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3 bombings minutes apart kill 21, wound 141 in India
and MUNEEZA NAQVI
MUMBAI, India — Three coordinated bombings tore through the heart of India's busy financial capital during rush hour Wednesday, killing 21 people and wounding 141 in the worst terror attack in the country since the 2008 Mumbai siege.
Bloody bodies were strewn in the dirt of Mumbai's crowded neighborhoods and markets. Doors were ripped off storefronts, motorcycles were charred and a bus stop was shredded. After the blasts in three separate neighborhoods, police set up checkpoints and were put on high alert.
The bombings came just months after peace talks resumed between India and Pakistan, which New Delhi has blamed for past attacks.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh condemned the blasts and appealed to the people of Mumbai "to remain calm and show a united face."
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, and Indian officials refused to speculate on who might be behind the blasts.
Indian officials have accused Pakistan's powerful spy agency of helping coordinate and fund earlier attacks, including the Mumbai siege, which killed 166 people over three days. Peace talks between the countries were suspended after the siege and resumed only recently.
Pakistan's government expressed distress about the loss of lives and injuries soon after Wednesday's blasts were reported.
U.S. President Barack Obama also condemned the "outrageous attacks."
"The American people will stand with the Indian people in times of trial, and we will offer support to India's efforts to bring the perpetrators of these terrible crimes to justice," he said in a statement. "I have no doubt that India will overcome these deplorable terrorist attacks."
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said she will go ahead with her plans to visit India next week despite the bombings. Standing with India "is more important than ever," she said.
The bombings began with an explosion that ripped through the famed Jhaveri Bazaar jewelry market at 6:54 p.m. A minute later, a blast hit the busy business district of Opera House, several miles away in southern Mumbai. At 7:05 p.m., the third bomb exploded in the crowded neighborhood of Dadar in central Mumbai, according to police.
Because of the close timing of the blasts, "we infer that this was a coordinated attack by terrorists," Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said.
A lifeless body lay on a cart. Survivors carried the wounded to taxis. One man was dragged out of the area on a red board used as a stretcher. Bleeding victims crowded into the back of a cargo truck to be taken to a hospital, where wards were filled with the wounded, slathered in white burn cream.
At Jhaveri Bazaar, a witness described two motorcycles exploding in flames and saw at least six bodies.
"People were shouting 'Help me, help me,'" the man told Headlines Today television.
People hugged and wept. Crowds gathered in the blast areas as police questioned witnesses, and investigators wearing gloves sifted through the debris for clues.
The government said the blasts killed 21 people and wounded 141 others.
"India is not going to cow down," Cabinet minister Farooq Abdullah said. "Let those perpetrators of this terror remember, we will find them and Inshallah (God willing) we will give them the justice that India believes in."
A U.S. official said there were no immediate claims of responsibility, or firm indication of which terrorist group might be behind the attack. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss matters of intelligence.
The blasts marked the first major attack on Mumbai since 10 militants laid siege to the city for 60 hours in November 2008. That attack targeted two luxury hotels, a Jewish center and a busy train station.
C. Uday Bhaskar, a defense analyst, said the bombings showed that Mumbai remained vulnerable despite precautions taken after the 2008 attack.
"The local police still does not have either the capability or the capacity to pre-empt such attacks, and this is going to be a constant challenge," he said.
Some media incorrectly reported Wednesday's blasts happened on the birthday of Ajmal Kasab, the only surviving gunman from the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Kasab, who was sentenced to death in Mumbai, was born on Sept. 13.
The city has been on edge since the 2008 attack. In December, authorities deployed extra police on city streets after receiving intelligence that a Pakistan-based militant group was planning an attack over New Year's weekend.
In March 2010, Mumbai police said they prevented a major terrorist strike after they arrested two Indian men, who, police said, were preparing to hit several targets in the city. In September, police issued a terror alert for the city during a popular Hindu festival.
Last month, India and Pakistan held their first formal talks on the disputed region of Kashmir since the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Both nuclear-armed nations claim Kashmir in its entirety, and have fought two of their three wars over the region since they gained independence from Britain in 1947.


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欧博allbet网址:Counsel\u2019s duty to soldier on
A 2007 case before the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) of England and Wales is instructive on counsel's duty to soldier on.
In that case, R v Ulcay; R v Toygun [2007] EWCA Crim 2379, the trial of a number of accused persons, including Ulcay, for conspiracy to facilitate the commission of breaches of Immigration law began on September 5. After the close of the prosecution case, Ulcay completely changed his instructions. On October 18, immediately before Ulcay's case was due to be presented to the jury, his counsels applied to the judge to withdraw from the case on the grounds of professional embarrassment.
The judge allowed the application, stating that counsels were in "an impossible professional situation". The case was adjourned to enable new counsels to take further instructions. On October 20 new counsels sought a four- to six-week adjournment. The judge was prepared to grant only a short adjournment of three days for counsel to read the papers and a day for an additional conference with Ulcay.,,皇冠体育开户(www.hg108.vip)是一个开放皇冠正网即时比分、皇冠体育开户的平台。皇冠体育开户平台(www.hg108.vip)提供最新皇冠登录,皇冠APP下载包含新皇冠体育代理、会员APP,提供皇冠正网代理开户、皇冠正网会员开户业务。
Counsels told the judge that in those circumstances they would be unable to act, having taken advice from the Bar Council (the representative body for, and approved regulator of, barristers in England and Wales).
On October 24 two new counsels appeared on Ulcay's behalf. They asked for a seven-day adjournment to prepare the case. The judge refused but agreed to adjourn for a further three days. On October 26 counsels reapplied, seeking a two-week adjournment. The judge refused. He stated that it was not in the interests of justice for a long trial to be allowed to be derailed because one of the accused persons had changed his instructions.
The second new team of lawyers then withdrew from the case. The trial proceeded on October 28 with Ulcay unrepresented. He was convicted. He appealed against conviction submitting that the learned judge had been wrong to allow counsels to withdraw from the case; that the learned judge had been wrong not to have allowed new counsels more time to read themselves into the case; and that the learned judge should have discharged the jury from reaching a verdict in his case.
The Court of Appeal took occasion to consider whether, and if so, in what circumstances, counsels instructed immediately before the beginning or during the course of a trial could refuse to accept instructions on behalf of an accused person because of the difficulties created by adjournments. The court considered paragraph 701(b)(ii) of the Bar Code of Conduct which directed that a barrister (advocate and solicitor here in Malaysia) should not undertake any task for which he did not have time and opportunity to prepare for and perform.
Sir Igor Judge (yes, Judge is His Lordship's name), then president of the Court of Appeal, delivered the court's judgment. The issues that arose before the court were not lost on His Lordship. At the outset, His Lordship said:


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Master Bedroom – Before and After
In Latin the word "redux" means "brought back, restored". So we thought it would be good to spend our next five Fridays talking about all the possibilities there are in bringing your master bedroom back to life – romantically speaking!
I'm not one to reinvent the wheel, really! I mean, why bother? There are so many others who provide great ideas and help in this area, that our job on The Romantic Vineyard is simply to help you find the ideas you need to romance your spouse. It doesn't matter who the ideas came from – so, I want to share with you two amazing blogs I've discovered. I have a feeling we'll be gleaning quite a bit from these two sites.
Today I introduce you to Melissa, from The Inspired Room. Her blog is full of beautiful pictures that will inspire you, but what I really want to share with you is her guest post on Simply Modern Moms. I know I've probably lost most of our husbands at this point, but so be it! Usually it's the wife who infuses romance into the decorating of the home anyway. However, if you're the husband, and this is your thing – have at it! We don't care who leads the charge, as long as the charge is embraced.
Valentine's Day is only a month away, and we want to help you reclaim your space with little to no cost. We will provide an assignment each Friday for you to work on the following week.
Assignment #1: Read the two blog links above and spend the next week taking care of the areas in your room that made you say, "Meh!" as Melissa would say! Clean out the clutter – remove the piles that don't belong. Practice making your bed everyday! But before you do anything – take a "before" picture. We want to see the progress you make. If this is something you would like to do…post a comment and be sure to check in every Friday for your next assignment!


