back stabbing saudi royal people

What??! I thought these guys were on our side.

The Saudi monarch has made a forceful appeal for Arab unity, denouncing US policy in Iraq and the embargo imposed by western nations on the Palestinians.

At the Arab League summit in Riyadh, King Abdullah described the US presence in Iraq as an illegitimate occupation.

Correspondents say he is seeking to show a measure of independence from Saudi Arabia's ally, the United States.

Arab leaders are meeting to relaunch a plan for peace with Israel that they first endorsed five years ago.

The plan offers Israel normal relations with Arab states if it withdraws from land occupied in 1967, and accepts a Palestinian state.

Arab hard-liners have accused Riyadh of being ready to water down the "land for peace" deal to gain Israeli acceptance.

Israel's western allies have withheld recognition from a new Palestinian unity government, including members of the Islamist group Hamas which they consider a terrorist organisation.

Abhorrent

The Saudi monarch insisted said the "real blame" for Arab woes lay with squabbling Arab rulers, who could only prevent "foreign powers from drawing the region's future" if they united.

"In beloved Iraq, blood is flowing between brothers, in the shadow of an illegitimate foreign occupation, and abhorrent sectarianism threatens a civil war," said the king.

"In wounded Palestine, the mighty people suffer from oppression and occupation," he said.

"It has become vital that the oppressive blockade imposed on the Palestinians end as soon as possible so the peace process will get to move in an atmosphere without oppression."

"Our constant disagreements and rejection of unity have made the Arab nation lose confidence in our sincerity and lose hope."

A US official has insisted King Abdullah was wrong to criticise the US military presence in Iraq.

"The United States is in Iraq at the request of the Iraqis and under a United Nations mandate. Any suggestion to the contrary is wrong," said National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe.

Guarded welcome

Separately, Israel's Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres said it refused to accept the revived Arab peace plan as it stood and further discussions were needed.

"There is only one way to overcome our differences, and that is negotiation," Mr Peres told Israeli public radio. "It's impossible to say: you must take what we offer you as is."

Under the plan, Arab nations would recognise Israel if Israel withdrew from land occupied in the 1967 war, accepted a Palestinian state, and agreed a "just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem".

Israel rejected the 2002 plan outright after it was first proposed at an Arab summit in Beirut, but Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is now giving it a guarded welcome, albeit with reservations linked to the issue of refugees.

There are more than four million Palestinian refugees registered with the US, most of them descendants of people living in British-administered Palestine, before Israel was created in 1948.

Israel opposes allowing them to exercise any right to return to their original homes or land, because it could erase its current Jewish majority.

marx cafe tonite!

I'll be at Marx Cafe tonite playing some classic garage, 2step and 4x4 bassline. Mention that you know where the treasure has been buried and I'll buy you a couple of drinks. Music starts at 10pm. Seeya tonite!

3203 Mount Pleasant St. NW

Why no Impeachment??

I really hope that Dave here is wildly off the mark. If not this would represent a truly cynical political manipulation of our armed forces involved in the fight in Iraq.

Why Haven't They Impeached Bush (and Cheney) Yet?

* ImpeachForChange

By Dave Lindorff

After a year of running around flogging my book The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006), I’ve had to give a lot of thought to a question I have gotten over and over from radio hosts to ordinary people concerned about the fate of the country and our Constitution. The question: Why haven’t the Democrats already impeached the president for all these crimes, abuses of power and assaults of the Constitution?

I used to chalk it up to cowardice, but I’m no longer happy with that answer. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) may be a politician’s politician, but she hasn’t lacked for courage. She has, for example, always been ready to stand for taking a tough line on civil liberties in China, when the corporatocracy has been pressing the government to cozy up to China.

It’s also hard to buy the idea that so many progressive members of the House--people like John Conyers (D-Mich.), Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), Chakka Fattah (D-Penna.) and Maxine Waters (D-Calif.)--all of whom clearly understand the nature of the president’s crimes, could be afraid to submit bills of impeachment--indeed that all the progressive members of the Democratic Party in the House are so afraid to take a stand on impeachment that not one has dared to submit an impeachment bill. (Only Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) has taken that step, and she waited until she had already been voted out of office and then filed her impeachment bill in the last week of the 109th Congress.)

That said, there are some things I do know.

First of all, there are members of Congress who understand that the president should be impeached. Chief among these is Rep. Conyers. Back in the last Congress, Conyers, as ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee--the committee that would hold impeachment hearings if a bill of impeachment were submitted--held unofficial hearings into some of the president’s high crimes and misdemeanors, which resulted in a book, George W. Bush Versus the U.S. Constitution: The Downing Street Memos and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, Coverups in the Iraq War and Illegal Domestic Spying. The book is a clear call for impeachment. Conyers also filed a bill in the 109th Congress which called for creation of a “select committee” to investigate possible impeachable crimes by the Bush administration. It ultimately boasted 39 co-sponsors, including Reps. Rangel, Fattah and Waters.

I also know that midway through the 2006 election year, Rep. Pelosi began telling reporters, at every opportunity, that if Democrats were elected to a majority in the House in the November election, there would be no impeachment effort--impeachment, in her words, would be “off the table.”

And so it has been, at least inside the Beltway. And not only has it been put off the table--Pelosi and the party leadership have been actively working behind the scenes in an unconscionable effort to undermine grassroots campaigns to put it back on, via state legislative resolutions. In both New Mexico and Washington state, Democratic party leaders from Washington have put the screws on local legislative leaders to keep the issue of impeachment from even making it to an open floor debate in a legislative chamber. Clearly, progressive members of Congress have also been pressured not to submit impeachment bills.

In part, I think this is all happening because Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership have bought the Republican Party’s spin--that impeachment would be “good for Republicans” because it would allegedly “energize the Republican base” that supports President Bush no matter what. Maybe that is technically true, but that base is less than 30 percent of the voting public, and it ignores that fact that impeachment would also energize the Democratic, progressive base, and might well also energize the libertarian base, all of which collectively would far outnumber any possible energized reactionary base.

This leads me to what I think is the real reason the Democratic leadership is opposing impeachment--a reason I find thoroughly disgusting and unworthy of the party of Roosevelt.

I believe that Pelosi, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), Howard Dean and the rest of the leaders of the Democratic Party, have concluded that the Republican Party and the Bush administration have so screwed up that they have lost the support of the majority of Americans, and that all Democrats need to do to win the White House and a bigger margin in the House and Senate in 2008 is to let them continue to screw up, aided by selective Congressional investigations designed to further embarrass them.

While Pelosi has talked grandly about passing a progressive agenda of bills in the 110th Congress, the Democrats know that they cannot pass any meaningful progressive legislation. Their majority in both houses is razor thin and could never survive a veto, and even if they could, by watering down their bills, lure enough Republican votes to override a veto, President Bush would invalidate any bill that made significant change or reform by just issuing one of his unconstitutional and illegal “signing statements” asserting that as commander in chief in the war on terror he doesn’t have to adhere to the Constitution.

So what Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Reid plan to do is pass legislation that they know won’t go into law, like the minimum wage bill, or global warming laws, and then go to the voters in 2008 saying, “We would have gotten these bills into law, if only we had more Democrats in the Congress, or a Democratic president.”

They’re doing the same thing with the war. If Democrats wanted to end the war, they could do so immediately by refusing to pass a supplemental funding measure to support it, but they don’t want to do this. It’s not that they fear being called unpatriotic--hell, with 70 percent of the public wanting the war to end immediately, nobody would fault Congress for pulling the plug. Even the troops who are stuck over there wouldn't be upset to see the funding that keeps them there terminated. But ending the war would leave the Democrats without their best issue going into the 2008 national election: Bush’s war. So instead of ending the war, they vote to oppose it, but then continue to fund it. (Rep. Emanuel has actually said publicly that it would be good for Democrats if the war were to continue through November 2008.)

It’s a supremely cynical campaign ploy, and it’s also behind the strategy of keeping impeachment “off the table.”

If Bush were impeached, and witnesses began getting called in under oath to expose his and Vice President Dick Cheney’s lies and deceit in tricking the nation into war, his illegal NSA spying activities, his obstruction of justice in the Valerie Plame outing investigation, his authorization of torture, his obstruction of efforts to combat global warming, his criminal failure to provide troops with armor or to plan for an Iraq occupation or to respond to the disaster in New Orleans, and his usurpation of the powers of Congress and the Judiciary in invalidating over 1200 laws passed by the Congress, it would almost certainly lead to his (and Cheney’s) removal from office and to a prompt end to the war.

Then where would Democrats be?

They’d have to stand on their own merits. They’d have to give voters a positive reason to vote for them.

And it’s been so long since Democrats have done that that they really may not even know how it’s done.

Even progressive Democratic representatives seem to have bought into this cynical thinking. How else to explain Rep. Conyers’ repudiation of his own book, even as it’s about to come out in paperback? How else to explain the deafening silence of progressives like Reps. Waters, Rangel, Jesse Jackson Jr., and, at least until this week, Dennis Kucinich?

I’m hoping that at least Kucinich will finally stand up and reject this cynical Democratic thinking, and file a bill of impeachment, giving Rep. Conyers the chance to redeem himself by standing up to Pelosi et al. If he does stand up, and begins hearings on an impeachment bill, I hope other progressive Democrats—and maybe a few principled Republicans?--will join him by filing their own impeachment bills. I hope state legislators in Vermont, Washington state, New Jersey and elsewhere, will take heart from what Kucinich appears ready to do, and will shrug off the pressure from Democratic national leaders, listen to their own residents, and pass joint resolutions calling for Congress to initiate impeachment hearings, too.

