~~ Ronald Reagan ~~
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Million Year Old Human Tooth Discovered
Spanish researchers on Friday said they had unearthed a human tooth more than one million years old, which they estimated to be the oldest human fossil remain ever discovered in western Europe.
Jose Maria Bermudez de Castro, co-director of research at the Atapuerca site said the molar, discovered on Wednesday in the Atapuerca Sierra in the northern province of Burgos, could be as much as 1.2 million years old.
“The tooth represents the oldest human fossil remain of western Europe. Now we finally have the anatomical evidence of the hominids that fabricated tools more than one million years ago,” the Atapuerca Foundation said in a statement.
“Since it is an isolated fossil remain, it is not possible at this point to confirm which Homo species this tooth belongs to,” the foundation added, but said first analyses “allow us to suppose it is an ancestor of Homo antecessor (pioneer).”
In 1994 at the nearby Gran Dolina site several Homo antecessor fossils were uncovered, suggesting human occupation of Europe around 800,000 years ago, whereas scientists had previously believed the continent had only been inhabited for around half a million years.
Subsequent findings in various sites across Spain lent further credence to the earlier date.
The Sierra Atapuerca contains several caves such as the Gran Dolina site, where fossils and stone tools of Europe’s earliest known hominids have been found.
Glasgow Airport Attack - British Terror Alert Raised to Critical - Updated
In what is already being called a terrorist attack, a blazing Jeep Cherokee was driven at high speed into the front plate glass doors of the Glasgow Airport.
A blazing car crashed into Glasgow Airport today in what is thought to be a failed terrorist bomb attack.
Eyewitnesses said two Asian men were in a Jeep Cherokee which was driven at speed with flames coming out from underneath at 3.15pm this afternoon.
After the crash, one of men, whose clothes were on fire, jumped out of the car and ran into the terminal building where he was tackled by a heroic holidaymaker.
Taxi driver Ian Crosby, who witnessed the carnage, said he was in no doubt that it was a terrorist attack.
“It looks to me like these people were intent on doing some serious damage,” he told the BBC.
He saw a small explosion which looked like it was coming from the back of the vehicle.
“There was smoke coming from inside of the back seats,” he said. “Immediately I realised this was a terrorist attack.”
“Somebody had planned this. This was no accident.”
Developing ...
NOTE: There are reports that the Mercedes used in the foiled London car bombs were stolen in Scotland.
Fox News via Sky News in Britain is reporting that the hospital where one of the burned suspects was taken for treatment is being evacuated. No reason why or details.
n Glasgow, the green SUV barreled toward the building at full speed shortly after 3 p.m., hitting security barriers before crashing into the glass doors and exploding, witnesses said. Two men jumped out of the burning vehicle, one of them engulfed in flames, they said.
“The car came speeding past at about 30 mph. It was approaching the building quickly,” said Scott Leeson, who was nearby at the time. “Then the driver swerved the car around so he could ram straight in to the door. He must have been trying to smash straight through.”
Two men were arrested, Strathclyde Police spokeswoman Lisa O’Neil said.
Passengers fled running and screaming from the busy terminal, Margaret Hughes told the British Broadcasting Corp. “There was black smoke gushing out where the car had obviously been driven into the airport,” she said.
Flames and black smoke rose from the vehicle outside the main entrance. Police said it was unclear if anyone was injured. Other passengers were stranded, with at least one airplane grounded on the runway, the BBC said.
...Leeson said bollards - security posts outside the entrance - stopped the driver from barreling into the bustling terminal at Glasgow’s airport.
“He’s trying to get through the main door frame but the bollards have stopped him from going through. If he’d got through, he’d have killed hundreds, obviously,” he said.
Leeson said only the nose of the vehicle made it inside the building. Richard Grey told the BBC that the vehicle was lodged into the center of the terminal’s main entrance.
“The jeep is completely on fire and it exploded not long after. It exploded at the entrance to the terminal,” witness Stephen Clarkson told the BBC. “It may have been an explosion of petrol in the tank because it was not a massive explosion.”
Two men - one of them engulfed in flames - were in the SUV, witnesses told BBC News executive Helen Boaden, who was at the airport at time. She described the men as South Asian.
Clarkson described him as a large South Asian man. “His whole body was on fire.... He was just talking gibberish,” he told the BBC.
“An Asian guy had been pulled out of the car by two police officers he was trying to fight off and they’d got him on the floor,” Grey told the BBC.
Boaden said police “wrestled him to the ground - the fire was burning through his clothes - and finally put him out with a fire extinguisher.”
Lesson said an airport officials did not think the incident was an accident.
“He said the men in the car got out and started throwing petrol about - that must be how it caught fire,” he said.
Another witness, Fiona Tracey, described a “bang” coming from the SUV. The vehicle was on fire and “every now and again there was a bang coming off it. ... There was definitely a bang,” she told Sky News television.
Grey said the car did not explode. “There were a few pops and bangs that seemed to be the tires and the petrol.”
UPDATE:
***ALERT*** British officials have raised their terror alert to CRITICAL, an indication they believe another attack is imminent. British officials discussing deploying troops to guard British airports.
Michael Chertoff, head of the Dept. of Homeland Security says U.S. will not raise U.S. terror level with no credible threats, but that airports will have increased security measures with increased curbside patrols and cannine patrols at U.S. airports as well as subways, buses, and trains.
WASHINGTON — Some U.S. airports will tighten security in response to possible terrorist incidents in Britain, the White House said Saturday.
The United States, however, is not raising its terror alert status, President Bush’s spokesman said. “There is no indication of any specific or credible threat to the United States—no change in the overall security level,” Tony Snow told reporters in Maine.
The Transportation Security Administration has taken steps to raise alertness at some airports, Snow said. More TSA agents will be posted outside some terminals, he said.
“There will be some inconvenience of passengers in terms of longer wait times,” Snow said. Local police also may take separate measures, he added.
“The most you’re going to see right now is some inconvenience—some increased inconvenience of airline passengers, more likely at large airports than small,” Snow said.
Police stepped up curbside patrols with canine units at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates Newark Liberty in New Jersey and John F. Kennedy and LaGuardia airports in New York, took “a number of measures as we always do to respond to security situations immediately,” spokesman Steve Coleman said.
Sky News is now reporting that Blackpool Airport (in northwest England) has been closed…
Unconfirmed: the hospital was evacuated because the burned suspect was found to be wearing some kind of vest ... reports that the vest was blown up in a controlled explosion…
John Lennon Airport in Liverpool closed until further notice.
UPDATE #2:
Scottish Police Update News Conference:
William Rae, Strathclyde police spokesman:
Vehicle caught fire on impact.
2 men arrested on scene
1 man taken to hospital suffering from severe burns and is critical. 2nd man arrested taken to police station.
“Suspect device” found on the suspect at the hospital and removed to safety.
Vehicle in highly unstable condition and emergency personnel have to wait to reach it.
Do not know if anyone else was in the vehicle.
Confirms that the incident in Glasgow linked to London bombing attempts and is considered a terrorist attack.
No intelligence prior to incident that Scotland would be attacked.
Terror alert raised to critical.
Public asked to report any suspicious activity to police. Considered an ongoing event.
Anxious to speak to the 20 or 30 people who were standing outside the airport and were witnesses.
One member of public suffered leg injury.
Will not tolerate harassment of minority communities in Glasgow.
Asking again for any information and tips to be reported.
***************************************
Posted by Sara
on 06/30/2007 at 11:24 AM in Terrorism-War-Foreign Turmoil -
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Another Day in Iraq #4 - Newer enteries listed first
Posted by Sara
on 06/30/2007 at 09:33 AM in Terrorism-War-Foreign Turmoil - Iraq -
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Friday, June 29, 2007
“Massive” Car Bomb Discovered in London - Updated - 2nd Car Bomb Confirmed - 3 Suspects Identified
BREAKING ...
The news is reporting that the car, a 4-door pale silvery green Mercedes, was filled with approximately 200 60 liters of fuel (propane) in cannisters and nails and it is being described as “massive,” but crude. Suspected targets were theatre goers and nightclubs near Picadilly Circus. The bomb is being described as having the ability to create massive destruction, devastation and death. The terror alert in London has been at the “Severe” level since last year at the time the airline terrorist plot was uncovered, but preliminary reports are that there was no intelligence or warnings about this current threat.
Today is new Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s first day on the job. (Bummer!)
British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has called an emergency meeting.
Scotland Yard has launched a terrorist investigation.
LONDON — Explosive experts “made safe” a suspected bomb in a vehicle parked near Picadilly Circus in central London on Friday, authorities said.
Police did not offer any details about what they called a “potentially viable explosive device” or how they dealt with it.
Terrorist police were investigating after explosives officers were called about the suspected bomb shortly before 2 a.m. local time, police said in a statement.
“They discovered what appeared to be a potentially viable explosive device,” police said. “This was made safe.”
Sky News showed images of a blue tent-like cover that it said forensic officers had placed over the vehicle, which was parked outside an American Express foreign exchange office.
The station cited witnesses as saying bouncers from a nearby night club had reported that someone had crashed a blue Mercedes sedan into garbage bins and ran away.
The area around the vehicle was cordoned off as a precaution on Friday morning while police examined the vehicle. London transport officials said the Picadilly Circus underground train station was closed.
The alert comes a week before the second anniversary of the July 7 London bombings, when four British Muslim homicide bombers killed themselves and 52 bus and subway passengers.
For more than a year, the government has held the country’s terrorist threat level at severe — which means a terrorist attack is highly likely.
Developing ...
UPDATE:
Via Scotland Yard press conference (Peter Clarke):
Witness saw what they thought was smoke inside vehicle and contacted authorities.
Car in front of Tiger Tiger Night Club. (Ladies Night, estimated 1700 patrons inside.)
Explosives officers manually disable the detonating device.
No speculation on who is responsible.
Obvious that had device detonated there would have been “significant” damage and loss of life.
Members of public who might have seen anything yesterday evening that seemed suspicious asked to call the terrorism hotline.
Car has been taken for forensic examination and analysis.
Cylinders of gas were of varying sizes.
Some similarities to previous plots, but too early to speculate if there is a connection.
No intelligence “whatsoever” that this attack in this way was coming.
CCTV (closed caption TV) tapes are being examined to see if driver can be identified.
**********************************
There seems to be some discrepancy between what Scotland Yard has been told and early reports. According to Peter Clarke, an ambulance driver who was there to assist an ill club patron, noticed the parked car with something that looked like smoke inside. Earlier witness reports say that the car was driving erratically and crashed and the driver jumped out and ran away. The two stories are not necessarily counter to each other as it isn’t clear whether the ambulance driver who called authorities arrived after the car arrived at that location.
Fox News is quoting a British official who says the bomb device is very similar to those used in Iraq.
RELATED:
Lots more at:
The “patio gas” bomb defused in Haymarket would have generated a fireball the size of a house and a shock wave spreading out over a diameter of at least 400 yards, explosives experts said today.
The propane cylinders and petrol used in the device would have triggered a huge conflagration, as well as causing shrapnel and blast injuries from the exploding car chassis and the nails packed around the bomb, according to Hans Michels, Professor of Safety Engineering at Imperial College, London.
Just one 13kg propane canister — the type sold by Calor under the brand name “Patio Gas” — would release a highly flammable cloud of vapour that would spread over an area of 50 to 60 cubic metres before igniting into a still larger fireball, he said.
“The vapour cloud from one cylinder would fill the order of a big room, and when it ignited the effect would be even bigger,” Professor Michels said. “In addition to the power of the explosion and the shrapnel, you would get a fireball the size of a small house.”
