Eideard

Hakeemullah Mehsud (L) poses for the media – last November

The Pakistani Taliban announced a successor to slain commander Baitullah Mehsud, but intelligence officials said it was probably a smokescreen meant to hold together a movement left leaderless for almost three weeks.

Taliban officials rang journalists…to say Hakeemullah Mehsud, a young militant who commands fighters in the Orakzai, Khyber and Kurram tribal regions, had been chosen as the new chief by a leadership council, or shura…

A BBC report quoted Faqir Mohammad, head of the Taliban in the Bajaur tribal region, as saying Hakeemullah was selected…

Two days ago, Fariq Mohammad claimed he’s acting chief and now he says Hakeemullah is,’ one senior intelligence officer in northwest Pakistan said. ‘It’s a trick.’

Intelligence officials insisted Hakeemullah was killed or gravely wounded in a shootout with a rival days after Baitullah Mehsud was killed by a US missile strike on Aug. 5.

‘The announcement is real, but the man isn’t,’ the officer said. ‘The real Hakeemullah is dead.’

Another senior officer, who requested anonymity, speculated that the Taliban leadership was trying to buy time until one of Hakeemullah’s brothers returned from fighting in the Afghan insurgency to take command of his men.

Sounds like some leftover hack from Bush’s 2004 campaign is leading the disinformation campaign on behalf of the Pak Taliban. Same style. Same sort of lies.

Next, they’ll be claiming they have WMD’s.

UPDATED: A big “oops!” from DAWN, this morning – because Hakeemullah is alive and showed up at a press conference.

Do you ever tire of articles, op-ed pieces, commentary from TV Talking Heads that avoid the point altogether? Here’s this week’s best example – Bob Greene at CNN offering a “humorous” commentary about the US Postal Service:

You seemed a little bit interested in last Sunday’s column: the one about the prospect of Saturday mail delivery being eliminated by the U.S. Postal Service.

That is what Postmaster General John E. Potter has asked Congress to authorize. Because of a budget crisis and a drastic decline in the number of items Americans send through the mail each year (an estimated 20 billion fewer items mailed this year alone), Potter wants to stop delivering mail on Saturdays.

Along with last week’s column, there was a feature where readers were invited to cast their votes on the subject (not a scientific poll, as they say; I think this means that Albert Einstein wasn’t counting the ballots).

More than 397,000 of you took the time to vote. The question was: “Would you miss Saturday mail if the Postal Service stopped delivering it?…”

Sixty-eight percent of you said you would not miss the Saturday mail if it stopped coming. Only 32 percent of you said you would miss it…

Postmaster General Potter says that getting rid of Saturday delivery would save more than $3 billion a year. My guess is that not only are they going to have to do away with Saturday mail — the time is probably coming when delivery on other days of the week will disappear, too.

So the question is not whether the days of mail delivery will be curtailed. It’s whether we will be happy about it.

The real problem hasn’t changed in 50 years. Junk mail doesn’t pay for itself.

What I also don’t expect is an honest challenge to the corporate status quo from a smiley flack working for Time-Warner.

Although Mr. Frommer, the founder of Frommer’s Travel Guides (which is an online content partner of The New York Times), has used his blog to express strong opinions in the past, his post on Wednesday — expressing horror at the spectacle of about a dozen gun-toting protesters on Arizona’s streets during a visit by President Obama — stuck out from other recent entries like “Current Room Rates in Orlando at Non-Disney Properties Are Almost Too Good to Be True” and “Southwest Airlines Announces a Four-Month Airfare Sale — and It’s a Dilly.”

In his post on Arizona, Mr. Frommer explained that news coverage of the president’s visit — a trip that was intended, in part, to promote the state’s tourism industry — had convinced him to avoid going there:

“I am not yet certain whether I would advocate a travel boycott by others of the state of Arizona; I want to learn more about Arizona’s gun laws and how they compare with those of other states. But I am shocked beyond measure by reports that earlier this week, nearly a dozen persons, including one with an assault rifle strapped about his shoulders and others with pistols in their hands or holsters, were openly congregating outside a hall at which President Obama was speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

“For myself, without yet suggesting that others follow me in an open boycott, I will not personally travel in a state where civilians carry loaded weapons onto the sidewalks and as a means of political protest. I not only believe such practices are a threat to the future of our democracy, but I am firmly convinced that they would also endanger my own personal safety there. And therefore I will cancel any plans to vacation or otherwise visit in Arizona until I learn more. And I will begin thinking about whether tourists should safeguard themselves by avoiding stays in Arizona…

“I would feel as I do regardless of the political identity of the speaker whom these thugs attempted to intimidate. The continued tolerance of extremists carrying guns is a frightening development which strikes at the heart of the political process and endangers the ability to carry out a reasoned debate. Is there any responsible citizen of the United States who believes that people should carry guns to a public debate or speech? If Ronald Reagan were delivering a political talk in Phoenix, Arizona, would they have felt it was proper for protestors with guns to mill about outside the hall from which he would leave?”

