The Best War Ever

Thursday, June 29, 2006

More on Net Neutrality

The new telecommunications bill before Sen. Ted Stevens' Senate Commerce Committee this week has been touted as reform of the cable-franchise laws. But it is much, much more. The bill is really a wholesale rewrite of the Telecommunications Act of 1934, the world's oldest existing telecom law. It is probably the most important piece of legislation the Congress will take up this session.

Living in the Silicon Forest, we've come to take certain things for granted. Our tech startups and venture-capital firms have learned to assume that Internet and telecom networks will be a platform for innovation open to anyone who can pay the freight for success. Workers have come to rely on fast and plentiful Internet access open to any type of device or application. Major retailers like Amazon, REI, Powell's Books and PC Connections have come to rely on the Internet as a route into the living rooms of customers all over the world.

Under Stevens' bill, all that will change. The telecoms will be able to split Internet access into premium lanes, segregating access to customers based on the content, origin and purpose of the data or bits. Amazon will have to pay the network operator for access to customers, finally legitimating the dream of telecom executives to tax the eyeblinks of every user. Apple will have to pay the networks to allow its customers to download iTunes music and video. If it chooses, the network can simply block iTunes music or Amazon book purchases, redirecting customers to another service the network operator prefers. In fact, there is no guarantee that Internet access, as we know it today, will continue to exist at all.

The thousands of startup visionaries living in the Northwest might want to find their passports, because creating new business models in the U.S. will become much more complicated, and expensive. In the rest of the developed world, it won't be a problem, because every developed country has a strong network-neutrality law in place, extending not just to the Internet, but also to mobile networks, cable TV and television. Stevens' bill puts the U.S. out of step with the rest of world, a world that is fast passing us in productivity, the knowledge economy and broadband connectivity.

The telecom and cable duopoly argues that it's necessary to impose a monopoly business model on the Internet in order to generate enough profits to upgrade the existing infrastructure and roll out new advanced services to the public. To date, the U.S. government has provided more than $200 billion to these companies as an incentive to upgrade their networks to the international norm.

We haven't seen much in return for this "free lunch." The duopoly enjoys below-market rates for tunneling under the sidewalks and streets, or hanging its wires in front of views. Still, the public has seen no competition to speak of, and the network operators shut out the many thousands of companies that tried to provide competition in the past 10 years.

The purpose of Stevens' bill is not to bring competition in cable TV or the Internet. There has never been any barrier to local competition, except the desire to compete. The purpose of the bill is to roll back the middling efforts at competition that Congress has enacted over the past two decades.

Leaders of the telecom and cable duopoly tell us to trust them, because this time they really mean it, competition and advanced services will come ... in 10 to 12 years. After all, their Astroturf Web sites and push polling tell us, you can't trust the government, so you are left with the cable and phone companies as your only friends. This means we're in big trouble.

The telecom and cable duopoly will find its respective monopolies enshrined in the law, with no obligation to play fairly with new entrants to the market (there can't be any under Stevens' bill), no requirement to carry traffic for "freeloaders" like YouTube, iTunes, Amazon, Real Networks or MSN, and no fear of future entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin or Craig McCaw horning in on the action.

Local franchising is only a small piece of this bill, and, yes, it needs reform. But it is dead wrong to claim that local franchising authorities have stifled competition. Any company that wishes to enter any community may do so at any time, and that has been the law for decades.

It would be a waste of valuable ink to reiterate the virtues of a free and open Internet. They are demonstrated every day in the pages of this newspaper, and in its excellent Web site and online news services. But we stand a very good chance of seeing these important democratic tools disappear, or at least be far less effective than the alternative.

The alternative is real. Every other major developed country has strong network-neutrality laws in place, far stronger than anything the Congress is considering in any of the many amendments to Stevens' bill.

Because these countries have strong laws, keeping the networks open to competition and free for any budding startup to use, they have far surpassed the U.S. on the information highway. They have faster networks, lower fees and more-advanced services like IPTV, distance learning, and remote medical and security monitoring. Their networks are more reliable and secure, because reliability, security and speed are built in.

While not as tangibly exciting as the space race, or with the threatening specter of Sputnik circling overhead, our national efforts to move into a 21st-century knowledge economy are every bit as important. This is a race we do not want to lose; it is a race we cannot afford to lose.

Monday, June 26, 2006

Definition of a Terrorist

This word seems to get bandied a lot these days and there are those who go so far as to say that George W. Bush is one. Here is the definition, let your conscious be your guide on defining who is and who isnt one.

