If an approaching weather system holds off, people in Northeastern Wisconsin may get a chance to see Jupiter, Mercury and Mars clustered together shortly before dawn this weekend.
About 45 minutes before dawn on Sunday the three planets will be so close that the average person's thumb can obscure all three from view.
Though he referred to the war in Iraq and the deaths of American troops in that country as “criminal” in a speech on the Senate floor last night, Senator Gordon Smith (R-OR) insists he did not mean the word to imply the conflict was a breach of either domestic or international law, RAW STORY has learned.
I would have never voted for this conflict had I reason to believe that the intelligence we had was not accurate. It was not accurate, but that is history.
Celebrity x-rays! How cool is that?Bananas need exposure to a naturally occurring gas called ethylene in order to ripen properly. Homeowners can "gas" their own bananas by placing them in an airtight plastic bag with several apples, which naturally emit the gas.
MENTOR, Ohio Firefighters in Ohio say shoppers at a Dillards South store in Mentor kept buying even as thick smoke from an electrical fire filled the business.
Baker and Hamilton proved to be unusual witnesses. They conceded that their 79 recommendations carry a good deal of risk, but they essentially said no one else had a better idea. "We think it is worth a try," said Baker, conveying the sense that the United States is down to its last chance in Iraq, and that the group had prescribed the least bad of several options.
"You don't have much to lose here," Hamilton added in defending the diplomatic recommendations. "Things are not going in a very good direction right now, and why not take some chance here in involving these countries?"
Echidne of the Snakes, fabulous blog goddess, takes on the GodMen.
José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, rushed to the aid of his German Vice-President yesterday, saying that he expected “people’s private spheres” to be respected.
From a blog called "the cool hunter," this advertising campaign promoting water conservation by Denver agency Sukle.
WASHINGTON -- It's the kind of hearty fare you might find in any bag lunch: a bologna sandwich, maybe a burger, a can of soup and a piece of fruit.
But for a growing number of the truckers who are plying routes across the Canada-U.S. border, packing a lunch has become risky business.
Drivers say they've been fined, detained for hours and threatened with confiscation of their U.S.-issued identity cards for trying to enter the United States with seemingly innocuous, but undeclared food items.
Barack Obama, now a United States senator, September 2002: “I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”Others, too, points out Susie, Suburban Guerrilla.
My heart leaps when I collect my mail and spot the blue-sky cover of The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
The survey finding, which includes Americans, Iraqis and third-party nationals hired by companies operating under U.S. government contracts, is significantly higher and wider in scope than the Pentagon’s only previous estimate, which said there were 25,000 security contractors in the country.
"By the 2008 presidential election, voters around the country are likely to see sweeping changes in how they cast their ballots and how those ballots are counted," write Ian Urbina and Christopher Drew, "including an end to the use of most electronic voting machines without a paper trail.
The ["modernization"] program's failures are spelled out in a series of Government Accountability Office and Department of Homeland Security inspector general's reports and in congressional testimony, which point to the leeway given to the program's contractors, Lockheed Martin Corp. and Northrop Grumman Corp. Through their joint venture, Integrated Coast Guard Systems, the companies declined to comment, referring all questions to the Coast Guard.
Secure Computer president Paul Burke will now pay $200,000 in penalties, make $75,000 worth of restitution to Washington residents, and pay another $725,000 to cover the state's attorneys' fees. The irony of an anti-spyware law being used against an anti-spyware vendor was not commented upon.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 — Pictures of Martian gullies taken several years apart strongly suggest that water still flows at least occasionally on the surface of the planet, scientists announced Wednesday.
[Many of the arrests] "were due to oversight associated with the inter-departmental oversight involved with the recovery process of Hurricane Katrina."
Riverside County, California, Supervisor Jeff Stone laid down the gauntlet to Election Integrity advocates at a public meeting on Monday, betting them "a thousand to one" they can't hack into the county's electronic voting machines made by Sequoia Voting Systems....
