-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- Is Time Speeding Up? Light is Slowing Down Scientists put on the brakes SCIENTISTS have managed to slow down the speed of light so that it can be overtaken by a bicycle. By passing it through an illuminated atomic cloud, they have cut the speed of a pulse of yellow laser light from 186,000 miles per second to 0.01 mile per second and plan to reduce it further to a crawl of about half an inch a second. This puts the speed of light in the shade when compared with the world-record cyclist Bruce Bursford, who has clocked up 207 miles per hour or 0.057 miles per second. The feat is reported today by Dr Lene Hau of the Rowland Institute for Science, and Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and colleagues. Light is already known to slow down a little when it enters a piece of glass, because glass has a refractive index which is larger than that of free space. Dr Hau said: "We are using a much more interesting mechanism to slow light down by a factor of 20 million." The trick is to use one light beam to alter the refractive index of an unusual medium - a cloud of sodium atoms cooled to ultra-low temperatures known as a "Bose-Einstein condensate" - in such a way that it can slow down a second pulse of light. The trick has a number of applications, Dr Hau said, such as converting infra-red light into blue light. "In the future, this could be of importance for laser light projectors - it is hard to generate blue light otherwise." Another possible use is in night vision. She said: "This technique can be used to convert infrared light to the visible spectrum (so we can see it) at low power cost." The technology could also help to reduce the noise in communications, and create switches that can control light. These may be useful in computers that work on light rather than electricity. Dr Hau said: "These possible applications are of course for the future - perhaps 10 years down the line if we get to work on it. Right now we have an experimental set-up where we are pushing technology to the outermost limit. We'll have to figure out how to make this into a practical instrument." The London Telegraph, Feb. 18, 1999 Drinking Water Left-Wing Magazine Promotes Fluoride Scare Whatever happened to those jokes about right-wingers & "precious bodily fluids"? Have you read the fine print on your toothpaste tube recently? Check it out. If your toothpaste contains fluoride -- which nearly every brand in the United States does -- there's a consumer advisory message that might surprise and alarm you, especially if you're the parent of young children. The advisory, which began appearing on fluoridated toothpaste in April 1997, by order of the Food and Drug Administration, begins with the familiar command to brush thoroughly at least twice a day. But then it includes special instructions for children ages two to six: "Use only a pea sized amount and supervise child's brushing and rinsing (to minimize swallowing)." Then comes an additional warning to keep the toothpaste "out of the reach of children under 6 years of age," and finally the ominous advice, "In case of accidental ingestion ... contact a Poison Control Center immediately." What's going on here? Isn't toothpaste supposed to be good for us? Haven't we been told for decades -- by the government, by the American Dental Association, by countless Crest and Colgate television commercials -- that fluoride is essential to fighting cavities? Isn't that why nearly two-thirds of the public water supplies in the United States are fluoridated? A recent issue of the new environmental newsletter News on Earth challenges this and other fluoride orthodoxies. Fluoride is, after all, an extremely toxic compound that originally was sold as a bug and rat poison. A growing body of scientific research suggests that long-term fluoride consumption may cause numerous health problems, ranging from cancer and impaired brain function to brittle bones and fluorosis (the white splotches on teeth that indicate weak enamel). An estimated 22 percent of American children have some form of fluorosis. Research is also beginning to show that the cavity-fighting power of fluoride may have been overstated. Recent studies in the Journal of Dental Research conclude that tooth decay rates in Western Europe, which is 98 percent unfluoridated, have declined as much as they have in the United States in recent decades. Indeed, it's only in the United States that fluoride is championed by the government; most European nations -- including Germany, France, Sweden and Holland -- prohibit fluoride on public health grounds. Opposition to fluoride was once confined to far-right conspiracy buffs, as parodied in the movie Dr. Strangelove. But the new evidence against fluoride comes from credentialed scientists in such mainstream institutions as the Environmental Protection Agency and Harvard's Forsyth Research Institute. And where water fluoridation was once a liberal cause, opposition to fluoride now comes from the left, specifically some environmental groups and at least one labor union. Local 2050 of the National Federation of Federal Employees, which represents all the scientists, engineers and other professionals at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., has voted unanimously to co-sponsor a citizens' petition to prevent fluoridation of California's waters. (Local 2050 has also filed a grievance asking for bottled water at EPA headquarters, due to fears about fluoride.) The union's letter endorsing the petition, sent in 1997, read in part: "Our members' review of the body of evidence over the past eleven years, including animal and human epidemiology studies, indicates a causal link between fluoride/fluoridation and cancer, genetic damage, neurological impairment, and bone pathology. Of particular concern are recent epidemiology studies linking fluoride exposure to lower IQ in children ... there is substantial evidence of