MINISTRY OF PEACE

State Premiers agree to 'draconian' terror laws

Suspected terrorists as young as 16 will face house arrest for up to a year without being convicted of an offence under sweeping laws agreed to by all Australian governments.
Police will also be able to pre-emptively detain people for up to 14 days, without charge, if they suspect they are planning a terrorist offence.
State premiers and chief ministers met the Prime Minister yesterday and accepted the harsh new laws, which Queensland's Peter Beattie called draconian but necessary.
Suspects placed under house arrest would have no warning of the action until issued orders by federal police. The court orders would be issued in secret.
Meeting Mr Howard in Canberra, the political leaders were reassured by the judicial checks and balances, although the new laws left lawyers aghast.
Mr Howard needed the states to agree because the Federal Government does not have the constitutional power on its own to bring in some of the changes.
At the heart of the legislative changes are the tough preventive detention rules and "control orders" - restrictions such as house arrest, electronic tagging and tracking, and bans on approaching certain areas or people.

[The US, British and Australian governments are passing laws that, paradoxically, are slowly removing the liberties that American, British and Australian governments claim to be protecting by passing with the laws!
The argument is that they are protecting our freedom to not be blown up, so any measure allowable.]

GOOGLE BOX

Google and the government

Terms of use documents show Google is ready, willing and able to show the information they collect about you to any Government official in any country they choose.
Google offers more storage for your email than other Internet service providers that we know about. The powerful searching encourages account holders to never delete anything. It takes three clicks to put a message into the trash, and more effort to delete this message. It's much easier to "archive" the message, or just leave it in the inbox and let the powerful searching keep track of it.
Google admits that even deleted messages will remain on their system, and may also be accessible internally at Google, for an indefinite period of time. For a few months they showed a note saying that messages left in the trash folder for 30 days would be automatically deleted, but many users reported that this never happened. Now that message, which is still present for the spam folder, is gone from the trash folder. Google wants very much to get to know you better.

[Google's corporate motto is "Don't be evil".]

THE WEATHERMEN

Michael Chertoff and Bush
US Northern Command and Hurricane Rita

There are indications that the Bush Administration is preparing to enact far-reaching emergency procedures in response to Hurricane Rita, which could potentially lead the country into a situation of Martial Law. 
Following his visit to Texas on September 23,  President Bush traveled together with DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff to The Peterson Air Force Base, at the headquarters of US Northern Command in Colorado Springs.
He spent the night of September 23 at Colorado Springs and was at US NorthCom headquarters on the morning of the 24th of September, when Hurricane Rita hit the Texas-Louisiana coastline.

At the same time. Radar imagery captured the following image. Noting the red bars on the left.



[From one comment on CyberspaceOrbit:
Whatever those 5 spots are, they definitely are not an artifact and they are the cause of rita turning north a few miles ahead of schedule. they seem to be directed from corpus christi. my presumption is that they are ships. we have high powered microwave weapons , ship mounted, in the 90-110 GHZ range which overlaps the radar freq. used in the animation. i worked on the first ones in 1983. contract was NSG through DOD. they heat a thin surface layer of any watery target (like raindrops-though that wasnt the original intent) they are aiming UP toward top of rita. you found a definite "something".]

BLACK AND WHITE

SKY IS FALLING

'Fireball' lights up Florida night sky

ates said one caller who was walking his dog near the Sebastian Inlet described the object as "huge, like a giant fireball."
The caller said he looked toward the Atlantic Ocean and saw the object disappear into the sea.

[Bart Lipofsky, a professor of physics and astronomy at Brevard Community College, said it more than likely sailed over the horizon instead of splashing down.]

APOCALYPTIC PANDEMIC

Indonesian Capital May Be Facing a Bird Flu Epidemic (Update1)

Indonesia's capital Jakarta and its surrounding areas may be facing a bird flu epidemic after at least four people died from the disease, Agriculture Minister Anton Apriantono said.
The government plans to spend 134 billion rupiah ($13 million) this year to cull poultry in the affected areas, Apriantono said in a phone interview in Jakarta.
"It may be right that it is an epidemic in Jakarta and Tangerang,'' which is 25 kilometers (16 miles) west of the capital, Apriantono said. "So that's why we are concentrating on our efforts in Jakarta and Tangerang.''
More than 140 million chickens have been slaughtered in Asia because of concern that H5N1 virus may mutate into a form easily transmissible between humans.
As humans are unlikely to have immunity to a mutated strain of H5N1, the World Health Organization is concerned it may trigger an influenza pandemic like the one that led to more than 40 million deaths worldwide in 1918. All cases of human infection in Asia are believed by health officials to have come from animals.

