Good news for Vice President Biden’s office! The Veep successfully delivered the commencement address at Wake Forest University without disclosing top secret information.
The problem is, he may have done that a few weeks ago.
Newsweek is reporting that Biden may have revealed where former Vice President Cheney’s undisclosed location was.
After the 9/11 attacks, Cheney’s whereabouts were frequently unknown. And that was on purpose. White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer coined the phrase “undisclosed location” and it stuck. And no one, save a few with the highest of clearances, knew where it was located.
Dinner
Enter Joe Biden. Known for his entertaining conversational skills, the vice president apparently thought the topic might be interesting. So while chatting at the Gridiron Dinner last March, he brought it up.
He reportedly told his companions that the secret location was a “bunker-like room” at the the Naval Observatory. This is where all the vice presidents have lived (not together) since 1974.
Writes Eleanor Clift:
“He said the young naval officer giving him a tour of the residence showed him the hideaway, which is behind a massive steel door secured by an elaborate lock with a narrow connecting hallway lined with shelves filled with communications equipment.
“The officer explained that when Cheney was in lock down, this was where his most trusted aides were stationed, an image that Biden conveyed in a way that suggested we shouldn’t be surprised that the policies that emerged were off the wall.”
The Vice President’s office has not yet issued a clarifying statement. Nor has Robert Gibbs explained to the press what Joe Biden meant to say.
Update: The Vice President’s office has issued a clarifying statement (they are very good at these).
“What the vice president described in his comments was not - as some press reports have suggested - an underground facility, but rather, an upstairs workspace in the residence, which he understood was frequently used by Vice President Cheney and his aides,” said Biden spokeswoman Elizabeth Alexander.
“That workspace was converted into an upstairs guestroom when the Bidens moved into the residence,” she said. “There was no disclosure of classified information.”
BEIJING – Chen Fuchao, a man heavily in debt, had been contemplating suicide on a bridge in southern China for hours when a passer-by came up, shook his hand — and pushed him off the ledge.
Chen fell 26 feet (8 meters) onto a partially inflated emergency air cushion laid out by authorities and survived, suffering spine and elbow injuries, the official Xinhua News Agency said Saturday.
The passer-by, 66-year-old Lai Jiansheng, had been fed up with what he called Chen's "selfish activity," Xinhua said. Traffic around the Haizhu bridge in the city of Guangzhou had been backed up for five hours and police had cordoned off the area.
"I pushed him off because jumpers like Chen are very selfish. Their action violates a lot of public interest," Lai was quoted as saying by Xinhua. "They do not really dare to kill themselves. Instead, they just want to raise the relevant government authorities' attention to their appeals."
Xinhua said Lai was "taken away by police" but did not elaborate.
A police officer who answered the telephone Saturday at a station close to the bridge confirmed the incident and said it was under investigation. He refused to give any other details and hung up.
According to Xinhua, Chen wanted to kill himself because he had accrued 2 million yuan ($290,000) in debt from a failed construction project.
On Thursday, he made his way to the Haizhu bridge, where 11 other people have tried to take their lives since April.
Lai volunteered to talk Chen down but was turned away by police, Xinhua said. Lai then broke through the cordon, climbed to where Chen sat, greeted him with a handshake, then pushed.
Photos in the Beijing Morning Post showed Lai, shoeless and in a T-shirt, saluting after Chen fell.
The paper said Lai was released on bail Friday but did not give any details. It said he had been on medication for "a mental illness" for decades and had been on his way to a hospital for his pills.
Canada's governor general, Michaelle Jean, has helped to butcher and eat a seal in an apparent act of solidarity with hunters.
Ms Jean used a traditional Inuit knife to help gut the animal then ate a slice of raw heart.
It came weeks after the EU voted to ban Canadian seal products, but Ms Jean did not say if her actions were in response to the EU proposals.
An EU spokeswoman said the story was "too bizarre to acknowledge".
The governor general is the representative of Canada's head of state, Queen Elizabeth II.
Ms Jean was touring northern Canadian communities and was at a festival at Rankin Inlet on Monday attended by hundreds of Inuit when she ate the seal heart.
Asked later if her actions were a message to the EU, she said: "Take from it what you will."
Hunting is 'crucial'
The European Parliament recently voted in favour of the ban on Canadian seal products in protest against commercial seal hunting methods.
Inuit people are exempt from the ban, but many fear that it will inevitably have a negative effect on their livelihoods as well.
The authorities say the hunt is crucial for about 6,000 North Atlantic fishermen who rely on it for much of their income.
