jamotto

Or perhaps vegetation in the area grew scarce forcing our predecessors to migrate. Those that evolved the ability to run survived those that didn't died. Two legged humans have a distinct advantage to the four legged apes as far as migration goes.

Link quote:By Patricia Reaney LONDON (Reuters) - Humans were born to run and evolved from ape-like creatures into the way they look today probably because of the need to cover long distances and compete for food, scientists said on Wednesday. From tendons and ligaments in the legs and feet that act like springs and skull features that help prevent overheating, to well-defined buttocks that stabilize the body, the human anatomy is shaped for running. "We do it because we are good at it. We enjoy it and we have all kinds of specializations that permit us to run well," said Daniel Liberman, a professor of anthropology at Harvard University in Massachusetts. "There are all kinds of features that we see in the human body that are critical for running," he told Reuters. Liberman and Dennis Bramble, a biology professor at the University of Utah, studied more than two dozen traits that increase humans' ability to run. Their research is reported in the science journal Nature. They suspect modern humans evolved from their ape-like ancestors about 2 million years ago so they could hunt and scavenge for food over large distances. But the development of physical features that enabled humans to run entailed a trade off -- the loss of traits that were useful for being a tree-climber. "We are very confident that strong selection for running -- which came at the expense of the historical ability to live in trees -- was instrumental in the origin of the modern human body form," Bramble said in a statement. The conventional theory is that running was a by-product of bipedalism, or the ability to walk upright on two legs, that evolved in ape-like human ancestors called Australopithecus at least 4.5 million years ago. But Liberman and Bramble argue that it took a few million more years for the running physique to evolve, so the ability to walk cannot explain the transition. "There were 2.5 million to 3 million years of bipedal walking without ever looking like a human, so is walking going to be what suddenly transforms the hominid body?" said Bramble. "We're saying 'no, walking won't do that, but running will."' If natural selection did not favor running, the scientists believe humans would still look a lot like apes. "Running has substantially shaped human evolution. Running made us human -- at least in the anatomical sense," Bramble added. Among the features that set humans apart from apes to make them good runners are longer legs to take longer strides, shorter forearms to enable the upper body to counterbalance the lower half during running and larger disks which allow for better shock absorption. Big buttocks are also important. "Have you ever looked at an ape? They have no buns," said Bramble. Humans lean forward when they run and the buttocks "keep you from pitching over on your nose each time a foot hits the ground," he added.

Link quote:By LARRY MARGASAK, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - House Republicans approved a party rules change Wednesday that could allow Majority leader Tom DeLay to retain his leadership post if he is indicted by a Texas grand jury on state political corruption charges. By a voice vote, and with a handful of lawmakers voicing opposition, the House Republican Conference decided that a party committee of several dozen members would review any felony indictment of a party leader and recommend at that time whether the leader should step aside. The current party rule in this area requires House Republican leaders and the heads of the various committees to relinquish their positions if indicted for a crime that could bring a prison term of at least two years. It makes no distinction between a federal and state indictment. Three of DeLay's political associates already have been indicted by that Texas grand jury. Rep. Henry Bonilla, R-Texas, said that under the change embraced Wednesday, the House Republican Steering Committee would have 30 legislative days to review a felony indictment and recommend to all House Republicans whether a lawmaker who is charged could remain as a committee chairman or leader. There is no indication that DeLay, a 57-year-old Texan, will be indicted in connection with a Travis County, Texas, campaign finance investigation. But the majority leader has called the probe a partisan attack on him. Bonilla said there was no vote count taken in the closed meeting but said the proposal passed overwhelmingly. "This takes the power away from any partisan crackpot district attorney who may want to indict" party leaders and make a name for himself, Bonilla said. Lawmakers said that DeLay did not publicly push for the change and did not participate in the closed-door debate which lasted several hours. Bonilla said the leader would not have to step aside while fellow party members considered whether an indictment was frivolous. The grand jury is probing alleged irregularities in 2002 state legislative races. Republican victories in those contests enabled DeLay ultimately to win support for a congressional redistricting plan that resulted in the GOP's gain of five House seats in Texas in this month's elections. House Democrats have a step-aside provision that applies to both federal and state proceedings similar to the current Republican rule, and their leader, Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, was highly critical of the GOP proposal. "If they make this rules change, Republicans will confirm yet again that they simply do not care if their leaders are ethical. If Republicans believe that an indicted member should be allowed to hold a top leadership position in the House of Representatives, their arrogance is astonishing," Pelosi said. In September, the grand jury indicted three political operatives associated with DeLay and eight companies, alleging campaign finance violations related to corporate money spent in the 2002 legislative races. The corporate donations were made to Texans for a Republican Majority, a political action committee created with help from DeLay. DeLay said he was not questioned or subpoenaed as part of the investigation, led by retiring prosecutor Ronnie Earle. The majority leader said after the indictments, "This has been a dragged-out 500-day investigation, and you do the political math. This is no different than other kinds of partisan attacks that have been leveled against me that are dropped after elections." In October, the House ethics committee rebuked DeLay for appearing to link political donations to a legislative favor and improperly persuading U.S. aviation authorities to intervene in the Texas redistricting dispute.

