We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
Aesop, 560-620 BC
10 November 2009
10 November
It's Marine Corps Birthday, yet again, and Rico's friend (and former Marine) Tex sends along this:
For something not nearly as pretty, but far closer to reality, however, this:
For something not nearly as pretty, but far closer to reality, however, this:
09 November 2009
Twenty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper watched the Wall fall
Rico says he saw it first-hand in 1969, and it was scary as hell. A friend from Claris happened to be there in 1989, and brought him back a piece of the thing; still scary, even as just a broken chunk of concrete.
Civil War for the day
William Henry Seymour (8 September 1840 to 24 December 1913) was an American politician and amateur historian best-known for having written a history of Algiers, Louisiana. Seymour was born in Warrenton in Warren County, Mississippi, lived in Europe as a child, then moved to Louisiana while still a dependent of his parents. At the outset of the Civil War he enlisted in the Confederate Army, becoming an artillery sergeant and receiving an honorable discharge. In 1863 he moved to Algiers, Louisiana, where he was initially employed by the Opelousas Railroad. Seymour took an interest in local affairs and was elected in 1864 to the Louisiana Constitutional Convention, where he was the youngest delegate. Also in 1864, Seymour was elected justice of the peace and president of the parish police jury. In 1865 Seymour was elected to the Louisiana state legislature. Seymour is best known as the author of The Story of Algiers, a 128-page history published in 1896.
08 November 2009
That for you...
Leading the fight is Marine Gunnery Sergeant Michael Burghardt, known as 'Iron Mike' or just 'Gunny'. He is on his third tour in Iraq. He had become a legend in the bomb disposal world after winning the Bronze Star for disabling 64 IEDs and destroying 1,548 pieces of ordnance during his second tour.
Then, on 19 September, he got blown up. He had arrived at a chaotic scene after a bomb had killed four US Marines. He chose not to wear the bulky bomb protection suit. "You can't react to any sniper fire and you get tunnel-vision," he explains. So, protected by just a helmet and a standard-issue flak jacket, he began what bomb disposal officers term 'the longest walk', stepping gingerly into a five-foot-deep and eight-foot-wide crater.
The earth shifted slightly and he saw a Senao base station with a wire leading from it. He cut the wire and used his knife to probe the ground. "I found a piece of red detonating cord between my legs," he says. "That's when I knew I was screwed." Realizing he had been sucked into a trap, Sergant Burghardt, 35, yelled at everyone to stay back. At that moment, an insurgent, probably watching through binoculars, pressed a button on his mobile phone to detonate the secondary device below the sergeant's feet. "A chill went up the back of my neck and then the bomb exploded," he recalls. "As I was in the air I remember thinking, 'I don't believe they got me...' I was just ticked off they were able to do it. Then I was lying on the road, not able to feel anything from the waist down."
His fellow Marines cut off his trousers to see how badly he was hurt. None could believe his legs were still there "My dad's a Vietnam vet who's paralyzed from the waist down," says Sergeant Burghardt. "I was lying there thinking I didn't want to be in a wheelchair next to my dad and for him to see me like that. They started to cut away my pants and I felt a real sharp pain and blood trickling down. Then I wiggled my toes and I thought, 'Good, I'm in business'." As a stretcher was brought over, adrenaline and anger kicked in. "I decided to walk to the helicopter. I wasn't going to let my team-mates see me being carried away on a stretcher." He stood and gave the insurgents who had blown him up a one-fingered salute. "I flipped them one. It was like, 'OK, I lost that round but I'll be back next week'."
Copies of the photograph depicting his defiance, taken by Jeff Bundy for the Omaha World-Herald, adorn the walls of homes across America and that of Colonel John Gronski, the brigade commander in Ramadi, who has hailed the image as an exemplar of the warrior spirit.
Sergeant Burghardt's injuries (burns and wounds to his legs and buttocks) kept him off duty for nearly a month and could have earned him a ticket home. But, like his father, who was awarded a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts for being wounded in action in Vietnam, he stayed in Ramadi to engage in the battle against insurgents who are forever coming up with more ingenious ways of killing Americans.
Military humor about women
Pam, the sister of my friend Kelley, sends along these:
Americans
Russians
North Koreans
Israelis
Indians
Brazilians (and, no, they don't make camouflage tangas)
and, of course:
Iranians
The moment when you know the love is gone
My friend Dave forwards this one:
A man was sitting on the sofa watching television, when he heard his wife's voice from the kitchen: "What would you like for dinner, love? Chicken, beef or lamb?"
He said, "I'll have chicken, thanks."
She said "Fuck you, you're having soup. I was talking to the cat."
07 November 2009
New plane
Air Force plans to include the C-27J Spartan, the latest propeller-driven airlifter planned for the Air Force inventory, are steadily progressing.
In April, through Resource Management Decision 802, Defense Secretary Robert Gates moved the C-27J program and its related direct support mission from the Army to the Air Force. Since April, the Air Force and Air Mobility Command have taken a serious approach to building the program, officials said.
"The program is in transition from an Army-led joint program to a sole Air Force program," said Lieutenant Colonel Gene Capone, AMC's C-27J test manager at the Joint Program Office. "Making a switch like this is no small affair, especially at this phase in the acquisition process. Because the Army lost all fiscal year 2010 C-27J funding due to RMD 802, the Air Force is funding the Army to continue leading the program through completion of Multi-Service Operational Test and Evaluation."
The Air Force will field 38 C-27Js, operated by the Air National Guard. Two are currently going through qualification and operational testing. According to Air Force officials, the C-27J is an "extremely rugged" aircraft, designed for austere environments. And, although it has yet to complete its testing, they say it should thrive in the "dirt".
"Think of the C-27J as a 'mini-Herc'; it looks like and acts like a C-130, but it is about half the size (3.5 pallet positions versus 6 to 8 pallets for the C-130)," Colonel Capone said. "This smaller size brings efficiency of scale to the Air Force's portfolio of airlifters." The colonel also said the aircraft is very powerful and agile. "It flies a lot like a C-130, but with a bit more power for its weight," he said. "Of course, as with most airplanes the pilots who fly the aircraft love it, myself included."
AMC officials here say work to make the C-27J capable of fully supporting the Army's needs in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility is also continuously progressing.
"The Secretary of Defense gave the C-27J and its mission to the Air Force and we are 100 percent committed to making this work," said Major General Brooks Bash, director of AMC's Air, Space, and Information Operations Directorate.
A formal test is taking place from October through December in Iraq to gather information on this new Air Force mission.
"This test will help us work out the command and control structure of the direct support mission and help us to validate requirements," said Colonel Bobby Fowler, also with the Air, Space and Information Operations Directorate. Air Force officials say there is still a lot to do as more and more C-27s come into the inventory. "A concept like this will take time and effort, but most importantly it will also require feedback from the forces," Colonel Fowler said.
AMC and Air Force officials plan to continuously review and update the C-27J using input from field commanders until it is incorporated into joint doctrine.
06 November 2009
Not the right guy in the right place at the right time
Brett Blackledge has an article via the Associated Press on the guy:
He was by turns caring and contentious, a man quick to say "I am blessed" in casual greeting, yet one who seemed to stew in discontent that he could not always keep to himself.
Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan, a suspect in the assault that killed thirteen people at Fort Hood, Texas, and hurt 30, salved the emotional wounds of troops returning from war even as he objected to his own looming deployment to Afghanistan, where he was to counsel soldiers suffering from stress.
But Hasan argued with fellow soldiers who supported U.S. war policy, say those who know him professionally and personally. He was a counselor who once required counseling for himself because of trouble he had dealing with some patients, said a former boss.
Authorities on Friday seized Hasan's home computer, searched his apartment and took away a dumpster as the 39-year-old Army major lay in a coma in the hospital, attached to a ventilator.
There are many unknowns about the man authorities say is responsible for the worst mass killing on a U.S. military base. Most of all, his motive.
For six years before reporting for duty at Fort Hood, in July, Hasan worked at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center pursuing his career in psychiatry, as an intern, a resident and, last year, a fellow in disaster and preventive psychiatry. He received his medical degree from the military's Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland in 2001.
While an intern at Walter Reed, Hasan had some "difficulties" that required counseling and extra supervision, said Dr. Thomas Grieger, who was the training director at the time. Grieger said privacy laws prevented him from going into details but noted that the problems had to do with Hasan's interactions with patients. He recalled Hasan as a "mostly very quiet" person who never spoke ill of the military or his country. "He swore an oath of loyalty to the military," Grieger said. "I didn't hear anything contrary to those oaths."
But, more recently, federal agents grew suspicious. At least six months ago, Hasan came to the attention of law enforcement officials because of Internet postings about suicide bombings and other threats, including posts that equated suicide bombers to soldiers who throw themselves on a grenade to save the lives of their comrades. They had not confirmed Hasan is the author of the posting, and a formal investigation had not been opened before the shooting, said law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the case. Federal authorities seized Hasan's computer Friday during a search of his apartment in Killeen, Texas, said a U.S. military official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation. His anger was noted by a classmate, who said Hasan "viewed the war against terror" as a "war against Islam".
Dr. Val Finnell, a classmate of Hasan's at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, attended a master's in public health program in 2007-2008. Finnell says he got to know Hasan because the group of public health students took an environmental health class together. At the end of the class, everyone had to give a presentation. Classmates wrote on topics such as dry cleaning chemicals and mold in homes, but Finnell said Hasan chose the war against terror. Finnell described Hasan as a "vociferous opponent" of the terror war. Finnell said Hasan told classmates he was "a Muslim first and an American second".
Hasan was recently involved in a spat with another Fort Hood soldier residing in his apartment complex, apparently related to his Muslim beliefs. The manager of the complex, John Thompson, said the other soldier, John Van de Walker, allegedly keyed Hasan's car and also removed and tore up a bumper sticker that read Allah is Love. Thompson said Van de Walker had been in Iraq and was upset to learn that Hasan was Muslim.
A report filed with Killeen police on 16 August indicates that Hasan's vehicle, a 2006 Honda Civic, had been scratched by an unknown object causing an estimated $1,000 worth of damage. The report indicates that Van de Walker, 30, was arrested on 21 October and charged with criminal mischief. The matter has been referred for prosecution, according to the report. The phone number for Van de Walker wasn't in service Friday, and Thompson, the apartment manager, said he had moved out of the complex.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Hasan's aunt, Noel Hasan of Falls Church, Virginia, said he had been harassed about being a Muslim in the years after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, and he wanted to get out of the Army. She said he had sought a discharge for several years, and even offered to repay the cost of his medical training.
Hasan was in the preparation stage of deployment, which can take months, though Army spokeswoman Colonel Cathy Abbott was uncertain when Hasan was to leave. Abbott said Hasan was to deploy with an Army Reserve unit that provides what the military calls "behavioral health" counseling.
Another military official said Hasan had indicated he didn't want to go to Iraq, but was willing to serve in Afghanistan. The official did not have authorization to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
A different military official said Hasan's family has Palestinian roots. There have been reports that he was harassed for his Muslim religion, but the official says there is no indication Hasan filed a complaint with military officials about that.
Alice Thompson, the manager at the apartment complex where Hasan lived, said he'd been living there since mid-August. Thompson said she didn't talk to him other than to say hello in passing. Thompson said he always answered her "How are you?" with "I am blessed."
Noel Hasan said her nephew "did not make many friends" and would say "the military was his life." A cousin, Nader Hasan, told The New York Times that, after counseling soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder, Hasan knew the scars of war well. "He was mortified by the idea of having to deploy," Nader Hasan said. "He had people telling him on a daily basis the horrors they saw over there."
Retired Army Colonel Terry Lee, who said he worked with Hasan, told Fox News that Hasan had hoped President Barack Obama would pull troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq. Lee said Hasan got into frequent arguments with others in the armed forces who supported the wars, and had tried hard to prevent his pending deployment.
Colonel Kimberly Kesling, deputy commander of clinical services at Darnall Army Medical Center at Fort Hood, said she had known Hasan. "You wouldn't think that someone who works in your facility and provided excellent care for his patients, which he did, could do something like this," Kesling said. She described him as "a quiet man who wouldn't seek the limelight" and said she was shocked when she heard he was the suspect in the shootings.
Hasan attended prayers regularly when he lived outside Washington, often in his Army uniform, said Faizul Khan, a former imam at a mosque Hasan attended in Silver Spring, Maryland. He said Hasan was a lifelong Muslim. "I got the impression that he was a committed soldier," Khan said. He spoke often with Hasan about Hasan's desire for a wife. On a form filled out by those seeking spouses through a program at the mosque, Hasan listed his birthplace as Arlington, Virginia, but his nationality as Palestinian, Khan said. "We hardly ever got to discussing politics," Khan said. "Mostly we were discussing religious matters, nothing too controversial, nothing like an extremist."
Hasan earned his rank of major in April 2008, according to a July 2008 Army Times article. He served eight years as an enlisted soldier. Military records show he also served in the ROTC as an undergraduate at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg and received a bachelor's degree in biochemistry there in 1997. But college officials said Friday that Hasan graduated with honors in biochemistry in 1995 and there was no record of him serving in any ROTC program. He previously had attended Barstow Community College in Barstow, California and Virginia Western Community College in Roanoke, Virginia, according to Virginia Tech records.
In Texas, but not Texan
Christy Hoppe has an article in The Dallas Morning News about the tragedy at Fort Hood:
The bloody scene might have been drawn from the scarred memories of Iraq war veterans assigned to this Army outpost in the hills of Central Texas: 13 dead and 30 wounded, gunned down in a sudden ambush. But Thursday's bloody assault at Fort Hood was committed by one of the Army's own. As night fell across the nation's largest military outpost, investigators sought to explain why Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a 39-year-old Army psychiatrist, reportedly turned a pair of pistols on his comrades.Rico says let that be a lesson to you: be careful who you taunt about their heritage, especially if they carry guns...
Late Thursday, Lieutenant General Robert Cone and Colonel Ben Danner gave an account of the chaos and carnage that began about 1:30 p.m. inside two buildings that house psychiatric, medical, and dental units. Officials say Hasan used two handguns, including a semi-automatic, to fire at fellow soldiers. Neither of the guns was military-issue. As Hasan fired, an unidentified female civilian officer managed to shoot him at least once before being shot herself. The gunman was finally felled by four bullets and airlifted by medical helicopter to an undisclosed hospital where he underwent surgery. Early reports said the gunman was dead, but Cone later said Hasan was in stable condition under guard at a hospital and "his death is not imminent." He was on a ventilator and unconscious, officials.
The general said that many of the military personnel used life-saving skills learned as part of their training. He described a scene where people were "ripping their uniforms and taking care of each other."
Still unexplained was the motive for the attack. Asked whether it could be considered a terrorist attack, Cone replied, "I couldn't rule that out" but said the evidence does not point to that. At one point, officials detained and interviewed three suspects, but they now think that there was a single shooter.
Late Thursday night, Killeen police had cordoned off Hasan's apartment at the Casa del Norte Apartments and had evacuated the neighborhood. They were concerned that Hasan might have booby-trapped his home and were cautiously moving in with a bomb squad.
Family members said Hasan, a native-born Virginian and 1997 biochemistry graduate of Virginia Tech University, had been distraught over an impending overseas deployment. Hasan had been posted to Fort Hood in July, after serving for six years at Water Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. He was unmarried, authorities said. Nader Hasan, a cousin of the major, told Fox News that Hasan had suffered harassment from comrades over his Middle Eastern heritage. "He is a good American," Hasan told the news channel. "We are shocked."
While wounded were being transported to hospitals around the area, authorities ordered the massive post closed. About 40,000 military personnel are based at the post, one of the country's largest military installations.
"It's a terrible tragedy. It's stunning," Cone told reporters gathered outside the vast facility northeast of Austin. "Soldiers and family members and many of the great civilians who work here are absolutely devastated."
At the Military Personnel Center, where arriving soldiers are processed and records updated, civilian employee Poi Shaffer was updating records for a soldier when she heard sirens on Battalion Avenue, about a mile away from the scene of the shooting. "I heard sirens, ambulances, fire trucks, all kinds of stuff," said Shaffer. "At first I thought it was a wreck, but I kept hearing more sirens. It kept going on." When she finished processing the soldier's records, she checked her phone and saw that her husband, who works on the base for the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, had been trying to call her. He phoned again and said urgently: "Where are you? Stay put!" Her husband was close enough to the scene of the attack to hear the gunfire, said Shaffer.
Specialist Joshua Branum, just back from his second long tour in Iraq, was at the Killeen courthouse taking care of a minor traffic issue when he heard of shootings and death at Fort Hood. Three months back and now it was his wife and 1-year-daughter in harm's way. "I went into combat mode," he said. He immediately called his wife and told her to lock the doors and windows. "Keep yourself and the baby down at all costs," he said to her. "And then I started on my way." For almost two hours, Branum paced outside the main gate at Fort Hood in his desert fatigues as he and more than a dozen active military personnel waited for the post to lift a lockdown so they could see their loved ones. Phone lines were jammed, and some were having trouble getting through. He said he wanted to patrol the perimeter in his truck, to feel he could help in some way. "In a situation like this, any soldier feels that I should have been there. Maybe there wouldn't have been so many dead, maybe there wouldn't have been so many wounded," Branum said. He said he was angered to hear that it was a soldier who fired at colleagues. Having defused bombs and cleared roadways during his first two-year tour in Iraq, Branum said he knows all about post traumatic stress disorder and has suffered from it the past two years. "If they blame this on PTSD, I'll lose my faith," Branum said. "PTSD does not cause you to organize and carry out a shooting." The lockdown was finally lifted about 9 p.m.
In Austin, Governor Rick Perry issued a statement: "The Texas family suffered a significant loss today with the tragedy at Fort Hood. Along with all Texans, Anita and I are keeping those affected by today's incidents in our thoughts and prayers." Perry ordered that all Texas flags be lowered to half-staff until Sunday.
The FBI and Texas Rangers joined with military investigators in the search to determine how and why the attack occurred.
Around the country, some bases stepped up security precautions, but no others were locked down. "The bottom line for us is that we are increasing security at our gates because the threat hasn't yet been defined, and we're reminding our Marines to be vigilant in their areas of responsibility," said Captain Rob Dolan, public affairs officer for the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma, Arizona.
After nightfall at Fort Hood, the religious gathered to pray, the patriotic gave blood, and doctors and nurses worked to save the lives of the wounded. Sirens continued to sound, but traffic once again rumbled along Battalion Avenue and speakers blared, "The emergency no longer exists."
'Splain that, Lucy
Julian Borger has an article in the Guardian about Iran:
The UN's nuclear watchdog has asked Iran to explain evidence suggesting that Iranian scientists have experimented with an advanced nuclear warhead design, the Guardian has learned.
The very existence of the technology, known as a "two-point implosion" device, is officially secret in both the US and Britain, but according to previously unpublished documentation in a dossier compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iranian scientists may have tested high-explosive components of the design. The development was today described by nuclear experts as "breathtaking" and has added urgency to the effort to find a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis. The sophisticated technology, once mastered, allows for the production of smaller and simpler warheads than older models. It reduces the diameter of a warhead and makes it easier to put a nuclear warhead on a missile. Documentation referring to experiments testing a two-point detonation design are part of the evidence of nuclear weaponisation gathered by the IAEA and presented to Iran for its response.
The dossier, titled Possible Military Dimensions of Iran's Nuclear Program, is drawn in part from reports submitted to it by western intelligence agencies. The agency has in the past treated such reports with scepticism, particularly after the Iraq war. But its director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, has said the evidence of Iranian weaponisation "appears to have been derived from multiple sources over different periods of time, appears to be generally consistent, and is sufficiently comprehensive and detailed that it needs to be addressed by Iran".
Extracts from the dossier have been published previously, but it was not previously known that it included documentation on such an advanced warhead. "It is breathtaking that Iran could be working on this sort of material," said a European government adviser on nuclear issues.
James Acton, a British nuclear weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said: "It's remarkable that, before perfecting step one, they are going straight to step four or five... To start with more sophisticated designs speaks of level of technical ambition that is surprising."
Another western specialist with extensive knowledge of the Iranian programme said: "It raises the question of who supplied this to them. Did AQ Khan [a Pakistani scientist who confessed in 2004 to running a nuclear smuggling ring] have access to this, or is it another player?"
