In a November 27 report discussing efforts to "turn around what some military analysts are calling an eight-year stalemate" in Afghanistan, NBC's Nightly News included a clip of NBC News military analyst and retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey saying, "The answer is the Afghan security forces, with 40 NATO and allied present supporting elements, but not the U.S. fighting the significant counterinsurgency battle." Neither McCaffrey nor NBC News disclosed during the report that McCaffrey is a member of the board of directors of DynCorp International, according to that company's website. An August 5 DynCorp press release reported that the company had been awarded an 18-month, $317.4 million contract with the State Department to "provide at least 580 civilian police advisors to advise, train, and mentor the Afghanistan National Police and the Ministry of Interior." According to a 2006 State Department "Fact Sheet," the "Afghan National Police" are one of two components of the "Afghanistan National Security Forces."

At the time Nightly News aired McCaffrey's remarks stressing the importance of "Afghan security forces," NBC was aware of McCaffrey's ties to DynCorp. McCaffrey's bio on MSNBC's website reports that he "has been elected to: the Board of Directors of DynCorp International." Additionally, in an April 20 New York Times article, investigative reporter David Barstow detailed the connections between media military analysts and the Pentagon and defense industries, and named McCaffrey as one of numerous military analysts who "have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air." Barstow reported that McCaffrey had his "own consulting firm[]" and "sat on the boards of major military contractors." (Following the Times' article, Media Matters for America conducted a review of appearances between January 2002 and May 2008 by military analysts named in the article, including McCaffrey, and identified more than 600 appearances by McCaffrey on NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC.)

Before Nightly News' November 27 broadcast aired, NBC was also reportedly aware of a then-forthcoming follow-up article by Barstow focusing on McCaffrey's extensive ties to military contractors. In a December 1 post on his Salon.com blog, Glenn Greenwald reported that he had "obtained, from a very trustworthy source" emails dated November 20 and 21 "between NBC News executives and McCaffrey (which cc:d [Nightly News host] Brian Williams), reflecting the extensive collaboration between NBC and McCaffrey to formulate a coordinated response" to Barstow's article, which was published on November 29 and detailed McCaffrey's ties to DynCorp, among other companies.

In his November 29 follow-up article, Barstow wrote that McCaffrey "has immersed himself in businesses that have grown with the fight against terrorism" and highlighted a June 28, 2005, NBC News special report anchored by Williams in which McCaffrey said that "the Iraqi security forces are real," but did not disclose his ties to DynCorp -- the company that trained those forces -- or to Veritas Capital, DynCorp's parent company. According to Barstow, McCaffrey served on DynCorp's board of directors at the time and "owned special stock that allowed him to share in DynCorp's profits, up 87 percent that year largely because of the Iraq war." Forbes.com has previously reported that McCaffrey joined DynCorp's board in 2005. Barstow further reported that McCaffrey has "earned at least $500,000" for his work on the "advisory council" of Veritas Capital.

According to a June 23 company press release, DynCorp has been a "major part of the CIVPOL [International Civilian Police] mission in Iraq since 2003" and has held the contract for the "overall Civilian Advisor Support work" in Iraq since 2004.

Barstow extensively detailed McCaffrey's role with DynCorp in his November 29 Times article, specifically how "when DynCorp executives learned that General McCaffrey was planning to travel to Iraq that June [1995], they asked him to sound out American commanders and reassure them of DynCorp's determination to make things right":

At the same time, General McCaffrey used his access to further business interests, as he did during the summer of 2005, when Americans were turning against the Iraq war in droves.

Veritas had been on a shopping spree, buying military contractors deeply enmeshed in the war. Its biggest acquisition was of DynCorp International, best known for training foreign security forces for the United States government. By 2005 operations in Iraq and Afghanistan accounted for 37 percent of DynCorp's revenues.

The crumbling public support, though, posed a threat to Veritas's prize acquisition. The changing political climate and unrelenting violence, DynCorp warned investors, could force a withdrawal from Iraq.

What is more, some of DynCorp's Iraq contracts were in trouble, plagued by cost overruns, inept work by subcontractors and ineffective training programs. So when DynCorp executives learned that General McCaffrey was planning to travel to Iraq that June, they asked him to sound out American commanders and reassure them of DynCorp's determination to make things right.

"It is useful both ways," Gregory Lagana, a DynCorp spokesman, said in an interview. "If there were problems, and there were, then we could get an independent judgment and fix them."

Mr. Lagana said General McCaffrey had been a troubleshooter for DynCorp on other trips. "He'll say: 'I'm going over. Is there anyone you want me to see?' " Mr. Lagana said. "And then he'd go in and say, 'I'm on the board. What can you tell me?' "

The Pentagon had its own agenda. For eight days, General McCaffrey was given red-carpet treatment. Iraqi commandos even staged a live-fire demonstration for him. But General McCaffrey also was given access to officials whose decisions were important to his business interests, including DynCorp, which was planning an I.P.O. He met with General [David] Petraeus, who was then in charge of training Iraqi security forces and responsible for supervising DynCorp's 500 police trainers. He also met with officials responsible for billions of dollars' worth of contracts in Iraq.

Barstow went on to report that following the June 2005 trip, McCaffrey "undertook a one-man news media blitz in which he contradicted the dire assessments of many journalists in Iraq" and "vouched for Iraq's security forces," including during the June 28, 2005, NBC News special report:

Back home, General McCaffrey undertook a one-man news media blitz in which he contradicted the dire assessments of many journalists in Iraq. He bore witness to progress on all fronts, but most of all he vouched for Iraq's security forces. A year earlier, before joining DynCorp's board, he had described these forces as "badly equipped, badly trained, politically unreliable." Just months before, Gary E. Luck, a retired four-star Army general sent to assess progress in Iraq, had reported to Mr. Bush that security training was going poorly. Yet General McCaffrey now emphasized his "surprising" conclusion that the training was succeeding.