Terrorist (as defined by the United States Department of Justice):
Involves violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or any State; Appears to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by assassination or kidnapping; and occur totally outside the United States, or transcend national boundaries in terms of the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they appear intended to coerce or intimidate, or the locale in which their perpetrators operate or seek asylum.

Thursday, June 22, 2006

But remember Global Warming is a Myth

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Earth is the hottest it has been in at least 400 years, probably even longer.

The National Academy of Sciences, reaching that conclusion in a broad review of scientific work requested by Congress, reported Thursday that the "recent warmth is unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia."

A panel of top climate scientists told lawmakers that the Earth is running a fever and that "human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming." Their 155-page report said average global surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rose about 1 degree during the 20th century.

The report was requested in November by the chairman of the House Science Committee, Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-New York, to address naysayers who question whether global warming is a major threat.

Last year, when the House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, launched an investigation of three climate scientists, Boehlert said Barton should try to learn from scientists, not intimidate them.

The Bush administration also has maintained that the threat is not severe enough to warrant new pollution controls that the White House says would have cost 5 million Americans their jobs.

Climate scientists Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes had concluded the Northern Hemisphere was the warmest it has been in 2,000 years. Their research was known as the "hockey-stick" graphic because it compared the sharp curve of the hockey blade to the recent uptick in temperatures and the stick's long shaft to centuries of previous climate stability.

The National Academy scientists concluded that the Mann-Bradley-Hughes research from the late 1990s was "likely" to be true, said John "Mike" Wallace, an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Washington and a panel member. The conclusions from the '90s research "are very close to being right" and are supported by even more recent data, Wallace said.

The panel looked at how other scientists reconstructed the Earth's temperatures going back thousands of years, before there was data from modern scientific instruments.

For all but the most recent 150 years, the academy scientists relied on "proxy" evidence from tree rings, corals, glaciers and ice cores, cave deposits, ocean and lake sediments, boreholes and other sources. They also examined indirect records such as paintings of glaciers in the Alps.

Combining that information gave the panel "a high level of confidence that the last few decades of the 20th century were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years," the academy said.

Overall, the panel agreed that the warming in the last few decades of the 20th century was unprecedented over the last 1,000 years, though relatively warm conditions persisted around the year 1000, followed by a "Little Ice Age" from about 1500 to 1850.

The scientists said they had less confidence in the evidence of temperatures before 1600. But they considered it reliable enough to conclude there were sharp spikes in carbon dioxide and methane, the two major "greenhouse" gases blamed for trapping heat in the atmosphere, beginning in the 20th century, after remaining fairly level for 12,000 years.

Between 1 A.D. and 1850, volcanic eruptions and solar fluctuations were the main causes of changes in greenhouse gas levels. But those temperature changes "were much less pronounced than the warming due to greenhouse gas" levels by pollution since the mid-19th century, it said.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private organization chartered by Congress to advise the government of scientific matters

If your 42 and younger .... the Army wants YOU!

The US Army said it is raising the maximum age for enlistment from 40 to 42 in an effort to expand its pool of potential recruits.

The move comes just six months after the army raised the maximum age from 35 to 40, reflecting continuing concerns about recruiting even though it has met its monthly goals for the past 12 months.


"Experience has shown that older recruits who can meet the physical demands of military service generally make excellent soldiers based on their maturity, motivation, loyalty, and patriotism," the army recruiting command said in a statement.

It said recruits between the ages of 40 to 42 must meet the same physical standards as younger ones but will be subjected to additional medical screening.

Both men and women in that age bracket can enlist and are eligible for the same signing bonuses and other incentives as younger recruits.

The command said more than 1,000 individuals over the age of 35 have enlisted since the maximum age was raised in January.

The next four months are crucial to the army's efforts to enlist 80,000 new recruits this fiscal year. Last year it fell about eight percent short of the mark.

The service will have to meet higher recruiting target02

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Thank you Comcast

AT&T and Big Brother .... seperated at birth?

AT&T has issued an updated privacy policy that takes effect Friday. The changes are significant because they appear to give the telecom giant more latitude when it comes to sharing customers' personal data with government officials.

The new policy says that AT&T -- not customers -- owns customers' confidential info and can use it "to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process."

The policy also indicates that AT&T will track the viewing habits of customers of its new video service -- something that cable and satellite providers are prohibited from doing.

Moreover, AT&T (formerly known as SBC) is requiring customers to agree to its updated privacy policy as a condition for service -- a new move that legal experts say will reduce customers' recourse for any future data sharing with government authorities or others.

