parakkum

The Brits are increasing the size of MI5, their domestic intelligence/security service by 50%:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3509869.stm

They're adding 1,000 people. So yeah, it was at 2,000 before.

Or basically the size of my old High School. With the added people, it'll be about the size of two semesters worth of Chemistry 1A at Berkeley.

For reference:

"As of January 31, 2002, the FBI had approximately 11,000 Special Agents and 16,000 Professional Support Personnel."

(This taken from: http://www.fbi.gov/aboutus/faqs/faqsone.htm )

Current US population: About 290 million.
Current UK population: About 60 million.

So they're doing just fine. Still cute, though. I'm guessing the US has rather more law enforcement per capita overall (but I haven't actually checked on that).

...and, of course, I'm leaving out the Border Patrol, ATF, DEA and all Homeland Security folks who might or might not become involved in US domestic surveillance and security.

In case anyone (a) actually reads this and (b) isn't keeping up with the news, the hostage situation in Beslan melted down today. Russian security forces stormed the building and they think deaths are in the hundreds (noting that the original hostage estimates of 3-400 people may have been low by a factor of three or so). The attack was supposedly prompted by gunfire from the terrorists inside, which in turn may have been prompted by this:

"It is unclear what caused the initial explosion, though one eyewitness told Russian TV that one of the bombs - which had been hung around the school gym by the hostage-takers - had simply fallen down and detonated."

It may turn out to be something different, but that's exactly the kind of stupid thing that will trip a situation like this. After all, a handful of semi-trained gunmen coating a school with explosives isn't likely to turn out well even if no one cares who they've take hostage.

It's all frustrating, terrible and stupid.

It kills my sympathy for Chechnya, and honestly, there are a lot of reasons to be sympathetic to those who want to leave Russia. But holding people hostage in return for a political aim is already too much of a world precedent to be sanguine about another bloody, awful attempt to do the same.

The story, at the moment:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3624024.stm

Well, the Danish foreign minister agrees with me:

Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller

"It is totally inhumane to take children as hostages. I think there is no excuse for that and it harms any kind of sympathy for the Chechen cause."

You can see more world response at:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3625692.stm

Give a typhoon a Korean name...

Meari

...and it lays waste to a Japanese prefecture.

Hmmm.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3706414.stm

Naturally, the Catholic Church is miffed.

Some reading about Stop Loss orders. The article makes a good point that the real negative impact is not the immediate one on soldier morale, but the dampening effect these orders will have on reenlistment, since all terms effectively gain two potential years as a result of Stop Loss orders.

The latest wartime prison abuse information comes from the FBI. FBI agents present at Gitmo were concerned about the interrogation techniques they saw and filed memos to that effect, which have now been pulled by the ACLU in a recent court case.

I don't always trust the accuracy of FBI agents, but they are pretty good about obeying their rules and maintaining ethical standards.

The United Kingdom is currently the world leader in private donor assistance to tsunami relief:

The article

Private pledges are at over twenty-five million pounds (forty-eight million U.S. dollars)

The UK government has upped its pledge to fifty million pounds (so that'd be nearly a hundred million dollars, or the pledge I wanted us to make).

Kids are a little slow on undersanding how the constitution works, or appreciation of same:

Half of 100,000 American students surveyed thinks newspapers shouldn't be able to publish stories without government approval.

Two thirds also think it's illegal to burn the flag.

I'd like to know how the trend line is going, though. More ignorant, less ignorant, staying the same?

Private Johnson Beharry has been awarded the first Victoria Cross since the Falklands war for valour during his service in Iraq. He'll be the first living recipient since 1965 (the two Falklands VCs were awarded posthumously). He's still recovering from injuries that left him in a coma.

You can read the BBC story here, and read more about the Victoria Cross here.

The prosecutor-general of the Ukraine says that arms dealers smuggled 18 Kh-55 cruise missiles to China and Iran. Designed for, though not smuggled with, a 200kt nuclear warhead, each missile has a range of 3,000 km. That assumes, of course, that Soviet-era cruise missiles that languished in the Ukraine for almost a decade still work well.

The BBC story.

Dutch businessman Frans van Anraat is being charged with genocide in the Netherlands for selling chemical precursors to Iraq, which were used to make chemical weapons that were subsequently deployed against the Iranians and (incurring the charge here) the Kurdish town of Halabja. In his own defense, he says:

"The images of the gas attack on the Kurdish city Halabja were a shock. But I did not give the order to do that..."

"How many products, such as bullets, do we make in the Netherlands?

This does bring up an interesting point. Who makes all the bullets used in Sudan, or in the conflict in the Congo? Are they manufactured locally, or do they come from an outside supplier? After all, it's horrible to kill people with poison gas, but it's also horrible to massacre people with gunfire or machetes.

This may be a case, however, where it's at least possible to find a single supplier to prosecute, and so people do.

The BBC story on the genocide trial.

BBC News: Iraqi troops 'kill 80 insurgents'

From the article:

Iraqi special police units have been stepping up operations against insurgents in recent weeks.

Though they are regarded with suspicion in some circles, he says, they are considered to be more reliable than conventional troops.

Too bad we didn't follow that original plan of putting the Iraqi army to work for us and decided instead to disband the old one and then form a new one. How many of the experienced soldiers ended up in the insurgency out of pure disaffectation when they were fired?

It's a pretty basic problem. Most of the people who make decent soldiers were probably already in the army when we arrived...

The United States recently shifted its policy and agreed to sell F-16s to Pakistan.

