:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 12.27.2006 ::

:: "ANALYSIS-Bush digging in heels on Iraq course change" ::

Reuters AlertNet, UK
By Matt Spetalnick

WASHINGTON, Dec 27 (Reuters) - Just weeks after pledging a new approach in the Iraq war in the wake of his party's defeat in congressional elections, U.S. President George W. Bush seems to be digging in his heels against any major change of course.

Bush is spending the holiday week in consultations at his Texas ranch preparing for one of the most fateful moments of his presidency, a policy speech early in the new year charting what he has called "a new way forward" in Iraq.

Even as he gives the impression of seriously considering a range of ideas on how to handle an increasingly unpopular war that has killed nearly 3,000 U.S. troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis, Bush has made clear some options are off-limits.

He has brushed aside a proposal from a bipartisan panel to ask U.S. foes Iran and Syria for help in stabilizing Iraq and, instead of talking about a U.S. troop reduction, he is said to be looking closely at a temporary increase.

That has critics predicting that Bush, who prides himself in sticking to decisions, will announce little real change.

"He is now caught between admitting the war was a mistake and his policy has failed, or trying to tough it out," said Joseph Cirincione, a foreign policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington think tank.

"It looks like the president would rather let the whole operation go down in flames than admit he was wrong."

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 10:53:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "JAMES BROWN: 1933-2006" ::

San Francisco Chronicle

James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, whose career spanned more than 50 years and who influenced the evolution of rap, funk and disco, died early Christmas morning in an Atlanta hospital. He was 73.

Brown, who had been admitted to Emory Crawford Long Hospital on Saturday for treatment of pneumonia, died at about 1:45 a.m. Monday of pneumonia and congestive heart failure, according to his agent, Frank Copsidas of Intrigue Music. The music legend, known for an exhausting touring schedule and sweat-drenched, hard-charging live shows, had seemed to be on the mend at first, even telling people he planned to be on stage in New York on New Year's Eve at B.B. King's nightclub.

Brown's long string of hits tells only part of the story of why he mattered so much in R&B and pop music. Among his hits were "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine" and "I Got You (I Feel Good)."

The rest of the story has to do with his drive, his inexhaustible power to reinvent himself and his indelible impact on other performers and pop music of many varieties. Performers as varied as Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, David Bowie and Public Enemy were influenced by Brown's musicality and unique style.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 12:52:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "Experts fear ‘Scream’ suffered lasting damage" ::

Edvard Munch masterpiece stolen 2 years ago may be too damaged to fix
msnbc.com

OSLO, Norway - Experts fear that theft damage to Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream,” one of the world’s most famous images, may be too extensive to completely repair, according to a report to be released Friday.

The painting and another Munch masterpiece, “Madonna” were recovered by police in August, two years after they were stolen from Oslo’s Munch Museum by masked gunmen in a brazen daylight heist on Aug. 22, 2004. Police have refused to say how they recovered the artworks, or where they had been for the two years.

After extensive study, museum experts are turning over a 200-page assessment to Oslo police, which, among other things, expresses concern about moisture damage to a swath of “The Scream.”

poted by me

:: 4:00:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "Researchers Find Surprise in Makeup of a Comet" ::

New York Times

WASHINGTON — Comets are not all made of interstellar dust and ice, but instead may contain material shot from the heart of the solar system during its tumultuous birth, scientists reported Thursday after examining pristine particles of a comet that were brought back by the Stardust spacecraft.

The evidence suggests that comets did not form in isolation in the outer parts of the solar system as it coalesced from a swirling mass of primal material, the researchers said. Instead, they said, some of the hot material that formed planets around the Sun seems to have spewed off into distant areas and become a component of distant comets.

“Many people imagined that comets formed in total isolation from the rest of the solar system; we have shown that’s not true,” said Donald Brownlee, a University of Washington astronomer who is the lead scientist for the Stardust mission.

“As the solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago,” Dr. Brownlee said, “material moved from the innermost part to the outermost part. I think of it as the solar system partially turning itself inside out.”