After Mr. Bush gave a speech praising Iraq's new security forces, Brian Williams asked General McCaffrey for an independent assessment. "The Iraqi security forces are real," General McCaffrey replied, without noting the concerns about DynCorp.

His financial stake in the policy debates over Iraq was not mentioned. He did not disclose that he owned special stock that allowed him to share in DynCorp's profits, up 87 percent that year largely because of the Iraq war.

Despite McCaffrey's repeated failure to disclose his ties to military contractors, as exemplified by his appearance on that June 2005 NBC News special report, in which he said that Iraqi security forces (trained by a company whose board McCaffrey serves on) were making progress, NBC defended its actions and those of McCaffrey to Barstow. Barstow reported:

The president of NBC News, Steve Capus, said in an interview that General McCaffrey was a man of honor and achievement who would never let business obligations color his analysis for NBC. He described General McCaffrey as an "independent voice" who had courageously challenged Mr. [Donald] Rumsfeld, adding, "There's no open microphone that begins with the Pentagon and ends with him going out over our airwaves."

General McCaffrey is not required to abide by NBC's formal conflict-of-interest rules, Mr. Capus said, because he is a consultant, not a news employee. Nor is he required to disclose his business interests periodically. But Mr. Capus said that the network had conversations with its military analysts about the need to avoid even the appearance of a conflict, and that General McCaffrey had been "incredibly forthcoming" about his ties to military contractors.

In an April 29 post on his MSNBC.com blog, Williams responded to Barstow's April 20 article, describing McCaffrey and fellow NBC News analyst Wayne Downing, who passed away in July 2007, as "honest brokers" and writing that McCaffrey and Downing were "warriors-turned-analysts, not lobbyists or politicians":

All I can say is this: these two guys never gave what I considered to be the party line. They were tough, honest critics of the U.S. military effort in Iraq. If you've had any exposure to retired officers of that rank (and we've not had any five-star Generals in the modern era) then you know: these men are passionate patriots. In my dealings with them, they were also honest brokers. I knew full well whenever either man went on a fact-finding mission or went for high-level briefings. They never came back spun, and never attempted a conversion. They are warriors-turned-analysts, not lobbyists or politicians.

In asserting that McCaffrey "never gave what I considered to be the party line," Williams' post did not address Barstow's April 20 reporting on McCaffrey's ties to military contractors. According to a Media Matters search, Williams has yet to comment on Barstow's November 29 story.

From the November 27 edition of NBC's Nightly News with Brian Williams:

DAVID GREGORY (guest anchor): When the Afghanistan veterans return to the war zone, they may in fact be using a new strategy to defeat the Taliban. Here's NBC's Jim Maceda.

[begin video clip]

MACEDA: Even on Thanksgiving Day, there was no letup in Islamist attacks on U.S. and Afghan forces. In Kabul, yet another suicide bomber set off explosives, this time outside the U.S. Embassy, just as an American military convoy passed by. None in the convoy was hurt, but the car bomb killed four more Afghan civilians.

With violence escalating, U.S. military commanders are now looking at bolder strategies, like winning over Afghan tribal leaders with money and the promise of political power if they fight against the Taliban -- similar to the game-changing deal struck with Sunni tribes in Iraq -- and investing billions of dollars to beef up the Afghan army and police to some 200,000 forces. In Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban, Major John Payne, an embedded police mentor from Brooklyn, New York, shows Afghans how to search cars, interrogate people, and be good cops.

PAYNE: You got 200 liters a month, would that be good?

MACEDA: But he spends a lot of his time on other more basic issues, like helping out when the Afghan police cars run out of gas and keeping their poor living standards high enough to fight off corruption.

PAYNE: Well, we're not talking fancy things. We're talking power, water, and sewer.

MACEDA: But here in Afghanistan, what is often called "the other war" is heating up. Some 10 to 15,000 more U.S. combat forces are expected to deploy here over the coming months to try to turn around what some military analysts are calling an eight-year stalemate. Still, even those who support a surge in Afghanistan say it's not America's war.

McCAFFREY: The answer is the Afghan security forces, with 40 NATO and allied present supporting elements, but not the U.S. fighting the significant counterinsurgency battle.

MACEDA: But with Afghan forces still years from being able to hold their own against the Taliban, U.S. soldiers are likely to mark many more Thanksgivings here. Jim Maceda, NBC News, Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan.

[end video clip]

