Will The Earth Burn Up In 2012?

There has been much talk of late about the doomsday prediction of December 21, 2012 as reflected in the Mayan long calendar. According to some astronomers, on this day our solar system will intersect with the Galactic Equator which only happens every 26,000 years. Since the Mayan calendar began in 3114 BC, they had never experienced anything like this before. The Mayans called this event the Sacred Tree. This alignment with the center of the galaxy also allows for maximum mass and thus maximum gravity. According to the National Earthquake Information Service of the US Geological Survey, earthquakes have gradually increased from 1 severe quake between 1890 and 1899 to 765 from 2000-2004. Could this be due to our solar systems movement towards this Galactic Equator?... NASA predicts that a terrific solar storm will hit the earth in 2012 which will be 30-50 percent greater than anything before it... A massive solar blast from the sun in 2012 could burn up the earth as could a collision with an asteroid or a comet. There has even been talk of a polar shift which could disrupt the functioning of the entire earth and could change the axis of rotation. Such a shift has taken place in our geologic past and could happen again... This apocalyptic date of December 21, 2012 is also found in Hopi myths, the I-Ching, Aztec writings, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Roman Oracles, writing of Seneca Elders, the chief Shaman of the Cherokee Tribe in NC, and even the writings of Nostradamus. The Russian mathematician Sergey Smelyakov of Khartov University taking the constant Phi (1.6180339), the so called Golden Mean or the Fibonacci sequence, and applying it to solar activity and planetary orbits, found that everything seemed to spiral in on itself on December 21, 2012 implying a time implosion or point of bifurcation. The planet Venus is set to make a transit across the face of the sun on December 21, 2012 which happens very infrequently. It did happen recently, however, on June 8, 2004 which means it will happen again in eight years which is very unusual but predicted by the Mayans. I cannot tell you for certain that the earth will be consumed by fire in 2012 or that there will be a polar shift or severe earthquakes, but I can tell you with certainty that one day in the not too distant future it will be consumed by fire and experience a polar shift and severe earthquakes. I can say that because the word of God says so and it did beginning over 2700 years ago, long before the Mayans or the Aztecs or the Hopi or the Seneca or the I-Ching or Nostradamus. Once before because of its sin the earth was destroyed by water in the Great Flood of Noah's day but the Bible says that the world will be destroyed again, this time by fire. "The present heavens and earth, by His word, are being reserved for fire, kept for the Day of Judgment and the destruction of ungodly men" (2 Peter 3:7).

North American Union Meeting Held

An internal memo from Canada's Foreign Affairs and Internal Trade ministry, obtained by World Net News under the Access to Information Act, documents the agenda at the most recent secret summit meeting of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) in Montebello, Quebec, held on August 20-21, 2007. The central activity of the meeting was to figure out a way to get the American people to swallow the idea of the collaboration leading to the North American Union, and to squelch the growing criticism surrounding it. Present at the meeting were U.S. President George Bush, Mexico's President Felipe Calderon, and Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The SPP consists of 20 working groups plus the attending cabinet officers from each country and the heads of state. Also present were members of the North American Competitiveness Council (NACC), the only participants invited to meet behind closed doors with the SPP bureaucrats. The NACC is a largely secretive advisory council to the SPP consisting of representatives from 30 North American corporations selected by the Chambers of Commerce in the three nations. The NACC issued no press releases disclosing specific recommendations made to them by the SPP trilateral working groups tasked with "integrating" and "harmonizing" administrative rules and regulations into a unified North American format. However, the memo documents that the NACC was urged to launch a public relations campaign to counter growing criticism of the trilateral cooperative that is seen by many as a major step toward the North American Union. "Leaders had a successful meeting with the members of the NACC, which had been launched at the leader's meeting in Cancun in March 2006, to counsel governments on how they might enhance North American competitiveness," the memo begins. As discussion continues, the members of the NACC were urged to "assist in confronting and refuting critics of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America". According to paragraph four of the memo, the public relations theme continued during the meeting. "In closing, all leaders expressed a desire for the NACC to play a role in articulating publicly the benefits of greater collaboration in North America." The memo documents a comment by the U.S. President. "In terms of building public support, President Bush suggested engaging the support of those who had benefited from NAFTA and from North American Integration (including small business owners) to tell their stories and humanize the impressive results." Regarding import safety, the document says, "President Bush underlined the importance of tackling the issue more broadly and showing that governments are ahead of this issue in order to prevent a trade protectionist backlash, especially against China." The memo again reinforces the public relations theme, emphasizing, "NACC members should have a role in communicating the merits of North American collaboration, including by engaging their employees and unions."

VeriChip Marketing To Consumers

VeriChip said on April 22, it will begin pitching its implantable RFID chips directly to consumers in a move that aims to link doctors directly to personal health records. VeriChip said it will launch a direct-to-consumer marketing campaign in South Florida on April 28. The general idea appears to be to woo a bunch of retirees to implant an RFID chip (right) and connect the information with personal health records. VeriChip will pitch its wares through HEARx hearing aid stores in the Palm Beach area. Rest assured the idea of implantable RFID chips will freak a few folks out. However, I see RFID as a key component to personal health records, which are patient controlled medical data repositories. Microsoft (HealthVault resources), Google (Google Health resources) and others have pitched personal health records and the idea makes a lot of sense. The problem: What happens if I’m in a car wreck and can’t tell the doctor my log-in and password? What if my personal health record on a portal doesn’t synch up with a hospital’s IT systems? Will I actively manage my personal health record? Simply put, personal health records (PHRs) have their limitations and an RFID chip could expand their use. It would be a lot easier if I were implanted with an RFID chip that could be read when I pass through the doors of the emergency room. Could this RFID chip be hacked? Possibly. But in real world use an implantable RFID chip used for medical purposes makes a lot of sense to me.

DNA of Newborns used by State

The state of Minnesota has advanced a plan to own the DNA of newborns, preserving it in a warehouse for use in genetic research, experimentation, manipulation, and profiling, according to an advocacy organization seeking to protect the privacy of that individual information. "Citizen DNA is citizen property. The government should be required to ask, not allowed to take," said Twila Brase, president of the Citizens' Council on Health Care, a Minnesota-based organization familiar with the progress in that state. "If this bill becomes law, each year 73,000 newborn citizens will not be protected by the state genetic privacy law. The [state] will take their DNA and unless the parents figure it out, the government will keep it," she said. "Children grow up. Eventually, every citizen will have their DNA owned by state government and available for government to engage in genetic research, experimentation, manipulation, and profiling," she warned. "What good is the state genetic privacy law if government warehousing and analysis of every child's DNA from birth is exempt from its informed consent protections?" In Minnesota, the state's genetic privacy law was challenged by the Health Department, which lost a court battle over the issue. But now the legislation could give the state government by legislative activism what it could not obtain through the judiciary. Brase said the state House voted this week to approve the plan forwarded by the state Senate. "If the Senate accepts the minor amendments adopted by the House without a conference committee, the bill could be sent directly to Gov. [Tim] Pawlenty for his signature." The legislative specifically would exempt warehousing, use and analysis of newborn blood and DNA from the informed consent requirements of the 2006 Minnesota Genetic Privacy Law.

Who’s Contaminating the Skies in the USA

A large local TV Station (KSLA - Shreveport, LA) had the courage to take on chemtrails. This attracted the attention of Los Angeles network affiliate, "KNBC" which aired a report entitled, "Toxic Sky?". In 1993, Dr. Shyh-Ching Lo, senior researcher at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, patented several virulent strains of mycoplasma. He stated in his own patents that they cause chronic fatigue syndrome. The Institute is currently reconstructing the 1918 Spanish Flu, inserting it into contemporary flu strains and enhancing its lethality. The Spanish Flu killed 675,000 Americans in the 1918-1919 interval. Many of the dead were vaccinated soldiers. Anyone born after 1918 has no immunity to the Spanish Flu. According to one credible source, there is a sub rosa project known as 'Cloverleaf' that uses domestic air carriers retrofitted with special tanks to spray civilian populations with a variety of chemicals. This retired government scientist goes on to say that reconstructed versions of the flu could be inserted into vaccines along with a more benign strain of the inoculum in order to slow the progression of its more deadly component. Chemicals in the "chemtrails" reported nationwide over the preceding decade, may assist the viral envelope to fuse with lung cells, guaranteeing ease of penetration and infection. People will pass along the flu to others and then start dropping like flies. This will cause a panic demand for more flu shots, thus accelerating the cycle. Persons not so inoculated will be blamed for spreading the disease. According to Tim White, "The CIA front, Evergreen Air, located at Pinal Air Park in Marana, Arizona is a longtime CIA/NSA secret facility for more than 40 years. This is the prime modification center that modifies a wide range of aircraft types to conduct the covert "chemtrail" spray operations that began in 1998. Prior to this, selected areas of the U.S. had Chemtrail operations to test all the technology employed in these Chemtrail operations and to determine the operating parameters related to aircraft performance envelopes and optimum atmospheric conditions. Once this was accomplished, the nationwide program began and is being conducted under more than one program code name. The two names most often discussed are "Operation Clover Leaf" and "Operation Rain Dance". Within months of the operation over the United States, Chemtrail spray operations began over wide parts of dozens of countries with the most notable exception being China. Some thoughts from Christopher Gussa, "The Herb Doc", about Chemtrails and the "Conspiracy Theory": I live "just down the road" (about 50 miles) from the Pinal Air Park in Tucson/Marana and I have seen these aircraft in action way too much to deny they are doing anything less than spraying away at us! I also have personally heard from our local MDs that their flu business is always up after a major spraying. Yes, It is very, very real and it does major harm to our health.

Satanism Growing Wildly in Rome

In this predominantly Catholic nation the devil is gaining a foothold. "There is a greater openness towards the devil," Rev. Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican's chief exorcist, said. In fact, Rome has been called the most 'satanized' city in Italy. "Satanism and the occult are in fashion," said Father Pedro Barrajón, a professor of theology. There are an estimated 800 satanic cults operating in the country, with more than 600,000 followers. And their numbers are growing. "The devil's diabolical influence is growing in so many areas of our society. He needs to be driven out!" Pastor Silvano Lilli of International Evangelical Church said. Leading the battle to drive the devil out of Italy is 82-year-old Amorth. Amorth, as the Vatican's Chief Exorcist, is the driving force behind the Catholic Church's renewed campaign against the devil. Amorth says "exorcism is God's true miracle" to confronting the devil and his handmaidens. The devil's growing influence has even gotten the attention of the Vatican. Last year it started offering courses to its bishops on exorcisms. "Our bishops need to know how to confront the devil," Barrajón said. "They need to know how an exorcism is conducted and how to help set people free from the influence of the devil." Italians got a taste of the devil's influence a couple of years ago when two teenagers were stabbed, bludgeoned and buried alive here in the woods northwest Milan. Members of a heavy metal band named the Beasts of Satan were convicted in the double murder. One of the victims was allegedly killed because she resembled the Virgin Mary. Many Italians are forsaking priests for magicians, fortune-tellers and faith healers. "The actions of the devil are not just limited to here in Italy- his evil spirit is roaming the earth, tempting people. We are trying to educate the society and families about the dangers of his influence."

Pope Says World Controlled By Few

Pope Benedict XVI warned diplomats at the United Nations on Friday, April 18, that international cooperation needed to solve urgent problems is "in crisis" because decisions rest in the hands of a few powerful nations. While he didn't identify the countries that have a stranglehold on global power, the German pope—just the third pontiff to address the U.N. General Assembly—addressed long-standing Vatican concerns about the struggle to achieve world peace and the development of the poorest regions. On the one hand, he said, collective action by the international community is needed to solve the planet's greatest challenges. On the other, "we experience the obvious paradox of a multilateral consensus that continues to be in crisis because it is still subordinated to the decisions of a few."

DNA Taken From People in Federal Custody

The Bush administration moved forward recently with a program to expand collecting DNA samples from people in federal custody. The Justice Department formally proposed regulations for collecting the samples, a technique that essentially mirrors taking the fingerprints of people arrested for federal offenses, as well as illegal immigrants detained by federal authorities. The government now collects DNA just from felons. DNA, the genetic marker found in hair and blood and other body fluids, can provide a more concrete link to a crime than fingerprints, which often are not left at a crime scene or are difficult to collect. For the new effort to succeed, the samples, most collected by swabbing an inside cheek, have to be entered into the DNA database of the F.B.I. A spokeswoman for the bureau’s laboratory, Ann Todd, said it already had a backlog of 225,000 samples to be processed, a more complex procedure than entering fingerprints. If Justice Department estimates are accurate, work at the laboratory would increase twelvefold, Ms. Todd said. No additional money was provided for the laboratory when Congress authorized the new collection program in 2006.
Some advocates of the program have questioned whether the backlog will hamper it. In addition, the new regulations would give federal agencies discretion not to collect samples if that would tax their resources, further clouding the effectiveness of the program. The Justice Department, which had worked on the regulations since last year, will write a final version after a 30-day comment period that began on Friday. Officials said they expected the collections to begin by Dec. 31. The department has estimated that 1.2 million people, a vast majority of them illegal immigrants who are not criminally charged, could fall under the regulations. That estimate, the department said, was based on the number of people whom federal agencies arrest and statistics from the Homeland Security Department. A spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department, Laura Keehner, said it was discussing with the Justice Department carrying out the regulations, specifically for illegal immigrants. Although advocates for illegal immigrants condemned the DNA collection as an overreach by the government and potentially damaging to detainees or those who have been erroneously arrested, advocates for crime victims praised the program as another tool to catch killers and rapists. Thirteen states collect DNA from people under arrest.

The 1994 ET Event with 62 witnesses

American film maker Randall Nickerson is currently visiting southern Africa to make a documentary that follows up an incident that happened at the Ariel School in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, in 1994, when 62 children aged between eight and 12 reported seeing a UFO and “strange beings” during their morning break. Those children are now young adults scattered around the globe. Nickerson is tracking them down and interviewing them about the experience. “Their stories have not changed at all,” he says. “Not what you would expect if they had made it all up.” So what exactly happened on that day in 1994 at the school in Ruwa just east of Harare? “It was morning break and they were out in the school yard playing,” says Nickerson. “They saw one main silver craft that had four others around it,” says Nickerson. “It came down on a hill beyond the school yard that was out of bounds. The boundary was the edge of the school yard, then it was bush and the hill. “They ran to the edge of the school yard to see what this thing was. They saw this small creature walk around on top of the craft while another came down to check out the children. He was all in black, with a very tight suit. The children said he had big eyes ‘like rugby balls’. “The children had direct eye contact with this creature. There seems to have been some kind of communication with the children about the state of the world — what we are doing to the planet, the destruction we are causing, although not all the children got this message. Some of the children were traumatised, others were excited. The young children were the most traumatised as they were at the front of the group. “They all went screaming back to the teachers. The teachers didn’t believe them at first. But then they went home and told their parents who came to the school and wanted to know what had happened.” Soon afterwards the children were asked to draw pictures of what they had seen. “They did this separately. The drawings were all the same.” A BBC television crew were first on the scene to follow it up. In November 1994, Harvard professor of psychiatry John E. Mack visited the school and filmed interviews with the children. He was assisted by South African producer Nicky Carter who had already made a short documentary on the subject for the SABC. “I had a half-brother at the school,” she says. “He was off sick on the day it happened, but the children told him all about it and he contacted me.” Carter has no doubt the children were telling the truth. “When they were interviewed by Mack with all his professional skills it was clear they were telling the truth — their voice tone, their body language. They were so consistent, they told their stories with such conviction. And they spoke about it in their own language. One child recalled being told by the alien that we should not be so ‘techknowledged’.

Masonic Influence in the EU

The French Federation of Le Droit Humain represented by its president, Michel Payen, met on April 8, 2008 with the president of the European Commission, José-Manuel Barroso, This meeting constitutes a major event regarding the place of Freemasonry in the construction of Europe; this place was underscored not only by the interest and attentiveness that President Barroso showed to the delegation and the time he accorded them, but also by the commitments he made to the values espoused by liberal and adogmatic Freemasonry, its positions and its opinions on subjects of concern. It was the first time that Freemasonry, as such, was able to express itself to such a high level European institution. The delegation received assurances from President Barroso of his attachment to the spirit of "laïcité" and to the principle of separation of religion from the State. The delegation stressed the importance of the Enlightenment in the history of Europe, a dimension to be taken into account at least equally with its religious roots, and certainly more closely tied to the roots of antiquity. Finally, a principle of communication between the liberal and adogmatic Masonic Orders and the services of the European Commission, to be used whenever needed, was decided upon. Thus the French Federation of Le Droit Humain will propose, in the near future, a recommendation concerning the principle of emancipation that ought to form the basis of all European education systems, in direct relation to a recognition of the contribution of the Enlightenment to the common culture of the peoples that compose Europe, and in accordance with the principles of the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Cloak of Invisibility Made in Theory

Researchers at Toyama Prefectural University and other institutions announced that they theoretically formulated a "perfect invisible cloak." The invisible cloak generates no reflection or phase delay at all even when an electromagnetic wave passes through it. It was developed with the use of an artificial dielectric material called "left-handed metamaterial," which has a negative refractive index n. It can be said that the researchers created a sort of blueprint of the perfect invisible cloak. It is predicted that the use of left-handed metamaterials makes electromagnetic control devices available. Some examples of such devices are a lens that reflects no light and a lens that can provide a perfect focal point. They are believed to be difficult to produce with the existing materials. The latest development relates to one of these control devices. Here, an invisible cloak refers to a columnar or block object with a void in the core or center, which is designed such that a plane electromagnetic wave with a certain frequency irradiated at this object goes around the void and reaches behind the object. In particular, the object may be called "the perfect visible cloak" when the electromagnetic wavefront becomes planar again after passing through the object and the amplitude and the phase of the resultant plane wave completely coincide with those of the wavefront obtained when there is no object. The cloak is named after the fact that it generates no reflection or phase delay when an electromagnetic wave with a given frequency is irradiated and the view behind the cloak can be seen as it is. Thus, taking into account an electromagnetic wave with a specific frequency, it appears as though anything hidden in the void portion of such an object will disappear together with the invisible cloak.

Prepping Students For Super-Humans

Some day – perhaps sooner than we think – we just might be saying “the transhuman race” instead of “the human race.” As technology marches forward at a dizzying pace, the “human-ness” in human beings is under siege. What will it mean to be human as time goes on? Transhumanism, or the transition phase from the “human” to the “posthuman,” brings with it a host of scientific, religious, technological and philosophical questions. ASU is one of 15 universities worldwide to receive a grant to conduct the Templeton Research Lectures, says Carolyn Forbes, assistant director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict. The theme for the four years is “Facing the Challenges of Transhumanism: Religion, Science and Technology.” This year’s events focus on the acceleration of knowledge and technologies that are rapidly changing the human condition, and exploring new ways for perceiving and analyzing a world that is far more complex than once imagined. ASU is one of 15 universities worldwide to receive a grant to conduct the Templeton Research Lectures, says Carolyn Forbes, assistant director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict. But ASU’s focus is a bit different from that of the other participants, she says. While the primary aim of the Templeton Research Lectures is to promote dialogue and research between the physical, biological and human sciences, “ASU is unique in using transhumanism as a theme to talk about how the changes taking place in biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science – and a host of other inter-related technologies – may affect the evolution of the human species,” Forbes says. History professor Hava Tirosh-Samuelson is the guiding force behind ASU’s Templeton Lectures and the other events organized around the theme of transhumanism. “My interest in transhumanism is part of a larger and deeper commitment to the dialogue of science and religion, which is rooted in the conviction that, historically and conceptually, science and religion are not antagonistic but intertwining cultural forces,” Tirosh-Samuelson says. “The term ‘transhumanism’ signifies a young and still-changing ideology that envisions a new phase for the human species as a result of new scientific discoveries and technological advances, especially in genetic engineering, robotics, informatics and nanotechnology.

