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- THE WAVES POUND MY BRAIN DEPARTMENT -

Think Twice Before You Place That Call
By William Thomas

Though intended for renovations, Chris Anderson would like all visitors to deposit their cellular phones in the cement mixer by his front door. This sounds excessive - until you step into Anderson s orchard, where the pegged needle of a shrieking electromagnetic radiation (EMR) meter placed beside a connected cell phone still shows significant exposure 100 feet away.

Much to the chagrin of this certified EMR-mitigation specialist, every day some 300 million cell phone users are reaching out and touching someone you love. Yourself, and anyone else within range of the microwaves emitted by your phone.

Mesmerized by magical gadgets, we have yet to count the costs of miniature radio transmitters that are transforming Marconi s invention into new possibilities for portable personal pollution. As entire nations reach for pocket communicators, the explosively emergent $40 billion a year mobile phone industry is poised to deliver a Wireless Revolution that over the next five years is expected to double the one billion people connected by telephone lines over the past century.

Silicon sensors are already calling to each other. Soon, countless communicating microchips embedded in everything from bumpers to brooms will be sending streams of encoded electrical energy through glass, steel, concrete, bone and flesh.

Exquisitely sensitive to subtle electromagnetic harmonies, human brains and bodies as intricate as galaxies depend on tiny electrical impulses to conduct complex life-processes -including the ability to read, recall and respond to these words. Acting as antennas, our anatomies just as easily tune into spurious signals from radio and microwave transmissions. Blake Levitt, author of Electromagnetic Fields, says that when it comes to cell phones, a worse frequency could not have been chosen for the human anatomy.

As cell phones conquer consumer minds and markets, researcher Carol Anne Patton notes that the brain reaches peak absorption in the UHF bands, right where cellular telecommunications operate. British military scientists have discovered that cell phone transmissions disrupt the brain sites for memory and learning, causing forgetfulness and sudden confusion. Other studies show that electromagnetic signals from cellular phones reduce the ability to concentrate, calculate and coordinate complicated activities such as driving a car. Startled by $4 billion a year in extra claims among cell phone-wielding drivers, North American insurers did a double-take that found simply juggling cell phones is not causing a 600% increase in accidents.'

Hands-free mobile speaker-phones cause even more crashes because they typically emit 10 times more brainwave interference than handheld units.

For all drivers dialing out, University of Toronto investigators report that the heightened probability of cracking up your car persists for up to 15-minutes after completing a call. That s comparable to the risk of crashing while driving dead drunk exclaims Dr. Chris Runball, chairman of the B.C. Medical Association s emergency medical services committee. Reeling from dial-a-collision costs, the government of British Columbia may join England, Spain, Israel, Switzerland and Brazil in banning the use of cell phones by drivers.

In New Zealand, cell phone towers are prohibited on school property because of possible health effects, but Health Canada regulations ignore the hidden hazards of cell-wrenching cell phones, which send pulsed signals through the skull in a process one expert likens to jackhammers on the brain.

One of a handful of licensed electricians who understand electromagnetic fields well enough to eliminate them from household wiring, McGinnis has been testing EMFs and collaborating with fellow testers and researchers for nearly a decade. In Victoria, where he has helped residents defeat six cell phone towers, there was dancing in the streets after Microcell Connexions withdrew its application to erect a microwave transmission tower against the Wishart Elementary School fence in the spring of 1998.

The cell phone's second-hand microwave and radio-frequency (RF) pollution pose invisible but significant risks to bystanders - particularly children riding in cars that transmit amplified cell phone signals through their steel structure. Reporting the conclusions of a 12-person British study team, scientist Sir William Stewart told London s Financial Times that children may be more vulnerable because of their developing nervous system, the greater absorption of energy in the tissues of the head and a longer lifetime of exposure.

Roger Coghill became a long-standing advocate for health warnings to be affixed to mobile phones after this biologist found that cell phone transmissions damage the ability of white blood cells to ward off infectious disease by disrupting the immune system s electromagnetic communications.

