Russian soldiers dressed in Soviet WWII uniform march along the Red Square during the Victory parade in Moscow Monday, May 9, 2005. World leaders whose countries fought each other in World War II paid tribute to the fallen soldiers and millions of civilian dead, joining Russian President Vladimir Putin on Red Square for a lavish military parade celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. (AP Photo/Ivan Sekretarev)

The Soviet Union lost an estimated 27 million people during the conflict known as the Great Patriotic War. Few families were untouched, and May 9, 1945, celebrated in Russia as Victory Day, remains sacred across most of the former Soviet Union.

Dot Flowers sucks. Ed Shull from uswest.com is a hack. I hope he shoves his search engine marketing up his ass…

I guess I won’t be receiving my $5 anytime soon

[Quote:]

SELF-REFERENTIAL APTITUDE TEST, by Jim Propp (propp@math.wisc.edu)

The solution to the following puzzle is unique; in some cases the
knowledge that the solution is unique may actually give you a short-cut
to finding the answer to a particular question, but it’s possible to
find the unique solution even without making use of the fact that the
solution is unique. (Thanks to Andy Latto for bringing this subtlety
to my attention.)

I should mention that if you don’t agree with me about the answer to #20,
you will get a different solution to the puzzle than the one I had in mind.
But I should also mention that if you don’t agree with me about the answer
to #20, you are just plain wrong.

You may now begin work.

1. The first question whose answer is B is question
(A) 1
(B) 2
(C) 3
(D) 4
(E) 5

2. The only two consecutive questions with identical answers are questions
(A) 6 and 7
(B) 7 and 8
(C) 8 and 9
(D) 9 and 10
(E) 10 and 11

3. The number of questions with the answer E is
(A) 0
(B) 1
(C) 2
(D) 3
(E) 4

4. The number of questions with the answer A is
(A) 4
(B) 5
(C) 6
(D) 7
(E) 8

5. The answer to this question is the same as the answer to question
(A) 1
(B) 2
(C) 3
(D) 4
(E) 5

6. The answer to question 17 is
(A) C
(B) D
(C) E
(D) none of the above
(E) all of the above

7. Alphabetically, the answer to this question and the answer to the
following question are
(A) 4 apart
(B) 3 apart
(C) 2 apart
(D) 1 apart
(E) the same

8. The number of questions whose answers are vowels is
(A) 4
(B) 5
(C) 6
(D) 7
(E) 8

9. The next question with the same answer as this one is question
(A) 10
(B) 11
(C) 12
(D) 13
(E) 14

10. The answer to question 16 is
(A) D
(B) A
(C) E
(D) B
(E) C

11. The number of questions preceding this one with the answer B is
(A) 0
(B) 1
(C) 2
(D) 3
(E) 4

12. The number of questions whose answer is a consonant is
(A) an even number
(B) an odd number
(C) a perfect square
(D) a prime
(E) divisible by 5

13. The only odd-numbered problem with answer A is
(A) 9
(B) 11
(C) 13
(D) 15
(E) 17

14. The number of questions with answer D is
(A) 6
(B) 7
(C) 8
(D) 9
(E) 10

15. The answer to question 12 is
(A) A
(B) B
(C) C
(D) D
(E) E

16. The answer to question 10 is
(A) D
(B) C
(C) B
(D) A
(E) E

17. The answer to question 6 is
(A) C
(B) D
(C) E
(D) none of the above
(E) all of the above

18. The number of questions with answer A equals the number of questions
with answer
(A) B
(B) C
(C) D
(D) E
(E) none of the above

19. The answer to this question is:
(A) A
(B) B
(C) C
(D) D
(E) E

20. Standardized test is to intelligence as barometer is to
(A) temperature (only)
(B) wind-velocity (only)
(C) latitude (only)
(D) longitude (only)
(E) temperature, wind-velocity, latitude, and longitude

more… and more…

[Quote:]

Zimbabwe state media have criticised the recent election in the United Kingdom, saying it involved fraud.

Zimbabwe Television’s (ZTV) Friday evening bulletin spoke of “a lack of transparency, suppression of media freedoms and fraud” in the UK poll.

International observers have accused Zimbabwe of fraud and intimidation in elections in recent years.

President Robert Mugabe’s campaigning has frequently singled out the UK and Prime Minister Tony Blair as enemies.

