"Hello, my name is Mary Man-Hating-Is-Fun," one participant said.
[This is an A-1 disaster in the making. Forget about foolisng around with Iraq or illegal immigrants or whatever. This is a serious food-related issue, and everyone eats food.]
More than $15 billion in U.S. crops rides each year on the tiny legs of an insect.
The honeybee is the major carrier of pollen for seeded fruits and just about anything that grows on a vine. Everything, in other words, from apples to zucchini.
"If honeybees ceased to exist, two-thirds of the citrus, all of the watermelons, the blueberries, strawberries, pecans and beans would disappear," said Jerry Hayes, apiary inspection chief with the state's Division of Plant Industry.
But now it's the bee itself that is disappearing.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0328-01.htm
Members of a violent Central America-based gang have been sent to Arizona to target Minuteman Project volunteers, who will begin a monthlong border vigil this weekend to find and report foreigner sneaking into the United States, project officials say.
James Gilchrist, a Vietnam veteran who helped organize the vigil to protest the federal government's failure to control illegal immigration, said he has been told that California and Texas leaders of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, have issued orders to teach "a lesson" to the Minuteman volunteers.
http://www.rense.com/general63/sddd.htm
"Hello, my name is Mary Man-Hating-Is-Fun," one participant said. "I am 23 years old, and I am what a feminist looks like. Ever since I learned to embrace my feminist nature, I found great joy in threatening men's lives, flicking off frat brothers and plotting the patriarchy's death. I hate men because they are men, because I see them for what they are: misogynistic, sexist, oppressive and absurdly pathetic beings who only serve to pollute and contaminate this world with war, abuse, oppression and rape."
Members of the FAL wore scissors around their necks, as members of the audience lightheartedly sang a song about castration.
...
"What I heard last night was not feminism; it was a hate rally," he continued. "I went there with an open mind, thinking the patriarchy was only that group of sexist, chauvinists that discriminate against women. Ms. Smith said that all men are the enemy. This is clear cut sexism and blind hatred."
http://www.rense.com/general63/dur.htm
[Now this seems to be science working for people. Why can’t scientists do more of this kind of thing?]
But amid the hubbub of the Easter crowds queuing yesterday in the Konditorei, cake shop, for rich chocolate cakes, Rattenberg and its 455 inhabitants are in the grip of a primeval yearning to improve their lives - sunlight. From mid-November to mid-February the village sits permanently in shadow, casting its maze-like streets and myriad medieval court yards into half-light at the height of the day.
...
Mr Wurzenrainer said: "It has captured our imagination and that of a lot of people elsewhere. I have had calls from Australia to Canada. It might sound very technical but this is really about making a romantic idea real. After all, how many places on earth can claim to have their own second sun?"
http://www.rense.com/general63/townd.htm
Hundreds of people were feared killed in a massive 8.7 magnitude earthquake that hit a small island in western Indonesia on Monday, but panic across Asia that it could lead to another devastating tsunami soon receded.
A police official on Nias said many buildings were wrecked in Gunungsitoli, the main town on the island off Sumatra.
http://news.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=UUYQ4CRFSGWSQCRBAELCFFA?type=topNews&storyID=8016164
When Ziegert and his co-workers finally returned to the site—near the town of Homs, which is adjacent to the ancient Roman settlement of Leptis Magna—they found, mixed in with the ruins of a modest farmhouse, those of a stately villa that housed gladiators, ancient Rome's superstar athletes. The mosaics decorated the floor of an elaborate cold-water bathhouse and consisted of tiny pieces of green, brown and gold glass and stone laid in a thin layer of chalk atop about five inches of concrete. Ziegert, who has conducted digs all across northern Africa, was stunned by the works' size: five huge panels that stretched 30 feet. Luisa Musso, a specialist in mosaics and Roman archaeology at the University of Rome Three, says, "I've seen mosaics all over this area, and these are extraordinary."
http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues05/apr05/digs.html
All the eyewitness accounts provide a similar description of the marine humanoid. His height is 165-168 cm, he has a strong build, a protruding ctenoid stomach, his feet are pinniped and he has four webbed fingers on either of his hands. His skin is of moonlight color. The hair on his head looks black and green. His arms and legs are shorter and heavier than those of a medium-build person. Apart from his fingernails, he has nails growing on the tip of his aquiline nose that look like a dolphin"s beak. No information as to his ears. His eyes are large and orbicular. The mouth of the creature is fairly large, his upper jaw is prognathic and his lower lip flows smoothly into the neck, his chin is missing.