Dr. Neil Cherry has measured accelerated aging, increased cell death and cancers caused by radio frequency microwaves from cell phones and their relay towers. With the brain s electro-chemical communications repeatedly zapped by lightning-like cell phone pulses, this Ph.D. biophysicist warns that headaches, fatigue, lethargy, nausea, dizziness, depression, arteriosclerosis and even Alzheimer s can result from frequent or prolonged calls.

There is also a higher incidence of cardiac problems, Cherry comments, in terms of the timing function in hearts. You get more heart attacks and more heart disease, it has now been shown in many studies.

The biophysicist from Lincoln University in Christ Church, New Zealand has also found that cell phones can murderously modify moods. In brains and bodies seriously derailed by tiny imbalances in trace minerals and hormones, depression, suicide, anger, rage and violence can result when calcium and serotonin levels are disrupted by cell phone transmissions.

In 1995, mobile phone sales in North America exceeded the birth rate. Hired by the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association to condone cell phones, public health scientist George Carlo found that tumors on the outside of the brain are more than doubled among cell phone callers - particularly on the right side of the head where cell phones are usually held. Carlo told ABC s 20/20 that cell phone causes genetic damage that leads to cancer.

Warning of the potential for a global health disaster, ABC recommended prudent avoidance of cell phones after finding that every cell phone they lab-tested exceeded the Federal Communication Commission s standards for EMF absorption rates. EMF researcher Dave Ashton cautioned 20/20 viewers that because cell phones constantly search for the nearest repeating tower, long-term damage comes from cell phones in the stand-by mode. cell phone shields and headsets cannot adequately address these problems, Ashton added.

Dr. Carlo later told London s Express newspaper that cell phones cause genetic damage following a dose-response curve. That is, the more a person uses a cell phone, the more cellular destruction and health risks they incur. Cell phone-confused cells can go crazy, Carlo cautioned. Experiments on captive animals show that this cumulative DNA damage is passed on to succeeding generations.

Addicted as we are to a culture of convenience, we forget how inconvenient it is to contract cancer. An Adelaide Hospital study confirmed Carlo s conclusions after finding B-cell lymphomas doubled in mice within 18 months of one-hour daily exposure to power densities experienced by a cell phone user. -B-cell lymphomas are implicated in 85% of all cancers.

As magazine-size cellular relay antennas hidden in church steeples and rooflines keep popping up just about everywhere, more and more communities are declaring their airspace a No Fry Zone. But in Canada, where cell phone towers come under federal jurisdiction, municipalities are only advisers to a process in which no permits are required to erect transmitter towers deemed necessary for national security.

Many more lives are involuntarily imperiled by non-emergency calls. Pat Irwin was working in a Colwood health food store when she noticed a truck unloading metal framework. The next morning, a new cell phone tower was ready to add its emissions to another BC Tel tower already operating down the street. There had been no announcement, no public hearings - just a quiet notification to the municipality that a tower was going up, literally overnight.

The intruder radiated for a month when Irwin felt her immunity dropping. She wondered if other changes in her energy and menstrual cycle were not from the moon or something that I ate.

Irwin also seemed more irritable after her central nervous switchboard began receiving round-the-clock cell phone calls. With cellular relay towers in Kansas and Oklahoma being shut down because they interfered with passing aircraft, Irwin sensed how the same transmissions plucked her own electrical circuitry, inflicting a chronic edginess that twangs human nerves. Sleep disorders, she learned, are common among people exposed to high levels of electromagnetic pollution.

After several other women in the same business centre reported similar symptoms, Irwin quit her job. I saw it as something that was there to stay and I d be daily exposed to it over a long period of time, she told Alive. All this stuff is what were playing with on a daily basis.

There is nothing safe about the new 1.9 gigahertz broadcasting frequency. Much like a boxer taking repeated blows to the head, rapidly pulsing cell phones signal permanent brain damage. A study by Dr. Peter Franch found unequivocally that cells are permanently damaged by cellular phone frequencies. This cellular damage, Franch noted, is maximized at low dosage - and inherited unchanged, from generation to generation.

