaming across the border in an attempt to check the power of the increasingly powerful Islamists who rule Mogadishu.
But the cheers that shook the stadium (which had no roof, by the way, and was riddled with bullet holes) were about another country, far, far away.
“Down, down U.S.A.!” thousands of Somalis yelled, many of them waving cocked Kalashnikovs. “Slit the throats of the Americans!”
Not exactly soothing words, especially when the passport in your pocket has one of those golden eagles on it.
Somalia may be the place that best illustrates a trend sweeping across the African continent: After Sept. 11, 2001, the United States concluded that anarchy and misery aid terrorism, and so it tried to re-engage Africa. But anti-American sentiment on the continent has only grown, and become increasingly nasty. And the United States seems unable to do much about it.
A number of experts on Africa trace those developments to a sense not of American power, but of its decline — a perception that the United States is no longer the only power that counts, that it is too bogged down in the Middle East to be a real threat here, and so it can be ignored or defied with impunity.
American officials, for example, acknowledge that they are at a loss about what to do about the on-again, off-again Somali crisis, which cracked open last week when the two forces dueling for power blasted away at each other in their first major confrontation. In this case, there are a lot of reasons why many of the people don’t like Americans, starting with the United States’ botched efforts to play peacemaker in the early 1990s to its current support for Ethiopia, which is taking sides in Somalia’s internal politics.
But the broader issue playing out here — the sense that the United States is not the kingmaker it once was — goes beyond Mogadishu. It is Africa-wide. And it is based on a changed reality: the emergence of other customers for Africa’s resources and the tying down of American military forces in Iraq have combined to reduce American clout in sub-Saharan Africa, even as the United States pumps in more financial aid than ever — about $4 billion per year — and can still claim to be the one superpower left standing.
“The actual ability of the U.S. to influence circumstances on the ground in Africa has declined dramatically,” said Michael Clough, a former director of the Africa program at the Council on Foreign Relations. “But the symbolic significance of the United States is still there. So we become the perfect target.”
For proof, please see Sudan, Congo, Eritrea, northern Nigeria to a lesser extent, and even South Africa.
Chester A. Crocker, who was an assistant secretary of state for Africa under President Ronald Reagan, says the drop in American influence began when the cold war ended. He argues that despite all the complaints about fickle cold war Africa policy, which critics say propped up one corrupt dictator after another under the rationale of containing Communism, the United States was at least paying attention to Africa, and its efforts may have saved millions of lives.
It was the decade immediately after the cold war, Mr. Crocker said, when the United States disengaged from much of the continent, that Africa fell apart. Cataclysmic wars swept through Somalia, Rwanda, Algeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Congo. More Africans were slaughtered in the 1990s than in any other recent decade.
Now, as the United States resumes its interest in Africa, it faces a new, more pixilated landscape. “Africa is in play again,” Mr. Crocker said. “It is a more competitive playing field which gives greater influence to African leaders as well as to potential competitors or ‘balancers’ of U.S. diplomatic leverage. It is not just China: it is Brazil, the Europeans, Malaysia, Korea, Russia, India.”
“Inevitably,” he concluded, “this dilutes somewhat U.S. ability to call the shots, define the agenda and mobilize coherent international action.”
For example, there is Sudan, a country that the West, and the United States in particular, has desperately tried to isolate. First, it was because of Sudan’s links to terrorists. Then came reports that the government was tied to genocide in Darfur. Sanctions have been imposed, almost embarrassing amounts of diplomatic pressure have been exerted and now military threats are being made. The result: even more anti-American hatred, which plays straight into the hand of the hard-line Khartoum regime.
Why are the results of American policy in Sudan so meager? Two reasons stand out above others: oil and Asia.
Sudan is flush with a booming supply of crude, and it has turned from West to East for trade partners: to China, India, Malaysia and the Arab world. That means American economic leverage doesn’t work as it once did. Consider how little effect the sanctions have had on Sudan’s economy — it’s one of the fastest growing in the world, even as Darfur burns.
“We learned that we don’t need the Americans anymore,” said Lam Akol, Sudan’s foreign minister. “We found other avenues.”
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Mr. Crocker said, there were few other avenues. In those cold war days, he said, sustained, patient, high-level American involvement helped end wars from Angola to Mozambique and helped to bring South Africa’s brutal apartheid system to its knees.
In the 1990s, with the Soviet Union gone, aid to Africa dipped; Americans were turning inward, and foreign policy focused far more on building trade relations with dynamic new partners, especially in Asia and Eastern Europe.
But then came 9-11.
“And suddenly poor, nasty, weak places mattered,” said Steve Morrison, director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
In an effort to reduce the conditions in which terrorism is thought to thrive, American foreign aid to Africa surged, with much of the money going to health programs (especially AIDS prevention), and peacekeeping. Private Western efforts to alleviate suffering also increased. Just ask Bill Gates. Or Bill Clinton.
TODAY, in Congo, the United States spends more than $200 million supporting a United Nations peacekeeping mission that has barely kept that unruly, violent, continent-sized country intact.
But Ted Dagne, a specialist in African affairs for the Congressional Research Service, said that such concern about security in Africa “has not led to expansion of relations in other areas and did not increase American influence in Africa.”
One reason, he argued, was that American policy these days does not necessarily mean sustained, patient, high-level attention. Instead, it emphasizes the role that Africans themselves can play (supported by American money and advice, of course). More and more, Africans are mediating their own conflicts, from the border disputes between Ethiopia and Eritrea to the civil wars in Burundi and Sudan.
Another reason is Iraq. The ceaselessness of Baghdad’s bloodshed has greatly undermined the United States’ credibility, fanned anti-American feelings in Muslim regions like the Horn of Africa, and drained resources that might otherwise have been available to address other problems.
“There is significant blowback coming from our catastrophic decisions in Iraq that is affecting our ability to do anything about Sudan or Somalia,” Mr. Morrison said.
Even so, many Africa experts say there are countries — Kenya is one — where the American message still matters. There, the United States is generally credited, along with other Western countries, with exerting crucial diplomatic leverage that helped Kenya make the peaceful transition in 2002 from a one-party state to a genuine multiparty democracy.
“America still has a lot of influence,” said S. O. Mageto, a former Kenyan ambassador to Washington. “But not like it used to.”

Allstate's 'Good Hands' Wave 'Bye Bye'

No more insurance in the future as the problems we create magnify? The trouble with Physics marches hand in hand with the trouble with a prehistoric economic model.......... and an extremely shortsighted, skewed view of Kuhn's philosophy that self-interest ultimately promotes community interest

