Eideard

I seem to have bumped into more than the usual number of looneybirds, dumb crooks and foolishly dangerous human beings in my reading around the world, around the Web, today. But, I think I’ll ignore ‘em for a nice guy-tale from General Motors.

Yes, you read that right. General Motors has indeed taken scrap battery covers that would otherwise have been discarded and, with the help of a team of youngsters from the Lasky Recreation Center in Detroit, turned them into duck houses.

Seems odd, no doubt, but we’d certainly rather see creative recycling such as this instead of sending off the scrap bits and pieces to rot for hundreds of years in a landfill or some other ignominious end-of-life scenario.

According to The General, these homes “will provide a safe place for wood ducks and even screech owls to lay their eggs.” For what it’s worth, this is the second such creative recycling project we’ve heard about from the team behind the 2011 Chevrolet Volt, the first being the reuse of oil-soaked boom material from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico made into underhood plastic Volt parts. Nice work, GM.

I agree.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

The blowout preventer that should have stopped the BP oil spill cold failed because of faulty design and a bent piece of pipe, a testing firm hired by the government said…in a report that appears to shift some blame for the disaster away from the oil giant and toward those who built and maintained the 300-ton safety device…

The report by the Norwegian firm Det Norske Veritas is not the final word on the Deepwater Horizon disaster last April that killed 11 workers and led to more than 200 million gallons of oil spewing from a BP well a mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico.

It helps answer one of the lingering mysteries nearly a year later: why the blowout preventer that sat at the wellhead and was supposed to prevent a spill in case of an explosion didn’t do its job.

The report cast blame on the blowout preventer’s blind shear rams, which are supposed to pinch a well shut in an emergency by shearing through the well’s drill pipe. In the BP crisis, the shear rams couldn’t do their job because the drill pipe had buckled, bowed and become stuck, according to the DNV report.

The 551-page report suggested that blowout preventers be designed or modified in such a way that the shear rams will completely cut through drill pipe regardless of the pipe’s position.

The blowout preventer was made by Cameron International and maintained by Transocean Ltd.

The report suggested that actions taken by the Transocean rig crew during its attempts to control the well around the time of the disaster may have contributed to the piece of drill pipe getting trapped.

“This is the first time in all of this that there has been a clear design flaw in the blowout preventer cited,” said Philip Johnson, a University of Alabama civil engineering professor who did not take part in the analysis. “My reaction is, ‘Holy smokes, every set of blind shear rams out there may have this problem…’”

Speculation on why the blowout preventer failed has persisted during the year since the disaster…

Johnson, the professor, said the report indicates that the blowout preventer had a design flaw that may have gone unnoticed by the entire industry, not just by Cameron.

RTFA if you feel you really need to know how each company’s lawyers attempts to pass the blame along to one or more of the other companies. Predictable.

The only item of substance – aside from laying the blame at the feet of Cameron International and Transocean – is that all the blowout preventers of this type may be potentially faulty. And that had better be changed real soon, folks.

Think it’s any safer just because it’s older, now?

A security officer at the McNamara Federal Building stored a suspicious package that turned out to contain a bomb for three weeks before alerting authorities, said a spokesman for a union that represents guards at the site, who called the incident “a total embarrassment.”

“He apparently set it aside,” said David Wright, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 918, which represents the Federal Protective Service (FPS) employees, who guard the McNamara and other federal buildings around the country.

“It should have been left in place and he should have called in a canine detection unit to see if they could make a determination about it,” he said Tuesday.

The package was eventually placed behind two dumpsters behind the McNamara Building on Michigan Avenue downtown around 10 a.m. Friday. The Detroit Police Department’s bomb squad collected the device from there and moved it to Belle Isle, where it was detonated…

The contracted security guard has been suspended, said an official with the Washington, D.C., office of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday.

Whoo-Hoo! If he loses the gig he can always go to work for the TSA.

Sosonko: “Pssst. You’re not supposed to be winning any more.”
Korchnoi: “I can’t help it.”

Of all modern players, Korchnoi impresses me so much– as he does many others– because of the longevity of his competition at the highest levels. At 80 years of age, he is rated 2557 and ranks 427th in the world (FIDE). He was about 75 years old before he fell off the top 100 list.

I got to watch Korchnoi play Mecking in the 1974 candidates match for the World Chess Championship. One of the things I remember was the sound of the large doors slamming when Mecking would exit the playing area after making his move. The first couple of times, Korchnoi looked up like a half-perturbed bear. After that, he seemed to ignore the sound as if ignoring a pesky fly at a picnic. He feasted on Mecking and won the match.

One day, I was seated next to the infamous and aging Norman Whitaker (quite a trip!). At one point, not realizing the volume of his voice (or did he?!), he remarked of a move just made: “As Tarrasch used to say, the Bishop bites granite.” He kept repeating this to himself. There was a bit of a stir, but things quieted down.

Abraham Mashal

Abe Mashal, a 31-year-old dog trainer from St. Charles, says FBI agents told him he ended up on the government’s no-fly list because he exchanged e-mails with a Muslim cleric they were monitoring.

The topic: How to raise his children in an interfaith household.

Mashal said he has never had any links to terror or terrorists and is a “patriotic,” honorably discharged Marine Corps veteran.

He found out he’d been flagged last April, when he tried to board a flight to Spokane, Wash., to train dogs for a client. Since then, his family members and friends have been questioned, and he said he has lost business because he isn’t allowed to fly.

Mashal is one of 17 plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed in June by the American Civil Liberties Union over the list.

FBI agents questioned him at Midway Airport, then at his home. Finally, he was summoned to a hotel in Schaumburg, where more FBI agents told him he’d been placed on the no-fly list because of an e-mail he had sent to an imam — a Muslim cleric — whom they’d been watching.

