November 2007
Monthly Archive
November 29, 2007
Richard Roberts, son of Oral, has announced his resignation from his post as president of Oral Roberts University.
Roberts told an assembly of students that God told him on Thanksgiving that he should retire the very next day.
Oral Roberts U has sunk into a pile of scandal lately. Ricky is being sued for lavish, personal spending habits while the U sunk $50-mill into debt. Then there are claims that his wife, Lindsay, has had a thing for some of the very young, male students.
Roberts said God told him he would “do something supernatural for the university” if he stepped down from the job he held at the 5,700-student school since 1993. Amen, brother.
November 29, 2007
The other “earth” is Venus and a European probe, called the Venus Express, is shedding light on how that planet, and ours, took differing paths. It all comes down to the “greenhouse gas effect”. From The Guardian:
Scientists had puzzled over Venus’s hellish characteristics. It is roughly the same size as Earth, with a roughly similar orbit. Both planets began life with similar atmospheres, but Venus underwent a ferocious greenhouse effect that left it with an atmosphere made up almost entirely of CO2 and almost no water.
“Earth and Venus were pretty much identical to start with … It really made you think the physics was different, which obviously it couldn’t be,” said Prof Fredric Taylor at Oxford University. Some scientists had thought that Venus’s proximity to the sun was key to its transformation, but the new data suggests a different explanation: “It’s not evil, just unfortunate.” Venus Express’s data appear in a set of paper’s in today’s edition of Nature.
One finding is that the solar wind – a stream of charged particles from the sun – is stripping away water molecules from the atmosphere by breaking them into atoms of hydrogen and oxygen and blasting them into space. That cannot happen on Earth because its rotation creates a magnetic field that diverts the solar wind. Without water, CO2 in the atmosphere could not be laid down in oceans as carbonate rocks. “[On Earth] it’s all in the white cliffs of Dover and places like that,” said Taylor. The CO2-rich atmosphere led to a runaway greenhouse effect.
Venus Express has also found some intriguing features of the atmosphere. One instrument detecting electromagnetic frequencies has observed the tell-tale signature of lightning, something some scientists did not think was possible. “It is like some sort of echo,” said Dr Magda Delva at the space research unit at the Austrian academy of sciences in Graz. “If you have lightning then chemical reactions are possible that would not under normal conditions take place … At least on Earth this was important for the beginning of life.”
November 29, 2007
Some of Britain’s biggest companies – car makers, airlines, banks and retailers – have joined together, pledging to offer greener products and pursue research into ways to reduce carbon emissions.
The group, which includes British Petroleum, Tesco and British Telephone, intend to set the standard for regular monitoring and reporting of carbon emissions, investing in technology and emission reducing products and promoting greener behaviour by their employees.
The 18-companies involved employ more than two million people worldwide and generate revenues of two trillion dollars annually. The group is to release a report on Monday setting out its plans. It notes that the real responsibility for cutting emissions lies with consumers who, through their purchases, directly influence some 60% of Britain’s carbon emissions.
November 29, 2007
Decisions, decisions. What’s a president to do? According to CNN, these are some of the decisions beguiling the president:
“…how to get the Saudis more involved in solving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, how to get them more engaged against terrorism, how to address the Arab view that the United States always sides with Israel and how to build up moderate Palestinians to counter extremists.”
The president, however, wasn’t George w. Bush, but Richard m. Nixon.
Declassified documents just released by the Nixon library show Tricky Dick was dealing with almost the same issues that confront Bush three decades later. And, yes, Nixon was just as successful in dealing with them as Bush has been.
November 28, 2007
A survey released today at
http://www.journalism.org/, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, doesn’t tally with many reports about great progress being made in Iraq.
“…the journalists—most of them veteran war correspondents—describe conditions in Iraq as the most perilous they have ever encountered, and this above everything else is influencing the reporting. A majority of journalists surveyed (57%) report that at least one of their Iraqi staff had been killed or kidnapped in the last year alone—and many more are continually threatened. “Seven staffers killed since 2003, including three last July,” one bureau chief wrote with chilling brevity. “At least three have been kidnapped. All were freed.”
A majority of journalists surveyed say most of the country is too dangerous to visit. Nine out of ten say that about at least half of Baghdad itself. Wherever they go, traveling with armed guards and chase vehicles is the norm for more than seven out of ten surveyed. “
The survey included responses from 111 journalists who have worked or are currently working in Iraq. The vast majority, 90 of them, were in Iraq when they took the survey or have worked there in 2007, and most have spent at least seven months in the country cumulatively since the war began.
The journalists are from 29 different news organizations (all of them U.S. based except for one) that have had staff in Iraq—including newspapers, wire services, magazines, radio, and network and cable TV. This represents, by best estimates, every news organization in the U.S. save one that has had a correspondent in Iraq for at least one month since January 2006.
November 28, 2007
It sounds as though Conrad Black has some hope of getting off lightly when he comes up before a Chicago judge for sentencing next month.
Right now the consensus is that Black can expect to get something in the range of 5 to 7-years if the judge accepts the findings of a court-ordered report. The pre-sentencing report disputes some of the claims the prosecution is making in seeing a 20-year term for Black.
The report concludes the amount actually lost was about $6-million, not the $32-million alleged by prosecutors, notes that the crime was not a “sophisticated” as in meticulously planned fraud, and that most of the misconduct happened outside the U.S.
