Blackwater is now receiving inquiries from dozens of new clients, mainly shipping companies and shipping insurance companies. All of them want the same thing: for Blackwater mercenaries to guide their freighters and tankers safely past Somalia, through the world’s most dangerous waters, the hunting grounds of bands of pirates armed with Kalashnikovs and grenade launchers, attacking anything that comes into their sights. In their flip-flops and inflatable plastic boats, they look more like small-time crooks, the sort hardly worth the effort of any Coast Guard vessel. And yet, in reality, these pirates are causing huge problems for the naval fleets of major powers — and, of course, for the governments in places like Berlin, Paris and Washington.
Somali pirates have already attacked more than 90 ships this year, three times as many as in 2007. They have managed to hijack 39 freighters, tankers and fishing vessels. At least 14 of them are currently anchored, under heavy guard, off pirate villages along the coast. The ships’ crews have been waiting for months for ransom money to arrive and secure their release. The United Nations estimates that shipping companies have already paid close to $31 million in ransom. More
Bill Moyers charged an audience of more than 3,500 at the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis. Moyers said the work of the media reform movement has “challenged the stranglehold of mega-media corporations over our press” and fostered “alternative and independent sources of news and information that people can trust.”
Hong Kong officials Saturday banned all poultry imports from China and began killing thousands of chickens as bird flu was detected at a city market. All poultry in the city may be slaughtered in a repeat of the 1990 culls if cases are found in other markets in the former British colony, officials said.
The outbreak, the first in Hong Kong in recent years, was discovered at a livestock market in the city’s Shamshuipo district, the government said. The H5N1 bird flu virus was found on swabs on chicken faeces from the market in Po On Road which was Saturday declared an infected area and sealed off to the public. Workers in protective suits and masks began culling around 2,700 chickens in the market as tests were carried out on poultry at other markets in the city of 6.9 million to see if the outbreak had spread. More
Chris Dolmetsch (Bloomberg)
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said it would be “the worst mistake” for Barack Obama, the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for president, to pick Hillary Clinton as his running mate, according to the Guardian.
Carter cited opinion polls showing that half of U.S. voters have a negative view of Clinton, and said choosing the former first lady as vice-presidential candidate would be the “worst mistake that could be made,” the U.K.-based Guardian reported.
Carter formally endorsed Obama for president yesterday, the Guardian said. Carter made the comments in an interview with the newspaper’s weekend magazine that will be published June 7 and was conducted before Obama clinched enough delegates to win the Democratic nomination.
Carter said Obama should pick someone who can compensate for “potential defects,” such as his “youthfulness” and lack of experience in international and military affairs, the Guardian said. The former president said he prefers former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, the newspaper reported.
There were no warm-up chants, no triumphalist campaign songs, no celebrity supporters, just five local women awkwardly flapping blue Hillary signs.
Suzanne Goldenberg in South Dakota
The audience at this Indian reservation - about 200 counting 14 students on a class trip from Massachusetts and their teacher, who said they were all Barack Obama supporters - was so small Clinton did not even attempt the politician’s hoax of pointing to faces in fake delight.
This is what it looks like for Clinton at the end, the last gasps of a dying presidential campaign. When she launched her campaign in January last year, she cast herself as the inevitable Democratic nominee. “I’m in it to win it,” she said.
Now Obama looks like the inevitable candidate. Clinton’s chances of a miracle recovery evaporated on Saturday when the Democratic party decided to recognise primaries in Michigan and Florida, but halve their voting power at the party’s nominating convention. More
Salon
Ickes — deputy chief of staff in the Clinton White House and one of the great rules mavens of the Democratic Party since the 1960s — had come back from the three-hour break looking distraught as he silently paced back and forth before the committee reconvened. Confronted with the apostasy of the Clinton defectors, Ickes thundered before the Michigan vote, “This motion will hijack, remove, four delegates won by Hillary Clinton. This body of 30 individuals has decided that they’re going to substitute their judgment for 600,000 [Michigan] voters.”
After the committee adjourned, Steed, a former DNC official, explained the logic behind the compromise in an interview, saying, “Our goal was what could be done to unify the party. The only unity proposal on the table was the Michigan proposal, so we accepted it.” Kamarck, a former top Gore aide, put it simply, “It was the only answer.” More
CNN A magnitude-6.4 earthquake hit the Pacific Ocean off the northern Philippines Sunday morning and was felt as far as southeastern Taiwan, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. The epicenter was about 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of Basco, the capital of the Batan Islands in the Philippines and about 340 miles (550 kilometers) south of Taipei, Taiwan. No injuries, deaths or damage were immediately reported, said Manny Torres of the National Disaster Coordinating Center in Manila, Philippines. The center put the earthquake at a 6.3 magnitude.
business24-7
Save the dollar. If it falls further, we all will fall and that’s the truth many refuse to acknowledge. Dollar doomsayers are rampant and widespread across the globe and there are a host of reasons supporting their argument. Crystallizing those points, it can be said that never before has the United States economy been confronted by so many issues that are affecting their fiscal and economic report cards, businesses, individuals and government.
