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Week 75

04.14.03

Man, the loot stories coming out of Iraq are pretty wild. Here's Saddam's yacht, blown to a smoldering hulk. "A black leather operating table"...?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi
/uk_news/2936603.stm

There's a secret escape hatch for submarines, too.

The Foreign Minister is off watching American DVDs and reading Danielle Steele novels.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles
/A4519-2003Apr10.html

It's just like a spy thriller, but it's not an American spy thriller. Basically it's like a *Bollywood* spy thriller. Check out the wack cyberspy angle on this promotional website on the latest Sunny Deol two-fisted shoot-'em-up.

http://www.theherothefilm.com/

 

04.15.03

Wow, it's an Iranian political joke that is almost, sort of, funny.

http://www.iranian.com/Anyway/
2003/April/coke.html

 

04.16.03

"Your money stinks of the corpse of the poet you never dared to become."

Yep, Aube, his daughter, finally raffled off Andre Breton's book collection.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/
2003/jan2003/bret-j11.shtml

I don't need to read French; I've got Google Translator.

http://www.lemonde.fr/imprimer_article_ref
/0,5987,3246--315923,00.html

"On the initiative of Laurence Calmels, I decided to digitize the collection, the files, photographs, books and manuscripts. At the beginning of May will open a data base which will place at the disposal, by Internet, the entirety of the contents of the street Fontaine, made thus available to all." Wow, good move Aube, good luck with that.

 

04.17.03

Okay, here's these Al Qaeda guys, and they're illegal aliens, and they work in some British factory, and in their no doubt not very copious spare time, they run credit card fraud to underwrite the racket.

Man, what kind of penny-ante terror outfit is that? Do they *have* to do that factory labor? They really need that nine bucks an hour that undocumented workers get, is that the story? They can't be doing it for cover; hell, they're illegal aliens, they don't even have real passports.

http://www.transparency.org/cgi-bin/
dcn-read.pl?citID=52442

Meanwhile, in the USA, it wasn't just a few guys running fraudulent, sleazy scams in the wreckage of 9.11. It was *hundreds* of guys. Martyrdom comes and goes, but petty theft is forever.

http://www.transparency.org/cgi-bin/
dcn-read.pl?citID=52456

 

04.18.03

The results for the world's stupidest security measures are in. Thank goodness somebody's measuring the depth of the stupidity here.

http://www.privacyinternational.org/activities
/stupidsecurity/

 

 

 


Bruce Sterling writes books like Darwin watched animals. Find out more about him, and read tattered electronic copies of Cheap Truth, at the Bruce Sterling Online Index. He lives with his wife Nancy and their two daughters in Austin, Texas.

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