GIT MO' BLUES

Hunger strikers pledge to die in Guantánamo

More than 200 detainees in Guantánamo Bay are in their fifth week of a hunger strike, the Guardian has been told.
Statements from prisoners in the camp which were declassified by the US government on Wednesday reveal that the men are starving themselves in protest at the conditions in the camp and at their alleged maltreatment.
The statements show that prisoners are determined to starve themselves to death.
In one, Binyam Mohammed, a former London schoolboy, said: "I do not plan to stop until I either die or we are respected.

BBC:

Dozens of detainees have joined a hunger strike at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, bringing the number refusing food to 128, US officials say.
Eighteen prisoners have been hospitalised, including 13 who are being tube-fed.
Lawyers for the detainees say they are demanding release or immediate trial.
This is the latest in a series of hunger strikes since 2002 by detainees, who are held at the facility on Cuba as part of the US war on terror.
Lawyers for the detainees said as many as 200 were involved in the protest.
Many of the inmates have been held without charge for more than three years. A hunger strike in July ended when the Pentagon agreed to talk to inmates.
The prison at Guantanamo holds about 500 prisoners from nearly 40 countries.

CNN:
Eighteen prisoners are in medical facilities forcibly receiving nutrition intravenously or through nasal tubes, Pentagon officials said.

[The prisoners follow in the long tradition of hunger-strikers from Gandhi to Bobby Sands. Their demands are simple. They want the ability to challenge the terms of their imprisonment in court.]

EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

Scottish MP George Galloway on Hurricane Katrina aftermath:

"The scenes from the stricken city almost defy belief. Many, many thousands of people left to die in what is the richest, most powerful country on Earth. This obscenity is as far from a natural disaster as George Bush and the U.S. elite are from the suffering masses of New Orleans.
"The images of Bush luxuriating at his ranch and of his secretary of state shopping for $7,000 shoes while disaster swamped the US Gulf Coast will haunt this administration.
"In the most terrible way imaginable they show to the whole world that it is not only the lives of people in Baghdad, Fallujah and Palestine that Bush holds cheap. It is also his own citizens - the black and poor people left behind with no food, water or shelter.
"This is not simply manslaughter through incompetence, though the White House's incompetence abounds. It is murder - for Bush was warned four years ago of the threat to New Orleans, as surely as he was warned of the disaster that would come of his war on Iraq."

CLOAK AND DAGGER

Zarqawi fuels his ambition with the release of a video of the beheading of Nick Berg.

How US fuelled myth of Zarqawi the mastermind

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist leader believed to be responsible for the abduction of Kenneth Bigley, is 'more myth than man', according to American military intelligence agents in Iraq.
Several sources said the importance of Zarqawi, blamed for many of the most spectacular acts of violence in Iraq, has been exaggerated by flawed intelligence and the Bush administration's desire to find "a villain" for the post-invasion mayhem.
US military intelligence agents in Iraq have revealed a series of botched and often tawdry dealings with unreliable sources who, in the words of one source, "told us what we wanted to hear".

MARTIAL LAW

US media hails martial law general in New Orleans

In search of reassurance, the media has latched onto an unlikely hero—the US Army general who is overseeing what amounts to martial law in New Orleans, directing thousands of heavily armed troops in this largely deserted American city littered with floating corpses.
The media is systematically promoting Lt. Gen. Russel Honore. He is portrayed as the antidote to the miserable incompetence and negligence exhibited by every level of government in the first four days following the hurricane, when the poor, the elderly, the sick and infant children were left literally to die in the streets without aid.

[Military takeovers of government are welcomed, initially. The military is seen as "able to get things done" and as less susceptible to corruption than the civilian government.  Was the incompetence by FEMA deliberate?]

PRESCIENCE, PLANNING?

Story describes New Orleans devastation ... before Katrina hits

As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however—the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.
...
Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse.
As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.
Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

When did this calamity happen? It hasn't—yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great.

[Article written prior to Hurricane Katrina devastating New Orleans in September 2005.]

DEAR LEADER

The Associated Press reports Bush's next speech will be held in historic Jackson Square, New Orleans, with the famous St. Louis Cathedral as a backdrop -- and he won't risk having anyone around who might disagree with him or ask an impertinent question.
In fact, the AP says, there won't be a live audience at all. (Journalists covering the event won't be allowed to stray from their press vans.)
As for the speech itself, it will inevitably seek to answer any naysaying about Bush by recasting him in the heroic, leadership role he played after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks -- while advocating a range of measures that are dear to the conservative political agenda.

POWER TRIP

Bush says he may need more power in disasters

President Bush on Monday urged Congress to examine whether the White House needs stronger powers to deal with catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina.
Bush’s backing for the congressional inquiry raised the possibility that lawmakers might expand presidential authority to:
• Order mandatory civilian evacuations
• Dispatch U.S.-based armed forces for emergency search-and-rescue operations
• Grant wider leeway for active-duty U.S. military personnel to carry out law enforcement operations.

