From fossils to ... fossils.

Oldest primate skeleton unveiled

Americans speak differently across the nation.

Heracleion Photos: Lost Egyptian City Revealed After 1,200 Years Under Sea

Perspective from a dwarf on the character Tyrion in the TV show Game of Thrones

Chinese company cleaning up US pork?

The sugar beet is entirely GMO at this point.

Rebranding the Republican name is superficial fakery and people can tell.

To and fro

Registration of Guns and Licensing of Gun Owners from the Alien Perspective

Two interesting posts from Juan Cole: Israeli Ads against Marriage with American Jews are Part of a Population War   and Theocratic Dominance of the New Egypt may be Exaggerated

We've used PayPal with great success... because we are customers.  Apparently those who sell things often have a different experience.  The evils of PayPal.  Numbers of PayPal higher-ups.  Another person's experience and his Reddit post.  An anti-PayPal site.

Paul Krugman's take on the GOP's field of candidates:  Send in the Clueless.

Think about what it takes to be a viable Republican candidate today. You have to denounce Big Government and high taxes without alienating the older voters who were the key to G.O.P. victories last year — and who, even as they declare their hatred of government, will balk at any hint of cuts to Social Security and Medicare (death panels!).
And you also have to denounce President Obama, who enacted a Republican-designed health reform and killed Osama bin Laden, as a radical socialist who is undermining American security.
So what kind of politician can meet these basic G.O.P. requirements? There are only two ways to make the cut: to be totally cynical or totally clueless.

For women cartoonists.. if any...  (I talked about this way back in 2007.)

One more thing in the Affordable Care Act that helps.

Demonstrators clean-up Egypt's streets

Egyptians clean up after the protests and the parties...

Obama about Mubarak stepping down

Or being tossed out on his head:

Did you ever want democracy so bad...

That you strapped bread to your head?

From soup to nuts....

A Guide: How Not To Say Stupid Stuff About Egypt

Egypt: The viral vlog of Asmaa Mahfouz that helped spark an uprising

Roger Ebert takes on Glenn Beck: Does Glenn Beck know less than you about Egypt?

Digby on Egypt and the wingnuts: Doubling Down on the Super Crazy

Tom Tomorrow and the teabaggers

Republicans and rape: H.R. 3 hides even bigger dangers than redefinition of rape

Mapping and analysis of new data documents still-segregated America

Anti-Choice Groups Unite To Increase Abortion Rate

Californian Republicans to Governor Brown: Nyah nyah nyah nyah.

There's rioting in Africa....

Egypt. And here.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose....

Blog sprinkles

A curbside view of an Australian flood taking out cars.

Purposely misunderstanding Martin Luther King.

Where hate talk leads.

Last chance to see Tutankhamen's tomb. The next one will be fake.

Make note: Australia Floods: Blow-up Sex Toys are “Not Recognized Flotation Devices

Tiger mothering: Get straight As or I'll burn your stuffed animal collection!

Arizona, where the American Dream went to die

Krugman: The war on logic.

Who actually has abortions in the US:

INCIDENCE OF ABORTION

Nearly half of pregnancies among American women are unintended, and four in 10 of these are terminated by abortion. Twenty-two percent of all pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion.

Frank Rich: No One Listened to Gabrielle Giffords

Darrell Issa:

Isolating the Middle East?

Bryan of Why Now? noted when it was three cables and then four... but now...

Five (5)! undersea cables have been cut, affecting Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Iran, Egypt, and Dubai:

DUBAI — An estimated 1.7 million Internet users in the UAE have been affected by the recent undersea cable damage, an expert said yesterday, quoting recent figures published by TeleGeography, an international research Web site.

Internet data was majorly affected as it is the biggest capacity carried by the undersea cables.

However, all voice calls, corporate data and video traffic were also affected.

Two du experts yesterday briefed the media on the current methods being undertaken by the telecom provider to re-route the Internet traffic to provide normalcy to the users.

Quoting TeleGeography and describing the effect the cuts had on the Internet world, Mahesh Jaishanker, executive director, Business Development and Marketing, du, said, “The submarine cable cuts in FLAG Europe-Asia cable 8.3km away from Alexandria, Egypt and SeaMeWe-4 affected at least 60 million users in India, 12 million in Pakistan, six million in Egypt and 4.7 million in Saudi Arabia.”

