I'll be assembling "It's Saturday Night" on Sunday Morning.
Enjoy your evening.
Best regards...
... until then.
Saturday, April 07, 2007
The "Culture of Fear" is narcisstic in nature...
Obsessed with misinformation and issues out of the reach of control of the average citizens of most countries. Stop trying to solve the problems that appropriately belong in government policy. Government isn't about killing, it's about healing wounds of cultures that adversely effect their economies to maintain mutual interest in benevolence in all international relations.
... a culture obsessed with death and dying, rather than bringing the Non-Prolieration Treaty to conclusion globally.
Disarm from nukes, don't faciliate them.
The USA military turned video games into acts of war. That should never be a societal directive.
Of the 40 Dramatic Television shows currently on tv, 27 of them are concerned with, as primary subject matter, death & killing. That’s a 60% focus on death. Of those shows focused on death, 13 of them, in fact, are connected with investigations of severe crimes & murders. As disturbing are the shows that deal not just with individual deaths but widespread disaster - Jericho, 24.
Previously defining a dramatic television show as one which focuses on the daily lives of a certain set of people. However, now that it’s not just about the lives of those people anymore, but also their involvement in serious crimes and/or environments of the sick & dying.
If we did an analysis of blockbuster dramatic movies, I think we would see the same results.
Although our connection to the subject matter - death - may not be surface to our mind because of the characters involved, it is clear from characters who deal with death as more interesting to us. Whether we are aware of it, our culture prizes the entertainment factor of death.
Where are the programs recognizing acceptance of difference? Where are the programs that recognize the real dangers of a society engaged in aggression? Where are the programs that promote peace? Where are the programs that properly engage society rather than 'craze' it?
The New York Times
Justices Rule Against Bush Administration on Emissions
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
WASHINGTON, April 2 — In one of its most important environmental decisions in years, the Supreme Court ruled today that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate heat-trapping gases in automobile emissions.
The court further ruled that the agency cannot sidestep its authority to regulate the greenhouse gases that contribute to global climate change unless it can provide a scientific basis for its refusal.
The 5-to-4 decision was a strong rebuke to the Bush administration, which has maintained that it does not have the right to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, and even if it did, it would not use the authority. The ruling does not force the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate auto emissions, but it would almost certainly face further legal action if it fails to do so.
Writing for the majority, Justice John Paul Stevens said that the only way the agency can “avoid taking further action” now is “if it determines that greenhouse gases do not contribute to climate change” or provides a good explanation why it cannot or will not find out whether they do.Beyond the specific context for this case — so-called “tailpipe emissions” from cars and trucks, which account for about one-fourth of the country’s total greenhouse-gas emissions — the decision is highly likely to have a broader impact on the debate over government efforts to address global warming.
Court cases around the country had been placed on hold to await the decision in this case. Among them is a challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency’s refusal to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, now pending in the federal appeals court here. Individual states, led by California, are also moving aggressively into what they have seen as a regulatory vacuum.
Justice Stevens, joined by Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, said that by providing nothing more than a “laundry list of reasons not to regulate,” the Environmental Protection Agency had defied the Clean Air Act’s “clear statutory command.” He said that a refusal to regulate can be based only on science and “reasoned justification,” adding that while the statute leaves the central determination to the “judgment” of the agency’s administrator, “the use of the word ‘judgment’ is not a roving license to ignore the statutory text.”
The court decided a second Clean Air Act case today, adopting a broad reading of the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority over factories and power plants that add capacity or make renovations that increase emissions of air pollutants. In doing so, the court reopened a federal enforcement effort against the Duke Energy Corporation under the Clean Air Act’s “new source review” provision. The vote in the second case, Environmental Defense v. Duke Energy Corp., No. 05-848, was 9 to 0.
The two decisions left environmental advocates exultant. Many said they still harbored doubts about the federal agency and predicted that the decision would help push the Democratic-controlled Congress to address the issue. Even in the nine months since the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 05-1120, and accelerating since the elections last November, there has been a growing interest among industry groups in working with environmental organizations on proposals for emissions limits.
Dave McCurdy, president of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the main industry trade group, said in response to the E.P.A. decision that the alliance “looks forward to working constructively with both Congress and the administration” in addressing the issue. “This decision says that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will be part of this process,” he said.
If the decision sowed widespread claims of victory, it left behind a prominent loser: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who argued vigorously in a dissenting opinion that the court never should have reached the merits of the case or addressed the question of the agency’s legal obligations.
His dissent, which Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel A. Alito Jr. also signed, focused solely on the issue of legal standing to sue: whether the broad coalition of states, cities and environmental groups that brought the lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency four years ago should have been accepted as plaintiffs in the first place.
This was the issue on which the coalition’s lawsuit had appeared most vulnerable, given that in recent years the Supreme Court has steadily raised the barrier to standing, especially in environmental cases. Justice Scalia has long been a leader in that effort, and Chief Justice Roberts made clear that, as his statements and actions in his prejudicial career indicated, he is fully on board Justice Scalia’s project.
Chief Justice Roberts said that the court should not have found that Massachusetts or any of the other plaintiffs had standing. The finding “has caused us to transgress the proper — and properly limited — role of the courts in a democratic society,” he said, quoting from a 1984 decision. And, quoting from a decision Justice Scalia wrote in 1992, he said: “This court’s standing jurisprudence simply recognizes that redress of grievances of the sort at issue here is the function of Congress and the chief executive, not the federal courts.”
Chief Justice Roberts complained that “today’s decision recalls the previous high-water mark of diluted standing requirements,” a 1973 decision known as the SCRAP case. That was an environmental case that the Supreme Court allowed to proceed on a definition of standing so generous as to be all but unthinkable today. “Today’s decision is SCRAP for a new generation,” the chief justice said, not intending the comparison as a compliment.
The majority addressed the standing question by noting that it was only necessary for one of the many plaintiffs to meet the three-part definition of standing: that it had suffered a “concrete and particularized injury,” that the injury was “fairly traceable to the defendant,” and that a favorable decision would be likely to “redress that injury.”
Massachusetts, one of the 12 state plaintiffs, met the test, Justice Stevens said, because it had made a case that global warming was raising the sea level along its coast, presenting the state with a “risk of catastrophic harm” that “would be reduced to some extent” if the government undertook the regulation the state sought.
In addition, Justice Stevens said, Massachusetts was due special deference in its claim to standing because of its status as a sovereign state. This new twist on the court’s standing doctrine may have been an essential tactic in winning the vote of Justice Kennedy, a leader in the court’s federalism revolution of recent years. Justice Stevens, a dissenter from the court’s states-rights rulings and a master of court strategy, in effect managed to use federalism as a sword rather than a shield.
Following its discussion of standing, the majority made short work of the agency’s threshold argument that the Clean Air Act simply did not authorize it to regulate greenhouse gases because carbon dioxide and the other gases were not “air pollutants” within the meaning of the law.
“The statutory text forecloses E.P.A.’s reading,” Justice Stevens said, adding that “greenhouse gases fit well within the Clean Air Act’s capacious definition of air pollutant.”
The justices in the majority also indicated that they were persuaded by the existing evidence of the impact of automobile emissions on the environment.
The agency itself “does not dispute the existence of a causal connection between man-made gas emissions and global warming,” Justice Stevens noted, adding that “judged by any standard, U.S. motor-vehicle emissions make a meaningful contribution to greenhouse gas concentrations.”
Justice Scalia, in his dissenting opinion, disputed the majority’s statutory analysis.
The decision overturned a 2005 ruling by the federal appeals court here.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/02/washington/02cnd-scotus.html?ex=1176177600&en=dfd85a525f8dfb18&ei=5070&emc=eta1
Scientists Detail Climate Changes, Poles to Tropics
By JAMES KANTER and ANDREW C. REVKIN
BRUSSELS, April 6 — From the poles to the tropics, the earth’s climate and ecosystems are already being shaped by the atmospheric buildup of greenhouse gases and face inevitable, possibly profound, alteration, the world’s leading scientific panel on climate change said Friday.
In its most detailed portrait of the effects of climate change driven by human activities, the panel predicted widening droughts in southern Europe and the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, the American Southwest and Mexico, and flooding that could imperil low-lying islands and the crowded river deltas of southern Asia. It stressed that many of the regions facing the greatest risks were among the world’s poorest.
And it said that while limits on smokestack and tailpipe emissions could lower the long-term risks, vulnerable regions must adjust promptly to shifting weather patterns, climatic and coastal hazards, and rising seas.
Without such adaptations, it said, a rise of 3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century could lead to the inundation of coasts and islands inhabited by hundreds of millions of people. But if steady investments are made in seawalls and other coastal protections, vulnerability could be sharply reduced.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/science/earth/07climate.html?hp
Even as Africa Hungers, Policy Slows Delivery of U.S. Food Aid
By CELIA W. DUGGER
MULONDO, Zambia — Traveling to school in wobbly dugout canoes, Munalula Muhau and her three cousins, 7- and 8-year-olds whose parents had died from AIDS, held onto just one possession: battered tin bowls to receive their daily ration of gruel.
Within weeks, those rations, provided by the United Nations World Food Program, are at risk of running out for them and 500,000 other paupers, including thousands of people wasted by AIDS who are being treated with American-financed drugs that make them hungrier as they grow healthy.
“Not to put too fine a point on it,” said Jeffrey Stringer, an American doctor who runs a nonprofit group treating more than 50,000 Zambians with AIDS, “but it will result in the death of some patients.”
Hoping to forestall such a dire outcome, the World Food Program made an urgent appeal in February for cash donations so it could buy corn from Zambia’s own bountiful harvest, piled in towering stacks in the warehouses of the capital, Lusaka.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/world/africa/07zambia.html?hp
A Top Aide to Gonzales Resigns, Becoming Latest Fallout Casualty
By DAVID STOUT and DAVID JOHNSTON
WASHINGTON, April 6 — A top aide to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales resigned on Friday, becoming another casualty of the political storm that has rocked the Justice Department in the aftermath of last year’s dismissals of eight United States attorneys.
The aide, Monica Goodling, had helped to coordinate those dismissals with the White House, an episode that has provoked demands for Mr. Gonzales’s dismissal. Even Mr. Gonzales’s allies, including President Bush, say the dismissals were bungled from a public relations and political standpoint.
Ms. Goodling, who has been on leave as the Justice Department’s liaison to the White House, notified the Senate Judiciary Committee through her lawyer on March 26 that she would invoke her constitutional right not to testify in the panel’s inquiry about the dismissals — not because she had anything to hide, the lawyer said, but because she did not expect fair treatment in the current climate of political hostility.
In a three-sentence resignation letter, Ms. Goodling wrote to Mr. Gonzales, “May God bless you richly as you continue your service to America.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/washington/07goodling.html?hp
Britons Say They Feared for Lives in Iran Captivity
By ALAN COWELL
LONDON, April 6 — Their greatest scare, they recalled, came on the second day, when they were flown to Tehran, blindfolded and backed up against a prison wall while their Iranian captors fiddled with weapons, cocking rifles and making them fear for their lives.
“We thought we were going to the British Embassy but we got taken to a detention center," said Royal Marine Joe Tindell, 21, one of 15 British sailors and marines seized by Iranian Revolutionary Guards in disputed waters in the Persian Gulf on March 23.
At the detention center, the mood turned drastically, as their captors changed from military dress into all black, their faces covered.
“We had a blindfold and plastic cuffs, hands behind our backs, heads against the wall,” Royal Marine Tindell said in an interview with the BBC. “Someone, I’m not sure who, someone said, I quote, ‘Lads, lads, I think we’re going to get executed.’
“After that comment someone was sick, and as far as I was concerned he had just had his throat cut. From there we were rushed to a room, quick photo, and then stuffed into a cell and didn’t see or speak to anyone for six days.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/world/europe/07britain.html?hp
Democrats’ Rise Has Pluses, Say G.O.P. Centrists
By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ
WASHINGTON, April 6 — If the Democratic ascendance on Capitol Hill was supposed to usher in dark days for Republicans, it is hard to tell from talking to moderate ones like Mike Ferguson, who represents a suburban district in central New Jersey.
As the new Democrat-led House rushed to complete its business before adjourning for spring break this week, Representative Ferguson was marveling at the many bills that had been passed in Congress’s first 100 days, including one that would make it easier for unions to organize and another that would increase the minimum wage.
“Under the Republican majority, those bills would have never gotten to the floor,” he explained before heading back to his district. “Now they have been brought to the floor, and I’ve voted for them.”
Mr. Ferguson’s enthusiasm captures a peculiar political reality in the Capitol: many Republicans from swing districts in the Northeast are finding that life under Democratic rule has its advantages.
During the 12 years that Republicans controlled the House, moderate Republicans were the stepchildren of their party, expected to vote with their conservative leadership on crucial issues, even if it meant taking positions that could anger centrist voters back home.
In fact, the Democrats made some of their deepest inroads last year in the Northeast. A total of 10 Republican incumbents in the House were defeated in four states — New Hampshire, Connecticut, New York and Pennsylvania — where the challengers aggressively tried to tie the incumbents to President Bush and his conservative allies on the Hill.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/washington/07moderates.html?hp
Networks Condemn Remarks by Imus
By DAVID CARR
On Wednesday morning, Don Imus called the students who play for the Rutgers University women’s basketball team a bunch of “nappy-headed ho’s.”
Even for Mr. Imus, a nationally syndicated radio host who knows his way around an insult, it was a shocking remark, one that seemed to impugn both the physical and moral characteristics of a team composed mostly of black players.
What followed was a familiar dance for Mr. Imus and the media companies that profit from his ability to shock his way to big audiences: outrage, indignation and, eventually, the expression of deep regret.
And so on Thursday, Mr. Imus wondered aloud on his show what the big deal was, saying people should not be offended by “some idiot comment meant to be amusing.”
But as often occurs in a modern media drama, Mr. Imus’s remarks were picked up on the Web, in this case by the Media Matters for America site (mediamatters.org). And by Friday, both his radio and television outlets were getting out 10-foot poles.
MSNBC, which simulcasts Mr. Imus’s show on cable television, issued an apology, noting that the program is not a production of the network; NBC, its parent company, called the comments “deplorable.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/arts/television/07imus.html?hp
A Setback Then a Reprieve for Vonage in Courts
By LAURIE J. FLYNN
Vonage Holdings, the Internet phone company, had a wild ride in the courtroom yesterday.
First, a federal judge in Alexandria, Va., barred Vonage from signing up new customers for its Internet phone service.
Then hours later, a federal appeals court gave Vonage a temporary stay of that injunction, allowing the company to continue to enroll customers while it sought to overturn the lower court ruling.
Vonage, based in Holmdel, N.J., has been entangled for years in a patent dispute with Verizon Communications, which had accused it of violating three patents covering technology that allows low-cost voice calls to be made over the Internet.
Yesterday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington issued its temporary stay in response to a request from Vonage. The move came after Judge Claude M. Hilton of the Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., issued a partial injunction that said Vonage could service existing customers but not new ones.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/technology/07vonage.html?hp
Bush Chides Democrats Over War Bill
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:13 a.m. ET
CRAWFORD, Texas (AP) -- President Bush criticized Democrats on Saturday for going on vacation without first giving him what he wants: a war spending bill free of orders to pull troops home.
''I recognize that Democrats are trying to show their current opposition to the war in Iraq,'' Bush said in his weekly radio address from Crawford, where he is on a break of his own.
''They see the emergency war spending bill as a chance to make that statement,'' Bush said. ''Yet for our men and women in uniform, this emergency war spending bill is not a political statement, it is a source of critical funding that has a direct impact on their daily lives.''
Bush has asked Congress for more than $100 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this year. The House and Senate have approved the money, but their bills aim to wind down the war by including timelines for troops to come home -- something Bush won't accept.