Politics and Human Microchips

Ignorance is a silent killer, and it appears that the U.S. government along with Mexico and Canada, may be as stealthy as Jack the Ripper when it comes to the proposed North American Union Free Trade Agreement. That may be a severe assessment, but when it comes to the end of the American dream, people get a little punchy. Lou Dobbs of CNN calls it, "A proposal for an expanded so-called free trade zone from Alaska to the tip of South America." He says it is not a government program, instead it is formed by international corporations who according to some sources, have seen a 45% increase in profits overall in the last five years, while the American workforce has seen a 3% increase overall. "Its a plan from the business elites, the political elites that will cost more American jobs, cost American sovereignty, but it would fulfill the President's father's vision." Dobbs is referring to a period of time in the late 80's and early 90's when George H.W. Bush was in office, and a single world government was touted frequently. While in office, President Bush described plans for his futuristic notion by saying, "It is a big idea; a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause." ... Parties involved include the Council on Foreign Relations, a number of politicians and national governments and several big players in international business. I.D. chip implants? A reporter with securityfocus.com, Scott Ganneman, reported in June 2003 that Applied Digital Solutions had designed an RFID tag - called the VeriChip - for people. "Only 11 mm long, it is designed to go under the skin, where it can be read from four feet away. They sell it as a great way to keep track of children, Alzheimer's patients in danger of wandering, and anyone else with a medical disability, but it gives me the creeps. The possibilities are scary."

Japanese Researchers Creating Cyborgs

Researchers at Osaka University in Japan aren't kidding around about cyborgs. They are looking into ways for robotic limbs to be controlled in real-time by the power of thought, and one such method is by performing invasive (or open-skull) surgery to place sensors directly onto the brain. Brain waves measured from outside the skull are read far less accurately than ones measured directly, so the researchers prefer for an electrode sheet to be placed onto the patient's gray matter. It wouldn't require puncturing the brain in any way — the sheet rests atop the central sulcus and allows scientists to record what happens when a subject moves an arm, a leg, a finger and so on. Bafflingly, a huge line of volunteers hasn't formed. Osaka University is hoping to work with patients already scheduled for open-head surgery, though the study currently has four volunteers. Researchers have been able to measure the intended actions of the four based on their brain waves with around 80% accuracy, and this system is the basis of how robotic limbs will be able to be controlled.

The Military Industrial Complex Rules

In 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned the country about the "unwarranted influence" of the "military-industrial complex." But back then, only a relative handful of companies did business with the Pentagon. Today, the military-industrial web is everywhere, Nick Turse writes in his new book, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives. And "it's nothing like the olive-drab outfit of Eisenhower's day: It reaches deeper into American lives and the American psyche than Eisenhower could ever have imagined. The truth is that, at every turn, in countless, not-so-visible ways [our day-to-day dealings are] wrapped up with the military." Back in Eisenhower's day, arms dealers and mega-corporations, such as Lockheed and General Motors, held sway over the corporate side of the military-industrial complex. Companies like these still play an extremely powerful role today, but they are dwarfed by the sheer number of contractors that stretch from coast to coast and across the globe. Looking at the situation in 1970, almost 10 years after Eisenhower's farewell speech, Sidney Lens, a journalist and expert on U.S. militarism, noted that there were 22,000 prime contractors doing business with the U.S. Department of Defense. Today, the number of prime contractors tops 47,000 with subcontractors reaching well over the 100,000 mark, making for one massive conglomerate touching nearly every sector of society, from top computer manufacturer Dell (the 50th-largest DoD contractor in 2006) to oil giant ExxonMobil (the 30th) to package-shipping titan FedEx (the 26th). In fact, the Pentagon payroll is a veritable who's who of the top companies in the world: IBM; Time-Warner; Ford and General Motors; Microsoft; NBC and its parent company, General Electric; Hilton and Marriott; Columbia TriStar Films and its parent company, Sony; Pfizer; Sara Lee; Procter & Gamble; M&M Mars and Hershey; Nestlé; ESPN and its parent company, Walt Disney; Bank of America; and Johnson & Johnson among many other big-name firms. But the difference between now and then isn't only in scale. As this list suggests, Pentagon spending is reaching into previously neglected areas of American life: entertainment, popular consumer brands, sports. This penetration translates into a remarkable variety of forms of interaction with the public.

Device To Translate ET Languages

If we ever make contact with intelligent aliens, we should be able to build a universal translator to communicate with them, according to a linguist and anthropologist in the US. Such a "babelfish", which gets its name from the translating fish in Douglas Adams's book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, would require a much more advanced understanding of language than we currently have. But a first step would be recognising that all languages must have a universal structure, according to Terrence Deacon of the University of California, Berkeley, US... Deacon argues that no matter how abstract a symbol becomes, it is still somehow grounded in physical reality, and that limits the number of relationships it can have with other symbol words. In turn, this defines the grammatical structure that emerges from stringing words together. If that is true, then in the distant future it might be possible to invent a gadget that uses complex software to decode alien languages on the spot, Deacon said. He presented his ideas on Thursday 17 April at the 2008 Astrobiology Science Conference in Santa Clara, California, US.

US to grow new ears, skin for military

Teams of university scientists backed by US government funds hope to grow new skin, ears, muscles and other body tissue for troops injured in Iraq and Afghanistan. The $US250 million ($NZ317 million) effort aims to address the Pentagon's unprecedented challenge of caring for troops returning from the war zones with multiple traumatic injuries, many of which would have been fatal years ago. "We've had just over 900 people, men, some women with amputations of some kind or another since the start of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq," said Ward Casscells, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs. Many have also suffered burns, spinal cord injuries and vision loss. "Getting these people up to where they are functioning and reintegrated, employed, able to help their families and be fully participating members of society, this is our task," he said. Their goal is to develop within five years therapies for burn repair, wound healing without scarring, facial reconstruction and limb reconstruction or regeneration. "We're embarking on a new generation of research that's going to redefine the Army and military medicine as we know it today," he told reporters at the Pentagon.

Terrorism As Trigger For New World Order

The prospect that the good old industrial nation state is a shrinking violet might rankle patriotic flag-wavers. But Bobbitt's statistic thrusts home an unsettling question: What does it say about the nation state that it has so often failed to provide, in the words of British statesman Douglas Hurd, "the security, prosperity, and the decent environment which the citizens demand"? Might it be time for something new? In Bobbitt's view, the current wars against terror provide a shrill wake-up call to confront this question. The best way to protect citizens of modern democracies, he claims, is to fundamentally rethink the nation state as the guarantor of the freedoms that terrorists intend to obliterate.

Dark matter found on Earth

Particles of invisible "dark matter" have been detected deep inside a mountain in Italy, a collaboration of Italian and Chinese physicists claims. But others remain sceptical of the result, because other experiments have failed to detect any dark matter at all. On Wednesday 16 April, at a workshop in Venice, Italy, the Dark Matter (DAMA) collaboration announced the results of the 4-year second phase of its experiment. DAMA scientists claimed to see dark matter back in 2003, but some scientists believed the result was a quirk of statistics. Now the evidence is stronger. "We are pretty sure now that this [signal] is not a statistical fluke. What it means is another matter," says Francis Halzen, an astroparticle physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US. He spoke to New Scientist after attending the announcement by DAMA project leader Rita Bernabei of the University of Rome, Italy. Astronomers believe our galaxy is awash with particles of dark matter, the invisible, unidentified substance that makes up nearly 90% of the matter in the universe. So far, the existence of dark matter in space has only been determined by its gravitational pull on normal stars and galaxies.

Monitoring Patients with Frequencies

Instead of asking friends "How do you feel?" or doctors examining patients, one day such queries and examinations may be replaced by tiny radio antennas implanted under the skin to act as remote sensors of humans' emotional, physiological state. Scientists at the Hebrew University's applied physics department have discovered a method for remote sensing of people's physiological and emotional state. Their initial results were published last week in the prestigious scientific journal The Physical Review Letters and have aroused much results in physicians and scientists. Their invention has been patented and commercialized by Yissum, HU's technology transfer company. The researchers - Profs. Yuri Feldman and Aharon Agranat with Dr. Alexander Puzenko, Dr. Andreas Caduff and doctoral student Paul Ben-Ishai - believe the discovery theoretically could help help monitor medical patients from afar, evaluate athletic performance, diagnose disease and remotely sense stress levels - which could have significant implications for technology in the biomedical engineering, anti-terror and security technology fields. The key is in the surprising shape of human sweat ducts. The researchers discovered that human skin is structured as an array of minute antennas that operate in the "sub-terahertz" frequency range. This discovery is based on investigations of the internal layers of the skin that were undertaken using a new imaging technique called "optical coherent tomography." Images produced by this technique revealed that the sweat ducts - tubes that lead the sweat from the sweat gland to the surface of the skin - are shaped as tiny coils. Similar helical structures with much larger dimensions have been used widely in as antennas in wireless communication systems. This led the investigators to consider the possibility that sweat ducts could behave like tiny helical antennas as well. In a series of experiments, the team measured the electromagnetic radiation reflected from the palm skin at the frequency range between 75GHz and 110GHz. It was found that the level of the reflected intensity depends strongly on the level of activity of the perspiration system. In particular, it was found that the reflected signal is very different if measured in a subject that was relaxed and if measured in a subject following intense physical activity. In a second set of measurements, they found that during the period of return to the relaxed state, the reflected signal was strongly correlated with changes in the blood pressure and the pulse rate that were measured simultaneously.

Middle East News and Bible Prophecy

These days there is much talk centered upon the future timing of the Russian and Iranian led invasion of Israel, foretold in the Bible prophecies of Ezekiel 38 and 39. Due to the newsworthy events that are presently occurring, whereby Russian and Iranian relationships are ever strengthening, prophecy buffs are appropriately attempting with god-speed, to connect the prophetic dots. For those of you who are not familiar with today’s most prevalent prophetic news pervading the Christian and Jewish scholarly communities, you should study Ezekiel 38 and 39, with the understanding that it alludes to a nuclear equipped Russian – Iranian led confederacy, which forms to invade the nation of Israel in the end times. Although scholars are somewhat split as to who all the other enjoining coalition member nations are, they all tend to agree that no explicit reference is made to the inclusion of Palestinians, Syrians, Egyptians, Lebanese, or Jordanians. Furthermore Saudi Arabians apparently abstain from enlisting themselves in the fight alongside Russia, Iran, Turkey, and the additional consortia of nations. The absence of these above listed predominately Arab populations tends to perplex the scholars, often causing them to postulate, rather than promulgate as to the reasons why. Bless their souls, but in their zeal have the prophecy buffs managed to put the colloquial cart before the proverbial horse? Certainly the events described in Ezekiel 38 and 39 are slated to arrive soon, but are they indeed scheduled next? There exists a litany of questions that should be appropriately answered before any scholar dare flip the pages of the prophetic calendar forward to the date of this Goliath Ezekiel event. Newspaper exegesis makes for sensational reporting, but has no inherent ability to accelerate the final fulfillment of a Bible prophecy. Before we list the flurry of questions, let’s ponder the most obvious one, which is; why are the Palestinians, and their Arab neighbors from Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan, not declared by Ezekiel to be enlisted members in the Russian – Iranian led coalition? These are the nations that have proven to be the most observable opponents of the Jewish State, since its inception in 1948. It is through much of their Arab soil, that Russia, Iran, and their cohorts intend to travel in order to invade Israel.

Soros: Euro Cannot Replace The Dollar

The euro cannot replace the dollar as the world’s main reserve currency, and a system of two reserve currencies would be unstable, billionaire investor George Soros said on Thursday. “I don’t think the euro can replace the dollar, and a system with two major reserve currencies is not a stable system,” Soros said. The euro has surged to record highs against the US currency as the US economy is seen going into recession. “What we have now is a period of instability and heightened uncertainty,” Soros said. He was in Brussels to promote his latest book, ‘The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means’. It was still a time of wealth destruction, Soros said, and he advised investors to find ways to preserve capital until it was clear how the authorities and markets would respond. He said the main lesson from the current financial market turmoil was the need to control credit and not just money supply, and added that markets were not yet out of trouble. “There is a commodities bubble still in the growth phase while other bubbles are being deflated,” Soros said.

Strange striped currents in our oceans

It's amazing that nobody has spotted it before. Superimposed on every ocean on the planet there is a striped pattern of currents. Yet what causes them is a mystery. Between 1992 and 2003, Peter Niiler of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, and colleagues collected data from more than 10,000 drifting ocean buoys, which they tracked with satellites. As expected, the buoys’ movements were influenced mainly by known global currents, which are driven by wind and by differences in the temperature and salinity of seawater. But when the team analysed the data, it emerged that something else had been subtly influencing the buoys’ paths. It turned out that there were alternating strips of water running eastward or westward, a bit like parallel moving sidewalks. Niiler recalls his reaction: “My God, we’ve never seen these before.” Satellite measurements showed that the interfaces between adjacent currents were alternately associated with slight peaks and troughs in sea level. When the team looked at this variation globally, they found that the 150-kilometre-wide bands covered pretty much every ocean. To confirm that the currents were real, the team set out to measure them directly in two regions in the eastern Pacific. “Their existence is so surprising that we had to prove first that they are not an artefact of satellite data,” says Nikolai Maximenko of the University of Hawaii. Sure enough, they recorded currents flowing in opposite directions at around 40 metres per hour. This is slower than most previously known ocean currents, which may explain why the striped flows have remained undiscovered until now. “Only a very lazy canoeist would notice the effect,” says Maximenko. The flows extend right down to the ocean floor, and the boundaries between currents are alternately associated with peaks and troughs in temperature as well as sea level. This suggests that they influence processes such as nutrient and energy flow around the oceans, but this has yet to be proven, says Niiler. What causes the striped flows remains a puzzle. “They are a fascinating new aspect to the ocean’s circulation, but the jury is still out on the mechanisms leading to their formation,” says Geoff Vallis of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University. He points out that similar patterns exist in atmospheric flows on other planets, for example, Jupiter. Whether similar effects are at play here is unclear, he says.

Prehistoric Civilization Built By Giants

According to Inca legend, Lake Titicaca was revered as the location where the god Viracocha [Quetzalcoatl] created a race of giants and later, the first humans. The Inca maintained that the giants built Tiahuanaco and also many other cities and structures in the area. However, due to their great evil, Viracocha destroyed the giants in a world flood. This legend is still believed by the local Indian inhabitants to this day. The geoglyphs covering this area also exhibit extreme age. In areas where ice age sediment surrounding hills and mountains has been eroded by rain and wind, patterns carved into the bedrock underneath the sediment has been exposed, suggesting their creation sometime before the last glacial melt near the end of the Pleistocene era, c. 13,000 years ago. Early researchers speculated that Inca and pre-Inca farming techniques produced the anomalous patterns on the ground around Lake Titicaca, especially in the horizontal terracing found surrounding the lake itself. However, the altitude of the Bolivian high plain presents several problems with a farming related explanation for the majority of the geoglyphs in the region. At an average of 12,500 feet above sea level, most of the shapes and patterns are located in areas that have not been conducive for growing crops for the last 10,000 years. Their creation would have required an immense workforce laboring for hundreds of years in such thin air that altitude sickness was a real danger... literally, a super human effort. Additionally, recent high-resolution satellite images suggest that most of the features are characteristic of religious and ritualistic forms of pre-Incan art. They may even represent a sophisticated yet unknown form of communication.

A 'brain cap' may warn us of mistakes

The possibility that car drivers could one day wear a special cap to warn when they are showing dangerous lapses in concentration is raised today. Scientists have found that it is possible to tell if a person is likely to make a mistake up to half a minute before they are even aware they have made it. The discovery suggests that one day employees could monitor the brain of a person doing a monotonous but important task, such as monitoring nuclear plant safety, driving or piloting a plane, to improve safety. Human errors, according to Dr Tom Eichele of the University of Bergen, Dr Stefan Debener of the MRC Institute of Hearing Research, Southampton, and colleagues in Germany and the US, are not solely the result of momentary fluctuations in concentration or brain activity, as had previously been suspected, but due to the brain itself doing the equivalent of losing its focus on doing a task: it reveals a drift in attention. To detect this drift, the researchers used a kind of scanner method, functional magnetic resonance imaging, to study blood flow in the brain of subjects engaged in a flanker task, a classic psychology test in which a subject has to say if he can see, for example, a certain shape when surrounded by distracting shapes. The team reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that it found that a set of regions in the brain displayed altered activity up to 30 seconds before a subject made a mistake. These areas include a part of the brain's default mode network, located in a posterior midline cortex, which showed a gradual increase in activity as the brain became fatigued by a repetitive task. The authors noted that, simultaneously, brain activity also decreased in frontal brain regions associated with maintaining effort while performing a task before a mistake occurred. Once the subjects committed and detected their errors, they re-engaged in the task, and the activity pattern reset, according to the team, which is now studying what this pattern does in other circumstances, and how the new analysis method developed could be used in clinical research. As for using the method to monitor workers, that would require a cheap, lightweight and mobile alternative to the bulky scanners used for the experiment, says Dr Eichele. However, it might be possible to find corresponding patterns of electrical activity that can be picked up by scalp electrodes, a more old fashioned method called EEG (electro-encephalography). "In the EEG literature there are some reports that found error-preceding activity, but so far not longer than a couple of hundred milliseconds (thousandths) of a second or so ahead," says Dr Eichele, whose team is seeing if this simpler method can detect errors. There are already commercial brain caps in use for mind control of computer games - Emotiv Systems, from San Francisco, has developed EEG caps that use the electrical signals from a player's brain to control the on-screen action.

UFOs: Why No "Open Contact"?

Assuming that UFOs represent extraterrestrial visitors (whether humanoid aliens in spacecraft or something stranger), there's no denying the secretive way in which the phenomenon has unfolded since the dawn of the "modern" UFO era in 1947. Strident debunkers have seized on the "ufonauts'" seeming desire to remain unseen as evidence that they don't exist--and maintain that studying evidence that might suggest the contrary can only be a waste of resources. Although I think the debunking argument is steeped in anthropocentric baggage, it's a fair enough question, at least in principle: Why would aliens go to the trouble of crossing interstellar distances if they possessed no interest in revealing themselves? There are several possible answers, none of them particularly comforting. 1.) We're being observed as part of some long-term anthropological study. In this scenario, occasional run-ins with UFOs and their occupants are purely accidental. The aliens rely on a screen of plausible deniability, lurking where least expected in order to further their scientific aims and taking considerable effort to leave the human population unsuspecting. 2.) We're being prepared, however patiently, for contact at some later time. Maybe the aliens are engaged in a psychosocial campaign designed to inoculate us to the presence of "others," thus ensuring we make for interesting company when we're eventually deemed ready for open dialogue. 3.) On the other hand, perhaps we're being harvested like so many unsuspecting cattle. Much of the "abduction" literature is concerned with the alleged taking of reproductive material and the creation of human-alien "hybrid" offspring. Author David Jacobs, for one, sees a distinctly malevolent agenda afoot. In his book "The Threat," he describes what amounts to an impending takeover by aliens who've been stealthily acclimating themselves to our planet. In my opinion, Jacobs' perspective is severely limited; nevertheless, it provides an engagingly paranoid synthesis that deserves attention if only to be intelligently refuted. 4.) The aliens are here for purposes that have little or nothing to do with us. Earth could be a way-station or even a vacation spot. Similarly, the aliens could be avoiding open contact for much the same reason humans avoid "open contact" with chimpanzees: we have nothing of value to gain that can't be deduced from passive observation. 5.) In the same spirit as number two (above), the aliens might desire contact but consider our social paradigms too fragile to accommodate a meaningful exchange of ideas. If our own history is any indication, abrupt encounters between cultures of differing technological prowess end in disaster; the aliens could be entirely aware of such a risk, deciding to monitor our social evolution until we're up for the challenge. The problem with the above scenarios is the unwelcome (and often deliberately ignored) complexity of the UFO phenomenon. We seem to be dealing with an intelligence every bit as "paranormal" as it is "technological.

