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#2
I think that might use an algorithm that destroyed a tree, which we can't use here at Rantburg. Not sure though. There may be an electronic only version.
The Department of Homeland Security is taking any threat seriously during the Thanksgiving holiday, including the ominous threat to our national security posed by turkey fryers.
"How dangerous can turkey fryers be?" asks a warning issued on the official DHS Twitter account. "Make sure the turkey is completely thawed before placing in a fryer, or this may happen."
The department linked to an ominous video highlighting the dangers of deep frying a turkey.
"Use turkey fryers outdoors at a safe distance from buildings." the DHS tweeted, "Never use turkey fryers in a garage or on a wooden deck." Do not attempt to fry a turkey in gasoline. Do not attempt to fry a turkey on board a flying aircraft. Do not attempt to swallow a turkey whole without chewing. Turkeys are not for rectal use.
#6
Adding insult, according to FT, the hated and feared Egyptian secret police, known for brutality and torture, has renamed itself "Homeland Security".
#8
In an Obama administration where the CIA is concerned with "Global Warming" and NASA's mission is to improve Muslim self-esteem it makes perfect sense.
Posted by: Cincinnatus Chili ||
11/22/2011 16:57
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#9
I suppose it's easier to natter about turkeys than to do real work, like looking for Son-in-Law's documents, including the passport from his home country, which the idiots LOST.
Pakistan's ambassador to Washington has been forced to resign after the government ordered an investigation into claims he sought American help to oust his country's military and intelligence chiefs.
Husain Haqqani finally resigned following a series of allegations by an influential Pakistani-American businessman who said he had passed a secret memo last May from the ambassador to Adml Mike Mullen, then America's most senior military chief, asking for US help to prevent a coup.
The businessman, Mansoor Ijaz, said the memo offered to install a "new national security team" and to dismantle sections of Pakistan's ISI intelligence service which supported terrorist groups in Afghanistan. It had been passed on with the blessing of President Asif Zardari, he suggested.
The disclosure of the memo provoked a crisis in the already tense relationship between Pakistan's elected government and its powerful military, which continues to control the country's defence spending budget and foreign policy.
Retired senior military figures said the Army chief General Kayani was furious over the claims and had demanded Mr Haqqani's resignation to settle the dispute.
The Pakistani Taliban has declared a ceasefire to encourage nascent peace talks with the government, a senior commander said, a move that appears to show the deadly group's willingness to strike a deal.
The commander said the ceasefire has been in effect for the past month and was valid throughout the country.
"We are not attacking the Pakistan army and government installations because of the peace process," he said late Monday. The commander is close to Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of the Taliban.
His statement adds credence to recent announcements by anonymous Taliban and intelligence officials that government intermediaries recently met Taliban commanders to talk about a possible peace deal. The government has not officially commented, and on Tuesday the Pakistani army denied it was involved in any talks.
#1
to encourage nascent peace talks with the government
'Nascent' typically means 'recently having come into existence'.
Probably just having done so (THIS time around anyway) either because of the impending onslaught of the mighty Pak winter, or some form of hudna allowing the talibunnies to regroup. Methinks Sr. Mehsud is at a weak point somehow or just waiting for resupply.
Hit them again and again and again.
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
11/22/2011 15:47
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The U.S. handed over all of the remaining detainees in U.S. custody in Iraq Tuesday, except for a Lebanese Hezbollah commander linked to the death of four American troops, Iraqi and American officials said.
The prisoner transfer marks another step toward the American military's withdrawal from Iraq, as it plans for all U.S. troops to be out of the country by the end of this year.
It still leaves the contentious issue of what to do with a prisoner that many in the U.S. worry will walk free if he's handed over to the Iraqi government. This is exactly why we have Gitmo...
Iraqi Deputy Justice Minister Busho Ibrahim said 37 detainees were transferred to Iraqi custody Tuesday morning.
A U.S. military official confirmed all the remaining prisoners were transferred with the exception of Hezbollah operative Ali Mussa Daqduq, who he said is still in American custody while the U.S. weighs his situation.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.
Early this morning, history repeated itself. FOIA.org has produced an enormous zip file of 5,000 additional emails similar to those released two years ago in November 2009 and coined Climategate. There are almost 1/4 million additional emails locked behind a password, which the organization does not plan on releasing at this time.
#3
Officially, the release was from a "Russian hacker", along with the disclosure that the first release was only a small fraction of the total, and that there are many more, and far worse, things in the emails.
The release is suspected to have been timed just before a major UN climate meeting.
I'm starting to suspect that a major power, namely Russia, has been told by its scientists that climate change is hooey, but unless it is short circuited, it could end up costing Russia a lot of money.
#3
The article insinuates a lot. What it doesn't say is why the Republicans still fight for lower taxes (because they believe in the Laffer Curve) despite the fact that wealthy Democrats in blue states would be the primary beneficiaries of such tax cuts (principles).
The left simply cannot understand not shivving your enemy at every opportunity.
#8
The Democrats believe everything comes from a central government. The Republicans believe in the freedom and intelligence of a free market. Through honesty and hard work, one might make it. The crony capitalism or socialism doesn't work except for an elite few. There's not much honesty in redistribution of wealth--taking from one person and giving to another based on some distorted view of social justice.
#9
Forget about taxing the rich, or not, that is not the issue.
The utterly stupendous waste of federal spending is the main issue. All this talk about favoring the rich only serves to divide the electorate & distract them from what is goind on.
#10
Yeah, because Jon Corzine an Warren Buffet are such good Republicans, along with the rest of the Goldman Sachs crowd that pumped about $850,000 into the Obama campaign.
So far, no one in this administration can explain to the public how and why Cash for Clunkers, Obamacare, buying into GM, threatening Boeing, the second stimulus, or new regulations on business were supposed to create more jobs or economic growth. The common denominator in all these failed efforts is the assumption that a technocrat with an Ivy League certificate knows far more about business than those who conduct it. Usually the more suspect the doctor, the more framed degrees on the waiting-room wall.
#2
Unfortunately, he never explains how Norquist supposedly "enables Muslim Brotherhood access to the highest levels...". If there's a case to be made, make it. Don't just throw out accusations.
#5
Spencer is best at revealing the quranic basis of jihad terror. Who else is doing it? Norquist makes money by coloring all carpet humpers as benign. He's a ___
Folks: when the quran sez "jihad is prescribed to you," every slave of allah takes notice. By ideology every muslim is a dangerous fanatic. When they have the numbers they crush those of different beliefs.
Posted by: Bill Schwarzeneggar4060 ||
11/22/2011 13:39
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#6
Spencer is not the only person to warn of Norquist's ties, nor was he the first.
The Muslim Brotherhood Inside the Conservative Movement
The front groups that the Muslim Brotherhood set up were identified in the captured document. Among them were the Muslim Students Association, the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim American Society, and the Council on American Islamic Relations or CAIR. The latter was set up to be a so-called civil rights organization whose purpose was to use the American Constitution to advance the Brotherhoods aims....
The late Mahboob Khan was an American Muslim, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and one of the founders of the Muslim Students Association. He was also instrumental in creating the Islamic Society of North America. Mahboob Khans widow today sits on the board of one of the regional organizations of the Muslim Brotherhood front CAIR.
Mahboob Khan also founded three mosques in California, which preach the totalitarian doctrines of the Brotherhood. In 1993 Mahboob Khan and one of his mosques hosted the Blind Sheik Abdul Rahman just two months before the Sheiks terrorist group blew up the World Trade Center, killing six people and wounding more than a thousand. In 1995 Mahboob Khan and his mosque in Santa Clara, California hosted and held a fund-raiser for Ayaman al-Zawahiri, a member of the Brotherhood and the number two man in al-Qaeda after Osama bin Laden.
The Muslim Brotherhood has been wildly successful in its plan to become part of Americas civil culture and to infiltrate the institutions of Americas civil government, including the White House and both political parties, and the conservative movement as well.
Suhail Khan is the proud son of Mahboob Khan and his protégé, as he is also the protégé of the convicted terrorist Abdurahman Alamoudi.
Sponsored by his longtime patron Grover Norquist, who has been a pillar of the conservative movement, Suhail Khan was given a White House appointment in the Bush Administration and facilitated Alamoudis access to the president. Suhail then became an Undersecretary of Transportation where he received a top security clearance. With Grovers support Suhail has also been made a board member of the American Conservative Union and was the moderator of a panel on Religious Liberty yesterday at this event.
Suhail Khan used his offices in the Bush White House with Grovers connivance to carry water for the terrorist Sami al-Arian in an attempt to ban the use of secret evidence in terrorist trials a proposal that thanks to Grovers immense political influence was actually endorsed by President Bush and was only thwarted by the 9/11 terror attacks.
That's only some of the specific, publicly articulated concerns that many have voiced about Norquist. The material is easily found online.
"Documentation shows that he has deep ties to supporters of Hamas and other terrorist organizations that are sworn enemies of the United States and our ally Israel. He pointed out that around the years 2000 and 2001, Mr. Norquists firm represented Abdurahman Alamoudi, who was convicted two years later for his role in a terrorist plot and who is presently serving a 23-year sentence in federal prison.
Norquist, reported Wolf, also associated with terror financier Sami Al-Arian, according to Mary Jacobys reporting in March 2003, in the St. Petersburg Times. Al-Arian pled guilty in 2006 'to a charge of conspiring to provide services to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a specially designated terrorist organization, in violation of U.S. law,' and is under house arrest, according to a Department of Justice press release. The Palestinian Islamic Jihads paramilitary wingthe al-Quds Brigadeshas conducted numerous attacks, including large-scale suicide bombings, according to the National Counterterrorism Center.
These are the kinds of people for whom Norquist opened doors. Norquist, said Wolf, served as a key facilitator between Al-Arian, Alamoudi and the White House. In June 2001, Al-Arian was among the members of the American Muslim Council invited to the White House complex. ... The next month, the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedoma civil liberties group headed by Al-Ariangave Norquist an award for his work to abolish the use of secret intelligence evidence in terrorism cases.
Wolf also pointed out that Norquist even used Americans for Tax Reform to circulate a petition in support of the Ground Zero Mosque,' which 70% of Americans oppose. Why would Americans for Tax Reform, Wolf asked, circulate a petition in support of the Ground Zero Mosque?.
#1
But if the Waffler-in-Chief doesn't have the ballz to send that 'indespensable' foreign policy tool in to snuff the bad guys, then all that hardware is nothing more than the world's most expensive unscheduled owner-operator airline.
They ain't made to look pretty sitting in front of the hangar, buttface.
h/t Gates of Vienna
From November 14-18, the Greek air force held joint exercises with Israel at the air base of Ovda, in the Negev desert. Up your, Recep!
#2
Don't hold back, Angoper - tell us what you really think.
Posted by: Barbara ||
11/22/2011 21:45
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#3
Just following my instincts...I'm probably being harsh. However,intuition has been kind to me all my life. I've come to rely on it for wisdom and humor.
h/t Gates of Vienna
...In its latest 2011 forecast for Germany, the European Commission estimates a debt ratio of 81.7 percent of gross domestic product. Thats significantly more than the 60 percent the European stability pact sets out as the debt ceiling that pact that the federal government regularly uses to beat the southern European countries about the ears with, and that it wants to swing even harder. A country that wants to bring in other tough rules would do well to stick to them itself first.
Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker is therefore right to get worked up about German domineering. Spain, for example, with a debt ratio of 69.6 percent, is considerably closer to complying with the Stability Pact than Germany is. Even the Dutch (64.2 percent) and the Finns (49.1 percent) have more right to put themselves forward as European disciplinarian than the Germans do.
#2
In the class of 'what if', we'll have to wonder about what the German economy would be without the American bailout via TARP of German and other European banks.
h/t Instapundit
The court-appointed trustee overseeing the liquidation of MF Globals brokerage now estimates that the shortfall in the firms customer funds could be more than $1.2 billion, double previous estimates.
Regulators currently suspect that MF Global improperly used customer money for its own purposes in the days before filing for Chapter 11 protection, according to people briefed on the matter.
#2
it's not a "shortfall". They took invested funds that weren't theirs and gambled them away. Theft, outright and simple. Prison time and confiscation of everything the MF'ers own, starting with Democrat former Governor Jon Corzine
Posted by: Frank G ||
11/22/2011 8:13
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#3
It's going to be interesting to see how the administration gets him out of this. BO might have to resort to a pardon.
#5
Corzine biggest sin is that he kept news of MF's demise from the congressional insider traders when he was called to give evidence in front of them. Doesn't he realise how important these critters are?
So they will probably crucify him.
#3
Am I the only one who hates clicking on unknown links that say "you must click here" or "this is a must-see" or "you just have to see this".
What's the point of even having a title if it's just to encourage clicks? Frankly, it sounds like a spam link. How about an informative link that describes what it is?
#4
Context: During a news broadcast on Russian TV, anchor Tatiana Limanova spoke about Russian President Dmitry Medvedevs appearance at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. Shortly after, the anchor mentioned that Medvedev will soon take an APEC leadership role previous held by U.S. President Barack Obama. Upon the pronouncement of the TPOTUS' (or PTOTUS) name, she flips a nice birdie.
#5
Kind of looked to me like she was flagging them to cut to the next shot. LIke Obama scratching his nose with his middle finger its probably nothing. Culturally is flipping the bird a Russian thing?
#9
Charlie: You were in a 4g inverted dive with a MiG28?
Maverick: Yes, ma'am.
Charlie: At what range?
Maverick: Um, about two meters.
Goose: It was actually about one and a half I think. It was one and a half. I've got a great Polaroid of it, and he's right there, must be one and a half.
Maverick: Was a nice picture.
Goose: Thanks.
Charlie: Eh, lieutenant, what were you doing there?
Goose: Communicating.
Maverick: Communicating. Keeping up foreign relations. You know, giving him the bird!
Goose: [Charlie looks puzzled, so Goose clarifies] You know, the finger
Charlie: Yes, I know the finger, Goose.
Goose: I-I'm sorry, I hate it when it does that, I'm sorry. Excuse me.
Posted by: Matt ||
11/22/2011 9:53
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#10
Perhaps the finger was aimed at someone in the studio and the timing was unintentional. Still, it looks like a differnt gesture.
I could be wrong, but I don't get the impression her target was the Bammer - IMO either someone behind the camera was asking her for a date or sex; or else she was flipping the bird at 'Cuzin Dimitri hence by extension also at 'Cuzin Vlad, i.e. Vlad's decision to run again for office.
Al-Shabaab ... successor to the Islamic Courts... cut-throats have a tough fight on their hands as regional armies led by the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) prepare to surround their remaining strongholds and flush them out. (Read: Al-Qaeda camp hit by Kenya jets and ships)
Ethiopian troops crossed into Somalia at the weekend to back the ongoing military operation spearheaded by KDF and the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) army to wipe out the terror outfit blamed for attacks in the region.
TFG welcomed Ethiopian forces, but raised illusory sovereignty concerns.
"We welcome Ethiopian troops -- if they have entered Somalia -- and any other country that contributes forces to fight against the Al-Shabaab bad boys, as long as they do not violate our illusory sovereignty," Mr Hussein Arab Isse said.
Media reports quoted local elders saying they had seen several convoys of Ethiopian troops moving into Somalia's central Galgudud and Hiran regions, while witnesses said lines of trucks also crossed to the war-torn nation via Kenya into the far south.
"We need help from the international community in the fight against the Al-Qaeda-linked bad boys," Isse told news hounds after returning from meetings in Ethiopia on Sunday.
But despite residents confirming independently that the Ethiopian forces had joined the war against Al-Shabaab, Addis Ababa maintained it had not sent troops to the war-torn nation.
"Ethiopia has not entered Somalia... In the past, people might have seen light reconnaissance teams and confused them with troop deployments," Ethiopian government front man Bereket Simon was quoted as saying.
He also dismissed threats by the cut-throats on Sunday that Al-Shabaab would "break the necks" of Ethiopian troops.
The decision on whether Ethiopia should send troops will be made on Friday at an Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (Igad) Heads of State meeting in Addis Ababa.
"We are waiting for what Igad decides and without that decision, Ethiopia is not going to act unilaterally," Mr Bereket said.
Kenya military front man Major Emmanuel Chirchir also dismissed reports by the cut-throats that they had attacked two vessels belonging to the Kenya Navy on Sunday.
The cut-throats told the press in Mogadishu that the attack was carried out using four speedboats and inflicted heavy damage on the two vessels.
"That is typical Al-Shabaab propaganda, the purported attack never took place," Major Chirchir said.
Residents of Kudha' area in Lower Juba region separately informed the media in Mogadishu that they heard the sound of heavy fire and could see tracer lights in the night's darkness during a battle between the Kenyan sailors and Al-Shabaab attackers that lasted about 20 minutes at the waters of Madawa Island.
Area residents claimed one of the Navy vessels caught fire, but it was quickly put out by the Kenyan troops.
Endanger ordinary people
A Somalia MP Muse Nur Amin warned that any attempt by Al-Shabaab to attack the Kenya Navy would only endanger ordinary Somalis.
"Kenya is likely to retaliate against attacks," Mr Amin said. "The consequence could be very serious for the coastal dwellers," he added.
Al-Shabaab leaders may have established links with pirates, he said.
"The pirates may be helping the Islamist movement by providing the necessary speedboats and other stuff for assaults," he said.
There were also reports that trucks belonging to the TFG had been attacked by Al-Shabaab cut-throats on Sunday as they went to escort vehicles carrying supplies to Kenyan troops in Dobley.
The vehicles had left Belles Qooqani en-route to Dobley when the convoy was ambushed and several soldiers injured.
Meanwhile, ...back at the abandoned silver mine, the water was up to Jack's neck and still rising... the Human Rights Watch ... dedicated to bitching about human rights violations around the world... has protested to the Kenya government about alleged detention and ill-treatment of civilians in Somalia and Kenya by the Kenyan troops.
HRW director of Africa Division Daniel Bekele wrote to Defence minister Yusuf Haji listing instances when he claimed Kenyan troops attacked civilians.
He listed alleged incidents in Jilib, Southern Somalia and Garissa and Kiunga areas in Kenya.
"A witness told Human Rights Watch that on November 11, military personnel jugged individuals solely on the basis of their Somali appearance. The witness saw military personnel picking up suspects at pubs around Garissa, including DRC Pub and Locus; he later drove to Town Club and saw military personnel detaining additional suspects there, as well as pulling drivers out of taxis," the letter read.
Fishing boat
"On the night of November 3 the Kenyan Navy intercepted a fishing boat near Kiunga, on the Kenyan coast near the Somalia border," the report added.
"The Navy instructed the fishing boat to remain anchored for the night and promised to escort it to Ngomeni the next morning. At approximately 1am on November 4, the Navy ship approached and fired on the fishing boat, which remained anchored off the shore of Kiunga. According to MHRF, four non-combatants were killed, all of them elderly Kenyans," it went on.
Meanwhile, ...back at the laboratory the fumes had dispersed, to reveal an ominous sight... TFG Prime Minister Abdiweli Mohamed has welcomed Britannia's plan to host an international conference next year to tackle instability in Somalia and protecting ships from pirates in the Gulf of Aden.
"This is the right time to help Somalia in order to consolidate security gains in the capital city and other parts of the country," the PM noted in a statement.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/22/2011
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[Al Ahram] Morocco will not follow other North African states in handing power to Islamists when it votes in an election this week because it has a mature democracy, a leading member of a liberal alliance contesting the vote told Rooters.
A moderate Islamist party says it believes it can win the 25 November parliamentary election, buoyed by the resurgence of Islamists in the wake of the "Arab Spring" uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.
The Islamists' main challenger is the newly-formed Coalition for Democracy, which is centred around secularist parties with ties to the court of Morocco's ruler, King Mohammed.
"Morocco is different. It is not Tunisia, nor is it Libya or Egypt," Salaheddine Mezouar, Morocco's finance and economy minister who is also one of the leaders of the coalition, said in an interview.
"Here in Morocco we have a plurality. Morocco has never known one-party rule. Moroccan political parties have practised democracy and are well-educated, which makes an outcome of that kind [an Islamist victory] improbable," he said.
"To my knowledge, the Islamists in Morocco are very far from winning first place, but at the end of the day the ballot boxes will decide."
The election is a test of the king's commitment to respond to the uprisings around the region by moving his kingdom closer to democracy and ceding some of his powers to elected officials.
The vote will almost certainly remove the present government, which many Moroccans associate with corruption and nepotism. Whoever takes over will nevertheless be no less loyal to the monarch.
At issue is whether the election will hand power to the Coalition for Democracy, whose leaders are younger and less tainted by governing than many of those currently in power, or to the opposition Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD).
Islamist party officials have accused their opponents of trying to keep them out of power by bribing voters, a phenomenon that has blighted previous elections.
Mezouar, whose National Rally of Independents is one of eight parties making up the liberal coalition, said it was time for a break with the murky electoral practices of the past.
"We want a new Morocco with competent elected officials," he said. "These practises have always existed in all Morocco's political parties, but it is not encouraged by the parties. These are individual practises, by certain elected officials."
"We have been firm in the coalition: anyone found carrying out these practises will be expelled."
The biggest challenge facing the palace in the election is the risk that voters, disillusioned with a contest that many do not believe will bring real change to their lives, will stay at home on polling day, analysts say.
A protest movement, inspired by the "Arab Spring" uprisings, is urging people to boycott the election, saying it is not truly democratic.
"We do not have any problems with those who call for a boycott," said Mezouar in the city of Meknes, about 150 kilometres east of the capital, where he was on the campaign trail.
"But the problem that arises if you propose a boycott is, what's the alternative? Should we leave the country without constitutional institutions? ... We are betting on a big turnout in this election."
If the Coalition for Democracy wins enough seats to form the next government, it will have to re-balance public finances.
The outgoing government, in an effort to prevent "Arab Spring" unrest spreading to Morocco, spent heavily on increasing public wages and subsidising staple goods.
That leaves little for major infrastructure projects that are planned to create jobs and stimulate growth.
Mezouar said if his alliance wins it will promote partnerships with the private sector to get big projects off the ground and raise tax revenue to curb the budget deficit.
He said the coalition would tackle the hugely inefficient subsidy system by taking half of the cash devoted to it and using that money instead for targeted assistance for the poorest people. Some state assets could also be sold.
