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Saudi Arabia’s religious police stopped 15 schoolgirls from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing correct Islamic dress, according to Saudi newspapers. The Saudi media has accused the kingdom?s powerful ?mutaween? police of hindering attempts to save the girls, who died in a fire inside a school in Mecca.

About 800 pupils were inside the school when the fire started. According to the al-Eqtisadiah daily, firemen confronted police after they tried to keep the girls inside because they were not wearing the headscarves and abayas (black robes) required by the kingdom?s strict interpretation of Islam.
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States from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific are experiencing severe drought conditions. This nationwide drought is more serious than the usual dry spell. The entire state of Wyoming has been declared a drought disaster area, and large areas of the Southeast and the West are in danger of wildfires.
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A piece of the Antarctic ice shelf the size of Delaware has shattered and separated from the continent in the largest such event in 30 years. The Larsen B shelf on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula has fragmented into small icebergs.

Researchers predicted in 1998 that several ice shelves around the peninsula were doomed because of rising temperatures in the region, but the speed with which the Larsen B has gone has shocked them. ?We knew what was left would collapse eventually, but the speed of it is staggering,? says Dr. David Vaughan, a glaciologist at Cambridge in the U.K. ?[It is hard] to believe that 500 million billion tons of ice sheet has disintegrated in less than a month.?
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On the English T.V. show Newsnight, reporter Susan Watts and Milton Leitenberg, of the Center for International & Security Studies at the University of Maryland, interviewed Dr. Barbara Rosenberg, of the Federation of American Scientists. Rosenberg recently publicly stated that the U.S. government knows the identity of the anthrax terrorist who killed 5 people but won?t reveal his name because he works for the U.S. government and can reveal government secrets. Col. David Franz, former head of the Ft. Detrick Medical Research Program from 1987-98, Dr. Mary Beth Downs, of St. Matthew?s Univ. School of Medicine, who is a former Ft. Detrick employee, Dr.read more