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U.S. President Barack Obama said last week that the Al-Qaeda was “on a path to defeat,” but Seth Jones, a former U.S. Special Operations Command senior adviser, says the evidence he has collected points to the contrary. Jones recently wrote a book called “Hunting in the Shadows: The Pursuit of Al Qa'ida Since 9/11”, .... Jones spoke with the U.S. News website last week about his theory of “waves” of violence from Al-Qaeda and what needs to be done to prevent the next cycle. “When you look at fatality data, what you see is three major waves of activity,” he...

Of course I am paraphrasing Goering’s famous quote about “culture” – and I also recognise that in a personal capacity I am usually willing to trust the doctor who repairs my hernia or the plumber who fixes my boiler because the chances are they know more about hernias and boilers than I do for they are dealing with them every day. No, the “experts” I would love to threaten are the ones beloved of the media because they need a gap filled in the programme or on the page. Moreover the “expert” is usually produced to push an agenda favoured...

Last week, Nancy Pelosi insisted that extending unemployment benefits would, er, save or create 600,000 jobs, and insisted that experts in macroeconomics told her so. Who are the economic experts that advise Pelosi? According to Roll Call, Pelosi hauled a few of them up to Capitol Hill to support her economic policy, but didn’t disclose her relationship with at least one of them: In May 2010, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi took to a podium in the Capitol to introduce a half-dozen economic experts she had convened for a meeting on how to jump-start the economy. The group had met for several...

Under President Obama, the Peter Principle appears to have been elevated to policy, at least in the case of architects of an American intelligence disaster. The International Atomic Energy Agency will soon release a report on Iran's nuclear program. The findings have been leaking for days now -- and come as no surprise to those who have long-harbored well-grounded suspicions of Iran's intentions. Iran is close to achieving nuclear breakthrough: the ability to begin cranking out nuclear weapons. The Western world (not just Israel, the surrounded outpost of Western civilization in the Middle East) will now face a theocratic regime...

Climate experts: Expect more weather disastersNovember 1, 2011 7:35 AM (AP) WASHINGTON - Freakish weather disasters — from the sudden October snowstorm in the Northeast U.S. to the record floods in Thailand — are striking more often. And global warming is likely to spawn more similar weather extremes at a huge cost, says a draft summary of an international climate report obtained by The Associated Press. The final draft of the report from a panel of the world's top climate scientists paints a wild future for a world already weary of weather catastrophes costing billions of dollars. The report says...

In this world of Photoshop and online scams, it pays to have a hearty dose of skepticism at reports of something strange — including an albino fetal shark with one eye smack in the middle of its nose like a Cyclops. But the Cyclops shark, sliced from the belly of a pregnant mama dusky shark caught by a commercial fisherman in the Gulf of California earlier this summer, is by all reports the real thing. Shark researchers have examined the preserved creature and found that its single eye is made of functional optical tissue, they said last week. It's unlikely,...

Manhattan and the Bronx would be uninhabitable if the accident-prone Indian Point nuke plant suffered a Chernobyl-like disaster, an environmental group charged Monday. A massive radiation release similar to the 1986 catastrophe in Ukraine could also contaminate Brooklyn and chunks of Queens and Staten Island, according to a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The more you learn about Indian Point, the more you know it must close," said Robert Kennedy Jr., a senior attorney at NRDC. "It's too old, it's near too many people, and it's just too vulnerable to fire, earthquake and attack." The doomsday scenario comes...

When asked what posed the greatest challenge to statesmen, Harold Macmillan, the former British prime minister, responded, "Events, my dear boy, events." That's because events tend to throw everybody off their plan. For example, Hurricane Irene ended President Obama's vacation early. And the hurricane's steady deterioration upset the plans of news producers who anticipated something more dramatic for their wall-to-wall coverage. In a similar fashion, Obama and his advisors predicted the economy would do better -- much better -- than it has, and those predictions were wrong. The president blames events: the European debt crisis, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami,...

"The legislative cannot transfer the power of making laws to any other hands... The power of the legislative, being derived from the people... [is] only to make laws, and not to make legislators." — John Locke, “Second Treatise of Government”Here, however, is a paradox of sovereignty: The sovereign people, possessing the right to be governed as they choose, might find the exercise of that right tiresome and so might choose to be governed in perpetuity by a despot they cannot subsequently remove. Congress did something like that in passing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. The point...

Since the anti-obesity campaign is allegedly motivated by scientific findings, it would seem reasonable and prudent to make doubly sure that those claims are factual and trustworthy. Yet, we continue to find that the case against obesity is significantly flawed. Not only are the claims of an obesity epidemic often wildly exaggerated, but the science linking weight to unfavourable mortality outcomes is also frequently nonexistent or distorted.