This dam can be broken.

If it is, perhaps Democrats and patriotic Republicans will finally be able to live up to their oaths of office, which pledge them to uphold and defend the Constitution “against all enemies foreign and domestic.” There is no greater enemy of Constitutional government, the rule of law, and the freedoms that so many have died to establish and to defend than President Bush and his administration. If Congress will not stand up to the crimes of this administration and call this president to account through impeachment, all future presidents will feel free to follow his corrupt example, and the impeachment clause may as well simply be removed from the Constitution.

Or be rewritten to refer only to lies about extramarital sex.

-----------------------
DAVE LINDORFF is co-author, with Barbara Olshansky, of "The Case for Impeachment: the Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net and at www.counterpunch.org

big surprise: TJX data theft earns for criminals

Wasn't this exactly what TJX officials said couldn't be done with the stolen/lost data right after going public with the news of the breach?

Stolen TJX Data Used in $8M Scheme Before Breach Discovery
By Evan Schuman, Ziff Davis Internet
March 21, 2007

Information stolen from the systems of massive retailer TJX was being used fraudulently in November 2006 in an $8 million gift card scheme, one month before TJX officials said they learned of the breach, according to Florida law enforcement officials.

The significance of this new TJX detail—discovered as Florida authorities issued arrest warrants for 10 suspects and took six of them into custody—is not clear, but it might yield clues as to how TJX learned of the breach.

The $16 billion retail chain has officially said that a huge amount of information was accessed as early as 2005 (with some of the captured data dating back to 2003), but that TJX officials didn't learn of the breach until December 2006. The company didn't announce the breach until mid-January 2007 due to—according to one credit-card source—a request from the Secret Service because it was actively pursuing a suspect.

The Florida information raises the possibility that whoever took the data had decided to start using it late last year. Law enforcement pursuing those cases would have found TJX as the common link, potentially prompting TJX to more closely examine its systems.

In the Florida case, a group used TJX credit- and debit-card information to do a low-tech clone scam to the tune of about $8 million. The group is accused of taking credit cards and applying new magstripes containing the stolen data. It is not clear if the credit cards displayed the same numbers in plastic embossing that were in the magstripe, said Dominick Pape, the special agent in charge for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Florida officials released the names of the six suspects who were arrested: Irving Escobar, 18; Reinier Camaraza Alvarez, 27; Julio Oscar Alberti, 33; Dianelly Hernandez, 19; Nair Zuleima Alvarez, 40; and Zenia Mercedes Llorente, 23. Four others are still at large, Pape said.

The group has been charged with an organized scheme to defraud, and they are also being investigated by the Secret Service, which participated in the arrests.

Florida officials said the group used the increasingly common tactic of using the bogus credit cards to purchase gift cards and then cashing them at Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores. The group usually purchased $400 gift cards because when the gift cards were valued at $500 or more, they were required to go to customer service and show identification, Pape said.

The gift card float technique is attractive to thieves because it buys them more time. When a credit card is stolen and detected by the victim, it's only a matter of hours before the card will be invalidated.

But if the thief immediately uses the card to purchase gift cards, it buys the thief a significant amount of time. Once the credit card is deactivated, it may take days or weeks before authorities learn what was purchased—down to the exact identification number of those gift cards—and then start invalidating those gift cards.

Florida authorities have video of their suspects from both inside the store and outside. Videotape captured the license plate of a rented vehicle one of the suspects was driving. Items purchased included computers, gaming devices and big-screen televisions, police said.

At this stage, authorities are hoping to press the group to identify where they got the card data, in hopes that it will ultimately lead them to the cyberthieves who struck TJX. Pape said it is unlikely that the 10 suspects are the ones who attacked TJX. "We do not have information today that they were at the high end of the compromise," he said.

In other TJX news this week, a TJX shareholder—the Arkansas Carpenters Pension Fund—is suing TJX to access records showing how TJX handled data security.

Retail Center Editor Evan Schuman can be reached at Evan_Schuman@ziffdavis.com.

marx cafe tonite!

That's right, it's Tuesday; AGAIN! Seems like this thing happens once a week weather I like it or not. It's an unstoppable force; time that is. i have a bunch of new music that I didn't get an opportunity to play last week.

Seeya tonight! Music starts at 10pm.

3203 Mount Pleasant St. NW

Clear headed analysis

Wow, this article was posted on Military.com; how far we have come in a couple of years. Even a year ago I think it would have been unthinkable to see these sentiments displayed so openly. Perhaps after this whole episode is over our country will learn to shy away from military adventurism and foreign conquest and instead focus on our priorities here at home.

Playing the Course
Jeff Huber | March 19, 2007

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. --Voltaire

The peculiarly insane brand of neoconservative pro-war rhetoric continues to resonate. Last week, Representative C.W. Bill Young (R-FL) said, "Nobody wants our troops out of Iraq more than I do, but we can't afford to turn over Iraq to al-Qaida."

The Sunni organization al-Qaeda is not going to take over Shiite dominated Iraq. If Young honestly thinks it can, he's an utter dullard. It's more likely that Young was the Bush liegeman chosen to introduce the latest Rovewellian talking point.

Straying the Course

From the beginning, The administration and its echo chamberlains have sold their woebegone war in Iraq with a fabric of glittering generalities, appeals to emotion, bandwagons, sand bagging, blame shifting, straw man attacks, faulty main assumptions, false analogies, and the rest of the propaganda arsenal. They coaxed us into this war by making visions of mushroom clouds dance in our heads, and they've been playing Rovewellian mind games with us ever since.

Their most enduring trick has been the "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" mantra. In recent months "fighting them over there" has morphed into "If we withdraw, they will follow us here." Pish. How are they going to get here--hide in our troops' luggage? Swim? Wind surf? Jump?

Despite what Bush the younger tells us, the oceans do, in fact, still protect us. Nobody has an army large enough to invade and occupy the United States, and they certainly don't have a navy or air force capable of transporting a force that size across the Atlantic or Pacific. Even if they did, we could sink them and/or shoot them down before they got halfway here.

Yes, terrorists might still sneak through our borders and ports in drips and drabs like the 9/11 perpetrators did, but nothing we're doing militarily in the Middle East is preventing that from happening. That's Homeland Security's job, and if Homeland Security can't keep terrorists from infiltrating our country, why does it even exist?

Young Mr. Bush exhorts us to show "resolve" in the Middle East. But the kind of resolve we're showing in the Middle East is the kind of resolve it takes to throw yourself in front of a moving bus, and then lie there while the bus continues to roll back and forth over you.

In January, Senator Joe Lieberman (?-CT) said on Meet the Press that "We all want to find the right exit strategy. But my own sense of history tells me that in war, ultimately, there are two exit strategies. One is called victory; the other is called defeat."

My three dogs have a better sense of history than Lieberman does. Wars, especially modern American wars, have seldom been decisive. World War I ended in an armistice, the conditions of which laid the groundwork for World War II. World War II concluded with the formal surrenders of Germany and Japan, but that only led to the Cold War and a series of dirty little third-world proxy wars that lasted for half a century.

One pro-war neoconservative pundit recently compared Representative Jack Murtha (D-PA) to Lee Harvey Oswald. He said that Murtha and Oswald formed a small club of individuals who deserved to be classified as "ex-Marines." This pundit is not a Coulter-class luminary in the neoconservative galaxy. He is a distinguished dean and professor at one of our most distinguished graduate level war colleges who consistently indulges in this kind of vituperative through the Big Brother Broadcast megaphone. With people like him in key positions of upper level of military academia, it's little wonder our national security brain trust is so bankrupt.

We hear from voices on the right that a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq will create conditions that could lead to a regional war, but the fact is that U.S. presence in Iraq has created a regional war. Conflict, at one level or another, rages from the Horn of Africa to Pakistan, and our presence in Iraq is fueling it, not containing it.

The Bush war hawks keep serving up grape flavored hallucinogen shooters, and their non-cognitive supporters keep slamming them down. Meanwhile, a pack of dune farmers armed with tinker toys continue to make the "best-trained, best-equipped" armed force in history look like it couldn't find its oasis with a map and a flashlight.

It's so difficult for me to watch our chicken hawk leaders pour more of our magnificent troops into a war they're not designed to fight in pursuit of a "victory" that cannot be defined, and justify their policies and strategies with arguments they have to know are medicine show hokum, and blame their failures on the CIA, the news media, Catholics who voted for John Kerry, and whatever other scapegoat is handy.

It breaks my heart.

marx cafe tonite!

Yes sir! I'll be at Marx tonite playing from 10pm until 2am. I have a whole batch of fresh tunes to try out, so it should be good times. Mention this blog and I'll buy you some drinks. Seeya there!

3203 Mount Pleasant St. NW

Casting call for national Treasure 2

Why make a NT2 when the first film was so awful? Do they think they will get it right this time? lol

National Treasure 2 Open Call in DC Monday the 19th
CARLYN DAVIS CASTING IS CALLING ALL MEMBERS WHO ARE AVAILABLE FOR BACKGROUND WORK ON NATIONAL TREASURE II

There will be a huge open call this Monday the 19th from 3:00 until 7:00pm.Location: McFadden’s Restaurant on the corner of 24th and Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Parking is on the street and Metro is the Foggy Bottom stop about 2 ½ blocks from McFadden’s.The entire Casting Team will be there. Come join the fun! McFadden’s will be showing National Treasure 1 on Monday night.