The revelation of the documents comes at a time of growing tension. Tehran has so far rejected a deal that would remove most of its enriched uranium stockpile for a year and replace it with nuclear fuel rods which would be much harder to turn into weapons. The Iranian government has also balked at negotiations, which were due to begin last week, over its continued enrichment of uranium, in defiance of UN security council resolutions.
There are fears in Washington and London that if no deal is reached to at least temporarily defuse tensions by the end of December, Israel could set in motion plans to take military action aimed at setting back the Iranian programme by force, with incalculable consequences for the Middle East.
Iran has rejected most of the IAEA material on weaponisation as forgeries, but has admitted carrying out tests on multiple high-explosive detonations synchronised to within a microsecond. Tehran has told the agency that there is a civilian application for such tests, but has so far not provided any evidence for them. Western weapons experts say there are no such civilian applications, but the use of coordinated detonations in nuclear warheads is well known. They compress the fissile core, or pit, of the warhead until it reaches critical mass.
A US national intelligence estimate two years ago said that Iran had explored nuclear warhead design for several years but had probably stopped in 2003. British, French and German officials have said they believe weaponisation continued after that date and may still be continuing.
In September, a German court found a German-Iranian businessman, Mohsen Vanaki, guilty of brokering the sale of dual-use equipment with possible applications in developing nuclear weapons. The equipment included specialised high-speed cameras, of the sort used to develop implosion devices, as well as radiation detectors. According to a report by the Institute for Science and International Security, the German foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, testified at the trial that there was evidence that Iran's weapons development was continuing.
The IAEA is seeking to find out what the scientists and the institutions involved in the experiments are doing now, but has so far not been given a response. The agency's repeated requests to interview Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, whose name features heavily in the IAEA's documentation and who is widely seen as the father of the Iranian nuclear programme, have been turned down.
The agency has also asked Iran to explain evidence that a Russian weapons expert helped Iranian technicians to master synchronised high-explosive detonations.
The first implosion devices, like the "Fat Man" bomb dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945, used 32 high-explosive hexagons and pentagons arrayed around a plutonium core like the panels of a football. The IAEA has a five-page document describing experimentation on such a hemispherical array of explosives.
According to a diplomat familiar with the IAEA documentation, the evidence also points to experiments with a two-point detonation system that represents "a more elegant solution" to the challenges of making a nuclear warhead, but it is much harder to achieve. It is used in conjunction with a non-spherical pit, in the shape of a rugby ball, or explosives in that shape wrapped around a spherical pit, and it works by compressing the pit from both ends.The IAEA has expressed "serious concern" about Iran's failure to give an account of the research its scientists have carried out.
Descriptions of "two-point implosion" warheads designs have occasionally appeared in the public domain (there are extensive descriptions on Wikipedia) and they were first developed by US scientists in the 1950s, but it remains an offence for American officials or even non-governmental nuclear experts with security clearance to discuss them.
Not apocryphal after all
"...cufflinks in the form of the RAF roundel that marked the wings of Spitfires."
A coach's dream team
A quarterback named Montana rolls to the right and, with that familiar, smooth motion that football fans in the 1980s and '90s remember so well, effortlessly delivers a perfect downfield spiral. What's this? The reincarnation of Joe Montana, once known as Joe Cool for calmly delivering four Super Bowl victories for the San Francisco 49ers? No, it's his son, Nick.
Later, Montana's team having built a lead, the backup is in and he runs the same play, same result. That's Trevor Gretzky, son of hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, and he'll be the starter next year.
Catching some of their passes is a small, speedy wide receiver who has a knack for going up and getting the ball. That would be Trey Smith, son of successful actor Will Smith.
The trio is contributing for one of the best high school football teams in the country. Didn't think a team with the sons of arguably the greatest quarterback in NFL history, the greatest hockey player of all time and one of the most popular actors of his generation would be a slouch, did you?
Oaks Christian High, a private school with tuition about $26,000 a year and founded in 2000 about an hour's drive northwest of downtown Los Angeles, is small but mighty. Its enrollment is about 750, but its football team makes national news. The Lions are consistently one of the top-ranked teams in California and are 8-0 and No. 5 in USA TODAY's Super 25 high school football rankings.
The Lions have produced many Division One college players, including current Notre Dame star Jimmy Clausen. Clausen, a junior quarterback who has climbed into this year's Heisman Trophy race, was one of 11 Oaks Christian seniors in 2006 to move on to major-college football, an extraordinary total for any school, much less a small one. The Lions have played on ESPN twice, in Clausen's senior year and earlier this year.
That 2006 team was one of many great ones at Oaks Christian, finishing 15-0 with a state championship, in the first year California went to a state title format. The Lions are 87-5 since the beginning of the 2003 season and this year are aiming for a seventh consecutive CIF division title and a second state title.
But there is something more intriguing, more exciting, more sexy about this one. That's because Joe Montana and Wayne Gretzky and Will Smith aren't detached celebrity dads who send a congratulatory text when their sons' team wins. They're in the stands, sipping bad coffee and getting gum on their shoes and agonizing over their kids' performance on Friday nights just like other parents across the country.
"People call us 'Hollywood High' and stuff, but it's really not like that," Wayne Gretzky says. "People are people, and kids are kids. Nick, Trevor and Trey, all three of them are respectful. They're good kids."
Actually, it is a little like Hollywood High. Although Oaks Christian athletics director Jan Hethcock declines to name names for privacy's sake, he says a number of A-level Hollywood celebrities have enrolled their kids.
Nick Montana transferred to Oaks Christian two years ago from Northern California prep powerhouse Concord De La Salle. It's not unusual for gifted football prodigies to seek Oaks Christian's 18-acre campus. Since Clausen's enrollment as a ninth-grader in 2003, the flood of talent has been steady and is the major reason the Lions got so good so fast.
"This is a rich and vibrant school in a lot of academic areas, but football is what put us on the map, and I'm not ashamed of that," Hethcock says.
The Montanas and the Gretzkys live a short drive from the school, the Montanas in Thousand Oaks, the Gretzkys in Westlake Village. Joe comes to offensive days at practice, giving tips to Nick and Trevor. Wayne, who recently stepped down as coach and head of hockey operations for the Phoenix Coyotes, limits participation to parental support.
"I really don't know too much about football," hockey's all-time leading scorer says.
Trey Smith has spent time with both parents, who divorced when he was young, and lives with his mother in Chatsworth, about a 25-minute drive.
On Friday nights, Montana and Gretzky arrive to little fanfare and are pretty much left alone. Smith sometimes creates a commotion, but not so much that the focus isn't on the game. The Lions typically draw 3,000 to 3,500 fans.
"I've heard some kids at school say they only go to the games to see Will," Trevor Gretzky says. "Compared to Will Smith, not too many people know who my dad is. I mean, this is California, and he's a hockey player."
Nick Montana is the one who is striding directly in his father's footsteps. But he seems completely unfazed by whatever pressure that puts on him. "I think of it as a blessing," says Nick, a 6-3, 195-pound senior who has committed to accepting a scholarship from the University of Washington. "I can go to him for any help. He doesn't put pressure on me. To have a guy like that to go to is awesome."
At one recent game, Joe Montana arrives just before kickoff, sits with his wife, Jennifer, a few rows from the top of the home stands, and nervously rubs his hands together as the Lions start their first offensive possession.
First play, Nick throws a touchdown pass. Lions fans jump up and cheer. Joe Cool remains seated, calmly clapping. On the second drive, Nick under-throws a long pass on third down and Joe shakes his head.
But the Lions score, and then score again, with Nick throwing a perfectly lofted long ball for a touchdown. Now, Joe can relax. "It's a little nerve-racking at the beginning," Joe says. "Once it gets going, I'm all right."
Meanwhile, Wayne and Janet Gretzky, a section further down the home stands, sit among friends and wonder if Trevor, a 6-4, 190-pound junior, will get playing time. He plays most of the second half, handcuffed, however, by conservative play-calling. Head coach Bill Redell, given his team's dominance over most of its competition, tries to not run up the score, though his team has won this year 51-0, 65-6 and, last weekend, 59-0.
"It's a perfect situation for Trevor," says Wayne, who sits in the stands wearing an Oaks Baseball jacket. "Nick is a very good player, yet he's a workaholic and he's very dedicated. That's tremendous guidance." Trevor is hoping to play college football, while still pursuing baseball (he plays catcher and first base).
Trey Smith, a junior in his first year on the Oaks varsity, is hoping to play college football, too, though he's about 6 feet, 165 pounds and says, "I know I've got to get in the weight room."
Redell, the only coach the Lions have had, has gotten along well with the celebrity parents. Like Montana, Redell is a former quarterback. Like Gretzky, he was a professional athlete in Canada, in the Canadian Football League. And like Smith, well...
"He's a really good guy," says Redell, grayed and a bit paunchy at 68. "I keep telling him I want a role in one of his movies. He tells me I'll be in every one. I say I don't want to be in every one. I just want a love scene."
To which Smith replied, "Yeah, okay, I'll put you in with Tommy Lee Jones." That ended that discussion.
The kids clearly are not clones, although they bear a striking resemblance to their dads.
Joe Cool's son actually is excitable, a little rambunctious. "Nick probably gets as fired up as anybody on the team," Trey Smith says.
The Great One's son? He never really warmed up to hockey. "There's nowhere to play out here," Trevor Gretzky says. "My dad was the one who encouraged me to stay out of hockey and play baseball and save my knees. Then, when I got to high school, I was encouraged to play football, and I've been edging over to the football side."
And Trey Smith, whose father has battled aliens and other menacing forces on screen, had to get over a fear of linebackers. "I had a lot of fear my freshman year," he says. "My motto now is, 'You're going to get hit. Why not make the best of it?'"
All three of them seem to be making the best of it.
05 November 2009
The best of the best of the best
Courtesy of my friend Tex, this to start the lead up to Veteran's Day on the 11th.
Dead man's glue
Gone now, alas, but his glue lives on.
And it's damn good, too. So go to the website and buy it, or go to the store and buy it, but buy it.
It ain't often you're gonna get a total recommendation out of Rico (and no kickbacks from the company, either), so do it today.
See? Missed it
Hey, it's a choice
Quote for the day
...a nominal Belgian who looks like Tom Cruise on a diet of virgins' blood and truffled chocolates.
From Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
Chigurh, very scary
Rico says there are scary movies (which he won't watch), and then there are movies that scare you, and then there are movies that scare the crap out of you (like this one). If Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh isn't the scariest guy in moviedom, he'll do until someone scarier comes along. Tommy Lee Jones is brilliant, as ever, and makes the movie worth watching. The book by Cormac McCarthy was excellent, too, but one will spoil you for the other...(In attempting to find a derivation for Chigurh, unsuccessfully thus far, though a 'Bulgarian' suggestion sounded right, Rico did run across a LinkedIn list of five Anton Chigurhs, with one in Monaco who is doing 'Alternative Dispute Resolution'. Sounds like our boy, but the one at Chigurh Enterprises in Chicago has Javier Bardem's photo on his page, and also does 'Permanent Alternative Conflict Resolution', so that one's probably a goof as well...)
Too much of a good thing
Rico says he doesn't know yet how he feels about the new Google Dashboard, but it's interesting, that's for sure:
Fortunately, Sonny's dead
And what's with the hot girlfriend? Was she a lesbian but is now straight, or was she straight-but-confused, or just confused, what?
But ain't it interesting what Chaz says about taking male hormones:
"It lowered my voice," he says. "Fat redistribution, muscle growth, hair growth, sex drive increase."
Poor stupid rich guy
Rico says Nicholas Cage always seemed smarter than that, but a People.com article by Brenda Rodriguez would imply that he's not:
In a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles, the National Treasure star, 45, claims that his longtime business manager, Samuel J. Levin, "lined his own pockets with several million dollars in business management fees while sending Cage down a path toward financial ruin." That journey began in 2001 when Cage– whose next movie is the crime drama Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans– hired Levin to oversee his investments and finances. Levin did not return calls seeking comment. A rep for Cage had no comment.Rico says the guy's got multiple houses worth multiple millions, an on-going income stream in the millions, and who knows what in the bank. Hard to really feel sorry for the guy... (But that'll teach him to trust people with his money.)
Though Cage claims it was only recently that he learned the gravity of his financial condition, the actor started selling off some of his prized possessions months ago. In April, Cage bid farewell to his Bavarian castle, selling it to his German advisor, lawyer Konrad Wilfurth.
Now he has placed other homes on the market in California, Las Vegas, and New Orleans, where two of his residences– each worth at about $3.5 million– are up for auction on 12 November, according to the Times-Picayune. Regions Bank foreclosed on Hancock Park Real Estate Co., the owner of Cage's properties, for $5.5 million in unpaid mortgage debts, the newspaper reported.
Cage's home liquidation comes as the U.S. government has placed a tax lien on his real-estate holdings because of $6 million in unpaid taxes dating from 2007, according to court papers. In addition, the Internal Revenue Service has another lien for more than $350,000 in unpaid taxes dating from 2002 to 2004. East West Bank also filed a breach-of-contract complaint in Los Angeles Superior Court that claims Cage had failed to repay a $2 million loan that was extended this past August.
In the lawsuit filed against his business manager, Cage says he "relied on Levin to handle his financial affairs to ensure that he and his family would have a financially secure future built on the foundation of the substantial monies Cage earned through years of hard work."
"He is now forced to sell major assets and investments at a significant loss and is faced with huge tax liabilities because of Levin's incompetence, misrepresentations, and recklessness," the lawsuit alleges. (Interestingly, Cage sold off his rare comic-book collection for more than $1.6 million in 2002, a year after hiring Levin.)
Now, as the actor gets ready to hit the big screen again this fall, he faces "catastrophic losses" of more than $20 million, according to his lawsuit. His next court hearing is scheduled for February 2010.
No, no, they're Billy's munitions
Rico says the article by Amy Teibel of the Associated Press reads like a kid's argument, with the guilty ones insisting that, no, it was that other gang down the block:
Israeli officials tallied up hundreds of tons of weapons seized from a commandeered ship as Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas denied Israeli claims that the arms were meant for them. Israeli naval commandos, acting on intelligence reports, boarded the Antiguan-flagged Francop before dawn in waters off Cyprus on Wednesday, and discovered that the cargo included hundreds of crates of rockets, missiles, mortars, anti-tank weapons, and munitions. The arms shipment was the largest Israel has ever seized, and it shone a spotlight on dangerous tensions between Israel and Iran. Israel considers Iran a strategic threat because of its nuclear program and long-range missile development, and says Tehran is lying when it denies it is building atomic arms.
The Hezbollah guerrilla group, which fought a bruising, month-long war with Israel three years ago, denied that the arms cache was meant for its fighters. "Hezbollah categorically denies it has any connection with the weapons which the Zionist enemy claims it seized aboard the Francop," Hezbollah said in a statement faxed to The Associated Press in Beirut. Israel had not provided evidence the arms were meant for Hezbollah and the guerrilla group accused the Jewish state of fabrication and "piracy" for intercepting the ship. Iran has had no comment on the affair.
The weapons were sealed in containers carrying Iranian shipping codes and provided Israel with a rare opportunity to showcase its longtime claim that Tehran was arming militants on Israel's northern border and, implicitly, Hamas militants in Gaza. Government spokesman Mark Regev said Thursday that he hopes the capture of the weapons will be a "wake-up call to those few in the international community who up until now have still held illusions about the true character of the extremist, radical regime in Tehran." The presence of Iranian proxies in the Mideast, combined with worries over Tehran's nuclear program and arsenal of long-range missiles, have made Iran the Jewish state's most formidable foe. Neutralizing Iran's bombmaking ability remains Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's top priority, and Israel has not ruled out a military strike against Tehran's nuclear facilities.
Israeli officials and commentators said that the capture of the ship should help buttress Israel as it fights war crimes allegations at the United Nations and seeks crippling global sanctions against Iran.
"When it comes to explaining the real situation in Israel, this gives us some more recognition that sometimes we must take protective measures to exercise our right to self defense," said lawmaker Tzahi Hanegbi, chairman of parliament's foreign affairs and defense committee. The arms shipment eclipsed the previously largest haul, in 2002, of fifty tons of missiles, mortars, rifles, and ammunition headed for Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip. Israel has said that shipment came from Iran as well.
"The Israelis are going to send the pictures of all those rockets all over the world," predicted Israeli military analyst Reuven Pedatzur. "For them, this is the perfect example of the activity of the Iranian regime in our area, that there is no doubt they are sending weapons, that they're trying to destabilize the region," Pedatzur said.
On Thursday, the U.N. General Assembly is expected to resume its discussion of a report accusing both Israel and Gaza's Islamic Hamas rulers of war crimes during their conflict last winter. Both sides deny the charges. The General Assembly is expected to send the report to the Security Council, where Washington is expected to veto it, already having said the report is biased and should not be taken up by the U.N.'s most powerful body. "This kind of vivid evidence makes it easier for the United States to veto any resolution against Israel," Hanegbi said.
Okay, okay, so we lost already
Disingenuous? Sounds like a lawsuit in the making
Ethan Smith has an article in The Wall Street Journal about the Beatles and the war over their music:
The Beatles catalog finally became available for paid digital downloading, but not the way the band's record label, EMI Group Ltd., intended.
London-based EMI on Tuesday filed suit against Bluebeat.com, accusing the online retailer of violating copyright law by offering the British band's entire catalog without permission.
Also named as defendants in the suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, were Bluebeat's parent company, Santa Cruz, California-based Media Rights Technology Inc., and Media Rights Chief Executive Hank Risan. A spokeswoman for EMI said the company "has not authorized content to be sold or made available on Bluebeat."
Mr. Risan, the Media Rights chief executive, in a telephone interview Wednesday, called EMI's lawsuit and statements "disingenuous". In a series of follow-up emails he declined to elaborate, saying he would have more to say later Wednesday or Thursday.
The Beatles music has long been an elusive prize for online music services like Apple Inc.'s iTunes Store. But the band and EMI have never reached an agreement to license the music for online sale. The Beatles, for instance, are a notable absence from Google Inc.'s OneBox, the new service that lets users listen to a song once, free of charge, from a Google search-results page.
Bluebeat.com lets users listen to music on its website for free, and sells MP3 downloads for just 25 cents. As of midday Wednesday, that included the entire Beatles catalog, which EMI and the band have never authorized for online use. The 25-cent price point is far less than the 99 cents to $1.29 typically charged by the iTunes Store.
Separately, TheBeatles.com began selling a $280 USB stick carrying digital copies of the entire Beatles catalog. That compares with a list price of $260 for the CD boxed set of the same material, released in September.
That's a lot
Rico says Techtree.com has the story of the App Store:
Just a few weeks after crossing the two billion application downloads milestone, Apple's App Store has crossed yet another landmark figure, when the number of approved applications available for download at the store went past the 100,000 mark.
The Apple App Store, launched just last year, has seen phenomenal growth in the period to become the largest online app store. Competing mobile OS platforms like RIM, Android, and Nokia (with its Ovi Store) have come with their own versions of app stores, but none of them match up to the Apple App Store both in terms of the number of downloads and availability of apps. Even the Palm Pre, considered a major competitor to the iPhone, does not have a store that offers as much as Apple's. In fact, the Pre currently has less than 500 applications for the WebOs platform. Then, there is Google's Android, which has always been considered a worthy rival to the iPhone platform; the Android App store boasts around 15,000 applications, which pales in comparison to what Apple has to offer.
Civil War for the day
04 November 2009
History for the day
Twenty years ago today, Sergeant Pepper might not have taught the band to play, but thirty years ago today the Iranians did take over the American embassy in Teheran.
Election results
While the economy and jobs were the chief concern for voters in both states, 26 percent of New Jersey residents said property taxes was also a major issue, while another 20 percent mentioned corruption. In Virginia, health care was the most important issue for 24 percent of the voters, while 15 percent named taxes and transportation was mentioned by 7 percent.
