New York Magazine:

When in Rome

* By Mark Adams

For VII days, all roads seemed to lead to Rome. Emperor George Bush suffered an Et tu? moment when Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki stuck a last-minute dagger in his plans for a triumphant triumvirate dinner. The Baker-Hamilton commission recommended pulling the Army legions out of Iraq; the Pentagon’s Cincinnatus, Colin Powell, crossed the rhetorical Rubicon and called the conflict a civil war. (The president declared that the die was cast, and that “we can accept nothing less than victory.”) Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asked Americans to lend him their ears, so that he could explain how the U.S. is too supportive of Zionists. Homeland Security gladiator Michael Chertoff offered a mea culpa for throwing New York City’s anti-terror funding to the lions. After cops shot a bridegroom 50 times, Ciceronian orator Al Sharpton came, saw, and conquered the media moment, even as Queens threatened to burn. Albany consuls Pataki and Spitzer bemoaned the decline and fall of the Empire State’s health-care system and backed the closing of five city hospitals with a hearty “Excelsior!” (Pataki, aware that tempus fugit, also rushed to push through the Atlantic Yards coliseum.) A Cleopatran Craigslist cutie was busted for trying to extort $125,000 from a Pepsi executive. Danny DeVito had watchers of The View running for the vomitorium after boozily bragging about the Caligulan delights he’d enjoyed on an overnight White House stay. (“Every place in that bedroom was, ah, utilized,” he slurred to a horrified Barbara Walters.) 30 Rock’s Tracy Morgan had his own in vino veritas moment during a Henry Hudson Parkway drunk-driving bust, tipsily telling cops he’d “had some beers.” Nascar held a chariot race in midtown. Coney Island’s Astroland—the Circus Maximus of Tilt-a-Whirl parks—was sold to a developer. Scientists determined that an artifact found aboard a sunken Roman ship was a 2,000-year-old astronomical computer. And soothsayers saw bad omens in the entrails of John Gotti’s grandson’s arrest report: pills, pot, and a barbarically unflattering Caesar haircut

Skype founders to launch broadband TV service:

Skype founders to launch broadband TV service
The founders of Skype, the free internet phone service, have just announced their plan to launch a broadband television service early next year. Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, the entrepreneurs who were also behind the Kazaa file-sharing service, are said to have invested part of the money they made from the sale of Skype to eBay last year in developing the new project, which is still code-named The Venice Project.In an interview with the Financial Times, Friis claimed, “At the time we launched Skype, broadband capacity was extremely ripe for communication. Now three years later it’s the same thing for video: you can do TV over the internet in a really good way. TV is a huge medium – that’s something we’d like to be part of.”

At present, some 6000 users are said to be testing the service, which utilises IPTV technology, or Internet Protocol Television. While this term may still be unfamiliar to most users, it has attracted much attention from media and telecoms companies, as the use of IPTV on sites like YouTube and MySpace has proved successful.

In fact, 2006 has seen a mini-revolution in the online video and television experience since the world’s leading search engine, Google, bought YouTube for a staggering $1.65 bn earlier this year. It was announced last week that British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) would be teaming up with Google in the UK in order to provide their customer base with a range of products, including a user-generated video service. Furthermore, bigmouthmedia reported last week that four of the USA’s largest media companies were discussing the possibility of a joint venture to implement a video service as a rival to YouTube.

However, the broadband TV offered by the Skype team will be fundamentally different from the hugely popular YouTube service. While YouTube allows any of its users to upload videos onto the web, Skype’s TV service will offer professionally produced content, which will be uploaded by content owners and encrypted before being released. In fact, British television station Channel 4 is already reputed to be in talks to supply content for the project.

Friis further commented in the FT, “We’re also bringing something back from that old TV – of having a shared experience with your friends, something you can talk about, rally around and enjoy with others.”

The service is capable of displaying high quality and full-screen videos on a computer screen. Through the service, users must download software onto their PC or Mac, and can search through channels from a menu on the left hand side of their screen. Users will even be able to pause, rewind or fast-forward the video they are viewing, as well as being permitted to share video playlists with friends. What’s more, Skype users will be able to use their conference call facility to chat to others watching the same programme.

In the UK, it appears that The Venice Project’s main competitors will be the BBC’s planned catch-up TV service, and BT’s latest video-on-demand project. It remains to be seen, however, in which direction the entrance of Skype’s TV project will propel the online video and television experience. And as the stratospheric rise of YouTube proves, it will really lie with users to make or break this particular product – after all, Time didn’t name ‘you’ the person of the year for nothing.

Crooks and Liars » 2006 » December » 15

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday the world faces “a new type of fascism’’ and likened critics of the Bush administration’s war strategy to those who tried to appease the Nazis in the 1930s. In unusually explicit terms, Rumsfeld portrayed the administration’s critics as suffering from “moral or intellectual confusion’’ about what threatens the nation’s security. Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., a former Army officer and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in an interview Tuesday that “no one has misread history more than’’ Rumsfeld. `It’s a political rant to cover up his incompetence,’’ said Reed, a longtime critic of Rumsfeld’s handling of the war.

