BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Film | God cut from Dark Materials film

God is to be cut from the film versions of His Dark Materials in case it upsets people. Seems a bit pointless as the whole trilogy is about an attack on the church and the way it tries to rule people's lives.

Weitz, who directed American Pie and About A Boy, said New Line feared that any anti-religiosity in the film would make the project 'unviable financially'.
He said: 'All my best efforts will be directed towards keeping the film as liberating and iconoclastic an experience as I can.
'But there may be some modification of terms.'
'Curtails freedom'
Weitz said he had visited Pullman, who had told him that the Authority could 'represent any arbitrary establishment that curtails the freedom of the individual, whether it be religious, political, totalitarian, fundamentalist, communist, what have you'.
He added: 'I have no desire to change the nature or intentions of the villains of the piece, but they may appear in more subtle guises.'
There are a number of Christian websites which attack the trilogy for their depiction of the church and of God, but Pullman has denied his books are anti-religious.
His agent told the Times newspaper that Pullman was happy with the adaptation so far.
'Of course New Line want to make money, but Mr Weitz is a wonderful director and Philip is very supportive.
'You have to recognise that it is a challenge in the climate of Bush's America.'

Thye bunny saves the world

081204
Originally uploaded by iGav.

Cool

There really was a madwoman in tha ttic

Charlotte Bonte wasn't completely making up the story of the first Mrs Rochester. It seems she based the story on a house she visited

Charlotte visited Norton Conyers in 1839 and knew the story of the mansion's 'madwoman' - probably epileptic or pregnant with an illegitimate child - who had been kept locked in an attic 60 years earlier.
The real and fictional halls are, in Bronte's words, 'three storeys high, of proportions not vast, though considerable, a gentleman's manor house, not a nobleman's seat'. Both have battlements, a rookery, sunken fence and wide main oak staircase. But until this month, only Thornfield had a hidden flight of stairs from near Mr Rochester's grand bedroom to his wife's miserable prison.

Economic `Armageddon' predicted

Over at the Boston herald there's an article in which they are talking about an inevitable uber-depression if the US continues to ignore its trade deficit.

So that imbecile hasn't even been re-inaugurated yet and already his country's imploding

Macworld UK - Rio outlines iPod attack plan

Creative try to detract from the success of the iPod by claiming to be taking some of Apple's market share. It's a bit of a non-story, really. though I do find it amusing that they are only now intending 'to design the right product' - what were they doing before, trying to design the wrong one?

Rio president Hugh Cooney told Business Week that his company intends to 'design the right product at the right value and then use any kind of buzz we can take advantage of.'
According to market researchers at NPD Group, the iPod accounts for 54.7 per cent of total digital-music-player units sold, while Rio accounts for just 8.9 per cent.
Vice-president for marketing Dan Torres believes that Rio is already taking away market share from Apple. He said: 'When we look at the entire space, Apple makes only a hard-disk player. We have a new hard-disk offering in the Carbon 5 gigabyte. It's a little hard for us to figure out what share we're taking from them, but we're competing with them directly. So far we think we're doing quite well, and we'll be taking share away from iPod mini.'

The Late, Great American Dollar :: AO

Is the dollar doomed??

Does George Bush care that he's wrecking the US economy? Probably not, so long as his greedy friends get richer

Two weeks ago, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan urged the Bush administration to reduce the budget deficit and encourage more personal saving here at home. He said foreign investors were not likely to finance America's huge and growing trade gap forever, and he implied that if current trends continued, the U.S. risked a currency crisis.

This is not the first time we've heard these warnings. But it is the first time we've heard them from Greenspan.

Be careful what you wish for

Is Bush's new term as President of the US off to a shaky start?

The article doesn't look at the masss resignations or the failing dollar - could be a case of Fasten your seat belt, it's gonna be a bumpy ride

The vaunted presidential juggernaut has cowed the Democrats but not his own party, at least in these early days. A lot of stuff happened this month that did not make the Republicans look good. Not all of it appears to have delighted the White House. And new polls suggest that Bush's victory was due more to his likability and military leadership than support for his dramatic domestic reforms in Social Security, Medicare, the tax system and conservative cultural positions.
That indicates political trouble ahead for Bush unless he can compromise with Democrats to win bipartisan support. But that's not his style.