another Wal-Mart in the making? quote:DES MOINES, Iowa - Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is widely referred to among its suppliers as the 800-pound gorilla. What the giant retailer wants, it usually gets. Now, many manufacturers must be wondering whether Kmart Holding Corp.'s pending acquisition of Sears, Roebuck & Co. will create a second behemoth that demands lower prices for their goods or, worse, drops them altogether. In announcing their marriage intentions Wednesday, the two retailers said they expect to save $300 million a year through "improved merchandising and non-merchandising, purchasing scale as well as improved supply chain, administrative and other operational efficiencies." For suppliers, the key words are "purchasing scale" and "improved supply chain." Those goals might translate into such buying power that to retain Sears/Kmart's business, manufacturers may be forced to go overseas to make products at a profit. "When they say they need a $49 price point for an electric drill, people have to come up with ways to do it," said Bill Drumm, president of Establish/Herbert W. Davis, a supply-chain consultant in Fort Lee, N.J. Significant U.S. manufacturing went offshore in order to meet the prices that Wal-Mart dictated, he said. Moreover, whereas several companies may be making drills for Sears and Kmart now, in the future the combined company may seek a single source. "Say today Sears has three suppliers of (something) and Kmart has three. Combining them you don't get six," Drumm said. "If I was No. 4 or 5, I would be concerned. If I was one of the top three I'd be thrilled." Indeed, Sears' biggest supplier of major appliances, Whirlpool Corp., believes the merger "will be a plus for us, absolutely," said spokesman Steve Duthie. He expects Sears will convert more Kmarts into Sears outlets, which means more locations where customers can buy Kenmore washers, driers and other appliances that Whirlpool makes under Sears' house brand. Asked whether Whirlpool expects the combined retailer to exact cheaper prices from it, Duthie replied, "We don't foresee that at all." He noted that Whirlpool has announced plans to increase its prices to retailers between 5 percent and 10 percent next year to reflect higher costs of steel and other raw materials. Sears now buys from more than 10,000 suppliers. The number of Kmart suppliers ÔÇö and their overlap with Sears ÔÇö couldn't be determined.

