The Incredible Hulk appeared Tuesday on the Senate floor, adorning the necktie of Sen. Ted Stevens - a familiar sign that the veteran from Alaska is pumped for the fight to open part of an arctic wildlife refuge to oil drilling.
But to hear his colleagues tell it, Stevens is more like the Grinch who would steal Christmas - and New Year's, if need be - to collect on his end of a vote-swapping deal he struck with two Democrats 25 years ago.
"A promise made is a debt unpaid," Stevens, 82, is fond of repeating. "This is a debt unpaid to this Senate, to the country, to Alaska."
Back in 1980, the deal went like this: Vote yes on setting aside 19 million acres of wilderness, said Sens. Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington and Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, and Congress will support permission to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Stevens agreed. Tsongas and Jackson, meanwhile, died before Congress could grant permission to drill.
Their debt survives, Stevens insists. And he's playing procedural hardball to make the Senate pay up.

For Stevens, drilling in Alaska is personal payback

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been shot dead, according to Wikipedia, the online, up-to-the-minute encyclopedia.
Apparently, the assassin was a "friend" of the victim of a recent controversy which ironically, smeared former Robert F Kennedy aid John Seigenthaler as a suspect in the assassination of both Kennedy brothers. That claim, which the site carried for several months, along with the assertion that Seigenthaler had lived in Russia, was eventually proved false.
"At 18:54 EST on December 12, John Seigenthaler's wife, who was infuriated at Wikipedia regarding the recent scandal regarding his role in the Kennedy Assassination, came into the house, where Jim was having dinner. Wearing a mask, he [sic] shot him three times in the head and ran," reported the online reference source.
The free-for-all, write-it-yourself website prides itself on its fact checking.
Wales made his fortune in bond trading before setting up the Bomis pornography ring. A long time devotee of Ayn Rand, Wales recently criticized the decision to grant federal funds to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, according to reports on a web discussion board.

Wikipedia founder 'shot by friend of Siegenthaler' (dead)

London is completely blanketed by the black plume of smoke from Europe's worst peacetime fire in this Envisat image, taken within five hours of the blaze beginning.

This image was acquired at 10:45 GMT on Sunday morning by the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS), one of ten instruments aboard Envisat, Europe's largest satellite for environmental monitoring. This Reduced Resolution mode image has a spatial resolution of 1200 metres, and shows the cloud spread across a span of around 140 km.

The pall of smoke comes from a fire at Buncefield oil depot on the outskirts of Hemel Hempstead. Buncefield is the fifth largest fuel storage depot in the UK, distributing millions of tonnes of petrol and other oil products per year, including aviation fuel to nearby Luton and Heathrow Airports.

Envisat sees smoke from Europe's worst peacetime fire

The reverse thrusters that should have slowed a Southwest Airlines jetliner before it slid off a runway at Midway Airport and into the street didn't immediately kick in when the pilots tried to deploy them, federal investigators said Saturday after interviewing the crew.

How much of a role that braking equipment played in Thursday's deadly accident wasn't immediately clear, though, and the investigation is continuing.

The plane's flight attendants told investigators that the Boeing 737 didn't appear to slow after it touched down at Midway in a snowstorm Thursday, said Robert Benzon, the National Transportation Safety Board's investigator in charge.

Reverse Thrusters Eyed in Midway Accident

It started as a joke and ended up as a shot heard round the Internet, with the joker quitting his job and Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, suffering a blow to its credibility.
A man in Nashville, Tenn., has admitted that, in trying to shock a colleague with a joke, he put false information into a Wikipedia entry about John Seigenthaler Sr., a former editor of The Tennessean newspaper in Nashville.
Brian Chase, 38, who until Friday was an operations manager at a small delivery company, told Seigenthaler he had written the material suggesting Seigenthaler had been involved in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy.
Seigenthaler discovered the false entry only recently and wrote about it in an op-ed article in USA Today, saying he was especially annoyed that he could not track down the perpetrator because of Internet privacy laws.
His plight touched off a debate about the reliability of information on Wikipedia — and by extension the Internet — and the difficulty in holding Web sites and their users accountable, even when someone is defamed.

Wikipedia prankster confesses

The U.S. secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, will fly into a storm of criticism Monday as she begins a four-country swing through Europe amid mounting outrage over allegations that the United States has conducted covert counterterrorism missions on the Continent.

Accusations that the United States has snatched terrorism suspects from European streets, operated secret detention facilities, and used airports as stopover points for CIA planes transferring captives have caused a furor.

The charges have provoked parliamentary inquiries, caused close U.S. allies to issue indignant demands for information, and triggered a spate of criminal investigations.

Most of the allegations are speculative, but they have made for shrill headlines from Portugal to Poland in recent days and stoked anti-U.S. anger on the Continent to levels not seen since the invasion of Iraq.

The European Union's top justice official warned last week that any member state found to have permitted secret U.S. jails on its territory could be stripped of its voting rights in the organization.

European storm awaits Rice on CIA allegations...

NEWSPAPERS editors were threatened with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act last night if they published details of a conversation between Tony Blair and George Bush in which the President is alleged to have suggested bombing al-Jazeera, the Arab news network. Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney-General, informed newspapers editors including that of The Times that “publication of a document that has been unlawfully disclosed by a Crown servant could be in breach of Section 5 of the Official Secrets Act.”

The Blair Government has obtained court injunctions against newspapers before but it has never prosecuted editors for publishing the contents of leaked documents.
Under a front-page headline “Bush plot to bomb his ally” in the Daily Mirror yesterday, a secret minute of the conversation in April 2004 records the President allegedly suggesting that he would like to bomb the channel’s studios in Doha, capital of Qatar. Richard Wallace, the Editor of the Daily Mirror, said last night: “We made No 10 fully aware of the intention to publish and were given ‘no comment’ officially or unofficially. Suddenly 24 hours later we are threatened under Section 5.”

Editors are threatened over TV station bombing claim...

For the third time in recent months, a federal judge has balked at allowing government investigators to track a citizen via cell phone in real time without agents showing probable cause.
Andrew J. Peck, a magistrate judge with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, asked the Justice Department to clarify its arguments after learning that a Long Island magistrate judge initially denied a similar request in August.

Judges Reject Cell-Phone Tracking

Bush may be slipping in the polls, but he’s still getting just about everything he wants out of the Congress.
Including reauthorization of the Patriot Act.
This week, a conference committee of the House and Senate agreed to make permanent almost every aspect of the Patriot Act. Even the most controversial measures—including allowing the FBI and local police to snoop on your library and bookstore activities—were given another seven-year lease.

Wow ... What a shame...

Bush Victorious on Patriot Act | The Progressive

Four state legislators in Massachusetts have introduced a bill that would soften the crime of bestiality, a move pro-family activists say is a natural progression of the state's legalizing same-sex marriage.
Stated traditional-values organization Article 8: "State Sen. Cynthia Creem, Sen. Robert O'Leary, Rep. Michael Festa and Rep. David Linsky have some interesting things in common.

Hmmm... Ok... :)

Bill softens bestiality statute...