OSLO, Norway — Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Honorable members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Excellencies, Ladies and gentlemen. I have a purpose here today. It is a purpose I have tried to serve for many years. I have prayed that God would show me a way to accomplish it. Sometimes, without warning, the future knocks on our door with a precious and painful vision of what might be. One hundred and nineteen years ago, a wealthy inventor read his own obituary, mistakenly published years before his death. Wrongly believing the inventor had just died, a newspaper printed a harsh judgment of his life’s work, unfairly labeling him ‘The Merchant of Death’ because of his invention – dynamite. Shaken by this condemnation, the inventor made a fateful choice to serve the cause of peace. Seven years later, Alfred Nobel created this prize and the others that bear his name. Seven years ago tomorrow, I read my own political obituary in a judgment that seemed to me harsh and mistaken – if not premature. But that unwelcome verdict also brought a precious if painful gift: an opportunity to search for fresh new ways to serve my purpose. […]
Obesity and diabetes — risk factors so often linked to heart disease — can also affect the incidence and severity of cancer, a collection of four new studies suggests. The findings, presented Friday at the American Association for Cancer Research’s Sixth Annual International Conference on the Frontiers of Cancer Prevention Research in Philadelphia, link weight gain and diabetes to a number of malignancies, including breast, prostate and colorectal cancer. ‘All of these are consistent with what we would expect with the occurrence of each of these cancers or cancer survival,’ said Elizabeth Platz, associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. ‘Metabolic perturbations enhance certain cancers. Insulin and other hormonal factors influence cell growth and make cells multiply.’ Women with diabetes have a 50 percent increased risk of developing colorectal cancer, according to the first study, by researchers at the University of Minnesota. The group, led by Andrew Flood, assistant professor of epidemiology and public health, followed more than 45,000 women enrolled originally in a breast cancer detection program for more than eight years. The increased incidence of colorectal cancer remained significant after all possibly confounding factors were taken into account. […]
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown yesterday delivered a stirring festive message to Our Boys in Iraq: ‘Happy Christmas – war is over.’ The PM was cheered as he praised UK troops and revealed combat operations in Basra will end ‘within two weeks’. Iraqi forces will take over as the 4,500-strong British force switches from front-line duties to a training role. By early next year, our contingent in Southern Iraq will be cut to 2,500 – and may be withdrawn completely in March. The PM broke the good news in a flying visit to Iraq. He landed at the Army’ s base at Basra airport in darkness in an RAF Hercules transporter plane. Minutes later he spoke to Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki. He then gave a rousing speech to 300 squaddies after shaking hands with them all. To warm applause, he told them the region – the last under British control in Iraq – would be handed back to the Iraqis in a fortnight. He said: ‘The Prime Minister of Iraq has asked me to pass on his thanks to you for helping to rebuild the democracy of Iraq. ‘This is […]
WASHINGTON — State Department Inspector General Howard J. Krongard, who has been accused of improperly interfering with investigations into private security contractor Blackwater USA and with other probes, resigned Friday. In a brief public statement, the longtime corporate lawyer pointed to his recent battles with congressional Democrats and said they explained the reason for his departure. ‘I have nothing further to say at this time,’ wrote Krongard, whose job made him the department’s chief internal watchdog. In a separate resignation letter to President Bush, he said that he was troubled by ‘inherent structural and conceptual defects’ in the inspector general’s job. He also expressed concern about the ‘grave threat to public service posed by current rancor and distrust’ among political parties, the government, the media and interest groups. Krongard, 66, has been accused by current and former members of his staff and by congressional Democrats of thwarting investigations of waste and fraud in Iraq. Among those are allegations of arms smuggling by Blackwater, the North Carolina-based security contractor that protects U.S. diplomats in Iraq and has been accused of using excessive force against Iraqi civilians. Rep. Henry A. Waxman, (D-Beverly Hills), chairman of the […]
According to the centuries-old rules of the Roman Catholic Church, sin-reduction is a two-step process. Guilt is absolved through confession and prayer, but punishment - on earth or in purgatory - can be avoided through indulgences, an ancient form of church-granted amnesty that critics deride as a shortcut to salvation. The door for indulgences is not always open, though, and for years after the Vatican Council reforms of the 1960s, they were rarely offered - until 2000, when Pope John Paul II started using them to attract pilgrims to World Youth Day. Today, Pope Benedict XVI put out the latest offer of indulgences, with two highly-detailed options. The harder way to get one, at least if you don’t live in southwestern France, involves making a pilgrimage to Lourdes, where the faithful believe that the Virgin Mary appeared to a teenage girl 18 times over a five-month span in 1858. The pilgrimage, which must be made in the next year, can be accomplished using Vatican charter flights that began over the summer. The easier way involves a tighter window of time - just nine days in February - but what will probably be a much shorter trip, to […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