The Senate bill would require a U.S. troop exit in Iraq to begin within 120 days, with a completion goal of March 31, 2008. The House bill orders all combat troops out by Sept. 1, 2008.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush.html
Katrina’s Scars Still Etch the Face of New Orleans
By ROGER COHEN
International Herald Tribune
NEW ORLEANS
You got a strong stomach?" The question came one early morning from a young black woman in a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "War is not the answer." She was standing on a sidewalk outside her home, not far from this battered city's fabled French Quarter.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because there's a dead cat here and I don't want to move it." She smiled, a little embarrassed. "I just covered it with this garbage can."
The inverted trash container stood nearby. There were, she explained, many stray animals in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in August 2005 and sent much of its pre-storm population of 455,000 into flight. "It's a big cat," she added.
Kirsten McGregor - we later got introduced - was right about that. The dead cat was large and rigid and heavy. I dropped it into a garbage bag she held open. It was a relief to get the animal off the street.
http://select.nytimes.com/iht/2007/04/06/us/IHT-06globalist.1.html
Looking Beyond the Brass Ring
Tags: achievement, college, girls
I still remember the day when I was in my mid-20s that Cate, my best friend from college, told me her cousin had gotten into Harvard.
She laughed as I expressed my congratulations. “She doesn’t know that it’s all downhill from here,” she said.
I’ve thought about this exchange many times in the course of my adult life. It came to mind, most recently, when I read Sara Rimer’s intriguing piece in The New York Times last Sunday about the “amazing girls” of Newton North High School.
These were girls who took multiple Advanced Placement classes while playing multiple sports and musical instruments, winning top prizes, starring in plays, helping the homeless and achieving fluency in one or two foreign languages. More amazing still: despite all this incredible accomplishment, they weren’t guaranteed access to their first-choice colleges.
I felt a bit sick at heart, at first, when I read this.
And then I thought: It’s probably the best thing that could have happened to them.
http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/looking-beyond-the-brass-ring/
A Great Year for Ivy League Schools, but Not So Good for Applicants to Them
By SAM DILLON
Harvard turned down 1,100 student applicants with perfect 800 scores on the SAT math exam. Yale rejected several applicants with perfect 2400 scores on the three-part SAT, and Princeton turned away thousands of high school applicants with 4.0 grade point averages. Needless to say, high school valedictorians were a dime a dozen.
It was the most selective spring in modern memory at America’s elite schools, according to college admissions officers. More applications poured into top schools this admissions cycle than in any previous year on record. Schools have been sending decision letters to student applicants in recent days, and rejection letters have overwhelmingly outnumbered the acceptances.
Stanford received a record 23,956 undergraduate applications for the fall term, accepting 2,456 students, meaning the school took 10.3 percent of applicants.
Harvard College received applications from 22,955 students, another record, and accepted 2,058 of them, for an acceptance rate of 9 percent. The university called that “the lowest admit rate in Harvard’s history.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/education/04colleges.html?em&ex=1176091200&en=2e58161b2ab23a9d&ei=5087%0A
Federal Official Put on Leave in Student Loan Investigation
By KAREN W. ARENSON and JONATHAN D. GLATER
A senior Education Department official who owned stock in a student loan company while helping oversee the federal lending program was placed on leave yesterday, the department said.
The New York attorney general also widened his investigation into the industry, subpoenaing one of the nation’s largest student lenders for a list of all former employees who had worked for the federal department in the past six years.
The moves came a day after the Education Department said it would investigate the shareholdings of the senior official, Matteo Fontana, general manager in a unit of the Office of Federal Student Aid and a department employee since 2002.
A 2003 prospectus for a stock offering filed by the Education Lending Group, the parent company of Student Loan Xpress at the time, showed that Mr. Fontana planned to sell 10,500 shares in the company valued at about $100,000.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/washington/07loans.html
Battle Grows Over Renewing Landmark Education Law
By SAM DILLON
When President Bush and Democratic leaders put together the bipartisan coalition behind the federal No Child Left Behind Act, they managed to sidestep, override or flat out ignore decades of sentiment that education is fundamentally a prerogative of state and local government.
Now, as the president and the same Democrats push to renew the landmark law, which has reshaped the face of American education with its mandates for annual testing, discontent with it in many states is threatening to undermine the effort in both parties.
Arizona and Virginia are battling the federal government over rules for testing children with limited English. Utah is fighting over whether rural teachers there pass muster under the law. And Connecticut is two years into a lawsuit arguing that No Child Left Behind has failed to provide states federal financing to meet its requirements.
Reacting to such disputes in state after state, dozens of Republicans in Congress are sponsoring legislation that would water down the law by allowing states to opt out of its testing requirements yet still receive federal money.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/education/07child.html
Chlorine Gas Attack by Truck Bomber Kills Up to 30 in Iraq
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
BAGHDAD, April 6 — A suicide truck bomb loaded with chlorine gas exploded in Ramadi on Friday, killing as many as 30 people, many of them children, a security official said.
The explosion burned victims’ lungs, eyes and skin. Dr. Ali Abdullah Saleh, of the main Ramadi hospital, said 30 people had been admitted with shrapnel wounds and 15 had been sent to a second hospital in the city. He said 50 people had been admitted for breathing problems.
It was at least the sixth chlorine bomb detonated in Anbar Province since late January and the most lethal, though it appears that most victims were killed by the explosion rather than the chlorine. Insurgents have also used chlorine bombs in the northern part of Baghdad, the capital, and near Taji, a town about 20 miles to the north.
The attacker in Ramadi struck in the late morning of the Muslim day of prayer, when children off from school usually play in the street and adults run errands and visit before going to the mosque at midday.
The truck, a fuel tanker loaded with the toxic gas, sped toward an Iraqi police checkpoint, according to witnesses and Col. Tareq al-Dulaimi, the head of security for Anbar Province. The police officers opened fire and the truck swerved toward a residential area, where the bomb exploded, he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/world/middleeast/07iraq.html
The Real Fumble in Damascus
There is at least one point on which we and the critics of Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Damascus can agree: It is the White House, not the speaker of the House, that should be taking the diplomatic lead. But the Bush administration has far more appetite for scoring political points than figuring out whether talking to Syria might help contain the bloodletting in Iraq or revive efforts to negotiate peace.
So long as Mr. Bush continues to shun high-level discussions with this troublesome but strategically located neighbor of Israel, Lebanon and Iraq, such Congressional visits can serve the useful purpose of spurring a much needed examination of the administration’s failed policies.
Ms. Pelosi and the five Democrats and one Republican who accompanied her are scarcely the first to raise such questions during the three years that Mr. Bush has instructed his top envoys — and reportedly Israel as well — to avoid negotiations with Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. Plenty of other Republicans and Democrats have been taking similar trips and offering similar advice. They were ignored, but spared the White House’s ridicule.
In the administration’s perverse view, the only legitimate time for negotiations would be after the most contentious and difficult issues — Syria’s support for Hamas and Hezbollah, its meddling in Lebanon and open border with Iraq — have already been resolved. Thus, what ought to be the main agenda points for diplomatic discussions have been turned into a set of preconditions designed to ensure that no discussions ever take place. As the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, Congressional representatives of both parties, this page, and many others have pointed out, Washington should be eager to raise just those issues, along with the possibility of a land-for-peace deal with Israel, directly with Syrian leaders.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/opinion/07sat1.html
22 Brands of Dog Biscuits Are Added to Pet Food Recall
By KATIE ZEZIMA
A recall of pet food tainted with melamine, a chemical used to make plastic products, has been widened to include 22 types of dog biscuits, the Food and Drug Administration said yesterday.
The biscuits, made by Sunshine Mills Inc., contain wheat gluten imported from China that contained melamine, said Stephen F. Sundlof, director of the Center for Veterinary Medicine at the F.D.A.
Sunshine Mills, of Red Bay, Ala., manufactures branded and private label dry pet food and biscuits. The recalled biscuits include Nurture Chicken and Rice Biscuit, Ol’ Roy Peanut Butter Biscuit and Pet Life Large Biscuit.
Conrad Pitts, a lawyer for Sunshine Mills, said 80 percent of the tainted biscuits were sold by Wal-Mart, under the Ol’ Roy brand. Mr. Pitts said that the company had produced about 24 truckloads of biscuits with the contaminated gluten, and that the majority of the product was large biscuits. He said wheat gluten accounted for less than 1 percent of the total weight of the biscuits.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/06/us/06petfood.html?em&ex=1176091200&en=6a90c819c45cc7b9&ei=5087%0A
To the Editor:
Even though the Army provides benefits to soldiers that liberals might wish our country provided for all of its citizens, we shouldn’t forget the questionable ends for which our Army is often deployed.
Nor should we forget the underfinanced social programs that the trillions in military spending represent.
Mark Johnson
Kirkland, Wash., April 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/opinion/l07army.html
My Life in the Army
By ROBERT WRIGHT
Published: April 3, 2007
In one sense, I was well positioned to enjoy the summer of love. In 1969, I was living in San Francisco, epicenter of hippiedom, antiwar fervor and utopian hope for perpetual peace.
Circumstances kept me from sharing the spirit. The part of San Francisco I lived in was the Presidio, which was then a military base. I was 12, and my father was an Army officer. I remember my family once driving toward the Presidio’s Lombard Street gate past tens of thousands of protesters who seemed to think my father was part of a very bad outfit.
I was sure they were wrong, and I still am. In fact, the whole, larger stereotype — that the military is a right-wing institution, best viewed with skepticism if not cynicism by the left — is way off. Growing up in, or at least amid, the Army helped make me a liberal — not because I reacted against my environment, but because I absorbed its values. If all of America were more like the Army, it would be a better country.
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/opinion/03wright.html
Karzai Says He Has Met With Some Taliban Members in an Effort at Reconciliation
By CARLOTTA GALL
KABUL, Afghanistan, April 6 — President Hamid Karzai said Friday, for the first time, that he had held meetings with members of the Taliban as part of a reconciliation effort, but he ruled out talks with the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, or foreign militants fighting with the Taliban.
He made the comments as the Taliban claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in the capital that killed six people, and as NATO battled Taliban forces for control of an important town in southern Afghanistan.
“We’ve had representatives from the Taliban meeting with the different bodies of the Afghan government for a long time,” Mr. Karzai said at a news conference at the presidential palace. “I’ve had some Taliban coming to speak to me as well, so this process has been there for a long time.” Mr. Karzai set up a reconciliation commission in 2005 to woo Taliban members over to the government, but it has had limited success.
“Afghan Taliban are the sons of this soil,” he said. “As they repent, as they regret, as they want to come back to their own country, they are welcome.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/world/asia/07afghan.html
Op-Ed Contributor
A United Front Against the Taliban
By MUNIR AKRAM
AS the spring fighting season opens, Afghanistan faces many challenges: terrorism, the Taliban, Islamic extremism, drugs and criminals, warlords and factional friction, weak government and an inadequate national and international security presence.
This is a good time to make an objective assessment of the Afghan and regional environment and to put together a strategy to overcome those challenges. This strategy should be comprehensive, combining military containment with political reconciliation, administrative control and rapid socio-economic development. It must build peace through a bottom-up approach — village by village, district by district — by offering incentives and disincentives to secure the support and cooperation of local populations.
Winning the hearts and minds of the people is even more important than killing or capturing insurgents. Military tactics that cause collateral civilian casualties and damage property may kill 10 terrorists, but they will create 100 more. Most important, no strategy will succeed without accelerated reconstruction and economic development. It must offer hope to the people — hope for peace, jobs and better lives for themselves and their children.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/opinion/07akram.html
HUD Institutes Changes to Speed Storm Repairs
By LESLIE EATON
Louisiana homeowners may get faster access to rebuilding grants after a federal decision late last month that is forcing the state to change its slow-moving $7.5-billion “Road Home” program to repair houses damaged or destroyed by hurricanes in 2005.
But the changes, which should be detailed next week, have raised concerns that some homeowners will not use their grants of up to $150,000 for repairs or could lose them to fraud or debt, potentially leading to increased blight in hard-hit areas.
The program has been criticized around the state for its slow pace in handing out the money, which was provided by the federal government. As of April 3, more than 121,000 families had applied to Road Home, but roughly half had still not had been told how much money they could receive.
Just 6,100 families — 5 percent of applicants — had actually reached the “closing” stage and been given access to the cash by early April. And the money has been doled out through banks only as homeowners proved that rebuilding was in progress.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/us/07rebuild.html
McCain Says He Erred on Iraq Security
By JOHN M. BRODER
WASHINGTON, April 6 — Senator John McCain has issued an apology of sorts for his remarks after visiting a Baghdad market last weekend, saying he misspoke when he declared that his ability to walk freely around the marketplace was a sign of a significant improvement in security in Iraq.
He led a Congressional delegation through the Shorja market under tight security, with 100 heavily armed American troops guarding the group and attack helicopters and snipers watching over them. Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, and another member of the delegation, Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, said the conditions showed that the decision to deploy more than 20,000 additional American forces to Iraq was having the intended effect.
Baghdad residents expressed astonishment at Mr. McCain’s rosy remarks, saying that he visited the marketplace, the scene of numerous deadly bombings, under unrealistic conditions. Democrats and antiwar bloggers ridiculed him for blindly supporting the administration’s so-called surge policy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/washington/07mccain.html
The Complicated Power of the Vote to Nowhere
By SCOTT SHANE
Correction Appended
WASHINGTON
SO it’s yes to timetables for Iraq, both the House and the Senate have now said. But don’t schedule the welcome-home parades yet.
For a start, the two very different spending bills passed in the last 10 days have yet to be reconciled and President Bush has promised a veto, with a veto override quite unlikely.
But that isn’t to say the votes were meaningless, judging from the last slow-motion collision of a wartime president and the antiwar voices in Congress.
Historians of the Vietnam era suggest that those who look to Congress for decisive action to end the current war will be disappointed. But they say that today, just as in the 1960s and 70s, Congress both reflects and amplifies public disillusionment; its votes, however symbolic, could set political limits on the president’s options.
“Congress becomes the public voice of opposition,” said Robert Dallek, the presidential historian, who has dissected the interaction of Congress with both Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. “And it’s happening more quickly this time because Iraq stands in the shadow of Vietnam.”
Vietnam certainly cast a deep shadow over the recent debate, both for those who demanded a swift pullout from Iraq and those who warned against it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/weekinreview/01shane.html
Detroit Decides to Help Shape, Not Resist, Regulation of Emissions
By MICHELINE MAYNARD and NICK BUNKLEY
The New York International Auto Show, which opened to the public yesterday, is a picture of an industry with a cloud over its head.
While the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center abounds with flashy new vehicles like the big Lexus LX 570, a sport utility vehicle equipped with 19 speakers and 10 air bags, and the high-powered Ford Mustang 500 GT KR, created by the longtime racing designer Carroll Shelby, the carmakers are also contending with the possibility that such gas-guzzling vehicles may soon become harder to sell.
On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from automobiles. The primary way that can be done, carmakers and environmentalists say, is to increase automobile fuel economy.
In normal times, that would raise hackles from Detroit carmakers, which have a long history of fighting regulations covering both fuel economy and tailpipe emissions. But this week, company executives were saying something different.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/business/07emissions.html
Wrestling With Songs Tougher Than the Rest
By NATE CHINEN
Bruce Springsteen, finally taking the stage at Carnegie Hall on Thursday night, started out by assuring the crowd that he was still alive. Or maybe he was reassuring himself. The evening had felt, he said, “a little bit like that dream everybody has, where you’re invisible and you’re floating above a room, and all these people are talking about you.” The kicker, of course, is that it turns out to be your funeral.
Mr. Springsteen was the surprise twist in “The Music of Bruce Springsteen,” and the only logical conclusion. He had observed roughly a third of the concert’s 20 performances from the vantage of a mezzanine box: floating above the room, if hardly invisible. What he heard was a raft of artists grappling with his songs and, a bit more arduously, his style.