Allstate's 'Good Hands' Wave 'Bye Bye'
CHICAGO, Dec. 21, 2006
(AP) Wary of the rising risk of hurricanes, Allstate Corp. has added coastal regions of North and South Carolina, Alabama, Maryland and Virginia to the growing list of areas nationwide where it is cutting back homeowners insurance coverage. The latest move adds to concern by consumer advocates that less competition in those areas will cause rates to jump. The nation's second-largest home and auto insurer (behind State Farm) confirmed Thursday that it is dropping coverage for about 12,000 homeowners in eight counties of South Carolina, 4,000 in 14 counties of North Carolina, and an unspecified number in Alabama. It also will no longer write new homeowners' policies starting in 2007 in 11 coastal counties of Maryland and 19 in Virginia, although existing policies will be renewed. Those decisions continue the company's strategy of minimizing risk in the wake of Katrina and other hurricanes that devastated the Gulf Coast and caused it to lose a record $1.55 billion in the third quarter of 2005. Mike Siemienas, a spokesman for Northbrook, Ill.-based Allstate, said the company for some time has been taking action "from Texas all the way on up the East Coast" to limit its property insurance business, which includes personal homeowners' as well as commercial property coverage. "Managing our risk is an ongoing effort within our business to insure we can continue to protect the assets of the 17 million households that rely on us," he said. "We continually review our exposure in all coastal areas and all markets that could be impacted by major catastrophic events." Collectively, the changes leave Allstate with sharply reduced coverage for almost the entire eastern seaboard. The insurer announced several weeks ago that it will no longer offer new property insurance policies, including homeowners', in Connecticut, Delaware and New Jersey beginning next year. It said earlier that it was dropping coverage to 120,000 customers in Florida and eight downstate New York counties, along with 26,000 Texas policyholders for wind damage; it also limited homeowners' coverage in coastal areas of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. Allstate is just one of the insurers that have scrambled to reduce exposure to future catastrophes since Katrina, including Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. and MetLife Inc. Chairman and Chief Executive Edward Liddy and Thomas Wilson, the president and chief operating officer who is to succeed Liddy as CEO next month, have said the company is forced to cut its exposure to disaster-related losses. While shifting its emphasis to other areas, such as financial services, Allstate has been seeking the creation of a government fund to help cover homeowners' losses in major disasters. Asked how the latest cutbacks will affect rates and availability of homeowners' insurance along the East Coast, Siemienas referred the question to the Insurance Information Institute. Jeanne Salvatore, a senior vice president for the trade group, said Allstate's moves shouldn't have any direct impact on rates or insurance availability. "For most locations other than Florida, where availability of private insurance is difficult, it's still a competitive marketplace and people will be able to get insurance with another carrier," she said. Homeowners' rates will continue to rise, she said, because the risk of hurricanes is rising. "The price is going to be based on the risk," she said. But consumer advocates are critical of insurers' recent moves in coastal areas, saying prices will go up because of reduced competition. "It's a negative for consumers," said J. Robert Hunter, director of insurance for the Consumer Federation of America and a former federal insurance administrator. "You remove maybe 15 or 20 percent of the market for new business, and obviously that puts pressure on the rest of the market." He characterized Allstate's actions as offensive, citing its $3.78 billion profit through the first nine months of 2006. "I don't know why any consumer would buy insurance from Allstate, because Allstate won't stay with you when the going gets tough," he said. In making its latest cutback decisions, Allstate cited hurricane and storm projections that point to the likelihood of many more severe storms further north on the East Coast. Risk Management Solutions, a company that forecasts the risk of natural disasters for the insurance industry, changed its computer modeling this year and predicted that the Atlantic coast would see more hurricanes over the next five years. That means annual insurance losses could increase by up to 30 percent in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast, and 50 percent in the Gulf of Mexico, Florida and the Southeast, the company said.
©MMVI, The Associated Press

What You Can't See Can Kill You

"The American Lung Association is one of many leading medical groups citing overwhelming evidence linking microscopic particles to fatal diseases. Tens of thousands of people die every year, from soot-based heart attacks, cancer, strokes" .............Profit versus Life, corporate scientific research funding direction versus Life's evolution and survival requirements, especially in the energy/trouble with physics arena

What You Can't See Can Kill You
SHIPPINGPORT, Pa., Dec. 21, 2006
(CBS) One day last July, a power plant smokestack rained black soot on the farms and homes of Shippingport, Pa., CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews reports. The power company, First Energy, said it was a maintenance accident — and, according to local residents, warned them not to eat anything dusted by the soot. The accident, which had the power company power-washing a town, was an unusually severe and visible example of what Americans breathe — in much smaller amounts — every day. And not just from power plants: Trucks, cars and even fires produce microscopic soot particles and chemicals that can damage your lungs. "Particle pollution, soot, kills people," says Janice Nolan with the American Lung Association The American Lung Association is one of many leading medical groups demanding that the Bush administration adopt stricter controls on microscopic soot. These groups cite overwhelming evidence linking microscopic particles to fatal diseases. Tens of thousands of people die "every year, from soot-based heart attacks, cancer, strokes," Nolan says. Despite that evidence, when the Environmental Protection Agency had the chance to set a tough new annual emissions standard for soot this year, the agency declined. The EPA also declined a request by CBS News to explain that decision on camera, but in a written statement said, "EPA's air-quality standards are the most health-protective in U.S. history. ..." Dr. Roger McClellan, an EPA adviser, agrees with the agency; he says none of the research cited by critics proves that tougher standards will save lives. "They are just stretching the scientific data. And I think that has been used excessively to try to scare the public into thinking these are real deaths," McClellan says. However, in a 20-2 vote last year, an independent committee of scientists advising the EPA said tighter annual control on microscopic soot would save lives. When EPA dismissed this, critics said the Bush administration was ignoring science to go easy on industry. Meanwhile, the power company in Shippingport is now telling residents it's safe to eat vegetables if they're washed. But remember, the black rain that fell that day was pollution you could see. On every other day, it's what you can't see that could kill you. ©MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc

Outsize Profits, and Questions, in Effort to Cut Warming Gases

Global Warming Solution - Polluted Profits: Yet the foreign companies will pay roughly $500 million for the incinerator — 100 times what it cost, which mostly enriches a few bankers, consultants and factory owners ........... human life or profit? Looking back, the civil war issue was only slavery ..... and there was no deliberate trouble with Physics

