A federal judge in Washington state sentenced Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian terrorist who bungled a Y2K plot to blow up LAX, to 22 years in prison, and then laid into some of President Bush’s terror policies:

U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour said the successful prosecution of Ahmed Ressam should serve not only as a warning to terrorists, but as a statement to the Bush administration about its terrorism-fighting tactics.

“We did not need to use a secret military tribunal, detain the defendant indefinitely as an enemy combatant or deny the defendant the right to counsel,” he said Wednesday. “The message to the world from today’s sentencing is that our courts have not abandoned our commitment to the ideals that set our nation apart.”

He added that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have madeericans realize they are vulnerable to terrorism and that some believe “this threat renders our Constitution obsolete … If that view is allowed to prevail, the terrorists will have won.”

Heh.

Ressam, for his part, “provided a short written statement in which he thanked the judge, renounced violence of any kind and apologized for his actions.” Which, alas, is more than the I.R.A. can say.

The leadership of the Irish Republican Army has “formally ordered an end to the armed campaign,” concluding a 30-year terrorist offensive that killed 1,706 people, including 497 civilians. (Source.) Here is the official I.R.A. statement:

The leadership of Oglaigh na hEireann [”Volunteers of Ireland” -ed.] has formally ordered an end to the armed campaign.

This will take effect from 4pm [1600 BST] this afternoon.

All IRA units have been ordered to dump arms.

All Volunteers have been instructed to assist the development of purely political and democratic programmes through exclusively peaceful means.

Volunteers must not engage in any other activities whatsoever.

The IRA leadership has also authorised our representative to engage with the IICD [Independent International Commission on Decommissioning] to complete the process to verifiably put its arms beyond use in a way which will further enhance public confidence and to conclude this as quickly as possible.

We have invited two independent witnesses, from the Protestant and Catholic churches, to testify to this.

The Army Council took these decisions following an unprecedented internal discussion and consultation process with IRA units and Volunteers.

We appreciate the honest and forthright way in which the consultation process was carried out and the depth and content of the submissions.

We are proud of the comradely way in which this truly historic discussion was conducted. The outcome of our consultations show very strong supportong IRA Volunteers for the Sinn Fein peace strategy.

There is also widespread concern about the failure of the two governments and the unionists to fully engage in the peace process.

This has created real difficulties. The overwhelming majority of people in Ireland fully support this process.

They and friends of Irish unity throughout the world want to see the full implementation of the Good Friday Agreement.

Notwithstanding these difficulties our decisions have been taken to advance our republican and democratic objectives, including our goal of a united Ireland.

We believe there is now an alternative way to achieve this and to end British rule in our country. It is the responsibility of all Volunteers to show leadership, determination and courage.

We are very mindful of the sacrifices of our patriot dead, those who went to jail, Volunteers, their families and the wider republican base. [”My name is O’Hanlon, and I’ve just turned sixteen…” -ed.]

We reiterate our view that the armed struggle was entirely legitimate. [Bullshit. -ed.] We are conscious that many people suffered in the conflict. [How very open-minded of you. -ed]

There is a compelling imperative on all sides to build a just and lasting peace. The issue of the defence of nationalist and republican communities has been raised with us.

There is a responsibility on society to ensure that there is no re-occurrence of the pogroms of 1969 and the early 1970s.

There is also a universal responsibility to tackle sectarianism in all its forms.

The IRA is fully committed to the goals of Irish unity and independence and to building the Republic outlined in the 1916 Proclamation.

We call for maximum unity and effort by Irish republicans everywhere. We are confident that by working together Irish republicans can achieve our objectives.

Every Volunteer is aware of the import of the decisions we have taken and all Oglaigh are compelled to fully comply with these orders.

There is now an unprecedented opportunity to utilise the considerable energy and goodwill which there is for the peace process.

This comprehensive series of unparalleled initiatives is our contribution to this and to the continued endeavours to bring about independence and unity for the people of Ireland.

Tony Blair called the statement a “step of unparalleled magnitude.” I suppose he’s right, with the ugly (but perhaps necessary, for internal reasons) exception of that statement that their past terrorism was justified.

