WASHINGTON — Broad new surveillance powers approved by Congress this month could allow the Bush administration to conduct spy operations that go well beyond wiretapping to include - without court approval - certain types of physical searches on American soil and the collection of Americans’ business records, Democratic Congressional officials and other experts said. Administration officials acknowledged that they had heard such concerns from Democrats in Congress recently, and that there was a continuing debate over the meaning of the legislative language. But they said the Democrats were simply raising theoretical questions based on a harsh interpretation of the legislation. They also emphasized that there would be strict rules in place to minimize the extent to which Americans would be caught up in the surveillance. The dispute illustrates how lawmakers, in a frenetic, end-of-session scramble, passed legislation they may not have fully understood and may have given the administration more surveillance powers than it sought. It also offers a case study in how changing a few words in a complex piece of legislation has the potential to fundamentally alter the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a landmark national security law. The new legislation is set to expire […]
Surf this: The potential market for wave energy — electricity generated by offshore turbines — is worth a staggering $1 trillion worldwide, according to the World Energy Council, a nonprofit research organization. In the United States alone, wave technology could supply 6.5 percent of the nation’s energy. No wonder, then, that startups are rushing to stake claims before someone else drops in on the best waves. So far, most of the action is taking place overseas, where government incentives and greenhouse gas limits are creating oceans of opportunity. Take the Aguçadoura pilot project in Portugal. This fall, Ocean Power Delivery of Edinburgh, Scotland, will begin sending electricity to 1,500 homes on Portugal’s north coast from a wave farm floating three miles offshore. World’s first carbon-free city The project combines OPD’s advanced Pelamis technology (see diagram) with a regulatory insider — in this case, the local utility — all funded by private investors. The project is expected to eventually power 15,000 households. ‘The ocean offers a massive energy resource that’s virtually untapped,’ says Max Carcas, OPD’s business development director. U.S. energy experts agree. ‘The natural processes of the ocean produce a denser, more concentrated form […]
LILONGWE, Malawi - When Yang Jie left home at 18, he was doing what people from China’s hardscrabble Fujian Province have done for generations: emigrating in search of a better living overseas. What set him apart was his destination. Instead of the traditional adopted homelands like the United States and Europe, where Fujian people have settled by the hundreds of thousands, he chose this small, landlocked country in southern Africa. ‘Before I left China,’ said Mr. Yang, now 25, ‘I thought Africa was all one big desert.’ So he figured that ice cream would be in high demand, and with money pooled from relatives and friends, he created his own factory at the edge of Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital. The climate is in fact subtropical, but that has not stopped his ice cream company from becoming the country’s biggest. Stories like this have become legion across Africa in the past five years or so, as hundreds of thousands of Chinese have discovered the continent, setting off to do business in a part of the world that had been terra incognita. The Xinhua News Agency recently estimated that at least 750,000 Chinese were working or living for extended periods […]
Comment Last week, statistician and amateur meteorologist Steve McIntyre notified NASA of an error in its climate data. The results of the hasty correction mean that as far as the US is concerned, 1998 is no longer the hottest year on record. 1934 is. Headline-grabbing statements that nine out of ten of the hottest years on record were in the last decade are no longer correct, for the US, at least (bad news for Mr Gore, certainly). And those who remain sceptical about the nature of the link between human activity and global warming were delighted, as the Goddard Institute for Space Studies had to quietly admit the mistake and publish corrected data. But what does this mean for the rest of us? What was the glitch? Where was the miscalculation? And do we need to check our data? Can we all hop into our Humvees and barrel around town, untroubled by our carbon emissions? Goddard itself says the change is not significant enough to change the overall trends associated with global warming. Is it right? Richard Allen, environmental systems scientist at the Centre for Atmospheric Science, thinks the revision is not worth getting too agitated […]
WASHINGTON - As President Bush escalates the United States’ confrontation with Iran across a broad front, U.S. allies in Europe and the Middle East are growing worried that the steps will achieve little, but will undercut diplomacy and increase the chances of war. In the latest step, Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are considering designating Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the elite military force that serves as the guardian of Iran’s Islamic state, as a foreign terrorist organization. News of the decision was leaked to newspapers in what a senior State Department official and Washington-based diplomats said was a sign of an intensifying internal struggle within the U.S. government between proponents of military action and opponents, led by Rice. State Department officials and foreign diplomats see Rice’s push for the declaration against the Revolutionary Guards as an effort to blunt arguments by Vice President Dick Cheney and his allies for air strikes on Iran. By making the declaration, they feel, Rice can strike out at a key Iranian institution without resorting to military action while still pushing for sanctions in the United Nations. Partisans of military force argue that Rice’s strategy has failed to […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
