ALISO VIEJO, Calif. (AP) – Traffic is so bad along the eastern rim of Los Angeles’ suburban ring that regional planners are considering the once unthinkable – an 11-mile tunnel through a mountain range in earthquake country.

Critics question the logic of building a multibillion-dollar project in a region so prone to earthquakes that an alternate proposal for a double-decker highway was deemed too dangerous. The tunnel would begin barely a mile from a fault that produced a 6.0-magnitude earthquake about a century ago.

“It’s absolutely absurd to have a tunnel 700 feet below ground in earthquake country,” said Cathryn DeYoung, mayor of Laguna Niguel and a vocal opponent. “I mean, would you want to be in that tunnel?”
apnews.myway.com

The physics of 9/11 — including how fast and symmetrically one of the World Trade Center buildings fell — prove that official explanations of the collapses are wrong, says a Brigham Young University physics professor.

In fact, it’s likely that there were “pre-positioned explosives” in all three buildings at ground zero, says Steven E. Jones.

In a paper posted online Tuesday and accepted for peer-reviewed publication next year, Jones adds his voice to those of previous skeptics, including the authors of the Web site www.wtc7.net, whose research Jones quotes. Jones’ article can be found at physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html

“It is quite plausible that explosives were pre-planted in all three (WTC) buildings,” BYU physics professor Steven E. Jones says.

Jones, who conducts research in fusion and solar energy at BYU, is calling for an independent, international scientific investigation “guided not by politicized notions and constraints but rather by observations and calculations.

“It is quite plausible that explosives were pre-planted in all three buildings and set off after the two plane crashes — which were actually a diversion tactic,” he writes. “Muslims are (probably) not to blame for bringing down the WTC buildings after all,” Jones writes.
deseretnews.com

Martial Law

Many folks accept, some with a sense of high probability, that the US will suffer a terrorist attack, perhaps of horrific proportions. If that happens, as General Tommy Franks and others have suggested, democracy could well fail and the US Constitution could be brought down and replaced by martial law. An attack would leave a terrified US populace, many of them so desperate for a sense of order, so lustful for revenge against the terrorists (to be identified by the War Machine, of course) that they will follow the US Government in lockstep. Nuke Iran and Syria immediately (as neocons have wanted to do for quite some time)? No problem. Arrest and intimidate anyone who dares speak out against the government? Hey, national security is at stake. Vigilantism waged against dissident “traitors”? We’re fighting for the survival of Western civilization, for God’s sake.

More than 5,000 high school students in five of the state’s largest school districts have removed their names from military recruitment lists, a trend driven by continuing casualties in Iraq and a well-organized peace movement that has urged students to avoid contact with recruiters.

The number of students removing their names has jumped significantly over the past year, especially in school systems with many low-income and minority students, where parents and activists are growing increasingly assertive in challenging military recruiters’ access to young people.

Since 2002, under the federal No Child Left Behind law, high schools have been required to provide lists of students’ names, telephone numbers, and addresses to military recruiters who ask for them, as well as colleges and potential employers. Students who do not wish to be contacted — or their parents — notify their school districts in writing.
In Boston, about 3,700 students, or 19 percent of those enrolled in the city’s high schools, have removed their names from recruiting lists. At Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, 952 high school students, more than half the student body, ordered the school system not to give their names to the military this year.
boston.com

Riots spread to the centre of a French city for the first time last night as police clashed with youths in Lyon.

Officers in the city’s famous Place Bellecour moved in with tear gas to disperse rioters vandalising vehicles. Police said they had been attacked by groups brandishing bottles, stones and dustbins.

The confrontation, which led to two arrests, happened shortly after the local prefect had announced a weekend curfew on minors.

Meanwhile, Paris was under siege yesterday as thousands of police guarded key tourist sites such as the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Elysées and enforced emergency laws, including a ban on groups of people gathering.

The capital’s prefect of police, Pierre Mutz, said the record deployment of some 3,000 officers was in response to a barrage of text messages and weblogs thought to have come from youths linked to the previous 16 nights of unrest in the city’s suburbs. They called for ‘the biggest riot ever seen’.
observor.guardian.co.uk

The Real Difference Between America and France

…The result of our conversation was that though the core issues among ethnic and racial minorities in the United States and France are the very similar, the French response would never work here. This is because the United States flatly refuses to address the core issues and denies the humanity of our urban poor. Despite the terrible nature of the French riots, ignoring the radical Right of Le Pen, it seems likely that many of the core issues will be addressed to one extent or another in France since they have been recognized. To quote Chirac, “We need to respond in a strong and quick way to the unquestionable problems that many inhabitants of the deprived neighborhoods surrounding our cities are facing.”

In the United States, on the other hand, the urban poor are simply denied any attributes of humanity. They can be killed and maimed with impunity, pushed deeper in debt and poverty without recourse, and by their very nature all their grievances can be written off as laziness and dependency on the “welfare state.” Make no mistake about it, my friends – who in of themselves are reasonably well off – made it crystal clear that the same anger and frustration is churning here but experience has shown them to expect no mercy from our government.

The main difference between France and the United States is that in France the youths recognized that their government might actually heed their plight, whereas here the people facing the same frustration know full well that our government will go to extreme measures to avoid doing so. The real difference is that in France the minorities are still human beings even if facing discrimination and poverty, whereas in the United States, those in poverty effectively lose their humanity as far as the powers-that-be are concerned. Despite this reality, repression of the downtrodden and ignoring fundamental problems is not a sustainable solution and given the right impetus the United States is moving toward a crisis that will make France’s current problems seem trivial in comparison.

