Your Tacos or Your Life!

AP:

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 6:14 p.m. ET

FONTANA, Calif. (AP) — A hunger for carnitas nearly led to some carnage after a Fontana man was robbed of a bag of tacos at gunpoint. Police Sergeant Jeff Decker said the 35-year-old victim had just bought about $20 in tacos from a street-corner stand Sunday night and was bicycling home when the suspect confronted him and said ”Give me your tacos.”

Decker said the suspect grabbed the bag of food, punched the victim in the face and began to flee.

When the victim demanded his tacos back, the suspect pointed what appeared to be a handgun at the man and threatened to kill him before running away.

NYT: Kosovo Declares Its Independence From Serbia

So Kosovo is independent now.

The last two lines in this NYT story make no sense to me:

European Union officials said Britain, France, and Germany were expected to recognize Kosovo 24 hours after the declaration, to try to stop prevent Moscow and Belgrade from trying to rally opposition to the independence declaration. The recognition of Kosovo by the United States [and] other European Union member states was expected to follow in the coming days.

President Bush, speaking Sunday in Tanzania on a tour of Africa, said the United States would continue to work to prevent violence in Kosovo in the wake of the proclamation, while reaching out to Serbia. “We will fight in each and every international forum,” he said. “Kosovo is part of Serbia.”

So wait, Bush is against a free Kosovo but the US is ok with it? Huh?

Update: Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed to President Bush a statement that he did not make. The president did not say “Kosovo is part of Serbia.”

As Earth Warms, Virus From Tropics Moves to Italy

NYT:

After a month of investigation, Italian public health officials discovered that the people of Castiglione di Cervia were, in fact, suffering from a tropical disease, chikungunya, a relative of dengue fever normally found in the Indian Ocean region. But the immigrants spreading the disease were not humans but insects: tiger mosquitoes, who can thrive in a warming Europe.

Aided by global warming and globalization, Castiglione di Cervia has the dubious distinction of playing host to the first outbreak in modern Europe of a disease that had previously been seen only in the tropics.

“By the time we got back the name and surname of the virus, our outbreak was over,” said Dr. Rafaella Angelini, director of the regional public health department in Ravenna. “When they told us it was chikungunya, it was not a problem for Ravenna any more. But I thought: this is a big problem for Europe.”

The epidemic proved that tropical viruses are now able to spread in new areas, far north of their previous range. The tiger mosquito, which first arrived in Ravenna three years ago, is thriving across southern Europe and even in France and Switzerland.

Philharmonic Agrees to Play in North Korea

The New York Times:

The Philharmonic, led by its music director, Lorin Maazel, has been considering the visit since an invitation arrived by fax in August. It was a typed letter from the North Korean culture ministry, in English, accompanied by a cover letter from a private individual in California who said he was acting as an intermediary. The orchestra had the invitation authenticated by the State Department, which has provided advice and help in negotiating the terms of the visit. Mr. Hill said that he did not know how the invitation had come about. But its timing was significant, after a series of breakthroughs in a decade-long effort to have North Korea halt its nuclear program.

In February North Korea agreed to shut down its main reactor in exchange for economic aid and other inducements. The reactor was switched off in July, a month before the invitation. And in September the Bush administration said that North Korea had agreed to disable its main nuclear fuel plant and give an accounting of its nuclear facilities, fuel and weapons by the end of the year. Progress toward the Philharmonic’s visit accelerated when orchestra executives and a State Department official visited Pyongyang in October.

The final major logistical pieces of the concert fell into place late last week, after a visit to Seoul, the capital of South Korea, by Zarin Mehta, the orchestra’s president. The Philharmonic’s spokesman, Eric Latzky, confirmed that the trip was on, but he declined to discuss details publicly until a news conference at Avery Fisher Hall tomorrow, when it is to be formally announced.

Mr. Hill, who was in Pyongyang last week delivering Mr. Bush’s letter and inspecting nuclear facilities, said he planned to attend the news conference. He has spoken privately to the orchestra members. Even more surprising, the Philharmonic said that Pak Kil-yon, North Korea’s representative to the United Nations, would also attend, a rare public appearance by a North Korean diplomat. Mr. Hill said he believed that the conditions sought by the Philharmonic had been met. They included the presence of foreign journalists; a nationwide broadcast to ensure that not just a small elite would hear the concert; acoustical adjustments to the East Pyongyang Grand Theater; an assurance that the eight Philharmonic members of Korean origin would not encounter difficulties; and that the orchestra could play “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

CQ stands by falafel story

Wired News publishes CQ’s insistence that their reporting on this falafel fiasco was right all along.

