RSOE HAVARIA Emergency and Disaster Information Service
Topic: Current Events
4:18 am EST, Jan 30, 2007
National Association of Radio-Distress Signalling and Infocommunications Havaria Emergency and Disaster Information Services Budapest Hungary
Well, here is one for your bookmark list. A website in Hungary that keeps an up to date map of the biggest disasters currently occuring everywhere on the planet. Its a death and destruction information console!
Mysterious source jams French satellite communications - New Scientist Space
Topic: Current Events
11:59 am EST, Jan 27, 2007
Paris-based satellite company Eutelsat is investigating "unidentified interference" with its satellite broadcast services that temporarily knocked out several television and radio stations. The company declined to say whether it thought the interference was accidental or deliberate.
The problem began Tuesday afternoon, blocking several European, Middle East and northeast African radio and television stations, as well as Agence France-Presse's news service. All transferred their satellite transmissions to another frequency to resume operations.
"It's really puzzling to me," she told New Scientist. "If it was accidental, why would they be so secretive about saying what the source was and if it's deliberate, you've got to wonder why – it just seems to me to be an odd target, unless someone's ticked off at the French," she says.
This post from No Quarter details what appears to be a military coverup, or at least a massive understatement, about a recent attack in Iraq.
Today brought sad news that someone with the U.S. military Multi National Force--Iraq (MNF-I) lied about an attack on U.S. soldiers in the Shia-controlled city of Karabala on Saturday, 20 January 2007. The initial story released to the press stated:
KARBALA, Iraq (CNN) -- Attackers who killed five U.S. troops at a government building in Karbala posed as U.S. military officials to get past Iraqi guards, a Karbala police spokesman said.
The attack happened Saturday as the U.S. military convened a meeting to discuss security for Ashura, the upcoming Shiite pilgrimage to Karbala.
According to police spokesman Abdul Rahman al-Mishawi, about 30 gunmen traveling in a convoy of at least seven SUVs with tinted windows -- similar to the vehicles used by top U.S. military officials -- drove up to the Karbala Provincial Joint Coordination Center wearing uniforms similar to those worn by the U.S. military.
About a dozen U.S. troops were inside the compound at the time, al-Mishawi said.
Today, we got Rosanne Rosanna Danna (I am now informed I should have referenced Emily Litella. Never Mind). As far as the first version is concerned, NEVER MIND. Instead of 30 attackers there were only 12. But it is the other details that makes the story truly alarming. Here's what happened according to the Associated Press:
BAGHDAD, Iraq - In perhaps the boldest and most sophisticated attack in four years of warfare, gunmen speaking English, wearing U.S. military uniforms and carrying American weapons abducted four U.S. soldiers last week at the provincial headquarters in the Shiite holy city of Karbala and then shot them to death.
The U.S. military confirmed a report earlier Friday by The Associated Press that three of the soldiers were dead and one was mortally wounded with a gunshot to the head when they were found in a neighboring province, about 25 miles from the compound where they were captured. A fifth soldier was killed in the initial attack on the compound.
The new account contradicted a U.S. military statement on Jan. 20, the day of the raid on an Iraqi governor's office, that five soldiers were killed "repelling" the attack. . . .
The brazen assault, 50 miles south of Baghdad, was conducted by nine to 12 gunmen posing as an American security team, the military confirmed. The attackers traveled in black GMC Suburban vehicles (the type used by U.S. government convoys), had American weapons, wore new U.S. military combat fatigues, and spoke English, according to two senior U.S. military ... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]
Escapee pursued through country-song odyssey - CNN.com
Topic: Current Events
6:28 am EST, Jan 27, 2007
It has all the makings of a country song: an escaped prisoner, his terminally ill mother, a Wal-Mart truck, NASCAR and a Nashville singer's tour bus.
Since Christopher Daniel Gay, 32, escaped from a prisoner transport van Sunday in South Carolina, police say, he has evaded a five-state manhunt by stealing a pickup, a big rig and a bus that belongs to singer Crystal Gayle.
Initially, police say, his motive for fleeing was simple. "I take it he was just trying to see his mom," said Michael Douglas, the police chief in Pleasant View, Tennessee, near the home where Gay's mother is dying of cancer.
He stole a pickup truck in South Carolina and made his way more than 300 miles northwest to Manchester, Tennessee, where he stole a Wal-Mart tractor-trailer filled with $300,000 worth of merchandise, police said.
On Tuesday, Gay got to within 50 yards of his mother's house, about 25 miles northwest of Nashville, but abandoned the Wal-Mart truck and fled into some woods, authorities said.
"What he done was wrong, but he knows his mama don't have long," his mother, Anna Shull, told The Tennessean this week. Efforts to contact Gay's family were unsuccessful Friday.
Authorities don't think Gay got to see his mother.