For better or worse it has begun. Film Trade Group Files Anti-Piracy Suits quote:By GARY GENTILE, AP Business Writer LOS ANGELES - A trade group representing seven major movie studios filed a first wave of lawsuits against individuals they say are offering pirated copies of films using peer-to-peer file-sharing programs. As part of a larger effort to combat piracy, The Motion Picture Association of America also said it would soon make available a computer program that sniffs out movie and music files on a user's computer as well as any installed file-sharing programs. The MPAA announced the federal court suits Tuesday, but did not say how many defendants were sued or where the lawsuits were filed. The group also did not immediately make available a copy of the complaint. Three lawsuits, obtained by The Associated Press, were filed in federal courts in St. Louis and Denver. Two suits filed in Denver name a total of 22 defendants, while the one in St. Louis targets 18 individuals. Other lawsuits are believed to have been filed in New York, Philadelphia and other areas with large concentrations of high-speed Internet customers. Such connections are required to download the massive movie files. The St. Louis lawsuit is brought against "John Doe" defendants, including four people who are allegedly in possession of one pirated film each. Some of the Internet addresses for the defendants can be traced to high-speed Internet connections made available by Charter Communications, a cable television company based in St. Louis. Like similar lawsuits filed by the record industry against downloaders of music files, the studios say they will be able to identify the individual defendants at a later date. Some of the pirated copies of films allegedly offered over Internet peer-to-peer networks include "Troy," from Warner Bros., "Spider-Man 2," from Columbia Pictures and "Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen," from The Walt Disney Co. Unlike the recording industry, the Hollywood studios did not offer an amnesty program for people to admit they have illegal downloaded files. The lawsuits seek injunctions against the defendants. The copyright law also provides for penalties of up to $30,000 for each motion picture traded over the Internet, and up to $150,000 if such infringement is shown to be willful. An MPAA executive defended the decision not to say how many suits were filed or where. "It's not important," said John Malcolm, senior vice president and director of worldwide anti-piracy operations for the MPAA. "It doesn't matter if it's 10 lawsuits or 500 lawsuits. The idea here is that there is no safe harbor." Malcolm said more lawsuits would be filed in additional cities if the current legal action does not stem illegal downloading. The MPAA said the information detected by the free file-detection program would not be shared with it or any other body, but could be used to remove any "infringing movies or music files" and remove file- sharing programs. The trade group said the program would be available for the Windows computer operating system on a special Web site established to educate consumers about copyrights. The name or exact nature of the program was not described Tuesday. "Many parents are concerned about what their children have downloaded and where they've downloaded it from," MPAA president and chief executive Dan Glickman said in a statement. The trade group said it would also join with the Video Software Dealers Association to place educational materials in more than 10,000 video stores nationwide. The materials will include anti-piracy ads that are also playing in theaters. The trade group said that the lawsuits, together with software and educational programs, are necessary tools to fight the small but growing number of films that are available on the Internet, often before a movie has even opened in theaters.

Link quote:By MARCY GORDON, AP Business Writer Shares of Fannie Mae fell sharply in pre-market trading Tuesday as the mortgage giant's outside auditor KPMG refused to sign off on its third-quarter earnings report, causing the the company to miss a regulatory deadline for filing it. The company's stock fell $2.50, or 3.6 percent, to $67.70 in electronic trading prior to the start of the session on the New York Stock Exchange. Fannie Mae, whose accounting is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, also said Monday that if the agency finds that it has improperly accounted for derivatives ÔÇö the financial instruments it uses to hedge against interest-rate swings ÔÇö it would show an estimated net loss of $9 billion for the July-September period. And it acknowledged that some of its accounting policies do not comply with generally accepted accounting principles. Washington-based Fannie Mae, which finances one of every five home loans in the United States, disclosed the SEC investigation on Sept. 22, stunning investors. The company, recently cited by regulators in the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight for serious accounting problems and accused of earnings manipulation, notified the SEC Monday that it would not file the third-quarter report on time. The OFHEO regulators had ordered Fannie Mae to make massive recalculations, and the delay fueled speculation as to whether the company would restate earnings. SEC spokesman Matt Well declined comment on the filing as did Corinne Russell, a spokeswoman for OFHEO, an independent agency within the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Spokesmen for Big Four accounting firm KPMG could not be reached for comment Monday. In its filing notifying the SEC, Fannie Mae said it "is not able to file a timely (quarterly report) that complies with the SEC's rules because it has been advised by its independent auditor that it is unable to complete its review of Fannie Mae's interim unaudited financial statements for the quarter ended September 30, 2004." Fannie Mae also acknowledged that some of its accounting policies do not comply with generally accepted accounting principles, apparently contradicting recent public statements by top executives who have defended the company's accounting. Chief executive Franklin Raines and Chief Financial Officer Timothy Howard insisted in sworn testimony at a congressional hearing last month that the HUD regulators' allegations of accounting improprieties and management misdeeds going back to the late 1990s were a matter of interpreting complex rules. In its filing Monday, the company said it "recently determined that its methodology for performing" some calculations for 2001 and 2002 balance sheets "was not consistent" with generally accepted accounting principles. It said it expects the effect of the discrepancies will be an increase in earnings for 2001 and 2002, and a decrease in 2003 profits, "with the cumulative effect of these changes across the three periods netting to zero." The "catch-up" calculations in question were related to 1998 expenses that OFHEO had said the company incorrectly put off to future periods so that top executives could collect full annual bonuses. The stakes are high for Fannie Mae, the second-largest financial institution in the country behind Citigroup, which also faces a criminal investigation by the Justice Department. The SEC inquiry makes things potentially tricky for Fannie Mae. Also by law, the quarterly financial reports must be certified in writing by Raines and Howard. If the SEC investigators turn up accounting violations in the quarter, that could expose Fannie Mae and its executives to legal liability with shareholders and others, some analysts say. A restatement could lead Fannie Mae's board to shuffle the company's executive ranks. Fannie Mae and its smaller sibling Freddie Mac pump money into the home mortgage market by buying and guaranteeing repayment of billions of dollars of home loans each year from banks and other lenders, then bundling them into securities that are resold to investors. Their stock and debt are widely held by investors worldwide.