Katharina Gustavss, a certified Building Biology consultant with 25 years experience, explains that CDMA s 217 Hz spikes are very close to the frequencies of human cell membranes. Gustavss accompanied a Microcell technician to the Colwood microwave relay tower Irwin and others had complained about. When he waved a spectrum analyzer, Gustavss checked the display and saw pretty scary energy spikes.

"What's that?", she asked the tech. I've never seen that before, he told her. It turned out that this cell phone tower tester only set his meter to an averaging mode. Switching to real time froze the readings at scary maximum output levels.

How dangerous are cell phones? The risk is extremely high, declares Dr. Cherry. There are 66 epidemiological studies showing that electromagnetic radiation across the spectrum increase brain tumors in human populations."

Cherry says that because cancer takes a decade to develop, it will be another 10 years before mobiles manifest a big bonanza in brain tumors. But he adds, we re already seeing acute effects that are noticed within minutes of using a cell phone.

After two minutes conversation, a cell phone s digitized impulses disable the safety barrier that isolates the brain from destructive proteins and poisons in the blood. Professor Leif Salford, the neurologist who carried out the research for this finding, informed the Daily Mail: It seems that molecules such as proteins and toxins can pass out of the blood, while the phone is switched on, and enter the brain. We need to bear in mind diseases such as MS and Alzheimer's which are linked to proteins being found in the brain.

If you must pack a cell phone, treat it like a loaded pistol. Keep it turned off. Don t carry it near ovaries, testicles, or the heart. For partial protection, buy an antenna shield. Limit calls to one-minute, six to 10 minutes a month. Never fire off a cell phone with children anywhere in sight.

When it comes to cells, consciousness and cell phones, every call is collect. How can convenience count more than cancer? What is gained by being in constant contact with disembodied voices, while being out of touch with the friends and neighbours immediately around us? Are we comfortable having our location continually traced by monitoring authorities?

Unless we start voting with our wallets, consumer complacency could prove as species-limiting as corporate cynicism. Microwave frequencies are the same as those used in radar and your microwave oven, says Florida cell phone tower opponent Joe Chwick. You wouldn't think of sticking your head in the oven, but there is no hesitation to putting the cell phone to your ear

Having somehow survived three-million years of evolution without them, many contemporary hominids claim they cannot live without them. But -can exquisitely sensitive electromagnetic beings live with cell phones -and the towers their signals ride in on? Like polyethylene food and water containers, plastic cookers and coffee-makers, microwave ovens and petroleum powered vehicles, cell phones could be one of those brilliantly beguiling inventions we have to let go. Would hanging up on such an intrusive and hazardous addiction be so terrible?

On Jan. 1, 2001 I cancelled my cell phone service

Originally published in Alive magazine

NOTES
For a fee, an electrical engineer has about five different types of meters, including very effective gaussmeters, to measure these fields. The most expensive meters have the most accurate measurements. These can cost thousands of dollars, so it is best to hire an engineer who has them already.

We returned our new laptop*, as the field with 18" of the screen was horrendous. The fields from satellites/cell phones and satellites/computers have been causing documented brain tumors for 20 years.

Laptops fields can be measured; there's a significant difference between models.

Don't ever stick your face within 10 inches of the screen for longer than a couple minutes, the field does start to substantially diminish about 20 inches from the screen on some models - for others, the field is a thick, heavy, and three feet deep of detrimental EMF, so that would drape your head and chest in the field.

http://www.emraa.org.au/rf/icnirpguideline.htm#top

http://www.buergerwelle.de/bodyscience.html
All of the articles on this site are good to skim through

http://www.igwl.de/pdf/MOBILFUN/KLAGENG.PDF

http://omega.twoday.net/stories/230816/

The aptness of Russia for a launch of "World Without Waves"
We and many scientists believe digital phones are far more dangerous than analog phones because the signals are pulsed at much higher mirowave frequencies and laboratory studies have shown that pulsed radiation is more damaging to biological tissue than steady state radiation (Analog). as found with the Dr. Henry Lai reports of DNA single and double strand breaks, at lower then most cell phone power levels, using the RF frequencies of newer digital cell phones. The Lai Studies results were or are repeatable as done in DNA.

