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Smoking Kills… Cobras

Smoking Kills Cobras!

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Unconventional Treatment

Two years ago the US military invited Mr Mujahid … to prove his innocence before a special military tribunal … Mr Mujahid called four witnesses from Afghanistan. But months later the tribunal president returned with bad news: the witnesses could not be found … [and] he was returned to the wire-mesh cell where he remains today. The Guardian searched for Mr Mujahid’s witnesses and found them within three days. One was working for President Hamid Karzai.

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Reality Distortion Field Dented

Apple Computer uncovered what it called “irregularities” related to certain stock options … issued between 1997 and 2001, and involve one grant to Chief Executive Steve Jobs … in at least one instance of grants in the period, options were dated immediately before an event that fueled a rally in the company’s stock price. That was on Aug. 5, 1997, when Apple issued options on 162,357 shares. The following day Microsoft announced it would invest $150 million in Apple.

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Bono: I Can’t Stand Whingeing Rock Stars

CHARLIE ROSE: How often do you just get tired of it and say, you know, justI got to get away, I’ve got toI can’t

BONO: Oh, I can’t stand

CHARLIE ROSE:I can’t take one more

BONO:whingeing pop stars. I mean, I reallytheythat really

CHARLIE ROSE: Yes.

BONO:you know, that really upsets me, the whingeing rock stars. I lookI know I’m spoiled.

Thanks Slate!

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School’s Out

In January 2003, Spc. Sean Baker put on a Guantanamo prisoner’s uniform to allow soldiers to practice extracting a prisoner from a cell. The extraction team did not know that Baker was an American. He recalls, “They grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me while I was face down.” Guard Scott Sinclair “began to choke me and press my head against the floor.” He twice “slammed my head against the floor and continued to choke me.” Baker was hospitalized for brain trauma, given a medical discharge, and continues to suffer from regular seizures. The videotape of the training exercise was lost.

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Big Box Miracle

Together with a few sister big box stores (Target, Best Buy, and Home Depot), Wal-Mart accounts for roughly 50% of Americas much vaunted productivity growth edge over Europe during the last decade. Fifty percent! Similar advances in wholesaling supply chains account for another 25%! The notion that Americans have gotten better at everything while other rich countries have stood still is thus wildly misleading. The US productivity miracle and the emergence of Wal-Mart-style retailing are virtually synonymous.

More here.

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Kabul Tailor Blues

“Nearly five years on, there is no rule of law, no accountability. The Afghans know it is all a charade, and they see us as not only complicit but actively involved. You cannot fight a terror war and build a weak state at the same time, and it was a terrible mistake to think we could” … In the modest Kabul tailor shop, Mohammed Jan, 50, snipped a pattern with shears. He said he brought his family back from Iran two years ago “because we were told there was democracy. Instead the old warlords are back,” he said. “At night people are robbed at home. In the day they are robbed at the ministries. I feel cheated and full of sorrow.”

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Slip And Slide Suicide

Should all of [Greenland's] ice sheet ever thaw, the meltwater could raise sea level 21 feet and swamp the world’s coastal cities, home to a billion people … the glaciers of Greenland are melting twice as fast as they were five years ago … The increasingly erratic behavior of the Greenland ice has scientists wondering whether the climate, after thousands of years of relative stability, may again start oscillating … computer models on which climate predictions are based did not take the dynamics of the glaciers into account … the monolith of ice is constantly on the move … [they have] accelerated in response to warmer temperatures, as summer meltwater lubricated the base of the ice sheet and allowed it to slide faster toward the sea. In a way no one had detected, the warm water made its way through thousands of feet of ice to the bedrock in weeks, not decades or centuries … On the eastern edge of Greenland, the Kangerlussuaq Glacier, like the Jakobshavn, has surged, doubling its pace. To the west, the Helheim Glacier now appears to be moving about half a football field every day … If they all slide too quickly, there is a possibility that … they could collapse suddenly and release the entire ice sheet into the ocean.

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Mogadishu Musical Chairs

A fundamentalist Muslim whom the U.S. suspects of collaborating with Al Qaeda terrorists was named Saturday as the new leader of an Islamist militia that has seized control of [Mogadishu]. The militia … appointed Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys as its new leader. The Bush administration has alleged that Aweys was an associate of Osama bin Laden in the 1990s … Aweys replaces Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, who is considered a moderate in comparison … Ahmed also agreed last week to stop military action and recognize the largely powerless interim government, which is based in Baidoa, 140 miles northwest of Mogadishu. Aweys has condemned that government and any attempts to install a Western-style democracy.

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50,000 And Rising

At least 50,000 Iraqis have died violently since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion … a toll 20,000 higher than previously acknowledged by the Bush administration … Proportionately, it is equivalent to 570,000 Americans being killed nationwide in the last three years.

Using this scaling that makes the equivalent of roughly 3,500 killed each week, week after week, since 2003. That’s a vaguely comparable death toll to the jetliner attacks of September 11th, 2001, on the United States. Except for the Iraqis it’s now a weekly occurrence.

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