Reposted from Repeating islands:

Christopher Columbus is on the move again in the New World, after numerous rejections in a nearly two-decade quest to find him a suitable spot, the Associated Press reports. A towering statue of the explorer -- twice the height of the Statue of Liberty without its pedestal and shunned by several U.S. cities -- might be erected on Puerto Rico's north coast. 

The online whistle-blowing organisation Wikileaks has made public more than 90,000 reports, detailing the war in Afghanistan. The documents, extracts of which were published by the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel, expose the unseen side to the Afghan war.

The New York Times writes on how these secret documents show a bleaker view of the war. 

Angry Gunmen in the Age of Obama from Leonard Doyle on Vimeo.

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  The oil catastrophe afflicting the Gulf of Mexico underscores just how dangerous offshore oil exploration can be. Oil companies are seeking to extract the planet's last remaining barrels by drilling from ever-deeper sites on the ocean floor that wouldn't even have been considered not too many years ago. From Spiegelonline

  The oil now coating the Gulf of Mexico in reddish brown streaks has a long journey behind it. Tracing that journey would require diving 1,500 meters (5,000 feet) into the ocean, passing through a massive layer of mud and finally pounding through hard salt.

  The oil originated more than four kilometers (two and a half miles) below the ocean floor, in rock layers that formed millions of years ago, during the Tertiary period. It's scalding hot down there, a veritable journey into hell, but companies such as BP, Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron are daring to make the trip more and more often these days. Flying over the site where the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon sank in late April reveals dozens more oil platforms projecting out of the water on the horizon, like toys bobbing in a bathtub.

  The United States government currently estimates that there are around 60 billion barrels of oil beneath the ocean floor in the Gulf of Mexico. This enormous reservoir would be enough to keep the US economy -- with its trucks, Chevrolets, Learjets and Boeings, its chemical and materials industries -- running for nearly another decade. The question, though, is how dangerous this deep sea oil extraction really is. Deepwater Horizon's catastrophic explosion, which claimed the lives of 11 crewmembers, has turned the spotlight on the challenges of offshore drilling.

  The Frontiers of Geology, Geography and Technology

  The attempt to plug the oil leaks on the ocean floor calls to mind the rescue of the Apollo 13 spacecraft, damaged on its journey to the moon in 1970, admits BP CEO Tony Hayward. "The energy industry is clearly working at the frontiers of geology, geography and technology," he told SPIEGEL in an interview.

  US Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, appointed by US President Barack Obama to coordinate oil spill response efforts, also deplored "the tyranny of distance and the tyranny of depth." Containment work using remotely operated vehicles on a wellhead at a depth of 1,500 meters is "unprecedented," Allen added.

  Efforts failed this week to lower a 100-ton steel containment dome onto the leakage site, because quickly accumulated methane hydrates blocked the device. Now BP is attempting the procedure with a much smaller dome. Still, even if this rescue mission succeeds, the disaster's effects will be felt for years. The sea area covered in oil is already twice as big as Luxembourg.

  First traces of oil washed up on the beaches of the Chandeleur Islands, an uninhabited island chain off the coast of Louisiana, on Friday. Around 10,000 people worked feverishly to keep the oil from reaching any more of the coast. Lockheed C-130 planes sprayed tons of a chemical mixture called Corexit, which is used to break down and disperse spilled oil -- but which is also suspected of causing harm to marine ecosystems itself. The fishing and tourism industries anticipate billions in losses.

  'Not for the Faint of Heart'

  An unprecedented deluge of complaints has hit BP and Transocean, the company that operated the Deepwater Horizon. "What has occurred in the Gulf of Mexico is precisely what we have always warned of," criticized geologist Klaus Bitzer at the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas. "They interfered with things that are better left alone."

  If oil companies continue to drill in deeper and deeper waters, predicts the professor at Bayreuth University in southern Germany, we can expect disasters like this one off the coast of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida to become more frequent. At the moment it's unclear to what degree BP is at fault in the disaster, Bitzer says, "but there is one accusation we must make of the industry now: a staunch refusal to acknowledge reality in evaluating future possibilities in oil production."

  The oil barons' daring seems limitless even in the face of the crisis. "The deepwater arena is not for the faint of heart or the underfinanced," writes Mark Riding, an expert at the oil exploration company Schlumberger, in the May edition of Offshore, a magazine dedicated to the offshore oil industry, but "with success comes enthusiasm."

  Deep sea floors rich in oil span the globe. Riding offers a simplistic assessment of the waters off the coasts of Madagascar, the Horn of Africa, Greenland, south of the Arabian Peninsula and along the continental shelves around the Atlantic: all "ripe targets for the drill bit."

