From News.com.au: Two of the suspects in the Najaf bombing were brought to a police station by a crowd of people who had watched them send an apparent email in the clear from an internet cafe about the bombing.
I'm getting the odd suspicion that Al Qaeda is running out of people who actually know about operational security.
Assuming it wasn't some other group of course. Then again, I believe what Michael Ledeen wrote on the comments page at the weblog of "Tacitus" that the various groups are all the same mafia. Which is something we forget from time to time, but at our peril.
Addendum: Another thought occured to me, the next day: Maybe they've been seeing all that propaganda about everyone being on their side, and actually believed it?
Seen on instapundit.
I wonder if the Usual Suspects realize that the US presence in Iraq now, after the fall of Saddam, serves two purposes:
Isn't that similar to the situation the British faced in Northern Ireland?
This is all something for the people in Egypt's government controlled press to think about, as they run editorials blaming the US for the bombing. Their own populace might be dumb enough to believe it, but what happens if the Shi'ites that Al Qaeda just bombed don't? The people who allegedly committed the bombing are under arrest, and not by US troops. According to this article from Fox and the Associated Press, the suspects are under arrest in Najaf, by the local police. The US had not been providing security forces for that area because it was deemed culturally sensitive, being the place where the Sunnis killed the founder of the Shi'a branch of Islam. And according to those local police, the bombing was carried out by a mixture of Kuwaitis, Saudis, Iraqis, and Jordanians, all affiliated with Al Qaeda.
The same sort of factors that made Najaf easier for them to bomb, may make their propagandic excuses more difficult, at least inside Iraq.
In the meantime, I think it's time to stop paying Egypt so much tribute per year for them to be preparing for war against us. We could spend the money on better ballistic armor for the guys in the US Army and Marines instead.
Just a quick pointer to all those fans of "Saudi Survivor" out there: you might find the following link from Rantburg to be of interest.
And now I have to get back to the MSG mines...
Megan McArdle, AKA Jane Galt, writes on the power grid situation here. I'm linking to it because it's mostly what I was going to write, eventually.
Finally, for the historically minded, I found a brief history of geomagnetically caused power faults at www.spaceweather.gc.ca . Poking around that site, though, there's little indication that there were any sorts of geomagnetic disturbances that day. A slight oscillation at 2300 UTC, which is I think when the cascade happened, but that wasn't the worst swing of the day.
Following up to last night's post... I found this link (thanks to instapundit) to Daniel Drezner's blog, where he and many commenters post about the coverage of the blackout in the foreign press. I also thought it would be a good time to point out a post on a proposed wind farm off the coast of Nantucket, written by Jane Galt. It's very funny how these stories seem to come in threes, and converge.
The current theory is that the collapse is because of unexplained behavior in the "Lake Erie Loop." A loop. Sounds familiar. I'm going to have to do some reading.
Due to some sort of glitch, some duplicate entries wound up in the database, with one post repeated three times. I have deleted them, and apologize for the inconvenience.
Anyone else running into problems? (Hopefully noone's using Movable Type to run the power grid in the NE).
Via Rantburg. The Bush administration is currently buying oil to top off the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Naturally, the usual suspects have criticized this, as possibly leading to higher prices. If they weren't intent on turning this into a five minute hate, they might realize that the reserve is probably much too small as it is. I don't think they're going to notice that until it's too late to easily increace the size, at which point they'll probably forget all about their current position.
An interesting contrast is how the current power outages in the NE are being handled on crashdot, er, slashdot, with the following being a main entry: Deregulation and Niagra Mohawk: Is There A Story? It's about what one would expect, although the comments are somewhat more balanced. Currently, noone knows the root cause of the interruption; the problem is widespread because of safety interlocks meant to drop sections of the grid from each other in the event of accidents, and because way too much of the grid is dependent on each other. Major parts of the East draw their power from hydroelectric plants in Quebec; whether that was caused by deregulation, or by difficulties in getting new plants built, making it easier to buy power from elsewhere than to generate it yourself, is something I don't know.
I just find the confluence of these two stories odd. The State doesn't plan enough for contingencies in the power system, but apparently the State is also wrong to try to plan for contingencies, because it increaces the price of oil.
(I could, if anyone wanted, mention the poster on slashdot who attributed Quebec's successful hydroelectric export system to nationalization, and not that they have more than twice the natural capacity for hydroelectric power than California (34,000 MW vs. 14,000 MW of capacity, with all available sites in CA effectively already used), and a much smaller population (7.5 million vs. 30 million). But that would just be an added distraction to the original contradictory stories).
I decided on a new category for items of this type, Other suggested new categories are welcome.
It's hard to tell if some of these items are serious, but look at this article on Rantburg to see some of the more newsworthy and some of the stranger things being reported in the Urdu press. They're apparently taken from a site called the Friday Times that regularly translates items of this nature.
Thanks to Rand Simberg, I found this article about a model plane that flew from Canada to Ireland.
On Rantburg, I found these two items concerning the recent sting of a wannabe arms dealer trying to buy a SAM in Russia for use in the United States: first, Sam News Leak Blows Big Opportunity, and a short primer, originally from Strategypage, on small SAM use and its impact on terrorism in general.
Addendum: The comments are particularly informative.
Over on the USS Clueless, Steven Den Beste has been posting about the possible future of Europe. His posts inspired this post by Stephen Green about "soft" fascism. I found it interesting, although I'm more worried about this sort of thing on a global scale, and not just a European one.