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The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) is the largest sanctioning body of motorsports in the United States. The three largest racing series sanctioned by NASCAR are the NEXTEL Cup, the Busch Series and the Craftsman Truck Series. It also oversees NASCAR Regional Racing, the Whelen Modified Tour, and the Whelen All-American Series. NASCAR sanctions over 1,500 races at over 100 tracks in 39 states, Canada, and Mexico. From 1996 to 1998, NASCAR held exhibition races in Japan, and an exhibition race in Australia in 1988.
NASCAR Videos
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With roots as regional entertainment in the Southeastern U.S., NASCAR has grown to become the second-most popular professional sport in terms of television ratings inside the U.S., ranking behind only the National Football
League. Internationally, NASCAR races are broadcast in over 150 countries. It holds 17 of the top 20 attended sporting events in the U.S.,1 and has 75 million
fans who purchase over $3 billion in annual licensed product sales. These fans are considered the most brand-loyal in all of sports and as a result, Fortune 500 companies sponsor NASCAR more than any other governing body.
NASCAR's headquarters are located in Daytona Beach, Florida, although it also maintains offices in four North Carolina cities: Charlotte, Mooresville, Concord, and Conover. Regional offices are also located in New York City, Los Angeles, Arkansas, and international offices in Mexico City and Toronto, Ontario.
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March 8, 2019 by Evan Schumacher Comments Off on NASCAR Xfinity Series ISM Raceway 2019 iK9 Service Dog 200 Pit Stall Selections
Here are the pit stall selections for Saturday's NASCAR Xfinity Series race at the ISM Raceway.
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Friday, November 15
8:00 PM – NASCAR Gander Outdoors Truck Series Race (Stages 30/60/134 Laps / 201 Miles)
Saturday November 16
12:35 PM – NASCAR Xfinity Series Qualifying Impound (Single Vehicle / One Lap All Positions)
2:05 PM – 2:55 PM – Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Final Practice
3:30 PM – NASCAR Xfinity Series Race (Stages 45/90/200 Laps = 300 Miles)
Sunday, November 17
3:00 PM – Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Race (Stages 80/160/267 Laps = 400.5 Miles)
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Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty; neither do I exercise myself in things too great, or in things too wonderful for me. Surely I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, my soul is with me like a weaned child. O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and for ever. - Psalm 131
Though we are separated, dear mother, at this solemn moment when I stand before your grave, I call to mind the love and solicitude with which you tended and watched over my childhood, ever mindful of my welfare, and ever anxious for my happiness. I feel the closeness of your spirit, mother dear, and my heart is filled with tender emotion as I recollect the many sacrifices you made to ennoble my heart and instruct my mind. I am grateful for your every blessing, your kindly deeds, your understanding heart, your sacrificial devotion and your warm love so freely given. What I achieved is because of your influence, and what I am, I have become through you. Indeed, the wisdom that you imparted unto me shall ever remain with me.
If at times, I have failed in showing you the love and appreciation which you so worthily deserved; if I have been thoughtless and ungrateful; I ask to be forgiven. In tribute to your beautiful memory, I implore your inspiration to noble and intelligent living as I cherish the recollections of your lifetime.
I pray, O God, that the soul of my dear mother be bound up in the bond of eternal life, together with the souls of all the righteous that are in Thy keeping. Amen.


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risen jeans | the Felicia throwback denim
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We only offer store credit for returns. Items must be returned unworn, unwashed and smoke, deodorant and perfume free. All original tags must be attached (please note that some items purchased online might not have tags). We reserve the right to refuse a return if these conditions are not met.
STORE ADDRESS TO SHIP: 2242 Coyote Drive, Joplin, MO 64804
All return must be made within 14 DAYS of the order being placed. Please make sure it is delivered back to Etta + East. Returns that exceed this limit will not be accepted. Etta + East does not provide return labels. We will use the delivery date from the USPS tracking link provided at the time of shipment. Any items sent back to us that are not in compliance with our return policy will be shipped back to the customer at their expense. After 14 days, we are unable to accept returns on any purchases.
Once a return is delivered, please allow 5 business days for it to be processed.
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IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS REGARDING OUR RETURN POLICY, FEEL FREE TO EMAIL US AT email@example.com! THANK YOU!


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Governor to lead Kansas delegation to Paris air show
Event gives Brownback chance to promote industry that had $12B in exports last year
Gov. Sam Brownback plans to lead a Kansas delegation to an international air show in Paris next week to promote the state's aircraft industry.
The governor's office says Brownback and state Commerce Secretary Pat George expect to spend a week in Paris, starting Monday.
They will be joined by representatives of the Greater Wichita Economic Development Coalition and several Kansas-based aviation businesses. Wichita is an aviation hub, and the state has more than 30,000 aviation workers and 200 industry suppliers.
Brownback also is touting the state's tax climate as attractive to aviation. The Republican governor has pushed over the past two years to decrease personal income taxes.
Kansas had nearly $12 billion in exports last year, with aircraft sales topping $2 billion.


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The Syrian government accuses Danny of distorting reality in Homs in his YouTube videos. He says the Assad regime is lying and his videos of the attacks and deaths are real.
Post by: Anderson Cooper
Filed under: Syria
Danny is such a loyal person to his country. I think highly of him to talk out, bravely, about what is going on in his country, Syria.
Anderson, I have been following your coverage of Syria for many mos. now. I dont understand why Nato & US doesnt intervene with airstrikes and help these people. It's obvious their gov't has no respect for human life, but certainly ours should! I think it is reprehensible our country is allowing this to continue. I know another conflict is not what we need, but their has to be a better answer than sitting idly by while these people are being slaughtered by their own country! I know in these situations there is always collateral damage, but this slaughter is way beyond collateral damage. Our country needs to pick up the pace and help these people! All they want is a democratic way of life! Do any of us blame them?
Thank You
Margaret Hodge
@ 3:19 he says that the Syrian news can't be trusted. America says that American news CAN NOT be trusted either!
Great that the Syrian regime is watching your show Anderson. They are fabricating allegations about Danny, that shows that his coverage is hitting home. Make sure Anderson that when you say "these reports cannot be independently verified" that you apply that to Assad's regime statements as well as they won't allow professional journalists like you to enter the country. Danny, keep doing what you are doing, you are clearly making an impact and providing a record of atrocities committed by Assad and his murderous troops.
Anderson Cooper goes beyond the headlines to tell stories from many points of view, so you can make up your own mind about the news. Tune in weeknights at 8 and 10 ET on CNN.
Questions or comments? Send an email
Want to know more? Go behind the scenes with AC361°


