[Quote:]

State-sanctioned teams of computer hackers were able to break through the security of virtually every model of California’s voting machines and change results or take control of some of the systems’ electronic functions, according to a University of California study released Friday.

The researchers “were able to bypass physical and software security in every machine they tested,” said Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who authorized the “top to bottom review” of every voting system certified by the state.

Neither Bowen nor the investigators were willing to say exactly how vulnerable California elections are to computer hackers, especially because the team of computer experts from the UC system had top-of-the-line security information plus more time and better access to the voting machines than would-be vote thieves likely would have.

And if you believe that last sentence, you’re too gullible to vote.

[Quote:]

De Evangelische Omroep (EO) heeft fragmenten uit een natuurserie van de BBC waarin de evolutietheorie aan bod kwam, aangepast of verwijderd. Het laatste deel van de tiendelige serie The Life of Mammals (Het leven van zoogdieren), dat gaat over mensapen en de mens, is op de dvd’s van de omroep geheel weggelaten.

Dat heeft Gerdien de Jong, universitair hoofddocent evolutiebiologie aan de Universiteit Utrecht, ontdekt. Zij bekeek de serie zowel bij de BBC als bij de Vlaamse Publieke Omroep Canvas en de EO en vergeleek de dvd’s die de BBC en de EO hebben uitgebracht.

De Jong plaatste haar bevindingen op de website evolutie.blog.com.

Fuck, hebben we in Nederland ook al van die hersenloze idioten…

[Quote:]

Two news helicopters covering a police chase on live TV collided and crashed to the ground Friday, killing all 4 people on board.

ABC15′s helicopter was lost in the crash, killing Chopper15 Pilot Craig Smith and Photojournalist Rick Krolak.

Krolak had worked at the station for 9 years.

Smith had been with ABC15 since September 2005. His dog Molly, who was frequently up in Chopper15 with him, was not with Craig at the time of the crash.

The second helicopter belonged to KTVK (Channel 3).

They have confirmed pilot Scott Bowerbank and photographer Jim Cox died in the crash near Indian School Road and Central Avenue.

[Quote:]

That was a totally bizarre Slavoj Zizek kind of moment there. The power class was buzzing around in the sky, watching the ruination of someone’s life way down below – making buckets of cash by broadcasting someone else’s tragedy, then – WHAM – the real bursts into their own life, they become the live tragedy – but we’re still viewing the whole thing through the lens of a t.v. camera. How tragic and fascinating.

[Quote:]

Apparently, an all white computer screen, such as an empty Word page, or the Google page, uses 74 watts to display, whereas a black screen consumes only 59 watts. So claimed Mark Ontkush in a post on the ecoIron blog in January. Doing a few back of the envelope calculations based on numbers of users per day and wattage for different coloured screen from EnergyStar, Ontkush figured that the energy saving would be 750 Megawatt hours per year if Google had a black screen.

Meet Blackle.

[Quote:]

Here’s a doozy for you: on Wednesday, the aviation industry is taking five million people – including a lot of their own staff – to court. If you’re a member or supporter of a group that’s concerned about climate change, the chances are you’re a defendant too.

The industry seems to want to ban five million of us from Heathrow and all routes to the airport, including the Piccadilly line, parts of the rail network, and sections of the M25 and M4.

In three weeks’ time, the Camp for Climate Action is due to gather near Heathrow to peacefully protest against Heathrow’s vast contribution to climate change (the airport’s planes emit more greenhouse gases than many individual countries) and its planned third runway expansion.

The owner of Heathrow, the British Airports Authority (BAA), seems to be, frankly, terrified.

It’s seeking an injunction, which names as defendants “all persons acting as members, participants or supporters” of anti-aviation group Plane Stupid, anti-noise group HACAN and AirportWatch. The injunction is to stop people from setting foot on Heathrow and “the arterial infrastructure serving” it.

So far, so good. Just another example of the aviation industry’s corporate bullying, albeit a draconian one.

But the interesting bit is that AirportWatch, named on the injunction, is just an umbrella organisation. Its member organisations include the National Trust, the RSPB, the Woodland Trust, the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, Transport 2000, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, among many others.

