Last night my friend Mark, came over to watch the Penguins play the New Jersey Devils. It’s hard to believe, but the New Jersey Devils swept every game this year against the Penguins. My beloved Penguins lost their sixth in a row to New Jersey last night, 5 to 2. At least the company and wings were Good because the game sucked.

During the game, a beer commercial came on (I can’t recall which) with girls dancing on stripper poles. It’s an interesting way to sell beer I guess….lol. We had a pretty good laugh saying ” if the girls wear ice skates and do those moves they are in the Olympics, add a stripper pole and it’s a beer commercial “. Lol…. could you tell it was a bad hockey game ?

Some 200 American law enforcement agents cracked down Thursday morning on a notorious gang in El Paso, Tex., in an attempt to determine whether its heavily armed members were behind the shooting deaths of three people connected to the American consulate in Ciudad Juarez over the weekend.

The raids involved agents from several federal agencies, and about 50 members of the Barrio Azteca gang were taken in for questioning, according to Andrea Simmons, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I. field office in El Paso.

The gang operates on both sides of the United States-Mexico border, and Mexican soldiers were also conducting operations, according to a spokesman for the Mexican military, Enrique Torres.

Mexican law enforcement officials have said that the Barrio Azteca gang, which supplies hit men for the drug traffickers who operate in Ciudad Juarez, is one of those that may have been responsible for killing the husband of a consulate employee and, minutes later in a separate shooting, a consulate employee and her husband.

One of the people being sought was Eduardo Ravelo, 41, a leader of the Barrio Aztecas in Ciudad Juarez, who was put on the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted list last year. He is accused of ordering killings in Ciudad Juarez as well as carrying out killings, the F.B.I. said.

American law enforcement officials said they were following several lines of investigation in the hunt for the killers. The consulate employee, Lesley A. Enriquez, and her husband, Arthur H. Redelfs, were shot Saturday afternoon as they left a children’s birthday party. Jorge Alberto Salcido, the husband of a Mexican employee of the consulate, who was on his way home from the same party, was the other victim. There were children in both vehicles.

“Everything is on the table until we get further information,” said Ms. Simmons. “At this point we don’t have any information that they were targeted because of their connection to the consulate.”

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Made up of Mexican nationals and Mexican-Americans, its members move back and forth across the border and earn money smuggling heroin, cocaine and marijuana from Mexico to the United States. “Barrio Azteca members also are involved in alien smuggling, arson, assault, auto theft, burglary, extortion, intimidation, kidnapping, robbery, and weapons violations,” the report said.

It sounds like they needed to be rounded up anyway. The US needs to find out who is facilitating the transfer of narcotics from Juarez to the I-10 corridor where it is shipped all across the US. The killings may have finally motivated the government to take action that needed to be taken. What the is looking for is evidence of involvement with the Mexican criminal insurgency.

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A leading North Korean financial expert has been dragged before a firing squad and shot dead for ruining the country’s financial affairs.

Mr Pak Nam Ki was responsible for revaluing the communist regime’s currency last November, but his attempts to curb inflation caused nationwide misery - and leader Kim Jong Ill was not amused.

It is understood the execution is an attempt to contain civil unrest.

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It has to be a tough job to manage a command economy which is going to be in the tank anyway. I guess firing was just not good enough, and they can’t fire the people really responsible for the mess starting with Kim Jong Ill.

Ask Rabbi Sam White what he thinks of the global political row over plans to expand the community in which he lives, prays and studies, and he answers bluntly: “I don’t see the problem. God gave us the land of Israel.” The notion that the location of Ramat Shlomo, on land occupied after the 1967 Six Day War and officially expropriated six years later, might belong to another people is wholly alien to the 32- year-old Salford-born rabbi. “There’s no question. It’s in the Torah, which says that God gave the land to the Jewish people.”

We are talking in a gabled brown brick house which, incongruously set amid the rows of plain white multi-storey apartment buildings in this hilltop settlement of some 18,000 in the north of Jerusalem, looks as if it might have been transplanted from another country. Which in a sense it was. For this is the Chabad House, the community base of the famous Hasidic sect which still reveres the leadership of the late Lubavicher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, its architecture a replica of the movement’s world headquarters in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

And Rabbi White is as opposed to territorial compromise of any part of the greater “land of Israel” – stretching, in his view, from the Jordan to the Mediterranean – as his spiritual leader was throughout his long life. “Look what happened in Gaza, when they took the people from Gush Katif [the main settlement bloc in the territory dismantled by Ariel Sharon in 1995],” he says. “An Israel in pieces is not an Israel at peace.”

