November 2005

"It is the absolute responsibility of every U.S. service member, if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene, to stop it"

"the 17th time in less than two years that the Iceland's main communications link has been cut. On two earlier occasions rats chewed through the line"

"more than half of the notices for link removal that were sent to Google were sent by businesses targeting apparent rivals"

"Almost 40 years after he died on the Biafran battlefield, [the poet] remains virtually unknown outside literary circles"

"a case for heavy migration from the Korean Peninsula into the Japanese Archipelago during what is now known as the Yayoi period"

a case study in bad history: "sources that cannot be checked... misuse of sources... simply unsourced... false..."

"The No 10 memo raises fresh doubts over US claims that previous attacks against al-Jazeera staff were errors"

"even under Maggie, more new council houses were built each year than during the entire eight years of Tony Blair"

"The goons finally backed off after the Dutch ambassador intervened and warned of a diplomatic incident"

I've read Robertson Davies' Fifth Business, William Gibson's Neuromancer and Naomi Klein's No Logo - and I'm in the middle of Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance

"the Earth's early surface supported water [and] massive amounts of continental crust were produced almost immediately upon Earth formation"

Brcko "is terrified of being dragged back into the chauvinistic mire after the Supervisor and aides pack their bags and go"

"Students and professionals, the trained and untrained, some driven by the call of humanity, others by the call of God, they trudge up mountainsides to deliver goods, to support widowed women, and to retrieve bodies."

"Domination of the air is irrelevant unless airpower can be precisely targetted... Support of the population is essential for the winning side..."

a study of deaths in Sudan is "reliable"; one carried out with the same methodology in Iraq is a "crazed fabrication"

"Tourists should dress like locals and maybe dye their hair. And they should have armed guards and they should be always vigilant."

"A problem that can be formulated in a few sentences has a solution more than 10,000 pages long. The proof has never been written down in its entirety, may never be written down, and as presently envisaged would not be comprehensible to any single individual. The result is important and has been used in a wide variety of other problems in group theory, but it might not be correct."

"all French citizens are identical in their Frenchness... statistics based on ethnicity or religion are illegal"

"On those nights when the ridge of Nanga Parbat is swept by a blizzard, some birds lose their course and fly blindly into the icecap"

a senior vice president calls for "a comprehensive and inclusive federal data privacy policy [superceding] existing federal and state privacy laws"

"Too many policymakers and intelligence officers mistake secrecy for intelligence and assume that information covertly acquired is superior to that obtained openly."