The main toilet aboard the International Space Station has broken down, forcing the three crew members to use the loo on the Soyuz escape craft that's permanently attached to the ISS, according to various media reports.However, the Soyuz head will offer only temporary relief, as its holding tank will quickly fill up.
With all the thought put into redundancies on the space station, nobody thought about the possibility of toilet failure?
But the most damaging effect of this communications strategy was that it changed the definition of success. Before the war, administration officials said that success would mean an Iraq that no longer threatened important U.S. interests – that did not support terrorism, aspire to WMD, threaten its neighbors, or conduct mass murder. But from the fall of 2003 on, the president defined success as stable democracy in Iraq.
This was a public affairs decision that has had enormous strategic consequences for American support for the war. The new formula fails to connect the Iraq war directly to U.S. interests. It causes many Americans to question why we should be investing so much blood and treasure for Iraqis. And many Americans doubt that the new aim is realistic – that stable democracy can be achieved in Iraq in the foreseeable future.
In fairness to the administration, they were taking a beating on WMD, and at that time the shift made sense, but only because they seemingly could not assertively defend themselves as well as their supporters did. They gave up that battle, and in doing so, they did sever the connection to American interests. However history views this war, it will look back on the rhetorical change as the point where the Bush administration began to hamstring itself on the home front.
The United Nations will send nearly a quarter of a million condoms into cyclone-hit Myanmar to help needy survivors with no access to contraceptives, a UN official says.So far, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) said it had sent 72 800 condoms to survivors struggling to maintain their family planning after the storm hit in early May.
A passerby saw flames shooting out of a second story apartment of a 32-unit complex in Fort Atkinson before entering the burning structure, banging on doors and alerting residents who all safely escaped the blaze before it destroyed their homes.
All have been displaced and lost their homes and belongings at 1521 Commonwealth Drive where Fort Atkinson Fire Capt. Mark Schoenleber said the building is considered a total loss today. The American Red Cross is assisting residents with temporary shelter.
By the sounds of it, a passerby and police did an excellent job of ensuring that there was no loss of life. I wish I could provide further coverage of this story, seeing that I live less than a mile away, but I'm getting codgerly and was asleep by 11 last night. I never even heard the fire trucks or the helicopter that I'm told hovered and monitored the site early this morning.
A boom in speculation and trading by investment banks and hedge funds has put our energy markets on steroids. Contract volume in the futures markets has risen by a third in just the last year. Oil closed at a record high of $125.96 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange on Friday. That's double the price two years ago, a difference clearly caused by market manipulation.This isn't complicated finance. The way traders push up prices is surprisingly simple. They buy in European futures markets, which don't have the limits that U.S. markets do. That drives up U.S. prices where they may already have positions. It's a move to think about next time one of these exchange chiefs talks about all of the benefits of "market globalization."None of it would matter except that these markets are supposed to be driven by supply and demand. China and other rapidly growing countries may be using more, or will use more resources, but the reality is that demand and supply haven't changed enough to warrant the price of oil doubling in less than three years.Here's what has changed: the proliferation of energy trading desks on Wall Street and at hedge funds. There are more than 9,000 hedge funds with $1.5 trillion under management, according to the Federal Reserve. Hedge funds, which almost exclusively use short-term strategies, do nearly 55% of derivatives trading, the kind used in energy futures, according to a study last year by Greenwich Associates.
Heavy rains and another potentially powerful storm headed toward Myanmar's cyclone-devastated delta on Wednesday. The U.N. warned that inadequate relief efforts could lead to a second wave of deaths among the estimated 2 million survivors.
The International Red Cross said in a new estimate that the death toll already may be between 68,833 and 127,990.
If you are going to be quoting a range of death numbers like that, do you really have to be exact at the upper and lower limits? Considering the real number could be any one of 59,157 possibilities, would even numbers have just sufficed? Or are these exact numbers in a guesstimate designed to personalize this for people in some way?
President George W. Bush said on Tuesday he quit playing golf in 2003 out of respect for the families of Americans killed in the war in Iraq."I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf," Bush said in an interview with Yahoo and Politico.com.
"I feel I owe it to the families to be as -- to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal," he said.
I'm in line with interpretation number one, which is that the guy was empathetic and understood how it could be perceived by the families.
Interpretation two will be the one that grabs hold until his post presidency numbers rebound a bit. It is also the one that will rage around the left. That interpretation will be that this president was so shallow as to think that giving up golf was enough. Of course, that isn't what he said, but putting words into the mouth of this communicationally challenged President has become a cottage industry, so why should that change now?
The House of Representatives on Tuesday followed the Senate in rejecting the Bush administration's policy of adding oil to the country's Strategic Petroleum Reserve while fuel prices are high.The House passed legislation that would suspend crude deliveries to the U.S. emergency oil stockpile while the price of oil was above $75 a barrel, a move the White House has opposed. Oil traded at a record near $126 a barrel on Tuesday.
Much of the oil placed into the reserve come in lieu of royalty payments from the oil companies, so it isn't an out of pocket expense for the United States. Additionally, the suspension will have absolutely no affect on the price of oil. I can't say I'm outraged by the suspension, but I am sick of congress make pointless gestures because it is politically easy to do. There are much better ways they can address our energy issues, but they require standing up to irrational environmentalists, something they are loathe to even think about.
An Omaha man struggling to breathe used a steak knife to perform an at-home tracheotomy. Steve Wilder said he thought he was going to die when he awoke one night last week and couldn't breath.
Wilder said he didn't call 911 because he didn't think help would arrive in time. So, the 55-year-old says, he got a steak knife from the kitchen and made a small hole in his throat, allowing air to gush in.
Wow.
The deaths of two U.S. soldiers in western Baghdad last week have sparked concerns that Iraqi insurgents have developed a new weapon capable of striking what the U.S. military considers its most explosive-resistant vehicle.The soldiers were riding in a Mine Resistant Ambush Protective vehicle, known as an MRAP, when an explosion sent a blast of super-heated metal through the MRAP's armor and into the vehicle, killing them both.
Their deaths brought to eight the number of American troops killed while riding in an MRAP, which was developed and deployed to Iraq last year after years of acrimony over light armor on the Army's workhorse vehicle, the Humvee.
The MRAP is designed to be resistant to explosives, not "bomb proof". You might be able to make a bomb proof vehicle, but it won't be going anywhere fast, and that would create all new security problems. While the military should investigate a recent spate of explosion deaths in the MRAP in order to be ahead of the game with insurgents, the eight deaths is hardly evidence that the vehicles are not doing their job. In fact, buried in the tenth and final paragraph of the story, the reporters acknowledge that of the 8 deaths, one was due to a roll over and two due to drowning.