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Back in Ramat Shlomo itself, some considerations are rather more mundane. Nechani Rabinovich, a young mother wheeling her baby son Ezekiel in his pushchair, typically reflects Mr Netanyahu’s political need to find relatively low cost housing to meet the rapid growth of large religious families. Mrs Rabinovich, whose parents have lived in Ramat Shlomo since its beginning in 1995 would like to buy a house – instead of renting – and to see many of her 11 siblings do so too. “If we had more houses it would be much cheaper,” she explains.

But asked if she would divide “Greater Israel” to make peace, Mrs Rabinovich, 23, says: “I don’t think this will bring peace and I don’t think we have a partner.” And if there was a “partner” would she relent? “No,” she admits. “This is our land, our country. God gave it to us. There is no reason why they should take something that belongs to us.” And what does she think about Mr Obama pressing Israel to abandon its plan for an extra 1,600 houses here? “I don’t think he likes Israel. I don’t think he likes Jews. I think” – she pauses here – “he is anti-Semitic.”

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Local grocery store owner Rafael Niasov, 45, is no exception. He too cites the Torah and argues that Jews have inhabited the land of Israel for “5,500 years”. Explaining that he came from Uzbekistan at the age of eight, he says: There we lived side by side with Muslims. We had good relations, we were like family. But these [the Palestinians] are savages.” On one point he disagrees with Mrs Rabinovich “I don’t think Obama is anti-Semitic,” he says. “He wants to make his place in history like Reagan, Bush, Clinton, the son of Bush; they all tried and now Obama’s trying. But it won’t help him. In the Torah it is written that there will be no peace. Obama is living under an illusion. We will continue suffering until the Messiah comes.”

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I think the chances of a deal with the Palestinians is remote. Even more remote is the chance that the Palestinians would stop attacking Israelis. There is no will among the Palestinian leadership to stop those attacks and among Hamas there is active encouragement for attacking Israel.

At some point Obama and his administration will have to recognize that the Palestinians do not want peace with Israel. They have nothing of value to offer Israel in return for an agreement. Note the killing of a worker in Israel by a radical Palestinian group. What are the chances that Hamas will turn the perps over to Israel for prosecution? None. Will Obama even demand it? No.

Kai Eide, the UN’s special representative to Afghanistan until earlier this month, has attacked Pakistan for having arrested prominent Taliban leaders who were taking part in back-channel peace talks.

Eide, a Norwegian, confirmed for the first time since leaving office that he had held what seemed to him to be promising discussions with senior Taliban representatives, but that channels of communication had shut down after the arrests.

These arrests had a “negative effect” on prospects for continuing the political process, he told the BBC World Service. The talks had taken place with at least the tacit assent of the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, Eide believed. “I find it unthinkable that such contact would take place without his knowledge,” he said.

Eide was tasked with bringing impetus to peace efforts in Afghanistan two years ago when relations between Kabul and the international community were in crisis. He left his post 10 days ago.

The US is sceptical about negotiations, though Britain wants greater efforts to talk to the Taliban about cutting ties with al-Qaida and ending a conflict which has cost more than 270 British lives and is being intensified by Kabul’s inefficiency and corruption.

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I guess I am beyond skeptical about talks with the Taliban other than the current talks with leaders in custody about where we can find other members of the religious bigots. In fact those talks have gone rather well in reducing the ranks of Taliban leadership and making their demise more likely.

The idea that the Taliban would give up their despotic ways and join in a good faith peace agreement with Kabul has no basis in experience or fact. Do you think they would stop making women wear funny clothes and preventing women from going to school? Would they stop their barbaric custom of dismembering the bodies of those who did not agree with their weird beliefs?

No, the current talks are more fruitful and more likely to lead to a lasting peace.

A Filipino tourist spent five days in custody after Australian officials mistook packets of tea for amphetamines.

Maria Cecilia Silva, 29, was stopped as she arrived in Melbourne airport when drug-detection dogs reacted to tea in her luggage.

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A tearful Ms Silva clung to a female prison guard as she was led through the court to a waiting friend.

“She’s a totally innocent young lady who has experienced five days in an horrendous situation having her liberty taken away and placed in cells with some serious offenders,” said her lawyer, Michael Penna-Rees.

“She’s traumatised, she’s lost a lot of weight and she’ll be seeing a doctor.”

He said the tea was purchased in a Philippine supermarket and had never been opened.

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The Judge ordered the prosecutors to pay $4,600 to the poor woman for their bad brew. I guess he is letting the dog off without penalty.

