US military unveils heat-ray gun

The US military has given the first public display of what it says is a revolutionary heat-ray weapon to repel enemies or disperse hostile crowds.
Called the Active Denial System, it projects an invisible high energy beam that produces a sudden burning feeling, but is said to be harmless.

Military officials believe the gun could be used as a non-lethal way of making enemies surrender their weapons. Officials said there was wide-ranging military interest in the technology. "This is a breakthrough technology that's going to give our forces a capability they don't now have," defence official Theodore Barna told Reuters news agency. "We expect the services to add it to their tool kit. And that could happen as early as 2010."

US 'plans stealth shark spies'

Pentagon scientists are planning to turn sharks into "stealth spies" capable of tracking vessels undetected, a British magazine has reported.
They want to remotely control the sharks by implanting electrodes in their brains, The New Scientist says.

It says the aim is "to exploit sharks' natural ability to glide through the water, sense delicate electrical gradients and follow chemical trails".

US military looks to 'black ice'

The plastic-like substance, the brainchild of the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), would be used to force slip-ups from enemies. The "polymer ice" would be designed for hot, arid environments, "as found in Iraq and Afghanistan", it said.

A spray-on "reversal agent" could be incorporated into boots and tyres to prevent friendly forces sliding around. In a document published on the agency's website, officials point out that "to get from point A to point B, one must have sufficient traction with the ground". Darpa believes a polymer-based compound could replicate the properties of black ice - a thin, translucent slippery coating, typically found on roads in winter - to reduce traction.

The villagers do not seem to see any link between their large appetite for firewood and the advancing sand dunes. They keep cutting down trees in the vicinity and using sun-dried branches as wood fuel or even as an income earner.

Further east in a village called Damasak, Sani Yunusa, 56, says the sand dunes were "not so strange". He claims he had witnessed something similar as a child. "The sand should not prevent people from cutting down trees as they have been doing for centuries," he says. "Desertification is just nature at work and it will reverse itself when it is ready."

But Mr Yunusa is no expert on desertification and the experts say that the march of the sand towards Nigeria's south has become almost irreversible. And the more trees villagers in Bulamadu and Damask cut down, the faster the sand dunes gallop towards the coastline to the country's south.

Earlier this month, Mr Bush announced the deployment of over 20,000 more troops in a bid to end the violence.
Site - a Washington-based organisation that analyses militant networks - posted the video and transcript on its website, but did not say how it obtained it. In the tape - 14 minutes of footage with English subtitles - Zawahiri said that Mr Bush's strategy in Iraq was going to fail.

"I ask him, why send 20,000 (troops) only - why not send 50,000 or 100,000?" he said. "Aren't you aware that the dogs of Iraq are pining for your troops' dead bodies?" He said that al-Qaeda and the Taleban were regaining control in Afghanistan, and called on all Muslims to bear arms or support those bearing arms to defend Islam. The message is the first apparent reaction by al-Qaeda to Mr Bush's planned "surge" in Iraq.

On 5 January, Zawahiri appeared in an audiotape posted on a website urging Somalia's Islamist militias to carry out attacks against Ethiopian troops.

He said he might have had to sanction the removal of a child from its natural family into the care of a gay couple. Mr McCormick said his request to avoid such cases had been refused. That left him with no option but to resign, he claims.

Mr McClintock, a member of the Christian People's Alliance council, said new rules on same-sex couples contradicted both his personal religious beliefs and his duty as a magistrate to put the child's welfare first.
Last year Mr McClintock, a former manager in the steel industry and now a self-employed logistics consultant, said he thought it was wrong for the government to use disadvantaged children as "guinea pigs".

He said placing them with gay couples was an "experiment in social science". The tribunal, which is expected to last three days, is due to begin in Sheffield. His case is to be heard as the Roman Catholic church mounts a campaign to be exempt from laws on adoption by gay couples.

Catholic leaders in England and Wales said its teaching prevented church adoption agencies placing children with homosexuals and they would have to close if bound by the rules.

In fact, in many cases, especially where the attacker is a woman and the student a male, such assaults are treated as a joke, with a hand-slap for the teacher, and some ribald locker room humor directed at the student.
WND has documented in recent months an alarming string of dozens of cases of female teacher-on-male student sexual assaults, but those are just part of the overall problem, Miller said.

