At least five people were killed and over 100 injured in Companiganj in Noakhali Thursday morning when police opened fire on demonstrators on the thana premises in protest against a dacoity at Basurhat Bazar, reports BDNEWS. Upazila Nirbahai Officer Md Zafar Alam, however, confirmed three deaths while police declined to make any comment. Local people alleged that police concealed the number of bodies. Officer-in-charge (OC) Ayub Hossain and Sub-inspector (SI) Sudhangshu Chakrabarti of the Companiganj thana were closed following the incident.
Police and locals said that a group of 50-60 armed dacoits boarding on truck and microbus raided a jewellery shop - Haji & Sons - at Basurhat in Companiganj upazila at around 3 am and looted cash money and jewellery worth about Tk 50 lakh. Locals alleged that police, despite being informed, dilly-dallied in reaching the spot, a few yards away from the police station, allowing time for the dacoits to flee the scene. The role of police generated anger among the local people. Later, the agitated traders of Bashurhat enforced a half-day hartal to protest the negligence of duties of the police.
Later, they along with local people gheraoed the Companiganj police station at about 9am and allegedly assaulted the OC by throwing shoe at him that prompted a clash between police and locals. Locals said that police suddenly went wild and fired nearly 200 rounds of bullet to disperse the furious people who pelted brickbats on them and ransacked the police station. At least 100 people, including 30 policemen, were injured during the clash.
Posted by: Fred ||
10/22/2005 00:00 ||
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Hurricane Wilma tore into Mexico's resort-studded Mayan Riviera on Friday with torrential rains and shrieking winds, filling the streets with water, shattered glass and debris as thousands of stranded tourists hunkered down in hotel ballrooms and emergency shelters. Packing winds of 140 mph, the storm shattered windows and downed trees that crushed cars on the island of Cozumel, a popular cruise-ship stop. Pay phones jutted from floodwaters in the famed hotel zone.
The fearsome Category 4 storm, which killed 13 people in Haiti and Jamaica, was expected to pummel the tip of the Yucatan Peninsula for two days, sparking fears of catastrophic damage. It is forecast to sideswipe Cuba before bearing down on Florida on Monday.
Posted by: Fred ||
10/22/2005 00:00 ||
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#1
Maybe we can initiate a reverse immigration, if for only a little bit, with media people to Mexico. Wonder how long they'll be permitted to broadcast lurid stories of rape, murder, looting, mayhem in the aftermath of Wilma till the local officials pull the plugs to save their tourist industry. Digame Oprah.
FRANCE'S prisons are the worst in Europe and their cells are akin to dungeons in the Middle Ages, according to a watchdog's report yesterday. Hygiene is "deplorable", with inmates crowded into filthy, rat-infested cells, leading to an explosion in the number of prisoners with infectious diseases, the International Observatory of Prisons (IOP) said.
It described conditions as "catastrophic" and condemned the French government for failing to improve matters. "The situation is totally unworthy of our level of civilisation. Conditions of detention are close to those of the Middle Ages," the Paris-based IOP said. It blamed the government's tougher sentencing polices for aggravating chronically bad prison conditions without solving the problem of delinquency. The report said French jails suffered from overcrowding, bad hygiene, rising violence and suicide rates of more than six times the national average - France has Europe's highest suicide rate among prisoners.
The number of suicide attempts rose 10 per cent last year, while incidents of self-wounding and hunger strikes were up 25 per cent.
None of these %s is entirely meaningful without actual quantities: 2 is a 100% increase over 1, for instance.
Violence and revolt against the prison authorities have also increased dramatically - there was a 155 per cent rise in the number of riots last year. Eight out of ten inmates suffer from psychiatric problems, but access to medical care is limited.
Hmmm .... 'psychiatric problems' as in, I'm depressed I got caught and jailed? As in, psychotic breaks? What???
As in, French prisons are depressing as hell ...
"Fifteen months to treat a toothache - one is less well treated when one is in prison than when one is an animal in the zoo," the main lawyers' union in France said. Both it and the judges' union described the situation as "detestable".
The IOP also denounced "disproportionate security measures", citing the example of a prisoner who was handcuffed while giving birth at Fleury-Merogis prison, near Paris. The report placed the blame squarely on policies championed by Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister who has stated his intention to run for president in 2007, saying France's conservative government was wrong to fight delinquency with a drive for longer sentences.