Since then, authorities believe he stole the bus belonging to Gayle -- the younger sister of Loretta Lynn, known for her long hair and hits such as "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue."
Her husband and manager, Bill Gatzimos, couldn't immediately be reached for comment Friday, but he told WSMV-TV, "There's got to be a country song in having your bus stolen and taken for a joyride by a fugitive."
New Saddam Hussein Video: Body with neck gash after Hanging
Topic: Current Events
4:07 am EST, Jan 9, 2007
(Update: Google removed the video. The link has been changed to a copy on YouTube.)
A new Saddam Hussein video has surfaced on Google Video. In this video, Hussein's body is on a gurney and the cover is removed to reveal his head, which has a huge gash in the neck where bone is exposed.
This unattributed video is currently linked on FoxNews's main page. FoxNews provides a translation of the dialog in the audio, which clearly suggests the person taking the video was trying not to get caught.
Defense Tech: The Law Catches Up To Private Militaries, Embeds
Topic: Current Events
6:11 am EST, Jan 4, 2007
Since the start of the Iraq war, tens of thousands of heavily-armed military contractors have been roaming the country -- without any law, or any court to control them. That may be about to change, Brookings Institution Senior Fellow P.W. Singer notes in a Defense Tech exclusive. Five words, slipped into a Pentagon budget bill, could make all the difference. With them, "contractors 'get out of jail free' cards may have been torn to shreds," he writes. They're now subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the same set of laws that governs soldiers. But here's the catch: embedded reporters are now under those regulations, too.
I've wondered why there has not been a high profile case of a contractor going over the line yet..
This video shows Saddam Hussein being hanged from the vantage of a witness using his or her cellphone. This shows almost everything -- except for the snap of the neck, viewer discretion advised.
There are five men in black face masks who are visible on the gallows platform around Saddam, acting as guards. As they guide him towards the trap door and put the noose over his head, they start chanting religious slogans with the names of Moqtada al Sadr (the head of the Mahdi army, accused of organizing death squads against Sunnis) and Baqr al Sadr (the father-in-law of Moqtada). Saddam, a Sunni, is outraged at this last-minute provocation, and tells them to “go to hell.” This is generally where the two TV stations cut the video, but on at least one occasion that we saw, Arabiya allowed the video to keep rolling: The cell phone camera is jerked down to the ground, as if the person holding it had to conceal the camera, then it is slowly raised up to Saddam again, and suddenly his body shoots down through the trapdoor. At this, the Arabiya anchor came on and made a scissors symbol with two fingers with a mischievous grin on his face, as if to say that they really shouldn’t have shown that, but so be it. A cynical voyeuristic ploy, nudge nudge wink wink.
However, the impact of this video could be quite significant. First, it will reinforce Sunni suspicions that the execution of Saddam was merely an act of Shiite revenge for decades of repression under Saddam. The building where the execution took place was expressly chosen because it was once used as a detention center by a division of Saddam’s secret police that was focused on the Shiite Dawa party. Some of the witnesses whom the government invited to the execution had themselves once been tortured in that same building. Indeed, Prime Minister Maliki, who signed the execution order the day before the hanging, is a long-term member of the Dawa party and had himself been sentenced to death by Saddam back in 1980 before fleeing the country.
Worse, it will also reinforce the fears of Sunnis that Maliki’s government is beholden to the Mahdi army, Moqtada’s militia. Executions are generally expected to be solemn affairs –- certainly not opportunities for thugs to score some final sectarian points before the “enemy” is disposed of. The video itself seems quite distasteful –- but it is informative to the extent that it reveals the political baggage that the current government carries on its shoulders. It does not add up to a pretty picture.
Almost immediately, he caused a stir after he joined the White House Press Corps in 2005, making waves as the first reporter to ask then-White House press secretary Scott McClellan whether the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame's name might be considered an act of treason.
"There has been a lot of speculation concerning the meaning of the underlying statute and the grand jury investigation concerning Mr. Rove," Sanford asked. "The question is, have the legal counsel to the White House or White House staff reviewed the statute in sufficient specificity to determine whether a violation of that statute would, in effect, constitute treason?"
The guy who first asked the Valerie Plame question jumps off a building. Conspiracy theorists, start your engines!
Ford Disagreed With Bush About Invading Iraq - washingtonpost.com
Topic: Current Events
6:20 pm EST, Dec 28, 2006
By Bob Woodward
Former president Gerald R. Ford said in an embargoed interview in July 2004 that the Iraq war was not justified. "I don't think I would have gone to war," he said a little more than a year after President Bush launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veterans of Ford's own administration.
In a four-hour conversation at his house in Beaver Creek, Colo., Ford "very strongly" disagreed with the current president's justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously. In the tape-recorded interview, Ford was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney -- Ford's White House chief of staff -- and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as Ford's chief of staff and then his Pentagon chief.
"Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction," Ford said. "And now, I've never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do."