Most media types are still too cowardly to identify this event as stage-managed, filmed and offered as “news coverage” by long-standing militia nutballs. The history of these clowns is tied directly to previous convictions of members of the Viper Militia as a public danger. Yet, Talking Heads from the world of TV news-as-entertainment never questioned a damned thing.

Even now, as a travel writer confronts these fearmongers – most broadcast journalists still describe the event as news coverage rather than a staged political farce. No different from teabaggers or “questions” from concerned Republicans at town hall discussions.

Though ocean-borne plastic trash has a reputation as an indestructible, immortal environmental villain, scientists announced yesterday that some plastics actually decompose rapidly in the ocean. And, the researchers say, that’s not a good thing.

The team’s new study is the first to show that degrading plastics are leaching potentially toxic chemicals such as bisphenol A into the seas, possibly threatening ocean animals, and us.

Scientists had previously thought plastics broke down only at very high temperatures and over hundreds of years. The researchers behind a new study, however, found that plastic breaks down at cooler temperatures than expected, and within a year of the trash hitting the water.

The Japan-based team collected samples in waters from the U.S., Europe, India, Japan, and elsewhere, said lead researcher Katsuhiko Saido. All the water samples were found to contain derivatives of polystyrene, a common plastic used in disposable cutlery, Styrofoam, and DVD cases, among other things, said Saido, who presented the findings at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Washington, D.C..

Plastic, he said, should be considered a new source of chemical pollution in the ocean…

The pollutants are likely to be more concentrated in areas heavily littered with plastic debris, such as ocean vortices, which occur where currents meet.

Nothing ever surprises me about the crap human beings dispose of by tossing it into the nearest body of water. Bigger just means a better place to shovel your debris.

You could remove the human-based garbage from the shore every day. It would be back as bad the next day. Human beings will always eat garbage as long as they can’t see it identified on their plate. And it’s easier than doing anything about it.

The technology behind giant video billboards can now be made into flexible and even transparent displays. These could be used to create brakelights that fit the curves of a car or medical diagnostics that envelop a patient like a blanket.

It has been made possible by a new technique, outlined in Science, for manufacturing so-called inorganic LEDs.

The new method allows these tiny light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to be attached to materials such as glass or rubber…

The approach is able to make thin inorganic LEDs in high quantities in such a way that they can be cut up by bathing them in a strong acid. The separated elements can then be picked up with a “stamp”, with holes cut precisely to size for the elements, and then placed on a wide array of surfaces, from glass to plastic to rubber.

The devices can be placed sparsely enough that a bright layer of them is practically transparent.

“Because you can get away with very low coverage by area, it opens up the possibility of making something that’s see-through,” Professor John Rogers explained…

“Displays remain the ultimate goal – we don’t need a new law of physics to enable it, it’s just more of an engineering question,” he said.

It is a trip! No question about it.

Should be able to make some beautiful displays – and consume less electricity in the process.

They flew like ducks and they landed like ducks, but they were never like ducks at all.

They were flying reptiles called pterosaurs with long, sharp beaks and wings for soaring. They lived in the days of their distant cousins, the dinosaurs, but evolved separately until they went extinct 65 million years ago – along with the dinosaurs and most other creatures of the time.

For the first time, a team of scientists, including a noted UC Berkeley paleontologist, has discovered the tracks that one small pterosaur made as it landed on the muddy shore of an ancient sea sometime between 150 million and 115 million years ago…

“These tracks,” Padian said, “tell us that this animal must have flapped its wings with its body upright, stalled in the air like many waterbirds do, and landed feet first just the way flying ducks like mergansers do today. Then, its newfound tracks show this pterosaur took a few short, stuttering steps, turned slightly to its left, and there the tracks stop.”

The first prints of the landing show long claw marks made as the flier apparently dug in its hind feet to stop. By the second step, two prints of the animal’s forefeet show up for the first time, according to the forthcoming report…

More than 30 of the intact tracks showing the passage of lighter pterosaurs have been carefully analyzed, but only one – the first ever discovered – revealed the precious trackway of the pterosaur’s complete landing. Its hind feet, the tracks show, were about 2 inches long, and the wingspread was about 3 feet, Padian said.

Although the discovery reveals much about the evolution of flight in the first vertebrate animals to reach the air, the scientists conclude that nothing in the tracks they have studied so far “provides any indication how these animals took off.”

