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Going To Hell In A Handbasket, and Doing It In Style!

links:
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we've had this many folks visit so far:

"El diablo sabes mas por viejo que por diablo" - old Mexican proverb

Achtung! Das machine ist nicht fur gerfingerpoken und mittengraben. Ist easy schnappen der pringenwerk, blowenfusen, und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fur gewerken by das dumkopfen, das rubbernecken sightseeren keepen hands in der pockets, relaxen und watchen der blinkenlights.

Movies I would take to a desert island with me:

- Alien
- Ferris Bueller's Day Off
- Legally Blonde
- Tomb Raider
- Blazing Saddles
- Rozencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
- The Emperor's New Groove
- Hunt For Red October
- Silence Of The Lambs

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Blair: Global Warming Is Advancing

LONDON, Associated Press - The threat posed by climate change may be greater than previously thought, and global warming is advancing at an unsustainable rate, Prime Minister Tony Blair said in a report published Monday.

The government-commissioned report collates evidence presented at a conference on climate change hosted by Britain's Meteorological Office last year. It says scientists now have "greater clarity and reduced uncertainty" about the impacts of climate change.

In a foreword, Blair said it was clear that "the risks of climate change may well be greater than we thought."

"It is now plain that the emission of greenhouse gases, associated with industrialization and economic growth from a world population that has increased six-fold in 200 years, is causing global warming at a rate that is unsustainable," he wrote.

Over the next century, global warming is expected to raise ocean levels, intensify storms, spread disease to new areas and shift climate zones, possibly making farmlands drier and deserts wetter.

The U.N.-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says temperatures rose by about 1 degree during the 20th century. Computer modeling predicts increases of between 2.5 degrees and 10.4 degrees by the year 2100, depending on how much is dome to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Scientists have warned of climatic "tipping points" such as the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melting and the Gulf Stream shutting down.

In the British report, the head of the British Antarctic Survey, Chris Rapley, warned that the huge west Antarctic ice sheet may be starting to disintegrate, an event that could raise sea levels by 16 feet.

Rapley said a previous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report playing down worries about the ice sheet's stability should be revised.

"The last IPCC report characterized Antarctica as a slumbering giant in terms of climate change," he wrote. "I would say it is now an awakened giant. There is real concern."

Blair's vow to put climate change at the center of the international agenda during Britain's leadership of the G-8 and the European Union last year met with limited success.

Religious Groups Get Chunk of AIDS Money

Associated Press - President Bush's $15 billion effort to fight AIDS has handed out nearly one-quarter of its grants to religious groups, and officials are aggressively pursuing new church partners that often emphasize disease prevention through abstinence and fidelity over condom use.

Award recipients include a Christian relief organization famous for its televised appeals to feed hungry children, a well-known Catholic charity and a group run by the son of evangelist Billy Graham, according to the State Department.

The outreach to nontraditional AIDS players comes in the midst of a debate over how best to prevent the spread of

HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The debate has activated groups on both ends of the political spectrum and created a vast competition for money.

Conservative Christian allies of the president are pressing the U.S. foreign aid agency to give fewer dollars to groups that distribute condoms or work with prostitutes. The Bush administration provided more than 560 million condoms abroad last year, compared with some 350 million in 2001.

Secular organizations in Africa are raising concerns that new money to groups without AIDS experience may dilute the impact of Bush's historic three-year-old program.

"We clearly recognize that it is very important to work with faith-based organizations," said Dan Mullins, deputy regional director for southern and western Africa for CARE, one of the best-known humanitarian organizations.

"But at the same time we don't want to fall into the trap of assuming faith-based groups are good at everything," Mullins said.

The administration is beginning a broad effort to attract newcomers and distribute money for AIDS prevention and care beyond the large nonprofit groups that traditionally have led the fight.

The New Partners Initiative reserves $200 million through the 2008 budget year for community and church groups with little or no background in government grants. Some may have health operations in Africa but no experience in HIV work. Others may be homegrown groups in Africa that have not previously sought U.S. support.

"The notion that because people have always received aid money that they'll get money needs to end," Deputy U.S. global AIDS coordinator Mark Dybul said in an interview with The Associated Press. "The only way to have sustainable programs is to have programs that are wholly owned in terms of management personnel at the local level."

Large nonprofit groups involved in health and development projects typically enlist local religious groups because of their deep community ties.

The goal now is to penetrate hard-to-reach corners of the target countries — 13 in Africa, and Haiti and Vietnam — and bring aboard community and faith groups that previously lacked expertise to win grants, Dybul said.

Religious organizations last year accounted for more than 23 percent of all groups that got HIV/AIDS grants, according to the State Department. Some 80 percent of all secular and religious grant recipients were based in the countries where the aid is targeted.

Among those winning grants were:

_Samaritan's Purse, which is run by Graham's son, Franklin. It says its mission is "meeting critical needs of victims of war, poverty, famine, disease and natural disaster while sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ."

_World Vision. The 56-year-old Christian organization is known for its TV appeals — some with celebrities such as game show host Alex Trebek — that asked people to support a Third World child.

_Catholic Relief Services. It was awarded $6.2 million to teach abstinence and fidelity in three countries; $335 million in a consortium providing anti-retroviral treatment; and $9 million to help orphans and children affected by HIV/AIDs. The group offers "complete and correct information about condoms" but will not promote, purchase or distribute them, said Carl Stecker, senior program director for HIV/AIDS.

_HOPE. The global relief organization founded by the International Churches of Christ recently brought comedian Chris Rock to South Africa for an AIDS prevention event. AIDS grants support HOPE in several countries.

_World Relief, founded by the National Association of Evangelicals. It won $9.7 million for abstinence work in four countries.

Most of the money in Bush's initiative goes to treatment programs, earning the administration praise for delivering lifesaving drugs and care to millions of HIV-infected patients.

For prevention, Bush embraces the "ABC" strategy: abstinence before marriage, being faithful to one partner, and condoms targeted for high-risk activity. The Republican-led Congress mandated that one-third of prevention money be reserved for abstinence and fidelity.

Condom promotion to anyone must include abstinence and fidelity messages, U.S. guidelines say, but those preaching abstinence do not have to provide condom education.

The abstinence emphasis, say some longtime AIDS volunteers, has led to a confusing message and added to the stigma of condom use in parts of Africa. Village volunteers in Swaziland maintain a supply of free condoms but say they have few takers.

"This drive for abstinence is putting a lot of pressure on girls to get married earlier," said Dr. Abeja Apunyo, the Uganda representative for Pathfinder International, a reproductive health nonprofit group based in Massachusetts.

"For years now we have been trying to tell our daughters that they should finish their education and train in a profession before they get married. Otherwise they have few options if they find themselves separated from their husbands for some reason," Apunyo said.

An AIDS-program pastor in Uganda explained his abstinence teaching to unmarried young people.

"Why give an alternative and have them take a risk?" asked the Rev. Sam Lawrence Ruteikara of the Anglican Church of Uganda, a U.S. grant recipient. "This person doesn't have a sexual partner, so why should I report too much, saying that in case you get a sexual partner, please use a condom. I am saying, please don't get a sexual partner — don't get involved because it is risky."

Secular activists say it is not realistic to expect all teenagers to abstain from sex and that teenagers also should be taught how to protect themselves.

U.S.-backed programs have spread abstinence and faithfulness education to more than 13 million people in Uganda, according to the State Department. Officials promote the nation as an "ABC" model, with its HIV infection rate down by more than half in a decade.

Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., said that on a tour of Uganda in January he saw pro-abstinence rallies and skits praising Bush, and U.S.-supported groups conducting house-to-house testing, care and counseling.

"The good news about the faith-based groups is not only the passion they bring to the work but it is the moral authority and the extended numbers of volunteers they can mobilize to get the word out," Smith said.

But Smith believes the administration is wrongly supporting some nonprofit groups. He and several other congressional conservatives wrote to Bush and the U.S. Agency for International Development, contending that several large grant recipients were pro-prostitution, pro-abortion or not committed enough to Bush's abstinence priorities.

The letters followed a briefing last year by Focus on the Family, run by Christian commentator and Bush ally James Dobson. The group's sexual health analyst, Linda Klepacki, said even some religious groups emphasize condoms over abstinence.

"We have to be careful that the president's original intent is being followed where A and B are the emphasized areas of the ABC methodology," she said.

Six congressional Democrats, in a letter last week to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, accused the conservatives of a distortion campaign that undermines a balanced approach to fighting AIDS.

"Their attack is based on a narrow, ideological viewpoint that condemns condoms and frames any attempt to reach out to high-risk populations as an endorsement of behaviors that these critics oppose," said Rep. Henry Waxman (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif.

USAID has declined to renew funding for two major AIDS-fighting consortiums, CORE and IMPACT, headed by organizations the conservatives targeted. Those two groups fund hundreds of community and religious-based organizations.

CORE, whose lead partner is CARE, is losing its central source of money, meaning its work survives only if it can win grants from individual USAID missions in target countries.

Family Health International, the lead organization of IMPACT, brought hundreds of local and religious groups into its $441 million project, but was told the administration wants new partners, said Sheila Mitchell, senior vice president of FHI's Institute for HIV/AIDS.

Dybul said the changes are in keeping with the shift to local groups. Any suggestion of political motivation is "inaccurate and offensive to people doing this work," he said. Millions of grant dollars still go to the groups that were criticized.

One grant was delayed when Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., last year complained about renewing $14 million to Population Services International, a leading nonprofit condom distributor.

The group's bingo-style games that teach Guatemalan prostitutes about safe sex misused funds "to exploit victims of the sex trade," Coburn said. Sen. Larry Craig (news, bio, voting record), R-Idaho, then wrote to praise PSI's work as "provably effective and efficient."

USAID divided the grant; condom distribution was separated into the smaller part so that religious groups could apply for the other part. PSI eventually won the larger grant. The second is outstanding.

Although administration critics frequently cite PSI as a group that fell from favor under the new initiative, "we have not been eviscerated," said Stewart Parkinson, a senior program analyst.

The group lost U.S. grants in Uganda and Tanzania but retained others. And Parkinson said he had no indication of political motivation.

___

Audit: U.S.-Led Occupation Squandered Aid

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, Associated Press - Iraqi money gambled away in the Philippines. Thousands spent on a swimming pool that was never used. An elevator repaired so poorly that it crashed, killing people.

A U.S. government audit found American-led occupation authorities squandered tens of millions of dollars that were supposed to be used to rebuild

Iraq through undocumented spending and outright fraud.

In some cases, auditors recommend criminal charges be filed against the perpetrators. In others, it asks the U.S. ambassador to Iraq to recoup the money.

Dryly written audit reports describe the Coalition Provisional Authority's offices in the south-central city of Hillah being awash in bricks of $100 bills taken from a central vault without documentation.

It describes one agent who kept almost $700,000 in cash in an unlocked footlocker and mentions a U.S. soldier who gambled away as much as $60,000 in reconstruction funds in the Philippines.

"Tens of millions of dollars in cash had gone in and out of the South-Central Region vault without any tracking of who deposited or withdrew the money, and why it was taken out," says a report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, which is in the midst of a series of audits for the Pentagon and State Department.

Much of the first audit reports deal with contracting in south-central Iraq, one of the country's least-hostile regions. Audits have yet to be released for the occupation authority's spending in the rest of Iraq.

The audits offer a window into the chaotic U.S.-led occupation of Iraq of 2003-04, when inexperienced American officials — including workers from President Bush's election campaign — organized a cash-intensive "hearts and minds" mission to rebuild Iraq's devastated economy.

But the corruption and incompetence documented in the reports reveal that much of the effort, however well-intentioned, was wasted.

The failure of the rebuilding effort has been borne out most vividly by the rise of a virulent anti-American insurgency that has claimed most of the 2,237 U.S. military lives lost since the war began.

In some cases, auditors could find no trace of cash, much of which came from Iraqi oil revenues overseen by the occupation authority.

"Those deficiencies were so significant that we were precluded from accomplishing our stated objectives," the auditors said of U.S. officials in Hillah being unable to account for $97 million of the $120 million in Iraqi oil revenues earmarked for rebuilding projects.

An October 2005 audit found documentation for the spending of just $8 million of that money.

Negligence proved deadly in at least one case. Three Iraqis plummeted to their deaths in an elevator in the Hillah General Hospital that was certified to have been replaced by a contractor who received $662,800.

Also in Hillah, occupation officials spent $108,140 to replace pumps and fix the city's Olympic swimming pool. But the contractor merely polished the old plumbing to make it look new and collected his money.

When the pool was filled, the water came out a murky brown and the pool's reopening had to be canceled. The reports did not identify the contractors involved.

Auditors have asked the U.S. ambassador to recover a total of $571,823 that the reports describe as overpaid funds.

In some cases, cash simply disappeared.

Two occupation authority field agents responsible for paying contractors left Iraq without accounting for more than $700,000 each. When auditors confronted their manager and asked where the money was, the manger tried to clear one of the agents through false paperwork.

"This appears to be an attempt to remove outstanding balances by simply washing accounts," the auditor said. The two agents were not identified and there was no word on whether the pair were referred for prosecution.

One report describes mismanagement of more than 2,000 small contracts in south-central Iraq worth $88 million. Occupation staffers or those they supervised handed out millions to companies that never submitted required competitive bids or that were paid for unfinished work.

Other examples cited in the reports:

_Only a quarter of $23 million entrusted to civilian and military project and contracting officers to pay contractors ever found its way to those contractors.

_One contractor was paid $14,000 on four separate occasions for the same job.

_Of $7.3 million spent on a police academy near Hillah, auditors could account for just $4 million. They said $1.3 million was wasted on overpriced or duplicate construction or equipment not delivered. More than $2 million was missing.

_U.S. personnel "needlessly disbursed more than $1.8 million" of the estimated $2.3 million spent for renovating the library in the Shiite holy city of Karbala.

_The library contractor delivered only 18 of 68 personal computers called for and did not install Internet wiring or software. The computers worked only as stand-alones.

_The U.S.-led security transition command spent $945,000 for seven armored Mercedes-Benzes that were too lightly armored for Iraq. Auditors were able to account for only six of the cars.

_At one point, several paying agents kept cash inside the same filing cabinet in the Hillah vault. One agent took $100,000 from another's stack of cash to clear his own balance. "This was only discovered because the other paying agent had to make a disbursement that day and realized that he was short cash," the report says.

___

On the Net:

Do you wanna be a stupid girl?

"Stupid Girls"

by Pink

---------

Stupid girl, stupid girls, stupid girls

Maybe if I act like that, that guy will call me back

Porno paparazzi girl, I don't wanna be a stupid girl

Go to Fred Segal, you'll find them there

Laughing loud so all the little people stare

Looking for a daddy to pay for the champagne

(Drop a name)

What happened to the dreams of a girl president

She's dancing in the video next to 50 Cent

They travel in packs of two or three

With their itsy bitsy doggies and their teeny-weeny tees

Where, oh where, have the smart people gone?

Oh where, oh where could they be?

Maybe if I act like that, that guy will call me back

Porno paparazzi girl, I don't wanna be a stupid girl

Maybe if I act like that, flipping my blonde hair back

Push up my bra like that, I don't wanna be a stupid girl

(Break it down now)

Disease's growing, it's epidemic

I'm scared that there ain't a cure

The world believes it and I'm going crazy

I cannot take any more

I'm so glad that I'll never fit in

That will never be me

Outcasts and girls with ambition

That's what I wanna see

Disasters all around

World despaired

Their only concern

Will they fuck up my hair

Maybe if I act like that, that guy will call me back

Porno paparazzi girl, I don't wanna be a stupid girl

Maybe if I act like that, flipping my blonde hair back

Push up my bra like that, I don't wanna be a stupid girl

[Interlude]

Oh my god you guys, I totally had more that 300 calories

That was so not sexy, no

Good one, can I borrow that?

