Posting for  David Goldstein: 


    Guantanamo was one of the issues du jour on the Sunday talkfests today.

As in Mother England. Thursday morning, Bermuda's premier, Ewart Brown, made the surprising announcement that four Uighur detainees from the American prison camp at Guantanamo had been resettled in the tourist mecca in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

The problem, reports Bermuda's only newspaper, the Royal Gazette, is that Brown forgot to tell the island's governor, the royally appointed official who is London's authority on the island. Bermuda isn't really an independent state, but a self-governoring overseas territory of the United Kingdom. And while Bermudans are at pains to point out that they approve their own laws and UK laws don't apply, the UK is supposed to decide Bermuda's foreign policy.

Which is why the island's governor, Sir Richard Gozney, thinks he should have been told before Bermuda agreed to take in the Uighurs, who'd been ordered freed last year by a U.S. district court judge and had grown tired of Guantanamo.

"The Government of Bermuda should have consulted with us because it carries with it foreign policy ground areas and security issues," Gozney is quoted as saying in the Gazette.

Brown disagrees, telling CNN Thursday afternoon that the matter is strictly an immigration one, which falls within local Bermuda officials' authority. He called the decision a "humanitarian one."

Brown acknowledged that he let Gozney know what was going on "rather late" -- apparently after the four Uighurs were already aboard a chartered flight from Guantanamo.

Why exactly wasn't clear. Brown told the Gazette the Uighur asylum had been in the works for a month.

As for the Obama administration, it expressed gratitude for the Bermudan hospitality and didn't address the issue of whether maybe some kind of headsup was owed to London.

And the Uighurs, who've been in Guantanamo for seven years? Their mental health appears fine, reports the Gazette, and they could barely contain their enthusiasm for moving to Bermuda during the flight from Guantanamo.

Still awaited is word that the 13 remaining Guantanamo Uighurs have made it to the Pacific island of Palau, which announced Wednesday it was taking all 17.

Apparently, no headsup for Palau, either.

Sen. Roland Burris, D-Il., thinks swine flu is giving pork a bad name. So at Wednesday's Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee hearing, Burris asked Anne Schuchat, the Center for Disease Control's interim deputy director for science and public health programs, if health officials could give the disease a new name.

"I've been in contact with pork producers in the great state of Illinois and they're requesting that we come up with some other name for this influenza or this virus because they call it swine flu but you always hear the reports saying it has nothing to do with swine," Burris said.

Schuchat told the junior senator from Illinois that health officials call the disease H1N1 influenza. Burris was unimpressed.

"That's not sexy," he responded.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano disagreed.

"I just call it H1N1," she told the committee. "And actually after you say H1N1 a few times, it does roll off the tongue."

President Barack Obama's Florida pick to head up the Federal Emergency Management Agency appears poised for confirmation by the Senate.

Craig Fugate got a glowing introduction at the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs by Republican Florida Sen. Mel Martinez, who introduced the Florida emergency management chief as a "great Floridian."

"In my view there's no more well-qualified person for the job," Martinez said. He noted Fugate as Florida's emergency director managed 23 state emergencies, including 11 presidentially declared disasters.

"It was Craig’s tremendous ability to coordinate disaster response, recovery, preparedness and mitigation efforts with each of the state's 67 counties and local governments that earned him reappointment after Gov. Charlie Crist was elected governor in 2006," Martinez said, noting Fugate was first appointed director by former Gov. Jeb Bush in 2001. "Although we in Florida will be sad to see him leave, our nation needs him as we continue to work toward improving our response to national disasters."

Florida Sen. Bill Nelson's office says cyber-invaders believed to be in China have recently hacked into the computer network in his office.

Two attacks on the same day this month and another one last month targeted work stations used by three Nelson staffers - a key foreign-policy aide, the deputy legislative director and a former Nelson NASA adviser. The hackers didn’t make off with any classified information, which isn’t kept on office computers, a Nelson spokesman said. 

The Florida Democrat is a member of the Senate’s Intelligence, Armed Services and Finance committees and heads a Senate subcommittee that oversees NASA. 

One of the attacks is believed to be serious, Nelson said during a Senate Armed Services hearing that touched on the subject of hackers trying to invade U.S. military computer networks.   

Besides the attacks on Nelson’s office, similar incursions on Capitol Hill computer networks are up significantly in the past few months, according to various information systems offices on Capitol Hill.  Nelson's office says last year, according to Newsweek, federal authorities showed up at the presidential campaign headquarters for both Barack Obama and John McCain and said information on the computers there was being downloaded by a "foreign entity." 

“The threat to our national security, to be sure, is real; and, it will require significant investment and inter-agency coordination at an unprecedented level to gain an upper hand against would-be cyber criminals and spies,” Nelson said. “These are anxious days, when you consider the threat from such espionage facing our country and recent developments on this front