Breaking News Thread Version 2.0

[Krandall]

Somali pirate: $3.3M ransom paid, 36 hostages freed
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091117/ap_on_re_af/piracy
Might I just add.... I don't understand how this is happening. why not set a bigass boat in there or a couple and if you see a Somali boat. burn their ass. 


MOGADISHU, Somalia – Pirates freed 36 crew members from a Spanish trawler Tuesday after holding them for more than six weeks off the coast of Somalia, while a self-proclaimed pirate said the hostage-takers were paid $3.3 million in ransom.

In Spain, Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said the tuna boat Alakrana "is sailing toward safer waters. All of its crew members are safe and sound."

A Somali villager named Ali Ahmed Salad said 12 armed pirates left the ship shortly after noon Tuesday and joined colleagues near the pirate town of Haradhere.

Ali Gab, a self-proclaimed pirate, told The Associated Press that a boat delivered $3.3 million in ransom. Gab said pirates began leaving the ship shortly afterward, and that a Spanish warship nearby watched the proceedings.

Cmdr. John Harbour, a spokesman for the EU's anti-piracy force, confirmed that a Spanish warship had been in the region.

Zapatero was evasive when asked if the government had taken part in payment of a ransom. "The government did what it had to do," he told a news conference after talks with the president of Hungary, Laszlo Solyom.

The reported ransom payment demonstrates why pirate attacks have been on the rise. The millions of dollars a successful hijacking can bring is a windfall in impoverished and war-ravaged Somalia.

The trawler was seized Oct. 2 with 16 Spaniards, eight Indonesians and 12 crew from five African countries aboard. The pirates holding the Alakrana had been pressing for the release of two colleagues who were captured by Spanish naval forces a day after the hijacking and eventually brought to Madrid to face charges.

The Spanish government has been working feverishly to find some sort of legal formula that would allow it to try them and send them back to Somalia quickly in hopes of appeasing the pirates who remained in control of the trawler.

In the end, the hostages were released with the two Somali suspects still in custody in Madrid. They were formally charged with kidnapping and related charges Monday.

In the latest attempted hijackings, pirates attacked two vessels Monday off East Africa, successfully capturing one of the ships and its crew of 28 North Koreans, officials said Tuesday.

The pirates attacked a chemical tanker named the MV Theresa with the 28 crew members on board, the European Union's anti-piracy force said. The vessel, which was operated out of Singapore, had been heading to the Kenyan port town of Mombasa. The EU force did not say what kind of chemicals were on board.

In a second incident Monday, pirates attacked a Ukrainian cargo ship with AK-47 rifles and rocket-propelled grenades after two small skiffs detached from a mother ship. Harbour, the EU Naval Force spokesman, said that private security guards on board fired on the pirates, wounding two. The pirates then broke off the attack, the force said, Harbour said the Ukrainian ship was not hijacked.

A Somali man who claims to be a spokesman for the pirates, Gedi Ali, said Tuesday that pirates had captured the Ukrainian ship. Ali also said two pirates were wounded in the attack.

Pirates hold around a dozen ships and more than 200 crew, and attacks have increased in recent weeks as the monsoon season subsided. An international flotilla of warships now patrols the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden, but pirates continue to carry out attacks because of the millions of dollars that can be made from a successful hijacking.

[Peelz]

I heard thaty on the radio this morning.

I wanna be a pirate! ARR!

[Krandall]

did you see my life motto song?

http://cristgaming.com/pirate.swf

[dragonz]

I vote for this thread to be re-named "The Breaking Wind Thread" 

[Krandall]

Iran begins war games to protect nuclear sites
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091122/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iran_war_games


TEHRAN, Iran – Iran on Sunday began large-scale air defense war games aimed at protecting the country's nuclear facilities against any possible attack, state television reported.

It said the five-day drill will cover an area a third of the size of Iran and spread across the central, western and southern parts of the country.

Gen. Ahmad Mighani, head of an air force unit that deals with threats to Iran's air space, said Saturday the war games would cover regions where Iran's nuclear facilities are located.

The drill involves both Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard, the paramilitary Basij forces affiliated with the Guard as well as army units.

The United States and its European allies accuse Iran of embarking on a nuclear weapons program. Iran denies the charge and insists the program is only for peaceful purposes.

Israel has not ruled out military action to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

The commander of the Guard's air force, Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, meanwhile sought on Sunday to play down the significance of Israel's threats against his country, saying they amounted to psychological warfare.

"We are sure they are not able to do anything against us since they can not predict our reaction," Hajizadeh was quoted as saying by the Guard's official Web site, Sephahnews.

"If their fighter planes could escape from Iran's air defense system, their bases will be hit by our devastating surface-to-surface missiles before they land," he said.

