Title Goes Here(tm)

Going To Hell In A Very Stylish Handbasket.

"El diablo sabes mas por viejo que por diablo" - old Mexican proverb

archives:

01 May 2007

01 Apr 2007

01 Mar 2007

01 Feb 2007

01 Jan 2007

01 Dec 2006

01 Nov 2006

01 Oct 2006

01 Sep 2006
01 Aug 2006
01 Jul 2006
01 Jun 2006
01 May 2006
Older Archives 2003-2006

Achtung! Das machine ist nicht fur gerfingerpoken und mittengraben. Ist easy schnappen der pringenwerk, blowenfusen, und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fur gewerken by das dumkopfen, das rubbernecken sightseeren keepen hands in der pockets, relaxen und watchen der blinkenlights.

links:
Tom Paine
The Nation
Think Progress
Bush or Chimp?
Landover Baptist Church
The White House
The Onion
Ernie's House of Whoop Ass
Project for the New American Century
Project for the Old American Century
Project for the New American Empire
All Hat, No Cattle
Unfairly Balanced
Buck Fush

Corps asked to explain pump contract

NEW ORLEANS, Associated Press - When the Army Corps of Engineers solicited bids for drainage pumps for New Orleans, it copied the specifications — typos and all — from the catalog of the manufacturer that ultimately won the $32 million contract, a review of documents by The Associated Press found.

The pumps, supplied by Moving Water Industries Corp. of Deerfield Beach, Fla., and installed at canals before the start of the 2006 hurricane season, proved to be defective, as the AP reported in March. The matter is under investigation by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

In a letter dated April 13, Sen. David Vitter (news, bio, voting record), R-La., called on the Corps to look into how the politically connected company got the post-Hurricane Katrina contract. MWI employed former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Bush's brother, to market its pumps during the 1980s, and top MWI officials have been major contributors to the Republican Party.

While it may not be a violation of federal regulations to adopt a company's technical specifications, it is frowned on, especially for large jobs like the MWI contract, because it could give the impression the job was rigged for the benefit of a certain company, contractors familiar with Corps practices say.

The Corps' January 2006 call for bids for 34 pumps used the wording on how the pumps should be built and tested, with minor changes, found in MWI catalogs.

The specifications were so similar that an erroneous phrase in MWI catalogs — "the discharge tube and head assembly shall be abrasive resistance steel" — also appears in the Corps specifications. The phrase should say "abrasion resistant steel." An incorrect reference to the type of steel that would be required apparently was also lifted.

Eugene Pawlik, a Corps spokesman in Washington, said the agency is working on a response to Vitter's letter.

MWI declined to discuss how it won the contract. GAO would not talk about its probe.

Richard White, a federal contracting expert, said it is "not unheard for a spec to be copied, in particular in cases of emergency purchases."

"It's not a good practice, but it's not anything egregious, especially if the Corps allowed other companies to negotiate to change it," White said.

After Katrina swamped about 80 percent of the city, Congress appropriated $5.7 billion to rebuild New Orleans' flood protection systems. Vitter and Sen. Mary Landrieu (news, bio, voting record), D-La., have excoriated the Corps over its workmanship since Katrina.

In his letter to the commander of the Corps, Vitter said the bid solicitation for the pumps "includes specifications identical to those written and marketed by Moving Water Industries." In addition, "the testing specifications are also identical to the testing specifications developed and authored by MWI."

A May 2006 memo by a Corps inspector working on the project, provided to the AP earlier this year, warned that the pumps were faulty and would not work if needed to remove water during a hurricane. GAO opened its investigation after the memo surfaced.

The Corps and MWI insist the pumps would have worked, but last year's mild hurricane season never put them to the test. The pumps have been overhauled and are being reinstalled.

The Corps withheld about 20 percent of MWI's contract price — including an incentive of about $5 million to deliver them by June 1, 2006 — until the flaws have been resolved. But the Corps also spent $4.5 million for six additional MWI pumps for use in troubleshooting the defective ones.

The Corps contract officer overseeing the January 2006 bid, Cindy Nicholas, was told about the copied specifications during a conference call with FPI Inc., a Florida company that also bid on the project, shortly after MWI was awarded the contract. A recording of the briefing was provided to the AP by FPI.

"Are you folks aware that the specifications that you folks put out was a copy of the specifications in the MWI catalog?" asked Bob Purcell, who was an FPI salesman at the time the bids were taken.

"No, I'm not aware of that," Nicholas replied.

Corps official Dan Bradley said during the briefing that consulting engineers had a hand in drawing up the specifications.

Purcell then complained: "We were forced to meet someone else's specifications in entirety." He said the consultants did not cooperate with FPI, and he charged that MWI was given "a head's up" about the job. That, he said, was evident by MWI's order for pump engines before the contract was even put out to bid.

"I don't know anything about that, sir," Nicholas responded. She said that if MWI ordered the engines ahead of time, "they took a big risk."

"Obviously it was a risk that paid off, let's put it that way. They must have had some assurance!" Purcell exclaimed.

"Not from me," Nicholas said.

MWI would not comment on the alleged order for pump engines before the award of the contract.

Saudi tribe holds camel beauty pageant

GUWEI'IYYA, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) - The legs are long, the eyes are big, the bodies curvaceous.

Contestants in this Saudi-style beauty pageant have all the features you might expect anywhere else in the world, but with one crucial difference -- the competitors are camels.

This week, the Qahtani tribe of western Saudi Arabia has been welcoming entrants to its Mazayen al-Ibl competition, a parade of the "most beautiful camels" in the desolate desert region of Guwei'iyya, 120 km (75 miles) west of Riyadh.

"In Lebanon they have Miss Lebanon," jokes Walid, moderator of the competition's Web site. "Here we have Miss Camel."

While tremendous oil wealth has brought rapid modernization to the desert state of Saudi Arabia, the camel remains celebrated as a symbol of the traditional nomadic lifestyle of Bedouin Arabs.

Throughout history camels have served multiple purposes as food, friend, transport and war machine. They were key to the Arab conquests of the Middle East and North Africa nearly 1,400 years ago that brought Islam to the world.

Camels are also big business in a country where strict Islamic laws and tribal customs would make it impossible for women to take part in their own beauty contest.

Delicate females or strapping males who attract the right attention during this week's show could sell for a million or more riyals. Sponsors have provided 10 million riyals ($2.7 million) for the contest, cash that also covers the 72 sports utility vehicles to be will be awarded as prizes.

"Bedouin Arabs are intimately connected to camels and they want to preserve this heritage. The importance of this competition is that it helps preserve the pure-breds," said Sheikh Omair, one of the tribe's leaders,

"We have more than 250 owners taking part and more than 1,500 camels," he said inside a huge tent where the final awards ceremony takes place.

RESTLESS BEAUTY QUEENS

Over at the camel pen, the contestants are getting restless as the desert wind howls and whips up swirls of sand in the hot afternoon sun.

Amid a large crowd of Bedouin who have gathered to watch, the head of the judging committee emerges to venture into an enclosure with some two dozen angry braying camels.

Camel-drivers sing songs of praise to their prized possessions as they try to calm the animals down.

"Beautiful, beautiful!" the judge mutters quietly to himself, inspecting the group. Finalists have been decorated with silver bands and body covers.

"The nose should be long and droop down, that's more beautiful," explains Sultan al-Qahtani, one of the organizers. "The ears should stand back, and the neck should be long. The hump should be high, but slightly to the back."

The camels are divided into four categories according to breed -- the black majaheem, white maghateer, dark brown shi'l and the sufur, which are beige with black shoulders. Arabic famously has over 40 terms for different types of camel.

Some females have harnesses strapped around their genitalia to thwart any efforts by the males to mount them. One repeat offender called Marjaa has been moved away.

... jazz hands! ...

Bobby "Boris" Pickett, writer of that timeless classic, "Monster Mash", died today.

http://www.myspace.com/therealbobbyborispickett

-----------------------------------

`Monster Mash' singer Pickett dies at 69

NEW YORK, Associated Press - He does the "Monster Mash" no more.

Bobby "Boris" Pickett, whose dead-on Boris Karloff impression propelled the Halloween anthem to the top of the charts in 1962, making him one of pop music's most enduring one-hit wonders, has died of leukemia. He was 69.

Pickett, dubbed "The Guy Lombardo of Halloween," died Wednesday night at the West Los Angeles Veterans Hospital, said his longtime manager, Stuart Hersh. His daughter, Nancy, and his sister, Lynda, were at Pickett's bedside.

"Monster Mash" hit the Billboard chart three times: when it debuted in 1962, reaching No. 1 the week before Halloween; again in August 1970, and for a third time in May 1973. The resurrections were appropriate for a song where Pickett gravely intoned the forever-stuck-in-your-head chorus: "He did the monster mash. ... It was a graveyard smash."

The novelty hit's fans included Bob Dylan, who played the single on his XM Satellite Radio program last October. "Our next artist is considered a one-hit wonder, but his one hit comes back year after year," Dylan noted.

The hit single ensured Pickett's place in the pantheon of pop music obscurities, said syndicated radio host Dr. Demento, whose long-running program celebrates offbeat tunes.

"It's certainly the biggest Halloween song of all time," said Demento. The DJ, who interviewed Pickett last year, said he maintained a sense of humor about his singular success: "As he loved to say at oldies shows, `And now I'm going to do a medley of my hit.'"

Pickett's impression of Karloff (who despite his name was an Englishman, born William Henry Pratt) was forged in Somerville, Mass., where the boy watched horror films in a theater managed by his father.

Pickett used the impersonation in a nightclub act and when performing with his band the Cordials. A bandmate convinced Pickett they needed to do a song to showcase the Karloff voice, and "Monster Mash" was born — "written in about a half-hour," said Dr. Demento.

The recording, done in a couple of hours, featured a then-unknown piano player named Leon Russell and a backing band christened The Crypt-Kickers. It was rejected by four major labels before Gary Paxton, lead singer on the Hollywood Argyles' novelty hit "Alley Oop," released "Monster Mash" on his own label.

The instant smash became a sort-of Christmas carol for the pumpkin and ghoul set. In a 1996 interview with People magazine, Pickett said he never grew tired of it: "When I hear it, I hear a cash register ringing."

While Pickett never re-created its success, his "Monster's Holiday," a Christmas follow-up, reached No. 30 in December 1962. And "Graduation Day" hit No. 80 in June 1963.

He continued performing through his final gig in November. He remained in demand for Halloween performances, including a memorable 1973 show where his bus broke down outside Frankenstein, Mo.

Potentially habitable planet found

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - For the first time astronomers have discovered a planet outside our solar system that is potentially habitable, with Earth-like temperatures, a find researchers described Tuesday as a big step in the search for "life in the universe."

The planet is just the right size, might have water in liquid form, and in galactic terms is relatively nearby at 120 trillion miles away. But the star it closely orbits, known as a "red dwarf," is much smaller, dimmer and cooler than our sun.

There's still a lot that is unknown about the new planet, which could be deemed inhospitable to life once more is known about it. And it's worth noting that scientists' requirements for habitability count Mars in that category: a size relatively similar to Earth's with temperatures that would permit liquid water. However, this is the first outside our solar system that meets those standards.

"It's a significant step on the way to finding possible life in the universe," said University of Geneva astronomer Michel Mayor, one of 11 European scientists on the team that found the planet. "It's a nice discovery. We still have a lot of questions."

The results of the discovery have not been published but have been submitted to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Alan Boss, who works at the Carnegie Institution of Washington where a U.S. team of astronomers competed in the hunt for an Earth-like planet, called it "a major milestone in this business."

The planet was discovered by the European Southern Observatory's telescope in La Silla, Chile, which has a special instrument that splits light to find wobbles in different wave lengths. Those wobbles can reveal the existence of other worlds.

What they revealed is a planet circling the red dwarf star, Gliese 581. Red dwarfs are low-energy, tiny stars that give off dim red light and last longer than stars like our sun. Until a few years ago, astronomers didn't consider these stars as possible hosts of planets that might sustain life.

The discovery of the new planet, named 581 c, is sure to fuel studies of planets circling similar dim stars. About 80 percent of the stars near Earth are red dwarfs.

The new planet is about five times heavier than Earth. Its discoverers aren't certain if it is rocky like Earth or if its a frozen ice ball with liquid water on the surface. If it is rocky like Earth, which is what the prevailing theory proposes, it has a diameter about 1 1/2 times bigger than our planet. If it is an iceball, as Mayor suggests, it would be even bigger.

