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Ozone may be a life-saver in the upper atmosphere where it shields us from harmful ultraviolet rays, but closer to the ground it is a pollutant causing asthma in humans and stunted growth in crops. In large cities such as Los Angeles, ozone forms a key ingredient of smog, produced when sunlight reacts with car exhaust and other fumes. Ozone can also reach ground level, however, in smaller amounts through “intrusions” from the stratosphere. Now, Wayne Hocking at the University of Western Ontario and other physicists in Canada have shown that it should be possible to forecast when and where such ozone intrusions occur (Nature 450 281).

Hocking and colleagues came to their conclusion by monitoring the position of the tropopause — the region separating the troposphere, which extends from ground level, and the stratosphere — at stations in Montreal and Walsingham in Canada. To do this they used “windprofilers”, a type of radar operating at frequencies around 50 MHz that detect whether the air is stable, as in the tropopause, or turbulent. They also released over 100 balloons lifting devices called ozonesondes, which continually sample the air for ozone levels as they rise upwards.

The tropopause varies in altitude between 7 and 28 km, but usually resides at around 8 to 10 km. The researchers found that, on occasion, the tropopause altitude changed rapidly — a drop followed by a quick climb — which would be followed by a significant intrusion of ozone into the troposphere, sometimes all the way to ground level. According to Hocking, scientists should therefore be able to use radar to give a forewarning, 12 hours to two days in advance, of ozone intrusion events that might reach the ground. This would enable people with breathing difficulties or with eyes prone to watering to keep indoors.

Martyn Chipperfield, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Leeds in the UK, told physicsworld.com that the study also shows it could be possible to find out how often ozone intrusions occur and thus how much they contribute to the amount of ozone in the troposphere. However, he added that this would also require knowledge of the mass of transported ozone during an intrusion event, which is not indicated in Hocking and colleagues’ study. “That would be a challenge,” he said.

As the US moves ahead with military programs in Africa, as it searches for an AFRICOM base, some warn that these tactics will lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy of a massive desert war.

With the emergence of al-Qaida as a global terrorist threat, the US was quick to identify the vast desert regions between West and North Africa as potential hideaways for terrorists and their supporters. To counter this perceived danger, the US initiated military programs with several countries bordering this region - the flagship of which is the Operation Flintlock exercises - to improve the ability to deter the threat.

An important test for this military policy occurred on 13 September, when a US Hercules transport plane was hit by small arms fire while re-supplying Malian troops encircled by Tuareg rebels in the northern town of Tin-Zaouatene.

No lives were lost and the plane returned safely to base, but the incident was a pointer to the unfolding violence in the Sahara Desert and its potential to become, like Iraq and Afghanistan, another theater of war between the US and Islamic forces.

“Those may well be the first shots fired in what may be unfolding as Africa’s own desert war involving the US,” Alex Wilson, a London-based West Africa specialist and political risk analyst, told ISN Security Watch.

Minerals and militants

Interplaying in West Africa is a volatile mix of strategic minerals - oil, uranium and diamonds - and milieus where radical Islamic and rebel groups are a potent threat. While the US wants to protect its oil supplies from the Gulf of Guinea, it is also keen that uranium from Niger and diamonds from Sierra Leone and Liberia do not become articles of trade for militant organizations.

Incidentally, Niger’s uranium figured strongly in debates in the lead up to US invasion of Iraq when the Bush administration falsely alleged that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium from the landlocked African country to power his nuclear ambitions.

There have also been reports of al-Qaida using the trade of diamonds controlled by rebels during Sierra Leone’s civil war to funnel funds and evade official banking systems with the help of Liberia under Charles Taylor.

US interests in the region are increasingly of strategic importance, with oil found all along the Gulf of Guinea coast, stretching from Angola in the south to Mauritania in the north. Even inland in the desert region, significant oil activities are taking place in the east, including in Niger, Chad and Sudan, with potential activity in other places. The entire West Africa region is overtaking the Persian Gulf in terms of the sheer quantity of oil supplied to the US - expected to reach 25 percent of imports by 2015.

A major target of US operations in the Sahara Desert has been the Islamic Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, active in parts of southern Algeria, the north of Niger and Mali as well as eastern Mauritania, and believed to be linked to al-Qaida. It is an offshoot of Algeria’s Armed Islamic Group (GIA), led by veterans of the Afghan mujahideen war who fought their government after it annulled elections won by an Islamist party in the 1990s.

The US has also shown concern about radical Islamic influences in parts of northern Nigeria, where anti-Western sentiments are strong and 9/11 was celebrated in some cities. Osama bin Laden in one of his messages named oil-rich Nigeria as a country due for liberation from Western influence.