Some of them managed the task brilliantly; nobody made it seem easy. Mr. Springsteen’s songs occupy various stations in the emotional expanse between defiant and defeated, and they don’t take kindly to revision. Robin Holcomb’s piano-and- vocal take on “Brilliant Disguise,” with its cloak of strange new tonalities, was among the concert’s most inventive turns; that it wasn’t too enjoyable was only partly Ms. Holcomb’s fault. Another pianist, Uri Caine, devised a jazz abstraction of “New York City Serenade.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/arts/music/07bruc.html
To Fortify China, Soybean Harvest Grows in Brazil
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
RONDONÓPOLIS, Brazil — For more than 2,000 years, the Chinese have turned soybeans into tofu, a staple of the country’s diet.
But as its economy grows, so does China’s appetite for pork, poultry and beef, which require higher volumes of soybeans as animal feed. Plagued by scarce water supplies, China is turning to a new trading partner 15,000 miles away — Brazil — to supply more protein-packed beans essential to a richer diet.
China’s global scramble for natural resources is leading to a transformation of agricultural trading around the world. In China, vanishing cropland and diminishing water supplies are hampering the country’s ability to feed itself, and the increasing use of farmland in the United States to produce biofuels is pushing China to seek more of its staples from South America, where land is still cheap and plentiful.
“China is out there beating the bushes,” said Robert L. Thompson, a professor at the University of Illinois who is a former director of agricultural and rural development at the World Bank. The goal, he said, is “to ensure they have access to long-term contracts for minerals and energy and food.”
Once, the biggest bilateral food trade flowed between the United States, the world’s largest food exporter, and Japan. But countries with vast arable land available for expansion, particularly Brazil, are now racing to meet demand in China, whose population of 1.3 billion is 10 times that of Japan’s.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/06/business/worldbusiness/06soy.html?ex=1176436800&en=138a6ebd57e667f7&ei=5070&emc=eta1>
An Arid West No Longer Waits for Rain
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD and KIRK JOHNSON
A Western drought that began in 1999 has continued after the respite of a couple of wet years that now feel like a cruel tease. But this time people in the driest states are not just scanning the skies and hoping for rescue.
Some $2.5 billion in water projects are planned or under way in four states, the biggest expansion in the West’s quest for water in decades. Among them is a proposed 280-mile pipeline that would direct water to Las Vegas from northern Nevada. A proposed reservoir just north of the California-Mexico border would correct an inefficient water delivery system that allows excess water to pass to Mexico.
In Yuma, Ariz., federal officials have restarted an idled desalination plant, long seen as a white elephant from a bygone era, partly in the hope of purifying salty underground water for neighboring towns.
The scramble for water is driven by the realities of population growth, political pressure and the hard truth that the Colorado River, a 1,400-mile-long silver thread of snowmelt and a lifeline for more than 20 million people in seven states, is providing much less water than it had.
According to some long-term projections, the mountain snows that feed the Colorado River will melt faster and evaporate in greater amounts with rising global temperatures, providing stress to the waterway even without drought. This year, the spring runoff is expected to be about half its long-term average. In only one year of the last seven, 2005, has the runoff been above average.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/us/04drought.html?ex=1176350400&en=0597f317e88b7736&ei=5070&emc=eta1>
Stay on Track
Americans made 10.1 billion trips on public transportation last year, the highest that ridership has risen in nearly half a century. That’s good for congestion on the roads as well as the pollution that goes with it. But any mass-transit renaissance will come to a grinding halt unless a commensurate investment is made in upkeep and expansion.
As Libby Sander reported recently in The Times, Chicago’s elevated train system, known as the El, appears to be near a breaking point. The second-largest public transit system in America after New York’s is suffering from rising commute times as the century-old system deteriorates.
Public transit systems are financed through a combination of federal and local money, so parochial priorities play a big role in underinvestment. For instance, the Chicago Transit Authority’s financing formula hasn’t changed since 1983. But at the same time, the federal gas tax — which contributes money for public transportation systems as well as highways — hasn’t changed since 1993. That means it hasn’t even kept up with inflation in maintenance and construction costs, much less rising demand.
Part of the trouble with financing for mass transit is that the upfront costs always appear prohibitively large (for the next five years, Chicago’s regional authority is seeking $10 billion in state and local money) while the benefits are long term and extremely diffuse. As a result, projects often linger. Planners have been trying to build New York’s Second Avenue Line since the 1920s.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/opinion/04weds4.html?ex=1176350400&en=68883f5abbccec18&ei=5070&emc=eta1
French Train Breaks Rail Speed Record
By ARIANE BERNARD
BEZANNES, France, April 3 — A French high-speed train broke the world speed record on rail on Tuesday, reaching 357 miles an hour (574.8 kilometers) in a much publicized test in eastern France, exceeding expectations that it would hit 150 meters a second, or 540 kilometers an hour.
The train, code-named V150, is a research prototype meant to demonstrate the superiority both of the TGV high-speed train and of its probable successor, the AGV, which is also manufactured by the French engineering group Alstom. The performance on Tuesday came close to but did not break the world speed record for any train, set by an electromagnetic train in 2003.
The French railroad company SNCF and Alstom publicized the event as a test of “French excellence,” building on national pride for the 25-year-old bullet train.
The train reached its maximum speed in about 16 minutes at a site about 125 miles from Paris on a specially chosen sector of tracks of the new Eastern Europe TGV line, which will begin service between Paris and Strasbourg in June. The V150 train, with a reduced number of train cars and larger wheels, incorporates technological elements from the AGV.
SNCF and Alstom insist that the demonstration does not fulfill any immediate commercial purposes, but others say the speed could serve as a selling point in Asia and other markets.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/business/worldbusiness/04train.html?ex=1176350400&en=e9c3c3b347aac71e&ei=5070&emc=eta1
continued ...
Justices Rule Against Bush Administration on Emissions
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
WASHINGTON, April 2 — In one of its most important environmental decisions in years, the Supreme Court ruled today that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate heat-trapping gases in automobile emissions.
The court further ruled that the agency cannot sidestep its authority to regulate the greenhouse gases that contribute to global climate change unless it can provide a scientific basis for its refusal.
The 5-to-4 decision was a strong rebuke to the Bush administration, which has maintained that it does not have the right to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, and even if it did, it would not use the authority. The ruling does not force the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate auto emissions, but it would almost certainly face further legal action if it fails to do so.
Writing for the majority, Justice John Paul Stevens said that the only way the agency can “avoid taking further action” now is “if it determines that greenhouse gases do not contribute to climate change” or provides a good explanation why it cannot or will not find out whether they do.Beyond the specific context for this case — so-called “tailpipe emissions” from cars and trucks, which account for about one-fourth of the country’s total greenhouse-gas emissions — the decision is highly likely to have a broader impact on the debate over government efforts to address global warming.
Court cases around the country had been placed on hold to await the decision in this case. Among them is a challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency’s refusal to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, now pending in the federal appeals court here. Individual states, led by California, are also moving aggressively into what they have seen as a regulatory vacuum.
Justice Stevens, joined by Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, said that by providing nothing more than a “laundry list of reasons not to regulate,” the Environmental Protection Agency had defied the Clean Air Act’s “clear statutory command.” He said that a refusal to regulate can be based only on science and “reasoned justification,” adding that while the statute leaves the central determination to the “judgment” of the agency’s administrator, “the use of the word ‘judgment’ is not a roving license to ignore the statutory text.”
The court decided a second Clean Air Act case today, adopting a broad reading of the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority over factories and power plants that add capacity or make renovations that increase emissions of air pollutants. In doing so, the court reopened a federal enforcement effort against the Duke Energy Corporation under the Clean Air Act’s “new source review” provision. The vote in the second case, Environmental Defense v. Duke Energy Corp., No. 05-848, was 9 to 0.
The two decisions left environmental advocates exultant. Many said they still harbored doubts about the federal agency and predicted that the decision would help push the Democratic-controlled Congress to address the issue. Even in the nine months since the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 05-1120, and accelerating since the elections last November, there has been a growing interest among industry groups in working with environmental organizations on proposals for emissions limits.
Dave McCurdy, president of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the main industry trade group, said in response to the E.P.A. decision that the alliance “looks forward to working constructively with both Congress and the administration” in addressing the issue. “This decision says that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will be part of this process,” he said.
If the decision sowed widespread claims of victory, it left behind a prominent loser: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who argued vigorously in a dissenting opinion that the court never should have reached the merits of the case or addressed the question of the agency’s legal obligations.
His dissent, which Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel A. Alito Jr. also signed, focused solely on the issue of legal standing to sue: whether the broad coalition of states, cities and environmental groups that brought the lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency four years ago should have been accepted as plaintiffs in the first place.
This was the issue on which the coalition’s lawsuit had appeared most vulnerable, given that in recent years the Supreme Court has steadily raised the barrier to standing, especially in environmental cases. Justice Scalia has long been a leader in that effort, and Chief Justice Roberts made clear that, as his statements and actions in his prejudicial career indicated, he is fully on board Justice Scalia’s project.
Chief Justice Roberts said that the court should not have found that Massachusetts or any of the other plaintiffs had standing. The finding “has caused us to transgress the proper — and properly limited — role of the courts in a democratic society,” he said, quoting from a 1984 decision. And, quoting from a decision Justice Scalia wrote in 1992, he said: “This court’s standing jurisprudence simply recognizes that redress of grievances of the sort at issue here is the function of Congress and the chief executive, not the federal courts.”
Chief Justice Roberts complained that “today’s decision recalls the previous high-water mark of diluted standing requirements,” a 1973 decision known as the SCRAP case. That was an environmental case that the Supreme Court allowed to proceed on a definition of standing so generous as to be all but unthinkable today. “Today’s decision is SCRAP for a new generation,” the chief justice said, not intending the comparison as a compliment.
The majority addressed the standing question by noting that it was only necessary for one of the many plaintiffs to meet the three-part definition of standing: that it had suffered a “concrete and particularized injury,” that the injury was “fairly traceable to the defendant,” and that a favorable decision would be likely to “redress that injury.”
Massachusetts, one of the 12 state plaintiffs, met the test, Justice Stevens said, because it had made a case that global warming was raising the sea level along its coast, presenting the state with a “risk of catastrophic harm” that “would be reduced to some extent” if the government undertook the regulation the state sought.
In addition, Justice Stevens said, Massachusetts was due special deference in its claim to standing because of its status as a sovereign state. This new twist on the court’s standing doctrine may have been an essential tactic in winning the vote of Justice Kennedy, a leader in the court’s federalism revolution of recent years. Justice Stevens, a dissenter from the court’s states-rights rulings and a master of court strategy, in effect managed to use federalism as a sword rather than a shield.
Following its discussion of standing, the majority made short work of the agency’s threshold argument that the Clean Air Act simply did not authorize it to regulate greenhouse gases because carbon dioxide and the other gases were not “air pollutants” within the meaning of the law.
“The statutory text forecloses E.P.A.’s reading,” Justice Stevens said, adding that “greenhouse gases fit well within the Clean Air Act’s capacious definition of air pollutant.”
The justices in the majority also indicated that they were persuaded by the existing evidence of the impact of automobile emissions on the environment.
The agency itself “does not dispute the existence of a causal connection between man-made gas emissions and global warming,” Justice Stevens noted, adding that “judged by any standard, U.S. motor-vehicle emissions make a meaningful contribution to greenhouse gas concentrations.”
Justice Scalia, in his dissenting opinion, disputed the majority’s statutory analysis.
The decision overturned a 2005 ruling by the federal appeals court here.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/02/washington/02cnd-scotus.html?ex=1176177600&en=dfd85a525f8dfb18&ei=5070&emc=eta1
Scientists Detail Climate Changes, Poles to Tropics
By JAMES KANTER and ANDREW C. REVKIN
BRUSSELS, April 6 — From the poles to the tropics, the earth’s climate and ecosystems are already being shaped by the atmospheric buildup of greenhouse gases and face inevitable, possibly profound, alteration, the world’s leading scientific panel on climate change said Friday.
In its most detailed portrait of the effects of climate change driven by human activities, the panel predicted widening droughts in southern Europe and the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, the American Southwest and Mexico, and flooding that could imperil low-lying islands and the crowded river deltas of southern Asia. It stressed that many of the regions facing the greatest risks were among the world’s poorest.
And it said that while limits on smokestack and tailpipe emissions could lower the long-term risks, vulnerable regions must adjust promptly to shifting weather patterns, climatic and coastal hazards, and rising seas.
Without such adaptations, it said, a rise of 3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century could lead to the inundation of coasts and islands inhabited by hundreds of millions of people. But if steady investments are made in seawalls and other coastal protections, vulnerability could be sharply reduced.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/science/earth/07climate.html?hp
Even as Africa Hungers, Policy Slows Delivery of U.S. Food Aid
By CELIA W. DUGGER
MULONDO, Zambia — Traveling to school in wobbly dugout canoes, Munalula Muhau and her three cousins, 7- and 8-year-olds whose parents had died from AIDS, held onto just one possession: battered tin bowls to receive their daily ration of gruel.
Within weeks, those rations, provided by the United Nations World Food Program, are at risk of running out for them and 500,000 other paupers, including thousands of people wasted by AIDS who are being treated with American-financed drugs that make them hungrier as they grow healthy.
“Not to put too fine a point on it,” said Jeffrey Stringer, an American doctor who runs a nonprofit group treating more than 50,000 Zambians with AIDS, “but it will result in the death of some patients.”
Hoping to forestall such a dire outcome, the World Food Program made an urgent appeal in February for cash donations so it could buy corn from Zambia’s own bountiful harvest, piled in towering stacks in the warehouses of the capital, Lusaka.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/world/africa/07zambia.html?hp
A Top Aide to Gonzales Resigns, Becoming Latest Fallout Casualty
By DAVID STOUT and DAVID JOHNSTON
WASHINGTON, April 6 — A top aide to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales resigned on Friday, becoming another casualty of the political storm that has rocked the Justice Department in the aftermath of last year’s dismissals of eight United States attorneys.
The aide, Monica Goodling, had helped to coordinate those dismissals with the White House, an episode that has provoked demands for Mr. Gonzales’s dismissal. Even Mr. Gonzales’s allies, including President Bush, say the dismissals were bungled from a public relations and political standpoint.
Ms. Goodling, who has been on leave as the Justice Department’s liaison to the White House, notified the Senate Judiciary Committee through her lawyer on March 26 that she would invoke her constitutional right not to testify in the panel’s inquiry about the dismissals — not because she had anything to hide, the lawyer said, but because she did not expect fair treatment in the current climate of political hostility.
In a three-sentence resignation letter, Ms. Goodling wrote to Mr. Gonzales, “May God bless you richly as you continue your service to America.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/washington/07goodling.html?hp
Britons Say They Feared for Lives in Iran Captivity
By ALAN COWELL
LONDON, April 6 — Their greatest scare, they recalled, came on the second day, when they were flown to Tehran, blindfolded and backed up against a prison wall while their Iranian captors fiddled with weapons, cocking rifles and making them fear for their lives.
“We thought we were going to the British Embassy but we got taken to a detention center," said Royal Marine Joe Tindell, 21, one of 15 British sailors and marines seized by Iranian Revolutionary Guards in disputed waters in the Persian Gulf on March 23.
At the detention center, the mood turned drastically, as their captors changed from military dress into all black, their faces covered.
“We had a blindfold and plastic cuffs, hands behind our backs, heads against the wall,” Royal Marine Tindell said in an interview with the BBC. “Someone, I’m not sure who, someone said, I quote, ‘Lads, lads, I think we’re going to get executed.’