The company's policy overhaul follows recent reports that AT&T was one of several leading telecom providers that allowed the National Security Agency warrantless access to its voice and data networks as part of the Bush administration's war on terror.

"They're obviously trying to avoid a hornet's nest of consumer-protection lawsuits," said Chris Hoofnagle, a San Francisco privacy consultant and former senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

"They've written this new policy so broadly that they've given themselves maximum flexibility when it comes to disclosing customers' records," he said.

AT&T is being sued by San Francisco's Electronic Frontier Foundation for allegedly allowing the NSA to tap into the company's data network, providing warrantless access to customers' e-mails and Web browsing.

AT&T is also believed to have participated in President Bush's acknowledged domestic spying program, in which the NSA was given warrantless access to U.S. citizens' phone calls.

AT&T said in a statement last month that it "has a long history of vigorously protecting customer privacy" and that "our customers expect, deserve and receive nothing less than our fullest commitment to their privacy."

But the company also asserted that it has "an obligation to assist law enforcement and other government agencies responsible for protecting the public welfare, whether it be an individual or the security interests of the entire nation."

Under its former privacy policy, introduced in September 2004, AT&T said it might use customer's data "to respond to subpoenas, court orders or other legal process, to the extent required and/or permitted by law."

The new version, which is specifically for Internet and video customers, is much more explicit about the company's right to cooperate with government agencies in any security-related matters -- and AT&T's belief that customers' data belongs to the company, not customers.

"While your account information may be personal to you, these records constitute business records that are owned by AT&T," the new policy declares. "As such, AT&T may disclose such records to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process."

It says the company "may disclose your information in response to subpoenas, court orders, or other legal process," omitting the earlier language about such processes being "required and/or permitted by law."

The new policy states that AT&T "may also use your information in order to investigate, prevent or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud (or) situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person" -- conditions that would appear to embrace any terror-related circumstance.

Ray Everett-Church, a Silicon Valley privacy consultant, said it seems clear that AT&T has substantially modified its privacy policy in light of revelations about the government's domestic spying program.

"It's obvious that they are trying to stretch their blanket pretty tightly to cover as many exposed bits as possible," he said.

Gail Hillebrand, a staff attorney at Consumers Union in San Francisco, said the declaration that AT&T owns customers' data represents the most significant departure from the company's previous policy.

"It creates the impression that they can do whatever they want," she said. "This is the real heart of AT&T's new policy and is a pretty fundamental difference from how most customers probably see things."

John Britton, an AT&T spokesman, denied that the updated privacy policy marks a shift in the company's approach to customers' info.

"We don't see this as anything new," he said. "Our goal was to make the policy easier to read and easier for customers to understand."

He acknowledged that there was no explicit requirement in the past that customers accept the privacy policy as a condition for service. And he acknowledged that the 2004 policy said nothing about customers' data being owned by AT&T.

But Britton insisted that these elements essentially could be found between the lines of the former policy.

"There were many things that were implied in the last policy." He said. "We're just clarifying the last policy."

AT&T's new privacy policy is the first to include the company's video service. AT&T says it's spending $4.6 billion to roll out TV programming to 19 million homes nationwide.

The policy refers to two AT&T video services -- Homezone and U-verse. Homezone is AT&T's satellite TV service, offered in conjunction with Dish Network, and U-verse is the new cablelike video service delivered over phone lines.

In a section on "usage information," the privacy policy says AT&T will collect "information about viewing, game, recording and other navigation choices that you and those in your household make when using Homezone or AT&T U-verse TV Services."

The Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984 stipulates that cable and satellite companies can't collect or disclose information about customers' viewing habits.

The law is silent on video services offered by phone companies via the Internet, basically because legislators never anticipated such technology would be available.

AT&T's Britton said the 1984 law doesn't apply to his company's video service because AT&T isn't a cable provider. "We are not building a cable TV network," he said. "We're building an Internet protocol television network."

But Andrew Johnson, a spokesman for cable heavyweight Comcast, disputed this perspective.

"Video is video is video," he said. "If you're delivering programming over a telecommunications network to a TV set, all rules need to be the same."

AT&T's new and former privacy policies both state that "conducting business ethically and ensuring privacy is critical to maintaining the public's trust and achieving success in a dynamic and competitive business climate."

Both also state that "privacy responsibility" extends "to the privacy of conversations and to the flow of information in data form." As such, both say that "the trust of our customers necessitates vigilant, responsible privacy protections."

The 2004 policy, though, went one step further. It said AT&T realizes "that privacy is an important issue for our customers and members."

The new policy makes no such acknowledgment.