NYT December 21, 2006
Outsize Profits, and Questions, in Effort to Cut Warming Gases
By KEITH BRADSHER
QUZHOU, China — Foreign businesses have embraced an obscure United Nations-backed program as a favored approach to limiting global warming. But the early efforts have revealed some hidden problems.
Under the program, businesses in wealthier nations of Europe and in Japan help pay to reduce pollution in poorer ones as a way of staying within government limits for emitting climate-changing gases like carbon dioxide, as part of the Kyoto Protocol.
Among their targets is a large rusting chemical factory here in southeastern China. Its emissions of just one waste gas contribute as much to global warming each year as the emissions from a million American cars, each driven 12,000 miles.
Cleaning up this factory will require an incinerator that costs $5 million — far less than the cost of cleaning up so many cars, or other sources of pollution in Europe and Japan.
Yet the foreign companies will pay roughly $500 million for the incinerator — 100 times what it cost. The high price is set in a European-based market in carbon dioxide emissions. Because the waste gas has a far more powerful effect on global warming than carbon dioxide emissions, the foreign businesses must pay a premium far beyond the cost of the actual cleanup.
The huge profits from that will be divided by the chemical factory’s owners, a Chinese government energy fund, and the consultants and bankers who put together the deal from a mansion in the wealthy Mayfair district of London.
Arrangements like this still make sense to the foreign companies financing them because they are a lot less expensive, despite the large profit for others, than cleaning up their own operations.
Such efforts are being watched in the United States as an alternative more politically attractive than imposing taxes on fossil fuels like coal and oil that emit global-warming gases when burned.
But critics of the fast-growing program, through which European and Japanese companies are paying roughly $3 billion for credits this year, complain that it mostly enriches a few bankers, consultants and factory owners.
With so much money flowing to a few particularly lucrative cleanup deals, the danger is that they will distract attention from the broader effort to curb global warming gases, and that the lure of quick profit will encourage short-term fixes at the expense of fundamental, long-run solutions, including developing renewable energy sources like solar power.
As word of deals like this has spread, everyone involved in the nascent business is searching for other such potential jackpots in developing countries.
As for more modest deals, like small wind farms, “if you don’t have a humongous margin, it’s not worth it,” said Pedro Moura Costa, chief operating officer of EcoSecurities, an emissions-trading company in Oxford, England.
The financing of the chemical factory’s incinerator here and other deals like it are now drawing unfavorable attention. Canada’s environment minister, Rona Ambrose, announced in October that her government would withdraw from the trading program.
“There is a lot of evidence now about the lack of accountability around these kinds of projects,” she said.
Another concern is that the program can have unintended results. The waste gas to be incinerated here is emitted during the production of a refrigerant that will soon be banned in the United States and other industrial nations because it depletes the ozone layer that protects the earth from ultraviolet rays.
Handsome payments to clean up the waste gas have helped chemical companies to expand existing factories that make the old refrigerant and even build new factories, said Michael Wara, a carbon-trading lawyer at Holland & Knight in San Francisco.
Moreover, air-conditioners using this Freon-like refrigerant are much less efficient users of electricity than newer models. The expansion of large middle classes in India and China has led to soaring sales of cheap, inefficient air-conditioners, along with the building of coal-fired plants to power them, further contributing to global warming and the depletion of the ozone layer.
The program is at the forefront of efforts to address the most intractable problem in climate change: how to limit soaring emissions from the largest developing countries. Sometime in 2009, China’s total emissions of carbon dioxide, the most important global warming gas, are expected to surpass those from the United States, according to the International Energy Agency.
While the challenge of addressing global warming is daunting, so are the consequences of inaction. Scientists warn that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide and other global warming gases could result in more severe storms, wide crop failures, the spread of tropical diseases and rising sea levels endangering some coastal cities.
Programs like the one the United Nations supports are increasingly common in Europe. In general, they allow companies to buy rights on the market to exceed their limits on global warming gases from other companies prepared to reduce emissions elsewhere at a lower cost. Many economists consider emissions-trading systems, which are driving participants to the cheapest cleanups with the biggest impact, as the most efficient way to address pollution.
But a study commissioned by the world organization has found that the profits are enormous in destroying trifluoromethane, or HFC-23, a very potent greenhouse gas that is produced at the factory here and several dozen other plants in developing countries. The study calculated that industrial nations could pay $800 million a year to buy credits, even though the cost of building and operating incinerators will be only $31 million a year.
The situation has set in motion a diplomatic struggle pitting China, the biggest beneficiary from payments, against advanced industrial nations, particularly in Europe. At a global climate conference in Nairobi, Kenya, in November, European delegates suggested that in the case of Freon factories now under construction in developing countries, any payments for the incineration of the waste gas should go only into an international fund to help factories retool for the production of more modern refrigerants that do not deplete the ozone layer.
But the Chinese government blocked the initiative, insisting that money for Chinese factories go into the government’s own clean energy fund. Negotiators ended up setting up a group to study the issue.
Even as hundreds of millions of dollars from the program are devoted to the refrigerant industry, countries in sub-Saharan Africa, which were originally envisioned as big beneficiaries of emissions trading, are receiving almost nothing. Just four nations — China, India, Brazil and South Korea — are collecting four-fifths of the payments under the program, with China alone collecting almost half.
Two-thirds of the payments are going to projects to eliminate HFC-23.
Those payments also illustrate conflicting goals under Kyoto and the Montreal Protocol, a 1987 agreement that requires the phasing out of ozone-depleting substances. The problem is that the trading program backed by the United Nations, known as the Clean Development Mechanism, is helping support an industry that another international organization is trying to phase out.
And while ozone depletion is a separate problem from global warming, some gases, like HFC-23, make both worse. The separate secretariats under the protocols have little legal authority to resolve this quandary.
“It’s tricky in that we don’t have a mechanism other than the Security Council, and who cares there about HFC’s?” said Janos Pasztor, the acting coordinator of the organization that oversees the program.
In the end, officials say, there should be more projects aimed at providing renewable energy and sustainable economic development for the world’s poorest people.
“If people only do HFC-23 projects, then they miss the whole idea,” Mr. Pasztor said.
Richard Rosenzweig, chief operating officer of Natsource, a company in Washington arranging emissions deals between poor and rich countries, said it was not fair to look only at incineration costs and compare them with the size of payments from industrial nations. The administrative costs of the program are high, he said, and at least disposal of the waste gas is taking place.
If the world tried to reduce emissions through an outright ban or regulation alone, as many environmentalists recommend, it might not happen at all, he said. The United Nations-favored program may have flaws, he added, but “it’s a pilot phase — this is a 100-year problem.”
Environmental groups say that governments in developing countries should either require factories to incinerate the waste gas as a cost of doing business, or receive aid from wealthier countries to cover the relatively modest cost of incinerators.
“Couldn’t we pay for the cost, or even twice the cost, of abatement and spend the rest of the money in better ways?” Mr. Wara asked.
DuPont produces HFC-23 as part of its output of Teflon, but has routinely burned the colorless, odorless waste gas without compensation for many years, even though it is not required by law to do so, a DuPont spokeswoman said.
The secretariat of the Clean Development Mechanism estimates that a ton of HFC-23 in the atmosphere has the same effect as 11,700 tons of carbon dioxide. James Cameron, the vice chairman of Climate Change Capital, which organized the chemical factory deal here, said there were considerable costs and risks in setting up plans that required elaborate certification by consultants, acceptance by developing-country governments and approval by a United Nations secretariat.
For small projects involving less than $250,000 worth of credits, fees for deal makers, consultants and lawyers can far exceed the cost of installing equipment to clean up emissions.
Even the Chinese government, the main seller of carbon credits and a defender of the program, is expressing some misgivings.
“We do not encourage more HFC projects,” a statement by Lu Xuedu, deputy director of the Office of Global Environment Affairs at the Ministry of Science and Technology, said. “We would prefer to have more energy efficiency and renewable-energy projects that could help alleviate poverty in the countryside.”
But for now, the projects involving industrial gases like HFC-23 are where most of the action is.
“You can do those quickly,” Mr. Rosenzweig of Natsource said, “and it’s worth the investment.”

A Place Where No One Breathes Easy

Continued use of an unrestrained, prehistoric, retarded economic model, appears to be anti- human with the consequences that are being created. Revisiting the Nature of Power: local/global/physical/mental - Key to Evolution or Extinction. The choice between Life or Profit would be unnecessary with the application of the required evolutionary energy systems discovered in the 1940's and 1950's (elementary grade school comprehension of an expanded E=MC2 equation)