Ahhhh .... NOW we come to the real reason for the wording of the report.
Someone's not happy with little Nicky ...
Patrick Marest, of the IOP, said: "The deterioration in the condition of the prisons is not due to the inevitable result of incarcerating dangerous people. It is the result of policy choices."
That's true pretty much the world over. I think of the maximum security prisons in my state -- Joliet, Pontiac, Stateville -- there's not a one of them that would meet the terms of the 'judges report' here, and not a one of them that I'd want to be incarcerated in ...
#1
However, it pales in comparison to the horrors of Guantanamo Bay.
Posted by: Mike ||
10/22/2005 9:08 Comments ||
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Sarkozy is minster of Interior who, in France, makes him big boss of the Police and of part of the Secret Services. He has zero control over jails, who, in France, are supervised by the Ministry of Justice.
Oh, and let me tell that if jails are overcrowded the solution is NOT to release the inmates to prey again on teh law abiding population.
#5
Time to reopen that old French carrib resort in Guiana. A little paint, redo the roof. Yep, just the ticket. Sun and Fun in the Carrib! No dark, dank dungeons.
The fourth powerful earthquake in a week rocked the western Turkish city of Izmir early on Friday, causing two deaths and keeping terrified residents on the edge, officials and reports said. The 5.9 magnitude quake struck Turkey's third-largest city around 12:40am, leading to about 30 people suffering broken bones or concussion from jumping off balconies or out of windows, Anatolia news agency reported.
Posted by: Fred ||
10/22/2005 00:00 ||
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France, grappling for decades with its colonial past, has passed a law to put an upbeat spin on a painful era, making it mandatory to enshrine in textbooks the country's "positive role" in its far-flung colonies. But the law is stirring anger among historians and passions in places like Algeria, which gained independence in a brutal conflict. Critics accuse France of trying to gild an inglorious colonial past with an "official history."
As a colonial power, La Belle France wasn't all that hot. Not as destructive as Belgium, a little more competent than Italy, but not as constructive or civilizing as Britain.
At issue is language in the law stipulating that "school programs recognize in particular the positive character of the French overseas presence, notably in North Africa."
JFM probably has a better handle on the character, positive or otherwise, of the French presence in North Africa. Political correctitude probably makes any kind of rational evaluation of whether the colonial presence in sub-Saharan Africa was more beneficial than the current crop of artificially drawn nation states, many of which seem incapable of governing themselves. Zim-Bob-we is only the grossest example.
Deputies of the conservative governing party passed the law in February, but it has only recently come under public scrutiny after being denounced at an annual meeting of historians and in a history professors' petition.
That'd be the politically correct crowd, assuming the law makes any sense at all...
An embarrassed President Jacques Chirac has called the law a "big screw-up," newspapers quoted aides as saying.
I guess it doesn't make any sense, then...
Education Minister Gilles de Robien said this week that textbooks would not be changed. But the law's detractors want it stricken from the books — something the minister says only parliament can do. The measure is one article in a law recognizing the "national contribution" of French citizens who lived in the colonies before independence. It is aimed, above all, at recognizing the French who lived in Algeria and were forced to flee, and Algerians who fought on the side of France. Unlike other colonies, Algeria, the most prized conquest, was considered an integral part of France — just like Normandy. It was only after a brutal eight-year independence war that the French department in North Africa became a nation in 1962, after 132 years of occupation. Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has equated the law with "mental blindness" and said it smacks of revisionism. The Algerian Parliament has called it a "grave precedent."
Posted by: Fred ||
10/22/2005 00:00 ||
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The only remaaining "Grand Project" of Shiraq is the "treaty of friendship" with Algeria, to be signed in december IIRC.
France is in the weak, asking position, and Bouteflika can allow himself to compare colonial France to nazi Germany, insult harkis (algerians who fought for France), ask french legislators to change their draft,... that kind of thing.
This treaty will be signed between a pseudo-gaullist who hates western civilization and is fascinated with islam and East Asia, and a FLN butcher.
Algeria war was the opening salvo of the jihad against the West, and the horrors comitted by the fellaghas were absolutely on the par with thoses comitted by the GIA, AIS, GSPC,... in the last decade, not to mention the 150 000 pieds noirs andd harkis slaughtered AFTER the fighting has ended, despite the peace agreement.
