Now some fresh pickings from the Political Grapevine:
Founding Fodder
One of the founders of Al Qaeda has written a book repudiating terrorism and railing against Usama bin Laden and deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri.
The Daily Telegraph newspaper reports Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, better known as Doctor Fadl, led an Islamist insurgency in Egypt in the 1990s. Now he writes that the terrorist attacks on 9/11 were both immoral and counterproductive: “Ramming America has become the shortest road to fame and leadership among the Arabs and Muslims. But what good is it if you destroy one of your enemy’s buildings, and he destroys one of your countries? What good is it if you kill one of his people, and he kills a thousand of yours?”
Fadl says the murder of innocent people goes against Islam: “Every drop of blood that was shed or is being shed in Afghanistan and Iraq is the responsibility of bin Laden and Zawahiri and their followers.”
Out of Gas
A $280 million NASA project to study global warming gases from space has failed. A satellite launched today from California crashed into the sea near Antarctica after a malfunction kept it from achieving orbit. This was NASA’s first satellite dedicated to monitoring carbon dioxide emissions on a global scale.
The project took almost a decade to plan and was supposed to last two years. A NASA spokesman says an exact cause of the failure has not been determined.
Dramatic Interpretation
Former Vice President Al Gore is removing a dramatic slide in his global warming presentation. The New York Times reports Gore used a graph from a disaster research center in Brussels to illustrate that human-driven climate change is, “creating weather-related disasters that are completely unprecedented.”
But the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, which came up with the raw data, says no such direct correlation can be proven: “Justifying the upward trend in hydro-meteorological disaster occurrence and impacts essentially through climate change would be misleading. Climate change is probably an actor in this increase but not the major one…
We need to be cautious when interpreting disaster data… and remain objective scientific observers.”
Spell Check
And finally, the $620 million Capitol Visitor Center here in Washington might need to start paying for a copy editor. The Politico reports that the newly-opened center was forced to cut off the top of some tour tickets because “U.S.Capitol” with an “o,” was misspelled “U.S. Capital” with an “a.” The CVC admits it made the error and is correcting the mistake in the next batch of printing.
— FOX News Channel’s Zachary Kenworthy contributed to this report.
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