Eideard

Daylife/AP Photo by Lewis Whyld

A British resident detained at Guantanamo Bay for more than four years has arrived back in the UK. Ethiopian-born Binyam Mohamed, 30, landed at RAF Northolt in London on Monday afternoon, accompanied by Metropolitan Police officers.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband said his release was the first step towards the goal of closing down the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

After he landed at 1300 GMT and walked to the terminal building surrounded by officials, he was questioned and released more than four hours later.

Mr Mohamed said in a statement: “I have to say, more in sadness than in anger, that many have been complicit in my own horrors over the past seven years. “For myself, the very worst moment came when I realised in Morocco that the people who were torturing me were receiving questions and materials from British intelligence.”

Referring to his alleged period of torture in Morocco, Mr Mohamed said: “I have met with British intelligence in Pakistan. I had been open with them. Yet the very people who I had hoped would come to my rescue, I later realised, had allied themselves with my abusers.”

Nothing like learning that a nation which officially stands for liberty and democracy is perfectly willing to turn their back on you – and their own standards – when it comes to politics and war. If in fact the US and the UK differentiate between the two.

When 91-year-old Irvin Lafferty was diagnosed with severe blockage of his heart valve…open-heart surgery was out of the question. He’d already survived quadruple bypass while in his 50s, and having lived almost a century, Lafferty wasn’t a good candidate for heart surgery for many reasons. His local cardiologist referred him to surgical and interventional specialists at Chicago’s Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute and, on January 21, 2009, Lafferty became the first patient in Illinois to receive a prosthetic heart valve through a procedure known as transapical transcatheter aortic valve implantation, which combines catheterization technology and traditional surgery, allowing doctors to implant a new heart valve in place of Lafferty’s diseased valve while his heart remained beating.

Dr. Patrick M. McCarthy says the procedure builds upon a routine catheter-based procedure, the balloon aortic valvuloplasty. Charles J. Davidson, MD, who is also a co-principal investigator for the trial said, “This particular technique is a more durable treatment than balloon valvuloplasty and is potentially a breakthrough for treating high-risk patients.”

Medical experts estimate every year nearly 200,000 people in the U.S. need new heart valves. Yet over half of them do not receive them primarily due to frailty, one of the most common reasons for exclusion from traditional open-heart surgery.

During insertion, the artificial valve remains collapsed until it reaches its destination. It is then expanded and released in place of diseased aortic heart valves. The prosthesis is made of stainless steel and biological leaflets that help direct the flow of blood in the heart. It is permanent and integrates an expandable stent that holds the valve in its intended position.

Wow. This is one of those old geezer survival tricks that stays on the hard drive. Might need it some day.

The topic of ISP data retention is up once again in the halls of Congress. A new bill, known as the “Internet SAFETY Act,” seeks to compel ISPs and anyone who hosts a Wi-Fi access point to log all information that could identify users, in order to assist police investigating child pornography. Actually two companion pieces of legislation – one working its way through the Senate as S.436, and the other through the House as H.R.1076. Their sponsors are Senator John Cornyn and Representative Lamar Smith, and both are republicans hailing from Texas.

“While the Internet has generated many positive changes in the way we communicate and do business, its limitless nature offers anonymity that has opened the door to criminals looking to harm innocent children,” said Cornyn in a Thursday press conference. “Keeping our children safe requires cooperation on the local, state, federal, and family level.”

Both bills are virtually identical, and contain the same language. “[Providers] of an electronic communication service or remote computing service” will be required to retain “all records … pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address” for two years.

Observers interpret the law to mean anyone who runs a network that assigns users a temporary IP address, internal or external – which would cast ISPs like AT&T in the same lot as coffee shops and corporate networks using DHCP.

The last serious try at this crap came from the now absent and unlamented Alberto Gonzales. The Attorney General with a shallow memory – and an even shallower interpretation of civil liberties.

Dear editor,

Regarding your front-page story in the Sunday, February 22, edition of the Sun: “Is Bible Saying the End is Near?”

Appalling.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, the story was fine. What’s appalling is your editorial decision to place it above the fold on the front page. What’s next? Eyewitness accounts of UFOs, personal tales of alien abduction or an expose on the predictions of Nostradamus?

