New Hampshire Health News Digest

Chalabi calls for security to be handed over to Iraqis after Najaf outrage : "BAGHDAD (AFP) - A member of Iraq (news - web sites)'s US-appointed Governing Council called on Friday for internal security to be handed over to Iraqis following the killing of top Shiite leader Ayatollah Mohammad Baqer al-Hakim in a devastating car bombing in the holy city of Najaf. Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Pentagon (news - web sites)-backed Iraqi National Congress (INC), blamed remnants of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s regime and supporters of the al-Qaeda terror network for the attack, which came a little over a week after another deadly bombing wrecked the UN headquarters in Baghdad. 'This is not an inter-Shiite affair,' Chalabi told AFP, flatly rejecting the suggestion that the attack could have been triggered by rivalries over the mantle of leadership of Iraq's majority Shiite community. 'The attack was against the holy shrine,' he said in a refere...

Voting machine controversy : "Columbus - The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is 'committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.' The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election. " I've said it before, and I'll say it again. If we ever go to computerized voting our democracy is finished.

NEWS.com.au | 'Dog is dead' sparked Najaf arrests (September 1, 2003) : "TWO Saudis arrested after the Najaf attack in Iraq that killed leading Shiite cleric Mohammad Baqer al-Hakim were picked up after sending an e-mail saying 'mission accomplished: the dog is dead', The Times reported today quoting a source close to the Iraqi inquiry. The men were grabbed by a crowd and taken to the nearest police station after being seen sending the e-mail from an Internet cafe, the source said. The bombing on Friday in the Iraqi holy city of Najaf killed at least 83 people including Ayatollah Hakim, regarded as a moderate Shiite. The two suspects apparently attracted the attention of the son of the cafe owner after having 'offered a larger than usual sum of money to use a computer', the British daily said. It was then that the son saw the men send a message saying 'mission accomplished: the dog is dead'. Grabbed by an angry crowd of Shiite Muslims, ...

I have been reading about the myers briggs personality types, and about my type in particular, and I think this is just fascinating. I know this has been around for a while, so some of you may have already found your type out, but if you haven't the top two links are to a longer and a shorter test to help you determine your type. Then I have some links about where you can find out more about your type. I am an INTP. quick 70 question test to determine your Myers Briggs personality type: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp If you don't have the patience for the 70 question test, here's a four question test, although it may not be as accurate. After you find your type, there are many good links on the bottom to sites with more info about your type. From this first page, select "are you ready to take a test?" http://bloginality.love-productions.com/index.php brief descriptions of the types in the middle of the page http://www.keirsey.com...

The Scotsman - International- 50 Taleban die in US-led strikes UP TO 50 Taleban fighters were killed yesterday in an air and ground operation by United States and Afghan forces against hundreds of guerrillas in the southern province of Zabul, Afghan officials said. "The deaths were the result of heavy bombing by US forces and ground attacks by government forces," the provincial governor, Hamdullah Watandoost said. "We have seen 40 to 50 dead bodies." A main Taleban guerrilla base was over-run, he said. "Our mopping-up operation continues and we have besieged the entire Taleban force who have no way to escape," he said. Juman Khan, a local police chief, said US planes had pounded mountain areas where up to 600 Taleban fighters were believed to be cornered after launching weekend attacks. Ground forces including about 450 Afghans and two dozen Americans, had captured up to 40 suspects and suffered no casualties. "The rest of Taleban,...

WorldNetDaily: Al-Qaida plot to hijack plane in UK : "Intelligence uncovered by the FBI indicates al-Qaida terrorists plan to hijack an aircraft in Britain within the next two months and fly it into an ''important'' building. British Airways and other leading airlines operating in and out of Britain have been put on alert. The report says the most likely targets for the hijackers were aircraft taking off from London's Heathrow and Gatwick airports, according to a report in the London Telegraph. The FBI and Department of Homeland Security circulated a warning to American and British airlines on July 30, saying terrorists working in teams of five were likely to try to attempt hijackings using common items carried by travelers, reports the paper. "

Reuters | Latest Financial News / Full News Coverage : "U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said in a television interview some of the people attacking U.S. forces in Iraq are slipping across the border from Saudi Arabia. U.S. officials have long suspected some militants have come through Iran and Syria and has warned both against interference in Iraq but have not previously singled out Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. ally because of its vast oil reserves. However, Riyadh's cooperation on fighting terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States has left some U.S. officials disappointed. 'The borders are quite porous, as you'd imagine, and the fact that we've captured a certain number of foreign fighters in Baghdad and around Iraq indicates that the ways that these people are getting into the country is from Iran and from Syria and from Saudi Arabia,' Armitage said in an interview with Arabic-language television channel Al-Jazeera. 'I'm...