The combined supporter base of these organisations is well over five million people.

And it includes the Queen, patron of the RSBP and CPRE. Prince Charles, president of the National Trust, would also be banned from Heathrow and its surrounds – as would Imran Khan and Shane Warne, who recently fund-raised for HACAN.

Even more bizarrely, the injunction covers many of BAA’s own staff.

[Quote:]

Lindsay Lohan’s best bet for avoiding jail time is to go back into rehab yet again and remove herself from a high-flying party lifestyle — if not, she could be facing up to six months behind bars, legal observers said Wednesday.

Lohan, 21, was less than two weeks out of a recovery program and was voluntarily wearing an alcohol-monitoring device when she was arrested Tuesday in Santa Monica for investigation of misdemeanor driving both under the influence and with a suspended license, and felony cocaine possession.

[..]

That behavior won’t cut it anymore and neither will spa-style clinics, said Barry Gerald Sands, a Century City defense attorney who’s also a certified drug and alcohol counselor.

“Whatever you have done in the past, do a 360-degree turn and go the other way,” Sands said Wednesday.

You know, that explains soooo much…

[Quote:]

Army medical examiners were suspicious about the close proximity of the three bullet holes in Pat Tillman’s forehead and tried without success to get authorities to investigate whether the former NFL player’s death amounted to a crime, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

“The medical evidence did not match up with the, with the scenario as described,” a doctor who examined Tillman’s body after he was killed on the battlefield in Afghanistan in 2004 told investigators.

I think it sounds like PFC William Santiago committed suicide.

[Quote:]

Dave’s Harry Potter piece below led to a lively comments discussion on why fundamentalists are so bothered by myth-and-magic stories. There are several things going on all at once here — but all of them, in the end, touch back to one thread at the deepest core of their theology.

The first thing to bear in mind about fundamentalists is that, in the darkest depths of their minds, almost all of them harbor deep, unspoken doubts about their belief system. In fact, for all their protestations about truth and certainty, doubt is perhaps the main wellspring of their zeal: only people who live in a perpetual state of guilty unbelief can be strung along for a lifetime in such a desperate, grasping quest for assurance that their faith is sufficient for a God who offers grace, but demands constant efforts at perfection in return.

My ex-fundie friends all acknowledge that they never felt good enough, pure enough, “saved” enough to be true Christians. Always, deep down, there was the feeling that if everybody really knew who they were, they’d be shunned by God and the church. Much of their passionate prayer and seeking was driven by this secret dread. Manipulative pastors foster these doubts deliberately, precisely to ignite that passion and keep their flock insecure, ever dependent on them for guidance and that elusive assurance of salvation.

So doubt is a standard feature of the fundamentalist package. And it’s also why they’re so defensive about their own mythos. We reality-based folk don’t need to feel terribly defensive about our worldview. We can verify truth with our own eyes. If our beliefs are questioned, we’ll debate the observable facts, and perhaps either change the other person’s mind or our own accordingly (and, either way, feel richer for the exchange). Acknowledging reality can’t shake our mythos, since we don’t have a mythos to shake.

But once you’ve rejected the reality-based world in favor of a mythic worldview, you are — by definition — building your life on an epistemology that has no verifiable support structure. Which means there are always going to be moments when faith dissipates just long enough to admit a quiet, nagging doubt about the foundations of your reality. It also means that you’re going to regard any and all competing myth systems — no matter how fantastic — as a serious existential threat that stands in direct competition to your own (equally fantastic) myth system. They have to be treated as equivalent, because they’re all made of the same flimsy stuff.

In this no-reality-allowed zone, no rational exchange of ideas is possible, and logic and reasoned debate have no power to cool the resulting conflicts. The battle can only be won by stirring up people’s emotions until they’re high, hot, and loud enough to drown out those nagging fears — at least for a while. And, like an addict, you need frequent and increasing doses of that emotional juice to keep the doubts at bay, because they’re never really gone for good.

Voltaire concisely summarized the potential dangers that lurk in this willful and escalating abandonment of reason when he said: “Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Left to run, the endless rush to quench doubt does end up, often enough, in atrocity.

