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This image from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity near the rim of “Victoria Crater.” Victoria is an impact crater about 800 meters (half a mile) in diameter at Meridiani Planum near the equator of Mars. Opportunity has been operating on Mars since January, 2004. Five days before this image was taken, Opportunity arrived at the rim of Victoria, after a drive of more than 9 kilometers (over 5 miles). It then drove to the position where it is seen in this image.

Shown in the image are “Duck Bay,” the eroded segment of the crater rim where Opportunity first arrived at the crater; “Cabo Frio,” a sharp promontory to the south of Duck Bay; and “Cape Verde,” another promontory to the north. When viewed at the highest resolution, this image shows the rover itself, wheel tracks in the soil behind it, and the rover’s shadow, including the shadow of the camera mast. After this image was taken, Opportunity moved to the very tip of Cape Verde to perform more imaging of the interior of the crater.

Awesome

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European Union and US negotiators have struck a new deal on sharing airline passenger data, resolving concerns that failure to reach an accord before a 1 October legal deadline might affect trans-Atlantic air travel.

Summary of the deal: EU caved.

Fucking morons.

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There are two groups of misguided Republicans.  The first is Gay Republicans, people who believe that their interests can be represented by a party that bashes them at every turn.  The second group is homophobic “family values republicans,” who are proving once again the foolishness of the first group by trying to turn the Mark Foley paige scandal into a “gay” scandal, as opposed to a Republican one.  In this vein, they have created a list of all Republican gay staffers, and it is only a matter of time before it is on the net, according to David Corn.

There’s a list going around. Those disseminating it call it “The List.” It’s a roster of top-level Republican congressional aides who are gay.

On CBS News on Tuesday, correspondent Gloria Borger reported that there’s anger among House Republicans at what an unidentified House GOPer called a “network of gay staffers and gay members who protect each other and did the Speaker a disservice.” The implication is that these gay Republicans somehow helped page-pursuing Mark Foley before his ugly (and possibly illegal) conduct was exposed. The List–drawn up by gay politicos–is a partial accounting of who on Capitol Hill might be in that network.

I have a copy. I’m not going to publish it. For one, I don’t know for a fact that the men on the list are gay. And generally I don’t fancy outing people–though I have not objected when others have outed gay Republicans, who, after all, work for a party that tries to limit the rights of gays and lesbians and that welcomes the support of those who demonize same-sexers.

What’s interesting about The List–which includes nine chiefs of staffs, two press secretaries, and two directors of communications–is that (if it’s acucurate) it shows that some of the religious right’s favorite representatives and senators have gay staffers helping them advance their political careers and agendas. These include Representative Katherine Harris and Henry Hyde and Senators Bill Frist, George Allen, Mitch McConnell and Rick Santorum.

The idea here is simple.  The cause of the Foley scandal was not a lack of Congressional oversight in general, but merely an overtolerance of gays.  

If Republicans think that releasing this list will solve their political problems, they are kidding themselves.  Outing high-ranking gay Republicans will only have the effect of 1.) humiliating and enraging the few misguided gay republicans that there are and 2.) further disgusting the “family values voters” and keeping them away from the polls.  

In effect, the Republican civil war is likely to get even worse, and even more disgusting.

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Wearing a helmet and a flak jacket and flanked by machine-gun-toting bodyguards to defend against insurgents, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice came here Thursday, insisting that there were new signs of progress in Iraq and that the Bush administration had never sugarcoated its news about the American occupation.

“It is a quite critical time for the Iraqi government,�? Ms. Rice said of the reasons for her brief unannounced visit to the Iraqi capital.

Of course it’s an “unannounced visit” – an announced visit would result in getting her killed. But it looks like this attempt at removing the spotlight from the Foley case is backfiring badly:

It began inauspiciously when the military transport plane that brought her to Baghdad was forced to circle the city for about 40 minutes because of what a State Department spokesman later said was either mortar fire or rockets at the airport.

On Thursday evening, during her meeting with President Jalal Talabani, the lights went out, forcing Ms. Rice to continue the discussion in the dark. It was a reminder of the city’s erratic — and sometimes nonexistent — electrical service.

She arrived in the midst of an especially bloody few days for American troops. At least 21 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq since Saturday, most in Baghdad. Two car bombings in the city on Thursday left at least four Iraqi civilians dead.

And ABC:

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How bad is bad? After six weeks away from Iraq and returning to Baghdad, I find the city appears much worse than when I left.

Last week, according to a U.S. military spokesman, Baghdad experienced more attacks from car bombs and improvised explosive devices than at any other time this year. In the last five days, 14 U.S. soldiers have died in Baghdad, numbers that haven’t been seen in the city since the 2003 invasion.

