- Terrorism has fallen on hard times nowadays. Much like music and movies aren't what they were decades ago, so too has terrorism become watered down and soul-less. There are few more prominent reminders of that fact than the man known as Carlos the Jackal. The Jackal, as he is known in these parts, was once among the world's most feared masterminds of terror. He hasn’t been a part of the terrorist scene for the past 17 years because he has been behind bars, getting gray and rotting away for his crimes. His next trial begins Monday in Paris, where he will be on trial for four deadly attacks that occurred nearly three decades ago. If the trail goes in his favor, he has a chance to see freedom at some point before he dies. If not…….you get the point. The Jackal has taken his typical defiant approach in the days leading up to the proceedings before a special anti-terrorism court. The trial of the man whose legal name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez is expected to take six weeks and should be compelling legal drama. He told a French radio station in a clandestine interview that he has "a character adapted to this kind of combat” and suggested that, "I'm still in a combative state of mind." His opponents include not only the court and prosecutors, but also Type 2 diabetes and a nagging case of melancholy. The Jackal admitted that he misses the family life he left behind in order to wage a freelance terrorist career through Middle East and European capitals in the 1980s and 1990s. He lived on the run before finally being captured and imprisoned in France in 1994. In the interview, The Jackal also pined for the day he can leave France as a free man and return to his home country, Venezuela, whose despotic leader Hugo Chavez once praised him as a "revolutionary fighter." Even behind bars, The Jackal has also managed to find love and in 2001, he married one of his lawyers, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, in an Islamic ceremony conducted in prison. "The first thing I'll do if I get out by the grace of God ... I'll start with my honeymoon. It's more than a decade late," he said in an interview in October. That unauthorized interview landed him in solitary confinement -- ended only by a 10-day hunger strike. Seeing a once boastful, confrontational terrorist mellow out is a bit sad, but not nearly as sad as the current state of terrorism without The Jackal around. Now, everything is large-scale, faceless terrorism and there is no personality, there are no charismatic mass killers of innocent people and the entire scene is just uninspiring to the core. No one is out there fueling revolutionary movements the way The Jackal did in the 1970s, where he became a cult figure. He remains the chief suspect in the 1975 seizure of OPEC oil ministers and received a hero’s welcome when he landed with his hostages in Algeria. One year later, he led the 1976 Palestinian hijacking of a French jetliner to Entebbe, Uganda, which ended with an Israeli commando raid. He was allegedly part of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics and joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to helping extreme-left European terror groups. When Communism collapsed in 1989, he began to run out of hiding places and French secret agents snatched him from his hideout in Khartoum, Sudan, on Aug. 14, 1994. More than 17 years later, he will stand trial for four deadly bombings in France, in 1982 and 1983, that killed 11 people and injured 140. The moment is a reminder that they just don’t make terrorists like they used to……………
- Does anyone think this is going to go well? Given that NBA owners and players have negotiated infrequently and made little progress toward a new collective bargaining agreement during the league’s four-month (and counting) work stoppage, is commissioner David Stern giving the NBPA an offer and a deadline for accepting that offer going to create any actual momentum toward an agreement? But that is the path Stern has chosen, dropping an offer predicated upon the chance to earn up to 51 percent of basketball-related income on the negotiating table but tagging that offer with a deadline of Wednesday. He then added a thinly veiled threat that unless the players accept the offer, the next one will be significantly less appealing to them. "We hope that this juxtaposition will cause the union to assess its position and accept the deal," Stern said. As is to be expected, the players bristled at the threat. "The players will not be intimidated," attorney Jeffrey Kessler said following eight hours of negotiations that stretched late into the night. "They want to play, they want a season, but they are not going to sacrifice the future of all NBA players under these types of threats of intimidation. It's not happening on Derek Fisher's watch; it's not happening on Billy Hunter's watch; it's not happening on the watch of this executive committee." Kessler went on to claim the proposal was really 50.2 percent for the players and called the chance of them ever reaching 51 percent a "fraud" and an "illusion." But if the players don’t change their mind on the deal by Wednesday, Stern said they would get a deal that would guarantee them just 47 percent of BRI and call for a flex salary cap. Fisher sounded a macabre tone after Saturday’s fruitless negotiations. "Today was another sad day for our fans, for arena workers, our parking lot attendants, our vendors. Very frustrating, sad day," the union president added. "We, for sure, unequivocally, made good faith efforts to try to get this deal done tonight. And we're at a loss for why we could not close it out." All words aside, Saturday was Day 128 of the lockout and the next big development in the process could well be the players beginning the process of decertification, which could take months and would likely sound the official death knell for the season if it occurs. Players and agents involved in the effort hope to have the requisite signed petition from 30 percent of the league's work force calling for a decertification vote by Tuesday and once signatures are collected from 30 percent of the players, that petition is filed with the National Labor Relations Board. The board could then take an estimated 45 days to verify the petition and schedule an actual decertification vote. In the meantime, fans will continue to be screwed over by both the players and owners and neither side could be less concerned about that………….