Iranians dubbed the creature Runan-shah or "the master of the sea and rivers." The name is partly based on stories about large shoals of fish accompanying the creature at sea. Other stories refer to the waters that would turn crystal clear and stay that way for two or three days after the creature was seen swimming in those areas. Fishermen claim that fishes that stay alive for a while in the net can feel the creature coming out of the deep blue sea. Fishes were reported producing barely heard gurgling sounds as the monster came near. He was said to answer the call of the catch by making similar throaty sounds.
http://www.rense.com/general63/creatured.htm
t cannot be below that figure," said Agus Mendrofa, a district official on the island of 500,000 people which is about 125 kilometres west of of Sumatra and popular with surfers.
?He said at least 80 percent of all multi-storey buildings in the main city of Gunung Sitoli had been destroyed, trapping thousands of people under the rubble.
http://www.thejakartapost.com/detaillatestnews.asp?fileid=20050329083505&irec=2
Sony Corp. (6758.T: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Monday it was ordered by a U.S. court to halt sales of its blockbuster PlayStation consoles in the United States and pay $90 million in damages to a California tech company, Immersion Corp. (IMMR.O: Quote, Profile, Research) , whose shares jumped more then 5 percent.
Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE), Sony's gaming unit, said it would appeal the decision by a California federal court in the patent infringement case.
For the time being, Sony will keep selling PlayStations as the order -- which covers the PlayStation and PlayStation 2, two game controllers and 47 software titles -- will not go into effect before the appeal, an SCE spokeswoman said. Sony will be paying compulsory license fees to Immersion, she added.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=businessNews&storyID=8013137
Just as the evacuation of the illegal outposts was postponed until after the withdrawal from Gaza, so will the issue of freezing construction in the settlements be deferred. Israel would like to "synchronize" Bush's promise that the settlement blocs will be annexed to Israel in the future with the possibility of building in the present phase, before a final status agreement.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/557472.html
At some point, the woman began connecting the dots. "I work for a bank and this information could be used to open a bank account."
"Yes," Sellick responded.
The event director for the Infosecurity Europe trade show recalled with incredulity what happened next. "She then proceeded to give me all her details!"
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid14_gci1071265,00.html
[Why should the Dc’ers care? It’s not their money going down the tubes. If anything they’ll probably get a cut of whatever is stolen, one way or another.]
By many accounts, Custer Battles was a nightmare contractor in Iraq. The company's two principals, Mike Battles and Scott Custer, overcharged occupation authorities by millions of dollars, according to a complaint from two former employees. The firm double-billed for salaries and repainted the Iraqi Airways forklifts they found at Baghdad airport—which Custer Battles was contracted to secure—then leased them back to the U.S. government, the complaint says. In the fall of 2004, Deputy General Counsel Steven Shaw of the Air Force asked that the firm be banned from future U.S. contracts, saying Custer Battles had also "created sham companies, whereby [it] fraudulently increased profits by inflating its claimed costs." An Army inspector general, Col. Richard Ballard, concluded as early as November 2003 that the security outfit was incompetent and refused to obey Joint Task Force 7 orders: "What we saw horrified us," Ballard wrote to his superiors in an e-mail obtained by NEWSWEEK.
Yet when the two whistle-blowers sued Custer Battles on behalf of the U.S. government—under a U.S. law intended to punish war profiteering and fraud—the Bush administration declined to take part. "The government has not lifted a finger to get back the $50 million Custer Battles defrauded it of," says Alan Grayson, a lawyer for the two whistle-blowers, Pete Baldwin and Robert Isakson. In recent months the judge in the case, T. S. Ellis III of the U.S. District Court in Virginia, has twice invited the Justice Department to join the lawsuit without response.
...