Also on Sunday, Iran's defense minister, Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, said Iran planned to pursue designing and producing its own air defense missiles, according to the official IRNA news agency.

His comments were apparently in response to the delay in the delivery from Russia of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles, a key component of Iran's air defense.

Iran complains that the delay is apparently the result of Israeli and U.S. pressure.

Israel and the United States have opposed the missile deal out of fear Iran could use the system to significantly boost air defenses at its nuclear sites — including its main uranium enrichment plant at Natanz.

[Krandall]

ugh.. Minnesota AGAIN?!!!

http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2009/11/drunk_man_drove.php
Photo by juhansonin
​It's one thing to go out for a drunken joy cruise alone if you are a boozed-up idiot, but offering a 7-year-old a sweet ride on top of your car is probably an epic fail in anyone's book. Worst babysitter ever.

Robert Wayne Christgau, 56, was allegedly driving circles near his Austin apartment Thursday night with a 7-year-old boy on top of the car roof. He's been charged with drunk driving and child neglect. He also left a 3-year-old boy alone in his apartment.

When another man saw this happening, he pulled Christgau out of the car and stopped him from leaving the scene after calling police.

More from the Rochester Post-Bullein:
Deputies found Christgau standing next to his vehicle with an open can of beer on its roof, the complaint says. Christgau allegedly smelled strongly of alcohol and failed sobriety tests, later testing at a 0.14 percent blood-alcohol level, which is higher than the state's 0.08 percent legal limit for driving.

Christgau, who returns to court Dec. 3, allegedly admitted driving with the 7-year-old on the roof and drinking alcohol before doing so.

The witness told authorities he saw the 7-year-old riding on the roof with his legs hanging over the windshield. At one point, he saw Christgau crash the car into the apartment's front steps, the complaint says.

[Krandall]

Bring on the Turkey!!!! 

Alcoholics will gobble up this meal.

Bar owner Paul Hurley said he is unveilling the nation's first 100-proof turkey on Monday.

"It's a turkey you can eat and drink at the same time, but you'll need a cab home," Hurley told the NY Post.  "There's an ounce of vodka in every bite."

Hurley, the owner of O'Casey's Tavern in Midtown Manhattan says that the bird is infused with fruit-flavored and 100-proof Georgi vodka for three days before being cooked.

He claims to have gotten the idea for the boozy bird from his dear ol' mother, in Ireland, 15 years ago.

"On christmas, my mom said, 'Why not try some vodka in the turkey?'" Hurley told the Post.

The flavors of vodka include peach, raspberry, cherry and apple.

The gravy is also laced with the distilled liquor, and there will be a vodka reservoir inside the turkey with a straw, letting you eat and drink at th same time.

The lush meal will run you $29.95, and includes stuffing, crandberry sauce, sweet potatoes and  -- out of concern for the danger of drinking-and-driving -- a free taxi ride home.

[Headrope]

Took place just down the road from me:

http://www.thenewstribune.com/topstory/story/973573.html

Four officers shot dead at coffee shop near Parkland south of Tacoma

Four local police officers were killed this morning at a Parkland-area coffee shop south of Tacoma.

The gunman walked into the coffee shop and shot two of the Lakewood officers as they sat down. The other two officers stood up. One officer was killed. The fourth officer fought the gunman and may have injured him. The officer was able to fire his weapon said Pierce County sheriff's spokesman Ed Troyer said. ...

[Krandall]

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/wiretap-prices/
Yahoo, Verizon: Our Spy Capabilities Would 'Shock', 'Confuse' Consumers

Want to know how much phone companies and internet service providers charge to funnel your private communications or records to U.S. law enforcement and spy agencies?

That's the question muckraker and Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian asked all agencies within the Department of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed a few months ago. But before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that, among other things, they would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public.

Yahoo writes in its 12-page objection letter (.pdf), that if its pricing information were disclosed to Soghoian, he would use it "to 'shame' Yahoo! and other companies — and to 'shock' their customers."

"Therefore, release of Yahoo!'s information is reasonably likely to lead to impairment of its reputation for protection of user privacy and security, which is a competitive disadvantage for technology companies," the company writes.

Verizon took a different stance. It objected to the release (.pdf) of its Law Enforcement Legal Compliance Guide because it might "confuse" customers and lead them to think that records and surveillance capabilities available only to law enforcement would be available to them as well — resulting in a flood of customer calls to the company asking for trap and trace orders.

"Customers may see a listing of records, information or assistance that is available only to law enforcement," Verizon writes in its letter, "but call in to Verizon and seek those same services. Such calls would stretch limited resources, especially those that are reserved only for law enforcement emergencies."

Other customers, upon seeing the types of surveillance law enforcement can do, might "become unnecessarily afraid that their lines have been tapped or call Verizon to ask if their lines are tapped (a question we cannot answer)."

