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London Power Cut

The BBC reports:

A rush-hour power cut has caused major disruption on rail and Tube services in London and the South East.

Power returned to the system at about 1900 BST but the knock-on effects are still being felt by commuters struggling home.

Network Rail says between 500 and 1,000 trains have been affected by the power cut, caused by a fault with the National Grid.

Train company Connex reported the power went out between London and Ashford, in Kent.

South London was hardest hit and Transport for London said 60% of the Tube network was affected.

Extremely busy

Stations and trains were evacuated as commuters using the Tube were plunged into darkness and some were stuck underground as the power went off at about 1820 BST.

Buses quickly became extremely busy and lines of people waiting for taxis grew as commuters abandoned packed Tube platforms.

London Fire Brigade took 400 calls and say they rescued about 100 people who were stuck in lifts.

We need more cabs
Stranded commuter Jane Marriott
Mayor of London Ken Livingstone said at least 250,000 people were affected and said the situation showed the need for a serious look at the National Grid and why power went down for so long.

"We've never had this catastrophic failure before and we clearly can't have it again," he said.

British Transport Police say Tube services on the East London Line and the Central Line have been restored.

There are limited services on other lines but the Jubilee, Circle and Hammersmith and City lines are still suspended.

Commuter Jane Marriott, 27, was trying to get to Paddington from Canada Water on the Tube, but ended up taking the bus and walking part of the way.

She said: "It's absolute chaos, it's very wet which is making people very miserable.

"A bit of the Blitz spirit is kicking in and people are talking to each other which is nice, but we need more cabs and more bus lanes."

Businesses and homes in Brixton, Battersea and London Bridge were plunged into darkness and police said 270 sets of traffic lights went out.

St Thomas's Hospital, in south-east London was among those which had to rely on back-up power generators.

Network Rail spokesman Kevin Groves said the situation was "unprecedented" as far as he knew.

'Very similar to New York'

The National Grid is investigating the cause of the fault but spokesman Sean Regan said any loss of power supply was "an unusual occurrence".

He added: "There was a fault in the 275,000 volt system affecting a ring around London, which occurred at 1826 BST.

"Power to the distribution network in London was restored at 1900 BST.

"Obviously it is going to take the regional distribution network some time to restore supplies to the end users of their system. Hopefully it shouldn't be long now."

Civil servant Alan Basford, 52, from Meopham, Kent, added: "This disruption seems very similar to what happened in New York, and it's also a bit strange the two events have happened close together."

© BBC MMIII

Hubble Telescope Takes Mars Close-Up

Hubble captured an image of Mars with a resolution of 27 kilometres thanks to the planet's recent fly-by (Image: NASA)

(via NewScientist)

Will Knight, NewScientist.com news service, writes:


Hubble captured an image of Mars with a resolution of 27 kilometres thanks to the planet's recent fly-by (Image: NASA)

To coincide with the closest encounter between Mars and Earth in 60,000 years, the Hubble Space Telescope has captured a spectacular new image of the Red Planet.

At 0932 GMT on Wednesday, Mars passed within 55,760,220 kilometres of the Earth - just 145 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. The planets will not be so near again until 28 August, 2287.

Such close passes are both rare and irregularly timed because of a complex interaction of the planets' orbits. Earth and Mars pass around the Sun on a similar plane of inclination but travel at different speeds.

Periodically, they coincide along a bearing from the Sun. But even then the distance between them can vary significantly, because the two planets have differently shaped elliptical orbits. When the planets were aligned in 1999, they were 87 million kilometres apart.

The Hubble image was taken 11 hours before the planets were at their closest, though the extra distance between them was just 2300 kilometres.

The image can resolve features on the surface of Mars measuring just 27 kilometres across. "These are the best that have ever been, and will ever be, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope," says Michael Wolff of the Space Science Institute in Colorado, US.

Among the features revealed in the Hubble image is Sinus Meridiani, the location of many meteorite impacts and seen as a dark blotch to the left of the image. This is where Opportunity, one of NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers, is scheduled to land in January 2004.

Fired Worker Kills Six in Chicago Auto Shop

Robert E. Pierre, Washington Post, writes:

CHICAGO, Aug. 27 -- A disgruntled former employee returned this morning to the South Side auto supply house where he worked until six months ago and shot to death six former co-workers before being gunned down by police, authorities said.

The man, Salvador Tapia, 36, of Chicago had allegedly made threatening phone calls since he was fired this year because of tardiness and poor performance. But police said they had received no formal complaints until 8:37 a.m. today when an employee, who was in the warehouse as Tapia began shooting, escaped and called 911 from a diner next door.

The employee, whose hands had been tied by Tapia, rushed outside and warned a co-worker who was arriving late for work not to go inside Windy City Core Supply. Everyone who remained inside was killed. Officials said the warehouse was cluttered with crates and 55-gallon drums full of auto parts, making escape nearly impossible.

"It appears that he went through the warehouse shooting people," said Acting Police Superintendent Philip Cline, who went to the scene. "There is little room to maneuver. There's really only one way out and one way in. Once he's inside the door, he's got them cornered."

When police arrived, Cline said, Tapia twice emerged from the warehouse to shoot at officers, who returned fire but did not hit him. Officers stormed the factory because the employee who escaped said five people had been shot. Members of a tactical team were shot at again when they entered, Cline said, and they returned fire, killing Tapia.

Tapia had been arrested 12 times since 1989 in connection with offenses including carrying a gun, aggravated assault, domestic violence and drunken driving.

The shooting occurred in Bridgeport, a working-class community on Chicago's South Side that was home to former mayor Richard J. Daley. The surrounding neighborhood contains small brick rowhouses, and two grills are on the same block as Windy City. One of them, Dox, was where the employee ran to call 911.

A driver who had tried to make a delivery to the warehouse ran to Kevin's Hamburger Heaven, waitress Joanne Pasternak said. The driver "tried to make a delivery and couldn't get in," Pasternak told the Chicago Sun-Times. "He came over to our restaurant and said they had hostages in there and asked us to call the police."

In a spate of recent workplace shootings, a worker with a shotgun and rifle killed five people and wounded eight others July 8 in Meridian, Miss., and a factory worker in Jefferson City, Mo., fatally shot three employees July 2 and then killed himself after a shootout with police.

Authorities said today's incident was Chicago's worst workplace shooting.

Handgun-Free America, which is compiling a list of workplace shootings in the United States, has found 115 shootings over the past 15 years in which an employee or former employee killed or injured a co-worker with a gun.

"The fact that guns are available is a factor," Executive Director Chris McGrath said.

Cline, the acting police superintendent, said that it is too easy to get guns, despite a ban on handguns in Chicago. Tapia used a Walther PP .380 semiautomatic.

"Here's someone who should have never had a gun," Cline said.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

Burining Man Bingo

Blogger and tech journalist Paul Boutin called for a Black Rock City version of Hipster Bingo, and you responded. BoingBoing reader Lev Johnson created the Burningman Bingo card, and here it is.

(via BoingBoing)

NTT Verifies Diamond Semiconductor Operation at 81 GHz

Yoshiko Hara, EE Times, reports:

TOKYO — Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT) has developed a diamond semiconductor device that operates at 81 GHz frequency, more than twice the speed of earlier devices. The advance promises to make amplification in the millimeter-wave band from 30 to 300 GHz possible for the first time, NTT claimed.

Diamond is expected to be the next generation semiconductor material because of its high thermal conductivity, high breakdown voltage and high carrier mobility. Together, these characteristics makes diamond semiconductors most suitable for high frequency, high power devices.

But diamond semiconductors are prone to defects and impurities that have hindered development of prototype devices with performance close to the expected, theoretical performance of diamond semiconductor devices.

NTT Basic Research Laboratory said it developed a diamond semiconductor thin-film layer in April 2002 that overcomes some of these problems. NTT researchers found that crystal defects, carbon graphite and impurities hurt performance. They eliminated crystal defects and graphite and reduced impurities to 1/20th of previous materials using a high purity gas to grow the diamond layer at lower temperatures of 650-750 degrees C.

The resulting diamond layer showed a carrier mobility at 1300 cm2/Vs, about 20 times higher when compared to previous prototypes, NTT said.

The NTT lab has been in collaboration with the University of Ulm in Germany, which had already succeeded in fabricating FET devices, to develop a diamond semiconductor device using its diamond thin-film layer.

The joint team formed T-shaped gates on the diamond layer, which is on a 3-mm2 diamond substrate. The gate width, which determines the performance of devices, is 0.2 micron. The device operated continuously at 81 GHz. Once the peripherals technology is established, NTT researchers said they expect to boost the output power of the device as high as 30 W/mm, the level required for practical use.

NTT is now working to further decrease impurities to improve the quality of diamond crystal. It is targeting devices with an operating frequency of 200 GHz and an output power of 30 W/mm.

The diamond devices are expected to be in demand to replace with the vacuum tubes that are used in the high frequency, high-power applications such as receivers and transmitters at digital TV broadcasting stations.

An Army of One Less

Horrifying US Secret Weapon Unleashed In Baghdad

Bill Dash writes:

In the midst of the fighting, he noticed that the Americans had called up an oddly configured tank. Then to his amazement the tank suddenly let loose a blinding stream of what seemed like fire and lightning, engulfing a large passenger bus and three automobiles. Within seconds the bus had become semi-molten, sagging "like a wet rag" as he put it. He said the bus rapidly melted under this withering blast, shrinking until it was a twisted blob about the dimensions of a VW bug. As if that were not bizarre enough, al-Ghazali explicitly describes seeing numerous human bodies shriveled to the size of newborn babies. By the time local street fighting ended that day, he estimates between 500 and 600 soldiers and civilians had been cooked alive as a result of the mysterious tank-mounted device.

A nightmarish US super weapon reportedly was employed by American ground forces during chaotic street fighting in Baghdad. The secret tank-mounted weapon was witnessed in all its frightening power by Majid al-Ghazali, a seasoned Iraqi infantryman who described the device and its gruesome effects as unlike anything he had ever encountered in his lengthy military service. The disturbing revelation is yet another piece of cinematic evidence brought back from postwar Iraq by intrepid filmmaker Patrick Dillon.