“After that comment someone was sick, and as far as I was concerned he had just had his throat cut. From there we were rushed to a room, quick photo, and then stuffed into a cell and didn’t see or speak to anyone for six days.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/world/europe/07britain.html?hp
Democrats’ Rise Has Pluses, Say G.O.P. Centrists
By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ
WASHINGTON, April 6 — If the Democratic ascendance on Capitol Hill was supposed to usher in dark days for Republicans, it is hard to tell from talking to moderate ones like Mike Ferguson, who represents a suburban district in central New Jersey.
As the new Democrat-led House rushed to complete its business before adjourning for spring break this week, Representative Ferguson was marveling at the many bills that had been passed in Congress’s first 100 days, including one that would make it easier for unions to organize and another that would increase the minimum wage.
“Under the Republican majority, those bills would have never gotten to the floor,” he explained before heading back to his district. “Now they have been brought to the floor, and I’ve voted for them.”
Mr. Ferguson’s enthusiasm captures a peculiar political reality in the Capitol: many Republicans from swing districts in the Northeast are finding that life under Democratic rule has its advantages.
During the 12 years that Republicans controlled the House, moderate Republicans were the stepchildren of their party, expected to vote with their conservative leadership on crucial issues, even if it meant taking positions that could anger centrist voters back home.
In fact, the Democrats made some of their deepest inroads last year in the Northeast. A total of 10 Republican incumbents in the House were defeated in four states — New Hampshire, Connecticut, New York and Pennsylvania — where the challengers aggressively tried to tie the incumbents to President Bush and his conservative allies on the Hill.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/washington/07moderates.html?hp
Networks Condemn Remarks by Imus
By DAVID CARR
On Wednesday morning, Don Imus called the students who play for the Rutgers University women’s basketball team a bunch of “nappy-headed ho’s.”
Even for Mr. Imus, a nationally syndicated radio host who knows his way around an insult, it was a shocking remark, one that seemed to impugn both the physical and moral characteristics of a team composed mostly of black players.
What followed was a familiar dance for Mr. Imus and the media companies that profit from his ability to shock his way to big audiences: outrage, indignation and, eventually, the expression of deep regret.
And so on Thursday, Mr. Imus wondered aloud on his show what the big deal was, saying people should not be offended by “some idiot comment meant to be amusing.”
But as often occurs in a modern media drama, Mr. Imus’s remarks were picked up on the Web, in this case by the Media Matters for America site (mediamatters.org). And by Friday, both his radio and television outlets were getting out 10-foot poles.
MSNBC, which simulcasts Mr. Imus’s show on cable television, issued an apology, noting that the program is not a production of the network; NBC, its parent company, called the comments “deplorable.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/arts/television/07imus.html?hp
A Setback Then a Reprieve for Vonage in Courts
By LAURIE J. FLYNN
Vonage Holdings, the Internet phone company, had a wild ride in the courtroom yesterday.
First, a federal judge in Alexandria, Va., barred Vonage from signing up new customers for its Internet phone service.
Then hours later, a federal appeals court gave Vonage a temporary stay of that injunction, allowing the company to continue to enroll customers while it sought to overturn the lower court ruling.
Vonage, based in Holmdel, N.J., has been entangled for years in a patent dispute with Verizon Communications, which had accused it of violating three patents covering technology that allows low-cost voice calls to be made over the Internet.
Yesterday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington issued its temporary stay in response to a request from Vonage. The move came after Judge Claude M. Hilton of the Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., issued a partial injunction that said Vonage could service existing customers but not new ones.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/technology/07vonage.html?hp
Bush Chides Democrats Over War Bill
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:13 a.m. ET
CRAWFORD, Texas (AP) -- President Bush criticized Democrats on Saturday for going on vacation without first giving him what he wants: a war spending bill free of orders to pull troops home.
''I recognize that Democrats are trying to show their current opposition to the war in Iraq,'' Bush said in his weekly radio address from Crawford, where he is on a break of his own.
''They see the emergency war spending bill as a chance to make that statement,'' Bush said. ''Yet for our men and women in uniform, this emergency war spending bill is not a political statement, it is a source of critical funding that has a direct impact on their daily lives.''
Bush has asked Congress for more than $100 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this year. The House and Senate have approved the money, but their bills aim to wind down the war by including timelines for troops to come home -- something Bush won't accept.
The Senate bill would require a U.S. troop exit in Iraq to begin within 120 days, with a completion goal of March 31, 2008. The House bill orders all combat troops out by Sept. 1, 2008.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush.html
Katrina’s Scars Still Etch the Face of New Orleans
By ROGER COHEN
International Herald Tribune
NEW ORLEANS
You got a strong stomach?" The question came one early morning from a young black woman in a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "War is not the answer." She was standing on a sidewalk outside her home, not far from this battered city's fabled French Quarter.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because there's a dead cat here and I don't want to move it." She smiled, a little embarrassed. "I just covered it with this garbage can."
The inverted trash container stood nearby. There were, she explained, many stray animals in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in August 2005 and sent much of its pre-storm population of 455,000 into flight. "It's a big cat," she added.
Kirsten McGregor - we later got introduced - was right about that. The dead cat was large and rigid and heavy. I dropped it into a garbage bag she held open. It was a relief to get the animal off the street.
http://select.nytimes.com/iht/2007/04/06/us/IHT-06globalist.1.html
Looking Beyond the Brass Ring
Tags: achievement, college, girls
I still remember the day when I was in my mid-20s that Cate, my best friend from college, told me her cousin had gotten into Harvard.
She laughed as I expressed my congratulations. “She doesn’t know that it’s all downhill from here,” she said.
I’ve thought about this exchange many times in the course of my adult life. It came to mind, most recently, when I read Sara Rimer’s intriguing piece in The New York Times last Sunday about the “amazing girls” of Newton North High School.
These were girls who took multiple Advanced Placement classes while playing multiple sports and musical instruments, winning top prizes, starring in plays, helping the homeless and achieving fluency in one or two foreign languages. More amazing still: despite all this incredible accomplishment, they weren’t guaranteed access to their first-choice colleges.
I felt a bit sick at heart, at first, when I read this.
And then I thought: It’s probably the best thing that could have happened to them.
http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/looking-beyond-the-brass-ring/
A Great Year for Ivy League Schools, but Not So Good for Applicants to Them
By SAM DILLON
Harvard turned down 1,100 student applicants with perfect 800 scores on the SAT math exam. Yale rejected several applicants with perfect 2400 scores on the three-part SAT, and Princeton turned away thousands of high school applicants with 4.0 grade point averages. Needless to say, high school valedictorians were a dime a dozen.
It was the most selective spring in modern memory at America’s elite schools, according to college admissions officers. More applications poured into top schools this admissions cycle than in any previous year on record. Schools have been sending decision letters to student applicants in recent days, and rejection letters have overwhelmingly outnumbered the acceptances.
Stanford received a record 23,956 undergraduate applications for the fall term, accepting 2,456 students, meaning the school took 10.3 percent of applicants.
Harvard College received applications from 22,955 students, another record, and accepted 2,058 of them, for an acceptance rate of 9 percent. The university called that “the lowest admit rate in Harvard’s history.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/education/04colleges.html?em&ex=1176091200&en=2e58161b2ab23a9d&ei=5087%0A
Federal Official Put on Leave in Student Loan Investigation
By KAREN W. ARENSON and JONATHAN D. GLATER
A senior Education Department official who owned stock in a student loan company while helping oversee the federal lending program was placed on leave yesterday, the department said.
The New York attorney general also widened his investigation into the industry, subpoenaing one of the nation’s largest student lenders for a list of all former employees who had worked for the federal department in the past six years.
The moves came a day after the Education Department said it would investigate the shareholdings of the senior official, Matteo Fontana, general manager in a unit of the Office of Federal Student Aid and a department employee since 2002.
A 2003 prospectus for a stock offering filed by the Education Lending Group, the parent company of Student Loan Xpress at the time, showed that Mr. Fontana planned to sell 10,500 shares in the company valued at about $100,000.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/washington/07loans.html
Battle Grows Over Renewing Landmark Education Law
By SAM DILLON
When President Bush and Democratic leaders put together the bipartisan coalition behind the federal No Child Left Behind Act, they managed to sidestep, override or flat out ignore decades of sentiment that education is fundamentally a prerogative of state and local government.
Now, as the president and the same Democrats push to renew the landmark law, which has reshaped the face of American education with its mandates for annual testing, discontent with it in many states is threatening to undermine the effort in both parties.
Arizona and Virginia are battling the federal government over rules for testing children with limited English. Utah is fighting over whether rural teachers there pass muster under the law. And Connecticut is two years into a lawsuit arguing that No Child Left Behind has failed to provide states federal financing to meet its requirements.
Reacting to such disputes in state after state, dozens of Republicans in Congress are sponsoring legislation that would water down the law by allowing states to opt out of its testing requirements yet still receive federal money.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/education/07child.html
Chlorine Gas Attack by Truck Bomber Kills Up to 30 in Iraq
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
BAGHDAD, April 6 — A suicide truck bomb loaded with chlorine gas exploded in Ramadi on Friday, killing as many as 30 people, many of them children, a security official said.
The explosion burned victims’ lungs, eyes and skin. Dr. Ali Abdullah Saleh, of the main Ramadi hospital, said 30 people had been admitted with shrapnel wounds and 15 had been sent to a second hospital in the city. He said 50 people had been admitted for breathing problems.
It was at least the sixth chlorine bomb detonated in Anbar Province since late January and the most lethal, though it appears that most victims were killed by the explosion rather than the chlorine. Insurgents have also used chlorine bombs in the northern part of Baghdad, the capital, and near Taji, a town about 20 miles to the north.
The attacker in Ramadi struck in the late morning of the Muslim day of prayer, when children off from school usually play in the street and adults run errands and visit before going to the mosque at midday.
The truck, a fuel tanker loaded with the toxic gas, sped toward an Iraqi police checkpoint, according to witnesses and Col. Tareq al-Dulaimi, the head of security for Anbar Province. The police officers opened fire and the truck swerved toward a residential area, where the bomb exploded, he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/world/middleeast/07iraq.html
The Real Fumble in Damascus
There is at least one point on which we and the critics of Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Damascus can agree: It is the White House, not the speaker of the House, that should be taking the diplomatic lead. But the Bush administration has far more appetite for scoring political points than figuring out whether talking to Syria might help contain the bloodletting in Iraq or revive efforts to negotiate peace.
So long as Mr. Bush continues to shun high-level discussions with this troublesome but strategically located neighbor of Israel, Lebanon and Iraq, such Congressional visits can serve the useful purpose of spurring a much needed examination of the administration’s failed policies.
Ms. Pelosi and the five Democrats and one Republican who accompanied her are scarcely the first to raise such questions during the three years that Mr. Bush has instructed his top envoys — and reportedly Israel as well — to avoid negotiations with Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. Plenty of other Republicans and Democrats have been taking similar trips and offering similar advice. They were ignored, but spared the White House’s ridicule.
In the administration’s perverse view, the only legitimate time for negotiations would be after the most contentious and difficult issues — Syria’s support for Hamas and Hezbollah, its meddling in Lebanon and open border with Iraq — have already been resolved. Thus, what ought to be the main agenda points for diplomatic discussions have been turned into a set of preconditions designed to ensure that no discussions ever take place. As the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, Congressional representatives of both parties, this page, and many others have pointed out, Washington should be eager to raise just those issues, along with the possibility of a land-for-peace deal with Israel, directly with Syrian leaders.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/opinion/07sat1.html
22 Brands of Dog Biscuits Are Added to Pet Food Recall
By KATIE ZEZIMA
A recall of pet food tainted with melamine, a chemical used to make plastic products, has been widened to include 22 types of dog biscuits, the Food and Drug Administration said yesterday.
The biscuits, made by Sunshine Mills Inc., contain wheat gluten imported from China that contained melamine, said Stephen F. Sundlof, director of the Center for Veterinary Medicine at the F.D.A.
Sunshine Mills, of Red Bay, Ala., manufactures branded and private label dry pet food and biscuits. The recalled biscuits include Nurture Chicken and Rice Biscuit, Ol’ Roy Peanut Butter Biscuit and Pet Life Large Biscuit.
Conrad Pitts, a lawyer for Sunshine Mills, said 80 percent of the tainted biscuits were sold by Wal-Mart, under the Ol’ Roy brand. Mr. Pitts said that the company had produced about 24 truckloads of biscuits with the contaminated gluten, and that the majority of the product was large biscuits. He said wheat gluten accounted for less than 1 percent of the total weight of the biscuits.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/06/us/06petfood.html?em&ex=1176091200&en=6a90c819c45cc7b9&ei=5087%0A
To the Editor:
Even though the Army provides benefits to soldiers that liberals might wish our country provided for all of its citizens, we shouldn’t forget the questionable ends for which our Army is often deployed.
Nor should we forget the underfinanced social programs that the trillions in military spending represent.
Mark Johnson
Kirkland, Wash., April 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/opinion/l07army.html
My Life in the Army
By ROBERT WRIGHT
Published: April 3, 2007
In one sense, I was well positioned to enjoy the summer of love. In 1969, I was living in San Francisco, epicenter of hippiedom, antiwar fervor and utopian hope for perpetual peace.
Circumstances kept me from sharing the spirit. The part of San Francisco I lived in was the Presidio, which was then a military base. I was 12, and my father was an Army officer. I remember my family once driving toward the Presidio’s Lombard Street gate past tens of thousands of protesters who seemed to think my father was part of a very bad outfit.
I was sure they were wrong, and I still am. In fact, the whole, larger stereotype — that the military is a right-wing institution, best viewed with skepticism if not cynicism by the left — is way off. Growing up in, or at least amid, the Army helped make me a liberal — not because I reacted against my environment, but because I absorbed its values. If all of America were more like the Army, it would be a better country.
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/opinion/03wright.html
Karzai Says He Has Met With Some Taliban Members in an Effort at Reconciliation
By CARLOTTA GALL
KABUL, Afghanistan, April 6 — President Hamid Karzai said Friday, for the first time, that he had held meetings with members of the Taliban as part of a reconciliation effort, but he ruled out talks with the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, or foreign militants fighting with the Taliban.
He made the comments as the Taliban claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in the capital that killed six people, and as NATO battled Taliban forces for control of an important town in southern Afghanistan.
“We’ve had representatives from the Taliban meeting with the different bodies of the Afghan government for a long time,” Mr. Karzai said at a news conference at the presidential palace. “I’ve had some Taliban coming to speak to me as well, so this process has been there for a long time.” Mr. Karzai set up a reconciliation commission in 2005 to woo Taliban members over to the government, but it has had limited success.
“Afghan Taliban are the sons of this soil,” he said. “As they repent, as they regret, as they want to come back to their own country, they are welcome.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/world/asia/07afghan.html
Op-Ed Contributor
A United Front Against the Taliban
By MUNIR AKRAM
AS the spring fighting season opens, Afghanistan faces many challenges: terrorism, the Taliban, Islamic extremism, drugs and criminals, warlords and factional friction, weak government and an inadequate national and international security presence.
This is a good time to make an objective assessment of the Afghan and regional environment and to put together a strategy to overcome those challenges. This strategy should be comprehensive, combining military containment with political reconciliation, administrative control and rapid socio-economic development. It must build peace through a bottom-up approach — village by village, district by district — by offering incentives and disincentives to secure the support and cooperation of local populations.
Winning the hearts and minds of the people is even more important than killing or capturing insurgents. Military tactics that cause collateral civilian casualties and damage property may kill 10 terrorists, but they will create 100 more. Most important, no strategy will succeed without accelerated reconstruction and economic development. It must offer hope to the people — hope for peace, jobs and better lives for themselves and their children.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/opinion/07akram.html
HUD Institutes Changes to Speed Storm Repairs
By LESLIE EATON
Louisiana homeowners may get faster access to rebuilding grants after a federal decision late last month that is forcing the state to change its slow-moving $7.5-billion “Road Home” program to repair houses damaged or destroyed by hurricanes in 2005.
