The intensity of the sun's million-mile-per-hour solar wind has dropped to its lowest levels since accurate records began half a century ago, scientists say.
Measurements of the cosmic blasts of radiation, ejected from the sun's upper atmosphere, were made with the Ulysses spacecraft, a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).

The solar wind "inflates a protective bubble, or heliosphere, around the solar system," which protects the inner planets against the radiation from other stars, said Dave McComas, Ulysses' solar wind principal investigator and senior executive director at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.

"With the solar wind at an all-time low, there is an excellent chance the heliosphere will diminish in size and strength," said Ed Smith, NASA's Ulysses project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

"If that occurs, more galactic cosmic rays will make it into the inner part of our solar system," added Smith.

Scientists say the weakening of solar wind appears to be due to changes in the sun's magnetic field, but the causes of these changes are unknown.

There over 800 prison camps in the United States, all fully operational and ready to receive prisoners. They are all staffed and even surrounded by full-time guards, but they are all empty. These camps are to be operated by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) should Martial Law need to be implemented in the United States and all it would take is a presidential signature on a proclamation and the attorney general's signature on a warrant to which a list of names is attached. Ask yourself if you really want to be on Ashcroft's list. The Rex 84 Program was established on the reasoning that if a "mass exodus" of illegal aliens crossed the Mexican/US border, they would be quickly rounded up and detained in detention centers by FEMA. Rex 84 allowed many military bases to be closed down and to be turned into prisons.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Ninety percent of Americans approve of the way President Bush is handling his job, the highest rating for a U.S. president ever recorded by the Gallup polling group, USA Today and CNN reported on Sunday.

The 90 percent job approval rating, measured in a poll of 1,005 adults Friday and Saturday, outranks the previous record -- a rating of 89 percent garnered by Bush's father, former President George Bush, at the end of the 1991 Gulf War.

It compares to an approval rating of 86 percent scored by the younger Bush in a survey conducted last week...

Gallup said the poll, which it conducted for CNN and USA Today, showed the highest presidential approval rating in the six decades it has been posing the question to Americans.

President Harry Truman scored an approval rating of 87 percent after the Germans surrendered in WWII. Gallup began measuring presidential approval in 1938 during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt.

Franklin D. Roosevelt scored an 84 percent approval rating in January 1942... Bush breaks record

Waxman: "It may well turn out to be the largest war profiteering in history." A BBC investigation estimates that around $23bn (£11.75bn) may have been lost, stolen or just not properly accounted for in Iraq. The BBC's Panorama programme has used US and Iraqi government sources to research how much some private contractors have profited from the conflict and rebuilding. A US gagging order is preventing discussion of the allegations. The order applies to 70 court cases against some of the top US companies. While Presdient George W Bush remains in the White House, it is unlikely the gagging orders will be lifted. To date, no major US contractor faces trial for fraud or mismanagement in Iraq.

"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency," the original draft of the proposed bill says.

And with those words, the Treasury secretary - whoever that may be in a few months - would be vested with perhaps the most incredible powers ever bestowed on one person over the economic and financial life of the United States. It is the financial equivalent of the Patriot Act, after 9/11.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr.'s $700 billion proposal to bail out Wall Street is both the biggest rescue and the most amazing power grab in the history of the American economy.

In many ways, it is classic Wall Street: a big, bold roll of the dice that one trade can save the day. But at the same time, the hypocrisy is thick. The lack of transparency and oversight that got our financial system in trouble in the first place seems written directly into the proposed bill, known as TARP, or the Troubled Asset Relief Program. House price crash goes global

THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is , where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.

What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.

All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.

New Cycle 24 Sunspot and SSN wavelet analysis

Maybe there is some hope for SC24 ramping up this year yet. This appears to be the largest SC24 spot to date. Previous SC24 spots have faded quickly, we’ll see how long this one lasts. In other news, Jan Jansens reports that SC23-24 continues to behave much more like cycles in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Bolivia: Indigenous government defies US-backed fascists

Relative calm has returned to Bolivia following a three-week offensive of violence and terrorism launched by the US-backed right-wing opposition denounced by Bolivian President Evo Morales as a “civil coup”.