A total of five cables being operated by two submarine cable operators have been damaged with a fault in each.

These are SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4) near Penang, Malaysia, the FLAG Europe-Asia near Alexandria, FLAG near the Dubai coast, FALCON near Bandar Abbas in Iran and SeaMeWe-4, also near Alexandria.

Who the hell is behind this? The Bush administration or Osama bin Laden? Hard to tell between the two terrorist organizations....

Walls will not contain people

Borders will fall.

As tens of thousands of Palestinians clambered back and forth between the Gaza strip and Egypt today, details emerged of the audacious operation that brought down a hated border wall and handed the Islamist group Hamas what might be its greatest propaganda coup.

Hamas, which took control of the coastal territory last June after a stand-off with Fatah, has denied that its men set off the explosions that brought down as much as two-thirds of the 12-km wall in the early hours.

But a Hamas border guard interviewed by The Times at the border admitted that the Islamist group was responsible and had been involved for months in slicing through the heavy metal wall using oxy-acetylene cutting torches.

That meant that when the explosive charges were set off in 17 different locations between midnight and 1am the 40ft wall came tumbling down, leaving it lying like a broken concertina down the middle of no-man's land as an estimated 350,000 Gazans flooded into Egypt.

Whatever the reasons and whoever is behind it, it does not make that much difference. Inequality, injustice, and mistreatment will not be endured while on the other side of the wall there are things longed for. Look at what brought down the wall in East Germany, the reason why the border between Mexico and the United States is so porous.

Remember too, that those who build walls are just as contained as those behind the walls. We make ourselves prisoners of our own fear.

Speak to the injustice and borders and walls could stand.... but then, at that point, what would be the need?

Update 1/28: Karin of Pax Americana has an excellent post on the reasons for the wall and its fall.

What we've known all along, part two

Marjorie Cohn of the Huffington Post:

My cousin Larry Russell, a travel writer, spent three weeks (May 11 through May 31 of 2007) in Jordan as a guest of the Jordanian Tourist Board. He was invited to dinner at the home of Karim Kawar, Jordan's ex- ambassador to the United States (2002-06), in Amman. Dick Cheney and his daughter were Kawar's guests two nights before Larry arrived. Kawar confided to Larry that "Cheney's mission was to sound out the reaction to a forthcoming bombing of Iran's nuclear sites (no ground invasion planned) by the U.S. from Jordan's King Abdullah and President Mubarak of Egypt. They both rejected the idea."

When Larry pointed out that Jordan and Egypt receive regular economic and military equipment assistance from the United States so any resistance to this plan on their parts would probably be of a token nature at best, Kawar just smiled.

I doubt Cheney was asking permission as much as telling them what was going to happen. Is this what Cheney was being told to do when he was commanded to report in Saudi Arabia?

While Bush pretends to build democracies, Al-Maliki branches out

And visits Syria:

DAMASCUS -- Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki is due in Damascus Monday, on his second visit to a US foe this month after a trip to Syria's main regional ally Iran.

It is Maliki's first visit to Syria since he became premier, early last year, although he was based in Damascus in the 1990s when in exile during the rule of executed dictator Saddam Hussein.

Maliki will be accompanied on the three-day visit by his ministers of oil, trade, the interior, and water resources, his office in Baghdad said.

Syria and Iraq only restored diplomatic ties last November, 26 years after they were broken under Saddam over Syria's support for Iran in its eight-year war with Iraq.

The rapprochement paved the way for a week-long visit to Syria in January by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, another formerly-Damascus-based exile, who secured a promise from his opposite number, Bashar Al Assad, to work to "eradicate terrorism."

The United States had been strongly critical of the role in Iraq of both Iran and Syria since its 2003 invasion.

But Maliki's Shiite-led government has friendly relations with Iran and, earlier this month, the prime minister drew White House criticism after he held cordial meetings with Iranian officials.

What does the Bush administration's irritation over al-Maliki's outreach to Iran and Syria actually mean when Bush and Cheney really like dictatorships rather than democracy?

