Licinius Crassus, Gordon Smith, lactose tolerance, Irwandi Yusuf, death squads, Prairie grasses

American Jewish weekly, Forward. It calls for President Bush to be impeached and put on trial "for misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 BC sent his legions into Germany and lost them".
......
If we're going as far back as 9 BCE, let's go back even further to Carrhae in 53 BCE where Marcus Licinius Crassus lost an army of forty thousand in the desert to Surena and his Parthian archers, not quite in present-day Iraq, but so close...!!!![beware the "Parthian shot", composite bows could penetrate Roman armour...]

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GB43:

I understand how tough it is, sir. I talk to families who die. ...

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noquarter

The CIA's first major covert project was to prevent the communists from winning the Italian elections of 1948. They succeeded, but they had a plan to intervene militarily if they failed. Their fear of democracy ...

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photos filched from MSNBC. I would be content to link to them, but they use the execrable Flash
Fact: there is no need to use flash to display photos, HTML does just fine.
It is marginally more difficult to download a 'flash' photo, and impossible to link. This saps the life from the internet.

Fact: there is no need to format using pdf, css & html can do just as well. People have a vague idea that their reports cant be altered if they use pdf. Meantime, no links mean that the internet suffers. And browsers lock if you accidentally click on a pdf. - I use downloadexpress to prevent browserlock.


Mt Bromo Java
msnbc
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Chilean anti=Pinochet protester
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DR Congo
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from jadeja on flickr.. cant link so filched. Also, jadeja dropped one of my faves, so bucket it
milapsinhjadeja
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Dec. 11, 2006 msnbc Republican Gordon Smith of Oregon ..

I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets, in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs, day after day.
That is absurd. It may even be criminal. I cannot support that anymore.

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nytimes .. Phase Change Memories
optical disks are read from and written to with laser beams.
I.B.M...the same effect can be realized by using a small electrical current. .an alloy of germanium and antimony, GS. .. 500 times as fast as flash chips. 3 nm x 20nm..

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nytimes December 11, 2006
..East Africa lactose tolerance..genetic changes as recently as 3,000 ybp
..one of the first instances of convergent human evolution to be documented at the genetic level. ....
..Such a mutation among an early cattle-raising people, the Funnel Beaker 5 - 6,000 ybp.. north-central Europe. ..
Almost all Dutch & Swedes are lactose tolerant, .. progressively less common ..at increasing distances from the Funnel Beaker region.
...43 ethnic groups in East Africa.. three new mutations, all independent ..that keep the lactase gene ..switched on.
..Nilo-Saharan-speaking groups of Kenya and Tanzania, arose 2,700 to 6,800 years ago..
Two other mutations among the Beja people of northeastern Sudan and..Afro-Asiatic, in northern Kenya.
..an enormous selective advantage .. almost 10 times as many descendants ..one of the strongest genetic signatures of natural selection yet reported in humans,..
.. evidence of cattle in Africa 8,000 ybp NW Sudan...independently from two other domestications, in the Near East and the Indus Valley of India.
..The mutations .. a nearby region of the DNA that controls the activation of the gene..

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Ex-rebel leader 'wins Aceh polls .. exit poll ..indicates.
Irwandi Yusuf, who was in jail for treason when the .. tsunami December 26, 2004, took 39 per cent of the vote for governor.

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cryingwolf
gbruno
who's death squads?

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petrodollarwarfare [PDF}
Jerome Corsi, who wrote an essay in May 2006 entitled, “Iran Signs It’s Own Death Warrant.” Although Corsi is an apologist for the Bush administration (he wrote Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry), at least he admits that a major reason for the US invasion of Iraq was in fact the oil-for-euros policy of Saddam Hussein. Corsi states the following with regard to Tehran’s oil bourse:

If Iran wants also to seriously threaten the dollar's position as a dominant foreign reserve currency, a war becomes almost certain. The Iranian oil bourse may never be mentioned by U.S. policymakers as an official reason the United States decides to go to war with Iran, but it may end up being the straw that broke the camel's back.

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physics911 .. Kevin Barrett

As a PhD in Islamic and Arabic Studies, I hate to say this, but I’ll say it anyway. The events of 9/11 had nothing to do with Islam. The war on terror itself is as phony as the latest “Bin Laden tape.” (Guardian 04)

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We (can only blame) ourselves for promoting the economies of
the enemies and letting them impose pressure on us whenever
they wish... Today, a big economic war is underway. The political
war is obvious to all but there is an economic war that goes on
undetected.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, January, 2006
energybulletin

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7 December 2006
.. Prairie grasses.. suck up a lot of carbon dioxide into roots and soil
David Tilman, U Minnesota, says that purpose-grown monocultures wouldn't be as good for the planet as old-fashioned prairie.
..His work is widely credited with helping to revive the notion, in the mid-1990s, that high biodiversity keeps an ecosystem stable and productive.
He has previously shown that mixed plots produce more plant mass in a given area than monocultures.
..mature prairie plots, planted in what was originally a nutrient-poor soil, can produce more than twice as much bioenergy as a monoculture field.
If you take into account the greenhouse gas emissions produced by growing, harvesting, transporting and converting plants ..prairie comes out 6-16 times better than corn grain ethanol or biodiesel.
..they can grow on land not suitable for agriculture..
500,000,000 hectares of degraded land worldwide could displace about 13% of global petroleum ,,and sequester about 15% of CO2 emissions

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Licinius Crassus, Gordon Smith, lactose tolerance, Irwandi Yusuf, death squads, Prairie grasses