Link quote:By Adam Tanner SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - For more than half a century, historian Raul Hilberg has studied the Holocaust, arguably the most savage episode in human history. He has tried to distance his personal life from his work but says on occasion, he has been overtaken by the pathos of his subject. "When you are done writing the work, bringing it to the public successfully, even being praised, you wake up one morning and say to yourself, 'They're still dead,' and that's really the most profound reaction there is," Hilberg, author of the definitive history "The Destruction of the European Jews," said. The suicide near San Francisco last week of Iris Chang, 36, author of "The Rape of Nanking," raises questions about the psychological toll of exposure to past tragedy, and experts say reactions differ. Historian Chang wrote a graphic best-selling account of the brutal Japanese Army invasion of China in 1937 and recently researched the wartime Bataan Death March in the Philippines. "The accumulation of hearing those stories, year after year after year, may have led to her depression. But that's just speculation," her husband Brett Douglas, was quoted as telling the San Francisco Chronicle. David Spiegel, associate chair of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, said some researchers believe it is possible that "people can sort of get post-traumatic stress disorder symptom by proxy." "Rescue workers, therapists, even though they are not themselves physically hurt, will sometimes just by the emphatic connection ... develop symptoms." "It is an occupational hazard, but I think depression is not the inevitable concomitant of work on depressing topics." Hilberg said that during his work on the Holocaust starting in 1948 a few small episodes affected him especially strongly. For example, he said he became sickened after researching the fate of a Jew who sued the Nazis for the right to purchase coffee. "I was nauseated because obviously this Jew was picked up and sent to Auschwitz or wherever they sent him and died," he said. "Why did this particular incident affect me when I could calmly read about mass murder?" As someone born in Vienna, a city of coffee houses, Hilberg said the subject sparked memories of his childhood. He added he has also dreamed of being a victim sent to Auschwitz. Robert Conquest, 87, a leading historian of Stalin's terror and famine that left tens of millions of dead, said he too was sometimes hit by smaller episodes amid larger tragedy. "There are details, not necessarily the most horrible in theory, that somehow make you feel this is somehow a worse world than we thought," Conquest, the author of "The Great Terror" and "Harvest of Sorrow," said in an interview. He cited for example documents about students during the Stalin era forced to stand in front of their schools and hear abuse after their parents were arrested. "They are harangued for two or three hours denouncing the parents of one of the kids. Then the kid has to come up and they are all screaming at him," he said. "It shows the awful level they've got to. Horrible." But both Hilberg and Conquest said their passion to tell the world about those episodes helped shield them from the tragedies in their books. "It is the blindness of the West to the world which is in a way more horrifying than the deeds," Conquest said. Psychosocial expert Spiegel said that a sense of purpose can help shield historians from their brutal subject matters. "What many people who adapt resiliently to it do is they find some aspect of what they're doing in which they feel they're taking charge and doing something." he said. "I would presume that somebody writing a history of the rape of Nanking would try and see it as not merely observing tragedy, but, you know, following Santayana's notion that those who don't know history are condemned to repeat it. The idea is perhaps in some way that this is contributing to something like this not happening again." But Roger Bell, professor emeritus at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, said those exposed to violence in their job can suffer if they have difficulty leaving work behind in their home life. "People sometimes begin to identify what they do with what they are," he said. "Especially where you have high-profile people, especially like law enforcement, they have a tendency to carry that over into who they are."Who would have guessed writing a book could kill you?