ABC’s local Iraqi staff tell us there are an increasing number of neighborhoods they no longer dare to visit.

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The invasion of Afghanistan, coming just weeks after the 9/11 attacks, was one of the most intensely covered news stories of all time. How much information were you taking in? Here’s a tougher-than-our-usual-weekly-news-quiz test of your Afghanistan knowledge from the final three months of 2001.

Damn. Only 7/10, I’m ashamed to say…

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When a neighbour knocked on her door and explained his son had accidentally kicked a football into her garden, Angela Hickling was happy to return it.

But despite carrying out a thorough search the grandmother-of-two could not find the ball anywhere.

Assuming Christopher Salisbury was mistaken, she thought nothing more of it.

So the law-abiding 56-year-old was astonished when a policeman arrived at her home and arrested her on suspicion of theft.

PC Mark Stokoe, of Derbyshire Constabulary, insisted he had proof of her wrong-doing – a photograph of a white leather Mitre ball on her lawn.

Stunned housewife Mrs Hickling was hauled from her dinner table, driven to a police station, quizzed for 90 minutes and had her fingerprints and a DNA sample taken before being released on bail.

Not surprisingly, police dropped the case a few days later because of lack of evidence.

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Finally, a personal note. I am in Vermont now for a week and I went to a lovely church supper yesterday. Who should walk in but Rich Tarrant, Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, facing Bernie Sanders, who is officially an independent, but in practice a Democrat. Tarrant works the room, shaking hands with about 80 people and making small talk with all of them. I was one of the last. So I said to him: “You realize that everyone in this room except for the little kids who are serving and one or two cooks is from out of state?” He looked like somebody had just punched him in the stomach. Here is a guy from Vermont who doesn’t know the state is overrun by leaf peepers from all over the country the first week of October? He also didn’t realize that the supper had been organized by one of the local churches to be neighborly to the tourists and maybe make a little bit of money for the church (they charged $8.50 a head but members of the congregation donated the food). I guess Tarrant is not a member of the reality-based community.

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Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day acknowledged Thursday that U.S. agents conduct investigations in Canada but said all are done according to Canadian law.

Day was responding to a report regarding an internal FBI audit that shows U.S. agents are carrying out investigations without the approval of the Canadian government.

It says the FBI has given agents in its Buffalo field office clearance to conduct “routine investigations” up to 50 miles into Canadian territory.

When asked about the report during question period, Day said Canadian security forces work with Canada’s allies, including the U.S, and have agreements in terms of information sharing.

“We have teams that are designated going back and forth across the border and sometimes it is farther than 50 miles or 50 kilometres,” Day said.

[..]

As well as the reference to “routine investigations” inside Canadian territory it also says that about 30 per cent of FBI agents crossing the border to work in Canada failed to get “country clearance.” In other words, they didn’t get Canada’s approval.

In the post-9/11 world, the US can do whatever the fuck it wants. You’re either with us, or against us. Now, watch this drive.

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60 Minutes, in collaboration with the National Security News Service, has obtained the secret list used to screen airline passengers for terrorists and discovered it includes names of people not likely to cause terror, including the president of Bolivia, people who are dead and names so common, they are shared by thousands of innocent fliers.

[..]

The “data dump” of names from the files of several government agencies, including the CIA, fed into the computer compiling the list contained many unlikely terrorists. These include Saddam Hussein, who is under arrest, Nabih Berri, Lebanon’s parliamentary speaker, and Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia. It also includes the names of 14 of the 19 dead 9/11 hijackers.

But the names of some of the most dangerous living terrorists or suspects are kept off the list.

The 11 British suspects recently charged with plotting to blow up airliners with liquid explosives were not on it, despite the fact they were under surveillance for more than a year.

The name of David Belfield who now goes by Dawud Sallahuddin, is not on the list, even though he assassinated someone in Washington, D.C., for former Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini. This is because the accuracy of the list meant to uphold security takes a back seat to overarching security needs: it could get into the wrong hands. “The government doesn’t want that information outside the government,” says Cathy Berrick, director of Homeland Security investigations for the General Accounting Office.

So all the people they’ve been harassing and double and triple searching are the guys we’re NOT actually worried about?

The reason the no-fly list is so ineffective is because it’s not about terrorism at all. This administration is not interested in fighting terrorism. They now have ALL the ingredients of a police state; controlled borders, ability to forbid people to fly, and the ability to point a finger at you and disappear you any time they like.

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De heffing voor consumenten op mp3-spelers en harddiskrecorders in Nederland wordt mogelijk al per 1 januari 2007 een feit. Dat blijkt uit een brandbrief van drie verontruste branche-organisaties aan de Minister van Justitie Hirsch Ballin.