The first results of Stardust, appearing in seven reports published in the Dec. 15 issue of the journal Science, were reported in San Francisco on Thursday at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

NASA launched Stardust in 1999, and the robot spacecraft met comet Wild 2 beyond the orbit of Mars in January 2004. The craft flew within 150 miles of the comet’s nucleus and trapped particles spewing from the body in a light, porous foam called aerogel. After a 2.88-billion-mile journey, Stardust returned to Earth last January with a payload of thousands of tiny particles from Wild 2.

The comet formed more than 4.5 billion years ago and had remained preserved in the frozen reaches of the outer solar system until 1974, when a close encounter with Jupiter shifted its orbit to a path between Jupiter and Mars.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 12:45:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "Support for War Dives as Bush Seeks New Iraq Plan" ::

Don Gonyea
NPR

The White House on Tuesday pushed back until January a major policy address from President Bush on the war in Iraq. The delay comes as several major national polls on the war, all of which became public Tuesday, show plummeting public support.

The president's speech had been promised before Christmas; the delay until next month comes as Mr. Bush continues to debrief policy experts from inside and outside his administration and weigh his options on a new U.S. strategy for Iraq. But one consideration could have been the combined weight of the polls, which offered numbers sure to be disturbing to the president and his advisers.

All the polls found that backing for the war -- already weak enough to hurt Republican candidates in the November midterm elections -- continues to decline. They also found that the general public wants the president to pay heed to key recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, a 10-member bipartisan panel commissioned by Congress. Among its 79 recommendations, the group urged the Bush administration to begin direct talks with Iran and Syria and to set a goal of withdrawing most U.S. ground troops over the next 15 months.

This week, the president has been holding a series of high-profile meetings behind closed doors at the Pentagon and State Department, as well as with prominent Iraqi politicians. The White House has said the president is seeking a new approach that might stem the tide of sectarian violence in Iraq. But the president and his spokespersons have said these meetings are not about the ISG report or its specific recommendations.

The White House's resistance to the report reflects the attitude of conservatives generally, who have denounced the report as a defeatist. But the more general public is clearly dissatisfied with the situation in Iraq and interested in policy alternatives.

The CBS poll, based on interviews conducted Dec. 8-10, shows that 21 percent of Americans approve of the way President Bush is handling the situation in Iraq. Further, the polls shows that 75 percent disapprove. (A scant 4 percent is undecided on this point.)

The poll also shows that 70 percent are "uneasy" about the president's "ability to make the right decisions about the war in Iraq." A majority also believe, according to the CBS survey, that it was wrong to take military action against Iraq and that the United States should have stayed out.

Other polls tell a similar story.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 9:58:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "Protests and parties after Pinochet's death" ::

Reuters.uk

SANTIAGO, Chile - The body of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose government killed thousands during his 17-year-rule, was taken to a military college in the capital Santiago on Monday after his death sparked violence, tears and celebration.

Pinochet, who polarised Chile during his 1973-1990 dictatorship and spent his old age fighting human rights, fraud and corruption charges, died on Sunday.

He suffered a heart attack a week ago and, just when he appeared to be recovering, his health suddenly deteriorated, doctors said.


News of his death prompted an outpouring of emotion in Chile where, a third of a century after he swept to power, Pinochet's legacy is still hotly disputed.

More than 5,000 people took to the streets, the Interior Ministry said. Some mourned a man who they say saved Chile from communism while others revelled in the death of South America's most notorious Cold War dictator.

Some demonstrations turned violent, and military police used tear gas to disperse anti-Pinochet protesters who tried to march to the presidential palace, a potent symbol for many Chileans since it was bombed during the 1973 coup which brought the general to power.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 12:38:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "The Iraq Study Group: A Fatal Flaw" ::

A report from The Nation
Robert Dreyfuss

There's good news and bad news in the long-awaited report of the Iraq Study Group. Happily, it starts the United States down the path of withdrawal. Unhappily, its most basic premise--that the United States can somehow support the nonexistent Iraqi government and bolster its viciously sectarian armed forces--is fatally flawed.

