and other family hassles. The problem with the “opt-out” story line, as E.J. Graff pointed out in her excellent critique of Belkin’s piece for the Columbia Journalism Review, is that women’s response to all this pressure is presented as a rather pleasant, personal choice to kick back and let dad bring home the paycheck while spending more time at the gym. The reality, as today’s news story and Johnson’s report for Women E-News shows, is that most families badly need women’s earnings to stay afloat. The answer is not to muse about how a few affluent women manage their careers and cultural expectations, but how we, as a society, make life workable for families under extreme economic, social, and emotional stress. Men, women, and children alike badly need a more modern approach to these problems. As the current recession hits home, it’s high time we did something about it. Source: Story by Ruth Conniff, 22.07.08
What if a child is born on the Moon?
As humanity becomes a space-faring civilisation, we’re going to come up with tricky situations that challenge current laws and concepts of nationality. For example, what’s your country if you’re born on the Moon? Or if two astronauts get into a fight while in orbit, whose laws are followed? If you break a piece of an international module, where do you send the cheque? During a recent conference in Vienna, Austria, scholars and space scientists met to propose unusual circumstances that might happen in space exploration. Law in space is currently covered by the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. It follows the tradition of maritime law – countries or states have legal jurisdiction within their own spacecraft but what happens when a spacecraft has been built by several nations, such as the Columbus laboratory module, which was sent to the International Space Station last December? The partner nations working to build the International Space Station have already rejected a proposal that the entire station falls under US law. There are issues of criminal law as well. What if one astronaut from one country punches another while in an international module, or pulls out a weapon? There are also patent law problems, where should an invention be patented? And
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there are civil law concerns like what happens if an astronaut damages a part of the station? The meeting looked far into the future too, when bases are established on the Moon and Mars. Since the 1967 treaty defines the Moon for the good of all humanity, it can never be considered a territory of any country back on Earth. So what nationality would a child have being born there? Would he or she be called a ‘Lunatic’? OK, just kidding. Source: Universe Today
Space rocks go under the hammer
Some of the world’s most famous meteorites have gone under the hammer at Bonhams New York auction house in what is said to be the first sale of its kind. The pieces were drawn from collections across the world and many examples are richly coloured and intricately patterned, some even bearing gemstones. A piece of America’s famous ‘Willamette Meteorite,’ discovered in Oregon in 1902 and priced at US$1.1million, did not sell but an iron meteorite from Siberia fetched US$123,000 and a US mailbox hit by a meteorite in 1984 sold for US$83,000. “The results were stronger than anticipated with a near-perfect result,” Bonhams meteorite specialist Claudia Florian said after the sale. Some of the 54 lots of meteorites for sale fell to Earth thousands of years ago. Only one is documented as having made a fatal impact. The fatality, in the case of the Valera Meteorite which landed in a field in Venezuela in 1972, was a cow. “It’s very rare to have a meteorite actually impact a living being ... so now that particular meteorite is considered to be collectible,” Ms Florian said before the sale. However, it was sold for US$1,300. An altogether more humble offering were four tiny stones – the smallest of them weighing just a gram – from a shower which hit Holbrook, Arizona, in 1912. That lot sold for US$325. Source: BBC News
Flying Saucers - Where It All Began
The modern phenomena of UFOs and “flying saucers” began in Washington state on June 24, 1947. American businessman Kenneth Arnold spotted nine mysterious, high-speed
news objects “flying like a saucer would” along the crest of the Cascade Range. His report made international headlines and triggered hundreds of similar accounts of “flying saucers” locally and across the nation. The rash of sightings peaked on July 8, 1947, when the U.S. Army reported that flying saucer wreckage had been found near Roswell, New Mexico. This was retracted the following day, and despite relentless debunking and the absence of concrete evidence, reports of flying saucers and other unidentified flying objects (UFOs) persist to the present day. While flying in his private airplane near Mt. Rainier en route from Chehalis, Washington, to his home in Boise, Idaho, Kenneth Arnold (1915-1984) was startled by a bright light shortly before 3 p.m., on June 24, 1947. He looked north and saw nine gleaming objects racing southward along the crest of the Cascades. They were roughly circular in form -- except for one crescent-like object -- about 50 feet across, and appeared metallic. He watched them for approximately two minutes until they disappeared over Oregon. During a refuelling stop in Pendleton, Oregon, Arnold described his experience to East Oregonian editor Nolan Skiff. He said the vehicles flew in an undulating formation “like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water” and weaved in and out of the mountain peaks at speeds approaching 1,400 m.p.h. Skiff’s report of Arnold’s encounter with “nine bright saucer-like objects” was picked up by the Associated Press and the “mystery discs” made national headlines on June 26. Local newspapers and authorities were immediately inundated with other reports of “flying discs” (the term “flying saucers” came later). Several residents of Bremerton, Washington, reported seeing a number of discs during the previous week. The most spectacular reports came on July 4, 1947. In Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington, scores of citizens and police officers claimed to see dozens of discs overhead. As many as 50 residents of Boise also reported spotting a large formation, and Emil J. Smith, pilot of a United Air Lines DC-3, said his plane was buzzed by several flying disks while en route from Boise to Pendleton that evening. Source: Story by David Reneke http://www.westender.com.au/news/101
HARD EVIDENCE
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