Her volunteer group, called Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct and Exploitation, often feels overwhelmed by the dearth of information, injuries to students, and obstacles posed by opponents such as the National Education Association.

But she says it's a do-or-die battle. "I won't give up trying. I have vowed to keep trying until we have good strong legislation to hold the perpetrators criminally responsible," she told WND.
She said the problem easily could be many times larger than the scandals involving Catholic Church priests molesting children, and the hundreds of millions of dollars in civil liabilities already determined in those cases.
"You are not mandated to send your children to church, but you are mandated by law to send your children to school," she said. "And, by God, schools better be mandated to keep them safe."

She's said she's confident of two things: the problem is bigger than most people want to realize, and there's very little being done to address it. "The U.S. Department of Education does not require any state to gather information on educators' misconduct with students. Only 17 of the states require that schools report to their own state Department of Education when a teacher resigns or is fired for these circumstances," Miller told WND.
And with so few requirements for reporting problems, the result is that offenders are not weeded out of the system, and in fact, many have been transferred and promoted even though their involvement in troubling situations is common knowledge, she said.

In one case, a school administrator had been in more than a dozen different school settings, with varying allegations of sexual misconduct in each case, before he finally was shut down, Miller said. And that happened only because the perpetrator drugged a student in order to assault him, and the student died of a drug overdose,

Even then, Miller said, it took the victim's family to hire a private investigator who assembled the background information in pursuit of a lawsuit over the death.
Even further, the established influences of teacher unions and other groups actually work to protect such offenders, sometimes making arrangements for a teacher caught in a sexual assault on a student to resign with a positive recommendation so they can move on the another district., she said.
In one case, a teacher caught stepping outside the law actually was paid damages to resign and move on.

"Such multitudes are indisposed by fevers in this country that farmers have difficulty gathering their harvest, the labourers having been almost every day carried out of the field incapable of work and many die." So wrote Bedfordshire poet William Cooper in the summer of 1783. Across the country, newspapers reported the presence of a thick smog, and a dull sun, "coloured like it has been soaked in blood".

The cloud first reached Britain on the 22 June 1783. In his Naturalist's Journal, Gilbert White reported: "The peculiar haze or smoky fog that prevailed in this island and even beyond its limits was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man." The killer cloud lasted weeks, if not months, and engulfed much of Western Europe - as thousands of kilometres away in Iceland, the volcano Laki continued to erupt.

Millions of tonnes of toxic gas were carried by the prevailing winds across Scandinavia and eventually to Britain. The cloud contained sulphur dioxide and sulphuric acid which attacked the lungs of its victims, choking and killing men and women, rich and poor alike.
The events are better documented in Iceland where up to a third of the population died. Yet, incredibly, the British tragedy wrought by Laki has been largely forgotten.

Evidence now brought together by BBC Two's Timewatch makes clear the extent of the disaster. Panic and fear were widespread - as was death. But just how many died, no-one knew until recently.
Dr John Grattan of Aberystwyth University, Wales, has spent a decade scrutinising hundreds of local parish records looking for evidence. In total, he estimates Laki's killer cloud took the lives of 23,000 British men and women, making it the greatest natural disaster in modern British history. France and other countries were similarly hit.

And it could happen again. Iceland has 18 volcanoes that have been active in recent centuries, the greatest concentration anywhere on the planet. "There will be another one," says leading vulcanologist Professor Stephen Self, of the Open University, who has studied the Laki eruption. "It's difficult to predict what size it will be, but there will be future events like this from Iceland. "Ash clouds, gas clouds, sulphuric acid clouds from Iceland could sweep across Britain again."

Some 10.3 million farmers in 22 countries grew engineered crops on 252 million acres last year, a 13 percent increase over 2005, according to the report. About 9.3 million of those people were considered subsistence farmers.

The United States, Argentina and Brazil were the top three countries that grew genetically engineered crops last year, mostly soy. India tripled its acreage of genetically engineered cotton last year to 9.5 million acres.
In the United States, 80 percent of soy - a key ingredient in many packaged foods - and a similar percentage of cotton are genetically engineered. Some 80.5 million acres of biotech corn are planted - about 40 percent of the country's crop - though much of that is used for animal feed.

