Eideard

Shh. Don’t tell Thierry Henry!
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

New France coach Laurent Blanc Friday has punished the country’s farcical World Cup squad by dropping each of the 23 players for a friendly against Norway next month.

Blanc’s decision to take action was approved by the French Football Federation’s federal council after a meeting with Raymond Domenech’s successor in Paris.

France suffered a miserable World Cup campaign in South Africa, marked by striker Nicolas Anelka’s expulsion after his foul-mouthed tirade at Domenech, infighting, and the players’ refusal to train.

‘Les Bleus’ returned home in ignominy after failing to win any of their first round games, with Domenech refusing to shake South Africa coach Carlos Alberto Parriera’s hand following the final defeat to the hosts…

France football has endured a woeful year, with Thierry Henry’s controversial handball which put France into the World Cup at the expense of Ireland in the play-offs, their pitiful display in the competition itself, and then the scandal involving international stars Franck Ribery and Karim Benzema who this week put under investigation on charges of having sex with an under-age prostitute.

Phew! How to start a new job, eh?

Gen. Stanley McChrystal ended his 34-year career as an Army officer Friday in an emotional retirement ceremony at his military headquarters in Washington, D.C., marking the last chapter of his swift and stunning fall from grace.

Before a crowd of a few hundred friends, family and colleagues on the Fort McNair parade grounds under an oppressively hot July sun, McChrystal said his service didn’t end as he hoped. But he regretted few decisions he had made on the battlefield, cherished his life as a soldier and was optimistic about his future, he said.

“I trusted and I still trust,” McChrystal said. “I cared and I still care. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

The former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan was fired last month after Rolling Stone magazine published an article titled “The Runaway General” that quoted scathing remarks he and his aides made about their civilian bosses…

Shortly after the article was published, McChrystal was sent packing…

McChrystal also sounded a more serious note, when he talked about the pain of leaving behind unfulfilled commitments in Afghanistan and watching colleagues ensnared in the scandal…

Still, he said he was approaching the future with optimism…

Soldiers attending the ceremony were allowed to forgo their formal dress uniforms in lieu of combat fatigues — an apparent tribute to a war commander fresh from battle and whose career was marked by more secret operations to snatch terror suspects than by pomp and circumstance.

Wearing his own Army combat uniform for the last time, the four-star general received full military honors, including a 17-gun salute and flag formations by the Army’s Old Guard.

RTFA. A modicum of interest and insight.

I haven’t saluted a general since the days of Omar Bradley and Georgii Zhukov. I salute Stanley McChrystal.

The United States used to lead the world in the number of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees. Now it ranks 12th among 36 developed nations.

“The growing education deficit is no less a threat to our nation’s long-term well-being than the current fiscal crisis,” Gaston Caperton, the president of the College Board, warned at a meeting on Capitol Hill of education leaders and policy makers, where he released a report detailing the problem and recommending how to fix it. “To improve our college completion rates, we must think ‘P-16’ and improve education from preschool through higher education.”

While access to college has been the major concern in recent decades, over the last year, college completion, too, has become a leading item on the national agenda. Last July, President Obama announced the American Graduation Initiative, calling for five million more college graduates by 2020, to help the United States again lead the world in educational attainment…

William Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, who hosted the Washington discussion along with Gaston Caperton, said…“We led the world in the 1980s, but we didn’t build from there,” he said. “If you look at people 60 and over, about 39-40 percent have college degrees, and if you look at young people, too, about 39-40 percent have college degrees. Meanwhile, other countries have passed us by.”

Canada now leads the world in educational attainment, with about 56 percent of its young adults having earned at least associate’s degrees…

“You can’t address college completion if you don’t do something about K-12 education,” Mr. Kirwan said.

The group’s first five recommendations all concern K-12 education, calling for more state-financed preschool programs, better high school and middle school college counseling, dropout prevention programs, an alignment with international curricular standards and improved teacher quality. College costs were also implicated, with recommendations for more need-based financial aid, and further efforts to keep college affordable.

Aside from sound governance – which drained away down sewers of greed in the eight years preceding the present administration – the mediocre stimulus budget approved by Congress doesn’t even keep up with maintaining staff minimums for education around the country. While there are legitimate discussions about the ratios of administrators to students, quasi-pro sports budgets versus the broad range of intelligent curricula, the task still remains to equip the young people of the United States to build a nation that can grow beyond an economy based wholly on consumption and service.

Though I imagine little or no change would please the beancounter breed of reactionary.

Photo from the article about the “reopening”

A homeless man allegedly broke into a California bar and served drinks to unsuspecting patrons all weekend — before police came calling.

The bar, called the Valencia Club, had gone out of business for some time and its liquor license had expired, police said this week.

But the suspect, Travis Lloyd Kevie, 29, somehow got into the California establishment in the Penryn area of Sacramento Valley last week. He reopened the bar using beer he bought from a nearby store.

Kevie allegedly started with a six-pack of beer and used money he received to buy more alcohol. He kept the bar open for a weekend serving about 30 customers a day, authorities said.

He was so successful that a local newspaper did a story about the bar reopening.

This was the follow-up story:

“As Detective Jim Hudson read the morning newspaper he recognized an individual pictured on the front page as a local transient who has had numerous contact with the Placer County Sheriff’s Office.”

He went to the bar to determine if Kevie had obtained a liquor license.

“When Detective Hudson arrived at the Valencia Club it was open for business with customers bellied up to the bar. Upon questioning Kevie Detective Hudson determined that he had no connection to the property and he did not have a liquor license,” the department said.

Kevie was arrested Tuesday and charged with burglary and selling liquor without a license…

The true American spirit of entrepreneurship. Or something like that.

As we have previously noted.

