hicups with ethanol and biofuels

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119621238761706021.html

Ethanol Craze Cools As Doubts Multiply

Claims for Environment, Energy Use Draw Fire; Fighting on the Farm

By LAUREN ETTER

Little over a year ago, ethanol was winning the hearts and wallets of both Main Street and Wall Street, with promises of greater U.S. energy independence, fewer greenhouse gases and help for the farm economy. Today, the corn-based biofuel is under siege.

In the span of one growing season, ethanol has gone from panacea to pariah in the eyes of some. The critics, which include industries hurt when the price of corn rises, blame ethanol for pushing up food prices, question its environmental bona fides and dispute how much it really helps reduce the need for oil.

A recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development concluded that biofuels "offer a cure [for oil dependence] that is worse than the disease." A National Academy of Sciences study said corn-based ethanol could strain water supplies. The American Lung Association expressed concern about a form of air pollution from burning ethanol in gasoline. Political cartoonists have taken to skewering the fuel for raising the price of food to the world's poor.

Last month, an outside expert advising the United Nations on the "right to food" labeled the use of food crops to make biofuels "a crime against humanity," although the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization later disowned the remark as "regrettable."

The fortunes of many U.S. farmers, farm towns and ethanol companies are tied to corn-based ethanol, of which America is the largest producer. Ethanol is also a cornerstone of President Bush's push to reduce dependence on foreign oil. But the once-booming business has gone in the dumps, with profits squeezed, plans for new plants shelved in certain cases, and stock prices hovering near 52-week lows.

Now the fuel's lobby is pleading with Congress to drastically boost the amount of ethanol that oil refiners must blend into gasoline. But formidable opponents such as the livestock, packaged-food and oil industries also have lawmakers' ears. What once looked like a slam-dunk could now languish in pending energy legislation that might not pass for weeks, if ever.

Ethanol's problems have much to do with its past success. As profits and production soared in 2005 and 2006, so did the price of corn, gradually angering livestock farmers who need it for feed. They allied with food companies also stung by higher grain prices, and with oil companies that have long loathed subsidies for ethanol production.

The U.S. gives oil refiners an excise-tax credit of 51 cents for every gallon of ethanol they blend into gasoline. And even though it's the oil industry that gets this subsidy, the industry dislikes being forced to use a nonpetroleum product. The U.S. ethanol industry is further protected by a 54-cent tariff on every gallon of imported ethanol.

Ethanol prices peaked at about $5 a gallon in some markets in June 2006, according to Oil Price Information Service. The price soon began to slide as the limited market for gasoline containing 10% ethanol grew saturated. New plants kept coming online, increasing supply and dropping prices further. Today, the oil refiners that purchase ethanol to blend in need pay only about $1.85 a gallon for it.

The low ethanol prices help some oil refiners. "I'd pay a hell of a lot more for ethanol than I am right now.... I'm getting a windfall because it's priced so much less than its value to me," Lynn Westfall, chief economist for refiner Tesoro Corp., told investors recently. The ethanol tax credit will bring refiners an estimated $3.5 billion this year. Some oil companies use ethanol to stretch gasoline supplies or meet state requirements to make gasoline burn more cleanly. Ethanol that's voluntarily blended into gasoline reached a high this month, according to the Energy Information Administration.

The low prices reflect soaring output. Global ethanol production has grown to a projected 13.4 billion gallons this year, from 10.9 billion gallons in 2006, according to the International Energy Agency. The U.S. production is more than half of that total, or about seven billion gallons this year, up 80% in two years. It equals less than 4% of U.S. gasoline consumption.

Analysts expect U.S. production capacity to keep growing, encouraged both by high oil prices and by the hope that Congress will stiffen the mandate for refiners to use ethanol. Some observers regard the profit squeeze as part of an ordinary industry shakeout that will ultimately leave the best producers in a position to thrive. As ethanol prices were pushed lower and corn prices stayed high, ethanol profit margins dropped from $2.30 per gallon last year to less than 25 cents a gallon.

Turning Up the Heat

This year, even as the production glut was driving down ethanol's price, critics and opposing lobbyists were turning up the heat. Environmentalists complained about increased use of water and fertilizer to grow corn for ethanol, and said even ethanol from other plants such as switchgrass could be problematic because it could mean turning protected land to crop use. Suddenly, environmentalists, energy experts, economists and foreign countries were challenging the warm-and-fuzzy selling points on which ethanol rose to prominence.

"Our love affair with ethanol has finally ended because we've taken off the makeup and realized that, lo and behold, it's actually a fuel," with environmental and various other drawbacks, says Kevin Book, an analyst at Friedman, Billings, Ramsey Group Inc.

Against all the criticism and lobbying, "we're David in this fight," says Bob Dinneen, the ethanol industry's top lobbyist. Mr. Dinneen says the industry has been made a scapegoat for food price increases that are due to many factors, including higher oil prices and growing overseas demand for grain. He also faults the lack of a mature U.S. distribution network that would make it easier for consumers to get ethanol. His group, called the Renewable Fuels Association, and the National Corn Growers Association have formed a coalition to "unify the voices" in the ethanol community, he says.

Back in early 2005, President Bush gave ethanol a boost in his State of the Union speech by calling for "strong funding" of renewable energy. Energy legislation that summer required oil companies to blend a total of 7.5 billion gallons of "renewable" fuels into the nation's fuel supply by 2012. The legislation also effectively extinguished ethanol's chief competitor as a clean-burning additive, methyl tertiary-butyl ether, which had groundwater-pollution issues. The bill anointed ethanol as the default additive and instantly created demand nearly double what was produced that year.

"That was when the floodgates started coming open," says attorney Dan Rogers of the Atlanta law firm King & Spalding LLP, which arranges financing for ethanol plants. Hedge funds, private-equity investors and East Coast bankers started pouring money into ethanol. Producers such as VeraSun Energy Corp. and Pacific Ethanol Inc. went public. Mr. Dinneen, the lobbyist, hopscotched the country attending ribbon-cuttings at new plants that popped up in corn-growing states.

Local farmers who'd invested soon were cashing handsome dividend checks, even as new demand pushed up the price of corn. After languishing roughly in the $2-a-bushel range for three decades, corn jumped to above $4 early in 2007. So far this year, it's averaging $3.35.

In the past, livestock farmers supported ethanol because it was good for the overall farm economy. But now they began to complain that the higher corn price cut sharply into their profits. A meat-producer trade group called the American Meat Institute took a stand against federal support for biofuels last December, joined soon after by the National Turkey Federation and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.

The farm fissure widened when livestock, meat and poultry groups started coordinating their lobbying with the oil industry, in discussions helped along by former Texas Congressman Charles Stenholm, who now lobbies for both industries.

Packaged-food companies, too, began pushing back, as one after another blamed biofuels' effect on grain costs for hurting earnings. In June, Dean Foods Co., H.J. Heinz Co., Kellogg Co., Nestle USA, PepsiCo Inc. and Coca-Cola Co. sent a letter to senators saying that requiring greater use of ethanol would affect their "ability to produce competitively available, affordable food."

Ethanol's opponents also began to highlight reasons why ethanol might not be such a boon to the environment, citing some recent research studies.

Strain on Water Supplies

One by the National Research Council said additional ethanol production could strain water supplies and impair water quality. A spring 2007 report by the Environmental Protection Agency said that "ozone levels generally increase with increased ethanol use."

A study coauthored by Nobel-prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen said corn ethanol might exacerbate climate change as the added fertilizer used to grow corn raised emissions of a very potent greenhouse gas called nitrous oxide. The ethanol industry replies to that one with an Energy Department study concluding that use of ethanol reduces greenhouse-gas emissions by 18% to 28% on a per-gallon basis, provided that coal isn't used to run ethanol plants.

Opponents of ethanol also have hammered on an Agriculture Department projection that by 2010, less than 8% of the U.S. gasoline supply will come from corn-based ethanol -- and 30% of the corn crop will be used to make it. That suggests to some that the tradeoff between food and fuel is unbalanced.

At the same time, some foreign countries have been increasingly questioning ethanol. Mexico blamed it in part for contributing to rising prices of corn-based tortillas. China barred new biofuel plants from using corn, and Malaysia trimmed its biofuels production mandates. Cuban President Fidel Castro has called using food crops for fuel a "sinister idea." President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela ordered troops to secure his oil-producing nation's grain supplies, saying corn was to be used for food, not fuel.

The government of Quebec, which has offered loan guarantees for corn ethanol plants, recently decided not to initiate any new ones. Instead it will turn its attention to so-called cellulosic ethanol, which would be made from switchgrass, wood chips or other plant matter. It concluded that "the environmental costs of corn ethanol are higher than expected," says a spokesman for the province's minister of natural resources.

In recent months, U.S. lawmakers appear to have become more receptive to the anti-ethanol arguments. "People never thought they would have to make a trade between energy security and food security," says Jesse Sevcik, a lobbyist for the ethanol-opposing American Meat Institute.

The ethanol industry, accustomed to getting its way in Washington, hadn't faced such opposition before. It may not have helped that Mr. Dinneen, in a close echo of former Vice President Spiro Agnew's famous line, for months brushed off his foes as "nattering nabobs of negativity."

