Aftershocks continue near the original earthquake zone, and they’re large.
Even in the crush of need, there’s enough surviving political will remaining to reject Israeli help and “if you can’t find blame, go for shame” criticism of the US. … It’s too bad the Americans didn’t respond by announcing diversion of their UN funding to the rescue and rebuilding efforts.
In other news, The NYT is acknowledging the ability of blogs to stay ahead of the information curve.
Tsunami Help is an example of just that.
Command Post has a lengthy roundup of organizations providing information and soliciting donations.

Several sites are following the reports coming in on the massive earthquakes and resultant tidal surges in the Asian Pacific.
Instapundit has picked up blogsites covering it, the Command Post has frequent updates. Drudge has devoted almost his entire page to news links.

(More reader supplied photos at the BBC.)
Update With some estimates placing the death toll at over 11,000 already, there is no word at all from Myanmar (formerly Burma) and low-lying Bangladesh.

(Red indicates within the past day – yellow, in the past two weeks)
Click here for the updated seismic map at IRIS.

“Project Rob Lowe”
Related news: Rats, ship.

Arthur Chrenkoff, in today’s Opinion Journal

The latest poll of 5,000 people in and around Baghdad suggests that an overwhelming majority are prepared to make a clean break with the past and pursue democracy–now. Some of the specific results:
What will you base your vote on?

Political agenda – 65%
Factional origin – 14%
Party Affiliation – 4%
National Background – 12%
Other reasons – 5%

Do you support dialog with the deposed Baathists?

Yes – 15%
No – 84%
Do not know – 1%

Do you support postponing the election?

Yes – 18%
No – 80%
Do not know – 2%

Do you think the elections will take place as scheduled?

Yes – 83%
No – 13%
Do not know – 4%

The long and detailed report is more than encouraging – it is a staggering indictment of a politically motivated mainstream media, intent on burying every sign of progress with “rising death tolls” (as if fatality statistics have the ability to drop) and “car bomb o’the day” coverage. There can be little remaining doubt that there is a determination to adhere to a “we told you so” agenda until the bitter end, even if it means taking an active hand in prophesy self-fulfillment.
I don’t know which makes me angrier, as a Canadian – the prospect of seeing the day in which a free and democratic Iraq looks to my country and asks “Where were you when we needed you most?”, or the sobering fact that there are substancial numbers of my fellow citizens who are not-so-secretly hoping they fail.

Mark Helprin in the WSJ;

The short unhappy life of whatever passed for unipolarity is emphatically over not merely because the strategy of the moment has allowed a small force of primitive insurgents in Iraq to occupy a large proportion of American military energy, but because China is now powerful and influential enough, at least as a “fleet-in- being,” to make American world dominance inconceivable. And in the longer term, China is bent upon and will achieve gross military and economic parity with the United States.

Just so you can say you saw it coming.

Supreme Court has ruled that the federal government has the authority to redefine marriage. Then they stated that churches have a right to refuse to perform them, and provinces may refuse to recognize them. [ update: full text here– ed]
Well, that settles everything!
A couple of questions for which I don’t know the answer – perhaps one of my readers does. In a tough child custody battle, would a remarried gay couple assume a prefered position in the eyes of the courts (vs a co-habitating gay parent) over the single parent ex-spouse? ie: the husband leaves, remarries his boyfriend, and then petitions for custody of the children based on having a “two parent” household and better financial status? Is the court allowed to weigh concerns of parents that may have religious or moral objections about their children being exposed to a gay lifestyle?
With the legal definition of marriage expanded, how does this affect the legal obligations that are applied to long time common law relationships? If same sex marriage becomes law, do existing long term gay couples instantly recieve common law status for purposes of property division, support, etc. in the same way that long term heterosexual relationships have? (I know it varies from province to province.)
The debate over same sex marriage isn’t venturing into these areas nearly often enough. Virtually all the focus is on the issue of “commitment” and sexual orientation, or, to be blunt – who gets to boink whom under the umbrella of state sanction. If that were the fundamental purpose of marriage, we wouldn’t need marriage at all.

Some of them have been found on Ebay, so we know there weren’t forgotten in a warehouse somewhere. CNN:

CBC television reported that one thousand uniforms and security badges were missing from federal airport screeners in 89 airports across the country during the first nine months of 2004.
Federal Transport Minister Jean Lapierre ordered a probe by the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority and will receive a report on Monday. Lapierre said Jacques Duchesneau, president of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, will make public the results of the investigation.
The minister alerted Canada’s airport screeners to double-check airport employee identification in all 89 airports and said Canadians have nothing to worry about at this moment. After the attacks on September 11, Ottawa invested billions of dollars to improve airport security, although Americans often view Canada’s airport security as lax.