But that's okay, because we're also offering to sell F-16s and F-18s to India.

How very clever.

Some surprisingly frank words from Kofi Annan about the UN Human Rights Commission (UNHCR) and its near-total lack of credibility.

You can read about it in detail here, but the gist is that:

1) Not acting on legitimate evidence of human rights violations in places like Sudan and then...

2) ...keeping Sudan and other rights violators on the committee...

....both totally derail whatever authority the committee might have. This in turn damages the UN's credibility. There are simply too many nations involved whose leaders believe they have a vested interest in never allowing human rights to become a worldwide standard.

Unfortunately, even if the UN shifts to a much smaller committee whose member nations are beyond reproach, as Mr. Annan recommends, the basic problem remains, both in the Security Council and in the General Assembly. For a host of reasons, too many national leaders don't want human rights to become an internationally enforceable standard.

A Pentagon defense analyst from the Iran desk is accused of passing secrets to members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Note this particularly carefully worded statement from Israeli foreign minister Silvan Shalom:

"Israel is not operating in the United States in any way that is liable to hurt US security... Israel has nothing to do with the matter..."

The BBC story

The CNN Headline News story had a headline similar to this one from the BBC:

Blast strikes UK consulate in US

As both news sources go on to point out, that same building houses a number of other diplomatic missions and the Caterpillar corporation, among other things. In fact, the British consulate is on the ninth and tenth floors, and the two small explosions were set off at ground level with weak black powder bombs placed in planters.

It is election day in the UK, but still..."Small explosions strike sidewalk in front of building housing UK consulate and others" would be, if less concise and snappy, a much more accurate headline.

CNN this morning reported on investigation into shootings on Southern California (Los Angeles, largely) area freeways. Naturally, this draws a lot of attention. It's good to be able to put it into context with other risks. First, from the CNN article itself:

Even as they announced the stepped-up enforcement efforts, officials released figures showing there have actually been two fewer freeway shootings this year than in the same period last year.

...and as the article later indicates, those tend to be "road rage" shootings rather than sniper fire.

More broadly, one might ask "how dangerous is driving?" Well, according to the NHTSA, 43,000 people died in motor vehicle crashes in 2002, and it was the leading cause of death for people ages 3 through 33. Doesn't that suggest that the primary risk involved in getting in your car is not getting shot by some random sniper?

For more detail, the article tells us:

According to data released by authorities, there were 36 freeway shootings, with one person killed, in 2004. In 2003, there were 46 incidents and four fatalities

So, to recap, one person killed by a freeway shooting in 2004, 4 people killed the same way in 2003.

According to the Los Angeles County Coroner, 861 people were killed in motor vehicle accidents in Los Angeles county in 2002. So you're anywhere from over 200 to 800 times more likely to die in a vanilla traffic accident than you are to be killed by a freeway shooting.

Seat belts, not body armor, people. If a freeway sniper has you too scared to drive to work, then the sheer danger of the drive itself, sniper-free, should keep you at home.

Japan threatens N Korea with UN

From the article:

Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura has again warned North Korea to return to nuclear talks or face being taken to the UN Security Council.

Analysts say that taking North Korea to the UN could result in international sanctions against the impoverished nation. They say a key deadline may be the end June, which would mark one year since Pyongyang took part in the talks.

North Korea has repeatedly said it would consider sanctions tantamount to a declaration of war.

As reported in the New York Times, American satellite photos "suggested the digging and filling in of a tunnel in the country's remote north east, and the construction of a viewing stand." Which, in turn, suggests that they're going to do a nuclear weapons test. Possibly. If they are, and if they're smart about it, the North Korean government won't announce a weapon test unless and until it succeeds (at which point the U.S. military, at least, will know about it already).*

*Lest I sound like the kind of paranoid conspiracy monger I loathe, I mean that it will be apparent because our surveillance will pick it up, not because we secretly have a hand in it or anything foolish like that.

James Monaghan, Niall Connolly and Martin McCauley, recently convicted of training Colombia's Marxist FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces) rebels in "explosives and terrorist techniques" skipped town while out on bail during an appeal of said conviction.

You can read the BBC story here.

I don't know which flavor of IRA they are -- the article mentions seizing rebel grenades that were copies of those produced by the PIRA, but that only speaks to where these three learned their explosives techniques.

I am, however, amazed that they were even allowed bail (and that they weren't "shot resisting arrest" in the first place).

Recipe

Combine two recent posts by my friend Tim:

Measuring failure in Iraq

Measuring failure in the drug war

Stir and get this news story:

Iraq is becoming a transit route for Afghan heroin (BBC)

"Authorities in Afghanistan say their drug problem is so severe the country's existence could be threatened."

That seems a little overstated. After all, Colombia still exists.

Newsweek has retracted its report of desecration of the Koran at Guantanamo:

The BBC story

In its new account, the magazine said that one of its reporters spoke to "his original source, the senior government official, who said that he clearly recalled reading investigative reports about mishandling the Koran, including a toilet incident".

"But the official, still speaking anonymously, could no longer be sure that these concerns had surfaced" in a forthcoming report by the US military, the magazine added.

People love to be quoted, even if they aren't cited. It's fun to be in a position where reporters think you have something of value to give to them.

Compare and contrast:

clearly recalled reading investigative reports

...and...

could no longer be sure that these concerns had surfaced

Nice.

(NB: Not annoyed with Newsweek on this one. Very annoyed with the "senior official" who wanted to feel important.)

