Iraq’s interim government ordered Qatar-based Al Jazeera satellite television network to close its Baghdad office for one month Saturday, a move criticised as unjustifiable by the channel. Iraqi police officers arrived in the early evening at the Baghdad office to implement the closure decision. The station’s lawyers said police officers did not carry an order from a court as the country’s law requires in such a case
A German court ruled excessive use of meta-keywords in HTML unlawful. Meta-tag keywords may still be used if they are in strong relation to the page. The decision does not address more popular search engine spamming methods of today — as meta-keywords are ignored by Google, they are rarely used as core strategy for Search Engine Optimisation
The FBI have questioned Benjamin Vanderford, a San Francisco computer expert, who duped international media into believing Islamist kidnappers had executed an American hostage in Iraq, by staging his own mock beheading on the Internet. The video showed a hand with a large knife apparently slicing the neck of a limp body. But the blood was dye, the setting was a friend’s garage, the Koran reading was a tape and the knife was held by a friend. Mutilated bodies and sound effects were edited in from photos on web sites and the video was purposefully blurred to make it seem even more amateur, Mr Vanderford said. A major motivation for his action, an unrepentant Mr Vanderford told Reuters, was to see how the world media would react and to see if they would be fooled — via Rogue Sun
Telstra has signed a deal with Microsoft that appears to add further credibility to the theory that the best way to negotiate with Microsoft is to explore moving to Linux
Two years after Microsoft executives began urging managers to outsource software development work to India, a Washington state technology union says the company has sent increasingly high-level jobs overseas, including some related to Longhorn, the next version of Windows — via Triode Internet
Human rights organisation Reporters sans Frontières has accused Yahoo! and Google of deliberately conspiring to censor the Web. RSF called the pair irresponsible
for blocking some content labelled as subversive by the Chinese government — sites relating to Tibet’s independence, for example. Such sites disappear from the Chinese language version of Yahoo and a Yahoo-parented search engine, Yisou, while a local search engine that Google now owns a share of, Baidu, also censors its results
The Kalashnikov, like vodka, seems quintessentially Russian. But, as with vodka, plenty of other countries make versions of the assault rifle, and Russia’s arms export agency isn’t flattered. It doesn’t help that the foreign versions come cheaper
The US Fish and Wildlife Service is planning to drop Endangered Species Act protections for wolves in the eastern United States, despite the fact that the removal of protections would likely preclude the return of wolves to their historical range in the Northeast. Although wolves in the upper-Midwest have made many gains, and now number more than 3,000 in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, wolf experts believe that the Northeast has prime wolf habitat and could support a population of the canines. The new plan would make it difficult to either reintroduce wolves in the Northeast, or protect those that naturally migrate from Canada
Five big US power companies were sued for creating a public nuisance on Wednesday, accused by eight states and the city of New York of being the largest global-warming polluters in the country
Loony fundie US conservatives have failed in their bid to change the American Constitution to ban gay marriage. The retarded monkey boy had urged Congress to support a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage after several states moved to make it legal. But the proposal failed to win enough support in the Senate. The head of the human rights campaign, Cheryl Jacques, said: Today we saw President Bush and the Republican leadership attempt to divide America and it backfired
. Michael Organ gave the finger to the fundies who are trying to same stunt locally
The rights and wrongs of using radio frequency identification (RFID) tags on humans have been debated since the tracking tags reached the technological mainstream. Now, school authorities in the Japanese city of Osaka have decided the benefits outweigh the disadvantages and will now be chipping children in one primary school. The tags will be read by readers installed in school gates and other key locations to track the kids’ movements. The chips will be put onto kids’ schoolbags, name tags or clothing in one Wakayama prefecture school. Denmark’s Legoland introduced a similar scheme last month to stop young children going astray
I’m a big fan of Dare’s Wicked Chocolate flavour and have been far from impressed to find that it’s missing from shelves and hideous coffee concoctions are in its place.
Had a chat to Dairy Farmers and it seems some cocaine-snorting sub-human from marketing thought it would be a good idea to drop the entire Dare product line and replace it with crappy coffee variants. Wrong!
The Dairy Farmers girl I spoke to said there had been a lot of negative feedback about the change. I suspect I wouldn’t be the only one to show the nameless marketing wanker exactly what he can do with his crap idea. I want my Wicked Chocolate Dare back.
Paul Khlebnikov, editor of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, walked out of his office late on Friday in northeastern Moscow when a car pulled up and several shots were fired at him. Khlebnikov, a US citizen of Russian origin, died on his way to hospital. He was the latest victim of post-Soviet city-center killings which have struck down officials, businessmen and journalists
Sheddrick Deon Bentley, a less than intelligent member of society, walked into a Wal-Mart covered in blood and bought clothes, bandages and garbage bags with a bloodstained $100 note. The employees found this a bit suss and called the cops. The rocket scientist was charged with murder after authorities found a stabbed body in a bin — via Keith Lynch
Francisco Javier Ortiz Franco, a top editor and founder of the Zeta weekly newspaper, was slain by unidentified gunmen as he drove through Tijuana’s Marron district with his children. The newspaper, in a statement posted on its Web site, said it would not speculate about motives for the attack but Zeta’s campaigns against corrupt politicians have in the past made its editors targets of gangland-style attacks
Inghams has told McDonalds in New Zealand that the next shipments of soy to feed their chickens will not be GE, whereas Australian consumers still have no choice but to eat Inghams chickens fed GE soy
The US Fish and Wildlife Service recently reported that a record 55 red wolf pups [BugMeNot] have been born in 11 litters in North Carolina this spring. More than 100 red wolves now roam 1.5 million acres in the northeastern part of the state. This year’s promising wolf census comes on the heels of a judge’s decision that temporarily halted the building of a landing field by the US Navy that Defenders and others charged would be harmful to wolves and migratory birds in the area
The United States is close to deciding whether to spend tens of millions of dollars establishing permanent joint training facilities in northern Australia for its military forces
Maria Isabel had been raped, beaten, stabbed in the chest and tied up with barbed wire before a blow to the back of her head finally killed her. Such murders have become common in Guatemala, where there are now daily reports of killings but rarely news of any arrests. Such unchecked misogyny, with no clear motive, is reminiscent of the situation in Ciudad Juárez, the Mexican city just over the border from Texas where around 100 serial-type sexual murders over the last decade have become an international cause célèbre
An 11-year-old girl led a fellow sixth-grader, Satomi Mitarai, to an empty classroom during their school lunch hour Tuesday, slit her throat and slashed arms with a box-cutter and left her to bleed to death — via Die Puny Humans
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