abc.net.au Mon, Feb 3 2003 11:36 AM AEDT

NASA set to launch research balloon The American space agency NASA has a careful eye on the weather in central Australia as it prepares to launch a giant research balloon from the Alice Springs airport this week.

Gary Woods from the joint Australia-United States cosmic rays research project says the balloon is 100 metres in diametre and will rise to an altitude of 40 kilometres before circumnavigating earth.

He says Alice Springs is one of only a few locations the balloons will be launched from.

"NASA launch these high altitude balloons around the world and Alice Springs is one of the three sites in the southern hemisphere," he said.

"The other one is in Brazil and the third one, which is more difficult to get at, is actually at the South Pole."

www.msnbc.com ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 — Federal health officials say a compound long used as the artist’s pigment Prussian blue could be an important antidote to a “dirty bomb” attack, and they are calling for drug companies to quickly seek permission to manufacture some of it.

Currently, an Energy Department-funded facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn., has the nation’s only supply of Prussian blue in pill form, and that supply is limited.

	       THE FOOD and Drug Administration action on Friday marks a big step toward radiation specialists’ call for a stockpile of the antidote — all but guaranteeing sales approval for manufacturers who meet some fairly simple conditions.

       Currently, an Energy Department-funded facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn., has the nation’s only supply of Prussian blue in pill form, and that supply is limited.

       That facility, the Radiation Emergency Assistance Center/Training Site — known as REACTS — helps with radiation accidents around the world. REACTS buys experimental Prussian blue pills from a German company, and had urged FDA to approve regular sales of the compound so it would easier to stockpile more in case of a terrorist attack.

       Friday, the FDA took a major step toward doing that by declaring Prussian blue an effective treatment for exposure to certain forms of radioactive cesium and thallium.

       Those materials are commonly used, at low doses, in medical treatment and diagnosis. But high levels can be deadly, and they are among the materials that officials worry might be used in a “dirty bomb” — a device that isn’t nuclear but that uses conventional explosives to disperse radioactive material.

COMPOUND CUTS EXPOSURE RISKS        The FDA evaluated reports of a 1987 accident in Brazil where 250 people were contaminated with cesium-137 that had been abandoned after use in a cancer clinic, plus a handful of smaller accidental exposures to radioactive cesium and thallium and a toxic but nonradioactive form of thallium.

       Prussian blue cut in half the time the body was contaminated, with minor side effects such as constipation, the FDA concluded. The mineral compound, known chemically as ferric hexacyanoferrate, worked by binding to the chemicals in the gut so they could be eliminated instead of absorbed.

       FDA’s unusual declaration removes a significant burden from any company considering making Prussian blue pills — they wouldn’t have to prove it’s a safe or effective treatment. Instead, interested manufacturers merely would have to prove they can properly brew the right dose, steps FDA drug chief Dr. Janet Woodcock called simple for any pharmaceutical company.

	       Currently, there is only one commonly available medication for protection against radiation, a drug called potassium iodide that people who live near nuclear reactors often keep on hand in case of an attack or accident. It has just one use — to prevent thyroid cancer by shielding the thyroid gland from exposure to radioactive iodine. It blocks no other type of radiation, and protects no other body part.

Radiation sickness

MSNBC answers your questions on the health effects of radiation exposure. How does radiation affect the body? Damage can be caused by brief exposure to high levels of radiation or long-term exposure to low levels. The harmful effects depend on the amount and duration of exposure. A single, rapid dose of radiation can be fatal. But the same dose given over a period of weeks or months may have little impact. The effects also depend on how much of the body is exposed. More than 6 grays (a gray is the amount of energy absorbed during exposure) of radiation usually cause death when the radiation is distributed over the entire body. However, when beamed to a small area, as in radiation therapy for cancer, three or four times this amount can be given safely.

What syndromes can result?

