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If you have not yet seen Ron Rivest’s latest offering, this one is essential reading: a three-part paper ballot that satisfies privacy and integrity while avoiding vote selling and eschewing cryptography. Very clever, very cute.

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A reader (thanks!) sends along this set and it turned out to have been documented on Snopes. That link leads to a press release with larger images.

This is from 2004, but you know the deal – I haven’t seen ‘em before and maybe you haven’t either. In any case, mind-boggling. Taken by a fire helicopter, they estimate the gator at about 13 feet.

All together now: Wenn ist das Nunstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!

Is at it again: Are YOURS the actions of a true American?

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Air traffic controllers monitoring a British Airways jumbo jet were stunned at the pilot’s decision to try to “get as far as we can” after an engine caught fire on takeoff, a transcript of discussions between the plane and the control tower revealed.

The controllers in Los Angeles expected the four-engine Boeing 747 to turn around but, after taking advice from BA’s operations base, the pilot carried on towards London. He told air traffic control: “We just decided we want to set off on our flight-plan route and get as far as we can.”

He was allowed on his way, but an air traffic controller who had seen the flames coming from the engine told a colleague: “If you would have saw what we saw out the window, you’d be amazed at that.”

Flight 268 eventually made it to the UK, but the pilot was so concerned about his fuel levels that he carried out an emergency landing in Manchester.

The UK’s Air Accident Investigation Branch has already made safety recommendations in the wake of the incident, which happened in February last year. But the transcript, obtained by the Wall Street Journal under US freedom of information laws, may reignite the controversy.

On the other hand, if a drunken passenger had been rude to a flight attendants they would have had an emergency landing immediately.

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“Every woman needs a good pounding every now and then.�?

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“I just follow my own common sense,�? Mr. Buckley, in an interview, said of his 13 years on the bench. “And the hell with the law.�?

(part 2 of the series)

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This is Russian Federal highway Moscow city – Yakutsk City, named “Lena�?, nowadays.

The road doesn’t have asfalt surface, though it is a Federal, vital highway.

Everytime it rains the road gets paralized, these shots are made a few days before the traffic jam for 600 cars got stuck there. Hunger and lack of the fuel followed, according to the witnesses. One woman gave a born to a child right in the public bus she was riding.

Construction team afraids to appear on site because during their previous visit it was beaten by people who stuck in the jam for a few days. People breaking the locks on the trucks, in a search of food and warm cloths.

Fuel, food, firearms and steel tow-line are the things that are needed most these days on this Federal highway.

(more pictures)

Sometimes pictures tell the complete story.

You wouldn’t get a Rolex through to someone in Gitmo because nowadays the sort of behaviour these documents in the post alude to, including Rolex insisting that payment can wait, are a long forgotten, almost quaint tradition. And that, truly, is a sad thing.

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Is waterboarding torture, or is it merely a stressful psychological technique?

Interestingly, the United States has long since answered that question. Following the end of the Second World War we prosecuted a number of Japanese military and civilian officials for war crimes. including the torture of captured Allied personnel. At one of those trials, United States v. Sawada, here’s how Captain Chase Nielsen, a crew member in the 1942 Doolittle Raid on Japan, described his treatment, when he was captured, (and later tried for alleged war crimes by a Japanese military commission):

Q: What other physical treatment was administered to you at that time?

A: Well, I was given what they call the water cure.

Q: Explain to the Commission what that was.

A: Well, I was put on my back on the floor with my arms and legs stretched out, one guard holding each limb. The towel was wrapped around my face and put across my face and water was poured on. They poured water on this towel until I was almost unconscious from strangulation, then they would let me up until I’d get my breath, then they’d start over again.

Q: When you regained consciousness would they keep asking you questions?

A: Yes sir they did.

Q: How long did this treatment continue?

A: About twenty minutes.

Q: What was your sensation when they were pouring water on the towel, what did you physically feel?

A: Well, I felt more or less like I was drowning, just gasping between life and death.

The prosecutor in that case was vehement in arguing that the captured Doolittle fliers had been wrongfully convicted by the Japanese tribunal, in part because they were convicted based on evidence obtained through torture. “The untrustworthiness of any admissions or confessions made under torture,” he said, “would clearly vitiate a conviction based thereon.”

