I have to wonder how accurate this report is, which names Al Jazeera as being the global brand with the fifth most impact, when the position number three is given as “German furniture company Ikea” (Actually IKEA – written in capitals by the company itself – is a Swedish company and the agency has now (2005-01-31, 21:00 hrs) partially corrected their news item). The first five companies are:
Well, if you can’t stop looting of museums and hospitals, plan ahead or have an exit strategy, I suppose it should come as no surprise to discover you have mislaid $9 billion within nine months:
According to a scathing report by the U.S. Inspector General, the U.S. occupation authority, known as the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and led in Iraq by L. Paul Bremer III, lost track of nearly $9 billion it transferred to Iraqi government ministries, between October 2003 and June 2004… ...The amount of ‘missing money’ represents around 4.5 per cent of the total cost of the Iraqi war effort to date; based on $200 billion. Back when $9 billion represented a lot of money, Bremer might have been held responsible for what could be described as criminal mismanagement of U.S. funds. As it happens, the Bush administration is likely to give Bremer a medal or put him in charge of Iran after they invade that country.
Mark Cliff, chief economist at ING Financial Markets, writes in the Independent today about the possible economic consequences of an invasion of Iran by the USA:
...this would imply: a $12 per barrel increase in the oil price, taking West Texas crude up to more than $60 per barrel; a 14 per cent drop in the Dow Jones, taking other stock markets with it; a plunge in bond yields, taking US 10-year yields down by around 0.75 per cent; and a 10 per cent drop in the US dollar…Actually, given the massive deficit (White House forecast: $427 billion this year) that Bush is currently running and the analysis in the Economist three days ago, Mark’s estimates look to be a trifle conservative, as he admits in the article. In fact, back in December – before the talk about an Iran invasion – the Economist was already talking about estimates that the dollar needs to fall by another 30% (to 1.80 dollars per euro) to bring it into line with its fair value reflecting the size of America’s budget deficit.
.jpg "Picture from www.skyandsummit.com")
(...and its been pretty cold in Schmitten the last 2-3 days too – but not as much spray in the air)
This is Preservation Month. I appreciate preservation. It’s what you do when you run for president. You gotta preserve.
We have noticed that over the last months that the quality of phishing e-mails (mails which try to get you to type your account names and passwords into fake websites that look just like the web site of your bank or credit card company) has gone from being an obvious fraud (wrong web address visible in the window of your bank’s “homepage”, bad grammar and spelling, etc.) to highly plausible.
Obviously, if you don’t happen to bank at, say, the Washington Mutual Bank, you are unlikely to be taken in for a moment. But the number of phishing attempts is increasing and so is the number of banks and other organisations being targeted – targets include PayPal and non-US banks, such as the German Postbank and the Deutsche Bank.
If you want to check out a suspicious mail, one of the best places to go is to The Anti-Phishing Working Group website, which tracks and describes the phishing attacks. Here is an example of an attempt to phish PayPal users for their credit card details.
The organisation is sponsored by some of the big names in finance and computer systems, including Visa, MasterCard, Symantec, and VeriSign. This is also a good place to report suspected phishing activity.
The Register points out some examples of the law of unintended consequences – a sort of Murphy’s Law for people, whose good ideas don’t always have the effect expected. For example:
Denny’s (a US cafe/restaurant chain) is known for being open 24 hours a day, every day, always. The story goes that in 1998, for the first time in 35 years, Denny’s decided to close its doors on Christmas, but there was a big problem: since Denny’s was always open, many stores didn’t have locks on the doors, so they couldn’t close.A more serious problem for the US government is also covered – if you provide your allies with state-of-the-art currency printing presses, it can become a serious problem after a change of government in the allied country.
Take a look at this page. Only the Japanese could come up with a hobby like this…
Up until now, it has been thought that if the brain, spinal cord and intestines of mad cows is avoided, you can safely eat the normal beef cuts and other organs, such as the liver and heart. Now research at the University Hospital of Zurich, Switzerland, shows that this may be wrong – if organs or tissues of infected cows are inflamed due to other diseases, they may be susceptible to habouring prions, and thus be a source of BSE, or mad cow disease.
The research has implications for the current BSE testing programs world-wide, as currently only the brains of cattle are tested for prions. As one might expect, unfortunately, these days, the agencies responsible for testing for BSE in the UK and the USA are both playing down the risks to the public at the moment.
If you drop a buttered piece of bread, it will fall on the floor butter-side down. If a cat is dropped from a window or other high and towering place, it will land on its feet.
But what if you attach a buttered piece of bread, butter-side up to a cat’s back and toss them both out the window? Will the cat land on its feet? Or will the butter splat on the ground?
Find out here.
(Thanks to Spiegel-Online for pointing me to the article)