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Politics : Clinton -- doomed & wagging, Japan collapses, Y2K bug, etc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SOROS who wrote (511)	9/30/1998 10:04:00 AM
From: wallstreeter	Respond to of 1151

Wow interesting piece of news Soros. What does the doctor say about catholics? because alot of born-agains consider catholics not to be christians.

To: SOROS who wrote (511)	9/30/1998 3:08:00 PM
From: SOROS	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1151

WASHINGTON (AP) — Legislation backed by key Republicans would give nearly $100 million to Iraqis trying to bring down Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. ''The purpose of this legislation is to finally and irrevocably commit the United States to the removal from power of the regime headed by Saddam Hussein,'' said Rep. Benjamin Gilman, R-N.Y., chairman of the House International Relations Committee. On Tuesday, Gilman and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., introduced bills that would authorize the president to give $97 million to Iraqi rebels and $2 million to Radio Free Iraq, set up under earlier legislation. Congress has either approved or is considering another $58 million, mostly in humanitarian and political assistance to Saddam's opponents, who operate mainly outside Iraq. The actual total that would go to the rebels would be determined by the president. The only direct requirement of the bill is that he designate which groups would be eligible for the aid. ''It is time to move beyond political support to direct military assistance,'' Lott said in introducing the legislation. ''This is the 55th day without weapons inspections in Iraq,'' Lott said. ''The problem in Iraq is not the people of Iraq; the problem is Saddam Hussein. And we should have a direct, active, overt support of the opposition that would lead to the removal of Saddam Hussein from office.'' The Clinton administration had no immediate response to the Republican move that would, in effect, openly commit the United States to overthrowing Saddam — a tack the administration has resisted. The bills have some Democratic support, however, and Lott said he consulted with the administration in drawing up the Senate measure. In the past, the White House has opposed direct aid to the Iraqi opposition on grounds it could lead to further U.S. obligations. The groups themselves also have preferred covert assistance that would not openly identify them as U.S.-backed. The CIA aided Iraqi resistance groups after the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and Congress earlier approved some humanitarian and political support for Kurdish and other opposition groups operating outside Iraq. Separate pending bills would authorize $48 million for political and humanitarian support for the Iraqi opposition. Another $5 million was earlier appropriated for support of the political opposition and another $5 million to set up Radio Free Iraq.

To: SOROS who wrote (511)	9/30/1998 3:11:00 PM
From: SOROS	Respond to of 1151

WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 — A burst of radiation from a distant star smashed into the Earth's upper atmosphere last month with enough energy to power civilization for a billion billion years, astronomers say. The immense wave of energy, the most powerful ever recorded from beyond the sun, caused at least two satellites to shut down briefly. DESPITE ITS powerful beginnings, the wave of energy reached the Earth's surface at a strength equal only to a typical, single dental X-ray. “We've been monitoring things like this for 30 years and we've never seen anything like this before,” Kevin Hurley, a research physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, said Tuesday at a NASA news conference. OVER PACIFIC OCEAN The burst of gamma and X-ray radiation struck the Earth over the Pacific Ocean at night on Aug. 27 and was so powerful that it temporary ionized the upper atmosphere just as the sun does in the daytime, said Hurley. Seven scientific satellites, five in orbit of the Earth, one approaching an asteroid far beyond, and one near the orbit of Jupiter, all detected the massive eruption. Hurley said the burst was so intense that two of the satellites were forced to shut down to protect their electronics. However, the energy was largely absorbed by the upper atmosphere and only a minuscule amount of radiation reached the Earth's surface. It posed no hazard to life, Hurley said. NEUTRON STAR THE SOURCE The eruption came from a neutron star, called SGR1900+14 in the constellation Aquila some 20,000 light years away. A neutron star is the collapsed core left after a massive star explodes. A light year is about 6 trillion miles. Astronomers said it is extremely rare for such a distant stellar explosion to have any effect on Earth, attesting to the immensity of the energy release. They estimated that the energy, if captured and put to use, could power all of the Earth's energy needs for a billion billion years - that is one billion periods of one billion years. “In this five-minute long flash we saw as much energy as there will be coming from the sun for the next 300 years,” said Hurley. “If we could harness this energy we would have enough power to power every city, every village, every light bulb until the end of the universe and far beyond.” The source star already was being studied because it is one of four known members of a class of stellar objects called “soft gamma ray repeaters.” These are neutron stars that put out steady flashes of gamma rays. But the extreme energy burst last month also suggests the object is a magnetar, a weird type of star first suggested by astrophysicists Robert Duncan of the University of Texas, Austin, and Christopher Thompson of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. SAMMY SOSA OF ASTROPHYSICS The dramatic proof of the star's existence, said Cornell University astronomer Jim Cordes, “is a triumph for theoretical astrophysics. “This is the Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire of astrophysics,” Cordes added. “It is that big a deal.” “It (the discovery) is that big.”' Duncan said at the news conference that magnetars are rapidly spinning neutron stars that have created a magnetic field far greater than any other known. He said the magnetic field around the star is so powerful that from more than 100,000 miles away “it could erase the magnetic strip on your credit card and suck the keys out of your pocket.” Duncan said the energy burst probably occurred when the magnetic field ripped apart the one-mile thick metal crust of the star, releasing an immense eruption of X-rays and gamma rays. This radiation is not optically visible, but it can be detected by instruments on satellites. Magnetars are extremely dense objects, containing one and a half times the mass of the sun in an area just 12 miles across, he said. “A tablespoon of material from this star would weigh as much as an aircraft carrier,” said Duncan. Approaching a magnetars would not be healthy, the astronomer noted. X-rays erupting from the star would kill from a distance. As one got closer, there would be lethal levels of electrons and anti-electrons, in addition to immense heat. It is not, said Duncan, “a good place to go.”

