The Mack Attack

Thought-provoking clap-trap for the skeptic-minded

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

http://www.armorofgodpjs.com/


"Shoot The White Bitch..."

Krugersdorp, South Africa - A white businesswoman has been raped and sodomized by four black men who kidnapped her and threatened to "shoot the white bitch".
The ordeal began when the 49-year-old woman stopped at a dept. store about 4 p.m.on the road to Randfontein, said police spokesperson Paula Nothnagel.
All of a sudden, there were men at the window of her vehicle.
Four men got into the car and put a revolver to her head.

They ordered her to drive to a nearby mine dump, where
the woman was robbed, kicked,beaten, raped and sodomized.
They tied her hands behind her back and shouted, 'Shoot the white bitch'.

After they took her jewelry, cellphone and credit cards from her bag, they fled, but told her they would return, "to get her".
She managed to free her hands and found her car still had the keys in the ignition.
Nothnagel said that the "seriously traumatized" woman drove to a doctor in Krugersdorp for treatment.

Sunday, August 27, 2006


Two Great Tastes...

Dozens of rural women in the southwestern district of Kapilvastu have stripped naked and ploughed their fields in a desperate attempt to appease the rain god following continuous draught.
Reports said some 50 naked women of Kapilvastu village went to their fields in the dead of the night on Saturday, ploughed the parched field and planted paddy, symbolically. The ‘all-women show’ went on along with reciting of prayers for rain.
Reports said the women made high-pitch cries, which is part of the ritual, as they worked in their fields.

“This is a tradition. We go to the fields without any clothes on and carry out the ritual to appease the gods for rain,” a
participating woman told the BBC Nepali Service.
Women in Kapilvastu villages had done such rituals in previous years as well after continuous drought.

That Go Great Together...

An Indian man born with two penises wants to get one of them removed so that he can marry, a report said Saturday.
The 24-year-old businessman checked himself into a city hospital for the operation after having lived all his life with the rare condition medically known as penile duplication or diphallus, the Times of India said. "It is an extremely rare condition. More so because two fully functional penises is unheard of even in medical literature," the newspaper quoted a doctor as saying. "In the more common form of diphallus, one organ is rudimentary." The doctor said the operation would be extremely complicated as surgeons would have to ensure that the retained organ was fully functional. The report did not name the patient or hospital to protect the man's identity. The developmental abnormality is found in one in 5.5 million men and only around 100 such cases have been reported since the first one in 1609, the newspaper said.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

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Tuesday, August 22, 2006

THE DRAFT BEGINS!

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Marine Corps said Tuesday it has been authorized to recall thousands of unwilling non-volunteer Marines to active duty, primarily because of a shortage of volunteers for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Up to 2,500 Marines will be brought back at any one time, but there is no cap on the total number of Marines who may be forced back into service in the coming years as the military battles the war on terror. The call-ups will begin in the next several months.

This is the first time the Marines have had to use the involuntary recall since the early days of the Iraq combat. The Army has ordered back about 14,000 soldiers since the start of the war.
Marine Col. Guy A. Stratton, head of the manpower mobilization section, estimated that there is a current shortfall of about 1,200 Marines needed to fill positions in upcoming unit deployments.

The call-up affects Marines in the Individual Ready Reserve, a segment of the reserves that consists mainly of those who left active duty but still have time remaining on their eight-year military obligation.
Generally, Marines enlist for four years, then serve the other four years either in the regular Reserves, where they are paid and train periodically, or they may elect to go into the IRR. Marines in the IRR are only obligated to report one day a year but can be involuntarily recalled to active duty.

Saturday, August 19, 2006


Masturbating Judge gets four years

BRISTOW, Okla.- A former judge convicted of exposing himself while presiding over jury trials by using a sexual device under his robe was sentenced Friday to four years in prison.
Donald Thompson had spent almost 23 years on the bench and had served as a state legislator before retiring from the court in 2004. He showed no reaction when he was sentenced.
At his trial this summer, his former court reporter, Lisa Foster, testified that she saw Thompson expose himself at least 15 times during trial between 2001 and 2003. Prosecutors said he also used a device known as a penis pump during at least four trials in the same period.
Thompson, 59, was convicted last month of four felony courts of indecent exposure for incidents that took place in his Creek County courtroom.
Thompson, a married father of three grown children, testified that the penis pump was given to him as a joke by a longtime hunting and fishing buddy.
"It wasn't something I was hiding," he said.
He said he may have absentmindedly squeezed the pump's handle during court cases but never used it to masturbate.
Foster told authorities that she saw Thompson use the device almost daily during the August 2003 murder trial of a man accused of shaking a toddler to death. A whooshing sound could be heard on Foster's audiotape of the trial. When jurors asked the judge about the sound, Thompson said he hadn't heard it but would listen for it.
Police built a case against the judge after a police officer testifying in a 2003 murder trial saw a piece of plastic tubing disappear under Thompson's robe. During a lunch break, officers took photographs of the pump under the desk.
Investigators later checked the carpet, Thompson's robes and the chair behind the bench and found semen, according to court records.