Based on theory, 581 c should have an atmosphere, but what's in that atmosphere is still a mystery and if it's too thick that could make the planet's surface temperature too hot, Mayor said.

However, the research team believes the average temperature to be somewhere between 32 and 104 degrees and that set off celebrations among astronomers.

Until now, all 220 planets astronomers have found outside our solar system have had the "Goldilocks problem." They've been too hot, too cold or just plain too big and gaseous, like uninhabitable Jupiter.

The new planet seems just right — or at least that's what scientists think.

"This could be very important," said

NASA astrobiology expert Chris McKay, who was not part of the discovery team. "It doesn't mean there is life, but it means it's an Earth-like planet in terms of potential habitability."

Eventually astronomers will rack up discoveries of dozens, maybe even hundreds of planets considered habitable, the astronomers said. But this one — simply called "c" by its discoverers when they talk among themselves — will go down in cosmic history as No. 1.

Besides having the right temperature, the new planet is probably full of liquid water, hypothesizes Stephane Udry, the discovery team's lead author and another Geneva astronomer. But that is based on theory about how planets form, not on any evidence, he said.

"Liquid water is critical to life as we know it," co-author Xavier Delfosse of Grenoble University in France, said in a statement. "Because of its temperature and relative proximity, this planet will most probably be a very important target of the future space missions dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life. On the treasure map of the Universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X."

Other astronomers cautioned it's too early to tell whether there is water.

"You need more work to say it's got water or it doesn't have water," said retired NASA astronomer Steve Maran, press officer for the American Astronomical Society. "You wouldn't send a crew there assuming that when you get there, they'll have enough water to get back."

The new planet's star system is a mere 20.5 light years away, making Gliese 581 one of the 100 closest stars to Earth. It's so dim, you can't see it without a telescope, but it's somewhere in the constellation Libra, which is low in the southeastern sky during the midevening in the Northern Hemisphere.

Before you book your extrastellar flight to 581 c, a few caveats about how alien that world probably is: Anyone sitting on the planet would get heavier quickly, and birthdays would add up fast since it orbits its star every 13 days.

Gravity is 1.6 times as strong as Earth's so a 150-pound person would feel like 240 pounds.

But oh, the view. The planet is 14 times closer to the star it orbits. Udry figures the red dwarf star would hang in the sky at a size 20 times larger than our moon. And it's likely, but still not known, that the planet doesn't rotate, so one side would always be sunlit and the other dark.

Distance is another problem. "We don't know how to get to those places in a human lifetime," Maran said.

Two teams of astronomers, one in Europe and one in the United States, have been racing to be the first to find a planet like 581 c outside the solar system.

The European team looked at 100 different stars using a tool called HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity for Planetary Searcher) to find this one planet, said Xavier Bonfils of the Lisbon Observatory, one of the co-discoverers.

Much of the effort to find Earth-like planets has focused on stars like our sun with the challenge being to find a planet the right distance from the star it orbits. About 90 percent of the time, the European telescope focused its search more on sun-like stars, Udry said.

A few weeks before the European discovery earlier this month, a scientific paper in the journal Astrobiology theorized a few days that red dwarf stars were good candidates.

"Now we have the possibility to find many more," Bonfils said.

___

On the Net:

Now the head of the Realtor's Association, an inveterate sunny-side-up chipper gosh-golly kinda fella (no, not Ned Flanders, but pretty darned close!) posits that maybe, perhaps, recovery might take as long as say, next year at some point.... *snicker*

---

Existing home sales plunge in March

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Sales of existing homes plunged in March by the largest amount in nearly two decades, reflecting bad weather and increasing problems in the subprime mortgage market, a real estate trade group reported Tuesday.

The National Association of Realtors reported that sales of existing homes fell by 8.4 percent in March, compared to February. It was the biggest one-month decline since a 12.6 percent plunge in January 1989, another period of recession conditions in housing.

The drop left sales in March at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 6.12 million units, the slowest pace since June 2003.

The steep sales decline was accompanied by an eighth straight fall in median home prices, the longest such period of falling prices on record. The median price fell to $217,000, a drop of 0.3 percent from the price a year ago.

The fall in sales in March was bigger than had been expected and it dashed hopes that housing was beginning to mount a recovery after last year's big slump. That slowdown occurred after five years in which sales of both existing and new homes had set records.

David Lereah, chief economist at the Realtors, attributed the big drop in part to bad weather in February, which discouraged shoppers and meant that sales that closed in March would be lower. Existing home sales are counted when the sales are closed.

Lereah said that the troubles in mortgage lending were also playing a significant part in depressing sales. Lenders have tightened standards with the rising delinquencies in mortgages especially in the subprime market, where borrowers with weak credit histories obtained their loans.

Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, N.Y., said the dismal March performance reflected in part better sales in January and February, which were driven by warmer-than-normal temperatures in the previous months.

"This looks awful but it is surely just a reversal of the favorable weather effects which boosted January and February sales," he said.

There was weakness in every part of the country in March. Sales fell by 10.9 percent in the Midwest. They were down 9.1 percent in the West, 8.2 percent in the Northeast and 6.2 percent in the South.

"The negative impact of subprime is considerable," Lereah said. "I expect sales to be sluggish in April, May and June."

Lereah said he didn't expect a full recovery in housing until 2008. He predicted that sales of existing homes would drop by about 3 percent this year with the decline in sales of new homes an even steeper 15 percent.

He said that the median price for homes sold in 2007 would fall by 1 percent to 3 percent, which would be the first price decline for an entire year on the Realtors' records, which go back four decades.

Pay gap persists: Women still make less, study says

NEW YORK, Associated Press — Women make only 80% of the salaries their male peers do one year after college; after 10 years in the workforce, the gap between men's and women's pay widens, according to a study released Monday.

The study, by the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, found that 10 years after college, women earn only 69% of what men earn.

Even after controlling for hours, occupation, parenthood, and other factors known to affect earnings, the study found that one-quarter of the pay gap remains unexplained. The group said part of the gap is "likely due to sex discrimination."

"Over time, the unexplained portion of the pay gap grows," the group said in a news release.

Catherine Hill, the organization's director of research, said: "Part of the wage difference is a result of people's choices, another part is employer's assumptions of what people's choices will be. ... Employers assume that young women are going to leave the workforce when they have children, and, therefore, don't promote them."

The organization found that women's scholastic performance was not reflected in their compensation. Women have slightly higher grade point averages than men in every major, including science and math. But women who attend highly selective colleges earn the same as men who attend minimally selective colleges, according to the study.

Probably not.

-----

Bans don't deter killers

by John R. Lott Jr., USA Today

People are beginning to notice what research has shown for years: Multiple-victim public shootings keep occurring in places where guns are already banned. Forty states have broad right-to-carry laws, but even within these states it is the "gun-free zones," not other public places, where the attacks happen. It is high time that legislatures remove these roadblocks to people protecting themselves, including at public universities.

Whether it is Virginia Tech or other deadly attacks - Columbine High School, where 13 were shot dead by two students in 1999; Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, where 23 were fatally shot by a deranged man in 1991; or a McDonald's in Southern California, where 21 people were shot dead by an unemployed security guard in 1984 - they happened in gun-free zones. (Many older shootings, such as the one at Luby's, occurred before states began issuing permits for concealed handguns.)

In recent years, similar attacks have occurred across the world, including Australia, France, Germany and Britain. Do all these countries lack enough gun-control laws? Hardly. The reverse is more accurate.

The law-abiding, not criminals, are obeying the rules. Disarming the victims simply means that the killers have less to fear. As last week's attack demonstrated, police can't always be there: Unarmed students and faculty met the killer before police could arrive.

Most people understand guns deter criminals. If a killer were stalking your family, would you feel safer putting a sign out front announcing, "This Home is a Gun-Free Zone"? That is what schools do.

Unfortunately, public schools don't even have the same incentives as private companies to make the correct decisions on protecting student safety. For one, they are generally immune from liability. Parents can't sue the school for the death of their children. Nor can injured students sue.

Fears of permit-holders endangering safety are misplaced. Permit-holders have been extremely law-abiding and well-behaved. For example, before 1995, few K-12 schools had prohibitions on permit-holders having guns, and there is no evidence that there was ever a single problem.

Bush administration under a cloud

The Associated Press - A rundown of Bush appointees who left under a cloud or face conflict-of-interest allegations:

• Scooter Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in a grand jury investigation into the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. His trial also implicated top political adviser Karl Rove and Cheney in a campaign to discredit her husband, Iraq war critic and retired ambassador Joe Wilson (news, bio, voting record). Libby, who plans an appeal, is awaiting a June 5 sentencing.

• Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is fighting to hold onto his job in the face of congressional investigations into his role in the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. Two top aides have resigned in the investigation into whether the firings were politically motivated. Emails and other evidence released by the Justice Deparment suggest that Rove played a part in the process. Other e-mails, sent on Republican party accounts, either have disappeared or were erased.

• Paul Wolfowitz, president of the World Bank and a former deputy defense secretary, acknowledged he helped arrange a large pay raise for his female companion when she was transferred to the State Department but remained on the bank payroll. The incident intensified calls at the bank for his resignation.

• J. Steven Griles, an oil and gas lobbyist who became deputy Interior Secretary J., last month became the highest-ranking Bush administration official convicted in the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling scandal, pleading guilty to obstructing justice by lying to a Senate committee about his relationship with the convicted lobbyist. Abramoff repeatedly sought Griles' intervention at Interior on behalf of Indian tribal clients.

• Former White House aide, David H. Safavian, was convicted last year of lying to government investigators about his ties to Abramoff and faces a 180-month prison sentence.

• Roger Stillwell, a former Interior Department official, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for not reporting tickets he received from Abramoff.

• Sue Ellen Wooldridge, the top Justice Department prosecutor in the environmental division until January, bought a $980,000 beach house in South Carolina with ConocoPhillips lobbyist Donald R. Duncan and oil and gas lobbyist Griles. Soon thereafter, she signed an agreement giving the oil company more time to clean up air pollution at some of its refineries. Congressional Democrats have denounced the arrangement.

• Matteo Fontana, a Department of Education official who oversaw the student loan industry, was put on leave last week after disclosure that he owned at least $100,000 worth of stock in a student loan company.

• Claude Allen, who had been Bush's domestic policy adviser, pleaded guilty to theft in making phony returns at discount department stores while working at the White house. He was sentenced to two years of supervised probation and fined $500.

• Philip Cooney, a former American Petroleum Institute lobbyist who became chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, acknowledged in congressional testimony earlier this year that he changed three government reports to eliminate or downplay links between greenhouse gases and global warming. He left in 2005 to work for Exxon Mobil Corp.

• Darleen Druyun, a former Air Force procurement officer, served nine months in prison in 2005 for violating federal conflict-of-interest rules in a deal to lease Boeing refueling tankers for $23 billion, despite

Pentagon studies showing the tankers were unnecessary. After making the deal, she quit the government and joined Boeing.

• Eric Keroack, Bush's choice to oversee the federal family planning program, resigned from the post suddenly last month after the Massachusetts Medicaid office launched an investigation into his private practice. He had been medical director of an organization that opposes premarital sex and contraception.

• Lurita Doan, head of the General Services Administration, attended a luncheon at the agency earlier this year with other top GSA political appointees at which Scott Jennings, a top Rove aide, gave a PowerPoint demonstration on how to help Republican candidates in 2008. A congressional committee is investigating whether the remarks violated a federal law that restricts executive-branch employees from using their positions for political purposes.

• Robert W. Cobb, NASA's inspector general is under investigation on charges of ignoring safety violations in the space program. An internal administration review said he routinely tipped off department officials to internal investigations and quashed a report related to the Columbia shuttle explosion to avoid embarrassing the agency. He remains on the job. Only Bush can fire him.

• Julie MacDonald, who oversees the Fish and Wildlife Service but has no academic background in biology, overrode recommendations of agency scientists about how to protect endangered species and improperly leaked internal information to private groups, the Interior Department inspector general said.

--------------------------------------------

Bush administration awash in scandals

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Campaigning in 2000, Texas Gov. George W. Bush would repeatedly raise his right hand as if taking an oath and vow to "restore honor and integrity" to the White House. He pledged to usher in a new era of bipartisanship.