• Cerebral (brain) syndrome: This syndrome can result if the total dose of radiation is extremely high (more than 30 grays). The first symptoms, nausea and vomiting, are followed by listlessness, drowsiness and sometimes coma. Tremors, convulsions and death occur within a few hours.
• Gastrointestinal syndrome: This results from smaller doses of radiation (4 grays or more). Symptoms include severe nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, leading to severe dehydration. This syndrome is caused by the death of cells lining the GI tract. Death occurs after bone marrow failure, which usually takes place two to three weeks later.
• Hematopoietic syndrome: This affects the bone marrow, spleen and lymph nodes. It develops after exposure to 2 to 10 grays of radiation and begins with a loss of appetite, nausea and vomiting. The symptoms are most severe 6 to 12 hours after exposure and may subside completely in 24 to 36 hours. Death occurs when the blood-producing cells in the lymph nodes, spleen and bone marrow begin to waste away, leading to a severe shortage of red and white blood cells.

How can I minimize radiation exposure? There are three factors that can minimize radiation exposure to your body: Time, distance and shielding.

• Time: Most radioactivity loses its strength fairly quickly. Limiting the time spent near the source of radiation reduces the amount of radiation exposure you will receive. Following an accident or attack, authorities will monitor any release of radiation and determine what protective actions to take.
• Distance: The more distance between you and the source of the radiation, the less radiation you will receive. In the event of a serious accident or attack, local officials will likely call for an evacuation, thereby increasing the distance between you and the radiation.
• Shielding: Like distance, the more dense the materials between you and the source of the radiation, the better. This is why local officials may advise you to remain indoors if an accident occurs. In some cases, the walls in your home or workplace would be sufficient to protect you for a short period of time.

What were the effects from Three Mile Island? Major radiation exposure did not result from the Three Mile Island accident. In fact, a person living within one mile of the plant received slightly less radiation than the average person receives from X-rays in one year. People living near the Chernobyl plant were exposed to considerably more radiation than those near Three Mile Island. More than 30 people died and many more were injured.

Sources: The Merck Manual, FEMA

www.nyjournalnews.com By RANDI WEINER THE JOURNAL NEWS

(Original publication: January 31, 2003) Rockland's public schools are expected to save an estimated $67,000 in fuel costs this month through a program that allowed districts to switch from natural gas to oil heating when petroleum prices plunged late last month.

Despite below-normal temperatures and the instability of the energy market, seven of the county's eight districts have been able to cut costs through a buying consortium they started nearly a decade ago to help control fluctuations in their budgets. The consortium locks in fuel prices in warm weather to protect members against the market-driven prices now expected to jolt home and business customers.

The consortium has been so successful that Orange County asked to join this year, said Marlene Riccobono, assistant superintendent for business for the Rockland Board of Cooperative Educational Services. BOCES coordinates natural-gas purchases.

"As a group, we put a tremendous amount of effort in this, and it's nice to see it pay off," she said. "If we can control the costs on noninstruction items and keep them as low as possible, it's more money for instruction."

For years, the public school districts have joined together to lock in both fuel-oil and natural gas prices to give them the option to shift from one system to the other to save money and to have a backup in case of emergencies. Generally, the districts heat their buildings with natural gas where possible because gas has consistently cost less than fuel oil in recent years.

But this year has been different. Temperatures are running colder than average, and the international oil market has been shaken by a strike in Venezuela that has cut off supplies from that country and by concerns about a war against Iraq, which may further constrict the amount of oil for export.

Michael Donovan, a spokesman for Orange and Rockland Utilities, which supplies natural gas to the districts through local dealers, said that "any time there are problems in the (Persian) Gulf — or in Venezuela — it affects the price of oil."

"If anything affects the supply source, it pushes prices up. There's a lot of anxiety, and that may be having an effect on price," Donovan said. "But the other (factor) is the weather — and if the weather is especially cold, that raises the demand. The more the demand, the greater the price."

Which makes local administrators even more pleased to belong to the consortium: Natural-gas prices were locked in last year, and fuel oil prices were locked in June, school administrators said.