A search of his chambers further revealed pornographic images of Native American women in various sexual poses.
Carmelia Brossett, a senior probation officer for the state Department of Corrections, said in a presentencing report that Thompson refused to undergo psychosexual testing.
"Thompson's denial of the offense would likely present difficulty, if not inability for treatment providers to provide meaningful and beneficial sex-offender treatment," she said.
The jury recommended a sentence of one year in prison and a $10,000 fine on each count. The jury foreman has said it was the jury's intent that Thompson serve the full sentence.
Judge C. Allen McCall denied a defense motion asking that Thompson be allowed to remain free pending an appeal. Thompson was also ordered to pay a $40,000 fine.

Friday, August 18, 2006

Have Demons Broken Through?

Residents are wondering if an animal found dead over the weekend may be the mysterious creature that has mauled dogs, frightened residents and been the subject of local legend for half a generation.
The animal was found near power lines along Route 4 on Saturday, apparently struck by a car while chasing a cat. The carcass was photographed and inspected by several people who live in the area, but nobody is sure exactly what it is.
Michelle O'Donnell of Turner spotted the animal near her yard about a week before it was killed. She called it a "hybrid mutant of something."
"It was evil, evil looking. And it had a horrible stench I will never forget," she told the Sun Journal of Lewiston. "We locked eyes for a few seconds and then it took off. I've lived in Maine my whole life and I've never seen anything like it."
For the past 15 years, residents across Androscoggin County have reported seeing and hearing a mysterious animal with chilling monstrous cries and eyes that glow in the night. The animal has been blamed for attacking and killing a Doberman pinscher and a Rottweiler the past couple of years.
People from Litchfield, Sabattus, Greene, Turner, Lewiston and Auburn have come forward to speak of a mystery monster that roams the woods. Nobody knows for sure what it is, and theories have ranged from a hyena or dingo to a fisher or coydog, an offspring of a coyote and a wild dog.
Now, people are asking if the mystery beast and the animal killed over the weekend are one and the same.
Wildlife officials and animal control officers declined to go to Turner to examine the remains. By Tuesday, the carcass had been picked clean by vultures and there was not much left of the dead animal.
Loren Coleman, a Portland author and cryptozoologist, said it's unlikely that the animal was anybody's pet.
After reviewing photos of the carcass, Coleman said he was bothered by the animal's ears and snout. It reminded him of a case years ago in northern Maine in which an animal shot by a hunter could not be identified. In the end, wildlife officials got a DNA analysis that showed the animal was a rare wolf-dog hybrid, he said.
Mike O'Donnell, who is married to Michelle O'Donnell, said the animal looked "half-rodent, half-dog" to him.
It was charcoal gray, weighed between 40 and 50 pounds and had a bushy tail, a short snout, short ears and curled fangs hanging over its lips, he said. It looked like "something out of a Stephen King story."
"This is something I've never seen before. It's an evil-looking thing," he said.

Truth behind Lebanon invasion?