Something for the man who has everything

With Christmas round the corner, why not get the man in your life something special. We all know how much men are obsessed by their penises, well now they can make their very own latex replica.

Is the man in your life too demanding in the bedroom? why not wait till he's asleep and give him a taste of his own medicine.

World's largest sleeping Buddha

The worlds largest statue of a sleeping buddha is being carved in China

The story taht will not die

Still more recounts going on, this time in New Hampshire, which may settle whether there is a recount demanded in florida

Disney try to catch some of that Pixar sparkle

Disney is reportedly setting up it's own digital animation house to develope Toy Story 3 - Obviously no one in Disney has cottoned on to the fact that endlessly throwing out inferior sequels to your past hits is no way to stay relevant or commercially successful

News from the Department of No Surprise

I was wondering how long it would be before we started hearing about things like this. Three Democratic members of the House of Representatives in the US are calling for an enquiry into irregularities with voting machines in the recent US election.

Reports from voters in Florida and Ohio also indicated that some of them had problems voting for the candidate of their choice. When they tried to vote for John Kerry, they said, the machine either wouldn't register the vote at all or would indicate on the review page that the vote was cast for Bush instead.

Does anyone believe Bush and his cronies hadn't rigged the election like they did last time??

Is there any reason not to suspect cheating?

With the result in the US election looking like it's going the way of giving us four more years of hell from George Bush, an article in wired which makes one wonder if there's any hope the election hasn't been rigged.

And still the idiots buy Windows

An article that is music to any Mac-head's ears - Mac OS X is the safest Operating system on the planet. As if we needed to know.

The most comprehensive study ever undertaken by the mi2g Intelligence Unit over 12 months reveals that the world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin. This is good news for Apple Computer whose shares have outperformed the benchmark NASDAQ, S&P and Dow indices as well as Microsoft by over 100% in the last six months on the back of revived sales and profits. The last twelve months have witnessed the deadliest annual period in terms of malware - virus, worm and trojan - proliferation targeting Windows based machines in which over 200 countries and tens of millions of computers worldwide have been infected month-in month-out.

One for the Doctor Who fans out there

Will just have to do till the return of the real thing

NO ONE DIED WHEN CLINTON LIED.......

A composite image of Bush composed of the American soldiers who have died fighting in Iraq. Just as well it doesn't use the images of the Iraqi people as the picture would be immense

England's orchards are in a bad way

Great piece from the Guardian about the decline of England's orchards. Supermarkets demand standardised apples and a change in EU subsidies mean that the few orchards that continue to grow older varieties of apples will be under greater pressure to burn the trees and turn to a more lucrative form of agriculture.

Then you see it. It's the names. The names of the fallen. Foxwhelp, Sheep's Snout, Hogshead, Duck's Bill, Black Wilding, Brown Cockle, Monstrous Pippin, Burr Knot, Broadtail, Hagloe Crab, Eggleton Styre, Peasgood's Nonesuch, Tom Putt, Bitter-scale, Slack-my-girdle, Bastard Rough Coat, Bloody Turk. The list runs into thousands. It is a history of rural England, a poem in pomology, rough and bitter and sad.

Sprouting from every name is a tree of knowledge. Before I read this book, I thought an apple was something you picked and ate some time around October. Now I know the best dessert apples are those that must be stored for a month or more. There are some that aren't ready to come off the tree until December; others that are unfit to eat unless they've been in the cellar from October to March. There is one variety, the Winter Greening (Shakespeare's Apple-John), that can be kept for two years. There are apples that taste of aniseed, banana, pineapple, caraway, and apples that can't be eaten in any state, but are grown for making cider. Some are the size of walnuts: the smaller they are, Hogg and Bull contend, the better the cider.

Common Ground is a charity dedicated to preserving orchards in the form of Community orchards with a series of events to increase awareness of the treat to orchards. Whole pile of links here

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Opinion piece pulled from the Telegraph about Kenneth Bigley

A piece by Mark Steyn which was pulled from the Telegraph. It's easy to see why as it is not mawkishly sentimental about the tragedy of the death of Kenneth Bigley in Iraq. I have to say that I have been perplexed by this latest example of DI-death-syndrome where Britain goes into an irrational frenzy of emotionalism.