A Place Where No One Breathes Easy
SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY, Calif., Dec. 20, 2006
(CBS) It takes good lungs to be on a marching band anywhere, but it's a particular challenge in California's San Joaquin Valley, CBS News correspondent John Blackstone reports. "Oh, I would say 20 or 30 kids probably have asthma in the band," says Mike Hipp, Buchanan High's band director. Asthma is common on the football team, too. When the air is particularly bad, coach Mike Vogt takes his players inside to practice. "Football's not a game to be played indoors, but that's a possibility," Vogt says. The air quality has "no doubt" changed the way he coaches. This stretch of farmland and small cities outside Los Angeles has the worst air pollution in the United States. One child in six has asthma — more than three times the national average. "Once in a while, I start to cry because I think I'm going to die," Ryan McVicar says. Both Ryan and his brother Robert have asthma. "It's like something's just punching your throat and you just stop breathing," Ryan explains. "Like you can't get air." Their mother has no doubt the Valley's heavy pollution is to blame. "I know that my kids are having to live in this air and it's only going to get worse if we don't get some help," says Gay McVicar. The 240-mile-long San Joaquin Valley is in part a victim of geography. It's a huge bowl, meaning that polluted air has nowhere to go. On some days it's so dirty you can almost see the thick air you're breathing. The hot gasses are trapped in the Valley and baked in the sun, creating a dangerous mixture. Sprawling suburbs, busy roads, and intense agriculture all foul the air. "Essentially, the Valley has a chronic disease, and it's called pollution," says Kevin Hamilton, a registered respiratory therapist. "When you have a chronic disease, you have to change the way you live your life if you want to survive." As part of the change, people in the Valley check the air quality forecast the way others check the weather. Air quality flags go up each morning at schools, telling kids how safe it is to breathe. Each color has its own degree of warning. On red days, when pollution is particularly bad, kids like Robert and Ryan wait until early evening to play outside, when the air is a bit cleaner. Efforts to clean up the air are under way, but they'll take years — not soon enough to let this generation breathe easy.
The American Lung Association has more information. You can reach the office nearest to you at 1-800-LUNG-USA and/or speak with registered nurses and respiratory therapists about air pollution and health or any other lung health issue.
©MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc

U.S. plans naval buildup in Gulf

Full Blown Nuclear Resource Wars "will be comin' around the mountain when she comes" ...... riding in the wave of people's fear of their corporate masters (bread/butter salary), along with their fear of required scientific energy and human evolution survival parameters - The Trouble With Physics: 5 great foundational problems in Theoretical Physics resulting from limitations of E=-MC2 definition


U.S. plans naval buildup in Gulf
CENTCOM plans to use 'gunboat diplomacy,' officials tell NBC News
NBC News and news services
Updated: 9:53 a.m. CT Dec 19, 2006

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Central Command is aggressively planning a naval buildup in the Persian Gulf, including the addition of a second aircraft carrier, in response to a series of aggressive actions by Iran, U.S. military officials told NBC News on Tuesday.
The officials pointed to Iran's interference in Iraq — including its support for Shiite militants and shipments of improvised explosive devices into the country — recent military naval exercises in the Gulf, and its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
The attempt at "gunboat diplomacy" is in its final planning stages. Although it has not been approved yet, it appears likely the increase in U.S. warships into the Gulf could come as early as January, the officials said.
U.S.: Iran making headway on weaponsOn Monday, the Bush administration said Iran was making headway in building nuclear weapons as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice tried to iron out differences with Russia over a U.N. resolution designed to stop the program with economic sanctions.
While not predicting when Iran would join the nuclear club, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the Iranians were trying to perfect technology to enrich uranium. Iran has denied an effort to build nuclear weapons and says its work is for energy development.
“It’s a very tricky matter of perfecting centrifuge technology so you can actually enrich all the uranium,” McCormack said. “So, yes, they are going along their way in trying to go down the various pathways.”
The spokesman provided no details of Rice’s telephone conversation with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. “They went over some of the outstanding issues,” McCormack said.
'Time for a vote'Russia, which has close economic ties with Iran, has favored diplomacy over punitive sanctions, but the Bush administration is hoping Moscow may be prepared to approve a watered-down resolution at the U.N. Security Council.
“We are hopeful that we can get a vote in the very near future. It is time for a vote,” McCormack said. “I think we need to see a vote on this in a matter of days.”
The United States and its European allies have proposed offering Iran economic concessions in exchange for halting its enrichment of uranium, a key part of the process of building nuclear weapons.© 2006 MSNBC InteractiveNBC News' Jim Miklaszewski and the Associated Press contributed to this report

Eli Lilly Said to Play Down Risk of Top Pill

Back in April 2002, we began questioning skyrocketing insurance rates, medicine, and drugs, as well as questioning drug advertisement hype: "the gift of life itself, Buy It Now!!!" in small print, "warning - 3000 side effects, some may be lethal, consult your doctor and BUY IT NOW"