All you get, sorry
Civil War for the day
Rico says no pictures today, but some good news, courtesy of his friend John Robinson:
Senator Mary Landrieu, Democrat from Louisiana, nd fellow Democratic Senator Jim Webb, of Virginia, have introduced the Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission Act of 2009 "to establish a commission to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War," a release from her office states. "We must remember the legacies of the Civil War," Landrieu said. "The United States emerged completely altered after the four years of struggle, and as a testament of American resilience, grew stronger than it was before. The cultural and political ramifications still shape the American landscape today. It was in the era of Reconstruction that Congress adopted the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution, acknowledging black Americans as free and equal citizens of the United States. The Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission Act of 2009 is about preserving that memory."Rico says the gummint can try and play catchup, but he's been planning his own Sesquicentennial for quite some time now...
As someone with ancestors who fought on both sides of the nation's bloodiest war, and a veteran himself, Webb said it has special significance for him. "It is important that all Americans are aware of the many sacrifices made, by soldiers and civilians alike, for which we emerged as a stronger, more diverse and free nation because of these sacrifices," he said. "The intention of this commission is to ensure the proper recognition of the sesquicentennial and builds on my other legislative efforts to support educational and preservation efforts for this turning point in American history."
It is the latest of a series of efforts to remember a war that still divides Americans of all races and political leanings. In 1996, Landrieu's predecessor, Senator J. Bennett Johnston Jr., sponsored legislation that called for the start of planning for the Civil War sesquicentennial and named the U.S. Civil War Center at LSU and the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College as the co-facilitators. Later, Virginia was added to the mix of planners.
Earlier this decade, former U.S. Representative Jim McCrery, Republican from Shreveport, and some two dozen other members of Congress have attempted, without success, to pass legislation creating a U.S. Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission.
Planning for the national centennial of the war, observed from 1961 to 1965, began in 1957. It competed with Sputnik being put into space by the Russians, the Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of a president and the beginning of the Vietnam War. But the centennial still became a tourist draw, with a national commission directing activities, an esteemed figurehead in Ulysses S. Grant III, 34 state commissions creating brochures and pamphlets and 300 city commissions coordinating activities. None of that was in evidence before 1957, though.
The Landrieu-Webb proposed commission would consist of 25 members drawn from government, business and academia, and would be charged to develop and carry out programs to ensure suitable national observance of the anniversary.
It also would work with state and local governments, as well as various organizations, to assist with commemoration activities and ensure that remembrance occurs at every level.
03 November 2009
Immigration in various places
Rico says his friend Tex sends along this observation about crossing borders:
Let me see if I understand things:
If you cross the North Korean border illegally, you get twelve years hard labor.
If you cross the Iranian border illegally, you are detained indefinitely.
If you cross the Afghan border illegally, you get shot.
If you cross the Turkish border illegally, you spend the rest of your life in prison.
But if you cross the US border illegally, you get a driver's license, a Social Security card, welfare, food stamps, and free health care.
Oh, well, sure. That makes perfect sense.
Prejudice can be lethal
It's a classic whodunit, starting with the rape and murder of a thirteen-year-old girl and ending in a lynching. It was grist for a prosecutor's political aspirations, a case that was appealed all the way to the country's highest court and a story hotly debated in the national press.
At the center of it all was Leo Frank, a northern Jew who'd moved to Atlanta to supervise the National Pencil Company factory. When the body of Mary Phagan, a white child laborer, was found in the factory basement, law enforcement homed in on Frank. He was tried and convicted, based on what most historians say was the perjured testimony of a black man, and sentenced to death. But when the governor commuted his sentence in 1915, about 25 men abducted Frank, then 31, from the state prison and hung him from a tree in Marietta, Georgia.
Considered one of the most sensational trials of the early 20th century, the Frank case seemed to press every hot-button issue of the time: North vs. South, black vs. white, Jew vs. Christian, industrial vs. agrarian. In the years since, it has inspired numerous books and films, TV programs, plays, musicals and songs. It has fueled legal discussions, spawned a traveling exhibition and driven public forums.
Who murdered Mary Phagan? What forces were behind the lynching of Frank? Why should we still care? Answers to these questions, or theories, keep coming.
"Leo Frank was not a good ole Southern boy. He was different and not ashamed of being different," said Ben Loeterman, whose new documentary, The People v. Leo Frank, will air on PBS. "The test of us as a society is not necessarily how we treat the best among us, but how we treat the most questionable."
Mixed in with ongoing analysis of the Phagan-Frank story are the descendants of those involved, people who learned of their connections differently and carry these legacies forward in unique ways. Frank was the one who handed Mary Phagan her check when she stopped by the factory on 26 April 1913, Confederate Memorial Day. The night watchman, Newt Lee, would find the body and call police early the next day.
Cathee Smithline, of Wyckoff, New Jersey, was sixteen when she first heard about the case. Her mother sat her down, told her a story about what a man in the South had been through, said it was based on her uncle and handed over a book: A Little Girl is Dead.
It turns out Smithline's mother got the news in her teens, too, when her boyfriend turned to her after seeing They Won't Forget, a 1937 Hollywood film. "You know that's about your uncle," he said.
She'd grown up hearing Uncle Leo died of pneumonia, and after asking family about it, the truth was revealed, followed by the words, "We will never talk about this again," Smithline said. "I think it was a family embarrassment," she said. "My grandmother [who died when Smithline was 1] was very close to her brother. It cannot be easy to tell someone your brother was lynched and why."
Mary Phagan Kean was thirteen when the story hit her. She was in a South Carolina classroom, and her name stopped short a teacher taking attendance. "Mary Phagan, you say?" she recalled the teacher asking, peering up from his list. He wanted to know if she was related to a girl with that name who died in 1913. Confidently, she told him she wasn't. But the boys on the playground taunted her anyway, telling her she was reincarnated from a dead girl. Traumatized, she asked her father about her name. "He turned whiter than white," she remembered. Mary Phagan had been her grandfather's little sister. He only wept when asked about her. When Mary Phagan Kean's family moved back to Marietta, questions about that name never stopped. "I went on a campaign," said Kean, 55, who sought out every article and piece of information she could find. "I did that for years and years and years."
The consensus of historians is that the Frank case was a miscarriage of justice. Crime scene evidence was destroyed, they say. A bloody hand print was not analyzed. Transcripts from the trial vanished. Frank's conviction was based largely on the testimony of a janitor, Jim Conley, who most came to see as Phagan's killer. He'd written notes found with the body, but said they were dictated to him. The prosecutor, Hugh Dorsey, used race in his argument, saying a black man couldn't be smart enough to come up with such stories. Witnesses would come forward to say Conley was seen carrying the body and washing out a bloody shirt. Conley's own attorney, William Smith, came to believe in Frank's innocence, scrawling a note to that effect on his death bed nearly 35 years later.
Conley, who appeared in the press for petty crimes over the years, eventually disappeared.
Dorsey, the prosecutor, had political aspirations riding on this win.
"A conviction of just another black guy wasn't going to do anything for his career," said Sandy Berman, the archivist at The William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum in Atlanta who created the traveling exhibit, Seeking Justice: The Leo Frank Case Revisited.
Two years after Frank's lynching, Dorsey was elected governor of Georgia. But the story was interpreted differently by Kean, who wrote The Murder of Little Mary Phagan, and stands by this conclusion: "Leo Frank was guilty as sin. He was a sexual pervert."
Kean often visits her namesake's grave in Marietta. She's not the only one. She says she's struck by the teddy bears people leave there.
Elizabeth Slaton Wallace couldn't be prouder of her heritage. At 81, she's the great-niece of the late Georgia Governor John M. Slaton, the man who commuted Frank's death sentence to a life sentence, believing Frank's innocence would be proved and, in doing so, ruined his political career. The Georgia National Guard was called out to protect the governor after his decision prompted a rabble-rousing newspaper publisher to call for the lynching of both Frank and Slaton. Frank had been moved to the state prison in Milledgeville, Georgia, where an inmate slashed his throat. He survived, but weeks later about two dozen Marietta men came into the prison, with no resistance from officials, and abducted Frank in the dark of night. By dawn, he was hanging from a tree in Marietta. Photographs of his dangling body and the crowds who gathered there adorned souvenir postcards.
"Leo Frank was a Jew and a Yankee Jew at that. He was railroaded. Uncle Jack knew that," said Wallace, who lives in Atlanta. She can't explain why the story persists to this day. But throughout her life she's witnessed the kindness of the Jewish community, especially toward her father, who was named for the late governor. "The Jewish community could never do enough for my father," said Wallace, who recalled being in a Jewish-owned store with her parents in the 1980s. "They could have given us the shop."
As grateful as they were to Slaton, Frank's lynching left Georgia's small Jewish community frightened. Many left the state; those who stayed kept a low profile. For decades, they only spoke of Frank in hushed tones.
The lynching of a white man can hardly be compared to what happened in the black community in the South. But this case, the only lynching of a Jew on American soil, was the culmination of a state-sponsored conspiracy, historians say. While Georgia Jews remained quiet, so did those who were involved in Frank's killing, said Steve Oney of Los Angeles, California, who wrote the authoritative book And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank. It would be about 80 years before members of the lynching party were publicly, and not just secretly, known.
"They were not liquored-up yahoos," said Oney, a journalist, editor and Atlanta native who spent seventeen years researching his book. "These were smart, deliberate people, from good, prominent families." They included a former governor, a former mayor, a U.S. senator's son, a judge, lawyers, a state legislator, and business owners. One of the 25 or so men was Cicero Dobbs, the grandfather-in-law of Roy Barnes, a Georgia lawyer and politician who is a former governor himself and will be running again in 2010.
Barnes and his wife, Marie, never knew Dobbs, who owned a taxi company in Marietta and likely provided transportation to the prison where Frank was held. Oney broke the news about the family connection to them. "Marie's parents didn't know. It was never mentioned," Barnes said. "On death beds, people confessed. It was just that powerful." Barnes, who is featured in the new documentary, said it's important to keep the story alive and learn from it. "It's a terrible blot on our history," he said. "How we keep it from happening again is to never forget."
Oops is now an oil rig term
Oh, well, another natural disaster
The snows of Mount Kilimanjaro will be gone within two decades, according to scientists who say that the rapid melting of its glacier cap over the past century provides dramatic physical evidence of global climate change.Rico says he'll be dead when the snow's all gone, and the young people of the next century will wonder about The Snows of Kilimanjaro... But only twelve thousand years since the last disappearance? A blink of an eye to the universe; only short-sighted humans think that's a long time.
If the forecast,based on 95 years of data tracking the retreat of the Kilimanjaro ice, proves correct, it will be the first time in about 12,000 years that the slopes of Africa’s highest mountain have been ice-free. Since 1912, 85 per cent of the glacier has disappeared and the melting does not appear to be slowing down. Twenty-six per cent of the ice has disappeared since 2000.
The study, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concludes that the primary cause of the ice loss is the increase in global temperatures. Although changes in cloudiness and snowfall may also play a role, these factors appear to be less important. Even intense droughts, including one lasting about 300 years, did not cause the present degree of melting.
The study, based on terrestrial and satellite photographs, shows the shrinking contours of ice at points between 1912 and 2007. The 12 sq km (4.6 sq miles) of ice coverage in 1912 contracted to 1.9 sq km by 2007, going from two large ice fields to a collection of several smaller, isolated patches.
In a second part of the study, scientists from the Ohio State University drilled down to the rock beneath the ice and extracted cylindrical crosssections, known as ice cores, at six different sites on the glacier. The cores, which were up to 49m (160ft) long, provided a record of the freezing, melting and precipitation patterns of the past 11,700 years.
Elongated bubbles in the surface layer of one of the cores indicated that extensive melting and refreezing had taken place in the past forty years. In the past even extreme climate events had not led to substantial melting. A severe drought 4,200 years ago lasting three centuries left a thin dust layer but no evidence of significant melting.
Radioactive dating techniques also showed that the ice was quickly thinning, as well as contracting in area. The Southern Ice Field had thinned by 5.1m between 2000 and 2007, and the smaller Furtwängler Glacier had thinned by 4.8m, fifty per cent of its total depth. “There will be a year when Furtwängler is present, and, by the next year, it will have disappeared,” Lonnie Thompson, a paleoclimatologist at Ohio State University who led the study, said.
The melting of Kilimanjaro is part of a trend of glacial retreat throughout Africa, India, and South America. Melting is occurring on Mount Kenya, the Rwenzori Mountains in central Africa, as well as on tropical glaciers high in the Andes and Himalayas.
“The fact that so many glaciers throughout the tropics and subtropics are showing similar responses suggests an underlying common cause,” Professor Thompson said. He attributed the changes to increases in the Earth’s surface temperatures, which are exaggerated at high altitudes. Scientists predict that, even if no further significant warming occurs, all but the very highest of summits will eventually melt.
The melting of glaciers can be devastating for species who rely on snowy environments for survival. It can also have consequences for agriculture. Much of the river flow in glacial regions comes from melt water and glacial retreat is predicted to increase water scarcity.
The Met Office predicted this month that glacial retreats could lead to a twenty per cent decline in global agricultural productivity.
And note how, in the book cover for that story, there's not as much snow, either:
Civil War for the day
02 November 2009
Prejudice is a bitch
Rico says accepting people of 'other' is hard, especially in a closed society like Korea. Choe Sang-Hun has the story in The New York Times:
On the evening of 10 July, Bonogit Hussain, a 29-year-old Indian man, and Hahn Ji-seon, a female Korean friend, were riding a bus near Seoul when a man in the back began hurling racial and sexist slurs at them. The situation would be a familiar one to many Korean women who have dated or even, as in Ms. Hahn’s case, simply traveled in the company of a foreign man. What was different this time, however, was that, once it was reported in the South Korean media, prosecutors sprang into action, charging the man they have identified only as Mr. Park, a 31-year-old, with contempt, the first time such charges had been applied to an alleged racist offense. Spurred by the case, which is pending in court, rival political parties in Parliament have begun drafting legislation that for the first time would provide a detailed definition of discrimination by race and ethnicity and impose criminal penalties.Rico says he's seen this sort of thing at work in Japan, years ago, but also here in the US; being a white guy in a black neighborhood in Philly can be tough, too...
For Mr. Hussain, subtle discrimination has been part of daily life for the two and half years he has lived here as a student and then research professor at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul. He says that, even in crowded subways, people tend not sit next to him. In June, he said, he fell asleep on a bus and when it reached the terminal, the driver woke him up by poking him in the thigh with his foot, an extremely offensive gesture in South Korea. “Things got worse for me this time, because I was with a Korean woman,” Mr. Hussain said in an interview. “Whenever I’ve walked with Ms. Hahn or other Korean women, most of the time I felt hostilities, especially from middle-aged men.”
South Korea, a country where until recently people were taught to take pride in their nation’s “ethnic homogeneity” and where the words “skin color” and “peach” are synonymous, is struggling to embrace a new reality. In just the past seven years, the number of foreign residents has doubled, to 1.2 million, even as the country’s population of 48.7 million is expected to drop sharply in coming decades because of its low birth rate.
Many of the foreigners come here to toil at sea or on farms or in factories, providing cheap labor in jobs shunned by South Koreans. Southeast Asian women marry rural farmers who cannot find South Korean brides. People from English-speaking countries find jobs teaching English in a society obsessed with learning the language from native speakers.
For most South Koreans, globalization has largely meant increasing exports or going abroad to study. But now that it is also bringing an influx of foreigners into a society where 42 percent of respondents in a 2008 survey said they had never once spoken with a foreigner, South Koreans are learning to adjust— often uncomfortably.
A report issued by Amnesty International criticized discrimination in South Korea against migrant workers, who mostly are from poor Asian countries, citing sexual abuse, racial slurs, inadequate safety training, and the mandatory disclosure of H.I.V. status, a requirement not imposed on South Koreans in the same jobs. Citing local news media and rights advocates, it said that following last year’s financial downturn, “incidents of xenophobia are on the rise.”
Ms. Hahn said, “Even a friend of mine confided to me that when he sees a Korean woman walking with a foreign man, he feels as if his own mother betrayed him.”
In South Korea, a country repeatedly invaded and subjugated by its bigger neighbors, people’s racial outlooks have been colored by “pure-blood” nationalism as well as traditional patriarchal mores, said Seol Dong-hoon, a sociologist at Chonbuk National University.
Centuries ago, when Korean women who had been taken to China as war prizes and forced into sexual slavery managed to return home, their communities ostracized them as tainted. In the last century, Korean “comfort women”, who worked as sex slaves for the Japanese Imperial Army, faced a similar stigma. Later, women who sold sex to American GI’s in the years following the 1950-53 Korean War were despised even more. Their children were shunned as twigi, a term once reserved for animal hybrids, said Bae Gee-cheol, 53, whose mother was expelled from her family after she gave birth to him following her rape by an American soldier.
Even today, the North Korean authorities often force abortion on women who return home pregnant after going to China to find food, according to defectors and human rights groups.
“When I travel with my husband, we avoid buses and subways,” said Jung Hye-sil, 42, who married a Pakistani man in 1994. “They glance at me as if I have done something incredible. There is a tendency here to control women and who they can date or marry, in the name of the nation.”
For many Koreans, the first encounter with non-Asians came during the Korean War, when American troops fought on the South Korean side. That experience has complicated South Koreans’ racial perceptions, Mr. Seol said. Today, the mix of envy and loathing of the West, especially of white Americans, is apparent in daily life.
The government and media obsess over each new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, to see how the country ranks against other developed economies. A hugely popular television program is “Chit Chat of Beautiful Ladies”, a show where young, attractive, mostly Caucasian women who are fluent in Korean discuss South Korea. Yet, when South Koreans refer to Americans in private conversations, they nearly always attach the same suffix as when they talk about the Japanese and Chinese, their historical masters: “nom,” which means “bastards”.
Tammy Chu, 34, a Korean-born film director who was adopted by Americans and grew up in New York State, said she had been “scolded and yelled at” in Seoul subways for speaking in English and thus “not being Korean enough.” Then, she said, her applications for a job as an English teacher were rejected on the grounds that she was “not white enough.”
Ms. Hahn said that after the incident in the bus last July, her family was “turned upside down”. Her father and other relatives grilled her as to whether she was dating Mr. Hussain. But when a cousin recently married a German, “all my relatives envied her, as if her marriage was a boon to our family,” she said.
The Foreign Ministry supports an anti-discrimination law, said Kim Se-won, a ministry official. In 2007, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination recommended that South Korea adopt such a law, deploring the widespread use of terms like “pure blood” and “mixed blood”. It urged public education to overcome the notion that South Korea was “ethnically homogenous”, which, it said, “no longer corresponds to the actual situation”.
But a recent forum to discuss proposed legislation against racial discrimination turned into a shouting match when several critics who had networked through the Internet showed up. They charged that such a law would only encourage even more migrant workers to come to South Korea, pushing native workers out of jobs and creating crime-infested slums. They also said it was too difficult to define what was racially or culturally offensive.
“Our ethnic homogeneity is a blessing,” said one of the critics, Lee Sung-bok, a bricklayer who said his job was threatened by migrant workers. “If they keep flooding in, who can guarantee our country won’t be torn apart by ethnic war as in Sri Lanka?”
Your terrorist is my freedom fighter, sort of
The New York Times has a story via al-Reuters about the Chinese protests over an unlikely bunch of terrorists:
China lashed out at the United States after the Obama administration sent six Uighur Chinese detainees from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay to the Pacific island nation of Palau. China has repeatedly demanded that the Uighurs be returned but the U.S. government has said it could not do so because they would face persecution, and it has searched for months for a nation willing to accept them.Rico says the Uighurs get moved from Cuba to Palau or Bermuda, both pretty cushy tropical paradises for terrorists. Surely Greenland could have taken them; that would have been punishment enough...
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said the six were "terror suspects" and ought to have been sent back to China. "We express our extreme dissatisfaction and resolute opposition that the United States disregarded the Chinese side and insisted on sending the terror suspects to a third place," Ma said in a statement on the ministry's website.
China had made "solemn representations" to the United States about the issue, he added. The six belonged to a terror group listed by the United Nations, and the United States had a duty to hand them over, Ma said. "China demands the United States abide by U.N. resolutions and fulfil its international anti-terror obligations, stop sending such terror suspects tofulfill third places, and should instead repatriate them to China as soon as possible," he added. "China opposes any country taking these terror suspects."
The Uighurs, who come from China's largely Muslim far-west region of Xinjiang, were swept up by the U.S. government during the Afghanistan war launched after the September 11th attacks on the United States.
