UNDERNEWS

UNDERNEWS
SEP 4, 2005
FROM THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW
EDITED BY SAM SMITH
Since 1964, Washington's most unofficial source

E-MAIL: mailto:news@prorev.com

1312 18th St. NW #502 Washington DC 20036
202-835-0770 Fax: 835-0779

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KATRINA
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[The portion about the Hilton evacuees was later dropped from the AP
website and cleansed from the Google cache]

MARY FOSTER, ASSOCIATED PRESS - Buses taking Hurricane Katrina victims
far from the squalor of the Superdome stopped rolling early Saturday.
About 2,000 people remained in the stadium and could be there until
Sunday, according to the Texas Air National Guard. Officials had hoped
to evacuate the last of the crowd before dawn Saturday. Guard members
said they were told only that the buses had stopped coming and to shut
down the area where the vehicles were being loaded. "We were rolling,"
Capt. Jean Clark said. "If the buses had kept coming, we would have this
whole place cleaned out already or pretty close to it.". . .

At one point Friday, the evacuation was interrupted briefly when school
buses pulled up so some 700 guests and employees from the Hyatt Hotel
could move to the head of the evacuation line - much to the amazement of
those who had been crammed in the Superdome since last Sunday.

"How does this work? They (are) clean, they are dry, they get out ahead
of us?" exclaimed Howard Blue, 22, who tried to get in their line. The
National Guard blocked him as other guardsmen helped the well-dressed
guests with their luggage.

The 700 had been trapped in the hotel, near the Superdome, but
conditions were considerably cleaner, even without running water, than
the unsanitary crush inside the dome. The Hyatt was severely damaged by
the storm. Every pane of glass on the riverside wall was blown out.

Mayor Ray Nagin has used the hotel as a base since it sits across the
street from city hall, and there were reports the hotel was cleared with
priority to make room for police, firefighters and other officials.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/09/03/national/a002514D11.DTL


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MARJORIE COHN, TRUTH OUT - Last September, a Category 5 hurricane
battered the small island of Cuba with 160-mile-per-hour winds. More
than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher ground ahead of the
storm. Although the hurricane destroyed 20,000 houses, no one died.

What is Cuban President Fidel Castro's secret? According to Dr. Nelson
Valdes, a sociology professor at the University of New Mexico, and
specialist in Latin America, "the whole civil defense is embedded in the
community to begin with. People know ahead of time where they are to
go."

"Cuba's leaders go on TV and take charge," said Valdes. Contrast this
with George W. Bush's reaction to Hurricane Katrina. The day after
Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Bush was playing golf. He waited three days
to make a TV appearance and five days before visiting the disaster site.
In a scathing editorial on Thursday, the New York Times said, "nothing
about the president's demeanor yesterday - which seemed casual to the
point of carelessness - suggested that he understood the depth of the
current crisis."

"Merely sticking people in a stadium is unthinkable" in Cuba, Valdes
said. "Shelters all have medical personnel, from the neighborhood. They
have family doctors in Cuba, who evacuate together with the
neighborhood, and already know, for example, who needs insulin." They
also evacuate animals and veterinarians, TV sets and refrigerators, "so
that people aren't reluctant to leave because people might steal their
stuff," Valdes observed.

After Hurricane Ivan, the United Nations International Secretariat for
Disaster Reduction cited Cuba as a model for hurricane preparation. ISDR
director Salvano Briceno said, "The Cuban way could easily be applied to
other countries with similar economic conditions and even in countries
with greater resources that do not manage to protect their population as
well as Cuba does."

http://truthout.org/contactmc.php

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JEFFERSON PARISH PRESIDENT AARON BROUSSARD, MEET THE PRESS -
The guy who runs this building I'm in, emergency management, he's
responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard
nursing home and every day she called him and said, "Are you coming,
son? Is somebody coming?" And he said, "Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to
get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to
get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday.
Somebody's coming to get you on Friday." And she drowned Friday night.
She drowned Friday night.