Now that's not to say that I don't feel sorrow for Bigley's family, I just don't see why the world must stop for this one guy when I doubt it's possible to find a list of the names of the innocent Iraqui dead.

The article goes further in suggesting that if anything, this overdose of emotionalism makes it more likely that people will be kidnapped and murder now the insurgents know what an easy target for emotional manipulation the British are.

Don't like the jacket? It will grow on you, literally!

Scientists are developing a way to grow leather like clothing from tissue cultures. The tissues come from so-called immortalised tissue cultures where, like with cancer, the cells continue to grow unimpeded. I guess the idea is that it shouldn't offend the prolifers and the animal liberationist; you know the people, the rational caring ones that bomb the houses of people they suspect of being abortionists and vivisectionists. Just one thing though, being a bit nit-pickking, presumably, even a coat that grows itself is a living thing, sure it may not be sentient in any way we know, but where do you draw the line?

Veronica Lake's ashes reappear

Veronica Lake was one of the biggest stars of the 1940s, who died penniless in her fifties.

She was so broke, apparently that there was a dispute over her ashes which were assumed to have been scattered. Recently they have reappeared in an antique store in Miami.

My favourite movie of hers is I married a witch, in which a beatiful 17th centruy witch returns to life to plague the descendant of her persecutor who had her burned at the stake. You can see a trailer here - unfortunately only in the dreaded WMF format (is that a weapon of Mass Frustration?)

What are Apple and U2 up to

Speculation is mounting about a special Music event that is happening on October 26th. If memory serves me right, that would be roughly the 3rd anniversay of the release of the original iPod - Sources suggest taht maybe there iwll a special edition U2 iPod pr-loaded with all U2's previous material and maybe their new one in advance of it's going on general release.

Is this a nifty way to put pressure on Apple Corps to accept a gentle settlement with Apple and release the Beatles back catalogue through iTunes?

The Google Bible

"Just for fun (and no offense) I replaced the following ten words in the King James Bible …

Book 01 Genesis

001:001 In the beginning Google created the Googleplex and the web.

001:002 And the web was without form, and void; and darkness was
upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of Google moved upon
the face of the waters.

001:003 And Google said, Let there be search: and there was search.
001:004 And Google saw the search, that it was good: and Google divided the
search from the darkness.
001:005 And Google called the search Day, and the darkness he called
Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

George Bush Bulges

But not in the right places

Photographic evidence of the bulges under Bush's jacket during the debates that everyone thinks were to power the earpiece that was prompting him

Why didn't Kerry ask him up front or take off his jacket to make the point?

Talk about a biased press

A news station has run a web page announcing the George Bush has wond the election - obviously American news organisations don't believe the American electorate has any say in the matter.

Oh of course, I forgot, they don't

Well, surprise surprise!

Dick Cheney is a liar

He claimed he'd never met Senator Edwards yet there's video evidence of the two of them together

The arrogance of these people - they completely forget just how many people want to expose them as the liars they are and prevent their getting re-elected.

did Bush cheat and use an earpiece?

quite a bit of traffic on the net questioning whether Bush had an earpiece and was being prompted during the first debate

And he's always cheated when he could. He believes in cheating and dirty fighting as much as he believes in anything. Still, I suspect that it's been a slippery slope for Bush and Rove and Karen. First they gave him an audio prompter, so he wouldn't have to read speeches and stumble on words. Nothing wrong with that -- it's like a teleprompter for a dyslexic. They should have 'fessed up to it, though. When he started using a human cue card in his ear for press conferences, that's when it became very wrong. Taking it into the debate was outright fraud, a "fuck you" to truth, justice, and the American people.

The lying liars keep up with their lies

So despite the fact that the report quite clearly states that there were no WMDs in Iraq, Blair and Straw are attempting to spin it that he was a greater menace than previously imagined. The logic of it goes like this

The Iraq Survey Group report published on Wednesday said Saddam was "doing his best" to get round the sanctions, according to Tony Blair.

