Archive for the 'State & Community' Category
ATLANTA The jackpot in the multistate Mega Millions lottery drawing grew to $81 million Wednesday.
None of the tickets sold for Tuesday’s $69 million drawing matched all five lotto numbers and the Mega Ball. The next drawing will be Friday.There were four second-prize winners from Tuesday night’s drawing, matching all five lotto numbers but not the Mega Ball number to win $250,000 each. Also, 37 tickets matched four of the five lotto numbers, plus the Mega Ball number. Those tickets are each worth $10,000.The winning numbers from Tuesday’s drawing were: 11, 16, 31, 52 and 53. The Mega Ball number was 42.
The American military has been accused of telling lies about two of its most famous soldiers.
Official versions of the rescue of prisoner of war Jessica Lynch and the death of former US football star Pat Tillman turned both into national heroes.
But the propaganda was dismissed as “utter fiction” at a Capitol Hill hearing to expose the false battlefield stories peddled by the Pentagon.
Jessica Lynch, now 23, said she was giving testimony “to set the record straight”.
“I’m no hero, the people who served with me who died are the real heroes,” she said. “The truth of war is not always easy. The truth is always more heroic than the hype.”
She said the stories of derring-do did not apply to her.
The former army private became a celebrity after being taken prisoner as the first wave of U.S. troops invaded Iraq in March 2003.
Military chiefs hailed her a gritty heroine who was only captured after putting up fierce resistance during a gunfight during which she was shot and stabbed.
She was eventually freed in a US raid on a hospital where she was being held captive, the Pentagon said.
But it later emerged that her gun was jammed with sand so she couldn’t use it and she was only injured when her vehicle crashed.
There were no Iraqi troops at the Saddam Hussein General Hospital when the Americans carried out their “rescue” and medical staff had unsuccessfully tried to hand over the wounded private to US forces prior to the raid.
Although an authorised book about her ordeal claimed she was raped by enemy soldiers, Iraqi doctors have disputed the allegations and Miss Lynch says she was too traumatised to remember it.
“My parents were hearing the story that I was this little girl Rambo from the hills of West Virginia who went down fighting. But it wasn’t true.
“The bottom line is the American people are capable of determining their own ideals of heroes and they don’t need to be told elaborate tales.
“Why did they lie when the real heroes were my fellow soldiers who rescued others or fought to the death?”
She told Congress she had a sixinch gash in her head and severe back and leg problems from injuries suffered during the battle that killed 11 US troops.
Her testimony began with a recollection of the March 2003 attack. As she and her fellow soldiers drove through Nassiriya, Iraq, they noticed armed men standing on rooftops. Three soldiers were quickly killed when a rocket-propelled-grenade hit their vehicle.
Another eight died in the ensuing fighting. Miss Lynch said she later woke up in hospital. “When I awoke, I did not know where I was. I could not move. I could not call for help. I could not fight,” she said.
“The nurses at the hospital tried to soothe me, and they even tried unsuccessfully at one point to return me to Americans.”
On April 1, US troops came for her. “A soldier came into the room. He tore the American flag from his uniform, and he handed it to me in my hand and he told me, ‘We’re American soldiers, and we’re here to take you home’. And I looked at him and I said, ‘Yes, I’m an American soldier, too’.”
“I had the good fortune to come home and to tell the truth. Many soldiers, like Pat Tillman, did not have that opportunity,” she added.
“I’m still confused as to why they chose to lie and try to make me a legend when the real heroes were my fellow soldiers that day.”
Pat Tillman, 27, became a national hero after he gave up a lucrative contract with the National Football League’s Arizona Cardinals to join the US Army and was killed during an ambush in an Afghan mountain pass three years ago.
Tillman, a member of the army’s elite Rangers force, was awarded the Silver Star, the military’s thirdhighest combat decoration, after the Pentagon said he was killed leading a counter-attack.
The story was revealed as bogus after pressure from Tillman’s family. In reality he died as a result of friendly fire.
His brother Kevin - who also joined up in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and was in a convoy behind his brother - rejected army claims that the confusion arose because of the fog of war.
He said the Pentagon version was “utter fiction” and charged the military with “intentional falsehoods that meet the legal definition for fraud”.
“We believe this narrative was intended to deceive the family but more importantly the American public,” he added.
The committee’s Democrat chairman Henry Waxman said: “The bare minimum we owe our soldiers and their families is the truth. That didn’t happen for two of the most famous soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.”
Google is using its popular online mapping service to call attention to atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan.In a project with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, inaugurated Tuesday, the Internet search company has updated its Google Earth service with high resolution satellite images of the region to document destroyed villages, displaced people and refugee camps.Google Earth allows those who have downloaded its free software to focus on satellite images and maps of most of the world. When users scan over the Darfur region, where the United Nations estimates that more than 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million displaced in four years of carnage, Google Inc. hopes to attract their gaze with icons.