Mr. Dinneen says arguments about ethanol driving up food costs are overblown, in part because corn farmers will produce so much grain that corn prices will ease. But even though U.S. farmers this year planted their biggest crop since World War II, prices have stayed well above $3 a bushel, thanks to rising demand in developing countries and poor weather in some grain-growing nations. The price is expected to stay well above $3 next year as farmers shift some land from corn to two other crops whose prices have risen sharply, wheat and soybeans.

Bigger Plants

New and bigger ethanol plants, spurred by money from investors far from the Corn Belt, have contributed to production capacity that's expected to approach 12 billion gallons next year. But annual U.S. demand stands at just under 7 billion gallons.

So it's easy to see why the industry supports the Senate version of pending energy legislation, which includes a requirement that gasoline blenders use 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2022. Up to 15 billion gallons of this would come from corn-based ethanol. The rest would come from cellulosic ethanol -- an industry that now barely exists -- or other fuels. A similar bill passed in the House has no such provision.

Mr. Dinneen, who has been lobbying on ethanol so long he's known as the "reverend of renewable fuels," says he's "reasonably confident" Congress will raise the ethanol mandate. He says he's talking with the military, labor groups, Southern black churches and others about how ethanol can help them. "We've got to build the biggest, baddest coalition we can."

Write to Lauren Etter at lauren.etter@wsj.com

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waterworld

Best of Campus Press Stories

Earth’s Eighth Continent

North Pacific Gyre traps flotsam.
It swirls. It grows. It’s a massive, floating ‘garbage patch.’

By David Reid

November 21, 2007

The Phoenix

Located in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii and measuring in at roughly twice the size of Texas, this elusive mass is home to hundreds of species of marine life and is constantly expanding. It has tripled in size since the middle of the 1990s and could grow tenfold in the next decade.
Although no official title has been given to the mass yet, a popular label thus far has been « The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. »
As suggested by the name, the island is almost entirely comprises human-made trash. It currently weighs approximately 3.5 million tons with a concentration of 3.34 million pieces of garbage per square kilometer, 80 per cent of which is plastic.
Due to the Patch’s location in the North Pacific Gyre, its growth is guaranteed to continue as this Africa-sized section of ocean spins in a vortex that effectively traps flotsam.
Few visitors
The cause for the Patch’s relative lack of acknowledgment is that the portion of the Pacific it occupies is almost entirely unvisited. It lacks the wind to attract sailing vessels, the biology to encourage fishing, and is not in the path of major shipping lanes.
What little air movement there is blows inwards, further trapping the garbage.

According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Marcus Eriksen, a director at the Algatita Marine Research Foundation, said that « with the winds blowing in and the currents in the gyre going circular, it’s the perfect environment for trapping. »
While the trash is in the ocean, it is doing what could be irreparable harm to sea life, the water it’s in, and eventually humans.
Plastic resists biodegrading. Instead, a plastic shopping bag or pop bottle will photo-degrade over time, meaning that it will break down into smaller and smaller pieces but retain its original molecular composition.
The result is a great amount of fine plastic sand that resembles food to many creatures.
Unfortunately, the plastic cannot be digested, so sea birds or fish can eventually starve to death with a stomach full of plastic.
Even if the amount of plastic in a creature’s body is not enough to block the passage of food, the small pellets act as sponges for several toxins, concentrating chemicals such as DDT to 1 million times the normal level.
This concentration then works its way up the food chain until a fish is served at our dinner table.
A deadly shining
Some birds, attracted to the shining in the ocean, approach the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in search of food. Marine researchers have commented that pelicans dissected in that area have stomachs so full of lighters that they resemble convenience stores. Sea turtles are also prone to mistaking plastic bags for jelly fish, which then cause their deaths or sit in their guts for the decades it takes the bags to break down.
In total, 267 species have been reported to have eaten from, or become entangled in, the Patch.
According to Chris Parry of the California Coastal Commission, regrettably little can be done to clean up the Patch, although many urge that a decreased reliance on plastic is the first step.
« At this point, » said Parry, « cleaning it up isn’t an option . . . it’s just going to get bigger as our reliance on plastics continues. »
« The long-term solution is to stop producing as much plastic products at home and change our consumption habits. »
Cleaning up the Patch will likely cost billions of dollars and, as an approximation, be more difficult than vacuuming every inch of the United States. The plastic and garbage reach more than 30 metres down into the ocean and a great number of organisms would be destroyed in the process.
So far, no country has so much as proposed a solution, presumably because no nation wishes to claim responsibility.
Even if all plastic usage were to stop immediately, future geologists would be able to clearly mark the stratum designating the 20th and 21st century by an indelible layer of plastic coating the world’s oceans.

scot cop predicts terrorist nuke

source: sunday herald

Top police officer warns that nuclear attack is inevitable

By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor

Scotland must prepare for ‘absolute terror’

A NUCLEAR attack by terrorists causing widespread panic, chaos and death is inevitable and will happen soon, a senior Scottish police officer has warned.
Ian Dickinson, who leads the police response to chemical, biological and nuclear threats in Scotland, has painted the bleakest picture yet of the dangers the world now faces.
Efforts to prevent terrorist groups from obtaining
materials that could be made into radioactive dirty
bombs - or even crude nuclear explosives - are bound
to fail, he said. And the result will be horror on an
unprecedented scale.

« These materials are undoubtedly out there, and undoubtedly will end up in terrorists’ hands, and undoubtedly will be used by terrorists some time soon, » he declared. « We must plan for failure and prepare for absolute terror. »
Dickinson is assistant chief constable with Lothian and Borders Police, and has responsibility through the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland for protecting Scotland from chemical and nuclear attacks. He has been closely involved in co-ordinating the country’s counter-terrorism response.
He said: « An incident will continue for days and all the public will see is people dying without reason. What will we do when our children come home from school with blisters on their skin and their parents don’t know what to do?
« What happens if 10 deaths, 50 deaths, 100 deaths start occurring in an unconnected and random way all over the country? The public will be rightly and understandably terrified. »
Casualties caused by radiation, which most people don’t understand, would trigger widespread « panic and fear », said Dickinson. And the response of the emergency services « would be chaotic » because of a shortage of resources.
The police capability for dealing with the chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threat - known as CBRN - needs to be increased, he argued. « I haven’t got as many officers with protective equipment as I would like, » he added. « We must prepare for the worst. »
Dickinson delivered his dire warnings to an international conference in Edinburgh last week. More than 300 experts from 70 countries were taking part in a high-level meeting organised by the UN International Atomic Energy Agency on the risks of nuclear terrorism.
The police response to a CBRN incident when it happened would have a « profound effect on our communities which should not be underestimated », he said. The protective clothing that officers would have to wear would look « terrifying ».
As Dickinson made the point in his speech on Wednesday, one of his fellow police officers appeared dramatically on the stage dressed head to toe in a regulation black protection suit. With his face completely obscured by a gas mask, the officer then walked slowly through the delegates seated in the Edinburgh International Conference Centre.
Decontamination after a radiation attack would be an « enormous cost », Dickinson contended. It would far exceed the multi-million pound bill for cleaning up the 50 premises contaminated with polonium-210 after the poisoning of the former KGB agent, Alexander Litvinenko, in London last year.
There would also be a huge drain on resources from having to reassure many people who were unharmed but worried. The additional monitoring and clean-up work would be « a major problem », he said.
Worldwide efforts to stem the spread of radioactive materials by the governments represented at the conference were vital, Dickinson concluded. « But the sad fact is that your work will fail. »
Dickinson’s nightmare analysis was backed up by Dr Frank Barnaby, a nuclear consultant who used to work at the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment in Berkshire. « The amazing thing is that this hasn’t happened already, » he told the Sunday Herald.
« We should expect it any minute. It’s an obvious thing for a terrorist to do. A primitive nuclear explosion would simply eliminate the centre of a city like Glasgow or Edinburgh. »
The Edinburgh conference heard a series of other warnings about the risks of radioactive materials being stolen and used to cause devastation.
« As the terrorists look for the next spectacular attack, we know that al-Qaeda in Iraq is calling on nuclear scientists to join in the jihad, » said William Nye, director of counter-terrorism and intelligence at the Home Office in London.
Richard Hoskins, from the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Office of Nuclear Security in Vienna, revealed that there had been 1266 confirmed incidents in which radioactive materials had been stolen or lost around the world since 1993.
Most involved radiation sources that could be made into dirty bombs, although in 18 instances small amounts of bombs-grade uranium or plutonium had been seized.

