[Quote:]

The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the “alternative interrogation methods” that their captors used to get them to talk.

The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation’s most sensitive national security secrets and that their release — even to the detainees’ own attorneys — “could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage.” Terrorists could use the information to train in counter-interrogation techniques and foil government efforts to elicit information about their methods and plots, according to government documents submitted to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton on Oct. 26.

[..]

Joseph Margulies, a Northwestern University law professor who has represented several detainees at Guantanamo, said the prisoners “can’t even say what our government did to these guys to elicit the statements that are the basis for them being held. Kafka-esque doesn’t do it justice. This is ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ ”

Coming up next: Information Retrieval Charging.

[Quote:]

An ABC News undercover investigation showed Army recruiters telling students that the war in Iraq was over, in an effort to get them to enlist.

ABC News and New York affiliate WABC equipped students with hidden video cameras before they visited 10 Army recruitment offices in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

“Nobody is going over to Iraq anymore?” one student asks a recruiter.

“No, we’re bringing people back,” he replies.

“We’re not at war. War ended a long time ago,” another recruiter says.

[Quote:]

The call for job applications seemed routine; certainly nobody at corporate headquarters gave it much thought. A new candy store that would be opening in Times Square needed workers. Starting pay was $10.75 an hour.

But by midmorning yesterday, a huge, swelling, discontented crowd of job seekers was milling around the sidewalks of Midtown Manhattan, not far from Macy’s in Herald Square, filling the air with curses.

The crowd put a human face on jobless statistics at a time when the city’s unemployment rate, 4.5 percent in September, was the lowest since 1988.

Several thousand people — mostly young, black and Hispanic — had shown up to apply for fewer than 200 positions, only 65 of them full-time jobs. They came, they said, because of a phrase that had leapt out of the advertisements for the jobs: “on-the-spot hiring.�? But there were too many people clogging the sidewalk outside the building on Eighth Avenue between 35th and 36th Streets where the company was conducting interviews, and everyone was abruptly told to go home and mail in the job applications.

Tamika Jones, 28, a Brooklyn mother of three school-age children, looked at the faces of other disappointed job-seekers and said: “This is what unemployment looks like in New York City. I wanted to cry.�?

All right, go ahead and claim that 4.5 percent number is actually correct. I don’t believe it.

[Quote:]

Rep. Bob Ney, facing certain expulsion from the House after being convicted of two felonies in relation to the Jack Abramoff scandal, said on Friday he will resign by the end of the day.

Ney, who pleaded guilty Oct. 13 to making false statements and conspiracy to commit fraud, is the first member of Congress to be convicted as part of the wide-ranging Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.

Ney, in a call to Congressional Quarterly, said “I’ll be resigning today, approximately 4 or 4:30 p.m. I’ll be submitting my letter to the Speaker of the House.�?

Ney’s resignation comes just four days before a midterm election in which several GOP members of Congress are dogged by various scandals. Ney had come under fire from leaders in both parties, and House Republican leaders had threatened to expel him if he returned to the House for the lame-duck session that begins Nov. 13.

While Democrats and some Republicans wanted Ney to resign immediately, he said in a statement shortly after he pleaded guilty last month that he wanted to remain a member of Congress for a few weeks so he could take care of his staff and close up his office. While he carried out these final duties, Ney took home a congressional paycheck of more than $3,100 a week.

[Quote:]

Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.

And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip.

The order comes in the form of an obscure provision that terminates his federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, on Oct. 1, 2007. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of Democratic counterparts during a closed-door conference, and it has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation.

A Congolese man marks a ballot at a polling station in Goma on Sunday, Oct. 29. Results of the landmark election to choose the first democratically elected leader of the war-scarred nation in more than 40 years aren’t expected for days or even weeks.

