OMG - this is one of the most incredible things I have seen in a while. what you're seeing is al green on soul train. but not the al green we've gotten used to over the last decade or so. no. this is the old al green. the al green with the demon inside him. just start with the fact that he has his right arm in a sling (which we might well assume had something to do with booze and a woman). but you can see the wildness in his eyes. sure, he looks wired on something. call it what you will. he's on fire. but then... it's the song itself. listening to him sing how jesus is just wating for him to ask for his help which climaxes with him screaming "I'm sorry. I'm sorry." are we seeing merely a performance or are we watching the man's own inner struggle which as we now know took him to spiritual depths so deep and a rescue so profound that he is now known as the reverend al green. and yes, I saw him preach and sing in his church once in memphis. he's as close to god as I'll ever get.
the album this track is on came out in the summer of 1973.
and so, this video was shot probably just about year from when everything changed....
(from wiki)
On October 18, 1974, Mary Woodson, a girlfriend of Green's, assaulted him before killing herself at his Memphis home.Although she was already married, Woodson reportedly became upset when Green refused to marry her.At some point during the evening, Woodson doused Green with a pan of boiling grits while he was showering causing third-degree burns on Green's back, stomach and arms. Woodson then shot herself with Green's gun. According to Glide Magazine, "by the late 70s, he had begun concentrating almost exclusively on gospel music." Green cited the incident as a wake-up call to change his life.He became an ordained pastor of the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Memphis in 1976.
You’re asleep and you slowly awaken to the sound of birds. But not the screaming grackles nor the cackling crows that populate the skies of Austin. But birds who sing as they perch on the bougainvilleas under my window. This is how the day begins.
The previous day began with me heading to the airport, flying from Austin to Houston and then Houston to Port of Spain, Trinidad. After a long day of travel, it’s especially nice to arrive at a place where when you exit the airport, there is an outdoor bar where you can have a beer whilst waiting for your friends to pick you up. How freakin’ civilized is that....?
I first met Paul 14 years ago when, for reasons I no longer remember, decided out of all the places in the world to go, I was going to go to Trinidad & Tobago on vacation. I posted a request on a Caribbean Usenet group (remember those days?) looking for info on what to do down there. Paul answered my posting with several tips and said if I was interested to meet some nice people I should head over to Martin’s Bar in Port of Spain. And so began our friendship when I walked into Martin’s and pretty much lived on a barstool there for a few days.
Back in the present, Paul and his girlfriend Wendy arrived and carted me away from the airport and off to Martin’s new bar to see my other old friend. Martin moved to a new location a few years ago, now dubbed Martin’s Piano Bar. Only one thing. The place hasn’t got a piano. But one thing you should understand about the Caribbean – don’t quibble over small details like that. It’s a piano bar, okay?
Paul invites to try this 12 year old rum which is better than any 12 year old scotch I’ve ever had. That an a Caribe beer for a back seems to make the night go smoothly. Martin is in good spirits, as is pretty much everyone in Trinidad right now as we’re are but two weeks from the annual Carnivale. Me, I don’t care for crowds, so I’ll be leaving the week Carnivale begins. But, you cry, you love music, don’t you? Well, there’ll be plenty of music to be heard and danced to before I leave, I’m sure. Already, Paul and I plan to go on Sunday to one of the annual pre-Carnivale events, the Panorama finals. And when we speak of Panorama, we don’t mean vistas, we mean pan drum orchestras competing. Plus, the radio is abuzz with all the new songs for this year’s festivities. Every year, new songs are composed and compete for the best song of the year. One of this year’s Calypso’s that Wendy, Paul & I get stuck in our heads is a not very subtle double-entendre’d song called “Flash Drive.” To sum up the lyrics, it’s about a girl who gets a job in IT at some company and gets very, um, excited whenever her manager sticks, um, his flash drive, into her, um, laptop. High tech meets Calypso. The 21st century is truly here.
Eventually, Martin closes the bar and we head to Wendy’s house in a suburb of the city and call it a night. Strangely – and something you don’t see in the USA as far as I’ve ever seen – is that this neighborhood was actually founded by Jews and the streets are either named after British royalty (Princess Margaret Street) or famous Jews. There’s Theodore Herzel Street, Professor Einstein Street, and Dr. Jonas Salk Street, which I discover as I go for a walk late this afternoon.
So it is that I wake up this morning to the sound of birds singing and I realize I’m not in Austin any more. I spend most of the day running around with Paul & Wendy on various errands, which includes helping her brother, Robin, who was a famous musician/producer in Trinidad for some time, but now travels ports of call as an a/v tech on cruise ships, and his new Filipino girlfriend, get on a plane to Tobago. We also drive up to the Benedictine Monastery – where I have a yoghurt drink the monks make (I thought they made booze, but I guess we’ve all gone on the health-craze these days), around the University of the West Indies (one of several campuses on several islands), thru the new bustling financial sector and around thru some of the slums of the city.