All you need to do is bring a headshop OR current snap shot of yourself.For up to date information, keep checking www.carlyndaviscasting.com (c-a-r-l-y-n) and www.mcfaddensdc.com . Look forward to seeing you on the big screen, Washington!

National Treasure 2: The Book of Secrets" Starring Nicholas Cage, Diane Kruger, Jon Voight, Harvey Keitel and Justin Bartha.

We will be needing the following types for background work:
- Cigar smokers (Senators) & White House Staff Types
- Secret Service and FBI types
- Good Drivers w/Cars (not black, white, red or yellow)
- Military to include 2 Generals and 1 Major
- Catering Waiters/Waitresses, Chefs and Bartenders (experience a plus)
- George and Martha Washington look-alikes
- Diplomat couples in formal attire (authentic Scottish, African, Japanese, French and Middle Eastern costumes)
- Beautiful Model types 25-40 in age for a formal scene
- Formal types-ladies in FULL length dresses, men in Tuxes
- Bomb Detection Units w/dogs
- Bike Messengers (experience a plus)
- College students including 20 skateboarders and some hacky sackers
- University Professors
- Security Guards and Police
- Lots of Business and Tourist types
- Librarians
- Joggers (female)
- Dog Walkers w/ dogs
- Senior Citizens
- Bicyclists w/ bikes
- 18 and older who look 15-17
- Park Rangers
- Teachers
- Rich Texans
- String Quartet

Northern State at Black Cat

OMG OMG!! I will be there, these girls are AWSOME!! I'll have to suck it up and return to the black cat, last time I went there i didn't have a very good time.

UPCOMING SHOWS (See list of past shows)

* Monday March 12, 2007
Washington DC

The Black Cat
1811 14th St. NW
Washington DC, 20009
202.667.7960
9 pm
$10
http://www.blackcatdc.com/schedule.html
w/ Bitch and The Exciting Conclusion

Happy John Frum day!!!!1

This is amazing, one day I will complete the trek; and celebrate this fine holiday with the people of Sulphur Bay.

A Christian youth worker told me how he thought the cult was childish. "It's like a baby playing games," he insisted. "Those people are holding on to a dream that will never come true," he said.

HA HA HA HA, oh.. Irony; this is your name.

Cargo cult lives on in South Pacific
By Phil Mercer
BBC News, Tanna, Vanuatu

At the base of a sacred volcano in an isolated corner of the South Pacific young men play the "Star Spangled Banner" on bamboo flutes.

Men march with the US flag
Islanders have celebrated John Frum's generosity for 50 years
Every February they parade in old US army uniforms with wooden weapons.

Others go bare-chested with the letters "USA" painted in bright red letters on their bodies.

Nearby, a giant Stars and Stripes flutters in the breeze from the main flagpole.

This is the heart of John Frum country on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu.

Villagers at Sulphur Bay worship a mystical figure who they believe will one day bring them wealth and happiness.

Time of upheaval

"John is our god," declares village chief Isaac Wan, who beats his fists into the ground to emphasise his words.

"One day he will come back," he says.

Believers are convinced that John Frum was an American.

The name could well have come from war-time GIs who introduced themselves as "Jon from America."

Devotees say that the ghost of a mystical white man first appeared before tribal elders in the 1930s.

It urged them to rebel against the aggressive teachings of Christian missionaries and the influence of Vanuatu's British and French colonial masters.

The apparition told villagers to do all they could to retain their own traditions.

Anthropologist Ralph Reganvalu told the BBC that the sect was a "cultural preservation movement" that was born during a time of upheaval.

"There was a whole period in history known as Tanna Law where the missionaries put in this series of rules about what people weren't supposed to do and the movement emerged because of this oppression," he said.

Homage to the US

World War II and the arrival of US troops on Vanuatu was a defining time for the movement. They had a name for their spiritual deity. He was John Frum.

Villagers believe that their messiah was responsible for delivering to them the munificence of the US military.

They were awestruck by the army's cargo of tanks, weapons, refrigerators, food and medicine.

John Frum day is held annually on 15 February. This year's celebration marks the 50th anniversary of the sect's formal establishment.

It also recognises the day when villagers raised the US flag for the first time.

Through this homage to the US, disciples hope their ethereal saviour can be encouraged to return.

"It's a little bit weird but it makes me feel really patriotic," said Marty Meth, a retired businessman from New York, who had travelled to Tanna to see the festivities.

"It's really nice to see Americans welcome here since in so many places in the world we're not so welcome these days," he added.

Many followers of John Frum believe his spirit lives deep within the volcano.

Every few minutes Yasur bellows.

Watching and listening from the crater's edge is both exhilarating and frightening. A deafening growl is followed by the blasting of molten rock high into the sky.

These rumblings are a constant reminder for villagers that the spirit of John Frum remains as potent as ever.

About 20% of Tanna's population of 30,000 follow the teachings of one of the world's last remaining cargo cults.

Other islanders can barely disguise their contempt for it.

A Christian youth worker told me how he thought the cult was childish. "It's like a baby playing games," he insisted. "Those people are holding on to a dream that will never come true," he said.

I put this view to Rutha, who's married to Chief Isaac's son. She was unfazed.

"I don't care what they think," she says gently without a hint of displeasure. "John is our Jesus and he will come back."

The John Frum Movement is still trying to entice another delivery of cargo from its supernatural American god.

In the meantime his disciples continue to wait and hope.

Marx Cafe tonight!

Another Tuesday; another opportunity to get wild without the weekend! I'll be spinning from 10-2, you know where.

3203 Mount Pleasant St. NW

DOD; global warming real, will destroy us all

Wow, this is not good news at all. Time to go to code red!

Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us

Mark Townsend and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday February 22, 2004
The Observer

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'

The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.

The report was commissioned by influential Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall, who has held considerable sway on US military thinking over the past three decades. He was the man behind a sweeping recent review aimed at transforming the American military under Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Climate change 'should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern', say the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.

An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is 'plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately', they conclude. As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.

Last week the Bush administration came under heavy fire from a large body of respected scientists who claimed that it cherry-picked science to suit its policy agenda and suppressed studies that it did not like. Jeremy Symons, a former whistleblower at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said that suppression of the report for four months was a further example of the White House trying to bury the threat of climate change.

Senior climatologists, however, believe that their verdicts could prove the catalyst in forcing Bush to accept climate change as a real and happening phenomenon. They also hope it will convince the United States to sign up to global treaties to reduce the rate of climatic change.

A group of eminent UK scientists recently visited the White House to voice their fears over global warming, part of an intensifying drive to get the US to treat the issue seriously. Sources have told The Observer that American officials appeared extremely sensitive about the issue when faced with complaints that America's public stance appeared increasingly out of touch.

One even alleged that the White House had written to complain about some of the comments attributed to Professor Sir David King, Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser, after he branded the President's position on the issue as indefensible.

Among those scientists present at the White House talks were Professor John Schellnhuber, former chief environmental adviser to the German government and head of the UK's leading group of climate scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. He said that the Pentagon's internal fears should prove the 'tipping point' in persuading Bush to accept climatic change.

Sir John Houghton, former chief executive of the Meteorological Office - and the first senior figure to liken the threat of climate change to that of terrorism - said: 'If the Pentagon is sending out that sort of message, then this is an important document indeed.'

Bob Watson, chief scientist for the World Bank and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, added that the Pentagon's dire warnings could no longer be ignored.

'Can Bush ignore the Pentagon? It's going be hard to blow off this sort of document. Its hugely embarrassing. After all, Bush's single highest priority is national defence. The Pentagon is no wacko, liberal group, generally speaking it is conservative. If climate change is a threat to national security and the economy, then he has to act. There are two groups the Bush Administration tend to listen to, the oil lobby and the Pentagon,' added Watson.

'You've got a President who says global warming is a hoax, and across the Potomac river you've got a Pentagon preparing for climate wars. It's pretty scary when Bush starts to ignore his own government on this issue,' said Rob Gueterbock of Greenpeace.

Already, according to Randall and Schwartz, the planet is carrying a higher population than it can sustain. By 2020 'catastrophic' shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war. They warn that 8,200 years ago climatic conditions brought widespread crop failure, famine, disease and mass migration of populations that could soon be repeated.

Randall told The Observer that the potential ramifications of rapid climate change would create global chaos. 'This is depressing stuff,' he said. 'It is a national security threat that is unique because there is no enemy to point your guns at and we have no control over the threat.'

Randall added that it was already possibly too late to prevent a disaster happening. 'We don't know exactly where we are in the process. It could start tomorrow and we would not know for another five years,' he said.

'The consequences for some nations of the climate change are unbelievable. It seems obvious that cutting the use of fossil fuels would be worthwhile.'

So dramatic are the report's scenarios, Watson said, that they may prove vital in the US elections. Democratic frontrunner John Kerry is known to accept climate change as a real problem. Scientists disillusioned with Bush's stance are threatening to make sure Kerry uses the Pentagon report in his campaign.

The fact that Marshall is behind its scathing findings will aid Kerry's cause. Marshall, 82, is a Pentagon legend who heads a secretive think-tank dedicated to weighing risks to national security called the Office of Net Assessment. Dubbed 'Yoda' by Pentagon insiders who respect his vast experience, he is credited with being behind the Department of Defence's push on ballistic-missile defence.

Symons, who left the EPA in protest at political interference, said that the suppression of the report was a further instance of the White House trying to bury evidence of climate change. 'It is yet another example of why this government should stop burying its head in the sand on this issue.'

