http://clf55.tigblog.org/ What's on the minds of young leaders from around the globe? en-us http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/557139
Willie's World

* Illinois governor seems to be growing stronger 12.21.08
* Illinois scandal from politician's view 12.14.08
* Willie Brown: This dinner crowd was the show 12.07.08
* George Moscone empowered S.F.'s diversity 11.30.08

More Willie's World »

Blagojevich said he had read my column in The Chronicle last week, in which I raised questions about the "pay to play" charges being leveled against him in connection with his pending appointment of someone to fill Barack Obama's now-empty U.S. Senate seat.

I think he liked how I raised questions about the timing and manner of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald's decision to charge him over what appears to be little more than loose conversations he had with his staff.

He laughed, we talked, and all in all he seemed in pretty good spirits for a guy looking at federal charges.

I wouldn't bet on him stepping aside anytime soon. If anything, his hand is getting stronger by the day.

I can't go into details, but my impression is that the whole mess started because the governor had been considering appointing a political rival, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, to the Senate so she wouldn't be able to run against him when he went up for re-election in 2010.

Apparently, Obama's people weren't happy about the idea of Madigan coming to Washington, and there were some pretty heated conversations between Blagojevich and Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, which I understand will burn your ears off.

It was pretty clear that Blagojevich is going to hang tough, especially after the Illinois Supreme Court shot down Madigan's request that he be forced from office because he supposedly can't carry out his duties.

It is also pretty clear that despite all the screaming over his appearing to be "selling" the seat in return for political favors or financial considerations, his fellow Democrats are not going to strip him of his power to appoint someone to replace Obama.

Publicly, they may say that's because a special election would cost the state millions. But the truth is, the Democrats are deathly afraid that with all these corruption stories swirling around, a do-gooder Republican could win the seat and damage the Democrats' chances of holding a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

And you know what? They're probably right to be afraid. If there was a fight, the only way the Democrats could hold onto the seat would be to have Obama himself come in and campaign.

That, however, would make it a referendum on him - and Obama would not want to put himself in that position so early in his presidency, even in his home state.

I know Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said after the "pay to play" stories hit the press that he wouldn't seat anyone appointed by Blagojevich.

But if the governor appoints someone of impeccable credentials - say, a university president or Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley's brother Bill, who used to be Bill Clinton's commerce secretary - who's going to say "no"?

Especially if it means risking a loss to a Republican.

Of course, if that doesn't fly, Blagojevich could always call Caroline Kennedy and tell her, "If New York doesn't work out, we got a seat for you right here."

I went to the party of the year Wednesday night. It was thrown by Emirates Airlines, and did they ever put on a show.

It was in the Herbst Pavilion, Building A out at Fort Mason. They had about 500 people.

They made up the place as if you were in the first-class section of their best aircraft. All red.

All these attractive, tall, model-like airline attendants were around with their helpers. And their helpers were nattily dressed guys with white tops and black pants - with tray after tray of anything you wanted to drink.

The cost? Who knows.

I mean, Hilary Swank as the hostess! They had the Lyon Opera Ballet perform during the cocktail reception.

Then a curtain opened up and you went into this dining room with huge screens all around on which they projected the story of Dubai.

Then out came the Irish river dancers and the Brazilian dancers. At the end, Swank invited everyone to come up and dance. And for an hour, Sheryl Crow performed and nobody, but nobody, left the dance floor.

Ordinarily, people at these events eat and run. But this time everybody stayed, because the door prizes were two first-class tickets and four days in Dubai - but you had to be there to win.

Ran into Quincy Jones the other night. He was in town for a book signing, and I caught up with him at 1300 on Fillmore for supper.

Quincy had just been inducted into the California Hall of Fame. He was talking about Barack Obama's inaugural. And like everybody else, he was trying to figure out how to get on the stage at the official inaugural ball.

I told him, direct the band for Aretha Franklin and you'll be right up there.

As I was leaving, this brother comes up and says to me, "Willie Brown, even with the housing market and the economy, this has been a really great year for black people."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because we got Obama."

Then he said, "But you know, come to think of it, it was a good year for white people, too."

"Why's that?" I asked.

"Because they finally got O.J."]]> Sun, 21 Dec 2008 08:59:00 EST http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/557139 43.6666667 -79.416666743.6666667-79.4166667 http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/455583
The press conference was held near Ancaster Road, one of the recently reopened streets in the area, where men in white-suited hazmat gear spent the day behind signs that warned "DANGER ASBESTOS " in big letters.

That heightened an already tense atmosphere, as expert after expert stepped forward to admit that while the substance was detected in places like the nearby playground and community centre - where recently returned kids were playing 24 hours before - there was no imminent danger to those who lived there.

It was a conclusion that didn't sit well with residents who came to watch the experts present their evidence.

"Today we wake up and see that most of this area is taped off again and we see people in full white suits walking around just a few feet away from us," noted resident James Durling. "They need a white suit but we don't. What's going to happen long term here? If we stay here, are we going to get sick 10, 15, 20 years from (now)? No one's giving us those answers."

"I have a house with broken windows, I have every reason to believe that is full of asbestos, and I challenge any one of you to tell me otherwise," another screamed.

"And I have lungs every reason to believe full of asbestos, and given myself and my neighbors were running from the streets, and running from the goddamn lies, and I challenge any one of you to tell me I won't get cancer in the next 15 or 25 years and just a coincidence ... The nerve of you people to act so goddamn smug! You screwed up big time!"

Associate Medical Officer of Health Dr. Barbara Yaffe tried to reassure residents there was no danger. "If it were my child, I would not be worried," she proclaimed. "I would not be worried because we know that the level of exposure would be exceedingly low ... It's not of concern."

Shouts of 'but you don't live here!' followed, as experts again tried to calm the increasing fury.

"The monitoring done so far simply shows that there is no airborne asbestos now and, in fact, no airborne asbestos even when personal samples were performed on a worker actively cleaning up this residue or debris," Dr. Don Pinchen tried to outline.

But that assurance also fell on deaf ears.

At one point, a local ratepayer's group spokesman confronted Councillor Maria Augimeri, who represents the area, asking her why she called her own meeting instead of attending theirs, scheduled for Thursday night. (see bottom of page for meeting details)

Her response was startling, referencing the death of Bob Leek, a firefighter who perished during Sunday's efforts to deal with the crisis.

"If people have problems of a partisan nature they should not use a death of a firefighter or anything associated with the disaster to deal with it!" she screamed. "So shut up!"

The man shot back, "You're trying to split the community."

Augimeri had spent two days flying in from Italy and explained her outburst by saying she was jetlagged and exhausted. "I haven't slept for two and a half days, and I've been traveling to try to get back here, okay," she pleads.

See unedited video of the confrontation here.

The City has set up a special hotline for anyone worried about asbestos exposure. Call (416) 338-7600 if you have any questions. It will remain open until 9pm Wednesday and be back up again Thursday morning.

The sudden death of a popular business-owner has only added to the collective sense of grief and frustration.

Fifty-one-year-old Patricia Loconte, a well known proprietor of a store in the area and something of a neighbourhood fixture, died suddenly of a heart attack after returning to her previously evacuated home.

Her stunned family says she was perfectly healthy and strong but was traumatized by the explosions.

Meanwhile, the probe into the disaster is continuing, as the Fire Marshal picks through the rubble of the ruined propane facility on nearby Murray Road. Bryan Fischer tells CityNews's Pam Seatle it's already been a difficult investigation because there's so much widespread destruction.

Asked if there's a chance we may never know the actual cause, Fischer responds "absolutely, absolutely. But at this point it's too soon to say."

Part of the confrontation between Maria Augimeri and residents was sparked by the fact that she called a 'Public Information Meeting' that directly conflicts with the one the area Ratepayers Association has called on the same day and time.
RATEPAYER MEETING

Thursday 7pm at St. Norbet Church Hall - called by the Ancaster Ratepayers Association]]> Fri, 15 Aug 2008 08:50:00 EDT http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/455583 43.6666667 -79.416666743.6666667-79.4166667 http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/455579
Parminder Saini, 24, has been missing since the explosion at Sunrise Propane, where he worked part-time, and friends and his family in Bhatinda, India are fearing the worst.

A body was recovered from the blast site and taken to the coroner's office for autopsy, but officials have yet to identify it.

"He was a very nice person... smiling all the time ... making other people laugh," Manpreet Sidhu wrote in an email, adding she was too upset to speak on the phone. "(He was) very down to earth. He loved his family and he was a very dedicated guy."

Sidhu met Saini at Sheridan College in Brampton, Ont., just west of Toronto, where they both went to school. Sidhu said they came from the same city in India and had become good friends since Saini arrived in Canada in December 2007.

Saini had completed his undergraduate degree in India and came to Canada to further his studies, she said.

Several hours after Sunday's explosion, a spokesman for Surnise said company officials "prayed" Saini would be found unharmed.

On Monday, a body was found in the ruins.

Veteran firefighter Bob Leek, whose funeral was to be held Friday, died at the scene after being found without vital signs. The coroner's office said Thursday that Leek's autopsy was complete but the cause of death wasn't being released at the request of his family.

Although Saini didn't like Canada at first he began to enjoy living in Brampton and "was looking forward to settling his life here," said Sidhu, who added she began to worry about her friend, nicknamed Rocky, when he didn't show up for a final exam Monday.

Janine Gliener, acting director of marketing and communication, confirmed Saini was enrolled at Sheridan College as an international student.

Saini began the quality assurance manufacturing and management post-graduate certificate program in January, Gliener said.

Saini's job at Sunrise was not affiliated with Sheridan, Gliener said.

"It would have been something that we were not involved with him obtaining," she said.

Amar Singh Bullar, the chief editor of Hamdard Weekly, a Punjabi newspaper in Mississauga, Ont., contacted Saini's family in Bhatinda and said Saini had spoken with his older brother, Bikramjit, only an hour before the blast.

"They were laughing about Parminder's hair," Bullar said. "Because before he had long hair and he had just cut it."

Saini's parents and brother don't have passports, Bullar said, so they are unable to come to Toronto to assist with the investigation.

Bullar also said that Saini, who entered the country with a 15-month student visa, had never been to the doctor or dentist in Canada. As a result, Saini's family are worried that authorities won't be able to identify the body found at the blast site.

A Facebook profile in Saini's name says he was the creator of an online group for Punjabi students]]> Fri, 15 Aug 2008 08:47:00 EDT http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/455579 43.6666667 -79.416666743.6666667-79.4166667 http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/331545 ADVERTISEMENT

McCain, whose campaign once verged on collapse, piled up more delegates than his two rivals combined, pushing over the halfway mark on what's needed to clinch the nomination. His victories stretched from New York to California, the biggest prize. Still, Mitt Romney in the West and Mike Huckabee in the South proved to be go-to candidates for conservatives, and they vowed to stay in the thick of the race.

Clarity of any sort eluded the Democrats as campaigns turned to the next rounds.

Both Obama and Clinton were looking ahead to the fall, campaigning as the Democrat tough enough to withstand Republicans attacks, and the Illinois senator pointedly argued Wednesday that he's been tested by the hard-driving Clinton campaign.

"The Clinton research operation is about as good as anybody's out there," he told a news conference. "I assure you that having engaged in a contest against them for the last year, that they've pulled out all the stops. ... We can take a punch. We're still standing."

On Saturday, Louisiana and Washington state hold two-party contests while Nebraska Democrats and Kansas Republicans make their picks. Then comes a larger series of two-party primaries in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia on Tuesday.

More than 168 Democratic delegates are at stake Tuesday, a sizable prize in two states and a district that are normally afterthoughts in nomination contests. Clinton, who plans to campaign in Virginia on Thursday, has been endorsed in Maryland by Gov. Martin O'Malley and Sen. Barbara Mikulski; Obama is backed by Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, and is expected to do well in largely black D.C. Republicans will award 116 delegates in the trio of races dubbed the Potomac Primary.

Romney enjoyed his first night at home in a month and then drove himself, his wife, Ann, and his son Craig to his office overlooking Boston Harbor for a strategy session with aides. "Got some good sleep," he said.

Exit polling indicated Obama and Clinton were each getting support from almost half of white men, marking a big improvement for the Illinois senator. Former Sen. John Edwards' departure from the Democratic race last week may have helped Obama with white males, who made up more than a quarter of Tuesday's Democratic voters from coast to coast.

More than four in 10 women and about the same number of whites also were supporting Obama. That represented a gain for him from most previous Democratic nominating contests this year, although he still trailed Clinton by more than 10 percentage points in both categories, a significant gap in a two-person race.

Democrats celebrated heavy turnout in several of their races and hoped they could bottle that electricity until the presidential campaign in the fall. As one measure, Clinton managed to get more votes in Minnesota than all that were cast in the 2004 Democratic caucuses in that state, despite her running a distant second to Obama.

Huckabee, who posted five Southern victories after being practically counted out of the contest, demurred when asked Wednesday if he'd be an irresistible running mate for McCain, the opponent he likes. "I still want to be the irresistible choice to be the president," he said on CBS' "The Early Show."

Despite his strong night, Huckabee trails both McCain and Romney in the delegate count.

Obama won 13 Super Tuesday states; Clinton, eight plus American Samoa. Clinton scored the advantage in delegates, bring her total to 845 to Obama's 765, by the latest accounting. The road ahead was long for the Democrats: It takes 2,025 delegates to claim their nomination.

Delegate tabulations continued Wednesday, possibly longer, and the victor in one race remained unsettled — the Democratic caucuses in New Mexico.

Clinton won the biggest state, California, capitalizing on backing from Hispanic voters. Obama scored victories in Alabama and Georgia on the strength of black support, and won a nail-biter in bellwether Missouri.

McCain's own victory in California dealt a crushing blow to his closest pursuer, Romney, a former Massachusetts governor.

"We've won some of the biggest states in the country," the Arizona senator told cheering supporters at a rally in Phoenix, hours before California fell his way. An underdog for months, he proclaimed himself the front-runner at last, and added. "I don't really mind it one bit."

In the competition that counted the most, the Arizona senator had 613 delegates, to 269 for Romney and 190 for Huckabee in incomplete counting. It takes 1,191 to win the GOP nomination.

Neither Democrat could plausibly claim an overall victory and didn't try.

Polling place interviews with voters suggested subtle shifts in the political landscape.

For the first time this year, McCain ran first in a few states among self-identified Republicans. As usual, he was running strongly among independents. Romney was getting the votes of about four in 10 people who described themselves as conservative. McCain was winning about one-third of that group, and Huckabee about one in five.

Overall, Clinton was winning only a slight edge among women and white voters, groups that she had won handily in earlier contests, according to preliminary results from interviews with voters in 16 states leaving polling places.

Obama was collecting the overwhelming majority of votes cast by blacks — a factor in victories in Alabama and Georgia.