In the film, al-Ghazali, whose english is less than fluent, describes the weapon as reminiscent of a flame thrower, only immensely more powerful. It is unclear what principle the weapon is based on. Searching for a description, al-Ghazali said it appeared to be shooting concentrated lightning bolts rather than just ordinary flames. Drawing on his many years as a professional engineer, al-Ghazali speculates that radiation of some kind probably figures into the weapon's hideous capabilities. Like all men in Saddam's Iraq, al-Ghazali was compelled to serve in the Iraqi equivalent of the Army National Guard and fought in three wars over the past thirty-odd years. Via email, he told me he has seen virtually every type of conventional weapon employed in battle, and is well acquainted with their effects on people and machines, but nothing in his extensive combat experience prepared him for the shock of what he saw in Baghdad on April 12th.

On that date, al-Ghazali and his family sheltered in their house as a fierce street battle erupted in his neighborhood. In the midst of the fighting, he noticed that the Americans had called up an oddly configured tank. Then to his amazement the tank suddenly let loose a blinding stream of what seemed like fire and lightning, engulfing a large passenger bus and three automobiles. Within seconds the bus had become semi-molten, sagging "like a wet rag" as he put it. He said the bus rapidly melted under this withering blast, shrinking until it was a twisted blob about the dimensions of a VW bug. As if that were not bizarre enough, al-Ghazali explicitly describes seeing numerous human bodies shriveled to the size of newborn babies. By the time local street fighting ended that day, he estimates between 500 and 600 soldiers and civilians had been cooked alive as a result of the mysterious tank-mounted device.

In a city littered everywhere with burned-out civilian and military vehicles, US forces were abnormally scrupulous about immediately detailing bulldozers and shovel crews to the job of burying the grim wreckage. Nevertheless, telltale remnants remained as Dillon found when al-Ghazali later took him to the site. Dillon said they easily uncovered large puddles of resolidified metal and mounds of weird fibrous material that, al-Ghazali explained, were all that remained of the vehicles' tires. Dillon, who accumulated plenty of battlefield experience as a medic in Viet-Nam, and has since covered a number of wars from Somalia to Kosovo, told me that he has witnessed every kind of conventional ordnance that can be used on humans and vehicles. " I've seen a freaking smorgasbord of destruction in my life," he said, "flame-throwers, napalm, white phosphorous, thermite, you name it. I know of nothing short of an H-bomb that conceivably might cause a bus to instantly liquefy or that can flash broil a human body down to the size of an infant. God pity humanity if that thing is a preview of what's in store for the 21st century."

For Majid al-Ghazali, images of the terrifying weapon and its victims haunt his every day. In addition to his work as an engineer, he is also a highly accomplished classical violinist, occupying the first chair in the Baghdad Symphony. He is widely acknowledged as one of the preeminent violinists in the Middle East. Besides his family, one of his greatest joys is teaching at Baghdad's premier music conservatory. Unfortunately, the conservatory was utterly destroyed. Yet somehow, despite the war's horrors and its seemingly endless privations, he manages to maintain a remarkably hopeful outlook. He recently informed me that the Baghdad Symphony continues to exist and has been invited to perform in the United States in December.

Copyright ©2003 - Bill Dash

Training an Eye on Mars

Bob Bunge of Bowie is one of many amateur astronomers who chart the location and appearance of the Red Planet. (Dudley M. Brooks -- The Washington Post)

Training an Eye on Mars
Amateurs Track Historic Planetary Alignment

By John F. Kelly
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 25, 2003; Page B01

At 2 o'clock on a recent morning, Bob Bunge ambled into the inky darkness of his Bowie back yard and prepared to meet an old friend. He swung the end of a massive home-built telescope skyward, gazed over the branches of a silver maple tree, then zeroed in on Earth's nearest neighbor.

"Mars is as bright as I've seen it in my 23 years of amateur astronomy," he said, marveling at the detail he could spot on the Red Planet: the shimmering southern polar ice cap, and the alternating bands of darkness and lightness that gave Mars the mottled look of an overripe orange.

It was a scene being played out wherever Earth was cloaked in night, as amateur astronomers enjoyed a celestial show not seen in recorded history. In the great race around the sun, Earth is gaining ground on Mars. The two planets line up on the same side of the sun roughly every two years, an arrangement known as opposition. This opposition, however, is particularly close. At 5:51 a.m. Wednesday, Mars will be 34,646,416 miles away from Earth, closer than it has been in nearly 60,000 years.

To take advantage of the long-awaited proximity of the fourth planet from the sun, researchers have launched what NASA's top Mars scientist calls an "armada" of unmanned spacecraft. Some will scrutinize the planet from orbit. Others will drop rovers to scurry over the surface. Even so, hobbyists such as Bunge are doing much of the day-to-day -- or night-to-night -- Martian grunt work.

Because the powerful telescopes that perch in thin mountaintop air or orbit Earth are usually trained on more esoteric targets than Mars, scientists depend on the work of amateurs.

"We can't allocate time on valuable assets like Hubble to look at Mars every single available second," said James Garvin, NASA's lead scientist for Mars exploration. "They have too many other priorities."

But barely an hour goes by when Mars isn't being observed by some earthling, who photographs it, sketches it or writes a detailed summary of its current condition. Mars is the only planet whose surface is visible from Earth, and amateurs such as Bunge can detect changes in clouds, polar ice and dust storms -- a volunteer sky-watching role akin to that played by amateur radio operators who tracked the path of the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 in 1957.

"We have no lives, we have good equipment and we have time," explained Donald C. Parker, a retired anesthesiologist from Coral Gables, Fla., and a member of the board of the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers, a hobbyist group formed to supplement the work of professionals.

Recent advances in telescope design, as well as the profusion of inexpensive Web cams and light-sensitive imaging instruments called charge-coupled devices, or CCDs, have allowed hobbyists to churn out pictures rivaling those produced by university astronomy departments 10 or 20 years ago. But many Mars observers use more old-fashioned tools: pencil and paper.

Dave Klassen, an astronomer at New Jersey's Rowan University, studies Martian clouds. Klassen also oversees the Web site International MarsWatch (elvis.rowan.edu/marswatch), to which amateur observers from around the world upload views of Mars.

"What's really nice is basically day to day I get an image of Mars that lets me see whether dust storms are kicking up, whether or not there are clouds," Klassen said. He takes those conditions into account when planning or carrying out research.

The astronomer flew to Hawaii on Wednesday to look at Mars through the infrared telescope atop Mauna Kea. The amateurs' pictures, he said, "give me a nice way of putting my images in context. . . . By looking at the [MarsWatch] images a week before and a week after, it sort of provides context."

NASA's Garvin lauds the network of skilled amateurs. "The same thing happens on Earth, where amateurs monitor local weather and stream quality," he said. "It's a great way of learning, educating and doing natural science. The fact that you can do it for a place like Mars is pretty cool."

Bunge, a Webmaster for the National Weather Service, has been infatuated with Mars since he was a child in Columbus, Ohio. "I trace it back to my father, who regularly played Orson Welles's 'War of the Worlds' when I was young," he said. "Every Halloween, it was a family tradition to listen to it. When I got a telescope and got interested in observing, Mars was a natural target."

On a recent morning, Bunge climbed the rungs of his custom-built three-legged ladder (made by a company that supplies orchards), a sheet of paper and a No. 2 pencil in hand. Mars was magnified 480 times, and through the eyepiece it looked about the size of a quarter.

"The number one mistake beginning Mars observers make is to look at it and say, 'I don't see anything,' " said Bunge, 41. But be patient, he said, and details will start to emerge.

The Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers has a detailed protocol for drawing Mars and even provides a 42mm-wide template. (Mars is 4,200 miles wide, creating a scale of 1mm to 100 miles.) The group urges observers to draw quickly, capturing the planet's essence in no more than 15 minutes. Any longer and Mars will have rotated enough to distort the drawing.

So Bunge's hand moved swiftly. The first thing he drew was the planet's most obvious feature: the glimmering southern polar ice cap. Though it is at the bottom of the planet, he drew the crescent of frozen water and carbon dioxide at the top of the circle, perched on Mars like a tiny yarmulke. Because of the way a telescope inverts an image, south is up and north is down.

"Then we'll shade a little bit here," he said as he added what are known as albedo markings, dark bands that gird Mars. "You can very easily be lulled into thinking they're continents or oceans," he said. Rather, they're due to the way light reflects off different types of Martian soil.

To the untrained eye, the Mars portraits can appear underwhelming, resembling tendrils of bacteria crawling across a petri dish. But scientists value each seemingly inscrutable detail, and embellishment is strictly forbidden.

"We discourage artists generally," said Parker. "They have a tendency to do art, which is nice, but it ain't real and it ain't science."

"You draw what you see and what's real, and not something that's imagined," said Sam Whitby of Hopewell, south of Richmond. Whitby has been looking at the planet each night after his late shift as a mental health worker in a hospital.

Mars has a tendency to inspire flights of fancy. Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury famously set civilizations there. Famed 19th-century Mars observer Percival Lowell thought he saw canals on Mars, proof of intelligent life.

"His imagination got the better of him, and he saw a lot of things that weren't really there," said Whitby, 54. "You don't want to do that."

Despite Mars's reputation as one of our solar system's most colorful planets, many artists prefer to work in black and white, because humans interpret the same color in different ways. Other Mars artists -- Miami's Carlos Hernandez, Italy's Mario Frassati -- produce ocher sketches that call to mind the pastel works of Marc Chagall.

Rowan University's Klassen laments the growing dependence on space-based planetary observation. While admitting that orbiting satellites can produce stunning images of Martian craters and volcanoes, he says he thinks Mars study would be the poorer if people stopped looking at Mars from Earth.

"It's a very different kind of viewing," he said. From Earth you can see the whole planet, not just the swaths of Marscape satellites provide. It's the difference, he said, between studying a forest in its entirety and studying it tree by tree.

Before finishing his drawing, Bunge screwed a blue filter onto the telescope's eyepiece. This has the almost magical property of revealing any clouds that are lolling in the Martian atmosphere. There were none.

"The forecast for Mars is clear and calm," Bunge said. And then he climbed back down to Earth.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

New York City Blackout Revelations

kbcjedi writes in the Rumor Mill News Agents Forum :

This article is not about the cause of the Blackout throughout the Northeast but rather my personal observations during the event. The lights went out at 4pm on a bright sunny day, I was walking back from the P.O. I saw traffic stopped on first Ave, I thought nothing of it. My first thought was I should go direct traffic; it might be fun like cutting the lawn the first time. I turned and looked at the intersection at 23rd st, someone had beat me to it.