Let's start with the good news. The ISG has delivered a stunning body blow to the White House. Stripped of its details, the ISG's message is that President Bush's Iraq policy is a complete failure that has brought Iraq and the Middle East to the brink of catastrophe. As a result, the United States must execute an about-face. Almost immediately, the United States must begin withdrawing virtually all of its combat forces from Iraq, a withdrawal that should be completed early in 2008. At the same time, it says, the United States will have to scramble to launch a diplomatic effort involving Iraq's neighbors--including Syria and Iran--the Arab League, the UN, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and other world powers to prevent Iraq from spiraling into chaos.

Further, says the ISG report--which was handed personally to Bush by Hamilton and his co-chair, former Secretary of State Jim Baker, Wednesday--the United States must renounce any idea of permanent bases in Iraq, "reject the notion that the United States seeks to control Iraq's oil" and urgently seek national reconciliation in Iraq. To that latter end, the ISG proposes that the United States "must also try to talk directly to Muqtada al-Sadr, to militia leaders, and to insurgent leaders"--in other words, instead of seeking to crush the Iraqi resistance and smash Sadr's Mahdi Army, it's time to talk to them. And to top it all off, the ISG proposes a vigorous effort to restart the Palestinian-Israeli peace process.

It's hard to imagine a more sweeping rebuke to the President's disastrously misguided Middle East policy. The report breathes not one word about "victory" in Iraq. Ever the master of understatement, Baker said that the idea of staying the course in Iraq "is no longer viable."

The Baker-Hamilton report instantly isolated President Bush against a snowballing consensus among the mainstream political establishment. In a collective I-told-you-so, Democrats mostly heaped praise on the ISG report. "If the president is serious about the need for change in Iraq, he will find Democrats ready to work with him in a bipartisan fashion to find a way to end the war as quickly as possible," said Nancy Pelosi, the incoming speaker of the House, who added that the ISG report echoed virtually all of the Democrats' main talking points on Iraq.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 4:35:00 PM [+] ::
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:: The Dark Side of the Moon ::

NASA to build permanent base on the moon
Daily Telegraph

NASA says it plans to build a permanently occupied base on the moon, most likely at the lunar south pole

The habitat will serve as a science outpost as well as a testbed for technologies needed for future travel to Mars, and construction will follow a series of flights to the moon scheduled to begin by 2020.

"We're going for a base on the moon," Scott "Doc" Horowitz, NASA's associate administrator for exploration, said from the Johnson Space Centre in Houston.
Plans for what the base will look like and what astronauts would do there have yet to be determined. Similarly, NASA has not projected a date when the base would go into operation.

The moon's polar sites are preferred to equatorial regions because of more moderate temperatures and longer periods of sunlight, which is critical for the solar-powered electrical systems NASA plans to develop. Eventually, nuclear power may be used to augment or replace the solar energy systems.

Scientists also suspect the poles have resources such as hydrogen, ice and other materials that could be used for life support.

"It's exciting," said NASA deputy administrator Shana Dale. "We don't know as much about the polar regions."

The US had already announced plans to develop new spacecraft to travel to the moon and land on its surface for the first time since the last Apollo flight there in 1972. It also plans to provide a communications system linking Earth and the moon.
But NASA doesn't plan to go to the moon alone. The United States will look for international and commercial partners to share the expense and possibly provide components such as extra power systems, living quarters and resources for surface travel on the moon.

NASA is not expecting a budget increase to pay for the program. Rather, it will use funds that will become available as the space shuttle fleet is phased out.

Read more here.

A L S O

America's Race to the Moon
California Literary Review

posted by me

:: 1:04:00 AM [+] ::
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:: Bad Day? ::

Bush says he's 'not happy' to have to accept Bolton resignation as U.N. ambassador
International Herald Tribune

WASHINGTON: Lacking the votes to keep his job, embattled U.N. Ambassador John Bolton is resigning, a defeat for a chagrined President George W. Bush who had clung to hopes of Senate confirmation.

Bolton got the position in August 2005, appointed by Bush when Congress was in recess. With that temporary assignment about to expire, and his long fight for confirmation going nowhere, Bolton made it official Monday.

He handed in a resignation letter that did not mention the political fight behind it. It said simply: "I have concluded that my service in your administration should end when the current recess appointment expires."