[Breaks into tears] You have to watch. Words fail me, except words of
anger. And thoughts of revenge for the people who have murdered
thousands of Louisianan's by their callous disregard for their fellow
citizens.

http://wetbankguide.blogspot.com/

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MITCH COHEN, NEW ORLEANS INDYMEDIA - My friend Les Evenchick, an
independent Green who lives in the French Quarter of New Orleans in a
3-story walkup, reports that 90 percent of the so-called looters are
simply grabbing water, food, diapers and medicines, because the federal
and state officials have refused to provide these basic necessities. Les
says that "it's only because of the looters that non-looters -- old
people, sick people, small children -- are able to survive."
Those people who stole televisions and large non-emergency items have
been selling them, Les reports (having witnessed several of these
"exchanges") so that they could get enough money together to leave the
area.

Think about it:

- People were told to leave, but all the bus stations had closed down
the night before and the personnel sent packing.

- Many people couldn't afford tickets anyway.

- Many people are stranded, and others are refusing to leave their
homes, pets, etc. They don't have cars.

You want people to stop looting? Provide the means for them to eat, and
to leave the area.

Some tourists in the Monteleone Hotel paid $25,000 for 10 buses. The
buses were sent (I guess there were many buses available, if you paid
the price!) but the military confiscated them and would not let the
people leave. Instead, the military ordered the tourists to the
now-infamous Convention Center. . .

There is something sinister going down -- it's not simply incompetence
or negligence. How could FEMA and Homeland Security not have something
so basic as bottled drinking water in the Super Dome, which was long a
part of the hurricane plan? One police officer in charge of his
120-person unit said yesterday that his squad was provided with only 70
small bottles of water.

Last year, New Orleans residents -- the only area in the entire state
that voted in huge numbers against the candidacy of George Bush -- also
fought off attempts to privatize the drinking water supply.

One of the first acts of Governor Kathleen Blanco (a Democrat, by the
way) during this crisis was to turn off the drinking water, to force
people to evacuate. There was no health reason to turn it off, as the
water is drawn into a separate system from the Mississippi River, not
the polluted lake, and purified through self-powered purification plants
separate from the main electric grid. If necessary, people could have
been told to boil their water -- strangely, the municipal natural gas
used in stoves was still functioning properly as of Thursday night!

There are thousands of New Orleans residents who are refusing to
evacuate because they don't want to leave their pets, their homes, or
who have no money to do so nor place to go. The government -- which
could have and should have provided water and food to residents of New
Orleans -- has not done so intentionally to force people to evacuate by
starving them out. This is a crime of the gravest sort.

http://neworleans.indymedia.org/news/2005/09/4209_comment.php#4214

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GEORGE FRIEDMEN, STRATFOR - A simple way to think about the New Orleans
port complex is that it is where the bulk commodities of agriculture go
out to the world and the bulk commodities of industrialism come in. The
commodity chain of the global food industry starts here, as does that of
American industrialism. If these facilities are gone, more than the
price of goods shifts: The very physical structure of the global economy
would have to be reshaped. Consider the impact to the U.S. auto industry
if steel doesn't come up the river, or the effect on global food
supplies if U.S. corn and soybeans don't get to the markets.

The problem is that there are no good shipping alternatives. River
transport is cheap, and most of the commodities we are discussing have
low value-to-weight ratios. The U.S. transport system was built on the
assumption that these commodities would travel to and from New Orleans
by barge, where they would be loaded on ships or offloaded. Apart from
port capacity elsewhere in the United States, there aren't enough trucks
or rail cars to handle the long-distance hauling of these enormous
quantities -- assuming for the moment that the economics could be
managed, which they can't be.

The focus in the media has been on the oil industry in Louisiana and
Mississippi. This is not a trivial question, but in a certain sense, it
is dwarfed by the shipping issue. First, Louisiana is the source of
about 15 percent of U.S.-produced petroleum, much of it from the Gulf.
The local refineries are critical to American infrastructure. Were all
of these facilities to be lost, the effect on the price of oil worldwide
would be extraordinarily painful. If the river itself became unnavigable
or if the ports are no longer functioning, however, the impact to the
wider economy would be significantly more severe. In a sense, there is
more flexibility in oil than in the physical transport of these other
commodities.

http://www.stratfor.com/news/archive/050903-geopolitics_katrina.php

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ELI STEPHENS, LEFTI - Speaking on Cuban television, Castro revealed that
on Tuesday, while George Bush was still on vacation playing with his
spiffy new guitar, and a day or two before the Secretary of State went
shopping for shoes, Cuba contacted the State Department and offered no
less than 1,100 doctors to assist in dealing with the crisis. Doctors
who, unlike the hospital ship which has yet to leave its berth in
Baltimore and isn't scheduled to be in New Orleans until next Saturday
could have been on site by Wednesday if the Cuban offer had been
accepted." "It wasn't."