MARTIAL LAW

FEMA Deliberately Sabotaging Hurricane Relief Efforts

Numerous credible sources have come forward with examples of how the Federal Emergency Management Agency is deliberately sabotaging Hurricane Katrina relief efforts in New Orleans.
Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard (pictured above) appeared on Meet the Press Sunday and broke down in tears as he described FEMA's criminal activities.
We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water, trailer trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didn't need them. This was a week ago. FEMA--we had 1000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. The Coast Guard said, "Come get the fuel right away." When we got there with our trucks, they got a word.
"FEMA says don't give you the fuel." Yesterday--yesterday--FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards on our line and says, "No one is getting near these lines."
Why would FEMA, an organization supposedly tasked with helping in a time of crisis, deliberately cut police communication lines? This is a blatant example of sabotage and a sick push to make the disaster worse.

FEMA's Katrina body count job to firm implicated in body-dumping

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has hired Kenyon International to set up a mobile morgue for handling bodies in Baton Rouge, Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina.
Kenyon is a subsidiary of Service Corporation International (SCI), a scandal-ridden Texas-based company operated by a friend of the Bush family. Recently, SCI subsidiaries have been implicated in illegally discarding and desecrating corpses.
Louisiana governor Katherine Blanco subsequently inked a contract with the firm after talks between FEMA and the firm broke down. Kenyon's original deal was secured by the Department of Homeland Security.
In other words, FEMA and then Blanco outsourced the body count from Hurricane Katrina to a firm whose parent company is known for its "experience" at hiding and dumping bodies.
Jennifer Crider, spokeswoman for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), expressed concern over FEMA's choice of an SCI subsidiary and questioned whether the selection was made through a no-bid process.

CROSS PURPOSES

Investigation finds Red Cross agreed to withhold Orleans aid, operates in tandem with Homeland Security

Information surrounding relief efforts by the American Red Cross in New Orleans raises questions about whether the organization provided adequate relief and whether funds are actually being directed to Katrina victims.
Previous investigations have shown that the Red Cross mishandled its 9/11 fund, attempting to divert more than half into a "war fund" before Congress intervened, and moved $10 million from a fund in 1989 for earthquake victims towards other uses.
Allegations of similar holdbacks following the Oklahoma City bombing and several later disasters, coupled with the discovery that the Red Cross, mandated by its Code of Conduct to remain independent of government, is officially part of the Bush Administration's national security apparatus.

SKY IS FALLING

Man in 'meteor' sighting over town

Steve Powell, 49, saw what he believes was a huge meteor last night at around 11.45pm. He described the object as a big orange ball, about the size of a full moon which he believed was a meteor crashing to earth.

BIOTERROR ALERT

Mice with plague vanish at top-level lab

Three lab mice carrying deadly strains of plague have disappeared from separate cages at a bio-terror research facility in Newark, sparking a hushed, intensive investigation by federal and state authorities. Officials said the animals could have been stolen from the center or simply misplaced in a colossal accounting error at one of the top-level bio-containment labs in New Jersey.
The incident occurred more than two weeks ago and was confirmed only Wednesday after questions were raised by The Star-Ledger newspaper.
The lab is run by the Public Health Research Institute, a leading center for research on infectious diseases, now participating in a six-year federal bio-defense project to find new vaccinations for the plague - which federal officials fear could be used as a bio-weapon.

PANDEMIC

US buys $100 million of bird flu vaccine

Mass production of a new vaccine that promises to protect against bird flu is poised to begin, as the US government agreed to stockpile $100 million worth of inoculations.
The new contract with French vaccine maker Sanofi-Pasteur marks a major scale-up in U.S. preparation for the possibility that the worrisome virus could spark an influenza pandemic.

ASTEROID MISSION

Japanese probe pulls alongside asteroid

Bringing Japan's most complex space mission near its climax, a probe is within 12 miles of an asteroid almost 180 million miles from Earth in an unprecedented rendezvous designed to retrieve rocks from its surface.
The Hayabusa probe, launched in May 2003, will hover around the asteroid for about three months before making its brief landing to recover the samples in early November. The asteroid is located between Earth and Mars.

TIPPING POINT

Global warming 'past the point of no return

A record loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer has convinced scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover.
Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years.
Current computer models suggest that the Arctic will be entirely ice-free during summer by the year 2070 but some scientists now believe that even this dire prediction may be over-optimistic, said Professor Peter Wadhams, an Arctic ice specialist at Cambridge University.
"When the ice becomes so thin it breaks up mechanically rather than thermodynamically. So these predictions may well be on the over-optimistic side," he said.