In all, about 136.5 million acres of the nation's 445 million acres of farmland was under biotech cultivation last year, an increase of 10 percent over 2005 plantings.
Clive James, head of the advocacy group that prepared the report, said he expected more genetically engineered corn seed to be planted this year because of the recent boom in ethanol production. Ethanol, which is primarily made from corn in the United States, is expected to get another boost next week during President Bush's State of the Union address.

The report was paid for by two philanthropic groups, the Rockefeller Foundation and Ibercaja, a Spanish bank. The advocacy group received funding from biotech companies.
So far, no one has introduced crops with added nutrients and other attributes that could fight hunger in the developing world, as the biotech industry often promises. What's more, few biotech versions of crops such as rice that are widely consumed in poor countries have been distributed on a large scale. The four most popular biotech crops are soy, corn, cotton and canola.

"No (biotech) crop on the market today offers benefits to the consumer in terms of quality or price, and to date these crops have done nothing to alleviate hunger or poverty in Africa or elsewhere," said Nnimmo Bassey, a spokesman for the anti-biotechnology advocacy group Friends of the Earth Africa in Nigeria. "The great majority of (biotech) crops cultivated today are used as high-priced animal feed to supply rich nations with meat."

But Ms Kelly, a devout Catholic and member of the Opus Dei sect, remains determined to include a loophole for her church in the Equality Act 2006 which comes into force this April. A spokeswoman for Ms Kelly, who has overall responsibility for equality, said the minister wanted to "protect the pool of prospective parents" and would be trying to find a "pragmatic way forward" this week.

The Catholic church has threatened to close its seven adoption agencies rather than comply with laws that forbid them to discriminate against gay couples.
The Prime Minister is supporting her efforts to water down new laws that are supposed to guarantee gay people equal rights to goods and services.

But Ms Kelly faces a humiliating defeat on the issue as senior ministers queue up to oppose what they regard as an unworkable and unfair loophole. Alan Johnson, the Secretary of State for Education, who refused Mr Blair's request to grant the exemption when he was responsible for the issue last year, has been joined by Jack Straw, David Miliband, Des Browne and Peter Hain. Blairite loyalists such as Tessa Jowell and Lord Falconer have expressed their dismay.

Angela Eagle, the vice-chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, said that the exemption would drive a "coach and horses" through laws designed to end anti-gay discrimination. Chris Bryant, MP for Rhondda, said the move would have the effect of denying vulnerable children "a loving home". Same-sex adoption was made legal in England and Wales in 2002 but Catholic agencies were allowed to turn away gay couples on the grounds that they were not married.

Of the 2,900 children put up for adoption last year, the agencies placed around 4 per cent. But they found homes for around a third of the "difficult-to-place" children. Ms Kelly argues it is these children that would suffer if Catholic couples were no longer encouraged to adopt by church-run agencies.

Gay campaigners argue, however, that gay parents are themselves more likely to adopt the most vulnerable children and nothing should be done to bar them from the system. Ms Kelly refuses to say whether she regards homosexuality as a sin. She has defended failing to vote for civil partnerships or gay adoption on the grounds that they are "issues of conscience".

Many parts of Australia have been hard-hit by the drought, described as the worst for more than 100 years.
Experts have warned that an army of snakes is on the move, looking for water. Driven by extreme thirst they have been discovered in gardens, bedrooms and even Australian shopping centres.

Hospitals have reported a rising number of snakebites. Toxicologists have said there have been 60 serious cases since September.

President Bush may feel he has no alternative but to push military options in the Middle East. The one wild card that would change the equation would be an aggressive move by Iran. Should Iran launch a cruise missile at a U.S. Navy ship in the Gulf, we will have war right now.

Should an Iranian missile sink a U.S. carrier, the U.S. population would experience another 9/11 moment. At that point, a massive U.S.-led military strike on Iran would become inevitable. Would President Bush provoke Iran to make just such a move?