The choice of Palau is likely to further infuriate China as the island is one of only 23 countries that recognize Taiwan over Beijing. Under its "one China" policy, Beijing claims self-ruled Taiwan as its own and insists on eventual unification, by force if necessary.
The transfer leaves 215 detainees at the detention camp that President Obama has pledged to close by 22 January, though political and legal hurdles are making it difficult for his administration to meet that goal.
Palau has agreed to take up to twelve Uighurs. Seven still remain at the controversial Guantanamo prison which was set up by the Bush administration to house terror suspects. Four other Uighurs were moved to Bermuda in June.
You Can Check Out Anytime You Like, But You Can Never Leave
Joe Childs and Thomas Tobin have an article in the St. Petersburg Times about Scientology:
For years, the Church of Scientology chased down and brought back staff members who tried to leave. Ex-staffers describe being pursued by their church and detained, cut off from family and friends, and subjected to months of interrogation, humiliation, and manual labor.Rico says there's a ton more to the story so, if you care (especially about Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman), click here to read the rest.
One said he was locked in a room and guarded around the clock. Some who did leave said the church spied on them for years. Others said that, as a condition for leaving, the church cowed them into signing embellished affidavits that could be used to discredit them if they ever spoke out.
The St. Petersburg Times has interviewed former high-ranking Scientology officials who coordinated the intelligence gathering and supervised the retrieval of staff who left, or "blew". They say the church, led by David Miscavige, wanted to contain the threat that those who left might reveal secrets of life inside Scientology.
Marty Rathbun, a former church official and confidant of Miscavige, said the leader especially targeted those he had edged aside during his rise to the top or anyone he feared might threaten his position or the church if left alone on the outside.
When the church founder L. Ron Hubbard was in charge, "there were no fences," Rathbun said. "If somebody blew, they blew. It wasn't until these purges started with Miscavige— where he was creating enemies and people… became a threat to him— that we went into this overdrive scenario."
Church spokesman Tommy Davis categorically denied Miscavige knew about or was involved in the pursuit of runaways or spying on former members. He said Rathbun and other former staff are liars, taking their own misdeeds and blaming them on Miscavige and the religion they have forsaken. He said they are trying to undermine Miscavige's leadership even as he presides over unprecedented church growth.
Miscavige "redefines the term 'religious leader,'" Davis said, while some of the Times sources are on the 'lunatic fringe' of anti-Scientology. He said they are the real villains, who Miscavige dismissed for "suborning perjury, obstruction of justice, and wasting millions of dollars of parishioner funds". He accused the Times of "naked bias" and engaging in tabloid journalism. "You have a few petty allegations,'' Davis said. "In fact, all you have is a few people who left a religion after committing destructive acts and are now complaining about what they did while in the church."
The story of how the church commands and controls its staff is told by the pursuers and the pursued, by those who sent spies and those spied upon, by those who interrogated and those who rode the hot seat. In addition to Rathbun, they include:
•Mike Rinder, who for 25 years oversaw the church's Office of Special Affairs, which handled intelligence, legal, and public affairs matters. Rinder and Rathbun said they had private investigators spy on perceived or potential enemies. They say they had an operative infiltrate a group of five former Scientology staffers that included the Gillham sisters, Terri and Janis, two of the original four "messengers" who delivered Hubbard's communications. They and other disaffected Scientologists said they were spied on for almost a decade.
•Gary Morehead, the security chief for seven years at the church's international base in the desert east of Los Angeles. He said he helped develop the procedure the church followed to chase and return those who ran, and he brought back at least 75 of them. "I lost count there for awhile." Staffers signed a waiver when they came to work at the base that allowed their mail to be opened, Morehead said. His department opened all of it, including credit card statements and other information that was used to help track runaways.
•Don Jason, for seven years the second-ranking officer at Scientology's spiritual mecca in Clearwater, supervised a staff of 350. He said that after he ran, he turned himself in and ended up locked in his cabin on the church cruise ship, the Freewinds. He said he was held against his will.
And then there's the story of the cook, his wife and the movie stars.
But "lunatic fringe of anti-Scientology"? No, they got that backwards; Scientology is the lunatic fringe... (And why didn't those who 'blew' get themselves some gubs and deal with those idiots trying to drag them back? Rico says it's another case of being stupid, thus unarmed and vulnerable...)
Oops is now a nautical term
Officials examine the damaged bow of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Forces destroyer JS Kurama on 28 October 2009 in Kitakyushu, Fukuoka Prefecture in southern Japan. The 5,200-ton warship and a 7,400-ton South Korean container ship, the Carina Star, collided in the narrow Kanmon Strait between Japanese main islands of Kyushu and Honshu, sparking fires on both ships and injuring three Kurama crew members, officials said.
Rico's own history
Another one goes to Allah
A suicide bomb killed 35 people near Pakistan's military headquarters Monday while a second blast wounded several police, continuing a wave of terrorism that prompted the United Nations to suspend long-term development work near the Afghan border.
The rash of attacks by Islamist militants has killed at least 300 people across Pakistan over the past month — including 11 U.N. workers — and threatened to destabilize the nuclear-armed nation.
The violence has grown bloodier since the government launched an anti-Taliban offensive in mid-October, pushing into the impoverished and underdeveloped tribal region of South Waziristan. The U.N. decision to suspend non-emergency aid could weaken efforts to counter the appeal of extremism by improving ordinary people's daily lives.
The first suicide bomber Monday killed 35 people outside a bank near Pakistan's military headquarters in Rawalpindi, just a few miles (kilometers) from Islamabad.
Most of those waiting in line were from the military and were there to cash paychecks, said Mohammad Mushtaq, a wounded soldier.
"I was sitting on the pavement outside to wait for my turn," said Mushtaq, who suffered a head injury. "The bomb went off with a big bang. We all ran. I saw blood and body parts everywhere."
Four soldiers were killed in the attack and nine were wounded, said the army's chief spokesman, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas. In total, 35 people were killed, Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira said.
No group claimed responsibility for the bombing, though suspicion immediately fell on the Pakistani Taliban.
Hours later, another suicide bombing ripped through a police checkpoint on the outskirts of the eastern city of Lahore. At least seven policemen were wounded and two were in critical condition after a car with two men inside blew up as police went to search it.
"By putting their lives in danger, our men have saved the city from enormous sabotage," Lahore Police Chief Pervaiz Rathor told reporters at the scene.
Police checkpoints, where cars are forced to drive slowly past officers looking inside, have become common sights in Pakistan.
Pakistan's president and other top officials condemned the blasts but vowed to press on with the South Waziristan offensive. Taliban militants have de facto control in many of the semiautonomous tribal areas.
The U.S. has reportedly provided technical support to the South Waziristan offensive, seeing the rugged mountain area as a haven for Islamist extremists involved in attacks on Western troops in Afghanistan.
The government has sealed off the battle zone to outsiders, making confirmation of military reports impossible to confirm, but officials insist the offensive is going well.
On Monday, Abbas said the army had captured the Taliban town of Kaniguram and killed 12 militants in the past 24 hours.
Washington, which has long provided massive military assistance to Pakistan, has stepped up its efforts to use development aid in a broader battle against the spreading militancy. The U.S. government recently approved $7.5 billion in aid over five years to improve Pakistan's economy, education and other nonmilitary sectors.
But the U.N. decision to suspend long-term development work in Pakistan's tribal areas and its North West Frontier Province could complicate international efforts to win hearts and minds.
The world body will reduce the level of international staff in Pakistan and confine its work to emergency, humanitarian relief, and security operations, and "any other essential operations as advised by the secretary-general," the organization said in a statement.
The U.N. made its decision after losing 11 personnel in attacks in Pakistan this year, including last month's bombing of the World Food Program's office in Islamabad that killed five people, said U.N. spokeswoman Amena Kamaal. "All of the decisions are being made in light of that."
The U.N. has been deeply involved in helping Pakistan deal with refugee crises resulting from army offensives against militants — work that will apparently continue — but Kamaal said the organization was still determining which programs would be suspended and how many staffers would be withdrawn. Staff that remain in the country will be assigned additional security.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Abdul Basit said Pakistan understood the U.N.'s decision, but said he hoped the organization would resume its work after the military completes the South Waziristan offensive.
Better drones, better killing of terrorists
The Pentagon plans to dramatically increase the surveillance capabilities of its most advanced unmanned aircraft next year, adding so many video feeds that a drone which now stares down at a single house or vehicle could keep constant watch on nearly everything that moves within an area of one-and-a-half square miles. The year after that, the capability will double to three square miles.
Military officials predict that the impact on counter-terrorism operations in Afghanistan will be impressive. "Predators and other unmanned aircraft have just revolutionized our ability to provide a constant stare against our enemy," said a senior military official. "The next sensors, mark my words, are going to be equally revolutionary."
Unmanned MQ-9 Reaper aircraft now produce a single video feed as they fly continuously over surveillance routes, and the area they can cover largely depends on altitude. The new technology initially will increase the number of video feeds to 12 and eventually to 65. Like the Reaper and its earlier counterpart, the Predator, the newest technology program has been given a fearsome name: the Gorgon Stare, named for the mythological creature whose gaze turns victims to stone.
Unmanned aircraft, used both for surveillance and for offensive strikes, are considered the most significant advance in military technology in a generation. They not only have altered the conduct of warfare, but have also changed the nature of the current policy debate in Washington. The improvements have bolstered the arguments of those in the Obama administration who oppose sending additional troops to Afghanistan. Unmanned aircraft also play a large role in the compromise plans being discussed by the administration. The White House is considering stepping up the use of Reaper and Predator aircraft in rural Afghanistan as a way to disrupt the Taliban and militant groups without having to put thousands of additional troops in sparsely populated areas.
"The technology allows us to project power without vulnerability," said a senior Defense official. "You don't have to deploy as many people. And in the modern age you want as little stuff forward as long as you can achieve the effects as if you had lots of people forward."
But some officials caution that policymakers should not rely too heavily on the unmanned drones. "It has made some people feel there can be a pure counter-terrorism mission without any counter-insurgency strategy," said a government official. "But that isn't truly viable without taking on a certain amount of risk."
Strikes by CIA-piloted unmanned aircraft have been deeply unpopular in Pakistan, where much of the population believes they have killed civilians as well as militants. In Afghanistan, drone missile strikes are subject to the same strict rules that apply to other airstrikes, guidelines that have helped reduce civilian casualties.
But the government official said if the U.S. steps up the number of strikes by Predators and Reapers, collateral damage and inadvertent civilian deaths will rise. "If you had a bead on Mullah Omar, of course you would strike," said the official. "But some ten-dollar-a-day thug, most people would say it is not worth it. There is a high downside of the attacks that is always present." Still, there is broad acceptance that unmanned aircraft and new surveillance technologies will play an outsize role. "It is very promising and will be of great value here," said Major General Michael T. Flynn, who leads military intelligence in Afghanistan. The Reapers' primary camera currently films thirty frames per second. To save bandwidth, the Gorgon Stare will transmit pictures at two frames per second, comparable to capturing every other step someone takes.
Computers will take the Gorgon Stare images and "quilt" them into a mosaic that shows a large swath of territory, military officials said. That will enable the Defense Department to keep unblinking watch on a midsize city or village, turning the Reapers into a kind of heavily-armed traffic camera.
Such "pattern of life" intelligence is considered crucial for analysts who are trying to hunt down members of an insurgent network. Using the video feeds, analysts will be able to zoom in on different parts of the city, or follow the movement of particular people. Officials also plan to store weeks of video feeds on computer servers, so that analysts will be able to look back in time to follow the movements of people or vehicles.
"Using the all-seeing eye, you will find out who is important in a network, where they live, where they get their support from, where their friends are," said the senior military official. "This gives you the option to arrest the individuals, talk to the individuals, or wait till those people have gone down a lonely stretch of road and take them out with a Hellfire missile."
Werner Dahm, the Air Force's chief scientist, said the scientific challenge for the Air Force Research Laboratories is to develop ways to automate or partially automate the analysis of all of the video of the wide-area surveillance. Defense officials say improving and speeding analysis is as important as the technological advances in collection. Predator and Reaper drones also can intercept electronic communications from radios, cellphones or other communication devices.
Last year, the Air Force overhauled how it organized its intelligence analysts. For the first time, video-feed analysts worked side by side with those listening to the audio. "It is not just video resolution, it is not just signals, it is not just access to analysts," said the Defense official. "What has really evolved is the fact we can integrate a variety of information and analyze it in real time."
The number of Air Force unmanned drones available for deployment has increased significantly. In 2006, the Air Force was able to fly six drones at a time. Now operators are able to keep 38 aloft at once, and the Air Force hopes to reach fifty by 2011.
With the wide-area surveillance technologies, the number of video feeds collected at one time is due to expand exponentially, from 38 today to nearly 3,000 by 2013.
"This is Buzz Lightyear technology," said a military officer. "This is an unprecedented amount of information in warfare."
Yeah, suspicion's a bitch
In this east-side Cleveland neighborhood, where gunfire and drug use are part of the landscape, there are no strangers to tragedy. But what police discovered inside a cream-hued duplex on Imperial Avenue was horrific even here: the bodies of six women— two stuffed into crawl spaces, some decayed beyond recognition— in the home of a convicted rapist.Rico says it's almost incidental (though probably not to the victims) to call this guy a rapist; he's a murderer who happened to rape his victims before killing them.
On Sunday, a day after police arrested Anthony Sowell, 50, the Cuyahoga County coroner declared what most people had surmised: All six were homicide victims. The bodies have not been identified, and Sowell has not been charged in any of the deaths.
The shocked community is grappling with self-recrimination. "One of my neighbors has been missing since May, and now I wonder if she was in there," said Teresa Brown, 54, an usher at the nearby Perfect Peace Baptist Church. "If I'd done something, called someone, would it have made a difference?"
Cleveland police found the bodies almost by accident. Officers arrived at the property to arrest Sowell on a separate rape charge. He wasn't there, but the smell of decay was so thick that officers headed upstairs. They found two bodies on the living room floor. As the days passed, investigators found another body in a freshly dug grave underneath a set of stairs in the backyard. Two more were crammed into a crawl space inside the house. The sixth was in a shallow grave in the basement.
"The stench of decay was overwhelming," said Lieutenant Thomas Stacho, spokesman for the Cleveland police department. "The closest I got was fifteen feet from an open door, and it was more than bad enough. I can't figure out how the neighbors didn't know something was wrong."
They did. For months, they said, they gagged whenever they walked past the wood-framed house, with its listing porch and neatly mowed lawn. Some recalled that Sowell's clothing smelled bad enough to make their eyes water. "He came into my store last week and reeked so bad, I had to open the front and back doors," said Eli Tayeh, who owns the Amira Imperial Beverage convenience store across the street. "I asked why he stunk. He shrugged, bought his beer and walked out."
Neighbors blamed the smell on mundane causes: body odor, the garbage bins Sowell picked through for scrap metal, the raw meat next door at Ray's Sausage Shop. No one called the authorities. No one, they said, even thought to do so. After all, in Cleveland these days, help can be hard to find.
The city has been reeling from the foreclosure crisis for several years. Its unemployment rate was 10.3% in September, and it has one of the nation's highest poverty rates. Hard hit by the collapse of the steel and auto industries, Cleveland has seen its population fall by half since 1960.
On Sunday, as police guarded the property, locals and the morbidly curious walked past and took pictures. Some stopped to pray. They stared at the upper floors, where investigators had left the windows and porch door open. Standing across the street, Tamica Pierceton wrinkled her nose in disgust. "We kept away from him and he kept away from us," said Pierceton, 26, who lives in the predominantly black area. "We should have said something to someone. I wish I had."
Sowell moved into the duplex's upstairs unit in 2005 after serving fifteen years in state prison for choking and raping a woman, investigators said. The property was owned by family members, but only his stepmother lived in the house, local media reports said.
Neighbors said Sunday that Sowell had told them his stepmother was having difficulty walking up stairs and had moved to a nursing home about a year ago. Investigators say they are trying to find her. Police learned that she had tried to kick Sowell out after he refused to pay rent, and had not been heard from recently, Stacho said.
Sowell registered with the state as a sex offender, as required by state law, investigators said. On 22 September, deputies with the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Department did a spot check on him to confirm that he was living at the address where he was registered, officials said. Later the same day, a woman contacted police and told them Sowell had choked her with an extension cord and raped her inside the home.
Police arrived to serve a warrant for his arrest and made their discovery. Officers located and arrested Sowell on Saturday. Only two victims were intact enough for the coroner to determine that they were black. At least four were found to have died from strangulation. Some of the bodies were so decomposed that investigators called in an entomologist from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History to gather evidence to help narrow down when the victims were killed.
Since police asked the public for help Saturday, three people have come forward with information about missing loved ones. "I haven't seen my sister for a year," Denice Patton told local media, holding a crumpled photocopy of the missing woman's picture. "She lived in the neighborhood. It's aggravating, it's stressful. I just want to know where she is."
Out of disaster, rebirth
A Navy assault ship built with steel from the fallen World Trade Center and named in honor of the city and state that were home to the twin towers is making its inaugural visit there. The USS New York was scheduled to sail up the Hudson River today. The $1 billion ship was built in Louisiana, incorporating about 7.5 tons of World Trade Center steel that was melted down and used in the bow structure.Rico says that someone, somewhere, is going to get their ass handed to them when this ship goes on duty...
As part of its journey, the ship is scheduled to stop when it nears Ground Zero, where first responders, families of September 11th victims, and the public have been invited to watch a 21-gun salute. Rosaleen Tallon, whose firefighter brother Sean Tallon died in the attacks, planned to be among them. "I think it's a really nice tribute," she said, adding that her brother, who also was a Marine, would be proud. She said she was glad that steel from the fallen towers would be used in a new form. "It's a transformation of it from something really twisted and ugly," Tallon said. "I'm proud that our military is using that steel."
Lieutenant Commander Colette Murphy, a Navy spokeswoman, said she was excited for those serving on board to see how the city would welcome them. "I think it's going to be awe-inspiring," she said. Of the 361 sailors serving aboard the ship, around thirteen percent are from New York State, which is higher than would normally be the case, Murphy said. There were many requests from Navy personnel to serve on the ship, which will also be carrying around 250 Marines, she said.
After the Ground Zero stop, the ship is expected to sail upriver to the George Washington Bridge, where it will turn around and head south to Pier 88, where it will dock. An official commissioning ceremony is scheduled for Saturday. The New York will remain in the city through Veteran's Day and then head to Norfolk, Virginia for about a year of crew training and exercises. The ship is 684 feet long and can carry as many as 800 Marines. Its flight deck can handle helicopters and the MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft.
It was scheduled to be built before the terrorist attacks. About a year later, the announcement came that the ship would bear the name New York to honor the city, state, and those who died. It's the latest in a line of Navy ships to bear that name. The others included a Spanish-American War-era cruiser, a battleship that served in World War One and World War Two, and a nuclear submarine that retired from the fleet in 1997.
The ship is technically known as a San Antonio-class amphibious dock vessel. Four vessels in that class are in service, the USS San Antonio, USS New Orleans, USS Mesa Verde and USS Green Bay. Four others are being built. Of those, two have also been named in connection with the September 11th attacks. The USS Arlington was named to honor the attack on the Pentagon. The USS Somerset was named after the county in Pennsylvania where United Airlines flight 93 crashed.
Couldn't have put it better himself
Rico says that, given that it's ZDNet.com, you'd expect no less a headline:
Yes, based on Mac history, Windows 7.5 will suck lessThe article, by David Morgenstern, runs in the same vein:
No doubt, Windows 7 users will find that the latest update to the Microsoft client operating system sucks less than Vista. And so they should after all the time, effort, and budget line items put into the fixes (and let’s not forget the pain in the user base). One of Apple’s latest ads counter by recalling past promises with of Redmond for a better experience, which reminds me of a time when a certain Mac OS also “sucked less.”
However, I don’t buy Redmond’s “Lucky 7″ version count.
In the Apple ad, the Windows 7 character transforms into the following previous versions: Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Me, Windows 95, Windows 2. This leaves Windows 1.0, which totals 7 versions.
