The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency won't oppose the U.S. Department of Defense and DuPont Co.'s plan to dump a wastewater byproduct of a deadly nerve agent into the Delaware River.
The agency said it's assured of a safe treatment for up to 4 million gallons of caustic wastewater created in the treatment for VX, a chemical weapon with a pinhead-size potency to kill a human. DuPont is treating VX for disposal at its Newport Chemical Depot in Indiana.
The agent, once neutralized, would be shipped to DuPont's Chambers Works plant in Deepwater, N.J., for discharge into the river.
"EPA believes that all of our previously identified ecological concerns have been resolved," said Walter Mugdan, director of the agency's Environmental Planning and Protection division in New York, in a letter released Friday to CNN and obtained by The News Journal in Wilmington, Del.
The agency's position angers opponents of the disposal plan. They're concerned the wastewater would harm the Delaware, which supplies drinking water to millions. Furthermore, opponents say the EPA's opinion is premature and raises more questions about the wastewater's effects on river health.
The EPA forwarded its findings to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where analysts are considering health risks posed by the Army and DuPont's plan. A final report from the CDC is expected to go to the region's congressional delegations in April. An earlier study by the agency was inconclusive as to the health effects of the discharge.
Tracy Carluccio, a spokeswoman for the Delaware Riverkeeper based in Washington Crossing, criticized the EPA for its action.
"This report [by the EPA] is not conclusive in any way," she said Saturday.
WASHINGTON - The United States and Russia are locked in another cold war, this time over a hole in the ice at the bottom of the world in Antarctica.
The Russians lost the real Cold War, but it looks as if they're going to win this one.
At issue is their plan to continue drilling a hole they began in 1998 until they poke through the ice into a large, long-buried lake known as Vostok. They've already drilled 2.2 miles down, stopping only about 100 yards from the lake, and have declared their intention to go the rest of the way next year.
Scientists in the United States and worldwide are panting to explore Lake Vostok, but they worry that the Russians are plunging ahead without taking adequate precautions to avoid contaminating the hidden waters with their drilling equipment.
Researchers think that the lake, which is about the size of Lake Ontario and more than a half-mile deep, has been sealed off from the rest of the world for more than 10 million years, far longer than humans have been on Earth. They want to find out whether living organisms are growing down there and see how they may have evolved differently from life on the surface. The findings also could tell a lot about the possibility of life on the icy moons of Jupiter or on planets beyond our solar system.
The problem is the Russians are using a drilling fluid - a mixture of kerosene and Freon that's infested with microbes - to bore into the ice. If the fluid gets into the lake, scientists can't be sure that any organisms they find were in the water already or came from the outside, said Scott Borg, the head of the Antarctic Sciences Section at the National Science Foundation. That would destroy their scientific value.
Alarmed by the Russian push, the National Academy of Sciences created a special committee to set "cleanliness" standards for drilling into lakes under glaciers or ice sheets, such as Vostok. It's not clear, however, that the Russians will pay any attention.
"The Russians aren't waiting for standards. They have decided to move forward," Borg said at the committee's first meeting earlier this month. "We have declined to participate (in the drilling). We don't feel it's ready."
The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, an international organization based in Cambridge, England, urged the Russians to wait for further studies before penetrating the lake.
"It is extremely important to be very cautious," the committee's executive director, Colin Summerhayes, said in an e-mail message. He listed two main concerns: "accidental penetration of the lake" and contaminated drill fluid seeping into the water "through tiny cracks in the ice just above the lake surface."
The Russians say they've done a successful test drilling in Greenland and that Vostok won't be harmed.
"I am convinced the concerns about possible contamination of the lake's water with the drilling fluid do not have any physical grounds," Valerii Lukin, the director of the Russian Vostok project, told Science magazine last fall.
All scientific activities in Antarctica are governed by the Antarctic Treaty, which 28 nations, including the then-Soviet Union, signed in 1959. It spells out procedures to protect the frozen continent's sensitive environment.
Has anybody noticed that news isn't what it used to be?
What happened to the general up and down, back and forth, flow of events, both good and bad, that used to be our daily fare? It used to be possible to read the news and the good news somehow was able to counterbalance the bad news. Yes, there were evil things afoot, but there were also good things in the works.
