In the days after Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon into Israel, on July 12th, to kidnap two soldiers, triggering an Israeli air attack on Lebanon and a full-scale war, the Bush Administration seemed strangely passive. ‘It’s a moment of clarification,’ President George W. Bush said at the G-8 summit, in St. Petersburg, on July 16th. ‘It’s now become clear why we don’t have peace in the Middle East.’ He described the relationship between Hezbollah and its supporters in Iran and Syria as one of the ‘root causes of instability,’ and subsequently said that it was up to those countries to end the crisis. Two days later, despite calls from several governments for the United States to take the lead in negotiations to end the fighting, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that a ceasefire should be put off until ‘the conditions are conducive.’ The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve […]
LONDON — Naweed Hussain sat in his little real estate office Friday, trying to focus on spreadsheets instead of the angry clatter outside. Furious young Muslim men crowded around the local mosque on his street surrounded by television cameras. They complained that their friends, other young Muslim men from Walthamstow, in East London, had been unfairly accused of plotting to blow up airliners. Police guarded the home of one suspect in what authorities call a plot to kill people on an ‘unimaginable’ scale, allegedly planned right here in Hussain’s working-class neighborhood. ‘Why is it not happening in some other country?’ wondered Hussain, 53, a soft-spoken man in a tie and black-rimmed glasses who has lived here since he migrated from Pakistan 40 years ago. ‘Why is it happening here?’ The answer is that Britain has become an incubator for violent Islamic extremism, fueled by disenchantment at home and growing rage about events abroad, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Four bombers killed themselves and 52 others in attacks on the London public transit system on July 7, 2005 , followed by an almost identical but failed attack two weeks later. Last month Metropolitan Police Commissioner […]
NEW YORK — It takes at least 10 minutes and a large glass of orange juice to wash down all the pills _ morphine, methadone, a muscle relaxant, an antidepressant, a stool softener. Viagra for sexual dysfunction. Valium for his nerves. Four hours later, Herbert Reed will swallow another 15 mg of morphine to cut the pain clenching every part of his body. He will do it twice more before the day is done. Since he left a bombed-out train depot in Iraq, his gums bleed. There is more blood in his urine, and still more in his stool. Bright light hurts his eyes. A tumor has been removed from his thyroid. Rashes erupt everywhere, itching so badly they seem to live inside his skin. Migraines cleave his skull. His joints ache, grating like door hinges in need of oil. There is something massively wrong with Herbert Reed, though no one is sure what it is. He believes he knows the cause, but he cannot convince anyone caring for him that the military’s new favorite weapon has made him terrifyingly sick. In the sprawling bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs, he has many caretakers. An […]
Age may be more related to reactions to stress and the absence of disease rather than to a person’s chronological age.’ Age may be more related to reactions to stress and the absence of disease rather than to a person’s chronological age, say leading researchers in the fields of neurobiology and psychoneuroendocrinology. And healthy aging is a good bet if stress can be moderated along with adopting an active, healthy lifestyle. This finding will be presented at the 114th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association (APA). From a review of studies on how stress hormones affect the brain, psychologist Bruce McEwen, PhD, of the Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology at The Rockefeller University, finds more evidence that biological and behavioral stress responses can be adaptive in the aftermath of stress, but can also cause damage when they are over- or under-produced and go on for a long time. ‘Acute stress seems to enhance immune function and improves memory but chronic stress has the opposite effect and can lead to disorders like depression, diabetes and cognitive impairment in aging,’ said Dr. McEwen. Cumulative stress effects, said McEwen, are showing up in people who are under constant stress, like those […]
Increasing temperatures will transform California, threatening some of its most valuable resources in coming decades. That’s the primary message of a new state publication that summarizes 17 scientific studies examining how global warming is expected to play out in California. ‘The potential impacts of global warming are unmistakable, adding more days of deadly heat, more intense and frequent wildfires, shorter supplies of drinking water and serious public-health risks,’ Linda Adams, the state’s secretary for environmental protection, said yesterday during a news conference at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. By publishing the report, titled ‘Our Changing Climate: Assessing the Risks to California,’ state officials hope to engage citizens who haven’t followed the steady stream of reports ordered last year by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger when he called for statewide reductions in the emission of greenhouse gases. Worldwide, scientists agree that Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are warming and that human use of fossil fuels for energy is driving the trend. Levels of carbon dioxide – a byproduct of burning gas, oil and coal – are now higher than they’ve been for at least 650,000 years, scientists have reported. One global change that will affect California’s […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
