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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - A spill of toxic liquids aboard International Space Station on Monday set off a short-lived emergency and fears of a fire aboard the outpost. The station crew was cleaning up from one group of visitors and preparing for their next guests when they smelled toxic fumes, flight engineer Jeff Williams and commander Pavel Vinogradov reported to ground control teams in Houston and Moscow. "The situation is stable right now. There's an obvious smell. There was never any smoke. It was perhaps wrongly assumed to be a fire initially," Williams said. The leak occurred near a...

... I sat in a roomful of journalists 10 years ago while Stanford climatologist Stephen Schneider lectured us on a big problem in our profession: soliciting opposing points of view. In the debate over climate change, Schneider said, there simply was no legitimate opposing view to the scientific consensus that man - made carbon emissions drive global warming. To suggest or report otherwise, he said, was irresponsible. Indeed. I attended a week's worth of lectures on global warming at the Chautauqua Institution last month. Al Gore delivered the kickoff lecture, and, 10 years later, he reiterated Schneider's directive. There is...

Iran has shrugged off the threat of sanctions, saying such a move would push already high oil prices higher still, hurting economies in industrialized countries more than Iran. International crude prices remain in sight of record highs partly because of market fears that supply from Iran, the world's fourth largest oil exporter, could be disrupted if the nuclear dispute escalates.

An Indonesian militant group has said over 200 Islamic suicide bombers will target countries that support Israel, including Britain and the US. Suaib Didu, chairman of the Jakarta-based ASEAN Muslim Youth Movement (AMYM), said militants have been trained to carry out suicide bombings to revenge Israel's military strikes on the Palestinian territories and Lebanon. Hardline militant groups in Indonesia have made claims in the past of sending volunteers to participate in conflicts overseas which have sometimes proved exaggerated. Didu claims over 3,000 people signed up for the mission but only 217 people from Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore have...

An expert with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is questioning the connection between climate change and the appearance of more intense hurricanes in recent years. Historical data on hurricanes is too crude to determine long-term trends in intensity, says Christopher Landsea, a science and operations officer with NOAA's National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida. Extreme hurricanes like Katrina were likely as common around the world 30 years ago as they are today, Landsea says. But since satellite imagery was poorer, storm intensities were underreported. Landsea is the lead author of a commentary in today's issue of the...

July 05, Nature — Multiple introductions of H5N1 in Nigeria. Phylogenetic analysis reveals that this deadly virus first arrived in Africa from different sources. As the avian influenza virus H5N1 swept from Asia across Russia to Europe, Nigeria was the first country in Africa to report the emergence of this highly pathogenic virus. Researchers analyzed H5N1 sequences in poultry from two different farms in Lagos state and found that three H5N1 lineages were independently introduced through routes that coincide with the flight paths of migratory birds, although independent trade imports cannot be excluded.

To take the issue of rising sea levels, these include: that the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940; that icebergs have been known since time immemorial; that the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average. A likely result of all this is increased pressure pushing ice off the coastal perimeter of that island land, which is depicted so ominously in Gore’s movie. In the absence of factual context, these images are perhaps dire or alarming. They are less so otherwise. Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th century, and...

EVERYBODY knows Republicans don't care about global warming. But here's some surprising news: Neither do Democrats. That's the finding of a poll out this week from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, a survey of more than 1,500 U.S. adults last month. Pew found a huge partisan gap in how Americans perceive whether global warming exists and whether it's caused by humans, with Democrats tending to think it's real and man-made, and Republicans less convinced. Yet, when asked to rate a selection of 19 national issues by importance, that gap looks less significant: Republicans ranked global...

Shepard Smith just referred to the current situation in the Middle East as a set of dominoes. He also implied America can't respond because we are "spread out" all over the globe. He is about as frantic as any woman I've ever seen. He used the image of an "ink blotter" being knocked over by Iran...Look, I like FNC, and I watch them because their reporters are pretty good--but the fearmongering by SS is a bit over the top. Maybe I'm just gettin' too old to be fretting about it, and I certainly don't want to make light of the...

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1810738,00.html Climate change can wait. World health can't With $50bn, we could make the planet a better place but money spent on global warming would be wasted Bjorn Lomborg Sunday July 2, 2006 The Observer A city council has a £10m surplus, which it wants to allocate to a good cause. Ten groups clamour for the cash. One wants to buy new computers for an inner-city school. Another hopes to beautify a park. Each puts a persuasive case for the benefits they could achieve. What should the councillors do? The straightforward answer might seem to be to divide the cash...