By the time I got home, I realized there was a blackout, I turned the tub on and filled the bathtub and went out to purchase candles. Everything was orderly like nothing special had happened, I bought candles at the regular price, no price gouging, got a couple gallons of water (same thing).

When it got dark, there was no martial law invoked, people filled the streets drinking like at Mardi Gras. I witnessed no violence or looting on any level, people rather than frightened took it as an opportunity to relax, and just enjoy the event. It was like being in the wild on Safari.

At Union Square, the source of the anti-war movement in NYC, something like a Rave broke out with Tribal drumming that extended into the morning. Hundreds of People brought out blankets and candles and slept in the Park. If you needed help, you just asked. The same phenomena occured during the week of 9-11 albeit with a little more intensity and of course fear. There was no fear this time at all, more like elation.

In the 70's the last time there was a blackout, there were riots, looting, murders and rapes a plenty, this time nothing.

Despite what may be being propagated by the media/entertainment machine, the exact opposite reality is manifesting before us, it is only being held in place by the electronic prison, it is a supeficial form of control that will not last much longer. Crisis determines the nature of the Man; and on two accounts I have witnessed a mass spontaneous expression of Love, courage and Compassion.

Chicago Anti War Rally

Heatwave Caused 1300 Deaths In Portugal

The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

(Reuters) -- Portuguese health authorities said 1316 people had died from a heatwave that gripped the nation, news agency Lusa reported.

The figures were from a preliminary Health Ministry report on deaths between late July and August 12, Lusa said late yesterday. The estimate is based on a comparison with the same period last year.

The heatwave was the hottest and longest recorded in Portugal. It fanned the country's worst forest fires in more than 20 years, which killed at least 15 people.

The heatwave affected much of Europe, causing forest fires and a number of deaths across the Continent.

The number of deaths in Portugal were less than during a 1981 heatwave and about the same as one in 1991 because of emergency measures put in place because of the fires, Lusa said.

Copyright © 2003. The Sydney Morning Herald.

(via Rense.com)

How America Nukes Its Own Troops

Amy Worthington, The Idaho Observer, reports:

On March 30, an AP photo featured an American pro-war activist holding a sign: "Nuke the evil scum, it worked in 1945!" That's exactly what George Bush has done. America's mega-billion dollar war in Iraq has been indeed a NUCLEAR WAR.

Bush-Cheney have delivered upon 17 million Iraqis tons of depleted uranium (DU) weapons, a "liberation" gift that will keep on giving. Depleted uranium is a component of toxic nuclear waste, usually stored at secure sites. Handlers need radiation protection gear.

Over a decade ago, war-makers decided to incorporate this lethal waste into much of the Pentagon's weaponry. Navy ships carrying Phalanx rapid fire guns are capable of firing thousands of DU rounds per minute.(1) Tomahawk missiles launched from U.S. ships and subs are DU-tipped.(2) The M1 Abrams tanks are armored with DU.(3) These and British Challenger II tanks are tightly packed with DU shells, which continually irradiate troops in or near them.(4) The A-10 "tank buster" aircraft fires DU shells at machines and people on the battlefield.(5)

DU munitions are classified by a United Nations resolution as illegal weapons of mass destruction. Their use breaches all international laws, treaties and conventions forbidding poisoned weapons calculated to cause unnecessary suffering.

Ironically, support for our troops will extend well beyond the war in Iraq. Americans will be supporting Gulf War II veterans for years as they slowly and painfully succumb to radiation poisoning. U.S and British troops deployed to the area are the walking dead. Humans and animals, friends and foes in the fallout zone are destined to a long downhill spiral of chronic illness and disability. Kidney dysfunction, lung damage, bloody stools, extreme fatigue, joint pain, unsteady gait, memory loss and rashes and, ultimately, cancer and premature death await those exposed to DU.

Award-winning journalist Will Thomas wrote: "As the last Gulf conflict so savagely demonstrated, GI immune systems reeling from multiple doses of experimental vaccines offer little defense against further exposure to chemical weapons, industrial toxins, stress, caffeine, insect repellent and radiation leftover from the last war. This is a war even the victors will lose."(6)

When a DU shell is fired, it ignites upon impact. Uranium, plus traces of plutonium and americium, vaporize into tiny, ceramic particles of radioactive dust. Once inhaled, uranium oxides lodge in the body and emit radiation indefinitely. A single particle of DU lodged in a lymph node can devastate the entire immune system according to British radiation expert Roger Coghill.(7)

The Royal Society of England published data showing that battlefield soldiers who inhale or swallow high levels of DU can suffer kidney failure within days.(8) Any soldier now in Iraq who has not inhaled lethal radioactive dust is not breathing. In the first two weeks of combat, 700 Tomahawks, at a cost of $1.3 million each, blasted Iraqi real estate into radioactive mushroom clouds.(9) Millions of DU tank rounds liter the terrain. Cleanup is impossible because there is no place on the planet to put so much contaminated debris.

Bush Sr.'s Gulf War I was also a nuclear war. 320 tons of depleted uranium were used against Iraq in 1991.(10) A 1998 report by the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances confirms that inhaling DU causes symptoms identical to those claimed by many sick vets with Gulf War Syndrome.(11) The Gulf War Veterans Association reports that at least 300,000 Gulf War I vets have now developed incapacitating illnesses.(12) To date, 209,000 vets have filed claims for disability benefits based on service-connected injuries and illnesses from combat in that war.(13)

Dr. Asaf Durakovic, a professor of nuclear medicine at Georgetown University, is a former army medical expert. He told nuclear scientists in Paris last year that tens of thousands of sick British and American soldiers are now dying from radiation they encountered during Gulf War I. He found that 62 percent of sick vets tested have uranium isotopes in their organs, bones, brains and urine.(14) Laboratories in Switzerland and Finland corroborated his findings.

In other studies, some sick vets were found to be expressing uranium in even their semen. Their sexual partners often complained of a burning sensation during intercourse, followed by their own debilitating illnesses.(15)

Nothing compares to the astronomical cancer rates and birth defects suffered by the Iraqi people who have endured vicious nuclear chastisement for years.(16) U.S. air attacks against Iraq since 1993 have undoubtedly employed nuclear munitions. Pictures of grotesquely deformed Iraqi infants born since 1991 are overwhelming.(17) Like those born to Gulf War I vets, many babies born to troops now in Iraq will also be afflicted with hideous deformities, neurological damage and/or blood and respiratory disorders.(18)

As an Army health physicist, Dr. Doug Rokke was dispatched to the Middle East to salvage DU-contaminated tanks after Gulf War I. His Geiger counters revealed that the war zones of Iraq and Kuwait were contaminated with up to 300 millirems an hour in beta and gamma radiation plus thousands to millions of counts per minute in alpha radiation. Rokke recently told the media: "The whole area is still trashed. It is hotter than heck over there still. This stuff doesn't go away."(19)

DU remains "hot" for 4.5 billion years. Radiation expert Dr. Helen Caldicott confirms that the dust-laden winds of DU-contaminated war zones "will remain effectively radioactive for the rest of time."(20) The murderous dust storms which ensnared coalition troops during the first few days of the current invasion are sure to have significant health consequences.

Rokke and his cleanup team were issued only flimsy dust masks for their dangerous work. Of the 100 people on Rokke's decontamination team, 30 have already "dropped dead." Rokke himself is ill with radiation damage to lungs and kidneys. He has brain lesions, skin pustules, chronic fatigue, continual wheezing and painful fibromyalgia. Rokke warns that anyone exposed to DU should have adequate respiratory protection and special coveralls to protect their clothing because, he says, you can't get uranium particles off your clothing.

The U.S. military insists that DU on the battlefield is not a problem. Colonel James Naughton of the U.S. Army Material Command recently told the BBC that complaints about DU "had no medical basis."(21) The military's own documents belie this. A 1993 Pentagon document warned that "when soldiers inhale or ingest DU dust they incur a potential increase in cancer risk."(22) A U.S. Army training manual requires anyone who comes within 25 meters of DU-contaminated equipment to wear respiratory and skin protection.(23) The U.S. Army Environmental Policy Institute admitted: "If DU enters the body, it has the potential to generate significant medical consequences."(24) The Institute also stated that, if the troops were to realize what they had been exposed to, "the financial implications of long-term disability payments and healthcare costs would be excessive."(25) For pragmatic reasons, DOD chooses to lie and deny.

Dr. Rokke confirms that the Pentagon lies about DU dangers and is criminally negligent for neglecting medical attention needed by DU-contaminated vets. He predicts that the numbers of American troops to be sickened by DU from Gulf War II will be staggering.(26) As they gradually sicken and suffer a slow burn to their graves, the Pentagon will, as it did after Gulf War I, deny that their misery and death is a result of their tour in Iraq.

Dr. Rokke's candor has cost him his career. Likewise, Dr. Durakovic's radiation studies on Gulf War I vets were not popular with U.S. officials. Dr. Durakovic was reportedly told his life was in danger if he continued his research. He left the U.S. to continue his research abroad.(27)

Naive young coalition soldiers now in Iraq are likely unaware of how deadly their battlefield environment is. Gulf War I troops were kept in ignorance. Soldiers handled DU fragments and some wore these lethal nuggets around their necks. A DU projectile emits more radiation in five hours than allowed in an entire year under civilian radiation exposure standards. "We didn't know any better," Kris Kornkven told Nation magazine. "We didn't find out until long after we were home that there even was such a thing as DU."(28)

George Bush's ongoing war in Afghanistan is also a nuclear war. Shortly after 9-11, the U.S. announced it would stockpile tactical nuclear weapons including small neutron bombs, nuclear mines and shells suited to commando warfare in Afghanistan.(29) In late September, 2001, Bush and Russian president Vladimir Putin agreed that the U.S. would use tactical nuclear weapons in Afghanistan while Putin would employ nuclear weapons against the Chechnyans.(30)

Describing the Pentagon's B-61-11 burrowing nuke bomb, George Smith writes in the Village Voice: "Built ram tough with a heavy metal casing for smashing through the earth and concrete, the B-61 explodes with the force of an estimated 340,000 tons of TNT. It is lots of bang for the buck, literally two apocalypse bombs in one, a boosted plutonium firecracker called the primary and a heavy hydrogen secondary for that good old-fashioned H-bomb fireball."(31)

Drought-stricken Afghanistan's underground water supply is now contaminated by these nuclear weapons.(32) Experts with the Uranium Medical Research Center report that urine samples of Afghanis show the highest level of uranium ever recorded in a civilian population. Afghani soldiers and civilians are reported to have died after suffering intractable vomiting, severe respiratory problems, internal bleeding and other symptoms consistent with radiation poisoning. Dead birds still perched in trees are found partially melted with blood oozing from their mouths.(33)

Afghanistan's new president, Hamid Karzai, is a puppet installed by Washington. Under the protection of American soldiers, Karzai's regime is setting a new record for opium production. Both UN and U.S. reports confirm that the huge Afghani opium harvest of 2002 makes Afghanistan the world's leading opium producer.(34) Thanks to nuclear weapons, Afghanistan is now safe for the Bush-Cheney narcotics industry.(35) ABC News asserts that keeping the "peace" in Afghanistan will require decades of allied occupation.(36) For years to come, "peacekeepers" will be eating, drinking and breathing the "hot" carcinogenic pollution they have helped the Pentagon inflict upon that nation for organized crime.