This campaign of terror, centred on the four resource-rich eastern departments (Santa Cruz, Pando, Beni and Tarija) known as the media luna (half moon), was initiated following a national referendum in which Morales’s presidency was endorsed by 67.4% of the vote — greater than the almost 54% that voted for him in 2005 and with a higher voter turnout.

The violence was an attempt to impose by force what was lost at the ballot box.

Violently assaulting civilians, police officer and soldiers, occupying and burning public buildings, blowing up gas pipelines, and blockading roads were among the tactics of the pro-neoliberal forces of the opposition, which utlitised fascist shock troops of racist armed youth gangs, such as the Santa Cruz Youth Union (UJC).

Financial-market wise guys, who had been seized with fear, are suddenly drunk with hope. They are rallying explosively because they think they have successfully stampeded Washington into accepting the Wall Street Journal solution to the crisis: dump it all on the taxpayers. That is the meaning of the massive bailout Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has shopped around Congress. It would relieve the major banks and investment firms of their mountainous rotten assets and make the public swallow their losses--many hundreds of billions, maybe much more. What's not to like if you are a financial titan threatened with extinction?

If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public--all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims. My advice to Washington politicians: Stop, take a deep breath and examine what you are being told to do by so-called "responsible opinion." If this deal succeeds, I predict it will become a transforming event in American politics--exposing the deep deformities in our democracy and launching a tidal wave of righteous anger and popular rebellion. As I have been saying for several months, this crisis has the potential to bring down one or both political parties, take your choice.

“So Sambo beat the bitch!”

This is how Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin described Barack Obama’s win over Hillary Clinton to political colleagues in a restaurant a few days after Obama locked up the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

According to Lucille, the waitress serving her table at the time and who asked that her last name not be used, Gov. Palin was eating lunch with five or six people when the subject of the Democrat’s primary battle came up. The governor, seemingly not caring that people at nearby tables would likely hear her, uttered the slur and then laughed loudly as her meal mates joined in appreciatively.

“It was kind of disgusting,” Lucille, who is part Aboriginal, said in a phone interview after admitting that she is frightened of being discovered telling folks in the “lower 48” about life near the North Pole.

Palestinian relatives of killed Hamas fighter Hisham Shomer, 25, cry during his funeral in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahiya, 6 May 2008. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) strongly condemns the killing of a mother in front of her children yesterday, during an Israeli incursion into New Abasan town, east of Khan Younes.

PCHR investigations indicate that at approximately 14:30pm on Wednesday, 7 May, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) troops raided the house of Majdi Abd al-Raziq al-Daghma during an incursion into New Abasan.

The troops opened the outside metal door, then blew up the wooden interior door. The force of the blast killed 33-year-old Wafa Shaker al-Daghma instantly. The IOF troops then stormed into the house and covered her body with a rug, having ascertained that she was dead. The troops then detained her three children, who had all witnessed the killing of their mother...

Video: Afghans Civilians Killed by U.S

By every measure, U.S. workers are facing a more difficult struggle to make ends meet. Lee Sustar looks at two new books that document the deteriorating conditions of life for working people today.

THE AMERICAN Dream is long gone.

The expectation of rising living standards for each generation of workers has given way to a low-wage economy in which young workers will struggle just to match their parents' income--and are increasingly likely to end up worse off.

Even before the current economic crisis took hold, workers were working harder for less and carrying big debts to compensate for falling income. Record numbers of workers endured long and fruitless searches for employment, while those who had jobs are plagued with insecurity over their employment, health care and retirement.

Today’s “Global War on Terrorism” is a modern form of inquisition. It has all the essential ingredients of the French and Spanish inquisitions.