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Russia's stunning protests end with hint of change
MOSCOW - Tens of thousands of people held the largest anti-government protests that post-Soviet Russia has ever seen on Saturday to criticize electoral fraud and demand an end to Vladimir Putin's rule. Police showed surprising restraint and state-controlled TV gave the nationwide demonstrations unexpected airtime, but there is no indication the opposition is strong enough to push for real change from the prime minister or his ruling party.
Nonetheless, the prime minister seems to be in a weaker position than he was a week ago, before Russians voted in parliamentary elections. His United Party lost a substantial share of its seats, although it retains a majority.
The independent Russian election-observer group Golos said Saturday that "it achieved the majority mandate by falsification," international observers reported widespread irregularities, and the outpouring of Russians publicly denouncing him throughout the country undermines Putin's carefully nurtured image of a strong and beloved leader.
Putin "has stopped being the national leader - in the eyes of his team, the ruling political class and society," analyst Alexei Malachenko of the Moscow Carnegie Center wrote on his blog.
Putin, who was the president of Russia in 2000-2008 before stepping aside because of term limits, will seek a new term in the Kremlin in the March presidential elections. The protests have tarnished his campaign, but there is not yet any obvious strong challenger.
The most dramatic of Saturday's protests saw a vast crowd jam an expansive Moscow square and adjacent streets, packed so tight that some demonstrators stood on others' toes. Although police estimated the crowd at 30,000, aerial photographs suggested far more, and protest organizers made claims ranging from 40,000 to 100,000 or more.
Elsewhere in Russia, some 7,000 protesters assembled in St. Petersburg, and demonstrations ranging from a few hundred people to a thousand took place in more than 60 other cities. Police reported only about 100 arrests nationwide, a notably low number for a force that characteristically quick and harsh action against opposition gatherings.
The police restraint was one of several signs that conditions may be easing for the beleaguered opposition, at least in the short term. Although city authorities generally refuse opposition forces permission to rally or limit the gatherings to small attendance, most the protests Saturday were sanctioned. In a surprise move, Moscow gave permission for up to 30,000 people to rally and police took no action when the crowd appeared to far exceed that. Just as striking, police allowed a separate unauthorized protest to take place in Revolution Square.
State-controlled television, which generally ignores or disparages opposition groups, broadcast footage not only of the Moscow protest - which was so big it would have been hard not to report - but in several other cities as well.
United Russia official Andrei Isayev on Saturday acknowledged that the opposition "point of view is extremely important and will be heard in the mass media, society and the state."
Yet the concessions may be only a way of buying time in hope the protests will wither away. The opposition says the next large Moscow protest will be on Dec. 24. What it will do in the interim to keep morale high is unclear. In addition, the social media that nourished Saturday's protests may be coming under pressure. A top official of the Russian Facebook analog Vkontakte said this week his company has been pressured by the Federal Security Service to block opposition supporters from posting. On Friday, he was summoned by the service for questioning.
Meanwhile, though United Russia may be shaken by the last week's events, it still can count on a large cadre of supporters. The head of its youth wing, Timur Prokopenko, was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying he had nearly 170,000 activists "who are ready at moment to go to rallies" in support of the government.
Saturday's Moscow protest was notable not only for its size, but also for attracting political forces from across the spectrum - from liberals to communists to extreme nationalists.
"United Russia made a miracle, prompting all of us to unite against it," nationalist leader Konstantin Krylov told the rally.
Thousands of protesters also were allowed to march from a gathering place near the Kremlin across downtown to a square where the main rally was held. Police were out in force, blocking all side lanes to prevent the demonstrators from approaching government buildings.
"Russia will be free!" ''Russia without Putin!" ''United Russia is a Party of Crooks and Thieves!" protesters chanted.
"We will fight to the end, to the cancellation of this shameful, false election," said Grigory Yavlinsky, leader of the liberal Yabloko party that failed to make it to parliament in last Sunday's vote. "We are launching a campaign to drive Putin from power."
The organizers sought to send a message of unity, urging the crowd to respect the diversity of speakers' views. At one point, the audience booed a military veteran when he called for the restoration of the Soviet Union, but chanted slogans of support when he denounced the vote-rigging and said the army was with people.
"The army is with us, 80 percent of officers hate the defense minister," retired Maj.-Gen. Yevgeny Kopyshev shouted.
The organizers also praised police for helping maintain order, as demonstrators chanted "Police with people!"
The rally demanded the cancellation of the election results, the punishment for officials responsible for vote-rigging, registration of the opposition parties that were denied it, liberalization of the electoral law and holding new elections. The organizers urged protesters to brace for another rally in two weeks.
"We'll come again!" the crowd chanted.
The Moscow organizers appeared to realize they are facing a tough challenge of keeping protest momentum.
"Nothing will change it if it remains a single rally," said Sergei Parkhomenko, the editor of Vokrug Sveta monthly magazine who was one of the demonstration's organizers. "It must be the first in a long series of protests."
Vladimir Milov, a former energy minister who is now an opposition activist, also acknowledged that the organizers need to plan their strategy to preserve the protests' energy. "Otherwise people will just grow tired and stop attending the rallies," he said, adding that the opposition must focus on next year's presidential election.
Yevgeniya Albats, editor of the liberal New Times weekly, said the opposition must gather signatures for the cancellation of the vote results and for Putin to step down. "This is only the beginning of a long and difficult struggle," she said. "This is our land, and we must get it back."
Oleg Orlov, the head of Memorial rights group, said the rally turned a new page in history.
"We are now changing the nation's history to the better," Orlov said. "We will force the government to realize that they will have to pay a price for rigging the vote, and the price is their legitimacy."
Orlov said the protests must focus on challenging Putin's re-election bid. "We can deal a blow on this rule of thieves next March and show the real price to that "national leader,'" he said.
The organizers read a letter from Ilya Yashin, an opposition leader jailed for taking part in a protest earlier this week. "Even behind bars we are feeling free, unlike those who are hiding from the people in the Kremlin," Orlov said.
Gary Peach and Sofia Javed in Moscow contributed to this story.