According to Al Gore's new film "An Inconvenient Truth," we're in for "a planetary emergency": melting ice sheets, huge increases in sea levels, more and stronger hurricanes and invasions of tropical disease, among other cataclysms -- unless we change the way we live now. Bill Clinton has become the latest evangelist for Mr. Gore's gospel, proclaiming that current weather events show that he and Mr. Gore were right about global warming, and we are all suffering the consequences of President Bush's obtuseness on the matter. And why not? Mr. Gore assures us that "the debate in the scientific community is...

WASHINGTON — Those in charge of the nation’s missile defense system have often said the interceptors based at Fort Greely could be used in a pinch. Today, amid reports that North Korea is about to launch a missile capable of reaching the United States, officials wouldn’t say whether that pinch has arrived. “There are many options available, and we are simply not going to tip our hand as to what the possible response would be,” White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters on a flight to Vienna with President Bush earlier today. Snow’s comments were made to pool reporters traveling...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration is weighing responses to a possible North Korean missile test that include attempting to shoot it down in flight over the Pacific, defence officials said Tuesday. Because North Korea has made it a practice not to announce its missile tests in advance, U.S. officials say they cannot be sure of the government's intentions. Under that circumstance, the Pentagon is considering the possibility that it might need to attempt an interception, two defence officials told the Associated Press. The officials agreed to discuss the matter only on condition of anonymity because of its political sensitivity....

"Scientists have an independent obligation to respect and present the truth as they see it," Al Gore sensibly asserts in his film "An Inconvenient Truth", showing at Cumberland 4 Cinemas in Toronto since Jun 2. With that outlook in mind, what do world climate experts actually think about the science of his movie?

MOUNT MERAPI, Indonesia - Mount Merapi erupted violently Monday, sending searing gas clouds and burning rocks down its scorched flanks and threatening villagers who refused to leave because of ancient mystical beliefs. The activity triggered renewed panic and fresh evacuations of some closest to the crater, but others ignored urgent warnings to leave. The volcano in the heart of densely populated Java Island had been rumbling for weeks, spewing ash high into the air and pushing lava to the surface, where it has formed a large unstable dome. On Saturday, authorities declared the highest danger alert, triggering mandatory evacuations for...

A Polipundit reader has reviewed the Goode Amendment - the "send troops to the border" provision and discovered some disturbing facts: The troops amount to one soldier with one current border patrol agent the troops have no arrest or detention powers THEY WOULD ONLY BE STATIONED AT THE BORDER FOR ONE YEAR. http://polipundit.com/index.php?p=13314 Here is the pre-amble; “To amend title 10, United States Code, to authorize the Secretary of Defense to assign members of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps, under certain circumstances and subject to certain conditions, to assist the Department of Homeland Security in the performance...

When a currency loses the confidence of its people, its fall becomes exponential, as has happened to the Zimbabwe $, where in 1982 one U.S.$ equalled 1 Zimbabwe $. Today around Z$200,000 buys one U.S. $ if you can find someone idiot enough to sell one for the Z$. In day-to-day terms, the smallest note in Zimbabwe a Z$500 is the size of a U.S.$. The price of a single-ply sheet of toilet paper is more expensive at around Z$867. The U.S.$ is nowhere near there, but clearly the U.S. Administration has no plan or even desire to rectify the...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. benchmark gold futures scaled a new 25-year high at $700 an ounce on Tuesday, boosted by relentless investor buying powered by geopolitical concerns and expectations of further price gains ahead, dealers said. By 11:30 a.m. EDT, June delivery gold on the New York Mercantile Exchange's COMEX division was up $20.10 or 2.9 percent at a session peak of $700, which marked the loftiest level for futures since September 1980.

Nothing to Fear but the Climate Change Alarmists April 23, 2006 BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST Do you worry? You look like you do. Worrying is the way the responsible citizen of an advanced society demonstrates his virtue: He feels good by feeling bad. But what to worry about? Iranian nukes? Nah, that's just some racket cooked up by the Christian fundamentalist Bush and his Zionist buddies to give Halliburton a pretext to take over the Persian carpet industry. Worrying about nukes is so '80s. "They make me want to throw up. . . . They make me feel sick...

Farmers fear free-range panic in the crucial run-up to Easter By David Derbyshire and Amy Iggulden (Filed: 08/04/2006) The poultry industry will be watching for signs of a consumer backlash against chicken and eggs today following confirmation of the first case of H5N1 bird flu in Britain. As thousands of callers rang the Government's hotline with reports of dead swans, geese, gulls and garden birds, farmers and health officials repeated assurances that there was no risk to public health. The run-up to Easter is traditionally a bumper week for sales of poultry and eggs and a slump in sales could...