The dual themes of honesty and bipartisanship struck a chord with many voters and helped propel Bush to the White House in one of the nation's closest-ever elections. Americans re-elected him in 2004 after he characterized himself as best suited to protect a nation at war.

Now, with fewer than two years left of his second term, the Bush administration is embroiled in multiple scandals and ethics investigations. The war in Iraq still rages. Bush's approval ratings are hovering in the mid-30s. And Democratic-Republican relations have seldom been more rancorous.

In the highest-profile current case, even some key Republicans are questioning the truthfulness and judgment of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. The panel is investigating whether the prosecutors were dumped to make way for more politically obedient successors.

Gonzales is fighting to hold onto his job. So far, two top aides have resigned, one indicating she would invoke her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination if questioned by Congress. E-mails and other evidence released by the Justice Department suggest Bush political adviser Karl Rove played a part in the firings.

Congress is also investigating whether Rove and other Bush political advisers improperly used Republican e-mail accounts to discuss the firings and other official business. The White House concedes the possibility but says much of the e-mail was lost or deleted.

"I don't believe that," asserted Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.. , chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino acknowledged that "we screwed up."

The furor over Gonzales and Rove's e-mail practices follow disclosures of shoddy medical treatment of war-injured veterans, FBI abuses of civil liberties, and the conviction of a top White House aide of lying to a grand jury.

What ever happened to restoring honor and dignity?

"From the very beginning, this administration emphasized loyalty over competence. And at some point, that catches up with you," said Paul Light, a professor of public policy at New York University. He said the increase in scandals and investigations also reflects the "natural decay" that happens late in a second presidential term as many experienced people have already left and those remaining start focusing on their financial futures.

Some recent incidents:

• World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the Iraq war as deputy defense secretary, acknowledged he erred in helping a female friend he is dating to get transferred to a high-paying job at the State Department while remaining on the World Bank payroll. The revelations fueled calls from the bank's staff association for him to resign.

• Matteo Fontana, a Department of Education official who oversaw the student loan industry, was put on leave after disclosure that he owned at least $100,000 worth of stock in a student loan company.

• Lurita Doan, head of the General Services Administration, attended a luncheon at the agency earlier this year with other top GSA political appointees at which Scott Jennings, a top Rove aide, gave a PowerPoint demonstration on how to help Republican candidates in 2008. A congressional committee is investigating whether the remarks violated a federal law that restricts executive-branch employees from using their positions for political purposes.

• Julie MacDonald, who oversees the Fish and Wildlife Service but has no academic background in biology, overrode recommendations of agency scientists about how to protect endangered species and improperly leaked internal information to private groups, the Interior Department's inspector general said.

Increasing coziness between federal officials and the industries they oversee "is not endemic to any particular administration in Washington," said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, which seeks to reduce the role of money in politics. "This has been an ongoing problem for some time now."

Potential conflicts "come into heavier play in the second term of two-term administrations because people who have been there for some time start leaving," said Wertheimer.

Both the House and the Senate, responding to voter frustration with corruption and special interest influence in Washington, have approved ethics and lobbying measures. But they apply only to members of Congress, restricting their gifts and free travel, and not to the executive branch.

Republicans like to emphasize that scandals, some large, most small, happen under Democratic presidents too. But Bush's critics say the number of current ethics allegations is unusually high. And they say evidence is strong of close links between the Bush administration and certain industries such as energy and defense.

For instance, Philip Cooney, a former oil-industry lobbyist who became chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, acknowledged to a House committee last month that he edited three government reports to eliminate or downplay links between greenhouse gases and global warming — and defended the changes. He left the government in 2005 to work for Exxon Mobil Corp.

Former Air Force procurement officer Darleen Druyun served nine months in prison in 2005 for violating conflict-of-interest rules after agreeing to lease Boeing refueling tankers for $23 billion, despite

Pentagon studies showing the tankers were unnecessary. After making the deal, she quit the government to join Boeing.

Scooter Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, became the first high-level White House official to be indicted while in office in more than 100 years.

He was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in a grand jury's investigation of the outing of

CIA operative Valierie Plame. The trial also implicated Rove and Cheney in a campaign to discredit her husband, retired diplomat and Iraq war critic Joe Wilson.

Ties between Bush administration officials and convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff also taken its toll in the executive branch, as it has in Congress.

J. Steven Griles, a former oil and gas lobbyist who became deputy interior secretary, last month became the highest-ranking administration official convicted in the Abramoff influence-peddling scandal, pleading guilty to obstructing justice by lying to a Senate committee about his relationship with Abramoff. Abramoff repeatedly sought Griles' intervention at Interior on behalf of Indian tribal clients.

Former White House aide, David H. Safavian, was convicted last year of lying to government investigators about his ties to Abramoff and faces an 180-month prison sentence. Roger Stillwell, a former Interior Department official, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for not reporting tickets he received from Abramoff.

Not all the administration officials who have left under a cloud have been accused of white-collar misconduct.

Claude Allen, who was Bush's domestic policy adviser, pleaded guilty to theft in making phony returns at discount department stores. He was sentenced last summer to two years of supervised probation and fined $500.

And in Fresno, no less - not exactly the land of the socially liberal...

Transgender student runs for prom king

FRESNO, Calif, Associated Press - When school officials announce the name of the Fresno High School prom king on Saturday, Cinthia Covarrubias will be wearing a tuxedo just like the six boys vying for the honor.

School officials this week added the 17-year-old's name to the ballot for prom king, reversing a previous district protocol that allowed only males to run for king and females for prom queen.

Gay youth advocates called it a landmark victory for campus gender expression and said they believe it's the first time in the U.S. that an openly transgender student has run for prom royalty.

Covarrubias, who wears black-and-white Vans, baggy shorts and close-cropped brown hair, sometimes identifies herself as Tony. Her date, a close female friend, plans to wear a black dress and red corsage to the prom at an outdoor reception hall surrounded by man-made waterfalls.

"I would never have run for anything if I had to wear a dress," Covarrubias said.

She considers herself transgender, an umbrella term that covers all people whose outward appearance and internal identity don't match their gender at birth.

"My freshman year I just started feeling different," she said. "When I decided to change to be like this, all of a sudden I said, 'Wow, I feel OK. I feel like finally I'm being me.'"

She has no current plans, however, to permanently alter her gender through hormones or surgery.

A native of Jalisco, Mexico, Covarrubias said she has bucked rigid expectations of how a girl in her culture should behave. Explaining the meaning of terms like "queer" and "transgender" to her parents and eight siblings has at times been painful, she said.

Covarrubias said she was honored her classmates nominated her for prom king last Friday, but administrators quickly dampened her enthusiasm by saying she could only run for queen.

Tiffani Sanchez, a science teacher who advises the school's Gay-Straight Alliance, complained.

"Cinthia is still really learning who she is," she said. "We want her to know that there's a safe space for her here and we support her."

On Wednesday, school officials shifted course, saying the district's lawyers had recommended adding Covarrubias' name to the ballot to comply with a state law protecting students' ability to express their gender identity on campus.

"We always want to do the right thing by our students," Vice Principal Sheila Uriarte said. "This is why we came to this decision."

The law, passed in 2000, requires schools to protect students from discrimination on the basis of their sexuality, gender or "gender expression."

Gay and lesbian advocates say that means creating a comfortable environment for students like Covarrubias to cross-dress.

"It's really important for an individual student like Cinthia to be able to feel she has the same access to participate in this rite of passage," said Carolyn Laub, director of the Gay-Straight Alliance Network. "We are growing as a society to accept much more diversity in gender expression, and that's a positive thing."

Some students criticized the decision to put Covarrubias on the ballot.

"I like lesbians, but they shouldn't be allowed to run for king," said senior Erich Logan, 18, as he stood outside the stately high school building.

But Leanne Reyes, 16, said Covarrubias had her vote.

"It's not like the stereotype where the king has to be a jock and he's there with the cheerleaders anymore," said Reyes, a senior. "We live in a generation now where dudes are chicks and chicks are dudes."

Covarrubias is giddily looking forward to the prom, but acknowledged being a little nervous.

When I was 5 or 6, the nuns at my catholic school whomped the shit out of me for daring to point out that it was a raw deal to make babies who could not fend for themselves eternally responsible for the inactions of others, and how could an "all-knowing, all-merciful God" demand such unfairness? I was beat for 'questioning doctrine' and never given any answer on the subject.

It was at that precise point that the catholic faith and I parted ways. I figured out right there and then that catholics have no fucking idea what they are talking about, but do have a pressing, institutionalized need to control the thoughts and behavior of others.

I still think they are a bunch of blithering idiots who do far more harm than good in the world.

Pope revises 'limbo' for babies

By NICOLE WINFIELDWriter 22 minutes ago

VATICAN CITY, Associated Press - Pope Benedict XVI has revised traditional Roman Catholic teaching on so-called "limbo," approving a church report released Friday that said there was reason to hope that babies who die without baptism can go to heaven.

Benedict approved the findings of the International Theological Commission, which issued its long-awaited document on limbo on Origins, the documentary service of Catholic News Service, the news agency of the American Bishop's Conference.

"We can say we have many reasons to hope that there is salvation for these babies," the Rev. Luis Ladaria, a Jesuit who is the commission's secretary-general, told The Associated Press.

Although Catholics have long believed that children who die without being baptized are with original sin and thus excluded from heaven, the church has no formal doctrine on the matter. Theologians have long taught, however, that such children enjoy an eternal state of perfect natural happiness, a state commonly called limbo, but without being in communion with God.

Pope John Paul II and Benedict had urged further study on limbo, in part because of "the pressing pastoral needs" sparked by the increase in abortion and the growing number of children who die without being baptized, the report said.

In the document, the commission said there were "serious theological and liturgical grounds for hope that unbaptized infants who die will be saved and brought into eternal happiness."

It stressed, however, that "these are reasons for prayerful hope, rather than grounds for sure knowledge."

Ladaria said no one could know for certain what becomes of unbaptized babies since Scripture is largely silent on the matter.

Catholic parents should still baptize their children, as that sacrament is the way salvation is revealed, the document said.

The International Theological Commission is a body of

Vatican-appointed theologians who advise the pope and the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Benedict headed the Congregation for two decades before becoming pope in 2005.

___

On the Web:

Document is at http://www.originsonline.com

Vermont Senate: Impeach the president

MONTPELIER, Vt. , Associated Press - Vermont senators voted Friday to call for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, saying their actions have raised "serious questions of constitutionality."

The nonbinding resolution was approved 16-9 without debate — all six Republicans in the chamber at the time and three Democrats voted against it.

Bush and Cheney's actions in the U.S. and abroad, including in Iraq, "raise serious questions of constitutionality, statutory legality, and abuse of the public trust," the resolution reads.

The Vermont Senate is believed to be the first state chamber in the country to pass such a resolution, said Bill Wyatt, a spokesman for the National Conference of State Legislatures.

"Many chambers passed resolutions about the war in Iraq, but none that we are aware have called for impeachment," he said.

Advocates were thrilled with the vote.

"I think it's going to have a tremendous political effect, a tremendous political effect on public discourse about what to do about this president," said James Leas, a vocal advocate of withdrawing troops from Iraq and impeaching Bush and Cheney.

Vermont lawmakers earlier voted to demand an immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq in another nonbinding resolution.

Democratic House Speaker Gaye Symington has kept a similar resolution from reaching the floor in her chamber. She argued that an impeachment resolution would be partisan and divisive and that it would distract Washington from efforts to get the United States out of Iraq, which she says is more important.

In the Senate, Republican Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie had opposed the resolution, but he was absent Friday. That left Democratic Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin in charge, and he immediately took up the measure.

Administration opposes 'say on pay' bill

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - The Bush administration is opposing a bill before the House, pushed by Democrats, to give shareholders at public companies a formal say in executives' compensation packages.

The legislation, written by Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, comes at a time of growing public and shareholder anger over lavish compensation for executives unrelated to their performance. It would give shareholders a chance to cast an advisory vote on executive pay plans, allowing them to show their approval or disapproval of them.

Investor advocates, union pension funds and shareholder groups have been pushing for such "say on pay" votes as the chasm between executives' salaries and the pay of rank-and-file employees continues to widen.

With Democrats in the majority in the chamber, the bill is expected to pass the House in a vote on Friday. No comparable measure has yet been put forward in the Senate.

Republican lawmakers criticized the legislation in House debate on Wednesday, and the White House registered its opposition.