Africa’s leading oil exporter and one of the top five US suppliers is split between a mainly Muslim north and a largely Christian south, and experiences frequent bouts of sectarian violence. In 2004, an armed group emerged in the country’s northeast, modeling itself after Afghanistan’s Taliban movement.

According to a 2006 report by the US State Department, while the extent of activities of terrorist groups in West and Central Africa was unknown, it was certain that groups supporting or affiliated to al-Qaida were engaging in fund-raising and recruitment activities in places like Nigeria and countries of the trans-Sahara belt. Though the Nigerian Taliban were routed by the country’s security forces, there are fears that similarly inspired radical elements may regroup and make their presence felt at any time.

Under the US military program, started in 2005, US$500 million will be spent over seven years to train thousands of African troops drawn from the trans-Saharan area including Algeria, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, Morocco and Tunisia. US military strategy for West Africa, within the framework of the global war on terror, appears to be to work with the regional militaries to keep out suspected terrorist groups while securing oil interests in the Gulf of Guinea.

In doing this, the US appears to be labeling “virtually all Islamist reform movements as terrorist or, at least, highly suspect […] regardless of local histories, national injustices or facts on the ground,” argue researchers Paul M Lubeck, Michael J Watts and Ronnie Lipschutz in a February report for the independent Washington-based Center for International Policy. It was the same mistake Western military interventionists made during the Cold War, they say.

Still, US military officials have refrained from referring to the ethnic Tuareg rebel group fighting black African-led governments in Mali and neighboring Niger as outright terrorists. In fact, they have downplayed the significance of the September shooting incident, saying the US was only responding to a “a military-to-military” request for assistance by the friendly Malian government.

“US forces were in a position to assist, as they had just completed the [Operation] Fintlock exercise, so they conducted the re-supply mission,” Captain Darrick Lee, public affairs officer of the US European Command, which carried out the operation, told ISN Security Watch. According to Lee, “the footprint of US troops in Africa is small, and intended to help nations build capacity to maintain security and stability in their own countries.”

Yet what happened in Mali was the type of operation envisaged by US military strategy in the region, where a friendly government is beleaguered and needs limited involvement of its forces to assist against perceived common threats. And with the creation of the US Africa Command, the bottom line is that direct US intervention is never far off if the situation deteriorates, many analysts say.

A home for AFRICOM

All of these seem to have contributed to the US decision to set up an Africa Command (AFRICOM) of its armed forces, a move received with suspicion across Africa.

While AFRICOM officially came into being in October, it still operates out of the European Command in Stuttgart as the US tackles the tricky issue of finding a base in Africa for the operation. Many governments there worry about the political implications of hosting US forces on their territory, and leading continental voices, particularly South Africa and Nigeria, have come out strongly in opposition to the command.

“If the command is about stationing US troops on African soil, we feel there is no need for that,” Nigerian Foreign Minister Ojo Maduekwe told reporters recently, expressing preference for training partnerships that did not require a significant presence of foreign troops.

“We even believe that such stationing of combat troops in African soil at a time when Africa is not at war with anybody sends the wrong kind of message. It is counter-productive even to US interests,” Maduekwe added.

The Tuaregs in rebellion in Mali and Niger appear to have perceived the project as a signal that the US is not sympathetic to their cause. Providing obvious support for the Malian government against the Tuaregs, irrespective of the merits of their struggle, may simply create hard-line enemies for the US where they did not exist before, says Charles Dokubo, a research fellow at the Nigerian Institute for International Affairs who notes that the Tuaregs are generally moderate Muslims.

“That way the Tuaregs may be forced into the embrace of the Salafists, creating the very extremists they [the Americans] want to keep out,” he told ISN Security Watch.

For the Tuaregs (a light-skinned ethnic Berber group found in Libya, Algeria, Mali and Niger), grievances go back to the pre-colonial times, when the French conquest of their desert region cost them their 2,000-year-old control of trans-Saharan trade routes between West and North Africa. However, their recent uprisings in Niger and Mali have centered on the demand for fairer access to resources from black African governments in both countries.

In Niger, the Tuareg rebel group, the Niger Movement for Justice, has targeted the uranium mines run by French companies on which France’s nuclear power and weapons are dependent. But here, potential for the internationalization of conflict is high, with Chinese interests recently gaining uranium mining concessions as well, ending the decade-long monopoly of French industrial conglomerate Areva.