Symons said the Bush administration's close links to high-powered energy and oil companies was vital in understanding why climate change was received sceptically in the Oval Office. 'This administration is ignoring the evidence in order to placate a handful of large energy and oil companies,' he added.

Awsome scam lands lawyer in clink

Wow, it’s sort of a dumb criminal story. Not the garden variety ones you see on Countdown mind you. This one is strange simply due to how incredibly sloppy the crime was carried out, almost as though there was no planning involved prior to the act. You would think someone in real estate, in Manhattan of all places, would have the ability to carry out this scheme successfully. Oh well, must have been some small timers thinking they could play with the big dogs.

DA: Manhattan Attorney Stole $500,000

MANHATTAN--A Manhattan attorney has been indicted on charges of stealing $500,000 from individuals involved in real estate transactions.

Gwenerva Cherry, 50, or Morningside Ave. in New York City, had a firm in the name of Cherry and Marshburn at 305 Broadway, Suite 303. The investigation leading to the indictment revealed that Cherry was well-known in the Harlem area as an expert in removing buildings from Single Room Occupancy (SRO) status and representing clients who wanted to purchase townhouses in need of renovation. The defendant also represented a number of corporations in bankruptcy.

One of these corporations, Rapsil Construction Corp., was in bankruptcy proceedings and attempted to sell off some of its Harlem properties. In the fall of 2005, Rapsil, represented by Cherry, entered into contracts with several prospective buyers, who gave the defendant down payments totaling over $300,000. Cherry deposited those funds into her firm's IOLA account (Interest on Lawyer Account) and allegedly proceeded to steal those funds. Prosecutors said Cherry used the funds to pay office expenses and make payments to other clients.

Among the victims in this scam is a woman who gave the defendant $95,000 as a down payment on a Manhattan Avenue townhouse and a man who gave Cherry $80,000 for a West 140th Street townhouse. Both of these victims lost their money. Many of the victims had known the defendant for many years, either as clients or through other business transactions.

The investigation also revealed that in April 2006, Cherry allegedly received $200,000 from two clients for an alleged real estate investment that never existed. Prosecutors said Cherry told investors that they would be able to invest money in the purchase of a block of apartments in a Brooklyn building. Cheryy had the clients wire money to an account she held in the name of a business she ran independently from the law firm. The defendant claimed that the real estate deal was closing within days and that she needed the money immediately, or the clients would lose the opportunity to invest. The day after the money hit defendant's account, she transferred it to another account and used it to make payments to other clients and to herself.

Cherry has been charged with second and third degree grand larceny and first degree scheme to defraud. 2-27-07

All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed by anyone without the express written permission of the publisher. This article is copyright protected.

© 2007 North Country Gazette

TELL CONGRESS NO TO WEAPONS BAN!!!!

This can't be allowed to happen!

THE MOST SWEEPING GUN BAN EVER INTRODUCED IN CONGRESS;
McCarthy Bill Bans Millions More Guns Than The Clinton Gun Ban

On Feb. 14, 2007, Representative Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.) introduced H.R. 1022, a bill with the stated purpose, "to reauthorize the assault weapons ban, and for other purposes."

McCarthy's verbiage warrants explanation. Presumably, what she means by "assault weapons ban" is the Clinton Gun Ban of 1994. Congress allowed the ban to expire in 2004 for multiple reasons, including the fact that federal, state and local law enforcement agency studies showed that guns affected by the ban had been used in only a small percentage of crime, before and after the ban was imposed.

With the nation's murder rate 43% lower than in 1991, and the re-legalized guns still used in only a small percentage of crime, reauthorizing the Clinton Gun Ban would be objectionable enough. But McCarthy's "other purposes" would make matters even worse. H.R. 1022 would ban every gun banned by the Clinton ban, plus millions more guns, including:

. Every gun made to comply with the Clinton ban. (The Clinton ban dictated the kinds of grips, stocks and attachments new guns could have. Manufacturers modified new guns to the Clinton requirements. H.R. 1022 would ban the modified guns too.)

. Guns exempted by the Clinton ban. (Ruger Mini-14s and -30s and Ranch Rifles; .30 cal. carbines; and fixed-magazine, semi-automatic, center-fire rifles that hold more than 10 rounds.)

. All semi-automatic shotguns. (E.g., Remington, Winchester, Beretta and Benelli, used for hunting, sport shooting, and self-defense. H.R. 1022 would ban them because they have "any characteristic that can function as a grip," and would also ban their main component, called the "receiver.")

. All detachable-magazine semi-automatic rifles-including, for example, the ubiquitous Ruger 10/22 .22 rimfire-because they have "any characteristic that can function as a grip."

. Target shooting rifles. (E.g., the three centerfire rifles most popular for marksmanship competitions: the Colt AR-15, the Springfield M1A and the M1 "Garand.")

. Any semi-automatic shotgun or rifle an Attorney General one day claims isn't "sporting," even though the constitutions of the U.S. and 44 states, and the laws of all 50 states, recognize the right to use guns for defense.

. 65 named guns (the Clinton law banned 19 by name); semi-auto fixed-magazine pistols of over 10 rounds capacity; and frames, receivers and parts used to repair or refurbish guns.

H.R. 1022 would also ban the importation of magazines exempted by the Clinton ban, ban the sale of a legally-owned "assault weapon" with a magazine of over 10 rounds capacity, and begin backdoor registration of guns, by requiring private sales of banned guns, frames, receivers and parts to be conducted through licensed dealers. Finally, whereas the Clinton Gun Ban was imposed for a 10-year trial period, H.R. 1022 would be a permanent ban.

Please be sure to contact your U.S. Representative and urge him or her to oppose
H.R. 1022!

You can call your U.S. Representative at (202) 225-3121.

Marx Cafe tonight!

Another Tuesday; another opportunity to get wild without the weekend! I'll be spinning from 10-2, you know where.

3203 Mount Pleasant St. NW

Complacent Nation event this weekend

I'll be down for hitting this up. Sounds like an adventure!

It's been a beautiful bitter winter and in this time of hibernation we've been building a dream that is long overdue. As you may have noticed, the venues relied upon in the past have all been woefully inadequate for our events, so we've been searching for a space to call our own. Our goal is to create a venue for intimate events, massive art and moments of intrigue that keep this city alive, livid and just a little dangerous.

On the dark edge of Williamsburg, we've found our new home.

This weekend you are invited to our opening, featuring a touch of bliss and a dose of bedlam within an ever-evolving landscape of art and media that will grow and deepen over the coming months. Saturday we rise from our cold long slumber to bring you a night of Simple Pleasures.

--------------------------------------------

Saturday, February Twenty Fourth
TheDanger presents:

Simple Pleasures
11pm to 11am
Twelve hours of intimate moments and wild spectacle.

We've built our space into seven Bedouin lounges and two areas of sound offering discreet experiences of bliss and infamy. Featuring music by:

Small Change : A musical addict, he's been collecting and DJing for over 15 years and has tens of thousands of records in every conceivable genre and time period. On this night of simple pleasures he will be digging deep in the crates for the most intoxicating funk infused hip-hop to soul to breaks.

Haj & Spiro [Freek Factory ] : In the late night Haj will be erupting the floor with thick layers of break-beats and deep progressions of glitch-hop to middle eastern ethnic dub while Spiro floats through the beat with his virtuoso guitar and bouzouki playing into bass-heavy real-time electronic jams. The result is an exquisite mix of dj lust and live music love.

Gadi Mizrahi [ Wolf + Lamb ] : The Lamb of Wolf + Lamb has been commuting between his Brooklyn lab and the beaches of Argentina creating new mixes and compositions in a constant search for the perfect dark techno sound. Expect an extended sunrise set of the tightest intelligent techno this side of Detroit.

Spinoza [Bunker/Beyond ] : The world renowned dj Spinoza is one of the driving forces for the New York City techno community. His subtly complex mixes inspire the after-hours crowd to abandon all hope of surrender as the dance floor continues to move through the next afternoon.

In the Plush Dome:
Autophage [ Imagenode ] : Brings melodic ambient techno to new delights with a sound developed on the alkali flats of Black Rock City and perfected in the dark and cozy spaces of underground Brooklyn.

Zemi17 & Dok [ Amoeba Technology ] : Expect timeless space sounds that defy weather conditions. Zemi17: live sampling of gongs, trash, appropriated nik-naks, bamboo things and the like with manipulations of insects and birds. Dok: analog synths, archival electronica, and unidentified objects that make places in your solar plexis smile.

In the Elixir Lounge:
Miss Elixir and Debonair offer libidinous tonics from a forgotten time. Tricks and treats will be traded for warm vanilla cognac voodoo love potion and tastes of the exotic and mysterious Agent Orange - a fruitful concoction built on liquors of ancient Eastern Europe.

In the Burlesque Lounge:
Big Apple Burlesque reminds us of a lost era when beauty was high on decadence and the stage was alive with equal parts sultry dream and performance perfection. Expect a little skin and a lot of attitude from Creme Brulee, Ruby Valentine, Honey Birdette, Snuffy Patterson and Broadway Brassy.

In the Fondue Den:
Master Chef Grrl Lola presents a fondue feast of intimate proportions with decadent fondue tastings of melted exotic cheese, chocolate and other delicacies served in a close setting by the beautiful chef herself. Here you taste the essence of simple pleasure.