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Your rights are being violated, but you probably dont care

WASHINGTON - Numerous federal and local law enforcement agencies have bypassed subpoenas and warrants designed to protect civil liberties and gathered Americans' personal telephone records from private-sector data brokers.


These brokers, many of whom advertise aggressively on the Internet, have gotten into customer accounts online, tricked phone companies into revealing information and even acknowledged that their practices violate laws, according to documents gathered by congressional investigators and provided to The Associated Press.

The law enforcement agencies include offices in the Homeland Security Department and Justice Department — including the FBI and U.S. Marshal's Service — and municipal police departments in California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia and Utah. Experts believe hundreds of other departments frequently use such services.

"We are requesting any and all information you have regarding the above cell phone account and the account holder ... including account activity and the account holder's address," Ana Bueno, a police investigator in Redwood City, Calif., wrote in October to PDJ Investigations of Granbury, Texas.

An agent in Denver for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Anna Wells, sent a similar request on March 31 on Homeland Security stationery: "I am looking for all available subscriber information for the following phone number," Wells wrote to a corporate alias used by PDJ.

Congressional investigators estimated the U.S. government spent $30 million last year buying personal data from private brokers. But that number likely understates the breadth of transactions, since brokers said they rarely charge law enforcement agencies any price.

PDJ said it always provided help to police for free. "Agencies from all across the country took advantage of it," said PDJ's lawyer, Larry Slade of Los Angeles.

A lawmaker who has investigated the industry said Monday he was concerned by the practices of data brokers.

"We know law enforcement has used this because it is easily obtained and you can gather a lot of information very quickly," said Rep. Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., head of the House Energy and Commerce investigations subcommittee. The panel expects to conduct hearings this week.

Whitfield said data companies will relentlessly pursue a target's personal information. "They will impersonate and use everything available that they have to convince the person who has the information to share it with them, and it's shocking how successful they are," Whitfield said. "They can basically obtain any information about anybody on any subject."

The congressman said laws on the subject are vague: "There's a good chance there are some laws being broken, but it's not really clear precisely which laws."

James Bearden, a Texas lawyer who represents four such data brokers, compared the companies' activities to the National Security Agency, which reportedly compiles the phone records of ordinary Americans.

"The government is doing exactly what these people are accused of doing," Bearden said. "These people are being demonized. These are people who are partners with law enforcement on a regular basis."

The police agencies told AP they used the data brokers because it was quicker and easier than subpoenas, and their lawyers believe their actions were lawful. Some agencies, such as Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, instructed agents to stop the practice after congressional inquiries.

The U.S. Marshal's Service told AP it was examining its policies but compared services offered by data brokers to Web sites providing public telephone numbers nationally.

None of the police agencies interviewed by AP said they researched these data brokers to determine how they secretly gather sensitive information like names associated with unlisted numbers, records of phone calls, e-mail aliases — even tracing a person's location using their cellular phone signal.

"If it's on the Internet and it's been commended to us, we wouldn't do a full-scale investigation," Marshal's Service spokesman David Turner said. "We don't knowingly go into any source that would be illegal. We were not aware, I'm fairly certain, what technique was used by these subscriber services."

At Immigration and Customs Enforcement, spokesman Dean Boyd said agents did not pay for phone records and sought approval from U.S. prosecutors before making requests. Their goal was "to more quickly identify and filter out phone numbers that were unrelated to their investigations," Boyd said.

Targets of the police interest include alleged marijuana smugglers, car thieves, armed thugs and others. The data services also are enormously popular among banks and other lenders, private detectives and suspicious spouses. Customers included:

_A U.S. Labor Department employee who used her government e-mail address and phone number to buy two months of personal cellular phone records of a woman in New Jersey.

_A buyer who received credit card information about the father of murder victim Jon Benet Ramsey.

_A buyer who obtained 20 printed pages of phone calls by pro basketball player Damon Jones of the Cleveland Cavaliers.

The athlete was "shocked to learn somebody had obtained this information," said Mark Termini, his lawyer and agent in Cleveland. "When a person or agency is able to obtain by fraudulent means a person's personal information, that is something that should be prohibited by law."

PDJ's lawyer said no one at the company violated laws, but he acknowledged, "I'm not sure that every law enforcement agency in the country would agree with that analysis."

Many of the executives summoned to testify before Congress this week were expected to invoke their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination and to decline to answer questions.

Slade said no one at PDJ impersonated customers to steal personal information, a practice known within the industry as pretexting.

"This was farmed out to private investigators," Slade said. "They had written agreements with their vendors, making sure the vendors were acquiring the information in legal ways."

