[Quote:]

If every hour a burglar turned up at your house and rattled the locks on the doors and windows to see if he could get in, you might consider moving to a safer neighbourhood.

And while that may not be happening to your home, it probably is happening to any PC you connect to the net.

[..]

When we put this machine online it was, on average, hit by a potential security assault every 15 minutes. None of these attacks were solicited, merely putting the machine online was enough to attract them. The fastest an attack struck was mere seconds and it was never longer than 15 minutes before the honeypot logged an attempt to subvert it.

The majority of these incidents were merely nuisances. Many were announcements for fake security products that use vulnerabilities in Windows Messenger to make their messages pop-up. Others were made to look like security warnings to trick people into downloading the bogus file.

However, at least once an hour, on average, the BBC honeypot was hit by an attack that could leave an unprotected machine unusable or turn it into a platform for attacking other PCs.

The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

(CNN, Late Edition, Sunday, September 8, 2002; see also:AP: U.S. says world can’t wait too long to decide on Iraq)

Well, Rice, that quote is going to come back and bite you:

[Quote:]

In 1993, North Korea announced it would pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, leaving it free to divert nuclear material from its energy reactors to make a nuclear weapon and setting off a round of crisis diplomacy led by the Clinton administration. The result was the so-called agreed framework, which – in return for supplies of fuel oil to North Korea – froze most aspects of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programme for the rest of the decade.

The agreed framework was in effect consigned to history when the Bush administration came to power in 2001. The new administration argued that although the road to a plutonium-based nuclear bomb had been frozen, the North Koreans were cheating by attempting to develop a uranium-based bomb that was not explicitly addressed by the agreement.

That five years later, North Korea has tested a nuclear weapon will be widely interpreted as a sign of the failure of the tougher approach favoured by the Bush team.

[Quote:]

N306UP (cn 27759/622) Cleared for takeoff with a southbound turnout.

[Quote:]

The current right-wing explanation for what went wrong in Iraq closely echoes Joseph McCarthy’s explanation for the Communist victory in China, which he said was “the product of a great conspiracy�? at home. According to the right, things didn’t go wrong because the invasion was a mistake, or because Donald Rumsfeld didn’t send enough troops, or because the occupation was riddled with cronyism and corruption. No, it’s all because the good guys were stabbed in the back. Democrats, who undermined morale with their negative talk, and the liberal media, which refused to report the good news from Iraq, are responsible for the quagmire.

You might think it would be harder to claim that traitors are aiding our foreign enemies today than it was during the McCarthy era, when domestic liberals and Communist regimes could be portrayed as part of a vast left-wing conspiracy. What does the domestic enemy, which Bill O’Reilly identifies as the “secular-progressive movement,�? have to do with the religious fanatics who attacked America five years ago?

But that’s easy: according to Mr. O’Reilly, “Osama bin Laden and his cohorts have got to be cheering on the S-P movement,�? because “both outfits believe that the United States of America is fundamentally a bad place.�?

Which brings us back to the Foley affair. The immediate response by nearly everyone in the Republican establishment — wild claims, without a shred of evidence behind them, that the whole thing is a Democratic conspiracy — may sound crazy. But that response is completely in character for a movement that from the beginning has been dominated by the paranoid style. And here’s the scary part: that movement runs our government.

[Quote:]

The White House has consistently played down the ties key officials like Karl Rove had with Mr. Abramoff, who pleaded guilty last January to conspiring to bribe public officials. But the administration has declined to publicly provide detailed answers or grant full access to relevant documents needed to establish the truth.

A newly released report, prepared with unusual bipartisan backing by the House Government Reform Committee, paints a different reality. It reveals that between January 2001 and March 2004, Mr. Abramoff and members of his staff had some 485 contacts with key White House officials, including at least 10 direct contacts between Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Rove. Billing records and e-mail messages unearthed by the committee indicate that Mr. Abramoff and his colleagues spent nearly $25,000 on meals and tickets for White House officials.

