Osama bin Laden, America's most wanted man, will not face capture in Pakistan if he agrees to lead a "peaceful life," Pakistani officials tell ABC News.

The surprising announcement comes as Pakistani army officials announced they were pulling their troops out of the North Waziristan region as part of a "peace deal" with the Taliban.

ABC News this morning:

The government of Pakistan today denied it would allow Osama bin Laden to avoid capture under terms of a peace agreement it signed with Taliban leaders in the country's North Waziristan area.

"If he is in Pakistan, today or any time later, he will be taken into custody and brought to justice," the Pakistani ambassador to the United States, Mahmud Ali Durrani, said in a statement.

The ambassador said a Pakistani military spokesman, Major General Shaukat Sultan, had been "grossly misquoted" when he told ABC News Tuesday that bin Laden would not be taken into custody "as long as one is being like a peaceful citizen." The comments were recorded in a telephone interview with ABC News.

What happened?

Arizona Republicans in a crowded House primary denounced the national GOP Tuesday for taking sides in the race. "They're idiots," one candidate said...

...On Tuesday, Huffman's four GOP opponents took the unusual step of holding a joint news conference and delivering a message to the National Republican Congressional Committee.

"Stay the hell out of southern Arizona," said Mike Hellon, one of the candidates and a former state party chairman, in an interview following the news conference.

The four contend the NRCC had split the party, handing an advantage to the Democrats. They urged the NRCC to pull its ads and stay quiet until after the Sept. 12 primary.

Sounds a little tense, don't you think?

Analysis: Terror war may need name change, by Pamela Hess, UPI Pentagon Correspondent.

As Pamela Hess points out- "Cheek's idea is not a new one, and for all the practical sense it makes to the military, it is being floated at a politically inopportune time."

Republicans need to hang on to power, "And one of their chief attacks on Democrats is their alleged preference to manage terrorism as a law enforcement problem rather than being serious about defeating them in a war."

What makes this piece more interesting is that UPI is part of Reverend Sun Myung Moon's right wing media empire that includes the Washington Times.

"Today, it is owned by News World Communications, which is owned by the Unification Church."-- Wikipedia

Cabin, have I ever thanked you for doing these news buckets?  I usually have nothing to contribute, but I sure do appreciate y'alls work to keep us informed.

ps - always great quotes.

Al Gore is hopeful for a Bush "conversion" on global warming:  Gore predicted on Tuesday that W. would shift to do more to fight global warming, under Republican pressure from California to New York.  [Both states have big 2008 electoral vote pools - K.P.]  "I think there is a better than 50-50 chance that President Bush will change his policy in the next two years," Gore told an audience in Oslo after showing his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" about global warming during a tour of Europe.

The failure to detect anticipated "shadows" cast by clusters of galaxies between us and the cosmic microwave background - the farthest thing we can see, and assumed to be the "echo" of the big bang - has physicists puzzling as to whether the microwave background might be something different entirely.

Certain properties of space-time predicted by "theories of everything" may already have been observed, but misinterpreted. (subscription required)  Just as the random jiggling of pollen particles in water ("Brownian Motion") was found to be due to the activity of much smaller atoms striking the grains, the seething activity of space-time itself at the smallest scales - far below what we can observe - can have observable consequences.  According to quantum mechanics, a beam of atoms can be interpreted as a matter wave, and like a light wave it can be split and interference patterns observed when the beams are brought back together.  Fuzziness in such images had been interpreted as due to heat and other random noise in the experiments, but a reexamination of the data shows the results are consistent with a transition between the "quantum gravity" realm and gravity as described by Einstein's relativity at a scale of 10-31 meters.  Certain "string theories" describing the smallest scales that exist predict this transition at 10-19 meters, and now look like they will need to be adjusted or scrapped.

World health officials last night put out an unprecedented warning that deadly new strains of tuberculosis, virtually untreatable using the drugs currently available, appear to be spreading across the globe.  The strains have recently been found in Africa, where they could swiftly put an end to all hope of containing the AIDS pandemic through treatment.  South African researchers found that 53 of their AIDS patients had the drug-resistant TB - and 52 of them died within an average of 25 days.  Anybody with the virus becomes very susceptible to all types of infection. Tuberculosis is a major killer of people with AIDS.

The WaPo reports on page A-1 that fish possessing both male and female characteristics have been discovered across the region -- raising alarms that the water is tainted by pollution that drives hormone systems haywire.

And the NY Times reports that the largest health study yet of the workers who labored at ground zero shows that the impact of the rescue and recovery effort on their health has been more widespread and persistent than previously thought.


"Money ruined Democracy. Washington is lost. We only have the grassroots left." - Bill Moyers

"A vast pool miles below the Gulf of Mexico could total 11% of what the U.S. produces. Skeptics note the uncertainty factor, and the cost."

While this is  potentially the largest find since Prudhoe Bay in Alaska and could represent up to 11% of domestic production, it will take years to develop and represents only 5.1% of our consumption (my math, highly suspect: 5.7 billion (annual) / 365 == 15.61 million.  800,000 production (per day) / 15,610,000 == .051 * 100 == % ).

..our dysfunctional foreign policy entanglement with Israel, the sinking of the USS Liberty coverup, the march to Iran and why the coming '06 midterm elections are high noon...

[snip]

DJ: Do you see any time-frame within which the Bush administration would like to drag Iran into this?

    RM: It's hard to discern whether Iran would come before Syria. The best thing to do would be to read the "Clean Break" document, and some of the others and try to figure it out for yourself, because they've had to adjust things a bit.

    But as far as Iran is concerned, which would be the main threat, the way I see it, the reason I give such urgency to the question is because the president is in real trouble. His numbers are very low. There are these midterm elections coming up in November and the stakes are really high. Because if the Democrats take the House, my view is that John Conyers wouldn't wait two weeks before initiating impeachment proceedings against the president for due cause. What would that mean? That wouldn't necessarily mean conviction, because who knows what would happen in the Senate, but it would mean the president would be bogged down for his last two years in defending himself for crimes committed. Demonstrable crimes. Witness only the violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Deliberate violation. Admitted violation, where the president brags about having authorized violation 29 times.

    Why do I cite that among other indignities? That happens to be one of the indictment counts that the House Judiciary Committee passed to impeach President Nixon in 1974. So it's an impeachable offense, demonstrably by precedent.

    All I'm saying is that the president has to look with great concern at a takeover of the House by the Democrats. Not only will he be under the gun, but every committee will be looking into crimes and misdemeanors by other departments and other agencies. And the next two years would be completely wasted in terms of his achieving more of the neo-con agenda.

    Not only that, there is personal liability here. Take torture for example. When the president decided he'd like the CIA to start torturing folks who were captured in Afghanistan, they came back to him and said, "We have 12-13 people who are willing to do this, they are all special-ops guys from Vietnam and know how to do this. But Mr. President, we have this little paper we'd like you to sign."

    It was then and only then that the president called in Alberto Gonzales, his White House Counsel and said, "Hey, can I authorize this torture of Taliban and al-Qaeda?" Gonzales goes to the vice president's lawyer, David Addington, who then drafts this memo that Gonzales signs. This is the one, dated January 25th, that says Geneva is quaint and obsolete and according to Gonzales, "you don't really have to worry about international law like that. However, Mr. President, there is unfortunately US Law, 18 US Code 2441, called the War Crimes Act, and it has very, very stringent penalties, including death, and ...

[snip]

High Noon. Indeed. Can the GOP afford to loose?

Well, "You can't vote for war and disown the results"