As governor of Arkansas during the Iran-Contra era, Bill Clinton laundered $multi-millions in cocaine profits for then vice-president George Bush Sr.(37) As a partner in the Bush family's notorious crime machine, President Clinton committed U.S. troops to NATO's campaign in the Balkans, a prime heroin production and trans-shipment area. DOD's campaign to control and reorganize the drug trade there for the Bush mafia was yet another nuclear project.

For years, the U.S. and NATO fired DU missiles, bullets and shells across the Balkans, nuking the peoples of Serbia, Bosnia and Kosovo. As DU munitions were slammed into chemical plants, the environment became hideously toxic, also endangering the peoples of Albania, Macedonia, Greece, Italy, Austria and Hungary. By 1999, UN investigators reported that an estimated 12 tons of DU had caused irreparable damage to the Yugoslavian environment, with agriculture, livestock and air water, and public health all profoundly damaged.(38)

Scientists confirm that citizens of the Balkans are excreting uranium in their urine.39 In 2001, a Yugoslavian pathologist reported that hundreds of Bosnians have died of cancer from NATO's DU bombardment.(40) Many NATO peacekeepers in the Balkans now suffer ill health. Their leukemias, cancers and other maladies are dubbed the "Balkans Syndrome." Richard Coghill predicts that DU weapons used in Balkans campaign will result in at least 10,000 cases of fatal cancer.(41)

U.S. citizens at home are also paying a heavy price for criminal militarism gone mad. DOD is a pollution monster. The General Accounting Office (GAO) found 9,181 dangerous military sites in USA that will require $billions to rehabilitate. The GAO reports that DOD has been both slothful and deceitful in its clean-up obligations.(42) The Pentagon is now pressing Congress to exempt it from all environmental laws so that it may pollute and poison free from liability.(43)

The Navy uses prime fishing grounds off the coast of Washington state to test fire DU ammunition. In January, Washington State Rep. Jim McDermott chastised the Navy: "On one hand you have required soldiers to have DU safety training and to wear protective gear when handling DU...and submarines must stay clear of DU-contaminated waters. These policies indicate there is cause for concern....On the other hand the Department of Defense has repeatedly denied that DU poses any danger whatsoever. There has been no remorse about leaving tons of DU equipment in the soil in foreign countries, and there appears to be no remorse about leaving it in the waters of your own country."(44)

DU has been used in military practice maneuvers in Indiana, Florida, New Mexico, Massachusetts, Maryland and Puerto Rico. After the Navy tested DU weaponry on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, one third of the island's population developed serious illness. Many people show high levels of uranium in their bodies. Hundreds have filed a class action suit against the Navy for $100 million, claiming DU contamination has caused widespread cancers.(45)

The Navy's Fallon Naval Air Station near Fallon, Nevada, is a quagmire of 26 toxic waste sites. It is also a target practice zone for DU bombs and missiles. Area residents report bizarre illnesses, including 17 children who have contracted leukemia within five years. A survey of groundwater in the Fallon area showed nearly half of area wells are contaminated with radioactive materials.(46)

The materials for DU weaponry have been processed mainly at three nuclear plants in Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee, where workers handling uranium contaminated with plutonium have suffered for decades with cancers and debilitating maladies similar to Gulf War Syndrome.(47)

Emboldened by power-grabbing successes made possible by his administration's devious 9-11 project, President Bush asserts that the U.S. has the right to attack any nation it deems a potential threat. He told West Point in 2002, "If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long."(48) Thus, it is certain that Bush-Cheney future pre-emptive nuclear wars are lined up like idling jets on a runway. Both Cheney's Halliburton Corp. and the Bush family's Carlyle Group are profiteers in U.S. defense contracts, so endless war is just good business.(49)

The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon will create special nuclear weapons for use on North Korea's underground nuclear facilities.(50) Next August, U.S. war makers will meet to consolidate plans for a new generation of "mini," "micro" and "tiny" nuclear bombs and bunker busters. These will be added to the U.S. arsenal perhaps for use against non-nuclear third-world nations such as Iran, Syria, Lebanon.(51)

The solution Americans must stop electing ruthless criminals to rule this nation. We must convince fellow citizens that villains like Saddam Hussein are made in the U.S. as rationale for endless corporate war profits. Saddam was placed in power by the CIA.(52) For years U.S. government agencies, under auspices of George Bush Sr., supplied him with chemical and biological weapons.(53) Our national nuclear laboratories, along with Unisys, Dupont and Hewlett-Packard, sold Saddam materials for his nuclear program.(54) Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton in the late 90s when its subsidiaries signed $73 million in new contracts to further supply Saddam.(55) The wicked villain of Iraq was nurtured for decades as a cash-cow by U.S. military-industrial piranhas.

If America truly supports its troops, it must stop sending them into nuclear holocaust for the enrichment of thugs. Time is running out. If the DU-maniacs at the Pentagon and their coven of nuclear arms peddlers are not harnessed, America will have no able-bodied fighting forces left. All people of the earth will become grossly ill, hideously deformed and short- lived. We must succeed in the critical imperative to face reality and act decisively. Should we fail, there will be no place to hide from Bush-Cheney's merciless nuclear orgies yet to come or from the inevitable nuclear retaliation these orgies will surely breed.

Endnotes

1."DOD Launches Depleted Uranium Training," Linda Kozaryn, American Forces Press Service, 8-13-99.

2."Nukes of the Gulf War,"John Shirley, . See this article in archives at www.gulfwarvets.com.

3. BBC News, "US To Use Depleted Uranium," March 18, 2003; U.S. General Accounting Office, Operation Desert Storm: "Early Performance Assessment of Bradley and Abrams," 1-2-92.

4."Nukes of the Gulf War," op. cit.

5. Ibid.

6. "Invading Hiroshima," William Thomas, 2-4-2003, www.willthomas.net

7. "US Shells Leave Lethal Legacy," Toronto Star, July 31, 1999; also "Radiation Tests for Peacekeepers in the Balkans Exposed to Depleted Uranium," www.telegraph.co.uk, 12-31-02.

8. "Depleted Uranium May Stop Kidneys In Days," Rob Edwards, New Scientist.com, 3-12-02; also "Uranium Weapons Too Hot to Handle," Rob Edwards, New Scientist.co.uk, 6-9-99.

9. "Navy Seeks Cash for More Tomahawks," David Rennie in Washington, Telegraph Group Limited, 1-4-03, news.telegraph.co.uk.

10. "Going Nuclear in Iraq--DU Cancers Mount Daily," Ramzi Kysia, CounterPunch.org, 12-31-01.

11."Depleted Uranium Symptoms Match US Report As Fears Spread," Peter Beaumont, The Observer (UK) 1-14-01, www.guardianlimited.co.uk.

12. "Gulf War Illnesses Affect 300,000 Vets," Ellen Tomson, Pioneer Press, www.pioneerplanet.com. See also American Gulf War Veterans Association at www.gulfwarvets.com.

13. "2 of Every 5 Gulf War Vets Are On Disability: 209,000 Make VA Claims," World Net Daily, 1-28-03, WorldNetDaily.com.

14. "Research on Sick Gulf Vets Revisited, "New York Times, 1-29-01; "Tests Show Gulf War Victims Have Uranium Poisoning," Jonathon Carr-Brown and Martin Meissonnier, The Sunday Times (UK) 9-3-02.

15. "Catastrophe: Ill Gulf Vets Contaminated Partners With DU," The Halifax Herald Limited, Clare Mellor, 2-09-01. This article is available in archives at www.rense.com.

16. "Iraqi Cancer, Birth Defects Blamed on US Depleted Uranium," Seattle Post- Intelligencer, 11-12-02; "US Depleted Uranium Yields Chamber of Horrors in Southern Iraq, Andy Kershaw, The Independent (London) 12-4-01.

17. "The Environmental and Human Health Impacts of the Gulf War Region with Special References to Iraq," Ross Mirkarimi, The Arms Control Research Centre, May 1992. See also Gulf War Syndrome Birth Defects in Iraq at www.web-light.nl/VISIE/extremedeformities.html.

18. "The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm, Has Our Country Abandoned Them," Life Magazine, November 1995; "Birth Defects Killing Gulf War Babies," Los Angeles Times, 11-14-94; "Depleted Uranium, The Lingering Poison," Alex Kirby, BBC News Online, 6-7-99.

19. "Depleted Uranium, A Killer Disaster," Travis Dunn, Disaster News.net, 12-29-02.

20. San Francisco Chronicle, 10-10-02.

21. "US To Use Depleted Uranium," BBC News, 3-18-03.

22. "Depleted Uranium Symptoms Match US Report As Fears Spread," Peter Beaumont, The Observer (UK) 1-14-01.

23. "Iraqi Cancer, Birth Defects Blamed on US Depleted Uranium," Seattle Post- Intelligencer, 11-12-02.

24. "US To Use Depleted Uranium," BBC News, 3-18-03.

25. US Army Environmental Policy Institute: Health and Environmental Consequences of Depleted Uranium in the U.S. Army, Technical Report, June 1995.

