DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY SCHOOL– Long Exposure Photography is something that can take your breath away when you get it right. Here are some shots to get you inspired.
Photo by MumbleyJoe, Exposure: 114 seconds
Photo by Express Monorail, Exposure: 10.9 seconds
Photo by Sarah Heinrichs, Exposure: 20 seconds
Photo by MumbleyJoe, Exposure: 31.9 seconds
by Darren Rowse
FOX NEWS– As it fights two wars, the Pentagon is steadily and dramatically increasing
the money it spends to win what it calls “the human terrain” of world
public opinion. In the process, it is raising concerns of spreading propaganda
at home in violation of federal law.
An Associated Press investigation found that over the past five years, the money the military spends on winning hearts and minds at home and abroad has grown by 63 percent, to at least $4.7 billion this year, according to Department of Defense budgets and other documents. That’s almost as much as it spent on body armor for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2004 and 2006.
This year, the Pentagon will employ 27,000 people just for recruitment, advertising and public relations — almost as many as the total 30,000-person work force in the State Department.
“We have such a massive apparatus selling the military to us, it has become hard to ask questions about whether this is too much money or if it’s bloated,” says Sheldon Rampton, research director for the Committee on Media and Democracy, which tracks the military’s media operations. “As the war has become less popular, they have felt they need to respond to that more.”
Read more at FOX NEWS.
© 2010 FOX News Network, LLC.
WASHINGTON POST– Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that
the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks
may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the
public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to
sources involved in the debate.
Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said.
In the end, the panel agreed to a compromise, turning over the allegations to the inspectors general for the Defense and Transportation departments, who can make criminal referrals if they believe they are warranted, officials said.
“We to this day don’t know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us,” said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. “It was just so far from the truth. . . . It’s one of those loose ends that never got tied.”
Although the commission’s landmark report made it clear that the Defense Department’s early versions of events on the day of the attacks were inaccurate, the revelation that it considered criminal referrals reveals how skeptically those reports were viewed by the panel and provides a glimpse of the tension between it and the Bush administration.
A Pentagon spokesman said yesterday that the inspector general’s office will soon release a report addressing whether testimony delivered to the commission was “knowingly false.” A separate report, delivered secretly to Congress in May 2005, blamed inaccuracies in part on problems with the way the Defense Department kept its records, according to a summary released yesterday.
A spokesman for the Transportation Department’s inspector general’s office said its investigation is complete and that a final report is being drafted. Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said she could not comment on the inspector general’s inquiry.
In an article scheduled to be on newsstands today, Vanity Fair magazine reports aspects of the commission debate — though it does not mention the possible criminal referrals — and publishes lengthy excerpts from military audiotapes recorded on Sept. 11. ABC News aired excerpts last night.
For more than two years after the attacks, officials with NORAD and the FAA provided inaccurate information about the response to the hijackings in testimony and media appearances. Authorities suggested that U.S. air defenses had reacted quickly, that jets had been scrambled in response to the last two hijackings and that fighters were prepared to shoot down United Airlines Flight 93 if it threatened Washington.
In fact, the commission reported a year later, audiotapes from NORAD’s Northeast headquarters and other evidence showed clearly that the military never had any of the hijacked airliners in its sights and at one point chased a phantom aircraft — American Airlines Flight 11 — long after it had crashed into the World Trade Center.
Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold and Col. Alan Scott told the commission that NORAD had begun tracking United 93 at 9:16 a.m., but the commission determined that the airliner was not hijacked until 12 minutes later. The military was not aware of the flight until after it had crashed in Pennsylvania.
These and other discrepancies did not become clear until the commission, forced to use subpoenas, obtained audiotapes from the FAA and NORAD, officials said. The agencies’ reluctance to release the tapes — along with e-mails, erroneous public statements and other evidence — led some of the panel’s staff members and commissioners to believe that authorities sought to mislead the commission and the public about what happened on Sept. 11.