OTTAWA, Ontario, February 28, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In a recent parliamentary session on a bill relating to sexual offenses against children, psychology experts claimed that pedophilia is a “sexual orientation” comparable to homosexuality or heterosexuality, a definition that was questioned by one Member of Parliament who was present. Bill C-54, an Act to Amend the Criminal Code, seeks to increase or impose mandatory minimum penalties or punishment on sexual offenders of children for particular crimes. Parliamentary discussion on February 14 centered on the mandatory minimum imprisonment and how offenders respond to treatment. Dr. Vernon Quinsey and Dr. Hubert Van Gijseghem,...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A climate change study that projected a 2.4 degree Celsius increase in temperature and massive worldwide food shortages in the next decade was seriously flawed, scientists said Wednesday. The study was posted on the website of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was written about by numerous international news agencies, including AFP. But AAAS later retracted the study as experts cited numerous errors in its approach. "A reporter with The Guardian alerted us yesterday to concerns about the news release submitted by Hoffman & Hoffman public relations," said AAAS spokeswoman Ginger Pinholster in an...

LOS ANGELES – The Pentagon and NASA experts have determined that a billowing contrail seen streaking into the skies above Southern California was likely caused by an airliner and not a missile. The phenomenon recorded Monday evening by a TV news helicopter created a media sensation and a vapor trail of commentary across the Internet about the possibility of a secret missile firing. But the military insisted it knew of no rockets launched in the area. Defense Department spokesman Col. Dave Lapan said Wednesday that officials were satisfied it was an airplane contrail distorted by camera angle, winds and other...

The Department of Justice is seeking to hire linguists fluent in Ebonics to help monitor, translate, and transcribe the secretly recorded conversations of subjects of narcotics investigations, according to federal records. A maximum of nine Ebonics experts will work with the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Atlanta field division, where the linguists, after obtaining a “DEA Sensitive” security clearance, will help investigators decipher the results of “telephonic monitoring of court ordered nonconsensual intercepts, consensual listening devices, and other media”

International outcry - and the pleas of a devoted son - seem to have saved an Iranian woman from being stoned to death for adultery. But while Sakineh Mohammedie Ashitani has been granted a reprieve, she is not the only woman sentenced to be stoned for adultery in Iran. There have been at least six sentences carried out since 2006, says Ann Harrison, an Iran expert at Amnesty International in London. Adultery is the only crime that carries such a penalty in Iranian law, she said. Only a handful of countries have laws calling for stoning, and Iran is the...

Yesterday’s court decision suspending Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s moratorium on deepwater oil exploration has drawn fire because of past and possible current stock holdings by the presiding federal judge, Martin Feldman, in oil services companies. But considering the arguments Salazar submitted to the court, and their apparent contradiction with his earlier public statements, the ruling is not terribly surprising. On June 10, Salazar had been forced to apologize for falsely implying that experts who peer-reviewed a Safety Report on the Deepwater Horizon rig’s explosion had endorsed his recommendation of a six-month deep-water drilling moratorium.

<p>Instead of quelling a growing outcry for more information on an alleged political bargain, the White House has raised more questions and calls for an investigation after its shocking revelation on Friday that it recruited former President Bill Clinton to pitch a possible administration role to Rep. Joe Sestak if he would sit out the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate primary.</p>

NEW YORK (AFP) – The planet is overheating, under-resourced, and almost out of time, but technical innovation and green economics could save the world, experts and leaders Thursday told an international conference here. Video-linked panels in New York, Monaco, Mexico City, Beijing, London, Nairobi and New Delhi painted an alarming picture of global poverty and environmental degradation. They called on the United States and other rich countries to show leadership, for example by investing in carbon capture technology and other long-term methods of reducing greenhouse gasses. But developing countries, where pollution is growing rapidly, can also play a big role...

LONDON – Here's a new warning from health experts: Sitting is deadly. Scientists are increasingly warning that sitting for prolonged periods — even if you also exercise regularly — could be bad for your health. And it doesn't matter where the sitting takes place — at the office, at school, in the car or before a computer or TV — just the overall number of hours it occurs. Research is preliminary, but several studies suggest people who spend most of their days sitting are more likely to be fat, have a heart attack or even die. In an editorial published...

"When this old world starts getting you down / and people are just too much for you to take / Just log right on to the top of GoogleNews / And search to see what all the "experts say" . . .

