:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 2.28.2005 ::

:: "Judge Says US Terror Suspect Can't Be Held as an Enemy Combatant" ::

From The New York Times
By NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON - A federal district judge in South Carolina ruled Monday that President Bush had greatly overstepped his authority by detaining an American citizen as an enemy combatant for nearly three years without filing criminal charges.

The judge, Henry F. Floyd, ruled that the government must release the American, Jose Padilla, within 45 days from the military brig in Charleston, S.C., where he has been held since June 2002. That left the Bush administration time to appeal, and a Justice Department spokesman, John Nowacki, said officials immediately decided to do so.

In his opinion, Judge Floyd sharply criticized the administration's use of the enemy combatant designation in Mr. Padilla's case.

"The court finds that the president has no power, neither express nor implied, neither constitutional nor statutory, to hold petitioner as an enemy combatant," Judge Floyd wrote.

The judge said he had no choice but to reject the president's claim that he had the power to detain Mr. Padilla, who was arrested in May 2002 at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago and was later accused of having planned to detonate a radiation-spewing "dirty bomb" in the United States as part of a plot by Al Qaeda.

"To do otherwise would not only offend the rule of law and violate this country's constitutional tradition," Judge Floyd wrote, "but it would also be a betrayal of this nation's commitment to the separation of powers that safeguards our democratic values and individual liberties."

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 11:38:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: "Talon news Web site closes amid heavy criticism" ::

A CNET News.com report
By Reuters

A Texas-based Web site whose conservative connections touched off a White House media controversy has shut down "to reevaluate operations," according to a message posted on the site.

posted by me

:: 11:59:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: So Weird ::

From Chuck Shepherd's News of the Weird

LEAD STORY
Some of the well-intentioned donations for victims of the December tsunami are bewilderingly inappropriate (such as ski jackets and Viagra), according to a February Wall Street Journal dispatch from Sri Lanka. Relief workers are being distracted by shipments of, for example, moisturizing gel, sweaters, women's dress shoes, Arctic-weather tents and thong underwear. Crucial medicines were in short supply, but not Valium, anti-depressants, or drugs with labels in languages that local doctors could not read. As the Journal wrote, some doctors "appear (just) to have unloaded their sample bins." [Wall Street Journal, 2-3-05]

Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net

posted by me

:: 10:23:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: "Gonzo RIP: addtl. note ::

Gonzo's ashes 'to be blasted from cannon'
Telegraph.co.uk

The ashes of American author Hunter S Thompson may be blasted from a cannon, in accordance with his dying wishes, his family has said.

Thompson, 67, dubbed the "gonzo journalist", said several times that he wanted an artillery send-off for his remains.

"There's no question, I'm sure that's what he would want," said Mike Cleverly, a longtime friend and neighbour. "Hunter truly loved that kind of thing."

posted by me

:: 12:44:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: "Solar Tower of Power Finds Home" ::

From Wired News
Planners pick a site for one of the most ambitious alternative energy projects on the planet. The Solar Tower -- a giant thermal chimney twice the height of the world's tallest building -- will rise on an Australian sheep farm. By Stephen Leahy.

"The time is now here. The world is looking for a major renewable energy source."
— The chairman of an environmental group says many countries are ready for green energy sources like the Solar Tower.

posted by me

:: 12:23:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: All the Rave? ::

Wired Magazine Gives Out Rave Awards
SAN FRANCISCO - (AP) Shock-jock Howard Stern won a renegade award and freelance journalist Kevin Sites got a nod for blogging as Wired Magazine doled out the 6th Annual Rave Awards to technology innovators.

ALSO
Directly from Wired Magazine
The 2005 Wired Rave Awards
A salute to 15 mavericks and dreamers reinventing movies, medicine, books, blogs, and more. Among them:
• Brad Bird, Mr. Incredibles
• Steven Squyres, our favorite Martian
• Danger Mouse, remixmaster
• Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, pop art stars
Plus: The complete list of amazing nominees

posted by me

:: 12:11:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: Life... on Mars? ::

Photo in the News
"Frozen Sea" Seen on Mars
National Geographic, D.C.
By Ted Chamberlain

The miles-wide, ice floe-shaped landforms in this new aerial view of Mars may be just that—ancient ice sheets. Noting their similarity to floes at Earth's poles, a team of European scientists speculates that an entire frozen sea is buried intact in this equatorial region. Released today by the European Space Agency, the image was captured by the agency's Mars Express spacecraft.

The scientists believe that a catastrophic event five million years ago sent subterranean water gushing onto the Martian surface, creating a sea. The red planet's frigid temperatures quickly turned the sea's surface to ice, which later broke up into the sheets seen buried above. Eventually the sea itself froze, and the entire region was later blanketed by dust, the researchers say.

Since Mars was no warmer five million years ago than it is today, the finding bolsters the possibility that water still flows underground here. And where there is water, there is the possibility of life.

posted by me

:: 10:55:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: RUMMY TV ::

From en e-newsletter
By Arianna Huffington

The Bush administration has shown a willingness to do just about anything to manipulate public opinion. It paid pundits to say nice things about it. It spent lavishly to create bogus--and, according to the comptroller general, illegal--video news reports on the president's Medicare, education and drug policies. And it has given us Gannon/Guckert-gate.