I imagine they may used catapults to take off. Like early flying Christians.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Central bankers from around the world have expressed growing confidence that the worst of the financial crisis was over and that a global economic recovery was beginning to take shape…

“The prospects for a return to growth in the near term appear good,” declared Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, offering optimism both about the United States and the worldwide outlook.

Though the Fed chairman repeated his warning that the economic recovery here was likely to be slow and arduous and that unemployment would remain high for another year, he went beyond the central bank’s most recent statement that economic activity was “leveling out.” Speaking to central bankers and economists at the Fed’s annual retreat here in the Grand Tetons, Mr. Bernanke echoed the growing relief among European and Asian central bankers that their own economies had already started to rebound…

At almost the same time that Mr. Bernanke spoke, the National Association of Realtors reported that sales of existing homes jumped 7.2 percent in July — the biggest monthly increase in more than a decade and much bigger than analysts had expected…

Here in Jackson Hole, the mood of relief and cautious confidence among central bankers and economists on Friday was almost palpable — a stark contrast to the anxiety and tension that permeated their retreat here one year ago.

“It is reasonable to declare that the worst of the crisis is behind us, and that the first signs of global growth have appeared earlier than we generally expected nine months ago,” said Stanley Fischer, governor of the Bank of Israel and a top former official at the International Monetary Fund.

RTFA. Lots of detail. Lots of thought and response. You ain’t going to hear it on Fox Snooze or from most of the other TV talking heads.

Credit where credit is due – will only be spoken of in quiet corners of the White House. Albeit with big smiles and a little smugness. Off camera for a little while longer.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Mexico has decriminalised the possession of small amounts of cocaine, heroin and marijuana, as part of an attempt to focus a police crackdown on drug producers and traffickers.

The new law, which also covers LSD and methamphetamine possession, will also offer addicts free treatment, in order to tackle the domestic demand for drugs.

A predictable jive statement was issued by the government to keep the moralists happy – “This [new law] is not legalisation, this is regulating the issue and giving citizens greater legal certainty,” said Bernardo Espino del Castillo of the attorney-general’s office.

The law, which was enacted on Friday, sets maximum “personal use” amounts for the listed drugs. Anyone found possessing those narcotics within the limit will not face criminal prosecution…

Those stopped and found in possession of drugs under the new limits will be encouraged to seek treatment, but those caught for a third time will face a mandatory health programme.

Under the previous law, possession of any amount of drugs could lead to a jail sentence, but authorities rarely prosecuted addicts found carrying small amounts…

But police often sought bribes from those they suspected of carrying drugs, under the threat of a stiff prison sentence.

Mexico has in recent months aimed to separate drug addicts and casual users from drugs traffickers.

Too bad the United States is incapable of the least amount of differentiation. Between right-wing hypocrites and Bible Belt shams, the Land of the Free remains a War-on-Drugs sandwich – with something like a 21st Century approach either side of our country – stuffed with ignorance and a special sauce of Liberal cowardice in the middle.

The word “tweet” may have entered the international lexicon thanks to an explosion in 140-word microblogging messages, but an attempt by Twitter’s founders to trademark it has been rejected.

Twitter applied to the US patent and trademark office last month for ownership of the word but the request was provisionally denied on the grounds that other companies had filed for trademarks of very similar words…

The ruling is a setback to Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone, who is keen to protect the rapidly growing language surrounding the service…

“We have applied to trademark tweet because it is clearly attached to Twitter from a brand perspective but we have no intention of ‘going after’ the wonderful applications and services that use the word in their name when associated with Twitter,” he said.

Uh, sorry about that. There is little else I can say about something I find terminally boring.

We’ll show you how to do it!

The affluent English county of Surrey — with its rolling hills, historic tiled houses and ancient oak woodlands to the south of London — may not seem the most obvious place to prospect for oil.

But two companies are working together to drill an exploratory well there and say a change in tax law could help to step up exploration elsewhere in British shires.

They face stiff local opposition… They should.

“The oil is over there, under the church in the village,” said Stuart McLachlan, standing on a wooded hill and pointing in the direction of Coldharbour’s Victorian stone church.

London-listed Europa Oil & Gas and Egdon Resources are seeking approval from Surrey County Council to drill a well on a hill 1.5 km from the village, and tap in horizontally. Europa’s CEO Paul Barrett…insisted the local residents, who need cars to supplement the village’s limited public transport, should not fear for their environment.

“With the right amount of planning, the right environmental impact assessments, doing everything properly, you can really do that without disturbing anyone,” Barrett told Reuters.

The Oil Barons of the world don’t even care how they crap in their own nest. Let me tell you a wee story: -

“Don’t be concerned. We call it ‘the smell of money!’”