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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (92743)	12/29/2004 12:04:18 PM
From: DMaA	Respond to of 793964

At least in our state, charter schools have nothing to do with the free-market. Their customers aren't parents, they are school boards who give them permission to live and can kill them at any time. What you get out of them are experiments and fads. In our town, the school board just okeyed a charter school that will be using the "Leonard Bernstein model of creative learning". And the math scores from this school will start showing up in the statistics in a couple of years. How many entrapranuers are going to invest for the long run when a school board can pull the rug out on you at any time? Yet clearly we have enough evidence to suggest that the free-market ideals that fueled this reform movement are at best misguided and at worst harmful to the most disadvantaged students. It

To: Lane3 who wrote (92743)	12/29/2004 1:21:11 PM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 793964

The Post is doing a series on the nuclear threat. There's another article there today about nuclear explosions. About This Series The three articles beginning today are the culmination of a year-long effort to examine the challenges the United States faces more than three years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Previous articles have ranged from the threat posed by conventional truck bombs to the difficulty of tracking terrorist fundraising. The articles starting today take a detailed look at terrorists' ability to acquire and use weapons of mass destruction -- nuclear, biological and chemical. While the dangers certainly are real, there is considerable disagreement among security experts about the probabilities for "catastrophic terrorism." In the case of nuclear and biological weapons, the subjects of articles today and tomorrow, there are technical and scientific hurdles that have proved daunting, even for nations with sizable budgets and state-of-the-art facilities. Chemical weapons, which will be explored in an article Friday, would be somewhat easier to devise or obtain, but also far less likely to yield huge numbers of casualties. A radiological device would have similar limitations for terrorists. Each type of weapon presents special challenges for the groups seeking to acquire it, but experts warn that the odds for a successful attack could rise significantly in the future as determined foes intersect with advancing technology. -------------- Attack With Dirty Bomb More Likely, Officials Say By Dafna Linzer Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, December 29, 2004; Page A06 Often called a weapon of mass disruption, not destruction, a dirty bomb -- which uses conventional explosives to spread radioactive material -- causes far fewer casualties than a nuclear explosion. But because such devices are easier to assemble and the ingredients are readily available, government officials and terrorism experts consider a dirty-bomb attack more likely than a terrorist nuclear strike. "You would need a stick of dynamite and the kind of radioactive source you find in a common smoke detector," said Charles D. Ferguson, co-author of "The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism." spacer There have been several alleged attempts to carry out a dirty-bomb attack. In June 2002, U.S. authorities arrested Jose Padilla, a former gang member from Brooklyn, on charges of plotting a dirty-bomb strike in the United States on behalf of al Qaeda. Last December, the Department of Energy dispatched scores of nuclear scientists with sophisticated detection equipment to scour several major cities for radiological bombs. In September, British police arrested four men suspected of plotting to set off a dirty bomb in London. "Any person who could build a car bomb or suicide bomb, like the ones we've seen in Iraq or other places, could couple that to radioactive materials and that is it," Ferguson said. Such an attack can be carried out by detonating a small conventional bomb that spews the radioactive material and radiation across a small area. John R. Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control, said in an interview that the availability of radiological sources presents a significant risk, and that both the United States and the rest of the world "have not paid enough attention to this question. Everybody needs to do more work on that." Americium, which is found in smoke detectors, is one of eight types of radioactive sources suitable for bombs. Four sources cause external injuries to skin and eyes, and three others, plus americium, can cause extensive internal damage, as well. Terrorists would need less than a gram of any one of the sources to build a dirty bomb, but the trace amounts found in everyday products are so minuscule that plotters would need more than 1 million smoke detectors to get enough americium for a weapon. Even if a terrorist was able to assemble, plant and detonate a dirty bomb, officials and experts agree the damage would be more psychological than lethal. "The real effects would be economic shutdown due to contamination, as well as the social and psychological fear created," Ferguson said.