Naturally, this is all over the place.

More from the BBC on the Newsweek retraction

Let me quote this bit:

Insulting the Koran or the Prophet Muhammad is regarded as blasphemy and punishable by death in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

...

There's a Republican effort in Congress to remove women from Forward Support Companies:

The BBC story

Because women are precious, rare treasures/baby factories that we can't possibly spare for our national defense.

Perhaps removing 22,000 women from Forward Support is part of the new, lighter and faster Army.

I honestly don't know why they let the FBI into gitmo:

FBI documents claims of abuse at Guantanamo (BBC story)

If anyone's going to thoroughly document anything that could potentially burn them, it's the FBI. Some of the claims seem more plausible than others, at least based on my read of American behavior. That said, the FBI reports document prisoner claims without any additional attempt to corroborate, so there's no way to do more than have a feeling about plausibility.

If these claims (1) come out (as they now have) and (2) are corroborated, the Bureau can officially declare, "We told you so." If not, then their organization has not ruffled any feathers with the hierarchy at Guantanamo.

I suspect the truth is somewhere between the extremes of "all claims are true" and "all claims are false."

So was the unnamed source for the Newsweek report failing to stick to his guns or making up stories in the first place?

NATO air assets will be used to airlift African Union forces into Darfur in Sudan.

The BBC story

The AU is increasing its presence from 2,200 peacekeepers to 7,700, of which 5,500 will be soldiers. Will a roughly threefold increase make a difference?

Note that the French government was against a NATO presence, as the EU was already operating to assist in Sudan; they were won over by U.S. transport capacity.

I find it peculiar that every news report I've heard about the arrest of two men in Lodi on suspicion of their being part of Al Qaeda repeats the phrase, "Trained on how to kill Americans" or some variant of same.

For example, there's this CNN story.

Does killing Americans require qualitatively different acts than killing anyone else? It's such a strange personalization of it. After all, yes, Al Qaeda does train people to kill, and their long-term intent includes applying that to Americans (and Saudis, Spaniards and anyone else they want to cow) -- but we hardly say that our soldiers are training to kill Arabs, North Koreans, Chinese, Soviets in days gone by, or anything else.

But maybe I am special, and some poor Al Qaeda schmuck has to learn special ways to defeat me that don't apply to, say, Canadians.

Bombs exploded in Iran, in the southwestern city of Ahwaz and in Tehran.

The BBC story

Ahwaz saw some Arab-Persian violence earlier in Spring, following rumors of attempts to load the city with non-Arabs.

Government spokesman Agha Mohammadi was pretty liberal in spreading the blame:

A spokesman for the Supreme National Security Council, Iran's top security decision-making body, blamed the attacks on separatist Arabs aided by members of the armed Iraq-based opposition group, the People's Mujahideen, and remnants of the Baath Party.

The spokesman, Agha Mohammadi, told the BBC he was sure the Americans were behind the attacks and also suggested that Britain might be involved - but he gave no evidence to support his claims.

Beware the highly improbable American-Baathist alliance against Iran (NB: not improbable at all in the 80s when we did just that, but fairly unlikely now).

The murder of American citizen and Forbes journalist Paul Klebnikov has now been blamed on Chechens.

The BBC story

I didn't believe that the moment I read the headline. I'm not alone:

But commentators in Russia and elsewhere have expressed doubt that Mr Nukhayev would have taken issue with Mr Klebnikov over the book.

Khozh-Akhmed Nukhayev is a Chechen "fugitive" about whom Klebnikov wrote a book in 2003. He has not been arrested for this crime (because they can't find him), though several other Chechens have.

The current Russian Forbes editor made this very careful statement after expressing confidence in the investigation:

"I think we should see what the Russian courts will say - only the courts can decide if these people are murderers or not," he added.

There just may be a subtext there.

This almost slipped under my radar today:

The BBC story

The CNN story

Staff Sergeant Alberto Martinez has been charged in the deaths of Captain Phillip Esposito and Lieutenant Louis Allen on June 7, in Tikrit. The deaths were originally blamed on a mortar strike, but the blast pattern was inconsistent with a mortar.

No motive has been presented for Martinez.

Anyone know any stats on relative murder rates within Army and National Guard units? (This one occurred within a New York National Guard unit.) The numbers are probably too low to draw any real conclusions, of course.

A U-2 crashed yesterday on its way back from a mission over Afghanistan, killing its pilot.

The BBC story

The official line is that the plane crashed in "southwest asia," with the actual country not being revealed due to "host country sensitivities." That said, it almost certainly crashed in or on the way to the United Arab Emirates, where the 380th Expeditionary Wing is based. CNN doesn't even bother to mention the "southwest asia" remark in their report:

The CNN story

The plane was not shot down; U-2s aren't the safest of aircraft. Newer models are apparently improving. The BBC report includes this odd remark on the topic:

But later versions, the U-2R and U-2S, though 40% bigger, are much more reliable.

That sentence implies that making a plane bigger would generally be expected to reduce its reliability.

Nothing yet on Al Jazeera's English-language site about it.

In case anyone hasn't heard about this yet, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor announced that she's going to retire. They were discussing possible successors on the radio this morning.

Here's the BBC story.

Ihab al-Sherif, Egypt's ambassador to Iraq, was kidnapped yesterday.

He's been in Iraq for five weeks, and is the first and only ambassador from an Arab nation -- this makes him a target, as he represents Arab legitimization of the Iraqi invasion, to some.

