Posts Tagged ‘domestic’
New bombs found as Greece suspends mail deliveries
Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP/Getty Images
The Greek authorities on Wednesday suspended all deliveries of foreign-bound mail for 48 hours after letter bombs were sent to several embassies in Greece and the leaders of Italy, Germany and France.
The latest discovery was a letter bomb addressed to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, which was intercepted less than 24 hours after a similar device, also sent from Greece, arrived at the mailroom outside the office of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. A cargo plane that left Athens International Airport late on Tuesday, destined for Paris with a stopoff in Rome, was rerouted to Bologna after the Greek authorities realized that the aircraft was carrying a package addressed to Mr. Berlusconi. The police at the Bologna airport found the package and destroyed it, according to the Italian news agency Ansa.
A spokesman for the Greek police, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said two suspicious packages intercepted at the Athens airport on Tuesday night and destroyed in controlled explosions had been addressed to the international police organization Europol at the Hague and the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.
Though only one person was injured, and only slightly, and most of the devices were neutralized, the wave of letter bombs unnerved European officials already scrambling to secure the continent’s air-cargo system after the discovery last week of parcel bombs in Britain and Dubai that were shipped from Yemen and addressed to Jewish institutions in Chicago. Those bombs have been linked an Al Qaeda branch in Yemen.
Prime Minister George Papandreou on Wednesday sought to make clear that the letter bombs were the work of domestic terrorists.
“Democracy will not be terrorized,” said Mr. Papandreou, whose administration is struggling with a huge debt crisis and preparing for local elections on Sunday. “The irresponsible and mindless acts of those who aim to undermine the efforts of the Greek people to put the country and the economy back on track will not succeed.”
RTFA. Long, detailed, knowledgeable coverage of anarchists whose perception of political struggle is as deranged as any follower of al Qaeda.
After a half-century of activism – which occasionally included places and periods when armed self-defense was not uncommon – I still find no more logic or reason behind leftwing nutballs than rightwing nutballs. Critical domestic conflict is not going to be resolved by assassination or terrorist tactics. You win nothing but contempt.
“Don’t tase me bro’” – Wyoming version
Not the perp – but, just as dumb
A Cheyenne man who doused himself with white latex paint in hopes of avoiding a police Taser was hit with the stun gun anyway.
The Taser chase happened…when Cheyenne police went to Brian Mattert’s house on a domestic violence call. The Wyoming Tribune Eagle reports that when police arrived, Mattert thought they’d use a Taser on him, so he hastily covered himself in paint and told officers that if they shot him with the stun gun, he’d die.
Officers told him the paint wouldn’t affect the Taser’s capability.
Mattert scuffled with officers and was hit with a Taser twice before officers handcuffed him.
He faces several criminal charges. Police say the officers’ uniforms had to be cleaned.
Har!
What? Did he think he would explode?
Brits believe the hills are alive with haggis
One in five people in Britain thinks that haggis, the traditional Scottish dish made from the lung, liver and heart of a sheep, is an animal that roams the Highlands, according to a survey on Friday.
Commissioned by the online takeaway food service Just-Eat.co.uk, the survey found that 18 percent of Britons believe that haggis is a hilltop-dwelling animal.
Another 15 percent said it is a Scottish musical instrument while 4 percent admitted to thinking it was a character from Harry Potter…
Even 14 percent of the…Scottish people polled said they did not know what haggis was.
It could be like learning what goes into a hot dog. You really don’t want to know.
Fact Check: Toyota not alone in acceleration problems
Pay attention to Congress and we’d still be driving these!
Toyota Motor Corp. has recently been in the hot seat after issuing massive recalls because of problems related to the accelerator pedal in several of its auto models.
To date, 8.1 million vehicles worldwide have been recalled by the manufacturer…
Speaking on Wednesday to CNN’s Campbell Brown, Larry Webster of Popular Mechanics magazine spoke at length on the problem, saying that “in the last decade, there have been tens of thousands of reports of sudden unintended acceleration in cars made by all the manufacturers.” Is this true?
The CNN Fact Check Desk wondered: Which other car manufacturers have had a problem with sudden unintended acceleration…?
The top five manufacturers of cars driven in the United States are General Motors, Toyota, Ford, Honda and Chrysler.
The NHTSA’s online database indicates that every one of these five has received numerous consumer complaints of sudden unintended acceleration in more than one of its models. Each manufacturer has faced a formal investigation into these complaints by the NHTSA and as a result has had to recall vehicles to fix various conditions that led to the problem.