Algeria war is a dark spot in France meory, not because of the french army's brutality, but because a whole country was surrendered to national-arabism, even though the fighting was clearly won by France (it was a very brutal and successful anti-insurrectional war, fought by well-led draftees).
I know I'm rambling on a subject I do not know, JFM will correct me (I think he's a pied-noir, given his family name I've seen in a french blog), but to me Algeria war never has truly ended, it has only opened an another front, what conspiracy-oriented would call Eurabia.
I think this is Boumedienne who said at the UN something like : "some day, millions of men from the south will go to the north, and they will not come as friends, they will come as conquerors; we will conquer you with the bellies of our women. You may have the atomic bomb, we've got the demographic bomb".
#2
I don't think imperialism was all bad. Case in point South Africa. The French are swine and getting what they deserve as did the English in indigenous revolts of the colonies. What amazes me is how societies decide to revise their pasts like our Political Correctness. Sincerely Yours, George Orwell.
#3
I don't think imperialism was all bad. Case in point South Africa. The French are swine and getting what they deserve as did the English in indigenous revolts of the colonies. What amazes me is how societies decide to revise their pasts like our Political Correctness. Sincerely Yours, George Orwell.
First: While there were a number of draftees in Algeria, the war winners were mostly airbone troops (volunteers) led by officers who had learned from Indochine. For the anecdota: the then colonel Bigeard (1) managed to transform a low-quality regiment of draftees who was having his ass kicked by the FLN into one as effective or more than his previous all-volunteer elite para regiment. BTW; It was the British who made an officer from Bigeard when he went to commando-training during WWII: in the French system you are born an NCO, you die an NCO.
Algeria was a war militarly won but De Gaulle thouhght that it would burn an anchor on France: that it would spend treasure and people building roads in an undevelopped country instead of building high tech goods.
One of the big shames was the treatment of the harkis: the Algerians who had fought for France and that, IMHO, made them more French than myself (and still more than any amnistiated collabo). Not only they were abandonned to the FLN. They were disarmed by the French to prevent the intersting situation of the harkis taking power: they outnumbered the FLN. Then the FLN came and they were impaled, electrocuted, burned alive, anything the sick minds of the FLN people were able to design.
Some French officers disobeyed orders and at great risk to their carreer managed to exfiltrate the harkis they commanded. They were placed into concentration camps in tents. They were robbed either by the government of by their guards (to my shame, most were pied-noirs) of most of the money they were entitled. Then they were employed in semi-forced labor (with of course the cost of the camps deduced of their meager pays). When a woman went in labour, she was led to hospital and within minutes of having had the baby she and her baby were brought back to their tent in the camp by -15 C.
"We didn't have gas chambers but that is only because we lacked gas". Solsyenitsin
#5
I would just love to see how the French try to put a positive spin on Haiti. Let's see: "We only put the worst of the worst slaves there, so it was like a penal colony. And we worked them to death, unlike other slaves, which is good, because they were bad.
It was like a Devil's Island, but for evil black people. So France did everyone a favor."
If Al Franken speaks on the radio, and no one is tuned in to hear him, does he make a sound?
That could be the question being asked these days in the nation's capital, where Franken's liberal network, Air America, has no measurable audience according to the Arbitron rating service...
#7
now that they have lost their ability to embezzel from a charity for the poor and aged, where will they get their funds?
Al Franken isn't funny, he's a not funny dork. He's the kid that made farting noises, only to get shoved in the face. But he liked it because it was the only attention he got. He's willing to humiliate himself with no ratings cause he's a dork with zero pride. He probably works for free and thinks it's more than what he's really worth. He's insecurity, dorkiness and juvenile humor are just painful to watch. Frankin, tears of the clown.
The first case of bird flu has been found in Britain, the Government said last night. The Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs said that a parrot has died from bird flu in quarantine. It said the H5 strain of the virus was isolated in a parrot imported from South America, which arrived in this country in mid-September. It marks the first case of the flu which is sweeping across the world from Asia in wildfowl and domestic birds.
That's actually misleading, since IIRC a milder form of H5N1 was found first in Scotland
It was unclear last night whether the strain discovered is the same lethal H5N1 strain found spreading across south-eastern Europe. Experts said there may be over 100 different avian flu strains of the H5 variety.
The H5N1 strain of influensa is dangerous because humans have no resistance to it but only a handful of cases have so far crossed from birds through very close contact. But the incident means the general population of farmed and wild birds is still free from the disease and normal quarantine measures have been effective.
