&hearts I vividly remember the NYC cops drunkenly booing Hillary Clinton when she tried to speak to them, now they are begging her for help: A former New York policeman died Tuesday night shortly before his 21-year-old son appeared at the State of the Union address to symbolize the desperate health problems of some Sept. 11 workers.
Cesar Borja, 52, had been in intensive care, breathing through a tube, at Mount Sinai Medical Center, awaiting a lung transplant.
*************************************************************************************
&hearts Looks like Libby is going to try to take down Cheney and Rove (arrest them all!): White House officials tried to sacrifice vice presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to protect strategist Karl Rove from blame for leaking a CIA operative's identity during a political storm over the Iraq war, Libby's lawyer said Tuesday.
After Libby complained "they want me to be the sacrificial lamb," Vice President Dick Cheney personally intervened to get the White House press secretary to publicly clear Libby in the leak, defense attorney Theodore Wells said in his opening statement at Libby's perjury trial.
************************************************************************************
&hearts Earliest Phoenician text is an anti-snake magic spell: In 2002 one of the Egyptologists e-mailed the undeciphered part of the inscription to Richard Steiner, a professor of Semitic languages at Yeshiva University in New York. Steiner discovered that the phrases are the transcription of a language used by Canaanites at some point in the period from 25th to the 30th centuries B.C.
"This is the oldest connected text that we have in any Semitic language," Steiner said in a telephone interview while visiting Israel to present his findings in a lecture sponsored by the Academy of the Hebrew Language. The previous oldest Semitic text dates from the 24th century B.C., Steiner said.
*************************************************************************************
&hearts Nice to see the Chinese missile test move from back pages to front, as usual, I was first in line with correct analysis: The Chinese test "was an overtly military, very provocative event that cannot be spun any other way," said Rob Hewson, the London-based editor of Jane's Air-Launched Weapons. "So a bald assessment of that is that it's a big fat challenge."
The test is a shot across the bow of U.S. efforts to remain predominant in space and on the ground, where its military is heavily dependent on networks of satellites, particularly the low-altitude imaging intelligence models that help it find and hit targets. Japan, also seen as a regional rival, is similarly vulnerable, while any potential conflicts in space would put much of the industrialized world's economies at risk, given that satellites are used to relay phone calls and data and to map weather systems.
*************************************************************************************
&hearts All sea animals with ears have very sensitive hearing and they all use sonar and this really pisses me off, I hate loud noises myself: The Defense Department gave the Navy permission Tuesday to keep training with sonar for another two years, a move denounced by activists who say the sound waves can harm dolphins and other marine mammals.
Navy officials had sought the two-year exemption from the Marine Mammal Protection Act, allowed under the 2004 National Defense Authorization Act, saying they needed time to study how sonar use at major underwater training ranges affects the environment.
*************************************************************************************
&hearts The CIA has been fatally dumbed-down by Bush, Cheney and their neocon buddies: A blog item at the magazine Harpers yesterday indicates that the Central Intelligence Agency has failed to complete an intelligence assessment on Iraq demanded by senators.
*************************************************************************************
&hearts So, the quislings in Iraq don't want to be bothered with even pretending to work anymore: Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, the speaker of Parliament, read a roll call of the 275 elected members with a goal of shaming the no-shows.Ayad Allawi, the former prime minister? Absent, living in Amman and London. Adnan Pachachi, the octogenarian statesman? Also gone, in Abu Dhabi.
Others who failed to appear Monday included Saleh Mutlak, a senior Sunni legislator; several Shiites and Kurds; and Ayad al-Samaraei, chairman of the finance committee, whose absence led Mr. Mashhadani to ask: “When will he be back? After we approve the budget?” It was a joke barbed with outrage. Parliament in recent months has been at a standstill. Nearly every session since November has been adjourned because as few as 65 members made it to work, even as they and the absentees earned salaries and benefits worth about $120,000.
*************************************************************************************
&hearts The second Cedar Revolution grinds onwards to the expected end when the Shi'ite majority take over Lebanon: Protesters bent on toppling Lebanon's cabinet blocked highways and roads with blazing tires on Tuesday, sparking clashes with government loyalists in which three people were killed and 133 people hurt, police said.
The violence raised the stakes in a campaign by Iranian- and Syrian-backed Hezbollah and its Shi'ite and Christian allies to oust Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's Western-supported government. Siniora, a Sunni Muslim, vowed to stand firm.
*************************************************************************************
&hearts Um, this is ridiculous, the Iraqis can fool us all the time, it seems:A license plate from a car registered to Iraq's minister of trade was found on an SUV used by the gunmen who killed five American soldiers in the city of Karbala on Saturday, an Iraqi police official said Monday.
Maj. Gen. Qais al Maamuri, a police commander in Hilla, said the plate had been stolen from a BMW that belongs to Abdul Falah al-Sudani, a member of the Shiite Muslim Dawa Party. He said Sudani wasn't a suspect in the attack.
*************************************************************************************
&hearts Chief prosecutor in England warns Blair to not imitate our dictator and impose draconian Saddam-style laws in England: The director of public prosecutions, Sir Ken Macdonald, put himself at odds with the home secretary and Downing Street last night by denying that Britain is caught up in a "war on terror" and calling for a "culture of legislative restraint" in passing laws to deal with terrorism.
Sir Ken warned of the pernicious risk that a "fear-driven and inappropriate" response to the threat could lead Britain to abandon respect for fair trials and the due process of law.
*************************************************************************************
&hearts This story broke in Israel during the Lebanon war but never made the news in America and this latest news will be equally ignored, of course: Israel's ministry of justice says it plans to charge the country's largely ceremonial head of state, Moshe Katsav, with rape and abuse of power.
Formal charges against him can be made only after a hearing at which he will be allowed to present his case.
*************************************************************************************
&hearts Criminals online are seeking new ways to worm their way into people's finances: Hackers have turned to other routes for infecting computers as companies realise the need to secure e-mail gateways.
They are also subtly changing tactics - instead of sending so-called spyware-infected e-mails, they are sending e-mails linking to websites which contain a malicious downloader.
*************************************************************************************
&hearts Royal, the photogenic French Presidential candidate, irks Canada over the French Quebec separation:Ségolène Royal, the French Socialist presidential candidate, sparked a diplomatic row with Canada yesterday after appearing to call for Quebec’s independence in the latest in a series of blunders.
Ms Royal, 53, touched a raw nerve when she backed demands for Quebec’s “freedom”, and was rebuked by Stephen Harper, the Canadian Prime Minister.
*************************************************************************************
Comments