The words of a Canadian United Nations observer written just days before he was killed in an Israeli bombing of a UN post in Lebanon are evidence Hezbollah was using the post as a ‘shield’ to fire rockets into Israel, says a former UN commander in Bosnia. Those words, written in an e-mail dated just nine days ago, offer a possible explanation as to why the post — which according to UN officials was clearly marked and known to Israeli forces — was hit by Israel on Tuesday night, said retired Maj.-Gen. Lewis MacKenzie yesterday. The strike hit the UN observation post in the southern Lebanese village of El Khiam, killing Canadian Maj. Paeta Hess-von Kruedener and three others serving as unarmed UN military observers in the area. Just last week, Maj. Hess-von Kruedener wrote an e-mail about his experiences after nine months in the area, words Maj.-Gen. MacKenzie said are an obvious allusion to Hezbollah tactics. ‘What I can tell you is this,’ he wrote in an e-mail to CTV dated July 18. ‘We have on a daily basis had numerous occasions where our position has come under direct or indirect fire from both (Israeli) […]
Richard Sandor, chairman and C.E.O. of the Chicago Climate Exchange, seems to be fond of green. His business card and company stationery are trimmed in green; he wears green neckties. When he is photographed by the news media, there’s lots of green in the frame: green file folders, green paper, anything. For Sandor, it may be a way of signaling that the Chicago Climate Exchange – a commodities market for an unusual kind of commodity, greenhouse gas allowances – is more than just another business venture. It is, as he describes it, the engine of an environmental revolution. But of course, green is also the color of money. And Sandor, who has been called ‘the father of financial futures’ for his role in creating interest-rate futures in the 1970’s and who made a fortune during the boom years of the 80’s at Drexel Burnham Lambert, the firm of the junk-bond king Michael Milken, is also familiar with that particular shade. However high-minded in principle, the Chicago Climate Exchange is also about making a buck off the planet’s looming climate catastrophe. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. In fact, the trading of greenhouse gas allowances, also known as […]
A Nobel Prize-winning scientist has drawn up an emergency plan to save the world from global warming, by altering the chemical makeup of Earth’s upper atmosphere. Professor Paul Crutzen, who won a Nobel Prize in 1995 for his work on the hole in the ozone layer, believes that political attempts to limit man-made greenhouse gases are so pitiful that a radical contingency plan is needed. In a polemical scientific essay to be published in the August issue of the journal Climate Change, he says that an ‘escape route’ is needed if global warming begins to run out of control. Professor Crutzen has proposed a method of artificially cooling the global climate by releasing particles of sulphur in the upper atmosphere, which would reflect sunlight and heat back into space. The controversial proposal is being taken seriously by scientists because Professor Crutzen has a proven track record in atmospheric research. A fleet of high-altitude balloons could be used to scatter the sulphur high overhead, or it could even be fired into the atmosphere using heavy artillery shells, said Professor Crutzen, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany. The effect of scattering sulphate particles […]
DUBLIN, Ireland — Irish archaeologists Tuesday heralded the discovery of an ancient book of psalms by a construction worker who spotted something while driving the shovel of his backhoe into a bog. The approximately 20-page book has been dated to the years 800-1000. Trinity College manuscripts expert Bernard Meehan said it was the first discovery of an Irish early medieval document in two centuries. ‘This is really a miracle find,” said Pat Wallace, director of the National Museum of Ireland, which has the book stored in refrigeration and facing years of painstaking analysis before being put on public display. ‘There’s two sets of odds that make this discovery really way out. First of all, it’s unlikely that something this fragile could survive buried in a bog at all, and then for it to be unearthed and spotted before it was destroyed is incalculably more amazing.” He said an engineer was digging up bogland last week to create commercial potting soil somewhere in Ireland’s midlands when, ‘just beyond the bucket of his bulldozer, he spotted something.” Wallace would not specify where the book was found because a team of archaeologists is still exploring the site. ‘The […]
In Fresno, the morgue is full of victims from a California heat wave. A combination of heat and power outages killed a dozen people in Missouri. And in parts of Europe, temperatures are hotter than in 2003 when a heat wave killed 35,000 people. Get used to it. –For the next week, much of the nation should expect more ”extreme heat,” the National Weather Service predicts. –In the month of August, most of the United States will see ”above normal temperatures,” forecasters say. –For the long-term future, the world will see more and worse killer heat waves because of global warming, scientists say. The July burst of killer heat waves around the world can’t be specifically blamed on global warming. And they aren’t the worst ever — they still can’t quite hold a melting candle to the scorching heat of America’s 1930s Dust Bowl. But the trend is pointed in that direction, experts say. Heat waves and global warming ”are very strongly” connected, said Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis branch chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. The immediate cause of the California heat wave — and other heat waves — […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
