Interview

“It was really hard when we first got here. It was shocking. We were all crying,” Brittney Fowler, 23, told Reuters as she picked through the rubble of her family’s large modern house in Yorba Linda, in Orange County.

Hot winds and record temperatures in the 90s Fahrenheit (30s Celsius) were forecast to ease off on Monday. But several fires burned through Sunday night and thick, choking smoke hung heavily over neighborhoods 25 miles away.

Wildfires have scorched more than 20,000 acres since Thursday night in foothills north of Los Angeles, in Orange County canyons to the south-east, and in celebrity-heavy Montecito near Santa Barbara, to the north. Mobile homes, apartments and multimillion dollar mansions were among the estimated 1,000 homes destroyed.

Officials began lifting evacuation orders on Sunday for more than half the estimated 50,000 people who fled at the height of the fires but firefighters said it would take days to extinguish all the blazes.

No deaths or major injuries have been reported and the cause of the fires was not known.

Southern California is in a drought after minimal rainfall for two years that has turned the terrain into a tinder box while population growth over the past 20 years has seen once arid brushland on city outskirts turned into housing developments.

DEVASTATING SCENES

Many people returned to devastating scenes of homes reduced to ashes in streets where neighboring houses were unscathed.

Fowler said she grabbed her two dogs, a turtle and a few pictures before fleeing with her family when the roof caught fire. “You could feel the heat and you saw little ember pieces flying by and we just said we’ve got to go. I kept looking around, thinking I’ll miss you house,” she said on Sunday.

Like many victims, Fowler vowed to rebuild. That sentiment was echoed by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa who told journalists on Sunday; “We are going to rebuild, make no mistake about that.”

In the foothills north of Los Angeles, where some 500 homes were burned down in a Sylmar mobile home park, firefighters presented a tattered U.S. flag to park manager Jinny Harmon as residents made homeless cried and applauded.

“It represents that we will survive, that we will be coming back,” Harmon said.

Arnold Caudill, 69, buried two of his five cats on Sunday in the backyard of his fire-ravaged home in Yorba Linda.

“There’s not a whole lot to save. All of our mementos are melted,” he told Reuters on his return. “This big wall of flames came right over the house and we just said, ‘Holy Shit’. Before you knew it, the flames were in our face.”

“This helps the pain,” he said, sipping from a bottle of red wine found intact in his refrigerator.

California’s fire season, which traditionally ran from June to October, has been a year-round menace as global warming has brought higher winter temperatures and less rainfall.

In October 2007, 30 blazes raged across Southern California for almost a week, forcing evacuation of more than 500,000 people and damaging some 2,000 homes.

To astronomers, not just dots.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Earth seems to have its first fuzzy photos of alien planets outside our solar system, images captured by two teams of astronomers. The pictures show four likely planets that appear as specks of white, nearly indecipherable except to the most eagle-eyed experts. All are trillions of miles away — three of them orbiting the same star, and the fourth circling a different star.

None of the four giant gaseous planets are remotely habitable or remotely like Earth. But they raise the possibility of others more hospitable.

It’s only a matter of time before “we get a dot that’s blue and Earthlike,” said astronomer Bruce Macintosh of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. He led one of the two teams of photographers.

“It is a step on that road to understand if there are other planets like Earth and potentially life out there,” he said.

Macintosh’s team used two ground-based telescopes, while the second team relied on photos from the 18-year-old Hubble Space Telescope to gather images of the exoplanets — planets that don’t circle our sun. The research from both teams was published in Thursday’s online edition of the journal Science.

In the past 13 years, scientists have discovered more than 300 planets outside our solar system, but they have done so indirectly, by measuring changes in gravity, speed or light around stars.

NASA’s space sciences chief Ed Weiler said the actual photos are important. He compared it to a hunt for elusive elephants: “For years we’ve been hearing the elephants, finding the tracks, seeing the trees knocked down by them, but we’ve never been able to snap a picture. Now we have a picture.”

In a news conference Thursday, Weiler said this fulfills the last of the major goals that NASA had for the Hubble telescope before it launched in 1990: “This is an 18 1/2-year dream come true.”