Propelling RFD For Tracking Technology

A Los Angeles start-up says it has developed a way to dramatically expand the range of a popular wireless tracking technology, opening up many new applications for low-cost identification tags. Closely held Mojix Inc. says its enhancements to a technology known as RFID -- for radio frequency identification -- sharply reduce the cost of setting up wireless networks that can cover entire warehouses, stores, distribution centers and yards where heavy equipment is stored. Such networks can be used to quickly locate goods and track their movements without having to be close to a scanning device. Networks with similar capabilities today typically require sophisticated RFID tags that cost anywhere from around $4 to more than $1,000 each, said John Fontanella, an analyst at AMR Research. Mojix says its hardware uses simpler tags that cost as little as 10 cents each. "I think this could have significant impact," said Michael Liard, an analyst at ABI research, of Mojix's technology. RFID, a more-sophisticated successor to bar codes, is used for applications such as preventing shoplifting of garments in stores and handling payments at bridge toll gates. Applying identification tags to pallets and boxes of goods has been touted as a better way to track inventories at retailers, manufacturers and other companies. But adoption has been slower than some companies expected, because of conversion costs and other issues. The least-expensive form of the technology uses what the industry calls "passive" RFID tags, which have no power source or means to transmit data on their own. They are activated by radio signals from a device called a reader, which allows the tags to answer by sending information such as product identification numbers. Readers for passive tags typically have a maximum transmission range of about 30 feet, said Ramin Sadr, Mojix's chief executive. Partly as a result, companies often only deploy RFID networks in limited locations, such has around loading docks so they can track goods entering and leaving warehouses. But in the late 1980s, Mr. Sadr and other Mojix engineers worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory on technology used in long-range communications to spacecraft. They attempted to apply some of those concepts to RFID. The system they developed uses a grid of low-cost transmitters to provide radio energy to nearby RFID tags, which respond by sending signals to an unusually sensitive central receiver, Mr. Sadr said. Each of the company's receivers can manage signals from 512 transmitters -- each as far as 600 feet away, Mr. Sadr said. The resulting coverage area can be up to 250,000 square feet, or about 100 times the coverage area of previous systems based on conventional tag readers, he added. Mojix isn't disclosing exact pricing, but estimates that a network based on its technology will cost 20% to 25% less than other typical RFID systems as well as offer more-sophisticated capabilities. Mojix isn't likely to lack for competition. Ronny Haraldsvik, vice president of marketing and industry relations at Alien Technology Corp., a maker of RFID tags and readers in Morgan Hill, Calif., said Mojix appears to be targeting long-range applications now served by companies that use active RFID tags. "They are very entrenched," he said.

DHS Terror Funds Creating Police Grid

CEDAP awardees have included local FEMA offices, fire and emergency units, and local and state police. The grantees’ own websites glorify the use of the CEDAP equipment to do everything from fighting crime to rescuing kittens from trees. The equipment was appropriated by Congress to the DHS to stop terrorism, yet there is little evidence that any of this equipment has been used to find one terrorist or prevent one single terrorist attack. It’s all done to stop red light runners, tail gaters, dead beat dads, and local dope sellers, all problems that could be solved with some good old detective work and a court order. Millions of dollars in used equipment, sometimes military equipment, does not need to be funded to the states just to get cats out of trees and sniff out marijuana bags at the local high school.

Biometric Traveler ID System

The Homeland Security Department today published notice it will begin testing an International Registered Traveler program at three airports starting June 10 to expedite airport clearances for prescreened travelers. Under the program, travelers who are registered in the program may bypass passport control when returning to the United States. Instead, they may verify their identities at automated kiosks at the Federal Inspection Services area of each airport. The program will use fingerprint biometric technology for the verifications. At the kiosk, the traveler will insert into a reader either their machine-readable passport or machine-readable permanent-resident card. Then, the traveler must provide fingerprints electronically, pose for a digital photograph and respond to questions on a touch-screen computer. Once the procedures are completed, the traveler receives a receipt enabling passage through exit control.

ETs & DNA Synthesis: Is Seti Dangerous?

The idea that the passive SETI can be dangerous is not new. F. Hoyle suggested in the novel "Andromeda” a scheme of alien attack through SETI signals. According to the plot, astronomers got alien signal, which contains a description of a computer and a computer program for it. This machine creates a description of the genetic code of substance. On the basis of this code was crated intelligent creature - Andromeda girl, which, working together with the computer, creating advanced technology for the military. First, people do not trust it, but then they see that it makes useful ideas. However, the main characters realize that the computer acts hostile to human civilization and he destroys the computer, and the girl dies. This scenario is fiction, because most scientists do not believe in the possibility of a strong AI, and, secondly, because we do not have the technology that enables synthesize of new living organism only on its genetic code. Or at least, we have not until recently. Current technology of sequencing and DNA synthesis, as well as progress in developing a code of DNA modified with another set of the alphabet, indicate that in 10 years the task of re-establishing living being sent from space on the computer codes would be feasible. The researchers emphasize however, that the research is still in its initial stages, and as they "sail in unsheltered water," it will take some time before the full significance of the research is understood and its technological potential is fully evaluated.

Human and Animal Hybrids: Chimeras

On Nov. 19, 2004 the Washington Post published an astonishing article that told us, among other things, "In Minnesota, pigs are being born with human blood in their veins. In Nevada, there are sheep whose livers and hearts are largely human. In California, mice peer from their cages with human brain cells firing inside their skulls." Less than a year later (June 27, 2005), Scientific American followed up with a more in-depth story on the same issue, human-animal chimeras, individuals who are composed of two genetically distinct types of cells, e.g. human and mouse): "In Greek mythology, the chimera was a monster that combined the parts of a goat, a lion and a serpent. With such a namesake, laboratory-bred chimeras may sound like a bad idea born of pure scientific hubris. Yet they may be unavoidable if stem cells are ever to be realized as therapies. Researchers will need to study how stem cells behave and react to chemical cues inside the body. Unless they are to do those risky first experiments in humans, they will need the freedom to test in animals and thereby make chimeras."

Experts say Bigfoot Is In S.C

Something apparently attacked Bob and Dixie Rawson’s van in the early morning hours of Feb. 28. The Rawsons live about two miles southeast of downtown Bishopville. They woke up Feb. 28 to find the front fender of their 2002 Dodge Grand Caravan chewed up, bite marks through the front grill, wheels on both sides bitten and metal crumpled in a wad. There was also blood on the front and sides of the car. While there has been no “official” sighting of the Lizard Man since July 1988, the Rawsons’ evidence has created a stir, not just locally but nationwide. After the Rawsons contacted a Columbia TV station, the story was aired on CNN. In March, filmmaker and self-proclaimed Bigfoot hunter Tom Biscardi and his five-man team visited Bishopville to discover the truth of the Lee County incident. Equipped with thermal imagers and high-tech cameras, Biscardi conducted initial forensic tests and sent the evidence to California. The team also planned to use its cameras overnight in search of the creature. The initial evidence found by Biscardi’s team is compelling, he said. “You’ve got the real deal here.” If you want to read a lot more about Bigfoot or over 40 different creatures of Cryptozoology, please visit the website: Unknown Creatures, at: http://www.unknown-creatures.com

Designing Babies From Genes

In the United States, this combination of reproductive and genetic medicine -- what one scientist has dubbed "reprogenetics" -- remains largely unregulated, but Britain has a formal agency, the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA), that must approve all requests for PGD. In July 2007, after considerable deliberation, the HFEA approved the procedure for both families. The concern was not about the use of PGD to avoid genetic disease, since embryo screening for serious disorders is commonplace now on both sides of the Atlantic. What troubled the HFEA was the fact that an embryo carrying the cancer mutation could go on to live for 40 or 50 years before ever developing cancer, and there was a chance it might never develop. Did this warrant selecting and discarding embryos? To its critics, the HFEA, in approving this request, crossed a bright line separating legitimate medical genetics from the quest for "the perfect baby." Like it or not, that decision is a sign of things to come.

Mammoth Cloaning Within 2 Years

The mammoth species has been extinct since the Ice Age. Tests on Lyuba showed she was fed on milk and was three to four months old when she died 37,000 years ago in what is now the Yamalo-Nenetsk region in Russia's Arctic. Scientists were excited by the find because, although her shaggy coat was gone, her skin was intact, protecting her internal organs from contamination by modern-day microbes. Tikhonov, who heads the Zoological Museum in Russia's second city of St Petersburg, said Lyuba's contribution to science could be far bigger than thought up to now. "If we take samples of Lyuba's tissues by biopsy, without unfreezing her, there is a big chance we can obtain promising results in genetics and microbiology," he said by telephone from St Petersburg. "I believe the genetic map (of the mammoth) will be decoded within a year or two.

The New Genetically Modified Humans

For more than 100 years, athletes have striven to complete the marathon in less than two hours. Now scientists believe that advances in genetics could lead to a runner completing the 26.22mile course in 90 minutes. After a series of laboratory breakthroughs they claim that bio-engineering techniques could be used to create a superhuman long-distance runner. The scientists claim that modifying the human genome could, in theory, increase the size of an athlete’s heart, boost the number of red blood cells supplying the body with oxygen and increase the endurance of specific muscles by up to 10%.

Santo Daime: The New Religion

Wherever I look, that is where I am. I can see everything from every angle, all at the same time. In fact, I feel I am everywhere. Outside, in the forest, the thrum of frogs and cicadas drowns out the sound of shrieking monkeys. Below me, the floor is shimmering, vanishing in waves like a spent mirage. Behind, I feel a cold vibration on my neck and sense a growling malevolence. I turn and see a red door, bulging at the hinges. Overcome with dread, I push hard to keep it closed, and all the while I feel a horrible nausea. When will this end, I am thinking. And, with sweat running down my forehead, how can I survive it? Welcome to the Church of Santo Daime, one of the fastest growing religions in the world. Its mixture of Christianity, South American shamanism and African animism is proving irresistible to thousands of new believers across the globe. But it is its central sacrament, ayahuasca, a powerful hallucinogenic brew made from rainforest plants - a brew that I have just drunk - that makes the Church so appealing to some yet so controversial to others. Santo Daime groups believe that ayahuasca, or Daime, as they call it, is a manifestation of Jesus Christ that brings them closer to God. Their visions, sometimes terrifying, sometimes blissful, help them to make sense of themselves, their universe and their god. Theirs is a young church - less than 80 years old - but in recent times it has spread throughout South America to the US and Canada, the Far East and Australasia, across mainland Europe and on to the UK. According to followers I have interviewed, the number of worshippers in Britain is in the mid-hundreds, operating in London, Devon, Cornwall, Northern Ireland, Wales and Yorkshire. But these numbers are growing in spite of an obvious hurdle - the active ingredient in ayahuasca, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), is a Class A drug. Irina Shutova, 41, an engineer from North London, says she attends secret Santo Daime ceremonies in nearby Kentish Town. “I have been going for 2 years,” she says. “I found out about them from a very close friend. I had known him for ten years and he had been involved for three years before he took me. It is very secretive.

Secret Iranian missile site revealed

New satellite photographs have revealed the secret site where Iran is suspected of developing long-range ballistic missiles capable of reaching targets in Europe, The Times reported on April 11. According to the British newspaper, the imagery pinpointed the facility from where the Iranians launched their Kavoshgar 1 “research rocket” on February 4, claiming that it was in connection with their space program. Experts who analyzed the photos, which were taken by the Digital Globe QuickBird satellite four days after the launch, said they revealed a number of intriguing features that indicate that it is the same site where Iran is focusing its efforts on developing a ballistic missile with a range of about 6,000km (4,000 miles), The Times said in its report. The Kavoshgar 1 rocket that was launched in the presence of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who said Iran was in need of an "active and influential presence in space".

Gravitational Waves To Be Found Soon

A $205 million upgrade will allow a laser-wielding observatory to monitor tens of thousands of galaxies for mysterious gravitational waves. Leading investigators are confident that the Advanced LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatories) Project will be able for the first time to detect gravitational waves from neutron stars and black holes, as predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. "With the limited LIGO range at time, it wasn't guaranteed detection," said Albert Lazzarini, deputy director of LIGO at the California Institute of Technology. "With Advanced LIGO, it'd be very surprising from a relativity perspective if we didn't observe anything."
Gravitational waves are ripples thought to occur in the fabric of space-time that result from interstellar collisions, explosions, or the dramatic movement of large and extremely dense objects such as neutron stars. Those ripples can then pass through the space-time that Earth occupies, causing a slight distortion which Advanced LIGO is meant to pick up on.

William Shatner Claims Secret Mars Info

The live chat with William Shatner held on April 4, was rife with tech issues, but it is now available online. The whole vid is about 40 minutes long. Due to the various tangents, he ended up taking only eight questions, none of which were related to Star Trek. The most interesting part was regarding Shatner’s beliefs on ET and his claim to have inside info. The seventh question in the chat (at time mark 5:27) was “Do you believe in Extra-terrestrial life?” Shatner replied in the affirmative saying “of course, it is beyond a certainty that there is life out there.” Shat then went on to say that he had insider info on Martians: "I will let you in on a little secret, that I have been told not to reveal. So I wont reveal who told me, but there is going to be new information about Mars. It wont be too long away..."

'Big brother' buildings offer security

Tracking people's every move using buildings packed with motion sensors is more effective than CCTV, and less invasive to privacy, say researchers who tried the technique on their own colleagues. "We want to have a god's eye view of the entire space," says Yuri Ivanov of the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), who led the project with colleague Christopher Wren. That may sound like the desire of George Orwell's fictional "Big Brother" in 1984. But the MERL system should actually preserve people's privacy better than CCTV and make buildings safer and more secure, says Ivanov. As digital video cameras get cheaper and smaller, CCTV systems are becoming more common. But as well as raising privacy concerns, Ivanov and Wren say, the footage is difficult to search through or interpret quickly. As an alternative, the two researchers used arrays of small, cheap motion detectors to watch over people instead, with their officemates as guinea pigs. They fitted their 3000 square metre office building with an array of 215 simple detectors placed along the hallways at 2-metre intervals. The detectors collect much less information than the cameras. "It's not going to catch you picking your nose. You can only tell that some person went by," Wren explains, "maybe this is better than living under thousands of cameras." But the motion-detector system still collects a lot of information. To find unusual or interesting patterns in the data, the researchers developed software to display movements of people around the building on a map in real time. People show up as a bright spot trailing a tail of lights that slowly fade away.

Human-Powered Brain Scanner

Apparently upset that their creations haven't destroyed humanity yet, scientists are now building machines directly from movies where we've been enslaved. The Holst Center has developed a device that harvests human body heat to power a brain-scanning sensor system. They call it a "battery-free wireless EEG", presumably because being honest and calling it "Agent Smith" would lead to legal trouble (at least until Sentinel units destroyed the Warner Bros lawyers). This is the latest in a series of such brain scanners, as the developers realize that a brain scanner doesn't just have to work: it has to be something that people are prepared to put on their head. Previous iterations were much bulkier and required a large array of thermoelectric panels on the forehead - so as well as neck pain, the user looked like a particularly fashion-unconscious Raelian. A sensor that picked up nothing but the brainwaves of "shame" and "embarrassment" wasn't much use - you can get the same effect by forcing someone to wear sweatpants - so a new hybrid power technology was developed.

Washington: A Satanic Map

Presidential candidate John McCain keeps calling Washington the city of Satan. Turns out he's not alone. "McCain was right," said David Bay, speaking by phone from Lexington, S.C., where as director of Cutting Edge Ministries he has long asserted that Washington's streets are positioned to usher in Lucifer as "the ultimate master of Government Center." "You will need to have your maps of Washington, D.C., opened in front of you as we proceed," reads a treatise on the subject posted on Bay's Internet site. Using Dupont and Logan circles as northern points, Bay instructs, you can trace various interlocking streets to form a demonic pentagram, one that bores directly into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.... McCain, a Republican senator from Arizona, has regularly called Washington Satan's City over the past 10 years. He did so twice last month, including during a visit to the Atlanta headquarters of Chick-fil-A, the fast-food chain whose founder is such a devoted Baptist he keeps the eateries closed on Sundays. "It's harder and harder trying to do the Lord's work in the city of Satan," McCain said, according to an Associated Press account. Brian Rogers, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, said the Satan comments are obviously jokes. Indeed, on the stump, McCain doesn't refer to the District per se, but to the culture of special interests and ethical lapses in Congress he has long railed against. Satan and Washington go back. After John Wilkes Booth murdered Abraham Lincoln, printers rushed out images of a horned and clawed devil whispering into Booth's ear at Ford's Theatre, according to "Manhunt," a book about the search for Booth. On Aug. 20, 1949, The Washington Post weighed in, greeting readers with a headline atop the front page: "Priest Frees Mt. Rainier Boy Reported Held in Devil's Grip." The story told of a 14-year-old Prince George's County boy who underwent "between 20 and 30" exorcisms, most of which had him breaking into violent, cursing tantrums and bouts of Latin, a language he had never studied. The article quoted unnamed "Catholic sources."

The Robot Revolution Has Began

Today's giant, budget-bending robots that are run by specialists in factories and on assembly floors are evolving into smaller, less-expensive and cuter machines that clean our carpets, entertain us and may someday take care of us as we grow old. The move is akin to the shift from the mainframe world of the 1970s to the personal computers that invaded our offices and homes over the past 20 to 25 years. "The transition is starting," said Tandy Trower, general manager of Microsoft's three-year-old robotics group. "It's like we're back in 1977 — four years before the IBM PC came out. We were seeing very primitive but very useful machines that were foreshadowing what was to come. In many ways, they were like toys compared to what we have today. It's the same with robots now." Trower said many countries are making significant investments in robotics, and advances are beginning to multiply. Robotic aids and companions — some looking like an updated version of R2-D2 and others more humanoid — will begin moving into our homes in three to five years as technology advances and prices drop, he predicted. "Robots are really an evolution of the technology we have now," Trower said. "We're just adding to our PCs, really. We're letting them get up off our desks and move around. They're evolving into something you will engage with and will serve you in your life someway." "Robots started out in factories making cars. There was no personal interaction," said Levy, who is also an international chess master who has been developing computer chess games for years. "Then people built mail-cart robots, and then robotic dogs. Now robots are being made to care for the elderly. In the last 20 years, we've been moving toward robots that have relationships with humans, and it will keep growing toward a more emotional relationship, a more loving one and a sexual one." While iRobot Corp.'s Roomba may be a vacuum cleaner and not a companion, Trower noted that people who own the robots identify with them, often naming them, drawing faces on them and even insisting that broken ones be repaired rather than replaced with a new machine. "This is part of the evolution," said Trower. "We now see robots coming into people's lives and living with us. It's sneaking in and saying, 'Aren't I cute?'"

Foot-and-mouth virus on US mainland?

