Looks like ...

 

The endangered coral Ctenella chagius is endemic to the British Indian Ocean Territory which comprises the 55 islands of the Chagos archipelago, home to the world’s largest coral atoll      [Dr Alasdair Harris, Blue Ventures Conservation/ARKive]

Looks like little love for Obama….

A US terror alert issued this week about al-Qaida plots to attack targets in western Europe was politically motivated and not based on credible new information, senior Pakistani diplomats and European intelligence officials have told the Guardian.

The non-specific US warning, which despite its vagueness led Britain, France and other countries to raise their overseas terror alert levels, was an attempt to justify a recent escalation in US drone and helicopter attacks inside Pakistan that have “set the country on fire”, said Wajid Shamsul Hasan, the high commissioner to Britain.

Hasan, a veteran diplomat who is close to Pakistan’s president, suggested the Obama administration was playing politics with the terror threat before next month’s mid-term congressional elections, in which the Republicans are expected to make big gains.

He also claimed President Obama was reacting to pressure to demonstrate that his Afghan war strategy and this year’s troop surge, which are unpopular with the American public, were necessary.

Not that it means much, love us love not…. There was a stray comment uttered in the past few days, Tom Dispatch caught it for his most recent essay (with Bacevich) that, should the US determine an attack on us had originated in Pakistan…… why, we would be FORCED to act unilaterally.

Achtung.  When do we crest into Czechoslovakia?  Poland?  We have an Africa campaign after all… Plans South of the border too.  Elsewhere…

And this, from the same Guardian piece:

Thomas de Maizière, Germany’s interior minister, publicly expressed his scepticism about the US terror warning, saying he saw no sign of an imminent attack on Germany.

He described the danger to Germany as “hypothetical“.

And this, a very reasonable concern:

He said fears were growing in Pakistan that the US was planning a bombing campaign using fixed-wing aircraft as well as drones in North Waziristan.

Hasan said Washington politicians failed to understand how much the US needed Pakistan in the “war on terror”. Nor did they realise that public anger over repeated US infringements of Pakistani sovereignty could boil over into attacks on American personnel and interests that the government might not be able to control.

“The government does not want to go down this road,” he said. “But people feel abused. If they [the Americans] kill someone again, they will react. There is a figure that there are 3,000 American personnel in Pakistan. They would be very easy targets.”

Tit for tat.  Love posies between armed lovers.  Unending war.

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And now for the really big problems… I caught a segment on the evening news about this, with New York’s own short, ill-tempered Napoleon holdng forth.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg sought federal permission on Wednesday to bar New York City’s 1.7 million recipients of food stamps from using them to buy soda or other sugared drinks.

Can’t someone drop a 10 storey crane on his big fat toes  :oops:  – - or something? 

Knock him out.  Shut him up.

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