"The administration does not believe that Congress should mandate the process by which executive compensation is approved," a statement from the White House said.

Earlier this year, President Bush challenged corporate America on extravagant pay, saying that company managers and directors "must step up to their responsibilities." He said the government shouldn't get involved in the matter, however.

Rep. Spencer Bachus (news, bio, voting record) of Alabama, the financial services panel's senior Republican, acknowledged Wednesday that many executive pay packages are outrageous and unjustified. Nonetheless, he said, the House bill "in fact, is a mandate. This is Congress beginning to intrude on corporations."

New Securities and Exchange Commission rules requiring public companies to provide clearer and more detailed information on their top executives' pay packages and perks, which recently went into effect, already help shareholders by giving them fuller disclosure, opponents of the bill say.

Opponents of giving investors a vote on executive pay maintain that small groups of activist shareholders could use the process to advance political agendas and create a distraction for boards of directors.

A better way to vote

USA Today - "The majority rules!" is one of the most frequently heard battle cries of American politics, but the reality is otherwise: Every year, in scores of state and local elections, no candidate wins a majority. That results in either costly runoffs or "winners" who in fact have been rejected by as many as two-thirds of the voters in a multi-candidate field.

Minnesota, for example, hasn't had a governor elected with majority support since 1994 (Jesse Ventura won with only 37% of the vote). North Carolina spent $3.5 million of the taxpayers' money in 2004 on a runoff to determine the Democratic nominee for superintendent of public instruction; just 3% of the voters participated.

There is, however, a worthwhile solution that can guarantee the majority really does rule. It's called instant-runoff voting, and over the past five years it has been adopted by communities as large as Minneapolis and San Francisco and as small as Ferndale, Mich., and Takoma Park, Md. Now, several more states and cities are experimenting with the idea or considering it. Sarasota, Fla., will vote on it in November. North Carolina has a pilot program for 20 municipalities to try instant-runoff voting in local elections and to use it for certain statewide elections.

In an instant-runoff election, instead of just placing an "X" beside the name of one candidate, voters have the option of ranking the candidates in order of preference: 1, 2, 3, etc. If no one gets 50% of the first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated from the count and the second-choice votes on those ballots are distributed among the remaining names. The process continues until one candidate with true majority support emerges.

Among the advantages of this system:

• Costly runoffs, in which voter turnout is often anemic, are avoided.

•Third-party or "spoiler" candidates finishing toward the bottom of the field are less likely to destroy a mainstream candidate's chances.

•Winners can claim a greater mandate from the voters.

• Campaigns can be more civil because candidates looking for second-choice as well as first-choice votes don't want to alienate a rival's supporters.

In most places, once the idea has been seriously advanced and explained, it has gained wide support. Some wary public officials warn of the cost - $1 million or more in big jurisdictions - of reprogramming voting machines or buying new ones to accept preferential votes. But San Francisco, for example, quickly recovered what it spent for that purpose by not having to hold a separate runoff election in 2004.

I've spent over 20 years in telecommunications. One thing I can tell you for real is if you want to paralyze your enemy, all you really need to do is take out their communications grid.

---------

BlackBerry outage felt across N. America

NEW YORK, Associated Press - Most of it happened outside "work" hours, but the nature of mobile e-mail meant plenty of dismay as BlackBerry service went down across North America from Tuesday evening to Wednesday morning.

By the time the service sputtered back to life, jamming the handheld devices with a torrent of delayed messages, grumbles had been heard at the highest levels of business and government.

"The sound of BlackBerries being thrown against the desk was deafening for a while," said Garth Turner, a member of the Canadian Parliament known for his constant Internet blogging.

"Because it has become the de facto channel of communications around this place, it actually impacts on the government of Canada and the work of the whole House of Commons."

BlackBerry was also the first order of business at a White House Press briefing Wednesday morning.

"I apologize to a number of you who tried e-mailing over the last 14 hours," White House spokesman Tony Fratto told reporters.

"We're 14 hours into no BlackBerry, so you can imagine how things are," he said. "We've already started a 12-step group."

Research in Motion Ltd., the Canadian company that provides the devices and e-mail service, confirmed the outage Wednesday morning, but disclosed no details about the cause.

The outage cut off incoming and outgoing e-mail on BlackBerry devices regardless of which cellular company a user buys the service from, indicating the problem originated at RIM's network data center in Canada.

That facility serves as a hub for RIM's North American traffic, routing messages between the roughly 8 million BlackBerry devices now in use and the various sources of e-mail, from private corporate servers to Web-based accounts like Yahoo and AOL.

The outage reverberated on Wall Street, too. RIM's share price slid at Wednesday's open, but recovered and rallied — suggesting, perhaps, that a product that can provoke this much consternation holds an enviable position against emerging challenges from the likes of Microsoft Corp., Motorola Inc. and

Nokia Corp.

The stock rose $3.10, or 2.4 percent, to close at $134.37 in Wednesday trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market despite falling as low as $128.80 in the opening minutes.

BlackBerry outages have been rare, although minor glitches occasionally cause delays in RIM's ability to deliver e-mail in real-time — perhaps the most important feature of the service for many users. The last two major disruptions appear to have occurred nearly two years ago, both in June 2005.

Nevertheless, even one outage is unbearable for some. While many people rely heavily on the device as a lifeline when they're away from their computers, even more have simply grown accustomed, occasionally obsessive, about being able to check their e-mail at night and on weekends.

"It's been most inconvenient," said Dacrie Brooks, a public relations professional attending the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters in Las Vegas. "I've been using (my BlackBerry) for all my communications because I don't have access to my laptop between meetings."

"It's been a challenging day because I'm missing things left and right. That's not fun."

The outage also was mentioned Wednesday morning during a conference call with the chief financial officer of JPMorgan, Michael J. Cavanagh, to discuss the bank's quarterly earnings, with the CFO noting that his device was still on the blink.

Other users shrugged at the disruption.

Actress Kitty Carlisle Hart dies at 96

[Actress Kitty Carlisle is shown as she portrays the Prince in 'Fledermaus' in this portrait photograph taken by Carl Van Vechten in 1933. Carlisle, who later married writer Moss Hart,and was then known as Kitty Carlisle Hart, has died at age 96 at her New York City home April 18, 2007. REUTERS/Carl Van Vechten Estate/US Library of Congress]

NEW YORK, Associated Press - Kitty Carlisle Hart, whose long career spanned Broadway, opera, television and film, including the classic Marx Brothers movie "A Night at the Opera," died after a battle with pneumonia, her son said Wednesday. She was 96.

"She passed away peacefully" Tuesday night in her Manhattan apartment, said Christopher Hart, a director-writer-producer who was at her side. "She had such a wonderful life and a great long run. It was a blessing."

Hart was touring the country in her autobiographical one-woman show, "Here's to Life," until the pneumonia struck around Christmas, her son said. Broadway's theaters planned to dim their marquee lights Wednesday in honor of the longtime patron of the arts.

In 1991, she received the National Medal of Arts from the first President Bush. Hart's last gig was a December performance of her show in Atlanta.

David Lewis, Hart's longtime musical director, said she would be remembered "as the grande dame not only of show business but also in her philanthropy and her support for the American musical theater."

Well known for her starring role as Rosa Castaldi in the 1935 comedy "A Night at the Opera," her other film credits included "She Loves Me Not" and "Here Is My Heart," both opposite Bing Crosby; Woody Allen's "Radio Days"; and "Six Degrees of Separation."

But she was probably best known as one of the celebrity panelists on the popular game show "To Tell the Truth." She appeared on the CBS prime-time program from 1956 to 1967 with host Bud Collyer and fellow panelists such as Polly Bergen, Johnny Carson, Bill Cullen and Don Ameche.

The show featured three contestants, all claiming to be the same person, with the panelists quizzing the trio to determine which one was telling the truth. Hart later appeared in daytime and syndicated versions of the show.

"People remember me from television," she once said. "They don't even remember me from `A Night at the Opera.' They have no idea that I played the lead and did all the singing. But they do remember television, particularly `To Tell the Truth.'"

She began her acting career on Broadway in "Champagne Sec" and went on to appear in many other Broadway productions, including the 1984 revival of "On Your Toes." In 1967 she made her operatic debut at the Metropolitan Opera in "Die Fledermaus" and created the role of Lucretia in the American premiere of Benjamin Britten's "Rape of Lucretia."

Hart's late husband was Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Moss Hart, who wrote "You Can't Take It With You" and "The Man Who Came to Dinner" with George S. Kaufman. He won a Tony for directing "My Fair Lady" on Broadway.

Kitty Carlisle Hart's film career began in 1934; in "Murder at the Vanities," she sang "Cocktails for Two," a song later made famous in a spoof by Spike Jones.

"A Night at the Opera" the following year was the Marx Brothers' sixth film and their first for MGM, where they shifted after their career at Paramount sagged at the box office. MGM's Irving Thalberg added more romance to the Marxes' formula, bringing in Hart and Allan Jones to play the young opera singers in love, and the film became a huge hit.

Elegant and sophisticated — with hair, makeup and dress perfectly in place — Hart has been called a "great dame."

In a piece on CBS' "60 Minutes" in 2000, Marie Brenner, author of "Great Dames: What I Learned From Older Women," said: "A great dame is a soldier in high heels. ... They lived through the Depression. They lived through the war. They were tough, intelligent and brassy women."

Discipline ruled Hart's success. She began every day with an exercise routine, even after turning 90.

[Master of Ceremonies Bud Collyer, rear, poses with the panel of the 'To Tell The Truth' quiz show on CBS in 1957. Panelists from left to right are: Polly Bergen, Ralph Bellamy, Kitty Carlisle and Hy Gardner . Hart, whose long career spanned Broadway, opera, television and film, including the classic Marx Brothers movie 'A Night at the Opera,' has died at age 96, her son said Wednesday, April 18, 2007.(AP Photo)]

Hart was born in New Orleans on Sept. 3, 1910. She attended the Sorbonne, the London School of Economics and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.

She and Hart married in 1946 and had two children: Christopher and daughter Catherine. Her husband died in 1961 at 57. In later years, she lived on the next block from Kaufman's daughter, Anne Kaufman Schneider, and the two would confer when a revival of a Kaufman-Hart play was in the offing. In a 2002 Associated Press interview, Schneider called her "my best friend."

She served on the state arts council from 1971 to 1996, including 20 years as its chairwoman. In 1988, she testified in Albany to a legislative committee amid complaints that the council had financed gay-oriented projects.

"We fund art," she said. "We don't fund anyone's point of view."

Hart's special concern for women's role in society led to her appointment as chairwoman of the Statewide Conference of Women and later as special consultant to New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller on women's opportunities. She also moderated a TV series called "Women on the Move."

She served on the board of Empire State College in New York and was an honorary trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art.

Besides her daughter and son, survivors include three grandchildren.

Huge California Surfing Waves Explained

LiveScience.com : Researchers have mapped the seafloor off central California in unprecedented detail, revealing what produces the famed waves at a reef called Mavericks. The towering waves are much prized by surfers.

Advanced sonar equipment and aerial light detection instruments helped produce detailed underwater images that display the myriad protuberances and depressions marking the seafloor near the well-known surfing spot at Half Moon Bay.

The newly collected data shows that the wave-making setup at Mavericks involves a portion of a rocky reef that protrudes above its surroundings while remaining under water. As a wave approaches the shore and enters shallower water, it compresses and grows taller. A ridge promontory also focuses wave energy and the wave rapidly increases in height, creating a monster.

At the highest point of the protrusion, the wave becomes unstable and breaks. Data collection was impossible in that location because the rough sea presented too much danger to the scientists.

Although interesting for explaining the mystery of Mavericks, scientists and others will use this data for a variety of purposes, including identifying hazards to navigation, classifying different habitat types, locating biological hot spots, and studying the San Gregorio fault,a major active fault within the San Andreas Fault System.

"This research is extremely valuable in identifying areas important to the California Marine Life Protection Act process and could simultaneously help to predict seismic hazards along California's coast," said Secretary for Resources Mike Chrisman, chair of the Ocean Protection Council.

---------------------------------------------

Mortgage defaults in California near decade high

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The number of mortgage default notices sent to California homeowners last quarter rose to its highest in nearly 10 years as home prices stagnated and rates on adjustable loans pushed higher, a report released on Monday said.