As several propane or butane cylinders were recovered, the volume of the fireball would have been greater still, though it is impossible to calculate the size without knowing how much gas would have been involved.
...
Propane cylinders contain liquified propane, a volatile hydrocarbon, which would rapidly be transformed into a gas occupying 200 to 400 times the volume when released. This would mix with between 15 and 20 times that volume of air to produce an inflammable vapour cloud.
Brian Baker, director of the Association For Petroleum And Explosives Administration, said: “Propane is liquefied petroleum gas and patio heater gas is usually 97 per cent propane. Cylinders of this type of gas are readily available to the public and can be bought in places such as petrol stations and iron monger in particular.
“Propane is heavier than air when released, highly flammable and easy to ignite. When released in to the atmosphere and only a small amount is a required to cause an explosive condition and this is worse in a confined space when subject to an ignition source. Its explosive properties mean that 10 litres of the gas is equivalent to 2770 litres of flammable gas and air mix. There are controls on using this type of gas and this is why the industry gives lots of safety advice about use.”
UPDATE #2:
A second car loaded with a similar type of explosive device has been found after it was towed for illegal parking and the garage employees smelled gas.
Details here:
The second vehicle had been towed from Trafalgar Square to Park Lane overnight because it was illegally parked, CNN reported sources as saying. At the Park Lane garage, workers became suspicious after news of the first incident, because the car smelled of gas, CNN said.
Police said the second car was found to contain components similar to those in the first car—definitely fuel, and possibly more. They said the car was of grave concern, and could potentially be a second car bomb.
Brian Ross and Richard Esposito Report:
British police have a “crystal clear” picture of the man who drove the bomb-rigged silver Mercedes outside a London nightclub, and officials tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com he bears “a close resemblance” to a man arrested by police in connection with another bomb plot but released for lack of evidence.
Officials say the suspect had been taken into custody in connection with the case of al Qaeda operative Dhiren Barot (pictured above), who was convicted of orchestrating a vehicle bomb plot involving targets in London, New York, Newark, N.J. and Washington, D.C.
Officials say a surveillance camera caught the suspect “staggering from the Mercedes” shortly after parking it outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub.
U.S. and British law enforcement officials tell ABC News it is increasingly clear Friday’s bomb plot in London involves multliple vehicles, and is described by a senior official as a “terror plot involving lslamic extremists.”
The silver Mercedes sedan discovered early Friday morning outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in Piccadilly Circus appears to have been stolen in early June and was spotted in the last two days, first in Scotland and then in Birmingham, England, according to law enforcement officials.
The car contained five or six propane and butane gas cylinders as well as 33 gallons of gasoline, all rigged to detonate with calls to two cell phones. Officials say the cell phones failed to initiate the explosions, even after each phone had been called twice.
UPDATE #3:
“These vehicles are clearly linked,” said Peter Clarke, chief of Britain’s antiterrorism police. “The discovery of a second bomb is obviously troubling.”
Chilling new threat: Iraq-style devices
The car bombs were similar to highly destructive explosives used in Iraq and could have killed hundreds of people, U.S. and British officials told NBC News. British officials warned that the country was facing a “serious and sustained” terrorist threat.
A law enforcement official indicated that a catastrophe was only narrowly averted. Speaking on condition of anonymity, the official told NBC News that the bomber or bombers apparently tried to detonate at least one of the cars but failed.
The first car, which had been stolen in Scotland, was found about 2:30 a.m. parked under a blue awning near the popular Tiger Tiger nightclub, which was jammed with as many as 2,000 people on Ladies Night.
Authorities believe it was intended to be set off by remote control by a cell phone found inside. The cell phone had received at least two calls, which should have detonated several gallons of gasoline, but when the calls came in, the bomb failed to go off, the official said.
Had it done so, that blast then would have ignited six to eight tanks of propane in a mist to make a fuel-air explosion, creating a fireball the size of a small house and propelling 18 to 20 boxes of roofing nails around a large area at bullet speed, counterterrorism officials said.
Clarke told reporters that the second car was similarly laden with gasoline, propane and nails. It was parked illegally nearby, ticketed and towed about 3:30 a.m., he said.
U.S. officials told NBC that the devices resembled the highly explosive car bombs that had been seen in Iraq but not, until now, in the West.
Islamist terrorist suspects convicted in recent London cases have spoken of moving up to more deadly fuel-air explosives, authorities said. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair said earlier this year that “vehicle-borne weaponry is the greatest danger that we can face.”
Details from cell phone
Authorities told NBC News that police had learned a great deal from the cell phone, which recorded incoming and outgoing phone numbers. In addition, they were trawling through footage from the scores of high-resolution closed-circuit television cameras that record nearly everything that happens across the city.
Police did not name the three men they were seeking, but they said the men were believed to be from the Birmingham area, home to Britain’s second-largest Muslim population and a strong recruiting base for the controversial Muslim group Hizb ut-Tahrir, or the Party of Liberation.
They said one of the three men could be an associate of Dhiren Bharot, an Indian convert to Islam who was sentenced to life in prison last year for plotting to fill limousines with explosives similar to those found Friday and park them in garages beneath hotels and office complexes.
Bharot, whom police described as a high-level al-Qaida operative, also planned to attack five financial landmarks in the United States: the New York Stock Exchange and the Citigroup Tower in New York; the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, both in Washington; and the Prudential Building in Newark, N.J.
UPDATE #4:
Nightclubs across Britain were warned they could be terrorist targets just weeks before a double car bomb attack in London, The Times has learnt.
A 53-page document alerting businesses to the threat posed by VBIEDs — vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices — was issued by police before a warning over “one of the most effective weapons in the terrorist’s arsenal” became reality in the heart of the West End.
Early yesterday morning only the vigilance of ambulancemen and the courage of police officers stood between hundreds of nightclubbers and a potential loss of human life on a massive scale.
Posted by Sara
on 06/29/2007 at 02:02 AM in Terrorism-War-Foreign Turmoil -
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Nature’s Oddities
Have you ever seen a Zorse?
Yes it is real.
(H/T: Presurfer)
Another Day in Iraq #3 - Newer entries listed first
Posted by Sara
on 06/29/2007 at 01:03 AM in Terrorism-War-Foreign Turmoil - Iraq -
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Thursday, June 28, 2007
Cat Attack
I don’t know how much longer today I will be able to type or use my mouse due to a freak attack this afternoon that has left me bloody, swollen and in severe pain.
I took a break and went out to enjoy the afternoon sun by the backyard pool. I was lazily swinging back and forth in our garden swing with my right hand hanging loosely over the side. Unbeknownst to me, there was a stray cat under the swing. Apparently, he could not resist my swinging hand. He attacked viciously, sinking his two front incisors so deep into the fleshy part of my hand, just below the bottom of my thumb joint, that he couldn’t let go. He then tried to disengage by grabbing my arm and digging his claws in deep. I was taken so by surprise, I couldn’t react at first, but then the pain hit. My arm from elbow to wrist has 9 ugly bloody gouges and bruises. My hand is swollen to about 3 times its normal size and turning redder by the hour because of two very deep puncture wounds. There was blood everywhere. It looked like a mass murder took place in and around the swing. It hurts big time. At first the pain was sharp and stinging but now it is deep and throbbing. I’m keeping ice on it, I’ve put an antibiotic ointment on, and I’m sitting here waiting for my daughter-in-law to get home from work so I can see a doctor, because, of course, you never have your car when you need it. Hers is in the shop and she is using mine today.
This is not the first time this cat has caused trouble. We caught it last week in our house, eating food left out for the two kitties who live here and one of them was not at all happy to find an interloper. Fur flew and so did pots and pans as they went after each other across and over the kitchen counters, the stove, and into the family room across furniture and tables. Normally, I’m a sucker for stray animals and this one must have been desperate for food to brave a doggie door with two adult cats and two adult dogs on the other side, but now that it has attacked me, somehow whatever compassion I had is gone.
UPDATE:
Talk about timing, this new article from the NYT Science section today:
Legalities
Jason Javitz at Wizbang sums up this Supreme Court term in a way that is helpful to those of us who are necessarily affected by any Supreme Court ruling, but often don’t have a clue. I suppose whether you agree or disagree with any single decision depends on your view of whose ox got gored. For instance, those who think that racial preferences are necessary will disagree with today’s decision that basically says the best way to end discrimination based on race is to end discrimination based on race.
Now that the Supreme Court’s 06-07 term is over I figured I’d give a bullet-point summary of all the major decisions:
Racial preferences in public education - Rejected.
Use of race in public school admissions - Severely limited.
McCain-Feingold - Gutted; essentially rendered moot.
Strict construction of federal employment laws - Mandated.
Strict construction of federal labor regulations - Mandated.
Strict construction of federal criminal laws - Mandated.
Strict construction of federal securities laws - Mandated.
Strict construction of patent laws - Mandated.
Monopoly effect of patents - Limited.
Death penalty - Upheld several times over.
Procedural challenges for death row inmates claiming mental illness - Expanded.
Labor unions - Defeated several times over.
Abortion - Restricted.
Fourth Amendment protections - Expanded.
1st Amend. protections for high school students - Limited.
Police civil tort liability - Limited.
Class action lawsuits - Limited further still.
Federal antitrust laws - Limited two times.
Federal consumer credit laws - Limited.
Civil punitive damages - Limited further still.
Appellate review of federal criminal sentences - Limited.
Federal court subject matter jurisdiction - Limited two times.
Clean Air Act - Expanded.
Endangered Species Act - Limited.
Gov’t regulation of banks - Limited.
An Interesting Suggestion on How Bush Should Play a Pardon of Scooter Libby
More and more voices are speaking out for a pardon or commutation for Scooter Libby. As the public begins to understand what a travesty this case has been, I think we’ll see even more. Libby replies 1 or 2; original Libby appeal; amicus brief to Judge Walton and the prosecution arguments on Libby’s bail appeal. The Libby Reply 2 is brilliant.
By Quin Hillyer
How the President Should Play It
Conclusion:
Further Note: It will be remarked that the President of the United States cannot and should not make himself the judge of the facts of a criminal trial, substituting his determination for that of the jury that directly heard all the evidence. That observation is correct. But it is immaterial to this case. There is a subsidiary duty that adheres to the presidential oath. That duty is to protect the entire ideal of public service by protecting those who serve at the president’s discretion and direction, if—and only if—the public servant is put at legal risk specifically because of that direction; and if—and only if—the president believes that the public servant is entirely innocent of charges that themselves arise because of the position that he would not be in, in the first place, if the president or his immediate designee had not put him there.
No man should suffer for honest and innocent public service at the request and direction of the president. If there is inadvertent fault in the performance of such duty, the fault should be laid at the feet of the president he serves. I cannot let another man be punished for a crime I do not believe he committed, in the performance of responsibilities I myself put on his shoulders.
Beldar on Cheney’s “Legal Leg”
Read it all. There is much to understand and much you have been misinformed about from the mainstream media. And folks, remember, this is just another attempt by Congressional Democrats to gin up yet another pseudo-scandal. It is a sickness that has enveloped them to the detriment of our country. Anything that comes from the egomaniacs Leaky Leahy, Killer Kennedy, or Schumcky Schumer is suspect on its face.
My ultimate conclusion, then, is that while the language of the order itself may be ambiguous, this full context actually strongly supports Mr. Cheney’s arguments. I think he not only has “a leg to stand on, legally,” but that a court would probably agree that overall, he has the better of this argument.
But of course, as I started off saying, no court will ever be called upon to answer this question. The only judgment that matters is the President’s, and as of today, that’s still George W. Bush.