26. "Pentagon Depleted Uranium No Health Risk," Dr. Doug Rokke, 3-15-03; also "The Terrible, Tragic Toll of Depleted Uranium," Address by Dr. Rokke before congressional leaders in Washington, D.C.,12-30-02; also "Gulf War Casualties," Dr. Doug Rokke, www.traprockpeace.org. 9-30-02.

27."Tests Show Gulf War Victims Have Uranium Poisoning," Sunday Times (UK), Jonathon Carr-Brown and Martin Meissonnier, 9-3-00.

28. "The Pentagon's Radioactive Bullet: An Investigative Report," Bill Mesler, The Nation, 5-28-99, see www.thenation.com/ issue/961021/1021mesl.htm.

29. "Tactical Nukes Deployed In Afghanistan," World Net Daily, 10-7-01. 30. Ibid.

31. "The B-61 Bomb,The Burrowing Nuke" George Smith,VillageVoice.com 12-29-02.; also "Bunker-busting US Tactical Nuclear Bombs, Nowhere to Hide," Kennedy Grey, Wired.com, 10-9-01.

32."Perpetual Death From America," Mohammed Daud Miraki, Afghan-American Interviews, 2-24-03; also "Dying of Thirst," Fred Pearce, New Scientist, 11-17-2001.

33. Ibid.

34. "Afghanistan Displaces Myanmar as Top Heroin Producer," Agence France-Presse, 3-01-03. This article is at www.copvcia.com.;also "Opium Trade Flourishing In the `New Afghanistan,'" Reuters, 3-3-03.

35. "The Bush-Cheney Drug Empire," Michael C. Ruppert, Nexus Magazine, February-March 2000; The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Alfred W. McCoy, Lawrence Hill & Co., revised edition due May 2003; Drugging of America, Rodney Stich, Diablo Western Press, 1999; "Blood for Oil, Drugs for Arms," Bob Djurdjevic, Truth In Media, April 2000, www.truthinmedia.org. 36. ABC News, February 27, 2003.

37. Compromised, Clinton Bush and the CIA, Terry Reed and John Cummings, S.P.I. Books, 1994; The Clinton Chronicles and The Mena Cover-up, Citizens for Honest Government, 1996; "The Crimes of Mena, Grey Money," Ozark Gazette, 1995 (see www.copvcia.com.)

38. "Damage to Yugoslav Environment is Immense, Says a UN Report," Bob Djurdjevic, 7-4-99, truthinmedia.org. This report was submitted to the UN Security Council on June 9, 1999; also, "New Depleted Uranium Study Shows Clear Damage," BBC News,8-28-99; also "NATO Issued Warning About Toxic Ammo," Associated Press, 01-08-01.

39. CounterPunch.org, 12-28-01.

40. "Hundreds Died of Cancer After DU Bombing--Doctor," Reuters, 1-13-01.

41."Depleted Uranium Threatens Balkan Cancer Epidemic," BBC News, 7-30-99.

42. "Many Defense Sites Still Hazardous," Associated Press, 9-24-02; also Old US Weapons Called Hidden Danger, Los Angeles Times, 11-25-02.

43. "Pentagon Seeks Freedom to Pollute Land, Air and Sea," Andrew Gumbel in L.A., 3-13-03, Independent Digital (UK) Ltd.

44. "Radioactive DU Ammo Is Tested in Fish Areas," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 1-11-03; Letter from Rep. McDermott to Department of the Navy: see "Navy Fired DU Rounds Into Waters Off Coast of Washington," 1-20-03, rense.com.

45."Cancer Rates Soar From US Military Use of DU On `Enchanted Island,'" www.telegraph.co.uk, 2-5-01; also "Navy Shells With Depleted Uranium Fired in Puerto Rico," Fox News Online, 5-28-99.

46. "The Fallon, NV Cancer Cluster And a US Navy Bombing," Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch.org, 8-10-02.

47. "DU Shells Are Made of A Potentially Lethal Cocktail of Nuclear Waste," Jonathon Carr-Brown, www.sunday-times.co.uk, 1-22-01.

48. "Preventative War Sets Perilous Precedent," Helen Thomas, Hearst Newspapers, 3-20-03.

49. PIGS at the Trough, Arriana Huffington, Random House, 2003 (New York Times best seller.); also "The Best Enemies Money Can Buy, From Hitler to Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden Insider Connections and the Bush Family's Partnership With Killers of Americans;" Mike Ruppert, From the Wilderness,10-10-01; also "Bush Sr.'s Carlyle Group Gets Fat on War and Conflict," Jamie Doward, The Observer (UK), 3-25-03; also "Halliburton Wins Contract for Iraq Oil Firefighting, Reuters, 3-7-03; also "Cashing In-Fortunes in Profits Await Bush Circle After Iraq War, Andrew Gumbel, The Independent (London) 9-15-02; also "War Could Be Big Business for Halliburton," Reuters, 3-23-03.

50. "Pentagon Seeks a Nuclear Digger," Washington Post, March 10, 2003.

51. "Remember: Bush Planed Iraq War Before Taking Office," Neil Mackay, The Sunday Herald (UK) 3-27-03; also "US Mini-Nukes Alarm Scientists," The Guardian (UK) 4-18-01; also "US Nuclear First-Strike Plan--It Keeps Getting Scarier, Jeffrey Steinberg, Executive Intelligence Review, 2-24-03.

52. Wall Street Journal, 8-16-90: The CIA supported the Baath Party and installed Hussein as Iraqi dictator in 1968.

53. "United States Dual-Use Exports to Iraq and Their Impact on the Health of Persian Gulf War Veterans," Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, 1992, 1994; "U.S. Had Key Role in Iraq Buildup," Washington Post, 12-30-02.

54. "US Government, 24 US Corps Illegally Helped Iraq Build Its WMD," Hugh Williamson in Berlin, Financial Times, 12-19-02; "Full List of US Weapons Suppliers To Iraq," Anu de Monterice, , 12-19-02.

55. Huffington, op. cit.

Amy Worthington is a reporter for The Idaho Observer

Big Business Pushes Porn Into The Mainstream

Phil Kloer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, reports:

From the nasty spam that clogs your e-mail account to the XXX video rental stores that have mushroomed all over metro Atlanta, the once underground pornography industry is now very much aboveground and impossible to avoid.

And profiting from that industry now are major corporations and mainstream entertainment companies, including network TV, movie studios and book publishers. Revenues for the porn industry -- about $10 billion a year -- now equal the domestic box office for all of Hollywood's major film releases.

"You're seeing a corporatization of pornography," says Blaise Cronin, professor of information services at Indiana University and a former consultant to the Justice Department on Internet pornography laws. "You have major corporations involved in the distribution, and the profits are very high."

Absolutely, says Jonathan Littman, executive producer of "Skin," a drama series airing this fall on Fox Television that is set in part in Los Angeles' porn movie industry. "It is a business, a very, very big business," Littman says. "And there's a fascination with the mechanism of how it runs, how it works, what's going on behind the curtain."

So mainstream entertainment is showing what's behind the curtain in the XXX industry, rolling out books, feature films and documentaries that cater to what is perceived as increased public interest in -- and acceptance of -- pornography. The result is that the line between pop culture and porn culture is increasingly hard to find.

"There's been a glamorization, coupled with a relaxation of society's mores," says Tim Connelly, editor in chief of the industry newsletter Adult Video News. "It's permeating the culture now, particularly with young people. There's a whole generation that's grown up with MTV and video porn and girls cavorting around with musicians."

At the Junkman's Daughter clothing store in Atlanta's Little Five Points, girls come in looking for popular T-shirts that read "Porn Star" across the front, sometimes in girlie-cursive, glittery letters. "They see it on TV, being worn by [rock star] Kid Rock, and they want to emulate it," says store manager Alex Wilson. Indeed, real porn actresses are as ubiquitous in MTV music videos as tattoos and tousled hair.

Christy Crutchfield, 20, of Tucker found out how far mainstream culture has gone in embracing so-called adult entertainment. One Halloween at Elon University in North Carolina, she dressed as a porn star as an inside-joke tribute to a lyric by one of her favorite rock bands, Jump Little Children: "I'd like to see you out one night, dressed up like a teenaged porn star."

She put on boots, fishnet stockings, a plaid schoolgirl skirt and a white blouse and wore her hair in pigtails. The only problem was, pop culture had pre-empted her attempt to be outrageous. "Everyone thought I was Britney Spears."

Other signs of the blurring lines:

ä Recycling big names from porn's past has never been bigger. The movie "Wonderland," coming in September from Lions Gate Films, stars Val Kilmer as legendary porn actor John Holmes, with Lisa Kudrow of "Friends" as his wife; former underage porn actress Traci Lords' autobiography, "Underneath It All," has just hit bookstores and the New York Times Best Seller List; and an off-Broadway, PG-rated theatrical takeoff of the famous 1978 movie "Debbie Does Dallas" closed in February after a successful run.

ä A Porn Star Ball, sponsored by XXX company Vivid Entertainment Group, one of the biggest producers of hard-core sex videos in the United States, will come to Atlanta on Sept. 5 as part of a national tour. Women are encouraged to dress as porn stars and compete for best costume. Instead of holding it in a strip club, Vivid is renting the Riviera Club, a popular Midtown music nightclub.

ä When it was revealed that "Joe Millionaire" finalist Sarah Kozer had appeared in bondage videos, the Fox reality TV show played up her past to boost viewership.

ä XXX actress Jenna Jameson has a book, "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star," coming early next year from HarperCollins, which also is publishing "How to Have a XXX Sex Life," written by several Vivid actresses. Jameson was one of several adult actresses hired by Pony sneakers for an ad campaign this year featured on billboards and in mainstream magazines like Vanity Fair and Vibe.

"The breakdown of the wall between the pornographic industry and the mainstream industry has been going on for some time, but it's become increasingly acceptable," says Evan Lieberman, a lecturer in film studies at Emory University.

Porn sells|

Americans spent $465 million in 2001 screening adult PayPerView movies on their home TV sets, and most of that money goes to big media like AOL Time Warner and AT&T Broadband, Eric Schlosser writes in "Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market," much of which covers the adult entertainment industry.

"The way we see it is, it's another type of programming that we offer, along with movies, sports, news and all the things that cable brings," says Reg Griffin, spokesman for the Atlanta division of cable giant Comcast, the biggest cable operator in both metro Atlanta and the United States.

