We had 3 more fires in the county caused by lightning yesterday.

Is it still okay to say that the suspect is a male, or is that too specific as well?

Officers working on the case believed the appeal, due to be shown in May, could have proved vital in the search for Seddiqi. They thought he might be working as an unlicensed taxi driver in the south of England.

But the Chief Constable of the Devon and Cornwall force, Stephen Otter, told officers not to go ahead with the programme after the Devon Racial Equality Council, funded by and affiliated to the Commission for Racial Equality, said the appeal could lead to a racist backlash.

Detectives had at first refused to pull the plug on the appeal but were overruled by Mr Otter.

The police are prevented from doing their jobs, and the citizenry are disarmed. What a nice set up for those that are criminally inclined, but only if they belong to a certain category that must not be named because it would be “racist” to do so.

“If FEMA shows up, good,” said Jack Colley, chief of the Governor’s Division of Emergency Management. ”But we’re not waiting.”

Call it one more example of the lingering Hurricane Katrina effect, but Colley and his team are looking past the traditional go-through-FEMA-to-get-ice kind of emergency management model.

This new strategy, borne during 2005′s Hurricane Rita and fine-tuned in the two years since by the state’s emergency agency, has retailers conducting mock drills alongside government officials.

“FEMA was an old contact point for ice, water, etc,” Colley explained from his agency’s state operations center in the basement of Texas Department of Public Safety headquarters in Austin. “The private sector is willing and able to do this for us.”

… These large retailers, including Wal-Mart, H-E-B and Home Depot, are part of the state’s emergency prep team, invited to brainstorm about strategy and problem solve when there are questions about the best way to respond to a disaster. In exchange for their know-how, they’re given advance notice about when the state is about to make critical decisions on evacuations, school closings or when highways will be “contraflowed” into one direction away from a storm.

… This new model, in which retailers’ flexible delivery systems are paired with government’s network of local emergency responders and powerful communication tools, has received rave reviews from those involved in recent Texas emergencies.

“I don’t know Jack Colley, but I can’t wait to meet him and shake his hand,” said Burnet County Judge Donna Klaeger, whose county includes Marble Falls, which flooded June 26, killing one person and sending 300 others from their homes.

“We could not have made it through without the state emergency management team,” Klaeger said. “They were amazing. I never was stressed about how we were going to get through, because I knew we would.”

EXACTLY! I HATE the complacent people/places that think that they can just sit on their asses with no preparation and that FEMA will magically appear on behalf of the Great Bureaucracy in Washington to do all the work and make everything whole once again. It is not going to happen. You rely on local. And Wal-Mart and Home Depot.

In the meantime, here’s something interesting: Putting the radiation release in the Japanese nuclear plant in the proper perspective. Knowing that there are people right out walking around in public that have received many times that amount of radiation in medical treatment sort of changes things, doesn’t it?

I expect they’ll get that whole cause and effect thing figured out any day now.

Comment by SwampWoman — July 21, 2007 @ 9:46 pm”

You can’t fix STUPID!