Syria: Cameron and Obama threaten ‘serious response’
25 August 2013 Last updated at 08:01 GMT
The BBC
The UK and the US have threatened a “serious response” if it emerges Syria used chemical weapons last week.
Prime Minister David Cameron and President Barack Obama spoke on the telephone for 40 minutes on Saturday.
Both were “gravely concerned” by the “increasing signs that this was a significant chemical weapons attack carried out by the Syrian regime”, Mr Cameron’s office said in a statement.
The Syrian government has denied involvement and blamed rebel fighters.
State television reported on Saturday that soldiers had found chemical agents in tunnels used by the rebels to the east of Damascus.
August 2013 archive
Aug 25 2013
Six In The Morning
Aug 25 2013
Three Things On The Internet
Each night during his evening show “All In“ host Chris Hayes highlights three things from the internet that his viewers have tweeted to him. These were his choices for Friday’s “Click 3”
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford takes down Hulk Hogan
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford defied the odds to beat wrestling icon Hulk Hogan in an arm-wrestling match at Toronto’s Fan Expo this morning.
“I own this town, man!” Ford yelled as he beat the 14-time pro wrestling champ.
The Hulk was scheduled to hold an “uncensored” presser after the match. I’ll let you know if I find the video for that.
11 Untranslatable Words From Other Cultures
The relationship between words and their meaning is a fascinating one, and linguists have spent countless years deconstructing it, taking it apart letter by letter, and trying to figure out why there are so many feelings and ideas that we cannot even put words to, and that our languages cannot identify.
#BATFLECK BACKLASH: On the Web, does Batman’s studio hear you scream?
Indeed, and one most passionately forged by the actor Richard Dreyfuss. Looking closer, we can see his engraving reads: “You read for a part, you feel good about it, you feel confident, then they cast Ben Affleck.”
Zing. By the ghost of “Gigli,” that stings.
Warner Bros. announced shortly before 9:30 p.m. Thursday that Ben Affleck is our new big-screen Batman. Within minutes, Dreyfuss – true to his own trained and brash and passionate style as an Oscar-winning actor – tweeted his artful thrust-and-parry, drawing first blood as the Internet responded to the casting fury that rapidly went by the handy hashtag #Batfleck.
One shakes ones head.
Aug 25 2013
Louis Vuitton Cup
What’s the best way to vaporize money?
Tear it up in the shower.
Seriously, you should never, ever bring anything on a boat you’re not prepared to lose over the side.
Including your life.
The big news of the 2013 America’s Cup is and will be the tragic death of Andrew ‘Bart’ Simpson in the Artemis capsize and no Nelson ‘ha-ha’s’ despite the amusing coincidence of names. He was an Olympic gold medalist.
The question is how did we get here and the answer is simple enough.
You see the real problem is that yacht racing is horrifically expensive and breathtakingly dull. The solution, according to billionaire Larry Ellison of Oracle, the computer database company, is to make the boats faster and sail them closer to shore.
Oh, they’re fast all right. Semi-rigid air foils push them up beyond ambient air speed and drag reducing hydrofoils literally lift them up out of the water at a blistering 40+ knots (50 mph or more to you lubbers) and the viewing in San Fransisco is free since they can’t figure out a way to charge for it.
The only real competition is the New Zealand Kiwis with dreams of past glory backed by Emirate Petro Bucks but if you want a thumb on the scale victory for USA! USA! USA! this is as close to a sure thing as you can get, better than Olympic Men’s Basketball (or Women’s, go Huskies).
Relax and enjoy the flaming chunks of twisted carbon fiber.
Aug 24 2013
Health and Fitness News
Welcome to the Health and Fitness NewsWelcome to the Stars Hollow Health and Fitness News weekly diary. It will publish on Saturday afternoon and be open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes.
Questions are encouraged and I will answer to the best of my ability. If I can’t, I will try to steer you in the right direction. Naturally, I cannot give individual medical advice for personal health issues. I can give you information about medical conditions and the current treatments available.
You can now find past Health and Fitness News diaries here and on the right hand side of the Front Page.
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
Four of this week’s recipes are for small, four-egg frittatas for two, all cooked in an 8-inch, heavy nonstick omelet pan. If you want to double or triple the recipes for a larger crowd, use a 10-inch pan for six to eight eggs and a 12-inch pan for more than eight eggs. You will need to finish the large ones under the broiler for a minute or two to set the top.
The last recipe is more time consuming, but well worth the effort. It’s a traditional Provençal terrine of stacked omelets, called a crespéu. Years ago, when I was working on my cookbook “Provençal Light,” I researched and wrote a recipe for the dish but never saw it in restaurants or shops. But in the last five years it has become fashionable in Provençal charcuteries, and I see it everywhere. I experimented with a couple of techniques for making it this week, and was so happy to have the results on hand in my kitchen.
~Martha Rose Shulman~
Pasta is just one destination for summer marinara sauce. This dish is the other.
Frittata With Peas, Herbs and Feta or Parmesan
This pretty frittata can be made using peas from the garden, market or freezer.
