bush set to appoint proven liar as un ambassador

in a way, it's fitting. who better to represent a liar than another liar?

Bush to bypass Senate to appoint Bolton-sources
Sat Jul 30, 9:06 AM ET

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Questions about Bolton surfaced anew on Thursday when the State Department reversed itself and acknowledged that Bolton had given Congress inaccurate information when he wrote that he had not been questioned or provided information to jury or government investigations in the past five years.

At first, the State Department had insisted Bolton's answer was truthful.

But it later acknowledged that Bolton had failed to tell lawmakers that he had been interviewed as part of a State Department-CIA joint investigation on intelligence lapses that led to the Bush administration's claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger.

"When Mr. Bolton completed his form during the Senate confirmation process he did not recall being interviewed by the State Department inspector general. Therefore his form as submitted was inaccurate in this regard and he will correct the form," said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.

McClellan said the White House was not concerned by the episode.
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how bad does it have to get, again

sheer, utter, blind folly. shame, shame, shame.

Curbs on fossil fuel consumption killed
Action in Congress on energy measure

Carl Hulse, New York Times

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Washington -- Working furiously to try to strike a deal on broad energy legislation, congressional negotiators Monday killed two major provisions intended to curb consumption of traditional fossil fuels like oil, natural gas and coal.

House members rejected an effort to incorporate a plan passed by the Senate to require utilities to use more renewable energy such as wind and solar power to generate electricity. They also defeated a bid to direct the president to find ways to cut the nation's appetite for oil by a million barrels a day.

Backers of the initiative to identify the oil savings said it was an alternative to the politically difficult approach of increasing automotive gas mileage standards and would demonstrate that Congress was serious about cutting the nation's dependence on oil imports.
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another dubious milestone in the GWOT

so it looks like the london met police executed an innocent man.

Britain Says Man Killed by Police Had No Tie to Bombings
By ALAN COWELL and DON VAN NATTA Jr.
Published: July 24, 2005

LONDON, July 23 - Scotland Yard admitted Saturday that a man police officers gunned down at point-blank range in front of horrified subway passengers on Friday had nothing to do with the investigation into the bombing attacks here.

The man was identified by police as Jean Charles de Menezes, a 27-year-old Brazilian, described by officers as an electrician on his way to work. "He was not connected to incidents in central London on 21st July, 2005, in which four explosive devices were partly detonated," a police statement said.
...

The shooting occurred the day after the copycat attackers tried to bomb three other subway trains and a bus, but their bombs failed to explode. Plainclothes police officers staking out an apartment followed a man who emerged from it, then chased him into the Stockwell subway station and onto a train. The man tripped, and one of the officers in pursuit fired five rounds at point-blank range.

After the shooting, Sir Ian Blair, the police commissioner, said the man was "directly linked to the ongoing and expanding antiterrorist operation," and the police issued images taken from closed-circuit cameras of four suspects in the failed attacks. They said that, while the man they shot may not have been one of the four, he was still being sought in their inquiry.

A Friday statement said that the man's "clothing and his behavior at the station added to their suspicions," apparently referring to reports that the man was wearing bulky jacket on a summer day.

Through most of Saturday, the police refused to give any further details. Then, in the late afternoon, Scotland Yard issued its statement admitting the "mistake."
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pentagon says war is on track

but where do those tracks lead?

pentagon says war is on track
Report to Congress assailed for obfuscation on Iraq's readiness

Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times

Friday, July 22, 2005

Washington -- The Pentagon sent Congress on Thursday a formal assessment of the war in Iraq that describes the insurgency as "capable, adaptable and intent," but declined to disclose details on the readiness of Iraqi security forces.

The report -- the first of a series now required by law at 90-day intervals -- provided a generally upbeat view of progress in Iraq, contending that the effort has the support of a majority of Iraqis and the international community.

"This process is on track," asserted the 23-page report, which was delivered more than a week behind schedule.
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gov groper faces contempt hearing

GO, CALIFORNIA NURSES!! who's kicking whose butt now?

Schwarzenegger faces contempt hearing in nurse staffing dispute
Tuesday July 19, 2005

By STEVE LAWRENCE
Associated Press Writer

SACRAMENTO (AP) A Sacramento judge on Tuesday scheduled an August hearing to determine if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and two aides should be held in contempt of court for repeated attempts to suspend a law requiring hospitals to hire more nurses.