[Vomits]

I WILL BE SKINNY

(Do ya thing, do ya thing, do ya thing)

(I like this, like this, like this)

Pretty will you fuck me girl, silly as a lucky girl

Pull my head and suck it girl, stupid girl!

Pretty would u fuck me girl, silly as a lucky girl

Pull my head and suck it girl, stupid girl!

Maybe if I act like that, flipping my blonde hair back

Push up my bra like that, stupid girl!

Maybe if I act like that, that guy will call me back

Porno paparazzi girl, I don't wanna be a stupid girl

Maybe if I act like that, flipping my blonde hair back

Prepare to be totally, like overcome by awesomeness from major entertainment talents:

First, for your rugged manly delight, Mr. David Hasselhof:

And now, that serious ass-shaker from Fresno, Mr. Britney Spears:

State of the Union? Not so good, most say

USA Today - A USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll taken last weekend and interviews across the country this week found most Americans pessimistic about the economy, divided on the war and doubtful that Bush has the best plan to address the issues that matter most to them - among them health care and corruption.

By more than 2-to-1, those surveyed say things have gotten worse in the United States over the past five years. "I love my country, but we're going the wrong way for sure," says Faye Sherer, 59, of Salinas, Calif., who helps run a family produce company and was among those polled. "I don't see the point in Iraq, when there were other countries going through worse atrocities and we did nothing to help them."

Bush has strong defenders, to be sure, and views of the country's course divide on partisan lines. Chris DeCaro, 20, of Farmington, Mich., praises the president, particularly for his handling of terrorism. "He runs this country not as a politician but as a businessman who does things that need to be done," DeCaro says. He says public opinion has been swayed by a "liberal media" that are "defeatist" on the war and antagonist toward Bush.

Still, even conservatives divide 47%-44% on whether things have gotten better or worse.

The country's downbeat mood poses a challenge for the president as he tries to command support for the legislative agenda he'll unveil for his sixth year in office. With a 43% approval rating, he is in "a weakened position trying to convince Congress to do whatever it is in the State of the Union that he wants them to do," says Charles Franklin of the University of Wisconsin.

Bush doesn't seem to be getting much credit for positive economic reports on unemployment and inflation. "This is a presidency whose ratings are less influenced by the economy" than his modern predecessors, says Richard Eichenberg of Tufts University. "The war in Iraq has defined his presidency."

Those surveyed:

• Said the country has gotten off track. By 62%-35%, they were dissatisfied with the way things are going in the USA. That's the most pessimistic view at the start of a year since Bush took office.

• Rated the economy as faltering. Six in 10 said the current economy was only fair or poor, and 54% said economic conditions were getting worse. Views differed by party: 68% of Republicans but just 16% of Democrats called the economy excellent or good.

• Questioned Bush's leadership. By 64%-34%, they said Bush didn't have a clear plan for solving the country's problems. The president received his strongest approval rating, 52%, on fighting terrorism. But on health care - ranked as an issue equal to the economy - congressional Democrats were more trusted, 54%-35%.

The poll of 1,006 adults Jan. 20-22 has a margin of error of +/-3 percentage points.

Ethanol Fuel More Advantageous Than Thought

by Bjorn Carey, LiveScience

Producing a gallon of ethanol gas from corn requires 95 percent less petroleum than producing a gallon from fossil fuels, a new study finds.

This method might also slightly reduce the production of greenhouse gases that speed up global warming, but the results on that point are not certain.

"It is better to use various inputs to grow corn and make ethanol and use that in your cars than it is to use the gasoline and fossil fuels directly," said Daniel Kammen of the University of California, Berkeley.

Ethanol could be even more energy efficient and 95 percent free of greenhouse gas emissions, Kammen said, if produced from woody plants instead of corn.

The study is detailed in the Jan. 27 issue of the journal Science.

Booze it up

Ethanol is produced by bacteria that ferment and break down carbohydrate sugars, such as the starch from corn. Humans have been fine-tuning this process for thousands of years, although mainly to brew alcoholic beverages.

The study refined results from several previous studies by comparing the total energy that goes into making ethanol gas from corn, such as harvesting and refining, and comparing it to the energy needed to produce gasoline from fossil fuels. Kammen's team looked into levels of greenhouse gases produced by both the production and the use of each fuel.

They found inconsistencies and errors in the previous work, which had suggested ethanol gas might not be beneficial.

After correcting the errors—which ranged from incorrect unit conversions to reliance on data from outdated methods more than a century old—the researchers arrived at a very different conclusion: not only does corn-based ethanol gas reduce petroleum use by 95 percent, it also reduces greenhouse gas emissions about 13 percent, although that decrease is within a range of uncertainty for the imprecise data involved.

"Making ethanol from corn is a good thing if you want to offset fossil fuels from overseas," Kammen told LiveScience. "On the greenhouse gas side of things, it is not clear if corn, as grown today, is a good thing. We just don't know yet, but it appears to be a mildly good thing."

A woody solution?

While corn-based ethanol is an improvement over gasoline, ethanol from woody, fibrous plants would pack even more energy. Willow trees, switch grass, farm waste and specially grown crops are all feasible sources.

The main energy components of these plants are cellulose and lignin, which produce more energy per unit—in the form of breaking hydrogen bonds—than the starches from corn.

"It looks to be that you can get just about twice the amount of energy by going the cellulose route, and greenhouse emissions are very small," Kammen said.

Assuming replant rates equal harvests, there is a 95 percent emission reduction from producing cellulosic ethanol over gasoline production in all three production phases—farming, refining, and use.

However, the real benefits of ethanol gas are not yet fully known, Kammen said, and the advantages could be even greater.

Wheels in motion

In the United States, some 5 million of the cars and trucks on the road are "flex-fuel," meaning that they can run either on traditional gasoline or E85, a mix of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline.

Converting an automobile to run on flex-fuel costs about $100.

"This is actually one of the cheapest possible transitions you can make," Kammen said. "It cuts the cost of fuel by half at the pump."

However, there are very few pumps offering ethanol fuel. Despite the number of flex-fuel automobiles—California boasts more flex-fuel than diesel vehicles—ethanol-blended fuel accounted for only 2 percent of all fuel sold in the United States in 2004.

While it doesn't yet make sense to convert the entire economy to corn-based ethanol, Kammen said, improved methods for processing corn or using other ethanol-rich materials could drive such a change.

"The people who are saying ethanol is bad are just plain wrong," Kammen said.

Brazil has converted nearly all its cars and gas pumps to run on a 96 percent ethanol fuel produced from sugarcane. Brazilians have already seen the benefits of sugarcane fuel—not only is it cleaner burning, but since it is produced within the country, it is half the price of imported gasoline.

Starving woman curses God, dies in her sleep

NAIROBI (Reuters) - A starving Kenyan woman placed a powerful tribal curse on God, accusing him of sending famine, and died in her sleep, local newspapers said Thursday.

The woman from eastern Kenya's drought-ravaged Kangundo district decided to invoke a dreaded oath from the Kamba community, famed for its potent witchcraft, media reports said.

"Whoever brought this famine, let him perish," the woman chanted, striking a cooking pot with a stick.

"She accomplished the feat at 10 a.m. and waited for the results, but God's wrath struck at night. She died peacefully in her sleep," the Kenya Times newspaper said.

Group: Housing Slowdown May Hurt Economy

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - The five-year housing boom is showing increased signs of cooling, and that's likely to mean slower growth for the entire national economy. The big question now is whether home prices will come crashing to earth with even more severe consequences.

The National Association of Realtors reported Wednesday that sales of existing homes climbed to an all-time high of 7.072 million units in 2005, up 4.2 percent from 2004 and the fifth straight year sales have set a record.

However, in a sign of slowing activity, sales fell by 5.7 percent in December, marking the third straight monthly decline, something that had not occurred since early 2002.

"The bloom is definitely off the housing rose. Housing peaked last summer and has been weakening ever since," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com.

Analysts are forecasting that sales of both existing and new homes will fall this year, perhaps by as much as 10 percent, reflecting the adverse impact of rising mortgage rates and buyer resistance to current price levels.

The Realtors reported that the median price for an existing home sold in 2005 rose to $208,700, up 12.7 percent from 2004. That was the biggest annual increase since a 14.4 percent rise in 1979.

But David Lereah, chief economist for the Realtors, said the days of double-digit price gains were probably coming to an end. He predicted price increases would slow to more normal gains of around 5 percent to 6 percent this year. Some analysts cautioned that the hottest markets in places like Florida and California could see actual price declines.

On Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average edged down 2.48 points to close at 10,709.74 as investors continued to worry about disappointing corporate earnings.

The boom in housing has boosted overall economic activity over the past five years. Zandi said he believed that about 1 percentage point of last year's estimated economic growth of 3.5 percent occurred because of the effects of the strong housing market.

Housing increased employment in construction industries and boosted consumer spending, which accounts for two-thirds of total economic activity, as rising home values allowed millions of Americans to refinance their homes or take out home equity loans to support higher spending on consumer goods.

Analysts said the economy could be in trouble this year unless other forces take up the slack from a slowdown in housing.

Analysts at Goldman Sachs estimated that the housing slowdown will begin to be a drag on economic growth by midyear and by early 2007 will be trimming growth by around 1.5 percentage points. Other sectors, such as business investment spending and an improving trade performance, are expected to take up the slack.

"We think that housing will go from being a source of strength for the economy over the past several years to a drag on the economy over the next couple of years," said Andrew Tilton, a senior economist at Goldman Sachs.

The danger is if home sales fall off by bigger amounts than analysts are currently forecasting.

That could cause investors, who have boosted sales with their purchases of rental properties and vacation homes, to start dumping homes onto the market, further depressing prices.

However, analysts do not believe that is the most likely outcome. They expect sales to decline slightly, reflecting only moderate further increases in mortgage rates as the Federal Reserve wraps up its credit tightening campaign.

Analysts believe the Fed is nearing the end of its rate hikes, with possibly two more quarter-point moves at its meetings next Tuesday and on March 28. If the Fed does call a halt to the rate increases, analysts said 30-year mortgage rates, currently at 6.1 percent, will only rise to perhaps 6.5 percent or 6.75 percent by the end of this year, levels that should still support home sales.

Sales were down in December by 11.4 percent in the West, 7.2 percent in the South and 2.6 percent in the Midwest. The level of sales was unchanged in the Northeast.

Analysts said some of the weakness last month reflected unusually cold weather in parts of the country and unusually wet weather in California and other western states.

___

On the Net:

White House Stalls Katrina Probe

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - The White House is crippling a Senate inquiry into the government's sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina by barring administration officials from answering questions and failing to hand over documents, senators leading the investigation said Tuesday.

In some cases, staff at the White House and other federal agencies have refused to be interviewed by congressional investigators, said the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. In addition, agency officials won't answer seemingly innocuous questions about times and dates of meetings and telephone calls with the White House, the senators said.

A White House spokesman said the administration is committed to working with separate Senate and House investigations of the Katrina response but wants to protect the confidentiality of presidential advisers.

"No one believes that the government responded adequately," said Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn. "And we can't put that story together if people feel they're under a gag order from the White House."

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the committee's Republican chair, said she respects the White House's reluctance to reveal advice to President Bush from his top aides, which is generally covered by executive privilege.

Still, she criticized the dearth of information from agency officials about their contacts with the White House.

"We are entitled to know if someone from the Department of Homeland Security calls someone at the White House during this whole crisis period," Collins said. "So I think the White House has gone too far in restricting basic information about who called whom on what day."

She added, "It is completely inappropriate" for the White House to bar agency officials from talking to the Senate committee.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said the administration's deputy homeland security adviser, Ken Rapuano, has briefed House and Senate lawmakers on the federal response. A "lessons learned" report from Homeland Security Adviser Frances Fragos Townsend also is expected in coming weeks, Duffy said.

But he defended the administration's decision to prohibit White House staffers or other presidential advisers from testifying before Congress.

"There is a deliberate process, and the White House has always said it wants to cooperate with the committee but preserve any president's ability to get advice from advisers on a confidential basis," Duffy said. "And that's a critical need for any U.S. president and that is continuing to influence how we cooperate with the committees."

Collins and Lieberman sidestepped questions about whether they plan to subpoena the White House to get the information they seek, though Collins said she does not believe subpoenaing the Homeland Security Department is necessary.

The Senate inquiry is scheduled to conclude in March with a report detailing steps the federal government took - and didn't take - to prepare for the Aug. 29 storm.

Investigators have interviewed about 260 witnesses from federal, state and local governments and the private sector. Additionally, the committee has received an estimated 500,000 documents - including e-mails, memos, supply orders and emergency operation plans - outlining Katrina-related communications among all levels of government.

But Lieberman said the Justice and Health and Human Services departments "have essentially ignored our document requests for months" while HHS has refused to allow interviews of its staff. He described the Homeland Security response as "too little, too late."

Christina Pearson, spokeswoman for Health and Human Services, disputed Liberman's characterization of the agency's response. "We've produced an extensive range of documents in response to the committee's request, well over 40,000 pages," she said. As for witnesses, Pearson was vague. "We're working with them," she said.

Collins offered a rosier view of Homeland Security's cooperation, noting that Deputy Secretary Michael Jackson and department chief of staff John Wood were scheduled to talk to investigators later this week.

A special House committee created to review the government's readiness for Katrina is to release its findings by Feb. 15. Although Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., the panel's chairman, earlier considered subpoenaing the White House, the panel backed away after the Rapuano briefing.

The panel ultimately did subpoena the Pentagon for Katrina documents, but one lawmaker, Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-La., said he believes Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has not handed over enough to fully comply with the legal order.

But in a letter to Melancon on Tuesday, Davis said he is satisfied the Pentagon has complied with the subpoena, which yielded "massive mounds of documents," including classified materials from Rumsfeld.

Last Year Was Warmest in a Century

NEW YORK, Associated Press - Last year was the warmest in a century, nosing out 1998, a federal analysis concludes.

Researchers calculated that 2005 produced the highest annual average surface temperature worldwide since instrument recordings began in the late 1800s, said James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The result confirms a prediction the institute made in December.

In a telephone interview, Hansen said the analysis estimated temperatures in the Arctic from nearby weather stations because no direct data were available. Because of that, "we couldn't say with 100 percent certainty that it's the warmest year, but I'm reasonably confident that it was," Hansen said.

More important, he said, is that 2005 reached the warmth of 1998 without help of the "El Nino of the century" that pushed temperatures up in 1998.

Over the past 30 years, Earth has warmed a bit more than 1 degree in total, making it about the warmest it's been in 10,000 years, Hansen said. He blamed a buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

Jay Lawrimore of the federal government's National Climatic Data Center said his own center's current data suggest 2005 came in a close second to 1998, in part because of how the Arctic was factored in. But he said a forthcoming analysis "will likely show that 2005 is slightly warmer than 1998."

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On the Net:

Goddard analysis: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2005

Investigator: U.S. 'Outsourced' Torture

STRASBOURG, France, Associated Press - The head of a European investigation into alleged CIA secret prisons in Europe said Tuesday that evidence pointed to the existence of a system of "outsourcing" of torture by the United States, and that it was highly likely European governments were aware of it.

But Swiss Sen. Dick Marty said there was no tangible proof so far of the existence of clandestine centers in Romania or Poland as alleged by the New York-based Human Rights Watch, and complained of a lack of cooperation by EU governments.

His interim report, based partly on results of national investigations and recent press reports, did not break new ground and largely repeated his previous claims that U.S. policies in the war on terror contravene international law on human rights. Allegations that the CIA hid and interrogated key al-Qaida suspects at Soviet-era compounds in Eastern Europe were first reported Nov. 2 in The Washington Post.

