Miss Liberty America is a beauty pageant aimed at showcasing the country's "elite feminine patriots".Rico says he can hardly wait for the feminists and gub-haters to chime in on this one...
Competing in Las Vegas on the Fourth of July in 2012, the contestants will be asked to display their 'patriotism, intelligence, talent, and beauty' while promoting the Armed Forces, the works of our Founding Fathers, and, ultimately, liberty.
Much like other national pageants, the contenders will be judged on a personal interview, along with evening gown, beauty, talent, and swimsuit competitions.
However, additional aspects of the competition will focus on marksmanship and knowledge of the principles upon which our country was founded.
19 December 2010
Feminine patriots? Right...
Rico says some things are almost too perfect to comment upon, and the NRA's new Miss Liberty America beauty pageant comes pretty close:
Me, too technology
Rico says you could buy one of these copycat tablets:
Middle row: Toshiba M200, Samsung Q1, Lenovo X61, Tablet Kiosk i213
Bottom row: Fujitsu Lifebook T4220 , Samsung Q1 Ultra, Toshiba R400, Samsung Q1 Ultra, Lenovo X60
or you could buy one of these:
Rico says it's your call, but he knows which one he bought...
Rico says his father, a practicing engineer himself, sends along these:
Comprehending Engineers One*Rico asks: 'Who stole my water?'
Two engineering students were walking across campus when one said: "Where did you get such a great bike?"
The second engineer replied: "Well, I was walking along yesterday, minding my own business, when a beautiful woman rode up on this bike, threw it to the ground and took off all her clothes, saying: "Take what you want."
The second engineer nodded approvingly: "Good choice; the clothes probably wouldn't have fit."
Comprehending Engineers Two
To the optimist, the glass is half full.
To the pessimist, the glass is half-empty.
To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.*
Comprehending Engineers Three
A pastor, a doctor, and an engineer were waiting one morning for a particularly slow group of golfers.
The engineer fumed: "What's with these guys? We must have been waiting for fifteen minutes!"
The doctor chimed in: "I don't know, but I've never seen such ineptitude!"
The pastor said: "Hey, here comes the greenskeeper. Let's have a word with him. Hey, George, what's with that group ahead of us? They're rather slow, aren't they?"
The greenskeeper replied: "Oh, yes, that's a group of blind firefighters. They lost their sight saving our clubhouse from a fire last year, so we always let them play for free anytime."
The group was silent for a moment.
The pastor said: "That's so sad. I think I will say a special prayer for them tonight."
The doctor said: "Good idea. I'm going to contact my buddy the ophthalmologist and see if there's anything he can do for them."
The engineer said: "Why can't these guys play at night?"
Comprehending Engineers Four
An engineer had an exceptional gift for fixing all things mechanical. After serving his company loyally for over thirty years, he happily retired. Several years later the company contacted him regarding a seemingly impossible problem they were having with one of their multimillion-dollar machines. They had tried everything and everyone else to get the machine to work, but to no avail. In desperation, they called on the retired engineer who had solved so many of their problems in the past.
The engineer reluctantly took the challenge. He spent a day studying the huge machine. At the end of the day, he marked a small "x" in chalk on particular component of the machine and stated, "This is the location of your problem".
The part was replaced and the machine worked perfectly again. The company received a bill for $50,000 from the engineer for his service. They demanded an itemized accounting of his charges. The engineer responded briefly:
One chalk mark: $1It was paid in full and the engineer retired again in peace.
Knowing where to put it: $49,999.
Comprehending Engineers Five
What's the difference between Mechanical Engineers and Civil Engineers?
Mechanical Engineers build weapons.
Civil Engineers build targets.
Comprehending Engineers Six
The graduate with a Science degree asks: "Why does it work?"
The graduate with an Engineering degree asks: "How does it work?"
The graduate with an Accounting degree asks: "How much will it cost?"
The graduate with a Liberal Arts degree asks: "Do you want fries with that?"
Comprehending Engineers Seven
Normal people believe that, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Engineers believe that. if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
Comprehending Engineers Eight
An engineer was crossing a road one-day when a frog called out to him: "If you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess".
He bent over, picked up the frog and put it in his pocket. The frog spoke up again: "If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will stay with you for one week."
The engineer took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it, and returned it to the pocket.
The frog then cried out: "If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I'll stay with you and do anything you want."
Again the engineer took the frog out, smiled at it, and put it back into his pocket.
Finally, the frog asked: "What is the matter? I've told you I'm a beautiful princess that I'll stay with you for a week and do anything you want. Why won't you kiss me?"
The engineer said: "Look, as an engineer I don't have time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog, now that's cool."
18 December 2010
More guys with patches
Good idea, bad outcome
Night-time raids by Special Forces have become a mainstay of the U.S.-led war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, but they have turned much of the local population in the war zone against the Western presence. The conflicting narratives over what transpired in an October raid in the rugged farming hamlet of Loyi Rud, near the Pakistan border, is typical of the disconnect between the NATO mission and many of those it purports to protect. And that disconnect dims the prospects for success of the U.S. war strategy reaffirmed Thursday by the Obama Administration following a progress review.
When area residents were jolted awake by an explosion late that Sunday, they assumed that foreign troops had come to destroy a local hashish factory. Outside their mud compounds, they saw the burning wreckage of a pick-up truck owned by a low-level drug smuggler. Soldiers moving through the hamlet dragged at least eight men, including the smuggler, from three compounds. And then, say locals and Afghan police officials, the operation took a wrong turn: In a fourth home, 28-year-old Nimatullah and his wife were lying in bed afraid, she claims,when several American soldiers crashed through their door, shouting over flashes of light and sharp, popping sounds that made her reach for her husband. He was already dead. "My clothes became wet with his blood," she says. "I pulled at his body and the soldiers were pulling me from him." The ordeal ended with her locked up in an adjacent room with her daughter and women relatives.
Western military officials tell a different story of that night's events. A statement by the NATO mission released the following day said intelligence reports had indicated that a Taliban operative smuggling weapons through the area was holed up in Loyi Rud. When a loudspeaker was used to call the suspect out of a compound, another man ran to a nearby building. He showed "hostile intent" when confronted, officials say,and was killed. The alleged Taliban facilitator was detained with several associates, who were said to be in possession of machine guns, grenades and 20 bags of wet opium. Lieutenant Colonel John Dorrian, a spokesman for the NATO mission, flatly denies that coalition forces shot an innocent man in his bed. "We stand by the material in this release, which I verified through operational reporting channels," he says, adding: "It is understandable that rumors can get stretched after so much time goes by."
Military officials hail night raids as an effective tactic that has killed or captured hundreds of low to mid-level militant commanders, and they say that, more than eighty percent of the time, not a single shot is fired. But critics, including the Afghan government, insist that costly mistakes are made with self-defeating regularity. A UN report released in August says that 41 civilians were killed in 13 raids during in the first half of 2010, although it noted that because of limited reporting of such raids, many of them clandestine, the real civilian toll is likely much higher.
Last month President Hamid Karzai demanded an end to night raids, which he says alienate rural communities to the Taliban's benefit. (The demand was rejected.) Diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks reveal that the Afghan president has been privately lobbying in vain against the tactic for almost two years. Over the same period, the frequency of night raids has reportedly grown fivefold, despite dire internal memos from State Department officials warning that civilian casualties would doom the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.
In Loyi Rud, the effects of the night raid appear to have alienated even the local law enforcement officials. Nimatullah, after all, had no prior criminal record, and was well known to neighbors and area police as a simple farmer who minded his own business. "The fact is that Nimatullah was just a farmer, not a Talib or a smuggler," says district governor Haji Abdul Ghani.The job of rooting out suspected Taliban or criminals, he argues, is best left to Afghan forces, who have a better knowledge of local people and their affiliations.
U.S. military officials counter that while Afghan forces are usually included in the operations, tipping off local authorities, many of which are riddled with corruption, risks compromising operational security. But many Afghans have seen too many instances of innocent civilians being killed to accept NATO's explanations. Each incident no doubt has its own distinct story, but the pattern has made the prospects of the U.S. and its allies winning local hearts and minds increasingly improbable. After burying Nimatullah, about 60 Loyi Rud villagers traveled to the Spin Boldak district center to demonstrate against U.S. forces in their country. Several chanted "Death to America".