Going after “Islamic terrorists”, carrying out a Worldwide preemptive war to “protect the Homeland” are used to justify a military agenda.

“The Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT) is presented as a “Clash of Civilizations”, a war between competing values and religions, when in reality it is an outright war of conquest, guided by strategic and economic objectives.

The GWOT is the ideological backbone of the American Empire. It defines US military doctrine, including the preemptive use of nuclear weapons against the “state sponsors” of terrorism.

The preemptive “defensive war” doctrine and the “war on terrorism” against Al Qaeda constitute essential building blocks of America’s National Security Strategy as formulated in early 2002. The objective is to present “preemptive military action” –meaning war as an act of “self-defense” against two categories of enemies, “rogue States” and “Islamic terrorists”, both of which are said to possess weapons of mass destruction.

(GAZA COASTAL WATERS) An Israeli military gunboat rammed an unarmed Palestinian fishing vessel today at high speeds. The gunboat smashed through the upper hull of the fishing boat, careened over the top, and landed on the other side.

Extensive damage was caused by the impact to the fishing boat. The hull was badly damaged, and virtually the entire deck area, all the equipment on it, and the canopy above the deck were severely damaged. Unusually, all of the crew happened to be in the cabin or at the fore at the time. Had they been on deck they would have had little chance of survival.

Via a megaphone, the Israeli military aboard the gunboat then made the threat that: "When the internationals leave Gaza, you will all be made to pay." Human rights observers from the International Solidarity Movement and from the Free Gaza Movement have recently been accompanying Gazan Fishermen during their work. Photographs

Seven guided missiles have been fired from US spy planes in North Waziristan, killing three persons and injuring 15 others, including women and children. According to Pakistani sources, the guided missiles targeted a madrassa, or Muslim school, and the house of Afghan commander Jalaluddin Haqqani.

A drone operated by US-led forces in Afghanistan allegedly fired six to seven guided missiles at the madrassa in north Waziristan. It then shot at the house of Commander Haqqani, who first surfaced as a guerilla during the war against Russia in Afghanistan.

North and South Waziristan tribal regions are considered strongholds of the Pakistani Taliban. Pakistan's tribal belt has witnessed a sharp increase in attacks by drones operated by the US-led coalition forces in Afghanistan over the past week. More than 40 people have died in these attacks.

In St. Paul, Minnesota, during the week of September 1st-4th the right to protest and peacefully assemble was greatly impinged upon by local, state and federal officials. It was also greatly diminished in Denver, Colorado but to a lesser extent. At the Republican National Convention protests I personally witnessed peaceful protesters demonstrating against war being beaten by police, nearly trampled by horses, dispersed with tear gas and concussion grenades, and everywhere treated as dangerous criminals and as a threat to the government.

I participated in a march led by mothers with children in strollers that was blockaded on several occasions by national guard troops in full paramilitary gear. I witnessed homeless people marching for the right to housing being dispersed by security police in riot gear wearing gas masks and carrying beating sticks that were in excess of two feet long. I witnessed journalists and legal observers rounded up by the police and detained prior to mass arrests of hundreds.

A government that cannot tolerate the dissent of its citizens is a terrible burden upon freedom and democracy. The right to dissent plays a healthy, vital role in the national dialogue. It is only through dissent that we can often see the ugly face of actions which the wealthy and powerful would prefer to remain hidden.

Most people had never heard of Sarah Palin when she was named Republican VP nominee. But I’d been hearing her name all too often, because I belong to a group called Defenders of Wildlife–and in her time as governor of Alaska, Palin has used her position as governor of Alaska to ruin the Alaskan wilderness in every way she could.

Her most recent “victory” came on August 26 when Alaska’s voters defeated Measure 2, an initiative that would have banned hunting wolves from airplanes for sport.