WASHINGTON, Aug 8 - Israel has argued that the war against Hezbollah's rocket arsenal was a defensive response to the Shiite organisation's threat to Israeli security, but the evidence points to a much more ambitious objective -- the weakening of Iran's deterrent to an attack on its nuclear sites. In planning for the destruction of most of Hezbollah's arsenal and prevention of any resupply from Iran, Israel appears to have hoped to eliminate a major reason the George W. Bush administration had shelved the military option for dealing with Iran's nuclear programme -- the fear that Israel would suffer massive casualties from Hezbollah's rockets in retaliation for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. One leading expert on Israeli national defence policy issues believes the aim of the Israeli campaign against Hezbollah was to change the Bush administration's mind about attacking Iran. Edward Luttwak, senior adviser to the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, says Bush administration officials have privately dismissed the option of air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities in the past, citing estimates that a Hezbollah rocket attack in retaliation would kill thousands of people in northern Israel. But Israeli officials saw a war in Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah's arsenal and prevent further resupply in the future as a way to eliminate that objection to the military option, says Luttwak. The risk to Israel of launching such an offensive was that it would unleash the very rain of Hezbollah rockets on Israel that it sought to avert. But Luttwak believes the Israelis calculated that they could degrade Hezbollah's rocket forces without too many casualties by striking preemptively. "They knew that a carefully prepared and coordinated rocket attack by Hezbollah would be much more catastrophic than one carried out under attack by Israel," he says. Gerald M. Steinberg, an Israeli specialist on security affairs at Bar Ilon University who reflects Israeli government thinking, did not allude to the link between destruction of Hezbollah's rocket arsenal and a possible attack on Iran in an interview with Bernard Gwertzman of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York last week. But he did say there is "some expectation" in Israel that after the U.S. Congressional elections, Bush "will decide that he has to do what he has to do." Steinberg said Israel wanted to "get an assessment" of whether the United States would "present a military attack against the Iranian nuclear sites as the only option." If not, he suggested that Israel was still considering its own options. Specialists on Iran and Hezbollah have long believed that the missiles Iran has supplied to Hezbollah were explicitly intended to deter an Israeli attack on Iran. Ephraim Kam, a specialist on Iran at Israel's Jaffe Centre for Strategic Studies, wrote in December 2004 that Hezbollah's threat against northern Israel was a key element of Iran's deterrent to a U.S. attack. Ali Ansari, an associate professor at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and author of a new book on the U.S. confrontation with Iran, was quoted in the Toronto Star Jul. 30 as saying, "Hezbollah was always Iran's deterrent force against Israel." Iran has also threatened direct retaliation against Israel with the Shahab-3 missile from Iranian territory. However, Iran may be concerned about the possibility that Israel's Arrow system could intercept most of them, as the Jaffe Centre's Kam observed in 2004. That elevates the importance to Iran of Hezbollah's ability to threaten retaliation. Hezbollah received some Soviet-era Katyusha rockets, with a range of only five miles, and a hundreds of longer-range missiles after Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000. But Israel's daily Haaretz, citing a report by Israeli military intelligence at the time, has reported that the number of missiles and rockets in Hezbollah hands grew to more 12,000 in 2004. That was when Iranian officials felt that the Bush administration might seriously consider an attack on their nuclear sites, because it knew Iran was poised to begin enrichment of uranium. It was also when Iranian officials began to imply that Hezbollah could retaliate against any attack on Iran, although they have never stated that explicitly. The first hint of Iranian concern about the possible strategic implications of the Israeli campaign to degrade the Hezbollah missile force in southern Lebanon came in a report by Michael Slackman in the New York Times Jul. 25. Slackman quoted an Iranian official with "close ties to the highest levels of government" as saying, "They want to cut off one of Iran's arms." The same story quoted Mohsen Rezai, the former head of Iran's Revolutionary guards, as saying, "Israel and the U.S. knew that as long as Hamas and Hezbollah were there, confronting Iran would be costly" -- an obvious reference to the deterrent value of the missiles in Lebanon. "So, to deal with Iran, they first want to eliminate forces close to Iran that are in Lebanon and Palestine." Israel has been planning its campaign against Hezbollah's missile arsenal for many months. As Matthew Kalman reported from Tel Aviv in the San Francisco Chronicle on Jul. 21, "More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail." Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's main purpose in meeting with Bush on May 23 was clearly to push the United States to agree to use force, if necessary, to stop Iran's uranium enrichment programme. Two days before the meeting, Olmert told CNN that Iran's "technological threshold" is "very close". In response to a question about U.S. and European diplomacy on the issue, Olmert replied: "I prefer to take the necessary measures to stop it, rather than find out later that my indifference was so dangerous." At his meeting with Bush, according to Yitzhak Benhorin of Israel's ynetnews, Olmert pressed Bush on Israel's intelligence assessment that Iran would gain the technology necessary to build a bomb within a year and expressed fears that diplomatic efforts were not going to work. It seems likely that Olmert discussed Israel's plans for degrading Hezbollah's missile capabilities as a means of dramatically reducing the risk of an air campaign against Iran's nuclear sites, and that Bush gave his approval. That would account for Olmert's comment to Israeli reporters after the meeting, reported by the Israel's ynetnews, but not by U.S. news media: "I am very, very, very satisfied." Bush's refusal to do anything to curb Israel's freedom to wreak havoc on Lebanon further suggests that he encouraged the Israelis to take advantage of any pretext to launch the offensive. The Israeli plan may have given Vice President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld new ammunition for advocating a strike on Iran's nuclear sites. Rumsfeld was the voice of administration policy toward Iran from 2002 to 2004, and he often appeared to be laying the political groundwork for an eventual military attack on Iran. But he has been silenced on the subject of Iran since Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice took over Iran policy in January 2005. Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in June 2005.