There are disputes about whether these are the first exoplanet photos. Others have made earlier claims, but those pictures haven’t been confirmed as planets or universally accepted yet. The photos released Thursday are being published in a scientifically prominent journal, but that still hasn’t convinced all the experts. Alan Boss, an exoplanet expert at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and Harvard exoplanet hunter Lisa Kaltenegger both said more study is needed to confirm these photos are proven planets and not just brown dwarf stars.

MIT planetary scientist Sara Seager, at the NASA press conference, said earlier planetary claims “are in a gray area.” But these discoveries, “everybody would agree is a planet,” said Seager, who was not part of either planet-finding team.

The Hubble team this spring compared a 2006 photo to one of the same body taken by Hubble in 2004. The scientists used that to show that the object orbited a star and was part of a massive red dust ring which is usually associated with planets — making it less likely to be a dwarf star.

Macintosh’s team used ground-based telescopes to spot three other planets orbiting a different star. That makes it less likely they are a pack of brown dwarf stars.

The planet discovered by Hubble is one of the smallest exoplanets found yet. It’s somewhere between the size of Neptune and three times bigger than Jupiter. And it may have a Saturn-like ring.

It circles the star Fomalhaut, pronounced FUM-al-HUT, which is Arabic for “mouth of the fish.” It’s in the constellation Piscis Austrinus and is relatively close by — a mere 148 trillion miles away, practically a next-door neighbor by galactic standards. The planet’s temperature is around 260 degrees, but that’s cool by comparison to other exoplanets.

The planet is only about 200 million years old, a baby compared to the more than 4 billion-year-old planets in our solar system. That’s important to astronomers because they can study what Earth and planets in our solar system may have been like in their infancy, said Paul Kalas at the University of California, Berkeley. Kalas led the team using Hubble to discover Fomalhaut’s planet.

One big reason the picture looks fuzzy is that the star Fomalhaut is 100 million times brighter than its planet.

The team led by Macintosh at Lawrence Livermore found its planets a little earlier, spotting the first one in 2007, but taking extra time to confirm the trio of planets circling a star in the Pegasus constellation. The star is about 767 trillion miles away, but visible with binoculars. It’s called HR 8799, and the three planets orbiting it are seven to 10 times larger than Jupiter, Macintosh said.

“I’ve been doing this for eight years and after eight years we get three at once,” he said.

• Science: http://www.sciencemag.org
• Hubble Space Telescope: http://hubblesite.org/
• Gemini Observatory: http://www.gemini.edu/
• Exoplanet encyclopedia: http://exoplanet.eu/

Syrian President Bashar Assad addresses the opening session of the transit Arab Parliamentarian Union in Damascus, Syria

Though Syrian officials feigned ignorance at Al-Qaeda’s encampment within its borders, the reality is that the country not only tolerates the presence of terrorists, but encourages them to use the country as a safe-haven, headquarters, and transit point. Why does Syria continue to harbor terrorists, knowing that it places the country squarely in the crosshairs of the Bush administration? Particularly in light of Syria’s historical problems with its own Islamist groups, why would it welcome radicals from across the region? Finding the answer to these questions is crucial in trying to defeat one of the Middle East’s most prolific boosters of terrorism.

To better understand Syria’s motivations, I visited Abdel Halim Khaddam, Syria’s former vice president, in Brussels, where he was leading a meeting of the National Salvation Front (NSF), a Syrian opposition group. Having served under both Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar, Khaddam is well-acquainted with the strategic and political exigencies driving the regime’s support for terror. “Fighting the Americans in Iraq is very dangerous,” he tells me. “But it also makes Bashar popular. Under the banner of resistance, anything is popular.”

Thus, it seems the first reason Syria backs these militants is because it wins public acclaim. As is the case in many countries across the Arab world, most Syrians distinguish between terror and resistance. They define the former as violence that hurts Syrians and Syrian interests–such as the Muslim Brotherhood’s war against the Syrian state in the late 1970s and early ’80s, for example. But resistance is the violence that the Syrian regime makes possible at the expense of other states–from Lebanon to Israel to Iraq–strengthening its position as the self-described “capital of Arab resistance.”

