The government was last night fighting to contain the fallout over £1bn in payments to a Saudi prince as the attorney general came under renewed pressure to explain how much he knew about the affair. While in public the government was issuing partial denials about its role in the controversy, in private there were desperate efforts to secure a new BAE £20bn arms deal with Saudi Arabia. And any hopes that the furore could be halted were dashed last night when the Guardian learned that the world’s anti-corruption organisation, the OECD, was poised to resume its own inquiry into why the British government suddenly abandoned its investigations into the £43bn al-Yamamah arms deal. Article continues The OECD’s anti-bribery panel will meet in Paris on June 19 and is expected to discuss the disclosures. When it travels to London, its inspectors are likely to ask ministers for a full explanation of their conduct. Last night, the Liberal Democrat leader, Menzies Campbell, demanded to know the role of the attorney general in concealing from the OECD the payments of more than £1bn from BAE to Prince Bandar as part of the al-Yamamah contract. The money was paid […]
LONDON — Britain’s first biofueled passenger train pulled out of a London station on Thursday at the start of a six-month test intended to measure the feasibility of replacing diesel power with biofuel. The train, run by Virgin Trains, will use a blended fuel made up of 20 percent biodiesel, which is derived from biological material - typically vegetable oil. Several British train companies are weighing whether to use biodiesel in their locomotives, and the test is being run in collaboration with the Association of Train Operating Companies, which represents Britain’s train industry, and the Rail Safety & Standards Board. The train will run for six months, during which time engineers will measure the fuel’s effects on the engine. If the experiment is successful, Virgin hopes to switch all its diesel-powered trains - which account for 78 of its 131-train strong fleet - over to biodiesel. Virgin Trains says the move could cut emissions from the trains by 14 percent. Virgin eventually wants its diesel-powered trains to run exclusively on biodiesel, which would require modifications to the train’s engines.
Boosting your vitamin D intake can dramatically reduce your risk of breast and other cancers, a new study found. The research adds to growing evidence that vitamin D can help protect against many forms of cancer as well as other diseases, Creighton University researchers said. But an American Cancer Society spokeswoman urged caution in interpreting the findings, saying it was premature to recommend taking vitamins to reduce cancer risk. Joan Lappe, a Creighton University professor of medicine and nursing and lead author of the study, said, ‘What we can say from our study is that 1,100 international units (IUs) a day of vitamin D definitely decreased the incidence of cancer.’ That amount of the vitamin is nearly triple the recommended intake for the age group studied — women who were 55 and older when the four-year study started. Lappe’s team followed 1,179 study participants who were all postmenopausal and lived in rural Nebraska. The women were free of known cancers for the 10 years before entering the study. They were assigned to one of three groups and followed for four years. One group took 1,400 to 1,500 milligrams of supplementary calcium a day, another […]
WASHINGTON — President Bush’s choice to be his war adviser, Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, said Thursday that the U.S. military surge has given the Iraqi government a ‘golden opportunity,’ but Iraqi leaders aren’t making the economic and political progress needed to achieve national reconciliation. Lute was skeptical about the troop increase before President Bush announced it in January, arguing that a military solution wasn’t enough to bring lasting national stability. At a Senate confirmation hearing Thursday, he promised to give Bush his unvarnished military advice and to keep the lives of U.S. military men and women foremost in this thinking as the administration shapes its war policy. Lute said that the Iraqis want to meet benchmarks they’ve set that are designed to lead to an end of factional fighting, but ‘have shown so far very little progress.’ Unless they start making progress, there’s unlikely to be any decrease in violence, he said. ‘I have reservations about just how much leverage we can apply on a system that is not very capable right now,’ Lute said. But he noted that the Iraqi government had been in power just over a year. ‘I think we’re in the early […]
Drought, a fixture in much of the West for nearly a decade, now covers more than one-third of the continental USA. And it’s spreading. As summer starts, half the nation is either abnormally dry or in outright drought from prolonged lack of rain that could lead to water shortages, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a weekly index of conditions. Welcome rainfall last weekend from Tropical Storm Barry brought short-term relief to parts of the fire-scorched Southeast. But up to 50 inches of rain is needed to end the drought there, and this is the driest spring in the Southeast since record-keeping began in 1895, according to the National Climatic Data Center. California and Nevada just recorded their driest June-to-May period since 1924, and a lack of rain in the West could make this an especially risky summer for wildfires. Coast to coast, the drought’s effects are as varied as the landscapes: .In central California, ranchers are selling cattle or trucking them out of state as grazing grass dries up. In Southern California’s Antelope Valley, rainfall at just 15% of normal erased the spring bloom of California poppies. .In South Florida, Lake Okeechobee, America’s second-largest […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