Palin organized a campaign against Measure 2, and funded it with $400,000 of state money. For most of us, the idea of zooming around in a private airplane over snowbound wilderness just for the chance to spot a terrified wild dog and blow it apart with a high-powered rifle is insane. But there’s a whole culture out there in love with the idea. Palin did her part by playing the tired old Alaskan pioneer card, saying that lower-48 naysayers who dared to object to the idea of divebombing wildlife didn’t “understand rural Alaska.”

While serving as CentCom commander between March 2007 and March 2008, Adm. William Fallon consistently pressed the Bush administration for more engagement with Iran and criticized the calls for another war. “This constant drumbeat of conflict is what strikes me which is not helpful and not useful,” Fallon told al Jazeera last year.

In his new book “The War Within,” Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward details a telling White House meeting on Iran in spring 2007 (p. 334):

“I think we need to do something to get engaged with these guys,” Fallon said. Iraq shared a 900-mile border with Iran, and he needed guidance and a strategy for dealing with the Iranians.

“Well,” Bush said, “these are assholes.”

Fallon was stunned. Declaring them “assholes” was not a strategy.

ROSS: Around the time Palin became mayor, [Palin's] church and other conservative Christians began to focus on certain books available in local stores and in the town library, including one called "Go Ask Alice," and another one written by a local pastor, Howard Bess, called "Pastor, I am Gay."

BESS: This whole thing of controlling, you know, information, censorship, yeah. That's a part of the scene.

ROSS: Not long after taking office, Palin raised the issue at a city council meeting of how books might be banned according to news accounts and a local resident, a Democrat, who was there.

ANNE KILKENNY: Mayor Palin asked the librarian, what is your response if I ask you to remove some books from the collection of the Wasilla Public Library?

ROSS: The Wasilla librarian, Mary Ellen Edmonds, the then president of the Alaska Library Association, responded with only a short hesitation.

KILKENNY: The librarian took a deep breath and said, the books in the collection were purchased in accordance with national standards and professional guidelines, and I would absolutely not allow you to remove any books from the collection.

"A few weeks after the council meeting, the mayor fired the librarian, although she was reinstated after a community uproar," Ross reported. "The Wasilla librarian, Mary Ellen Edmonds, left two years later, and according to friends, because it was just too hard working for Sarah Palin."

MANTA, Ecuador — When U.S. officers stationed in this humid coastal city give reasons they should continue their decade-old airborne surveillance mission, they talk not only about fighting drug runners on the open seas but about the $71 million they’ve spent to renovate and maintain the city’s airport, and the $6.5 million they inject each year into the local economy.

But the government of Ecuador has decided, and Washington has apparently agreed, that one of the most important foreign outposts in the United States’ war on drugs will close. The 450 U.S. Air Force personnel and contractors stationed at a military base that shares the airport’s runway will be leaving next year.

This decision reflects both the prevailing political climate here — standing up to the United States tends to be widely popular — and a new economic reality. With major projects underway in Manta by the Venezuelan government and a Hong Kong company, the U.S. dollars don’t amount to much.

St. Paul is a window into our future. It is a future where, as one protester told me by phone, "people have been pepper-gassed, thrown on the ground by police who had drawn their weapons, had their documents seized and their tattoos photographed before being taken away to jail." It is a future where illegal house raids are carried out. It is a future where vans containing heavily armed paramilitary units circle and film protesters. It is a future where, as the protester said, "people have been pulled from cars because their license plates were on a database and handcuffed, thrown in the back of a squad car and then watched as their vehicles were ransacked and their personal possessions from computers to literature seized." It is a future where constitutional rights mean nothing and where lawful dissent is branded a form of terrorism.

Since the impeachable installation of George W. Bush as President in January of 2001 by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Gang of Five, the peoples of the world have witnessed a government in the United States that has demonstrated little if any respect for fundamental considerations of international law, human rights, and the United States Constitution.

