US waves white flag in disastrous ‘war on drugs’

After 40 years, Washington is quietly giving up on a futile battle that has spread corruption and destroyed thousands of lives Read the full story

Only miles from the scenic vistas and celebrity mansions that draw sightseers from around the globe — but a world away from the glitz and glamour — a bus tour is rolling through the dark side of the city’s gang turf.

Passengers paying $65 a head Saturday signed waivers acknowledging they could be crime victims and put their fate in the hands of tattooed ex-gang members who say they have negotiated a cease-fire among rivals in the most violent gangland in America.

If that sounds daunting, consider the challenge facing organizers of LA Gang Tours: trying to build a thriving venture that provides a glimpse into gang life while also trying to convince people that gang-plagued communities are not as hopeless as movies depict. Read the full story

Just months after rushing to order enough swine-flu vaccine to protect their citizens, European governments are canceling orders and trying to sell or give away extra doses as they sit on a glut of the vaccine.

The main reason: European health officials decided that only one shot per person was needed, instead of the two originally planned. Low demand is also to blame. Many Europeans believe the pandemic has turned out to be fairly mild, and don’t see a reason to get vaccinated. Some are also concerned that they will suffer side effects from the shots, despite assurances otherwise from global health officials. Read the full story

Confidential intelligence documents obtained by The Times show that Iran is working on testing a key final component of a nuclear bomb.

The notes, from Iran’s most sensitive military nuclear project, describe a four-year plan to test a neutron initiator, the component of a nuclear bomb that triggers an explosion. Foreign intelligence agencies date them to early 2007, four years after Iran was thought to have suspended its weapons programme. Read the full story

Homeless brothers in line to inherit billions

Hungarian cave-dwellers could split grandmother’s $6.6 billion fortune

BUDAPEST, Hungary – Talk about a reversal of fortunes.

Two brothers who are so poor they live in a cave on the outskirts of Budapest and get by selling scavenged junk are in line to receive a $6.6 billion inheritance from a long-lost grandmother, the U.K. Daily Telegraph reports.

Zsolt and Geza Peladi have been informed that they are entitled to the fortune, along with a sister who lives in the United States, the newspaper reported Wednesday. Read the full story

The Netherlands were the surprise beneficiary of FIFA’s late decision to abandon the principles of the 2002, 2006 World Cup draw’s seeding formula.

In those cycles, FIFA assigned weights to the two preceding World Cup finishes along with the end-of-year FIFA World Rankings from the last three years.

Today, when announcing the eight seeded teams that will be draw into separate groups for World Cup 2010, FIFA disclosed that the only factor in this year’s seeding was the October 2009 FIFA World Ranking.  The top seven nations from that last will join host nation South Africa as seeds for Friday’s draw. Read the full story

Patient trapped in a 23-year ‘coma’ was conscious all along

A man thought by doctors to be in a vegetative state for 23 years was actually conscious the whole time, it was revealed last night.

Student Rom Houben was misdiagnosed after a car crash left him totally paralysed.

He had no way of letting experts, family or friends know he could hear every word they said. Read the full story

Italy Convicts 23 Americans in C.I.A. Trials

MILAN — In a landmark ruling on Wednesday, an Italian judge convicted a C.I.A. station chief and 22 other Americans accused of being C.I.A. agents of kidnapping in the 2003 abduction of a Muslim cleric from the streets of Milan. Read the full story

The tropical rainforest in the eastern lowlands of Ecuador assaults the senses: the sunlight dazzles the eyes, the heat is so fierce that within seconds one’s clothes are soaked in sweat. Then there are the sounds: a hypnotic symphony of frogs, crickets and other insects and birds which continues unabated day and night. There are sudden glimpses of the jungle’s abundant wildlife: a spectacular flash of a blue morpho butterfly at the river’s edge, a flock of green parakeets screeching.

This stunning region, which covers more than a third of Ecuador’s area, almost the size of England, and which is one of the world’s richest biospheres, with a huge diversity of animals and plants, some found nowhere else on Earth, faces a double threat: from the logging industry, which would strip it bare, and from the oil industry, which for nearly 40 years has been exploiting the huge resources of crude beneath the soil. Now, however, Ecuador is betting it can keep what is left of the oil in the ground and hang onto its biosphere into the bargain.

The South American country has learned the hard way that oil brings human misery and environmental devastation along with billions in export earnings. Every new oil field is an invasion that brings tens of thousands of outsiders into the forest’s heart, polluting the air, soil and water, destroying wildlife, and assaulting the support systems of indigenous tribes, which can lead to their extermination. And the damage is not confined to the immediate vicinity of the wells.

The Via Auca is the main highway cutting through the Ecuadorean Amazonia region, and it has been a lifeline of the oil industry for nearly 40 years, slicing through the countryside like a badly healed wound, the roadside lined with hellish flares, murky waste pits and corroded pipelines. Accidents involving the pipelines are frequent, and their consequences harrowing. On the far side of the town of Dayuma, which sprang up as an oil workers’ shantytown and is still riddled with crime and prostitution, one of the ageing pipelines has ruptured, sending a jet of oil shooting 30 metres into the air, staining the vegetation black all around.

