http://www.wikio.com/search=Specter Wikio - Specter http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69448198 Listening to Barack Obama's acceptance speech, I got two messages. The first was tactical. Like a general mapping out a battle strategy, Obama has listened... Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:30:41 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69448198 2008-08-29T18:30:41Z http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69414384 Reacting to government plans to submit a bill that would severely limit Ugandan’s rights to freedom of expression and privacy, Amnesty International today said that the proposed legislation could seriously undermine human rights in the country and raises the specter of the broad abuse of ministerial powers, with few accountability mechanisms to protect the Ugandan people. Fri, 29 Aug 2008 13:25:48 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69414384 2008-08-29T13:25:48Z http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69445112 Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:57:00 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69445112 2008-08-29T12:57:00Z http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69403961 It is rarely difficult to distinguish between Professor Danny Blanchflower and a ray of sunshine. The Anglo-American professor is the chief dove on the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, and a worrier. In particular, he worries that interest rates are too high and will smother the UK economy, leading to the return of the most baleful spectre in the political realm: mass unemployment. Fri, 29 Aug 2008 11:01:26 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69403961 2008-08-29T11:01:26Z http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69385997 Thomas Gerbasi, UFC - Rashad Evans can't elude Chuck Liddell. Even more than a week away from their UFC 88 main event on September 6th in Atlanta, Evans, looking to get away from it all for a night at the movies, is followed by the specter of 'The Iceman'. Fri, 29 Aug 2008 09:01:00 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69385997 2008-08-29T09:01:00Z http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69374045 I guess the Bloomberg editor who transmitted this story in error has suffered the equivalent of being thrown into a pool of sharks, as happened to a baddie who got on the wrong side of Largo in Thunderball. There has always been a Spectre-like feel about the Bloomberg news operation, not to mention a cultish aspect, even. In their London office, there are lots of fish-tanks dotted about, presumably designed to make the staff feel... Fri, 29 Aug 2008 07:20:45 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69374045 2008-08-29T07:20:45Z http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69374236 Rod Dreher cuts straight to the heart of the matter: No, you know what makes people cynical about government? When politicians promise things like ending dependence on foreign oil within 10 years, and don’t deliver because they can’t deliver. If Obama had produced a single line that good (and true) tonight, the speech would have been an [...] Fri, 29 Aug 2008 05:01:01 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69374236 2008-08-29T05:01:01Z http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69356484 what’s he so askeert of, anyway? Something is spoiling The One’s moment in the Son sun today: the specter of Bill Ayers. Although Obama actually launched his political career at an event at Ayers’s and Dohrn’s home , Obama has dismissed Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” and “not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.” For his part, Ayers refuses to discuss his relationship with Obama. ...With Obama heading up the board and Ayers heading up the other key operating body of the Annenberg Challenge, the two would necessarily have had a close working relationship for years ... Stanley Kurtz of NRO [quoted above] was on WGN radio to discuss his frustrated attempts to examine the documents from the Annenberg Challenge—one of Uh-bama’s and Ayers closest ties. Uh-bambi’s Chi-Town-style reaction? Call out the flying Bama’tards! Weak, Barry. Very weak. Well, that’s what happens when ya have the judgement to select a Plouffe* for your manager. In addition, the minute the McCain campaign oh, wait… It was an independant 501(c)(4) entity, American Issues Project that raised the Ayers issue . The B-rock’s response was to, again, call out the Flying Bama’tards. Obama has responded to the ad the way liberals often react to free speech that they don’t like : he is trying to shut it down… Obama’s spokesmen didn’t explain what about the ad is false, let alone despicable or outrageous. Every word in the ad is true. I suspect that “despicable” and “outrageous” are synonymous with “effective.” Then he pulled out the Big Guns. “We reiterate our request that the Department of Justice fulfill its commitment to take prompt action to investigate and to prosecute the American issues Project , and we further request that the Department of Justice investigate and prosecute Howard (sic) Simmons for a knowing and willful violation of the individual aggregate contribution limits,” [Obama general counsel Bob Bauer*] wrote. [clearly not related to Jack...] And we thought Hillary!’s FBI files were discomfiting… There wasn’t as much reactionary