Now the Bushies are taking things to the next level. Not content to buy their press coverage retail, they are producing and distributing their own news network. And, no, I'm not talking about Fox. It's the Pentagon Channel, a 24/7 niche network brought to you by the Department of Defense.

Started last year as an internal public relations unit within the Pentagon designed to keep U.S. soldiers and their families informed about all things military, the network is now expanding its reach to the general public. A number of cable systems, including Time Warner, already carry the Pentagon Channel--and the Dish Network will soon begin beaming the station to its more than 11 million viewers right alongside the half-dozen porn channels the satellite giant offers.

DoD television execs (there's a new phrase) say Pentagon Channel viewers can expect programming that is "a mix between CNN and C-SPAN"--combining military news and lifestyle shows with live coverage of military briefings, speeches by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Congressional appearances by The Man himself, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld.

So fire up those TiVos, disinformation fans; Rummy TV is coming soon to a flat screen near you. "If you hate the truth, you'll love DoD TV!"

According to the network's Web site, current Pentagon Channel programs include: "Why I Serve" ("Vignettes that allow military members . . . to share their stories and motivation for serving"); "Korea Destinations" ("Monthly preview of some great getaway locations in and around the Korean peninsula"); and "The American Veteran" ("a half-hour video news magazine designed to inform veterans. . . about the services and benefits they have earned through their service to America").

Which is all well and good. But, as is so often the case with the Bush administration, the Pentagon Channel's programming appears to have been prepared by--to quote Jeff Gannon--"people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality."

Now, if Secretary Rumsfeld were really interested in following the network's motto--"Serving Those Who Serve"--he might want to consider a more realistic lineup. How about:

-- "The Real World: Fallujah." What happens when a group of former Abu Ghraib guards, forced to share a bombed-out, camera-filled apartment in Fallujah with a collection of their former prisoners, stop being polite? Series highlights: Lynndie England hooking up at a Green Zone nightclub with a Baathist hottie who turns out to be none other than the guy she had on the leash! Then Mohammed, one of the ex-prisoners, getting wasted, prank-calling new Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and asking him if being sodomized with a broomstick sounds "quaint."

-- "Pimp My Humvee." Xzibit, Mad Mike, Big Dane and the "Pimp My Ride" crew lend a helping hand to American soldiers forced to scrounge through junk yards in an effort to outfit their vehicles with the armor the military has failed to provide--hooking our troops up with protective plates, as well as slammin' paint jobs, state-of-the-art sound systems, and spinning tire rims able to detect the roadside explosives responsible for so many U.S. casualties. The Humvees go from wimp to pimp while the soldiers go from sitting ducks to Mac Daddies.

-- "Desperate Military Housewives." There may be a lot of dark secrets on Wisteria Lane--but not half as many as there are in the homes of America's military families. "DMH" peels the curtain back on the home-front havoc being caused by President Bush's stop-loss policies and the extended tours of duty that result. Don't miss the very special episode where the president promises to "support our troops," then proposes a budget that slashes veterans' benefits and leaves one in five military families needing food stamps or Women, Infants and Children program aid to get by. Is it drama? Is it comedy? We produce. You decide.

-- "Iron Chef, Iraq." It's military cooking on an unlimited budget! Watch as the master chefs at Halliburton show what kind of battlefield-mess-hall-magic they can create with a noncompetitive, no-bid, cost-plus contract that allows them to overbill the Pentagon $186 million for meals that were never served. Who needs fast food when you can feed the troops phantom food? Sponsored by (who else?): "Halliburton, proud to serve our troops . . . and even prouder of the money we rake in by not serving them!"

-- "Survivor: Pentagon." Forget Africa, the South Pacific and the Australian Outback. This classic reality show really gets interesting when Donald Rumsfeld is cast adrift in the halls of the Pentagon with a tribe made up of people he has clashed with and helped push out the door, including former Secretary of State Colin Powell, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White, former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, former Secretary of the Air Force James Roche, and former head of the Iraqi Occupation, Jay Garner. Outwit. Outplay. Outlast. Out on your ass.

Will Rummy TV be a hit? Who can say? As The Man himself once put it: "As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns--the ones we don't know we don't know."

Stay tuned.

© 2005 ARIANNA HUFFINGTON.

posted by me

:: 10:21:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: Alternet Column ::

What We Don't Know About 9/11 Hurts Us
By Robert Scheer
The terrible fact is that the administration took none of the steps that would have put the protection of human life ahead of a diverse set of economic and political interests.

posted by me

:: 10:54:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: Dubya's Wead ::

Dubya taper: Keeping quiet cost me a million
BY KENNETH R. BAZINET
and THOMAS M. DeFRANK in Washington
and DAVE GOLDINER in New York
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

The conservative author who secretly taped conversations with President Bush insisted he gave up big bucks by holding his controversial book until after the 2004 election.

Doug Wead, who worked for Bush's father, said that decision proves he never planned to betray the future President by playing tapes of their private conversations for a reporter.

"I lost a million dollars by delaying the book after the election, where it would have been driven by partisan interests," Wead told CNN.

Wead drew on the tapes to write "The Raising of a President," which was released just after the new year to little fanfare. But he only recently played the tapes for a New York Times reporter to prove what he wrote was true.

"I'm a historian, and he's President," Wead said yesterday of Bush, adding, "He's my friend, yes."

