AMY GOODMAN The Bureau of Land Management held a controversial auction Friday to sell oil and gas drilling rights to nearly 150 000 acres of wilderness in southern Utah. The sale had been strongly opposed by many environmental groups. Stephen Bloch of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance said "This is the fire sale the Bush administration’s last great gift to the oil and gas industry.”"
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The Bureau of Land Management must now wait over a month before it can auction off these properties, but by then the bureau will no longer be run by the Bush administration.
Tim DeChristopher was arrested Friday and is scheduled to appear in court later today. He joins us in Salt Lake City.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Tim DeChristopher.TIM DeCHRISTOPHER: Good morning, Amy. It’s great to be here. I read your book last summer and really enjoyed it.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, thanks. Why don’t you start off by telling us what happened on Friday? What did you start off planning to do that day? Where were you?
TIM DeCHRISTOPHER: I started off, actually, at a final exam at the university and went straight from there down to the BLM office. And I saw some protesters walking back and forth outside, and I knew that I wanted to do more than that and that this kind of injustice demanded a higher level of disruption. And so, I just decided that I wanted to go inside and cause a bigger disruption.
And from there, I found it really easy to get inside and become a bidder, and went inside and was in the auction room. And once I was in there, I realized that any kind of speech or disruption or something like that wasn’t going to be very effective, but I saw pretty quickly that I could have a pretty major impact on the way this worked. And it just took me a little bit of time to build up the courage to do that, knowing what the consequences would be. And so, I started bidding and started driving up the prices for some of the oil companies. And throughout that time, I knew that I could be doing more and could really set aside some acres to really be protected. And so, then I started winning bids and disrupting it as clearly as I could.
AMY GOODMAN: How does it work? You get a paddle?
TIM DeCHRISTOPHER: Yeah. I just had a bidder paddle and just kept raising it as much as I could.
AMY GOODMAN: And you ended up buying what? Over 22,000 acres of land?TIM DeCHRISTOPHER: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: And where was this land?
TIM DeCHRISTOPHER: Honestly, I didn’t know at the time. But now it turns out that a lot of that land was the land right around Arches National Park and in Labyrinth Canyon and Mineral Point and beautiful places like that. So it turned out pretty well.AMY GOODMAN: And now what are your intentions? Or first, I should ask, what was the response of the people in the room? When did they understand who you were? Or did they, at the time?
TIM DeCHRISTOPHER: Once I started buying up every parcel, they understood pretty clearly what was going on. And so, at that point, they stopped the auction, and some federal agents came in and took me out. And from other people who were in the room afterwards, I guess there was a lot of chaos, and they didn’t really know how to proceed at that point. But then, I was away talking to the federal agents at that point.AMY GOODMAN: When did they arrest you?
TIM DeCHRISTOPHER: Well, they took me into custody there on Friday, and they had me for a few hours. But it was a pretty cordial conversation that I was having with them. I was very clear about what I was doing and why I was doing it. I told them all my motivations and why the environmental movement, as it’s been, and myself included, hasn’t been effective and why I felt it was necessary to take more drastic actions. And so, they took my statement there and decided that I wasn’t a threat, and so they released me. But charges haven’t been pressed yet. That’s going to happen later today.
AMY GOODMAN: I’m looking at the Salt Lake Tribune article on you. It says, “He didn’t pour sugar into a bulldozer’s gas tank. He didn’t spike a tree or set a billboard on fire. But wielding only a bidder’s paddle, a University of Utah student just as surely monkey-wrenched a federal oil- and gas-lease sale Friday, ensuring that thousands of acres near two southern Utah national parks won’t be opened to drilling anytime soon.”via Democracy Now! | Posing as a Bidder, Utah Student Disrupts Government Auction of 150,000 Acres of Wilderness for Oil & Gas Drilling.
Ha ha! ... uh, I hope he doesn't get into any small airplanes anytime soon ... at least until they arrest Karl Rove. Long live DeChristopher! Why let Bush destroy anything else on the way out? I don't understand, however, why they didn't just restart the auction on the things where he was the bidder. I guess other people already saw how high the others in the room went and so the whole process was messed up? I don't go to auctions much.
Officials warned the country's 3.5 million citizens to be on the lookout for a missing radioactive United States $100 bill. They say they do not know how the bill became radioactive. One theory is that it could have come from somewhere in Eastern Europe that still has a high level of post-Chernobyl contamination. The bill was discovered in September when it set off alarms at an airport checkpoint and was quarantined in a safe room. But it was reported missing -- probably stolen -- on Tuesday just before it was to be shipped off to be destroyed. A security official said the bill was not potent enough to cause burns, but could pose risks for children or pregnant women. In Lithuania, $100 is equivalent to about two-thirds of the monthly minimum wage.
To many people bird song can herald the coming of spring reveal what kind of bird is perched nearby or be merely an unwelcome early morning intrusion. But to Sandra Vehrencamp Cornell professor of neurobiology and behavior bird song is a code from which to glean insights into avian beh Vehrencamp records bird songs and then plays them back to birds of the same species to decipher strategies that various species use to attract mates and resolve territorial disputes. The technique allows researchers to study birds reactions to songs when such elements as overlapping vocalization finer song structural features and the type of song played back are varied. "You kind of feel like you re talking to the bird " Vehrencamp said. ... She found for example that song sparrows in southern California can interpret some forms of playback as "fighting words " because they often resolve conflict by singing the same type of song -- known as song-type matching -- back to one another. "They get really mad " Vehrencamp said. "They treat playback like it s another bird and will sometimes come right up to the speaker."
