Sunday - October 23, 2005

Burning Christian Churches In Egypt

Bloody riots, burning churches, people murdered ... and it all started over a DVD which “offended” MOOS-lims. All this from a so-called “Religion Of Peace” ... ?

Egypt Police Guard Churches After Riots
ALEXANDRIA, Egypt (AP)

Thousands of police manned barricades around Christian churches in Egypt’s second largest city Saturday, a day after Muslim rioters attacked churches and shops, leaving four people dead in the country’s worst religious violence in five years. Egypt’s top Muslim and Christian leaders appealed for calm as tensions simmered in Alexandria, where some 5,000 Muslim rioters rampaged through two predominantly Christian neighborhoods. Clashes with rubber bullet-firing police killed two rioters and two policemen, police and hospital officials said Saturday. At least 90 people were injured.

The violence followed a week of protests over the distribution of a DVD of a play deemed offensive to Muslims. St. George’s Coptic Church, where the play was performed two years ago, was one of the seven churches attacked Friday. The play, entitled “I Was Blind But Now I Can See,” tells the story of a young Christian who converts to Islam and becomes disillusioned. Islamic leaders accused Copts of releasing the DVDs and demanded an apology.

But political leaders and security officials said Islamic extremists distributed the DVDs in an effort to tarnish a Coptic Christian candidate running in next month’s parliamentary elections for Alexandria’s impoverished Ghorbal constituency. Maher Khalah, one of two Copts running on the ruling National Democratic Party ticket in this mainly Sunni Muslim country, announced Saturday that he was withdrawing from the race to prevent any recurrence of the violence.

“This violence is not about the DVD, it is all about the elections,” Khalah told The Associated Press. Coptic Christians, who account for about 10 percent of Egypt’s population of 72 million, complain of discrimination but generally live in harmony with the Muslim majority. Violence flares occasionally, particularly in small southern communities. Friday’s violence was the bloodiest since January 2000, when an argument between a Coptic shopkeeper and a Muslim customer swelled into gunfights and other street battles that killed 23 people, mostly Christians, in el-Kusheh, a town south of Cairo.

In a joint statement, the head of the Coptic Orthodox Church, Pope Shenouda III, and Egypt’s highest Islamic authority, Grand Sheik of al-Azhar Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, urged Christians and Muslims not to resort to violence. “We call on everyone to be calm so we can spread the grace of peace, security and affection among us,” the religious leaders said. “If something happened and was misunderstood, then it is our duty to deal with it in the spirit of dialogue and understanding.”

Shenouda canceled a trip to Alexandria on Saturday for his annual Ramadan fast-breaking meal with Muslim officials because of the violence, church leaders said. Coptic community leader Kamil Sediq warned that the repercussions of Friday’s violence could spread to Cairo and other provinces and reiterated that the church would not apologize. “We’re not going to apologize because we don’t want it to become a precedent,” said Sediq, of the Coptic Community Council, a secular body of prominent Copts established in 1874 to oversee affairs of the community. “We did nothing to apologize for.”

Posted by The Skipper     on 10/23/2005 at 08:04 AM   
Filed Under: • Outrageous • RoPMA •  
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Where’s The Outrage?

When they do it, there are celebrations and parties in the streets. When we do it, there is worldwide outrage and the UN weeps. Something’s entirely out of whack when MOOS-lims can assassinate Americans, burn the bodies and then mutilate them and drag them through the streets without a single peep from their MOOS-lim bothers and sisters around the world. As usual, Amnesia International and the United Notions are awfully quiet. However, let one lousy Arab stub his toe while in American captivity and all hell breaks loose. It’s time to take off the gloves and institute public hangings with rope soaked in pig fat ... and tell all the whining complainers on the Left to go take a flying leap ....

Four U.S. Contractors Killed in Iraq
BAGHDAD (AP)

An angry mob of insurgents attacked a convoy of American contractors last month when they got lost in a town north of Baghdad, killing four and wounding two, the U.S. military said on Sunday. The Sept. 20 attack in the mostly Sunni Arab town of Duluiyah, about 45 miles north of Baghdad, was reported for the first time on Saturday by the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph and confirmed by the military on Sunday.

The convoy, which included U.S. military guards riding in Humvees, made a wrong turn into Duluiyah and insurgents opened fire with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, Maj. Richard Goldenberg, a spokesman for Task Force Liberty in north-central Iraq, told The Associated Press.