WorldNetDaily: Al-Qaida trickle into Iraq becomes flood : "Many are coming unhampered from the border areas of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. More than 1,000 al-Qaida operatives have entered Iraq just in the last three months. Many other supporters have also entered Iraq. These are not the young, unemployed looking for action. These forces appear trained and highly disciplined. " Better to have our soldiers fight them in Iraq then to have them attack our civilians in the streets of the United States

Design your own hell! : This is a fun one! It takes a little while, but once it's all sorted out you get html code to insert into your web page that depicts your new hell. (hint, if you don't have a webpage, paste the html text into a notepad file, and then save it with an .html extension, and save it as *all files type. )

Tech News - CNET.com : "Rockin' on without Microsoft By David Becker CNET News.com Sterling Ball, a jovial, plain-talking businessman, is CEO of Ernie Ball, the world's leading maker of premium guitar strings endorsed by generations of artists ranging from the likes of Eric Clapton to the dudes from Metallica. But since jettisoning all of Microsoft products three years ago, Ernie Ball has also gained notoriety as a company that dumped most of its proprietary software--and still lived to tell the tale. In 2000, the Business Software Alliance conducted a raid and subsequent audit at the San Luis Obispo, Calif.-based company that turned up a few dozen unlicensed copies of programs. Ball settled for $65,000, plus $35,000 in legal fees. But by then, the BSA, a trade group that helps enforce copyrights and licensing provisions for major business software makers, had put the company on the evening news and featured it in regional ads warning other businesses to monitor t...

Zombie Infection Simulation Wow! This also is cool and hard to describe. Watch the zombie infection progress, and especially watch how the waves of panic spread out. Very and fun interesting simulation. Here are the instructions: "Zombies are grey, move very slowly and change direction randomly and frequently unless they can see something moving in front of them, in which case they start walking towards it. After a while they get bored and wander randomly again. If a zombie finds a human directly in front of it, it infects them; the human immediately becomes a zombie. Humans are pink and run five times as fast as zombies, occasionally changing direction at random. If they see a zombie directly in front of them, they turn around and panic. Panicked humans are bright pink and run twice as fast as other humans. If a human sees another panicked human, it starts panicking as well."

Egg Very cool interactive flash movie. Very well done, kind of hard to describe, but really cool, almost hypnotic

The Prometheus Society > Articles > The Outsiders : "One of the problems faced by all gifted persons is learning to focus their efforts for prolonged periods of time. Since so much comes easily to them, they may never acquire the self-discipline necessary to use their gifts to the fullest. Hollingworth describes how the habit begins. Where the gifted child drifts in the school unrecognized, working chronically below his capacity (even though young for his grade), he receives daily practice in habits of idleness and daydreaming. His abilities never receive the stimulus of genuine challenge, and the situation tends to form in him the expectation of an effortless existence [3, p. 258]. But if the "average" gifted child tends to acquire bad adjustment habits in the ordinary schoolroom, the exceptionally gifted have even more problems. Hollingworth continues: Children with IQs up to 150 get along in the ordinary course of school life quite well, achieving excel...

FOXNews.com : "'Chemical Ali' Captured in Iraq Ali Hassan al-Majid al-Tikriti (search), a first cousin of former Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein linked to some of the regime's most brutal acts, is the King of Spades and No. 5 in the U.S. Army's deck of 'Most Wanted' playing cards. " Looks like they got him this time

Jolted Over Electronic Voting (washingtonpost.com) : " Report's Security Warning Shakes Some States' Trust The Virginia State Board of Elections had a seemingly simple task before it: Certify an upgrade to the state's electronic voting machines. But with a recent report by Johns Hopkins University computer scientists warning that the system's software could easily be hacked into and election results tampered with, the once perfunctory vote now seemed to carry the weight of democracy and the people's trust along with it. " As much as I love computers, if we ever switch to electronic voting our democracy is finished.

Left-Wing Bloggers Select The 20 Worst Figures In American History - Right Wing News (Conservative News and Views) : "Left-Wing Bloggers Select The 20 Worst Figures In American History by John Hawkins Out of all the gangsters, serial killers, mass murders, incompetent & crooked politicians, spies, traitors, and ultra left-wing kooks in all of American history -- have you ever wondered who the worst of the worst were? Well, we here at RWN wondered about that too and that's why we decided to email more than a hundred left of center bloggers to get their opinions." > 20) The Rosenbergs (3) + Julius Rosenberg (3) (6 total votes) 20) Pat Robertson (6) 20) Oliver North (6) 20) William Randolph Hearst (6) 20) Aaron Burr (6) 20) Aldrich Ames (6) 18) George Lincoln Rockwell (7) 18) Robert McNamara (7) 14) Richard Mellon Scaife (8) 14) Lee Harvey Oswald (8) 14) Charles Coughlin (8) 14) Strom Thurmond (8) 13) Ronald Reagan (9) 12) George Wallace (10) 11) And...