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/77597?ns=guardianpageName=World+news%3A+US+%27warned+India+before+Mumbai+attacks%27ch=World+newsc3=guardian.co.ukc4=Mumbai+terror+attacks+%28News%29%2CIndia+%28News%29%2CPakistan+%28News%29%2CTerrorism+-+international%2CWorld+news%2CIslam+%28News%29c5=Not+commercially+usefulc6=Vikram+Dodd%2CMark+Tranc7=2008_12_02c8=1127546c9=articlec10=GUc11=World+newsc12=Mumbai+terror+attacksc13=c14=h2=GU%2FWorld+news%2FMumbai+terror+attacks" width="1" height="1" //divpThe US warned a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/india"India/a before the Mumbai attacks, a senior Bush administration official said today, fuelling criticism of the Indian government's lack of preparedness. /ppAccording to an unnamed official, the US told Indian officials that terrorists appeared to be plotting a water-borne attack on India's financial capital. /ppSeveral top Indian officials a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/02/mumbai-terror-attacks-india" have resigned/a after the a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/mumbai-terror-attacks"attacks/a that claimed at least 172 lives and injured more than 300. Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of Maharashtra state, yesterday became the latest official to offer his resignation over alleged warnings about terrorist activities that were not acted upon. /ppHis deputy, RR Patil, also submitted his resignation after being quoted as downplaying the seriousness of the attacks. Their offers to go followed the resignation of the home minister on Sunday and came amid Indian media reports of a string of intelligence blunders, all of which are adding to an atmosphere that the government and state apparatus cannot cope with the scale and complexity of the security threat facing the country./ppa href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/02/mumbai-attack-india-pakistan"India has demanded that Pakistan hand over 20 militants/a it believes are in the neighbouring country amid fears that relations between the two nations will deteriorate following the Mumbai attacks./ppBut the Pentagon has seen no signs that Pakistan is preparing to shift troops out of its tribal region near the Afghanistan border due to rising tensions, a US defence official said./pp"There are no indications that anything is happening. Nothing has happened or is planned to happen in that vein," the official told Reuters. "It's business as usual." /ppIn India, recriminations after the Mumbai attacks have been rife./ppAn officer in the elite commando unit that ended the siege has told the Guardian his troops were delayed getting to the scene of the attacks because a plane could not initially be found to take them./ppMajor Vikram Singh, of the national security guard, said his unit, which is based in Delhi, took 10 hours to reach Mumbai. The NSG, nicknamed the Black Cats, have been feted by the Indian public after ending the siege. The criticism by a serving officer of his government is a sign of the anger politicians are facing after the attacks. Singh told the Guardian the delay may have let the terrorists gain more control of the two hotels and Jewish centre than they otherwise would have had./ppSingh, who was speaking outside the Oberoi Trident hotel, said: "We've taken 10 hours to come from Delhi. Initially no one could judge the level of threat."/ppBut the officer said his troops were ready to move 20 minutes after an order to deploy, and believes they were delayed by at least four hours in reaching the scene. /pp"In 20 minutes we could have started. The aircraft to take us was somewhere else." /ppMumbai is 90 minutes by air from Delhi. Singh said an NSG unit should be based outside Delhi including in cities such as Mumbai: "Had we been in Mumbai, 30 minutes would have been enough to start the operation."/ppIn a further sign of anger at India's elite, a senior politician seeking to attend the funeral of a commander killed in the fighting was refused permission by the commander's father./ppAway from the recriminations there were signs yesterday that the death toll from the Taj Mahal Palace hotel may be less than feared. So far 23 bodies have been recovered, 19 Indian and four foreigners./ppThe trustee of a Muslim graveyard in Mumbai said yesterday that it would not bury the dead gunmen, with an official saying they are not true followers of the Islamic faith./pp"People who committed this heinous crime cannot be called Muslim," said Hanif Nalkhande, a trustee of the Jamia Masjid Trust, which runs the three-hectare (7.5 acres) Bada Kabrastan graveyard in Mumbai. Meanwhile teams from Scotland Yard and the FBI have arrived to help the investigation. The British team will assist with the forensic investigation./pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/mumbai-terror-attacks"Mumbai terror attacks/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/india"India/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/pakistan"Pakistan/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/terrorism"Global terrorism/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/islam"Islam/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/6zfZy8dtgi3TopZWhA9cW5t8ay4/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/6zfZy8dtgi3TopZWhA9cW5t8ay4/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/31756?ns=guardianpageName=World+news%3A+Mumbai+attacks%3A+India+demands+Pakistan+hand+over+terror+suspectsch=World+newsc3=guardian.co.ukc4=Mumbai+terror+attacks+%28News%29%2CIndia+%28News%29%2CPakistan+%28News%29%2CWorld+news%2CUS+newsc5=Not+commercially+usefulc6=Julian+Borger%2CVikram+Dodd%2CMark+Tranc7=2008_12_02c8=1127301c9=articlec10=GUc11=World+newsc12=Mumbai+terror+attacksc13=c14=h2=GU%2FWorld+news%2FMumbai+terror+attacks" width="1" height="1" //divpIndia today downplayed the possibility of military action in response to the Mumbai attacks but demanded that Islamabad hand over suspected terrorists believed to be in Pakistan./pp"Nobody is talking of military action," India's foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee, told reporters when asked what action might be taken./ppIndian investigators have said the attacks that killed at least 172 people last week were carried out by militants from Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Kashmiri extremist group based in Pakistan./ppMukherjee said a list of about 20 names was given to Pakistan's high commissioner to India at a meeting last night. India has already demanded that Pakistan take "strong action" against those responsible for the attacks, and the US has put pressure on Islamabad to cooperate./ppCondoleezza Rice yesterday called for full Pakistani cooperation with the investigation into the Mumbai attacks, saying they represented a "critical moment" in the new civilian government's efforts to stamp its authority on Pakistan's security services./ppThe outgoing secretary of state said she did not want to "jump to conclusions", but made it clear during a visit to London that she expected Islamabad would have to answer for the attacks./ppRice, who is due to arrive in India tomorrow, urged its government to focus on the investigation of the attacks, and to avoid actions that might have "unintended consequences", such as troop manoeuvres./ppThe Indian government has claimed the attackers trained in Pakistan./ppIslamabad has denied any involvement, but has warned that it might have to transfer forces from its western tribal areas, where they are fighting Islamic extremist groups, to its eastern border with India if there were threatening moves by Indian troops./ppThe Indian authorities have been releasing parts of their case against Pakistan to the media. Yesterday Indian media reported intelligence sources as saying an email claiming responsibility for the attack had been traced to an internet address in Lahore./ppThere were signs yesterday that India was winning the diplomatic tussle. A western diplomatic source said India's claims that extremist elements in Pakistan were involved in the attack were being widely believed, and that Pakistan's warning that it would have to move troops away from the Afghan border was being interpreted as "a threat" to western interests./ppSpeaking to reporters in London yesterday, Rice directed most of her remarks to the newly elected government of President Asif Ali Zardari./pp"President Zardari has said rightly that extremism in any form is a threat to Pakistan as well as India. So I fully expect the commitment of Pakistan to absolute transparency and wherever the leads go, to follow them up," Rice said./ppThe civilian government's control over Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) came into question last week when the prime minister, Yousef Raza Gilani, announced he would dispatch the agency's new director general, Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, to India to discuss the attack, only for the offer to be withdrawn within hours. A more junior ISI representative was promised instead./ppMost foreign observers believe at least some ISI officers still harbour sympathy for Islamic extremist groups and turn a blind eye to their terrorist activities./ppRice did not mention the ISI yesterday but made clear she believed the time had come for Pakistan's government to ensure different parts of its security apparatus were not pursuing separate agendas./pp"Everyone knows that you don't have day one with a military government and day two with a civilian government," Rice said. "But this is a critical moment for Pakistan to bring all its institutions into a common strategy to defend Pakistan. And defending Pakistan means rooting out extremism, defending Pakistani interests means cooperating fully, defending Pakistani interests means investigating this so further attacks can be prevented."/ppRice said she was flying to New Delhi tomorrow "to show solidarity" and offer help with the investigation and counter-terrorism measures. She would also be discouraging the escalation of the situation./ppIndia's high commissioner in London said last night the attacks were "probably" aimed at derailing peace talks between India and Pakistan, which had been given a boost by the election of a new democratic government in Islamabad./ppShiv Shankar Mukherjee told Sky News that India had made no "aggressive moves" since the attack, but warned that the peace process between the two countries was "under pressure"./ppBut he added that "over the last few months we've been having a terrorist attack virtually every month in India. And we've leaned over backwards and have gone the extra mile ... to see that the dialogue succeeds, because there is no alternative, except peaceful dialogue to resolve our problems."/pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/mumbai-terror-attacks"Mumbai terror attacks/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/india"India/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/pakistan"Pakistan/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/usa"United States/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/oAr-hPTX2E23WVHEq4DXYtND2eE/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/oAr-hPTX2E23WVHEq4DXYtND2eE/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