NYT December 17, 2006
Eli Lilly Said to Play Down Risk of Top Pill
By ALEX BERENSON
The drug maker Eli Lilly has engaged in a decade-long effort to play down the health risks of Zyprexa, its best-selling medication for schizophrenia, according to hundreds of internal Lilly documents and e-mail messages among top company managers.
The documents, given to The Times by a lawyer representing mentally ill patients, show that Lilly executives kept important information from doctors about Zyprexa’s links to obesity and its tendency to raise blood sugar — both known risk factors for diabetes.
Lilly’s own published data, which it told its sales representatives to play down in conversations with doctors, has shown that 30 percent of patients taking Zyprexa gain 22 pounds or more after a year on the drug, and some patients have reported gaining 100 pounds or more. But Lilly was concerned that Zyprexa’s sales would be hurt if the company was more forthright about the fact that the drug might cause unmanageable weight gain or diabetes, according to the documents, which cover the period 1995 to 2004.
Zyprexa has become by far Lilly’s best-selling product, with sales of $4.2 billion last year, when about two million people worldwide took the drug.
Critics, including the American Diabetes Association, have argued that Zyprexa, introduced in 1996, is more likely to cause diabetes than other widely used schizophrenia drugs. Lilly has consistently denied such a link, and did so again on Friday in a written response to questions about the documents. The company defended Zyprexa’s safety, and said the documents had been taken out of context.
But as early as 1999, the documents show that Lilly worried that side effects from Zyprexa, whose chemical name is olanzapine, would hurt sales.
“Olanzapine-associated weight gain and possible hyperglycemia is a major threat to the long-term success of this critically important molecule,” Dr. Alan Breier wrote in a November 1999 e-mail message to two-dozen Lilly employees that announced the formation of an “executive steering committee for olanzapine-associated weight changes and hyperglycemia.” Hyperglycemia is high blood sugar.
At the time Dr. Breier, who is now Lilly’s chief medical officer, was the chief scientist on the Zyprexa program.
In 2000, a group of diabetes doctors that Lilly had retained to consider potential links between Zyprexa and diabetes warned the company that “unless we come clean on this, it could get much more serious than we might anticipate,” according to an e-mail message from one Lilly manager to another.
And in that year and 2001, the documents show, Lilly’s own marketing research found that psychiatrists were consistently saying that many more of their patients developed high blood sugar or diabetes while taking Zyprexa than other antipsychotic drugs.
The documents were collected as part of lawsuits on behalf of mentally ill patients against the company. Last year, Lilly agreed to pay $750 million to settle suits by 8,000 people who claimed they developed diabetes or other medical problems after taking Zyprexa. Thousands more suits against the company are pending.
On Friday, in its written response, Lilly said that it believed that Zyprexa remained an important treatment for patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The company said it had given the Food and Drug Administration all its data from clinical trials and reports of adverse events, as it is legally required to do. Lilly also said it shared data from literature reviews and large studies of Zyprexa’s real-world use.
“In summary, there is no scientific evidence establishing that Zyprexa causes diabetes,” the company said.
Lilly also said the documents should not have been made public because they might “cause unwarranted fear among patients that will cause them to stop taking their medication.”
As did similar documents disclosed by the drug maker Merck last year in response to lawsuits over its painkiller Vioxx, the Lilly documents offer an inside look at how a company marketed a drug while seeking to play down its side effects. Lilly, based in Indianapolis, is the sixth-largest American drug maker, with $14 billion in revenue last year.
The documents — which include e-mail, marketing material, sales projections and scientific reports — are replete with references to Zyprexa’s importance to Lilly’s future and the need to keep concerns about diabetes and obesity from hurting sales. But that effort became increasingly difficult as doctors saw Zyprexa’s side effects, the documents show.
In 2002, for example, Lilly rejected plans to give psychiatrists guidance about how to treat diabetes, worrying that doing so would tarnish Zyprexa’s reputation. “Although M.D.’s like objective, educational materials, having our reps provide some with diabetes would further build its association to Zyprexa,” a Lilly manager wrote in a March 2002 e-mail message.
But Lilly did expand its marketing to primary care physicians, who its internal studies showed were less aware of Zyprexa’s side effects. Lilly sales material encouraged representatives to promote Zyprexa as a “safe, gentle psychotropic” suitable for people with mild mental illness.
Some top psychiatrists say that Zyprexa will continue to be widely used despite its side effects, because it works better than most other antipsychotic medicines in severely ill patients. But others say that Zyprexa appears no more effective overall than other medicines.
And some doctors who specialize in diabetes care dispute Lilly’s assertion that Zyprexa does not cause more cases of diabetes than other psychiatric drugs. “When somebody gains weight, they need more insulin, they become more insulin resistant,” Dr. Joel Zonszein, the director of the clinical diabetes center at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, said when asked about the drug.
In 2003, after reviewing data provided by Lilly and other drug makers, the F.D.A. said that the current class of antipsychotic drugs may cause high blood sugar. It did not specifically single out Zyprexa, nor did it say that the drugs had been proven to cause diabetes.
The drugs are known as atypical antipsychotics and include Johnson & Johnson’s Risperdal and AstraZeneca’s Seroquel. When they were introduced in the mid-1990s, psychiatrists hoped they would relieve mental illness without the tremors and facial twitches associated with older drugs. But the new drugs have not proven significantly better and have their own side effects, said Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, the lead investigator on a federally sponsored clinical trial that compared Zyprexa and other new drugs with one older one.
The Zyprexa documents were provided to the Times by James B. Gottstein, a lawyer who represents mentally ill patients and has sued the state of Alaska over its efforts to force patients to take psychiatric medicines against their will. Mr. Gottstein said the information in the documents raised public health issues.
“Patients should be told the truth about drugs like Zyprexa,” Mr. Gottstein said.
Lilly originally provided the documents, under seal, to plaintiffs lawyers who sued the company claiming their clients developed diabetes from taking Zyprexa. Mr. Gottstein, who is not subject to the confidentiality agreement that covers the product liability suits, subpoenaed the documents in early December from a person involved in the suits.
In its statement, Lilly called the release of the documents “illegal.” The company said it could not comment on specific documents because of the continuing product liability suits.
In some ways, the Zyprexa documents are reminiscent of those produced in litigation over Vioxx, which Merck stopped selling in 2004 after a clinical trial proved it caused heart problems. They treat very different conditions, but Zyprexa and Vioxx are not entirely dissimilar. Both were thought to be safer than older and cheaper drugs, becoming bestsellers as a result, but turned out to have serious side effects.
After being pressed by doctors and regulators, Merck eventually did test Vioxx’s cardiovascular risks and withdrew the drug after finding that Vioxx increased heart attacks and strokes.
Lilly has never conducted a clinical trial to determine exactly how much Zyprexa raises patients’ diabetes risks. But scientists say conducting such a study would be exceedingly difficult, because diabetes takes years to develop, and it can be hard to keep mentally ill patients enrolled in a clinical trial.
When it was introduced, Zyprexa was the third and most heralded of the atypical antipsychotics. With psychiatrists eager for new treatments for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and dementia, Zyprexa’s sales soared.
But as sales grew, reports rolled in to Lilly and drug regulators that the medicine caused massive weight gain in many patients and was associated with diabetes. For example, a California doctor reported that 8 of his 35 patients on Zyprexa had developed high blood sugar, including two who required hospitalization.
The documents show that Lilly encouraged its sales representatives to play down those effects when talking to doctors. In one 1998 presentation, for example, Lilly said its salespeople should be told, “Don’t introduce the issue!!!” Meanwhile, the company researched combinations of Zyprexa with several other drugs, hoping to alleviate the weight gain. But the combinations failed.
To reassure doctors, Lilly also publicly said that when it followed up with patients who had taken Zyprexa in a clinical trial for three years, it found that weight gain appeared to plateau after about nine months. But the company did not discuss a far less reassuring finding in early 1999, disclosed in the documents, that blood sugar levels in the patients increased steadily for three years.
In 2000 and 2001, more warning signs emerged, the documents show. In four surveys conducted by Lilly’s marketing department, the company found that 70 percent of psychiatrists polled had seen at least one of their patients develop high blood sugar or diabetes while taking Zyprexa, compared with about 20 percent for Risperdal or Seroquel. Lilly never disclosed those findings.
By mid-2003, Lilly began to change its stance somewhat, publicly acknowledging that Zyprexa can cause severe obesity. Marketing documents make clear that by then Lilly believed it had no choice. On June 23, 2003, an internal committee reported that Zyprexa sales were “below plan” and that doctors were “switching/avoiding Zyprexa.”
Since then, Lilly has acknowledged Zyprexa’s effect on weight but has argued that it does not necessarily correlate to diabetes. But Zyprexa’s share of antipsychotic drug prescriptions is falling, and some psychiatrists say they no longer believe the information Lilly offers.
“From my personal experience, at first my concerns about weight gain with this drug were very significantly downplayed by their field representatives,” said Dr. James Phelps, a psychiatrist in Corvallis, Or. ‘Their continued efforts to downplay that, I think in retrospect, was an embarrassment to the company.”
Dr. Phelps says that he tries to avoid Zyprexa because of its side effects but sometimes still prescribes it, especially when patients are acutely psychotic and considering suicide, because it works faster than other medicines.
“I wind up using it as an emergency medicine, where it’s superb,” he said. “But I’m trying to get my patients off of Zyprexa, not put them on.”

U.S. troops should leave country, but how will America then keep control of oil fields