Laura Rozen of War and Piece:

The WP's Peter Baker missed a few important insights in its piece on why Bush's democracy vision has stalled. The two biggest: Bush's vision of overturning tyranny and bringing democracy to Iraq has been dashed in massive sectarian bloodshed, loss of life, turmoil, insurgency, uncertainty and heartbreak and a massive devotion of US resources that might have gone to promoting grand things lots of places, and secondly, that in many targeted countries, promoting democracy would mean allowing Islamist groups, some designated as terrorist groups by the Bush administration, to prevail. The piece left out so many big examples of the contradictions -- Musharraf/Pakistan, Saudi Arabia whose corrupt royal family is so close to the White House and Cheney's office, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt -- of where Bush has decided he isn't quite sure he really wants democratic realities to be realized, and he just may prefer the tyrant, as Cheney openly does in Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia. While the piece would seem to promote a few voices blaming the stalling of Bush's grand vision on the bureaucrats in the U.S. government, it also tried to save itself from total ingratiation with the White House by naming responsible the office of the vice president's "little-girl crush on strongmen." But how did it miss how corrupted and stalled and conflicted is the vision at the very top of the U.S. government -- with the president himself -- and the realities the president has found himself confronting? Bush is now using all the Sunni tyrants, the autocrats, royals and propped up, hardly a two of them democratically elected, to counter Iran, for instance. Bush have a hard time with the policy? Congress may be interested to know due to the $30 billion in military aid to those states it's being asked to approve by the Bush White House.

The U.S. government may be in serious trouble if and when Pakistan's military dictator falls. Same the hideously corrupted Saudi royal family, so personally close with Bush and Cheney. They don't seem to have too much use for democracy when it comes to their friends, the corrupt autocrats. It's hard to understand how the piece skipped such big glaring points and contradictions, as if Bush's pure longing for democracy in the world had not been sabotaged by nothing so much as conflicts of interest going to the very top, and U.S. national security interests defined by the very top. How would we know if Bush were really serious about democracy? If he told Riyadh to stuff it. That's never going to happen, so we can rest assured that Bush is quite content to live with the art of the possible, with a very high degree of realism, and any griping about the bureaucrats is something journalists should know better than to accept as more than a wink-nod excuse for the president's own decisions to compromise his vision of promoting democracy.

I don't know... I don't think Bush ever tried to smear democracy around the world. I think saying that gave him an excuse to activate wars to protect our freedoms, to pervert the Constitution, to deny Americans their civil liberties, to amass more power for the White House.

I really never have gotten the sense Bush gives a fuck about democracy.

Hey, can'tcha take a joke?

Jokes about bombing Tehran, calling you evil doers, the axis of evil, the lovers of terrorism... jokes, all jokes!:

TEHRAN (Reuters) - The United States is showing signs of softening its attitude towards Iran, an Iranian official said on Sunday, but added that Tehran had not yet decided to attend a meeting on Iraq with senior U.S. officials.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said Iran would decide after talks this week with Iraq's foreign minister whether it would take part in an international conference next month to discuss the conflict in neighboring Iraq.

Egypt will host the high-level meeting of a group of countries that includes Syria, Turkey and the United States in the first week of May to discuss how to stop the violence in Iraq. The conference is a follow-up to one in Baghdad in March.

An Iranian newspaper reported earlier this month that Iran might not attend if U.S. forces do not release five Iranians they are holding in Iraq.

But Hosseini said Iran had not linked the meeting with other issues. "About participating or not participating, or the level of participation, this is still under examination," he told a regular briefing

[snip]

Hosseini suggested the United States was changing its stance towards Iran, saying in a response to a question:

"I agree with you on the softer tone from Miss Rice and in some American officials' statements ... it will be good if we witness this change in their behavior."

"If there is goodwill and if they correct the behavior they have had so far this will create a chance for reconsidering the kind of relations we have," he said.

Hosseini said he saw positive signs regarding the five Iranians held in Iraq, who Tehran says are diplomats but Washington accuses of links to Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards and of backing Iraqi militants.

