The Bush administration formally has accused North Korea of manufacturing high-quality counterfeit $100 "supernotes" for the first time, according to an indictment made public yesterday as part of a 16-year probe.
"Quantities of the supernote were manufactured in, and under auspices of the government of, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea)," said the indictment of Irish national Sean Garland and six others.
TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED the 1930's, 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's!!
First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us.
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes.
Then after that trauma, our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paints.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets.
As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.
Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.
We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.
We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.
We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.
No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.
We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.
We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video tape movies or DVD's, no surround sound, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms..........WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!
We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.
We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.
We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.
We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!
Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!
This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!
The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.
We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!
And YOU are one of them! CONGRATULATIONS!
You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good, and while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave their parents were.
Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn't it?!
City health inspectors, drawn by the overpowering stench of thousands of rotting sea-urchin carcasses, uncovered what they say was an illegal seafood-processing plant on Middlesex Street.
“I got a call (Tuesday) from an ambulance company saying ‘I drove by it and thought there might be a dead body in the building' because it did smell like a cadaver,” said city Health Director Frank Singleton. “You've got thousands of little bodies. It's almost like one big corpse.”
After September 2001, pollsters switched from recording spontaneous responses to presenting respondents with “forced-choice” questions. This switch, “probably made in order to more efficiently process the survey data, had the unintended effect of exaggerating the degree to which Americans saw a connection between Hussein and the attacks,” Althaus said.
In addition, most polls only permitted respondents to assess the likelihood that Saddam was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. Only one poll allowed respondents a range of options. This poll, sponsored by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, revealed that about one in five Americans believed Saddam was directly involved in the attacks.
“It appears that rather than becoming duped, as the popular account has it, the American public has gradually grown more critical of the idea that Hussein had a hand in 9/11,” the researchers wrote. “Rather than showing a gullible public blindly accepting the rationales offered by an administration bent on war, our analysis reveals a self-correcting public that has grown ever more doubtful of Hussein’s culpability since the 9/11 attacks.”
Hundreds of South Koreans gathered in downtown Seoul on Saturday as the city officially reopened a stream that had been hidden under cement paving stones for nearly 50 years.
The Cheonggyecheon, which runs 5.8km through central Seoul, was opened to the public after a two-year multimillion-dollar face-lift ordered by Mayor Lee Myung-bak, who had pledged to recover the city's ecological landscape.
"It seemed like a far-fetched dream when they first said they will restore the stream," said 59-year-old Yoo Young-koo, who runs a business in central Seoul. "It's really nice to have a place to rest and take a stroll right in the center of the city."
South Korea's drive for industrialization in the 1960s and 1970s has helped the country become the world's 11th-largest economy, but it has also trapped major cities like Seoul in walls of concrete.
The US$380 million project involved demolishing an elevated highway that was built on top of the Cheonggyecheon, which was paved over in 1958-61 to prevent flooding and pollution...
Venezuelan Tax Agency Orders Shutdown of IBM, Others
The Associated Press
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - Venezuela's tax agency said that it had imposed fines and ordered the temporary closure of several foreign companies, including International Business Machines, due to tax irregularities.
GOVERNMENT AND COMPUTER MANUFACTURERS CAUGHT INSTALLING HARD-WIRED KEYSTROKE LOGGERS INTO ALL NEW LAPTOP COMPUTERS!
Devices capture everything you ever type, then can send it via your ethernet card to the Dept. of Homeland Security without your knowledge, consent or a search warrant each time you log onto the internet!
Freedom Of Information Act Requests For Explanation From DHS, refused.
...British scientists have made a breakthrough in the control of malaria: by creating mosquitoes with fluorescent testicles.
The team of researchers at Imperial College London has found a way to tell the sex of the mosquitoes - by genetically modifying them so that the males express a glowing protein in their testes. A laser beam then singles out the glowing larvae, which are then separated from the females...
Sean Garland, 71, from Navan in County Meath, appeared at Belfast County Court on Saturday.
The US government alleges he and others bought, moved and either passed as genuine or re-sold high quality counterfeit $100 notes.
A defence lawyer said Mr Garland "strongly protested" his innocence.
The US authorites further allege that Mr Garland "arranged with North Korean agencies for the purchase of quantities of notes and enlisted other people to disseminate" the money, known as "superdollars", with the UK.
The conflict between All Qa' ida and the West must become solved by peaces negotiations under supervision of an independent agent. This says princess Irene of Lip-Biesterfeld Saturday in the peoples paper...
...The causes of the islamic violence have to make according to Irene with poverty, trade barriers, wrong proportions. ‘The differences between the property and the property-nots its entire out balance.'
"...One of the great pieces of information we got recently is 80 percent of the al Qaeda network in the north has been devastated. And those are not our figures, those came from the last six leaders in Mosul , al Qaeda leaders that we captured; they informed us of that. We also had a letter that was captured from Abu Zaid (sp) going to Zarqawi . We recently killed Zaid (sp) and we had that letter, and it also talked about the desperate situation for the al Qaeda and the insurgents in Mosul and in the north. And then also, sources we have inside the al Qaeda network up here have also informed us of that..."