The second thing (which several commenters touched on) is the observation that fundamentalists reject almost anything that takes people’s mindshare off God, bible, and church. They’re not fond of popular culture in any of its forms; and many live in carefully-constructed personal bubble zones within which everything they read, hear, see, touch, buy, and use is Christian-oriented. Anything secular is “of the Devil,” and therefor unfit for someone seeking to live a godly life. It was easy enough to predict that they’d reject Harry Potter on these grounds alone.

But that, on its own, doesn’t explain the extreme hysteria we see in the video Dave linked to. Harry Potter, like Dungeons & Dragons (disclaimer: Mr. R worked on several D&D games as an employee of the game’s original publisher), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sabrina, Magic: The Gathering, Kiki’s Delivery Service (which also got its share of this) or Pokemon pushes some extra buttons that can’t be rationalized by a mere desire to avoid all things secular. So, what’s that about?

The common thread that runs through all of these is magic. And that, I think, is the real burr that gets under fundamentalist saddles. In fundieland, magic is the most frightening and legitimate of all the competing myth systems — the Devil’s own preferred alternative to prayer and submission. Other belief systems (Buddhism, Hinduism, the Greek myths) are viewed as sad and rather pathetically delusional; but anything that smacks of magic is feared as actively Satanic.

Why is magic such a hot button? The reasons go to the heart of fundamentalist theology. At their core, fundamentalists believe that humans are wretched creatures who aren’t really even human unless touched by God’s grace. (And, yes, this does mean that those of us who are unsaved can rightly be considered subhuman.) We cannot do anything right; we do not deserve to have control over our own affairs; and any notion that we have intrinsic power to achieve good in the world (or even the authority to define “good” or “bad” on our own terms) is a diabolical delusion. Left to our own devices, we will not only screw it up for ourselves; we will ultimately ensure the Devil his victory over the world — including them — as well.

Implicit in this is the idea that all authority is necessarily, rightfully external. The fate of the entire world depends on how completely we can give up our desire to control our destinies, and submit to God and his appointed earthly overseers. This obsession with the need for external authority is, in a nutshell, is why fundamentalism is a form of religious authoritarianism.

Stories about magic openly defy this whole belief system. Magic-using characters like Harry usurp the supernatural power and prerogatives of God — a sufficient heresy in its own right. But it’s worse than that: they’re also exercising their own internal authority, and acting out of their own agency. And that’s the last thing fundamentalists want their children — or anyone else — learning how to do.

That’s why we’re hearing all the shrieking hysterics from the fundie side. Stories and games like Buffy and Harry and D&D put us in the shoes of heroes who take charge of their power and use it to shape their own realities — and worse, to defy overweening, intrusive authority. They contain messages that undermine the power of external leaders, and encourage people to believe in their own limitless power to create change. They show us protagonists who overcome doubt, take risks, and gain confidence; and who make their world better without waiting around for God to act.

If everyone thought that way, where would we be then? We wouldn’t follow our leaders. We’d try to rule ourselves. We might get the idea that our destinies were in our own hands. We might even entertain the delusion that we’re somehow “free” people who don’t have to answer to anyone but ourselves. And then where would God’s designated regents — the would-be dictators, oligarchs, and theocrats — be?

Dave has promised his thoughts on the deeper implications of Harry Potter’s final volume. My point here is that the fundamentalist panic over these books is not something we can just laugh off as more deranged weirdness from people who don’t understand the world they live in. They do understand, perhaps better than we do, that the stories we tell ourselves ultimately create the reality we’ll be living in at some point in the future. And they also know that stories like these have the power to raise our awareness, focus our intention, and steel our resistance against the unholy authoritarian plans they have laid for our obedient “salvation.”

[Quote:]

Shortly before she died, my grandmother—one of the people, naturally, I loved the most in the world—broke my heart. Celia Perlstein, like most of our grandparents, didn’t get out much in her final years; in fact, for the last few years of her life, I’m not sure she got out of her old folks home at all. I don’t think she really wanted to. She was sure that beyond its threshold lay dragons: far-far-far leftists out to steal her Social Security; turbaned terrorists just itching to fly a jet into the First Wisconsin tower a few blocks to the south; quisling Democrats itching to help them do it; grandma-gutting criminal marauders just outside her door.