The Bush administration is likely to move its research on one of the most contagious animal diseases from an isolated island laboratory to the U.S. mainland near herds of livestock, raising concerns about a catastrophic outbreak. Skeptical Democrats in Congress are demanding to see internal documents they believe highlight the risks and consequences of the decision. An epidemic of the disease, foot and mouth, which only affects animals, could devastate the livestock industry. One such government report, produced last year and already turned over to lawmakers by the Homeland Security Department, combined commercial satellite images and federal farm data to show the proximity to livestock herds of locations that have been considered for the new lab. "Would an accidental laboratory release at these locations have the potential to affect nearby livestock?" asked the nine-page document. It did not directly answer the question. A simulated outbreak of the disease — part of an earlier U.S. government exercise called "Crimson Sky" — ended with fictional riots in the streets after the simulation's National Guardsmen were ordered to kill tens of millions of farm animals, so many that troops ran out of bullets. In the exercise, the government said it would have been forced to dig a ditch in Kansas 25 miles long to bury carcasses. In the simulation, protests broke out in some cities amid food shortages. "It was a mess," said Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., who portrayed the president in the 2002 exercise. Now, like other lawmakers from the states under consideration, Roberts supports moving the government's new lab to his state. Manhattan, Kan., is one of five mainland locations under consideration. "It will mean jobs" and spur research and development, he says. The other possible locations for the new National Bio-and Agro-Defense Facility are Athens, Ga.; Butner, N.C.; San Antonio; and Flora, Miss. The new site could be selected later this year, and the lab would open by 2014. The numbers of livestock in the counties and surrounding areas of the finalists range from 542,507 in Kansas to 132,900 in Georgia, according to the Homeland Security study. Foot-and-mouth virus can be carried on a worker's breath or clothes, or vehicles leaving a lab, and is so contagious it has been confined to Plum Island, N.Y., for more than a half-century — far from commercial livestock.

UFOs Are Real Say Military Experts

A guest lecturer in town this week intends to confirm beyond any reasonable doubt that unidentified flying objects do, in fact, exist. They take a particular interest in nuclear missile sites, Robert Hastings says. Hastings is a speaker who says he will use interviews with highly credible former military personnel and declassified government documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act to prove the existence of UFOs. "UFOs are real. Their technology is better than ours," Hastings said, quite bluntly, in an interview. "We're dealing with visitations from somebody." Those visitations, Hastings said, occur near nuclear missile launch sites at an alarmingly frequent rate. And he said he's visited with multiple retired Air Force personnel who related to him a chillingly similar tale: That of a flying saucer appearing over nuclear launch sites, hovering for several moments, and then, mysteriously, the launch site's missiles activating without authorization from authorities. In each case, the missiles were immediately powered down by military personnel. "If you have 100 former launch officers who are saying, 'There are flying saucers that have hovered over our nukes,' That obviously is a front-page story," Hastings said. "You have to ask yourself why 100 people who had their finger on the button are suddenly going crazy." "Long story short, there's some very strange and spooky things going on at the missile sites," Hastings said. Hastings began UFO research after an incident in 1967. His dad was in the Air Force, stationed at Malmstrom Air Base, near Great Falls, Mont. And Hastings was a kid working a part-time job as a janitor at the base when, one night while he was sweeping up in an air traffic control tower, he witnessed something that made the controller extremely nervous. Five UFOs were tracked on radar for several minutes, Hastings said. Air Force interceptor jets were scrambled to meet them. As the jets closed in, the UFOs skeedadled -- at a rate so fast they could not have possibly been of this world.

Chinas Christian persecution worsens

A Chinese man has been taken into custody and faces a possible sentence of death for charges alleging "subversion of the national government and endangering national security." But several Christian organizations that monitor human rights activities in China say Alimujiang Yimiti could face the penalty simply because he is a Christian. While much headline space has been devoted during recent days to China's crackdown on residents of Tibet, such attacks are more-or-less everyday experiences for Christians in the communist nation, according to officials with three of the largest organizations monitoring China: International Christian Concern, China Aid Association, and the Voice of the Martyrs. "In the months now leading up to the Olympic Games, we actually see things getting worse," said Todd Nettleton, a spokesman for Voice of the Martyrs. "There are more raids, foreign Christians are not having their visas renewed and are being forced to leave the country. There are numerous circumstances where the churches are under attack by the government."

'American Idol' censors Jesus

The prospect that America's most-watched television program would feature a popular Christian worship song to close its fundraising special last night generated a buzz on the Internet, but some now are crying foul after the lyrics were altered to eliminate the word "Jesus." In the grand finale of "American Idol Gives Back," eight "Idol" finalists performed "Shout to the Lord," the song by Darlene Zschech of Australia's Hillsong Church that has been sung in thousands of congregations around the world. Zschech's lyrics open with "My Jesus, My Savior, Lord there is none like You, All of my days, I want to praise, The wonders of Your mighty love." Instead of "My Jesus," however, viewers last night heard the "American Idol" stars begin the song with "My shepherd," as seen in a clip posted on YouTube. Hillsong's music is distributed in the U.S. by Alabama-based Integrity Music. Blogger John Rothra, who noted the lyric change, said his "heart leaped" when "Idol" host Ryan Seacrest announced the final song would be "Shout to the Lord." "However, when the song began," he writes, "I realized that while 'Idol' may be giving back, Idol producers also took away." Rothra said, "On the one hand it doesn't surprise me that the producers would remove Jesus from the song. On the other hand, it shocks and saddens me they would stoop so low." Rothra argued Maria Shriver, the former NBC reporter and wife of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, quoted Gandhi by name, "but 'American Idol' was unwilling to let 'Jesus' be said on national television." "I suppose they were afraid to offend non-Christians or that they simply don't agree with Christianity," he writes. "Welcome to the culture of tolerance, where every religion is accepted except Christianity; welcome to the pluralistic relativistic society that welcomes all faiths except Scriptural Christianity."

Nuclear Attack On D.C. Called Inevitable

A nuclear device detonated near the White House would kill roughly 100,000 people and flatten downtown federal buildings, while the radioactive plume from the explosion would likely spread toward the Capitol and into Southeast D.C., contaminating thousands more. The blast from the 10-kiloton bomb — similar to the bomb dropped over Hiroshima during World War II — would kill up to one in 10 tourists visiting the Washington Monument and send shards of glass flying the length of the National Mall, in a scenario that has become increasingly likely to occur in a major U.S. city in recent years, panel members told a Senate committee yesterday. "It's inevitable," said Cham E. Dallas, director of the Institute for Health Management and Mass Destruction Defense at the University of Georgia, who has charted the potential explosion's effect in the District and testified before a hearing of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. "I think it's wistful to think that it won't happen by 20 years." The Senate committee has convened a series of hearings to examine the threat and effects of a terrorist nuclear attack on a U.S. city, as well as the needed response.

Risk Of Nuclear Attack On U.S. Rises

Concerned that not enough attention is being paid to the risk of a nuclear attack, a Senate committee yesterday looked at the consequences of such a terrorist strike in Washington -- and said that more could be done to save lives. A hearing, called by the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, featured charts showing the horrific effects of a small nuclear device detonating near the White House. It was the panel's third session in recent months on the threat of a nuclear explosion. "The scenarios we discuss today are so hard for us to contemplate and so emotionally traumatic that it is tempting to push them aside," said Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), the panel's chairman. "However, now is the time to have this difficult conversation, to ask the tough questions, then to get answers." The committee summoned witnesses yesterday who said the risk of such an attack on U.S. cities has grown in the past five years because of the spread of nuclear technology and the growth of a global terrorist movement. "I definitely conclude the threat is greater and is increasing.

Cyber Security Like 'Manhattan Project'

In a keynote address at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff warned that the damage caused by a large-scale cyberattack might result in consequences comparable to the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center buildings in New York. "We have to look not only at threats that have materialized in the past," said Chertoff. "We have to consider the threats that may materialize in the future. ... We know that a successful large-scale cyberattack against our country would have very wide-reaching consequences." Through the Internet, terrorists and criminals can do the kind of damage they could never do on their own, Chertoff said. As an example, he cited the massive denial-of-service attack launched against Estonian government computers last year. "This attack went beyond simple mischief, it represented an actual threat to the ability of the Estonian government to govern the country," said Chertoff. "Imagine what would happen if it were possible for hackers to enter the air travel system," he said. Chertoff characterized cybersecurity as a very serious challenge, one that is likely to grow more serious over time. A network response, he said, is necessary to deal with network attacks. "It takes a network to beat a network," said Chertoff. Though US-CERT, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, which provides information necessary to defend the nation's networks, Chertoff hopes to bring additional resources to bear to defend the country's computers. Chertoff likened the government's attempt to improve its cybersecurity to the intensive effort of the Manhattan Project that brought the atomic bomb to fruition. In January, President Bush signed an order that gave DHS and the National Security Agency greater power to oversee government computer security. Details about what the agencies are doing remain classified. Presently, Chertoff said it's not possible to monitor access to federal networks in real time, not all federal agencies have 24/7 network monitoring capabilities, and US-CERT's Einstein system is too backward looking in that it identifies threats that have already had an impact.

Senator Wants Space-based Defense

Sen. Wayne Allard (R-Colo.) called on (April 8) for the addition of a "space-based layer of interceptors for ballistic missile defense" in his opening keynote at the National Space Symposium here. Allard said he is not interested in reviving space-based laser architectures, but instead wants to promote orbital kinetic interceptors. "Space gives you faster response and flexibility than ground-based missile defense," Allard said. "This is not anything like Ronald Reagan's Star Wars plan, though Reagan gave us many good concepts for moving from mutually assured destruction to defense." Allard, who is not seeking re-election, admitted it will be an uphill battle to maintain U.S. Missile Defense Agency funding allocated in fiscal 2008, let alone to augment the budget with the controversial space-based interceptor plan. Allard has pulled together a space coalition among industry, civilian space and military space agencies to better coordinate space lobbying efforts in Congress. The senator criticized the reduction of Europe-based missile defense budgets by $85 million in last year's budget, and said that last week's agreements with Poland and the Czech Republic to move forward with missile and radar sites "reinforces the importance of investing in this technology." Allard said he supports the conclusions of a March 27 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report which urged the Defense Department and intelligence agencies to cooperate in creating a National Security Space Strategy in order to prioritize space projects. Allard said he does not support congressional mandates, but hoped that the Director of National Intelligence and DoD would heed GAO's recommendations.

T-Rays Will Find Hidden Objects

Everybody knows microwaves – but what are terahertz waves? These higher-frequency waves are a real jack-of-all-trades. They can help to detect explosives or drugs without having to open a suitcase or search through items of clothing. They can reveal which substances are flowing through plastic tubes. Doctors even hope that these waves will enable them to identify skin cancer without having to perform a biopsy. In the electromagnetic spectrum, terahertz waves are to be found between infrared radiation and microwaves. They can penetrate wood, ceramics, paper, plastic or fabrics and are not harmful to humans. On the other hand, they cannot pass through metal. This makes them a universal tool: They change when passing through gases, solid materials or liquids. Each substance leaves its specific fingerprint, be it explosives or water, heroin or blood. So far, however, the technology has not made a breakthrough, as it is expensive and time-consuming to build the required transmitters and receivers. Now researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Physical Measurement Techniques IPM are making the devices mobile. To generate terahertz waves, the scientists use a femtosecond laser which emits extremely short flashes of infrared light. The advantages are obvious: The transmitters and receivers, which are about the size of beverage cans, are now attached to a flexible cable and can be positioned wherever desired. Since vibrations are no longer a problem, the device can even be deployed on the factory floor with fork-lift trucks driving around and heavy machinery vibrating. No inspection point is too difficult to access, as the glass fiber cables can bridge distances up to 25 meters.

London Police to be 'microchipped'

Every single Metropolitan police officer will be 'microchipped' so top brass can monitor their movements on a Big Brother style tracking scheme, it can be revealed today. According to respected industry magazine Police Review, the plan - which affects all 31,000 serving officers in the Met, including Sir Ian Blair - is set to replace the unreliable Airwave radio system currently used to help monitor officer's movements. The new electronic tracking device - called the Automated Personal Location System (APLS) - means that officers will never be out of range of supervising officers. According to service providers Telent, the new technology 'will enable operators in the Service's operations centres to identify the location of each police officer' at any time they are on duty - whether overground or underground. Although police chiefs say the new technology is about 'improving officer safety' and reacting to incidents more quickly, many rank and file believe it is just a Big Brother style system to keep tabs on them and make sure they don't 'doze off on duty'. Some officers are concerned that the system - which will be able to pinpoint any of the 31,000 officers in the Met to within a few feet of their location - will put a complete end to community policing and leave officers purely at the beck and call of control room staff rather than reacting to members of the public on the ground. Pete Smyth, chairman of the Met Police Federation, said: "This could be very good for officers' safety but it could also involve an element of Big Brother. One officer, working in Peckham, south London, said: "They are keeping the exact workings of the system very hush-hush at the moment - although it will be similar to the way criminals are electronically tagged. There will not be any choice about wearing one. The system is one of the largest of its kind in the world, according to Telent, the company behind the technology, although neither the Met nor Telent would provide Police Review with any more information about exactly how the system will work or what sort of devices officers will wear. Nigel Lee, a workstream manager at the Met, said: "Safety is a primary concern for all police forces.
"The area served by our force covers 620 miles and knowing the location of our officers means that not only can we provision resource more quickly, but should an officer need assistance, we can get to them even more quickly." Forces currently have the facility to track all their officers through GPS devices on their Airwave radio headsets, but this is subject to headsets being up to date and forces buying the back office systems to accompany them, according to Airwave. Steve Rands, health and safety head for the Met Police Federation, told Police Review: "This is so that we know where officers are. Let us say that when voice distortion or sound quality over the radio is lost, if you cannot hear where that officer telling you where he is, you can still pinpoint his exact position by global positioning system. "If he needs help but you cannot hear him for whatever reason, APLS will say where he is."

Change By Crises And Syntheses

Some years ago, Ervin Laszlo of the UN Institute for Training and Research spoke about how various crises and a change in man could create a critical instability resulting in a transformation to a New World Order. As I’ve written before, the power elite wants a New World Order with ultimate control over us. However, they have to have an excuse for intervening in our lives. This is accomplished by the use of crises (followed by syntheses), and this article focuses on domestic and international examples of this process. In Naomi Klein’s THE SHOCK DOCTRINE (2007), she explains the use of crises to promote a “new colonialism” around the world. She indicates the doctrine works as follows: “The original disaster (crisis) ­ the coup, the terrorist attack, the market meltdown, the war, the tsunami, the hurricane ­ puts the entire population into a state of collective shock. The falling bombs, the bursts of terror, the pounding winds, serve to soften up whole societies much as the blaring music and blows in the torture cells soften up prisoners. Like the terrorized prisoner who gives up the names of comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up things they would otherwise fiercely protect.”

Did Ancient Biotech Create "Nephilim"

What if, by corrupting the species barrier in which each creature was to recreate after its "own kind," Watchers had successfully mingled human-animal DNA and combined the hereditary traits of different species into a single new mutation? An entirely new being—Nephilim—might have suddenly possessed the combined intelligence and instincts (seeing, hearing, smelling, reacting to the environment) of several life forms and in ways unfamiliar to creation. Will modern biotechnology resurrect Nephilim? Today, molecular biologists classify the functions of genes within native species but are unsure in many cases how a gene's coding might react from one species to another. In recombinant DNA technology, a "transgenic" organism is created when the genetic structure of one specie is altered by the transfer of a gene or genes from another. This could change not only the genetic structure of the modified animal and its offspring, but its evolutionary development, sensory modalities, disease propensity, personality and behavior traits among other things.

2008 To Be Nasty Hurricane Season.

That's the latest word from a team of Colorado State University forecasters, who predict the nation's Atlantic coast will experience a hurricane season "well above average."
"Current oceanic and atmospheric trends indicate that we will likely have an active Atlantic basin hurricane season," said William Gray, who heads the university's forecast team. The forecasters predict at least 15 named storms will form in the Atlantic basin between June 1 and Nov. 30. Eight of the storms are predicted to become hurricanes, and of those eight, four are expected to develop into intense or major hurricanes with sustained winds of 111 mph or greater. "Based on our latest forecast, the probability of a major hurricane making landfall along the U.S. coastline is 69 percent compared with the last-century average of 52 percent," said Phil Klotzbach, a member of the forecast team. "We are calling for a very active hurricane season this year.

The Emerging Surveillance State

Last month, the House amended the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to expand the government’s ability to monitor our private communications. This measure, if it becomes law, will result in more warrantless government surveillance of innocent American citizens. Though some opponents claimed that the only controversial part of this legislation was its grant of immunity to telecommunications companies, there is much more to be wary of in the bill. In the House version, Title II, Section 801, extends immunity from prosecution of civil legal action to people and companies including any provider of an electronic communication service, any provider of a remote computing service, “any other communication service provider who has access to wire or electronic communications,” any “parent, subsidiary, affiliate, successor, or assignee” of such company, any “officer, employee, or agent” of any such company, and any “landlord, custodian, or other person who may be authorized or required to furnish assistance.” The Senate version goes even further by granting retroactive immunity to such entities that may have broken the law in the past. The new FISA bill allows the federal government to compel many more types of companies and individuals to grant the government access to our communications without a warrant. The provisions in the legislation designed to protect Americans from warrantless surveillance are full of loopholes and ambiguities. There is no blanket prohibition against listening in on all American citizens without a warrant. In communist East Germany , one in every 100 citizens was an informer for the dreaded secret police, the Stasi. They either volunteered or were compelled by their government to spy on their customers, their neighbors, their families, and their friends.

Cell phone Gov. Alerts coming soon

Federal regulators have approved a plan to create a nationwide emergency alert system using text messages delivered to cell phones. Text messages have exploded in popularity in recent years, particularly among young people. The wireless industry's trade association, CTIA, estimates more than 48 billion text messages are sent each month. The plan stems from the Warning Alert and Response Network Act, a 2006 federal law that requires upgrades to the nation's emergency alert system.

New Domestic Spy Program set for use

The Bush administration said yesterday that it plans to start using the nation's most advanced spy technology for domestic purposes soon, rebuffing challenges by House Democrats over the idea's legal authority. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said his department will activate his department's new domestic satellite surveillance office in stages, starting as soon as possible with traditional scientific and homeland security activities -- such as tracking hurricane damage, monitoring climate change and creating terrain maps.

Glass Particles To Fix Global Warming

Government scientists are studying the feasibility of sending tiny particles of specially made glass into the Earth's upper atmosphere to try to dampen the effects of "global warming." One leading global warming skeptic said the idea is "not practical" and could depress the ozone layer and cause other problems. Details from documents Cybercast News Service obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, S.C., are conducting limited tests and developing computer models of what might happen if a huge amount of particulate matter is shot into the stratosphere. The particles, consisting of a very fine and special form of glass -- "porous-walled glass microspheres" -- would be able to absorb a certain amount of carbon dioxide, and would reflect sunlight away from the Earth.

Putting "Radio Tags" on Americans

Some University of Washington students, faculty and staff are being tracked as they move about the computer-science building, with details of where they've been, and with whom, stored in a database. Professor Gaetano Borriello checks a computer to find graduate student Evan Welbourne's last location: on the fourth floor, outside room 452 at 10:38 a.m. Wednesday. He opens another screen to reveal the building's floor plan, and a blinking green dot representing Welbourne shows him walking down the hall. If it seems a bit like Big Brother, that's the intention. The project is meant to explore both positive and negative aspects of a world saturated with technology that can monitor people and objects remotely. "What we want to understand," Borriello said, "is what makes it useful, what makes it threatening and how to balance the two." The technology, radio frequency identification, or RFID, is rapidly moving into the real world through a wide variety of applications: Washington state driver's licenses, U.S. passports, clothing, payment cards, car keys and more. The objects all have a tiny tag with a unique number that can be read from a distance. Many experts predict that the radio tags, as an enhanced replacement for bar codes, will soon become ubiquitous. Leaders of the UW's RFID Ecosystem project wanted to understand the implications of that shift before it happens. They're conducting one of the largest experiments using wireless tags in a social setting. "Our objective is to create a future world where RFID is everywhere and figure out problems we'll run into before we get there," said Borriello, a computer science and engineering professor. RFID has been used primarily to track goods in supply chains, and the RFID Ecosystem works as a kind of human warehouse. For more than a year, a dozen researchers have carried around RFID tags equipped with tiny computer chips that store an identification number unique to each tag. Researchers installed about 200 antennas throughout the computer-science building that pick up any tag near them every second. The system can show when people leave the office, when they return, how often they take breaks, where they go and who's meeting with whom, Borriello said.

