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Artificial reef made of tires becomes ecological disaster

What began 30 years ago as an idealistic plan to shape an artificial coral reef has become an underwater wasteland

A plan in the early 1970s to create a massive artificial reef off Fort Lauderdale has turned into an environmental mess with the U.S. Navy, Broward County and others trying to figure out how to remove about two million tires covering 36 acres of ocean floor.

What was intended to lure game fish now is damaging sensitive coral reefs and littering Broward’s tourist-populated shoreline.

”They thought it would be a good fish habitat. It turned out to be a bad idea,” said William Nuckols, project coordinator and military liaison for Coastal America, a federal group involved in the cleanup. “It’s a coastal coral destruction machine.”

There’s a video of the desolate scene here.

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Last week, news reports circulated about a cyber thief who strolled into a gas station in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and, with no special equipment, reprogrammed the mini ATM in the corner to think it had $5.00 bills in its dispensing tray, instead of $20.00 bills.

Using a pre-paid debit card, the crook then made a withdrawal, and casually strolled off with a 300% profit in his pocket.

Foolishly, he left the ATM misprogrammed this way for 9 days — presumably to the delight of other customers — before a good Samaritan reported the issue and exposed the caper.

How, exactly, he pulled off the swindle remained unreported. Curious, Dave Goldsmith, a computer security researcher at Matasano Security began poking around. Based on CNN’s video, he identified the ATM as a Tranax Mini Bank 1500 series.

He then set out to see if he could get a copy of the manual for the apparently-vulnerable machine to find out how the hack worked. Fifteen minutes later, he reported success.

I am holding in my hands a legitimately obtained copy of the manual. There are a lot of security sensitive things inside of this manual. As promised, I am not going to reveal them, but there are: 

• Instructions on how to enter the diagnostic mode.
• Default passwords
• Default Combinations For the Safe

Do not ask me for them.

I didn’t have to. Following his clues, I found a copy of the Tranax manual online, from a third-party website, within a few seconds. Sure enough, it includes a special key sequence to put the ATM into “Operator Mode.” Passwords are required from there, but the default passwords are listed.

The manual suggests operators change the default passwords. Presumably, Tranax sent out a reminder of this important tip last week after the Virginia heist appeared on CNN. Otherwise, expect long lines at the ATM for a while.

Na alles wat ze hebben geblunderd, kost dit ze uiteindelijk de kop?

Wat een land….

en het kabinet was al net-niet-demissionair, met de belofte zo min mogelijk te doen – gaan ze nu beloven nog minder te doen?

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A Missouri mother is angry that her first-grader was suspended from school over a plastic toy gun.

“I asked her, ‘You’re going to suspend my son for 10 days for this? He cannot harm a soul with this,’” said Danielle Womack, whose son, Tawann Caskey, was suspended from Milton Moore Elementary School in Kansas City.

Tawann was suspended over a 2-inch plastic squirt gun.

“She told me it’s a weapon, a little girl saw it and reported to a teacher that he had a weapon,” Womack said.

According to Kansas City, Mo., School District policy, the squirt gun is a simulated weapon and a class IV, which is the most serious school offense. Principals claim to have no discretion in cases like Tawaan’s. It is an automatic 10-day suspension.

“We ask our principals for safety of students and staff, and we do follow the code of conduct and do not give exceptions to Class IV offenses. We take it very seriously,” the school district’s Phyllis Budesheim said.

The incident will stay on Tawann’s permanent school record. But Womack said her son does not understand why he’s not in school.

And if you’re wondering what this dangerous Class IV weapon looks like:

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U.S. President George Bush is a big winner in this year’s World Stupidity Awards, joining the likes of the entire petroleum industry and Vice President Dick Cheney as the recipients of top honours.

Bush was nominated in several categories, including Stupidest Statement of the Year and Most Out of Touch with Reality in the awards roundup which was created to “salute achievement in ignorance and stupidity.”

But the big winner, taking home the prize for the flagship category Stupidest Man of the Year, was District Judge Donald Thompson.

Known as the “Oklahoma Penis Pump Judge,” Thompson operated a powerful penis pump underneath his robes — while court was in session — during at least three trials. He was convicted on June 29 of four counts of felony indecent exposure.