What the world has watched instead is a comprehensive and malicious assault upon the integrity of the international and domestic legal orders by a group of men and women who are thoroughly Machiavellian and Straussian in their perception of international relations and in their conduct of both foreign policy and domestic affairs. Even more seriously, in many instances specific components of the Bush administration’s foreign policies constitute ongoing criminal activity under well-recognized principles of both international law and U.S. domestic law, and in particular the Nuremberg Charter, the Nuremberg Judgment, and the Nuremberg Principles, as well as the Pentagon’s own U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 on The Law of Land Warfare (1956), all of which apply to President Bush himself as Commander-in-Chief of United States Armed Forces under Article II, Section 2 of the United States Constitution.

According to a report by the Organic Consumers Association, a toxic chemical that is a byproduct of rocket fuel is rapidly poisoning the food and water supply in the United States. Known as perchlorate, this chemical has been found in 93% of the nation's milk and lettuce supply in a recent FDA study. It has also been found in the drinking water for at least 22 states at extremely alarming levels. Perhaps the scariest statistic is that perchlorate has been found in the breast milk of 97% of the mothers who were tested. What are Americans supposed to eat? Unfortunately, lettuce and milk weren't the only foods that were found to be contaminated. Perchlorate was found in tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, spinach, citrus, melons and more. Sadly, even organic vegetables were affected, because most crops are irrigated from polluted water sources.

Minnesota ACLU Takes Legal Action ST. PAUL - In response to reports of widespread civil liberties abuses in connection with mass arrests, police raids on private homes and the detention of several journalists during the Republican National Convention (RNC), the American Civil Liberties Union renewed its call for an investigation into the actions of law enforcement there.

"Attempts by law enforcement to squelch lawful political speech and stifle the press have no place in our democracy and are unacceptable," said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU. "Political conventions should be a showcase for free expression, not a venue for bullying and intimidation."
The ACLU specifically called for an investigation into possible violations of the First and Fourth Amendments, including:

• the arrest of reporters trying to gather the news;
• the mass arrest of hundreds of peaceful protestors;
• the surveillance and subsequent raids on several activist groups and private homes; and
• the confiscation by law enforcement agents of constitutionally-protected private property.

The ACLU affiliate office in Minnesota has assembled legal counsel for many of the reporters and peaceful protestors arrested since Monday. The ACLU of Minnesota has also filed a lawsuit in federal court calling for the release of boxes of literature that were confiscated during Monday's raids.

In this study, both an older neuroleptic (Haldol or "haloperidol") and a newer atypical neuroleptic (Zyprexa or "olanzapine") caused significant shrinkage in the higher level parts of the brains in monkeys. Source: Neuropsychopharmacology 9 March 2005

Former RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli said the United States effectively "threw away the rule book" in dealing with Canadian authorities on the Maher Arar affair. In an interview with the CBC broadcast Tuesday night, Zaccardelli blamed a post 9-11 hardline attitude in the United States for the Ottawa software engineer's detention and subsequent deportation to his native Syria. After Arar was detained in New York in the fall of 2002, Zaccardelli told the CBC that American authorities indicated to Canadian officials that they didn't have enough evidence to lay charges and asked whether he would be detained upon returning to Canada. "The discussion centres around: 'If we let him go and he comes to Canada, can you arrest him or detain him?' And we keep reaffirming, 'No we can't'," Zaccardelli said in the CBC interview, conducted in Lyons, France, where he is a senior official with Interpol. The Americans then led Canadian officials to believe Arar was going to be released and sent back to Canada, prompting the RCMP to put together a surveillance team to watch him. "We are waiting in Montreal for the plane to arrive with Mr. Arar getting off the plane. The plane arrives. Mr. Arar never got off," he said. Arar spent about a year in Syrian custody where he said he was tortured.

A chunk of ice shelf nearly the size of Manhattan has broken away from Ellesmere Island in Canada's northern Arctic, another dramatic indication of how warmer temperatures are changing the polar frontier, scientists said Wednesday. Derek Mueller, an Arctic ice shelf specialist at Trent University in Ontario, told The Associated Press that the 4,500-year-old Markham Ice Shelf separated in early August and the 19-square-mile shelf is now adrift in the Arctic Ocean. "It was a shocking event that underscores the rapidity of changes taking place in the Arctic," said Muller. Muller also said that two large sections of ice detached from the Serson Ice Shelf, shrinking that ice feature by 47 square miles — or 60 percent — and that the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf has also continued to break up, losing an additional eight square miles.