But the changes, which should be detailed next week, have raised concerns that some homeowners will not use their grants of up to $150,000 for repairs or could lose them to fraud or debt, potentially leading to increased blight in hard-hit areas.
The program has been criticized around the state for its slow pace in handing out the money, which was provided by the federal government. As of April 3, more than 121,000 families had applied to Road Home, but roughly half had still not had been told how much money they could receive.
Just 6,100 families — 5 percent of applicants — had actually reached the “closing” stage and been given access to the cash by early April. And the money has been doled out through banks only as homeowners proved that rebuilding was in progress.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/us/07rebuild.html
McCain Says He Erred on Iraq Security
By JOHN M. BRODER
WASHINGTON, April 6 — Senator John McCain has issued an apology of sorts for his remarks after visiting a Baghdad market last weekend, saying he misspoke when he declared that his ability to walk freely around the marketplace was a sign of a significant improvement in security in Iraq.
He led a Congressional delegation through the Shorja market under tight security, with 100 heavily armed American troops guarding the group and attack helicopters and snipers watching over them. Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, and another member of the delegation, Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, said the conditions showed that the decision to deploy more than 20,000 additional American forces to Iraq was having the intended effect.
Baghdad residents expressed astonishment at Mr. McCain’s rosy remarks, saying that he visited the marketplace, the scene of numerous deadly bombings, under unrealistic conditions. Democrats and antiwar bloggers ridiculed him for blindly supporting the administration’s so-called surge policy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/washington/07mccain.html
The Complicated Power of the Vote to Nowhere
By SCOTT SHANE
Correction Appended
WASHINGTON
SO it’s yes to timetables for Iraq, both the House and the Senate have now said. But don’t schedule the welcome-home parades yet.
For a start, the two very different spending bills passed in the last 10 days have yet to be reconciled and President Bush has promised a veto, with a veto override quite unlikely.
But that isn’t to say the votes were meaningless, judging from the last slow-motion collision of a wartime president and the antiwar voices in Congress.
Historians of the Vietnam era suggest that those who look to Congress for decisive action to end the current war will be disappointed. But they say that today, just as in the 1960s and 70s, Congress both reflects and amplifies public disillusionment; its votes, however symbolic, could set political limits on the president’s options.
“Congress becomes the public voice of opposition,” said Robert Dallek, the presidential historian, who has dissected the interaction of Congress with both Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. “And it’s happening more quickly this time because Iraq stands in the shadow of Vietnam.”
Vietnam certainly cast a deep shadow over the recent debate, both for those who demanded a swift pullout from Iraq and those who warned against it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/weekinreview/01shane.html
Detroit Decides to Help Shape, Not Resist, Regulation of Emissions
By MICHELINE MAYNARD and NICK BUNKLEY
The New York International Auto Show, which opened to the public yesterday, is a picture of an industry with a cloud over its head.
While the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center abounds with flashy new vehicles like the big Lexus LX 570, a sport utility vehicle equipped with 19 speakers and 10 air bags, and the high-powered Ford Mustang 500 GT KR, created by the longtime racing designer Carroll Shelby, the carmakers are also contending with the possibility that such gas-guzzling vehicles may soon become harder to sell.
On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from automobiles. The primary way that can be done, carmakers and environmentalists say, is to increase automobile fuel economy.
In normal times, that would raise hackles from Detroit carmakers, which have a long history of fighting regulations covering both fuel economy and tailpipe emissions. But this week, company executives were saying something different.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/business/07emissions.html
Wrestling With Songs Tougher Than the Rest
By NATE CHINEN
Bruce Springsteen, finally taking the stage at Carnegie Hall on Thursday night, started out by assuring the crowd that he was still alive. Or maybe he was reassuring himself. The evening had felt, he said, “a little bit like that dream everybody has, where you’re invisible and you’re floating above a room, and all these people are talking about you.” The kicker, of course, is that it turns out to be your funeral.
Mr. Springsteen was the surprise twist in “The Music of Bruce Springsteen,” and the only logical conclusion. He had observed roughly a third of the concert’s 20 performances from the vantage of a mezzanine box: floating above the room, if hardly invisible. What he heard was a raft of artists grappling with his songs and, a bit more arduously, his style.
Some of them managed the task brilliantly; nobody made it seem easy. Mr. Springsteen’s songs occupy various stations in the emotional expanse between defiant and defeated, and they don’t take kindly to revision. Robin Holcomb’s piano-and- vocal take on “Brilliant Disguise,” with its cloak of strange new tonalities, was among the concert’s most inventive turns; that it wasn’t too enjoyable was only partly Ms. Holcomb’s fault. Another pianist, Uri Caine, devised a jazz abstraction of “New York City Serenade.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/arts/music/07bruc.html
To Fortify China, Soybean Harvest Grows in Brazil
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
RONDONÓPOLIS, Brazil — For more than 2,000 years, the Chinese have turned soybeans into tofu, a staple of the country’s diet.
But as its economy grows, so does China’s appetite for pork, poultry and beef, which require higher volumes of soybeans as animal feed. Plagued by scarce water supplies, China is turning to a new trading partner 15,000 miles away — Brazil — to supply more protein-packed beans essential to a richer diet.
China’s global scramble for natural resources is leading to a transformation of agricultural trading around the world. In China, vanishing cropland and diminishing water supplies are hampering the country’s ability to feed itself, and the increasing use of farmland in the United States to produce biofuels is pushing China to seek more of its staples from South America, where land is still cheap and plentiful.
“China is out there beating the bushes,” said Robert L. Thompson, a professor at the University of Illinois who is a former director of agricultural and rural development at the World Bank. The goal, he said, is “to ensure they have access to long-term contracts for minerals and energy and food.”
Once, the biggest bilateral food trade flowed between the United States, the world’s largest food exporter, and Japan. But countries with vast arable land available for expansion, particularly Brazil, are now racing to meet demand in China, whose population of 1.3 billion is 10 times that of Japan’s.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/06/business/worldbusiness/06soy.html?ex=1176436800&en=138a6ebd57e667f7&ei=5070&emc=eta1>
An Arid West No Longer Waits for Rain
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD and KIRK JOHNSON
A Western drought that began in 1999 has continued after the respite of a couple of wet years that now feel like a cruel tease. But this time people in the driest states are not just scanning the skies and hoping for rescue.
Some $2.5 billion in water projects are planned or under way in four states, the biggest expansion in the West’s quest for water in decades. Among them is a proposed 280-mile pipeline that would direct water to Las Vegas from northern Nevada. A proposed reservoir just north of the California-Mexico border would correct an inefficient water delivery system that allows excess water to pass to Mexico.
In Yuma, Ariz., federal officials have restarted an idled desalination plant, long seen as a white elephant from a bygone era, partly in the hope of purifying salty underground water for neighboring towns.
The scramble for water is driven by the realities of population growth, political pressure and the hard truth that the Colorado River, a 1,400-mile-long silver thread of snowmelt and a lifeline for more than 20 million people in seven states, is providing much less water than it had.
According to some long-term projections, the mountain snows that feed the Colorado River will melt faster and evaporate in greater amounts with rising global temperatures, providing stress to the waterway even without drought. This year, the spring runoff is expected to be about half its long-term average. In only one year of the last seven, 2005, has the runoff been above average.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/us/04drought.html?ex=1176350400&en=0597f317e88b7736&ei=5070&emc=eta1>
Stay on Track
Americans made 10.1 billion trips on public transportation last year, the highest that ridership has risen in nearly half a century. That’s good for congestion on the roads as well as the pollution that goes with it. But any mass-transit renaissance will come to a grinding halt unless a commensurate investment is made in upkeep and expansion.
As Libby Sander reported recently in The Times, Chicago’s elevated train system, known as the El, appears to be near a breaking point. The second-largest public transit system in America after New York’s is suffering from rising commute times as the century-old system deteriorates.
Public transit systems are financed through a combination of federal and local money, so parochial priorities play a big role in underinvestment. For instance, the Chicago Transit Authority’s financing formula hasn’t changed since 1983. But at the same time, the federal gas tax — which contributes money for public transportation systems as well as highways — hasn’t changed since 1993. That means it hasn’t even kept up with inflation in maintenance and construction costs, much less rising demand.
Part of the trouble with financing for mass transit is that the upfront costs always appear prohibitively large (for the next five years, Chicago’s regional authority is seeking $10 billion in state and local money) while the benefits are long term and extremely diffuse. As a result, projects often linger. Planners have been trying to build New York’s Second Avenue Line since the 1920s.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/opinion/04weds4.html?ex=1176350400&en=68883f5abbccec18&ei=5070&emc=eta1
French Train Breaks Rail Speed Record
By ARIANE BERNARD
BEZANNES, France, April 3 — A French high-speed train broke the world speed record on rail on Tuesday, reaching 357 miles an hour (574.8 kilometers) in a much publicized test in eastern France, exceeding expectations that it would hit 150 meters a second, or 540 kilometers an hour.
The train, code-named V150, is a research prototype meant to demonstrate the superiority both of the TGV high-speed train and of its probable successor, the AGV, which is also manufactured by the French engineering group Alstom. The performance on Tuesday came close to but did not break the world speed record for any train, set by an electromagnetic train in 2003.
The French railroad company SNCF and Alstom publicized the event as a test of “French excellence,” building on national pride for the 25-year-old bullet train.
The train reached its maximum speed in about 16 minutes at a site about 125 miles from Paris on a specially chosen sector of tracks of the new Eastern Europe TGV line, which will begin service between Paris and Strasbourg in June. The V150 train, with a reduced number of train cars and larger wheels, incorporates technological elements from the AGV.
SNCF and Alstom insist that the demonstration does not fulfill any immediate commercial purposes, but others say the speed could serve as a selling point in Asia and other markets.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/business/worldbusiness/04train.html?ex=1176350400&en=e9c3c3b347aac71e&ei=5070&emc=eta1
continued ...
What men do with their larger muscle mass is their choice. But, war should never be an agenda for it.
This study showed that war does have an appeal to both men and women, but that appeal is different and is related to the set of moral concerns that are unique to each gender. To assess the different aspects of men's and women's attitudes towards war, a 48-item Likert-type scale was constructed and administered to 148 students. Results showed that women will support war, at least as enthusiastically as men, when an appeal is made based on empathy for oppressed and vulnerable human beings, or an emphasis is placed on group cohesion and intensification of interpersonal relationships in the community during war. The data indicated that men are more prone than women to justify war according to rational and legal criteria, and that women find it more difficult than men to accept, condone, or justify any acts of violence, killing, and destruction during war. It was also found that men more than women accept stereotypical sex roles during war, e.g., men as warriors and protectors and women as caretakers. (Author/RM)
Hello?
Where are my men here?
Morning Papers - continued ...
Men's News Daily
(The disjointed identity. I have a feeling men are better off tuning into the reality Moore puts forward in that aggressive self identity is the pitfall of success on Earth.)
http://www.mensnewsdaily.com/
NO, there isn't any unemployment anywhere to speak of, right? Sure.
Great Lake Lunacy: Michigan Government Reveals Third World Aspirations
By Doug Powers
All governments, Federal, state and local, do dumb and irresponsible things — it’s the nature of the beast — but my home state of Michigan is cutting a trail through Idiot Jungle, overworked machete in hand, for other government boneheads to follow. If we’re not careful, we might run into California and accidentally hack each other to death — mercifully.
Michigan has an over $1 billion budget deficit and an unemployment rate so high that we’re a 7/11 closing away from overtaking Mississippi for the lead. If this keeps up, I fully expect the Upper Peninsula secede to Wisconsin.
Businesses in the state are fleeing the area like screaming waitresses with torn blouses running out of a Kennedy family reunion. One recent example is Comerica Bank, a 160 year Michigan staple, which recently announced they would be relocating their headquarters to Dallas, Texas. At least they left Comerica Park — for now, but I’m sure the movers will be back to pack that up too.
http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/07/great-lake-lunacy-michigan-government-reveals-third-world-aspirations/
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." - Mahatma Gandhi
April 5, 2007
International Response to Solomon Islands Tsunami Victims Gathers Momentum
By voanews
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies says the international response to tsunami victims in the Solomon Islands is gathering pace. At least 34 people have been killed and more than 5,000 others displaced by a powerful earthquake and tsunami that struck the South Pacific nation Monday. Lisa Schlein reports for VOA from Red Cross headquarters in Geneva.
The Red Cross Federation reports about 15,000 people are affected by the tsunami. Government health officials say the figure could be higher, with up to 50,000 people affected by the disaster.
Getting aid to the victims has been difficult. But, Red Cross Spokeswoman, Anna Nelson, says it should be easier now that direct air travel into Gizo, the hardest hit island, has resumed.
Over the past few days, she says relief items have had to be flown to an airstrip on the island of Mundo, which is not far from Gizo. From there, she says the supplies have been sent by boat to the more remote regions.
“In addition, planes from New Zealand, Australia and France have all been dispatched with relief items. So, the international response in terms of just getting the items there has definitely gathered pace,” she said. ”And, in terms of the Red Cross, Red Crescent response, the International Federation has sent a team of 10 disaster management experts who are now on the ground and are now active in that operation in the affected area. And, those include water and sanitation, health, relief experts who can really lend a hand and support to this response as well.”
http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/05/international-response-to-solomon-islands-tsunami-victims-gathers-momentum/
Common Errors in Custody Cases: Losing Your Cool—Especially over the Phone
By Glenn Sacks
I’ve previously discussed how men can get set up during custody cases in visitation exchange traps, and I frequently caution men to be on guard during their legal battles.
Caution should be heeded not only during in-person exchanges with your ex-spouse, but in all types of interactions. Guy White, a private investigator/custody case advisor who seems to have seen everything when it comes to divorce and custody issues, has an interesting section on this in his book Child Custody A to Z. He discusses some of the common mistakes men make during their court proceedings that hurt their chances of gaining custody.
http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/06/common-errors-in-custody-cases-losing-your-cool%e2%80%94especially-over-the-phone/
Podcast: The Woman’s Real Man (Parts 1 - 5)
By Bernard Chapin
The Woman’s Real Man
Written by Bernard Chapin
Read by Mike LaSalle
http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/03/08/the-womans-real-man-pt-3/
Nancy Pelosi: Broken Left Speaker
http://blackandright.mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/06/podcast-premium-pelosi/
Turning 21 in prison doing life without parole
By Denise Noe
A verse in one of my favorite Merle Haggard songs, “Mama Tried,” has the narrator sadly singing, “I turned twenty-one in prison doing life without parole.” While I expect people to think I’m making too much of what is “just a song,” I believe this particular song has an unusual depth and a relevancy to the all-too-common real life stories of young people, usually boys, who end up behind bars.
The song evokes an extreme sense of melancholy as it tells the tale of a young man who went profoundly wrong. The main message of the song is not to blame the narrator’s mother: “that leaves only me to blame because mama tried/She tried to raise me right but I refused.” He talks of a mother who “worked hours without rest/wanted me to have the best.” Yet, “despite all my Sunday learning/to the bad I kept on turning/that leaves only me to blame because mama tried.”
http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/07/turning-21-in-prison-doing-life-without-parole/
What leads 'the call' of the bigotry of the Religious Right? According to these folks, not the oppression of taxation without representation. The idea/philosophy that the USA was 'saved' for the preservation of religion by the migration of the pilgrams and others that left England to practice their faith as they wished rather than as dictated by the British Monarchy through the Church of England.
http://www.cofe.anglican.org/
The Anglicans.
The Act of Uniformity 1559 (citation 1 Eliz c. 2) set the order of prayer to be used in the English Book of Common Prayer. Every man had to go to church once a week or be fined 12 pence, which was a lot for the poor. With this act Elizabeth made it a legal obligation to go to church every Sunday. The 'Act of Uniformity' reinforced the Book of Common Prayer.