There are limits, though. "The mainstream is not interested in showing porn or glorifying the industry, but it's interested in finding out how far it can go and what it can get away with," says Susannah Breslin, who writes about the sex industry for the Web site Salon.com and runs a popular Web log on the subject.

How far the mainstream will go is generally just this side of actual sex. Traditionally, sex in mainstream entertainment, from R-rated movies to "NYPD Blue" to late night on Cinemax, has been called soft-core -- actors pretending to have sex. Hard-core, also called XXX, shows real sex acts.

Adult Video News reports that rentals of hard-core videos in the United States soared from 79 million in 1985 to 759 million in 2001, an increase of almost 1,000 percent.

Griffin says Comcast does not break out figures for how much of its business comes from adult PayPerView movies. Time Warner Cable, the second-largest U.S. cable operator, also does not provide separate adult figures. (Most cable systems, including Comcast, offer a mix of hard- and soft-core adult movies on PayPerView.)

"There is a group of people who are genuinely interested in adult entertainment, and they are a sizable group," says Mark Harrad, spokesman for Time Warner Cable.

In addition, many major hotel chains profit from adult in-room movie rentals. A 2002 report by ABC News' "Nightline" stated that adult movie rentals were available in about 1.5 million hotel rooms and accounted for 80 percent of in-room movie profits.

'Everywhere I look'|

Another reason for the high profile of the formerly taboo is the erosion of structures that once kept porn in its place -- outside the main culture -- argues Robert Peters, president of the anti-porn watchdog group Morality in Media.

"The barriers are basically gone," he says. "Obscenity laws are rarely enforced. The religious community has become a silent giant. [Television standards and practices] departments are a joke, if they even exist anymore. And the sense of self-restraint is basically gone."

"Today porn is everywhere I look," Lords writes in "Underneath It All." "I find it in the junk mail folder on my computer, it peers at me from local magazine racks, and sits blatantly in the window of the liquor store where I buy my wine. Porn stars play themselves on television shows, appear on billboards and give interviews about how 'liberating' porn is for women."

There is much uncertainty about the role women play as consumers of porn.

"I think the porn industry is pushing very hard for women to consume porn, and popular culture is following suit," says Nina K. Martin, assistant professor of film studies at Emory University, who wrote her dissertation on pornography. "Just as it's cool to take exotic dancing classes at the gym," she adds, "it's also 'cool' for women to be sexually experienced. Still, I can't help but wonder who the consumption of porn by women really benefits."

Web delivers at home|

John Cornetta, owner of the Love Shack adult video stores, says his company has issued 15,000 video rental cards in metro Atlanta, about one-third of them to women.

"It's really difficult to tell, but it's safe to say there's probably more women viewing [porn] than ever before," says Adult Video News' Connelly.

However, cautions sex industry Web columnist Breslin, "the rap you get from the industry about appealing more toward women is mostly a lot of talk. There are not women in massive numbers going in and renting adult videos."

According to a public opinion poll published in June in American Demographics magazine, only 9 percent of women acknowledged viewing porn or strippers regularly or occasionally; the comparable figure for men was 44 percent.

The mainstream entertainment industry may believe, however, that women are more accepting of porn now, and that may be fueling some of the projects.

But the biggest reason for this shift in entertainment values is the Internet, says Emory's Lieberman. Porn certainly predates the Internet, but "the Internet has taken some of the mystique out of it," says Lieberman.

"At one time, only certain people would go to a peep show or an adult bookstore," he continues. "But now it's available to everyone, and the fact that it's so available has taken away at least some of the stigma of the anti-social."

Cronin agrees that what he calls the "Web-ification of pornography" has not only increased demand, but also made the hard stuff more acceptable. "We know millions of Americans every day are looking at porn on the Web," he says. And the privacy of that experience, he adds, "may remove some of the social inhibitions.".

The appeal, says Breslin, is that porn "allows us to look at this strong lust that we have; it's about our own sexual desire. It's about things you're scared to look at in yourself, and it's sort of horrifying and beautiful at the same time."

And as porn booms, the mainstream tags along for the ride. The idea of "porno chic" was negligible 30 years ago compared with today, when "Friends" devotes an episode to porn, or the popular rock band Blink 182 puts a XXX star named Janine on an album cover bought by millions of youngsters. But the original porno chic will be revisited next year in a documentary about "Deep Throat," in the works for cable network HBO. It's being made by Imagine Entertainment, the Oscar-winning studio co-owned by Ron Howard.

When it airs, society will officially be down to only one degree of separation between hard-core porn and "The Andy Griffith Show."

Ham Radios Came to Rescue in Blackout

:

HARTFORD, Conn. - When technology failed on a massive scale last week, some old-fashioned broadcasting stepped into the breach as ham radio operators took to the airwaves to reach emergency workers.

For millions of people in the Northeast and Midwest, the Aug. 14 outage took access to e-mail and the Internet with it. Landline and cellular telephones were jammed by a crush of calls.

But the ham radio, which came into being in the World War I era, connected firefighters and police departments, Red Cross workers and other emergency personnel during the most extensive blackout in the Northeast since 1977.

Ham operators are not dependent on a server or cell tower, and with battery backups can operate when grids can't.

"When everything else fails, the ham radio is still there," said Allen Pitts, a ham operator in New Britain. "You can't knock out that system."

The radios are operated by a network of volunteers organized by the Newington-based American Radio Relay League.

Ham radio's importance won renewed recognition after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. ARRL won a federal Homeland Security grant of nearly $182,000 to train amateur radio operators in emergency operations to help during terrorist attacks.

"It's incredible the differences you're seeing, the large cadre of people who know what they're doing," Pitts said. "It's making a major difference."

Tom Carrubba, a coordinator for ARRL in New York City's five boroughs and two counties on Long Island, said volunteers went to work immediately after power went down Thursday afternoon.

"In five minutes guys were on the air with the Red Cross and Office of Emergency Management," he said.

During other disasters, such as severe weather, ARRL volunteers and coordinators activate telephone trees, Carrubba said. On Thursday, they instead hit their assigned frequency or staffed an emergency operations center.

In the New York-Long Island region, with a population of nearly 10 million, about 100 ham radio operators handled the situation, Carrubba said. Some volunteers headed to a Red Cross headquarters or shelter, fire department, or hospital, he said. One hospital was temporarily out of power and ARRL volunteers provided communications to ambulances until electricity was restored.

Carrubba estimated that operators handled 800 to 1,000 communications from Thursday afternoon until early Friday.

Wood to watts

Susan Moran, The Rocky Mountain News Reports:

Give him wood chips, coconut husks, corncobs, even chicken litter, and Robb Walt will turn it into electricity and heat.

"This stuff is so cool!," said the burly co-founder and chief executive of Community Power Corp., located just north of C-470 and just west of South Kipling Parkway in Jefferson County.

The company, founded in 1995, boasts it has developed the world's first non-polluting biomass-based power generator - a gasifier, in engineer-speak. A small team of engineers is designing the machines - each resembling an industrial-size copy machine or larger - for homes, small businesses and schools, particularly those situated way off the grid.

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, helped pique the public's appetite for domestic energy sources. And President Bush's push to thin out fire-prone national forests has spurred more federal financing for projects like Community Power's machine, which can turn wood and other forest residues into electricity.

"Today, there's a general acceptance that renewable energy is not just an experiment, it's an imperative; 9-11 has really changed the marketplace," Walt said. "Nowadays, it's much easier to justify investing in renewables."

Community Power is partly financed by the Department of Energy, through its National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden. "9-11 is somewhat changing the emphasis of our support to more heavily concentrate on trying to produce substitutes for imported oil, including gasification," said Richard Bain, group manager of NREL's biomass thermochemical conversion center. Gasification is a process in which solid fuel is vaporized to a gas.

Biomass, which includes plant matter, agricultural waste and landfill gas, already outpaces geothermal, wind and solar energy generation in the United States. In 2001 (the most recent figures available) it represented 75 percent, or 60 billion kilowatt-hours, of all non-hydro renewable energy generation in the nation, according to NREL.

Most of that generation comes from large-scale utility companies, including Burlington Electric in Vermont, that sell electricity to the grid.

Big thoughts

Walt is acting small while thinking big. His team, equipped with $5 million in financing, mostly from the Department of Energy, Shell Renewables, the U.S. Forest Service and the California Energy Commission, has been demonstrating Community Power's BioMax cookers in a handful of small towns in the United States. Additionally, a 15-kilowatt machine has been electrifying a remote village of 150 homes in the Philippines for three years using wasted coconut shells. Villagers turn the residual fiber into erosion-controlling mats and other products.

Walt aims to start making the machines for commercial use in the United States by late next year, at an estimated cost of $15,000 per unit. If the startup recruits corporate investors and manufacturing partners, Walt expects the price of each unit to drop considerably, making the technology more affordable to homeowners.

"We're writing a new chapter with small modular biopower," he said. "The broader part of our initiative is to offset our use of and dependence on fossil fuels and nuclear energy."

The BioMax system gasifies woody waste instead of incinerating it to make a renewable, gaseous fuel. In turn, this fuel-gas powers an engine or fuel cell to generate electricity and heat, making it an environmentally cleaner alternative to typical fossil fuel-based generators.

So how does Community Power's BioMax work In one end you pour a sack of wood chips, nut shells or pellets (considered the optimal fuel because they are small and dense) into an oxygen-starved tank- shaped gasifier, which heats the solid fuel until it forms a combustible gas (up to 800 degrees Celsius, or 1,472 degrees Fahrenheit). The so-called producer gas is a mixture of fuel gases such as hydrogen, carbon monoxide and methane.

Thermal energy producer

Residual tars and particulates are filtered out. The gasifier, along with the engine's coolant and exhaust, produces thermal energy, which can be used to heat water or dry grain. In future BioMax systems, CPC plans to incorporate an optional household cooling system that uses excess heat and a small amount of water and electricity.

According to Walt, roughly 60 pounds of wood chips morphs into 20 kilowatt-hours of energy - sufficient to run a typical three-bedroom home for a day.

The household machine's generator need not run more than five hours a day, thanks to a battery bank that stores the energy. Which is a good thing, given that the humming of two BioMax machines being demonstrated recently at CPC's office drowned out conversation within 10 feet of them. Walt suggests homeowners place the machines in a shed outside.