"If urgent steps are not taken, Iraq ... will become the biggest corruption scandal in history," warned the anti-corruption group Transparency International in a recent report. Grassley adds that if the government decides the False Claims Act doesn't apply to Iraq, "any recovery for fraud, waste and abuse of taxpayer dollars ... would be prohibited."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7306162/site/newsweek/
The astounding rise in home values is enticing many middle-class Californians to bet on dirt, gambling their retirements that they can do better with property than with any other investment.
In the same way that the stock market's apparently limitless ascent in the late 1990s seduced investors into buying shares in untested dot-coms, relentlessly rising house and land prices are spurring people to do things that used to be considered unusual — if not irresponsible.
They're cashing in retirement funds, selling stock and taking out second mortgages. They're pouring the money into real estate, often in distant states, often without seeing the property.
"Markets are ruled by either fear or greed," said Robert Campbell, a San Diego investor who has written a book on timing the real estate market. "At the moment, it's all about greed. Huge numbers of people are buying in at very high prices."
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2026&e=5&u=/latimests/puttingstockinproperty
The report concluded that the government does not fully understand the risks that a terrorist attack could pose to the pools and ought to expedite the removal of the fuel to dry storage casks that are more resilient to attack. The Bush administration has long defended the safety of the pools, and the nuclear industry has warned that moving large amounts of fuel to dry storage would be unnecessary and very expensive.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5408-2005Mar27.html
[This is another story from the futuer. People working desperately to keep even. In the past these birds were just naturally occuring. You probably had to shoe them out the way when you were walking, now they have to have an intensive program to keep them from disappearing entirely.
We will see this in more and more areas in the future. People working to keep water clean, or to keep water in a particular place at all, like the Aral Sea case.]
Down on a lonely island off the southern tip of New Zealand, three new kakapo have just hatched.
These new chicks bring the total number of one of the world's rarest birds to 86.
The critically endangered kakapo - fat, green, musty-smelling nocturnal parrots, which cannot fly but which can climb trees - are confined to New Zealand's offshore islands.
Once, they roamed mainland New Zealand from sea level to the mountains.
Decimated by introduced predators, the kakapo population dwindled to just 51 in the mid-1990s, but an intensive conservation effort has boosted kakapo numbers in the past few years.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4384813.stm
[It’s stupid to kill off elephants. It may be true there are too many in one spot, but overall there are way too few. Why not just move some from the overflow areas to the underflow areas?]
Animal rights groups have begun fresh public campaigns timed for the start of the annual seal hunt off the coast of Canada this week and suggestions that South Africa may kill elephants for population control.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0328-08.htm
Louis Jourdain, son of Floyd Jourdain Jr. and a student at Red Lake High School, where most of the killings took place, was arrested Sunday, the source told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The younger Jourdain was arrested as part of an investigation into a potentially wider plot, the source said.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-03-28-red-lake-arrest_x.htm?csp=24&RM_Exclude=Juno
In the past two years the US media have drastically reduced their coverage of Afghanistan. According to the American Journalism Review only three news organizations--Newsweek, Associated Press and the Washington Post--have full-time reporters stationed in Kabul. What little is published focuses mostly on feel-good stories, superficial change and unopposed reportage of the Bush administration's claims. There is little to no critical coverage of the effects of the on-going US military and political presence. For example, on March 18th, the New York Times' Joel Brinkley and Carlotta Gall reported Condoleezza Rice's visit to Afghanistan and her claim that "there could be no better story . than Afghanistan's democratic development". Brinkley and Gall apparently agreed with Rice - they made no mention of how the central government is legitimizing US-backed warlords who are stifling democracy.
This is not new. In the early 1990s, the worst atrocities by Mujahadeen fighters (including some members of the current government) resulted in tens of thousands of civilian deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees in a four year period in Kabul alone. During that time, media coverage dropped drastically. In the late 1990s, when the Taliban were implementing their oppressive laws, the media largely ignored it. In 2000, when tens of thousands of Afghan refugees were trapped in horrific conditions in refugee camps in the Pakistani side of the border, the same pattern of silence continued. Only when the Buddha statues of Bamiyan were blown up, or the attacks of 9-11 took place was Afghanistan worth focusing on.
...