So does the Auditor General, though I don’t know why Canadian media is so utterly disinterested in her most recent report. I covered major portions of the findings here about 2 weeks ago.

Security clearances for airport workers

… the RCMP provides only information on whether a person has been charged or convicted of a criminal offence – information that does not identify for Transport Canada whether a person has associations with organized crime or is a refugee claimant. Based on the information it receives, Transport Canada determines whether a security clearance should be issued.

…based on our analysis about 5.5�percent of clearance holders hired between January 2001 and May 2003 had criminal records. While this is still lower than the Canadian average, the upward trend over the last two years is of concern.

Transport Canada officials told us that the clearance program focussed on a relatively narrow concept of “unlawful interference with civil aviation,” which concentrated on the risks of hijacking and sabotage. This concept has been derived from international conventions. The risks of drug smuggling and other criminal activity were not necessarily regarded as grounds for denial of a clearance.

We reviewed the investigation files at the five airports we visited. Police and Customs had identified 247 individuals with clearances to restricted areas who were involved in criminal conspiracies … The RCMP’s assessment of clearance holders indicates a greater problem than is indicated in the criminal conspiracy investigation files at airports. At the two airports where police and Customs had no active investigations, clearance holders included individuals who may have significant criminal associations.

In addition to identifying individuals with criminal associations, the RCMP identified 16 businesses operating at airports that were linked to criminal activity such as providing travel arrangements for organized crime, facilitating identity fraud, and selling stolen passes.

During our audit, various officials told us that there were legal barriers to wider sharing of criminal intelligence information. For example, some mentioned that individuals had a Charter right to freedom of association that precluded denial of a security clearance.

Nice thought – a thousand security screener uniforms in the hands of the Hells Angels or associates of “refugee claimants”.

Faced with an open challenge from George Bush to sign on to the missile defense shield, Paul “Weeble Wobbles But He Won’t Fall Down” Martin is on the defensive from opposition pounding and concern for maintaining solidarity in the red wing of his minority government. He’s standing firm in his decision to continue to consider.
Last night, at a Liberal fund raiser, Martin countered critics by announcing that Canada does not need the help of the USA to defend herself, thankyou very much , and that we are capable of providing security for our part of North America. The only explanation I have for this outburst of absurdity is medical. I hope someone is talking to him about seeing a doctor – head first.
While Monty Paul’s Flying Circus loses their collective minds over a program that is going ahead with or without our approval – we can only pray that someone in Ottawa is paying attention to the potential of tax reform in the US to go nuclear.
In case you haven’t heard – the world’s largest economy is considering elimination of income, payroll, corporate and estate taxes, and replacing them with an across the board federal sales tax of 23%. The estimated 600 billion currently spent to collect and manage these taxes would be virtually eliminated, along with the need for the IRS. The underground and criminal economy that historically evades income tax would be brought into the revenue stream.
The saving to business by the elimination of corporate taxes should result in a drop in wholesale pricing, making US manufactured goods more competitive. The implications for Canadian manufacturing alone are profound. Without corporate taxation, there would be tremendous incentive for business to remain in, or relocate to, the US.
With the beckoning glow of an income tax free America, there wouldn’t be time to worry about an outright exodus of highly skilled Canadian professionals – we’ll need a national strategy to keep our truck drivers.
A couple of western provinces won’t be far behind.

Republican governer Mike Johanns, of Nebraska, has been named the new US Secretary of Agriculture. (homepage). Johanns grew up on a dairy farm before studying law, and changed party affiliation from Democrat to Republican in 1988.
This item from March 2004 is encouraging:

Gov. Mike Johanns also said partial reopening of the market for U.S. cattle in Mexico is good news for Nebraska cattle producers.
He said Mexico is not only this country’s second-largest customer for U.S. beef, but also Nebraska’s second- largest beef customer.
The USDA announced on Wednesday that the United States and Mexico agreed on a partial resumption of trade. The agreement opens the border for boneless beef from animals less than 30 months of age.
According to the U.S. Meat Export Federation, the agreement covers 75 to 80 percent of the total beef products that the United States had been shipping to Mexico.
“This is a glimmer of hope that we are starting to work our way through this in terms of the international marketplace,” Johanns said.
He said he has also urged Veneman to reopen the borders with Canada to allow U.S. processors access to live Canadian cattle.
“The news about Mexico is good news, but it doesn’t get us to where we want to be. But it is a step in the right direction,” he said.
Johanns said the goal is to open up the markets and get beef moving again to this country’s foreign customers.
“So far, it has been a situation where it wasn’t anywhere near as devastating as Canada,” he said. “I don’t think it will be in the United States because 90 percent of our beef is consumed here. We have weathered this much better than Canada did. They were just annihilated.”

