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TOP NEWS FBI Probe Continues By MARK PAZNIOKAS And EDMUND MAHONY The Hartford Courant July 31, 2001 WATERBURY - The FBI seized more documents Monday from the office of jailed Mayor Philip A. Giordano, with at least one of the targets of the continuing investigation being a controversial sewage-treatment plant built by a company with alleged ties to organized crime. A lone agent, who carried boxes from the offices of the mayor and corporation counsel, barely attracted a second look, unlike Thursday when dozens of agents arrived armed with search warrants. "They're in and out of our offices all ...

The House rejected steeper increases in automobile fuel economy Wednesday as it tackled a broad energy bill that would open an Arctic wildlife refuge to oil drilling and provide billions of dollars in tax breaks for energy industries.The Bush administration said the legislation was essential to meeting the country's future energy demands and that it struck a balance between energy development and conservation.By a 269-160 vote, the House turned back a proposal that would have required sport utility vehicles to achieve a fleet average of 27.5 miles per gallon, the same as cars, by 2007.Automobile fuel economy peaked at 26.5 ...

A couple of weeks ago I got in a conversation with a lady who turned out to be one of the biologists who worked on the Human Genome Project. The project has not only sequenced the genes of good ol' Homo Sap, but of several other critters as well. As I recall they were a bacterium, an ameoba, a worm, a fly and a mouse. During the conversation I learned many fascinating facts about genomes (eg. the human genome is 200 times larger than the bacterum's, but the ameoba's is 200 times larger than the human's) she mentioned that they ...

 NEWARK, New Jersey -- Nicodemo S. Scarfo is not merely an affable computer aficionado, the son of Philadelphia's former mob boss and an alleged mastermind of a loan shark operation in New Jersey. He's also the defendant in a case that could -- depending on how a federal judge rules in the next few weeks -- dramatically expand the government's powers to spy on Americans or restrict police to traditional techniques. To hear federal prosecutors tell it, the FBI became so frustrated by Scarfo's use of Pretty Good Privacy software (PGP) to encode confidential business data that they had to ...

"The whites must pay." No this isn't the latest rap song burning up the charts (but we all know it could be). Rather it's what Muammar Gaddafi proposed as the solution to the thorny question of who precisely should pay reparations for slavery. Funnily enough, he offered this Solomonic tidbit while on a trip earlier this month to visit his friend Robert Mugabe, the president-for-eternity of Zimbabwe. It's funny because Mr. Mugabe is actually a policy trailblazer on making whites pay. He's declared war against white farmers in his own country as a way to distract the populace from the ...

Sign the petition to stop Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research!

The operation to lift the sunken Russian nuclear submarine, the Kursk, has run into trouble. The commander of the operation admits preparatory work is taking longer than planned. Vice-admiral Mikhail Motsak told the pro-Kremlin strana.ru website that divers are having to carry out work by hand which was supposed to be done by robots. "In the beginning of the operation we thought everything would be considerably quicker and smoother," he said. It is not yet clear whether the raising of the vessel, planned for September, will have to be put back. Torpedoes Before the Kursk can be raised, holes must ...

GEORGE W. BUSH: UPHILL SKIER © by Norman Liebmann George W. Bush is an uphill skier - one of those intellectual snow bunnies who, when learning to ski, has to be told over and over again by the ski instructor, "The pants go on first - and then the skis." It has been said Bush is evocative of the unworldly and vacuous Chance, the Gardener, portrayed by Peter Sellers in the movie, "Being There." The analogy fails on one set of disparities. Chance was naïve and well intentioned. George Bush is trivial and dull. To relegate any matter to Bush's ...

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) -- Armed with quotations from U.S. history, the "Ten Commandments judge" unveiled a monument to the Commandments in the Alabama Supreme Court building Wednesday morning. Chief Justice Roy Moore presented the monument, which is four feet tall and holds two tablets with the Ten Commandments displayed on them. It weighs 5,280 pounds and is displayed in the Supreme Court rotunda. Engraved on the granite are quotes from America's forefathers supporting the Commandments' basis as the foundation for law. "To restore morality we must first recognize the source from which all morality springs," Moore said in a ...

HEROIC DOPEHEADS? By STEVEN MILLOY August 1, 2001 -- SUBSTANCE abusers have a problem the rest of us should be penalized for. That seems to be the liberal view, anyway. The New York Times Magazine just featured a cover story about OxyContin, a prescription wonder drug for chronic pain caused by cancer, other diseases and injuries. Some rural-area drug abusers discovered they could get high by crushing OxyContin pills (thwarting the time-release mechanism) and snorting the powder. This sparked a wave of abuse. Unverified media reports of deaths attributed to OxyContin abuse surfaced, spawning a new species of "victim," ...