Privacy advocates bristled over data brokers gathering records for police without subpoenas.

"This is pernicious, an end run around the Fourth Amendment," said Marc Rotenberg, head of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, a leading privacy group that has sought tougher federal regulation of data brokers. "The government is encouraging unlawful conduct; it's not smart on the law enforcement side to be making use of information obtained improperly."

A federal agent who ordered phone records without subpoenas about a half-dozen times recently said he learned about the service from FBI investigators and was told this was a method to obtain phone subscriber information quicker than with a subpoena.

The agent, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak with reporters, said he and colleagues use data brokers "when he have the need to act fairly quickly" because getting a subpoena can involve lengthy waits.

Waiting for a phone company's response to a subpoena can take several days or up to 45 days, said police supervisor Eric Stasiak of Redwood City, Calif. In some cases, a request to a data broker yields answers in just a few hours, Stasiak said.

Legal experts said law enforcement agencies would be permitted to use illegally obtained information from private parties without violating the Fourth Amendment's protection against unlawful search and seizure, as long as police did not encourage any crimes to be committed.

"If law enforcement is encouraging people in the private sector to commit a crime in getting these records that would be problematic," said Mark Levin, a former top Justice Department official under President Reagan. "If, on the other hand, they are asking data brokers if they have any public information on any given phone numbers that should be fine."

Levin said he nonetheless would have advised federal agents to use the practice only when it was a matter of urgency or national security and otherwise to stick to a legally bulletproof method like subpoenas for everyday cases.

Congress subpoenaed thousands of documents from data brokers describing how they collected telephone records by impersonating customers.

"I was shot down four times," Michele Yontef complained in an e-mail in July 2005 to a colleague. "I keep getting northwestern call center and they just must have had an operator meeting about pretext as every operator is clued in."

Yontef, who relayed another request for phone call records as early as February, was among those ordered to appear at this week's hearing.

Another company years ago even acknowledged breaking the law.

"We must break various rules of law in acquiring all the information we achieve for you," Touch Tone Information Inc. of Denver wrote to a law firm in 1998 that was seeking records of calls made on a calling card.

The FBI's top lawyers told agents as early as 2001 they can gather private information about Americans from data brokers, even information gleaned from mortgage applications and credit reports, which normally would be off-limits to the government under the U.S. Fair Credit Reporting Act.

FBI lawyers rationalized that even though data brokers may have obtained financial information, agents could still use the information because brokers were not acting as a consumer-reporting agency but rather as a data warehouse.

The FBI said it relies only on well-respected data brokers and expects agents to abide by the law. "The FBI can only collect and retain data available from commercial databases in strict compliance with applicable federal law," spokesman Mike Kortan said Monday.

Monday, June 19, 2006

Parents Just Dont Understand

ANECDOTAL evidence gathered over the last few years has all pointed to a frightening increase in the number of children being exposed to the dangers of excessive drinking at an early age. But today's statistics obtained by the Evening News confirm that in the Lothians this has indeed grown to a dangerous level with an average of two children a week now requiring hospital treatment as a result of alcohol abuse.


It would be all too easy to lay the blame squarely on the children for their own indiscipline and misguided experimentation were it not for the truth - that the country's booze culture is largely responsible and much of the adult population are poor role models for the growing generation to follow.

Children who come from households where alcohol is abused, or taken in excess, cannot be expected to know any better. Relatively speaking, alcohol is cheap and readily available. Despite laws and the efforts of many responsible shopkeepers to uphold them it is easily passed on to minors by those of legal age.

While it may seem inappropriate to some to raise subjects like drink, drugs and sex with children of primary school age it is becoming increasingly clear that if attitudes are to be changed intervention has to made at an earlier age. If children are more willing to experiment before they even reach their teens they must be made aware of the risks they run.

No-one balks at children being taught about road safety or the dangers involved in going off with strangers. Why should they resist educating children on what are essentially health issues? Surely it is better they hear they are given guidance and advice from professionals rather than from their peers.

At the same time, curbs must continue to be placed on those who glamorise drinking or seek to encourage younger audiences to drink. Only by sending out a clear message that drinking to excess is publicly unacceptable can attitudes be altered.

It will be interesting to see in future years whether the smoking ban drastically reduces the take-up rate among youngsters.

Saturday, June 17, 2006

GM Kills the Electric Car TWICE!

WASHINGTON -- Just weeks before the release of a movie about the death of the electric car from the 1990s, the Smithsonian Institution has removed its EV1 electric sedan from display.

