HOUSTON - A sprawling and strengthening Hurricane Ike steamed through the Gulf of Mexico on Friday on a track toward the nation's fourth-largest city, where authorities told residents to brace rather than flee. Closer to the coast, small towns were mostly empty after forecasters issued dire warnings the storm could kill.
Ike's 105-mph winds and potential 50-foot waves stopped the Coast Guard from attempting a risky helicopter rescue of 22 people aboard a 584-foot freighter that broke down in the path of the storm about 90 miles southeast of Galveston, Chief Petty Officer Mike O'Berry said. The ship was hauling petroleum coke used to fuel furnaces at steel plants.
Ike's eye was forecast to strike somewhere near Galveston late Friday or early Saturday, but the massive system was already buffeting Texas and Louisiana, causing flooding along the Louisiana coast still recovering from Labor Day's Hurricane Gustav. The National Weather Service warned residents of smaller structures on Galveston they could "face certain death" if they ignored an order to evacuate; most had complied, along with hundreds of thousands of fellow Texans in counties up and down the coastline.
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#1
My boyfriend Niles still lives in Houston. He's safe from flooding but we're worried about the wind. There's no knowing how well his apartment building is constructed. He sent me email at 4:30pm CDT and said the wind had picked up, and the power is already flickering. He figures he's going to lose it, which will be very unpleasant.
To comfort him, I sent him this clip (scroll down to bottom) of Geraldo Rivera being knocked on his ass by a wave.
China's current pace of wind development will bring 10,000 MW by the end of this year, two years ahead of schedule. What's more, they foresee a total of 100,000 MW by 2020, an increase in wind energy of 1667%. And, they add, this may be a conservative estimate. The region of Inner Mongolia, site for this current project, is estimated to have sufficient wind resources to supply up to 40% of China's ultimate wind energy potential.
#1
To put this into perspective, the U.S. electric power industry's total installed generating capacity was 1,089,807 megawatts (MW) as of December 31, 2007. This includes all sources.
#2
Good heavens. I had no idea things had gotten so bad in Australia re: self-defense. Sounds even more extreme than the UK. Weren't you guys allowed to own guns not-that-long-ago??? Wot happened?
#3
"QUEENSLAND shopkeepers are demanding the right to arm themselves with clubs, Tasers and capsicum spray to fight back against violent robbers."
If the shopkeepers just had some small, hand held device that would propel say, pellets of some heavy metal at high speed, they would be more than capable of defending themselves.
#4
Lets not get too excited. Stats from the Australian Institute of Ciminology (here http://www.aic.gov.au/topics/violence/robbery/stats/) show that there are about 600 armed robberies per month in across Australia. That is about 20 per day. In Australia, "Armed" means any sort of weapon, including guns, knives, blunt instruments, hands, feet, sticks and so on. Robberies using guns add up to around 10% of the total, so that is 2 or 3 per day, across the whole of Australia.
In the 1990s, there were a series of events where some fool would go postal, take one or more guns into a public place, and start shooting until they were taken down. The worst of these, at Port Arthur in Tasmania in 1996, cost us 35 lives. To put that in perspective, the total number of firearm deaths that year was 105 across the whole country, including the 35 from the Port Arthur massacre.
John Howard, our Prime Minister at the time, instituted a scheme to reduce the number of guns in the community. He set up a gun-buyback scheme, so that the government compulsorily purchased weapons legally held by citizens. I thought (and still think) that it was a reasonable response.
My own family sold back to the government a nice Browning automatic shotgun, an old double barrel shotgun with a damascus woven wire barrel, a .410 snake gun, and a single shot 22. Just the normal guns that families tended to have back then.
The result? Since then, homocides with long guns reduced by about 45%, homocides with handguns doubled (from about 15 to about 30 per year, Australia wide), suicides with guns halved (although it was already trending down from about 1990).
So, judge for yourself. One thing I do know. The degree and history of guns in the community in Australia is different to that in the US.
WELLINGTON, New Zealand: New Zealand's prime minister called elections for Nov. 8, setting a relatively long campaign period to give her Labor Party a chance to win back the many voters who have switched their loyalties to the conservative opposition. Recent opinion polls have shown that the conservative National Party has its best chance in a decade of being victorious in the South Pacific nation of about 4.1 million people.