A strong signal that there is cause for optimism.

With four years as a Canadian resident behind her, Norma Jacobson has some advice fo Americans considering a move to the Great White North – don’t.

Although I enjoy my work and have made good friends here, I’ve found life as an American expatriate in Canada difficult, frustrating and even painful in ways that have surprised me. As attractive as living here may be in theory, the reality’s something else. For me, it’s been one of almost daily confrontation with a powerful anti-Americanism that pervades many aspects of life. When I’ve mentioned this phenomenon to Canadian friends, they’ve furrowed their brows sympathetically and said, “Yes, Canadian anti-Americanism can be very subtle.” My response is, there’s nothing subtle about it.
The anti-Americanism I experience generally takes this form: Canadians bring up “the States” or “Americans” to make comparisons or evaluations that mix a kind of smug contempt with a wariness that alternates between the paranoid and the absurd.
Thus, Canadian media discussion of President Bush’s upcoming official visit on Tuesday focuses on the snub implied by his not having visited earlier. It’s reported that when he does come, he will not speak to a Parliament that’s so hostile it can’t be trusted to receive him politely. Coverage of a Canadian athlete caught doping devolves into complaints about how Americans always get away with cheating. The “Blame Canada” song from the “South Park” movie is taken as documentary evidence of Americans’ real attitudes toward this country. The ongoing U.S. ban on importing Canadian cattle (after a case of mad cow disease was traced to Alberta) is interpreted as a form of political persecution. A six o’clock news show introduces a group of parents and children who are convinced that the reason Canadian textbooks give short shrift to America’s failed attempts to invade the Canadian territories in the War of 1812 is to avoid antagonizing the Americans — who are just waiting for an excuse to give it another try.
[…]
Part of what’s irksome about Canadian anti-Americanism and the obsession with the United States is that it seems so corrosive to Canada. Any country that defines itself through a negative (“Canada: We’re not the United States”) is doomed to an endless and repetitive cycle of hand-wringing and angst. For example, Canadians often point to their system of universal health care as the best example of what it means to be Canadian (because the United States doesn’t provide it), but this means that any effort to adjust or reform that system (which is not perfect) precipitates a national identity crisis: To wit, instituting co-payments or private MRI clinics will make Canada too much like the United States.

She has seen us as we are. Read it all.
hat tip – Cosh.

First it was the great works of art…. time to start hoarding the Kim Jong-Il trading cards…?

No word on this from the mainstream media, as far as I can tell, but it’s burning up the internet.
Via LGF and Flea at the Shotgun
Video downloads available here. Read the Shotgun post first, though, so you are duly warned about the graphic nature of the film.
Freewillblog has a new, downsized version. Still around 15 megs, so dialup users like me are out of luck. His site is getting hit pretty hard though, so be patient if you can’t get through.

New York Daily News

Alfonso Gagliano has held titles in Canada that include labor minister, deputy House leader, ambassador to Denmark and minister of public works.
In New York he held a different kind of title, according to secret FBI documents obtained by the Daily News: “made” member of the Bonanno crime family.
Gagliano was identified as a longtime soldier in the Bonanno crime family by Frank Lino, a former Mafia capo-turned-informer.
Lino is now cooperating with the FBI and federal prosecutors as they slowly take apart the mob family to which he once swore allegiance.
Gagliano’s name surfaced as Lino described the Bonanno family’s operations in Montreal, which has served as an outpost for the Brooklyn-based group for decades.
He said he and a group of top Bonanno gangsters traveled to Montreal in the 1990s to let the northern branch office know the family had a new boss, Joseph Massino.
The group met at a catering hall, and during the meeting, a Bonanno gangster, Joseph Lopresti, introduced Gagliano to Lino as a made man in the family, FBI documents state.
Lino made a point of telling the FBI that only actual members of the Bonanno family were allowed to attend the meeting at the catering hall. Associates were banned.
Gagliano attorney Pierre Fournier did not return calls seeking comment yesterday.
For years, Gagliano was a fixture in Canada’s national politics, rising through the ranks of the Liberal Party.
But his most powerful position was undoubtedly Canada’s minister of public works and government services, the office that oversees the Canadian mint and awards most of Canada’s government contracts.
In that capacity, Gagliano found himself embroiled in a growing scandal over potential corruption in the awarding of contracts for government advertising.
In February, he was dismissed as ambassador.
There is an ongoing investigation into allegations that government funds were funneled to large contributors to the Liberal Party for no-work contracts.
Lino was shown an array of photographs and identified Gagliano, the FBI documents state.
When he began cooperating with the FBI, Lino admitted he was involved in six murders, several attempted murders, loansharking, extortion and gambling.

