Galileo Navigation 

The European Union launched its first Galileo navigation satellite Wednesday, moving to challenge the United States' Global Positioning System (GPS).

Russia's space agency said the 1,300 lb spacecraft went into its designated orbit 15,000 miles from the earth after its launch on a Soyuz rocket.

The $4.27-billion Galileo program, due to go into service in 2008 and eventually deploy 30 satellites, may end Europe's reliance on the GPS and offer a commercial alternative to the GPS system run by the U.S. military.

The GPS is currently the only worldwide system offering services ranging from driver assistance to search-and-rescue help. Critics say its services for civilians offer less precision than those for military or intelligence purposes.

EU officials say Galileo, organized as a public-private partnership, will offer more exact positioning. They privately add Galileo would never be switched off for strategic reasons, which might be the case with the GPS.

Population Decline 

Here is some interesting news: Japan's population fell for the first time in 2005, the government said, calling it a "turning point" that will force the world's second largest economy to adapt to a rapidly aging society. With its young people increasingly finding children a burden to their careers and lifestyles, Japan joins Germany and Italy among a club of nations whose populations have started to shrink.

 New Cheap Labor Market Found!

The two Koreas established limited commercial telephone links across their heavily armed border on Wednesday for the first time in their 60 years of division.

The cross-border phone service is exclusively for South Korean businesses operating in an industrial zone in the North Korean border city of Kaesong, 50 miles north of Seoul.

Three-hundred phone lines were established to the complex, according to a spokesman for KT Corp., South Korea's main telecommunications company. South Koreans run 15 factories there using cheap North Korean labor.  Capitalism at work there.

Telephone lines between the countries were severed in 1945, after Soviet troops occupied what later became the communist North. The two countries have remained separated since the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a cease-fire, not a peace treaty.

Man-Made Disasters

An express train traveling through strong winter winds derailed in northern Japan, killing five people and injuring more than 30. All six cars of the train derailed Sunday evening, and three of the cars toppled onto their sides about 180 miles north of Tokyo. All people killed were riding in the first car, which buckled under the force of the crash. The engineer said the train was traveling in a blizzard and that a heavy gust of wind caused the cars to tip on their sides.

Police detained the owners of an unlicensed bar in south China after at least 26 people died and 11 were injured in a Christmas Day fire. Firefighters rushed to the scene and put out the blaze, which broke out shortly before midnight on Sunday at Tandao bar in Zhongshan. Over a hundred people were inside the bar when fire broke out. The four brothers who ran it were held by police on Monday.

Natural Ones 

Relief operations in Kenya's drought-hit northeast intensified after at least 20 people died from hunger and related illness this month. Amid an outcry over what local media have dubbed the "Christmas famine," the country’s president visited two of the worst-hit areas after making an urgent weekend appeal for 100 million dollars to fill a shortfall in funding to help the 2.5 million people expected to need aid by February.

Landslides in Yemen have destroyed a small village near the capital Sanaa, killing at least 43 people including women and children with dozens more missing, officials said. A Yemeni official said rocks slid off a mountain late Wednesday and destroyed about 27 houses in Dhafari village.   

At least 24 people were killed Tuesday in an avalanche while hunting precious stones in a remote mountain range in northwest Pakistan, police said. "There were around 120 people extracting gemstones when the avalanche struck, burying a number of them," Ahmed said.

Iraq War Blazing Again 

The guns were blazing and bombs exploding again in Iraq after a brief peace during and immediately following the national elections.

Guerrillas killed 10 Iraqi policemen and soldiers in attacks north of Baghdad on Monday, while the capital itself was rocked by five major explosions that left at least eight dead.

It was one of the bloodiest days in Iraq since the election on December 15, when rival ethnic and sectarian groups took part in a vote for a new parliament.

By nightfall, at least 20 were killed and over 40 injured. In the capital, five people were killed and 15 wounded when four car bombs exploded in quick succession as civilians traveled to work in the morning, the U.S. military said.

More than 5,000 people rallied in Baghdad Tuesday to protest alleged fraud in Iraq’s Dec. 15 election as top politicians discussed forming a government of national unity.

Japan Terrorism?

A member of an Islamic extremist group banned in Pakistan entered Japan two years ago to try to establish a foothold in the country, a Japanese newspaper said on Friday. Japanese police had warned this month that Islamist extremists may tempt Muslim communities in Japan to turn radical and attack Japan, whose government has been a staunch backer of the U.S.-led war on Iraq.