The BBC story

Al Jazeera indicates that while Egypt had upgraded its contacts in Iraq to embassy status, it was not explicitly clear that al-Sherif was the ambassador. More from The Al Jazeera story:

Egypt has been training Iraqi security forces and civil servants under a US-backed international programme and on Friday about 140 Iraqi civil servants arrived in Cairo.

Muhammad Mamdouh Helmi Qutb, then Egypt's third-ranking diplomat, was briefly detained in July 2004 by a group of fighters who claimed they wanted to deter Egypt from deploying troops in Iraq.

The top CNN story is about a missing blond in Aruba.

As I just noted in the previous post, the top CNN story is about an American student missing in Aruba.

This is not national news -- not unless her abduction is an act of war or terrorism. For reference, here are some figures from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children on how many kids go missing in the United States:

According to NISMART-2 research, which studied the year 1999, an estimated 797,500 children were reported missing; 58,200 children were abducted by nonfamily members; 115 children were the victims of the most serious, long-term nonfamily abductions called "stereotypical kidnappings"; and 203,900 children were the victims of family abductions.

These are just figures for minors, of course, so the total load of missing people will be higher. What makes any one of these more worthy of national news coverage than the others?

Relevant to the bombings in London and the kind of thought and language that enables people to justify such actions after deciding they want to commit them*:

Muslim scholars declare that only religious authorities can issue fatwas (Al Jazeera).

The three-day meeting in Amman, which ended on Wednesday, has for the first time gathered representatives of eight Sunni and Shia Muslim schools of thought.

They all also agreed that followers cannot label other Muslims as "apostates", something groups in Iraq have done to justify attacks against Iraqi police and civilians.




*I phrase it this way because this appears to be how it works much of the time. See The Anatomy of Motive by John Douglas.

Pictures from London today, from the BBC:

Pictures taken by London residents

More pictures

Propagating a good statement:

If the Luftwaffe couldn't bring the city to its knees, these pathetic penny-ante cowards certainly won't.

Television and radio news coverage of the London bombings has seen frequent lauding of the attacks as "complex" and "highly coordinated." While I understanding the journalistic and storytelling impulse to glorify otherwise banal evil, this is complete crap.

The attacks were coordinated, in the same sense that our group of friends meeting for a movie last month was coordinated. In fact, we did them one better -- we arrived within a fifteen-minute window, rather than a one-hour window.

A commentator on NPR was positing that this was too complex to have been carried out by foreigners.

Again, crap. Untrue. Do people seriously believe that it's too complex a thing to pick a rough time, get together with three other people, look up the public transit schedules and leave a package on the floor of a train or bus? I bet any four people could do that, even in a country where they spoke not a word of the language, with a day's lead time.

Simultaneity is not a big deal -- especially when it's as fuzzy as "sometime within the last hour of morning traffic."

NASA managed to hit a comet with a spacecraft launched from another spacecraft. That is impressive coordination.

Building these guys up to be more than they are is no different from building up any other threat. It's a reckless practice, even if it makes for a livelier story.

From the BBC:

The police say timings show that the Tube explosions took place at 8.50am - and the synchronisation could suggest bombs used in the attack were triggered using timing devices.

High-explosives were used in the attacks and were not home-made, say the police.

Still not impressed, but it's good to know they can synchronize their timers.

Construction workers laying foundations for a new Moskva Hotel on the site of the old hotel found one ton of explosives packed into 20kg crates.

From the BBC article:

The find has been linked to Soviet plans to blow up key buildings if Nazi German troops reached the city.

Suppose there are any more old buildings out there with toy surprises inside?

Another BBC story

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is being investigated in the US over reports that it contains sexually explicit mini-games hidden in its code.

A fan's mod, Hot Coffee, apparently unlocks sexually explicit scenes. Modder Patrick Wildenborg points out that "all this material is completely inaccessible in an unmodded version of the game."

GTA:SA runs the risk of receive an Adults Only rating.

Because it's okay to inundate people with violence, theft and killing, but sex is far too risky for 17 year olds. Gotta wait a year for that.

I'm surprised I missed this (except I was at Comic Con, avoiding news for the sake of kwc's Tour innocence):

"If the Americans draw their missiles and position-guided ammunition onto the target zone on China's territory, I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons," Maj Gen Zhu told an official briefing for foreign reporters.

He added that he was confident the US and China would not go to war.

The BBC story

On the face of it, the goal would seem to be pretending to be "just crazy enough to do it," but is that all? I wonder if it's also another attempt to manufacture an issue to distract attention from the continuing domestic strife within China.

My home town's developed some issues of late:

An article about the upcoming runoff election

My favorite bit:

In a separate scandal, two other council members resigned last week after they were convicted on federal charges related to contributions from a strip-club owner who wanted a change in the city's ban against contact with dancers.

One of the council members had just been sworn in as interim mayor the three days before his conviction.

San Diego mayors -- the Spinal Tap drummers of our time.

"The IRA has formally ordered an end to its armed campaign and says it will pursue exclusively peaceful means.

In a long-awaited statement, the republican organisation said it would follow a democratic path ending more than 30 years of violence."

The BBC story

1) I wonder if this would have happened if not for Al Qaeda and the threat of being bundled in with them and losing all public support.

2) I wonder how many splinter factions this will create, as every time the IRA has "cooled down" a little in the past, unrepentant militants have broken off with an eye toward continued violence.

The full statement

I wonder what the UDA thinks of this.