Recalls due to incidents of sudden unintended acceleration are not limited to the big five manufacturers. According to the NHTSA database, recalls have also been issued for vehicles made by Nissan, BMW, Volkswagen, Mitsubishi, Subaru, Mercedes-Benz, Kia, Mazda, Land Rover, Suzuki and Volvo…
Bottom Line: Sudden unintended acceleration is not a problem limited to Toyota. Many car manufacturers, including the other four with the largest shares of the U.S. market, have had to recall vehicles because of this issue.
Speaking as a car geek who’s been involved with everything from building hot rods to racing sports cars – there is hardly a social phenomenon more deserving of cynical disregard than a typical U.S. recall.
First, they generally are the result of some sleazy lawyer who found a case akin to the poor benighted bastard who picked up his lawnmower to trim a hedge and managed to lose a few fingers. Thereby leaving the rest of us to pay for stickers, warnings and inspection regimes on every lawnmower sold since – in the United States.
Second, absurdity triumphs in these lawsuits over reason – consistently. The first “major” recall I experienced on my 1994 Dodge Ram pickup was a special plug required to be installed in a recess in the steering column. Someone with fourteen pounds of crap dangling from his keychain managed to get a portion of it stuck into the recess – which he then blamed for a subsequent crash into something sturdy and inanimate.
Someone with a “stuck accelerator who whines about being unable to stop their motor vehicle obviously never had the brainpower to understand that turning off the ignition key also stops the engine from running.
China’s stimulus package appears to be right on target
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission
Unfettered by public opinion, partisan squabbling or parliamentary opposition, Chinese leaders responded swiftly a year ago to the global economic downturn by authorizing a huge fiscal stimulus plan, followed up in short order with a loosening of monetary policy and a surge of bank credit.
The stimulus package, announced in November, promised 4 trillion yuan, or $585 billion, in spending over the following two years. As details trickled out, it became clear that public spending on large-scale infrastructure was to be a huge part of the mix.
Other recession-struck governments around the world had to struggle to find and fund enough so-called “shovel-ready” projects to stimulate the creation of construction jobs. But China, with countless such projects already on the drawing boards, faced no such
dilemma.
I have to chuckle because not only my oldest and dearest friends on the Left still try to explain that Keynesian reforms can’t work – even as modified and improved by Leontief – equally rigid and backwards ideologues ranging from Germany’s Christian Democrats to our forever retrograde Republicans attempt the same on the Right.
Fugitive still licensed to fly – Does TSA get anything right?
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is offering a $50,000 reward for a Seattle man it says is a domestic terrorist. But that has not kept him from keeping his pilot’s license or from trying to sell his airplane online, apparently because the Transportation Security Administration has not compared the F.B.I.’s wanted list with the Federal Aviation Administration’s list of licensed pilots.
The pilot, Joseph Mahmoud Dibee, 31, was indicted with 10 other people in January 2006, in Eugene, Ore., on charges that they committed arson, destroyed an electric tower and other acts of domestic terrorism. Credit for those acts and others were claimed by two groups, the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front…
According to F.A.A. records, Mr. Dibee still owns a single-engine airplane, a 1977 Grumman/American Cheetah. He is also trying to sell the plane on the Internet for $39,000.
The New York Times learned that Mr. Dibee still has his license and his plane from a database processing company, Safe Banking Systems, which in June released the names of six other people with F.A.A. licenses who had been charged or convicted of terrorism crimes or otherwise were considered a threat to national security.
After the names were released, the Transportation Security Administration suspended the six licenses and said it would take steps to weed out other pilots who posed security risks from among the nearly four million names in the F.A.A.’s public database…
Mr. Dibee was born in Seattle, and the F.B.I. poster and F.A.A. records spelled his name the same way and had the same birthday for him, Nov. 10, 1967.
With such a straightforward match, David M. Schiffer, president of Safe Banking Systems, said it was “highly unlikely” that, despite assurances in June, the Transportation Security Administration was matching the publicly available F.B.I. list with the publicly available F.A.A. list.
The TSA offered up a couple of lame boilerplate excuses. You can make them up on your own.
It just becomes less than laughable when Homeland Insecurity babbles on about the need to infringe upon constitutional rights to protect us – when they and their loyal minions can’t even figure out how to compare a couple of lists.