Wead did not seem to get the message reported yesterday in the Daily News that he's persona non grata after breaking the No. 1 demand of the nation's most powerful political family: loyalty.

Read more here.

ALSO
Phone Tapes Suggest Bush's Unlawful Past
NPR (audio)

AND
Bush Unplugged
An Editorial
From The Los Angeles Times

The George W. Bush revealed in two years of surreptitiously recorded private conversations with a former friend is more complicated and appealing than the uncompromising, language-mangling leader whom Americans are accustomed to hearing. His struggle to fit his morality to his politics is illuminating, if not exactly comforting.

The Bush on the tapes — which begin in 1998, when he was running for a second term as Texas governor, and continue into 2000 and his run for the Republican presidential nomination — believes homosexuality is a sin but is unwilling to "kick gays" to win votes from religious conservatives because he understands human frailty. He may have smoked marijuana when he was young, but he won't admit it to reporters because that might lead kids down a dangerous path. And never mind that turn-the-other-cheek stuff, the born-again Bush is not afraid to sabotage political rivals who hit below the belt on the campaign trail.

The conversations — segments from a dozen tape recordings made by onetime Bush family political advisor Doug Wead and played first for the New York Times — display flashes of the sort of personality quirks that endear Bush to his supporters and frighten his critics.

Bush tells Wead, "The Bible is pretty good about keeping your ego in check" and says he stays humble by reading it every day. Yet he casts himself in grandiose terms, boasting that his popularity will "change Texas politics forever" by catapulting coattail Republicans to success when he wins his second term as governor.

While campaigning in 2000, he says he favored John Ashcroft as a vice presidential running mate because the right-wing senator "wouldn't say ugly things about me," suggesting that then, as now, he saw loyalty as the preferred litmus test for political picks.

And he demonstrates a political savvy that suggests that college grades and the ability to find Latvia on a map aren't the only measures of brilliance. Bush understands — in the same way Bill Clinton did — that the American electorate is eager to embrace the underdog, the fallible, the redeemed, and he manages to turn his self-described "wild behavior" as a young man into a political asset.

"I've sinned and I've learned" becomes his campaign mantra. He tells Wead, and now us, "That's part of my shtick, which is, 'Look, we have all made mistakes.' "

Odd that the same man, once in office, would be incapable of admitting them.

posted by me

:: 10:33:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: Gonzo RIP ::

Thompson Death Marks End of Literary Era

LOS ANGELES - (AP) In a rare moment of nostalgia, Hunter S. Thompson once reflected on the 1960s, the era that had formed him as a writer, as a time when "we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave."

Looking back at the era's passing, he added with no small measure of disappointment: "You can almost see the high-water mark - the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

Thompson's suicide Sunday at age 67 now gives those words from his 1971 classic, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," a special poignancy. Because the style of writing he invented - "gonzo journalism" - surely reached its peak with its creator and isn't likely to be duplicated in quite that way ever again.

Read more here.

A L S O
NOSE HAIR AND HUNTER
Greg Palast on HST

It was Princess Di's photographer who told me to shave the hair on top of my nose. That was when I was famous, famous for a whole week. I was famous only in England, an island off the coast of Ireland, but it was fame nonetheless. The entire front page of the Mirror, a London tabloid newspaper, was splashed with a ghastly photo of my head (hair on nose, not on head), an attacking my investigation of Tony Blair. My own paper, the Guardian/Observer, wanted to give a different impression of me, so the editors spent an ungodly sum of money to hire Princess Di's photographer to make me pretty for a large photo spread of their own. But there was nothing much the lens man could do. "Get rid of the nose hair," he suggested, working, without success, on the 200th snap.

I met Hunter Thompson when I was twenty years old; that is, saw him from the back of a crowd at the gym at my college where he was performing. I say "performing" because that's what Thompson did, even three decades ago. He'd become an astonishing success as a writer -- and his writing was astonishing. Then he became very accomplished at success and stopped accomplishing much as a writer. That's when I decided not to become a journalist.

If that's what a journalist does, I thought, I'd rather do something a little more interesting with my life. I switched to the hospital administration program with a plan to open a community health center in Woodlawn, then the hardest of the hard-core poverty troughs in Chicago.

Things didn't work out as planned; and twenty-five years later I ended up a reporter. Thompson ended up as a cartoon character. No kidding: "Transformer," the bald-headed comic book journalist hero, drinker, druggie, smart-aleck scourge of bad guys and editors.

That was the comic book; then there's the man. Thompson the writer kept writing in bits and snips, but it was always a parody of Thompson. His later compilations (he couldn't sustain a book) like "Generation of Swine" were brilliant one-joke rants. You'd read them and you didn't know a goddamn thing you didn't know before you read them.

Thompson stopped taking on the big topics -- after all, what topic could measure up to him?

It wasn't always that way. What impressed me about "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" is that it was written as a coda, a needed break, from Thompson's grueling investigative report on the death of Chicano activist Ruben Salazar. And this I also know: all that cool fear-and-loathing patter was not written on acid in a Ghia doing 140; it was typed alone in a quiet room.


Alone in a quiet room. No school gyms of adulating audiences on their feet to cheer the genius, no comic book figures dropping bon mots could press those keys.

And then came the satanic sucker-punch, celebrity. Poor Mr. Thompson.