A change of government would not signal any major turnover in foreign policy, including the country's long-standing anti-nuclear stance and opposition to the Iraq war, but would indicate strong dissatisfaction with Labor after nearly 10 years in power.
Prime Minister Helen Clark's government is being blamed in part for a severe economic downturn, and has been hit by scandals including campaign finance investigations into Foreign Minister Winston Peters, who leads a party that is a junior member of the ruling coalition. New Zealand politics is dominated by the two largest parties --— Labor and National —-- though the political landscape is full of smaller players that often snare significant portions of the vote.
"I do believe the future of New Zealand is at stake," Clark said in a televised news conference to announce the election date. "I believe that Labor has shown through its record in office that we can be trusted with the future of New Zealand."
National leader John Key did not immediately comment.
Posted by: Steve White ||
09/12/2008 00:00 ||
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#1
Compare wid TOPIX > AUSTRALIA PLANS MILITARY MODERNIZATION AND BUILDUP TO COUNTER "ASIAN THREATS".
Right outta the playbook...
A Muslim advocacy group that last year helped mediate a worker dispute at a JBS Swift & Co. packing plant in Nebraska on Thursday said it hopes to do the same in Greeley where 103 Muslim workers were fired.
Officials at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington, D.C.-based civil-rights group, said the dispute over prayer time at the Greeley slaughterhouse is the worst they've seen in the country. "We've never seen anything like the wholesale firings to this degree, and it makes me wonder what's really going on there," council spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said Thursday. Ummmmm... they don't follow the rules of the company they work for so they got fired? You can thank me later, Ibby.
A nearly identical rift occurred last year at a JBS packing plant in Grand Island, Neb., when Muslim workers walked off the job when they were refused prayer time. Three workers were fired for leaving stations without permission, and 90 quit.
The council filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of the workers, which is pending. Workers in Nebraska gave managers a 45-minute window in which prayer breaks were necessary; in Greeley the workers offered a 10-minute window, according to people familiar with the discussions.
The Greeley workers, all Muslim and many Somalian, were fired Wednesday for not reporting to work after nearly 400 walked off the job Friday saying they were denied prayer time. At issue is a request by the workers for a 10-minute prayer break at sundown. Workers said they were refused the break on Friday but had been allowed the break previously.
About 120 employees returned to work Tuesday after JBS officials said they'd accommodate the need for Muslim prayers, but only during a universal meal break that turns out to be too late for the religious practice and too early for other workers.
Ahmed Mohamud, one of the fired workers and a spokesman for the group, said the workers told JBS managers "we would take pay cuts for the time we are praying, but they refused."
A JBS spokeswoman said she was unaware of the civil rights group's desire to help the Greeley workers.
Disputes between companies and Muslim employees over time to pray are nothing new, Hooper said. "The problems we've seen in the past involved the sunset prayer, which is only one of five that is specifically tied to a time of day," he said. "The other four are general times with a window of opportunity. But the sunset prayer is, by definition, at sunset." So suck it up...INFIDEL!
The most friction occurs during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which began Sept. 1, where practitioners fast from sunrise to sunset and break the fast just ahead of evening prayers.
Large flightless birds of the southern continents - African ostriches, Australian emus and cassowaries, South American rheas and the New Zealand kiwi - do not share a common flightless ancestor as once believed.
Instead, each species individually lost its flight after diverging from ancestors that did have the ability to fly, according to new research conducted in part by University of Florida zoology professor Edward Braun.
#1
What about the giant, carnivorous, flightless birds of South America? Called "terror birds", they were 3-10 feet in height, and would think a human was a yummy snack:
#1
A Tiny Ancestral Remnant Lends Developmental Edge To Humans
Not so tiny at first, but still an elegant remote kindling/log finder.
Back in the day, couples had arguments over who could have/control over the remote which lead to developing all sorts of skills and further development of Human's fore brains.
Posted by: Red Dawg ||
09/12/2008 2:50 Comments ||
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#2
Now if we can just stimulate that area of Africans' brains they may quit eating our closest genetic relatives for lunch.
#3
like elephants, chimps and gorillas are food on the hoof (or target practice) to the locals. Like elephants they must be made to benefit the locals to gain the locals protection. Benefiting the locals, however, is not usually on the agenda of the "powers that be" or the NGO's. Oh Well!
