President Bush’s popularity ratings have plummeted, but why, asks Justin Webb, is it that the opposition, the Democrats, are not surfing the opinion polls, capitalising on the Republicans’ misfortunes and preparing to take over Congress when the election comes in the autumn? In any list of America’s greatest contributions to world culture – the kazoo, the electric guitar, drive-in fast food etc – space should be found, in my view, for an invention deeply ingrained in the life of this nation. An invention on show to almost all Americans, every day. That invention is the car bumper sticker. And, in case you think you have seen them elsewhere in the world, let me just tell you that you have not. At least not on the scale, and not of the sophistication of the American model. Bumper stickers are a treasure trove of American free speech, expressing opinions of every stripe, on every subject. Political message Some are just plain weird. A perfectly normal looking Chrysler in front of me the other day had “cops smell funny” emblazoned on the boot. The stickers which have caught my attention and which I […]
France has confirmed the deadly bird flu virus H5N1 has been found on a turkey farm in the east of the country. It is the first time a European Union farm has been infected. France has already had cases in two wild ducks. About 80% of more than 11,000 birds at the farm have died in the past week, and the rest have been culled. Despite assurances that cooked poultry is safe, sales in France have fallen by 30%, and Japan has announced an import ban with immediate effect. France, Europe’s largest poultry producer, is to start vaccinating millions of birds against bird flu to try to protect its 7bn euros ($6bn) a year poultry industry. Poultry sales fall “The H5N1 virus is confirmed as the cause of the death of turkey farmed in the Ain department,” the ministry said in a statement. This is the confirmation that the whole of the French poultry industry feared, says the BBC’s Daniel Sandford in Lyon. The farm in Versailleux, where so many turkeys fell ill on Thursday, lay just 200 metres (yards) from the lake where the first case of bird flu among wild […]
New research supports and expands on previous studies to suggest that a lower risk of ovarian cancer may be as close as your teacup. Among a large group of Swedish women, those who drank at least two cups of tea a day developed 46 percent less ovarian cancer than non-tea drinkers. Black tea, which is the most popular tea in the U.S., is what most of these tea drinkers consumed, rather than the green tea, which is more common among Asian populations. This latest study linking tea with less ovarian cancer followed more than 61,000 Swedish middle-aged and older women for about 15 years. Those who drank at least two daily cups of tea had the lowest rates of this cancer, but even one cup a day decreased a woman’s risk by 24 percent. Admittedly, tea-drinkers tend to have healthier lifestyles in many Western cultures than the general population because they exercise more, drink less alcohol, practice better weight control and eat more vegetables. In this study, however, other possible influences were taken into account. The lowered risk appeared after adjustments were made for factors influencing ovarian cancer risk, like a woman’s weight, age, past pregnancies and […]
WASHINGTON — Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Friday he is worried the Gulf Coast may not be ready to withstand another major storm as it struggles to recover from Hurricane Katrina. Less than 100 days before the start of the next hurricane season on June 1, Chertoff said his department is working now with state and local officials to develop plans for evacuations and other emergency response priorities. But with so much of Louisiana and Mississippi still under reconstruction with partly rebuilt homes and numerous house trailers, “I personally am very concerned,” he said. “I can’t tell you when the next hurricane is going to come, or where it’s going to come, but I can envision a scenario in which it will head into a partly reconstructed area that will be vulnerable,” Chertoff told reporters. The Bush administration has approved spending $3 billion to rebuild New Orleans’ levees to a strength sufficient to withstand a storm as strong as Katrina. About 80 percent of the city was flooded when water surged through the levees in some spots after the hurricane struck last Aug. 29. The Army Corps of Engineers has set a goal of repairing […]
In 2003, Congress voted to shut down a controversial program called Total Information Awareness (TIA). The project, which would have linked major information databases together in order to “hunt for terrorists,” was shut down primarily because of privacy concerns, but also because its main advocate was Adm. John Poindexter, known for his involvement with the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s. Wired.com reported at the time that US senators from both parties, saying “they feared government snooping against ordinary Americans,” voted to block funding for TIA. It now appears, however, that the controversial program, which was first brought to the public’s attention in 2002, is continuing. The National Journal reported Thursday that TIA “was stopped in name only” and has been continued within the National Security Agency (NSA), the intelligence agency now fending off charges that it has violated the privacy of US citizens in the domestic wiretapping scandal. Research under the Defense Department’s Total Information Awareness program – which developed technologies to predict terrorist attacks by mining government databases and the personal records of people in the United States – was moved from the Pentagon’s research-and-development agency to another group, which builds technologies primarily for the National Security […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