The Seventh Day is a day of rest, not necessarily worship. As you'll have it, I suppose.
The Providential Call of the United States and its Constitution
By Steve Farrell
Sir, God raised up the United States and influenced her constitutional institutions for the very purpose of shielding and protecting the Church in the wilderness, and all men in their liberties, and of throwing a guard around His embryo kingdom till He should come, whose right it is to reign and subdue all enemies under his feet. - Parley P. Pratt, Quorum of the Twelve, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/06/the-providential-call-of-the-united-states-and-its-constitution/
MICHAEL MOORE HAS IT RIGHT.
Bush is a flash in the pan, not a trend of the USA.
It's completely obvious.
The claims the Republicans like to make about 2006 is that it was to teach them a lesson about fiscal responsiblity. That is not the reality I am seeing. The Republican constituency is coming away from it's 'hard line' politics. The Conservative Christians are finding their agenda as unrealistic as a political agenda and doesn't want to be a focus of ridicule. They feel Jesus got lost in their lives to political dogma that has cost the USA dearly in it's Surplus Treasury, soldiers, their families and the deaths of many innocent people that once lived in Iraq.
They are moving in a direction of participation of their democracy shared with others just as moral as they are. They are measuring themselves differently and inclusively.
So long as Republicans seem to believe there is a benefit politically to feel they need to apologize for the change in direction of the legislature in 2006, that nonsense will continue to present itself in the media. Won't last forever. Bush's house of cards is not only falling but being scattered to the winds.
Where all this comes to men? Their self identity? One aspect of feminism I absolutely loved was the fact it set free men as well as women.
Peace. The real place for the USA military is as Global Peacekeepers and not aggressors for profiteers.
Michael Moore Today
"...it is increasingly difficult to imagine yet another two years of slow bleed with a leader so clearly unfit to lead." -- Joe Klein, Time Magazine
We've seen this before leading to the Iraq Invasion.
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."-- Joseph Goebbels
Cheney reasserts al-Qaida-Saddam connection
Vice president’s words come as latest Pentagon report again dismisses link
Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney repeated his assertions of al-Qaida links to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq on Thursday as the Defense Department released a report citing more evidence that the prewar government did not cooperate with the terrorist group.
Cheney contended that al-Qaida was operating in Iraq before the March 2003 invasion led by U.S. forces and that terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was leading the Iraqi branch of al-Qaida. Others in al-Qaida planned the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
“He took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq, organized the al-Qaida operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene and then, of course, led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June,” Cheney told radio host Rush Limbaugh during an interview. “As I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq.”
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=9543
"Thomas Jefferson gave states the authority to do this, so we'd be remiss to pass up on that opportunity."
-- Wisconsin State Rep. Frank Boyle
April 5th, 2007 6:32 pm
Boyle introduces impeachment bill
By Ron Brochu / Superior Daily Telegram
MADISON, Wis. - State Rep. Frank Boyle has introduced a resolution in the Wisconsin Assembly calling for the impeachment of President George W. Bush.
The rural Douglas County Democrat admits his bill has little chance of passage, but said it’s justified.
“Will it go anywhere? No. Does it need to be done? Absolutely,” Boyle said Wednesday afternoon in a telephone interview.
Wisconsin is among six states in which similar bills have been introduced. Boyle’s resolution is fashioned after measures in Illinois and New Jersey. The other states are Maine, New Mexico, Washington and Vermont, he said, conceding none of those legislatures so far have approved the measure.
The state lawmaker alleges President Bush authorized torture in violation of the Geneva Conventions, held suspects in prison without charge or trial, and manipulated intelligence reports to launch war against Iraq, resulting in Iraqi civilian and U.S. military deaths. He accuses President Bush of leaking classified national secrets as part of a political agenda that exposed covert agents to harm and retribution.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=9536
'Making Our Own Way' ...by Dan DeWalt
At the very moment that citizens' calls for impeachment are growing in number and in volume, our elected representatives are shrinking into their holes, plugging their ears and repeating out loud "I will not listen I will not listen."
The latest entrant into this hall of shame is Vermont Senate President pro-temp, Peter Shumlin. He grabbed the headlines last week by declaring himself to be in favor of impeachment as an obvious remedy to a lying and dangerous administration. However, he left himself an easy out by declaring that he would not interfere with the Vermont Democratic Speaker of the House, Gaye Symington who has squarely thrown herself in the protect Bush camp by denying Vermonters the right to have a debate on an impeachment resolution that is now in the House Judiciary committee. Now a Senate impeachment resolution has been introduced but Shumlin won't let it move forward, saying that there is not enough support for it in the statehouse and it wouldn't have any impact on the Congress. Here is a politician who shows every sign of thinking himself gubernatorial material, but he doesn't even have a fundamental sense of history.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/mustread/index.php?id=854
Impeachment Declaration from Texas
http://www.legis.state.tx.us/tlodocs/80R/billtext/html/HC00154I.htm
RESOLVED, That George W. Bush, if found guilty of the charges contained herein, should be removed from office and disqualified to hold any other office in the United States.
Be It Resolved: You Can Impeach the President
Official State Impeachment Text
Impeachment Text for Cities & Towns
Impeachment Text for County Democratic Committees
Impeachment Text for State Assemblies and/or Legislatures
Jefferson's Manual, Section LIII, 603
You Can Impeach the President
http://www.michaelmoore.com/mustread/index.php?id=622
Camp Casey Easter Update
Hey you Camp Casey folks:
Get your mudboots and come on to Camp Casey!!!! They can't Rain Out a Revolution!
Camp Casey may be under water, but George has some barns in Crawford that he just might invite his neighbors into!!! It will be a lean Camp Casey if the rains continue-but 10 to a hotel room ain't bad!
Camp Casey is all about flexibility. In August 2005, 12,000showed up in the ditches! For Easter 2007, we can handle a little water and mud to end the war!
Come on to Crawford!!! (But be Flexible!!!)
- Ann Wright, Camp Casey Commander
http://www.michaelmoore.com/mustread/index.php?id=851
Camp Casey Easter 2007
http://www.gsfp.org/article.php?id=320
Military: 8 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq
By Kim Gamel / Associated Press
BAGHDAD - The U.S. military reported Thursday that eight U.S. soldiers were killed in the Baghdad area over the past three days as militants fought back against a security plan in its eighth week. An Army helicopter went down south of the capital, wounding four, after an Iraqi official said insurgents fired on it.
Four British soldiers — including two women — died Thursday in an ambush that Prime Minister Tony Blair called an "act of terrorism," suggesting it may have been carried out by elements linked to Iran but stopping short of blaming Tehran.
One U.S. soldier died and two were wounded in a roadside bombing Thursday in restive Diyala province north of Baghdad, the military said. Four others died Wednesday in two roadside bombs explosions in southern Baghdad and north of the capital, while another was killed by small-arms fire in the eastern part of the city. Two other soldiers were killed by small-arms fire on Tuesday — one in eastern Baghdad and another on foot patrol in the southern outskirts of the capital.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=9538
April 6th, 2007 3:07 am
Kucinich: Bush's approach to Iran raises questions about impeachment
By Holly Ramer / Associated Press
AMHERST, N.H. --Democratic presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich said President Bush may be setting himself up for impeachment by setting the stage for war with Iran.
"The administration's preparations for war in and of itself have raised questions relating to impeachment," Kucinich told The Associated Press between campaign stops in New Hampshire.
The Ohio congressman said he has met with diplomats, ambassadors and other national leaders around the world in recent months to discuss Iran.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=9539
Chesapeake 'Impeach Bush Cheney' sign may be illegal
By Janette Rodrigues / Virginian-Pilot
CHESAPEAKE — Note to the political pundit or prankster who put “Impeach Bush Cheney” signs in trees around Chesapeake: Political speech is protected, but not in print on a road right of way.
Under state law, it’s illegal to place signs in the area between the road and the property line or in the medians.
The city sent out an inspector today to see if the eye-catching, cloth sign off Interstate 64, just east of the High Rise Bridge, is on state, municipal or private land. If it’s not on private property, it’s coming down.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=9537
Public Punditry Contest!
http://freewayblogger.blogspot.com/2007/03/public-punditry-contest.html
Swift Boat donor's appointment sidesteps Congress
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush named Republican fundraiser Sam Fox as U.S. ambassador to Belgium on Wednesday, using a maneuver that allowed him to bypass Congress where Democrats had derailed Fox's nomination.
Democrats had denounced Fox for his 2004 donation to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The group's TV ads, which claimed that Sen. John Kerry exaggerated his military record in Vietnam, were viewed as a major factor in the Massachusetts Democrat's losing the election.
Recognizing Fox did not have the votes to obtain Senate confirmation, Bush withdrew the nomination last month. On Wednesday, with Congress out of town for a spring break, the president used his power to make recess appointments to put Fox in the job without Senate confirmation.
This means Fox can remain ambassador until the end of the next session of Congress, effectively through the end of the Bush presidency.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=9531
April 5th, 2007 3:52 am
Location finally set for Anderson-Hannity debate
One of the last remaining issues standing in the way of a Sean Hannity-Rocky Anderson debate has been resolved.
Brian Burton, programming adviser for the Associated Students of the University of Utah, said Wednesday that the school will host the May 4 debate on campus at Kingsbury Hall. Anderson and Hannity will discuss the war in Iraq and calls for impeachment of President Bush.
Earlier discussions surrounding plans for a face-off between the liberal Salt Lake City mayor and the conservative Fox News Channel talk-show pundit left uncertain the availability of any campus venues to host the event, because the university's commencement ceremonies are being held the same day.
Tuesday, March 27th, 2007'
Three arrested in Grassley office occupation
Three Iowa peace activists participating in a national campaign of sustained civil disobedience Monday were arrested when they refused to leave the office of Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, Des Moines police said.Lindsay Ayling, 19, and Brian Perbix, 20, Grinnell College students, and Chris Gaunt of Grinnell had delivered a 350-signature petition that urged the senator to stop the funding for the war in Iraq. They hoped to elicit a pledge from Grassley that he would vote against President Bush's $93 billion war appropriation request.The three members of the Occupation Project, a national civil disobedience campaign, were charged with trespassing. They were held overnight in the Polk County Jail and will be arraigned today.
http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070306/NEWS/703060401/-1/SPORTS09
and
http://vcnv.org/arrests-made-at-senator-grassleys-iowa-office
New Zealand Herald
Flood waters sweep through Far North
The War Memorial Park in Kawakawa.
Storm was a one-in-150-year event
5:00AM Saturday March 31, 2007
By Martin Johnston
A farmhouse at Hikurangi Swamp, northwest of Whangarei. Photo / Brett Phibbs
North Islanders should be able to don sports gear and stow their parkas for most of the weekend: the week's storms have moved on.
"The next time Northland gets rain would be just a few showers on Sunday," MetService weather ambassador Bob McDavitt said last night.
The weekend forecast is for lighter and drier northwesterlies, replacing the moist northeast air flow over the country that flooded parts of eastern Northland.
Mr McDavitt said a front predicted to move over the South Island today should bring Wellington some wind tonight.
"As that front moves onto the North Island on Sunday it fades; a few showers, that's it.
Cleanest cars get gold emissions tick
5:00AM Tuesday April 03, 2007
Flash: Everest, beyond the limit launch
How fitting to launch the Discovery Channel's new documentary series, Everest: Beyond the Limit, with a photographic exhibition from the programme at the Viaduct's not-so-hot spot Minus 5. The temperature is a constant minus 5C and the bar is fitted out with ice sculptures, ice chandeliers and ice-molded glasses filled with blue vodka cocktails.
The new series, which premieres on Anzac Day, documents the 2006 climbing season on Mt Everest - the second deadliest on record and the first time a double amputee, New Zealander Mark Inglis, has reached the summit. The series follows climbers from around the world, led by New Zealander Russell Brice, through the gruelling two-month attempt to reach the top. The Kiwi contingent on the film crew included cameraman Mark Whetu.
Timor leader's plea to NZ
East Timor presidential candidate Jose Ramos Horta says he'll swallow his pride and ask New Zealand to keep its troops in the tiny nation for years if he wins Monday's election.
And Prime Minister Helen Clark indicated that New Zealand would be willing to stay.
"This year with the presidential and parliamentary elections, East Timor is particularly volatile," she said yesterday.
"So long as the East Timor Government and the United Nations continue their support, it's hard to see a withdrawal in the near future."
The commitment to East Timor, which began in 1999, had been reduced, but it was lifted again last year when violence flared in the fledgling state.
'I was Monroe's daughter' claimed Anna Nicole
Anna Nicole Smith so idolised Marilyn Monroe she convinced herself she was the screen siren's daughter, according to a biography of the former Playboy bunny.
As Howard K. Stern, Smith's lawyer and lover, fights in a United States court to prove he's the father of her baby daughter Dannielynn, Great Big Beautiful Doll provides an insight into the life, fame and ultimately death of Smith.
The book was written in 1996 but has been updated since her death in February.
It shows Smith might not have been smart - she thought Los Angeles was in New York when Playboy first flew her out there in 1991 - but she used her story of a "small-town girl made good" to charm many rich and famous men, including Hugh Hefner, Donald Trump and of course, 89-year-old J. Howard Marshall II.
Editorial: Emissions tests for cars should be compulsory
5:00AM Saturday April 07, 2007
Being eco-friendly carries a certain cachet these days, but enough to pay $33.75 to obtain a sticker proclaiming your car has passed an emissions standards test? Zero Emissions, an organisation that plans a national network of testing stations, hopes so. Where the Government fears to tread, private enterprise has spied an opportunity.
The Auckland Regional Council did its bit to publicise the first of the stations, at Browns Bay, this week. A council-owned 2006 hybrid petrol-electric car proved extremely environmentally friendly, winning a top-rating gold certificate. Compact Toyota models from the North Shore City Council's fleet did similarly well, showing most of their fuel was being used for its intended purpose rather than pollution.
Spectre of Harry as hostage
5:00AM Saturday April 07, 2007
Self-satisfied President basks in his own glory
5:00AM Saturday April 07, 2007
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, shakes the hand of one of the 15 sailors after their surprise release. Photo / Reuters
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sat on the podium, a satisfied smile hovering around the corners of his mouth, clearly savouring the enormous surprise he was about to spring on the world.
One minute sermonising, the next pinning a medal on a grizzled revolutionary guard, this was, from the beginning, Ahmadinejad's day.
As he stepped forward for the last act, to meet the 15 captives at the centre of this extraordinary saga, the sky was lit up by a flash of lightning and a long rumble of thunder.
Editorial: A blow for Iran's hardliners
5:00AM Saturday April 07, 2007
The 15 British naval personnel taken captive by Iran have been released as a gesture, says Iran, to Easter. Christians everywhere will be happy to accept that excuse, even as they suspect that a more prosaic explanation lies in Iranian politics. The Easter reference is more apposite than possibly Iran knows.
This has been a story of commendable - dare we say Christian - restraint by Britain in the face of severe provocation and rank injustice.
When the 14 men and one woman were seized three weeks ago, on the pretext that they had entered Iranian waters, Britain's passive response might have been seen as a sign of weakness. Certainly, the United States might have reacted more aggressively if one of its ship inspection parties had been taken at gunpoint in the Shatt al Arab waterway between Iran and Iraq. But Britain's response has proved to be right.
Three charged over 2005 London bombings
2:21PM Friday April 06, 2007By Tim Castle
The first charges over the attacks in London in July, 2005 were laid today. File photo / Reuters
LONDON - Three men were charged today in connection with the July 7, 2005, suicide bomb attacks that killed 52 commuters on London's transport system, police said.
They are due to appear in court in London this weekend charged with conspiring with the bombers to cause explosions on the transport network or at tourist attractions in the capital.