[..]

Meanwhile, the idea that Mr. Abramoff exerted no influence with the administration seems about as believable as Mark Foley’s early claim that his only interest in 16-year-old pages was “mentoring.�?

[Quote:]

President Bush has described today’s Iraq as a “young democracy.�? He even boasted at one point that the advance of democratic institutions in Iraq is “setting an example�? that others in the area would be “wise to follow.�? But when it comes to one of the most basic tenets of democracy — freedom of speech and the press — Iraq is not setting an example that even the youngest of democracies would be wise to follow.

New laws in Iraq criminalize speech that ridicules the government or its officials, and any journalist who “publicly insults�? the government or public officials can be subject to up to seven years in prison. Some of the language is resurrected verbatim from Saddam Hussein’s own penal code. It is hard enough for journalists to operate on the ever-expanding battlefields of Iraq. That is true for foreign journalists, who often have all the gear and protections of powerful outside media. But it is even harder for Iraqi journalists, who now face not only the dangers on the street but the threat of defamation laws as well.

[Quote:]

A system of iron weirs in the Tigris River 20 miles southeast of Baghdad was designed to prevent lily pads, known here as “Nile flower,” from traveling down-river and clogging canals vital to farmers for irrigating Iraq’s south.

But now, the weirs also catch corpses that float down from the capital, murder victims in the sectarian violence that blights Iraq.

Local police in the nearby town of Swaira say that since January 2005 they have collected 339 bodies of men, women and children from the filters. It’s considered one of the highest numbers of corpses found in a single location in Iraq since the U.S. invasion in 2003.

“Every day, we find bodies in the river,” an official at the Swaira police force’s crime department told ABC News. “Most of them are of Iraqis living in the bloody areas to the south of Baghdad.”

So that’s what they mean when they say things are going “swimmingly” in Iraq…

[Quote:]

Justitie weigert uit te leggen hoe een tbs’er vrijdag in Hoogvliet kon ontsnappen aan zijn begeleiders.

De zaak had ernstige gevolgen: er werden mensen beroofd, mishandeld en verkracht.
De ontsnapping van een 31-jarige tbs’er uit kliniek Kijvelanden in Poortugaal bij Rotterdam, die gewelddadige gevolgen had, is nog een compleet raadsel. De autoriteiten weigeren een verklaring te geven hoe dit kon gebeuren.

De vraag waarom justitie niets wil uitleggen is intussen beantwoord: ze schamen zich dood:

[Quote:]

Hoewel de zedendelinquent vluchtgevaarlijk was, gaf tbs-kliniek De Kijvelanden hem vrijdag toestemming om, onder begeleiding van een 20-jarige medewerkster, tandpasta te kopen in Rotterdam-Hoogvliet.

Toen de 31-jarige Surinaams-Hindoestaanse man op de vlucht sloeg, kon de vrouw niets doen om hem tegen te houden.

[..]

Na twee mensen met geweld te hebben beroofd sleurde de zedendelinquent vrijdagmiddag de vrouw bij een metrostation de struiken in. Hij sloeg haar en dreigde haar neer te steken.

Volgens haar moeder deden voorbijgangers niets toen de verkrachte vrouw huilend en onder de modder uit de bosjes tevoorschijn kroop. ‘Zij is meteen naar het politiebureau gelopen.’

De familie heeft aangekondigd een advocaat in de arm te nemen om verhaal te halen bij tbs-kliniek De Kijvelanden. ‘De kliniek waar dit monster verbleef en het ministerie van Justitie zullen alle schade moeten herstellen,’ aldus de moeder. De Kijvelanden was maandagmorgen niet bereikbaar voor commentaar.

via

Remember when the US hired bin Laden and the Taliban to fight the USSR in Afghanistan?

You’d think the HR decisions these days are influenced by how that worked out eventually.

Well, guessagain.