BBC News - 29/11/2006
Large-scale disturbances are taking place in the UK’s largest immigration detention centre.
Police, prison officers and fire crews were called to the Harmondsworth centre, west London, in the early hours after a number of fires were started.
About 50 detainees have been seen in a courtyard spelling out the words help and SOS with [...]
The Guardian - 29/11/2006
Britain’s role in CIA “torture flights” was roundly condemned yesterday by the European parliament in a scathing report which for the first time named the site of a suspected secret US detention centre in the EU - at Stare Kiejkuty in Poland.
It says EU governments, including the British, knew about the practice [...]
Ah, yes. ‘Tis the season for office party planning. Not for the party itself, you understand, but for the brave organising souls to inform the rest of the office when/where the party is, what will occur therein, and how many wheelbarrows will be laid on to remove the bodies at the end of the night.
The [...]
A fantastic little art project. A projector mounted in a moving car, displaying an animation of a running tiger on the sides of the buildings that the car passes by.
(Note, if you start looking around the rest of the artist’s site things get Not Safe For Work very quickly. Unless you work in the same [...]
Reviews of Jones Soda 2006 holiday pack, which features various mouth-watering flavours such as “Turkey and Gravy”, “Sweet Potato”, “Dinner Roll”, “Pea”, and “Antacid”.
The 1861 Edinburgh Time-Gun map: shows the time taken for the sound of Edinburgh’s one o’ clock gun to travel from the castle to various parts of the city.
Video: Urban sprinting. Artificially [...]
BBC News - 22/11/2006
A haul of stolen car stereos has been recovered by police investigating 205 car break-ins in Cardiff over the weekend.
Officers found 37 car stereos, 21 stereo security panels and a laptop in a car in the city on Tuesday.
It follows a spate of car stereos thefts thought to be instigated after an [...]
A quote unearthed from a few-months-old print edition of The Metro:
Welsh-speaking cyclists were baffled by a sign in front of roadworks at Barons Court roundabout between Penarth and Cardiff. It said “Llid y bledren dymchwelyd” (which roughly translates as “bladder disease has returned”). Above this, in English, it said “Cyclists dismount”. Vale of Glamorgan Council [...]
The Chronicle Herald - 26/11/2006
RED DEER, Alta. (CP) — A Red Deer man has been jailed after an outraged burglar spotted massive amounts of child pornography on his computer and called police.
William Mitchell, who pleaded guilty earlier this year in Red Deer provincial court, was charged in October 2005 after RCMP, acting on an anonymous [...]
Since 1999, 214 “insiders” - such as retailers and ticket clerks - in Ontario, Canada have won prizes of $50,000 or more in the province’s lottery.
The odds of this occurring are 1 in 10^48 (or one in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion)
Are you going to have to apply for one of the UK’s new biometric passports soon? You know, the ones which were going to make identity theft all but impossible and - through some unexplained mechanism - stop all forms of terrorism, as well as allowing all-and-sundry access to your personal data?
I’m sure you will [...]
LA Times - Via Houston Chronicle - 17/11/2006
BEIJING — After years of denial, China has acknowledged that many of the human organs used in transplants here are taken from executed prisoners and that many of the recipients are foreigners who pay hefty sums to avoid a long wait.
Speaking at a conference of surgeons in the [...]
As fun as being in the nosebleed galleries at the top of the Albert Hall during a Flaming Lips show was, it turns out it can’t really compare to seeing them whilst jammed into the second row at the Hammersmith Apollo. Having a crazy-haired man in a 70’s suit crawling above your head in [...]
Lords of Logistics: Episode 1 and Episode 2
Obsessive-compulsive linguaphiles unite! Every linguistic term you could ever want
When, way back in the mists of time, we first set up a wireless computer network in our university flat, the standard ingrate comment was that now we just needed wireless A/C power and we’d all be set. While we just whined about it, it turns [...]
Don’t try to tell me you’ve never imagined this as a great way to let your boss know you’re resigning. A prison guard in Marin County was fired after giving an inmate a wedgie hard enough to break the prisoner’s underwear. (Amongst other ‘unethical’ acts.)
STUART — A Martin County jail guard has been dismissed following [...]