Giant Ice Shelf Snaps Free Near North Pole By ROB GILLIES, AP.

TORONTO (Dec. 29) - A giant ice shelf has snapped free from an island south of the North Pole, scientists said Thursday, citing climate change as a "major" reason for the event.

NASA / AP

The ice shelf, at center of this satellite photo, was one of six major shelves remaining in Canada's Arctic. They are packed with ice that is more than 3,000 years old.
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The Ayles Ice Shelf - all 41 square miles of it - broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 500 miles south of the North Pole in the Canadian Arctic.

Scientists discovered the event by using satellite imagery. Within one hour of breaking free, the shelf had formed as a new ice island, leaving a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake.

Warwick Vincent of Laval University, who studies Arctic conditions, traveled to the newly formed ice island and couldn't believe what he saw.

"This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are losing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years," Vincent said. "We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead."

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The ice shelf was one of six major shelves remaining in Canada's Arctic. They are packed with ancient ice that is more than 3,000 years old. They float on the sea but are connected to land.

Some scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in Canada in 30 years and that climate change was a major element.

"It is consistent with climate change," Vincent said, adding that the remaining ice shelves are 90 percent smaller than when they were first discovered in 1906. "We aren't able to connect all of the dots ... but unusually warm temperatures definitely played a major role."

Laurie Weir, who monitors ice conditions for the Canadian Ice Service, was poring over satellite images in 2005 when she noticed that the shelf had split and separated.

Weir notified Luke Copland, head of the new global ice lab at the University of Ottawa, who initiated an effort to find out what happened.

Using U.S. and Canadian satellite images, as well as seismic data - the event registered on earthquake monitors 155 miles away - Copland discovered that the ice shelf collapsed in the early afternoon of Aug. 13, 2005.

AP

This photo provided by the University of Ottawa shows time-lapse series images illustrating the breakup of the Ayles Ice Shelf.

Copland said the speed with which climate change has effected the ice shelves has surprised scientists.

"Even 10 years ago scientists assumed that when global warming changes occur that it would happen gradually so that perhaps we expected these ice shelves just to melt away quite slowly," he said.

Derek Mueller, a polar researcher with Vincent's team, said the ice shelves get weaker and weaker as temperatures rise. He visited Ellesmere Island in 2002 and noticed that another ice shelf had cracked in half.

"We're losing our ice shelves and this a feature of the landscape that is in danger of disappearing altogether from Canada," Mueller said.

Within days of breaking free, the Ayles Ice Shelf drifted about 30 miles offshore before freezing into the sea ice. A spring thaw may bring another concern: that warm temperatures will release the new ice island from its Arctic grip, making it an enormous hazard for ships.

"Over the next few years this ice island could drift into populated shipping routes," Weir said.

12/29/06 06:40 EST

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. Active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.

U.S. Should Not Support Ethiopia’s Invasion of Somalia

by Amitabh Pal

The United States has been concerned about Islamist fundamentalist militias operating in Somalia. These militias contain some extremely vile elements and allegedly have ties to Al Qaeda. They have laid siege to the Ethiopian-backed interim Somali government and have not only threatened to impose Shariah law on the country but also to export their agenda. The Ethiopian government cites the Islamist threat as the reason for its operation. The United States has not only given its approval to the invasion, but has troops in Ethiopia training the country’s soldiers, and is providing intelligence to the Ethiopian armed forces.

The Bush Administration is so spooked by the specter of Islamic fundamentalism that it’s willing to overlook the dangers of the conflict sparking off a larger conflagration.of the “AfricaAlas

Cont. Ckick On Link Belo

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1229-21.htm

Link to U.S. Should Not Support Ethiopia’s Invasion of Somalia

BBC NEWS | Americas | Chavez to shut down opposition TV

Chavez to shut down opposition TV

The move has been called a grave violation of freedom of expression

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has said he will not renew the licence for the country's second largest TV channel which he says expires in March 2007.

In an address to troops, Mr Chavez said he would not tolerate media outlets working towards a coup against him.

Radio Caracas Television, which is aligned with the opposition, supported a strike against Mr Chavez in 2003.

But the TV's head said there must be some mistake as its licence was not up for renewal in the near future.

Marcel Granier also vowed to fight against the president's plans in Venezuela's courts and on the international stage.

The BBC's Greg Morsbach in Caracas says Mr Chavez has repeatedly threatened to take the TV off the air but has never given a date.

