1.3 trillion cubic meters of natural gas in waters near gaza... hmmm...this may explain a few things...

Israel has dramatically intensified its military campaign in the Gaza Strip, stepping up air strikes and shelling of the beleaguered coastal strip. UN officials and human rights advocates warn that Gazans now face a humanitarian disaster of unprecedented magnitude with widespread disease and famine rapidly becoming reality as electricity generation, water supply, sewage treatment, food supplies and medical services grind to a halt as a consequence of the ever tighter Israeli blockade.

Israel claims its recent moves are retaliation for continued rocket attacks originating in Gaza that despite their consistency cause scant damage and few actual casualties. But the reasons may include motivations with roots back in 2000, when the British firm British Gas Group (BG) discovered proven natural gas reserves of at least 1.3 trillion cubic meters beneath Gazan territorial waters worth nearly $4 billion.

The Palestinian Investment Fund (PIF), a financial holdings company owned primarily by independent Palestinian shareholders, is investing in the project and heads the negotiations in coordination with Mahmoud Abbas' government in the West Bank. BG won a majority stake in the concession to develop the Gaza Marine Field and originally targeted Egypt for the sale of the natural gas. But pressure from then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair led the company to redirect its efforts toward Israel and develop plans for an underwater pipeline that would transport the gas to an Israeli refinery at Ashkelon. That deal could have eventually provided Israel with approximately 10 percent of its annual energy requirement, and would have generated approximately $1 billion for the PIF. The Hamas election victory in 2006 put all that in jeopardy.

The Palestine Investment Fund was set up by Salam Fayyad, a World Bank veteran lauded by the United States as a practical thinker and fiscal reformist who would deliver transparency to the Palestinian Authority's financial dealings. In 2003, then PA Finance Minister Fayyad consolidated a varied collection of Palestinian Authority holdings into the fund audited by Standard & Poor's and now valued at an estimated $1.3 billion. The fund's portfolio includes Palestine's most profitable company, Paltel, and serves as the primary vehicle for private investment in Palestinian sustainable infrastructure.

The PIF is ostensibly overseen by the Palestinian Authority; revenue generated by the fund could potentially be available to a Hamas-led government. Through the deal structured with the PIF, BG owns 90 percent of the Gaza Marine license. Consolidated Contractors Company, a Palestinian owned construction firm, owns the remaining 10 percent. The Palestinian Authority retains an option to take a stake in the concession once production is sanctioned. After the 2006 Palestinian election results, Israel began stalling in its negotiations with BG. Any deal that could result in funds reaching Gaza would seriously undermine official Israeli policy toward Hamas. For its part, Hamas assured it would not interrupt development of the project, but reserved its right to restructure parts of the deal it deemed harmful to Palestinian interests. In an interview with Dow Jones Newswires, Minister of Economy Ziad al-Zaza reiterated Hamas opposition to any sale of fuel to Israel.

After the Hamas election victory, Israel embarked on an intense campaign to eliminate the movement as a viable political entity in Gaza while at the same time attempting to rehabilitate the defeated Fatah as the dominant political player in the West Bank. By leveraging political tensions between the two parties, arming forces loyal to Abbas and the selective resumption of financial aid, Israel and the United States effectively re-installed Fatah in the West Bank, projected the party back onto the international stage and revived the possibility of concluding the energy deal.

With Hamas isolated geographically in Gaza, Israeli policy focused on isolating it politically as well. Israel has made significant progress toward this goal. Fayyad was appointed Prime Minister of the new unelected West Bank government recognized by the West, and by April 2007 the Israeli Cabinet had reversed an earlier decision to prohibit the purchase of natural gas from the Palestinian Authority. But with 1.5 million people living in the Gaza Strip, Hamas retains significant influence in the Palestinian political arena. Israel will have to eliminate the party completely in order to create a political climate suited to accommodate the BG deal. Time is running out.