He said Saddam "never had any intention of complying with UN resolutions."

Mr Blair said the report made clear that there was "every intention" on Saddam's part to develop WMD.

Which translates as "he had no weapons, but would have liked some weapons therfore he was a greater threat than if he had had the weapons in the first place"

Jack Straw takes a similar approach:

Earlier, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the report showed Saddam posed a bigger threat than previously imagined.

It was now no surprise the Iraq Survey Group had found no WMD, he said.

But Mr Straw, speaking in Baghdad, said "the threat from Saddam Hussein in terms of his intentions" was "even starker than we have seen before"
So by this logic, the fact that I harbour fantasies about ruling the world means that there is a very good possibility that Blair will send in the army.

Why don't these useless liars just admit they lied. Blair claims he wants to win the trust of the British people back; how, by spinning more lies for us. How stupid does he think we are.

Some people will do anything to get on tv

Rebecca Loos, David Beckham's former PA/shag bit wanked a pig off last night on Channel Five's the Farm. Apparently there is a storm of protest about it but as far as I can see, if she's so desperate to be on tv she'll do that, why not let her humiliate herself!

Whose side is Dick Cheney on?

Not content that Donald Rumsfeld dropped the bomb a few days ago that he'd never seen any evidence linking Al Quaeda with Iraq, Dick Cheney in an attempt to bypass allegations about his ties to Halliburton directed people to Factcheck.com when he really meant to direct people to Factcheck.org. Now this wouldn't normally have been a problem excepte the the Factcheck.com redirects the browser to George Soros' website with a huge banner announcing "Why we must not re-elect President Bush"

President Bush ran on the platform of a ‘humble’ foreign policy in 2000. If we re-elect him now, we endorse the Bush doctrine of preemptive action and the invasion of Iraq, and we will have to live with the consequences. As I shall try to show, we are facing a vicious circle of escalating violence with no end in sight. But if we repudiate the Bush policies at the polls, we shall have a better chance to regain the respect and support of the world and to break the vicious circle.

Soros' website claims it is not responsible for the redirect, but I'm sure George Soros must be rubbing his hand in glee at the vice-President's mistake. Handy too as Soros is embarking on a nationwide tour to talk about how the wr in Iraq is making America less safe

Desperate Bush tries to improve on last week's performance

George Bush has used a rally to try to win back some of the ground he lost it his lacklustre performance at the first presidential debate

The president tried to redo the debate from last week by giving a speech full of untruths he couldn't say on stage with John Kerry because he knew Kerry would knock them down,' Kerry spokesman Phil Singer said.

The Guardian goes further, questioning whether Bush is slipping into a substitute reality - as if we had to ask. Mind I thought we slipped into an alternate reality back in 2000 when a monkey allegedly got elected president of the United States

EU investigates Microsoft's attempt to control DRM patents

The recent acquisition of ContentGuard by Microsoft and Time Warner is being investigated by the EU.

The reason for the EC's concern is that ContentGuard owns key patents based on early 1990s work by Mark Stefik, a researcher at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, on DRM technologies. These include machine-readable markup languages to attach rights to content so that, for example, an article could be read but not printed, or a rights-holder could specify how many times a song could be played. The technologies also include the ability to attach fee-charging mechanisms, and other such basic DRM ideas.

Good job too since American regulators have rubber-stamped it. It is cases like this which clearly show why Europe should become more united so that there is at least one body able to scrutinise monopolistic behaviour by arrogant conglomerates

Keep tabs on your MP

Not sure your MP's working hard enough, or maybe not representing your views, now you can check up. They work for you lets you see how often your MP has attended Parliament, what they have said and whether you would like to vote for them next year. It makes for interesting reading.

for instance, my MP, Kate Hoey, spoke in Parliament 49 times last year, she replied to 27% of messages sent to Faxyourmp.com, making her 532nd out of 587 MPs and she spoke against the ban on fox hunting

The Ideal Government Project

An online brainstorming session to come up with ideas for how e-enabled public services should look

Wouldn't it be better if...

You're a web user. What do you think ideal e-enabled public services should look like?

