Will a British divorcee cost ‘Wolfie’ his job?

Scott | Uncategorized | Wednesday, March 30th, 2005

(via The Daily Mail)

Wolfie

The appointment of George Bush’s leading hawk as head of the World Bank was heading for a crisis over his relationship with a senior British employee.

Influential members of staff at the international organisation have complained to its board that Paul Wolfowitz, a married father of three, is so besotted with Oxford-educated Shaha Riza he cannot be impartial.

Extraordinarily, they claim she played a key role in pushing the 61-year-old Pentagon official into the Iraq War. And the row comes amid claims that Wolfowitz’s wife Clare once warned George Bush of the threat to national security any infidelity by her husband could cause.

A British citizen – at 51, eight years younger than Wolfowitz’s wife – Ms Riza grew up in Saudi Arabia and was passionately committed to democratising the Middle East when she allegedly began to date Wolfowitz.

She studied at the London School of Economics in the Seventies before taking a master’s degree at St Anthony’s College, Oxford, where she met her future husband, Turkish Cypriot Bulent Ali Riza, from whom she is now divorced.

After they moved to America, Shaha worked for the Iraq Foundation, set up by expatriates to overthrow Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War. She subsequently joined the National Endowment for Democracy, created by President Ronald Reagan to promote American ideals.

Bulent Riza said Shaha started to “talk to Paul” about reforming the Middle East. And New Yorker magazine’s respected commentator Paul Boyer observed that a senior World Bank official “named Shaha Ali Riza” was an “influence”.

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This infuriates me!

Scott | Uncategorized | Wednesday, March 30th, 2005

(via DailyKos.com)

George Bush

Suppressing free speech

Very rarely does the everyday public get a glimpse of what happens behind the scenes in a normally-secret Bush Administration.

But Monday, March 28, the Secret Service called three everyday people into their offices to discuss why we were kicked out of a presidential event in Denver last week where Bush promoted his plan to privatize Social Security. What they revealed to us and our lawyer was fascinating.

There we were – three people who had personally picked up tickets from Republican Congressman Bob Beauprez’s office and went to a presidential event. But as we entered, we were told that we had been “ID’ed” and were warned that any disruption would get us arrested.

After being seated in the audience we were forcibly removed before the President arrived, even though we had not been disruptive. We were shocked when told that this presidential event was a “private event” and were commanded to leave.

More astonishingly, when the Secret Service was contacted the next day they agreed to meet with us this Monday, March 28 to discuss the circumstances surrounding our removal. We had two big questions going into this meeting:

1. How is the Bush Administration “ID’ing” citizens before presidential events?

2. Why was an official taxpayer-funded event called a “private event” – leading to citizens being kicked out?

Most shocking of all, we got answers to both questions.

The Secret Service revealed that we were “ID’ed” when local Republican staffers saw a bumper sticker on the car we drove which said “No More Blood For Oil.” Evidently, the free speech expressed on one bumper sticker is cause enough to eject three citizens from a presidential event. (Similarly, someone was ejected from Bush’s Social Security privatization event in Arizona the same day simply for wearing a Democratic t-shirt.)

The Secret Service also revealed that ticket distribution and staffing of the Social Security event was run by the local Republican Party. They wanted us to be clear that it was a Republican staffer – not the Secret Service – who kicked us out of the presidential event. But this revealed something else that should be startling to all Americans.

After allowing taxpayers to finance his privatization events (let’s call them what they really are after all,) and after using the White House communications apparatus to set them up, Bush is privatizing the ticket distribution and security staffing at his events to the Republican Party. The losers are not just taxpayers, but anyone who values the First Amendment. Under the banner of a “private event” the Republican Party is excluding citizens from seeing their president because of the lone sin of expressing the wrong idea on a bumper sticker or t-shirt. The question for Americans is – will we allow our freedom to be privatized?

Karen Bauer, Leslie Weise. Alexander Young
Denver residents

…More

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Del.icio.us gets funding

Scott | Uncategorized | Wednesday, March 30th, 2005

Joshua Schachter received an influx of cash to work on Del.icio.us full time, cool deal.

More info here.

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Open Source social bookmarking service

Scott | Uncategorized | Wednesday, March 30th, 2005

(via Slashdot.com)

comforteagle writes “This past week I launched an open source social bookmarking competitor to del.icio.usde.lirio.us. After running it for a while open to the public it appears to be running relatively bug free so this is the invitation to the Slashdot crowd. The code is entirely open and the content is cc licensed, so I’m sure it won’t take too long for folks to cook up some additional tools aside from the blogging feature. For those not familiar the meme is social bookmarking, which is basically a service to share bookmarks publicly instead (or in addition to) only within your browser. There are lots of other additional benefits, but that’s the gist of it. More details here and here.

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Ecology Building Society offers loans for sustainable building

Scott | Uncategorized | Wednesday, March 30th, 2005

(via Treehugger.com)

Ecology Building Society

Savings on energy bills is one of the key reasons to build (or renovate) green. But your bank is quite likely to charge you a higher interest rate on loans for any houses that deviate from the norm. The UK’s Ecology Building Society, in these solar-powered offices, offer mortgages for properties with “an ecological payback.” The building society (Yanks read “savings and loan association”) also has eco-oriented savings and investment accounts, but they may check your green credentials before you can sign up.

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Energy planning at the township level

Scott | Uncategorized | Wednesday, March 30th, 2005

(via Treehugger.com)

Wind Turbine

Wayne New Jersey is undertaking a prototype energy plan in grand TreeHuggin-style. Let the pork barrel buzzards and influence peddlers have Washington DC. Economics and common sense, not idealism, are powerful enough forces that small towns can find ways to slow energy consumption and in doing so reduce taxes. Now that’s a “frame”. If local industries and Chamber of Commerce types get involved, planning like this could be coming to a town near you.
For starters…

An excerpt from local coverage includes that: “Parking lot lights with small wind turbines mounted on them would further cut electrical costs, and solar panels on buildings would provide about 37 percent of their electrical needs. The plan also includes technology to reduce energy use, such as lighting fixtures that dim when ambient light alone is sufficient.

Heat from a cogeneration plant would cut the amount of natural gas the township uses and replace several 50-year-old boilers that now heat the municipal complex. Ludwig said cogeneration would reduce maintenance and replacement costs and cut air pollution created by exhaust that the old boilers release.

State agencies and organizations have already taken notice of Wayne’s plan. The Sierra Club, the state League of Municipalities and the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group have all praised it”.

…More

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Underdog “Stinky” robot beats MIT in underwater bot championship

Scott | Uncategorized | Wednesday, March 30th, 2005

(via Engadget.com)

Carl Hayden Community High

Wired has the story of how four students from Carl Hayden Community High School in Phoenix, Arizona, beat some of the best schools in the country, including MIT, to win the national underwater robot championship. The students, who are all undocumented Mexican immigrants, built their robot on the cheap in just three days, using PVC pipe, off-the-shelf electronics and a few tampons. Called “Stinky”, the bot can record sonar pings and retrieve objects 50 feet below the water’s surface.

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Ibiza speaker lights

Scott | Uncategorized | Wednesday, March 30th, 2005

(via Mocoloco.com)

Ibiza Speaker Lights

From Italy’s Oluce. You can also light up your garden or your sauna with lit Stones made of white weatherproof plastic, or Teda, a reflecting rod with both indirect and diffused light.

The website is NOT Firefox friendly.

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