Sunday News Roundup

Good Morning Conflucians!! Let’s see what’s brewing in the news.

A secret memo from Gates was leaked:

U.S Defence Secretary Robert Gates has warned in a secret memo to senior White House officials that the United States does not have an effective long-term strategy for dealing with Iran’s nuclear programme.

The three page document, written in January, set off intense efforts within the Pentagon, White house and America’s intelligence agecies to come up with new options, including the use of the military, according to the New York Times newspaper.

Mr Gates outlined a number of concerns including the absence of an effective strategy if Iran managed to assemble all the major components for a nuclear weapon but stopped short of putting together a missile.

In that case, the Times said, Iran could remain a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty while still becoming a “virtual” nuclear weapons state.

The memorandum also urged new thinking about also urged the White House to consider how to contain Iran if it decided to produce a weapon and how to deal with the possibility that one of the terror groups supported by Iran might get hold of a nuclear weapon.

Apparently Goldman Sachs had 9 months warning from SEC:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which fell 13 percent yesterday after U.S. regulators announced fraud accusations, didn’t disclose that it was warned nine months ago that investigators wanted to bring a case, people with direct knowledge of the talks said.

Goldman Sachs responded to the so-called Wells notice from the Securities and Exchange Commission within months and met with the agency officials trying to fend off the civil lawsuit, said the people, who declined to be identified because the talks weren’t public. In March, the New York-based firm said it was cooperating with regulators’ “requests for information.”

“The question is whether a general disclaimer like that is rendered misleading because you left out the specifics,” said Adam Pritchard, a former SEC attorney who teaches law at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “The prudent, conservative choice is to disclose more,” because omissions can lead to shareholder lawsuits, Pritchard said.

Lucas van Praag, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs in New York, declined to comment.

In a stunning non story, Palin makes hay out of Obama saying we’re a super power like it or not. Really, that’s the best the right can come up with:

Sarah Palin criticized President Barack Obama on Saturday for saying America is a military superpower “whether we like it or not,” saying she was taken aback by his comment.

“I would hope that our leaders in Washington, D.C., understand we like to be a dominant superpower,” the former Alaska governor said. “I don’t understand a world view where we have to question whether we like it or not that America is powerful.”

Obama said earlier this week that the United States must do its best to resolve conflicts around the world before they grow too serious.

“It is a vital national security interest of the United States to reduce these conflicts because whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower, and when conflicts break out, one way or another we get pulled into them,” Obama said. “And that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.”

That’s pretty lame of Palin and the right. Hello, it’s a figure of speech. As in, we have to face facts here people, we’re a superpower, so we’ve got some responsibilities. Duh.

WW I buried arsenal uncovered at the nations capital:

A year ago, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers thought chances of finding any more chemical weapons in the front yard of a home in the nation’s capital were slim. So they removed an airtight protective structure from the World War I munitions cleanup site. Then, they uncovered a small arsenal.

The Corps discovered an open flask containing traces of the chemical agent mustard, another blistering agent called lewisite and munition shells with more digging near a one-time Army chemical warfare station at American University.

More recently, protective structures were rebuilt and digging continued. Workers found a larger jar with mustard, glassware that was smoking and fuming, scrap munitions and a shell containing a tear gas agent.

The Army Corps has removed more than 500 pounds of glassware and scrap metal and nearly 750 barrels of soil, some of it contaminated with chemical agents, said spokeswoman Joyce Conant.

“It’s a much larger disposal area than we predicted,” project manager Dan Noble told The Associated Press on Thursday. “The nature of debris is so different, perhaps it’s a different disposal area.”

It’s too soon to know, though, whether the Army Corps has uncovered a fourth major disposal area in the pricey Spring Valley neighborhood near American University, Nobel said.

During World War I, the Army used the university as an experiment station to develop and test chemical weapons. Some munitions were fired into a nearby wooded area during testing. When the Army station closed, the leftover munitions and chemicals were buried behind the school in what was then rural farmland.

Right in their own backyard too. Silly government.

The ultimate haters of freedom, privacy and general decency in all of humanity, the recording industry (RIAA) and motion picture industry (MPAA) associations want you to have spyware that monitors your computers:

We’re not easily shocked by entertainment industry overreaching; unfortunately, it’s par for the course. But we were taken aback by the wish list the industry submitted in response to the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator’s request for comments on the forthcoming “Joint Strategic Plan” for intellectual property enforcement. The comments submitted by various organizations provide a kind of window into how these organizations view both intellectual property and the public interest. For example, EFF and other public interest groups have asked the IPEC to take a balanced approach to intellectual property enforcement, paying close attention to the actual harm caused, the potential unexpected consequences of government intervention, and compelling countervailing priorities.

The joint comment filed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and others stands as a sharp contrast, mapping out a vision of the future where Big Media priorities are woven deep into the Internet, law enforcement, and educational institutions.

Consider the following, all taken from the entertainment industry’s submission to the IPEC.

