On Aug. 1, Gen. Richard Cody, the United States Army’s vice chief of staff, flew to the sprawling base at Fort Knox, Ky., to talk with the officers enrolled in the Captains Career Course. These are the Army’s elite junior officers. Of the 127 captains taking the five-week course, 119 had served one or two tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, mainly as lieutenants. Nearly all would soon be going back as company commanders. A captain named Matt Wignall, who recently spent 16 months in Iraq with a Stryker brigade combat team, asked Cody, the Army’s second-highest-ranking general, what he thought of a recent article by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling titled ‘A Failure in Generalship.’ The article, a scathing indictment that circulated far and wide, including in Iraq, accused the Army’s generals of lacking ‘professional character,’ ‘creative intelligence’ and ‘moral courage.’ Yingling’s article - published in the May issue of Armed Forces Journal - noted that a key role of generals is to advise policy makers and the public on the means necessary to win wars. ‘If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means,’ he wrote, ‘he shares culpability for […]
The West Nile Virus season appears to have taken a turn for worse in North America with many US states reporting increasing number of human cases. Additionally Canadian health authorities in Saskatchewan are looking into the possible death of a person from West Nile virus infection. Saskatchewan Health revealed on its website that thus far it has detected seven confirmed cases of West Nile Neurological Syndrome, while one death has been attributed to it. West Nile encephalitis and West Nile meningitis are forms of severe disease that affect a person’s nervous system. Encephalitis refers to an inflammation of the brain; meningitis is an inflammation of the membrane around the brain and the spinal cord, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. According to the CDC, West Nile virus infection is established as a seasonal epidemic in North America that flares up in the summer and continues into the fall. West Nile virus (WNV) is a potentially serious illness and this year is predicted to be the worst season in the United States. California is the worst affected state with 147 people contacting the West Nile virus infection. Among them six cases have proved […]
Astronomers are scratching their heads over a puzzling non-discovery, an enormous hole in the universe measuring nearly a billion light-years across. There really is nothing to the void, which is empty of both normal matter such as stars, galaxies, and gas, and the mysterious, unseen ‘dark matter’ that astronomers detect by its gravitational pull. While earlier studies have shown holes in the large-scale fabric of the cosmos, this new discovery dwarfs them all. advertisement ‘Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size,’ said Lawrence Rudnick of the University of Minnesota. ‘This is 1,000 times the volume of what we sort of expected to see in terms of a typical void,’ he said. ‘It’s not clear that we have the right word yet … This is too much of a surprise.’ Rudnick, along with Shea Brown and Liliya Williams, also of the University of Minnesota, reported their findings in a paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. Astronomers have known for years that, on large scales, the universe has voids largely empty of matter. However, most of these voids […]
The government’s terrorist screening database flagged Americans and foreigners as suspected terrorists almost 20,000 times last year. But only a small fraction of those questioned were arrested or denied entry into the United States, raising concerns among critics about privacy and the list’s effectiveness. A range of state, local and federal agencies as well as U.S. embassies overseas rely on the database to pinpoint terrorism suspects, who can be identified at borders or even during routine traffic stops. The database consolidates a dozen government watch lists, as well as a growing amount of information from various sources, including airline passenger data. The government said it was planning to expand the data-sharing to private-sector groups with a ‘substantial bearing on homeland security,’ though officials would not be more specific. Few specifics are known about how the system operates, how many people are detained or turned back from borders, or the criteria used to identify suspects. The government will not discuss cases, nor will it confirm whether an individual’s name is on its list. Slightly more than half of the 20,000 encounters last year were logged by Customs and Border Protection officers, who turned back or handed over to […]
1. The economy is an abiding issue in the minds of Americans. Explicit top-of-mind concern about the economy waxes and wanes depending on the current economic indicators and the presence of other high visibility problems, but is always important when the public is asked about it specifically. Along with national security, keeping the economy on solid footing can be considered one of the basic requirements of elected representatives. 2. Americans tend to view the U.S. economy through the prism of jobs. Americans say maintaining the availability of good jobs is the No. 1 thing they would recommend to improve the economy. Statistical research shows that the public’s evaluation of the jobs situation has the strongest relationship to evaluation of the overall economy. 3. As of early 2007, less than half of Americans say now is a good time to be looking for a quality job. This is up from the low points of 2003, but lower than the boom years of the late 1990s. 4. American concern about the economy as a top-of-mind issue remained relatively low so far in 2007, perhaps in large part because the war in Iraq is such a dominant concern. 5. […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