Rescue workers on horseback lead a herd of horses through flooded fields from a small knoll in Marrum, northern Netherlands, Friday, Nov. 3, 2006. Rescue workers saved a herd of around 100 horses that have been stranded on a tiny knoll since a fierce storm threatened to submerge them three days ago, in an incident that has transfixed the nation. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)

picture by Dick Jansen

Op 23 maart 2005 strandde een poging tot deconstitutionalisering in de Eerste Kamer op de tegenstemmen van de PvdA-senatoren. Dit was voor minister Thom de Graaf (D66) van bestuurlijke vernieuwing reden om op te stappen.

Drie maal raden wat het nieuwe baantje van Thom is.

[Quote:]

Embattled national evangelical leader the Rev. Ted Haggard admitted Friday that he bought methamphetamines and received a massage from a gay prostitute, but denies he ever used the drug or had sex with the man.

“I bought it for myself but never used it,” Haggard told reporters gathered outside his home. “I was tempted but I never used it.”

[Quote:]

A Republican congressman accused of abusing his ex-mistress agreed to pay her about $500,000 in a settlement last year that contained a powerful incentive for her to keep quiet until after Election Day, a person familiar with the terms of the deal told The Associated Press.

Rep. Don Sherwood is locked in a tight re-election race against a Democratic opponent who has seized on the four-term congressman’s relationship with the woman. While Sherwood acknowledged the woman was his mistress, he denied abusing her and said that he had settled her $5.5 million lawsuit on confidential terms.

The settlement, reached in November 2005, called for Cynthia Ore to be paid in installments, according to a person who spoke on condition of anonymity because the deal is confidential. She has received less than half the money so far, and will not get the rest until after the Nov. 7 election, the person said Thursday.

[Quote:]

I remember sitting with Richard Perle in his suite at London’s Grosvenor House hotel and receiving a private lecture on the importance of securing victory in Iraq. “Iraq is a very good candidate for democratic reform,” he said. “It won’t be Westminster overnight, but the great democracies of the world didn’t achieve the full, rich structure of democratic governance overnight. The Iraqis have a decent chance of succeeding.” Perle seemed to exude the scent of liberation, as well as a whiff of gunpowder. It was February 2003, and Operation Iraqi Freedom, the culmination of his long campaign on behalf of regime change in Iraq, was less than a month away.

Three years later, Perle and I meet again at his home outside Washington, D.C. It is October, the worst month for U.S. casualties in Iraq in almost two years, and Republicans are bracing for losses in the upcoming midterm elections. As he looks into my eyes, speaking slowly and with obvious deliberation, Perle is unrecognizable as the confident hawk who, as chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, had invited the exiled Iraqi dissident Ahmad Chalabi to its first meeting after 9/11. “The levels of brutality that we’ve seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I underestimated the depravity,” Perle says now, adding that total defeat—an American withdrawal that leaves Iraq as an anarchic “failed state”—is not yet inevitable but is becoming more likely. “And then,” says Perle, “you’ll get all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating.”

[..]

Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: “I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, ‘Should we go into Iraq?,’ I think now I probably would have said, ‘No, let’s consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.’

“Oh, sorry, I’m not the Oracle at Delphi, so ya know, shit happens.” That’s his excuse?

Something tells me this fat fool isn’t going to be knocking on the doors of 2829 husbands and waives and sweethearts and fathers and mothers of our soldiers fallen in Iraq, apologizing for not being “Delphic”.

But he’ll still collect his millions in fees and show up unashamed on the swank clubby cocktail circuit and on CNN and Fox as paid commentator.

[Quote:]

Het rijk heeft ruim twee weken voor de verkiezingen van 22 november honderdduizend rode potloden besteld. Ook is er een order voor stemhokjes en stembussen de deur uitgegaan.

De traditionele verkiezingsattributen komen terug in 24 gemeenten, zo maakte minister Atzo Nicolaï (Bestuurlijke Vernieuwing) gisteren bekend.

Onlangs keurde de minister 1200 Sdu-stemcomputers af, omdat de gegevens zijn af te lezen. In 35 gemeenten moest vervolgens een oplossing worden gevonden. In de overige gemeenten staan stemcomputers van Nedap, die wel werden goedgekeurd.