!-- pageType= magazinewide slug= ff_diamonds section= science subsection= planetearth headline= How a Rogue Geologist Discovered a Diamond Trove in the Canadian Arctic authorName= Carl Hoffman creditType= photo credit= Andrew Hetherington caption= Diamond hunter Chuck Fipke with maps of potential new discoveries. -- pBehind an unmarked door in a faded business park outside Kelowna, British Columbia, in a maze of rooms crowded with desks, computers, and floor-to-ceiling shelves, Chuck Fipke sifts through 20-pound bags of dirt./p p"We take samples, hey, from gravel and streambeds all over the world," Fipke says. He sieves the earth, runs it through magnetic drums and centrifuges and electromagnetic separators. Then his technicians, working with scanning electron microscopes, separate out grains and mount them on postage-stamp-sized squares of epoxy. It's painstaking work but worth the trouble. Fipke has learned to understand those grains of dirt, and that understanding has led him to diamonds./p pEighteen years ago, there was no such thing as a Canadian diamond mdash; as far as anyone knew. Diamonds came mostly from Australia, Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, and Russia. De Beers mined 75 percent of the world's output, much of it tainted by controversial "a href="http://www.un.org/peace/africa/Diamond.html"blood diamonds/a," sold to fund African wars./p div id="embed" div id="pic"img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_ice2_f.jpg" alt="" / div id="caption"Stones from the Ekati Mine.br / emPhoto: Andrew Hetherington/em/div /div /div pToday, Canada is the world's third-largest producer, by value, of rough stones. In the Northwest Territories, a href="http://www.bhpbilliton.com/"BHP Billiton/a's Ekati a href="http://www.bhpbilliton.com/bb/ourBusinesses/diamondsSpecialtyProducts/ekatiDiamondMine.jsp"mine/a has been producing since 1998 and Rio Tinto's a href="http://www.diavik.ca/"Diavik mine/a since 2003. De Beers opened its first Canadian mine, at Snap Lake, in July mdash; a confirmation that Canada is the new center of the world./p pThe story behind the addition of Canada to the ranks of diamond-producing nations leads back to one man: a short, absentminded Canadian geologist named Chuck Fipke. When he discovered diamonds in a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac_de_Gras"Lac de Gras/a, Northwest Territories, in 1991, he started the largest staking rush in North America since a href="http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=Articleid=4614"George Carmack/a found gold in the Klondike a century earlier. And he's not finished: He's prospecting around the world, toting gravel samples back to his lab in British Columbia to figure out where to look for his next big strike./p pstrongIn 1970, fresh out of/strong the University of British Columbia with a degree in geology, Chuck Fipke signed on with mining company a href="http://www.kennecott.com/"Kennecott Copper/a to look for gold and copper in Papua New Guinea. A helicopter would drop him off alone in the middle of a jungle, and pick him up at the end of the day. The terrain was so rough that the chopper often couldn't land mdash; Fipke would just leap out as it hovered close to the ground. One day he turned around to face 20 locals, arrows strung. He raised his arms, slowly removed his vest, and offered it to "the one who looked like the chief." By the time the helo returned for him, Fipke was in his underpants clutching a fine array of tribal shields, bows and arrows, and fetishes. "I've got an amazing collection of stuff!" he says./p pFipke is a small man with a shaved head, a burnished tan, piercing blue eyes, and forearms like Popeye's. As a kid, his frantic start-stop mind made people think he was stupid. After getting his high school girlfriend pregnant, he agreed to marry her ... and then failed to show up for the wedding. (The couple eventually married after the baby was born.) He stutters and says "hey" in almost every sentence. He frequently loses his glasses and his keys, shows up late to appointments, and has a history of spending prodigious amounts of money in strip joints. His nicknames have included Captain Chaos and Stumpy./p pAfter stints in the Amazon, Australia, and South Africa, Fipke opened a mineral separation laboratory in British Columbia in 1977. A year later, a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_Oil_Company"Superior Oil/a hired him to go back into the field mdash; to look not for metals but gems./p !-- pagebreak -- div class="wide_img"img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_ice3_f.jpg" alt="" div class="wide_caption"div class="wide_caption_txt"The wilderness around Snap Lake, in Canada's Northwest Territories, conceals a trove of diamonds.br / emPhoto: Andrew Hetherington/em/div/div/div br/br/ pThe company already had a search method. A couple of years prior, a geologist named a href="http://web.uct.ac.za/depts/geolsci/people/staff/johng.htm"John Gurney/a, working with Superior's money at the University of Cape Town, hypothesized that certain common minerals might reliably form alongside diamonds. He used an electron microprobe to analyze geological structures called a href="http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/diamonds/kimberlite.html"kimberlite pipes/a mdash; the places you occasionally (but not often) find diamonds mdash; and discovered that the presence of chromite, ilmenite, and high-chrome, low-calcium garnet did indeed predict a rich strike. He examined a host of pipes in South Africa that had these so-called indicator minerals and published a paper explaining his results./p div id="embed" div id="pic"img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_diamonds_map_250.jpg" alt="" / div id="caption"The Snap Lake site is one of four diamond mines established in Canada in recent years.br / emIllustration: Bryan Christie/em/div /div /div pFipke heard about Gurney's work on a tour of De Beers' a href="http://www.mining-technology.com/projects/finsch/"Finsch Mine/a in South Africa and quickly turned himself into an expert on indicator minerals mdash; combining what he understood of Gurney's work with results coming out of Russian labs and his own skills with field sampling. Superior had worked with Fipke before, back in his gold mining days, so by the time the company wanted someone to go look for kimberlite