Rove Off The Record On Katrina: The Only Mistake We Made Was Not Overriding The Local Government... Karl Rove, President Bush's top political advisor and deputy White House chief of staff, spoke at businessman Teddy Forstmann's annual off the record gathering in Aspen, Colorado this weekend. Here is what Rove had to say that the press wasn't allowed to report on.
On Katrina: The only mistake we made with Katrina was not overriding the local government...
On The Anti-War Movement: Cindy Sheehan is a clown. There is no real anti-war movement. No serious politician,... (more)
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U.S. Seeks Donations... For IraqWASHINGTON - (KRT) - From the Indian Ocean tsunami to the church around the corner, Americans have shown time and again they are willing to open their pocketbooks for charity, for a total of about $250 billion last year alone.
But now, amid pleas for aid after Hurricane Katrina, the Bush administration has launched an unusual effort to raise charitable contributions for another cause: the government's attempt to rebuild Iraq.
Although more than $30 billion in taxpay... (more)
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The Coming Category 5 Financial HurricaneBefore the US House of Representatives, September 15, 2005
The tragic scenes of abject poverty in New Orleans revealed on national TV by Katrina’s destruction were real eye-openers for many. These scenes prompted two emotional reactions. One side claims Katrina proved there was not enough government welfare, and its distribution was based on race. The other side claims we need to pump billions of new dollars into the very federal agency that failed (FEMA), while givin... (more)
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Mayor Ray Nagin: Troops are "decontaminating themselves as they would if they were operating in a toxic environment"BATON ROUGE, La. -- A weakened levee system and a lack of drinkable tap water will make it "extremely problematic" to follow the New Orleans mayor's timeline for allowing residents to return to the evacuated city, the head of the federal disaster relief effort said Saturday.
Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen said federal officials have worked with Mayor Ray Nagin and support his vision for repopulating the city, but he called Nagin's idea to return up to 180,000 people to New Orlea... (more)
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NOLA Mayor Says Forget The Feds & Come On BackFeds try to stop Mayor Ray Nagin from bringing people back to New Orleans.
Federal and local authorities on Sunday clashed over whether New Orleans was ready for residents to return, putting in doubt efforts to quickly resettle the devastated city.
Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen, head of the federal recovery efforts in New Orleans, said the city lacked most of the basic services -- such as drinkable wa... (more)
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Wading into an E. coli stewMy memory is muddy, what's this river I'm in
New Orleans is sinking and I don't want to swim.
— "New Orleans is Sinking," The Tragically Hip
They swam, they dogpaddled, they floated, they waded.
Up to the knees, the waist, the chest and above the head.
In abyssal New Orleans, there was no escape from water. It deluged homes, lapped at rooftops, turned streets into channels, fire escapes into cataracts and ent... (more)
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Blair gave Murdoch 'veto' over EU, says PM's ex-aide
Tony Blair promised Rupert Murdoch that he would be consulted on any change to Britain's policy towards Europe, according to a diary kept by a former Downing Street press officer.
But the original entry in The Spin Doctor's Diary was toned down on the orders of the Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus McDonald. The original entry, published in today's Mail on Sunday, described the atmosphere in No 10 as "very edgy" after pro-euro comments by the then Secretary of State for Tr... (more)
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Blair attacks BBC for 'anti-US bias'Tony Blair has denounced the BBC's coverage of Hurricane Katrina as 'full of hatred of America' and 'gloating' at the country's plight, it was reported yesterday.
Blair allegedly made the remarks privately to Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, which owns the rival Sky News.
The comments threatened a new rift between the government and the BBC following the Andrew Gilligan affair over events leading to the Iraq war and recent criticisms of mini... (more)
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Child STD cases prompt sex abuse investigationsUp to 70 cases of possible abuse are being investigated by police in Western Australia's north after reports of sexually transmitted diseases (STD) among children.
Six of the cases involve children aged under five.
Under a new system, health authorities are obliged to report cases of STDs among children to police and social workers.
Detective Senior Sergeant Martin Voyez says as a result, there have been three convictions of child abuse in the north-w... (more)
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Indonesia reports bird flu deathAn Indonesian woman who died last week had the H5N1 bird flu virus and was the fourth Indonesian to die of the disease, the health ministry has said.
It was not clear how the 37-year-old woman, who lived in south Jakarta, caught the virus, the ministry said.
More than 60 people have died in four Asian countries since late 2003, and millions of birds have been culled to try to stop the virus spreading.
Scientists fear it could combine with human flu to... (more)
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Cut the high-tech noise in ChinaIMAGINE what would have happened if during the 1980s an American communications company had provided information that allowed the South African government to track down and imprison an anti-apartheid activist. That is pretty much the moral equivalent of what Yahoo has just done in China in the case of journalist Shi Tao. And the California-based Web giant deserves the same kind of public opprobrium that would have fallen on any Western company that dared to publicly cooperate with the enforcers ... (more)
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Chinese try to break nuke talks standoffBeijing -- The United States joined North Korea Saturday in raising objections to a Chinese compromise proposal designed to break a stalemate in six-nation talks on dismantling North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
Christopher Hill, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs and the chief U.S. negotiator, said he and other diplomats were consulting with their governments to come as close as possible to China's new suggestions, which seek to bridge a U.S.-Nort... (more)
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Blair relished ‘first blooding’ in Iraq, claims No 10 diary DOWNING Street was embarrassed last night after a frank account of the tantrums and cynicism of Tony Blair’s inner circle were published in the diaries of a former No 10 aide.
