bad time for a rowboat malfunction

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You don't want police boats pulling up to your house when your husband has just gone to the shop to make sure the sandbags are holding.

Butcher Steven Bateman spotted two bull sharks swimming near his Goodna shop yesterday — one of several reports of a sharks in Goodna's main street.

Ipswich local councillor Paul Tully confirmed it was a bizarre but true story out of Queensland's flood disaster.

"It would have swum several kilometres in from the river, across Evan Marginson Park and the motorway," Cr Tully told The Queensland Times.

"It's definitely a first for Goodna, to have a shark in the main street.

"I know Steve (Bateman) and he wouldn't say he saw a shark unless he really saw one."

The local MP Jo-Ann Miller also said she believed Mr Bateman’s sighting was genuine.

“Steve wouldn’t lie about something like that. He’s very well known in the community," she told The Queensland Times.

Bull sharks are the third most likely shark to attack a human being. They are noted for their aggressive behaviour and often swim in shallow waters along coasts and rivers.

They can tolerate fresh water and have been known travel long distances along rivers.

What a damn drag. I hope that on top of everything else this isn't polluting the ocean like with the L.A. floods, or that the loss of life does not become as epic as in Brazil.

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love, 99
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i have to feel we will love her like we loved lula

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I thought a little bio would be appropriate now.

The world's most powerful woman will start coming into her own next weekend. Stocky and forceful at 63, this former leader of the resistance to a Western-backed military dictatorship (which tortured her) is preparing to take her place as President of Brazil.

As head of state, president Dilma Rousseff would outrank Angela Merkel, Germany's Chancellor, and Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State: her enormous country of 200 million people is revelling in its new oil wealth. Brazil's growth rate, rivalling China's, is one that Europe and Washington can only envy. ...

Ms Rousseff, the daughter of a Bulgarian immigrant to Brazil and his schoolteacher wife, has benefited from being, in effect, the prime minister of the immensely popular President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the former union leader. But, with a record of determination and success (which includes appearing to have conquered lymphatic cancer), this wife, mother and grandmother will be her own woman. ...

Like President Jose Mujica of Uruguay, Brazil's neighbour, Ms Rousseff is unashamed of a past as an urban guerrilla which included battling the generals and spending time in jail as a political prisoner. As a little girl growing up in the provincial city of Belo Horizonte, she says she dreamed successively of becoming a ballerina, a firefighter and a trapeze artist. The nuns at her school took her class to the city's poor area to show them the vast gaps between the middle-class minority and the vast majority of the poor. She remembers that when a young beggar with sad eyes came to her family's door she tore a currency note in half to share with him, not knowing that half a banknote had no value.

Her father, Pedro, died when she was 14, but by then he had introduced her to the novels of Zola and Dostoevski. After that, she and her siblings had to work hard with their mother to make ends meet. By 16 she was in POLOP (Workers' Politics), a group outside the traditional Brazilian Communist Party that sought to bring socialism to those who knew little about it.

The generals seized power in 1964 and decreed a reign of terror to defend what they called "national security". She joined secretive radical groups that saw nothing wrong with taking up arms against an illegitimate military regime. Besides cosseting the rich and crushing trade unions and the underclass, the generals censored the press, forbidding editors from leaving gaps in newspapers to show where news had been suppressed.

Ms Rousseff ended up in the clandestine VAR-Palmares (Palmares Armed Revolutionary Vanguard). In the 1960s and 1970s, members of such organisations seized foreign diplomats for ransom: a US ambassador was swapped for a dozen political prisoners; a German ambassador was exchanged for 40 militants; a Swiss envoy swapped for 70. They also shot foreign torture experts sent to train the generals' death squads. Though she says she never used weapons, she was eventually rounded up and tortured by the secret police in Brazil's equivalent to Abu Ghraib, the Tiradentes prison in Sao Paulo. She was given a 25-month sentence for "subversion" and freed after three years. Today she openly confesses to having "wanted to change the world".

