From various reports I had already figured that Egypt and Israel had some secret understanding regarding Isreal’s planned attack on Hamas. I knew that the Egyptian government was furious with Hamas. But I never expected to see the above expressed on Egyptian prime time television in Arabic by Egypt’s Foreign Minister. Regardless of what Arab leaders think in private, they are not supposed to say things like this in public.
Granted, the clip is short and I am sure if I had a full transcript of what he said I would find that he made some kind of pro forma denouncements of Israel. Still, I admire his forthrightness.
However, if I was a life insurance company I would deny him coverage. There is a reason why he went on television to say this and not Mubarak.
That threshold was lowered considerably by yesterday’s operation when, for the first time, Israel targeted groups of Hamas soldiers and policemen not involved in active operations.
Membership alone of the security structures of Hamas was yesterday turned by Israel into grounds for attack. To put on a Hamas police baseball cap is to make oneself a target.
This means that any Hamas traffic cop on a street corner in Gaza – or manning a makeshift ‘border’ checkpoint – can expect to be attacked.
From later on in the article…
Throughout this period, Hamas planners assumed their security forces were safe from Israeli strikes, as long as they were not directly involved in running or ordering an attack. All of that changed with yesterday’s raids. Somehow, I no longer expect to see uniformed Hamas officers guiding traffic at Gaza’s junctions.
Kind of amazing that Hamas could shoot at Israel and assume that only the people involved in the shooting were in danger huh?
Authority officials initially said that about 1.7 million cubic yards of wet coal ash had spilled when the earthen retaining wall of an ash pond breached, but on Thursday they released the results of an aerial survey that showed the actual amount was 5.4 million cubic yards, or enough to flood more than 3,000 acres one foot deep. The amount now said to have been spilled is larger than the amount the Authority initially said was in the pond, 2.6 million cubic yards.
Authority officials offered little explanation for the discrepancy, telling reporters that the initial number was an estimate based on their information at the time. The aerial survey was done on Tuesday, but the results were not released until Thursday. Calls to an Authority spokesman on Friday morning were not immediately returned.
Residents were stunned by the new numbers. “That’s scary to know that they can be off by that much,” said Angela Spurgeon, whose yard is swamped with ash. “I don’t think it was intentional, but it upsets me to know that a number was given of what the pond could hold, and the number now is more than double of what the pond actually held.”
Gilbert Francis Jr., a spokesman for the Authority, said Wednesday that the pond had not exceeded its allowable capacity.
Look, the dam burst. That is a fact.
Thus, it seems that the pond had exceeded the its allowable capacity according to the laws of physics. Now maybe there is a piece of paper somewhere that says that the dam could hold more. But if so, that piece of paper was wrong.
Given that their are lots more of these dams all around the pressing question is why was that piece of paper wrong?
In this case though, I suspect that someone is lying. The clip below seems to suggest that they knew there where problems with the dam.
Figures released by the Conservatives show that 2,196 foreign offenders have been invited to take part in the early release scheme, called End of Custody Licence, since its introduction 15 months ago in response to prison overcrowding.
As well as walking free having served less than half of their sentence, each released prisoner is entitled to around £7 a day in compensation to make up for missing out on the state-provided food and lodging they would have received had they remained in jail.
Offenders released on End of Custody Licence receive an initial discharge payment of £46, followed by the subsistence allowance of £47.12 a week, up to a cap of £168.24.
If all those eligible received the full allowance, the taxpayer would by now have paid out £369,455 in compensation to foreign prisoners who had been released early.
The defense establishment is currently preparing for a military move against Hamas targets in Gaza, after the Islamist group launched more than 70 rockets into Israel on Wednesday.
As an initial retaliatory measure, an Israel Air Force strike killed a Hamas gunman in the southern Gaza Strip on Wednesday. Israel’s response will go beyond the air raid, an Israeli official told Haaretz.