Clinton's continued strong appeal among Hispanics — she was winning nearly six in 10 of their votes — was a big factor in her California triumph, and in her victory in Arizona, too.

McCain won in California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Missouri, Delaware and his home state of Arizona — each of them winner-take-all primaries. He also pocketed victories in Oklahoma and Illinois.

Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, won a series of Bible Belt victories, in Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee as well as his own home state. He also triumphed at the Republican West Virginia convention.

Romney won a home state victory in Massachusetts. He also took Utah, where fellow Mormons supported his candidacy. His superior organization produced caucus victories in North Dakota, Montana, Minnesota, Alaska and Colorado.

Democrats played out a historic struggle between two senators: Clinton, seeking to become the first female president, and Obama, hoping to become the first black to win the White House.

Clinton won at home in New York as well as in California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Arizona and Arkansas, where she was first lady for more than a decade. She also won the caucuses in American Samoa.

Obama won Connecticut, Georgia, Alabama, Delaware, Utah and his home state of Illinois. He prevailed in caucuses in North Dakota, Minnesota, Kansas, Idaho, Alaska and Colorado. His Missouri victory was so close in the vote total that there was no telling whether he or Clinton would end up with a majority of the state's 72 delegates.

New Mexico shut its vote counting operation until 11 a.m. EST, the Democratic race too close to know the winner.

The allocation of delegates lagged the vote count by hours. That was particularly true for the Democrats, who divided theirs roughly in proportion to the popular vote.

Nine of the Republican contests were winner take all, and that was where McCain piled up his lead.]]> Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:57:00 EST http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/331545 43.6666667 -79.416666743.6666667-79.4166667 http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/160093 Fidel Castro meeting with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and saying his recovery was "far from a lost battle," in the first images of the ailing leader shown in three months.

Castro stood and appeared alert in the 10-minute video clip, which state TV said was shot during Chavez's previously unannounced visit to Havana on Monday.

The video seemed to be aimed at knocking down recent rumors about Castro's health, including a report that he was in grave condition.

Castro looked heavier than in previous images that had showed him much more thin and frail. Dressed in a red, white and blue track suit, the 80-year-old was shown sitting and drinking juice.

"This also is far from being a lost battle," Castro said of his current health problems.

He noted that when his severe intestinal problems struck last summer he was still not fully recovered from a devastating October 2004 fall that severely injured a knee and a shoulder. "One after the other," Castro said of his health troubles.

Later in the video, Chavez was even more optimistic, saying Castro had already won the battle to recover his health. The Venezuelan president's brother, Education Minister Adan Chavez, was also seen in the video visiting Castro.

The broadcast came six months after Castro's July 31 announcement that he had undergone intestinal surgery and was provisionally ceding power to his younger brother Raul.

Castro had looked thinner and frailer in the last video images, which aired on Oct. 28.

The date that Tuesday's video was taken could not be immediately confirmed. In it, Chavez said the two-hour private meeting took place on Monday and ended at 3 p.m. on Jan 29. In Caracas, a presidential spokeswoman, speaking on customary condition of anonymity, confirmed that Chavez made a one-day visit to Havana on Monday.

On the video, Castro was also heard reading aloud a headline from a printout of an article dated Saturday from the Web version of Argentine newspaper Clarin.

Castro stunned the nation six months ago when he temporarily stepped aside for his younger brother, the 75-year-old defense minister. Since then, Raul Castro has led the nation at the head of a collaborative leadership that has kept the government running calmly in his brother's absence from public life.

Castro has not been seen in public since July 26 — five days before he stepped aside.

Cuban officials told visiting U.S. lawmakers last month that Castro does not have cancer or a terminal illness and will eventually return to public life, although it was not clear whether he would return to the same kind of absolute control as before.

In the latest video, Chavez said he found his friend to be "of good humor, with a good face and in good spirits." He said the pair discussed a variety of issues, including the world's energy crisis, and that Castro showed "much clarity, as always in his ideas and analysis."

A report in the Spanish newspaper El Pais earlier this month said the Cuban leader was in "very grave" condition. The paper, citing two unnamed medical sources from Gregorio Maranon hospital in Madrid, had reported Castro was still recovering after three failed operations and complications from an intestinal ailment common in older people called diverticulitis.

The hospital employs surgeon Jose Luis Garcia Sabrido, who flew to Cuba in December to treat Castro. The article's authors later said Garcia Sabrido was not among their sources and he later dismissed much of the report as half-truths and rumors.]]> Tue, 30 Jan 2007 21:18:00 EST http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/160093 43.6666667 -79.416666743.6666667-79.4166667 http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/85003 Saddam Hussein struggled briefly after American military guards handed him over to Iraqi executioners before dawn Saturday. But as his final moments approached and masked executioners slipped a black cloth and noose around his neck, he grew calm.
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In a final moment of defiance, he refused a hood to cover his eyes.

Hours after Saddam faced the same fate he was accused of inflicting on countless thousands during a quarter-century of ruthless power, Iraqi state television showed grainy video of what it said was his body, the head uncovered and the neck twisted at a sharp angle.

A man whose testimony helped lead to Saddam's conviction and execution before sunrise said he was shown the body because "everybody wanted to make sure that he was really executed."

"Now, he is in the garbage of history," said Jawad Abdul-Aziz, who lost his father, three brothers and 22 cousins in the reprisal killings that followed a botched 1982 assassination attempt against Saddam in the Shiite town of Dujail.

The post-execution footage showed the man identified as Saddam lying on a stretcher, covered in a white shroud. His neck and part of the shroud have what appear to be bloodstains. His eyes are closed.

Al-Arabiya satellite television reported Saturday night that a delegation including the governor of Salahuddin Province and the head of Saddam's clan retrieved his body from Baghdad and took it for burial near the executed dictator's hometown of Tikrit. The broadcaster reported the burial would take place Sunday. The report could not immediately be verified.

Earlier, in Baghdad's Shiite enclave of Sadr City, hundreds of people danced in the streets while others fired guns in the air to celebrate. Some hanged an effigy of Saddam. The government did not impose a round-the-clock curfew as it did last month when Saddam was convicted to thwart any surge in retaliatory violence.

It was a grim end for the 69-year-old leader who had vexed three U.S. presidents. Despite his ouster, Washington, its allies and the new Iraqi leaders remain mired in a fight to quell a stubborn insurgency by Saddam loyalists and a vicious sectarian conflict.

The execution took place during the year's deadliest month for U.S. troops, with the toll reaching 109. At least 2,998 members of the U.S. military have been killed since the
Iraq war began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

President Bush said in a statement issued from his ranch in Texas that bringing Saddam to justice "is an important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain and defend itself, and be an ally in the war on terror."

He said that the execution marks the "end of a difficult year for the Iraqi people and for our troops" and cautioned that Saddam's death will not halt the violence in Iraq.

Within hours of his death, bombings killed at least 68 people in Iraq, including one planted on a minibus that exploded in a fish market in a mostly Shiite town south of Baghdad.

Ali Hamza, a 30-year-old university professor, said he went outside to shoot his gun into the air after he learned of Saddam's death.

"Now all the victims' families will be happy because Saddam got his just sentence," said Hamza, who lives in Diwaniyah, a Shiite town 80 miles south of Baghdad.

But people in the Sunni-dominated city of Tikrit, once a power base of Saddam, lamented his death.

"The president, the leader Saddam Hussein is a martyr and God will put him along with other martyrs. Do not be sad nor complain because he has died the death of a holy warrior," said Sheik Yahya al-Attawi, a cleric at the Saddam Big Mosque.

Police blocked the entrances to Tikrit and said nobody was allowed to leave or enter the city for four days. Despite the security precaution, gunmen took to the streets of Tikrit, carrying pictures of Saddam, shooting into the air, and calling for vengeance.

Security forces also set up roadblocks at the entrance to another Sunni stronghold, Samarra, and a curfew was imposed after about 500 people took to the streets protesting the execution of Saddam.

A couple hundred people also protested the execution just outside the Anbar capital of Ramadi, and more than 2,000 people demonstrated in Adwar, the village south of Tikrit where Saddam was captured by U.S. troops hiding in an underground bunker.

In a statement, Saddam's lawyers said that in the aftermath of his death, "the world will know that Saddam Hussein lived honestly, died honestly, and maintained his principles."

"He did not lie when he declared his trial null," they said.

Saddam's half-brother Barzan Ibrahim and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, were not hanged along with their former leader as originally planned. Officials wanted to reserve the occasion for Saddam alone.

"We wanted him to be executed on a special day," National Security adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie told state-run al-Iraqiya television.

Sami al-Askari, the political adviser of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, told the AP that Saddam initially resisted when he was taken by Iraqi guards but was composed in his final moments.

He said Saddam was clad in a black suit, hat and shoes, rather than prison garb. His hat was removed and his hands tied shortly before the noose was slipped around his neck.

Saddam repeated a prayer after a Sunni Muslim cleric who was present.

"Saddam later was taken to the gallows and refused to have his head covered with a hood," al-Askari said. "Before the rope was put around his neck, Saddam shouted: 'God is great. The nation will be victorious and Palestine is Arab.'"

Iraqi state television showed footage of guards in ski masks placing a noose around Saddam's neck. Saddam appeared calm as he stood on the metal framework of the gallows. The footage cuts off just before the execution.

Saddam was executed at a former military intelligence headquarters in Baghdad's Shiite neighborhood of Kazimiyah, al-Askari said. During his regime, Saddam had numerous dissidents executed in the facility, located in a neighborhood that is home to the Iraqi capital's most important Shiite shrine — the Imam Kazim shrine.

The Iraqi prime minister's office released a statement that said Saddam's execution was a "strong lesson" to ruthless leaders who commit crimes against their own people.

"We strongly reject considering Saddam as a representative of any sect in Iraq because the tyrant only represented his evil soul," the statement said. "The door is still open for those whose hands are not tainted with the blood of innocent people to take part in the political process and work on rebuilding Iraq."

The execution came 56 days after a court convicted Saddam and sentenced him to death for his role in the killings of 148 Shiite Muslims from Dujail. Iraq's highest court rejected Saddam's appeal Monday and ordered him executed within 30 days.

A U.S. judge on Friday refused to stop Saddam's execution, rejecting a last-minute court challenge.

U.S. troops cheered as news of Saddam's execution appeared on television at the mess hall at Forward Operating Base Loyalty in eastern Baghdad. But some soldiers expressed doubt that Saddam's death would be a significant turning point for Iraq.

"First it was weapons of mass destruction. Then when there were none, it was that we had to find Saddam. We did that, but then it was that we had to put him on trial," said Spc. Thomas Sheck, 25, who is on his second tour in Iraq. "So now, what will be the next story they tell us to keep us over here?"

At his death, he was in the midst of a second trial, charged with genocide and other crimes for a 1987-88 military crackdown that killed an estimated 180,000 Kurds in northern Iraq. Experts said the trial of his co-defendants was likely to continue despite his execution.

Many people in Iraq's Shiite majority were eager to see the execution of a man whose Sunni Arab-dominated regime oppressed them and Kurds. Before the hanging, a mosque preacher in the Shiite holy city of Najaf on Friday called Saddam's execution "God's gift to Iraqis."

In a farewell message to Iraqis posted Wednesday on the Internet, Saddam said he was giving his life for his country as part of the struggle against the U.S. "Here, I offer my soul to God as a sacrifice, and if he wants, he will send it to heaven with the martyrs," he said.

One of Saddam's lawyers, Issam Ghazzawi, said the letter was written by Saddam on Nov. 5, the day he was convicted by an Iraqi tribunal in the Dujail killings.

Najeeb al-Nauimi, a member of Saddam's legal team, said U.S. authorities maintained physical custody of Saddam until the execution to prevent him being humiliated publicly or his corpse being mutilated, as has happened to previous Iraqi leaders deposed by force. He said they didn't want anything to happen to further inflame Sunni Arabs.

"This is the end of an era in Iraq," al-Nauimi said from Doha, Qatar. "The Baath regime ruled for 35 years. Saddam was vice president or president of Iraq during those years. For Iraqis, he will be very well remembered. Like a martyr, he died for the sake of his country."

Iraq's death penalty was suspended by the U.S. military after it toppled Saddam in 2003, but the new Iraqi government reinstated it two years later, saying executions would deter criminals.

Saddam's own regime used executions and extrajudicial killings as a tool of political repression, both to eliminate real or suspected political opponents and to maintain a reign of terror.

In the months after he seized power on July 16, 1979, he had hundreds of members of his own party and army officers slain. In 1996, he ordered the slaying of two sons-in-law who had defected to Jordan but returned to Baghdad after receiving guarantees of safety.

Saddam built Iraq into a one of the Arab world's most modern societies, but then plunged the country into an eight-year war with neighboring
Iran that killed hundreds of thousands of people on both sides and wrecked Iraq's economy.

When the U.S. invaded in 2003, Iraqis had been transformed from among the region's most prosperous people to some of its most impoverished.

___

Associated Press Writer Will Weissert contributed to this report.]]> Sat, 30 Dec 2006 15:38:00 EST http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/85003 43.6666667 -79.416666743.6666667-79.4166667 http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/70201
Texts of various motions put forward by federal parties for debate on the nationhood of Quebec and Quebecers:

Bloc Québécois: Motion for debate today in the House of Commons: "That this House recognize that the Québécois form a nation."

Conservatives: Motion for debate, likely Monday, in the House of Commons: "That this House recognize that the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada."

Liberals: Motion from the Quebec wing of the federal Liberal party being put forward for consideration at the leadership convention in Montreal next week: "Be it resolved that the Liberal Party of Canada recognizes the Quebec nation within Canada; and be it further resolved that the Liberal Party of Canada will create an expert task force with the mandate of reporting to the next leader of the party on possible ways and the appropriate timing to officialise this historic and social reality."]]> Thu, 23 Nov 2006 20:14:00 EST http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/70201 43.6666667 -79.416666743.6666667-79.4166667 http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/41253
One of the best documentaries ever made.

Somewhere around the mid-way point, this fascinating film moves off the beaten path into a dark area of America, one criss-crossed with secret roads and sinister people. Allen has been missing for 4.5 years, and a fellow documentary film-maker goes to find him. By the time the search leads to the basement of an Oklahoma monastery, and the discovery of an abandoned once-beloved car, the viewer realizes there will be no happy ending to this story. We find that Allen has been drawn into a sinister and sad world of cult theorists, and more and more creepy elements are brought forth to be revealed. An abandoned cabin in the mountain of Colorado provides further links; the approach and search of the house are terrifying in a way that it shouldn't be...after all, it's only a house, right? But the connections made to the apparent crime force the viewer to see everything through the lens of worst-case scenarios. The only sticking point? Why didn't we get to see any of Allen's unfinished films that he had been working on in Oklahoma?]]> Thu, 27 Jul 2006 13:11:00 EDT http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/41253 43.6666667 -79.416666743.6666667-79.4166667 http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/40644

From the UK Office series first season.