Superior Court Judge Judy Holzer Hersher set the Aug. 17 hearing after the administration reissued emergency regulations blocking new nurse staffing requirements despite a permanent injunction barring the regulations.

A spokeswoman for the state Health and Human Services Agency, Sabrina Demayo Lockhart, said the regulations were reissued for technical reasons to "preserve appeal rights.''

"We understand that the judge's ruling stands,'' she said. ``We are not in any way trying to violate her order. We've been very clear that we wanted to appeal her ruling.''

But Charles Idelson, a spokesman for the California Nurses Association, said the department had no authority to reissue the regulations.

"There is nothing in the law that anyone is aware of that says they have the authority to ignore a court order on the basis of their desire to appeal...,'' he said. ``He (Schwarzenegger) is sending a signal to hospitals that don't like the law that they can continue to violate it.''
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The administration announced that it would appeal those orders but hasn't filed the appeal yet.

loophole lets gov groper's PACs pay rent to himself

looks like "mr open-all-the-books" got caught again. the guy who wanted to audit the state's finances, needs to have his own books audited. by someone with some ethical common sense.

Loophole lets rent flow to governor
Building he owns charges political groups he controls
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
...
According to records filed with the secretary of state, three Schwarzenegger-controlled committees have paid rent to Main Street Plaza: Citizens for Afterschool Programs, which advocated for the initiative; Californians for Schwarzenegger, one of Schwarzenegger's committees during the recall; and the California Recovery Team, Schwarzenegger's main fund-raising committee since becoming governor.

Rent for a space with two offices is $3,334 per month, according to Tom Hiltack, the lawyer representing Schwarzenegger's fund-raising committees. Hiltack said the fee had been negotiated between himself and a lawyer for Schwarzenegger's real estate company and was a typical rate for the area.

State law prohibits a candidate or elected official from using campaign funds to pay rent on property owned by the same candidate or elected official. But a 1999 advice letter by the Fair Political Practices Commission, which is the state's arbiter on campaign finance laws, allows campaign funds to be used to pay rent to a company, even if the company is solely owned by the politician.

It's a ruling that Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies, called ridiculous. He said Schwarzenegger was "violating the spirit of the law.''
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us economy a casualty of war

let's see, over $300 billion, that's more than a thousand dollars for every man, woman, and child in the US. it's heartbreaking to think of what we could have done with this money instead of spending it on a war that is only going to cost us more to clean up and make us more hated. i'm sure these estimates are lowball, too.

CASUALTY OF WAR: THE U.S. ECONOMY
James Sterngold, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, July 17, 2005

Casualty of War: The U.S. Economy. Chronicle graphic by T... Military Costs: U.S. action in Iraq and Afghanistan has c...

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost taxpayers $314 billion, and the Congressional Budget Office projects additional expenses of perhaps $450 billion over the next 10 years.

That could make the combined campaigns, especially the war in Iraq, the most expensive military effort in the last 60 years, causing even some conservative experts to criticize the open-ended commitment to an elusive goal. The concern is that the soaring costs, given little weight before now, could play a growing role in U.S. strategic decisions because of the fiscal impact.
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gov groper to be paid $8M from "contract"

so this how he honors his campaign promise to boot the "special interests" out of sacto. why is it only an "apparent" conflict of interest???

Gov. to Be Paid $8 Million by Fitness Magazines

By Peter Nicholas and Robert Salladay
Times Staff Writers
2 hours, 42 minutes ago

SACRAMENTO — Two days before he was sworn into office, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger accepted a consulting job paying an estimated $8 million over five years to "further the business objectives" of a national publisher of health and bodybuilding magazines.

The contract pays Schwarzenegger 1% of the magazines' advertising revenue, much of which comes from makers of nutritional supplements. Last year, the governor vetoed legislation that would have imposed government regulations on the supplement industry.

According to records filed Wednesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Schwarzenegger entered into the agreement with a subsidiary of American Media Inc. on Nov. 15, 2003. The Boca Raton, Fla.-based company publishes Muscle & Fitness and Flex magazines, among others.

Watchdog groups and state lawmakers called the contract — which refers to Schwarzenegger as "Mr. S" — a conflict of interest.