“Task Force Liberty soldiers, which have a forward operating base in that area, responded to assist the convoy, administered first aid to two wounded contractors and evacuated the remains of four contractors killed,” Goldenberg said. He said he had no information about what the U.S. soldiers riding in the convoy had done during the attack.

The attack caused no U.S. military casualties, but Goldenberg said his men, acting on a tip, returned to the area two days later to detain an individual suspected of ties to the attack. The U.S. troops killed two insurgents after coming under fire. The Telegraph reported the contractors killed and wounded were employees of the Halliburton Co. subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, the biggest U.S. military contractor in Iraq. But Goldenberg could not confirm that.

The Telegraph reported that two of the contractors not killed in the initial attack were dragged alive from their vehicle, which had been badly shot up. They were forced to kneel in the road before being killed. “Killing one of the men with a rifle round fired into the back of his head, they doused the other with petrol and set him alight,” the paper reported. “Barefoot children, yelping in delight, piled straw on to the screaming man’s body to stoke the flames.” The crowd then “dragged their corpses through the street, chanting anti-U.S. slogans,” the report said.

Read The Rest Of This Miserable Story Here

Posted by The Skipper     on 10/23/2005 at 07:48 AM   
Filed Under: • RoPMA • Terrorists •  
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Sunday Funnies

Posted by The Skipper     on 10/23/2005 at 07:23 AM   
Filed Under: • Humor •  
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   Saturday - October 22, 2005

HELP!

I have just spent four hours with this ”productivity enhancer” and can’t solve it to save my life! I need help before I go stark raving insane. I suspect this is an Al-Qaeda trick or perhaps a devious plot by Democrats. We must not let the enemy prevail! Help me out here! Figure out how to beat this evil game and ... and ... I’ll come up with a suitable prize later (perhaps a suitable title like BMEWS First Mate will be bestowed upon the lucky winner?) ....

Posted by The Skipper     on 10/22/2005 at 01:54 PM   
Filed Under: • Fun-Stuff •  
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Wakey-Wakey!

It must be Saturday. How else to explain why, when I read the following news story from the UK Guardian (Liberal Rag Of Record In Britain), my mind instantly did a hop-skip-jump to Monty Python and the famous parrot sketch ....

Parrot That Died In UK Quarantine Diagnosed With Avian Flu
LONDON (GUARDIAN)

The arrival of a highly pathogenic form of avian flu in Britain was confirmed last night as veterinary officials revealed that a parrot that died in quarantine had the disease.

The parrot, part of a consignment from Surinam in South America, was among birds sharing space in a biosecure unit with another consignment from Taiwan. A “small number” of people who had been in contact with the birds have been given anti-viral treatment.

Debby Reynolds, the chief vet, said the case would not affect Britain’s disease-free status as she revealed more than 360 birds had been culled. “It is very difficult for humans to contract avian influenza. However, the necessary actions to protect human health have been taken in this instance,” she said.

Tests have yet to confirm whether the parrot, which was imported into Britain in September and died three days ago, succumbed to the feared H5N1 form, although it is known the virus was one of the H5 types.

- More On Dead Parrots Here

Posted by The Skipper     on 10/22/2005 at 12:25 PM   
Filed Under: • Humor • Science-Technology •  
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Quote Of The Day

“We decided to burn the bodies because they were bloated and they stank.”
-- A US Soldier in Afghanistan after Taliban corpses were destroyed last week

“In that case, let’s apply the napalm to Teddy Kennedy and Michael Moore too.”
-- The Skipper

Stench Prompted U.S. Troops to Burn Corpses
The desecration of Taliban dead prompts outrage in Afghanistan
(TIME)

There simply wasn’t enough room on the rocky hilltop above Gonbaz village in southern Afghanistan for the U.S. platoon and the corpses of the two Taliban fighters. The Taliban men had been killed in a firefight 24 hours earlier, and in the 90 degree heat, their bodies had become an unbearable presence, soldiers who were present have told TIME. Nor was the U.S. Army unit about to leave — the hilltop commanded a strategic view of the village below where other Taliban were suspected to be hiding.

Earlier, Lt. Eric Nelson, the leader of B Company, I-508 platoon leader had sent word down to Gonbaz asking the villagers to pick up the bodies and bury them according to Muslim ritual. But the villagers refused — probably because the dead fighters weren’t locals but Pakistanis, surmised one U.S. army officer.