A majority of Afghans voted for Hamid Karzai, even though he is clearly a US puppet. They did so because he promised never to compromise with warlords. But after his election, Karzai appointed the former governor of Herat, Ismail Khan, a fundamentalist misogynist warlord, as Minister of Energy. Karzai recently appointed a known war criminal, Abdul Rashid Dostum, as the National Army Chief of Staff. These moves were praised by US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad as "wise", even though the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission's recent survey revealed a deep desire among Afghans across the country for justice for past war crimes committed by the likes of Khan and Dostum. The Afghans I met were eager to see the warlords disarmed, and prosecuted, not rewarded with government positions.
...
The very people that Americans compassionately and generously supported after 9-11 are suffering once more because of a lack of attention and interest. Donations toward life-saving projects like hospitals, clinics, schools and training centers, have plummeted. Armed militias led by US-backed warlords have replaced the Taliban, financing their armies through heroin sales. In the short term, this compliance has had tangible consequences for the people of Afghanistan. In the long term, the lack of media coverage of the rise of these armed groups could once again have horrible and shocking consequences, like the attacks of 9-11
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0328-29.htm
In an age where many people bemoan English's growing global influence, advocates of local languages scored a small victory Monday when Ireland enacted a law outlawing English in road signs and official maps on much of the nation's western coast, where many people speak Gaelic.
http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2005/03/28/ireland_enacts_law_banning_english_on_maps/
As Mohammed Atta and his fellow hijackers were boarding the planes they would crash on 9/11, the U.S. media were preoccupied with shark, not terrorist, attacks.
If only journalists had focused more on foreign affairs.
Perhaps then Johnell Bryant, a Florida government official, might have called the FBI when Atta showed up in her office in 2000 talking about bombing U.S. cities and crowing about Osama bin Laden. As she told the New York Times in 2002, "I didn't know who he was talking about."
Who can blame her?
The media and, in particular, networks from which most Americans get their news had failed them. Despite tracking al Qaeda and its allies for a decade, they rarely reported on them. They never helped viewers understand why people on the other side of the world hate them enough to blow them to bits.
"Sept. 11, 2001 was my moment of truth," says veteran CBS foreign correspondent Tom Fenton, now retired, on the line from London.
In his new book Bad News: The Decline of Reporting, The Business of News and the Danger to Us All (Regan Books, 262 pages, $36.95), Fenton lists the trivial and the titillating that passed for news in 2001.
...
Consider last week. Italy announced the withdrawal of its troops from Iraq. There was international uproar over U.S. President George W. Bush's naming the hawkish deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz to lead the World Bank. Iraq's new National Assembly opened while under mortar fire. But TV news delivered the trials and tribulations of Scott Peterson, Martha Stewart, Michael Jackson and Robert Blake.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0327-28.htm
[You know I have followed this RAWA organization for a pretty long time. I think it is fair to say they are pro-woman, and anti-male oppression. Yet I have never heard anything from them in the way of songs or poems encouraging castration, I have never heard anything form them along the lines of “I hate men because they are men” or anything like that.
They do have strong feelings about warlords and the Taliban and whoever else, but who wouldn’t?
So how to account for the difference between RAWA and those fools at UNH?]
We appeal for your support and help. Help to RAWA is urgent, especially for the continuation of the work of its hospital and schools. Succor to RAWA is succor to the only womenís organization in Afghanistan with a principled anti-fundamentalists and and with the courage to stand up and actively fight the bigotry and fanaticism of Afghan fundamentalist relgio-fascists through organizing and mobilizing women, staging protest and demonstrations and through exposure of the fundamentalistsí hypocrisy, backwardness and criminality via publications and through the media. Support for RAWA is homage to the overlooked, decimated, yet tenacious movement of secular pro-democracy forces in Afghanistan and shall be a concrete expression of solidarity with the movement of the most miserable, most tyrannized women in the todayís world. You will be supporting a force which raises the slogan of social progress and democracy in conditions of the most heavy-handed oppression against women imposed by the most backward, most anachronistic mercenary band of criminal religo-fascist it has been the misfortune of contemporary world history to witness.
