Indian Space Launch Fails

A rocket carrying the heaviest satellite India has ever tried to launch disintegrated a few seconds after takeoff. There are no indications yet as to what caused the failure.

The 49-metre (161-foot) rocket was launched at 1205 GMT from an island off the coast of the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh, but veered off course and disintegrated about 30 seconds later, live television pictures showed.

"A mishap happened in the first stage of the separation and it will be some time before we know what went wrong," Madhavan Nair, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) mission chief, told reporters at the launch site on Monday.

"We have to analyse the sequence of events to see what happened."

The rocket carried a 2,168-kilogram (2.4 ton) satellite to be placed in stationary space orbit at 36,000 kilometres (22,320 miles), designed for a mission life of 10 years and meant to boost television services.

It was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota in the Bay of Bengal.

A similar version of the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle successfully placed a satellite in orbit in 2004.

India has had a somewhat spotty record on their launches in past years.

Russian Payback

Russian security forces finally caught up with the terrorist who was behind both the Moscow theater attack and the attack on a school in Beslan where 331 people died. Half of those killed were children. Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev was killed along with other Chechen terrorists by Russian special forces.

FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev said on Monday that Basayev, who claimed responsibility for the 2004 Beslan school attack in which 331 people, half of them children, were killed, was planning an attack to coincide with Russia hosting the G8 summit of world leaders this weekend.

CNN's Matthew Chance said the killing was a massive victory for the security services and a huge blow for the rebel leadership.

Basayev, together with other Chechen fighters, was killed in Ingushetia, a region neighboring Chechnya, where rebels are battling for independence.

In a televised meeting with Patrushev, Putin described Basayev's death as "deserved retribution" for Beslan and other attacks.

"This is retaliation he deserves for killing our children in Beslan, Budennovsk, all the terrorist acts his bandits perpetrated in Moscow and other regions of Russia, including Ingushetia and the Chechen Republic," Patrushev said, according to an Interfax report.

A statement on website www.kavkazcenter.com said the Chechen rebel leadership was not making any comment yet, Reuters news agency said.

The U.N. Security Council put Basayev on its official terrorist list last year after Washington classified him as a threat to the United States.

The FSB had stepped up the pressure on the country's most wanted man by announcing a $10 million reward for information leading to the "neutralization" of him and separatist former Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov said in 2004.

A truly evil man. Retribution did not come soon enough for him, but it came nonetheless. Anyone else notice this:

CNN's Matthew Chance said the killing was a massive victory for the security services and a huge blow for the rebel leadership.

What, no second guessing? No airing of unsubstantiated accusations that Russian forces somehow did some horrible action? No blaming it on the administration?

Why is that?

Scoping Out The Neighborhood

A sinister surveillance of a high-priced suburb of Wellington, New Zealand has finally been brought to an end. The agent had escaped from custody along with two accomplices, who were recaptured almost immediately. The fugitive eluded capture for almost a month though and gathered a great deal of information about Devenport. But Jin was finally captured on Monday. Jin, the master spy. Jin the Asiatic short-clawed otter.

Jin, a short-clawed Asiatic otter which escaped from Auckland Zoo on June 13, was found in a trap on an island in the Hauraki Gulf — part of the harbor that forms the eastern sea entrance to New Zealand's largest city.

The otter was sighted by a sailor Sunday and extra food was laid out for her around traps on islands in the Gulf. Zoo staff said she had been caught overnight.

"She is in pretty good shape. But obviously she will be a little worse for the wear for being out there," zoo spokeswoman Jane Healy told the New Zealand Press Association.

Jin was being taken back to the zoo for checks by a veterinarian, Healy said.

While on the run, Jin had captured the public's attention with almost daily media coverage on her continued evasion despite the best attentions of the zoo and New Zealand's Department of Conservation.

The fools thought this was entertaining. They simply haven't caught on to the fact that Jin was picking out prime real estate and plotting the animal uprising in New Zealand.

Japanese Cowboys?

Reports today indicate that Japan is considering preemptive strikes against North Korean missile launch facilities.

TOKYO - Japan said Monday it was considering whether a pre-emptive strike on the North's missile bases would violate its constitution, signaling a hardening stance ahead of a possible U.N. Security Council vote on Tokyo's proposal for sanctions against the regime.

Japan was badly rattled by North Korea's missile tests last week and several government officials openly discussed whether the country ought to take steps to better defend itself, including setting up the legal framework to allow Tokyo to launch a pre-emptive strike against Northern missile sites.

"If we accept that there is no other option to prevent an attack … there is the view that attacking the launch base of the guided missiles is within the constitutional right of self-defense. We need to deepen discussion," Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe said.

Japan's constitution currently bars the use of military force in settling international disputes and prohibits Japan from maintaining a military for warfare. Tokyo has interpreted that to mean it can have armed troops to protect itself, allowing the existence of its 240,000-strong Self-Defense Forces.

A Defense Agency spokeswoman, however, said Japan has no attacking weapons such as ballistic missiles that could reach North Korea. Its forces only have ground-to-air missiles and ground-to-vessel missiles, she said on condition of anonymity due to official policy.

Despite resistance from China and Russia, Japan has pushed for a U.N. Security Council resolution that would prohibit nations from procuring missiles or missile-related "items, materials goods and technology" from North Korea. A vote was possible in New York later Monday, but Japan said it would not insist on one.

While I suspect this is at least a diplomatic maneuver, there is probably at least a chance Japan would carry out the proposed attacks if it comes down to being a last resort. The world better get it's collective act together here or things are going to continue to deteriorate.

Double Talk

The Palestinians are absolute masters at double talk. They kidnap a soldier, they launch rockets at civilians, but the incursion by the IDF to try to rescue the kidnapped soldier and stop the rockets is Israeli aggression according to the leader of Hamas. Who's sitting comfortably in Damascus.