The world's biggest and most expensive scientific experiment has been hit by a last minute legal challenge, amid claims that the research could bring about the end of the world.

Four years after the tragedy in School Number One, which left more than 300 people dead, Beslan remains a small town filled with immense grief. Its cemetery contains the graves of 186 children. On September 3, 2004, Russian forces attempted to release hostages in the school building where terrorists were holding more than 1,000 people. The small town is marking the anniversary of one of Russia's deadliest hostage takings with candles, tolling of bells and tears. Hundreds of mourners assembled at the ruins of School Number One, left untouched since the tragedy, to lay flowers and light candles in memory of those who died in September 2004. The sad day was marked by one minute's silence and the release of 334 white balloons in the air – one for each victim. Then the ceremony moved to Beslan’s Memorial Cemetery, where the list of victims was read out. For many residents of Beslan the days of mourning bring back their bad dreams and memories.

After two years on its humiliating defeat in Lebanon by the Islamic resistance fighters, Israeli army is still trying to figure out what really happened and its leaders are still trying to find excuses for the failure of the “strongest army in the Middle East”. Israeli army Chief Intelligence Officer Brig.-Gen. Yuval Halamish told Israeli daily The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday that the army's Military Intelligence has dramatically increased its relevance and capabilities since the Second Lebanon War, when some field units went into combat with outdated maps of Hezbollah strongholds. "When we look back today at the past two years we are without a doubt in a different place," Halamish said in a rare interview he granted the Post in honor of MI's 60th anniversary. "Like the rest of the IDF at the time, MI was busy focusing on the Palestinian arena and that is where we invested our resources." Incidents such as units being given outdated maps before going into combat should never have happened, he said, revealing that today MI has established an advanced computerized database that stores all of the maps and other intelligence material that is continuously updated and can be distributed to relevant units on short notice.

Released through the Official Secrets Act after 60 years, the Plan that Britain would Hatch with Germany to Rule the World. The attempt to discredit this as the work of an amateur and maverick WILL NOT WASH. Re: Britain planned Collusion with Nazis to Rule the World. (by setfree69): In fact I have always contended that Edward VIII was forced to resign as King of the UK, for his close ties with the Nazis and personal friendship with Hitler, of course it was easy to blame his choice of Wife! Churchill and Hitler were alike in MANY ways however painful that might be to hear, and it needed someone like Churchill to defeat Hitler. Churchill advocated the forced sterilisation of people deemed as disabled or retarded, and another interesting point was that people often ask why did Hitler never use Gas on London? because oddly enough he hated the use in warfare and Churchill had threatened to respond in like if he did. Wether this is actually true I do not know but have found no hard evidence either way. One last point they say that the Victors are the ones who write the History and the nanquished are demonised, one of Churchill quotes is "History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."

[ENLARGE] Appearing with other member of the Congressional Black Caucus at the Democratic National Convention tonight for a moving tribute to their recently deceased colleague Stephanie Tubbs Jones, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee John Conyers brings the issue of fair elections and election integrity to the convention. Speaking after Charles Rangel of New York, Chairman Conyers said: "I knew Stephanie Tubbs Jones as a constant voice for justice and peace. She was known to others for her work as a prosecutor, a judge and chairwoman of the Ethics Committee of the House of Representatives. She was a stalwart Democrat, a real leader and an enthusiastic supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s bid for the nomination. After Senator Obama prevailed, the Congressional Black Caucus met with Senator Obama, and Stephanie Tubbs Jones led us in standing rock-solid in support of him as our candidate for president. She knew the importance of making sure that every vote counts and every vote is counted."