Had you chosen to place this story as a feature in either the religion or local sections of the paper, you would have heard no complaint from me. But the front page is for NEWS. Real, hard, research-driven, fact-filled Who-What-Where-When-Why-How journalism.

You should be ashamed of yourselves, but I doubt you are.

It wasn’t a slow news day: With the economy in shambles, our soldiers fighting in two wars, a newly inaugurated president breaking ground in any number of ways, new taxes and spending cuts coming down from Sacramento… There were fifty good stories you could have presented on the front page of your newspaper. But you didn’t.

Shame on you. Shame on you for showing such poor editorial judgment and for trying to exploit your readers’ fears during hard times in a cheesy maneuver to boost circulation. If the San Bernardino County Sun goes belly-up like so many other papers around the country are, don’t blame the internet or bad economy, blame yourselves.

Mark Parker
Banning, CA

Mark has many interesting thoughts fruiting on the vine of his blog. This is a favorite. Take a look around.

UPDATE: Mark received an email apology from the editor of the newspaper:

You’re right. We should not have run that story as the lead in Sunday’s
paper. We’ll do better. Thank you for speaking your mind about it.

Daylife/Getty Images

The Pentagon has not started complying with a law requiring the payment of monthly bonuses of up to $500 to soldiers forced to remain on active duty beyond their enlistment period.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman acknowledged the five-month delay in paying the bonuses and said the Defense Department is working on a plan to start paying the almost 13,000 soldiers currently under the Army’s stop-loss orders. Although Defense Secretary Robert Gates wants to end the policy, the number of soldiers affected has risen since the middle of 2007.

Congress added $72 million to pay for the bonuses in its plan for the budget year that started Oct. 1. The money was to be paid after the Pentagon submitted a plan outlining how the payments would be made.

But no plan has been provided by the Pentagon.

Maybe they thought McCain was going to be elected. And now they’re sulking.

Daylife/AFP/Getty Images

The Obama administration’s efforts to help struggling homeowners will aid “responsible” borrowers, not deadbeats or speculators, says Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan…

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs acknowledged Friday that some people who made “bad decisions” might end up getting help under the proposal. But Donovan, Obama’s secretary of housing and urban development, told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that “there are no ‘flippers,’ investor-owners or scammers that are eligible for this program.”

“We’re going check everybody’s income when they come into this program. We’re going to make sure that people are paying their bills. And more than anything, we’re targeting the folks who are playing by the rules,” Donovan said.

The administration’s proposal would make it easier for homeowners to afford their monthly payments either by refinancing the mortgages or having their loans modified. And it would vastly broaden the scope of the government rescue by focusing on homeowners who are still current in their payments but at risk of default.

Republicans singled out a provision that would allow judges to modify or reduce the principal of loans for borrowers in bankruptcy — an idea they called “incredibly dangerous for the precedent it sets.”

But Donovan told CBS’s “Face the Nation” that judges already have that power for second homes or vacation homes. It’s only for people who have one home and are living in it or are in trouble where you can’t have a modification of that loan in bankruptcy,” he said. But he said the administration would limit the plan to existing loans, not future ones, and considered it a “last resort.”

Why do Republicans feel called upon to lie about the law? We know their ideology is essentially bankrupt and just finished eight years of global failure.

Do they consider Americans so ignorant and gullible that lies are still their best chance for a return to power?

Plans for a system that would allow people to use one username and password across the internet have moved closer with a number of popular sites agreeing to the scheme in recent weeks.

Earlier this month Facebook became the most recent site to sign up to OpenID, joining the board of the scheme that provides users with a single digital identity which can then be used across many websites.

Microsoft and Google were early adopters of the single sign-on scheme, and have since been joined by the likes of AOL, Yahoo, IBM and PayPal. The idea is that just as you can use e-mail anywhere on the web to sign up for a new service, you should be able to do the same thing with an Open ID – but without having to create a new password,” Chris Messina, an Open ID board member told BBC.

He admitted that the risk of what would happen if Open ID got hacked was “a very good question” – but added that the risks in the current system are even greater.

It is also hoped that the Open ID system will reduce people’s vulnerability to phishing scams, as they will not be typing in their username and password into a fake website set up to get their personal details.

Interesting enough to me that I think I’ll give it a try.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures

Declaring that “we hope you won’t make the same mistakes we made,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton invited China to join the United States in an ambitious effort to curb greenhouse gases, as she toured an energy-efficient power plant in Beijing.