Loyalist (pro-UK) terrorists in Northern Ireland are having a gang war.

The BBC story

Detectives are working to disrupt activities relating to "fear and intimidation" from the feud in an operation costing £30,000 a day.

So far three people have died in the feud between the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Loyalist Volunteer Force.

Though they don't get the press the IRA does, by dint of constraining their activities to Northern Ireland, the various loyalist terrorist groups can be just as vicious.

Rumsfeld claims Iranian weapons are in Iraq:

"It is true that weapons clearly, unambiguously from Iran have been found in Iraq," Mr Rumsfeld told reporters at a Pentagon news conference.

"It's a problem for the Iraqi government," he said. "It's a problem for the coalition forces. It's a problem for the international community. And ultimately it's a problem for Iran."

This is perfectly reasonable, and it pains me that I am less inclined to buy it because Rumsfeld said it. This is despite the political and religious state of the area suggesting that it is quite likely that Iranian sources are moving weapons into Iraq. I also don't appreciate his weak attempt at a threat against Iran. Rumsfeld's half-assed approach to Iraq, Iran and North Korea is terribly frustrating to watch.

The BBC story

For some reason, Abu Qatada (pictured in this BBC article) reminded me of John Rhys-Davies.

The UK has picked up ten foreign nationals for deportation to their home countries.

Home Secretary Charles Clarke announced the UK detentions, but did not reveal names.

Gareth Peirce, who represents a number of former Belmarsh detainees who have now been held, said Thursday's arrests were "insane and dangerous government at its worst".

I'd have to go with Clarke on this one. Hosting foreign nationals who repeatedly call for the violent overthrow of your own government seems "insane and dangerous" to me. It's bad enough having to deal with the home-grown would-be revolutionaries (e.g. Tim McVeigh); there's no need to compound the problem by playing nice with noncitizens who aren't even making an effort at compromise.

The UK had to reach an agreement with the countries to which these people will be deported:

Under the Human Rights Act, the UK cannot deport anyone to a country where they may face persecution.

The government has now reached agreement with Jordan that deportees will not be persecuted, and is in negotiation with 10 other countries, including Lebanon and Algeria.

That strikes me as a pretty harsh standard -- you can't deport someone to their home country because it generically has a poor human rights record? Amnesty International has issues with the United States with regards to human rights -- does that mean the UK can't deport me back to the States if I do something bad while I'm there? Do we just deport everyone to Switzerland?

I'd argue for a standard based on a specific threat of persecution, such as a threat to the individual or to their ethnic group.

A BBC article on the computer gaming industry in Scotland, home of such classic games as Grand Theft Auto:

Could Scotland be the new Japan?

Scotland is lagging behind on being exoticized, though. The "Highland Games" contingent in America is smaller, I think, than the contingent that believes Japan is inscrutable and mysterious.

Of course, people seem to like the Scottish men and the Japanese women, so maybe it's meant to be:

(That's a Chinese woman playing a Japanese character. Having not seen the movie, I have no idea if Ewan's character is meant to be of any specific ethnicity.)

From a BBC article on the current face of the anti-war movement in America:

One of the dead was Edward "Augie" Schroeder - a 23-year-old college student.

"So if we're not going to do it differently, it's just going to be throwing 1,800 more bodies on the same scrap heap."

Given that they've lost their son, Palmer and Schroeder are very reasonable and cogent. They aren't calling for an unconditional pullout. Instead, they're suggesting that a policy that is observably failing by many metrics should be revised if we are going to continue to operate in Iraq, and failing that, we should leave.

I agree. Unfortunately, the current administration does not appear to have any definite metrics of success or failure.

Domestic strife in China is typically underreported like crazy in most Western media. Here's a BBC story on that topic:

China sets up riot police units

I'm surprised they didn't have dedicated riot units before. I guess the military handled it?

Here's a quote for you, Tim:

The government, fearful as ever of any instability getting out of control, is now putting in place a range of measures to deal with the surge in demonstrations, says BBC East Asia editor Clare Harkey.

They include new rules on complaining to the authorities - citizens are now banned from petitioning central government directly.

An interesting article from the BBC about the Chinese presence in Malaysia:

Chinese diaspora: Malaysia

A fascinating cornucopia of opinions on ethnic and political identity:

Most visitors to Malaysia are struck by how successfully the country's Chinese population has preserved its identity - in contrast to Thailand, for instance, which has operated a policy of assimilation.

"Especially [for the] younger generation, which was born after independence in 1957, we no longer see China as the motherland," said Jadryn Loo.

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez thinks Pat Robertson speaks for our elites. The very clever Mr. Robertson set Chavez off with this simple remark:

"I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it," he said.

(From this BBC story.)

I'm pretty sure that sentiment violates the sixth commandment (not murdering and all that).

Ostensible violations of his own ethics aside, Robertson managed to:

Endanger missionaries in Venezuela
Anger the president of Venezuela
Endanger our own political officials by promoting assassination

It's as if he were both unintelligent and lacking an actual, defined moral code.

The BBC is tallying the fatality count for hurricane Katrina, along with an estimated damage toll of $25 billion. Thus, while the hurricane was devastating in terms of property, it has nothing on the amount of life that has been lost in the past, especially in areas like Bangladesh.

According to AccuWeather.com, a 1991 storm that hit Bangladesh killed 70,000 people.

christianaid.org reminds us that thousands died in the Caribbean and Bangladesh last year due to storms. Naturally, these areas won't be able to match the damage tallies of the American southeast -- they're just not wealthy enough.