Also, Night of Fire visuals from Jeannie Angel, Electronic Sheep from Spot, Fire Ritual by SamIam and the 2am Whip Cream Fiasco.

11pm to 11am
$15 if you bring your own can of whip-cream.
$20 otherwise.
*entrance includes free elixirs, fondue, whip cream and cherries.

21+ and you must mention : "The Fiasco" for entry.

All this is and more at the new : Danger Space.
341 Scholes St.
L train to Morgan Ave.
Details at map: http://www.thedanger.com

Please Note: In order to keep this space alive and unscathed by the authorities we ask you to do these three simple things: 1) don't pee/drink/make noise on the street, 2) bring only the people you love and trust and
3) Use the password for entry, this prevents the uninvited from wandering in off the street. No password, no entry.

Please respect our new home. With your brilliance and cooperation we will be building this space into the dream venue that we all deserve. If you have any interested in participating in the development of the space, hit reply.


____________________________________

TheDanger List
http://www.thedanger.com

To remove yourself write to:
complacent-unsubscribe@lists.complacent.org

Marx Cafe tonight!

Hey all, I'm back in action tonight! Bringing the two-step goodness with that funky twist for the groove time wonder!

Music starts at 10pm. Seeya there!

3203 Mount Pleasant St. NW

Gambian president can cure AIDS; It's Magic!!

Ok, the witch doctor will see you now. NEXT!

Gambia's Aids 'Miracle'
Updated: 09:15, Tuesday February 20, 2007

The United Nations has warned of dangerous consequences after the leader of a tiny West African country declared he can cure Aids.

The President of The Gambia says his herbal remedy can kill HIV in his patients' blood.

Sky's Africa correspondent Emma Hurd went to meet him and has this exclusive report:

Dressed from head to toe in sparkling white robes, President Yahya Jammeh, leans over his latest patient and massages a herbal ointment into his chest.

The man is HIV positive, but after a few sessions of this treatment: a rub down with the cream, a splash on the face with another potion and a drink of a murky looking liquid, the President claims he'll be cured.

He's already treated dozens of his people with his traditional medicine, succeeding, he says, where modern medical science has failed.

Sceptics are not welcome.

"Who do I have to convince?" he demanded, jabbing his finger towards me.

"The World?" I suggested.

"I do not have to convince anybody. I can cure Aids and I will not explain it to those who don't want to understand."

The only proof we were shown were photocopied laboratory results which appear to show that some of his patients now have "undetectable" levels of HIV in their blood.

No evidence was provided to show they were HIV positive before the treatment.

We asked for independent tests, which were refused along with a request to take samples of the secret herbal medicines.

"Not in a million years," the President told me.

We were at least permitted to speak to one of his patients, Ousman Sowe, a university lecturer.

"I believe I am cured," he said. "I believe that I am now HIV negative." He could offer no proof.

This 'cure' is sponsored by The Gambia's Department of Health.

The President's patients are kept on special wards in the nation's hospitals and the Health Minister selects suitable candidates for treatment.

Fatou Sanyang arrived with her two-year-old son.

The child, like her, is HIV positive, she told me, and she wants the President to heal them both.

The Minister, Dr Tamsir Mbowe, did not think that would be a problem.

"One hundred per cent the President can cure everyone. It is absolutely medically proven," he said.

Despite the lack of evidence, there are few in the Gambia who dare doubt this 'miracle'.

The President controls the media and the only message his people are hearing is that the treatment works, and patients are now queuing up outside his door.

President Jammeh cures Aids on Thursdays and Asthma on Saturdays, the rest of the time he runs the country he's ruled for 12 years.

It's a place which attracts 80,000 British tourists every year, and was until recently considered progressive in its approach to Aids.

Organisations which run orthodox programmes to combat the spread of the virus now fear all of their work is being undone.

Fadzai Gwarazimba, the co-ordinator for the UN in The Gambia, told me: "If people start to believe there is a cure then they will start to engage in risky behaviour and that could mean even more of a problem with Aids in this continent."

Africa is crying out for leaders who will take Aids seriously, but President Jammeh seems to have joined those who believe it's a conspiracy cooked up by the drugs companies of the West.

We watched as he finished treating a young woman, who lay passively on a bed while she was covered in ointment until her black skin shone.

In a few weeks she, along with the latest batch of 29 patients, will finish her treatment.

What is chilling is that they will all, most likely, still be HIV positive - but they will be convinced they can live life as if they are cured.

Skipped marx last nite

Yeah, didn't go last nite, it was too cold and snowing to justify the trip, it was proably dead anyways. Last week i went out and there was nobody there, didn't even bother playing at all. Hopefully next week we can get back on track.

cheers,

Matt

Price of AK ammo doubles

Lord of war anyone?

The AK-47 Ammo Crises
February 6, 2007: Gun runners worldwide were shocked late last year when the found the price of the favorite ammunition, the 7.62x39 (diameter and length, in millimeters) round used in the AK-47, doubled in price. For decades, this 7.62x39 was the cheapest rifle ammo available, selling for as low as ten cents per round. Even the highest quality ones rarely sold for more than twenty cents a round. But suddenly, hardly anything was under twenty cents, and the reason was massive orders from the United States. The Americans were laying in supplies for their Iraq and Afghan allies. Both of these nations had been working down supplies left over from Cold War era stockpiles, but all that stuff was pretty much gone, and there was still lots of fighting going on. Moreover, those crazy Americans were insisting that Afghan and Iraqi security personnel learn to shoot their AK-47s accurately. That took a lot of ammo.

read the rest.

Marx Cafe tonight!

I'll be making my triumphant return to the decks at marx tonite after a two week absence. Music starts at 10pm. Seeya there!

Marx Cafe
3203 Mount Pleasant St. NW

Copper theives strike again

This sounds like an easy scam, how easy is it to flip the wire, how much ya get per pound? per ton? That Jack Wyscarver guy sure has his work cut out for him.

""""""""""'

Copper thefts plague city
Culprits steal valuable utility wiring, leaving darkened streets
By Ralph Monta?o - Bee Staff Writer

Published 12:00 am PST Thursday, January 25, 2007
Story appeared in CITY section, Page H1

Friday morning brought more bad news for Jack Wyscarver, Sacramento's
supervisor of traffic signals and street lighting.

The street lights were out in another section of Natomas, and the
culprit wasn't bad weather or a broken conductor. It was wire thieves,
again.

"I just got a call that they hit Benefit Way and East Commerce Way,"
Wyscarver said. "On Thursday, it was Orchard Drive and Barandas Drive.
Just about every night we get a call."

For almost two months, the city has been plagued by thieves who tear up
the city's streetlights to get the copper wire. Neighborhoods are being
left in the dark, sometimes for days as repair are being made.

Linda Tucker, a spokeswoman for the city's Department of
Transportation, said repairs have cost the city $25,000, counting
employee time and materials.

The problem is one that has popped up all across the Sacramento area,
thanks largely to the rising prices being paid by recyclers for the
metals. The Bee reported in August 2006 that authorities in Yolo and El
Dorado counties were seeing an increase in thefts of aluminum and
copper. Aluminum irrigation pipes were being pulled out of the ground
and copper wire was being torn out of the walls at construction sites,
investigators told The Bee.

Last year, hundreds of thousands of people in Placerville lost
telephone service after thieves knocked down more than 1,000 feet of
AT&T cable seeking copper wiring. In Lodi, hundreds of copper vases
disappeared from graves in Cherokee Memorial Park. Almost 800 of the
vases turned up in scrap yards across San Joaquin County.

Officials with the scrap recycling industry said copper prices are at
an all-time high, up to $3 a pound because of several factors,
including increased demand and strikes at mines throughout the world.

City officials say they are contacting scrap metal recyclers to warn
them about accepting the stolen goods.

"If we can cut off where they are cashing it in, then hopefully they
will move on," Wyscarver said. A similar strategy appears to have been
successful in Stockton, Wyscarver added. "Their problem apparently
stopped the day before ours began."

The theory that the thieves are coming from Stockton has no real
evidence, according to Sacramento police spokesman Sgt. Matt Young. He
said investigators have yet to find a single eyewitness to 15 different
thefts.

"We are asking the public's help in being our eyes and ears," Young
said. Anyone seen working on utility wires not wearing a city worker
uniform or driving a city truck should raise suspicion.

The thieves are getting access to the wire by lifting the concrete
covers located on sidewalks. Wyscarver said once the thieves get to the
wire, they cut the connection and pull out hundreds of feet of
underground wire. The Orchard Way theft, for example, resulted in the
theft of about 2,000 feet of wire, Wyscarver said. A 10-foot section of
wire weighs about a pound, he estimated.

The thefts have left behind open utility covers and live wires that are
a danger to the public. Anyone finding a street light wiring box left
open is advised not to reach inside.

Anyone with information about the thefts is asked to call the
Sacramento Police Department at (916) 264-5471.
"""""""""'

Fed employees who owe back taxes

You would think the federal govt would be able to automatically garnish their wages to recover the shortfall. I wonder if they have considered doing this at all, seems it would be a simple solution. Link to the article for the spreadsheets mentioned, it breaks down each govt agency into different categories.

Federal Workers Owe Billions in Unpaid Taxes
Jan 17th - 10:26am

Mark Segraves, WTOP Radio

WASHINGTON - As the 2006 tax season approaches, the federal government is still trying to recover nearly $3 billion from its own employees who failed to file income tax returns for 2005.

