cryptogon.com

Eating in: Each month, California inmates process more than 680,000 pounds of beef, 400,000 pounds of chicken products, 450,000 gallons of milk, 280,000 loaves of bread, and 2.9 million eggs (from 160,000 inmate-raised hens). Starbucks subcontractor Signature Packaging Solutions has hired Washington prisoners to package holiday coffees (as well as Nintendo Game Boys). Confronted by a reporter in 2001, a Starbucks rep called the setup “entirely consistent with our mission statement.”

Around the Big House: Texas inmates produce brooms and brushes, bedding and mattresses, toilets, sinks, showers, and bullwhips. Bullwhips?

Windows dressing: In the mid-1990s, Washington prisoners shrink-wrapped software and up to 20,000 Microsoft mouses for subcontractor Exmark (other reported clients: Costco and JanSport). “We don’t see this as a negative,” a Microsoft spokesman said at the time. Dell used federal prisoners for PC recycling in 2003, but stopped after a watchdog group warned that it might expose inmates to toxins.

Back to school: Texas and California inmates make dorm furniture and lockers, diploma covers, binders, logbooks, library book carts, locker room benches, and juice boxes.

Patriotic duties: Federal Prison Industries, a.k.a. Unicor, says that in addition to soldiers’ uniforms, bedding, shoes, helmets, and flak vests, inmates have “produced missile cables (including those used on the Patriot missiles during the Gulf War)” and “wiring harnesses for jets and tanks.” In 1997, according to Prison Legal News, Boeing subcontractor MicroJet had prisoners cutting airplane components, paying $7 an hour for work that paid union wages of $30 on the outside.

The law won: In Texas, prisoners make officers’ duty belts, handcuff cases, and prison-cell accessories. California convicts make gun containers, creepers (to peek under vehicles), and human-silhouette targets.

A stitch in time: California inmates sew their own garb. In the 1990s, subcontractor Third Generation hired 35 female South Carolina inmates to sew lingerie and leisure wear for Victoria’s Secret and JCPenney. In 1997, a California prison put two men in solitary for telling journalists they were ordered to replace “Made in Honduras” labels on garments with “Made in the usa.”

Open wide: At California’s prison dental laboratory, inmates produce a complete prosthesis selection, including custom trays, try-ins, bite blocks, and dentures.

Constructive criticism: Prisoners in for burglary, battery, drug and gun charges, and escape helped build a Wal-Mart distribution center in Wisconsin in 2005, until community uproar halted the program. (Company policy says, “Forced or prison labor will not be tolerated by Wal-Mart.”)

Abramoff is already serving a nearly six-year term on unrelated charges and the new sentence will be served at the same time, meaning he will not spend any extra time behind bars once his original sentence ends in 2012.

But Abramoff will serve at least four more years in prison, even if his lawyers are successful in getting a reduction in his first sentence on charges of fraud in the purchase of a Florida casino cruise line. When his terms expire, he will have spent nearly six years in prison.

Security officials in the region have said the incursion into the tribal area of South Waziristan was carried out by US commandos dropped from helicopters.

The North West Frontier Province governor, Owais Ahmed Ghani, who is in administrative charge of the tribal areas, said in a statement: “It is outrageous … This is a direct assault on the sovereignty of Pakistan and the people of Pakistan expect that the armed forces … would rise to defend the sovereignty of the country and give a befitting reply.”

A spokeswoman for Afghanistan’s Nato-led force said she had no information about the incident.

A spokesman for a separate US-led coalition force declined to comment, referring questions to the US Central Command.

The pre-dawn raid took place in a village across the border from a US base at Shikin in Afghanistan’s Paktika province.

“Troops came in helicopters and carried out action in three houses,” a village shopkeeper, Gul Nawaz, told Reuters.

Witnesses told the BBC Urdu service that troops entered the house of a local tribesman, opened fire and threw a bomb in the house.

The Sahara Forest Project, which is already running demonstration plants in Tenerife, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, envisages huge greenhouses with concentrated solar power (CSP), a technology that uses mirrors to focus the sun’s rays, creating steam to drive turbines to generate electricity.

The installations would turn deserts into lush patches of vegetation, according to its designers, and do away with the need to dig wells for fresh water, an activity that has depleted aquifers across the world.

Charlie Paton, a member of the team, and the inventor of the Seawater Greenhouse, said the scheme was a proven way to transform arid environments. “Plants need light for growth but they don’t like heat beyond a certain point,” he said.

Above certain temperatures the amount of water lost through leaves’ stomata rises so much plants stop their photosynthesis and do not grow. The solar farm planned by the project runs seawater evaporators, pumping damp, cool air through the greenhouses. This reduces the warmth inside by about 15C, compared with the temperature outside.

At the other end of the greenhouse from the evaporators, water vapour is condensed. Some of this fresh water is used to water the crops, some for cleaning the solar mirrors.

“So we’ve got conditions in the greenhouse of high humidity and lower temperature,” said Paton. “The crops sitting in this slightly steamy, humid condition can grow fantastically well.”

