Category: News

From The Observer:

Colonel Bob Stewart, a British commander of United Nations forces in Bosnia, told the Sunday Times that the MoD had turned a military disaster into a media circus. ‘The released hostages are behaving like reality TV stars,’ he said. ‘I am appalled that the MoD is encouraging them to profit in this way.’

One of the ex-hostages reportedly wanted £70,000 for his story. There were reports that the Royal Marines were planning to sell the vases given to them in their ‘goody bags’ by the Iranians on eBay. The father of one of the hostages said the MoD had suggested the servicemen ‘Go out there, tell the truth and make the money.’

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From The New York Times:

The delegation arrived at the market, which is called Shorja, on Sunday with more than 100 soldiers in armored Humvees — the equivalent of an entire company — and attack helicopters circled overhead, a senior American military official in Baghdad said. The soldiers redirected traffic from the area and restricted access to the Americans, witnesses said, and sharpshooters were posted on the roofs. The congressmen wore bulletproof vests throughout their hourlong visit.

At a news conference shortly after their outing, Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican, and his three Congressional colleagues described Shorja as a safe, bustling place full of hopeful and warmly welcoming Iraqis — “like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime,” offered Representative Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican who was a member of the delegation.

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Guardian-Observer:

Foreigners think we’re nuts coming back to a doomed city on a damned continent,’ Rian Malan once wrote about Johannesburg, ‘but there is something you don’t understand: it’s boring where you are.’ When I go to meet Malan, South Africa’s most controversial and charismatic writer, in his home city, I see the force of both halves of that statement.
Three stories are dominating the Jo’burg headlines. The first is the brutal murder of the ‘white Zulu’ David Rattray, friend of Prince Charles, who told the story of Rorke’s Drift from the African perspective. Rattray was shot in his bedroom by a local Zulu, a man he knew, in a botched robbery. The second story exercising the phone-in shows concerns an attempt by the First National Bank to draw attention to violent crime – murders are running at 50 per day – in an advert which talked of ‘mobilising the population’. The ANC government, jumpy about such language, had pressured the bank to withdraw the campaign. And the third story was about the extraordinary popularity of an Afrikaans song, ‘De la Rey’, a homage to a general who had fought the British with the Transvaal Bittereinders and helped forge the Afrikaans nation. The song called for the return of General De la Rey – ‘We are ready’ – and suggested that the Boer ‘nation will rise up again’.

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Salt Lake Tribune:

More than eight years have passed since Colin Reesor fatally stabbed an unconscious boy during a Halloween night riot between Straight Edge gang members and others, but Reesor still doesn’t understand his actions.
“I’m a coward, I guess,” Reesor said Tuesday during his first hearing before the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole.
The board in the coming weeks will determine how much more time Reesor, now 26, and cohort Andrew Moench, also 26, will spend in prison for the Oct. 31, 1998, death of 15-year-old Bernardo Repreza.

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LA Weekly:

Two days after Pierce and the others showered engineer Arrigoni with ketchup — an incident never before reported publicly — the Station 5 crew decided to grab an early-morning volleyball game at nearby Dockweiler State Beach. Pierce began loudly bragging about being the “Big Dog,” his longtime nickname, and avidly taunting a fellow crew member, Latino paramedic George Arevalo — at 5 feet 7 inches nearly a foot shorter than Pierce. One player, firefighter Glen Phillips, tells the L.A. Weekly Pierce was shouting, “I take craps bigger than you!” at the much smaller Arevalo.

Pierce’s laughter and gross taunts seemed like no big deal — at the time. But within hours, Arevalo, a quiet type who was studying to become a helicopter pilot, would feed dog food to Tennie Pierce in the Station 5 kitchen — a prank that would hurt the careers of two captains, open taxpayers to a $2.7 million settlement pushed by City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, prompt Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to enact his first veto of the Los Angeles City Council, force the demotion of a deputy chief and the stunning resignation of admired Fire Chief William Bamattre — and send the morale of the department plummeting.

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The Observer:

In today’s China, there are now 119 men for every 100 women. In some areas, the imbalance is greater than it was in Huai-pei in 1850. Earlier this year, an official Chinese report projected that by 2020, one in 10 men between 20 and 45 would be unable to find a wife. Professor Valerie Hudson of Brigham Young University in the US estimates that by 2020, there will be 28 million surplus Chinese men and 31 million surplus Indian men.

Both governments are becoming more and more worried about the psychological and social consequences, not to mention the sheer criminality of it. As one Indian commentator remarks, the most dangerous period of a woman’s life is her first few months in the womb. China’s President Hu Jintao, remembering the Nian rebellion, has publicly recognised that such a huge population of ‘bare branches’ constitutes one of the biggest potential threats to the communist regime’s survival. Real unemployment in China is more than 20 per cent, inequality is growing rapidly and there is plenty of injustice for rootless, violently inclined, womanless men to protest about.

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NYT:

The men belong to a new militant Islamic organization called Fatah al Islam, whose leader, a fugitive Palestinian named Shakir al-Abssi, has set up operations in a refugee camp here where he trains fighters and spreads the ideology of Al Qaeda.

He has solid terrorist credentials. A former associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia who was killed last summer, Mr. Abssi was sentenced to death in absentia along with Mr. Zarqawi in the 2002 assassination of an American diplomat in Jordan, Laurence Foley. Just four months after arriving here from Syria, Mr. Abssi has a militia that intelligence officials estimate at 150 men and an arsenal of explosives, rockets and even an antiaircraft gun.

