In Canada’s Manitoba province, clearcut logging, roadbuilding and industrial hydropower development have devastated the old-growth boreal forest habitat of the woodland caribou, cutting the provincial population of this majestic species in half in the span of just a few decades. Now numbering roughly 2,000 animals, Manitoba’s last remaining woodland caribou survive hard winters by feeding on abundant lichens in our Heart of the Boreal Forest BioGem and other boreal woodlands.

According to scientists, a dwindling caribou population serves as an alert that the health of other forest wildlife is in jeopardy as well. But despite warnings from federal and provincial endangered species committees about the impacts of habitat loss on woodland caribou, the Manitoba government still refuses to list woodland caribou as threatened under its Endangered Species Act. Please take action now to ensure the protection of this sensitive boreal species in Manitoba.

Nice Money if you can get it!
Parts of an audit done by Pentagon’s Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) and released by Democratic California Rep. Henry Waxman, yesterday revealed that Halliburton Co., Vice Presidents Dick Cheney former company may have overcharged by as much $212 million to get fuel to Iraqi civilians under a contract that had “no-bid” deal with the U.S. military.
The audit identifies fuel delivered in Iraq by Halliburton unit Kellogg Brown & Root(KBR) in 2003 and 2004 may have been overcharged by as much as 47% in some cases.
KBR is the U.S. military’s biggest contractor in Iraq and is being investigated by some U.S. government departments over whether it overcharged for services.Last month, an ex-employee of KBR was indicted for defrauding the U.S. government of more than $3.5 million by inflating the cost of fuel tankers for military operations in Kuwait.Another KBR contractor was found to be charging for 42,042 meals a day when only 14,053 meals a day were served.
Despite this , only last week the Penatgon agreed to reimburse Halliburton $145 million out of the $200 million in disputed costs.
So far as much as $1.7 Billion dollars has beed paid to Halliburton and its subsiduaries
The DCAA is still investigating possible overcharges from a separate contract for transporting cooking and heating fuel into Iraq.It was alleged that Halliburton had charged the Pentagon $27.5 million to ship in $82,100 worth of fuel.

WHAT A LOAD OF BALLS!
Sharon Jacobsen

When it comes to the US Masters, one thing’s certain - whoever dons the Green Jacket this year won’t be a woman!

What women will be doing is a fair amount of shouting whilst bearing gripe-sloganed banners in order to let the world know they’re unhappy that a private club has the audacity to make its own decisions about membership. Women simply aren’t welcome at the ‘Augusta National’, the prestigious golf club that’s home to the annual Masters event.

Martha Burk, Chairwoman (or should that be chairperson?) of the ‘National Council of Women’s Organizations’ is calling for investors to sell their stock in companies who hold memberships at Augusta!

I’ve no problem understanding what they’re asking, I do, however, have trouble understand quite why anybody would want to dump their shares over something as trivial as membership to a golf club! Is the club exploiting somebody, perhaps? Are they producing a dangerous product that’s being marketed as healthy? No, they’re doing nothing of the kind.

What they’re doing is simply insisting that their members have a place - a sanctuary some might say - where men can get away from women and just enjoy being men. What’s so wrong with that?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for equality and will be eternally grateful for the work the suffragettes did to improve the position of women. We’ve come a long way, honey, and we ain’t going back!

My point in the debate is that although men and women are of equal worth, we are not and never will be the same. And I’m not just talking about our roles in the procreation process, either!

Men cuss a lot. Not all of them, but a lot of them. Men also feel they need to act in a certain way when women a present: pull out chairs, hold doors open and generally be a gentleman. Not all of them, but a lot of them.

What’s wrong with men having a place where they can get together for a round of golf and relax in the knowledge that nobody is going to fuss if they drop the odd expletive or forget to allow somebody else to go through the door ahead of them? Don’t they have rights, too?

I wonder which WOMEN’S ORGANIZATIONS Martha Burk represents? How can there possibly be organizations specifically for women? I also wonder whether ‘The General Federation Of Women’s Clubs’, which is represented by Ms Burk’s organization, is open to male members? Or even any of the clubs that they again represent? If the Augusta National has decided that its membership is open to men only then so be it.

Please, let’s stop this puerile bickering and pack away the ill judged belief that we as women have a right to membership of any chosen club or organization. Let’s just accept that as equal as we are, men need their space and so, ladies, do we.