Chief Veterinary Officer Debby Reynolds said: "The confirmed case does not affect the UK's official disease free status because the disease has been identified in imported birds during quarantine.
The bird was part of a mixed consignment of 148 parrots and "soft bills" that arrived on September 16. They were being held with a consignment of birds from Taiwan. The birds, which were being held in a biosecure quarantine unit, have all been humanely culled, Defra said.
Maybe you shouldn't be importing birds from Taiwan in the first place.
Miss Reynolds said this "incident showed the importance of the UK's quarantine system". She added: "We have had similar incidents in the past where disease has been discovered but successfully contained as a result of our quarantine arrangements."
Defra stressed it was "very difficult" for humans to contract avian influenza but all those who came in contact with the culled consignment have been given antiviral treatment.
Micro-biologist Professor Hugh Pennington said he was not surprised by bird flu had reached Britain. "The thing about the H5N1 strain is that it's very good at getting about. I wouldn't have been all that surprised if there was an announcement of that sort."
But he said he was a relief to know that the case was not among wild birds. "If that happened it would be very difficult to know where the bird had come from," he added.
Earlier this week, Markos Kyprianou, the EU health commissioner, told an emergency meeting of EU ministers in Luxembourg that the apparently relentless march of the disease westwards from Asia was unlikely to stop soon. "All evidence indicates that the virus can be spread by wild migratory birds," he said. "This means that we cannot exclude outbreaks in other areas."
The Government's Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson, said a bird flu pandemic would kill about 50,000 people in Britain but he was hopeful it would not strike as soon as this winter. But Sir Liam admitted it was now a question of "when, not if" the disease infecting birds in Asia and the fringes of eastern Europe mutated into a deadly form of human influenza.
The number of deaths in Britain could reach 750,000 if the human strain were particularly serious, although a lower figure was more realistic, he said.
But he added that the higher number was more useful to scare government ministers and thus increase funding for his unit.
In a typical year, influenza kills about 12,000 people in the UK, mostly the elderly and infirm. Sir Liam's comments came as the Government prepared to contact every GP in the country about the threat of a flu pandemic. Officials are also revising contingency plans that could see schools closed and sporting events cancelled if the disease strikes.
Mostly VoIP and other technologies are a market rather than political issue. But in the context of UN attempts to wrest control of Web and Internet space control from the US, filtering/stopping VoIP calls represents one more attempt by governments to control citizen access to information - and thereby control them and their opinions.
Internet-based telephony saves consumers money by bypassing traditional carriersâbut new software lets the carriers block those pennies-per-minute calls
The convergence of telephony and the Internet is a great thing for consumers. It makes voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) services, such as Vonage, Packet8, and Skype, possible.
In particular, Skype Technologies SA, in London, looms as a dagger poised to cut your phone costsâand your local phone company's profits. With its SkypeOut service, a call anywhere in the world costs about 3 US cents per minute. And when the recipient is also a Skype user, the call is absolutely free.
In some countries, such as Saudi Arabia, regulations protect a phone company's revenues, prohibiting customers from saving money by making phone calls using any service other than the national carrier, Saudi Telecom, based in Riyadh. Skype users there have gleefully flouted those regulations, paying cheap local tariffs to access the Internet and use it for their calls, instead of directly using Saudi Telecom's expensive long-distance and international calling services.
Although these Skype calls travel along Saudi Telecom's network, the national carrier had been helpless to prevent the practiceâVoIP phone calls were just ordinary data packets, indistinguishable from Web and e-mail traffic. Until now.
A seven-year-old Mountain View, Calif., company, Narus Inc., has devised a way for telephone companies to detect data packets belonging to VoIP applications and block the calls. For example, now when someone in Riyadh clicks on Skype's "call" button, Narus's software, installed on the carrier's network, swoops into action. It analyzes the packets flowing across the network, notices what protocols they adhere to, and flags the call as VoIP. In most cases, it can even identify the specific software being used, such as Skype's.
Narus's software can "secure, analyze, monitor, and mediate any traffic in an IP network," says Antonio Nucci, the company's chief technology officer. By "mediate" he means block, or otherwise interfere with, data packets as they travel through the network in real time.