With the Chinese uranium company under attack by rebels, the Niger government of Mamadou Tandja has accused France’s Areva of backing the Tuareg rebels in their choice of targets in an attempt to shut out competition. The company denies the charge. The Tuareg rebels have also accused the Chinese government of providing military support to Tandja’s government in order to obtain their mining license.

Military sources in Niger say many of the Tuareg fighters were deserters from an elite military company trained by the US in counterterrorism tactics between 2003 and 2006. In Mali, the leading Tuareg rebel leader, Ibrahim Bahanga, is a former army officer who has also drawn fighters from army deserters. Tuareg fighters from the two countries have also forged an alliance to pursue joint objectives.

Under the current scenario, most analysts of the trans-Saharan situation believe the temptation for increased US military involvement remains great in the twin-pronged pursuit of oil security and the war on terror. Such involvement in turn has the potential of radicalizing moderate elements and drawing into the region extremists from the Middle East and North Africa, realizing Africa’s potential as the next front in the US-led effort.

“What is virtually certain, however,” Lubeck, Watts and Lipschutz stated in their report, “is that sending additional American ‘advisers,’ eager to earn combat promotions, and delivering more lethal weapons into Sahelian states will, once again, provoke fierce Muslim resistance to what they perceive as foreign occupation, validate the most extreme world views, and ultimately encourage the very anti-American alliances and insurrections [US] military commanders fear most - a classic self-fulfilling prophecy.”

President Mikhail Saakashvili declared a state of emergency in the Georgian capital Tbilisi on Wednesday after police fought pitched battles with protesters, and the prime minister said there had been an attempt at a coup.“The president has declared a state of emergency in Tbilisi and this decision will be submitted to parliament within 48 hours,” Prime Minister Zurab Nogaideli said on television.

“There was an attempt at a coup and creating disorder.”

Riot police armed with batons repeatedly clubbed and kicked unarmed demonstrators in Tbilisi, firing tear gas and rubber bullets to clear the streets, reporters at the scene said.

Special forces stormed an opposition TV station and Saakashvili blamed Russia for the crisis in the former Soviet state, now an U.S. ally.

Saakashvili announced he was expelling three Russian diplomats from Georgia and withdrawing his ambassador from Moscow, claiming he had evidence that Russian intelligence was behind six days of mass protests.

“We cannot let our country become the stage for dirty geo-political escapades by other countries,” he said in a television broadcast. “Our democracy needs a firm hand of the authorities.”

Shortly after his remarks, the main opposition television station Imedi said it had been stormed by Georgian special forces and went off the air. Imedi had been broadcasting extensive coverage of the opposition demonstrations.

Witnesses at the scene said armed police had forced staff to the floor, smashed equipment, destroyed mobile phones and put guns to employees’ heads.

Saakashvili has previously trumpeted his country as a shining example of democracy and respect for human rights in the volatile Caucasus region, which is mainly governed by authoritarian leaders.

In a sign of international concern, the European Union said it was sending its special envoy for the South Caucasus, Peter Semneby, to Georgia to meet “all the relevant parties”.

PASSIONS INFLAMED

Georgia’s human rights ombudsman, Sozar Subari, told reporters he was among those beaten by police. “Although I told them that I am a defender of human rights, they told me ‘This is precisely why the beating is so harsh’,” he said.

Patriarch Ilia II, head of the Georgian Orthodox Church, condemned the government crackdown as “completely unacceptable”. “There is only one way — negotiations,” he said.

Saakashvili has flatly rejected the protesters’ call for an early parliamentary election, but the government’s use of force to put down the demonstrations has inflamed passions further in the volatile former Soviet republic.

“Saakashvili’s regime showed us that it is in no way different from the Communist regime whose soldiers beat their citizens with shovels in the same place,” billionaire business tycoon Badri Patarkatsashvili told the Kavkaz Press news agency.

Opposition leaders said the actions of Saakashvili, who wants to join NATO and the EU, proved their accusations that he was an authoritarian and corrupt president.

“The authorities have used weapons against peaceful demonstrators and therefore the authorities will get what they deserve from the people,” opposition leader Kakha Kukava was quoted as saying by Interfax news agency.

Relations between Georgia and Russia were already at all-time lows. Saakashvili’s desire to join NATO and his drive to regain sovereignty over two breakaway pro-Russian provinces have angered Moscow, which last year cut all transport links.

“Russia has launched a wide-scale attack against Georgia,” Georgian Parliament Minister Givi Targamadze said on television. Opposition members had “sold their motherland for a specific price”, he added.