Another Commission Recommends Bureaucratic Buffet to Fix U.S. Intelligence
April 4, 2005
Ivan Eland

President Bush insists that he is already implementing recommendations from the officious smorgasbord of the presidential commission on intelligence. Let’s hope not.

It’s not that the U.S. intelligence agencies don’t need reform. The severe intelligence failures surrounding 9/11 and the non-existence of Iraqi WMD indicate that significant change is needed. But this panel, like the 9/11 commission before it, has recommended expanding an already swollen intelligence bureaucracy rather than putting it on a much-needed diet.

The adoption of the earlier 9/11 commission’s recommendations by Congress and the administration resulted in the worst of all possible worlds. A new layer of bureaucracy, in the form of a new national intelligence director, was added on top of the already extensive 15-agency intelligence community. In addition, this new office was not given the power to rein in the entrenched agencies of the community. Congress did not give the new director the authority to match his responsibility. In fact, the legislation doesn’t make the powers of the new office clear, and they will probably be the subject of much interagency wrangling. But something is wrong when Congress creates such a sprawling intelligence structure that requires even more bureaucracy to ride herd on it.

And the recent suggestions of the presidential commission on intelligence make the 9/11 commission’s appetite for recommendations look restrained. The presidential commission went on a federal feeding frenzy and recommended stuffing the intelligence community with many new offices and organizations. The commission suggested creating a new National Intelligence University, a directorate in the CIA to supervise the nation’s human spying, a national security directorate in the FBI, a long-term analysis unit that would not have to bother with day-to-day intelligence, a National Counter Proliferation Center to coordinate government efforts to counter WMD, a non-profit research institute to encourage dissenting views, and an open source directorate to snare intelligence information from newspapers, TV, and the internet.

The recommendations of the two panels are typical of such “independent” commissions in the nation’s capital. Usually composed of ex-members of Congress and former high-level bureaucrats, they instinctively prescribe adding bureaucracy as a remedy for any ill. Furthermore, they usually get so wound up in what to recommend that they lose sight of the original problem that they were asked to examine.

Both of these commissions noted that the existing 15 intelligence agencies don’t adequately cooperate or share information, but the panels’ recommendations would make the problem worse, not better. This dilemma is nothing new. Problems of intelligence coordination and information sharing existed long before September 11, 2001; in fact these same problems were present prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor.on December 7, 1941. In both cases, there was enough information inside the U.S. government—if shared and integrated—that could have warned of an impending attack. Yet U.S. intelligence agencies didn’t adequately collaborate in either case, leading to disaster. The more offices, organizations, agencies, and bureaucracies that are created, the more difficult coordination and effective dissent become.

One justification for having so many agencies is that policymakers get a range of opinion. In the case of Iraqi WMD, however, the numerous agencies all knew who was boss and what he wanted to hear. Any dissent—and there wasn’t much—was stifled or ignored. Perhaps the intelligence agencies should be made more independent of presidential authority, much like independent regulatory boards.

And to improve the speed of interagency coordination against an agile terrorist foe, we should put the bloated intelligence bureaucracies on a diet by reducing and streamlining the number of agencies. Unlike typical foreign government adversaries, terrorists don’t need to complete a lot of paperwork before attacking. A nimble enemy demands leaner government agencies to counter it.

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Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute in Oakland, California, and author of the books The Empire Has No Clothes, and Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy.

AUGUSTA NATIONAL turns into one of the world’s great sporting shrines every April. We all know about the quality of the golf, but the experience for the visitor is out of this world.

It is easy to spot the first-time visitors to Augusta National. They are the ones whose eyes, cartoon-style, are popping out on stalks and whose mouths are dangling near the floor. It works every time. However much anyone else builds the place up, whatever your own expectations might be as a result of watching countless Masters on television, actually being there is far from an anti-climax.

For the full, speech-inhibiting effect, all you have to do is walk down the hill by the 10th hole - the flat TV pictures do not prepare you for the sharp changes in elevation - and then on to the 11th. About halfway down the fairway, suddenly you realise that stretched out in front of you is none other than Amen Corner: the 11th green, where Nick Faldo won his two play-offs, in the foreground and Rae’s Creek and the 12th green with the bank of azaleas.
Everywhere you turn there is a recognisable feature which prompts memories of dramas past. At least on the back nine. Discovering the front nine, rarely seen on television, is a joy in itself. If anything, it can alI be a touch overwhelming if not intimidating.