Another of Narus's Skype-blocking customers is Giza Systems, a consulting company that specializes in information technologies. Giza, which is based in Cairo, Egypt, installed Narus's software on the network of a Middle Eastern carrier in the spring. Nucci wouldn't say which one, but presumably it is Telecom Egypt, the national phone company. Narus already has a close relationship with the carrier, having written the software for its billing system.
The desire to block or charge for VoIP phone calls extends far beyond the Middle East. According to Jay Thomas, Narus's vice president of product marketing, it can be found in South America, Asia, and Europe. International communications giant Vodafone recently announced a plan to block VoIP calls in Germany, Thomas says. A French wireless carrier, SFR, has announced a similar plan for France.
Nor is it just Skype that's at risk. Most international telephone calling cards also use VoIP technology.
In the United States and many other countries, a phone company's common carrier status prevents it from blocking potentially competitive services.
"But there's nothing that keeps a carrier in the United States from introducing jitter, so the quality of the conversation isn't good," Thomas says. "So the user will either pay for the carrier's voice-over-Internet application, which brings revenue to the carrier, or pay the carrier for a premium service that allows Skype use to continue. You can deteriorate the service, introduce latency [audible delays in hearing the other end of the line], and also offer a premium to improve it."
U.S. broadband-cable companies are considered information services, which by law gives them the right to block VoIP calls. Comcast Corp., in Philadelphia, the country's largest cable company, is already a Narus customer; Thomas declined to say whether Comcast uses the VoIP-blocking capabilities.
In August, a Federal Communications Commission ruling gave phone companies the same latitude for DSL.
Narus's software does far more than just frustrate Skype users. It can also diagnose, and react to, denial-of-service attacks and dangerous viruses and worms as they wiggle through a network. It makes possible digital wiretaps, a capability that carriers are required by law to have.
However, these positive applications for Narus's software may not be enough to make Internet users warm to its use. "Protecting its network is a legitimate thing for a carrier to do," says Alex Curtis, government affairs manager for Public Knowledge, a consumer-interest advocacy group in Washington, D.C. "But it's another thing for a Comcast to charge more if I use my own TiVo instead of the personal video recorder they provide, or for Time Warner, which owns CNN, to charge a premium if I want to watch Fox News on my computer."
Public Knowledge advocates a set of principles of "network neutrality." One is open attachmentâthe right to connect that TiVo, or any Internet-enabled hardware, to a network. Another is a right of openness to all application developers, such as Skype, and information providers. "Consumers have come to expect a lot from the Internetâto be able to get to any site, for example, or any service, like VoIP," Curtis says. "Without Net neutrality, that goes out the window."
Such concerns used to be largely academic, because carriers had no way of restricting the activities of their customers anyway. Software such as Narus's, with its ability to do what the company euphemistically calls "content-based billing," puts the issue front and center.
Posted by: too true ||
10/22/2005 08:07 ||
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#1
Does anyone else think that Saudi Arabia wants also to prevent men and women talking to each other untraceably?
Posted by: Eric Jablow ||
10/22/2005 10:22 Comments ||
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An article from the online edition of IEEE Spectrum says phone companies in France, Germany, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have announced they will block VoIP calls on their networks. Using new software from Narus Inc., the carriers can detect data packets belonging to VoIP applications and block the calls.
#2
Sounds like a server based packet sniffer and firewall.
BFD. One server in a network segment could route packets out over a different port before translating them to Skype's port.
Or in the alternative, an independant service could just start up a ssh tunnel, encrypted from start to finish. How are you going to break and sniff encrypted packets?
That would put a pretty little crimp in Arabia's and China's internet gamesmanship.
#4
As an exceptionally happy Vonage customer, with unlimited calls throughout the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico for less than half what Sprint charged for a local land line, I figure they're both protecting their existing Luddite phone system profitability as well as hoping to throttle anything they can't monitor. In the case of Egypt and the Soddies, they're worried about the little people getting ideas, methinks...
From what I have read so far the packet header isn't encrypted, and that is what Naurus uses to block them. An SSH or an SSL packet are both encrpyted from the start of the request to the end. The only thing a packet sniiffer can gain is an encrypted packet, if it can break the encryption for the link, and then try to break the encrypton to determine if the ssh packet is in fact carrying a VOIP data. By the time it could break the encryption, the phone call will likely be over.
Posted by: john ||
10/22/2005 13:24 ||
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#1
Let's see ... the French think that journalists should have the same access as diplomatic staffs.