Mortgage lenders filed 46,760 notices of default from January through March, marking an increase of 23.1 percent from the previous quarter and 148 percent from the year-earlier period, according to a report by DataQuick Information Systems, a real estate information service.

The first quarter's default level was the highest for the most populous U.S. state since the second quarter of 1997. It came amid a sharp rise in defaults on mortgages held by subprime borrowers, or borrowers with blemished credit, across the United States.

The low introductory interest rates on the their mortgages have been expiring, replaced by much higher rates that have made monthly mortgage payments too expensive for many households to maintain. Additionally, their options for refinancing their mortgages have been limited because home prices in many markets have been largely flat or slipping.

Many analysts say a surge of foreclosures is in the making and that it will weigh an already sluggish housing market and may slow the broader economy.

"Defaults tend to happen after a certain length of time and today's activity reflects a peak in the number of home loans made back in the summer of 2005. Additionally, the loans being made back then were riskier because of the subprime activity, as well as higher appreciation rates. It's easier to make a loan when the security for that loan is going up in value, than when values are flat," said Marshall Prentice, president of DataQuick.

RISKIEST LOANS INLAND

Most mortgages in California that went into default in the first quarter were originated between April 2005 and May 2006 and their median age was 15 months.

According to DataQuick, mortgages were least likely to go into default in Marin, San Francisco and San Mateo counties, three affluent coastal markets with a tight supply of housing that has helped prevent home prices from slipping.

The likelihood of default was highest in inland Sacramento, Riverside and San Joaquin counties, where prospective first-time home buyers rushed in during the housing boom in search of relatively affordable housing.

Squeezed from pricey coastal markets, many Californians moved to such interior areas and used adjustable-rate mortgages to purchase houses in scores of new-home developments. They now are facing higher interest rates on their loans and rising mortgage payments while home values in those markets decline.

"It's hard for me to say whether or not the damage is done in those areas," said economist Alan Gin of the University of San Diego's Burnham-Moores Center for Real Estate.

Global warming may put U.S. in hot water

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - As the world warms, water — either too little or too much of it — is going to be the major problem for the United States, scientists and military experts said Monday. It will be a domestic problem, with states clashing over controls of rivers, and a national security problem as water shortages and floods worsen conflicts and terrorism elsewhere in the world, they said.

At home, especially in the Southwest, regions will need to find new sources of drinking water, the Great Lakes will shrink, fish and other species will be left high and dry, and coastal areas will on occasion be inundated because of sea-level rises and souped-up storms, U.S. scientists said.

The scientists released a 67-page chapter on North American climate effects, which is part of an international report on climate change impact.

Meanwhile, global-warming water problems will make poor, unstable parts of the world — the Middle East, Africa and South Asia — even more prone to wars, terrorism and the need for international intervention, a panel of retired military leaders said in a separate report.

"Water at large is the central (global warming) problem for the U.S.," Princeton University geosciences professor Michael Oppenheimer said after a press conference featuring eight American scientists who were lead authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's climate-effects report.

Roger Pulwarty, one of the federal government's top drought scientists, said states such as Arizona and Colorado, which already fight over the Colorado River basin water, will step up legal skirmishes. They may look to the Great Lakes, but water availability there will shrink, he said.

Reduced snow melt supplying water for the Sacramento Valley in California means that by 2020 there won't be enough water "to meet the needs of the community," Pulwarty said. That will step-up the competition for water, he said.

On the East Coast, rising sea levels will make storm surge "the No. 1 vulnerability for the metropolitan East Coast," said study lead author Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA. "It's a very real threat and needs to be considered for all coastal development."

Rising sea level can harm Florida's biodiversity and be dangerous during hurricanes, the scientists added.

A few hours later, retired Gen. Charles F. "Chuck" Wald focused on the same global warming problem.

"One of the biggest likely areas of conflict is going to be over water," said Wald, former deputy commander of U.S. European Command. He pointed to the Middle East and Africa.

The military report's co-author, former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, also pointed to sea-level rise floods as potentially destabilizing South Asia countries of Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Vietnam.

Lack of water and food in places already the most volatile will make those regions even more unstable with global warming and "foster the conditions for internal conflicts, extremism and movement toward increased authoritarianism and radical ideologies," states the 63-page military report, issued by the CNA Corp., an Alexandria, Va.-based national security think tank.

Kristi Ebi, a Virginia epidemiologist on the scientific panel, said reduced water supplies globally will hinder human health. "We're seeing mass migration of people because of things like water resource constraint, and that's certainly a factor in conflict," she added.

Peter Glieck, president of the Pacific Institute, an Oakland, Calif., think tank, said the national security and domestic infighting over water comes as little surprise.

"Water is connected to everything we care about — energy, human health, food production and politics," said Glieck, who was not part of either panel. "And that fact alone means we better pay more attention to the security connections. Climate will effect all of those things. Water resources are especially vulnerable to climate change."

As water fights erupt between nations and regions and especially between cities and agricultural areas, Stanford scientist Terry Root said there will be one sure loser low on the priority list for water: other species.

"The fish will lose out and the birds and everything," she said.

Pollution will also worsen with global warming, the scientists said.

As places like the Great Lakes draw down on water, the pollution inside will get more concentrated and trapped toxins will come more to the surface, said Stanford scientist Stephen Schneider.

And even the air, especially in the Northeast, will become more deadly. More heat means more smog cooked and about a 4 to 5 percent increase in smog-related deaths, Ebi said. That's thousands of people, she said.

The scientists and military leaders held out hope that dramatic cuts in fossil fuel emissions could prevent much of the harm they are predicting. But they said the U.S. government — and the rest of the world — has to act now.

___

On the Net:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chapter on global warming impacts in North America: http://www.gtp89.dial.pipex.com/FGD/Ch14.pdf

The CNA Corporation's report on global warming and national security:

Beijing's war of words heats up as Olympics get closer

BEIJING (AFP) - Watch out "deformed men" and "liquor heads" -- your days in Beijing are numbered.

A campaign to correct the notoriously goofy English translations on city signs in time for next year's Olympics could mean the end for the misnomers that have confused and amused visitors for years.

Officials are taking aim at menu items such as "Fried Crap" and "Acid Food", and slippery-when-wet signs that read, "To take notice of safe: The slippery are very crafty".

The campaign began last year to avoid causing confusion and possible offence when visitors from around the world descend on a city that has for years featured a "Racist Park" dedicated to ethnic minorities.

But to some, the "pubic toilets" and "harsh browns" will be missed.

"It's too bad. They give the city a little more character," said Ian McCulloch, a Briton who studies Chinese at a local university.

"It's almost worth a walk down the street just for that."

Officials have launched several parallel campaigns -- some aim to discourage spitting and queue-jumping while others encourage smiling and other civilities -- in a bid to soften a city that has its share of rough edges.

But authorities have pushed the language effort as much as any other, sending out camera-wielding inspectors to comb the streets in search of offenders like "Deformed Men" on handicapped restroom stalls, and "liquor heads" seen on signs banning public drinking.

Translation guidelines also have been issued to local governments and industry groups, who have been urged to clean up the English in their spheres.

A city official said Wednesday that 6,530 road signs had been changed or replaced by the end of 2006.

Another 1,076 signs at tourist sites have been edited, over 20,000 have been inspected in medical facilities and still more offending wordage is being given the once-over at public restrooms, restaurants and other facilities.

"We are targeting public places that are closely related to the life, work, study and travel of our foreign friends," said Liu Yang, deputy director of Beijing's foreign affairs office.

The push has already claimed a high-profile victim.

For years, the flaming-red neon sign of the Dongda Hospital for Anus and Intestine Disease loomed high over a busy street in eastern Beijing. But it recently gave way to "Dongda Proctology Hospital".

Liu said more needs to be done in a city where menus still offer such delicacies as "Big Bowl Fresh Immerse Miscellaneous Germ" and construction sites warn "Beware of Safety".

But getting hotels, restaurants and private businesses to comply with the non-binding guidelines could prove more difficult than altering state-owned road signs.

"So far I think we have achieved good progress in standardising English translations of signs. But we need cooperation from all sectors to avoid lax enforcement and future confusion," Liu said.

One possible bone of contention will be plans by the city to soon launch a push to tighten up menus at hotels and restaurants.

Liu said the city wants many of the Chinese dishes that carry ambiguous names like Seven Happiness, a mix of seafood, meats and vegetables, to be translated more informatively, an idea that provoked a backlash in the blogosphere when first floated earlier this year.

"Menus should introduce to a guest what kind of meat or vegetables are in the dish and should be brief and clear," Liu said.

"I know that some of the translations now are really problematic and not so polite."

Warming could spark N. American water scramble: U.N.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Climate change could diminish North American water supplies and trigger disputes between the United States and Canada over water reserves already stressed by industry and agriculture, U.N. experts said on Wednesday.

More heat waves like those that killed more than 100 people in the United States in 2006, storms like the killer hurricanes that struck the Gulf of Mexico in 2005 and wildfires are likely in North America as temperatures rise, according to a new report that provided regional details on a U.N. climate panel study on global warming issued in Brussels on April 6.

Severe weather already costs North America tens of billions of dollars annually in productivity and damaged property, and those costs are expected to rise, the U.N. report said.

The broadest effects of climate change will be water problems across the entire continent -- including more frequent droughts, urban flooding and a scramble for water from the Great Lakes, which border both the United States and Canada.

"Water was an issue in every region ... but in very different ways and very different places," Michael MacCracken, a review editor of the report, said in a telephone interview.

Unlike many continents, North America has no east to west mountain ranges that limit droughts by forcing rapidly moving wet air to release rain, said MacCracken, also chief scientist for climate change at the Climate Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit group.

Cities will also be threatened as glacial melt leads to higher ocean levels. Late in the 21st century, severe flooding that occurs in New York once every 500 years could happen as often as once in 50 years, putting at risk much of the infrastructure in the New York region, the report said.

Droughts would also occur more often in the U.S. Midwest and Southwest as warmer temperatures evaporate soil moisture.

Those droughts could diminish underground supplies like the Edwards Aquifer in Texas, which supplies 2 million people with water, by up to 40 percent, and cut levels of the Ogallala aquifer which underlies eight U.S. states, the report said.

During droughts like the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, U.S. farmers pumped water from underground aquifers to save their fields through irrigation. "Much of that water is now gone," said MacCracken. "We've used up our savings bank."

Tight underground water supplies could kick off a scramble for large above-ground supplies in the Great Lakes, the report said. Spats have already occurred over diversion of the lakes' water for distant cities and farms, while calls have increased for channeling water to the Mississippi River to supply U.S. cities during hot summers.

Problems are also expected to intensify as warmer temperatures lower water levels through evaporation. "Climate change will exacerbate these issues and create new challenges for binational cooperation," the report said.

Who you gonna believe here, me or your lying skinned dog?

Top furrier says fakes are bad for your skin

TOKYO, April 12 (Reuters) - Chie Imai, furrier to Japan's royal family, wants more young women to wear the real thing, for the sake of their skin.

"Fake fur is bad for your health," Imai told Reuters after showing vividly colored coats made of mink, lynx and other furs in Tokyo this week for the 30th anniversary of her fashion house.

"Real fur is lighter and better on your skin. So that is why young people should be wearing more."

Animal rights activists and many celebrities have campaigned strongly against using real fur in fashion.

But many of the world's biggest fashion retailers say real animal pelts sell very well and designers such as Jean-Paul Gaultier, Christian Lacroix and Valentino all celebrated the return of fur during their shows in Paris last month.

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut dies at age 84

NEW YORK, Associated Press - Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Cat's Cradle," died Wednesday. He was 84.

Vonnegut, who often marveled that he had lived so long despite his lifelong smoking habit, had suffered brain injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home weeks ago, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.

The author of at least 19 novels, many of them best-sellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays, Vonnegut relished the role of a social critic. He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanizing people.

"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations," Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.

A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles for his points of view. He also filled his novels with satirical commentary and even drawings that were only loosely connected to the plot. In "Slaughterhouse-Five," he drew a headstone with the epitaph: "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."

But much in his life was traumatic, and left him in pain.

Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.

His mother had succeeded in killing herself just before he left for Germany during World War II, where he was quickly taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. He was being held in Dresden when Allied bombs created a firestorm that killed an estimated tens of thousands of people in the city.

"The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am," Vonnegut wrote in "Fates Worse Than Death," his 1991 autobiography of sorts.