There are two things one should avoid while in T&T (Trinidad & Tobago - they are sister islands - both different than the other Caribbean islands as they are not volcanic but actually pieces of South America than broke off). The first is Dengue Fever. Not the cool band from LA, but the real thing. So I’m spraying myself with massive amounts of poison with a “cool mountain” scent. The other is – don’t get shot. When I first visited T&T, there were maybe 100 murders a year. As of today, there have been 60 murders so far in 2009. Last year, there were a whopping 550 murders. While most of them are attributed to an influx of guns and gang violence. But just to note in passing – since 2004, the FBI has set up a permanent branch here because of a couple high profile Al Qaeda types have been reported to be living here. But let’s not dwell on such matters. One of the things I love about Port of Spain is how multi-culti it is. Almost everyone you meet is of mixed races. You’ve got Euro blood (first the Spaniards, then the French, then the English all settled here), Black (from slaves), East Indian (imported by the Euros for cheap labor), Chinese (also for cheap labor), and Middle Easterners (there’s oil in Trinidad – how’d you think they got all those steel drums to play with?). The people are a lovely stew of all these flavors as is the food. For instance, for breakfast this morning, we had a Trini street food favorite – Doubles, which is a spongy flat bread filled with curry-spiced garbanzo beans and hot sauce.
Speaking of Doubles. One place pointed out to me today was a corner where there were two competing Double stands pretty much side by side. Once upon a time, the man and woman were married. When they divorced, the wife opened a stand next to her ex to get back at him. Apparently, hers are more popular than his, I am told. In Austin we have a similar deal with the competing Fran’s & Dan’s burger places, who were once married but now own competing restaurants.
Now, the prediction was for massive amounts of rain while I was here, but as always it seems, I bring global warming wherever I go and thankfully, so far, it has only been spotty drizzles here and there.
So after a long, long day of driving around town, we headed back to the house where I quickly pass out for a quick nap and then wake up for a walk around the neighborhood. Some of the houses around here were built in the late 50's and early 60's others look like they were built yesterday.
We have a problem getting out to our dinner reservations – I told Paul to pick a favorite restaurant of theirs and I’d take them out tonight – because the nursemaid for Wendy’s 90-something year old Mom is an hour late. So Paul & I head out first, then Wendy meets us about a half-hour later. We go to an upscale Italian restaurant named Angelo’s. Angelo is from Calabria and married a local girl here. And because who doesn’t love Paul & Wendy, we are drinking with Angelo well after the restaurant has closed and most of the staff have left. I had seafood pasta with mostly locally caught ingredients. But I really want to go for a walk down the street we’re on where there are tons of nightclubs with music and people pouring out of them. Angelo asks me if I have a gun. I tell him no. He suggests then I don’t wander around the nightclubs then. Sigh. I really need to walk some, but apparently not tonight. On the way home, we see some statuesque young girls in their Carnivale gear. In Trinidad, people can get loans from their bank to buy their Carnivale costume. That’s how serious they take it here.
But now more carousing tonight. We head back to Wendy’s, say our goodnights and off to bed. See you tomorrow....
'94 military report panned Humvee as 'deathtrap' By Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY February 4, 2009
WASHINGTON — Army and Marine Corps officials knew nearly a decade before the invasion of Iraq that its workhorse Humvee vehicle, was a "deathtrap" even with armor added to protect it against roadside bombs, according to an inspector general's report.
Reports distributed throughout the Army and Marine Corps after the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the Somalia conflict in 1994 urged the development of armored vehicles to avoid the devastating effects of roadside bombs and land mines, but the Pentagon failed to act, the report says.
The Pentagon didn't field significant numbers of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles until 2007, more than three years after roadside bombings began to escalate in the Iraq war. The conclusions of the 1991 and 1994 reports were not included in the one-page summary of the inspector general's findings released in December.
The inspector general's full report was later posted on a website by the Center for Public Integrity, a government watchdog group.
Troops added makeshift armor to their Humvees and the Pentagon rushed kits to retrofit the vehicles with better protections after the threat from roadside bombs escalated in 2003 and 2004. Even so, retrofitted Humvees remained vulnerable to improvised explosive devices (IEDs), because of the vehicle's "flat bottom, low weight, low ground clearance and aluminum body," the inspector general found.
The report distributed throughout the Army and Marine Corps in 1994 found that Humvees "even with a mine-protection retrofit kit developed for Somalia remained a deathtrap in the event of an anti-tank mine detonation."
That report called on the Army to outline what types of mine-resistant vehicles it might need, according to the inspector general.
The Pentagon didn't develop such a fleet because championing the vehicles wasn't seen in the '90s as a "good career move," said John Pike of Globalsecurity.org. The military had spent hundreds of millions on Humvees and drawn-out ground wars were seen as a thing of the past, he said.
Geoff Morrell, Pentagon spokesman, said the full inspector general's report had nothing new.