I’d look out of her eighth floor picture window, down at the scene she saw every day, half expecting to find that nightmare landscape before me. Nope: same as always, the brightly colored sailboats on Lake Michigan, kids and their parents feeding the ducks (Grandma used to take me to feed the ducks), happy, strolling Milwaukee couples—paradise. Where was she getting these fantasies?

One evening’s visit, all became clear. She gestured at the blaring TV set. The excruciating grandma-volume was even more excruciating than usual, because she was visiting with her best TV friend. She told me how much she adored Bill O’Reilly. My wife and I cringed. Watching our latter-day Joe McCarthy on TV every night, she had learned, late in life—for this development was entirely new—how to hate her fellow Americans. I almost cried, because one of the people she was learning how to hate was me.

Watch this video:

Reflect, for a minute, on who America’s grandparents are being taught to hate: Americans who do what Americans are supposed to do, what our founders implored us to do: debate vigorously and in the open, the meaning of the public good. They used to call these people “citizens.” They’re “like the Nazi Party,” Bill O’Reilly says. They are you and me.

You’ve known it for a long, long time: every single hour of every day, Fox News conspires to degrade the capacity of ordinary citizens fighting for truth and accountability from American elites. Now finally—finally!—we have a campaign to degrade their capacity. Their capacity to turn our grandparents into frightened shut-ins. Their capacity to steal America for themselves.

The Oversight Committee is currently holding a hearing, “Allegations of Waste, Fraud, and Abuse at the New U.S. Embassy in Iraq.” The hearing will examine the performance of the State Department and its contractors in the construction of the new $600 million U.S. embassy in Baghdad. The Committee will be reviewing questions regarding the embassy compound construction as well as allegations of labor abuse through improper contracting practices.

[http://www.speaker.gov/blog/?p=626]

“Mr. Chairman, when the airplane took off and the captain announced that we were heading to Baghdad, all you-know-what broke out on the airplane. The men started shouting, it wasn’t until the security guy working for First Kuwaiti waved an MP5 in the air that the men settled down. They realized that they had no other choice but to go to Baghdad. Let me spell it out clearly: I believe these men were kidnapped by First Kuwaiti to work at the US Embassy… I’ve read the State Department Inspector General’s report on the construction of the embassy. Mr. Chairman, it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. This is a cover-up and I’m glad that I’ve had the opportunity to set the record straight.”

[Quote:]

As the Bush administration struggles to convince lawmakers that its Iraq war strategy is working, it has stopped reporting to Congress a key quality-of-life indicator in Baghdad: how long the power stays on.

Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that Baghdad residents could count on only “an hour or two a day” of electricity. That’s down from an average of five to six hours a day earlier this year.

But that piece of data has not been sent to lawmakers for months because the State Department, which prepares a weekly “status report” for Congress on conditions in Iraq, stopped estimating in May how many hours of electricity Baghdad residents typically receive each day.

Instead, the department now reports on the electricity generated nationwide, a measurement that does not indicate how much power Iraqis in Baghdad or elsewhere actually receive.

[Quote:]

The Justice Department sent a letter yesterday to the House Judiciary Committee that made the administration’s position official: a U.S. attorney will not enforce a citation of contempt, should it pass the House.

Or as the letter (you can read it here), sent to the committee yesterday by Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski, put it:

“As it considers the contempt resolutions, we think it is important that the Committee appreciate fully the longstanding Department of Justice position, articulated during Administrations of both parties, that “the criminal contempt of Congress statute does not apply to the President or presidential subordinates who assert executive privilege.”

That last quote is indeed from a 1995 opinion from Clinton’s Justice Department, which The Washington Post reported on this weekend. As the Clinton-era DoJ officials behind that memo told the Post, they didn’t think that Congress could force the U.S. attorney to prosecute, but did think that the president’s assertion of executive privilege should be heard in court.

Or, alternatively, rather than allowing the Administration to continue to run out the clock is for the House to invoke Inherent Contempt, and have Miers and Bolten brought by in their Sargeant at Arm to either testify or rot in the Houses own detention until deciding to do so.