Sunday, August 13, 2006

Sicko dressed as priest on the run

SANTA ROSA, Calif. - A Roman Catholic bishop apologized Saturday for waiting several days to notify authorities about sexual abuse allegations against a priest, a delay that may have allowed the priest to flee to Mexico.
Bishop Daniel Walsh of the Santa Rosa diocese said in a one-page statement to parishioners that he put “caution” before “doing the right thing” in handling the allegations against The Rev. Xavier Ochoa.
Church officials say Ochoa admitted April 28 to sexually abusing a 12-year-old altar boy, but the allegations were not reported to Child Protective Services until May 1, and Ochoa disappeared the next day.
“I made an error in judgment by waiting to report Rev. Ochoa’s admission,” Walsh wrote in the statement, distributed at Saturday Mass throughout the diocese, which stretches from Santa Rosa to the Oregon border. “I should have acted immediately, and not delayed. For this I am deeply sorry.”
Ochoa, 68, was charged June 22 with 10 felony counts and one misdemeanor count of child sex abuse involving three boys he allegedly abused. A warrant was issued for his arrest.
Walsh said the public admission could aid prosecutors in filing criminal charges against him.
Prosecutors said last month they were investigating whether church officials violated a state law requiring doctors, nurses, teachers and clergy members to immediately report child sex abuse claims.
“If I am found guilty for not taking immediate action, I will accept whatever punishment is imposed,” Walsh said.
Sonoma County District Attorney Stephan Passalacqua told The (Santa Rosa) Press Democrat on Saturday he had not seen the letter and that the investigation was pending.

Friday, August 11, 2006

Ahmadinejad disses Bush

60 Minutes Interview To Air Sunday


Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sat down with Mike Wallace in Tehran on Tuesday in a rare, exclusive interview with a Western reporter.

In the wide-ranging interview, the Iranian leader comments on President Bush's foreign policy, the lack of relations between Iran and the United States, Hezbollah, Lebanon and Iraq.

Speaking about President Bush's failure to answer his 18-page letter that criticized U.S. foreign policy, Ahmadinejad said, "Well, (with the letter) I wanted to open a window towards the light for the president so that he can see that one can look on the world through a different perspective. … We are all free to choose. But please give him this message, sir: Those who refuse to accept an invitation will not have a good ending or fate. You see that his approval rating is dropping every day. Hatred vis-à-vis the president is increasing every day around the world. For a ruler, this is the worst message that he could receive. Rulers and heads of government at the end of their office must leave the office holding their heads high."

On what the "conducive conditions" would be for Iran to establish relations with the U.S., the president said, "Well, please look at the makeup of the American administration, the behavior of the American administration. See how they talk down to my nation. And this recent resolution passed about the nuclear issue, look at the wording. They have given us — presented us with a package which we are studying right now. We even gave them a date for our response. Ignoring that, they passed a resolution. They want to build an empire. And they don't want to live side-by-side in peace with other nations. The American government, sir, it is very clear to me they have to change their behavior and everything will be resolved. (George W. Bush) believes that his power emanates from his nuclear warhead arsenals. The time of the bomb is in the past, it's behind us. Today is the era of thoughts, dialogue and cultural exchanges."

The report will be broadcast on 60 Minutes
this Sunday at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Hillary Gets Busted

NEW YORK - A "Presidential Bust" of U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton was unveiled on Wednesday at New York's Museum of Sex, where sculptor Daniel Edwards hopes it will spark discussion about sex, politics and celebrity.
Edwards, the artist who also created a life-size nude of Britney Spears giving birth on a bear-skin rug, said he wanted to capture Clinton's age and femininity in the sculpture.
Clinton's office had no immediate comment.
Edwards said his work features a soft "presidential smile" and wrinkles framing her eyes. A floral pattern runs across her breasts, which have faintly raised nipples, part of Edwards' effort to present Clinton "as a woman -- not a covered up person, but as a woman."
"I didn't want to give her a face lift or change her age," he said of his work.
"The key was to reveal her chest a little bit. She usually covers herself up, but I don't think that's necessary."