http://lefti.blogspot.com/2005_09_01_lefti_archive.html#112570619924445561

JEFF SCHOGOL, STARS & STRIPES - Authorities are avoiding airdropping
provisions into New Orleans - the traditional way of supplying disaster
victims - out of fear of sparking riots, a state official said. While
the military has used helicopters to drop provisions to some stranded in
New Orleans, authorities have not launched the massive supply airdrops
seen in Afghanistan at the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom.

Several C-130 Hercules aircraft are stationed at Little Rock Air Force
Base, but authorities have not ordered them to drop supplies to flood
victims, Arkansas Air National Guard officials said.

Airdropping supplies could actually worsen the situation, said Army
National Guard Lt. Kevin Cowan, with the state Office of Emergency
Preparedness. "Just like Afghanistan, you drop food, it creates chaos,"
Cowan said.

He said authorities are looking for a more controlled way to get badly
need food and other supplies to people in the hurricane-ravaged region
who need it.

"We're trying to logistically to plan how to get food the best way,"
Cowan said. "But as of right now, airdrops are not part of the plan."

He said dropping supplies from the air is an option that is still
available, but "I don't think that is high on the priority list."

Officials at U.S. Northern Command and Task Force Katrina could not be
reached in time for publication Friday.

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CNN - Defending the U.S. government's response to Hurricane Katrina,
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff argued Saturday that
government planners did not predict such a disaster ever could occur.
But in fact, government officials, scientists and journalists have
warned of such a scenario for years.

Chertoff, fielding questions from reporters, said government officials
did not expect both a powerful hurricane and a breach of levees that
would flood the city of New Orleans.
"That 'perfect storm' of a combination of catastrophes exceeded the
foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody's foresight," Chertoff
said. He called the disaster "breathtaking in its surprise."

But engineers say the levees preventing this below-sea-level city from
being turned into a swamp were built to withstand only Category 3
hurricanes. And officials have warned for years that a Category 4 could
cause the levees to fail. Katrina was a Category 4 hurricane when it
struck the Gulf Coast on September 29.

Last week, Michael Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management
Agency, told CNN his agency had recently planned for a Category 5
hurricane hitting New Orleans.

Speaking to "Larry King Live" on August 31, in the wake of Katrina,
Brown said, "That Category 4 hurricane caused the same kind of damage
that we anticipated. So we planned for it two years ago. Last year, we
exercised it. And unfortunately this year, we're implementing it."

Brown suggested FEMA -- part of the Department of Homeland Security --
was carrying out a prepared plan, rather than having to suddenly create
a new one.

Chertoff argued that authorities actually had assumed that "there would
be overflow from the levee, maybe a small break in the levee. The
collapse of a significant portion of the levee leading to the very fast
flooding of the city was not envisioned."

He added: "There will be plenty of time to go back and say we should
hypothesize evermore apocalyptic combinations of catastrophes. Be that
as it may, I'm telling you this is what the planners had in front of
them. They were confronted with a second wave that they did not have
built into the plan, but using the tools they had, we have to move
forward and adapt."
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/03/katrina.chertoff/index.html?section=cnn_topstories


BBC - Rescuers are scouring New Orleans for the last survivors of
Hurricane Katrina after what has been called the largest emergency
airlift in US history. Up to 40 aircraft operating around the clock
finally cleared thousands from squalid conditions at the city's
Superdome and convention centre. . . .

President Bush has pledged thousands of extra troops for affected areas,
amid criticism of the rescue effort. . .

The streets of New Orleans were quieter on Sunday after more than 10,000
people were removed from the flood-ravaged city the previous day.

Utilities experts were preparing to enter the city for the first time to
assess the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina and the failure of New
Orleans' flood defences.

After spending days without food, water or medicines among rubbish and
human waste, survivors appeared numb as they stumbled towards buses and
helicopters.

The exact number of victims is still unknown, but thousands are believed
to have died.

People who died while waiting to be rescued could be found among the
survivors just outside the convention centre.