Obama kills Bush program using satellites for domestic spying
Government will be watching over you…
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission
The Obama administration plans to kill a controversial Bush administration spy satellite program at the Department of Homeland Security, according to officials familiar with the decision.
The program came under fire from its inception two years ago. Democratic lawmakers said it would lead to domestic spying. The program would have provided federal, state and local officials with extensive access to spy-satellite imagery — but no eavesdropping capabilities— to assist with emergency response and other domestic-security needs, such as identifying where ports or border areas are vulnerable to terrorism.
It would have expanded an Interior Department satellite program, which will continue to be used to assist in natural disasters and for other limited security purposes such as photographing sporting events. The Wall Street Journal first revealed the plans to establish the program, known as the National Applications Office, in 2007…
The plans to shutter the office signal Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s decision to refocus the department’s intelligence on ensuring that state and local officials get the threat information they need, the official said. She also wants to make the department the central point in the government for receiving and analyzing terrorism tips from around the country, the official added.
Lawmakers alerted Ms. Napolitano of their concerns about the program-that the program would violate the Fourth amendment right to be protected from unreasonable searches-before her confirmation hearing…
The lawmakers were most concerned about plans to provide satellite imagery to state and local law enforcement, so department officials asked state and local officials how useful that information would be to them. The answer: not very useful.
Cheney’s little army of Republican clones will spend the rest of the week in front of the White House – in the shade, of course, with beverage in hand – chanting, “Soft on communism!” Something like that, anyway.
Whatever is leftover in their chickenhawk pea-brains from the McCarthy days of the Cold War.
China may reach 11 million car sales in 2009
China’s automobile sales will “definitely break the 10-million-unit barrier” in 2009, the China Passenger Car Association said, raising its forecast for the automobile industry this week on the back of a robust growth in vehicle sales in May, the fifth consecutive month it has climbed this year.
The association said “automobiles sales in China will touch 11 million units this year, on the basis of the total number of vehicles sold across the country in the first five months.”
Data released by the association showed that China sold 812,178 units of passenger vehicles, including minivans, sports utility vehicles, and multipurpose vehicles, in May, another monthly high…
Total passenger car sales in the first five months jumped 29.6 percent, to 3.64 million units from the same period last year, said the association.
China also has, for the fifth consecutive month, beaten the US as the world’s largest automobile market. “The growth in the passenger car segment will probably continue in June to hit a new monthly record, which will boost the whole-year sales to the 11-million-unit mark,” said Rao Da, secretary-general of the association.
This is a growth market that refuses to be halted by America’s effect on the global economy.
McDonald’s pushed to take steps to cut potato pesticides
McDonald’s Corp, the largest purchaser of potatoes in the United States, has agreed to take preliminary steps to reduce pesticide use in its domestic potato supply.
Following the agreement, the Bard College Endowment, Newground Social Investment and the AFL-CIO Reserve Fund withdrew a shareholder proposal that, if approved, would have required the company to publish a report on options for cutting pesticide use in its supply chain…
“Because McDonald’s has such a commanding presence in the marketplace, this commitment offers the promise of significant reductions of pesticide use — which will benefit consumer health, as well as farm workers, local agricultural communities and the environment,” said Newground Social Investment Chief Executive Bruce Herbert, who is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Children’s Environmental Health.
Had the agreement not been reached, the resolution would have appeared in the company’s upcoming proxy statement and come up for a vote at the company’s shareholder meeting later this year…
Dr. Richard Liroff said food companies such as Sysco Corp, General Mills Inc and Campbell Soup Co have already shown that cutting pesticide use can makes sense from both an environmental health and business perspective.
Why does this sound like “we’re proud to announce we’re studying how to put less rat poison in your hotdogs”?
Obama updates Afghanistan – Pakistan strategy
Daylife/AP Photo
Barack Obama has unveiled his administration’s new strategy in Afghanistan, including the deployment of an additional 4,000 US troops to train Afghan forces, following a review of policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The new strategy includes proposals to counter a persistent Taliban and al-Qaeda campaign that spans the two countries’ shared border, and additional development aid for both nations.
Obama, who ordered the review of Afghanistan and Pakistan shortly after taking office in January, said a new strategy was essential because intelligence indicated al-Qaeda was “actively planning attacks” on the US from Pakistan.
“This is not simply an American problem, it’s an international security problem of the highest order,” he said.
Here’s the full text of his statement.
I watched it live. Something I rarely do with press conferences. I think it’s pretty much on target – and about seven years overdue.