Budgeting for heat at the more than 80 buildings owned by the county's eight public school districts and the Board of Cooperative Educational Services is not an exact science. It begins in March, when most school boards start figuring out their finances for the next school year.

Based on past fuel usage, weather predictions and ideas from consultants, district administrators try to estimate what's needed to keep thousands of children and staff members comfortable during cold weather.

"We have a consultant out of Pennsylvania whose predictions are based on the way the market runs and (who) came up with their best guesstimate," said Ed Dolan, director of facilities for South Orangetown schools. "They thought it was going to be a cold winter. I budgeted extra in oil, especially — like 50 percent more."

In order to make predicting fuel costs more reliable, Rockland's public schools belong to two fuel consortiums. One, through the state Office of General Services, allows the districts to purchase heating oil at a reduced rate. The other, through Rockland BOCES and O&R, does the same for natural gas.

O&R also can request that local schools switch from natural gas to oil in case home-heating requests skyrocket, although that hasn't happened this year, Donovan said.

Although the districts use the consortiums to control prices, each district budgets and pays for its own consumption costs. The contracts with suppliers often include a range of prices to allow for price fluctuations, with a cap on costs that is generally negotiated yearly.

Pearl River school district officials decided to purchase energy independently this year because they got a better deal on energy costs in the summer, although they had been part of the consortium for years.

"This year, we negotiated our rate back in June with Hess," said Sandra Cokeley-Pedersen, district spokeswoman. "We pay a lower rate — $4.15 per decatherm, and the current rate is $5.60 per decatherm. Then there's a $10,000 fee to participate in the consortium, and it just wouldn't have been cost-effective for us."

The dual-heating option has been particularly advantageous for the schools recently, since below-normal temperatures during the winter have followed the record-breaking warm winter of 2001-02.

"Between August and the end of November, our (natural) gas usage had risen 35 to 40 percent due to colder weather," said Clarkstown Schools Superintendent William Heebink. "However, we had been part of a countywide bid in October 2001 which locked in gas prices for us, so the actual per-unit gas cost had decreased 15 percent from 2001-02."

Peter Wichrowski, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said winter 2001-02 was the warmest on record, with an average temperature of 41.5 degrees, compared with the normal 34.7 degrees. Winter, he said, is December, January and February for National Weather Service calculations.

Since Dec. 1, temperatures have been slightly below normal, he said. December was 1.3 degrees below normal, and so far, January has been 2 degrees below normal. He said projections for February are for normal temperatures — the average for February is 34.6 degrees — but added that predictions of even a week in advance are only guesses.

Most Rockland districts voluntarily switched to heating oil for January after oil prices plummeted, administrators said. There have been exceptions, of course. Not all schools have the dual heating option, and not all buildings would save money by doing so because of age, size or oil tank capacity.

Dolan said his district's high and middle schools made the switch, while the three elementary schools remained heated by natural gas. If the low temperatures continue, he said, the district may be asked by O&R to switch to oil anyway.

"We're also bracing ourselves for O&R to hit us. I've got a feeling it's going to be a cold February," he said.

Most of the public schools already had budgeted more for heating costs this year because of predictions for both weather and fuel expenses, administrators said.

"We didn't decrease our budget simply because we had two mild winters," said East Ramapo Schools Superintendent Jason Friedman. "We don't like to see ourselves fluctuate on that. We would rather have a consistent funding level. We have protections in terms of cooperative bidding through BOCES for oil and gas. We feel we'll be fine."

Send e-mail to Randi Weiner

www.pilotonline.com By CHRISTOPHER DINSMORE, The Virginian-Pilot © January 31, 2003

NORFOLK -- Hampton Roads, you've come a long way.

``You have indeed made a name for yourself,'' said Kate McEnroe, a leading national site selection consultant.

McEnroe, who advises companies on relocation and expansion, spoke Thursday to the annual meeting of the Hampton Roads Economic Development Alliance, a public-private partnership charged with marketing the region.