I wonder, though, what of the various I.R.A. splinter groups? I haven’t been following this story as closely as I suppose I should, so I don’t really know. But I was in Ireland during the immediate aftermath of the Omagh bombing in 1998, and that atrocity was carried out by the “Real I.R.A.,” not the official I.R.A. How does this agreement affect them? Not at all, I assume.

UPDATE: My assumption was right: “The Continuity IRA, which is linked with Sinn Féin politicians who split from the party in the 1980s, and the Real IRA, a breakaway group which defected in 1997 in opposition to the party’s decision to sit in what they called a partitionist assembly, have shown no indication they may end their campaigns, let alone declare a ceasefire.” [I think they have that backwards… shouldn’t it be “declare a ceasefire, let alone end their campaigns”? -ed.]

P.S. There’s one thing the I.R.A. failed to address in its statement: Does Dr. Johnson get his car back? :)

Once the Discovery returns (God willing), there will be no more Space Shuttle flights until NASA’s scientists and engineers figure out why, despite all their best efforts, a piece of insulating foam — the very thing that doomed the Columbia — fell off the fuel tank during Tuesday’s liftoff. Excerpt:

The foam does not appear to have struck the Discovery … But further flights will be postponed indefinitely, starting with that of the Atlantis, which was to have lifted off as early as September.

“Until we fix this, we’re not ready to go fly again,” William W. Parsons, the manager of the shuttle program, said at a news briefing at the Johnson Space Center here on Wednesday evening.

The detection of another large breakaway piece of insulating foam is a potentially devastating setback for [NASA] and a bitter counterpoint to the elation of [Tuesday]’s seemingly perfect launching of the Discovery, a return to flight that was hailed as an inspiring comeback for the space program.

The effort to fix the foam problem had consumed more than two years and hundreds of millions of dollars. NASA identified the area on the tank that shed the latest piece of foam as a risk, but put off redesigning it.

“We decided it was safe to fly as is,” Mr. Parsons said. “Obviously, we were wrong.”

The incident occurred two minutes into the launching, at a point where the atmosphere is so thin that the piece drifted away. The Columbia accident occurred in part because the foam fell off the tank about 82 seconds after liftoff, when the air was much thicker and slowed the foam so the climbing orbiter struck it with great force.

N. Wayne Hale, the deputy manager of the shuttle program, said that if the Discovery foam had been shed earlier, “we think that it would have been really bad.”

Tense and somber, Mr. Parsons said that he was “disappointed” in the news. Mr. Hale sounded resigned. “We are in the business of flying in space - it’s a very difficult business,” he said, adding: “It isn’t disheartening. It’s just the nature of the business.”

Others were more dismayed. A NASA engineer who has been involved in the return-to-flight effort said: “It’s an ugly story. It’s a mess.” The engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issues involved, added, “Everyone’s really, really disappointed,” but continued: “It is what it is. Physics doesn’t lie.”

Alex Roland, a former NASA historian who now teaches at Duke and is a frequent critic of the space program, said that in some ways the problem was “worse than an unexpected anomaly arising.”

“This was the major problem that they were looking to solve,” Mr. Roland said. “It must be enormously demoralizing to them.”

Indeed.

Theazing Google Maps has added a new, extremely useful (and cool) “hybrid mode,” which displays translucent street grids superimposed on top of its satellite views. Awesome! They’ve also enhanced their coverage of the Notre Dame area, which was previously very limited resolution; now you can zoom waaay in, just like in other parts of the country. For example, here’s a hybrid map of the general campus area, and here’s a close-up centered on the Golden Dome.

Alas, the Gold Canyon area in Arizona — where Becky’s parents live, and where our wedding will be — is still a mixed-resolution zone; the high-resolution images abruptly end just west of Gold Canyon Golf Resort. :( Still low resolution in Newington, too.

