mondonation created a powerful message and opportunity with their i believe t-shirts and thousands of people have purchased their shirts and supported the many charities working with them. I am one of those people. I personally own a few shirts and have referred my friends and family to buy them too… but I don’t think I want to become a walking billboard for Britney Spears new product… and if something isn’t done about her fragrance logo… that is exactly what my shirts will become.
I’d say “you ought to be ashamed”, but it’s the shameless Britney Spears we’re talking about here. She probably couldn’t give two shits about ripping off mondonation and the charities they support.
A Chinese couple tried to name their baby “@,” claiming the character used in e-mail addresses echoed their love for the child, an official trying to whip the national language into line said on Thursday.
The unusual name stands out especially in Chinese, which has no alphabet and instead uses tens of thousands of multistroke characters to represent words.
“The whole world uses it to write e-mail, and translated into Chinese it means ‘love him’,” the father explained, according to the deputy chief of the State Language Commission Li Yuming.
While the “@” simple is familiar to Chinese e-mail users, they often use the English word “at” to sound it out–which with a drawn out “T” sounds something like “ai ta,” or “love him,” to Mandarin speakers.
TSUNAMI MESSAGE NUMBER 2
NWS PACIFIC TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER EWA BEACH HI
220 PM HST WED AUG 15 2007
TO - CIVIL DEFENSE IN THE STATE OF HAWAII
SUBJECT - TSUNAMI ADVISORY
A TSUNAMI ADVISORY IS ISSUED FOR THE STATE OF HAWAII EFFECTIVE
AT 0220 PM HST.
AN EARTHQUAKE HAS OCCURRED WITH THESE PRELIMINARY PARAMETERS
ORIGIN TIME - 0141 PM HST 15 AUG 2007
COORDINATES - 13.5 SOUTH 76.7 WEST
LOCATION - NEAR COAST OF PERU
MAGNITUDE - 7.9 MOMENT
EVALUATION
THE PACIFIC TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER HAS ISSUED AN EXPANDING
REGIONAL TSUNAMI WARNING AND WATCH FOR PARTS OF THE PACIFIC
LOCATED CLOSER TO THE EARTHQUAKE. AN EVALUATION OF THE PACIFIC
WIDE TSUNAMI THREAT IS UNDERWAY AND THERE IS A POSSIBILITY THAT
HAWAII COULD BE ELEVATED TO A WATCH OR WARNING STATUS.
IF TSUNAMI WAVES IMPACT HAWAII THEIR ESTIMATED EARLIEST ARRIVAL
TIME IS
0214 AM HST THU 16 AUG 2007
MESSAGES WILL BE ISSUED HOURLY OR SOONER AS CONDITIONS WARRANT.
This is a Tsunami Advisory Cancellation Update for Wednesday, August 15 at 4:15 in the afternoon.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center has confirmed that the earthquake which occurred off Peru this afternoon did not generate a tsunami. There is no threat of a tsunami for the island or state of Hawaii due to the earthquake that occurred off Peru.
Interviewer: Do you think US or UN forces should have moved into Baghdad?
Interviewee: No.
Interviewer: Why not?
Interviewee: Because if we’d gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone, there wouldn’t have been anybody else with us. It would have been a US occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world and if you take down the central government in Iraq you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it the Syrians would like to have, to the west. Part of eastern Iraq the Iranians would like to claim. They fought over it for eight years. In the north you’ve got the Kurds. If the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey then you’ve threatened the territorial integrity of Turkey. It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.
The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact that we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had, but for the 146 Americans killed in action and for their families it wasn’t a cheap war. And the question for the President in terms of whether or not we went to Baghdad and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was “How many additional dead Americans was Saddam worth?” Our judgement was “not very many” and I think we got it right.
As of August 15, 2007, Saddam Hussein is worth 3553 dead American soldiers.
Hurricane Flossie completely fell apart just before reaching the Big Island. After a few brief downpours in the late morning, the day turned out to be kind of nice. The National Weather Service is showing that we only got about an inch and a half of rain between 5am Tuesday and 5am Wednesday. We were expecting five to ten inches. Kau got less than a quarter of an inch in the same timespan; they were expecting ten inches.
The highest wind gusts at South Point, the closest point of land to the hurricane, were only 45 knots.
It was a valuable exercise for Civil Defense and other disaster planning and recovery groups. The Red Cross learned that they need to better inform people that when they go to a shelter they need to bring their evacuation kits with them, including bedding, as most people who showed up at the evacuation shelters had to be sent back home to get their stuff.
