Abu Ghraib officer found guilty of... discussing the abuse investigation

Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan was the only officer and the last of 12 defendants to go to trial in the 2003 Abu Ghraib scandal, which embarrassed the Pentagon and shocked the Muslim world.

The jury acquitted Jordan of three counts: cruelty and maltreatment for subjecting detainees to forced nudity and intimidation by dogs; dereliction of a duty to properly train and supervise soldiers in humane interrogation rules; and failing to obey a lawful general order by ordering dogs used for interrogations without higher approval.

The jury found him guilty of one: disobeying a general's order not to talk to others about the investigation into the abuse.

Eleven enlisted soldiers have been convicted of crimes in connection the Abu Ghraib scandal. The longest sentence, 10 years, was given to former Cpl. Charles Graner Jr., of Uniontown, Pa., in January 2005. Lynndie England, who was an MP reservist from Fort Ashby, W. Va., and the most recognizable face from the Abu Ghraib photos, was sentenced to three years.

Plastic Ocean

It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. [...] Dragging a fine-meshed net he discovered minuscule pieces of plastic, some barely visible to the eye, swirling like fish food throughout the water. He and his researchers parsed, measured, and sorted their samples and arrived at the following conclusion: By weight, this swath of sea contains six times as much plastic as it does plankton.

The North Pacific gyre is only one of five such high-pressure zones in the oceans. There are similar areas in the South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. Each of these gyres has its own version of the Garbage Patch, as plastic gathers in the currents. Together, these areas cover 40 percent of the sea. "That corresponds to a quarter of the earth's surface," Moore says. "So 25 percent of our planet is a toilet that never flushes."

BPA has been found in nearly every human who has been tested in the United States. We're eating these plasticizing additives, drinking them, breathing them, and absorbing them through our skin every single day. [...] "Findings suggest that developmental exposure to BPA is contributing to the obesity epidemic that has occurred during the last two decades in the developed world, associated with the dramatic increase in the amount of plastic being produced each year." Given this, it is perhaps not entirely coincidental that America's staggering rise in diabetes -- a 735 percent increase since 1935 -- follows the same arc.

"Except for the small amount that's been incinerated -- and it's a very small amount -- every bit of plastic ever made still exists." [...] "It's not the big trash on the beach. It's the fact that the whole biosphere is becoming mixed with these plastic particles. What are they doing to us? We're breathing them, the fish are eating them, they're in our hair, they're in our skin."

Fat German Rabbits to Feed Poor: Monster Bunnies For North Korea.

North Korea's Idolization - 40% of National Budget.

Washington Post:

President Bush this morning proudly signed into law a bill that critics consider one of the most un-American in the nation's long history.

The new law vaguely bans torture -- but makes the administration the arbiter of what is torture and what isn't. It allows the president to imprison indefinitely anyone he decides falls under a wide-ranging new definition of unlawful combatant. It suspends the Great Writ of habeas corpus for detainees. It allows coerced testimony at trial. It immunizes retroactively interrogators who may have engaged in torture.

ACLU:

The president can now - with the approval of Congress - indefinitely hold people without charge, take away protections against horrific abuse, put people on trial based on hearsay evidence, authorize trials that can sentence people to death based on testimony literally beaten out of witnesses, and slam shut the courthouse door for habeas petitions. Nothing could be further from the American values we all hold in our hearts than the Military Commissions Act.

The hunt for the killer hairballs

There is one story that many flushers in London like to recount. It concerns a fat iceberg that had been building up below Leicester Square over the course of a whole decade. Eventually, this 150-square-foot "slug of hardened fat" grew so large that it was impassable. A gang of flushers armed with supersucker machines spent six weeks one blazing summer trying to dislodge it. By the time they finished they were reduced to using ice picks to hack away at the white mountain.

"It looks like a huge packet of lard. It shines in the dark and gives off this phenomenal transparent heat. Within ten minutes, as soon as you stick a shovel in it, you could slide through. The water comes at you like a dyke. The risks are colossal. Later, an animal food company got in touch because they wanted to buy and recirculate the fat."

Previously.