The upshot of all this? We are very good at keeping our people alive during disasters.

Edit: Actually, we're very good at warning people in advance to leave. If you have no transportation of your own, you're stuck.

Here's a different comparison: In 2001, Louisiana had 952 traffic fatalities, with an economic cost of $4 billion. Mississippi had 784 traffic fatalities costing $2.1 billion. Florida had 3,012 fatalities costing $14.4 billion.

So if those three states can survive losing 4,748 residents and $20.5 billion a year to driving, they can probably deal with losing 80 people and $25 billion to a hurricane. Let's just hope there's not another one this year.

Second edit: The death toll in New Orleans appears to be much higher than the early accounts. Still on the order of driving-related deaths, but not a big advance over years past when we had less effective prediction mechanisms.

Notable stories on Al Jazeera today:

More than 600 killed in Iraq stampede

Hundreds of people have died after a stampede triggered by rumours of a bomber among a massive Iraqi Shia crowd attending a religious ceremony at a shrine in Baghdad.

The BBC is calling the tally at up to 1,000. The putative cause was someone yelling "suicide bomber" into the crowd.

Iraq conflict costlier than Vietnam war

The report on Wednesday, entitled The Iraq Quagmire from the Institute for Policy Studies and Foreign Policy in Focus, both liberal, anti-war organisations, put the cost of current operations in Iraq at $5.6 billion per month. This breaks down to almost $186 million a day.

"By comparison, the average cost of US operations in Vietnam over the eight-year war was $5.1 billion per month, adjusting for inflation," it said.

As a proportion of gross domestic product, the Vietnam War was more significant, costing 12% of annual GDP, compared to 2% for the Iraq War. However, economists said the Iraq war is being financed with deficit spending and may nearly double the projected federal budget deficit over the next 10 years.

Family to curb misuse of Che photo

Che Guevera's family is trying to curtail the degree to which his iconic image is used on merchandise. I dislike Che (and worship of Che) and find some humor in how his image has become another component of capitalism.

Iraq leader criticises Arab League

Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari has criticised the Arab League over what he called its disregard for Iraq, after its chief demanded to know why a draft constitution failed to refer to the entire country as an Arab nation...
The contentious article of the draft constitution states that "Iraq is part of the Muslim world and its Arab people are part of the Arab nation".

Yeah, because the Kurds would love a constitution that instead said "Iraq is an Arab nation." Being pointlessly hardline like that suggests that Arab League leaders are either (1) stupid or (2) driving to make Iraq fail as a nation.

The mayor of New Orleans calls it at up to a thousand now, though the basis for this estimate wasn't stated.

The BBC story

Bush is speaking now. I wish he sounded more like he's giving the nation an update on support for New Orleans and less like he's making a campaign speech bragging about his work.

Susan Wood, director of the FDA's Office of Women's Health is resigning after the FDA "indefinitely" postponed any decision on allowing nonprescription sale of Plan B, the emergency "morning-after" pill. Naturally, an emergency contraceptive that requires a prescription is doubly bad. It limits anyone who can't manage to be seen in time (say, those without health coverage, or a typical HMO) and anyone who can't be seen without the consent of parents.

The agency said it was safe for adults to use without a doctor's guidance but was unable to decide how to keep it out of the hands of young teenagers without a prescription -- a decision contrary to the advice of its own scientific advisers.

Making it available without prescription to women age 16+ was recommended twice by advisory committees.

Plan B's maker has been trying for two years to begin nonprescription sales, and the FDA's latest postponement of its fate was a surprise: Commissioner Lester Crawford won Senate confirmation to take his job only after promising members of Congress to make a final decision by September 1.

Stall, stall...

The CNN story

BBC: Crackdown in fearful New Orleans

From the article:

US troops, armed with a shoot-to-kill policy, are being sent to New Orleans to quell growing lawlessness, four days after Hurricane Katrina hit.

...and...

Announcing the deployment of 300 "battle-tested" National Guardsmen to New Orleans from Iraq, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco said the men were carrying deadly weapons and were ready to use them.

"They have M-16s and are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and I expect they will."

...and...

Horrific reports have emerged from the Louisiana Superdome, where up to 20,000 people have been corralled, mainly without power and sanitation, since Hurricane Katrina struck.

"People were raped in there. People were killed in there. We had multiple riots," one police officer told the AFP news agency.

...and...

More than a million people fled before the hurricane arrived on Monday, but at least 100,000 were unwilling or unable to leave.

Lessons learned so far? FEMA's large-scale disaster plans for the area were inadequate, even though the problems were well characterized. American weather disaster prediction is reliable and effective.

Conclusion? If a mass evacuation order is given for your area, leave. If you don't get out before the disaster, you won't get out with any speed afterward, and greatly increase your risk of injury or death.

It's a bad sign that we have to plug holes in our disaster response with active-duty soldiers from our military frontier.

Added note: As Ray's comment indicates, it may sound like I'm chiding the people left in New Orleans for not leaving, which wasn't my point (as many of them were simply unable to leave). My intended lesson learned is that our predictive capabilities are good enough and our post-disaster rescue poor enough that if an evacuation order is given, the best course is to evacuate if possible, because the possibility of being stuck in anarchy afterward is too high.

This BBC article has pictures of New Orleans before and after flooding (click on the box next to New Orleans on the map).

I don't know my New Orleans geography, but notice that the streets are all waterways.