"I accepted. I'm not happy about it," Bush said Monday afternoon in the Oval Office, with Bolton at his side. Bush did not name a replacement, and officials offered no timetable for an announcement.

The setback for the White House seemed to put a hold on talk of bipartisanship after last month's election gave control of the Senate and the House of Representatives to Democrats. Both formerly were in the hands of Bush's Republican Party.

Bush considered Bolton a strong voice as the United Nations dealt with crises in Iraq, Lebanon, North Korea and other complex matters around the world. Bolton also pushed the administration's effort to reform the United Nations.

Most Democrats strongly opposed Bolton, whom they viewed as a brusque, ill-suited diplomat. Some Republicans helped scuttle his nomination, including moderate Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island.

The president had stinging words for Bolton's opponents.

"They chose to obstruct his confirmation, even though he enjoys majority support in the Senate, and even though their tactics will disrupt our diplomatic work at a sensitive and important time," Bush said in a statement. "This stubborn obstructionism ill serves our country."

Democrats, though, said Bolton's resignation signaled a fresh start.
"Hopefully this change marks a shift from the failed go-it-alone strategies that have left America less safe," said the incoming Senate majority leader, Democrat Harry Reid of Nevada.

"With the Middle East on the verge of chaos and the nuclear threats from Iran and North Korea increasing, we need a United Nations ambassador who has the full support of Congress and can help rally the international community to tackle the serious threats we face," said Sen. John Kerry, the Democrats' 2004 presidential candidate.

Read more here.

:: 1:01:00 AM [+] ::
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:: RE Rummy ::

Rumsfeld Memo Proposed ‘Major Adjustment’ in Iraq
New York Times

WASHINGTON — Two days before he resigned as defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld submitted a classified memo to the White House that acknowledged that the Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq was not working and called for a major course correction.

“In my view it is time for a major adjustment,” wrote Mr. Rumsfeld, who has been a symbol of a dogged stay-the-course policy. “Clearly, what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough.”

Nor did Mr. Rumsfeld seem confident that the administration would readily develop an effective alternative. To limit the political fallout from shifting course, he suggested the administration consider a campaign to lower public expectations.

“Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis,” he wrote. “This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not ‘lose.’ ”

“Recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about them) — go minimalist,” he added. The memo suggests frustration with the pace of turning over responsibility to the Iraqi authorities; in fact, the memo calls for examination of ideas that roughly parallel troop withdrawal proposals presented by some of the White House’s sharpest Democratic critics.

The memo’s discussion of possible troop reduction options offers a counterpoint to Mr. Rumsfeld’s frequent public suggestions that discussions about force levels are driven by requests from American military commanders.

It also puts on the table several ideas for troop redeployments or withdrawals, even as there have been recent pronouncements from American commanders emphasizing the need to maintain troop levels for the time being.

Read more here.

A L S O

Text of the Memo

Doubts on Iraq, Even From Rumsfeld (Letters)

posted by me

:: 12:56:00 AM [+] ::
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:: Civil War? ::

UN Secretary Says Iraq Is Engulfed in Deadly Civil War
New York Times

BAGHDAD — Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, said Sunday that Iraq had descended into a civil war that was even deadlier and more anarchic than the 15-year sectarian bloodshed that tore apart Lebanon.

“When we had the strife in Lebanon and other places, we called that a civil war; this is much worse,” Mr. Annan said in an interview with the BBC.

In making his remarks, Mr. Annan joined a growing number of foreign and Iraqi leaders, policy makers and news organizations who say that Iraq is in the grip of civil war. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said last Wednesday at a conference in the United Arab Emirates that Iraq is in a civil war. A former Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, said the same last March.

The Bush administration has not characterized the conflict as a civil war.

The debate over the term raged last week in the United States, after NBC and other major news organizations said they were ready to apply it to Iraq. Scholars say that the widening sectarian conflict meets the common scholarly definition of a civil war and that when measured by deaths per year, Iraq is among the top civil wars of the last half-century. The civilian death toll is believed to be at least 50,000.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 12:51:00 AM [+] ::
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