It is facing declining stock and real estate prices, increasing food, commodity and energy prices, trade and fiscal deficits, increasing unemployment and inflation, decreasing investment, stagnant productivity levels, low confidence levels, decreasing consumption, low savings level, increasing cost of debt in a credit dependent economy and failures major investment banks.
Okay, “dollar is doomed”; but is that in the greater interest of people? This is a tricky and complex question, with a lot of strings attached to it. Let us analyse a few. More
briefingroom.thehill.com
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) said that the House Judiciary Committee would be willing to arrest Karl Rove if the former White House official doesn’t testify about his role in the firing of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006.
Wasserman Schultz, in an interview on MSNBC Tuesday, echoed the demand of House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) that Rove would not be allowed to invoke executive privilege to avoid testifying. Rove could not invoke the privilege since he said he did not have conversations with the president about the attorneys’ firing, Wasserman Schultz said.
Asked by MSNBC host Dan Abrams if the committee would go far as having Rove arrested, Wasserman said it would. “Well, if that’s what it takes,” she said. “I mean we really cannot allow the co-equal branch of government, the legislative branch, to be trampled upon by the executive branch. The founding fathers established three branches of government. We are a co-equal branch, and this is an administration that essentially has ignored and disrespected the role of the legislative branch for far too long.”
A future Conservative government will bring in “boot camps” for unemployed young people aged between 18 and 21 who refuse to take a job, Chris Grayling, the party’s welfare spokesman, will say tomorrow.
In a significant hardening of Conservative policy towards welfare claimants, he will announce the abolition of benefit payments for any able-bodied person under 21 who is out of work for more than three months and who refuses to go on a compulsory community service programme or a “boot camp” training course aimed at improving their work discipline and giving them basic skills to get a job.
The measures should cut crime because people would not be hanging around with nothing to do, Grayling will say. For those who decided to embark on a life of crime because they would not work and could not get benefit, there would be “zero tolerance from the criminal justice system”. More
(CNN) Police in Israel are investigating the burning of hundreds of New Testaments in a city near Tel Aviv, an incident that has alarmed advocates of religious freedom. Investigators plan to review photographs and footage showing “a fairly large” number of New Testaments being torched this month in the city of Or-Yehuda, a police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, said Wednesday.
News accounts in Israel have quoted Uzi Aharon, the deputy mayor of Or-Yehuda, as saying he organized students who burned several hundred copies of the New Testament. The deputy mayor gave interviews to Israeli radio and television stations after word of the incident surfaced about two weeks ago. More
Photo blur Nedra Pickler/Ap
A Democratic Party rules committee has the authority to seat some delegates from Michigan and Florida but not fully restore the two states as Hillary Rodham Clinton wants, according to party lawyers. Democratic National Committee rules require that the two states lose at least half of their convention delegates for holding elections too early, the party’s legal experts wrote in a 38-page memo.
The memo was sent late Tuesday to the 30 members of the party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, which plans to meet Saturday at a Washington hotel. The committee is considering ways to include the two important general election battlegrounds at the nominating convention in August, and the staff analysis says seating half the delegates is “as far as it legally can” go. Saturday’s meeting is expected to draw a large crowd, with Clinton supporters among those encouraging a protest outside demanding that all the states’ delegates be seated. More
David Mark
It’s been 11 years since six people in Hong Kong died after contracting the H5N1 virus more commonly known as bird flu. Since then, more than 240 people have died from the disease. That number may seem large, but it pales compared to the hundreds of thousands or millions that could die if the virus mutates and a pandemic takes hold.
Australia has a plan to fight a pandemic, but the Australian National University’s Associate Professor Mohammed Patel says it’s a flawed one.”The national plan mentions general practice very infrequently, besides it’s not the national plan that’s the critical one here, it’s the state plans,” Professor Patel told The World Today. More
And after ABC’s debate debacle, is it any wonder? As far as I’m concerned, television, radio, and print are dying mediums. “Two thirds of Americans - 67% - believe traditional journalism is out of touch with what Americans want from their news, a new We Media/Zogby Interactive poll shows. The online survey documented the shift away from traditional sources of news, such as newspapers and TV, to the Internet - most dramatically among so-called digital natives - people under 30 years old.”
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One recent study showed that only 20 domains (websites) capture 39% of all time spent online by US users. Considering that the Internet is technically an open medium, this is an amazingly high level of user concentration. Myspace.com, which is owned by a News Corporation, commands an astounding 11.9% of US users time online. Bearing in mind the USA has well over two hundred million Internet users, this kind of concentration of online website usage creates huge vectors of power.
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Ordinarily, I don’t post on events surrounding the lives of sports figures, but I found this Herschel Walker story so fascinating, I’m posting a YouTube interview where Walker, an All-American, Heisman Trophy winner and former NFL running back, “talks to WNYC’s Leonard Lopate about his struggles with dissociative identity disorder, which nearly drove him to suicide.” In his recent autobiography, “Breaking Free”, Walker divulged that he can’t remember the season he won the Heisman Trophy, that he held a gun to his ex-wive’s head, and has played Russian Roulette several times.