The icons represent destroyed villages with flames and refugee camps with tents. When users zoom in to a level of magnification that keeps most of Darfur on a computer screen, the icons seem to indicate that much of the region is on fire. Clicking on flame icons will open windows with the village’s name and statistics on the extent of destruction.
Google enhanced the resolution for certain areas of the region so that users can zoom in to see the burnt remnants of houses. Google says it will periodically update the images.The online maps of the region also include an icon that links to a presentation by the Holocaust museum on the crisis in the region with photos, video, historical background and testimony on atrocities.Sara Bloomfield, the museum’s director, said museum staff members had approached Google about the project as they sought ways to highlight what they believe is genocide to many people who remain unaware. In Google Earth, which the company says has been downloaded by 200 million people worldwide, they found an ideal medium.”This is like the world’s biggest bulletin board,” Bloomfield said.Sudanese officials, including President Omar al-Bashir, have denied that widespread atrocities have occurred in Darfur. But The Hague-based International Criminal Court has accused officials and militias of orchestrating massacres, mass rapes and the forcible transfer of thousands of civilians from their homes. The United States characterizes the massacres as genocide; other countries and international organizations do not.Daowd Salih, a native of Darfur and a former officer for the German Red Cross, who spoke Tuesday at a presentation by Google and the museum on the new project, said he hoped that Google Earth would help document atrocities for millions of users.”We need President Bashir and other perpetrators to know they are being watched,” he said.By adding unique focus on Darfur through the addition of the media and by investing in higher-quality resolution images for the region, Google is venturing into political territory.”This mirrors the type of things that news organizations deal with: deciding how much resources to spend on an issue and what you cover,” said Steve Jones, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “It raises the question of what their responsibility is to decide what to cover.”Google recently came under fire for replacing post-Hurricane Katrina imagery on its map portal with views of the city as it existed before the storm.The company backtracked after an Associated Press article highlighted the changes and a House subcommittee accused it of “airbrushing history” for depicting a New Orleans and Mississippi Gulf Coast without hurricane damage.The company said its use of the pre-Katrina imagery occurred as part of routine enhancements and denied that the move involved political considerations.
Iran said on Sunday it would not discuss its “obvious right” to master the nuclear fuel cycle but was open to talks that could reassure the West that its atomic plans were not aimed at producing bombs.Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini also told a weekly news conference the Islamic Republic’s military was “totally prepared to defend the country and Iran is totally prepared for any possible military strike.”
The United States, which believes Iran is trying to build an atomic bomb, has said it wants a diplomatic solution to end the row over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions but has not ruled out military action if that route fails.
Hosseini said Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, and European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana had been in contact to try to resolve the dispute, which has prompted the United Nations to slap two rounds of sanctions on Iran.
But he said Iran would not discuss what Tehran calls its right under international treaty to enrich uranium, a process which can be used to make fuel for power stations, or material for warheads if enriched to a high enough level.
“The talks should have a purpose and Iran’s obvious right will not be discussed. We want talks without preconditions to remove ambiguities and to assure the other parties there will be no diversion (to military uses),” Hosseini said.
The International Atomic Energy Agency says there are still gaps in its knowledge about Iran’s atomic plans that need to be filled before it can confirm those plans are peaceful.
Solana led four months of talks with Larijani last year to try to persuade Iran to heed calls to halt enrichment work in return for incentives offered by the six world powers — the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany.
But the talks collapsed, prompting the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran in December, followed by further measures last month. Iran, the world’s fourth largest oil exporter, insists it will not suspend its nuclear work.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, accompanied by senior officials and journalists, will visit the Natanz enrichment plant on Monday, the day on which he has said Iran will announce “good news” about its atomic plans.
Asked what he might announce, Hosseini said: “If you wait 24 hours, you will all find out.”
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Google Inc. may be famous for instant searches, but it took a bit longer to find a 3-foot (one meter) python that escaped in its massive Manhattan offices.
The pet of one of its employees, “Kaiser” got loose over the weekend, prompting a search that ended when the snake was found on Monday night, according to company spokeswoman Ellen West.
“We are pleased to report that Kaiser was located in the office,” West said in a statement. “Kaiser was taken home by his owner and is no longer in the building.”
The slippery snake was reported on Monday by Valleywag.com, a technology gossip Web site. Valleywag said the gray and brown reptile was brought to the building by an employee who didn’t want to be away from it during the work day. It was dangerous to mice but not humans, Valleywag said.