The aggressive tempo of Special Forces raids this year suggests that U.S. commanders believe that the tactical impact of eliminating local insurgent leaders outweighs the hearts-and-minds cost of the occasional mistake. But a senior U.S. officer who has commanded forces in Afghanistan maintains that a single lethal error has the power to drive an entire family or village irretrievably into enemy hands. "In the long term, building the relationship with the local community is more significant... than killing any one local insurgent leader or commander," he says. After all, despite official boasts that a rising body count has handicapped the Taliban, the tenacity of the insurgency seems to suggest otherwise.
17 December 2010
A real hero, for once
You're a nineteen-year-old kid. You're critically wounded and dying in the jungle somewhere in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. It's 11 November 1967, a Saturday, on Landing Zone X-ray. Your unit is outnumbered eight to one, and the enemy fire is so intense, coming from less than one hundred yards away, that your commanding officer has ordered MedEvac helicopters to stop coming in.
You're lying there, listening to the enemy machine guns, and you know you're not getting out. Your family is halfway around the world, 12,000 miles away, and you'll never see them again. As the world starts to fade in and out, you know this is your day to die.
Then, over the noise of the machine guns, you faintly hear the sound of a helicopter. You look up to see a Huey coming in. But it doesn't seem real, because there are no MedEvac markings on it.
Captain Ed Freeman is coming for you. He's not MedEvac, so it's not his job, but he heard the radio call and decided he's flying his Huey down into the machinegun fire anyway. Even after the MedEvacs were ordered not to come, he's coming anyway. And he drops it in and sits there in the machinegun fire, as they load three of you at a time on board. Then he flies you up and out through the gunfire to the doctors and nurses and safety.
And he kept coming back, thirteen more times, until all the wounded were out. No one knew until the mission was over that the Captain had been hit four times, in the legs and left arm. He took 29 of you and your buddies out that day. Some would not have made it without the Captain and his Huey.
Captain Ed Freeman, United States Air Force, a Medal of Honor recipient for his actions on that Saturday, died last Wednesday at the age of 70, in Boise, Idaho. May God rest his soul. I bet you didn't hear about this hero's passing, but we've surely heard a whole bunch about Michael Jackson and Tiger Woods....
Now they're flying in
The AP has the story:
Federal authorities are investigating why a Mexican drone aircraft was in Texas airspace and what caused the unmanned surveillance aircraft to crash into a back yard in El Paso. The crash occurred after sunset behind a house in a former agricultural area, the El Paso Times reported. Police Detective Mike Baranyay said no one was injured.Rico says this one has a lot more to it...
U.S. officials did not release the exact location of the crash. The neighborhood is separated from Mexico by the Rio Grande, floodlights, the fifteen- to eighteen-foot tall border fence, a chain-link fence, a line of poles with surveillance cameras, and a highway, according to the newspaper.
"We responded to a concerned citizen's call and recovered a small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), which belonged to the Government of Mexico (GOM)," said Jenny L. Burke, a spokeswoman for Homeland Security, in a statement.
Keith Holloway, spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board, described the drone as an unmanned aerial vehicle. "We are collecting data about the crash. We don't have the aircraft because it was returned to its owner," Holloway said.
Baranyay said the Border Patrol handed the drone back to Mexican officials at one of the international bridges. Border Patrol Agent Ramiro Cordero told the newspaper that numerous agencies were involved in returning the aircraft. Officials at the Mexican consul's office in El Paso did not immediately comment.
Vincent Perez, a spokesman for U.S. Representative Silvestre Reyes, said the congressman's office was notified about the incident after asking the Department of Homeland Security about media reports of the drone. "We don't have all the details yet, but we expect to receive more information" said Perez. Reyes, a former chief of the Border Patrol's El Paso sector, chairs the House Select Committee on Intelligence.
John Concha, a spokesman for the El Paso Fire Department, said emergency units were not sent to the crash site because no one was injured.
Oops is now a criminal term
A jewelry store owner shot and killed three armed men who tried to rob his business, Houston police said. Two men were in an east Houston jewelry store pretending to be customers when a third man burst into the store and stated "this is a robbery", Houston police spokesman Kese Smith said. All three men then pulled out pistols, tied up the store owner's wife, and took her to a back room, Smith said.
As they were trying to tie up the store owner, the 52-year-old took out a handgun from his waistband and fatally shot one of the suspects, Smith said. The store owner then grabbed a shotgun and shot and killed the two other suspects in the ensuring gunbattle, Smith said.
The Houston Chronicle identified the store owner and his wife as Ramon and Eva Castillo, 48. The newspaper said Castillo was in critical but stable condition at hospital after suffering gunshot wounds to his left shoulder, left abdomen, and legs. According to the Chronicle, Castillo apparently initially didn't realize he'd been shot until after he untied his wife. The woman was unharmed, police said.
Houston Police homicide investigator M.F. Waters told the newspaper it was difficult to estimate how many shots had been fired during the two- or three-minute span. "We've got bullet fragments all over the place, casings all over the place, shotgun slugs all over the place, so it's really hard to determine at this point how many rounds were actually fired, but quite a few," Waters added. "It is a pretty incredible story. The man was clearly defending his business, clearly defending his wife," Waters told the newspaper. "It's amazing with all the bullets flying around in there that she wasn't hit."
Police are looking for a fourth suspect who may have been the getaway driver and was last seen driving a brown or gold colored vehicle.
Sex in Sweden a problem? Who knew?
Eben Harrell has an article at Time.com about Sweden's problems:
Foreign visitors to Stockholm's lively bar scene might be struck by the assertiveness of the nation's women; the typical Swedish female seems to have no qualms about approaching men to start a conversation or initiate a romantic encounter. To Swedish feminists, that confidence is just one part of the country's wider effort to promote women's rights. "The whole society now expects women to be as forward with their sexual will as men. That, after all, is part of achieving gender equality," explains Karine Arakelian, chairwoman of Terrafem, a shelter organization for abused women.Rico says that, when he was young and living in Stockholm, he never saw this 'come fuck me' behavior by any Swedish girls he knew. (Durn.)
But despite having the freedom to dictate their sexual encounters, Swedish women face a troubling fact: Sweden has by far the highest incidence of reported rapes in Europe, and one of the lowest conviction rates in the developed world. Various international bodies— from the U.N. to Amnesty International— have slammed the country for the prevalence of sex crimes committed by its citizens. In response, the Swedish government has in recent years undertaken aggressive measures to toughen up its sex-crime laws.
It's in this context that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, currently under police watch in London, finds himself awaiting possible extradition to Sweden to face questioning related to five different sex-crime allegations. The claims, which include rape, stem from sexual encounters Assange had with two women in August that began as consensual but, according to his accusers, became nonconsensual. Assange and his attorneys have claimed that Sweden's public prosecutor is pursuing the former hacker at the behest of the U.S. government, as retribution for the embarrassing diplomatic cables published recently by WikiLeaks. But it's much more likely that political pressure of a different sort has landed Assange under police watch: Sweden's campaign to aggressively pursue all accusations of sex crimes.
A British judge has released Assange on conditional bail. Assange had been granted bail but spent the next two days in prison while Swedish prosecutors appealed the decision. Assange has not been charged with a crime, and he denies any wrongdoing. But his arrest is another piece of Sweden's internal dialogue about how the country can counter its sex-crime crisis.
Each year, Sweden records 46 cases of reported rape per 100,000 people, roughly twice the rate in the U.S. or the U.K. Yet the conviction rate is a measly ten percent, one of the lowest in the developed world. And the problem seems to be getting worse: the rate of reported sex crimes has increased by sixty percent in the past decade, according to government statistics. Some commentators suggest that the high rates of reported rape could, paradoxically, be a sign of Sweden's success in promoting gender equality, as women who have a greater awareness of their rights are more likely to speak out if those rights are violated. "Rape is not more common in Sweden than elsewhere," says Karin Sandell of Uppsala University's National Centre for Knowledge of Men's Violence Against Women, echoing a sentiment expressed by many Swedish rape experts. "It's just that Swedish women are more empowered to report it to police."
But no one knows that for sure. Some observers worry that there is a subterranean current of sexual violence running beneath Sweden's seemingly placid public image. (Swedish crime fiction, for example, is famous for its lurid descriptions of sexual violence— the literal translation of the Swedish title for the first book in Stieg Larsson's popular Millennium trilogy is Men Who Hate Women.) In a report in 2007, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on violence against women wrote, "While the equal opportunity agenda has paved the way for significant advances in the public representation of women... the Swedish experience is less effective in countering the unequal power relations between women and men in the private sphere, thus resulting in the normalization of violence." Indeed, it's not just police reports that paint a troubling picture. A government survey in 2001 found that almost half of the women who responded said they had been the victim of a violent or sexual assault by a man since their fifteenth birthday.