The awards, now in their fourth year, were created by Canadian actor, director and journalist Albert Nerenberg who worked with the philosophy that “we’re all stupid, some of us just need to have it pointed out.”

[..]

Stupidest Trend of the Year was won cleanly by “Killing people for God.”

Bush took honours in the category of “Stupidest Statement by George W. Bush.” The president’s televised statement to FEMA director Michael Brown during the Hurricane Katrina devastation: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” won easily.

Bush also won for being Most out of Touch with Reality.

The Middle East won the Lifetime Achievement Award for Stupidity.

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Graduate business students in the United States and Canada are more likely to cheat on their work than their counterparts in other academic fields, the author of a research paper said on Wednesday.

The study of 5,300 graduate students in the United States and Canada found that 56 percent of graduate business students admitted to cheating in the past year, with many saying they cheated because they believed it was an accepted practice in business.

Diverting a plane’s flightplan happens when a terrorist or other threat to the safety of the flight is assumed. Apparently two men kissing will cause cabin decompression, or the plane will suddenly nosedive into a skyscraper, or something.

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Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) released its second annual report on the most corrupt members of Congress entitled Beyond DeLay: The 20 Most Corrupt Members of Congress (and five to watch). This encyclopedic report on corruption in the 109th Congress documents the egregious, unethical and possibly illegal activities of the most tainted members of Congress. CREW has compiled the members’ transgressions and analyzed them in light of federal laws and congressional rules.

Two members have been removed from last year’s list of 13. Rep. Randy “Duke�? Cunningham (R-CA) is now serving an eight-year jail term for bribery and Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) has agreed to plead guilty to crimes that will likely result in a minimum two-year prison term.

CREW has also re-launched the report’s tandem website, www.beyonddelay.org. The site offers short summaries of each member’s transgressions as well as the full-length profiles and all accompanying exhibits.

CREW’s Most Corrupt Members of Congress:
Members of the Senate:
Conrad Burns (R-MT)
Bill Frist (R-TN)
Rick Santorum (R-PA)

Members of the House:
Alan Mollohan (D-WV)
Roy Blunt (R-MO)
Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO)
Ken Calvert (R-CA)
Richard Pombo (R-CA)
John Doolittle (R-CA)
Rick Renzi (R-AZ)
Tom Feeney (R-FL)
Pete Sessions (R-TX)
Katherine Harris (R-FL)
John Sweeney (R-NY)
William Jefferson (D-LA)
Charles Taylor (R-NC)
Jerry Lewis (R-CA)
Maxine Waters (D-CA)
Gary Miller (R-CA)
Curt Weldon (R-PA)

Five Members to Watch:
Chris Cannon (R-UT)
J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ)
Dennis Hastert (R-IL)
John Murtha (D-PA)
Don Sherwood (R-PA)

4 D, 21 R. Woa.

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When U.S. civilian airplanes were spotted in late 2002 taking trips to and from Andrews Air Force Base, and making stops in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, journalists and plane-spotters wondered what was going on. It soon became clear that these planes were part of the largest covert operation since the Cold War era. Called extraordinary rendition, the practice involves CIA officials or contractors kidnapping people and sending them to secret prisons around the world where they are held and often tortured, either at the hands of the host-country’s government or by CIA personnel themselves.

On Sept. 6, after a long period of official no-comments, President Bush acknowledged the program’s existence. But the extent of its operations has yet to be publicly disclosed.

How extensive is it? Trevor Paglen, an expert in clandestine military installations, and A.C. Thompson, an award-winning journalist for S.F. Weekly, spent months tracking the CIA flights and the businesses behind them. What they found was a startlingly broad network of planes (including the Gulfstream jet belonging to Boston Red Sox co-owner Phillip Morse), shell companies, and secret prisons around the world. Perhaps the most disturbing revelation of their new book “Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights�? is the collusion of everyday Americans in this massive CIA program. From family lawyers who bolster the shell companies, to an entire town in Smithfield, N.C., that hosts CIA planes and pilots, “Torture Taxi�? is the story of the broad reach of extraordinary rendition, and, as Hannah Arendt coined the phrase, the banality of evil.

via

The principles of this world beyond terror can be found in the very first sentence of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document declares that, “The equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom and justice and peace in the world.