The Day That Nothing Happened

The Wal-Mart in the basement of my building sells live frogs in a big aquarium, for eating. I don't know what surprised me more when I moved here - the frogs, or the Wal-Mart. [...] In addition to the frogs there are live turtles, plastic bar code tags threaded through little holes in their shells. [...] This being China, any employee handling food inevitably wears a gauze mask and sanitary outfit that gives the deli counter the feel of a level-3 containment facility.

There are two Chinas - a small urban China that is getting richer, and an enormous rural one that remains desperately poor. Imagine cities in the United States surrounded by rural Mexico and you have the dynamic. [...] What makes the situation exceptionally weird is that this is happening in a country that still professes to be Marxist. And the new Chinese capitalism feels like it was introduced by people whose understanding of it came solely from reading Marx: it is ruthless, exploitative, and contains the seeds of its own destruction. The only hitch is that the inevitable finale - proletarian revolution - is supposed to have already happened.

Wal-Mart's Data Center

Behind a fence topped with razor wire just off U.S. Highway 71 is a bunker of a building that Wal-Mart considers so secret that it won't even let the county assessor inside without a nondisclosure agreement.

Wal-Mart's ability to crunch numbers is a favorite of conspiracy theorists, and its data centers are the corporate counterpart to Area 51 at Groom Lake in the state of Nevada. According to one consumer activist, Katherine Albrecht, even the wildest conspiracy buff might be surprised at just how much Wal-Mart knows about its customers - and how much more it would like to know.

"We were contacted about two years ago by somebody who runs a security company that had been asked in a request for proposals for ways they could link video footage with customers paying for their purchases," Albrecht said. "Wal-Mart would actually be able to view photos and video of customers paying, say, for a pack of gum."

Poll #729849 N+1
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(Yes, I am aware that there is no Option Three. Take a fuckin' stand.)

Hundreds killed in Nigerian pipeline explosion:

At least 150 people were killed today when a petrol pipeline exploded in Nigeria as locals tried to siphon fuel from it, police said. Around 50 burned corpses could be seen lying on the sandy beach near an area of the pipeline close to the waterside village of Ilado, about 28 miles east of Lagos, Nigeria's commercial centre. The Red Cross said the pipeline blew up while locals were drilling into it, igniting about 500 cans full of fuel that were lying nearby, apparently full of fuel that had been siphoned off.

There were drilling marks in several places on the pipe. A few of the bodies were floating in the sea. Despite its oil riches, the impoverished people of Nigeria often tap into pipelines, seeking fuel for cooking or resale on the black market. The pipelines often go through poor areas, but drilling into them is highly dangerous as the fuel can be so volatile.

Sacramento Police report that thieves are drilling for gas -- not from wells -- but directly from vehicle's gas tanks. Crooks get under cars with a drill and make a hole in the gas tank, draining it. Police say that this isn't a rare occurrence. Thieves have struck several times in the last week the same way, and authorities expect that it will get worse as the price of gas continues to climb.

Enough water to supply 58 million people is stolen from Spain's underground reserves each year, drying out already-parched land to feed the lucrative property, tourism and agricultural sectors, a report warned on Thursday.

The World Wildlife Fund said there was a hugely profitable black market in water extracted from around 510,000 illegal wells throughout Spain. Southern Spain is already one of the driest parts of Europe and according to the government, a third of the country is in danger of turning into a desert.

The report estimated that around 3,600 cubic hectometres of water are stolen each year -- only 25 percent less than the whole country uses legally.

Today's happy fun news comes from bruce_schneier, wired_27b_6, & so_very_doomed:

• Major Vulnerability Found in Diebold Election Machines: Armed with a little basic knowledge of Diebold voting systems and a standard component available at any computer store, someone with a minute or two of access to a Diebold touch screen could load virtually any software into the machine and disable it, redistribute votes or alter its performance in myriad ways. "This one is worse than any of the others I've seen. It's more fundamental." (See also Voting Machines versus Slot Machines.)