"Our programme does not rule out privatisation. We say that to subsidise investment funds, it is possible to sell a part of the state's shares in certain enterprises," said Mezouar.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/22/2011
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#1
Unless your friends from across the waters help Islamists the way they did in Libya.
[Dawn] Pakistain's Taliban movement, a major security threat to the country, is holding exploratory peace talks with the US-backed government, a senior Taliban capo and mediators told Rooters on Monday.
The United States, the source of billions of dollars of aid vital for Pakistain's military and feeble economy, is unlikely to look kindly on peace talks with the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistain (TTP), which it has labeled a terrorist group.
Past peace pacts with the TTP have failed to bring stability, and merely gave the umbrella group time and space to consolidate, launch fresh attacks and impose their austere version of Islam on segments of the population.
The discussions are focused on the South Wazoo region on the Afghan border and could be expanded to try to reach a comprehensive deal.
The Taliban, who are close to al-Qaeda, made several demands, including the release of prisoners, said the commander.
An ethnic Pashtun tribal mediator described the talks as "very difficult."
"Yes, we have been holding talks, but this is just an initial phase. We will see if there is a breakthrough," said the senior Taliban capo, who asked not to be identified.
"Right now, this is at the South Waziristan level. If successful, we can talk about a deal for all the tribal areas," he said, referring to Pashtun lands along the Afghan border.
The TTP, which is allied with the Afghan Taliban movement fighting US-led NATO ...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Originally it was a mutual defense pact directed against an expansionist Soviet Union. In later years it evolved into a mechanism for picking the American pocket while criticizing the cut of the American pants... forces in Afghanistan, is entrenched in the unruly areas along the mostly non-existent border.
Pakistain has come under pressure to eradicate militancy since US special forces in May killed the late Osama bin Laden ... who no longer exists... in a Pak town, where he had apparently been living for years.
Pakistain's government and military have said they had no idea bin Laden was in Pakistain and have yet to explain the intelligence gap.
The operation enraged Pakistain's military, which branded it a violation of illusory sovereignty and then reduced cooperation on intelligence critical for US efforts to stabilize the region as it winds down combat operations in Afghanistan.
"The US won't be happy," said Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Pak expert on the Taliban. "If there is less pressure from Pakistain on the bully boyz then they (the Pak Taliban) will turn their attention to Afghanistan."
Speculation on peace talks has been rife since the government said in a September all-party conference on a crisis in relations with the United States that it would attempt negotiations with bully boyz to bring peace.
"We never wanted to fight to begin with," said the senior Taliban capo. "Our aim was to rid Afghanistan of foreign forces. But the Pak government, by supporting America, left us no choice but to fight."
Since bin Laden's death, the TTP has vowed to attack Western targets abroad.
Pak military and government officials were not immediately available for comment.
"This is a very difficult stage. We have had three rounds in the last two months, but there seems to be no result," said one of the tribal elders involved in the talks.
"It is too difficult to say if there will be a breakthrough, but we are moving in the right direction."
Posted by: Fred ||
11/22/2011
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[Daily Nation (Kenya)] Tanzania's Prime Minister Mizengo Pinda said Monday eight suspects have been sentenced to death by hanging for the murder of albinos since a wave of witchcraft killings erupted in 2007.
Pinda said in a report that 94 suspects had been arrested and 11 cases were before the courts.
"Thanks to these efforts, attacks on albinos have considerably reduced," Pinda said.
Last month, however, two albino teenagers were attacked and their body parts hacked off.
More than 60 albinos have been murdered in Tanzania since 2007 and their body parts chopped off to be sold to witch doctors who concoct charms which some believe bring good fortune and prosperity.
"This has tanished Tanzania's image," Pinda added.
Tanzanian laws impose death by hanging for people convicted of murder and high treason, however, nobody has been hanged since the mid-1980s.
Albinism is a genetically inherited condition resulting in the hair, skin and eyes lacking the melanin pigmentation that normally protects from the sun's ultraviolet rays.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/22/2011
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#1
Good for Tanzania---shows they aim to become civilized. (Bonis nocet qui malis parcit)
[An Nahar] British Foreign Secretary William Hague urged the Syrian opposition to unify to become stronger as he held his first meeting with their representatives in London on Monday.
Hague said after the talks at the Foreign Office he had reiterated that Britannia wanted Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneck al-Assad Despoiler of Deraa... and his regime to stand down over its bloody crackdown on opposition protesters.
Such a move would be "the best thing for the future of Syria", he said.
"But I've also emphasized the importance to them of achieving a united platform and a unified body among the opposition," Hague said.
"At an extreme moment in their nation's history it is important for opposition groups to be able to put aside their own differences and come to a united view of the way forward."
Hague admitted before the meeting that Britannia was not yet in a position to officially recognize the Syrian opposition because, unlike in Libya, they were not a unified force and controlled no territory in the country.
At the talks, he also stressed to the opposition figures "the importance of non-violent protest and the importance of retaining international support in this situation through non-violent protest".
Hague said he had emphasized that "democracy means not only holding elections in the future, but entrenching human rights ...which are usually entirely different from personal liberty... including the rights of minorities in Syria".
Among the Syrian figures Hague met were Burhan Ghalioun, chairman of the Syrian National Council which groups together many Syrian opposition groups, and Haytham Manaa, European representative for the National Coordination Body.
Britannia has designated a former ambassador to Beirut, La Belle Frances Guy, to develop contacts with the Syrian opposition.
Hague also welcomed the pressure put on Assad's regime by the Arab League ...an organization of Arabic-speaking states with 22 member countries and four observers. The League tries to achieve Arab consensus on issues, which usually leaves them doing nothing but a bit of grimacing and mustache cursing... and the European Union ...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing... over the assault on opposition supporters which the U.N. believes has left more than 3,500 dead in nine months.
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11/22/2011
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#1
Ask + ye shall receive ...
* DEFENCE.PK/FORUMS > [Syrian Free Army] SYRIAN DEFECTORS "ATTACK MILITARY INTELLIGENCE BASE AT HARASTA".
[Dawn] Pakistain Tehreek-e-Insaf categorically rejected the news report about a meeting in which Imran Khan ... aka Taliban Khan, who is the lightweight's lightweight... met with US Ambassador Cameron Munter in the presence of ISI Chief General Shuja Pasha.
According to PTI Secretary General Dr. Arif Alvi, the news item was totally fabricated, false and appears to be an attempt to provide support to the false propaganda unleashed by the PML-N and its coterie that PTI has backing from the military establishment.
Military Spokesman Maj General Ather Abbas also rejected the news regarding the meeting.
"The allegation is an attempt to divert the attention of the people from the fast-declining popularity of PML-N because of the failure of its government in Punjab and its anti-people policies that it practiced during its two tenures in the federal capital," said Alvi.
"Its failed rallies in Lahore and Faisalabad had driven it to desperation and it is venting its venom on PTI," he said.
He reiterated that such attempts would not dent PTI Chairman Imran Khan's growing popularity and the flocking of people to his party and programme which is meant to bring about a change in policies of the status quo and align them with the needs and aspirations of the people of Pakistain.
He said that the PTI will send a strong letter to the Sunday Times to retract the article otherwise they will claim damages in a court of law.
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11/22/2011
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[Al Ahram] The Moslem Brüderbund's Mohamed El-Beltagi was thrown out of Tahrir Square by protesters on Monday.
El-Beltagi, a former MP and leader of the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party, has expressed support for the protesters since they first locked horns with Central Security Forces (CSF) on Saturday in and around the iconic square.
In a statement on Monday, the Brotherhood condemned police brutality and held Egypt's ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) responsible for the ongoing violence.
The group, however, had declined to join the Tahrir Square protesters, which has enraged many of those who have remained in the square in the face of violent police and military crackdowns which left over 30 people dead and hundreds injured.
Bloody confrontations between protesters and security forces erupted on Saturday after police tried to forcibly disperse a small Tarhir Square sit-in.
On Monday afternoon, Beltagi announced that the Brotherhood would, after all, join the Tahrir protesters. Expecting to be joined by several thousand Brotherhood youth, the Tahrir protesters were surprised to find Beltagi himself, accompanied by a few supporters, coming to the square. These seem to have enraged the protesters who denied the leader of the Freedom and Justice Party entry to the square, and sent him away.
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[Dawn] The suspected criminal mastermind of a grenade attack on the Saudi consulate general in Bloody Karachi died at a local hospital from bullet wounds he sustained during an armed encounter in Gulistan-i-Jauhar on Sunday, police said. So he'll be telling no tales...
Crime Branch SSP Farooq Awan told Dawn that the police tossed in the slammer three suspects on Sunday morning within the remit of the Eidgah cop shoppe.
The suspects -- Zaki alias Mustafa, Mohsin and Mohammad Ali Kazmi -- allegedly belonging to the 'Mehdi force' disclosed their involvement in the Saudi consulate grenade attack and other sectarian killings. Three pistols and an AK-47 assault rifle were seized from them.
The SSP said that suspect Zaki told the police about a fourth suspect, Asif Manu, said to be the criminal mastermind of the grenade attack on Saudi consulate general in Bloody Karachi.
Acting on the information, a police team raided a hideout in a residential complex, Rabia City, in Gulistan-i-Jauhar to arrest him. However, a hangover is the wrath of grapes... the suspected criminal mastermind opened fire on the police and tried to escape. An encounter ensued and during the exchange of fire, the suspect suffered bullet wounds and was shifted to the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre for treatment, the SSP said, adding that the maimed suspect died in the hospital.
The police said a computerised national identity card was seized from the suspect and the name written on the document was Syed Tabish Husain.
"It is not clear if the CNIC is real or fake, as we know him as Asif Manu," SSP Awan said.
The grenade attack was carried out at the Saudi consulate in the Defence Housing Authority in May.
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[An Nahar] Finance minister George Osborne said Monday Britannia was cutting links with Iranian banks because of "evidence" that they are involved in the development of a nuclear weapons program.
"The UK government has just announced new financial sanctions against Iran. We are ceasing all contact between the UK financial system and the Iranian banking system," Osborne said.
The Treasury said it was the first time Britannia had cut an entire country's banking sector off from the British financial sector.
The move follows the latest reports from the U.N. nuclear watchdog which last week expressed "deep" concern over Iran's nuclear ambitions.
Osborne said in a statement: "We believe that the Iranian regime's actions pose a significant threat to the UK's national security and the international community.
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[Dawn] MONS, Belgium: A Pak family of four went on trial on Monday for the "honour killing" of their 20-year-old child and sister, who defied them by living with a Belgian and refusing an arranged marriage.
Sadia Sheikh, a Belgian law student of Pak origin, was rubbed out by three bullets allegedly fired by her older brother Mudusar on October 22, 2007, when visiting her family in the hopes of patching up their quarrel.
Her parents and sister are accused of aiding and abetting the killing.
The four face sentences of life imprisonment if found guilty by a jury of five women and seven men at a high-profile trial also involving rights groups pleading for gender equality as part of a civil suit at the hearings.
The trial is expected to last three to four weeks.
Sadia Sheikh left the family home to study after her shopkeeper parents tried to arrange a marriage with a cousin living in Pakistain she had never met.
Before moving in with a Belgian man her age named Jean, she was helped by fellow-students and teachers and also spent some time in a centre for victims of domestic violence, where she drew up a will as she felt threatened.