It is hard not to believe that the beauty is not artificially enhanced - the water in some of the ponds is indeed dyed blue. But nothing can detract from the magnificence of the vista of the “cathedral of pines” to be enjoyed from back up beside the clubhouse, either by standing under the grand old oak tree, where anyone who is anyone in golf passes sooner or later, or by sitting on the verandah sipping a pink lemonade.

Bobby Jones, who created Augusta National back in the early 1930s, described the experience of seeing that view for the first time as “unforgettable”. He knew instantly that this nursery garden was where he wanted to build his monument to the game.
“This ground has been lying here all these years,” he said, “waiting for someone to come along and lay a golf course on it.”

Before Jones, with the architectural help of the inimitable Dr Alister Mackenzie and the financial support of a few friendly fellow businessmen, set about building his club after retiring from competitive play in 1930, the land was a nursery that had been created by a Belgian baron called Berckmans. Prior to that it was an indigo plantation, and the clubhouse, originally built in 1854, is considered the first cement-built structure in the South.
Jones and Clifford Roberts, the long-time chairman of the club, knew about the land since it bordered the Augusta Country Club. With a couple of other fine courses in the city, Augusta had the reputation as a winter resort long before the likes of Hilton Head and Kiawah Island came along.

The winter climate is perfect for a leisurely, comfortable game of golf, and even now the Augusta National closes for the summer when it gets seriously hot. These days, except for Masters Week, everyone flies over Augusta on the way to Florida.
The city is 150 miles east of Atlanta on the Savannah River, which marks the
Georgia-South Carolina border. Named after Princess Augusta, the mother of George
III, it was founded in 1735 and was initially an inland port and then a mill town.
Downtown has changed little for decades and the shops suffer during
Masters Week as so many residents leave town.

None the less, the bars and restaurants do a roaring trade, notably attracting clients from the Army Signal School at nearby Fort Gordon. Down by the river there has been redevelopment and the city stages rowing regattas twice a year. But in Masters Week, the place to be is up on Washington Road. Exit the gates of Augusta National and it is a different world. While even Coca-Cola have to sell their product in green cups on the course, here it is neonsignville. Here you can find every established burger outlet and steakhouse chain in America, but don’t expect to get a table before 10pm.

Then there are the motels, with rooms charged at over $350 a night (plus tax), a price hike of around 1,000 per cent on their rates for the other 51 weeks of the year.

Most of the players and corporate visitors hire a house for the week rather than seek hotel or motel accommodation. This largely explains why all the residents who don’t have tickets - and the patrons’ lists closed decades ago - flee the town and use the fees they receive for letting their properties to pay for their holidays. Nightlife consists of parties put on by various organisa tions, companies or influential individuals, while the players chill out with friends in the temporary homes.

Chipping contests around the house are very popular, according to the former American Ryder Cup golfer Ken Green. “You pick out holes all over the house and the yard. It could be a mailbox, a car tyre, or even the boot of a car. The year we rented two houses we were able to play back and forth between them, even using the Jacuzzi or the pool as a hole.
We even sneaked into the neighbours’ yard one time for a few holes, but the following day they had put up a sign saying ‘Out of Bounds’. That was a nice way of telling us to leave them and their property alone.”

The most sought-after invitations are to those events up at the National’s clubhouse. Monday is for the international players. This used to be a sit-down dinner, but the number of overseas players and administrators has grown to such an extent over the last few years that it is now a cocktail party.

On Tuesday night, it is the Champions’ Dinner. This year Phil Mickelson will be host for the dinner having joined one of sporting’s most exclusive club.
‘I am a little concerned with the champion’s dinner. The wine cellar they have is extremely good and I have to pay for dinner,’ said the American with a laugh.

The amateurs, some of whom stay in the dormitory-style rooms in the Crows’ Nest in the clubhouse, have their own reception on Wednesday and, for a reason lost in the mists of time, not to mention the wine glasses, the British Press are offered cocktails in the Trophy Room on Saturday night. Not a single person present on this particular occasion is without hope (not expectation, note) that he or she might end up being invited to play the course by one of the green-jacketed members.
But, of course, the prize invitation comes on the Sunday night when the new champion is dined and wined in the clubhouse whilst wearing his newly acquired piece of (Green Jacketed) evening wear. Now that is exclusive.