"We were very scared, because it was the first time we had seen this," Castellano said. Keepers in Ecuador put that bear, which had previously been fed human food—including Coca-Cola—on its natural diet of fruits and bamboo, and added enrichment items, such as toys and exotic foods, into the bear's enclosure. Four months later the fur grew back.

With H1N1 poised to enter history as the least deadly of four global flu pandemics, some experts are calling for an end to Canada's mass vaccination program. Nature is already achieving what we would hope to achieve by vaccinating, they say. ~snip~ Fisman can't understand the rational for continuing mass vaccinations. He said that for a virus as contagious as H1N1, less than 30 per cent of the population needed vaccination to reach a critical level of immunity. ~snip~ Despite that view, Canada's top doctor this week pleaded with Canadians to get vaccinated if they have not already done so....

The World Health Organization tried this week to dampen fears about mutations seen in the swine flu virus in several countries, noting that both mutations had been found in very few people. A change that created Tamiflu resistance has been found in about 75 people around the world, said Dr. Keiji Fukuda, chief flu adviser to the W.H.O.’s director general. Two clusters, in cancer units at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina and a hospital in Wales, were both among patients whose immune systems had been severely suppressed by cancer treatment; some had had their bone marrow, which produces...

We are at the mercy of economic "experts." These practitioners of the "dismal science" are managing large sectors of our economy in accordance with theories learned in Ivy League Universities. They have assured us that the lessons learned from the Great Depression will prevent another such occurrence. The problem is that every forecast by an economic expert can be matched by an equal and opposite forecast. Often these conflicting forecasts are made by the same individual. Economist Howard S. Katz provides an explanation for this situation in his book, The Paper Aristocracy: "Modern economics claims to be a science. This...

The Pharma vaccination heist that’s planned for this Fall (autumn) has met some serious opposition: hard facts and cool common sense! Those who stand to gain are insisting that when the flu revisits this Fall it will be much more severe than the first spring “herald wave” we had. They are banking on it (literally!) Trouble is that if you look at the facts, meaning the history of flu epidemics, it just isn’t true. The idea it starts mild and gets stronger by picking up mutations is a myth, according to leading experts of today. "Pandemic history suggests that changes...

Received via e-mail: ------------- The following is being sent at the request of Vint Cerf on behalf of Susan Crawford, National Economic Council We need your help in support of a broadband initiative that President Obama cares deeply about. Specifically, we are seeking subject matter experts who would review grant applications being filed with the federal government by applicants seeking financial support for broadband projects throughout the country. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act appropriated $7.2 billion to the Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA) and the Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service (RUS) and to expand broadband...

From a friend of my Father: I attended a breakfast meeting where the speaker/guest was David E. Cole, Chairman Center for Automotive Research (CAR) and Professor at the Univ. of Michigan. You have all likely heard CAR quoted, or referred to in the auto industry news lately. Mr. Cole, who is an engineer by training, told many stories of the difficulty of working with the folks that the Obama administration has sent to save the auto industry. There have been many meetings where a 30+ year experienced automotive expert has to listen to a newcomer to the industry, someone with...

The Obama administration’s strongest option as it fights to keep hundreds of photographs of prisoner abuse secret may be to classify them and claim they are exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, experts on government secrecy said Thursday

A group of scientists have unveiled what they say is the most comprehensive study ever of African genes. Published following a decade of study, the researchers say their findings give new insight into the origins of humans. The first humans probably evolved near the South Africa-Namibia border before migrating north, the study says. Published in the US journal Science, it aims to teach Africans on population history and aid research into why diseases hit particular groups. The scientists examined genetic material from 121 African populations, as well as four African-American populations and 60 non-African populations.

SAN LORENZO DE EL ESCORIAL, Spain (AFP) - "Computer-savvy" terrorists are using the Internet as a new weapon but national authorities must be aware of individual rights when combating the threat, speakers at an international conference said Thursday. "Information technology and particularly the Internet has become a key tool of terrorist groups as well as a potential target," said Mike Smith, the head of the UN Counter Terrorism Committee. "Terrorists use it to spread their ideology, to recruit, train and motivate their followers, to plan their attacks and communicate with each other across borders." However, he said fighting the threat...

SYDNEY (AFP) – Australia's outback Aborigines will be among the worst affected by climate change as soaring temperatures likely cause more disease and spur distress about the changing landscape, a new report shows. The expert report, published in the latest edition of the Medical Journal of Australia, argues that the country's remote indigenous communities are the most vulnerable to changing environmental conditions. "Their vulnerability to climate change is intensified by the social and economic disadvantage they already experience -- the result of factors that include decades of inadequate housing and public services, and culturally inappropriate medical services," the journal said...

