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9. februar 2005
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A 33-year-old Norwegian lawyer visited a prostitute after a night on the town, where he in addition to drinking beer had taken amphetamines. The prostitute was a 60 year old woman.
Immediately after coming to her flat in Oslo, the two started arguing about payment. The lawyer attacked the prostitute, hit her in the head with a big knife, and stabbed her four times, once in a breast so her silicone transplant bursted.
That was when the woman had had enough. She overpowered the small lawyer, hit him in the head with the knife sheath, and after a long struggle she managed to tie him up with his own scarf. This was the condition he was in when the police arrived and arrested him.
He lost his job, was sentenced to one year in prison (half of which suspended) and had to pay the prostitute a small sum of NOK 2500 (~$410) in compensation. Prostitution is not illegal in Norway.
(From a Norwegian article in Aftenposten)
4:30:29 PM 
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Mark Jen, a new Google employee who made some waves by posting "candid" remarks about his employer on his weblog, is no longer with Google. It is not known, strictly speaking, whether the termination of Jen was related to the blogging.
The employee blog issue is doubly sensitive for Google, which became a prominent booster of blogging through its acquisition of Web logging pioneer Pyra Labs in February 2003. The company also has made a point of putting ethics before profits in its business operations, suggesting it holds itself to a higher standard of care than the average for customers and employees.
The blog, ninetyninezeros (you got that, right?) has been heavily edited after some controversial comment received widespread attention.
You can read the old postings at bloglines.
Based on some of the comments, I'd say that if the postings on the blog was not the direct cause of being fired (which I hope it wasn't), the comments themselves tell us something about this particular employee that is not very attractive (even leaving aside the no caps style). Look at this example, posted just a few days after starting the new job:
which led me to thinking about the "benefits" package at google. as i thought about it, i realized that most of the "benefits" actually seem to be thinly veiled timesavers to keep you at work. take for example: free lunch and dinner. now this one is an awesome value proposition for google; i'm not exactly sure why other companies don't also recognize the value and join in. consider this: it probably costs google a maximum of $3 per employee for lunch and $5 per employee for dinner. so that's only $8 per day, but if you think about the fact that the employee now probably only takes a half hour lunch break and also stays late working, the company actually realizes far more than an $8 gain in employee output. not to mention that most people think this is a great "benefit" and google gets a ton of positive press on it. in short, this "benefit" is designed benefit the company, not the employee.
then look at all these other fringe "benefits": on-site doctor, on-site dentist, on-site car washes... the list goes on and on with one similarity: every "benefit" is on-site so you never leave work. i'm not going to say this isn't convenient for us employees, but between all these devices designed to make us stay at work, they might as well just have dorms on campus that all employees are required to live in.
Not very positive attitude, I'll say. Of course the employer is not doing charity. D'oh.
1:33:39 PM
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Probable ETA car bomb in Madrid:
CNN's Madrid Bureau Chief Al Goodman said there were no reported fatalities but police said between 10 and 15 people were lightly injured by the blast wave.
Members of the Spanish royal family were to inaugurate a major art show at the Ifema convention center later in the day, Goodman said.
The Basque newspaper Gara said on its Web site it had received a warning about the blast from ETA 35 minutes before the blast, at around 9:30 a.m. (0830 GMT).
I suspect ETA considers the current Spanish government weaker than the previous, thus it wants to put up the pressure.
11:02:43 AM
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A spokesman for Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani dismisses the claims that Islam should be Iraq's sole basis of law:
Hamed Khafaf said Ayatollah Ali Sistani believes Iraq's new constitution should respect what he described as the Islamic cultural identity of Iraqis.
Shia success in the election led to speculation that the ayatollah wanted a constitution based on Sharia law.
Mr Khafaf said the speculation was baseless.
He insisted that Ayatollah Sistani's position had not changed.
In Ayatollah Sistani's view, his spokesman went on to say, it was up to the elected representatives of the people in the new National Assembly to decide the details.
No "guardian council" in Iraq, then.
On a related note, Mark Steyn pokes fun at old Europe, and adds:
For want of a better expression, they'd like a "Third Way": so, just as America has New Democrats and Britain has New Labour, here come the New Shia. Ayatollah Sistani isn't like Khomeini and the other old-school mullahs, and the emergence of a moderate pluralist Shia-led federation in Iraq will be as devastating to the Teheran regime's long-term prospects as any Israeli-American strike on their nuke facilities. As the Arab networks' election-day coverage instinctively grasped, the American angle to this story will be increasingly peripheral.
I like the term: New Shia. In a few years we will know how it works.
10:42:15 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.03.2005; 01:30:02.
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