Toronto Star Article

U.S. troops should leave country, but how will America then keep control of oil fields, asks Linda McQuaig
Toronto Star Dec. 17, 2006. 01:00 AM
Advising the Bush administration on how to deal with the Iraq fiasco, the report of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group urges the president to clarify that Washington does not seek to control Iraq's oil.
It then gets down to business and sets out exactly how Washington should take control of Iraq's oil.
The report calls for Iraq to pass a Petroleum Law — to be drafted with U.S. help — that would allow foreign oil companies to develop Iraq's vast and largely undeveloped oil reserves (which, the report notes, are the second-largest in the world).
It's hard not to feel exasperated reading the report. Released in the wake of the Republican trouncing in the U.S. mid-term elections, it generated excitement that George Bush's imperial adventure was finally coming under sharp attack, and that senior figures from both parties would force the president into line.
Instead, the report reveals the extent of the imperial mindset — shared by both Democrats and Republicans — that is the very heart of the problem of American foreign policy in Iraq, and elsewhere.
Yes, the report acknowledges the extent of the Iraq debacle, and outlines a strategy for getting U.S. troops out.
But it's essentially the strategy of the Bush administration: Create an Iraqi army strong enough to handle security — within the context of a U.S.-controlled Iraq.
One senses the impatience inside the White House and the Iraq Study Group. For heaven's sake, it's almost four years since the invasion! How long does it take to get a competent puppet government and army up and running?
The report sets out a vision for extending U.S. control over Iraq. U.S. officials will be embedded everywhere: U.S. soldiers inside the Iraqi army, American trainers inside the Iraqi police, FBI agents inside the interior ministry, CIA agents inside intelligence operations.
The report even specifies that Iraqi consumers must pay more for oil, and that the Iraqi Central Bank must raise interest rates to 20 per cent — before the end of this month.
All this is in line with Bush's contempt for meaningful Iraqi self-government, as illustrated by the massive, new $1 billion U.S. embassy he's built in Baghdad, which has 1,000 employees, only six of whom speak fluent Arabic. Six! Presumably the other 994 employees are busy bringing democracy to Iraq — by talking to each other or to Washington.
The reluctance to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq has nothing to do with fears of a bloodbath, which is already underway.
Washington contributes to the bloodbath, through its own violence and by allowing death squads, operating within the Iraqi army, to murder enemies of the U.S.-sponsored regime.
U.S. troops are only worsening the situation. They should leave. But that would involve giving up control over a country Washington has already spent $400 billion trying to subdue. And then how would America get control of all that oil?
Linda McQuaig is a commentator and author of It's the Crude, Dude. lmcquaig@sympatico.ca

A Liberty View When Science Foundation Stagnates

Demise of Democracy, Rise of Corporate Power

Vanquished American liberty
by Paul Craig Roberts

George Orwell warned us, but what American would have expected that in the opening years of the 21st century the United States would become a country in which lies and deception by the president and vice president were the basis for a foreign policy of war and aggression, and in which indefinite detention without charges, torture, and spying on citizens without warrants have displaced the Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution?
If anyone had predicted that the election of George W. Bush to the presidency would result in an American police state and illegal wars of aggression, he would have been dismissed as a lunatic.
What American ever would have thought that any U.S. president and attorney general would defend torture or that a Republican Congress would pass a bill legalizing torture by the executive branch and exempting the executive branch from the Geneva Conventions?
What American ever would have expected the U.S. Congress to accept the president's claim that he is above the law?
What American could have imagined that if such crimes and travesties occurred, nothing would be done about them and that the media and opposition party would be largely silent?
Except for a few columnists, who are denounced by "conservatives" as traitors for defending the Bill of Rights, the defense of U.S. civil liberty has been limited to the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. The few federal judges who have refused to genuflect before the Bush police state are denounced by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as a "grave threat" to U.S. security. Vice President Richard Cheney called a federal judge's ruling against the Bush regime's illegal and unconstitutional warrantless surveillance program "an indefensible act of judicial overreaching."
Brainwashed "conservatives" are so accustomed to denouncing federal judges for "judicial activism" that Cheney's charge of overreach goes down smoothly. Vast percentages of the American public are simply unconcerned that their liberty can be revoked at the discretion of a police or military officer and that they can be held without evidence, trial, or access to an attorney and tortured until they confess to whatever charge their torturers wish to impose.
Americans believe that such things can only happen to "real terrorists," despite the overwhelming evidence that most of the Bush regime's detainees have no connections to terrorism.
When these points are made to fellow citizens, the reply is usually that "I'm doing nothing wrong. I have nothing to fear."
Why, then, did the Founding Fathers write the Constitution and the Bill of Rights?
American liberties are the result of an 800-year struggle by the English people to make law a shield of the people instead of a weapon in the hands of government. For centuries English-speaking peoples have understood that governments cannot be trusted with unaccountable power. If the Founding Fathers believed it was necessary to tie down a very weak and limited central government with the Constitution and Bill of Rights, these protections are certainly more necessary now that our government has grown in size, scope, and power beyond the imagination of the Founding Fathers.
But, alas, "law-and-order conservatives" have been brainwashed for decades that civil liberties are unnecessary interferences with the ability of police to protect us from criminals. Americans have forgot that we need protection from government more than we need protection from criminals. Once we cut down civil liberty so that police may better pursue criminals and terrorists, where do we stand when government turns on us?
This is the famous question asked by Sir Thomas More in the play A Man for All Seasons. The answer is that we stand naked, unprotected by law. It is an act of the utmost ignorance and stupidity to assume that only criminals and terrorists will stand unprotected.
Americans should be roused to fury that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Vice President Cheney have condemned the defense of American civil liberty as "a grave threat to U.S. security." This blatant use of an orchestrated and propagandistic fear to crate a "national security" wedge against the Bill of Rights is an impeachable offense.

Military Taking a Tougher Line With Detainees

nearly all of them without having been charged.