flopping about for the Jeremiah Wright tapes. Those were a lot more “sound-bite-able” and therefore accessible to the average voter. So why the Panic about the Ayers connection which requires a lot longer attention span to even make sense? Buried treasure? Or Distraction from *something else*? So the QOTD is BarryBoy, whatchew so askeert of? --- Way more here: Global Labor --- *Plouffe— rhymes with “fluff” —a strange, yet common political bird. DrewM, Ace of Detectives Fri, 29 Aug 2008 02:42:08 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69356484 2008-08-29T02:42:08Z http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69355699 Thailand's embattled prime minister vowed yesterday to end massive rallies against his rule without force - raising the spectre of a prolonged siege of Bangkok's main government compound. Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:24:56 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69355699 2008-08-28T17:24:56Z http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69299903 This Monday the 25th, volunteer Dan Donmoyer and I continued our August “crunch” to meet with our respective Congressman and Senators while they are in recess. Many members use the August congressional recess to host town halls and forums in their communities - so check out their websites for a schedule to meet up with [...] Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:08:53 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69299903 2008-08-28T15:08:53Z http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69288730 Editor's Note: Just seven miles from the Democratic National Convention, Hispanics in Denver are living a very different reality. Since Denver passed a city ordinance that allows police to confiscate the car of anyone suspected of being undocumented, Hispanics say they are afraid to drive downtown, let alone attend the DNC. Carmen Alarcón reports for New York's Spanish-language newspaper El Diario/La Prensa. read more Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:22:35 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69288730 2008-08-28T14:22:35Z http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69225886 August 27, 2008 By Carmen Alarcón While members of the Democratic Party are gathered in the Pepsi Center to support Senator Barack Obama as the party’s nominee in the presidential campaign, Mexicans working just seven miles away, on Federal Boulevard,... Thu, 28 Aug 2008 03:32:28 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69225886 2008-08-28T03:32:28Z http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69244099 The most recent incident of an application being pulled though is raising the specter of Apple censorship; or at least applying their own moral judgement of whether an application can be listed. Such is the case of Infurious Comics and their Comic Reader that was meant for easier distribution and reading of web comics on the iPhone. Thu, 28 Aug 2008 03:19:04 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69244099 2008-08-28T03:19:04Z http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69228030 Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole I blame Rushdie. It's been nearly thirty years since Midnight's Children was first published, but the specter of the capacious, gravity-defying, say-it-all novel is still with us, and continues to lure unsuspecting young novelists to their doom. Its latest victim, it seems to me, is Steve Toltz, whose debut novel A Fraction of the Whole , tells the story of the All-Australian Dean family - brothers Martin and Terry (the former a champion misanthrope, the latter a legendary outlaw) and Martin's son Jasper - in "fist-eating, gut-wrenching, seat-edging, nail-biting, lip-pulling, chain-smoking, teeth-clenching detail". A Fraction of the Whole is in many ways a splendid and exhilarating work, but one so overwrought with cleverness, so fraught with baroque contrivances, that it fails to establish an emotional connection with the reader. James Wood would call this hysterical realism; and he would be right. This is not, by itself, a criticism. Unlike Wood, I don't believe that every novel has to conform to some form of 'lifeness'. I'm quite willing to trade cleverness for authenticity, inventiveness for depth. Done properly, there are few things more mesmerising than truly larger-than-life fiction. And mesmerising, for the first 200 pages or so, is exactly what Steve Toltz is. That long first section of A Fraction of the Whole is a comic tour de force: vigorous, imaginative, witty, pugnacious and bristling with kind of manic energy that keeps you glued to the page with a big grin plastered all over your face. Judged by the first 200 pages alone, A Fraction of the Whole may be one of the finest books published this year, and certainly one of the funniest. Which is why it's a pity that Toltz doesn't stop there, but keeps going for another 330 pages, in the course of which the momentum of that glorious opening is allowed to dissipate. Oh, Toltz tries all right, and the book is still funny - there are some electrifying one-liners, some hilarious diatribes and every now and then a genuinely comic situation. But nothing that quite matches the full-throttle brilliance of those early pages. Having started off at an almost Pynchon-ian pitch, Toltz slips into a mode that is half Martin Amis and half Peter Carey - without either the former's