The recent report focused on the Marine Corps and included findings that its Combat Development Command did not create a plan to field the vehicles or obtain funding for them despite receiving an urgent request from field commanders in Iraq for MRAPs in February 2005. The Pentagon inspector general is now investigating the Army's response to the IED threat.
Troops suffer four times more casualties from roadside bombs while riding in Humvees than MRAPs. The Marines insist they rushed the best protection available at the time — armored Humvees — to Iraq.
"Eight Major League ballparks are named for financial-services companies, as are the theater for the Alvin Ailey dance company, a top children’s hospital in New York and even a planned entrance of the St. Louis Zoo. At Princeton, the financial-engineering program, meant to educate future titans of finance, enrolled more undergraduates than any of the traditional engineering programs. Before the stock market crashed last year, finance companies earned 27 percent of the nation’s corporate profits, up from about 15 percent in the 1970s and ’80s. These profits bought political influence. Congress taxed the income of hedge-fund managers at a lower rate than most everyone else’s. Regulators didn’t ask too many hard questions and then often moved on to a Wall Street job of their own."
The economy will recover. It won’t recover anytime soon. It is likely to get significantly worse over the course of 2009, no matter what President Obama and Congress do. And resolving the financial crisis will require both aggressiveness and creativity. In fact, the main lesson from other crises of the past century is that governments tend to err on the side of too much caution — of taking the punch bowl away before the party has truly started up again. “The mistake the United States made during the Depression and the Japanese made during the ’90s was too much start-stop in their policies,” said Timothy Geithner, Obama’s choice for Treasury secretary, when I went to visit him in his transition office a few weeks ago. Japan announced stimulus measures even as it was cutting other government spending. Franklin Roosevelt flirted with fiscal discipline midway through the New Deal, and the country slipped back into decline.
Geithner arguably made a similar miscalculation himself last year as a top Federal Reserve official who was part of a team that allowed Lehman Brothers to fail. But he insisted that the Obama administration had learned history’s lesson. “We’re just not going to make that mistake,” Geithner said. “We’re not going to do that. We’ll keep at it until it’s done, whatever it takes.”
Once governments finally decide to use the enormous resources at their disposal, they have typically been able to shock an economy back to life. They can put to work the people, money and equipment sitting idle, until the private sector is willing to begin using them again. The prescription developed almost a century ago by John Maynard Keynes does appear to work.
But while Washington has been preoccupied with stimulus and bailouts, another, equally important issue has received far less attention — and the resolution of it is far more uncertain. What will happen once the paddles have been applied and the economy’s heart starts beating again? How should the new American economy be remade? Above all, how fast will it grow?
That last question may sound abstract, even technical, compared with the current crisis. Yet the consequences of a country’s growth rate are not abstract at all. Slow growth makes almost all problems worse. Fast growth helps solve them. As Paul Romer, an economist at Stanford University, has said, the choices that determine a country’s growth rate “dwarf all other economic-policy concerns.”
Growth is the only way for a government to pay off its debts in a relatively quick and painless fashion, allowing tax revenues to increase without tax rates having to rise. That is essentially what happened in the years after World War II. When the war ended, the federal government’s debt equaled 120 percent of the gross domestic product (more than twice as high as its likely level by the end of next year). The rapid economic growth of the 1950s and ’60s — more than 4 percent a year, compared with 2.5 percent in this decade — quickly whittled that debt away. Over the coming 25 years, if growth could be lifted by just one-tenth of a percentage point a year, the extra tax revenue would completely pay for an $800 billion stimulus package.
Yet there are real concerns that the United States’ economy won’t grow enough to pay off its debts easily and ensure rising living standards, as happened in the postwar decades. The fraternity of growth experts in the economics profession predicts that the economy, on its current path, will grow more slowly in the next couple of decades than over the past couple. They are concerned in part because two of the economy’s most powerful recent engines have been exposed as a mirage: the explosion in consumer debt and spending, which lifted short-term growth at the expense of future growth, and the great Wall Street boom, which depended partly on activities that had very little real value.
Richard Freeman, a Harvard economist, argues that our bubble economy had something in common with the old Soviet economy. The Soviet Union’s growth was artificially raised by massive industrial output that ended up having little use. Ours was artificially raised by mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations and even the occasional Ponzi scheme.
Where will new, real sources of growth come from? Wall Street is not likely to cure the nation’s economic problems. Neither, obviously, is Detroit. Nor is Silicon Valley, at least not by itself. Well before the housing bubble burst, the big productivity gains brought about by the 1990s technology boom seemed to be petering out, which suggests that the Internet may not be able to fuel decades of economic growth in the way that the industrial inventions of the early 20th century did. Annual economic growth in the current decade, even excluding the dismal contributions that 2008 and 2009 will make to the average, has been the slowest of any decade since the 1930s.
So for the first time in more than 70 years, the epicenter of the American economy can be placed outside of California or New York or the industrial Midwest. It can be placed in Washington. Washington won’t merely be given the task of pulling the economy out of the immediate crisis. It will also have to figure out how to put the American economy on a more sustainable path — to help it achieve fast, broadly shared growth and do so without the benefit of a bubble. Obama said as much in his inauguration speech when he pledged to overhaul Washington’s approach to education, health care, science and infrastructure, all in an effort to “lay a new foundation for growth.”