The UK is spending a lot of money and effort computerising government. Let's get a clear idea what we want it to look like when it's done. Dream a little, and help set out the wish list. Otherwise we might end up with something we did not want.

This will be a four-week online brainstorm. Then I'll produce edited highlights, with credits to contributors. I'll send it to five top UK politicians and offer to present the output to new UK government CIO Ian Watmore and government's efficiency review process boss John Oughton.

Send in your ideas

I bet he does

Steve Ballmer claims he doesn't remember branding all iPod users thieves - hmm guess who's learned where the back pedal is?

Ballmer may have decided to soften his view after the backlash experienced after his earlier comments. Silicon suggests that 'within 24 hours, Ballmer's words were coming back to haunt him'.

Steve Ballmer is just plain scary

It's no wonder Microsoft is so evil - they have an insane demon in charge.

Take a look at This - very unpleasant sweat stains - makes my skin crawl

And if that's not enough, have a look at this - the man is crazed.

Steve Ballmer: where is your survey? :: The London News Review

follow-up on the Steve Ballmer story from yesterday

But what's most odious about this non-statement is the word 'most'. None of the iPod-users I know have been surveyed about this. You can put anything the hell you like on an iPod, so long as it supports formats which aren't crippled with corporate padlocks. Recordings of birdsong, stuff off the radio, your own CDs, you friend's band, stuff from covermounts... it's up to you. No-one knows what's on iPods, and a hunch based on what you're most scared of isn't much use to anyone. So let's have none of this nonsensical, unresearched scaremongering guesswork.
But that's not the only way that Ballmer is offending clear thinking.
There's Ballmer's model, which treats all music fans as irredeemably criminal, and wants to constrain their behaviour to a form which fits the way the current, temporary music industry currently likes things. There's the totally free model of transferable files. And there's Apple's model, which treats us a little more grown-up, but allows some free action, within reasonable constraints.
And the most sensible model is not the one in the middle. You don't stop people doing something because they might do something illegal. That's plain bad lawmaking and the record shows that these laws don't work.

Is the Pope mad or what?

the Pope continues to make more and more saints, choosing the beatify a further five today which brings his running total up to 1,340 people beatified.

Among the potential saints are the last Austro-Hungarian Emperor Karl, which has brought condemnation as this 'saintly figure' authorised the use of poison gas in world War One. And guess what is the miraculous basis for his beatification?? A Brazilian nun claims he cured her varicose veins. Gosh that sounds wonderful. I wonder would praying to him cure piles??

One of the other people to be beatified was Anne Catherine Emmerich, a 19th century Nun, whose crazed anti-semitic ravings were used by Mel Gibson in that pile of superstitious clap-trap he inflicted on the world earlier this year

Who does Steve Ballmer think he is?

CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, has the cheek to call iPod users music thieves!

Speaking in London, Ballmer praised Microsoft's own digital rights management technologies, taking the chance to criticise Apple's own implementation. "We’ve had DRM in Windows for years," he said, "the most common format of music on an iPod is ‘stolen'." It's a sign of the increasingly bitter bettle between Apple and Microsoft to create the de facto standard for music downloads.

He described the sector as at "tipping point", and predicted massively increased sales for devices that integrate video, audio and computer functions. "We may get a device that can take on critical mass," he said, according to Silicon.com.
Ballmer took a swipe at Microsoft's only significant non-Linux OS competitor, as he talked up his company's dominance of the market, a dominance that is currently before the European courts.

"There is no way that you can get there with Apple," he said, "The critical mass has to come from the PC, or a next-generation video device," he said

All this from the CEO of a company that admits is copied the iTunes music store for its own offering and only entered the legal music download market because it could see there was yet another market it could attempt to saturate with its substandard bug-ridden unsecure software. It must surely be a sign of how worried Microsoft are that they have to resort to slagging off a tremendously successful product

MediaGuardian.co.uk | Media | Ofcom proposes new public service TV channel to rival BBC

OfCom proposes that a new public service broadcaster be set up to offer public service competition for the BBC.