As familiar as the name Hampton Roads is to you, it is not to the rest of the world,'' McEnroe said. But now Hampton Roads does evoke a place.''

McEnroe credits Hampton Roads' growing name recognition to the marketing efforts of the alliance.

Email this Page Print this Page Newsletter Sign-up Get Wireless Pilot Subscriptions Her firm -- Kate McEnroe Consulting -- is based in Atlanta. She played a role in bringing Towers Perrin to Chesapeake, where the firm now employs about 1,000 workers.

After the luncheon, McEnroe explained that the average person outside the region still may not be able to identify Hampton Roads, but among the alliance's base of prospects, it has become a known name brand.

A name like Hampton Roads is a political expediency in markets without a clearly dominant city or with competing municipalities, she said.

It's good locally, but harder to market,'' McEnroe said. If you were starting over, I'd say you were setting a very high hurdle. But it doesn't matter anymore because you're over the hurdle.''

McEnroe praised Hampton Roads for several attributes that will help it in economic development, including decent airline service, a better cultural scene than some larger cities, moderate costs and a young, growing population.

She also said she was especially impressed by downtown Norfolk's residential nature, which she called unusual for small cities.

After a couple of slow years, corporate expansion and relocation should begin to pick up in the second half of 2003, she said, citing three caveats: Venezuela, North Korea and Iraq.

Whereas several years ago the fastest-expanding companies were telecommunications firms, active industries today include security and insurance, particularly health insurance, McEnroe said.

Long a low-cost haven for call centers, Hampton Roads can expect increasingly global competition for such centers, she said. India and the Philippines are aggressively seeking such businesses.

And call centers do not necessarily mean low-skill, low-wage jobs. Insurers, for example, are seeking medical professionals to staff call centers where they might make as much as $50,000 a year, she said.

To be successful, regional economic development efforts can't just seek ``high-technology'' jobs anymore, because the term doesn't mean anything, she said.

``The way to compete is to have tightly defined niche strategies, which I think I have seen in your plans,'' she told the alliance meeting.

Such plans play to a region's strengths and needs.

``You've made a name for yourself because you've stayed consistent, you've stayed out there,'' she said.

Thursday's meeting marked the end of Franklin ``Lin'' Earley's three-year reign as the alliance's chairman. Earley, Bank of America's Hampton Roadspresident, passed the reins to Donald V. Jellig, president of Sentara Enterprises, which oversees outpatient services, real estate and new market development for Sentara Healthcare.

Both men praised the alliance as the best example of regional cooperation they've seen.

The alliance distributed its annual report at the meeting, highlighting its successes and some of its misses. Successes this year include Target Corp.'s huge East Coast distribution center in Suffolk, Visteon Corp.'s fuel tank plant in Chesapeake and SafeCard ID Systems' production facility in Virginia Beach.

Among the misses this year was Project Inbound Financial, a deal involving the Navy Federal Credit Union. The credit union considered bringing 350 jobs to Suffolk but instead opted for Pensacola, Fla., citing that city's lower wages and the perceived terrorism threat in Hampton Roads.

``That's the first time that one had come up,'' said C. Jones Hooks, the alliance president.

Reach Christopher Dinsmore at 446-2271 or dins@pilotonline.com

frontpagemag.com By Ellen Almer FrontPageMagazine.com | January 24, 2003

Despite the endless blathering and squirming to the contrary on the part of Wired Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Cato Institute and other institutions that normally proclaim the truth of free-market economics, the Law of Supply and Demand applies to labor as much as to any other thing that is bought and sold.  That is to say, if one increases the supply of labor relative to demand, its price will fall.

That price is your salary, friend.  And mass immigration is inexorably driving it down.