For centuries, people have worried that economic growth had limits — that the only way for one group to prosper was at the expense of another. The pessimists, from Malthus and the Luddites and on, have been proved wrong again and again. Growth is not finite. But it is also not inevitable. It requires a strategy.
The List: The Next Iceland FP looks at five countries on the verge of following Iceland to economic ruin and political meltdown. By David Kennerm, Foreign Policy January 2009 http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4648
Great Britain
Economic damage: The financial crisis has gotten so severe in Britain that it has earned London a new nickname in the international media: Reykjavik-on-Thames. The question in Britain is no longer when the economy will enter a recession, but when it will enter a depression, with many bracing for a slump that could rival the 1930s in severity. GDP fell 1.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, and the European Union estimates it will contract another 2.8 percent in 2009. Unemployment is projected to balloon to more than 8 percent by year's end, and an estimated 23 percent of adult Britons currently consider their debt level "unmanageable."
The British downturn is especially severe because the U.K. is more dependent on its financial sector than most developed economies. All told, British banks currently hold about $4.4 trillion in foreign debt (which, until recently, included a large amount of Iceland's debt). For a $2.1 trillion economy, that's a heavy load to bear.
Political fallout: Prime Minister Gordon Brown initially earned voters' confidence by seizing a leading international role in the response to the crisis but, as the recession deepened, British sentiment has turned against the government. A recent poll showed that almost 6 in 10 Britons think the latest economic recovery measures will fail and gave the opposition Tories a 15-point edge over Brown's Labour Party.
The government has already nationalized much of its financial sector, and investors fear that another round of nationalization might be around the corner. Government intervention has become so pervasive that nearly half of the economy will consist of state spending in the coming year. This, in turn, has earned Britain another nickname: Soviet Britain.
Latvia
Economic damage: Latvia is arguably the one country that most resembles Iceland, and not just because of the cold climate. The small, developing country's lofty growth rates in recent years were fueled by heavy investment from elsewhere in Europe, massive foreign debt, booming consumption, and minimal savings. After growing at an extraordinary 12.2 percent rate in 2006, Latvia's economy is now the weakest of the 27 EU member states. A European Commission report forecast that Latvia's GDP is set to contract 6.9 percent in 2009 and a further 2.4 percent in 2010, with unemployment climbing into the double digits by next year. The International Monetary Fund has approved a $7.3 billion bailout package for Latvia, but a long road to recovery remains.
With financial markets tightening and housing markets crashing down to earth, Latvian businesses have ground to a halt and the government has been forced to cut services to the bone. A new program will involve a 25 percent cut in the state budget, 15 percent wage reductions, and widespread layoffs.
Political fallout: The financial crisis threatens not only Latvians' livelihoods, but it also poses a danger to their nascent democratic system. The government's popularity currently sits at about 10 percent. In the largest protests since the rallies against Soviet rule in the 1980s, more than 10,000 Latvians gathered earlier this month in the capital of Riga to protest the government's mismanagement of the economy. Some demonstrations turned violent, as angry youths threw rocks and eggs at police and lobbed cobblestones at the Parliament building.
The government has initiated a crackdown of its own, unleashing its security forces against those guilty of economic pessimism. When a university lecturer speculated that the crisis might cause a devaluation in Latvia's currency, he was arrested and held in jail for two days.
Greece
Economic damage: The Greek economy, burdened by a debt-to-GDP ratio of more than 90 percent, is one of the shakiest in the European Union. The adoption of the euro had previously fueled Greece's economic boom, but it is now one of the primary obstacles to getting the country out from underneath its massive debt. The typical method countries use to alleviate their debt is to depreciate their currency, lessening the real value of their liabilities. But with a single currency in use across the euro zone, Greece no longer controls its own monetary policy. Faced with the strain of falling tax revenues and the need to fund a bailout program, Greece could be forced to withdraw from the euro zone or default on its debt.
Standard & Poor's cut the country's sovereign debt rating earlier this month due to concerns over its rising deficit. Now, Greece must pay 5.6 percent to finance its 10-year debt, 2.5 percentage points more than Germany. As the financial crisis continues, expect the rift between the haves and the have-nots in the EU to widen further.
Political fallout: Outrage over a police shooting spilled over into widespread rioting throughout Greece in December. More than 150 banks were targeted by youths during the first days of the riots. Greece's bleak economic situation is widely considered to be the underlying cause of the unrest. Greek banks had invested heavily in development in the Balkans and, with the onset of the financial crisis, found themselves dangerously overextended. The center-right government was forced to bail them out, but at the cost of drawing funds from social welfare programs. The image of the Greek government handing bags full of money to wealthy financiers while services were cut for the general populace has decimated the government's credibility.