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Thor worshipper set to die

(Aug. 7) It is often said that inmates find God when they get to prison. That is only partly true for Michael Lenz. Once behind bars, he became a devoted pagan, worshipping multiple gods from Norse mythology -- some with familiar names such as the mighty Thor and his father, Odin.
Lenz, a drifter from Prince William County, Virginia, serving 29 years and 30 days in prison for burglary and firearm possession, converted to Asatru, an ancient heathen religion, and helped found a prison chapter called Ironwood Kindred.
The religion became the focal point of his life -- "the only thing that mattered to him," according to legal documents. And it was this devotion to his gods that, according to his testimony, prompted him to plan a murderous ambush at a makeshift pagan altar set up in a prison conference room.
Tonight, Lenz, who still practices Asatru from his cell on Virginia's death row, is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection for killing in the name of his gods. He has applied for a stay of execution by the U.S. Supreme Court and for clemency from Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D).
Lenz is one of a few inmates in Virginia prisons who practice Asatru. But in prisons across the United States, the number of converts has increased in recent years, according to experts, some of whom say prisoners find encouragement for violence in the gods they worship.
"This is a warrior thing," said Heidi Beirich, deputy director of the Intelligence Project for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups and extremist organizations. "What they take out of it is violence, physical dominance and racial purity. To them, Thor represents the ultimate white male."
Beirich said many of the inmates who have converted to Asatru or Odinism are white supremacists. "It is anti-Christian, and these particular pagan religions glorify deities created by the white race," she said. "They reflect values they are drawn to, like being really strong, being able to fight -- Thor with his hammer. And that's what they worship."
Beirich said there are racist and nonracist versions of the religion in prisons and among the general population.
Stephen McNallen, director of the Asatru Folk Assembly, a leading Asatru group in the United States, has been fielding calls from the media as Lenz's execution approaches.
"There is nothing in Asatru that would justify what he did," McNallen said of the killing by Lenz and Jeffrey Remington, Lenz's best friend, who also was an Asatru devotee.
"There is just not justification for what he did. Like any other group, we expect the holy powers to be honored. Clearly, when someone does something that is just plain wrong, just plain evil, obviously it hurts us. It hurts us in the same way that the lunatic-fringe Muslims hurt Islam. It is an embarrassment."
Once a Catholic altar boy, McNallen, 57, said he became a devotee of Asatru about 35 years ago while contemplating a career in the U.S. Army. "This warrior thing loomed in my own life," he said. He prefers not to use heathen or pagan as adjectives because, he said, both terms carry too much baggage.
"The best way to describe Asatru is to compare it with other native religions: Native American or other native or indigenous religions in any location on the globe," McNallen said in a telephone interview from his California home. "We are a group of people attempting to follow the way of our ancestors and look toward our ancestors as a source of spiritual comfort, nourishment and connection."
He estimated that 10,000 to 20,000 people in the United States share his religious beliefs and only a small percentage of devotees -- less than 5 percent -- are white supremacists. He guessed that a good number of those people are prison inmates.
What drew Lenz, 42, to Asatru while in prison is unclear. He had a "troubled childhood and adolescence," according to his clemency application. He was living in a tent in Prince William and broke into three homes and a restaurant to steal food. In 1993, he was convicted of burglary and possession of a firearm and sent to the Augusta, Ga. Correctional Center.
In court documents, he is described as a rule-abiding inmate with no violent episodes before or after the killing of Brent Parker.
Parker was a convicted murderer serving a 50-year sentence for killing a man in Winchester in 1985 by beating him for an hour. Parker laughed while beating the man, who did not fight back, taking breaks to smoke, according to court documents.
Lenz testified that Parker had threatened Remington and that his efforts to organize his Asatru group in prison were being "thwarted" by Parker.
On the evening of Jan. 16, 2000, Lenz, Parker, Remington and three other inmates attended a meeting of the Ironwood Kindred. A guard was stationed outside the door. Lenz read some poetry and afterward called Parker to the altar.
"I called [Parker] up to the altar and I asked him -- and I said to him, 'It has been a long, hard path between us,' " Lenz testified at his trial. "And Parker said, 'Yes, it is.' And I pulled a knife out of my pocket and I said, 'Are you trying to take it to the next step?' And he said, 'Yes, I am.' And so I stabbed him."
Remington also pulled a knife and began stabbing Parker. The three other inmates ran out of the room and notified the guard. The corrections officer called for backup and yelled at the two men to drop their knives -- an order they ignored. Parker was stabbed 68 times, according to the medical examiner's report, and received multiple stab wounds to the lungs and liver, each of which would have been fatal by themselves.
Remington also was sentenced to death for Parker's slaying, but he killed himself on death row in 2004.
Lenz's attorney, Jennifer L. Givens, said that Lenz's religion surely played a role in the killing but that the jury should have been told about Parker's history of violence. Her appeal to the Supreme Court is also based on the fact that a juror was reading a Bible during deliberations.