A sweet-tasting frittata that makes a great meal or snack.
A colorful frittata that makes a great portable meal.
A beautiful terrine made with stacked frittatas.
Aug 24 2013
Formula One 2013: Spa-Francorchamps Qualifying
At Spa if it’s not raining it’s getting ready to rain.
Qualifying is tape delayed and I know how it came out even if you don’t because I read the funny papers. Two hundred ninety nine cases of undisputed, self-reported, illegal NSA intercepts- isn’t that funny? I can hardly stop laughing myself. They didn’t make it a round 300 because that would be too pat and unbelievable like a $2.99 burger actually costing $3.06 with sales tax. It sounds so icky that way that you can barely choke down your cholesterol grease disk and still have room for the fries you want.
But it’s all about the money and the Gasoline Circus is visiting the Bulge in the place you go to get rid of those unsightly muffin tops.
The good news is that the 3 practice blow outs were due to track debris, NOT a design flaw. The bad news is that Michelin is still sniffing around Pirelli’s vacant 2014 contract despite their last snub with vast chunks of cash burning a hole in their pocket when it could just as well be in Bernie’s better insulated one. Alas for the fans of the Stay-Puff Marshmallow, Michelin has publicly said it has no interest at all in developing the timed degradation tires that represent the only excitement in the “race”.
On offer this week will be the Hards and Mediums. Not that it means much since the likelihood of at least one lap on the Inters is high to certain so for the purposes of speculation teams may be considered to have an unlimited supply of whichever they favor and any requirement to run two compounds satisfied.
With Webber retiring from Red Bull many teams are looking at how much money a driver can pay for a ride which is far more important than whether they can actually race or not. It’s now generally acknowledged that Alonso is worth .5 seconds a lap regardless of what piece of crap you strap him into, but that doesn’t mean he’ll jump to the Bulls since Vettel is not interested in rivals, he wants servants.
Kind of quashes any rumors about Raikkonen also. Too Damn Good. So they’ll probably pick someone like Ricciardo, you know, a loser.
The two week August vacation is strictly enforced, not that they needed much this year. McLaren has given up and will do no more development after wasting their time on a 2013 chassis that is not only slow, but one which they’ll have to scratch in 2014 when the blown 6s make their debut. Everyone else is doing the same thing, they just did it earlier and are not talking about it.
That said, there is still room for some surprises in the second half of the season. Tonight at 7 pm we have Louis Vuitton Cup racing for those of you who prefer tearing up even larger piles of money in a shower.
Aug 24 2013
Punting the Pundits
“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan: Manning Wronged AND Miranda’s Rights
“There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people,” wrote the late historian Howard Zinn, author of “A People’s History of the United States.”
These words were included in a statement by Pfc. Bradley Manning, read by his defense attorney David Coombs, at a press conference following Manning’s sentencing to 35 years in military prison for releasing hundreds of thousands of documents to the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks. The statement accompanies Manning’s request to President Barack Obama for a presidential pardon.
Across the Atlantic, David Miranda, the partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald, was detained under Britain’s terrorism laws at London’s Heathrow Airport, his electronic equipment was confiscated, and he was interrogated and threatened with prison.
Both events have heightened the already intense level of scrutiny on the expanding, seemingly unchecked reach of the U.S. government. Miranda is rattled, but free. Manning will soon head, shackled, to begin serving his sentence. NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden remains in temporary political asylum somewhere in Russia, and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange continues his residence in exile, not far from Heathrow, in the cramped Ecuadorean Embassy in London. What is remarkable is that this patchwork of individuals has set this brave, new world of global war and surveillance reeling.
Charles M. Blow: 50 Years Later
As we approach the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, I have a gnawing in my gut, an uneasy sense of society and its racial reality.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech keeps ringing in my head, an aching, idyllic, rhetorical masterpiece that envisions a future free of discrimination and filled with harmony and equality. But I wonder whether the day he imagined will ever come and whether many Americans have quietly abandoned King’s dream as a vision that can’t – or shouldn’t – exist in reality.
Gail Collins: Where Credit Is Due
A few months ago, a saleswoman at Macy’s tried to wheedle me into renewing my expired store credit card by offering a deep discount on the towels I was buying. So I dug it out of my wallet, where it was nestled between an expired press pass to the Texas State Capitol and an expired library card from Manchester, N.H., and happily handed it over.
She looked at it, puzzled. “But this isn’t your name,” she said.
The card said Daniel Collins. That’s my husband, who I believe has never been to Macy’s, or bought a towel, in his entire life. [..]
I’m telling you all this because on Monday we will celebrate Women’s Equality Day, the anniversary of the 19th Amendment and women’s right to vote. That was in 1920, and there’s no longer anyone around who can tell us what that felt like to be disenfranchised because of your sex. But there are plenty of people who recall the time when women couldn’t get credit in their own name.
Laura Flanders: Americans Are Working Too Damn Hard
A lot of us will go to Washington again to mark that occasion, and we’ll march for jobs again, as well we should, given the current climate. But can I admit something?