"The allegation is that they were involved in reconnaissance and planning for a plot with those ultimately responsible for the bombings on July 7," said Sue Hemming, head of the Crown Prosecution Service's counter-terrorism division.
Arrests over 'Harry Potter train' attack
1:28PM Friday April 06, 2007
LONDON - Ten youths have been arrested after Harry Potter's train, the Hogwarts Express, was attacked by vandals, police said today.
More than 300 of the tourist train's windows -- famous for departing from imaginary platform 9 3/4 at King's Cross station in the Harry Potter books -- were smashed with hammers while it was in a depot in Lancashire.
The damage will cost at least 50,000 pounds to repair, according to train operator West Coast Railways (WCR).
(The disjointed identity. I have a feeling men are better off tuning into the reality Moore puts forward in that aggressive self identity is the pitfall of success on Earth.)
http://www.mensnewsdaily.com/
NO, there isn't any unemployment anywhere to speak of, right? Sure.
Great Lake Lunacy: Michigan Government Reveals Third World Aspirations
By Doug Powers
All governments, Federal, state and local, do dumb and irresponsible things — it’s the nature of the beast — but my home state of Michigan is cutting a trail through Idiot Jungle, overworked machete in hand, for other government boneheads to follow. If we’re not careful, we might run into California and accidentally hack each other to death — mercifully.
Michigan has an over $1 billion budget deficit and an unemployment rate so high that we’re a 7/11 closing away from overtaking Mississippi for the lead. If this keeps up, I fully expect the Upper Peninsula secede to Wisconsin.
Businesses in the state are fleeing the area like screaming waitresses with torn blouses running out of a Kennedy family reunion. One recent example is Comerica Bank, a 160 year Michigan staple, which recently announced they would be relocating their headquarters to Dallas, Texas. At least they left Comerica Park — for now, but I’m sure the movers will be back to pack that up too.
http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/07/great-lake-lunacy-michigan-government-reveals-third-world-aspirations/
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." - Mahatma Gandhi
April 5, 2007
International Response to Solomon Islands Tsunami Victims Gathers Momentum
By voanews
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies says the international response to tsunami victims in the Solomon Islands is gathering pace. At least 34 people have been killed and more than 5,000 others displaced by a powerful earthquake and tsunami that struck the South Pacific nation Monday. Lisa Schlein reports for VOA from Red Cross headquarters in Geneva.
The Red Cross Federation reports about 15,000 people are affected by the tsunami. Government health officials say the figure could be higher, with up to 50,000 people affected by the disaster.
Getting aid to the victims has been difficult. But, Red Cross Spokeswoman, Anna Nelson, says it should be easier now that direct air travel into Gizo, the hardest hit island, has resumed.
Over the past few days, she says relief items have had to be flown to an airstrip on the island of Mundo, which is not far from Gizo. From there, she says the supplies have been sent by boat to the more remote regions.
“In addition, planes from New Zealand, Australia and France have all been dispatched with relief items. So, the international response in terms of just getting the items there has definitely gathered pace,” she said. ”And, in terms of the Red Cross, Red Crescent response, the International Federation has sent a team of 10 disaster management experts who are now on the ground and are now active in that operation in the affected area. And, those include water and sanitation, health, relief experts who can really lend a hand and support to this response as well.”
http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/05/international-response-to-solomon-islands-tsunami-victims-gathers-momentum/
Common Errors in Custody Cases: Losing Your Cool—Especially over the Phone
By Glenn Sacks
I’ve previously discussed how men can get set up during custody cases in visitation exchange traps, and I frequently caution men to be on guard during their legal battles.
Caution should be heeded not only during in-person exchanges with your ex-spouse, but in all types of interactions. Guy White, a private investigator/custody case advisor who seems to have seen everything when it comes to divorce and custody issues, has an interesting section on this in his book Child Custody A to Z. He discusses some of the common mistakes men make during their court proceedings that hurt their chances of gaining custody.
http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/06/common-errors-in-custody-cases-losing-your-cool%e2%80%94especially-over-the-phone/
Podcast: The Woman’s Real Man (Parts 1 - 5)
By Bernard Chapin
The Woman’s Real Man
Written by Bernard Chapin
Read by Mike LaSalle
http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/03/08/the-womans-real-man-pt-3/
Nancy Pelosi: Broken Left Speaker
http://blackandright.mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/06/podcast-premium-pelosi/
Turning 21 in prison doing life without parole
By Denise Noe
A verse in one of my favorite Merle Haggard songs, “Mama Tried,” has the narrator sadly singing, “I turned twenty-one in prison doing life without parole.” While I expect people to think I’m making too much of what is “just a song,” I believe this particular song has an unusual depth and a relevancy to the all-too-common real life stories of young people, usually boys, who end up behind bars.
The song evokes an extreme sense of melancholy as it tells the tale of a young man who went profoundly wrong. The main message of the song is not to blame the narrator’s mother: “that leaves only me to blame because mama tried/She tried to raise me right but I refused.” He talks of a mother who “worked hours without rest/wanted me to have the best.” Yet, “despite all my Sunday learning/to the bad I kept on turning/that leaves only me to blame because mama tried.”
http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/07/turning-21-in-prison-doing-life-without-parole/
What leads 'the call' of the bigotry of the Religious Right? According to these folks, not the oppression of taxation without representation. The idea/philosophy that the USA was 'saved' for the preservation of religion by the migration of the pilgrams and others that left England to practice their faith as they wished rather than as dictated by the British Monarchy through the Church of England.
http://www.cofe.anglican.org/
The Anglicans.
The Act of Uniformity 1559 (citation 1 Eliz c. 2) set the order of prayer to be used in the English Book of Common Prayer. Every man had to go to church once a week or be fined 12 pence, which was a lot for the poor. With this act Elizabeth made it a legal obligation to go to church every Sunday. The 'Act of Uniformity' reinforced the Book of Common Prayer.
The Seventh Day is a day of rest, not necessarily worship. As you'll have it, I suppose.
The Providential Call of the United States and its Constitution
By Steve Farrell
Sir, God raised up the United States and influenced her constitutional institutions for the very purpose of shielding and protecting the Church in the wilderness, and all men in their liberties, and of throwing a guard around His embryo kingdom till He should come, whose right it is to reign and subdue all enemies under his feet. - Parley P. Pratt, Quorum of the Twelve, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/06/the-providential-call-of-the-united-states-and-its-constitution/
MICHAEL MOORE HAS IT RIGHT.
Bush is a flash in the pan, not a trend of the USA.
It's completely obvious.
The claims the Republicans like to make about 2006 is that it was to teach them a lesson about fiscal responsiblity. That is not the reality I am seeing. The Republican constituency is coming away from it's 'hard line' politics. The Conservative Christians are finding their agenda as unrealistic as a political agenda and doesn't want to be a focus of ridicule. They feel Jesus got lost in their lives to political dogma that has cost the USA dearly in it's Surplus Treasury, soldiers, their families and the deaths of many innocent people that once lived in Iraq.
They are moving in a direction of participation of their democracy shared with others just as moral as they are. They are measuring themselves differently and inclusively.
So long as Republicans seem to believe there is a benefit politically to feel they need to apologize for the change in direction of the legislature in 2006, that nonsense will continue to present itself in the media. Won't last forever. Bush's house of cards is not only falling but being scattered to the winds.
Where all this comes to men? Their self identity? One aspect of feminism I absolutely loved was the fact it set free men as well as women.
Peace. The real place for the USA military is as Global Peacekeepers and not aggressors for profiteers.
Michael Moore Today
An Administration's Epic Collapse
By Joe Klein / Time
The first three months of the new Democratic Congress have been neither terrible nor transcendent. A Pew poll had it about right: a substantial majority of the public remains happy the Democrats won in 2006, but neither Nancy Pelosi nor Harry Reid has dominated the public consciousness as Newt Gingrich did when the Republicans came to power in 1995. There is a reason for that. A much bigger story is unfolding: the epic collapse of the Bush Administration.
The three big Bush stories of 2007--the decision to "surge" in Iraq, the scandalous treatment of wounded veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys for tawdry political reasons--precisely illuminate the three qualities that make this Administration one of the worst in American history: arrogance (the surge), incompetence (Walter Reed) and cynicism (the U.S. Attorneys).
"...it is increasingly difficult to imagine yet another two years of slow bleed with a leader so clearly unfit to lead." -- Joe Klein, Time Magazine
We've seen this before leading to the Iraq Invasion.
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."-- Joseph Goebbels
Cheney reasserts al-Qaida-Saddam connection
Vice president’s words come as latest Pentagon report again dismisses link
Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney repeated his assertions of al-Qaida links to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq on Thursday as the Defense Department released a report citing more evidence that the prewar government did not cooperate with the terrorist group.
Cheney contended that al-Qaida was operating in Iraq before the March 2003 invasion led by U.S. forces and that terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was leading the Iraqi branch of al-Qaida. Others in al-Qaida planned the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
“He took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq, organized the al-Qaida operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene and then, of course, led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June,” Cheney told radio host Rush Limbaugh during an interview. “As I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq.”
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=9543
"Thomas Jefferson gave states the authority to do this, so we'd be remiss to pass up on that opportunity."
-- Wisconsin State Rep. Frank Boyle
April 5th, 2007 6:32 pm
Boyle introduces impeachment bill
By Ron Brochu / Superior Daily Telegram
MADISON, Wis. - State Rep. Frank Boyle has introduced a resolution in the Wisconsin Assembly calling for the impeachment of President George W. Bush.
The rural Douglas County Democrat admits his bill has little chance of passage, but said it’s justified.
“Will it go anywhere? No. Does it need to be done? Absolutely,” Boyle said Wednesday afternoon in a telephone interview.
Wisconsin is among six states in which similar bills have been introduced. Boyle’s resolution is fashioned after measures in Illinois and New Jersey. The other states are Maine, New Mexico, Washington and Vermont, he said, conceding none of those legislatures so far have approved the measure.
The state lawmaker alleges President Bush authorized torture in violation of the Geneva Conventions, held suspects in prison without charge or trial, and manipulated intelligence reports to launch war against Iraq, resulting in Iraqi civilian and U.S. military deaths. He accuses President Bush of leaking classified national secrets as part of a political agenda that exposed covert agents to harm and retribution.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=9536
'Making Our Own Way' ...by Dan DeWalt
At the very moment that citizens' calls for impeachment are growing in number and in volume, our elected representatives are shrinking into their holes, plugging their ears and repeating out loud "I will not listen I will not listen."
The latest entrant into this hall of shame is Vermont Senate President pro-temp, Peter Shumlin. He grabbed the headlines last week by declaring himself to be in favor of impeachment as an obvious remedy to a lying and dangerous administration. However, he left himself an easy out by declaring that he would not interfere with the Vermont Democratic Speaker of the House, Gaye Symington who has squarely thrown herself in the protect Bush camp by denying Vermonters the right to have a debate on an impeachment resolution that is now in the House Judiciary committee. Now a Senate impeachment resolution has been introduced but Shumlin won't let it move forward, saying that there is not enough support for it in the statehouse and it wouldn't have any impact on the Congress. Here is a politician who shows every sign of thinking himself gubernatorial material, but he doesn't even have a fundamental sense of history.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/mustread/index.php?id=854
Impeachment Declaration from Texas
http://www.legis.state.tx.us/tlodocs/80R/billtext/html/HC00154I.htm
RESOLVED, That George W. Bush, if found guilty of the charges contained herein, should be removed from office and disqualified to hold any other office in the United States.
Be It Resolved: You Can Impeach the President
Official State Impeachment Text
Impeachment Text for Cities & Towns
Impeachment Text for County Democratic Committees
Impeachment Text for State Assemblies and/or Legislatures
Jefferson's Manual, Section LIII, 603
You Can Impeach the President
http://www.michaelmoore.com/mustread/index.php?id=622
Camp Casey Easter Update
Hey you Camp Casey folks:
Get your mudboots and come on to Camp Casey!!!! They can't Rain Out a Revolution!
Camp Casey may be under water, but George has some barns in Crawford that he just might invite his neighbors into!!! It will be a lean Camp Casey if the rains continue-but 10 to a hotel room ain't bad!
Camp Casey is all about flexibility. In August 2005, 12,000showed up in the ditches! For Easter 2007, we can handle a little water and mud to end the war!
Come on to Crawford!!! (But be Flexible!!!)
- Ann Wright, Camp Casey Commander
http://www.michaelmoore.com/mustread/index.php?id=851
Camp Casey Easter 2007
http://www.gsfp.org/article.php?id=320
Military: 8 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq
By Kim Gamel / Associated Press
BAGHDAD - The U.S. military reported Thursday that eight U.S. soldiers were killed in the Baghdad area over the past three days as militants fought back against a security plan in its eighth week. An Army helicopter went down south of the capital, wounding four, after an Iraqi official said insurgents fired on it.
Four British soldiers — including two women — died Thursday in an ambush that Prime Minister Tony Blair called an "act of terrorism," suggesting it may have been carried out by elements linked to Iran but stopping short of blaming Tehran.
One U.S. soldier died and two were wounded in a roadside bombing Thursday in restive Diyala province north of Baghdad, the military said. Four others died Wednesday in two roadside bombs explosions in southern Baghdad and north of the capital, while another was killed by small-arms fire in the eastern part of the city. Two other soldiers were killed by small-arms fire on Tuesday — one in eastern Baghdad and another on foot patrol in the southern outskirts of the capital.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=9538
April 6th, 2007 3:07 am
Kucinich: Bush's approach to Iran raises questions about impeachment
By Holly Ramer / Associated Press
AMHERST, N.H. --Democratic presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich said President Bush may be setting himself up for impeachment by setting the stage for war with Iran.
"The administration's preparations for war in and of itself have raised questions relating to impeachment," Kucinich told The Associated Press between campaign stops in New Hampshire.
The Ohio congressman said he has met with diplomats, ambassadors and other national leaders around the world in recent months to discuss Iran.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=9539
Chesapeake 'Impeach Bush Cheney' sign may be illegal
By Janette Rodrigues / Virginian-Pilot
CHESAPEAKE — Note to the political pundit or prankster who put “Impeach Bush Cheney” signs in trees around Chesapeake: Political speech is protected, but not in print on a road right of way.
Under state law, it’s illegal to place signs in the area between the road and the property line or in the medians.
The city sent out an inspector today to see if the eye-catching, cloth sign off Interstate 64, just east of the High Rise Bridge, is on state, municipal or private land. If it’s not on private property, it’s coming down.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=9537
Public Punditry Contest!
http://freewayblogger.blogspot.com/2007/03/public-punditry-contest.html
Swift Boat donor's appointment sidesteps Congress
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush named Republican fundraiser Sam Fox as U.S. ambassador to Belgium on Wednesday, using a maneuver that allowed him to bypass Congress where Democrats had derailed Fox's nomination.
Democrats had denounced Fox for his 2004 donation to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The group's TV ads, which claimed that Sen. John Kerry exaggerated his military record in Vietnam, were viewed as a major factor in the Massachusetts Democrat's losing the election.
Recognizing Fox did not have the votes to obtain Senate confirmation, Bush withdrew the nomination last month. On Wednesday, with Congress out of town for a spring break, the president used his power to make recess appointments to put Fox in the job without Senate confirmation.
This means Fox can remain ambassador until the end of the next session of Congress, effectively through the end of the Bush presidency.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=9531
April 5th, 2007 3:52 am
Location finally set for Anderson-Hannity debate
Sean Hannity likes to 'seek' statements/moments of political significance to support his 'idea' of reality. Sean Hannity could never present the entire political picture of the Middle East and survive two minutes of any program he does. His most recent statement was "The liberals side with extremists, like Assad, in the Middle East." That has absolutely no basis in fact and he knows it. He just doesn't care about fact unless he can manipulate it into his own reality trying to 'steer' enough of the electorate in the 'fiscal' direction of Republicans.
