In the wake of Attorney General John Ashcroft?s attempt to defeat the Euthanasia law in Oregon, it?s interesting to note a new study showing that more than one-third of the doctors in Australia admit helping to end the lives of their terminally ill patients. In most cases the patients hadn?t asked them to perform euthanasia.
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A study of North Atlantic ice suggests that the brightening and dimming of the sun may cause a 1,500-year cycle of cooling and warming on parts of the Earth. Researchers have found that a very slight difference in the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth can have a powerful effect on the climate. As ice builds up in lands bordering the North Atlantic, the average temperature drops in Europe and North America.
Gerard C. Bond, a researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in Palisades, New York, says, ?Whether the whole Earth is affected, we don?t know for sure yet, but it is certainly implied. The effect does extend from the high northern latitudes down, maybe even to the tropics.?
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One of the first thoughts that surfaced in almost every American mind, as we sat in stunned silence in front of our TV sets on September 11 and watched the Twin Towers fall, was ?How could our intelligence agencies not have had any warning about this?? We later learned that the CIA and FBI spend a great deal of their time in jealous backbiting and that each agency tries to withhold information from the other.
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On November 1, President George W. Bush signed Executive Order 13233, which ends 27 years of Congressional and judicial efforts to make Presidential papers and records publicly available.
This Executive Order suggests that Bush not only doesn?t want Americans to know what he?s doing, he also doesn?t want to worry that historians will someday find out. That is the message in this effort to prevent public access to Presidential papers ? not only his, but those of all Presidents since the Reagan-Bush administration.
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