On The Corner, Ramesh Ponnuru asks: “Does he [Cheney] have a leg to stand on, legally? He sure doesn’t seem to.”
When you say “legally,” Mr. Ponnuru, it’s not clear what context you mean, and your question simply can’t be answered without knowing the context.
If your question is, “Could anyone go to court to compel Cheney’s cooperation with the Director of the Information Security Oversight Office in this dispute?” then the answer is a very definite “No.” What’s at issue is an executive order — literally an order from the Chief Executive to his subordinates in the executive branch — and its only compulsive force comes from the President’s ability, at his sole discretion, to punish or ultimately to fire those in the chain of executive command below him who disobey him. The POTUS is presumptively not only the author, but the only relevant ultimate interpreter of executive orders. Whatever the then-President says an executive order means — regardless of what it may or may not actually say, or what it was originally intended to mean — is what the executive order does effectively mean (using the word “effectively” quite literally). So does Mr. Cheney have a leg to stand on in that legal sense? Absolutely, as long as Dubya says so. (And he does.)
If you instead meant (as I suspect), “Is there prior court precedent, or are there statutes or regulations, or principles of legal reasoning and interpretation, that directly answer or even address this question?” then the answer is: “Not exactly, but: Such statutes and regulations and precedents and legal principles as there are actually tend to support Cheney’s position.”
I advise you against taking your legal advice from WaPo writers, Mr. Ponnuru. (Or from CBS News, which published an equally vapid and one-sided analysis that also pretty much, ummm, skipped the actual law stuff.)
You surely knew from the title of this post and its subject matter that this was going to get tedious, didn’t you? Hang tough, and I’ll try to take it one step at a time.
RELATED:
All they want is to continue to raise the spector of Nixon, wrongly of course, when they speak of Bush so they throw up new charges of silly idiotic wrongdoings weekly. Anything to get their showtrials in the news, which the MSM is more then willing to do for them.
Have you noticed that the media almost always side with congressional Democrats in their battles with the executive branch on constitutional matters? This is no different.
The president didn’t cause a constitutional confrontation. The requests by these committees — seeking information that clearly seeks to weaken the president’s power to not only to fire his own employees, but to protect the decision-making process surrounding those decisions — are politically motivated.
Here’s what the White House should do — “a slow bleed.” That’s right, the same strategy employed by the Democrats in the Iraq war should be used against these committees from a legal perspective. In short, the White House should litigate this to the bitter end. It should throw every legal obstacle it can muster in front of these partisan committees. It should appeal all setbacks and take it all the way to the Supreme Court. And hopefully, but the time the matter is resolved, it won’t matter. The administration will be over.
These subpoenas are nothing more than the latest attempt to undermine President Bush in his legitimate exercise of power, which would also weaken the constitutional structure of separation of powers. These committees have no evidence that the U.S. attorneys were fired for the purpose of obstructing any criminal investigations, despite months of hearings and testimony.
(As an aside, I am not saying the courts have a role in deciding this issue — which may be considered a political issue — only that the White House should avail itself of all legal tactics available to fight this congressional power grab.)
Yes, we have noticed.
Posted by Sara
on 06/28/2007 at 03:05 PM in Legal - Politics - Presidential -
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This Day in History - WWI
1914 - Archduke Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was assassinated in Sarajevo, Bosnia, an act credited with igniting World War I.
1919 - World War I officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.
Woodrow Wilson Georges Clemenceau David Lloyd George
The Treaty of Versailles was the peace settlement signed after World War One had ended in 1918 and in the shadow of the Russian Revolution and other events in Russia. The treaty was signed at the vast Versailles Palace near Paris - hence its title - between Germany and the Allies. The three most important politicians there were David Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson. The Versailles Palace was considered the most appropriate venue simply because of its size - many hundreds of people were involved in the process and the final signing ceremony in the Hall of Mirrors could accommodate hundreds of dignitaries. Many wanted Germany, now led by Friedrich Ebert, smashed - others, like Lloyd George, were privately more cautious.
BACKGROUND
World War One had left Europe devastated. Those countries that had fought in it, had suffered casualties never experienced before:
Britain : 750,000 soldiers killed; 1,500,000 wounded
France : 1,400,000 soldiers killed; 2,500,000 wounded
Belgium : 50,000 soldiers killed
Italy : 600,000 soldiers killed
Russia : 1,700,000 soldiers killed
America : 116,000 soldiers killedThose who had fought against the Allies suffered heavy casualties as well:
Germany : 2,000,000 soldiers killed
Austria-Hungary : 1,200,000 soldiers killed
Turkey : 325,000 soldiers killed
Bulgaria : 100,000 soldiers killedThe total deaths of all nations who fought in the war is thought to have been 8.5 million with 21 million being wounded.
Alongside these statistics, was the fact that vast areas of north-eastern Europe had been reduced to rubble. Flanders in Belgium had been all but destroyed with the ancient city of Ypres being devastated. The homes of 750,000 French people were destroyed and the infrastructure of this region had also been severely damaged. Roads, coal mines, telegraph poles had all been destroyed and such a loss greatly hindered the area’s ability to function normally.
The victors from World War One were in no mood to be charitable to the defeated nations and Germany in particular was held responsible for the war and its consequences.
During mid-1918, Europe was hit by Spanish flu and an estimated 25 million people died. This added to the feeling of bitterness that ran through Europe and this anger was primarily directed at Germany.
The treaty was signed on June 28th 1919 after months of argument and negotiation amongst the so-called “Big Three” as to what the treaty should contain.
Who were the “Big Three” and where did they clash over Germany and her treatment after the war ?
The “Big Three” were David Lloyd George of Britain, Clemenceau of France and Woodrow Wilson of America.
David Lloyd George of Great Britain had two views on how Germany should be treated.
His public image was simple. He was a politician and politicians needed the support of the public to succeed in elections. If he had come across as being soft on Germany, he would have been speedily voted out of office. The British public was after revenge and Lloyd George’s public image reflected this mood. “Hang the Kaiser” and “Make Germany Pay” were two very common calls in the era immediately after the end of the war and Lloyd George, looking for public support, echoed these views.
However, in private Lloyd George was also very concerned with the rise of communism in Russia and he feared that it might spread to western Europe. After the war had finished, Lloyd George believed that the spread of communism posed a far greater threat to the world than a defeated Germany. Privately, he felt that Germany should be treated in such a way that left her as a barrier to resist the expected spread of communism. He did not want the people of Germany to become so disillusioned with their government that they turned to communism. Lloyd George did not want Germany treated with lenience but he knew that Germany would be the only country in central Europe that could stop the spread of communism if it burst over the frontiers of Russia. Germany had to be punished but not to the extent that it left her destitute. However, it would have been political suicide to have gone public with these views.
Georges Clemenceau of France had one very simple belief - Germany should be brought to its knees so that she could never start a war again.
This reflected the views of the French public but it was also what Clemenceau himself believed in. He had seen the north-east corner of France destroyed and he determined that Germany should never be allowed to do this again. “The Tiger” did not have to adapt his policies to suit the French public - the French leader and the French public both thought alike.
Woodrow Wilson of America had been genuinely stunned by the savagery of the Great War. He could not understand how an advanced civilisation could have reduced itself so that it had created so much devastation.
In America, there was a growing desire for the government to adopt a policy of isolation and leave Europe to its own devices. In failing health, Wilson wanted America to concentrate on itself and, despite developing the idea of a League of Nations, he wanted an American input into Europe to be kept to a minimum. He believed that Germany should be punished but in a way that would lead to European reconciliation as opposed to revenge.
He had already written about what he believed the world should be like in his “Fourteen Points” The main points in this document were:
1) no more secret treaties
2) countries must seek to reduce their weapons and their armed forces
3) national self-determination should allow people of the same nationality to govern themselves and one nationality should not have the power to govern another
4) all countries should belong to the League of Nations.Linked to the “Big Three” was Italy led by Vittorio Orlando. He was frequently left on the sidelines when the important negotiations took place despite Italy fighting on the side of the Allies. Why was Italy treated in this manner?
At the start of the war in 1914, Italy should have fought with Germany and Austria as she had signed the Triple Alliance which dictated that if one of the three was attacked, the other two would go to that country’s aid. Italy did not join in on Germany’s side but waited until 1915 and joined the side of Britain and France. This association with Germany was enough to taint Italy in the eyes of the “Big Three”. Also Italy had not played an overwhelming part in the war. Her army had been beaten at the battles of Caporetto. Her strategic importance to central Europe was minimal whilst Britain dominated the Mediterranean with naval bases in Malta and Gibraltar. Italy’s potential military clout in 1919, should the need arise to put pressure on Germany and Austria, was limited.
Therefore, the three main nations in the lead up to the treaty were far from united on how Germany should be treated. The eventual treaty seemed to satisfy everyone on the sides of the Allies. For France, it appeared as if Germany had been smashed; for Britain, Lloyd George was satisfied that enough of Germany’s power had been left to act as a buffer to communist expansion from Russia ; Wilson was simply happy that the proceedings had finished so that he could return home.
Immigration Bill - Cloture Defeated 46 - 53
I told you the other day the sky wasn’t falling and that all the hair pulling and hand wringing and hysteria was nothing more than political show business. So the Immigration Bill is dead again in the Senate and it is doubtful any of the politicians will have the nerve to bring it up again before the elections in November of 2008. So what does this mean? It means we are still stuck with the status quo. It wasn’t the best bill and with all the knee jerk amendments added, it became a very bad bill. But I have one question, how does a Kennedy driven bill get to be a Bush failure? If you remember, President Bush was pushing a “comprehensive” approach to immigration with a 5-point plan that addressed all aspects of the problem. It was the 25ers on both sides that latched on to one point or another and played their games so that in the end we ended up with nothing. There was a window of opportunity for real legislation, but as usual, it degenerated into a partisan food fight with the Dems wanting a defeat for President Bush and the GOPers just wanting face time and to show the other side they don’t want anything good for Bush either. Everyone needs to chill out and take some time to reevaluate what the hell the real goal here is. Ponder. Hint: the goal is to stop terrorists from entering this country and blowing things up. Stopping the illegals and those who play the system and get here legally but for illegal and very bad reasons. All the rest is window dressing.
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 28, 2007; 3:00 PMThe most dramatic overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws in a generation was trounced this morning by a bipartisan filibuster, with the political right and left overwhelming a coalition of Republicans and Democrats who had been seeking compromise on one of the most difficult social and economic issues facing the country.
The 46-53 tally fell dramatically short of the 60 votes needed to overcome opponents’ dilatory tactics and parliamentary maneuvers that have dogged the bill for weeks.
The failure marked the second time in a month the bill was pulled from the Senate floor, and this time, Democratic leaders of the Senate indicated it would not be back.
The vote was a major defeat for President Bush, dealt largely by members of his own party. The president made a last-ditch round of phone calls this morning to senators in an attempt to rescue the bill, but with his poll numbers at record lows, his appeals proved fruitless. Bush has now lost what is likely to be the last, best chance at a major domestic accomplishment for his second term.
Bush later told reporters he was disappointed by “Congress’s failure to act” on immigration. He indicated that he and lawmakers would now turn their attention to other issues, notably the federal budget.
Both of Maryland’s Democratic senators voted to keep the bill alive, while Virginia’s Democrat, James Webb, and its Republican, John W. Warner, voted to kill it.
A flood of angry phone calls from the bill’s opponents shut down the Capitol switchboard ahead of the vote, overwhelming the message of a small klatch of immigrant-rights demonstrators urging passage outside the Capitol. Latino lawmakers from the House flooded onto the Senate floor to encourage the Senate to keep the legislation alive and let the House have a turn. But it was not even close.