When I think of how my one goofy week of offshore stardom twisted my head (I'm still neurotically plucking hairs off my nose), I can only imagine what Thompson's daily dose of fame cocaine did to him.

When I go off track, when I catch myself obsessing about my number on the Times' paperback nonfiction list, I wrestle my thoughts back to Tundu Lissu. Tundu's the lawyer who followed up on my investigation of the deaths of 50 Africans in George Bush Sr's gold mines. They were buried alive and Lissu brought back the evidence for which he was arrested and charged with sedition by the government of Tanzania. Released from prison, he refuses to seek refuge and safety.

Tundu Lissu is a giant. I barely reach his knees, that is, as a moral being. But I can do one thing: tell his story to the world -- and keep myself out of the way.

When a writer gets bigger than his subjects, he's dead -- though not yet buried.

This morning, I heard that Thompson faced this intractable truth, and completed the job; suicide with one of the guns he toyed with for the cameras.

Goodnight, Mr. Thompson.

And thanks for those astonishing words, no matter what they cost you.

posted by me

:: 9:21:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: News Light ::

Hackers Hit Celebrity Jackpot on Paris Hilton's Phone
From KGMB9 Hawaii

A hacker accessed Paris Hilton's cell phone and the entire contents of the phone were put online.

Personal photos and notes about her friends, parties and the phone numbers of some celebrities were posted over the weekend.

The website is no longer up. But several stars like Lindsay Lohan, Christina Aguilera and Eminiem say they're angry with Paris and have received hundreds of phone calls and will now have to change their numbers.

posted by me

:: 10:45:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: So Weird ::

From Chuck Shepherd's News of the Weird (.889)

LEAD STORY
In January, days after a crackdown by Mexican President Vicente Fox on corruption at the La Palma jail near Mexico City, a full-page ad appeared in the daily newspaper Reforma, supposedly placed by higher-profile inmates, who, according to the ad, were now suffering under "subhuman" conditions, treated "like dogs, like animals, like we are worthless ... scum of society." What the government had done was to confiscate the drug lords' and organized-crime leaders' big-screen TVs, computers and cell phones (which they were using to retain control of their operations from behind bars), break up their prison rackets, and even end their personal pizza deliveries. [Reuters, 1-31-05]

Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net

posted by me

:: 12:23:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: "Mystery Deepens Over Hariri Slaying" ::

BEIRUT, Lebanon - (AP) From traces of explosives supposedly collected off airline seats to the prospect a powerful bomb could have been planted beneath a Beirut street during recent road work, the mystery is deepening over who killed former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and how.

The Lebanese government and its Syrian supporters have been under intense domestic and international pressure to apprehend those responsible for the massive explosion that also killed 16 others and wounded more than 100 a week ago.

Foreign Minister Mahmoud Hammoud said Saturday that his government would "study" a request by the United Nations to involve a team of international investigators, adding it was "keen" to cooperate with the international body.

Lebanon has asked Switzerland to send DNA and explosives experts but has rejected an internationally led inquiry, which was called for by Hariri's family, political opposition members, and France and the United States. The government has promised a thorough investigation and has condemned the attack.

An unsettled public has been pressing for answers sooner rather than later and military experts, politicians and citizens have been weighing in with their own theories about the Feb. 14 attack. Many Lebanese have little confidence in authorities who were unable to solve a string of assassinations during its 1975-1990 civil war.

Read more here.

ALSO
Lebanon's Sorrow
Hariri's Murderers Were Targeting Democracy
By Nora Boustany
The Washington Post

From his first year as Lebanon's prime minister, Rafiq Hariri knew he was a hunted man.

One day in 1993, about 10 months into his tenure, I went to interview Hariri at his art deco villa. As we talked, I noticed that he was barely listening to my questions. His face ashen and glistening with beads of sweat, he led me to a square garden behind the house to chat privately. But even then, as we strolled and conversed, he kept looking nervously over his shoulder.

He was just back from Damascus, where he and Lebanon's president and speaker of the parliament had been dressed down by Hafez Assad, Syria's president then, as though they were office boys who had spilled the coffee. The reason: The Lebanese leaders had sent their army into towns just north of Israel to disarm the Shiite guerrilla group Hezbollah, which Assad felt was a useful tool of Syrian policy.

And while the Lebanese leaders had quickly pulled the army back, Hariri had good reason to be worried. That week, I learned later, two car bombs had been found along the road between his home in Koreitem near the sea and his office at the Serail near the center of Beirut.

For 20 years, Hariri had trod softly through the minefield of Lebanese politics, making deals at home while placating the Syrian overlords who treat Lebanon like a colony. But when he stopped doing business as usual, it all caught up to him.

Read more here.

AND
From The Sunday Herald Online
NEW FRONT IN THE WAR ON TERROR
With controversial diplomat John Negroponte installed as the all-powerful Director of National Intelligence, is the US about to switch from invasions to covert operations and dirty tricks? The assassination of the former Lebanese PM has aroused suspicions

posted by me

:: 6:44:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: "Iraq is spawning terrorist recruits" ::

War fuels resentment, officials say
Dana Priest and Josh White
Washington Post

WASHINGTON - The Iraq insurgency continues to baffle the U.S. military and intelligence communities, and the U.S. occupation has become a potent source of recruiting for al-Qaida and other terrorist groups, top U.S. national security officials said before Congress on Wednesday.

