Mr. Toad's Wild Ride

New York ‘lone wolf’ was one hour away from finishing his bomb
She also praised the New York Police Department, saying, “I think they handled it well.”
Officials with the NYPD, which conducted the undercover investigation using a confidential informant and a bugged apartment, said the department had to move quickly because Pimentel was about to test a pipe bomb made out of match heads, nails and other ingredients bought at neighborhood hardware and discount stores.
Two law enforcement officials said Monday that the NYPD’s Intelligence Division had sought to get the FBI involved at least twice as the investigation unfolded. Both times, the FBI concluded that Pimentel lacked the mental capacity to act on his own, they said.
The FBI thought Pimentel “didn’t have the predisposition or the ability to do anything on his own,” one of the officials said.
The officials were not authorized to speak about the case and spoke on condition of anonymity. The FBI’s New York office and the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan both declined to comment on Monday.
Pimentel’s lawyer, Joseph Zablocki, said his client was never a true threat.
“If the goal here is to be stopping terror … I’m not sure that this is where we should be spending our resources,” he said.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly defended the handling of the case Monday, saying the NYPD kept federal authorities in the loop “all along” before circumstances forced investigators to take swift measures using state charges.
“No question in my mind that we had to take this case down,” Kelly said. “There was an imminent threat.”
Added Kelly: “This is a classic case of what we’ve been talking about �� the lone wolf, an individual, self-radicalized. This is the needle in the haystack problem we face as a country and as a city.”
Authorities described Pimentel as an unemployed U.S. citizen and “al-Qaida sympathizer” who was born in the Dominican Republic. He had lived most of his life in Manhattan, aside from about five years in the upstate city of Schenectady, where authorities say he had an arrested for credit card fraud.
His mother said he was raised Roman Catholic. But he converted to Islam in 2004 and went by the name Muhammad Yusuf, authorities said.
Using a tip from police in Albany, the NYPD had been watching Pimentel using a confidential informant for the past year. Investigators learned that he was energized and motivated to carry out his plan by the Sept. 30 killing of al-Qaida’s U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, police said.
Pimentel was under constant surveillance as he shopped for the pipe bombmaterials. He also was overheard talking about attacking police patrol cars and postal facilities, killing soldiers returning home from abroad andbombing a police station in Bayonne, N.J., authorizes said.

@Cmdr:

bump for the new year.

Merry Christmas everyone (or your respective holiday season.)

Thank you.

Mussolini made the trains run on time. The rest of that made no sence… sorry.

Gas is stilll cheap. it is 2.30 where I live and my driving habits are yet to change. At least suv sales are down 20%.

@cystic:

At the same time, one could probably get an ob/gyn, a psychiatrist and a statistician together for a retrospective study - even if it’s a simple questionaire. … It could simply analyze feelings, thoughts etc. … Clinical depression is evaluable, as is anxiety, PTSD, and one can measure drug intake if your state/province has a DPIN system. Other out-comes too might be evaluated in terms of 3, 5, and 10 year morbidity, mortality etc. (i do believe some have been done with some equivocal data).

True, with the first. Though the problem with questionaires is that you have to be extremely careful with the wording. I fear that any study on this can very easily be manipulated by the according interest group who launched it. So, you could make a study testing depression etc., but that then must be done to women who have given birth, have aborted, have not been pregnant, and no question should somehow relate to pregancy.
Then, after evaluated for these three different groups, you could start to make some statitics out of that.
But, i fear that the above-mentioned statistics did not pay enough attention to that, something i conclude from the “30% to 60%”, an error i can not accept when having 1000, say “datapoints”.

No. DS. It’s in case your dog is sick, or you and your life partner adopt, or you need time to recuperate from your sex correction operation. Currently(since 1998?), they can have it without pay, I believe. But, last summer or fall, the CA legislature was considering Gov. Davis’ request to make it PAID @ 55% of salary :roll: . This opens the door for increasing it to 100% later, of course.

The 2003 will be of about the record size as it seems, and the predictions are quite reliable. So, the answer is “yes, it can fluctuate that much”.
Something that usually is used against environmentalists, as some (other) fluctuations are normal, then the effect could be “just fluctuations”. The other side of the medal is never heard (not even by environmentalists): the same fluctuations could be “favoring” us, and the real man-made effect is much worse….

@TM:

Be nice to Sir Horten! The Komet is a fine looking plane, and I am sure anyone would love to fly one…

Everyone would want to fly a Komet!!??? Yeah, right. Only if they’re planning on committing suicide. :wink:

@TM:

You are just mad that you couldn’t think of something better first.

Yes, why don’t I buy bmbs every turn? I’m sure that’s real inventive. What genius plot do you have in store next, why don’t I build battleships every turn? Oh wait, you already tried that! :P