Opponents of the bill painted the fight as a battle between the people of the United States against a government that has grown insensitive to an illegal immigrant invasion that threatens the fabric of the nation. Proponents said the Senate had succumbed to the angry voices of hate, venom and racism.
“This immigration debate has become a war between the American people and their government,” proclaimed Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who led a small group of Republican senators who used every parliamentary maneuver they could find to stymie progress on the bill over the past month. “It transcends anything about immigration. It has become a crisis of confidence.”
“We know what they’re against. We just don’t know what they’re for,” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), one of the bill’s main architects, thundered about his opponents. “Are we going to respond to the voices of fear? That is the issue.”
The bill would have coupled tough border enforcement measures and a crackdown on employers of illegal immigrants with a pathway to citizenship for 12 million illegal immigrants, a new guest worker system for foreigners seeking entry and dramatic changes to the system of legal migration.
But in crafting a delicate compromise, the bill’s 12 architects created a measure that was reviled by foes of illegal immigration, opposed by most labor unions and unloved by immigration advocates. Opposition came not only from talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage, but from the American Civil Liberties Union and the AFL-CIO.
Fact sheet In Focus: Immigration
1. MYTH: A comprehensive approach to immigration reform is not necessary.
* FACT: Mass deportation is not a workable solution. Deporting the millions of illegal immigrants who are already in the country would be impractical, harmful to our economy, and potentially devastating to families with deep roots in their communities.
* FACT: Keeping our Nation secure requires bringing the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants already here out of the shadows and into a regulated system. This will allow law enforcement officials to know who is in the country and allow immigration enforcement officers to focus their resources on finding and apprehending violent criminals and terrorists who want to stay hidden from the law.
* FACT: To help meet the needs of our growing economy, there must be a lawful and orderly channel for foreign workers to fill jobs that Americans are not doing. Current enforcement, while necessary to uphold the rule of law, is leaving farmers without workers to pick their crops.
* FACT: A temporary worker program will give immigrants trying to support their families a legal way to find employment, thus reducing pressure on the border. This will allow Border Patrol and immigration enforcement agents to focus on those entering the country illegally with the intent of doing our Nation harm.2. MYTH: The Administration is not enforcing current immigration law.
* FACT: In FY 2006, the Border Patrol caught and sent back nearly 1.2 million illegal immigrants. So far in FY 2007, more than 600,000 illegal immigrants have been removed.
* FACT: As a result of the Administration’s increased investment in border security and other deterrence factors, the number of people apprehended illegally crossing our Southern border is down by more than 25 percent.
o Since the President took office in 2001, the Administration has more than doubled funding for border security – from $4.6 billion in 2001 to $10.4 billion in 2007.
o The Administration has expanded the Border Patrol from approximately 9,000 agents in 2001 to more than 13,000 agents today. By the end of 2008, there will be a total of more than 18,000 agents, doubling the size of the Border Patrol under the President’s leadership.
o In addition to thousands of ground sensors, hundreds of cameras, more than 350 miles of improved patrol roads, and 78 miles of permanent vehicle barriers, there are 86 miles of primary fencing now in place at the Southern border, part of 370 miles planned by the end of 2008.
* FACT: Arrests for criminal violations brought in worksite enforcement actions have increased from 49 in FY 2000 to a record 716 in FY 2006 – a nearly 15-fold increase.
* FACT: During the first half of FY 2007, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) obtained criminal fines, restitution, and civil judgments in worksite enforcement investigations against egregious violators in excess of $29 million.
* FACT: ICE established the Fugitive Operations Program to eliminate the Nation’s backlog of immigration fugitives. Today, there are 61 fugitive operations teams nationwide, up from 15 in 2005. ICE expects to expand this number to 75 by the end of the year.
* FACT: The Administration has effectively ended the practice of “Catch and Release” at the Southern border. To help sustain this, the Administration has provided funding for 7,798 new beds to accommodate apprehended illegal immigrants – a 40 percent increase over 2001.3. MYTH: The preliminary background checks required for illegal immigrants to gain probationary legal status are insufficient.
* FACT: In order to obtain probationary status, undocumented workers must come out of the shadows, acknowledge they have broken the law, and pass a preliminary background check. There is a provision in the bill that says the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) should grant probationary status unless it has found a “disqualifying factor” by the end of the next business day, but applicants will undergo significant scrutiny in that time, as four components of the five-layered background check almost always generate answers within 24 hours. As a general rule:
o The DHS Interagency Border Inspection System check is effectively immediate.
o The DHS immigration records check is effectively immediate.
o The biometrics check against DHS’s Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT) is completed within 24 hours.
o The biometrics check against the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) is completed within 24 hours.
* FACT: In general, the only component of the background check that sometimes takes longer than 24 hours is the FBI Name Check. Of these, 68 percent are returned within 48 hours.
* FACT: Any portion of the background check that remains incomplete after 24 hours will continue during the probationary period. Probationary status must be revoked at any time if a worker is found ineligible for the Z visa, fails to maintain a clean record, or fails the background check required for obtaining a Z visa.
* FACT: No Z visas will be awarded until all appropriate background checks begun during the probationary period are completed to the satisfaction of the Homeland Security Secretary.
* FACT: Creating a mechanism to bring illegal workers with clean records out of the shadows will enhance our national security by letting enforcement officials know who is in the country and why they are here. This is far preferable to the status quo, under which millions of illegal workers live outside the recognition of the law.
4. MYTH: The Employee Eligibility Verification System (EEVS) required under the bill will create a vast government database containing extraordinary amounts of information.* FACT: EEVS is first and foremost a verification service that bounces queries against existing databases to confirm data.
* FACT: The data currently retained by EEVS includes only the worker’s name, date of birth, Social Security number, citizenship status/work authorization, and place of employment.
* FACT: The bill specifically requires the Homeland Security Department, in consultation with the Social Security Administration and other Federal and State agencies, to develop policies and procedures to ensure protection of this information. It further mandates that DHS’s Chief Privacy Officer conduct regular audits of these olicies.
RELATED:
Once again, the Senate has killed the unpopular bill which would, judging from the vitriol hurled around in the past month, have surrendered the United States to a hated foreign power, replaced all happiness and joy with dismal angst, banished the sun and the laughter of children from our lives, and subjected the nation to the maniacal designs of the denizens of hell. Of course, the actual bill did none of those things, but the hatred against it took on a dark identity of its own, and rational debate was one of its first victims. There was a palpable rage in many circles, many of whom took it upon themselves to declare that they spoke for America. This basilisk of political correctness prowls the halls in both parties, always hungry, never forgiving. Consequently, I am not optimistic that we will now move forward towards a functional decision.
The problem here, is that while the bill is once again entombed in that most formidable of mausoleums, the United States Senate, whose Majority Leader so reminds one of funerals and loss, the issues which initially gave energy to the conception of that well-meaning but poorly-built legislative spawn are still corroding the security and commonwealth of the nation. People of goodwill are now morally compelled to consider the next step, which will be difficult regardless of its author. One unfortunate hallmark of this bill’s presence, was the common use of character assassination. Many unfortunate statements made no attempt at all to address the issue, but instead attacked proponents and opponents personally, and even many influential individuals who have profited from their association with certain leaders, did not hesitate to lie about their statements, the context, or their motives. The public now regards the entire federal government, across the board, as dishonest and of no integrity, as well as both major parties. The cost of this season of spite is high, indeed. The worst may yet be still to come, as well. The nation is not well-served by narcissism on such a scale, but we were not consulted, either by the legislators, nor by those famous mandarins in the old and new media, and so we must hang on as best we can, and hope that God brings a miracle. He’s done that before, but at other times He has delivered us the leaders we asked for, a torment devoutly to be feared.
But to the issues. The whole mess is not one issue, as I have said over and over again, but a set of issues, and part of the problem is that the people working on the Hill have bollixed up even explaining what they are trying to do. And that thought gave me the starting point for trying to unravel this mess. You see, Americans have some ideas about what they want, and the Congress, strange as they have been acting, may be said in general to want the right things. The problem is that the bills they have put up for consideration are just not dealing with things effectively. I have remarked, when someone says to just do “X”, that he is presenting a goal, rather than a plan to accomplish that goal. And it occurs to me, that they are right, in that Congress is not being clear about its goals, and until they do that much, they are bound to get the plans wrong for making those goals happen.
UPDATE:
Today’s defeat of the comprehensive immigration bill in the Senate was, in my view, a victory for the American people. It was also a defeat for the Senate’s Democratic leadership, which tried to push the bill through without committee hearings and without a normal amendment process.
...
Given that 34 Democrats and 12 Republicans voted for cloture, while 16 Democrats and 37 Republicans voted against, the result was primarily a defeat for the Democratic Party. My guess, however, is that the press’s ability to spin it as a defeat for President Bush will cause them to go easier on the anti-comprehensive “reform” forces than would otherwise have been the case.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Dead Sea Scrolls - San Diego
I almost missed this announcement. My first introduction to one of my favorite subjects, Biblical Archeology, was a small book my Mother had on the bookshelf detailing the discovery and importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I was maybe twelve years old at the time and I remember being blown away by the subject and the ramifications of the find. The fact that I now, so many decades later, actually have a chance to see them in real life, rather than just as pictures on the Net or in books, is exciting. So, if you live in the Southern California area, take note and mark your calendar:
Dead Sea Scrolls on exhibit in San Diego
SAN DIEGO, June 26 (UPI) --The San Diego Natural History Museum expects thousands of visitors willing to pay up to $28 for a brief look at some of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The scrolls may not look like much—a museum director in 2003 described them as resembling “little pieces of burned paper”—but they have been a subject of fascination and controversy to Jews and Christians since a shepherd found the first ones in 1947 in cave near the Dead Sea.
The six-month San Diego exhibit, which opens Friday, includes 12 scroll fragments from Israel and three from Jordan, The Los Angeles Times reported. The Israeli government plans to switch in mid-exhibit to limit exposure to light.
Each piece is in its own exhibit case with a separate climate-control system. The light in each will turn off for 5 seconds out of every 20, again to limit light exposure.
“We’ve got to go down and see them,” the Rev. John Mann, assistant pastor at Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa, told the Times. “The significance is that these words that were preserved in these manuscripts are the inspired word of God.”
RELATED:
The Center aims to stimulate and foster research on the Scrolls, particularly the great task of integrating the new information gained from the Scrolls into the body of knowledge about Jewish history and religion in the Second Temple period. Such integration will affect areas like biblical studies, Jewish literature and thought of the Second Temple Period, earliest Christianity and the New Testament, the study of early rabbinic Judaism, and more.
THE CENTURY OF MANUSCRIPT DISCOVERIESThe 20th century may be characterized as the “Century of Manuscript Discoveries”. From the Cairo Geniza to the more recent discovery of the Bar Kochba Letters which date to the time of the Second Jewish Revolt, scholars have access to an extraordinary amount of written sources.
THE DISCOVERY OF THE SCROLLS and THE MODERN STATE OF ISRAELA century of monumental manuscript discoveries began in 1897 with the discovery of the Cairo Geniza, a repository of 10th through 19th century manuscripts written mainly in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, and Aramaic. Two Scottish sisters, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, first stumbled upon the Genizah and they referred their find to Solomon Schecter, Doctor of Talmudic and Rabbinic literature at the University of Cambridge. The most famous of these texts include the 10th century versions of Ben Sira and a sectarian text known as the Damascus Document, which was attested also at Qumran fifty years later. Nevertheless, despite the wealth of information which was brought to light by the Cairo Genizah, the most famous 20th century find is the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This library of over 800 papyrus and parchment texts was uncovered between 1947 and the late 1950s. The Scrolls’ rather romantic and dramatic discovery by two Bedouin shepherds first caught the public through a series of articles written by Edmund Wilson and published in the New Yorker magazine in 1947.
