| A package of news briefs from the Caribbean
The United States and members of the Caribbean Community have agreed to pool their efforts toward combating the smuggling of small arms, light weapons and ammunition within the Western Hemisphere, the U.S. State Department said Monday. Officials agreed to improve import and export controls; promote the tracing of recovered firearms and ammunition; advocate the destruction of obsolete and excess national stockpiles; and restrict the availability and use of illicit firearms. In a statement, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the agreement was in response to meetings among regional foreign ministers in March and reaffirmed at the June U.S.-Caribbean summit meeting in Washington. The text of the joint initiative said the agreement by members of the Caribbean Community, also called Caricom, and the United States was necessary because of "the growing gray and black market arms markets" in the hemisphere.
Symantec chief executive advocates fair play — and Macs
"We think more people ought to buy them," Thompson said of Apple's Macintosh computers, in response to a question from the audience at the Future in Review conference in Coronado, California on Monday. The "target-rich" environment created by Windows vulnerabilities means that virus writers and hackers have set their sights on Windows PCs, he said. However, Thompson noted that if more and more people did go out and buy Macs, virus writers might change their tactics. And many attacks are increasingly of the phishing or identity theft variety, which targets computer users independently of their operating system, he said. "We shouldn't assume that any one technology at any layer is sufficient to protect our notion of a connected world," Thompson said. Computer users and network operators need to take many steps to ensure their data will be protected, regardless of which products they use, he said.
Shadowcrew: Web Mobs
One of the most popular ways to steal credit card numbers and personal information is through "phishing" for it, using scam e-mails that draw unsuspecting recipients to Web sites where they're enticed to divulge personal financial data. Consumers are becoming reluctant to enter their credit card numbers at retail sites, according to John Pescatore, a vice president at research firm Gartner, and are becoming extremely wary of responding to e-mails. They're resisting not just the requests from music or publishing companies pitching discounts, or travel companies pushing hotel or airline seat promotions, or utilities trying to establish online billing accounts. Pescatore also sees a lack of confidence in talking online with health-care providers and signing up for processes like electronic voting.
Catharsis, Schmatharsis!
The Saudi government--almost as susceptible as the Chinese to "feel good" solutions--is planning a 900-kilometer fence on its border with Iraq. 10:50 P.M. link Majority Leader Boehner boasts to fellow House Republicans that the Secure Fence Act is "set to be signed by President Bush." [Is there a paranoid, Clintonian reading of that one?--ed. Yes, but I'll spare you.] 5:24 P.M. Is this why Rove is smiling? Do the Dems have to gain 15 House seats--or 18 seats? Or 20 seats? Influence Peddler identifies at least two possible Dem-to-GOP party-switchers should Pelosi's team fail to win "by a margin of more than a seat or two." ... Update: Reader C.S. points out another possibility--that some potential party-switchers might be anti-Pelosi rather than anti-Dem, forcing the Dems (in a close race for control) to substitute a more conservative candidate for Speaker.
Two arrested after allegedly trying to run down Roseville officer
Roseville police said two men tried to run over an officer Sunday after he tried to stop them on suspicion of stealing a credit card. The policeman jumped out of the way and smashed the rear window on the driver's side with his baton, police said. The suspects were later stopped by another officer and arrested, said police spokeswoman Dee Dee Gunther. The series of incidents began Saturday after 3 p.m. when a Rocklin man left his wallet unattended in a fitting room at Nordstrom's Rack in the Creekside Center, Gunther said. When he returned just minutes later, the wallet was gone, she said. .
July 2006
Compared to conventional shallow water offshore windfarms that cost about $2 million per MW installed [3], the fixed-pile foundation Talisman project at $5.8 million per MW is almost three times as expensive and prohibitively uneconomical in the near term. In a cautious statement Talisman Energy has said "current forecasts for electricity prices will never render this Demonstrator Project economic. It is an R&D project, not a commercial one, and as such requires public sector funding in order to proceed." Furthermore, they say it is impossible, at this stage to give any definitive answer regarding the go ahead for the commercialization of this project "but it certainly should not be regarded as inevitable." [4] For even deeper water installations from 600 to 2,000 feet, anchored floating platforms are envisioned.
The Editors
He also asked website readers to email him with any research or data they had which supported the view that the scientific establishment is itself biased against climate sceptics. He got a lot of feedback (though not as much as he expected) and it's taken him more or less until now to sort through it. You can see the results here and in a series of articles this week by Richard and others on the website science pages. They do a great deal to shed light on the arguments and investigate the evidence behind them. We wanted to give them proper consideration, in part to counter accusations that we simply ignore the sceptics' views. But this also raises issues about how much weight, over time, we should give to their views, and what impartiality means on an issue like this.
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