Source: Rense.com
http://www.rense.com/general56/place.htm

- READING IS FUN-DAMENTAL DEPARTMENT -

New on the Endangered Species List: The Bookworm

First, there's e-mail to check. Then instant messages to send and a conference call before you go. Your older son has soccer practice, but he needs new cleats on the way. The twins are coming home from dance camp and you promised they could watch a DVD tonight - but only after dinner, and only after you help them with their two reports on endangered species. It's your uncle's birthday, too - but you can call him in the car. And if you're hoping for a raise, be back at work by 8 p.m.

Maybe it's not surprising that Americans have lost touch with their inner bookworms, or that reading has become more luxury than habit. There are simply too many other outlets - chirping, blinking, buzzing - that promise to simplify your life or fill your spare moments, assuming you still have any.

Busy lives and cultural clutter help explain why Americans are reading less and less these days - dropping books, in fact, at a rate that's tripled over the past 10 years. The latest evidence of America's bookish decline came in a comprehensive study unveiled last week by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). In one sense, the findings weren't particularly jarring: Americans have been reading less for more than a decade. But what was unexpected was the rate of decline: The numbers are starker than expected.

Consider that, while America has gained 40 million adults in the past 20 years, only about 600,000 more people are reading literature (defined in the study as fiction, poetry, or drama). The habit is down across the board - in every racial, age, and ethnic category, across all income levels and regions - and the decline is worst among young adults. For the first time in history, less than half the adult population reads literature. Nearly two-thirds of men don't read it at all. Among Americans over 18, the rate of decline has nearly tripled in 10 years, accelerating from 5 to 14 percent.

To some, it's a sign not just of changing habits, but of a society that's becoming less imaginative. As America loses its drive to read, they say - the act that "returns you to otherness," in the words of literary critic Harold Bloom - it becomes a nation of oblivious narcissists with a shrinking capacity to empathize, imagine, visualize, and dream. "We are seeing, I think, a great dumbing down of America," says Dana Gioia, NEA chairman. "We've never had a population so seemingly well educated or so affluent - and yet we have proportionally fewer readers."

For the publishing industry and the reading public, it's fearsome news. But for Mr. Gioia, the most startling revelation goes to the core of democracy itself. Readers in the NEA study were three times as likely to do volunteer and charity work and visit museums and performances as were nonreaders - and twice as likely to attend sporting events. "So even if you don't particularly care for books, the civic and cultural consequences of this study are terrifying for a free society," he says. "You cannot delegate a democratic society to a small elite."

As with any good detective novel, the usual suspects are here - but surprises are, too. As websites and talk radio proliferate, reading is no longer the only way, or even the primary one, of getting information. In the past 20 years, American homes have come abuzz with everything from the Internet to iPods. Demands on time have grown. Attention spans have shrunk. But the amount of TV viewing isn't all that different between readers and nonreaders: Those who don't read literature take in only 24 extra minutes of TV a day.

And as reading swerves in all directions and the 1950s "Book of the Month" clubs give way to Oprah Winfrey's book list, "grass roots" reading, and niche markets (think "chick lit"), Americans have a fainter sense of what they "should" read. The idea of a cultured person has broadened, says Tim Morris, an English professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, "eroding the notion that there is a central culture we all must subscribe to."

But perhaps the most profound shift behind the dying breed of bookworms is that Americans have less time - and a shrinking tolerance for solitude. "There are so many ways not to feel alone, where the one way used to be moving into a novel's imaginative space," says Kathleen Fitzpatrick, an associate professor at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif.

As the wired, and wireless, world grows, the dominant culture is increasingly one of immediacy. "Why pick up Tolkien when you can spend three hours watching 'Lord of the Rings?' " asks Matthew Felling of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a research group in Washington. "Modern media is making us a Cliffs Notes nation."