The importance of the Scrolls was first realized on November 29, 1947, by the late Professor E. L. Sukenik, Professor of Archaeology at the Hebrew University. Of interest is the fact that this date corresponds with the vote by the United Nations to partition Palestine. Seven years later, a number of the better preserved Scrolls were purchased for the State of Israel and initially kept at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During this time, the War of Independence of 1948 had caused a separation between Israel and Jordan and the Scrolls that were discovered subsequently were purchased by the Jordanian Government and placed in the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem. The vast majority of the material placed there was found to be extremely fragmentary.
After the Six Day War in 1967, Yigael Yadin--Sukenik’s son--purchased the Temple Scroll for the State of Israel. Other fragments are housed in the United States, at the University of Chicago. Today, the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem houses many of the larger Scrolls. The building itself is a representation of the jars in which the scrolls were found. Its architecture and design also visualize some of the important concepts found in the Scrolls and use white and black to conceptualize the war between the Sons of Light and Darkness.
WHAT ARE THE SCROLLS?Most scholars agree that the Dead Sea Scrolls are the remains of a library that belonged to an ancient Jewish sect, the Essenes. This community inhabited an arid plateau on the north-east corner of the Dead Sea. Scrolls were deposited in caves situated in the cliffs behind the community’s central building. The site was occupied by the Essenes from the late second century B.C.E. until the appearance of the Romans in the year 68 C.E. Most of the manuscripts were written in Hebrew; however, Aramaic and Greek are represented as well.
Most of the Scrolls are in extremely poor condition. The first international team of scholars, assembled in cooperation with the Jordanian government, spent years in the painstaking task of reconstructing texts based upon the analysis of the scripts (paleography) and the identification of literary genres. The international team began the publication of a number of Scrolls volumes. In 1967, the Rockefeller Museum came under Israeli rule. However, during the 1960s and 70s, much had remained unpublished. As the original members of the international team neared retirement age, the practice of passing manuscripts on to students and colleagues for publication began. In 1991, as the result of various developments, the international team was reconstituted with about 40 members, with Professor Emanuel Tov of the Hebrew University as its Editor-in Chief. Nevertheless, the influence of the original publication team continued to affect future scholars, since their unpublished comments and analyses on the Scrolls fragments were considered by those future scholars who would later take over the process of publication. During the early part of this decade, all photographs of the Scrolls, both published and unpublished, were made available to scholars and the general public. This development resulted in a growing stream of Scrolls publications.
The year 2001 saw the completion of the publication of the remaining Scrolls manuscripts. This spate of new publications (known as DJD volumes, short for the series published by Oxford, “Discoveries in the Judaean Desert") has renewed interest in the Scrolls among scholars and the general public. Conferences, volumes of studies and exhibitions are taking place at a great rate. One of the best examples is the major exhibit staged at the Library of Congress now accessible online. That exhibition has been in New York, and is now in San Francisco. Major conferences have been held recently in Jerusalem, Madrid, Groningen, Haifa, New York and elsewhere. Clearly, the publication of the new material is making a major impact on the scholarly world.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SCROLLS
The Dead Sea Scrolls were produced by Jews in Judea during a momentous time. They contribute to our understanding of this time period, and represent broad aspects of both ancient Judaism and early Christianity. From these texts, it is possible to trace the development of the Hebrew language, to learn about the different manuscript traditions, including knowledge of scribal practices in use by the community.This data can enable a fairly accurate historical reconstruction of this formative time period. This period was significant in the history of what later developed into Rabbinic Judaism and the Scrolls are concurrent with the origins of Christianity. With respect to the study of Second Temple Judaism, the Dead Sea Scrolls are the single most important discovery of our time.
TODAY AND THE FUTURE
Today the study of Second Temple Judaism and especially, the Dead Sea Scrolls, is rapidly growing at the Hebrew University. Programs of study exist at the undergraduate and graduate levels, in English and in Hebrew. The establishment of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature is another manifestation of the extent of interest in the Scrolls at the Hebrew University. With our unique focus on research resources and outreach to the public, the future looks very exciting indeed!
During the middle years of the twentieth century two important but very different collections of ancient religious texts were unearthed in Palestine and Egypt: he Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library. Visitors to the Gnostic Society Library often do not understand the distinction between these two discoveries. Since our Library collection contains a vast amount of material related specifically to the Nag Hammadi texts (including complete translations), a brief description of the two discoveries might be useful.
What are popularly called The Dead Sea Scrolls
consist of a very large number of scrolls – most poorly preserved and many surviving only as tiny scraps – discovered in a series of eleven caves near Qumran and the Dead Sea beginning around 1947. Over 800 separate texts of several divergent types are now recognized among this find. The scrolls date from the “intertestamental period” – a period ranging from about 250 BCE to 100 CE, the epoch after textual formation of the “Old Testament” but still before the formation of Christianity and rabbinical Judaism.
In contrast, The Nag Hammadi Library was discovered in upper Egypt in 1945 and is comprised of 13 ancient leather- bound books (or codices) containing in total 55 texts.
The codices were all hidden together, probably around 390 CE, within a large, sealed jar. After 1,500 years buried in the Egyptian desert, they were unearthed in remarkably good condition. The texts in the Nag Hammadi Library date from the first two or three centuries of the Christian era and primarily represent previously lost or unknown Christian sacred writings – writings often described as “Gnostic” in character. Notably included among the texts was an edition of the Gospel of Thomas, a text perhaps older than the four known canonical gospels. While the Dead Sea Scrolls received wide publicity in the first decades after their discovery, the Nag Hammadi Library has only more recently attracted public notice. (For further information about the Nag Hammadi texts, see the Nag Hammadi Library section in the Gnostic Society Library.)
There is now an abundance of information available both in print and on the internet about the Dead Sea Scrolls. This site offers a brief introduction and guide to these resources. We start, below, with a short essay on the Dead Sea Scrolls discovery and associated controversies, intended to help orient readers new to the subject. This is augmented by a descriptive catalog of the best currently available Dead Sea Scrolls Internet Resources. Comprehensive collections of the Dead Sea Scrolls texts in translation are only available in print editions (listed in the bookstore), but a large introductory sample of selected texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls is available here online (several new selection have recently been placed in this collection, available here since 1994). The Gnostic Society Library Bookstore also has a special Dead Sea Scrolls Section with reviews and suggestions on different print editions of the Dead Sea Scrolls in translation, as well as a collection of other important books on the subject.
Another Day in Iraq #2 - New updates listed first
More from the Multi-National Forces in Iraq:
Posted by Sara
on 06/27/2007 at 02:51 PM in Terrorism-War-Foreign Turmoil - Iraq -
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Laugh of the Day
What is it? See: HERE for the surprising and funny answer.
Court Rules Kurds Can Hang “Chemical Ali”
The citizens of Halabja, Kurdistan want Chemical Ali brought to town for his hanging. The Iraqi court agreed in a ruling today. ADN Kronos reported:
A judge in northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region has said there are no legal reasons preventing a cousin and former close aide of Saddam Hussein from being executed in Kurdistan. Judge Razkar Muhammad Amin was referring to the former Iraqi defence minister and military commander, Ali Hasan al-Majid, also known as “Chemical Ali”, who has been sentenced to death for his role in the killings of ethnic Kurd villagers in Iraq during the 1980s.
“There isn’t a single juridical text that prevents the carrying out of a death sentence anywhere within the borders of Iraq, including the Kurdish city of Halabja,” he told Adnkronos International (AKI).
Halabja was where thousands of Kurdish civilians were killed with poisonous gas and other chemical weapons, an event which gave al-Majid his nickname.
“Iraqi penal law does not specifiy the location of where an execution should take place because this is a government responsibility. A magistrates’ role ends with the sentencing,” Amin told AKI.
Halabja has launched a citizens’ campaign to have al-Majid hanged in the city, which they believe would be a symbolic gesture to highlight the suffering of Iraq’s ethnic Kurds under Saddam’s regime.
The gruesome story:
Chemical massacre of the Kurds by the Iraqi regime
Halabja-March 1988Prepared by Alex Atroushi
March 11, 1994
This page is dedicated to the people of Halabja who on March 16th, 1988 suffered the worst chemical attacks committed by the Iraqi regime. On that day, 5,000 innocent civilians, 75% women and children, immediately perished. This was not the only chemical attack ordered by Saddam, it was just the worst.
Posted by Sara
on 06/27/2007 at 01:45 PM in Terrorism-War-Foreign Turmoil - Iraq -
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Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Gals, He Can’t Help it, He’s Hardwired
From Discovery Magazine via Tigerhawk, who seems pretty happy to know that “indignities he may have visited upon his better half is not the result of not giving a damn.”
Researchers found that the amygdala, which also processes emotional memories, acts differently in men and women. In one study, volunteers were shown a series of graphically violent films while their brain activity was measured using a PET scan.
To process the most disturbing material, men fired up the amygdala’s right hemisphere, which is more in tune with the outside world and communicates with regions that control sight, such as the visual cortex, and motor coordination, like the striatum. Women, on the other hand, activated the left hemisphere, which concentrates more on the body’s inner environment and is connected to the insular cortex, where sensory information is translated into emotional experiences, and to the hypothalamus, the master regulator of such basic functions as metabolism.
“When men are presented with an emotionally provocative stimulus, part of the motor system is activated, which may be why men try to resolve the situation by acting on the environment,” says Witelson. “But in women, the hypothalamus is activated, which controls digestion, so it may not be surprising that when a woman is really upset, she feels weak and nauseated and can’t sleep.”
We also know that the brain’s right hemisphere distills the essence of a situation, the central idea, while the left side mulls the finer points and tracks the details. Consequently, this right-left amygdala division may also illuminate why women remember every excruciating detail of a blowup they had on their honeymoon—where they were, what they were wearing, the time of day—while their husbands barely recall the tiff.
Does knowing this make it any less frustrating when dealing with the male mind? Not in my world.
NASCAR Socks it to Gordon, Johnson and their Crew Chiefs
Jeff Gordon is my guy and Jimmy Johnson my second guy in NASCAR so this really really hurts. Each driver docked 100 points. Jeff stays in first for points, but Jimmy drops from third to fifth with the loss. Crew Chiefs fined $100,000 and suspended for 6 races. This will hurt. Drivers depend on their crew chiefs and Hendricks has the best.
- Gordon, Johnson docked 100 points for violations. Crew chiefs Letarte, Knaus suspended for six races
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla.—NASCAR has issued penalties and fines to the No. 24 and No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports teams that compete in the Nextel Cup Series, as a result of rule infractions found this past weekend at Infineon Raceway in Sonoma, Calif.
Both cars—the No. 24 driven by Jeff Gordon and the No. 48 driven by Jimmie Johnson—were found to be in violation of Sections 12-4-A (actions detrimental to stock car racing); 12-4-Q (car, car parts, components and/or equipment used do not conform to NASCAR rules); 20-2.1E (parts or components of the car not previously approved by NASCAR that have been installed or modified to enhance aerodynamic performance will not be permitted); and 20-2H (fenders may not be cut or altered except for wheel or tire clearance which must be approved by the Series Director) of the 2007 NASCAR rule book. The violations were found during the initial inspection process last Friday.
As a result, Gordon and Johnson have each been penalized 100 driver championship points. Their respective crew chiefs—Steve Letarte and Chad Knaus—have each been fined $100,000, suspended for the next six Nextel Cup Series events until Aug. 15 and placed on probation until Dec. 31, 2007.