CPC hopes to resolve the noise problem by replacing the existing generator with hydrogen fuel cell technology, which is also more energy-efficient. "I predict that in five years, half of our systems will use fuel cells," Walt said. Fuel cell technology is advancing rapidly but is still very expensive.

So far, Community Power has designed 5-kilowatt (for homes) and 20-kilowatt Bio-Max machines, such as one powering a greenhouse at a Walden high school in northwest Colorado. Within two years, Walt expects to add 50- and 100-kilowatt systems (enough to power a school or business) to Community Power's product line. One cooker under development would convert poultry litter - a massive economic and environmental problem - into electricity and heat on-site at U.S. poultry farms.

The company also is working with Nike Corp. to develop biopower systems to apply in the shoe-manufacturing process, using factory waste as fuel for micro-factories in Thailand and elsewhere.

A huge market

"This could be a huge market for us," Walt said.

Skeptics of wood gasification argue that it devours too much of a not-so-easy-to-replenish natural resource. Walt acknowledges that his BioMax machines aren't for every home or town but that they make most economic and ecological sense in areas where there's plenty of wasted wood that would otherwise be left to rot or tossed - at a cost - in landfills (producing methane and other greenhouse gases).

Walt was hardly born a biomass evangelist. For years he installed solar power systems in Indonesian villages for Westinghouse. But he grew frustrated with the steep cost of delivering enough solar panels to satisfy villagers' insatiable thirst for TVs and other appliances. He left Westinghouse and formed a joint venture with a large Indonesian conglomerate hoping to electrify Sumatra's 44,000 villages. Then came the "Asian flu," which bankrupted Walt's corporate partner.

Walt returned to the United States, where he attended a renewable conference at NREL. A top scientist spoke of the promise of biomass. "Biomass - I couldn't even spell it," Walt recalled. "Gasifier sounded to me like a disease. I had no clue what it was."

With the help of Tom Reed, an inventor and engineer who Walt refers to as "the father of modern gasification," Walt began the quest to develop a small-scale, modular biomass gasifier. (Gasification dates back to the 1800s and took off during World War II. At that time more than a million gasifiers were used in Europe to power civilian cars when the military guzzled most of the precious gasoline supplies. But the systems were clunky and far from clean.)

"Gasifiers still aren't really there yet. It'll be awhile before you can go out and buy one and get a warranty on it," said Tim Maker, director of the Biomass Resource Center in Mont-pelier, Vt., a nonprofit dedicated to expediting the commercialization of biomass energy applications. "But CPC is definitely in a leadership position. They have something that's very close to commercialization." Maker has advised Community Power.

Walt and his team are test-running a 5-kilowatt BioMax machine that they plan to install in a Navajo hogan in Cameron, Ariz., next month. If that proves successful, Walt hopes to eventually install many more throughout the partly electrified region.

"This is bigger than just one hogan," he said. "Our approach is to go small and distribute lots of them. Never before has anyone had the opportunity to use wood to produce electricity, not just heat."

BioMax at the source

BioMax is the trade name used by Community Power Corp. for its trailer-mounted systems that convert woody biomass residues to electricity and thermal energy. Here are some other facts:

• Fuel sources: Wood chips from hard and soft wood, sawdust pellets, coconut shells, pecan shells and corncobs. Poultry litter is being tested.

• Electricity generation: The BioMax has a gasifier that converts wood chips, for example, to a mixture of fuel gases such as hydrogen, carbon monoxide and methane. This producer gas is combusted or mixed in an internal combustion engine, a stirling engine, a micro-turbine or fuel cell.

• Waste products: The BioMax uses a dry system to cool and clean the producer gas, eliminating the need to process large quantities of contaminated water, as found in wet scrubbers. Ash and char are stored and periodically combusted to ash that can be dispersed in the soil. Tars and soot are recycled through the gasifier.

A23: End the Occupation of Iraq! - Bring the Troops Home Now! Rally and March

Coalition Against War and Racism

End the Occupation of Iraq! Bring the Troops Home Now!
RALLY and MARCH

When: Noon, Saturday, August 23
Where: Federal Plaza - Adams & Dearborn
(This action will include a march to Chicago's north side.)

THE FACTS:

• 
  
• The war in Iraq is NOT over. The U.S. has lost more troops in the ‘second’ Gulf war than in the first -- and the body count is rising daily.

• Bush lied. Thousands of Iraqi died for a falsehood -- non-existant weapons of mass destruction -- and millions suffer from lack of water, food, shelter, the most basic human needs.

• Politically connected companies like Haliburton, Brown & Root, Boeing and Bechtel are making millions as war profiteers, while U.S. troops and Iraqi civilions become mired in a deepening cycle of violence and hopelessness.

• State governments are broke and officials are gutting health care and education -- while military spending is soaring and our tax dollars bankroll the largest military machine in history.

• The U.S. government continues to aggressively recruit Black and Latino youth for its war machine, while denying affirmative action to them at home – and ignoring a national epidemic of police violence against people of color. This is a racist war in all aspects.

• The Pentagon brass has told soldiers they could be court martialed for telling the truth about what’s really going on in Iraq. While morale sinks lower daily, G.I.’s are told they may not come home for months or longer, and we are now being told that the U.S. military occupation of Iraq may last for years.
  

(via Chiocago IndyMedia)

Auroras

On August 9th, photographer Warren Justice looked up and saw these green auroras over Dauphin Lake, Manitoba.

(via SunSpotCycle)

US Admits Killing Reuters Cameraman

(AFP) -- The US military has acknowledged its troops in Iraq killed a Reuters cameraman in Iraq, saying they thought his camera was a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

Navy Captain Frank Thorp, a spokesman for the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, has given the explanation to Reuters in Washington.

Forty-three-year-old cameraman Mazen Dana was shot and killed on Sunday while filming near a US-run prison on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Witnesses say he was shot by soldiers on an American tank.

(via rense.com)

Meanwhile, a former US diplomat who resigned over the Iraq war has described US President George W. Bush as a "very weak" man led by the hand into battle by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Brady Kiesling, who was political counsellor at the US embassy in Athens at the time of his resignation in February, said in an open letter published by Greek daily To Vima today that Rumsfeld exploited the war to increase his own power.

Kiesling - whose warning that US aims in Iraq were "incompatible with American values" struck a chord with the predominantly anti-war Greeks - described Bush as "a politician who badly wants to appear strong but in reality is very weak".

He said Rumsfeld led Bush by the hand into war, marginalised the secret services who had doubts about the war, and emerged as the top politician in Washington.

"Easy to convince, (Bush) blindly believed in Rumsfeld's assurances that the occupation of Iraq would pay for itself," Kiesling said.

"The longer we remain in Iraq, the more the resistance to the American presence is going to be a source of legitimacy for the extremists," he said. He called for an expanded role for the United Nations and the European Union in the reconstruction of Iraq.

Kiesling said he regretted that US intelligence services had not spoken out about untruths concerning Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which he added had humiliated the United States and damaged its closest ally, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain.

French Heat Wave Overloads Cemeteries

ANGELA DOLAND, Associated Press Writer , reports:

PARIS (AP) - Gravediggers were called back to work on a national holiday Friday to deal with the grim aftermath of a heat wave that left up to 3,000 dead in France.

With morgues full, authorities took over the vast storeroom of a Paris farmers' market or kept bodies in refrigerated tents - as temperatures subsided throughout Europe, ending one of the most severe periods of intense heat on record across the continent.

Morgues and cemeteries have been overwhelmed in the heat wave, which the health minister called ``a true epidemic.'' A Paris regional funeral official said families would likely have to wait 10-15 days to have relatives buried.

``We're explaining the situation to families,'' said Hugues Fauconnet of General Funeral Services, the country's largest undertaker. ``Our most important mission is to preserve the dignity of the deceased.''

Funeral officials claimed the 43,000 square-foot refrigerated storage area of the Paris area's wholesale market in the suburb of Rungis. They planned to place bodies on army cots.

Complicating matters for burials: Many priests were away on summer vacation in predominantly Roman Catholic France, which all but shuts down during August.

Doctors have said many victims, who were generally elderly, died of dehydration heat stroke in the punishing heat wave that has gripped Europe, where many homes and offices lack air conditioning.

Throughout Europe, temperatures settled back to normal Friday. At times, the mercury had hovered around 100 degrees, fanning forest fires and devastating livestock and crops.

Thunderstorms cooled Switzerland on Friday, while in the Netherlands, temperatures were down to 68 degrees. The heat eased in Germany, though officials were still on watch for fires.

France's political climate still simmered with accusations the government didn't do enough to prevent the crisis.

Despite warnings from emergency room doctors, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin waited until Wednesday to order Paris hospitals to prepare more beds and call health care workers back from vacation.

If the government had acted sooner, ``many lives could have been saved,'' Patrick Pelloux, head of the association for French emergency hospital physicians, told Le Parisien newspaper.

Former Health Minister Claude Evin, a Socialist, also accused the center-right government for waiting too long.

Health Minister Jean-Francois Mattei toured a hospital Friday in the suburb of Longjumeau that set up a refrigerated tent to store bodies.

``We're on maximum alert,'' said Mattei, who has denied allegations of foot-dragging. ``The crisis is not over.''

Friday was a Roman Catholic holiday, the feast of the Assumption, and most of France had a long weekend. The Paris mayor's office authorized cemetery personnel to stay on the job.

If the preliminary French figures of up to 3,000 deaths holds, the death toll would be among the highest in recent years, officials at the World Health Organization in Geneva said.

About 2,600 heat-related deaths were recorded in India five years ago, and roughly 500 people died from heat-related causes in 1995 in Chicago, according to WHO experts.

No other European countries reported deaths anywhere near the scale of those in France. Spain, for example, has recorded 42. Germany and Italy haven't issued figures on heat-related deaths, saying such figures are difficult to come by because heat may be just one factor contributing to a person's death.

"There is no software on the path to enlightenment."

Michelle Kessler, USA TODAY, reports:

Dalai Lama's image enlightens SalesForce.com publicity pitch

SAN FRANCISCO — In a publicity pitch that approaches — if not tops — the most audacious of the dot-com boom, software maker SalesForce.com is enlisting no less than the Dalai Lama.

On a poster with the Tibetan leader in meditative pose, it says it's celebrating SalesForce.com's 100,000 "enlightened subscribers who have been freed from the boundaries of software." The Dalai Lama sits below the headline: "There is no software on the path to enlightenment."