"There is a great deal of coherent, convergent evidence pointing to the existence of a system of "relocation" or "outsourcing" of torture," Marty said in the report to the Council of Europe, the human rights watchdog on whose behalf he is investigating.

"Acts of torture or severe violation of detainees' dignity through the administration of inhuman or degrading treatment are carried outside national territory and beyond the authority of national intelligence services," Marty said. He added that more than 100 suspects may have been transferred to countries where they faced torture or ill treatment in recent years.

"The entire continent is involved," Marty told the Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly, a body comprising several hundred national lawmakers. "It is highly unlikely that European governments, or at least their intelligence services, were unaware."

In his report, Marty analyzed the cases of an Egyptian cleric allegedly kidnapped from Milan, Italy, in 2003 by CIA agents and a German captured in Macedonia and taken to Afghanistan in an apparent case of mistaken identity.

Citing an American lawyer, Marty also said six Bosnians were abducted by U.S. agents on Bosnian soil and taken to Guantanamo Bay, despite a Bosnian court ruling ordering their release.

Last week, Italy's justice minister formally asked the United States to allow Italian prosecutors to question 22 purported CIA operatives they accuse of kidnapping the Egyptian cleric, Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, in 2003 from a Milan street.

Nasr, believed to belong to an Islamic terror group, was seized Feb. 17, 2003. Prosecutors claim the cleric, who is also known as Abu Omar, was taken by the CIA to a joint U.S.-Italian air base, flown to Germany and then to Egypt, where he says he was tortured.

Marty also said he would follow up on evidence gathered in the case of Khaled al Masri, a German of Lebanese origin reportedly kidnapped from Germany to Afghanistan, in the next stage of his investigation.

Marty, who is expected to issue another interim report in the next few months, complained there was enormous pressure on him to produce evidence of secret CIA prisons but there was not much help from the Council of Europe or governments.

"Not a single day passes without me being asked, 'Do you have any hard evidence, is there any proof?'" he said. "I am not a judicial authority, I have no means of investigation, the logistical support available to me is very limited."

The European Union's top justice official, Franco Frattini, called on all EU governments Tuesday to "fully cooperate" with the investigators.

The Council of Europe launched its probe after allegations surfaced in November that U.S. agents interrogated key al-Qaida suspects at clandestine prisons in eastern Europe and transported some suspects through Europe to other countries.

Human Rights Watch identified Romania and Poland as possible sites of secret U.S.-run detention facilities. Both countries have denied involvement. Clandestine detention centers would violate European human rights treaties.

Marty said there was no irrefutable evidence of the existence of secret CIA prisons in Romania, Poland or any other country.

"On the other hand, it has been proved that individuals have been abducted, deprived of their liberty and all rights and transported to different destinations in Europe, to be handed over to countries in which they have suffered degrading treatment and torture," he said. If eventually uncovered, the detention centers would likely be small cells that could be easily hidden, he added.

Documents Show Govt Forewarned on Katrina

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - The government had advance warning of the danger and potential damage from Hurricane Katrina before the storm hit, newly released documents show.

Despite early warnings, plans to evacuate people from New Orleans in the approach of a catastrophic storm were only 10 percent complete a month before the devestating hurricane that accounted for more than 1,100 deaths.

"If you think soup lines in the Depression were long, wait till you see lines" at collection points in New Orleans, Transportation Department regional emergency officer Don Day said at a July 29 briefing with federal and state authorities.

"We're at less than 10 percent done with this ... planning when you consider the buses and the people," Day said at the briefing, according to notes taken by contractors Innovative Emergency Management Inc. of Baton Rouge.

The plans were part of a government exercise, known as Hurricane Pam, to test the nation's preparedness for a catastrophe.

Pam, a "tabletop" exercise that began in July 2004, focused on a mock Category 3 hurricane that produced more than 20 inches of rain and 14 tornadoes. It found, among other things, that floodwaters would surge over New Orleans levees, creating "a catastrophic mass casualty/mass evacuation" and leaving drainage pumps crippled for up to six months.

Katrina was a Category 4 storm when it slammed into the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, though some weather experts downgraded it to Category 3 or even Category 2 by the time it reached New Orleans.

The documents were released by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which was examining Hurricane Pam at a Tuesday hearing.

Pam's warnings proved prophetic. The documents show that the Homeland Security Department, which directed the Pam exercise, was warned a day before Katrina hit that the storm's surge could breach levees and leave New Orleans flooded for weeks or months.

An Aug. 28 report by the department's National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center concluded that a Category 4 or 5 hurricane would cause severe damage in the city, including power outages and a direct economic hit of up to $10 billion for the first week.

"Overall, the impacts described herein are conservative," stated the report, which was sent to Homeland Security's office for infrastructure protection.

"Any storm rated Category 4 or greater ... will likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching, leaving the New Orleans metro area submerged for weeks or months," said the report.

The documents are the latest indication that the federal government knew beforehand of the catastrophic damage that a storm of Katrina's magnitude could cause. The Bush administration has been lambasted for its lackluster response to Katrina and its aftermath, including criticism that the government should have known a hurricane of that strength posed a danger to the area's levees and was unprepared to cope with it.

Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said he was not familiar with the documents but that the levees situation was one likely reason the government urged an evacuation of New Orleans before the storm hit.

Bush Says Surveillance Legal and Necessary

MANHATTAN, Kan.Associated Press - President Bush defended what he called a "terrorist surveillance program" as a necessary tool to defend the United States against "21st century threats."

Speaking at Kansas State University, the president said the National Security Agency's program to monitor phone calls and e-mails without a warrant was legal under laws passed by Congress, upheld by the Supreme Court and consistent with the actions of his predecessor.

"Congress gave me additional powers to use force, but it didn't prescribe the tactics," Bush said.

The president dismissed accusations that the eavesdropping program is illegal, saying that only calls initiated from overseas from suspected al-Qaida affiliates to the United States are monitored.

"If I wanted to break the law," Bush asked rhetorically, "why was I briefing Congress?"

Bush cited the law authorizing force after the Sept. 11 attacks as justification for the program and said decisions by the Supreme Court and the actions of his predecessors bolster the legal argument for his acctions.

The president also called on Congress to renew all aspects of the Patriot Act so that law enforcement will have the tools necessary to fight terrorists.

"The Patriot Act may be set to expire," Bush said, "but the threats to the United states are not about to expire."

Bush said he is mindful of civil liberties and that tactics are under constant review. "There have been no documented abuses of the patriot act," Bush said.

The president reiterated his defense of the war in Iraq as a vital part of the effort to fight terrorism and said that seeking to attack the United States cannot be appeased and must be destroyed.

He said that the war on terror is an "ideological struggle" against an enemy that has a "view of the world that is the exact opposite of our view of the world."

After his speech, Bush opened himself up to questions from the audience.

Bush has been taking questions from audience members in recent speeches, and the White House says none has been prescreened even though the sessions are limted to invited groups. It's a throwback to the folksy style on the campaign trail that helped him win re-election and a departure from the heavily scripted speeches that were the norm last year.

His answers have resulted in some revelations — both personal and political.

The White House has grown so comfortable with the format that most of his appearance Monday at Kansas State University was reserved for Q-and-A with the audience.

And unlike the more intimate settings where the president has taken questions before, this appearance was set in front of a coliseum full of 9,000 ticket holders, including students, soldiers from nearby Fort Riley and invited guests.

Bush to Take Unscripted Audience Questions

MANHATTAN, Kansas Associated Press - Move over, Oprah. President Bush is making himself into television's newest talk show host by featuring audience participation in his appearances.

Bush has been taking questions from audience members in recent speeches, and the White House says none has been prescreened even though the sessions are limted to invited groups. It's a throwback to the folksy style on the campaign trail that helped him win re-election and a departure from the heavily scripted speeches that were the norm last year.

His answers have resulted in some revelations — both personal and political.

The White House has grown so comfortable with the format that most of his appearance Monday at Kansas State University was reserved for Q-and-A with the audience.

And unlike the more intimate settings where the president has taken questions before, this appearance was set in front of a coliseum full of 9,000 ticket holders, including students, soldiers from nearby Fort Riley and invited guests.

Bush has taken a wide variety of questions in three other appearances during the last six weeks. Many of the people he has called on have fawned over him, thanking him for his wartime leadership, saying they pray for him and bringing best wishes from other fans in their family who couldn't be there.

"It's always good to have a plant in every audience," Bush joked last week in Sterling, Va., after a woman rose and said she was proud of him.

But he has gotten some tough questions, too, such as the one from a woman in Philadelphia last month who challenged the administration's linkage of the Iraq war to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Bush said Saddam Hussein was a threat and at the time was widely believed to have weapons of mass destruction — which later proved false.

He told another audience member in Philadelphia that an estimated 30,000 Iraqis had died in the war, the first time he publicly put a number on the high toll Iraqis have paid for freedom. In response to another question in Louisville, Ky., he signaled that after initial reservations, he was resigned to congressional hearings into his domestic spying program as long as they don't aid the enemy.

On the personal side, he has spoken about one of the worst things about being president — exposing his daughters to public scrutiny — and one of the best — impressing his childhood friends with dinner at the White House.

"It's a great honor, pretty awe-inspiring deal," Bush said in Virginia. "They walk in there and, kind of (say), `What are you doing here, Bush?'"

He also ruled out any future run for office by his wife, Laura, in response to a plea from a fan who called her "one of the best first ladies we've ever had." And he disclosed that Mrs. Bush designed the rug in the Oval Office.

"I said, I want it to say `optimistic person comes here to work every day,'" the president said. "It was the strategic thought for the rug. She figured out the colors. And it looks like a sun, with nice, open colors."

Bush was opening Monday's event in Manhattan, Kan., by talking about the war on terror and making a point of defending his secret domestic eavesdropping program. It's part of a new administration effort to convince Americans that the National Security Agency's communications spying program is necessary to fight terrorism.

The public relations campaign comes two weeks before congressional hearings to examine the top-secret program, disclosed last month by The New York Times, are set to begin. Critics have said the president broke the law by authorizing the eavesdropping without a judge's approval and by failing to fully consult with Congress.

As part of that campaign, presidential adviser Dan Bartlett made a pitch for the surveillance program Monday morning on network television news shows. He insisted that Bush was "not bypassing the law. In fact, we're interpreting the law correctly."

"It would be our choice to not to have to talk about this at all," he said on ABC's "Good Morning America."

While the president was heading for Kansas, anti-abortion activists were gathering in Washington and elsewhere to protest the 33rd anniversary of the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. As he has in past years, Bush planned to call in his support rather than attend in person.

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On the Net:

Google, U.S. Clash Over Online Searches

SAN FRANCISCO, Associated Press - Google Inc. is rebuffing the Bush administration's demand for a peek at what millions of people have been looking up on the Internet's leading search engine — a request that underscores the potential for online databases to become tools of the government.

Mountain View-based Google has refused to comply with a White House subpoena first issued last summer, prompting U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this week to ask a federal judge in San Jose for an order to force a handover of the requested records.

The government wants a list all requests entered into Google's search engine during an unspecified single week — a breakdown that could conceivably span tens of millions of queries. In addition, it seeks 1 million randomly selected Web addresses from various Google databases.

In court papers that the San Jose Mercury News reported on after seeing them Wednesday, the Bush administration depicts the information as vital in its effort to restore online child protection laws that have been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Google competitor Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news), which runs the Internet's second-most used search engine, confirmed Thursday that it had complied with a similar government subpoena.

Although the government says it isn't seeking any data that ties personal information to search requests, the subpoena still raises serious privacy concerns, experts said, especially considering recent revelations that the White House authorized eavesdropping on domestic civilian communications after the Sept. 11 attacks without obtaining court approval.

"Search engines now play such an important part in our daily lives that many people probably contact Google more often than they do their own mother," said Thomas Burke, a San Francisco attorney who has handled several prominent cases involving privacy issues.

"Just as most people would be upset if the government wanted to know how much you called your mother and what you talked about, they should be upset about this, too."

The content of search request sometimes contain information about the person making the query.

For instance, it's not unusual for search requests to include names, medical information or Social Security information, said Pam Dixon, executive director for the World Privacy Forum.

"This is exactly the kind of thing we have been worrying about with search engine for some time," Dixon said. "Google should be commended for fighting this."

Other search engines already have complied with similar subpoenas issued by the Bush administration, according to court documents. The cooperating search engines weren't identified.

Yahoo stressed that it didn't reveal any personal information. "We are rigorous defenders of our users' privacy," Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako said Thursday. "In our opinion, this is not a privacy issue."

Microsoft Corp. MSN, the No. 3 search engine, declined to say whether it even received a similar subpoena. "MSN works closely with law enforcement officials worldwide to assist them when requested," the company said in a statement.

As the Internet's dominant search engine, Google has built up a valuable storehouse of information that "makes it a very attractive target for law enforcement," said Chris Hoofnagle, senior counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

The Department of Justice argues that Google's cooperation is essential in its effort to simulate how people navigate the Web.

In a separate case in Pennsylvania, the Bush administration is trying to prove that Internet filters don't do an adequate job of preventing children from accessing online pornography and other objectionable destinations.

Obtaining the subpoenaed information from Google "would assist the government in its efforts to understand the behavior of current Web users, (and) to estimate how often Web users encounter harmful-to-minors material in the course of their searches," the Justice Department wrote in a brief filed Wednesday

Google — whose motto when it went public in 2004 was "do no evil" — contends that submitting to the subpoena would represent a betrayal to its users, even if all personal information is stripped from the search terms sought by the government.

"Google's acceding to the request would suggest that it is willing to reveal information about those who use its services. This is not a perception that Google can accept," company attorney Ashok Ramani wrote in a letter included in the government's filing.

Complying with the subpoena also wound threaten to expose some of Google's "crown-jewel trade secrets," Ramani wrote. Google is particularly concerned that the information could be used to deduce the size of its index and how many computers it uses to crunch the requests.

"This information would be highly valuable to competitors or miscreants seeking to harm Google's business," Ramani wrote.

Dixon is hoping Google's battle with the government reminds people to be careful how they interact with search engines.

"When you are looking at that blank search box, you should remember that what you fill can come back to haunt you unless you take precautions," she said.

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On The Web:

http://www.worldprivacyforum.org

US memo in 2002 doubted Niger uranium sale to Iraq

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Well before President George W. Bush said in 2003 that Iraq was buying uranium from Niger, a high-level State Department intelligence assessment deemed the deal "unlikely" for several reasons, a US daily reported.

The document cast doubt on the alleged purchases as France controlled the uranium industry in Niger and could block the sale, Niger was avoiding actions that risked it losing US and other foreign aid, and moving tonnes of uranium by truck across the border would be very difficult to do and easy to detect.

The March 2002 memo was distributed at senior levels, but a White House official would not say whether Bush had seen it before his State of the Union address in January 2003, in which he cited the uranium deal as a sign Iraq was secretly developing nuclear weapons, The New York Times daily said.

Known as the infamous "16 words," the charge was pivotal in justifying the US-led invasion of Iraq two months later. The White House has since admitted it was based on faulty intelligence and should have been struck from the speech.

While the State Department's intelligence assessment has been mentioned in past media reports and by a bipartisan commission that last year analyzed intelligence failures in Iraq, it was never disclosed in its entirety.

The memo was only recently declassified as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, which provided The New York Times with a copy.

Judicial Watch director Chris Farrell said the analysis was "a very strong, well-thought-out argument that looks at the whole playing field in Niger, and it makes a compelling case for why the uranium sale was so unlikely."

US-led terror war fuelling human rights abuses across globe: HRW

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The US-led war on terror, which has led to charges of torture and inhumane treatment of detainees, is fuelling erosion of human rights across the globe, Human Rights Watch said.