adverse health effects, and contrary to public perception, virtually no evidence of significant benefits." "Would you brush your teeth with arsenic?" asks Dr. Robert Carton, a former scientist at the Environmental Protection Agency whose union is Local 2050. "Fluoride is somewhat less toxic than arsenic and more toxic than lead, and you wouldn't want either of them in your mouth." Nevertheless, the official momentum behind fluoride is considerable. The Clinton administration's stated goal is to increase the number of Americans with fluoridated tap water from 62 percent today to 75 percent by 2000. The National Institute of Health supports this target. "We are for water fluoridation, of course, 100 percent," says Sally Wilberding of NIH's National Dental Research Institute. The same goes for the American Dental Association. "I'm a very big supporter of appropriate use of fluorides," says Dr. John Stamm, dean of the School of Dentistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an official fluoride spokesman for the ADA. Stamm argues that fluoridation has significantly decreased tooth decay in the United States over the past 50 years. He attributes Western Europeans' shunning of fluoridation to "cultural differences" in the approach to dental care. Fluoride's positive image in the United States may rest in part on the whitewashing of unwelcome research findings and the firing of scientists who dared question fluoride's benefits. Dr. William Marcus, formerly the chief toxicologist for the EPA's Office of Drinking Water, lost his job in 1991 after he insisted on an unbiased evaluation of fluoride's potential to cause cancer. Marcus fought his dismissal in court, proved that it was politically motivated and eventually won reinstatement. Marcus now declines comment on the episode beyond saying, "I was right about fluoride's carcinogenicity, and now we know that." An investigation by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in 1991 supported Marcus' charges, documenting that government scientists had been coerced to change their findings and portray fluoride more favorably. Dr. William Hirzy, a senior EPA scientist and the senior vice president of Local 2050, explains that, in 1977, Congress had instructed NIH's National Toxicology Program to investigate fluoride's effects on lab animals, a task that got assigned to the government's Battelle Laboratories. In the tests, rats and mice were given fluoride in their drinking water. Thirteen years later, the results came back, but not until they had been "adjusted" by a senior official of the United States Public Health Service to suggest that fluoride had no carcinogenic effects. In response, Marcus urged in a May 1, 1990, memo that the fluoride study be "reviewed by an outside panel not related to the Public Health Service, because the PHS has been in the business of promoting fluoridation for more than fifty years." The memo from Marcus said, "In almost all cases, the Battelle-board certified pathologists' findings were downgraded [by the PHS], with the effect of downgrading the study's conclusion from definitive evidence of carcinogenicity to equivocal evidence." "One of the most telling parts of that study," says Hirzy, who stresses that he speaks as a union official rather than an EPA spokesman, "is that the rats who got bone cancer had lower levels of fluoride in their bones than people who drink tap water with 4 parts per million (ppm) of fluoride would have. But EPA says that 4 ppm is absolutely no danger to your health; in fact, that's the official standard in this country. That conclusion is such a fraud there are no words to describe it." Hirzy adds that Local 2050 has "filed a grievance asking to be given bottled water here in the EPA headquarters, because the tap water has 1 ppm of fluoride, and all the data we look at says 1 ppm is hazardous." "There are three or four very strong anti-fluoridation experts in the EPA union, but we feel there's no scientific basis for their charges," responds Tom Reeves, a national fluoridation engineer at the federal Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. Reeves says that two major studies -- one commissioned by the National Academy of Science, one by the Public Health Service -- "examined those charges and found no truth to them." Reeves denies Marcus' accusation that the data gathered by Battelle scientists were tampered with, though he concedes that the congressional investigation concluded otherwise. At Harvard, Dr. Phyllis Mullenix says she lost her job at the Forsyth Research Institute, which specializes in dental issues, in 1994, after she insisted on publishing research results in the scholarly journal Neurotoxicology and Teratology showing that fluoride adversely affected brain function. By then, Mullenix had spent 12 years at Forsyth's toxicology department, 11 of them as department chairwoman; she was highly regarded for her previous research demonstrating how exposure to lead and radiation lowered children's IQ levels. "To be honest, I thought studying fluoride would be a waste of time," says Mullenix. "I mean, it's in the water supply, so it's got to be safe, right?" But Mullenix's research found that rats who experienced prenatal exposure to fluoride exhibited higher levels of hyperactivity, while rats with postnatal exposure suffered the reverse: "hypoactivity -- that is, a slowing down of their spontaneous movements -- sitting, standing, smelling, turning the head, etc. ... The reactions of these animals reminded me of the reactions you'd find from high exposures to radiation." Mullenix says that her superiors ordered her not to publish her results. "Don Hay, the associate director of Forsyth, came and told me, 'If you publish this information, we won't get any more grants from NIDR [the National Institute of Dental Research],' and Forsyth gets about 90 percent of its money from NIDR. I was really upset. I'd never been told not to publish a paper." Within