Hi, my FRiends - This came to mind when I watched SNL last weekend, with guests John & Cindy McCain and musical guest David Cook. Remember American Idol? Everyone KNEW that Archuleta was going to win. Foregone conclusion. Why not just skip to the finals? Well, Archuleta, being young, peaked early, stuck with what had worked well for him before, including a lot ofsocial commentary wrapped up in music - while dark horse David Cook kept steadily moving on, trying a few new things, some unexpected things. Even sang Andrew Lloyd Webber and made it sound pretty fresh. And he...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The Pentagon is pushing for more troops to go to Afghanistan but experts question whether a new "surge" can shut down the insurgency flourishing in Pakistan's safe havens. "That's a totally open question," said Michael O'Hanlon, an expert at the Brookings Institution. US commanders in Afghanistan have asked for 10,000 more combat troops for what until recently was thought of as a forgotten war. US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Wednesday he wanted to send more forces "sooner rather than later." The push comes on the back of a "surge" strategy in Iraq that succeeded in bringing...

Washington elites, pontificating pundits and media types would be very surprised to know: There is life outside the beltway. Millions of largely invisible, average Americans live there. And these Americans are living lives totally alien to the thousands of so-called experts and talking heads who claim to represent them. For instance: These Americans, (I'll call them 'we' Americans, as I belong to their ranks), aren't waiting breathlessly for the latest word on high from Hillary. We really don't care what she says, having learned long ago that much of what comes out of her mouth is designed for political expediency,...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An ambitious vision to take people to the moon and Mars may fall apart before it even gets off the ground because of uncertain planning and inadequate funding, several experts said on Thursday. A congressional report said NASA's replacement for the space shuttle, the Constellation Program, is in jeopardy, and members of Congress as well as at least one former astronaut agreed at a hearing on the issue. The U.S. Government Accountability Office said the Constellation program, scheduled to begin by 2015, is troubled by engineering, funding and mechanical issues. For instance, the program was meant to...

William F. Buckley, Jr. has died, God rest his soul. He famously said, “I’d rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the dons of Harvard.” I can’t usefully add to the praise of this great man that has begun appearing since his death two days ago, but I can say something interesting about this statement. There are several grades of pine “2 by 4’s”, the studs that make up the walls and ceilings of your house. Superior grades are made for exterior walls, lesser grades are useful for external projects, such as...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The sharp drop in violence that has accompanied the U.S. troop buildup in Iraq has given the war-torn country a rare opportunity for stability, analysts said on Wednesday. The panel of independent experts on Iraq told a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee that the fragile successes of recent months in Iraq could easily unwind if the United States is unwilling to maintain a large troop presence in the Gulf region for years to come. "We may have an opportunity in Iraq that has not been available since 2003 to stabilize the country and avert the downside risks...

People for whom indignation is a way of life — and there seem to be an increasing number of such people — repeatedly have outbursts of outrage whenever the police fire a lot of shots at some criminal. People who have never fired a gun in their lives, and have never had a split second in which to make a decision that could mean life or death for themselves or others, are often nevertheless convinced that the police used excessive force. As someone who once taught pistol shooting in the Marine Corps, it has never seemed strange to me that...

If there's one document on global warming policymakers might put in their briefcase, this would be it. On Monday, scientists and government officials gather in Valencia, Spain to put together the fourth and last U.N. report on the state of global warming and what it will mean to hundreds of millions of people whose lives are being dramatically altered. Unlike the past three tomes, this one will have little new data. Instead, it will distill the previous work into a compact guide of roughly 30 pages that summarizes complex science into language politicians and bureaucrats can understand. It will be...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Scientists and economists Tuesday warned lawmakers of consequences Florida faces from climate change, including more destructive hurricanes and a rising sea level, but they also said the state could be a leader in reducing global warming. Three panels of experts spoke at a symposium held by the House Environmental Resources Council and three related committees. Climate change will figure into comprehensive energy and environmental policy legislation the lawmakers will be considering during the 2008 legislative session, said Council Chairman Stan Mayfield, R-Vero Beach. Some legislators, though, questioned whether Florida could do much to reduce carbon dioxide and...

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. - Oak Ridge National Laboratory researcher Virginia Dale likes to say the scientific process is all about studying vast amounts of evidence over time. In the case of global climate change, the Department of Energy lab has crunched 100 trillion bytes of information in its high-performance computers. The results went into the international studies credited by Al Gore for his Nobel Peace Prize. "Basically one third of all the (computer) runs that were done were done at the Oak Ridge lab," said David Erickson, a climate modeling expert who helped brief the former vice president during a multimedia...