Oh, and irony of having Meirs or Bolten file Habeaus Motions against their detention would be most delicious.

[Quote:]

Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a military intelligence officer, spent six months at the Department of Defense working in the office that reviews the government’s cases against detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

His experience — as recounted in a sworn affidavit — is credited with helping to persuade the Supreme Court to take a second look at the Bush administration’s war-on-terror powers.

On Thursday, he became the first military insider to urge Congress to scrap the military-run reviews conducted on the island and give detainees access to U.S. courts. He described the reviews, known as Combatant Status Review Tribunals, as “designed not to ascertain the truth, but to legitimize the detentions.”

“What we were handed were diluted, watered-down summaries, and it was the best they had,” Abraham, who participated in a detainee review as part of his assignment, told members of the House Armed Services committee. “We said it was not good enough to justify holding someone for the rest of their life. … It’s a game of spin the wheel.”

[Quote:]

Oh… oh my. Japan, a country that never fails to blow my mind, has just seen the release of, according to Google’s hilariously inept machine translation, the “Hello Kitty transformation set.” It’s basically a hat, bib, collar and carrying bag to turn your cat into the saddest, most ridiculous-looking cat on the block.

[Quote:]

You could almost hear the sighs of disappointment echoing around television and radio studios yesterday morning as the threatened flooding of a power station in Gloucestershire failed to occur. One reporter for the Radio 4 Today programme was embarrassingly corrected by the Chief Constable of Gloucestershire, Tim Brain, as she breathlessly reported that hundreds of thousands of people had come within two inches of losing their power supply. Actually, the chief constable gently corrected her, the river was three feet away from flooding at the power station: it was only where she stood, farther along the river, that the water was two inches below the quay.

I hate to intrude on the British love of a disaster, but haven’t the emergency services done brilliantly? Far from the “1m victims of the deluge” promised in a Daily Mail headline yesterday morning, there are 350,000 people without tapwater, but not without drinking water, 50,000 were without power for 24 hours, and 10,000 have been moved out of their homes. As I write, we do not know of anybody who has died as a direct result of the floods. Strenuous work overnight by the military and the fire service saved the power station from flooding.

Properties have been ruined, and it is miserable for those who have been hit, but they will be fixed. Insurance companies will cough up; a government emergency fund will have to be established to make up the shortfall. Ministers have some hard questions to answer about who will bear insurance risks in flood-prone areas in future – but those questions were there before this summer. The cost of flooding in areas susceptible to it is already shared among nearly all household insurance policies, at risk or not.

I suspect that farmers with devastated crops and presumably dead livestock will bear the brunt of the real financial damage. But without in any way demeaning the nuisance and misery caused to hundreds of thousands of people in Central England; if this is a disaster, I am a tomato.

I guess that’s what happens if you don’t have to appoint political friends as leaders.

[Quote:]

[Quote:]

Geef vandaag je systeembeheerder een schouderklopje! Breng ‘m een kopje blije koffie, of geef ‘m eens een hand. Koop hierrr of hierrr wat leuks voor hem. Vertel hem alles over LolCatz of beweer dat je ook elk uur Bash F5t. Want het is System Administrator Appreciation Day. Je systeem administrator is wél de man die je mail leest en je historyfile uitpluist. Bedank hem voor alle porno die je dit jaar mocht browsen, en bedank hem voor het feit dat je GeenStijl weer mocht ontvangen. Kan je geen GeenStijl ontvangen? Hij zit op verdieping -1 op de deur hangen Dilbertstrips en BOFH-bordjes. Succes. En voor de sysadmins ook dit jaar weer gewoon hetzelfde liedje. Sysadmins die GeenStijl lezen bedanken? Drop links in de comments, zijn ze gek op!

[Quote:]

The European Commission and US security authorities have agreed a new deal on the handover of airline passenger information. Data will now be kept for 15 years, far longer than the three-and-a-half year limit in an earlier agreement.

Passenger Name Records (PNR) are transferred to US authorities by every commercial airline flying from Europe to the US under a deal struck between the commission and the US in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in the US in September 2001.

Data protection officials have expressed concern about the deal because the US does not have as strict data protection measures as the European Union.