A swirl of green detected by a spacecraft among purple and yellow rocks shows patches of the mineral carbonate on Mars, which suggests that the planet may support life.
A "spectacular" display of dozens of UFOs has been reported in the skies over the West Midlands. Eyewitnesses told Sky News that up to 70 bright circular objects could be seen near Halesowen. Stunned residents watched in disbelief convinced they were viewing an extra-terrestrial spectacle. Each object was encircled with lights and had lights in the middle according to witness Steven Randall who lives in Halesowen with is wife and three children. He said "This was incredible and so spectacular. The lights seem to climb into the sky to the north of us just before 8pm last night. "A neighbour had shouted for us to come and look. There were so many objects. From a distance they looked like bubbles rising in a fizzy drink. "Then they came towards us and flew right over the top. Some were so close they were almost touching and were only a hundred feet or so above us. "The objects were absolutely silent and travelling at probably twice the speed of a normal aircraft. "They were all circular and had 13 to 15 lights around the rim. Each had lights in the centre which were flashing on and off. They went south at a terrific speed." Birmingham International airport is to the east of the sightings but according to Mr Randall the flight path comes nowhere near the houses. "Aircraft are not allowed to fly over this area. We regularly see air traffic in the distance and I can assure you that this was something very different " he said. Air traffic control at Birmingham International airport had nothing on their radar to suggest anything out of the ordinary. A Ministry of Defence spokesman said that independent experts have concluded there are straightforward explanations behind alleged UFO reports such as aircraft lights or natural phenomena.
Pope Benedict XVI has paid tribute to 17th-Century astronomer Galileo Galilei, whose scientific theories once drew the wrath of the Catholic Church.
Pictures of beasts that look as if they come from a science-fiction movie but actually live in their billions off the British coast will be on show in an exhibition that will be touring aquariums around the country.
George S. Patton, America's greatest combat general of the Second World War, was assassinated after the conflict with the connivance of US leaders, according to a new book.
FORGET Viagra scientists are working on an electronic "sex chip" that will be able to stimulate pleasure centres in the brain The Australian reports. The prospect of the chip is emerging from progress in deep brain stimulation in which tiny shocks from implanted electrodes are given to the brain. It has already been used to treat symptoms of Parkinson s disease. In recent months scientists have been focusing on an area of the brain just behind the eyes known as the orbitofrontal cortex. This is associated with feelings of pleasure derived from eating and sex. A research survey conducted by Morten Kringelbach senior fellow at Oxford University s department of psychiatry and reported in the Nature Reviews Neuroscience journal found the orbitofrontal cortex could be a "new stimulation target" to help people suffering from anhedonia an inability to experience pleasure from such activities. Stimulating this area can produce pleasure as intense as "devouring a delicious pastry" he said. His colleague Tipu Aziz a professor of neurosurgery at the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford predicted a significant breakthrough in the science behind a "sex chip" within 10 years. "There is evidence that this chip will work " Dr Aziz said. "A few years ago a scientist implanted such a device into the brain of a woman with a low sex drive and turned her into a very sexually active woman. She didn t like the sudden change so the wiring in her head was removed."
Earth’s atmosphere was known to "breathe" in a cycle lasting nearly a month. Now scientists say the planet takes a quick breath every few days. The breathing-like activity is the result of high-speed solar wind disturbances that cause a recurrent expansion and contraction of Earth’s atmosphere every few days satellite observations show. This atmospheric mode could affect radio communication orbiting satellites and possibly the Earth s climate researchers say. The expansion and contraction happens way up in the Earth s thermosphere the layer of the atmosphere that extends from about 60 to 300 miles 96.5 to 483 kilometers above the planet s surface. The thermosphere is constantly interacting with the sun s upper atmosphere as it expands out into the solar system said one of the researchers who made the discovery Jeff Thayer of the University of Colorado in Boulder during a press conference at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco yesterday. This interaction causes an energy exchange that can change the density of the thermosphere how closely the gas molecules within it are packed together . As its density changes the thermosphere expands and contracts. 5 7 and 9 Extreme ultraviolet UV radiation from the sun was known to cause a 27-day expansion-and-contraction cycle by changing the thermosphere s density through heating. Thayer and his team analyzed data from the German Challenging Minisatellite Payload CHAMP and the NASA Advanced composition Explorer satellite and found that the thermosphere also appeared to breathe every five seven and nine days "which was unexpected " Thayer said. The researchers determined that the cause of these shorter expansions and contractions was high-speed winds generated by relatively cool pockets on the sun s surface known as solar coronal holes which periodically rotate around the solar surface. Thayer said this finding could help improve satellite tracking which was part of the aim of the study which was funded in part by the U.S. Air Force. The thermosphere is heavily populated with spacecraft including the International Space Station and more than 800 operational satellites.
The clouds of suspicion and paranoia swirling over the world’s last remaining Cold War frontier darkened dramatically today when North Korea accused its southern neighbor of plotting to assassinate Kim Jong Il.
Michael 
"... And what do they call it when an irate borrower abandons his home, yanking electrical outlets from walls, leaving faucets running and otherwise trashing it on the way out?