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Ex Bush Official Willing to Testify Bush, Cheney Knew Gitmo Prisoners Innocent
Ex Bush Official Willing to Testify Bush, Cheney Knew Gitmo Prisoners Innocent
Friday 09 April 2010
by: Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | Report
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once declared that individuals captured by the US military in the aftermath of 9/11 and shipped off to the Guantanamo Bay prison facility represented the "worst of the worst."
"If you think of the people down there, these are people, all of whom were captured on a battlefield," Rumsfeld said back in 2002, "they're terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers … would-be suicide bombers."
But Rumsfeld knowingly lied, according to a former top Bush administration official.
And so did then Vice President Dick Cheney when he said, also in 2002 and in dozens of public statements thereafter, that Guantanamo prisoners "are the worst of a very bad lot" and "dangerous" and "devoted to killing millions of Americans, innocent Americans, if they can, and they are perfectly prepared to die in the effort."
Now, in a sworn declaration obtained exclusively by Truthout, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell during George W. Bush's first term in office, claims that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others knew the "vast majority" of prisoners captured in the so-called War on Terror were innocent and the administration refused to set them free once those facts were established because of the political repercussions that would have ensued.
For Cheney and Rumsfeld, and "others," Wilkerson said, "the primary issue was to gain more intelligence as quickly as possible, both on Al Qaeda and its current and future plans and operations but increasingly also, in 2002-2003, on contacts between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's intelligence and secret police forces in Iraq."
Wilkerson filed his declaration in support of a lawsuit filed by Adel Hassan Hamad, a 52-year-old former Guantanamo detainee who is suing Defense Secretary Robert Gates, former Joint Chief of Staff Richard Myers, and a slew of other Bush administration officials.
Hamad alleges that he was arrested in his apartment in Pakistan in July 2002, rendered to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan for three months, where he says he was tortured, and then transferred to Guantanamo, where he allegedly endured further torture at the hands of US military personnel.
At Bagram, according to Hamad's lawsuit, dogs were set upon [him] while watching United States military personnel laughed and mocked him." Moreover, he was forced to stand for three days without "sleep or food" and eventually collapsed. He was then sent to a hospital where it took him two weeks to recover.
"Mr. Hamad was not given notice of the basis for his detention until more than two years after first being detained, when a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) was convened in November 2004," according to the lawsuit, filed in US District Court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle earlier this week. "Not until March 2005, nearly three full years after initially being detained, was Mr. Hamad officially labeled an 'enemy Combatant' by the flawed CSRT process," according to the lawsuit.
"However, this determination drew a rare dissenting opinion that acknowledged his enemy combatant status determination was unwarranted and, as such, would have 'unconscionable results,'" the lawsuit states. "The basis for Mr. Hamad's enemy combatant determination was simply because of his association as an employee of two organizations for whom he had done humanitarian and charity work (one of which he had left years before), and nothing more.
"In fact, a second CSRT was ordered for Mr. Hamad in November of 2007, one month before he was ultimately released to the Sudan. This was unusual, and indicates that the government recognized that the initial CSRT determination of Mr. Hamad was not accurate."
Wilkerson said he "made a personal choice to come forward and discuss the abuses thatoccurred because knowledge that I served in an Administration that tortured and abused those it detained at the facilities at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere and indefinitely detained the innocent for political reasons has marked a low point in my professional career and I wish to make the record clear on what occurred."
"I am also extremely concerned that the Armed Forces of the United States, where I spent 31 years of my professional life, were deeply involved in these tragic mistakes. I am willing to testify in person regarding the content of this declaration, should that be necessary," he added.
Wilkerson said people like Hamad, who was clearly innocent of the charges leveled against him, were of little concern to Cheney.
The Office of Vice President Dick Cheney "had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees were innocent, or that there was a lack of any useable evidence for the great majority of them," Wilkerson said in the 9-page declaration. Cheney's position, Wilkerson asserted, "could be summed up as 'the end justifies the means.'"
Cheney, and his daughter Liz, have been vocal critics of President Obama's efforts to shut down Guantanamo. Obama signed an executive order immediately after he was sworn into office and set a one-year deadline to close the facility. But he missed the date, due in part, to Congress' refusal to earmark funds that would have allowed the administration to close the prison and move some detainees to a supermax prison in Illinois.
Cheney said last year that the only alternative the Bush administration had to setting up Guantanamo was to kill the prisoners detained there.
"If you don't have a place where you can hold these people, the only other option is to kill them, and we don't operate that way," Cheney said.
It is not news that the majority of the more than 700 prisoners who have been detained at Guantanamo were innocent of the crimes for which they were accused of. In February of 2006, the National Journal reviewed the case files of 132 prisoners who filed habeas corpus petitions and reviewed the redacted CSRT transcripts of 314 others and concluded that "most of the 'enemy combatants' held at Guantanamo… are simply not the worst of the worst of the terrorist world" as Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush had claimed.
"Many of them are not accused of hostilities against the United States or its allies," according to an investigative report published by the National Journal. "Most, when captured, were innocent of any terrorist activity, were Taliban foot soldiers at worst, and were often far less than that. And some, perhaps many, are guilty only of being foreigners in Afghanistan or Pakistan at the wrong time. And much of the evidence — even the classified evidence — gathered by the Defense Department against these men is flimsy, second-, third-, fourth- or 12th-hand. It's based largely on admissions by the detainees themselves or on coerced, or worse, interrogations of their fellow inmates, some of whom have been proved to be liars."
The Journal noted that a common thread among many of the detainees is that a majority of them "were not caught by American soldiers on the battlefield. They came into American custody from third parties, mostly from Pakistan, some after targeted raids there, most after a dragnet for Arabs after 9/11."
That's a point Wilkerson made in his declaration and said it likely applied to Hamad's case as well.
"With respect to the assertions by Mr. Hamad that he was wrongfully seized and detained, it became apparent to me as early as August 2002, and probably earlier to other State Department personnel who were focused on these issues, that many of the prisoners detained at Guantanamo had been taken into custody without regard to whether they were truly enemy combatants, or in fact whether many of them were enemies at all," Wilkerson said in his declaration. "I soon realized from my conversations with military colleagues as well as foreign service officers in the field that many of the detainees were, in fact, victims of incompetent battlefield vetting.
"There was no meaningful way to determine whether they were terrorists, Taliban, or simply innocent civilians picked up on a very confused battlefield or in the territory of another state such as Pakistan. The vetting problem, in my opinion, was directly related to the initial decision not to send sufficient regular army troops at the outset of the war in Afghanistan, and instead, to rely on the forces of the Northern Alliance and the extremely few US Special Operations Forces (SOF) who did not have the necessary training or personnel to deal with battlefield detention questions or even the inclination to want to deal with the issue.
"A related problem with the initial detention was that predominantly US forces were not the ones who were taking the prisoners in the first place. Instead, we relied upon Afghans, such as General [Abdul Rashid] Dostums forces, and upon Pakistanis, to hand over prisoners whom they had apprehended, or who had been turned over to them for bounties, sometimes as much as $5,000 per head.
"Such practices meant that the likelihood was high that some of the Guantanamo detainees had been turned in to US forces in order to settle local scores, for tribal reasons, or just as a method of making money. I recall conversations with serving military officers at the time, who told me that many detainees were turned over for the wrong reasons, particularly for bounties and other incentives."
Wilkerson said that he discussed the Guantanamo detainees issue with Powell and, based on those discussions, Wilkerson discovered that "President Bush was involved in all of the Guantanamo decision-making."
"My own view is that it was easy for Vice President Cheney to run circles around President Bush bureaucratically because Cheney had the network within the government to do so," Wilkerson said. "Moreover, by exploiting what Secretary Powell called the president's 'cowboy instincts,' Vice President Cheney could more often than not gain the President's acquiescence."
Wilkerson said issues revolving around efforts to repatriate individuals wrongfully detained at Guantanamo came up during the morning briefings chaired by Powell that he and about 50 to 55 senior State Department officials attended beginning in August 2002 after the prison facility was opened.
"At the briefing, Secretary Powell would question Ambassador Pierre Prosper (Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes), Cofer Black (Coordinator for Counter Terrorism), and Beth Jones (Assistant Secretary for Eurasia), or other senior personnel for information about specific progress in negotiating detainee releases," Wilkerson said. "A number of these conversations arose because Secretary Powell received frequent phone calls from British Foreign Minister Jack Straw, who had consulted with Secretary Powell frequently about repatriating the British Guantánamo detainees …
"I also know that several other foreign ministers spoke with Secretary Powell urging him to repatriate their countries' citizens. During these morning briefings, Secretary Powell would express frustration that more progress had not been made with detainee releases."
During one particular meeting, Wilkerson said, Ambassador Prosper, the point person on negotiating the transfer of detainees to other countries, "would discuss the difficulty he encountered in dealing with the Department of Defense, and specifically Donald Rumsfeld, who just refused to let detainees go."
That may have played a role in Hamad's habeas case, although as Jim White pointed out in a blog post, the Pentagon appears to have had a policy in place to "justify the long-term detention and interrogation of innocent civilians."
According to the lawsuit, the Pentagon had cleared Hamad for release in November 2005, according to a redacted copy of his clearance decision. But he was not freed from Guantanamo until December 2007. His attorneys said they were notified via email in March 2007 that Hamad was eligible to be sent back home to Sudan and it was during negotiations with the Sudanese government that they discovered he was eligible for release a full two years earlier.
One Response to "Ex Bush Official Willing to Testify Bush, Cheney Knew Gitmo Prisoners Innocent"
I'm not really a driven businessman, but a driven artist. I never take into consideration money. Beautiful things generate profits.
An allowance tells us what we can't buy, nonetheless it doesn't stop us from buying it.


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Gabriel Nderitu is not an aerospace engineer He's an IT professional and self-proclaimed innovator, who built his own airplane from scratch. If the plane flies, he'll be the first in his country to successfully build one.
Nderitu will put the two-seater to the test sometime next week, and he's clearly got some last-minute fixes to make. But his success shouldn't be defined by how high or how long his creation can stay in the air. He's already won just for having the determination to build something of his own—especially something as complex as an airplane.
So best of luck to you, Gabriel Nderitu. For my money, you've already reached some pretty impressive heights. [AfriGadget via The Daily What]


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SSI Cuby offers the highest availability through its intelligent and high-performance system components. The storage shuttle system consists of a rack, at least one lift, and one shuttle per storage level. The system also includes the maintenance platforms (lift, control cabinet, and access platform) as well as the control system and our WAMAS® logistics software.
By tailoring the lift and shuttle performance to the conveying systems in the warehouse area and the connected goods-to-person work stations, the system provides a highly attractive solution for a broad spectrum of applications in diverse industries.
The system components are perfectly coordinated and guarantee the combination of high-efficiency with maximum reliability. At the same time, you retain the complete freedom to configure the racking system layout to your requirements. The system components enable you to flexibly expand the facility to as many as 42 storage levels.