Here is the tab.

C, F , Am and G

verse

C F Am G
Pretty girl on the hood of a caddilac, yeah
C F Am G
Shes broken down on freeway 9
C F Am G
Take a look at her engine and start it and...
C F Am G
Gave a purr and then i rolled on by, bye bye.

Chorus
C F Am G
Free love on the free love freeway,
C F Am G
Love is free and the freeways long,
C F Am G
ive got some hot love on the hot love highway,
C F Am G
i aint going home cos my babys gone..



ok thats all i got, the verse should be mildly palm muted and all down strokes,
the chorus is strummed. the C chord should be played with the low E string being
freeted on the 3rd fret, and the F should be an open chord, leaving the high E
open, this basically makes it easier to move down from the C chord to the F. ok,
happy strumming!


"shes dead" "shes not dead"]]> Wed, 12 Jul 2006 12:01:00 EDT http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/40644 43.6666667 -79.416666743.6666667-79.4166667 http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/40621
Low-fat diets didn’t reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, colorectal cancer or invasive breast cancer, according to three large studies published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The researchers divided 48,835 women into two groups based on diet-- one group with 19,541 women consumed a low fat diet and the other group with 29,294 women consumed their usual diets ­-- and followed the women for 8.1 years.

The most significant result of the $415 million study is that low-fat diets don’t reduce heart disease risk. As the researchers put it, “Over [an average] of 8.1 years, a dietary intervention that reduced total fat intake and increased intake of vegetables, fruits and grains did not significantly reduce the risk of coronary heart disease, stroke or cardiovascular disease in postmenopausal women and achieved only modest effects on cardiovascular risk factors…”

Low-fat diets didn’t even improve heart health among the population of women who had heart disease at the beginning of the study. In fact, the low-fat diet regimen was associated with a slightly increased risk of heart disease among these women.

(Story continues below)

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Think about that the next time you turn down the scrumptious banana-pecan French toast with a side of sausage in favor of choking down some tasteless low-fat cereal with skim milk.

So how did the low-fat myth come to be so widely accepted by the public in the first place? For the last 30 years we’ve been constantly bombarded with the message that low-fat is healthy – a message first broadcast by government and public health nannies, and then reinforced on a daily basis by the food industry selling low-fat products at high prices and by pharmaceutical companies selling cholesterol-lowering drugs in an effort to turn us into a “Lipitor Nation.”

But as has been previously pointed out in this column, scientific study has never supported the dietary propaganda thrust upon us during the past three decades.

Politically correct dietary theory, for example, postulates that high-fat diets -- particularly diets high in animal and saturated fats – can raise cholesterol levels to unhealthy levels. But in the much-vaunted Framingham Heart Study involving 5,200 men and women who have been extensively studied in over 1,000 published reports since 1948, high cholesterol levels were not associated with increased heart disease risk after age 47.

After age 47, in fact, those whose cholesterol went down had the highest risk of a heart attack. “For each 1 mg/dl drop of cholesterol there was an 11 percent increase in coronary and total mortality,” reported the study's authors.

There are also the data from the ongoing highly-touted Nurses Health Study involving about 90,000 nurses studied since 1976 by Harvard University researchers. A 1997 interim report published in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that total fat intake, animal fat intake, saturated fat intake and cholesterol intake weren’t associated with coronary heart disease.

Then just last a month, a study published in the Jan. 4 Journal of the American Medical Association involving the same group of women in the current study reported that low fat diets were associated with only moderate and temporary weight loss – an average of 4.8 pounds after the first year, after which most of the weight was regained.

None of this is to say that there aren’t some people with certain genetic backgrounds or medical conditions who might benefit from certain physician-prescribed dietary changes, but generally speaking, low-fat diets don’t appear to confer any significant health benefits that are detectable on a population scale.

“Low-fat,” of course, is not the only dietary myth of the last 30 years that has been debunked – low-salt and high-fiber diets have also been exposed as junk science.

A 2005 analysis of 13 previous studies involving 725,000 individuals published in the Dec. 14 Journal of the American Medical Association reported that high fiber diets did not reduce the risk of colon cancer.

Since 1995, 10 studies have examined whether lower sodium diets produce health benefits. Not a single one of those studies showed that lower sodium diets improved health outcomes for the general population.

What are some other dietary myths that may soon go by the wayside? The sugar scare is a prime candidate. Researchers have been trying for years to link sugar consumption with type 2 diabetes, and obesity in adults and children -- without success.

Another endangered scare involves so-called “trans fats” – vegetables oils altered to be firm at room temperature. In much the same mindless fashion that we were goaded into abandoning butter in the 1970s for high-trans fat margarines, we are now being pushed to consume only low-trans fat margarines -- even though no evidence indicates that trans fats are harmful or that a diet low in trans fats provides any health benefits.

The unfortunate fact is that, when it comes to diet and health, we’ve been misinformed, ripped off and unnecessarily medicated by junk scientists, behavior-control nannies and unscrupulous marketers in the government, public health community and the food and pharmaceutical industries. And, of course, let’s not forget the media that seldom miss opportunities to pump health scares and scams.]]> Tue, 11 Jul 2006 17:20:00 EDT http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/40621 43.6666667 -79.416666743.6666667-79.4166667 http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/40620
We thought that since there is long-standing, intense public interest in these topics and that vast sums of public and private monies are being thrown at the much-dreaded "problem" of "global warming," there should be a wealth of quality explanations and graphics to which we can point readers to alleviate their confusion.

That was about the time that our quick project and quiet weekend went awry very quickly.

Who would have thought so many "issue" sites, environment sites and, yes, government sites, could be hosting so much utter garbage on a topic subject to such intense scrutiny? Who could have imagined having to spend several hours wading through searches to find a few simple graphics correctly expressing the greenhouse effect? Who knew that so many blowhards are out there pontificating from complete ignorance?

Some of the bad descriptions appear to be poor efforts at simplifying the material to suit grade school course work and the like, but that does not make them any more acceptable. Obviously a slight rethink of this project was necessary. We will now try to deliver an extremely simplified version of how this greenhouse thing actually works and some indication of what might be expected from what is known about the Earth and what has been measured, rather than simply guessed about.
Basic misconceptions that must be addressed include:
Does the Earth's atmosphere primarily behave like an actual greenhouse?

No. The term "greenhouse effect" is unfortunate since it often results in a totally false impression of the activity of so-called "greenhouse gases." An actual greenhouse works as a physical barrier to convection (the transfer of heat by currents in a fluid) while the atmosphere facilitates convection. So-called "greenhouse gases" in the Earth's atmosphere do not act as a barrier to convection so the impression of actual greenhouse-like activity in the Earth's atmosphere is wrong.

For an expanded description of physical greenhouses see Sue Ann Bowling's ASF piece here.

Supplemental, April 25: A couple of people have written challenging whether physical greenhouses function as convection barriers since they do radiate and so does the atmosphere - apparently we need to expand on this point. To begin with, a physical greenhouse is simply a contained subset of the atmosphere - it is not bounded by the near-vacuum of space as is the planet's atmosphere and so has rather different properties. The proof that convection containment is critical to the function of physical greenhouses is that it is possible to create structures with similar radiative properties, one which allows convective activity between the structure and unconstrained atmosphere and one which does not. Only the structure constraining internal-external convection will function as an effective greenhouse. Greenhouse gases categorically do not inhibit convective activity and so are not like a physical greenhouse.
Forgetting about the unfortunate-but-commonly-used terminology for a moment, is the so-called 'greenhouse effect' bad?

Only if you think undesirable a habitable planet with relatively stable temperature. Our moon, lacking greenhouse effect, makes a kind of comparison even though lack of atmosphere makes it uninhabitable regardless of temperature. The moon's mean surface temperature by day is 107 °C (225 °F) and by night drops to -153 °C (-243 °F). The Lunar temperature increases about 260 °C from just before dawn to Lunar noon. So, if you fancy such a temperature range then a greenhouse effect-free world is for you, otherwise you might want to be pleased we have it here on Earth.
How much does the so-called 'greenhouse effect' warm the Earth?

It's estimated that the Earth's surface would be about -18 °C (0 °F, 255 K) with atmosphere and clouds but without the greenhouse effect and that the (we'll call it "natural") greenhouse effect raises the Earth's temperature by ~33 °C (59 °F). Devoid of atmosphere it would actually be a less cold -1 °C (272 K) because the first calculation strangely includes 31% reflection of solar radiation by clouds (which could obviously not occur without an atmosphere) while clouds actually add significantly to the greenhouse effect - for simplicity, just stick with ~33 °C.

[Edited for clarity, April 24] Theoretically, if the planet's surface cooled by radiation alone, then the greenhouse-induced surface temperature would be much warmer, about 350 K (77 °C), but atmospheric motion (convective towers carrying latent and sensible heat upwards and large scale circulation carrying it both upwards and polewards) significantly increase the "escape" of energy to space, leaving Earth's surface more than 60 °C cooler than a static atmosphere would do.

So, despite there being far more greenhouse gas in the atmosphere than required to achieve the current greenhouse effect, and that has been so since before humans discovered fire, evapo-transpiration and thermals transport heat higher in the atmosphere where radiation to space is increased. This is why Earth remains about 15 °C rather than about 77 °C.
Wait a minute! Those aren't the numbers I learned!

Ah! Someone who remembers their science classes eh? Well, you got us. Reference works frequently list the planet's mean surface temperature as 16 °C (61 °F); sometimes 15 °C (59 °F) is mentioned and yes, these are about the expected temperatures by calculation -- in the 1960s and 1970s numbers as high as 65 °F (18 °C) were popular but we haven't seen those for some time. Here we run into a little bit of a problem, however -- taking the Earth's temperature is no trivial task. In fact, even defining precisely what we mean by the absolute surface air temperature is challenging. Current global temperature anomalies (the amount of warming or cooling reported) are estimated against an expected average of 14 °C (57 °F) -- the guess-timated mean temperature over the period 1961-1990.
Are greenhouse gases like a blanket around the Earth?

No, for the same reason that they don't behave like an actual greenhouse, they simply do not behave as a barrier to convective activity and so aren't "like a blanket."
Do greenhouse gases trap the sun's radiation/'heat'?

Not to any great extent. The Sun, being much hotter than Earth, emits high energy, shortwave radiation while Earth, in response, emits longwave radiation. The cooler the portion of the Earth or atmosphere, the lower energy intensity, longer wave radiation is emitted -- that old white hot, yellow hot, red hot thing. Greenhouse gases are generally transparent to incoming solar radiation -- they let most solar radiation through -- and opaque to Earth's radiation -- they absorb and transfer the Earth's infrared radiation by a variety of means. That said, oxygen and ozone do absorb incoming Ultraviolet (UV) radiation (<0.3µm) and water, ozone, oxygen and, to a tiny extent, carbon dioxide also absorb a small amount of incoming shortwave below the 3 micron (µm) wavelength range (see graphic) and it is mostly the UV absorption by ozone that causes warming in the stratosphere above the tropopause. The tropopause is the boundary between the troposphere (which is based at the earth's surface and has temperature that decreases with height, extending about 10-50Km or 6-30 miles above the surface) and the stratosphere (which is a stable region of very low levels of vertical mixing above the troposphere).

A representation of relative emission wavelengths can be seen on the following graphic.

Greenhouse gases, therefore, do not "trap heat," but could be fairly described as delaying the energy transfer from Earth to space. "Trapping heat" implies that the energy is stuck in the system forever -- this is a false notion. Greenhouse gases do not emit energy in the same bandwidth that they absorb energy, and thus emissions from carbon dioxide are not absorbed by carbon dioxide. While energy may be delayed on its inevitable journey back to space, it will eventually be emitted regardless of the number of intervening stages.
Do greenhouse gases 'reradiate' the infrared radiation they absorb?

This is an unfortunate expression that is all too common. Absorbed radiation is transformed to either kinetic or potential energy and, as such, no longer exists in its original form -- hence, it cannot be "reradiated." When molecules absorb infrared radiation they are said to become excited ("hot"). Such molecules can release energy usually in one of three ways: by chemical reaction (uncommon, since greenhouse gases are pretty stable and non-reactive); quenching (transferring energy to cooler molecules, increasing their temperature) and; emission (usually at lower energy [longer wavelength] radiation than the energy previously absorbed). Once more, since the absorbed energy has been transformed it cannot be said to be "reradiated".
Is 'greenhouse' the same as 'global warming'?

Absolutely not. We'll look at both terms below.
What about 'climate change' then?

That's a different thing altogether. Change is what the climate is always doing and is the result of our planet's orbital eccentricities, axial wobble, solar brightness variation, cosmic ray flux, etc.. There are also plausible terrestrial drivers of climate change too, including super volcanic events and tectonic movement, but these are not in the realm of anthropogenic (manmade) effects and so we won't looking at them here.

The global mean temperature over which there has been so much obsession is only one part of climate -- for example, how wet or dry the climate happens to be is probably of far greater significance than a simple mean temperature -- in fact, it's not even clear that a global mean temperature is a particularly useful metric. However, it is the cause of great angst at present so it will remain the focus of this document for that reason alone.
Graphics for a simple understanding of the greenhouse effect

This first graphic meets the criteria of being simple, doesn't say things like "reradiated" (as so many do), specifically includes water vapor and clouds as both absorbers and emitters (remarkably few greenhouse graphics do so) and is reasonably proportionate.

Big note here -- we were unable to find useful graphics adequately expressing convection, which, as we highlighted above, keeps the planet more than 60 °C cooler than would otherwise be the case.

The next graphic provides an indication of the infrared component of the planetary radiation budget. Note that these are expressed as percentages and that the 100% incoming and outgoing solar energy balance is not the whole story -- there is additional energy transfer in progress between the atmosphere and surface, and surface and atmosphere. This is the natural greenhouse effect that makes life as we know it possible on Earth. (Don't worry if you don't quite follow the numbers, we'll provide a "map" view below.)

The preceding view is very pretty and contains lots of numbers but we can perhaps get a better look at what is going on from a different representation. The following is from Earth’s Annual Global Mean Energy Budget (Kiehl and Trenberth, 1997). This is expressed in Watts per square meter (Wm-2) and tells the same story of the incoming 342 Wm-2 = outgoing (235 + 107 Wm-2). Note that there is relatively little direct reflection and radiation from surface to space but significant exchange via the atmosphere. Note further that the surface receives almost twice the energy from the atmosphere as it does directly from the sun. The exchange between surface, atmosphere and surface is what is meant by greenhouse effect. (Those not enjoying lots of numbers or missing primary colors might prefer viewing this simplified Earth energy budget)

It might also help novices to conceive of the atmosphere and the natural greenhouse effect as a kind of a metaphorical energy flow control valve. There's a lot of energy bouncing around, but the amount of energy entering the system and the amount leaving is fairly tightly constrained. The atmosphere is acting as a kind of check valve, slowing the loss of energy to space but the net incoming (324 + 168 Wm-2) = net outgoing (390 + 78 + 24 Wm-2).
Okay, if that's greenhouse, what is 'global warming'?

