Eideard

A good time was had by all.

Especially my friends who prefer homemade dark rum over commercial white.

MADRID: Chess legends Garry Kasparov and Anatoli Karpov will face off on Monday in the Spanish city of Valencia for a five-day re-match, 25 years after their epic world championship duel.

The September 21-25 match will not carry the same suspense as the Moscow showdown between then world champion Karpov and challenger Kasparov, their first battle that dragged on five months before it was called off with no winner.

The new match will have only 12 games – four semi-rapid and eight rapid – with Kasparov, 46, and Karpov, 58, facing off under the watch of Dutch chess arbiter Geurt Gijssen, the Valencia regional government said.

Kasparov, who earlier said it would be more a “ceremonial tournament” with a time-limit on moves, has been training in the Norwegian capital Oslo with the 18-year-old chess prodigy Magnus Carlsen….

Karpov has secluded himself for the last week in an apartment on the Spanish coast, training with a group of world-class players and with a computer, according to organisers.

The matches will be broadcast live on the Valencia regional government website (www.gva.es). Organisers said they expect some 10 million web users to follow the event in this city known as the birthplace of modern chess, where the game has been played since the 15th century.

I realize that this story is about as interesting to most people as watching paint dry. And, of course, I don’t care.

It won’t be the match of the century. It probably won’t even be the match of the year. But for some of us who were watching in 1984, it will be interesting on one level or another.

____________________
Updates:
Kasparov Wins First Two Games Against Karpov

Despite the stagnation of book, music and DVD sales, Amazon.com is gaining momentum as a retailer of almost every other kind of product.

Like many general retailers, Amazon seeks to forge direct ties with manufacturers wherever it can so that it can keep a larger percentage of the profits. Just as shoppers might find Safeway cereal, RadioShack batteries and Wal-Mart diapers, Amazon has sold such “private label” items since 2004, including Pinzon bath towels and sheets, Strathwood patio furniture, and Denali power tools.

Now, Amazon is expanding its private-label line with AmazonBasics, a new collection of consumer electronics items.

The items are not all that exciting, at least for now. They include HDMI cables, Ethernet cords, and blank CDs and DVDs.

All will be shipped in Amazon’s recycled cardboard frustration-free packaging, which gives people another opportunity to avoid those hermetically sealed plastic clamshell containers from other vendors.

Just being able to open the fracking package makes a difference for me. Hopefully, I will no longer need the old pair of kitchen shears I keep in the study.

An Ohio prisoner whose execution was halted after two hours…because technicians were unable to find a usable vein that could be injected with lethal drugs won a stay Friday against another attempt to put him to death next week.

The stay, issued by Judge Gregory L. Frost of the Federal District Court in Columbus, expires on Sept. 28.

A hearing on a further stay has been scheduled for that day, but the one that Judge Frost granted Friday could mean a substantial delay at the very least. Defense lawyers and the office of Gov. Ted Strickland said Ohio required that a new execution date be approved by the State Supreme Court once a stay of execution is issued, whether by the state courts or the federal.

That process, said lawyers for the condemned prisoner, Romell Broom, 53, is likely to take months…

That was the first time an execution by lethal injection in the United States had failed and been rescheduled for another day.

The effort to execute Mr. Broom, convicted of the rape, abduction and murder of a 14-year-old girl, has drawn wide attention to Ohio’s death chamber…

“The problem is there’s no Plan B,” said Dr. Groner, an outspoken opponent of the death penalty. “They have a group of individuals who have a certain skill set for inserting IVs. It’s a very low skill level, and some of the inmates are extremely challenging.”

I admit I’m as self-contradicting as any other thoughtful American. On one hand, mandatory appeals which our legal system mandates means that any death penalty takes decades to happen. Broom has been on Death Row for 25 years. Convicted murderers sentenced to life without parole cost the state less in time and money.

There’s a certain existential calculation that has to be balanced here. If you do the crime, you do the time. If it is supposed to be the end of time – make it short.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Russia has said it will scrap a plan to deploy missiles near Poland since Washington has dumped a planned missile shield in Eastern Europe. It also harshly criticized Iran’s president for new comments denying the Holocaust.

Neither move, however, represented ceding any significant ground. A plan to place Iskander missiles close to the Polish border was merely a threat. And while the Kremlin has previously criticized Tehran for questioning the reality of the Holocaust, Russian leaders have refused to back Western push for tougher sanctions against Iran.

It still remains unclear whether Moscow will make any significant concessions on Iran and other issues in response to President Barack Obama’s move to scrap the Bush-era plan for U.S. missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Russia’s Deputy Defense Minister Vladimir Popovkin told Ekho Moskvy radio Saturday that Obama’s move has made the deployment of Iskander short-range missiles in the Kaliningrad region unnecessary.

He described Obama’s move as ”victory of reason over ambitions.”

”Naturally, we will cancel countermeasures which Russia has planned in response, one of which was the deployment of Iskander missiles in the Kaliningrad region,” Popovkin said.

Diplomatic solutions don’t make for great parades – and no one with sense presumes a single event makes a strategic sea change. Still, the difference in governance in the United States is clear to all with an appreciation of history, an understanding of achieving goals through reason instead of solely relying on military hardware.

A series of spooky lights above parts of the northeastern United States Saturday sparked a flurry of phone calls to authorities and television news stations…

CNN affiliate stations from New Jersey to Massachusetts heard from dozens of callers who reported that the lights appeared as a cone shape shining down from the sky.

However, the lights were the result of an experimental rocket launch by NASA from the agency’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, a spokesman told CNN.