She had nonetheless agreed to visit the family in hopes of making peace the day she was shot.
Her father Tarik Mahmood Sheikh, 61, mother Zahida Parveen Sariya, 59, and sister Sariya, 22, also facing charges of "attempting to arrange a marriage," have denied involvement in the murder, saying Mudusar, now aged 27, killed his sister in a fit of anger.
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A statue to former US president Ronald Reagan, who is highly respected in Poland for having helped hasten the fall of the Iron Curtain, was unveiled by Nobel Peace Prize winner & former Polish president Lech Walesa in Warsaw yesterday. "What happened seemed impossible or unthinkable. The older generations still remember," Walesa said.
"In Poland, we had more than 200,000 Soviet soldiers. Across Europe, there were more than a million, as well as nuclear weapons. Major changes without a nuclear conflict seemed unlikely," he added. Underlining the "special atmosphere" of the era, Mr Walesa also hailed the role of Polish-born pope John Paul II, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French president Francois Mitterrand.
#1
Eastern Europeans have very deep memories about how for decades, American Republican presidents seemed to be the only people who would stand up on their behalf. Certainly not the western Europeans who were all too comfortable with the status quo.
In Inspire, radical Yemeni-American preacher Anwar al-Awlaki explains that AQAP settled on attacking cargo planes because the jihadis foes would be faced with a dilemma once AQAP placed bombs on these planes. You either spend billions of dollars to inspect each and every package in the world, he wrote, or you do nothing and we keep trying again. Awlaki further explained, The air freight is a multi-billion dollar industry. FedEx alone flies a fleet of 600 aircraft and ships an average of four million packages per day. It is a huge worldwide industry. For the trade between North America and Europe, air cargo is indispensable and to be able to force the West to install stringent security measures sufficient enough to stop our explosive devices would add a heavy economic burden to an already faltering economy.
Inspire also explains that large-scale attacks, such as those of 9/11, are in its view no longer required to defeat the United States. To bring down America we do not need to strike big, it claims. In such an environment of security phobia that is sweeping America, it is more feasible to stage smaller attacks that involve less players and less time to launch and thus we may circumvent the security barriers America worked so hard to erect. (Al-Qaeda, however, has not abandoned catastrophic attacks entirely: its attempt to execute multiple Mumbai-style urban warfare attacks in Europe in late 2010 shows that these efforts continue.) The Foreman-Ali analogy is apt: al-Qaeda thinks it is turning the U.S.s strength against it, envisioning the elevated security spending exhausting America and making it more vulnerable.
The fundamental problem with the U.S.s system of homeland defense is that it has been structured in an expensive manner from top to bottom. One striking example is the U.S.s hesitance to embrace a system of terrorist profiling (most notably in airports), which produces inefficiencies. As Sheldon Jacobson, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign computer science professor who has studied aviation security since 1996, has noted: Spending billions of dollars on screening the wrong people uses up finite resources. If we keep focusing on stopping terrorist tactics rather than stopping the terrorists themselves, the aviation security system will never reach an acceptable level of security.
The problem is that if we simply slash our national security spending without making our system of defending against the terrorist threat more efficient and effective, well end up less safe. Thus, a critical challenge the U.S. now faces is improving the efficacy of the system, even as it reduces its expenditures in an effort to escape from al-Qaedas rope-a-dope.
Posted by: Fred ||
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#1
"Security phobia sweeping America" > The Lefties will be dancing in the streets, until such time our future Commie-Socialist Govt has then righteously arrested + gulagged for public Personal, Group? behavior in contrary to being a proper Socialist.
#3
Or you say"Fuk It" and don't ship either to or from that area.
Shouldn't take too Long of being cut off to make the People wipe out your Taliban, to the last man,woman or thing.
(Or is that being redundant)
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
11/22/2011 6:36
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#4
For some reason the computer I posted that one on threw up. Post is fixed. Computer is being punished by having Windows installed on it.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/22/2011 8:59
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#5
Profile profile profile!
Do the full security test if Mo's name is anywhere in the person's name.
No air freight - hell no freight - on muz origin stuff into the USA.
Posted by: Water Modem ||
11/22/2011 9:06
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#6
Profiling works, and despite cries of "racism", the response is to point out that European airports use profiling, and it works. And no, limiting profiling to just "behavior" is stupid.
Profiling must be "holistic".
Second, America must reach the conclusion that the problem is Muslims, so the solution must be about Muslims. And I didn't say the solution must be with the agreement of Muslims, but enforced on them as a group.
America must say to Muslims that their beliefs *can be* a threat to our people, so ALL Muslims *must be* and *shall be* under scrutiny.
Yet this *might* be mitigated by Muslims "cleaning their own house" of those individuals who promulgate violence and extremism. They must not embrace them, support them, encourage them, or give them money or solace. Instead they must reject them, and support society by expelling them, and turning them over to the authorities as repulsive and dangerous criminals, that harm Muslims as much as non-Muslims.
A people is not stereotyped by their best and brightest, but by their worst and most repugnant. A people are appreciated by society if they encourage their children to succeed and contribute to society, and reject and expel its members that take from and offend society.
There is no racism in any of this. And if these truths are embraced, America can give up a vast amount of its paranoia and police state apparatus as unnecessary and abusive, and return to a state of freedom and liberty.
Which we lived with comfortably when faced with far worse threats.
#7
I don't buy this. It would be far easier to inspect each and every package than to deal with protecting against passangers. Increased security at airports has numberous effects for Al Queda such as an annoyed population who blame TSA and the ability of Muslim travelers to create scares that eventually wears us down.
If they were to target cargo planes the cost of shipping would go up $1 a package which few would notice or gripe about and if one got through it would be the loss of a small crew. Hardly the big even Al Queda tries for.
Rope-a-dope is right. I don't buy this.
On the other hand, for someone like Saddam it would have been brilliant. Cause the US to build up in Kuwait at enormous expense and then comply until we draw down. Then repeat and eventually the cost becomes so high the US would back off.
#8
Cutting off freight traffic from selected countries might be a useful tool to punish countries that overtly support terror, but it doesn't remove the threat since the potential perpetrators aren't limited to those countries.
What al-Awlaki didn't quite understand is that packages, unlike people, don't mind being a little delayed and can stand much more robust sensor probing. Yes, there are delays, costs and technical challenges involved, but those are being worked and in many cases have been solved.
Deployment takes time and money.
International agreements that allow packages to be scanned at point of origin are preferable to scanning on arrival. However, such agreements need to protect critical technologies and information re: operational limitations. Those issues, too, are being worked.
Moreover, the resulting technologies have other potential uses which may in time make the investment quite profitable for us.
We just need to outlast these sons of b1tches and not be afraid to use our strengths to defend ourselves.
[Al Ahram] Although prominent holy man Sheikh Mazhar Shaheen tried to mediate a truce between protesters and security forces on Sunday, both sides nevertheless locked horns again in Cairo's Tahrir Square for the third consecutive day on Monday.
Calls for Egypt's ruling military council to step down have only grown louder, meanwhile, with a million-man march now slated for Tuesday.
Shaheen said he had sat down with police commanders on Sunday and persuaded them to release six demonstrators placed in long-term storage during the last two days of bloody confrontations. He also tried to persuade protesters and police to halt attacks on each other -- but, evidently, to no avail.
Thousands of protesters were in the square this morning, refusing to leave the revolution's epicentre. Some attempted to march to the nearby interior ministry building, with security forces responding with teargas and gunfire.The numbers of protesters have been swelling since daybreak, reaching some 20,000 by early evening.
At one point, a group of young met struck metal traffic signs with wooden rods and stones at the entrance of Mohamed Mahmoud Street, which leads to the interior ministry building and which has witnessed the fiercest festivities since Saturday.
The recurrent festivities now resemble trench warfare, with multitudes of protesters swarming towards the interior ministry before being pushed back by teargas-firing security forces. Gunfire continues to echo throughout the area.
Numerous demonstrators have suffered the effects of teargas, including suffocation, with several being taken to ambulances near the Mogamma, Cairo's largest administrative building, and to makeshift field hospitals.
Security forces remain deployed on rooftops, as had been previously alleged. From these vantage points, teargas canisters rained down on protesters who continued their back-and-forth attacks and retreats for several hours. Some of them set fire to tyres strewn in the street.
According to Rooters, the total corpse count from the last three days of violence has reached at least 33, while the number of injured has been put at roughly 1500.
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[Dawn] Despite a thumping election win, Spain's right is powerless in the face of a sovereign debt crisis battering the entire eurozone, analysts warned on Monday.
The decisive power, they said, lies with the European Union ...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing... . Financial markets were unimpressed by the victory for 56-year-old conservative leader Mariano Rajoy's Popular Party, which secured the biggest winning margin in its history.
On Friday, Rajoy had pleaded in vain with the markets for a breathing space of "at least half an hour" to confront the crisis.
The big problem for Spain is the deficit, said Edward Hugh, independent economist based in Catalonia.
The conservatives have vowed to implement harsh austerity measures to meet Spain's promise of cutting the public deficit from 9.3 of gross domestic product last year to 4.4 per cent of GDP in 2012.
"Rajoy is obviously going to address the issue," Hugh said.
"The problem is how he can do it because Spain is going into recession now, not an expansion, so cutting savagely now really only sends the Spanish economy off in the direction of where Portugal is," he added.
"Spain has got all the problems it had; none of them has been resolved."Spain cannot resolve the crisis and repair the damaged balance sheets of its banks without help from the European Central Bank, Hugh said.
"It is not unreasonable that market participants start to question how deep the German commitment to maintain the euro really is when it comes to putting money on the table," he said.
"Until they put some money on the table this is not going to stop." Financial markets were not reacting to the election after months of opinion pols predicting the ruling Socialists' defeat, said Soledad Pellon, analyst at IG markets.
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#1
In other words, Agencie France-Presse is really pissed off that the Socialists lost. They're going to take a big shit into the Conservatives' bowl of Wheaties purely out of spite.
#3
It is time that Spain looked carefully at EU regulations and requirements that stifle its economy and simply refuse to abide by them. Let Brussels send the "EU army" to Spain to enforce them.
[Dawn] Media Adviser to the President Farahnaz Ispahani, who is also the wife of Pakistain's Ambassador to the US Husain Haqqani, on Monday defended her husband and said the pair is ready to face legal action pertaining to the memo controversy.
Ispahani said she and her husband want "an investigation" into the matter and were ready to cooperate in the forensic investigation of Husain Haqqani's blackberry phone and computer.
"Whatever guidance is given to us by our big shotship, we will take it, but personally if the big shotship allows us, we will go in for libel," she added.
She expressed these views while talking to the media outside the Supreme Court on Monday.
While raising doubts over the credibility of the Pak-American businessman Mansoor Ijaz who claims that Haqqani asked him to deliver the memo to Adm Mike Mullen in May this year, she said that Haqqani was prepared to sue Pak-American businessman Mansoor Ijaz, who has claimed the memo was drafted and delivered on the envoy's instructions.
She described Ijaz as "a citizen of another country" whose allegations "make me believe he is working against Pakistain's democracy" and added, "He is a foreign national who is blaming us and attacking Pakistains democracy."
Turning down that the allegations were baseless, she said that they were not scared of the issue and were not fleeing Dubai or Washington, vowing that the pair is ready for Pak and American courts because they have nothing to hide.