"Islamic extremists are exploiting the Iraqi conflict to recruit new anti-U.S. jihadists," CIA Director Porter Goss told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

"These jihadists who survive will leave Iraq experienced and focused on acts of urban terrorism," he said. "They represent a potential pool of contacts to build transnational terrorist cells, groups and networks in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries."

On a day when the top half-dozen U.S. national security and intelligence officials went to Capitol Hill to talk about the continued determination of terrorists to strike the United States, their statements underscored the unintended consequences of the war in Iraq.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 10:22:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: "Modern humans date back nearly 195,000 years" ::

From Globe and Mail, Canada
By LEE BOWMAN
Scripps Howard News Service

New dating analysis of Ethiopian rocks, found nearly 40 years ago holding the partial skulls of two modern humans, concludes that the remains are nearly 195,000 years old.

These findings, reported in today's edition of the journal Nature, roll back the debut of anatomically modern humans by as much as 50,000 years from previous estimates and raise new questions of just when the "sapiens" (thinking) part of Homo sapiens came into play.

When paleontologist Richard Leakey first found the fossilized bones in 1967 among rock formations beside Ethiopia's Omo River, they were thought to be 130,000 years old.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 10:08:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: "House panel approves spyware bill" ::

From CNET News.com
By Declan McCullagh

A House of Representatives panel on Wednesday approved a bill to regulate spyware, a move that begins a second attempt to target the problematic class of software after a similar measure died in the Senate in 2004. Last year, the House voted for the so-called Spy Act by a 399 to 1 margin.

This year's version is slightly different. Author Mary Bono, R-Calif., said that it was revised before Wednesday's vote to clarify that cookies, text files saved by Web browsers, are not covered by the bill--something that some online advertisers had worried about.

posted by me

:: 9:53:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: "Are Bullies After Our Culture?" ::

From Wired News
Book Review » David Bollier's Brand Name Bullies seeks to expose the "quest to own and control our culture." But the book's real value is in its numerous case studies of copyright and trademark battles. By Amit Asaravala.

posted by me

:: 11:13:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: "Kyoto Treaty Takes Effect Wednesday" ::

From The Washington Post
The Kyoto treaty to reduce global warming goes into effect today after seven years of wrangling, harangues, and dramatic entrances and exits by Russia and the United States.

posted by me

:: 10:27:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: "Future of Radio Is Downloadable" ::

From Wired News
A new station in Berlin is attempting to redefine music broadcasting for the interconnected internet age. The key will be MP3s and cell phones, not the old-fashioned radio. By Jason Walsh

posted by me

:: 10:33:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: "Radio station offers free divorce for Valentine's Day" ::

SYRACUSE, New York (AP) -- Cupid occasionally misses his mark, so a local radio station is running a Valentine's Day contest offering a free divorce.

"Everyone associates Valentine's Day with love, and diamonds, chocolate, roses. But what about those people that hate it? This is for those people," said Scott Petibone, program director at WKRL-FM, a progressive rock station.

The station began promoting its divorce-giveaway last week. By Thursday, the station received over 100 entries, Petibone said. A winner will be selected on Valentine's Day.

posted by me

:: 10:59:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: Love is all around ::

Some international Valentine's Day headlines:

Bombs explode at Valentine's day event in Bangladesh

Abu Sayyaf Claims Velentine's Day Bombings

Assam is despondent on Valentine's Day

Hindu Hard-Liners Burn Valentine's Day Cards

Valentine's Day comes under fire in Iraq; romantics seek safe venues

posted by me

:: 10:45:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: "St Valentine's day mass suicide pact fears" ::

by Jenny Booth,
Times Online

A 26-year-old man allegedly used an internet chatroom to try to entice up to 31 lonely single women to kill themselves on St Valentine's Day.

Gerald Krein was arrested last Wednesday at his mother's mobile home in the town of Klamath Falls, Oregon, after a woman in Canada reported him to police.

The woman told detectives that she had been intending to join in the pact herself, but changed her mind after another chatroom participant said she would do it, and talked about killing her two children before taking her own life.

So far investigators have tracked down four women - in Canada, Oregon, Missouri and Virginia - who were in touch with Gerald Krein, and discussed taking their own lives.

But detectives fear that there may be other women who are unaware that Mr Krein has been arrested, who may be intending to go ahead and kill themselves. Mr Krein has said that he was in touch with 31 women.

posted by me

:: 10:41:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: So Weird ::

From Chuck Shepherd's News of the Weird (.888)

LEAD STORY
Most Competent Criminal: Jeffrey "Roofman" Manchester, 33, was finally recaptured after six months of inspired police-dodging in Charlotte, N.C., after having smuggled himself out of a previously escape-proof prison nearby. According to a January profile in the San Francisco Chronicle, Manchester (a handsome, athletic, personable man who got his nickname from a multistate series of ceiling-entry burglaries) built an ingenious home behind a cubbyhole at a Toys-R-Us, then at an abandoned Circuit City next door, outfitting both digs with various conveniences, such as a protective surveillance camera. The dashing Manchester volunteered at a church, befriending the pastor and dating a parishioner, who eventually helped police capture him. Said a police sergeant, "(W)e can learn a lot from him." [San Francisco Chronicle, 1-11-05]

Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net

posted by me

:: 10:11:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: Penguin legal update ::

The Day After SCO Dies
eWeek
Opinion: When SCO finally goes down in flames, what will happen to Linux and SCO's Unix products and IP? I have a few ideas and a lot of questions.

posted by me

:: 8:59:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: "Denying the public access to information ..." ::

A danger to democracy
Paul K. McMasters
The Daily Herald, Provo, UT

"The first casualty when war comes is truth," thundered Hiram Johnson, senator from California, on the floor of the Senate in 1917.