I see the count differently than Apple or Microsoft: There can be no dispute until we head past flavors of Windows 3. Here’s my list:
Windows 1: Shipped in 1985 and nobody cared.
Windows 2: Shipped in 1987 and few cared.
Windows 3: Came out in 1990 and PC users cared, especially with Windows 3.1 in 1992 (And I include here the introduction of Windows NT, which I believe was given a 3.x number.)
Windows 4: Windows 95. Huge. The last DOS-based version.
Windows 5: Windows 2000. The transition to the NT kernel.
Windows 6: Windows XP. Still gotta love it.
Window 7: Vista. Incorporated a number of Longhorn elements.
Windows 7.5: What Microsoft is calling Windows 7.
In the Windows Vista Team blog, Mike Nash says that Windows 7 is called Version 7 for “simplicity.”The decision to use the name Windows 7 is about simplicity. Over the years, we have taken different approaches to naming Windows. We’ve used version numbers like Windows 3.11, or dates like Windows 98, or “aspirational” monikers like Windows XP or Windows Vista. And since we do not ship new versions of Windows every year, using a date did not make sense. Likewise, coming up with an all-new “aspirational” name does not do justice to what we are trying to achieve, which is to stay firmly rooted in our aspirations for Windows Vista, while evolving and refining the substantial investments in platform technology in Windows Vista into the next generation of Windows.It makes sense to you, Mike. To me and most Vista users, the update is mostly a big batch of fixes bundled with some new features and fixes to the interface outrages of Vista. So, this Windows 7 should be called Windows 7.5.
Simply put, this is the seventh release of Windows, so therefore “Windows 7″ just makes sense.
Version 7 reminds me of the problems faced by Apple and the Mac community with the transition to System 7 back in the early 1990s. FYI: in those days, it wasn’t called Mac OS System 7 or Mac OS 7, or whatever; it was just plain System 7. It ran on Macs.
For developers, System 7 was a huge transition, similar to the later transition experienced moving from the Classic Mac OS to the Unix-based Mac OS X. It introduced support requirements for technologies or capabilities that today we would find almost unimaginable to be without:
- The version required a hard disk and needed more memory than the older System 6, which ran in 1MB of RAM (yes, that’s “megabyte”).
- Support for multitasking with Multifinder became mandatory for programs as was support for “32-bit clean” coding (now we’re making the transition to 64-bit computing). Color support was also assumed and required by developers.
- System extensions, or “inits” that let developers and users add low-level capabilites at boot time.
- Full implementation of a drag-and-drop interface.
- Aliases for files, directories, disk volumes, printers and network shares.
- File sharing, which was done over an AppleTalk network.
- Apple Events and their scripting language, AppleScript, were introduced.
Users found that performance with older hardware suffered. It was a tough time. In a January 1993 special report in MacWEEK, more than a year after release, less than half of machines at subscriber sites had upgraded. Software compatibility was still an issue and hardware upgrade costs constrained adoption. A “Pro” version, System 7.1 wasn’t well received.
In the summer of 1994, Apple engineers prepped a major fix. At the Macworld Expo in Boston, I remember walking down the hallway to an Apple insider developer party in a hotel. It was ad hoc, not funded by marketing; a few bowls of potato chips. Yet, like almost everything at Apple then, there was a t-shirt for the event. It read “System 7.5 sucks less” and “We’ve upped our standards — up yours.” This was pointed jab at third-party developers. Ouch. Still, a bit defensive.
And Version 7.5 was better. It did suck less, a lot less.
My guess is that Windows 7 will suck less. Or maybe, Apple is right, we will have to wait for Windows 7.5. Whatever, I’m still staying with Windows XP on my MacBook Pro. The price is right.
No Holocaust for these Jews
When Moses came down from Mount Sinai about 3,300 years ago, he couldn't have seen these Jews coming.Rico says more power to 'em, tattoo'd or not...
A blogger writes about how one of Judaism's holiest days ended, for her, in a strip club, while elsewhere a guy strolls into a tattoo parlor requesting a Star of David. Two women exchange wedding vows in a Jewish ceremony, and hipsters toss back bottles of He'Brew, The Chosen Beer. A full-time software developer prepares to lead a group in Jewish prayer, as a PhD candidate in Jewish thought pens a letter criticizing Israel's policies.
Meet the "New Jews," as some call them: pockets of post-baby boomers or, more accurately, Generation X and Millennial (Gen Y) Jews, who are making one of the world's oldest known monotheistic faiths and its culture work for them and others in a time when, more than ever, affiliation is a choice.
"I could wake up tomorrow and say, 'I don't want to be Jewish.' There would be no social, political, or economic consequences," said Shawn Landres, the 37-year-old co-founder of Jumpstart, a Los Angeles-area organization that pushes forward out-of-the-box ideas in the Jewish world. "It's true for the first time in thousands of years that we can build the identities we want."
Many of those at the forefront of innovative Jewish construction are rabbis, religious educators, people who know their stuff. But they're not interested in foisting labels on people— like the denominational terms Reform, Conservative or Orthodox— nor do they want to perpetuate the pressures that come with fitting into religious, political and social molds.
For Atlanta, Georgia punk-rock musician Patrick A, or Aleph (the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet), this means he can seamlessly blend who he's been with his newly embraced religious observance.
"When I'm on stage screaming, hitting my face with a microphone and pouring beer on my head, at least I'm singing about the Torah," said the 26-year-old founder of PunkTorah, an outreach effort to inspire Jewish spirituality.
Turns out the traditional synagogue model doesn't have a lock on religious offerings. One alternative that's sprouted up: independent prayer groups that invite the spiritually hungry to study text, as well as shape and lead their own services.
"It's tapping into a need that stems from people wanting to take hold of their Jewish life," said Rabbi Elie Kaunfer, 36, executive director of Mechon Hadar, a New York-based organization that tracks and empowers such groups. He said there are about sixty nationwide. "When the institution wasn't serving the need, people stood up to create their own communities."
It's this kind of innovation that Jonathan Sarna, of Brandeis University and a leading scholar of American Jewish history, can get behind. "When there's religious complacency, when there's boredom, we're much more likely to see people check out," said Sarna, who is a member of an Orthodox synagogue. The more pressing issue, he added, is whether cultural ties alone can keep Jewish life going.
That concern is a real one, said Steven Cohen, a sociologist at Hebrew Union College in New York. He said about half of young Jews are not marrying Jews, and that only 25 percent of children born to interfaith couples grow up to see themselves as Jewish.
But by making Judaism and its rituals more accessible and meaningful Emergent Jews, as they're also often referred to, hope they can inspire a long-lasting connection to their faith.
It's why volunteer-driven educational retreats, sponsored by a group called Limmud (Hebrew for learning), are cropping up in Colorado, Illinois, Georgia and across the globe. It's why Jewish Milestones in Berkeley, California, is helping interfaith, same-sex and other couples have Jewish weddings. And it's why another Bay Area group, Wilderness Torah, hosts Passover in the desert, where participants combine Jewish traditions with their commitment to the outdoors and sustainable living.
Unlike their parents and grandparents, who may have gathered to fight anti-Semitism, remember the Holocaust, rally around Israel, and liberate Soviet Jews, many Gen X and Y Jews see their worlds as wide open.
These Internet and media savvy Jews are behind what Ari Wallach, a 34-year-old social entrepreneur and consultant in New York, likes to call Judaism 2.0. "They want to re-engage in the world as Jews, but not solely for Jewish causes," said Wallach, who was one of the forces behind The Great Schlep, an online push, featuring comedian Sarah Silverman, that encouraged young Jews to fly to Florida and convince their grandparents to vote for Barack Obama. "If asked, 'Would you rather fund raise for trees in Israel or for solar-powered ovens for refugees in Darfur,'" he said, "they're more likely to go with Darfur," which is why the American Jewish World Service, an organization that fights poverty, disease and hunger in the developing world, resonates with many of them in a way other Jewish organizations don't.
In fact, they may not have a relationship with Israel. And if they do, it's often complicated. They might support the country and people while being critical of the government's policies and wanting a Palestinian state, too, as evidenced by J Street, a new left-leaning lobbying group in Washington.
Jay Michaelson, a 38-year-old writer, activist and scholar received a torrent of responses when he recently wrote in The Forward, a daily Jewish newspaper, about his ambivalent love for Israel, where he lived for three years. The reactions that interested him most came from rabbis and Jewish Federation leaders who wrote, "You've said what I cannot say," said Michaelson, who was the founding editor of Zeek, an online journal to push discussions about the Jewish tomorrow. "There's a climate of fear, and they cannot speak out on this issue."
But many of these "New Jews" aren't afraid to be who they are, say and show how they feel.
Heeb magazine, a hipster quarterly based in Brooklyn, does this and leaves some cringing. The magazine recently raised a collective "oy", and stirred outrage, when it published a photograph of Roseanne Barr standing at an oven, dressed as Hitler, holding a tray of burnt-Jew cookies. The intention, said publisher Josh Neuman, was to force a conversation about how pervasive Hitler references are in modern culture. "We aim to elicit responses, even if they're illicit responses," said Neuman, 36, who formerly taught Jewish culture and thought, and worked at the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.
If they can't easily find what inspires them, some create it themselves. Sarah Lefton, 36, of San Francisco, California, said she developed G-dcast, weekly cartoon webisodes, narrated by a wide cast of characters, including an indie rocker, to make Jewish learning more engaging, "because God knows we all grew up in boring Sunday school classes."
Allowing younger Jews to connect with their faith while living in a secular world is what drives Aaron Bisman, 29. Inspiration came for him at a 1996 Phish show, when the rock band busted out with a performance of Avinu Malkeinu, a Jewish prayer. Hearing a non-Jew sing in Hebrew a song to thousands of fans showed this rabbi's son that Jewish expression could go mainstream, without being limited to Larry David shtick.
So he formed JDub Records, the original label for Matisyahu, the Hasidic Jewish reggae phenom. Bisman's New York nonprofit promotes cross-cultural understanding by putting out innovative Jewish sounds, like hip-hop meshed with Israeli folk songs. JDub also recently adopted Jewcy, an online media outlet rich in blogs and discussions, to help build more bridges.
And mixed in with all this are those who, irrespective of where they are religiously or in the Jewish community, advertise their identities with Jewish-themed tattoos, as Andy Abrams, who is behind Tattoo Jew, a documentary in development, found out.
They're not swayed by the long-perpetuated myth that Jews with tattoos cannot be buried in Jewish cemeteries. While tattoos are prohibited by Jewish law, Rabbi Joel Roth, a professor of Talmud and Jewish law at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York said he knows of "no Jewish legal source that would prohibit the burial of a Jew who violated that law." If such a prohibition existed, added Florence Pressman, executive director of Jewish Funeral Directors of America, "how would we honor our Holocaust survivors?"
When they're getting inked with Hebrew letters or Jewish symbols, these Jews are not fretting about laws followed by the most observant. Nor are they haunted by the numbers tattooed on arms during the Holocaust, said Abrams, the forty-year-old filmmaker of St. Louis, Missouri. They're taking a bold stand today that they'll carry with them, permanently, into the future."They're being overtly Jewish," Abrams said. "They're saying, 'I'm Jewish. I'm proud. And I'm willing to wear it on my skin.'"
01 November 2009
Elsewhere
31 October 2009
Saluting the dead
Rico says it's a sad day when a president gets ragged for doing the right thing, but there is the question of the salute, as one Canadian reporter noted: "Frankly, knowing that he had never worn the uniform of his nation, it bothered me that he would stand there in the dark giving a salute. The closest he ever got to wearing a uniform and saluting in his past was when he was in the Boy Scouts— the Indonesian Boy Scouts."
As Rico remembered, it probably wasn't the exact right thing, either:
Is it appropriate for a non-military person to return a salute or initate a salute to a military person? No, it is not. A military salute is a greeting accorded to those who are or were engaged in the profession of arms and then only for those who have not disgraced themselves and the profession. Aside from being a gesture of respect, it is also an expression of brotherhood. If you didn't earn the right to salute, don't do it.But maybe it was okay anyway (as it was with Rico):
While it is a breach of the formal protocols, if it is actually out of respect and could not possibly be taken for sarcasm or mockery it would likely be received in the spirit it was rendered.
Don't fuck with the Chinese
Sharon LaFraniere has the story in The New York Times:
A long-running dispute over Google’s efforts to digitize books has spread this month to China, where authors have banded together to demand that their works be protected from what they call unauthorized copying. Two Chinese writers’ groups claim that Google has scanned Chinese works into an electronic database in violation of international copyright standards. The organizations are urging China’s authors to step forward and defend their rights. “Google has seriously violated the copyrights of Chinese authors. That is an undeniable fact,” Chen Qirong, a spokesman for the China Writers’ Association, said by telephone. The group says it represents nearly 9,000 writers. Google has sent a representative to Beijing to meet with officials of the China Written Works Copyright Society, which manages Chinese copyrights. The company insists it has fully complied with copyright protections.Rico says it's a legal quagmire, and he hopes Google can find its way out...
Google’s ambitions to digitize millions of books, in most cases without first seeking permission from publishers or authors, has been contentious in the United States and elsewhere for more than four years.
But most Chinese authors learned of Google’s efforts only this month, after writers’ groups were notified of a potential class-action settlement between Google and American authors and publishers. Some Chinese authors discovered that Google had obtained their works from libraries in the United States and scanned them into its database.
The settlement would allow Google to create a vast library and bookstore where the full text of the digitized books would be available in the United States. For now, the books appear only in the company’s Book Search service, which allows people to read short snippets of copyrighted texts or, if the company has obtained permission, longer excerpts.
“We take the view, backed up by international copyright law, that no copyright is violated in this process since the amount of text displayed is so small and it’s purely for information,” said Courtney Hohne, a Google spokeswoman, in an phone interview from Singapore. “In fact, it’s comparable to a quotation from a book in a review or our Web search results, both of which are perfectly legal.”
Ms. Hohne said it was virtually impossible for Google to discover who holds the rights to all of the millions of books on library shelves. Waiting for copyright holders to surface would doom any effort to create a comprehensive electronic index, she said. If a copyright holder does object, Google removes the snippets or even all reference to the book from the search engine, she said.
The Chinese groups see it differently. “It is as if you have something nice in your living room and Google takes it and puts it in its living room,” said Zhang Hongbo, deputy director general of the Chinese copyright society. “We are definitely opposed to using our works without our permission.”
The class-action settlement, if approved, would create a registry of copyright holders and allow them to share in revenue generated through online book purchases or subscriptions to the database. Mr. Zhang said Chinese authors didn’t like the proposed settlement either. “We think that reconciliation is extremely unfair,” he said. “We don’t accept it.”
The settlement is currently being rewritten, in part because of opposition from the Justice Department. Marybeth Peters, the top copyright official in the United States, told Congress in September that the settlement could put “diplomatic stress” on the government because it would affect foreign authors whose rights were protected by international treaties. The governments of France and Germany oppose the deal.
A few Chinese authors have suggested that Google has not only scanned in their works, it has published selections of them online without obtaining permission. No such cases could be immediately confirmed, and at least a few authors appeared to be mistaken about whether their books could be viewed.
Ms. Hohne said more than fifty Chinese publishers had allowed parts of 60,000 books to be read online at books.google.cn. Typically, publishers have agreed to allow Google to show about twenty percent of the book and link to sites where readers can buy it, she said.
Stupid rule, anyway
Andy Pettitte held his black Louisville Slugger bat close to his chest, treating it as carefully as if he were carrying a three-month-old baby. He wore blue-and-white batting gloves and a blue helmet. He was a pitcher trying to prove that he could fake it as a hitter. “I’ve got my name on it,” Pettitte said, happily displaying the barrel of the bat. “I’ve got my own signature model.”
Now that the setting for the World Series has switched to this National League city for the next three games, the Yankees will watch pitchers bat against the Phillies. The Yankees will try not to grimace as pitchers who have not swung bats for four months will swing them in the most important games of the season. Pettitte will be the first to take some cuts, in Game 3 on Saturday night. “Hopefully, I get a hit somewhere,” said Pettitte, who did not sound too hopeful.
Actually, the Yankees will probably not cringe when C.C. Sabathia hits in Game Four or Five. More than any Yankee pitcher, Sabathia, who is 6 feet 7 inches tall and more than 300 pounds, looks and acts like a hitter. Sabathia stands tall in the batter’s box, holds the bat steady, takes a short stride into the ball, and has a fluid swing.
Sabathia also has a strategy that could be called the Babe Ruth approach. Pettitte laughed as he explained that the difference between him and Sabathia is that Pettitte is trying to “get the ball through the infield” and Sabathia is trying to bash the ball 400 feet, but Pettitte was not joking. Sabathia confirmed Pettitte’s characterization. “I’m trying to hit a homer,” Sabathia said. “If I hit a single, I hit a single. I hit a double, I hit a double. I’m trying to go deep.”
In addition to looking the part of a hitter, Sabathia also has the best statistics among Yankee pitchers. Sabathia is 24 for 92 (a .261 average) with three homers and fourteen runs batted in. Surprisingly, Sabathia has only one walk and three sacrifice bunts in his career, overwhelming evidence that he considers himself a hitter and not a pitcher who is trying to hit. He uses a 35-inch, 33-ounce bat, which is heavier than Albert Pujols’s bat.
Pettitte, who swings a 34-inch, 31-ounce bat, is much more of hacker. As Pettitte took his initial swings against Tony Pena’s 70-mile-per-hour fastballs Friday, he showed little bat speed. Still, the bar was so low that Robinson Cano gave Pettitte a high-five because Pettitte lifted a ball to the outfield.
“There was never any point where I was the best hitter on my team,” Pettitte said. “I think I hit like .350 in high school, but I didn’t have any home runs. Even in my senior year, I only hit on the days I pitched.”
The more Pettitte swung Friday, the more comfortable he became. Pettitte hit several line drives to left field, prompting Derek Jeter to shout, “That a boy, Pe-tee-tay.”
Reggie Jackson, the Hall of Famer who is a Yankees adviser, challenged Pettitte: “You got the line drives,” Jackson said. “You got any pop?”
Pettitte pulled off his helmet and smiled. But Pettitte met the challenge and followed with a shot that nearly hit the left-field warning track. Pettitte, who is 25 for 186 (.134) with one homer, is the only current Yankee pitcher with a hit in the World Series. He had a single in a 15-2 loss to the Arizona Diamondbacks in Game Six in 2001 and is 2 for 16 in the postseason. “Being in the National League definitely helped me,” said Pettitte, who played with the Houston Astros for three seasons. “At times, I felt like I had a chance.”
If Chad Gaudin starts Game Four, does he have a prayer of getting a hit? It would be stunning, because he is 1 for 32 with 16 strikeouts. A.J. Burnett, who is a candidate to start Game Five, was with the Florida Marlins for seven seasons and has more at-bats than any other Yankee pitcher. But that also means Burnett has failed a lot. He is 35 for 266 (.132) with three homers and a whopping 126 strikeouts. Mostly, Manager Joe Girardi hopes the pitchers are skillful enough to produce some sacrifice bunts.
Throughout Sabathia’s batting practice, Jeter teased Sabathia after the pitcher clubbed some impressive shots. During Sabathia’s last round, he lined a ball over the right-field fence for one of those homers that he routinely tries to deliver. “Yeah, we can go now,” shouted Jeter, who began walking off the field.
Two minutes later, all the Yankees walked off the field, too. Sabathia and the other pitchers were finished hitting. Soon, the Yankees will discover if they are finished hitting for their entire visit here.
It was soybeans after all
Nicolette Hahn Niman has an article in The New York Times about the reality of global warming (hint: it ain't meat that's the problem):
IS eating a hamburger the global warming equivalent of driving a Hummer? This week an article in The Times of London carried a headline that blared: “Give Up Meat to Save the Planet.” Former Vice President Al Gore, who has made climate change his signature issue, has even been assailed for omnivorous eating by animal rights activists.Rico says cow farts and damned soybeans are the problem; may Al Gore eat both...
It’s true that food production is an important contributor to climate change. And the claim that meat (especially beef) is closely linked to global warming has received some credible backing, including by the United Nations and University of Chicago. Both institutions have issued reports that have been widely summarized as condemning meat-eating.