Sunday, August 06, 2006

A CONVENIENT SPOOF

A tiny little movie making fun of Al Gore, supposedly made by an amateur filmmaker, recently appeared on the popular Web site YouTube.com.
At first blush, "An Inconvenient Spoof" seemed like a scrappy little homemade film poking fun at Gore and his anti-global warming crusade.
In the movie, Gore is seen boring an army of penguins with his lecture and blaming global warming for everything, including Lindsay Lohan's thinness.
But when the Wall Street Journal tried to find the guy who posted this film — listed on YouTube as a 29-year-old — they found the movie didn't come from an amateur working out of his basement.
The film actually came from a slick Republican public relations firm called DCI, which just happens to have oil giant Exxon as a client.
Exxon denies knowing anything about the film, and DCI says, "We do not disclose the names of our clients, nor do we discuss the work we do on behalf of our clients."
Media ethicists say that if DCI is behind "An Inconvenient Spoof," they should fess up.
"Without the disclosure, it's really ethically questionable," said Diane Farsetta, a senior researcher at the Center for Media and Democracy.
Another question is why would this movie be done in a seemingly unprofessional way, to be shown alongside YouTube's mostly amateur videos, which feature lip-synching, odd performances and funny satires?
"They want it to look like this came from someone who really believes this, who is really critical of Al Gore and global warming," Farsetta said.
Ana Marie Cox, the Washington editor of Time.com, said Americans have come to distrust the mainstream media.
"They're more likely to believe something that comes straight from the horse's mouth," Cox said.
Public relations firms have long used computer technology to create bogus grassroots campaigns, which are called "Astroturf."
Now these firms are being hired to push illusions on the Internet to create the false impression of real people blogging, e-mailing and making films.
"People will become more savvy, and then the people who are making the fake videos will become more savvy about how to cover it up," Cox said.
So next time you're reading something on the Internet from a "real person" pushing a movie or defending an actor's alcohol-fueled rant — be wary. That real person might actually be a hired gun, selling you an idea through deception.

Saturday, August 05, 2006


Iran admits to arming Hizbullah

Iran admitted for the first time on Friday that it did indeed supply long-range Zelzal-2 missiles to Hizbullah.
Secretary-general of the "Intifada conference" Mohtashami Pur told an Iranian newspaper that Iran transferred the missiles so that they could be used to defend Lebanon, Jeruselem's Channel 1 reported.
The extent of Iran's intimate involvement in Hizbullah attacks is starting to emerge.
According to the defense establishment, the reason Hizbullah has not fired long-range Iranian-made Fajr missiles at Israel is due to Teheran's opposition. Israel now understands that without direct orders from the ayatollahs, Hizbullah is not allowed to use Iranian missiles in attacks against Israel.
The IDF also believes that it seriously damaged the long-range rocket array in the first night of air strikes almost three weeks ago and impaired Hizbullah's ability to fire the rockets.
The longer-range Zelzal missiles, manufactured by Iran and capable of reaching Tel Aviv, have also not been fired at Israel, and the IDF believes this is because it destroyed almost two-thirds of these in the Hizbullah arsenal.