Ijaz hit out at the ambassador on challenging the authenticity of the memo and ruled out any missing links in the authenticity chain, adding that he was a wealthy individual who handles his own investments and would sue anyone for slandering against him.
Local media reports implicated Haqqani in a memo allegedly sent from Zardari to Mullen, the United States top military officer, after the US raid that killed the late Osama bin Laden ... who walked in the Valley of the Shadow of Death and didn't make it out... on May 2, sought American assistance to stave off a possible military coup.
The alleged memo, released last month by Ijaz, said that a new national security team in Pakistain with US support could end ties between Pak intelligence and bad boys.
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[An Nahar] The U.N. General Assembly on Monday passed an annual resolution condemning alleged human rights ...which are usually open to widely divergent definitions... abuses in Iran with a record number of votes in support.
The assembly also passed resolutions condemning human rights in North Korea and Myanmar. All received record high backing.
The Iran vote came only three days after the General Assembly condemned an alleged plot to assassinate the Soddy Arabian ambassador to Washington -- a plot which the United States accuses Iran of criminal masterminding.
The 193-member assembly passed the resolution condemning "torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" by Iranian authorities with 86 votes in favor, six more than last year, 32 against, down eight from 2010, and 59 abstentions.
The resolution, proposed by Canada, condemned "flogging and amputations" carried out in Iran and deplored a "dramatic increase" in the use of the death penalty, particularly against minors. Many human rights groups say events have deteriorated in Iran over the past year.
Iranian government representative, Mohammad Javad Larijani, an advisor to the country's supreme leader, called the resolution "substantially unfounded and intentionally malicious" in a speech to the General Assembly's human rights committee.
Syria, which faces a special human rights vote on Tuesday over its deadly crackdown on opposition protests, spoke out strongly for its Iranian ally.
The North Korea vote was passed with 112 votes in favor, 16 against and 55 abstentions. On Myanmar the vote was 98 in favor, 25 against with 63 abstentions.
The assembly raised "very serious concern" over the "torture" and "inhuman conditions of detention, public executions, extra judicial and arbitrary detention" in North Korea.
It also condemned the "existence of a large number of prison camps and the extensive use of forced labor."
The Myanmar resolution welcomed recent talks between democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and the military-dominated government, the release of some political prisoners and other changes over the past year.
But the General Assembly said there were still "systematic violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms."
It highlighted "arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, rape and other forms of sexual violence, torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment." It also raised concerns about the treatment of ethnic minorities such as the Karen people.
Western nations, which have sanctions against Myanmar, have sought to encourage the tentative reforms started by the government. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ... sometimes described as The Woman to Call at 3 a.m. and at other times as Mrs. Bill, never as Another Richelieu ... is to hold talks in Myanmar next month.
Myanmar's U.N. ambassador U Than Swe highlighted the government's efforts towards "building a flourishing, democratic society."
"We do deserve warm, welcome, kind understanding and sincere encouragements of the international community rather than unconstructive approach by adopting such resolutions," he told the assembly.
In a statement, Britannia's Foreign Secretary William Hague acknowledged the changes in Myanmar, but said "human rights abuses continue, especially in ethnic areas, and the level of support for this resolution shows once again that the international community has not forgotten the people" of Myanmar.
"The U.N. General Assembly passed these three resolutions by a record majority today, and I welcome the strong signal that sends," Hague said.
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#1
Setting the stage for arguing the "Obama Doctrine" for UNSC Mandate for milaction agz Iran???
* ION FREEREPUBLIC > IRAN MULLING CREATION OF 100.0MILYUHN-STRONG MUSLIM BASIJ ARMY.
Iff Iran, Regional military histoire' is any measure, all of Iran's neighbors should count on Iran's army, "People's War" forces, + aligned MilTerr Groups violating their sovereign borders both for retreat + attack as per anti-US war requirements.
#4
Oh wow, that really going to get their attention. I suspect the might ask the U.S. to drop in and pick up all their nuke materials next week and isue an immediate apology and disband the IRGC Al Kuds force and stop funding Hezbullah and ........ oh wait, I need another doobie.....
[An Nahar] Yemen's embattled President President-for-Life Ali Abdullah Saleh ... Saleh initially took power as a strongman of North Yemen in 1977, when disco was in flower, but he didn't invite Donna Summer to the inauguration and Blondie couldn't make it... has agreed to sign a plan to transfer power to his deputy and end the crisis that has gripped the country since January, a senior opposition figure said on Monday.
"The negotiations that have been under way for the past three days have led to an agreement by which the Gulf initiative and mechanisms for implementing it will be signed on Tuesday," Mohammed Bassandawa, who heads the National Council of revolutionary forces, told Agence La Belle France Presse.
The plan submitted by the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) calls on Saleh to hand power to his deputy, Abdrabuh Mansour Hadi, thus ending his 33-year rule in return for immunity from prosecution.
Saleh has so far refused to sign the agreement, despite violence which has seen hundreds of people killed and thousands maimed since an uprising against his regime erupted in January.
Bassandawa refused to give more details on the negotiations which he said finally persuaded Saleh to sign the GCC deal which the wealthy neighbors of impoverished Yemen first proposed in April.
There was no immediate confirmation from the Yemeni authorities, however.
A GCC official told AFP in Riyadh that the six-nation group's chief, Abdul Latif al-Zayani, could travel to Sanaa if Yemen's political rivals were ready to seal the deal.
"The secretary general will go to Sanaa in the next two days if the Yemeni parties are ready to sign the Gulf initiative," the official said.
Several opposition sources insisted the plan would be signed on Tuesday in Sanaa, and said Zayani would probably attend.
An opposition official, speaking on condition of anonymity ... for fear of being murdered... , said an agreement was reached "concerning the mechanisms for the implementation" of the GCC plan "and an agreement was reached."
In line with this accord, "President-for-Life Saleh ... exemplifying the Arab's propensity to combine brutality with incompetence... will sign on Tuesday in Sanaa the Gulf initiative," said the opposition official.
"Vice President Abdrabuh Mansour Hadi, leaders of the (ruling) General People's Congress and of the opposition will also sign the mechanism for implementing the agreement on Tuesday," the opposition leader said.
But he also sounded a note of caution, saying: "This in an agreement in principle."
Saleh, who has been in power since 1978, has repeatedly thwarted efforts by the GCC and the United Nations ...an organization which on balance has done more bad than good, with the good not done well and the bad done thoroughly... , to ensure the pact is signed.
On May 1 the GCC called off a signing ceremony because Saleh refused at the last minute to sign the document. A second ceremony on May 22 was also scrapped for the same reason.
The GCC plan proposes the formation in Sanaa of a government of national unity, Saleh transferring power to Hadi and an end to the deadly protests rocking the impoverished Arabian Peninsula nation since late January.
Saleh would submit his resignation to parliament within 30 days, to be followed two months later by a presidential election.
The latest developments come as a U.N. Security Council meeting on Yemen which was due to take place on Monday was postponed at the request of the political rivals in Sanaa.
"The Security Council meeting was postponed to November 28 at the request of the protagonists" of the Yemen crisis, Jamal Benomar, the U.N.'s envoy to Yemen, said on Sunday.
Benomar has been in Sanaa since last week for talks aimed at ending 10 months of political deadlock and bloodshed.
The 15-member Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 2014 on October 21 condemning the Sanaa regime's crackdown on the mass anti-regime protest movement that has swept the country.
It also called on Saleh to sign the initiative submitted by the GCC which groups Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Soddy Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The political turmoil in Yemen has seen powerful tribes and army dissidents join opposition parliamentarians and youth protesters in their struggle to oust Saleh.
The unrest has left Yemen's already impoverished economy on the brink of collapse.
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[Dawn] Prime Minister Julia Gillard on Monday said Australia would not abandon Afghanistan, despite suffering a spate of deadly attacks by rogue Afghan troops.
In an address to parliament on the decade-old conflict, Gillard said there was no evidence to suggest the attacks, in which four Australians have died this year, were part of a pattern.
In the worst of three incidents this year, an Afghan opened fire on a parade in October, killing three Australians and wounding seven others.
In May, an Australian lance corporal was rubbed out by an Afghan with whom he was sharing guard duties at a patrol base in the Chora Valley, and earlier this month an Afghan soldier opened fire on Australians, seriously wounding three.
The attacks have prompted renewed debate about Australia's involvement in the war, to which it was first committed in late 2001 by then-prime minister John Howard. It withdrew and then redeployed in 2005.
Delivering her annual statement on Afghanistan, Gillard insisted progress was being made and that the 1,550 troops based mostly in the southern province of Uruzgan were on track to hand over the lead role on security by 2014.
"Australia will not abandon Afghanistan," she said.
Australian troops are training the Afghan National Army's 4th Brigade and Gillard said the timing on completely handing over to Afghan forces in Uruzgan "may well be complete before the end of 2014" given progress being made there.
While this would lead to a drawing down of Australian forces in the country, she repeated her stance that Canberra would be engaged in Afghanistan through this decade at least.
Gillard said she had discussed a long-term partnership with Afghanistan's Caped PresidentHamid Maybe I'll join the Taliban Karzai ... A former Baltimore restaurateur, now 12th and current President of Afghanistan, displacing the legitimate president Rabbani in December 2004. He was installed as the dominant political figure after the removal of the Taliban regime in late 2001 in a vain attempt to put a Pashtun face on the successor state to the Taliban. After the 2004 presidential election, he was declared president regardless of what the actual vote count was. He won a second, even more dubious, five-year-term after the 2009 presidential election. His grip on reality has been slipping steadily since around 2007, probably from heavy drug use... during their meeting in Kabul last month, adding the government would consider keeping Special Forces troops there beyond 2014.
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[An Nahar] Egypt's ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces on Monday rejected the resignation of Prime Minister Essam Sharaf's cabinet, state television ... and if you can't believe state television who can you believe?
reported, quoting a military source. What're they gonna do? Shoot 'em?
Cabinet front man Mohammed Hegazy said earlier that the cabinet had resigned, as deadly festivities raged for a third day in Cairo's Tahrir Square.
The festivities have left 24 people dead and plunged Egypt into its worst crisis since the fall of Hosni Mubarak ...The former President-for-Life of Egypt, dumped by popular demand in early 2011... in February.
"The government of Prime Minister Essam Sharaf has handed its resignation to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces," Hegazy said in a statement carried by the official MENA news agency.
"Owing to the difficult circumstances the country is going through, the government will continue working" until the resignation is accepted, he said.
The government expressed "deep regret over the painful events, and based on this it handed its resignation (on Sunday) to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces."
The current political turbulence threatens to derail parliamentary elections scheduled for November 28 -- the first polls since the ouster of Mubarak in February.
Sharaf was appointed in March to massive nationwide support, but the same protesters who carried him on their shoulders in Tahrir Square to celebrate his nomination gradually turned into his fiercest critics, slamming his weakness in the face of the SCAF.
He ignored numerous calls for his resignation in recent months, saying while his resignation would turn him into "a national hero", he would stick to the job in order to fulfill the goals of the revolution.
But 10 months after Mubarak's ouster, protesters have vehemently denounced Sharaf's government and the ruling military council which they accuse of trying to maintain a grip on power.