US disregard for basic human rights standards in the name of combating terrorism had triggered a "copy cat phenomenon around the world," Kenneth Roth, the executive director of the independent US monitor told a media conference while launching an annual report documenting rights issues in 68 nations.

Roth said he had queried Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif last year about the rounding up and alleged torture of suspects following a bomb blast and "he said to me, really without batting an eyelash: 'What do you want? That is what the United States does.'"

New evidence shows that torture and mistreatment are a deliberate part of the Bush administration's counterterrorism strategy, hampering Washington's ability to pressure other states into respecting international rights laws, the New York-based group said in the report.

"There is an enormous problem that when a government as influential as the United States flouts basic human rights standards, it undermines the standards and gives green light to other governments to do the same," Roth said.

Many countries -- Uzbekistan, Russia and China among them -- used the war on terror to "attack their political opponents, branding them as Islamic terrorists," Human Rights Watch said.

It cited Malaysia's defense of its arbitrary detention law, the Internal Security Act, based on the US example of detaining people indefinitely without trial.

"Malaysia is justifying its Internal Security Act on the basis of Guantanamo and that is, if the United States is detaining people without trial, who are you to protest Malaysia detaining people without trial?," Roth said.

The controversial US naval base at Guantanamo Bay is a detention center for war on terror prisoners.

Roth said that in respect to US policy, Malaysia had a point but added that "it is important to stress that the United States is not the arbiter of international standards.

"There is international law which everybody should abide by and there is no excuse for Malaysia."

Roth said the "biggest blind spot" in terms of Washington's policy towards Asia has been Indonesia, another US anti-terror ally.

He said Washington lifted a congressional ban on military aid to Indonesia even though not a single senior military official had been prosecuted for atrocities in the province of now-independent East Timor.

"There is a sense that because (Indonesian President Susilo Bambang) Yudhoyono is elected that therefore Indonesia's human rights problem is solved, when, in fact, the president has very little control of military.

"The military continues to largely self finance through its own business activity and it has absolutely blocked efforts to hold military officials accountable," he said.

"So, it was utterly premature to lift the congressional ban ... but Indonesia is an ally in the fight against terror."

Pakistan was cited as another example where Washington looked the other way, being a top ally in US counterterrorism efforts.

Roth said President Pervez Musharraf broke his promise to step down as army chief and then came to the United States in September and boasted: "Let me assure you that President Bush never talks about 'when are you taking your uniform off?'"

There was no US rebuttal over that statement, he said.

"The US, in fact, today rarely speaks in terms of human rights when it addresses the conduct of other governments around the world. It prefers warmer, vaguer, buzzier words like democracy and freedom," Roth said.

Human Rights Watch said while there was a need for vigorous enforcement of human rights norms by other powerful nations, Britain and Canada compounded the lack of leadership by trying to undermine critical international rights protections.

Britain sought to send suspects to governments likely to torture them based on "meaningless assurances of good treatment" while Canada moved to dilute a new treaty outlawing enforced disappearances, it said.

Clinton Says House Run Like 'Plantation'

NEW YORK, Associated Press - Sen. Hillary Clinton on Monday blasted the Bush administration as "one of the worst" in U.S. history and compared the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to a plantation where dissenting voices are squelched.

Speaking during a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event, Clinton also offered an apology to a group of Hurricane Katrina survivors "on behalf of a government that left you behind, that turned its back on you." Her remarks were met with thunderous applause by a mostly black audience at the Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem.

The House "has been run like a plantation, and you know what I'm talking about," said Clinton, D-N.Y. "It has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard."

"We have a culture of corruption, we have cronyism, we have incompetence," she said. "I predict to you that this administration will go down in history as one of the worst that has ever governed our country."

A spokeswoman for the White House declined to comment and referred questions to the Republican National Committee.

RNC spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt said: "On a day when Americans are focused on the legacy of Martin Luther King, Hillary Clinton is focused on the legacy of Hillary Clinton."

Obama Backs Clinton's Criticism of GOP

WASHINGTON, Associated press - Sen. Barack Obama on Wednesday defended Sen. Hillary Clinton for describing the House of Representatives as a "plantation," saying he felt her choice of words referred to a "consolidation of power" in Washington that squeezes out the voters.

The senator told CNN's "American Morning" he believed that Clinton was merely expressing concern that special interests play such a large role in writing legislation that "the ordinary voter and even members of Congress who aren't in the majority party don't have much input."

"There's been a consolidation of power by the Republican Congress and this White House in which, if you are the ordinary voter, you don't have access," Obama said. "... That should be a source of concern for all of us."

First lady Laura Bush, en route home from a visit to West Africa, criticized Clinton.

"It think it's ridiculous — it's a ridiculous comment," Mrs. Bush told reporters when asked about the senator's remark.

Obama, D-Ill., also told ABC's "Good Morning America" that under GOP control in Washington, "what one has seen is the further concentration of power around a very narrow agenda that advantages the most powerful."

Clinton, D-N.Y., who is seeking re-election this year and is a potential presidential candidate in 2008, said during a Martin Luther King Day event in Harlem this week that the House "has been run like a plantation," in that "nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard."

Obama also said New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was correct to apologize for suggesting that the hurricane-ravaged city would be majority black again because "it's the way God wants it to be."

Study: Men Enjoy Seeing Bad People Suffer

NEW YORK, Associated Press - Bill Clinton said he felt others' pain. But a new brain-scanning study suggests that when guys see a cheater get a mild electric shock, they don't feel his pain much at all. In fact, they rather enjoy it.

In contrast, women's brains showed they do empathize with the cheater's pain and don't get a kick out it.

It's not clear whether this difference in schadenfreude — enjoyment of another's misfortune — results from basic biology or sex roles learned during life, researchers say. But it could help explain why men have historically taken charge of punishing criminals and others who violate societal rules, said researcher Dr. Klaas Stephan.

Stephan, a senior research fellow at the University College London, is co-author of a study led by Tania Singer at the college and published online Wednesday by the journal Nature.

Singer, in an e-mail message, said the sex difference in results was a surprise and must be confirmed by larger studies. The researchers said women might have reacted like men if the cheater suffered psychological or financial pain instead.

The scientists scanned the brains of 16 men and 16 women after the volunteers played a game with what they thought were other volunteers, but who in fact were actors. The actors either played the game fairly or obviously cheated.

During the brain scans, each volunteer watched as the hands of a "fair" player and a cheater received a mild electrical shock. When it came to the fair-player, both men's and women's brains showed activation in pain-related areas, indicating that they empathized with that player's pain.

But for the cheater, while the women's brains still showed a response, men's brains showed virtually no specific reaction. Also, in another brain area associated with feelings of reward, men's brains showed a greater average response to the cheater's shock than to the fair player's shock, while women's brains did not.

A questionnaire revealed that the men expressed a stronger desire than women did for revenge against the cheater. The more a man said he wanted revenge, the higher his jump in the brain's reward area when the cheater got a shock. No such correlation showed up in women.

Philip Jackson, who studies brain systems responsible for empathy at the University of Laval in Quebec City in Canada, said he found the sex differences intriguing and worth following up on.

Groups Sue to Stop Domestic Spying Program

NEW YORK, Associated Press - Federal lawsuits were filed Tuesday seeking to halt President Bush's domestic eavesdropping program, calling it an "illegal and unconstitutional program" of electronic eavesdropping on American citizens.

The lawsuits accusing Bush of exceeding his constitutional powers were filed in federal court in New York by the Center for Constitutional Rights and in Detroit by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The New York suit, filed on behalf of the center and individuals, names Bush, the head of the National Security Agency, and the heads of the other major security agencies, challenging the NSA's surveillance of persons within the United States without judicial approval or statutory authorization.

It asked a judge to stop Bush and government agencies from conducting warrantless surveillance of communications in the United States.

The Detroit suit, which also names the NSA, was filed by the ACLU, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Greenpeace and several individuals.

Messages seeking comment were left Tuesday morning with the National Security Agency and the Justice Department.

Bush, who said the wiretapping is legal and necessary, has pointed to a congressional resolution passed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that authorized him to use force in the fight against terrorism as allowing him to order the program.

The program authorized eavesdropping of international phone calls and e-mails of people deemed a terror risk.

But the New York lawsuit noted that federal law already allows the president to conduct warrantless surveillance during the first 15 days of a war and allows court authorization of surveillance for agents of foreign powers or terrorist groups.

Instead of following the law, Bush "unilaterally and secretly authorized electronic surveillance without judicial approval or congressional authorization," the lawsuit said.

At a news conference, Center for Constitutional Rights Legal Director Bill Goodman portrayed the president as a man on an unprecedented power grab at the expense of basic democratic principles.

He said the public was starting to understand the assertion that the erosion of individual rights is a slippery slope that lets the government "brand anyone a terrorist with no right to counsel, no right to be brought before a judge and no right to privacy in communications."

The Detroit lawsuit said the plaintiffs, who frequently communicate by telephone and e-mail with people in the Middle East and Asia, have a "well-founded belief" that their communications are being intercepted by the government.

"By seriously compromising the free speech and privacy rights of the plaintiffs and others, the program violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the United States Constitution," the lawsuit states.

In its suit in New York, the Center for Constitutional Rights maintained its work was directly affected by the surveillance because its lawyers represent a potential class of hundreds of Muslim foreign nationals detained after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

It said its attorney-client privilege was likely violated as it represented hundreds of men detained without charge as enemy combatants at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station and a Canadian citizen who was picked up at a New York airport while changing planes, sent to Syria and tortured and detained without charges for nearly a year.

The group said the surveillance program has inhibited its ability to represent clients vigorously, making it hard to communicate via telephone and e-mail with overseas clients, witnesses and others for fear the conversations would be overheard.

Plaintiff Rachel Meeropol, an attorney at the center, said she believes she has been targeted. "I'm personally outraged that my confidential communication with my clients may have been listened to by the U.S. government," she said.

Analysts: Growing Deficit Hobbles Economy

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Like a person packing on pounds, the United States keeps adding to its flabby budget deficits, endangering the nation's economic health and the pocketbooks of ordinary Americans. Here's the worry: Persistent deficits will lead to higher borrowing costs for consumers and companies, slowing economic activity.

As Uncle Sam seeks to borrow ever more to finance those deficits, rates on Treasury securities would rise to entice investors. That would push up other interest rates, such as home mortgages, many auto loans, some home equity lines of credit and some credit cards.

"That's the pocketbook risk to the American consumer," said Greg McBride, a senior financial analyst at Bankrate.com, an online financial service.

For businesses, rates on corporate bonds would climb. It would become more expensive to borrow to pay for new plants and equipment and other capital investments.

With a succession of budget deficits, "you do expect to see higher interest rates. Where we fight about this is over how big the effects are. But they are definitely there," said James Feyrer, assistant economics professor at Dartmouth College.

The government's budget deficit last year was $319 billion. While smaller than the record $413 billion in 2004, it still was the third-highest ever.

A White House budget official now predicts that the deficit in the current budget year will top $400 billion, pushed up by the costs of the Gulf Coast hurricanes. The red ink is expected to keep flowing for years.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office forecasts deficits every year through 2015; that is as far out as the office projects. The White House forecast, which runs to 2010, also expects annual shortfalls.

"The budget deficit is like gaining weight. You are not really aware of it until at some point, all of a sudden you can't do what you want to do because you are heavier. Interest rates go up and slow things down," said Brian Bethune, economist at Global Insight. "Then you go to your check up and the doctor tells you you got to lose 25 pounds."

America's economic doctor is Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

Greenspan, who retires Jan. 31 after 18-plus years at the central bank, repeatedly has urged Congress and the Bush administration to get the country's financial house in order.

Bloated budget deficits, if not curbed, could endanger the economy over the long term, Greenspan warned. Increased government borrowing would drive up interest rates and weigh down economic activity.

"In the end, the consequences for the U.S. economy of doing nothing could be severe," he said recently.

The looming retirement of 78 million baby boomers will put massive strains on the country's finances, Greenspan said.

In 2008, the oldest of the boomers will reach 62, the earliest age at which they can tap Social Security retirement benefits. Three years after that, in 2011, they will reach 65 and become eligible for Medicare.

Ben Bernanke, chosen by President Bush to succeed Greenspan, also believes the situation is troubling and that the deficits need to be controlled.

"Budget deficits are a problem," he said. "I think it's important to continue to reduce budget deficits."

The administration has a goal of cutting the deficit in half by 2009 and plans to do that by restraining spending. The president, meanwhile, is continuing to press Congress to make his tax cuts permanent.

Democrats mostly blame Bush's tax cuts for the government's red ink. The last time the government recorded a surplus was in 2001.

In a worst-case scenario, foreigners who finance the U.S. budget and trade deficits would sour on U.S. investments and unload their holdings. The prices of U.S. stocks and bonds could plunge. Interest rates, including those for mortgages, could soar. A financial crisis could confront the country.

Economists are troubled by the prospects of budget deficits as far as the eye can see and want to see them trimmed. But the size of the current budget deficits, while unwelcome, do not signal that a crisis is imminent, they said.

An important barometer is the size of the federal debt — now about $8 trillion — relative to the overall economy, as measured by gross domestic product. Under that measure, this debt accounts for around 63.2 percent of

GDP, Bethune said.

"Generally speaking, when it is over 75 percent of GDP, then the yellow flag goes out. I would say 95 percent of GDP and over is definitely a red flag," Bethune said.

The government produces a budget deficit when its total spending exceeds its total revenues. Budget deficits cause the government to borrow more money by selling Treasury securities to domestic and foreign investors. That additional borrowing increases the government's debt.

Despite the recent string of large budget deficits, long-term interest rates in the U.S. have behaved well. In fact, relatively low long-term rates around the world have puzzled economists and spawned a number of theories. Some experts believe too little investment worldwide may be behind this; others believe too much savings is the reason.

From an economic point of view, there is more concern about higher borrowing costs over time crimping business investment and ultimately the production of goods and services, economists said.

"Low investment is bad. That's going to mean lower productivity and lower production in the future, which has a cost on society," said Erik Hurst, associate professor of economics at University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business.

Situation in Iraq Is Civil War

by Congressman John Murtha, Pennsylvania's 12th Distict

According to the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition, the definition of a civil war is a "war between political factions or regions within the same country." That is exactly what is going on in Iraq, not a global war on terrorism, as the President continues to portray it.

93 percent of those fighting in Iraq are Iraqis. A very small percentage of the fighting is being done by foreign fighters. Our troops are caught in between the fighting. 80 percent of Iraqis want us out of there and 45 percent think it is justified to kill American troops.

Iraqis went to the polls in droves on December 15th and rejected the secular, pro-democracy candidates and those who the Administration in Washington propped up. Preliminary vote results indicate that Iyad Allawi, the pro-American Prime Minister, received about 8 percent of the vote and Ahmad Chalabi, Iraq's current Oil Minister and close associate of the U.S. Iraq war planners, received less than 1 percent. According to General Vines, the top operational commander in Iraq, "the vote is reported to be primarily along sectarian lines, which is not particularly heartening." The new government he said "must be a government by and for Iraqis, not sects."

The ethnic and religious strife in Iraq has been going on, not for decades or centuries, but for millennia. These particular explosive hatreds and tensions will be there if our troops leave in six months, six years or six decades. It is time to re-deploy our troops and to re-focus our attention on the real threats posed by global terrorism.

(John P. Murtha is a decorated 37-year Marine veteran and has been an outspoken member of Congress for 30 years. http://www.house.gov/murtha/index.shtml )

Climate-change fungus is wiping out frogs

(Frog hidden in a tropical plant. Global warming has wiped out two-thirds of species of unique frogs that inhabit the cloud forests of Central America, a study published in Nature, the British weekly science journal, says.(AFP/File/Gabriel Bouys))

LONDON (Reuters) - An infectious fungus aggravated by global warming has killed entire populations of frogs in Central and South America and driven some species to extinction, scientists said on Wednesday.

