28. oktober 2003

From Jacques with love The Sun, never letting down a good chance to bash the French, says that the rockets fired at the Baghdad hotel where Wolfowitz was staying were made in France: Half of the missiles fired were modern French weapons, said experts — produced after the arms embargo imposed on Iraq following the first Gulf War. The shock discovery will further fuel growing concern over blackmarket French arms links with Islamic terrorists. The French government has furiously denied turning a blind eye to illegal weapon supplies, despite the recent discovery in Iraq of military hardware apparently built there. It'll be interesting to see if this is right. The attack didn't look particularly advanced to me, but of course it may be correct that half the missiles themselves were modern and advanced. It would not be the first time modern French weapons unexpectedly hit its supposed allies. 11:50:45 PM    comment []  trackback []

Uh, congratulations, I think Rob Krueger from Toronto has won the world championship in Rock, Paper, Scissors. I'm practicing for the world championship in dice throwing myself. 11:34:18 PM    comment []  trackback []

British conservative leader faces no-confidence vote Embattered Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith finally faces a no-confidence vote, after the required 25 Tory parliamentaries have sent a written request for such a vote. IDS insist that he will fight the leadership contest. There has been mounting criticism of how the conservatives have failed to capitalise on Tony Blair's crisis after the Iraq war, and Duncan Smith also is under sharp criticism for mismanagment of the Party Central Office. He faces an inquiry for allegedly improperly having his wife on a taxpayer payroll for the party while she did little or no work for it. 5:17:27 PM    comment []  trackback []

Disallow: /iraq/* The crafty democrats have been looking at the robots.txt file of whitehouse.gov, and found that it denies search engines like google from indexing anything related to Iraq. Disallow: /911/progress/iraq Disallow: /911/progress/text Disallow: /911/remembrance/iraq Disallow: /911/remembrance/text Disallow: /911/response/iraq Disallow: /911/response/text You get the idea. It is big, and almost everything disallowed is related to Iraq. The Democrats have an explanation: Why would the White House do this? Those pages are still public, and the White House search engine itself does index those pages, so users can still get to them. It's easy enough to understand the reasoning if you look at past White House actions. Earlier this year, the White House revised pages on its website claiming that "combat" was over in Iraq, changing them to say "major combat." One of the reasons some alert readers noticed the change — and were able to prove it — was that Google had archived the pages before the change occurred. Now that all of the White House pages about Iraq are no longer archived by Google, such historical revisionism will be harder to catch. Maybe a bit far fetched, but it is interesting that the robots.txt file excludes Iraq-related information specificially. PS: Here is an explanation of how the robots.txt file works. 2:58:42 PM    comment []  trackback []

SoCal burning Here is a collection of pictures from the southern Californian brush fires, taken on the spot with digital and mobile cameras. A real-time look at the horrors. We'll no-doubt see more of real time photographs taken by amateurs of all sorts of incidents in the future. 1:01:07 PM    comment []  trackback []

Tired of red lights? A $300 gadget allows drivers to manipulate traffic lights from their cars, e.g. turning red lights into green for themselves. Police and traffic control wonders what will happen if everybody gets one... 12:54:39 PM    comment []  trackback []

Stuffed madness A guy put up on EBay a Collection of 26 Beanie Babies from Ex-Wife and netted $860 on these dumb stuffed toys. He writes in the "description": I make no claims on value, and to be honest. I am amazed anyine pays more then a dollar a piece for these things. What happened to collecting STAMPS? Pay what you want for them! IT ALL GOES TO HOMEDEPOT !!!!!! and BEER! All for a good cause, then. Final Notice and Disclaimer: I know nothing about these stuffed Beanie Babies. I offer no proof of anything. It is a stuffed animal, get over it! I don't think my ex-wife was in the Black Market Beanie Trade..but then again, I didn't know she was having an affair either! Ouch! 2:31:59 AM    comment []  trackback []

Iraqis start to like the new life Despite the obvious security problems, Iraqis are beginning to like their new life in freedom from Saddam's oppression. 1:05:53 AM    comment []  trackback []

© Copyright 2003 Jan Haugland. Last update: 01.11.2003; 03:23:48.