We invite your donations to be deposited to the bank accounts given under. Thanks you for your contribution and for your solidarity with the martyred women of Afghanistan.
http://pz.rawa.org/rawa/appeal.html
More than $15 billion in U.S. crops rides each year on the tiny legs of an insect.
The honeybee is the major carrier of pollen for seeded fruits and just about anything that grows on a vine. Everything, in other words, from apples to zucchini.
"If honeybees ceased to exist, two-thirds of the citrus, all of the watermelons, the blueberries, strawberries, pecans and beans would disappear," said Jerry Hayes, apiary inspection chief with the state's Division of Plant Industry.
But now it's the bee itself that is disappearing.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0328-01.htm
Members of a violent Central America-based gang have been sent to Arizona to target Minuteman Project volunteers, who will begin a monthlong border vigil this weekend to find and report foreigner sneaking into the United States, project officials say.
James Gilchrist, a Vietnam veteran who helped organize the vigil to protest the federal government's failure to control illegal immigration, said he has been told that California and Texas leaders of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, have issued orders to teach "a lesson" to the Minuteman volunteers.
http://www.rense.com/general63/sddd.htm
"Hello, my name is Mary Man-Hating-Is-Fun," one participant said. "I am 23 years old, and I am what a feminist looks like. Ever since I learned to embrace my feminist nature, I found great joy in threatening men's lives, flicking off frat brothers and plotting the patriarchy's death. I hate men because they are men, because I see them for what they are: misogynistic, sexist, oppressive and absurdly pathetic beings who only serve to pollute and contaminate this world with war, abuse, oppression and rape."
Members of the FAL wore scissors around their necks, as members of the audience lightheartedly sang a song about castration.
...
"What I heard last night was not feminism; it was a hate rally," he continued. "I went there with an open mind, thinking the patriarchy was only that group of sexist, chauvinists that discriminate against women. Ms. Smith said that all men are the enemy. This is clear cut sexism and blind hatred."
http://www.rense.com/general63/dur.htm
[Now this seems to be science working for people. Why can’t scientists do more of this kind of thing?]
But amid the hubbub of the Easter crowds queuing yesterday in the Konditorei, cake shop, for rich chocolate cakes, Rattenberg and its 455 inhabitants are in the grip of a primeval yearning to improve their lives - sunlight. From mid-November to mid-February the village sits permanently in shadow, casting its maze-like streets and myriad medieval court yards into half-light at the height of the day.
...
Mr Wurzenrainer said: "It has captured our imagination and that of a lot of people elsewhere. I have had calls from Australia to Canada. It might sound very technical but this is really about making a romantic idea real. After all, how many places on earth can claim to have their own second sun?"
http://www.rense.com/general63/townd.htm
Hundreds of people were feared killed in a massive 8.7 magnitude earthquake that hit a small island in western Indonesia on Monday, but panic across Asia that it could lead to another devastating tsunami soon receded.
A police official on Nias said many buildings were wrecked in Gunungsitoli, the main town on the island off Sumatra.
http://news.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=UUYQ4CRFSGWSQCRBAELCFFA?type=topNews&storyID=8016164
When Ziegert and his co-workers finally returned to the site—near the town of Homs, which is adjacent to the ancient Roman settlement of Leptis Magna—they found, mixed in with the ruins of a modest farmhouse, those of a stately villa that housed gladiators, ancient Rome's superstar athletes. The mosaics decorated the floor of an elaborate cold-water bathhouse and consisted of tiny pieces of green, brown and gold glass and stone laid in a thin layer of chalk atop about five inches of concrete. Ziegert, who has conducted digs all across northern Africa, was stunned by the works' size: five huge panels that stretched 30 feet. Luisa Musso, a specialist in mosaics and Roman archaeology at the University of Rome Three, says, "I've seen mosaics all over this area, and these are extraordinary."
http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues05/apr05/digs.html
All the eyewitness accounts provide a similar description of the marine humanoid. His height is 165-168 cm, he has a strong build, a protruding ctenoid stomach, his feet are pinniped and he has four webbed fingers on either of his hands. His skin is of moonlight color. The hair on his head looks black and green. His arms and legs are shorter and heavier than those of a medium-build person. Apart from his fingernails, he has nails growing on the tip of his aquiline nose that look like a dolphin"s beak. No information as to his ears. His eyes are large and orbicular. The mouth of the creature is fairly large, his upper jaw is prognathic and his lower lip flows smoothly into the neck, his chin is missing.