While greenhouse is the "what," "global warming" really refers to the "how much." Populist overuse and abuse has largely rendered "global warming" meaningless -- what is really meant is "enhanced greenhouse" -- yes, another term but don't worry, we'll explain this one easily and quickly. Since Arrhenius began speculating a century ago about low CO2 levels and ice ages the hypothesis of temperature relation to atmospheric carbon dioxide has drifted in and out of scientific focus. At present it is the focus of a great deal of attention. "Enhanced greenhouse" means the additional delay in energy loss to space induced by the fraction of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases released by humans before those gases are removed from the atmosphere by breakdown and/or biological activity.
So, greenhouse is all about carbon dioxide, right?

Wrong. The most important players on the greenhouse stage are water vapor and clouds. Carbon dioxide has been increased to about 0.038% of the atmosphere (possibly from about 0.028% pre-Industrial Revolution) while water in its various forms ranges from 0% to 4% of the atmosphere and its properties vary by what form it is in and even at what altitude it is found in the atmosphere. In simple terms, however, the bulk of Earth's greenhouse effect is due to water vapor by virtue of its abundance. Water accounts for about 90% of the Earth's greenhouse effect -- perhaps 70% is due to water vapor and about 20% due to clouds (mostly water droplets), some estimates put water as high as 95% of Earth's total greenhouse effect. The remaining portion comes from carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane, ozone and miscellaneous other "minor greenhouse gases." As an example of the relative importance of water it should be noted that changes in the relative humidity on the order of 1.3-4% are equivalent to the effect of doubling CO2.

The adjacent radiation absorption window graphic gives an idea of which molecules absorb various wavelengths. Where the shaded portions completely span between 2 lines it indicates that particular wavelength is fully absorbed and the "window" is saturated (or said to be "closed"). Rather obviously, once a window is saturated adding more gases with the same properties will do nothing. This point seems to cause confusion for some people so perhaps consider multiple shades on a window with each shade blocking half the light coming through - pull one shade and you reduce the light source by half, pull another so you block half the light coming through the first shade, etc.. The effect of each shade diminishes as you keep adding more and eventually you get no additional effect - you have saturated or blocked the radiation window and it makes no difference if you double or quadruple the number of shades again.
Well, I heard that carbon dioxide is bad -- it's pollution, isn't it?

There seem to be a few things that your informant forgot to tell you -- like carbon dioxide being an essential trace gas that underpins the bulk of the global food web. Estimates vary, but somewhere around 15% seems to be the common number cited for the increase in global food crop yields due to aerial fertilization with increased carbon dioxide since 1950. This increase has both helped avoid a Malthusian disaster and preserved or returned enormous tracts of marginal land as wildlife habitat that would otherwise have had to be put under the plow in an attempt to feed the growing global population. Commercial growers deliberately generate CO2 and increase its levels in agricultural greenhouses to between 700ppmv and 1,000ppmv to increase productivity and improve the water efficiency of food crops far beyond those in the somewhat carbon-starved open atmosphere. CO2 feeds the forests, grows more usable lumber in timber lots meaning there is less pressure to cut old growth or push into "natural" wildlife habitat, makes plants more water efficient helping to beat back the encroaching deserts in Africa and Asia and generally increases bio-productivity. If it's "pollution," then it's pollution the natural world exploits extremely well and to great profit. Doesn't sound too bad to us.
But we're responsible for all the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect?

Gracious no! Humans can only claim responsibility, if that's the word, for abut 3.4% of carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere annually, the rest of it is all natural (you can see the IPCC representation of the natural carbon cycle and human perturbation here or a simple schematic from Woods Hole here). Half our estimated emissions fail to accumulate in the atmosphere," "disappearing" into sinks as yet undetermined. Humans' total accumulated carbon contribution could account for perhaps 25% of the total non-water greenhouse gases (that is, accounting for all the increase since the Industrial Revolution regardless of source and irrespective of whether warming from any cause might result in an increase in natural emission to atmosphere -- we're simply claiming the lot as anthropogenic or human-caused here).

Clarification June 4: the mention of 25% of total non-water greenhouse effect above and the following mention of 2.5% of total greenhouse effect has confused a few readers, leading to some e-mails suspecting one or the other to be a typographical error. The figures are correct. Recall that water vapor accounts for about 70% and clouds (mostly water droplets) accounts for another 20%, thus water in it's various forms is 90% of the greenhouse effect, leaving 10% for non-water greenhouse effect. Of this remaining 10%, mainly atmospheric carbon, humans might be responsible for 25% of the total accumulated atmospheric carbon, thus 0.25 x 0.1 = 0.025 x 100 = 2.5% of the total greenhouse effect.
Ah, we've added 2.5% to the total greenhouse effect then?

Not exactly, if it were such a simple accumulation, we could easily determine exactly how much Earth would warm from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 (not much) and certainly that would be an improvement on the silly figures bandied about. Theoretically, in a dry atmosphere, carbon dioxide could absorb about three times more energy than it actually does, as could clouds in the absence of all other greenhouse gases -- look at it as there already being "competition" for available suitable longwave radiation (energy these gases can absorb), if you like. Readers should be aware that the temperature effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide is logarithmic (that means there is a diminishing response as you keep adding more, like the additional window shade example, above). If we consider the warming effect of the pre-Industrial Revolution atmospheric carbon dioxide (about 280 parts per million by volume or ppmv) as 1, then the first half of that heating was delivered by about 20ppmv (0.002% of atmosphere) while the second half required an additional 260ppmv (0.026%). To double the pre-Industrial Revolution warming from CO2 alone would require about 90,000ppmv (9%) but we'd never see it - CO2 becomes toxic at around 6,000ppmv (0.6%, although humans have absolutely no prospect of achieving such concentrations).
Well, how much does carbon dioxide heat the Earth?

Oh my, we were afraid you were going to ask that. Because so many of the atmospheric processes are still being sorted out and quantified this is a non-trivial task. But alright, here goes.

What we can do is plot some of the more common estimates -- note that these are something of a curve-fitting exercise on our part because we don't have the full papers and workings at hand. Stay with us while we run through a couple of rough sketch graphs, following which we'll try a different approach to see if we can't narrow the possibilities.

co2greenhouse-X2.png (16665 bytes) We'll offer three of the more commonly used and/or discussed estimates for the amount of cooling Earth would experience for a hypothetical zero-CO2, cloud-free atmosphere; Lindzen (5.3 °C clear sky, 3.53 °C with 40% cloud), along with Charnock Shine (12 °C clear sky), CS are the big number guys in the estimation game (both from Physics Today, 1995) and Kondratjew Moskalenko (7.2 °C, commonly cited but we are not sure why, perhaps because Houghton used their estimate in his book, 'The Global Climate', 1984) - here these estimates are simply scripted up to produce the following graphs and the numbers are imprecise, merely adequate to give everyone a reasonable look at how carbon dioxide fits into the picture. Note also that there is still dispute over whether water would (does) act as a positive or negative "feedback" (multiplier effect) since water vapor and droplets (clouds) affect both incoming Solar radiation and outgoing Earth radiation.

Our simple script is logarithmic (remember our example of adding more shades over a window) but does not allow for complete saturation of radiative wavelengths, likely increases in evapo-transpirative cooling, increases in albedo (bright clouds reflecting more incoming solar radiation) nor any variation by latitude and so will progressively overestimate potential warming from CO2 alone. No matter, it does quite well enough to demonstrate the principle.

co2greenhouse-X4.png (17247 bytes) You can see how much this little script has overshot the mark since Lindzen states explicitly that a doubling from 300ppmv to 600ppmv of atmospheric carbon dioxide would result in only 0.5 °C warming. Rather obviously, Lindzen's calculations do not suggest a particularly large greenhouse influence on post-Industrial Revolution temperatures and, significantly, this does not include clouds, so CO2 would really only be a fraction of the total effect shown (Lindzen states 0.22 °C if calculated with 40% cloud cover). Despite our over-estimation of the numbers on the graph it should be apparent there is only moderate warming potential from carbon dioxide emissions. These have all been plotted simultaneously so you can see the range of estimates for incremental change in temperature driven by greenhouse gases and below we show for a quadrupling of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas relative to pre-Industrial Revolution levels.

globe_west_540.jpg (66065 bytes) globe_east_540.jpg (61649 bytes) Update May 14: we've had a few people wonder why we "allow" claims of 40% cloud cover as though such was an outrageous claim -- what can we say? These thumbnails link to NASA's famous Blue Marble composites (low resolution versions) and you can find plenty more Earth images on their Visible Earth site. end update.

Since some people are not familiar with logarithmic effect, we'll just point out a few features from the above graphs. Note the diminishing effect in all cases -- the first half of pre-IR greenhouse-driven temperature increment in each estimate is achieved by less than 20 parts per million carbon dioxide (20ppmv CO2), it then took adding thirteen times as much again to repeat the performance (to 280ppmv). The estimated temperature increment range for a doubling of pre-IR CO2 (graphed as 300ppmv to 600ppmv) is just +0.6 °C to +1.5 °C and for a quadrupling (to 1200ppmv) +1.3 °C to +2.9 °C.
Lots of numbers, which ones fit what we think we know of the Earth's greenhouse effect?

Let's try working backwards for a moment. The Earth's greenhouse effect is commonly estimated at 33 °C and these calculations simply assume that to be true. If water vapor accounts for 70% and clouds another 20% then we have 10% left for carbon dioxide and the ubiquitous "other" GHGs. Lindzen's 3.53 °C cooling potential for complete removal of CO2 would then seem to fit the bill fairly adequately at around 10.7% of the total effect, while there's really not room for the larger estimates. Note, however, that carbon dioxide is generally reckoned to account for between 4.2% and 8.4% of Earth's greenhouse effect because water vapor and clouds also behave differently at different concentrations and temperatures (we warned you this wasn't linear).

If, on the other hand, we assume Charnock and Shine are closer to the mark then ~36% of Earth's greenhouse effect would be driven by CO2. This is intuitively unreasonable since water is both prolific and has absorption windows overlapping those of carbon dioxide to a large extent. Given that water covers more than 70% of the globe and that the lower atmosphere over water tends to be relatively well supplied with water both as vapor and clouds and further given that water is the dominant absorber in wavelengths expected in the warmer regions, such as in the tropics where water is hugely prolific and where significant greenhouse warming occurs, it simply does not seem reasonable to expect CO2 to preferentially absorb more than one-third of the available energy. This suggests (but does not prove) that Lindzen is likely to be the nearest estimate from those we've plotted above.

Note that if you discount all other possible drivers of global temperature change -- meaning that humanity has completely taken over from all natural effects that were operating until that time (highly unlikely) -- then the estimate of Charnock Shine neatly fits observed warming over the period. If their massive estimate of greenhouse effect from carbon dioxide is true then a worst case doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide will still only produce a total warming under 1.5 °C (and we're thought to be almost half-way there already). This still does not suggest a major enhanced greenhouse catastrophe.
If that's all the anticipated greenhouse effect, where do the big warming estimates come from?

Ah, this is where it gets rather contentious because the big warming numbers come not from measurements but from computer models. These computer models and their output are passionately defended by the modeling clique and frequently derided by empiricists -- but the bottom line is that models make an enormous range of assumptions. Whether all the assumptions, tweaks and parameter adjustments really collectively add up to a realistic representation of the atmosphere is open to some conjecture (current climate models do not model "natural" climatic variation very well), but there is no evidence yet that they can predict the future with any greater certainty than a pack of Tarot cards. Moreover, humans do a lot besides emitting greenhouse gases, changing vegetation and transpiration rates through agriculture, for example, and many effects expected to both increase and decrease regional temperatures are not included in these models.

Regardless, climate models are made interesting by the inclusion of "positive feedbacks" (multiplier effects) so that a small temperature increment expected from increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide invokes large increases in water vapor, which seem to produce exponential rather than logarithmic temperature response in the models. It appears to have become something of a game to see who can add in the most creative feedback mechanisms to produce the scariest warming scenarios from their models but there remains no evidence the planet includes any such effects or behaves in a similar manner.

Update May 14: There has been some claim we are ignoring "self-evident" positive feedbacks, which we'd be delighted to highlight if only someone could point to any such empirical measure. The bottom line, however, is that the IPCC estimates a trivial 0.6 °C ± 0.2 °C warming during the Twentieth Century and both the GHCN-ERSST Data Set and the HadCRUT2v Data Set record the period of the 19-teens through mid-1940s as having a global trend of +0.13 °C/decade for a net warming of 0.45 °C -- leaving a mere 0.15 °C ± 0.2 °C net warming potential for the post-WWII period of significant carbon emission from fossil fuel use. It is evident, to us at least, that if positive feedback mechanisms exist (entirely plausible) then their effect is negligible or mitigated by negative feedback mechanisms (equally plausible). Unlike modelers, who alter their virtual worlds at whim, we can only measure what the world actually does, and there simply isn't room in the measured change for the existence of significant unmitigated positive feedbacks. -- end update.

As an example of how mileage may vary, as they say, we've reproduced here a table of comparisons between 108 model guess-timations for a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide compiled by Kacholia and Reck, published in 1997. Note that the range spans from 0.2 °C to 6.3 °C and that the same modelers get large variations as they play with their model parameters, e.g. Washington and Meehl show listings of 1.3 °C; 1.4 °C–3.5 °C; 1.6 °C; 4.0 °C and back to 1.6 °C over the course of a decade (not highlighted as being egregious or any such thing, just frequent in this list). Charnock and Shine appear in this list (1993) with estimations of 1.5 °C–2.4 °C and we derive their 1995 discussion in Physics Today as 1.46 °C so we're in the ballpark and they may have reduced their estimate as Lindzen seems to have done, listed here from 1982 as 1.46 °C–1.93 °C and stating explicitly in the same Physics Today discussion that he estimated 0.5 °C for clear sky conditions and just 0.22 °C when including 40% cloud cover.

Unfortunately there has been no narrowing of the estimated range of "expected" warming from a doubling of CO2 -- in fact the range has widened even further as ever more players attempt to stand out in a crowded publication field. It isn't that the physics of carbon dioxide's radiative properties keep changing, rather that ever more imaginative "feedbacks" are shunted into the positive column to make model output more interesting. The bottom line is that you need to stuff a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere to get much response as more of the absorptive bands near saturation.
Why do we suspect the big warming numbers are likely wrong?