It was then that Lt. Nelson took the decision that could jeopardize his service career. “We decided to burn the bodies,” one soldier recounts, “because they were bloated and they stank.” News of this cremation may have remained on these scorching hills of southern Afghanistan, had the gruesome act not been recorded on film by an Australian photojournalist, Stephen Dupont. Instead, when the footage aired on Australian TV on Wednesday, it unleashed world outrage. A Pentagon spokesman described the incident as “repugnant” and said that the army was launching a criminal investigation into the alleged desecration of the corpses, which is in violation of the Geneva Convention on human rights.

Fueling the furor was the fact that the TV report showed that after the bodies were torched, a U.S. Psychological-Operations team descended on Gonbaz in Humvees with their loudspeakers booming: “Taliban, you are cowardly dogs. You are too scared to come down and retrieve the bodies. This just proves you are the lady-boys we always believed you to be.”

- Go Read The Rest Of The Story Here

Posted by The Skipper     on 10/22/2005 at 10:03 AM   
Filed Under: • War-Stories •  
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Gullible White People?

This is the face of the enemy. Nigerian e-mail scammers. Go read what they think of Americans. They think we’re fools. They obviously have us confused with Democrats ...

As patient as fishermen, the young men toil day and night, trawling for replies to the e-mails they shoot to strangers half a world away. Most recipients hit delete, delete, delete, delete without ever opening the messages that urge them to claim the untold riches of a long-lost deceased second cousin, and the messages that offer millions of dollars to help smuggle loot stolen by a corrupt Nigerian official into a U.S. account.

But the few who actually reply make this a tempting and lucrative business for the boys of Festac, a neighborhood of Lagos at the center of the cyber-scam universe. The targets are called maghas — scammer slang from a Yoruba word meaning fool, and refers to gullible white people.

Samuel is 19, handsome, bright, well-dressed and ambitious. He has a special flair for computers. Until he quit the game last year, he was one of Festac’s best-known cyber-scam champions.

Go Read The Rest Of The Story Here

Posted by The Skipper     on 10/22/2005 at 09:53 AM   
Filed Under: • Crime • International •  
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Yabba-Dabba-Doo

Wilma Rips Cancun
CANCUN, Mexico (AP)

Ocean waves surged over the narrow strip of land holding Cancun’s resort hotels Saturday as Hurricane Wilma crawled over Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, keeping some 30,000 tourists huddled in hotels and shelters amid shrieking winds and shattering glass.

The slow advance of the storm, which killed 13 people in Haiti and Jamaica last week, gave Florida more time to prepare but meant another day of misery for people riding out 120 mph winds and flooding in hot, leaky shelters with little food and water.

After battering Cozumel Island with 140 mph winds Friday, Wilma came ashore overnight near Playa de Carmen in a sparsely populated area of luxury resorts about 30 miles south of Cancun and creeped toward this city, weakening to a Category 3 storm.

The storm was expected to pummel the tip of Yucatan all day Saturday before moving into the Gulf of Mexico, curling around Cuba’s western end and sprinting toward Florida for an expected landfall Monday.

In Florida, residents began leaving the Keys and parts of the mainland Friday. Scattered gasoline shortages were reported and traffic jams backed up highways as people fled Florida’s west coast.

Winds caused severe damage in Playa de Carmen, flattening dozens of wood-and-tarpaper houses and tossing rooftop water tanks and wooden window coverings through the air. Communications were cut off with Cozumel, a popular cruise ship destination 11 miles offshore. Damage was intensified by the storm being nearly stalled atop Yucatan since Friday.

- More On This Story Here

- National Hurricane Center Bulletins, Maps Here

Posted by The Skipper     on 10/22/2005 at 09:36 AM   
Filed Under: • Climate-Weather •  
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Laci Peterson: Follow-Up

The courts finally ruled that Scott Peterson can’t collect the insurance money on the wife he murdered. That was a no-brainer but you can never tell what will happen in our nation’s courts. Now, if they’ll just fry the SOB the world will be a better place ...

Laci’s Life Insurance Money Going to Mom
FRESNO, Calif. (AP)

A judge ruled Friday that proceeds from a $250,000 life insurance policy Scott Peterson took out on his wife, Laci, will go to her mother instead. Because Scott Peterson was convicted of killing his pregnant wife, Stanislaus County Superior Court Judge Roger Beauchesne said he is not entitled to collect the benefits of her life insurance policy. Under state law, criminals cannot profit from their crimes.