SalesForce.com, perhaps the first successful Web services company to emerge from the dot-com crash, bought 500 tickets to a speech the Dalai Lama is giving in San Francisco. Afterward, it's throwing a Tibet-themed party. Entertainment includes former Tibetan monk Robert Thurman — the father of actress Uma Thurman — and 1980s cover band Tainted Love.

(via TechDirt)

SalesForce.com sells low-profile but popular low-cost software to help businesses automate backend systems. But its marketing is anything but low-profile.

Arnold Schwarzenegger recently hosted a premiere of Terminator 3 for the company, in exchange for a donation to his after-school charity. SalesForce.com buys seats at a David Bowie benefit concert each year for Tibetan causes. The company donates 1% of its income to charity each year.

It's unclear whether the Dalai Lama has ever used sales force automation software. SalesForce.com CEO Marc Benioff, a longtime donor to Tibetan charities, says he has not spoken to the Dalai Lama about the campaign. Tibet's government gave him permission to use the photo, he says. SalesForce.com made a $100,000 donation to Tibetan charities in honor of the sales milestone.

Apple Computer used the Dalai Lama's image in its "Think Different" campaign in the late '90s. His face has also popped up in political ads in Australia and Brazilian ads for high-speed Internet access.

Benioff says the event will help garner attention as it tries to move to a new level. SalesForce.com expects to bring in $100 million in revenue this year — nearly double that of 2002. A Web site to collect RSVPs from employees had to be taken down once the Web address was made public.

Such buzz can backfire, advertising executives say.

"There's an unwritten rule not to use religious stuff in advertising. You stay away from it because it's so controversial," says David Crawford, a creative director at GSD&M advertising in Austin.

Yet Crawford recently did advertisements for a faucet company featuring a Hindu goddess, Adam and Eve and a priest, because religious icons can grab attention in an increasingly crowded market. "The envelope is being pushed every day," he says.

During the tech boom, even an event featuring the Dalai Lama might not have attracted much notice. Lavish, celebrity-studded events took place nightly as dot-coms tried to stand out from the loud buzz.

"They were doing anything and everything they could to get attention," says Manuel Ramirez, co-owner of Bay City Events, a San Jose, Calif., party-planning firm. Now, a sales milestone will be celebrated with a party in a hotel ballroom decorated with just balloons, Ramirez says.

NY AC KO

New York City Blackout

System and Method for Producing Synthetic Diamond

United States Patent 6,582,513
Linares , et al. June 24, 2003

Abstract
Synthetic monocrystalline diamond compositions having one or more monocrystalline diamond layers formed by chemical vapor deposition, the layers including one or more layers having an increased concentration of one or more impurities (such as boron and/or isotopes of carbon), as compared to other layers or comparable layers without such impurities. Such compositions provide an improved combination of properties, including color, strength, velocity of sound, electrical conductivity, and control of defects. A related method for preparing such a composition is also described, as well as a system for use in performing such a method, and articles incorporating such a composition.

(via WIRED 11.09)

Computer 'Worm' Widely Attacks Windows Versions

Kirk Semple, New York Times, reports:

A malicious computer program aimed at the most recent versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system rapidly spread around the world over the Internet yesterday, infecting tens of thousands of home computers and corporate networks.

Known by a variety of names — including W32.Blaster, MSBlast and W32/Lovsan — the viruslike program, called a worm, first appeared on Monday.

Even though the possibility of such an attack had been widely anticipated by computer security experts, the worm managed to take advantage of a vulnerability in a common component of Windows to invade numerous computer hard drives, where it was in position to impede operations and attack other computers.

malicious computer program aimed at the most recent versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system rapidly spread around the world over the Internet yesterday, infecting tens of thousands of home computers and corporate networks.

Known by a variety of names — including W32.Blaster, MSBlast and W32/Lovsan — the viruslike program, called a worm, first appeared on Monday.

Even though the possibility of such an attack had been widely anticipated by computer security experts, the worm managed to take advantage of a vulnerability in a common component of Windows to invade numerous computer hard drives, where it was in position to impede operations and attack other computers.

According to the SANS Institute, a computer security training firm based in Bethesda, Md., the worm also riddles the infected computer's registry with several computer strings, including the taunt, directed at Microsoft's chairman: "billy gates why do you make this possible Stop making money and fix your software!!"

On Saturday, experts said, the Blaster worm will attempt to shut down Microsoft's Windows Update Web site, where users are encouraged to go for the patch, by signaling infected computers around the world to swamp the site with bogus requests for service.

"It's like Mother's Day," Mr. Lindner said. "It's a big deal for everyone to call their mother on Mother's Day, but you get a busy signal because there are not enough telephone lines."

The worm also instructs infected computers to continue pelting the site.

Security experts said the only way to thwart the attack this weekend, and forestall future attacks, is for people with infected computers to remove the worm from their machines and download the patch. Cleansing tools and instructions are available at http://www.microsoft .com/security/incident/blast.asp, as well as at numerous Internet security and antivirus Web sites.

To prevent future Blaster infections, experts said, all computer owners using Microsoft Windows should update their antivirus software and download and install the Microsoft patch regardless of whether their machines are behaving erratically. Computer owners who regularly use the Windows update feature, either automatically or manually, or keep their antivirus software current, are probably already protected against the worm. More instructions and links are available at www.nytimes.com/technology.

Security officials also said that the worm might spawn other offspring over the next few days.

Mr. Toulouse of Microsoft said the cat-and-mouse game between software engineers and hackers would certainly not stop when Blaster is solved. "Security in and of itself is not going to be perfect," he said. "It's really a journey, not an endpoint."

Nth Digit of Pi

This simple formula can calculate any binary or hexadecimal digit of pi without calculating the digits preceding it.

Sex-Crazed Giant Squid

Stuff (NZ) reports:

New Zealand squid expert Steve O'Shea says he will mount a new expedition in July next year to film "sex-crazed" giant squid in the wild.

Dr O'Shea plans to film about 600m below the sea surface off the West Coast, after squirting squid pheromones, sexual scents, into the ocean.

The extracts of male and female giant squid sex organs will be squirted from a remotely-operated submersible, the latest New Scientist magazine reports.

He hopes the pheromone will attract squid long enough for a good opportunity to film them.

"These things come into New Zealand waters to breed," Dr O'Shea said of the squid. "They're sex-crazed".

In a paper submitted to the New Zealand Journal of Zoology, Dr O'Shea and his assistant, Kat Bolstad have described finding fragments of the end of a giant squid tentacle in the stomach of a female.

He said it probably was not intentional cannibalism – but the tentacle of a male swept too close to a female's "beak" during mating and she ate it.

A squid expert at the Melbourne Museum, Mark Norman, and his colleague Chung-Cheng Lu, six years ago investigated the first recorded mated female giant squid, and found sperm packages or "spermatophores" embedded in the skin of the female's arms, where it is stored until the female is ready to use it.

The pair said it seemed a male giant squid used its muscular elongated penis – up to 1.5m long – to "inject" sperm packages under pressure directly into the arms of females.

Since then, Dr O'Shea has found males implanted with their own spermatophores.

"If we are talking about a 200kg squid, this is an animal with a 20g brain," he told New Scientist.

"It's not very bright and it is trying to coordinate a metre-long penis.

"He's going to get a bit confused."

The researchers believe female giant squid – scientifically known as Architeuthis – probably mix eggs from their ovary with jelly secreted from glands inside the body. They then extrude the egg mass to be cradled in their arms in the form of a small gelatinous sphere.

Chemicals in the egg-jelly matrix activate the sperm packages buried in her arms, and the spermatophores migrate towards the surface of the skin, where they explode, shooting sperm out onto the egg mass.

The sperm then burrow into the mass to fertilise many thousands of eggs.

Dr O'Shea thinks this egg mass drifts for a week or two before the larvae hatch.

He said there were two separate geographical groups that migrated to New Zealand waters to breed. One gathered off the West Coast of South Island in July and August, the other off the East Coast in late December, January and February.

In February 2001, Dr O'Shea's team, funded by the Discovery Channel, trapped some tiny squid larvae swimming 250km east of New Zealand which turned out to be Architeuthis larvae – the first ever caught – but they all died over the next three days.

Other groups, such as a Smithsonian-led team, funded by the National Geographic Channel, are also trying to film a giant squid.

Po-Po-Mo Email

I found this today and I really can't explain it:

Date: Fri, January 11, 2002 4:12 pm
To: postmaster
From: "Fred Cooper" postm
Subject: blustering

scream mechanic savoy
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power practitioners practiced
boy euphemist arequipa
exempt coupons coupe
humoring meteors hurrying
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hydride acceptor mending
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counterbalance booty council excavated hungriest

remove mail
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augusta ignoring teleprinter
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ethically pleura bolt
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belgrade coupler tears
brainstorm poultice methodological
billings idealizations metabolic
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cremations hydrochloride counsels
actress atwood players
boycotts hostage sat
craftsman medico exigent boise thatches councilman
expansible meadow mechanized poor meteors

Hand Crank for Game Boy

This hand-crank charger for the Game Boy Advance is out in Japan for about US$15 -- not sure if it's available in the US.

(via BoingBoing)

Human Batteries

The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

A device that produces electricity from blood could be used to turn people into "human batteries".

Researchers in Japan are developing a method of drawing power from blood glucose, mimicking the way the body generates energy from food.

Theoretically, it could allow a person to pump out 100 watts - enough to illuminate a light bulb.

But that would entail converting all the food eaten by the individual into electricity. In practice, less power would be generated since food is needed by the body.

However the scientists say the "bio-nano" generator could be used to run devices embedded in the body, or sugar-fed robots.

The team at electronics giant Panasonic's Nanotechnology Research Laboratory near Kyoto has so far only managed to produce very low power levels.

But the scientists ultimately expect to gain much greater performance from the device.

The battery is based on an enzyme capable of stripping glucose of its electrons, The Engineer magazine reported.

Dr Kazuo Eda, heading the research, said: "It is like the metabolism of food. Human bodies can process glucose and obtain energy. When glucose is oxidised, electrons can be obtained."

He believed bio-nano fuel cells were the next step for researchers after generators powered by hydrogen, natural gas and methanol now being developed for the car and energy industries.

PA