The National Museum of American History removed the rare exhibit yesterday, just as interest in electric and hybrid vehicles is on the rise.

The upcoming film "Who Killed the Electric Car?" questions why General Motors created the battery-powered vehicles and then crushed the program a few years later. The film opens June 30th.

GM happens to be one of the Smithsonian's biggest contributors. But museum and GM officials say that had nothing to do with the removal of the EV1 from display.

A museum spokeswoman says the museum simply needed the space to display another vehicle, a high-tech SUV.

The Smithsonian has no plans to bring the electric car back on view. It will remain in a Suitland storage facility.

Friday, June 16, 2006

Further Signs of Global Warming

CHICAGO (AFP) - Polar bears are resorting to cannibalism as global warming shrinks the arctic ice cap and makes foraging for food more difficult, a recent study has found.

"It really took us by surprise," lead researcher Steven Armstrup of the US Geological Survey said in a telephone interview from his Anchorage, Alaska office.

"These are animals that actively stalked, hunted and killed and ate one of their own kind."

While bears will kill and then eat other bears in fights over territory or females it is extremely rare for them to hunt other bears as prey, Armstrup said. In nearly 40 years of studying polar bears in northern Alaska and Canada, researchers had never observed such behavior.

Until the winter of 2004 when three carcasses were discovered.

The area where the bear remains were found - the Beaufort sea near the border between Alaska and Canada - has seen large retreats of polar ice in recent years.

Bears in the region were "noticeably" thin because they had been forced to spend the summers either on ice over deep water, where there were fewer seals to hunt, or else on land, where foraging opportunities were poor.

The first carcass found was of a mother bear stalked by a larger male who knocked down her den made of snow, attacked her and dragged her body away to be eaten. Two cubs inside the den were suffocated by the caved-in snow.

The den was so far from traditional sea hunting grounds that researchers believe the male bear "was specifically searching for occupied dens."

Her body was discovered in January, only hours after she was killed, by researchers using an infrared-equipped helicopter to study maternity dens.

The body of another mother bear was discovered on the sea ice in April, along with tracks showing that her cub escaped. A few days later, researchers spotted an adult male feeding on a young bear it had stalked in its bed on the ice.

While it is possible that cannibalism has been occurring among polar bears for quite some time, Armstrup said he believes hunger resulting from the recently retreating ice is the most likely cause.

And while it is impossible to extrapolate from such a small number of cases, it is very likely that more than three bears were cannibalized.

"These sort of events are very unlikely to be discovered," Armstrup said. "If the helicopter had been in just a slightly different place you wouldn't have seen it at all in the tens of thousands of square miles of sea ice."

It is also very likely that starving polar bears will continue turning on each other and that the phenomenon will spread to other areas of the arctic since the ice is retreating throughout the polar basin, Armstrup warned.

"We anticipate we're going to continue to see these things and if the ice retreats farther and farther out we're likely to see an increased stress in the polar bear population," he said.

Thursday, June 15, 2006

A reason to reflect

U.S. death toll in Iraq reaches 2,500
18,490 U.S. troops have been wounded since 2003 invasion, Pentagon says

Saturday, June 10, 2006

Heard Any Good News Lately?

Iraqi and U.S. officials announced this morning that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has been killed in an air strike northwest of Baghdad. At the White House, George W. Bush declared the news "a victory in the global war on terror."

Assuming that Zarqawi is really dead -- and we could wallpaper a small house with news reports of major al-Qaida leaders who turned out not to be -- the U.S. special forces who pulled off the attack deserve whatever praise they're going to get. But at the risk of raining on anyone's parade, it's fair to make one observation here:

The Bush administration didn't need to go to war to take out Zarqawi.

In fact, there's evidence that the war actually helped keep Zarqawi alive longer -- and certainly presented him with more easily accessible targets -- than would have been the case if the United States had not invaded Iraq. As NBC News reported back in 2004, U.S. military planners drew up plans to take out Zarqawi three times in 2002 and 2003, but the Bush administration killed the plans each time. Why? Because, military officials told NBC, the Bush administration feared that destroying Zarqawi's terrorist camp in Iraq "could undercut its case for war against Saddam."

Friday, June 09, 2006

Hate Speech




Tell me .... Do you think that Anne Coulter is just a wingnut?

• "To expiate the pain of losing her first-born son in the Iraq war, Cindy Sheehan decided to cheer herself up by engaging in Stalinist agitprop outside President Bush's Crawford ranch. ... After your third profile on Entertainment Tonight, you're no longer a grieving mom; you're a C-list celebrity trolling for a book deal or a reality show," Coulter wrote in her TownHall.com column on Aug. 18, 2005.

