inkbluesky

Clark: U.S. needs new plan on terror war

Former Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark accused the Bush administration Saturday of taking the nation on a "path to nowhere" with misguided moves on national security.

The retired Army general and NATO military commander argued in the Democrats' weekly radio address that the United States needs a new plan to win the war on terror after failing to find Sept. 11 terror mastermind Osama bin Laden, fighting an unnecessary war in Iraq and stumbling in halting weapons proliferation in North Korea and Iran.

Clark coupled his criticism of President Bush's policies with a renewed call for the Democratic plan on national security that party leaders unveiled this week.

Portrayed by opponents as weak on national security, Democrats contend that they've cut into the Republican advantage in this midterm-election year based on White House missteps on Iraq and ports security.

"This administration has taken us on a path to nowhere - replete with hyped intelligence, macho slogans and an incredible failure to see the obvious," Clark said in the broadcast.

A candidate in 2004 for the Democratic nomination, Clark has been mentioned as a possible contender again in 2008.

The administration "has shown tragic incompetence in everything from nation building in Iraq to disaster relief in Louisiana," he said. "Let's face it: We're not going to win the war on terror unless we start making more friends and fewer enemies in the world, and we're not going to be able to protect the American people without a new strategy."

It is a shame that so many so-called conservatives continue to dig the depths of denial to try and cover for this administrations failures. They have truly put party loyalty above what is best for the troops, America and Iraq. Think of it this way, Roosevelt won a world war against an advanced mechanized army in less time then its taken for Bush to let Iraq and Afghanistan lapse into chaos and let world wide terrorism reach all time highs.

Henri Cartier-Bresson:The Impassioned Eye

He rarely photographed the obvious, preferring to make his way where his instinct told him to go and then, simply not quite the right word take the picture destiny laid out for him. In some cases he needed only one shot, in other cases, just a few. And, perhaps, that was his genius. As some critics indicated, in the film we enter a master class in photography. To that I have no objection. I found what Cartier-Bresson said useful and insightful, and disarming as well as charming.

Report: Species loss worst since the dinosaurs

Humans are responsible for the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs and must make unprecedented extra efforts to reach a goal of slowing losses by 2010, a U.N. report said on Monday.

Habitats ranging from coral reefs to tropical rainforests face mounting threats, the Secretariat of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity said in the report, issued at the start of a March 20-31 U.N. meeting in Curitiba, Brazil.

"In effect, we are currently responsible for the sixth major extinction event in the history of earth, and the greatest since the dinosaurs disappeared, 65 million years ago," said the 92-page Global Biodiversity Outlook 2 report.