pipes northwest of Fort Collins, Colorado, Fipke was the best choice. He found half a dozen, but like 98 percent of the kimberlite formations in the world, they didn't contain diamonds in commercially viable quantities./p pBut Fipke knew that, 100 miles under those pipes, was a craton, a thick, old chunk of continental plate where diamonds form. Kimberlite pipes are created when magma bubbles up through a craton, expanding and cooling on its way up. If the craton has diamonds in it, the result is either a carrot-shaped, diamond-studded pipe reaching up to the surface or a wide, flat underground structure called a dike./p pFipke also knew that the craton underneath the pipes he had found ran all the way up the Rockies. With Superior's backing, he teamed up with a geologist and pilot named Stewart Blusson, formed a href="http://www.diamet.com/"Dia Met Minerals/a, and headed north./p pBy 1981, the two men were sampling the ground in Canada; they would eventually secure mining concessions on 80,000 square miles. "It was just me and Sewart and a floatplane," Fipke says. "We took all the supplies and all the samples in ourselves."/p pDe Beers geologists, it turned out, were already there, relying on their own indicator mineral formulas. But Fipke and Blusson surmised that the indicators De Beers found had in fact been dragged far from the kimberlite pipe eons ago by a passing glacier. What they needed to do was look "upstream" for the point of origin. Fipke got a helicopter and flew back and forth over the Arctic Circle, using a magnetometer to track variations in magnetic field that would suggest kimberlite. After thousands of miles and hundreds of hours in the air, he found a promising site near Lac de Gras, a barren world of lakes and rock and muskeg a few hundred miles outside the Arctic Circle./p pHe'd been surveying for eight years. He hadn't found a single diamond. Superior had abandoned the diamond business. Dia Met's stock was trading at pennies a share. But based upon a few samples, Fipke estimated a diamond concentration at Lac de Gras of more than 60 carats per 100 tons mdash; with about a quarter of the stones of good quality or better. (In kimberlite pipes that have gem-quality stones in commercial quantities, a concentration of 1 carat mdash; 0.2 grams mdash; per 100 tons can be profitable.) After six months of sampling, Fipke went public. It was 1991, and he had found a kimberlite pipe (buried under 30 feet of glaciated sediment) with a concentration of 68 carats per 100 tons mdash; the first Canadian diamonds ever found. Shares of Dia Met rocketed to $70. Fipke had partnered with mining giant Broken Hill Proprietary Company (now BHP Billiton) to get the diamonds out; BHP opened the Ekati mine at Lac de Gras in 1998. Soon Dia Met's 29 percent share of the mine was worth billions. Fipke would go on to sell his chunk to BHP for $687 million, retaining 10 percent ownership in the mine, worth another $1 billion./p pToday Canada's diamond business is soaring. The country's four working mines produced 17 million carats in 2007, up 23 percent from 2006. Diamonds from Canada now account for 10 percent of all diamonds by carat sold in the world. And the addition of more diamonds to the global market hasn't driven prices down. Average carat value has actually risen 15 percent, and the gems from the far north are untainted by the bad publicity that comes from an association with African wars./p pShortly before Fipke sold most of his Ekati claim to BHP Billiton, his marriage, faltering for years after so much time in the field, fell apart. At the time it was the a href="http://www.nnsl.com/frames/newspapers/2000-02/feb28_00dia.html"largest divorce settlement/a in Canadian history. "Cost me $200 million, hey," Fipke says. "Best money I ever spent!"/p pstrongFipke now has mining/strong projects in Morocco, Greenland, Canada, Angola, and Brazil. His laboratory bookshelves are heavy with mineral guides mdash; and the family histories of thoroughbreds. Besides diamonds, he's now obsessed with horse racing. "It's a huge challenge, hey, and I like challenges even if they're risky," he says. "And I think I'm really going to do spectacularly well with horses." So far, so good: He has more than 50 brood mares in Ireland and Kentucky and 20 racehorses all over the world. His horse a href="http://www.kentuckyderby.com/2008/contenders/tale-ekati"Tale of Ekati/a placed fifth in this year's Kentucky Derby. "I always go to the Derby with Bo Derek," he says, unlocking the door to a windowless room piled with maps and electron microscopes and computers. "She's a good rider, and she knows horses. And she's a lot of fun, hey! I'm gonna do for horse racing what I did for diamonds!"/p !-- pagebreak -- div class="wide_img"img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_diamonds_debeers_630.jpg" alt="" div class="wide_caption"div class="wide_caption_txt"The De Beers mine at Snap Lake is a labyrinth of crushers and separators. br/ emPhoto: Andrew Hetherington/em/div/div/divbr/br/ pWhether or not Fipke actually turns out to have an eye for horseflesh, his eye for the characteristics of crystals is unparalleled. He shows me rooms of glass flasks and tubes, the equipment for analyzing all those gravel samples. I peek through a microscope and see a rainbow treasure of sparkling gems: green chrome diopsides and red garnets mdash; the low-calcium, high-chrome G-10s that mean diamonds are nearby./p pOver many years in the field and the lab, Fipke has refined his understanding of this unique stew of minerals. "Everyone now knows that G-10 garnets with low calcium might lead you to diamonds, hey," Fipke says. "But how do you distinguish between a Group 1 eclogitic garnet that grew with a diamond and a Group 2 eclogitic garnet that didn't? They look the same." Custom software compares the grains' shapes and chemical compositions, analyzes them against 1,000 minerals that are intergrown with diamonds, and compares them against 10 fields of mineral groupings. If seven to 10 of the fields from one pipe overlap, Fipke says, "there's no doubt; it's full of diamonds. No one else out there can distinguish between these similar tiny particles of minerals that grow with a diamond and ones that don't."