And it wasn't just denial of the bad things either. There used to be serious groups working for peace and global understanding and betterment who were actually making progress even if they did have to fight for every step forward against corporations only out for money or against corrupt government power fiends. Nowadays, the news is almost unrelentingly horrible and the only "good news" seems to be from delusional characters who are paid to propagandize, trying to convince all of us that black is white and sour is sweet.
I don't know about you, but as bad as it might have been under the surface or behind the scenes, I want the old days back... the days before George W. Bush was appointed to a presidency he did not win. Since George Bush was hoisted to the highest office in the land, everything has gone downhill like nuclear train.
I mean, just take a look at some of the stories headlines here - just a few out of a much larger selection:
Shi'ite militia, insurgents clash in Baghdad
Ten imams murdered in Iraq as sectarian killings intensify :
Dozens of Mosques Attacked, Over 100 Dead, Thousands Protest :
Ted Koppel in 'NYT': Iraq for U.S. Is 'About the Oil' :
Germany admits its spies helped US in Iraq war:
Taleban kill four Afghan soldiers in ambush:
Further Evidence That Senior Officials Approved Abuse of Prisoners at Guantánamo :
Blair condones Amin-style tactics against terrorism, says Archbishop:
Balata Refugee Camp under invasion again :
Car bombers attack Saudi oil plant:
Emergency declared in Philippines:
Venezuela cuts US airline flights :
Venezuelan-Owned Citgo Faces Congressional Inquiry For Offering Discounted Oil to U.S. Poor
A Global Infrastructure for Mass Surveillance :
UAE terminal takeover extends to 21 ports:
Watchdog Group Questions 2004 Fla. Vote :
To combat hunger, more in US turn to soup kitchens:
Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Iran, Venezuela, Philippines, people in the US being spied on and going hungry while their president steals their money to give to his pals to bomb more people and stir up more violence, so he has to take more money to give to his friends to bomb more people and citizens of the US keep sliding further and further into poverty and despair.
What the HELL is going on? Four and a half years ago the world was not like this! I could read the news without feeling like the ground was being snatched from under my feet! I could read the news and not wonder who was going to bomb who first and who was going to nuke who first. Sure, there were problems - mostly caused by subversive Intell agencies trying to manipulate the global players into position so that what is being done today COULD be done, but at least they were being partly contained by actions from those seeking peace and stability. In four and a half years, we've gone from the point where postive changes could have taken the world in an entirely different direction, to a point where it looks like the days of this civilization are, indeed, numbered.
It all started when George Bush stole his first election.
Increased carbon dioxide emissions are rapidly making the world’s oceans more acidic and, if unabated, could cause a mass extinction of marine life similar to one that occurred 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs disappeared. Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology will present this research at the AGU/ASLO Ocean Sciences meeting in Honolulu, HI on Monday, Feb 20.
Caldeira’s computer models have predicted that the oceans will become far more acidic within the next century. Now, he has compared this data with ocean chemistry evidence from the fossil record, and has found some startling similarities. The new finding offers a glimpse of what the future might hold for ocean life if society does not drastically curb carbon dioxide emissions.
“The geologic record tells us the chemical effects of ocean acidification would last tens of thousands of years,” Caldeira said. “But biological recovery could take millions of years. Ocean acidification has the potential to cause extinction of many marine species.”
When carbon dioxide from the burning of coal, oil, and gas dissolves in the ocean, some of it becomes carbonic acid. Over time, accumulation of this carbonic acid makes ocean water more acidic. When carbonic acid input is modest, sediments from the ocean floor can buffer the increases in acidity. But at the current rate of input—nearly 50 times the natural background from volcanoes and other sources—this buffering mechanism is overwhelmed. Previous estimates suggest that in less than 100 years, the pH of the oceans could drop by as much as half a unit from its natural value of 8.2 to about 7.7. (On the pH scale, lower numbers are more acidic and higher numbers are more basic.)
This drop in ocean pH would be especially damaging to marine animals such as corals that use calcium carbonate to make their shells. Under normal conditions the ocean is supersaturated with this mineral, making it easy for such creatures to grow. However, a more acidic ocean would more easily dissolve calcium carbonate, putting these species at particular risk.
The Supreme Court said Tuesday it will consider the constitutionality of banning a type of late-term abortion, teeing up a contentious issue for a newly-constituted court already in a state of flux over privacy rights.
The Bush administration has pressed the high court to reinstate the federal law, passed in 2003 but never put in effect because it was struck down by judges in California, Nebraska and New York.