Not surprising, since in France the press - like corporations and other supposedly independent groups - are pretty much mouthpieces for the government.
Not surprising, actually. The cause/effect relationships in climate are complex and there are powerful feedback loops involved. The actual 'climate' is the result of a bunch of such feedbacks in some sort of equilibrium - which can change over time.
Greenland's icecap has thickened slightly in recent years despite concerns that it is thawing out due to global warming, says an international team of scientists. A team led by Professor Ola Johannessen, at the Some Institute We've Never Heard Of Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Norway, report their findings online ahead of print publication in the journal Science.
The 3,000-metre thick Greenland icecap is a key concern in debates about climate change because a total melt would raise world sea levels by about 7 metres. And a runaway thaw might slow the Gulf Stream that keeps the North Atlantic region warm.
Glaciers at sea level have been retreating fast because of a warming climate, making many other scientists believe the entire icecap is thinning. But satellite measurements showed that more snowfall is falling and thickening the icecap, especially at high altitudes, say Johannessen and team. "The overall ice thickness changes are ... approximately plus 5 centimetres a year or 54 centimetres over 11 years."
But, they say, the thickening seems consistent with theories of global warming, blamed by most experts on a build-up of heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars.
Yes, we mustn't diss the theory.
Warmer air, even if it is still below freezing, can carry more moisture. That extra moisture falls as snow below 0°C. And the scientists say that the thickening of the icecap might be offset by a melting of glaciers around the fringes of Greenland. Satellite data is not good enough to measure the melt nearer sea level.
Most models of global warming indicate that the Greenland ice might melt within thousands of years if warming continues.
Well dang, we'd better do something about it then ... in thousands of years.
Oceans would rise by about 70 metres if the far bigger icecap on Antarctica melted along with Greenland. Antarctica's vast size acts as a deep freeze likely to slow any melt of the southern continent.
The panel that advises the United Nations has predicted that global sea levels might rise by almost a metre by 2100 because of a warming climate. Such a rise would swamp low-lying Pacific islands and warming could trigger more hurricanes, droughts, spread deserts and drive thousands of species to extinction.
A separate study in today's issue of Science reports that sea levels are probably rising slightly because of a melt of ice sheets. "Ice sheets now appear to be contributing modestly to sea level rise because warming has increased mass loss from coastal areas more than warming has increased mass gain from enhanced snowfall in cold central regions," the report by a team led by Professor Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University in the US says. "Greenland presently makes the largest contribution to sea level rise."
#1
"Ice sheets now appear to be contributing modestly to sea level rise because warming has increased mass loss from coastal areas more than warming has increased mass gain from enhanced snowfall in cold central regions," the report by a team led by Professor Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University in the US says.
Translation: My Pugh Foundation grant money is about to run out.
#3
Its all because of the American failure to ratify Kyoto that Mars has been experiencing global war. Damn earthlings! Now where's my illudium Q-38 explosive space modulator.
#5
"where's my illudium Q-38 explosive space modulator"
Didn't you loan that to the gentlehumans from Halliburton last week? Such nice young humans, so polite and well dressed. It is a bit curious that they borrow so many of your tools and gadgets, but I guess myns, no matter the species, will be myns. Besides, they always bring them back - in perfect condition, too. We should invite them to stay for dinner next time they call. Your sister needs to meet a better class of being - and humans aren't so bad, are they?
This global warming thing really hasn't worked too well for me.
1) My bet on global warming - a Sequoia keeps loosing its top with our teasing early spring warm-ups getting it's sap moving then getting cold again. I will need a geneticly modified Sequoia given enough savy to skip that first tease.
2) I figured that by 2000 it would be warm enough to plant pecan trees in the Chicago area. It isn't. Really sucks. I want pecan trees. I don't really want to move so it needs to get warmer. Where is this global warming?
3) The winters have longer cold spells with little snow on the ground. Snow provides some insulation for the ground. Without it the frost goes deeper. Where is the warming? I want warming.
4) In the late sixtys it was said it would be warm enough to grow bananas in Kansas City by 2000. In what greenhouses? Where is the promised warming.
I tell you its a conspiricy to cheat the North out of the warmth it needs. An evil comspiricy. I think the heating oil and Natural gas companies along with the Saudis are behind it. We need that global warming. We were promised it. Somebody is cheating us out of our due.