Who's watching the class? Webcams in schools raise privacy issue : "Who's watching the class? Webcams in schools raise privacy issue By Greg Toppo USA TODAY When students in Biloxi, Miss., show up this morning for the first day of the new school year, a virtual army of digital cameras will be recording every minute of every lesson in every classroom. Hundreds of Internet-wired video cameras will keep rolling all year long, in the hope that they'll deter crime and general misbehavior among the district's 6,300 students -- and teachers. ''It helps honest people be more honest,'' says district Superintendent Larry Drawdy, who, along with principals and security officers, can use a password to view classrooms from any computer. In an emergency, police also can tune in. So far, Biloxi is the only school district in the nation to install Webcams in every classroom -- nearly 500 so far. But school districts in cities nationwide and in England are e...

U.S.: Banned arms evidence in Iraq : "MSNBC AND NBC NEWS WASHINGTON, June 25 � U.S. investigators in Iraq have found equipment for a nuclear weapons program and millions of detailed documents relating to chemical and biological weapons, U.S. officials told NBC News on Wednesday." U.S. OFFICIALS said the discoveries were not proof that Iraq had managed to build or obtain banned weapons of mass destruction, as President Bush asserted before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March. But they said the materials, some of which dated back to the first Gulf War, were compelling proof that Saddam was trying actively to acquire such weapons in defiance of the United Nations. NBC News has learned of several recent discoveries, some within the past week, one related to nuclear weapons and the others to chemical, biological and banned conventional weapons.

News : "Mob attacks pollsters who found few Palestinians want their old homes in what is now Israel By Eric Silver in Jerusalem 14 July 2003 A mob of about 100 Palestinian refugees stormed the office of a Ramallah polling organisation yesterday to stop it publishing a survey showing that five times as many refugees would prefer to settle permanently in a Palestinian state than return to their old homes in what is now Israel."

U.S. struggling to find replacement troops : "WASHINGTON - The Pentagon is scrambling to find enough fresh troops to begin an orderly rotation program that would bring home some of the 147,000 soldiers spread thinly across troubled Iraq. With the new commanding general of U.S. Central Command, Gen. John Abizaid, confirming what others in the Defense Department had been reluctant to admit - that United States forces face an increasingly deadly guerrilla war - the question of relief and rotation for weary GIs moved to the front burner. The easiest fix would be for the 14,000 foreign forces, mostly British, already in Iraq to be augmented by thousands more allied soldiers. But negotiations to internationalize the occupation have been slow and difficult."

NYTimes.com Abstract : "AFTER THE WAR: BAGHDAD; IRAQIS SET TO FORM AN INTERIM COUNCIL WITH WIDE POWER By PATRICK E. TYLER (NYT) 1289 words Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 1 , Column 6 ABSTRACT - Representatives of major political, ethnic and religious groups of Iraq will declare first postwar interim government in Iraq this weekend, in form of 'governing council' of between 21 and 25 members with extensive executive power; new body of Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis, Christians and Turkmen will share responsibility for running country under United Nations resolution that will continue to vest Washington and London with ultimate authority until sovereign government is elected and new constitution ratified; there is no clear timetable for that transition; American administrator L Paul Bremer III says he agreed that majority of council's members would be Shiites, one of 'tactical adjustments' he made to meet demands of Iraqis; formulation of governing pane...

Terror Group Seen as Back Inside Iraq : "Terror Group Seen as Back Inside Iraq By MICHAEL R. GORDON BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 9 � The American-led administration in Iraq has received intelligence reports that hundreds of Islamic militants who fled Iraq during the war have returned and are planning to conduct major terrorist attacks. L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator in Iraq, said in an interview on Friday night that fighters from Ansar al-Islam, a militant organization that the United States tried to destroy during the war, had escaped to Iran and then slipped back across the border into Iraq. He said hundreds of the militants were now in Iraq, where they were preparing to attack the occupation forces or administration. "

US admits it used napalm bombs in Iraq American pilots dropped the controversial incendiary agent napalm on Iraqi troops during the advance on Baghdad. The attacks caused massive fireballs that obliterated several Iraqi positions. The Pentagon denied using napalm at the time, but Marine pilots and their commanders have confirmed that they used an upgraded version of the weapon against dug-in positions. They said napalm, which has a distinctive smell, was used because of its psychological effect on an enemy"

World Tribune.com--Front Page : "11,000 sign up for new Iraqi army SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM Thursday, July 31, 2003 The United States will begin training Iraq's new military this weekend. Officials said the training program will begin on Saturday. They said the program was delayed because of intense U.S. search-and-destroy operations of Sunni insurgents northwest of Baghdad. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, head of the U.S. military in Iraq, said more than 11,000 people have expressed interest in enlisting for the new Iraqi army. Sanchez said on July 23 that the first battalion of the new Iraqi army would begin training within 10 days."