The ZTV report interviewed members of the public who said Britain had no right to tell African countries how to run democratic elections when the UK poll was characterised by lack of transparency.

Tony Blair returning to Downing Street
Blair won with a reduced majority
Similar allegations were made in the Saturday midday bulletins.

The reports identified the UK’s use of black ballot boxes – as opposed to translucent ones used in Zimbabwe – and the use of postal voting as problem areas.

The conduct of the UK election “raises a lot of questions about the democracy preached by the British,” ZTV reported.

[Quote:]

It took Thérèse Mwandeko a year to save the money. She knew she could walk the first 40 kilometers of her journey, but would need to pay for a lift for the last 20.

So she traded bananas and peanuts until she’d saved $1.50 in Congolese francs, then set out for Bukavu. She walked with balled-up fabric clenched between her thighs, to soak up blood that had been oozing from her vagina for two years, since she had been gang-raped by Rwandan militia soldiers who plundered her village in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Finally, she arrived at Panzi Hospital.

Here, Thérèse takes her place in line, along with 80 women, waiting for surgery to rebuild her vagina. Dr. Denis Mukwege, Panzi’s sole gynecologist and one of two doctors in the eastern Congo who can perform such reconstructive surgeries, can repair only five women a week. The air is thick with flies. It reeks from women with fistula: rips in the vaginal wall where rape tore out chunks of flesh separating the bladder and rectum from the vagina. Yet Thérèse, 47, is happier than she’s been in years.

“Until I came here, I had no hope I could be helped,�? she says.

Across the DRC are tens of thousands of women like this: physically ravaged, emotionally terrorized, financially impoverished. Except for Thérèse and a few fortunate others, these women have no help of any kind: Eight years of war have left the country in ruins, and Congolese women have been victims of rape on a scale never seen before.

Every one of dozens of armed groups in this war has used rape as a weapon. Amnesty International (AI) researchers believe there has been more rape here than in any other conflict, but the actual scale is still unknown.

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.

Stephen Jay Gould (1941 – 2002)

[Quote:]

Found an admirable tome but it’s in praise of the wrong god?

The premier theological plagiarism solution for OS X, Faith Converter converts text between twenty-seven different religions, encompassing Atheism, Biopsychosocialism, Buddhism, Christianity, Communism, Confucianism, Druidism, Falun Gong, Hinduism, Islam, Juche, Judaism, Keynesianism, Linux, MacEvangelism, Mahanism, Maoism, NIMBYism, Roman, Scientology, Shinto, Sikh, Stalinism, Taoism, Thatcherism, Trotskyism and Veganism.

[Quote:]

If you are interested in computers, their function and operation, but are discouraged by their complexity, you should read this book. It deals as simply as possible with the principles and does not delve too deeply into electronics. The combination of carefully-written and instructive illustrations should give older students a good basic knowledge of what computers are all about.

(first edition: 1971. revised edition: 1979)

This undated photo released by the U.S. Department of Defense shows the casket bearing the body of US Navy Machinist’s Mate Third Class Nathan Taylor being sent over the edge of the USN Aircraft Carrier USS Enterprise as US Navy Sailors conduct a Burial at Sea ceremony on May 19, 2004. The photo was released by the U.S. Defense Department April 28, 2005 with more than 350 other photos in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the National Security Archive.

A photo from a video allegedly shot by suspect Ghasoub al-Abrash Ghalyoun of the World Trade Center in New York, left, that was shown during a trial in Madrid Wednesday April 27, 2005, of an alleged cell of al-Qaida who planned the Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S. (AP Photo/ EFE/TV)

US Army soldiers from the 1st Battalion 5th Infantry give medical assistance to a member of the Iraqi Intermediate Forces after his convoy was hit by a suicide car bomb in Mosul.(AFP/Cris Bouroncle)

A wounded Iraqi boy cries from pain Saturday at a local hospital in the town of Suwayrah, south of Baghdad. The boy was wounded in Friday’s car bomb explosion at a crowded market. At least 26 people were killed and 45 wounded in the attack.(AFP/file/Karim Sahib)

US Army soldiers from the 1st Battalion 5th Infantry rush by the charred remains of a suicide car bomb after it detonated between the vehicles of an Iraqi Intermediate Forces convoy severely wounding some of its members as they exited their headquarters in Mosul.(AFP/Criss Bouroncle)