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9. mars 2005
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Blogger The Jawa Report has the pictures of the car that was supposedly hit by "300-400 bullets" (Sgrena herself) by gunfire lasting for "10 or 15 seconds" (The Italian Foreign minister).
The car looks like it's in far better shape than most cars driving around Rome, that's for sure.
The pictures clearly support the US soldiers' claim that a few rounds were fired at the car's engine block (and even that is hard to see). Also, one car tire is shot out, certainly more consistent with an attempt at stopping the car as opposed to killing whoever is inside it. It appears one or two bullets unfortunately hit the windscreen and the passenger cabin, tragically killing a secret service agent.
One thought: maybe the "10 or 15 seconds" is correct, and that most of these shots were the warning shots the Italians claim didn't happen?
Via InstaPundit, who has more links to blog coverage asking the questions the press isn't even bothered to look at.
Update: A US official says the car was speeding:
A senior U.S. military official tells ABC News he believes the investigation into the fatal shooting of an Italian intelligence officer by U.S. troops in Iraq will ultimately prove the officer's car was traveling in excess of 100 mph. [...]
But, according to the senior U.S. military official, the car was traveling at speeds of more than 100 mph. The driver almost lost control several times before the shooting as the car hydroplaned through large puddles, the official told ABC News.
Exactly what the confused Sgrena herself wrote, contradicting her earlier claim.
5:33:00 PM 
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Google Desktop was out of beta and released a few days ago, and I promptly downloaded and installed it. It has a few new features, most notably adding the Acrobat format and quite a few others, and third-party plug-ins allowing developers to add new formats (many are already available). There is also a new deskbar allowing you to search your files without opening a browser window.
All this is good and well, but what Google Desktop does not do is search compressed files. So far, no plug-ins allow this either. I can understand it doesn't go into ZIP files and the like, but it annoys me that it refuses to look at NTFS compressed folders. Text files is precisely the kind of stuff you store in compressed folders, so many of my old archives are thus unindexed and unsearchable. Bad choice, Google!
Maybe I'll replace it by Yahoo! Desktop Search instead.
4:57:17 PM
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There has been quite some discussion of the possibility of a disastrous asteroid impact on Earth, but one global disaster that is more than five times as frequent is the so-called super-volcanoes, which hit the planet with a frequency of once per 100,000 years, or even more often. Possibly the last such event was at Toba in Sumatra 74,000 years ago, when a super-volcano caused a global winter that may have been the reason humanity was nearly driven to extinction.
The BBC has made a drama depicting a hypothetical super-volcano eruption at Yellowstone Park in the USA, based closely on scientific evidence.
The plot revolves around a series of violent eruptions at Yellowstone in Wyoming that send thousands of cubic metres of rock, gas and ash spiralling up in cloud that rains down over three-quarters of the United States. [...]
Highways become blocked with cars as millions flee the unfolding disaster, and as the chain of eruptions unzip the surface of Yellowstone, hundreds of thousands are killed as the ash swamps whole towns and cities.
America's food-producing regions are devastated, communications are knocked out and planes are forced out of the sky.
Sulphuric acid droplets form in the atmosphere, blocking out sunlight, and causing global temperatures to plummet.
Professor Stephen Sparks, of Bristol University, an author on the new report, said civil contingency plans would need to be similar to those for a nuclear war.
"You would need contingencies for food and shelter. But you would need to put a serious amount of resources into any effort to cope with an event on this scale, so it poses a dilemma," he said.
The volcanic winter resulting from a super-eruption could last several years or decades, depending on the scale of an eruption, and according to recent computer models, could cause cooling on a global scale of 5-10C.
There is always something around the corner wanting to kill you.
Ailsa Orr, producer of Supervolcano, said that when the programme team presented the scenario to the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the agency admitted it had given little thought to such an event happening on American soil.
"We don't want to be sensationalist about this, but it's going to happen. We just can't say exactly when," said Professor Self.
"But we have just had a natural disaster affecting hundreds of thousands of people. Now is the time to thinking about this."
3:37:42 PM
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Wildlife experts in Uganda have succeeded in capturing alive a 5 meter (16 ft) crocodile that according to local media has killed 83 people over the last decades. The monster, with an estimated age of 60 years, weighs around a ton.
Local fishermen and villagers, who wanted to kill the crocodile after the capture, will no doubt find Lake Victoria safer after its capture.
The crocodile has been relocated to the Buwama crocodile farm west of Kampala.
6:30:25 AM
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If destruction is your thing, you'll be happy to learn that SSI has set up a web page with lots of flim clips showing everything from aluminum cans to wood pallets getting shredded.
12:40:44 AM
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"Tests Show King Tut Was Not Murdered" (AP Headline)
And in other news, the police dismissed complaints about a huge backlog in unsolved old murder cases.
12:05:22 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.04.2005; 01:57:14.
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