Hunger Strike 

Eighty-four of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners are now participating in a hunger strike that began nearly five months ago. Forty-six detainees at the prison for foreign terrorism suspects at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, joined the protest on Christmas Day, military officials said. The prisoner population, which the Pentagon says numbers about 500, is believed to be Muslim. Only nine have been charged with any crime.

Wall Protest 

Mexico's foreign minister will meet with counterparts in Central America to seek their backing against a U.S. plan to build a high-tech border fence aimed at holding back illegal immigrants.

Mexicans are incensed by the proposal in the U.S. Congress to erect the fence with lights and security cameras along parts of the border and make illegal immigration a felony.

The meeting with Central American leaders, whose nations also send many undocumented workers to the United States, is Mexico's latest move to block the U.S. proposal.

Economic News

The last week of the calendar year is Wall Street's time for "window-dressing," a longtime tradition of money managers buying up stocks to boost their portfolios' performance before year's end.

In the past three years, this last spike upward followed on the heels of a strong December rally. Yet with modest returns likely in 2005 and predictions for perhaps a more difficult 2006, stocks have tracked sideways to slightly lower this month.

That means the windows may already be dressed. The market right now is fairly valued in the eyes of most money managers, which means there's little room to maneuver before year end. If the market was undervalued, portfolio managers could pick up stocks on the cheap and look like geniuses, while if stocks seemed pricey, they could just sell and collect the gains.

But where things stand now, there's no real impetus to go out and buy, especially when January has historically been a down month for stocks. So while the week ahead may see a little window-dressing here and there, it is highly unlikely that stocks will mount a major rally in just four trading days. There's no corporate earnings, no market-moving news expected, and simply no real reason for it.

U.S. consumers spent 8.7 percent more during the just ended holiday shopping period than in the comparable period a year ago, according to a report from an affiliate of MasterCard Inc., the Wall Street Journal reported in its online edition on Monday.

The study, by SpendingPulse, covered the period from the Friday after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday through December 24, Christmas Eve. That period included 30 days in 2005, compared with 29 days in 2004.

The report found the biggest increases in spending on home furnishings, up 15.2 percent, followed by consumer electronics and appliances, up 10.5 percent. Spending on jewelry was down 4.6 percent.

The report covers spending in stores and on the Internet, and includes food sales. It excludes spending on autos and gasoline.

The question here is, since the study was made by an affiliate of a credit card company, does the spending reflect credit debt, or actual cash spending? If it is debt, Americans may be worse off financially then they were before the holiday season began.

Natural gas futures plunged 10 percent Tuesday, settling at their lowest level in three and a half months amid forecasts calling for mild U.S. weather over the next week. It was the third straight decline for natural gas prices, which have fallen 23 percent since Wednesday, and the selloff triggered a decline in other energy futures.

The executive board of New York's Transport Workers Union voted to accept a new contract on Tuesday, the union's leader said, after a dispute that brought the city's subways and buses to a standstill last week.

The union's board voted 37-4 to approve the proposed contract. It also must be ratified by the union's 34,000 members. The deal provides for wage increases of 3 percent, 4 percent and 3-1/2 percent for the next three years.

The union's dispute with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority over pay, pensions and health care came to a head last week as transit workers staged a three-day strike, causing traffic havoc in America's most populous city at the height of the holiday season and costing the economy more than $1 billion, according to city officials.

The new contract provides for a refund of member contributions to pensions over the past several years, plus medical coverage and health benefits coverage for retirees. It also establishes that workers will pay 1.5 percent of wages toward health benefit coverage.

The contract treats Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a paid holiday each January and provides state disability insurance for workers hurt on the job, plus extra pay for workers assaulted in the line of duty.

Putting our economy in perspective, we offer the following editorial analysis from the website AlterNet:

"The economy is balanced on a knife-edge. The Bush administration would like you to forget that the US has a record trade deficit, a record budget deficit, and that the housing market--the one thing that's kept the US economy afloat for the past three years--is beginning to cool a little too quickly for comfort.

"Republican attempts to balance the budget on the backs of poor people while trying to make Bush's tax cuts permanent have garnered little attention from the press. And so has the fact that China and Japan own most of our public debt.

"While Bush's approval ratings rise and fall with the price of oil, a very cold winter is hitting Americans in the pocketbooks, and the press can only talk about the economy "steaming full-speed ahead."

Also in the reality news: Advisen Ltd. on Tuesday estimated worldwide insurance and reinsurance losses related to the three major hurricanes that hit the United States this year would amount to $57.6 billion, making the cumulative catastrophe losses the largest on record. The losses amount to more than twice the annual total for other U.S. natural disasters and one-and-a-half times the losses from the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. That is going to sting us all when we get our house insurance bills next year.