...Democrats must "admit that they cannot simply grow themselves out of their electoral dilemmas," wrote William A. Galston and Elaine C. Kamarck, in a report released yesterday. "The groups that were supposed to constitute the new Democratic majority in 2004 simply failed to materialize in sufficient number to overcome the right-center coalition of the Republican Party."
Since Kerry's defeat, some Democrats have urged that the party adopt a political strategy more like one pursued by Bush and his senior adviser, Karl Rove -- which emphasized robust turnout of the party base rather than relentless, Clinton-style tending to "swing voters."
But Galston and Kamarck, both of whom served in the Clinton White House, said there are simply not enough left-leaning voters to make this a workable strategy. In one of their more potentially controversial findings, the authors argue that the rising numbers and influence of well-educated, socially liberal voters in the Democratic Party are pulling the party further from most Americans. [Avenger's note: Doh, it took'em this long to realize this?!?]
On defense and social issues, "liberals espouse views diverging not only from those of other Democrats, but from Americans as a whole. To the extent that liberals now constitute both the largest bloc within the Democratic coalition and the public face of the party, Democratic candidates for national office will be running uphill." ...
One of the great pieces of information we got recently is 80 percent of the al Qaeda network in the north has been devastated. And those are not our figures, those came from the last six leaders in Mosul , al Qaeda leaders that we captured; they informed us of that. We also had a letter that was captured from Abu Zaid (sp) going to Zarqawi . We recently killed Zaid (sp) and we had that letter, and it also talked about the desperate situation for the al Qaeda and the insurgents in Mosul and in the north. And then also, sources we have inside the al Qaeda network up here have also informed us of that. [Avengers note: this is the first time I've heard anyone mention that WE have penetrated AQ operations]
...
Like when we first got here in October, there was -- no hotline existed. We opened a hotline; we got about 40 calls a month prior to January. The last six months, we're up to 400 calls a month. Every day the citizens are stopping us on the street telling us where a potential suspicious individual is who may be a terrorist, and telling us where they tried to plant IEDs and those type of devices. So the population is clearly very confident.
...
Right now, 80 percent of the folks on the street in Mosul and Nineveh province in the north here say that they will vote. And very interesting -- these are -- many of the folks I talked to are Sunnis who are very upset that they were lied to last election, told not to vote, and they were very excited to vote this election.
...
COL. BROWN: We did face well-trained foreign fighters prior to January elections. We have not faced well-trained foreign fighters since. Since February of this year until now, we have not seen any well-trained, in fact, very poorly trained foreign fighters. So whoever was training them before, I don't know, but apparently they've lost their support and they're not able to train them and they've -- you know, now we're getting much younger -- we had 15- to 17-year- olds, very young. You know, we were estimating -- it's kind of hard, you know, when you see the remains of a suicide bomber, there's not much left. But from captured ones, and then reports from these folks, they were very young, 15- to 17-years-old; not well trained. And we have not seen well-trained foreign fighters at all since February. So wherever they were training before, I don't know, but it's sure not -- they're not doing it anymore that I'm aware of because they're not coming here and we have not seem them.
The personnel of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs’ office in Poltavskaya region arrested 39-year-old milker and watchman of one of the farms for cutting cows’ tails, Ukrainski Novyny reports.
The arrested man was in the state of alcoholic intoxication and became angry when one of the cows lashed his face with its tail.
“He could not imagine anything else but to cut cows’ tails”, a representative from the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ office reported.
The milker decided to cut the tails and realized what he was doing only after cutting the twelfth tail. Cows were crying from pain and lost a lot of blood.
The detainee explained that he had lost his temper.
Police officers initiated a case according to the article 299 of the Russian Criminal Code (cruelty to animals).
El Salvador's largest volcano, dormant for more than a century, shook the ground as it woke up on Saturday...
...Military emergency sirens blasted, calling for an immediate area evacuation...
...The volcano "has begun to expel magma on the side of the town of San Blas...
...Hot rocks belched out by the volcano ranged from the size of a football to the size of a car, a journalist on the scene reported.
...Two people were killed when 200 residents fled the hamlet of Palo Campana, located just 2km from the crater, Interior Minister Rene Figueroa said....
A University of Iowa law professor said she has received death threats after voicing her objections over the pink visitors' locker room at Kinnick Stadium in Iowa City.
Erin Buzuvis, 29, who moved from Boston to Iowa City to begin teaching at the law school, said she and several friends, colleagues and neighbors have been concerned for months about the message behind the locker rooms. She said the locker room promotes negative stereotypes.
Former Hawkeye football coach Hayden Fry had the visiting team's locker room painted pink in the 1970s. University officials have kept the color and expanded its use with the renovation under way at the stadium.
The carpeting, metal lockers, brick walls, sinks, shower floor -- even the urinals -- are pink.
"I've heard this is a way to honor a great coach, and Fry was a great coach," Buzuvis said. "But I don't think it does him any honor to perpetuate what is seen by many as a sexist and homophobic gesture."
