Blames Internet for “ugly climate,” echoes vitriolic rhetoric of web haters

During an appearance with his wife Barbara on Fox News last night, George Bush senior slammed Internet bloggers for creating an adversarial and ugly climate, echoing the rhetoric of fellow Neo-Cons and the White House itself in trashing the reputation of the world wide web.

HOST: “Why do you think it’s gotten so adversarial? Tonight is literacy. Everybody comes in from all different sides and wants to help. It seems like oftentimes in Washington, you know, on something we all want to work towards it’s not necessarily so civilized. It’s not so pleasant.”

H.W. BUSH: “It’s true but that’s not new really. I mean, you go back in history and you’ll find that there was always adversarial politics. There was always gut fighting. And it’s probably a little worse now given the electronic media and the bloggers and all these kinds of things.”

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Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday his country expects its uranium enrichment program to be ready by February to meet Iran’s nuclear fuel needs, the national news service IRNA reported.

“We will commission some 3,000 centrifuges by this year end. We are determined to master fuel cycle, and commission some 60,000 centrifuges to meet our demands,” the president said at a news conference closed to foreign reporters.

“Today the Iranian nation possesses the full nuclear fuel cycle and time is completely running in our favor in terms of diplomacy.” (more…)

Focusing cop cameras on Halifax’s known trouble spots is not likely to dramatically decrease crime, but it will cut into every individual’s right to privacy, says one resident.

Following the recent stabbing death of an American sailor outside a downtown bar, police announced they are adding surveillance cameras to their arsenal of crime-fighting equipment.

John van Gurp has made a hobby of noting where surveillance cameras are located around his city.

“I started noticing cameras appearing about three or four years ago, especially on Spring Garden Road,” said the federal civil servant. (more…)

In December 2002, the city of Chicago dedicated a statue called “The Flame of the Millennium” — a seven-ton, stainless-steel, abstract rendering of a flame in high wind, standing over the Kennedy Expressway, just west of the downtown Loop. Last Friday, November 3, the statue appeared to be on fire. When authorities got there, they found a video camera, a canister of gasoline, a sign reading “Thou Shalt Not Kill”, and a human body so badly charred that it was impossible to determine its sex. Someone had self-immolated, near a highway off-ramp, amid rush-hour traffic.

Over the next few days, members of Chicago’s avant-garde music community would be shocked to learn that the person who’d done this was one of their own — someone many of them had been running into, several nights a week, for more than a decade. Tougher still would be dealing with the reasons behind it. According to the statements left on his website, 52-year-old Malachi Ritscher had set himself on fire to protest the war in Iraq and the politics that allowed it to happen. (more…)

International Atomic Energy experts have found unexplained plutonium and enriched uranium traces in a nuclear waste facility in Iran and have asked Tehran for an explanation, an IAEA report said Tuesday.The report prepared for next week’s meeting of the 35-nation IAEA also faulted Tehran for not cooperating with the agency’s attempts to investigate suspicious aspects of Iran’s nuclear program that have lead to fears it might be interested in developing nuclear arms. As well, the four-page paper made available to The Associated Press confirmed that Iran continues uranium enrichment experiments in defiance of the U.N. Security Council.

Earlier Tuesday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday that Iran would soon celebrate completion of its nuclear fuel program and claimed the international community was ready to accept it as a nuclear state. (more…)

A Russian envoy on Monday warned Japan against developing nuclear weapons, saying it would set off a nuclear arms race and cause “huge damage” to regional stability. Top Japanese lawmakers have called for Japan to debate the long-time taboo on developing nuclear weapons in the wake of North Korea’s test of an atom bomb last month.

“If Japan, which has contributed a great deal to the international community, heads the way of developing nuclear weapons, it would be of huge damage to the stability of the international community,” said Alexander Losyukov, the Russian ambassador to Japan.

“If such a situation occurs, it would provoke the arms race. Other countries in the vicinity of Japan, especially Russia and China, would have to respond to it,” he said at a news conference. (more…)

Canadians aren’t entirely troubled that Big Brother may be watching. It’s his blabbing that has them worried.

In the aftermath of 9/11 and other terrorist attacks around the world, most Canadians are willing to put up with a certain amount of surveillance, such as security cameras in stores and even employers reading their email. And almost no one would deliberately provide governments with inaccurate personal information.

But they don’t trust governments to protect that information — and are opposed to giving governments free rein to share it with other countries. (more…)

With a top Democrat calling for a “phased redeployment” of U.S. troops in Iraq, President Bush met Monday with a commission studying the war and said conditions in Iraq, not politics, would dictate troop levels there.

Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, who is expected to chair the Armed Services Committee in January when Democrats take control of Congress, said redeploying troops would prompt the Iraqis to take more expeditious steps to ending the war.

“We cannot save the Iraqis from themselves,” Levin said. “We’ve been told repeatedly by our top uniformed military leaders that there is no purely military solution in Iraq; there is only a political solution in Iraq.” (Watch how Levin suggests proving U.S. troops will not be in Iraq forever — 1:27) (more…)

A German man deported from the US has gone on trial in the Germany city of Mannheim for alleged Holocaust denial.

Germar Rudolf published a study saying the Nazis did not use gas to kill Jews at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The prosecution says he “represented the Holocaust as invention” and used the internet to spread his documents.

If found guilty, Mr Rudolf will face up to five years in prison. He has already been given an jail sentence in a similar case but fled to the US. (more…)

A little-noted provision of the recently passed Defense Authorization Act allows President Bush to send in the military to police any trouble spot in this country regardless of the wishes of state governors.

On Oct. 17, President Bush signed the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007.

The act grants the military the authority to seek from Congress $462.8 billion. In addition, Senate and House conferees added another $70 billion in supplemental defense spending bringing the overall total of the act to an unprecedented $532.8 billion. The supplemental funding provides billions of dollars to help “reset” Army and Marine Corps equipment, which is wearing out faster than planned because of the war in Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq. (more…)

By Ernest Gill, Hamburg — In a scenario resembling the dramatic conclusion to a TV crime drama, paleo-forensics experts have produced new evidence to show that the dinosaurs were bumped off by a different meteor than the one that has received the rap for their extinction. The German palaeontologists insist that a mysterious meteor or comet must have done the deadly deed - long after the notorious Yucatan meteor that has hitherto been blamed.

Until now, it has been accepted generally that the Chicxulub impact off the coast of Mexico 65 million years ago wiped out the dinosaurs. Evidence of the crater left by the giant asteroid or comet has been found under the sea off the coast of Yucatan.

But a group of scientists led by Professor Gerta Keller of Princeton and Professor Wolfgang Stinnesbeck of the University of Karlsruhe begged to differ. They uncovered a series of geological clues which suggests the truth may be far more complicated. (more…)

The British government is set to fight off proposed European rules that would make it responsible for overseeing taste and decency in video clips on sites such as YouTube and MySpace.

Under a clause in the European media regulation directive TV Without Frontiers, national governments would be responsible for regulating the internet for the first time. Britain’s media watchdog, Ofcom, backed by the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, argued that the plan was unworkable and would stifle creativity and investment in new media across Europe.

Ofcom said internet users should be left to police themselves within the bounds of the law. Because internet technology does not respect borders, it argued, users would simply turn instead to websites in the US and elsewhere. (more…)

Tony Blair has been warned that he faces renewed dissent over planned anti-terror laws as research showed the Government faced record levels of rebellion from its backbenchers last year.

Labour MPs defied the whip in more than a quarter of votes during the last session of Parliament, academics at Nottingham University said.

More than half of the rebellions, and the four defeats inflicted, were over Home Office Bills, leading to warnings that the Government could face problems with legislation in a Queen’s Speech expected to focus on crime and anti-terror measures. (more…)

Gunmen in military-style uniforms have kidnapped more than 100 men from a research institute belonging to Iraq’s higher education ministry.

A ministry spokeswoman said the gunmen arrived in new pick-up vehicles and stormed the ministry’s Research Directorate in central Baghdad.

They ordered women into one room and seized the men, including employees, guards and visitors to the building.

Academics and researchers have been frequent targets of violence in Iraq. (more…)

Controversial instructor Kevin Barrett told 27 News he is not returning to teach at UW-Madison in the spring semester.

Barrett had been paid $8,000 to teach a one semester, introduction to Islam course, which is not being offered next January.

“The semester by semester lecturing jobs are fairly hard to come by,” Barrett said. “There was no appropriate course to apply for.” Barrett’s decision to forego applying for a 2007 UW-Madison lecturing position was first reported by the campus newspaper The Badger Herald.

Barrett’s advocacy of the theory the Bush administration was behind controlled demolitions of the World Trade Center’s twin towers and other 9/11 destruction brought national headlines, criticism from Governor Jim Doyle and Republican challenger Mark Green, and led UW-Madison’s Provost to restrict Barrett’s teaching of the subject to two class sessions. (more…)