/p div id="embed" div id="pic"img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_ice5_f.jpg" alt="" / div id="caption"Miners prepare to blow up a rock face.br / emPhoto: Andrew Hetherington/em /div /div /div p"Look," he says, opening a folder on a table. He has thousands of photos of mineral grains magnified to the size of golf balls. Some are all sharp corners and jagged edges, some rounded. Since erosion and age wear the minerals down, "we can tell when we're getting closer to the source. If the edges are sharp, hey, we know they haven't traveled far from the pipe."/p pThat level of geographic precision has allowed Fipke to stake more claims. He's even working in areas of Brazil where De Beers hasn't been able to turn a profit. "And Angola. Angola has the richest alluvial diamond river in the world," he says, "and there are thousands of diamond works there. But we're looking for the source pipes." Five years ago Fipke started making magnetometer survey flights over the a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwango_River"Kwango River/a. Having identified 100 possible targets, he now has 40 men taking core samples 900 to 1,200 feet under the riverbed. "I'm there at the camp at least three times a year, hey, and it's much harder than in the Arctic. Your drilling equipment just gets buried in enormous piles at customs in Luanda and you can't get it. In the Northwest Territories it was cold, hey, and full of snow, but you get a good parka and you're a bug in a rug. Angola is the most inefficient place on earth!"/p pI start to ask another question, but Fipke has something else in mind. "I'm hungry, hey," he barks, as the door to the map room slams shut behind us. "Do you like oysters?" But we're not going anywhere: He has locked his keys in the room and has to call someone to drive in and open up his office./p pWe finally head into town. "Hi, Chuck!" says the hostess, leading us to the back room of a hip Asian fusion place. Around a long table sit 23 young women, all sporting stilettos and big hair. "Chuck!" they shout. We have, it seems, shown up at the bachelorette party for Fipke's granddaughter. The hostess seats us at the next table. Fipke orders four dozen oysters and a bottle of wine that has to be driven to the restaurant from some special cellar, and a young women shimmies into the booth next to Fipke. "Chuck," she says, kissing him on the cheek, "do you think you can pay for us all tonight?"/p p"Sure," Fipke says, beaming./p p"Do you remember this?" says another woman mdash; his daughter, it turns out, who slides in next to him, holding up a purse. "You bought it for me!"/p pWith Fipke suddenly bankrolling the night, the girls break loose, and the restaurant staff starts hauling out the bottles of champagne. Pretty soon a couple of lasses are dancing on the tables, the oysters are slipping down, a second bottle of rare wine is being decanted, and Fipke is remixing the menu like Danny DeVito in ema href="http://www.imdb.com/Title?0113161"citeGet Shorty/cite/a/em./p pAnd the tales spill forth: three week forays into the Peruvian Amazon, travels with the Kalahari Bushmen of Southern Africa, visits to the pygmies of the Ituri forest in the Congo. "I'd just leave my family and go, hey," he says. "I was really into native culture."/p pSomebody asks him about Brazil, and it reminds him of something important. "Caipirinhas!" he shouts out of the blue. "I want 25 caipirinhas!"/p pWhen the bill arrives, it's 3 feet long and $4,000. Fipke pays up, and we spill into the night mdash; his daughter and granddaughter and their friends and now boyfriends, who joined us in the restaurant. On the street, Fipke suddenly leaps into the air and delivers a solid, suede loafer-clad foot to the head of a parking meter. "I fucking hate parking meters, hey!" he shouts. He jumps and kicks another one, and then erupts into a fit of giggles./p pWe are ushered past the velvet rope at the Cheetah Lounge, Kelowna's classiest strip joint, and Captain Chaos orders another round of caipirinhas for everyone. Three generations of Fipkes pound drinks as naked women dangle upside down from poles onstage./p pThe room is spinning by the time Fipke takes me aside and lays a big warm hand on my arm. "Hey," he says, "here's the thing. I learned that I did my best. I mean, I really tried my best. How many people can say that? I worked hard, and I mean really hard. I worked seven days a week from 8 am until 3 am. Every day. We drilled and drilled all winter when it was dark and the windchill was 80 below. Everyone thought I was crazy. But most people just never do their best, hey. And I did."/p pemContributing editor Carl Hoffman /em(a href="mailto:carlhoffmn@earthlink.net"carlhoffmn@earthlink.net/a) emwrote about the private space company SpaceX in issue 15.06./em/pbr style="clear: both;"/ a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:0627ce3c3b6ae327e5f06dd2f229cc5e:%2FfMZEsh%2BwKLICU5UU6f2XvNPdawcsXbrPL0IgcNmb1HkbkovTIq34grsdoe%2FarsA5BIV0olmUO5vOg%3D%3D'img border='0' title='Add to Facebook' alt='Add to Facebook' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/facebook.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:f6c60dd504b07078bdbc6b09258399fa:z9re7O%2Fr9g7IWr4dUnV7qrGpZcrb8Jda0z5wA4Ind8sbvwvuCjEcWeHZ3OMoIQ2%2FlAqrQu%2BxQ%2Fwj'img border='0' title='Add to Reddit' alt='Add to Reddit' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/reddit.png'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:eabae8e0f643b5c7f7a103cea954fefd:B7poPN8AgcPsLABfHqfLdvTArLYNDoIDfq7hJXfovsGgeK1C%2FXxzP9gLrcWMNRJZSzyblLz%2BiS6g'img border='0' title='Add to digg' alt='Add to digg' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/digg.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:3669b8286376e46e06956252ef17c5b1:cfCGfTXzx74lBKekrETCStAWLWyBnGkD8fTmyGqiNQWrC6%2FmqUtSmWQQxfC2zORnD6oE0JLZc9DD'img border='0' title='Add to Google' alt='Add to Google' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/google.png'//a br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=aee47be5de030b69470388cf099ed063p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=aee47be5de030b69470388cf099ed063p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=aee47be5de030b69470388cf099ed063" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/ pa href="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?a=IAu4eH"img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?i=IAu4eH" border="0"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~4/472101281" height="1" width="1"/

