An Asiatic black bear from a Japanese zoo twirls sticks better that a Jedi Master. The bear named Claude learn the moves from Star Wars Episode VI - Jedi Returns to the Zoo.

The US military has charged a civilian contractor in Iraq under U.S. military law for the first time.

Alaa Mohammad Ali is accused of stabbing another contractor. This is the first contractor charged under an amendment passed by Congress in 2006, which governs military trials for contractors accompanying U.S. troops.

Alaa Mohammad has been held by U.S. military since February and will face his first pre-trial hearing on April 10. And he will be given the same rights as a U.S. service member facing military court.

Since last September when contractors from the U.S. firm Blackwater where accused of killing 17 people in a shooting incident in Baghdad the legal status of contractors in Iraq has been the subject of substantial controversy.

FBI is still investigating whether Blackwater employees broke any laws in that incident. The Blackwater staff was employed by the State Department to guard embassy officials and it is not clear if they could be prosecuted under laws covering contractors accompanying the military, or other U.S. laws.

The State Department announced on Friday it was extending Blackwater’s contract for another year.

Reuters

Google and Virgin have created a joint venture Virgle Inc., with the purpose of colonizing Mars. The spacecrafts should be ready to send people and materials to Mars in 2014, the crafts will be manufactured by Virgin and Google will finance project.

Also Virgin created a 100 years plan for the development of the Mars Settlement and Google already started to sell ads on Mars.

Don’t take this too seriously like my, this is Google’s April Fool’s day of 2008.

For more information read the Google blog.

Corruption revealed at Pentagon

Pentagon gave an inexperienced 22 year old a $300 million contract to provide ammunition to Afghanistan. The company AEY Inc. delivered 40 years old ammunition to US and Afghan troops fighting on the front lines of the war.

AEY Inc. thrived after 2003 when the US government began handing out billions of dollars to private defense contractors.

The American military has relied since early last year on AEY Inc. a company led by a 22 year old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur. With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company operates in an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces.

The company has provided ammunition that is 40 years old and in decomposing packaging. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.

In purchasing munitions, the contractor has worked with middlemen and a shell company on a federal list of entities suspected of illegal arms trafficking.

The AEY Inc., company’s president is 22-year-old Efraim E. Diveroli, who ran the company with a 25-year-old from Miami Beach, Florida. Waxman has requested that Diveroli testify, along with company vice president David M. Packouz and Levi Meyer its general manager.

After the Times began asking questions about the suspicious contract, the Army suspended the company from future contract efforts.  The contracts with thee company have been suspended because it shipped Chinese-made ammunition “in violation of its contract and US law.”

AEY provided ammo manufactured in China more than 40 years ago, and other munitions provided by the company were in such bad shape, that the Army decided not to use it.

Diveroli apparently had little experience in arms procurement and his dealings with the Albanian government were corrupt.

The company “shopped from stocks in the old Eastern bloc, including Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kazakhstan and Montenegro.”

Diveroli did not deal directly with Albanian officials. Instead, a middleman company registered in Cyprus, Evdin Ltd. bought the ammunition and sold it to his company. The local packager involved in the deal, Mr. Trebicka, said that he suspected that Evdin’s purpose was to divert money to Albanian officials.

Albanian political observers say the Times story just begins to scratch the surface of corruption there.

AEY is still in business, and it is hiring, according to a Craigslist ad.

Unauthorized software was installed on servers in Hannaford Bros supermarkets in the Northeast and Florida. The program created a data breach that compromised up to 4.2 million credit and debit cards.

Hannaford doesn’t know how the malware got in its 271 stores’ servers. 1,800 cases of fraud have been linked to the data breach, with unauthorized charges showing up far in Mexico, Italy and Bulgaria.

This appears to be the first large-scale theft of credit and debit card numbers while the information was in transit.

That the breach, occurred between Dec. 7 and March 10 allowed credit and debit card numbers to be stolen as shoppers swiped their cards at checkout line machines and the information was transmitted to banks for approval.

The malware turned up in all Hannaford stores in New England and New York, and in most of the company’s affiliated Sweetbay stores in Florida, Eleazer said. 

The breach remains under investigation by the U.S. Secret Service and had not been previously disclosed “because of the confidential nature of the investigation”.

Cuba will allow unrestricted use of mobile telephones for the first time. Until now in Cuba only foreigners and government officials where allowed to use them. Cuban telecommunications ETECSA will begin to offer mobile phone service for the public in the next days.