Libranos flashback….
update Western Standard staff writer, Kevin Steel has written to the Daily News asking if any Canadian news agency has asked for copies of the FBI documents. Heh.

… and prepare for the slide.
Ont. minister urges Muslims to stay in gay-ed classes

Controversy erupted after students at Market Lane Public School were shown videos that depicted the feelings of children who get taunted at school because their own parents are homosexuals.
Angry Muslim parents complained that their religious beliefs were getting less respect from the board than gay rights and demanded that their children be excluded on religious grounds from similar presentations in the future.
The board rejected their request Tuesday night on the grounds that allowing some students to be excluded from discussions about gay families would violate the rights of those children with same-sex parents.

Still clinging to the lie assurance that churches won’t be forced to perform same-sex marriages?

Ontario’s New Democrats echoed the government’s position.
“I believe that human rights come above religious rights,” said NDP critic Michael Prue.

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms lists freedom of religion as a “fundamental right”. Further down, under “equality rights” we have this:

15. (1) Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.

Contrary to popular belief, the word “orientation” does not actually appear in the document.

The figures for the UN Oil-For-Food rip-off scheme have been revised from the previous 10 – 11 billion estimates. Doubled, actually.
William Safire at the NYT (registration may be necessary).

Annan’s obstruction of outside investigations has strong support within the U.N. members whose citizens are most likely to be embarrassed by revelations of payoffs: Russia, France and China lead all the rest. He has dutifully continued to align himself with their interests by declaring the overthrow of Saddam “illegal” and recently denouncing our attack on the insurgents in Falluja. Perhaps he thinks that this confluence of national interest in cover-up – along with the unwillingness of most media to dig into a complicated story – will let his stonewalling succeed. He reckons not with an insulted Congress.

Via Powerline, this Chicago Sun-Times column by Robert Novak on the upcoming showdown:

Coleman said this week’s hearings will show that ”the scope of the ripoff” at the U.N. is substantially more than the widely reported $10 billion to $11 billion in graft. But more than money is involved. These hearings also should expose the arrogance of the secretary-general and his bureaucracy. At the same time that he has refused to honor the Senate committee’s request for documents, Annan has inveighed against the Fallujah offensive sanctioned by the new Iraqi government while ignoring the terrorism of insurgents. This is an unprecedented showdown between a branch of the U.S. government and the U.N.
The scandal is not complicated. Money from Iraqi oil sales permitted by the Saddam Hussein regime under U.N. auspices, supposedly to provide food for Iraqis, was siphoned off to middlemen. Billions intended to purchase food wound up in Saddam’s hands for the purpose of buying conventional weapons. The complicity of U.N. member states France and Russia is pointed to by the Senate investigation. The web of corruption deepened when it was revealed that Annan’s son, Kojo, was on the payroll of a contractor in the oil- for-food program.
[…]
The reaction by the U.N. bureaucracy has been an intransigent defense of its stone wall. Edward Mortimer, Annan’s director of communications, publicly sneered at the Coleman-Levin letter as ”very awkward and troubling.” Privately, Annan’s aides told reporters that they were not about to hand over confidential documents to the Russian Duma and every other parliamentary body in the world.
But the U.S. Senate is not the Russian Duma. These are not just a few right- wing voices in the wilderness who are confronting Kofi Annan. ”In seeing what is happening at the U.N.,” Coleman told me, ”I am more troubled today than ever. I see a sinkhole of corruption.” The United Nations and its secretary-general are in a world of trouble.

Stay tuned.

Via Powerline; Clifford May connects the dots behind the New York Time’s crumbling story about “missing bomb material” in Iraq.