A pre-emptive strike on Iran would never be approved by a Democratic Congress, but U.S. massive retaliation for a serious act of war by Iran would be a totally different matter. Truthfully, we are already at war with Iran. My concern stems from the realization that the internal politics in Iran may be such that Ahmadinejad cannot allow a massive U.S. military build-up in the region without making some kind of a response. With Iraq's borders as open as is our southern border with Mexico, Iran has now sent into Iraq a sufficient number of terrorists and arms to create a real civil war.

Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi militia, which featured so prominent in the Shi'ite rejoicing that reduced Saddam's hanging to a partisan event, is an Iran-funded creation. Ahmadinejad cannot afford to see a strengthened U.S. military destroy Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army.

If a broader war breaks out in Iraq, Olmert will certainly face pressure to send the Israel military into the Gaza after Hamas and into Lebanon after Hezbollah. If that happens, it will only be a matter of time before Israel and the U.S. have no choice but to invade Syria. The Iraq war could quickly spin into a regional war, with Israel waiting on the sidelines ready to launch an air and missile strike on Iran that could include tactical nuclear weapons.

With Russia ready to deliver the $1 billion TOR M-1 surface-to-air missile defense system to Iran, military leaders are unwilling to wait too long to attack Iran. Now that Russia and China have invited Iran to join their Shanghai Cooperation Pact, will Russia and China sit by idly should the U.S. look like we are winning a wider regional war in the Middle East? If we get more deeply involved in Iraq, China may have their moment to go after Taiwan once and for all. A broader regional war could easily lead into a third world war, much as World Wars I and II began.

At the same time, Ahmadinejad's top national security official, Ali Larijani, sharply denounced U.S. policy in Iraq, saying Washington is fueling Shiite-Sunni hatred.
Washington has accused Iran of backing militants fueling Iraq's violence, increasing tensions amid the dispute over Iran's nuclear program, which the U.S. says aims to produce nuclear weapons.
The United States sent an aircraft carrier to the Gulf this week - the second to deploy in the region - a buildup that Defense Secretary Robert Gates said was intended to impress on Iran that the four-year war in Iraq has not made America vulnerable.

In an apparent reaction to the deployment, Ahmadinejad vowed Thursday that Iran would not back down over its nuclear program, which Tehran says is being developed only to produce energy.
Larijani, the top national security official, kept up criticism of the United States in an interview with journalists from several Lebanese papers.

Larijani, who was in Lebanon on a tour of Arab nations seeking to build alliances with Iran, accused Washington of "stirring up Sunni-Shiite disputes" and "inciting Arab-Iranian discord."
The papers said Larijani was "encouraged" by his visit to Saudi Arabia - a pro-American, predominantly Sunni Arab kingdom considered a rival of overwhelmingly Shiite Persian Iran.

Ahmadinejad said he had sent a message to Saudi King Abdullah proposing the countries cooperate in trying to ease the violence in Iraq - a message apparently delivered by Larijani. Saudi officials have not commented on the message.

According to the Oil Sands Discovery Centre in Alberta, it now costs an average of just $13.21 to process each of the 2.5 trillion barrels of oil embedded in the sands a reserve 8 times bigger than Saudi Arabia's containing more oil than all OPEC nations combined. Now, Big Oil companies that didn't get in early can only sit by and watch as savvy oil laughs all the way to the bank. With crude selling for $60-plus, revenues at Albert's premier oil sands producers are rocketing skyward.

In a speech in Bangalore yesterday, Mr Brown gave details of the foreign policy he plans to pursue when he becomes prime minister, as is almost certain this year. Making his first visit to India, he said that the post Second World War institutions had to be made fit for the 21st century. He outlined plans to overhaul the UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Group of Eight (G8) industrialised countries, the EU and Nato.

He also promised to take the pressure off British troops by insisting that other Nato countries do more to help in hotspots such as Afghanistan. He pledged continuity to Mr Blair's policies but, in a change of tone, emphasised the importance of working multinationally rather than unilaterally.

He told an audience of Indian and British industrialists: The post-1945 system of international institutions built for a world of sheltered economies and just 50 states is not yet broken, but for a world of 200 states and an open globalisation, urgently in need of modernisation and reform. He said that he would work to ensure that the new world order would be in Britain's interests. We can help to build things and shape this new world order and shape it in a way that is good for Britain and British values.