Organs may have their own Consciousness

The progress of medical science in the past 30 years has been so rapid that yesterday's miracles are tomorrow's commonplace procedures. So it has proved with heart transplants, which have become almost routine in hospitals around the world. Yet every once in a while a story emerges which should cause us all to sit up and take note that there is nothing "routine" or "commonplace" about such complex operations. The suggestion, highlighted again this week, that donor patients could not only be acquiring the organs but also the memories - or even the soul - of the donor is surely one such story. This bizarre possibility was raised by the inexplicable case of Sonny Graham - a seemingly happily married 69-year-old man living in the U.S. state of Georgia. He shot himself without warning, having shown no previous signs of unhappiness, let alone depression. His friends described it as an act of passion, not of reason. The case might have remained just an isolated tragedy were it not for the fact that Sonny had received a transplanted heart from a man who had also shot himself - in identical circumstances. To make things even more intriguing, shortly after receiving the heart transplant, Sonny tracked down the wife of the donor - and fell instantly in love with her... Virtually every doctor and scientist will tell you the heart is a mere pump. The seat of our mind, our consciousness, our very soul - if such a thing exists - lies in the brain. The heart's only control over our mind is whether or not it sends it blood. Ever since William Harvey unravelled the mysteries of the heart and circulatory system centuries ago, this fact has remained beyond doubt. Well, almost beyond doubt. For a few brave scientists have started claiming that our memories and characters are encoded not just in our brain, but throughout our entire body. Consciousness, they claim, is created by every living cell in the body acting in concert.

Gov. Wants Its Mind Around Yours

Imagine a world of streets lined with video cameras that alert authorities to any suspicious activity. A world where police officers can read the minds of potential criminals and arrest them before they commit any crimes. A world in which a suspect who lies under questioning gets caught immediately because his brain has given him away. Though that may sound a lot like the plot of the 2002 movie "Minority Report," starring Tom Cruise and based on a Philip K. Dick novel, I'm not talking about science fiction here; it turns out we're not so far away from that world. But does it sound like a very safe place, or a very scary one? It's a question I think we should be asking as the federal government invests millions of dollars in emerging technology aimed at detecting and decoding brain activity. And though government funding focuses on military uses for these new technologies, they can and do end up in the hands of civilian law enforcement and in commercial applications. As spending continues and neurotechnology advances, that imagined world is no longer the stuff of science fiction or futuristic movies, and we postpone at our peril confronting the ethical and legal dilemmas it poses for a society that values not just personal safety but civil liberty as well.

Spying on Internet Users

In 1993, the dawn of the Internet age, the liberating anonymity of the online world was captured in a well-known New Yorker cartoon. One dog, sitting at a computer, tells another: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Fifteen years later, that anonymity is gone. It’s not paranoia: they really are spying on you. Technology companies have long used “cookies,” little bits of tracking software slipped onto your computer, and other means, to record the Web sites you visit, the ads you click on, even the words you enter in search engines — information that some hold onto forever. They’re not telling you they’re doing it, and they’re not asking permission. Internet service providers are now getting into the act. Because they control your connection, they can keep track of everything you do online, and there have been reports that I.S.P.’s may have started to sell the information they collect. The driving force behind this prying is commerce. The big growth area in online advertising right now is “behavioral targeting.” Web sites can charge a premium if they are able to tell the maker of an expensive sports car that its ads will appear on Web pages clicked on by upper-income, middle-aged men. The information, however, gets a lot more specific than age and gender — and more sensitive. Tech companies can keep track of when a particular Internet user looks up Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, visits adult Web sites, buys cancer drugs online or participates in anti-government discussion groups. Serving up ads based on behavioral targeting can itself be an invasion of privacy, especially when the information used is personal. (“Hmm ... I wonder why I always get those drug-rehab ads when I surf the Internet on Jane’s laptop?”) The bigger issue is the digital dossiers that tech companies can compile. Some companies have promised to keep data confidential, or to obscure it so it cannot be traced back to individuals. But it’s hard to know what a particular company’s policy is, and there are too many to keep track of. And privacy policies can be changed at any time. There is also no guarantee that the information will stay with the company that collected it. It can be sold to employers or insurance companies, which have financial motives for wanting to know if their workers and policyholders are alcoholics or have AIDS. It could also end up with the government, which needs only to serve a subpoena to get it (and these days that formality might be ignored). If George Orwell had lived in the Internet age, he could have painted a grim picture of how Web monitoring could be used to promote authoritarianism. There is no need for neighborhood informants and paper dossiers if the government can see citizens’ every Web site visit, e-mail and text message.

Garden of Eden Serpent Fossil Found

Researchers at the National Museum of Natural History, Paris were thrilled to finally confirm that a slab of Lebanese limestone depicts the body of a snake with two legs. Researchers at the European Light Source (ESRF) in Grenoble, France used a high-powered super camera to validate their suspicions about the fossilized reptile. Alexandra Houssaye, from the National Museum of Natural History, Paris, said that the X-ray technique is useful because it allows researchers to get an in-depth glimpse of the inner structure of the creature without damaging the specimen. "We were sure he had two legs but it was great to see it, and we hope to find other characteristics that we couldn't see on the other limb," said Houssaye. Known as Eupodophis descouensi, the reptile is 33 inches long and comes from the Late Cretaceous, about 92 million years ago. “It’s very rare,” Houssaye said of the specimen. “There are only five or six species known, and there are only three species with a leg preserved
. So, it’s very unique.” Although part of the vertebral column is absent and the tail has become detached and positioned near the head, the fibula, tibia and femur are unmistakable. Its hind limb is only 0.8 inches long, and researchers said it was most likely useless to the creature. In the genealogy of snakes, two theories are prevalent. One theory states that as lizards started to adapt to their subterranean existence, their forelimbs and hind-limbs were eventually eliminated. Another theory says that the snake originated from a habitat primarily composed of water. “Every detail can be very important in establishing the great relationships and that's why we must know them very well," said Houssaye. "I wanted to study the inner structure of different bones and so for that you would usually use destructive methods; but given that this is the only specimen [of E. descouensi], it is totally impossible to do that. 3D reconstruction techniques were the only solution. We needed a good resolution and only this machine can do that," she said. The recent discovery was made largely in part by the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, which has proven its extensive imaging capabilities in the past by enabling archaeologists to study fossils of ancient minute insects in samples of opaque amber. Researchers fixed the reptilian fossil to a table that was rotated in front of the powerful X-ray beam to produce an interwoven and very detailed 3D image. The finished product, which can be spun around on a computer screen, reveals details that will be measured in just millionths of a meter. "We can even see ankle bones," ESRF's resident palaeontologist Paul Tafforeau said.

Superfast internet to replace Web

Scientists in Switzerland have developed a lightning-fast replacement to the internet that would allow feature films and music catalogues to be downloaded within seconds. The invention could signal the end of the dreaded 'frozen screen', when computers seize up after being asked to process too much information. The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the internet, the grid could also provide the power needed to send sophisticated images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call. David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technology could change society. He said: "With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine." The power of the grid will be unlocked this summer with the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a new particle accelerator designed to investigate how the universe began. The grid will be turned on at the same time to store the information it generates, after scientists at Cern, based near Geneva, realised the internet would not have the capacity to capture such huge volumes of data. The grid has been built with fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data, unlike the internet. There are 55,000 grid servers already installed, a figure which is expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years. Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: "We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. "The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries." Britain has 8,000 servers on the grid system, meaning access could be available to universities as early as this autumn.

Scientists Considering Response To ET

As the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) enters a new phase, with the recent start of observations for radio signals from other worlds with the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array, the international scientific community has begun preparing all the more earnestly for the cascade of events that would follow the detection of an alien civilization. Among the most important questions humankind will ponder on that day is whether we should reply, and if so, what we should say. If such a signal from the stars bears a readily intelligible message, some of our choices may be laid out for us. Perhaps, some have argued, a message from extraterrestrials will include their suggestions for a reply. After all, the reasoning goes, they will probably have made contact with many other civilizations before us, so they will be well versed in the productive first steps in interspecies communication.

Iran, Syria, Lebanon On military Alert

According to British media, the US is set to attack Iranian military facilities. DEBKAfile’s military sources add that the USS Abraham Lincoln Strike Force is heading for the Persian Gulf. War tensions in the Middle East have shot up - not only over the signals flashing between Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, but also on the US-Iranian front in Iraq in the wake of rising in violence around the Basra conflagration. Recently the US Iraq commander, Gen. David Petraeus and ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, stressed in their report to Congress that Iran is waging war on America in Iraq, say sources in Washington, London and Baghdad. This emerged strongly last week, when US intelligence learned that Iran had intervened directly in the Iraqi government’s crackdown on renegade militias in Basra and southern Iraq, by directing and provisioning those militias through the Revolutionary Guards’ al Qods Brigades. Official sources in London predict that Iran’s intervention against the American effort to stabilize Iraq may well prompt a US attack on the military installations in Iran which are orchestrating the interference. Gen. Petraeus is on record as accusing Iran of being the source of the daily rocket bombardment of Baghdad’s Green Zone, seat of government and US diplomatic and military headquarters. DEBKAfile’s military sources report that Moscow has dropped its two nickels into the rising war alarm. In the last two weeks, Russian military and intelligence officials have been leaking claims of intensified American military movements around Iranian shores.

Civil Rights Battle Over the Mind

Trolling down the street in Manhattan, I suddenly hear a woman's voice. "Who's there? Who's there?" she whispers. I look around but can't figure out where it's coming from. It seems to emanate from inside my skull. Was I going nuts? Nope. I had simply encountered a new advertising medium: hypersonic sound. It broadcasts audio in a focused beam, so that only a person standing directly in its path hears the message. In this case, the cable channel A&E was using the technology to promote a show about, naturally, the paranormal. I'm a geek, so my first reaction was, "Cool!" But it also felt creepy. We think of our brains as the ultimate private sanctuary, a zone where other people can't intrude without our knowledge or permission. But its boundaries are gradually eroding. Hypersonic sound is just a portent of what's coming, one of a host of emerging technologies aimed at tapping into our heads. These tools raise a fascinating, and queasy, new ethical question: Do we have a right to "mental privacy"? "We're going to be facing this question more and more, and nobody is really ready for it," says Paul Root Wolpe, a bioethicist and board member of the nonprofit Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics. "If the skull is not an absolute domain of privacy, there are no privacy domains left." He argues that the big personal liberty issues of the 21st century will all be in our heads — the "civil rights of the mind," he calls it.

War With Iran: What Would It Look Like?

President Bush launches Operation Boundless Fortitude after Iran's religious leader Ali Khameini announces baldly that his nation has manufactured weapons-grade fissionable material enriched to nearly 100% (in lieu of 5% enrichment for peaceful nuclear reactors). In an effort to show the world that the U.S. has not been paralyzed by its disastrous adventure in neighboring Iraq, on Aug. 16, 2008, Bush orders a massive aerial bombardment, flights of Tomahawk cruise missiles streaking from submarines and naval warships to strike Iranian command and control centers, ministries, telecommunications facilities and Iranian air defenses, especially Russian-made TOR M-1 missile emplacements, while B-2 stealth bombers destroy all access to the subterranean enrichment facilities at Natanz. American warplanes and missiles carefully avoid striking research reactors in Teheran and Ispahan as well as the nuclear reactor at Bousher--less than 100 kilometers from Kuwait--as well as the centrifuges themselves at Natanz in an effort to prevent the spread of radioactive material to nearby population centers. However, other missiles producing electromagnetic pulses do knock out virtually all of Iran's electric grid and computer systems. By Sept. 4, less than three months after the first flight of Tomahawks, Iran is reduced to a state of near paralysis, unable in any sense to retaliate militarily, its entire economic infrastructure in shambles.

UN UFOs and Int.Year of Astronomy

The United Nations has designated the year 2009 as the International Year of Astronomy. Whether this was purposeful or just a coincidence, it lines up perfectly with their alleged plan to encourage disclosure of information about the UFO phenomenon next year. After one or more meetings and briefings on the subject were allegedly held in February of this year, I made a number of inquiries and have been astonished at the results. I recently received two interesting responses to emails that I sent to various departments within the United Nations. The first came from the Office of the Spokesperson for the Secretary-General and was unsigned. It stated that the U.N. has named 2009 as the International Year of Astronomy. Among other things, this designation honors the four hundred year anniversary of Galileo Galilei as the father of modern observational astronomy. Although no mention was made of my inquiry about the alleged UFO briefings or planned 2009 disclosure effort, it’s noteworthy that the first email also mentioned the stated purposes of the International Year of Astronomy as found on the official website at www.astronomy2009.org. The first purpose has some interesting wording: “Increase the scientific awareness among the general public through the communication of scientific results in astronomy and related fields, as well as the process of research and critical thinking that leads to these results.” By adding ‘related fields’ to the mission statement, the International Year of Astronomy event organizers can easily incorporate almost anything related to space, science and astronomy into their program. Although any mention of the search for life in the universe is conspicuously absent from the IYA-2009 website, that doesn’t mean that the UN cannot use IYA-2009 as a springboard to launch various inquiries into the existence of extraterrestrial life or make announcements about UFO disclosure. The second email response I received was from the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development. It was also unsigned, brought several interesting facts about the commission to my attention and included an enigmatic statement. The commission on science and technology has several stated purposes. One includes “Formulating UN system recommendations and guidelines on science and technology.” If most everything involving science and technology within the U.N. organization somehow falls under the auspices of this commission, UFOs would certainly qualify. That makes this committee a possible key player in any plan for UFO disclosure. It also means we can likely read much into this statement that they included in the email: “The United Nations is a forum for new ideas. The U.N. Commission on Science and Technology for Development encourages the sharing of scientific and technological discoveries to benefit all the nations of the world.” Again, without mentioning UFOs or Aliens, the second email response I received makes it clear that these subjects obviously qualify as scientific discoveries that should be shared. Based on the content of both emails, I believe that the United Nations is involved in a plan to disclose information about UFOs and Aliens. While the United Nations is not in a position to pressure powerful nations that are responsible for most of the secrecy surrounding UFOs to disclose anything, they are always a convenient place for those nations to use as a platform to discuss, debate and share information. It’s entirely possible that the USA and other powerful nations have begun to run out of excuses when it comes to explaining away UFO sightings and encounters. With the number of credible witnesses and whistleblowers that have come forward on the rise ,and instantaneous reporting of large scale UFO events on the internet, nations in the know are beginning to face a real problem of credibility.

Worlds Most powerful laser activated

The Texas Petawatt laser reached greater than one petawatt of laser power on Monday morning, March 31, making it the highest powered laser in the world, Todd Ditmire, a physicist at The University of Texas at Austin, said. Ditmire says that when the laser is turned on, it has the power output of more than 2,000 times the output of all power plants in the United States. (A petawatt is one quadrillion watts.) The laser is brighter than sunlight on the surface of the sun, but it only lasts for an instant, a 10th of a trillionth of a second (0.0000000000001 second). Ditmire and his colleagues at the Texas Center for High-Intensity Laser Science will use the laser to create and study matter at some of the most extreme conditions in the universe, including gases at temperatures greater than those in the sun and solids at pressures of many billions of atmospheres. This will allow them to explore many astronomical phenomena in miniature. They will create mini-supernovas, tabletop stars and very high-density plasmas that mimic exotic stellar objects known as brown dwarfs. “We can learn about these large astronomical objects from tiny reactions in the lab because of the similarity of the mathematical equations that describe the events,” said Ditmire, director of the center. Such a powerful laser will also allow them to study advanced ideas for creating energy by controlled fusion. While most people understand a need for a certain level of government secrecy regarding the protection of citizens and property, there is always a danger that concealing too much information or lying about security issues can lead to a total loss of credibility. If people lose confidence in their government, it will not be long before that system of government is replaced by another. The United Nations is the logical place for disclosure. It takes the pressure off nations that don’t want to explain their individual roles in decades of secrecy or have the media spotlight directed solely at them. The 2009 UFO disclosure event is a likely scenario. We can only hope that the nations with all the secrets will finally agree to share some of them.

Scientist Looks For God Particle

The 40-year hunt for the holy grail of physics – the elusive “God particle” that is supposed to give matter its mass – is almost over, according to the leading scientist who first came up with the theory. Peter Higgs, whose work gave his name to the elusive Higgs boson particle, said that he was more than 90 per cent certain it would be found within the next few years. The Higgs boson was the professor’s elegant 1964 solution to one of the great problems with the standard model of physics – how matter has mass and thus exists in a form that allows it to make stars, planets and people. He proposed that the universe is pervaded by an invisible field of bosons that consist of mass but little else. As particles move through this field, bosons effectively stick to some of them, making them more massive, while leaving others to pass unhindered. Photons, light particles that have no mass, are not affected by the Higgs field at all. The mysterious boson postulated by Professor Higgs, of the University of Edinburgh, has become so fundamental to physics that it is often nicknamed the “God particle”. After more than 40 years of research, and billions of pounds, scientists have yet to prove that it is real. But Professor Higgs, 78, now believes the search is nearly over. A new atom-smasher that will be switched on near Geneva later this year is virtually guaranteed to find it, he said. It is even possible that the critical evidence already exists, in data from an American experiment in Illinois that has yet to be analysed fully.
Speaking after visiting Cern, the European particle physics laboratory that has built the £2.6 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to find the Higgs boson, he praised the collaborative work behind the project, adding that such future work could be jeopardised by a funding crisis surrounding particle physics in Britain. The government agency responsible is being told to make £70 million in cuts, forcing Britain to withdraw from a project to build the successor to he LHC. “It looks like a major disaster in the funding of this kind of physics in the UK,” said Professor Higgs. “You are letting down your international partners, and what happens after that sort of thing is they don’t trust you any more. That’s even worse than the impact on the domestic users of this machine.” Tantalising glimpses of the boson from other, less powerful particle accelerators, have suggested that unequivocal evidence should emerge almost immediately when the LHC begins its experiments. The Higgs boson is hard to detect because it is hypothesised to exist only at very high energies, which last existed in nature in the moments after the Big Bang, hence the need for an atom smasher. The LHC will fire beams of protons around a 17-mile underground tunnel before these collide at close to the speed of light to release vast bursts of energy. Four vast caverns hold sophisticated detectors that will track the particles produced by the collisions. The largest, named Atlas, is buried in a space big enough to enclose the nave of Westminster Abbey.

Exorcist Knows What Causes Violence

How do you separate what is human evil and what is demonic? I might be tempted to cheat on my taxes. Is that demonic temptation? That's human nature. But the enemy might use it to get us in deeper. He may get you to lie about the reality of your situation. The devil is deceit. So it can (start) as something that is human but can be led in the wrong direction. There was a young fellow who came for counselling. He was having difficulty controlling himself and his actions. One day he said to me, "I have a feeling of rage. I hear in my mind, the voice says, 'Kill.' I haven't done it yet, but there is that compulsion." I started asking about the video games he had played as a child and they were full of violence. So it's not surprising to me we have these shooting incidents in high schools.

Nanotechnology Dangerous Potential

No one disputes nanotechnology's potential. But is it safe for humans and the environment? That question remains intensely debated by researchers such as Andreas Leson from the Fraunhofer Insitute IWS in Dresden. The German government has established a "nano-dialogue" that includes scientists, companies and also nature conservation groups, Leson said. The German government has given scientists multi-million euro grants to study nanotechnology's safety. The EU has also gotten involved in funding projects with names such as NanoDerm, NanoTox and Impart. Researchers are still performing tests to discover which nanoparticles are dangerous and still lack reliable data on whether particles could cause damage to humans. Although the debate over risk remains very preliminary, potentially dangerous aspects are already beginning to emerge. The nanoparticles are so small that they can override the blood-brain-barrier, which in humans protects the brain from harmful chemicals in the blood. Animal tests have shown this to be potentially very dangerous. The tiny particles also have the potential to damage the lungs, much as asbestos does.

