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Why the Antichrist Matters in Politics
In Rush to Assist Solyndra, U.S. Missed Warning Signs
“It’s here that companies like Solyndra are leading the way toward a brighter and more prosperous future,” the president [Obama] declared in May 2010 to the assembled workers and executives. The start-up business had received a $535 million federal loan guarantee, offered in part to reassert American dominance in solar technology while generating thousands of jobs.
But behind the pomp and pageantry, Solyndra was rotting inside, hemorrhaging cash so quickly that within weeks of Mr. Obama’s visit, the company canceled plans to offer shares to the public. Barely a year later, Solyndra has become one of the administration’s most costly fumbles after the company declared bankruptcy, laid off 1,100 workers and was raided by F.B.I. agents seeking evidence of possible fraud.
The murder of a reporter who exposed Pakistan’s secrets.
by Dexter Filkins
The New Yorker
Sept. 19th, 2011
Less than three weeks after the Abbottabad raid, the Army was humiliated a second time. A group of militants, armed with rocket-propelled grenades and suicide vests, breached one of the country’s most secure bases, the Pakistan Naval Air Station-Mehran, outside Karachi, and blew up two P-3C Orion surveillance planes that had been bought from the United States. At least ten Pakistanis affiliated with the base died. The components of several nuclear warheads were believed to be housed nearby, and the implication was clear: Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal was not safe. In barracks across the country, military officers questioned the competence of Pakistan’s two most powerful men, General Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani, the chief of the Army staff, and General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the chief of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or I.S.I. Some officers even demanded that the Generals resign. Ordinary Pakistanis, meanwhile, publicly disparaged the one institution that, until then, had seemed to function.
Pakistanis Tied to 2007 Border Ambush on Americans
The attack, in Teri Mangal on May 14, 2007, was kept quiet by Washington, which for much of a decade has seemed to play down or ignore signals that Pakistan would pursue its own interests, or even sometimes behave as an enemy.
Over the past five years, with relatively few American troops operating in eastern Afghanistan, the Haqqanis have run what is in effect a protection racket for construction firms — meaning that American taxpayers are helping to finance the enemy network.
Maulavi Sardar Zadran, a former Haqqani commander, calls this extortion “the most important source of funding for the Haqqanis,” and points out that a multiyear road project linking Khost to Gardez in southeastern Afghanistan was rarely attacked by insurgent forces because a Haqqani commander was its paid protector.
“The Haqqanis know that the contractors make thousands and millions of dollars, so these contractors are very good sources of income for them,” he said in an interview.
Plane Crash Kills Top Russian Hockey Team
By ANDREW E. KRAMER
September 7, 2011
MOSCOW — A passenger airplane that had been chartered by one of Russia’s best-known hockey teams crashed during take-off Wednesday, killing much of the team, including many of its star players, in the latest air disaster here this summer.
The Yak-42 jet was carrying the team, called Lokomotiv, from its home in Yaroslavl, a city northeast of Moscow, to an away game in Minsk, the capital of Belarus.
The initial accounts of the number of people on board varied from 37 to 44. A Russian aviation official told the Interfax news agency that all but one — a member of the crew — had died.
The list of victims was not immediately published, but a spokesman for Lokomotiv said the starting lineup and many of the top players had died.
“We have no team any more,” Vladimir N. Malkov, the spokesman, said in a telephone interview. “All our starting players, and all the service people, they all burned in the crash.”
The plane was one of the vintage, Soviet-designed needle-nosed aircraft that have been the focus of safety concerns after a series of problems and crashes, including one in June that killed most of the 52 passengers on board.
The plane that crashed Wednesday came down about 500 yards from the runway shortly after 4 p.m., the Russia Today television news channel reported.
Lokomotiv is a three-time champion in Russia’s Continental Hockey League, the equivalent here of the N.H.L. The team’s roster includes Czech, Swedish, Ukrainian, Latvian and Belarusian hockey players.