• "Even if corners were cut, (Iran-Contra) was a brilliant scheme. There is no possibility that anyone in any Democratic administration would have gone to such lengths to fund anti-communist forces. When Democrats scheme from the White House, it's to cover up the president's affair with an intern. When Republicans scheme, it's to support embattled anti-communist freedom fighters sold out by the Democrats," she wrote in 2003's Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.

• "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building," The New York Observer quoted her as saying on Aug. 20, 2002. She clarified those remarks with RightWingNews.com: "Of course I regret it. I should have added, 'after everyone had left the building except the editors and reporters.'"

• "After all other suitable office space in Manhattan had dried up — and also after spending the weekend golfing at an all-white club in Florida — Clinton announced he would take an office in Harlem. ... As one of my friends remarked, that should be nice: Having escaped a mugging on the way to work, Clinton's female employees will then have to face an accused rapist in the office," Coulter wrote on Feb. 19, 2001.

• "(Liberals) are always accusing us of repressing their speech. I say let's do it. Let's repress them. ... Frankly, I'm not a big fan of the First Amendment," Coulter said during an Oct. 21, 2005, speech at the University of Florida.

• "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war," Coulter wrote in a column published by the National Review Online on Sept. 13, 2001.

• "The portrayal of Senator Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is sheer liberal hobgoblinism. Liberals weren't cowering in fear during the McCarthy era. They were systematically undermining the nation's ability to defend itself while waging a bellicose campaign of lies to blacken McCarthy's name. Everything you think you know about McCarthy is a hegemonic lie. Liberals denounced McCarthy because they were afraid of getting caught, so they fought back like animals to hide their own collaboration with a regime as evil as the Nazis," she wrote in Treason.

• "Mostly the Witches of East Brunswick wanted George Bush to apologize for not being Bill Clinton," she wrote in Godless. She was referring to the New Jersey town where two of the Sept. 11 widows live.

• "We need somebody to put rat poison in Justice Stevens' creme brulee," Coulter said in a Jan. 27 appearance at Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Ark., regarding Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. She later explained she was joking about the justice, whose votes have upheld Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision legalizing abortion.

• "You want to be careful not to become just a blowhard," she said in the Washington Post on October 16, 1998.

Monday, June 05, 2006

Perpetually Single

I'm sure if my parents were to read this, they'd think that something is STILL wrong with me.

THEY HAVE NAMES FOR THEMSELVES NOW: Quirkyalone, Modern Spinsters, Marriagefree, and Spinsterellas. Couplists depress them, and even worse are the Perkytogethers, the sort who feed each other in public or make out in movie theaters or hold hands while riding bicycles. "Yes," wrote one Quirkyalone in an online chat room after recently spotting such a four-wheeled spectacle, "I wanted to see the Tyranny of Coupledom take a tumble."

This message launched dozens of responses. "I had to vent," wrote the woman who started it all. And who can blame her? Singles can feel subjected to an endless stream of Couplists riding bicycles while holding hands and asking as they pedal by: "So, when are you going to get married?"

It is the question that has dogged single people - perhaps more than any other - ever since the invention of the prying mother. But now, tired of being marginalized and scrutinized by a wedded society, unattached Americans are throwing a cultural curveball. They're announcing they're happy just as they are. They're buying houses on their own, having children on their own, and even planning to retire on their own. Single folks today have what one advertising executive calls a feeling of "growing militancy." And they've got numbers. More than ever before, men and women are living single well into their 30s, 40s, and beyond. It's been estimated that, as early as 2008, a majority of US households will be headed by an unmarried person - a shift that has already taken hold in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and 15 other states. People continue to marry later in life, especially in this state, and some are opting out altogether, posing Couplists a question of their own: "Why bother?"

In 1970, only 7.8 percent of Americans aged 30 to 34 had never married, and 65.4 percent of all men were hitched, as were 59.7 percent of all women. By 2003, the number of never-marrieds aged 30 to 34 had exploded to 27.9 percent. The number of all men who were married had dropped to 55.4 percent, and barely half of all women were wed.

Few places are as single-minded as Boston. According to the US Census, a stunning 53.6 percent of all men here have never married, tops in the nation. And the city's women are close behind; more than 45 percent have never walked down the aisle, a figure that trails only Newark and Washington, D.C. In other words, Boston isn't a city that never sleeps; it's a city that sleeps alone or sleeps around, depending on how you look at it.

