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This story is so full of irony and self referential recursions, it’ll make your head spin.

Joseph DeLappe is making a wickedly clever protest about the war in Iraq.

He is subverting the US Military’s online recruitment game by logging in as “dead-in-iraq�? and slowly posting one-by-one the names of over 2000 U.S military personnel who have met their deaths in Iraq, by using the game’s inbuilt texting tool.

(Interesting to note that the U.S. military uses a COMPUTER GAME as their premier recruitment tool.) Quote: America’s Army is the free, downloadable first person shooter game that serves as a primary recruiting mechanism for the United States Army.

His tactic is to log in to the game and announce the name, rank and date of death of one of the dead U.S. soldiers. He will then be shot dead by the potential recruits. Moderators of the online game, presumably U.S. military recruiters, will try desperately to shut him up, as in this screenshot:

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This is the story of a piece of paper no bigger than a credit card, thrown away in a dustbin on the Heathrow Express to Paddington station. It was nestling among chewing gum wrappers and baggage tags, cast off by some weary traveller, when I first laid eyes on it just over a month ago.

The traveller’s name was Mark Broer. I know this because the paper – actually a flimsy piece of card – was a discarded British Airways boarding-pass stub, the small section of the pass displaying your name and seat number. The stub you probably throw away as soon as you leave your flight.

It said Broer had flown from Brussels to London on March 15 at 7.10am on BA flight 389 in seat 03C. It also told me he was a “Gold” standard passenger and gave me his frequent-flyer number. I picked up the stub, mindful of a conversation I had had with a computer security expert two months earlier, and put it in my pocket.

If the expert was right, this stub would enable me to access Broer’s personal information, including his passport number, date of birth and nationality. It would provide the building blocks for stealing his identity, ruining his future travel plans – and even allow me to fake his passport.

via

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Career appointees at the Department of Agriculture were stunned last week to receive e-mailed instructions that include Bush administration “talking points” — saying things such as “President Bush has a clear strategy for victory in Iraq” — in every speech they give for the department.

All over Oceania there have been spontaneous demonstrations of Party workers voicing their gratitude and joy. In honor of this massive overfulfillment of the ninth three-year plan, it’s been announced that chocolate ration is to be increased to 20 grams per week.

Doubleplusgood.

With so much cynical news the last few days, I just had to post something cute.

For more cuteness, visit http://dailykitten.com/, http://www.dailypuppy.com/ or http://www.thingsthatmakeyougoaahh.com/

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A panel of Nigerian medical experts has concluded that Pfizer Inc. violated international law during a 1996 epidemic by testing an unapproved drug on children with brain infections at a field hospital.

That finding is detailed in a lengthy Nigerian government report that has remained unreleased for five years, despite inquiries from the children’s attorneys and from the media. The Washington Post recently obtained a copy of the confidential report, which is attracting congressional interest. It was provided by a source who asked to remain anonymous because of personal safety concerns.

The report concludes that Pfizer never obtained authorization from the Nigerian government to give the unproven drug to nearly 100 children and infants. Pfizer selected the patients at a field hospital in the city of Kano, where the children had been taken to be treated for an often deadly strain of meningitis. At the time, Doctors Without Borders was dispensing approved antibiotics at the hospital.

Pfizer’s experiment was “an illegal trial of an unregistered drug,” the Nigerian panel concluded, and a “clear case of exploitation of the ignorant.”

The test came to public attention in December 2000, when The Post published the results of a year-long investigation into overseas pharmaceutical testing. The news was met in Nigeria with street demonstrations, lawsuits and demands for reform.

Pfizer contended that its researchers traveled to Kano with a purely philanthropic motive, to help fight the epidemic, which ultimately killed more than 15,000 Africans. The committee rejected that explanation, pointing out that Pfizer physicians completed their trial and left while “the epidemic was still raging.”

This, for the record, is what a perch looks like:

This, on the other hand, is a large mouth bass.

Bush claimed to have caught a “7.5 pound perch”. That would be a larger perch than the world record.

