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AT&T Inc. said Sunday it will acquire smaller rival BellSouth Corp. for $67 billion in stock, in a deal that goes a long way toward resurrecting the old Ma Bell telephone system.

"Change the logos back!"

CNN.com - AT&T reaches deal to buy BellSouth - Mar 5, 2006

Another tape from al-Zawahri has surfaced and been aired on Al-Jazeera.

"(Muslims have to) inflict losses on the crusader West, especially to its economic infrastructure with strikes that would make it bleed for years," said Zawahri, an Egyptian."

The strikes on New York, Washington, Madrid and London are the best examples," he said.

"We have to prevent the crusader West from stealing the Muslims' oil which is being drained in the biggest robbery in history," he added. It was not clear if the tape was made before the failed al Qaeda attack last month on a major Saudi oil facility.

"Reaching power is not a goal by itself ... and no Palestinian has the right to give away a grain of the soil," said Zawahri in comments directed at Hamas. "The secularists in the Palestinian Authority have sold out Palestine for crumbs... Giving them legitimacy is against Islam."

He described the cartoons as part of a U.S.-led "crusader" campaign. "An example of the hatred of the crusaders led by America ... are the repeated offences against the personality of the Prophet Mohammad, may peace be upon him," Zawahri said.

The AP has more quotes:

"The insults against Prophet Muhammad are not the result of freedom of opinion but because what is sacred has changed in this culture," he said. "The Prophet Mohammed, prayers be upon him, and Jesus Christ, peace be upon him, are not sacred anymore, while Semites and the Holocaust and homosexuality have become sacred."

"In the eyes of the West, they have the right to occupy our land, rob our wealth and then insult us and our religion, and humiliate our Quran and our prophet, prayers be upon him," al-Zawahri said. "After that they give us lessons in freedom, justice and human rights."

"Recognizing those people is against Islam's principles. They are criminals in the Islamic balance," he said. "Palestine is not their own property that they can give up."

Speaking of Palestine and Iraq, al-Zawahri said: "We have to be aware of the American game called 'political process.'"

"Bush, the caller for democracy, threatened Hamas in his State of the Union speech to cut assistance unless it recognizes Israel, abandons Jihad and abides by the agreements of surrender between the (Palestinian) Authority and Israel."

"I would like to tell my brothers in Palestine that reaching power is needed to implement Islamic rule," he said.

Al Qaeda's Zawahri calls for strikes against West | Reuters.com

The U.S. Justice Department says it has launched an inquiry into possible price fixing in the burgeoning online music industry.

The Justice Department would not name the companies it has targeted. "The antitrust division is looking at the possibility of anticompetitive practices in the music download industry," spokeswoman Gina Talamona said Thursday.

Universal and Warner have been told by the Justice Department to expect a formal demand for information, according to the two officials, who requested anonymity because the probe was ongoing. Warner has publicly acknowledged that it was subpoenaed by Spitzer.

CNN.com - Feds probe online music price fixing - Mar 3, 2006

Late Sunday night, we will be transitioning MemeStreams to a new data-center and server. We will be unavailable for about an hour during this operation. The site will issue an automatically refreshing message informing you of our progress.

The new infrastructure has completed testing successfully, we have created a procedure for all the changes involved, and there is very little room for error. We expect everything to go smoothly.

The actual work related to the transition is only expected to take about a half hour, but we will most likely be down for a full hour. This is to account for DNS issues and unanticipated problems.

Years of radioactive waste water spills from Illinois nuclear power plants have fueled suspicions the industry covers up safety problems and sparked debate about the risks from exposure to low-level radiation.

The recent, belated disclosures of leaks of the fission byproduct tritium from Exelon Corp.'s Braidwood, Dresden, and Byron twin-reactor nuclear plants -- one as long ago as 1996 -- triggered worries among neighbors about whether it was safe to drink their water, or even stay.

"How'd you like to live next to that plant and every time you turn on the tap to take a drink you have to think about whether it's safe?" asked Joe Cosgrove, the head of parks in Godley, Illinois, a town adjacent to Braidwood.

"The president's plan is misguided. It presents health risks, creates additional nuclear waste that we have no long-term solution for, creates additional terrorist targets that we do not adequately defend, and costs an enormous amount of money. (Bush's) phrase 'clean, safe nuclear power' is oxymoronic," he said.

The problem isn't nuclear power plans. The problem is nuclear power plants built on 60's technology operating way past their design lifetimes.

Every nuclear power plan currently in operation in the United States should be scrapped and rebuilt using modern technology. They would be safer, more efficient, and produce more output. We don't need to create new plants. We need to update the ones we have.