But the essential component of truth, information, is so heavily guarded these days that truth, if not a casualty in the war on terrorism, certainly goes missing in action all too often.

In a war setting, of course, the right information in the wrong hands can be lethal. The same is true for homeland security. But there's also this: The right information in the public's hands can prove embarrassing, inconvenient or worse for our elected and appointed leaders.

It is no wonder, then, that information is heavy on the minds of government officials.

First and foremost, it is a kind of currency, used for bartering, brokering, managing, safeguarding, hoarding. It is used to purchase influence. It even comes in various denominations: "raw data," described in a recent government report as having no assessment of its accuracy or implications; "knowledge," having "a high degree of reliability or validity"; and "intelligence," which has been "carefully evaluated concerning its accuracy and significance, and may sometimes be credited in terms of its source."

However it's categorized or utilized within the government, only a pathetic amount of the total makes its way to the public. Just a few days' worth of news illustrates how quickly new and improved barriers to public access to government information are springing up all over the nation's capital.

Perhaps the most troubling recent development was the decision of the Justice Department to require a public interest group to pay almost $400,000 upfront if it wanted to take a peek at records that might reveal how many secret legal proceedings the department had initiated against immigrant detainees rounded up after 9/11.

Department officials initially denied the Freedom of Information request by People for the American Way filed in November 2003, saying that it would violate the detainees' privacy. Now, it has decided that it could comply with the request if PFAW would pay the $400,000 for the cost of searching its files.

"To say it would take hundreds of thousands of dollars to look for something that should be obvious in any U.S. attorney's office -- cases that are filed under seal -- is very difficult to credit," said Elliot Mincberg, the organization's general counsel.

Elsewhere in the Justice Department, the Office of Justice Programs denied the request of a reporting team from Cox Newspapers for access to records about illegal aliens convicted of serious crimes and who had been released without being deported. The office explained that the database couldn't be made available because the privacy interest of the criminals trumped the public interest in information about who and where they were.

The Department of Energy, in a dramatic reversal of intent, announced that it would not release to the public an unclassified history of highly enriched uranium. DOE officials had promised in 1997 that they would publish the history. Now, they've decided the history has become an "internal" document.

"This is a bizarre redefinition of the FOIA exemption for 'internal' agency records," said secrecy expert Steven Aftergood, noting that this interpretation of "internal" would probably exempt massive amounts of government records from public disclosure. Aftergood also pointed out that as late as Feb. 2, the history was available on DOE's Web site.

The CIA, meanwhile, refuses to release to a government working group hundreds of thousands of pages of documents about the United States' dealings with former Nazis after World War II, despite a 1998 law requiring release of the documents.

(After two years of refusing to budge on this issue and under the threat of CIA director Porter Goss's being summoned to testify in public about the matter, the CIA agreed over the weekend of Feb. 5-6 to broaden its interpretation of the law and release some of the records to the working group, according to The New York Times.)

This is just a sampling of the barriers federal officials are putting in the way of ordinary citizens, public-interest groups and the press seeking to know more about what the government is doing or not doing. These barriers come in many forms: delay, denial, prohibitive fees, new categories of withholding and new ways of interpreting old categories.

Certainly a lot of this activity comes from a heightened sensitivity about security. But some of it also is about reflexive action on the part of some officials. They want to appear to be taking action. They want to appear to be in control. And they often use control of information as a way to buy time to solve a problem, a self-defeating mechanism that shuts out the public, a necessary source of experience, wisdom and support.

Without scanting the needs of security, Americans must reassert their right to examine policy and scrutinize actions taken in their name and paid for with their taxes. They must insist that government leaders get past the reflexive and on to the thoughtful, to share with one another rather than compartmentalize without deliberation, to manage sensitive information without trying to control public opinion or participation.

Government policies and action draw allegiance from public awareness and participation. Democracy draws its strength and vitality from the multiplicity of viewpoints and experience embedded in the citizenry.

What we can't know can hurt us. It can hurt good decisions and policy. It can hurt government accountability. And it can hurt our ability to identify and address our vulnerabilities in the war on terrorism.

Paul K. McMasters is the First Amendment ombudsman at the Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center.

posted by me

:: 10:59:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: 52 Pre-9/11 Warnings? ::

Reports before 9/11 warned FAA of al Qaeda hijackings
Eric Lichtblau, New York Times
via SF Chronicle

Washington -- In the months before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal aviation officials reviewed dozens of intelligence reports that warned about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, some of which specifically discussed hijackings and suicide attacks, according to a previously undisclosed report from the Sept. 11 commission.

posted by me

:: 10:59:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: Penguin legal update ::

Judge slams SCO's lack of evidence against IBM
By Stephen Shankland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

The federal judge overseeing the SCO Group's suit against IBM regarding Unix and Linux has thwarted an IBM attempt to defang SCO's claims, but he also voiced loud skepticism about SCO's case.