Khaled Meshal, the Damascus-based head of the Hamas political office, insisted Monday on a swap of Palestinian prisoners for the captured Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit.

"Our people… are united on the insistence to swap the captured soldier with prisoners in the jails of the Zionist enemy," said the exiled Hamas leader during a rare press conference from the Syrian capital.

He said that Shalit is a "prisoner of war and international conventions and laws should be applied to his case."

He blamed Israel for the collapse of Egyptian, Qatari and European mediation efforts to solve the crisis over the soldier.

"These efforts hit snags over Israel's insistence on the release of the Israeli soldier and its refusal to release Palestinian prisoners," he said.

"This is not a solution … We don't want escalation. We are for a peaceful, quiet resolution."

"The solution is simple: an exchange. But Israel refuses that," he said, adding that the Israelis are "under an illusion" if they think that by escalating their Gaza offensive they will win the soldier's release.

Meshal criticized the West for keeping silent on the IDF offensive to free the captured soldier.

"The Palestinian people are facing consecutive strikes by the Zionist, aggressive and terrorist entity," he said.

"Today, Israel is really terrorizing our people… Israel and America, which talked too much about this terrorism in past are the worst, severest and ugliest examples of terrorism."

Ah yes, the silence of the west. Like the criticism by the UN and the EU? All this posing and posturing to shift responsibility away from Hamas' own aggression in this matter. Meshal sits nice and cozy in Damascus while the war he brought down on his people is borne by them.

UPDATE: Oddly, in the comment section there is a European reaction blaming Israel, but Omar at Iraq the Model has an Iraqi roundup of opinion that almost universally condemns Hamas. Funny world, isn't it?

Damned If You Do

Damned if you don't. Having endured incessant attacks for being too unilateral in his approach to Iraq, President Bush is now taking criticism for trying to use diplomacy.

WASHINGTON, July 9 — President Bush has never made apologies for enshrining pre-emption as the defining doctrine of his first term. He has declared many times that in a post-9/11 world, presidents no longer have the luxury of waiting for the slow grinding of diplomatic give-and-take when unpredictable dictators are assembling arsenals that could threaten the United States.

But as he leaves for Europe and Russia this week, where the simultaneous nuclear standoffs in Iran and North Korea will top the agenda, Mr. Bush finds himself struggling to square his muscular declarations with the realpolitik of his second term after the invasion of Iraq. At every turn, and every provocation, he finds himself in an unaccustomed position: urging patience.

"These problems didn't rise overnight, and they don't get solved overnight," he told reporters during an hourlong news conference in Chicago on Friday. At another point, he said: "You know, the problem with diplomacy, it takes a while to get something done. If you're acting alone, you can move quickly." Underscoring the idea again, he said, "It's painful in a way for some to watch because it takes a while to get people on the same page."

The Chicago news conference was notable because it seemed to mark the completion of a rhetorical journey for Mr. Bush. It is a journey that has steadily moved away, in public pronouncements — if not the president's own thinking — from the lines he drew in the 2002 State of the Union address. In that famous "axis of evil" speech, he identified the threats from Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the three most pressing post-9/11 challenges facing the United States.

The problem, of course, is how to confront these regimes. One already has nuclear weapons, progress that they made under the Clinton administration, by the way, the other has been and continues to be a sponsor of international terror. I have always maintained that the only way to deal with Iran and North Korea is for the world to show a unified front against the two regimes. Yet we have former Clinton officials and Democratic presidential nominees urging preemptive and unilateral strikes on North Korea while Bush tries to get the recalcitrant Russians and Chinese to back diplomatic efforts. What a world.

A military attack on North Korea's missile pads, they say, has always been regarded as an unacceptable risk — even before American forces were tied up on the other side of the world. That is why they were so quick to dismiss a call two weeks ago by President Clinton's defense secretary, William Perry, and his top aide on nuclear issues, Ashton B. Carter of Harvard, to conduct a lightning, precision strike on North Korea's Taepodong 2 long-range missile before it could be tested.

"It sounds good," one of Mr. Bush's national security aides said at the time, "until you ask yourself the question, what good is a strike if it leaves their nuclear capability untouched?"

To Mr. Bush's critics, the question goes to the heart of the new argument over pre-emption: whether Mr. Bush, in focusing on Iraq in 2003, missed his chance. It was in January of that year, as American forces were flowing toward the Middle East, that North Korea threw out the international inspectors who had been watching over its stockpile of nuclear fuel, and withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

It's easy to criticize when you are not the one responsible. It's easy to find fault when you will not bear any consequences if you are wrong. It is just human nature to second guess other's decisions, I guess. Yet much of the fault finding would be more credible if it offered workable alternatives instead of finger-pointing.

Wage Disparity

The Washington Post informs us that wages and salaries are rising faster for people in higher earning jobs than in lower earning ones. This wage disparity exists, according to the Post, because better skilled and educated people are more in demand and better able to press for higher wages.

Wages are rising more than twice as fast for highly paid workers in the Washington area as they are for low-paid workers, an analysis of federal data by The Washington Post shows.

That means the spoils of the region's economic expansion are going disproportionately to workers who are already well-paid, widening a gap between rich and poor in a place where it is already wider than in most of the country.

The region's economy is strong and businesses are expanding, hiring more software engineers, financial analysts, salespeople and other skilled workers, thus bidding up their pay. But companies are simultaneously finding ways to automate clerical tasks, move call centers to cheaper places and handle business online, weakening demand for less-skilled workers.

So on the one hand, we are seeing educated, skilled people getting higher increases in salary and decreasing demand, therefore lower wages, for less skilled labor. Anyone care to explain this frantic desire among some people to continue the flood of unskilled illegal immigration?