The sickly stench of crude oil is overwhelming in the midday tropical heat. A house and a field across the road have also been soaked by the filthy gusher. Sebastian Ortiz, whose elderly father owns the simple wooden house by the roadside on the edge of the jungle, points out where the oil has drenched the field and seeped into the ground. Petrobel, one of many oil companies now operating in the region, has said it will pay his father US$5,000 (£3,000) towards the clean-up costs. But Ortiz says: “I don’t know when he will be paid, or even if it is still safe for him to carry on living here.”

Pollution is only one of the many ills that the oil business brings with it. Fernando Moreno, an anthropologist with the Ministry of the Environment, has been monitoring the oil industry’s effect on the local community for years. “The people have become beggars” he says. “They have become accustomed to demanding whatever they need and more from the oil companies, just because they are in the same territory. Weighing up the benefits and drawbacks of the oil companies, I think it would be better not to have them. They lead to many bad habits, they make people avaricious, they increase the differences between people – and they are a source of contamination: for the land, the water and the people themselves.”

For the last 16 years Ecuador has been embroiled in a bitter battle over a huge $27.3 billion environmental damages claim brought against US oil giant Chevron by 30,000 Amazonian inhabitants. The plaintiffs accuse Texaco (which Chevron acquired in 1993) of dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the rainforest between 1964 and 1990, and claim that 1,400 deaths occurred in the region as a result of the contaminated soil and water, which brought unaccountably high levels of cancer, skin and breathing conditions. The Amazon Defence Coalition, which represents the plaintiffs, says the scale of the pollution makes it the biggest environmental disaster in the world, dwarfing the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and leading some experts to dub it “South America’s Chernobyl”. It is certainly shaping up to become the world’s biggest environmental lawsuit.

Chevron robustly refutes the allegations. It says Texaco spent US$40 million on a clean-up before it handed over operations to the state oil company in 1992. Ecuador’s government then signed a release freeing Chevron from any liability for subsequent damages from potential oil contamination.

Whatever the outcome of the legal battle Ecuador is now banking on a new idea to help it shed its poisonous dependency on oil. The Yasuni-ITT Initiative aims to keep the region’s remaining oil reserves untapped and underground, in return for financial compensation from the international community and carbon offsets from the carbon markets.

The crux of the scheme is simple: to keep the oil beneath the Yasuni National Park where it is, in perpetuity. Covering nearly 2.5 million acres of primary tropical rainforest, Yasuni is the ancestral territory of the Waorani people and two other tribes, the Tagaeri and the Taromenane. It was named a Unesco biosphere reserve in 1989, and scientists regard it one of the most biodiverse places on earth.

It is also the home of Ecuador’s largest oil reserve. But by not extracting the estimated 846 million barrels of oil in the reserve, Ecuador will keep an estimated 410 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere, makinga big contribution to the fight against global warming.

It will also pledge to respect the territories of the indigenous cultures living in the national park, as well as protecting its flora and fauna. In return, the Ecuadorean Government has asked for compensation of $350 million a year for 10 years, which would be invested in environmental and social development programmes, helping the country move towards a sustainable economy.

After a slow start the plan has begun to attract serious promises of commitment. Amazon Watch, an organisation dedicated to protecting the rainforest and its indigenous inhabitants, calls it “a landmark proposal … a precedent-setting effort by an oil-exporting nation to preserve a global biodiversity hotspot, protect indigenous rights and set the stage for its own economic and energetic shift away from fossil fuels”.

Some big international players agree: Germany has offered $50 million on condition that other nations stump up similar sums. Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, and Yolanda Kakabadse, a senior member of the Yasuni commission, have been in London and continental European capitals this week spreading the word. And in December Ecuador’s former chancellor Francisco Carrión, the Government’s envoy on the initiative, will present it at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

Among Ecuadoreans themselves, the initiative is welcomed particularly by the flourishing tourist industry. With a spectacular range of natural attractions, from the Galapagos Islands to the snow-peaked Andes, Ecuador has long been a pioneer in ecotourism.

Fander Falconi the foreign minister and one of the founders of the initiative, says the scheme will work on the basis of shared responsibility, locally and globally. “What we are aiming for is global sustainability, but with a distinction drawn between those who harm the environment and those who suffer the consequences of this harm.”

Luz Coloma, Yasuni-ITT’s press officer, added, “Ecuador has had sad experiences with the exploitation of oil and no one wants any more environmental disasters like the Chevron-Texaco case.”

On the banks of the Shiripuno river, to the west of the Yasuni National Park, is the Huaorani Ecolodge run and owned by formerly nomadic hunters who only came into contact with the outside world 50 years ago. Omene Paa, a tour guide at the lodge, tells how oil has been a curse for his people from the time “the path-cutters” first arrived. The “petrolera” companies brought disease and contaminated the water, he claims. One of his cousins died of a lung infection. Now Omene says his people, who first fought off the US oilmen with axes, just want to be allowed to live in peace. “Our battle should continue; we the Huaorani must look after our territory.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/

A deep hole on the moon that could open into a vast underground tunnel has been found for the first time. The discovery strengthens evidence for subsurface, lava-carved channels that could shield future human colonists from space radiation and other hazards.