Category: br / Size: 161.47 MBbr / Status: 1 seeders and 3 leechersbr / Speed: -121.21 kB/sbr / Added: 2008-12-02 16:11:11

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/38762?ns=guardianpageName=World+news%3A+Rice+urges+Pakistan+to+cooperate+fully+with+investigationch=World+newsc3=The+Guardianc4=Mumbai+terror+attacks+%28News%29%2CPakistan+%28News%29%2CIndia+%28News%29%2CUS+news%2CWorld+news%2CTerrorism+-+internationalc5=Not+commercially+usefulc6=Vikram+Dodd%2CJulian+Borgerc7=2008_12_02c8=1127164c9=articlec10=GUc11=World+newsc12=Mumbai+terror+attacksc13=c14=h2=GU%2FWorld+news%2FMumbai+terror+attacks" width="1" height="1" //divpCondoleezza Rice yesterday called on full Pakistani cooperation with the investigation into the Mumbai attacks, saying they represented a "critical moment" in the new civilian government's efforts to wrest control of Pakistan's security services./ppThe outgoing US secretary of state said she did not want to "jump to conclusions", but made it clear during a visit to London yesterday that she expected Islamabad would have to answer for the attacks which left nearly 200 people dead last week./ppRice, who is due to arrive in India tomorrow, urged its government to focus on the investigation of the attacks, and to avoid actions that might have "unintended consequences", such as troop manoeuvres./ppThe Indian government has claimed the attackers had trained in Pakistan, while the Indian press has claimed they were members of a Kashmiri extremist organisation based in Pakistan, Lashkar-e-Taiba. The Indian foreign ministry yesterday summoned the Pakistani high commissioner to call for "strong action" against the perpetrators./ppPakistan has denied any involvement, but has warned that it might have to transfer forces from its western tribal areas, where they are fighting Islamic extremist groups, to its eastern border with India if there were threatening moves by Indian troops./ppThe Indian authorities have been releasing parts of their case against Pakistan to the media. Yesterday Indian media reported intelligence sources as saying an email claiming responsibility for the attack had been traced to an internet address in Lahore./ppThere were signs yesterday that India was winning the diplomatic tussle. A western diplomatic source said India's claims that extremist elements in Pakistan were involved in last week's attack were being widely believed, and that Pakistan's warning that it would have to move troops away from the Afghan border was being interpreted as "a threat" to western interests./ppSpeaking to reporters in London yesterday, Rice directed most of her remarks to the newly elected government of President Asif Ali Zardari./pp"President Zardari has said rightly that extremism in any form is a threat to Pakistan as well as India. So I fully expect the commitment of Pakistan to absolute transparency and wherever the leads go, to follow them up," Rice said./ppThe civilian government's control over Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) came into question last week when the prime minister, Yousef Raza Gilani, announced he would dispatch the agency's new director general, Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, to India to discuss the attack, only for the offer to be withdrawn within hours. A more junior ISI representative was promised instead./ppMost foreign observers believe at least some ISI officers still harbour sympathy for Islamic extremist groups and turn a blind eye to their terrorist activities. /ppRice did not mention the ISI yesterday but made clear she believed the time had come for the Pakistan's government to make sure that different parts of its security apparatus were not pursuing separate agendas./pp"Everyone knows that you don't have day one with a military government and day two with a civilian government," Rice said. "But this is a critical moment for Pakistan to bring all its institutions into a common strategy to defend Pakistan. And defending Pakistan means rooting out extremism, defending Pakistani interests means cooperating fully, defending Pakistani interests means investigating this so further attacks can be prevented."/ppRice said she was flying to New Delhi tomorrow "to show solidarity" and offer help with the investigation and counter-terrorism measures. She would also be discouraging the escalation of the situation./ppBritain's foreign secretary, David Miliband, said the attacks had put Pakistani-Indian relations, which had been improving since the election of a civilian government in Islamabad, to a severe test./pp"Now these are under the greatest possible scrutiny and the greatest possible strain," Miliband said. "I think it is precisely at this moment of strain and scrutiny that we need very strong statesmanship and leadership so that it is joint action and cooperative action that will make the difference."/ppIndia's high commissioner in London said last night that the attacks were "probably" aimed at derailing peace talks between India and Pakistan, which had been given a boost by the election of a new democratic government in Islamabad./ppShiv Shankar Mukherjee, told Sky News that India had made no "aggressive moves" since the attack, but warned that the peace process between the two countries was "under pressure"./ppBut he added that "over the last few months, we've been having a terrorist attack virtually every month in India. And we've leaned over backwards and have gone the extra mile ... to see that the dialogue succeeds, because there is no alternative, except peaceful dialogue to resolve our problems."/pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/mumbai-terror-attacks"Mumbai terror attacks/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/pakistan"Pakistan/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/india"India/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/usa"United States/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/terrorism"Global terrorism/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/sLiGHPisou7MJ39wgj40puH-53U/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/sLiGHPisou7MJ39wgj40puH-53U/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