If he made the catch on his own land, it’s far more likely it was a bass:

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The Bushes immediately began transforming it into their Texas home, building a 4,000-square-foot, limestone-walled, passive-solar living quarters, adding an 11-acre pond stocked with bass and other fish, and planting native grasses and flowers

So, just like his veep is unable to tell the difference between a small bird and a lawyer, W. is unable to tell the difference between a bass and a perch.

They’re neither hunters nor fishers. Or, as they say in Texas, all hat and no cattle.

“what was the best moment of your presidency?”
to summarize:
carter: the camp david negotiations
clinton: the resolution of the kosovo crisis
bush: that time i caught a big fish on my ranch

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Vaccine industry officials helped shape legislation behind the scenes that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist secretly amended into a bill to shield them from lawsuits, according to e-mails obtained by a public advocacy group.

E-mails and documents written by a trade group for the vaccine-makers show the organization met privately with Frist’s staff and the White House about measures that would give the industry protection from lawsuits filed by people hurt by the vaccines.

The communications were made public in a report released this week by the group Public Citizen. Its study follows a February story in The Tennessean that Frist, along with House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., ordered the vaccine liability language inserted in a defense spending bill in December without debate and in violation of usual Senate practice.

And guess who represented the vaccine industry? Hastert’s son and three of Frist’s former staffers.

And from that same report:

Conferees asked at the meeting whether a liability shield would be in the final version of the bill, according to Keith Kennedy, the staff director of the Senate Appropriations Committee. They were assured it would not.

Conference participants, including Obey and Rep. James P. Moran (D-Va.), also reported receiving such assurances. “The conference committee ended its work with the understanding, both verbal and in writing, that there would be no legislative liability protection language inserted in this bill,” Obey said.

Later that same evening, however, according to Obey, Frist went to Hastert and asked him to authorize insertion of the liability shield measure into the bill. Frist evidently was in possession of a 40-page text that had evolved considerably from the language that BIO had received five weeks earlier.

“After the conference was finished at 6 p.m., Senator Frist marched over to the House side of the Capitol about four hours later and insisted that over 40 pages of legislation … that had never been seen by conferees be attached to the bill,” Obey said on the House floor. “The speaker joined him in that insistence so that without a vote of the conferees, that legislation was unilaterally and arrogantly inserted into the bill after the conference was over in a blatantly abusive power play by two of the most powerful men in Congress.”

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A peaceful crowd of several hundred gathered at the Place de la Bastille in Paris Sunday afternoon (May 7) to march in support of “digital freedom�?—and against digital rights management and a proposed change in copyright law currently on the floor of the French Senate.

The demonstrators, many of whom identified themselves as open-source software developers, said they were protesting the bill on two fronts: consumers’ right to fair use and software developers’ freedom to innovate.

The controversial legislation has come under fire from all sides. Often described as the “iPod law,” the bill has triggered anxiety in the business community here and abroad, which fears the mandate for “interoperability” could shut down Apple Computer’s iTunes service based on its proprietary DRM approach.

But yesterday’s march was not about the iPod. The grass-roots organizations that participated said they fear the copyright bill threatens “free software in France” and heralds “the death of fair use.” They made it clear that they favor interoperability and authors’ rights.

Photos, More photos, More photos, Video

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Een meerderheid in de Tweede Kamer vindt dat procureur-generaal Steenhuis moet opstappen als wordt bevestigd dat hij zijn chauffeur op de snelweg geregeld 140 kilometer per uur liet rijden. Minister Donner van Justitie, die gaat over het Openbaar Ministerie, wil niet reageren zo lang de zaak onder de rechter is.

Opvallend, elke regering die de bek vol heeft over “normen en waarden” (of “bringing back integrity”) laat hetzelfde gedrag zien zodra er een vriendje betrapt wordt: geen reaktie “zolang de zaak onder de rechter is”. Het stelletje lafbekken weet best dat het niet deugt, maar hoopt dat de persaandacht overgewaaid is als de uitspraak er eenmaal is. En Steenhuis gaat per 1 juni met pensioen, dus als de zaak afgerond is hoeven ze’m ook niet meer te ontslaan, en ontwijken ze ook dan enige vorm van “doen wat je zegt”.