Larry Noble, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, D.C., said: "This is one of the most egregious apparent conflicts of interest that I have seen. This calls into question his judgment as to who he is working for, and it calls into question what he thinks he owes the public."
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circumcision may reduce AIDS risk

will be interesting to see if this is borne out. correlation != causation, etc.


Circumcision may offer Africa AIDS hope
Procedure linked to much lower rate of new HIV infections

Sabin Russell, Chronicle Medical Writer

Wednesday, July 6, 2005

French and South African AIDS researchers have called an early halt to a study of adult male circumcision to reduce HIV infection after initial results reportedly showed that men who had the procedure dramatically lowered their risk of contracting the virus.

The study's preliminary results, disclosed Tuesday by the Wall Street Journal, showed that circumcision reduced the risk of contracting HIV by 70 percent -- a level of protection far better than the 30 percent risk reduction set as a target for an AIDS vaccine.

According to the newspaper account, the study under way in Orange Farm township, South Africa, was stopped because the results were so favorable. It was deemed unethical to continue the trial after an early peek at data showed that the uncircumcised men were so much more likely to become infected.
...

The hope is that, lacking a vaccine, the nearly 5 million new HIV infections occurring each year could be slowed by circumcision, the surgical removal of the foreskin -- a simple, low-cost and permanent medical intervention that is a common but controversial cultural practice in much of the world. In Africa, about 70 percent of men are circumcised at birth or during rite-of-passage ceremonies in early puberty.

Medical anthropologists began noticing as early as 1989 that the highest rates of HIV infection in Africa were occurring in regions of the continent where the predominant tribal or religious cultures did not practice circumcision. Adult HIV infection rates above 30 percent are found in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Swaziland and eastern South Africa, where circumcision is not practiced; yet HIV infection rates remain below 5 percent in West Africa and other parts of the continent where circumcision is commonplace.

Laboratory studies have found that the foreskin is rich in white blood cells, which are favored targets of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. So the theory is that men who are uncircumcised are much more likely to contract the virus during sex with an infected woman, and that the epidemic spreads when these newly infected men have sex with other women within their network of sexual partners.
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"I would be thrilled if it works, but we will also need the results of other trials,'' said Johns Hopkins University epidemiologist Ronald Gray, who is conducting, in Uganda, one of two other controlled clinical trials of male circumcision.
...

Although the apparent protective effect of circumcision has been noted for more than 20 years, doubts linger as to whether circumcision itself is protective, or whether the lower risk may be the result of cultural practices among those who circumcise. HIV rates are low in Muslim communities, for example, which practice male circumcision but also engage in ritual washing before sex and frown on promiscuity.

E-mail Sabin Russell at srussell@sfchronicle.com.

security flaw in acroread

Adobe warns of security flaw to Reader software

Wednesday, July 6, 2005
(07-06) 17:07 PDT San Francisco (AP) --

A security flaw found in the popular Adobe Reader software could be exploited to seize control of a computer system, according to the software's maker.

San Jose, Calif.-based Adobe Systems Inc. issued a warning on its Web site saying that the flaw affects only the Adobe Reader versions 5.0.9, 5.0.10, which were written for the Unix computer operating system.

A hacker could exploit the security breach by e-mailing maliciously written PDF files. Unsuspecting computer users who open the PDF files would expose their hard drives to attack, Adobe said.

Adobe posted a fix for the vulnerability on its site, and a spokesman said Wednesday he was unaware of any security breaches resulting from the software flaw, which was discovered by the security defense firm IDefense, headquartered in Reston, Va.

Known for its imaging software Photoshop and Acrobat, Adobe has distributed more than 500 million free copies of Adobe Reader since it was introduced in 1993. Only a small percentage were written for Unix.

___

On the Net:

Adobe's fix:

www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/329083.html

but will they move it?

israeli govt admits in court that route of wall was based on factors other than security. so much for the "survival" argument.

State to High Court: Fence route determined not only by security considerations
Last update - 13:27 04/07/2005
By Yuval Yoaz, Haaretz Correspondent

Israel has acknowledged for the first time that not just "security" considerations were instrumental in determining the route of the West Bank separation fence.

Responding to a petition brought to the High Court by the residents of the Palestinian village Azun in the northern West Bank, the state asked for the fence to be left on its original route, previously ruled to be unsuitable, as it would be very expensive to move.

The state's position marks a fundamental change in its legal arguments. Initially, the state claimed security concerns were the sole motivation for erecting the fence, and there were no other considerations.