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Polonium – Alexander V. Litvinenko – Vladimir V. Putin – New York Times:

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored ByDecember 3, 2006
All Aglow
Polonium, $22.50 Plus Tax
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

THE trail of clues in the mysterious death of Alexander V. Litvinenko may lead to Moscow, as the former spy claimed on his deathbed. But solving the nuclear whodunit may prove harder than Scotland Yard and many scientists at first anticipated.

The complicating factor is the relative ubiquity of polonium 210, the highly radioactive substance found in Mr. Litvinenko’s body and now in high levels in the body of an Italian associate, who has been hospitalized in London. Experts initially called it quite rare, with some claiming that only the Kremlin had the wherewithal to administer a lethal dose. But public and private inquiries have shown that it proliferated quite widely during the nuclear era, of late as an industrial commodity.

“You can get it all over the place,” said William Happer, a physicist at Princeton who has advised the United States government on nuclear forensics. “And it’s a terrible way to go.”

Today, polonium 210 can show up in everything from atom bombs, to antistatic brushes to cigarette smoke, though in the last case only minute quantities are involved. Iran made relatively large amounts of polonium 210 in what some experts call a secret effort to develop nuclear arms, and North Korea probably used it to trigger its recent nuclear blast.

Commercially, Web sites and companies sell many products based on polonium 210, with labels warning of health dangers. By some estimates, a lethal dose might cost as little as $22.50, plus tax. “Radiation from polonium is dangerous if the solid material is ingested or inhaled,” warns the label of an antistatic brush. “Keep away from children.”

Peter D. Zimmerman, a professor in the war studies department of King’s College, London, said the many industrial uses of polonium 210 threatened to complicate efforts at solving the Litvinenko case. “It’s a great Agatha Christie novel,” he said. “She couldn’t have written anything weirder than this.”

Mr. Litvinenko, 43, a vocal critic of the Russian government, died on Nov. 23 after a traumatic illness in which his organs failed and his hair fell out. As he lay dying, he claimed that he had been poisoned and blamed Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin. The Kremlin dismissed the charge as absurd.

The British authorities soon found that Mr. Litvinenko had died of polonium 210 poisoning in what appeared to be its first use as a murder weapon. Conspiracy theorists said Russia had the motive and means, noting its long history of polonium work, as well as creative assassinations. The recent discovery of traces of radioactivity on British commercial jets flying to and from Russia has heightened the suspicions.

As in any good murder mystery, the deadliness was foreshadowed. Marie Curie, who discovered the radioactive element in 1898 and named it after her native Poland, organized its close study. One of her polonium workers died in 1927 from apparent poisoning, according to Susan Quinn, author of “Marie Curie: A Life” (Simon & Schuster, 1995). Another worker lost her hair.

At first, mines provided minute samples nearly invisible to the human eye. But the debut of nuclear reactors let scientists make polonium 210 by the pound. The substance emits swarms of subatomic rays, and the Manhattan Project in 1945 used them to trigger the world’s first atom bombs. Such initiators became the global standard for basic nuclear arms.

President Eisenhower, eager to promote “atoms for peace,” had the high heats of polonium 210 turned into electricity for satellites. But the batteries lost power relatively fast because of the material’s short half-life, just 138 days. The United States made few such spacecraft.

By the 1960’s, researchers worried increasingly about polonium 210’s deadly health effects. Harvard researchers found it in cigarette smoke and argued that its concentrations were high enough to make its radioactivity a contributing factor in lung cancer.

Vilma R. Hunt, who helped lead the studies, called polonium 210 a nightmare for health workers, and perhaps sleuths, because it tended to move about in unexpected ways. “It crawls the walls,” she said in an interview. “It can be lost for a while and then come back.”

Though dangerous when breathed, injected or ingested, the material is harmless outside the human body. Skin or paper can stop its rays cold.

Industrial companies found polonium 210 to be ideal for making static eliminators that remove dust from film, lenses and laboratory balances, as well as paper and textile plants. Its rays produce an electric charge on nearby air. Bits of dust with static attract the charged air, which neutralizes them. Once free of static, the dust is easy to blow or brush away.

Manufacturers of antistatic devices take great pains to make the polonium hard to remove. Even so, Dr. Zimmerman of King’s College said it could be done with “careful lab work,” which he declined to describe.

The Health Physics Society, a professional group in McLean, Va., that distributes information on radiation safety, estimates that a lethal dose of polonium 210 is 3,000 microcuries (a radiation measure named after Marie and Pierre Curie). Other experts put the figure slightly higher.

