TANGKAK: The Johor Education Foundation (YPJ) has launched an aggressive move to attract as many orang asli youth to take up skills training courses next month.

A team, led by Muar and Batu Pahat community college chairman Abdullah Omar, has started making visits and giving talks to a community of Temuan orang asli near Gunung Ledang.

Abdullah said the programme was aimed at providing work skills to orang asli youth who did not have proper education to help them improve themselves.

"The community colleges in Johor have been providing work skills such as electrical wiring, air-conditioning repair, sewing and even tailoring to youth for several years.

"However, we now want to push the programme to the orang asli youth," he said in Kampung Tanah Gembur on Thursday.

Abdullah said the settlement, headed by Tuk Batin Jengking Jani, had about 66 families living in 52 homes located at the foothill of Gunung Ledang near Bekok.

He said initial checks with the community showed many of the youth either worked as contract labourers with daily wages or were self-employed.

He said the community of about 300 residents who owned cars or motorcycles and mostly lived in homes powered by generators could benefit if there was a certified electrical wireman or mechanic among them.

He said besides installing or repairing electrical wires, those with motor mechanical knowledge could repair vehicles while the girls could become tailors and sew dresses.

What is the Iraq war's carbon footprint?

We are updated on a daily basis about the ever mounting human cost of the Iraq war, but even the US military is now starting to ask questions about how much oil the "war over oil" is consuming. Last year, Major General Richard Zilmer sent the Pentagon a "priority one" request from Iraq for "a self-sustainable energy solution" that would include "solar panels and wind turbines". The US military's carbon footprint was not his concern - rather, that "by reducing the need for [petrol] at our outlying bases, we can decrease the frequency of logistics convoys on the road, thereby reducing the danger to our marines, soldiers, and sailors".

Amory Lovins, the world-renowned energy consultant, agrees that the US military has a "fat fuel-logistics tail" and believes that this is a "very teachable moment for the military" on reducing its immense fossil fuel consumption.

Fire near Inner Harbor quickly extinguished

A fire this morning in a downtown Baltimore building near the Inner Harbor was confined to an air-conditioning unit on top of the six-story structure and was quickly extinguished, according to a spokesman for the city Fire Department.

The fire was out by 11 a.m. but Light Street between Lombard and Baltimore streets remained closed for the four fire engines that responded to 26 Light St. Black smoke was visible from as far away as Interstate 83 and North Avenue.

Chief Kevin Cartwright, the Fire Department spokesman, said the building is in the process of being gutted and that several firefighters took one hose line to the top of the building and put out the fire. No one was injured, Cartwright said, but late morning traffic was backed up downtown.

The Freedmen's Remedy

Because the issue of water-boarding will not be subject to a protracted legal battle. To the extent the upcoming military commissions address the issue at all, it will happen—as it is happening now—in a black box, cloaked in assertions of secrecy. For one thing, the Military Commissions Act passed by Congress permits the government to assert national security privilege where sources and methods of obtaining information are concerned. They can keep this evidence from the defense, so long as the military judge finds the sources and methods are classified. In Hamdan, the government has already asserted that this prohibition extends to the interviews of the detainees themselves concerning their interrogations, and as such, the government has already erected a wall of silence around the high-value detainees extending even to their interviews.