Bad news I must say

It's the date that the Halo action figures hit the store shelves.

quote:Originally posted by LostInSpace: Now look for CPU to AGP controller in the expanded list of system devices.It may look like this also "? CPU to AGP2.0/AGP3.0 Controller" where ? = your chipset maker like Intel, Via etc.

quote:Originally posted by Kiran: In fact, I'm not sure how it was even news worthy.It was a very slow news day.

Why don't you just download the newest drivers for your graphics card and install them. The latest Display Driver Miniport should be included with the device driver. the version for mine is 6.14.10.5672.

quote:Originally posted by LostInSpace: Bah, Falcon 4.0 should be #1.It's not quite that good. I would have placed it at number two.

Gamespy article

Link

Link quote:SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp.'s widely anticipated search engine, which launched in test mode on Thursday, encountered some glitches on its first day, the world's largest software maker said. The new search engine, Microsoft's first assault on Google Inc.'s leading position in the market, returned "temporarily unavailable" messages to some users looking for answers to queries at its Web site at beta.search.msn.com. "In the process of making our new MSN Search Beta globally available, we experienced technical difficulties that rendered it unavailable for some consumers for periods of time," Microsoft said in an e-mailed statement. Microsoft said it had expected such problems with MSN Search during its beta, or test mode, while soliciting feedback from users. "We expected to find some problems in the beta, and we anticipate there will be additional times when we limit service availability for maintenance purposes," the company said. Microsoft had been working on its search engine for the last 18 months after deciding to challenge Google's leading position the market. Microsoft's said its new search engine would deliver results from a database index of more than 5 billion indexed Web documents and pages. Google said on Wednesday that it had nearly doubled its index database to 8 billion pages.

quote:Originally posted by Jaguar: First the Liberty, which has been PROVEN through previously SECRET documents that it was indeed a TRAGIC accidenta 1 hour and 15 minute accident.

quote:Originally posted by Jaguar: Israel Targeted MILITARY, NOT CIVILIANS. Let's not forget the Israeli "false flag" or "black propaganda" operations whereby Israel deliberately sacrificed its own Jewish citizens or Ariel Sharon's infamous Unit 101 that killed Arab civilians. quote: There is someone who got it right in the mainstream media.....I can certainly agree with this, Arafat was a cold blooded killer, unfortunately so was everybody on the other side of the fence.

quote:Originally posted by XOR: If you simply must have your BC pills then at LEAST make sure they have PROGESTERONE in them. I think both types of BC pills contain Progesterone. One contains a combination of Progesterone and estrogen, the other contains just Progesterone.

quote:Originally posted by Jaguar: And your point is what Jamotto? The point is that the Israeli and Palestinian terrorism is cut from the same cloth. To say one is better than other is ludicrous. Neither is lily white. The Israeli terrorist's are responsible for the bombing of the King David Hotel, the assasination of Folke Bernadotte and the bombing of American and British properties in Cairo and Alexandria.