Ukraine
Economic damage: Ukraine's export-oriented economy and its volatile political system have combined to make the country one of the hardest-hit eastern European markets in the financial crisis. Steel exports are at the heart of Ukraine's economy, and plummeting international demand has brought the country's mills to a near standstill. The production of metals needed to manufacture steel dropped 43 percent in December 2008 compared with that month in 2007, when Ukraine ranked as the world's eighth-largest steel producer. Ukraine was only saved from complete economic collapse by a $16.5 billion loan from the IMF in October, the largest package given to a country in Eastern Europe. But recently, the Parliament approved a 2009 budget with a planned deficit of 3 percent, in violation of the terms of the IMF loan, which requires a balanced budget. This could delay the next, desperately needed installation of IMF funds, due in February.
Political fallout: Ukraine's politicians, meanwhile, are bickering while their country goes bust. In early October, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko dissolved Parliament and called for early elections in a bid to weaken his rival, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Tymoshenko responded that it would be irresponsible to burden Ukraine with the costs of an election during the crisis, and blocked funding for the elections. A poll conducted in December found that only 26 percent of Ukrainians thought the government could tackle the country's economic crisis. If the politicians' bickering continues to harm Ukraine's economic standing, both ruling parties could pay for it at the next election – whenever that may be.
Nicaragua
Economic damage: Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, an old U.S. enemy from the Cold War, explained the financial crisis by stating, "God is punishing the United States." But the ripple effects from the crisis will likely reach all the way to his own country. Nicaragua's economy is heavily dependent on remittances, with the central bank estimating that Nicaraguans abroad send back between $800 million and $1 billion every year. The U.S. economic downturn means that fewer Nicaraguans will have money to send home. The financial crisis has also pushed down the price of coffee, Nicaragua's main export, as investors have abandoned the commodity market.
Political fallout: To make matters worse, Ortega's increasingly authoritarian tendencies have earned him the enmity of developed countries, which Nicaragua depends on for aid. In the run-up to municipal elections in November, Ortega's government disqualified two opposition parties, sent police to intimidate his regime's leading critics, and banned independent local and foreign observers from monitoring the election. In response, the United States and six European countries suspended an estimated $150 billion in development aid to the Western Hemisphere's second-poorest country.
Ortega might come to regret his schadenfreude at the U.S. economic downturn when it's his country that is feeling the effects.
it's good that your kids get to learn this lesson when they are this young. the best don't rise to the top, only the rich do. it's shit like this that gives us the george w bushes of the world.
Opportunity for Sale Psst! Wanna buy an internship? By Timothy Noah, Slate Posted Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2009 http://www.slate.com/id/2209985/
Three years ago, Ellen Gamerman reported in the Wall Street Journal on a deeply discouraging trend: Summer internships were being put up for bid at charity auctions for elite private schools. You could see immediately how so grotesquely inegalitarian a practice might evolve. Corporate bigwigs felt they were making a noble sacrifice by donating internships to their kids' place of learning. Private—ahem, I mean "independent"—schools were usually scrupulous in dedicating the proceeds to scholarship programs. Winning bidders were making generous charitable contributions (these items didn't go cheap), officially recognized as such by the Internal Revenue Service, which allowed a tax deduction for the bid amount spent in excess of market value. Within this tiny bubble of human interaction, all parties were doing good. Outside it, they were conspiring to make life even more of a rigged game than it already is.
I figured Gamerman's story would get wide pickup, provoke outraged public hearings, maybe even inspire some creative sort of criminal investigation (though you can't really prosecute people for violating the Declaration of Independence's claim that all men are created equal). I was wrong. Equality of opportunity was no longer a fashionable topic, except as it pertained to race or gender (where it enjoys some legal protection) or to sexual orientation (where public attitudes are evolving toward greater tolerance). The failure of college kids who lacked means or connections to get choice internships was not new, and the formal monetization of such internships didn't seem to shock very many people. As the Brazilians say: "When shit acquires value the poor are born without assholes."
The problem with such world-weariness is that it encourages bad situations to get worse. In the Jan. 28 Wall Street Journal, Sue Shellenbarger reports that the selling of internships has blossomed into a cottage industry. There's no mention of private schools—is it too much to hope that the earlier Journal piece shamed them out of it?—but other charities now auction off internships routinely. Web sites aggregate these auctions for the bidder's convenience. At CharityFolks.com, the current bid on a semester-long internship at ID-PR, a "public-relations powerhouse," is $2,500. ("Get your foot in the door today!") Or maybe you'd like to "jump start your career in the music industry" with an internship at Atlantic Records, cradle of rhythm and blues (a genre nursed largely without help from career-minded collegians). Next bid: $2,500. Proceeds from the sale of both internships go to the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, where equality apparently must take a back seat to freedom. On CharityBuzz.com, I'm sorry to report, the bidding on an internship with fashion designer Caroline Herrera (proceeds to New York University Hospital for Joint Diseases) is already closed, as it is on an internship with Rolling Stone magazine (proceeds: New York Restoration Project). Better luck next time!