Now if we could only do something about Cheney snarling in a corner over his 5 Iranian hostages....

Were they explosive?

A woman was stopped at the Gaza-Egypt border for looking odd:

JERUSALEM (AP) -- A woman with three crocodiles strapped to her waist was stopped at the Gaza-Egypt border crossing after guards noticed that she looked "strangely fat," officials said Monday.
[snip]

The woman's shape raised suspicions at the Rafah terminal in southern Gaza, and a body search by a female border guard turned up the animals, each about 20 inches long, concealed underneath her loose robe, according to Maria Telleria, spokeswoman for the European observers who run the crossing.

"The woman looked strangely fat. Even though she was veiled and covered, even with so many clothes on there was something strange," Telleria said.

The incident, which took place on Thursday, sparked panic at the crossing.

"The policewoman screamed and ran out of the room, and then women began screaming and panicking when they heard," Telleria said. But when the hysteria died down, she said, "everybody was admiring a woman who is able to tie crocodiles to her body."

In her defense, the woman said she "was asked" to carry the crocodiles, said Wael Dahab, a spokesman for the Palestinian guards at the crossing.

The reptiles, which had their jaws tied shut with string, were returned to the Egyptian side of the border.

Dhabi said the animals were likely meant for sale to Gaza's small zoo or to private owners. The crocodiles would fetch "good money," even in the impoverished territory, he said.

Welcome the new boss, same as the old boss: Saddam without a moustache

I told you guys it was Saddam's moustache that drove Bush bonkers! So now we have come around full circle: (my bold)

The Bush administration has perfected the art of fall-guy selection. The more convoluted the plot, the more credible the fall guy must be. As Lewis "Scooter" Libby was the fall guy in Washington, Premier Nuri al-Maliki will be the fall guy in Baghdad.

The Baghdad conference on Saturday was a derivative talk-fest setting up three committees to prepare the way for another meeting at the foreign-minister level next month in Istanbul. The subtext, though never explicit, is more glaring: it is the absolute US impotence to guarantee security or stability in Iraq, and the desperate search for a way out, now pitting the "axis of fear" (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates) against the "axis of evil" (Iran and Syria).

[snip]

General David Petraeus, touted as the miracle worker who might save the occupation from itself, had to admit on the record that in fact the surge won't solve or stabilize anything. To "stabilize" Baghdad to a minimum, the US would have to deploy at least 120,000 combat troops.

But that's not the point. The point is that this gory chronicle of a failure foretold is inevitably slouching toward the "secret" US Plan B - which is none other than installing the new Saddam Hussein: in this case the same old "Saddam without a mustache" (as he is known in Baghdad) Iyad Allawi. Allawi's stellar record - former car-bomber, Ba'ath thug, alleged embezzler (in Yemen), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) asset, corrupt interim prime minister and "butcher of Fallujah" - could have been penned by a Hollywood hack.

[snip]

Maliki will be the fall guy and a new Washington/Green Zone-engineered "coalition", led by perennial favorite Allawi, will usurp his power in Parliament. This coup-in-the-making has been rumored in Baghdad for months. At least this is how the ideal Bush administration scenario develops.

From a Bush administration point of view Allawi's legitimacy is a minor issue - as most Iraqi members of Parliament would rather legislate by remote control from London anyway. In real life the masses, Sunni or Shi'ite, despise them and totally ignore them. The really popular leaders in Iraq are, religiously, Grand Ayatollah Sistani and, politically, Muqtada al-Sadr - whose reach also includes a great deal of moderate Sunnis.

Sadrism, apart from the excesses of a minority, is in essence a nationalist liberation movement. Thus, for axis-of-evil cheerleaders, inevitably it is as dangerous as Hamas or Hezbollah.

Maliki, the fall guy, is already irrelevant. Any analysis of US imperial designs since the CIA-engineered coup against prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran more than half a century ago reveals the same pattern. If you want divide-and-rule and total domination, who's your man? A clever, charismatic nationalist or a ruthless CIA asset?

Spreading the love around

Apparently we like to build weapons with our allies. Must be a bonding type thing:

Abu Dhabi: The United States is planning to jointly produce tank components, light armoured vehicles and other products in Saudi Arabia, according to a senior US military official.