The judge said the money should go to the executor of Laci Peterson’s estate, her mother, Sharon Rocha. Neither Rocha, who had petitioned the court, nor Scott Peterson’s attorney could be reached for comment Friday. Scott Peterson was sentenced to death earlier this year for killing his wife and their unborn son. Their bodies were found on the shore of San Francisco Bay months after her December 2002 disappearance. A $25 million wrongful death lawsuit filed against Scott Peterson by Laci Peterson’s family is set for trial in April.

Posted by The Skipper     on 10/22/2005 at 09:26 AM   
Filed Under: • Crime •  
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Hang ‘Em High!

_{Bob Englehart, Hartford, Connecticut—The Hartford Courant}

Posted by The Skipper     on 10/22/2005 at 09:17 AM   
Filed Under: • Humor •  
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   Friday - October 21, 2005

Your Printer Is Spying On You

Be aware that if you print a ransom note or bomb threat on your printer attached to your PC that it will tell on you. That’s right, the little bugger is secretly encoding information that would allow the authorities to track you down. This was all instigated secretly by the US Secret Service in cooperation with printer manufacturers. When questioned, representatives of the Secret Service said only, “Trust us. We’re from the government and we’re here to help.” Now I’m scared ....

Printer-Spy Caper Threatens Freedom
(TECHNEWSWORLD)

The next time you print a summary of your favorite James Bond film, you should consider that there might be more than one spy on the page. That’s because printer manufacturers and the U.S. Secret Service have been quietly collaborating to track documents—a worrisome revelation. An announcement by the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) that their staff cracked the code Xerox uses to secretly tag documents printed by color laser printers recently put the issue in the spotlight.

“At the request of the United States Secret Service, manufacturers developed mechanisms that print in an encoded form the serial number and the manufacturer’s name as indiscernible markings on color documents,” the EFF’s white paper says. But no need to take the EFF’s word for it—the secret markings can be found by anyone with a blue light and a magnifying glass.

Law enforcement claims that the purpose of the secret markings is to help catch counterfeiters. “It’s to protect our currency and to protect people’s hard earned money,” Secret Service spokesman Eric Zahren told the Washington Post. Fighting thieves is indeed an important task, but that begs the question of why the government made such a huge policy decision behind closed doors, putting American privacy, security and freedom of speech at risk.

If an anti-theft device is to be effective, it must be useful regardless of whether anyone knows about it. The idea that secrecy is needed for efficacy is reminiscent of the encryption debates of the late 1990s when the technology community thoroughly rejected secret deals such as government-coerced back-doors into secure codes.

Government has no business dictating the design of widespread technology devices, especially when the design makes it easy for governments, or anyone else for that matter, to spy on Americans. Since anyone with common tools can view the printer’s encoding, it could put important anonymous speech at risk. One can imagine a scenario in which one person creates two documents one with that person’s name on it and the other anonymous. If another individual were to use a blue light to compare the two documents, the anonymity of the second document would disappear. That could be bad in a business setting or from an anonymous political speech point of view.

What truly disturbs is the “trust us” attitude that radiates from government agencies. No one should assume that the government won’t abuse its spy powers. Recall the famously intrusive J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI which illegally wiretapped the Rev. Martin Luther King and Vietnam War protesters. But on the printer issue, the government is not solely responsible. Printer manufacturers and, apparently, banks were in on the scheme too.

One could argue that the printer companies were just doing what they needed to do in order to make sure they could sell their wares. But that’s the same sort of argument that Yahoo and others make when explaining their complicity with a rights-abusing Chinese communist dictatorship.

Consumers should reject that excuse and demand that technology producers inform customers if there are tracking devices in the products they sell, particularly when those devises are used as extensively and for so many sensitive purposes as printers. Like the cell phone cameras that captured the London bombings before government or big business got to the scene, the EFF has demonstrated that when everyone has access to technology tools, the truth comes out and has less chance of being manipulated by the powers that be.

- Go Read More About Big Brother’s Plans Here

- Technical Info from EFF Is Here ..