Iranians dubbed the creature Runan-shah or "the master of the sea and rivers." The name is partly based on stories about large shoals of fish accompanying the creature at sea. Other stories refer to the waters that would turn crystal clear and stay that way for two or three days after the creature was seen swimming in those areas. Fishermen claim that fishes that stay alive for a while in the net can feel the creature coming out of the deep blue sea. Fishes were reported producing barely heard gurgling sounds as the monster came near. He was said to answer the call of the catch by making similar throaty sounds.
http://www.rense.com/general63/creatured.htm
t cannot be below that figure," said Agus Mendrofa, a district official on the island of 500,000 people which is about 125 kilometres west of of Sumatra and popular with surfers.
?He said at least 80 percent of all multi-storey buildings in the main city of Gunung Sitoli had been destroyed, trapping thousands of people under the rubble.
http://www.thejakartapost.com/detaillatestnews.asp?fileid=20050329083505&irec=2
Sony Corp. (6758.T: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Monday it was ordered by a U.S. court to halt sales of its blockbuster PlayStation consoles in the United States and pay $90 million in damages to a California tech company, Immersion Corp. (IMMR.O: Quote, Profile, Research) , whose shares jumped more then 5 percent.
Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE), Sony's gaming unit, said it would appeal the decision by a California federal court in the patent infringement case.
For the time being, Sony will keep selling PlayStations as the order -- which covers the PlayStation and PlayStation 2, two game controllers and 47 software titles -- will not go into effect before the appeal, an SCE spokeswoman said. Sony will be paying compulsory license fees to Immersion, she added.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=businessNews&storyID=8013137
Just as the evacuation of the illegal outposts was postponed until after the withdrawal from Gaza, so will the issue of freezing construction in the settlements be deferred. Israel would like to "synchronize" Bush's promise that the settlement blocs will be annexed to Israel in the future with the possibility of building in the present phase, before a final status agreement.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/557472.html
At some point, the woman began connecting the dots. "I work for a bank and this information could be used to open a bank account."
"Yes," Sellick responded.
The event director for the Infosecurity Europe trade show recalled with incredulity what happened next. "She then proceeded to give me all her details!"
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid14_gci1071265,00.html
[Why should the Dc’ers care? It’s not their money going down the tubes. If anything they’ll probably get a cut of whatever is stolen, one way or another.]
By many accounts, Custer Battles was a nightmare contractor in Iraq. The company's two principals, Mike Battles and Scott Custer, overcharged occupation authorities by millions of dollars, according to a complaint from two former employees. The firm double-billed for salaries and repainted the Iraqi Airways forklifts they found at Baghdad airport—which Custer Battles was contracted to secure—then leased them back to the U.S. government, the complaint says. In the fall of 2004, Deputy General Counsel Steven Shaw of the Air Force asked that the firm be banned from future U.S. contracts, saying Custer Battles had also "created sham companies, whereby [it] fraudulently increased profits by inflating its claimed costs." An Army inspector general, Col. Richard Ballard, concluded as early as November 2003 that the security outfit was incompetent and refused to obey Joint Task Force 7 orders: "What we saw horrified us," Ballard wrote to his superiors in an e-mail obtained by NEWSWEEK.
Yet when the two whistle-blowers sued Custer Battles on behalf of the U.S. government—under a U.S. law intended to punish war profiteering and fraud—the Bush administration declined to take part. "The government has not lifted a finger to get back the $50 million Custer Battles defrauded it of," says Alan Grayson, a lawyer for the two whistle-blowers, Pete Baldwin and Robert Isakson. In recent months the judge in the case, T. S. Ellis III of the U.S. District Court in Virginia, has twice invited the Justice Department to join the lawsuit without response.
...
"If urgent steps are not taken, Iraq ... will become the biggest corruption scandal in history," warned the anti-corruption group Transparency International in a recent report. Grassley adds that if the government decides the False Claims Act doesn't apply to Iraq, "any recovery for fraud, waste and abuse of taxpayer dollars ... would be prohibited."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7306162/site/newsweek/
The astounding rise in home values is enticing many middle-class Californians to bet on dirt, gambling their retirements that they can do better with property than with any other investment.
