Eideard

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Germany’s top army officer has resigned over the disclosure that the defence ministry had withheld information about civilian casualties caused by a Nato air strike in Afghanistan.

The resignation of Wolfgang Schneiderhan, the Bundeswehr’s chief of staff, along with that of ministry state secretary Peter Wichert, was announced by Germany’s new defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg during a parliamentary debate on the future of Germany in Afghanistan.

Schneiderhan’s resignation amounts to an admission by the defence ministry that it suppressed information about civilian casualties which was ordered by the Bundeswehr – even though it had numerous sources of information, including from its own military police.

According to Nato information, 142 insurgents and civilians were killed in the attack on 4 September on two oil tankers, which had been seized by the Taliban in the northern region near Kunduz.

The then defence minister, Franz Josef Jung, initially dismissed reports that civilians had been among the victims. The ministry later backtracked, saying some civilians had been killed.

Now, Former German Defense Minister and current Labor Minister Franz Josef Jung has resigned over the fatal Afghan airstrike…

The German newspaper, Bild, said it had access to confidential documents and it posted a video of the airstrike on its Web site. It said German Col. Georg Klein was not able to rule out the possibility of civilian victims before he ordered the strike.

The newspaper said a report dated Sept. 6 — two days after the strike — made clear that it was impossible for Klein to verify information his informant had provided before he called in the airstrike.

Jung said Friday he was taking responsibility for miscommunication following the incident.

Bild reported that for days after the incident, Jung — who was then defense minister — repeated that there had been no civilian victims. That was despite Jung having videos and documents that proved the defense ministry knew about civilian victims and also had insufficient information before the strike was ordered.

The Fog of War claims victims at the top as well as on the battlefield. Though, of course, those at the top don’t get bloodied except in the metaphor.

Forensic Anthropological Research Center trainees

Coroners and medical examiners across the country are reporting spikes in the number of unclaimed bodies and indigent burials, with states, counties and private funeral homes having to foot the bill when families cannot.

The increase comes as governments short on cash are cutting other social service programs, with some municipalities dipping into emergency and reserve funds to help cover the costs of burials or cremations…

About a dozen states now subsidize the burial or cremation of unclaimed bodies, including Illinois, Massachusetts, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Most of the state programs provide disposition services to people on Medicaid, a cost that has grown along with Medicaid rolls…

Already in 2009, Wisconsin has paid for 15 percent more cremations than it did last year, as the number of Medicaid recipients grew by more than 95,000 people since the end of January…

The majority of burials and cremations, however, are handled on the city, county, town or township level, an added economic stress as many places face down wide budget gaps…

Many places are turning to cremation, which averages a third to half the price of a burial. However, they will accommodate families’ requests for burial…

RTFA. Hard times affect every aspect of life.

Though there are some interesting solutions – I must admit. Check out the “body farm” in Tennessee.

Amrit Singh and Jameel Jaffer

In the spring of 2003, long before Abu Ghraib or secret prisons became part of the American vocabulary, a pair of recently hired lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union noticed a handful of news reports about allegations of abuse of prisoners in American custody.

The lawyers, Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh, wondered: Was there a broader pattern of abuse, and could a Freedom of Information Act request uncover it? Some of their colleagues, more experienced with the frustrations of such document demands, were skeptical. One made a tongue-in-cheek offer of $1 for every page they turned up.

Six years later, the detention document request and subsequent lawsuit are among the most successful in the history of public disclosure, with 130,000 pages of previously secret documents released to date and the prospect of more.

The case has produced revelation after revelation: battles between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the military over the treatment of detainees at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp; autopsy reports on prisoners who died in custody in Afghanistan and Iraq; the Justice Department’s long-secret memorandums justifying harsh interrogation methods; and day-by-day descriptions of what happened inside the Central Intelligence Agency’s overseas prisons…

But Mr. Aftergood said the case also illustrated how costly litigation was often necessary to unearth documents the government preferred to protect. “The law gives you standing to fight,” he said. “It doesn’t guarantee victory.”

Nor, in reality, does it guarantee the American people an open and trustworthy government. The months and years of stonewalling by the Republican administration and the bureaucrats loyal to obfuscation rather than the Constitution they were sworn to uphold – leave us with only a few lawyers dedicated to the task.

RTFA. Think about it. We’re supposed to be the freedom-loving nation that shines the light for the rest of the world – if you accept the propaganda. Then why should we even need a Freedom Of Information Act – and why do we have to sue our elected officials to wring out the truth of what they do in office?

A row has erupted in Mexico after the government distributed a history textbook to primary schools which makes no mention of the Spanish conquest.

The chronology of the text neatly avoids the issue by ending before the Spanish arrived in the early 1500s…

The arrival of the conquistadors resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people and the colonisation of Mexico.

