Leaders of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) on Thursday agreed unified measures against terrorism, but also issued a warning against a monopolistic world order in what was seen by analysts as a message for Washington.

In a final declaration at their summit in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek, the leaders of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan warned that unilateral actions were not adequate to solving existing problems.

‘An effective global security architecture can only be achieved under the leadership of the United Nations and by closer adherence to the UN charter,’ read the final statement, which specifically mentioned the United States.

More at Monsters & Critics

Since we haven’t heard yet from the great Reverend Graham, (son of Reverend Billy Graham), on the flooding going on in Texas and God’s hate for the evil that goes on in that region, I thought I’d help him out.

Tropical Storm Erin had maximum sustained winds near 40 mph and was centered about 250 miles east’southeast of Brownsville, Texas, at 11:30 a.m. ET Wednesday.

Tropical storm Erin makes landfall in Texas

Flash flood warnings issued for 6 counties; National Guard sent to region

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas - Tropical Storm Erin made landfall Thursday morning and brought rain to the Texas Gulf Coast even as it was downgraded to a tropical depression.

Erin came ashore at Copano Bay, about 25 miles northeast of Corpus Christi.

Though the wind speed dropped to 35 mph, the storm was still expected to bring 3 to 6 inches of rain across much of central and southern Texas. Up to 10 inches of rain were forecast in some areas.

Associated Press

Source: MSNBC.com

Things aren’t going so swimmingly in Iraq, so now Bush wants the ever so anticipated September report to be given behind closed door.

Senior congressional aides said yesterday that the White House has proposed limiting the much-anticipated appearance on Capitol Hill next month of Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker to a private congressional briefing, suggesting instead that the Bush administration’s progress report on the Iraq war should be delivered to Congress by the secretaries of state and defense.

White House officials did not deny making the proposal in informal talks with Congress, but they said yesterday that they will not shield the commanding general in Iraq and the senior U.S. diplomat there from public congressional testimony required by the war-funding legislation President Bush signed in May. “The administration plans to follow the requirements of the legislation,” National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said in response to questions yesterday.

The skirmishing is an indication of the rising anxiety on all sides in the remaining few weeks before the presentation of what is widely considered a make-or-break assessment of Bush’s war strategy, and one that will come amid rising calls for a drawdown of U.S. forces from Iraq.

More at the Washington Post

Hurricane Dean: (going to be one bad mofo wherever it goes. Pressure already down to 987)

Now forecast to mushroom into a Category 4 with 135 mph sustained winds, Dean became a hurricane early Thursday and was still in position to easily attack the U.S. East Coast as it plowed west across the Atlantic.

On the other hand, the forecast track was being steadily adjusted to the south, and the storm was predicted to pass south of Cuba. If so, it would remain about 500 miles from Florida.

Those projections could change. Forecasters were growing more confident, however, that a high-pressure area north of Dean’s forward track would keep the storm on a westerly course and prevent a northward turn toward Florida.

Tropical Storm Erin:

Some vacationers packed up while others vowed to wait out Tropical Storm Erin and its torrential rainfall as it headed for flood-weary Texas early Thursday.
Meanwhile, Hurricane Dean formed in the open Atlantic and headed toward the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean, forecasters said.

Erin was not expected to gain hurricane strength before making landfall Thursday morning, which was why some said they wouldn’t abandon long-planned trips to Texas’ coast.

You can track these storms here

PERU HIT WITH MASSIVE EARTHQUAKE, 337 DEAD
Tsunami warning was issued for Peru, Chile, Ecuador and Colombia ( I just heard on the news the tsunami warning has been cancelled.)

A massive earthquake hit Peru on Wednesday evening and officials said hundreds of people were killed in the rubble of collapsed homes and a church as rescuers searched for victims early on Thursday.

Peru’s Health Minister Carlos Vallejos said 115 died in the 7.9-magnitude quake. But the nation’s civil defense agency, which leads rescue efforts, said more than 330 perished.

A view of a building on fire after an earthquake struck Rimac district in Peru, August 15, 2007. The massive earthquake hit Peru on Wednesday evening and officials said hundreds of people were killed in the rubble of collapsed homes and a church as rescuers searched for victims early on Thursday. (REUTERS/Andina/Handout)
Hundreds were injured and forced to sleep outside.

“Unfortunately we have official numbers,” Luis Palomino, the head of the agency, told Reuters. On its web site, the agency said 337 people died and 827 were injured.

Emergency workers said the coastal province of Ica south of Lima was the hardest hit region.

ALMOST 300 DEAD IN NORTH KOREA FLOODING

Almost 300 people are dead or missing in floods in North Korea, an aid agency said Thursday, as the communist state painted a grim picture of inundated crops and homes, flooded mines and washed-out roads.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) said 214 were killed and 80 are missing in what it has called the worst floods to hit the impoverished country in a decade.

The acting head of the IFRC delegation in Pyongyang, Terje Lysholm, told Agence France-Presse by phone that the figures — the first detailed casualty count — came from the government.

The Bush administration has decided to expand the government’s use of information from U.S. spy satellites for homeland security and domestic law-enforcement purposes. Officials say the change is intended primarily to help them monitor the borders and coastal areas. But it is also raising some serious privacy concerns.

