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Friday, June 29, 2007 |
BBC: "Police have disabled a car bomb containing gas cylinders in the heart of central London."
This is a weird story. Two days after Gordon Brown became pm this happens. The media comments are again full of scare mongering speculations: dirty bomb, nuclear, biological bomb, they were all mentioned.
Looks like a Special Branch operation to me, the kind we are not allowed to know everything of. Just a wild guess, of course. Why couldn't this be a warning to Brown to stay the course set by Blair?
Anyway, so far I don't swallow this bomb story.
Independent: "Today's dramatic discovery of a massive bomb in the heart of central London has led to the convening of the Government's 'Cobra' emergency response committee.
The Cobra committee - which brings together ministers, officials and experts to discuss urgent concerns - will meet at official rather than ministerial level to go over what is known about this morning's dramatic events.
They will then brief the Cabinet, which is due to meet later today.
It will be the emergency committee's first meeting since the Cabinet was reshuffled."
Ah, there you have it. A warning to the new Cabinet and/or a try-out of the new committee?
Reuters: "British gilt futures crept up on Friday after police defused a suspected bomb in central London, tempting investors into the relative safety of highest grade government debt.
Absent the bomb scare, gilt and interest rate futures had been expected to weaken slightly after the U.S. Federal Reserve kept interest rates steady on Thursday but said price pressures in the economy were still its number one concern."
Seems like a farewell gift from Blair to Brown. Don't worry, ye good citizen, the government has everything under control.
11:24:28 AM 
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Email message from the Yes Men: "One day after the Yes Men made a joke announcement that ExxonMobil plans to turn billions of climate-change victims into a brand-new fuel called Vivoleum, the Yes Men's upstream internet service provider shut down Vivoleum.com, the Yes Men's spoof website, and cut off the Yes Men's email service, in reaction to a complaint whose source they will not identify. The provider, Broadview Networks, also made the Yes Men remove all mention of Exxon from TheYesMen.org before they'd restore the Yes Men's email service.
The Yes Men assume the complainant was Exxon. 'Since parody is protected under US law, Exxon must think that people seeing the site will think Vivoleum's a real Exxon product, not just a parody,' said Yes Man Mike Bonanno. 'Exxon's policies do already contribute to 150,000 climate-change related deaths each year,' added Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum. 'So maybe it really is credible. What a resource!'
After receiving the complaint June 15, Broadview added a 'filter' that disabled the Vivoleum.com IP address (64.115.210.59), and furthermore prevented email from being sent from the Yes Men's primary IP address (64.115.210.58). Even after all Exxon logos were removed from both sites and a disclaimer was placed on Vivoleum.com on Tuesday, Broadview would still not remove the filter. (The disclaimer read: 'Although Vivoleum is not a real ExxonMobil program, it might as well be.')
Broadview did restore both IPs on Wednesday, after the Vivoleum.com
website was completely disabled and all mention of Exxon was removed from TheYesMen.org."
11:11:37 AM
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Azzaman: "As U.S. troops battle to retake Baghdad and surrounding areas, the government is reported to have lost its control of Basra where almost all of the country's oil exports originate.
The city, according to well-placed sources, is under the hegemony of militias who do not run its streets only but have imposed levies and taxes on oil output."
11:01:04 AM
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IHT: "The White House announced Thursday that it was invoking executive privilege to reject subpoenas for internal documents that Congress is seeking in its investigation into the firings of nine federal prosecutors last year.
The White House counsel, Fred Fielding, made clear that the Bush administration would not release documents from two senior officials - Harriet Miers, the former counsel to the president, and Sara Taylor, the director of political affairs - and that it would not allow them to testify before Congress. The White House has rejected previous requests from the Senate and House judiciary committees to interview presidential aides, saying instead that it would allow interviews in private if no transcripts were kept."
The Nation: "No one was all that surprised when the Bush administration announced Thursday that it would not cooperate with congressional demands for documents and testimony by prominent former officials that would likely confirm this White House's reckless disregard for the rule of law.
What was surprising, and encouraging, was the decisiveness with which key players in Congress responded.
After the White House asserted executive privilege in rejecting subpoenas issued by the House and Senate Judiciary committees as part of the ongoing probe of abuses within the Department of Justice, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers wasted no time expressing his sense that a Contempt of Congress citation is in order.
The issuance of a Contempt of Congress citation would provoke the sort of Constitutional showdown that it now appears will be required if this administration is to be held to account for its abuses of power. In such a showdown between the legislative and executive branches, the third branch of the federal government, the judiciary, would be asked to decide whether the White House has a right to assert, as White House counsel Fred Fielding did in a letter telling the committee chairs that their demands would not be met.
'Increasingly,' says Leahy, 'the president and vice president feel they are above the law - in America no one is above law.'
The senator is right, at least in theory.
But, in practice, this administration has operated above, or more precisely outside the law for more than six years. Without proper congressional and judicial oversight, the White House has expanded the reach and authority of the executive branch far beyond the limits imagined by the founders. And it will continue to do so until Congress reasserts itself as a coequal branch of government.
That process begins with the issuance of Contempt of Congress citations. For the sake of the Republic, those citations cannot be dispatched quickly enough."
Slate: "In grasping and exercising presidential powers, Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed King George III. The most recent invention we know of is the vice president's insistence that an executive order governing the handling of classified information in the executive branch does not reach his office because he also serves as president of the Senate. In other words, the vice president is a unique legislative-executive creature standing above and beyond the Constitution. The House judiciary committee should commence an impeachment inquiry. As Alexander Hamilton advised in the Federalist Papers, an impeachable offense is a political crime against the nation. Cheney's multiple crimes against the Constitution clearly qualify."
10:58:54 AM
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LiveEarth: "Live Earth is a 24-hour, 7-continent concert series taking place on 7/7/07 that will bring together more than 100 music artists and 2 billion people to trigger a global movement to solve the climate crisis."
10:44:45 AM
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RawStory: "Sweden, already a pioneer in giving same-sex couples the right to adopt children, looks set to allow gays to marry in the Lutheran Church, with plans to introduce a new marriage law in January 2008.
If the so-called 'gender neutral' marriage legislation is adopted, the Scandinavian country would become the first in the world to allow gays to marry within a major church."
This is a very positive sign in a world in which gay bashing is again on the rise.
Fight hate crimes.
And if we are honest much of the intolerant attitude is due to the prejudice of the immigrant population. No, not all of them, but some countries stand out prominently. One of these is Poland with its rabid Catholic fundamentalism. Then you have countries like Turkey, Romania, Albania which still have problems with human rights and see Europe only as a source of free money, while doing nothing to promote tolerance.
By the way, what's up in Poland? And this is just one of the more decent images. Actually, Poland is acting like a bully since their entry into Europe. I never was a fan of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but Poland is going berserk. To say nothing of their cooperation with US torture schemes.
IC: "The head of the Turkish armed forces insisted Wednesday on the need for a military incursion into northern Iraq to hunt down Turkish Kurd rebels based there, but said he needed the government's green light to do so."
The first thing those countries will have to learn is tolerance.
10:36:02 AM
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