Inevitably, the internship-selling racket has slipped the surly bonds of philanthropy and entered the for-profit marketplace. An outfit called the University of Dreams guarantees placement or your money back. Summer-internship fees (the University of Dreams prefers to call it "tuition") range from $5,499 to $9,499. For 3 percent extra, you can pay on an installment plan. The interns have been placed with firms like Hill and Knowlton and Smith Barney (did a rich, dumb intern start the credit crunch?) in Barcelona, Chicago, Costa Rica, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, Sydney, and Washington, D.C. For-profit consultants like Fast Track Internships are extending the principle of SAT prep to internships by teaching marginally literate students how to polish their résumés and cover letters and by guiding them to potential summer employers. Like the University of Dreams, Fast Track Internships offers a money-back guarantee. Its Web site boasts that it can tap into 85 percent of all internships that are never advertised, a proposition that suggests divine omniscience. Prices range from $799 for an unpaid internship to $999 for a paid internship to $1,999 for a full-time job.
"It's a huge misconception to say this is a program for rich kids," Eric Lochtefeld, CEO of University of Dreams, told the Journal. "The average student comes from the middle class, and their parents dig deep." To whatever extent that were true, inegalitarianism would shade into encyclopedia-salesman-style exploitation. The company "has begun funding scholarships and grants for low-income applicants," the Journal reports. But that merely lowers the price of opportunity. Whoever said a summer internship was something you had to pay for? The idea of getting a job is that they're supposed to pay you.
BERLIN (AFP) — The UN's special torture rapporteur called on the US Tuesday to pursue former president George W. Bush and defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld for torture and bad treatment of Guantanamo prisoners.
"Judicially speaking, the United States has a clear obligation" to bring proceedings against Bush and Rumsfeld, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak said, in remarks to be broadcast on Germany's ZDF television Tuesday evening.
He noted Washington had ratified the UN convention on torture which required "all means, particularly penal law" to be used to bring proceedings against those violating it.
"We have all these documents that are now publicly available that prove that these methods of interrogation were intentionally ordered by Rumsfeld," against detainees at the US prison facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Nowak said.
"But obviously the highest authorities in the United States were aware of this," added Nowak, who authored a UN investigation report on the Guantanamo prison.
Bush stepped down from power Tuesday, with Barack Obama becoming the 44th president of the United States.
Asked about chances to bring legal action against Bush and Rumsfeld, Nowak said: "In principle yes. I think the evidence is on the table."
At issue, however, is whether "American law will recognise these forms of torture."
A bipartisan Senate report released last month found Rumsfeld and other top administration officials responsible for abuse of Guantanamo detainees in US custody.
It said Rumsfeld authorized harsh interrogation techniques on December 2, 2002 at the Guantanamo prison, although he ruled them out a month later.
The coercive measures were based on a document signed by Bush in February, 2002.
French, German and US rights groups have previously said they wanted to bring legal action against Rumsfeld.
Authorities at Super Bowl XLIII will be looking for more than just drunken fans. They'll be watching spectators' body language, facial expressions and demeanor to find suspicious people.
For the first time Sunday, federal behavior-detection officers will team with local police to use a controversial technique on people heading to a major event, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) says. The officers usually work in airports.
Behavior observation aims to find people in crowds acting unusually. A flagged person gets a casual interview from an officer who determines if he or she should be formally questioned or arrested.
At the Tampa Police request, the TSA is sending dozens of its behavior officers to Tampa to watch spectators entering 75,000-seat Raymond James Stadium on Sunday, said Tampa Police spokeswoman Laura McElroy. The TSA on Jan. 13 gave a four-hour training overview on behavior detection to 100 Tampa-area police, TSA operations chief Lee Kair said.
"They'll be a dedicated set of eyes looking for suspicious behavior," McElroy said of TSA officers.
The American Civil Liberties Union says that the technique is unproven and that its use at a stadium sets an alarming precedent for police inquiries.
"Police shouldn't be stopping and questioning people unless they have some credible reason to suspect them. Behavior detection is just too vague," ACLU analyst Barry Steinhardt said. He noted sarcastically, "If we're going to use this at high-profile sporting events, why not start using it on streets?"
Behavior observation is used daily by 2,600 specially trained TSA officers at more than 160 airports. Officers look for obvious signs of nervousness or other behavioral flags, such as sweating, avoiding eye contact or talking evasively.
Police want to guard against an attacker such as the man who drove to last year's Super Bowl site near Phoenix with an automatic rifle intending to open fire, McElroy said. The man, Kurt William Havelock, apparently changed his mind in the stadium parking lot and turned himself in. He was sentenced in October to a year in prison for making threats.
The TSA officers, who get seven days of training, will take the lead in spotting suspicious spectators, while their police partners will do the questioning, McElroy said. Police around the USA are asking for the TSA training, Kair said.
in every article I think I've ever read for the last, um, 20 years, on global warming they always find some guy to quote to say "this is a wake-up call." I think those who are awake are awake and those who are asleep, are gonna stay there at this point, you know.....
