[Quote:]

George Galloway had vowed to give US senators “both barrels” and after sitting – coiled – through an hour-and-half of testimony against him, he unloaded all his ammunition.

Far from displaying the forelock-tugging deference to which senators are accustomed, Mr Galloway went on the attack.

He rubbished committee chairman Norm Coleman’s dossier of evidence and stared him in the eye.

“Now I know that standards have slipped over the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer, you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice,” the MP declared.

The whole room scanned Mr Coleman’s face for a reaction. The senator shifted in his seat – nervously it seemed.

It was the first time a British politician had been interrogated as a hostile witness at the US Senate – but Mr Galloway cast himself not as the accused, but the accuser.

On stage at the heart of American power, he attacked the US-led war on Iraq and accused Washington of installing a “puppet” regime there.

‘Lions’ den’

The Scotsman launched into his opening statement with relish.

He had never received any money or any allocations of oil from Iraq. He was not, as the committee alleged, a supporter of Saddam Hussein.

“I have a rather better record of opposition to Saddam Hussein than you do, and than any member of the British or American governments do,” he told the committee.

Mr Galloway had expected to testify before a panel of 13 senators in what he termed their “lions’ den”.

But he faced off against just two, Mr Coleman and Democratic counterpart Carl Levin.

It was Republican Mr Coleman who bore the brunt of the attack in one of the Senate’s most flamboyant confrontations.

“Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong,” he told the chairman, whom he labelled a “neo-con, pro-war hawk”.

Mr Coleman tried desperately to take it without emotion, but at one point could not resist breaking in to a smile.

There’s a 47 minute streaming video on this page. Crooks and Liars have a Real video
here and an MP3 audio file here.

This has to be the most riveting, balls of steel performances I have ever seen from a politician.
Galloway has been “targeted” because he is a long time opponent of the war in Iraq.

Here are some quotes from his onslaught aimed at the heart of the US establishment …..

# “Who paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars? The answer to that is nobody and if you had anybody who paid me a penny you would have produced them here today.”

# “I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns.”

# “You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever having written to me or telephoned me, without any contact with me whatsoever and you call that justice.”

# “Senator [Norm Coleman, committee chairman], this is the mother of all smoke screens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq’s wealth.”

# “You have nothing on me Senator [Coleman], except my name on lists of names in Iraq, many of which were drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Iraq.”

# “I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one, and neither has anybody on my behalf.”

# “I know that standards have slipped over the last few years in Washington but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice.”

# “One of the most serious mistakes you have made in this set of documents is such a schoolboy howler it makes a fool of the efforts you have made.”

# “Senator [Coleman], in everything I said about Iraq I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 have paid with their lives, 1,600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies.”

Wow….

There’s a Quicktime clip here.

He’s now splashed all over the front page of The Daily Telegraph (The right wing newspaper he won a libel action against 6 months ago)

“Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.”

– Mark Twain

[Quote:]

The race to solve the world’s most pressing health problems through science and technology received a $250 million pledge yesterday from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The latest amount brings to $450 million the Gates Foundation will award researchers to tackle 14 specific public-health challenges in developing countries — challenges ranging from the development of vaccines that need no refrigeration to creating a single staple crop to help alleviate malnutrition.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates announced the grant yesterday at the annual World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland. The Gates Foundation committed the initial $200 million in 2003 to its Grand Challenges in Global Health, an initiative to fight diseases that, while uncommon in rich nations, kill millions of people in poor countries. The foundation expects to award the first of the $450 million worth of grants late next month.

Gates said that science and technology can be harnessed to achieve more groundbreaking advances in global health over the next decade than in all of the past 50 years.

“We are on the verge of taking historic steps to reduce disease in the developing world,” Gates said. “I believe we can do this, and if we do it will be the best thing humanity has ever done.”

[Quote:]

Video from an AH-64 Apache as it flys nap of the earth. Trees sometimes get in the way when you are doing flying of this kind as this video demonstrates.

Sex has always been fair play for advertisers. But how obvious can you get?

[Quote:]

An inmate condemned to die by chemical injection this month is seeking a reprieve at least long enough to donate his liver to his dying sister.

Gregory Scott Johnson is scheduled to die May 25 for the 1985 murder of Ruby Hutslar, an 82-year-old woman from Anderson. Authorities say he beat and stomped on Hutslar, then set a fire to try to hide his crime.

Defense attorneys want Gov. Mitch Daniels to grant Johnson a short reprieve that would allow time for medical tests to determine whether the organ is compatible with Johnson’s sister.

[..]

Eric Meslin, director of the Indiana University Center for Bioethics, said Johnson’s offer puts doctors, lawyers and society in a dilemma.