The prime minister’s office censored parts of the diaries, the first memoirs from a No 10 spin doctor.
Lance Price, a former deputy to Alastair Campbell, reveals in his book, The Spin Doctor’s Diary, that:
Blair privately seemed to “relish” sending... (more)
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Iran warning on sanctions threatIran has warned the UN's atomic agency not to refer it to the Security Council over its nuclear programme.
A referral could lead to UN sanctions against the Islamic republic.
Tehran hinted that such a move could prompt it to start uranium enrichment as well as a uranium conversion process that has already been resumed.
The remarks came after the UK foreign secretary described as "unhelpful" an assertion by Iran's president that Iran had a right to pro... (more)
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US Ambassador To Iraq Predicts US Will Go Into Syria…Dr. Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador to Iraq, made the off the record prediction that the US will go into Syria to combat insurgents that have been using the country as a staging ground for terrorist activity in Iraq.
Ambassador Khalilzad’s comments were made at businessman Teddy Forstmann's annual off the record gathering in Aspen, Colorado this weekend.
In attendance at the conference, among others were: Harvey Weinstein, Brad Grey, Michael Eisner, Les Mo... (more)
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Many Iraqis believe ’suicide’ bombings done by US to start a civil war A suicide bomber sparked Baghdad’s worst day of slaughter since the fall of Saddam 30 months ago when he lured labourers desperate for work towards his van by offering them jobs and then detonated explosives that killed 114 and injured 156 of them.
On a day when more than a dozen co-ordinated attacks thundered across Baghdad from dawn into the late afternoon - claiming 152 lives and wounding 542 - al-Qa’ida in Iraq said it was retaliating against a US-Iraqi operation ... (more)
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Plan to cut number of UK troops in Iraq is scrappedSecret plans by the Government to reduce troop numbers in Iraq have been shelved - and there is now no official date for the withdrawal of British soldiers, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.
The decision comes as ministers prepare to announce an unexpected redeployment of up to 6,000 members of the 7th Armoured Brigade - the renowned Desert Rats - in the conflict zone next month. This follows growing concerns that Iraq is heading into full-scale civil war.
Under the ... (more)
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New trigonometry is a sign of the times: Dr Norman Wildberger, has rewritten the arcane rules of trigonometry and eliminated sines, cosines and tangents What's more, his simple new framework means calculations can be done without trigonometric tables or calculators, yet often with greater accuracy.
Established by the ancient Greeks and Romans, trigonometry is used in surveying, navigation, engineering, construction and the sciences to calculate the relationships between the sides and vertices of triangles.
"Generations of students have struggled with classical trigonometry because the framework is wrong," says Wild... (more)
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Putin Won't Support U.N. Action Against IranPresident Bush won no support from Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday in his bid to bring Iran before the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions and acknowledged he has not yet forged an international consensus on how to deal with Tehran's alleged nuclear program.
After a meeting at the White House, Bush and Putin emerged to reaffirm their friendship and emphasize that they both oppose Iran obtaining nuclear weapons. But Putin offered no backing for the tougher appro... (more)
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Shorter New York Times: FEMA Still Sucks.NYT has a lengthy article about how FEMA is unable (or unwilling?) to get their sh*t together and help people. It's a long read, so I boiled it down for you.
FEMA - the same federal agency that botched the rescue mission - is faltering in its effort to aid hundreds of thousands of storm victims, local officials, evacuees and... (more)
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New York Man Claims Sex DiscriminationALBANY, N.Y. -- Michael Cunningham has filed a $1 million one lawsuit against his employers at the New York Department of Labor, alleging a lack of promotion opportunities for men.
Cunningham is the department's director of training. His suit names the Labor Department's top three officials as defendants.
In the suit, Cunningham said he complained to his immediate supervisor -- a woman -- about a lack of minority hiring and promotions. He also told her that all of t... (more)
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Sheehan: Get troops out of 'occupied New Orleans'Mother of slain soldier decries 'military and governmental fascism'
Fresh from a visit to hurricane-ravaged Louisiana, anti-Bush activist Cindy Sheehan is demanding the U.S. military be removed from "occupied New Orleans."
In a dispatch on leftist filmmaker Michael Moore's website, Sheehan said she was troubled by the "level of the military presence" in the Gulf Coast state.
<... (more)
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FEMA's City of Anxiety in FloridaPUNTA GORDA, Fla. -- "Someone killed my dog," sputtered Royaltee Forman, still livid two weeks later.
"They just threw him out the window and hung him with his own leash," he said, convinced that someone broke into his home while he was out. "I mean, what kind of place has this become?"
Forman's place is FEMA City, a dusty, baking, treeless collection of almost 500 trailers that was set up by the federal emergency agency last fall to house more than 1,500 people mad... (more)
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