The outcome will likely rest with the two men that President Bush has recently installed on the court. Justices had been split 5-4 in 2000 in striking down a state law, barring what critics call partial birth abortion because it lacked an exception to protect the health of the mother.
But Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who was the tie-breaking vote, retired late last month and was replaced by Samuel Alito. Abortion had been a major focus in the fight over Alito's nomination because justices serve for life and he will surely help shape the court on abortion and other issues for the next generation.
Alito, in his rulings on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, has been more willing than O'Connor, the first woman justice, to allow restrictions on abortions, which were legalized in the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.
The federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act prohibits a certain type of abortion, generally carried out in the second or third trimester, in which a fetus is partially removed from the womb, and the skull is punctured or crushed.
Justices on a 9-0 vote vote reaffirmed in January that states can require parental involvement in abortion decisions and that state restrictions must have an exception to protect the mother's health.
The federal law in the current case has no health exception, but defendersmaintain that the procedure is never medically necessary to protect a woman's health.
By Shankar Vedantam, Washington February 18, 2006 Page 1 of 2
Alarming satellite images show seas rising far faster than expected.
GREENLAND'S glaciers are melting into the sea twice as fast as previously believed, the result of a warming trend that renders obsolete predictions of how quickly the Earth's oceans will rise over the next century.
The new information, from satellite imagery, gives fresh urgency to worries about the role of human activity in global warming. The Greenland data is mirrored by findings from Bolivia to the Himalayas, scientists said, noting that sea-level rise threatens widespread flooding and severe storm damage in low-lying areas worldwide.
The scientists warned that they did not yet understand the precise mechanism causing glaciers to flow and melt more rapidly, but they said the changes in Greenland were unambiguous - and accelerating.
Greenland ice cap breaking up at twice the rate it was five years ago, says scientist Bush tried to gag
By Jim Hansen
Published: 17 February 2006
A satellite study of the Greenland ice cap shows that it is melting far faster than scientists had feared - twice as much ice is going into the sea as it was five years ago. The implications for rising sea levels - and climate change - could be dramatic.
Yet, a few weeks ago, when I - a Nasa climate scientist - tried to talk to the media about these issues following a lecture I had given calling for prompt reductions in the emission of greenhouse gases, the Nasa public affairs team - staffed by political appointees from the Bush administration - tried to stop me doing so. I was not happy with that, and I ignored the restrictions. The first line of Nasa's mission is to understand and protect the planet.
full story
http://news.independent.co.uk...
Naturally, this whole sketchy and uncorroborated affair is simply a transparent effort to deflect attention away from congressional intelligence committee hearings supposedly empanelled to uncover details about Straussian neocon criminal behavior vis-à-vis snooping on millions of Americans. It is also intended to offer up an excuse for continued snooping and the deliberate trashing for the Bill of Rights as the Straussian neocons behind the Bush administration make steady progress in reducing America to a nightmarish Panopticon.
In a brazen effort to divert attention away from the lukewarm grilling of the Straussian neocons over the massive NSA violations of the Fourth Amendment, Bush “defended his anti-terrorist policies anew today, asserting that the United States and its allies had foiled a terrorist plot meant to bring down a Los Angeles building that is the tallest in the United States west of the Mississippi River,” according to the New York Times. “Osama bin Laden himself was involved in the plot, which was to be carried out by Southeast Asian men on the assumption that they would not arouse as much suspicion as Middle Easterners, Mr. Bush told the National Guard Association.”
In addition, the “independent [whitewash] commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks said in its 2004 report that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 assaults on New York City and Washington, had originally envisioned an even broader assault on America, with as many as 10 hijacked aircraft flying into buildings on both coasts. And last October, government counterterrorism officials provided further details, saying that Mr. Mohammed and a terrorist ally, Riduan Isamuddin (better known as Hambali), had planned a new spate of attacks after Sept. 11 and that Los Angeles was in their sights.” In essence, this is a recycling of an October, 2005, claim, warmed over as heat is directed at the Bush Straussian neocon masters of total war and Orwellian surveillance.
Hambali was fingered as “operations chief” of Jemaah Islamiyah, the Indonesian intelligence and military created terror organization, with more than a little help from the CIA. “Without the CIA’s dirty operations in Afghanistan, neither Jemaah Islamiyah nor Al Qaeda would have come into existence,” writes Peter Symonds. “The anti-Soviet war provided the money and the training, as well as forging the loose international network of contacts that was to characterize the future modus operandi of these organizations.” In fact, Jemaah Islamiyah was fully compromised by the CIA.