Even if by some miracle the nations of the world could bring carbon dioxide levels back to those of the pre-industrial era, it would still take 1,000 years or longer for the climate changes already triggered to be reversed, scientists said Monday.
The gas already here and the heat that has been absorbed by the ocean will exert their effects for centuries, according to an analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Over the long haul, the warming will melt the polar icecaps more than had previously been estimated, raising ocean levels substantially, the report said.
And changes in rainfall patterns will bring droughts to the American Southwest, southern Europe, northern Africa and western Australia comparable to those that caused the 1930s Dust Bowl in the U.S.
"People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide, the climate would go back to normal in 100 years, 200 years," lead author Susan Solomon, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in a telephone news conference. "That's not true."
The changes will persist until at least the year 3000, said Solomon, who conducted the study with colleagues in Switzerland and France.
Scientists familiar with the report said it emphasized the need for immediate action to control emissions.
"As a climate scientist, this was my intuition," said geoscientist Jonathan T. Overpeck of the University of Arizona. "But they have done a really good job of working through the details and . . . make a case that the situation is more dire than we thought if we don't act quickly and aggressively to curb carbon dioxide emissions."
Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said the persistence of climate change caused by global warming was "poorly appreciated by policymakers and the general public, and it is real."
"The policy relevance is clear: We need to act sooner, even if there is some doubt about exactly what will happen, because by the time the public and policymakers really realize the changes are here, it is far too late to do anything about it," Trenberth said.
The report came as President Obama ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to consider allowing states the right to enact auto emission standards stricter than federal rules.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton also is expected to appoint a new envoy for climate change to bolster the administration's credentials in environmental policy.
The slowness with which ocean water circulates is central to the new findings. Carbon dioxide is primarily removed from the atmosphere through absorption into seawater, an incredibly slow process because of the time it takes for surface water saturated with the gas to be replaced by deeper water that can further absorb carbon dioxide.
That gas accounts for about half of the global warming caused by greenhouse gases, but the other gases are removed from the atmosphere more quickly. Thus, the long-term influence of carbon dioxide will have the greatest effect on climate change, the report said.
Moreover, heat absorbed by the ocean is released slowly, and will continue to contribute to global warming even if the concentration of greenhouse gases should decline, the authors said.
Solomon said in a statement that absorption of carbon dioxide and release of heat -- one acting to cool the Earth and the other to warm it -- would "work against each other to keep temperatures almost constant for more than 1,000 years."
Geoscientist Jorge L. Sarmiento of Princeton University said, "This is really a wake-up call about the seriousness of this issue."
The study looked particularly at ocean levels and rainfall. The team found that by thermal expansion of ocean water alone, sea levels will rise from 1.3 to 3.2 feet if carbon dioxide climbs from the current level of 385 parts per million to 600 parts per million, and twice that if it peaks at 1,000 parts per million.
Melting of the icecaps could increase sea levels even more, inundating low-lying islands and continental shorelines, but the effects are too uncertain to quantify, Solomon said.
Reductions in rainfall would also last centuries, the report said, decreasing drinking water supplies, increasing fire frequency and devastating dry-season farming of wheat and maize.
if you remember back in 2003, I went to a protest the first day of the iraq war. I ran into this kid I kinda new from around who came up to me, scared, because he spotted these undercover cops who were trying to provoke the protestors and he was telling people to stay away from them but they came up to him and threatened him and he wanted to take a photo of them to have as proof if they did. so I went with him away from the crowd to take the photo.
and as you know I wound up getting beaten and arrested by the police for this.
personally, I think they are rushing to close gitmo because we're gonna need that spot for a base to launch our attacks on failed central/south american countries. but hey, what do I know....
but yes, let us not forget that gitmo isn't the only hellhole george bush created....
WASHINGTON — For months, a national debate has raged over the fate of the 245 detainees at the United States military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
But what may be an equally difficult problem now confronts the Obama administration in the 600 prisoners packed into a cavernous, makeshift prison on the American air base at Bagram in Afghanistan.
Military personnel who know Bagram and Guantánamo describe the Afghan site as tougher and more spartan. The prisoners have fewer privileges and virtually no access to lawyers. The Bush administration never allowed journalists or human rights advocates inside.
Problems have also developed with efforts to rehabilitate former jihadists, some of whom had been imprisoned at Guantánamo. Nine graduates of a Saudi program have been arrested for rejoining terrorist groups, Saudi officials said Monday.
President Obama must now decide whether and how to continue holding the men at Bagram, most of them suspected of being Taliban fighters. Under the laws of war, they are being held indefinitely and without charge. He must also determine whether to go forward with the construction of a $60 million prison complex at Bagram that, while offering better conditions for the detainees, would also signal a longer-term commitment to the American detention mission.
Mr. Obama tried last week to buy some time in addressing the challenges Bagram poses even as he ordered Guantánamo closed. By a separate executive order, Mr. Obama directed a task force led by the attorney general and the defense secretary to study the government’s overall policy on detainees and to report to him in six months.