In 1973 she moved to the prosperous southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, where her second husband, Carlos Araujo, a lawyer, was finishing a four-year term as a political prisoner (her first marriage with a young left-winger, Claudio Galeno, had not survived the strains of two people being on the run in different cities). She went back to university, started working for the state government in 1975, and had a daughter, Paula.

In 1986, she was named finance chief of Porto Alegre, the state capital, where her political talents began to blossom. Yet the 1990s were bitter-sweet years for her. In 1993 she was named secretary of energy for the state, and pulled off the coup of vastly increasing power production, ensuring the state was spared the power cuts that plagued the rest of the country.

She had 1,000km of new electric power lines, new dams and thermal power stations built while persuading citizens to switch off the lights whenever they could. Her political star started shining brightly. But in 1994, after 24 years together, she separated from Mr Araujo, though apparently on good terms. At the same time she was torn between academic life and politics, but her attempt to gain a doctorate in social sciences failed in 1998.

In 2000 she threw her lot in with Lula and his Partido dos Trabalhadores, or Workers' Party which set its sights successfully on combining economic growth with an attack on poverty. The two immediately hit it off and she became his first energy minister in 2003. Two years later he made her his chief of staff and has since backed her as his successor. She has been by his side as Brazil has found vast new offshore oil deposits, aiding a leader whom many in the European and US media were denouncing a decade ago as a extreme left-wing wrecker to pull 24 million Brazilians out of poverty. Lula stood by her in April last year as she was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, a condition that was declared under control a year ago. Recent reports of financial irregularities among her staff do not seem to have damaged her popularity.

Ms Rousseff is likely to invite President Mujica of Uruguay to her inauguration in the New Year. President Evo Morales of Bolivia, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and President Fernando Lugo of Paraguay—other successful South American leaders who have, like her, weathered merciless campaigns of denigration in the Western media—are also sure to be there. It will be a celebration of political decency—and feminism.

From guerrilla to most powerful woman... not bad.

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love, 99
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seems to me 3 + 1 in that tri-border area is bad math

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Britain's Guardian has definitely stretched the meaning of this cable even more than the Ambassador was stretching the meaning of "terrorism" to have something to report. It came directly on the heels of THIS ONE, wherein it reports a cop "admitting" "in public" that A Muslim who had been arrested in Brazil "on hate crimes-related" charges was "linked to" al-Qa'eda. Ahem.

We MIGHT be talking about ONE guy who in some way seemed to give material support to The Latrine, and, indeed, "KUBISKE" seems well-pleased about this "progress" as it affects the possible enhancement of dividends from the oft-mentioned 3 Plus 1. The 3 is Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. The 1 is the United States. They meet to discuss security and law enforcement in their shared borders area. What is wrong with this picture? WHAT are we doing in such a powwow and DID we impose it on them to begin with? It sounds to me as though we did. It sounds to me as though we are just infiltrating their sovereignty to the greatest extent possible and this global hissy we pitched over terrorists we made up is succeeding in getting our fascists in where they were never allowed before.

That "with us or against us" fist waving thing Dubya did was about you-let-us-into-your-security-mechanisms-or-we-will-fuck-you-up. It worked. Everywhere.

And, now, how many are going to glimpse at that headline and think Brazil is a hotbed of Islamist killers?

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On an unfortunately related note, the CIA Office of Inspector General report on the "Airbridge Denial Program" is out, and is a very big PDF, so if you want to read it, or skim it, I heavily advise you right click THIS to download it. Much easier to use your reader if you want to get a better idea about the ways the United States "partners" with Latin American governments in furtherance of our multifarious wars on awful stuff... terrorism, drugs, human trafficking, DECENCY....

Seems that missionary and her daughter shot down in April of 2001 in Peru were victims of the CIA's bright idea to just shoot down planes they felt were carrying drugs. It was "routine"... and probably still is. Even if they were CERTAIN the planes were carrying drugs, just shooting them down, especially in someone else's country, but really ANYWHERE, is NOT okay, okay? I mean, do you even start to think Rafael Correa is too crabby with our people in Ecuador? I don't. I'm amazed any of them let any of us in for any reason.