During the November 26 broadcast of The Savage Nation, host Michael Savage discussed the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, that had started earlier that day and said, "[T]he question to you is, what should the U.S. government do right now? Should the U.S. military be deployed? Should the tribal areas of Pakistan be wiped out and the rats killed in there once and for all? Should we nuke the tribal areas in Pakistan's wild-man region and wipe out the terrorists once and for all?" Later, responding to a caller's assertion that "[W]e need to exterminate them like rats," Savage said, "Yeah, we know where they're coming from. ... [T]hey're in the tribal areas of western Pakistan. What the heck do we have nuclear weapons for? What are tactical nuclear weapons for but to wipe out an enemy? The enemy lives there -- kill them and their families, and show them that the terror they inflict on the West will come home to roost and will be inflicted on them." Savage later added, "[T]here's no question that entire region needs to be annihilated and stripped off the earth."

As Media Matters for America has noted, Savage has previously advocated attacking other countries. On the October 29, 2007, edition of his nationally syndicated radio show, Savage played the song "Everybody's Dixie" by recording artist Bobby Horton, and said: "Yee-haw! This is the America -- this is the America that those Islamic-fascist, robe-wearing, throwback bums have never seen!" Savage repeatedly said, "Let's bring it on! Bomb Iran, bring our boys home now!," and then demanded, "Get every hunter in America armed to the teeth!" He continued: "Throwback bastards! I'm so sick of them! I'm so sick of the brainwashing about Islam and Muslims and the Koran! Shove it! Shove it all! I'm sick of it!"

Talk Radio Network, which syndicates Savage's show, claims that Savage is heard on more than 350 radio stations. The Savage Nation reaches at least 8.25 million listeners each week, according to Talkers Magazine, making it one of the most listened-to talk radio shows in the nation, behind only The Rush Limbaugh Show and The Sean Hannity Show.

From the November 26 broadcast of Talk Radio Network's The Savage Nation:

SAVAGE: They have set a landmark hotel, the Taj [Mahal] hotel, on fire. Screams can be heard in the background. Enormous clouds of black smoke are rising from the century-old edifice on Mumbai's waterfront. The fact of the matter is, India is at war, only you don't know it. And the question to you is, what should the U.S. government do right now? Should the U.S. military be deployed? Should the tribal areas of Pakistan be wiped out and the rats killed in there once and for all? Should we nuke the tribal areas in Pakistan's wild-man region and wipe out the terrorists once and for all? Is this a result of Bush's weakness? Is this a result of Bush's catering to Islamic fanatics? Is this a result of the FBI saying you cannot use the word "Islamic" in relationship to terrorism? Is this a result of Obama's weakness? Is this a result of the financial meltdown? Is this connected in some way to the threat against the New York subway system that we heard about earlier today? Is this retaliation for the pirate attack? Is this some way related to anything other than more of the same, which is Islamic madness against the world? Mad Islamic fanatics taking it out on Hindus, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, anybody but the fanatics. Is this a result of anything other than insanity? I will open up the lines to you on The Savage Nation.

[...]

CALLER: We in the Western world and the United States -- I don't see how we're gonna win this, because we do not have the guts, we don't have the stomach to do the things it takes to be violent enough, to fight fire with fire and give these -- I mean, basically, we need to exterminate them like rats, and we're so worried about --

SAVAGE: Yeah, we know where they're coming from, we know they're coming out of the -- the training, at least, is probably coming out of the area where Osama bin Laden is hiding. If we can believe our intelligence agencies -- of course, we have no real knowledge as to whether they're really intelligent intelligence agencies -- they're in the tribal areas of western Pakistan. What the heck do we have nuclear weapons for? What are tactical nuclear weapons for but to wipe out an enemy? The enemy lives there -- kill them and their families, and show them that the terror they inflict on the West will come home to roost and will be inflicted on them. Why must we sit here waiting for the New York subways to go up in flames?

CALLER: Yes, sir, but what are we gonna do? Instead of what you just said, what we're gonna do is we're gonna cut our nuclear arsenal.

[...]

SAVAGE: The only way to defend ourselves against these fanatic Islamists is with strength. Not with hand-wringing, not with the United Nations, but with a strong and swift attack on the tribal regions of western Pakistan. Now, I will not quibble with you as to whether they should be with nuclear -- that is, tactical nuclear weapons, which are limited in their scope and limited in their power -- or with cluster bombs or with weapons I'm not even aware of. But there's no question that entire region needs to be annihilated and stripped off the earth.