Keith Koehler said the Black Brant XII Suborbital Sounding Rocket was launched to study the Earth’s highest clouds. The light came from an artificial noctilucent cloud formed by the exhaust particles of the rocket’s fourth stage about 173 miles high…

Normally, noctilucent clouds are not visible to the naked eye and can only be seen when illuminated by sunlight below the horizon. The launch took place at 7:46 p.m. Saturday, just as the sun was setting for the day.

Observation stations on the ground and in satellites will track the artificial noctilucent clouds created by the rocket for months, NASA said.

And we will track the fear and trepidation of ill-educated superstitious people fearful of signs and portents in the heavens.

I think the researchers at the Wallops Facility must run a pool on how many panic-stricken calls come in from across the East Coast when they plan one of these experiments. They should time the next one to coincide with some auspicious Christian date and really scare the crap out of everyone.

Just about every political decision in this story requires stupidity.

It is unlikely anyone has ever come to this city and commented on how clean the streets are. But this litter-strewn metropolis is now wrestling with a garbage problem so severe it has managed to incite its weary residents and command the attention of the president…

But the crisis should not have come as a surprise.

When the government killed all the pigs in Egypt this spring — in what public health experts said was a misguided attempt to combat swine flu — it was warned the city would be overwhelmed with trash.

The pigs used to eat tons of organic waste. Now the pigs are gone and the rotting food piles up on the streets of middle-class neighborhoods like Heliopolis and in the poor streets of communities like Imbaba…

What started out as an impulsive response to the swine flu threat has turned into a social, environmental and political problem for the Arab world’s most populous nation.

It has exposed the failings of a government where the power is concentrated at the top, where decisions are often carried out with little consideration for their consequences and where follow-up is often nonexistent, according to social commentators and government officials.

“The main problem in Egypt is follow-up,” said Sabir Abdel Aziz Galal, chief of the infectious disease department at the Ministry of Agriculture. “A decision is taken, there is follow-up for a period of time, but after that, they get busy with something else and forget about it. This is the case with everything.”

The reasons for decisions like this are as phony as the excuses. I doubt if the pigs would have been slaughtered the way they were – if they were owned by Arabs. But, since custom only allowed Christians to raise swine, it was easy as pie to get the Ehyptian public to agree with the decision.

Foolishness in every corridor of government.

Chicago coppers in their Starship Troopers garb

Four former members of a disbanded Chicago police unit have admitted to taking part in a scheme in which they barged into homes and stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from people suspected of dealing drugs and others — once after withholding insulin from a diabetic man until he told them where to find cash.

Three of the former officers — Bart Maka, Guadalupe Salinas and Brian Pratscher — pleaded guilty to felony theft, and the fourth, Donovan Markiewicz, pleaded guilty to official misconduct. All four entered their pleas in deals that called for each to be sentenced to six months in jail and various terms of probation in exchange for their cooperation in continuing state and federal investigations…

Five other members of the once-elite drug and gang unit, the Special Operations Section, still face charges, including Jerome Finnigan, who is accused of plotting to hire someone to kill another member of the unit to keep him from talking to the government. Mr. Finnigan and the others have pleaded not guilty.

Prosecutors said the four who pleaded guilty had resigned from the department and had been cooperating with the investigation for over a year.

They said the plea bargain was agreed upon before the current Cook County state’s attorney, Anita Alvarez, took office. Jack Blakey, an assistant state’s attorney who leads the special prosecutions bureau, would not comment on the terms of the deal, in which prosecutors dropped all other charges, including kidnapping and burglary. Mr. Blakey said only that the office was ethically bound to abide by the deal.

Don’t you like the part about ethically bound? These slimeballs were ethically bound to serve and protect law and order on behalf of the people of Chicago. They did none of the above.

I’ve known too many good cops in my life to want to take it easy on creeps copping a plea.

Law enforcement officers figured they would find gamecocks when they raided the house in Shelton, CT.

Instead, petite songbirds with bright yellow feathers and orange crowns awaited.

Because they had been trained to be aggressive, the South African tanagers will be monitored for a month to see how well they’re getting along, said Roger Sweeney, the Salt Lake City bird park curator.

Which is one of the locations where the rescued birds have been transported for rehab.

“We’d gotten 100 cages ready to house these fighting cocks that we were going to seize,” said Bruce Sherman, director from the CT Dept of Agriculture. “There was a lot of time spent setting up and preparing for that, then everything changed when we found out they were finches.”

The cages sized for roosters were made of wire mesh open enough for the tanagers to fly right back out of the cages.

Our society has so many demented, strung out, lame cultural hangups, you have to wonder what will be the next focus for sex, drugs or gambling?

Almost an ordinary story about lovers, conflict about a child and responsibility, fear and violence.

She was an exotic dancer at a Miami strip club called Porky’s. He showed up wearing a Hawaiian shirt, eager to share a night in the VIP lounge.

They began a torrid, on-and-off love affair that ended for good in January, after she gave birth to a daughter she says is his. Now, she wants child support and has filed a restraining order against him.

It might be a routine, if tawdry, court case if not for respondent David Dueppen’s job: Catholic priest with the Miami Archdiocese.

The sordid story line inflicts another black eye on an Archdiocese already embarassed in May, when popular Miami television priest Alberto Cutié admitted to an affair with a woman, whom he quickly married…

Former stripper Beatrice Hernandez filed the restraining order last week, claiming that an argument over paternity and child support escalated when Dueppen began “grabbing her by the throat and choking her.”

“He is the devil,” said Hernandez, 42, of Miami, who provided DNA test results naming Dueppen as the father. “He is the devil dressed as an angel.”

RTFA. Better than the average soap opera – though I’m not certain if the soaps focus as much on official hypocrisy in one of our bastions of Christianity.