It is unclear whether or not Stone is aware of either Sequoia's "Yellow Button" issue or, as we reported earlier this year, that Dr. Michael Shamos of Carnegie Mellon University accidentally hacked into a Sequoia system while demonstrating how such systems couldn't be hacked.
I don't see a civil war in Iraq....
...I see debates among Iraqis.
(HUFFPO) - A closed-door panel of defeated and retiring members, including Katherine Harris, R-Fla.; Clay Shaw, R-Fla.; Mike Bilirakis, R-Fla.; Anne Northup, R-Ky.; J.D. Hayworth, R-Ariz.; and Ed Case, D-Hawaii, turned up in the Longworth Building on Tuesday for a career advice panel called "Life After Congress."
"The main idea is you're making the transition between being the grovelee versus the groveler," said former Appropriations Chairman Bob Livingston, who now helms his own lobbying shop. "Before you were a Democrat or Republican. Now you are bipartisan beyond belief."
Sounds like great advice, former Appropriations Chairman Bob Livingston. Can't be a grovelee forever, huh?
The country, in my judgment, is tired of pure political bickering that happens in Washington, and they understand that on this important issue of war and peace, it is best for our country to work together.
COLUMBIA, S.C. -- A fed-up mother had her 12-year-old son arrested for allegedly rummaging through his great-grandmother's things and playing with his Christmas present early.
The mother called police Sunday after learning her son had disobeyed orders and repeatedly taken a Game Boy from its hiding place at his great-grandmother's house next door and played it. He was arrested on petty larceny charges, taken to the police station in handcuffs and held until his mother picked him up after church.
GAITHERSBURG, Md. -- A federal advisory panel on Monday rejected a recommendation that states use only voting machines that produced results that could be independently verified....
The failed resolution, proposed by Ronald Rivest, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientist and panel member, closely mirrored a report released last week warning that paperless electronic voting machines are vulnerable to errors and fraud and cannot be made secure....
More than half of all voters used machines with paper records during the 2006 elections.
Commanders say they believe that a major influx of American advisers can add spine and muscle to Iraqi units that will help them to move into the lead in improving security.So there you go. Commanders say. (That's sort of like "dentists say," come to think of it. Or "homemakers say." But that would be advertising and this is... OK, just forget I brought that up.)
LONDON (AFP) - An eatery in Sheffield, central England, called the 'Polonium Restaurant' is getting more business from local customers in the aftermath of the poisoning of a former Russian spy, a tabloid reported.
"It is impossible to burn [the city of Gavle's 43-foot tall Christmas straw goat] to the ground this year, although you might be able to singe its paws," said Anna Ostman, a spokeswoman for the committee in charge of building the goat. "After 40 years, we think we finally found the solution."
The company providing the fireproof treatment is so sure of its resilience that its spokesman Freddy Klassmo told newspaper Aftonbladet that "not even napalm can set fire to the goat now."
The 43-foot-high goat — a centuries-old yule symbol that preceded Santa Claus as the bringer of gifts to Swedish homes — has been burned down 22 times since it was first set up in Gavle's square on Dec. 3, 1966.
The vandals are seldom caught, but the 2001 culprit — 51-year-old American Lawrence Jones — was convicted and spent 18 days in jail.
The 2005 vandals — who witnesses said were dressed up as Santa Claus and the Gingerbread Man — remain at large. The pair fired flaming arrows at the goat, reducing it to its steel skeleton.
(American Prospect) - Since Bolton took the helm of the U.S. mission to the UN, he has been a singularly pernicious influence on American foreign policy. As an unnamed diplomat told the Economist a couple of weeks ago, "It is extraordinary how badly he has served American interests. To be embraced by America is now seen as a kiss of death."
"They chose to obstruct his confirmation, even though he enjoys majority support in the Senate, and even though their tactics will disrupt our diplomatic work at a sensitive and important time," Bush said. "This stubborn obstructionism ill serves our country, and discourages men and women of talent from serving their nation."