In essential ways, experts say, reading simply feels less important. Early America saw literacy as a means to salvation: You learned to read in order to read the Bible, and that impetus was strong enough that New England joined Scotland as one of the first hubs of universal literacy. A few generations ago, "the whole idea of literacy was something parents thought to be terribly important because not everyone was literate," says Douglas Raybeck, an anthropologist at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. "Now literacy is taken for granted."

That shift has been so profound, he continues, that technology now "meets people halfway," demanding less and less literacy as chores once completed through written correspondence can be done at the sound of a voice or the click of a mouse.

To many, the alarm bells have a familiar ring: In every age, societies lament their own decline; there is always "a mythologization of a past in which everyone was well-read, everyone debated, everyone went to the coffee shops," says Professor Fitzpatrick. So the goal, in that sense, is to look for new habits that give people the same satisfaction and knowledge that bookishness once instilled. People still interact and read, after all - just not through books. Web logs ("blogs"), Fitzpatrick says, may function in some ways like the old bildungsroman - episodic narratives of life and coming of age.

Perhaps the answer to literary anxiety, then, is to relax the hold on traditional forms: "Reading has been worked into the fabric of our lives through the Internet and all kinds of other media," she says. "We are reading all the time, just not reading in ways that might appear visually literary."

To a surprising extent, people are writing more, too. The NEA study found Americans doing more creative writing than ever - 30 percent more than 10 years ago. More models exist of the personal narrative, as memoir mania cuts into the fiction market and as blogs chronicle strangers' days from breakfast to bed.

Even the most desperate tragedy has its heroes and its denouement: Dante's "dark woods" of declining literacy has its rays of light, too. Public libraries, for one thing, have undergone a renaissance. The number of items libraries circulate has gone from 1.5 billion in 1991 to 1.8 billion today, though, admittedly, that circulation includes more CDs, DVDs, and videos.

Bookstores are changing as well, with more guests and author readings. They have become the "locus of cultural and civic activity in communities," says Rusty Drugan of the New England Booksellers Association. And then, there's Harry Potter. The NEA study didn't measure children's reading, but Mr. Drugan calls the Potter books "a real cultural phenomenon."

Source: July 12, 2004 edition The Christian Science Monitor
(Thanks to Brad Steiger for sending this!)

Norman Massie died last Tuesday at the hospital in Carmi, Ill. He was 91.

The Mount Erie native had taught school in Wayne County for 37 years and once served as principal of the Geff Grade School.

Many Wayne County residents remembered him simply as "Coach Massie." For years, he taught basketball skills to grade schoolers at Center Street School in Fairfield.

Even more residents around Southern Illinois remember Norman as a sales representative for World Book Encyclopedia, a job he held for more than 20 years until computers and the Internet came along, reducing an entire set of books to a few mouse clicks or a couple of CDs.

While the folks in Southern Illinois will remember Coach Massie for his many years in education, perhaps the world will remember him for what he witnessed 81 years ago - when he was just 10 years old.

It was a warm day in June 1923 when Norman led a team of horses into a pasture near his Mount Erie home, looked up and saw what he was convinced until his last days was a spaceship.

In a 1998 interview with Norman, he told me, "I opened the gate to let the horses into the pasture. I let them through, and as I was closing the gate, I looked back down the field and there was an object with lights all around it," Massie said. "I kept walking closer to the object until I got about 50 feet away. I stood there and watched the five men who were on board."

I've heard Norman tell this story many times, and it was always the same - never embellished from one time to the next. "The machine was metallic and stood on three legs. The top was a dome with holes in it. The best way I could describe the top was it looked like melted glass," Massie said.

"I got close enough that I could hear them talk. One guy sat in a chair and the others called him the commander. Four others made trips back and forth in the ship. I didn't know what was going on until the end. Then, one of the crew members told the commander that the repairs had been made."

Massie said the whole experience lasted about five minutes. In a matter of minutes, he said, it came to a hovering position; the tripod legs telescoped up into the belly of the thing, went straight up about 200 feet and whizzed off to the west like a bullet.

Norman's mom and dad tried to convince him that he really hadn't seen anything - that he had made the whole thing up. Then, in 1990, he got up the nerve and told his son who served as a colonel in the Air Force about the incident. "He told me there was nothing wrong with me. He said the Air Force files are full of pictures of UFOs. He accepted my story as the truth."