Verizon does disclose a little tidbit in its letter, saying that the company receives "tens of thousands" of requests annually for customer records and information from law enforcement agencies.

Soghoian filed his records request to discover how much law enforcement agencies — and thus U.S. taxpayers — are paying for spy documents and surveillance services with the aim of trying to deduce from this how often such requests are being made. Soghoian explained his theory on his blog, Slight Paranoia:

    In the summer of 2009, I decided to try and follow the money trail in order to determine how often Internet firms were disclosing their customers' private information to the government. I theorized that if I could obtain the price lists of each ISP, detailing the price for each kind of service, and invoices paid by the various parts of the Federal government, then I might be able to reverse engineer some approximate statistics. In order to obtain these documents, I filed Freedom of Information Act requests with every part of the Department of Justice that I could think of.

The first DoJ agency to respond to his request was the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS), which indicated that it had price lists available for Cox Communications, Comcast, Yahoo and Verizon. But because the companies voluntarily provided the price lists to the government, the FOIA allows the companies an opportunity to object to the disclosure of their data under various exemptions. Comcast and Cox were fine with the disclosure, Soghoian reported.

He found that Cox Communications charges $2,500 to fulfill a pen register/trap-and-trace order for 60 days, and $2,000 for each additional 60-day-interval. It charges $3,500 for the first 30 days of a wiretap, and $2,500 for each additional 30 days. Thirty days worth of a customer's call detail records costs $40.

Comcast's pricing list, which was already leaked to the internet in 2007, indicated that it charges at least $1,000 for the first month of a wiretap, and $750 per month thereafter.

But Verizon and Yahoo took offense at the request.

Yahoo objected on grounds that its pricing constituted "confidential commercial information" and cited Exemption 4 of the Freedom of Information Act and the Trade Secrets Act.

Exemption 4 of the FOIA refers to the disclosure of commercial or financial information that could result in a competitive disadvantage to the company if it were publicly disclosed. The company claims its pricing is derived from labor rates for employees and overhead and, therefore, disclosing the information would provide clues to its operating costs — regardless of whether these same clues are already available in public records, such as those the company files with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company also claims that since Soghoian is trying to determine the actual amounts the Marshals Service paid Yahoo for responding to requests, the price lists are irrelevant, since "there are no standard prices for these transactions."

But equally important to Yahoo's objections was the potential for "criticism" and ridicule. Yahoo quoted Soghoian on his blog writing that his aim was to "use this blog to shame the corporations that continue to do harm to user online privacy."

Yahoo also objected to the disclosure of its letter objecting to the disclosure of pricing information saying that "release of this letter would likely cause substantial competitive harm" to the company. The company added, in a veiled threat, that if the Marshals Service were to show anyone its letter objecting to the disclosure of pricing information, it could "impair the government's ability to obtain information necessary for making appropriate decisions with regard to future FOIA requests."

If anyone out there has a copy of Verizon or Yahoo's law enforcement pricing list and wants to share it, feel free to use our anonymous tip address.

[Krandall]

http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2009/11/mist_of_pig_bra.php
Mist of pig brain tissue sickened slaughterhouse workers

Between November 2006 and May 2008, two dozen slaughterhouse workers in Minnesota and Indiana took ill with a variety of neurological and physical illnesses. Now, researchers think they know why.

The medical journal Lancet Neurology describes what happened this way: "An outbreak of neurological autoimmunity with polyradiculoneuropathy in workers exposed to aerosolised porcine neural tissue."

That's another way of saying the workers inhaled a mist of pig brain tissue and it made them very sick.

Twenty-one of those affected were from Minnesota, while the rest were from Indiana. Many, but not all, of the workers were stationed near a high-powered air compressor used to blow the brains out of pig heads. Researchers say that when workers inhaled the mist, it triggered their immune systems to attack their own nervous systems:

[Headrope]

http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2009/11/mist_of_pig_bra.php
Mist of pig brain tissue sickened slaughterhouse workers

Between November 2006 and May 2008, two dozen slaughterhouse workers in Minnesota and Indiana took ill with a variety of neurological and physical illnesses. Now, researchers think they know why.

The medical journal Lancet Neurology describes what happened this way: "An outbreak of neurological autoimmunity with polyradiculoneuropathy in workers exposed to aerosolised porcine neural tissue."

That's another way of saying the workers inhaled a mist of pig brain tissue and it made them very sick.

Twenty-one of those affected were from Minnesota, while the rest were from Indiana. Many, but not all, of the workers were stationed near a high-powered air compressor used to blow the brains out of pig heads. Researchers say that when workers inhaled the mist, it triggered their immune systems to attack their own nervous systems:

That's truly f-ed up.