Concerned particularly about the low rates of conviction following rape reports, the government launched a three-year program in 2007 designed to educate elements in the criminal-justice system on how to more aggressively pursue rape claims, since victims often drop their charges out of fear, shame, or loyalty to the accused. And, in 1998 and 2005, the definition of rape in Sweden was broadened to include, for instance, forcing sex through the threat of violence and having sex with a sleeping or unconscious woman.
It is under this wider definition of the word that police wish to question Assange. Police reports state that the allegations against Assange center around claims by two Swedish women who say that, on separate occasions, each had consented to have sex with Assange, but that sometime during or after the encounter, he engaged in sexual behavior against their will. According to the Swedish branch of Interpol, a recent arrest warrant for Assange states that the rape accusation stems from a sexual encounter in which the woman "was asleep and in a helpless state." There is also a sexual-molestation allegation based on claims that in a different incident, "the pair were sleeping naked together and the suspect pushed his naked erect penis into her body." Prosecutors also want to question Assange in relation to the suspicion that he sexually coerced one of the women by "lying on top of her, using his weight to prevent her from moving, and forcefully spreading her legs," and that he sexually molested both women by "having sex without the use of a condom, without the woman's knowledge."
No one could have predicted that Assange would become one of Sweden's 'most wanted' when he traveled to the country in August to hold a series of lectures on WikiLeaks and received a rapturous welcome. According to Thomas Mattsson, editor of the Swedish daily Expressen, the nation's affinity for Assange came naturally: Swedes share his love of technology and his belief in open government. But Mattsson says Swedes have another passion that is equally important. "We are very moral in terms of how well-known and powerful men may behave with women in all kinds of situations, romantically or professionally," he says.
For the Swedes who are grappling with the disturbingly high rates of sexual crimes against women, when it comes to nonconsensual sex, what happens behind closed doors should never remain a secret. If anyone can understand that compulsion to expose injustice, it's Assange.
On our border, however
The Arizona Star has an article about the killing of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry:
A Border Patrol agent was shot and killed during a gunbattle with suspected bandits. Four people, including one suffering gunshot wounds, were taken into custody. Authorities were searching for a fifth suspect, said Rick Barlow, deputy chief in the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector.
Agent Brian A. Terry, 40, of the agency's SWAT team called Bortac, was killed when he and fellow agents exchanged fire with a group of five people believed to be border bandits in a remote area west of Rio Rico, said FBI spokeswoman Brenda Nath.
Agent Brandon Judd, president of the agents' union in Arizona, Local 2544, was the first to publicly say bandits were responsible for the killing. Bandits are criminals who try to rip-off loads of drugs and people from smugglers. Four of the five suspected bandits were in custody Wednesday morning, including one man who was hospitalized for gunshot wounds, he said. The severity of his injuries are unknown. The search for the fifth suspected bandit lasted much of the day and involved officers on horseback and in helicopters scanning the canyons and hills surrounding the Nogales area.
Santa Cruz County Sheriff's deputies found a man just before 2 p.m. on southbound Interstate 19 south of Rio Rico about 10 miles from the Mexico border, said Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada. The man has been turned over to the Border Patrol but it doesn't appear he is a suspect.
Terry and his fellow agents from the Bortac team were in the area where the shooting occurred because of the high levels of illegal activity involving armed border bandits.
"It wasn't a surprise encounter," Judd said. "They knew what they were going into." Border Patrol spokesman Eric Cantu declined to confirm Judd's account. Bandits are the lowest of the low among criminals operating along the border, despised even by the drug and people smuggling organizations, Judd said. "This is the biggest scum that you are going to run up against," Judd said.
The shooting occurred in a remote area near Forest Service Road 4197, west of Interstate 19 , said Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada. When deputies arrived at Peck Canyon Drive and Circulo Sombrero in Rio Rico, they found Terry dead from gunshot wounds, Estrada said.
The remote area where the shooting occurred is an area frequently used by drug traffickers and people-smugglers. "All these canyons in Santa Cruz County are notorious for smuggling humans and drugs," Estrada said. "Obviously, it is a very dangerous situation for anyone patrolling those remote areas, particularly for Border Patrol. There is always that threat." The Santa Cruz Sheriff's Department was only serving in a support role, Estrada said. The FBI is handling the investigation.
"Our thoughts and prayers are with the Terry family for their tragic loss," CBP Commissioner Alan Bersin said in a news release. "Our commitment to Agent Terry and his family is that we will do everything possible to bring to justice those responsible for this despicable act."
Terry wasn't married. He is survived by parents and siblings, Judd said. He called Michigan home and his parents live there. He was a police officer for nine years in Detroit before joining the Border Patrol just over three years ago, Judd said. Terry was a great guy and well liked by colleagues, said Judd, who worked with Terry in Naco. He was a big, muscular guy who stood about 6-foot-4. He was ideal for Bortac, one of the Border Patrol's elite crews. "He was, by all accounts, an absolutely outstanding agent," Judd said. "He was everything you would want on this team."
Terry was strong-willed, very focused and "lived to protect his country," said his older sister, Michelle Terry-Balogh via phone from her home in southern Detroit. Born in Flat Rock, Michigan, Terry served as a Marine, went to college and worked for two different Michigan police departments before joining the Border Patrol three years ago.
The shooting elicited mixed feelings for Judd, who is president of the agents' union in Arizona, Local 2544. "You are very saddened when you hear something like this, especially when you know the individual," Judd said. "You are also upset that the activity is such that it continues to present a very dangerous situation for our agents."
Still trying
Reuters has an article about yet another foiled attack, this one in Yemen:
Yemeni police said they prevented a man from bombing a U.S. embassy car in Sana'a, and were investigating whether the Jordanian suspect, who was carrying fake identity papers, had ties to al-Qaeda.Rico says they're still trying to kill us, and will keep at it. Someone needs to figure out how to whack these guys...
The U.S. State Department said an embassy vehicle was attacked: "On 15 December 2010, a U.S. Embassy vehicle was attacked in Hadda, a suburb of Sana'a, Yemen, where it was parked in front of a restaurant frequented by Westerners. We can confirm that four American embassy personnel were in the vehicle and no one was injured," it said.
A Yemeni security official told Reuters that Yemeni police charged with protecting embassy staff caught the attacker when he tried to plant explosives next to the embassy car as it stopped outside a pizza restaurant in Sana'a. The young man, a Jordanian citizen who is a resident of Yemen, had weapons and false identity papers in his car, the official said, adding that police were still trying to determine if he had links to al-Qaeda.
Impoverished Yemen is struggling to combat a resurgent wing of al-Qaeda based in the Arabian Peninsula state. It is also trying to quell a separatist rebellion in the south and maintain a shaky truce with Shi'ite insurgents in the north.
In October, the Yemen-based al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claimed responsibility for two U.S.-bound parcel bombs that were intercepted in Britain and Dubai. It was its second foiled attack on U.S. targets using aircraft. The militant group also took credit for a botched attempt to bomb a Detroit-bound aircraft last December, and for two attempts to attack British embassy officials this year.
Illegal immigration in other places
Joanna Kakissis has an article at Time.com about illegal immigration, and not where you might think:
Rasha had a simple dream when she left Gaza'sRico says one can only imagine the poverty that drives people to do these things...al-Shaticamp a month ago. "Job, food, house," she says. "Or at least hope for this." Europe, she had heard, was full of hope. So Rasha, 25, and her husband Ali, 31, sold their belongings and borrowed from friends and relatives to pay a smuggler nearly $2,000 to help them and their four-month-old son Yusef get there. One November night, they crossed the Evros River that marks the land border between Greece and Turkey. At dawn, Greek police found them at a dilapidated train station and sent them to the Fylakio detention center near the northeastern Greek city of Orestiada.
After three days at the center, which Rasha says was so crowded with migrants that she couldn't see the floor, the family got out. Now they're outside Fylakio waiting to board a bus bound for Athens, where they know no one. "I am hoping," says Rasha, as Ali holds their exhausted son. "And I am so happy."
