"A U.S. judge says an Internet marketer known as the "Spam King" must pay the Facebook Web site $711 million in damages.

U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel ruled in San Jose, Calif., Thursday that Sanford Wallace must pay Facebook after employing compromised user accounts to send out 14 million junk e-mails to the Web site's members, the San Francisco Chronicle reported."

http://www.upi.com/Business_News/2009/10/31/Judge-Spammer-owes-Facebook-711-million/UPI-15161256998319/

"Russia should build a new nuclear-powered spaceship for prospective manned missions to Mars and other planets, the nation's space chief said Thursday.

Anatoly Perminov first proposed building the ship at a government meeting Wednesday but didn't explain its purpose. President Dmitry Medvedev backed the project and urged the government to find the money.

In remarks posted Thursday on his agency's Web site, Perminov said the nuclear spaceship should be used for human flights to Mars and other planets."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091029/ap_on_sc/eu_russia_nuclear_spaceship

>>

Junior Field Reporter 09/10/31(Sat)05:32 No.2594   File: 1256992329331.jpg -(14218 B, 450x291) Thumbnail displayed, click image for full size. See also http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/29/russian_nuke_spaceship/ which has a link to "massive old NASA PDF" http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19890013609_1989013609.pdf

http://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2009/10/30/kipling-haunts-obamas-afghan-war/

Here’s the thing. Would you believe there is no current National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan? Rather, Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal are running the show, allowing professional intelligence analysts to be mostly straphangers at planning and strategy meetings.

CIA Director Panetta, a self-described "creature of Congress," is not going to risk putting any senior military noses out of joint by objecting, and neither is his nominal boss, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair. And, sad to say, National Security Adviser James Jones, in deferring to the military, is serving President Obama just as poorly as Bush apparatchik Condoleezza Rice served President Bush.

How many "militants" are there in Afghanistan? How may "insurgents?" How do you draw a distinction between a militant and an insurgent? Could it be that these combatants are widely regarded, in many areas of Afghanistan, as resistance fighters? What would be the implications of that?

"Federal safety authorities in the US are imposing a record fine of $87m (£52m) on BP for failing to fix hazards at its Texas City oil refinery after an explosion at the industrial complex killed 15 people in 2005.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) will announced the penalty later today. It is more than four times the size of any p r e v i o u s financial penalty levied by the authority, which is part of the US department of labour.

Officials in the US say BP has failed to fulfil commitments to reduce risk to workers and fix technical issues - including faults in pressure-relief systems. The company had agreed to a series of measures in a p r e v i o u s $21.3m settlement with the OSHA and had committed itself to an independent safety audit.

The Obama administration's labour secretary, Hilda Solis, is scheduled to speak about BP later today."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/oct/30/bp-texas-city-safety-fine

"The booster rocket used in a test flight was badly dented when it fell into the Atlantic because of a deflated parachute, NASA said Thursday.

The new Ares I-X — the precursor to NASA's planned moon rockets — completed a two-minute flight Wednesday. The launch itself went well, officials said, but one of the three parachutes on the booster failed to work properly.

All three parachutes opened, but one ended up deflating for unknown reasons, said NASA spokesman Allard Beutel. That caused the booster to hit the ocean with extra force.

The first-stage booster — similar to what's used for the space shuttles — was found to be dented near the bottom when it was recovered from the ocean."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091029/ap_on_sc/us_sci_moon_rocket_test

"U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton came face-to-face Friday with Pakistani anger over U.S. aerial drone attacks in tribal areas along the Afghan border, a strategy that U.S. officials say has succeeded in killing key terrorist leaders.

In a series of public appearances on the final day of a three-day visit marked by blunt talk, Clinton refused to discuss the subject, which involves highly classified CIA operations. She would say only that "there is a war going on," and the Obama administration is committed to helping Pakistan defeat the insurgents and terrorists who threaten the stability of a nuclear-armed nation.

Clinton said she could not comment on "any particular tactic or technology" used in the war against extremist groups in the area."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091030/ap_on_re_as/as_clinton

"The EU has agreed a conditional deal on how much it will pay to help other countries fight global warming, ahead of a key climate summit in December.

The EU agreed climate change would need 100bn euros ($148bn; £90bn) a year by 2020, and would pay up to 50bn euros a year, conditional on other nations."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8334146.stm

http://ze nhub er.blo gs pot.com/2009/10/new-york-times-tells-us-that-obamas.html

The New York Times tells us that Obama’s advisers are curling themselves around a strategy that will protect “about 10 population centers” in Afghanistan. The debate is no longer over whether to send more troops but over how many more to send. Obama hasn’t made his mind up yet, the Times reports, but the story is a sanctioned leak, so you know he’s pretty close to a decision. This is a propaganda technique known as “desensitizing.” By the time official word comes down the pike, we’ll already be used to the idea and will have moved on to caring about something else.

Military pundit Ralph Peters is on the right side of the Afghanistan issue. “Even if everything went perfectly in Afghanistan—which it won't—the results would be virtually meaningless: Our mortal enemies (above all, al Qaeda) have dug in elsewhere, from Pakistan to Somalia,” he wrote recently in the New York Post. “Our soldiers are dying for a fad, not for a strategy. Our vaunted counterinsurgency doctrine is the military equivalent of hula hoops, pet rocks and Beanie Babies: an oddity that caught the Zeitgeist.” Indeed, counterinsurgency (COIN) is the “it” strategy now, the Army’s reason for being. There won’t be any big tank battles in the Fulda gap. COIN is the only kind of war left; without it, there is no Long War.

Of course, if we don’t need the Long War, we don’t need to do COIN in Afghanistan.

Comment too long. Click here to view the full text.

N.Y. Post mocks Phillies as ‘Frillies’

By Peter Mucha

Inquirer Staff Writer

New York - home of TV networks, the New York Times, great magazines and Columbia University - has long been considered a center of serious journalism.

Notice no mention of the New York Post.

As people debate whether FoxNews is a serious media outlet, the Post makes its position completely clear:

It's not.

Comment too long. Click here to view the full text.

"A mob of angry parents lynched a book salesman and badly injured four of his colleagues after rumors spread that the men were part of a human smuggling ring, the official Xinhua agency said late Monday.

The attack at the Chumen Primary school, in prosperous eastern Zhejiang province, occurred in the early morning as the group handed out leaflets about a lecture to be given nearby, the agency quoted a police official as saying.

After gossip spread that a gang was trying to ensnare the young pupils, parents surrounded the group and set upon them until police intervened. One man died in hospital and the others were undergoing treatment, Xinhua said.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children go missing in China each year, seized by roving criminal gangs to serve as props for beggars or for sale to childless couples."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091027/od_nm/us_china_lynching

>>	Junior Field Reporter 09/10/29(Thu)08:58 No.2581   File: 1256831901840.jpg -(31543 B, 1024x768) Thumbnail displayed, click image for full size. Always good to know that people are as dumb over there as they are here. Our only hope is untamed machine intelligence.