Every week the dive club has the pool for two hours. Usually, we leave the air bottles at home and just do lots of workout to keep in shape. Every now and then, we bring compressed air and do some excercises under water, which includes guiding a blindfolded buddy around. just a short shot, I was, ehm, guiding a blindfolder buddy around at the time and didn’t have that much attention to give to the camera. Every now and then we hang the pool full of nets as well – after all, there’s plenty of nets in the Oosterschelde, where we dive regularly.

via

Newsfilter: The NYTimes is reporting that the Democrats forced Congress into a closed session last week because of a recently declassified memo citing concerns by intelligence agencies over the source of information used to justify the Iraq war. Turns out the White House had been informed their source couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth and were probably fabricating evidence. Knowing this, the Bush administration still presented the stories as absolute truth. The memo was apparently ignored. Of course, the administration has ignored important memos before.
This new evidence probably invalidates the conclusions (pdf) drawn by the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on the Intelligence Community’s pre-war work on Iraq.

Oh, and Newsweek is reporting that Libi was tortured, thus invalidating the questionable value of that interrogation method.

No, wait, it gets better….

These guys make me wish I was religious, just so I could be smugly confident that Bush would pay an eternal price for his actions. If only this whole thing involved a blowjob so the majority of the American public could understand it well enough to be outraged, too…

[Quote:]

Producenten en importeurs van mp3-spelers krijgen mogelijk al snel te maken met een kopieerheffing die afhankelijk van de opslagcapaciteit varieert van 80 eurocent tot 25 euro. Dat blijkt uit een compromisvoorstel van voorzitter H. Vonhoff van de Stichting Onderhandelingen Thuiskopievergoeding (SONT).

De kopieerheffing is bedoeld als compensatie aan musici en producenten voor het privékopiëren. De Stichting Thuiskopie die de heffing int, verschilt al tijden van mening met de importeurs en producenten over het principe en het voorgestelde tarief. Maandag vergaderen de partijen over het idee van Vonhoff en komt het wellicht tot een besluit.

Voor de goedkopere draagbare digitale audiospelers met een beperkte capaciteit gaat volgens het plan een vergoeding van 0,20 eurocent per 32 megabyte gelden, met een maximum van 5 euro per stuk. Voor de duurste exemplaren met meer dan 10 gigabyte opslagmogelijkheid gaat de heffing 8 tot 25 euro bedragen. De populaire muziekspeler iPod van Apple kan zo ineens 25 euro duurder worden.

Ik heb nog een prachtig compromisvoorstel voor de Stichting Thuiskopie: ik koop de rest van m’n leven geen voorbespeelde CD’s of DVD’s meer, zodat jullie je totaal geen zorgen hoeven te maken over het thuis kopieren van die dingen, en in ruil daarvoor koop ik m’n blanko media (die ik als software ontwikkelaar nu eenmaal gebruik) in het buitenland. Al mijn macjes hebben een firewire aansluiting zodat ik ze van m’n iPod op kan starten in geval van nood, dus ik denk dat ik die dan ook maar in het buitenland ga kopen.

Wat denk je, deal?

[Quote:]

“When people are on CNN debating Bush’s policies, that to me is very separate from what my husband’s doing,” she said. “I know that sounds naïve, but when your husband’s in this, you don’t think about politics because there’s no choice. He’s going. This is what he signed up for.

“I would probably say that I’m for the war in Iraq because I am pro-military,” Smiley went on. “I’m for the war because we have people that we love, and friends that are over there, and it just feels wrong to be against it. But that’s not to say I don’t question why we still are there. Or what the connection is between Iraq and the war on terror.”

She leaned forward, eager to make herself understood. “It’s almost scary to me when I read things in the news and I start to question,” she said. “Maybe it’s even like being a Christian and questioning things in the Bible. You feel almost afraid because that’s your faith. It’s like that scary moment at church when you all of a sudden go, ‘Huh, that doesn’t make sense.’ And you instantly feel shame, like ‘Oh, no, what does this mean for me? I’ve based my whole world on this.’ When I read things in the newspaper and I start to agree with the antiwar side, it feels like I’m going against something that’s a part of me. So I turn it off and keep the politics separate because I’m in it right now.” She threw up her hands. “It would be like being married to a doctor and being against medicine. How would you justify what your husband’s doing each day?”

[Quote:]

The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters — one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people — are extending the bureau’s reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.

Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.

[Quote:]

Tony Blair is set to face an unprecedented parliamentary inquiry into his conduct in the run-up to the Iraq war.

A coalition of Tory and Labour MPs is to table a motion to set up a Commons committee to examine “the conduct of ministers” both before and after the war. They believe they need the support of about 30 Labour rebels to succeed.

The committee, comprising seven privy counsellors, would have the power to see all sensitive documents and call any British witnesses, including intelligence chiefs.

The failure to plan for the aftermath is likely to be at the heart of the committee’s inquiries now that Iraq is in the grip of a violent insurgency, says the Tory MP Douglas Hogg, one of the inquiry’s architects and who is canvassing support for the move. The coalition already has backing from the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists.

It’s amazing what make-up and a good photographer can do. Here and here are two more great examples..