American contractor Roy Hallums and an Iraqi national were rescued from a farmhouse just south of Baghdad. Hallums was kidnapped on the first of November, 2004.

The BBC story

NPR reported yesterday that cities receiving hurricane refugees have been told to treat them as new permanent residents.

San Francisco's supposed to receive about three hundred refugees.

Apparently, the NBA wants to institute a dress code for its players.

The BBC story

Some players see this as an attack on their lifestyle. I found retired player Charles Barkley's opposing take on it quite interesting:

He told the Los Angeles Times newspaper: "Black kids dress like NBA players but don't get paid like NBA players.

"So when they go out in the real world, what they wear is held against them."

For Meta:

In between buying handbags or browsing the jewellery counters, shoppers in Thailand will soon also be able to get their daily dose of dharma under a plan to install monks in major department stores.

"People nowadays have no time to go to temples, only shopping malls. They can get closer to the religion if we provide the opportunity," the Culture Minister, Uraiwan Thienthong, was quoted as saying by the local media.

The BBC story

BBC: Russian squirrel pack 'kills dog'

I'm guessing this story isn't true, but it yields some great quotes:

"They literally gutted the dog," local journalist Anastasia Trubitsina told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.

"When they saw the men, they scattered in different directions, taking pieces of their kill away with them."

A Mizuho Securities stock trader accidentally traded inputs, attempting to sell 610,000 shares of J-com stock at 1 Yen per share rather than one share of J-com stock at 610,000 Yen per share.

"Everyone in the market instantly knew the order was a mistake so some clever guys predicted that Mizuho Securities would have to put in a massive buy order later," said Hideo Mizutani, chief market analyst at Sieg Securities.

The estimated loss to Mizuho is over $200 million, as they had to buy back shares at something approximating their actual price.

The Al Jazeera story

From The BBC:

A US man threw a mouse he had found in his home onto a pile of burning leaves - only to see it run away and burn his house down.

Here's what's coming up in 2006 for Mountain View, according to the January 13, 2006 issue of the Mountain View Voice:

• The Camino Medical Group will (continue to) build a 250,000 sf campus at 85 and El Camino. Now I know what that big construction site is. Apparently it's replacing a defunct Emporium -- those things litter the Bay Area like large carcasses. Due for finish in 2007.
  
• The parking garage at California and Bryant, just off Castro, should be completed. There will be a Longs Drugs on the ground floor. Due to finish by the end of the year.
  
• The Rengstorff Park Senior Center will open (on Escuela). After a delay, due for completion at the end of the year, though there's still some wrangling to be done over whether a proposed child care center is added or not.
  
• The SRO low-income apartment complex at San Antonio Circle should open.
  
• The 85/101 interchange will be completed. As a special note for kwc, your cost estimate was off by a factor of two -- it cost $125 million to build. As you've noted, of course, no one expects freeways to pay for themselves, so no on cares how expensive they are.
  
• The Mayfield Mall site (formerly owned by HP) at Central and San Antonio should be demolished in favor of home construction -- up to 630 new ones.
  
• ...and free Google wireless throughout the city.

...will be titled Snake and Meal:

BBC: Snake 'befriends' snack hamster

A rodent-eating snake and a hamster have developed an unusual bond at a zoo in the Japanese capital, Tokyo, the Associated Press news agency reports.

The rat snake, however, refused to eat the rodent. The two now share a cage.

Neat. Currently laying odds on whether it's true or not, but it is plausible -- not much weirder than bunnies and cats living together, and that happens.

As reported in this Chosun Ilbo article, Korean men scored very low on a Bayer survey (NB: this survey is mainly Bayer's way of trying to pimp their drug Levitra).

When asked, “Is it essential to take a partner’s satisfaction into consideration when having sex?” 60 percent of German respondents said yes, placing the country in the first place, ahead of Latin lovers from Brazil (59 percent), Spain (56 percent) and Mexico (46 percent). But only 30 percent of Korean men thought it decisive whether they made any great impression.

Perhaps not surprisingly, 70 percent of Korean respondents cited “stress” as the most influential factor in their sex life. In the West, the percentage was only 63 percent and among Asian men 66 percent. From Bayer’s point of view, the best news in Korea was that 100 percent of Korean men identified as “vitalsexual” declared themselves willing to use anti-impotence drugs, compared to only 75 percent in the West.

Worst in the world is a touch of hyperbole, as Bayer only surveyed twelve nations.

Chosun Ilbo has been reporting fairly consistently about Hines Ward's trip to Korea. From a recent article:

Emotionally charged ceremony brings tears from NFL superstar Hines Ward. "I used to be ashamed of my Korean heritage when I was child," said Ward. But he added he was now very proud of that heritage and apologized for his past resentment while expressing his gratitude for the warm welcome he has received. After making these comments he was overwhelmed and could not continue speaking. In his left hand he clutched his certificate of honorary citizenship in Seoul. Ward opened his tear-filled eyes and looked at his mother who was sitting nearby.

This caption below a picture of Hines hugging a cute little girl caught my attention:

U.S. Super Bowl star Hines Ward embraces An Arum, like Ward the child of an African American father and a Korean mother, at a meeting with mixed-race children organized by Pearl S. Buck International on Wednesday.

I hadn't heard of Pearl S. Buck International. You can read more about them at the Pearl S. Buck International site, which describes the organization's three missions of promoting adoption for orphaned and abandoned children, providing health and education services for those in need and maintaining Pearl S. Buck's home, which is now a National Historic Landmark.