There is no humanly possible way of knowing at this stage how many
people like that still exist in this vast urban area

Many survivors have witnessed scenes of violence, including rapes and
murders at the shelters, mainly carried out by criminal gangs.

"There is rapes going on here," Africa Brumfield, 32, who was staying at
the convention centre, told Reuters news agency.

"Women cannot go to the bathroom without men. They are raping them and
slitting their throats," she said.

A National Guard soldier described a similar incident. "We found a young
girl raped and killed in the bathroom [at the arena]," he said.

"Then the crowd got the man and they beat him to death."

The vast majority of those stranded were poor black people who may not
have had the means to leave New Orleans ahead of Hurricane Katrina.

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ROBERT HILBURN, LA TIMES - As we enter the celebrity telethon phase of
the Katrina tragedy, NBC's "A Concert for Hurricane Relief" stands as a
blueprint for its own kind of institutional failure. By censoring
Grammy-winning rapper Kanye West's remarks critical of President Bush
during its West Coast feed of the program Friday night, the network
violated the most moving and essential moment in an otherwise sterile,
self-serving corporate broadcast.

"It would be most unfortunate," the network said in a statement
defending its action, "if the efforts of the artists who participated
tonight and the generosity of millions of Americans who are helping
those in need are overshadowed by one person's opinion."

Excuse me, but whose tragedy is this: NBC's or America's?

NBC may have been nervous about West's comments, including the notion
that America and its president are unresponsive to the needs of the
poor. But you can be sure those remarks would have been cheered more
than anything else in the program by the black parents and children
still trapped in the New Orleans Convention Center and the Superdome if
they had been able to hear them.

The line NBC stopped us from hearing on the West Coast: "George Bush
doesn't care about black people." The puzzling thing is why NBC axed
that, but allowed another provocation, potentially more disturbing, to
stay in: "We already realized a lot of the people that could help are at
war right now, fighting another way, and they've given them permission
to go down and shoot us."

West was apparently referring to the National Guard troops who were sent
to New Orleans to help the flood victims and stop the looting.

The show was aired live on the East Coast, where West's full comments
were heard.

There was a several-second tape delay, but the person in charge "was
instructed to listen for a curse word and didn't realize [West] had gone
off script," NBC spokeswoman Rebecca Marks told Associated Press.

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AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE - A top New Orleans police officer said that
National Guard troops sat around playing cards while people died in the
stricken city after Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans deputy police
commander W.S. Riley launched a bitter attack on the federal response to
the disaster though he praised the way the evacuation was eventually
handled. His remarks fuelled controversy over the government's handling
of events during five days when New Orleans succumbed to lawlessness
after Katrina swamped the city's flood defenses.

The National Guard commander, Lieutenant General Steven Blum, said the
reservist force was slow to move troops into New Orleans because it did
not anticipate the collapse of the city's police force. But Riley said
that for the first three days after Monday's storm, which is believed to
have killed several thousand people, the police and fire departments and
some volunteers had been alone in trying to rescue people.

"We expected a lot more support from the federal government. We expected
the government to respond within 24 hours. The first three days we had
no assistance," he told AFP in an interview. Riley went on: "We have
been fired on with automatic weapons. We still have some thugs around.
My biggest disappointment is with the federal government and the
National Guard.

"The guard arrived 48 hours after the hurricane with 40 trucks. They
drove their trucks in and went to sleep. "For 72 hours this police
department and the fire department and handful of citizens were alone
rescuing people. We have people who died while the National Guard sat
and played cards. I understand why we are not winning the war in Iraq if
this is what we have." Riley said there is "a semblance of organization
now." "The military is here and they have done an excellent job with the
evacuation" of the tens of thousands of people stranded in the city.

The National Guard commander said the city police force was left with
only a third of its pre-storm strength.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050903/ts_alt_afp/usweatherpolice_050903215815


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JOSEPH B. TREASTER, NY TIMES - Reeling from the chaos of this
overwhelmed city, at least 200 New Orleans police officers have walked
away from their jobs and two have committed suicide, police officials
said on Saturday. Some officers told their superiors they were leaving,
police officials said. Others worked for a while and then stopped
showing up. Still others, for reasons not always clear, never made it in
after the storm.