USS Liberty: Did Israel commit one war crime to hide another? quote:USS Liberty: Did Israel commit one war crime to hide another? By James M. Ennes, Jr., The Washington Post Report on Middle East Affairs, May/June 1996 Washington Report readers know the story well. In 1967 on the fourth day of the Six Day War, the armed forces of Israel attacked the American intelligence ship USS Liberty for 90 minutes in international waters in broad daylight following several hours of close, low-level reconnaissance. Thirty-four men died, 171 were hurt, and the ship was so badly damaged that it had to be scrapped. The government of Israel has lied about the circumstances ever since, telling a story markedly different from that told by American survivors. Congress has refused to question Israel's demonstrably false account, even though the State Department's own analysis finds the Israeli story to be untrue. Yet the most pressing question remaining from that infamy is not whether the attack was deliberate. That was settled long ago for most reasonable people. The question is why Israel risked its cozy relationship with America by killing American seaman on the high seas. Indeed, spokesmen for Israel use that question in Israel's defense. Why, they ask, would Israel risk alienating its American friends? So why did Israel attack? Intelligence analysts and others have long supposed that Israel attacked to prevent the ship from reporting the impending invasion of the Golan Heights, then imminent despite cease fire pleas by the United States. Israel's defenders reject that explanation. Recent reports in the Israeli and Egyptian press suggest another powerful possibility. According to eyewitness accounts by Israeli officers and journalists, the Israeli Army - the army that claims to hold itself to a higher moral standard than other armies - executed as many as 1,000 Arab prisoners during the 1967 war. Historian Gabby Bron wrote in the Yediot Ahronot in Israel that he witnessed Israeli troops executing Egyptian prisoners on the morning of June 8, 1967, in the Sinai town of El Arish. Bron reported that he saw about 150 Egyptian POWs being held at the El Arish airport where they were sitting on the ground, densely crowded together with their hands held on the back of their necks. Every few minutes, Bron writes, Israeli soldiers would escort an Egyptian POW from the group to a hearing conducted by two men in Israeli army uniforms. Then the man would be taken away, given a spade, and forced to dig his own grave. I watched as (one) man dug a hole for about 15 minutes, Bron wrote. Afterwards, the (Israeli military) policeman told him to throw the shovel away, and then one of them leveled an Uzi at him and shot two short bursts, each of three or four bullets. Bron says he witnessed about ten such executions, until the grave was filled. Then an Israeli Colonel threatened him with a revolver, forcing him to leave the area. USS Liberty was nearby As those executions were underway, America's most sophisticated intelligence platform, USS Liberty, was less than 13 miles from El Arish. We were close enough to see the town mosque with the naked eye. With binoculars we could make out individual buildings and might have seen the executions if we had looked in the right place. Could our operators have heard voice radio messages revealing these killings? Did senior Israeli officers sanction the murders, or did they learn of them? How would they have reacted to the knowledge that USS Liberty was nearby and might have heard incriminating radio traffic? Would they have been desperate enough to attack an American ship? The Liberty attack was a war crime The attack on USS Liberty was itself a war crime. US Navy Commander Walter Jacobsen, a Navy Legal Officer then doing graduate work at George Washington University, conducted an extensive legal analysis of the attack. His conclusion, reported in the Winter, 1986, Naval Law Review, was that several aspects of the attack violated provisions of the Geneva Conventions -- war crimes. Specifically, Commander Jacobsen found that the attack was not legally justified, that it constituted an act of aggression under the United Nations Charter, that the use of unmarked aircraft, the wanton destruction of life rafts in the water, the jamming of international radio distress frequencies, and the failure of the torpedo boat commanders to render immediate assistance to a disabled and helpless enemy were all violations of international law. US refusal to investigate violates Geneva Conventions For years, USS Liberty survivors have asked Members of Congress to investigate the circumstances of the attack. The Israeli version is untrue. We did fly a flag. We did identify ourselves. We were in international waters. They did not stop firing after seeing our flag as they claim, but continued to fire for another 40 minutes. The attack lasted 75 minutes and was not brief or accidental as Israel claims. We did not attempt to hide or escape when detected, as Israeli has charged. These things are easy to prove. More important are the war crimes discussed by Commander Jacobsen. These things should have been investigated in 1967. Yet U.S. officials have ignored the offenses for 29 years, refusing to investigate or even to acknowledge them. That refusal is itself a crime. The United States, as a signatory to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, is under the obligation to search for persons alleged to have committed, or to have ordered to be committed violations of the conventions, and to see that violators are brought to trial. There are no exceptions. War crimes reported to government officials must be investigated and perpetrators tried. Yet even this is ignored by U.S. officials. Liberty survivors for many years have reported the crimes committed against us and have requested an appropriate investigation. Despite the law, our complaints are ignored. No investigation of these charges has ever been held. Recently Liberty's Joe Meadors, a former president and chairman of the Liberty Veterans Association, has filed formal complaints with the House and Senate Ethics Committees against members who have ignored our complaints. To no surprise, these complaints, too, are being ignored. Navy Refusal to investigate violates Navy Regulations When the Liberty was attacked, Captain Joseph Tully in the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga received the ship's call for help and immediately sent jet aircraft to her assistance. Tully's jets were recalled almost immediately by orders from Washington. As a result, American jet fighter support was withheld for more than 90 minutes. By then the damage was done and 34 men were dead or dying. Had those aircraft been sent, they would probably have arrived before the torpedo boats started their part of the attack. At least 25 lives could have been saved. We survivors have tried for 29 years to learn why we were denied the immediate air support that we were promised in case of trouble. There are no answers. The Navy still will not even admit that help was not sent, even though one of the aircraft carrier commanders has offered to testify that he was forbidden to help us. The Uniform Code of Military Justice, the body of law that governs every military person, provides that Any person subject to this chapter who before or in the presence of the enemy . . . does not afford all practicable relief and assistance to . . . troops, vessels, or aircraft of the armed forces . . . when engaged in battle . . . shall be punished by death or such punishment as a court martial may direct. That provision was clearly violated when Liberty's air support was withheld. Yet the Navy will not even admit that we were not defended. George Orwell suggested in 1945 that some animals are more equal than other animals. Some countries, too, it would seem. James Ennes retired from the Navy in 1978 as a lieutenant commander after 27 years of enlisted and commissioned service. He was a lieutenant on the bridge of the USS Liberty on the day of the attack. His book on the subject, Assault on the Liberty (Random House, 1980), is a Notable Naval Book selection of the U.S. Naval Institute and was editors choice when reviewed in The Washington Post.