Friday, August 04, 2006


BEIRUT, Lebanon (Aug. 4) -- Israel and Hezbollah fought bloody ground battles and exchanged fierce air and missile strikes Friday - including bombing raids that severed Lebanon's last major supply link with Syria and the outside world, and the guerrillas' deepest rocket attack inside Israel to date.
After days of desultory diplomacy, Washington said it was near agreement with France on a U.N. cease-fire resolution, possibly by early next week. But Israel and Hezbollah showed no signs of holding their fire.
Israeli aircraft on a mission to destroy weapons caches hit a refrigerated warehouse where farm workers were loading fruit, killing at least 28 near the Lebanon-Syria border. And three Hezbollah rockets landed near Hadera, 50 miles south of the Israel-Lebanon border; 188 rockets rained on other towns, killing three Israeli Arabs.
Given the determination of both Hezbollah and Israel to look victorious when the conflict finally ends, the worst of the fighting may still lie ahead with the militant Shiite guerrilla fighters perhaps making good on their threat to rocket Tel Aviv and Israel launching an all-out ground offensive, pushing northward to the Litani River.
Israeli military officials said Friday they completed the first phase of the offensive, securing a 4-mile buffer zone in south Lebanon, though pockets of Hezbollah resistance remained.
Defense Minister Amir Peretz told top army officers to begin preparing for a push to the Litani, about 20 miles north of the border - a move that would require Cabinet approval. Peretz vowed his forces would complete "the whole mission" of driving guerrilla fighters out of missile range, a defiant response to the Hezbollah leader's threat to launch missiles into Israel's largest city.
Israeli airstrikes destroyed four key bridges after dawn, severing Beirut's final major connection to Syria and raising the threat of severe shortages of food, gasoline and medicines within days. The attack in the Christian heartland just north of Beirut killed four civilians and a Lebanese soldier.
Israel said it targeted the bridges to stop the flow of weapons to Hezbollah from Iran through Syria. Those weapons include not only missiles, but sophisticated anti-tank missiles said to be responsible for most of the 44 Israeli soldiers killed in more than three weeks of fighting.
However, aid workers said the destroyed highway was a vital conduit for much-needed food and supplies, with Christiane Berthiaume of the World Food Program calling it Lebanon's "umbilical cord."
"This (road) has been the only way for us to bring in aid. We really need to find other ways to bring relief in," she said in Geneva, Switzerland.
Hospitals were in danger of closing soon because medicines, hospital supplies and fuel for generators was fast running out. Staples like milk, rice and sugar were growing short across the country. Lines at Beirut filling stations stretch longer by the day.
Dr. George Tomey, acting president of the American University of Beirut, said its Medical Center, one of the prime and best known medical facilities in the Middle East, will stop receiving new patients as of Monday, except for emergency cases.
Dr. Ghassan Hammoud, who runs a 320-bed hospital packed with war wounded in the southern port city of Sidon, said he may have to shut down within 10 days.
On the 24th day of the conflict, the State Department said Friday that the United States and France were nearing completion of a U.N. resolution designed to halt the fighting in Lebanon and to set out principles for a lasting cease-fire.
"We are very close to a final draft with the French on a text," the department spokesman Sean McCormack said.
In a sign of billowing support for Hezbollah's Shiite fighters across the Arab world, tens of thousands of Shiite Muslims protested in Baghdad's Sadr City slum, chanting "Death to Israel, Death to America," the biggest rally in support of the militant Shiite organization since the fighting began.
As of Friday the Associated Press count showed at least 559 Lebanese have been killed, including 482 civilians confirmed dead by the Health Ministry, 27 Lebanese soldiers and at least 50 Hezbollah guerrillas.
Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora said that 1 million people - or about a quarter of Lebanon's population - has fled the fighting. Others estimate some 800,000 Lebanese have been made refugee.
Since the fighting started, 74 Israelis have been killed, 44 soldiers and 30 civilians. More than 300,000 Israelis have fled their homes in the north, Israeli officials said.
Lebanese security officials and the state news agency said Israeli airstrikes flattened two southern houses Friday and that more than 50 people were buried in the rubble. Israel denied attacking the villages, Aita al-Shaab and Taibeh.
Friday's attack on the refrigerated warehouse in Lebanon's eastern Bekaa Valley killed at least 28 farm laborers as they loaded peaches and apples onto trucks bound for the Syrian market, Lebanese security and hospital officials said. Syria's official news agency, SANA, reported that 33 people were killed in the raid, including 23 Syrian workers.
Israeli army spokesman Capt. Jacob Dallal said the army suspected the warehouse was used for arms because it tracked a truck it believed was carrying weapons that went into the warehouse from the Syrian side. He said the truck stayed inside for about 90 minutes before returning to Syria.
Israel contends that Hezbollah gets almost all of its weaponry from Syria and by extension Iran. That's why it says cutting off the supply chain is essential - and why fighting Hezbollah after it has spent six years building up its arsenal is proving so painful to Israel.
On Friday, the army confirmed a Hezbollah anti-tank missile killed three soldiers and wounded two others in southeastern Lebanon.
In the last two days alone, these missiles have killed seven soldiers and damaged three Israeli-made Merkava tanks - mountains of steel that are vaunted as symbols of Israel's military might, the army said. It said Hezbollah has fired Russian-made Metis-M anti-tank missiles and owns European-made Milan missiles.
Hezbollah's sophisticated anti-tank missiles are perhaps the guerrilla group's deadliest weapon in Lebanon fighting, with their ability to pierce Israel's most advanced tanks. Experts say this is further evidence that Israel is facing a well-equipped army in this war, not a ragtag militia.
In the second front of Israel's offensive against Islamic militants, an airstrike early Saturday in the southern Gaza town of Rafah killed at least two Palestinians and wounded five others, officials said. The Israeli army said its aircraft fired at several armed Palestinians.

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

A Couple of Dicks

Man cuts off penis, throws it at police

Chicago--Before cops threw the book at him, Jakub Fik threw something unusual at them -- his penis.
Fik, 33, cut off his own penis during a Northwest Side rampage Wednesday morning. When confronted by police, Fik hurled several knives and his severed organ at the officers, police said. Officers stunned him with a Taser and took him into custody.
"We took him out without any serious injury, with the exception of his own," said Chicago Police Sgt. Edward Dolan of the 16th District.


Man cuts off penis in drunken bet

Latvia( July 21)--A man who cut off his own penis in a drunken bet had it stitched back on by Latvian doctors, the first such operation in the country's history.
While strongly under the influence of alcohol, the 30-year-old made a bet with his friend for 1000 Lats ($2600.00) that he would cut off his penis, according to a Latvian public television report.
He was taken to hospital with severe bleeding yesterday.
"We have had a few cases with penis traumas, when it was half-cut or damaged, but this is the first time that it was totally cut off - and brought to hospital in a plastic bag," said microsurgeon Aivars Tihonovs from Gailezers hospital in the Latvian capital, Riga.
The operation lasted three and a half hours as doctors had to sew six nerves back together, according to media reports.
"The first operation of this kind in the world was carried out in 1977, and it is still very rare," Dr Tihonovs said, adding that such surgery was sometimes needed after bomb explosions.
The surgeon said that he was proud of his work but also "really angry that he (the patient) did it to himself".
Doctors said that it would take four or five days to assess if the operation was successful. It would take about half a year to be sure that the man's penis was functioning properly.