There will be no new operating licence for this coupist TV channel - the measure has been drafted so go turn off the equipment

Hugo Chavez

The move could help silence some of his critics in the media who have been a thorn in his side for several years, he says.

Mr Chavez, who was returned to power by a wide margin on 3 December, said Mr Granier was mistaken in believing "that concession is eternal".

"It runs out in March. So it's better that you go and prepare your suitcase and look around for what you're going to do in March," he said during a televised speech to soldiers at a military academy in Caracas.

"There will be no new operating licence for this coupist TV channel called RCTV. The operating licence is over... So go and turn off the equipment," Mr Chavez said.

'Violation of freedom'

Mr Chavez said the channel was "at the service of coups against the people, against the nation, against national independence, against the dignity of the republic".

The channel is among a number of private TV and radio networks that in recent years have strongly criticized Mr Chavez' government and favoured the opposition.

Many media outlets, including RCTV, supported a bungled coup in 2002 and a devastating general strike in 2003 that failed to unseat the president.

The press freedom campaign group, Reporters Without Borders, said the proposed move would be a grave violation of freedom of expression in Venezuela.

RCTV is one of the country's oldest channels and began broadcasting in 1953.

Link to BBC NEWS | Americas | Chavez to shut down opposition TV

Courts Side With NSA

Courts Side With NSA On Wiretaps
New York Sun | December 26, 2006 Joseph Goldstein
Defense lawyers who had hoped that the public disclosure a year ago of the National Security
Agency's wiretapping program would yield information favorable to their clients are being rebuffed by the federal judiciary, which in a series of unusually consistent rulings has rejected efforts by terrorism suspects to access the records.
In at least 17 criminal cases, federal district judges nominated to the federal bench by presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush have ruled against requests to force the government to tell defendants, most accused of terrorism-related crimes, whether the NSA eavesdropped on them without a court warrant.
The rulings indicate that even as public support for the war in Iraq has eroded in polls and as the NSA program has come under criticism from congressional Democrats, and even some Republicans, federal judges may be a bulwark that the Bush administration can rely on to defer to at least some aspects of its wartime policies.
The judges' decisions have come after defense attorneys filed motions requesting access to relevant surveillance intercepts that the government obtained without a warrant. Defense attorneys claim they are entitled to such information and that evidence obtained from warrantless wiretaps is tainted and inadmissible at trial. In many, but not all instances, the motions were filed after a conviction.
Individually, the judges' orders, often very brief and rarely providing explanations, indicate little. Taken together, however, they signal that the judges are unwilling to permit defense attorneys to use prosecutions to force disclosures about the program.
The legality of the NSA program is being litigated in several civil lawsuits across the country. In one case, a district judge in Detroit, Anna Diggs Taylor, ruled in August that the program was unconstitutional, a decision that the government has appealed. Legal observers dispute whether even a ruling by the Supreme Court that the program is unconstitutional would lead to the overturning of criminal convictions in which the program played a role in securing evidence or targeting the defendants.
In every instance, the Justice Department's policy is to refuse to say publicly whether the NSA program was involved in a case, because denying its role in one case but refusing to deny its role elsewhere could disclose classified information, according to public government court filings. Rather, in response to defense motions, the Justice Department has filed secret documents with the court that are not supplied to defense lawyers.
"There is a veil of secrecy over these parts of the proceedings," said one attorney, Marvin Miller, who filed such a motion on behalf of Ali Asad Chandia, who was convicted in Alexandria, Va., of aiding a terrorist organization in Pakistan.
Defense attorneys say they are frustrated that judges are accepting these secret briefs from the government.
"Whatever the government is saying in these secret ex parte in camera filings, it is sure clamming up a lot of judges," said attorney Jeanne Baker, who represents Adham Amin Hassoun, a co-defendant of "dirty bomb" suspect Jose Padilla.
Speculation abounds among attorneys over just what the Justice Department is saying in the secret briefs.
Some defense attorneys suggest that the government's ex parte briefs may contain a simple yes-or-no answer as to whether a specific defendant was targeted by the NSA program. Another defense attorney, Jill Shellow-Lavine, speculates that the size of the program may prevent the government from stating whether a particular defendant was the subject of the surveillance.
A former Justice Department official says that the government probably declines to give any answers in its secret filings.
"There is no basis to assume than the government is making defendant-specific disclosures," David Rivkin, who served in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, said. "The far more likely scenario is that the government is telling the relevant judges that the classified program has nothing to do with this prosecution."
Defense attorneys say the willingness of judges to accept secret briefings puts them in an unfair position.
"It short-circuits the adversary system, and it prevents the issues from being litigated," a lawyer who has filed a motion for disclosure regarding the NSA program, Malick Ghachem, said. "I haven't found a single judge so far who has been willing to take a serious look at this or at least let the defendants know they are taking a serious look at it."
Defense attorneys acknowledge that these motions for disclosure are made routinely, even without any evidence to suggest that their clients were targeted by the NSA program.
Still, even in cases in which the NSA program is believed to have played a role, it is not clear that judges would rule any differently. Officials in the Bush administration have credited the NSA program with helping uncover the terrorist plot of an Ohio truck driver, Iyman Faris, to topple the Brooklyn Bridge, according to a New York Times report. In October a federal judge in Alexandria, Va., Leonie Brinkema, declined Faris's request for government documents about the NSA program's role in the case. Last month, Judge Brinkema upheld Faris's guilty plea from 2003, ruling that Faris did not have standing to bring his challenge even if "electronic surveillance" had first led the government to him.
In only one case has a federal appeals court looked at the relationship of the NSA program to criminal prosecutions. The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., in April remanded a separate case to Judge Brinkema, questioning whether the government possessed "undisclosed intercepts" that should have been turned over. The case involved a Muslim cleric, Ali al-Timimi, who was found guilty last year of encouraging Muslims to join the Taliban's war efforts.
Timimi's attorney, Jonathan Turley, said he believes that NSA intercepts may contain exculpatory evidence that could have benefited Timimi, rather than incriminating evidence used to target him.
A court filing by the Justice Department in the case against Lynne Stewart, the New York lawyer who was convicted of criminally helping her terrorist client communicate with his followers, listed 17 criminal cases in which judges have denied motions for disclosure about the NSA program. The New York Sun reviewed 14 of them. In those orders, the judges, excluding Judge Brinkema, did not state any reason for denying the defense motions, except to indicate that they had considered the secret briefs of the government. In one written order, a judge implied that his willingness to sentence a defendant without further hearings was on the condition that the government's secret brief said no evidence came from the NSA program.
 