Considering the rise in migrants traveling to Greece, and the poverty and bureaucracy that keeps them stuck there, Rasha's optimism might soon disintegrate. So far this year, more than 90% of illegal migrants to Europe have entered through Greece, according to Frontex, the E.U.'s border-patrol agency. Until recently, Italy, France, and Spain were the most popular entry points for illegal immigration into the continent. But increased coast-guard patrols in the past couple of years have blocked routes by sea, forcing migrants to find new ways in. "Smugglers were being arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned, so criminal networks shifted their route to this area around Orestiada," says Frontex spokesman Michal Parzyszek.
Alarmed by the sudden influx of illegal migrants pouring into Greece, the E.U. sent Frontex forces to Orestiada in November to help Greek police patrol an especially troublesome eight-mile (13 km) section of the 128-mile (200 km) land border between Greece and Turkey. Some 31,400 people crossed just that portion of the border in the first nine months of 2010— more than the number of illegal crossings through all of the Canary Islands in 2006, a peak year for immigration to Spain.
Frontex says almost half of the migrants say they're Afghans, who pay smugglers around $3,000 to help them escape a country where per capita income is only $900. But for Jamir Khan, 22, it wasn't money that sent him to Greece, it was war. The skinny, tough car mechanic from Laghman province in eastern Afghanistan— a place he describes as "all fight, all the time"— learned his trade in Manchester, England, where he lived illegally for a few months about four years ago. Then police raided the house he was sleeping in and deported him. "I told them, 'Give me a chance! I'm not a Talib! I am working!'" he tells Time. "I told them I was going to come back." True to his word, he arrived at the Fylakio detention center in mid-November after his family took out loans to pay a smuggler $3,000. He's broke, so he's walking nearly 600 miles to Athens.
The journey to Orestiada is not without its dangers. Scores have died crossing the border from Turkey over the years, many while trying to get to the other side of the Evros River. According to Frontex, at least 44 migrants have drowned there this year. That's nearly twice as many as the number that died last year, says Mehmet Serif Damadoglou, the mufti of the mixed Christian and Muslim prefecture of Evros. He buries the dead in a makeshift cemetery on a hill near his village of Sidero.
Surrounded by 140 small mounds of dirt, each marking a grave, Damadoglou recalls meeting the distraught parents of a sixteen-year-old Somali girl who drowned in the Evros this summer. He remembers how the mother hugged the earth that held her daughter's body. "They could not swim, but they were trying to because their small inflatable boat overturned. The last time the mother saw her daughter, she heard someone yell, 'Help! Help!' and then the river took the girl away," Damadoglou says, sighing. "They came here to visit her and pray." He says he cringed when they told him they were heading to Athens to find jobs. "It's very hard in Athens, because right now even the Greeks don't have work," he says. "Migrants can fall into an abyss there and never get out."
Though most migrants go to Europe through Greece with the hopes of traveling on to countries like Sweden or Britain, where jobs and benefits are more plentiful, many run out of money and find themselves trapped in Athens. That's what happened to Tahar Zarouk, a 33-year-old Tunisian from the southeastern city of Medenine. He subsists on a free daily meal of soup, salad, and bread prepared by the capital's Greek, Anglican, and African churches. The food is distributed in a drab courtyard on Sophocleous Street, a drag in central Athens infested with drug dealers. He sleeps in a nearby alley and says he's been beaten up several times by anti-immigrant thugs. Standing in a food line on a damp December day, Zarouk says he's desperate to work. "Every day, Greeks tell me to leave," he says. "But I have no money. Where am I supposed to go?"
Others wait in Athens for asylum that will likely never come. The U.N. says Greece has more than 52,000 asylum requests waiting to be processed. Only 0.3% of those applications are granted, compared with an average of 31% in Britain, France, Germany, and Sweden, the U.N. says.
Jobless and often homeless, migrants face increasing hostility from Greeks despairing over the country's rising unemployment. Supporters of the far-right, anti-immigrant group Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn) regularly trawl through some central Athens neighborhoods brandishing clubs and beating up homeless migrants. In a troubling sign that relations between Greeks and migrants are souring further, Athenians elected Chrysi Avgi's president to the city's municipal council in October. "It's disillusioning for them, to see the Europe of their dreams be like this," says Father Jimoh Adebayo, a Nigerian minister who helps at the food line on Sophocleous Street. "They have sold everything back home and they see that here, there is nothing." Adebayo says he sees more people in the food line every week, including Greeks who have lost homes or jobs.
But Rasha knows none of this as she's leaving the Fylakio detention center and boarding the bus to Athens with about eighty other migrants. The Greek bus driver wears rubber gloves to handle their tickets; the seats are covered in plastic wrap. Tickets cost 60 euros, or $80, each, but Rasha can pay— she stashed euros left over after paying the smuggler in a money belt she wore under three layers of clothing. "Ali and I will have jobs, maybe at a shop, and we will have a little house, and the baby can sleep," she says. As the bus pulls away, Rasha waves through a window. She's the only one smiling.
Quotes for the day
"More than half of Iraq's Christian minority has fled the country because of targeted violence by Islamist groups."David Harris on CBS radio
Rico says but it's the religion of peace (or so they say)...
History for the day
Richard M. Nixon has long been the Freddy Krueger of American political life. You know in your bones that he is destined to keep returning. Sure enough, though dead sixteen years, Nixon is back onstage, with the release of a fresh batch of tapes from his Oval Office days. They show him at his omni-bigoted worst, offering one slur after another against the Irish, Italians, and blacks. Characteristically, he saved his most potent acid for Jews. “The Jews,” he said, “are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.”Rico says Kissinger was something to conjure with at the height of his 'power'; you could scare kids going to bed just by using his name... (And, if they were political, you could raise the blood pressure of adults the same way.)
But Nixon’s hard-wired anti-Semitism is an old story. What has caused many heads to swivel is a recording of Henry A. Kissinger, his national security adviser. Mr. Kissinger is heard telling Nixon in 1973 that helping Soviet Jews emigrate and thus escape oppression by a totalitarian regime— a huge issue at the time— was “not an objective of American foreign policy.”
“And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union,” he added, “it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”
In New York, the epicenter of Jewish life in the United States, some jaws are still not back in place after dropping to the floor.
Bad enough that any senior White House official would, without prodding, raise the grotesque specter of Jews once again being herded into gas chambers. But it was unbearable for some to hear that language come from Mr. Kissinger, a Jew who as a teenager fled Nazi Germany with his family, in 1938. Had he not found refuge in this country and in this city— the Kissingers settled in Washington Heights— he might have ended up in a gas chamber himself.
“Despicable,” “callous,” “revulsive,” “hypocrite,” “chilling”, and “shocking” were a few of the words used this week by some leaders of Jewish organizations and by newspapers that focus on Jewish matters.
Conspicuously, however, many groups and prominent individuals stayed silent. They include people who would have almost certainly spoken up had coldhearted talk of genocide come from the likes of Mel Gibson or Patrick J. Buchanan, neither a stranger to provocative comments about Jews.
Even some who deplored Mr. Kissinger’s remarks tempered their criticism. The Anti-Defamation League called the recorded statements “outrageous”, but said they did not undermine “the important contributions and ultimate legacy of Henry Kissinger”, including his support of Israel. The American Jewish Committee described the remarks as “truly chilling”, but suggested that anti-Semitism in the Nixon White House might have been at least partly to blame. “Perhaps Kissinger felt that, as a Jew, he had to go the extra mile to prove to the president that there was no question as to where his loyalties lay,” the committee’s executive director, David Harris, said in a statement.
There was no hedging in editorials by Jewish-themed newspapers like The (Jewish Daily) Forward and The Jewish Week. Separately, in a Jewish Week column, Menachem Z. Rosensaft, a New York lawyer who is active in Holocaust-related issues, dismissed Mr. Kissinger as “the quintessential court Jew”. And J. J. Goldberg, a Forward columnist, wrote, “No one has ever gone broke overstating Kissinger’s coldbloodedness.”
Now 87, Mr. Kissinger confined himself this week to a brief statement that said his taped comments “must be viewed in the context of the time.”
Back then, American Jewish groups strongly supported legislation that would have made any improvement in American-Soviet trade relations contingent on freer emigration by Soviet Jews. The president and Mr. Kissinger rejected that approach, which was rooted in human rights concepts not suited to their power politics, or realpolitik. They were bluntly angry at Jewish organizations for pushing hard on the issue.
In his statement, Mr. Kissinger said of Jewish emigration that “we dealt with it as a humanitarian matter separate from the foreign policy issues.” That approach, he said, led to a significant rise in the number of Jews permitted to leave the Soviet Union. In fact, it did, for a while anyway.
