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29. desember 2005
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Couldn't happen to nastier people:
Two would-be suicide bombers have blown themselves up while strapping on explosives in an Afghan town bordering Pakistan, police said.
No one else was hurt in the blast near the market in Spin Boldak, Afghan border force commander Abdul Raziq told Reuters.
"They were hiding explosives under their clothes when they went off," he said, adding that police suspected the bombers had intended to target troops from the US-led force in Afghanistan.
Maybe they had taken lessons from Palestinian terrorists?
11:06:18 PM 
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Now this is weird.
Salon Magazine can probably be characterised as partially socialist, and quite a few bloggers in the Salon Blogs community are also socialists of various stripes, so I was more than a bit surprised to find that the Salon Blogs comment system bans comments containing the words 'socialist' and 'socialism' (403 forbidden). I have tested extensively, and any message where this word is garbled (ie. soc!alist) goes through fine, while it chokes on the words proper.
It was my regular commenter Raging Bee who found something odd when he tried to comment on my recent article on the worst Britons. I posted it bit by bit for him, as you can see, and it eventually choked on the last bit, where the statement 'pseudo-socialist syphilitic' appears. After a lot of experimentation, I found that the offending word was indeed 'socialist'.
If there are to be censorship on my blog, I'd like to at least be the one doing the censoring, thank you!
Update: The folks at Radio Userland came back with the explanation. What is really banned is the word 'c-i-a-l-i-s' which, as we all know, is used extensively in comment spam. Now the overreach is apparently fixed.
9:11:58 PM
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 One of the most mindblowing aspects of the UN oil-for-food scandal is the mysterious death of Bertouji Zeytountsian, disgraced UN official Benon Sevan's aunt. She, you will remember, fell down an elavator shaft in her building just after Sevan had claimed he had recieived $160,000 from her, money he'd otherwise have some problem explaining. Claudia Rosett details a surprise encounter between US congress investigatiors and the man himself, despite the the UN's refusal to admit he even exists these days.
But to such sketchy accounts, investigators for Rep. Henry Hyde's International Relations Committee are now prepared to add some illuminating details--starting with their encounter with Mr. Sevan himself, less than three months ago, in Cyprus. As it happens, they were not expecting to find Mr. Sevan in person. They went to Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, trying to track down details of the case, including the fate of Mr. Sevan's deceased aunt, Bertouji Zeytountsian. By Mr. Sevan's account to Mr. Volcker, this aunt, while living in Nicosia as a retired government worker on a pension, had sent him funds totaling some $160,000 during the last four years in which he was running Oil for Food, 1999-2003. The day after the U.N. investigation into Oil for Food was announced, in March, 2004, Zeytountsian fell down an elevator shaft in her Cyprus apartment building. A few months later, she died.
Mr. Hyde's investigators decided while in Nicosia to have a look at the elevator shaft. On Oct. 14, a Cypriot police official showed them the way to the building. There, printed plainly on a mailbox at the entrance to the apartment block, was the name not of Mr. Sevan's aunt, but of Benon Sevan himself. After shooting the picture shown nearby, the investigators went up to the eighth-floor apartment where the aunt had lived. They knocked, and the door opened.
There stood Benon Sevan. As one of the investigators describes it, Mr. Sevan came to the door "in shorts, no shirt, and sandals, smoking a cigar." Apparently everyone was surprised to come thus face-to-face. Mr. Sevan was polite but did not invite them in. They chatted across the threshold. He told the congressional investigators to address all questions to his lawyers, saying, "My conscience is clear."
The investigators turned to go, and, as one of them recounts, as they headed for the stairs, Mr. Sevan told them, "You can take the elevator. It's fixed now."
You can't make this stuff up!
PS: As if nothing had happened, the UN OIP website still has his bio up. Reminds me of old Soviet propaganda.
6:47:58 PM
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Michael J. Totten has been in Libya, and has written a wonderful, if depressing, account of his stay in a great country with very friendly people, oppressed by a crazy despot who has converted it into what appears to be a parody of old Soviet's communist dystopia.
Almost everyone in this part of town lived in a low barrackslike compound or a Stalinist tower. Landscaping didn’t exist. There were no smooth edges, no soft sights, nothing to sigh at. Tripoli’s aesthetic brutality hurt me.
I walked parts of the city hardly any foreigners ever bothered to see. It looked post-apocalyptic, as if it had been evacuated in war or hit with a neutron bomb.
Still, Totten found that people are people everywhere, even under the most brutal oppression.
The forced isolation of Libya due to sanctions may well be over, or close to it, but until Qaddafi joins his ancestors, it appears unlikely the country will rejoin the real world.
5:22:50 PM
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The Chicago Tribune has done an evaluation of the case President Bush made for the Iraq war, and how the arguments have played out in hindsight. It appears to be a quite fair assesment, even though there is much we still don't know about Saddam Hussein's WMD programmes and links to terrorist organisations.
It is often forgotten that Bush made a significant number of arguments for the war, not limited to WMD. The tribune lists nine different reasons, and while some of them has proven to be exaggarated, quite a few were also found to be strongly understated.
4:00:06 PM
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The Jeb Bush administration doesn't care more about the Geneva convention than his brother's government.
Laura and Edmund Gerstein, keen to save their beloved grapefruit tree from Florida's citrus canker eradication program, claimed immunity for the tree under the Geneva Conventions (the paragraph on protecting crops needed for civilians' survival during wartime). "As I understand it," said Edmund Gerstein, "we're in a state of war." Responded a state Department of Agriculture spokesman: "That tree will be coming down."
Where is Amnesty International?
PS: The WaPo article linked above is a real great summary of weird news of 2005, some of which has been reported on this blog during the year.
3:33:04 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 31.12.2005; 03:33:58.
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