In Tahrir Square, protesters welcomed the news of the resignation.
"Good. Now SCAF must resign, and we need to hold them accountable," said teacher Tarek Sabri, 35.
Political forces have repeatedly criticized the SCAF for not giving the cabinet its full prerogatives.
"We need a government with full powers," said Mohammed al-Hita, a leading activist with the National Association for Change set up by former U.N. nuclear watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei. Egyptian law scholar and Iranian catspaw. He was head of the IAEA from December 1997 to November 2009. At some point during his tenure he was purchased by the Iranians. ElBaradei and the IAEA were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for something in 2005. After stepping down from his IAEA position ElBaradei attempted to horn in on the 2011 Egyptian protests which culminated in the collapse of the Mubarak regime. ElBaradei served on the Board of Trustees of the International Crisis Group, a lefty NGO that is bankrolled by the Carnegie Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as George Soros' Open Society Institute. Soros himself serves as a member of the organization's Executive Committee. "Any government under the same restrictions by SCAF will be worthless," said the 24-year-old.
Activists and parties behind the uprising that toppled Mubarak have called for a mass rally on Tuesday to demand that the army cede power to civilian rule.
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[An Nahar] At least 12 Syrians were rubbed out Monday in raids by security forces in the central provinces of Homs and Hama, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The state news agency SANA said four "terrorists" were killed, including a suspect high on a wanted list, while also reporting that two judges were kidnapped in Hama.
"Two people were killed and seven others were maimed in Homs while two others died and eight were maimed in (nearby) Qusayr by gunfire during raids on Monday morning by the army and security forces," said the Observatory earlier on Monday.
And the Local Coordination Committees said as many as seven people, including a Saudi national, were killed, including six in Homs, and that a 65-year-old man died from "random shooting by security forces" in Karnaz.
At least 24 more people were reported to have been killed at the weekend, adding to the U.N. figure of the more than 3,500 deaths in the crackdown since mid-March.
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[Daily Nation (Kenya)] South Sudan rebel chief George Athor vowed Sunday to continue battling the government in Juba and demanded new elections to end his bloody war.
"People must die so we can have peace and can have democracy," Athor told news hounds in the Kenyan capital, his first public appearance since launching his bloody rebellion in April 2010 after alleging fraud in elections.
Athor, a former general who began his rebellion after losing the gubernatorial race in Jonglei state, said he met with South Sudanese President Salva Kiir last week in Nairobi, but his demands had been rejected.
"There is a grave need for peace in South Sudan but unfortunately the other side were not cooperating," the militia leader said, who called for both fresh nation-wide elections and "two or three ministerial posts."
"President Kiir was positive but that was not the same for the rest of the delegation," he added.
South Sudan accuses Athor of acting on behalf of former civil war enemies in Khartoum in a bid to destabilise the country, which won independence in July.
Athor, who denied he was supported by Khartoum, Sure he's not...
demanded a third party to guarantee the implementation of any agreement, as well as "reparations for the losses people have suffered."
He did not give details of the financial package he demanded, but also said that schools and hospitals should be built in the areas badly hit by the conflict.
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It wasn't until after the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks that much of the world recognized the threat of Lashkar-i-Taiba. But in France, a renowned judge had been warning about the Pakistan-based militant group's international ambitions for years..."Today Pakistan is the heart of the terrorist threat," Bruguière, now a French envoy working with the European Union on counter-terror issues, told Rotella. "And it may be too late to do anything about it."
The presentation will also give attention to David Headley's rise from heroin dealer and U.S. government informant to highly trained terrorist/spy and master plotter of the 2008 attack on Mumbai.
#2
On 9-11 Pakistan was down to its last foreign currency reserves, under US sanctions. Sindhis, Balochis, Waziris, and Pashtos were all revolting against the Punjabi majority. After 9-11, all of America's most sophisticated technology was shipped to Pakistan. Wonder how that happened?
Posted by: Bill Schwarzeneggar4060 ||
11/22/2011 13:15
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#3
all of America's most sophisticated technology was shipped to Pakistan
Congratulations - You've won the Rantburg Hyperventilating Hyperbole Award for the month of November.
[Bangla Daily Star] Delawar Hossain Sayedee along with other collaborators kept a Hindu girl confined to her father's house at Parerhat in Pirojpur and raped her day after day during the Liberation War, the International Crimes Tribunal was told yesterday.
The victim, Bhanu Shaha, daughter of Bipod Shaha, left the country after liberation out of fear of public humiliation. She still lives in India, said Syed Rezaur Rahman, a senior prosecutor, while placing the opening statement against Sayedee.
In the tribunal's first trial since its formation on March 25 last year, the prosecution on Sunday got through 61 pages of the statement in court.
Yesterday, Rezaur read out the remaining 27 pages before the three-member panel of judges headed by Nizamul Huq.
On October 3, Jamaat-e-Islami Nayeb-e-Ameer Sayedee, one of the seven Jamaat-BNP leaders jugged over war crimes links, was charged with 20 counts of crimes. The charges include genocide, murder, rape, arson, abduction and torture of civilians.
The tribunal will start taking depositions of witnesses on December 7.
Rezaur described the crimes against humanity allegedly committed by Sayedee in 1971 and also the background of the case.
He told the tribunal that Sayedee had led a 50-member team of the Razakar Bahini, an anti-liberation force, in attacking Hindu Para of Hoglabunia under Pirojpur.
Spider senses tingling at the proximity of the myrmidons, members of the Hindu community had managed to flee.
The razakars, however, got hold of Shefali Gharami, wife of Madhusudan Gharami, and raped her.
Shefali gave birth to a baby girl after the war but, like Bhanu Shaha, she had to leave for India.
On May 5, 1971, Saif Mizanur Rahman, deputy magistrate of then Pirojpur Sub-Division; Foyezur Rahman Ahmed, sub-divisional police officer and father of famed writer Humayun Ahmed and noted educationalist-writer Muhammad Zafar Iqbal, and Abdur Razzak, SDO in charge of Pirojpur, were taken to the Baleshwar river bank and shot to death.
Sayedee as a member of the killing squad was present there.
Under his pressure, some 100-150 Hindus of Parerhat and other villages converted to Islam and had to go to a mosque, said the prosecutor.
He oversaw the creation of a fund with cash and other property looted by the razakars from the locals, mainly Hindu families. He also issued a Fatwa (religious edict) legalising war booty, said the prosecutor.
He also succeeded in allying himself with the Pakistain army, as he had a good command of Arabic and Urdu.
Sayedee went into hiding after the war but returned to his home district of Pirojpur in 1986. In the guise of an Islamic scholar, he began addressing waz mahfils or religious gatherings to hide his past, Rezaur said.
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[Dawn] Afghanistan is sending an official delegation to Pakistain "soon" to investigate the killing of Kabul's peace envoy, a presidential front man said Monday.
Pakistain has agreed to accept the delegation, front man Aimal Faizi told news hounds, adding that it could leave as early as Tuesday.
Rabbani was assassinated by a turban bomber at his Kabul home in September in a move which stalled efforts to talk peace with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Afghan officials say the killing was planned in Pakistain and carried out by a Pak jacket wallah. They have also previously accused Pakistain of refusing to cooperate in the probe.
But at a conference in Istanbul earlier this month, the two sides agreed to cooperate on an investigation into the killing.
"The government of Afghanistan, in order to further investigate the liquidation of professor Burhanuddin Rabbani ... the gentlemanly murdered legitimate president of Afghanistan... ... will soon send a delegation to Pakistain. Pakistain has accepted to receive the delegation," Faizi said.
"After the pressures that Afghanistan and Turkey put on Pakistain at the Istanbul conference, Pakistain finally agreed to accept our delegation."
The delegation will feature officials from Afghanistan's defence and interior ministries, plus its intelligence service.
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[Dawn] Fourteen Pak soldiers were killed on Monday in an ambush blamed on separatist rebels in the country's southwestern Balochistan ...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it... province, the Frontier Corps paramilitary force said.
It was one of the deadliest attacks on Pak troops and marked the highest number of military dead in a single incident since March when friendly fire killed 13 soldiers on the northwestern border with Afghanistan.
Up to four dozen rebels struck before dawn in the Musa Khel district, 400 kilometres (250 miles) southeast of the scenic provincial capital Quetta in one of the most troubled and deprived parts of Pakistain, bordering Afghanistan and Iran.
The military said the troops were guarding a private coal mine and blamed the attack on Baloch rebels, who rose up in 2004 to demand political autonomy and a greater share of profits from the province's wealth of natural resources.
"Fourteen paramilitary personnel, including a major, were killed and several others were maimed. Baloch cut-throats were involved," the front man told AFP.
Security officials said the rebels were armed with automatic weapons and that most of the soldiers died from gunshot wounds in the remote area.
The wilds of Balochistan, virtually a no-go area for journalists, is deeply troubled not only by local insurgency, but militancy and a rising number of sectarian attacks on minority Shia Moslems.
The province straddles a key NATO ...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Originally it was a mutual defense pact directed against an expansionist Soviet Union. In later years it evolved into a mechanism for picking the American pocket while criticizing the cut of the American pants... supply route into neighbouring Afghanistan and on Sunday gunnies torched three trucks carrying supplies to US-led troops.
The federal government, elected in February 2008, has struggled to implement reforms and inject more money in order to appease Baloch nationalists.
Security officials said Musa Khel, which is dominated by ethnic Pashtuns and borders the Baloch-dominated district of Kohlu, had seen several private coal mines closed due to local tribal disputes.
Troops intervened to resolve those disputes. The coal mines were inaugurated by army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani ... four star general, current Chief of Army Staff of the Mighty Pak Army. Kayani is the former Director General of ISI... in August and work began with the military providing protection, the officials said.
But Baloch separatist rebels oppose the military presence and there have been a string of attacks on troops in the area.
The scene of Monday's attack was not far from Sui town, where two other soldiers were killed in a bombing on Saturday.
Last month, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani ... Pakistain's erstwhile current prime minister, whose occasional feats of mental gymnastics can be awe-inspiring ... said the government planned to create 20,000 jobs in Balochistan, admitting that past neglect of the region had fuelled its troubles.
He announced a six percent employment quota in some federal government departments and the introduction of 3,000 jobs in tribal police for Balochistan residents.
But previous attempts at regional reform have failed to raise the sparsely populated area from poverty and conflict.
In November 2009, the government announced a package of reforms, including an increase in the provincial budget as well as constitutional, administrative, political and economic reforms in a bid to grant Balochistan more independence.
But there is dispute over how much of the deal ever came to fruition.
Hundreds of people have died since Baloch bully boyz rose up in 2004 demanding autonomy and a greater share of the profits from natural resources in the mineral-rich province.
Disappearances and the discovery of bullet-riddled and tortured bodies in the province that the families of victims blame on security and intelligence forces have led human rights ...which often include carefully measured allowances of freedom at the convenience of the state... activists to call for investigations into the killings.