In 1951, Morton Sobell was tried and convicted with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on espionage charges. He served more than 18 years in prison.. Through it all, he maintained his innocence. But on Thursday, Mr. Sobell, 91, dramatically reversed himself. In an interview, he admitted for the first time that he had been a Soviet spy...
Mr. Sobell also concurred in what has become a consensus among historians: that Ethel Rosenberg, who was executed with her husband, was aware of Julius's espionage, but did not actively participate. "She knew what he was doing," he said, "but what was she guilty of?"
Duh, conspiracy?
Government prosecutors later acknowledged that they had hoped that a conviction and the possibility of a death sentence against Ethel Rosenberg would persuade her husband to confess and implicate others, including some agents known to investigators through secretly intercepted Soviet cables.
The prosecutors' strategy failed. Julius never implicated anyone & he and Ethel were both executed. After reading what I could about the Soviet espionage records publicized after 1990, I believe many of the other Soviet agents completed their careers in the US, retired on pensions & either died of old age or are still living. The NYT article is mostly an attempt to change the subject of the disclosure, that Morton & Julius were guilty, and that Ethel went along with it, which, I guess, is conspiracy, but IANAL.
#9
Mrs. Rosenberg could also have chosen to reveal what she knew to the prosecutors, and gotten a sentence less than death. Given that they knew she was not a conspirator, I imagine they would have happily cut a deal. But she also chose to say nothing, and so she also chose to orphan her children.
#11
All comments have been most interesting. Would like a Rantburg lawyer to chime in on the meaning of "conspiracy." AFAICT, Ethel was a conspirator by the sum total of her actions. Whether or not she actually typed material that was passed on the to Soviets is not critical.
I believe the Venona declassified stuff did nail the Rosenbergs, but modern fellow travelers continue to pretend the stuff doesn't exist. This is more than a reference to modern 'truthers'. The Rosenberg orphans changed their surnames but continue to defend their parents' memories, and deserve a measure of sympathy for what happened to them. At least they were totally innocent. I doubt any amount of evidence will ever change their minds.
Sobell continues to believe he did the right thing, and he continues to be disloyal to the United States. This bad attitude permeates much of the modern domestic left establishment.
Latin conspiratio, from conspirare to conspire see conspire
1: an agreement between two or more people to commit an act prohibited by law or to commit a lawful act by means prohibited by law
also
: the crime or tort of participating in a conspiracy
(compare substantive crime)
Note: Some states require an overt act in addition to the agreement to constitute conspiracy.
2: a group of conspirators
chain conspiracy
: a conspiracy in which the conspirators act separately and successively (as in distributing narcotics)
civil conspiracy
: a conspiracy that is not prosecuted as a crime but that forms the grounds for a lawsuit
criminal conspiracy
: a conspiracy prosecuted as a crime
In the case of the Rosenberg's, Ethel's agreement (tacit or otherwise) was sufficient -- she did not need to engage in any overt act to further the conspiracy.
BURN THEM Now That's a Sweet Sound When Dealing with Traitors.
Of all our institutions under the corrosive Lefty Tides our Legal System has to be the worse off since the 50s when Ethel and Julius took steps to destroy our Nation thru sabotage and collusion with the Soviet Union.
Unfortunately we still have a few million dangerous LEFTY Whack Jobs doing their best to destroy our Courts; State and Federal all the way up to the Supreme Court with Ruth Bader Ginsberg types for instance.
Justices like Ginsberg believe by written statement & by verbal statements that some of our Constitutional Rights are out-dated and need a little or alot of work**. BUT she is so mealy mouth and obtuse that her "statements" are more like Gobley Gook ramblings substituting instead for simple direct logic.
Posted by: Red Dawg ||
09/12/2008 18:46 Comments ||
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#15
I have to tell my 84 year old mom. She took dictation on this case in the New Haven FBI office when Whitacre Chambers first approached them. The agents there didn't believe him but mom did. It took the NYNY office to act on it.
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.
HOUSTON - A sprawling and strengthening Hurricane Ike steamed through the Gulf of Mexico on Friday on a track toward the nation's fourth-largest city, where authorities told residents to brace rather than flee. Closer to the coast, small towns were mostly empty after forecasters issued dire warnings the storm could kill. 