In its principal ruling on the issue last year, in the Beit Surik affair, the High Court determined that the state has no authority to build a fence for "political" considerations, such as appending land to Israel.

The state's new stance also highlights a major policy change regarding the "temporary" nature of the fence. Until now, the state has claimed that the fence was a short-term measure, and it was possible to move or dismantle the barrier.

The construction of the separation fence has already been completed in the area, and the barrier is fully functional.

In the region north of Qalqilyah, the route creates an "enclave" where it departs from the 1967 Green Line border and moves eastward to encompass the settlement of Tzofin, as well as much land from the villages of Jayyus and Azun.

reclaim our faith

H*LL YES

'Reclaim our faith': America's pulpit politics take a left turn

Sun Jul 3, 4:31 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) - America's moderate and progressive evangelists, outgunned for years by the mighty "religious right," are demanding their own share of the political action.

Their mantra, in a building campaign against conservative Christians, a key constituency of President George W. Bush, is: "Since when was God pro-war, and pro-rich?

"There is a silent majority of moderate and progressive Christians out there and other people of faith who have felt completely left out of the conversation," Jim Wallis, a leading evangelical activist, told AFP.

Christians opposed to Bush, the most overtly religious president of modern times, say his war in Iraq, and tax cuts which they claim favor the rich, do not square with a faith which teaches followers to love their neighbor.

"We can no longer stand by and watch people speak hatred, division, war and greed in the name of our faith," said Patrick Mrotek, founder of the new Christian Alliance for Progress. "We must reclaim our faith."

Left-leaning Christians shudder at the prominence of conservative televangelists like Reverend Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who preside over vast political empires.

They are seething over comments Robertson made on the ABC News Show "This Week" in May, which implied "liberal" judges were more of a threat to America than "a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings."
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one nuclear plant, 48 tons of waste per year

first rule for getting out of a hole: stop digging immediately.

Nuclear waste: 1 plant, 48 tons a year
In an age of terrorism fears, no plan to dispose of society's most lethal toxin

...
At the Department of Energy, Sell argues that deep geologic storage of the waste at Yucca Mountain would be the best technical solution. He believes the project will eventually be completed. But the loss of a key court case last year and political resistance in Congress have put the dump at least 14 years behind schedule.

Without a dump, utilities have few options short of shutting down their reactors and eliminating 20 percent of the U.S. electricity supply that comes from nuclear power. And without a solution to the waste, the proposal by President Bush to start a new era of nuclear plant construction could go nowhere.
...

Nuclear waste at power plants will remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. The fission of uranium inside reactors produces heat for electricity production. Afterward, the uranium fuel rods are far more radioactive than when they entered the reactor.

To maximize storage capacity for the spent fuel rods, the nuclear industry devised a way to pack them more closely in the 50-foot-deep storage pools than initially planned. Critics say this kind of dense packing poses a safety risk, however. If terrorists were to puncture the pool wall and drain the water, the rods could ignite and disperse lethal amounts of radiation, according to a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences.
...

The logistics of nuclear waste ensure it will be around a long time. Even if the federal government gets a license to operate Yucca Mountain, the earliest it could accept waste shipments would be 2012. By that year, more than 60,000 tons of civilian nuclear waste would be spread across about three dozen states.

It would take about 50 years to work down the backlog, according to Frank von Hippel, a nuclear expert at Princeton University and former White House national security adviser. That's because under current plans Yucca could process a maximum of 3,000 tons of waste annually, while nuclear power plants would be generating 2,000 tons of waste each year. That means a net reduction of just 1,000 tons each year, he said.

"We have to assume that these casks will be around for a very long time," Von Hippel said. "It will take quite a while to move them, even if we had someplace to send them today."

In any case, "on the day Yucca Mountain opens" it would be too small to handle all the waste, said Sell, the Energy Department official. There is no Plan B. Under federal law, the department can pursue only Yucca Mountain.

Further complicating matters are the divided lines of authority between the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Energy Department. The commission regulates waste at plant sites and authorizes dry cask storage but has no role in national policy for disposing of nuclear waste. That policy responsibility rests with the Energy Department, which has no voice or authority in the use of dry casks.

In the vacuum, a private consortium is planning to build an above-ground storage site for hundreds of casks on an Indian reservation in Utah. Despite state opposition, it is getting approval from the nuclear commission.
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