The absences come during a period of extraordinary stress for the New
Orleans Police Department. For nearly a week, many of its 1,500 members
have had to work around the clock, trying to cope with flooding, an
overwhelming crush of refugees, looters and occasional snipers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/national/nationalspecial/04police.html?ei=5090&en=8bf8550c348bbc33&ex=1283486400&adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=
rss&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=1125835894-cxD8WZfUVOAR/++cu0wJ/Q


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SENATOR MARY LANDRIEU - Perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at
the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday
with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant
effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over
this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it
became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set
for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed
resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of
equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the
Gulf Coast - black and white, rich and poor, young annd old - deserve
far better from their national government.
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/09/bush-faked-levee-repair-for-photo-op.html


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STEPHANIE ZIMMERMANN AND SCOTT FORNEK, CHICAGO SUN TIMES - A visibly
angry Mayor Daley said the city had offered emergency, medical and
technical help to the federal government as early as Sunday to assist
people in the areas stricken by Hurricane Katrina, but as of Friday, the
only things the feds said they wanted was a single tank truck. That
truck, which the Federal Emergency Management Agency requested to
support an Illinois-based medical team, was en route Friday. "We are
ready to provide more help than they have requested. We are just waiting
for their call," said Daley, adding that he was "shocked" that no one
seemed to want the help.

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MSNBC - Tens of thousands of people spent a fifth day awaiting
evacuation from this ruined city, as Bush administration officials
blamed state and local authorities for what leaders at all levels have
called a failure of the country's emergency management. The White House
dispatched 7,200 more troops to the area, bringing the total in the
stricken region to more than 40,000 National Guard and active-duty
soldiers. Authorities reported progress in restoring order and
electricity and repairing levees, as a hospital ship arrived and cruise
ships were sent to provide temporary housing for victims. As Louisiana
officials expressed confidence that they had begun to get a handle on
the crisis, a dozen National Guard troops broke into applause late
Saturday as Isaac Kelly, 81, the last person to be evacuated from the
Superdome, boarded a school bus.

But there remained an overwhelming display of human misery on the
streets of New Orleans, where the last 1,500 people were being evacuated
from the Convention Center amid an overpowering odor of human waste and
rotting garbage. The evacuees, most of them black and poor, spoke of
violence, anarchy and family members who died for lack of food, water
and medical care.

About 42,000 people had been evacuated from the city by Saturday
afternoon, with roughly the same number remaining, city officials said.
Search-and-rescue efforts continued in flooded areas of the city, where
an unknown number of people wait in makeshift shelters. Hundreds of
thousands of people have been displaced by the flooding -- 250,000 have
been absorbed by Texas alone, and local radio reported that Baton Rouge
will have doubled in population by Monday. Federal officials said they
have begun to collect corpses but could not guess the total toll.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9189916

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REUTERS - The U.S. government has chartered three luxury cruise liners
-- Ecstasy, Sensation and Holiday -- for the next six months to provide
temporary housing for victims of Hurricane Katrina, Carnival Cruise
Lines said Saturday. Two of the ships, the Ecstasy and Sensation, have a
maximum capacity of 2,606 each and will be based in Galveston, Texas,
while the third boat, the Holiday, has a maximum capacity of 1,800 and
will likely be docked in Mobile, Alabama, the Miami-based company said.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/03/katrina.cruise.reut/index.html

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OBSERVER, UK - British families trapped in New Orleans last night
claimed that US authorities had refused to evacuate them as Hurricane
Katrina approached the city. Although assistance was offered to US
residents, British nationals were told they would have to fend for
themselves. According to those who remain stranded in the stricken city,
police had visited hotels and guest houses on the eve of the hurricane
offering to evacuate Americans, but not Britons. The order meant UK
holidaymakers without cars were left helpless in the face of the
hurricane. Some have been trapped in hotels and guest houses since the
hurricane struck at 7am local time last Monday.