The first deal was ruled illegal on a technicality by the European Court of Justice and was opposed by the European Parliament. An interim deal runs out on 31 July and will be replaced by the just-approved agreement.

“The EU welcomes the new agreement which will help to prevent and combat terrorism and serious transnational crime, while ensuring an adequate level of protection of passengers’ personal data in line with European standards on fundamental rights and privacy,” said a statement from the European Union’s Presidency, Council, and Commission.

The deal will last for seven years and actually reduces the amount of data transferred. It requires 19 pieces of data per passenger to be handed over as opposed to the 34 contained in the previous agreements.

Other parts of the deal could worry privacy activists, though. The data can be kept for seven years in an active database. It can then be kept for a further eight years in what the agreement calls “dormant, non-operational status”.

And if you think “19 is better than 34″, no, not really:

[Quote:]

The new agreement now gives them access to 19 possible categories, which could include information on ethnic origin, political and philosophical opinions, credit card numbers, trade union membership, sex life and details of the passengers’ health.

I wonder if there’s any statistics that shows how much tourism to the US has declined because of this crap…

An Iraqi study group reacts to a car bombing. Researchers (not pictured) gathered data from a fortified observation booth.

[Quote:]

A field study released Monday by the University of North Carolina School of Public Health suggests that Iraqi citizens experience sadness and a sense of loss when relatives, spouses, and even friends perish, emotions that have until recently been identified almost exclusively with Westerners.

“We were struck by how an Iraqi reacts to the sight of the bloody or decapitated corpse of a family member in a not unlike an American, or at the very least a Canadian, would,” said Dr. Jonathan Pryztal, chief author of the study. “In addition to the rage, bloodlust, and hatred we already know to dominate the Iraqi emotional spectrum, it appears that they may have some capacity, however limited, for sadness.”

Though Pryztal was quick to add that more detailed analysis is needed, he said the findings cast some doubt on long-held assumptions about human nature in that region.

[Quote:]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit today against Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG), asking a federal court to protect the fair use and free speech rights of a mother who posted a short video of her toddler son dancing to a Prince song on the Internet.

Stephanie Lenz’s 29-second recording shows her son bouncing along to the Prince song “Let’s Go Crazy,” which is heard playing in the background. Lenz uploaded the home video to YouTube in February to share it with her family and friends.

But last month, YouTube informed Lenz that it had removed the video from its website after Universal claimed that the recording infringed a copyright controlled by the music company. Under federal copyright law, a mere allegation of copyright infringement can result in the removal of content from the Internet.

“I was really surprised and angry when I learned my video was removed,” said Lenz. “Universal should not be using legal threats to try to prevent people from sharing home videos of their kids with family and friends.”

“Universal’s takedown notice doesn’t even pass the laugh test,” said EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry. “Copyright holders should be held accountable when they undermine non-infringing, fair uses like this video.”

[Quote:]

The state chairman of the “Californians for Obama” campaign has raised thousands of dollars in donations through promotions ranging from celebrity-studded Mexican cruises to CD sales to campaign office “grand openings” in support of the popular Illinois Democratic senator and presidential candidate.

But the official presidential campaign of Barack Obama said Tuesday it was unaware of the activities of the entirely unauthorized Los Angeles-based fundraising efforts of Emmett Cash III — a self-proclaimed former movie mogul who was a registered Republican until last month.

[..]

But a Chronicle examination of the latest Federal Election Commission records on file for the organization for the reporting period ending June 30 shows that while Cash has raised nearly $10,000 this year, not one dollar has gone to the Obama campaign — or any other political candidate.

[Quote:]

The Bush administration finally nails a notorious supplier to terrorists—after he spent 30 years hiding in plain sight.

[..]

For 30 years, Monzer al-Kassar has been linked to some of history’s most notorious international arms deals and terrorist atrocities. He has been accused of aiding in the attempted assassination of an Israeli spy; supplying the weapons used in the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro luxury liner; and seeding the Somali and Bosnian civil wars with countless AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades. Swiss and Spanish officials have repeatedly tried to prosecute him for murder and money laundering, and a small group of private investigators, in conjunction with the United Nations and such groups as Human Rights Watch, have worked to expose his international network of offshore companies, crooked port officials, and Eastern European arms manufacturers. Each time, Kassar beat the rap and returned to his hacienda on the Spanish coast.

