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8/20/2005

Army Planning for Four More Years in Iraq :.

The Army is planning for the possibility of keeping the current number of soldiers in Iraq - well over 100,000 - for four more years, the Army's top general said Saturday.


8/19/2005

Blackout: One Hundred Million Indonesians Without Electricity :.

D. O. W. N.

Some 100m Indonesians were without electricity on Thursday as power outages hit the country's main grid, leaving office workers in Jakarta trapped in elevators and the state-owned power monopoly struggling for an explanation.

Perusahaan Listrik Negara said power was last night being restored across most affected areas after a failure hit the Java-Madura-Bali inter-connection system at 10.23am, causing outages across the main island of Java and nearby Bali.

But Eddie Widiono, PLN's president, warned that yesterday's problems highlighted the fragile state of an electricity grid that almost half of Indonesia's 220m population relies on.



Low Volume of Updates

I've been extremely busy with work. I'll return to the "normal" volume of posts as soon as I can. If you've sent an email lately, know that I, quite literally, haven't had time to open them up. I'll be reading them soon.


8/18/2005

World Running Out of Time for Oil Alternatives :.

Use the time you have left wisely:

The world could run out of time to develop cleaner alternatives to oil and other fossil fuels before depletion drives prices through the roof, a leading Dutch energy researcher said on Thursday.

Ton Hoff, manager of the Energy Research Center of the Netherlands, said it could take decades to make alternatives affordable to the point where they can be used widely, although high oil prices were already stimulating such research.

"If we run out of fossil fuels -- by the time the oil price hits 100 dollars or plus, people will be screaming for alternatives, but whether they will be available at that moment of time -- that's my biggest worry," Hoff said.

"That's why we need to use fossil fuels in a more efficient way to have some more time to develop these alternatives up to a level where the robustness is guaranteed and their price has come down ... This could take decades for some technologies."


8/16/2005

'Able Danger' Barred from Informing FBI :.

I'm also interested in how elements of U.S. Special Forces are running operations inside the U.S. That's pretty weird, in and of itself.

It appears that the Left hand didn't know what the Right hand was up to, but be very careful with this story. It's emerging out of crack-pot, right wing circles, Fox news, etc.:

Wednesday August 17, 2005 3:31 AM

WASHINGTON (AP) - An Army intelligence officer says his unit was blocked in 2000 and 2001 from giving the FBI information about a U.S.-based terrorist cell that included Mohamed Atta, the future leader of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer said the small intelligence unit, called "Able Danger," had identified Atta and three of the other future Sept. 11 hijackers as al-Qaida members by mid-2000. He said military lawyers stopped the unit from sharing the information with the FBI.

The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks left the Able Danger claims out of its official report.

In an interview with Fox News Channel and The New York Times, Shaffer said the panel was not given all the information his team had gathered.

"I'm told confidently by the person who did move the material over that the 9/11 commission received two briefcase-size containers of documents," Shaffer said in the interview, part of which was aired by Fox News Tuesday night. "I can tell you for a fact that would not be ... one-20th of the information that Able Danger consisted of during the time we spent."

Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, has said the Sept. 11 commission did not adequately investigate the claim that four of the hijackers had been identified more than a year before the attacks.

Former commission chairman Thomas Kean and vice chairman Lee Hamilton said last week that the military official who made the claim had no documentation to back it up.

Shaffer rejected that remark. "Leaving a project targeting al-Qaida as a global threat a year before we were attacked by al-Qaida is equivalent to having an investigation of Pearl Harbor and leaving somehow out the Japanese," he said.



Zotob: Microsoft Worm Takes Down Systems Worldwide :.

Twits:

A fast-moving computer worm Tuesday shut down computer systems using Microsoft operating software, causing computer systems to crash across the United States and reportedly in Germany and Asia.

While the worm primarily affects Windows 2000, it also can affect some early versions of Microsoft XP, said Johannes Ullrich, director of the Sans Institute, a network security firm based in Jacksonville, Florida.

Symptoms include the repeated shutdown and rebooting of a computer.

Microsoft is putting a patch on its Web site, Microsoft.com, for users to download, a company spokesperson said. The spokesperson told CNN that Microsoft would not estimate how many users have been affected and described the problem as low-impact.

Among those hit were offices on Capitol Hill and media organizations, including CNN, ABC and The New York Times.


More: /. Coverage of the Antics



July Inflation Jumps on Higher Gas Prices :.

Consumer prices shot up in July, reflecting higher prices for gasoline and other energy products while output at the nations' factories, mines and utilities slowed sharply.



U.S. Army: Able Danger Intelligence Unit and Mohamed Atta :.

9.11 Commission spokesman Al Felzenberg on Thursday excused the Commission’s decision to withhold from their Report any mention of the Army Able Danger intelligence unit in Tampa which was tracking Mohamed Atta and other members of his terrorist cadre during 1999 and 2000.



U.S. Lowers Sights On What Can Be Achieved in Iraq :.

This is an absolutely astonishing article.

Tens of thousands of dead Iraqis.

Nearly 2000 dead U.S. military personnel.

$177 million per day.

Woops...

The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad.

The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.

"What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground," said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. "We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning."


8/15/2005

U.S. Shoots Ahead in Stun Gun Design :.

Home of the free, land of the...

WEAPONS designed to fire "electric bullets" into crowds are being developed for police and border protection agencies in the US.

The Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency, the domestic equivalent of the defence agency DARPA, has launched an "innovative less-lethal devices for law enforcement" programme to radically expand the capabilities of electric shock weapons.

Existing stun weapons, such as the Taser, typically fire a pair of darts trailing current-carrying wires to shock the target, with a maximum range of about 7 metres. The HSARPA programme aims to develop wireless weapons that can be used over greater distances in spaces such as "an auditorium, a city street or a sports stadium".


Related: Crowd Control via Lightning Cannon

Related: Crowd Control via Sound Cannon

Related: Crowd Control via Microwave Cannon



Chavez Makes U.S. Oil Export Threat :.

Oil exports to the US could stop amid growing tensions between the two countries, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has said.

He described recent US government actions as "aggressive" in a speech at a youth festival in Caracas.

As a result, Venezuelan oil "instead of going to the United States, could go elsewhere," he said.

Venezuela exports about 1.3 million barrels a day to the US and is the world's fifth largest oil producer.



'Marine of Year' Shoots at Noisy Crowd :.

A man who was named Marine of the Year last month for his service in Iraq injured two people when he fired a shotgun from his apartment window at a group of revellers leaving a night club.


8/14/2005

Cindy Sheehan: I Won't Pay Federal IncomeTax :.

Sounds about right:

As she continues her anti-war protest, Cindy Sheehan is labeling President Bush a "maniac" and a "lying bastard," and she's vowing not to pay her federal income tax.

"My son was killed in 2004. I am not paying my taxes for 2004," Sheehan told an audience of Veterans for Peace. "You killed my son, George Bush, and I don't owe you a penny. ... You give my son back and I'll pay my taxes. Come after me [for back taxes] and we'll put this war on trial."




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