Swamp gas might be more believable to UFO witnesses

Nation: When the military owned up that it had been flying F-16s on maneuvers near Stephenville, Texas, on Jan. 8 — the night many people saw UFOs, it fueled more speculation on the topic instead of quieting it down, The Dallas Morning News reports. According to the paper, “Witnesses generally described what they saw as silent, apparently changing speeds and passing over populated areas.” That doesn’t gibe with the official report, aviation consultant Jay Miller told the paper. “For one thing, any jet that dumps flares would also be trying to get away as fast as possible. ‘He’s going to be in full afterburner,’ Mr. Miller said, and that’s very loud. But the jets wouldn’t be the only noise associated with flares. ‘Flares don’t burn silently. They actually burn quite loudly,’ he said.”

Nation: The Associated Press (via The Baltimore Sun) reports that Vice President Dick Cheney asked Congress to “extend and broaden an expiring surveillance law, saying ‘fighting the war on terror is a long-term enterprise’ that should not come with an expiration date.”

Health:A study by a university in New Zealand finds pot smokers develop serious bullous lung disease 20 years earlier than cigarette smokers, the New Zealand Herald reports.

Journalism: Pope Benedict XVI is calling the media to embrace “info-ethics” by doing more to promote the “dignity of the human being,” the BBC reports. The pope raised concerns about the media that “in order to attract listeners and increase the size of audiences, it does not hesitate at times to have recourse to vulgarity and violence, and to overstep the mark.”

Science:An analysis of the data recovered from the 2004 mission of NASA’s Stardust spacecraft that flew through the tail of the comet 81P/Wild 2 shows that the comets and asteroids share more in common than previously thought, the Los Angeles Times reports.

O P I N I O N

Is the pool of experts really that small that Paul Wolfowitz, one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, is the best choice for Chairman of the Secretary of State’s International Security Advisory Board?
     Let’s rewind a little. Lord of the neocons, Wolfowitz wrote a draft for a document called “Defense Planning Guidance” — dubbed the Wolfowitz Doctrine — in 1992 in which he mentions the following:
♦     “The U.S. must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.”
♦     “In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region’s oil.”
♦     “While the U.S. cannot become the world’s policeman, by assuming responsibility for righting every wrong, we will retain the preeminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends, or which could seriously unsettle international relations.”
     This document inspired one written in 2000 called  Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century for the Project for the New American Century. The focus of the document was to lay groundwork for exerting U.S. presence in the Middle East to preserve oil interests and boost America’s military might around the globe. The document mentions the so-called axis of evil — Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Libya — long before President Bush coined the term.
  Here’s a sample from the document’s text: “as the leader of a global network of alliances and strategic partnerships, U.S. armed forces cannot retreat into a ‘Fortress America.’ Thus, while long-range precision strikes will certainly play an increasingly large role in U.S. military operations, American forces must remain deployed abroad, in large numbers.”
     This is a scary time for an uber-hawk such as Wolfowitz to return to our government in an advisory position. January 2009 and a new administration cannot get into the White House fast enough!

♣ Nation/world news tally in my local paper today: 1¼ pages