“There are several technologies and methods that can be used by network administrators and providers…these include [consumer] tools for managing copyright infringement from the home (based on tools used to protect consumers from viruses and malware).”

In other words, the entertainment industry thinks consumers should voluntarily install software that constantly scans our computers and identifies (and perhaps deletes) files found to be “infringing.” It’s hard to believe the industry thinks savvy, security-conscious consumers would voluntarily do so. But those who remember the Sony BMG rootkit debacle know that the entertainment industry is all too willing to sacrifice consumers at the altar of copyright enforcement.

Pervasive copyright filtering

“Network administrators and providers should be encouraged to implement those solutions that are available and reasonable to address infringement on their networks. [This suggestion is preceded by a list of filtering methods, like protocol filtering, fingerprint-based filtering, bandwidth throttling, etc.]“

The entertainment industry loves widespread filtering as a “solution” to online copyright infringement — in fact, it has successfully persuaded Congress to push these technologies on institutions of higher-education.

But, but, but, isn’t corporate America just looking out for our best interest. It’s interesting to note that the majority of legal staff Obama has brought into the white house are former RIAA and/or MPAA lawyers. They and their practices is why I fly a pirate flag.

A koolaid drinkers take on Obama’s late night order for gay rights (hospital visits):

President Obama’s decision Thursday night to grant same-sex couples hospital visitation rights is the latest and most visible example of a strategy to make concrete steps toward equality for gays and lesbians without sparking a broad cultural debate or a fight with Congress.

The approach has angered some of the president’s fiercest supporters, who are eager for bold change, but other politically savvy activists have encouraged Obama to act in small ways to reshape government rules and regulations on behalf of gays and lesbians.

If you don’t like his pace or the brilliant and thorough changes he’s making, then you’re just not savvy enough to understand.

Obama Administration won’t share Ft. Hood information with the Senate, and so they may subpoena:

The Obama administration, facing a subpoena threat from Congress, will not share information that could compromise its prosecution of the suspected gunman in last year’s Fort Hood shooting, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Friday.

Two U.S. senators vowed on Thursday to subpoena the Obama administration next week unless it produces information sought in a congressional investigation of last year’s rampage at the Texas military base in which 13 soldiers were killed.

They said the Justice and Defense departments had until Monday to provide the information or face legal action.

Gates, speaking to reporters after attending a Caribbean security conference in Barbados, said the U.S. government had no interest in hiding information from Congress but the legal case against Major Nidal Malik Hasan had to take priority.

“Anything that does not have any impact on that prosecution, we are more than willing to share,” Gates said.

“But what’s most important is this prosecution. And we will cooperate with the committee in every way — with that single caveat, that whatever we provide doesn’t compromise the prosecution.”

Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, an independent, and Susan Collins, the panel’s top Republican, have been trying for months to obtain specific information about the rampage, which also left many wounded.

Perhaps the Senate is also not savvy enough to understand what the whitehouse is up too. It’s the new transparent, because the old way of being transparent is just, well, old.

And speaking of what the Democratic party has been up to recently, there’s an interesting story about cannibalism. It may turn out that the Donner Party (or Dinner Party for those comedians out there) may not have gone as far as cannibalism:

Gwen Robbins, an anthropologist at Appalachian State University, has found “no evidence of cannibalism among the 84 members of the Donner Party who were trapped by a snowstorm in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the mid-1840s.”

Robbins is hardly the first scholar to assert that the Donner Party cannibalism story was perhaps just a story. As the A.S.U. press release puts it: “The legend of the Donner party was primarily created by print journalists, who embellished the tales based on their own Victorian macabre sensibilities and their desire to sell more newspapers.”

There’s some of the report with a link in the article. They’ve taken all the fun out of that story for me.

And finally, here’s a lovely image from Herschel Space Observatory:

The Herschel Space Observatory has uncovered a cosmic garden of budding stars, each expected to grow to 10 times the mass of our sun.

The new image can be seen online here. It was taken using infrared light by Herschel, a European Space Agency mission with important NASA participation.

“Herschel can see through cold thickets of dust to where big, baby stars are forming,” said Paul Goldsmith, the NASA project scientist for the mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

The image shows most of the cloud associated with the Rosette nebula, located about 5,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Monoceros, the Unicorn. The region contains a family of growing stars, with the oldest and most massive members in the center of the nebula, and younger and less massive generations located farther out in the associated cloud. The nebula’s cluster of the most massive stars, located beyond the right edge of the picture, is responsible for hollowing out the cavity. There’s enough dust and gas in the entire Rosette cloud to make about 10,000 suns.

The large, embryonic stars uncovered by Herschel are thought to be a younger generation. They are located inside the tips of pillars that appear to branch out from thicker cloud material. The pillars were, in fact, excavated by the nebula’s massive star cluster. Winds and radiation from those stars pushed less dense material away from the pillars, and probably triggered the birth of the big stars inside the finger-like structures. In fact, the pillars point to the location of the massive nebula stars.

That’s a bit of what’s happening. Post anything else you find, good or bad or just plain loopy. Loopy is good.