But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other POW's inside an underground meat locker labeled slaughterhouse-five.

The novel, in which Pvt. Pilgrim is transported from Dresden by time-traveling aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, was published at the height of the Vietnam War, and solidified his reputation as an iconoclast.

"He was sort of like nobody else," said Gore Vidal, who noted that he, Vonnegut and Norman Mailer were among the last writers around who served in World War II.

"He was imaginative; our generation of writers didn't go in for imagination very much. Literary realism was the general style. Those of us who came out of the war in the 1940s made it sort of the official American prose, and it was often a bit on the dull side. Kurt was never dull."

Vonnegut was born on Nov. 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, a "fourth-generation German-American religious skeptic Freethinker," and studied chemistry at Cornell University before joining the Army.

When he returned, he reported for Chicago's City News Bureau, then did public relations for General Electric, a job he loathed. He wrote his first novel, "Player Piano," in 1951, followed by "The Sirens of Titan," "Canary in a Cat House" and "Mother Night," making ends meet by selling Saabs on Cape Cod.

Critics ignored him at first, then denigrated his deliberately bizarre stories and disjointed plots as haphazardly written science fiction. But his novels became cult classics, especially "Cat's Cradle" in 1963, in which scientists create "ice-nine," a crystal that turns water solid and destroys the earth.

Many of his novels were best-sellers. Some also were banned and burned for suspected obscenity. Vonnegut took on censorship as an active member of the PEN writers' aid group and the

American Civil Liberties Union. The American Humanist Association, which promotes individual freedom, rational thought and scientific skepticism, made him its honorary president.

His characters tended to be miserable anti-heros with little control over their fate. Pilgrim was an ungainly, lonely goof. The hero of "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" was a sniveling, obese volunteer fireman.

Vonnegut said the villains in his books were never individuals, but culture, society and history, which he said were making a mess of the planet.

"We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard ... and too damn cheap," he once suggested carving into a wall on the Grand Canyon, as a message for flying-saucer creatures.

He retired from novel writing in his later years, but continued to publish short articles. He had a best-seller in 2005 with "A Man Without a Country," a collection of his nonfiction, including jabs at the Bush administration ("upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography") and the uncertain future of the planet.

He called the book's success "a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life."

In recent years, Vonnegut worked as a senior editor and columnist at "In These Times." Editor Joel Bleifuss said he had been trying recently to get Vonnegut to write something more for the magazine, but was unsuccessful.

"He would just say he's too old and that he had nothing more to say. He realized, I think, he was at the end of his life," Bleifuss said.

Vonnegut, who had homes in Manhattan and the Hamptons in New York, adopted his sister's three young children after she died. He also had three children of his own with his first wife, Ann Cox, and later adopted a daughter, Lily, with his second wife, the noted photographer Jill Krementz.

Vonnegut once said that of all the ways to die, he'd prefer to go out in an airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. He often joked about the difficulties of old age.

"When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon," Vonnegut told The Associated Press in 2005.

"My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy late in life. But he was proud of not committing suicide. And I'll do the same, so as not to set a bad example for my children."

...'collateral damage' is what BushCo calls it....

-------

Red Cross: Iraqi situation getting worse

GENEVA, Associated Press - Millions of Iraqis are in a "disastrous" situation that is getting worse, with mothers appealing for someone to pick up the bodies on the street so their children will be spared the horror of looking at them on their way to school, the international Red Cross said Wednesday.

Thousands of bodies lie unclaimed in mortuaries, with family members either unaware that they are there or too afraid to recover them, according to Pierre Kraehenbuehl, the neutral agency's director of operations.

Medical professionals also have been fleeing the country after cases where their colleagues were killed or abducted, the group said in a 13-page report. "Hospitals and other key services are desperately short of staff," Kraehenbuehl said. "According to the Iraqi Ministry of Health, more than half the doctors are said to have already left the country."

The report, "Civilians without Protection: The Ever-Worsening Humanitarian Crisis in Iraq," was produced over the past two to three weeks, a spokesman said — well after the stepped-up American-led military operations in the capital began Feb. 14.

The report went beyond the International Committee of the Red Cross' usual appeals for all sides to protect civilians as required by the Geneva Conventions. It added photographs and quotes from the civilians to describe the situation.

"Once I was called to an explosion site," it quoted a young Baghdad humanitarian worker named Saad as saying. "There I saw a 4-year-old boy sitting beside his mother's body, which had been decapitated by the explosion. He was talking to her, asking her what had happened."

Kraehenbuehl said the situation has steadily deteriorated in recent years — especially since February 2006, when an attack on a Shiite shrine in Samarra set off a wave of sectarian violence. He said there had been no immediate improvement in the Baghdad area as a result of the recent security crackdown, though in southern Iraq the security situation has improved in certain instances.

ICRC spokesman Florian Westphal said the report, together with Kraehenbuehl's comments, "reflects the situation on the ground now."

It is difficult to determine the numbers of people killed in shootings, bombings and military operations, but overall the situation in the country has been steadily deteriorating, with numbers of refugees swelling, medical staff fleeing and other problems growing, Kraehenbuehl said.

Kraehenbuehl said a colleague recently had asked several Iraqi women what their most pressing need was.

The colleague said that, after a long silence, the women answered: "The most important thing that anyone could do would be to help collect the bodies that line the streets in front of our homes every morning. No one dares to touch them, but for us it is unbearable to have to expose our children to such images every day as we try to bring them to school."

"Humanitarian aid is clearly not enough when it comes to addressing the immense needs of Iraqis in the present disastrous security situation," the report said.

If there is water on other planets, then there is the chance of life for humanity off Earth. We can, as a species, survive. And we are most likely not alone, not by a longshot. Hooray!

-------------

Signs of water seen on planet outside solar system

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Evidence of water has been detected for the first time in a planet outside our solar system, an astronomer said on Tuesday, a tantalizing find for scientists eager to know whether life exists beyond Earth.

Travis Barman, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, said water vapor has been found in the atmosphere of a large, Jupiter-like gaseous planet located 150 light years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. The planet is known as HD 209458b.

Other scientists reported in February that they were unable to find evidence of water in this planet's atmosphere, as well as another Jupiter-like planet.

"I'm very confident," Barman said in an interview. "It's definitely good news because water has been predicted to be present in the atmosphere of this planet and many of the other ones for some time."

Lowell Observatory, a privately owned astronomical research institution, announced the finding, which has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. The research was backed by

NASA, it said.

The detection of the presence of water vapor was possible because this planet, from the vantage point of Earth, orbits directly in front of its star every 3-1/2 days, allowing crucial measurements to be made. It is what is known as a transiting planet.

Scientists searching for signs of life beyond Earth are keen to learn about the presence of water on other planets -- both in and beyond our solar system -- because water is thought to be fundamental to the existence of life.

Barman noted that a Jupiter-like gaseous planet such as this one, as opposed to a rocky one like Earth, is highly unlikely to harbor life, and said the finding about water vapor in its atmosphere does not answer one way or another questions about the existence of extraterrestrial life.

'PART OF PUZZLE'

The findings, he said, "are not adequate to really address a question as deep and profound as the existence of life elsewhere. We're not there yet."

"Certainly this is part of that puzzle -- understanding the distribution of water in other solar systems is important for understanding whether or not conditions for life are possible. The presence of water does not exclude the possibility of life, but it doesn't mean it's there, either," Barman added.

He said his findings do provide good reason to believe other planets beyond our solar system also have water vapor in their atmospheres.

The conclusions stemmed from an analysis of

Hubble Space Telescope measurements by Harvard University's Heather Knutson and new theoretical models developed by Barman, Lowell Observatory said.

Water is plentiful on Earth and has been found elsewhere in our solar system, for example in large deposits of ice at the north and south poles of Mars.

White House seeks war "czar" for Iraq

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Help Wanted: White House seeks high-profile manager of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to coordinate competing agencies and make sure President George W. Bush's unpopular strategy is implemented.

In a tradition of presidential trouble-shooting, the White House is considering creating a "war czar" post in the National Security Council and has put out feelers to some retired generals to see if they would be interested.

But no takers so far. The Washington Post said at least three retired four-star generals approached by the White House in recent weeks had turned down the position.

Retired Marine Gen. John "Jack" Sheehan, a former top NATO commander who rejected the White House overture, told the Post: "The very fundamental issue is, they don't know where the hell they're going."

After U.S. intelligence agencies came under fire for failures related to the September 11 attacks and Iraq, an "intelligence czar" was created as recommended by the 9/11 Commission.

The U.S. government also has a "drug czar" to oversee efforts to fight illegal drugs.

The "war czar" would report directly to Bush and national security adviser Stephen Hadley and coordinate policy with agencies like the Pentagon and the State Department, which at times have their own competing agendas.

Sheehan also told the Post he thought Vice President Dick Cheney's hawkish views on the war continued to dominate administration policy. A majority of Americans favor a Democratic plan to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq, according to a recent Newsweek poll.

In Afghanistan, fighting against a resurgent Taliban is expected to be heavy this year, and 2006 was the most violent year since U.S. led forces ousted the Taliban in 2001.

Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino said the White House was considering many options after the resignation announcement of Meghan O'Sullivan, the top National Security Council official on Iraq and Afghanistan, and the completion of strategic reviews on the two conflicts.

"There's no job description. Again it's very much in the nascent stages," Perino told reporters.

"They are considering a wide range of options," she said.

All this crap with Gonzales and BushCo shennanigans is just symptomatic of a nasty 'business as usual' neocon mindset that started with Ronald Reagan. The right-wingers have been systematically re-tooling the bureaucracy to suit themselves for decades now.

---------

Did US Attorneys Do Rove's Bidding?

John Nichols, The Nation -- The real story of the U.S. Attorneys scandal that has so endangered the tenure of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is not that of the eight fired prosecutors. It is that of the 85 U.S. Attorneys around the country who were not let go.

There is mounting evidence that the Bush administration was pressuring U.S. attorneys to politicize their prosecutions prior to the 2006 elections, on the apparent theory that stirring up trouble for Democrats in battleground states might ease concerns about abuses by White House aides, former House Majority Leader Tom Delay, former California Congressman Duke Cunningham and the various and sundry GOP solons who had been linked to no-longer-so-super lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

And it certainly looks as if some of the U.S. Attorneys who refused to bow to the pressure to mount prosecutions that might embarrass Democrats were removed from their positions because of their regard for the rule of law.

But what about the U.S. Attorneys who were not fired?

Did they agree to mount political prosecutions in order to keep their jobs? Were they reliably partisan enough to secure White House political czar Karl Rove approval?

Did they act on that partisanship in their official duties?

These are the question of the moment in a number of states, most notably Wisconsin.

Wisconsin is the ultimate battleground state in presidential politics, an almost evenly-divided jurisdiction where the Bush-Gore race of 2000 was decided by barely 5,000 votes and the Bush-Kerry race of 2004 was decided by only a little more than 10,000. Gearing up for 2008, Republicans wanted very much to replace Democratic Governor Jim Doyle, whose control of the state's top job, it was thought, had helped Kerry secure his narrow victory in 2004.

As the 2006 gubernatorial election approached, Doyle appeared to be a solid shape. They he was linked to a nasty pay-to-play politics scandal. Stephen Biskupic, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, aggressively pursued an investigation of whether political considerations had influenced the awarding of a state travel contract to a Doyle donor.

As the election approached, Biskupic secured the conviction of state employee Georgia Thompson, who was charged with steering the contract to the donor's firm. More prosecutions were reportedly in the offering. Republicans had a field day. They mounted an expensive television ad campaign linking Doyle to the "scandal."

When Democrats criticized Biskupic for pressing what appeared to be a shaky case against Thompson on a schedule that paralleled that of the 2006 gubernatorial race, their arguments were dismissed as nothing more than political spin. Yes, of course, Biskupic was a Republican, with family ties to the state party and friendly relations with the Bush White House. Yes, he had investigated supposed "vote fraud" cases pushed by the state and national GOP, even though the investigations came to nothing. But few independent observers could believe that a career prosecutor would abuse his position for political purposes.

After Doyle was easily reelected in what turned out to be a strong Democratic year, Georgia Thompson was whisked off to a federal prison in Illinois. Biskupic's actions pre-election prosecution of the woman, while suspect to some, was generally accepted as an accident of timing.

Now, however, the complaints about Biskupic's election-season execution of a case involving a Democratic governor in a battleground state are being seen in a new light.