IBM in 2004 sought a declaration that its Linux activities hadn't violated SCO's purported Unix copyrights, as SCO had claimed publicly and in its lawsuit. Although U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball didn't grant that declaration--called a partial summary judgment--he sharply criticized SCO for not producing evidence for its case.

"Despite the vast disparity between SCO's public accusations and its actual evidence--or complete lack thereof--and the resulting temptation to grant IBM's motion, the court has determined that it would be premature to grant summary judgment," Kimball wrote Wednesday. "Viewed against the backdrop of SCO's plethora of public statements concerning IBM's and others' infringement of SCO's purported copyrights to the Unix software, it is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence to create a disputed fact regarding whether IBM has infringed SCO's alleged copyrights through IBM's Linux activities."

The opinion bodes poorly for SCO, intellectual property attorneys agreed.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 10:57:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: "Twilight of the Jedi" ::

From Wired News
Star Wars fans can't wait for the opening of the supposedly final installment of the series, but what are they going to do once it's all over? By Jason Silverman.

posted by me

:: 7:55:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: "Uncle Sam & the Swastika" ::

CIA ties to ex-Nazis in spotlight
From Reuters UK

By David Morgan

WASHINGTON - A U.S. senator has demanded that the CIA director release thousands of pages of documents detailing the agency's ties with former Nazis who aided in Cold War espionage against the Soviet Union, officials said.

Sen. Mike DeWine of Ohio, Republican co-author of a 1998 bill ordering the disclosure of government records on Nazi war criminals, wants CIA Director Porter Goss to say publicly why his agency has not agreed to divulge the records.

DeWine has asked Goss to appear this month at an open hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on which the Ohio lawmaker sits, a Senate aide said. The CIA had no immediate comment on the invitation.

Read the story here.

ALSO
CIA agrees to release records detailing ties to former Nazis
Douglas Jehl, New York Times
via San Francisco Chronicle

... the CIA explicitly pledged for the first time to "acknowledge any relationship" between the CIA and SS members, regardless of whether there was any information specifically tying them to war crimes. The message said the CIA had also agreed that documents "concerning acts performed by Nazi war criminals, to include members of the SS, on behalf of CIA" are relevant and are subject to disclosure under the law.

posted by me

:: 10:59:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: "All the News That's Fit to Buy" ::

From Wired News
A couple of websites purporting to be legitimate news outlets are the subject of a probe into the Pentagon's practice of paying journalists to write articles and commentary to influence opinion. The military calls them "information operations."

ALSO
from Wired News

Disposable DVDs at Crossroads
Environmentalists are thrilled that Disney has ditched the disposable DVD format, which didn't sell well anyway. But the company that created the technology has sold, and the new owners are committed to the throwaways. By Katie Dean.

Photographer Seeks Resolution
Crisscrossing America taking giant, ultra-high-resolution photographs of cities and landmarks, retired Reagan-era Star Wars physicist Graham Flint has custom-built a camera that captures gigapixels. By Leander Kahney.

AND
from Wired Magazine

The Microsoft Memo
Wait - Gates hires open source icon Linus Torvalds? That was just the beginning of Redmond's bold hybrid strategy to face the free software future. By Gary Wolf.

posted by me

:: 10:44:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: So Weird ::

From Chuck Shepherd's News of the Weird

Great Art!

In December, outgoing San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Matt Gonzalez turned over his City Hall office to graffiti artist Barry McGee, who orange-spray-painted the walls with various designs and the message "Smash the State" as Gonzalez's tribute to street art. (Mayor Gavin Newsom, a political opponent of Gonzalez, has been a vocal critic of street graffiti.) Gonzalez promised that, before he left office, he would restore the walls to their previous color. [San Francisco Chronicle, 12-10-04]

A survey of 500 arts experts, conducted in November by the sponsor of Britain's prestigious Turner Prize, named as the most influential work of modern art (beating out two works by Picasso) Marcel Duchamp's 1917 "Fountain," which is merely a white porcelain urinal. (Duchamp was a central figure in the movement to present ordinary objects as art.) [Associated Press, 12-1-04]

In November at the Tate Britain gallery, sculptor Antony Gormley presented "Bed," a pile of 8,000 slices of bread arranged to resemble a large mattress but from which Gormley had first eaten an amount out of it that represented the volume of his body. Apparently Gormley did not devour the bread so much as chew it and then remove it and form different-shaped pieces, which he then dried out, chemically preserved, and displayed. The Tate Britain was so thrilled with the installation that it became the centerpiece in a room devoted to Gormley's lifetime body of work. [The Times (London), 11-25-04]

Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net

posted by me

:: 10:55:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: "POST-ELECTION BUZZKILL: WHY IRAQ IS STILL A DEBACLE" ::

By Arianna Huffington

Quick, before the conventional wisdom hardens, it needs to be said: The Iraqi elections were not the second coming of the Constitutional Convention.

The media have made it sound like last Sunday was a combination of 1776, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Prague Spring, the Ukraine's Orange Revolution, Filipino "People Power," Tiananmen Square and Super Bowl Sunday -- all rolled into one.

It's impossible not to be moved by the stories coming out of Iraq: voters braving bombings and mortar blasts to cast ballots; multiethnic crowds singing and dancing outside polling places; election workers, undeterred by power outages, counting ballots by the glow of oil lamps; teary-eyed women in traditional Islamic garb proudly holding up their purple ink-stained fingers -- literally giving the finger to butcher knife-wielding murderers.