In the same way that the stock market's apparently limitless ascent in the late 1990s seduced investors into buying shares in untested dot-coms, relentlessly rising house and land prices are spurring people to do things that used to be considered unusual — if not irresponsible.
They're cashing in retirement funds, selling stock and taking out second mortgages. They're pouring the money into real estate, often in distant states, often without seeing the property.
"Markets are ruled by either fear or greed," said Robert Campbell, a San Diego investor who has written a book on timing the real estate market. "At the moment, it's all about greed. Huge numbers of people are buying in at very high prices."
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2026&e=5&u=/latimests/puttingstockinproperty
The report concluded that the government does not fully understand the risks that a terrorist attack could pose to the pools and ought to expedite the removal of the fuel to dry storage casks that are more resilient to attack. The Bush administration has long defended the safety of the pools, and the nuclear industry has warned that moving large amounts of fuel to dry storage would be unnecessary and very expensive.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5408-2005Mar27.html
[This is another story from the futuer. People working desperately to keep even. In the past these birds were just naturally occuring. You probably had to shoe them out the way when you were walking, now they have to have an intensive program to keep them from disappearing entirely.
We will see this in more and more areas in the future. People working to keep water clean, or to keep water in a particular place at all, like the Aral Sea case.]
Down on a lonely island off the southern tip of New Zealand, three new kakapo have just hatched.
These new chicks bring the total number of one of the world's rarest birds to 86.
The critically endangered kakapo - fat, green, musty-smelling nocturnal parrots, which cannot fly but which can climb trees - are confined to New Zealand's offshore islands.
Once, they roamed mainland New Zealand from sea level to the mountains.
Decimated by introduced predators, the kakapo population dwindled to just 51 in the mid-1990s, but an intensive conservation effort has boosted kakapo numbers in the past few years.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4384813.stm
[It’s stupid to kill off elephants. It may be true there are too many in one spot, but overall there are way too few. Why not just move some from the overflow areas to the underflow areas?]
Animal rights groups have begun fresh public campaigns timed for the start of the annual seal hunt off the coast of Canada this week and suggestions that South Africa may kill elephants for population control.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0328-08.htm
Louis Jourdain, son of Floyd Jourdain Jr. and a student at Red Lake High School, where most of the killings took place, was arrested Sunday, the source told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The younger Jourdain was arrested as part of an investigation into a potentially wider plot, the source said.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-03-28-red-lake-arrest_x.htm?csp=24&RM_Exclude=Juno
In the past two years the US media have drastically reduced their coverage of Afghanistan. According to the American Journalism Review only three news organizations--Newsweek, Associated Press and the Washington Post--have full-time reporters stationed in Kabul. What little is published focuses mostly on feel-good stories, superficial change and unopposed reportage of the Bush administration's claims. There is little to no critical coverage of the effects of the on-going US military and political presence. For example, on March 18th, the New York Times' Joel Brinkley and Carlotta Gall reported Condoleezza Rice's visit to Afghanistan and her claim that "there could be no better story . than Afghanistan's democratic development". Brinkley and Gall apparently agreed with Rice - they made no mention of how the central government is legitimizing US-backed warlords who are stifling democracy.
This is not new. In the early 1990s, the worst atrocities by Mujahadeen fighters (including some members of the current government) resulted in tens of thousands of civilian deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees in a four year period in Kabul alone. During that time, media coverage dropped drastically. In the late 1990s, when the Taliban were implementing their oppressive laws, the media largely ignored it. In 2000, when tens of thousands of Afghan refugees were trapped in horrific conditions in refugee camps in the Pakistani side of the border, the same pattern of silence continued. Only when the Buddha statues of Bamiyan were blown up, or the attacks of 9-11 took place was Afghanistan worth focusing on.
...
