Bush plotted to bomb Al-Jazeera

President Bush planned to bomb Arab TV station al-Jazeera in friendly Qatar, a "Top Secret" No 10 memo reveals.

But he was talked out of it at a White House summit by Tony Blair, who said it would provoke a worldwide backlash. 

And while the Bushies deny everything (what else is new?), in Britain a civil servant has been charged with leaking the memo. Sounds like they think the memo exists!

A civil servant has been charged under Britain’s Official Secrets Act for allegedly leaking a government memo that a newspaper said Tuesday suggested that Prime Minister Tony Blair persuaded President Bush not to bomb the Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera.

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Rebel guitarist’s power chord in ‘Rumble’ started rock music on its journey to punk and heavy metal

The legendary three-chord riff that Wray used in "Rumble," his signature tune and biggest seller, has reverberated down through the decades.

"Without the power chord, punk rock and heavy metal would not exist," Dan Del Fiorentino, historian for the Museum of Making Music in Carlsbad.

From an AP article from 2002 quoted on Rockabilly Hall of Fame

The power chord. Distortion. The raw and the rumble. The man in black at midnight. A wall of noises, never-ending riffs, the echo of the whammy bar. This is Link Wray. Frederick Lincoln Wray Jr., the 73-year-old Shawnee Indian, a pioneer of punk and heavy metal, or just that dirty guitar sound.

In passing, it’s startling how many forms of American music; rock and roll, jazz, blues, country, gospel, bluegrass and rockabilly, were born in the South.

"Street-corner singing", doo-wop, soul, and hip hop, of course, had their start in the urban North.

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For the first time, Iraq’s political factions on Monday collectively called for a timetable for withdrawal of foreign forces, in a moment of consensus that comes as the Bush administration battles pressure at home to commit to a pullout schedule.

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ANSWER Coalition organizer John Beacham just returned from South Korea, where he participated in the protests against Bush and APEC and spoke at the International People’s Forum, an event which got major media attention and was covered on their TV news channels.
 
From the Korea Herald

The list of groups include Via Campesina, an international civic group representing peasants’ rights and ANSWER Coalition, which led a mass demonstration in Washington, D.C. in September against the U.S government for leading a "war of aggression" against Iraq.

Beacham will report back from South Korea at an ANSWER LA forum on Fri. Dec. 2 (He took the photo posted here.)

Tag APEC

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WaPo Op-ed on the hideous, medieval, racist US prison system which sentences child offenders to life in prison, no parole, something virtually unheard of in any other country.

A recent report by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reveals that 2,225 child offenders in the United States been locked up for life without any possibility of parole. Fifty-nine percent of child offenders serving life without parole are in prison for their first criminal offense, and an estimated 27 percent were sentenced for felony murder — that is to say, they were involved in a crime during which a murder took place, but they did not take part in the murder itself. Sixteen percent of child offenders serving life sentences without parole were between the ages of 13 and 15 when they committed their crimes.

Also striking are the racial disparities, which we find in every area of the criminal justice system but which are perhaps even more pronounced in the sentencing of children to life without parole. Black children in the United States are 10 times more likely to receive life without parole than white children are. Sixty percent of the current population of child offenders serving life without parole is black.

Often touted as a leader in human rights, the United States lags behind the rest of the world on this important human rights issue. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch were able to identify only 12 child offenders in the entire rest of the world serving the sentence often termed "death by incarceration." That’s right — 12 in the rest of the world and 2,225 in the United States.

Talk about schizophrenic. The US lectures the rest of the planet about human rights then engages in hideous practices like these.

Ditto for the death penalty. Most countries have no death penalty, and practically no other countries execute those under 18. But the US does. 

Hey, I made dumb mistakes when I was a teenager. Maybe you did too. Had I been poor and black, I probably would have paid more severely for them too. The racism here can not be avoided. Yes, some of them probably commited nasty crimes, yet they are being punished way more harshly than adults would be, it seems to me.

A fifteen year old deserves a second chance - not insanely vindictive nastiness that lasts until they die in prison decades later.

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At an intellectual property conference

Stewart Baker, the assistant secretary for policy in the Department of Homeland Security <said> with a comment aimed squarely at Sony: "It’s very important to remember that it’s your intellectual property — it’s not your computer. And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it’s important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days."

RIAA and the rest of the greedheads in the music business must be dumbfounded by that comment, especially coming from Homeland Security. No Sony, you do not have the right to install nasty spyware on my PC because you’re afraid I might copy one of your CDs. But hey,  I do have a solution. Boycott Sony. I’ll be making it a point to not buy ANYTHING by Sony for quite some time to come.

And ain’t this the kicker…

Scotch Tape stymies Sony copy protection

With a small bit of tape on the outer edge of the CD, the PC then treats the disc as an ordinary single-session music CD and the commonly used music ‘rip’ programs continue to work as usual.

EFF, Texas Attorney General sue Sony 

May their greed cost them billions in sales and stop other record companies from attempting the same crap.

Tag: Boycott Sony  Sony rootkit

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Zero-Day Exploit targets IE

Exploit code for a critical flaw in fully patched versions of Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer browser has been released on the Internet, putting millions of Web surfers at risk of computer hijack attacks.

The zero-day exploit, posted by a U.K.-based group called "Computer Terrorism," could allow a remote hacker to take complete control of a Windows system if the victim simply browses to a malicious Web site.

It does not affect Firefox.

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