- Two weekends in theaters, two wins for Paramount’s animated family flick Puss in Boots. The cat-centric film garnered an additional $33 million in its second weekend and has scored a solid $75.5 million in cumulative earnings. The over-promoted and truly terrible Tower Heist, seeking to take what remains of the star power of a few aging, former leading men and jam it into an absurd plot with horrible writing, opened in second placed with $25 million. An even worse and more asinine movie (although the battle was close) was right on its heels as A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas finished third in its debut by making $13 million even with the benefit of having the elevated price of 3D tickets working in its favor. Paranormal Activity 3 continued its strong run with an additional $8.5 million to land in fourth place despite a 53-percent decline from the previous weekend. The small-budget horror thriller has scored a big-time total of $95.3 million and counting in three weeks of release. The final top five entry was In Time, which claimed the fifth slot thanks to a $7.7 million performance that nudged its two-week tally up to a modest $24.2 million and counting. Perhaps Justin Timberlake’s dreamy, former man-bander good looks aren't enough to make a movie a box office hit after all. In the latter half of the top 10 were the crap-tacular remake of Footloose (No. 6 with $4.5 million and a four-week total of just $44.8 million), Disney’s “Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robots” movie, also known as Real Steel, which dropped one spot (No. 7 with $3.4 million for the weekend and a cumulative take of $78.8 million in its first month), Johnny Depp’s under-perfoming new drama The Rum Diary (No. 8 thanks to a $2.9 million weekend and with a paltry two-week take of $10.4 million), the equally disappointing The Ides of March (No. 9 with $2 million despite its star power and with a mere $36.8 million for one months’ worth of work) and Moneyball (hanging in at No. 10 in its seventh week with an additional $1.9 million and $70.3 million so far). The Three Musketeers 3D (No. 11) and Courageous (No. 12) both dropped out of the top 10 for the weekend……………
- California needs water. The problem truly is that simple, but of course the solution is anything but. A massive aquifer the size of Rhode Island sits under the 35,000-acre Cadiz ranch just off historic Route 66 in the heart of the California desert, where an oasis of tall green trees heavy with lemons and grape vines serves as evidence to the abundance of H2O in the area. It may not be enough to solve the state’s water dilemma, but proponents of tapping the aquifer say they can supply 400,000 people with drinking water in only a few years. Nearly a decade ago, a plan by Los Angeles' Metropolitan Water District to tap the aquifer was rejected after it faced widespread environmental opposition. The plan is more modest and eco-friendly this time around, with support from five water agencies and what the company behind it claims is better science to win over doubters. "Do we need additional water supplies? Yes. Do we need groundwater storage? Yes," said Winston Hickox, a Cadiz board member who headed the California Environmental Protection Agency. "The question is 'OK, environmental community, what are your remaining concerns?' I don't know." The tree huggers of the Sierra Club are not convinced by Cadiz’s plan and claim the company has misrepresented the size of the aquifer. Others worry that mining it could harm the threatened desert tortoise, bighorn sheep and damage the nearby Mojave National Preserve, which has some of the densest and oldest Joshua tree forests in the world. The state’s Department of Fish and Game did not help matters in March when its biologists voiced similar criticisms over possible endangerment of rare desert species. Oh, and there’s also the conspiracy theory that accessing an aquifer in a place where water is so scarce could cause dust storms. "There's a lot of unknowns here but we think this project has the potential to adversely affect air quality, draw down water resources and alter the flow of groundwater beneath the Mojave Preserve," said Seth Shteir with the National Parks and Conservation Association, a tree-hugging group of liberals who plan their own environmental study of the Cadiz plan. Oddly enough, California has few regulations when it comes to groundwater pumping. This often leaves these important issues in the hands of weaker local agencies, leading to a plethora of problems ranging from groundwater contamination to over-pumping and ground sinking. Water supply issues became more of a state matter last year when a conservation group sued the state water board in an effort to force the agency to regulate groundwater pumping that has depleted Northern California's Scott River, threatening salmon populations. Cadiz officials say they have factored all of these concerns in to their plan and will have an extensive monitoring system in place. So far, that has not been enough to silence the doubters……………
- NASA isn't in the business of shooting people into space any more and the agency’s budget is being slashed away piece by piece, so science will need to come up with new ways to figure out what’s out there in the great beyond if man is to truly understand worlds beyond our own. In that quest, astronomers have come up with a new way to search for advanced life on distant planets. Banking on the fact that aliens really do exist and that they, like all living things in domesticated settings, need lights, astronomers believe that looking for the light given off by alien cities could allow humans to pinpoint intelligent life on other planets.
“This method opens a new window in the search for extraterrestrial civilizations,” said researchers Abraham Loeb of Harvard University and Edwin Turner of Princeton University in a joint statement. A push to discover planets orbiting stars in distant galaxies has turned up 687 new planets, sparking researchers’ hopes for finding an Earth-like planet that might harbor life similar to our own. Loeb and Turner believe large telescopes could allow astronomers to detect artificial light coming from the dark side of these planets and have laid out how the process would work in a research paper submitted to the journal Astrobiology. Their theory is at least feasible because the technology already exists to use telescopes for these sorts of projects. Also, sunlight has a different signature to artificial light so would be easy to decipher the difference between the two. Telescopes are capable of detecting the light spectrum coming from objects at the very edge of Earth’s solar system some 4.6 billion miles away and possibly farther if there was anything near the edge of the system. The task becomes much more difficult when attempting to observe planets that are millions of light years away, but that’s why scientists like Loeb and Turner have watched for any evidence of intelligent life beyond the galaxy through the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence program, listening for incoming radio waves as a sign of intelligent life in the great beyond. But Loeb and Turner believe that just as earth’s own radio signals are weakening as they reach outer space, the same could be happening for any civilizations on other planets. Thus, their plan to rely on light as evidence that aliens exist. “Artificial illumination may serve as a lamp post which signals the existence of extraterrestrial technologies and thus civilisations,” their research paper states. Yet even these two kooks concede that finding any intelligent life would be “a long shot” and would probably have to wait until the next generation of more powerful telescopes. Thanks for the colossal time waste, fellas………
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