Still, that “gas chamber” line is about as ugly as it gets. It seems unlikely to change many views of a man who is both widely admired and widely hated, but there is one word that just might haunt Mr. Kissinger to his final days: Genocide is “not an American concern,” he said, but “maybe a humanitarian concern.”
Maybe, the man said.
16 December 2010
Nokia, whining again
Kevin O'Brien has an article in The New York Times about the latest salvo in the Nokia v. Apple war:
In the latest salvo of a protracted legal battle, Nokia sued Apple in Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands, alleging that the U.S. technology company used thirteen of its patents, including a basic touch-screen maneuver, without its permission. The lawsuits filed by Nokia are the most recent demands for royalty payments from its archrival Apple, the computer and device maker based in Cupertino, California, which entered the mobile phone business in 2007 with the iPhone, a device that redefined the smartphone.Rico says if all you've got is kludgy technology, you gotta sue somebody...
“The Nokia inventions protected by these patents include several which enable compelling user experiences,” said Paul Melin, a Nokia vice president in charge of intellectual property. Two of the patents that Nokia is claiming are the familiar finger “wiping gesture” used to navigate content on a cellphone touch screen, and the technology that enables access to the real-time services of an applications store. Mr. Melin said Nokia had filed patents protecting both technologies more than ten years ago. Nokia said it sued Apple in the High Court in London, district courts in Düsseldorf and Mannheim, Germany, and district court in The Hague. The suits claim that Apple is improperly using Nokia technologies in the iPhone, iPad, and iPod devices.
An Apple spokesman in Europe, Alan Hely, did not immediately respond to email and phone messages requesting comment on the Nokia lawsuits
The iPhone’s success over the past three years has come at the expense of Nokia, which still has the largest share of the global cellphone market, but has struggled to develop a smartphone lineup that can compete for consumer attention and slow the iPhone juggernaut.
In October of 2009, Nokia sued Apple in U.S. District Court in Delaware and Wisconsin, and filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission. Last December, Apple countersued, saying the Finnish company had misappropriated thirteen Apple technologies.
Peter Chrocziel, an intellectual property lawyer at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in Munich, said Nokia was using a common strategy by filing the claims in countries that bring potential gains for litigants.
Germany’s streamlined legal process means intellectual property claims are generally resolved faster than in the United States, usually within twelve to eighteen months, Mr. Chrocziel said.
The Dutch courts have been known to issue cross-border injunctions in IP cases, which would broaden the effect of the court’s decision. In Britain, the court will allow Nokia to use legal discovery, a process of questioning Apple that is not available on the European Continent, which could unearth useful information.
“In the United States, most intellectual property claims never reach court and are settled in advance,” Mr. Chrocziel said. “But in Europe, it is the opposite.” The latest series of lawsuits, Mr. Chrocziel said, is part of a broader pattern of rising litigiousness in the mobile phone industry, caused by the increasing technological complexity of the devices and a more fierce business environment among handset makers. A smartphone represents 1,000 or more individual patents, Mr. Chrocziel said. “That means a company, if it chooses, can usually find one or more patents in its portfolio that could be used to cause a competitor trouble,” he said.
Sure, he'll hang around to hang later
Rico says they let Julian Assange out on bail in the UK, awaiting extradition to Sweden to face sexual assault charges. Ravi Somaiya and Alan Cowell have an article in The New York Times about it, but Rico is betting serious money the guy disappears:The High Court in London granted bail on Thursday to Julian Assange, the founder of the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks, while he fights extradition to Sweden on a warrant connected with alleged sex offenses. He emerged onto a London street late in the day.Rico says, okay, the electronic tag might be a bit tricky, but surely Assange knows some smart boys who can crack that. Given that Ellingham Hall is less than 25 miles from Lowestoft and the Channel, if his escape is planned right he should have more than enough time to make it across to the Continent and be gone before they even miss him...
“Well, it’s great to feel the fresh air of London again,” he said in a brief statement to reporters outside of the Royal Courts of Justice. “I hope to continue my work and continue protesting my innocence in this matter.”
But Judge Duncan Ouseley added more restrictive bail conditions to those imposed by a lower court two days ago, when the prosecutors filed an appeal and said Mr. Assange was a flight risk.
In dismissing the appeal by prosecutors, Judge Ouseley said he accepted arguments by the prosecution that many of those who were posting bail for Mr. Assange were doing so because they supported WikiLeaks and might regard “absconding as a right and justified act” to keep the beleaguered Web site running.
Dressed in a white shirt open at the collar and a dark suit, Mr. Assange sat with legs crossed through the two-hour hearing in the High Court, which is near the London theater district. He reacted impassively when the Judge Ouseley pronounced his ruling.
Bail of $315,000 was granted by the lower court on Tuesday after a friend of Mr. Assange offered to allow him to stay at a mansion in Suffolk, an hour’s drive from London in eastern England.
According to the bail conditions set by the lower court, Mr. Assange must spend every night at the mansion, Ellingham Hall, a ten-bedroom Georgian home on a 650-acre estate owned by Vaughan Smith, the wealthy founder of the Frontline journalists’ club in London.
The conditions include a curfew, daily visits to the police, and electronic tagging to enable the police to track his movements.
On Thursday, Judge Ouseley said that in addition, Mr. Assange would be restricted to a small area around Ellingham Hall rather than be given free access to the entire estate. The judge also sought additional financial guarantees from at least two of Mr. Assange’s closest associates, Sarah Harrison and Joseph Farrell. The newest demands for bail and sureties brought the total to $370,000.
Geoffrey Robertson, one of Britain’s most prominent lawyers, who is assisting Mr. Assange’s defense team, joked on Thursday that during his stay at Ellingham Hall, Mr. Assange would also be under the scrutiny of the estate’s gamekeepers.
The hearing on Thursday was formally separate from Mr. Assange’s role in the publication of some 250,000 American diplomatic documents, and came as federal prosecutors in Washington looked for evidence that would enable them to charge him with helping an Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking the information. The American prosecutors believe that, if he did so, they could charge him as a conspirator rather than a passive recipient of the documents.
WikiLeaks said on its website hat it had so far released 1,606 of the 251,287 diplomatic cables.
Mr. Assange’s court appearance in London is related to allegations of sexual misconduct on three occasions with two young Swedish women in Stockholm last August, something he denies. Swedish prosecutors say they want him to be returned to their country to question him in connection with accusations that he broke Swedish rape and other laws. Mr. Assange has said the encounters were consensual but his accusers say they ceased to be consensual when a condom was not being used.
The Guardian newspaper reported on Wednesday that the appeal against bail was initiated by British prosecutors, not their Swedish counterparts, who said they had “not got a view at all on bail”.
The case has become bitterly divisive among supporters and critics of Mr. Assange, and the focus of much attention by news media outlets around the world. Scores of reporters, photographers and camera crews gathered outside the High Court as Mr. Assange arrived in a white armored prison services truck to take his place in an ornate dock in Courtroom 4.
His incarceration has not ended the flow of classified American cables, mostly between American diplomats abroad and the State Department in Washington. Earlier, WikiLeaks published confidential American material relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The documents were made available to newspapers including The New York Times.
Really good friends help you bury the body
Rico says Skidmore, Missouri knows how to keep a secret, and A.G. Sulzberger's article in The New York Times explains why:
The murder of Ken Rex McElroy took place in plain view of dozens of residents of this small farm town, under the glare of the morning sun. But, in a dramatic act of solidarity with the gunman, every witness, save the dead man’s wife, denied seeing who had pulled the trigger.Rico says the old phrase applies, that 'some people just need killing'. Too bad it took so long for whoever it was to get around to it...
The killing was a shocking end for a notoriously brutal man who had terrorized the area for years, with seeming impunity from the law, until he was struck down in a moment of vigilante justice. It was also the first major case for a young county prosecutor, not far removed from law school and just months into the job, who said he was confident that the case would be solved soon.
But the silence of the townspeople held. Now, nearly thirty years later, that prosecutor, David A. Baird, is preparing to leave office with his first and most famous case still unsolved.
No one has ever been brought to trial in Mr. McElroy’s death, and, although there is no statute of limitations on murder, most people around here suspect that no one ever will be.
“Once the shroud of silence fell, there was going to be no one talking,” said Cheryl Huston, whose elderly father had been shot by Mr. McElroy, and who watched the killing of Mr. McElroy from her family’s grocery store but, like the others, said she did not see the gunman. “They could have pushed and dug, pushed and dug, and gotten nothing. We were so bitter and so angry at the law letting us down that it came to somebody taking matters in their own hands,” she said. “No one has any idea what a nightmare we lived.”