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National Geographic The Price Of Precious
The minerals in our electronic devices have bankrolled unspeakable violence in the Congo.
by Jeffrey Gettleman. He is the East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times.
The first child soldier pops out of the bush clutching an AK-47 assault rifle in one hand and a handful of fresh marijuana buds in the other. The kid, probably 14 or 15, has this big, goofy, mischievous grin on his face, like he's just stolen something—which he probably has—and he's wearing a ladies' wig with fake braids dangling down to his shoulders. Within seconds his posse materializes from the thick, green leaves all around us, about ten other heavily armed youngsters dressed in ratty camouflage and filthy T-shirts, dropping down from the sides of the jungle and blocking the red dirt road in front of us. Our little Toyota truck is suddenly swarmed and immobilized by a four-and-a-half-foot-tall army.
This is on the road to Bavi, a rebel-controlled gold mine on the Democratic Republic of the Congo's wild eastern edge. Congo is sub-Saharan Africa's largest country and one of its richest on paper, with an embarrassment of diamonds, gold, cobalt, copper, tin, tantalum, you name it—trillions' worth of natural resources. But because of never ending war, it is one of the poorest and most traumatized nations in the world. It doesn't make any sense, until you understand that militia-controlled mines in eastern Congo have been feeding raw materials into the world's biggest electronics and jewelry companies and at the same time feeding chaos. Turns out your laptop—or camera or gaming system or gold necklace—may have a smidgen of Congo's pain somewhere in it.
The mine in the Bavi area is a perfect example. It's controlled by a potbellied warlord called Cobra Matata, though "controlled" may be a strong word. There are no discernible front lines out here marking where government rule definitively ends and Cobra's territory definitively begins, no opposing troops hunkered down in trenches or foxholes eyeballing each other through their scopes. Instead there are just messy, blurry degrees of influence, often very marginal influence, with a few Congolese government guys lounging under a mango tree in one place, and maybe two miles down the road a few of Cobra's child soldiers smoking pot, and nothing in between but big, vacant, sparkling green wilderness.
"Sigara! Sigara!" the child soldiers yell, seeking cigarettes. Photographer Marcus Bleasdale and I quickly push fistfuls of Sportsmans, a local brand, out the window, and they are instantaneously gobbled up by feverish little hands. That seems to do the trick, along with a few thousand crumpled Congolese francs, worth less than five bucks, and then we're on our way again, rumbling down an excruciatingly bumpy dirt road, past thatched-roof villages and banana trees. In the distance giant mountains nose the sky.
When we get to Bavi, we sit down with the village elders and talk gold. The world gold price has quadrupled over the past ten years, but there's no sign of development or newfound prosperity out here. Bavi has the same broken-down feel of any other village in eastern Congo: a clump of round huts hunched by the road, a market where the shops are made of sticks, shopkeepers torpidly selling heaps of secondhand clothes, and glassy-eyed men reeking of home brew stumbling down the dirt footpaths. There's no electricity or running water, and the elders say they need medicine and books for the school. The kids are barefoot, their bellies pushed out like balloons from malnutrition or worms or both.
"We're broke," says Juma Mafu, one of the elders. "We've got a lot of gold but no machines to get it out. Our diggers use their hands. No big companies are ever going to come here unless we have peace." Which they clearly don't.
The birds are chirping, and the afternoon sun is slanting behind us as we walk down the hill toward the gold mine. First stop is to say hello to the "minister of mines," who is at a pub in the market, sitting Buddha-like with his eyes half closed behind a forest of freshly polished-off Primus beer bottles. He is an enormous man and wears a cheap, silvery blazer stretched awkwardly over the thick rolls of fat on his back.
"Hujambo, mzee," I say, giving him a respectful Swahili greeting.
He burps—loudly. I tell him we're journalists and we'd like to see the gold mine.
He laughs a nasty little laugh and then says, "How do I know you're journalists? Maybe you're spies." The word "spies" shoots through the market like a spark, igniting a crowd of people, who suddenly flock around us. A one-eyed child soldier glares at us menacingly and fingers his gun. Another young man abruptly announces that he works for the Congolese government intelligence service and wants to see our documents.
Time to leave, I think. Time to leave, right now. As casually as I can manage at this point, though my voice is beginning to crack, I say, "Fine ... uh ... no problem. Then we'll just ... um ... go home."
But the minister of mines shakes his fat head. "No, no, you won't. You're under arrest."
"For what?" I ask, my throat parched.
"For being in a zone rouge."
Isn't most of eastern Congo a red zone, controlled by armed groups? I think. But I don't say anything, because the next minute we're marched into a car for a five-hour drive to the larger town of Bunia, where we will be held at gunpoint and interrogated in a dark, little house with mysterious stains on the floor.
The story of Congo is this: The government in Kinshasa, the capital, is weak and corrupt, leaving this vast nation rotten at its core. The remote east has plunged straight into anarchy, carved up by a hodgepodge of rebel groups that help bankroll their brutality with stolen minerals. The government army is often just as sticky fingered and wicked. Few people in recent memory have suffered as long, and on such a horrifying scale, as the Congolese. Where else are men, women, and children slaughtered by the hundreds, year after year, sometimes so deep in the jungle that it takes weeks for the truth to come out? Where else are hundreds of thousands of women raped and just about nobody punished?
To appreciate how Congo descended into this madness, you need to step back more than a hundred years to when King Leopold II of Belgium snatched this huge space in the middle of Africa as his own personal colony. Leopold wanted rubber and ivory, and he started the voracious wholesale assault on Congo's resources that has dragged on to this day. When the Belgians abruptly granted Congo independence in 1960, insurrections erupted immediately, paving the way for an ambitious young military man, Mobutu Sese Seko, to seize power—and never let go. Mobutu ruled for 32 years, stuffing himself with fresh Parisian cake airlifted into his jungle palaces while Congolese children curled up and starved.
But Mobutu would eventually go down, and when he did, Congo would go down with him. In 1994 Rwanda, next door, imploded in genocide, leaving up to a million dead. Many of the killers fled into eastern Congo, which became a base for destabilizing Rwanda. So Rwanda teamed up with neighboring Uganda and invaded Congo, ousting Mobutu in 1997 and installing their own proxy, Laurent Kabila. They soon grew annoyed with him and invaded again. That second phase of Congo's war sucked in Chad, Namibia, Angola, Burundi, Sudan, and Zimbabwe—it's often called Africa's first world war.
In the ensuing free-for-all, foreign troops and rebel groups seized hundreds of mines. It was like giving an ATM card to a drugged-out kid with a gun. The rebels funded their brutality with diamonds, gold, tin, and tantalum, a hard, gray, corrosion-resistant element used to make electronics. Eastern Congo produces 20 to 50 percent of the world's tantalum.
Under intense international pressure in the early 2000s, the foreign armies officially withdrew, leaving Congo in ruins. Bridges, roads, houses, schools, and entire families had been destroyed. As many as five million Congolese had died. Peace conferences were hosted, but cordial meetings in fancy hotels didn't alter the ugly facts on the ground. The United Nations sent in thousands of military peacekeepers—there are around 17,000 today—but the blood continued to flow. Donor nations sank $500 million into an election in 2006—Congo's first truly inclusive one—but that didn't change things either.
Congo's east remained a battle zone. Ugandans, Rwandans, and Burundians kept sneaking across the borders to sponsor various rebel outfits, which kept using minerals to buy more weapons and pay more rebels, like the wig-wearing Cobra Matata boys. Despite the international outcry, no one knew exactly what to do.
Sometime around 2008 a critical mass of human rights groups and American lawmakers started asking a crucial question: What about the minerals? What if Congo's mineral trade could be cleaned up and the rebel ATM shut down? A "blood diamonds" campaign in the late 1990s had exposed how the West African diamond trade was funding rebellions on that side of Africa. What about a similar conflict-minerals campaign for Congo?
On July 21, 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank financial-reform bill, an 848-page behemoth that included a special section on conflict minerals. The law called for publicly listed American companies to disclose whether any of their products included minerals from mines controlled by armed groups in or around Congo. Though Dodd-Frank did not explicitly ban corporations from using Congo's conflict minerals, it made big companies worry about being linked with what is arguably the world's worst humanitarian disaster.
Even before the legislation was enacted, some leading electronics companies such as Intel, Motorola, and HP had begun tracking the minerals used in their products. Since the law went into effect, many other companies, but not all, have also made progress auditing their supply chains, according to the Enough Project, an American nonprofit that ranks major company efforts to create a clean minerals trade.
Chuck Mulloy of Intel concedes that complying with the new regulations eats into profits (he won't estimate how much), but "we don't want to support people who are raping, pillaging, and killing. It's as simple as that." By the end of 2012 Intel's microprocessors were conflict free for tantalum, though the company cannot guarantee that a dash of other conflict minerals, like gold, tin, or tungsten, hasn't made it into their microchips.
One of the criticisms of Dodd-Frank was that it might prompt electronics companies to simply boycott all minerals from Congo, which would inadvertently hurt local miners' livelihoods. And this did happen, at least at first. Multinationals stopped buying tin and tantalum ore from smelters unable to prove that their minerals did not fund conflict. And in September 2010 the Congolese government issued a six-month ban on all mining and trading activities in the east—devastating thousands of miners.
But then the first green shoots of a reformed mining trade began to emerge. Congolese authorities started inspecting mines. The army kicked out the militias and rogue soldiers and sent in newly trained mining police to monitor the sites. Armed groups that were trading in tin, tantalum, and tungsten saw their profits drop by 65 percent. Congo's mines were starting to clean up.
We visited one "green," or conflict-free, mine, in Nyabibwe, a mining center that stretches for miles in a valley not far from Lake Kivu. The mountainside was crawling with young, hulking men wearing rags and headlamps, hammering, digging, shoveling, scooping, scraping, and hauling away every possible speck of yellowish cassiterite rock, or tin ore. Their cheeks bulged with chunks of sugarcane for energy. It was an antlike army expending millions of calories and gallons of sweat to feed a vast and distant global industry. None of the men knew much about Dodd-Frank, and when asked about the regulations, most grumbled that the price of cassiterite was still too low.
In Nyabibwe all of the easy-to-reach cassiterite was dug up long ago, so today's miners must bore deep into the mountain, using only hammers and shovels. Inside one tunnel, named Maternity, the mother tunnel, the walls were moist and slimy and narrower at each step. In the thick darkness there was no sense of up or down, just the drip, drip, drip of water and the faint sound of men singing from deep in the bowels of the Earth.
The miners lug the sacks of cassiterite out of the tunnels on their backs and drag them down to a little hut at the bottom of the mountain, where clerks weigh them, record the numbers in a big book, and affix a plastic bar-code tag indicating that this cassiterite is conflict free. Then onward by motorbike or pickup to Bukavu, the main town, to be loaded onto tractor trailers bound for Rwanda and then to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, a big port on the Indian Ocean. The cassiterite ends up in Malaysia, where it is smelted at more than 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit and then sold to electronics companies.
The Nyabibwe mine used to be run by Congolese soldiers. But in 2011 the government ordered the military out. Since then, reports indicate that military-led smuggling may still be going on at the mine. But when we were there, in January of this year, we didn't see any soldiers, militiamen, or child laborers. The record books looked pretty clean. Nyabibwe seemed like progress.
The problem is that there are still too few clean mines. Only about 10 percent of mines in the east—55 in total—have been deemed conflict free. Although most tin, tantalum, and tungsten mines have been demilitarized, gold mines remain largely in army or rebel hands. Government officials collude secretly with rebel chiefs like Cobra Matata to make money, as we learned when we tried to get to the Bavi gold mine.
After our arrest, soldiers interrogated us in the small, dark house in Bunia for hours: "Who took you to Bavi? What was the purpose of your trip? Where did you go?" they shouted.
We were confused. We knew Bavi was rebel controlled. We'd seen all those rebel child soldiers there with our own eyes. So why did a government intelligence officer have us arrested? Wasn't the government supposed to be fighting the rebels? When we were released, security agents tailed us and slept in a car outside our hotel.
"You stumbled into a game," explained a United Nations official with years of experience in Congo. "They are all sharing the illegal spoils. It's a scramble. It's grab as much as you can."
He pointed to the recent scandal of Gen. Gabriel Amisi, Congo's land-forces commander, who was suspended after UN investigators revealed that he was covertly arming brutal rebel groups, selling them weapons and ammunition that helped them poach elephants for ivory. All this while he was ostensibly fighting the same rebels. A game indeed. A double game.
"The government is crumbling, and everybody is trying to do a deal and cut Kinshasa out," the UN official said. "Those guys in Bavi didn't want you seeing what they were up to."
When we asked him what it would take to fix Congo, he looked down at his polished shoes for a long time. "There's no easy solution," he said. "And I'm not even sure there is any solution."
The next day we flew out of Bunia in a small prop plane. Below us, the banana trees faded into dark green swirls and the thatched-roof villages turned into tiny brown dots as we crossed over the same beautifully sculpted mountains where all that treasure lay buried.