The plane was operated by YAK Service, a charter carrier founded in 1993 that flies five Yakovlev aircraft, including three Yak-40 and two Yak-42 models. In 2009, Russian regulators restricted the carrier’s operations for nearly three months after finding major safety deficiencies, according to the Aviation Safety Network, which maintains a database of air accidents and incidents. In 2010, the European Union barred two of YAK Services Yak-40 planes from flying into the 27-nation bloc after Russian regulators failed to provide evidence that all of the airline’s planes were fitted with mandatory safety equipment.
The Yak-42 is a three-engine, 120-seat jet that first entered service in 1975. There are currently about 90 of the planes in service, most of which are operated by Russian airlines, though several are operated by abroad in countries like Cuba, Iran, Armenia, Tatarstan and Kazakhstan. The model has suffered a total of eight crashes involving 570 fatalities.
According to Russia’s Interstate Aviation Committee, the plane involved in Wednesday’s crash had the tail number RA-42433, a Yax-42D, the most recent build of the plane, which ceased production in 1999.
So far, 2011 has been a terrible year for air safety in Russia, with eight crashes that have killed 120 people. Six of those crashes have occurred since June.
Nicola Clark contributed reporting from Paris.
[visual mood supplement by bif]
090211a-open-thread-september
The mask is cuz he’s gonna be a banker soon
The people I grew up with—and the ones you grew up with too, unless you were rich and on the coast somewhere–were all pissed off about something, but it wasn’t freedom. It was the Blacks at first, the riots and the muggings and all that Civil Rights noise. Then it was the Mexicans driving wages down and not picking up their trash. Then it was the Liberals, even though nobody’d ever spotted a live one in the city limits. They didn’t want freedom, they wanted the people they hated bashed, the harder the better.
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2011/09/01/is-america-a-force-for-good-in-the-world/
click on image for link
Brushing aside the official explanations and excuses, when you look at what Operation Fast and Furious actually accomplished – the arming and consolidation of a military force currently fighting Mexico’s armed forces – the conclusion that we are actively involved in destabilizing the Mexican government is hard to avoid. It is a simple statement of fact.
It turns out that the arms benefited the Sinaloa cartel, led by a chap known as “El Chapo,” another indication that the “entrapment” explanation is a cover story, and a not very believable one at that. If the idea was to entrap Mexican drug lords in a “sting” operation, then why focus on the Sinaloa gang to the exclusion of all others?
An American Drug Lord in Acapulco
How a high school jock from Texas rose to the top of one of Mexico’s most powerful and ruthless cartels
Barbie and the Beltrán brothers were enraged. They knew there was only one person with the motive and the means to take down Alfredo: Chapo, their longtime ally in the Sinaloa cartel. Chapo was reportedly displeased with the growing power the Beltráns and Barbie held over Acapulco. “Chapo doesn’t run a very hierarchical cartel – his allies are more like a loose federation of warlords, like in Afghanistan,” says Scott Stewart, an analyst with the intelligence firm Stratfor. “He isn’t always looking over everyone’s shoulder, but whenever someone starts to get too big for his britches and pose some sort of leadership challenge, that person suddenly seems to start having problems.”
Chapo’s perceived move against the Beltráns sparked an all-out war. A few months later, Chapo’s 22-year-old son was killed by multiple gunmen on the same day that assassins ambushed Mexico’s new federal police chief. Soon, corpses were turning up all along the Pacific coast. President Felipe Calderón sent in thousands of troops, but more than 580 people, including 64 policemen, died in the dispute.
If the Beltráns had a strong leader, they could probably have withstood Chapo’s attack. But Arturo, the head of the cartel, was becoming more and more erratic, partying at all hours and reportedly even dabbling in cannibalism. “I was friends with Arturo,” Barbie would later report. “But when he was on drugs, he wanted to kill me. And when he wasn’t, everything was cool.” On the verge of a paranoid break, Arturo retreated to his house in Cuernavaca, where he sat by the pool, lazily flicking $100 bills at girls he hired to entertain him. One night in December 2009, he hired 24 strippers and a Grammy-winning norteño band to come over for a party. Barbie was there too, keeping an eye on the two dozen or so bodyguards with gold-and-diamond-studded pistols who roamed the property. But just as the party was getting started, Mexican special forces suddenly stormed the house. As chaos erupted and the girls scrambled to hide from the gunfire, Arturo fled with his most trusted men to a nearby condo.
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