One family from Liverpool, trapped in a flooded section of the city,
told relatives yesterday of their bewilderment when they realized US
citizens would be offered preferential treatment. Gerrard Scott, 35,
spoke to his brother Peter from the Ramada Hotel in New Orleans where he
has been stranded without assistance with wife, Sandra, 38, and
seven-year-old son Ronan for the past six days. 'Those that didn't fit
their criteria were told to help themselves. The police said they were
evacuating Americans, and took away the majority.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1562517,00.html

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MORE ECHOES OF NEW ORLEANS

From somewhere outside I hear the street vendor cry "File' gumbo!"
Through my window I see him going down the street and he don't know
That she fell right to sleep in the damp tangled sheet so soon
After love in the hot afternoon

Now the Bourbon Street lady sleeps like a baby in the shadows
She was new to me and full of mystery, but now I know
That she's just a girl and I'm just a guy in a room
For love in the hot afternoon

We got high in the park this morning and we sat without talking
Then we came back here in the heat of the day tired of walking
Where under her breath she hummed to herself a tune
Of love in the hot afternoon

Now the Bourbon Street lady sleeps like a baby in the shadows
She was new to me and full of mystery, but now I know
That she's just a girl and I'm just a guy in the room
For love in the hot afternoon

("Love In The Hot Afternoon" by Vince Matthews and Kent Westberry)

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JEFF SCHOGOL, STARS & STRIPES - Authorities are avoiding airdropping
provisions into New Orleans - the traditional way of supplying disaster
victims - out of fear of sparking riots, a state official said. While
the military has used helicopters to drop provisions to some stranded in
New Orleans, authorities have not launched the massive supply airdrops
seen in Afghanistan at the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom.

Several C-130 Hercules aircraft are stationed at Little Rock Air Force
Base, but authorities have not ordered them to drop supplies to flood
victims, Arkansas Air National Guard officials said.

Airdropping supplies could actually worsen the situation, said Army
National Guard Lt. Kevin Cowan, with the state Office of Emergency
Preparedness. "Just like Afghanistan, you drop food, it creates chaos,"
Cowan said.

He said authorities are looking for a more controlled way to get badly
need food and other supplies to people in the hurricane-ravaged region
who need it.

"We're trying to logistically to plan how to get food the best way,"
Cowan said. "But as of right now, airdrops are not part of the plan."

He said dropping supplies from the air is an option that is still
available, but "I don't think that is high on the priority list."

Officials at U.S. Northern Command and Task Force Katrina could not be
reached in time for publication Friday.



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CORPORADOS
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COURT GIVES CORPORADOS NEW WAY TO RIP YOU OFF

DONNA WENTWORTH, CORANTE - The Latest IP Crime: "Box-Wrap" Patent
Infringement What's that, you ask? Evidently, it's when you ignore the
terms written on the side of Lexmark printer cartridge box, refilling
the cartridge with ink even when the company has designated it "single
use only." According to the Ninth Circuit ruling [PDF] this week in ACRA
v. Lexmark, opening the package means you agree to Lexmark's wishes. And
if you break that agreement, you could face claims under contract and
patent law.

As Fred von Lohmann explains it, it's sort of like when you buy those
fancy Gillette Sensor razors, then purchase cheap replacement razor
heads - except that a court has ruled that if the package says "single
use," then by opening it you've agreed you can't have any cheap
replacements (but you can buy another Gillette "single use" razor). And
that means the company that makes the replacement heads is out of luck,
too.

[The strategy here is] a variant on the "shrinkwrap license" that used
to appear plastered on software. Lexmark is bringing this practice to
the world of patented goods. If you step outside the bounds of the
"contract" (by giving your spent cartridge to a remanufacturer), you're
suddenly a patent infringer. More importantly, Lexmark can sue cartridge
remanufacturers for "inducing" patent infringement by making and selling
refills.

http://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/2005/09/02/
the_latest_ip_crime_boxwrap_patent_infringement.php


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RELIGION & ITS ALTERNATIVES
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UTAH SHOWS SOME INTELLIGENCE, STICKS TO SCIENCE

SALT LAKE TRIBUNES - To borrow a line from Dorothy: We're not in Kansas
anymore. Unlike the Kansas School Board, which earlier this summer
approved allowing educators to teach theories in addition to evolution
that explain life on Earth, the Utah Board of Education on Friday
unanimously approved a position statement supporting the continued
exclusive teaching of evolution in state classrooms. Only two people out
of the dozens who attended Friday's meeting sided with Sen. Chris
Buttars, R-West Jordan, and his proposal to allow teaching "intelligent
design" as a theory to explain the origins of life. Intelligent design
asserts that an intelligent force created the universe. Though advocates
claim the theory does not attempt to identify the designer, many of them
are affiliated with explicitly Christian-centered Related Resources Utah
State School Board statement on evolution.

http://www.sltrib.com/ci_2997771