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Portales Woman's Club
Portales Woman's Club met Dec. 9th with Second Vice President Beth Davis presiding. The Collect and pledges were led by Sheryl Borden and Julie Nickles gave the invocation.
The minutes from the November meeting were approved and the treasurer's report was filed. A thank you letter was read from Mayor Sharon King for the club's participation in the lighting of the Blessing Tree, and a Christmas card was read from the City of Portales.
Gaynelle Thomas presented a donation of socks to the Hartley House. Lois Crozier made a special presentation in honor of Jane Mauk Hilliard, whose picture will hang in the club building.
The board approved providing cookies for the Santa Cop distribution on Dec. 17.
Following the close of the business meeting, Jan Smartnick introduced Franklin Smith, director of the Portales High School Choir, whose members sang Christmas carols.
The next meeting will be on Jan. 11.
— Submitted by
Sheryl Borden Beta Phi
Seven members and one guest attended the annual Beta Phi meeting Dec. 7 at Church of God on Lea St. Bev Miller was the hostess. We voted to send a donation to Make a Wish in Clovis.
We had sandwiches, bean dip, salsa, cantaloupe, water melon, strawberries and drinks.
College Baldwin, Sandy Friday, Laura Loflin, Patsy Lorenz, Bev Miller, Suzy Moore, Rebecca Rael and Rachel Wallace were in attendance.
— Submitted by Bev Miller
Encanto Garden Club
Encanto Garden Club's annual Christmas brunch was held recently in the home of Jacque Wuest. After a brief business meeting the group enjoyed an array of holiday foods.
President Helen Martinez introduced the members to some new and entertaining Christmas games.
The group departed Jacque's beautifully decorated home after gifts were exchanged and the blessings of Christmas were expressed.
— Submitted by B. Voges


