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Brigitte Bardot  has threatened to follow Gérard Depardieu in asking for a Russian passport, in protest not at tax hikes but at the treatment of two circus elephants.

The animals, named Baby and Nepal, are owned by a touring circus and thought to be carrying tuberculosis. They were ordered to be put down by a court in Lyon, southern France, on Friday as a precautionary measure.

Bardot’s threat on Friday comes a day after her fellow actor Depardieu caused a storm in France by becoming a Russian citizen in protest at high tax rates proposed by François Hollande’s Socialist government, which he accuses of penalising success.

Absolutely nothing, nothing, to do with taxes.

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The Dutch government’s cyber security center has published guidelines that it hopes will encourage ethical hackers to disclose security vulnerabilities in a responsible way.

“Persons who report an IT vulnerability have an important social responsibility,” the Dutch ministry of Security and Justice said on Thursday, announcing guidelines for ethical hacking that were published by the country’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC).

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While the released guidance does not affect the existing legal framework, it encourages parties to work together to make IT systems safer, the NCSC said.

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When an organization decides to follow these guidelines, it should include in its policy that it will not take legal action against ethical hackers who comply with the rules, it added.

The Dutch Public Prosecution Service however will keep the option to prosecute when it suspects that crimes have been committed, the ministry of Security and Justice said.

In other words, you’re still better off dumping the info anonymously on hacker forums. A missed chance.

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Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has released a public letter urging the United Kingdom to relinquish its control over the disputed Falkland Islands.

She accused Britain of taking part in an act of “blatant colonialism” in claiming the archipelago and called on UK Prime Minister David Cameron to honour UN resolutions that indicate both sides should sit at the negotiating table to discuss the sovereignty of the Falklands.

Even those who actually know history are apparently doomed to repeat it.  This, from an Argentine politician in political trouble, is an absolute gift to a Conservative British Prime Minister in political trouble.

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Wegelin & Co, the oldest private Swiss bank, has said it would shut its doors permanently after more than 250 years following its guilty plea to charges of helping wealthy Americans evade taxes through secret accounts.

The plea, in US District Court in Manhattan, marks the death knell for one of Switzerland’s most storied banks, whose original European clients pre-date the American Revolution.

Wegelin on Thursday admitted to charges of conspiracy in helping Americans evade taxes on at least $1.2bn for nearly a decade.

What a lot of American tax evaders there are! Naughty bankers!

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Maps are an easy path to the heart for several geeks I know, but I haven’t seen enough of them that pertain to the Star Wars universe. Artist Andrew DeGraff created a series of them, but instead of showing you the galaxy, they take you on the path of the films in the original trilogy.

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A chilling video leaked by an Anonymous cell this week has added a new twist to a sordid tale of alleged rape that has shattered the peace of a close-knit Ohio football town.

The disturbing 12-minute video, posted online Tuesday by the hacktivist group “Knight Sec,” shows teens making jokes about the events that reportedly transpired on Aug. 22.

One teen appears to refer to the victim as “deader than” Trayvon Martin, and adds, “she is so raped her p**s is about as dry as the sun right now.”

Months later, what exactly happened in Steubenville, Ohio, is still being pieced together. Few witnesses have stepped forward to talk about the parties where the underage girl, who was from a neighboring town, was allegedly transported, assaulted and photographed by athletes from local Steubenville High.

The video, which was allegedly posted to YouTube on the night of the incident, has been brought to the attention of local police.

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“Flossing is almost completely useless, it doesn’t stop tooth decay,” he says, adding that he has “slides of bacteria waving as the floss goes past.”

On the other hand, he, like so many at the forefront of preventive dentistry, “would advise people to use xylitol. I have some xylitol mints in my desk drawer. If you look at the evidence it is overwhelming that xylitol works.”

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San Bernardino, California, has gone from being the birthplace of McDonald’s, one of the world’s most successful companies, to a mound of unpaid debts. It’s a sad example of what a lack of infrastructure investment and an almost religious aversion to higher taxes have done to cities across the United States.

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Jose Rodriguez thinks the new movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden is “well worth seeing.” But the retired CIA veteran has reservations about its gut-churning portrayal of the CIA’s treatment of detainees. Which is rich, coming from the man who destroyed the video footage documenting many of those brutal agency interrogations.

In an op-ed for the Washington Post on Friday, the former chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and its clandestine service takes issue with Zero Dark Thirty‘s torture scenes. Those scenes are admittedly hard to watch. They show terrified, disoriented and bloodied detainees kept awake for days on end by having their arms painfully suspended from the ceilings of secret jails; stuffed into tiny wooden boxes when they don’t cooperate with their inquisitors; and waterboarded on soiled mattresses while interrogators bark questions. They also largely match up with the minimal public disclosure of how the post-9/11 program actually operated.

But they offend Rodriguez, who describes himself as “intimately involved in setting up and administering” a program he has steadfastly denied amounted to torture. Most CIA detainees weren’t subject to what he euphemistically calls “enhanced interrogation.” Those who were experienced “harsh measures for only a few days or weeks at the start of their detention.” And director Kathryn Bigelow left out all the bureaucratic red tape CIA interrogators encountered: “To give a detainee a single open-fingered slap across the face, CIA officers had to receive written authorization from Washington.”

Except there’s a problem with Rodriguez’s account that he sidesteps in calling the film inaccurate. While at the CIA, Rodriguez himself destroyed nearly 100 video recordings of brutal interrogations, including those of two al-Qaida figures who most definitely were subjected to “harsh measures,” Abu Zubaydah and 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. If Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal are in the dark about torture — like the rest of the country — Rodriguez is a big part of the reason why.