December 2005

"VRSN is one of the best companies out there in terms of intimidation and greed... and I wouldn't sell them short on bribing politicians and supposed non-profit corporations, either."

"Since May 2004 almost 450,000 people, most of them from the poorest fringes of the formerly communist east, have legally migrated west to the job-rich economies of Ireland, Britain and Sweden"

"The Iraqi army's 2nd Division, which oversees the Irbil-Mosul area, has some 12,000 soldiers, and at least 90 percent of them are Kurds"

I went bushwalking in Deua national park - we had a great trip and saw two echidnas and a wombat as well as lots of kangaroos

"a loose movement consisting mainly of concerned philologists and ethnographers has prompted an allergic reaction"

they're no longer enemy combatants, but they can't be returned to China because "they could face death or torture" and "their release inside the US is not feasible"

A History of the Struggle for Great Power among Tibetans, Turks, Arabs, and Chinese during the Early Middle Ages

"I want my daughters to have FBI files. I want them filmed by hostile government agents during mass protests against injustice."

"the tough guy in the White House who stood up to Saddam and other bad boys becomes a pathetic wimp when confronting a government that is desperately dependent on U.S. aid"

"When I arrived at first in Tamra, I understood within 10 minutes that the situation here was comparable to the situation I knew from South Africa"

Gates: "The development of this new operating system is a terrific global IT success story. By developing a low-cost, copyleft operating system for older computers, the GNU Project and its partners have given the world more effective systems with good security, at a fraction of the cost"

there are moves by ISPs to prioritise their own network traffic, violating the principle under which all data is treated equally

Mikhail Bulgakov's masterpiece of 20th-century storytelling was widely considered "impossible to adapt to film" (Amazon)

"thousands of migratory birds were found dead on a hill... local villagers started scooping up the dead fork-tailed drongos to eat"

"The outcome was a 10-year plan that amounts to nothing less than an attempt to modernise Islam" and "revamp existing mindsets"

"a woman in her 20s will increase her lifetime earnings by 10 percent if she delays the birth of her first child by a year"

"The CIA concluded his passport was genuine and it had the wrong man... but he was held for two more months before being flown to Albania and dumped in a wood"

"Far from acknowledging a miscarriage of justice, the prosecution said it couldn't disclose its evidence because of national security concerns"

"however brutal the pacification of Xinjiang, China has so far managed to prevent it from degenerating into a security nightmare"

"Compared with dams and underground waste deposits, skyscrapers such as Taipei 101 are mere pinpricks on the Earth's surface"

"he called the Liberals a party of fear and reaction, and confided he had considered resigning from the party over the Government's anti-terror laws"