chemtrails: the plot thickens

rense.com

Toxic Barium In Chemtrails -
What It Means

By Dick Eastman

11-25-7

If a mass of barium is vaporized in space, within seconds much of the barium becomes ionized by the suns rays, producing a highly reflective ionic cloud which deflects newly arriving solar energy back into space, thereby preventing the ground from warming to the temperature it otherwise would have attained.
Cooler-than-otherwise surface temperature means the air immediately above the ground will not heat as much as it would have, not expand and rise (evacuate upwards) as it would have, and not create the lower air pressure (relative vacuum) in that location that would have obtained otherwise. In short, laying cloud causes air pressure to be higher in regions where the sun has been prevented from reaching the ground. Oversimplifying somewhat, it means that there will be less « pull » and more « push » affecting movement of air in neighboring regions of near-surface air than otherwise; and that, of course, means control of the weather.
By using this push-pull
(« high-pressure-block/low-pressure-suck ») technique, the movement of neighboring parcels of air—the parcels may be wet, dry, hot or cold, or rotating (cyclonic) -- can be redirected from the course that a super-high-speed computer pre-determined they would have taken to new courses calculated during the process. The calculations take into account (plug into the set of simultaneous equations that comprise the model) all of the variables (interacting factors) fed in real time from sensors collecting data from thousands of points in land, sea air and space. The planes laying reflective cloud change their course seveal times in the middle of a run as new computations dictate the latest requirements in the weather intervention to effect the desired result.
It is impossible to predict weather more than two or so weeks in advance, because of the errors that creep in each time you multiply a number shortened in the decimal places (man is limited in his data measurements to only so many decimal places and each time different measures are multiplied accuracy is lost, the prediction becomes accurate to fewer and fewer « significant figures. » But the fact that no one computation can predict weather too far ahead ( because of the just-mentioned rounding of data numbers that takes place both in the initial gathering data and in subsequent multiplication of these numbers in « running the model ») does not rule out effective weather modification, as mathematician John von Neumann pointed out. The problem of prediction is solved by continuous computing and building the desired weather effect through successive short-run approximations.
Clandestine weather modification is done by continuous high-speed computing generating tolerably accurate short range-predictions of ,1) what will happen without intervention and 2) what will happen towards the desired event given a « fitted » a trial intervention. When an intervention is found that moves the weather system closer to producing the desired effect, the CWM planes are instructed to execute that intervention. And even as the planes are heading to their assigned targets a new intervention is being computed for achieving the next approximation to what is needed to get what is wanted. In this way short-range interventions following one after another so that the final goal—a drought in one place, a flood in another, a hurricane landing on a particular point on a coast -- is attained. This is clandestine weather modification—also called weaponized weather modification—or perhaps more dramatically but no less accurately, playing God with peoples lives.

The new weather modification leglislation passed by Congress has been crafted to conceal, not to regulate this activity. The legislation does not recognize the technology and so these interventions are exempted. (It’s like a company continuing to sell a cancer-causing product simply because the Food and Drug Administration has not officially recognized this effect.)
Also, there are those who argue that the laying of ionized cloud is part of a benevolent plan to save the earth from global warming due to greenhouse-effect-producing gases in the atmosphere. While it is true that physicist Edward Teller did make such a proposal, the last thing you should think is that weaponized weather modification has anything to do with the government secretly saving us from global warming. Global warming a deception, the result of selecting the research, suppressing research, and differentially rewarding researchers for the conclusions they reach. Global warming is a cover for the use of weather technology by the most powerful people in the world for their own economic and geopolitical benefit. Global warming is more real than space aliens at Roswell or ray guns bringing down the twin towers of the WTC. Increased carbon dioxide is not a threat, but a potential boon to mankind. The global warming deception both conceals weather crimes (unlegislated crimes against humanity) for profit and it is used as an excuse for international agencies (copntrolled by the weather atrocity perpetrators themselves) to take over more of the economic activity of the human race.

Dick Eastman
Yakima, Washington


Clandestine Weather Modification

I spent several years on the « chemtrail issue », eventurally calling the activity « clandestine weather modification » and determining that it works like this:

The cloud cover that is generated causes the surface of the earth (land or sea) to be cooler than otherwise.
Cooler surface means the air directly above the ground or ocean will be less warmed than otherwise, which means less air will rise than would have risen otherwise, which means the pressure in that area will be higher than it would have been otherwise, which means that air flows will be redirected.
Note: Whenever a high pressure area is to your right you will have wind at your back. This is called the Buys-Ballot rule. Thus, to create wind at your back create high pressure at your right—or more specfically, have an aircraft lay cloud so that to your right the ground will be cooler with less thermal energy from the sun, with the near-surface air therefore less heated, and the pressure therefore higher. Explanation: Air does not just pour straight into a low pressure area. This is because of the spinning of the earth producing the Coriolis Effect. Try tossing a ball back and forth with someone while standing on a gigantic rotating platter. The air molecules are like the ball moving in straight lines over the rotating earth.

With this simple ability to create higher than otherwise pressure by laying cloud, if you have an amazingly high powered/fast computer (the National Science Foundation computer was the fastest known in the world the last time I looked) and a powerful enough weather model (systems of simultaneous equations with thousands of real data coefficients all continuously updated) then you can control major weather events with this proviso:
Even with the most complete data, the best model and the fastest computer, mankind’s continuing inability to gather data and compute data out to enough decimal places will yield eventual big-time error as approximation/estimate computations are multiplied too many times in the computation (fancifully called the « chaos » effect.) This limits the ability to predict weather in a single computation to perhaps a week or two.
However, this is enough to modify weather because all
that is needed is a succession of fresh short-term
interventions. Continuous inverventions and continuous
re-computing affording successive approximations to
the desired effect to enable clandestine weather modification; and so parcels of air that are hot or cold, wet or dry, spinning or not spinning, can be redirected.
If hot air is contained in one area, its movement slowed by high pressure areas blocking its usual movement, that air will become hotter, i.e. as when Yugoslavia was fried in 124 degree heat to bring down Slobodan Milosovic. The Sahara heat from the south was kept in the Mediterrainian area by chemtrailing—I call it « cloudtrailing »—creating high pressure in Central Europe where it would ordinarily have circulated. The air parcel hung in the Mediterrainain getting hotter and hotter.
Also when you put « chemtrailed » cloud cover over the central Pacific south of the equator, the higher-than-normal air pressure—remember the sea surface gets cooler than normal so the air above the sea does not get warmed as much -- the air does not rise as it would have; it does not create the relative vaccum (low pressure) to maintain the wind.
So in this way you stop the prevailing winds (the air moving west) and this in turn stops the South Equatorial Current normally pushed by those winds, which in turn stops the Peru Current behind it (replacing the water that went west) that normally brings cold arctic surface waters (and fish) up the west coast of South America. And you have created the El Niño effect which devestates the economies of many countries (including our own).
The conspiracy is that El Niño and other high-impact weather events really are under control of powerful private interests.
Of course there are other aspects to it: Using the spin of one system to accelerate another of smaller scale; changing the radius of a cyclonic system to speed it up; altering the intensity of hurricanes by seeding near the wall of the eye etc. My goal here is merely to convince you of the validity of one aspect of current CWM technology. I have merely presented the simple model of redirecting weather movements by the creation of high pressure zones. I do not deny that the weather is complex. Remember, the economy is not complex either, but the supply and demand model nevertheless provides players with power to predict and control economic events.
No critic on usenet weather and physics newsgroups has ever touched this argument. The science is rock solid and the computation, modelling, monitoring and cloud-laying systems all exist. Billions have been spent—and the elite does not spend money like that merely to know when to put their cars in their garages. No meterologist or earth scientist has agrued against what I am saying and many meterologists have said they are open to the possibility. An Israeli meterologist who read my articles on CWM on the Usenet in the late 1990’s informed me that Israel gets 21 percent of its rain from weather modification.
Also, National Science Foundation has given its weather models and global weather monitoring feedback to Red China, while it does not share this super data with the National Weather Service. The Chinese are the world’s experts in medium-term weather modification. Yet in the United States weather modification is a taboo subject. Americans still think of it in terms of cloud seeding or carboning the sky to warm and dissipate cloud (the van Stratton effect). We are left to guess what methods the Chinese use. My guess is that they use CWM.
I suppose I would have gotten further in getting the word out if I didn’t put so many ideas in one sentence all the time. Editing my own writing is impossible because when I try I only think of more qualifying and elaborating phrases to include, etc. I invite anyone to break down the above and put it out on their own. It never has recieved a clear statment for the general public.
The existence and criminal use of CWM is something that everyone in the world should be made to understand. Forget the « Global Warming » myth—which I believe is mere cover for what is really being done. The people who brought you 9-11 are capable of doing a lot worse with CWM—in fact they already have.
One more thing: The people who are controlling the weather are more interested in destroying crops for geopolitical purposes (weaponized weather modification) and for economic purposes than for « benefiting farmers. » If you buy agricultural commodities futures (rights to buy farm products in the future at a given price) and then destroy this crop around the world using CWM to raise the price (supply and demand) you really « make a killing » in every sense of the word.
Did I mention that hurricane systems can also be steered by this process? A hurricane is simply a spinning parcel of air. The rotating parcel moves along like any other parcel of air, pushed and pulled by differences in air pressure in neighboring regions. There is as much money to be made following a hurricane as there is following the invasion of a Muslim country. Katrina? And remember, the ruling minority are Malthusians—they think it is doing God a favor to kill off surplus population. In this way they justify their depradations.

And were tornadoes in Washington D.C. on recent year meant to send the same message as the anthrax scare?