The old reactor cores can be stored on site. Just incase them in plastic and concrete, or something that should last for a few hundred thousand years. Give it a nice external layer of granite so it looks pretty. Put a statute on top of whoever actually manages to make it happen. Have the statue holding an old school lantern in one hand and a bundle of electrical cable in the other.

All these plants already have waste storage on site. In many cases the waste storage facilities have been the only thing these plants have changed over the years. They have been augmented to store more waste from inefficient plants that have been operating for too long. Plans like Yucca Mountain cannot be counted on. A distributed approach is necessary, and we already have it to a certain degree.

Start with this plant, please.

Reuters | US nuclear plant leaks fuel health concerns

Peter J. Biondi, NJ Assemblyman for District 16, has introduced A1327, a bill to force every ISP and website with comments/forums to demand user identification from every single poster (called an "information content provider" in the bill). The bill also forces all ISP and websites to turn over that information upon demand to anyone who claims to have been defamed, without any legal process or protections:

Well, it appears Seigenthaler's stupid campaign to remove due process protecting the identity of Internet posters, based on the inane assumption that claimants are always good guys who always have a legitimate claim, has gotten traction in the New Jersey legislature. MemeStreams users in New Jersey ought to contact their local representatives and calmly and respectfully explain that for every human problem there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong.

Talking points:
1. Anonymous and pseudononymous speech has a long history of political significance in our country.
2. People seeking to identify Internet users do not always have a legitimate claim. Sometimes they are stalkers or other criminals.
3. Having a court decide whether Internet Services are required to turn over personal information about their customers creates a process which validates the legitimacy of a claim before personal information is forcibly disclosed.
4. Internet message boards are often informal things run by hobbyists. Information collection and reporting requirements create barriers to entry for those seeking to operate message boards, which has a deleterious effect on the free flow of discourse critical to our democracy.

Update: Biondi can be message on the web here. Office phone number: (908) 252-0800. Office address: 1 East High Street, Somerville, NJ 08876

LawGeek: New Jersey Assemblyman introduced bill to force online identification

The following is from a State Department press release, which I don't have a direct link for. I'm on several mailing lists that pump this stuff at me...

The United States is concerned deeply by reports of China's alleged detention of human rights activists participating in hunger strikes over the recent beating of a Chinese human rights lawyer, says State Department spokesman Adam Ereli.

"Individuals should not be detained for the peaceful expression of political views, "Ereli said during a February 27 press briefing.

According to media reports, Chinese authorities detained several human rights protesters, including Beijing AIDS activist Hu Jia, over hunger strikes in support of a protest launched on February 6 by Beijing-based lawyer Gao Zhisheng in response to the beating of a human-rights activist outside a police station in Guangzhou.

"The mistreatment of lawyers seeking to represent their clients undermines China's efforts to promote the rule of law," Ereli said.

The UK Guardian has some coverage:

A Chinese lawyer whose hunger strike in protest of violence against dissidents galvanized other activists into a rare nationwide show of support was detained by authorities on Saturday, the lawyer and a friend said.

There is also coverage in the Washington Post:

The Communist Party routinely tightens security before the annual meeting of the rubber-stamp National People's Congress, but it appears to be taking special precautions ahead of this year's session, which begins Sunday, in response to rising social unrest in the countryside and an increasingly assertive campaign by civil rights activists in several cities.

The crackdown began in mid-February after a prominent Beijing lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, staged a two-day hunger strike to draw attention to the beating of a fellow human rights activist, Yang Maodong, by thugs who appeared to have been hired by police. Gao said he stopped eating to protest the government's growing use of "Mafia tactics" to suppress efforts by citizens to protect their legal rights.

Legal rights are a hard thing for a people to keep nailed down. We have been having poor results with doing it here too. Cisco, take note of this:

News of Gao's hunger strike spread quickly on the Internet, and supporters in as many as 15 provinces soon agreed to take turns fasting in solidarity... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

From infosthetics.org:

animated visualization simulating the US & coalition military fatalities that occured in Iraq, shown in the context of time & (geographical) space. the animation runs at 10 frames per second, one frame for each day, with data taken from icasualties.org. might be interesting to overlay this with a similar chart consisting of Iraqi casualties over the same timeframe?

...

April and November of 2004 really stand out in this kind of visualization. There's also sound that varies in volume to go along with the plots.

Iraq War Coalition Fatalities

They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn't move until the threat alert is lifted.

Very few people have really paid attention to the banking surveillance. All kinds of transactions are carefully monitored by the feds.

Big Brother: Whats in your wallet?