More than 450,000 active and retired federal employees did not voluntarily comply with federal income tax requirements for the 2005 tax year, according to documents obtained by WTOP through the Freedom of Information Act. (See Excel spreadsheets in the Related Links below.)

The total balance owed is $2,799,950,165.

The documents show that every federal agency has employees who failed to comply with federal tax laws.

Seventy-one employees in the Executive Office of the President, which includes the White House, owe $664,527 in taxes for 2005. About 20 of those employees have entered into an IRS payment plan, bringing the EOP balance down to $455,881owed by 50 employees.

The White House did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

In fact, about one third of the delinquent employees, or 149,500, entered into a payment plan, but the total owed is still more than $2 billion.

At the IRS, employees can be fired for failure to pay federal income taxes. But an IRS spokesperson tells WTOP it's no easier to collect from federal employees than it is to collect from the general public.

In the past, IRS officials have been quick to compare the federal workers' rate of compliance with the general public's. But this year, the IRS is not able to track the compliance rate for the general public. The percentage of federal employees who still owe back taxes for the 2005 year is 3.3 percent of the workforce including retirees.

The federal agency with the highest number of delinquent taxpayers is the United States Postal Service, where 56,652 employees owe more than $320 million. So far, about 22,000 of those employees have agreed to a payment plan.

A spokesperson for the Postal Service says the agency hopes all of its employees follow the law, but will leave enforcement to the IRS.

The agency with the best compliance rate is the Department of Treasury, which includes the IRS. Fewer than 2 percent of Treasury employees failed to pay their taxes. About 3,000 Treasury employees owed $13,489,683 -- 1,437 of those feds also have made payment plans.

The IRS tracks the compliance rate of federal employees each year in an effort to increase compliance. Agency directors are made aware of their department's compliance rate and then memos are sent to staff encouraging them to file their taxes.

(Copyright 2007 by WTOP Radio. All Rights Reserved.)

Chinese shoot down satellite

Now we'll have to develop counter-anti-satellite capabilities to protect our imaging platforms. Like we didn't have enough going on right now without the Chinese going and raising the stakes. Thanks a lot, jerks.

Chinese Test Anti-Satellite Weapon
By Craig Covault/Aviation Week & Space Technology
01/17/2007 07:45:59 PM

U. S. intelligence agencies believe China performed a successful anti-satellite (asat) weapons test at more than 500 mi. altitude Jan. 11 destroying an aging Chinese weather satellite target with a kinetic kill vehicle launched on board a ballistic missile.

The Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, NASA and other government organizations have a full court press underway to obtain data on the alleged test, Aviation Week & Space Technology will report in its Jan. 22 issue.

If the test is verified it will signify a major new Chinese military capability.

Neither the Office of the U. S. Secretary of Defense nor Air Force Space Command would comment on the attack, which followed by several months the alleged illumination of a U. S. military spacecraft by a Chinese ground based laser.

China's growing military space capability is one major reason the Bush Administration last year formed the nation's first new National Space Policy in ten years, Aviation Week will report.

"The policy is designed to ensure that our space capabilities are protected in a time of increasing challenges and threats," says Robert G. Joseph, Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security at the U. S. State Dept. " This is imperative because space capabilities are vital to our national security and to our economic well being," Joseph said in an address on the new space policy at the National Press Club in Washington D. C.

Details emerging from space sources indicate that the Chinese Feng Yun 1C (FY-1C) polar orbit weather satellite launched in 1999 was attacked by an asat system launched from or near the Xichang Space Center.

The attack is believe to have occurred as the weather satellite flew at 530 mi. altitude 4 deg. west of Xichang located in Sichuan province. Xichang is a major Chinese space launch center.

Although intelligence agencies must complete confirmation of the test, the attack is believed to have occurred at about 5:28 p.m. EST Jan. 11. U. S. intelligence agencies had been expecting some sort of test that day, sources said.

U. S. Air Force Defense Support Program missile warning satellites in geosynchronous orbit would have detected the Xichang launch of the asat kill vehicle and U. S. Air Force Space Command monitored the FY-1C orbit both before and after the exercise.

The test, if it occurred as envisioned by intelligence source, could also have left considerable space debris in an orbit used by many different satellites.

USAF radar reports on the Chinese FY-1C spacecraft have been posted once or twice daily for years, but those reports jumped to about 4 times per day just before the alleged test.

The USAF radar reports then ceased Jan. 11, but then appeared for a day showing "signs of orbital distress". The reports were then halted again. The Air Force radars may well be busy cataloging many pieces of debris, sources said.

Although more of a "policy weapon" at this time, the test shows that the Chinese military can threaten the imaging reconnaissance satellites operated by the U. S., Japan, Russia, Israel and Europe.

The Republic of China also operates a small imaging spacecraft that can photograph objects as small as about 10 ft. in size, a capability good enough to count cruise missiles pointed at Taiwan from the Chinese mainland. The Taiwanese in the past have also leased capability on an Israeli reconnaissance satellite.

Tonight @ the Marx Cafe

I'll be at the Marx tonight, playing 2step and classic old school garage. Music starts at 10pm.

holla!

3203 Mount Pleasant St. NW

Global warming, now also real in Europe.

WOW, global warming hits home. Here too on the east coast there's no snow to be found, all the slopes within 2 hours of here are closed. WTF!?

Snowboarders stage protest over lack of snow

Romanian snowboarders blocked traffic by staging a protest in front of the national weather institute to complain about the lack of snow.

The sit down protest in the capital Bucharest only ended when weathermen told them their complaint "would be passed on to a higher authority".

Romania's ski resorts, like much of the rest of Europe, have been hit by a chronic lack of snow and high temperatures - as much as 19 Celsius in some areas.

The appeal may have had some effect, as snow is predicted to fall some time later this week.

Pandas; can't seem to make it happen

Maybe they need some viagra, or perhaps livitra(sp?) cause you know it works for 36 hours, cause sometimes life gets in the way. this reminds me of that Simpsons episode where Homer bulks up to 400lbs so he can go on disibility and work from home. Not entierly certain why though.

Male panda said too fat to have sex

By SUTIN WANNABOVORN, Associated Press Writer 35 minutes ago

BANGKOK, Thailand - Chuang Chuang the Panda is just too heavy to have sex. Thai authorities have put him on a strict diet as part of a long-running campaign to get him to mate with female partner Lin Hui at the Chiang Mai Zoo in northern Thailand.

"Chuang Chuang is gaining weight too fast and we found Lin Hui is no longer comfortable with having sex with him," said the zoo's chief veterinarian, Kanika Limtrakul, adding that Chuang Chuang weighed 331 pounds while Lin Hui is only 253 pounds.

As a result, zoo authorities are cutting out bamboo shoots in the daily meal for Chuang Chuang and giving the obese bear only bamboo leaves, Kanika said.

The diet plan is the latest in an unsuccessful and often strange campaign by zoo officials to get the two bears to mate.

They have held a mock wedding, announced plans to separate the two to spark a little romance and even talked of introducing panda porn — videos of other pandas mating — to get the pair in the mood.

Thailand rented Chuang Chuang and Lin Hui from China for $250,000 in October 2003 for 10 years. They are expected to generate millions of dollars in revenues from Thai and foreign tourists.

There are as few as 1,600 giant pandas in the mountain forests of central China, according to the zoo. An additional 120 are in Chinese breeding facilities and zoos, and about 20 live in zoos outside China.

Pandas are threatened by loss of habitat, poaching and a low reproduction rate. Females in the wild normally have a cub once every two to three years.

Marx Cafe tonight!

Awhhhhh yeah!

3203 Mount Pleasant St. NW

10pm

you know.

Beautiful Alfa GTV on Ebay!

Oh man, this machine is gorgeous! I want it.

Peru, king of the world.

Wow, the peruvian stock market earned 182% during 2006, that's amazing.

The Sunday Times December 24, 2006

Peru races to top of world stock market league
Paul Durman

THE populous and fast-growing Bric economies — Brazil, Russia, India and China — produced the four best performances among major stock markets last year, according to an annual review by Thomson Financial.

The analysis by the financial-information firm underlines the growing importance of these emerging economic powerhouses to investors as well as to trading partners.

*
China was the best-performing major market, the Shenzhen A-share index delivering total returns of 101.7% last year for a dollar investor. The Russian market rose by 65.8%, the Brazilian market by 40.9% and the Indian market by 36.6%.

All these figures are calculated to include dividends and were calculated in dollars — thus neutralising currency changes.

The much larger British and American stock markets also performed well last year, but trailed far behind the Bric markets. In dollar terms, the FTSE 100 delivered a total return of 26.3%, making it the 56th best- performing market among the 93 tracked by Thomson. The 14% gain in the S&P 500, the broader American index, ranked 84th.

Some smaller stock markets did even better than China. Peru was the best performer, producing a 182% gain on the back of its metals industry. Cyprus was next with returns of 157%.

The worst performers included several Middle East stock markets, hurt by the bursting of the oil bubble. Investors in Jordan were the worst hit, suffering losses of 34%. Kuwait, Lebanon, Turkey and Bangladesh also produced negative returns.

In the UK, the best-performing company in the FTSE All-Share was Manganese Bronze, the black-cab maker that gave investors a total return of 290%. There were also stellar performances from UK Coal (returns of 201%), software group Aveva (158%) and Nord Anglia Education (141%).

The worst performers are a group of companies that generated a great many column inches. Isoft, the software company that nearly went bust after failing to meet its commitment to the NHS IT programme, was the worst performer, showing a loss of 85.9%.