Bush Faces Legal Action over Global Warming

The Bush administration could be forced to take action on global warming using a 30-year-old piece of legislation to control the nation's vast emissions of greenhouse gases.
The US Supreme Court will today be asked to force the government to order its environmental regulatory body to control, as a matter of the public health, the amount of carbon dioxide pumped out by vehicles.
Amid a growing disparity between the Bush administration and many US states on the issue of global warming, it will be the first time the country's highest court has heard a case relating to climate change.
A number of environmental groups have joined with a dozen US states and several cities to try to force the government to make the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulate carbon emissions under the framework of the Clean Air Extension Act. This legislation, passed by Richard Nixon's administration in 1970, requires the EPA to develop and enforce regulations to protect the public from exposure to airborne contaminants.
The Bush administration has argued that the EPA lacks the authority under the act to regulate CO2 as a pollutant. The agency has argued that even if it had the authority, it would still have the discretion not to impose emission controls.
Carbon dioxide is one of the main greenhouse gases pumping into the atmosphere that a broad majority of scientists believe are responsible for raising the planet's temperature. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that most of the planet's warming over the past 50 years has been the result of human activity.
The US, with 5 per cent of the world's population, is responsible for 25 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions and accounts for 37 per cent of the world's vehicles. The Bush administration has repeatedly refused to agree to limits on emissions, saying it would damage the economy. It has instead proposed developing better technology to limit emissions. One of the first things George Bush did on taking office in 2001 was to signal that the US would not support the Kyoto treaty.
A divided lower court had ruled in favour of the government in this test case, but the Supreme Court has agreed to a request, filed by the State of Massachusetts, to consider an appeal.
The Massachusetts attorney general, Thomas Reilly, said "global warming is the most pressing environmental issue of our time and the decision by the court on this case will make a deep and lasting impact for generations to come".
In his filing to the court, he added: "Delay has serious potential implications. Given that air pollutants associated with climate change are accumulating in the atmosphere at an alarming rate, the window of opportunity in which we can mitigate the dangers posed by climate change is rapidly closing."
In papers filed with the Supreme Court, the government has argued that the EPA should not be required to "embark on the extraordinarily complex and scientifically uncertain task of addressing the global issue of greenhouse gas emissions" when there were other ways to tackle climate change.
The Associated Press reported that James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, told reporters: "We still have very strong reservations about an overarching, one-size-fits-all mandate about carbon."
The government is being supported by a number of industry groups representing car makers and manufacturers. Quentin Riegel, a lawyer with the National Association of Manufacturers, said dealing with climate change required a global response that was enforced fairly. "It's not a problem you can solve unilaterally," he said. "We want a system where everyone shares the burden."
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