Deze zogenaamde thuiskopievergoeding zou de prijs van een mp3-speler in Nederland met tot 25 euro verhogen, evenals die van een gangbare harddiskrecorder, de opvolger van de videorecorder. Op dit moment bedraagt de heffing op een blanco DVD-R in Nederland 45 procent van de consumentenprijs. Vorig jaar kostte deze opslag de Nederlandse consument circa 30 miljoen euro.

[..]

De organisaties, die onder meer elektronicabedrijven en ict-ondernemingen vertegenwoordigen, vinden de toeslag een “onterechte aanslag op de portemonnee van de Nederlandse consument”. Ook zijn ze bang dat de Nederlandse industrie uiteindelijk de dupe wordt. Als in Nederland een toeslag wordt ingevoerd, zal de consument volgens de branche uitwijken naar het buitenland.

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Rep. Harold Ford (D-TN) seized on the cybersex scandal surrounding former Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) Wednesday to deflect a question about an NRSC ad which asks: “What kind of man parties with Playboy Playmates in lingerie then films a commercial in a church pew?”

“I’m not going to take a lecture on morality from a party that took hush money from a child predator,” said Ford Wednesday in Memphis, TN after speaking to the downtown Kiwanis Club.

[Quote:]

Yesterday at a fundraiser for an Arizona congressman, Mr. Bush claimed, quote, “177 of the opposition party said, ‘You know, we don’t think we ought to be listening to the conversations of terrorists.’�?

The hell they did.

One hundred seventy-seven Democrats opposed the president’s seizure of another part of the Constitution.

Not even the White House press office could actually name a single Democrat who had ever said the government shouldn’t be listening to the conversations of terrorists.

President Bush hears what he wants.

Tuesday, at another fundraiser in California, he had said, “Democrats take a law enforcement approach to terrorism. That means America will wait until we’re attacked again before we respond.�?

Mr. Bush fabricated that, too.

[..]

No Democrat, sir, has ever said anything approaching the suggestion that the best means of self-defense is to “wait until we’re attacked again.�?

No critic, no commentator, no reluctant Republican in the Senate has ever said anything that any responsible person could even have exaggerated into the slander you spoke in Nevada on Monday night, nor the slander you spoke in California on Tuesday, nor the slander you spoke in Arizona on Wednesday … nor whatever is next.

You have dishonored your party, sir; you have dishonored your supporters; you have dishonored yourself.

But tonight the stark question we must face is — why?

Why has the ferocity of your venom against the Democrats now exceeded the ferocity of your venom against the terrorists?

Why have you chosen to go down in history as the president who made things up?

In less than one month you have gone from a flawed call to unity to this clarion call to hatred of Americans, by Americans.

If this is not simply the most shameless example of the rhetoric of political hackery, then it would have to be the cry of a leader crumbling under the weight of his own lies.

We have, of course, survived all manner of political hackery, of every shape, size and party. We will have to suffer it, for as long as the Republic stands.

But the premise of a president who comes across as a compulsive liar is nothing less than terrifying.

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President Bush, again defying Congress, says he has the power to edit the
Homeland Security Department’s reports about whether it obeys privacy rules while handling background checks, ID cards and watchlists.

In the law Bush signed Wednesday, Congress stated no one but the privacy officer could alter, delay or prohibit the mandatory annual report on Homeland Security department activities that affect privacy, including complaints.

But Bush, in a signing statement attached to the agency’s 2007 spending bill, said he will interpret that section “in a manner consistent with the President’s constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch.”

In other words, he has the power to do the very thing Congress said only one person (not him!) had the power to do.

How’s that for a big Fuck You! to Congress?

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De loods in de Rotterdamse Waalhaven waar stemmachines staan opgeslagen, krijgt een alarmsysteem dat is aangesloten op de politiemeldkamer. Dat deelde burgemeester Ivo Opstelten donderdag aan de gemeenteraad mee.

Dat gebeurt naar aanleiding van een televisieuitzending woensdagavond, waarin werd aangetoond dat de loods makkelijk is binnen te dringen. Opstelten zei op vragen van de PvdA dat machines en software gescheiden worden bewaard. Allebei de ruimtes waren tot nu toe slechts beveiligd met sloten.

De actiegroep Wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl toonde donderdag aan dat de computers eenvoudig te kraken zijn. Bovendien zenden de apparaten een radiosignaal uit, dat op afstand te ontvangen is. De actievoerders wisten met behulp van navigatieapparaat TomTom een ‘CDA-stemdetector’ te maken.

Volgens de actiegroep, die bestaat uit mensen uit de ict-wereld, zijn de beveiligingsproblemen van de apparaten niet voor de komende verkiezingen op te lossen en zouden we daarom terug moeten naar het stembiljet.