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Canada's governing Conservative Party has expelled one of its Members of Parliament -- for blogging. Garth Turner, Conservative MP for Halton, author of "The Turner Diaries Report" (link) was today suspended from the ruling party's caucus because of his blog. "There is [sic] attacks that were made on individuals, including the Prime Minister," explained Conservative MP Rahim Jaffer. "The theme of confidentiality was not being respected, in their opinion, and it restricted the ability for members to operate in a confidential way." At least one national pundit compares the exiling to 1984.
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Web-rage. Man attacked with pickaxe after insults exchanged in an internet chatroom.
comment posted at 9:55 AM on Oct-18-06

Sniper training starts a little earlier these days. Forget violence in video games - the best way to teach your kids how to kill is still with a good old-fashioned Nerf war. Still, is creating a new generation of sharpshooters really the best idea?
comment posted at 10:03 AM on Oct-18-06

Evolutionary theorist Dr Curry predicts humanity will "split in two". At the very least this should provide material for playground insults. At the top end, as Dr Curry says, we could be living in Wells' The Time Machine. Only without the time machine, sadly.
comment posted at 8:20 AM on Oct-17-06

Ms Dewey: A is a search engine with a "human" face. I can't understand why anyone would think this is a good idea, but whoever did seems to have spent a lot of money doing it.
comment posted at 11:46 PM on Oct-16-06

Mexican government bans American Catholics who sued Mexico City Prelate The Mexican government took the unprecedented and controversial step of banning Dave Clohessy of SNAP and Jeffrey Anderson, a lawyer specializing in abuse cases, from entering the country for five years. The men had filed a lawsuit against Mexico City Archbishop Norbeto Rivera, who they allege covered up sex abuse in his diocese.
comment posted at 4:27 PM on Oct-16-06

Air samples over North Korea show no radiation "It is possible there was no radiological data. That could be the case if: the North Koreans successfully sealed the site; it was such a small detonation and so deep underground there was no escape of nuclear debris; or the test was actually conventional explosives."
comment posted at 2:45 PM on Oct-13-06

"As the Arabs see the Jews" by His Majesty King Abdullah, The American Magazine, November, 1947. This fascinating essay, written by King Hussein’s grandfather King Abdullah, appeared in the United States six months before the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
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Both are open 24 hours a day, and serve as a "mecca" to their respective worshipers. One was ordained by Allah as a place of worship on Earth to reflect the house in Jannah called al-Baytu l-Maˤmur. The other was built by the house of Jobs to showcase Macs and iPods. Is Apple's Fifth Avenue Cube (QTVR) mocking the Kaaba? Some Islamic website thinks it's a new insult to Islam.
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An international manhunt is under way seeking the man who expressed his displeasure of Polish president Lech Kaczynski by forcefully expelling intestinal gas. No word on whether he did another for the president's twin brother, nor whether he will attempt arson by lighting these farts on fire.
comment posted at 8:52 PM on Oct-10-06

Newsfilter: Chechen war reporter found dead - Anna Politkovskaya. Courageous reporting from the "forgotten" conflicts in Caucasus. I guess she found out the truth too often.
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In a corporate jet flying 37,000 feet above the Amazon rainforest, I heard the three words I will never forget: “We’ve been hit.”
comment posted at 10:05 AM on Oct-4-06

You Jackin' It? The Daily Show's Jason Jones gets an interview with Carl Monday, CLEVELAND'S INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER, discussed here previously.
comment posted at 11:24 PM on Sep-29-06

Get your Yom Kippur Piñatas here! Why atone for your sins in shul when you can just whack the heck out of a carboard horsey? If you'd like to carry the south-of-the-border theme through, you can play music by these guys. Or kick it old-shul with this classic. You could just gather for a traditional game of swing the chicken, but maybe not for a kids' party.
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A POW takes a Rolex on credit: an amazing story told by the original documents.
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He loves tradition: "[He] said he came to Virginia because he wanted to play football in a place where 'blacks knew their place'."