Last week, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled that Thompson, a former state purchasing supervisor, had been wrongly convicted of making sure a state travel contract went to a firm linked to Doyle's re-election campaign.

The judges declared that Thompson was innocent.

They ordered her immediate release from prison.

And they went out of their way to criticize Biskupic's case against the state employee, with Federal Judge Diane Wood saying "the evidence is beyond thin."

The question that arises, at a point when the U.S. House and U.S. Senate judiciary committees are investigating efforts by the Bush administration, Republican members of Congress and GOP operatives to get U.S. attorneys around the country to engage in political prosecutions designed to harm Democrats as the election approached, is whether Biskupic aggressively pursued a case built on evidence that was "beyond thin" in order to assist Republican electoral prospects.

The circumstances surrounding the Thompson prosecution, when seen in the context of the known pressures on U.S. attorneys to conduct political prosecutions, require nothing less. And it happens that Wisconsin's senators, both of whom serve on the Judiciary Committee, are in a position to press the matter. But it should not fall only to Russ Feingold (news, bio, voting record) and Herb Kohl to question members of the Bush administration about any and all contacts with Biskupic, and make similar inquiries regarding efforts by current and former Republican Party officials in Wisconsin and nationally to pressure the U.S. Attorney's office.

And the questioning ought not end at the Wisconsin line. As the New York Times noted April 9, in an editorial, "Another Layer of Scandal": "Ms. Thompson's case is not the only one raising questions about whether prosecutors tried last year to tilt close elections toward the Republicans. New Jersey's federal prosecutor conducted an investigation of weak-looking allegations against Senator Robert Menendez (news, bio, voting record) that was used in Republican ads."

The bottom line should be clear: The investigation into the politicization of prosecutions by the Bush administration needs to expand dramatically. As this happens, there is good reason to believe that the firings of the eight U.S. Attorneys that have to now been so much in the news may turn out to be the lesser scandals brought to light by an inquiry that could yet be the most damning of Bush's presidency.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

John Nichols' new book is "THE GENIUS OF IMPEACHMENT: The Founders' Cure for Royalism". Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson hails it as a "nervy, acerbic, passionately argued history-cum-polemic [that] combines a rich examination of the parliamentary roots and past use of the 'heroic medicine' that is impeachment with a call for Democratic leaders to 'reclaim and reuse the most vital tool handed to us by the founders for the defense of our most basic liberties.'"

It's the same thing with AIDS, genocide, poverty and forced labor. Nobody cares, 'coz they're just "a bunch of nappy-headed ho's", isn't that right, Don?

---------

Millions face hunger from climate change

BANGKOK, Thailand, Associated Press - Warming temperatures could result in food shortages for 130 million people across Asia by 2050 and cause potentially catastrophic problems in Africa, wiping out one of the continent's staple crops altogether, according to a U.N. report released Tuesday.

Climate change threatens the ecologically rich Great Barrier Reef and sub-Antarctic islands, and could melt the snow on Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro, according to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

A summary of the full, 1,572-page document written and reviewed by 441 scientists was released Friday. The latest document, the second of four reports including the summary, tries to explain how global warming is changing life around the world, region by region.

Further details were unveiled Tuesday in regional news conferences.

The report suggests that a 3.6-degree increase in mean air temperature could decrease rain-fed rice yields by 5 percent to 12 percent in China. In Bangladesh, rice production may fall by just under 10 percent and wheat by a third by the year 2050.

The drops in yields combined with rising populations could put close to 50 million extra people at risk of hunger by 2020, 132 million by 2050 and 266 million by 2080, the report said.

Water shortages will also become more common in India as the Himalayan glaciers decline, while nearly 100 million people annually will face the risk of floods from seas that are expected to rise in Asia between 0.04 inches to 0.12 inches annually, slightly higher than the global average.

"Unchecked climate change will be an environmental and economic catastrophe but above all it will be a human tragedy," Achim Steiner, executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, said in a statement.

"It is absolutely vital that international action is taken now to avoid dangerous climate change," he said. "Otherwise the consequences for food and water security in Asia, as for many other parts of the world are too alarming to contemplate."

The report said Africa is the continent most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The fallout from a swiftly warming planet — extreme weather, flooding, outbreaks of disease — will only exacerbate troubles in the world's poorest continent, said Anthony Nyong, one of the lead authors.

The panel predicts that sea levels could rise on the eastern Africa coast, leading to flooding that could cost 10 percent of each country's gross domestic product. East African countries have limited or no budgets for dealing with such emergencies and usually depend on foreign aid.

Wheat, a staple in Africa, may disappear from the continent by the 2080s, the report said.

Africa has "the least responsibility for climate change and yet it is perversely the continent with the most at risk if greenhouse gases are not cut," Steiner said.

But Nyong said African governments cannot rely on outside aid to fix problems from climate change. "It is dangerous ... for African governments to continually and perpetually depend on aid for such things that have such a major impact on what we do," he told reporters in Nairobi, Kenya.

In Europe's Mediterranean region, climate change will sap electric power generation, reverse long-standing tourism trends, raise sea levels in coastal regions and leave millions of people with water shortages, scientists said.

Mediterranean ecosystems are among the world's most sensitive and will thus be among those hardest-hit by global warming, said Jose Manuel Moreno, a Spanish scientist who helped write the report on Europe. By 2070, between 16 and 44 million Europeans are projected to be suffering water shortages, he added.

For Australians and New Zealanders, the warming temperatures will be felt mostly through more extreme weather.

"Heat waves and fires are virtually certain to increase in intensity and frequency," Kevin Hennessy, a lead author on the chapter for Australia and New Zealand, said in a statement.

"Floods, landslides, droughts and storm surges are very likely to become more frequent and intense and frosts are very likely to become less frequent," he said.

In the South Pacific, rising seas are "expected to exacerbate inundation, storm surge, erosion, and other coastal hazards, thus threatening vital infrastructure, settlements, and facilities that support the livelihood of island communities," according to the report.

While the South Pacific islands will struggle to adapt to climate change, the report said Australia and New Zealand have "considerable capacity" to adjust. Efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions should be launched, although the report predicted immediate reductions would not offset climate changes in these countries until at least 2040.

In Asia, the report calls for mainstreaming of sustainable development policies. It also suggest improving public food distribution networks, disaster preparations and health care systems to reduce the vulnerability of developing countries.

Iraqi details 'shocking' U.S. missteps

NEW YORK Associated Press - In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation's "shocking" mismanagement of his country — a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007 Iraqis had "turned their backs on their would-be liberators."

"The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order," Ali A. Allawi concludes in "The Occupation of Iraq," newly published by Yale University Press.

Allawi writes with authority as a member of that "new order," having served as Iraq's trade, defense and finance minister at various times since 2003. As a former academic, at Oxford University before the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, he also writes with unusual detachment.

The U.S.- and British-educated engineer and financier is the first senior Iraqi official to look back at book length on his country's four-year ordeal. It's an unsparing look at failures both American and Iraqi, an account in which the word "ignorance" crops up repeatedly.

First came the "monumental ignorance" of those in Washington pushing for war in 2002 without "the faintest idea" of Iraq's realities. "More perceptive people knew instinctively that the invasion of Iraq would open up the great fissures in Iraqi society," he writes.

What followed was the "rank amateurism and swaggering arrogance" of the occupation, under L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which took big steps with little consultation with Iraqis, steps Allawi and many others see as blunders:

• The Americans disbanded Iraq's army, which Allawi said could have helped quell a rising insurgency in 2003. Instead, hundreds of thousands of demobilized, angry men became a recruiting pool for the resistance.

• Purging tens of thousands of members of toppled President Saddam Hussein's Baath party — from government, school faculties and elsewhere — left Iraq short on experienced hands at a crucial time.

• An order consolidating decentralized bank accounts at the Finance Ministry bogged down operations of Iraq's many state-owned enterprises.

• The CPA's focus on private enterprise allowed the "commercial gangs" of Saddam's day to monopolize business.

• Its free-trade policy allowed looted Iraqi capital equipment to be spirited away across borders.

• The CPA perpetuated Saddam's fuel subsidies, selling gasoline at giveaway prices and draining the budget.

In his 2006 memoir of the occupation, Bremer wrote that senior U.S. generals wanted to recall elements of the old Iraqi army in 2003, but were rebuffed by the Bush administration. Bremer complained generally that his authority was undermined by Washington's "micromanagement."

Although Allawi, a cousin of Ayad Allawi, Iraq's prime minister in 2004, is a member of a secularist Shiite Muslim political grouping, his well-researched book betrays little partisanship.

On U.S. reconstruction failures — in electricity, health care and other areas documented by Washington's own auditors — Allawi writes that the Americans' "insipid retelling of `success' stories" merely hid "the huge black hole that lay underneath."

For their part, U.S. officials have often largely blamed Iraq's explosive violence for the failures of reconstruction and poor governance.

The author has been instrumental since 2005 in publicizing extensive corruption within Iraq's "new order," including an $800-million Defense Ministry scandal. Under Saddam, he writes, the secret police kept would-be plunderers in check better than the U.S. occupiers have done.

Rare occurrence as 2 faiths mark Easter

ROME, Associated Press - From Moscow to Washington, Rome to Jerusalem, Christians of the Orthodox and Western faiths celebrated Easter on Sunday, prayed for a better future and relished their ancient rituals.

The alignment of the two faiths' Easter calendars, based on equinox and moon phases, occurs every few years, and this year's overlap made the narrow streets in the Holy Land especially crowded.

At the Vatican, the Eastern Christian celebrations of Easter resounded across the steps of St. Peter's Basilica when black-robed clerics intoned a long chant from the Byzantine liturgy during Pope Benedict XVI's outdoor Mass for tens of thousands of faithful. St. Peter's Square was ablaze with color from tulips, tiger lilies, hyacinths and azaleas from the Netherlands.

Benedict, head of the world's 1.1 billion Catholics, tempered his message about Easter joy with a litany of suffering in the world today, including what he decried as "continual slaughter" in Iraq and bloodshed in parts of Africa and Asia.

In Washington, a dawn crowd gathered for an Easter service at the Lincoln Memorial. Bundled up in blankets, scarves and hats, the worshippers sang "God Bless America" as the sun's rays glimmered on the reflecting pool.

President Bush worshipped at the chapel at Fort Hood, an Army post 50 miles southwest from his ranch in Crawford, Texas. The sprawling post has sent thousands of soldiers to the war in Iraq.

"I had a chance to reflect on the great sacrifice that our military and their families are making," Bush said after the service. "I prayed for their safety, I prayed for their strength and comfort, and I pray for peace."

A bagpiper played "Amazing Grace" and led a pre-dawn crowd of more than 200 up Mt. Davidson, San Francisco's highest peak, which is topped with a 103-foot concrete cross. Pastors from churches of several denominations led prayers for soldiers in Iraq.

Bethany Baptist Church in Boulder, Colo., used graffiti, nails and an interactive prayer labyrinth with nine stations to tell the story of the crucifixion. Pastor Rob Stout said labyrinths were created in the Middle Ages as a way of symbolizing the journey to Jerusalem.

"Graffiti has an interesting history to it. I call it vandalism. Some call it art. We wanted to use it because the story of the passion and the crucifixion of Christ is a very raw story," Stout said.

After weeks of Lenten sacrifice and fasting in preparation for Easter, many Christians in Eastern Europe enjoyed holiday meals including brightly colored hard-boiled eggs. Roast lamb was featured on many tables in the Balkans as well as in Italy.

Cries of "Christ is risen!" went up in Macedonia after midnight, when priests symbolically announced Jesus' victory over death. Archbishop Stefan, head of the Macedonian Orthodox Church, called for peace "in our homeland and among all the people in the world."

While Christians are a tiny minority in Turkey, for historical reasons the Orthodox patriarchate has its home in Istanbul, ancient Constantinople, and the spiritual leader of the world's 200 million Orthodox, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, is based there.

Most of the worshippers packing the Church of St. George at a Saturday night Easter vigil service were visitors from Greece.

In the Pacific's predominantly Christian Solomon Islands, struggling with earthquake and tsunami losses, frightened villagers descended from the hills to celebrate Easter.

Exit Iraq? Republicans say "Yes!"

The Nation

QUESTION: Do you favor a withdrawal of all United States military from Iraq within the next six months?

