Invisible “smog”, created by the electricity that powers our civilization, is giving children cancer, causing miscarriages and suicides and making some people allergic to modern life, new scientific evidence reveals.

The evidence – which is being taken seriously by national and international bodies and authorities – suggests that almost everyone is being exposed to a new form of pollution with countless sources in daily use in every home.
commondreams.org

This is not new information.

Global warming is rapidly melting the ice-bound roof of the world, and turning it into desert, leading scientists have revealed.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences – the country’s top scientific body – has announced that the glaciers of the Tibetan plateau are vanishing so fast that they will be reduced by 50 per cent every decade. Each year enough water permanently melts from them to fill the entire Yellow River.

They added that the vast environmental changes brought about by the process will increase droughts and sandstorms over the rest of the country, and devastate many of the world’s greatest rivers, in what experts warn will be an “ecological catastrophe”.

The plateau, says the academy, has a staggering 46,298 glaciers, covering almost 60,000 square miles. At an average height of 13,000 feet above sea level, they make up the largest area of ice outside the polar regions, nearly a sixth of the world’s total.
commondreams.org

President George W Bush has revealed to a German newspaper his best moment since he took office in 2001.

“I would say the best moment of all was when I caught a 7.5lb (3.4kg) perch in my lake,” he told Bild am Sonntag.

The worst moment was the 11 September 2001 hijacked plane attacks on New York and Washington that killed about 3,000.

Mr Bush also said ahead of the summer’s football World Cup that “old guys” like him were starting to understand the competition’s importance to the world.

President Bush said he had had “experienced many great moments” in his five years in power and it was “hard to name the best”.

But he plumped for the perch, although he did not specify what type it was.

Of the 9/11 attacks, he said: “In such a situation it takes a while before one understands what is happening.

“I would say that this was the hardest moment, once I had the real picture before my eyes.”
bbc.co.uk

US President George W. Bush said the September 11 revolt of passengers against their hijackers on board Flight 93 had struck the first blow of “World War III.”

In an interview with the financial news network CNBC, Bush said he had yet to see the recently released film of the uprising, a dramatic portrayal of events on the United Airlines plane before it crashed in a Pennsylvania field.

But he said he agreed with the description of David Beamer, whose son Todd died in the crash, who in a Wall Street Journal commentary last month called it “our first successful counter-attack in our homeland in this new global war — World War III”.

Bush said: “I believe that. I believe that it was the first counter-attack to World War III.

“It was, it was unbelievably heroic of those folks on the airplane to recognize the danger and save lives,” he said.

Flight 93 crashed on the morning of September 11, 2001, killing the 33 passengers, seven crew members and four hijackers, after passengers stormed the cockpit and battled the hijackers for control of the aircraft.

The president has repeatedly praised the heroism of the passengers in fighting back and so launching the first blow of what he usually calls the “war on terror”.

In 2002, then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer explicitly declined to call the hunt for Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda group and its followers “World War III.”
commondreams.org

Brazil has joined the select group of countries with the capability of enriching uranium as a means of generating energy.

A new centrifuge facility was formally opened on Friday at the Resende nuclear plant in the state of Rio de Janeiro.

The Brazilian government says its technology is some of the most advanced in the world.

The official opening follows lengthy negotiations with the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the IAEA.

Brazil has some of the largest reserves of uranium in the world but until now the ore has had to be shipped abroad for enrichment – the process which produces nuclear fuel.

In future some of that enrichment will take place in Brazil.

The government says that within a decade the country will be able to meet all its nuclear energy needs.
bbc.co.uk

GAZA, May 7 (Xinhua) — Israel has sealed off on Sunday all crossings on Israel-Gaza borders without advanced notice, said a senior Palestinian official.

Director of Palestinian Crossing Security Salim Abu Safiea told reporters in Gaza that the Israeli side has closed Karni commercial terminal and forced Palestinian workers and merchants out.

Other travel passages like Erez on northern tip of the Gaza Strip, and Sofa cargo crossing in the south have also been closed, according to Abu Safiea.