“You can’t donate a liver before you die, because that would kill you and that gets in the way of the state killing you,” he said. “And you can’t donate organs after you die, because the method of execution would render the organs unusable.”

Johnson told The Indianapolis Star during an interview at the prison this week that he wants to donate his liver in hopes of leaving something positive to society.

“‘I’m sorry’ just doesn’t cut it,” he said. “All of the same stupid things I’ve done that I thought wasn’t hurting anyone– at that time in my life, I didn’t care. I care now, but it’s too late.”

[..]

Kraus said doctors could take a piece of Johnson’s liver in what is known as a “split liver” transplant. The remainder of the organ would regenerate and, in time, Johnson would be healthy enough to be put to death.

America: where laws replace common sense.

[Quote:]

The former head of the Mossad espionage agency, Efraim Halevy, was a guest of Haaretz Q&A on Monday, May 9, 2005. Thank you to the thousands of people who took part in this live event.

During a 40-year career in the Mossad, the British-born Halevy played key roles in such milestones as forging Israel’s peace treaty with King Hussein of Jordan and bringing the Jews of Ethiopia to Israel.

Born in London in 1934, he immigrated to Israel in 1948, joining the Mossad in 1961. In 1998, following Israel’s botched attempt to assassinate senior Hamas official Khaled Meshal in Amman, then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu tapped him to head the spy agency, a position he held for four years.

In September 2002, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon appointed him head of the National Security Council, dispatching Halevy on a wide range of secret diplomatic missions. He resigned a year later.

Many interesting questions, read the entire thing, I’m not going to copy/paste just one.

[Quote:]

The Dutch Ministry of Defence intends to sign a large (6500 seat) Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft for the use of Windows XP, MS Office and several of Microsoft’s servers despite a government ban on such renewals, Dutch IT weekly Automatisering Gids disclosed last Friday.

Although the Dutch parliament in 2002 voted unanimously to adopt open standards, Microsoft last year opened exclusive negotiations with the Dutch government regarding a major software upgrade. When it turned out that the government had negotiated a price of �120 per seat per year for 250,000 desktops (a deal that would total �150m), the Dutch parliament demanded that the negotiations should stop immediately. It was also agreed that the government would no longer enter into any Enterprise Agreements with Microsoft.

The Defence department cites “financial and functional reasons” for the renewal, as well as Microsoft’s active involvement with the Defense IT infrastructure project MULAN.

[Quote:]

Being caught between a tornado and softball sized hail
is probably not something you should try at home, but it does make for some rather incredible video, as this storm chaser’s video from May 12 in Texas demonstrates. A lot of really good chasers and even storm tour companies were caught completely off guard by this storm. I’m sure the auto glass companies near the caprock in Texas were thrilled. WARNING: Perhaps understandably, this clip contains some very strong language.

[Quote:]

No longer am I afraid of Skinheads and neo-Nazis and white supremacists, by comparison to a church that’s committed to the destruction of the civil rights and human rights and families of my sisters and brothers.

Skinheads and Klansmen I can recognize for the enemies that they are. But anti-gay Christians come in the disguise of love, and that disguise is a powerful weapon in itself. They demonize, but they don’t see themselves as responsible for the violence their demonizing causes.

I try to bring up examples like that terrible killing of a gay couple in California by the Williams brothers [Matthew and Tyler, in 1999]. When one of them was asked by his mother, “Why’d you do it?” he said, basically, “The Bible says the world would be better off without them.”

There are so many of these stories. What kind of smoking gun is more smoking than that?

[Quote:]

Ideologues don’t want you to go beyond the typical labels of left and right because people may start believing you. They embrace a world view that cannot be proven wrong because they will admit no evidence to the contrary. They want your reporting to validate their belief system and when it doesn’t, God forbid. Never mind that their own stars were getting a fair shake on “NOW,” Gigot, Viguerie, David Keen of the American Conservative Union, Steven Moore of the Club for Growth. Our reporting � our reporting was giving the radical right fits because it wasn’t the party line. It wasn’t that we were getting it wrong, either. Only three times in three years did we err factually, and in each case we corrected those errors as soon as we confirmed their inaccuracy. I believe our broadcast was the best researched on public broadcasting.

And the problem was that we were telling stories that partisans in power didn’t want told, and we were getting it right, not rightwing.

[..]

The flag�s been hijacked and turned into a logo, the trademark � the trademark of a monopoly on patriotism. On most Sunday morning talk shows, official chests appear adorned with the flag as if it�s the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. During the State of the Union, did you notice Bush and Cheney wearing the flag? How come? No administration�s patriotism is ever in doubt, only its policies. And the flag bestows no immunity from error. When I see flags sprouting on official labels, I think of the time in China when I saw Mao�s Little Red Book of orthodoxy on every official�s desk, omnipresent and unread.