Actually, you can play with some parameters and work it out for yourselves. Since the really big guesses made by the IPCC and some truly bizarre output by climateprediction.net (CPN) are at least linear, if not exponential in their response to changes in minor trace gases we can work backwards and below you will find a pair of calculators so you can have a go.

Update: we didn't even manage to post this yet and poor old CPN has suffered a major embarrassment: Error discovered in the BBC Climate Change Experiment. So now even they know they're wildly over-guess-timating. The BBC is advising those they dragooned into the project that their model runs will be restarting here. Meanwhile, Red Tops like The Inquirer are mischievously postulating "With around 200,000 PCs running the experiment non-stop for two months, it looks very much as if the BBC experiment is making more of a contribution to global warming than scientific knowledge." Fortunately, the real world is not so easily perturbed. End update.

At left we have a linear calculator. To know how it works you just have to remember that the Earth is about 15 °C, so that's the output target you are aiming at producing at the bottom of the calculator. You know that carbon dioxide accounts for something less than 10% of the Earth's greenhouse effect so your first input is going to be a number less than or equal to that (in fact, we've limited the calculator so any greater input will be calculated as 10% and it will ignore any attempted input that is not greater than zero). The second parameter is the guess-timated warming. The output produced will be what the current global mean temperature must be for the linear increase to be as input.

At right we have a logarithmic calculator so you can play with the atmosphere to your heart's content. The calculator will always assume a base of 33 °C for the starting net greenhouse effect - it's limited to a max of 10% greenhouse effect from CO2 and a minimum of 2ppmv CO2 so you can really have a play with the atmosphere and logarithmic effect. Notice how doubling small concentrations of carbon dioxide gives large responses while the reverse also applies - enjoy! When you are finished we have some more information below the calculators.



How did you go? No? Oh well, try 4.2% of greenhouse effect for a net warming of 1.4 °C for the linear calculator.
Well, why is the planet warming so catastrophically if it's not CO2 then?

Who says it is warming catastrophically? Humans have only been trying to measure the temperature fairly consistently since about 1880, during which time we think the world may have warmed by about +0.6 °C ± 0.2 °C. As we've already pointed out, the estimate of warming is less than the error margin on our ability to take the Earth's temperature, generally given as 14 °C ± 0.7 °C for the average 1961-1990 while the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) suggest 13.9 °C for their average 1880-2004. We are pretty sure it was cold before the 1880 commencement of record and we would probably not handle the situation too well if such conditions returned but there has been no demonstrable catastrophic warming while people have been trying to measure the planet's temperature. If we have really been measuring a warming episode as we think we have, then setting new records for "hottest ever in recorded history" should happen just about every year -- although half a degree over a century is hardly something to write home about -- so there's really nothing exciting about scoring the highest number when looking at such a short history.

At risk of belaboring the point, the following data is from the merged land air and sea surface temperature data set (based on data from the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) of land temperatures and the Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (COADS) of SST data). This is the Time series: Temperature January-December, 1880 - 2005: Global Trend: 0.04 °C/decade (for the arithmetically-challenged that's 12.5 decades for a total of +0.5 °C since 1880). The land temperature-only data (less than 30% of the planet and usually measured around cities) yields a trend of 0.07 °C/decade over the same period for a total increment of 0.875 °C.

A lot of people seem to like an idea of a specific temperature number so here's the National Climatic Data Center's monthly mean temperature record. Rather obviously seasonal change throughout the year dwarfs net increment over one and one-quarter centuries.

While we are talking about thermometry and measured near-surface temperatures we must underline that these accumulate to mere estimates and are fraught with difficulties. Seven-tenths of the globe's surface is water and historical temperature series from these regions are largely based on sailors tossing a bucket on a rope over the side and then dangling a thermometer in the water hauled aboard, so coverage is basically from sea lanes and measurement somewhat, shall we say, agricultural. Then there's the problems introduced by discontinuity in local records as observation points move over time or small towns cease to exist altogether, even gardens or the growth of adjacent trees might influence how air flows around a specific recording point and then there's changes in equipment to take into account. Calculating what the temperature is, let alone what it has been, is no trivial task and then accumulating myriad changing locales to a global amalgam leaves much room for error.

We briefly mentioned above that much of the temperature record is derived from measurement taken where people happen to be and thus there is an increasingly urban nature to the temperature record as rural recording sites have ceased to operate, especially over the last three decades or so. To some extent this is due to meteorological satellites as there is no longer a need to maintain remote observation outposts for the purpose of deriving surface-based weather forecasts, hence the urbanization of the near-surface temperature record. The significance of this is that there is an increasing difference between the temperatures found in the built environment and surrounding land surface - it's called the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHIE). Berkeley Lab have a good example here.

Armagh-CET.gif (26002 bytes) To what extent UHIE is influencing the global temperature trends we think we are measuring remains uncertain. Although curators of global temperature datasets tend to claim the effect has been eliminated through adjustments to the record, or that it is irrelevant, such claims are not entirely convincing.

There are regions where temperature records have been maintained for much longer than the 1880 commencement usually seen and these make interesting comparators. Additionally, we have some available rural and urban records from similar regions that can be viewed in parallel where we might expect similar trends if urban influence has genuinely been removed from the record. Alongside we have an example of the Armagh Observatory and Central England Temperature trends compared. Since there is no obvious reason carbon dioxide would behave differently in Northern Ireland than it does in Central England we must at least entertain the suspicion other factors are in play.

Radiosonde.gif (31477 bytes) In addition to relatively subtle disparity in trends between locations we have measurements which are likely less influenced by UHIE, those taken actually in the atmosphere by instrument packs carried aloft by meteorological balloons. At left is the radiosonde record from 1958-2004 (latest we have available).

temp_dep49-04.jpg (99280 bytes) At right we have the Alaskan surface record classically highlighting the effect of the PDO phase shift. There is no plausible means by which accumulating greenhouse gas could effectively act as a major warming agent in one year but not in the preceding or subsequent years. There are many other datasets and attempts at measuring the temperature of the Earth ranging from satellite-mounted Microwave Sounding Units (MSUs) to meteorological station near-surface thermometer records and a comprehensive collection of these can be found here on JunkScience.com.

We would be remiss if we did not at least mention the infamous "hockey stick" representation of global temperature as estimated for Earth's recent history. The graphic linked at left comes from the IPCC's Third Assessment Report (TAR). The red "blade" section of the graphic is the same data as depicted in red on the graphic linked below, right and serves as an object lesson - always check the scale of depiction.

Notice that the graphic does not show absolute Central England Temperature as does the Armagh comparison above. Of particular significance is that the CET contains abrupt warming episodes of similar or greater magnitude early in each of the previous centuries. While it appears that the CET makes a fair proxy for Northern Hemisphere temperatures as derived by Jones and Mann this is merely speculative and constitutes no proof. It does, however, suggest great caution is warranted before attempting to extrapolate trends from a mere century or so of temperature data.

What caused the apparently massive temperature leap at the beginning of the 18th Century? It certainly wasn't industrialization, that hadn't happened yet. If such changes appear in the record during recent periods when people can not have caused them then they are by definition "natural" and, if such natural changes are evident in recent history, why are we so fixated on carbon dioxide as a "culprit" driving lesser warming now?

Finally, it is worth wondering why, with some three and one-half centuries of population growth, development and urbanization depicted in the Central England Temperature series, recent "chart-toppers" have managed to elevate top temperatures by a paltry 0.16 °C over those of the early 1730s. The vast majority of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide has taken place over the seventy years since the Second World War and if CO2 were a significant driver of temperature change we would expect those years to be almost exclusively represented in the highest temperatures and yet fewer than half manage to make the warmest one-hundred list. The post hoc ergo propter hoc association of carbon dioxide is observed to increase, warmer temperatures are measured, therefore carbon dioxide warms the planet is a very poor basis for the current fixation.
So, humans aren't affecting the planet or its temperature.

Whoa! We didn't say that at all. This discussion is on greenhouse effect and possible enhanced greenhouse, but that's a long way from anthropogenic effect in total. Whether or not they really affect global mean temperature, human endeavors have significant local effects. The heat island effect mentioned above or the local effect of increased water vapor from large scale irrigation schemes would be good examples. Then there's land use change which can be variable depending on latitude -- replacing dark forest with wheat fields might significantly affect local albedo and cooling one region while denying shade in a more heavily irradiated region might cause ground heating through increased absorption. There are many effects in a hugely complex system, some will be negative, some positive and all represent change, although that is neither good nor bad in and of itself. That humans affect the region of their activities is true -- that enhanced greenhouse from human activity is known to be a current or imminent catastrophe is not. And this document is only dealing with greenhouse effect and "global warming."
What are the take-home messages:

* The temperature effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide is logarithmic, not exponential.
* The potential planetary warming from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide from pre-Industrial Revolution levels of ~280ppmv to 560ppmv (possible some time later this century - perhaps) is generally estimated at less than 1 °C.
* The guesses of significantly larger warming are dependent on "feedback" (supplementary) mechanisms programmed into climate models. The existence of these "feedback" mechanisms is uncertain and the cumulative sign of which is unknown (they may add to warming from increased atmospheric carbon dioxide or, equally likely, might suppress it).
* The total warming since measurements have been attempted is thought to be about 0.6 degrees Centigrade. At least half of the estimated temperature increment occurred before 1950, prior to significant change in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Assuming the unlikely case that all the natural drivers of planetary temperature change ceased to operate at the time of measured atmospheric change then a 30% increment in atmospheric carbon dioxide caused about one-third of one degree temperature increment since and thus provides empirical support for less than one degree increment due to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
* There is no linear relationship between atmospheric carbon dioxide change and global mean temperature or global mean temperature trend -- global mean temperature has both risen and fallen during the period atmospheric carbon dioxide has been rising.
* The natural world has tolerated greater than one-degree fluctuations in mean temperature during the relatively recent past and thus current changes are within the range of natural variation. (See, for example, ice core and sea surface temperature reconstructions.)
* Other anthropogenic effects are vastly more important, at least on local and regional scales.
* Fixation on atmospheric carbon dioxide is a distraction from these more important anthropogenic effects.
* Despite attempts to label atmospheric carbon dioxide a "pollutant" it is, in fact, an essential trace gas, the increasing abundance of which is a bonus for the bulk of the biosphere.
* There is no reason to believe that slightly lower temperatures are somehow preferable to slightly higher temperatures - there is no known "optimal" nor any known means of knowingly and predictably adjusting some sort of planetary thermostat.
* Fluctuations in atmospheric carbon dioxide are of little relevance in the short to medium term (although should levels fall too low it could prove problematic in the longer-term).
* Activists and zealots constantly shrilling over atmospheric carbon dioxide are misdirecting attention and effort from real and potentially addressable local, regional and planetary problems.

Remember: Water vapor and carbon dioxide are major greenhouse gases. Water vapor accounts for about 70% of the greenhouse effect, carbon dioxide somewhere between 4.2% and 8.4%. Much of the wavelength bands where carbon dioxide is active are either at or near saturation. Water vapor absorbs infrared over much the same range as carbon dioxide and more besides. Clouds are not composed of greenhouse gas -- they are mostly water droplets -- but absorb about one-fifth of the longwave radiation emitted by Earth. Clouds can briefly saturate the atmospheric radiation window (8-13µm) through which some Earth radiation passes directly to space (those hot and sticky overcast nights produce this effect - that is greenhouse but has nothing to do with carbon dioxide). Greenhouse gases can not obstruct this window although ozone absorbs in a narrow slice at 9.6µm. Adding more greenhouse gases which absorb in already saturated bandwidths has no net effect. Adding them in near-saturated bands has little additional effect. ]]> Tue, 11 Jul 2006 17:13:00 EDT http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/40620 43.6666667 -79.416666743.6666667-79.4166667 http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/39702
"I was scared," Hybben said Thursday. "But being scared doesn't do a hell of a lot of good, so I just kept calm and (the rescuers and I) just kept working through it."

After about two hours, with emergency and utility workers from six neighboring cities and a big assist from a sewer-sand-sucking machine, Hybben was pulled out unscathed, grateful and a little wiser.

Hybben, 32, had bent a water valve with an earth mover as he prepared to re-sod his yard. About 1:30 p.m. Thursday he had dug just deep enough to expose the valve he planned to repair when he was deluged with sand that buried him past his belly button.

Hybben's 7-year-old son, who was nearby, tossed him a phone to call 911. Rescuers at first used buckets to try to dig him out, but the surrounding sand kept collapsing tighter around him.

It felt like "having your blood pressure checked on both legs continuously for two hours," he said.

Finally, planks were pounded down around him, and once the sand was down to his knees, Hybben, strapped in a harness, was lifted out.

"I knew at that point I wasn't going to die," he said. "About an hour before that, I didn't know."

Hybben still plans to get his re-sodding project done this weekend, but he'll heed the advice of Police Chief Jim Way when it comes to the still-damaged water valve.

"Let the professionals handle it," Way told him.
]]> Sun, 18 Jun 2006 23:18:00 EDT http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/39702 43.6666667 -79.416666743.6666667-79.4166667 http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/39701
Authorities in Johnson City said the 40-year-old man dashed into the bathroom of a Dunkin' Donuts across the street from the Oakdale Mall after stealing trousers from a Kaufmann's store.

The two store security guards and police officers subdued Robinson and took him into custody.