hours of learning that she was indeed publishing her paper, Forsyth fired her, says Mullenix. "Dr. Mullenix's claim that I wanted to stop her publishing her results, showing a fluoride toxicity in rats, is false," wrote Donald Hay, after consulting with his institute's attorneys. "My concern was that Dr. Mullenix, who had no published record in fluoride research, was reaching conclusions that seemed to differ from a large body of research reported over the last fifty years. These extensive studies have been reviewed and approved by prestigious organizations (American Medical Association and American Dental Association), and indicated that fluoride at ordinary levels was safe. I brought these concerns to her attention." Hay adds, "Dr. Mullenix's claim that she was dismissed after her fluoride paper was accepted is false. We had no knowledge of the accept ance of her paper prior to the time she left [Forsyth]." Hay says Mullenix was dismissed because of problems with the quality of her work. But if fluoride's health advantages are at least open to question, why is it still being promoted in the United States? "The American Dental Association and the Public Health Service have been committed to fluoridation as a safe and effective way to reduce cavities for 50 years or so, so how could they now come out and admit maybe it isn't safe and effective?" asks the EPA's Hirzy, who adds that besides bureaucratic inertia, there is corporate incentive. Fluoride is a waste product of many heavy industries; it is emitted by aluminum, steel and fertilizer factories, coal-burning power plants and in the production of glass, cement and other items made from clay. These industries would have to pay dearly to dispose of their waste fluoride if they could not sell it to municipalities for adding to tap water. Hirzy cites a memo written on March 30, 1983, by Rebecca Hammer, the deputy assistant administrator in EPA's Office of Drinking Water, which called water fluoridation "an ideal environmental solution to a long-standing problem." "In other words," says Hirzy, "this [fluoride] that otherwise would be an air and water pollutant is no longer a pollutant as long as it's poured into your reservoir and drinking water. The solution to pollution is dilution, and in this case the dilution is your drinking water. It's a good deal for the fertilizer industry. Instead of paying a substantial amount to cart this stuff away, they get paid $180 a long ton by the water municipalities." Fluoridation may be an infamous right-wing cause, but the corporate history of fluoride could stir the blood of left-wing conspiracists as well. The fluoride disposal problem arose during World War II, when demand for war materials meant increased production of aluminum, steel and other fluoride-related products. At the end of the war, with massive amounts of fluoride waste needing disposal, the Public Health Service began pushing to add fluoride to the water in Grand Rapids, Mich., and dozens of other U.S. cities. At the time, the Public Health Service was being run by Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon, a founder and major stockholder of the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), which had dominated fluoride research since the 1920s. By 1950, as the fluoridati on campaign gained steam, the Public Health Service was headed by another top Alcoa official, Oscar R. Ewing, who in turn was aided by Edward L. Bernays, the father of modern public relations and author of the book "Propaganda," who sought to portray fluoride's opponents as wackos. Whatever its origins, is it possible that America's 50-year embrace of fluoridation has been a terrible mistake? The town of Natick, near Boston, recently reviewed the research and found that there was more than enough fluoride now packaged in our food, drinks and toothpastes; the town decided not to fluoridate its water. Los Angeles, Newark and Jersey City, N.J., and Bedford, Mass., have also removed fluoride from their water. Critics like Mullenix, Hirzy, Marcus and Carton say we don't yet know enough to say definitively that it's all been a mistake. They want more research by the scientific community, more coverage of the dispute by the media and more awareness of the health risks by the American people. As more parents begin to notice the warnings on toothpaste labels -- and those nasty, irreversible white spots on their kids' teeth -- the issue may once again get the attention and the debate it deserves. Salon Magazine, Feb. 17, 1999 Post-Impeachment POTUS Judge to Hold Clinton in Contempt? Testimony in Jones Case WASHINGTON - Just days after winning acquittal at his impeachment trial, President Bill Clinton was confronted with a new legal threat as a federal judge signaled that she may hold him in contempt of court for providing misleading testimony about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Judge Susan Webber Wright of U.S. District Court, who oversaw the Paula Jones lawsuit that led to Mr. Clinton's impeachment, told attorneys involved in the case Tuesday afternoon that she would explore civil sanctions against the president and gave them until Friday to file the first motions related to the process. The judge's comments, made at her own initiative during a telephone conference call on an unrelated issue, took lawyers on both sides by surprise and indicated that the consequences of the Lewinsky scandal may not be completely over for Mr. Clinton, even if his trial in the Senate is. A contempt proceeding could revisit many of the same issues about Mr. Clinton's veracity that were examined in Congress, leading to written briefs and even a full-blown hearing in a Little Rock, Arkansas, courtroom. A civil contempt citation could force the president to pay tens of thousands of dollars and conceivably aid the independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, if he seeks to indict Mr. Clinton. On Tuesday, Mr. Starr reconvened his Lewinsky grand