In addition, Rick Hendrick, owner of the No. 24, has been penalized 100 car owner championship points as has Gordon, who is the owner of the No. 48.
“We are disappointed in NASCAR’s decision and feel the penalties are excessive,” Hendrick said. “Right now, all of our options are being evaluated, including our personnel situation and a possible appeal to the National Stock Car Racing Commission.
“We’ll take some time to decide on a direction and make an announcement regarding our plans for New Hampshire later in the week.”
Gordon’s lead in the driver standings was reduced to 171 points on second place Denny Hamlin. Johnson, who was third, dropped to fifth in points behind Matt Kenseth and Jeff Burton. He remains 366 points behind Gordon.
NASCAR parked the cars of Gordon and Johnson on Friday at Sonoma after each failed its Car of Tomorrow inspection prior to that day’s activities at Infineon Raceway. Neither car was allowed on the track for the opening practice session of that day’s qualifying.
This is Soooooooooooo Sick!
Really, this is so sick, I cannot even write about it.
Check it out.
And then there is this cartoon by Michael Ramirez titled “Fashions for the Ignorant Celebrity” (h/t Powerline) which needs to be distributed to all celebrities:
On This Day in History - Electronic World
1945 The FCC began development of commercial television by allocating airwaves for 13 TV stations.
1974 The bar code, allowing for the electronic scanning of prices, was used for the first time on a pack of gum at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio.
Sixty-two years ago, the world became smaller and the tables were set to bring news, entertainment, and education directly into our living rooms and bedrooms in pictures and commentary. Radio began the trend, but it was television that changed everything. Twenty-nine years later, the world joined the geek class with the introduction of electronics into our daily lives at the grocery stores and eventually in every aspect of our lives.
For all intents and purposes, these two events have done more to end class struggle than any other single event or invention. We all have access to the same information now. We all get breaking news instantly. There is no excuse anymore to not know what is going on. If you don’t know, it is your own damn fault and has nothing to do with your income, your education, the color of your skin, your ethnicity, your religion, or who your ancestors were or where they came from or how.
When “No” is the Right Answer
If you are like I used to be, you have a hard time saying “no” to almost anyone who asks you for a favor. I spent more than the first 50 years of my life trying hard to be a good friend, a good parent, a good spouse and gave up much of myself in order to help when asked. It wasn’t until my Mother died that I woke up to the hard fact that all those years of running myself ragged or worrying myself over how I could help were worth absolutely zero. When the tables were turned, the very same people I had felt so loyal to, felt so responsible for, acted insulted that I should have any expectation that they be there for me in my time of need. It was a shock from, in some respects, I have yet to recover. Someone said, “well you should have picked better friends.” Yes, maybe, but these were friends of as much as 30 years duration. And, we don’t get to pick our family. It has made me reevaluate friendship and even whether I need friends. It has made me much more hard line when it comes to family. They don’t like it and I’ve been criticized and ridiculed and made to feel like a very bad person. I don’t care anymore. I feel free. And surprisingly, after the first flush of resentments, I’ve begun to make new friends or establish new boundaries with older friends.
So, when is “no” the right answer?
How to Not Be a Pushover
By Emily Battaglia, LifeScript Staff WriterWhile driving home from work the other night, a friend called to ask if I’d pick up something for her. I don’t mind doing favors, but this little request would add 30 minutes to my commute plus jeopardize my chances of claiming a laundry machine and getting to my gym class on time. However, as annoyed as I was, I obliged. So why did I say yes when I really wanted to say no? Was I fulfilling my friend obligations or being a total pushover? Susan Newman, Ph.D., author of The Book of No (McGraw-Hill, 2006) helps explain the people-pleasing phenomenon and offers tips on how to say no without the guilt…
It’s easier to say yes than no– we’d rather play the good guy than risk being known as the bad friend, neighbor, co-worker, or lover. And it’s no surprise who tops the list of being the biggest pushovers.
“Women are more often than men taught to be nurturing and caring,” says Newman, a social psychologist and parenting expert. “Men have an easier time brushing others off.”
The difficulty in saying no can be the same regardless of scenario. It can be just as tough to say no to a telemarketer as it is to your boss or your kids. Much of our yes compulsion stems from our need for approval, to be liked and accepted. But that’s not to say being a “yes woman” never comes from a truly good place – often we do genuinely want to help. But more than that, “We don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings,” Newman says. And so it becomes a habit, part of our daily discourse.
We also want to avoid the wrath we think will ensue if we deny a favor or request, taking the path of least resistance. “People get so hung up on the consequences,” Newman points out. But guess what? “The fallout is never as great as we think it will be.”
Why ‘No’ Is a Must
Learning to say no is more important than you realize. Being a pushover puts the health of your relationships, even your physical health, in jeopardy. While you may think you’re earning brownie points by always conceding, you’ll eventually be disappointed in yourself, not to mention burned out and frazzled because your own needs are constantly put on hold.“You become a pawn and people take advantage of you,” Newman says. “You give control to everyone else.”
You may also become bitter at those who constantly demand so much of your time. “Resentment creates stress and anxiety, and that’s linked to depression,” Newman warns.
It’s impossible to be there at someone’s every beck and call. Eventually, when you start taking control you’ll realize that you have a life, too, Newman says.
The Basics
Saying no is a learned art, so let’s get down to business. Before responding to a request made of you, Newman suggests asking yourself the following questions to cut down on spontaneous or guilt-ridden yeses:- Do I have time?
- Will I feel pressure to get it done?
- Will I be upset with myself?
- Will I be resentful of the other person?
- Will I feel duped, had or swindled?
- What do I have to give up to do this?
- What can I gain? (What’s in it for me?)Once you get used to asking yourself these questions, you’ll start making better choices.
“Saying no with some thought gives you time to say yes to the people you really care about,” Newman says.
It is Terrorism, Stupid! - Updated
WHAT SHOULD REPUBLICANS DO as the GOP seems to be committing suicide? I dunno—saving the GOP isn’t my job, and if the Democrats weren’t worse on national security I wouldn’t mind much. (And the GOP advantage there seems to be shrinking anyway).
But you’ve got three basic choices: Exit, voice, and loyalty. That is, quit, bitch like hell, or hold your nose and vote.
Problem is, people have been exercising “voice” a lot and it’s clear that President Bush, Trent Lott, et al., don’t care and aren’t listening. So if you don’t want to hold your nose, you’ve got to exit, either to a third party, to a GOP candidate you like, or to another engagement on Election Day—go fishing, perhaps? I think the GOP’s vulnerability to a third party challenge has just gone way up.
I see our political landscape as breaking down with 25% on the far left, the Nutroots, those foul mouthed anti-war kiddies who don’t have a clue and somehow think they are reliving the 60s in some meaningful way. They provide little of use to the discussion of any topic.
25% on the far right, including the Malkinite immigration hypochondriacs (thanks AJ for the term) and the blinder bound evangelicals who seem to live in a world of their own (you know who I mean, the ignoramuses who say they’ll never vote for the smartest and best candidate of the GOP because he is a Mormon). They are better writers, not nearly so foul mouthed and yet just as threatening.
This 50% that makes up the extremes of left and right use the same tactics of threats, threats, and more threats. Neither side really cares about America or American security. They are far more engaged in outshouting, out threatening and out blogging each other. Bloviating self-congratulatory and preening wannabes who would sell out their mothers to rise to the top of the propaganda hierarchy.
Then there is the remaining 50%, some who lean right, some who lean left. They are far more pragmatic and rational. They are willing to compromise and they don’t like the games the other 50% play of “my way or the highway,” or “do it my way or I’ll take my ball and go home.”
The GOP is in trouble right now and if you listen to the far right 25%, you will believe the trouble arises because Congress and the White House are ignoring the “will of the people.” Of course, they mean the will of their 25% of the people.
The Donks are in trouble too. People are getting really sick and tired of their sell out to our terrorist enemies and even more tired of the daily doses of trumped up pseudo-scandals. They show no skill at actually governing and people are noticing.
I fall within the middle group. I see much about the Immigration Bill that is good, some I think needs much work and some things I see as just plain stupid when juxtaposed against the real world. I don’t think threats are the way to go. I want to see strict employer sanctions and a fool proof database system that gives both border patrol agents and employers the tools they need to check the status and criminal backgrounds of those suspected of being illegal. I think the fence is a good idea for some areas of the border and a stupid idea for long stretches that are in very rough terrain. But first and foremost, I want our immigration policy to have as its goal STOPPING terrorists from entering, then we can work on the problems we face with illegals coming for better economic opportunities. I don’t care about the amnesty/shamnesty debate. It is a red herring and totally destroys any intelligent discussion. It is a useful tool for the two extremes of left and right because it gives both sides an excuse to bash the President or anyone else who they think isn’t giving them their selfish, childish way.
So now the Senate has voted for cloture on the current Immigration Bill and already the GOP 25ers are out threatening all GOPers who voted for cloture. Dumb, dumb, dumb. It is like someone gave them a pirated copy of the Nutroots playbook and they think that by mimicking their plays, they can win the game. They forget that the Nutroots have lost 19 of the games they actually played hard in, think the recent Joe Lieberman fiasco as an example.
To listen to the 25ers, you would think they are Henny Penny running around shouting “the sky is falling, the sky is falling.” Get a grip folks. By a vote of 64-35, the Senate has invoked cloture (voted to end debate), 60 votes were needed. The cloture vote means that the legislation will be brought back to the Senate floor. There will be another cloture vote later in the week after a series of amendments have been voted on. If there are sixty votes for cloture at that stage, then the Senate could pass the legislation with a required simple majority. BUT ... then it goes to the House of Representatives and we start the process all over again. Then the two forms of the bill, Senate and House versions, go to conference where differences are supposed to be worked out. Then that bill, if it survives, goes on to be voted on. You see, the sky isn’t falling.
You could say that I am in the DJ Drummond camp, at least as far as this post:
Despite casualties and the long heavy weight of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the troops are still strong supporters of the President. The media and the Democrats, and sadly even some Republicans have tried to use the troops as pawns for their own gambits, but as a whole the military strongly supports and stands by the President. I am constantly amazed by the strength of their conviction that the war is a worthy cause, and that President Bush is doing the right and necesaary job.
Sure, you can find all kinds of big-ego people who don’t like Bush. Some think Bush-hate is their ticket to higher office, some think that the President of the United States must cater to their personal opinion like some kind of butler, and some think that they should hold Bush to expectations of perfection - rejecting everything done right in the past if he ever puts a foot wrong in his job. Some cannot stand for the man to have his own mind and make the tough decisions, and are willing to tear down all the man stands for because they cannot agree to disagree on one or two issues. The Left and Right have extremists united in malice and hysteria, and they forget why America needs President Bush. Such cowardice and hate is sadly all too common these day, but I will not pretend it is something to overlook or excuse.
Liars claim Bush “betrayed” them. People who never once ran for office, and who would not support reform when the GOP held the majority in Congress, have no standing to play at God now.
I stand with the President, come what may. To my mind, his enemies stand in self-deceit and dishonor, and what comes of that must surely be ill tidings.
And let’s be brutally honest here. Most of the 25ers don’t have a clue what the immigration bill is all about. Sure they have big megaphones and they are quite good at distilling talking points and using them to advantage, but when you try to engage them in details, their eyes glaze over, they toss off some ad hom attack akin to your Mom wears combat boots and move on to the next audience they can bedazzle and hornswaggle with their made up words and sky is falling rhetoric. The left doesn’t care about immigration, they care about destroying George W. Bush. The right cares somewhat, but the under current is exactly the same as the other 25ers, they held their noses and voted for President Bush because of the (R) but they’ve never liked or respected him and they lie in wait to attack, attack and attack from one flank, while protecting the opposite flank under attack from the other side’s 25ers, not because they believe in the President’s policies, but as a matter of their own personal aggrandizement. Is there any wonder with this type of schizophrenia we are in the political mess we are in today?