Mashal said he had sought the imam’s advice about raising children in a mixed-religion household. Mashal is Muslim; his wife is Christian.

He said the agents offered to get him off the list — if he would become an undercover informant at mosques. He refused and said he feels he was being blackmailed.

The FBI conducts their activities on behalf of Freedom and the American Way the same way they always have. Like gangsters with a license to steal, extort and blackmail.

Sanctioning someone’s lifestyle and livelihood must be in Chapter 1 of the Handbook of Sleazy Practices issued to unprincipled intel operatives worldwide. Pretending to defend our Bill of Rights is exactly what it is – a pretense, a ruse.

The power plant at the centre of the biggest civilian nuclear crisis in Japan’s history contained far more spent fuel rods than it was designed to store, while its technicians repeatedly failed to carry out mandatory safety checks, according to documents from the reactor’s operator…

According to documents from Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), the company repeatedly missed safety checks over a 10-year period up to two weeks before the 11 March disaster, and allowed uranium fuel rods to pile up inside the 40-year-old facility…

The revelations will add to pressure on Tepco to explain why, under its cost-cutting chief executive Masataka Shimizu, it opted to save money by storing the spent fuel on site rather than invest in safer storage options.

The firm already faces scrutiny over why it waited so long to pump seawater into the stricken reactors and, according to a report in the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper last week, turned down US offers of help to cool the reactors shortly after the disaster.

Critics of Japan’s nuclear power programme say the industry’s patchy safety record and close ties to regulating authorities will have to change if it is to regain public trust…

One month before the tsunami, government regulators approved a Tepco request to prolong the life of one of its six reactors by another decade, despite warnings that its backup power generator contained stress cracks, making them more vulnerable to water damage.

Weeks later, Tepco admitted it had failed to inspect 33 pieces of equipment inside the plant’s cooling systems, including water pumps, according to the nuclear safety agency’s website…

When disaster struck earlier this month, the plant contained almost 4,000 uranium fuel assemblies kept in pools of circulating water – the equivalent of more than three times the amount of radioactive material usually kept in the active cores of the plant’s reactors.

And like the First and second-generation nuclear plants in the United States – those uranium fuel rods could have been recycled. Beancounters in charge? You can almost be guaranteed that cost was more important than efficiency – or safety.

Do you really wish to scare the bejabbers out of your local coppers?

Three people have been charged with trying to buy a Stinger missile and other military weapons for a Mexican drug cartel, according to an indictment unsealed last week in Phoenix. The government says the plot was foiled because the people the alleged conspirators were dealing with were federal undercover agents and a government informant.

“The object of the conspiracy was to obtain and possess military-grade weaponry, and to then export and transfer that weaponry to the Republic of Mexico, and supply that weaponry to a Mexican drug trafficking organization,” says the indictment filed in U.S. District Court in Phoenix.

The three defendants named in the indictment are David Diaz-Sosa, Jorge De Jesus-Castenada and Emilia Palomina-Robles. The charges against them include conspiracy to acquire and export an anti-aircraft missile, conspiracy to possess unregistered firearms and transfer firearms for use in a drug trafficking crime.

Court documents say the alleged conspirators’ shopping list included: a Stinger surface-to-air-missile at a negotiated price of $200,000; a Dragon fire anti-tank weapon for a cost of $100,000; a Law Rocket anti-tank weapon for $20,000; and two AT-4 recoilless anti-tank guns for $20,000. The indictment says the defendants were to pay with some cash and also with illegal drugs.

Enough hardware to attack a small country.

Mohamed’s sister, Hagar, carries Giovani

A large pet tortoise that managed to escape from its tank and tip it over caused a fire that gutted a New York family’s apartment, fire investigators said.

Giovani, an African spurred sulcata tortoise, was rescued from the fire, the New York Post reported. Another turtle owned by Mohamed Salem, an 18-year-old art student, was not so lucky and died in its tank.

Salem and the rest of the family were out Sunday when the fire started in their apartment in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn. Investigators say when Giovani knocked over the tank the heat lamp fell on a pile of clothes and art supplies, including flammable liquids such as paint thinner.

Three police officers who were in the neighborhood and entered the building to make sure no one was trapped in the apartment suffered smoke inhalation along with one firefighter. Giovani, the size of a basketball, was rescued.

Ibrahim Salem, Mohamed’s father, told the Post he does not see how the tortoise could have started the fire. He said firefighters told him the fire was an electrical one.

Go ahead – blame the tortoise. He can’t defend himself.

Probably some neighbor’s rabbit started the fire.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Former Israeli president Moshe Katsav has been sentenced to seven years in prison for rape and other sexual offences following a year-long trial which ended with his conviction in December.

Katsav, president from 2000 to 2007, said he was innocent and was being persecuted by the courts and Israeli society at large. He is expected to appeal.

Katsav was convicted of two counts of rape of an employee at the tourism ministry, where he was minister from 1996-1999. He was also convicted of the indecent assault and sexual harassment of two other employees at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem during his presidency.

The president was given the chance of a plea bargain in which he could admit lesser charges but chose to fight all charges in a trial which, although conducted in private, was accompanied by leaks from both sides in the media.

The judges told the court: “The crime of rape damages and destroys a person’s soul … Due to the severity of the crime, the punishment must be clear and precise. The defendant committed the crime and like every other person, he must bear the consequences. No man is above the law…”

The former president was also ordered to pay 100,000 shekels ($28,000) to the rape victim and 25,000 shekels to each of the other victims.

He isn’t the first president – nor will he be the last – to end up in prison. There is an endless supply of politicians seeking the highest office in their land – who think they are above the law.

 
Thanks, Cinaedh