Question #1: How will this cheese go with my Ritz cracker?

Mmm.. looks yummy.

Question #2: How will this activity help my business?

“Will your course really allow me to make all that money in only two hours a week?”

World Chess Champion Vishy Anand is featured on the current cover of Forbes India.

[Continue reading to find out where the heck this post is going, if it is. Read the rest of this entry »

The UK-built Zephyr unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has confirmed its place in aviation history as the first “eternal plane”.

The solar-powered craft completed two weeks of non-stop flight above a US Army range in Arizona before being commanded to make a landing.

The Qinetiq company which developed Zephyr said the UAV had nothing to prove by staying in the air any longer.

It had already smashed all endurance records for an unpiloted vehicle before it touched down at 1504 BST (0704 local) on Friday…

Zephyr took off from the Yuma Proving Ground at 1440 BST (0640 local time) on Friday, 9 July.

After only 31 hours in the air, it had bettered the official world record for a long-duration flight by a drone; but then it kept on going, unencumbered by the need to take on the liquid fuel that sustains traditional aircraft.

Clear skies at 60,000ft delivered copious amounts of sunshine to its amorphous silicon solar arrays, charging its lithium-sulphur batteries and keeping its two propellers turning.

At night, Zephyr lost some altitude but the energy stored in the batteries was more than sufficient to maintain the plane in the air.

Zephyr is set to be credited with a new world endurance record (336 hours, 24 minutes) for an unmanned, un-refuelled aircraft – provided a representative of the world air sports federation, who was present at Yuma, is satisfied its rules have been followed properly.

One more step in a lot of right directions.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

India has come up with the world’s cheapest “laptop,” a touch-screen computing device that costs $35.

India’s Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal this week unveiled the low-cost computing device that is designed for students, saying his department had started talks with global manufacturers to start mass production.

“We have reached a (developmental) stage that today, the motherboard, its chip, the processing, connectivity, all of them cumulatively cost around $35, including memory, display, everything,” he told a news conference.

He said the touchscreen gadget was packed with Internet browsers, PDF reader and video conferencing facilities but its hardware was created with sufficient flexibility to incorporate new components according to user requirement…

The device was developed by research teams at India’s premier technological institutes, the Indian Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science.

Go for it, folks. Every step may feel like a First Step; but, the goal of improving the knowledge and skills of your nation’s children is admirable.

Some countries seem to have forgotten about it.

Washington has given up on moving 8,000 U.S. Marines to the U.S. territory of Guam from Japan by 2014…a potential blow to Prime Minister Naoto Kan who is already struggling over a U.S. base dispute.

The planned transfer of Marines from the southern island of Okinawa is a part of a larger agreement between Washington and Tokyo that includes relocating functions of the U.S. Futenma airbase in Okinawa to a less crowded area on the island…

Any postponement over moving the controversial base on Okinawa, host to about half the U.S. troops in the country, could be a blow to Kan’s government, already reeling from a poor showing in an upper house election this month…

A scrapped government pledge to move the base off Okinawa had sparked anger from local residents who complain of noise, pollution and crime, and led to the resignation of Kan’s predecessor in June.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada reaffirmed in a meeting in Hanoi…that experts will work out details of the Futenma relocation site by end-August as agreed in a May deal. But doubts remain over whether the deal can be implemented on time.

An election for the Okinawa governor is due in November and the result could also affect plans to move the airbase, coming near the time when U.S. President Barack Obama is expected to visit Japan for an Asia-Pacific leaders’ summit.

If there’s anything that reveals how tied at the hip our two supposedly conflicted political parties are – it’s the phoniness of foreign policy “discussion”. Both parties function on behalf of the new imperialism we took over from the Brits after World War 2.

Obama differs not from Kennedy or LBJ – who didn’t stand out in a crowd of Nixons or Reagans.

A man accused of swiping an Apple iPhone out of a woman’s hand in San Francisco may have been shocked when police found him only nine minutes later. It turns out the phone had been tracking his every move.

The iPhone was being used to test a new, real-time GPS tracking application, and the woman holding it was an intern for the software’s maker, Mountain View-based Covia Labs.

Covia CEO David Kahn had sent the intern into the street to demonstrate the software. Police say Horatio Toure snatched it and sped away on a bicycle.

Khan was watching a live map of the phone’s location on a computer and says he was immediately struck by how quickly the image began moving down the street.

Then someone told him the iPhone had just been stolen.

Police arrested Toure nine minutes later, and the intern identified him as the thief.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan is used to political lashings. But the latest one is not from an opposition party — it’s from his own wife.

In a book released this week titled, “What On Earth Will Change in Japan After You Become Prime Minister,” first lady Nobuko Kan writes bluntly about her husband’s shortcomings.

The book says the prime minister is unable to cook a simple meal and has no fashion sense. But it’s the blunt review of her husband’s ability to govern that will raise eyebrows.

She writes that her husband — a grassroots politician — is a good off the cuff speaker and is suited to working in supporting political roles. But as the world’s second-largest economy’s prime minister, she questions, “Is it okay that this man is prime minister? Because I know him well…”

The marriage between the Kans spans four decades, and is widely regarded by the public as a pairing of equal minds. The prime minister speaks publicly about his sharp-tongued wife and how she is his toughest critic.

In her book, she notes that most of their conversations are about politics. They disagree and debate the issues, she writes, from capital punishment to tax reform.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan appears to have been left out of the writing of his wife’s book. Talking to reporters, the prime minister joked, “I’m afraid to read it.”

Har!

Actually, I’d be as inclined to vote for Michelle Obama as her husband – a second time around. She might be more likely to face down the cowards in the Democratic Party – and the hypocrites in the Party of NO.