It was a great moment. A Kodak moment. And unlike the other Kodak moments from this war -- think Saddam's tumbling statue and Jessica Lynch's "rescue" -- this one was not created by the image masters at Karl Rove Productions.

But this Kodak moment, however moving, should not be allowed to erase all that came before it, leaving us unprepared for all that may come after it.

I'm sorry to kill the White House's buzz -- and the press corps' contact high -- but the triumphalist fog rolling across the land has all the makings of another "Mission Accomplished" moment.

Forgive me for trotting out Santayana's shopworn dictum that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it but, for god's sake people, can't we even remember last week?

So amid all the talk of turning points, historic days and defining moments, let us steadfastly refuse to drink from the River Lethe that brought forgetfulness and oblivion to my ancient ancestors.

Let's not forget that for all the president's soaring rhetoric about spreading freedom and democracy, free elections were the administration's fallback position. More Plan D than guiding principle. We were initially going to install Ahmed Chalabi as our man in Baghdad, remember? Then that shifted to the abruptly foreshortened reign of "Bremer of Arabia." The White House only consented to holding open elections after Grand Ayatollah Sistani sent his followers into the streets to demand them -- and even then Bush refused to allow the elections until after our presidential campaign was done, just in case more suicide bombers than voters turned up at Iraqi polling places.

And the election doesn't change that.

Let's not forget that despite the hoopla, this was a legitimate democratic election in name only. Actually, not even in name since most of the candidates on Sunday's ballot had less name recognition than your average candidate for dogcatcher. That's because they were too afraid to hold rallies or give speeches. Too terrorized to engage in debates. In fact, many were so anxious about being killed that they fought to keep their names from being made public. Some didn't even know their names had been placed on the ballot. On top of that, this vote was merely to elect a transitional national assembly that will then draft a new constitution that the people of Iraq will then vote to approve or reject, followed by yet another vote -- this time to elect a permanent national assembly.

And the election doesn't change that.

Let's not forget that many Iraqi voters turned out to send a defiant message not just to the insurgents but to President Bush as well. Many of those purple fingers were raised in our direction. According to a poll taken by our own government, a jaw-dropping 92 percent of Iraqis view the U.S.-led forces in Iraq as "occupiers" while only 2 percent see them as "liberators."

And the election doesn't change that.

Let's not forget that the war in Iraq has made America far less safe than it was before the invasion. According to an exhaustive report released last month by the CIA's National Intelligence Council, Iraq has become a breeding ground for the next generation of "professionalized" Islamic terrorists. Foreign terrorists are now honing their deadly skills against U.S. troops -- skills they will eventually take with them to other countries, including ours. The report also warns that the war in Iraq has deepened solidarity among Muslims worldwide and increased anti-American feelings across the globe. Iraq has also drained tens of billions of dollars in resources that might otherwise have gone to really fighting the war on terror or increasing our preparedness for another terror attack here at home.

And the election doesn't change that.

Let's not forget the woeful lack of progress we've made in the reconstruction of Iraq. The people there still lack such basics as gas and kerosene. Indeed, Iraqis often wait in miles-long lines just to buy gas. The country is producing less electricity than before the war -- roughly half of current demand. There are food shortages, the cost of staple items such as rice and bread is soaring, and the number of Iraqi children suffering from malnutrition has nearly doubled. According to UNICEF, nearly 1 in 10 Iraqi children is suffering the effects of chronic diarrhea caused by unsafe water -- a situation responsible for 70 percent of children's deaths in Iraq.

And the election doesn't change that.

Let's not forget the blistering new report from the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, which finds that the U.S. occupation government that ruled Iraq before last June's transfer of sovereignty has been unable to account for nearly $9 billion, overseeing a reconstruction process "open to fraud, kickbacks and misappropriation of funds."

And the election doesn't change that.

Let's not forget that we still don't have an exit strategy for Iraq. The closest the president has come is saying that we'll be able to bring our troops home when, as he put it on Sunday, "this rising democracy can eventually take responsibility for its own security" -- "eventually" being the operative word. Although the administration claims over 120,000 Iraqi security forces have been trained, other estimates put the number closer to 14,000, with less than 5,000 of them ready for battle. And we keep losing those we've already trained: some 10,000 Iraqi National Guardsmen have quit or been dropped from the rolls in the last six months. Last summer, the White House predicted Iraqi forces would be fully trained by spring 2005; their latest estimate has moved that timetable to summer 2006.

And the election doesn't change that.

And let's never forget this administration's real goal in Iraq, as laid out by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and their fellow neocon members of the Project for the New American Century back in 1998 when they urged President Clinton and members of Congress to take down Saddam "to protect our vital interests in the Gulf." These vital interests were cloaked in mushroom clouds, WMD that turned into "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities," and a Saddam/al-Qaida link that turned into, well, nothing. Long before the Bushies landed on freedom and democracy as their 2005 buzzwords, they already had their eyes on the Iraqi prize: the second-largest oil reserves in the world, and a permanent home for U.S. bases in the Middle East.

This is still the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. And the election, as heart-warming as it was, doesn't change any of that.

© 2005 ARIANNA HUFFINGTON.

posted by me

:: 10:22:00 AM [+] ::
...