jury at the federal courthouse in Washington after weeks of inactivity, although it remained unknown what it was doing behind closed doors. Judge Wright first raised the possibility of contempt in a footnote to an order last September but said Tuesday that she had waited to follow through because she ''did not want to interfere in any way with the impeachment proceedings then underway'' or with Mrs. Jones's attempt to reinstate her dismissed case. Mrs. Jones has since dropped her appeal in exchange for an $850,000 settlement from Mr. Clinton With those matters now out of the way, Judge Wright said, ''I believe that now it is time for the court to address the contempt issue.'' For the president's weary defenders, that was a dispiriting development, although they were relieved at least that she waited until after the Senate trial, when a contempt finding could have been far more devastating. Compared with the war they just won, they viewed a contempt dispute now as a far less grave threat. The White House referred calls to Mr. Clinton's private attorney, Robert Bennett, who had no comment. While maintaining that Mr. Clinton's testimony in the Jones case was literally true, his own lawyers have acknowledged that it was deliberately misleading and even ''maddening.'' After Mr. Starr sent his impeachment referral to Congress and Judge Wright raised the contempt issue, Mr. Bennett sent her a letter in October asking her to disregard the Lewinsky affidavit as ''misleading and not true.'' Still, Judge Wright gave the Clinton team something of an escape hatch. She disclosed to the lawyers that she was contacted last month by Representative Asa Hutchinson, Republican of Arkansas, one of the House prosecutors, about testifying in the Senate trial, which she said she refused to do. Instead, one of her clerks filed an affidavit stating that Mr. Clinton was looking at Mr. Bennett when the lawyer said Ms. Lewinsky's affidavit meant ''there was absolutely no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form'' between her and the president. Judge Wright said she did not believe she had to recuse herself from the contempt issue as a result of this but suggested she would if Mr. Clinton asks her to, and she gave the president until Friday to decide whether to make such a request. If she steps aside, the matter would be assigned to another judge. International Herald Tribune, Feb. 18, 1999 Gay Nights in Old Prague Czech Intelligence Chiefs Complain About MI6 Outing "Put on your high-heel slippers, honey, we're going out spying" TWO former Czech intelligence chiefs have hit out at the country's Social Democrat government over the "outing" of the homosexual head of MI6 in Prague. Oldrich Cerny, ex-head of the foreign intelligence service UZSI, described the naming of Christopher Hurran as "an absolute disaster". Stanislav Devaty, his former counterpart at BIS, the Czech Security and Intelligence Office, accused the government of "playing political games" with the intelligence services. Both men pointed to the painstaking way in which they had developed close relationships with their British counterparts in the years since the fall of communism only to see their efforts destroyed by Prague's inability to keep secrets. The row broke earlier this month when a Czech television station broadcast the name, address and sexual orientation of Mr Hurran, who lives with the Venezuelan boyfriend that he met on a previous MI6 posting to Caracas. The criticism from Mr Cerny, a close associate of President Vaclav Havel, will be particularly damaging to the government. He has refused to be drawn into discussing intelligence matters since resigning four months ago. But in an interview with The Telegraph, Mr Cerny suggested that certain government members who were keen to see BIS broken up were the likely source of Mr Hurran's name. Mr Cerny said: "I don't see what anyone in BIS had to gain from leaking Chris's name. But the government hasn't got used to the fact that it is not in opposition and there are ministers who want to get rid of BIS. The deputy Prime Minister, Pavel Rychetsky, was on a television talk show the other day complaining that he didn't know who BIS worked for. Opposition politicians couldn't believe it. There were about 25 politicians and most of BIS who knew that Chris was the MI6 head of station. That's far too many people in a country as small as this." Mr Cerny dismissed suggestions that Mr Hurran's name and the fact that he was a homosexual had been leaked in retaliation for the sacking of the man who succeeded Mr Devaty as head of BIS. Karel Vulterin was sacked after a letter of complaint from Mr Hurran over the BIS handling of the defection to the West of the Iraqi head of intelligence in the region. Mr Vulterin was a good man with a great deal of integrity, but he had been an ineffectual BIS chief and many people in intelligence and the government wanted him to go, said Mr Cerny. He said: "I don't know who leaked Chris's name. I wish I did. I would like to get my hands on him. It was sheer stupidity." Mr Cerny regretted that so much of the press coverage focused on the fact that Mr Hurran was the service's first openly homosexual head of station. He said: "I don't know why anyone here would want to let it be known that he was homosexual. Even under the communists, homosexuals never had any problem here." Despite being publicly named, Mr Hurran is likely to be kept in place for the time being. MI6 insists that his work has not been seriously damaged and will not want to be seen to be reacting to the affair by moving him at this stage. But the former army officer has been in Prague for two years and would in any case be due a posting soon. He is likely to be brought back to London later this year prior to be being sent somewhere where he is less well known. The London Telegraph, Feb. 18, 1999 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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