Robinson was charged with robbery and tampering with evidence. Police said he tried to eat the tags from the stolen clothing. He was sent to Broome County Jail without bail.]]> Sun, 18 Jun 2006 23:17:00 EDT http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/39701 43.6666667 -79.416666743.6666667-79.4166667 http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/36852 response to a Gazette editorial of Nov. 26th, 2004, “the wrong yardstick”
However you measure it, child poverty is too high
A recent Gazette editorial (Nov. 26th) challenged the use of Statistics Canada’s Low Income
Cut-Off (LICO) as an accurate measure of poverty. At stake is the question of whether
Campaign 2000’s Report Card on Child Poverty in Canada is inflating the numbers of the
poor.
First, given that Canada does not have an official poverty line, it should come as no surprise
that government agencies caution against using the LICO as a measure. However, let’s not
confuse the question of official assent with whether the LICO is accurate in measuring low
income in Canada. It’s simple to dismiss the LICO as “unofficial” but turn the question
around, and the answers are not as categorical. If the LICO is not a good measure of who’s
struggling in Canada, than how do we know whether Canada’s income security programs
like pensions and provincial welfare payments are doing their job?
The government of Canada provides three primary measures of low income in Canada,
none of which are officially endorsed as poverty lines.
The Low Income Measure (LIM) is a purely relative measure of inequality. It sets the
benchmark of low income at half the median income. It is widely used by international
bodies, such as the UN, to compare poverty across nations. Using this measure, UNICEF
ranks Canada 17th worst out of 23 industrialized nations in terms of child poverty levels (at
15.5%).
Statistics Canada’s LICO has been widely used as an indicator of low income in Canada for
more than 20 years and has provided a consistent measure for tracking trends over time. It
is published annually by Statistics Canada as a measure of “low income”.
The LICO is mix of relative and absolute measures of poverty. It looks at what the average
family in different-sized communities spends on shelter, food and clothing and then
determines the levels at which families spend a disproportionate amount of their income on
life’s most basic needs. It is not simply income which is at stake in the LICO, it is what that
income can buy you in the real world. So, to build on the Gazette’s example, if the average
income in Canada became $1 million overnight, we can almost be sure that rents, along with
grocery and clothing prices would rise accordingly.
A third measure, the Market Basket Measure (MBM), addresses head-on the Gazette’s
call for “a yardstick for how much a family requires to meet basic needs ... that would be
very helpful in working towards the elimination of child poverty.” In fact, the MBM was
commissioned by the federal, provincial and territorial governments as a "consensus
definition of basic needs/poverty level." Released in 2003, the MBM defines a basket of
goods and services necessary to live in communities across Canada and then
determines the necessary disposable income to purchase those services.
The MBM has essentially set the standard for how many families and children are at a
severe disadvantage in meeting their basic needs. What is that standard? The MBM
shows almost exactly the same child poverty rate for 2000 (16.9 per cent) than the pretax
LICO as reported by Campaign 2000 (16.4 per cent).
It is clear that however you measure it, be it through relative or absolute means, child
poverty in Canada remains at about 16 per cent, meaning that more than a million
children are living in conditions of disadvantage, low income, or poverty. Whatever word
we want to use, that’s one million too many children.
So what do we do about it?
We know what it will take to make a difference. Nations that have significantly reduced
child and family poverty have done so by investing in widely accessible early learning
and child care programs, effective child benefit systems, national affordable housing
programs, a healthy stock of good jobs and generous income security and
unemployment benefits.
Canada can do the same. Over the next decade, Canada’s multi-year surpluses afford
us the fiscal capacity for social investments that will make a real difference in the lives of
children and families in Canada. It’s time to end to social deficit..
]]> Tue, 21 Mar 2006 18:04:00 EST http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/36852 43.6666667 -79.416666743.6666667-79.4166667 http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/36011
"This meeting ... is intended to underscore our concern about the Belarussian government's conduct leading up to the election, harassment of civil society and the political opposition and failure to investigate seriously the cases of the disappeared," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

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It comes less than three weeks before Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko seeks a new term. The United States and European Union accuse Lukashenko of cracking down on opponents, muzzling the media and systematically falsifying ballots -- including his re-election in 2001.

The two women -- Irina Krasovskaya and Svyatlana Zavadskaya -- are co-founders of an organization called "We Remember," which seeks justice for the disappeared.

Krasovskaya's husband, a prominent pro-democracy businessman, disappeared in 1999. Zavadskaya's husband was a well-known television journalist who disappeared in 2000 following his reports that Belarussian authorities may have aided Chechen separatists.

Several international investigations have concluded that the women's husbands were murdered.

"We continue to stand with the people of Belarus in their effort to determine their own future," McClellan said.

Lukashenko, the favorite, faces three rivals in the election on March 19, including two representing Belarus's small opposition.]]> Mon, 27 Feb 2006 16:55:00 EST http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/36011 43.6666667 -79.416666743.6666667-79.4166667 http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/35498 saucepan with a little gravy, made of the trimmings of the fowl, or
of veal, a blade of mace, a little grated lemon peel, the juice of
one lemon; thicken with flour, and when ready to serve, stir in a
table-spoonful of white wine.

EGG SAUCE: A FINE WHITE SAUCE FOR BOILED CHICKENS, TURKEYS, OR WHITE

frim Home Made Cookies]]> Tue, 14 Feb 2006 21:00:00 EST http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/35498 43.6666667 -79.416666743.6666667-79.4166667 http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/35497
our standard authors to whom we have been accustomed to look up as

infallible have sinned more or less against the fundamental principles of

grammar by breaking the rules regarding one or more of the nine parts of

speech. In fact some of them have recklessly trespassed against all nine,

and still they sit on their pedestals of fame for the admiration of the

crowd. Macaulay mistreated the article. He wrote,--"That _a_ historian

should not record trifles is perfectly true." He should have used _an_.



Dickens also used the article incorrectly. He refers to "Robinson Crusoe"

as "_an_ universally popular book," instead of _a_ universally popular

book.



The relation between nouns and pronouns has always been a stumbling block

to speakers and writers. Hallam in his _Literature of Europe_ writes,

"No one as yet had exhibited the structure of the human kidneys, Vesalius

having only examined them in dogs." This means that Vesalius examined

human kidneys in dogs. The sentence should have been, "No one had as yet

exhibited the kidneys in human beings, Vesalius having examined such

organs in dogs only."



Sir Arthur Helps in writing of Dickens, states--"I knew a brother author

of his who received such criticisms from him (Dickens) very lately and

profited by _it_." Instead of _it_ the word should be _them_ to agree

with criticisms.



Here are a few other pronominal errors from leading authors:



"Sir Thomas Moore in general so writes it, although not many others so

late as _him_." Should be _he_.--Trench's _English Past and Present_.



"What should we gain by it but that we should speedily become as poor as

_them_." Should be _they_.--Alison's _Essay on Macaulay_.



"If the king gives us leave you or I may as lawfully preach, as

_them_ that do." Should be _they_ or _those_, the latter

having persons understood.--Hobbes's _History of Civil Wars_.



"The drift of all his sermons was, to prepare the Jews for the reception

of a prophet, mightier than _him_, and whose shoes he was not worthy

to bear." Should be than _he_.--Atterbury's _Sermons_.



"Phalaris, who was so much older than _her_." Should be _she_.--Bentley's

_Dissertation on Phalaris_.



"King Charles, and more than _him_, the duke and the Popish faction were

at liberty to form new schemes." Should be than _he_.--Bolingbroke's

_Dissertations on Parties_.



"We contributed a third more than the Dutch, who were obliged to the same

proportion more than _us_." Should be than _we_.--Swift's _Conduct of the

Allies_.



In all the above examples the objective cases of the pronouns have been

used while the construction calls for nominative cases.



"Let _thou_ and _I_ the battle try"--_Anon_.



Here _let_ is the governing verb and requires an objective case after it;

therefore instead of _thou_ and _I_, the words should be _you_ (_sing_.)

and _me_.



"Forever in this humble cell, Let thee and I, my fair one, dwell"

--_Prior_.



Here _thee_ and _I_ should be the objectives _you_ and _me_.



The use of the relative pronoun trips the greatest number of authors.



Even in the Bible we find the relative wrongly translated:



Whom do men say that I am?--_St. Matthew_.



Whom think ye that I am?--_Acts of the Apostles_.



_Who_ should be written in both cases because the word is not in the

objective governed by say or think, but in the nominative dependent on

the verb _am_.



_Who_ should I meet at the coffee house t'other night, but my old

friend?"--_Steele_.



"It is another pattern of this answerer's fair dealing, to give us hints

that the author is dead, and yet lay the suspicion upon somebody, I know

not _who_, in the country."--Swift's _Tale of a Tub_.



"My son is going to be married to I don't know _who_."--Goldsmith's

_Good-natured Man_.



The nominative _who_ in the above examples should be the objective

_whom_.



The plural nominative _ye_ of the pronoun _thou_ is very often

used for the objective _you_, as in the following:



"His wrath which will one day destroy _ye both_."--_Milton_.



"The more shame for _ye_; holy men I thought _ye_."--_Shakespeare_.



"I feel the gales that from _ye_ blow."--_Gray_.



"Tyrants dread _ye_, lest your just decree Transfer the power and

set the people free."--_Prior_.



Many of the great writers have played havoc with the adjective in the

indiscriminate use of the degrees of comparison.



"Of two forms of the same word, use the fittest."--_Morell_.



The author here in _trying_ to give good advice sets a bad example.

He should have used the comparative degree, "Fitter."



Adjectives which have a comparative or superlative signification do not

admit the addition of the words _more_, _most_, or the terminations,

_er_, _est_, hence the following examples break this rule:



"Money is the _most universal_ incitement of human misery."--Gibbon's

_Decline and Fall_.



"The _chiefest_ of which was known by the name of Archon among the

Grecians."--Dryden's _Life of Plutarch_.



"The _chiefest_ and largest are removed to certain magazines they call

libraries."--Swift's _Battle of the Books_.



The two _chiefest_ properties of air, its gravity and elastic force,

have been discovered by mechanical experiments.--_Arbuthno_.



"From these various causes, which in greater or _lesser_ degree,

affected every individual in the colony, the indignation of the people

became general."--Robertson's _History of America_.



"The _extremest_ parts of the earth were meditating a submission."

--Atterbury's _Sermons_.



"The last are indeed _more preferable_ because they are founded on some new

knowledge or improvement in the mind of man."--Addison, _Spectator_.



"This was in reality the _easiest_ manner of the two."--Shaftesbury's

_Advice to an Author_.



"In every well formed mind this second desire seems to be the _strongest_

of the two."--Smith's _Theory of Moral Sentiments_.



In these examples the superlative is wrongly used for the comparative.

When only two objects are compared the comparative form must be used.



Of impossibility there are no degrees of comparison, yet we find the

following:



"As it was impossible they should know the words, thoughts and secret

actions of all men, so it was _more impossible_ they should pass judgment

on them according to these things."--Whitby's _Necessity of the Christian

Religion_.



A great number of authors employ adjectives for adverbs. Thus we find:



"I shall endeavor to live hereafter _suitable_ to a man in my station."

--_Addison_.



"I can never think so very _mean_ of him."--Bentley's _Dissertation on

Phalaris_.



"His expectations run high and the fund to supply them is _extreme_

scanty."--_Lancaster's Essay on Delicacy_.



The commonest error in the use of the verb is the disregard of the

concord between the verb and its subject. This occurs most frequently

when the subject and the verb are widely separated, especially if some

other noun of a different number immediately precedes the verb. False

concords occur very often after _either_, _or_, _neither_, _nor_, and

_much_, _more_, _many_, _everyone_, _each_.



Here are a few authors' slips:--



"The terms in which the sale of a patent _were_ communicated to the

public."--Junius's _Letters_.



"The richness of her arms and apparel _were_ conspicuous."--Gibbon's

_Decline and Fall_.



"Everyone of this grotesque family _were_ the creatures of national

genius."--D'Israeli.



"He knows not what spleen, languor or listlessness _are_."--Blair's

_Sermons_.



"Each of these words _imply_, some pursuit or object relinquished."

--_Ibid_.



"Magnus, with four thousand of his supposed accomplices _were_ put

to death."--_Gibbon_.



"No nation gives greater encouragements to learning than we do; yet at

the same time _none are_ so injudicious in the application."

--_Goldsmith_.



"_There's two_ or _three_ of us have seen strange sights."--_Shakespeare_.



The past participle should not be used for the past tense, yet the

learned Byron overlooked this fact. He thus writes in the _Lament of

Tasso_:--



"And with my years my soul _begun to pant_ With feelings of strange

tumult and soft pain."



Here is another example from Savage's _Wanderer_ in which there is

double sinning:



"From liberty each nobler science _sprung_, A Bacon brighten'd and a

Spenser _sung_."



Other breaches in regard to the participles occur in the following:--



"Every book ought to be read with the same spirit and in the same manner

as it is _writ_"--Fielding's _Tom Jones_.



"The Court of Augustus had not _wore_ off the manners of the republic"

--Hume's _Essays_.



Moses tells us that the fountains of the earth were _broke_ open or

clove asunder."--Burnet.



"A free constitution when it has been _shook_ by the iniquity of

former administrations."--_Bolingbroke_.



"In this respect the seeds of future divisions were _sowed_ abundantly."

--_Ibid_.



In the following example the present participle is used for the infinitive

mood:



"It is easy _distinguishing_ the rude fragment of a rock from the splinter

of a statue."--Gilfillan's _Literary Portraits_.



_Distinguishing_ here should be replaced by _to distinguish_.



The rules regarding _shall_ and _will_ are violated in the following:



"If we look within the rough and awkward outside, we _will_ be

richly rewarded by its perusal."--Gilfillan's _Literary Portraits_.



"If I _should_ declare them and speak of them, they should be more

than I am able to express."--_Prayer Book Revision of Psalms XI_.



"If I _would_ declare them and speak of them, they are more than can

be numbered."--_Ibid_.



"Without having attended to this, we _will_ be at a loss, in understanding

several passages in the classics."--Blair's _Lectures_.



"We know to what cause our past reverses have been owing and _we_

will have ourselves to blame, if they are again incurred."--Alison's

_History of Europe_.



Adverbial mistakes often occur in the best writers. The adverb _rather_ is

a word very frequently misplaced. Archbishop Trench in his "English Past

and Present" writes, "It _rather_ modified the structure of our sentences

than the elements of our vocabulary." This should have been written,--" It

modified the structure of our sentences _rather than_ the elements of our

vocabulary."



"So far as his mode of teaching goes he is _rather_ a disciple of

Socrates than of St. Paul or Wesley." Thus writes Leslie Stephens of Dr.

Johnson. He should have written,--" So far as his mode of teaching goes

he is a disciple of Socrates _rather_ than of St. Paul or Wesley."



The preposition is a part of speech which is often wrongly used by some

of the best writers. Certain nouns, adjectives and verbs require

particular prepositions after them, for instance, the word _different_

always takes the preposition _from_ after it; _prevail_ takes _upon_;

_averse_ takes _to_; _accord_ takes _with_, and so on.



In the following examples the prepositions in parentheses are the ones

that should have been used:



"He found the greatest difficulty _of_ (in) writing."--Hume's

_History of England_.



"If policy can prevail _upon_ (over) force."--_Addison_.



"He made the discovery and communicated _to_ (with) his friends."

--Swift's _Tale of a Tub_.



"Every office of command should be intrusted to persons _on_ (in)

whom the parliament shall confide."--_Macaulay_.



Several of the most celebrated writers infringe the canons of style by

placing prepositions at the end of sentences. For instance Carlyle, in

referring to the Study of Burns, writes:--"Our own contributions to it,

we are aware, can be but scanty and feeble; but we offer them with good

will, and trust they may meet with acceptance from those they are

intended _for_."



--"for whom they are intended," he should have written.



"Most writers have some one vein which they peculiarly and obviously

excel _in_."--_William Minto_.



This sentence should read,--Most writers have some one vein in which they

peculiarly and obviously excel.