Google Dick + Eastman + Clandestine Weather Modification in google groups from about 1998 to 2002 and you will see about a hundred messages with documentation, first hand observation, an inventory of the technology at the service of clandestine weather modification, debate, and forwarded letters sent to me from individuals around the world—including a letter from a man who layed chemtrails over the Indian Ocean but didn’t know what the mission was about.
Unfortunately I left all this behind me following 9-11 and especially after the Pentagon security camera video was released in March 2002.
One more thing: When you tell people about this they just reply by dropping the name HARP as if that magic word makes everything I have uncovered about the true purpose of « chemtrailing » irrelevant and so is forgotten. HARP is a system that can heat parcels of air (whatever else it does) and so can create low pressure areas, instead of high ones, -- or so I speculate—but that does not change the fact that creation of high pressure areas by laying cloud is being done with disastrous effects on agriculture, water needs, farm communities, all regions hit by steered cyclonic weather and the general economy.
Bottom line: Chemtrails—cloudtrails -- although less conspicuous than in the late 90’s (perhaps because some of us are on to them) is still being done and it is still mass-murder and a crime against humanity if there ever was one.

My thanks to Jackie Patru for her helpful editing of this text.

saudi fm defends dollar at opec meeting

.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/nov/18/oil.saudiarabia

Oil leaders’ private debate televised by mistake

Tim Webb in Riyadh

Sunday November 18, 2007

The Observer

‘Kill the cable, kill the cable,’ shouted the security guard as he burst through the double doors into the media room at the Intercontinental Hotel in Riyadh, followed by Saudi police. It was too late.
A private meeting of Opec leaders, gathered this weekend in Riyadh for the cartel’s third meeting in its 47-year history, had just been broadcast to the world’s media for more than half an hour after a technician had mistakenly plugged the TV feed into the wrong socket. The facade of unity that the cartel so carefully cultivates to a world spooked by soaring oil prices was shattered.

Sometimes, such innocent mistakes can have far-reaching economic and political consequences. Commodity and currency traders said this weekend that oil prices would surge again tomorrow - possibly breaking the $101 per barrel record set in the late 1970s - while the already battered dollar would fall further on the back of the unintentional broadcast.
On Friday night, during what the participants thought were private talks, Venezuela’s oil minister Venezuela Rafael Ramirez and his Iranian counterpart Gholamhossein Nozari, argued that pricing - and selling - oil using the crippled dollar was damaging the cartel.
They said Opec should formally express its concern about the weakness of the dollar when the cartel makes its official declaration at the close of the summit today. But the Saudis, the world’s largest oil producers and de facto head of Opec, vetoed the proposal. Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, warned that even the mere mention to journalists of the fact that leaders were discussing the weak dollar would cause the US currency to plummet.
Unfortunately his words and those of everyone at the meeting were being broadcast via a live television feed to a group of astonished reporters. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ said one who was there. ‘When I realised they didn’t know they were being broadcast live, I frantically started taking notes.’
Opec only realised that the leaders’ row was being broadcast to the world when the Reuters news agency put out a report of the argument.
The weakness of the dollar is one reason why oil prices are so high, as cartel members seek to
compensate for their lower earnings. This means a further drop in the dollar is likely to be accompanied by a rise in oil prices.

chavez leads opec against drowning dollar

.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/17/world/main3517873.shtml

Chavez Uses OPEC Summit To Blast U.S.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Nov. 17, 2007(CBS/AP) Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez warned the Unites States on Saturday that oil prices could more than double if Washington attacked his country or Iran - part of a provocative opening address here to a rare OPEC summit.
The Venezuelan leader also appealed to fellow members of the Organization of Petroleum Countries to join his crusade for social justice, saying the group should be « at the vanguard in the fight against poverty. »
After Chavez’s speech, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, the conservative head of the world’s largest oil exporter, appeared to rebuke the leftist president by insisting « OPEC has always acted moderately and wisely. »
« Oil is an energy for development, it should not become a tool for conflict and emotions, » said Abdullah, a strong U.S. ally.
The king also sought to head off Chavez’s attempt to reshape OPEC in his socialist image, saying the organization « has not overlooked its responsibilities to developing countries and poverty alleviation. » He highlighted that the OPEC Fund for International Development has made donations to over 120 developing countries.
The OPEC summit opened Saturday in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh with heads of states and delegates from 13 of the world’s biggest oil-producing nations. It was the third OPEC summit since the organization was created in 1960.
But Chavez’s comments overshadowed another controversial discussion, whether to drop the dollar as the standard for pricing petroleum, reports CBS News correspondent Randall Pinkston.
In part, the move was political—to embarrass the United States, but there are also basic economics involved. The value of the dollar against foreign currencies is dropping, which in turn is one of the reasons oil prices are rising.
Some OPEC members, including Saudi Arabia and Algeria opposed the idea, which was put forth by Venezuela and Iran, fearing the move could trigger a recession in the U.S. and damage America’s ability to keep buying huge quantities of crude.
« We would like to see the dollar, you know, stabilized, » said Algeria’s minister of energy and mines, Chakib Khelil.
Some economists say this talk signals global concern about the strength of the U.S. economy and foreign investor confidence in the dollar, reports Pinkston.
« If foreigners decide we don’t want to hold dollars anymore, and they start to sell dollars for other assets like euros, that means that our dollars buy a lot less in the world, » said Benn Steil, director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Some analysts say OPEC’s threat to ditch the dollar is a bluff, reports Pinkston. OPEC nations have billions of dollars in their reserves, and a sell off would hurt them, as well as the U.S., which buys more oil than any other nation in the world.
Chavez used his position as the summit’s opening speaker to further his faceoff against the U.S. « We are witnessing constant threats against Iran, » Chavez said. « If the United States attempts the madness of invading Iran or attacking Venezuela again, the price of oil is probably going to reach $200, not just $100, » Chavez said.
The Venezuelan president has accused Washington of backing a short-lived 2002 coup against him—a claim U.S. officials strongly deny.
The U.S. is at odds with Iran over its nuclear program, which Washington claims is cover for weapons development and Tehran insists is peaceful.
Chavez’s calls to OPEC to increase its efforts to redistribute wealth to the world’s poorest countries were equally strident, proposing the group « put itself at the forefront in the design of a new international economic structure. »
Prior to the summit, the Venezuelan president had suggested OPEC sell oil to poor countries at much lower prices than those paid by wealthy nations. During Saturday’s speech, he also suggested the group set up a bank to fund increased international development.
During his address to a hall full of heads of state, ministers and journalists, King Abdullah sought to redirect the focus back toward one of the summit’s key agenda items, which was OPEC’s efforts to mitigate the impact of the oil industry on the environment.
He announced that Saudi Arabia would donate US$300 million to a program for environmental research, and urged fellow member countries to do the same.
He also countered Chavez’s views of OPEC with a more traditional representation, saying the group has had « two essential objectives » since its creation: « First to defend the interest of its members, and second to protect the international economy from sudden shake-ups in oil prices and supplies. »
The run-up to the meeting was dominated by speculation over whether OPEC would raise production following recent oil price increases that have closed in on US$100.
U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman called on OPEC to increase production earlier this week, but cartel officials have said they will hold off any decision until the group meets next month in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Both Chavez and Abdullah potrayed the current price of oil as fair, saying it was close to the levels in the seventies and eighties when adjusted for inflation.
Also, OPEC officials have cast doubt on the effect any output hike would have on oil prices, saying the recent rise has been driven by the falling dollar and financial speculation by investment funds,rather than any supply shortage.

© MMVII, CBS Interactive Inc. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

imf: bric account for 50% of world's growth

Independent.co.uk

How China is eating the world

China’s remarkable economic growth is powering the
global economy, but can the world afford to keep on
supplying its ever-growing demands for food and raw
materials?

