Absent Element

WASHINGTON – Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge claims in a new book that he was pressured by other members of President George W. Bush's Cabinet to raise the nation's terror alert level just before the 2004 presidential election.
Ridge says he objected to raising the security level despite the urgings of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, according to a publicity release from Ridge's publisher. In the end the alert level was not changed. Ridge said the episode convinced him to follow through with his plans to leave the administration; he resigned on Nov. 30, 2004.
Bush's former homeland security adviser, Frances Townsend, said Thursday that politics never played a role in determining alert levels.
Two tapes were released by al-Qaida in the weeks leading up to the election — one by terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and the other by a man calling himself "Azzam the American." Terrorism experts suspected that "Azzam the American" was Adam Gadahn, a 26-year-old Californian whom the FBI had been urgently seeking.
Townsend said the videotapes contained "very graphic" and "threatening" messages.
Townsend said that anytime there was a discussion of changing the alert level, she first spoke with Ridge and then, if necessary, called a meeting of the homeland security council comprising the secretaries of defense and homeland security, the attorney general and CIA and FBI directors. The group then made a recommendation to the president about whether the color-coded threat level should be raised.
"Never were politics ever discussed in this context in my presence," she said.
Asked if there was any reason for Ridge to have felt pressured, Townsend said: "He was certainly not pressured. And, by the way, he didn't object when it was raised and he certainly didn't object when it wasn't raised."
Ridge's publicist, Joe Rinaldi, said Ridge was out of town and was not doing interviews until his book, "The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege ... and How We Can Be Safe Again," is released on Sept. 1.
In 2004, Ridge explained why he didn't feel the alert should be raised. "We don't have to go to (code level) orange to take action in response either to these tapes or just general action to improve security around the country," he said then.
In 2005, months after he resigned, Ridge said his agency has been the most reluctant to raise the alert level. "There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, 'For that?'" he said during a panel discussion in May 2005. But his book appears to be the first time he publicly attributes some of the pressure to politics.
The Homeland Security Department, which Ridge was the first person to lead, faced criticism in 2004 from Democrats who alleged that raising the alert level was designed to boost support for the Bush administration during an election year.
Ridge, a former Republican congressman and governor of Pennsylvania, was widely named as a potential running mate to John McCain in 2008 before the GOP candidate chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

In the United States, the earliest settlers claimed land by simply fencing it in. Later, as the American government formed, unsettled land became technically owned by the government and programs to register land ownership developed, usually making raw land available for low prices or for free, if the owner improved the property, including the construction of fences.

Five foot high fences (over which many people can see and talk) are increasingly being superseded by six-foot fences giving the impression of complete privacy.

Fence Fort Worth

They may not be the best-smelling homes, but Asian elephant dung piles provide certain frog species with shelter, one researcher has found.

Ahimsa Campos-Arceiz, of the University of Tokyo, found the dung-dwelling frogs in Sri Lanka's Bundala National Park, while searching for signs that Asian elephants acted as ecosystem engineers in their environments.

Ecosystem engineers are "organisms capable of controlling the availability of resources for other organisms by modifying the physical environment," Campos-Arceiz said. The beaver is probably the most well-known example of an ecosystem engineer, Campos-Arceiz said. "The construction of their dams modifies the landscape, creating a new type of ecosystem."

Big animals, such as elephants, are particularly good at ecosystem engineering, because they can have such a proportionately large impact on their environment, Campos-Arceiz said.

Previous studies have shown that African savanna elephants (Loxodonta Africana) impacted their ecosystem by creating refuges for tree-dwelling lizards - when the elephants broke off twigs and branches while feeding, they left behind crevices in the trees. The research showed that lizard communities were more diverse in places where elephants also lived.

Campos-Arceiz wondered if Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) might have a similar impact on their ecosystems.

During August 2008, Campos-Arceiz was in Bundala National Park inspecting Asian elephant dung piles looking for seeds (the feces can act as a nutrient source for plants and fungi, which will germinate and grow there). Instead, he found an amphibious surprise: six frogs representing three different species (Microhyla ornata, Microhyla rubra and Spaerotheca sp.) in five dung piles.

"I was looking for seeds in the dung. And was ready for some insects and other invertebrates. But I never thought about a vertebrate like a frog staying inside of the dung," Campos-Arceiz told LiveScience.

Accompanying the frogs in the dung piles were beetles, termites, ants, spiders, scorpions, centipedes and crickets, "suggesting that a dung pile can become a small ecosystem of its own," Campos-Arceiz wrote in the study, entitled "Shit Happens (to be Useful)! Use of Elephant Dung as Habitat by Amphibians," detailed in the journal Biotropica.

"I don't really remember how it came up, but it happened as soon as I decided to write a paper. I created a folder in my computer called 'Shit Happens!' and this project name made the work funnier for me," Campos-Arceiz said.

The frogs Campos-Arceiz found live among the leaf litter on the ground. But that litter can be scarce in the dry season (when Campos-Arceiz was visiting), so he suspects the dung may provide an alternative habitat for the frogs.

Campos-Arceiz suspects that Asian elephants may act as ecosystem engineers in their environment in other ways as well.

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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) –
Cable television's Sundance Channel on Monday unveiled a video-on-demand service offering documentaries and international films endorsed by Sundance festival founder Robert Redford and often available the same day the movies hit theaters.

Sundance Selects will make its debut on August 26 with Spike Lee's new documentary, "Passing Strange: The Movie." The service will be available on cable TV systems owned by three major operators -- Comcast Corp, Cox Communications and Cablevision Systems Corp -- reaching as many as 50 million U.S. households.

For Sundance Channel, which plays films and shows aimed at art-house and independent film fans and is owned by Cablevision unit Rainbow Media Holdings, a video-on-demand service provides new revenues in a growing business arena.

And indie movie fans who live in smaller cities or towns that may not have art houses can now access documentaries and foreign language films they only hear about from media coverage of festivals like Sundance.

"At Sundance, increasing the size of the market for independent film has always been our mission, in addition to just giving exposure to new voices, so this allows us to electronically take that vision to a broader group," Redford told Reuters.

The actor, filmmaker and creative director of the Sundance Channel said he would be instrumental in helping program the films that will be available on Sundance Selects.

"Passing Strange: The Movie," which premiered at the 2009 Sundance festival, captures on film the Broadway musical of the same name that tells of a young black man finding his way in life.

The service will launch with five other titles: animated film "Mary and Max" from Australian director Adam Elliot; "Unmade Beds" from Alexis Dos Santos; and documentaries "Complete History of My Sexual Failures," "Kassim the Dream" and "Nick Nolte: No Exit."

The number of titles will increase as the service reaches more homes, and the focus on nonfiction and foreign-language films is designed to tap an underserved market, Rainbow Chief Executive Joshua Sapan said.

"We think feature documentaries and world cinema are important parts of the landscape and ones that are underattended and undervalued," Sapan said.

He declined to give revenue forecasts, but the demand and use of VOD is rising with the deployment of new high-speed cable systems and sophisticated set-top boxes.

VOD transactions increased 20 percent from 2007 to 2008, and while the rate of growth slipped in the first six months of 2009, the increase was still 12 percent over the year-earlier period, according to industry tracker Rentrak Corp.

"I do see a time in the not too distant future when VOD sales for films like these dramatically surpasses theatrical revenue," Sapan said, "and some of these movies will be released with VOD only."

(Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)