Now get rid of Ariel Sharon and peace might abound. If only that Israeli extremist had not assassinated Rabin there could have been peace in Israel a decade ago.

Hey, everybody likes good ribs.

Link quote:By DAVID BAUDER, AP Television Writer NEW YORK - It shocked many pundits when ABC's new series "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost" became the breakout hits of the new television season. But not the folks at Initiative, a top New York media agency, who say they've developed a new tool to help predict which shows will succeed or flop. The research device combs the Internet to pick up buzz about TV programs being developed. They hope to sell its findings to networks, advertisers and ad agencies. "Does this mean we can predict all success? No," said Alec Gerster, Initiative chief executive. "But it does seem to pick up a growing word-of-mouth about a particular show. Historically, that's always been there." Trying to pick a hit show in advance is like trying to predict the scores of this week's football games. It's good sport for fans, but for television executives who must make million-dollar decisions based on gut instincts, their jobs depend on it. Getting early tips on which shows people are eager to see can help networks decide where to spend promotional money, and advertisers decide where to buy commercials. The device, called PropheSEE, measures which shows are being talked about most on the Internet. Unlike other systems that do the same thing, it also gauges whether the talk is positive or negative. Both "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" ranked in the top five new shows for advance word-of-mouth, Initiative said. "Joey" was the show with the most pre-air buzz. Unfortunately for NBC, some of that chatter was negative, said Stacey Lynn Koerner, Initiative's top researcher. The show's performance has reflected that ambivalence: it's the most successful new sitcom on the air, yet last week didn't even make Nielsen Media Research's top 20 shows for the week. Two of the shows in Initiative's bottom five haven't made the air yet. It has to be an ominous sign for NBC that one of them is "The Contender," the midseason boxing series developed by Mark Burnett and Sylvester Stallone, which the network captured in a bidding war. "This isn't the be-all and end-all of predictions," Koerner said. "It's the early warning system." One of the top network researchers, CBS's David Poltrack, questions the value of PropheSEE. CBS, which has a research facility in Las Vegas, already surveys viewers in the summer about which new shows they've heard about and are looking forward to watching. The Initiative device also doesn't take into account people who are not active on the Internet, he said. "I don't see that this adds anything significant," Poltrack said. Initiative, which developed PropheSEE with the research firms Trendum and TVtracker.com, said there's a value in collecting the opinions of people who aren't aware they're being surveyed. Initiative is a firm that advises advertisers on where they should target their commercials. It's bound to be of value to industry executives at the mercy of the general public. "The amount of panic about loss of control is palpable within the industry," Koerner said.You might want to watch what you say about a new show on the internet. "They" might be watching.