FOX IS TOXIC !
FOX has this news station called 'The Big Talker' whereby all they talk about are financial affairs of the individual. They chronically advertise ONE INVESTMENT FIRM. They allude to the others but for the most part advise against them while advertising a particular firm that matches their political affiliations. The 'Religious Right' really needs to join the real world and so do their news agencies. They don't live in a reality that the majority of this country lives and it's very sad. Very.
Speaker Pelosi would never hurt this country or any of it's citizens in a million years. No one can say the same of the Republicans that conduct illegal wars killing not only Americans, but, diverting it's treasury to profiteers without a second thought to the deaths of completely innocent people such as the Iraqis. We need to re-establish the No Fly Zones as we leave the Iraqi people to solve their own problems.
Kingsbury Hall site of May 4 face-off; still no moderator
By Doug Smeath /
One of the last remaining issues standing in the way of a Sean Hannity-Rocky Anderson debate has been resolved.
Brian Burton, programming adviser for the Associated Students of the University of Utah, said Wednesday that the school will host the May 4 debate on campus at Kingsbury Hall. Anderson and Hannity will discuss the war in Iraq and calls for impeachment of President Bush.
Earlier discussions surrounding plans for a face-off between the liberal Salt Lake City mayor and the conservative Fox News Channel talk-show pundit left uncertain the availability of any campus venues to host the event, because the university's commencement ceremonies are being held the same day.
Tuesday, March 27th, 2007'
Go See Air Guitar Nation!'
...by Björn Turöque
Air Guitar Nation has received rave reviews from nearly every media outlet! But we still need your love!
Tickets are available here
If you’ve seen the film, you know it rocks. Please forward this info to friends in NY and LA. If you haven’t seen it, please check it out. It’s a well made, hilarious movie that will make you laugh out loud and actually get sucked in to the story, as the New York Times notes:
“The movie's wild performances and droll humor are tough to resist. So are its obsessive yet self-mocking heroes: the Los Angeles-based actor David Jung, who performs as C-Diddy, who has a kung phooey stage persona and wears a Hello Kitty pouch like a warrior's breastplate; and the New York writer-musician Dan Crane, a k a Björn Turöque, whose parched wit and jackhammer performance style suggest Bill Murray trapped in the body of Sid Vicious. Mr. Crane also wrote and sang the closing credits theme, a garage band anthem that lodges in the brain like a fishhook.” -- Matt Zoller Seitz, The New York Times
http://michaelmoore.com/mustread/index.php?id=850
April 5th, 2007 4:21 am
Friendly fire may have killed 2 in Iraq
By Lolita C. Baldor / Associated Press
WASHINGTON - A week after acknowledging a litany of errors in the friendly fire death of former NFL star Pat Tillman, the Army said Wednesday two soldiers who died in Iraq in February may also have been killed by their own comrades.
The Army said it is investigating the deaths of Pvt. Matthew Zeimer, 18, of Glendive, Mont., and Spc. Alan E. McPeek, 20, of Tucson, Ariz., who were killed in Ramadi, in western Iraq, on Feb. 2. The families of the two soldiers were initially told they were killed by enemy fire.
According to Army Col. Daniel Baggio, unit commanders in Iraq did not at first suspect they were killed by U.S. forces, but an investigation by the unit concluded that may be the case.
Defund the war - Rebuild the Gulf Coast
In solidarity with the people of the Gulf Coast and understanding that every bomb dropped in Iraq explodes over the U.S. Gulf Coast, Veterans For Peace and partner organizations will return to the area devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, to aid in reconstruction efforts. The project will raise money and volunteers to aid in rebuilding homes for survivors of the hurricanes. In addition, we will raise awareness of the continued plight of the gulf coast survivors and the persistent commitment to an illegal, immoral war fought at staggering costs, both financially and in human casualties.
Three arrested in Grassley office occupation
Three Iowa peace activists participating in a national campaign of sustained civil disobedience Monday were arrested when they refused to leave the office of Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, Des Moines police said.Lindsay Ayling, 19, and Brian Perbix, 20, Grinnell College students, and Chris Gaunt of Grinnell had delivered a 350-signature petition that urged the senator to stop the funding for the war in Iraq. They hoped to elicit a pledge from Grassley that he would vote against President Bush's $93 billion war appropriation request.The three members of the Occupation Project, a national civil disobedience campaign, were charged with trespassing. They were held overnight in the Polk County Jail and will be arraigned today.
http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070306/NEWS/703060401/-1/SPORTS09
and
http://vcnv.org/arrests-made-at-senator-grassleys-iowa-office
New Zealand Herald
Flood waters sweep through Far North
The War Memorial Park in Kawakawa.
Photo / Barney Houston
7:05PM Thursday March 29, 2007
Flood waters have drenched the top of the North Island, sweeping away buildings, closing roads and cutting power in areas from the Far North to the Bay of Plenty.
Police said there had been "no confirmed reports" of loss of life but that several people had been rescued after being swept away.
Two children and two adults have been trapped by flood waters in a house at Punaruku, on the Whangaruru Harbour, Newstalk ZB reported in its 7pm bulletin.
Northland police are urging residents in the Bay of Islands' town of Opua to evacuate their homes and go to the Opua Cruising Club, due to cliff-top slips endangering several properties.
Several buildings - including the motel at Haruru Falls and a house at Waioimo - are reported to have been swept away by flood waters, police said.
Emergency Civil Defence Operating Centres have been set up in Kaikohe and Whangarei in response to the severe weather, which saw two months' of rain fall in the Far North over 24 hours.
Storm was a one-in-150-year event
5:00AM Saturday March 31, 2007
By Martin Johnston
A farmhouse at Hikurangi Swamp, northwest of Whangarei. Photo / Brett Phibbs
North Islanders should be able to don sports gear and stow their parkas for most of the weekend: the week's storms have moved on.
"The next time Northland gets rain would be just a few showers on Sunday," MetService weather ambassador Bob McDavitt said last night.
The weekend forecast is for lighter and drier northwesterlies, replacing the moist northeast air flow over the country that flooded parts of eastern Northland.
Mr McDavitt said a front predicted to move over the South Island today should bring Wellington some wind tonight.
"As that front moves onto the North Island on Sunday it fades; a few showers, that's it.
Cleanest cars get gold emissions tick
5:00AM Tuesday April 03, 2007
By Mathew Dearnaley
The certificate that shows a car has passed the test. Photo / Richard Robinson
Auckland Regional Council transport chairman Joel Cayford is promising his middle-aged Volkswagen new spark plugs, despite winning a "green" certificate yesterday from the country's first licensed vehicle emissions workshop.
Dr Cayford said that when he bought the 1996 Volkswagen Polo four months ago he felt confident it would be a relatively clean-burning machine and planned to postpone a tune-up until its warrant expired in June.
"But I didn't think it would be that good after 10 years," he admitted after receiving his certificate at Anzac Automotive in Browns Bay, one of two workshops used yesterday to launch a national network of testing stations under the umbrella of an organisation called Zero Emissions.
But Dr Cayford, a Green Party member, had to make do with a green rather than gold "badge of honour" after failing to reach the latest Euro 4 emissions standard on one of three measures.
Flash: Everest, beyond the limit launch
How fitting to launch the Discovery Channel's new documentary series, Everest: Beyond the Limit, with a photographic exhibition from the programme at the Viaduct's not-so-hot spot Minus 5. The temperature is a constant minus 5C and the bar is fitted out with ice sculptures, ice chandeliers and ice-molded glasses filled with blue vodka cocktails.
The new series, which premieres on Anzac Day, documents the 2006 climbing season on Mt Everest - the second deadliest on record and the first time a double amputee, New Zealander Mark Inglis, has reached the summit. The series follows climbers from around the world, led by New Zealander Russell Brice, through the gruelling two-month attempt to reach the top. The Kiwi contingent on the film crew included cameraman Mark Whetu.
Timor leader's plea to NZ
East Timor presidential candidate Jose Ramos Horta says he'll swallow his pride and ask New Zealand to keep its troops in the tiny nation for years if he wins Monday's election.
And Prime Minister Helen Clark indicated that New Zealand would be willing to stay.
"This year with the presidential and parliamentary elections, East Timor is particularly volatile," she said yesterday.
"So long as the East Timor Government and the United Nations continue their support, it's hard to see a withdrawal in the near future."
The commitment to East Timor, which began in 1999, had been reduced, but it was lifted again last year when violence flared in the fledgling state.
'I was Monroe's daughter' claimed Anna Nicole
Anna Nicole Smith so idolised Marilyn Monroe she convinced herself she was the screen siren's daughter, according to a biography of the former Playboy bunny.
As Howard K. Stern, Smith's lawyer and lover, fights in a United States court to prove he's the father of her baby daughter Dannielynn, Great Big Beautiful Doll provides an insight into the life, fame and ultimately death of Smith.
The book was written in 1996 but has been updated since her death in February.
It shows Smith might not have been smart - she thought Los Angeles was in New York when Playboy first flew her out there in 1991 - but she used her story of a "small-town girl made good" to charm many rich and famous men, including Hugh Hefner, Donald Trump and of course, 89-year-old J. Howard Marshall II.
Art warms to climate change
5:00AM Saturday April 07, 2007
A giant metal sunflower stands atop a wind-swept hill in the world's southernmost city, an artistic statement gauging and protesting climate change near the ends of the Earth.
As icebergs melt and sea levels rise at the north and south poles due to global warming, dozens of artists are installing and performing works in Ushuaia, a small Argentine city on the island of Tierra del Fuego, to highlight the damage being done.
Sunflower: Sentinel for Climate Change is just one of the pieces on display this month at the so-called End of the World Biennial. But with its solar-panelled petals, thermometers and cameras, it is probably the most functional.
"I think all of us should do something" about global warming, said Argentine artist Joaquin Fargas. "The idea of Sunflower is that it becomes an icon, an emblem of the need for all of us to be witnesses to what is happening."
NZ's water pollution record slammed in international report
12:25PM Thursday April 05, 2007
New Zealand's increasing water pollution has been criticised in an international report.
The OECD Environmental Performance Review of New Zealand said better protection of surface and ground waters was needed because pollution was affecting rivers, streams and lakes. Irrigation was also taking a toll.
It said regulations on water quality or economic measures would avoid problems.
Environment Minister David Benson-Pope said last month that the Government was very clear that water was a public resource which the Government and local authorities continued to manage on behalf of all New Zealanders.
The Government had no intention of privatising water, or establishing water markets for trading water rights.
Editorial: Emissions tests for cars should be compulsory
5:00AM Saturday April 07, 2007
Being eco-friendly carries a certain cachet these days, but enough to pay $33.75 to obtain a sticker proclaiming your car has passed an emissions standards test? Zero Emissions, an organisation that plans a national network of testing stations, hopes so. Where the Government fears to tread, private enterprise has spied an opportunity.
The Auckland Regional Council did its bit to publicise the first of the stations, at Browns Bay, this week. A council-owned 2006 hybrid petrol-electric car proved extremely environmentally friendly, winning a top-rating gold certificate. Compact Toyota models from the North Shore City Council's fleet did similarly well, showing most of their fuel was being used for its intended purpose rather than pollution.
Spectre of Harry as hostage
5:00AM Saturday April 07, 2007
By Dominic Lawson
Harry has decided to be a career soldier. Photo / Reuters
As 15 members of the Armed Forces arrived back in Britain from their captivity by Iran's Revolutionary Guards, the officer already named by leaders of the Iraqi insurgency prize as the man they most want to capture is preparing to leave for Basra.
That officer is Second Lieutenant Harry Wales of the Household Cavalry.
The third in line to the throne declared himself to be "over the moon" when the Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Richard Dannatt, agreed to his being sent as the officer in command of a troop of 12 men in four Scimitar light tanks.
Dannatt took this decision only after lengthy Army consultations with the Royal Household and Government ministers.
I suspect that of those three groups, far and away the most reluctant was the Army itself. This is not a reflection on Harry Wales' soldiering qualities.
Self-satisfied President basks in his own glory
5:00AM Saturday April 07, 2007
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, shakes the hand of one of the 15 sailors after their surprise release. Photo / Reuters
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sat on the podium, a satisfied smile hovering around the corners of his mouth, clearly savouring the enormous surprise he was about to spring on the world.
One minute sermonising, the next pinning a medal on a grizzled revolutionary guard, this was, from the beginning, Ahmadinejad's day.
As he stepped forward for the last act, to meet the 15 captives at the centre of this extraordinary saga, the sky was lit up by a flash of lightning and a long rumble of thunder.
Editorial: A blow for Iran's hardliners
5:00AM Saturday April 07, 2007
The 15 British naval personnel taken captive by Iran have been released as a gesture, says Iran, to Easter. Christians everywhere will be happy to accept that excuse, even as they suspect that a more prosaic explanation lies in Iranian politics. The Easter reference is more apposite than possibly Iran knows.
This has been a story of commendable - dare we say Christian - restraint by Britain in the face of severe provocation and rank injustice.
When the 14 men and one woman were seized three weeks ago, on the pretext that they had entered Iranian waters, Britain's passive response might have been seen as a sign of weakness. Certainly, the United States might have reacted more aggressively if one of its ship inspection parties had been taken at gunpoint in the Shatt al Arab waterway between Iran and Iraq. But Britain's response has proved to be right.
Pope washes 12 men's feet in Holy Thursday service
12:23PM Friday April 06, 2007
ROME - Pope Benedict washed and dried the feet of 12 men at a traditional Holy Thursday service commemorating Christ's gesture of humility to his apostles on the night before he died.
The 79-year-old German Pope, approaching the second Easter of his pontificate, called on Catholics to pray for the "purification of the heart".
"We pray to help us not keep our lives to ourselves, but to devote them" to God, the Pope said.
At the midpoint of the service the Pontiff poured water over the right feet of 12 men sitting on raised platforms, and dried them.
Three charged over 2005 London bombings
2:21PM Friday April 06, 2007By Tim Castle
The first charges over the attacks in London in July, 2005 were laid today. File photo / Reuters
LONDON - Three men were charged today in connection with the July 7, 2005, suicide bomb attacks that killed 52 commuters on London's transport system, police said.
They are due to appear in court in London this weekend charged with conspiring with the bombers to cause explosions on the transport network or at tourist attractions in the capital.
"The allegation is that they were involved in reconnaissance and planning for a plot with those ultimately responsible for the bombings on July 7," said Sue Hemming, head of the Crown Prosecution Service's counter-terrorism division.
Arrests over 'Harry Potter train' attack
1:28PM Friday April 06, 2007
LONDON - Ten youths have been arrested after Harry Potter's train, the Hogwarts Express, was attacked by vandals, police said today.
More than 300 of the tourist train's windows -- famous for departing from imaginary platform 9 3/4 at King's Cross station in the Harry Potter books -- were smashed with hammers while it was in a depot in Lancashire.
The damage will cost at least 50,000 pounds to repair, according to train operator West Coast Railways (WCR).
Aborigines lose native title appeal over Darwin
6:00AM Friday April 06, 2007
DARWIN - Aborigines in Darwin have lost their appeal against a failed bid for native title recognition, in Australia's first case involving a large part of a capital city.
The Federal Court dismissed the landmark claim in April last year by nine Larrakia families over 575 sq km of crown land in Darwin and nearby Palmerston.
The court found the Larrakia had not maintained a continuous observance of traditional laws and customs since sovereignty, with "an interruption" occurring sometime between the late 1930s and early 1970s.
But the Northern Land Council (NLC), representing the traditional owners, immediately sought to appeal the ruling, despite the fact the claim was vigorously contested by the NT government and the Darwin City Council.
Their lawyer said the judgment had failed to deal with the concept of "a body of people united by a notion of custom".
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/2/story.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10432845
continued ...
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