Party Gaming, the online gaming giant damaged by new American restrictions, ended the year down 76.9%. Acambis, the biotech company that recently lost its contract to make smallpox vaccine for the US government, and Skye Pharma, the subject of a shareholder revolt, also halved in value.

Among the larger companies, the mining groups Xstrata and Lonmin headed the list of FTSE 100 gainers, producing returns of 107.9% and 92.6% respectively. Then came Corus, the steel maker that is the subject of a takeover battle.

Carnival, the cruise operator, was by far the worst performer in the FTSE 100, costing its investors losses of 23.5%. Drugs giant Glaxo Smith Kline was next worst, down 6.3%.

Many of the winning companies reflected the strength of the utilities and construction and materials sectors. The laggards were technology, healthcare and automobiles.

This has also been a boom year for flotations on AIM, although many debutantes performed poorly for their investors. According to Thomson, the worst were Atelis, Microfuze International, Arthro Kinetics, Netservices and Chariot (UK), which all lost at least 70% of their value.

By contrast, Worthington Nicholls, Tasty, Lipoxen Technologies and iX Europe all at least doubled in value.

To put these returns on equities in context, Thomson looked at data from asset classes. Government bonds, as measured by the JP Morgan index, produced returns of 8%. Corporate bonds, a substantially riskier class of assets, did not fare much better, returning 9.7%. The returns on cash were 4.5%. Property was the star performer, the global real-estate market showing gains of 40%.

Iraq may be lost

Maybe we will see a return to conservative values now, meaning no more military adventurism for the foreseeable future.

White House Postponing Loss of Iraq, Biden Says

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 5, 2007; A06

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said yesterday that he believes top officials in the Bush administration have privately concluded they have lost Iraq and are simply trying to postpone disaster so the next president will "be the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof," in a chaotic withdrawal reminiscent of Vietnam.

"I have reached the tentative conclusion that a significant portion of this administration, maybe even including the vice president, believes Iraq is lost," Biden said. "They have no answer to deal with how badly they have screwed it up. I am not being facetious now. Therefore, the best thing to do is keep it from totally collapsing on your watch and hand it off to the next guy -- literally, not figuratively."

Biden gave the comments in an interview as he outlined an ambitious agenda for the committee, including holding four weeks of hearings focused on every aspect of U.S. policy in Iraq. The hearings will call top political, economic and intelligence experts; foreign diplomats; and former and current senior U.S. officials to examine the situation in Iraq and possible plans for dealing with it. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will probably testify next Thursday to defend the president's new plan, but at least eight other plans will be examined over several sessions of the committee.

Other witnesses invited for at least 10 days of hearings include former national security advisers and secretaries of state, including Brent Scowcroft, Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry A. Kissinger, Madeleine K. Albright and George P. Shultz.

Biden expressed opposition to the president's plan for a "surge" of additional U.S. troops and said he has grave doubts about whether the Iraqi government has the will or the capacity to help implement a new approach. He said he hopes to use the hearings to "illuminate the alternatives available to this president" and to provide a platform for influencing Americans, especially Republican lawmakers.

"There is nothing a United States Senate can do to stop a president from conducting his war," Biden said. "The only thing that is going to change the president's mind, if he continues on a course that is counterproductive, is having his party walk away from his position."

Biden said that Vice President Cheney and former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld "are really smart guys who made a very, very, very, very bad bet, and it blew up in their faces. Now, what do they do with it? I think they have concluded they can't fix it, so how do you keep it stitched together without it completely unraveling?"

Hackers fool chump

Awwhh.. that's awsome, I couldn't make this stuff up if I had too.

Congressional aide tries to hire hackers to change college grades - but the joke's on him

Dan Kaplan Dec 28 2006 19:53

A Texas Christian University (TCU) graduate who solicited two hackers to infiltrate the college's database to improve his grade point average - but was instead strung along by the pair in an often humorous exchange of emails - has been fired after it emerged he was the top aide to a Montana congressman.

In August, Todd Shriber, 28, former communications director for Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., began email correspondence with two hackers - using the online aliases "Jericho" and "Lyger" - who run attrition.org, a site featuring computer security resources.

"I need to urgently make contact with a hacker that would be interested in doing a one-time job for me," Shriber said in his first email to Jericho. "The pay would be good."

Jericho and Lyger, who consider themselves "security enthusiasts," never attempted to breach TCU's database, instead choosing to engage in a series of emails with Shriber, who had no idea he was being duped by the hackers. They have since posted the 22-email exchange on their website.

"This was seemingly all a joke played on Mr. Shriber," Tracy Syler-Jones, a spokeswoman for TCU, told SCMagazine.com today. "We would certainly want Mr. Shriber to learn from this experience and move on and do well with the remainder of his career."

But, she said, the university "does take proactive steps….to continuously monitor and update our systems in an effort to prevent security breaches."

Shriber - a 2000 graduate from TCU with a broadcast journalism degree - was unaware that the joke was on him, even after Jericho asked Shriber to shoot a picture of a pigeon to prove that he was legitimate in his request, and not a federal agent.

"Forgive what I assume is (a) dumb question, but what are pigeons?" Shriber asked. "I know you're not talking about the bird."

"Actually I am," Jericho responded.

Using his friend's camera, Shriber shot two photos of a squirrel in a front yard and then emailed them to Jericho. He received permission to photograph a squirrel because he could not locate any pigeons.

Jericho and Lyger said their site - which has dedicated a section called "Going Postal" to chronicle bizarre requests they receive - entertain about two emails per day seeking hacker assistance.

"Some people mail us and seem like they will to any length to get what they want," Jericho told SCMagazine.com today. "We often test that."

The emails with Shriber were not all joking in manner. Jericho and Lyger mixed in some actual computer security jargon to make it appear to Shriber like they were attempting to access the college's network to make changes to Shriber's grades. (He told them he wanted his GPA modified because he was considering a run at graduate school).

"Have had a chance to set up a couple of IDS/IPS evasion bots, perimeter scanning came up clean," Lyger said in one email to Shriber. "Small SQL injection issue merged with XSS shows that the backend database may be either 768-bit encrypted or a simple 3DES matter, but a little more time should take care of that issue."

In addition, Jericho warned Shriber that what he was requesting was illegal.

"First, let's be clear," Jericho said. "You are soliciting me to break the law and hack into a computer across state lines. That is a federal offense and (punishable by) multiple felonies."

The correspondence ended when Lyger told Shriber in a profanity-ridden rant that TCU had discovered the attempted hack.

"I'm going deep underground," he said. "If they (authorities) ask about me or attrition, we don't know each other. You're just as guilty and liable so when they come knocking, don't say anything without a lawyer and when you ask them to put the gun down, say it nice because that (expletive) isn't fun."

Shriber was fired from his role as communications director to Rehberg after a blogger revealed his identity about a week ago and Shriber acknowledged the emails were his. The congressman's office refused to comment today to SCMagazine.com.

"It's a real head-scratcher," Erik Iverson, Rehberg's chief of staff, told the Dallas Morning News on Sunday. "This whole thing was really out of character for Todd, and I believe this was a one-time incident. At the end of the day, the position entails a lot of trust. This was a violation of that trust, and I just felt like we really didn't have any choice at that point (but to fire him)."

Jericho said he was "amused" when learning his victim was a congressman's aide and fired as a result of the stunt.

Click here to email reporter Dan Kaplan.

Related Links
attrition.org

Marx Cafe tonight.

Hey all, I'll be at marx playing music tonight around 10pm or so. Hope to see you there!

about time!

Interesting development

Monday, December 25, 2006
U.S. Blocks Arms, Technology To Israel (gesture to Saudis)
U.S. Blocks Arms, Technology To Israel

TEL AVIV [MENL] 23 December 2006 -- The Bush administration has blocked
arms and technology transfers to Israel.

Israeli and U.S. sources said the State Department has blocked the
transfer of weapons and technology to the Jewish state over the last three
months. The sources said the halt reflected deteriorating relations between
the two countries since the end of the war in Lebanon in August 2006.

"Nobody will say openly that there is a problem," a government source
said. "But there is a serious problem that reflects the marginalization of
Israel in U.S. strategy."

The unofficial suspension of U.S. arms deliveries began in late
September, the sources said. They said the suspension halted the airlift of
air-to-ground and other munitions conducted during and immediately after the
Israeli war with Hizbullah.

"Several weeks after the war, the U.S. supplies stopped," the source
said. "There was no real explanation."

The sources said the administration has held up a list of weapons
requested by Israel in wake of the Lebanon war. They said the weapons and
equipment -- including the Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM -- were
meant to replenish munitions and other stocks in preparation for a larger
war that would include Syria in mid-2007.

"The administration has not rejected any Israeli request," a U.S.
official said. "Instead, the State Department and Defense Department have
said that all requests must be examined."

The administration refusal to approve the Israeli requests has also
hampered military cooperation between the two countries. In November, the
Israel Air Force canceled plans to send delegations to the United States to
examine air systems and munitions.

A U.S. official said the White House was deeply disappointed by the
Israeli failure to defeat Hizbullah. The official said the war undermined
U.S. confidence in Israel's military and government.

"The word in the White House was that Israel lost the war," the official
said. "That alone led to a plummet in Israel's stock in the administration,
particularly the Pentagon."

The U.S. refusals have also hampered Israeli defense programs. The
sources said the State Department has prevented the transfer of data and
technology, even from projects that included Israeli participation.