In research that showed the effects of rising temperatures on delicate ecosystems, a team of researchers found that a warming atmosphere encouraged the spread of a fungus that has wiped out species of harlequin frogs and golden toads.

"This is the first clear evidence that widespread extinction is taking place because of global warming," Dr Alan Pounds, an ecologist of the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve in Costa Rica, said in an interview.

"Climate change is already altering the dynamics of infectious disease and causing species to disappear."

Pounds and his team established the link between global warming and the disappearance of frogs in the cloud forests of Costa Rica by analyzing sea surface and air temperatures, which rose by 0.18 degrees per decade between 1975 and 2000.

Warmer temperatures increased cloud cover over the tropical mountain which the scientists believe promoted conditions to spur the growth of the chytrid fungus that kills frogs.

They are confident that global warming is a key factor in the disappearance of many amphibian populations in tropical forests.

"There is absolutely a linkage between global warming and this disease -- they go hand-in-hand," said Dr Arturo Sanchez-Azofeifa, of Canada's University of Alberta and a co-author of the research published in the journal Nature.

"With this increase in temperature, the bacteria has been able to increase its niche and wipe out large populations of amphibians in the Americas," he added in a statement.

About a third of the 5,743 known species of frogs, toads and other amphibians are classified as threatened, according to the Global Amphibian Assessment.

Up to 167 species may already be extinct and another 113 species have not been found in recent years. Habitat loss is the greatest threat to amphibians but fungal disease is also a serious problem.

Andrew Blaustein, of Oregon State University, and Andy Dobson, of Princeton University in New Jersey, described the research as a breakthrough.

"The powerful synergy between pathogen transmission and climate change should give us cause for concern about human health in a warmer world," they said in a commentary in Nature.

"Doomsday vault" to house world's seeds

PARIS (AFP) - Norway is to build a "doomsday vault" in a mountain close to the North Pole that will house a vast seed bank to ensure food supplies in the event of catastrophic climate change, nuclear war or rising sea levels, New Scientist says.

Built with Fort Knox-type security, the three-million-dollar vault will be designed to hold around two million seeds representing all known varieties of the world's crops.

They are the precious food plants that have emerged from 10,000 years of selection by farmers.

The facility "would essentially be built to last forever," according to a feasibility study.

It will be built deep in permafrost in the side of a sandstone mountain on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, 1,000 kilometers (625 miles) from the North Pole, the British weekly says in its next issue, out on Saturday.

With walls of one-metre- (3.25-feet-) thick concrete, the seed bank will be protected behind two airlocks and high-security blast-proof doors.

The facility will not be permanently manned but "the mountains are patrolled by polar bears," the report quotes Cary Fowler, director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an organisation that is promoting the project, as saying.

To be preserved, the seeds must be kept below freezing point.

Operators plan to replace the air inside the vault once a year at winter-time, but even if for some reason this becomes impossible, the permafrost will still keep the seeds viable.

The thick walls, airlocks and doors mean that even if global warming accelerates badly, it would take many decades for hotter air to reach the seeds.

"This will be the world's most secure gene bank by some orders of magnitude," said Fowler. "But its seeds will only be used when all other samples have gone for some reason. It is a fail-safe depository, rather than a conventional seed bank."

The proposal is backed by Norway, which sketched a similar project back in the 1980s that was thwarted at the time by the Soviet Union's access to Spitsbergen.

Climate battle must not hamper growth - Australia PM Howard

SYDNEY (AFX - Forbes) - Australian Prime Minister John Howard said it was unrealistic to expect nations to sacrifice economic growth in order to halt global climate change.

Howard told a conference of Asia-Pacific nations and corporations that growth was the only way many nations could reduce poverty levels among their populations.

'The idea that we can address climate change matters successfully at the expense of economic growth is not only unrealistic but it also unacceptable to the population of Australia which I represent,' Howard said.

'(It's also) I'm sure, unacceptable to the populations of all the other countries that are represented around this table.'

Howard, whose conservative government has joined the United States in refusing to sign the UN's Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, said economic growth and climate solutions need not be mutually exclusive.

'Our societies require of us that we find solutions to these issues that maintain the momentum of economic growth,' he said, adding that new technologies could find a solution to the problem.

'New technologies are therefore a credible and essential part of any suite of measures needed to reduce global emissions growth,' he said.

Howard said private enterprise must perform the bulk of the work needed to deal with climate change, reiterating a position that has become a central theme of this week's Asia-Pacific Clean Development and Climate Partnership.

'Without the active partnership with the business community we are not going to achieve our goal,' he said.

The partnership, known as AP6, brings together ministers from United States, China, India, Japan, South Korea and Australia with corporate giants such as Exxon Mobil, Rio Tinto, Peabody Energy and American Electric Power.

Howard pledged an additional 75 mln usd for environmental projects over the next five years.

Mum's The Word For Ethics Committee

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Indictments, investigations, a resignation -- and now a top lobbyist has struck a deal to tell his presumably sordid tale to prosecutors. It's enough to rattle the handcuffs of even a convicted official.

The past year was a tough one for ethics in Congress, and the coming year may be worse. So why is the House ethics committee so steadfastly silent?

Blame it on a deal made in the mid-1990's. That's when, by many accounts, House Democrats and Republicans were each convinced that the opposing party was using ethics charges for unfair political attacks. So both parties agreed to a truce.

"Everybody knew about it," says former Democratic Congressman Chris Bell of Texas. "There was never any formal agreement between the two parties, but it just came to be known that you don't file a complaint against anyone on our side and we won't file a complaint against anyone on your side."

Unlike the Senate, the House forbids ethics complaints from outsiders, so hardly a whisper has been heard from the committee as ethical, even criminal, complaints have rained down on House members.

Five Democrats and five Republicans sit on the committee, and both parties say they want to restore ethical standards in the Capitol, but the committee has said nothing to say about the spate of recent ethical troubles. That has political activists on both the left and the right saying the ethics truce itself is unethical.

They are making rare alliances with each other to lobby Congress on the matter. Conservative Tom Fitton is the president of Judicial Watch. "We're in a coalition of many groups," he says, "some from the far left, all concerned about congressional ethics reform. It's not a matter of Republicans versus Democrats, or liberals versus conservatives. It's a matter of crooks versus the rest of us!"

Melanie Sloan, a liberal, disagrees with Fitton about almost everything, except this. "It's a total disaster," she says. As head of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, she is used to fighting hopeless causes, but she is digging in with her conservative allies to force reform of the ethics committee.

"It needs to be repaired quickly so that the American people can have some confidence in the institution of the House of Representatives," she says.

I called the ethics committee and was told congressional rules forbid them from discussing much of what they do publicly, and some of the corrective measures they take against members are properly private.

They acknowledge that the committee has not been a hotbed of activity for quite awhile. However, they point out that the committee is being given more funds for investigations, a bigger staff, and a promise of improvement is in the air.

Still, some critics argue Congress has done such a terrible job of policing itself, it should just give up and appoint a panel of ex-judges to consider ethical lapses and present findings to the entire Congress for a public vote.

It's not likely, Fitton says. "The leadership of both parties don't want an ethics committee with bite," he says. Bell, the former congressman, adds, "You're dealing with a body that you basically have to force over a cliff if you want to get anything done."

U.S. Emergency Medicine System Near Breaking Point

By Jeff Minerd, MedPage Today Staff Writer - Reviewed by Robert Jasmer, MD; Assistant Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco - January 11, 2006

Also covered by: Chicago Tribune, MSNBC, USA Today, Washington Post

MedPage Today Action Points:

* Be aware that the emergency medical system in your community is likely to suffer from lack of resources.

Review:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 - The emergency medicine system in the United States, already under stress, could fail if severely tested by a new natural disaster or terrorist attack, according to a report from the American College of Emergency Physicians.

The state-by-state evaluation awarded poor or near-failing marks in emergency medicine to 41 states and a grade of C- to the country at large. No state failed completely, but none earned top marks, according to the National Report Card on the State of Emergency Medicine, published by the college.

California, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the District of Columbia led the nation with overall grades of B. Rating worst in the nation with grades of D+ or D were Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming. The Gulf Coast states’ grading was established on the basis of statistics gathered prior to Hurricane Katrina.

“The Hurricane Katrina disaster demonstrated the critical role of emergency medicine in times of natural or man-made disasters,” said the report. “It also showed the need for ‘surge capacity’ in the critical time between when a disaster occurs and when state or federal resources can be mobilized to respond.”

The number of people coming to emergency departments continues to increase, said the college, with nearly 114 million patient visits in 2003, the highest number ever, the report said. At the same time, the overall capacity of the nation’s emergency systems has decreased, with hundreds of emergency departments closing in the past 10 years. Since 1993, the number of emergency departments has decreased by 14%, according to the report.

Local emergency departments are increasingly crowded, often to the point that ambulances must be diverted to another hospital. A key cause is the lack of staffed inpatient hospital beds. During the 1990s, hospitals lost 103,000 staffed inpatient medical-surgical beds and 7,800 intensive care unit beds nationwide, the report said.

“Often, when emergency patients need to be moved into hospital beds, they must wait in emergency department hallways for hours and sometimes days,” the report said.

The growing ranks of the uninsured -- who often turn to emergency rooms for their medical care -- are also putting a strain on the system, according to the report. “A large number of people pay nothing for their care,” the report said. “Soaring amounts of uncompensated care means fewer resources for everyone.”

At the same time, all health insurance payers, including private insurance companies, Medicare, and Medicaid, are paying less for services, and state governments are cutting health budgets.

Another stress on the emergency medicine system is the high cost of medical liability insurance, which has led some specialty doctors to leave medicine or to be less willing to be on call for emergency situations, hampering hospitals’ ability to provide emergency care, the report said.

To create the report, a task force of emergency physicians assembled by the college, graded each state on a scale of A through F in the following four areas:

* Access to emergency care, which covered availability of emergency care resources and state health spending, including spending on publicly-funded health insurance.

* Quality of care and patient safety, which included state support for training emergency physicians and emergency medical technicians as well as patient access to ambulance and 911 services.

* Public health and injury prevention, which covered seat belt and helmet laws, domestic violence programs, and state immunization rates.

* Medical liability rules, which included state rates for medical liability insurance as well as any initiatives to reform the current rules.

The grades in these four areas were then averaged into one overall grade for each state.

The task force analyzed data from sources including the American Medical Association, the American Nurses Association, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“Americans assume they will receive lifesaving emergency care when and where they need it, but increasingly this isn't the case," said Frederick C. Blum, M.D., president of the college. "Our report found the nation's support for emergency medical care is mediocre or worse.”

Primary source: American College of Emergency Physicians

Source reference:

(I've probably posted this before, but it's still a goodie)

---------

Dear Dr. Laura,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.

a) When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

b) I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

c) I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev 15:19-24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

d) Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?

e) I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?

f) A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an Abomination (Lev 11:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?

g) Lev 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?

h) Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev 19:27. How should they die?

i) I know from Lev 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

j) My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? (Lev 24:10-16) Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)

I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help.

Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

Angry and Furious at the Collaborationist Democrats

by Martin Garbus, Huffington Post

I don't understand. An hour after I saw the Times "scoop" on the Bush illegal wiretapping plan, I wrote that it was clearly illegal and unconstitutional.

But as it now turns out, dozens of politicians, as well as the New York Times knew about the surveillance plan and did nothing.

Representative Nancy Pelosi (news, bio, voting record), the Democratic leader in the House, and Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, a man known for some sensitivity to civil liberties infringements, and a substantial number of congressmen, plus the New York Times, all knew of Bush's illegal spying. Pelosi, Rockefeller, and several other congressmen "confidentially" expressed concern but did nothing. Nothing.

Not a peep.

Why? It is totally obvious, (1) that the FISA statute specifically prohibits what the President did, and (2) that the congressional permission to use force to fight overseas does not permit illegal surveillance.

You need not be a lawyer to know that it's illegal--anyone who can read or understand English can see the plain language of the statute and the military force authorization. Why didn't Pelosi, Rockefeller and the others take a closer look at the illegal surveillance? Even people in Ashcroft's justice department recognized it was illegal--they refused to sign off. They refused to sign off, showing more courage than our Democratic congressmen. For a while, the Bush administration tried to float that the legal justification for the wiretap program was a 34-year old conservative wunderkind, John Yoo, presently teaching at Stanford University. They claimed that his sophisticated legal analysis determined Bush's policy.

It was apparent that Bush's John Yoo story was totally false. There are layers and layers of bureaucracy in the

Department of Justice, and Yoo's memo would have had to go up the ladder. It's now been confirmed that the Yoo story was fake, for his superiors knew that his legal rationale was at best questionable.

We also learned, this Saturday on January 7th, that the congressional research services, a nonpartisan arm of the Congress, said that the "legal rationale... does not seem to be as well-grounded as the Bush team now argues." Why then didn't Pelosi, Rockefeller, or the others, immediately after learning of the programs, get a legal analysis of the program's constitutionality? Instead, they choose to ignore the democratic process and let unchallenged a program that authorized unconstitutional physical break-ins and the surveillance of millions of Americans.

Was it that it was not their ox being gored? We know that most Americans do not believe in or support the Bill of Rights. The benefits of liberty, freedom, and privacy rights are too ephemeral and not concrete. Do our politicians also really believe that those ephemeral rights fall in the face of Bush's claims of national security damage?

In truth, Pelosi, Rockefeller, and the New York Times collaborated with Bush for four years to ignore the Constitution. No one did anything on behalf of the millions of Americans being surveyed. At the end of the day, no one tried to stop it or even examine it. That says a great deal about our politicians' commitment to democracy and the Constitution. In the immortal words of John Mitchell, the head of Nixon's Department of Justice, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going."

Hopefully, the Democrats will compel Supreme Court nominee, Samuel Alito, to tell us why he believes the spy program is not illegal. If the Democrats can't even get that in the nomination process, then the country is in worse shape than I thought.

Nine factors that affect your heart's health

By Steve Sternberg, USA TODAY

If you think heart disease is inevitable, Salim Yusuf has news for you.

Nine risk factors account for 90% of the heart disease in every population on earth, says Yusuf, a global heart specialist at McMaster University in Toronto.

Change your lifestyle and that percentage will shrink dramatically. So will the $400 billion annual cost of heart treatment and lost productivity; the 900,000 heart attacks and strokes; the 1.2 million angioplasties; the 500,000 bypass operations and a million hospitalizations for heart failure, according to the American Heart Association.

The risk factors aren't new. You've heard them before: smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, stress, a desk-bound job and a diet that is rich in processed foods, low in fruit and fiber and missing a daily thimbleful of alcohol.

What's new is the powerful evidence of the toll they take. The evidence lies in Yusuf's Interheart study, a worldwide examination of heart-disease risk factors involving more than 26,000 volunteers in 52 countries. Slightly more than half of the volunteers had heart disease. Based on the study, Yusuf says, "we know virtually all of the risk factors in every population."

Clogged arteries are a "societal disease," Yusuf says, brought on by cities built for automobiles and ease, featuring urban sprawl, high-pressure sedentary work, passive entertainment and lots of cheap, tasty processed food. Surprisingly, family history - believed by many to be the biggest heart risk of all - accounts for just a fraction of the 10% of remaining risk, the study shows.

"I'm a fan of the study," says Richard Milani, director of preventive cardiology at the Ochsner Institute in New Orleans. "It reflects risk factors for all of us, and heart disease is a leading killer no matter where we live."

Interheart, Milani says, focuses on things we can do something about. "We're all dying from a disease that's primarily a disease of choice, of lifestyle," he says.

"We're not saying your Dad had a heart attack, you're doomed. All these things can be changed. If you can focus your attention on these nine things, there's not much else you have to worry about."

