A huge beached whale has been dumped outside the Japanese embassy in Berlin in a Greenpeace anti-whaling protest. The environmental activists hauled the fin whale to Berlin from the Baltic coast after finding it beached on a sandbank. The dead whale measured 17m long and weighed 20 tonnes. Activists are trying to demonstrate that there is no need to kill the mammals for research — as Japan does — because cadavers can be found — via Darren Barefoot
A group of Papuans who arrived on Queensland’s Cape York yesterday have accused the Indonesian Government of genocide. The group of 30 Papuan men, six women and seven children displayed a banner on their 25-metre canoe, asking for help to save West Papua
British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s plan to introduce national identity cards has suffered a setback, with the House of Lords voting to force the government to provide more details on the cost of the controversial scheme
Security experts and privacy advocates unanimously agree that ID cards will not protect Australia from terrorist attacks, despite Attorney-General Philip Ruddock saying the key reason
for an Australian ID card would be national security
Idaho Department of Fish and Game intends to kill up to 75% of the wolves in the Lolo elk zone to bolster struggling elk herds there, pending approval from the Idaho Fish and Game commission and the US Fish and Wildlife Service — via TidePool
Stan Howard faces prosecution for felling endangered trees as his brother, brother of Australian Prime Minister John Howard, prepared to host a major six-nation conference on climate change
A secret Pentagon study has found that as many as 80% of the marines who have been killed in Iraq from wounds to their upper body could have survived if they had had extra body armour. Such armour has been available since 2003, but until recently the Pentagon has largely declined to supply it to troops despite calls from the field for additional protection
From the beginning to the end of his career, Ariel Sharon was a man of ruthless and often gratuitous violence. The waypoints of his career are all drenched in blood, from the massacre he directed at the village of Qibya in 1953
A boy in Canton, Ohio puts up a web page telling his friends to go to their school web site and hit refresh. Now the local prosecutor wants to charge him with a felony and threatens him with jail time, although prosecutors say community service is more likely and disciplinary action from the school — via Boing Boing
Last month Grant Goodman, an 81-year-old retired University of Kansas history professor, received a letter from his friend in the Philippines that had been opened and resealed with a strip of dark green tape bearing the words by Border Protection
and carrying the official seal of the Department of Homeland Security — via digg
A hoax press-release claiming Narnia had walked out of the World Trade Organisation talks in Hong Kong because it was fed up with being bullied by the US and Europe was picked up and run as news by many outlets including Forbes — via Boing Boing
US Government backed policy changes have led ICANN to redelegate top level domains in such a way as to provide greater state-controlled censorship on the internet, reduce people’s ability to use the internet to communicate freely, and leave expansion of the internet in the hands of the people least capable of doing the job
The US government has been collecting information on peaceful war protest groups reminiscent of the Vietnam-era investigations. Is anyone surprised? — via morons.org
The US Department of Transportation has been handing millions of dollars to state governments for GPS-tracking pilot projects designed to track vehicles wherever they go. So far, Washington state and Oregon have received fat federal checks to figure out how to levy these mileage-based road user fees
. The Office of Transportation Policy Studies, part of the Federal Highway Administration, is about to announce another round of grants totaling some $11 million — via digg
The French Parliament voted into law an amendment to the DADVSI bill that allows free sharing of music and movies over the internet, considering the downloaded files as a private copy. This decision goes against the French government and the music industry’s recommendations, who argue the deputies only wanted to show their independence from the government. The initial bill’s detractors who pushed for this amendment want a tax for author rights to be paid by everyone on the ISP fees
Using a network of cameras that can record number plates, Britain plans to build a database of vehicle movement for police and security services: rollout begins in March
Local importers have begun filing damages claims worth tens of millions of dollars against the Australian Customs Service after computer glitches left shipping containers filled with Christmas stock stranded on wharves
The House baulked at a Senate plan to extend the USA Patriot Act by six months to give Congress and the retarded monkey boy more time to work out their differences, instead forcing the Senate and the administration to accept a one-month extension
The US National Security Agency has been caught spying on American citizens. According to numerous un-named sources, the retarded monkey boy signed a secret order authorising him to intercept phone calls and e-mails from US persons in communication with persons outside the US, and all without the slightest bit of judicial oversight. It’s not like this is anything new, it’s just that the targets have changed from those who can help line the pockets of the usual parade of rich, white morons, to those who show an interest in stopping that sort of corruption
The American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Colorado says that the names and license plate numbers of about 30 people who protested three years ago in Colorado Springs were put into FBI domestic-terrorism files
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