Matrix-style Worlds A Few Years Away

Are supercomputers on the verge of creating Matrix-style simulated realities? Michael McGuigan at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, thinks so. He says that virtual worlds realistic enough to be mistaken for the real thing are just a few years away. Although existing computers can produce artificial scenes and textures detailed enough to fool the human eye, such scenes typically take several hours to render. The key to passing the Graphics Turing Test, says McGuigan, is to marry that photorealism with software that can render images in real-time – defined as a refresh rate of 30 frames per second. McGuigan decided to test the ability of one of the world's most powerful supercomputers – Blue Gene/L at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York – to generate such an artificial world. Blue Gene/L possesses 18 racks, each with 2000 standard PC processors that work in parallel to provide a huge amount of processing power – it has a speed of 103 teraflops, or 103 trillion "floating point operations" per second. By way of comparison, a calculator uses about 10 floating operations per second. In particular, McGuigan studied the supercomputer's ability to mimic the interplay of light with objects – an important component of any virtual world with ambitions to mimic reality. Although Blue Gene/L can model the path of light in a virtual world both rapidly and realistically, the speed with which it renders high-resolution images still falls short of that required to pass the Graphics Turing Test. But supercomputers capable of passing the test may be just years away, thinks McGuigan. "You never know for sure until you can actually do it," he says. "But a back-of-the-envelope calculation would suggest it should be possible in the next few years, once supercomputers enter the petaflop range – that's 1000 teraflops."

Neuromarketing: Ad-man's Dream Tool

Neuroscience and marketing had a love child a few years back. Its name - big surprise - is neuromarketing, and the ugly little fellow is growing up. Corporate pitchmen have always wanted to get inside our skulls. The more accurately they can predict how we'll react to stimuli in the marketplace, from prices to packages to adverts, the more money they can pull from our pockets and transfer to their employers' coffers. But picking the brains of consumers hasn't been easy. Marketers have had to rely on indirect methods to read our thoughts and feelings. They've watched what we do in stores or tracked how purchases rise or fall in response to promotional campaigns or changes in pricing. And they've carried out endless surveys and focus groups, asking us what we buy and why. The results have been mixed at best. People, for one thing, don't always know what they're thinking, and even when they do, they're not always honest in reporting it. Traditional market research is fraught with bias and imprecision, which forces companies to fall back on hunches and rules of thumb. But thanks to recent breakthroughs in brain science, companies can now actually see what goes on inside our minds when we shop. Teams of academic and corporate neuromarketers have begun to hook people up to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines to map how their neurons respond to products and pitches. Last year, the journal Neuron published an article titled Neural Predictors of Purchases by a group of scholars from three leading US universities. The researchers described how they had used brain imaging to monitor the mental activity of shoppers as they evaluated products and prices on computer screens. By watching how different neural circuits light up or go dark during the buying process, the researchers found they could predict whether a person would end up purchasing a product or passing it up. They concluded, after further analysis of the results, that "the ability of brain activation to predict purchasing would generalise to other purchasing scenarios". A new group of high-tech consulting firms, with names like NeuroFocus and Neuroconsult, have sprung up to help companies deploy neuromarketing. The neuromarketers are playing a prominent role at Re:think, the Advertising Research Foundation's annual convention, held in New York this week. The New York Times reports its agenda is "filled with presentations" on the new scientific approaches to marketing. In the future, marketers won't have to ask us what we think or try to decipher our intentions from our actions. They'll be able to monitor what we think directly - at the cellular level. That's good news for companies. Not only will they be able to spend their marketing budgets more efficiently, but they'll be able to wield more influence over the purchases we make.

Evidence for Ancient Star Wars

As recently as five years ago, recondite researchers and authors had been considered by some to be extraneous, their inclusion of metaphysical concepts, problematic. And yet with astonishing acceleration, there has been a recognition and demand for expanded examination: classical science and history have inadequately addressed the otherwise irreconcilable fragments of history and reality. The prevalence and consistency of mythologic similarity has stimulated investigation of Earth’s earliest records. But for those with an eye on the future, the renewed scrutiny is disturbing. Author Tom Horn began to see that, "something alarming has been happening since the dawn of time, which has been recorded in the history, holy books, and mythos of every great civilization. Ancient rabbinical authorities including Septuagint translators and early church fathers understood it. Sumerians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Greeks, the Hindus, the American Indians, and virtually all other civilizations wrote about it. Beings of super intelligence sometimes referred to as "gods" descend through openings of sky, earth, and sea to interact with this planet's creatures." But the implications were not limited to animals or man and clay tablets, parchments and stone carvings amplified the depth, intensity and complexity of Earth’s history. Researcher and author Joseph Farrell is one of few who possesses the acumen and perseverance to challenge orthodox teaching with an extraordinary ability to correlate enormous volumes of obscure and disparate details. With a PhD in Patristics from the University of Oxford and a strong background in physics, Dr. Farrell’s approach to ancient history is through the analysis of "paleographic encryption of ancient paleophysics."

Control oil and water - Run the world

At present, a race for the world's resources is underway that resembles the Great Game that was played in the decades leading up to the First World War. Now, as then, the most coveted prize is oil and the risk is that as the contest heats up it will not always be peaceful. But this is no simple rerun of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, there are powerful new players and it is not only oil that is at stake. The biggest new player in the game is China and it is there that the emerging pattern is clearest. China's rulers have staked everything on economic growth. Without improving living standards, there would be large-scale unrest, which could pose a threat to their power. Moreover, China is in the middle of the largest and fastest move from the countryside to the city in history, a process that cannot be stopped. Because ongoing growth requires massive inputs of energy and minerals, Chinese companies are scouring the world for supplies. The result is unstoppable rising demand for resources that are unalterably finite. Although oil reserves may not have peaked in any literal sense, the days when conventional oil was cheap have gone forever. Countries are reacting by trying to secure the remaining reserves, not least those that are being opened up by climate change. Canada is building bases to counter Russian claims on the melting Arctic icecap, parts of which are also claimed by Norway, Denmark and the US. Britain is staking out claims on areas around the South Pole. The scramble for energy is shaping many of the conflicts we can expect in the present century. The danger is not just another oil shock that impacts on industrial production, but a threat of famine. Without a drip feed of petroleum to highly mechanised farms, many of the food shelves in the supermarkets would be empty. Far from the world weaning itself off oil, it is more addicted to the stuff than ever. It is hardly surprising that powerful states are gearing up to seize their share. Oil remains at the heart of the game and, if anything, it is even more important than before. With their complex logistics and heavy reliance on air power, high-tech armies are extremely energy-intensive. According to a Pentagon report, the amount of petroleum needed for each soldier each day increased four times between the Second World War and the Gulf War and quadrupled again when the US invaded Iraq. Recent estimates suggest the amount used per soldier has jumped again in the five years since the invasion. Rising sea levels reduce food and fresh-water supplies, which may trigger large-scale movements of refugees from Africa and Asia into Europe. Global warming threatens energy supplies. In this round of the Great Game, energy shortage and global warming are reinforcing each another. The result can only be a growing risk of conflict. There were around 1.65 billion people in the world when the last round was played out. At the start of the 21st century, there are four times as many, struggling to secure their future in a world being changed out of recognition by climate change. It would be wise to plan for some more of history's rhymes.

Morgellon’s Disease and GM “Food”

Just in case you thought it was fine to eat Genetically Modified foods (better identified as “FrankenFoods”), along comes a study which makes it clear that you are eating this make believe non-food at your own peril and, worse yet, you are feeding it to your kids at their peril as well. It is important to note that Codex Alimentarius, which sets standards for the international trade of food, permits genetically modified foods and makes no effort to limit, control or eliminate them. In fact, the US has been trying for years to prevent the labeling of GM foods and seed in international trade to emulate its domestic policy which prohibits any label indication that foods contain GM ingredients, as 75-80% of all foods sold in the US do. Now it appears that the increasingly prevalent nightmare of a disease called “Morgellon’s Disease” may be a result of GM crops and food. Morgellon’s Disease was first described when a woman’s 3 year old son developed rashes and intensely itchy sores which produced weird multicolor fibers emerging from his skin. She put up a website about the condition in 2001 and named it “Morgellons Disease” after a 17th century report of a similar affliction. As it always does, the allopathic community of Western, drug-oriented physicians labeled sufferers as delusional. As a physician, I have a great deal of difficulty explaining how a delusion can produce colored fibers which protrude from the skin and continue to grow in a petri dish. Be that as it may, the multicolored fibers produced by the “delusion” have been analyzed and we now know that Morgellon’s Disease is no longer rare, nor is it mysterious any longer. A study of the fibers shows that they contain DNA from both a fungus and a bacterium which are used in the commercial preparation of genetically modified foods and non-food crops.

Al-Qaida Planning Nuclear Attack

Deposing before a Congressional Committee on Homeland Security early this week, these US intelligence officials told US lawmakers that the threat of nuclear attack by the Taliban was growing and there is need to enhance its security measures. Charles Allen, Undersecretary for Intelligence and Analysis and Chief Intelligence Officer at the Department of Homeland Security; and Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, the director of Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence for the Department of Energy testified before this key Congressional committee on nuclear terrorism on April 2. ''There's been a long-term effort by Al-Qaida, to develop an improvised nuclear device,'' Allen said. ''I have no doubt that Al-Qaida would like to obtain nuclear capability. I think the evidence in their statements that they've made over many years publicly indicate this,'' he argued in his testimony. Giving details of the Al-Qaida preparation, based on years on intelligence inputs, Mowatt-Larssen said: ''An Al-Qaida nuclear attack would be in the planning stages at the same time as several other plots, and only Al-Qaida's most senior leadership will know which plot will be approved.'' In keeping with Al-Qaida's normal management structures such as the role of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in the 9/11 attacks, Mowatt-Larssen said there is probably a single individual in charge, overseeing the effort to obtain materials and expertise. The intelligence officials commented that some nuclear experts / scientists may have joined Al-Qaida years ago, long before the world began paying adequate attention to the proliferation of the kinds of technologies that could yield a terrorist nuclear weapon. Referring to the planning of the 9/11 attack, Mowatt-Larssen said it was operationally very straightforward. ''It had a very small footprint, was highly compartmented. Al-Qaida's nuclear effort would be just as compartmented and probably would not require the involvement of more than a small number of operatives who carried out 9/11,'' he said. Mowatt-Larssen then went out to divulge his information about a prototypical Al-Qaida nuclear attack plot. This would have, he said, approval and oversight from Al-Qaida's most senior leadership, with possible assistance from other groups and a planner responsible for organizing the material, expertise and fabrication of a device; operational support facilitator, responsible for arranging travel, money, documents, food and other necessities for the cell; assets in the United States or within range of other Western targets to case locations for an attack and to help move the attack team into place; and finally, the attack team itself. Observing that the Al-Qaida's nuclear intent remains clear, he said it obtained a fatwa in May 2003 that approved the use of weapons of mass destruction. Al-Qaida spokesman Suleyman Abu Ghayth declared that it is Al-Qaida's right to kill four million Americans in retaliation for Muslim deaths that Al-Qaida blames on the United States. ''Osama bin Laden said in 1998 that it was an Islamic duty to acquire weapons of mass destruction. In 2006, bin Laden reiterated his statement that Al-Qaida will return to the United States. He said Al-Qaida has a track record of returning to finish a job they started. They failed at the World Trade Center in 1993. They came back in 2001. They canceled plans for chemical attacks in the US in 2003. ''We do not yet know when and where they intend to strike us next, but our past experience strongly suggests they are seeking an attack more spectacular than 9/11,'' he said.

Eyedrops that Probe the Brain

By dosing mice with eyedrops containing gene probes that then travel to the brain, Harvard researchers are using magnetic resonance imaging to observe the brains of living animals. The method could allow doctors to directly diagnose problems such as tumors, viral infections, and head injury, without the need for a brain biopsy. It could also be useful in monitoring patients and perhaps even targeting drug treatment to affected areas of the brain. The gene probe technique, reported in the latest issue of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal, allows MRI scans that show gliosis, the process in which glial cells in the brain form a fibrous network as a defense against damage. This scarring occurs in disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease and as a consequence of brain tumors and serious brain injury. The work is "really a good start," says Monique Stins, a visiting scientist at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, who was not involved in the research. However, she adds, "It's still far from the bedside. The safety of all these kinds of probes still has to be assessed." In earlier studies, radiologist Philip Liu and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School injected the probes directly into the brains of animals. Now they've incorporated them into eyedrops. To create the gene targeting probe, Liu and his colleagues hitched a common MRI probe to a DNA sequence complementary to the mRNA of a protein found in glial cells. They tested the probe in mice in which the blood-brain barrier--which regulates the movement of substances from the blood to the brain--had been breached. The barrier is compromised in many neurological disorders, including stroke, multiple sclerosis, and viral infections, although the process is not yet well understood. Liu and his colleagues are not sure how the probes penetrated the brain, but they believe it may have been via the lymphatic system, which includes vessels in the eyes. Fluid from the lymphatic system merges with blood in the vascular system, and if the blood-brain barrier is compromised, Liu says, probes could travel from the eye to the brain.

Carlyle Group: Control all Banking

So what's Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's call for changes in regulation of the financial markets all about? A clue may have been revealed today by Randal Quarles, former Under Secretary of the Treasury who led the Treasury Department's effort in the coordination of the President's Working Group on Financial Markets and is a current Managing Director at Carlyle Group. Quarles spoke at a luncheon meeting of the Washington DC-based National Economists Club. His topic: "Restructuring Financial Regulation". Quarles told the luncheon group that he chose the topic in January. Hmmm. Didn't Treasury Paulson just make the proposal to restructure the financial regulatory agencies last week? How did Quarles pick this topic back in January? Short-answer, Quarles is a major insider and his comments should be monitored to get a sense for what insiders are thinking. In his talk, Quarles said that estimates go into the hundreds of billions in terms of capital that will be required by the financial industry because of losses sustained as a result of the current crisis. He said there will be more financial institutions that will go under in coming months. He said that public markets will not supply the necessary funds because they don't have the capabilities to study in detail the risks and potential rewards of the complex financials of financial institutions. He said private equity firms have the capabilities to do so and to supply the necessary funds. (N.B. Carlyle Group is a private equity firm). Quarles stated that some changes in the structure of regulations that Paulson proposed were necessary but would take time to develop. He specifically stated that one regulation that needed to be changed is the limitation on the size of positions that non-banks can take in banks. So what you said here today is that you would like to see regulatory changes to make it easier for private equity to take major positions in banks? And private equity, through various entities on and offshore gets its money from banks. So what you want is an environment where private equity can borrow from banks to takeover banks? We might add this private equity acquisition of financial institutions will go on as the general public is scared off from investing in the financial institutions by scare headlines, or as Quarles would put it, "Public markets just don't have the capabilities to judge the risks and rewards of the various financial institutions." Translation: The public is not clued in on which firms the insiders have decided to let survive, like JPMorgan, and which they are going to takedown, like Bear Stearns.

The mechanism of poltergeist activity

The sight of small blonde girls watching television is guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of anyone who has watched the movie Poltergeist. We're right to be terrified, say physicists. Children generate poltergeist activity by channelling energy into the quantum mechanical vacuum. Pierro Brovetto, whose last known address was the Instituto Fisica Superiore, in Cagliari, Italy and his colleague Vera Maxia wanted to explain the origin of poltergeist phenomena, characterised by objects flying around the room "of their own accord". The researchers note that poltergeist encounters have been reported around the world and across different cultures, but tend to have one thing in common. "Poltergeist disturbances often occur in the neighbourhood of a pubescent child or a young woman," the authors note in their paper. So Brovetto and Maxia have come up with a mechanism to explain just how these women and children create such havoc. Like so many problems that arise in adolescence, puberty gets the blame. "Puberty is a modification of the child body which involves various organs, chiefly the brain," they state. Brovetto and Maxia hypothesise that the changes in the brain that occur at puberty involve fluctuations in electron activity that, in rare cases, can create disturbances up to a few metres around the outside of the brain. These disturbances would be similar in character to the quantum mechanical fluctuations that physicists believe occur in the vacuum, in which "virtual" particle and antiparticle pairs pop up for a fleeting moment, before they annihilate each other and disappear again. Brovetto and Maxia believe that the extra fluctuations triggered by the pubescent brain would substantially enhance the presence of the virtual particles surrounding the person. This could slowly increase the pressure of air around them, moving objects and even sending them hurtling across the room.

Deep Oil, Deep Politics

First, a few facts: In 1960, George H.W. Bush secretly formed a partnership between his Zapata-Offshore Oil Company and Permargo, a Mexican drilling-equipment company that was known as Perforaciones Marinas del Golfe at the time. Bush’s main partner at Permargo was Jorge Diaz Serrano, a Mexican national. Both Bush and Serrano were CIA assets at the time. Bush had placed Zapata-Offshore at the CIA’s disposal, allowing the Agency to use the company as a conduit to place counterintelligence people in the Caribbean. Serrano had assisted the CIA with the logistical aspects of its anti-Castro operations. Through Bush and Serrano, the CIA gained control of the presidency of Lopez Portillo and successfully infiltrated Pemex. Portillo became president of Mexico in 1976, the same year Bush became the director of the CIA. Bush’s business partner, Diaz Serrano, was Portillo’s most powerful aide. Portillo went on to make Serrano head of Pemex. In 1983, Diaz was convicted of defrauding the Mexican government out of $58 million and was sentenced to ten years in prison. With the introduction of foreign involvement in Mexico’s oil industry, Pemex might be used as a cover for intelligence operations once again. But who would be the targets of such operations?

Military-Industrial Complex: Eco-System

The future direction of present technological emergence is one that seeks to go beyond networks; rather it is towards ubiquitous technologies that offer a complete immersive (or rather ‘sub-mersive’) experience of a digitised environment. With networks there is always the possibility of moving into the grey and illusive areas in-between. These are the areas where the networks do not, or cannot, cover; neglected zones of poverty and risk, and insecure zones of warlord regions, and smuggling zones. With immersive technological mapping there may one day be no ‘spaces in-between’; the distinction between ‘in’ and ‘out’ dissolved; boundaries melted away under the digital gaze. In this article I argue that the US military-industrial complex is attempting to gain full dominance over the complete information spectrum, including dominating the electro-magnetic spectrum and the Internet, in order to gain full total coverage for purposes of containment and control.