But that’s an overly simplistic conclusion to draw from the research. To a rancher like me, who raises cattle, goats and turkeys the traditional way (on grass), the studies show only that the prevailing methods of producing meat— that is, crowding animals together in factory farms, storing their waste in giant lagoons and cutting down forests to grow crops to feed them— cause substantial greenhouse gases. It could be, in fact, that a conscientious meat eater may have a more environmentally friendly diet than your average vegetarian.
So what is the real story of meat’s connection to global warming? Answering the question requires examining the individual greenhouse gases involved: carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxides.
Carbon dioxide makes up the majority of agriculture-related greenhouse emissions. In American farming, most carbon dioxide emissions come from fuel burned to operate vehicles and equipment. World agricultural carbon emissions, on the other hand, result primarily from the clearing of woods for crop growing and livestock grazing. During the 1990s, tropical deforestation in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Sudan, and other developing countries caused 15 percent to 35 percent of annual global fossil fuel emissions.
Much Brazilian deforestation is connected to soybean cultivation. As much as seventy percent of areas newly cleared for agriculture in Mato Grosso State in Brazil is being used to grow soybeans. Over half of Brazil’s soy harvest is controlled by a handful of international agribusiness companies, which ship it all over the world for animal feed and food products, causing emissions in the process.
Meat and dairy eaters need not be part of this. Many smaller, traditional farms and ranches in the United States have scant connection to carbon dioxide emissions because they keep their animals outdoors on pasture and make little use of machinery. Moreover, those farmers generally use less soy than industrial operations do, and those who do often grow their own, so there are no emissions from long-distance transport and zero chance their farms contributed to deforestation in the developing world.
In contrast to traditional farms, industrial livestock and poultry facilities keep animals in buildings with mechanized systems for feeding, lighting, sewage flushing, ventilation, heating, and cooling, all of which generate emissions. These factory farms are also soy guzzlers and acquire much of their feed overseas. You can reduce your contribution to carbon dioxide emissions by avoiding industrially produced meat and dairy products.
Unfortunately for vegetarians who rely on it for protein, avoiding soy from deforested croplands may be more difficult: as the Organic Consumers Association notes, Brazilian soy is common (and unlabeled) in tofu and soymilk sold in American supermarkets.
Methane is agriculture’s second-largest greenhouse gas. Wetland rice fields alone account for as much 29 percent of the world’s human-generated methane. In animal farming, much of the methane comes from lagoons of liquefied manure at industrial facilities, which are as nauseating as they sound.
This isn’t a problem at traditional farms. “Before the 1970s, methane emissions from manure were minimal because the majority of livestock farms in the U.S. were small operations where animals deposited manure in pastures and corrals,” the Environmental Protection Agency says. The E.P.A. found that with the rapid rise of factory farms, liquefied manure systems became the norm and methane emissions skyrocketed. You can reduce your methane emissions by seeking out meat from animals raised outdoors on traditional farms.
Critics of meat-eating often point out that cattle are prime culprits in methane production. Fortunately, the cause of these methane emissions is understood, and their production can be reduced. Much of the problem arises when livestock eat poor quality forages, throwing their digestive systems out of balance. Livestock nutrition experts have demonstrated that by making minor improvements in animal diets (like providing nutrient-laden salt licks) they can cut enteric methane by half. Other practices, like adding certain proteins to ruminant diets, can reduce methane production per unit of milk or meat by a factor of six, according to research at Australia’s University of New England. Enteric methane emissions can also be substantially reduced when cattle are regularly rotated onto fresh pastures, researchers at University of Louisiana have confirmed.
Finally, livestock farming plays a role in nitrous oxide emissions, which make up around 5 percent of this country’s total greenhouse gases. More than three-quarters of farming’s nitrous oxide emissions result from manmade fertilizers. Thus, you can reduce nitrous oxide emissions by buying meat and dairy products from animals that were not fed fertilized crops; in other words, from animals raised on grass or raised organically.
In contrast to factory farming, well-managed, non-industrialized animal farming minimizes greenhouse gases and can even benefit the environment. For example, properly timed cattle grazing can increase vegetation by as much as 45 percent, North Dakota State University researchers have found. And grazing by large herbivores (including cattle) is essential for well-functioning prairie ecosystems, research at Kansas State University has determined.
Additionally, several recent studies show that pasture and grassland areas used for livestock reduce global warming by acting as carbon sinks. Converting croplands to pasture, which reduces erosion, effectively sequesters significant amounts of carbon. One analysis published in the journal Global Change Biology showed a 19 percent increase in soil carbon after land changed from cropland to pasture. What’s more, animal grazing reduces the need for the fertilizers and fuel used by farm machinery in crop cultivation, things that aggravate climate change.
Livestock grazing has other noteworthy environmental benefits as well. Compared to cropland, perennial pastures used for grazing can decrease soil erosion by 80 percent and markedly improve water quality, Minnesota’s Land Stewardship Project research has found. Even the United Nations report acknowledges, “There is growing evidence that both cattle ranching and pastoralism can have positive impacts on biodiversity.”
As the contrast between the environmental impact of traditional farming and industrial farming shows, efforts to minimize greenhouse gases need to be much more sophisticated than just making blanket condemnations of certain foods. Farming methods vary tremendously, leading to widely variable global warming contributions for every food we eat. Recent research in Sweden shows that, depending on how and where a food is produced, its carbon dioxide emissions vary by a factor of ten.
And it should also be noted that farmers bear only a portion of the blame for greenhouse gas emissions in the food system. Only about one-fifth of the food system’s energy use is farm-related, according to University of Wisconsin research. And the Soil Association in Britain estimates that only half of food’s total greenhouse impact has any connection to farms. The rest comes from processing, transportation, storage, retailing and food preparation. The seemingly innocent potato chip, for instance, turns out to be a dreadfully climate-hostile food. Foods that are minimally processed, in season and locally grown, like those available at farmers’ markets and backyard gardens, are generally the most climate-friendly.
Rampant waste at the processing, retail, and household stages compounds the problem. About half of the food produced in the United States is thrown away, according to University of Arizona research. Thus, a consumer could measurably reduce personal global warming impact simply by more judicious grocery purchasing and use.
None of us, whether we are vegan or omnivore, can entirely avoid foods that play a role in global warming. Singling out meat is misleading and unhelpful, especially since few people are likely to entirely abandon animal-based foods. Mr. Gore, for one, apparently has no intention of going vegan. The 90 percent of Americans who eat meat and dairy are likely to respond the same way.
Still, there are numerous reasonable ways to reduce our individual contributions to climate change through our food choices. Because it takes more resources to produce meat and dairy than, say, fresh locally grown carrots, it’s sensible to cut back on consumption of animal-based foods. More important, all eaters can lower their global warming contribution by following these simple rules: avoid processed foods and those from industrialized farms; reduce food waste; and buy local and in season.
More places that Rico would like to visit
As Singapore’s thirst for cocktails has grown steadily over the last few years, a new generation of bars and clubs has emerged in some memorably unusual places. Ground zero for the city’s new breed of night life is the Dempsey Hill neighborhood. Where army barracks once stood surrounded by tropical jungle, bars and restaurants have been sprouting at a breakneck pace. The result combines a laid-back atmosphere with alfresco settings, all just a few miles from downtown.
The area trailblazer, way back in 2006, was Richard Goh, who opened Oosh Bar and Lounge (22 Dempsey Road; 65-6475-0002) on almost 100,000 square feet of lush green property. “Dempsey was just a nature enclave when I chanced upon it,” Mr. Goh said. “I had a vision that it could be transformed into a resort lifestyle venue.”
Indeed, Oosh may evoke memories of your last tropical getaway. Live musicians often entertain at the main bar; out in the garden, Balinese-style pavilions are set among moodily lit waterfalls and reflecting pools. Service can be slow, but strong cocktails and the stirring décor are distraction enough.
A more recent addition to Dempsey is the White Rabbit (39C Harding Road; 65-6473-9965), where a young and well-heeled crowd competes for attention with the space itself: a charmingly restored chapel, complete with stained-glass windows, which houses a bustling restaurant and alcove lounge leading out to a garden bar. The whimsical theme is carried through from topiary sculptures to “reinvented” takes on classic cocktails, like the Black Forest mojito, which is made with Chambord.
“I think locals and expatriates alike respond well to unique, multifaceted concepts,” said Tengwen Wee, a co-owner of the White Rabbit. “We’ve seen a growing base of discerning clientele in Singapore.”
Mr. Wee’s latest addition to the party scene fills a surprisingly underrepresented niche on this tropical island: the beach bar. Opened in May on the resort island of Sentosa, just off the city’s coast, the Shack (120 Tanjong Beach Walk, Sentosa; 65-6278-9934) is an aptly unpretentious moniker for this breezy hangout, where the bar resides within an old shipping container and beer barrels have been recycled as tables.
Wild Oats (11 Upper Wilkie Road; 65-6336-5413) promises a lower-key experience at its hidden-away location within the residential maze of Mount Emily. Keep your eye out for an elegant, sprawling colonial mansion with a tranquil terrace out front. While the drinks selection is rather standard, there is an ambitious menu of bar food (the owner, Willin Low, is also the chef at the nearby Wild Rocket restaurant).
The most unlikely setting of all may be at KPO (1 Killiney Road; 65-6733-3648) in downtown Singapore, where a bar and lounge share space with an operating post office. During the day, KPO is a sleek cafe, but after dark, it fills with down-tempo beats and a mix of locals and tourists. A second floor also opens up at night, with a lovely open-air balcony where bar stools are arrayed to overlook the whizzing traffic below.
“KPO’s a great chill-out alternative to clubs and pubs,” said Vanessa Murthy, 31, while sharing drinks with a group of friends. “Singapore’s night life definitely offers a lot of variety nowadays.”
Nothing becomes some men like the leaving of it
Abdullah Abdullah, the chief rival to President Hamid Karzai, plans to announce on Sunday his decision to withdraw from the 7 November run-off election, effectively handing a new five-year term to Mr. Karzai, according to Western diplomats here and people close to Mr. Abdullah.
But Mr. Abdullah seemed to be keeping his options open until the last second, as he has done throughout the Afghan political crisis. Those close to him, speaking on condition of anonymity on Saturday, said he was still trying to decide whether to publicly denounce Mr. Karzai, whom he has accused of stealing the 20 August election, or step down without a fight.
American and other Western diplomatic officials said late Saturday that they were worried that a defiant statement by Mr. Abdullah could lead to violence and undermine the credibility of Mr. Karzai, and they were urging him to bow out gracefully. Obama administration officials have scrambled for weeks to end the deadlock, trying to ensure a credible government as President Obama weighs whether to increase the American military presence in Afghanistan.
People close to Mr. Abdullah said that his representative met with Mr. Karzai on Saturday, but were unable to make any progress on the issue that soured personal talks between the rivals on Thursday: mainly, Mr. Abdullah’s demands that the Afghan election system be overhauled to forestall more fraud in the second round.
Following the first round of voting, a United Nations-backed panel threw out nearly a million ballots— one third of Mr. Karzai’s total— on the grounds that they were fake.
Places that Rico would like to visit
If you’ve walked in the creamy Barcelona sunlight through the streets around the Paseo de Gracia, you will be no stranger to the elegant charm of the Eixample, the imposing 19th-century grid that is the city’s geographical and architectural heart. Magnificent modernist buildings gaze proudly over the tree-lined boulevards. Delights beckon from every shop front: sleek furniture, elaborate tapas, chic couture, and handmade chocolates.
Hidden from view, however, behind the Eixample’s grand facades is a little-advertised patchwork of public gardens and courtyards that offers refuge from the urban rush and an intimate view of everyday Barcelona life. Many of these green spaces have been carved in recent years from the patios that form the center of each city block, and are reached down narrow passageways or by cutting through a building. They are the ideal place to pause between the sights of the Eixample, which stretches from the old city to neighborhoods like Gracia, especially if you have children in tow.
As you stroll around the Quadrat d’Or — the central section of the Eixample known for its modernist gems — step into the gracious garden of the Palau Robert, a late-19th-century mansion that hosts the Catalan tourist office. Filled with stately palm, cypress, and orange trees, the gardens were part of the estate of Robert Robert i SurÃs, a Spanish grandee. You can reach the garden through the door of the palace, at Paseo de Gracia, 107, or through two gates around the corner on Diagonal.
This is drought-stricken Barcelona, however, not well-watered Paris or London, and some of the Eixample’s gardens are paved and spare; more interesting as places to watch people than to spot flora.
If you take a few minutes out of your hunt for designer cookware at the popular shop Vinçon (Paseo de Gracia, 96; 34-93-215-6050), you can sit in the peaceful courtyard behind the shop and check out the undulating balconies on the rear facade of Antoni GaudÃ’s Casa Milà . You may even catch a couple of the residential building’s lucky occupants shooting the breeze.
Or for a taste of local life, pop into the courtyard at the end of the Pasaje Rector Oliveras, where children clamber on the climbing frame in the shadow of the Gothic Church of the Immaculate Conception, which was moved stone by stone from the old city in the late 1800s. A local resident said the neighbors use the garden for alfresco dinners in summer, so, you never know, you may even snag an invitation to partake of some pa amb tomaquet.
Or cool your heels — literally — in the shallow, turquoise swimming pool reached via a dark passageway at Calle Roger de Llúria, 56, one of the first patios returned to the public by the city in the late 1980s and home to a looming brick water tower. (Entry during summer costs 1.45 euros, about $2.20.)
“The patios are like a window onto Barcelona,” said Francesc Muñoz RamÃrez, a professor of urban geography at the Barcelona Autonomous University, during a recent afternoon stroll through the Eixample. “You can be an urban voyeur and watch the business of the city from the inside.”
This speckle of green in the Eixample’s urban lattice is a nod to the vision of Idelfons Cerdà i Sunyer, the progressive civil engineer whose design for the district marks its 150th anniversary this year. When he submitted his plan in 1859, the city Cerdà had in mind was to be functional rather than flamboyant, a breed of socialist utopia where rich and poor would live side-by-side in city blocks of identical size wrapped around parks and kitchen gardens.
Back then, Barcelona was a teeming, disease-ridden warren of streets, clustered around the port and hemmed in by medieval walls beyond which lay the wide expanse that became the Eixample. Life for the working class was grim and short; the average person died before his or her 36th birthday. Onto this squalid, airless muddle, Cerdà grafted his huge, orderly grid, an ambitious expansion that was an heir of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s plan for remodeling the chaotic center of Paris earlier in the decade.
Cerdà foresaw the needs of modern life and created a template from which the city has evolved to become one of Europe’s most vibrant and enticing. Thrilled by the potential of railways, he designed wide streets that could handle trains and trams. To help visibility and, some believe, to allow trams to turn, he cut the corner of each block at an angle, creating the graceful chamfered corners so characteristic of the Eixample.
Cerdà ’s plan became the DNA of modern Barcelona, but his detractors condemned it as vulgar and monotonous and many of its egalitarian precepts were ignored. “Cerdà ’s vision was so avant-garde, so modern that few people at the time recognized his genius,” said LluÃs Permanyer, a Catalan journalist who has written books on the Eixample. “It is only today that we are realizing how important he was.”
Some streets became more equal than others, with grand avenues sprouting elaborate mansions that made the Eixample a showcase for modernist architects like GaudÃ, LluÃs Domènech i Montaner, and Josep Puig i Cadafalch, while nearby streets languished, unpaved and without sanitation.
Greedy developers constructed more, and taller, buildings than Cerdà intended, cutting the light and public space that were supposed to make his city sanitary and pleasant (like other 19th-century urban planners, he believed good ventilation would prevent the spread of disease). The patios inside each block became cluttered with warehouses, garages, and offices.
However, the green spaces that Cerdà believed would define the Eixample prefigured a very contemporary need. As part of an effort to make Barcelona greener, the city has created 40 gardens and plans to add more, as well as create a network of pedestrian-only areas.
“We’re returning to Cerdà ’s original concept,” said Professor Muñoz. “The vision we have for the city now isn’t very different from the one he had, 150 years ago.”
Through June of 2010, the Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture () is organizing exhibitions, walks, and seminars to mark Cerdà ’s urban design legacy.
An extensive list of Barcelona’s often-overlooked public gardens — like the serene grounds of the Barcelona Seminary (Calle Diputación, 231) or the courtyard of the Casa Elizalde cultural center (Calle Valencia, 302), where you can often catch a weekend children’s show — can be found on the website of ProEixample, a public-private partnership dedicated to revitalizing the Eixample.
More on changes to the internet
The New York Times has an article by Choe Sang-Hun about the moves by ICANN to allow non-Latin scripts:
By the middle of next year, Internet surfers will be allowed to use Web addresses written completely in Chinese, Arabic, Korean and other languages using non-Latin alphabets, the organization overseeing Internet domain names announced Friday in a decision that could make the Web more accessible. In an action billed as one of the biggest changes in the Web’s history, the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) voted during its annual meeting in Seoul to allow such scripts in Internet addresses.
The decision is a “historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet,” said Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s president and chief executive. “We just made the Internet much more accessible to millions of people in regions such as Asia, the Middle East, and Russia.”
This change affects domain names: anything that comes after the dot, including .com, .cn or .jp. Domain names have been limited to 37 characters: 26 Latin letters, 10 digits, and a hyphen. But starting next year, domain names can consist of characters in any language. In some Web addresses, non-Latin scripts are already used in the portion before the dot. Thus, ICANN’s decision Friday makes it possible, for the first time, to write an entire Internet address in a non-Latin alphabet.
Initially, the new naming system will affect only Web addresses with country codes, the designators at the end of an address name like .kr (for Korea) or .ru (for Russia). But eventually, it will be expanded to all types of Internet address names, ICANN said.
Some security experts have warned that allowing internationalized domain names in languages like Arabic, Russian, and Chinese could make it more difficult to fight cyberattacks, including malicious redirects and hacking. But ICANN said it was ready for the challenge.
“I do not believe that there would be any appreciable difference,” Mr. Beckstrom said in an interview. “Yes, maybe some additional potential but at the same time, some new security benefits may come too. If you look at the global set of cybersecurity issues, I don’t see this as any significant new threat if you look at it on an isolated basis.”
The decision, reached after years of testing and debate, clears the way for ICANN to begin accepting applications for non-Latin domain names on 16 November. People will start seeing them in use around mid-2010, particularly in Arabic, Chinese, and other scripts in which demand for the new “internationalized” domain name system has been among the strongest, ICANN officials say.
Internet addresses in non-Latin scripts could lead to a sharp increase in the number of global Internet users, eventually allowing people around the globe to navigate much of the online world using their native language scripts, they said. This is a boon, especially for users who find it cumbersome to type in Latin characters to access Web pages. Of the 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not based on the Latin alphabet.
Hong Jong-gil, an Internet industry analyst at Korea Investment and Securities in Seoul, said the new names would help children and old people who had not learned the Latin alphabet. But he did not foresee any major increase in the number of Internet users, because Internet penetration has less to do with whether one has to type in English-alphabet domain names and more to do with “whether you can afford a PC and your community has broadband access”.
Agencies that help companies and individuals get Internet domains welcomed the ICANN decision, noting it would be good for their own businesses. “This is great news for us. This opens a new demand for domain names,” said Yang Eun-hee, an official at Gabia.com, an Internet domain agency. “There will be a rush among businesses to get new local-language Web addresses to protect their brand names. These days, a big company typically has dozens or hundreds of domains for their products, and it will be quite a cost to get all the new names.”
Observers agree that the change could make a difference for many businesses. “A lot of companies will end up having double domains, the existing one in English and a new one in the local script,“ said Choi Kyoung-jin, an analyst at Shinhan Investment. “A Korean domain name may be useful for Koreans but it’s not for foreign customers.”
Users who do not use the Latin alphabet can now reach Web sites by asking search engines to provide their links. But a change in the domain name policy has become inevitable, Internet industry officials said. For example, there are so many .com Web addresses that it has become next to impossible to find an English word or an intelligible combination of two English words not already in use, they said. “Today’s decision opens up a whole new Internet territory,” Ms. Yang said. “The Internet will become more multi-lingual than before.”
Correction: 30 October 2009
An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the origins of the World Wide Web. It was first devised two decades ago, not four; it is the Internet that has roots going back four decades.