By Sean O’Grady

09 November 2007

Economists are notorious for being unable to reach an easy consensus on many issues, but talk to any of them about the outlook for the global economy and before long the word « China » always starts to dominate the conversation. And it is true that the robustness of Chinese economic growth – around 10 per cent forecast for 2008, barely changed on recent trends – is picking up the pace being lost by faltering Western economies. Trouble is, they’re also eating the world – literally, in the case of food supplies.
According to the IMF, about half of the world’s economic growth this year will be accounted for by Brazil, Russia, India and China – the BRICs. India, staggeringly, is contributing more growth to the world economy than the United States, but China is by far the most powerful engine of growth – more so than the US, the eurozone and Japan combined. So, « China saves the world » – or at least helps to maintain global economic growth around the 5 per cent mark. Were it not for China and these other emerging economies, the world might well be staring a recession in the face.
Yet this phenomenon is not an unalloyed economic good. As yesterday’s news about Rio Tinto and BHP demonstrates, the commodities price boom has led to huge valuations for companies in this field; great for their shareholders, but another signal that the insatiable Chinese demand for oil, copper, zinc, nickel and all the other raw materials of industrialisation is pushing the prices of those commodities to ever-higher peaks. The International Energy Agency warned yesterday that Chinese and Indian crude oil imports will almost quadruple by 2030, creating a supply « crunch » as soon as 2015. Research from ING suggests that marginal Chinese demand for oil, as a percentage of the growth in total consumption, rose to around 72 per cent in 2006, from 10 per cent in the 1980s. This marginal demand could grow to close to 100 per cent of total consumption growth in 2007.
Such an appetite brings with it its own dangers, both to China and the rest of the world. As China pushes the price of oil higher, for example, we in the UK are threatened with « slowflation » – where a slowing economy coexists with higher prices of fuel – and food. Were the British economy to slow to a stop –just possible in say a year – we would see the return of stagnant output plus inflation – the « stagflation » last experienced in the UK in the early 1980s. This is all developing because commodity inflation is spreading into a second phase covering the so-called « soft commodities », as China’s burgeoning middle classes develop a taste for a more Western style of eating, enjoying foods such as milk, pork and beef that were once scarce. Like other peoples suddenly able to expunge the memories of socialist starvation, the Chinese are overcompensating for their malnourished past. Thus they have become a net food importer, probably for the first time in their very long history (socialist-inspired famines apart). There’s also an aspect of culture; as China embraces the West so its young people are more given to hanging around the branches of Starbucks, McDonald’s and KFC that have popped up all over the prosperous east of the nation. The rice bowl is giving way to the burger and shake. The world is seeing some dairy prices up 200 per cent, the cost of wheat doubling and pork up 50 per cent.
In the past decade alone, meat consumption in China has been rising at an average of 2kg per capita per year, a pattern mirrored elsewhere. Over the past few decades, consumption of meat in developing countries has grown at a rate of 5 to 6 per cent a year; consumption of dairy products at 4 per cent. Meat consumption is growing 10 times faster in newly industrialised countries than in, say, bacon-loving Britain. Poultry is the fastest growing sector worldwide; it represented 13 per cent of meat production in the 1960s, compared with 28 per cent now. Poultry is the most efficient means of converting grain into animal protein; the less palatable truth is that it is more effective to eat the grain directly.
Agricultural inflation – « agflation » in another of these modish phrases – is not entirely down to the Chinese. There are other factors. Freakish weather conditions across the world haven’t helped: hurricanes in Florida and floods in England affect the cost of the orange juice and brussels sprouts on your dining table. (Then again, China’s breakneck rush for coal-powered growth, and our own profligacy, have caused the global warming that may have intensified these storms.)
Then there’s the switch to biofuels which has pushed grain prices higher. So called « phase one » biofuels –bioethanol (a petrol substitute or additive) from grain and biodiesel from palm oil – have met with opposition from environmentalists. Palm oil production has encroached on the remaining rainforest in Indonesia. We are only at the start of the process. Credit Suisse’s economist Andrew Garthwaite points out that biofuels make up 3.5 per cent of US gasoline consumption. In January, President George Bush pledged a biofuel target of 20 per cent of US fuel consumption within 10 years. This means more of America’s corn harvest being put into the tanks of cars rather than the bellies of Mexicans, with upward effects on the price of grain: « The 35 billion gallons of ethanol required to meet the 20 per cent target will account for 40 per cent of the US corn crop by 2017, » Mr Garthwaite says. Worldwide, « the combined impact of these targets commits 238 million acres or 12 per cent of global arable and permanent cropland to biofuel production ». Crucially, though, « second generation » biofuels will use waste material and be a more unequivocally green and economical option; the stalks of grain crops rather than their seeds; surplus cellulose from paper mills; grass cuttings from your lawn.
The big picture, according to Credit Suisse, is that, globally, demand for food and biofuels will grow at about 3.3 per cent per annum – compared with the historic average of 2.3 per cent. Can supply – of food and other commodities – keep pace with a step change in demand?
It was Thomas Malthus who predicted, way back in 1798 as the West was undergoing the transformation China and India are now, that the tendency for populations to rise at a geometric rate while agricultural production rises at an arithmetic rate would constrain population growth through periodic famines. Malthus was wrong, because he failed to foresee the rapid growth in agricultural productivity – crop rotation, selective breeding and mechanisation. Agronomists are scarcely less imaginative today, yet there are political, environmental and physical obstacles which make the business of extracting more crops for fuel and food tricky. Genetic modification, for example, is viewed with deep suspicion by some shoppers, and politicians have shown themselves unwilling to take on the voters’ prejudices. Ditto the supermarkets, at least in the UK.
Apart from China, Brazil, Indonesia and Argentina have the greatest potential for increased acreage and urbanisation, but the environmental cost – itself an economic burden that will have to be shouldered –ought to restrict incursion on pristine environments. When it comes to productivity – the factor that saved the world from a Malthusian nightmare 200 years ago –things are looking a little grim. In the case of cereals, productivity has grown at only 1.3 per cent in the past 20 years.
So the outlook is for agricultural, commodity and oil prices to carry on rising. The $100 barrel of oil could be just the start. Bad news for Britain and the West – but worse for poorer peoples. Countries such as Bangladesh with large and growing populations but who are net importers of food will feel the effects badly (on top of dealing with rising sea levels in the Ganges delta). The less developed the economy, the greater the share of food prices in the shopping basket, and thus the bigger the impact on standards of living. In the West, food accounted for about 18 per cent of headline inflation in 2007; in eastern Europe it was 33 per cent, and in the Middle East 52 per cent. Everywhere, and especially in the least-developed regions, there will be a regressive redistribution of income, from the very poorest to the relatively well off, as food accounts for such an overwhelming proportion of the living costs of those at the bottom of the heap. In China that means the rural poor, already a source of anxiety of Beijing as it seeks « balanced » growth. Everywhere, pressure on water supplies and migration will inevitably follow.
We may grumble about another few pence on the price of a loaf and the £1 litre of petrol, but we should also be aware that those nations emerging from poverty –
China, India, Brazil – are exacting a heavy price on those left behind.

sarkotchad: perspicacite de voltaire

Arche de Zoé : que faisaient Nicolas, Cécilia et François dans cette galère ?

par Thierry Meyssan*

Des citoyens français intoxiqués par la propagande atlantiste ont été convaincus qu’un génocide se déroulait au Darfour et qu’ils pouvaient sauver des enfants d’une mort certaine. Ils ont financé l’équipée de « l’Arche de Zoé » qui a tenté d’enlever des enfants au Tchad. Étrangement, lorsque la presse s’est emparée de cette affaire, le président Sarközy n’est pas venu au secours des enfants victimes, ni des familles d’accueil abusées, mais des voleurs d’enfants. Pour protéger qui ?