Omar al-Faruq, described as a senior al-CIA-duh operative, was a CIA mole. Al-Faruq “was assigned to infiltrate Islamic radical groups and recruit local agents within these groups,” Tempo Interactive reported in September, 2002. “When Al Faruq finished his assignments, the CIA created a scenario that he had been arrested,” former Indonesian State Intelligence Coordinating Board chief A.C. Manulang told Tempo. “It’s common in intelligence world,” a fact borne out by the recent and suspicious “escape” of the 2000 U.S. Cole “mastermind” bomber Jamal al-Badawi from a Yemeni prison. It is said al-Faruq escaped from the Bagram “high value” (as in goat herders and taxi drivers) detention center in Afghanistan in July, 2005. If we are to believe the corporate media, al-Farug and “three other captives picked locks, cut through barbed wire and negotiated a minefield” (see ARG’s GNN blog). If you believe this I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.
As for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the “architect of the 9/11 assaults on New York City and Washington” (once again, there is a bridge in Brooklyn) and “terrorist entrepreneur,” he was supposedly captured in Pakistan on March 1, 2003 by the ISI (the Pakistani intelligence organization responsible, at the behest of the CIA, for creating “al-Qaeda” and the Taliban, as a virtual mountain of evidence demonstrates). It is said he was transferred to U.S. custody and shipped off to a torture facility in Jordan (where he was “waterboarded&rdquo ; by the CIA; another variation has the terrorist shipped to Diego Garcia). However, less reported as part of the Khalid Shaikh Mohammed legend, B. Raman writes for Redliff that “Pakistani authorities did a volte face within 24 hours [of Mohammed’s alleged captured] and denied that Mohammad had been taken out of Pakistan. He was being interrogated in Pakistani territory by Pakistani officials, they maintained. Faisal Saleh Hayat, Pakistan’s interior minister, even denied that the US had requested his extradition… [and an] officer in charge of the raid had submitted a report to the headquarters claiming to have killed Mohammad and buried his body without informing the Americans about it.”
Of course, since there is no independent verification of “enemy combatants” or inspection of the Straussian neocon torture gulag by humanitarian organizations, we have no idea if Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is alive, dead, or in the custody of the Pakistanis or Americans. Moreover, since most of what we know about Mohammed comes from the “independent” nine eleven lie and omission commission, anything said about him should be considered suspect. Naturally, this whole sketchy and uncorroborated affair is simply a transparent effort to deflect attention away from congressional intelligence committee hearings supposedly empanelled to uncover details about Straussian neocon criminal behavior vis-à-vis snooping on millions of Americans. It is also intended to offer up an excuse for continued snooping and the deliberate trashing for the Bill of Rights as the Straussian neocons behind the Bush administration make steady progress in reducing America to a nightmarish Panopticon.
Mothers had given birth on island instead of ice floes due to warm weather
Updated: 12:34 p.m. ET Feb. 3, 2006
OTTAWA - Around 1,500 seal pups were swept out to sea and drowned by a tidal surge off Canada’s east coast this week after a lack of ice cover meant their mothers were forced to give birth on a small island, environment officials said Friday.
A resident on the island described how the mother seals had frantically tried to push their tiny pups back on to land as they floundered in the storm-tossed water.
Gray seals in the Northumberland Strait — which lies between the provinces of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island — usually give birth on the pack ice which forms in winter.
But abnormally warm conditions this year mean there is no ice in the strait, so some seals had to give birth on the beaches of Pictou Island. Unusually high tides hit the island this week after a major storm.
“The majority of those seals born above the high water mark have been lost. We’re estimating ... that of about 2,000 pups that were born prior to the storm, we lost about 1,500,” said Jerry Conway, a marine mammal adviser for the federal Fisheries and Oceans Department.
Television pictures showed dead seal pups littered on one of Pictou Island’s beaches.
Resident describes frantic mothers
Jane MacDonald, one of the island’s few permanent residents, said the mother seals had tried hard to save their offspring. “The mothers just push them and push them with their nose, and they dive back under and push them back up, and they get back into the tide wash, and then a big wave will hit and just sweep them back out to sea,” she told CBC television.
Conway said it was not uncommon for seals in the Northumberland Strait to give birth on land.
“I’ve been with the department 27 years and I can remember at least half a dozen instances when there hasn’t been ice of sufficient strength (for seals to give birth there),” he told Reuters from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.