“I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described,” John Farmer, a former New Jersey attorney general who led the staff inquiry into events on Sept. 11, said in a recent interview. “The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years. . . . This is not spin. This is not true.”
Arnold, who could not be reached for comment yesterday, told the commission in 2004 that he did not have all the information unearthed by the panel when he testified earlier. Other military officials also denied any intent to mislead the panel.
John F. Lehman, a Republican commission member and former Navy secretary, said in a recent interview that he believed the panel may have been lied to but that he did not believe the evidence was sufficient to support a criminal referral.
“My view of that was that whether it was willful or just the fog of stupid bureaucracy, I don’t know,” Lehman said. “But in the order of magnitude of things, going after bureaucrats because they misled the commission didn’t seem to make sense to me.”
By Dan Eggen, Washington Post Staff Writer
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
Photo by flickr user Cliff1066
NY TIMES– In late 2007, as the mortgage crisis gained momentum and many banks were suffering losses, Goldman Sachs executives traded e-mail messages saying that they would make “some serious money” betting against the housing markets.
The messages, released Saturday by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, appear to contradict statements by Goldman that left the impression that the firm lost money on mortgage-related investments.
In the messages, Lloyd C. Blankfein, the bank’s chief executive, acknowledged in November 2007 that the firm had lost money initially. But it later recovered by making negative bets, known as short positions, to profit as housing prices plummeted. “Of course we didn’t dodge the mortgage mess,” he wrote. “We lost money, then made more than we lost because of shorts.”
He added, “It’s not over, so who knows how it will turn out ultimately.”
In another message, dated July 25, 2007, David A. Viniar, Goldman’s chief financial officer, reacted to figures that said the company had made a $51 million profit from bets that housing securities would drop in value. “Tells you what might be happening to people who don’t have the big short,” he wrote to Gary D. Cohn, now Goldman’s president.
Actions taken by Wall Street firms during the housing collapse have become a major factor in the contentious debate over financial reform. In his weekly radio address on Saturday,President Obama said Wall Street had “hurt just about every sector of our economy” and again pressed the case for tighter regulation. On Monday, Senate Democrats will try to prevent a Republican filibuster in the first major test of the administration’s effort to push through legislation.
Goldman on Saturday denied it made a significant profit on mortgage-related products in 2007 and 2008. It said the subcommittee had “cherry-picked” e-mail messages from the nearly 20 million pages of documents it provided. This sets up a showdown between the Senate subcommittee and Goldman, which has aggressively defended itself since theSecurities and Exchange Commission filed a security fraud complaint against it nine days ago. On Tuesday, seven current and former Goldman employees, including Mr. Blankfein, are expected to testify at a Congressional hearing.
Continue reading about Goldman Sachs E-mail Messages.
© COPYRIGHT NY TIMES, 2010
PRESS & JOURNAL– A lonely and lovelorn snowy owl is still languishing in the Western Isles without a female companion. It is now seven years since the large white owl, the same species as Harry Potter’s faithful companion Hedwig, first appeared in the Outer Hebrides.
Each year he takes up his pattern of nomadic wandering in quest of a mate. In the past, the big bird’s search has taken him all around the islands, including visits to North Uist, Lewis, Harris and even remote St Kilda, but sadly all to no avail.
It is thought the roaming Romeo is at least eight years old. He was identified as male when his white feathers lost some of the black flecking more commonly recorded in younger snowy owls. From his plumage and visits, local RSPB Scotland staff can ascertain he is the same bird and has been without a mate for years now.
But they do say that good things come to those who wait. Hopes were raised in 2008 when the bird was joined by another wandering snowy owl, but dreams of a happy ending were dashed when it emerged it too was male.
No snowy owl has bred in Britain since 1975 when, famously, a pair bred in Shetland.
Continue reading about Lovelorn Snowy Owl Continues 7 Year Quest to Find Mate.
© COPYRIGHT PRESS & JOURNAL, 2011
Photo by Flickr User Envirotex