The government has authorised the killing of more than 300,000 seals this year.
But fisheries officials say only about 65,000 seals will be killed as a fall in the price of seal pelts means there are fewer hunters this season.
Animal welfare groups have long argued that the clubbing of seal pups by hunters is barbaric.
The EU's proposed ban still requires the agreement of EU ministers to take effect.
But correspondents say it is likely to be imposed before the 2010 hunting season starts.
Adolf Hitler couldn't conquer Euope.. but his Nazi raccoons have
May 28 2009 By Mark McGivern
RACCOONS released by the Nazis managed to outdo Hitler - by conquering Europe.
Now scientists have found out how just four animals released into the wild have spread all over the mainland continent.
It seems they will roam hundreds of miles to find a mate. The animals were imported from the US and released near Frankfurt in 1934.
They were seen as a potential food source and a target for hunters.
But they bred at an amazing rate, with up to a million in Germany alone. They have reached as far as Norway and Spain.
The population explosion stunned zoologists and sparked a study.
Scientists fitted animals with radio collars and found one raccoon travelled 180 miles before he found a female in Bremen, Germany.
A scientist working on the project said: "That is three times further than we previously thought they would travel - it really is an incredible distance to cover."
The species quickly took a liking to the forests of central Germany.
Encountering no natural predators - and with hunters increasingly called away by World War II - the woodland creatures multiplied.
Wildlife biologists say the problem was aggravated by the release of raccoons from other farms that sustained bomb damage in the war.
In 2005, hunters and cars killed 10 times as many raccoons as a decade earlier, according to the official statistics.
Uk commentators believe it is a matter of time before the "Nazi raccoons" colonise our shores.
Trapper Frank Becker has caught hundreds of the animals in Kassel, Germany.
He said: "It's a very intensive taste. But there's just no demand for them, basically."
SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO -- A homeless man is on trial in San Mateo County on charges that he smacked a fellow transient in the face with a skateboard as the victim was engaged in a conversation about quantum physics, authorities said Wednesday.
Jason Everett Keller, 40, allegedly accosted another homeless man, Stephan Fava, on the 200 block of Grand Avenue in South San Francisco about 1:45 p.m. March 30.
At the time, Fava was chatting with an acquaintance, who is also homeless, about "quantum physics and the splitting of atoms," according to prosecutors.
Keller joined in the conversation and, for reasons unknown, got upset, authorities said. He picked up his skateboard and hit Fava in the face with it, splitting his lip, prosecutors said.
Fava also fell and broke his ankle, although how this happened wasn't known, authorities said.
What kid? It was 3 homeless guys. The thing I'm wondering is why they bother to mention the subject of the conversation at all? It's completely irrelevant except maybe to make people chuckle because of the perceived irony.
Not everyone knows the king of pop died. For those wonderinghow Michael Jackson died, he had a cardiac arrest. Sorry if my last post offended you god in anyway. Turning over a new leaf does take time.
Not everyone knows the king of pop died. For those wonderinghow Michael Jackson died, he had a cardiac arrest. Sorry if my last post offended you god in anyway. Turning over a new leaf does take time.
Comics writer Mark Sable was detained and intensively questioned by the TSA for carrying a script for an upcoming comic book about a writer who is detained and intensively questioned by the TSA for writing a comic about terrorism.
"Flying from Los Angeles to New York for a signing at Jim Hanley's Universe Wednesday (May 13th), I was flagged at the gate for 'extra screening'. I was subjected to not one, but two invasive searches of my person and belongings. TSA agents then 'discovered' the script for Unthinkable #3. They sat and read the script while I stood there, without any personal items, identification or ticket, which had all been confiscated.
"The minute I saw the faces of the agents, I knew I was in trouble. The first page of the Unthinkable script mentioned 9/11, terror plots, and the fact that the (fictional) world had become a police state. The TSA agents then proceeded to interrogate me, having a hard time understanding that a comic book could be about anything other than superheroes, let alone that anyone actually wrote scripts for comics.
"I cooperated politely and tried to explain to them the irony of the situation. While Unthinkable blurs the line between fiction and reality, the story is based on a real-life government think tank where a writer was tasked to design worst-case terror scenarios. The fictional story of Unthinkable unfolds when the writer's scenarios come true, and he becomes a suspect in the terrorist attacks.
"In the end, I feel my privacy is a small price to pay for educating the government about the medium."
Comments
Passer-by pushes suicide jumper in south China
And bolded emphasis!
I'll go post it in the effed up news thread then.