“When we were industrializing and growing, we didn’t know any better; neither did Europe,” Clinton said. “Now we’re smart enough to figure out how to have the right kind of growth.”

The gas-fired power plant, which uses sophisticated turbines made by General Electric, is nearly twice as efficient as the coal-fired plants that supply much of China’s electricity and that helped vault China past the United States as the world’s leading emitter of carbon dioxide. [I have more to offer on that last sentence. Remind me.]

The Obama administration hopes to make climate change the centerpiece of a broader, more vigorous engagement with China. For Clinton, the two-day stop in Beijing at the end of a weeklong Asian tour, represents an effort to put her own stamp on a relationship that was dominated by the Treasury Department in the latter years of the Bush administration.

“The opportunities for us to work together are unmatched anywhere in the world,” Clinton declared, on a hectic day filled with meetings with President Hu Jintao and other top Chinese officials…

On the global economic crisis, the two governments said they would work together to chart a recovery. Clinton said she expected to see changes in the economic relationship between China, with its high savings rate, and the United States, with its heavy borrowing.

Still, some China experts say they believe that climate change can give relations between the countries fresh energy. The White House has paid close attention to a report by the Asia Society and the Pew Center for Global Climate Change, which offers a road map for cooperation.

Perish the thought we finally have people in our government who may have read Leontiev. I doubt if they’ve read much of Deng Xiaoping. But, then, the Russians – especially Gorbachev – never even read Kruschev.

Commerce and competition can be treated as commerce and cooperation when nations and government reach maturity. Maturity doesn’t mean they stop learning – as the Chinese have demonstrated. I don’t know what to say about the United States because we’re not anywhere near maturity, yet.

Civil engineers using a specialized laboratory at Purdue University have demonstrated the effectiveness of a simple, inexpensive method to strengthen buildings that have a flaw making them dangerously vulnerable to earthquakes. The flaw is widespread in China, Latin America, Turkey and other countries. The buildings have too many “partial-height” walls between structural columns and could be easily strengthened by replacing some windows with ordinary masonry bricks, said Santiago Pujol, an assistant professor of civil engineering at Purdue.

Partial-height walls do not extend all the way to the ceiling, sometimes causing structural columns to fail during powerful quakes. The strengthening would not only be low-cost but also easy to install, Pujol said.

“There are countries where there is a huge gap between the building codes and what is actually being built,” he said. “Sure, government enforcement is lax, but I would like to think that if we engineers made the standards easier to apply they would also be easier to enforce. That’s where we have an obligation to find solutions that are simple, affordable and effective.”

The researchers built an entire three-story building inside Purdue’s Robert L. and Terry L. Bowen Laboratory for Large-Scale Civil Engineering Research in work led by former Purdue civil engineering doctoral student Damon Fick, who is now an assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.

RTFA. I know I’m a science and engineering nut; but, I ain’t gonna change after all these years. Folks at Purdue are doing something worthwhile with their research – and given the climate of spookiness and anti-scientific silliness we live in here in the GOUSA, take the time to applaud what we still manage to invent.

The morning shift comes up into the daylight… Mick Barnes and his mates, once again, are doing what they do best.

The miners are back. The tough, proud men of coal. A quarter of a century after the bitter strike that nearly finished it off, their industry is ready to stage a remarkable revival.

“None of us would ever have predicted this,” says Mick, 47, after he’s scrubbed away the dust and grime from eight hours underground.

“Did the miners lose the strike? Yes, we did, to be honest. We took on Margaret Thatcher and the might of the Tory Government, and we lost. But look what’s happening now. In the end, we’re the ones having the last laugh, Maggie.”

Under plans announced by the Government this month, an updated Hatfield Main will provide the fuel for a new breed of carbon-friendly power stations – linked directly to one that will be built next door by 2014, at a cost of £1 billion.

Jobs should be assured for decades. The seam they are mining now could last for at least 50 years. Suddenly, Mick and the rest can glimpse the flicker of a bright future.

A delightful tale. A piece of writing [forgive me] I wouldn’t have expected inside the Mirror. And I like the Mirror.

RTFA. Reflect upon people ready and willing to re-examine what life and industry may now have to offer. They never gave up.