Nine factors

Abdominal obesity

Abdominal obesity more than doubles heart attack risk in both men and women. "It's not a big butt that will get you in trouble, it's a big belly," Milani says. Abdominal fat is hormonally active, "begetting diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol."

Alcohol

Another platelet blocker. Modest amounts of alcohol reduce a man's heart attack risk by 12% and a woman's by 60%. All forms of alcohol help in small amounts. Too much beer or hard liquor, more than a drink a day, can promote heart disease, cancer and alcoholism.

Bad cholesterol/good cholesterol

High cholesterol roughly quadruples heart attack risk. It works this way: Bad cholesterol (LDL) carries fats into the artery wall; good cholesterol (HDL) carts it away. A sedentary lifestyle and fatty diet increase LDL and lower HDL. Exercise and a healthy diet switch that ratio and keep arteries clear.

Diabetes

Diabetes is especially deadly for women, quadrupling their risk of having a heart attack. Men aren't much better off; diabetes doubles their risk. Like smoking, diabetes causes platelets to stick together, resulting in scores of tiny clots. These clots clog the microscopic blood vessels that feed nerves and arteries, which is a key reason diabetes destroys circulation. Diabetes also raises the level of harmful fats in the blood.

Eating fruits and vegetables

Eating fruits and vegetables daily cuts heart risk by 30% to 40%. They lower bad cholesterol, improve blood sugar and replace foods that might not be as healthy.

Exercise

Moderate exercise reduces a man's heart risk by 23% and a woman's by twice that amount. "We're not talking about marathons," Milani says. "Even just a nice walk in the park." Exercise improves cholesterol, staves off diabetes by improving blood sugar and promotes blood vessel growth.

High blood pressure

High blood pressure nearly triples a man's risk of having a heart attack and more than doubles a woman's. Narrowed blood vessels force the heart to work harder, slowly wearing it out. The blood's friction against artery walls also can promote the rupture of plaques, which can lead to heart attacks.

Psychosocial stress

Stressful life events, behavioral disorders and depression nearly triple heart attack risk. Depressed people with heart disease are four times more likely to have a heart attack or die, and depression is prevalent among 20% of people with heart disease in the USA.

Smoking

Poll: Most Say U.S. Needs Warrant to Snoop

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - A majority of Americans want the Bush administration to get court approval before eavesdropping on people inside the United States, even if those calls might involve suspected terrorists, an AP-Ipsos poll shows.

Over the past three weeks, President Bush and top aides have defended the electronic monitoring program they secretly launched shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, as a vital tool to protect the nation from al-Qaida and its affiliates.

Yet 56 percent of respondents in an AP-Ipsos poll said the government should be required to first get a court warrant to eavesdrop on the overseas calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens when those communications are believed to be tied to terrorism.

Agreeing with the White House, some 42 percent of those surveyed do not believe the court approval is necessary.

"We're at war," Bush said during a New Year's Day visit to San Antonio. "And as commander in chief, I've got to use the resources at my disposal, within the law, to protect the American people. ... It's a vital, necessary program."

According to the poll, age matters in how people view the monitoring. Nearly two-thirds of those between age 18 to 29 believe warrants should be required, while people 65 and older are evenly divided.

Party affiliation is a factor, too. Almost three-fourths of Democrats and one-third of Republicans want to require court warrants.

Cynthia Ice-Bones, 32, a Republican from Sacramento, Calif., said knowing about the program made her feel a bit safer. "I think our security is so important that we don't need warrants. If you're doing something we shouldn't be doing, then you ought to be caught," she said.

But Peter Ahr of Caldwell, N.J., a religious studies professor at Seton Hall University, said he could not find a justification for skipping judicial approvals. Nor did he believe the administration's argument that such a step would impair terrorism investigations.

"We're a nation of laws. ... That means that everybody has to live by the law, including the administration," said Ahr, 64, a Democrat who argues for checks and balances. "For the administration to simply go after wiretaps on their own without anyone else's say-so is a violation of that principle."

The eavesdropping is run by the secretive National Security Agency, the government's code-makers and code-breakers.

Charles Franklin, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said most people think that the eavesdropping is aimed at foreign terrorists, even when the surveillance is conducted inside the country.

"They are willing to give the president quite a lot of leeway on this when it comes to the war on terror," said Franklin, who closely follows public opinion.

Some members of Congress have raised concerns about the president's actions, but none of those lawmakers who have been briefed on the program has called for its immediate halt.

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, GOP Sen. Arlen Specter (news, bio, voting record) of Pennsylvania, has promised hearings this year. Five members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, including GOP Sens. Olympia Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, have called for immediate inquiries.

On top of that, a memorandum circulated Friday from two legal analysts at the Congressional Research Service concluded that the justification for the monitoring may not be as strong as the administration has argued.

The NSA's activity "may present an exercise of presidential power at its lowest ebb," the 44-page memo said.

Bush based his eavesdropping orders on his presidential powers under the Constitution and a September 2001 congressional resolution authorizing him to use military force in the fight against terrorism.

The administration says the program is reviewed every 45 days and that Bush personally reauthorizes it. His top legal advisers argue its justification is sound.

The issue is full of grays for some people interviewed for the poll, including homebuilder Harlon Bennett, 21, a political independent from Wellston, Okla. He does not think the government should need warrants for suspected terrorists.

"Of course," he added, "we all could be suspected terrorists."

Memo Questions Domestic Monitoring Excuse

Good Guy James Comey Stands Up For Decency.

Comey, pictured in 2004, a former top official at the US Justice Department, objected in 2004 to aspects of the National Security Agency's domestic spying program and refused to back it amid concerns about the program's legality and oversight, a US newspaper reported.(AFP/File/Tim Sloan)

WASHINGTON , Associated Press- A memorandum from two congressional legal analysts concludes that the administration's justification for the monitoring of certain domestic communications may not be as solid as

President Bush and his top aides have argued.

The Congressional Research Service, which advises lawmakers on a wide range of matters, said a final determination about the issue is impossible without a deeper understanding of the program and Bush's authorization, "which are for the most part classified."

Yet two attorneys in the organization's legislative law division, Elizabeth Bazan and Jennifer Elsea, say the justification that the Justice Department laid out in a Dec. 22 analysis for the House and Senate intelligence committees "does not seem to be as well-grounded as the tenor of that letter suggests."

The National Security Agency's activity "may present an exercise of presidential power at its lowest ebb," Bazan and Elsea write in the 44-page memo.

Bush and his top advisers have defended the program, which allowed the highly secretive agency to eavesdrop without court approval on international calls and e-mails of people who were inside the United States and suspected of communicating with al-Qaida or its affiliates.

The Bush administration says it was legal under Article 2 of the Constitution, which grants presidential powers, and Congress' September 2001 authorization to use military force to conduct the war on terror.

But the memo concludes: "It appears unlikely that a court would hold that Congress has ... authorized the NSA electronic surveillance operations here under discussion."

Responding to the report, Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the activities "were conducted in accordance with the law and provide a critical tool in the war on terror that saves lives and protects civil liberties."

The domestic monitoring has raised questions about the appropriate powers of Congress and the executive branch. Congress' legal advisers are saying lawmakers should have a role in overseeing such activities.

Ken Bass, a Carter administration Justice Department official and an expert on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, said the issue of the president's inherent power has remained unresolved for decades.

The White House's analysis of presidential power is consistent with previous administrations, Bass said. But he said he didn't know of an administration that had asserted authority for four years, as in the monitoring program, to delegate decisions normally requiring court orders to midlevel intelligence officials.

On Monday, Bush reasserted his authority to order the surveillance.

"The enemy is calling somebody, and we want to know who they're calling and why," Bush said in San Antonio, Texas. "And that seems to make sense to me, as the commander in chief, if my job is to protect the American people."

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (news, bio, voting record), D-N.J., who was among those who requested the research service's memo, said it contradicts Bush's claim that the program was legal.

Did Jesus exist? Italian court to decide

Rome, Reuters: An Italian court is tackling Jesus — and whether the Roman Catholic Church may be breaking the law by teaching that he existed 2,000 years ago.

The case pits against each other two men in their 70s, who went to the same seminary school. The defendant, Enrico Righi, went on to become a priest writing for the parish newspaper. The plaintiff, Luigi Cascioli, became a vocal atheist who, after years of legal wrangling, is set to get his day in court later this month.

“I started this lawsuit because I wanted to deal the final blow against the Church, the bearer of obscurantism and regression,” Cascioli told Reuters.

Cascioli says Righi, and by extension the whole Church, broke two Italian laws. The first is “Abuso di Credulita Popolare” (Abuse of Popular Belief) meant to protect people against being swindled or conned. The second crime, he says, is “Sostituzione di Persona”, or impersonation.

“The Church constructed Christ upon the personality of John of Gamala,” Cascioli claimed, referring to the 1st century Jew who fought against the Roman army.

A court in Viterbo will hear from Righi, who has yet to be indicted, at a January 27 preliminary hearing meant to determine whether the case has enough merit to go forward.

Prove Christ exists, judge orders priest

ROME, UK Times - An italian judge has ordered a priest to appear in court this month to prove that Jesus Christ existed.

The case against Father Enrico Righi has been brought in the town of Viterbo, north of Rome, by Luigi Cascioli, a retired agronomist who once studied for the priesthood but later became a militant atheist.

Signor Cascioli, author of a book called The Fable of Christ, began legal proceedings against Father Righi three years ago after the priest denounced Signor Cascioli in the parish newsletter for questioning Christ’s historical existence.

Yesterday Gaetano Mautone, a judge in Viterbo, set a preliminary hearing for the end of this month and ordered Father Righi to appear. The judge had earlier refused to take up the case, but was overruled last month by the Court of Appeal, which agreed that Signor Cascioli had a reasonable case for his accusation that Father Righi was “abusing popular credulity”.

Signor Cascioli’s contention — echoed in numerous atheist books and internet sites — is that there was no reliable evidence that Jesus lived and died in 1st-century Palestine apart from the Gospel accounts, which Christians took on faith. There is therefore no basis for Christianity, he claims.

Signor Cascioli’s one-man campaign came to a head at a court hearing last April when he lodged his accusations of “abuse of popular credulity” and “impersonation”, both offences under the Italian penal code. He argued that all claims for the existence of Jesus from sources other than the Bible stem from authors who lived “after the time of the hypothetical Jesus” and were therefore not reliable witnesses.

Signor Cascioli maintains that early Christian writers confused Jesus with John of Gamala, an anti-Roman Jewish insurgent in 1st-century Palestine. Church authorities were therefore guilty of “substitution of persons”.

The Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius mention a “Christus” or “Chrestus”, but were writing “well after the life of the purported Jesus” and were relying on hearsay.

Father Righi said there was overwhelming testimony to Christ’s existence in religious and secular texts. Millions had in any case believed in Christ as both man and Son of God for 2,000 years.

“If Cascioli does not see the sun in the sky at midday, he cannot sue me because I see it and he does not,” Father Righi said.

Signor Cascioli said that the Gospels themselves were full of inconsistencies and did not agree on the names of the 12 apostles. He said that he would withdraw his legal action if Father Righi came up with irrefutable proof of Christ’s existence by the end of the month.

The Vatican has so far declined to comment.

THE EVIDENCE

# The Gospels say that Jesus was born to the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem, grew up in Nazareth, preached and performed miracles in Galilee and died on the Cross in Jerusalem

# In his Antiquities of the Jews at the end of the 1st century, Josephus, the Jewish historian, refers to Jesus as “a wise man, a doer of wonderful works” who “drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles”

# Muslims believe Jesus was a great prophet. Many Jewish theologians regard Jesus as an itinerant rabbi who popularised many of the beliefs of liberal Jews. Neither Muslims nor Jews believe he was the Messiah and Son of God

# Tacitus, the Roman historian who lived from 55 to 120, mentions “Christus” in his Annals. In about 120 Suetonius, author of The Lives of the Caesars, says: “Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, Emperor Claudius expelled them from Rome.”

Is Christianity a Casualty of War?

by Tony Campolo, Huffington Post

Recently, I sat in dismay as I watched a television show that featured a prominent Christian author defending the use of torture in the war against terrorism. I was outraged that this man could try to make a case for followers of Jesus condoning such an immoral practice. I shared my feelings with a group of fellow Evangelicals and was stunned when the consensus that emerged from this group of Christians was in agreement with this author.

One of those in the group was wearing one of those WWJD bracelets that proposes that when facing any decision and in every circumstance, the question should be asked, "What would Jesus do?" He evaded the question as to whether or not Jesus would torture a terrorist.

The question is would Jesus ask, "What doth it profit if you gain information from a tortured terrorist and lose your own soul?"

I came away from that discussion with a sense that many of us Evangelicals have given up our moral compasses and wandered into an ethical wasteland where we are not only losing our souls, but also losing our testimonies as good people. Checking around, I found very little condemnation of America's use of torture from those pundits of Christian Fundamentalism who usually can be counted on to speak out with righteous indignation whenever our government provides even the appearance of evil.

Friedrich Nietzsche once said, "Beware when you fight a dragon, lest you become a dragon," and I wonder if we are becoming as despicable as those evil terrorists who are our declared enemies.

Secondly, I am asking if we evangelicals are not only losing any moral authority we once had, but also are losing our opportunity to carry out what we believe is our Biblical imperative to preach the whole Gospel to the whole world. One of the distinguishing traits of we Evangelicals has been our zeal to carry the good news of Christ's salvation to every nation--even as our Lord directed us to do. Sadly, one of the consequences of our support of our nation's foreign policies is that the doors for missionary work are being shut. Because Christianity, throughout the Muslim world, is associated with America, anti-Americanism has heated up anger against Christians in many parts of the Islamic world.

In Iraq, Christians, who even during the evil days of the Hussein regime had the privilege of boldly worshipping and evangelizing, are now being threatened. There have been churches in Baghdad that have been burned down, and tens of thousands of Christians have been fleeing the country in fear of persecution. Undoubtedly, missionary endeavors are losing ground in Iraq. Furthermore, if democracy comes to Iraq it is not likely to bode well for Christians there. The new government probably will be Shiite and, if history is to be trusted, Christians will not fare well under Shia law.

Around the world there are radical Muslim fundamentalists who have responded to our invasion of Iraq, as well as to our general acquiescence in the face of the sufferings of Palestinian people, by declaring a Jihad against Christianity. In Indonesia, the Sudan, and the Philippines, and in other nations, Christians now live in fear of death because of their faith.

These disturbing conditions worsen when American television preachers foolishly declare Islam to be an evil religion, and when the leader of a prominent Evangelical denomination calls Mohammed a pedophile. To add injury to such insults, a worldwide news story broke that an American general stood, dressed in full uniform, in a Christian church and told the congregation that Islam is a creation of Satan.

Don't these people realize that there are dire consequences for our missionaries in Muslim countries as a result of such rhetoric?

More than 300 missionaries who had been serving in Pakistan have lost their visas. Christianity is so identified with American power and politics that in some places missionaries are being sent home, not only because they are thought to be people who denigrate Islam, but also because of suspicion that they might even be CIA agents.

Again the question must be raised as to whether or not Christianity is becoming a casualty of the war on terrorism.

Christianity has been hurt by the failure of leading Evangelical spokespersons to decry how the war on terrorism has been conducted. It also has been hurt by the failure of the rest of we Evangelical Christians to show loving support for moderate Muslims, and by prejudices that have driven many Muslim young people into the camps of radicals.

Global warming 55 million years ago shifted ocean currents

PARIS (AFP) - An extraordinary burst of global warming that occurred around 55 million years ago dramatically reversed Earth's pattern of ocean currents, a finding that strengthens modern-day concern about climate change, a study says.

The big event, the Palaeocene/Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), saw the planet's surface temperature rise by between five and eight degrees C (nine and 16.2 F) in a very short time, unleashing climate shifts that endured tens of thousands of years.