This recognises that the existing commercial channels will have increasing pressures on them to compete for audience shares when the analogue service is switched off in 2012

At least OfCom recommends that the Licence fee is retained and there are no changes in the structure of the BBC

Vampire queen versus Amazon

Anne Rice has hit back at bad reviews of her book Blood Canticle on Amazon. So inflamed was the gothic queen that she offers to refund people's money

"And if you want your money back for the book, send it to 1239 First Street, New Orleans La. 70130. I am not a coward about my real name or where I live," she writes in a message posted Sept. 6 in response to the harsh criticisms and expressions of disappointment from dozens of readers. "And how glad I am that this book is the last one in a series that has invited your hateful and ugly responses."

I've read quite a few of her books and must say that they've just got worse and worse over the years to the point I wouldn't buy one now unless I was desperate for a trashy read

t r u t h o u t - Garrison Keillor | We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore

Garrison Keillor, of Lake Wobegon fame in an incredibly well written and passionate peace shows there is hope in America, if only the fair-minded can convince enough of the downtrodden to vote against Bush and his cronies

Britney Spears throwing milkshake at photographers

Poor thing has completely lost it - very funny tho

Love thy neighbour

Isn't that the 11th commandment? Now I thought the message of Christianity was all peaces and love and turning the other cheek.

Yeah right. From the Guardian comes a piece telling of a punch up in Jerusalem at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, supposedly the site of Golgotha, the site of the Crucifixion

The punch-up erupted during a procession to mark the discovery in 327 by Helena, mother of Constantine, of the True Cross.

A Greek Orthodox cleric said Franciscans had left open their chapel door in what was taken as disrespect. Priests and worshippers hit one another at the doorway dividing Orthodox and Franciscans, said a police spokesman.

Arrests were made but nobody was seriously hurt.

"This is supposed to be a festive time," said Pandelemos, an Orthodox cleric afterward at the site of the tomb.

"We are all Christians, and there is nothing to fight about," said David Khoury, a Franciscan.

The row was the latest in a series of disputes at the church, where six Christian denominations guard rights laid down in an Ottoman law of 1757 to separate parts of the Romanesque building, built by Crusaders in 1149 on the earlier Byzantine basilica.

Two years ago, Ethiopian and Copt monks threw stones at each other over rights to the church roof.

It sounds like a scene out of Monty Python's Life of Brian

Carter fears Florida vote trouble

From the BBC. Ex US President, Jimmy Carter, fears that Jeb Bush and his cronies are busy fixing the Florida election again. This is hardly a surprise as these people will stop at nothing to ensure Bush gets back in

UK Indymedia | Blair's daughter Kathryn in suicide bid

If sources on the Internet are to be believed Tony Blair's teenage daughter, Katherine, has attempted suicide and the story has been blacked-out by the media.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power

Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, was financially implicated with the financiers of the Nazi Party even during the war. The Guardian has a very detailed nad balanced article about these involvements

Liisa's Paperdolls - Celebrity Dress Up Games

How camp is this??

Dress up your favourite female celebrity

YouThink.com - Quiz - Personality Test

Which British Literary Period are you? Restoration 1660-1785--Pope, Swift, Johnson. Times they are a changing. You're very cynical and you like looking out for the little guys. You have a sense of humor a lot of people just don't get.

Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

SEINFELD IS BACK...

SEINFELD IS BACK...
Originally uploaded by frmorais.

Apparently - this is a test photopost

Above the Eye of Hurricane Ivan

That is just awsome!!

Hurrican Ivan photographed from the ISS

The Child Prostitution Ring that Reached Bush Whitehouse

Was there a cover-up of a child sex ring at the time of the first Bush presidency - all sounds weird, but there are links to a documentary in Windows media format. There seems an awful lot of material on this site so I guess I'll have to read through it before deciding one way or another

Bushwater - reasons to impeach Bush

Go here and here

The question is, do any of these websites make a difference?

Atrios has a story which is a rehash of allegations from the last election that Bush was involved in an illegal abortions - did that make a difference?

Bush Coke crisis

Bushwatch takes a look at the media fall-out from Bush's refusal to answer questions about his alleged cocain usage.