6 novembre 2007

La presse française ne manque pas un éditorial pour brocarder le président tchadien Idriss Déby qui a accusé sans retenue l’association humanitaire l’Arche de Zoé d’avoir tenté d’enlever des enfants pour satisfaire des pédophiles et se livrer à un trafic d’organes. Simultanément, elle loue le président français Nicolas Sarközy, qui s’est immédiatement déplacé au Tchad pour faire baisser la tension et rapatrier plusieurs prévenus.
L’ombre de Cécilia
Le Figaro s’est fait l’écho de la colère de la nièce d’un des bénévoles de l’Arche de Zoé incarcéré au Tchad : ce sapeur-pompier aurait été abusé par les dirigeants de l’association qui lui aurait fait croire que l’opération de sauvetage des enfants était patronnée par Cécilia Sarközy [1].
Mais le quotidien n’indique pas de quelle manière les dirigeants de l’Arche de Zoé avaient pu convaincre les bénévoles d’un tel patronage s’il n’existait pas.
Et si ce patronage était imaginaire, pourquoi le président Sarközy s’est-il cru obligé de monter immédiatement en première ligne ? [2]
Un Sarközy peut en cacher un autre
L’objet social de l’association l’Arche de Zoé est d’« intervenir en faveur des enfants victimes du tsunami du 26 décembre 2004, à Banda Aceh (Sumatra, Indonésie) pour leur permettre de retrouver des conditions de vie décentes par des programmes sanitaires, sociaux et éducatifs ; développer, mettre en œuvre et coordonner des programmes de réhabilitation de l’environnement familial et social de ces enfants ; développer tout programme en adéquation avec les besoins des enfants et de leur environnement de manière à favoriser le retour à l’autonomie, de façon plus générale ; mettre en œuvre toute action permettant de venir en aide aux enfants en difficulté, en détresse ou victimes de catastrophes naturelles ». Comme ne le laisse pas deviner cet énoncé humanitaire, l’association est une initiative d’un organisme semi-public français, Paris Biotech Santé. Celui-ci a été fondé conjointement par l’Université Paris-V Descartes, l’INSERM, l’École centrale de Paris, et l’ESSEC, et dispose de tous les agréments officiels nécessaires. Son objet est de soutenir des projets de création d’entreprises dans le domaine du médicament, des dispositifs médicaux et des services aux malades [3]. Paris Biotech Santé gère un immeuble de 3 200 m², dont 2 500 m² de laboratoires, à l’hôpital Cochin. Ces installations ont été inaugurées en grande pompe, il y a trois semaines par le maire de Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, le président de la région Île-de-France, Jean-Paul Huchon, et le président de l’université Paris-V Descartes, Jean-François Dhainaut [4].
Il résulte de ce montage que la finalité ultime de l’Arche de Zoé est de tester des programmes sanitaires sur des enfants en difficulté dans le tiers-monde en vue de leur développement commercial.
Les liens organiques de l’Arche de Zoé et de Paris Biotech Santé sont attestés par l’avis de création de l’association publiée au Journal officiel de la République française du 2 juillet 2005. Il précise : « Siège social : 23, rue Hallé, 75014 Paris. Courriel :
lefebvre.s@parisbiotech.org ».
Au demeurant, Stéphanie Dhainaut-Lefèbvre, contact légal de l’Arche de Zoé est aussi la directrice adjointe de Paris Biotech Santé et l’épouse du président de l’université.
En outre, l’Arche de Zoé est la déclinaison française de la Zoe’s Ark Foundation Inc. (154 A’Becket Street, Melbourne 3000, Victoria, Australie). Malgré le communiqué de la Fondation assurant n’avoir aucun lien avec l’association homonyme française, tous les responsables français sont membres de l’organisation-mère australienne, y compris Paris Biotech Santé qui figure parmi la liste fiscale en notre possession.
Contacté par téléphone, Paris Biotech Santé indique que seul son directeur, le professeur Olivier Amedée-Manesme, est habilité à répondre à la presse et que celui-ci n’est pas joignable. C’est dommage car il aurait été en mesure d’indiquer quel avis le Comité d’évaluation de Paris Biotech Santé a émis sur le programme Arche de Zoé ; un Comité d’évaluation où siège le docteur François Sarközy, médecin pédiatre. Contacté à son tour par téléphone, le secrétariat de François Sarközy nous assure qu’il transmet notre question et nous rappelera.
François Sarközy est politiquement proche de son frère aîné, le président Nicolas Sarközy, au point que celui-ci, lorsqu’il était maire de Neuilly et ministre de l’Intérieur, l’avait fait nommer médiateur dans le conflit social de l’hôpital américain de Neuilly [5].
Le Figaro le présentait au lendemain de l’élection présidentielle comme l’une des 100 personnalités qui compteraient désormais « au coeur de la future équipe de France » [6]. Le média sarközyste (excusez le pléonasme) précisait : « Ce pédiatre de 48 ans, vice-président du Conseil de surveillance d’une société de biopharmaceutique, s’est beaucoup rapproché de son grand frère Nicolas lors de la campagne, notamment à l’occasion de séjours brefs mais studieux dans la maison de François, en Provence. » De son côté, Le Nouvel Observateur indique : « Autant Nicolas Sarkozy entretient des relations orageuses avec son frère aîné Guillaume, un temps vice-président du Medef, autant il se sent proche de François, un pédiatre devenu manager. C’est chez lui que Sarkozy a reçu ses amis, le soir de son discours “fondateur” du 14 janvier, et c’est dans sa maison du Midi qu’il s’est parfois réfugié pendant la campagne » [7]. Le Monde note : « Le frère cadet de M. Sarkozy a été beaucoup vu au cours de la campagne. C’est chez lui, dans sa maison des Alpilles, que l’ex-ministre a passé de nombreux week-ends ces derniers mois. En l’absence de Mme Sarkozy - qui n’a été officiellement présente au côté de son mari que le 14 janvier et le 22 avril, et enfin dimanche 6 mai sur le podium dressé place de la Concorde, à Paris, au soir de la victoire -, il a symbolisé une présence familiale autour du candidat. Interrogé un jour sur le sens de sa présence, François Sarkozy, soucieux de lever toute ambiguïté, avait précisé : “Je ne le soutiens pas, je l’accompagne”. » [8]
François Sarközy est aussi une personnalité influente des médias. Ainsi Libération lui a attribué un rôle dans l’éviction de Robert Namias de la direction de TF1 au lendemain de l’élection présidentielle [9].
À la rubrique « François SARKÖZY de NAGY-BOCSA », le Who’s Who in France indique : « Interne des Hôpitaux de Paris en pédiatrie (1983-85 et 1987-89), Assistant au laboratoire de physiologie respiratoire de l’hôpital Trousseau à Paris (1989-90) ; aux laboratoires Roussel-Uclaf : Chef de projet international pour les antibiotiques (1990-93), Directeur du développement clinique international (1994-95), Responsable du développement international (1995) ; au groupe Hoechst Marion Roussel :
Vice-président, Directeur de la gestion du
portefeuille et des projets en développement
international à Bridgewater (États-Unis) (1996-98),
Directeur médical et pharmaceutique pour la France
(1998-99) ; Président-directeur général du Centre
international de toxicologie (1998-99) ; Directeur
médical pour la France à Aventis (1999-2000), Associé
du Cabinet de conseil en stratégie et en organisation
devenu AEC Partners (depuis 2001), Président d’AEC
Partners Inc. (depuis 2006) ; Vice-président, Membre
du conseil de surveillance de BioAlliance Pharma
(depuis 2005) »
Bio Alliance Pharma termine ses expérimentations humaines pour le lancement de médicaments luttant contre des maladies opportunistes du cancer et du HIV, Loramyc, Lauriad et Transdrug [10].
Le monde étant petit, en 2006, le principal client de François Sarközy à AEC Partners est le syndicat français de l’industrie pharmaceutique (LEEM), lequel emploie aussi Stéphanie Lefebvre de Paris Biotech Santé et de l’Arche de Zoé, via LEEM-Recherche.
Le président Idriss Déby ne s’est certainement pas exprimé à la légère. Le rapatriement des journalistes et des hôtesses de l’air impliqués dans cette opération a dû être chèrement négocié. Au demeurant, le Tchad, en traduisant en justice les responsables de l’Arche de Zoé, conserve un moyen de pression non-négligeable sur le président français.
[1] « La nièce d’un des Français détenus dénonce les mensonges de l’association », par Angélique Négroni, Le Figaro, 3 novembre 2007.
[2] « Nicolas Sarkozy en première ligne dans l’affaire de l’Arche de Zoé », AFP, 4 novembre 2007.
[3] « Paris Biotech : un cocon protecteur pour jeunes entreprises de la santé », AFP, 3 octobre 2006.
[4] « Inauguration de la pépinière d’entreprises Paris Santé Cochin », AFP, 17 octobre 2007.
[5] « Fin de la grève du personnel de nuit à l’Hôpital américain de Neuilly » et « Accord direction/personnel de nuit à l’Hôpital américain de Neuilly », AFP, 17 et 28 février 2006.
[6] « Les 100 noms qui vont compter » par Yves Derai, Le Figaro, 12 mai 2007.
[7] « Aujourd’hui, ce sont eux qui incarnent la fameuse « rupture » - Les 100 de Sarkozy », par Hervé Algalarrondo, Le Nouvel Observateur, 10 mai 2007.
[8] « Eux aussi ont fait gagner Sarkozy », Le Monde, 8 mai 2007.
[9] « ...Des rides, et c’est pas fini » par Raphaël Garrigos et Isabelle Roberts, Libération du 22 mai 2007.
[10] « BioAlliance Pharma Names Francois Sarkozy as Vice-Chairman of its Supervisory Board ; Healthcare Industry Professional Brings Further Operational and International Experience to Specialty Pharma Company », Business Wire, 5 janvier 2006.

food hyperinflation rocks the uk

The Scotsman Tue 6 Nov 2007

16% surge in food bills as supermarkets pass costs on
to customers

RAYMOND HAINEY

THE cost of the family shopping run has rocketed by up to 16 percent over the last year, according to a new survey.
Prices at Tesco on a selection of foods went up 16 per cent in the year to October - nearly 6.5 per cent above the average rate of inflation.
Click to learn more...
The cost of the same basket of shopping at Sainsbury’s went up by 11.8 per cent and by 8.6 per cent at ASDA.
The average increase across the three supermarkets was 12 per cent - nearly five times the average 2.5 per cent rate of inflation over the same period.
The shopping basket contained staple goods such as bread, milk, butter, cheese, potatoes, tea bags and corn flakes.
Tesco rang up the biggest increases for the basket of staple foods in the year up to last month, with the bill rising £3.55 to £25.70.
Scotland’s biggest retailer was followed by Sainsbury, which increased prices by £2.66 on the same items.
And ASDA - consistently voted the cheapest supermarket in polls - hiked its prices on the 24 item basket of necessities by £1.87.
The survey was carried out by consumer comparison site mySupermarket.co.uk, which checked price increases on a weekly buy of basics for a family of four for the year.
The news came after government statistics showed that prices for many food items had increased, partly due to bad summer weather in the UK and a poor wheat crop globally.
Johnny Stern, the director of the shopping website, said: « Raw commodity prices have gone up worldwide, which is having an effect on prices.
« Supermarkets in the UK have decided they are not going to absorb the rising cost and are passing it on to the consumer.
« Different supermarkets have chosen to do that in different ways and on different products. »
Mr Stern added: « It’s really what supermarkets think they can get away with and they are reacting on a daily basis to that. »
« There is a certain amount of smoke and mirrors - the challenge to the consumer is to work out how to deal with this smoke and mirrors. »
Mr Stern said that staple items were traditionally regarded as loss leaders and competitively priced to tempt shoppers through the doors.
He added: « That was certainly true several years ago and that is what makes these figures so interesting.
« People expect staples to be priced at a reasonable figure - no-one expects them to be expensive.
« And people are going to assume that if prices have gone up in one supermarket, they probably expect them to have gone up by the same in another supermarket, which is not always the case. »
A spokesman for Tesco agreed the that more expensive raw materials had played a part in increasing prices.
But he described the selection of goods in the survey as « small and arbitrary » and unrepresentative of the firm’s overall price policy, and said shoppers should check the company’s online price comparison site.
And he claimed: « This independently-compiled data proves that Tesco is consistently cheaper across a representative range of products. »
A spokesman for ASDA added: « Floods have definitely increased prices of things like vegetables and dairy products.
« It’s always as a last resort we would pass this on to our customers. This study illustrates that when we do that, we are lean in terms of passing the costs on. »
FAIR’S FAIR SAYS CHURCH
THE Church of England has urged shoppers to question who subsidises two-for-one offers in supermarkets.
The move came in a new report accusing major food retailers of selling cheap food at the expense of farmers.
The pursuit of low-cost food, coupled with the big supermarkets’ buying power, is putting farmers’ livelihoods at risk and could threaten our self-sufficiency in basic foodstuffs, the report, Fair Trade Begins at Home, supermarkets and the effect on British farming livelihoods, has warned.
Launching the study, the Rt Rev Michael Langrish, Bishop of Exeter and chairman of the rural strategy group of the Church’s Mission and Public Affairs Division, said although the benefits of the supermarkets were widely recognised, he believed the costs and the risks of food production were not being equally shared.
He said: « Farmers seem to be unwilling to complain or to expose these practices for fear that their produce may be boycotted by the major retailers. »