NYT December 16, 2006
Military Taking a Tougher Line With Detainees
By TIM GOLDEN
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba, Dec. 10 — As the first detainees began moving last week into Guantánamo’s modern, new detention facility, Camp 6, the military guard commander stood beneath the high, concrete walls of the compound, looking out on a fenced-in athletic yard.
The yard, where the detainees were to have played soccer and other sports, had been part of a plan to ease the conditions under which more than 400 men are imprisoned here, nearly all of them without having been charged. But that plan has changed.
“At this point, I just don’t see using that,” the guard commander, Col. Wade F. Dennis, said.
After two years in which the military sought to manage terrorism suspects at Guantánamo with incentives for good behavior, steady improvements in their living conditions and even dialogue with prison leaders, the authorities here have clamped down decisively in recent months.
Security procedures have been tightened. Group activities have been scaled back. With the retrofitting of Camp 6 and the near-emptying of another showcase camp for compliant prisoners, military officials said about three-fourths of the detainees would eventually be held in maximum-security cells. That is a stark departure from earlier plans to hold a similar number in medium-security units.
Officials said the shift reflected the military’s analysis — after a series of hunger strikes, a riot last May and three suicides by detainees in June — that earlier efforts to ease restrictions on the detainees had gone too far.
The commander of the Guantánamo task force, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., said the tougher approach also reflected the changing nature of the prison population, and his conviction that all of those now held here are dangerous men. “They’re all terrorists; they’re all enemy combatants,” Admiral Harris said in an interview.
He added, “I don’t think there is such a thing as a medium-security terrorist.”
Admiral Harris, who took command on March 31, referred in part to the recent departure from Guantánamo of the last of 38 men whom the military had classified since early 2005 as “no longer enemy combatants.” Still, about 100 others who had been cleared by the military for transfer or release remained here while the State Department tried to arrange their repatriation.
[Shortly after Admiral Harris’s remarks, another 15 detainees were sent home to Saudi Arabia, where they were promptly returned to their families.]
The detainee population here has also been reshaped by the arrival in September of 14 terror suspects, including the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, who had been held by the Central Intelligence Agency in secret prisons overseas.
United States officials said these so-called high-value suspects were being held apart from the rest of the Guantánamo prisoners, at a secret detention facility supervised by C.I.A. officers. The 14 have been visited twice by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, but have not yet been interrogated by military intelligence officials, these officials said.
Next year, after the Defense Department finishes rewriting rules for the military tribunals that the Bush administration first established in November 2001, the intelligence agency’s prisoners are to be charged with war crimes. The timetable for their prosecutions remains uncertain.
Military officials said they would continue to try to improve conditions at the prison to the extent that security considerations allowed. They said they have abandoned special cell blocks for discipline and segregation, so that prisoners who violate rules are now punished simply by the withdrawal of various privileges in their regular cells. The authorities have also standardized rules for exercise, allowing each detainee at least two hours a day, they said.
Nonetheless, the tightening of security at the detention center represents a significant shift in Guantánamo’s operations.
Since spring 2004, the military’s handling of the detainees had been heavily influenced by the political and diplomatic pressures that grew out of the Abu Ghraib scandal and other cases of prisoner abuse. At the same time, Guantánamo’s focus was shifting from interrogations to the long-term detention of men who, for the most part, would never be charged with any crime.
With little guidance from Washington, senior officers here began in 2005 to edge back toward the traditional Geneva Convention rules for prisoner treatment that President Bush had disavowed after 9/11 for the fight against terrorism, military officials said. Military officers began listening more attentively to the prisoners’ complaints, and eventually met a few times with a council of detainee leaders.
Those talks were quickly aborted in August 2005. The hunger strikes were effectively broken last January, when the military began strapping detainees into padded “restraint chairs” to force-feed them through stomach tubes.
But those protests gave way to several drug overdoses in May and the hangings in June of three prisoners — all of whom had previously been hunger strikers.
The current Guantánamo commanders eschewed any criticism of their predecessors. But they were blunt in laying out a different approach.
Asked about his discussions with prisoners, Colonel Dennis said he basically had none. As for the handful of detainees who have continued to wage hunger strikes, including three who were being force-fed last week, he said they would get no “special attention” from him.
“If they want to do that, hook it up,” he said, apparently referring to the restraint chair system for force-feeding. “If that’s what you want to do, that’s your choice.”
Admiral Harris said he had ordered a hardening of the security posture on the basis of new insights into the threat that the detainees pose. “We have learned how committed they are, just how serious they are, and how dangerous they are,” he said.
Several military officials said Admiral Harris took over the Guantánamo task force with a greater concern about security, and soon ordered his aides to draw up plans to deal with hostage-takings and other emergencies.
He and Colonel Dennis both asserted that Camp 4 — where dozens of detainees rioted during an aggressive search of their quarters last May — represented a particular danger.
Admiral Harris said detainees there had used the freedom of the camp to train one another in terrorist tactics, and in 2004 plotted unsuccessfully to seize a food truck and use it to run over guards.
“Camp 4 is an ideal planning ground for nefarious activity,” he said.
But according to several recent interviews with military personnel who served here at the time, the riot in May did not transpire precisely as military officials had described it. The disturbance culminated with what the military had said was an attack by detainees on members of a Quick Reaction Force that burst into one barracks to stop a detainee who appeared to be hanging himself.
But officers familiar with the event said the force stormed in after a guard saw a detainee merely holding up a sheet and that his intentions were ambiguous. A guard also mistakenly broadcast the radio code for multiple suicide attempts, heightening the alarm, the officers said.
Admiral Harris conceded that an error “could have been” made, but said “it was certainly no accident” that the prisoners had slicked the floor of their quarters with soapy water and excrement, and fought the guards with makeshift weapons. He said he believed the guards acted properly.
The May 18 search took place after at least two prisoners were found unconscious from overdoses of hoarded drugs. The detainees who attacked the guards were known as especially religious, and had been angered in the past by searches of their Korans.
After the three suicides in June, Camp 6 was substantially reconfigured. Staircases and catwalks were fenced in so that detainees could not jump from them to attack guards or try to kill themselves. Shower stalls were built higher so they could not be used for hangings. Exercise yards were divided up into a series of one-man pens.
The detainees will still look out the small windows of their computer-controlled cell doors to see the stainless steel picnic tables where they were once supposed to have shared their meals; they just will not be able to sit at those tables with other detainees.
Military officials confirmed that since the suicides in June, three detainees who were part of the council that negotiated with military commanders had been kept isolated from nearly all other prisoners in Camp Echo, a collection of bungalows where detainees often see their lawyers.
Those detainees include Shaker Aamer, a Saudi resident of Britain who is accused of having ties to Al Qaeda; Ghassan al-Sharbi, a Saudi electrical engineer who was charged earlier with plotting to make bombs for Qaeda forces in Afghanistan; and Saber Lahmar, an Algerian religious scholar seized in Bosnia.
Lawyers for Mr. Aamer and Mr. Lahmar said that they had been alone for most of that time, and that the isolation was causing them psychological damage.
“They have thrown away the key and forgotten him even though he is spiraling down physically and psychologically,” Mr. Lahmar’s lawyer, Stephen H. Olesky, said.
Noting that a petition for relief on behalf of Mr. Lahmar has been before a federal appeals court for nearly two years, he added, “They know we do not have a judge to take this case to, so they can pile on the detainee.”
Colonel Dennis, the commander of the detention group, said Mr. Lahmar was being allowed to exercise and had access to any medical attention he required.

China, at Energy Summit, Urges Oil Consumers to Unite

also highlighted U.S. concerns -- and the potential gulf between Washington and Asian counterparts -- about subsidized prices and a global race for assets.

NYT December 16, 2006
China, at Energy Summit, Urges Oil Consumers to Unite
By REUTERS
Filed at 11:33 a.m. ET
BEIJING ( Reuters) - China, hosting its first major energy summit on Saturday, urged top oil consumers to join together in the face of resurgent producer power and sought to paper over differences on how best to achieve energy security.
Ministers from the United States, India, Japan and South Korea -- nations that consume nearly half the world's oil -- gathered in Beijing for the meeting, which marked a rare move by China to take a leadership role on global energy issues.
``We want to send out an important, positive message, which is: the world's key energy consuming countries plan to strengthen mutual cooperation,'' China's top energy policy maker Ma Kai said.
``(We will) promote conservation of oil, improvement of energy efficiency, strong development of oil alternatives, and reduce reliance on oil,'' he added in prepared remarks to the forum.
The call to action may reflect a growing desire by China to engage with other key energy users, some of whom have criticized its secretive approach, price controls and a strategy favoring Chinese ownership of resources over spot buying of oil.
It also echoed a shared concern over increasingly nationalistic policies in major oil and gas producers that threaten to stymie investment and limit new supplies.
In addition, producer cartel OPEC will see its power expand when new member Angola joins next year.
``This is the first time an energy conference is organized to look at the interest of consumers,'' Indian oil minister Murli Deora told Reuters after the meeting.
``Otherwise it is all OPEC and the oil producers interests.''
Ma emphasized that the five countries had common problems and could benefit from a joint approach to them, although delegates were already pleased China was taking a more prominent role.
``South Korea is hopeful that the meeting -- hosted by China which has been rather inactive in energy cooperation up until now -- will increase China's role as a important partner in global energy security,'' one official in Seoul said.
The five consumer nations will focus on diversifying energy sources and increasing efficiency to reduce oil dependency, cooperating on strategic oil reserves, and encouraging more investment in the industry to boost market stability, according to a ministerial statement issued at the end.
They hope the dialogue will become a regular event, and Japan has already offered to host the next round, India's Deora said.
PRICE, EQUITY TENSIONS
U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman, echoed calls for greater cooperation, but also highlighted U.S. concerns -- and the potential gulf between Washington and Asian counterparts -- about subsidized prices and a global race for assets.
Although he avoided mentioning any country by name, Beijing's caps on fuel costs and its rush to buy up oil and gas fields worldwide have been top of the agenda in previous bilateral meetings between the two countries.
``I believe our mutual long-term economic goals will be best served by relying on global markets to set prices, in both the upstream and the downstream and both internationally and domestically,'' he added.
Bodman also repeated the U.S. position that well-functioning markets are a better guarantee of supplies than owning oilfields.
``It seems as though there is a growing trend to equate energy security with ownership of energy reserves, rather than broad access to reserves,'' he said, according to a copy of his remarks.
``Even under the best circumstances, in my view, only a fraction of any nation's projected needs can be met through direct ownership of reserves,'' he added.
Bilateral deals were finalized on the summit sidelines included a multi-billion dollar agreement for U.S.-based Westinghouse Electric Co. to build nuclear plants in China, that analysts said may help Beijing smooth ties with Washington.