Pentagon Lied To 9/11 Panel

Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon's initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.
Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said.
In the end, the panel agreed to a compromise, turning over the allegations to the inspectors general for the Defense and Transportation departments, who can make criminal referrals if they believe they are warranted, officials said.
"We to this day don't know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us," said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. "It was just so far from the truth. . . . It's one of those loose ends that never got tied."
Although the commission's landmark report made it clear that the Defense Department's early versions of events on the day of the attacks were inaccurate, the revelation that it considered criminal referrals reveals how skeptically those reports were viewed by the panel and provides a glimpse of the tension between it and the Bush administration.
A Pentagon spokesman said yesterday that the inspector general's office will soon release a report addressing whether testimony delivered to the commission was "knowingly false." A separate report, delivered secretly to Congress in May 2005, blamed inaccuracies in part on problems with the way the Defense Department kept its records, according to a summary released yesterday.
A spokesman for the Transportation Department's inspector general's office said its investigation is complete and that a final report is being drafted. Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said she could not comment on the inspector general's inquiry.
In an article scheduled to be on newsstands today, Vanity Fair magazine reports aspects of the commission debate -- though it does not mention the possible criminal referrals -- and publishes lengthy excerpts from military audiotapes recorded on Sept. 11. ABC News aired excerpts last night.
For more than two years after the attacks, officials with NORAD and the FAA provided inaccurate information about the response to the hijackings in testimony and media appearances. Authorities suggested that U.S. air defenses had reacted quickly, that jets had been scrambled in response to the last two hijackings and that fighters were prepared to shoot down United Airlines Flight 93 if it threatened Washington.
In fact, the commission reported a year later, audiotapes from NORAD's Northeast headquarters and other evidence showed clearly that the military never had any of the hijacked airliners in its sights and at one point chased a phantom aircraft -- American Airlines Flight 11 -- long after it had crashed into the World Trade Center.
Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold and Col. Alan Scott told the commission that NORAD had begun tracking United 93 at 9:16 a.m., but the commission determined that the airliner was not hijacked until 12 minutes later. The military was not aware of the flight until after it had crashed in Pennsylvania.
These and other discrepancies did not become clear until the commission, forced to use subpoenas, obtained audiotapes from the FAA and NORAD, officials said. The agencies' reluctance to release the tapes -- along with e-mails, erroneous public statements and other evidence -- led some of the panel's staff members and commissioners to believe that authorities sought to mislead the commission and the public about what happened on Sept. 11.
"I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described," John Farmer, a former New Jersey attorney general who led the staff inquiry into events on Sept. 11, said in a recent interview. "The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years. . . . This is not spin. This is not true."
Arnold, who could not be reached for comment yesterday, told the commission in 2004 that he did not have all the information unearthed by the panel when he testified earlier. Other military officials also denied any intent to mislead the panel.
John F. Lehman, a Republican commission member and former Navy secretary, said in a recent interview that he believed the panel may have been lied to but that he did not believe the evidence was sufficient to support a criminal referral.
"My view of that was that whether it was willful or just the fog of stupid bureaucracy, I don't know," Lehman said. "But in the order of magnitude of things, going after bureaucrats because they misled the commission didn't seem to make sense to me."


Mad Mel to Jews: Sorry

August 2, 2006 -- Mel Gibson's apology for his drunken, anti-semetic ramblings:

There is no excuse, nor should there be any tolerance, for anyone who thinks or expresses any kind of Anti-Semitic remark. I want to apologize specifically to everyone in the Jewish community for the vitriolic and harmful words that I said to a law enforcement officer the night I was arrested on a DUI charge. I am a public person, and when I say something, either articulated and thought out, or blurted out in a moment of insanity, my words carry weight in the public arena. As a result, I must assume personal responsibility for my words and apologize directly to those who have been hurt and offended by those words. The tenets of what I profess to believe necessitate that I exercise charity and tolerance as a way of life. Every human being is God’s child, and if I wish to honor my God I have to honor his children. But please know from my heart that I am not an anti-Semite. I am not a bigot. Hatred of any kind goes against my faith. I’m not just asking for forgiveness. I would like to take it one step further, and meet with leaders in the Jewish community, with whom I can have a one on one discussion to discern the appropriate path for healing.I have begun an ongoing program of recovery and what I am now realizing is that I cannot do it alone. I am in the process of understanding where those vicious words came from during that drunken display, and I am asking the Jewish community, whom I have personally offended, to help me on my journey through recovery. Again, I am reaching out to the Jewish community for its help. I know there will be many in that community who will want nothing to do with me, and that would be understandable. But I pray that that door is not forever closed.This is not about a film. Nor is it about artistic license. This is about real life and recognizing the consequences hurtful words can have. It’s about existing in harmony in a world that seems to have gone mad.

MEL GIBSON

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