Like you, we take the issues of national security and civil liberties very seriously, which is why Jeff Stein thought it important to write about the domain management program. His sources described to him the intelligence-gathering program that involved the sales of Middle Eastern food in some detail, and we had no reason to believe that those sources inaccurately portrayed it when the column was published. After conferring further with them upon receipt of your letter, Mr. Stein and Congressional Quarterly stand by the column.

The FBI’s San Francisco office was given repeated opportunities by Mr. Stein to respond to his column before it was published, and declined. An FBI spokesman in Washington did respond, choosing neither to confirm nor deny the existence of the program, and his comments were included in the column. An after-the-fact denial is of less use to readers than one that could have run with the column, but, in the interest of fairness, we will publish it with Mr. Stein’s next column.

Falafel story a fake?

The FBI denies all knowledge of the falafel story:

Having never heard of this, I spoke to the counterterrorism managers, who in the story were identified as having hatched the plan, as well as everyone else who would have had any knowledge of it. Nobody did. At one point in the story, writer Jeff Stein opines “as ridiculous as it sounds,” in reference to the alleged food monitoring plan, which reportedly was described to Mr. Stein by “well-informed sources.”

In this case, too ridiculous to be true.

CQ, are you still standing by your story?

[via The Lede ; Hat tip: Clark Boyd]

Go Team America!

Tom Friedman: “On Sept. 11, 2001, the OPEC basket oil price was $25.50 a barrel. On Nov. 13, 2007, the OPEC basket price was around $90 a barrel.”

This is absurd.

FBI Hoped to Follow Falafel Trail to Iranian Terrorists Here

CQ:

Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.

The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn’t last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI’s criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous — and possibly illegal.

A check of federal court records in California did not reveal any prosecutions developed from falafel trails.

I’m not even close to having the skillz of an FBI agent, but I can tell you three reasons why this plan was doomed from the beginning — beyond than the fact that it’s totally illegal.

1) Falafel isn’t a Persian food at all. When was the last time you saw an Iranian eating falafel? (And the one time I went with Boyk to Sunshine Café in Berkeley two weeks ago doesn’t count.)

2) Iranian terrorist? Seriously? Think about that for a second. Name one Iranian terrorist. Go ahead, I dare you.

3) While the Bay Area may have some Iranians, we’re dwarfed by the number that are in LA and Orange counties. Plus, everyone knows that real Iranians (“terrorists” or otherwise) hit up Mashti Malone’s for totally sweet bastani.

[via FP Passport]

Adventures in Freelancing: Getting Paid

As you all know, I’m a freelancer. That means I never know when my next paycheck is going to arrive in my mailbox. But whatever, generally it works out. Usually, it takes a little bit of time from when I do the piece to when I get paid for it. I recognize that I’m not the only one that these places need to pay, but really, how hard is it to get your freelancers a check, on time?

Let’s take a recent true-life example:

Say you’re Big New York Media Co. — name changed to protect the incompentent — and I do a piece for you. I do all the work, send in the piece on time, and file the invoice on September 6, 2007. I don’t receive the $150 check until October 24, 2007.

The same week I receive this first check, I get a second check for $300 from another national media company in Washington, D.C. for a different piece that I did merely days before. That’s days in the single digits — not nearly two months later.

So, Big New York Media Co., seriously, what’s the problem?

Leak Severed a Link to Al-Qaeda’s Secrets

WashPost:

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group’s communications network.

“Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless,” said Rita Katz, the firm’s 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE’s methodology. Her firm provides intelligence about terrorist groups to a wide range of paying clients, including private firms and military and intelligence agencies from the United States and several other countries.

The precise source of the leak remains unknown. Government officials declined to be interviewed about the circumstances on the record, but they did not challenge Katz’s version of events. They also said the incident had no effect on U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts and did not diminish the government’s ability to anticipate attacks.

While acknowledging that SITE had achieved success, the officials said U.S. agencies have their own sophisticated means of watching al-Qaeda on the Web. “We have individuals in the right places dealing with all these issues, across all 16 intelligence agencies,” said Ross Feinstein, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

But privately, some intelligence officials called the incident regrettable, and one official said SITE had been “tremendously helpful” in ferreting out al-Qaeda secrets over time.