Norman Massie was never afraid that people might think he was a crazy old man for what he had seen. "In my own mind and my own heart, it existed and I saw it with my own two eyes."

Norman is gone now. He leaves his wife, four children, seven grandchildren, 13 great-grandchildren and a remarkable story from his childhood.

His story has traveled around the globe, and is still shared by those who remain convinced we've received visitors from other planets.

- EQUINE MADNESS DEPARTMENT -

Return of the Horse Ripper

The morning of June 23 was bright and warm. 17 year-old Emma Allan considered it a perfect day for riding. Humming softly, she unbolted the door to her horse's stable. The door creaked open and, as it did so, a strange smell hit her throat.

"That was when I saw the blood," she says. "It was streaming down my horse Jane's back legs. At first, I thought it might be just a cut on her hindquarters. But when I brought her outside, I saw the pain and bewilderment in her eyes."

The vet was called to the house in Barrhead, Glasgow, and his verdict devastated Emma and her family: someone had brutally violated the three-year-old animal with a sharp instrument.

"My horse bled for a day and a half," Emma says. "Pints of blood. It was like a tap. The attacker must have sedated her; there is no way she'd consciously allow someone to violate her."

Two nights later, the pretty bay mare was assaulted again. This time, she was so distressed that she wouldn't allow anyone to touch her.

"I almost wish it had been me that had been assaulted, rather than her," says Emma, struggling to suppress her tears. "At least I would have been able to explain to people how it happened and who did it."

The police were casually indifferent, barely bothering to note down the details of the assault. "They treated me as if I were stupid for caring about my horse," says Emma.

It was when a friend pointed out that the first attack had taken place on the last day of the summer solstice - which marks the longest day of the year on the pagan calendar - that Emma started to worry about possible witchcraft links to the assault.

She had heard of seven other attacks on horses in the past year, all of them believed by the SSPCA - the Scottish version of the RSPCA - to be "ritualistic" in nature. They included barbed wire being plaited into a horse's mane and four horses having their tails cut off in one night.

In another incident, a horse was found dead in a stable with the gutted remains of two ducks carefully positioned nearby.

The question on everyone's lips was: "Who would be so sick as to harm innocent animals?" Increasingly, the evidence pointed towards pagan rituals. Some of the attackers left distinct clues behind: symbols associated with occult practices.

And many of them stole hair from the mares' tails and manes which, in pagan circles, is said to help increase a man's sexual potency.

Blood is the most coveted acquisition from a horse, believed by some pagans to enhance a woman's fertility. A woman wishing to become pregnant would lie naked on an altar while worshippers scattered horse blood - still warm - over her body.

"We strongly suspect these attacks may be a linked to members of a religious cult or sect," said a spokeswoman for the SSPCA.

The charity is so concerned about the increase religiously motivated attacks on horses that it has enlisted the help of Dr Richard Hoskins, an expert on witchcraft from the University of London.

Horses in Scotland are not the only ones to have been violated. Three horse owners who live within a fivemile radius of Chatsworth, in Derbyshire's Peak District National Park, endured 17 incidents in just 17 days, involving more than a dozen horses.

Nottinghamshire has also been targeted, with the most recent attack occurring on June 23, tellingly the same day that Emma's horse was assaulted.

"I got up at 7am to fetch Chochie in from the field," says Julie Colbrooke, a 33-year-old mother-of-four who owns a stable just outside Worksop in Nottinghamshire.

"I could see immediately that he was upset. I found rope burns around his back legs; somebody had tied them with twine.

"I stroked his mane to comfort him. That was when I felt the lump on his neck. When I lifted up his mane, a whole chunk of skin came up with it. They'd tried to scalp him. My son was hysterical."

The vet was convinced the injuries were the work of some kind of cult. Now Mrs Colbrooke can barely sleep at night.

"How can I," she says, "when I know they are out there, watching me?"