[Quote:]

D66-leider Dittrich wil dat de AOW-leeftijd over 25 jaar in stapjes is verhoogd naar 67 jaar. Dat staat in een pamflet, dat hij dinsdag presenteerde en dat aan de basis staat van een discussie in de partij.

In het pamflet staat de solidariteit tussen generaties centraal. “Veel oudere en welvarende Nederlanders zijn huiverig om maatregelen te nemen om ook jongeren een welvarende en sociale toekomst te geven.” Volgens Dittrich is solidariteit van ouderen met jongeren nodig om de gezondheidszorg, de oudedagsvoorzieningen en de sociale zekerheid te waarborgen.

Jaren terug (in het vorige millennium) werd het bedrijf waar ik werkte overgenomen door een grote nederlands automatiseringsclub. Bij de “onderhandelingen” om onze arbeidscontracten gelijk te trekken meldde de nieuwe directeur trots dat de club een pensioenregeling had. Ik vroeg ‘m hoe die die kosten dacht te gaan compenseren. Een opmerking waar de brave man helemaal niets van snapte. Ik vertelde toen niet te verwachten in Nederland nog met pensioen te kunnen, en dat ik elke storting in een pensioenfonds dus als verloren geld beschouwde, een verlies dat ik gecompenseerd wilde zien in m’n salaris. De onderhandelingen gingen daarna snel bergafwaarts… Ik roep sindsdien dat ik niet verwacht voor m’n 75e met pensioen te mogen, en word nog steeds niet begrepen. KPN, m’n huidige werkgever, heeft ook een pensioenfonds, en stuurt braaf elk jaar een document met hoeveel geld ik wel niet zal krijgen als ik met m’n 63e (de huidige officiele KPN pensioenleeftijd) stop met werken. Elk jaar lach ik weer hard om de fantasie van de auteur.

Every now and then Worth1000 has a really great contest

[Quote:]

Minister Gerrit Zalm van Financien en zijn ministerie hebben voor de introductie van de euro ontkend dat de gulden was ondergewaardeerd. Ook daarna spraken zij beweringen van het tegendeel door banken en deskundigen tegen.

Op 30 april onthulde directeur Henk Brouwer van De Nederlandsche bank dat de gulden bij de introductie van de euro vijf tot tien procent was ondergewaardeerd. De koers van de euro had twee of 2,10 gulden moeten bedragen en niet 2,20371 gulden.

Inmiddels heeft Zalm de onderwaardering erkend, hoewel hij, ook in de Tweede Kamer, altijd had gezegd dat daar geen sprake van was. Naar nu dus blijkt ten onrechte.

Zalm zei deze week in het televisieprogramma Barend en Van Dorp ook dat de wisselkoers nooit in de Kamer aan de orde was geweest. Ook dat is niet juist.

De wisselkoersverhouding is wel degelijk in de Kamer aan de orde geweest, op 9 april 1998, vlak voordat de euromunten in een bepaalde verhouding aan elkaar zouden worden vastgeklonken. Zalm zei toen: ”Verder is zeker geen sprake van een onderwaardering van de gulden. (…) De spilkoersen zijn in lijn met de fundamentals.”

Die uitlatingen staan haaks op de rapporten van banken, zoals een nota van februari 1998 van ABN Amro-medewerker Frank Heemskerk, thans PvdA-Kamerlid. Ook oud-secretaris-generaal Sweder van Wijnbergen van het ministerie van Economische Zaken en andere economen bleven wijzen op de hoge inflatie, die volgens hen te wijten was aan de onderwaardering van de gulden.

Zalm en zijn ministerie bleven de onderwaardering ontkennen. Thesaurier-generaal Kees van Dijkhuizen van het ministerie van Financien zei in oktober nog in Amsterdam: ”Steeds meer rapporten tonen aan dat van onderwaardering geen sprake was.”

Lieg lekker door, jongens…

[Quote:]

De SP roept iedereen op om de nieuwe grondwetfolder die de regering laat verspreiden, als ongewenste post retour te sturen naar het Ministerie van Buitenlandse zaken.

[..]

Van Bommel: “Het is volstrekt ongepast dat het kabinet onbeperkt belastinggeld gebruikt om de bevolking tot een “ja” te bewegen. Zowel de voor- als tegenstanders kregen 400.000 euro ter beschikking om de bevolking te informeren. Maar nu de tegenstanders in alle peilingen in de meerderheid zijn, trekt het kabinet opeens 3,5 miljoen euro uit de staatskas om het ja-kamp te versterken. Het kabinet misbruikt belastinggeld om een politieke propagandaslag te winnen. Hoe meer de weerstand onder de bevolking groeit, des te meer de regering zich van haar slechtste kanten laat zien.”