LAHORE â Meerwala gang-rape victim Mukhtaran Mai has been invited by a New York-based magazine to receive "Glamour Women of the Year Awards" in a ceremony on November 2, acoording to a newspaper report says.
In a letter to Mai, Glamour editor-in-chief Cindi Leive explained that the magazine honoured the women who had struggled for the cause of women. Mai has been invited to visit the US from today to November 5. The award-giving ceremony will be held at Lincoln Centre in the New York City. Mukhtar Mai can attend the ceremony if the government grants her permission.
Posted by: Steve White ||
10/22/2005 00:11 ||
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#1
Cool - Its about time she got some recogition. She has more guts that most democrats (and a good number of republicans too...)
Unfortunately the MSM will ignore her in favor of Mother Cindy Shitian....
Posted by: Karl Rove Emperor of the Republic ||
10/22/2005 0:59 Comments ||
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#2
When she gets here, she needs to ask for political asylum. Going back to Pakistan after coming to the US would be tragic - for her. I'm sure some idiot will decide that she needs to be killed to regain someone's "honor" - backward bunch of clothes-apes.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
10/22/2005 13:45 Comments ||
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#3
I second the motion vigorously, Old Patriot. Isn't there some way we could send back a few dozen MSM collaborators in her place? It's about time they had a chance to enjoy the utopic splendors of the terrorist dens they are so prone to extoll. Mai has already shown more courage than most of them will ever summon forth in a lifetime.
LUCKNOW: Free liquor handed out by village politicians to win votes in Indiaâs largest state has killed 19 people and blinded others over two days, and some was laced with insecticide and other chemicals, officials said Friday. Five people died overnight and 20 others fell ill in Gorakhpur, 250 kilometres (155 miles) southeast of Uttar Pradeshâs state capital, Lucknow, government spokesman Narendra Sinha said. Similar incidents killed 14 in two other Uttar Pradesh villages on Wednesday, said CN Upadhaya, joint commissioner of the department that monitors liquor production and sales. Village council elections are under way in the state.
Upadhaya said one politician who allegedly mixed pesticide with liquor to increase its quantity had been arrested and charged with attempted murder. He could face up to 14 years in prison if convicted. Other arrests were being made, Upadhaya said. The accused politicians could not be reached for comment.
Posted by: Fred ||
10/22/2005 00:00 ||
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Ah.. UP and Bihar..India's own fourth world.. lands of darkness
Posted by: john ||
10/22/2005 13:30 Comments ||
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Baghbanpura police registered a case against 40 people belonging to two religious groups and arrested several of them when they scuffled in the premises of the police station over the ownership of an under-construction mosque on Friday. Baghbanpura SHO Faisal Sharif said that the two sectarian groups had a dispute over an under-construction mosque at Miraj Park in the Baghbanpura police jurisdiction. The SHO said that one group claimed that their sect owned the mosque while the other group demanded the possession of the mosque on the grounds that the first group already had a mosque in the area.
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10/22/2005 00:00 ||
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Turkey announced a $150 million aid pledge Friday for survivors of South Asia's massive earthquake, as NATO agreed to deploy hundreds of military engineers and medics to bolster relief efforts weeks before the bitter winter begins.
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10/22/2005 00:00 ||
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U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan sent a letter urging Eritrea to lift its ban on peacekeeping flights, saying the move jeopardized troop safety along a buffer zone between the Eritrean and Ethiopian armies, a spokesman said Friday. In a blunt response, Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki rejected Annan's appeal, telling him that he lacks the "humanitarian high ground on matters of law, the rule of law and humanitarian issues."
Annan expressed his concern about a prolonged humanitarian crisis in Eritrea, where 2.3 million people are in need because of poor nutrition and lack of food, spokesman Stephane Dujarric said. The letter was dated Monday, the same day that Annan told reporters the United Nations may have to withdraw troops from the area if the ban isn't lifted. Eritrea informed the United Nations that it was banning helicopter flights by U.N. peacekeepers in its airspace in a buffer zone with Ethiopia starting Oct. 5. It also banned U.N. patrol vehicles from operating at night on its side of the 621-mile Temporary Security Zone.
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10/22/2005 00:00 ||
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In a blunt response, Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki rejected Annan's appeal, telling him that he lacks the "humanitarian high ground on matters of law, the rule of law and humanitarian issues."
