The (unfortunate) winner: Expanding the FBI's surveillance authority (NY Times) to help it hunt for terrorist organizations within the US. Now, I'm as big a proponent as anyone of maintaining a competent intelligence service, but this new Justice Department policy seems to just release all bounds on when the FBI can monitor people, tap phones, and so on. This is clearly going to have to be whittled down by the courts, but given the Supreme Court of late I've got a bad feeling that we're about to return to the Bad Old Days of the 1930's-70's, when the FBI's main interest was hunting down "subversives," including actively searching for "damaging material" which could be used to smear them. (Those are ol' J. Edgar's words...)
On a happier note: More details on the discovery of large amounts of ice beneath the Martian poles. (NASA) The official word is that this is a very preliminary result, we still need to take careful measurements and so on... the unofficial word is that there is no way in hell the gamma spectrometers would have spotted anything at all now unless there was an enormous amount of ice there, on the order of a frozen ocean. In some places, data indicates that it may be as close as a foot below the surface, but on this number watch out; that may be changed (upwards) as more data comes in. While this may not affect geopolitics much, it's certainly the most cheering thing I've heard from a news service in a while...
Israel and India had no major developments today, just various diplomatic initiatives that don't look likely to have any effect whatsoever. Medium-low significance for these stories.
...... ok, end of experimental post. I still need to figure out what to really do with a LiveJournal, so bear with my highly random junk a bit longer...