The new history textbook, published and distributed free by the education ministry, omits what historians agree was one of the most important eras in the country’s history – the arrival of the Spanish led by Hernan Cortes in 1519 that led ultimately to colonisation until Mexico gained independence in 1821.

Some opposition politicians have accused the conservative government of President Felipe Calderon of deliberately discouraging a critical analysis of the conquest.

The government is even accused of being closer to the Spanish conquerors than to Mexico’s indigenous population.

Has Mexico been taking lessons from US revisionists?

Sounds like the sort of crap I’d expect from the state board of education in Texas or Kansas.

Late last month, a group of Azeri bloggers posted their latest tongue-in-cheek opus, a video in which a donkey holds a news conference before a circle of gravely nodding journalists.

Dressed in a voluminous gray costume, Adnan Hajizada rhapsodizes over the lush life awaiting donkeys in Azerbaijan. To his audience — cosmopolitan young Azeris following his commentaries on blogs and Facebook — the video was a sly send-up of the government, which had been accused in the local news media of paying exorbitant prices to import donkeys.

Mr. Hajizada, 26, and his fellow activist Emin Milli, 30, were arrested last week in Baku, the capital, in an event their supporters say could signal the beginning of a crackdown on online media. Azeri authorities said the two physically attacked other men, though witnesses have challenged that account. They are awaiting trial on charges of hooliganism, which carries a sentence of one to five years in prison.

According to a motion filed by Mr. Hajizada’s lawyer, the two men were with friends at a restaurant last Wednesday, engrossed in political debate, when two strangers broke into their conversation and started a fight. Mr. Hajizada and Mr. Milli went to file a complaint about the assault, but instead an investigator opened a criminal case against them, the motion said…

In Azerbaijan, as elsewhere in the region, Internet use has risen as press freedoms have dwindled. With the Azeri government buoyed by sky-high oil prices in recent years, opposition voices have all but disappeared from public life. Television, once financed by competing oligarchs, has come under solid government control, and advertisers have pulled back from newspapers critical of the government. Web sites — especially those registered on foreign servers, which cannot be blocked by the government — became “the last source of information,” said Magerram Zeynalov, 27, a former newspaper reporter.

Anyone out there know of lots of countries basing their economy on oil – that encourage democracy over graft and corruption?

I could think of a couple. What? Maybe 15%?

Researchers discovered during the Reagan administration that contaminated fresh eggs sickened thousands of people, but federal officials squabbled for two decades about how to solve the problem.

On Tuesday, the Obama administration released a rule to deal with the nation’s egg problem and used the moment to promise a sweeping overhaul of the system to ensure the safety of spinach, lettuce, tomatoes, melons, beef and chicken — foods that lead to millions of illnesses and thousands of deaths a year…

Most of the measures announced Tuesday are more aspirational than actual. The Agriculture Department promised to develop new standards to reduce salmonella levels in chickens and turkeys by the end of the year. The Food and Drug Administration promised to advise the food industry by the end of the month on how to prevent contamination of tomatoes, melons, spinach and lettuce. And within three months the F.D.A. plans to release advice about how farmers, wholesalers and retailers can build systems to trace contaminated foods quickly from shelf to field.

But many rules that even industry representatives call essential are years away. “We’ve got to move to mandatory regulatory standards, and this is a step along the way,” said Michael Taylor, a food specialist who is a senior adviser at the food and drug agency…

Agriculture officials set up a pilot program in Pennsylvania in 1992 to test regulatory efforts and found that one source of contamination was mouse and rat feces in chicken feed. Another problem was infected breeder hens. Pest controls, certified breeders, regular manure testing and other measures helped reduce the share of infected henhouses in the state to 7 percent from 39 percent, said Paul H. Patterson, a professor of poultry science at Pennsylvania State University…The egg rule released Tuesday largely copied Pennsylvania’s voluntary program but made it mandatory.

Howard Magwire, vice president of the United Egg Producers, said his industry supported the new rule. About 250 major egg producers in the United States account for 99 percent of fresh egg production, Mr. Magwire said, and most already abide by the rule. Since the rule applies only to producers with 3,000 or more laying hens, thousands of small producers are exempt.

Federal researchers estimated that more than 130,000 people are sickened every year and 30 die as a result of contaminated eggs, and the government estimated that the new rule would cut illnesses by 60 percent and save $1.4 billion in health costs.

Looking in from the outside, I suppose we could get mired down over who gets the most blame: the fools leading both parties in ideological stasis; bureaucrats arguing over responsibility, turf and budget; or both segments of the political bedrooms striving to bend over further for a corporate screwing.

Finally, we have an administration willing to commit to change. It will likely take a couple of terms to get all of this shorn of clutter and copout. At least, we now have a chance at trying for sensible regulation and protection.

America’s first chief information officer Vivek Kundra launched the new spending dashboard on his website Data.gov Tuesday, which should bring transparency to government-funded information technology projects. Kundra, who previously demo’d the platform at Wired’s first-ever business conference on June 15th, announced it again Tuesday at the Personal Democracy Forum conference in Manhattan.