UPDATED:
Okay, I will agree with Tammy Bruce to a great extent. The idea that anyone can digest the latest on the Immigration Bill in a 48 hour turn-a-round period is ludicrous and nothing but a political trick. I don’t lay the blame where she does, however. This is all politics at this point, another “my way or the highway” move. It indicates in a stark way that it is all about political posturing and nothing about the security of our borders. This is what happens when the 25ers drive the system.
This situation is now strangely like what Reid wanted in the first 72 hours of the old Amnesty Bill. Remember, on a Monday the Amnesty Senators announced they had come to a consensus for an “immigration reform” bill. Reid then announced they would have it passed before Friday of that same week. This, when the bill had not been printed or passed out to the senators. It took another 48 hours before the senators and their staffs even had a chance to look at the thing, and then, according to Reid’s original plan, would have been expected to vote on it less than 48 hours later. A bill that was 600+ pages long.
Now we have an almost identical situation. Reid has released his “Flying Cow” as it will not be dubbed here at Tammy Blog, bigger than the New Testament, late on Tuesday night and expects it to be voted on (and passed) 48 hours later. We are to believe the Senators will 1) read these amendments, 2) understand their impact, and then 3) debate and vote on them, all within two days.
So much for open discussion amongst the people, and representing our will. Heck, they don’t even want us involved anymore at any level. The way this bill has been handled from the beginning reveals a very disturbing turn of events which is significantly dangerous. No more is this a discussion about differences of opinion or misunderstandings, or even politicians ‘meaning well’. The behavior in the White House and from congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle must be seen for what it is--a serious divergence from normal political and governmental procedure based in thwarting the will of the people.
Malkin, of course, has the 373 page document available.
If you are really serious about immigration reform, take the document, use your red pencil, and go through it amendment by amendment. Then, let your elected officials know what you like, what you have minor problems about, and what you think is ludicrous. Anything less, and your “will” as one of the people is so uninformed you should have no say at all.
Another Day in Iraq - New Feature - New updates listed first
Because Americans are led by the mainstream media to believe that Iraq is nothing more than one car bomb after another, all blowing up our hapless troops, I intend to fully support the latest effort by the Multi-National Forces to get the true word on Iraq out to the public.
In 2006, medical care improved in Iraq with the renovation of 15 hospitals. Each completed facility sees approximately 500 patients per day for a total of 11,000 patients nationwide.
Completed Gulf Region Division water treatment projects have provided the capacity to serve an additional 2.2 million Iraqis with potable water. At the end of the program, the added capacity could serve approximately 5.2 million Iraqis with potable water.
In Iraq, approximately 270 km of village roads have been completed. These projects are directly contracted with local firms and assist in the economic development of smaller communities. The Village Roads program is expected to be completed in July 2007 and will provide 424 km of improved roads.
Posted by Sara
on 06/26/2007 at 12:15 PM in Terrorism-War-Foreign Turmoil - Iraq -
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Monday, June 25, 2007
Science - DNA, Being Human, Evolution?
Fossils found in Ethiopia in the last 10 years include Ardipithecus kadabba bones from over five million years ago, left, teeth of the Australopithecus anamensis, which lived four million years ago; and the skull and lower limbs of a 3-year-old Australopithecus afarensis, thought to be 3.3 million years old. At right, teeth of the afarensis, anamensis and the modern chimpanzee.
Time was, fossils and a few stone artifacts were about the only means scientists had of tracing the lines of early human evolution. And gaps in such material evidence were frustratingly wide.
When molecular biologists joined the investigation some 30 years ago, their techniques of genetic analysis yielded striking insights. DNA studies pointed to a common maternal ancestor of all anatomically modern humans in Africa by at least 130,000 years. She inevitably became known as the African Eve.
Other genetic research plotted ancestral migration patterns and the extremely close DNA relationship between humans and chimpanzees, our nearest living relatives. Genetic clues also set the approximate time of the divergence of the human lineage from a common ancestor with apes: between six million and eight million years ago.
Fossil researchers were skeptical at first, a reaction colored perhaps by their dismay at finding scientific poachers on their turf. These paleoanthropologists contended that the biologists’ “molecular clocks” were unreliable, and in some cases they were, though apparently not to a significant degree.
Now paleoanthropologists say they accept the biologists as allies triangulating the search for human origins from different angles. As much as anything, a rapid succession of fossil discoveries since the early 1990s has restored the confidence of paleoanthropologists in the relevance of their approach to the study of early hominids, those fossil ancestors and related species in human evolution.
The new finds have filled in some of the yawning gaps in the fossil record. They have doubled the record’s time span from 3.5 million back almost to 7 million years ago and more than doubled the number of earliest known hominid species. The teeth and bone fragments suggest the form — the morphology — of these ancestors that lived presumably just this side of the human-ape split.
“The amount of discord between morphology and molecules is actually not that great anymore,” said Frederick E. Grine, a paleoanthropologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
With more abundant data, Dr. Grine said, scientists are, in a sense, fleshing out the genetic insights with increasingly earlier fossils. It takes the right bones to establish that a species walked upright, which is thought to be a defining trait of hominids after the split with the ape lineage.
“All biology can tell you is that my nearest relative is a chimpanzee and about when we had a common ancestor,” he said. “But biology can’t tell us what the common ancestor looked like, what shaped that evolutionary change or at what rate that change took place.”
Although hominid species were much more apelike in their earliest forms, Tim D. White of the University of California, Berkeley, said: “We’ve come to appreciate that you cannot simply extrapolate from the modern chimp to get a picture of the last common ancestor. Humans and chimps have been changing down through time.”
But Dr. White, one of the most experienced hominid hunters, credits the genetic data with giving paleoanthropologists a temporal framework for their research. Their eyes are always fixed on a time horizon for hominid origins, which now appears to be at least seven million years ago.
Ever since its discovery in 1973, the species Australopithecus afarensis, personified by the famous Lucy skeleton, has been the continental divide in the exploration of hominid evolution. Donald Johanson, the Lucy discoverer, and Dr. White determined that the apelike individual lived 3.2 million years ago, walked upright and was probably a direct human ancestor. Other afarensis specimens and some evocative footprints showed the species existed for almost a million years, down to three million years ago.
In the 1990s, scientists finally crossed the Lucy divide. In Kenya, Meave G. Leakey of the celebrated fossil-hunting family came up with Australopithecus anamensis, which lived about four million years ago and appeared to be an afarensis precursor. Another discovery by Dr. Leakey challenged the prevailing view that the family tree had a more or less single trunk rising from ape roots to a pinnacle occupied by Homo sapiens. Yet here was evidence that the new species Kenyanthropus platyops co-existed with Lucy’s afarensis kin.
The family tree now looks more like a bush with many branches. “Just because there’s only one human species around now doesn’t mean it was always that way,” Dr. Grine said.
Since its humble beginnings as a single cell, life has evolved into a spectacular array of shapes and sizes, from tiny fleas to towering Tyrannosaurus rex, from slow-soaring vultures to fast-swimming swordfish, and from modest ferns to alluring orchids. But just how such diversity of form could arise out of evolution’s mess of random genetic mutations — how a functional wing could sprout where none had grown before, or how flowers could blossom in what had been a flowerless world — has remained one of the most fascinating and intractable questions in evolutionary biology.
Now finally, after more than a century of puzzling, scientists are finding answers coming fast and furious and from a surprising quarter, the field known as evo-devo. Just coming into its own as a science, evo-devo is the combined study of evolution and development, the process by which a nubbin of a fertilized egg transforms into a full-fledged adult. And what these scientists are finding is that development, a process that has for more than half a century been largely ignored in the study of evolution, appears to have been one of the major forces shaping the history of life on earth.
For starters, evo-devo researchers are finding that the evolution of complex new forms, rather than requiring many new mutations or many new genes as had long been thought, can instead be accomplished by a much simpler process requiring no more than tweaks to already existing genes and developmental plans. Stranger still, researchers are finding that the genes that can be tweaked to create new shapes and body parts are surprisingly few. The same DNA sequences are turning out to be the spark inciting one evolutionary flowering after another. “Do these discoveries blow people’s minds? Yes,” said Dr. Sean B. Carroll, biologist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “The first response is ‘Huh?’ and the second response is ‘Far out.’ ”
“This is the illumination of the utterly dark,” Dr. Carroll added.
The development of an organism — how one end gets designated as the head or the tail, how feet are enticed to grow at the end of a leg rather than at the wrist — is controlled by a hierarchy of genes, with master genes at the top controlling a next tier of genes, controlling a next and so on. But the real interest for evolutionary biologists is that these hierarchies not only favor the evolution of certain forms but also disallow the growth of others, determining what can and cannot arise not only in the course of the growth of an embryo, but also over the history of life itself.
“It’s been said that classical evolutionary theory looks at survival of the fittest,” said Dr. Scott F. Gilbert, a developmental biologist at Swarthmore College. By looking at what sorts of organisms are most likely or impossible to develop, he explained, “evo-devo looks at the arrival of the fittest.”
Charles Darwin saw it first. He pointed out well over a century ago that developing forms of life would be central to the study of evolution. Little came of it initially, for a variety of reasons. Not least of these was the discovery that perturbing the process of development often resulted in a freak show starring horrors like bipedal goats and insects with legs growing out of their mouths, monstrosities that seemed to shed little light on the wonders of evolution.
But the advent of molecular biology reinvigorated the study of development in the 1980s, and evo-devo quickly got scientists’ attention when early breakthroughs revealed that the same master genes were laying out fundamental body plans and parts across the animal kingdom. For example, researchers discovered that genes in the Pax6 family could switch on the development of eyes in animals as different as flies and people. More recent work has begun looking beyond the body’s basic building blocks to reveal how changes in development have resulted in some of the world’s most celebrated of evolutionary events.
In one of the most exciting of the new studies, a team of scientists led by Dr. Cliff Tabin, a developmental biologist at Harvard Medical School, investigated a classic example of evolution by natural selection, the evolution of Darwin’s finches on the Galápagos Islands.
Like the other organisms that made it to the remote archipelago off the coast of Ecuador, Darwin’s finches have flourished in their isolation, evolving into many and varied species. But, while the finches bear his name and while Darwin was indeed inspired to thoughts of evolution by animals on these islands, the finches left him flummoxed. Darwin did not realize for quite some time that these birds were all finches or even that they were related to one another.
RELATED:
Posted by Sara
on 06/25/2007 at 06:56 PM in Science - Archeology - DNA/Genetics -
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Legalities
I was a bit under the weather yesterday, so I turned the computer off, crawled into bed, pulled the covers over my head and slept the day away. I’m not a 100% yet, but lots going on today and the need to see a new post too strong to ignore just because my head is pounding, food won’t stay in my stomach, and my muscles ache from top to bottom.
On the legal front:
- Dry Cleaners prevail in that ridiculous law suit for $54,000,000 against them. Dry cleaner wins missing pants case.
WASHINGTON - A judge ruled Monday in favor of a dry cleaner that was sued for $54 million over a missing pair of pants.
The owners of Custom Cleaners did not violate the city’s consumer protection law by failing to live up to Roy L. Pearson’s expectations of the “Satisfaction Guaranteed” sign once displayed in the store window, District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Judith Bartnoff ruled.
“A reasonable consumer would not interpret ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed’ to mean that a merchant is required to satisfy a customer’s unreasonable demands” or to agree to demands that the merchant would have reasonable grounds for disputing, the judge wrote.