I wish we were marching for less work, not more of it.
I know, it’s cheeky to talk about time off. Unemployment is high and jobs are scarce. Americans are supposed to feel grateful to have paid work at all. A vacation too? We’re so busy tightening our belts and “leaning in” that even when we do get vacation days at work, we often skip them. Admit it – did you feel guilty taking every last day this summer, or (more likely) guilty that you didn’t?
Patrick Cockburn: Evidence of Chemical Attack Seems Compelling, but Remember There’s a Propaganda War On
Ghouta just east of Damascus are graphic and moving. But they are likely to be viewed sceptically because the claims so much resemble those made about Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) before the US and British invasion of Iraq in 2003. Nevertheless, the present claim differs from previous ones in the number of dead, variously put at between 213 and 1,360 and the quantity of YouTube evidence of the dead and dying supported by interviews with local activists.
Like the Iraqi opposition to Saddam, who provided most of the evidence of WMDs, the Syrian opposition has every incentive to show the Syrian government deploying chemical weapons in order to trigger foreign intervention. Although the US has gone cold on armed involvement in Syria, President Obama did say a year ago that President Bashar al-Assad’s use of such weapons was “a red line”. The implication is that the US would respond militarily, though just how has never been spelt out.
Ben Winzner: Chelsea Manning Was No Criminal
Many Americans have been perplexed about how to view the prosecution of Chelsea Manning, who was sentenced this week under the name Bradley Manning.
On the one hand, they’re not comfortable with the notion that any Army private should be able to decide for herself, without consequences, which government records should be made public. On the other, they’ve witnessed, time and again, government officials abusing their classification authority to protect themselves from embarrassment and accountability, not to protect the nation from harm, and they wonder why much of the information that Manning disclosed had been hidden from the public in the first place.
Aug 24 2013
Today’s March on Washington: It’s About Jobs and Freedom
One week out from the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom – and just days away from a major march this Saturday commemorating the event – we spend the hour looking at much of its forgotten history. More than a quarter-million people came to the nation’s capital on August 28, 1963, to protest discrimination, joblessness and economic inequality faced by African Americans. Many now consider the march to be a key turning point in the civil rights movement.
Aug 24 2013
On This Day In History August 24
This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.
Find the past “On This Day in History” here.
August 24 is the 236th day of the year (237th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 129 days remaining until the end of the year.
On this day in 79 A.D., Mount Vesuvius erupted burying the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in nearly thirty feet of ash and pumice. The toxic gases killed at least 2200 people who remained in Pompeii after the evacuation.
After centuries of dormancy, Mount Vesuvius erupts in southern Italy, devastating the prosperous Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum and killing thousands. The cities, buried under a thick layer of volcanic material and mud, were never rebuilt and largely forgotten in the course of history. In the 18th century, Pompeii and Herculaneum were rediscovered and excavated, providing an unprecedented archaeological record of the everyday life of an ancient civilization, startlingly preserved in sudden death.
At noon on August 24, 79 A.D., this pleasure and prosperity came to an end when the peak of Mount Vesuvius exploded, propelling a 10-mile mushroom cloud of ash and pumice into the stratosphere. For the next 12 hours, volcanic ash and a hail of pumice stones up to 3 inches in diameter showered Pompeii, forcing the city’s occupants to flee in terror. Some 2,000 people stayed in Pompeii, holed up in cellars or stone structures, hoping to wait out the eruption.
A westerly wind protected Herculaneum from the initial stage of the eruption, but then a giant cloud of hot ash and gas surged down the western flank of Vesuvius, engulfing the city and burning or asphyxiating all who remained. This lethal cloud was followed by a flood of volcanic mud and rock, burying the city.
The people who remained in Pompeii were killed on the morning of August 25 when a cloud of toxic gas poured into the city, suffocating all that remained. A flow of rock and ash followed, collapsing roofs and walls and burying the dead.
Those that did not flee the city of Pompeii in August of 79 AD were doomed. Buried for 1700 years under 30 feet of mud and ash and reduced by the centuries to skeletons, they remained entombed until excavations in the early 1800s.
As excavators continued to uncovered human remains, they noticed that the skeletons were surrounded by voids in the compacted ash. By carefully pouring plaster of Paris into the spaces, the final poses, clothing, and faces of the last residents of Pompeii came to life.
n the only known eye witness account to the eruption, Pliny the Younger reported on his uncle’s ill-fated foray into the thick of the ash from Misenum, on the north end of the bay:
“. . .the buildings were now shaking with violent shocks, and seemed to be swaying to and fro as if they were torn from their foundations. Outside, on the other hand, there was the danger of failing pumice stones, even though these were light and porous; however, after comparing the risks they chose the latter. In my uncle’s case one reason outweighed the other, but for the others it was a choice of fears. As a protection against falling objects they put pillows on their heads tied down with cloths. ”
And then:
“You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men; some were calling their parents, others their children or their wives, trying to recognize them by their voices. People bewailed their own fate or that of their relatives, and there were some who prayed for death in their terror of dying. Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore.”
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