Agenda Of The Secret World Government

Many people no longer believe that presidents, premier ministers and other "visible" officials rule their countries. Instead, they suspect that the real authority – one that is powerful, unwavering and secret – is concentrated in the hands of others. Like the masons for example. The truly paranoid have devised the so-called "International Conspiracy Theory," which tells how a handful of wealthy, highly positioned individuals rule the world. This group of decision-makers launches wars, invents deadly diseases and pumps the population full of narcotics, alcohol and pornography to get rid of the world's dead weight. Consequently, a population of 1 billion select individuals will someday remain. They will freely enjoy the blessings of nature – clean air, freshwater and natural food. Recently a British intelligence officer from M16 has asserted that this secret international organization does exist in his book, "The Conspirators Hierarchy: The Committee of Three Hundred." "During my career as an officer in British intelligence," Coleman writes, "I received access to strictly confidential documents on numerous occasions. Their contents were unexpectedly straightforward. I learned that there are powers that control the governments of many nations. I was taken aback and decided to inform a world living in ignorance. Imagine a powerful group that doesn't recognize any national borders that is involved in the financial, insurance, coal-mining, pharmaceutical and oil industries -- whose members only answer to the group. This is the ‘Committee of Three Hundred,' an elite group that has ruled the world from 1897. Its backbone today is the world's 300 most influential people." Coleman writes that secret organizations and think tanks work for the Committee of Three Hundred. A list of these institutions follows. As of 1921, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has consisted of the most influential individuals in the U.S. and Western world, ranging from current and previous presidents to CIA officials. The CFR was established by the American banker J.P. Morgan, and controls the U.S. Federal Reserve system, New York Stock Exchange and leading mass media. In 1954, the Bilderberg Group held its original conference uniting the American and European elite. (The organization was named after the Hotel de Bilderberg in Oosterbeek in the Netherlands where the meeting took place.) In 1973, a third influential structure came into being – the Trilateral Commission – consisting of representatives from the U.S., Europe and Japan. The organization's goal is to "create a mechanism of global planning and long-term repartition of resources." Since 1968, the Club of Rome has been one of the most important foreign affairs divisions of the Committee of Three Hundred. The organization unites scholars, globalists, futurists and internationalists of various suites. The organization has its own private intelligence agencies and "borrows" information from Interpol, the FSB and Mossad. The millionaire executive David Rockefeller controls the activities of these organizations. A short list of periphery organizations lending assistance to these four intelligence giants are: Round Table, David Millner Group, Order of St John, The German Marshall Fund of the United States, The China Fund, Inc., Fabian Society, Black Nobility, Mont Pelerin Society, Hellfire Club and the Masons. The mother of all international think thanks and research institutions is the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, which is beginning to help the Stanford Research Institute. Coleman writes that past and present members of the Committee of Three Hundred include the Queen of England, the Queen of the Netherlands, the Queen of Denmark, European royal families, George Bush, Edward Carter, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Francois Mitterrand, Jean Monet, Ernest Oppenheimer and his heir Henry. Goals: Coleman describes the new world order as seen by the Committee of Three Hundred. Leaders: There will be a single world state and monetary system ruled by unelected oligarchs and their royal lineage, who will appoint leaders from their own ranks in a feudal system as existed in the Middle Ages. Religion: Only one religion will be permitted in the form of a state church. The church has existed secretly since 1920. All Christian churches will be prohibited. Control: All individuals will have an identification number. The numbers will be entered into a composite file at NATO in Brussels together with details dossiers. Family: Marriages will be canceled. Children will be taken from their parents at an early age. They will be raised at special institutions like state property. Free sex will be compulsory. Children: If a woman gets pregnant after having two children, she will be immediately sent for an abortion and sterilization. Resources: Only members of the Committee of Three Hundred and select individuals will have the right to make use of natural resources. Agriculture will be completely controlled by the Committee of Three Hundred, and food processing will be strictly controlled. Social Policy: At least 4 billion "useless individuals" will be exterminated by 2050 as a result of territorial wars, organized deadly epidemics, quickly spreading diseases and hunger. Electrical energy, food and water will sufficiently provide for the white population of Western Europe and North America and only later different races. The populations of Canada, Western Europe and the U.S. will decrease more quickly than on other continents until the population reaches the controllable level of 1 billion. Of these individuals, 500 million will be Chinese and Japanese, who will be "chosen" as they have been subject to strict regulations and unquestioningly obeying authorities for centuries.

Real and Growing nuclear threat to U.S.

The government must act to reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism in a major U.S. city, senior government officials and top terrorism experts are scheduled to tell the Senate today. Testifying as part of a months-long Senate investigation into the government's ability to prevent a nuclear attack, the experts will paint a chilling picture of a post-nuclear America: hundreds of thousands dead, $1 trillion in damage and panic nationwide. "The prospect of terrorists detonating a nuclear device on American soil sometime within the next quarter-century is real and growing," according to prepared testimony from Gary Ackerman, research director of the Homeland Security Department-funded National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. "Such a calamitous attack would represent a game-changing event far exceeding the impact of9/11 on the nation." Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, director of the Department of Energy's Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, outlined several steps the government has taken to mitigate the threat. Among them are working with other governments to try to eliminate and secure nuclear stockpiles. "Today, al-Qaeda's nuclear intent remains clear," his testimony says. The near-monthly reports of people trying to smuggle "real or purported" nuclear materials means "that we collectively have not done enough to suppress trafficking and ensure the security of all nuclear materials worldwide," according to his testimony. The Senate homeland security committee is conducting the government's first investigation into nuclear terrorism and the needs and plans for responding. Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., said Tuesday that the hearing "is not to encourage unnecessary fear but to confront the threatening realities so that we can then deal with them in defense of our country and people." Charles Allen, intelligence chief at the Homeland Security Department, said, "One of our gravest concerns is the entry of a nuclear device or materials into the U.S."

Sonic Blaster + Laser = New Weapon

Imagine being hit by a nonlethal blast that seems to explode in front of you -- a deafening and blinding combination of light and sound. As the battle for "sonic blasters" heats up, a number of companies are looking at innovative ways to combine light and sound into new, nonlethal devices. One company, Wattre Corp., is working to couple its acoustic technology with a nonlethal laser. In a recent interview with DANGER ROOM, Curt Graber, president of Wattre Corp. explained this newfangled device, which puts together the company's collimated beam of sound with another firm's laser (which creates a sort of mid-air plasma ball). "It’s a laser that basically ignites the air in front of the person," Graber says. The combined effect is what Graber calls a "psycho-acoustical event." Wattre's technology, called Hyperspike, is a Guinness Book of World Records winner for "loudest speaker." As for the laser portion, produced by a company called Stellar Photonics, DANGER ROOM's David Hambling actually has a good writeup of the technology at New Scientist. "The device uses a technology known as dynamic pulse detonation (DPD). A short but intense laser pulse creates a ball of plasma, and a second laser pulse generates a supersonic shockwave within the plasma to generate a bright flash and a loud bang," he writes. The Plasma Acoustic Shield System will eventually combine a dynamic pulse detonation laser with a high power speaker for hailing or warning, and a dazzler light source." While the combined sound/laser weapon is certainly a novelty, Wattre Corp. has its eye on the growing long-range hailer market. It competed for a recent Navy contract that was ultimately awarded to American Technology Corp., which produces the Long Range Acoustic Device (Wattre protested the contract award; Graber says the Hyperspike technology has better beam forming capabilities in the human voice range, among other advantages). While Wattre lost its protest, they've sold units to foreign navies, among other customers; Wattre has also made sales to France for riot control. "Now it’s just a mater of people trying to figure out the best possible usage," he says.

The War on Terror and the NWO

One of the central assumptions of most studies about the New World Order is that a covert combination of the most economically and politically powerful people in the world, otherwise known as the ‘Establishment’, ‘Illuminati’, the ‘Insiders’, the ‘Brotherhood of the Snake’, the ‘Syndicate’ or even the ‘Committee of the 300’ – said to be secretly operating within and above the highest levels of government – are united in seeking to establish a ‘One World Government’ or ‘global fascist superstate.’ When describing this power-elite clique, most researchers into the New World Order typically refer to a wide-ranging network of policy-planning organisations, such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Bilderbergers, and the Trilateral Commission; and secret societies, such as the Illuminati, Freemasons, Skull and Bones, Bohemian Grove and the Templars. Membership of these organisations is said to be limited to selected politicians, government officials, academics, businessmen, bankers and journalists; in other words the leading private and public individuals in society. This exclusive group is charged with implementing, justifying, hiding and ultimately benefiting from the sole objective to which all these ‘Insiders’ are believed to be committed: world government.

Al-Qaeda: Western-Looking Militants

CIA director Michael Hayden said al-Qaeda was training operatives who "look western" and could enter the United States undetected to conduct terrorist attacks. General Hayden said the terror network over the past 18 months has established a safe haven in tribal areas along the Afghanistan-Pakistan where they are preparing militants for attacks against the West. "They are bringing operatives into that region for training - operatives that, a phrase I would use, wouldn't attract your attention if they were going through the customs line at Dulles (airport near Washington DC) with you," Hayden told NBC television. The new recruits "look western" and "would be able to come into this country ... without attracting the kind of attention that others might", he said.

UAV Helicopter Gets X-Ray Vision

The new RQ-8A Fire Scout UAV will be equipped with a SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar), that will enable it to map the ground below, and identify vehicles and buildings. The Lynx SAR weighs 110 pounds, and can also be carried by the Predator UAV. The max range of this SAR is 85 kilometers. But for the finest resolution, max range is 25 kilometers. SAR can see through clouds and sand storms. The RQ-8A is a helicopter type UAV that can stay in the air for up to eight hours at a time (five hour missions are more common), has a top speed of 230 kilometers an hour, and can operate over 200 kilometers from its controller (on land, or a ship.) The RQ-8A is being developed for use on smaller navy ships, as well as with army combat units. The U.S. Army version will be particularly useful supporting combat operations in urban areas. Both versions carry day and night cameras, GPS and targeting gear (laser range finders and designators). The RQ-8 is based on a two seat civilian helicopter (the Schweizer Model 333), and has a maximum takeoff weight of 1.5 tons. With its rotors folded (for storage on ships), the RQ-8 is 23 feet long and 9.4 feet high. Max payload is 600 pounds, meaning it would probably carry hundred pound Hellfire, or 44 pound Viper Strike missiles. Each RQ-8 UAV costs about $8 million (including a share of the ground control equipment and some spares.) The flight control software enables the RQ-8 to land and take off automatically

Bring Extinct Beings Back Via Cloning

“Modern life” is killing off the animal kingdom, but there are no easy solutions for the crisis. Some scientists believe that cloning may offer a partial solution. While it may make only a tiny dent in the problem, scientists argue that at least it would preserve the world’s biological heritage from total annihilation. Several scientists across the globe are taking cloning to a whole new level. They want to clone animals that are already extinct. In an earlier Daily Galaxy post "Neanderthal Man, the Sequel -Scientists Aim to Bring Extinct Species Back to Life," we discussed how paleontologists are piecing together the complete genomes of long-dead species, such as the woolly mammoth and the Neanderthals, in an effort to bring them back to life. Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark who is working on reconstructing the mammoth says he believes it is possible to bring back an extinct species like a mammoth if an extremely well preserved cell is found. He May have gotten his wish. A beautifully persevered baby mammoth was recently announced. "The mammoth has no defects except that its tail was bit off," said Alexei Tikhonov, deputy director of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a member of the delegation. “In terms of its state of preservation, this is the world's most valuable discovery,” he said. The six-month-old female calf was discovered on the Yamal peninsula of Russia and is thought to have died 10,000 years ago. The animal's trunk and eyes are still intact and even some of its fur remains on the body. The 130cm (4ft 3ins) tall, 50kg Siberian specimen dates to the end of the last Ice Age, when the great beasts were vanishing from the planet. Larry Agenbroad, director of the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs research centre in South Dakota, US, points out: "To find a juvenile mammoth in any condition is extremely rare." Despite the inherent challenges, Dr Agenbroad is optimistic about the potential for cloning or “resurrecting” the long gone species. "When we got the Jarkov mammoth [found frozen in Taimyr, Siberia, in 1997], the geneticists told me: 'if you can get us good DNA, we'll have a baby mammoth for you in 22 months'," he told BBC News.

UAV With Directed Energy Weapons

Although currently only a design proposal, the prospects of seeing a fly by wire drone seem to be nearing completion. The X-47Bis a sophisticated radio-controlled jet, that can be flying off aircraft carriers as early as next year. Besides calling the beast a "manhunter," the company plans to equip the unmanned plane with air-to-air missiles, laser and microwave firepower (called "directed energy and rechargeable weapons") that can take out enemy missiles. Sure, there have been drones before, many armed with missiles, but none as big and dangerous as this 19-foot craft that can carry a 4500-lb. payload. Besides why fight them when you can annihilate them without being seen or harming our own men?

Brain Lie Detectors: Already Being Used

A brain imaging technique called fMRI may be being used as a "lie detector" by US intelligence agencies, despite concerns over unreliability and the possibility of abuse, a leading academic has claimed. Professor Jonathan Marks, a bioethicist at Pennsylvania State University in the US and a lawyer at London's Matrix Chambers, says in an article in the American Journal of Law and Medicine that he believes that the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in interrogations of terror suspects "has begun the transition from the world of fantasy to fact". He draws this belief from the unpublished views of a senior US interrogator, who is quoted in Prof Mark's article as claiming that processes developed by "neuro-psychologists at London's University College and Mossad" are "now being used to screen terrorists" with "great results". Further, a Department of Defence directive speaks of the need to include other "technical devices" to bolster the traditional polygraph lie detector in its "credibility assessment" of terror suspects. Prof Marks warns of the "risk of mistreatment and abuse" of interrogation subjects in the event of a false positive. While it has been suggested in recent years that the technique could possibly be used for lie detection, as lying uses different parts of the brain to telling the truth, there has previously been little suggestion that it is in current use. fMRI techniques have been used for over a decade in diagnostic situations, to view brain tumours and other disorders. They work by using powerful magnetic fields to map tiny differences in oxygen usage in brain cells. Since active cells use more oxygen than inactive ones, it is possible to see what brain areas are working when a statement is made - and in theory, whether it is a lie or a genuine memory. However, Prof Marks says that while the technique has been tested on healthy people in low-stress environments, it is unclear whether they will work on terror suspects who may be being held in high-stress situations and who may have mental health issues that could be exacerbated by their incarceration. Prof Marks also worries that while the images created require subtle interpretation, they may inspire false confidence in interrogators, leading to more aggressive treatment. This is particularly a concern in the wake of President George W Bush's March 8 veto of legislation that would have prohibited the CIA using aggressive interrogation methods. "One of the real concerns I have is that you can see how people can begin to say 'the fMRI picked him out as a terrorist so let us give him a going over in the interrogation room,' " Prof Marks said in an interview with the American Association for the Advancement of Science's website EurekAlert.

Cellphones For Buying & Tracking

Payments by cellphone are expected to explode over the next few years as more stores are equipped to handle such transactions. Here's how it'll work: You go to the Gap, select a pair of khakis and wave your phone in front a reader at the cash register. The purchase price is instantly deducted from your checking account like a debit card or applied to a credit card account. A record of the purchase is also entered into the Gap's database. That's very convenient and will undeniably be a boon to shoppers, merchants and cellphone companies. What the technology also means, though, is that all cellphone owners, which is nearly everyone, will be technologically "tagged." In theory, anyone -- or any company or government agency -- with a desire to do so would be able to identify you from as much as 300 feet away and track you as you go about your business. Your cellphone would be constantly broadcasting your location, along with, possibly, your name, address and other potentially sensitive information. "The public has been slow to appreciate the privacy implications of this technology," said Simitian, who has a variety of other bills in the hopper to address various aspects of what's known as radio frequency identification, or RFID. "Most people don't realize that there's no law against who can read the information on an RFID tag, and no limit on what can be placed on the tag," Simitian said. OK, let's take a deep breath. RFID technology has been around since World War II, when transponders were placed in Allied aircraft to distinguish them from German planes. These days, RFID is everywhere. When workers wave an ID card or fob in front of a reader to enter their office building, that's RFID. When plastic tags are placed on merchandise in supermarkets or retail stores to manage inventory, that's RFID. RFID tags are starting to be inserted in driver's licenses and passports. The Legoland theme park in Denmark recently experimented with giving RFID wristbands to kids so they could easily be found by parents. (A spokeswoman said there were no plans to test the technology at the Legoland in Carlsbad.) China is now in the process of issuing RFID-equipped national ID cards to all of its 1.3 billion citizens. There's no question RFID can make official documents harder to fake and make life much easier for consumers. Think how fast a checkout line would move if everyone was carrying an RFID-equipped cellphone or credit card instead of cash or old-fashioned, magnetic-stripped plastic. Cellphone companies love the technology because they anticipate customers using more minutes and being less likely to switch services once they've turned their handset into an e-wallet. "Everybody's interested in this," said Mark Desautels, vice president of CTIA -- The Wireless Assn., an industry group. "There's an awful lot of experimentation taking place throughout the industry."

UN Meeting on ETs/UFOs More Credible

Veteran UFO researcher Robert VanDerClock has confirmed that he has met with and seen the credentials of an anonymous source who disclosed that a secret UN meeting had taken place on February 12 that discussed UFOs and extraterrestrial life. In a February 13 article first announcing the secret UN meeting, the anonymous source disclosed that the meeting was called in response to national governments concerns about increases in global UFO sightings. In a later article, the anonymous source, henceforth referred to as “Source A”, disclosed a time table existed for full disclosure of extraterrestrial life by 2017. In a phone interview conducted with me on March 25, VanDerClock confirmed that he had met with Source A approximately one year earlier. At the time, Source A was accompanied by the same two New York researchers, Clay and Shawn Pickering, who were responsible for the initial release of information concerning the February 12 meeting. At their meeting one year ago, VanDerClock personally reviewed the military credentials of Source A that were, in VanDerClock’s opinion, “impeccable”. Source A showed Vanderclock an album of his military service in classified facilities. This helps confirm some of the claims of Source A of having worked in classified facilities where he was exposed to projects involving extraterrestrial technology and life. Source A possessed, for example, a classified document he obtained in 1982 that detailed retrieval operations for crashed extraterrestrial vehicles that was another version of the famed Special Operations Manual that publicly emerged in 1994. VanDerClock’s confirmation of Source A’s military background and service in highly classified facilities is significant since Source A claims he was instructed to brief the UN meeting on UFO sightings and extraterrestrial life under extraordinary security procedures. Source A had claimed that he was authorized leak information about the UN meeting, prior to its occurrence, by his superior, an undisclosed Navy admiral to the general public. The Pickering brothers claimed to have received the information on February 11, and relayed the information to me on February 12, soon after the meeting had taken place. According to VanDerClock, Source A is very reliable and there is no reason to doubt what he has disclosed so far. VanDerClock believes Source A is being directed to release information by an admiral as Source A claims. Asked where he would place Source A in terms of a hypothetical credibility scale from zero to 100, VanDerClock replied, around 92%. Vanderclock ranks Source A’s testimony very highly, and ranks him among the three most important whistleblowers he has come across. He places Source A alongside former military intelligence officer Lt Col. Philip Corso, Snr, and former NASA rocket specialist, Clark McClelland, as the three most significant ‘insiders’ to so far have revealed accurate information on UFOs and extraterrestrial life. Vanderclock was therefore highly confident that the secret UN meeting on UFOs/extraterrestrials occurred on February 12 as claimed by Source A.

Supercollider Could Destroy the Universe

The Cernier Company or CERN, the world’s largest physics research firm, is currently in the process of building what would be the world’s largest working supercollider. Known as “Large Hadron Collider,” or LHC, the device is 27 kilometers (16.7 miles) long and resides in a tunnel approximately 100 meters beneath the Franco-Swiss border, just outside of Geneva. By accelerating protons toward each other at 99.999999% the speed of light the LHC can recreate conditions similar to those that resulted from the Big Bang, ultimately alighting a great deal about the particles and forces that comprise our Universe. LHC functions by accelerating two counter-rotating beams of protons toward each other at high speeds. By cooling magnets to near absolute zero (-273 degrees celcius) with an enormous cryogenics system, the LHC can move particles toward each other at speeds only one millionth of a percent away from the speed of light. And while Physicists have the logistics of the LHC well in hand ideas about its outcome are strictly theoretical. According to one scenario tiny black holes could be produced which hopefully would decay into what is known as Hawking radiation (the tinier the black hole, the faster it evaporates). If these black holes fail to decay, however, the consequences could be disasterous. CERN software developer Ran Livneh has expressed some concerns about the project: This physical realm is unknown, and dangerous phenomena might arise…Any physicist will tell you that there is no way to prove that generated black holes will decay. The consequences of being mistaken are unfathomable. This subject deserves serious unbiased discussion.

