3 BOMBS IN TORONTO CAR

Breaking News - Toronto Ontario Canada Aug 31,07 11 40 AM
By Stan L Bowman Jr

A Toronto Muslim was arrested last night at 9:30 PM for suspicion of being a letter Bomber, 2 in Toronto and 1 in Guelph in the last week. After investigating they discovered 3 bombs in the Arrested mans car at Overlea BLVD and Thorncliffe Park outside a gas station. The Police say the Muslim is not a terrorist it is a grudge aginst the 3 people. The bombs will be transported up Southbound Don valley parkway to the Commisioners and detinated at the Leslie Street split.

Police detonate 3 bombs found in Toronto car trunk
Man, 37, arrested and charged in connection with recent letter bomb incidents
Last Updated: Friday, August 31, 2007 | 4:05 PM ET - CBC News

Toronto police performed a controlled detonation of three bombs in an isolated waterfront area on Friday after transporting the devices from the city's east end amid heavy security.Police used a specialized explosives trailer on Friday to transport the explosive devices down Toronto's Don Valley Parkway to a secure location.(CBC)Investigators alleged the devices — described as 35- to 45-centimetre packages with an as yet unidentified explosive — were discovered after a man driving the vehicle was arrested late Thursday night in connection with three letter-bomb incidents earlier this month.Police took the extraordinary step of closing off a major roadway to transport the bombs and perform the controlled detonation at about 3 p.m. ET. A large plume of smoke rose from the site.

Just after noon ET, a special explosives trailer carrying the devices slowly began travelling southbound on the Don Valley Parkway — just metres from long-weekend traffic filling the northbound lanes — to the Leslie Street Spit more than seven kilometres away at the edge of Lake Ontario.Deputy Chief Tony Warr said the extraordinary safety precautions were necessary after bomb technicians determined the bombs could not be defused.It's the safest place to do it, he told reporters from the edge of the cordoned area. We're not able to disassemble them to the point where we can completely take them apart.Early Friday, the emergency task force sealed off a large perimeter around Overlea Boulevard, Millwood Drive and Don Mills Road, as well as the entire Thorncliffe Park Drive loop, as the bomb disposal units used a pair of remote-controlled robots to move the devices into the trailer. Investigators also searched a residence on Ashdale Avenue, which was cleared, police said.

Incidents believed linked

Warr said investigators believe the three earlier incidents are linked to the devices found Friday — they're similar — and that the motive appears personal.

Two of the letters were sent to homes in Toronto, while another was sent to a residence in Guelph.On the evening of Aug. 11, a man in the Victoria Park Avenue-Lawrence Avenue East area sustained injuries after an envelope he received at his home exploded in his hands.Eight days later, a real estate lawyer found an envelope at his home in the Yonge Street-Sheppard Avenue West area. The package smelled like petroleum, so he notified police and it was safely detonated. Police said it was rigged to explode if opened.On Aug. 22, a self-employed home renovator found a Canada Post Xpresspost envelope at the rear of his Guelph home, but didn't open it and called police. Media reports said the letter was detonated at the scene and contained enough explosive to take the man's head off had it exploded.

Similar packages mailed to addresses in Toronto and Guelph did not explode, authorities have said.Adel Arnaout, 37, of Toronto, has been charged with three counts of attempted murder, three counts of intending to cause an explosion, and possession of explosives for an unlawful purpose, police said. He was scheduled to appear Friday in a Toronto court.

Global Warming Might Spur Earthquakes and Volcanoes Andrea Thompson
LiveScience Staff Writer - LiveScience.com - Thu Aug 30, 5:40 PM ET

Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and landslides are some of the additional catastrophes that climate change and its rising sea levels and melting glaciers could bring, a geologist says. The impact of human-induced global warming on Earth's ice and oceans is already noticeable: Greenland's glaciers are melting at an increasing rate, and sea level rose by a little more than half a foot (0.17 meters) globally in the 20th century, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. With these trends in ice cover and sea level only expected to continue and likely worsen if atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue to rise, they could alter the stresses and forces fighting for balance in the ground under our feet—changes that are well-documented in studies of past climate change, but which are just beginning to be studied as possible consequences of the current state of global warming.

Although they've described it in the past, nobody's thought about it in terms of future effects of climate change, said Bill McGuire of the University College London's Hazard Research Center. McGuire's speculations of increased geological activity have not yet been published in a journal, but he has written an article about them published in the Guardian Unlimited.

Rebounding crust

One particular feature that can change the balance of forces in Earth's crust is ice, in the form of glaciers and ice sheets that cover much of the area around Earth's poles plus mountains at all latitudes. The weight of ice depresses the crust on which it sits. As the ice melts, the crust below no longer has anything sitting on top of it, and so can rebound fairly rapidly (by geological standards). (This rebounding is actually occurring now as a result of the end of the last Ice Age: The retreat of massive ice sheets from the northern United States and Canada has allowed the crust in these areas to bounce back.) Areas of rebounding crust could change the stresses acting on earthquake faults and volcanoes in the crust. In places like Iceland, for example, where you have the Eyjafjallajökull ice sheet, which wouldn't survive [global warming], and you've got lots of volcanoes under that, the unloading effect can trigger eruptions, McGuire said. With the changing dynamics in the crust, faults could also be destabilized, which could bring a whole host of other problems.

