The Caribbean island nation of Antigua and Barbuda has a major publicity problem on its hands and it is one as Prime Minister Winston Baldwin Spencer notes that puts the nation’s economic survival at risk. Last Sunday, a young Welsh couple, Ben and Catherine Mullany, were attacked in a botched robbery in their villa on Antigua. Catherine Mullany died instantly in the attack. Her husband, Ben, died today after being flown back to Britain. He had a bullet lodged in his brain and it was determined that he was brain dead. It is an unspeakable tragedy.
Ben and Catherine Mullany on their Wedding Day
Antigua’s 350-strong police force is faced with a rise in crime which has “nearly overwhelmed” the nation, according to its Prime Minister, Winston Baldwin Spencer. He said it had no computers, no crime database and an emergency call system which “sometimes doesn’t work”.
A video report from the BBC. More on this story from the UK Guardian.
Below the fold is Prime Minister Wintson Baldwin Spencer’s address to his nation: (more…)
T. Boone Pickens explains his plan for alternative, domestic energy in a 30-second TV commercial. It is the second in a series of commercials that the energy tycoon is running on behalf of his energy plan. I’ve been writing about the Pickens plan and you can view the first commercial here: T. Boone Pickens on Energy.
For more on T. Boone Pickens’ views of our energy policy and solutions, please visit Picken’s Plan.
In related energy news, the New York Times highlightes the Ainsworth wind farm in Nebraska. The first major wind farm in Nebraska is just south of Ainsworth and consists of 36 wind turbines. In its first two years, the project has sent enough energy to a national grid to power about 19,000 homes a year.
Wind Farm in Nebraska
Driving south out of the agricultural town of Ainsworth, you can’t miss its newest crop: wind turbines, three dozen of them, with steel stalks 230 feet high and petal-like blades 131 feet long, sprouting improbably from the sand hills of north-central Nebraska, beside ruminating cattle.
Though painted gray, the turbines stand out against the evening backdrop of battleship-colored thunderclouds and bear an almost celestial whiteness when day’s light is right. Airplane pilots can spot them from far away, and rarely does a bird make their unfortunate acquaintance.
The sound of 8.5-ton blades, three to a turbine, turning and turning, only enhances their almost supernatural presence. Standing at the base of a turbine’s stalk, you hear a whistling whoosh — whuh … whuh … whuh — as steady summer winds come like the breath of gods to toy with pinwheel amusements.
Six renewable energy technicians share in tending this strange garden, including Jered Saar and Devin Painter, neither of whom could be described as chatty. Mr. Painter, 25, is the son of ranchers; when he’s working at the top of a turbine, he can see his family’s spread miles away. Mr. Saar, 34, comes from the nearby town of Bassett; he spent last year in Iraq with the Nebraska Army National Guard, and yes, he would rather be here than there.
Wearing sunglasses and hard hats, they drive the undulating hills in a white pickup truck emblazoned with the name of their employer, the Nebraska Public Power District, often stopping to check a turbine’s control panel, or to climb dozens of feet up its spine to the gear box. Or, simply, to listen attentively to the whuh-whuh-whuhing rhythms.
The sound, they say, of energy created; of less coal burned; of the future.
Ainsworth, population 1,800, maybe, embraces its intimate remoteness. For example, local officials say that back in the 1980s a professional bowler was interviewed on national television about his plans to attend a horseshoe tournament in Ainsworth; when asked where Ainsworth was, he replied: the middle of nowhere. The town now has an annual Middle of Nowhere festival.
I have been sick all week with a dreaded Summer cold but lucky for me, I have been under the faithful care of Bear-Bear, my little black Pomeranian. He is quite the character. The above is his favourite video, he’ll sit in on my lap and just watch the parade of his fellow pom poms go past on the computer screen. When it’s over, he dig into my chest and beg that it be replayed. With Bear-Bear, all is doubled. We go for walk-walks out in the Castro where he ignores all the other woof-woofs but he helps me snare the boy-boys who just think he is all too precious, which he is. He loves his bacon-bacon the most (Purina Bacon Begging Strips) but he is also quite fond of his chicken-chicken everything else that is not bacon-bacon. He loves to play “king of the Charles” a game we play where he jumps on me and then has me scratch his back. When I am ill, he stays particularly close to me and this week was no exception.
He must be desperate and he must have internal polling that Clinton’s supporters aren’t coming around. And certainly he can’t be pleased that polls showing him now trailing in Florida and Missouri and even in Michigan and Ohio where he had five points leads but weeks ago. So Senator Barack Obama said Sunday that delegates from Florida and Michigan should get a “full vote” at the Democratic convention this month.