To: SOROS who wrote (511)	9/30/1998 3:12:00 PM
From: SOROS	Respond to of 1151

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- U.S. officials were aware of credible reports that Iraq had built and maintained three or four "implosion devices" that lacked only enriched uranium to make 20-kiloton nuclear bombs, but have not been able to corroborate them, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday. The newspaper quoted U.S. government and United Nations sources as saying there was no known evidence that Baghdad has acquired plutonium or highly enriched uranium, without which its weapons design cannot be completed. And one senior U.S. official told the paper that getting the fissile material would be extremely difficult. But the existence of the weapons shells would be a milestone for Iraq -- and it would likely quash any prospects for the U.N. Security Council to downgrade inspections on nuclear weapons once the current standoff over other weapons inspections ends. Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter has said repeatedly that Iraq had the components and the knowledge to make three nuclear bombs but did not have the uranium as it had been destroyed by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The IAEA is responsible for investigating any evidence that Iraq is violating a ban on its nuclear weapons program. What Ritter said Ritter, a former Marine who has been critical of U.S. policy since he resigned from the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) in August, testified about the devices to U.S. Senate and House of Representatives committees on September 4 and September 15. After his testimony, senior U.S. policy-makers said the government had never received such a report from UNSCOM and did not regard the claims as credible. But the Washington Post said in its Wednesday edition that U.S. government and U.N. sources had since confirmed that Ritter passed intelligence about the devices orally to the Central Intelligence Agency's Nonproliferation Center in 1996 and in writing in May 1997 to an interagency group supporting UNSCOM. The newspaper quoted U.S. officials responsible for assessing the reports as saying that they believed the findings are plausible. "It is credible that they (Iraqi designers) have all the parts to put together," one of the officials said on Tuesday. "Do I think there might be parts out there that could provide the basis to put together several weapons? Yeah." Since 1996, the Vienna-based IAEA has reported regularly to the U.N. Security Council that it has found "no indication of prohibited equipment, materials or activities." IAEA's Gary Dillon told the Security Council on July 28 that the agency had an adequate picture of Iraq's past nuclear programs but that "absolute certainty is simply not possible." However, he said there were no indications Iraq had the "physical capability -- hardware and facilities to produce weapons-usable material." Sources told the Post that Dillon this month described Ritter's report as "unsubstantiated" and said it has "no credibility." Information from defectors Ritter's original information, according to accounts he gave the U.S. government, was compiled from three Iraqi defectors, according to the Washington Post report. Ritter later told the IAEA, according to other sources, that the data came to UNSCOM by way of a "northern European" country. The defectors' credibility was enhanced by their detailed descriptions of the methods used by Iraq's Special Security Organization to hide the weapons components, and because their story matched intelligence known only to a handful of Westerners at the time, sources said. About a year after the first report, UNSCOM summarized it in a briefing paper for a conference on Iraq held in Washington on May 19 and 20, 1997, with the U.S. and British governments, sources said. UNSCOM wrote in the briefing paper, which was classified upon receipt by the U.S. government, "These components may comprise several complete weapons minus the HEU (highly enriched uranium) core."