Former top Enron Corporation accountant Richard Causey has pleaded guilty to securities fraud and agreed to help pursue convictions against Enron founder Kenneth Lay and former CEO Jeffrey Skilling.

It seems that the rats are beginning to turn on each other after four years in the cage.

Lay, Skilling and Causey had been scheduled to be tried together on 17 January on conspiracy, fraud and other charges related to the scandal-ridden company's collapse more than four years ago.

The deal on Wednesday leaves Lay and Skilling with another opponent rather than an ally who has been part of their united defense front since the trio was first indicted last year.

After Causey's plea, the judge granted a defense request for a two-week delay, pushing the trial for Lay and Skilling to 30 January.

Health News 

A daily dose of vitamin D could cut the risk of cancers of the breast, colon and ovary by up to a half, a 40-year review of research has found. The evidence for the protective effect of the "sunshine vitamin" is so overwhelming that urgent action must be taken by public health authorities to boost blood levels, say cancer specialists.

A growing body of evidence in recent years has shown that lack of vitamin D may have lethal effects. Heart disease, lung disease, cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis are among the conditions in which it is believed to play a vital role. The vitamin is also essential for bone health and protects against rickets in children and osteoporosis in the elderly.

Vitamin D is made by the action of sunlight on the skin, which accounts for 90 per cent of the body's supply. But the increasing use of sunscreens and the reduced time spent outdoors, especially by children, has contributed to what many scientists believe is an increasing problem of vitamin D deficiency.

After assessing almost every scientific paper published on the link between vitamin D and cancer since the 1960s, US scientists say that a daily dose of 1,000 international units (25 micrograms) is needed to maintain health. " The high prevalence of vitamin D deficiency combined with the discovery of increased risks of certain types of cancer in those who are deficient, suggest that vitamin D deficiency may account for several thousand premature deaths from colon, breast, ovarian and other cancers annually," they say in the online version of the American Journal of Public Health.

China is most likely using substandard poultry vaccine or not enough good vaccine, which would explain recent outbreaks of the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus in poultry, a prominent virologist said on Thursday.

Thirty-one counties in China have reported outbreaks of the H5N1 in poultry this year, although only one county remains under isolation and there have been no new outbreaks for three weeks, according to Chinese state media.

But the fear among experts is that the virus could mutate from a disease that largely affects birds to one that can pass easily between people, leading to a human pandemic.

Scientists have cracked the genetic code of a fungus responsible for deadly infections and allergic reactions. Researchers at the Institute for Genomic Research hope their work could lead to better diagnostic tests, and treatments for fungal infections. Their international collaboration is reported in the journal Nature.

Civil Unrest 

Colombia's president has vowed to destroy every coca plant in the region where 29 soldiers died in one of the worst rebel attacks in recent years.

The troops had been protecting workers who were destroying crops of coca, the leaf used in the production of cocaine.

Outnumbered by about five-to-one by FARC rebels, the soldiers died in a hail of artillery fire and explosives.

Correspondents say the left-wing FARC may be stepping up attacks as President Alvaro Uribe seeks re-election in 2006.

Space: The Final Frontier 

NASA scientists observed an explosion on the moon on Nov. 7 when a 12-centimeter-wide meteoroid slammed into it near the edge of the Sea of Rains. The blast was equal in energy to about 70 kg of TNT.

Rob Suggs, Marshall Space Flight Center researcher, who recorded the impact's flash, said he and colleague Wes Swift were testing a new telescope and video camera they assembled to monitor the moon for meteor strikes. On their first night out, "we caught one," Suggs said.

The object that hit the moon was probably part of the same meteor shower that peppered Earth with fireballs in late October and early November 2005.

The moon was peppered, too, but unlike Earth, the moon has no atmosphere to intercept meteoroids and turn them into harmless streaks of light. On the moon, meteoroids hit the ground--and explode. And that explains why the moon is covered with impact craters and the Earth isn’t.

Man will take a bold step towards the final frontier of the Solar System with the expected launch of the first mission to Pluto and beyond next month.

The piano-sized New Horizons probe will travel faster than any previous spacecraft on its journey to the planet farthest from the Sun, its moon Charon and the mysterious, icy Kuiper Belt.

Relatively little is known about the ninth planet and scientists expect the NASA mission to provide important clues to the origins of the Solar System and possibly to life on Earth.

They will have to be patient, however. New Horizons will travel at 26,700 mph over four billion miles to the only remaining planet that has not been observed at close quarters. It will arrive in the summer of 2015 at the earliest.