– President Bush at the United Nations, Sept 19, 2006

COMPLETE list of states NOT YET RATIFYING the CONVENTION ON THE ELIMINATION OF ALL FORMS OF DISCRIMINATION AGAINST WOMEN (CEDAW), one of the enabling conventions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Holy See
Montenegro
United States of America
Iran (Islamic Republic of)
Nauru
Palau
Qatar
Tonga
Somalia
Sudan
Latest to ratify: Cook Islands, August 11, 2006
Note: This treaty was signed by Jimmy Carter and has gone unratified by the United States of America for 27 years.

COMPLETE list of states NOT YET RATIFYING the INTERNATIONAL COVENANT ON ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS (CESCR)
Andorra
Antigua and Barbuda
Bahamas
Bahrain
Belize
Bhutan
Brunei Darussalam
Comoros
Cook Islands
Cuba
Fiji
Haiti
Holy See
Kazakhstan
Kiribati
Lao People’s Democratic Republic
Malaysia
Maldives
Marshall Islands
Micronesia (Federated States of)
Mozambique
Myanmar
Nauru
Niue
Oman
Pakistan
Palau
Papua New Guinea
Qatar
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Saint Lucia
Sao Tome and Principe
Saudi Arabia
Singapore
South Africa
Tonga
United States of America
This treaty was signed by Jimmy Carter in 1977 and has gone unratified by the United States of America for 29 years.

International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (MWC) — NOT SIGNED OR RATIFIED BY USA (adopted:1990)

CONVENTION ON THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD (CRC) — SIGNED (1995) BUT NOT RATIFIED BY USA (adopted:1989)Status:  192 countries have ratified this Treaty.

CONVENTION AGAINST TORTURE (CAT) — RATIFIED BY USA (1994), but ignored at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, among other locations.

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The House Judiciary Committee just reversed itself, calling a re-vote and passing a controversial detainee treatment bill that has White House backing, according to House sources.

Earlier today, the panel had voted down the measure, 18-17, with three members not voting. The re-vote swung the tally to 20-18 in favor of the bill.

Update: WSJ’s Washington Wire has more details (and a better vote tally — we’d originally reported 17-20). “The amendment might have passed had two Democrats not missed the vote; the two were at a news conference on the Medicare drug benefit.”

Huh? Lose the vote, wait for the opposition to leave the room, revote and win? Is this a democracy or a banana republic?

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Een Nederlandse man is maandag in de Dominicaanse Republiek aangehouden met honderd bolletjes cocaïne in zijn maag. Dat heeft een woordvoerder van de DNCD, de Dominicaanse antidrugseenheid, woensdag laten weten.

De man werd gearresteerd op het vliegveld Punta Cana, vanwaar hij naar Amsterdam wilde vliegen. Hij is overgebracht naar het ziekenhuis, waar de bolletjes uit zijn maag zijn verwijderd.

Naar verluid had hij de bolletjes genummerd, en hebben ze in het ziekenhuis nog een hele leuke bingo avond gehad…

Credit & Copyright: Thierry Legault

Though it’s 93 million miles away, the Sun still hurts your eyes when you look at it. But bright sunlight (along with accurate planning and proper equipment!) resulted in this sharp silhouette of spaceship and space station. The amazing telescopic view, recorded on September 17, captures shuttle orbiter Atlantis and the International Space Station in orbit over planet Earth. At a range of 550 kilometers from the observing site near Mamers, Normandy, France, Atlantis (left) has just undocked and moved about 200 meters away from the space station. Tomorrow, yet another satellite of planet Earth can be seen in silhouette – the Moon will eclipse the Sun. This last eclipse of 2006 will be seen as an annular solar eclipse along a track that crosses northern South America and the south Atlantic.

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California sued six of the world’s largest automakers over global warming on Wednesday, charging that greenhouse gases from their vehicles have caused billions of dollars in damages.

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Top Gear’s Richard Hammond is seriously ill in hospital after a crash in a jet-powered car while filming for the BBC programme.

The 36-year-old presenter was taken by air ambulance to Leeds General Infirmary’s neurological unit.

A spokesman for the hospital said Mr Hammond was “stable”.

Mr Hammond had been driving a dragster-style car capable of reaching 300mph at the former RAF airfield in Elvington, near York.