While Mr. Pitcavage was surprised the Krar case did not receive more attention, "It is a fact that a lot of stories involving domestic extremists get undercovered," he says. He points to a case he calls one of "the major terrorist plots of the 1990s" in which militia from around the country converged in central Texas allegedly to attack a military base. They were arrested at a campground near Fort Hood on the morning of July 4, 1997, with a large collection of weapons and explosives. "There was virtually no media coverage of that incident either," says Pitcavage.
Featherston speculates that the Krar case got little attention because the arrests were made just after the war began in Iraq. "Excuse me, a chemical weapon was found in the home state of George Bush," says Levitas.
Inside the home and storage facilities of William Krar, investigators found a sodium-cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands, more than a hundred explosives, half a million rounds of ammunition, dozens of illegal weapons, and a mound of white-supremacist and antigovernment literature.
His attorney, Tonda Curry, says the US government has no reason to be afraid of him. "It looks a whole lot worse than it is. He had a lot of things that most people would never have any desire to have, but much of what he had was perfectly legal."
(LATimes) - Instead, the soldiers of the Iraqi army's 9th Mechanized Division and their American trainers had walked into a deadly ambush Friday. From upper-story apartments, insurgents stopped the soldiers' advance with grenades and shoulder-fired rockets. Others launched coordinated mortar strikes, hitting one of two nearby Iraqi field posts.
Imagine, for a moment, what would have happened if a Muslim extremist with an apparent hatred of the American government had been apprehended in, say, Tennessee, and charged with plotting to blow up Congress with a briefcase bomb.
"Contrary to popular belief, members of Congress are human beings. They have a certain shelf life and a certain amount of energy to be drawn on. We're tired," Pence complains.
The year is likely to end with no final action on a number of major issues, including Social Security and immigration reform and tighter ethics standards for lawmakers. . . . This year, Congress will probably end up meeting for about 100 days — an average of about two days a week in return for a salary of $165,000.
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - Saudi women still can't drive cars, but they can sell them. Potential buyers can go to an all-women showroom where, for the first time, other women will help them choose a car and answer questions about horsepower, carburetors and other automotive features.
Pink lighting may be introduced in towns in Lancashire in a bid to stop teenagers committing crime.
(Sunday Telegraph) - The gulf's two military powers, Sunni-Muslim Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran, are lining up behind their warring religious brethren in Iraq in a potentially explosive showdown, as expectations grow in both countries that America is preparing a pull-out of its troops.
The Saudis are understood to be considering providing Sunni military leaders with funding, logistical support and even arms, as Iran already does for Shia militia in Iraq.
(Times Online) - Half a dozen senior figures, including former prime ministers, Cabinet members, and even the heir to the Iraqi throne, have relocated to fashionable areas of London. Scores of other politicians living in Iraq have kept second homes in London as possible bolt holes.
The move has angered Iraqis back home, who complain that they are the same exiled politicians who argued hardest for the US-led invasion.
[David] GERGEN: Yes, I do. I think Nick Kristof is bright on this. But I must tell you that the pendulum has swung on this. There was a sense, in the lead-up to the war, in which the press, I think, was guilty of cheerleading. We were waving the flags and it was almost unpatriotic to question the possibility of war with Iraq. And then during the time of the invasion itself, when the reporters were embedded, you know, many of them fell in love with the military and I think they reported very accurately.
(NYTimes) - Commercially, Web sites and companies sell many products based on polonium 210, with labels warning of health dangers. By some estimates, a lethal dose might cost as little as $22.50, plus tax.
(HUFFPO) - A secretive Air Force facility in Colorado Springs tested a radio frequency this past week that it would use to communicate with first responders in the event of a homeland security threat. But the frequency also controls an estimated 50 million garage door openers, and hundreds of residents in the area found that theirs had suddenly stopped working.