The UN should be reformed to reflect the growing power of Asia, and Mr Brown insisted that he strongly backed India's bid to join the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, which have the right to veto all resolutions. The IMF would have to work to pre-empt financial crises rather than respond to them; the World Bank shift focus from purely development to promoting renewable forms of energy.

The Chancellor called for the stalled world trade talks to be restarted and condemned rising protectionism in America and Europe. He said that the EU would have to do more to embrace globalisation, rather than shut it out, saying that it would have to move from an inward-looking union the union of a trade-bloc Europe to outward-looking internationalists, the union of a global Europe .

Labour is drawing up plans for Mr Brown to face a formal ballot to confirm him as Labour leader, even if no one challenges him to replace Mr Blair (Philip Webster, Political Editor, writes).
This would avoid the need for him to kick his heels while the party elects a deputy leader, senior party sources said last night.

The British Government is keen to avoid holding a referendum on the constitution, despite Mr Blair's pledge three years ago to do so. Under the German timetable a referendum would coincide with the next general election and cause problems for Mr Blair's successor.

Mrs Merkel has announced private consultations over the next few months with the 18 countries that ratified the proposed constitutional treaty and the eight that did not to establish every nation's demands. A senior British official told The Times that the Government will argue that the EU is working well within its existing treaties and does not need a constitution nor a fresh round of referendums. The only way to avoid that would be to scrap the idea of a constitution or to present a dramatically slimmed-down treaty that makes technical changes in voting arrangements to reflect Europe's expansion from 15 to 27 nations.

The British position is at loggerheads with Mrs Merkel's dream of restoring the bulk of the rejected document, including sections that would create a European foreign minister and end the British veto in home affairs and justice policy.

The British official said: Europe is not broken. Decisions are being taken every month. Legislation is going through we have just had one of the most ambitious proposals announced for climate change. So you cannot say Europe's future hangs on another bout of institutional reform. The British position was last night complicated when Ségolène Royal, the French Socialist presidential candidate, vowed to hold a referendum on whatever new constitutional treaty emerged from the German process.

If she wins, the next prime minister, likely to be Gordon Brown, will struggle to avoid a referendum, even if he is able to argue that Mr Blair's 2004 promise to hold one no longer applies. The British source added: I do not think it is in Europe's interests to have another round of referenda. We all know what a shock to the system it was to have the French and Dutch votes. Why would you go back into it? If you lose one or two of these you are straight back into the crisis you have just tried to climb out of.

William Hague, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, said: It appears that the Government is saying one thing in the House of Commons and another in Brussels. Only yesterday Geoff Hoon [the Europe Minister] reiterated the Government's commitment to a referendum. Now we learn that it is not so committed.

Other crops, including avocados and strawberries, also have suffered damage in the cold snap, agricultural officials said."This is one of those freezes that, unfortunately, we'll all remember," said A.G. Kawamura, secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture.The latest freeze will likely surpass the damage done by a three-day cold snap in December 1998 that destroyed 85 percent of California's citrus crop, a loss valued at $700 million, Kawamura said.

Overnight temperatures dropped into the teens again early Monday in parts of the San Joaquin Valley, where many of the state's oranges and lemons are grown, according to the National Weather Service. The subfreezing conditions came after a weekend of record lows.Growers should expect the mercury to dip into the mid-20s until at least Wednesday night, National Weather Service meteorologist Daniel Harty said.

Citrus growers already have lost between 50 percent and 75 percent of their crops, said Philip LoBue, a farmer and chairman of California Citrus Mutual, a 2,000-member trade organization."When you're already cutting ice within the oranges, you know those are gone," LoBue said.

Growers hastened to pick as much fruit as possible before the chilly weather hit Friday, but an industry labor shortage meant much of the $960 million crop went unharvested, LoBue said.The full impact of the freeze would not be known until inspectors check fruit for damage, agricultural officials said. In the meantime, fruit packers were asked to keep produce harvested during the freeze on hold for five days to monitor for quality problems and keep damaged fruit off store shelves.

After a weeklong freeze in 1990, the industry took two years to recover, said Joel Nelsen, president of California Citrus Mutual.