Posted by The Skipper     on 10/21/2005 at 12:44 PM   
Filed Under: • Outrageous •  
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Stealing Is Now Legal In Alabama

Leave it up to the state legislators in my old home state to make asses out of themselves. I sometimes wonder where the brains are in that august body of worthy southern politicians ... or even if any of them have brains. Through a quirk of language, a recent bill passed that altered the language referring to horses and asses in criminal cases. It turns out the asses were the legislators who didn’t proofread the bill ... or it could be they were just horsing around. Either way, they erased from the books a section that made theft illegal, so if you’re in Alabama this weekend, feel free to take whatever you want. It’s all free ...

Legislative Mistake Wipes Out Theft Law
MONTGOMERY, Alabama (MONTGOMERY ADVERTISER)

What started with taking the words “ass,” “mule” and “horse” out of state code has ended with the creation of a loophole in state law. A 2004 mistake by Alabama legislators has eliminated the code that says it’s a crime in Alabama to steal property valued between $1,000 and $2,500.

Area prosecutors say the inadvertent deletion has not caused much trouble in prosecuting alleged law breakers, but is something the Legislature needs to change. “We’ve tried to get around it as best we can,” said Randall Houston, district attorney for Elmore, Autauga and Chilton counties.

The foul-up happened when Rep. Richard Lindsey, D-Centre, put in a routine bill backed by the Alabama Horse Council to change the words “horse,” “mule” and “ass” to “equine” and “equidae.” Lindsey’s bill inserted the word “equine” into state code 94 times while inadvertently using outdated language for other parts of the code that neither he nor anyone else meant to change.

The bill sailed through the Legislature and was signed by the governor without anybody noticing that it eliminated the crime of second-degree theft. “I would suspect that people really haven’t been wise to it,” said Joseph Van Heest, president of the Alabama Criminal Defense Lawyers Association. Lindsey did not know about the loophole until the Advertiser told him about it. After looking up the code language, Van Heest said he would use the glitch if defending a theft charge.

“I would probably argue that, yes, you can’t be convicted,” he said. On Thursday, Lindsey had no idea that his bill had eliminated a law. But the Alabama District Attorneys Association has noticed it, and pushed for a correction earlier this year during the 2005 regular legislative session, only to be thwarted by a Senate feud that locked down the upper chamber in weeks of filibuster. “The theft cases are not usually the ones that go to trial,” said Michael Jackson, district attorney for Bibb, Dallas, Hale, Perry and Wilcox counties.

Posted by The Skipper     on 10/21/2005 at 11:43 AM   
Filed Under: • Crime • Politics •  
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Syria Implicated

We all saw this coming from a mile away. Syria, which sits on the UN’s Human Rights Committee has been directly implicated in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. In fact, the trail of blood leads all the way back to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s brother in law. The UN report on the assassination was released yesterday. Look for the UN to impose strict sanctions on Syria and to come down hard on the rogue regime .... aw, horse-crap - you know better than that. The UN won’t do a damned thing and Syria will keep on meddling in Lebanon and Iraq until the US finally decides to smash the crackpot Baathist regime of the Assad family ...

Brother-In-Law of Syrian Leader Implicated
UNITED NATIONS (AP)

The brother-in-law of Syria’s president was implicated in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, and Lebanese intelligence officials helped organize it, according to a U.N. inquiry that officially linked Damascus to the slaying for the first time.

The exhaustive report into the Feb. 14 car bomb that killed the popular opposition leader and 20 others stopped short of fingering Syrian President Bashar Assad or his inner circle. But it accused the regime of failing to cooperate in the inquiry and alleged Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-Sharaa lied in a letter to the investigating commission.

It also cites one witness as saying Assad’s brother-in-law Assef Shawkat, Syria’s military intelligence chief, set up a false confession to Hariri’s murder 15 days before it took place.

Syria rejected the report.

Chief investigator Detlev Mehlis’ findings were issued to the U.N. Security Council late Thursday and will almost certainly inflame tensions in the region.

The Security Council is likely to use the report to renew pressure on Syria to ease its continued influence on Lebanon. The council is expected to discuss it on Tuesday, and may consider sanctions against Syria.

The decision to assassinate Hariri “could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security officials and could not have been further organized without the collusion of their counterparts in the Lebanese security services,” the report said.

- Go Read Of This Disgusting Example Of Arab Terrorism and UN Impotence

Posted by The Skipper     on 10/21/2005 at 10:29 AM   
Filed Under: • Terrorists • United-Nations •  
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The Friday Diversion

Wax David!

Posted by Drew458     on 10/21/2005 at 10:06 AM   
Filed Under: • Humor •  
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Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:

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