Bush fights trade backlash on the Hill By Edward Alden in Washington Published: July 31 2001 20:37GMT | Last Updated: August 1 2001 01:37GMT US senators Phil Gramm and John McCain waged a lonely campaign on behalf of the Bush administration's trade policy last week. With the Senate moving to force a vote that would slap tough inspection requirements on Mexican trucks entering the US, the Texas and Arizona Republicans used every delaying tactic available in the futile hope of persuading their colleagues to reconsider what Senator Gramm called "raw, rotten protectionism". It was a striking display of how thoroughly ...

IbisTek Viper - Pickup truck with popup .50BMG remote-control machinegun:

BRUSSELS, Aug 1 (Reuters) - NATO's policy-making council is skipping its summer holiday to stay on alert in case a peace deal in Macedonia opens the way for Western military deployment to gather in rebels' weapons, a NATO official said on Wednesday. "The Council is going to meet weekly in August with the single topic of the situation in FYROM (the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia," he said. NATO Secretary-General George Robertson was away on holiday but was keeping in touch with events in Macedonia by mobile phone and would return to Brussels if circumstances warranted, he said. The ...

Should Should Talk magazine be publishing a photo spread depicting President Bush's daughters as jailbirds?

SKOPJE, Aug 1 (Reuters) - Macedonia's hawkish Interior Minister said on Wednesday the only way to resolve Macedonia's crisis was to defeat ethnic Albanian rebels. "They have crossed every limit," Ljube Boskovski said in televised remarks in a reference to the guerrillas. "They continue to use military force, they terrorise the Macedonian people and they force them out of their homes. "We should convince even the last optimist that the only optimistic variant is to defeat the terrorists to achieve peace and we have enough force to cope with the terrorists." Boskovski was speaking as talks between mainstream ethnic ...

Frank Buble, 71, pled guilty in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, in December to attempted murder for smashing his son Philip, 44, with a crowbar several times, mostly because he was tired of the son's sexual relationship with his dog. Philip was relieved at the guilty plea, pointing out that he is "the first out-of-the-closet 'zoo' (zoophile) to be attacked because of my sexual orientation, so (lawyers) have no precedent to gauge how a jury would react." [Bangor Daily News, 12-10-00]

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, Aug 1 (AFP) - The NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo (KFOR) said Wednesday its troops have arrested a "number of individuals, including Iranian nationals", working for a humanitarian mission in the province. "We detained a number of individuals in Pristina, including Iranian nationals", said KFOR spokesman Roy Brown, adding that the arrests happened between July 19 and 21. "Since then, two of these individuals have been released, while others remained detained" in the US KFOR base Bondsteel in Kosovo, and are being questioned, Brown said. He did not indicate how many Iranian nationals had been arrested or whether ...

Srebrenica massacre verdict due August 1, 2001 Posted: 2140 GMT THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- A former Bosnian Serb general faces judgement on Thursday over charges of genocide related to the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. Radislav Krstic could become the first defendant to be jailed for life by the United Nations war crimes tribunal if he is found guilty. Krstic is charged with the murder of thousands of Muslim men and boys after the fall of Srebrenica, a U.N.-designated "safe area." On Wednesday, the head of Bosnia's Commission for Missing Persons, Amor Masovic, told Reuters that the remains of more than 200 ...

According to the LA Times, Stanton Glantz, self-described "anti-tobacco lunatic," wended his weary way to London (his first-class ticket paid for by taxpayers) to preach the evils of tobacco use to London's mayor, Ken Livingstone, in an effort to get Brits fired up against smoking. " 'The fact that these laws have worked so well in California means they can work anywhere in the world,' Glantz told a committee of the Greater London Assembly." The report continues: "On a day when British newspaper editorials called Glantz the "arch-creep" and "high priest of the American anti-smoking movement," members of the committee ...

EMBRYONIC STEM CELL RESEARCH EMBRYONIC STEM CELL RESEARCH REDEFINES THE BEGINNING OF HUMAN LIFE by Joseph B. Stanford, MD, MSPH July 21, 2001 As physician and researcher, I have spent many years wrestling with issues related to the beginning of human life. In considering the current debate over embryonic stem cell research, I have come to conclusions that are outside those of current mainstream medicine, which supports this research. I do not do this lightly, nor do I impugn the motives or the integrity of my medical colleagues who support embryonic stem cell research. But I believe there are ...