Here's a fun article in Al Jazeera puzzling over why Japanese culture is rife with cuteness.

Of course, amidst all the theories, they're missing the key observation that abundant cuteness in Asian culture is definitely not limited to Japan.

The Scottish Premier League club Heart of Midlothian is considering picking up Ahn Jung-hwan, of World Cup fame.

Wonder if he'll like it in Edinburgh?

Chosun Ilbo and BBC stories.

ARLINGTON, Tennessee (AP) -- A knife-wielding grocery store employee attacked eight co-workers Friday, seriously injuring five before a witness pulled a gun and stopped him, police said.

...and...

Cope said he grabbed a 9mm semiautomatic pistol from his pickup truck when he saw the attacker chasing the victim "like something in a serial killer movie."

"When he turned around and saw my pistol, he threw the knife away, put his hands up and got on the ground," Cope told The Associated Press. "He saw my gun and that was pretty much it."

...and...

Higgins said police were pulling into the parking lot as Cope was confronting the attacker.

"We commend him," Higgins said. "But we don't encourage people to take that kind of risk. He could have been hurt."

Um. Seriously? I think I'd rather that pulling firearms to keep knife-wielding loonies from slashing folks be encouraged. After all, I guess there's a chance Higgins could have been hurt, but overall, fewer people were hurt because he chose to act.

The CNN story

From this CNN story:

I'll just quote this in full:

PORTLAND, Oregon (AP) -- A nurse returning from work discovered an intruder armed with a hammer in her home and strangled him with her bare hands, police said.

"You didn't need to calm her. She's an emergency room nurse. She's used to dealing with crisis."

The median price of a home in the Bay Area's nine counties, including new and old single-family houses and condos, dropped 1.4 percent last month to $616,000 from $625,000 in November 2005, according to DataQuick Information Systems. The price drop was the sharpest since a 2.1 percent decline in February 2002.

The number of new and resale homes sold tumbled 26 percent to 7,204. Last month's sale count was the lowest for any November since 2001, when there were 6,644 homes sold.

Big caveat -- this slump is happening from the outside in; housing prices in SF still rose. As housing weakens generally, people are drifting back toward the center.

Housing prices fell the most in Solano, Sonoma and Contra Costa counties as new-home builders slashed prices to clear inventory. San Francisco and Marin counties posted modest price gains.

SFGate

Woman, 65, saves husband from mountain lion

Jim and Nell Hamm, who will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary next month, were hiking Wednesday in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, 60 miles south of the Oregon state line, when the lion pounced.

...

Nell Hamm said she grabbed a 4-inch-diameter log and beat the animal with it, but it would not release its hold on her husband's head.

When the pen bent and became useless, Nell Hamm went back to using the log. The lion eventually let go and, with blood on its snout, stood staring at the woman. She screamed and waved the log until the animal walked away.

The Bay Area's aggregate population grew 2% between 2000 and 2006 following a diaspora after the dot com bust that opened that period.

In comparison, the population of Bakersfield grew over 3% between 2005 and 2006.

Property prices in the Bay Area, coastal Los Angeles and Orange County, and San Diego have driven the growth of areas like Bakersfield, Riverside, and San Bernardino. Whereas one can commute from San Bernardino into Los Angeles, I'm not sure what you do if you relocate to Bakersfield, although I suppose the commute isn't out of the question.

Bakersfield to Los Angeles is 112 miles.
San Bernardino to Los Angeles is 60 miles.

From The Chronicle

The most important Viking treasure find in Britain for 150 years has been unearthed by a father and son while metal detecting in Yorkshire.

David and Andrew Whelan uncovered the hoard, which dates back to the 10th Century, in Harrogate in January.

Also:

The ancient objects come from as far afield as Afghanistan in the East and Ireland in the West, as well as Russia, Scandinavia and continental Europe.

Dr Jonathan Williams, keeper of prehistory in Europe at the British Museum, said: "[The cup] is beautifully decorated and was made in France or Germany at around AD900.

Amazing.

BBC article

Mountain View had its first homicide in two years just this last weekend, in Whisman Park.

Marco Jauregui, 25, was booked on suspicion of murder in the weekend slaying of his friend, Rene Escalante, 24, said Mountain View police spokeswoman Liz Wylie.

"All of the involved parties are affiliated with the Mountain View Sureños," Wylie said. "We're still trying to figure that all out. We're not quite sure why a good friend, who is affiliated with the same gang, would kill his friend."

From The Chronicle

At least, that's what I thought of when the headline came up in my reader.

The original article, with substantially fewer interstellar dungeon monsters

Woolworths withdraws 'Lolita' bed

A parenting website said it was in "unbelievably bad taste" to give the bed the same name as a novel about a sexually precocious young girl.

The BBC article on this particular headslap-meriting incident also features a couple other impressive branding missteps by British companies:

In 2005, WH Smiths came under fire for selling youngsters stationery bearing the Playboy bunny - a symbol of the pornography empire.

Prior to that Bhs decided to withdraw its Little Miss Naughty range of padded bras and knickers for pre-teen girls after attracting criticism.

Father Gabriel Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory, has said that there could be life on Mars, and if there is, that doesn't contradict Christian belief.

(Well, yeah. Can't see why it would.)

This is the part that put me in mind of the C.S. Lewis book Perelandra:

Just as there are multiple forms of life on earth, so there could exist intelligent beings in outer space created by God. And some aliens could even be free from original sin, he speculates.