In January, BG announced it was pulling the plug on negotiations with Israel due to the long impasse, and was again considering Egypt as a buyer. The Egyptian option includes liquefying up to a third of the gas for export to the US and Europe. BG announced plans to close its office near Tel Aviv at the end of January and sell its share in Israel's offshore Med Yavne natural gas field. Since the announcement, Israel has radically expanded its sanctions, cut fuel shipments entirely and stepped up its military campaign. Increased air strikes and use of internationally proscribed tank shell ammunition has led to a drastic increase in civilian deaths and injuries in hopes of eroding support for Hamas in Gaza. Combined with dangerous shortages of food, water and basic supplies, the coastal region has fallen into catastrophe. Israel and the United States refuse to acknowledge the growing chorus of international condemnation. Appeals from Ramallah lack the popular mobilization needed to effectively advocate an end to the Israeli siege. Regardless of the future of the Gaza Marine Field, Gazans can be sure they will be denied any relief it might once have afforded them.

International human rights activist Mark Turner recently returned from a nine-month stay in Balata Refugee Camp in the northern West Bank city of Nablus. Turner is currently touring the US, presenting his experiences and analysis of the developing situation in occupied Palestine and can be reached at Mark.Turner[@]ResearchJournalismInitiative.net.

rare footage , miles davis & gil evans orchestra

wow...a moment to remember...

life on earth ..guess we lucked out

Plate Tectonics: Earth's Lucky GeologyLarry O'Hanlon, Discovery News

Jan. 11, 2008 -- Four decades after the rise of the great, unifying theory of plate tectonics, geologists are still scratching their heads over a lot of the details.

Unanswered, for instance, are basic questions like how the shifting and colliding of plates got started, what keeps plates moving, why other planets in our solar system lack plate tectonics, and how important all the geological turmoil might be to the evolution of life.

"We didn't get it all right the first time, so let's ask the questions," said geologist Vicki Hansen of the University of Minnesota at Duluth, referring to the fact that despite decades of work, many mysteries remain.

Hansen recently stirred the pot with a controversial hypothesis published in last month's issue of the journal Geology. Meteorite impacts early in Earth's history, she suggested, created the first rifts in the crust, jump-starting plate tectonics.

Prior to the 1960s, geologists were hard pressed to explain such basic things as how most mountain ranges formed and why volcanic regions and earthquakes were clustered in certain parts of the planet. Plate tectonics put these phenomena, and many others, into a single, unified framework.

That framework is an Earth with a rocky crust divided into plates that are moving, rifting, colliding and overrunning each other. It finally made sense of a previously nonsensical geography and is now recognized as one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century.

Energizer Bunny Tectonics?

Another iconoclastic hypothesis just out last week goes after the question of whether plate tectonics ever stops. Has it ever done so? Geologist Paul Silver of the Carnegie Institution of Washington thinks it's possible.

"It's an implicit assumption that plate tectonics never shuts down," Silver told Discovery News. "But it's nowhere stated in plate tectonics theory."

Silver and his colleague Mark Behn proposed in the Jan. 4 issue of Science that all it takes to stop plate tectonics is the devouring of the crustal plate under the Pacific Ocean. And that's not as far-fetched as it sounds.

The Pacific Plate is surrounded by most of Earth's overriding (subducting) crust collision zones, so it's getting smaller all the time. Eventually, roughly 350 million years from now, the surrounding adjacent continents will collide.

Meanwhile, the lost crust is being made up on the other side of the planet by the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which has been efficiently churning out magma and expanding the Atlantic for millions of years.

The end result would be a supercontinent, no remaining subduction zones, and virtually no plate tectonics, at least for a while.

Accidental Earth

In recent years, plate tectonics has also become a matter of importance in the search for life on other planets. Is it, for instance, just a coincidence that Earth is the only planet in our solar system known to have both life and plate tectonics?

Probably not.

"Plate tectonics helps make a planet habitable," said astrobiology researcher Diane Valencia of Harvard University. It does so by regulating a planet's climate, she said.

Valencia and her colleagues recently published an article in the Astrophysical Journal outlining how very large, rocky planets in other solar systems -- which they call super-earths -- can have plate tectonics, and therefore be great candidates for life.