Het kabinet wijkt af van de belofte die ze op 8 februari deed, toen het in een persbericht liet weten: “Het kabinet zal zijn opvattingen over de Europese Grondwet actief uitdragen volgens de principes uit het eindrapport van de Commissie Toekomst Overheidscommunicatie (Commissie-Wallage). Hierin staat dat overheidsvoorlichting over niet-aanvaard beleid feitelijk en zakelijk moet zijn, dat de overheid herkenbaar moet zijn als afzender en dat de communicatie in redelijke verhouding moet staan tot de communicatie van anderen.” Zowel de hoeveelheid geld die het kabinet uittrekt voor haar VOOR-campagne als de feitelijkheid en zakelijkheid van haar uitlatingen (ze omschrijft de argumenten van de oppositie als mythes op www.grondweteu.nl) wijken duidelijk af van deze belofte.

[Quote:]

The response from the “vocabularians” was so “ginormous” that the lexicographers let out a “whoot.” “Confuzzled?” You must be a “lingweenie.”

The editors of Merriam-Webster dictionaries got more than 3,000 entries when, in a lighthearted moment, they asked visitors to their Web site to submit their favorite words that aren’t in the dictionary.

“It was a lot of fun,” Arthur Bicknell, a spokesman for the Springfield-based dictionary publisher, said Monday. “We weren’t expecting so many. They only had two weeks. But it shows how much people love words. It was very, very gratifying.”

Some of the proposed words even gained multiple submissions so the editors came up with an admittedly unscientific Top 10 list.

In first place was “ginormous” -bigger than gigantic and bigger than enormous – followed by “confuzzled” for confused and puzzled simultaneously, and “whoot,” an exclamation of joy. A “lingweenie”- a person incapable of making up new words – was tenth.

The survey, like a similar one the dictionary publisher ran last year asking readers their favorite word in the dictionary, “was all in the spirit of good fun,” said John M. Morse, president and publisher.

Getting a word into the dictionary is a more serious business, he said, with a candidate typically requiring years of use in a variety of printed matter to demonstrate the breadth of its acceptance and staying power with the American public.

In addition to the Top Ten, some loyal Mary Poppins fans submitted “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” which is in the Oxford English Dictionary, Bicknell said. He also spotted “a number of Harry Potterisms” among the entries.

“We will have to see about those,” he said.

[Quote:]

Kuwait’s parliament passed a law on Monday granting women the right to vote and run in elections for the first time, after pressure from the pro-Western Gulf Arab state’s reformist government.

“We made it. This is history,” prominent activist Roula al-Dashti told reporters. “Our target is the parliamentary polls in 2007. I’m starting my campaign from today.”

Outside parliament, people danced and cheered, passing drivers hooted their horns in support and fireworks lit the sky.

Parliament speaker Jassim al-Khorafi said a majority of the all-male parliament passed the law after a marathon nine-hour session. Thirty-five voted in favor, 23 against and one abstained in a vote that had met fierce resistance from Islamists and conservative tribal MPs.

[Quote:]

Uit recente opiniepeilingen blijkt dat in Frankrijk de nee-stemmers de overhand hebben in de aanloop naar het referendum over de Europese grondwet op 29 mei. Uit peilingen van de instituten Ipsos en CSA bleek maandag dat 51 procent van de ondervraagden ‘non’ zou stemmen en 49 procent ‘oui’.

Zaterdag voorspelden onderzoekers van het instituut Ifop dat de nee-stemmers op 54 procent zouden uitkomen, terwijl peilingen uit de periode daarvoor een kleine meerderheid voor ‘ja’ aangaven. Het aantal ja-stemmers is nu zowel bij de linkse als de rechtse kiezers gedaald.

Volgens Balkje zou Frankrijk zich nu dus onsterfelijk belachelijk maken ten opzichte van de rest van Europa?

[Quote:]

The Jim Henson Co. announced that it will produce a feature-film sequel to its 1982 fantasy film The Dark Crystal, with the working title The Power of the Dark Crystal. The original movie was directed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz, with conceptual designer Brian Froud, and has remained a fan favorite with consistently strong worldwide home video and DVD sales, the company said.

The company’s co-chief executives, Brian Henson and Lisa Henson, made the announcement. Odyssey Entertainment will represent the worldwide sales and distribution of the film, beginning immediately at the Cannes Film Festival.

The sequel is based on an original screenplay by Annette Duffy and David Odell, who wrote the first film. It is set many years after the events of the first movie. The Power of the Dark Crystal sees Jen and Kira as king and queen and guardians of the crystal, who fight to save their kingdom when the crystal is once again split. Incorporating a hybrid of live-action animatronic characters and computer animation, the production is expected to commence in the fall. Lisa Henson and Kristine Belson will produce, with Brian Henson, Ralph Kamp and Louise Goodsill serving as executive producers.

I remember that one.. cool!