ANSWER: Yes 52% No 39% Undecided 9%

No, those are not particularly shocking numbers.

We have known for a long time that Americans favor the rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

What is interesting about these numbers is who they come from.

The Strategic Vision polling group asked 600 likely Iowa caucus goers the question in a survey conducted March 30-April 1, 2007.

To be more precise, the survey queried 600 likely Republican caucus goers.

George Bush can forget about rallying the nation behind his war.

At this point, Bush can't even rally the most engaged Republicans in the nation behind the continuation of quagmire.

Needless to say, when the president threatens Congress with a veto of an Iraq supplemental spending bill that includes soft benchmarks and a slow timeline for withdrawal, Democratic leaders would be wise to quote from the Bush lexicon: "Bring it on!"

Mysterious disappearance of US bees creating a buzz

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US beekeepers have been stung in recent months by the mysterious disappearance of millions of bees threatening honey supplies as well as crops which depend on the insects for pollination.

Bee numbers on parts of the east coast and in Texas have fallen by more than 70 percent, while California has seen colonies drop by 30 to 60 percent.

According to estimates from the US

Department of Agriculture, bees are vanishing across a total of 22 states, and for the time being no one really knows why.

"Approximately 40 percent of my 2,000 colonies are currently dead and this is the greatest winter colony mortality I have ever experienced in my 30 years of beekeeping," apiarist Gene Brandi, from the California State Beekeepers Association, told Congress recently.

It is normal for hives to see populations fall by some 20 percent during the winter, but the sharp loss of bees is causing concern, especially as domestic US bee colonies have been steadily decreasing since 1980.

There are some 2.4 million professional hives in the country, according to the Agriculture Department, 25 percent fewer than at the start of the 1980s.

And the number of beekeepers has halved.

The situation is so bad, that beekeepers are now calling for some kind of government intervention, warning the flight of the bees could be catastrophic for crop growers.

Domestic bees are essential for pollinating some 90 varieties of vegetables and fruits, such as apples, avocados, and blueberries and cherries.

"The pollination work of honey bees increases the yield and quality of United States crops by approximately 15 billion dollars annually including six billion in California," Brandi said.

California's almond industry alone contributes two billion dollars to the local economy, and depends on 1.4 million bees which are brought from around the US every year to help pollinate the trees, he added.

The phenomenon now being witnessed across the United States has been dubbed "colony collapse disorder," or CCD, by scientists as they seek to explain what is causing the bees to literally disappear in droves.

The usual suspects to which bees are known to be vulnerable such as the varroa mite, an external parasite which attacks honey bees and which can wipe out a hive, appear not to be the main cause.

"CCD is associated with unique symptoms, not seen in normal collapses associated with varroa mites and honey bee viruses or in colony deaths due to winter kill," entomologist Diana Cox-Foster told the Congress committee.

In cases of colony collapse disorder, flourishing hives are suddenly depopulated leaving few, if any, surviving bees behind.

The queen bee, which is the only one in the hive allowed to reproduce, is found with just a handful of young worker bees and a reserve of food.

Curiously though no dead bees are found either inside or outside the hive.

The fact that other bees or parasites seem to shun the emptied hives raises suspicions that some kind of toxin or chemical is keeping the insects away, Cox-Foster said.

Those bees found in such devastated colonies also all seem to be infected with multiple micro-organisms, many of which are known to be behind stress-related illness in bees.

Scientists working to unravel the mysteries behind CCD believe a new pathogen may be the cause, or a new kind of chemical product which could be weakening the insects' immune systems.

The finger of suspicion is being pointed at agriculture pesticides such as the widely-used neonicotinoides, which are already known to be poisonous to bees.

Climate report: Poor will suffer most

BRUSSELS, Belgium, Associated Press - The world faces increased hunger and water shortages in the poorest countries, massive floods and avalanches in Asia, and species extinction unless nations adapt to climate change and halt its progress, according to a report approved Friday by an international conference on global warming.

Agreement came after an all-night session during which key sections were deleted from the draft and scientists angrily confronted government negotiators who they feared were watering down their findings.

"It has been a complex exercise," said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Several scientists objected to the editing of the final draft by government negotiators but, in the end, agreed to compromises. However, some scientists vowed never to take part in the process again.

Five days of negotiations reached a climax when the delegates removed parts of a key chart highlighting devastating effects of climate change that kick in with every rise of 1.8 degrees, and in a tussle over the level of scientific reliability attached to key statements.

There was little doubt about the science, which was based on 29,000 sets of data, much of it collected in the last five years. "For the first time we are not just arm-waving with models," Martin Perry, who conducted the grueling negotiations, told reporters.

The United States, China and Saudi Arabia raised many of the objections to the phrasing, often seeking to tone down the certainty of some of the more dire projections.

The final IPCC report is the clearest and most comprehensive scientific statement to date on the impact of global warming mainly caused by man-induced carbon dioxide pollution.

"The poorest of the poor in the world — and this includes poor people in prosperous societies — are going to be the worst hit," Pachauri said. "People who are poor are least able to adapt to climate change."

The report said up to 30 percent of species face an increased risk of vanishing if global temperatures rise 3.6 degrees above the average in the 1980s and 1990s.

Areas in drought will become even more dry, adding to the risks of hunger and disease, it said. The world will face heightened threats of flooding, severe storms and the erosion of coastlines.

"This is a glimpse into an apocalyptic future," the Greenpeace environmental group said of the final report.

Without action to curb carbon emissions, man's livable habitat will shrink starkly, said Stephen Schneider, a Stanford scientist who was one of the authors. "Don't be poor in a hot country, don't live in hurricane alley, watch out about being on the coasts or in the Arctic, and it's a bad idea to be on high mountains with glaciers melting."

"We can fix this," by investing a small part of the world's economic growth rate, said Schneider. "It's trillions of dollars, but it's a very trivial thing."

Negotiators pored over the 21-page draft meant to be a policy guide for governments. The summary pares down the full 1,572-page scientific assessment of the evidence of climate change so far, and the impact it will have on the Earth's most vulnerable people and ecosystems.

More than 120 nations attended the meeting. Each word was approved by consensus, and any change had to be approved by the scientists who drew up that section of the report.

Parry denied the hard-fought editing process resulted in a watered-down version, but acknowledged that "certain messages were lost."

At one point early Friday, it looked like the report "was not going to be accepted. It was very, very close to that point," said David Karoly, one of the scientific authors from the University of Oklahoma.

Though weakened by the deletion of some elements, the final report "will send a very, very clear signal" to governments, said Yvo de Boer, the U.N.'s top climate official.

The summary will be presented to the G8 summit of the world's richest nations in June, when the

European Union is expected to renew appeals to

President Bush to join in international efforts to control emissions of fossil fuels.

This year's series of reports by the IPCC were the first in six years from the prestigious body of 2,500 scientists, formed in 1988. Public awareness of climate change gave the IPCC's work unaccustomed importance and fueled the intensity of the closed-door negotiations during the five-day meeting.

"The urgency of this report prepared by the world's top scientists should be matched by an equally urgent response from governments," said Hans Verolme, director of the global climate change program of the World Wide Fund for Nature.

At the final session, the conference snagged over a sentence that said the impact of climate change already were being observed on every continent and in most oceans.

"There is very high confidence that many natural systems are being affected by regional climate changes, particularly temperature increases," said the statement on the first page of text.

But China insisted on striking the word "very," injecting doubt into what the scientists argued were indisputable observations. The report's three authors refused to go along with the change, resulting in an hours-long deadlock that was broken by a U.S. compromise to delete any reference to confidence levels.

It is the second of four reports from the IPCC this year; the first report in February laid out the scientific case for how global warming is happening. This second report is the "so what" report, explaining what the effects of global warming will be.

For the first time, the scientists broke down their predictions into regions, and forecast that climate change will affect billions of people.

North America will experience more severe storms with human and economic loss, and cultural and social disruptions. It can expect more hurricanes, floods, droughts, heat waves and wildfires, it said. Coasts will be swamped by rising sea levels. In the short term, crop yields may increase by 5 percent to 20 percent from a longer growing season, but will plummet if temperatures rise by 7.2 degrees.

Africa will be hardest hit. By 2020, up to 250 million people are likely to be exposed to water shortages. In some countries, food production could fall by half, it said.

Parts of Asia are threatened with massive flooding and avalanches from melting Himalayan glaciers. Europe also will see its Alpine glaciers disappear. Australia's Great Barrier Reef will lose much of its coral to bleaching from even moderate increases in sea temperatures, the report said.

Separately, an independent organization that keeps tabs on glacial melting in Austria's Alps said its latest survey confirms that the ice sheets continue to shrink significantly and predicted most will vanish by the end of the century.

The Austrian Alpine Association said experts measured 105 of Austria's 925 glaciers last year and found they had receded by an average of 52 1/2 feet, with one of the sheets shrinking a dramatic 262 feet during 2006.

___

Deep Thoughts For Those Who Take Life Way Too Seriously:

1. Save the whales. Collect the whole set.

2. A day without sunshine is like, Night.

3. On the other hand, you have different fingers.

4. 42.7 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.

5. 99 percent of lawyers give the rest a bad name.

6. Remember, half the people you know are below average.

7. He who laughs last thinks slowest.

8. Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.

9. The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese in the trap.

10. Support bacteria. They're the only culture some people have.

11. A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.

12. Change is inevitable, except from vending machines.

13. If you think nobody cares, try missing a couple of payments.

14. How many of you believe in psycho-kinesis? Raise my hand.

15. OK, so what's the speed of dark?

16. When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.

17. Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now.

18. Every one has a photographic memory. Some just don't have film.

19. How much deeper would the ocean be without sponges?

20. Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.

21. What happens if you get scared half to death twice?

22. I couldn't repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder.

23. Why do psychics have to ask you for your name?

24. Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what happened.

25. Just remember -- if the world didn't suck, we would all fall off.

26. Light travels faster than sound. That's why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Fuck your orwellian "Clean Air Act", George Bush.

Court rules against EPA

In 5-4 opinion, justices say agency offered no 'reasoned' account for inaction on global warming

CHICAGO TRIBUNE, April 3, 2007

In a stinging reprimand of the Bush administration's policy on global warming, the Supreme Court yesterday ruled the Clean Air Act expressly authorizes the Environmental Protection Agency to limit greenhouse-gas emissions.

The 5-4 ruling rejected the administration's claims that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are not pollutants covered by the landmark law. It also supported the right of 12 states and 13 environmental groups to challenge the EPA's lack of action in the courts.

Defining greenhouse gases as pollutants gives a significant boost to the movement in Washington and the states to regulate heat-trapping emissions. California and a handful of northeastern states are seeking to adopt limits on tailpipe exhaust from cars and trucks.

The decision also gives momentum to efforts in Congress to adopt sweeping national standards that would require cleaner cars and power plants, the top sources of carbon dioxide that prevents the sun's heat from radiating back into space.

If the EPA still attempts to avoid regulating those emissions, the court ruled, it must prove that greenhouse gases don't cause global warming, contrary to the latest science, or come up with better arguments that are based on the law.

"EPA has offered no reasoned explanation for its refusal to decide whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute to climate change," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority, which also included Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and Anthony Kennedy.

Writing for the dissenters, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. said the issue of whether greenhouse gases should be regulated under the law should be left to Congress and the president. Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito Jr. joined him.

The dissent "involves no judgment on whether global warming exists, what causes it, or the extent of the problem," Roberts wrote.

What can you say about a country that sells its children for the price of lunch?

---------------------------------

Children in India cheaper than buffaloes: report

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Traffickers are selling children in India for amounts that are often lower than the cost of animals and most of them end up working as laborers or commercial sex workers, activists said on Tuesday.

"Children are purchased like buffaloes," said Bhuvan Ribhu of Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Save the Childhood Movement), quoting a study that is due to be released later this year.

"While buffaloes may cost up to 15,000 rupees ($350), children are sold at prices between 500 and 2,000 rupees ($12 and $45)," he told Reuters.

For instance, two brothers in Bihar were recently given away for 250 rupees ($6) each by their parents and trafficked out of the state in connivance with police, Ribhu said.

The group estimates that children account for 40 to 50 percent of all victims of human trafficking. They are sold to work as domestic laborers, or in the carpet industry, on farms or as commercial sex workers.

The traffickers-police connection was so strong in some parts of the country that traffickers scout freely and children rescued from brothels and bonded labor were often victims again, he said.