History for the day
On 31 October 1984, Indira Gandhi, then prime minister of India, was assassinated. William Stevens had an article in The New York Times:
So thoroughly had Prime Minister Indira Gandhi dominated Indian politics over the last two decades that even some of her critics said she was what held the fractious country together. Many called her Madam, Madamji, Mrs. G., Indiraji, Amma (Mother), or just 'She'. Not everyone thought of her in kind terms, but all knew who 'She' was, and her assassination leaves an incalculable void in the life of the country. Her sudden disappearance from the public scene represents a considerable challenge to the future of the Indian experiment in democracy.Rico says the son, Rajiv, was assassinated in turn:
Hours after her death, her forty-year-old son, Rajiv Gandhi, was sworn in as her successor. It is his abilities and performance that are, perhaps, the biggest uncertainty for many people as the nation tries to adjust to the events of today.
Charan Singh, another former Prime Minister, who failed to hold an opposition Government together in 1979 and 1980, thereby paving the way for Mrs. Gandhi's return from three years out of power, expressed as much horror as anyone else when he heard the news of Mrs. Gandhi's assassination. But when he heard about Rajiv Gandhi's rapid elevation, he said it confirmed his fear that "democracy is being gradually eroded in this country in order to establish a dynastic rule". Whether that interpretation turns out to be correct, or whether Mr. Gandhi's swift installation as Prime Minister will exercise a stabilizing influence, is not clear.
What seems clearer is that Mr. Gandhi, because of his mother's death, appears at the moment to be in an almost invulnerable political position. By law, parliamentary elections should be held by next 20 January, when the five-year life of the present Parliament expires. It was widely expected that Mrs. Gandhi would set the elections for late December or early January. It was also widely believed that her Congress-I Party would win enough seats to keep her in power, even if with a drastically reduced majority or at the head of a coalition government.
Whatever doubt there was stemmed largely from the negative baggage she had acquired during her years in power: for example, the suspicion after the 1975-77 period, when she declared a state of emergency and suspended civil rights, that she was authoritarian at heart; or her apparent acceptance of power politics, as in this year's bald attempts to topple duly elected state governments hostile to her party, or what was commonly perceived as a serious erosion of political institutions, for which she was largely blamed.
Rajiv Gandhi, though he has involved himself as leader of the Congress-I Party at the very lowest levels of power politics, comes to office essentially without such baggage. His image is still mostly that of Mr. Clean, a nickname he won in 1981 when, campaigning for a seat in Parliament, he promised to rid Indian politics of venality and corruption.
More important to the relatively narrow consideration of winning an election, he now wears the mantle both of a martyr's son and of the Nehru dynasty. There are some who think that if an election were called tomorrow, this combination would produce a Congress-I majority larger even than the two-thirds majority won under his mother's leadership five years ago.
It is not known, however, if and when elections will take place. Beyond that, it is an open question whether Mr. Gandhi has either the tough, pragmatic shrewdness of his mother or the idealistic depth of his grandfather, Jawharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India.
The combination of Nehru's idealism and Mrs. Gandhi's adroit use of power on the international scene is credited by some students of Indian foreign policy with having placed this country among the world's most influential nations. During Mrs. Gandhi's tenure, for example, India has solidified its position as a leader of the third world and of the Commonwealth, and become the dominant power in South Asia.
Closer to home and to the moment, Mr. Gandhi must confront the possibility of rioting between Hindus and Sikhs. In his first radio address to the nation tonight, he called for "maximum restraint" on the part of all Indians. Moreover, he must now confront the intractable problem of Punjab, where the Sikhs have been pressing for political autonomy and religious rights. Some say they fear that Sikh terrorism might convert the wealthy but unhappy breadbasket state into a Northern Ireland on the Subcontinent.
If Mrs. Gandhi's assassination is indeed the work of Sikh terrorists, as was commonly believed here today, the Punjab situation has been made just that much worse.
Rajiv Ratna Gandhi (20 August 1944 – 21 May 1991), the elder son of Indira Nehru and Feroze Gandhi, was the 7th Prime Minister of India from his mother's death on 31 October 1984 until his resignation on 2 December 1989 following a general election defeat. He became the youngest Prime Minister of India when he took office (at the age of 40).
Rajiv Gandhi was a professional pilot for Indian Airlines before entering politics. While at Cambridge, he met Italian-born Antonia Maino whom he later married. He remained aloof from politics despite his mother being the Indian Prime Minister, and it was only following the death of his younger brother Sanjay Gandhi in 1980 that Rajiv entered politics. After the assassination of his mother in 1984 after Operation Blue Star, Indian National Congress party leaders nominated him to be Prime Minister.
Rajiv Gandhi led the Congress to a major election victory in 1984 soon after, amassing the largest majority ever in Indian Parliament. The Congress party won 411 seats out of 542. He began dismantling the License Raj - government quotas, tariffs and permit regulations on economic activity - modernized the telecommunications industry, the education system, expanded science and technology initiatives and improved relations with the United States.
In 1988, Rajiv reversed the coup in Maldives antagonising the militant Tamil outfits such as PLOTE. He was also responsible for first intervening and then sending Indian troops (Indian Peace Keeping Force or IPKF) for peace efforts in Sri Lanka in 1987, which soon ended in open conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) group. In mid-1987, the Bofors scandal broke his honest, corruption-free image and resulted in a major defeat for his party in the 1989 elections.
Rajiv Gandhi was an active amateur radio operator, and used the callsign VU2RG.
Rajiv Gandhi remained Congress President until the elections in 1991. While campaigning, he was assassinated by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE or Tamil Tigers) group. His widow Sonia Gandhi became the leader of the Congress party in 1998, and led the party to victory in the 2004 elections. His son Rahul Gandhi is a Member of Parliament and the General Secretary of All India Congress Committee.
Rajiv Gandhi was posthumously awarded the Highest National Award of India, Bharat Ratna, joining a list of forty luminaries, including Indira Gandhi.
30 October 2009
Wogs win one
The U.S. Army will make an exception to a decades-old rule and allow a Sikh doctor to serve without removing his turban and cutting his hair, an advocacy group said Friday.
Captain Kamaljeet Singh Kalsi is the first Sikh to be allowed to go on active duty with a turban, beard, and unshorn hair in more than twenty years, according to the New York-based Sikh Coalition.
The decision does not overturn an Army policy from the 1980s that regulates the wearing of religious items, Acting Deputy Chief of Staff Major General Gina Farrisee wrote in a letter to Kalsi and posted online by the Sikh Coalition.
Instead, the Army's decision follows a long-standing practice of deciding such requests on a case-by-case basis, the letter said. Farrisee said the Army had weighed Kalsi's request against factors such as "unit cohesion, morale, discipline, safety, and/or health."
There's no indication that the overall policy is being reconsidered, said Army spokeswoman Jill Mueller, adding that she could not confirm that the Army had reached a decision in the case until she received word from her superiors that Kalsi himself had been notified.
But Sikh Coalition director Amardeep Singh said he was hopeful the Army would announce a full policy shift. "This bodes well for the future," he said. "My guess is the Army's going to be seeing a lot more Sikhs requesting to be a part of the Army. This issue is not going away."
The 32-year-old Kalsi, of Riverdale, New Jersey, is an emergency room doctor. He promised to serve in the Army in exchange for help paying for his medical training. A similar case, that of Captain Tejdeep Singh Rattan, will be decided after he receives the results of his dental board exams, Amardeep Singh said.
A number of members of Congress wrote to Defense Secretary Robert Gates asking him to allow the men to serve while wearing the turban, beard, and unshorn hair required by their faith. "We do not believe that any American should have to choose between his religion and service to our country," the letter said.
More internet weirdness
Rico says his friend Bill Calloway is prone to sending him odd photos off the internet. Here's one of an albino moose (sure to become winter food for some hunter) and some dollar-bill origami:
Well, at least that's not in doubt any more
Fritz Darges died at 96, with instructions for his manuscript about his time spent at the side of the Führer to be published once he was gone.
Darges was the last surviving member of Hitler's inner circle, and was present for all major conferences, social engagements, and policy announcements for four years of the war.
Experts say his account of his time as Hitler's direct link to the SS could discount the claims of revisionists, who have tried to claim the German leader knew nothing of the extermination programme. Right-wing historians have claimed the planning for the murder of six million Jews was carried out by SS chief Heinrich Himmler. Mainstream historians believe it inconceivable that Hitler did not issue verbal directives about the mass killings in Darges' presence. Other courtiers, such as armaments minister Albert Speer and propaganda chief Josef Goebbels, had their diaries published post war with no reference to hearing Hitler order the Final Solution.
Darges died still believing in the man who engineered the Jewish Holocaust was "the greatest who ever lived." His memoirs will be published now in accordance with his will.
Darges trained as an export clerk but joined the SS in April of 1933. His zeal for National Socialism soon earmarked him for great things, and by 1936 he was the senior adjutant to Martin Bormann, Hitler's all-powerful secretary.
"I first met the Führer at the Nuremberg party rally in 1934," he said in an interview given to a German newspaper shortly before his death at his home in Celle. "He had a sympathetic look, he was warm-hearted. I rated him from the off."
After serving in the SS panzer division Wiking in France and Russia, he was promoted to the Führer's personal staff in 1940. He rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, and was awarded the Knights Cross, the highest gallantry award for bravery in the field.
Much of his time after 1942 was either spent at Hitler's eastern headquarters, the 'Wolf's Lair' at Rastenburg, East Prussia, or at his holiday home, the Berghof, on a mountain in Berchtesgaden, Bavaria. "It was a very familial atmosphere at the Berghof," he recalled. "One time we went off to Italy together with Eva Braun and her sister Gretel in an open-topped car. I had to organise all the finances. I had the feeling that Eva's sister was interested in me, but I didn't think I should become the brother-in-law of the Führer. As adjutant I was responsible for his day-to-day programme. I must, and was, always there for him, at every conference, at every inter-service liaison meeting, at all war conferences. I must say I found him a genius."
But Darges misjudged the "warm-hearted" Führer deeply during one conference at Rastenburg on July 18 1944, two days before a bomb plot nearly succeeded in killing him.
During a strategy conference a fly began buzzing around the room, landing on Hitler's shoulder and on the surface of a map several times. Irritated, Hitler ordered Darges to "dispatch the nuisance". Darges suggested whimsically that, as it was an 'airborne pest', the job should go to the Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below. Enraged, Hitler dismissed Darges on the spot. "You're for the Eastern Front!" he yelled. And so he was sent into combat. But, despite the dramatic end to his time with Hitler, he would still hear nothing against "the boss". "We all dreamed of a greater German empire," he said. "That is why I served him and would do it all again now," said the man who had a career after the war selling cars.
Mafia justice, caught on tape
The Telegraph has the story:
The horrific footage, captured by closed circuit cameras, shows the assassin walk up to a man in broad daylight outside a bar in Naples and shoot him three times. As the victim slumps to the ground, the hitman then finishes him off with a bullet to the head and calmly walks away. Blood can be seen spreading onto the pavement from the head of the dead man, who is still holding a cigarette in his hand.
The dead man was Mariano Bacio Tarracino, 53, and is believed to have been connected to a mafia clan involved in a drug trafficking turf war with a rival group. Anti-mafia investigators said they released the horrific footage of the murder, which happened in May, because they still had not managed to find the killer, despite the fact that the angle of the surveillance cameras means that his face is clearly visible beneath his baseball cap. He even seems to be smirking after carrying out the execution.
"We have decided to circulate the video as widely as possible, urging the co-operation of whoever can provide information to identify the killer and his lookout," the Naples' office for anti-mafia investigations said in a statement.
His shooting was met with apparent indifference by bystanders who were caught on film outside the bar, in Naples's central Sanita district. A man holding a toddler in his arms looks at the victim and walks away, while a woman is seen rubbing off her scratch-and-win lottery card as the execution takes place. No witnesses have so far come forward.
Italy's third biggest city is home to the Camorra crime syndicate, a rival to the better known Cosa Nostra mafia of Sicily, and many locals have become resigned to violence on the streets after decades of deadly feuds.
The killing, in the middle of a busy neighbourhood, was "chilling", said a former head of the Democratic Party, Walter Veltroni, who is now a member of the Anti-Mafia Commission. The scale of organised crime and the state's apparent inability to combat it was an "absolute emergency" for Italy.
An investigative journalist who wrote a best-selling expose of the Camorra, Roberto Saviano, said the indifference of bystanders was perhaps the most shocking element of the video. "When a city's at war, people stop caring about the things they see around them. This video shows that in some parts of Italy, life isn't worth anything". Mr. Saviano, whose book Gomorrah earned him death threats from the Mafia, which means he has had to live under police escort for the last three years, said the killer's ice-cold composure marked him out as a professional hit man.
"First he walks in the bar, looks around, and then he comes out and starts shooting." The mundane surroundings of the assassination and its brutality could help to "dispel Hollywood myths about Mafia violence and show what a Camorra execution is really like," he said.
Must've been for his money
Rico says the Guardian has an article by David Smith out of Johannesburg:
He is old enough to be her great-great-grandfather. But Ahmed Muhamed Dhore, a Somalian who claims to be 112 years old, said he had realised a "dream" by marrying a 17-year-old bride.Rico says it's unfortunate there are no pictures of the wedding, but thankfully there won't be any of the wedding night, either...
Dhore– who says he was born in 1897, the year that Queen Victoria celebrated her diamond jubilee– already has 13 children by five wives, but said he would like more with his newest, Safiya Abdulle.
Hundreds of people attended the extraordinary ceremony this week in Guriceel, in the region of Galguduud. "Today God helped me realise my dream," Dore said. He and his new wife, who is almost a century his junior, are from the same village in Somalia, he said, adding that he had waited for her to grow up to propose. He says his children and two other wives agreed to the marriage, as did Abdulle's parents.
"I didn't force her, but used my experience to convince her of my love, and then we agreed to marry," the groom said. The bride's family said she was "happy with her new husband". Somali adolescent girls are often married off to older men.
Dhore has 114 children and grandchildren. His oldest son is 80 and three of his wives have died. This was his first marriage for three quarters of a century.
Thank goodness
Rico says that al-Reuters has the story of the decline and fall of the decrepit Latin alphabet:
The body in charge of assigning the world's Internet users their online addresses said it had agreed to allow the use of any of the world's scripts, no longer just the Latin alphabet. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which approved the change at a meeting in Seoul, said in a statement it could lead to a dramatic rise in the number of Internet users. "This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and an historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet," ICANN's President and CEO Rod Beckstrom was quoted as saying. "We have just made the Internet much more accessible to millions of people in regions such as Asia, the Middle East, and Russia."Rico says we shouldn't have let go of ICANN; it will now work with the precision and efficency of the UN...
The program will be rolled out in stages, starting on 16 November. Initially, it will allow internationalized domain names (IDNs) using scripts such as Chinese, Korean, or Arabic for the country code designators at the end of an address name.
Eventually, the use of IDNs will be expanded to all types of Internet address names.
ICANN was set up in 1998 and operated under the aegis of the U.S. Commerce Department. It decides what names can be added to the Internet's top level domains (TLDs) such as .com as well as country designations. Last month, the U.S. government agreed to changes that in effect meant ICANN would no longer report solely to the United States.
Now they're drinking buddies
Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates and Cambridge police Sergeant James Crowley were spotted at a pub in Cambridge Wednesday night. The owner of the pub said the two sat in a booth together and talked for about an hour.
Over the summer, Crowley arrested Gates for disorderly conduct while responding to reports of a possible break-in at Gates' home. Gates accused the officer of racial profiling.
The incident led to a nation-wide debate over racial profiling and race relations, when President Barack Obama commented on the situation by coming to Gates' defense. All three men later sat at a table outside the White House in what became known as the 'beer summit.'
Falling back
Daylight saving time in most of the United States ends at 2 a.m. local time on Sunday, 1 November. Contrary to popular belief, no federal rule mandates that U.S. states or territories observe daylight saving time. Most U.S. residents set their clocks one hour forward in spring and one hour back in fall. But people in Hawaii and most of Arizona, along with the U.S. territories of Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the Virgin Islands, will do nothing. Those locales never deviate from standard time within their particular time zones.Rico says there's a lot more at the site.
The federal law first passed in 1918 and, thanks to a 2005 revision that went into practice in 2007, now stipulates areas that observe daylight saving time must switch back to standard time at 2 a.m. on the first Sunday in November.
Likewise, the new daylight saving time rule requires that regions that observe daylight saving time begin at the same time on the second Sunday in March.
29 October 2009
Not in Pennsylvania, they don't
ABC News has an article by Alice Gomstyn about what's happening in less benighted states:
What makes a grocery store stand out from its competitors? Try a fresh, cold beer on tap. More stores are adding beer and wine selections in an effort to appeal to consumers who now prefer to drink at home instead of at bars and restaurants.Rico says you can read the rest here if you care...
Last week, a Piggly Wiggly store in Myrtle Beach, S.C. introduced taps dispensing craft beers into growlers-- half-gallon, glass containers also sold at the store-- for $9.99 to $12.99. As with Piggly Wiggly's more traditional alcohol offerings-- wine and canned and bottled beer-- customers aren't allowed to drink their purchases at the store. But what they lose in instant gratification, beer lovers might gain in savings.
"It's a lot cheaper to buy it from us than to pay $4 or $5 for a beer at a bar," said store manager Timmy Parrott. Parrott's thinking seems to be increasingly popular among retailers large and small as more stores look to off-premises alcohol sales-- sales of alcohol outside of eateries and bars-- to grow their business and meet customer demand.
Earlier this year, the pharmacy chain Walgreens announced it was returning beer and wine to its store shelves after abandoning the products more than a decade earlier. Discount chain Family Dollar is testing beer sales at ten of its Florida stores this year. There was "a groundswell of interest saying, 'Hey, now that you've got these great coolers here, it'd be great if you stocked some beer too,'" said Family Dollar spokesman Josh Braverman.
Between September of 2008 and last month, the number of U.S. stores engaged in off-premises beer sales jumped by nearly 2,600, while wine sellers increased by more than 3,000, according to market research giant Nielsen. The increase occurred despite the fact that the total number of U.S. grocery stores, convenience stores, drug stores, and others declined by more than 3,000.
"While there's lots of disarray going out there in general because of the economy, there are more stores that are deciding they want to get into the beverage alcohol business," said Danny Brager, vice president and group client director for the beverage alcohol team at Nielsen. The trend is largely driven by the recession, Brager said, as more cost-conscious consumers choose to skip the bar scene to spend a night at home, drink in hand, Brager said. "A big night in is replacing a big night out these days more and more, so retailers are recognizing that consumers are looking to stores to buy products more so than going out and enjoying an alcoholic beverage while they're out," he said.
Throughout the universe in perpetuity
Rico says its the latest hip legal phrase, according to an article by Dionne Sarey and James Hagerty in The Wall Street Journal:
Decked out in sequined black and gold dresses, Anne Harrison and the other women in her Bulgarian folk-singing group were lined up to try out for NBC's America's Got Talent television show when they noticed peculiar wording in the release papers they were asked to sign. Any of their actions that day last February, the contract said, could be "edited, in all media, throughout the universe, in perpetuity."Rico says he will now incorporate this bullshit into all his legal agreements, in perpetuity...
She and the other singers, many of whom are librarians in the Washington, D.C., area, briefly contemplated whether they should give away the rights to hurtling their images and voices across the galaxies forever. Then, like thousands of other contestants, they signed their names. Ms. Harrison figured the lawyers for the show were trying to hammer home the point that contestants have no rights to their performances, "but I think they're just lazy and don't want to write a real contract," she says.
Lawyers for years have added language to some contracts that stretches beyond the Earth's atmosphere. But more and more people are encountering such everywhere-and-forever language as entertainment companies tap into amateur talent and try to anticipate every possible future stream of revenue.
Experts in contract drafting say lawyers are trying to ensure that with the proliferation of new outlets— including mobile-phone screens, Twitter, online video sites and the like— they cover all possible venues from which their clients can derive income, even those in outer space. FremantleMedia, one of the producers of NBC's America's Got Talent, declined to comment on its contracts.