How we got here is the result of countless cultural shifts: the feminist movement, the jump in the divorce rate, the decline of the loveless marriage, and the rise of a soulmate society born of a quaint, high-minded ideal called love. One recent poll found that almost all young adults believe there is someone special out there for them, and they will not settle just to be married. They will wait. And that decision is changing how we define happiness and the need for partners, and it's transforming the look of our neighborhoods. Less than 50 years removed from Leave It to Beaver, everyone wants to know what will happen if the tyranny of coupledom finally tumbles.

THIS STORY, like all good stories about the single life, begins in a cafe, three days before Valentine's Day on the night of the biggest snowstorm of last winter. Nancy Howell couldn't have counted on the blizzard, which by morning would bury Boston in snow. But everything else she could have predicted. Here she was, once again, alone and soon to be without a date on the Couplists' favorite holiday.

Howell, a textbook proofreader and Brighton resident, had not planned her life this way. "Thirty," she tells me, "kind of meant I should be settling down. Maybe buying a house, buying a condo." But that milestone birthday came and went in June 2005, and Howell was still unattached and renting. She thought about how, when she was a kid, 30 seemed so old. And how, when her mother was 30, she wasn't only married, she was pregnant. Then Howell thought about her parents' divorce just a few years ago, and she remembered something else about herself: "I have never felt like I needed to be with someone."

Howell is not alone in this regard. Hollywood would have us believe that single people are falling over themselves to find a mate, yet the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported in February that 55 percent of single people nationwide have no active interest in seeking a partner. While Pew found that 26 percent of singles are in committed relationships, it also discovered that just 16 percent are actively looking for love - a number that would seem to contradict everything we've ever been told about being single. Happy, uncommitted singles were suddenly everywhere, and not just in the survey. Boston has them. The suburbs have them. Even rural Pittsfield has them. They are men and women, gay and straight.

read the rest of the story here

This is how I feel today

I believe I can see the future
Cause I repeat the same routine
I think I used to have a purpose
But then again
That might have been a dream
I think I used to have a voice
Now I never make a sound
I just do what I've been told
I really don't want them to come around

Oh, no

Every day is exactly the same
Every day is exactly the same
There is no love here and there is no pain
Every day is exactly the same

Friday, June 02, 2006

Sean Hannity has a heart!

Just look:

And if you didnt believe that last story .... read this.

Ok, so there are those people who claim that the Democrats just have a bad case of sour grapes, but as I've said on here many times, there are some serious flaws in place as far as our election process goes. (If you want more information go to Black Box Voting's site.) But anyway, here is the story from the latest edition of Rolling Stone:

Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -- and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in ''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,''(1) and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.''(2)

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)

(read the rest of the story here)

Throwing your vote away ... literally

This is a fact: On November 2, 2004, in the State of Ohio, 239,127 votes for President of the United States were dumped, rejected, blocked, lost and left to rot uncounted.

And not just anyone's vote. Dive into the electoral dumpster and these "spoiled" votes have a very dark color indeed.

In another life, I taught statistics. And these statistics stank: the raw data tells us that if you are a Black voter, the chance of you losing your vote to technical errors in voting machinery is 900% higher than if you were a white voter.

Any guesses as to whom those African-Americans chose for president on those junked ballots? Check Ohio's racial demographics, do the numbers, and there it is: Kerry won Ohio. And that, too, is a fact. A fact that could not get reported in the USA.

But the shoplifting of those votes in Ohio was just the tip of the theft-berg. November 2, 2004 was a national ballot-box bonfire. In total, over three million votes (3,600,380 to be exact) were cast -- marked, punched, pulled -- YET NEVER COUNTED. I'm not talking about the Ukraine or Uganda. I'm talking about the United States of America "with liberty and justice for all."

Well, not "all." The nine-to-one Black-to-White ballot spoilage rate is a national statistic -- not just an Ohio trick. Last year, I flew to New Mexico to investigate the 33,981 cast but not counted ballots of that state in the 2004 race. George Bush "won" New Mexico by 5,988 votes. Or did he? I calculated that, of the all the ballots rejected and "spoiled," 89% were cast by voters of color. Who won New Mexico? Kerry won -- or he would have, if they had counted the ballots.

But they didn't count them. And that was deliberate. It's in the plan. It's the program. And the program for 2008 is simple. Two million ballots were cast but not counted in the 2000 race. (Over half, 54%, were cast by African-American.) In 2004, the GOP kicked it up to THREE million. Get ready, these guys aim high: "four in '06" and "five in '08" looks to be their game plan.
How will they pile up five million un-voters in 2008? Let's start with the three million "disappeared" of 2004:

(read the rest of this story here)

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