LIMA, Peru - A fiery meteorite crashed into southern Peru over the weekend, experts confirmed on Wednesday. But they were still puzzling over claims that it gave off fumes that sickened 200 people. Local residents told reporters that a fiery ball fell from the sky and smashed into the desolate Andean plain near the Bolivian border Saturday morning. Jose Mechare, a scientist with Peru's Geological, Mining and Metallurgical Institute, said a geologist had confirmed that it was a "rocky meteorite," based on the fragments analyzed. He said water in the meteorite's muddy crater boiled for maybe 10 minutes from the...

WASHINGTON - Intelligence experts scouring the latest video of Osama bin Laden for clues warned on Saturday that his message offers hints that Al-Qaeda is planning another attack on US interests. In his first video appearance in three years, the elusive Al-Qaeda chief mocks the United States as "weak" and vows to escalate fighting in Iraq, all the while using language similar to the kind used ahead of other past attacks. At times, bin Laden speaks directly to Americans, using plain language that "appears to be crafted in a way as to be understood by the average person on the...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More than half of top U.S. foreign policy experts oppose President George W. Bush's troop increase as a strategy for stabilizing Baghdad, saying the plan has harmed U.S. national security, according to a new survey. As Congress and the White House await the September release of a key progress report on Iraq, 53 percent of the experts polled by Foreign Policy magazine and the Center for American Progress said they now oppose Bush's troop build-up...

LONDON - It may be obvious that most Britons are overweight. What isn't so obvious is that at least 2 million of them are likely malnourished — and that includes some of the people who are too fat. Experts say the poor state of the average British diet — often high in fat, salt and calories, but low on nutrition — means malnutrition is a problem even though food is plentiful. "You can't always tell if a person is malnourished with your eyes," said Dr. Marinos Elia, a professor of clinical nutrition and metabolism at Southampton University. "People may be...

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - Al-Qaida's latest offensive appears to be taking place on computer and television screens, and uses techniques associated more with Madison Avenue than Fallujah. Although viewership is difficult to measure, analysts say the group's videos seem to be reaching a wider audience than ever, piggybacking on the popularity of blogs and video-sharing programs like YouTube. Key to the operation are two broadcast anchors, Libyan firebrand Abu Laith al-Libi and an American fugitive, Adam Yehiye Gadahn. "You're losing on all fronts, and losing big time," Gadahn, also known as Azzam al-Amriki, told President Bush in an Internet...

Iran four years from atomic bomb, say experts By David Blair, Diplomatic Correspondent Last Updated: 3:35am BST 24/04/2007 Iran's nuclear programme is facing such severe technical difficulties that it could take four years to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for one bomb and eight years to deploy an operational nuclear weapon, experts say. Students hold placards supporting Iran's nuclear right President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's announcement on April 9 that uranium enrichment on an "industrial scale" had begun was "misleading" and the time-scale for success is likely to be longer than early estimates suggested. "It's very difficult to enrich uranium," said Norman Dombey,...

After painstakingly analyzing the costs of U.S. nuclear power plants built decades ago, energy experts caution that a resurrection of nuclear power could bring along some financial risk and surprisingly high electricity costs. Researchers reporting in the most recent edition of the journal Environmental Science & Technology found that construction costs varied by as much as 500 percent before the last U.S. nuclear power station was built almost 30 years ago. "There is no other (energy) technology we're looking at where the range in cost is a factor of five," said Dan Kammen, professor of energy and resources and of...

Following revelations that a high-ranking member of Wikipedia's bureaucracy used his cloak of anonymity to lie about being a professor of religion, the free Internet encyclopedia plans to ask contributors who claim such credentials to identify themselves. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said in interviews by phone and instant message Wednesday from Japan that contributors still would be able to remain anonymous. But he said they should only be allowed to cite some professional expertise in a subject if those credentials have been verified. "We always prefer to give a positive incentive rather than absolute prohibition, so that people can contribute...

WASHINGTON - Later this week in Paris, climate scientists will issue a dire forecast for the planet that warns of slowly rising sea levels and higher temperatures. But that may be the sugarcoated version. Early and changeable drafts of their upcoming authoritative report on climate change foresee smaller sea level rises than were projected in 2001 in the last report. Many top U.S. scientists reject these rosier numbers. Those calculations don't include the recent, and dramatic, melt-off of big ice sheets in two crucial locations: They "don't take into account the gorillas — Greenland and Antarctica," said Ohio State University...