For more than 30 years, domestic agencies have had access to images gathered by U.S. spy satellites. But for the most part, the information has been used for scientific research or to monitor things such as hurricanes and volcanic activity.

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, however, intelligence officials have talked about how that information might also be used to help tighten domestic security. Three months ago, National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell authorized his department to make it easier for civilian agencies and law enforcement to access the spy satellite network.

More at NPR

LiveScience Staff
LiveScience.com

Major League Umpires are more likely to call strikes for pitchers of the same race or ethnicity, a new study finds.

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin analyzed every pitch from the 2004 through 2006 major league seasons to explore whether racial discrimination factored into umpires- decisions to call a pitch a strike or a ball.

Just as discrimination in the labor market can affect disparities in wages, promotion and performance evaluation, the researchers said, possible discrimination by umpires could affect the outcome of games and careers.

During a typical baseball game, umpires call about 75 pitches for each team (they call about 400,000 pitches over the whole season-this figure excludes foul balls), so an umpire’s evaluation heavily influences pitcher productivity and performance.

“Umpires judge the performance of players every game, deciding whether pitches are strikes or balls,” said study leader Daniel Hamermesh, who will present his findings next month at his campus and later at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. “Discrimination affects the outcome of a game and the labor market, determining the pitcher’s market value and compensation.”

The researchers found if a pitcher is of the same race or ethnicity as the home plate umpire, more strikes are called and his team’s chance of winning is improved.

The power to evaluate players- performances disproportionately belonged chiefly to white umpires, while negative calls particularly impacted minority pitchers, Hamermesh said.

read more HERE

By Gordon Lubold
The Christian Science Monitor

Washington - In the hunt for Osama bin Laden and other individuals the military considers high-value targets, the US Air Force is pursuing a new program that could put a missile on a target in minutes instead of hours.

The Air Force is developing a “hypersonic” engine designed to fly bombs at Mach 6.5 speed, or more than 4,000 miles per hour, allowing commanders a chance to conduct long-range strikes on targets in a fraction of the time it takes now. The program, known as the X-51A scramjet, could be a valuable tool as a “manhunter” in fights such as those in Afghanistan or Iraq - or as a deterrent against more conventional enemies in industrialized nations, officials say. It all comes down to speed, and that could change the nature of the fight in the war on terrorism, military officials say.

“Faster is always better in air power,” says Brig. Gen. Jim Poss, the Air Force’s director of intelligence for its Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base, Va. “What we’ve found from combat experience is that people realize very quickly you have to move to survive on the modern battlefield. And the best way to counter that is to get there with the appropriate weapon in the appropriate size very quickly.”

The program isn’t a weapons program per se, but a demonstration of an engine that can move a weapon really, really fast. Unlike a rocket, which requires its own oxygen stored in heavy tanks, a scramjet engine mixes the oxygen already in the air with fuel at such a high rate that it can propel itself faster than anything else that can fly long distances within the atmosphere. Strap on a warhead, and the United States has a unique new weapon, analysts and military officials say.

It sounds ideal from a military commander’s standpoint. There’s just one problem: The X-51A doesn’t quite exist just yet.

read more HERE

By Jonathan Spicer
Reuters

TORONTO (Reuters) - Warmer, drier weather coupled with alterations to the waterways of North America’s Great Lakes will likely drive Lake Superior down to record low water levels sometime this year, experts say.

Lake Superior, the world’s largest body of fresh water by surface area, has declined precipitously over the last decade but plunged down another 30 cm (1 foot) in the last year alone amid an “extreme drought,” putting pressure on both commercial shipping and fish habitats.

“That’s a dramatic fall,” Cynthia Sellinger, a hydrologist at the U.S. Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, told Reuters. “Lake Superior has been in and out of an extreme drought since 2003, and now the drought has got more extreme on the lake’s western basin.”

Lakes Huron and Michigan, into which Superior flows, are similarly low — down 1 meter (3.3 feet) in the last ten years — leaving dried out marshes and some inaccessible ports.

Meanwhile, some of the shallows and riverbeds used by fish species such as salmon and trout for spawning have dried up.

read more HERE

by Paul Foy
The Associated Press

HUNTINGTON, Utah - Images from a videocamera lowered Wednesday into the mine where six men were trapped 10 days ago showed an undamaged shaft and a curtain that could mean the men, if they survived the initial blast, found breathable air, the mine’s co-owner said.

Rescue officials were reviewing the images, which were the first from a camera lowered into the third borehole drilled into the mountain. The camera picked up no sign of the miners, but showed a hemp ventilation curtain that divides intake air in the mine from the exhaust air.

If the miners passed through the ventilation curtain, they would be in a pocket of good air, mine co-owner Bob Murray told The Associated Press late Wednesday.

“There was no damage at all. The roof is intact; no ribs have outburst. The floors are in place - it looked just as it did when we mined it,” he said. “If the men went in there, they could be alive.”

Earlier Wednesday, some noise was detected by devices monitoring vibrations in the mountain, raising “a very small amount” of hope that the men might be found alive, officials said.

The sounds detected by two geophones could be a rock breaking underground or even an animal, said Richard Stickler, chief of the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.