The National Post reveals how overzealous Black’s prosecutors can be. They’re asking that “the relevant-conduct analysis should consider not only convicted conduct, but also acquitted and uncharged criminal conduct that is proved by a preponderance of evidence.” Say what? They want the judge to assess Black’s sentence by incorporating conduct for which he’s either not been charged or has been acquitted? I don’t much care for Connie but this is really piling on
Wonder what Babs is going to do. Will she dump Connie and go for a new suitor or will she hang around and wait for her Lordship to come back to her open arms?
November 28, 2007
By most accounts, conditions on the ground in Iraq, particularly in Baghdad, have improved noticeably over the past two months. There’s disagreement on why but the improvement is pretty well accepted.
The outlook on the war among the American people has certainly picked up. A Pew Research poll found that 48% now believe the war is going fairly well compared to just 30% last February. Yet this growing confidence hasn’t translated into improved support for either the war or for George w. Bush.
The percentage of Americans who want their troops out soon has held at 54% compared to 53% last February. It was telling that the percentage of Americans who still believe the Iraq war will wind up poorly hasn’t changed at all. The latest figures from Pew shows Bush’s approval rating has actually fallen a few points to 30%. Probably the economy and subprime mortgage meltdown have offset any extra support Bush might have hoped for from Iraq.
The numbers seem to suggest that a lot of Americans made their minds up about this war some time ago and improvements now are too little, too late to change their minds.
November 28, 2007
It’s reported that the Commons Ethics Committee will have government lawyers open the questioning of Karlheinz Schreiber when and if he appears before them tomorrow.
If it was up to me, my first question would be to ask Schreiber if he would release his former lawyer, Robert Hladun, from his privilege restrictions concerning any communications between Hladun, Brian Mulroney and Mulroney’s lawyer, Gerard Tremblay, during October, 1999, pertaining to funds that passed from Schreiber to Mulroney or Frank Moores.
Why focus on this? The answer is contained in this account from the Fifth Estate of events said to have transpired on October 17, 1999:
October 17, 1999
“Mulroney contacts Schreiber’s lawyer Robert Hladun and asks him to ask Schreiber for a written statement indicating that at no time did Mulroney solicit or receive compensation from Karlheinz Schreiber.
Gerard Tremblay phones Robert Hladun and asks for a letter to keep on file from Schreiber, which is not to be disseminated, so that he can send a letter to the CBC which “would in his opinion shut down the airing of the fifth estate story on the “Airbus”—October 20th.
Mulroney contacts Hladun and tells him he has instructed Tremblay to send a letter to the fifth estate “indicating that if there was the slightest implication that Mr. Schreiber, Mr. Moores and Brian Mulroney were involved in any way then there would be terrible consequences.
He would issue the letter but first wanted an assurance or comfort in writing from Mr. Schreiber saying that he would confirm what he had publicly on many occasions, that at no time did Brian Mulroney solicit or receive of any kind from Schreiber. Mulroney called Hladun again that day, at which time Mulroney was told “I was no sure whether or not a letter would be forthcoming.”
These events, to my mind, could be the most troublesome for Mulroney because of what they say if they’re true and because they can be confirmed or denied by a person whose integrity is not questioned, Robert Hladun.
If Hladun corroborates this account it would put Mulroney in the spot of having to explain why he personally contacted Schreiber’s lawyer asking for a letter from Schreiber denying payments that even Mulroney himself now acknowledges he received. It would also make it vastly more difficult for Mulroney to lay on the blarney about what he said under oath in his lawsuit and why he forgot to declare this income for tax purposes until it was disclosed in the media. In other words, any guy who would try to pull this stunt has just kissed goodbye the benefit of the doubt.
If these events didn’t happen I think Hladun would be eager to set the record straight, if only to extricate himself from the controversy.
November 28, 2007
This little fellow is the Asian Tiger mosquito. With much of the world getting warmer, he’s been arriving at all sorts of new places.
The Asian Tiger is being blamed for spreading chikungunya fever to Italy. The Italians have been dealing with an outbreak of 300-cases of the fever. Before this outbreak there had only been one case of the fever recorded in that country.
The spread of this mosquito is of particular concern because of two other gifts it often carries – dengue fever and yellow fever. Dengue fever has a 7% fatality rate.
The spread of the Asian Tiger has been remarkable. It is now firmly established in much of Latin America, in a minimum of 26 states of the US, in parts of Africa and much of southern and parts of central Europe. In North America it’s credited with spreading West Nile, eastern equine encephalomyelitis and Cache Valley virus.
November 28, 2007
Karlheinz Schreiber is on his way to Ottawa. Opposition MPs want the Speaker to let Schreiber spend tonight in his house, hoping that might make him more co-operative when he appears tomorrow before the ethics committee.
Will Schreiber talk? That’s the great unknown. What more can he say about Brian Mulroney and Frank Moores than he’s already said, on camera, to CBC? Maybe there’s not a lot more to tell, although it would be helpful, to everyone involved including Mulroney, to get Schreiber’s account under oath and be able to test his statements through cross-examination.
Even if Schreiber dummies up that won’t put an end to Mulroney’s troubles. He’s already got too many facts and claims on the record, either personally or through his spokesmen, to avoid having to answer a lot of tough questions.
My instincts tell me not to expect too much tomorrow. I’m guessing that Schreiber’s performance will be a real letdown.
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