US President George W. Bush on Saturday called for Congress to revise a US security law in order to ease restrictions on the government’s secret communications surveillance of terror suspects. Amid furor over Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s handling of the government’s secret warrantless wiretap program, Bush urged legislators to pass the update of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) proposed in April. The changes would ease intelligence collection aimed at people plotting attacks on the United States, Bush said in his weekly radio address. ‘Today we face sophisticated terrorists who use disposable cell phones and the Internet to communicate with each other, recruit operatives, and plan attacks on our country,’ he said. ‘Technologies like these were not available when FISA was passed nearly 30 years ago, and FISA has not kept up with new technological developments. ‘As a result, our nation is hampered in its ability to gain the vital intelligence we need to keep the American people safe.’ Bushed urged lawmakers to work in a bipartisan manner to pass the legislation before leaving for August recess, saying: ‘Our national security depends on it.’ Bush made the plea as Gonzales became more […]
WASHINGTON — Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) released the most comprehensive matrix available to date detailing all offers of assistance from around the world in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. CREW’s matrix is based on 25,000 Department of State (DOS) documents it received as a result of a lawsuit filed under the Freedom of Information Act in December 2005 for records relating to the federal government’s handling and acceptance of international offers of aid after Hurricane Katrina. The matrix includes all international offers, whether they were rejected or accepted and the reasons why, if available. The documents reveal a number of disturbing responses to offers from 145 countries and 12 international organizations from around the world. For example, an email from Jeffrey Goldstein, a U.S. Embassy official in Estonia, to several DOS officials, states: It is getting downright embarrassing here not to have a response to the Estonians on flood relief. And now I see from the staff meeting notes that the task force may disband soon. We know that what the Estonians can offer is small potatoes and everyone at FEMA is swamped, but at this point even ‘thanks […]
New York Sen. Charles E. Schumer, a powerful member of the Democratic leadership, said Friday the Senate should not confirm another U.S. Supreme Court nominee under President Bush ‘except in extraordinary circumstances.’ ‘We should reverse the presumption of confirmation,’ Schumer told the American Constitution Society convention in Washington. ‘The Supreme Court is dangerously out of balance. We cannot afford to see Justice Stevens replaced by another Roberts, or Justice Ginsburg by another Alito.’ Schumer’s assertion comes as Democrats and liberal advocacy groups are increasingly complaining that the Supreme Court with Bush’s nominees – Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito – has moved quicker than expected to overturn legal precedents. Senators were too quick to accept the nominees’ word that they would respect legal precedents, and ‘too easily impressed with the charm of Roberts and the erudition of Alito,’ Schumer said. ‘There is no doubt that we were hoodwinked,’ said Schumer, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee and heads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. A White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said Schumer’s comments show ‘a tremendous disrespect for the Constitution’ by suggesting that the Senate not confirm nominees. ‘This is […]
Large-scale renewable energy projects will cause widespread environmental damage by industrialising vast swaths of countryside, a leading scientist claims today. The warning follows an analysis of the amount of land that renewable energy resources, including wind farms, biofuel crops and photovoltaic solar cells, require to produce substantial amounts of power. Jesse Ausubel, a professor of environmental science and director of the Human Environment programme at Rockefeller University in New York, found that enormous stretches of countryside would have to be converted into intensive farmland or developed with buildings and access roads for renewable energy plants to make a significant contribution to global energy demands. Prof Ausubel reached his conclusions by ranking renewable energies according to the amount of power they produce for each square metre of land. The assessment allows direct comparison between the different approaches, based on the impact they will have on the surrounding landscape. The analysis showed that damming rivers to make use of hydroelectric power was among the most harmful to the landscape, producing around 0.1 watts of power per square metre. The world’s largest dam, the Three Gorges power station on the Yangtze in China, stores nearly 40bn cubic metres of water, […]
NEW YORK — Liberal activists are stepping up their campaign against Fox News Channel by pressuring advertisers not to patronize the network. MoveOn.org, the Campaign for America’s Future and liberal blogs like DailyKos.com are asking thousands of supporters to monitor who is advertising on the network. Once a database is gathered, an organized phone-calling campaign will begin, said Jim Gilliam, vice president of media strategy for Brave New Films, a company that has made anti-Fox videos. The groups have successfully pressured Democratic presidential candidates not to appear at any debate sponsored by Fox, and are also trying to get Home Depot Inc. to stop advertising there. At least 5,000 people nationwide have signed up to compile logs on who is running commercials on Fox, Gilliam said. The groups want to first concentrate on businesses running local ads, as opposed to national commercials. ‘It’s a lot more effective for Sam’s Diner to get calls from 10 people in his town than going to the consumer complaint department of some pharmaceutical company,’ Gilliam said. Some of videos produced by Gilliam’s company compile statements made by Fox anchors and guests that the activists consider misleading, such as those […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