Many authors use redundant words which repeat the same thought and idea.

This is called tautology.



"Notwithstanding which (however) poor Polly embraced them all around."

--_Dickens_.



"I judged that they would (mutually) find each other."--_Crockett_.



"....as having created a (joint) partnership between the two Powers in

the Morocco question."--_The Times_.



"The only sensible position (there seems to be) is to frankly acknowledge

our ignorance of what lies beyond."--_Daily Telegraph_.



Lord Rosebery has not budged from his position--splendid, no doubt,--of

(lonely) isolation."--_The Times_.



"Miss Fox was (often) in the habit of assuring Mrs. Chick."--_Dickens_.



"The deck (it) was their field of fame."--_Campbell_.



"He had come up one morning, as was now (frequently) his wont,"

--_Trollope_.



The counsellors of the Sultan (continue to) remain sceptical

--_The Times_.



Seriously, (and apart from jesting), this is no light matter.--_Bagehot_.



To go back to your own country with (the consciousness that you go back

with) the sense of duty well done.--_Lord Halsbury_.



The _Peresviet_ lost both her fighting-tops and (in appearance)

looked the most damaged of all the ships--_The Times_.



Counsel admitted that, that was a fair suggestion to make, but he

submitted that it was borne out by the (surrounding) circumstances.

--_Ibid_.



Another unnecessary use of words and phrases is that which is termed

circumlocution, a going around the bush when there is no occasion for

it,--save to fill space.



It may be likened to a person walking the distance of two sides of a

triangle to reach the objective point. For instance in the quotation:

"Pope professed to have learned his poetry from Dryden, whom, whenever an

opportunity was presented, he praised through the whole period of his

existence with unvaried liberality; and perhaps his character may receive

some illustration, of a comparison he instituted between him and the man

whose pupil he was" much of the verbiage may be eliminated and the

sentence thus condensed:



"Pope professed himself the pupil of Dryden, whom he lost no opportunity

of praising; and his character may be illustrated by a comparison with

his master."



"His life was brought to a close in 1910 at an age not far from the one

fixed by the sacred writer as the term of human existence."



This in brevity can be put, "His life was brought to a close at the age

of seventy;" or, better yet, "He died at the age of seventy."



"The day was intensely cold, so cold in fact that the thermometer crept

down to the zero mark," can be expressed: "The day was so cold the

thermometer registered zero."



Many authors resort to circumlocution for the purpose of "padding," that

is, filling space, or when they strike a snag in writing upon subjects of

which they know little or nothing. The young writer should steer clear of

it and learn to express his thoughts and ideas as briefly as possible

commensurate with lucidity of expression.



Volumes of errors in fact, in grammar, diction and general style, could

be selected from the works of the great writers, a fact which eloquently

testifies that no one is infallible and that the very best is liable to

err at times. However, most of the erring in the case of these writers

arises from carelessness or hurry, not from a lack of knowledge.



As a general rule it is in writing that the scholar is liable to slip; in

oral speech he seldom makes a blunder. In fact, there are many people who

are perfect masters of speech,--who never make a blunder in conversation,

yet who are ignorant of the very principles of grammar and would not know

how to write a sentence correctly on paper. Such persons have been

accustomed from infancy to hear the language spoken correctly and so the

use of the proper words and forms becomes a second nature to them. A

child can learn what is right as easy as what is wrong and whatever

impressions are made on the mind when it is plastic will remain there.

Even a parrot can be taught the proper use of language. Repeat to a

parrot.--"Two and two _make_ four" and it never will say "two and two

_makes_ four."



In writing, however, it is different. Without a knowledge of the

fundamentals of grammar we may be able to speak correctly from

association with good speakers, but without such a knowledge we cannot

hope to write the language correctly. To write even a common letter we

must know the principles of construction, the relationship of one word to

another. Therefore, it is necessary for everybody to understand at least

the essentials of the grammar of his own language.

from Speaking Writing]]> Tue, 14 Feb 2006 20:53:00 EST http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/35497 43.6666667 -79.416666743.6666667-79.4166667 http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/35496
the lonely longing we all experience when we are not part of a special twosome.

For this simple magic you will need:

Three glasses or chalices A small picture of two happy people

A love-associated oil such as rose, apple blossom, or vanilla (vanilla extract from your kitchen is an

excellent substitute for the oil) A candle in pink, red, or silver.

The picture you choose does not have to be anything special; in fact, it works better if it is

something you cut from a magazine that can be viewed as an overall concept of your goal,

rather than as a concrete image.

Fill two of the chalices about half-full with water and set them on opposite ends of your alter.

These will represent yourself and the person who will soonmysticmagicspellsall magic spells, charms, talismans and herbal medication alle into your life as being apart,

each feeling like only "half" of something you have yet to discover.

Set the empty chalice in the center of the alter. Put the oil, picture, etc., wherever it is

convenient for you to place them. Perfuming the air with your oil by using it to anoint a

working candle (one lit to offer you light to see by) can also add to the atmosphere.

If you choose to do this, make sure you visualize your goal and project it into the

candle as you work. Light it as soon as you have cast your circle, so that it can

function as your working light. Say:

Candle red (or silver or pink) as love light bright,

Carry my prayers to the God Goddess tonight.

Begin, as always, by slowing your mind and focusing inward until the visualization of loneliness

endingmysticmagicspellsall magic spells, charms, talismans and herbal medication alles clearly to you.

Form a picture of yourself as you are now...alone...and allow yourself to build up amysticmagicspellsall magic spells, charms, talismans and herbal medication allplete

hatred and intolerance for this state of being.

Pour all of that deeply-felt emotion into the mental image and then, with a burst of will, force

that image far, far away from you. See it flying out into the vast darkness of the universe,

exploding, and being harmlessly absorbed in the endless vacuum of space.

Now focus your attention on the center chalice, which is empty. See it as unused potential

waiting to be filled by you. Invest the empty cup with all of your hopes and dreams of romance,

mysticmagicspellsall magic spells, charms, talismans and herbal medication allpanionship, love, and loyalty.

If you are female, the chalice on the left will represent you; if male, the one the right is yours.

These are the traditional directional attributes of the feminine and the masculine in many cultures.

Lift the chalice that represents you, and then the other, holding them both out to your sides

as far away from each other as possible.

Feel your need pouring into yours, and the need of someone yet unknown to you filling the other.

Look into the depths of the empty chalice and feel the aching loneliness inside you melting

away as the cup fills with loving potential, representing unity and wholeness, aching to be used.

While still focusing on the empty vessel, bring the two cups to your breast and sense the

energy you have invested in them straining tomysticmagicspellsall magic spells, charms, talismans and herbal medication alle together.

Pour as much energy as you can into this image and then, when you feel the time is right,

pour the contents of the of the two chalices into the empty center one.

Sense the happiness and relief of the two halves of the whole which are now united.

Seal the magical union with a single drop of the oil you have chosen. As it mingles with

the energy of the joined waters, intone words that affirm the success of your spell:

Separated at birth, full circlemysticmagicspellsall magic spells, charms, talismans and herbal medication alle, Two halves of wholeness are joined as one.

With harm to none, leaving all choice free, By my will, So Mote It Be!

Lastly, take the picture and hold it over the chalice, allowing the joyful energy

within to be transferred to the picture.

Project your likeness, and that the one you have drawn into your life, onto the image.

When you have invested as much energy as you can, place a single drop of the water,

and another of the oil, on the picture, fold it tightly, and carry it with you until the moon phase changes.

At that point it should be burned.

If you feel the need, repeat the spell on the next full moon.

from White Magic]]> Tue, 14 Feb 2006 20:47:00 EST http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/35496 43.6666667 -79.416666743.6666667-79.4166667 http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/35323
A non-governmental Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) report released in late January 2006 found scores of cases of arbitrary arrests and detention, torture, extrajudicial executions, “disappearances” and use of excessive force by security and intelligence forces committed since early 2005. Amongst the victims are women, children and many political activists. In addition, the Commission noted with concern that armed Baloch fighters opposing the army's presence in the province have laid landmines as a result of which civilians have been indiscriminately killed and maimed.

Though Amnesty International has not been in a position to visit Balochistan to investigate these allegations of human rights violations, the organisation considers the findings of the HRCP's report to be credible, and strongly supports the Commission's demand that human rights abuses be stopped forthwith and that all allegations of violations of human rights, including civil, political and economic rights, be independently and impartially investigated with a view to bringing the perpetrators to justice.

Amnesty International also appeals to all armed fighters and armed groups to abide by international humanitarian law, in particular the rules that are binding on all parties to a non-international armed conflict. These rules prohibit, inter alia, torture, hostage-taking, deliberate killing of civilians and other non-combatants and indiscriminate attacks.

The findings of the HRCP fact-finding mission corroborate a large number of reports received by Amnesty International from Baloch activists and civil society organisations since early 2005. According to a January 2006 statement by Senator Sanaullah Baloch, at least 180 people have died in bombings, 122 children have been killed by paramilitary troops and hundreds of people have been arrested since the beginning of the campaign in early 2005. On 8 December 2005, the federal Interior Minister stated that some 4,000 people had been arrested in Balochistan since the beginning of 2005. The identities, whereabouts of and charges against many of these detainees remain unknown. Having monitored some of these cases of detention and "disappearance", Amnesty International fears that some of the detainees may have been arbitrarily detained, or held under preventive detention legislation or on politically motivated criminal charges, in violation of Pakistan statutory law and international human rights standards.

Since the HRCP concluded its fact-finding visit, further reports of human rights violations have been received. Twelve men, arrested after an attack on a Frontier Corps unit on 11 January 2006, were reportedly extrajudicially executed killed in the Dera Bugti camp of the Frontier Corps when news arrived that three of the injured soldiers had died. Two elderly villagers sent to collect the bodies were also killed. On 16 January 2006, three children were reportedly killed in Kahan by aerial bombardment. On 7 February, a bomb, possibly planted by armed fighters, blew up a bus killing 13 people travelling in it.

Amnesty International is also concerned that the fact-finding team of the HRCP and journalists accompanying them were attacked on 8 January 2006 when their cars were fired at for several minutes near Kashmore. Although the HRCP team submitted an application to police in Rojhan to file a complaint, police did not comply nor investigate the alleged attempted murder.

Journalists have also been arbitrarily detained, harassed and threatened by intelligence agencies if they continued to investigate incidents in Balochistan. Amnesty International believes that it is important that journalists and human rights defenders can pursue their legitimate roles unimpeded and without fear, so that human rights violations can be monitored and brought to public attention, Remedies may then be found to ensure the protection and promotion of human rights in the province.]]> Sat, 11 Feb 2006 15:18:00 EST http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/35323 43.6666667 -79.416666743.6666667-79.4166667 http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/30626
Sept 30, 1993 - INDIA - A series of quakes killed almost 10,000 people in western and southern India. The first tremor was of magnitude 6.4.

June 6, 1994 - COLOMBIA - A quake brought down buildings and triggered mudslides, killing about 1,000 people in the Paez River valley in southwestern Colombia.

Jan 17, 1995 - JAPAN - A magnitude 7.2 quake, the country's worst in half a century, rocks Kobe, killing 6,430 people.

May 28, 1995 - RUSSIA - Russia's worst earthquake, magnitude 7.5, kills 1,989 people in the oil-producing Far East.

Feb 28, 1997 - IRAN - A magnitude 5.5 quake kills about 1,000 people in northwestern Iran.

May 10, 1997 - IRAN - A magnitude 7.1 quake kills 1,560 people in rural areas of eastern Iran near the Afghan border.

Feb 4, 1998 - AFGHANISTAN - At least 4,500 people are killed in Takhar province in a quake of magnitude 6.1.

May 30, 1998 - AFGHANISTAN - A magnitude 6.9 quake kills up to 4,000 people in northern Takhar province.

July 17, 1998 - PAPUA NEW GUINEA - An undersea quake of magnitude 7.1 creates three tsunami waves, killing at least 2,100 people.

Jan 25, 1999 - COLOMBIA - A magnitude 6.3 quake kills at least 1,170 people in the central coffee-growing region.

Aug 17, 1999 - TURKEY - More than 17,800 people are killed by a magnitude 7.4 quake.

Sept 21, 1999 - TAIWAN - At least 2,000 people are killed and hundreds of thousands made homeless by a magnitude 7.6 quake in central Taiwan.

Jan 26, 2001 - INDIA - An earthquake of magnitude 7.7 strikes the western state of Gujarat killing at least 19,700 people and causing damage in neighbouring Pakistan. The quake affected 15.9 million people in 7,904 villages.

March 26, 2002 - AFGHANISTAN - At least 1,500 people are killed when a series of quakes of between magnitude five and six strike northern Afghanistan, destroying the district capital of Nahrin in the Hindu Kush mountains.

May 21, 2003 - ALGERIA - A magnitude 6.7 earthquake strikes Algiers and nearby towns to the east, killing 2,251 and injuring 10,243.

Dec 26, 2003 - IRAN - A magnitude 6.8 earthquake strikes the historic city of Bam, 1,000 km (600 miles) southeast of Tehran. 30,948 were killed in the quake.

Dec 26, 2004 - ASIA - The number of dead and missing in an Asian earthquake and tsunami is at least 232,010. The wave crashed into Sri Lanka and India, drowning thousands and swamping tourist isles in Thailand and the Maldives. The quake measured 9.15 in magnitude.

March 28, 2005 - INDONESIA - Nearly 1,000 people are killed after a quake of magnitude 8.7 struck the coast of Sumatra.

Oct 8, 2005 - PAKISTAN - 18,000 people are killed and a further 40,000 people injured by a 7.6 magnitude quake that struck about 95 km (60 miles) northeast of Islamabad. The quake also rocked Indian Kashmir, killing more than 300 there.
]]> Sun, 09 Oct 2005 22:25:00 EDT http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/30626 43.6666667 -79.416666743.6666667-79.4166667 http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/30625
The frightened voices of trapped children and the anguished wails of parents accompanied the frantic work in the Balakot valley in the mountains of Northwest Frontier Province, one of the areas worst hit by Saturday morning's devastating quake.

"Save me, call my mother, call my father," came the faint voice of a boy, again and again, from the rubble of a government school in which residents said about 200 children were trapped.

"Bring out my child, bring out my child," his mother wailed, beating her chest as other parents and relatives pulled out the bodies of four children, bringing Sunday morning's toll to eight.

Residents of the scenic resort town of about 20,000 people estimated 2,500 people may have been killed there and in seven surrounding villages. They complained they had received no support from police and emergency services.

Thousands were injured, mostly women and children who were in their homes at the time of the disaster while their men worked in the open. Almost every second woman or child bore an injury.

Prime Minister Saukat Aziz said more than 18,000 people had been killed across northern Pakistan. President Pervez Musharraf Musharraf appealed to Pakistanis to contribute to relief efforts.