new declassified cia ufos documents

source: sydney morning herald

November 3, 2007

In January 1979, The New York Times reported that despite repeated, feverish denials, the CIA had indeed investigated the UFO phenomenon: « CIA Papers Detail UFO Surveillance » screamed the headline. The report is said to have so upset the then CIA director, Stansfield Turner, that he reportedly asked his staff:
« Are we in UFOs? »
The answer was yes - since the late 1940s, apparently. But exactly how, what, when, why and who remained layered in mystery, leaving grist for the conspiracy mill.
But this year a raft of newly unclassified CIA documents revealed that the remote possibility of alien invasion elicited greater fear than the threat of a Soviet nuclear attack.
More interesting still, the CIA documents show that despite decades of repeated public denials, behind the scenes there raged a series of inter-agency feuds that involved the highest levels of the US government.
The subject of UFOs - and dabbling in psychological warfare techniques - not only focused the attention of the US government elite for 50 years, but of some of the greatest scientific and military minds of the era.
Throughout the 1950s CIA files clearly document an explosion of activity by US intelligence and military bodies concerned with studying every possible implication for the US, and other Western democracies, of UFOs. The phenomenon, so adored by the cinematic world, was reflected in the CIA’s fixations. Indeed, while highly educated CIA employees experimented by giving each other surprise LSD trips in 1953, there were others, in other parts of the agency, dealing with a flood of UFO reports.
But significantly, after a burst of intense scrutiny in the early ‘50s, the available documents effectively go cold. Why? The Kafkaesque explanation provided is that few files were kept because these would only confirm that the CIA was investigating UFOs. A 1995 CIA review stated: « There was no formal or official UFO project within the agency in the ‘80s, and agency officials purposely kept files on UFOs to a minimum to avoid creating records that might mislead the public if released. »
But the wildly eclectic UFO files cover everything from « flying saucers over Belgian Congo uranium mines » to Nazi « flying saucers ».
A 1953 memo shows that the physicist John Wheeler, while critically involved with Edward Teller in the creation of the hydrogen bomb, was available to the « CIA attack on the flying saucer » problem. The urgency of the H-bomb race was his priority, but he « would be pleased at any time to discuss the issue briefly », the memo said.
Wheeler recommended two « foreign nationals » who could help with the « problem », including the « mysterious problems of ion paths and magnetic focusing » and « cosmological electrodynamics ».
A secret 1995 report was titled: CIA’s role in the study of UFOs 1947-90: a diehard issue. Collated and written by Gerald Haines, the CIA’s National Reconnaissance Office historian, its detailed summary of CIA involvement inadvertently undermined its « UFOs-don’t-exist » conclusion. The document begins with a June 24, 1947, report from the pilot Kenneth Arnold, who spotted nine unidentified objects near Mount Rainier, Washington state, travelling at an estimated 1600 kmh. Haines did not mention that days later, on July 8, 1947, the Roswell Daily Record reported a US Army press release below the headline « RAAF captures flying saucer on ranch in Roswell region ».
The report noted that that controversy, coloured with Byzantine denials, dogged the CIA and its UFO investigations for decades. Using operational names like Project Blue Book, Story, Grudge, Sign, Saucer, Moon Dust and Twinkle, the US Air Force and other entities always looked into UFO sightings with the CIA peering over their shoulders.
The US Army, of course, promptly retracted the Roswell story but it and the « flying saucers » spotted by Arnold triggered a flurry of sightings and conspiracy theories that continue to this day.
The US Air Force finally admitted in 1994 that there had been a cover-up at Roswell - of a secret project known as Mogul, created to monitor Soviet nuclear tests using high-flying balloons - and that the « aliens » were crash-test dummies.
« Ufologists », naturally, were sceptical of this belated explanation. For 50 years now, right across the globe, people have been reporting sightings of giant, luminous flying saucers, cigars, globes, triangles and doughnuts. Aliens have allegedly abducted, probed and impregnated scores of hapless earthlings. Some believe that a top-secret entity, called Majestic-12, was formed in 1947 by the then president, Harry Truman, in an attempt to deal with the Roswell event. It was supposedly established to aid interaction with aliens. The FBI labelled the Majestic-12 documents a hoax, but the story persists to this day.
Intriguingly, the unclassified documents show that within the CIA, there was an uber-intelligence group called ONE, created by a CIA director, General William Bedell Smith. His tenure spanned the period between October 1950 and January 1953. These documents confirm that ONE was concerned with UFOs.
In 1978 the CIA came under strong pressure from a series of freedom of information requests about UFOs and reluctantly released about 800 documents. The reasonable claim by The New York Times at the time was that the files confirmed intensive government concern about UFOs.
This was branded by the CIA as the press being sensationalist. According to the CIA’s self-critique on the issue, bureaucratic clumsiness, charges that witnesses were being asked to keep sightings secret, and CIA officers talking to civilians about UFOs while wearing air force uniforms, had added « fuel to the growing mystery surrounding UFOs and the CIA’s role in their investigation ». The 1995 Haines report concluded: « The belief that we are not alone in the universe is too emotionally appealing and the distrust of our government is too pervasive to make the issue amenable to traditional scientific studies of rational explanation and evidence. »
My painstaking review of hundreds of unclassified documents reveals that the CIA at the highest level, far from being incompetent, displayed good faith in its efforts to examine the mystery of UFOs over a period of decades. These investigations covered a gamut of inquiries: scientific, political, cultural and military.
And although the air force was the agency given the task of investigating UFOs from 1948 onwards, the CIA remained deeply involved. This is best reflected in a memo to the agency’s deputy director for scientific intelligence, titled Flying Saucers and dated August 3, 1952: « It is recommended that CIA surveillance of subject matter (flying saucers), in co-ordination with proper authorities of primary operational concern at the Air Technical Intelligence Centre (ATIC), be continued. It is strongly urged, however, that that no indication of CIA interest or concern reach the press or public, in view of their probable alarmist tendencies to accept such interest as ‘confirmatory’ of the soundness of ‘unpublished facts’ in the hands of the US government. »
Although most reports were « phoney » or explainable, it said, « caution requires that intelligence continue coverage of the subject ».
On July 28, 1952, Winston Churchill wrote to his secretary of state for air: « What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth? » The minister’s response on August 9, 1952, provided the ground rules for most official responses that continue until today. These were that a 1951 study had found that all reports could be explained by astronomical or meteorological phenomena, mistaken identification of aircraft, balloons, birds, optical illusions and psychological delusions, or were deliberate hoaxes.
But in the CIA at the time, two other responses were countenanced: the need for vigilance and caution because extraterrestrial life could exist, and the potential for « psychological warfare », including fears that popular hysteria could be exploited by an enemy.
The sceptics are best represented in a memo in March 1949 from a Dr Stone in the CIA Office of Scientific Intelligence to a Dr Machle that states: « A rapid perusal of your [flying saucer] documents leaves one confused and inclined to supineness. »
Yet with a deluge of UFO reports over the next four years, the matter suddenly assumed a modicum of gravitas, reflected in many top-secret documents. General Smith said: « There was one chance in 10,000 that the phenomenon posed a threat to the security of the country, but even that chance could not be taken. » On July 1, 1952, there was an about-turn: General Smith wrote to the director of the Psychological Strategy Board established by Truman the previous year: « I am today transmitting to the National Security Council a proposal in which it is concluded that the problems associated with unidentified flying objects appear to have implications for psychological warfare as well as for intelligence and operations. I suggest that we discuss at an early board meeting the possible offensive and defensive utilisation of these phenomena for psychological warfare purposes. »
Searching for this « proposal », I found versions addressed also to the secretary of defence. Some of their highlights, quoting directly from the documents, include: « [Since] 1947 there have been about 1500 official reports of sightings and [of these] the air force carries 20 per cent as unexplained. » And:
« Operational problems are of primary importance and should be attacked at once [including] determination of what [use could] be made of these phenomena by US psychological warfare planners and what … defences should be planned in anticipation of Soviet attempts to utilise them. »
This memo suggested a plot that transcends Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove: the CIA, in the face of unknown phenomena - or even an attack from outer space - was seemingly more concerned about what the Russians might do with UFOs than with the objects themselves. The CIA’s interest in the Soviet and Chinese study of UFOs continued for decades. But on October 2, 1952, General Smith received this ominous note from his Office of Scientific Intelligence: « Flying saucers pose two elements of danger which have national security implications. The first involves mass psychological considerations and the second concerns the vulnerability of the US to air attack. » In January 1953 the Office of Scientific Intelligence convened a committee to review the UFO « problem ». Its members reviewed « 75 case histories of sightings », taking intense interest in a Tremonton, Utah, sighting that included a Kodachrome movie of « 1600 frames ».
At the air force’s request, the US Photo Interpretation Laboratory spent 1000 hours making « graph plots » of the film frames, concluding that the objects were not birds, balloons, aircraft or reflections and that they were « self-luminous ». In a tone of reasonable scepticism, it suggested that the public be educated to avoid hysteria.
But the Office of Scientific Intelligence panel dismissed the military conclusions, suggesting instead that the mysterious objects were seagulls reflecting sunlight.
On January 21, 1953, another memo concluded that the panel had found no evidence of « physical threat to the security of the US ». The convoluted memo stated: « The subject UFO is not of direct intelligence interest. It is of indirect intelligence interest only insofar as any knowledge about innumerable unsolved mysteries of the universe are of intelligence interest. » But it also noted the potential for « interference with air defence by intentional enemy jazzing », the possibility of interference by « overloading communication lines », or the possibility of « psychological offensive by the enemy timed with respect to an actual attack ».
This report and the original Tremonton « seagull » film were then made part of an Office of Scientific Investigation briefing on January 29, 1953, to the entity known as ONE. The air force briefed ONE on UFOs the next day and its 11 members included « Dr Edgar Hoover [sic], William Bundy, General H. Pull and Admiral B. Bieri [Eisenhower’s chief of staff] ».
These documents reveal that ONE was an elite think tank within the CIA and that General Smith created the Office of National Estimates on the issue.
But it was said its « ultimate approval should rest on the collective judgment of the highest officials in various intelligence agencies ». This was to give it the prestige of the best available and most authoritative advice from the government.
General Smith created the Office of National Estimates under the auspices of the National Security Act of 1947. His opinion was that ONE would form the « heart of the CIA and of the national intelligence machinery ».
William Langer, a Harvard historian, was its chairman, and while there is no record of whether ONE thought the Tremonton film showed seagulls or UFOs - or of what the air force told them the next morning - ONE is as close as we get to a documented version of the rumoured Majestic-12 group.
With the Cold War in full swing, the CIA was also watching for UFO activity behind the Iron Curtain. Field stations were to be alerted to any mention of flying saucers by Iron Curtain countries and the CIA discovered that the Soviet establishment mirrored its own ambiguity about UFOs.
The files spotlight Soviet articles in 1968 that show some scientists thought they were real, while others ridiculed the sightings as US propaganda.
One Soviet sceptic noted, with tongue firmly in cheek:
« The number of saucers always grows sharply on the eve of presidential elections. This is difficult to explain.
« Maybe people on other planets lay bets on who will win in the next elections - the Republicans or the Democrats. »