On Earth plate tectonics help regulate the planet's long-term temperature by recycling climate-warming carbon from the atmosphere, Valencia explains.

Plate tectonics allows captured carbon that is buried in the seas to find its way back into the atmosphere via subduction zones. Where one plate is pushed under another, carbon-rich, wet ocean sediments are pressed into the Earth's mantle, where they are heated. The water there helps melt the sediments, which then buoy upwards to create chains of volcanoes -- which release the carbon back into the atmosphere.

"If you don't have plate tectonics, you don't have this way of transporting materials out of (and back into) the atmosphere," said Valencia.

This sort of recycling -- which takes place over a over a million-year timescale -- doesn't eliminate some millennial-scale climate swings, she said. But it's a thermostat which keeps Earth's long-term climate within the range that allows water to remain liquid -- the habitable range for life.

What this means for other planets in other solar systems is that plate tectonics can expand the Goldilocks zone of habitability around a star -- where it's neither too hot nor too cold -- by allowing a planet to better regulate its own temperature and keep water wet.

Very large, rocky planets -- those super-earths -- would be the most likely places for life because their greater internal heat causes them to experience larger forces on thinner plates, Valencia asserts. As a result, they would be particularly good at regulating their climates and allowing life to evolve.

It's likely that the lack of plate tectonics is the reason that both Mars or Venus -- Earth's closest local sibling planets -- are dead, Valencia explained.

"If Mars were to have plate tectonics, it would have to be bigger early on," said Valencia. This is because plate tectonics require a planet to have a lot of interior heat to keep things moving. Smaller planets dissipate their heat faster, and so have a very short window of time for plate tectonics.

Venus, on the other hand, is about the same size as Earth, but it lacks water, said Hansen. Without water in the mantle to help melt rocks and trigger volcanic recycling of material, Venus' crust appears to have remained stiff and locked up forever. Had Venus held more water, or if it had been a super-sized rocky planet, it too would have had plate tectonics and perhaps life.

The implication of all this, of course, is that little old Earth lucked out. A little less water and the planet may not have had plate tectonics. Climate swings would have been harsher, and life might have foundered early on.

Earth, just barely large enough to have the internal heat; just wet enough to melt and recycle its crust -- may have barely made the cut for life.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Plate Tectonics: The Mechanism The main features of plate tectonics are: The Earth's surface is covered by a series of crustal plates.
The ocean floors are continually, moving, spreading from the center, sinking at the edges, and being regenerated.
Convection currents beneath the plates move the crustal plates in different directions.
The source of heat driving the convection currents is radioactivity deep in the Earths mantle.
Advances in sonic depth recording during World War II and the subsequent development of the nuclear resonance type magnometer (proton-precession magnometer) led to detailed mapping of the ocean floor and with it came many observation that led scientists like Howard Hess and R. Deitz to revive Holmes' convection theory. Hess and Deitz modified the theory considerably and called the new theory "Sea-floor Spreading". Among the seafloor features that supported the sea-floor spreading hypothesis were: mid-oceanic ridges, deep sea trenches, island arcs, geomagnetic patterns, and fault patterns.

Mid-Oceanic Ridges
The mid-oceanic ridges rise 3000 meters from the ocean floor and are more than 2000 kilometers wide surpassing the Himalayas in size. The mapping of the seafloor also revealed that these huge underwater mountain ranges have a deep trench which bisects the length of the ridges and in places is more than 2000 meters deep. Research into the heat flow from the ocean floor during the early 1960s revealed that the greatest heat flow was centered at the crests of these mid-oceanic ridges. Seismic studies show that the mid-oceanic ridges experience an elevated number of earthquakes. All these observations indicate intense geological activity at the mid-oceanic ridges.