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love, 99
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viva lula

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I love him.

Brazil recognizes Palestinian state
The Associated Press
Friday, December 3, 2010; 12:15 PM

SAO PAULO — Brazil says it has recognized the state of Palestine based on borders at the time of Israel's 1967 conquest of the West Bank.

The Foreign Ministry says the recognition is in response to a request made by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas last month to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Silva sent a letter to Abbas on Dec. 1, saying Brazil recognizes Palestine and hopes that the recognition will help lead to states of Israel and Palestine "that will coexist peacefully and in security."

The foreign ministry says that the recognition is "in line with Brazil's historic willingness to contribute to peace between Israel and Palestine."

The announcement was posted Friday on the Foreign Ministry's website.

I love him.

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love, 99
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bottomless, it's bottomless

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Never any respite.

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love, 99
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when a leader has virtue and humanity

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Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is one of the most trusted leaders of all time, and so he is loved, and so he is heeded by everyone.

Consider, if you will, just how natural this is, the lack of effort, the void of deceit, the nonexistence of the concept of spin involved in Brazilian presidential politics, all because a real man, a true human, has led them.

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i was wrong

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I finally found confirmation that Russia and China were working on the draft sanctions proposal with "us" for some weeks. Should have gone to Xinhua first.

Iran has notified the IAEA of its agreements with Brazil and Turkey

More detail....

And let's not leave out the Russians....
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the straight dope on the iran situation

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If you want a better picture of how this latest bit has come about and PRECISELY what kind of threat Iran is to the world, take out twenty minutes for this. Whatever you want to say about the kid over at Antiwar, he is UP on this stuff, has made a POINT of being as impeccably-informed as possible, precisely to head off a replay of the lie-America-into-war shtick.
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excuse me

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But is this Lavrov's way of gently stating Hillary is being a little optimistic about Russian support for these sanctions she's so meatily bragging about? What will I find when I look for what China has to say? Brazil and Turkey are none too pleased.
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I get bubkes, except that it appears this draft she's bragging about has a bunch of non-binding provisions in it and some people are antsy about trying to make it any stronger, or the U.S. trying to unilaterally carry it further.

I don't know what the hell is going on. I think last time I looked we were going to have to water down our proposed tough new set of sanctions against Iran considerably before we could get more than a "maybe later" out of Russia and a "maybe much later" from China. So I'm assuming that's the drill. Hillary watered them down to nothing much and not binding in exchange for being able to say she has their backing, but they're looking snake-eyed at her, lest she get over zealous. I think that's the thing, because I think they're with everyone else in liking the Turkey and Brazil deal.

This is so mortifying.
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Russia-US-China-Iran: Russian authorities refused to confirm or deny a statement by the US Secretary of State that Russia backed new sanctions against Iran.

A Chinese official statement clarified that new sanctions would not interfere with legitimate trade, implying China backed some form of new sanctions, as stated by the Secretary.

So, right, she got them to agree to watered down and non-binding sanctions, and they aren't going to humiliate her unless she gets too awful.

At last count, Iran was completely onboard with the IAEA thing, not breaching ANY nonproliferation treaty obligations, only not having ratified some add-on that didn't really make any difference... not so much as a toenail paring over the line... and we're just screaming crazy stuff, trying to bully our way into not sounding insane, because we CAN. Has that changed? I don't think so. I think one of my sources would have mentioned that by now.
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So, anyway, I'm glad I didn't go berserk, thinking China and Russia had REALLY suddenly decided to hop aboard the Love Boat, here, only some fantastic space weapon or psychic death ray—or Ahmadinejad unveiling a shiny new nuke—maybe not even that—being all that could have explained this to me. I just had a momentary fit, batted it off and came back to look where any sense could be made of it this evening.

Semi-Zen.
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the noyve

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