BOSTON — State lawmakers are increasingly stepping into the void created by the failure of Congress to approve sweeping changes to immigration policy, a new report finds. Legislatures have passed bills dealing with a range of immigration issues, from employment and health care to driver’s licenses and human trafficking – creating a sometimes uneven patchwork quilt of immigration law across the country. Arkansas approved a law barring state agencies from contracting with businesses that hire illegal immigrants. Louisiana has a new law barring the state from issuing driver’s licenses to foreigners until their criminal background has been checked. Oregon made it illegal for anyone other than lawyers to perform immigration consultation work. In the first six months of the year, 171 immigration bills became law in 41 states. That’s more than double the 84 laws approved in all of 2006, according to the report by the National Conference of State Legislatures, being released Monday at the group’s annual meeting in Boston. More than half of the states have considered bills seeking to toughen or clarify laws related to driver’s licenses or other identification. Nineteen have studied immigration laws that would affect the ability of immigrants to […]
Levitation has been elevated from being pure science fiction to science fact, according to a study reported today by physicists. Beijing saleswoman demonstrates toy which levitates by magnetic force; Physicists have ‘solved’ mystery of levitation. In theory the discovery could be used to levitate a person In earlier work the same team of theoretical physicists showed that invisibility cloaks are feasible. Now, in another report that sounds like it comes out of the pages of a Harry Potter book, the University of St Andrews team has created an ‘incredible levitation effects’ by engineering the force of nature which normally causes objects to stick together. Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, have worked out a way of reversing this pheneomenon, known as the Casimir force, so that it repels instead of attracts. Their discovery could ultimately lead to frictionless micro-machines with moving parts that levitate But they say that, in principle at least, the same effect could be used to levitate bigger objects too, even a person. The Casimir force is a consequence of quantum mechanics, the theory that describes the world of atoms and […]
DELHI — ‘Afghanistan is in a much better position now than it ever was before as a nation.’ So said Richard Boucher, America’s assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, on Thursday August 2nd. If that were true, the meetings scheduled on August 4th and 5th between President George Bush and Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai would be an uneventful affair-a matter of mutual congratulation on a hard job well-done. On his inaugural visit to Camp David, Mr Karzai might even find time for a bracing walk in the surrounding Maryland hills. That would make a nice change from the heavily-fortified compound in Kabul where he spends most of his time cooped up. On a rare, recent venture outside, Mr Karzai was lucky to survive a Taliban rocket attack-at least the third assassination attempt since he took charge of Afghanistan, under heavy American steerage, in 2001. Others have been less fortunate. In 18 months of appalling and worsening violence in Afghanistan, some 6,000 people have been killed-some 1,500 of them civilians. This is despite a big increase over the past year in the number of NATO peacekeepers in Afghanistan. There are currently 35,500 of these troops, in […]
A warning about a possible link with breast and prostate cancers from a hormone-like chemical found in everyday plastic products such as food containers and water bottles has been issued by an international expert group. Earlier this week a study of animals concluded that exposure within the womb to bisphenol A (BPA), a bulk chemical used in the production of plastics and resins, could cause changes in offspring linked with diseases such as obesity, cancer and diabetes. Now new evidence has been published linking the chemical to possible health effects as an expert group of 38 researchers from around the world studying BPA issued a ‘consensus statement’ in the journal Reproductive Toxicology based on more than 700 studies. The statement was on the potential human impact of this ubiquitous chemical, one that has effects similar to those of the female sex hormone oestrogen, drawn up after a meeting sponsored in part by the US Government. Lead author, Prof Fred vom Saal of the University of Missouri, Columbia, said this work marks the first expert verdict on the impact, enough to warn the public: ‘BPA has become a chemical of ‘high concern’ only in recent years, even […]
The self-regard of Israelis is built, in no small part, around a sense of sang-froid, and yet few would deny that the past year was deeply unnerving. Last July, Israel launched an aerial attack on Lebanon designed to destroy the arsenal of the radical Islamist group Hezbollah, the Party of God, and force its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, to return two kidnapped soldiers and end its cross-border rocket attacks. ‘If the soldiers are not returned,’ Dan Halutz, the Israeli Army’s chief of staff, said at the time, ‘we will turn Lebanon’s clock back twenty years.’ Israel bombed the runways of the Beirut airport, the Beirut-Damascus highway, and numerous towns, mainly in the south; Hezbollah, from a network of guerrilla installations and tunnel networks worthy of the Vietcong, launched some four thousand rockets, mainly Katyushas, at cities in northern Israel. Israel degraded Hezbollah’s military capabilities, at least temporarily, but there was no victory. Hezbollah survived and, in the eyes of the Islamic world, in doing so won; Nasrallah emerged as an iconic hero; and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, one of his sponsors, called yet again for the elimination of Israel from the map of the Middle East. Halutz, who had dumped […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