Geomagnetic Anomalies Occasionally, at random intervals, the Earth's magnetic field reverses. New rock formed from magma records the orientation of Earth's magnetic field at the time the magma cools. Study of the sea floor with magnometers revealed "stripes" of alternating magnetization parallel to the mid-oceanic ridges. This is evidence for continuous formation of new rock at the ridges. As more rock forms, older rock is pushed farther away from the ridge, producing symmetrical stripes to either side of the ridge. In the diagram to the right, the dark stripes represent ocean floor generated during "reversed" polar orientation and the lighter stripes represent the polar orientation we have today. Notice that the patterns on either side of the line representing the mid-oceanic ridge are mirror images of one another. The shaded stripes also represent older and older rock as they move away from the mid-oceanic ridge. Geologists have determined that rocks found in different parts of the planet with similar ages have the same magnetic characteristics.

Deep Sea Trenches
The deepest waters are found in oceanic trenches, which plunge as deep as 35,000 feet below the ocean surface. These trenches are usually long and narrow, and run parallel to and near the oceans margins. They are often associated with and parallel to large continental mountain ranges. There is also an observed parallel association of trenches and island arcs. Like the mid-oceanic ridges, the trenches are seismically active, but unlike the ridges they have low levels of heat flow. Scientists also began to realize that the youngest regions of the ocean floor were along the mid-oceanic ridges, and that the age of the ocean floor increased as the distance from the ridges increased. In addition, it has been determined that the oldest seafloor often ends in the deep-sea trenches.

Island Arcs
Chains of islands are found throughout the oceans and especially in the western Pacific margins; the Aleutians, Kuriles, Japan, Ryukus, Philippines, Marianas, Indonesia, Solomons, New Hebrides, and the Tongas, are some examples.. These "Island arcs" are usually situated along deep sea trenches and are situated on the continental side of the trench.

These observations, along with many other studies of our planet, support the theory that underneath the Earth's crust (the lithosphere: a solid array of plates) is a malleable layer of heated rock known as the asthenosphere which is heated by radioactive decay of elements such as Uranium, Thorium, and Potassium. Because the radioactive source of heat is deep within the mantle, the fluid asthenosphere circulates as convection currents underneath the solid lithosphere. This heated layer is the source of lava we see in volcanos, the source of heat that drives hot springs and geysers, and the source of raw material which pushes up the mid-oceanic ridges and forms new ocean floor. Magma continuously wells upwards at the mid-oceanic ridges (arrows) producing currents of magma flowing in opposite directions and thus generating the forces that pull the sea floor apart at the mid-oceanic ridges. As the ocean floor is spread apart cracks appear in the middle of the ridges allowing molten magma to surface through the cracks to form the newest ocean floor. As the ocean floor moves away from the mid-oceanic ridge it will eventually come into contact with a continental plate and will be subducted underneath the continent. Finally, the lithosphere will be driven back into the asthenosphere where it returns to a heated state.

"bradley effect" my ass...diebold strikes again...

was my immediate reaction when they said obama was up by 10 percent over hillary and then a stunning upset occured. the pollsters got everything right in new hampshire except barack vs hillary. when the media started saying that both the pre-vote polls AND the exit polls were off in the obama clinton contest --my often accurate "paranoia gland " began its now TOO familiar twitching ...

the percentages between obama and hillary on the hand counted paper ballots compared to machine counted ballots .

Clinton Optical scan 91,717 52.95%
Obama Optical scan 81,495 47.05%

Clinton Hand-counted 20,889 47.05%
Obama Hand-counted 23,509 52.95%

in technical terms : shit like this don't come out like that ! the percentages are exactly alike only reversed ! the mathematical odds of the percentage numbers coming out exactly like this , only reversed is like the average person's odds of winning the megalottery--something like 200 million to one --something seems rotten in the cotton


i'm not an obama or hillary supporter but since bush/gore 2000 and bush / kerry 2004 i've grown suspicious enough that i can sometimes smell it when the fix is in ...like in kenya's recent "election" , or in france when french neo-con nicolas sarkozy got "elected" .

interesting to note that john kerry who folded up like a republican umbrella when black folks votes got blatantly stolen in Ohio 2004 --jumped up and endorsed obama today...