sharpness or the latter's gift for character development. Much of the problem, I suspect, is that having told us all there really is to know about Martin Dean (who is the book's undeniable epicenter) in the first section, Toltz is left with very little to add; so that the rest of the novel becomes a set of repetitive variations on a familiar and, by the end, hackneyed theme. So successfully has Toltz brought Martin Dean to life, so swiftly has he added nuance and depth to this unforgettable character, that we come to know him a little too well, and when no further revelations are forthcoming, Dean Sr., whose only real charm is his ability to shock, quickly turns into something of a boor. And because no other character in the book is half as fascinating as Martin Dean is, he takes the rest of the book down with him. In part, this is deliberate: the central point of Toltz's novel is that for all his smarter-than-thou intellectualizing Martin will end up a bitter, frightened and deeply frustrated man. But because Martin Dean is too outrageous a figure to merit any emotional investment on our part, his eventual fall from grace inspires not sympathy but disappointment. And the fact that Toltz keeps the story going long after it has lost all dramatic interest - the last section in particular is a terrible miscalculation - only makes this worse. By the time the book finally ends that brilliant starting seems a distant memory, as though from a different book. All of that said, A Fraction of the Whole is a rambunctious, scathingly funny book that, despite its considerable length, is well worth the read. Even at his most uninspired Toltz is never really dull, and the sheer ambition of what he sets out to do here is admirable, even if his achievement falls a little short of his aspiration. If this book is anything to go by we're going to be hearing more about Toltz in the years to come, and I, for one, look forward to that. [Part of the 2008 Booker Mela ] Thu, 28 Aug 2008 02:38:00 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69228030 2008-08-28T02:38:00Z http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69199389 A spectre is haunting Europe; the spectre of Cold War II! Cold War II seems to have now formally broken out with the Russian dismemberment of Georgia (albeit being triggered by Saakashvili’s recklessly CRIMINAL rocket attack on his own CIVILIANS at the middle of night!). Possibly this is the logical prognosis of the Bush-Blair doctrine of dismantling the painstaking achievements of Reagan-Thatcher-Gorbachev by unnecessarily needling Russia instead of capitalising on its eagerness to be “European” and be the vanguard against terrorism. So, whilst we may brace ourselves to sadly watch history repeating itself (unless Obama’s diplomatic approach later on stops the rot), let me defer to the oracle of Matthew Arnold (“Dover Beach”) written in the 19 th ..... the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight Where ignorant armies clash by night. Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:02:06 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69199389 2008-08-27T22:02:06Z http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69204134 I don’t count myself as a visionary, but there is a specter looming over mankind’s collective head, and I’m not sure if I can see how we can avoid it. In my opinion, creating good artificial intelligence is just a matter of time. Already researchers have created a robot that uses a rat’s brain, and the [...] Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:00:12 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69204134 2008-08-27T21:00:12Z http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69193635 Proposed bill honors fallen Fort Myers officer Immigrant community in fear after nearly 600 detained in southern Miss. ICE raid Applicants line up to fill jobs open after plant raid U.S. immigration cops nab 595 in largest-ever raid Sessions speaks to crowd at Albertville immigration forum Specter hears from Adams residents Wicker stresses immigration enforcement Party Platform, McCain Differ on Immigration, Climate The [...] Wed, 27 Aug 2008 20:12:11 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69193635 2008-08-27T20:12:11Z http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69193583 from IPS News The food and fuel crises are bad enough, but add water into the fray and it could be disastrous. The World Bank still insists on water privatization before making loans. - Kale By Thalif Deen STOCKHOLM, - "It's the spectre of a food, fuel and water crisis," says Lars Thunell, executive vice president of the Washington-based International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank group. "I believe we are at a tipping point," he said, because the scarcity of water poses a threat to the food supply just when the agricultural sector is stepping up production in response to riots over food prices, growing hunger, and rising malnutrition. Speaking at the conclusion of the weeklong Stockholm International Water Conference Friday, Thunell said the growing demand for water is outpacing supply. The world's current population of over 6.0 billion is expected to rise to about 9.0 billion by 2050, with more than 60 percent living in mega cities. "Since water consumption goes up where there is development and improved lifestyles, we can expect even greater demands on fresh water," Thunell