During a recent interview with The New York Times, Mr. Abssi displayed his makeshift training facility and his strident message that America needed to be punished for its presence in the Islamic world. “The only way to achieve our rights is by force,” he said. “This is the way America deals with us. So when the Americans feel that their lives and their economy are threatened, they will know that they should leave.”

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Washington Post:

Shortly before he was inaugurated for his second term, President Bush was asked why no one was held responsible for the mistakes of the first. “We had an accountability moment,” he replied, “and that’s called the 2004 elections.”

Two years and a stinging midterm election later, Bush is having another accountability moment, but this one isn’t working out as well. The conviction of former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby has coincided with a string of investigations into the mistreatment of injured soldiers and the purge of federal prosecutors, putting the operations of his administration into harsh relief.The timing may be coincidental, but the confluence of events has revived a pattern largely missing through the six years of Bush’s presidency, in which high-level officials accused of wrongdoing are grilled, fired and sometimes even jailed. For an administration that has been unusually opaque and mostly insulated from aggressive congressional oversight and prosecutorial investigation, it may seem like a gut-churning harbinger.

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Wired:

Like everyone else, compulsive hoarders have gone digital. Infohoarding may be the first psychiatric dysfunction born of digital age.

“Jim” is an infohoarder like few others. In the last four years, this 37-year-old Brooklyn native has downloaded and burned every piece of broadcast and print media that’s been digitized. Or so it seems. His apartment is filled with DVDs and CDs packed with bootleg anime, comic books, books, e-books, television programs, movies and, of course, music. He’s a completionist who must have every episode, every issue, every track.

Using Jim’s stacks and drives — which contain 2,500 GB of data — aliens could recreate a low-res version of human civilization from 1990 to the present day.

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LA Times:

Arriving home, Kartofelnikov noticed a car parked near the entryway. Someone had written “62,” the auto license code for Ryazan, and taped it over part of the license plate. Underneath, he saw “77,” the Moscow code. Suspicious, he called police.

The car was gone by the time police arrived. But in the basement, officers discovered what appeared to be a bomb made from three sacks of white powder, a detonator and a timer set for 5:30 a.m. The powder tested positive for hexogen, an explosive used in the bombings.

The next morning, Russia launched its second war in Chechnya, bombing the airport in the republic’s capital, Grozny, in what Moscow said was a counterattack against terrorists. The separatist southern region had exercised de facto independence after defeating Russian forces in a 1994-1996 war.

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NYT:

But people from all demographic groups across the country are facing a much more frightening real-life situation: the disappearance of millions of bees. This winter, in more than 20 states, beekeepers have noticed that their honeybees have mysteriously vanished, leaving behind no clues as to their whereabouts. There are no tell-tale dead bodies either inside colonies or out in front of hives, where bees typically deposit corpses of dead nestmates.

What’s more, the afflicted colonies tend to be full of honey, pollen and larvae, as if all of the workers in the nest precipitously decamped on some prearranged signal. Beekeepers are up in arms — last month, leaders in the business met with research scientists and government officials in Florida to figure out why the bees are disappearing and how to stop the losses. Nobody had any answers.

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The Observer:

Last week, in a remarkable insight into the world of gangs and how teenagers get dragged in, The Observer spent two days with Kerr and other members of the PDC, a group of young men who, throughout the Nineties, formed the most feared gang in south London. Lee Jaspar, the Mayor of London’s senior adviser on policing, has said the PDC were ‘as tough to crack as the IRA’.

PDC stands for the ‘Pil Dem Crew’, a term which has its roots in the Jamaican ‘peel dem’, meaning to ‘rip them off’ or ‘steal from them’. But during our time with the founder members of the group, we met young men who insist they have left the gangster lifestyle behind. They are, they maintain, working to persuade local children not to follow them into the world of guns, drugs and crime.

The group, which now calls itself PDC Entertainments, is based around a nucleus of men aged from 15 to 32: Kerr, his younger brother Najar and their friends Ribbz, Inches, Sykes, Skippy, Birdie, Phat Si, Blacker, Justin, Temp Man and the 15-year-old KC. Other founder members of the group have fallen victim to the gun and gang lifestyle over the years: Adrian Marriot, or Ham, was shot five times in the head in 2004 after an argument with some local men.

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NYT:

In Collinsville, Ill., Daniel Burrus scrolled through digital photographs of bloodied faces as he described how, on a crew he helped manage for several years, men who missed their sales quota were forced to fight each other.

In Flagstaff, Ariz., Isaac James sat with his wife and newborn daughter as he told how he and others on his mag crew — as they are typically called — stole checkbooks, jewelry, medicine-cabinet drugs and even shoes from customers’ homes.

Last October, Jonathan Gagney joined a mag crew to escape the “crack scene” back home in Marlborough, N.H. But one night last month, he called this reporter from a bus station in St. Petersburg, Fla., to say he had just sneaked away from his motel to run away from his crew.

“All I know is this guy got beaten and there was blood all over the motel wall,” Mr. Gagney said, his voice shaking.

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The Onion:

American security is not certain how Al-J’Aqasse was allowed to build their custom snowpipe-ramp setup across the street from the embassy, but banners and promotional materials scattered across the blast zone point to the involvement of radical, extreme-sports-beverage bottler Sunni Delight.

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