Pashenko found a spike of radon gas when he tested a PORTS sample over time. Buske reported that radium, not uranium, would be the source of radon of that quantity. Radium can be used as a powerful source of neutrons. Buske, an expert on nuclear weapons facilities and the politics surrounding the production of nuclear weapons, concluded that a probable explanation for radium in the sample is that the US is engaging in micronuclear neutron weapons research. If this is proven to be true, it would be a violation of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty to which the U.S. is signatory.

More than two years after the illegal and immoral U.S. invasion of Iraq, the nightmare continues.

More than 1600 U.S. soldiers have died, at least another 15,000 have been wounded; even the most conservative estimates of Iraqi deaths number in the tens of thousands. Iraq, a once sovereign nation, now lies in ruins under the military and corporate occupation of the United States; U.S. promises to rebuild have not been kept and Iraqis still lack food, water, electricity, and other basic needs.

A majority of Americans believe that this war never should have happened, but our elected representatives in Washington continue to rubber-stamp the Bush Administration's disastrous Iraq policies. They have given military recruiters nearly unrestricted access to our schools ? and the Pentagon nearly unrestricted access to our tax dollars. At a time when our vital social programs are eroding or completely decimated, an overwhelming majority in Congress recently approved Bush's request for an additional $82 billion in war funding, and there's already talk of another $50 billion appropriation this fall.

Our country remains overly dependent on oil, which has serious consequences ranging from rising gasoline prices that burden every American to global warming that threatens current and future generations. This addiction to oil represents a failed energy strategy, one that ExxonMobil not only supports but has helped to develop. Most disturbing are these facts: ExxonMobil's active support of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; ExxonMobil's efforts to block meaningful action to cut global warming pollution and its funding of junk science to hide the real facts about global warming; ExxonMobil's conscious decision to forgo investment in clean energy solutions despite your record profits at a time of rising gasoline prices; ExxonMobil's failure to pay all of the punitive damages awarded to fishermen and others injured by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. ExxonMobil represents yesterday's energy policy; I would rather spend my money and time moving forward, not backward. Pledge not to purchase ExxonMobil's gas or products, invest in ExxonMobil stock, or work for the company.

Nature really kicks the door down once in a while and lets us know how humans have made a mess of things. A few years ago, Hurricane Mitch laid waste much of Guatemala and neighboring countries. The hills crumbled and topsoil sluiced into the sea. There were politics, class politics, in that sluicing, same way there's politics in most "natural" disasters. The United States had crushed land reform in Guatemala in the 1950s, with the CIA overseeing a coup against Arbenz and launching decades of savage repression. The peasants had to surrender the good flat land to the United Fruit Co. and scratch small holdings for subsistence into ever steeper hillsides, which in consequence got more and more eroded. Then came Mitch, and the hillsides and the small plots were washed away.

Hurricane Katrina . the aftermath is payback time for decades of stupidity, greed, pillage and racism. My thought is that the tempo toward catastrophe really picked up in the Reagan era. That's when the notion of this society being in some deep sense a collective effort, pointed toward universal human betterment -- the core of the old Enlightenment -- went onto the trash heap.