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/11/02/1193619145400.html

biofuel, food riots, global food crisis

Global food crisis looms as climate change and fuel
shortages bite

Soaring crop prices and demand for biofuels raise
fears of political instability

John Vidal, environment editor

The Guardian

Saturday November 3 2007

Empty shelves in Caracas. Food riots in West Bengal and Mexico. Warnings of hunger in Jamaica, Nepal, the Philippines and sub-Saharan Africa. Soaring prices for basic foods are beginning to lead to political instability, with governments being forced to step in to artificially control the cost of bread, maize, rice and dairy products.
Record world prices for most staple foods have led to 18% food price inflation in China, 13% in Indonesia and Pakistan, and 10% or more in Latin America, Russia and India, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). Wheat has doubled in price, maize is nearly 50% higher than a year ago and rice is 20% more expensive, says the UN. Next week the FAO is expected to say that global food reserves are at their lowest in 25 years and that prices will remain high for years.
Last week the Kremlin forced Russian companies to freeze the price of milk, bread and other foods until January 31, for fear of a public backlash with a parliamentary election looming. « The price of goods has risen sharply and that has hit the poor particularly hard, » said Oleg Savelyev, of the Levada Centre polling institute.
India, Yemen, Mexico, Burkina Faso and several other countries have had, or been close to, food riots in the last year, something not seen in decades of low global food commodity prices. Meanwhile, there are shortages of beef, chicken and milk in Venezuela and other countries as governments try to keep a lid on food price inflation.
Boycotts have become commonplace. Argentinians shunned tomatoes during the recent presidential election campaign when they became more expensive than meat. Italians organised a one-day boycott of pasta in protest at rising prices. German leftwing politicians have called for an increase in welfare benefits so that people can cope with price rises.
« If you combine the increase of the oil prices and the increase of food prices then you have the elements of a very serious [social] crisis in the future, » said Jacques Diouf, head of the FAO, in London last week.
The price rises are a result of record oil prices, US farmers switching out of cereals to grow biofuel crops, extreme weather and growing demand from countries India and China, the UN said yesterday.
« There is no one cause but a lot of things are coming together to lead to this. It’s hard to separate out the factors, » said Ali Gurkan, head of the FAO’s Food Outlook programme, yesterday.
He said cereal stocks had been declining for more than a decade but now stood at around 57 days, which made global food supplies vulnerable to an international crisis or big natural disaster such as a drought or flood.
« Any unforeseen flood or crisis can make prices rise very quickly. I do not think we should panic but we should be very careful about what may happen, » he warned.
Lester Brown, president of the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute thinktank, said: « The competition for grain between the world’s 800 million motorists, who want to maintain their mobility, and its 2 billion poorest people, who are simply trying to survive, is emerging as an epic issue. »
Last year, he said, US farmers distorted the world market for cereals by growing 14m tonnes, or 20% of the whole maize crop, for ethanol for vehicles. This took millions of hectares of land out of food production and nearly doubled the price of maize. Mr Bush this year called for steep rises in ethanol production as part of plans to reduce petrol demand by 20% by 2017.
Maize is a staple food in many countries which import from the US, including Japan, Egypt, and Mexico. US exports are 70% of the world total, and are used widely for animal feed. The shortages have disrupted livestock and poultry industries worldwide.
« The use of food as a source of fuel may have serious implications for the demand for food if the expansion of biofuels continues, » said a spokesman for the International Monetary Fund last week.
The outlook is widely expected to worsen as agro-industries prepare to switch to highly profitable biofuels. according to Grain, a Barcelona-based food resources group. Its research suggests that the Indian government is committed to planting 14m hectares (35m acres) of land with jatropha, an exotic bush from which biodiesel can be manufactured. Brazil intends to grow 120m hectares for biofuels, and Africa as much as 400m hectares in the next few years. Much of the growth, the countries say, would be on unproductive land, but many millions of people are expected to be forced off the land.
This week Oxfam warned the EU that its policy of substituting 10% of all car fuel with biofuels threatened to displace poor farmers.
The food crisis is being compounded by growing populations, extreme weather and ecological stress, according to a number of recent reports. This week the UN Environment Programme said the planet’s water, land, air, plants, animals and fish stocks were all in « inexorable decline ». According to the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) 57 countries, including 29 in Africa, 19 in Asia and nine in Latin America, have been hit by catastrophic floods. Harvests have been affected by drought and heatwaves in south Asia, Europe, China, Sudan, Mozambique and Uruguay.
This week the Australian government said drought had slashed predictions of winter harvests by nearly 40%, or 4m tonnes. « It is likely to be even smaller than the disastrous drought-ravaged 2006-07 harvest and the worst in more than a decade, » said the Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics.
According to Josette Sheeran, director of the WFP, « There are 854 million hungry people in the world and 4 million more join their ranks every year. We are facing the tightest food supplies in recent history. For the world’s most vulnerable, food is simply being priced out of their reach. »
Food for thought Possible scenarios
Experts describe various scenarios for the precarious food supply balance in coming years. An optimistic version would see markets automatically readjust to shortages, as higher prices make it more profitable once again to grow crops for people rather than cars.
There are hopes that new crop varieties and technologies will help crops adapt to capricious climactic conditions. And if people move on to a path of eating less meat, more land can be freed up for human food rather than animal feed.
A slowdown in population growth would naturally ease pressures on the food market, while the cultivation of hitherto unproductive land could also help supply.
But fears for even tighter conditions revolve around deepening climate change, which generates worsening floods and droughts, diminishing food supplies. If the price of oil rises further it will make fertilisers and transport more expensive, and at the same time make it more profitable to grow biofuel crops.
Supply will be further restricted if fish stocks continue to decline due to overfishing, and if soils become exhausted and erosion decreases the arable area.

This article appeared in the Guardian on Saturday November 03 2007 on p27 of the International section.