P.S. Google is also now officially allowing webmasters to embed Google Maps into their websites, something certain clever developers had been doing anyway — in violation of Google Maps’s terms of service — through various hacks. ChicagoCrime.org, for instance, is one of the sites that has now “gone legit,” using the new Google Maps API. Another is SanDiegoBloggers.com. (Now somebody needs to create a Google Blog Map for bloggers across the entire country. Seriously! That would ROCK!)

UPDATE: Turns out, I’m behind the times. BlogWise is developing exactly that — a Google Blog Map — and not just for the entire country, but for the entire world! Woohoo! It’s in beta, and it does seem to have some glitches, especially when you zoom in and out, and they need to make some improvements to the navigation… but the concept is freakin’ awesome. Here are the British Isles; here’s Connecticut; here’s Michiana (not too many blogs yet, but I’ll add mine momentarily); and here’s the Phoenix area. Hmm… can I sign my blog up in multiple places? :) [UPDATE: No… and I also won’t be appearing “momentarily” anywhere. “There are currently 4919 blog(s) in the queue. Your blog is expected to be added within 24 day(s).” D’oh!]

UPDATE 2: Feedmap.net is doing something similar, but with Microsoft maps.

Osama Bin Laden reportedly plotted in 2002 to kill thousands ofericans with poisoned cocaine, but the plot fell apart when Colombian drug lords concluded that it would be “bad for their business.” Gee… ya think?

Embattled former Miami Commissioner shot himself in the head in the lobby of the Miami Herald on Thursday. He died two hours later at the hospital.

If Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa wants to convince Angelinos to use public transit, a good starting point would be to make Los Angeles’s public-transit system actually usable. Having made heavy use of public-transit systems in Los Angeles, London, New York, Phoenix, Hartford and South Bend, I can honestly say that L.A.’s is by far the least reliable and efficient. In Phoenix, I could always depend on the bus being within two or three minutes of its schedule (and usually exactly on time); in L.A., it could be anywhere from 10 minutes early to a half-hour late. I’m not exaggerating. I don’t know why it’s so bad — the Phoenix metro area is similarly vast, so it’s not just geography — but whatever it is, Villaraigosa needs to figure out how to fix it if he’s serious about this. (Of course, something tells me it’s a lost cause anyway…)

Congratulations to Erin Galloway and Cody Groeber, both members of the NDLS Class of 2007, who, according to Patrick, recently got engaged!!!

Erin came to NDLS from the University of Maryland; Cody came from Furman University. They met here, “under the Dome,” as it were, and have been a couple since (if I’m not mistaken) pretty early in the fall semester. Their engagement will not come as a huge shock to their fellow 2Ls :), but it is certainly wonderful news!

Erin was one of my first friends here (thanks in part to her infamous party), and Cody and I later bonded over the fact that we are both massive Lord of the Rings nerds. I remember having a conversation with the two of them a while back about my aerial proposal to Becky, with Erin not-so-subtly hinting to Cody that such grandiose gestures are wonderfully romantic. Heh. I wonder how he ended up popping the question? Anyone with gossip is welcome to comment. :)

Oh, and yes, the above photo is a picture of them walking hand-in-hand through the snow last winter. Awww. :)

Congrats again, Erin & Cody!

The New York Times has an interesting article about the dilemma that NASA scientists face in trying to prevent the Space Shuttle Discovery from meeting Columbia’s tragic fate: when it comes to analyzing potentially catastrophic damage from debris hitting the Shuttle, they’ve got a serious signal-to-noise problem. In the 113 prior missions, Space Shuttles have been hit by debris approximately 15,000 times, usually during liftoff; exactly one of those hits resulted in a break-up on re-entry.

“How do you distinguish - discriminate - between damage which is critical and damage which is inconsequential?” asks astronaut David Wolf. And if, with all the new high-tech detection systems that NASA now has in place, you discover damage that, upon rigorous scientific analysis (the sort of analysis that wasn’t properly done after the Columbia debris hit), you conclude is almost certainly inconsequential (”almost certainly” because “you can never say anything is a zero threat”), how do you explain that to the press? In other words, “if a crack is detected… ‘how is NASA supposed to explain that this is not a problem?’” How, indeed.