Bartnoff ordered Pearson to pay the court costs of defendants Soo Chung, Jin Nam Chung and Ki Y. Chung.
Pearson, an administrative law judge, originally sought $67 million from the Chungs, claiming they lost a pair of trousers from a blue and maroon suit, then tried to give him a pair a pair of charcoal gray pants that he said were not his. He arrived at the amount by adding up years of alleged law violations and almost $2 million in common law fraud claims.
Bartnoff wrote, however, that Pearson failed to prove that the pants the dry cleaner tried to return were not the pants he had taken in for alterations.
WASHINGTON (AP)—The Supreme Court tightened limits on student speech Monday, ruling against a high school student and his 14-foot-long “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner.
Schools may prohibit student expression that can be interpreted as advocating drug use, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court in a 5-4 ruling.
IMPEACH CHENEY IF YOU WANT, but do bear in mind that he’ll preside over his own impeachment trial.
No, really. The Senate has the sole power to try impeachments. The Vice President is the President of the Senate. He presides. The Constitution provides for only one exception in cases of impeachment: “When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside.” That’s because of the obvious conflict-of-interest of having the VP preside when the President is tried. But there’s no similar provision for having someone else preside if the Vice President is impeached.
McCain/Feingold takes a hit.
Today’s opinion is a major victory for those who oppose campaign finance regulation, and will likely lead to a new proliferation of corporate and union funded campaign ads in the 2008 election season.
“The Supreme Court loosened restrictions Monday on corporate- and union-funded television ads that air close to elections, weakening a key provision of a landmark campaign finance law.
The court, split 5-4, upheld an appeals court ruling that an anti-abortion group should have been allowed to air ads during the final two months before the 2004 elections.
The case involved advertisements that Wisconsin Right to Life was prevented from broadcasting. The ads asked voters to contact the state’s two senators, Democrats Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl, and urge them not to filibuster President Bush’s judicial nominees.
Feingold, a co-author of the campaign finance law, was up for re-election in 2004.”
WASHINGTON --
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that ordinary taxpayers cannot challenge a White House initiative that helps religious charities get a share of federal money.The 5-4 decision blocks a lawsuit by a group of atheists and agnostics against eight Bush administration officials including the head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.
The taxpayers’ group, the Freedom From Religion Foundation Inc., objected to government conferences in which administration officials encourage religious charities to apply for federal grants.
Taxpayers in the case “set out a parade of horribles that they claim could occur” unless the court stopped the Bush administration initiative, wrote Justice Samuel Alito. “Of course, none of these things has happened.”
The justices’ decision revolved around a 1968 Supreme Court ruling that enabled taxpayers to challenge government programs that promote religion.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court sided with developers and the Bush administration Monday in a dispute with environmentalists over protecting endangered species.
The court ruled 5-4 for home builders and the Environmental Protection Agency in a case that involved the intersection of two environmental laws, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the conservative majority, said the endangered species law takes a back seat to the clean water law when it comes to the EPA handing authority to a state to issue water pollution permits. Developers often need such permits before they can begin building.
A federal appeals court had said that EPA did not do enough to ensure that endangered species would not be harmed if the state took over the permitting.
Environmental groups, backed by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal, said the administration position would in essence gut a key provision of the endangered species law. The act prohibits federal agency action that will jeopardize a species and calls for consultation between federal agencies.
The cases are National Association of Home Builders v. Defenders of Wildlife, 06-340, EPA v. Defenders of Wildlife, 06-549.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Tom Sizemore, best known for battle-hardened film roles in “Saving Private Ryan” and “Black Hawk Down,” was sentenced on Monday to 16 months in prison for violating his probation in a drug possession case.
But the 45-year-old performer must return to court on Tuesday for a hearing on whether he will receive credit for the time he has spent in residential drug treatment facilities.
The actor admitted in court last week to violating his probation on a previous felony drug conviction and tearfully pleaded with the Los Angeles Superior Court judge for leniency, begging her, “If you would please just give me one more chance for myself.”
Sizemore was on three years probation when he was arrested May 8 outside a California hotel on suspicion of methamphetamine possession.
The actor’s probation for a previous methamphetamine possession conviction was revoked in 2005 when he admitted to using a prosthetic penis in a bid to fake a urine test.
But he checked into a psychiatric hospital for treatment of chronic depression and drug dependency, which a doctor said he has battled for years, and a judge later reinstated his probation.
BAGHDAD — Saddam Hussein’s cousin, known as “Chemical Ali,” and two other regime officials were sentenced yesterday to hang for slaughtering up to 180,000 Kurdish men, women and children with chemical weapons, artillery barrages and mass executions two decades ago.
Two other defendants were sentenced to life in prison for their roles in the 1987-88 crackdown, known as “Operation Anfal.” A sixth defendant was acquitted for lack of evidence. Death sentences are automatically appealed.
The most notorious defendant was Saddam’s cousin, Ali Hasan al-Majid, who gained his nickname for ordering the use of mustard gas and nerve agents against the Kurds in response to their collaboration with the Iranians during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War.
Witnesses testified that Iraqi government forces indiscriminately attacked women and children, burned crops, killed livestock and rounded up civilians into detention camps in a campaign to exterminate the restive Kurdish minority.
The defendants insisted that they were defending the nation against Kurdish guerrillas who had sided with Iran during the bloody eight-year war.
Al-Majid, once among the most powerful and feared men in Iraq, trembled in silence as Judge Mohammed Oreibi al-Khalifa read the verdict against him and imposed five death sentences for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
“You had all the civil and military authority for northern Iraq,” Judge al-Khalifa said. “You gave the orders to the troops to kill Kurdish civilians and put them in severe conditions. You subjected them to wide and systematic attacks using chemical weapons and artillery. You led the killing of Iraqi villagers. You restricted them in their areas, burned their orchards, killed their animals. You committed genocide.”
“Thanks be to God,” Al-Majid said as he was led from the courtroom.
Oh, and let us not forget that Paris Hilton is getting out of jail sometime in the wee hours. Weeeeeeehooooo! **rolling eyes**
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Red Pepper, a Diet Aid?
Who knew? I love my food hot and spicy and I do not have much of a weight problem, so maybe ...
Here’s a little known secret for curbing your appetite: red pepper.
Red pepper, when eaten early in the day, decreases food intake later in the day. Try adding a little to your egg-white omelet in the morning. Here’s how it helps control hunger.
Capsaicin Catalyst
The capsaicin in red pepper may get the credit for decreasing appetite. The heat-giving ingredient appears to stop sensory information in the intestine from reaching the brain. It basically kills—or stuns—the message that you’re hungry. Capsaicin may also give your metabolism a boost.For a breakfast that will really fire you up, add cayenne, hot red peppers, or jalapeno peppers to a frittata. These hotties all contain capsaicin.
What other foods might help you eat less and still feel satisfied? Read this article.
And did you know that Capsaicin may help protect against cancer?
Reminder: “Muslims Against Jihad” - Tonight - Update - Postponed until Sunday
***ALERT*** Due to breaking news with the discovery of the body of pregnant Jessie Davis, Fox has postponed the airing of this show until Sunday.
Fox News has gotten hold of Muslims Against Jihad, and will air it tonight, hosted by E.D. Hill. Tune in at 9 PM Eastern.
Posted by Sara
on 06/23/2007 at 01:39 PM in Media - Terrorism-War-Foreign Turmoil -
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Crowned World’s Ugliest Dog
I’m speechless. Uhhhhg-leeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
PETALUMA, Calif. (AP) - Elwood, a 2-year-old Chinese Crested and Chihuahua mix, was crowned the world’s ugliest dog Friday, a distinction that delighted the New Jersey mutt’s owners.
Elwood, dark colored and hairless—save for a mohawk-like puff of white fur on his head—is often referred to as “Yoda,” or “ET,” for his resemblance to those famous science fiction characters.
Friday, June 22, 2007
Alheimer’s Vaccine Highly Effective in Early Tests
This would be an amazing breakthrough for a disease that devastates not only the victim of the disease but their family and loved ones. Anyone who has seen the end stage of Alzheimer’s in someone you love knows the heartbreak and hopelessness.
- A jab to halt Alzheimer’s could be available within a few years
Vaccine will save patients from worst symptoms of illness
A revolutionary drug that stops Alzheimer’s disease in its tracks could be available within a few years.
It could prevent people from reaching the devastating final stages of the illness, in which sufferers lose the ability to walk, talk and even swallow, and end up totally dependent on others.
The jab, which is now being tested on patients, could be in widespread use in as little as six years.
The most common cause of dementia, Alzheimer’s affects around 500,000 Britons, with about 500 new cases diagnosed every day as people live longer.
Treatment costs the NHS up to £14billion a year - more than it spends on strokes, heart disease and cancer combined.
Existing drugs can delay the progress of the symptoms, but their effect wears off relatively quickly, allowing the disease to take its devastating course. In contrast, the new vaccine may be able to hold the disease at bay indefinitely.
Professor Clive Ballard, of the Alzheimer’s Society, said: “A successful vaccine would be a groundbreaking treatment advance for the 25million people with Alzheimer’s disease worldwide.”
Vaccines are typically used to provide immunity to a disease as a preventive measure before it can develop, but this is an example of a therapeutic vaccine, used to treat a disease which has already developed.
Known as CAD106, it is the brainchild of scientists at Zurich-based biotechnology firm Cytos, which is also developing anti-smoking, obesity and flu vaccines.
Cytos chief executive Dr Wolfgang Renner said: “If it could prevent the progression of Alzheimer’s, it would be fantastic.”
Early tests showed the vaccine is highly effective at breaking up the sticky protein that clogs the brain in Alzheimer’s, destroying vital connections between brain cells.
When the jab was given to mice suffering from a disease similar to Alzheimer’s, 80 per cent of the patches of amyloid protein were broken up.
The vaccine is now being tried out on 60 elderly Swedish patients in the early and middle stages of Alzheimer’s. Half of the men and women are being given the vaccine while half are being given dummy jabs.
Although the year-long trial is designed to show that the treatment is safe, the researchers will also look at its effect on the patients’ symptoms.
Most Annoying Words on the Net
A funny article on the most annoying words on the internet (according to Britons at least) - things that make you feel like a goofball to talk about, like “wikis” or the “blogosphere.”
There is no way I’d put “blogosphere” into a conversation with a group of non-technical layperson friends - its easier and less silly sounding to just say “the web.” Apparently I’m not alone in this feeling.
I’d also like to nominate “webinar” for inclusion. Just call it a bloody conference or seminar, which happens to use the internet for remote attendees. A “net conference” would do well - much like we call it a “conference call,” not a “phoninar” (though I guess “teleconference” sounds ok).
What are some of those annoying words? Well, wiki and blogosphere as noted, but after reading the above article, I discovered Weblogisms (an annoying word all by itself). Weblogisms are described as: “Strange technology terms, real or invented, that make their way through the blogosphere, through TIME magazine, and eventually someone’s business model…”
So if you aren’t up to date as to what Blangina is (A clinical disorder of blog addiction. Symptoms include: obsessive monitoring of stats, nervous twitch when a post is in draft mode, itchy scalp when comments are left unanswered, paranoia that A-listers are out to destroy you, and an annoying tendency to repeat in verbal conversation things you wrote on your blog.) or how ‘bout Blogamageddon (The coming destruction of all blogs - when blogging is largely automatic, meaning it’s so easy anybody can do it, so most people give up due to the difficulty of maintaining an audience. Origin: Engtech. (Source)) then maybe you aren’t quite the geek you were hoping you weren’t.