Scientists Flavia Nunes and Richard Norris of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California explored how these warmer temperatures might have affected ocean currents.

They measured carbon-13 isotopes from 14 cores that had been drilled into the deep floor in four different ocean basins, taking samples from sediment layers deposited before, during and after the PETM.

These isotopes are considered to be an indicator of the nutrients deposited by the water at the time. The higher the isotope value, the likelier that the source came from the deep ocean, the prime source for nutrients.

With a painstaking reconstruction, Nunes and Norris found that the world's ocean current system did a U-turn during the PETM -- and then, ultimately, reversed itself.

Before the PETM, deep water upwelled in the southern hemisphere; over about 40,000 years, the source of this upwelling shifted to the northern hemisphere; it took another 100,000 years before recovering completely.

What unleashed the PETM is unclear. Most fingers of blame point to volcanic eruptions that disgorged gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, or coastal reservoirs of methane gas, sealed by icy soil, that were breached by warmer temperatures or receding seas.

The huge temperature rise may have occurred within just few thousand years, but as Nunes and Norris point out, the effects were enduring and the lesson for mankind today is clear.

"Modern CO2 input to the biosphere from fossil fuel sources is approaching that estimated for the PETM, raising concerns about future climate and circulation change," they warn.

"The PETM example shows that anthropogenic (man-made) forcing may have lasting effects not only in global climate but in deep-ocean circulation as well."

The study, which appears on Thursday in the British journal Nature, comes on the heels of research published in November which suggests that global warming is slowing the Atlantic current that gives western Europe its mild climate.

The suspected reason for this is an inrush of freshwater into the northern Atlantic, caused by melting glaciers in Greenland and melting sea ice, and higher flow into the Arctic from Siberian rivers caused by greater rainfall.

The influx brakes the conveyor belt in which warm surface water is taken up to the northeastern Atlantic from the tropics before returning down to the southern hemisphere as cool, deep-sea water.

In 2001, the UN's top scientific authority on global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), estimated that there would be a temperature rise of 1.4 to 5.8 C (2.5 to 10.4 F) from 1990-2100.

The increase was predicted according to scenarios of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), ranging from 540 to 970 parts per million (ppm).

That compares with 280ppm for pre-industrial times and around 380ppm today, which is already the highest concentration of CO2 for 650,000 years.

Bush, Others Dump Abramoff Donations

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - President Bush and numerous lawmakers hastily jettisoned campaign donations linked to lobbyist Jack Abramoff on Wednesday as Republican Party officials pondered the impact of a spreading scandal on their 2006 election prospects.

"I wish it hadn't happened because it's not going to help us keep our majority," conceded Rep. Ralph Regula (news, bio, voting record), R-Ohio.

As Abramoff pleaded guilty to a second set of felony charges in as many days, this time in Florida, officials said Bush's 2004 re-election campaign intended to give up $6,000 in donations from the lobbyist, his wife and a client.

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas — facing legal problems of his own — took similar steps, as did his leadership successor, Rep. Roy Blunt (news, bio, voting record) of Missouri, and Rep. Eric Cantor (news, bio, voting record) of Virginia, another member of the GOP leadership.

"While we firmly believe the contributions were legal at the time of receipt, the plea indicates that such contributions may not have been given in the spirit in which they were received," said Burson Taylor, a spokeswoman for Blunt.

In all, two dozen Republicans and six Democrats, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, have announced plans this week to return donations, mostly funds that came from Abramoff or Indian tribes he represented.

Rep. Bob Ney (news, bio, voting record), R-Ohio, who faces legal scrutiny for his links to the lobbyist, joined in the rush.

And a political action committee controlled by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said it planned to return $2,000 from the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe.

The Republican rush to shed cash that once was eagerly sought underscored the potential political problem the party faces at the dawn of an election year.

"You can't have a corrupt lobbyist unless you have a corrupt member (of Congress) or a corrupt staff," former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich said in a lunchtime speech. "This was a team effort."

Gingrich, who battled ethics charges near the end of his tenure in Congress, also told reporters he thinks Republicans should elect a permanent replacement for DeLay. In addition to links with Abramoff, the Texan is battling campaign finance charges in his home state.

Regula, who came to Congress in 1973 and survived post-Watergate elections that crippled his party, said the implications of the Abramoff plea deals could be devastating for the GOP. "I was in the minority for 22 years and the majority for 11, and having tried it both ways, I definitely prefer the majority."

Frist issued a statement placing ethics issues on the Senate agenda for the year. He said he intends to "examine and act on any necessary changes to improve transparency and accountability for our body when it comes to lobbying.'

For their part, House Democrats have signaled they intend to make ethics an element in their drive to gain a majority in next fall's elections.

"It's more important for these Republicans to come clean with the American people about ... what (they) did for Jack Abramoff and his special interest friends in return for those campaign contributions," said Sarah Feinberg, a spokeswoman at the House Democratic campaign organization.

Federal prosecutors, armed with subpoena power and a newly cooperative witness, want answers to similar questions, according to the guilty plea that Abramoff entered on Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Washington.

In a section of court papers headed "corruption of public officials," Abramoff acknowledged he had worked to provide "things of value to public officials in exchange for a series of official acts and influence."

Among others, the material refers to Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, and his former chief of staff, Neil Volz, as well as to Tony Rudy, who was a top aide to DeLay at the time of the events described in the papers.

DeLay and Ney, who have both declared their innocence of wrongdoing, announced separately they would give to charity money they received as campaign donations from Abramoff or his clients.

Republicans scrambled to distance themselves from Abramoff on the day the lobbyist pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Miami to conspiracy and wire fraud stemming from his 2000 purchase of SunCruz, a gambling boat fleet.

Court papers say Ney placed a statement related to SunCruz, drafted by Abramoff's partner, Michael Scanlon, in the Congressional Record. The statement, the court papers say, was calculated to pressure the owner of SunCruz to sell on terms favorable to Abramoff.

People familiar with the investigation said federal investigators are interested in questioning Abramoff about his dealings with DeLay and Ney as well as other lawmakers and officials. Those include Rep. John Doolittle (news, bio, voting record), R-Calif., Rudy and Sen. Conrad Burns (news, bio, voting record), R-Mont., as well as former deputy Interior Secretary Stephen Griles and former top Bush administration contract officer David Safavian, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because Abramoff's information is likely to be submitted to a federal grand jury.

The money being returned paled in comparison to the totals raised.

The president's campaign raised more than $300 million in all for the 2004 campaign.

Abramoff raised $100,000 or more, but a spokeswoman at the Republican National Committee said that would be kept apart from the $6,000 being given to the American Heart Association.

Bush pulls the plug on Iraq reconstruction

$18bn funding to stop at end of year

WASHINGTON, UK Guardian - The Bush administration has scaled back its ambitions to rebuild Iraq from the devastation wrought by war and dictatorship and does not intend to seek new funds for reconstruction, it emerged yesterday.

In a decision that will be seen as a retreat from a promise by President George Bush to give Iraq the best infrastructure in the region, administration officials say they will not seek reconstruction funds when the budget request is presented to Congress next month, the Washington Post reported yesterday.

The $18.4bn (£10.6bn) allocation is scheduled to run out in June 2007. The move will be seen by critics as further evidence of the administration's failure to plan for the aftermath of the war.

A decision not to renew the reconstruction programme would leave Iraq with the burden of tens of billions of dollars in unfinished projects, and an oil industry and electrical grid that have yet to return to pre-war production levels.

The decision is a tacit admission of the failure of the US rebuilding effort in the face of a relentless insurgency. Nearly half the funds earmarked for reconstruction were diverted towards fighting the insurgency and preparations to put Saddam Hussein on trial.

At least $2.5bn earmarked for Iraq's dilapidated infrastructure and schools was diverted to building up a security force. And funds originally intended to repair the electricity grid and sewage and sanitation system were used to train special bomb squad units and a hostage rescue force. The US also shifted funds to build 10 new prisons to keep pace with the insurgency, and safe houses and armoured cars for Iraqi judges, the Post said.

The reconstruction fund was tapped for the hundreds of millions of dollars required to hold elections and for four changes of government. It also helped pay for the tens of millions required to establish a criminal justice system, including $128m to examine several mass graves of Saddam's victims.

While 3,600 projects will be completed by the end of the year, the cost of security accounted for as much as 25% of each project, according to the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction. A US congressional report in October forecast that many reconstruction projects were unlikely to get off the ground because of the spiralling costs of security.

Production on Iraq's national electrical grid remains at 4,000 megawatts, 400 megawatts below pre-war levels, with the average Iraqi receiving less than 12 hours of power a day. Oil production, which was supposed to provide the funds for Iraqi reconstruction, according to the Pentagon's pre-war planning, also remains well below pre-war levels, mainly due to sabotage by insurgents. Iraq's refineries are producing 1.1m barrels of oil a day, compared with 2.6m barrels on the eve of the invasion.

The cut-off to reconstruction programmes adds to increasing speculation that the administration is planning at least a partial withdrawal of troops from Iraq before November's US mid-term election.

It marks a retreat from a promise by Mr Bush in 2003 to provide Iraq with the best infrastructure in the region.

Yesterday, however, a Pentagon official disavowed that ambition. "The US never intended to completely rebuild Iraq," Brigadier General William McCoy, the Army Corps of Engineers commander overseeing the work, was quoted in the Post as saying. "This was just supposed to be a jump-start."

Book: CIA Ignored Info Iraq Had No WMD

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - A new book on the government's secret anti-terrorism operations describes how the CIA recruited an Iraqi-American anesthesiologist in 2002 to obtain information from her brother, who was a figure in Saddam Hussein's nuclear program.

Dr. Sawsan Alhaddad of Cleveland made the dangerous trip to Iraq on the CIA's behalf. The book said her brother was stunned by her questions about the nuclear program because — he said — it had been dead for a decade.

New York Times reporter James Risen uses the anecdote to illustrate how the CIA ignored information that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction. His book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration" describes secret operations of the Bush administration's war on terrorism.

The major revelation in the book has already been the subject of extensive reporting by Risen's newspaper: the National Security Agency's eavesdropping of Americans' conversations without obtaining warrants from a special court.

The book said Dr. Alhaddad flew home in mid-September 2002 and had a series of meetings with CIA analysts. She relayed her brother's information that there was no nuclear program.

A CIA operative later told Dr. Alhaddad's husband that the agency believed her brother was lying. In all, the book says, some 30 family members of Iraqis made trips to their native country to contact Iraqi weapons scientists, and all of them reported that the programs had been abandoned.

In October 2002, a month after the doctor's trip to Baghdad, the U.S intelligence community issued a National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program.

In the book, which quotes extensively from anonymous sources, Risen said the NSA spying program was launched in 2002 after the CIA began to capture high-ranking al-Qaida operatives overseas, and took their computers, cell phones and personal phone directories.

The CIA turned the telephone numbers and e-mail addresses from the material over to the NSA, which then began monitoring the phone numbers — in addition to anyone in contact with the telephone subscribers, the book said, saying this led to an expansion of the monitoring, both overseas and in the United States.

The book said the NSA does not need approval from the White House, the Justice Department or anyone else in the Bush administration before it begins eavesdropping on a specific phone line in the United States.

In another chapter on a "rogue operation," the book said a CIA officer mistakenly sent one of its Iranian agents information that could be used to identify virtually every spy the agency had in Iran. The book said the Iranian was a double agent who turned over the data to Iranian security officials.

Abramoff Pleads Guilty, Will Cooperate

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Once-powerful lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty Tuesday to federal charges of conspiracy, tax evasion and mail fraud, agreeing to cooperate in an influence-peddling investigation that threatens powerful members of Congress.

In a heavily scripted court appearance, Abramoff agreed with U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle when she said he had engaged in a conspiracy involving "corruption of public officials." The lobbyist also agreed when she said he and others had engaged in a scheme to provide campaign contributions, trips and other items "in exchange for certain official acts."

"Words will not ever be able to express my sorrow and my profound regret for all my actions and mistakes," Abramoff said, addressing the judge. "I hope I can merit forgiveness from the Almighty and those I've wronged or caused to suffer."

To each of the three charges, Abramoff said, "I plead guilty, your honor." Huvelle and lawyers in the case referred to restitution possibly reaching $25 million in the case. As is typically the case in such pleadings, what happened in the courtroom Tuesday was arranged in advance between lawyers for the defendant and the prosecutors.

Abramoff faces 30 years in prison, and he will cooperate with federal prosecutors in a wide-ranging corruption investigation that is believed to be focusing on as many as 20 members of Congress and aides.

Abramoff's travels with former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay are already under criminal investigation. The lobbyist's interactions with the Texas Republican's congressional office frequently came around the time of campaign donations, golf outings or other trips provided or arranged by Abramoff for DeLay and other lawmakers. In all, DeLay received at least $57,000 in political contributions from Abramoff, his lobbying associates or his tribal clients between 2001 and 2004.

Court papers released Tuesday also detailed lavish gifts and contributions that Abramoff gave an unnamed House member, identified elsewhere as Rep. Bob Ney (news, bio, voting record), R-Ohio, chairman of the House Administration Committee, in return for Ney's agreement to use his office to aid Abramoff clients.

Ney's lawyer, Mark Tuohey, said Tuesday that the charges against Abramoff were "nothing new." He said they repeated information in the November plea agreement from Abramoff's lobbying partner, Michael Scanlon.

Abramoff also was expected to plead guilty in Florida to two of the six charges in a federal indictment, according to his lawyer there, Neal Sonnett. A planned status conference was canceled Tuesday and a change of plea hearing has been scheduled in the Miami case for Wednesday, Justice officials said.

Prosecutors say Abramoff and Scanlon conspired to defraud Indian tribes in Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi and Texas of millions of dollars. Abramoff reaped roughly $20 million in hidden profits from the scheme, according to the information. Scanlon pleaded guilty in November.

Abramoff and Scanlon also lavished a golf trip to Scotland and other things of value on Ney, the court document said. Ney has denied doing anything wrong.

It also said Abramoff solicited $50,000 from a wireless telephone company and got Ney's agreement to push the company's application to install a wireless telephone infrastructure in the House of Representatives, a job Ney's committee would have overseen.

Pressure had been intensifying on Abramoff to strike a deal with prosecutors since another former partner, Adam Kidan, pleaded guilty earlier this month to fraud and conspiracy in connection with the 2000 SunCruz boat deal in Florida.

The continuing saga of Abramoff's legal problems has caused anxiety at high levels in Washington, in both the Republican and Democratic parties.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan could not say Tuesday whether Abramoff ever met President Bush. But when asked at the White House about this, the spokesman said that "what he is reportedly acknowledged doing is unacceptable and outrageous."

"If laws were broken, he must be held to account for what he did," McClellan said.

For months, prosecutors in Washington have focused on whether Abramoff defrauded his Indian tribal clients of millions of dollars and used improper influence on members of Congress.

In a five-year span ending in early 2004, tribes represented by the lobbyist contributed millions of dollars in casino income to congressional campaigns, often routing the money through political action committees for conservative lawmakers who opposed gambling.

Abramoff also provided trips, sports skybox fundraisers, golf fees, frequent meals, entertainment and jobs for lawmakers' relatives and aides.

In Florida, Abramoff and Kidan were indicted in August on charges of conspiracy, wire fraud and mail fraud in connection with their purchase of the SunCruz fleet for $147.5 million from Miami businessman Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis.

Prosecutors said the pair faked a $23 million wire transfer to make it appear that they were making a significant contribution of their own money into the deal. Based on that transfer, lenders Foothill Capital Corp. and Citadel Equity Fund Ltd. agreed to provide $60 million in financing for the purchase.