Give Afwerki a prize! Finally, a third world leader with the courage to take an elitist pansy like Annan to task for his piss-poor track record. How refreshing!
Tens of thousands of Ugandans turned out a rival ceremonies to mourn and condemn the country's twice-toppled president Milton Obote, illustrating a bitter debate over the late leader's legacy. A day after his arch-foe, President Yoweri Museveni, made a surprisingly strong appeal to mark Mr Obote's death in exile last week to herald a new era of national reconciliation, large crowds at the two events underscored the deep divide.
As a sombre crowd of 15,000 to 20,000 people gathered to grieve at an open-air state funeral service in Kampala's Independence Square, some 10,000 showed up at a rival demonstration to rejoice at Mr Obote's demise, an AFP correspondent said. Mr Museveni, who led the rebellion that toppled Mr Obote and sent him into exile in Zambia 20 years ago but then praised his nemesis and placed a wreath on his flag-draped coffin in parliament on Thursday, was absent from the official service.
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10/22/2005 00:00 ||
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NATO says it will send up to 1,000 troops to help hundreds of thousands of earthquake survivors in the rugged mountains of northern Pakistan, who have yet to to receive aid. But the measures fall far short of matching an appeal from top UN aid official Jan Egeland, who has urged the alliance to mount a massive airlift to rescue stranded survivors. Mr Egeland has called for an effort on the scale of the 1948-49 Berlin airlift to the beleaguered people of Soviet-blockaded West Berlin.
"There is no question of the alliance doing that. That was Berlin after World War II and this is Pakistan now - there is absolutely no comparison," said one NATO source. Helicopters are the only means of getting quickly deep into the Himalayan foothills of Pakistani Kashmir and North-West Frontier Province where 51,000 people are known to have died. That toll, in addition to some 1,300 killed on the Indian side of Kashmir, is expected to climb much further with large areas still unreached and the harsh Himalayan winter looming.
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10/22/2005 00:00 ||
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If they happen to run across this guy - I hope they shoot the f**ker.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
At least five people were killed and over 100 injured in Companiganj in Noakhali Thursday morning when police opened fire on demonstrators on the thana premises in protest against a dacoity at Basurhat Bazar, reports BDNEWS. Upazila Nirbahai Officer Md Zafar Alam, however, confirmed three deaths while police declined to make any comment. Local people alleged that police concealed the number of bodies. Officer-in-charge (OC) Ayub Hossain and Sub-inspector (SI) Sudhangshu Chakrabarti of the Companiganj thana were closed following the incident. 
France, grappling for decades with its colonial past, has passed a law to put an upbeat spin on a painful era, making it mandatory to enshrine in textbooks the country's "positive role" in its far-flung colonies. But the law is stirring anger among historians and passions in places like Algeria, which gained independence in a brutal conflict. Critics accuse France of trying to gild an inglorious colonial past with an "official history."
LAHORE â Meerwala gang-rape victim 
LUCKNOW: Free liquor handed out by village politicians to win votes in Indiaâs largest state has killed 19 people and blinded others over two days, and some was laced with insecticide and other chemicals, officials said Friday. Five people died overnight and 20 others fell ill in Gorakhpur, 250 kilometres (155 miles) southeast of Uttar Pradeshâs state capital, Lucknow, government spokesman Narendra Sinha said. Similar incidents killed 14 in two other Uttar Pradesh villages on Wednesday, said CN Upadhaya, joint commissioner of the department that monitors liquor production and sales. Village council elections are under way in the state. 
Baghbanpura police registered a case against 40 people belonging to two religious groups and arrested several of them when they scuffled in the premises of the police station over the ownership of an under-construction mosque on Friday. Baghbanpura SHO Faisal Sharif said that the two sectarian groups had a dispute over an under-construction mosque at Miraj Park in the Baghbanpura police jurisdiction. The SHO said that one group claimed that their sect owned the mosque while the other group demanded the possession of the mosque on the grounds that the first group already had a mosque in the area.
Tens of thousands of Ugandans turned out a rival ceremonies to mourn and condemn the country's twice-toppled president Milton Obote, illustrating a bitter debate over the late leader's legacy. A day after his arch-foe, President Yoweri Museveni, made a surprisingly strong appeal to mark Mr Obote's death in exile last week to herald a new era of national reconciliation, large crowds at the two events underscored the deep divide. 