The designers said that virtually any vegetables could be grown in the greenhouses. The demonstration plants already produce lettuces, peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes. The nutrients to grow the plants could come from local seaweed or be extracted from the seawater.

Michael Pawlyn, of Exploration Architecture, based in London, worked on the Eden Project for seven years and is now part of the Sahara Forest team. He said that the Seawater Greenhouse and CSP provided substantial synergies for each other. “Both technologies work extremely well in hot, dry, desert locations. CSP produces a lot of waste heat and we’d be able to use that to evaporate more seawater from the greenhouse. And CSP needs a supply of clean, de-mineralised water in order for the [electricity generating] turbines to function and to keep the mirrors at peak output. It just so happens the Seawater Greenhouse produces large quantities of this.”

Paton said the greenhouse produced more than five times the fresh water needed to water the plants inside, so some of the water could be released to the outside, creating a microclimate for hardier plants such as jatropha, a crop that can be turned into biofuel.

The cost of the Sahara Forest Project could be relatively low as both CSP and Seawater Greenhouses are proven technologies. The designers estimate that building 20 hectares (nearly 50 acres) of greenhouses combined with a 10MW CSP scheme would cost about €80m (£65m).

Paton said groups in countries across the Middle East, including in UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait, have expressed interest in possibly funding demonstration projects.

He said use of Seawater Greenhouses could reverse the environmental damage done by the glasshouses already built in places such as the desert region of Almeria, southern Spain, where, constructed over the past 20 years to grow salad crops, they now covered more than 40,000 hectares.

Paton said: “They take water out of the ground something like five times faster than it comes in, so the water table drops and becomes more saline. The whole of Spain is being sucked dry. If one were to convert them all to the Seawater Greenhouse concept it would turn an unsustainable solution into a more sustainable one.”

Pawlyn said: “In places like Oman they’ve effectively sterilised large areas of land by using groundwater that’s become increasingly saline. The beauty of the Sahara Forest scheme is that you can reverse that process and turn barren land into biologically productive land.”

Neil Crumpton, an energy specialist at Friends of the Earth, said the potential of these desert technologies was huge. “Concentrated solar power mirror arrays covering just 1% of the Earth’s deserts could supply a fifth of all current global energy consumption. And 1 million tonnes of sea water could be evaporated every day from just 20,000ha of greenhouses.”

Governments should invest in the technologies and “not be distracted by lobbyists promoting dangerous nuclear power or nuclear-powered desalination schemes”, Crumpton added.

It paints a picture of all three branches of the defence forces hamstrung by a lack of staff and poor equipment.

In the report, the Army said while land forces were “partially” prepared for low level conflicts, it was not equipped to meet higher threat situations, even though it had managed to send a company to Afghanistan.

The report said: “Deficiencies in command and control, firepower, and compatible protection and mobility for combat service support elements would impair effectiveness in conventional military operations, and the more challenging peace support operations.”

The Air Force had “insufficient personnel” to meet crew levels and was only “partially prepared” for complex maritime air operations. In the Navy, few of the ships managed to get out to sea as much as planned.

The HMNZ Endeavour spent 50 days at sea out of an expected 100-120 days, HMNZS Te Kaha 99 days out of 140-160, and the HMNZS Canterbury only 95 days out of 140-160.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco said yesterday that the e-mails, as well as tapes and recordings of interviews for a book about Ellison called “Softwar,” were willfully withheld. Ellison and Oracle knew the material was potentially relevant to claims that they made false statements about the company’s 2001 second-quarter financial results and problems with a software product, Illston said.

“The court believes it is appropriate to infer that the e-mails and the Softwar-related materials would demonstrate Ellison’s knowledge of, among other things, problems with the Suite 11i, the effects of the economy on Oracle’s business and problems with defendant’s forecasting models,” Illston said.

As a penalty, Illston said the jury in the case will be instructed to assume that Ellison knew about the problems. Illston also said she would take that assumption into account when deciding whether to rule in favor of investors on their claims and Oracle’s requests to throw the case out. The trial is scheduled to begin March 30.

…

Investors claim that Redwood City, California-based Oracle, the world’s second-largest software company, improperly booked millions in sales in 2001 and that Ellison knew about the problems and sold $900 million company stock before they were disclosed to investors.

Russia officially recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states on August 26, saying the move was needed to protect the regions after Georgia’s August 8 attack on South Ossetia.

“According to our information, Georgian security forces are trying to restore their [military] presence in Georgian populated villages in South Ossetia. With this aim, Georgia is mobilizing its special forces from the interior and defense ministries near the administrative border with South Ossetia,” Col. Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, the deputy chief of Russia’s General Staff, said.

He also said that Russia had deployed 19 peacekeeping observation posts in South Ossetia to provide security and stability in the republic, adding that South Ossetian military detachments were also mobilizing near the border to counter any possible Georgian attacks.

Georgia attacked South Ossetia on August 8 in an attempt to regain control over the republic, which split from Tbilisi in the early 1990s. Most people living in South Ossetia have Russian citizenship and Moscow subsequently launched an operation to “force Georgia to accept peace.” The operation was concluded on August 12.