An antistatic fan made by NRD, of Grand Island, N.Y., contains 31,500 microcuries of polonium 210 — or, in theory, more than 10 lethal doses. The unit often sells commercially for $225.00. Repeated calls to NRD were not returned, but the company in sales literature describes its products as unusually safe.

The company’s antistatic brushes contain less polonium, typically 500 microcuries of radiation. The three-inch brush often sells on the Web for $33.99. In theory, by spending $203.94, before tax and any handling charges, and then disassembling six brushes, someone with lab experience could accumulate a lethal dose.

In Tennessee, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory sells dozens of types of rare nuclear materials to American manufacturers. But Bill Cabage, a lab spokesman, said it sold no polonium 210 because Russia was able to do so much more inexpensively.

“That’s typical” of exotic radioisotopes, he said. “We can’t compete with their prices.”

Last week, Russia’s top nuclear official said it exports 8 grams of polonium 210 a month, or 96 grams a year, to the United States. That is 3.4 ounces, which seems like a trifle but in theory is enough for thousands of lethal doses. He also said Russia had made no exports to Britain in the past five years. “Allegations that someone stole it during production are absolutely unfounded,” Sergei Kiriyenko, director of the Russian Federal Atomic Energy Agency, said on Tuesday. “The controls are very tough.”

Russian officials have repeatedly called Mr. Litvinenko’s death part of a choreographed effort to discredit Mr. Putin. But despite such denials, British tabloids have tended to blame the Kremlin, and the affair has strained relations between London and Moscow.

Nuclear experts said the apparent origin of much of the world’s polonium 210 in Russia, including quantities used in American products, meant that investigations of the toxin’s provenance would probably reveal little. What would be surprising, the experts said, was if the radioactive toxin turned out to have been made or mined outside Russia.

Still, several experts held out the possibility that close examination of polonium 210 residues from Mr. Litvinenko’s body or from the multiple sites where it has been found around London might reveal nuclear fingerprints that could throw light on the baffling case.

“What they’ll be looking for is radioactive contaminants made at the same time,” said Dr. Happer of Princeton. “They’ll do the best they can technically,” hoping to find a match between the London samples and the known attributes of the world’s stocks of polonium 210. “But my guess,” he added, “is that it will take an informant” to clear up the mystery.

Rolling Stone : Iran: The Next War:

A few years later, after Reagan was elected, Ledeen had become prominent enough to earn a spot as a consultant to the National Security Council alongside Feith. There he played a central role in the worst scandal of Reagan’s presidency: the covert deal to provide arms to Iran in exchange for American hostages being held in Lebanon

Crooks and Liars:

TT. First, invent arbitrary ethical or journalistic standards which apply to no one else in the universe, and then show how bloggers violate them. Second, assume beliefs and motives of bloggers, lumping them all together, and then invent charges of hypocrisy. Third, invent arbitrary benchmarks for accomplishments which if achieved prove bloggers have superpowers, but if not achieved prove they all suck. Fourth, elevate an invented concept of “civility” as an all-important value. Fifth, the practice of “nutpicking,” attributing the comments in unmoderated comments sections to the blogger him/herself.

I’m sure there are more.

washingtonpost.com, CBSNews.com and Newsweek.com have all added comments to their news story pages in the past few months.

“We felt that it was the most honest and direct way to include our readers, add their perspectives and start conversations,” says CBSNews.com editorial director Dick Meyer. “These were all things we publicly committed to when we launched ‘Public Eye’ and we were dead serious. This is a logical extension of what we started with ‘Public Eye.’ Obviously, the internet is the only news media that can do this is a deep, consistent way. Having said all that, I have some conflicting views of our comments. I am not, and may never be, comfortable publishing hateful and insulting writing, but some comments are just that. Though we try hard to filter out obscenities, racism, personal viciousness and other blatant offense, the line blurs. Many comments have nothing to do with the story at hand. And i know the very existence of comments is off-putting to some readers; to some, they’re clutter and they just don’t care. So my ambivalence with the execution aside, it was the right thing to do.”

MyDD :: John Hinderaker unhinged
Jerome Armstrong wrote:
John Hinderaker,  who writes for Time magazine’s “Blog of the Year”, dived into calling Jimmy Carter treasonous (“Jimmy Carter isn’t just misguided or ill-informed. He’s on the other side.”) This week, Hinderaker has become unhinged:

You dumb shit, he didn’t get access using a fake name, he used his real name. You lefties’ concern for White House security is really touching, but you know what, you stupid asshole, I think the Secret Service has it covered. Go crawl back into your hole, you stupid left-wing shithead. And don’t bother us anymore. You have to have an IQ over 50 to correspond with us. You don’t qualify, you stupid shit.
……………………………………………..John Hinderaker via email
So I fired off an email:
Hindrocket, you need to take your meds, your sounding and reading LGF now, roflmao.
Waiting for a response…