Seeking UFOs, deep underground

Peter Davenport has a radio voice, the kind of exaggerated baritone that cuts through walls and most doors, but not this one. This is solid steel and a foot thick. It is Davenport's door, which opens into a tunnel leading below ground to what was once a nuclear missile complex here in the desert of eastern Washington. "That door," he says with dramatic pause. "That door weighs 4,000 pounds. It's been reinforced to withstand a nuclear blast." The Air Force decommissioned the site in the mid-1960s and it sat empty for most of the time since. Davenport, longtime director of the National UFO Reporting Center, a nonprofit clearinghouse and 24-hour hotline for UFO sightings, bought it for $100,000 two years ago to turn into his new headquarters. Why does a man buy an old windowless missile complex deep underground, only to spend his days tracking unidentified objects flying through the sky? Davenport doesn't have an answer. Furthermore, he doesn't need one. As a full-time UFO investigator and possessor of one of the world's most comprehensive, though unofficial, UFO databases, his life already runs counter to convention. The center, in continuous operation since 1970, is known worldwide among those interested in UFOs: scientists as well as people surfing the Web. The hotline is posted on various UFO websites, and calls -- as many as 20,000 in a year -- come from people who believe they've seen or experienced something beyond the ordinary, potentially involving extraterrestrials. Although mainstream science tends to dismiss the subject, along with Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, a number of prominent scientists and much of the public -- as many as 60%, according to polls -- believe UFOs exist and should be studied. As a corollary, a large number of astronomers believe life in other parts of the universe is not only possible but likely.

US Readies April Nuclear Attack On Iran

Russian Foreign Ministry Officials are reported to be ‘alarmed’ today over a ‘presentation’ made by the United States War Leaders to President Putin at this weeks NATO summit in Romania and which details the Americans plan to begin a nuclear attack against Irans atomic facilities in the next two weeks. Most disturbing of these reports, according to Foreign Ministry Analysts, are the United States ‘offers and threats’ towards Russia to ‘remain neutral’ in this conflict or face the combined weight of the American and EU central banks deliberate collapsing of the Western banking system, and US dollar, and which is estimated will cause the loss of nearly $800 billion of Russian foreign reserves. To the ‘offers’ presented to President Putin for keeping Russia out of this war, these reports continue, will be NATO’s rejection of Ukraine and Georgia membership into the Western Military Alliance and the ending of the planned US Missile Shield being planned for Poland and the Czech Republic. In what, sadly, passes for diplomacy these days with the United States, this ‘presentation’ to President Putin is eerily reminiscent of the offer made to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan prior to the US invasion of their country after their rejection of the American offer, and which French news sources reported was stated, “Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs." To the likelihood of the US carrying out their brutal expansion of their war against the Muslim peoples of the World with a nuclear attack upon Iran there remains today little doubt as Saudi Arabia has ordered their people to prepare for nuclear war, and as we can read as reported by Iran’s Press TV News Service, and which says: "Saudi Arabia is reportedly preparing to counter any ’radioactive hazards’ which may result from a US strike on Iran’s nuclear plants.

Canada Christian Ministry shut down

The Canadian government has ordered a Christian ministry that teaches doctrine and the differences between Christians and cults shut down because its reference materials were "critical" of the beliefs of those who are not Christian, WND has learned. So what used to be called MacGregor Ministries with offerings in how to recognize and eliminate "faulty fads" in Christian churches has been re-created in the United States, and now operates under the name MM Outreach Media Ministries. Lorri MacGregor, who has dedicated her life to explaining the straight and narrow of Christian beliefs since she found her way out of the Jehovah's Witness system years ago, told WND Canada's version of a "hate crimes" law prevented their work from continuing as it had for nearly 30 years. "Canada is no longer a Christian nation," she said. "And watch out America!" The issue of the ministry's charities license in Canada, allowing it to operate as a ministry, came up during a routine audit of the ministry's finances, which was uneventful. The auditor that originally looked at our books told us her supervisor had said she wanted us shut down," Mrs. MacGregor said, "Canada has very strong hate laws." She said the ministry points out the differences between Christianity and various cult beliefs, but also with respect, and never as a proponent. She said the work always is in response to a question or issue. "When a group such as Jehovah's Witnesses said of our doctrine we're worshipping a freakish three-headed God (the Trinity), we should be able to respond," she said. "We say, 'Here's the doctrine of the Trinity and here is where it is in the Scripture.'" That, however, violates Canada's hate crimes laws, and the ministry was ordered to either make wholesale changes in its presentations, or shut down. "There was nothing we could do that would please them," she said. "They wanted us every time we criticized something to say, 'So Christianity is equal to Buddhism, Islam, Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses… Just decide for yourself.'" "We cannot do that," she said of the work she and her husband, Keith, have spent their lives assembling. "She gave us an ultimatum that we needed to say that all religions are equal, Lorri MacGregor was to stop writing our magazine on the cults, we were to remove our websites and stop selling any products to help [teach about] the cults, and any future DVDs that we do on the Bible must not be persuasive," the couple alerted friends in an e-mail. "We could not live under those restrictions." "We chose to shut down the ministry and we are in Washington to sign papers to start up a U.S. corporation and also start the long process of applyign for 501(c)3 status in the U.S. We have been told that within five to 10 years, the U.S. government will be in the same position as the Canadian government and t hey will also go after Christian apologetics groups," the alert continued. "It was a no-win situation. We didn't want to see our charity money eaten up by lawyers," Mrs. MacGregor told WND. "It was heart-wrenching."

Navy Creating Battlefield Laser Guns

The Navy is pushing ahead with a five-year, $163 million dollar plan to bring the "Holy Grail" of energy weapons up to battlefield strength. For decades, scientists have been slowly working on a laser that never runs out of shots -- and can be "tuned" to blast through the air, at just the right wavelength. And for most of that time, all they could get what a laser at lightbulb-strength. But in 2004, researchers at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility finally managed to assemble a "Free Electron Laser," or FEL, that could generate 10,000 watts of power. Now, the Navy has started an effort to design and build a new FEL, 10 times as strong. That would bring the laser up to 100 kilowatts -- what's considered the minimum threshold for weapons-grade. But it would also be just a stepping stone, on the way to an energy weapon as powerful as any produced.

Fingerprint Scanners Track Workers

Some workers are doing it at Dunkin' Donuts, at Hilton hotels, even at Marine Corps bases. Employees at a growing number of businesses are starting and ending their days by pressing a hand or finger to a scanner that logs the precise time of their arrival and departure—information that is automatically reflected in payroll records. Manufacturers say these biometric devices improve efficiency and streamline payroll operations. Employers big and small buy them with the dual goals of keeping workers honest and automating outdated record-keeping systems that rely on paper time sheets. The International Biometric Group, a consulting firm, estimated that $635 million worth of these high-tech devices were sold last year, and projects that the industry will be worth more than $1 billion by 2011. Ingersoll Rand Security Technologies, a leading manufacturer of hand scanners based in Campbell, Calif., said it has sold at least 150,000 of the devices to Dunkin' Donuts and McDonald's franchises, Hilton hotels and to Marine Corps bases, who use them to track civilian hours. Scores of civil servants who are members of Local 375 of the Civil Service Technical Guild rallied Tuesday against a plan to add the city medical examiner's office to the list of 17 city agencies which already have the scanners in place. The city expects to save $60 million per year by modernizing a complicated record keeping system that now requires one full-time timekeeper for every 100 to 250 employees. The new system, dubbed CityTime, would free up thousands of city employees to do less paper-pushing. Another benefit of the system is curtailing fraud. Several times each year, New York City's Department of Investigation charges city employees with taking unauthorized time off and falsifying timecards to make it looked as though they worked. Other cities have embraced similar technology.

Cyborg Insects May Explain Rev 9:7-11

Biological weapons delivered by cyborg insects. It sounds like a nightmare scenario straight out of the wilder realms of science fiction, but it could be a reality, if a current Pentagon project comes to fruition. Right now, researchers are already growing insects with electronics inside them. They're creating cyborg moths and flying beetles that can be remotely controlled. One day, the U.S. military may field squadrons of winged insect/machine hybrids with on-board audio, video or chemical sensors. These cyborg insects could conduct surveillance and reconnaissance missions on distant battlefields, in far-off caves, or maybe even in cities closer to home, and transmit detailed data back to their handlers at U.S. military bases. Today, many people fear U.S. government surveillance of email and cell phone communications. With this program, the Pentagon aims to exponentially increase the paranoia. Imagine a world in which any insect fluttering past your window may be a remote-controlled spy, packed with surveillance equipment. Even more frightening is the prospect that such creatures could be weaponized, and the possibility, according to one scientist intimately familiar with the project, that these cyborg insects might be armed with "bio weapons." These half insect have cyborg, genetically modified insects may explain Revelation 9: 7-11 in the Holy Bible.

Ghostly Orbs perplex researchers

Tens of thousands of ordinary people around the globe are reporting mysterious spheres of light known as ORBS, which have started appearing on their digital photographs. A few scientists are taking this phenomenon seriously and incredibly claim to have found evidence of beings from other dimensions. The world’s first conference on the Orbs Phenomenon recently took place in Sedona, Arizona - where several scientists controversially stated that orbs, spherical or circular objects that are appearing on digital pictures - demonstrate good evidence of ‘other worldly’ life forms. Their conclusions, if correct, could have huge implications for the way we view our universe and our part in it. Dr. Klaus Heinemann, a former research professor at Stanford University and researcher in materials science for NASA, the American space agency says ‘ There is no doubt in my mind that the Orbs may well be one of the most significant ‘outside of this reality’ phenomena mankind at large has ever witnessed’. Heinemann’s fascination with Orbs began in September 2004, when he noticed a pale but clearly defined small circle of light on several pictures that his wife had taken at a gathering of spiritual healers. ‘ When I first saw the spheres, like thousands of people I presumed they were due to dust particles, flash anomalies, water particles and so on. But I was sufficiently intrigued, that I quickly returned to the room in which the pictures were taken in the hope of finding a rational explanation. None was forthcoming. ‘ As a scientist with considerable experience in sophisticated microscope techniques which examine down to atomic levels of optical resolution, Heinemann decided to try and discover the cause of the mysterious circles. He and his wife began taking hundreds of digital photographs at random events to see what happened. Apparently, high definition digital technology can enhance the appearance of something that would otherwise at very low contrast, not previously have appeared on older type cameras hence why Heinemann states that we are now witnessing this new phenomenon. Absurd though it may sound, Heinemann quickly realised that if he asked the orbs to appear on his pictures, he claims they appeared more regularly especially at spiritual gatherings. We were quickly able to eliminate the common problems associated with photography such as dust particles, water droplets, reflections and a host of other likely causes and can now easily differentiate between photographic anomalies and real orb pictures. For the novice, discerning fake orbs takes time, practise and diligence. The more photographs you take, the more easily you will eventually be able to distinguish orb-like features from real orbs.’ Heinemann set up dozens of experiments using two cameras on static tripods under controlled conditions. His early experiments found that Orbs can move very fast, up to 500mph or more, so in order for him to obtain clear pictures the orbs needed to remain still, which at times they did. This fact alone, claims Heinemann, implies some level of conscious intelligence.
Eventually Heinemann concluded that he was witnessing intelligences from other realties adding ‘ Until now there has been a huge amount of anecdotal evidence that the spirit world exists, and I believe it’s no longer anecdotal as thanks to digital technology we can now see it. We are dealing with a non-physical- albeit real - phenomena’.

Planet Earth As A Chessboard

The man who wrote The Grand Chessboard -- Zbigniew Brzezinski -- is a member of these elite extra-legal bodies and his book sets out the rules for the planet. I have only read excerpts, which I do not agree with in any way for one big reason: the planet is not a chessboard and its peoples are "not merely players" (1) to be moved, supplanted, or killed by the two players, who are, strangely enough, also mere human beings. Those two players would be the US president and whoever grabs the Eurasian area to play opposition to our need for resources. This causes a strange tangle on the earth; i.e., a few humans are gods, as in the "old days" when they ascended to various thrones and enslaved their peoples to kowtow to them while they stole local wealth for varying periods of time. The most interesting thing is that the people vying for the United States presidency are all part and parcel of the new American empire which Brzezinski and his cohorts hope to birth before the planet perishes under the rape of its resources. The future is theirs, not ours as pawns.

Radiation Monitors Cannot Detect Uranium

Customs inspectors at a pier in New York City send a sealed cargo container just taken off a ship from Istanbul through a radiation scanner. A dozen new tractors seem to be inside. Although the detector senses no radiation, the inspectors open the container anyway. Their handheld units show no radiation either, so they allow the container to leave. A private hauler drives it to a small Midwestern city. There terrorist cell members remove what was their final shipment of highly enriched uranium, concealed as 10 metal washers in the tractor engines, together weighing two kilograms. Months later an improvised nuclear device with a yield of one kiloton is detonated in Los Angeles. The blast, fire and airborne radioactivity kill more than 100,000 people. Virtually all shipping into the U.S. is halted, precipitating a financial crisis. Military operations commence in the Middle East after forensics and intelligence efforts trace the plot to cells in Pakistan and Iran. Are these terrible events far-fetched? Twice in recent years the two of us helped an ABC News team that smuggled a soda can–size cylinder of depleted uranium through radiation detectors at U.S. ports. The material did not pose a danger to anyone, but it did emit a radiation signature comparable to that of highly enriched uranium (HEU), which can be assembled into a nuclear bomb. As you read this article, the Bush administration and the U.S. Congress are likely considering spending billions of dollars for additional detectors at ports and other border crossings—detectors that would also fail to reliably spot our cylinder or a similar amount of HEU. A crude nuclear device constructed with HEU poses the greatest risk of mass destruction by terrorists. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the U.S. government sought to prevent the smuggling of nuclear weapons and materials. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security instituted what it called a “layered defense,” built largely around costly radiation detectors.

Financial Conspiracy And World Events

Let’s turn to the U.S. personage that conspiracy theorists most often mention as being at the epicenter of whatever elite plan is reputed to exist. This would be David Rockefeller, the 92-year-old multibillionaire godfather of the world’s financial elite. The lengthy Wikipedia article on Rockefeller provides the following version of a celebrated statement he allegedly made in an opening speech at the Bilderberg conference in Baden-Baden, Germany, in June 1991: "We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during these years. But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government which will never again know war, but only peace and prosperity for the whole of humanity. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in the past centuries." This speech was made 17 years ago. It came at the beginning in the U.S. of the Bill Clinton administration. Rockefeller speaks of an "us." This "us," he says, has been having meetings for almost 40 years. If you add the 17 years since he gave the speech it was 57 years ago—two full generations. Not only has "us" developed a "plan for the world," but the attempt to "develop" the plan has evidently been successful, at least in Rockefeller’s mind. The ultimate goal of "us" is to create "the supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers." This will lead, he says, toward a "world government which will never again know war." Average family income in the U.S. has steadily eroded while the share of the nation’s wealth held by the richest income brackets has soared. Some Wall Street hedge fund managers are making $1 billion a year while the number of homeless, including war veterans, pushes a million. The housing bubble has led to a huge inflation of real estate prices in the U.S. Millions of homes are falling into the hands of the bankers through foreclosure. Rising property taxes based on inflated land assessments have forced millions of lower-and middle-income people and elderly out of their homes. The total tax burden on Americans from federal, state, and local governments now exceeds forty percent of income and is rising. Gasoline prices are soaring even as companies like Exxon-Mobil are recording record profits. Other commodity prices are going up steadily, including food prices, with some countries starting to experience near-famine conditions. 40 million people in America are officially classified as "food insecure." Corporate control of water and mineral resources has removed much of what is available from the public commons, and the deregulation of energy production has led to huge increases in the costs of electricity in many areas. The destruction of family farming in the U.S. by NAFTA (along with family farming in Mexico and Canada) has been mirrored by policies toward other nations on the part of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Since the 1980s the U.S. has been fighting wars throughout the world either directly or by proxy. The former Yugoslavia was dismembered by NATO. Under cover of 9/11 and by utilizing off-the-shelf plans, the U.S. is now engaged in the military conquest and permanent military occupation of the Middle East. A worldwide encirclement of Russia and China by U.S. and NATO forces is underway, and a new push to militarize space has begun.

Nox Defense creates RFID for tracking

An employee looking to steal confidential information from his employer sneaks into what should be a secure back room after hours. He pulls charts and files from a top-level financial meeting and slides them into his briefcase before heading back out. What the insider doesn't know is that his shoes picked up hundreds of tiny radio frequency identification (RFID) chips that had been scattered across the floor. As he passes by an RFID reader near the front door of his office building, security will be alerted that he had accessed a secure area. The evidence is all over the soles of his shoes. Sound a little like a scene from a James Bond movie? It's not. Nox Defense, an arm of SimplyRFID Inc., said it has created an invisible perimeter-defense system designed to track things and people in real time -- all without their knowledge. The system that is made up of several technological pieces -- RFID chips the size of grains of sand and an RFID and video camera surveillance system. "The key to an effective surveillance system is intelligence in the equipment itself," said Carl Brown, president of Nox Defense. "It does no good to install a thousand video cameras if a thousand people have to watch them all day. ... Everybody is doing surveillance nowadays everywhere. They just don't have a setup that tells them what is important video to look at. RFID technology will tell you when something was moved, where it was moved, and then you can check the corresponding video." Brown explained that the RFID chips, or spy chips, are perfect for what he calls clandestine surveillance. The RFID readers can be hidden in an office building or warehouse, and the RFID tags can be placed on company products or property -- even on employee name tags or ID badges. Thieves, intruders and even personnel see nothing of the tracking system. If an employee in the warehouse walks off with a plasma TV or loads seven instead of five computers into the delivery truck, it can be tracked with the RFID technology. And since the RFID chips will tell security what time the equipment was moved, the company can check the digital video archives for that time and that section of the warehouse. The Nox RFID readers and the digital video cameras are all tied into software that tracks the data feeds and allows security to quickly call up, for instance, all the video shot that day of a particular employee or of the video taken of the area where certain products are stored, explained Brown. The software creates data files of the RFID and video data.

'Manhunting' Drone to Fly Next Year

It hasn't even flown yet, but defense company Northrop Grumman says its killer drone can do everything from ballistic missile defense to "manhunting" for "irregular force attack." At a press briefing earlier this week in Washington, Scott Winship, Northrop's vice president and program manager of Navy Unmanned Combat Air Systems showed a PowerPoint slide with so many mission acronyms that even he admitted he didn't know off the top of his head what some of them were. I managed to jot down a few, but they included: SCAR, ESM, SOF support, CAS interdiction and SEAD/EW. That's a mouthful. The big mystery was SCAR; it turns out to stand for strike-coordinated armed reconnaissance. Why throw out all the mission sets? Well, in part, because there needs to be a case for why the X-47B is needed, and that means knowing how it will operate, and what missions it can fulfill. Winship says Northrop will be working on a theoretical "day in the life" of X-47B to demonstrate this all-in-one combat drone. Northrop topped Boeing in a $635 million contract to develop the carrier-based drone. The X-47B is now set to begin flying in November '09, Winship said, and two years later it's scheduled to complete it first carrier landing.

Archbishop Warns Against Occult Forces

The Archbishop is particularly concerned about people using the supernatural to contact deceased loved ones. "There's become a great deal more freedom than there used to be decades ago, with mind and spirit stuff; new age religions," he said. "All the sort of stuff you see very prominently in book stores. But there's also been a large migrant intake into this country from people who haven't been impacted by Western cynical secularism, but culturally have a strong belief in the afterlife and in supernatural beings; in ghosts and spirits."... He says if a grieving person tries to and then believes they do make contact with a loved one, and then achieves some type of closure or comfort from that, there is no way to be sure a supernatural visitor is actually the person. "From the biblical and Christian point of view, this universe has within it spiritual forces, many of which are evil or occult and which will be quite keen to open us up," he said. "If we're prepared to dabble in occult things then we will open ourselves up to these evil forces. You can never be sure that the person you're contacting is really - in fact you can be pretty sure, it's not the person you think it is.