The moon seems to possess long, winding tunnels called lava tubes that are similar to structures seen on Earth. They are created when the top of a stream of molten rock solidifies and the lava inside drains away, leaving a hollow tube of rock.

Their existence on the moon is hinted at based on observations of sinuous rilles – long, winding depressions carved into the lunar surface by the flow of lava. Some sections of the rilles have collapsed, suggesting that hollow lava tubes hide beneath at least some of the rilles.

But until now, no one has found an opening into what appears to be an intact tube. “There’s sort of a chicken-and-egg problem,” says Carolyn van der Bogert of the University of Münster in Germany. “If it’s intact, you can’t see it.”

Finding a hole in a rille could suggest that an intact tube lies beneath. So a group led by Junichi Haruyama of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency searched for these “skylights” in images taken by Japan’s Kaguya spacecraft, which orbited the moon for almost two years before ending its mission in June.

Deep cave

The team found the first candidate skylight in a volcanic area on the moon’s near side called Marius Hills. “This is the first time that anybody’s actually identified a skylight in a possible lava tube” on the moon, van der Bogert, who helped analyse the feature, told New Scientist.

The hole measures 65 metres across, and based on images taken at a variety of sun angles, the the hole is thought to extend down at least 80 metres. It sits in the middle of a rille, suggesting the hole leads into a lava tube as wide as 370 metres across.

It is not clear exactly how the hole formed. A meteorite impact, moonquakes, or pressure created by gravitational tugs from the Earth could be to blame. Alternatively, part of the lava tube’s ceiling could have been pulled off as lava in the tube drained away billions of years ago.

Radiation shield

Finding such an opening could be a boon for possible human exploration of the moon (see What NASA’s return to the moon may look like).

Since the tubes may be hundreds of metres wide, they could provide plenty of space for an underground lunar outpost. The tubes’ ceilings could protect astronauts from space radiation, meteoroid impacts and wild temperature fluctuations (see Can high-tech cavemen live on the moon?).

“I think it’s really exciting,” says Penny Boston of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro. “Basalt is an extremely good material for radiation protection. It’s free real estate ready to be exploited and modified for human use.”

Blocked passage?

But even if astronauts were to rappel into the hole, they might not be able to travel far into the tube it appears to lead into. “I would bet a lot of money that there’s a tube there, but I would not bet nearly so much that we could gain access to the tube,” says Ray Hawke of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who has also hunted for lunar lava tubes.

Rubble or solidified lava might block up the tube. “It could be closed up and inaccessible,” Hawke told New Scientist.

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which should be able to snap images of the area that are at least 10 times as sharp, could help reveal more about the hole. And more lava tube openings may be found.

The Kaguya team is still combing over images of other areas in search of additional skylights. And Hawke says a proposal is in the works to use LRO’s main camera to snap oblique shots of the lunar surface. This could help reveal cave entrances that are not visible in a bird’s-eye view.

Journal reference: Geophysical Research Letters (in press)

http://www.newscientist.com/

2009-10-24

A deep hole on the moon that could open into a vast underground tunnel has been found for the first time. The discovery strengthens evidence for subsurface, lava-carved channels that could shield future human colonists from space radiation and other hazards.

The moon seems to possess long, winding tunnels called lava tubes that are similar to structures seen on Earth. They are created when the top of a stream of molten rock solidifies and the lava inside drains away, leaving a hollow tube of rock. Read the full story

Exclusive BREAKING information. 14 Art Students, it has now been confirmed, were in the World Trade Center Towers with Construction Passes, Connection to Mossad Spy Ring

Hello everyone, I wrote and directed the film series found here at this website. If you have not yet seen it, it is free on the internet just google this key phrase: Core of Corruption. It should be on Youtube and Google Video. If you wish to support me, you can do so by purchasing merchandise from my store here on this website as well. Read the full story

Prison sought for 26 Americans in CIA case

Sept. 30, 2009
COLLEEN BARRY,Associated Press Writer

MILAN (AP) — An Italian prosecutor in the first trial anywhere scrutinizing the CIA’s extraordinary renditions asked a Milan court on Wednesday to sentence 26 Americans to jail terms ranging from 10 to 13 years for the abduction of an Egyptian terror suspect.

Read the full story

New world economic order takes shape at G20

By Lesley Wroughton

PITTSBURGH (Reuters) – The Group of 20 is set to become the premier coordinating body on global economic issues, reflecting a new world economic order in which emerging market countries like China are much more relevant, according to a draft communique. Read the full story

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Most of us, and all of us most of the time, deal with the market economy as a definite type of economic order, a sort of “economic technique” as opposed to the socialist “technique.” For this view, it is significant that we call its constructional principle the “price mechanism.” Here we move in the world of prices, of markets, of supply and demand, of competition, of wage rates, of interest rates, of exchange rates, and what not.

That is, of course, right and proper — as far as it goes. But there is a great danger of overlooking an important fact: the market economy as an economic order must be correlated to a certain structure of society, and to a definite mental climate which is appropriate to it.

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