At the private Shaheen School, 650 children were trapped inside the four-storey building that collapsed as the children sat in class at 8:50 a.m. (0350 GMT) on Saturday, a school day in Pakistan.

Parents scrabbling through the rubble said they had brought out the bodies of six dead children and 19 injured. The bodies of four more were seen on the school roof.

CRIES OF CHILDREN

A teenage girl named Busra was pulled out covered in dust and with leg injuries on Sunday morning.

"We were sitting down when it happened. We tried to get up and run, but everything just caved in," she said. "I was lying buried up to my neck. There are many others in there."

The rescue effort has been hampered by frequent aftershocks causing panic among survivors, who face a bleak immediate future with little or no food or shelter. Some relied on soft drinks and biscuits recovered from a damaged warehouse.

The Balakot region is a scene of massive devastation. About half of the concrete houses have collapsed and dozens of bodies lay in the open. The road into town has been blocked by landslides, and it is only possible to reach the town on foot.

A Reuters reporter counted 105 bodies on the eight-km (five-mile) trek into town. Some were laid by the road by relatives hoping for help with their burial. Others were carried on charpoys, or traditional rope beds.

A boy carried a younger sister of perhaps four or five, her skin stripped off her face and the side of her body by a rock that flattened their house. He did not know what to do.

"There are no bandages or anything at all," he said. "There are no doctors, no nothing -- where should we go?"

A German woman doctor running a leprosy centre in Balakot said they were doing what they could. She said six of their patients died when the centre's roof collapsed and 20 were hurt.

"I've been involved in helping refugees for the last 17 years, but I am in shock because I have never seen such devastation," said the doctor, Chris Schmoter.

Villager Haji Nawaz lost his wife, his mother and four children when his house collapsed.

"The whole place shook and the boulders came down from the mountain. In less then a minute, I saw half the town destroyed. I have seen women going mad with shock.

"The government sends troops and doctors to foreign countries -- why is it taking them so long to come here?" he said, of help sent for last year's Asian tsunami victims and other disasters.

Javed Akhtar, a doctor from Rawalpindi, said he came to recover the bodies of 25 of 30 relatives, including uncles, aunts, sisters, cousins and his grandmother.

"Unless official help is provided, the bodies buried in the debris will not be recovered for at least a month. The most serious issue is the children buried in the schools -- something needs to be done immediately."]]> Sun, 09 Oct 2005 22:24:00 EDT http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/30625 43.6666667 -79.416666743.6666667-79.4166667 http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/30624
Many survivors of Saturday's quake in the country's towering northern mountains spent a second night in the open, shivering in autumn cold and showers, but safer from the continuing aftershocks than indoors.

Relief workers have yet to reach many remote villages and officials said the final death toll was likely to climb far above the 19,400 already known to have died in Pakistan.

Politicians in the worst-affected areas, Pakistan-held Kashmir and North West Frontier Province, said they expected a far higher tally -- as many as 38,000.

Across the border in Indian-held Kashmir almost 700 people are known to have been killed.

It is the worst natural disaster in Pakistan's turbulent history since its formation in 1947 as a homeland for South Asia's Muslims, and the quake, measured at 7.6 magnitude, was the strongest in South Asia for a century.

With Pakistan's resources stretched beyond their limits, President Pervez Musharraf appealed for foreign aid to supply tents, blankets, transport helicopters and medicines.

"We're trying to cope with these difficulties, there should not be any blame game," Musharraf said on state-run television, wearing his army fatigues.

Rescue teams and ordinary citizens laboured with cranes and excavators or used their bare hands to shift masonry burying the victims, some angered by the central authorities' inability to reach them sooner.

The keening cries of mothers hysterical with grief over lost children could be heard throughout the death zone in Pakistan, and the faith of devout Muslim fathers was tested.

"It is God's will that my daughter has been taken, but my heart cannot accept the way she went," Mohammad Ramazan said after burying his 8-year-old daughter in Frontier province's Balakot town.

"I can't get her wounded face out of my mind."

Many worked through the night in the search for survivors, including hundreds of children trapped in collapsed schools.

SURVIVOR'S STORY

Another 150 people, including foreigners, were buried under two flattened apartment blocks in the capital Islamabad, where Chinese, Turkish, and British teams, helped by sniffer dogs, joined the rescue effort.

Decorator Ikhalaq Ahmed was one of the lucky few to be dragged alive from the collapsed Margala Towers. Ahmed recounted how he called relatives on a mobile telephone after being trapped in the rubble for more than 24 hours.

"I was just praying to God. I was fasting so I wasn't feeling thirsty and I never lost hope," Ahmed told journalists an hour after his rescue late on Sunday night.

The Muslim holy month of Ramadan, requiring Muslims to fast through the day, began late last week.

Militant groups fighting Indian rule in Kashmir suffered casualties. An Islamic charity linked to one of the most feared outfits, Lashkar-e-Taiba, said scores of its workers were killed when its mosques, hospitals, schools and seminaries were obliterated by the quake.

The United States sent eight helicopters from a military base in Afghanistan to help the relief effort led by General Musharraf, Washington's ally in the war on terror.

The first U.S. planeload of relief supplies landed at Rawalpindi's military airfield early on Monday morning.

"We're moving eight choppers over," President George W. Bush said. "One of the biggest concerns for the government of Pakistan is not enough airlift capacity to get in some of the rural areas where people are suffering."

The communications minister for Pakistani Kashmir, Tariq Farooq, said the toll in that region alone could reach 30,000, as the fatalities in many villages were still unknown.

North West Frontier Province's Chief Minister Mohammad Akram Durrani said more than 1,800 bodies had been counted in his province so far, but anticipated a final tally of around 8,000.

"We are in desperate need of assistance. The situation is very, very bad. We need tents, food and everything."]]> Sun, 09 Oct 2005 22:19:00 EDT http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/30624 43.6666667 -79.416666743.6666667-79.4166667 http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/24711
1. Analysis:
Once a customer is started discussing his requirements, the team gets into it, towards the preliminary requirement analysis. As the web site is going to be a part of a system, It needs a complete analysis as, how the web site or the web based application is going to help the present system and how the site is going to help the business. Moreover the analysis should cover all the aspects especially on how the web site is going to join the existing system. The first important thing is finding the targeted audience. Then, All the present hardware, software, people and data should be considered during the time of analysis. For example, if a company XYZ corp is in need of a web site to have its human resource details online, the analysis team may try to utilize the existing data about the employees from the present database. The analysis should be done in the way, that it may not be too time consuming or with very less informative. The team should be able to come up with the complete cost-benefit analysis and as the plan for the project will be an output of analysis, it should be realistic. To achieve this the analyst should consult the designers, developers and testers to come up with a realistic plan.

Input: Interviews with the clients, Mails and supporting docs by the client, Discussions Notes, Online chat, recorded telephone conversations,Model sites/applications etc.,
Output: 1. Work plan, 2. Cost involved, 3. Team requirements, 4. Hardware-software requirements, 5. Supporting documents and 6. the approval

2. Specification Building:
Preliminary specifications are drawn up by covering up each and every element of the requirement. For example if the product is a web site then the modules of the site including general layout, site navigation and dynamic parts of the site should be included in the spec. Larger projects will require further levels of consultation to assess additional business and technical requirements. After reviewing and approving the preliminary document, a written proposal is prepared, outlining the scope of the project including responsibilities, timelines and costs.

Input: Reports from the analysis team
Output: Complete requirement specifications to the individuals and the customer/customer's representative
3. Design and development:
After building the specification, work on the web site is scheduled upon receipt of the signed proposal, a deposit, and any written content materials and graphics you wish to include. Here normally the layouts and navigation will be designed as a prototype.

Some customers may be interested only in a full functional prototype. In this case we may need to show them the interactivity of the application or site. But in most of the cases customer may be interested in viewing two or three design with all images and navigation.

There can be a lot of suggestions and changes from the customer side, and all the changes should be freezed before moving into the next phase. The revisions could be redisplayed via the web for the customer to view.

As needed, customer comments, feedback and approvals can be communicated by e-mail, fax and telephone.
Throughout the design phase the team should develop test plans and procedures for quality assurance. It is necessary to obtain client approval on design and project plans.
In parallel the Database team will sit and understand the requirements and develop the database with all the data structures and sample data will also be prepared.

Input: Requirement specification
Output: Site design with templates, Images and prototype

The possible steps in the process of web site engineering.

4. Content writing:
This phase is necessary mainly for the web sites. There are professional content developers who can write industry specific and relevant content for the site. Content writers to add their text can utilize the design templates. The grammatical and spelling check should be over in this phase.

Input: Designed template
Output: Site with content

5. Coding:
Now its programmers turn to add his code without disturbing the design. Unlike traditional design the developer must know the interface and the code should not disturb the look and feel of the site or application. So the developer should understand the design and navigation. If the site is dynamic then the code should utilize the template. The developer may need to interact with the designer, in order to understand the design. The designer may need to develop some graphic buttons when ever the developer is in need, especially while using some form buttons. If a team of developers is working they should use a CVS to control their sources. Coding team should generate necessary testing plans as well as technical documentation. For example Java users can use JavaDoc to develop their documents to understand their code flow. The end-user documentation can also be prepared by the coding team, which can be used by a technical writer who can understand them, writes helps and manuals later.

Input: The site with forms and the requirement specification
Output: Database driven functions with the site, Coding documents

6. Testing:
Unlike software, web based applications need intensive testing, as the applications will always function as a multi-user system with bandwidth limitations. Some of the testing which should be done are, Integration testing, Stress testing, Scalablity testing, load testing, resolution testing and cross-browser compatibility testing. Both automated testing and manual testing should be done without fail. For example its needed to test fast loading graphics and to calculate their loading time, as they are very important for any web site. There are certain testing tools as well as some online testing tools which can help the testers to test their applications. For example ASP developers can use Microsoft's Web Application Test Tool to test the ASP applications, which is a free tool available from the Microsoft site to download.

After doing all the testing a live testing is necessary for web sites and web based applications. After uploading the site there should be a complete testing(E.g.. Links test)
Input: The site, Requirement specifications, supporting documents, technical specifications and technical documents
Output: Completed application/site, testing reports, error logs, frequent interaction with the developers and designers

7. Promotion:
This phase is applicable only for web sites. Promotion needs preparation of meta tags, constant analysis and submitting the URL to the search engines and directories. There is a details article in this site on site promotion, click here to read it. The site promotion is normally an ongoing process as the strategies of search engine may change quite often. Submitting a site URLs once in 2 months can be an ideal submission policy. If the customer is willing, then paid click and paid submissions can also be done with additional cost.

Input: Site with content, Client mails mentioning the competitors
Output: Site submission with necessary meta tag preparation

8. Maintenance and Updating:
Web sites will need quite frequent updations to keep them very fresh. In that case we need to do analysis again, and all the other life cycle steps will repeat. Bug fixes can be done during the time of maintenance. Once your web site is operational, ongoing promotion, technical maintenance, content management updating, site visit activity reports, staff training and mentoring is needed on a regular basis depend on the complexity of your web site and the needs within your organization.

Input: Site/Application, content/functions to be updated, re-Analysis reports
Output: Updated application, supporting documents to other life cycle steps and teams.

The above-mentioned steps alone are not strict to web application or web site development. Some steps may not applicable for certain tasks. Its depend on the cost and time involved and the necessity. Sometimes if it is a intranet site, then there will be no site promotion. But even if you are a small development firm, if you adopt certain planning along with this web engineering steps in mind, it will definitely reflects in the Quality of the outcome.]]> Mon, 16 May 2005 13:59:00 EDT http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/24711 43.6666667 -79.416666743.6666667-79.4166667 http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/22919
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Peritoneal Mesothelioma is another form of this disease but is not as common as Pleural Mesothelioma. This type of the disease affects the peritoneum membrane of the abdomen. These tumors can also be found in the stomach and abdominal organs. Sufferers of Peritoneal Mesothelioma can experience symptoms which include: stomach pains and abdominal swelling, nausea, loss if appetite, vomiting, bowel obstruction, and blood clotting abnormalities.

The third and the rarest type of mesothelioma is Pericardial Mesothelioma, which affects the tissue and cavity surrounding the heart. Patients of this type of the disease may experience symptoms such as shortness of breath, chest pains, persistent coughing and palpitations.

Mesothelioma can be both malignant and benign in nature, although the most common is the malignant form. The cancerous cells can spread quickly and the life-expectancy of sufferers is not very long. Life expectancy can be between four months and two years, with the average survival rate being four months to one year following the onset of symptoms. With clinical trials being conducted on a regular basis, it is hoped that a treatment will be found that can extend the life expectancy of sufferers and perhaps even stop this disease from being life-threatening. However, this may still be a long way off.

Mesothelioma results from exposure to asbestos, a substance which was used for many years as a form of thermal insulation. Although asbestos has been a known cause of cancer since the 1920s, it is still present in many places, and was very widely used until the mid 1970s. The people at maximum risk are those who have had regular exposure to asbestos. Even those who have regular contact with a person who works with asbestos must be careful. The fibres can be picked up when touching or washing their clothes or in a variety of other ways.

The latency period for mesothelioma is alarmingly long, and the manifestation of symptoms can take many years from the actual exposure to asbestos - usually 35-40 years. Therefore, many people who are diagnosed with mesothelioma today have not worked with or been exposed to asbestos for 35 years or more. The fact that the disease does not present itself during the time of working with this fibre does not mean in any way that the risk factor is not present and high risk workers must be constantly vigilant and fully aware of the possible symptoms.

Mesothelioma is far more common in men than in women, and also in men between the ages of sixty and seventy than in younger men. People who have worked with asbestos on a regular basis - and even those who have had only moderate exposure to asbestos - should always be vigilant and seek assistance should any of the typical symptoms begin to manifest. However, the difficulty here is that the symptoms of mesothelioma can also be attributed to a variety of more common ailments and diseases, so diagnosis of the disease can be difficult even for experienced GPs. Anyone that has worked with asbestos is advised to inform their doctor of this so that a speedier diagnosis can be made should these symptoms arise.

There are currently several ways in which mesothelioma patients are treated: the most common forms of treatment include surgery, to remove the affected area (or part of it); chemotherapy, to kill off the affected cells through the use of drugs; and radiotherapy, used to concentrate radiation on the affected cells to kill them off. There are also many ways in which your GP may test you for signs of the disease, which may include: scans and x-rays, fluid testing, and tissue biopsies.

National Cancer Institute research shows that around 3000 cases of malignant mesothelioma are brought to light each year in the United States, and this figure is on the increase.

]]> Fri, 10 Dec 2004 10:37:00 EST http://clf55.tigblog.org/post/21071 43.6666667 -79.416666743.6666667-79.4166667