As his long tenure comes to an end, questions about the lack of resolution in the murder case— perhaps the most infamous in the area since Jesse James was shot nearby, a century earlier— continue to follow Mr. Baird. He was charged with wading through the sensational details and moral ambiguities of the case to ensure that, in his words, justice was served.
But justice is a loaded term in a case that challenges the usual assumptions of victim and perpetrator. And Mr. Baird, all these years later, is still unwilling to give his own view on whether justice was served even though— or because— the killer was never tried. “You could talk to everybody in this case, and they’d all give you a different answer,” he said in an interview at his office in the red brick county courthouse in nearby Maryville. “I’m never going to answer that question. It’s never going to happen.”
Richard McFadin, 87, a lawyer, now retired, who represented Mr. McElroy in numerous cases and, after the killing, his widow, said he believed there was enough evidence for a prosecution. He believes one of the gunmen was the suspect named by the widow. “The town got away with murder,” Mr. McFadin said.
The police chief who oversaw the investigation, Hal Riddle, disagrees. He said that Mr. Baird pushed aggressively to bring a case to trial, but that investigators were never able to secure enough evidence to charge someone with a crime. “If we could have proved who done it, he would have prosecuted him,” said Mr. Riddle, 72 and also retired, who describes the case as the most frustrating of his career.
The last three decades have been tough on this agricultural community of 342, about an hour and a half north of Kansas City. Like so many other small towns, Skidmore has shrunk inside itself, watching businesses close and residents depart.
Perversely, the town’s share of tragedy has grown. Road signs bear a picture of a young man who disappeared nine years ago and is feared dead. A memorial in the tiny downtown park displays the name of an expectant mother murdered six years ago, her fetus cut from her womb.
Even with these raw wounds, the memory of the nightmare surrounding Mr. McElroy— during his years of troublemaking and after a killing that many here feel was forced by an impotent criminal-justice system— continues to loom large.
“After all these years, people talk about it still,” said Marla Messner, 37, a restaurant manager who remembers being hurried inside her home for safety anytime Mr. McElroy came to town. “I think it’s something that’s going to define this town forever.”
Just months after Mr. Baird became county prosecutor— a post he was encouraged to take because “nothing exciting ever happens in Nodaway County”— he found himself in a courtroom for the first time with Mr. McElroy, who had shot an elderly Skidmore grocer in the neck with a shotgun. Known for stealing livestock, harassing women, destroying property, and threatening lives, Mr. McElroy had been charged with numerous felonies over the years— his lawyer estimated at least three a year— but had never been convicted.
The streak ended when a jury convicted Mr. McElroy of second-degree assault in the grocer’s shooting. A conviction should have been a victory for the people of Skidmore, but the jury set a maximum sentence of two years, and the judge, without protest from Mr. Baird, released Mr. McElroy on bond pending appeal. Mr. McElroy was quickly rearrested after he appeared in town with a rifle, but he was again released.
When a court hearing was postponed, there was a meeting in town, with the mayor and the sheriff attending, to discuss Mr. McElroy. Within hours, Mr. Baird heard that there had been a shooting downtown. He was sure it was Mr. McElroy who had done the shooting. It was hours before he learned that it was Mr. McElroy who had been shot, sitting in the front seat of his pickup truck alongside his wife, after picking up some beer at the town bar. Bullet casings from two guns were found. As many as sixty people were reported to have been at the scene, but not one of them would say who had wielded the weapons.
The local major-cases squad investigated, then the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Three grand juries heard evidence. But even after a federal prosecutor forwarded to Mr. Baird what he called “substantial” new evidence, no one was indicted. Instead of playing out in court, the details emerged in newspaper and magazine accounts, as well as a best-selling book, In Broad Daylight: A Murder in Skidmore, Missouri, which was later made into a television movie.
Reached by phone, Mr. McElroy’s wife, who has since remarried and left the state, said she was not interested in talking about the case.
Mr. McElroy has been dead for almost three decades now, a round number that has residents here bracing for the next round of visits by reporters. The bar that provided the backdrop for the shooting is closed and for sale for $20,000. The man identified by the widow as the main gunman recently died, something Mr. Baird raised in suggesting that the case may never be reopened.
And Mr. Baird lost his first election, in the Democratic primary this year, by just 25 votes, a loss noted by The Kansas City Star because of his connection with the case. He said he was not at all disappointed to leave office with the case still unsolved. “My experience is that trying a case is not always good at bringing closure,” Mr. Baird said. As he packed up his office last week, he gave his successor a memo that listed a dozen or so unsolved cases in Nodaway County including, down toward the end, the killing of Mr. McElroy. “Just to be aware,” he explained.
His successor, Robert Rice, already knew how Mr. McElroy died. He grew up hearing the story. And he has already asked the sheriff’s office to re-examine some of the unsolved cases. But not that one. “I don’t know if I will,” Mr. Rice said.
Videos for the day
Rico says this video (which he thinks is great) waa created by Hollis Cameron, the son of one of his father's friends; the fact that Mr. Cameron did so after incurring a severe spinal injury several years ago as a teenager makes it all the more amazing. (See all his current videos: La Jolla Art and Wine Festival - Entertainment from hollis cameron on Vimeo.)
Can't even whistle one
There is, as far as Rico knows, no carols (or any other kind of song) about Buddha. Too bad, we could use one right about now...
Get a bag, fool
Call it the male iPad dilemma: too large to slip into a pants pocket, too stiff to be curled up like a magazine, and too precious to leave unprotected. With its rigid tablet shape, Apple’s iPad has raised an awkward consideration for many men: how to carry it in a manner that is practical and yet, well, masculine.
“Women, they have purses to put this kind of stuff in; men don’t,” said André von Houck, a 22-year-old programmer from San Francisco. “I don’t want to carry any bags.” His solution: he simply leaves his iPad at home. “I don’t carry it anywhere.”
But guys who want to lug around their iPads are finding themselves quietly reaching for a so-called man purse, or murse. The iPad-shaped bags seem to be the gadgetphile’s equivalent of a woman’s clutch.
Scott Stein, a senior associate editor at CNET who lives in New York City, has reviewed iPad bags and ranked each with a “humiliation index.” Scoring poorly was the Cocoon Harlem Netbook/iPad Sling, which he said looked like “a giant iPad fanny pack,” while a “hipster-perfect olive-drab messenger bag” from STM bags received high marks for style.
“One might have a clutch that doesn’t hold anything, but it’s stylish,” he said. “An iPad bag can be similarly stylish and absurd.”
But even the most fashionable iPad bag can be mistaken for a murse. Some men are so stymied by the iPad’s shape that they have avoided buying one. “How do you carry it?” asked Keith Nowak, a 27-year-old entrepreneur in New York City. “It’s this weird in-limbo device. It’s why I haven’t gotten one: I don’t know what I would do with it.” But he still wrestles with iPad envy. “It’s supercool, and I want one,” he said.
Apple’s advertisements, which show the iPad comfortably ensconced in laps in living-room settings, gently skirt the transport issue. And most iPad cases, including one offered by Apple, protect the glassy device only from bumps and scratches. They don’t offer handles or straps for easy carrying. “You can’t throw it over your shoulder,” said David Epstein, 49, of Ossining, New York. “You have to keep it in your hand. And it’s easy to lose.”
One strategy, touted on online forums, is to turn to macho surplus military gear. That advice led Foo Conner, a 25-year-old consultant from Pittsburgh, to buy a World War †wo-era Swiss ammunition case to carry around his iPad. “It had to be more masculine,” said Mr. Conner, who added that the bag is now nearly sold out online. Another popular choice: military map pouches. The pre-GPS-era bags are perfectly sized for a tablet device.
For the fashion forward, the solution can lie in clothing. Jeffrey Jacques, a 40-year-old physician in New York City, owns two zip-up fleeces with iPad-size pockets from Scottevest, a company in Sun Valley, Idaho, that started promoting “iPad-compatible” clothing a few hours after the iPad was unveiled by Steve Jobs in January.But Mr. Jacques also wants something more formal that could be used for business meetings. In particular, he likes the idea of being able to take a quick business trip and take an iPad instead of a bulkier briefcase for a laptop. In response to demand,
Scottevest plans to introduce an iPad-compatible blazer in time for Christmas.The company may want to contact David Hockney, the famed British artist, who carries his iPad in a custom pocket sewn into his jackets. “The pocket was put there for a sketchbook that size by my tailor,” he emaildc. Instead of an old-fashioned sketchbook, he now carries the iPad, using an app for sketching whenever inspiration strikes, which is often.
