May 2004

"a Ponzi scheme is an ingenious method to expropriate state assets by a politically well-connected promoter in a transition economy"

"The Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha quietly decided to set the locks to all zeros in order to circumvent this safeguard"

"President Bush's utter incompetence has made the world a far more dangerous place and dramatically increased the threat of terrorism"

but colonial attitudes threaten: CPA personnel are "incapable of seeing Iraqi intellectuals, writers and academics as partners"

"The 71-year-old justice minister said TV images from Rafah reminded him of the suffering of his own family."

siltation has reduced the dam to 10% of its original storage capacity and power generation to 2% of planned - and 400,000 people were displaced for this

"A thousand pigeons, each with a two ounce explosive capsule, landed at intervals on a specific target might be a seriously inconvenient surprise."

"A: They were young and they had no weapons. ... Q: What kind of firepower was employed? A: M-16s, 50-cal. machine guns. Q: You fired into six or ten kids? Were they all taken out? A: Oh, yeah."

"Sometimes we would go with empty trailers; we would go both ways. We'd turn around and go back with empty trailers."

"Traveling on a containership is not better than sex, though it does last longer. It is an experience you will never forget."

"When Iraqis are blown apart in Baghdad by a car bomb, or Israelis in Haifa by a suicide bomber, these are instantly and correctly labelled as terrorist attacks."

"Ok, I admit it. I was just a front-man for the real fathers of Linux, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus."

"hundreds of radiological, chemical and biological tests were conducted in which hundreds of thousands of people were used as test subjects"

Ahmed Rashid: "the most objective history I have read of the many failures of the CIA and the US government in [the Middle East]"

"South Korea's traditionally noisy leftists will find it hard to scream bloody murder now that they run the country"

"Leftist parties, which have promised to support a Congress-led government, could give the opposition the edge it would need to take power"

"sensationalist media, religious fanatics, and alternative medical practitioners" help revive pertussis

and with them will come an increase in teenage pregnancies, abortions, and sexually transmitted diseases

"the Beatles' journey into their time now appears in its own way no less surprising and world-modifying than the developments of Picasso"

"just take your Puppets, your tanks, your smart weapons, your dumb politicians, your lies, your empty promises, your rapists, your sadistic torturers and go"

"a young man whose 17-year-old girlfriend lets him take a picture of her in the nude to keep in his wallet is theoretically liable to 14 years' imprisonment"

"It stretches from prisons in Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantánamo to secret CIA prisons around the world."

"Their censorship orders are totally groundless, absolutely arbitrary, at odds with the basic standards of civilisation, and as counter to scientific common sense as witches and wizardry."