P.S. Pictures of yesterday’s debris here, including one of, as Alex aptly put it, “a very unlucky bird.”

Governor George Pataki of New York, who rose to power by stunning three-term incumbent Mario Cuomo in the 1994 elections that also spawned the Congressional “Republican Revolution,” won’t run for a fourth term in 2006, the New York Times reports. There are two likely motivations for this decision: he is trailing Attorney General Eliot Spitzer in the polls, and he also harbors 2008 presidentialbitions.

New York-based late-night talk-show host David Letterman, who spent much of the mid-1990s making fun of Pataki’s name, is no doubt crestfallen. Rudy Giuliani, who, as a first-term mayor of NYC, famously endorsed Cuomo in ‘94 instead of backing his fellow Republican — a move that might have seemed politically shrewd at the time, given the seemingly overwhelming odds in Cuomo’s favor, but turned out to be something of a fiasco when Pataki unexpectedly won and suddenly New York and Albany were governed by two Republicans who didn’t like each other — is also probably crestfallen, if only because this means he’ll likely face in-state opposition for the presidential nomination in ‘08. It’s Giuliani vs. Pataki, Part Deux… followed, perhaps, by Giuliani vs. Hillary, For Real This Time. :)

British police arrested four men in Birmingham this morning, including one whom they believe was a would-be bomber on July 21.

Meanwhile, the investigation of the July 7 atrocity has taken a new turn: some investigators now think the 7/7 terrorists may have been unintentional suicide bombers, i.e., that they were duped into believing that the bombs wouldn’t go off until they’d gotten the hell out of Dodge. If so, that seems rather an odd strategy on the Islamists’ part, as presumably it would become harder to sign up future jihadists once it gets out that you duped the last batch. But it’s not exactly surprising either. They say there’s no honorong thieves, and it seems that applies to murderous Islamofascist thugs as well.

Former Gonzaga basketball star Ronny Turiaf’s NBA career in jeopardy after he had heart surgery this past weekend for an enlarged aortic root, a condition similar to the one that famously killed fellow West Coast Conference player Hank Gathers of Loyola Marymount in the middle of that school’s 1990 dream season. Thank goodness they caught Turiaf’s condition in time — it, too, could have been fatal — but it’s unclear if he’ll play basketball again, or cash in on the $1 million he was supposed to get from his two-year contract with the Lakers. Luckily, he stuck around all four years at Gonzaga and got his degree, so he has that to fall back on. (Hat tip: Patrick.)

If their highway signs are any indiciation, some Bay Staters seem to be under the mistaken impression that they live in Alabama. (Hat tip: my dad.) Now, if only we could get Alabamans to vote like Massachusettsians… :)

href="http://pratie.blogspot.com/07/carnival-of-vanities-149.html">Carnival
of the Vanities #149 is up at Pratie
Place, and I’m featured in it. (At last, my vanity is getting the recognition it so richly deserves! Jay Harris would be so proud…)

Houston, we have liftoff.

P.S. This view is pretty damn cool.

P.P.S. Wondering where the Shuttle is right now? Click here. Wondering if you’ll have a chance to see it flying overhead, and if so, when? Click here.

UPDATE: Déjà vu? Hopefully not, but:

[V]ideo of what appeared to be some kind of debris falling off Discovery during launch prompted questions that NASA officials said they couldn’t immediately answer.

The NASA video showed the unidentified debris falling and not appearing to hit Discovery. Falling debris that struck the craft during liftoff was blamed for the eventual destruction of Columbia as it re-entered the atmosphere in February 2003.

Since then, NASA has taken steps to minimize theount and size of debris falling off the shuttle’s exterior tank during its ascent. But the space agency has said it’s impossible to eliminate falling launch debris. NASA experts said they will analyze liftoff video frame by frame in the coming days.

In a departure from previous shuttle liftoffs, 107 ground and aircraft cameras scrutinized this one to observe possible damage to Discovery from falling debris.

By the mission management team will have enough information from the cameras to know whether Discovery is in safe enough condition to return to Earth, a NASA spokesman said before the debris video was released.