At the end of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East of which the United States was a leading member (the Tribunal was established by Douglas MacArthur) convicted former Japanese Prime Minister Tojo and numerous other generals and admirals of a panoply of war crimes. Among them was torture:

The practice of torturing prisoners of war and civilian internees prevailed at practically all places occupied by Japanese troops, both in the occupied territories and in Japan. The Japanese indulged in this practice during the entire period of the Pacific War. Methods of torture were employed in all areas so uniformly as to indicate policy both in training and execution. Among these tortures were the water treatment…

The so-called “water treatment” was commonly applied. The victim was bound or otherwise secured in a prone position; and water was forced through his mouth and nostrils into his lungs and stomach until he lost consciousness. Pressure was then applied, sometimes by jumping upon his abdomen to force the water out. The usual practice was to revive the victim and successively repeat the process.

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The government has maintained since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that, based on its reading of the laws of war, anyone it labels an unlawful enemy combatant can be held indefinitely at military or CIA prisons. But Congress has not yet expressed its view on who is an unlawful combatant, and the Supreme Court has not ruled directly on the matter.

As a result, human rights experts expressed concern yesterday that the language in the new provision would be a precedent-setting congressional endorsement for the indefinite detention of anyone who, as the bill states, “has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States” or its military allies.

The definition applies to foreigners living inside or outside the United States and does not rule out the possibility of designating a U.S. citizen as an unlawful combatant. It is broader than that in last week’s version of the bill, which resulted from lengthy, closed-door negotiations between senior administration officials and dissident Republican senators. That version incorporated a definition backed by the Senate dissidents: those “engaged in hostilities against the United States.”

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Under a separate provision, those held by the CIA or the U.S. military as an unlawful enemy combatant would be barred from challenging their detention or the conditions of their treatment in U.S. courts unless they were first tried, convicted and appealed their conviction.

So they can pick up anybody they want, and simply claim “that’s an unlawful enemy combatant”, toss that person in jail indefinately, and it would be impossible to challenge that detention.

How is this not a police state?

In politics, absurdity is not a handicap.

– Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 – 1821)

source

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For a little thought experiment, go to the website of Newsweek‘s international edition. There, running down the left side of the page, are three covers, all the same, for the European, Asian, and Latin American editions of the October 2 issue.

Each has a dramatic shot of a Taliban fighter shouldering an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade). The cover headline is: “Losing Afghanistan,” pointing to a devastating piece on our Afghan War by Ron Moreau, Sami Yousafzai, and Michael Hirsh, “The Rise of Jihadistan.” which sports this subhead: “Five years after the Afghan invasion, the Taliban are fighting back hard, carving out a sanctuary where they–and Al Qaeda’s leaders–can operate freely.” The piece begins: “You don’t have to drive very far from Kabul these days to find the Taliban.” (In fact, the magazine’s reporters found a gathering of 100 of them in a village just a two-hour drive south of the Afghan capital.)

The fourth cover is for the US edition. Go check the difference.

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Passengers will be able to carry lotions and gels onto airliners again after a six-week ban — but only in tiny containers of 3 ounces or less and only if they’re in clear zip-top plastic bags.

Because, as we all know, planes will suddenly start dropping out of the sky if you’ve got a plastic bag without a zip-top.

I must say, thanks to those bags I feel much, much safer.

Track and field line judge Lia Mara Lourenco is helped after a javelin hit her in her foot during ‘Brazil Trophy,’ a national track and field competition, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Sunday, Sept. 24, 2006. (AP Photo/Jonne Roriz, Agencia Estado

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Quick- What’s the number of your congressional district? Don’t know? Shame on you. You’re supposed to know. Here is the official Alameda County (CA) absentee ballot.

It lists the candidates for four different congressional districts. Do you get to pick your favorite? Mine would be CA-11 (Pombo – McNerny)? But I think you are supposed to vote only in the one you live in. With a ballot like this, many people will be confused and either vote for a candidate in the wrong district or vote for one candidate in all four CDs, either way invalidating the ballot. Would it be too hard to send each voter an absentee ballot that included only races the voter is allowed to vote for? Did Theresa “Butterfly Ballot” LePore get a new job designing ballots in California? What kind of moron thought of this? Choose just ONE.