[Peelz]

http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2009/11/mist_of_pig_bra.php
Mist of pig brain tissue sickened slaughterhouse workers

Between November 2006 and May 2008, two dozen slaughterhouse workers in Minnesota and Indiana took ill with a variety of neurological and physical illnesses. Now, researchers think they know why.

The medical journal Lancet Neurology describes what happened this way: "An outbreak of neurological autoimmunity with polyradiculoneuropathy in workers exposed to aerosolised porcine neural tissue."

That's another way of saying the workers inhaled a mist of pig brain tissue and it made them very sick.

Twenty-one of those affected were from Minnesota, while the rest were from Indiana. Many, but not all, of the workers were stationed near a high-powered air compressor used to blow the brains out of pig heads. Researchers say that when workers inhaled the mist, it triggered their immune systems to attack their own nervous systems:

That's truly f-ed up.

meh, I've inhaled worse

[Krandall]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091204/ap_on_re_as/as_afghanistan
US Marines launch large offensive in Afghanistan

KABUL – U.S. Marines and Afghan troops Friday launched the first offensive since President Barack Obama announced an American troop surge, striking against Taliban communications and supply lines in a southern insurgent stronghold, a military spokesman said.

Hundreds of troops from the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines and the Marine reconnaissance unit Task Force Raider were dropped by helicopter and MV-22 Osprey aircraft behind Taliban lines in the northern end of the Now Zad Valley of Helmand province, scene of heavy fighting last summer, according to Marine spokesman Maj. William Pelletier.

A second, larger force pushed northward from the Marines' Forward Operating Base in Now Zad, Pelletier said. Combat engineers were forcing a corridor through Taliban minefields with armored steamrollers and explosives, Pelletier said.

In all, about 1,000 Marines as well as Afghan troops were taking part in the operation, known as "Cobra's Anger," he said.

There were no reports of casualties.

The operation began three days after Obama announced that he was sending 30,000 reinforcements to Afghanistan to help turn the tide against the Taliban. America's European allies will send an estimated 7,000 more troops to Afghanistan next year "with more to come," NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen announced Friday.

Most of the new troops are expected to be sent to southern Afghanistan, including Helmand, where Taliban influence is strongest.

The new offensive aims to cut off the Taliban communication routes through Helmand and disrupt their supply lines, especially those providing explosives for the numerous lethal roadside bombs that litter the area.

Pelletier said several arms caches and at least 400 pounds of explosive materials had been found so far Friday.

"Right now, the enemy is confused and disorganized," Pelletier said by telephone from Camp Leatherneck, the main Marines base in Helmand. "They're fighting, but not too effectively."

Pelletier said insurgents were caught off guard by the early morning air assault, the first using Ospreys, an aircraft that combines features of helicopters and fixed wing aircraft.

[Peelz]

let's get this over with.  Take em out boys! Hope they don't half ass it.

[Krandall]

Mysteries Surround Afghanistan's Stealth Drone (Updated)
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/tag/beast-of-kandahar/



Earlier this year, blurry pictures were released by the French magazine Air & Cosmos of a previously unknown stealth drone taken at Kandahar in Afghanistan. The photos, snapped in 2007, prompted a wave of speculation about the classified aircraft. That speculation grew even more intense this week, when a blog belonging to the French newspaper Libération released an even better photograph. But while the new picture may answers some questions, it also creates a heap of new mysteries. Chief among them: Why use such a fancy, stealthy aircraft in Afghanistan? The Taliban have neither the radar to spot the plane, nor the weaponry to shoot it down.

The lines of the drone clearly indicate a stealth design slightly reminiscent of the B-2A Spirit bomber, but smaller. Over on Ares, veteran aviation expert Bill Sweetman describes the wingspan as being perhaps eighty feet, and notes "One important detail: the overwing fairings are not B-2-like inlets, but cover some kind of equipment - satcoms on one side, perhaps, and a sensor on the other."

The aircraft, which Bill has dubbed the Beast of Kandahar, is widely believed to be a product of Lockheed's celebrated Skunk Works, home of the F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter. The Beast bears some resemblance to the Skunk Works' Polecat drone, revealed in 2006. This was a private venture, costing some $27 million of Lockheed's own money, designed to operate stealthily at high altitude and at supersonic speed. However, the Beast is not Polecat, as one look at the exhaust will indicate.

The Beast has also been identified with the covert Desert Prowler program, identified by black ops spotter Trevor Paglen. The Desert Prowler's patches include the phrases "alone and unafraid" and "alone and on the prowl" as well as the figure of a wraith taken from an album cover by Insane Clown Posse. The wraith is said to represent the Grim Reaper...peculiar as it may seem, Paglen has shown that a remarkable amount of information can be gleaned from Black Ops patches and has written a book on the subject.