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#1
Happy Birthday/Daily Gam Shot
Scarlett Johansson aka Grace MacLean in "The Horse Whisperer" aka Rebecca in "Ghost World" aka Charlotte in "Lost in Translation" aka Griet in "Girl with a Pearl Earring" aka Pursy Will in "A Love Song for Bobby Long" aka Nola Rice in "Match Point" aka Natalie Rushman/Natasha Romanoff in "Iron Man 2" aka Olivia Wenscombe in "The Prestige" aka Cristina in "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" aka Jordan Two Delta / Sarah Jordan in "The Island" aka Kelly Foster in "We Bought a Zoo (New Release)" aka Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow in "The Avengers (2012)" (age 27)
#2
My wife's B-Day as well....SJ is hot but she's such a lefty loon that it takes her down a few notches. Call me strange but I find women less attractive based on their ideology... Now...Angie Harmon...all righty then!
[An Nahar] Saudi security forces opened fire on protesters in the Eastern Province Shiite region of al-Qatif on Monday, wounding several people, witnesses said.
The demonstrators had taken to the streets in the town of Shwika to protest against the death overnight Sunday of a 19-year-old Shiite man, Nasser al-Mheishi, accusing police of killing him, the witnesses said.
Mheishi had been maimed near a police checkpoint in unclear circumstances.
"The police told us that gunnies had opened fire on the police checkpoint ... and that my son was caught in the crossfire between the police and the gunnies, and was struck by four bullets," the man's father, Ali al-Mheishi told Agence La Belle France Presse.
But a witness later said that one of the coppers at the checkpoint shot Mheishi dead, his father said.
A police front man in the Eastern Province declined to comment.
According to Orcs and similar vermin the death is the second in the past few days after another young man was shot by security forces in the Shiite town of Awamiya.
In October 14 people, including 11 coppers, were maimed during festivities in Awamiya between security forces and demonstrators.
At the time the interior ministry in the Sunni-ruled kingdom blamed "outlaws" for the violence.
The group carried out acts causing "insecurity with incitement from a foreign country that aims to undermine the nation's security and stability," a ministry front man said in an indirect reference to Shiite Iran.
The overwhelming majority of the estimated two million Saudi Shiites live in Eastern Province, which neighbors Bahrain where authorities, supported by Saudi-led Gulf troops, earlier this year crushed a Shiite-led protest.
Shiites in oil-rich Soddy Arabia often complain of being marginalized.
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[Dawn] An international team of scientists in Italy studying the same neutrino particles colleagues say appear to have travelled faster than light rejected the startling finding this weekend, saying their tests had shown it must be wrong.
The September announcement of the finding, backed up last week after new studies, caused a furore in the scientific world as it seemed to suggest Albert Einstein's ideas on relativity, and much of modern physics, were based on a mistaken premise.
The first team, members of the OPERA experiment at the Gran Sasso laboratory south of Rome, said they recorded neutrinos beamed to them from the CERN research centre in Switzerland as arriving 60 nanoseconds before light would have done.
But ICARUS, another experiment at Gran Sasso -- which is deep under mountains and run by Italy's National Institute of National Physics -- now argues that their measurements of the neutrinos energy on arrival contradict that reading.
In a paper posted on Saturday on the same website as the OPERA results, the ICARUS team says their findings "refute a superluminal (faster than light) interpretation of the OPERA result."
They argue, on the basis of recently published studies by two top US physicists, that the neutrinos pumped down from CERN, near Geneva, should have lost most of their energy if they had travelled at even a tiny fraction faster than light.
But in fact, the ICARUS scientists say, the neutrino beam as tested in their equipment registered an energy spectrum fully corresponding with what it should be for particles travelling at the speed of light and no more.
Physicist Tomasso Dorigo, who works at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, and the U.S. Fermilab near Chicago, said in a post on the website Scientific Blogging that the ICARUS paper was "very simple and definitive." The science, as they say, is settled...
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#6
I have no idea who is right, but I will say that I applaud the folks doing the experiments. Do the (appropriate) experiments and let the results speak. I'm tired of politically inspired (i.e., leftist) theories ruling the day.
#9
There is one alternative that hasn't been discussed much, because it could really impact physics in a harsher way than going faster than light.
This is that there is something, anything really, that in normal space slightly inhibits light from traveling at its maximum speed. And that somehow, this experiment creates a circumstance where that inhibitory factor does not come into play, at least for these particles.
In effect, this would mean that the *real* speed of light is slightly faster than it is in normal space. But is there any place in normal space where the *real* speed of light matters?
#10
There are lots of possibilities here. The most interesting I've seen is that what we think the speed of light is from our measurements of charged particles and photons, is actually slowed down from the true speed of light by just a bit in vacuum, because of interactions with virtual particles. Neutrinos being unaffected by most forces are thus slowed down in the vacuum, but slowed less than the usual suspects.
While this is most interesting, it is still probably wrong, because of long distance measurements of neutrinos from stuff in space that seem to be synchronized in time with light, but shouldn't be if there were a really different speed limit, so were this theory correct it would still require that the neutrinos eventually slowed down to the same speed as light in a vacuum through some interactions over a million years or so, even if it started out faster.
Anyway it turns out, there's lots of fun to be had here.
#12
Oh, and as far as the accuracy of the speed of light is concerned, the most accurate speed to date, using lasers, was only devised in 1973 at 299,792.4574 km/s.
Then again, in 1978, again using lasers, at 299,792.4588 km/s.
The trouble is that there are many different techniques to figure out the exact speed of light, but they have to be based on other constants than the speed of light. Pretty soon you are burdened with constants that may themselves be questionable.
It sounded like a good idea at the time.
But once corrupt politicians decided policy would be based on the best science; It was science that was corrupted. Hopefully, not permanently.
(And it's not like I trust non-leftist politicians, it's just that they are the least worst.)
Posted by: Zebulon Spawn of the Wee Folk9512 ||
11/22/2011 9:48
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#14
The science is settled the science is settled! Why are they still talking about it when there are faster than light credits to buy!
#18
The really fun stuff begins with tachyon theory.
One theory to ponder is that particles are essentially "stuffed to the gills" with energy as they approach the speed of light, and crossing that barrier does not change this condition; but once they have become tachyons, the way for them to accelerate even further is to "give up" energy.
So the very fastest of tachyons would be as energy-less as the most stationary of objects in our space.
Which leads to the speculation, what if this completes a circle, so that only Brownian motion keeps a particle in this space. If it stops moving at all it is the same as an ultra high speed tachyon.
#21
Pretty soon you are burdened with constants that may themselves be questionable. I think questionable constants have been used ever since Isaac Newton. Scientists have to assume that some things never change, have to make assumptions so that their calculations will work out. And mostly those calculations do.
Nevertheless, besides constants taken on faith, there are other anomalies tangled up in modern physics. One is How can we make inferences about past events that we haven't observed while at the same time acknowledge that the act of observing it affects the reality we are inferring to?
Another is: According to quantum mechanics, the vacuum state is not truly empty but instead contains fleeting electromagnetic waves and particles that pop into and out of existence.
Then there is the Casimir effect in quantum electrodynamics, where 2 uncharged metal plates in a perfect vacuum, arranged just so but untouching, are under about 1 atmosphere of pressure pushing or pulling them apart - in a perfect vacuum.
Etc. Maybe physics will have to re-define 'faster.'
#25
Actually, the ICARUS group's conclusion, based on Glashow's paper, doesn't really disprove Opera's result. Glashow pointed out that superluminal neutrinos should emit the equivalent of Cerencov radiation and slow down quickly--if the existing theory is correct. But if neutrinos can go faster than light when traveling through rock, we know the theory has some holes somewhere anyhow. (As rammer notes, the supernova SN1987A neutrinos were pretty close to lightspeed traveling through vacuum.)
Not that I believe Opera's results yet.
Posted by: James ||
11/22/2011 23:18
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The Labor Department today announced that it had approved Trade Adjustment Assistance for the former employees of the bankrupt solar panel maker Solyndra.
That means all of the firm's 1,100 ex-employees are eligible for federal aid packages, including job retraining and income assistance. The department has valued packages at about $13,000 a head. Quite a gig they have going there.
Taxpayers will have to cough up yet another $14.3 million as a result of Solyndra's bankruptcy. They are already on the hook for $528 million in federal loan guarantees to the company that are unlikely to ever be paid back. Pocket Government money, screw your employees, and dump it on the Taxpayers.
The department's decision also bodes well for a trade complaint made against China by a coalition of domestic solar panel makers. The request for the TAA was based on the claim that Solyndra failed because China was underselling U.S. manufacturers. Horse-hockey! Solyndra failed because they had bad management. And they mis-read the market.
By granting the assistance, the Labor Department has indicated it believes those charges have at least some merit. Management should have seen that the Chinese could cut prices, since prices had been driven high.
The announcement was made quietly today by the DOL's Employment and Training Administration on its website. The decision was reached Friday. Another attempt at keeping the scandal quiet.
There was some confusion regarding the decision, which was posted on the DOL website accidentally this morning before the official announcement. A department spokesman told Capital Hill that a programming error was the cause. DOL briefly pulled the information, but has reposted it.
The TAA request was first made on Sept. 2, just days after Solyndra went bankrupt. The Alameda County Workforce Investment Board, a public-private group that aids in job retraining programs, made the request on behalf of the employees.
"We are very pleased," said Patti Castro, interim director of the board. "These workers are highly skilled but they need the retraining available through this." And it'll keep them from voting Republican...
Most TAA requests take 60 days to process according to DOL, but this one took about 80. The department said the delay was caused by a Senate fight over reauthorizing the program.
"During that period all pending TAA announcements were put on hold," said DOL spokesman Joshua Lamont. Fight harder next time, Pubs...
That fight was triggered in part by Republican lawmakers' outrage that Solyndra employees were up for TAA help.
As it happens, the decision to grant the aid was made the day after Energy Secretary Steven Chu had a long-expected and highly contentious hearing before a House panel over the Solyndra failure.
Lamont said the administration did not delay the decision until after Chu's testimony. "Perish the thought!"
The Obama administration has apparently pushed to delay bad news regarding Solyndra before.
The TAA program offers help to domestic workers who have lost their jobs due to the trade practices of foreign countries. The assistance includes job retraining, allowances for job searching, health benefits and up to 130 weeks of income support. The average recipient gets about $13,000 in assistance.
Solyndra was given a $535 million federal loan guarantee in 2009 by the Obama administration as part of a program to boost green jobs. The company was a favorite of the administration, with President Obama himself visiting its Fremont, Calif., location and singing its praises in 2010.
A top Obama fundraiser, George Kaiser, was a major backer of the company through his namesake foundation and discussed the company with White House officials in at least one private meeting in 2010.
Behind the scenes, the company was bleeding cash and seeking a second DOE loan to stay afloat. By late 2010 it had defaulted on the original loan and DOE agreed to a restructuring to allow the company to survive.
The renegotiation included giving private investors first crack at the first $75 million recovered in the event of liquidation. The decision was in apparent violation of DOE loan rules. It all but ensures that taxpayers will recover none of the original loan.
This article starring:
George Kaiser
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#1
Solyndra + similar is going to un/dis-motivate Americans = Amerikans on [Jetson-ian]SPACE TECH + GREEN TECH for decades to come.
[Al Ahram] A bus carrying Turkish pilgrims came under attack in neighbouring Syria as they were travelling back from the Islamic Hajj pilgrimage in Soddy Arabia, leaving two injured, according to media reports on Monday.
The private CNN-Turk television station, citing unconfirmed claims, said the attack had been carried out by Syrian soldiers when the bus took a wrong turn near the flashpoint city of Homs.