But human rights advocates and former government officials say that several factors — including expanding combat operations against the Taliban, the scheduled opening of the new prison at Bagram in the fall and a recent federal court order — will probably force the administration to deal with the vexing choices much sooner.
“How the Obama administration plans to deal with detention in Afghanistan is an open question,” said Tina M. Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network, a human rights organization in New York. “How will this administration differ from the Bush administration in its conduct of detention in Afghanistan?”
The population at Bagram has increased nearly sixfold over the past four years, driven not just by the deepening conflict in Afghanistan but also by the fact that the Bush administration in September 2004 largely halted the movement of prisoners to Guantánamo, leaving Bagram as the preferred alternative to detain terrorism suspects.
Bush administration lawyers argued this month that the Bagram detainees were different from those at Guantánamo. Virtually all of the Bagram prisoners were captured on the battlefield and were being held in a war zone, the lawyers contended, and they could pose a security threat if released. On Thursday, Judge John D. Bates of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia gave the Obama administration until Feb. 20 to “refine” the government’s legal position with respect to four men who are seeking to challenge their detention at Bagram under habeas corpus, a right that the Supreme Court has granted for detainees at Guantánamo.
The four plaintiffs were taken to Bagram from outside Afghanistan and have been imprisoned there without access to any legal process, many of them for over six years, said Ms. Foster, who is representing the detainees.
Judge Bates issued his order after Mr. Obama signed his directives on Thursday, and the judge cited the presidential orders as “indicating significant changes to the government’s approach to the detention, and review of detention, of individuals currently held at Guantánamo Bay.” He noted that “a different approach could impact the court’s analysis of certain issues central to the resolution” of the Bagram cases as well.
At a White House briefing about the executive orders last Thursday, a senior administration official was asked whether terrorism suspects captured by American authorities would continue to be sent to Bagram. The official said not to expect any changes to existing policies in Afghanistan for at least six months, pending the completion of the task force’s review.
A Justice Department spokesman, Dean Boyd, declined to comment on Judge Bates’s order, saying that government lawyers were studying it.
The challenges confronting the Obama administration at Bagram do not extend to the much larger American detention operations in Iraq, where the United States now holds about 15,000 prisoners. Under a security agreement with the Iraqi government, the United States will begin next month to release up to 1,500 detainees a month. Fighters captured and imprisoned in Iraq are afforded legal protections under the Geneva Conventions.
Human rights advocates are already pressing the administration to revamp the review process for releasing or transferring the Bagram detainees, all but about 30 of whom are Afghans. This process, which the military calls “unlawful enemy combatant review boards,” involves reviews of the status of each prisoner every six months. Human rights lawyers criticize the process as a sham and have called for a return to the longstanding battlefield reviews called for by the Geneva Conventions.
More broadly, Mr. Obama’s move away from the Bush administration’s aggressive detention policies will have to be reconciled with his plans to increase combat operations in Afghanistan, a step that will almost inevitably generate new waves of detainees.
“The decisions about detention in and around Afghanistan are linked to strategic decisions Obama needs to make on the Afghanistan war,” said Matthew Waxman, a professor at Columbia Law School who served in the Department of Defense overseeing detainee policies under the Bush administration. “Does a proposed ‘surge’ in Afghanistan, for example, include an expanded detention mission? How does detention fit within a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan?”
Mr. Waxman said one approach the Obama administration might consider is whether it can defend a narrower definition of enemy combatant than the broad one asserted by the Bush administration.
In 2005, the Bush administration began trying to scale back American involvement in detention operations in Afghanistan, mainly by transferring Bagram prisoners to an American-financed high-security prison outside of Kabul guarded by American-trained Afghan soldiers.
The American military has handed over about 20 to 30 detainees a month since 2007, or more than 500 detainees in all, according to Lt. Col. Mark Wright, a Defense Department spokesman.
But United States officials conceded more than a year ago that the new Afghan prison could not absorb all the Bagram prisoners. The officials have also acknowledged serious problems in the security-court system in Afghanistan in which the transferred detainees are being tried.
Another question confronting the Obama administration is whether to go ahead with the construction of a 40-acre detention complex to replace the existing prison. After the prison was created in early 2002, it became a primary screening site for prisoners captured in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.
Harsh interrogation methods and sleep deprivation were used routinely, and two Afghan detainees died there in December 2002 after being beaten by American soldiers and hung by their arms from the ceiling of isolation cells.
Conditions and treatment have improved markedly since then, but there are still only minimal areas for the prisoners to exercise. The new detention center at Bagram is supposed to incorporate some of the lessons learned by the United States in Iraq. Classrooms will be built for vocational training and religious discussion, and there will be more space for recreation and family visits, officials said.
“The tragedy is, the U.S. is spending tens of millions of dollars building better detention facilities, but still has no process in place to handle these guys,” said Sam Zarifi, director of Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific program, which is based in London.