It also asks about the draconian treatment many young impoverished people receive for drug usage offences

Department of hear hear

A bit out of date, but I haven't had the time to keep up with all the blogs I'm reading just recently

I had to log it though cos I love the Quote:

Sorry about wishing the Bush Administration all the best after 9/11. Sorry I ever entertained the thought that these vicious pigs might find redemption in defending our country with honor.

BBC NEWS | Health | Aids epidemic a threat to Europe

European governments need to act now to minimase the devastation that AIDS is having

"In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, it is estimated about 15,000 people currently receive antiretroviral therapy out of 120,000 who need it"

Is it possible that we're still hearing the same things. With the many millions that the British and American government has spent killing innocent people and devastation Iraq it is iniquitous that there can be any funding difficulites to ensuring people get the medicine they need

Oh yes, I forgot the pharmaceutical companies have deep pockets and contribute huge amounts to reelection campaigns

How far will they go

An article at the New York Review of Books which looks at the lengths Rumsfeld has gone to enable the torture of prisoners

The memos read like the advice of a mob lawyer to a mafia don on how to skirt the law and stay out of prison. Avoiding prosecution is literally a theme of the memoranda. Americans who put physical pressure on captives can escape punishment if they can show that they did not have an "intent" to cause "severe physical or mental pain or suffering." And "a defendant could negate a showing of specific intent...by showing that he had acted in good faith that his conduct would not amount to the acts prohibited by the statute." …

Another argument is especially ingenious—or perhaps the proper adjective is hypocritical. The federal statute against torture is limited to acts committed "outside the United States." The Guantánamo Bay naval base "is included within the special naval and maritime jurisdiction of the US," the Defense Department memorandum of March 2003 says, so torture there would not be covered. In the Guantánamo cases that are now awaiting decision in the Supreme Court, the Bush administration strenuously argued the opposite: that Guantánamo is under Cuban sovereignty and hence is outside the jurisdiction of United States courts.

… The debate between the two views on Geneva was really a debate between traditional American views of law and the radically different outlook of the Bush lawyers. The legal adviser to the State Department, William H. Taft IV, in a memo of his own to Gonzales, supported Powell's position, saying that it would demonstrate that the United States "bases its conduct on its international legal obligations and the rule of law, not just on its policy preferences." Secretary Powell said that making Geneva inapplicable at Guantánamo would "reverse over a century of US policy and practice... and undermine the protections of the law of war for our troops...."

… Secretary Powell predicted, correctly, that making the Geneva Conventions inapplicable at Guantánamo would hurt the United States seriously in world opinion. But Secretary Rumsfeld dismissed foreign criticism, in 2002, as "isolated pockets of international hyperventilation."

… The basic premise of the American constitutional system is that those who hold power are subject to the law. As John Adams first said, the United States is meant to be a government of laws, not men. For that Bush's lawyers seem ready to substitute something like the divine right of kings.

There's too much in the report to quote, I suggest reading it through. It makes the blood boil

Iraq fare worse than Vietnam

Sidney Blumenthal, former senior advisor to Bill Clinton wirtes in the Guardian that Iraq has become an unwinnable war far worse than Vietnam and senior military figures are starting to air this view also

Almost every day, in campaign speeches, Bush speaks with bravado about how he is "winning" in Iraq. "Our strategy is succeeding," he boasted to the National Guard convention on Tuesday.
But, according to the US military's leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush's war is already lost. Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: "Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse, he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost." He adds: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends."

Retired general Joseph Hoare, the former marine commandant and head of US Central Command, told me: "The idea that this is going to go the way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. We're conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground. It's so unrealistic for anyone who knows that part of the world. The priorities are just all wrong."

Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College, said: "I see no ray of light on the horizon at all. The worst case has become true. There's no analogy whatsoever between the situation in Iraq and the advantages we had after the second world war in Germany and Japan."

You can teach on old dog new trick … apparently

I consider myself to be a bit of a word whizz, but it's amazing that no matter how much you use a program there are still things that can surprise you.

I just rediscovered something in Word I had completely forgotten about - I guess I never had a use for it in the past - the spike (Ctrl F3 ), which cuts a series of pieces of text and puts them into an autotext entry which you can paste once with Ctrl Shift F3, or repeatedly from the autotext entry - how marvellous