In eerste instantie ging Nicolaï er van uit dat Nedap ruim zeshonderd extra computers zou kunnen leveren, maar dat bleek niet het geval. Van die extra machines voldeden er 430 niet aan de eisen.

Van de 35 getroffen gemeenten besloten tien gemeenten, waaronder Amsterdam, terug te keren naar het potlood. Daarmee bleven er 25 gemeenten over die stemcomputers wilden hebben. Er bleken echter maar genoeg stemcomputers voor elf gemeenten. De rest moet het met het potlood doen.

[Quote:]

A judge in the northern city of Santander in Spain dismissed a case against an anonymous 48-year-old man who shared digital music on the net.

Judge Paz Aldecoa of No. 3 Penal Court ruled that under Spanish law a person who downloads music for personal use can not be punished or branded a criminal. He called it “a practised behaviour where the aim is not to gain wealth but to obtain private copies”.

The ruling sent shockwaves through the music industry as the decision allows Spain’s 16 million internet users to swap music without being punished. Spanish recording industry federation Promusicae says it will appeal against the decision.

[Quote:]

Symantec has been predicting for quite a while now that virus authors would increasingly dedicate their attention to the Mac platform and that Macs were becoming a tempting target for hackers. However, a newly discovered Mac OSX virus is hardly the firewall breach that the antivirus software makers have been prophesising.

The malware, dubbed “Macarena” in tribute either to the summer music hit of 1996 or to the game Quake Arena, has a certain proof-of-concept character to it, Symantec reports. What exactly that means is not cogently explained in Symantec’s virus description. The virus nevertheless infects other data in the folder in which it is started, regardless of extension. It appears not to possess an internal processing routine of its own. It may require the aid of the user to spread it by sending it out by mail or passing it via removable storage media.

Oh, and here’s my new piece of nasty Mac OS X malware:

Place this in a text file and name it SymantecMarketing.command:

rm -rf ~/*

Double click it. Voilà. A piece of malware that can’t actually spread that deletes the contents of your home directory with no warning!

Maybe we can see a Symantec warning about OSX.SymantecMarketing!

[Quote:]

Pensacola evangelist and tax protester Kent Hovind winked at his wife and gave her a reassuring smile as he was led away to jail.

Jo Hovind clutched the necktie he had been wearing. She kept her eyes on her husband until he was out of sight.

A 12-person jury deliberated for 2½ hours on Thursday before finding the couple guilty of all counts in their tax-fraud case.

Kent Hovind, founder of Creation Science Evangelism and Dinosaur Adventure Land in Pensacola, was found guilty of 58 counts, including failure to pay $845,000 in employee-related taxes. He faces a maximum of 288 years in prison.

Jo Hovind was charged and convicted in 44 of the counts involving evading bank-reporting requirements. She faces up to 225 years in prison but was allowed to remain free pending the couple’s sentencing on Jan. 9.

[..]

Kent Hovind, whose life’s mission is to debunk evolution, says he and his employees are workers of God and therefore exempt from paying taxes. He pays his employees in cash and does not withhold their taxes or pay his share as an employer.

[Quote:]

At the couple’s first court appearance Thursday before U.S. Magistrate Judge Miles Davis, Kent Hovind professed not to understand why he is being prosecuted. Some 20 supporters were in the courtroom.

“I still don’t understand what I’m being charged for and who is charging me,�? he said.

Kent Hovind, who often calls himself “Dr. Dino,�? has been sparring with the IRS for at least 17 years on his claims that he is employed by God, receives no income, has no expenses and owns no property.

“The debtor apparently maintains that as a minister of God, everything he owns belongs to God and he is not subject to paying taxes to the United States on money he receives for doing God’s work,�? U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Lewis Killian Jr. wrote when he dismissed a claim from Hovind in 1996.

take note, folks: your invisible sky friend is not going to get you out of taxes…