Opposition leaders, who have not questioned Saakashvili’s pro-Western line, called the accusations baseless and laughable.

Lawyers clashed with Pakistani police again today as the country’s president, General Pervez Musharraf, considered his response to intense international pressure to restore civilian rule and hold elections as planned. Britain, the US and the UN have led international demands for Gen Musharraf to keep his earlier promises to restore the constitution, resign as the army chief and hold elections by January.

General Musharraf must restore the democratic and constitutional process and guarantee that the commitment to parliamentary elections in January will be honoured. He must also honour his repeated pledge to retire from the military and move Pakistan towards full civilian administration.

This year’s sub-prime mortgage bust has done a lot of damage in a short period of time to the U.S. housing industry and the economy as a whole. And the Washington and Maryland area has been just as affected.

In Maryland, for example, home foreclosures tripled in the first seven months this year to more than 9,000 compared to about 2,500 at the same time in 2006.

But, in the midst of the misery there are still some bright spots.  Even as mortgage lenders make things tougher and low- and moderate-income home buyers, there are two programs that are helping them continue to buy homes.

In Washington, hundreds of residents have used the Home Purchase Assistance Program (HPAP) for first time home buyers.

J.K. Rowling recently announced that Albus Dumbledore, the head of the  Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft, is gay. Apparently she believes that Dumbledore’s qualities are under her control. I disagree. True, she is the author of the books in which Dumbledore is a character. But at this point it is not fully under her control what qualities Dumbledore has. She could say (or even publish a book in which) Dumbledore was actually a robot controlled by the CIA. But it would remain false that Dumbledore is  a robot controlled by the CIA.

Dumbledore can be gay only if this is narratively compatible with what Rowling has said about Dumbledore in the past. Now one might say that the gayness of a male character is always narratively compatible when a book is set in an English boarding school. But I would expect a bit more than that here. And I don’t see it.

A rapidly spreading patch of flowering American lotus is causing an ugly battle.Across the Detroit River’s Gibraltar Bay on Hickory Island, Sue Liphardt said she doesn’t like the sight of the aquatic plants. She and others fear the patch will grow to interfere with fishing and boating, driving down property values.

“It’s like an island moving closer to our dock,” she said. “I don’t want them to wait until it’s 50 feet away to decide how to control it.”

But to Bruce Jones, a founder and board member of the Grosse Ile Nature Conservancy, the plants are lovely — and a sign the water near Grosse Ile, south of Detroit, is cleaner.

The American lotus is threatened in Michigan, and there is a fine as high as $500 for picking it, according to the state Department of Natural Resources.

The fight between the nature conservancy and Hickory Island homeowners has escalated in the past year.

The lotus bed was spotted in 1999, when it consisted of a few plants, Jones said. But some homeowners say it’s now nearly 10 acres and claim they saw people in boats planting seeds to expand it in 2002.

Only natural beds are protected by law. The nature conservancy planted lotus seeds in other parts of the bay in 2002, Jones said, but those seeds didn’t take root.

The bed “is not our fault,” he said. “It’s nature.”

Bikini pirates is ready to hit the road.

She was only a child at the time, but Bettie Brown’s recollection of the hurricane of 1900 is still retold in vivid detail. She was standing on the staircase of her parents’ Italianate mansion when the waters swept through the first floor, rising and bringing horrible things with it. Some reports would later say that the storm surge washed clear over Galveston Island.

Brown’s mother acted on an inspiration to leave Ashton Villa’s doors and tall, graceful windows wide open to the torrent, and so the only lasting effects the delicate-looking home sustained were a basement filled with sand and a wrought-iron fence rendered forever “shorter,” the bottom few feet buried by the grade change.

This 1859 mansion, now on the National Register of Historic Places and open to daily guided tours, is one of the town’s most engaging survival stories. But other historic houses have tales to tell. The castle-like 1888 Bishop’s Palace and the turreted 1895 Moody Mansion are also on the tour-home circuit and, along with the boutique-filled buildings of the Strand National Historic Landmark district a few blocks away, they keep Galveston at the forefront of Victorian destinations.

That’s probably not the image most of the nation expects at the mention of Texas, let alone Galveston.

Galveston’s gulf-side beaches are the main reason spring-breakers and families vacation here. Many more come to embark from the port of Galveston on weeklong cruises to the Caribbean. ÀôÀ But unlike many modern seaside communities, Galveston isn’t a master-planned resort. Its attractions sprang from the convergence of history, industry, philanthropy and that awful storm.