West declined to say how the python escaped, or who found it. The episode “was not an April Fool’s Day joke,” she said.
By: Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER)
The U.S. Interior Department is preparing a wide-ranging set of regulations which substantially weaken the federal Endangered Species Act, according to internal documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and the Center for Biological Diversity.
“These draft regulations slash the Endangered Species Act from head to toe,” said Kieran Suckling, policy director of the Center for Biological Diversity. “They undermine every aspect of law - recovery, listing, preventing extinction, critical habitat, federal oversight and habitat conservation plans - all of it is gutted.”
The draft regulations would:
* Remove recovery of a species or population as a protection standard;
* Allow projects to proceed that have been determined to threaten species with extinction;
* Permit destruction of all restored habitat within critical habitat areas;
* Prevent critical habitat areas from being used to protect against disturbance, pesticides, exotic species, and disease;
* Severely limit the listing of new endangered species; and
* Empower states to veto endangered species introductions as well as administer virtually all aspects of the Endangered Species Act within their borders.
“Kicking responsibility for endangered species protection to the states will make it nearly impossible to restore national oversight when states fail to protect endangered species,” stated Southwest PEER Director Daniel R. Patterson. “State biologists will be under enormous political pressure to accommodate development interests while lacking, in many cases, even rudimentary legal protection to defend scientific concerns about species survival.”
Following the collapse of former U.S. Representative Richard Pombo’s efforts to legislatively weaken the Endangered Species Act in 2006, the Bush administration pledged to use administrative rulemaking to accomplish some of the same objectives.
“If these regulations had been in place 30 years ago, the bald eagle, grizzly bear, and gray wolf would never have been listed as endangered species and the peregrine falcon, black-footed ferret, and California condor would never have been reintroduced to new states,” added Suckling. “This plan makes recovery all but impossible for most endangered species. Simply stated, it is the worst attack on the Endangered Species Act in the past 35 years.”
“Although states are key conservation partners the reason we have a national act is that leaving species protection to the states was a recipe for extinctions,” Patterson concluded.
The draft regulations are being circulated for final inter-agency review and are expected to be formally unveiled later this spring. Congress could also proscribe or limit Bush administration proposals through the appropriations process.
The U.S. House of Representatives on Friday voted to impose a September 1, 2008, deadline for withdrawing all American combat troops from Iraq, prompting a quick veto promise from President George W. Bush.In a mostly partisan 218-212 vote, House Democrats succeeded in attaching the deadline to legislation authorizing more than $124 billion in emergency funds, mostly for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this year.
The narrow margin of the vote was far short of what Democrats would need to override any presidential veto. But the vote was a significant victory for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and her fellow Democrats who took control of Congress in last November’s elections on a pledge to end the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq.
Bush, who as commander-in-chief does not want Democratic lawmakers meddling in his handling of the war, condemned the House vote.
“They set rigid restrictions that would require an army of lawyers to interpret. They set an arbitrary date for withdrawal with regard for conditions on the ground. And they tacked on billions in pet projects that have nothing to do with winning the war on terror,” Bush said.
But most House Democrats, who are geared up to do battle with Bush in the final two years of his presidency, disagreed during a spirited debate on the House floor.
Pelosi said the country had “lost faith” in Bush’s handling of the war, adding, “The American people do not support a war without end and neither should this Congress.”
The Senate could vote as early next week on its version of the war-spending bill and a deadline for withdrawing.
Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said a vote for the spending bill would mean “that we’re going to end the permanent, long-term, dead-end babysitting service. That’s what we are trying to do.”
Pelosi had labored to round up the 218 votes needed to pass the controversial bill in the 435-member House. She had to maneuver around opposition from liberals and moderates in her Democratic Party.
“It’s a historic moment for our party and a historic moment for our country,” Pelosi said.
All but two House Republicans voted against the legislation, which they say will tie military leaders’ hands and contribute to failure in Iraq.
House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio warned, “We have no choice but to win. If we fail in Iraq, you’ll see the rise even further and faster of radical terrorism all around the world.”
While the legislation would provide emergency funding for U.S. troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for the rest of this year, it lays out timetables for withdrawing combat troops in Iraq, linked to that government’s progress in securing its country and other benchmarks.
The House vote marked the first time either chamber of Congress moved to impose a mandatory deadline for ending the U.S. combat role in the war Bush launched in early 2003.
Overall, the bill provides more than $124 billion, including domestic funds for farmers, veterans’ health care and continuing rebuilding Gulf Coast states hit by hurricanes.
(Additional reporting by Susan Cornwell and Kevin Drawbaugh)
By Richard Cowan
Article Source: Reuters
Related Link: Online House Loan