Goulish Activities 

In suits filed this month in Atlantic County, N.J., plaintiffs charge that bone pieces implanted in them during surgery at Shore Memorial Hospital were pilfered from cadavers and sold without the consent of the deceases' families or the protective screening required by law, leaving recipients exposed to risk of infection with HIV, hepatitis and syphilis.

The suits come in the wake of recalls of bone and tissue products and investigations by the Food and Drug Administration and the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office, which has reportedly been exhuming bodies in Brooklyn and Queens, N.Y., graveyards.

Suits have also been filed in Brooklyn by people who claim that the bodies of their relatives were carved up and sold without their knowledge or permission.

Unique New Way To Tax

Viennese city authorities are putting the bite on the Austrian capital city's new dog owners starting next week.

From Jan. 1, liability insurance will be mandatory for Vienna's dog owners for pets born after that date under new city laws.

Policies must have minimum coverage of $864,000. They are meant to pay for legal, hospital or other costs arising from damage or injury caused by the animals.

Those caught without insurance could be forced to pay fines up to $4,000.

On The Light Side

Police in Berlin made their easiest arrest of the year at their annual Christmas party, after spotting a man rummaging through the pockets of their coats in the cloakroom. Officers of the Federal Police criminal investigations unit said the unlucky pickpocket did not know that the 35 revelers in a Berlin brewery were cops.

Nashville police and residents were searching Monday for clues to the Christmas Day theft of a cinnamon bun that found unlikely fame for its resemblance to the late Mother Teresa's face.

The bun has been a draw for curious tourists since it was preserved and put on display in a glass case at the shop where it was discovered by a customer in 1996.

"What I can't figure out is why anyone would steal it," said the shop's owner, Bob Bernstein. "They can't sell it on eBay, it's not fit to eat, there was no ransom note and the police put its value at only $25 on their report."

Bernstein said the thief broke into the coffee house at 6 a.m. Sunday, and had smashed the glass case containing the bun, ignoring cash lying nearby.

Before her death in 1997, Nobel Peace Prize winner Mother Teresa wrote to Bernstein asking that her name not be used commercially. The pastry became known simply as the "Nun Bun."

Surfer Brian Anderson, 36, was attacked by a great white shark off the Oregon coast Monday but he warded off the assault in a unique way. He punched the shark repeatedly in the nose until it let go of his leg. Anderson was hospitalized for treatment of lacerations on his leg, but is expected to make a full recovery.

More than a half-trillion junk e-mails, known as spam, were blocked this year by AOL filters, slightly above 2004 levels, the company said. The number of junk e-mails reported by AOL's 26 million members worldwide has declined about 75 percent since 2003.

E-mails using more sophisticated tactics that attempt to deceive recipients by purporting to be from a friend or a legitimate agency or bear subject lines such as "Your Mortgage Application is Ready" are also beginning to replace blatant product promotions, AOL said.

Spammers "are (employing) 'back alley' tactics, and they are doing it with a specialized team that's working overtime to hide the source of their spam by employing zombie PC's, bot-nets and using other nefarious tactics," Charles Stiles, AOL's postmaster, said.

In 2005, AOL blocked an average of 1.5 billion spams per day. Approximately 8 in 10 e-mails received at its gateway were blocked as junk.

On a toilet repair call in Bloomington, Illinois, Roto Rooter’s Michael Woggon found that a 3-year-old boy had apparently been trying to train his G.I. Joes for deep-water rescues. When they didn't return, he began sending Matchbox cars after them. Woggon reported recovering 15 toys from the pipes.

A 44-year-old German businessman whose digital camera was stolen at a restaurant was relieved when he managed to buy exactly the same model on the eBay Internet auction site to match his accessories.

But he became suspicious when it emerged the seller came from his home town. It proved to be the same camera.

Ed Lorenz, 69, bowled his third perfect 300 game in a Portage, Michigan bowling alley this week, then fell over dead.

"If he could have written a way to go out, this would be it," said Johnny D Masters, who was bowling with Lorenz.

Friends said Lorenz started bowling in 1957 and ended last season with a 223 average. He rolled his first two 300 games over a one-week period in 2004.

In May, Lorenz was inducted into the Kalamazoo Metro Bowling Association Hall of Fame.

And that concludes our weekly Luciferian News show for this week. Be sure to listen to Voice of Lucifer with Psychics Aaron C. Donahue and his sister, Jennifer Sharpe on Sunday night, and plug into the New Year’s Day Coast to Coast night radio broadcast. Aaron will be matching wits with a number of other named psychics in making predictions for the New Year. You will really want to hear what Aaron has to say.