Well, maybe not your salary personally, if you are lucky enough to work in a sector of the economy that is sheltered, for some reason, from the effects of immigrant labor, as lawyers are by the fact that few immigrants have American law degrees.  But it is the salary of your neighbors, and it is being depressed by an influx of cheap labor.  There is just no way around this basic economic fact.  If there is, then free-market economics is a lie.   Yes, immigrant labor expands the economy as a whole by adding more producing workers.  But a big aggregate GNP isn’t prosperity: just compare Switzerland, which is tiny but rich, with India, which is huge but poor.  Per capita GNP, which produces per-capita income, is prosperity, and immigration does nothing to increase that.  True, it might, if immigrants were on average more productive than native Americans.  But they’re not.  Every measure – by the Census Bureau and others – shows them as being massively poorer, less educated, and less likely to attain middle-class status than native Americans.     America was founded on the concept – well understood by Alexander Hamilton and the other economic sophisticates among the founders – of a middle-class society, i.e. a society organized to minimize the number of people who constitute cheap labor.  Cheap labor was the proletariat which drove Europe’s class-ridden and undemocratic politics, the nightmare of revolution and reaction America was founded to escape.    Contrary to libertarian myth, America’s economy was never, ever, based on a totally free market in labor.  It was based on a labor market constricted by limited immigration and a small population relative to national resources, and a free market in everything else.  This was designed to produce high wages.  We have always been an explicitly high-wage nation relative to other societies, and this did not happen by accident.  (This is the key story in Pat Buchanan’s book The Great Betrayal, and he is right about this, even if he is wrong about other things.)      Labor is the one and only area in which no rational society should want to construct a free market, because free markets make things cheap, and high wages equal a high standard of living. Before anyone pounces, I realize you have to define this a real, not nominal, wages and that there are all sorts of technicalities to this issue.  But the principle is rock-solid.  Labor is fundamentally different from all other commodities because its well-being is an end in itself, not a means to other ends.  And before anyone pounces again, I am advocating controls on the influx of foreign labor, not unions or limits on which jobs Americans can hold.    We used to have a commitment to a middle-class, bourgeois society. We have now lost that commitment at the moment when we are busy congratulating ourselves on how supremely capitalist we have become.  We are importing a proletariat when we should be abolishing poverty.     Rather than making a profit through superior technology and management, as American business has surpassed the entire world in doing for 200 years, an increasingly large sector of corporate America just wants to take the lazy road of importing cheap labor to work for them.  This is not economic progress; it is retrogression.  It is a formula for becoming Brazil.    Some of cheap labor’s biggest lobbyists:   