  The deep sea has become a playground for engineers and energy market strategists. This enthusiasm, though, is born of necessity. Multinational companies would hardly venture voluntarily to tap difficult undersea reservoirs. Rather, it's the last option they have left. For about five years, global oil production has remained steady at around 85 million barrels a day. "Even though the industry returned to making massive investments between 2003 and 2008, it could not match the tide of rising oil demand," Sadad al Husseini, former vice president of the oil company Saudi Aramco, told the journal Petroleum Technology. "Ultimately, it was unable to exceed a production (that) production plateau."

  A large portion of the world's petroleum is pumped from oilfields that were first discovered more than 60 years ago without a great deal of complex technology. Today, prospectors must use costly methods to search for new oilfields that are located in some of the world's most inaccessible locations and yield amounts of oil once considered marginal.
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• Exxon Valdez veteran, marine biologist on oil spill's impact on fishing  In 1989, Riki Ott was just your average marine biologist-turned commercial fisherman in Alaska, when the Exxon-Valdez dumped millions of gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound. 

Ott witnessed first-hand the environmental, economic and social impacts of the Valdez spill and was part of a 20-year legal battle with Exxon-Mobil. She's written two books about the impacts of the Valdez spill and now travels the globe, helping other communities deal with oil spils. 

Ott met with a small group of Share the Beach volunteers last week to share her experiences with them and warn them of the potential effects of the Deepwater Horizon spill on the Gulf of Mexico.

In the first video, Ott talks about the impact the Valdez spill had on commercial fishing in Alaska, and speculates about the impact it might have on the Gulf of Mexico and its fragile eco-systems.

 BY SARAH LASKOW  Media Consortium blogger

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill  in the Gulf of Mexico is worse than anyone thought, and the crisis will likely go on for months. British Petroleum (BP) is tripping over itself to say it'll cover the costs of the clean-up, yet before the spill, the company spent its time and money pushing back against government regulation and safety measures.

Care2 reports, "A piece of machinery costing .004% of BP's 2009 profits might have prevented the Gulf of Mexico oil spill that is currently threatening the U.S. gulf coast. An acoustic valve designed as a final failsafe to prevent oil spills costs $500,000; the Wall Street Journal writes that the valve, while not proven effective, is required on oil rigs in Norway and Brazil, but not in the U.S."

A press release from the oil spill Joint Command could have been in the satirical "newspaper" The Onion.The half-dozen tar balls found at Dauphin Island were being sent to a lab for testing to determine their point of origin--as if there were any doubt that the tar came from the BP oil sick. 

Warrant officer Adam Wine of the Coast Guard said they planned to test the tar, but "strongly suspected it came from the oil spill."

The Institute for Southern Studies (ISS) features a vivid video on its website documenting an overflight at ground zero of the BP oil catastrophe resulting from the explosion of the Transocean/Deepwater Horizon well platform on April 20. 

This is the view that cannot be seen from sanitized satellite photos and composite maps depicting the direction and extent of the massive river of oil threatening entire ecosystems in the Gulf of Mexico. Tar balls have already been reported on pristine Dauphin Island, and the damage is escalating daily.

Angry Brigade: Muster on the Potomac from Leonard Doyle on Vimeo.

                      Ribbon cutting spooks at the Joint Intelligence Resource Centre

THE US Army developed plans to destroy Wikileaks, the online whistle-blower organisation,  by resorting to the same computer hacking techniques that the Obama Administration and Google indignantly accuse China of engaging in.

Washington holds up Internet freedom as a fundamental principle of its foreign policy and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently declared that "Viral videos and blog posts are becoming the samizdat of our day." 

Holbroke's message to Pakistan.....

 $50 million slush fund for Pakistani Television stations

In the Cold War  the CIA and Britain's MI6 secretly funded writers, journalists and artists as a war of  ideas, images and propaganda secretly unfolded across Europe.

The Obama Administration wants to emulate that policy in Pakistan and the region, where America is getting pasted in the media. 

A 15-page spending plan reveals that it has asked Congress for $50 million which it wants to get into the hands of Pakistan's media barons -  in the name of buying a better press.

 The State Department ambitious plan is to transform a growing hostility towards America into admiration. We can assume that the CIA is already doing something similar with its own secret slush funds.

A drumbeat of drone attacks over the past two years have whipped up intense anger among Pakistanis towards the US. At its core is the concern that the country's sovereignty is being trampled by the US. 

Now the US hopes to tamp down those concerns by sending in what it calls "rapid response team" to monitor Pakistani and regional media and "swiftly correct inaccurate reporting."

Beyond the Echo Chamber
Reshaping Politics Through Networked Progressive Media

JESSICA CLARK AND TRACY VAN SLYKE
Paperback: The New Press
$19.95

By Leonard Doyle

If you've ever been confused by the alphabet soup of online progressive media outlets in the US, here, finally, is a handbook to decode them.

Progressives, unlike their wimpy liberal cousins, have a political identity that is left of center without being fundamentally radical. 

The movement has provided a rallying cry for younger democratic activists (by no means all of them enamored with the Democratic party) over the past couple of years.