About a year ago, a book came out in England that made a fascinating prediction: at some point in the future, the author wrote, six top officials in the Bush Administration would get a tap on the shoulder announcing that they were being arrested on international charges of torture. If the prediction seemed improbable, the background of the book’s author was even more so. Philippe Sands is neither a journalist nor an American but a law professor and a certified Queen’s Counsel (the kind of barrister who on occasion wears a powdered horsehair wig) who works at the same law practice as Cherie Blair. Sands’s book, ‘Torture Team, offers a scathing critique of officials in the Bush Administration, accusing them of complicity in acts of torture. When the book appeared, some scoffed. Douglas Feith, a former Pentagon official, dismissed Sands as ‘a British lawyer who ‘wrote an extremely dishonest book. Last week, Sands’s accusations suddenly did not seem so outlandish. A Spanish court took the first steps toward starting a criminal investigation of the same six former Bush Administration officials he had named, weighing charges that they had enabled and abetted torture by justifying the abuse of terrorism […]
Opponents of the Iowa Supreme Court ruling last week allowing same-sex marriages said Friday that they would step up pressure on state lawmakers to block the marriages through a constitutional amendment and predicted political fallout for Democratic state leaders, including Gov. Chet Culver, if they did not join the opposition. In Iowa, State Representative Christopher C. Rants, back to camera, talked to fellow Republicans about their effort to put through a constitutional amendment blocking same-sex marriage. ‘This isn’t over, not even for this year, said Bryan English, a spokesman for the Iowa Family Policy Center, which encouraged hundreds of opponents of same-sex marriages to meet and pray outside the State Capitol in Des Moines this week, and plans a similar rally next week. ‘Everyday folks who get up and go to work were shocked at what happened here, and it’s really gotten people activated. Since the court ruled unanimously on April 3 that an Iowa law banning the marriages was unconstitutional, opponents have been searching for a way to begin the process of amending the state’s Constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman. Because, under Iowa law, that process would take two […]
ISLAMABAD — The prognoses for Pakistan’s future grow grimmer by the day. It is, said President Asif Zardari this week, ‘fighting a battle for its own survival. In the latest violence 24 people were killed on April 5th in a suicide-bomb attack, calculated to foment sectarian hostility, on a Shia mosque in Chakwal in Punjab province. The day before, eight troops were killed in a similar attack in the capital, Islamabad, and a suicide-bomber drove a vehicle into a group of civilians in the tribal area of North Waziristan, killing at least eight. Responsibility for the attacks in Chakwal and Islamabad was claimed by the Fedayeen al-Islam, a group led by Hakimullah Mehsud, a powerful deputy to Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. The spate of attacks came a week after Baitullah Mehsud orchestrated a suicidal commando attack on a police training school in Lahore, in which eight police were killed and over 90 wounded. Terrorist attacks have killed more than 1,700 Pakistanis since July 2007. Malik Naveed, the inspector-general of police of the insurgency-hit North West Frontier Province (NWFP), said this month that Taliban groups had merged with al-Qaeda and were spreading rapidly across the […]
Glaciers across the Tibetan plateau are melting ‘at an accelerated rate,’ raising concerns for harvests and river-flows in China and India, according to environmental experts. ‘The majority of the glaciers across this region are in retreat,’ China expert Isabel Hilton said, speaking recently at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. ‘The continued research on these glaciers suggests that they will be gone by 2050,’ Hilton added. Tibet’s glaciers are the source of Asia’s major rivers’including the Yellow River, the Mekong, and the Ganges’said Hilton, founder and director of the London-based environmental group chinadialogue. ‘And millions of people depend on [these rivers] for agriculture, for drinking water, for living.’ ‘We’ve taken the glaciers and the world’s water supply for granted,’ Hilton said, adding that ‘some 15,000’ glaciers are involved. The entire Tibetan plateau is a ‘climate-change hot spot,’ Hilton said. Glaciers at middle levels of elevation are retreating faster than those at higher elevations, Hilton said. ‘It’s just bad luck that they form a substantial proportion of what’s there.’ Nomads affected Rising temperatures are already having an impact in Tibet, Katherine Morton, a China specialist at Australia National University, said, also speaking […]
More than 100 teams are vying for some of the $10 million being offered to winners of the Progressive Automotive X Prize competition next year. Progressive Insurance announced Monday that 111 teams had registered and qualified in the first round of judging for a contest that will require cars to get more than 100 miles per gallon of fuel. Twenty-five teams from the United States and 11 teams from other countries have proposed using 14 different sources of fuel and 136 cars. The teams, which formed around private automakers, startups, universities, and individual inventors, will be judged for their designs over the next several months. Those that make it through the screening process will begin to compete in a series of long-distance events in May 2010. ‘We are thrilled with the wide variety of teams and technologies from around the world that are joining us in this competition,’ Peter H. Diamandis, chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, said in a statement released Monday. ‘Being accepted as a Registered Team is a major milestone. This is also an exciting step for the foundation as we move closer to our goal of inspiring a new generation of […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