"Our biggest co-production project in the Middle East is in Egypt, where we jointly produced 1025 M1A1 tanks. In Saudi Arabia we are still in the planning phase, though the project initially will not be as big as what we have in Egypt, but there is good potential for growth there," Brigadier General Clinton Anderson, head of the US Army's Security Assistance Command, told Gulf News yesterday.

Even though no co-production projects have been planned with the UAE, relations and cooperation between the two countries are excellent, the general said.

United States has 32 co-production programmes with other countries and their total value exceeds $32 billion (Dh117.7 billion).

Just 26?

Can't he take Bush and Cheney and the whole PNAC crowd while he's at it?

An Italian judge has ordered 26 Americans - most of them CIA agents - to stand trial over the kidnap of an Egyptian cleric in Milan in 2003.

Osama Mustafa Hassan was allegedly seized by the CIA and flown to Egypt, where he says he was tortured. Five Italians were also indicted by the judge.

Most of the indicted US citizens are believed to have returned home from Italy.

The case would be the first criminal trial over the secret US practice known as 'extraordinary rendition'.

Washington acknowledges secret transfers of terrorism suspects to third countries but denies using or sanctioning torture, and is not expected to hand over its agents for trial.

The case is the subject of a lot of interest across Europe.

The European Parliament approved a report on Wednesday saying governments of 14 member states, including Ireland, helped conceal secret US transfers of terrorism suspects.

A court in Munich in Germany issued arrest warrants last month for 13 suspected CIA agents accused of kidnapping a German of Lebanese descent and flying him to a jail in Afghanistan, where he too says he was tortured.

Real bird terrorism

for people and the poor birds:

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - South Korean quarantine officials are set to slaughter 273,000 poultry after an outbreak of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu, the Agriculture Ministry and health officials said Saturday.

The outbreak occurred at a chicken farm in Cheonan, about 60 miles south of Seoul, earlier this week, the fifth such outbreak since November, said Lee Joo-won, a ministry official.

"We plan to start slaughtering 273,000 poultry within a 500-meter radius of the outbreak site and destroying eggs as early as Saturday evening," Lee said.

The ministry also said it will make a decision whether to kill another 386,000 poultry on Sunday while limiting the movement of about 2.16 million chickens and ducks from 90 farms within a six-mile radius of the outbreak.

And then this:

LONDON (AP) - Mutations in the bird flu virus have been found in two infected people in Egypt, in a form that might be resistant to the medication most commonly used to treat the deadly disease, the World Health Organization said Thursday.

The mutations in the H5N1 virus strain were not drastic enough to make the virus infectious enough to spark a pandemic, WHO officials said. But more such mutations could prompt scientists to rethink current treatment strategies.

Samples taken from two bird flu patients in Egypt - a 16-year-old girl and her 26-year-old uncle - were not as responsive as regular H5N1 viruses to Tamiflu, a drug also know as oseltamivir that is used to treat the disease, the officials said

.

Well.. if it won't be global warming that kills off the wild birds, avian flu and pesticides will....

Strange.... Arab countries do not really believe Bush's New Better Manly Big Surge Way Forward Now With Sparkles!

"A new US strategy in Iraq has been received with skepticism in the Arab world.

Egypt and Saudi Arabia have warned that reconciliation and national unity in Iraq are necessary for the success of Bush's new plan.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf countries - all dominated by Sunni Muslims - are increasingly suspicious of al-Maliki's government and worry about the influence of Iran.

Some fear that the Shia-led government is sidelining Iraq's Sunni minority.

Suleiman Awaad, the Egyptian presidential spokesman, told reporters on Saturday that Egypt wants "everybody to comprehend ... that a national reconciliation is the necessary condition and obligation for this process to succeed".

A change in US policy toward Iraq was inevitable, Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi Arabian foreign minister, said.

"Unity of Iraq is necessary, independence of Iraq is necessary and peace in Iraq is necessary," he said.

"None of these have been achieved so far. There must be a change, of course."

The comments were the first official response by the two powers to Bush's call on moderate Arab countries to step up their support for the Iraqi government.