It's not just the volcanoes. Obviously if you load and unload active faults, then you're liable to trigger earthquakes, McGuire told LiveScience, noting that there is ample evidence for this association in past climate change events. At the end of the last Ice Age, there was a great increase in seismicity along the margins of the ice sheets in Scandinavia and places like this, and that triggered these huge submarine landsides which generated tsunamis, McGuire said. So you've got the whole range of geological hazards there that can result from if we see this big catastrophic melting.Roland Burgmann, a geologist at the University of California, Berkeley, agrees that changes in ice cover can have significant effects on the underlying crust, but says that more research needs to be done to determine the actual scale of the threat and where the effects are most likely to occur.

Water pressure

Ice melt can have an added consequence because all that melted ice has to go somewhere—namely, the ocean. And ice melt won't be the only factor changing sea levels: as ocean temperatures rise, the water itself expands (a process called thermal expansion). As all that extra water piles up, it could apply pressure to faults near coastlines. The added load of the water bends the crust, and that means that you tend to get tensional conditions in the upper part of the crust and compressional a bit lower down, just as if you bend a plank of wood or something, McGuire explained. These compressional forces could push out any magma lying around underneath a volcano, triggering an eruption. (This mechanism is actually believed to be the cause of the seasonal eruptions of Alaska's Pavlof volcano, which erupts every winter when sea levels are higher.) McGuire conducted a study that was published in the journal Nature in 1997 that looked at the connection between the change in the rate of sea level rise and volcanic activity in the Mediterranean for the past 80,000 years and found that when sea level rose quickly, more volcanic eruptions occurred, increasing by a whopping 300 percent.

If today's worst-case global warming scenarios of catastrophic melting of glaciers and ice sheets come to pass, sea levels could rise rapidly, wreaking all sorts of geological havoc comparable with the most rapid increases in sea level that we've seen in the last 15,000 years, McGuire said. Burgmann isn't too worried about sea level rise causing more earthquakes or volcanic eruptions though, noting that catastrophic rates of sea level rise in the future are uncertain and that the current rate of rise—about 0.12 inches per year (3 millimeters per year)—isn't enough to destabilize the crust. It would take a long time to add up to a significant amount, Burgmann said—so while it's an area of research to keep an eye on, it's unlikely to have any disastrous consequences, at least for now.

Phoenix sets heat record By Bernie Woodall
Thu Aug 30, 9:12 PM ET

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Phoenix has had a record 30 days this year in which the mercury hit at least 110 degrees Fahrenheit, the U.S. National Weather Service said on Thursday. Phoenix on Thursday had a high temperature of 111 degrees Fahrenheit, extending the record broken on Wednesday of 29 days with at least 110 degrees F in a calendar year, said meteorologist Keith Kincaid of the National Weather Service.

The previous record of 28 days was set in 1970 and matched in 2002. Phoenix has not neared its all-time record high of 122 F set in 1990.Kincaid said the Phoenix high will be 110 F on Friday. By the weekend, Arizona's biggest city will cool slightly so 2007 is likely to end with a record 31 days that were hotter than 110 degrees F.

There's a tropical system south of Mexico that will move up and affect us, so I don't foresee us being 110 degrees in the next two weeks after Friday, said Kincaid, who is based in Phoenix.That's good news for the two biggest utilities in the state, both of which serve parts of the Phoenix area -- the investor-owned Arizona Public Service and the municipal Salt River Project.Jeff Lane of the Salt River Project said the utility reached a peak demand of about 6,260 megawatts, shy of its record peak for the year and about 250 megawatts short of Wednesday's demand.In Arizona, where summer air-conditioning use is high, a megawatt powers about 250 homes.

The state's largest utility, APS, had peak demand Thursday of about 7,500 megawatts, down from Wednesday's peak of about 7,595 megawatts, said Betty Dayyo of APS, a subsidiary of Pinnacle West Capital Corp.As was the case in California on Thursday and Wednesday, Arizona's power grid held despite the intense heat.Another weather record for Phoenix has been challenged recently, Kincaid said.It is the second-hottest summer when measuring average temperatures (daily low and high) from June 1 through August 28. This year that average is 94.7 degrees F, second only to 94.8 F set in 2002, Kincaid said.In Phoenix, overnight lows have been creeping higher in recent years because of the concrete, asphalt and steel in the city that retain heat, Kincaid said.It's the urban heat island effect, he said. "You go 40 miles southeast of Phoenix to Coolidge, Arizona and the overnight lows are 10 to 15 degrees (F) lower than in Phoenix and the daily highs of the two places is pretty much on par.

Fatah protest of Hamas ends in clashes AUG 31,07

GAZA CITY, Gaza City - A protest of Hamas rule by Fatah supporters turned violent Friday when Hamas men began forcefully dispersing the crowd, firing in the air and beating demonstrators and reporters. Three people were wounded, according to Dr. Muawiya Hassanin of the Palestinian Health Ministry. It was not immediately clear if they were protesters or police, and Hassanin did not specify the nature of their injuries.Associated Press reporters saw the beating of one journalist by Hamas men. He was not seriously hurt.The violence began at the end of a Fatah prayer meeting held to protest Hamas, which seized control of the coastal territory in June. A similar protest a week ago also ended in clashes and harassment of journalists.

After the Fatah supporters finished prayers, Hamas men began firing into the air to disperse the crowd. The Hamas security forces then began arresting protesters and taking them away in jeeps, and also beat several demonstrators. AP Television News video showed several uniformed Hamas men beating an unarmed protester with long sticks.Hamas supporters in civilian clothes also joined the uniformed forces in dispersing the protest.