1. The high-tech industry. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, the pre-eminent figure in the high tech industry, is a passionate and vociferous supporter of cheap labor, primarily because overseas-trained engineers from India, China and Pakistan are cheaper than American tech workers.
2. The meat packing industry, especially pig and chicken slaughtering. This industry, of course, has a long and storied past of using cheap immigrant labor. Read Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle from 100 years ago. 
3. Clothing manufacturers. Despite the efforts of the Ladies Garment Workers Union to eliminate sweat shops some 60 years ago, they are still alive and thriving in the states, employing mostly Asian women who work in terrible conditions.
4. Unions. These supposed advocates of the American worker and longtime opponents of importing immigrant labor are now part of the cheap labor lobby because they primarily serve the interests of union bosses, not workers.  Bosses want more poor workers so they can have more members.  They don’t want to see their members graduate to the middle class, where people generally don’t feel the need to belong to a union.  
5. The hotel and restaurant industry. Another big business interest whose employees are primarily cheap labor from Latin America.  
6. The ultra-wealthy – both liberals and nominal conservatives. They believe that only foreign workers are willing to work as their nannies, landscapers, and housekeepers.  
7. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, led by Grover Norquist, formerly a vocal spokesman for many conservative issues. This group has led the charge in convincing Congress to expand the awful H-1B visa program. They argue that more H-1B visas granted to foreign workers will alleviate a mythical  shortage of skilled technology workers. The H-1B visa program allots 115,000 foreign worker visas annually, but the Chamber of Commerce said that isn’t nearly enough.  
8. The governors of certain rural, Midwestern states (such as Iowa) whose populations are shrinking, prompting a cry for an influx of new residents.  Of course, these governors do not consider attracting native Americans by offering a growing economy a better solution.   Cheap labor is not real capitalism, it is corporatism, for cheap labor is subsidized by the government, which ends up paying the health and welfare costs of these workers. All taxpayers bear the cost.    Let’s get clear about one thing:  there are no jobs that Americans “won’t do.”  There are jobs that Americans won’t do at the wage being offered. If you offered me enough money, I would bus tables or clean bathrooms. When I was younger and without work experience, I would have done so gladly. If employers can’t fill these jobs, this is their own fault for not offering enough.  They have no intrinsic right to be able to fill positions at the price they feel like paying, any more than you or I have the right to buy a car or a TV at the price we feel like paying. I will concede there is a shortage of labor in this country when the cheap labor lobby concedes there is a shortage of Lear Jets, which I would dearly like to own.     Who’s fighting the cheap labor lobby?  For one thing, the 235,000 members of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.-USA and the American Engineering Association. Last summer they chastised Congress for facilitating the cheap labor lobby when there were so many unemployed American engineers with training in high-demand skills such as C++ and Java. According to the IEEE-USA, the unemployment rate for electrical and electronics engineers was up to 4.8 percent by last summer, compared to 4.1 percent for the first quarter of the year. In addition, the jobless rate for computer scientists was 5.3 percent, up from 4.8 percent in the first quarter.  Among older engineers, who can easily be scrapped for new foreign workers, the rates are much worse.    At the time, LeEarl Bryant, president of the IEEE-USA, told the Boston Globe:    "It is time for Congress to take a closer look at the problem of engineering unemployment and eliminate the government subsidies and incentives that encourage corporate management to treat US engineers as a disposable labor commodity rather than an essential investment in our nation's future.”     It is not simply laid off workers who see the problem. Norman Matloff, a computer science professor at the University of California at Davis, has studied hiring at high-tech firms. Using hard data, he has concluded that companies overwhelmingly hire cheap foreign labor over American engineers applying for the same jobs. He debunked the myth of a “desperate software labor shortage” when he appeared before Congress several years ago.     One of the cheap labor lobbyist’s most devious tactics is supporting immigrants rights groups. This is a practice favored by Bill Gates, who contributes large amounts to “open borders” and immigrants rights groups.     One irony is that many of the immigrants who are harmful additions to the American economy would actually be beneficial back home, where the level of economic development is much lower.  The Indian government isn’t that happy about seeing its best and brightest end up in Silicon Valley.  We should sympathize entirely with their desire to have them back home where they can do some good.    But in Iowa last year, that state’s residents risked the retribution of the left by speaking out against a plan by Gov. Tom Vilsack, a Democrat and cheap-labor lobbyist. His “New Iowans” proposal to bring immigrants there to fill jobs caused a swift and strong backlash, with many Iowans complaining that immigrants would take their jobs and drive wages down.  Indeed, liberals and the cheap-labor lobby quickly attacked, citing Iowa’s overwhelmingly white population and accusing its citizens of racism and fear-mongering. However, once his constituents voiced their opposition, Vilsack quietly reversed his position on mass immigration to the state, emphasizing instead the part of the plan that encourages former Iowa residents to return to the state.   Ironically, cheap labor will ultimately be the undoing of American unions, one of cheap labor’s newest devotees. In the hotel and restaurant industry, a new set of workers has collectively negotiated lower wages and worse working conditions for its rank and file members, an inevitable consequence of a shift in the supply-demand balance with respect to labor that unionization cannot abolish.  The same pressure, more or less intense in some industries, in some regions, and at different points in the economic cycle, is inexorably at work against the rest of the labor force.    And that includes you.

Note: My thanks to Diana Hull, of the group Californians for Population Stabilization, which has done extensive research on the detrimental effects of immigration on that state.  Also, thanks to David Simcox, chair of the Policy Board of the Center for Immigration Studies, who wrote an excellent article on the subject of labor and the role of unions in The Social Contract.