• NSA Creating Massive Phone-Call Database: The NSA is collecting a massive traffic-analysis database on Americans' phone calls. This looks like yet another piece of Echelon technology turned against Americans. "The agency's goal is 'to create a database of every call ever made' within the nation's borders." Note that this database does not just contain phone calls that either originate or terminate outside the U.S. This database is mostly domestic calls: calls we all make everyday. AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth are all providing this information to the NSA. Only Quest has refused.

• Fun With Surveilance: It's important to link this up to the broader chain. One thing the Bush administration says it can do with this meta-data is to start tapping your calls and listening in, without getting a warrant from anyone. Having listened in on your calls, the administration asserts that if it doesn't like what it hears, it has the authority to detain you indefinitely without trial or charges, torture you until you confess or implicate others, extradite you to a Third World country to be tortured, ship you to a secret prison facility in Eastern Europe, or all of the above. If, having kidnapped and tortured you, the administration determines you were innocent after all, you'll be dumped without papers somewhere in Albania left to fend for yourself.

• Domestic spying inquiry killed: The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers security clearance. "Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation."

• US energy research is declining: Given the decades-long warnings about a looming world energy crisis - punctuated by the recent spike in crude oil prices - you'd assume the U.S. has been ramping up its research and development spending on energy. Think again. Since 1980, energy research has fallen from 10 percent to 2 percent of total R&D spending. And while the Bush administration lists energy research as a "high priority national need" and points to its recent energy bill as evidence, the 2005 federal budget cuts another 11 percent from energy programs.

Thursday, April 27, 2006, clergy from around the Washington, DC and MD area will gather in downtown DC to pray for the lowering of gas prices.

Chinese PM admits sandstorms are sign of 'ecological destruction'

Beijingers unfurled their face-scarves and wiped the coating of yellow dust off their homes yesterday after days of sandstorms which deposited on to the capital 300,000 tons of sand from the Gobi desert and dust from the thousands of building sites around the city.

By the time the sandstorms whipped Beijing, they had picked up a large dose of heavy metals and carcinogens which, over the past week, caused a suffocating layer of foul air to hang over China's capital.

The head of China's environment watchdog warned yesterday that worsening water and air pollution could soon become a political issue and translate into social tension, riot and protests. [...] His views were echoed by Wen Jiabao, the Prime Minister. "The succession of dust storms is a warning to us. Ecological destruction and environmental pollution are creating massive economic losses and gravely threatening people's lives and health," he said earlier this week.

The premier said China had no problem meeting economic goals but was faltering on environmental targets. China's sulphur dioxide emissions last year were 27 per cent higher than in 2000, despite the goal set by the government to reduce emissions by 10 per cent over that time.

The World Bank says 16 of the world's 20 most polluted cities are in China and so far this year the capital has recorded just 56 days with blue skies - 16 fewer than for the same time last year. Environmental damage has sparked widespread anger and many citizens have taken to the streets to protest.

Russian Thieves Break Into Missile Silo to Find it Filled With Money

A team of thieves that broke into an abandoned missile silo not far from the Russian city of Kostroma in search of nonferrous metals was shocked to find the shaft packed with Soviet money bills, Regnum news agency reported on Tuesday.

The incident would have remained secret, had the wind not blown hundreds of banknotes all over the countryside.

Four men from Nizhny Novgorod found the silo that had had missiles dismantled and put on maintenance decades ago in accordance with the Soviet disarmament program. They targeted the metals inside and said they had had no idea about the money hidden in the shaft.

It's the wind-blown money that elevates this from mere Madmaxian doomedness to screwball comedy. Is this what Schneier means by "movie plot threats"?

Happiness: The Chinese zombie ships of West Africa

He's the 2nd mate, and says that he's been sitting here on his own for five days, awaiting a new crew, He doesn't know when they'll arrive. The trawler itself has been anchored here, at this spot, for three months.

"Is this ship ready for fishing?" we ask. "Yes, of course", he looks around, gestures at the deck. He seems surprised that we would ask. We're amazed it's even floating.

We had been told this was where old pirate fishing boats were left at anchor, abandoned. We didn't expect to find living people on board the dying ships.

Update: Part 2.