In one case, State prevented Northrop Grumman from providing details of
its Skyguard laser weapon, which the company has sought to sell to Israel.
The ban led to the suspension of Israeli negotiations to procure Skyguard,
designed to intercept short-range rockets and missiles.

The sources said the halt in U.S. weapons exports to Israel was designed
to assuage Saudi Arabia. They said Riyad has increasingly linked regional
cooperation with Washington to pressure on Israel to halt attacks on
Palestinian insurgency strongholds in the Gaza Strip.

"The White House believes that Saudi help is vital for the United
States in Iraq," a diplomatic source said. "There's nothing like stopping
the weapons flow to Israel to show the Saudis that the United States means
business."

Women's rights in Iraq

Jeez, what a kick in the face.

The Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) recently issued a frightening report documenting the growing practice of public executions of women by Shia Militia. One of the report's more grisly accounts was a story of a young woman dragged by a wire wound around her neck to a close-by football field and then hung to the goal post. They pierced her body with bullets. Her brother came running trying to defend his sister. He was also shot and killed. Sunni extremists are no better: OWFI members estimate that no less than 30 women are executed monthly for honor related reasons.

Almost four years into the Bush Administration's ill fated adventure in Iraq, Iraqi women are worse off than they were under the Baathist regime in a country where, for decades, the freedoms and rights enjoyed by Iraqi women were the envy of women in most other countries of the Middle East.

Before the U.S. invasion, Iraqi women had high levels of education. Their strong and independent women's movement had successfully forced Saddam's government to pass the groundbreaking 1959 Family Law Act which ensured equal rights in matters of personal law. Iraqi women could inherit land and property; they had equal rights to divorce and custody of their children; they were protected from domestic violence within the marriage. In other words, they had achieved real gains in the struggle for equality between women and men. Iraqi women, like all Iraqis, certainly suffered from the political repression and lack of freedom, but the secular -- albeit brutal -- Baathist regime protected women from the religious extremism that denies freedom to a majority of women in the Arab world.

The invasion of Iraq, however, changed the status of Iraqi women for the worse. Iraq's new colonial power, the United States, elevated a new group of leaders, most of who were allied with ultra conservative Shia clerics. Among the Sunni minority, the quick disappearance of their once dominant political power led to a resurgence of religious identity. Consequently, the Kurds, celebrated for their history of resistance to the Iraqi dictator, were able to reclaim traditions like honor killings, putting thousands of women at risk.

Iraqi sectarian conflict has exacerbated violence against women, making women's bodies the battlefields on which vendettas and threats are played out. My organization, The Global Fund for Women, and the humanitarian community has long known that the presence of military troops in a region of conflict increases the rate of prostitution, violence against women, and the potential for human trafficking.

While many believed that interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq would result in greater freedoms for women, international women's rights organizations like the Global Fund for Women were highly skeptical of the Bush administration's claims from the start. US representatives in Iraq failed to even listen to, much less validate, the voices of independent and secular Iraqi women leaders like Yana Mohammed during the process of drafting the constitution. As a result, the Iraqi constitution elevated Islamic law over constitutional rights for matters pertaining to personal and family matters.

For the first time in over 50 years of Iraq's history, Iraqi women's right to be treated as equal citizens has been overturned. This disgrace has happened on the watch of the United States. In many ways, it is no less shameful than the human rights abuses that occurred at Abu Ghraib. If left unchallenged, it has the potential to affect many thousands of innocent lives in the years to come.

Since the US has failed to protect Iraqi women's rights, a new Secretary General of the United Nations must demonstrate the courage and conviction to take action. The women of Iraq deserve nothing less. We owe them at least this much.

Digg!

Tagged as: iraq war, iraqi women, violence against women, honor killings

Kavita N. Ramdas, President and Chief Executive Officer of The Global Fund for Women, has won numerous awards for her vision and advancement of an inclusive philanthropy in which donors and grantees are treated as equal partners.

Marx Cafe Tonight!

I'll be at Marx tonight, playing modern 2step and old school garage classics. Come out, mention this blog and I'll buy you a drink. Music starts at 9, goes till 2.

3203 Mount Pleasant St. NW

Ebay "second chance" scams

Dosen't sound terribly complicated, a simple operation. I wonder how many others involved managed to escape arrest.

Chicagoans held on Internet fraud charges

By Jeff Coen
Tribune staff reporter
Published December 12, 2006, 9:38 PM CST

Eight people were arrested in the Chicago area Tuesday as part of an Internet fraud scheme that allegedly included bogus auctions on eBay and involved millions of dollars, federal authorities said.

Some 2,000 people may have been victimized between November 2003 and last August, authorities said.

Prosecutors charged 21 people with wire fraud in a complaint unsealed Tuesday. In the scheme, which originated in Romania, people who were unsuccessful bidders at Internet auctions were given a "second chance" to buy big-ticket items, according to the complaint.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Brian Hayes said participants in the ring would contact those who had bid unsuccessfully in the auctions. "Sometimes they would offer the exact item that people had bid on previously, saying that the guy who was going to purchase it had fallen through," Hayes said, adding that the items varied.

"It was cars, ATV's, motorcycles, trailers," he said, "even farm equipment."

The victims were told to send money via Western Union to someone in the Chicago area, the complaint states.

Federal authorities began to unravel the ring in October 2005 when Gary Michael Schneider, 25, of Chicago, was arrested on a fraud warrant out of Minnesota, according to the affidavit of Michael Blessing, an FBI agent in the case.

Schneider had been recruited to join the scheme the prior July by Adrian Florin Fechete, 35, of the 6100 block of North Seeley Avenue in Chicago, the affidavit states. Schneider began cooperating with authorities after his arrest, telling the FBI he had first been directed to make money pickups at Western Union locations, and then recruited friends to help.

Schneider and those he brought into the scheme received fraud proceeds totaling about $356,000, Blessing's affidavit states. Schneider has been given no specific promises for leniency, Hayes said.

No goods were ever provided for the payments, and much of the proceeds wound up going to people outside the United States, authorities said. Those working the scheme in the Chicago area allegedly obtained fake identification to use when receiving money transfers from victims, several hundred of whom have discussed their losses with authorities.

The U.S. attorney's office, the FBI, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Chicago police were involved in the probe, officials said. Investigators were able to determine the identities of many of those who allegedly participated by combing through Western Union records.

Those arrested in the Chicago area Tuesday included Aida Salem, 40; Jessie Vega, 25; Adrian Ianc, 32; Mihai Bledea, 30; and Igor Ashlan, 60; all of Chicago. Also arrested were Gianina Simon, 30, of Addison; Muszka Ladislau, 32, of Glenview; and Radu Rizescu, 31, of Elk Grove Village.

They are scheduled to appear Friday before U.S. Magistrate Judge Maria Valdez for a detention hearing.

The U.S. attorney's office in Chicago asked anyone who believed they might be a victim of the scheme to e-mail the office at usailn.victim.witness@usdoj.gov and include your name, address and phone number.

Or call the toll-free hot line at 866-364-2621.

Hayes said the best way to avoid being duped in such a scam is to use common sense. "Don't wire transfer money to someone you don't know or someone who's not an established retail presence," Hayes said, warning that doing so can leave consumers with little recourse if the person receiving the funds is not on the up and up.

jcoen@tribune.com

Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune

Father, son die in bizarre incident

My my.. What a tragic and senseless accident, I can't bring myself to joke about it.

By Indo Asian News Service

New Delhi, Nov 22 (IANS) A mentally-challenged man, jumped off his eight-storey apartment Wednesday, only to fall on his son standing below. Both died.

Police said 74-year-old Kailash Chand Garg, a resident of sector 22 of Dwarka in southwest Delhi, bolted his room from inside and went to the terrace. His 47-year-old son Sudhir Garg, went down and pleaded with his father to come down.

But Kailash Chand jumped and fell on Sudhir. The father died on the spot while Sudhir died in the hospital where he was taken for treatment.

Copyright Indo-Asian News Service

Elderly driver leaves road

awh.. being old sounds like fun, I'll have to wait and see. I wish someone had thought to film this.

About a Dozen Hurt After Car Crashes into Restaurant

Dec 11, 2006 06:01 AM

About a dozen people were injured Sunday night after a car plowed into the dining area of an Sshkosh restaurant.

It happened at about 5:45 p.m. at Mr. Cinders restaurant, ocated on 9th Avenue, near Highway 41 in Oshkosh.

Police say the bizarre incident could have been a lot worse.

They say an elderly man was driving a tan Grand Marques north on Washburn Street when he drove off the road and right into the dining area.

On Sunday night, investigators were reconstructing the scene and interviewing witnesses to get a better grasp on how it happened.

Police say the man's granddaughter was in the car with him.

Police say about a dozen people were hurt and brought to Mercy Medical Center.

When officers arrived the driver was conscious and alert, but his exact condition was not available.

People around town say Mr. Cinders restaurant is a popular establishment, with a very loyal customer base.

But, the restaurant was not very crowded when the crash happened.

Sgt. Steve Weyers of the Oshkosh Police Department said "In just hearing some of the owners that were inside talking, said they think that because the Packers were playing that it may have helped keep the totals down, maybe some of the numbers in the restaurant."

The restaurant owner says he's already talking to construction companines about fixing this place up.

He says he'd like to be back open soon, but a time frame is not known yet.

Iraq in a nutshell

Well, that just about sums it up nicely.

Said Cordesmann: "The U.S. effectively sent a bull in to liberate a china shop, and the Study Group now called upon the U.S. to threaten to remove the bull if the shop doesn't fix the china."