He gives free food to the poor: "After they had killed a deer, [he asked] where the local black residents lived. [He] then drove... to that neighborhood with the severed head of the deer. 'He proceeded to take the doe's head and stuff it into a mailbox'".

And even before "macaca", he enjoyed giving out clever nicknames: "[He] gave him the nickname 'Wizard,' because he shared a last name with.... the imperial wizard of the United Klans of America".

(But don't call him a Jew! That would be an "aspersion.")
comment posted at 10:34 PM on Sep-24-06

Osama bin Dead for a month? PARIS (Reuters) - A French regional newspaper quoted a French secret service report on Saturday as saying that Saudi Arabia is convinced that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden died of typhoid in Pakistan last month.
comment posted at 10:26 AM on Sep-23-06

Folks, the condom broke Friday night and I searched all weekend for someone who could prescribe me EC. It is now Monday and I have to report that I have been unable to find anyone who will write me a fucking prescription for EC. None of the hospitals in the surrounding counties would write it for me. I stopped my search at about 100 miles from my home because my telephone book wouldn't take me out any further than that.

I have been asked about my sexual practices. Whether I'm 'monogamous' or 'in a relationship' if I'm married, if I have kids, how many kids I have, if I was raped or 'traumatized' but there wasn’t' ONE question about my health. Not one. The few places that said that they had a doctor who would occasionally write prescriptions for EC told me that I had to ask for that doctor specifically and then they proceeded to tell me that I would be 'interviewed' to see if I meet that doctors 'criteria' and then they proceeded to ask me all the above questions before telling me that I should 'try anyway' and I 'might be able to talk him into it'.

comment posted at 4:25 PM on Sep-22-06

The atheist. "Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explains why God is a delusion, religion is a virus, and America has slipped back into the Dark Ages."
comment posted at 8:37 AM on Sep-22-06

Senators cave on torture.
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Chris Columbus's Indiana Jones and the Monkey King and Jeb Stuart's Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars are just two rejected sequel scripts for the Indiana Jones franchise. Tom Stoppard, Steven Gaghan, Jeffrey Boam, M. Night Shyamalan, and Frank Darabont each submitted treatments and scripts of their own, but Steven Spielberg and George Lucas (or, more probably, just George Lucas) swatted down every idea until finally Jeff Nathanson's concept was greenlighted--and even that's still being reworked by David Koepp. But with Harrison Ford now older than Sean Connery was in Last Crusade and Steven Spielberg still hobbled by other commitments, it's not clear that Indiana Jones 4 won't be just another false start. The only Indy movie that looks at all certain is the one that Daniel Clowes is making.
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Our very own ZippityBuddha's guide to the changes made to Star Wars , now with added continuity with dinosaurs and various anime series. [via mefi projects]
comment posted at 9:12 AM on Sep-20-06

Meet our new Special Envoy to Darfur, where genocide is taking place-- Andrew Natsios--he did a heckuva job at the Big Dig in Boston, and in misunderestimating the costs of Iraq, and --while head of USAid--at refusing funding AIDS drugs in Africa because many Africans 'don't know what Western time is.
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Gonzales wants Internet records saved for two years. Because any of you could be child porn perverts. "Gonzales acknowledged the concerns of some company executives who say legislation might be overly intrusive and encroach on customers' privacy rights. But he said the growing threat of child pornography over the Internet was too great.
comment posted at 4:24 PM on Sep-19-06

After two months of sifting the information, Hegland had her answer. 'The data was really clear,' she says. 'It was mind-boggling.' It showed that most of the detainees hadn’t been caught 'on the battlefield' but rather mostly in Pakistan; fewer than half were accused of fighting against the U.S., and there was scant evidence to confirm that they were even combatants. In other words, most of the detainees probably were entirely innocent. Just a few days after Hegland published a three-part series on her findings in early February, a law professor at Seton Hall University... and his son, ...who together have represented Guantanamo detainees, published a study that also used the Defense Department’s own data... Only 8 percent of detainees at Guantanamo were labeled by the Defense Department as 'al Qaeda fighters,' they found, and just 11 percent had been captured 'on the battlefield' by coalition forces.

Who are the Prisoners at Gitmo?
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