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According to an internal AppleCare document, Apple is actively investigating a series of WiFi-related issues affecting the third-generation iPad. Since the new iPad's launch, many users have been complaining about third-generation iPad WiFi issues ranging from connection drops, slow download and upload speeds, or the device's inability to even pickup local WiFi networks. A thread discussing the issue exists on Apple's online support forums has almost amassed 700 replies from users with similar issues. Here are some examples from the forum thread:
I am in a hotel with my laptop and new ipad3. The laptop wifi reception is as strong as it gets, but the iPad only registers a weak signal. Anyone else having similar problems? Any suggestions?
It has absolutely nothing to do with routers. I am right next to my wife, to whom I gave my iPad 1: she has full bars and I have 1-2. FYI: on Speedtest near the router I get over 10 mb downloads; 20 feet away I get .2 mb downloads. That's ridiculous.
Same problem; same issue. Mine with University's wifi or my home wifi (Airport Express). Original iPad maintains a strong connection right next to new iPad, which doesn't.
Besides the supposed third-generation iPad charging and overheating issues, the iPad WiFi issues were noted by the media during the past couple of weeks. Apple has taken notice and has admitted internally to some new iPad models having the WiFi issues described in numerous reports and on forum threads. The company says "symptoms can include, but are not limited to: intermittent connectivity, slow WiFi speeds, and WiFi network not seen." Apple tells AppleCare employees to ensure that devices they test are not facing these issues due to normal software bugs, but instead because of the actual hardware components.
WiFi-only third-generation iPads are the only devices affected by these issues, according to Apple. The 4G LTE models are presumably safe from these issues due to the extra network power allowed by the black rubber cut on the top of the unit.
iPads that are affected by WiFi issues are supposed to be "Captured." According to one source, "Captured" is code for the device to be immediately packed up and shipped to Apple's engineering centers for examination and investigation. Apple employees are instructed to Capture the iPad itself and included accessories (the charging adapter and USB cord). Apple will replace affected units.
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Thanks to some really hard work by our own rsjtdrjgfuzkfg, Nightingale now supports the current/vanilla version of TagLib! For all of our users, this means better ID3 tag support, and a lot fewer problems and bugs with tags and importing your music in general. For our Linux users, this means that Nightingale will automatically build against your distro's TagLib package. If you maintain Nightingale packages, please update them to require TagLib>=1.8 before your next build of sb-trunk-oldxul.
We plan on releasing official builds (a new version) as soon as we get the build process working 100% on Windows and Mac with our new dependencies. Once the transition is complete, you can be sure the next version of Nightingale will be coming your way!
Other Upgrades and News
In other news, the only two dependencies left to convert to use those provided by the host distribution on Linux are SQLite and XULRunner. Both are in progress, and we welcome any help and support you can provide in speeding up the process. This work not only benefits Linux users, but will also provide Windows and Mac users with much more stable, efficient, and fast versions of the dependencies, all making for a better Nightingale.


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Go Wild Activities
01761 463356
01761 463356
News & Events
19 Sept Wild food foray with Adrian Boots
21/22 Sept Dry stone walling with Kevin Toal
16 Oct Wild & untamed flower arranging with Carolyn (Callie) Marks
19 Oct Wild booze with Adrian Boots
27 Oct Fungi foray with Adrian Boots
6 Nov Autumn heart & wreath with Callie Marks
9 Nov Fungi foray with Adrian Boots
4 Dec Christmas wreath with Callie Marks
11 Dec Christmas arrangement with Callie Marks
25 Jan Intro to hedge laying with Kevin Toal
Jan/Feb Orchard management with Les Davies MBE
Mar 20 Tree and woodland planting
2020 Go Wild landscape series talks & walks with Adrian Boots & Les Davies MBE
Private wild food events
Adrian has been busy running Spring wild food events for groups of family & friends, chefs, as well as corporate clients. If you'd like a private event, please contact us for ideas & prices.
We can't promise you'll see these gorgeous English Summer Truffles, found in September, but we will try to find a range of interesting edible fungi and teach you how to identify them and check they are what you think they are!
During our foray you will learn where and how to look for fungi, the various habitats and tree species that are associated with different fungi. You will also learn how to avoid any dangerous fungi.
During the morning we will normally be able to cook up our edible finds and all have a taster to whet your appetite for fabulous fungi!
Please note that open events are unsuitable for young children, but older children are welcome if they have a keen interest.
Go Wild Food foraging with Adrian Boots
Call or email us for a unique and original Gift Voucher.
Information for open events: Pre-booking essential. Children over the age of 12 may attend wild food forays, accompanied by an adult, assuming they have a keen interest. Sorry, no dogs.
Private forays can be arranged, please enquire.
For participants comfort and safety, unfortunately very young children and dogs are not permitted to attend open events. If you have older children or teens with a keen interest in the countryside and wildlife please contact us as limited places for older children may be available.
* Please note that we do not collect fungi or wild food for you to take home during our activities. We do not provide any commercial foraging services or supplies.
Why not book a private event with Adrian or the team? Here are some ideas from past groups:
Coming Of Age / Teenage birthday
A 'coming of age' for a 16 year old, with 11 of his friends, and family members. The event involved a late afternoon start with a walk to a woodland camp area, setting up camp, fire-lighting and safe fire management, food preparation and dinner, story telling around the fire, bush craft skills, sleeping out under the stars, breakfast cooked over the camp fire, and back to reality, older and wiser! This event worked really well, both male and female friends were invited, as well as relatives including an older brother, cousin and uncle present. We had 2 instructors present at all times. It was a fantastic experience, which this young man chose himself to repeat again for his 17th birthday last year!
Family Fun Birthday Celebration
A family birthday celebration for dad aged 50, and his daughter, aged 30. A fun half day consisting of a wild food & natural history walk on Burrington Ham, a fire-lighting challenge and bush-bow archery competition. Pub lunch arranged to follow.
Parents & Children
Family gatherings for adults with their children, all ages, short sessions with foraging, bannock making for the kids, and a chance to get back to nature with your children!
Past Events
Terry & Mason's Great Food Trip, BBC 2
Adrian was featured on this popular TV programme, cooking 'Mendip Wallfish' (aka snails in cider!) for Terry Wogan in Vicar's Close in Wells.
Tree Pollarding Course at Shapwick for Avalon Marshes Project
This day was spent learning about the history, ecology, and practical uses of willow and pollarding. We discussed the importance of these trees in the unique and historical landscape of the Somerset Levels.
Hedgerow Heritage Course near Glastonbury
Another successful training day for Avalon Marshes volunteers on the history, mystery, myth and magic of hedgerows in our landscape. Including archaeology, ecology and cultural significance of our much loved English hedgerows.
Avalon Marshes Wild food foray
We had another fantastic morning organised by the Avalon Marshes Project on behalf of Natural England, Somerset Wildlife Trust and funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund on the Shapwick Heath National Nature Reserve. We followed the route of the ancient Sweet Track, looking for autumn/winter wild foods in a wetland environment. We found many things including Greater Reed Mace, Sorrel, and my favourite plant of the moment Bog Myrtle, also known as Sweet Gale which was historically used in the making of beer. We found a few edible mushroom species including Wood Blewitt, Puffball and Purple Brittlegill.
Autumn Fungi Foray 2014
We set off on a clear morning, and a great time was had by all. We found some great edible examples including Amethyst Deceiver, Common Yellow Brittlegill, Stump Puffball, Wood Blewitt and Ceps. Congratulations to Oliver, one of the participants who spotted the best Cep of the Year! Adrian then got out the camping stove and fried up the best examples for everyone to have a taste! There's nothing quite like the smell of mushrooms gently frying in the woods...
For future info: Our forays provide an educational experience so that individuals may gain a deeper understanding of the countryside, our environment and landscape history. During the activity, you will learn about the various habitats in which wild food can be found, and how to identify a selection of wild foods / fungi. We will pick & also taste small quantities of common wild food / fungi (subject to availability).
Wild Food & Foraging Talk & Walk for Avalon Marshes Project
A morning talk and afternoon walk designed to give volunteers skills, knowledge and experience in identifying wild food. The purpose of the training is that volunteers are able to provide an enriched experience to members of the public visiting the Avalon Marshes Project. The volunteers were enthusiastic and motivated, and soon got used to spotting edible wild foods!
Hedgerow Heritage Talk & Walk for Avalon Marshes Project
A training day for Avalon Marshes volunteers on the history, mystery, myth and magic of hedgerows in our landscape. Including history, archaeology, ecology and cultural significance of our much loved English hedgerows.
Wells Food Festival 2014
Thanks to everyone who came along to the talk & wild food forage at the Wells Food Festival, particularly the very enthusiastic youngsters.
Private Fungi Forays
We have had fun with lots of families & groups arranging private forays. In particular, a great time was had celebrating Ruth's birthday with family, friends and fungi! The rain didn't dampen anyone's spirits and we had an amazing haul with just enough time to try a delicious bolete cooked on a tiny camp stove, which inspired everyone to take the rest home to try later!
Autumn Fungi Foray 2013
We had a superb day on the Mendips finding many edible species in a variety of habitats.
The first woodland we visited was dominated by pine trees where we found many examples of Common Yellow Brittlegill (Russula ochrluca) mildly peppery, Stump Puffball (Lycoperdon pyriforme) and Common Puffball (Lycoperdon perlatum) which have a lovely soft white interior and quite a strong smell. Then the discovery of a stunningly vast ring of Wood Blewitts (Lepista nuda) with their bright purple/lilac colour, created much excitement within the group.
Moving on to deciduous woods, mainly consisting of beech we found Hedgehog Mushroom (Hydnum repandum). Strikingly different looking with an irregularly shaped cap the texture of chamois leather with neither gills or pores but 'spines', a clue is in the name. Heading up to some spruce woodland we found two large Ceps (Boletus edulis) hiding under a low slung spruce bough. What a find! Massive brown caps, like a hot cross bun (without the cross), thick swollen stems with fine white tubes or pores. These two would feed an army and that's pretty much what we did. I removed a small gas stove, pan, oil, seasoning and cooking utensils from my bag and proceeded to cook up our finds. The aroma of fried mushrooms on this cool Autumn day was truly otherworldly.
So who's up for the title of Woodland King? Well, it's down to the two best finds of the day, both woodland species and both delicious. It's a flavour match between the Cep, our reigning champion, and the Wood Blewitt contender. Unanimously the group preferred the Wood Blewitts, regardless of my culinary skills, so we can officially crown them 'Woodland King'. Hurray! So as dusk settled we ended the day at the pub (of course!) with a pint and an ID session of our finds.