[..]

At a press conference in New York the day after the arrest, Garcia acknowledged that the whole thing had been a setup from the start. “It is important to note that for Kassar and his co-defendants, the arms deal was absolutely real,” he said. “They demonstrated both their willingness to support a terrorist organization as well as their capacity for doing so. They knew the weapons they agreed to sell were destined for a terrorist organization. They knew the arms were going to be used to kill Americans. And because of the great work of DEA and its law enforcement partners around the world, yesterday Kassar and his co-defendants met face to face with law enforcement and will be brought to justice.”

In other words, the arrest of Kassar was a significant—not to mention brilliantly conceived and executed—victory in the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.” For some reason, however, the government didn’t go to the same lengths to publicize the arrest (nor did American media outlets trumpet it in their turn) the way it has the takedowns of homegrown would-be terror suspects who, with the prodding of government informants, allegedly fantasized about bringing down the Chicago Sears tower, or assaulting Fort Dix, or lighting gas mains like fuses in order to blow up the John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Perhaps that had something to do with what Garcia made clear in his remarks: that the U.S. government has been well aware of Kassar’s work on behalf of terrorists around the world since the 1970s. Kassar was allegedly up to his neck in the Iran-Contra scandal, the BCCI scandal, the murder of Achille Lauro passenger Leon Klinghoffer, and the supply of weapons that were in all likelihood used against American soldiers in the 1993 Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia. Yet no American court had ever leveled formal charges against him, and he’d spent decades hiding in plain sight. “Most arms dealers of his caliber aren’t skulking in some shithole in Marseille,” says David Isenberg, a senior analyst with the British American Security Information Council. Isenberg has been tracking illicit arms dealers for almost 20 years. “He’s been on radar screens. With enough money, you can buy all the respect you need.”

AT&T reports about the second quarter:

[Quote:]

Sales of the Apple iPhone have been robust. The June 29 launch allowed for less than two days of sales and activations before the end of the quarter. In that time, AT&T activated 146,000 iPhone subscribers, more than 40 percent of them new subscribers. Sales of the iPhone continue to be strong in July with store traffic above historical levels.

Result: call the whaaaaambulance, low iPhone sales numbers cause Apple shares to drop $9.

A few days later…

[Quote:]

- Apple says it sold 270,000 iPhones in the 1st 30 hours of sales.

And, more importantly, reports about the rest of the company:

[Quote:]

Apple shipped 1,764,000 Macintosh® computers, representing 33 percent growth over the year-ago quarter and exceeding the previous company record for quarterly Mac® shipments by over 150,000. The Company also sold 9,815,000 iPods during the quarter, representing 21 percent growth over the year-ago quarter.

Result: shares rise $14.

There’s idiots in them there woods….

[Quote:]

The Malaysian government has warned it could use tough anti-terrorism laws against bloggers who insult Islam or the country’s king.

The move comes as one of Malaysia’s leading online commentators has been questioned by police following a complaint by the main governing party.

The new rules would allow a suspect to be detained indefinitely, without being charged or put on trial.

But officials insist the law is not intended to strangle internet freedom.

Aren’t those anti-terror laws nifty?

[Quote:]

Celebrate Sony/BMG’s lawsuit against SunComm, the company that provided the rootkit spyware that caused such a ruckus, with this oddly powerful rendition of the Sony/BMG End User License Agreement — arranged for women’s choir and recorded by Toronto recording artist Brian Joseph Davis.

MP3: Brian Joseph Davis (and The Eula Singers) – “EULA”

[Quote:]

After the first Hello World application, hacker NerveGas and the people at #iphone-shell have built Apache, Python and other Open Source apps for the iPhone. Yes, your iPhone can now be a web server and do all sort of 1337 things.

Next up: using the built-in camera as a webcam, and setting the default document-root to your iPod-music directory so everybody can download your mp3′s.

I wonder when we’ll hear about somebody who manages to make a phone call with one.