The purpose of the spending dashboard is accountability. Viewers will be able to track the progress of government-funded IT progress. More than that, they’ll be able to point fingers. There’s a little thumbnail picture of the CIO and contact information next to each project’s page. People who are unsatisfied with the way things are moving can write in.

At this stage, Kundra and his team have thrown the data up, and hoped that America will work out the kinks. “This is version 1.0, we’ve launched it in beta and we’re going to continue to innovate and ad more and more features.” One feature that he emphasized was a feedback loop, so that the site won’t just be about exposure, but also creating a dialogue.

I’ll have to send them some of the truly nutball neocons who comment over at the “big” blog. Rightwing geeks are almost as useless and unproductive as rightwing talk radio hosts.

Leon Simmons, disabled with emphysema, has a free Tracfone

John Cobb, 59, a former commercial fisherman who is disabled with cirrhosis of the liver and emphysema, lives in a studio apartment in Greensboro, N.C., on a fixed monthly income of $674. He has been hoping to receive more government assistance, and in February, he did.

It came in the form of a free cellphone and free service.

Mr. Cobb became one of a small but rapidly growing number of low-income Americans benefiting from a new wrinkle to a decades-old federal law that provided them with subsidized landline telephone service.

In a twist, wireless carriers are receiving subsidies to provide people like Mr. Cobb with a phone and typically 68 minutes of talk time each month. It is a form of wireless welfare that puts a societal stamp on the central role played by the mobile device.

Mr. Cobb’s cellphone is a Motorola 175. “I feel so much safer when I drive. If I get sick, I can call someone. If I break down, I can call someone,” Mr. Cobb said. “It’s a necessity…”

Since November, the number of customers receiving free or subsidized wireless service has doubled to 1.4 million, he said. To be eligible for the program, known as Lifeline, a person must meet federal low-income guidelines or qualify for one of a handful of social service programs, including food stamps or Medicaid.

The opportunity has prompted interest from the nation’s biggest carriers, including Sprint Nextel and AT&T. But at the forefront is a much smaller company, Tracfone, a Florida provider of prepaid mobile service that has become the face of the fledgling subsidized cellphone.

Tracfone began providing its service, called SafeLink, in Tennessee in August and now does so in 16 states, including New York, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia, according to its Web site. Each time it enters a market — which generally requires state approval — it runs television ads telling people how easy it is to get a free Motorola phone, like Mr. Cobb’s…

Tracfone, whose paid service has 10 million subscribers, sees the Lifeline service as an opportunity to make some money but, more pointedly, to eventually convert the subsidized customers into paying ones if their fortunes turn around and they no longer qualify for a free phone.

RTFA. Lots more detail than I’m offering here. Looks like a win-win even with some exposure of how meager costs actually are for wireless providers. Certainly no reason to feel sorry for the profits drawn from marginal accounts.

Also – a landmark – with “official” recognition of how the cellphone has replaced landlines.

Canadian police will investigate why the Royal Canadian Mint seems to have lost some of its gold and other precious metals.

Media reports say more than $9.1 million in gold and other assets are missing. Ottawa acted after it learned that an independent audit of the mint was not going to be able to solve the mystery.

“I have instructed the mint to call in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to (do) a full investigation,” junior government minister Rob Merrifield told reporters, declining to say how much was missing.

Opposition politicians said the incident showed the minority Conservative government was hopelessly incompetent.

“If they can’t even hold on to the gold in the mint, what are they capable of doing?” asked New Democrat legislator Thomas Mulcair.

The mint…says its vaults are “an exceptionally secure facility.”

Some pain-in-the-ass once said it’s the exception that proves the rule, eh?

It has become one of the staples of modern, hi-tech life: using satellite navigation tools built into your car or mobile phone to find your way from A to B. But experts have warned that the system may be close to breakdown.

US government officials are concerned that the quality of the Global Positioning System (GPS) could begin to deteriorate as early as next year, resulting in regular blackouts and failures – or even dishing out inaccurate directions to millions of people worldwide…

The satellites are overseen by the US Air Force, which has maintained the GPS network since the early 1990s. According to a study by the US government accountability office (GAO), mismanagement and a lack of investment means that some of the crucial GPS satellites could begin to fail as early as next year.

“It is uncertain whether the Air Force will be able to acquire new satellites in time to maintain current GPS service without interruption,” said the report, presented to Congress. “If not, some military operations and some civilian users could be adversely affected.”

The report says that Air Force officials have failed to execute the necessary steps to keep the system running smoothly…

The first replacement GPS satellite was due to launch at the beginning of 2007, but has been delayed several times and is now scheduled to go into orbit in November this year – almost three years late.

If you consider the faith-based incompetents who’ve been in charge of running the government for the previous eight years, we’re lucky someone can even find the bloody satellites.