January 10, 2008

Obama-Clinton: remarkable opscan v. handcount results

By Bruce O'Dell


Analysts at the Election Defense Alliance (EDA) have confirmed that based on the official results on the New Hampshire Secretary of state web site, there is a remarkable relationship between Obama and Clinton votes, when you look at votes tabulated by op-scan v. votes tabulated by hand:

Clinton Optical scan 91,717 52.95%
Obama Optical scan 81,495 47.05%

Clinton Hand-counted 20,889 47.05%
Obama Hand-counted 23,509 52.95%

The percentages appear to be swapped. That seems highly unusual, to say the least.

EDA and others are proceeding with intra and inter-county results and demographic analysis to better understand what this extremely unusual "coincidence" may indicate. The work to understand what really happened in New Hampshire is far from complete.

In the meantime, what are we to make of all this?

On the one hand, everyone has heard of the unanimous verdict of both private and public opinion polls leading up to the New Hampshire primary, showing Obama with about a 10% lead. And a report on Brad Blog today quotes Chris Matthews on "Hardball" who saw a comparable lead for Obama - about 8% - in the media's "unadjusted" New Hampshire exit poll.


On the other hand, it is a fact that the specific models of Diebold op-scan and central tabulators currently in use to count votes in New Hampshire have been proven, by multiple public demonstrations, to be wide-open to insider manipulation through a variety of mechanisms. Some exploits involve computer programs, and others, simple proximity to the central tabulator or precinct scanner.

So there is an undeniable possibility that the optical scan vote in New Hampshire could have been manipulated by insiders at the outsourced companies that run the election there, or by anyone with hand-on access to the voting and tabulating machines.

One recourse might be to recount the paper ballots by hand, but as we saw in Ohio in 2004, in the absence of a secure chain of custody the accuracy of any after-the fact recount of optical scan and hand-count ballots remains problematic - and the clock is ticking.


I've met some of the people who run elections in New Hampshire and I know that they are proud of their state's historic committment to fair elections. When I testified there last year to their State House Subcommitee on Voting Equipment, I advocated New Hampshire adopt the Universal Ballot Sampling hand-count audit protocol, a statistically-robust way of checking the accuracy of optical scan voting and central tabulation systems. If only the state had chosen to implement that simple and universal hand-count audit protocol for the 2008 primary, these lingering questions about the accuracy of the official count could be have been examined independently.

New Hampshire, and most other states still - unbelievably - run their elections with equipment and procedures so open to insider manipulation that they would lead to serious civil or criminal liability if comparable systems were allowed to run, in any bank in America.

If we can't simply return to the best system of voting, hand-counted paper ballots, why can't we at least put in place the capability for an independent citizen-run verification of the accuracy of our computerized voting equipment on election night?

If you have faith that the Diebold equipment is accurate, you are left only with the supposition that many voters in New Hampshire lie to exit pollsters or are secret racists - and the ones who do so also vote on optical scan equipment.

I think New Hampshire is a better state, and we're a better nation than that; and I'd like to know why the people who run our elections think it's acceptable that I can't prove it.





Authors Bio: Bruce O'Dell is a self-employed information technology consultant with more than twenty five years experience who applies his broad technical expertise to his work as an election integrity activist. His current consulting practice centers on e-Commerce security and the performance and design of very large-scale computer systems for Fortune 100 clients. He recently spent a year as the chief technical architect in a company-wide security project at one of the top twenty public companies in America, led a multiple client projects for compliance with new credit card data security standards, and has designed secure "virtual cash" e-commerce protocols. In 2007 he was invited to testify on computer voting security issues to the Texas and New Hampshire legislatures. He lives just outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, and shares a love of good books with his wife - and her beautiful garden, with their talkative cat.

mugshot of cassiopeia-a

thought this was a cool photo of cassiopeia-a taken by Spitzer space telescope .apparently they believe these are the remains of a huge supernova explosion 325 years ago that left enough dust to equal the mass of 10,000 earths