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So, I am gravely serious when I write this – if I catch someone not replacing the milk, or at least, in the case where the downstairs store has close already, not sending an email to the office so the first person that arrives (usually Christa or me) can pick one up upon arrival – then I am going to fire you. Im not joking. You will be fired for not replacing the milk, and have fun explaining that one to your next employer. This is not a empty threat so PLEASE don’t test me.

SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!!!

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RIM has started to slash prices for its little-loved BlackBerry PlayBook tablet in the US amid channel talk on this side of the pond that the fondleslabs are shifting more slowly than expected and inventory levels are out of control.

The troubled Canadian firm is taking a lead from HP which saw demand for its TouchPad go through the roof after it hacked prices ahead of canning the product family. RIM is trying to tempt customers with a $100 coupon and $100 rebate.

The latest price-hacking measures have yet to reach Europe, although telco launch partner for the PlayBook Carphone Warehouse confirmed it is now giving PlayBooks away for free when bought as part of a mobile contract with its BlackBerry device.

[..]

“It’s a dog with fleas,” claimed one reseller. “Demand is very poor”.

I’ve played around with one – it’s actually not that bad, but the problem is all the other tablets available..

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The United States is looking at building fences along the border with Canada to help keep out terrorists and other criminals.

…

Ironically, the moves come as Canada and the U.S. try to finalize a perimeter security arrangement that would focus on continental defences while easing border congestion. It would be aimed at speeding passage of goods and people across the Canada-U.S. border, which has become something of a bottleneck since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The line formerly known as the Longest Undefended Border in the World  is crossed, at Buffalo, by the Peace Bridge. Should this be renamed the Bridge of Uneasy Vigilance?

Mexico-US border fence

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Kainat Soomro is a 17-year-old Pakistani girl who has become a local celebrity of sorts in her battle for justice in the Pakistani courts, a daring move for a woman of any age in this country, let alone a teenager.

She is fighting to get justice for a gang rape that she insists happened four years ago in Mehar, a small town in Pakistan.

[..]

According to the Kainat family’s account, the tribal elders declared her kari, (which literally means black female), for losing her virginity outside marriage.

In Pakistan, women and men who have illicit relationships or women who lose their virginity before marriage are at risk of paying with their lives.

“These are matters of honor and the leaders call a jirga and they declare that the woman or the couple should be killed,” said Abdul Hai, a veteran field officer for the Human Rights Commission in Pakistan. These acts of violence are most commonly labeled as “honor killings.”

[..]

Kainat said that despite the pressures her family refused to kill her.

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Somebody must be making money out of the music-streaming service Spotify, mustn’t they? This isn’t the early 1990s, after all. You can no longer have a business model that says: we’re going to be a tech-sounding company, right, and venture capitalists are going to give us millions, right, all of which we are going to spend on cargo pants, haircuts and those weird trainers with ninja toes. And then, as long as we get to the stock market flotation before anybody notices that we haven’t worked out a way of getting paid for whatever our gadget does, we’re laughing.

Those were the good old days. But Spotify isn’t like that. Spotify shows every sign of actually being a proper business. Advertisers pay Spotify to play their adverts on the free service; subscribers pay Spotify a tenner or so a month to use it advert-free; Spotify pays record companies to stream their music; and the record companies pay their artists royalties.

All happy? Well, no. The British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors has complained that Spotify’s payments to songwriters are "tiny", and that the way they are calculated is distressingly opaque. The most eyecatching detail to emerge recently is the claim that, in a five-month period shortly after the service launched, Spotify users enjoyed more than 1m plays of Lady Gaga’s song Poker Face – which earned Her Gaganess the sum of $167.

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The latest issue of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s Inspire magazine is finally here, with a special edition for the 10th anniversary of 9/11. This issue has gotten some traction in the media for its feature story, “Iran and the Conspiracy Theories”

You can view excerpts at Public Intelligence, download the entire magazine as a PDF, or simply read the Iran article after the jump.

Please note that this magazine contains images of 9/11 and other conflicts that may be triggers for some people.
Iran and the Conspiracy Theories:

There have been plenty of conspiracy theories surrounding the events of 9/11. These conspiracy theorists believe that the U.S. government manufactured the attacks while others believe that it was the Israeli Mossad who was behind them. They site claims such as the Pentagon was not hit by a plane but by a rocket, and that the World Trade center building number seven was brought down by a controlled demolition. The prescribers to these theories have been some scattered individuals here and there who do not posses the research capabilities and capacities that are only available to governments. However, there has been one exception: the government of Iran.

The Iranian government has professed on the tongue of its president Ahmadinejad that it does not believe that al Qaeda was behind 9/11 but rather, the U.S. government. So we may ask the question: why would Iran ascribe to such a ridiculous belief that stands in the face of all logic and evidence?

Since the start of the Iranian revolution, Iran wanted to project an image of antiAmericanism. This would serve as a rallying call for the millions of Muslims around the world who despise America for its aggression against them. Iran played this card very well and garnered a lot of support among the Muslims as being the country that is willing to stand up to America.

If Iran was genuine in its animosity towards the U.S., it would be pleased to see another entity striking a blow at the Great Satan but that’s not the case. For Iran, anti-Americanism is merely a game of politics. It is anti-America when it suits it and it is a collaborator with the U.S. when it suits it, as we have seen in the shameful assistance Iran gave to the U.S. in its invasion of Afghanistan and in the Shi`a of Iraq, backed by Iran, bringing the American forces into the country and welcoming them with open arms.

Therefore with 9/11, the Iranians saw a great operation that had brought damage to the U.S. like nothing they had ever dreamed of causing during their two decades in power. For them, al Qaeda was a competitor for the hearts and minds of the disenfranchised Muslims around the world. Al Qaeda, an organization under fire, with no state, succeeded in what Iran couldn’t. Therefore it was necessary for the Iranians to discredit 9/11 and what better way to do so? Conspiracy theories.

Iran and the Shi`a in general do not want to give al Qaeda credit for the greatest and biggest operation ever committed against America because this would expose their lip-service jihad against the Great Satan

Note: None of these links go to Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda affiliated groups.

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…and yes, The Onion did this already.

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

– Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.