Israel gave serious thought this spring to launching a military strike on Iran’s nuclear sites but was told by President George W Bush that he would not support it and did not expect to revise that view for the rest of his presidency…
So Bush is now THE voice or reason? We’re all screwed.
Read the scary news from The Guardian here.
Alright, so Bush has unilaterally OK’d military raids into Pakistan -incursions in which civilians have been killed- without seeking permission first from the Pakistani government. This is of course not the first time something of this sort happens, but it seems like it being ok is SO ingrained in culture and driven home by the media that it doesn’t seem to cause anyone to flinch. I’m going to get all Chomskyan on you:
Lets start from the beginning:
If you look at the UN Charter, chapter 1, article 2:
2. All Members, in order to ensure to all of them the rights and benefits resulting from membership, shall fulfill in good faith the obligations assumed by them in accordance with the present Charter.
“Authorities say they’ve arrested a man who broke into the home of two California farmworkers, stole money, rubbed one with spices and whacked the other with a sausage before fleeing.”
Maybe he was marinating them and planned on cooking them later?
Read the story here.
Bloomberg news published a few days ago Steve Jobs’ obituary…No, he’s not dead, it was just one of those little mistakes – hit “Publish” instead of “Save”? It was quickly removed from the site, yet not quick enough for Gawker not to pick up on it.
Read the entire 17 page (yes 17 pages!!) obituary, internal notes and other goodies in Gawker’s site here.
Creepy, but unsurprising that they pre-write these things. I wonder if the folder structure where they keep them looks something like this.
Oh, and welcome back Mr. Jobs.
Unless you’re part of some sort of urban-cyclying-gothic sect or really ARDENTLY have a problem with pigeons nesting on your wheel cover, is there any need for these?
About 20 minutes after hearing a muffled ‘boom’ while at work, subsequently looking at each other not knowing what it was we just heard, all the lights flickering at the studio and then stepping out for a coffee, this is what 27th St. looked like.
According to one of the firefighters, it was an electrical fire.
To me, it sounded more like a power generator blew up, then the fire followed.
Update: ConEd trucks are all over it now. So yep, must’ve been electrical…
John Ashcroft defended yesterday waterboarding as not constituting torture before a House panel. There were of course some very valuable pearls dropped in there:
The reports that I have heard, and I have no reason to disbelieve them, indicate that they were very valuable,” Ashcroft said, adding that CIA Director George Tenet indicated the “value of the information received from the use of enhanced interrogation techniques — I don’t know whether he was saying waterboarding or not, but assume that he was for a moment — the value of that information exceeded the value of information that was received from all other sources.”
“I believe a report of waterboarding would be serious, but I do not believe it would define torture,” Ashcroft said, responding to questions from Rep. Maxine Waters, D-California.
Can someone remind John Ashcroft of a little piece of history:
In the war crimes tribunals that followed Japan’s defeat in World War II, the issue of waterboarding was sometimes raised. In 1947, the U.S. charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for waterboarding a U.S. civilian. Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.
“All of these trials elicited compelling descriptions of water torture from its victims, and resulted in severe punishment for its perpetrators,” writes Evan Wallach in the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.
On Jan. 21, 1968, The Washington Post ran a front-page photo of a U.S. soldier supervising the waterboarding of a captured North Vietnamese soldier. The caption said the technique induced “a flooding sense of suffocation and drowning, meant to make him talk.” The picture led to an Army investigation and, two months later, the court martial of the soldier.
Read the CNN article on Ashcroft’s nonsense here and the quotes following here , from an NPR note. Don’t miss the account at the end of the article on what it actually feels like.
I recently received -not for the first time of course – this message requesting help. For the first time though, I actually sat down to read and redline it. Poor Miss Sandra does sound like she’s in a lot of distress, so much that she’s writing from Ivory Coast, yet the reply address -which is different from the outgoing mail address- is from India. Maybe she commutes to write emails from India. She must be spending her 5.6 million dollars flying between the two contries to write these emails…
I also appreciate the fact that there is a rose next to her name. That just tilted the balance and prompted me to -almost- help her. Or be sorry for her.
It’s all in the details folks.
Really? Should I? Am I the only one that gets texted this idiotic ads?
If you’ve been a ‘victim of credit fraud’. Yay!!! (Hate the whole phrase by the way).
Last night I received an email stating that my credit score had changed (I had setup an alarm that notified me, due to another incident…) and voila, there went my credit score.
Today I had the pleasure of spending most of my morning trying to sort this thing out, and it seems like it might be easier than I thought. To make a long story short, some knucklehead used some of my info to open a cell-phone account under my name somewhere in Philly, and not pay the bills of course…
So, you get someone’s info and the best thing you can come up with is to get a cell phone and start, I don’t know, calling and texting hotlines or whatever? The idiocy of the end itself sort of defeats the purpose of the entire thing. I mean, if you’re already going to do something stupid, wouldn’t you want to just go all the way through and get something interesting out of it?
Pfff