The Future Of Spying

December 4, 2006
Are wikis and blogs the future of spying?
Government technology
Intelligence
In a fascinating piece in Sunday's Times, Clive Thompson reveals that, confronted with the intractable problem of getting 16 intelligence agencies communicating and interoperating, the CIA set up a competition, the Galileo Awards, for the best ideas on how to combat the problem. The winning essay was written by Calvin Andrus, chief technology officer of the Center for Mission Innovation at the C.I.A.
In his essay, “The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community,” Andrus posed a deceptively simple question: How did the Internet become so useful in helping people find information?
Andrus argued that the real power of the Internet comes from the boom in self-publishing: everyday people surging online to impart their thoughts and views. He was particularly intrigued by Wikipedia, the “reader-authored” encyclopedia, where anyone can edit an entry or create a new one without seeking permission from Wikipedia’s owners. This open-door policy, as Andrus noted, allows Wikipedia to cover new subjects quickly. The day of the London terrorist bombings, Andrus visited Wikipedia and noticed that barely minutes after the attacks, someone had posted a page describing them. Over the next hour, other contributors — some physically in London, with access to on-the-spot details — began adding more information and correcting inaccurate news reports. “You could just sit there and hit refresh, refresh, refresh, and get a sort of ticker-tape experience,” Andrus told me. What most impressed Andrus was Wikipedia’s self-governing nature. No central editor decreed what subjects would be covered. Individuals simply wrote pages on subjects that interested them — and then like-minded readers would add new facts or fix errors.
Similarly, blogs work through a crowd effect. When worthy material is posted it is quickly discovered, linked to, enlarged and corrected. This, Andrus argued, would be a far better system for intelligence work than the hierarchical control model. It would, for instance, make sure that good, relevant information floats to the top of the system, rather than being squashed when it doesn't comport with preconceived notions held at the top.
With Andrus and Burton’s vision in mind, you can almost imagine how 9/11 might have played out differently. In Phoenix, the F.B.I. agent Kenneth Williams might have blogged his memo noting that Al Qaeda members were engaging in flight-training activity. The agents observing a Qaeda planning conference in Malaysia could have mentioned the attendance of a Saudi named Khalid al-Midhar; another agent might have added that he held a multi-entry American visa. The F.B.I. agents who snared Zacarias Moussaoui in Minnesota might have written about their arrest of a flight student with violent tendencies. Other agents and analysts who were regular readers of these blogs would have found the material interesting, linked to it, pointed out connections or perhaps entered snippets of it into a wiki page discussing this new trend of young men from the Middle East enrolling in pilot training.
As those four original clues collected more links pointing toward them, they would have amassed more and more authority in the Intelink search engine. Any analysts doing searches for “Moussaoui” or “Al Qaeda” or even “flight training” would have found them. Indeed, the original agents would have been considerably more likely to learn of one another’s existence and perhaps to piece together the topography of the 9/11 plot. No one was able to prevent 9/11 because nobody connected the dots. But in a system like this, as Andrus’s theory goes, the dots are inexorably drawn together. “Once the intelligence community has a robust and mature wiki and blog knowledge-sharing Web space,” Andrus concluded in his essay, “the nature of intelligence will change forever.”
Amazingly, technical leadership at the DNI implemented Wikis, blogs and chatrooms. But uptake was hardly enthusiastic.
“The Spying 2.0 vision has thus created a curious culture battle in intelligence circles. Many of the officials at the very top, like Fingar, Meyerrose and their colleagues at the office of the director of national intelligence, are intrigued by the potential of a freewheeling, smart-mobbing intelligence community. The newest, youngest analysts are in favor of it, too. The resistance comes from the “iron majors” — career officers who occupy the enormous middle bureaucracy of the spy agencies. They might find the idea of empowered grass roots to be foolhardy; they might also worry that it threatens their turf. “
And the critics might turn out to be right. As Clay Shirky of N.Y.U. points out, most wikis and blogs flop. A wiki might never reach a critical mass of contributors and remain anemic until eventually everyone drifts away; many bloggers never attract any attention and, discouraged, eventually stop posting. Wikipedia passed the critical-mass plateau a year ago, but it is a rarity. “The normal case for social software is failure,” Shirky said. And because Intellipedia is now a high-profile experiment with many skeptics, its failure could permanently doom these sorts of collaborative spy endeavors.
Talkback - Add your opinion