Report: U.S. Schools Not Making The Grade

Still at it!

FYI: the universe does not stop evolving because of greedy guts. George T. Land called it "Grow or Die. Ceasation of scientific research into energy evolution, directly connected to human evolution, by top secret greedy guts confronts us with the scenerio described in the evolution blog, "and yet, by SECRECY AND SILENCE - THE DEATH SENTENCE WAS ALSO SEALED, as the advanced energy requirements for survival were denied"

Report: U.S. Schools Not Making The Grade
ARLINGTON, Va., Dec. 14, 2006
(CBS) A bipartisan panel is warning that America's students are falling behind those in even some of the poorest countries, CBS News correspondent Thalia Assuras reports. "I am really worried about where this country is," says ex-Sen. Bill Brock, a former Secretary of Labor. "We've got an information world, we're networked to the rest of the world, it's a global economy and we're not preparing our young people for that world." Students from Asia to Europe outperform Americans on tests. Thirty years ago, the U.S. boasted 30 percent of the world's college students. That figure is now 14 percent. Meanwhile, most other industrialized nations educate their 16-year olds at a college level. Neha Sharma is 16. The daughter of a diplomat from India, she's in an advanced college-level program in Virginia, rare in U.S. public high schools. "I hate to say this, but the education system over here is worse than it is in India," Sharma says. Emerging giants like India are churning out college graduates who often have more advanced skill sets than American graduates. Many go on to take U.S. jobs. "That is going to drive the standard of living down in the United States," says Commissioner Mark Tucker. The commission calls for a radical overhaul to stream all students to college. Public schools would no longer be run by local districts. Instead, schools could be managed by groups of teachers or private companies. Teachers would need to pass rigorous assessments ... and be paid a lot more. All 4-year-olds and all low-income 3-year-olds would enroll in universal pre-K. Finally, high school students should be prepared to pass college-level board exams by age 16, like Neha Sharma and her classmates. Do students think they are ready for what's going to be the new globalized world? "Absolutely not, no!," Sharma and her classmates say, laughing. It's not the answer any parent or teacher in this country wants to hear.
©MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc

Asia's greenhouse gas 'to treble'

Makes one wonder if Footsybally, Shopping Dropping, I-Poding, Hollywoodsy Movies, and Maximizing Profits for the Shareholders (i.e., the 2% that own half the world) can have any effect on global warming, resource wars, corporate predators, demise of democracy and the science/physics hangup

Asia's greenhouse gas 'to treble'
BBC 12/14/06
Asia's greenhouse gas emissions will treble over the next 25 years, according to a report commissioned by the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
The report provides detailed analysis of the link between transport and climate change in Asia.
It says that its estimate of future levels of greenhouse gas could even be an optimistic assessment.
Air pollution and congestion will seriously hamper the ability to move people and goods effectively, it warns.
'Partnerships required'
The report, Energy Efficiency and Climate Change: Considerations for On-Road Transport in Asia, says that Asia currently has low levels of personal motorized transport, which in many cases are motorcycles.
But it says that these levels are likely to increase significantly as incomes in these countries grows and the urban population becomes bigger.
The report points out that China is already the world's fourth largest economy, and the number of cars and utility vehicles could increase by 15 times more than present levels to more than 190 million vehicles over the next 30 years.
In India, traffic growth is likely to increase by similar levels over the same time period, the report says.
Carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles could rise 3.4 times for China and 5.8 times for India.
"Progress toward reducing the growth of greenhouse gases from the transport sector will require partnerships and involvement of a wide range of stakeholders," Bindu Lohani, director-general of the ADB's sustainable development department, wrote in the foreword to the report.
He said that addressing these problems would mean "changing existing travel behaviour patterns and modifying urban development patterns to minimize the type, length, and frequency of trips that people need to take".
Last month, the British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett urged India to help in efforts to tackle climate change.
She made the call ahead of a report commissioned by the British government which said that rich nations must act now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
'Costing cities'
Meanwhile a conference in Indonesia has heard that while some Asian governments should be praised for toughening vehicle emissions standards, with many phasing out leaded gasoline, much work still needs to be done.
"Transport is growing faster in most cities so transport emissions are a big part of the problem," Lew Fulton, a transport expert with the UN Environmental Programme, told the three-day Better Air Quality Conference 2006 in the city of Yogyakarta.
"We're not only seeing increases in pollutant emissions. We're seeing huge increases in fuel consumption which is coupled tightly with (carbon dioxide) emissions," he said.
"It's costing cities and countries ever increasing amounts of foreign exchange with the high oil prices that we've got."
The World Health Organization said increased pollution in Asia is estimated to cause as many as 537,000 premature deaths each year, as well as a rise in cardiopulmonary and respiratory illnesses.
Story from BBC NEWS

Doctor: FDA-Approved Drug A 'Time Bomb'

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Doctor: FDA-Approved Drug A 'Time Bomb'
NEW YORK, Dec. 13, 2006
(CBS) Iraq war veteran Chuck Gregg was back home with his family last winter when he got bronchitis. His doctor prescribed Ketek, a relatively new antibiotic, CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian reports. Five days later, Gregg was in the hospital with liver failure. "They run their battery of tests, and they come back and it's definitely what's called 'drug induced' or 'pharmaceutically induced hepatitis," Gregg explains. "He survived 13 months in Iraq, you know, all over Iraq, to come home for this," adds Sherry, his wife.
Iraq War veteran Chuck Gregg and his wife Sherry describe how his health failed after taking the antibiotic Ketek.
The FDA has continuously updated warnings of Ketek's possible side effects, including "signs ... of liver problems." Gregg says because he had no previous liver problems, he had no reason to be concerned. Now he's pointing a finger at the FDA. "Based upon the data available to me, I believe this drug is far more dangerous than other drugs that fight the same infections," says Dr. David Ross. In an exclusive interview with CBS News, Ross, who reviewed Ketek's safety for the FDA, says he warned his superiors that the drug was, in his words, a "time bomb," and was shocked last summer when the acting head of the agency, Dr. Andrew Von Eschenbach, told employees to keep concerns about the drug in-house — and out of the press. "He said, 'If you don't follow the team, if you don't do what you're supposed to do, the first time you'll be spoken to, the second time you'll be benched, and the third time, you'll be traded,'" Ross says. Instead, Ross says, he quit the FDA in disgust. "The leaders of an agency should not be holding a meeting to suggest dissenters should be kicked off the team," says Sen. Charles Grassley. "Particularly when the life of American people are at stake." Sen. Grassley today issued a scathing report criticizing the FDA's oversight of Ketek. CBS News has learned there is a new Congressional probe under way to determine whether Ketek should remain on the market. The manufacturer says Ketek is safe to use. Von Eschenbach declined to speak with CBS News, citing a FDA meeting about Ketek beginning tomorrow.
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