When seal pups are born they weigh only about 20 pounds and have no blubber, which means they find it hard to float.
Conway blamed the unusually high tide for the deaths, adding: “Normally, these pups would have survived.”
The gray seal population in the Northumberland Strait and the Gulf of St Lawrence is around 400,000 animals.
Conway said the lack of ice cover off Eastern Canada could also cause problems for the large harp seal population, which usually gives birth in late March near the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
“I’m suggesting that unless we have a tremendous decrease in temperature and the forming of ice in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, we may have a repeat of this with harp seals,” he said. This could mean seals being forced to give birth on beaches on the Magdalen Islands and Prince Edward Island.
Mothers usually birth on ice floes
The mother seals, which can grow as heavy as 800 pounds, normally have their pups on the ice floes that clog the gulf.
Fisheries officials say they haven't seen so many seals onshore since the early 1980s, when mild weather also hindered the formation of the floes.
Female seals normally abandon their pups about three weeks after birth, but the young remain out of the water for some time while they shed their downy white coats.
Dave Phillips, a senior climatologist at Environment Canada, said there have been weather anomalies across the country, with ice roads not forming in northern Saskatchewan, Winnipeg getting unseasonable rain in January and barren ski slopes in Vancouver.
Phillips said that while winters have been getting warmer over the last several years, it isn't clear if this points to global warming.
And while most Canadians are enjoying the mild winter, there could be a steep price to be paid in the months ahead, he said. Crops, for example, could be hurt by a shock of warm and then cold weather. Businesses that rely on winter activity are hurting, and several remote northern communities have been cut off by a lack of ice.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11127...
Sid Perkins
GREAT LAKES. Lake Vostok and the newly described 90°E and Sovetskaya Lakes lie beneath a kilometers-thick blanket of ice. The black square in the inset shows the outline of this satellite image on a map of Antarctica; the cross indicates the South Pole.
R.E. Bell, et al.
Trapped beneath Antarctica's kilometers-thick ice sheet are two bodies of water that rival North America's Great Lakes, new analyses suggest. The geological setting of these huge, unfrozen lakes hints that they may harbor ecosystems that have been isolated for millions of years.
More than 140 lakes lie buried beneath varying thicknesses of Antarctic ice, but most of them are small and shallow, says Michael Studinger, a geophysicist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y. Lake Vostok, discovered decades ago, is the largest. It's the size of Connecticut and holds 5,400 cubic kilometers of water, enough to fill Lake Michigan.
Scientists who've drilled through Lake Vostok's overlying ice sheet to within 120 meters of the lake's upper surface have found microbes trapped in the ice (SN: 10/9/99, p. 230: http://www.sciencenews.org/pa...). The researchers view that finding as a tantalizing clue that the lake may hold a thriving ecosystem.
Lake Vostok sits in a basin that formed as Earth's crust stretched thin, a feature that had set this body of water apart from all other subglacial Antarctic lakes, says Studinger. Now, he and his colleagues have used a collage of data to depict two large subglacial lakes near Lake Vostok and to determine that they also sit in basins formed by a thinning tectonic plate.
One of the lakes is dubbed 90°E because it stretches along that longitude. The other is called Sovetskaya, after the Russian research station atop it. Although scientists knew of these two lakes, they had no notion of their sizes until they saw recent satellite images of the region, says Studinger.
90°E Lake has a surface area of about 2,000 square kilometers, about half the size of Rhode Island, which makes it the second-largest known subglacial lake in Antarctica. It probably holds about 1,800 km3 of water, more than enough to fill Lake Ontario. Sovetskaya Lake covers about 1,600 km2. Studinger's team describes the lakes in the Jan. 28 Geophysical Research Letters.
Ice-penetrating-radar data gathered during aerial surveys indicate that the upper surfaces of these lakes lie beneath 4 km of ice. A new analysis of measurements of Earth's gravitational field suggests that the lakes in some places are about 900 m deep.
The lakes remain unfrozen because heat seeps up from Earth's interior and insulating blankets of ice lie above them, says Studinger. Any ecosystems now in the lakes would have been isolated from Earth's surface for 35 million years, the estimated age of the ice sheet in that region.
Because of their great sizes, the covered lakes probably have always contained at least some liquid water, says David M. Karl, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.
"This is an important discovery," says Karl. "It shows how little we know about the Earth around us."
