UPDATE: After I posted this yesterday, news came out that Sen. John McCain’s passport was also snooped upon. While the administration is scurrying to sweep this story under the rug, I have trouble embracing the “imprudent curiousity” line. (Call me cynical ~ I resemble that remark.) This is a story with legs that deserves a thorough investigation.
Election 2008: CNN is now reporting that Secretary of State Condoleezza Wright told both Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton that their passports were snooped by contractors with the State Department. Sen. Clinton’s passport records were snooped on in 2007; Sen. Obama’s were snooped on at least three times this year. Yesterday State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said it was “imprudent curiosity” by low-level contractors. If you think about it, you could also say the Watergate “low-level” burglars were “curious,” too.
Religion: The International Herald Tribune reports that Pope Benedict XVI plans to “meditate on the persecution of Catholics in China and the need for religious freedom during a Good Friday procession at Rome’s Colosseum.” At the same time, Macedonian Radio & Television reports that the Dalai Lama in “Seeking to put pressure on China, he said he was willing to travel to Beijing in a matter of weeks if there was a “concrete indication” that the Chinese authorities were prepared to negotiate and if the protests in Tibet had concluded.”
World: The Ottawa Citizen reports that blueprints of a new headquarters for an elite Canadian Forces counter-terrorism unit were “found in a pile of garbage on Bank Street.” The blueprints were found by the director of the “left-leaning think tank” the Rideau Institute on his way back from dinner, the Citizen reports. He brought them to the attention of the newspaper. According to the “The plans also show the electrical grid scheme for the unit’s computers and details about sewer systems, areas for workshops, sea container loading docks, and offices for the unit’s various troops. There is also a blueprint for the storage bay for the unit’s robots, which are designed to detect chemical and biological agents.” The unit, according to one of its officers, “handles “Jack Bauer-24″ type scenarios.”
Nation: Environment News Service reports bad news for those states in the heartland hit hard by flooding this week. Heavy snowfall and a predicted wet spring mean “above-normal flood potential is evident in much of the Mississippi River basin, the Ohio River basin, the lower Missouri River basin, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, most of New York, all of New England, and portions of the West, including Colorado and Idaho.”
World: The BBC reports that French President Nicolas Sarkozy has said he will reduce the number of his country’s airborne nuclear weapons by one third, leaving France with “half the maximum number of warheads we had during the Cold War.”
Feed me 5 Under the Radar