The ongoing Israel closure on the Gaza Strip would deepen the humanitarian and fiscal crisis the Palestinians are suffering from as food aid from the United Nations was not allowed into Gaza. “Even humanitarian cases were not allowed out of Gaza through Erez crossing,” said Abu Safiea, warning that the continuation of this siege would lead to humanitarian disasters.
xinhuanet.com

Major U.S. companies, including Wal-Mart, Gloria Vanderbilt, Target, Kohl’s, Victoria’s Secret and L.L. Bean, are buying apparel from sweatshops in Jordan under a three-way trade deal that binds the Arab nation to Israel and the United States, according to a new report.

The report by the New York-based National Labor Committee says that the U.S-Jordan Free Trade Agreement (FTA) has descended into human trafficking and “involuntary servitude.”
informationclearinghouse.info

The draft resolution on Iran’s nuclear activities that the United States, Britain and France presented to the United Nations Security Council this week is designed to fail.

By making it a Chapter Seven resolution (one that is mandatory under international law and can be enforced by sanctions or even by military action), the authors have guaranteed that it will ultimately face a veto by Russia and China, neither of which is convinced that such extreme measures are necessary.

They are not necessary, but this resolution burns the bridges on further negotiations (not that the U.S. was willing to talk directly to Iran anyway), and there have been heavy hints in Washington of military action against Iran.

If President George W. Bush follows the same path that he took into Iraq, a “failure to act” by the Security Council is the necessary preliminary to an attack on Iran.

Such an attack would make no military sense, but American foreign policy is still in the hands of neo-conservatives whose mantra used to be that “the boys go to Baghdad, the men go to Tehran.”

Even if Iran does intend to build nuclear weapons eventually, there is no urgency.

As Robert Joseph, U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control, said in March, the U.S. intelligence community believes that Iran is “five to 10 years away from a nuclear weapons capability.”

Attacking Iran is also a military nightmare for American strategic planners:

Former White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke pointed out last month that the Clinton administration also contemplated a bombing campaign in the late 1990s, but “after a long debate, the highest levels of the military could not forecast a way in which things would end favourably for the United States.”
hamiltonspectator

NEW YORK Midway through Thomas RicksÕ Washington Post scoop on Monday detailing a U.S. military Òpropaganda programÓ aimed at convincing Iraqis that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has a very prominent role in directing violence in that country, there is one specific tip on how the plan may have also targeted American reporters and audiences.

Ricks found that one Òselective leakÓ–about a recently discovered letter written by Zarqawi–was handed by the military to Dexter Filkins, the longtime New York Times reporter in Baghdad. Filkins’s resulting article, about the Zarqawi letter boasting of foreigners’ role in suicide attacks in Iraq, ran on the front page of the Times on Feb. 9, 2004.

ÒLeaks to reporters from U.S. officials in Iraq are common, but official evidence of a propaganda operation using an American reporter is rare,Ó Ricks observed. He quoted Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the U.S. military’s chief spokesman when the propaganda campaign began in 2004: “We trusted Dexter to write an accurate story, and we gave him a good scoop.”
editorandpublisher.com

KABUL, Afghanistan – A top U.S. counterterrorism official said Saturday that parts of Pakistan are a “safe haven” for militants and Osama bin Laden was more likely to be hiding there than in Afghanistan.

Henry Crumpton, the U.S. ambassador in charge of counterterrorism, lauded Pakistan for arresting “hundreds and hundreds” of al-Qaida figures but said it needed to do more.

“Has Pakistan done enough? I think the answer is no. I have conveyed that to them, other U.S. officials have conveyed that to them,” he told reporters at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul after talks with Afghan officials.

The chief spokesman for Pakistan’s army, Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, dismissed Crumpton’s assertion that Islamabad was not doing enough.

“It is totally absurd,” he said. “No one has conveyed this thing to Pakistan, and if someone claims so, it is absurd.”
news.yahoo.com