At least they're buying American
As the body count in the Mexican drug wars goes beyond 30,000, federal authorities have, in the past four years, tracked more than 60,000 guns back across the border to American dealers. Congress, enthralled with the gun lobby, has done nothing about a legal loophole increasingly at the heart of the carnage: the dealers’ freedom to make multiple sales of AK-47s and other battlefield assault rifles without having to report to federal authorities, as the law requires for handgun sales.Of course, as usual, the NYT doesn't understand what it's talking about: AK-47s are machine guns, and not available for purchase by the average American, let alone the average Mexican. Rico says the problem is 'straw buyers', long an illegal practice; Mexican nationals can't buy any gubs in the US, much less multiple rifle purchases. The Feds should be concentrating their efforts on those clowns who are buying for their cartel buddies...
No wonder one dealer felt free to sell fourteen AK-47s to one trafficker in a single day.
The gun lobby previously convinced an obeisant Congress that “long guns”, like military rifles and shotguns, were not favored by criminals and deserved a pass at dealers supposedly catering to sportsmen. But the drug war toll is proving otherwise, with use of high-power long guns more than doubling in the past five years, as cartel gunmen turn to the rat-a-tat annihilators easily obtainable across the border.
A big reason for that preference is the failure to require reports on multiple rifle sales, according to a new inspector general’s report at the Justice Department. In Texas, the traffic is white hot. Eight of the top dozen dealers in Mexican crime guns are nestled profitably near the border, according to The Washington Post, which spent a year penetrating some of the data secrecy that Congress has enacted to protect the gun industry.
With a more Republican Congress in the wings and Democratic lawmakers openly fearful of the gun lobby’s political clout, there is no expectation of courageous legislating to close the loophole. But executive order is another possibility. It has enough traction lately among Justice Department officials to prompt a “grass-roots alert” by the National Rifle Association to its four million members, according to The Post.
It is hard to believe that most ordinary NRA members would not agree something must be done about the cross-border sale of war weapons that underpins the drug scourge. If it takes an executive order to cut the carnage, President Obama should not hesitate.
Because it's the right thing to do, that's why
Rico says he has no shame in editing the writings of others that he purloins for his blog, but there is one thing he insists on fixing, like it or not: serial commas.
What's a serial comma?
They're the ones separating a long list of items in a sentence, like "he bought a range of vegetables, including rutabagas, carrots, beets, and lima beans".
Why are they important, even though most writers fail to put the one after 'beets'?
Because, as Rico's friend Rani Cochran pointed out, back when they both worked for Apple, it matters, as in this book acknowledgement:
What's a serial comma?
They're the ones separating a long list of items in a sentence, like "he bought a range of vegetables, including rutabagas, carrots, beets, and lima beans".
Why are they important, even though most writers fail to put the one after 'beets'?
Because, as Rico's friend Rani Cochran pointed out, back when they both worked for Apple, it matters, as in this book acknowledgement:
"She wished to thank her parents, Ayn Rand and God."What a difference a little serial comma makes...
But it's the religion of peace, dammit
Nicholas Kristof has an op-ed piece in The New York Times about the feminine side of Islam:
What’s the ugliest side of Islam? Maybe it’s the Somali Muslim militias that engage in atrocities like the execution of a thirteen-year-old girl named Aisha Ibrahim. Three men raped Aisha, but when she reported the crime she was charged with illicit sex, half-buried in the ground before a crowd of 1,000, and then stoned to death.
That’s the extremist side of Islam that drives Islamophobia in the United States, including Congressional hearings on American Muslims that House Republicans are planning for next year.
But there’s another side of Islam as well, represented by an extraordinary Somali Muslim woman named Dr. Hawa Abdi, who has confronted the armed militias. Amazingly, she forced them to back down, and even submit a written apology. Glamour magazine, which named Dr. Hawa a “woman of the year”, got it exactly right when it called her “equal parts Mother Teresa and Rambo”.
Dr. Hawa, a 63-year-old ob-gyn who earned a law degree on the side, is visiting the United States to raise money for her health work back home. A member of Somalia’s elite, she founded a one-room clinic in 1983. But then the Somali government collapsed, famine struck, and aid groups fled. So today Dr. Hawa is running a 400-bed hospital.
Over the years, the hospital became the core of something even grander. Thousands and thousands of people displaced by civil war came to shelter on Dr. Hawa’s 1,300 acres of farmland around the hospital. Today her home and hospital have been overtaken by a vast camp that she says numbers about 90,000 displaced people.
Dr. Hawa supplies these 90,000 people with drinking water and struggles to find ways to feed them. She worries that handouts breed dependency (and in any case, United Nations agencies can’t safely reach her now to distribute food), so she is training formerly nomadic herding families to farm and even to fish in the sea.
She’s also pushing education. An American freelance journalist, Eliza Griswold, visited Dr. Hawa’s encampment in 2007 and 2008 and was stunned that an unarmed woman had managed to create a secure, functioning oasis surrounded by a chaotic land of hunger and warlords. Ms. Griswold helped Dr. Hawa start a school for 850 children, mostly girls. It’s only a tiny fraction of the children in the camp, but it’s a start. (Ms. Griswold also wrote movingly about Dr. Hawa in her book The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam.)
In addition, Dr. Hawa runs literacy and health classes for women, as well as programs to discourage female genital mutilation. And she operates a tiny jail for men who beat their wives.
“We are trying an experiment,” she told me. “We women in Somalia are trying to be leaders in our community.”
So Dr. Hawa had her hands full already, and then, in May, a hard-line militia, Hizb al-Islam, or Party of Islam, decided that a woman shouldn’t run anything substantial. The militia ordered her to hand over operations, and she refused, and pointedly added: “I may be a woman, but I’m a doctor. What have you done for society?”
The Party of Islam then attacked with 750 soldiers and seized the hospital. The world’s Somalis reacted with outrage, and the militia backed down and ordered Dr. Hawa to run the hospital, but under its direction. She refused. For a week there were daily negotiations, but Dr. Hawa refused to budge. She demanded that the militia not only withdraw entirely but also submit a written apology.
“I was begging her, ‘Just give in,’ ” recalled Deqo Mohamed, her daughter, a doctor in Atlanta who spoke regularly to her mother by telephone. “She was saying, ‘No! I will die with dignity.’”
It didn’t come to that. The Party of Islam, tired of being denounced by Somalis at home and around the world, slinked off and handed over an apology, but also left behind a wrecked hospital. The operating theater still isn’t functional, and that’s why Dr. Hawa is appealing for money (especially from ethnic Somalis). She has worked out an arrangement with Vital Voices, a group that helps to empower female leaders, to channel tax-deductible contributions to her hospital.
What a woman! And what a Muslim! It’s because of people like her that sweeping denunciations of Islam, or the “Muslim hearings” planned in Congress, rile me and seem profoundly misguided.
The greatest religious battles are often not between faiths, but within faiths. The widest gulfs are often not those that divide one religion from the next, but those between extremists and progressives within a single faith. And in this religious season, there’s something that we can all learn from the courage, compassion, and tolerance of Dr. Hawa Abdi.
Get the lead out
Rico sys Anthony Prieto has an opinion column in The New York Times about bullets for hunting:
I’VE hunted elk, deer and wild pigs in the American West for 25 years. Like many hunters, I follow several rules: Respect other forms of life, take only what my family can eat and the ecosystem can sustain, and leave as little impact on the environment as possible.Rico says he doesn't hunt (did once, years ago in California; too cold, and we didn't shoot anything), but the whole 'omigod, gotta get rid of lead bullets' thing, while important for the environment, ignores the many shooters who must have lead bullets for cowboy action shooting. If you can't cast your own, or buy 'em, you'll be screwed...
That’s why I hunt with copper bullets instead of lead. We’ve long known about the collateral damage caused by lead ammunition. When bald and golden eagles, vultures, bears, endangered California condors, and other scavengers eat the innards, called gutpiles, that hunters leave in the field after cleaning their catch or the game that hunters wound but don’t capture, they can ingest poisonous lead fragments. Most sicken, and many die.
When I began hunting, I buried the lead-laden gutpiles. It would help if more hunters did this, but it’s not enough. Scavengers often dig gutpiles up anyway. And the meat that hunters take home to their families could be tainted. I’ve seen X-rays of shot game showing dust-sized lead particles spread throughout the meat, far away from the bullet hole. The best solution is to stop using lead ammunition altogether.