"We confirm that an attack took place in Syria," a foreign ministry official told AFP, without giving any further information.
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[Al Ahram] Russia on Monday accused the West of provocative behaviour during the Syrian crisis, saying Western countries were telling the opposition to forget dialogue with Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneck al-Assad. Lord of the Baath... Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov complained that while the Arab League ...an organization of Arabic-speaking states with 22 member countries and four observers. The League tries to achieve Arab consensus on issues, which usually leaves them doing nothing but a bit of grimacing and mustache cursing... had called for a halt to violence in Syria, Western capitals had been telling the opposition to refrain from dialogue with Assad, the RIA Novosti and Interfax news agencies reported.
Russia, one of few powers still offering support to Assad, has repeatedly called on the West for a more balanced approach in the crisis saying violence by both the authorities and the opposition should be condemned.
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#1
I'm not aware that Assad wants a dialog with anyone.
[Al Ahram] Egypt's ruling military on Monday called for crisis talks with the country's political forces, as deadly clashes raged for a third day between police and protesters demanding democratic change
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[An Nahar] Bahrain admitted on Monday "excessive force" was used on pro-democracy protesters earlier this year as tension escalates two days ahead of the unveiling of a probe into the deadly crackdown.
Bahrain's Independent Commission of Inquiry, commissioned by King Hamad ...King of Bahrain (since 14 February 2002), having previously been its emir (from 6 March 1999). He is a Sunni, while the rest of Bahrain is predominantly Shiite... , will on Wednesday unveil the results of its investigation into alleged government misconduct during the February-March crackdown on Shiite-led protests.
As the Gulf kingdom braced for the findings of the probe, tension has escalated in Shiite areas of the Sunni-ruled nation and the opposition has vowed not to back down from demands for democratic reform.
"Regrettably, there have been instances of excessive force and mistreatment of detainees" during the deadly crackdown against protests, the Bahraini government statement said.
Authorities say 24 people, including four coppers, were killed in the unrest, while the Shiite-led opposition puts the corpse count at 30. Hundreds more were maimed.
The statement said authorities have begun prosecuting 20 officers involved in the crackdown, adding that more steps will be taken.
"We cannot condone mistreatment and abuses by our officials. There will be no impunity. All those responsible for abuses will be held accountable," it added.
Amnesia Amnesty International urged the authorities to act on the probe's findings.
"The publication of this report gives Bahrain's authorities a key opportunity to demonstrate that they intend to deliver justice to victims of abuse and carry through on promises of reform," it said.
Apart from trying those responsible for rights violations, "the authorities must provide reparations to the victims, reinstate those who were dismissed from work and reform legislation that criminalizes public gatherings."
Anti-government protests in mainly Shiite areas outside Manama have intensified this month, resulting in festivities with security forces that have left a 16-year-old boy dead and dozens of people injured.
On Sunday, King Hamad warned Bahrainis to steer clear of "anything that adversely affects" their unity.
The mass demonstrations which rocked Bahrain earlier this year were violently crushed as government forces used live ammunition and heavy-handed tactics in festivities with protesters.
The final blow to the protests, inspired by the Arab Spring, came in mid-March when the security forces, boosted by troops from Gulf nations, drove demonstrators out of Manama's Pearl Square -- the focal point of protests.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/22/2011
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#1
"they're Shiites. They like it."
Posted by: Frank G ||
11/22/2011 8:06
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[An Nahar] Syrian leader Bashir al-Assad has reached a "dead end" but only internal forces can bring about change, Turkish President Abdullah Gul said Monday, in an interview with the Guardian.
Speaking on the eve of a three-day state visit to Britannia, Gul warned that Assad's back-tracking on reforms agreed by the Arab League ...an organization of Arabic-speaking states with 22 member countries and four observers. The League tries to achieve Arab consensus on issues, which usually leaves them doing nothing but a bit of grimacing and mustache cursing... had made international negotiation impossible.
"It's quite too late for that sort of thing now," he told the British newspaper. "He seems to have opted for a different route. And frankly we do not have any more trust in him.
"Syria is now at a dead end, so change is inevitable," Gul said. "But we don't believe the right way to create change is through external intervention. The people must make that change."
Gul urged former ally Assad to relinquish power without a struggle, adding that "everything must be done" to prevent a civil war.
However, corruption finds a dozen alibis for its evil deeds... Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan earlier Monday said foreign intervention could not be ruled out completely over Assad's refusal to end the bloody crackdown on protesters.
"You can remain in power with tanks and cannons only up to a certain point. The day will come when you'll also leave," Erdogan told a meeting in Istanbul.
"Someone shows up and says 'I'll fight and die.' Against whom will you fight? Will you fight against your Mohammedan brothers you rule in your country?" Erdogan asked.
The prime minister was referring to an interview with Assad published in London's Sunday Times in which the Syrian leader vowed to fight and die if faced with foreign intervention.
Turkey has become increasingly vocal in its criticism of Assad after its diplomatic missions came under attack by pro-government demonstrators in several Syrian cities earlier this month.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/22/2011
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#2
Erdogan went farther later in the day (per haaretz) and unambiguously called for Assad to resign.
"...Without spilling any more blood, without causing any more injustice, for the sake of peace for the people, the country and the region, [Assad, you should] finally step down," Erdogan told a meeting of his ruling AK Party.
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
11/22/2011 13:51
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#3
As long as Assad's still alive, you can't say he's reached a 'dead end.'
[An Nahar] Hizbullah and the AMAL movement on Monday said they would continue to stand by Syria and Iran against "international conspiracies" and "threats", as global pressure mounts on the two countries.
"The current events in Syria are clearly an international conspiracy against Syria's support for Arab and Islamic resistance movements in the region," they said in a joint statement.
"Leb will never be a conduit for a conspiracy against a sister state."
The statement comes amid renewed international pressure on Syrian Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneck al-Assad Light of the Alawites... over his brutal crackdown on an eight-month popular revolt.
Hizbullah and AMAL also reiterated their support for Iran, as pressure mounts on the Islamic state over its nuclear program.
"We firmly support the Islamic Theocratic Republic of Iran against all American and Israeli threats," the statement said.
Hizbullah earlier this month accused Washington of ramping up pressure on Iran and Syria as a way to deflect attention from its "searing defeat" in Iraq.
The United States for its part has urged Lebanese authorities to protect their financial sector against potential Syrian attempts to sidestep sanctions, sparking fears that Beirut could be in the lineup of possible future measures against the Assad regime.
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11/22/2011
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[An Nahar] Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Wally Jumblat ... Druze politician, head of the Progressive Socialist Party, who's been on every side in Leb at least four times. He'll sell you his friends for a dollar, but family comes higher because of shipping and handling... voiced on Monday his support of the funding of the Special Tribunal for Leb, adding that the party understands Hizbullah's insecurities over the matter.
He said in his weekly editorial in the PSP-affiliated al-Anbaa magazine: "Keeping in mind its reservations, Hizbullah should cooperate positively with the issue of the funding in order to ease the tensions on the internal Lebanese scene."
The MP noted that Leb can achieve interests through the funding, which it would not be able to achieve if it refrained from this duty.
Addressing the national dialogue, Jumblat stated that the talks should resume in order to continue discussions on the defense strategy, stressing the importance of the resistance's arms in defending Leb against Israel.
He added that the national dialogue may eventually reach an agreement on incorporating Hizbullah's arms within the concerned state institutions.
Turning to the developments in Syria, the PSP leader warned against embroiling Leb in the Syrian crisis "due to some sides' attachment to the regime and others' eagerness to witness its downfall."
The best way to avert this fate lies in fortifying the internal Lebanese scene and ending the political divide between the rival March 8 and 14 camps, the MP noted.
"Ending the anti-regime protests through the use of force has proven its failure," Jumblat said.
"The sensitivity of the regional developments requires the highest level of governmental unity in order to prevent Leb from falling into vacuum," he continued.
"It would have been better if Leb had not opposed the Arab foreign ministers decision on Syria and instead taken a more balanced stand," he stated.
A few weeks ago, the Arab foreign ministers suspended Syria's membership from the Arab League ...an organization of Arabic-speaking states with 22 member countries and four observers. The League tries to achieve Arab consensus on issues, which usually leaves them doing nothing but a bit of grimacing and mustache cursing... over its failure to adhere to a League initiative aimed at ending the crisis.
Leb, Syria, and Yemen voted against the decision, while Iraq abstained.
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11/22/2011
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#1
It's a good thing Wally has that heavily fortified mountain-redoubt...
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.
The U.S. handed over all of the remaining detainees in U.S. custody in Iraq Tuesday, except for a Lebanese Hezbollah commander linked to the death of four American troops, Iraqi and American officials said.
[Dawn] Pakistain's Taliban movement, a major security threat to the country, is holding exploratory peace talks with the US-backed government, a senior 
Wazoo
Tanzania's Prime Minister Mizengo Pinda said Monday eight suspects have been sentenced to death by hanging for the murder of albinos since a wave of witchcraft killings erupted in 2007.
Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir 
presence of ISI Chief General Shuja Pasha.
[Al Ahram] The 
The suspected 
[An Nahar] Finance minister George Osborne said Monday 
MONS, Belgium: A Pak family of four went on trial on Monday for the "honour killing" of their 20-year-old child and sister, who defied them by living with a Belgian and refusing an arranged marriage.
A statue to former US president Ronald Reagan, who is highly respected in Poland for having helped hasten the fall of the Iron Curtain, was unveiled by Nobel Peace Prize winner & former Polish president Lech Walesa in Warsaw yesterday. "What happened seemed impossible or unthinkable. The older generations still remember," Walesa said.
In Inspire, radical Yemeni-American preacher Anwar al-Awlaki explains that AQAP settled on attacking cargo planes because the jihadis foes would be faced with a dilemma once AQAP placed bombs on these planes. You either spend billions of dollars to inspect each and every package in the world, he wrote, or you do nothing and we keep trying again. Awlaki further explained, The air freight is a multi-billion dollar industry. FedEx alone flies a fleet of 600 aircraft and ships an average of four million packages per day. It is a huge worldwide industry. For the trade between North America and Europe, air cargo is indispensable and to be able to force the West to install stringent security measures sufficient enough to stop our explosive devices would add a heavy economic burden to an already faltering economy.
[Dawn] Despite a thumping election win, Spain's right is powerless in the face of a sovereign debt crisis battering the entire eurozone, analysts warned on Monday.
The assembly also passed resolutions condemning human rights in 
Hillary Clinton
... Saleh initially took power as a strongman of North Yemen in 1977, when disco was in flower, but he didn't invite Donna Summer to the inauguration and Blondie couldn't make it...
[An Nahar] Egypt's ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces on Monday rejected the resignation of Prime Minister Essam Sharaf's cabinet, state television
[Bangla Daily Star] Delawar Hossain Sayedee along with other collaborators kept a Hindu girl confined to her father's house at Parerhat in Pirojpur and raped her day after day during the Liberation War, the International Crimes Tribunal was told yesterday.
Afghanistan is sending an official delegation to Pakistain "soon" to investigate the killing of Kabul's peace envoy, a presidential 
The Labor Department today announced that it had approved Trade Adjustment Assistance for the former employees of the bankrupt solar panel maker Solyndra.
Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir 
Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir 
Walid 