Is President Bush Sane?

by Paul Craig Roberts

Tens of millions of Americans want President George W. Bush to be impeached for the lies and deceit he used to launch an illegal war and for violating his oath of office to uphold the US Constitution. Millions of other Americans want Bush turned over to the war crimes tribunal at the Hague. The true fate that awaits Bush is psychiatric incarceration.

The president of the United States is so deep into denial that he is no longer among the sane.

Delusion still rules Bush three weeks after the American people repudiated him and his catastrophic war in elections that delivered both House and Senate to the Democrats in the hope that control over Congress would give the opposition party the strength to oppose the mad occupant of the White House.

On November 28 Bush insisted that US troops would not be withdrawn from Iraq until he had completed his mission of building a stable Iraqi democracy capable of spreading democratic change in the Middle East.

Bush made this astonishing statement the day after NBC News, a major television network, declared Iraq to be in the midst of a civil war, a judgment with which former Secretary of State Colin Powell concurs.

The same day that Bush reaffirmed his commitment to building a stable Iraqi democracy, a secret US Marine Corps intelligence report was leaked. According to the Washington Post, the report concludes: "the social and political situation has deteriorated to a point that US and Iraqi troops are no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar province."

The Marine Corps intelligence report says that al-Qaeda is the "dominant organization of influence" in Anbar province, and is more important than local authorities, the Iraqi government and US troops "in its ability to control the day-to-day life of the average Sunni."

Bush’s astonishing determination to deny Iraq reality was made the same day that the US-installed Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki and US puppet King Abdullah II of Jordan abruptly cancelled a meeting with Bush after Bush was already in route to Jordan on Air Force One. Bush could not meet with Maliki in Iraq, because violence in Baghdad is out of control. For security reasons, the US Secret Service would not allow President Bush to go to Iraq, where he is "building a stable democracy."

Bush made his astonishing statement in the face of news leaks of the Iraq Study Group’s call for a withdrawal of all US combat forces from Iraq. The Iraq Study Group is led by Bush family operative James A. Baker, a former White House chief of staff, former Secretary of the Treasury, and former Secretary of State. Baker was tasked by father Bush to save the son. Apparently, son Bush hasn’t enough sanity to allow himself to be saved.

Bush’s denial of Iraqi reality was made even as one of the most influential Iraqi Shi'ite leaders, Moqtada al-Sadr, is building an anti-US parliamentary alliance to demand the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.

Maliki himself appears on the verge of desertion by his American sponsors. The White House has reportedly "lost confidence" in Maliki’s "ability to control violence." Fox "News" disinformation agency immediately began blaming Maliki for the defeat the US has suffered in Iraq. NY Governor Pataki told Fox "News" that "Maliki is not doing his job." Pataki claimed that US troops were doing "a great job."

A number of other politicians and talking heads joined in the scapegoating of Maliki. No one explained how Maliki can be expected to save Iraq when US troops cannot provide enough security for the Iraqi government to go outside the heavily fortified "green zone" that occupies a small area of Baghdad. If the US Marines cannot control Anbar province, what chance is there for Maliki? What can Maliki do if the security provided by US troops is so bad that the president of the US cannot even visit the country?

The only people in Iraq who are safe belong to al-Qaeda and the Sunni insurgents or are Shi'ite militia leaders such as al-Sadr.

An American group, the Center for Constitutional Rights, has filed war crimes charges in Germany against former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. A number of former US attorneys believe President Bush and Vice President Cheney deserve the same.

Bush has destroyed the entire social, political, and economic fabric of Iraq. Saddam Hussein sat on the lid of Pandora’s Box of sectarian antagonisms, but Bush has opened the lid. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed as "collateral damage" in Bush’s war to bring "stable democracy" to Iraq. Tens of thousands of Iraqi children have been orphaned and maimed. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have fled their country. The Middle East is aflame with hatred of America, and the ground is shaking under the feet of American puppet governments in the Middle East. US casualties (killed and wounded) number 25,000.

And Bush has not had enough!

What better proof of Bush’s insanity could there be?