Can this be true, Aljazeera report over 100,000 Iraqi deaths since war began? “Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess deaths or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq,” That’s a staggering figure!
Jesus H!! A 14 year old boy in France took his dads shotgun and shot his whole family (registration: cheat) killing both his parents and his brother. Only his sister survived. The description of the killing is sickening!
Good article here by Desmond Morris who wonders what we would do if we encountered living members of the ‘hobbit’. Would we cage them for experimentation, stick them in a zoo for display or treat them as fellow humans? Such a discovery would really make us question what it is to be human.
Morris concludes that it’s the ability to speak which would be the deciding factor, if they merely grunted we’d think they are fairly advances chimps, if they spoke a language perhaps we’d treat them more like fellow human beings and attempt to learn from them or teach them our ways.
Of course me being a cynical fucker thinks we’d simply cage them and cut them open. And no doubt such a discovery would bring all kinds of religious nuts out of the woodwork! But what a discovery it would be!!
Neil Horan the pretty-much-ex-priest who tried to tried to wreck the marathon at this years Olympics (not to mention a grandprix at Silverstone) was up in court on sex charges but was today aquitted of the charges of indecency with a seven-year-old girl in 1991. Turns out anyway he was actually naked in the presence of the child but she didn’t touch his penis! And that doesn’t count as “indecent”???
After the trial Horan, dressed in an Irish dancing outfit, danced a jig (or could have been a reel or hornpipe though) to celebrate. This guys is obviously completely nuts as well as being a pervert.
If you haven’t see this it’s quite interestring. Scientists have discovered a new species of human which was approximately 3 foot tall and lived in Indonesia about 12000 years ago. The new species Homo floresiensis (no wonder they are extinct – yeah ok you heard that one before) lived on the island of Flores which in itself is interesting because they must have arrived there by boat but boat/craft building was assumed to be beyond the intelligence of our earlier cousins.
Update: Better info available at Irish Indep. (registration required: cheat)
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Looks like things could really explode in New Zealand. Things have been going great in New Zealand for a number of years with a tourist boom and a Maori cultural renaissance. But things could be turning nasty as the government is planning to nationalise the coastline to prevent anyone from claiming property rights over the land. The problem is that the Maori claim the coastline is theirs.
This is almost reminiscent of Northern Ireland, the “we were here first – you’re stealing our land argument”. Hopefully both sides, especially the Maoris as their culture could be hurt most by this, will have enough sense to find a fair solution as it could be very damaging to New Zealand as a whole.
Just one of the stories from the earthquake in Japan. It always seems worse when there’s kids involved.
“The Cassini spacecraft has made a close pass of Saturn’s giant moon Titan which is expected to result in the closest views yet of the mysterious satellite. “
I’ve started using a cool program called Celestia a couple of months ago. Basically Celestia is a real-time space simulation which allows you to tour the universe checking out all known planets & stars as well as satellites & spacecraft (such as the aforementioned Cassini), comets and other such extra-terrestrial thingies. I’d highly recommend downloading it, and while your at it pay a visit to Celestia Motherlode and download some extras such as surface textures, NASA shuttles, satellites, nebulae and wormholes or fictional add-ons like Star Wars/Star Trek vessels.
Know what i saw today on the way home from work? A George Bush election poster … in Finland of all places!! I know they are pushing to get the expat vote but I really didn’t expect to see an election poster! Gas!
Tough case ongoing in France at the moment. A couple are being prosecuted for allowing a guest at their party to drive away drunk. The drunk man crashed shortly after leaving the party killing himself and 4 members of another family. Only a 5 year old girl survived the crash. The grandmother of the girl is bringing the case against the host couple saying they should have done more to prevent the guy driving off. The irony of the story is that the couple being prosecuted met the drunk driver because they themselves were victims of drink driving. Very interesting to see how this one turns out.