Horse-slashers have been a muchfeared feature of English country life for years. The first spate of attacks to attract national attention was in 1991, when at least six horses died or had to be destroyed as a result of their injuries. A further 85 were injured - some even had acid and paint thrown at them.

The village of Flintham in Nottinghamshire is a charming place: redbrick cottages, prim flowers, winding roads.

Yet villagers here - and in nearby Thoroton, Screveton and Aslockton - have become so consumed by their hatred of the occult that they have daubed white crosses and Christian symbols (believed by some to repel pagan evil-doers) on fences, gates, stable doors and even horse blankets.

Others in the region are relying on guard dogs and CCTV cameras to protect their animals. Some even admit to having purchased infrared goggles so they can watch out for intruders at night.

They have good reason. In the days leading up to last summer's solstice, there were at least 50 incidents in this area, says Ian Callingham, an RSPCA officer for Newark-on-Trent.

One horse had more than ten pints of blood drained from its body, while stones arranged to form five-pointed stars - a pagan symbol - were found in the surrounding fields. Another horse had its tail cut off, the wound so deep that it cut into the spine.

"We've also had three fence posts ripped up and arranged in the shape of a triangle with a dead seagull pinned to one corner," says Mr Callingham.

"They look to me like offerings - of a sort. And I've noticed that these attacks often coincide with the full moon."

Until now, most horse owners have chosen to keep quiet about the attacks, fearful of attracting more trouble. But some are so distraught that they have agreed to share their anger and fear on the condition of anonymity.

"I've got a shotgun in my cupboard and I'm not afraid to use it," a middleaged woman tells me, standing like a sentry outside her farmhouse in Screveton. She invites us in to inspect a pair of binoculars mounted on a tripod in an upstairs bedroom.

She says she's scared of "ending up in prison" for defending her animal. "If ever I find one of these people hurting my horse, I'll kill them," she says.

Another local woman, a nurse who lives with her farmer husband, claims her horse has been "harassed" for eight years. She cites incidents ranging from the relatively minor - plaits braided into its mane and then dipped in glue, or its rug torn to shreds - to the downright threatening.

"My vet said my horse was anaemic because so much blood had been drained out of her. Sometimes they leave behind makeshift altars - upside-down dustbins with stones arranged on top, or circles with burnt horsehair attached to a cross." Only last week, her horse was attacked again. "I saw the blood on her knees," she says. "I've seen it enough times.

"But the police tell me that there is no evidence of vandalism, there is no obvious evidence of attack."

She now has laser-beam alarms, CCTV cameras in her stables and a TV monitor at the end of her bed.

"My husband calls it Pony TV," she jokes, but it is clear from her expression that she finds the matter of her horse's safety far from amusing: "I feel like they are torturing me psychologically as much as they are torturing my horse. They know when I'm here. They are the ones in control.

"And I can't even confront them if I do find them, because God only knows what they've got in those syringes."

Ian Callingham says some owners are close to breaking point: "I am worried about what would happen if one of these owners were to discover the culprit. I believe there would be a bloody confrontation."

Yet so far the perpetrators have escaped capture, their attacks planned with precision. They leave no footprints or vehicle tracks.

"My husband and I have sat up through the night to keep watch on dozens of occasions," says one victim. "We sometimes see torches and hear voices but we have never caught anyone."

Back in Scotland, the police and the SSPCA have taken advice from a former police officer who specialised in New Age religions and crimes associated with them. He agreed to talk on condition of anonymity.

Most of the horse-rippers are not paid-up members of mainstream cults such as the Wicca or other pagan groups, he insists. Instead, they are loners who have siphoned information from the internet and have deluded themselves into believing that they have "special powers".

To get close to the horses, these followers of the occult will prepare the horses, rather like a paedophile will groom a child before sexually abusing them. If the horse proves difficult to control, they will use a drug to sedate it.

"They have an obsession with perfection,' says the expert. "They believe that the more perfect the preparations are, the stronger the spell will be.

"They look for the perfect day, the perfect time, the perfect mare and they tend to use a special knife, which they regard as sacred."

Tuesday night is often chosen - the day ruled by Mars (the planet of strength) on the astrologer's calendar.