The terms of use listed on Starwars.com, where people can post to message boards among other things, tell users that they give up the rights to any content submissions "throughout the universe and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media or technology now known or hereafter developed". Lucasfilm Ltd., Star Wars creator George Lucas's entertainment company that runs the site, said the language is standard in Hollywood. "But, to be honest with you, we have had very few cases of people trying to exploit rights on other planets," says Lynne Hale, a Lucasfilm spokeswoman.
In a 15 May 2008, "expedition agreement" between JWM Productions LLC, a film-production company, and Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc., a shipwreck-exploration outfit, JWM seeks the rights to footage from an Odyssey expedition. The contract covers rights "in any media, whether now known or hereafter devised, or in any form whether now known or hereafter devised, an unlimited number of times throughout the universe and forever, including, but not limited to, interactive television, CD-ROMs, computer services, and the Internet."
Odyssey said the wording was standard entertainment-law contract language. Jason Williams, JWM's president, said he feels a bit strange when his lawyers start using "cosmic language", but it's prudent. "These days there is an enormous amount of concern about how rights get appropriated," he said. "Paranoia is paramount."
The space and time continuum has extended to other realms outside the arts, including pickles. A 189-word sentence in a September agreement between Denver-based Spicy Pickle Franchising Inc. and investment bank Midtown Partners & Co., which has helped raise capital for the sandwich and pickle shops dotted across the region, unconditionally releases Spicy Pickle from all claims "from the beginning of time" until the date of the agreement. "We're trying to figure out how to cover every possible base as quickly as possible," says Marc Geman, chief executive officer of Spicy Pickle. "When you start at the beginning of time, that is pretty clear." As for the wordy language, he says, "the length of the paragraph is only limited by the creativity of the attorney".
Midtown Partners CEO John Clarke didn't realize the wording was in the contract until it was pointed out and said it "probably is a little extreme". Had he drafted the contract, he says he may have suggesting substituting "dating back to the birth date of the oldest party involved".
James O'Toole, politics editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, recently signed a release form for WQED, a PBS TV station in Pittsburgh, before he appeared on a news talk show. The contract allows the TV station to make use of "any incidents" of his life and reproduce his image or voice "throughout the universe in perpetuity, in any and all media now known or hereinafter devised". Mr. O'Toole, who says he didn't bother to read the release before signing it, took the news calmly. "I'm very popular in some of the far reaches of the Milky Way," he says. Even so, he says, "I don't think I've missed out on a lot of potential income."
Jacquelyn Thomas, general counsel for WQED, says the company has "never gotten any pushback" on this language. "I don't mean to sound like a science-fiction nut, but it's not inconceivable that media will move beyond Earth," Ms. Thomas says.
Members of the Washington-area Bulgarian folk ensemble Slaveya signed a contract before they tried out for America's Got Talent that said their work could be 'edited, in all media, throughout the universe, in perpetuity'.
Some legal experts rail against such language as imprecise and unnecessary. Ken Adams, a Garden City, N.Y., attorney and lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who advocates for clarity in contract language, says references to outer space and the end of time are silly. That kind of language could even be a way of drumming up business, he says. "It adds an aura of magic; you're dabbling in the occult and you, of course, need a lawyer to guide you through the mysteries."
But Eric Goldman, an associate professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law who specializes in intellectual-property and Internet law, says the language could be "a stroke of brilliant foresight". Referring to geographical limits loosely can be dangerous, he says. For instance, "the United States is an ambiguous term... American Samoa, yes or no?" 'Throughout the world' would be one alternative, but that excludes possible future markets, he says. Some day, Mr. Goldman adds, people might ask, "What were they thinking? Why didn't they get the Mars rights?"
Google eats another industry
The New York Times has an article by Jenna Wortham and Miguel Helft about another Google move:
GPS navigation devices were the latest must-have tech toys just two years ago, and shares of device makers like Garmin and TomTom were soaring.
That didn’t last long. In a turnabout that has been remarkably swift even for the fast-moving technology business, those companies have suffered as competition has pulled down prices, and as more people have turned to their cellphones for directions. In the latest blow to the business, Google announced a free navigation service for mobile phones on Wednesday that will offer turn-by-turn directions, live traffic updates and the ability to recognize voice commands. The service will initially be available on only one phone, the new Motorola Droid, but will be expanded to more phones soon.
In a briefing in advance of its announcement, Google said that the service might be supported by advertisements in the future. That would make driving directions the latest form of information to shift from being a paid service to one that is ad-supported.
“This is consistent with a certain pattern of Google, where they are able to build volume and usage of a product and then subsidize it with advertising,” said Greg Sterling, principal of Sterling Market Intelligent, a research firm. The losers, he said, were companies like TomTom and Garmin, along with the cellphone carriers, which offer navigation services by subscription.
Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said that he didn’t view the new service as hurting an industry. Instead, he said, it is a boon to consumers, made possible by the increasing power of smartphones and the growing ubiquity of Internet access. “Obviously we like the price of free, because consumers like that as well,” he said. But analysts say that if successful, Google’s service could chip away at sales of stand-alone GPS devices and the subscription services offered by cellphone carriers.
Sales growth for those devices is already slowing. In 2007, global shipments of stand-alone navigation devices grew a hefty 131 percent from the year before, according to data from the research firm In-Stat. But the firm predicts that shipments will grow just 19 percent this year from 2008, and a price war has hurt the industry’s profits.
“With a free alternative that is just as good, I don’t see much positive growth for the likes of TomTom, Navigon, or Garmin,” said Dominique Bonte, director of navigation research at ABI Research. “If it’s free and a good service, why would you pay for something you can get for free?”
Google’s announcement also reflects a broader shift toward consolidation in the gadget world.
The smartphone is already the Swiss Army knife of the digital age, able to transform into a camera, music player, or game machine at the swipe of a finger. Now it is increasingly a navigation device too. Many people still prefer dedicated GPS devices, which tend to display maps faster, since the data is typically stored in the device rather than downloaded over a wireless network. But the list of smartphone shortcomings is shrinking. Smartphone users can download applications that offer spoken directions and live traffic updates. And at $100 to $300 apiece, smartphones are competitively priced with GPS units, which average about $177.
By 2013, phone-based navigation systems, which are already more popular among younger smartphone owners, will dominate the market, according to a recent report.
The makers of navigation devices have not ignored the spread of smartphones. But Google’s move could make it harder for them to adapt. TomTom, based in Amsterdam, introduced a $100 navigation application for the iPhone in August. The company said the program had been downloaded close to 80,000 times. Garmin recently released the Nuvifone, a hybrid of a navigational device and a cellphone that has generally received poor reviews. “Turn-by-turn navigation on a handset is what we’re been doing with the Nuvifone,” said Ted Gartner, a spokesman for Garmin, which declined to release sales figures for the phone. “Google’s announcement reaffirms that consumers want their smartphones to double as a navigation device.”
Julien Blin, principal analyst at JBB Industry, called Garmin’s phone a “desperate move”, adding: “The Nuvifone is around $300, and you can get an iPhone for a comparable amount that can now do the same thing.”
Shares of both TomTom and Garmin plummeted Wednesday after Google’s announcement. Garmin’s shares fell 16 percent to $31.45 on Nasdaq, while TomTom’s shares closed around 21 percent lower on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange.
Google’s navigation service, which for now works only in the United States, is part of a new version of Google Maps for Mobile, software that will work on the growing number of phones that run Google’s Android operating system. Google executives said they eventually hoped to offer the service on Apple’s iPhone and other mobile devices. But they said this would be up to those device makers. Apple and Google have clashed over Apple’s reluctance to approve an application that works with the Google Voice calling service.
As mobile services that involve location have become increasingly important, the underlying mapping data has become a valuable strategic asset. Google recently began creating its own digital maps in the United States, ending a contract with the map data provider TeleAtlas, which is owned by TomTom. A year earlier, Google had chosen TeleAtlas to replace Navteq, a map data provider that Nokia acquired for $8.1 billion in 2007. Google and Nokia are rivals in mobile phone operating systems.
More on pirates
CNN.com has the story of real-life piracy:
The British Royal Navy has found the yacht belonging to a British couple missing in the Indian Ocean since last week, but the yacht was empty, the British Ministry of Defence said Thursday. A ministry spokesman said it appeared the couple, who are feared kidnapped by pirates, had been transferred to another vessel. "There's nothing to indicate that they've been harmed," said the spokesman, who asked not to be named in line with policy. The yacht was found in international waters, but the spokesman refused to give a more exact location.But it certainly sounds like it's high time for some Q-ships to lie off Somalia, attract some pirates, and blow the shit out of them. Of course, you can go buy Rico's book on the subject, too:
Paul and Rachel Chandler set off from the Seychelles for Tanzania on 21 October on their 38-foot-yacht, the Lynn Rival, according to their blog. They have not been heard from since, but a distress beacon was activated on 23 October, according to naval officials.
International military forces have been treating the case as a "potential hijacking", Lieutenant Ian Jones of Britain's Royal Navy told CNN. "We have no confirmation that anything has been pirated," he added. There are many possibilities, he said, adding he was aware of the reports of piracy but that hijacking was "far from certain".
Britain's Foreign Office issued a statement this week saying it is "extremely concerned for their safety," while pointing out it had not confirmed reports they were taken captive.
Pirates have been very active off the east coast of Africa in the past several years, operating out of lawless Somalia.
Two vessels were attacked the day after the Chandlers set sail. One of them, a cargo ship, was successfully boarded and seized off the Seychelles, while the other fought off its attackers near the Kenyan coast.
On Thursday, pirates attacked and boarded a Thai-flagged fishing vessel about 200 miles north of the Seychelles, according to the European Union Naval Force. EU NAVFOR aircraft spotted the pirates onboard and said the vessel now appears to be heading toward the Somali coast. The Thai vessel is the eighth ship held by criminals at the Somali coastline, EU NAVFOR said. Attacks in the region have significantly increased this year, according to the International Maritime Bureau, which monitors shipping crimes. But successful attacks have gone down as a result of a strong presence of international monitors.
The first nine months of this year has seen more pirate attacks than all of last year, the bureau reported 21 October. From 1 January until 30 September, pirates worldwide mounted 306 attacks, compared with 293 in all of 2008, it said. More than half of this year's attacks were carried out by suspected Somali pirates off the east coast of Somalia and in the Gulf of Aden, a major shipping route between Yemen and Somalia. Out of those attacks, Somali pirates successfully hijacked 32 vessels and took 533 hostages. Eight people were wounded, four were killed and one is missing, the bureau said.
Dabbling
When Rico asked his friend Alan what he should be doing, he (foolish boy) assumed Rico meant working. While Rico could probably be doing something ("Do you want fries with that?"), in reality he wouldn't be worth his pay (and most employers would get pissed when he lay down for a nap every day after lunch, siesta be damned), and surely not at any job that paid what he used to make. (Which wasn't astronomical, but a lot.) Rico fears he would end up like the guy who was with him in Rehab, who's been fired from several positions because he just can't keep up.
Rico's time at the bokken class last night reminded him that, for fifty years, he's been a dabbler; one who does a little of something, just enough to know he's not gonna give it the effort it requires to be really good at it.
The only thing that Rico has really worked at (without major economic success, thus far) is writing, this blog being but one example. His books and magazines are proof of that. Feel free to go buy one (or more; no need to scrimp) and support Rico's act.
Rico's time at the bokken class last night reminded him that, for fifty years, he's been a dabbler; one who does a little of something, just enough to know he's not gonna give it the effort it requires to be really good at it.
The only thing that Rico has really worked at (without major economic success, thus far) is writing, this blog being but one example. His books and magazines are proof of that. Feel free to go buy one (or more; no need to scrimp) and support Rico's act.
28 October 2009
You can help
Get 'em while you can
Rico says he just bought a cheap ticket on Southwest; they're running a special sale (sure, it has limitations; what deal doesn't?) with tickets less than a hundred bucks. Fly, dammit! It's your duty as an American to spend money and end this recession.
Bad medical humor
Civil War for the day
27 October 2009
Firmness is important
Courtesy of my ladyfriend Chris:
There is more money being spent on breast implants and Viagra than on Alzheimer's research.
This means that, by 2040, there should be a large elderly population with perky boobs and huge erections and absolutely no recollection of what to do with them.
No peacenik hippie, him
When Matthew Hoh joined the Foreign Service early this year, he was exactly the kind of smart civil-military hybrid the administration was looking for to help expand its development efforts in Afghanistan. A former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq, Hoh had also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July, he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed.Rico says go here to read the rest of this long article.
But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.
"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan," he wrote in a four-page letter to the department's head of personnel. "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."
The reaction to Hoh's letter was immediate. Senior U.S. officials, concerned that they would lose an outstanding officer and perhaps gain a prominent critic, appealed to him to stay.
Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry brought him to Kabul and offered him a job on his senior embassy staff. Hoh declined. From there, he was flown home for a face-to-face meeting with Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"We took his letter very seriously, because he was a good officer," Holbrooke said in an interview. "We all thought that given how serious his letter was, how much commitment there was, and his prior track record, we should pay close attention to him."
While he did not share Hoh's view that the war "wasn't worth the fight," Holbrooke said, "I agreed with much of his analysis." He asked Hoh to join his team in Washington, saying that "if he really wanted to affect policy and help reduce the cost of the war on lives and treasure," why not be "inside the building, rather than outside, where you can get a lot of attention but you won't have the same political impact?"
Hoh accepted the argument and the job, but changed his mind a week later. "I recognize the career implications, but it wasn't the right thing to do," he said in an interview Friday, two days after his resignation became final.
"I'm not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love," Hoh said. Although he said his time in Zabul was the "second-best job I've ever had," his dominant experience is from the Marines, where many of his closest friends still serve. "There are plenty of dudes who need to be killed," he said of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. "I was never more happy than when our Iraq team whacked a bunch of guys."
But many Afghans, he wrote in his resignation letter, are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there; a growing military presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected. While the Taliban is a malign presence, and Pakistan-based al-Qaeda needs to be confronted, he said, the United States is asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war.
Bombs and votes; hard choices
The Associated Press has an article by Qassim Abdul-Zahra about the on-going problems in Iraq:
A long-sought political consensus in Iraq over how to conduct crucial upcoming elections fell apart Tuesday over the thorny issue of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, an Iraqi lawmaker said Tuesday. Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish lawmaker, told The Associated Press an agreement by the nation's leaders the night before over an emergency proposal to break the deadlock had fallen apart over who will control the fractious northern city split between Arabs and Kurds. Othman said the vote over the election law would not take place Tuesday.Rico says the old line about separating the Kurds and Whey still applies, as soon as we can figure out who the fuck the Whey are...
The proposal was agreed upon last night by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and others as the capital was reeling from the worst bombing incident in two years the day before that killed 155 people. The bombing galvanized Iraq's Shiite-dominated government to make a push to smooth over differences in the divided government and wrap up the electoral law so that the contests could proceed on time in January.
With Iraq's public already angry over the bombing and the resurgence of violence, the politicians appeared to not want to risk further angering people by delaying the elections with their internal wrangling.
Observers, including the United States, worry that failure to agree on the guidelines would delay the crucial vote and allow violence to spiral out of control once more in Iraq.
In oil-rich Kirkuk, which is claimed by Kurds, Arabs, and Turkomens, the dispute focuses on whether all the people living there should be allowed to vote in the election.
During the Saddam era, tens of thousands of Kurds were displaced under a forced plan to make Kirkuk predominantly Arab. Since the 2003 invasion, many of these Kurds have returned, and other groups now claim there are more of them than before, which could sway the vote in their favor and bring Kirkuk and its oil fully under Kurdish control.
Proposals to solve the problem have included assigning the province's seats to the three groups ahead of time and dividing it into ethnic constituencies. Kurds have rejected these plans as unconstitutional.
Oh, that's okay, then...
The Wall Street Journal has an article by Andy Pasztor about the Northwest pilot problem:
The pilots of Northwest Flight 188 who overshot their destination told investigators that they were poring over their personal laptops in the cockpit while frantic air-traffic controllers were trying to establish contact. That was part of a sequence of events, along with an unfortunately timed bathroom break and a chat with a flight attendant in the cockpit, that distracted the pilots and caused them to fall out of radio contact with controllers for more than an hour.Rico says that firing both of these idiots, and disciplining the flight attendant, might go a long way toward preventing another of these incidents...
Air safety experts have said investigators may never be able to conclusively back up the version of events laid out by the pilots of Flight 188, partly because the cockpit voice recorder captured only the last 30 minutes of some conversation. Even portions of that were later mistakenly recorded over by mechanics.
Investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration continue to pursue other possible theories, including that the crew may have nodded off at the controls. But the airline's officials believe the pilots' version of the events.
The flight's saga, during which controllers worried the jetliner might have been hijacked, appears to offer examples of two of the biggest safety hazards in commercial aviation: lax cockpit discipline and pilot complacency.
Commercial pilots are finding they have less to do during routine portions of flights as engines, navigation devices, and automated flight-management systems have become more sophisticated and reliable. Equipment malfunctions occur so rarely that one of the biggest worries among safety experts is how to keep pilots engaged in monitoring flight instruments. Crews, meanwhile, look for ways to fill idle time on long flights, sometimes leading to spells of inattention.
No mechanical problems were reported aboard the Airbus A320 during last week's flight. The jetliner was cruising on autopilot at 37,000 feet. The two pilots, Captain Timothy B. Cheney and first officer Richard Cole, hold unblemished training records and are highly experienced at the controls of the A320.
The missteps began when a female flight attendant brought meals into the cockpit and the captain ducked out for a bathroom break, according to people familiar with the details
The flight attendant stayed inside the cockpit for a brief chat, just as controllers were instructing the crew to switch to another radio frequency. The co-pilot, engaged in conversation with her, missed the instruction, and the captain didn't return until later, according to consultant Greg Feith, a former safety board investigator.
As the plane crossed state lines, neither pilot realized the jet no longer was on the correct radio frequency and that controllers were growing worried about their failure to stay in contact. The pilots continued to hear radio chatter, but told investigators they didn't notice that they hadn't heard from a controller for a long time. The aircraft was traveling unusually fast as it neared Minneapolis, due to a stiff tailwind, according to Mr. Feith. That may have added to the crew's confusion about the plane's position.
Investigators said the pilots recounted that they became engrossed in a heated discussion about a newly designed work-schedule system, a controversial topic among pilots since Northwest was merged with Delta Air Lines Inc. Both pilots retrieved their laptops and the first officer demonstrated to the captain how the new scheduling system worked.
During what the safety board described as a "concentrated period of discussion", neither pilot monitored the progress of the airplane nor air-traffic control communications. The pilots failed to notice when Northwest dispatchers sent repeated messages that popped up on the cockpit display screens. Five minutes before the scheduled landing, a flight attendant called the cockpit on the intercom to inquire about preparing the cabin for landing. It was then, the pilots told investigators, that they realized they had overshot Minneapolis and re-established contact with controllers.
When controllers quizzed the pilots about what happened, the terse response was "just cockpit distraction" and "dealing with company issues", according to an NTSB summary.
Though pilots say it happens relatively infrequently, cockpit crews do open up personal laptops while cruising in good weather during quiet periods when automated flight-management systems are fully engaged. Crossword puzzles, magazines and other diversions are more common. But no amount of automation reduces the responsibility of today's pilots to carefully listen and respond to ground controllers.
According to some pilots, members of other crews have even been known to play DVDs on laptops in the cockpit to pass the time on particularly long overwater and international flights.
Federal safety rules prohibit laptops in cockpits below 10,000 feet, but allow them during cruise. However, Delta put out a statement saying the airline expressly forbids pilots from using laptops at any time or engaging in personal activity that could distract from flight duties. The pilots have told associates that Northwest's procedures, which are being integrated with Delta's, allowed laptop use at cruise altitude. The FAA has signaled it plans to suspend or revoke their licenses.
According to investigators, the Northwest jet's cockpit voice recorder only picked up radio transmissions between the crew and controllers, not any direct discussion between the pilots themselves. That is likely to further reduce the amount of useful information that can be retrieved to buttress the pilots' chronology.
In its summary, the safety board also disclosed that during most of the incident the pilots didn't have headsets on to keep tabs on air-traffic control. Instead, according to investigators, the crew reported using speakers built into a portion of the cockpit to listen to radio communications at cruise altitude. Investigators said they are still examining the plane's flight-data recorder to try to unravel crew activity.
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