For instance, when Hezbollah went to war against Israel in the summer of 2006, it hurt not only Israel but the majority of Lebanese, who were not standing with Hezbollah. But Syria’s logistical, financial, and political support for the Islamic resistance burnished Assad’s credentials at home, while also earning him respect across the region. If other Arab rulers, like Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Saudi king Abdullah Al-Saud, were, in Assad’s words, “half-men,” the Syrian had shown himself to be a citadel of anti-Zionist, anti-Western resistance, the most popular Arab leader after Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah.

Support for terror is also a significant element in Syria’s attempt to exert power over its neighbors. In addition to hosting groups that target Israel, like Hamas and Hezbollah, Syria has long maintained a broad portfolio of regional terror outfits, from secular organizations like Abdullah Ocalan of the Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK) and Palestinian rivals to Yasser Arafat, to Salafi groups like Shaker al-’Absi’s Fatah splinter organization, Fatah al-Islam. And as the recent US attack on Bou Kamal illustrated, Damascus hosts significant Iraqi assets, such as Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Syria also uses these groups as insurance against the subterfuge of fellow Arab regimes. “Before 1970, Syria was the place where other people interfered,” Obeida Nahas, a Muslim Brotherhood representative with the NSF, tells me. Ever since Syrian independence in 1946, coup followed coup, all of them backed or instigated by outside actors, including Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and even the U.S. “When Hafez al-Assad came to power,” Nahas explains to me, “he made a pre-emptive counter-attack to interfere in other regimes before they could get to Syria.”

Nahas’s father-in-law, Ali Sadr al-Din al-Bayanouni–the leader of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood in exile, who spent two decades living in Jordan–is himself an illustration of this strategy. Amman’s relationship with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood is part of a long-standing rivalry, in which the Jordanians back Syrian Islamists like al-Bayanouni as a threat to the Damascus government, and Syria, in turn, supports elements of Jordan’s Islamist opposition, like the Islamic Action Front. While this game of chicken seems to risk Islamist blowback, it is a key strategy in Arab balance-of-power politics.

The Syrians have similarly managed their relationship with Saudi Arabia, which has been at an all-time low since the 2005 murder of former Lebanese prime minister and Saudi ally Rafiq al-Hariri, which the Saudis blamed on Damascus. In December 2005, Khaddam made a big splash in the first part of a televised interview on the Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya satellite network charging Bashar with the assassination, but then the Saudi royal family pulled the plug on the second part of the interview. The public rationale in Arab circles is that the Saudi kingdom is not in the habit of bringing down fellow Arab regimes. More likely, however, is that Damascus has an important card to play against the Saudis, who fear that Syria is holding several hundred Saudi fighters in prison; Damascus could embarrass the Saudis by publically announcing the existence of these extremists–or even worse, allow those jihadis to return home to fight the House of Saud.

This kind of leverage is not the only reason Syria keeps its jails stocked with foreign terrorists. According to Ghassan al-Mufleh, an NSF member who spent 12 years in Syrian jails for his Communist activities, this is also one of their primary ways of collecting intelligence, as well as tapping foreign agents to do their bidding abroad and subvert Arab rivals. Since Syria does not require visas from Arabs to enter the country, many terrorists use it as a transit point to places like Iraq, “so if they return from jihad alive and want to head home–Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco–they just say that they were working in Syria,” Mufleh tells me. But this free flow also allows the Syrians to detain valuable operatives and “give them a choice–either they can agree to work for the Syrian services or they will be turned into their own home intelligence agency,” he says. “It is an easy choice.”

Shaker al-’Absi is a case in point. Along with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, ‘Absi was sentenced to death in absentia by the Jordanian authorities for the 2002 murder of U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley in Amman. Syria rejected Jordan’s extradition request for ‘Absi and allegedly detained him in prison for a few years. He resurfaced last spring in a northern Lebanon refugee camp, leading Fatah al-Islam in its month-long battle with the Lebanese Armed Forces–part of Assad’s plan to destabilize the Lebanese government, which the Syrian president describes as hostile to Syrian interests.