The United Nations is already embroiled in the largest economic scam in world history: the multibillion dollar Oil-for-Food scandal. Now there is reason to ask whether a senior U.N., official also has attempted to influence an American election by spreading misleading information.
[…]
Here’s one theory: It was Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Why would he do that? “The U.S. is trying to deny ElBaradei a second term,” a high U.S. government official told me. “We have been on his case for missing the Libyan nuclear weapons program and for weakness on the Iranian nuclear weapons program.”
ElBaradei also opposed the liberation of Iraq. And he would like nothing better than to see President Bush be defeated next week.
If all this is true it would amount to a major scandal: It would mean that a senior U.N. official may be changing the outcome of an American election by spreading false information. And major U.S. media outlets are allowing themselves to be manipulated in pursuit of that goal.
The Times and other news organizations also have ignored this pertinent question: Why did Saddam Hussein have the kinds of explosives favored by terrorists � and why was he permitted to keep them? Such explosives, according to the Times, also “are used in standard nuclear weapons design,” and were acquired by Saddam when he “embarked on a crash effort to build an atomic bomb in the late 1980s.”
[…]
Writing in The Corner, former federal terrorism prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy pointed out that U.N. Security Council Resolution 687, which imposed the terms of 1991 Gulf War ceasefire, required Iraq to “unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless, under international supervision, of . . . [a]ll ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometres and related major parts, and repair and production facilities[.]”
Yet the IAEA made no attempt to force Saddam to comply with his obligations to destroy these “related major parts” of its ballistic missiles.
In addition, McCarthy noted, Iraq was required “not to acquire or develop nuclear weapons or nuclear-weapons-usable material or any subsystems or components[,]” and, to the extent it had such items, present them for “urgent on-site inspection and the destruction, removal or rendering harmless as appropriate of all items specified above.”
It shouldn’t require a rocket scientist to understand that a detonator is a key component of a nuclear bomb. But according to the Times, Saddam persuaded ElBaradei that he wanted to hold on to the explosives in case they were needed “for eventual use in mining and civilian construction” – and ElBaradai agreed.

May asks good questions. It makes one wonder why the Times didn’t ask them.

A buzz has been running through the blogosphere since last night about this story.

The communist regime in Hanoi monitored closely and looked favorably upon the activities of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War during the period Senator Kerry served most actively as the group’s spokesman and a member of its executive committee, two captured Viet Cong documents suggest.
The documents – one dubbed a “circular” and the other a “directive” – were captured in 1971 and are part of a trove of material from the war currently stored at the Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University at Lubbock. Originally organized by Douglas Pike, a major scholar who is now deceased, the archive contains more than 20 million documents. Many are available online at the Virtual Vietnam Archive and, as the election has heated up, have been the focus of a scramble for insights into Mr. Kerry’s anti-war activities. The Circular and the Directive are listed as items numbered 2150901039b and 2150901041 respectively. Their authenticity was confirmed by Stephen Maxner, archivist at the Vietnam Archive.

My first reaction to this story? Well, duh.

… more than 350 Americans secretly worked for Soviet intelligence during World War II — when the United States and the Soviet Union were allies. A number of them served in very high positions in the U.S. government. Harry Dexter White was assistant secretary of the Treasury and played a key role in creating the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, pillars of the postwar world monetary structure. Lauchlin Currie was one of a half-dozen special assistants to President Franklin Roosevelt. Laurence Duggan was in charge of U.S. relations with Latin America.

The Venona story.
If Soviet communists could be this successful at infiltrating the highest levels of the US government, how difficult do you think it would be to influence Vietnam protest groups? One could hardly consider their goals to be in conflict.

Excerpts from recorded lectures given by Sheik Younus Kathrada;

“We know what happened over the last week and how the brothers of the monkeys and the swine assassinated and murdered one of the heroes of Islam, the Salah al-Din of this day and age, Ahmed Yassin.
“Once again they’ve shown their treachery; once again they’ve shown that they are cowards and that they cannot be trusted.”
[…]
“The prophet . . . said the final hour will not be established until such time as the Muslims will battle and will fight against the Jews.
“Then what will happen? Listen to the good news after that. The prophet . . . says that the stone and the tree will say ‘oh Muslim, oh slave of Allah, that verily behind me is a Jew. Then come and kill him.’ . . . It is not meant to be understood metaphorically but rather literally.
“Unfortunately we hear too many people saying we must build bridges with them. No. They understand one language. It is the language of the sword and it is the only language they understand.”
[…]
“When the Muslims have a leader, when the Muslims have the strength and the ability to take on an enemy, then absolutely they call the other nations towards Islam. Should they reject the message then they will declare war upon them.
“That is what we know as the offensive jihad. There is a good reason for that. It is in order to establish security on this earth. It is so that the word of Allah will be the superior word.”
[…]
“I mentioned to you a while ago that it should be all of our intentions that one day we be martyred. If it is not I say revise yourself. Look deep into your heart because there is some hypocrisy in it.
“It is inconceivable that a true believer will not desire martyrdom.”

… leader of the Dar al-Madinah Islamic Society of Vancouver.
Update – Peaktalk has a related post.

Europe is no better at selling uranium to Iran than John Kerry is.