The process of globalisation has started a long time ago but the effects are still unknown for many industries. During the last decades the world has seen a variety of financial crisises which occurred in many places. Global finance means huge cross-border flows of money which can have a negative influence when things go wrong, and lead to crisis which threatens the world financial system itself.

The world has seen a lot of substantial changes during the last two decades, especially in the developing countries. These changes had led to the globalization, which started when the worldwide trend of financial opening in the 1990s has restored degree of international capital mobility not seen since this century’s beginning. In industrialized countries the elimination of restrictions on capital flows accelerated in the 1980s and the 1990s, beginning with Margaret Thatcher’s reform in the united kingdom continuing with Japan’s liberalization of capital inflows and outflows in the early of 1980s, and ending with the European community elimination of intra-community barriers to capital flows in the 1990s (on line).

Globalization means the world capitalism, and capitalism is the market plus of the corporation. For last decade on a world scene new powerful operating forces have appeared and have affirmed. The basic subjects of the international economic attitudes were the state and the businessmen who are being under their jurisdiction
With the growth of new technologies, the expanding global marketplace, people, goods and services are crossing borders at ever-increasing rates. Economic globalization, aided by the growth of new technologies, has provided new opportunities for economic growth. This has created enormous economic and social benefits to some countries, but not to others, and disproportionately to some groups within those countries. It has also reduced the regulatory authority of national and sub-national governments (the public sector) and increased the power and influence of transnational corporations (the private sector). The planet may be shrinking as far as business interests are concerned, but the gap between rich and poor within and between most nations is going in the opposite direction. This has profound implications for people in both the developed and developing world.
Economic globalization described the integration of economic activities that were once more national or regional in scale to planet-wide functioning. This is not a new phenomenon, but has been a characteristic of capitalist economic expansion for at least a century or longer. The scale of this expansion, especially in speculative finance or “hot money,” is new. So it is the shift in corporate structure from a multinational corporation (one company selling its product in many countries) to a transnational corporation (one company with productive units spread throughout many countries). Economic globalization has also been accompanied by a new regime in trade and investment liberalization.

Moreover, globalization will facilitate risk diversification by banks and improve the overall performance of individual economies by improving resource allocation. On the minus side, if consolidation is taken too far, it could lead to abuse of dominant market positions and moral hazard issues, such as when institutions are considered to be too big to fail. In addition, excessive involvement in foreign markets without sufficient knowledge of local economic conditions could increase the vulnerability of individual banks.
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It was the state that bestowed authority on Mafia families so that they might collect the taxes from the people. This was lucrative as 10% commission was taken by a few leading mafia families; this money was invested either in legal enterprises, or sent to Swiss and Latin America banks.

The economic problems of the 1970’s showed that the political elite could not fulfil the commitments of law and order, which the mafia had been allowed to control by the use of protection rackets and intimidation. There solution to the problem was to throw money at the South, which bred violence and it was at this time that the mafia gained real economic power and ‘became its own master.’

The Mafia’s growing control on the state’s legislation, economy, politics and even education made the government start Antimafia policy which aimed to evolve new laws, judicial reforms and bank controls to fight against Mafia.

One of the key turning points in the fight against the Mafia was the discovery in May 1981, of a membership list detailing Propaganda Due (P2), a renegade Masonic lodge. It was revealed within the list that almost one thousand of Italy’s leading establishment figures belonged to this lodge, including 12 generals of the Carabinieri, 22 Army generals, 8 admirals, 4 Air Force generals, the head of the Navy chiefs of staff and the heads of Italy’s secret services as well as judges, journalists, and media tycoons, including the current Italian Prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.

Another key turning point in the fight against the Mafia occurred a year later. On 30th April, 1982, the PCI regional secretary Pio La Torre with his driver was murdered. La Torre had become a target after he had co-sponsored a new draft law in March 1980 that would allow the judiciary to view bank records so that they could follow money trails, and would defined membership of the mafia as a crime. As part of the legislative package the freezing and confiscation of Mafia assets would be for the first time, due to the interpretation of ‘Mafia Type organisations. . This legislation was to be some of the most powerful tools that an investigator or judge could use.

With the new legislative powers in place and a new pool of investigating judges and magistrates, some 15,000 individuals were reported for Mafia association between 1982 and 1986 and over 20 000 asset-tracing investigations were carried out.

Although the true involvement of secret societies and Mafia have never been revealed, there will always be those judges, magistrates and investigators that will continue to uncover the darkest sides of politics and criminality. The legislation that has come since 1980 has shown that the power of the Mafia is being curbed, but at the same time the Mafia can exercise control elsewhere in different countries and would ensure its eventual survival.
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