Retreating glaciers worrying Greenlanders

The gargantuan chunks of ice breaking off the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier and thundering into an Arctic fjord make a spectacular sight. But to Greenlanders it is also deeply worrisome.
The frequency and size of the icefalls are a powerful reminder that the frozen sheet covering the world's largest island is thinning - a glaring sign of global warming, scientists say.
"We now have bream in our river, which we didn't have in the past because that fish is typical of warmer regions," said one. "On the one hand it may look like good news, but bream are predatory fish that prey upon fish eggs, often of rare kinds of fish."
Research also shows that populations of turbot, Atlantic cod and snow crab are no longer found in some parts of the Bering Sea, an important fishing zone between Alaska and Russia

CORPORATE LAW

Forget Martial Law. What about Corporte Law?

Already, the usual forces of corporate restructuring are lining up. Halliburton's Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary has begun work on a $500 million US Navy contract for emergency repairs at Gulf Coast naval and marine facilities damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
Blackwell Security - the folks that brought you Abu Ghraib - are patrolling the streets of our city.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the rich white elite is already planning their vision of New Orleans' reconstruction, from the super-rich gated compounds of Audubon Place Uptown, where they have set up a heliport and brought in a heavily-armed Israeli security company. "The new city must be something very different, one of these city leaders was quoted as saying, "with better services and fewer poor people. Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically"

BUSH GOES POTTY

Websites being hacked? No, it's just Bush getting weirder

U.S. President George W. Bush writes a note to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during a Security Council meeting at the 2005 World Summit and 60th General Assembly of the United Nations in New York September 14, 2005. (REUTERS/Rick Wilking).
The note reads: "I think I MAY NEED A BATHroom break? Is this possible? ..."

[How many other world leaders would need two conditional declarations within the first four words about something so definitive, still need a question mark at the end of the sentence, and then have to ask again?]

DARK STAR

Sun may have binary partner which affects the Earth

The movement of the solar system known as the precession of the equinox occurs because the Sun has a companion star; both stars orbit a common center of gravity.
The grand cycle–the time it takes to complete one orbit––is called a "Great Year," a term coined by Plato.

[When it passes through the Oort Belt, it dislodges comets and other bodies, sending them sunward (ie towards us.]

WEATHER NERDS

Blogger warns New Orleans 3 days before hurricane

One of the earliest and perhaps clearest alarms about Hurricane Katrina's potential threat to New Orleans was sounded not by the Weather Channel or a government agency but by a self-described weather nerd sitting on a couch in Indiana with a laptop computer and a remote control.
"At the risk of being alarmist, we could be 3-4 days away from an unprecedented cataclysm that could kill as many as 100,000 people in New Orleans," Brendan Loy, who is 23 and has no formal meteorological training, wrote on Aug. 26 in his blog. "If I were in New Orleans, I would seriously consider getting the hell out of Dodge right now, just in case."
Loy's posting that Friday afternoon came three days before the hurricane struck and two days before the mayor of New Orleans, Ray C. Nagin, issued an evacuation order.

WINDS OF CHANGE

Hurricane Katrina's aftermath: from natural disaster to national humiliation

The presidency, the Congress and both the Republican and Democratic parties - all have displayed an astounding lack of concern for the hundreds of thousands of people whose lives have been shattered and who face the most daunting and uncertain future, not to mention the tens of millions more who will be hard hit by the economic aftershocks of Katrina.
In the figure of the president, George W. Bush, the incompetence, stupidity, and sheer inhumanity that characterize so much of America's money-mad corporate elite find their quintessentially repulsive expression.
It is now clear that his administration made no serious preparations to deal with the dangers posed by the approaching storm.
On the "Good Morning America" television program, Bush reprised his miserable performance of the previous day, adding to earlier banalities the declaration that there would be "zero tolerance" for looters.

GIT MO' BLUES

Guantanamo hunger strike

Scores of detainees are on hunger strike at the Guantanamo US 'war on terror' detention camp, lawyers for the detainees and US military authorities said today.
Lawyers for the inmates said at least 210 men had been on hunger strike for the last three weeks.
Military officials at Guantanamo said there were 76.
Detainee advocates have blamed brutal treatment from guards, including beatings and abuse.
"Since January 2002, the (Defense Department) has denied prisoners access to the courts or legal counsel in an effort to avoid justifying the basis for the detentions. This policy has driven detainees to strike until they die or are afforded a fair hearing and humane treatment," said attorney Gitanjali Gutierrez, of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing some of the prisoners.
There are about 505 detainees at the detention camp on the US naval base in Cuba, including Australian David Hicks.