Kidan pleaded guilty Dec. 15 to one count of conspiracy and one count of wire fraud. He faces a maximum of 10 years in prison and up to $500,000 in fines at sentencing scheduled for March 1.

Scanlon agreed to cooperate in the SunCruz case as part of a plea agreement in a separate case with federal prosecutors in Washington. In that agreement, Scanlon admitted helping Kidan and Abramoff buy SunCruz, partly by persuading Ney to insert comments in the Congressional Record designed to pressure Boulis to sell.

The Wit and Wisdom (NOT) of Ann Coulter

assembled by Morrie Friendly

(with a tip of the hat to Dave "Doctor" Gonzo, Washington Monthly,

Media Whores Online, Steve Gilliard, Mark Nash, Eschaton and Lynn Meese)

-------------------

Ann practices her revenge against her childhood sexual abuser, a 'liberal'

“If Giuliani wants to have a national ambition, and I’m a big fan of his, he’s going to have to become pro-life if he wants to run for president. No one ever believed he was pro-choice anyway - he’s a Catholic from Queens," she says, adding, “Americans understand that Manhattan is the Soviet Union.”

-- Ann Coulter, quoted in "All Smiles On GOP's Right Wing", CBSNews.com, Sept. 1, 2004

"Kwanzaa itself is a lunatic blend of schmaltzy '60s rhetoric, black racism and Marxism. Indeed, the seven 'principles'of Kwanzaa praise collectivism in every possible arena of life – economics, work, personality, even litter removal."

-- Ann Coulter, TownHall.com, Dec. 26, 200

"Well, my point is that it shows the ideological insanity of these people and how they are terrified of anyone who believes in a Being even higher than the New York Times. When you try to figure out what the Religious Right is, essentially my conclusion is that it either comes down to one man, Pat Robertson, or 80 percent of Americans, anyone who believes in God and wants his taxes cut. When you look at Pat Robertson’s positions, they are really quite moderate positions, as one would expect from a Yale Law School graduate. I may not agree with him as a conservative, but my point is they are trying to demonize Pat Robertson as some sort of horned conservative. If he didn't believe in God and go on TV and talk about it, he would be Jim Jeffords, he would be Christie Todd Whitman, I mean just in his political positions. It really shows how crazy these people are. They really are terrified of believing Christians."

-- Ann Coulter to Pat Robertson, The $700 Club, Oct. 2, 2002

"[Anti-war Democrats] know that the American people support defending America, unlike them. Their real feelings are coming out as much as they can right now, which is that they're desperately dying to provide aid and support to al-Qaeda."

-- Ann Coulter on WOR radio, September 21, 2002

"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building."

-- Ann Coulter to George Gurley, New York Observer, August 21, 2002

Phil Donahue: "I just want to make sure we got this right. Liberals hate America. They hate all religions except Islam. Liberals love Islam, hate all other religions."

Ann Coulter: "Post 9/11."

Donahue: "Well, good for you."

--Donahue, MSNBC, July 19, 2002

"[In response to Mike Barnacle] I've been promoting my book today so I haven't read the [Ninth Circuit] decision [declaring the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional]. Perhaps there was a misunderstanding about my coming on this program to talk about my book. But I will guess that the judges who said the pledge of allegiance violates the constitution were appointed by Democrats and not Republicans I haven't looked at the decision, I haven't heard about the decision. But that's a wild guess I'm going to make.... [Later, responding to Katrina van den Heuvel] Oh, I'm just waiting to see if anyone will take any bets on me on whether the judges who wrote this decision were appointed by a Democrat or a Republican."

-- Ann Coulter on MSNBC's Hardball, June 27, 2002

NOTE: The decision was rendered by Judge Alfred T. Goodwin, appointed by President Richard Milhous Nixon, 1971

Ann Coulter: "I can tell which ones don't need to be looked at, I can tell you that. Old ladies, old black men, little children, blondes, blue eyed. Do this experiment. I've done it many times: go around wherever you are, and you can always exclude about 80% of the people there, and I know once again Congressman Honda will not tell us the other factors that are going to be so crucial in figuring out which ones the terrorists are."

Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA): "You know there's another form of terrorism in the country, and that's the kind of terrorism that you spread. It's through racial profiling, and you're simply out of step."

Michael "The Moralist" Medved: "Congressman Honda, do you really want to compare Ann Coulter to the people who attacked the United States on September 11? ... You want to stand by your accusation that Ann Coulter is a terrorist?"

Honda: "Her comments and everything else engenders fear in people, it creates fear in people and it brings up other people who are out of step who will listen to that and turn around and target other people and were about educating people about what's the best way of proceeding and misinformation and using race as the soul ingredient is out of step."

-- The Michael Medved Show, March 18, 2002

"As Mineta has endlessly recounted in interviews of late: 'I remember on the 29th of May, 1942' -- note that he remembers the day -- 'when we boarded the train in San Jose under armed guard, the military guard, I was in my Cub Scout uniform carrying a baseball, baseball glove and a baseball bat. And as I boarded the train, the MPs confiscated the bat on the basis it could be used as a lethal weapon.'

"Good G-d! A guard took Mineta's baseball bat as a child, and as a result he's subjecting all of America to the Bataan Death March! Someone please give him a baseball bat."

-- Ann Coulter, Jewish World Review, Feb. 28, 2002

"Ann is an illustration of how a certain kind of virulent right-wing politics is based on emotion, not reason. Almost to a one, I found that the most hateful voices on the right were venting their own deep-seated problems and frustrations. "

-- David Brock, Washington Post, Feb. 26, 2002

From "Cam Kate":

On [Fox News Channel's February 7th] Hannity and Colmes, Alan Colmes confronted Ann Coulter with the following statement she made at the Conservative Political Action Committee conference:"We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too."

Coulter whined to Colmes, "I didn't know we were talking about this tonight, but now that you've sprung it on me..." but confirmed she made the comment and boasted it was a "huge hit with the audience."

Colmes: "You hate liberals. You despise liberals. This is unbelievable. We should execute them to make liberals scared?"

Coulter: "Right. Right!"

-- Feb. 10, 2002

"When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that John Walker is not getting the death penalty.We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too. Otherwise they will turn out to be outright traitors."

-- Ann Coulter, CPAC convention, February 2002

"...a cruise missile is more important than Head Start."

-- Ann Coulter, Nov. 2001 speech rebroadcast by C-Span in Jan. 2002

On Islamic extremists: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."

-- Ann Coulter, National Review Online, September 2001

On Ted 'Perjurer General' and Barbara 'Paid Liar' Olson: "It's 'Ted and Barbara' just like it's Fred and Ginger, and George and Gracie. They were so perfect together."

-- Ann Coulter, National Review Online, September 2001

Note from Morrie: She forgot "Adolf and Eva", or "Bonnie and Clyde". And I've gotta say -- I've seen Ted and his brand new curvy blonde, over-made-up squeeze in a Washington eatery. They are SO perfect together...

"The presumption of innocence only means you don't go right to jail."

-- Ann Coulter, Hannity & Colmes,August 24, 2001

"God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it! It's yours.'"

-- Ann Coulter, Hannity & Colmes,June 20, 2001

"I think [women] should be armed but should not [be allowed to] vote. No, they all have to give up their vote, not just, you know, the lady clapping and me. The problem with women voting -- and your Communists will back me up on this -- is that, you know, women have no capacity to understand how money is earned. They have a lot of ideas on how to spend it. And when they take these polls, it's always more money on education, more money on child care, more money on day care."

-- Ann Coulter, Politically Incorrect, Feb. 26, 2001

"Women like Pamela Harriman and Patricia Duff are basically Anna Nicole Smith from the waist down. Let's just call it for what it is. They're whores."

-- Ann Coulter, Salon.com, November 16, 2000

"The thing I like about Bush is I think he hates liberals."

-- Ann Coulter, Washington Post, August 1, 2000

"Let's say I go out every night, I meet a guy and have sex with him. Good for me. I'm not married."

-- Ann Coulter, Rivera Live, June 7, 2000

"The swing voters? I like to refer to them as the idiot voters because they don't have set philosophical principles. You're either a liberal or you're a conservative if you have an IQ above a toaster. "

-- Ann Coulter, Beyond the News, FOX News Channel, June 4, 2000

"Clinton is in love with the erect penis."

-- Ann Coulter, This Evening with Judith Regan,FOX News Channel, February 6, 2000

"[The] backbone of the Democratic Party [is a] typical fat, implacable welfare recipient"

-- Ann Coulter, syndicated column, October 29, 1999

"[Clinton] masturbates in the sinks."

-- Ann Coulter, Rivera Live, August 2, 1999

"If you don't hate Clinton and the people who labored to keep him in office, you don't love your country."

-- Ann Coulter, George, July 1999 (and you wonder why the magazine folded)

On Rep. Christopher Shays (D-CT) in deciding whether to run against him as a Libertarian candidate: "I really want to hurt him. I want him to feel pain."

-- Ann Coulter, Hartford Courant, June 25, 1999

Another brilliant pundit forecast: "I think [Whitewater]'s going to prevent the First Lady [Hillary Clinton] from running for Senate."

-- Ann Coulter, Rivera Live, March 12, 1999

"We're now at the point that it's beyond whether or not this guy is a horny hick. I really think it's a question of his mental stability. He really could be a lunatic. I think it is a rational question for Americans to ask whether their president is insane."

-- Ann Coulter, Equal Time(date unspecified)

"It's enough [to be impeached] for the president to be a pervert."

-- Ann Coulter, The Case Against Bill Clinton(1998, Regnery)

"My track record is pretty good on predictions."

-- Ann Coulter, Rivera Live, December 8, 1998

To a disabled Vietnam vet: "People like you caused us to lose that war."

-- Ann Coulter, MSNBC

"If those kids had been carrying guns they would have gunned down this one [child] gunman. ... Don't pray. Learn to use guns."

-- Ann Coulter, Politically Incorrect, December 18, 1997

"I am emboldened by my looks to say things Republican men wouldn't."

-- Ann Coulter, TV Guide, August 1997

"[Princess Diana's] children knew she's sleeping with all these men. That just seems to me, it's the definition of 'not a good mother.' ... Is everyone just saying here that it's okay to ostentatiously have premarital sex in front of your children?...[Diana is] an ordinary, and pathetic, and confessional. I've never had bulimia! I've never had an affair! I've never had a divorce! So I don't think she's better than I am."

-- Ann Coulter, MSNBC September 19, 1997

"I think there should be a literacy test and a poll tax for people to vote."

-- Ann Coulter, Hannity & Colmes, August 17, 1997

"If they have the one innocent person who has ever to be put to death this century out of over 7,000, you probably will get a good movie deal out of it."

-- Ann Coulter, MSNBC July 27, 1997

"Anorexics never have boyfriends. ... That's one way to know you don't have anorexia: if you have a boyfriend."

-- Ann Coulter, Politically Incorrect, July 21, 1997

"I think we had enough laws about the turn-of-the-century. We don't need any more." Asked how far back would she go to repeal laws, she replied, "Well, before the New Deal...[The Emancipation Proclamation] would be a good start."

-- Ann Coulter, Politically Incorrect, May 7, 1997

"I have to say I'm all for public flogging. One type of criminal that a public humiliation might work particularly well with are the juvenile delinquents, a lot of whom consider it a badge of honor to be sent to juvenile detention. And it might not be such a cool thing in the 'hood to be flogged publicly."

-- Ann Coulter, MSNBC, March 22, 1997

"My libertarian friends are probably getting a little upset now but I think that's because they never appreciate the benefits of local fascism."

Pressure to export fresh water likely to grow as U.S. shortages increase

OTTAWA (Canadian Press) - There was an edge of frustration in Paul Cellucci's voice when he raised the topic of fresh water exports in a radio interview last month.

"Canada has probably one of the largest resources of fresh water in the world," the former U.S. ambassador said during a debate on Canada-U.S. relations.

"Water is going to be - already is - a very valuable commodity and I've always found it odd where Canada is so willing to sell oil and natural gas and uranium and coal, which are by their very nature finite. But talking about water is off the table, and water is renewable.

"It doesn't make any sense to me."

It was as close as any high-profile American has come recently to saying what many Canadians have long suspected - Washington wants our water.

Officially, the U.S. government says it's not interested in Canadian water. But many believe the issue will soon break into the open.

Maclean's magazine recently ran a cover story arguing that Canada should sell its water "before they take it."

"This country is in a position to provide a solution that would yield enormous economic and humanitarian benefits for the entire continent, even the world," the magazine wrote. Such viewpoints don't sit well with Peter Lougheed, the former premier of Alberta.

In a recent speech to the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, Lougheed called for an all-party declaration in the House of Commons confirming Canada's refusal to allow large-scale water transfers to its southern neighbour.

"We should not export our fresh water - we need it and we should conserve it," Lougheed said. "And we should communicate to the United States very quickly how firm we are about it."

U.S. water shortages are becoming critical. Flow in the Colorado River, which feeds the Las Vegas Valley, dropped by almost half between 2000 and 2005 due to successive droughts. Yet Canada has major water problems of its own.

The International Joint Commission has repeatedly warned about declining water quality in the Great Lakes due to toxic contamination, and water levels in the lakes have dropped to record lows.

"Although the Great Lakes contain about 20 per cent of the fresh water on the Earth's surface, only one per cent of this water is renewed each year," the commission noted in a recent report.

Ontario, Quebec and eight states signed a deal earlier this month that will prevent thirsty jurisdictions in the southern U.S. from getting access to water from the Great Lakes.

But critics have said the deal still allows for water to be withdrawn at unacceptable levels.

The biggest threat, though, hangs over Western Canada. The most important rivers in the Prairies are fed by mountain glaciers, and the glaciers are melting due to climate change.

"The consequences of these hydrological changes for water availability . . . are likely to be severe," said a study published last month in the British science journal, Nature.

Cities like Calgary, Edmonton and Saskatoon are at risk of literally losing the rivers on which they are built over the next generation or two.

"It's a huge problem," says Andrew Weaver of the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria. "These glaciers are basically toast. They won't be around by the end of the century, or they'll be around in such insignificant amounts that it won't be a big source of water. You've got to start thinking about adaptation here."

The shrinkage of the glaciers is well-documented. Visitors to Glacier National Park in Alberta can follow the retreat of the Athabasca Glacier over the past century by visiting the cairns that used to mark the toe of the glacier.

"That's fossil water and when it's gone, it's gone," said Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at La Jolla, California, lead author of the article in Nature. "If you really are glacier-fed in a warming world, you're up the creek without a paddle, no pun intended."

Maude Barlow, chairwoman of the Council of Canadians, argues that a global shortage of water will be the most threatening ecological, economic and political crisis in the 21st century. But she says Canada's apparent abundance of blue gold is illusory.

"There is no water to spare in the Great Lakes. The only place one could go for the kind of massive water they're talking about is up north and all those rivers are flowing north, so you'd have to be undertaking huge engineering projects to reverse the flow of water.

"So this notion that we have lots of water sitting around is absolutely false."

Barlow says the federal government can't legally ban bulk water exports because water is included in NAFTA. Ottawa has banned inter-basin transfers but she questions whether the ban could be enforced against a provincial government determined to export.

She rejects the suggestion that Canada would be doing a service to the world by sharing its water: "I think it would end up going to places that can buy it as opposed to places that need it."

Despite evidence that water is being wasted on a massive scale, municipalities still don't charge residents the real cost of water or effectively promote conservation.

Due to budget cuts in recent years, the federal government has cut back on water research, closing monitoring stations and reducing data collection on water supplies. The underground aquifers that store the nation's groundwater haven't been mapped, so there is no way to know if they are being depleted or contaminated.

"As a society we are largely forging ahead blindly when it comes to our management of water," the Senate environment committee said in a report tabled just before the government fell on Nov. 28. "We are in essence gambling with our most precious but often under-appreciated natural resource."