Russia devalued the ruble for the third time in a week, sending the currency to its lowest level against the dollar since January 2006, as oil’s drop below $37 a barrel dimmed the outlook for growth.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev threatened sanctions against Ukraine, and state-run OAO Gazprom said it might cut off natural gas to the former Soviet republic if it fails to pay $2.1 billion it owes by next week.
Meanwhile, even their victory over Georgia is giving them problems. From Spiegel…..
In the city, 10 schools, kindergartens and the hospital have been rebuilt. But in many houses there are now plastic tarps and blankets where windows used to be. “We brought enough glass to Tskhinvali to provide it with three times as many windows as it needs,” Russian Disaster Protection Minister Sergei Shoigu said angrily.
No one knows exactly what happened to all the glass and other building materials. The same appears to apply to much of the €350 million ($490 million) in Russian reconstruction aid. To be on the safe side, Moscow did send two of its own people to Tskhinvali to serve as prime minister and finance minister. But President Kokoity has declared the budget, filled almost exclusively with Russian funds after the war, a state secret. A former security advisor accuses Kokoity of having surrounded himself with confidants from the Russian regions of Samara and Ulyanovsk and of conducting money-laundering operations with dubious companies.
Yuri Morosov, the former prime minister who resigned after the war — supposedly of his own free will — voices similar complaints. According to Morosov, 100 million rubles or about €2.7 million ($3.8 million) in salary payments for public servants were embezzled shortly before the conflict. Most of the money was intended for South Ossetia’s armed militias.
The above might seem just like western tut tuting. But the problems in South Ossetia have gotten so bad that even the normally compliant Russian media have been talking about them.
As it turned out, they would make it across the wadi, but not easily. Most of the Afghan “jingle trucks,” named after their tinkling decorations, got stuck in the mud, some more than once. Some of the American vehicles got stuck trying to pull them out. The crossing took three hours.
The convoy finally reached its destination, Combat Outpost Kushmand in Paktika province, but only after a 17-hour day that covered just 20 miles.
Iraq was the bad war. Afghanistan is supposed to be the good war. But before it is all done, I think that Afghanistan is going to leave deeper scars on the American consciousness.
The supply situation is just so much worse in Afghanistan then it was in Iraq that I can’t help feeling that we are a heart beat away from a detachment being surround and killed. Or even worse, the supply lines for Pakistan getting cut and forcing the evacuation of most American troops.
Soon after radar-guided anti-aircraft missiles became a threat, planners realized that the simplest way to stop them was to take out the radar. These radars make an easy target; in radio terms, they are equivalent to lighthouses, radiating brightly. So in 1958 the U.S. introduced the Shrike, an “Anti-Radiation Missile” that homed in on enemy radar and proved invaluable in the Vietnam War. The modern successor is the AGM-88 HARM High Speed Antiradiation missile, which has longer range and a speed of over mach 2. “No U.S. aircraft has ever been lost to surface-to-air missiles when HARM has been flying cover,” Mike Vigue, HARM Growth Manager at Raytheon, told me.
When ever you read articles like this, people act like it is a great weakness that HARM missiles can’t hit a radar set that has been turned off. But a radar set that has been turned off is not a threat. It is a lot cheaper to pay few planes armed with HARM missiles to fly cover then it is to make sure all of your planes are stealthy.
In a world of unlimited resources, naturally one would want all your planes to be stealthy. But in the real world, their are lot more pressing concerns.
Frustration over lingering power outages is turning to outrage in some New Hampshire communities, and police say they are concerned for the safety of line crews.
Unitil officials say that in some cases, residents have parked cars in front of utility trucks to keep them from leaving neighborhoods.
I find it hard to believe that there are enough residents of New Hampshire who can plausibly threaten the safety of an average line crew to be worth worrying about. I think the real police concern is that they not have to arrest a line crew for beating the snot out of somebody who deserves it.
I feel for the foremen though. Trying to keep the hot heads on your crew in line has to be a problem that they don’t need right about now. They are already working 16 hours or more a day from what I hear.