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Goldman Sachs explains: social impact bonds are socially bankrupt
Have you ever heard of a social impact bond? It's a kooky financial instrument – a bond that "pays off" when some socially desirable outcome is reached.
The idea is that people with money put that money to some "positive" purpose, and if it works out they get their money back with a bonus for a job well done. It's meant to incentivize socially positive change in the market. Instead of only caring about profit, the reasoning goes, social impact bonds will give rich people and companies a reason to care about healthy communities.
So, for example, New York City issued a social impact bond in 2012 around recidivism for jails. Recidivism, which is the tendency for people to return to prison, has to go down for the bond to pay off. So Goldman Sachs made a bet that they could lower the recidivism rate for certain jails in the NYC area.
Or who knows, maybe they sold that bond three times over to their clients, and they are left short the bond. Maybe they are actually, internally, making a bet that more people are going to jail in the future. That's the thing about financial instruments, they are flexible little doodads.
Also, and here's a crucial element to look for when you hear about social impact bonds: the city of New York didn't actually put up an money to issue the bonds. That was done instead by Goldman Sachs and MDRC, a local nonprofit. However, NYC might be on the hook if recidivism rates actually go down. On the other hand fewer people would be in jail in that case, so maybe the numbers would work out overall, I'm not sure. Theoretically, in that best case scenario, the city would also have the knowledge of how to reduce recidivism rates, so they'd be happy for that as well.
Which is how we get to the underlying goal of the social impact bond: namely, looking for privately financed "solutions" to social problems. The reasoning is that governments are inefficient and cannot be expected to solve deep problems associated to jails or homelessness, but private companies and possibly innovative non-profits might have the answers.
As another example, there's a Massachusetts anti-homelessness social impact bond initiative, set up in 2014 with $1 million in philanthropic funding and $2.5 million in private capital investments, with the following description: "the investors assume project risk by financing services up front with the promise of Commonwealth repayment only in the event of success".
There are actually a ton of examples. This is the new, hot way to create social experiments. Take a look here for an incomplete list. It's international, as well; it's done mostly in the US and the UK, but New Zealand is throwing its hat into the ring as well.
It's a good idea to try things out and see what works for the big problems like homelessness and recidivism. That's not up for debate. However, it's not clear that social impact bonds are the best approach to this. There's a real danger that it's going end up being a lot like the charter school movement: they juice their numbers by weeding out problematic students, they are unaccountable, and even when they tout success their "solutions" don't scale.
Here's a big red flag on the whole social impact bond parade: Goldman Sachs was caught rigging the definition of success for a social impact bond in Utah. It revolved around a preschool program that was supposed to keep kids out of special ed. Again, it was hailed by the Utah Governor as "a model for a new way of financing public projects." But when enormous success was claimed, it seemed like the books had been cooked.
Basically, Goldman Sachs got paid back, and rewarded, if enough kids who were expected to go into special ed actually didn't. But the problems started with how find the kids "expected to go into special ed."
Namely, they administered a test known as the PPVT, and if the kid got a score lower than 70, they were deemed "headed to special ed." But the test was administered in English, when up to half of the preschoolers didn't speak English at home. And also, the PPVT was never meant to measure kids for special ed needs in the first place. In fact, it's a vocabulary test. Kids are shown a picture and a word or two of description – in English – is spoken, and the kid is supposed to say the number of the picture associated with the description. Here's a sample:
Lo and behold, after a couple of years where the kids learned English, most of them headed to normal classrooms, and Goldman Sachs got paid back. From the article:
From 2006 to 2009, 30 to 40 percent of the children in the preschool program scored below 70 on the P.P.V.T., even though typically just 3 percent of 4-year-olds score this low. Almost none of the children ended up needing special education.
Let's take a step back. We're asking for help from private finance companies to solve big hard societal problems, and we're putting huge money on the line. There's a problem with this approach. We asking for gaming such as the above. We should expect to see more of it.
Worst case scenario: financiers are betting against the "socially beneficial" outcomes. It's possible, we saw it happen in the housing crisis. From their perspective, it doesn't make sense to have a market where you can't bet against something, and if they think the chances of a positive outcome are overblown, they'd be stupid not to. And of course, if they can influence the result directly, then why not. It could get ugly.
Here's my hope: that we soon realize that engaging like this doesn't solve any problems, and moreover it wastes time and money. Financial incentives are not compatible with the scientific approach, and basic research depends on money not being directly involved. When private financiers want to get involved in this stuff, it's because they can profit off of it, not because they want to help.
November 9, 2015 at 7:06 am
Hey kiddies, can you spell "i-r-r-a-t-i-o-n-a-l e-x-u-b-e-r-a-n-c-e"?
(I do give the financial marketeers credit for unbounded creativity.)
November 9, 2015 at 9:22 am
My (limited, imperfect) understanding of the Utah bond is slightly different to yours. The school district used the PPVT as its proxy for "at risk of going into special education". The proxy was imperfect, in that a relatively small percentage of the kids identified as "at risk" actually went into special education. Goldman agreed to use the school district's definition of "at risk", with the knowledge that the mismatch between the proxy and the outcome weighted the odds of success in its favour, which to me sounds different to, "it rigged the definition of success".
November 10, 2015 at 4:41 am
Unfortunately, the class of "social impact" financing structures seems so broad that the term is practically meaningless. Similar to financial derivatives, some could be useful, some could be benign, some could be harmful, most could be any of these depending on the context.
If there are any helpful generalities, however, it seems to be in two areas:
(1) Government financial commitments contingent on the behavior of some third party.
This is how the GS/MDRC deal was described.
This is generally an unwise structure. From the perspective of origination governance, it seems that the government authorizers are often much more lax about this structure than if there were a more central to the deal. I think the extra layer of complexity is a problem, possibly people intuitively assume their organization can't/shouldn't be on the hook for someone else's actions, or some variant of I'll-be-gone-you'll-be-gone syndrome.
(2) interventions are only weakly causal of the outcomes we desire
While we may have good ideas, deep problems generally come from a system of interacting factors and need to be addressed by a similarly comprehensive collection of interventions. Crediting or blaming one intervention for an outcome is popular, since most of us have a strong illusion of control and causation. The mild risk is that we over-reward for actions that weren't really valuable. The larger risk is that, through the game-like incentives, providers are encouraged to find or create opportunities that are stacked in their favor. Like the GS in Utah example ….
November 10, 2015 at 6:22 am


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