said. The most water-intensive sector, agriculture, is expanding and industrialisation and energy production are further driving demand, he added. The conference, which was attended by over 2,400 water experts and government officials, ended with an ominous warning: that water and sanitation are not far behind the food, energy and climate crises. Summing up the weeklong proceedings, the Stockholm International Water Institute said that slow progress on sanitation will cause the world to badly fail the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). At the same time, weak policy, poor management, increasing waste and exploding water demands will push the planet towards the tipping point of a global water crisis. According to U.N. estimates a little less than one billion people worldwide still don't have access to clean drinking water while over 2.6 billion people lack adequate sanitation. The MDGs aim at a 50 percent reduction both in the number of people without drinking water and without basic sanitation. The deadline has been set at 2015. But most of the world's poorer nations are likely to miss the deadline. Colin Chartres, director general of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) said the causes of water scarcity are essentially identical to those of the food crisis. "There are serious and extremely worrying factors that indicate that water supplies are close to exhaustion in some countries," he said. He pointed out that current estimates indicate the world will not have enough water to feed itself in 40 years time, "by when the current food crisis may turn into a perpetual crisis." Chartres said he and his water science colleagues have raised a warning flag that significant investments in both research and development and water infrastructure development are needed, "if dire consequences are to be avoided." IFC's Thunell said providing clean water and sanitation services are not only business opportunities but also opportunities to improve lives. He said investors see an opportunity in the 450-billion-dollar global water sector, where stocks are performing strongly worldwide. Private firms also regard water supply as a business risk and are tackling it as an integral part of their risk-management strategy. "I believe the moment is right," Thunell said. "We can avert a crisis -- as partners, working together." He said IFC will do its part by investing in companies that pursue opportunities in water conservation and quality, and by fostering public-private partnerships in the water sector. But Patti Lynn, campaigns director of Corporate Accountability International, has a different take on the role of the private sector. "The crisis stems from a confluence of problems, but perhaps no contributing factor is more insidious and correctable than the privatisation of the resource," she told IPS. "When people's access to clean drinking water is reliant on the profit interests of a handful of transnationals, all of us pay a premium and because of this many of the world's poor go thirsty." Asked if the international community will meet the MDGs relating to water and sanitation by 2015, she said: "Not if we don't change immediate course." Link to full article. May expire in future. Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:37:00 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69193583 noreply@blogger.com (Kale) 2008-08-27T19:37:00Z http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69167961 ...water and sanitation are not far behind the food, energy, and climate crises. STOCKHOLM, Aug 22 (IPS) - A specter is haunting the cities and villages of most developing nations, warns a senior official of a World Bank-affiliated organization. "It's the specter of a food, fuel and water crisis," says Lars Thunell, executive vice president of the Washington-based International Finance Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:10:00 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69167961 2008-08-27T15:10:00Z http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69162548 Dimitri Medvedev From Times Online: Russia put the West on alert for a new Cold War that the Kremlin is ready to fight, its President said yesterday. President Medvedev set tensions soaring when he recognised the independence of two breakaway republics inside Georgia. “We are not afraid of anything, including the prospect of a Cold War,” he said. Hours earlier he had ordered his Foreign Ministry to start establishing diplomatic ties with the secessionist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The move brought instant condemnation from the United States, Britain, France, Germany and other Western countries. President Bush appealed to the Kremlin to “reconsider this irresponsible decision”. David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, said that it was “unjustifiable and unacceptable”. Read more .... My Comment: There is going to be no "second" cold war. Russia is not the Soviet Union of the past. The cold war between the Soviet Union and the West was an ideological conflict .... this conflict is mainly economic and nationalistic. There will be a sour of diplomatic relations .... how extensive these relations will be pulled back will be determined in the next few months. Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:06:00 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/Specter?rinfoid=69162548 2008-08-27T14:06:00Z