A majority of Afghans voted for Hamid Karzai, even though he is clearly a US puppet. They did so because he promised never to compromise with warlords. But after his election, Karzai appointed the former governor of Herat, Ismail Khan, a fundamentalist misogynist warlord, as Minister of Energy. Karzai recently appointed a known war criminal, Abdul Rashid Dostum, as the National Army Chief of Staff. These moves were praised by US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad as "wise", even though the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission's recent survey revealed a deep desire among Afghans across the country for justice for past war crimes committed by the likes of Khan and Dostum. The Afghans I met were eager to see the warlords disarmed, and prosecuted, not rewarded with government positions.
...
The very people that Americans compassionately and generously supported after 9-11 are suffering once more because of a lack of attention and interest. Donations toward life-saving projects like hospitals, clinics, schools and training centers, have plummeted. Armed militias led by US-backed warlords have replaced the Taliban, financing their armies through heroin sales. In the short term, this compliance has had tangible consequences for the people of Afghanistan. In the long term, the lack of media coverage of the rise of these armed groups could once again have horrible and shocking consequences, like the attacks of 9-11
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0328-29.htm
In an age where many people bemoan English's growing global influence, advocates of local languages scored a small victory Monday when Ireland enacted a law outlawing English in road signs and official maps on much of the nation's western coast, where many people speak Gaelic.
http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2005/03/28/ireland_enacts_law_banning_english_on_maps/
As Mohammed Atta and his fellow hijackers were boarding the planes they would crash on 9/11, the U.S. media were preoccupied with shark, not terrorist, attacks.
If only journalists had focused more on foreign affairs.
Perhaps then Johnell Bryant, a Florida government official, might have called the FBI when Atta showed up in her office in 2000 talking about bombing U.S. cities and crowing about Osama bin Laden. As she told the New York Times in 2002, "I didn't know who he was talking about."
Who can blame her?
The media and, in particular, networks from which most Americans get their news had failed them. Despite tracking al Qaeda and its allies for a decade, they rarely reported on them. They never helped viewers understand why people on the other side of the world hate them enough to blow them to bits.
"Sept. 11, 2001 was my moment of truth," says veteran CBS foreign correspondent Tom Fenton, now retired, on the line from London.
In his new book Bad News: The Decline of Reporting, The Business of News and the Danger to Us All (Regan Books, 262 pages, $36.95), Fenton lists the trivial and the titillating that passed for news in 2001.
...
Consider last week. Italy announced the withdrawal of its troops from Iraq. There was international uproar over U.S. President George W. Bush's naming the hawkish deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz to lead the World Bank. Iraq's new National Assembly opened while under mortar fire. But TV news delivered the trials and tribulations of Scott Peterson, Martha Stewart, Michael Jackson and Robert Blake.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0327-28.htm
[You know I have followed this RAWA organization for a pretty long time. I think it is fair to say they are pro-woman, and anti-male oppression. Yet I have never heard anything from them in the way of songs or poems encouraging castration, I have never heard anything form them along the lines of “I hate men because they are men” or anything like that.
They do have strong feelings about warlords and the Taliban and whoever else, but who wouldn’t?
So how to account for the difference between RAWA and those fools at UNH?]
We appeal for your support and help. Help to RAWA is urgent, especially for the continuation of the work of its hospital and schools. Succor to RAWA is succor to the only womenís organization in Afghanistan with a principled anti-fundamentalists and and with the courage to stand up and actively fight the bigotry and fanaticism of Afghan fundamentalist relgio-fascists through organizing and mobilizing women, staging protest and demonstrations and through exposure of the fundamentalistsí hypocrisy, backwardness and criminality via publications and through the media. Support for RAWA is homage to the overlooked, decimated, yet tenacious movement of secular pro-democracy forces in Afghanistan and shall be a concrete expression of solidarity with the movement of the most miserable, most tyrannized women in the todayís world. You will be supporting a force which raises the slogan of social progress and democracy in conditions of the most heavy-handed oppression against women imposed by the most backward, most anachronistic mercenary band of criminal religo-fascist it has been the misfortune of contemporary world history to witness.
We invite your donations to be deposited to the bank accounts given under. Thanks you for your contribution and for your solidarity with the martyred women of Afghanistan.
http://pz.rawa.org/rawa/appeal.html
posted by abu nakba at 3/28/2005 08:06:00 PM
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