And for the spell to be potent, the blood or horsehair has to be harvested between midnight and dawn - usually alongside running water. This is confirmed by Mr Callingham: "90% of the attacks happen to horses near water - either a stream or a river."

Some, however, are sceptical. David Guy believes many of the injuries suffered by horses are selfinflicted.

He gives the example of a mare found dead with its genitals missing. The owner was convinced it had been cut out by someone involved in black magic, despite evidence to the contrary.

"When I turned her over with my foot, it was clear that she had died naturally and badgers and foxes had been at her.

"We did a post mortem and she was found to have died from peritonitis (inflammation of the abdomen).

John Macintyre of the Pagan Federation agrees. True pagans, he says, worship horses, as embodied by the Celtic Goddess of Horses, Epona.

"Horses are seen as the noblest of animals," he says, "so close to human beings that they can only be revered. No true pagan would dream of hurting a horse."

These words are of little comfort to those whose lives have been put on hold by attacks on their animals.

And despite all their best efforts at keeping vigil, despite the police involvement, the horse protection bodies and everything else, the fact remains that no one in recent years has been found guilty of mutilating a horse - or even charged with the offence.

Source: The Daily Mail
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=
314834&in_page_id=1770

Synaesthesia, a condition in which people make weird sensory associations, may rely more on the plasticity of the brain than on any genetic predisposition. This might mean that all of us are capable of having a synaesthetic experience.

People with synaesthesia often say that letters, words and numbers have innate colours. Even when tested years later, their associations remain consistent. But no one really knows why or how these odd associations form.

In 1996, Simon Baron-Cohen and his team at the University of Cambridge, UK, estimated that about one in every 2000 people had the condition and that it was likely to be a genetic trait encoded on the X chromosome (Perception, vol 25, p 1073).

But now a study of blind and blindfolded people by Megan Steven and colleagues at the University of Oxford suggests that while genes almost certainly play a role, it may be a minor one.

Steven and her team recruited six "late-blind" subjects, all of whom were synaesthetes before losing their sight. For three of them, their synaesthesia changed after they became blind.

One man, JF, for instance, had always thought of days and months as having colours. Instruments in an orchestra and even his pay scale at work were also colour-coded in his mind. After learning Braille, he began experiencing colours when he touched the raised Braille characters denoting letters, numbers or musical notes - or even when he simply thought about touching them.

Knowledge of Braille, instruments and remuneration are all learned, Steven points out, so people such as JF must be adapting their pre-existing synaesthesia to incorporate them. But that still leaves a big question: can all brains adapt to make these unusual associations, with the ability only being unmasked in a select few people? Or are the associations themselves rare?

Evidence from a blindfolding experiment hints that the associations might be universal. For instance, DB, who was not known to be synaesthetic, was blindfolded for five consecutive days, and saw very vividly a frightening face whenever he listened to a specific passage of Mozart's Requiem. It only happened while he was deprived of vision.

Though this mental association was not genuine synaesthesia, it did have many of the hallmarks of the condition, the researchers claim. It could be reproduced, was consistent and was triggered by something specific.

This suggests that even non-synaesthetes may have the neural machinery for generating a synaesthetic experience and that changes to the brain might expose them, they say in a forthcoming issue of Perception.

"It can't be entirely genetic," Steven says. She speculates that in non-synaesthetes, the input of visual signals may be inhibiting tactile and auditory inputs to the "visual" areas. "When there's no more visual stimulation, maybe other connections become more important," she says.

Baron-Cohen agrees that genes and environments are likely to interact in shaping synaesthesia. But he questions whether atypical cases like these can teach us much about more common varieties. His main work is in autism and he points out that up to 40 per cent of congenitally blind children show autistic behaviours in early childhood, such as persistent rocking. But blind kids tend to grow out of such rocking behaviour, while those with true autism do not.

"We should be wary of assuming phenomena that resemble synaesthesia - such as coloured hallucinations in a subject blindfolded for five days - involve the same brain mechanisms that give rise to 'naturally occurring' synaesthesia."