People fled, and some have returned. Others have arrived for the first time from near and wide to tend the sick and haul debris, to patch roofs and, perhaps, strike it rich from the rebuilding. It is obvious from walking the streets in New Orleans – many barren, a few bustling – that the populace has changed. But what is the current population?

Will the population of New Orleans return to pre-Katrina levels?
The city had 460,000 residents before the hurricane, but with many neighborhoods uninhabitable, some officials speculate that there are no more than 100,000 people now.

The best data may be from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which found that nonfarm jobs in the city and surrounding parishes dropped to 378,400 in September, from 615,600 in August. (The bureau does not break out figures for New Orleans alone.)

Looking at the city itself, the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, a nonprofit group, determined that 135,000 people lived in areas that were not flooded. Most left under an evacuation order, and it is not clear how many have returned.

The local power company, Entergy New Orleans, said that less than 30 percent of its customers were drawing power. Change-of-address forms have been filed by nearly two-thirds of the postal customers in New Orleans and a section of neighboring Jefferson Parish, according to an analysis by the local newspaper, The Times-Picayune.

Beyond the permanent residents, no one has even tried to determine the number of transient workers who have arrived.

Matt Fellowes of the Brookings Institution in Washington, which will soon begin publishing a Katrina Index on the rebuilding effort, said it had been easier gathering data for Iraq than for New Orleans.

“There is more of a focus, frankly, on the rebuilding effort in Iraq,” he said. “Because it’s become politically important, there is a lot of data generated there.”
nytimes.com

At least 500,000 earthquake survivors in Pakistan still have no shelter with the fierce Himalayan winter just days away, international relief agencies have warned. Aid workers are scrambling to get tents to survivors in high mountain areas where snow may arrive any day, but the international relief effort is failing.

The problem is a severe lack of funds. Relief agencies warn that if they do not get adequate shelters to survivors before snow falls, thousands will die.

…Aid agencies say they are doing what they can but governments have not put up enough money. The United Nations has received only $133m (£76m) towards an emergency appeal for $550m. It urgently needs $42m just to keep the current aid effort going. Pakistan says that out of the $2bn pledged by foreign governments, it has received only $9.5m. The charity Oxfam says Britain has contributed only 24 per cent of what it says would be its “fair share”, based on the size of its economy.
independent.co.uk

Supporters of the Liberian presidential candidate George Weah clashed with United Nations peacekeepers in Monrovia as they protested against allegedly fraudulent results they said had robbed the former football star of a victory.

The angry demonstrations followed claims by Mr Weah’s rival, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, that she had won the run-off in the war-ravaged west African state.

The protest, in which at least two people were injured, followed a plea from Mr Weah at his Congress for Democratic Change (CDC) headquarters for his supporters to remain calm and stay off the streets until an investigation into the alleged fraud and ballot tampering was resolved.
independent.co.uk

by Stephen Edward Seadler

…Only a lifetime ago, three quarters of a million people died here for a couple of square miles of ground, where the heirs to the culture of Voltaire were bled white by the heirs of Goethe and Beethoven. The pointlessness of it all passes belief today, but the history of the West more than any other has swung between savagery and idealism. A contradiction apparently deeply rooted in our character and history.

Earlier Wood had summarized the problem as follows:

We Westerners of the late 20th century — for all our modernity — are still a Bronze Age people.

In 1997, during the course of the six years of researching and writing Principia Ideologica: A Treatise on Combatting Human Malignance, I spoke with Dr Bruce Manning Metzger, Professor Emeritus of Princeton Theological Seminary. Professor Metzger had been Chairman of the Standard Bible Translation Committee, which is affiliated with the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, and which developed the New Revised Standard Version. During our conversation I remarked that in developing Principia Ideologica I had found it necessary to assume the burden of attacking the savagery of Western Civilization at what I perceived to be its roots in the savage Bronze Age literature of Judaeo-Christian mythology and ethos as expressed in the Bible, and asked if that would offend him. “Oh, no…no…not at all,” he replied.
civillibertarian.blogspot.com

War, Peace, and Arms Control in the Bronze Age

Stephen Edward Seadler is a member of:American Physical Society, New York Academy of Sciences, Institute of Electrical & Electronic Engineers, Foreign Policy Association, Academy of Political Science, West Point Society of New Jersey, Union of Concerned Scientists, American Physical Society Forum On Physics & Society, Naval Intelligence Professionals, Wisdom Hall of Fame.and is listed in: Marquis Who’s Who in the World, Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in Science & Engineering, Who’s Who in Finance & Business Who’s Who in American Education. Others in the UK, Europe & Asia.

11/12/05 “New York Times” — — WASHINGTON, Nov. 11 – Democrats who had voted previously to prohibit abusive treatment of detainees in American custody provided the margin of victory on Thursday for a Republican-backed measure that would deny prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the right to challenge their detention in federal courts.
informationclearinghouse.info

Meditation alters brain patterns in ways that are likely permanent, scientists have known. But a new study shows key parts of the brain actually get thicker through the practice.

Brain imaging of regular working folks who meditate regularly revealed increased thickness in cortical regions related to sensory, auditory and visual perception, as well as internal perception — the automatic monitoring of heart rate or breathing, for example.

The study also indicates that regular meditation may slow age-related thinning of the frontal cortex.

“What is most fascinating to me is the suggestion that meditation practice can change anyone’s gray matter,” said study team member Jeremy Gray, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale. “The study participants were people with jobs and families. They just meditated on average 40 minutes each day, you don’t have to be a monk.”
news.yahoo.com