“I believe Party unity calls for the delegates from Florida and Michigan to be able to participate fully alongside the delegates from the other states and territories. Accordingly, I ask that the Credentials Committee, when it meets on August 24 to approve the delegates for the National Convention, pass a resolution that would entitle each delegate from Florida and Michigan to cast a full vote.”
“As a candidate for the nomination, I supported the DNC’s efforts to establish and enforce a schedule for primaries and caucuses that would broaden the opportunity for Democrats from all regions of the country and all backgrounds and walks of life to have a meaningful voice.”
“As we prepare to come together in Denver, however, we must be – and will be – united in our determination to change the course of our nation. To that end, Democrats in Florida and Michigan must know that they are full partners and colleagues in our historic mission to reshape Washington and lead our country in a new direction.” — Senator Barack Obama in a letter to the DNC on August 3, 2008
Sorry Barack, I said no deal months ago.
I might also add isn’t Obama sending a letter to DNC the equivalent sending himself a letter. Since June, Obama is the DNC.
In Sacramento, California this weekend the statewide convention of the Peace and Freedom Party chose Ralph Nader to be its candidate for President. And Matt Gonzalez to be its candidate for Vice President. With this move, Nader/Gonzalez is on the ballot in California. The Nader campaign is now on the ballot in 21 states.
Warning: these are videos released by the Colombian Army and obtained from Semana, a Colombian newsweekly magazine. The first video shows a gun battle, the capture of a FARC guerrilla and the recovery of a dead FARC guerrilla. It is graphic.
This second video was taken by Colombian army commandos who inflitrated the Compañía Kendor Segovia del Frente 10 de las FARC (the Kendor Segovia Brigade of the FARC’s Tenth Front) in Arauca, near the Venezuela border. Two Colombian army commandos lived with the guerrillas for eleven months gathering intelligence. One of the commandos had been married just five months when he undertook this mission. His wife was two months pregnant at time. Such heroism. Simply amazing. The full story in Spanish from Semana.
This third video is also graphic. It shows the attack on Compañía Kendor Segovia del Frente 10 de las FARC (the Kendor Segovia Brigade of the FARC’s Tenth Front) in Arauca on July 26, 2008.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author whose books chronicled the horrors of the Soviet gulag system, has died of heart failure, his son said Monday. He was 89.
Stepan Solzhenitsyn told The Associated Press his father died late Sunday, but declined further comment.
Solzhenitsyn’s unflinching accounts of torment and survival in the Soviet Union’s slave labor camps riveted his countrymen, whose secret history he exposed. They earned him 20 years of bitter exile, but international renown.
And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person’s courage and integrity could, in the end, defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire.
Beginning with the 1962 short novel “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” Solzhenitsyn devoted himself to describing what he called the human “meat grinder” that had caught him along with millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and seemingly absurd reasons, followed by sentences to slave labor camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually.
His “Gulag Archipelago” trilogy of the 1970s shocked readers by describing the savagery of the Soviet state under the dictator Josef Stalin. It helped erase lingering sympathy for the Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe.
But his account of that secret system of prison camps was also inspiring in its description of how one person — Solzhenitsyn himself — survived, physically and spiritually, in a penal system of soul-crushing hardship and injustice.
The West offered him shelter and accolades. But Solzhenitsyn’s refusal to bend despite enormous pressure, perhaps, also gave him the courage to criticize Western culture for what he considered its weakness and decadence.
The New York Times has a full seven page obituary. It should be noted that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was first sent to prison for referring to Joseph Stalin in a letter as “that man with a moustache.”
The Government of Colombia today announced that in the past few days the Colombian Armed Forces have been battling forces of the FARC in the macizo colombiano, the area in south central Colombia where the Andes break up into three Cordilleras. Colombian troops discovered a large FARC contingent in the Cañón de las Hermosas, Tolima and ambushed them. In the battle the newly appointed leader of the FARC, Alfonso Cano, has been shot in the forearm.
El Macizo Colombiano
According to reports, Alfonso Cano fled with a small security detail to a hamlet in Río Blanco, Tolima where a doctor attended to his wound. He then fled to another hamlet in La Herrera, Tolima and then on to Bejuqueros near Pradera, Valle del Cauca. An elite military force of over 500 men from Quinta División del Ejército (Fifth Division of the Army) has been in hot pursuit over the mountainous terrain.
Operación “Moisés”
This afternoon, Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos announced that the army has surrounded not only Alfonso Cano but also Jorge Briceño Suárez alias el Mono Jojoy, the number two man in the FARC and the most hated man in Colombia. These battles across the Colombian Andes form part of Operación “Moisés that has been on-going since June. Operación “Moisés involves over 10,000 Colombian troops dispersed over south-central Colombia attacking and destroying FARC camps of the Bloque Oriental del Las FARC under the command of el Mono Jojoy.
Vice President called on the FARC leaders to surrender and added that otherwise they would not come out alive.