Raul Castro is the first new leader of Cuba in almost half a century, he has begun series of reforms to improve the living standards of Cubans.

The new service will fund the development of Cuba’s telecommunications systems and to extend land line telephone services.

U.S. military “mistakenly” shipped four fuses for nuclear missiles to Taiwan in 2006 and it never caught the error.

The shipment was supposed to deliver helicopter batteries to Taiwan, but sent fuses that are used to trigger the Minuteman missiles. Taiwan returned the fuses to U.S. last week.

The military didn’t know about this problem until it received an unnoticed from Taiwan informing that they didn’t receive the helicopter batteries.

United States has notified China, which claims the self-ruled island as its own, and is modernizing its military to close the technology gap with Taiwan’s mainly U.S. weapons. China and Taiwan are separated since 1949, and Beijing has never renounced the use of force to bring the island under its control.

This is the second time U.S. military “misplaces” nuclear or nuclear-related equipment in recent months. An Air Force bomber “mistakenly” carried nuclear warheads over the United States in August 2007.

The Defense Department has ordered the Navy and Air Force to take inventory of all nuclear and nuclear-associated equipment and material and U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has ordered an investigation into the fuse incident.

Gates wants initial results from the investigation by April 15 and a full report within 60 days.

The United States has violated international law or international arms agreements with the shipment.

The Pentagon does not know who was responsible. The fuses, which send an electronic signal to the device that starts the nuclear weapons trigger process, are among a class of sensitive equipment that must be accounted for on a quarterly basis.

The four fuses, do not resemble helicopter batteries, were “wrongly” placed in an unclassified storage area. They were then shipped in late 2006 to Taiwan, which placed them in storage.

When Taiwan realized it had received the incorrect shipment, it notified the U.S. military. Wynne would not say when Taiwan first reported the problem.

But U.S. military officials did not understand the nature of the problem until last week.

“We thought we were talking about different sorts of batteries. There was an effort to resolve and reimburse them. It wasn’t until this past week that we became aware that they had something akin to a nose-cone assembly,” Henry said.

And it also said there was no indication Taiwan tampered with the fuses before returning them.

A study revealed the next U.S president Barack Obama. He is related with six U.S. presidents as distant cousins, including George W. Bush.

The New England Historic Genealogical Society released a study in which traced the family trees of all the presidential candidates found that all have famous relatives.

Barack Obama is related with at least six U.S. presidents as distant cousins, including George W. Bush and his father, Gerald R. Ford, Lyndon B. Johnson, Harry S. Truman, James Madison, British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill and Brad Pitt who is a ninth cousin linked back to Edwin Hickman.

Obama’s mother is from Kansas and his maternal ancestry includes the Mid-Atlantic States and the South.

Hillary Clinton has a large French Canadian ancestry. She is related with actress Angelina Jolie as ninth cousins twice removed linked by Jean Cusson of St. Sulpice. Clinton has more famous cousin like Madonna ninth cousins linked by Pierre Gagne, Celine Dion, Alanis Morissette, author Jack Kerouac and Camilla Parker-Bowles, wife of Prince Charles.

John McCain is a sixth cousin of Laura Bush the wife of George W. Bush. and because his ancestry is almost entirely southern it was harder to trace his genealogy.

By observing the genealogical tree of the candidates we see that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are now related through Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie marriage.

Comparing their genealogy we see that Hillary Clinton is related only with the second wife of Prince Charles and other famous women, John McCain is also related with only one famous women and Obama is actually related with six presidents.

We can assume that Barack Obama will be the next U.S president because being a president runs in the family.

Can you spot the difference?

The most disturbing discovery!

The newspaper of the China’s Communist Party is asking the government to “crush” Tibet’s independence movement.

The “People’s Daily” newspaper accuses Dalai Lama that his is responsible for the latest anti-government protest with the hope of splitting Tibet from China Tibet and for undermining the Beijing Olympics. But Dalai Lama has denied the accusation.

The Chinese Government has sent elite units of the People’s Liberation Army into Tibet to crack down on the protests and kill the leaders.

Tibetan exile groups said that at least 80 people were killed in Lhasa, and in the riots in other Chinese provinces other 20 people died.

All foreign journalists from Tibet where expelled, before they were force to leave they where able to report that thousands of troops are creating blockades and checkpoints across in the western China.