Scientists have created the first device to render an object invisible in three dimensions.

The “cloak”, described in the journal Science, hid an object from detection using light of wavelengths close to those that are visible to humans.

Previous devices have been able to hide objects from light travelling in only one direction; viewed from any other angle, the object would remain visible.

This is a very early but significant step towards true invisibility cloaks.

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The basis of the design is known as a “carpet cloak”. This was first proposed by Professor Sir John Pendry from Imperial College London, who also took part in this study.

“He proposed the theoretical design of having an object hidden under a bump and making the bump disappear,” said Mr Ergin.

“It’s like a carpet mirror,” he continued. “If you hide an object under it, there is a bump, so you see a distortion in the reflected image.

“We put the carpet cloak on top of that bump and it bends the light so that the distortions disappear.

“You have the impression that the mirror you’re looking at is flat.”

The trick is to change the speed and direction in which light travels through the material - that is, to change the material’s refractive index.

The researchers achieved by this using a polymer crystal made up of very tiny rods. “By changing the thickness of the rods, you can change the ratio of air to polymer,” explained Dr Ergin.

“Since the refractive index of air is about one and the refractive index of the polymer is about 1.52,” he explained, “in principle, we can get any refractive index between those two numbers,” he said.

By tailoring the refractive index of the the surface of the bump, the scientists rendered it invisible to a wide range of light wavelengths slightly longer than those that we can see.

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One of the major challenges that remains in the design of cloaking devices is hiding objects from wavelengths of light that are visible to humans.

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It will be a while before we will be able to hide Abram tanks while they are attacking. While the creation can hide very small things, which might be handy for bugs, making a cloak for an electronic bug could take considerable time using the process.

Still, it is a developing field that is worth watching–if you can see it.

Fifty percent (50%) of U.S. voters say they are less likely to vote for their representative in Congress this November if he or she votes for the health care plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey taken Wednesday night finds that 34% are more likely to vote for their Congress member’s reelection if he or she supports the president’s health care plan. Eight percent (8%) say the health care vote will have no impact on how they vote this November, and another seven percent (7%) are not sure.

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But perhaps more significantly, 51% of voters not affiliated with either major party are less likely to support someone who votes for the legislation. Just 32% of unaffiliateds are more likely to vote for someone who supports the bill.

Sixty-three percent (63%) of voters now think it would be better for the country if most incumbents in Congress were defeated this November. Just 27% of voters say their representative in Congress is the best possible person for the job.

While the president and Democratic congressional leaders push for passage of the health care plan with a vote possible as early as this weekend, most voters continue to oppose it. Forty-five percent (45%) now favor the plan, while 52% oppose it. This marks the highest level of support since mid-November. The new findings include 29% who Strongly Favor the plan and 45% who Strongly Oppose it.

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As I have noted before the passion is on the side of the opponents which means they are more likely to continue their opposition and punish the Democrats who support the legislation.

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Passage of the Senate bill would increase Texans’ health insurance premiums by 61 percent over the next five years. Passage of the Senate bill would increase Texas’ Medicaid population by 50 percent and Texas’ budget deficit by several billion dollars. Passage of the Senate bill could expose Texas medical providers to more than 20 new types of medical malpractice lawsuits and pre-empt the tort reforms approved by Texas voters. All of this means that Texans’ health care costs would go up, while our access to quality health care would go down.

The CBO admitted that the numbers it released this morning were merely an educated guess, as “the agency has not thoroughly examined the reconciliation proposal to verify its consistency with the previous draft. This estimate is therefore preliminary, pending a review of the language of the reconciliation proposal, as well as further review and refinement of the budgetary projections.”

However, the CBO estimate continues to double-count $463 billion in Medicare cuts that are unlikely to occur in the first place, as well as $53 billion in Social Security payroll taxes that are already committed to paying for future benefits. Once these and other smoke-and-mirrors tricks are removed from the analysis, the Senate’s health care legislation would increase the deficit nearly $600 billion in the first decade and by more than $1.6 trillion in its second decade.

Beyond that, the latest reconciliation draft postpones a more onerous tax on so-called “Cadillac” health plans until the end of the decade. Given that this tax is one of the unions’ most hated provisions and that the changes will hit a broad swath of the middle class, it is almost certainly to be repealed before it can take effect, which further guts the deficit reduction promises after 2018.

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The repeal of the Cadillac tax will just be one of the many items that will be repealed after this legislation becomes law, if it does. Hopefully some of the items repealed will be the special deals cut to get it passed. They have become indefensible as voters rebel against spending by Congress.