So last summer conservationists— along with the organization that I run— formally petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to ban lead bullets and shot nationwide (there are limited bans for some hunting areas and game). The EPA rejected the petition, and we’ve since filed a lawsuit to get the agency to address the problem.
Unfortunately, there is vocal opposition to any ammunition regulation from groups like the National Rifle Association and the National Shooting Sports Foundation, which see the campaign as an attack on hunting rights, and fear that the cost of non-lead ammunition would drive hunters away from the sport.
But this campaign has nothing to do with revoking hunting rights; if it did, I would not be involved. It’s an issue of using non-toxic materials. Was the removal of lead paint from children’s toys a plot to do away with toys? Did the switch to unleaded gas hide an ulterior motive of removing vehicles from our roads?
And although copper bullets can be more expensive than lead ones, the cost of ammunition is a small fraction of what I spend on hunting, which includes gear, optics, food, gas, and licenses. No one will quit hunting over spending a few more quarters per bullet. Besides, the more hunters switch to copper, the faster prices will come down. Back in the ’90s, before pre-loaded copper cartridges could be bought over the counter, I had to hand-load my copper bullets. But already it’s easy to find them in many calibers, including those for my Browning .270 and my Winchester .300.
The dozen friends I hunt with love shooting non-lead bullets, and it’s not just because they’re doing something good for the environment. The ballistics are better. I’ve killed more than 80 pigs and 40 deer shooting copper. These bullets travel up to 3,200 feet per second and have about a 98 percent weight retention, meaning they don’t fragment as easily as lead. Copper kills cleanly. It can help keep our hunting grounds clean as well.
Anthony Prieto is the founder of Project Gutpile, a hunting group that advocates lead-free ammunition.
15 December 2010
Him, sir? Nossir, must've tripped
The Best Buy sales manager at the Augusta, Georgia store, Orvin Smith, told The Augusta Chronicle that a man was seen on surveillance cameras putting a laptop under his jacket.Rico says the investigation will, undoubtedly, determine that, even four against one, it was self-defense...
When confronted, the man became irate, knocked down an employee, pulled a knife, and ran toward the door.
Outside were four Marines collecting toys for the Marine Corps' "Toys For Tots" program. Smith said the Marines stopped the man, but he stabbed one of them, Corporal Phillip Duggan, in the back. The cut did not appear to be severe.
The suspect was transported to the local hospital with two broken arms, a broken leg, possible broken ribs, and assorted lacerations and bruises he obtained when he 'fell', trying to run, after stabbing the Marine. The suspect, whose name was not released, was held until police arrived. The Richmond County Sheriff's office said it is investigating.
Getting green out of the Reds
The United States is too reliant on China for minerals crucial to new clean energy technologies, making the American economy vulnerable to shortages of materials needed for a range of green products, from compact fluorescent light bulbs to electric cars to giant wind turbines.
So warns a detailed report to be released by the United States Energy Department. The report, which predicts that it could take fifteen years to break American dependence on Chinese supplies, calls for the nation to increase research and expand diplomatic contacts to find alternative sources, and to develop ways to recycle the minerals or replace them with other materials.
At least 96 percent of the most crucial types of the so-called rare earth minerals are now produced in China, and Beijing has wielded various export controls to limit the minerals’ supply to other countries while favoring its own manufacturers that use them.
“The availability of a number of these materials is at risk due to their location, vulnerability to supply disruptions, and lack of suitable substitutes,” the report says, which also mentions some concerns about a few other minerals imported from elsewhere, such as cobalt from the Congo.
The Energy Department report is being released the same morning that cabinet officials from China and the United States will meet in Washington to discuss economic and commercial issues. While no detailed agenda has been released, the talks are expected to include American objections to China’s tightening restrictions on rare earth exports, like a two-month halt this autumn on shipments to Japan, and a shorter-lived slowdown of exports to the United States and Europe.
China’s finance ministry announced on its website, and the official Xinhua news agency later reported as well, that China plans to increase its export taxes on some rare earths next year. The ministry did not say how much the taxes would increase. Although World Trade Organization rules ban export taxes, China has imposed them on rare earths for the last four years.
David Sandalow, the assistant secretary of energy for policy and international affairs, who oversaw preparation of the Energy Department report, said in a telephone interview that the timing of the report’s release and the American-China cabinet meetings was coincidental.
But the report reflects an emerging view within the American government that domestic sources of rare earths are needed, in addition to suppliers in many other countries, to ensure the viability of clean energy manufacturing in the United States.
“We can build a new industry and put our clean energy future on a sound footing, creating many new jobs in the process,” Mr. Sandalow said.
Still, the report presents a fairly gloomy assessment of the United States’ ability to wean itself from Chinese imports. For as long as the next fifteen years, the supplies of at least five minerals that come almost exclusively from China will remain as vulnerable to disruption as they are absolutely vital to the manufacture of small yet powerful electric motors, energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs and other clean energy technologies, the report said.
The five minerals are medium and heavy rare earth elements of which China mines an estimated 96 percent to 99.8 percent of the world’s supply: dysprosium, terbium, neodymium, europium, and yttrium.
China also increasingly dominates the manufacture of clean energy technologies that require such minerals, including the production of million-dollar wind turbines. Chinese export restrictions have added up to $40 a pound to world prices, which makes a big difference, particularly for some of the less expensive rare earths, like lanthanum, that sell for several dollars a pound in China.
That is among the reasons, along with cheap labor and extensive Chinese government subsidies, that many clean energy manufacturers have found it cheaper to shift production to China.
Mr. Sandalow said that wind turbine manufacturers were capable of building very large turbines without rare earths. But using rare earths could reduce the per megawatt cost of wind energy and improve its competitiveness through savings on other materials, like steel and copper. He cautioned that the United States had been putting far fewer resources than China into exploring ways to use the powerful magnetic and other properties of rare earths. “There are thousands of rare earth researchers in China and dozens in the United States, and that underscores both the challenge and the opportunity,” he said. “Their expertise in this area is significant.”
China’s finance ministry, in announcing plans to raise export taxes on some rare earths, did not indicate which minerals might be affected. Since 2006, China has imposed an export tax of fifteen percent on light rare earths like lanthanum and cerium, which are needed for oil refining and glass manufacturing, and 25 percent on heavy rare earths like dysprosium and terbium. Dysprosium, which helps rare earth magnets preserve their magnetism at high temperatures, is mined almost exclusively in southern China and sells for $95 a pound in China and $135 a pound outside, including the export tax. Dysprosium has emerged as the mineral most vital to clean energy industries yet most vulnerable to supply disruptions, the report said.
Dudley Kingsnorth, a prominent rare earth mining consultant in Perth, Australia, said he agreed that a dysprosium shortage was likely. He added that he expected that a rare earth shortage would slow the overall adoption of new rare earth technologies by clean energy industries for at least the next five years.
American and Japanese officials have said that they might file a legal challenge at the World Trade Organization to China’s taxes on rare earth exports, as well as on quotas that China imposes on rare earth exports.
Until this autumn, Chinese officials had portrayed their rare earth policies as an effort to force high-tech companies to move their factories to China and retain supplies for domestic industries. The Chinese government has recently shifted to describing the export restrictions as an environmental measure, noting that extracting and processing the minerals can be a highly toxic process that has also resulted in leaks of radioactive mining waste into the groundwater in northern China.
While W.T.O. rules allow export restrictions for environmental reasons, that is only if a country also restricts domestic consumption, which China has not done.
Demand for rare earths and China’s virtual chokehold on supplies have prompted some overseas companies to enter, or re-enter, the field. Molycorp, an American company that in August made an initial public offering of its shares on the New York Stock Exchange, plans to open in 2012 a large rare earth mine at Mountain Pass, California that closed in 2002 after prices were undercut by Chinese competitors. Molycorp announced on Monday that it had received the last of the construction permits needed to proceed.
The Lynas Corporation of Australia plans to open at the end of next year a large rare earths mine at Mount Weld, Australia.
But both the Molycorp and Lynas mines will produce mostly light rare earths and relatively little of the medium and heavy rare earths needed for magnets and other significant clean energy applications.
Dozens of small mining companies hope to open new mines in the United States and elsewhere that could tap reserves of medium and heavy rare earths. But these small companies face formidable legal, financial, marketing, and management obstacles, the Energy Department report said.
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