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After the experience with hurricanes Katrina and Rita, municipalities all over the country are reassessing their disaster preparations. In California, the main threats from nature are brush fires and earthquakes. The Santa Ana winds that arrive every October fan any flames that start into huge life threatening wildfires. But earthquakes are what Angelenos fear the most, due to their proximity to the San Andreas fault. Are they prepared for the inevitable?
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The Times of London reports that societies are much worse off when they have “God on their side.” This is because they don’t really have God on their side (which assumes that God takes sides), it’s because of the kind of POLITICIANS that claim to have God on their side, like the recently embarrassed Tom DeLay. Every cruel dictator who has ever lived has claimed to be doing the will of God and some of them probably even truly believed that they were.

Ruth Gledhill reports that fundamentalist belief is behind high murder rates, sexual promiscuity and suicide. A new study on the belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to its social problems and challenges the idea that religion is necessary for morality.
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Japanese scientists have taken the first photos of the elusive and endangered giant squid, which lives over a mile down in the ocean. Researchers have rarely glimpsed the giant squid in the ocean, but they know it exists because they have seen dead squid washed up on beaches or caught in nets. Scars from its tentacles are sometimes burned into the flanks of beached whales.

The photos of the squid suggest that it’s more active that scientists thought. The Japanese scientists spotted the creature, which can grow as large as 40 feet, by following sperm whales, which hunt the giant squid. There are legends that these squids come to the surface and drag down ships, but this may only be a legend. They do come up to around 1,000 feet from the surface at night.
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The science service Newswise reports that scientists across the nation are enraged at Bush’s recent statement that the mainstream scientific theory of evolution should be presented side-by-side with the competing doctrine of intelligent design. In the September 17-23 issue of New Scientist magazine, eminent scientist Richard Dawkins says, “Darwinian natural selection can produce an uncanny illusion of design. An engineer would be hard put to decide whether a bird or a plane was the more aerodynamically elegant.” As someone who is fascinated by science but largely self-taught, I don’t understand the whole conflict, because surely evolution merely describes a process. In other words, it’s how God did it.
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