Thanks to News From The Fridge's Pacific Rim Correspondent to this link to an article at CNN about the mysterious "Bili Ape" of the Democratic Republic of Congo. I have read about them before, and a quick web search turned up this article at National Geographic and the home page of Karl Ammann, a wildlife photographer involved in both the search for the Bili Ape and efforts to preserve the better-known primates of Africa, which are being killed off at an alarming rate. If you have trouble navigating his site, you can find the section on the mystery apes at http://karlammann.com/bondo.html.
Finally, although I don't have a link handy, there have been reports this year that a new population of gorillas has been discovered in Cameroon.
I thought y'all might find this interesting: pictures of the Iraqi Air Force, after it went underground, can be found here at Dar's page.
Hopefully noone has the job of getting them to run again. There are rumors going around that these planes are a recent EW/Reconnaisance version of the Mig-25.
It looks like the wings were removed.
Yet another strange datum from postwar Iraq.
Take a look at this item in Computerworld about SCO stock manipulation tricks. Isn't this the sort of stuff that Enron was doing? Come to think of it, every time I've heard about a company doing stuff like this, it's usually in the context of a postmortem analysis after it's died.
Here are some interesting things that have been reported recently. First, as I and others have been expecting since this started, IBM has opened up its patent porfolio and countersued SCO. You can find the expected discussion at slashdot here. Speaking for myself, I'm surpised they only found four of their patents that SCO was in violation of. IBM has a huge patent portfolio, which they have assidiously assembled for cases such as this. I suspect the average american citizen is in violation of one or two IBM patents, not counting the ones on respiration or cellular meitosis, but IBM doesn't really care, as long as you're not trying to sue them out of business or anything like that. Of course, if you are, good luck selling any of your products.
In other news, the Navy is buying customized Xserves running Linux to put in submarines for image processing. Here's the article at zdnet.
Finally, Robert X. Cringely writes in his weekly column about the reasons he thinks moving offshore isn't going to solve any of the IT industry's problems. For a lot of reasons, which I'll talk about later, I tend to agree with him.
Dad, I think you'll really want to read that last one.
You've been saying a lot of the same things for a while now.
I finally got a working link for SCO's recent insider trading activity, on Yahoo Business. I'd appreciate it if anyone could tell me why (for instance) Jeff Hunsaker, Vice President, is listed for two sales on the same day, for 5,000 shares each sale, once as Vice President, and once as Employee. They're apparently different sales, totalling, since the end of June, 1.2 million dollars. SCO's current valuation is roughly 80 million dollars.
It's hard to tell from looking at the chart, but it looks like some days, these insider sales are a big chunk of the total trading volume of SCO stock.
Donald Sensing writes here about the use and misuse of polygraph machines. I'm reminded of two things I've heard recently. The first, to which I don't have a link, is a report that interrogators in Iraq are finding polygraph machines totally useless in interviewing Iraqi persons of interest. It seems they can tell the investigator things independently known to be false without producing any sort of indication on the machine. The second, was an urban legend/joke I've heard, about the burglar being interrogated by the police; they had run a bunch of wires from his head to a Xerox machine, and every two or three questions or so, the interrogator would press a button on the copier and it would spit out a piece of paper, with "He's lying" written on it.
I wish I knew if that one was true.
If you've been keeping track of SCO's lawsuits and extorsion threats to the Linux community at large (which I don't put any stock in anyway) you'll want to see this item on slashdot that says that SCO if offering to license Linux to indivudial users for the low low price of $699.00 now, with the price increacing later.
Of course, if a diabolical equivalent of a miracle occurs, and SCO can start prosecuting Linux users for using their code, it is far more likely to cause a mass exodus of users to FreeBSD than to actually make money for SCO. SCO will make no money from the people using FreeBSD, and FreeBSD already spent a large part of its early history fighting off a lawsuit alleging that it contained unlicensed System V AT&T Unix code. In fact, Linux was started in part because BSD was under a cloud from that lawsuit; that suit was remarkably similar to the one SCO is attempting to prosecute now. That lawsuit failed, but it's the reason why Solaris (for instance) is SysV based rather than BSD based. Then again, the user suffered. For a couple years after that, Henry Spencer had in his .signature something along the lines of "We're considering upgrading from SunOS 5.0 to SunOS 4.1.1."
Given the cold hard fact that you're not going to make money off of a $ 1400.00 desktop OS if alternatives are available, I now believe that SCO isn't even trying to make money from the suit. They're just trying to sow Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt for someone else.
To provide some perspective, in closing, this message in the comments on slashdot alleges that the brokerage firms can't even find shares of SCO to borrow for people interested in shorting the stock. Also, another post reports that SCO executives are dumping their stock as fast as they can. It included a link to Quicken's server for insider trading statistics, but it seemed to be down. So they don't seem to have any confidence that the suit is going to work, but they want people like me to bet $ 1400.00 that they'll win?
I found this recipie at Coyote at the Dog Show. I think I'll try it one of these days. In the meantime, I'll leave the link up for people with more time to mess with cooking than I have.
I ran across this story at SpaceRef on the Aral Sea, as seen from orbit.
They expect to be able to save about a quarter of it.
After reading this entry at Little Green Footballs, I wonder if there's a market out there for a cable news network or television show that didn't cover stuff like the Lacie Peterson case, or the Kobe Bryant case. I wasn't really sure who Bryant was before the whole uproar broke out, just that he was some sort of sports figure. Now I really wish I didn't.