Syria’s incessant meddling in Lebanon also illustrates a larger motivation for their support of terrorists. Long before the Americans touched down in Iraq, the Assads (father and son) recognized that supporting terror meant Washington would have to include Damascus in any of its regional dealings. For instance, U.S. policymakers have historically felt compelled to engage with Syria in order to secure peace in Jerusalem, since, as American officials euphemistically explain, Syria has the ability to “spoil” the Arab-Israeli peace process by unleashing their Hamas or Hezbollah clients. Thus, according to Khaddam, Colin Powell’s efforts in May 2003 to convince Damascus to close its Hamas offices were futile. “The Americans should’ve known better,” he says. “How could Bashar separate himself from Hamas? It’s an important card for him, so why would he throw it away?”

But perhaps the most significant driver of Syria’s support for terrorism is that it clinches the relationship with their only strategic partner in the region that is not a terrorist group. “Bashar helped the groups in Iraq because there is an arrangement with Iran to undermine the Americans,” Khaddam says. He claims that Syria’s decision to let Al-Qaeda use their borders to fight the Americans in Iraq is largely at the behest of Tehran: “Iran’s ambitions in the region stretch from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean, which is against the interest of the Arabs and the West. Syria’s alliance leaves it in the middle of the conflict but there is no way out of the relationship.”

Khaddam dismisses the notion prevalent in some U.S. and Israeli circles that it is possible to split Syria from Iran. “Iranian influence is extensive,” he says. If there are factions in the Damascus government, it is not about whether Syria should lean towards Iran or the West. “The disagreements are about personal interests and cuts of money, not Iran. Everyone agrees about Iran.”

But as Mufleh notes wryly, Assad would do well to learn the lessons of Syrian history: It was his own father’s decision to provide jihadis passage through to Afghanistan in the ’80s that inadvertently helped defeat his Soviet patron. For all the good reasons to support “resistance,” Tehran as well as Damascus may one day be on the receiving end of Islamist terror–a price infinitely higher than last month’s U.S. raid on Syrian territory.

Amazon UK has barred the sale of a new Scientology exposé penned by a former member of the church’s “elite paramilitary group.”

The British incarnation of the world’s most popular etailer is no longer offering The Complex: An Insider Exposes the Covert World of the Church of Scientology, a 318-page tome from John Duignan, who spent 22 years inside the top secret organization.

In a recent post to an anti-Scientology discussion forum, an Anonymous Brit says that after pre-ordering the book, he received an email from Amazon announcing it had been “removed from sale for legal reasons”.

Amazon UK has yet to respond to out request for comment. But the book - published on October 7 - is no longer listed on the site. A Google search reveals it was available for sale as recently as October 23.

Amazon listing retrieved via Google time machine

For the moment, The Complex is still available from UK booksellers WH Smith and Waterstones. And it’s available on Amazon’s US incarnation - though it’s listed as “out of stock”. We’re also awaiting a response from Amazon US.

The US listing describes the book like this:

For the first time ever, a former high-ranking member of the Church of Scientology is lifting the lid on life inside the world s fastest growing cult. The Complex reveals the true story behind the religion that has ensnared a Who’s Who list of celebrities such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta, and convinced thousands of ordinary people to join up.

Duignan describes how two years ago he staged a dramatic escape from the elite paramilitary group at the core of the Church, the Sea Organisation, and how he narrowly evaded pursuit by Scientologists from the Office of Special Affairs. He looks back on the 22 years he served in the Church’s secret army and describes the hours of sleep deprivation, brain-washing and intense auditing or religious counselling he endured, as he was moulded into a soldier of Scientology.

He talks about the money-making-machine at the heart of the Church, the Scientology goal to Clear the Planet and Get Ethics In, the training programmes, the Rehabilitation Project Force and the punishments meted out to anyone who transgresses, including children. We follow his journey through the Church and the painful investigation that leads to his eventual realisation that there is something very wrong at Scientology’s core.

The Complex was published by the Dublin, Ireland-based Merlin Publishing. Famously, Andrew Morton’s unauthorized biography of American film star Tom Cruise - which also served as a Scientology exposé - was published in the US, but not in the UK, Australia, or New Zealand, thanks to stricter libel laws. ®

Update

Amazon US says “we’re awaiting arrival of the inventory into our fulfillment networks. As soon as we get the books in our fulfillment centers, we’ll start shipping them out to customers.”

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