Karl's Weird News

Microsoft Changes Policy Over Russian Crackdown

Microsoft announced sweeping changes on Monday to its software policy in Russia, responding to criticism that it has been supporting a crackdown on dissent.

The company essentially prohibited its Russian division from taking part in piracy cases against government opponents and declared that it would thwart any attempt by the authorities, in this country and elsewhere, to use such inquiries to exert political pressure.

The security services in recent years have seized computers from dozens of outspoken advocacy groups and opposition newspapers in raids that all but paralyzed their operations.

Officials claim that they are merely investigating the piracy of Microsoft software, but the searches typically happen when these groups are seeking to draw attention to a cause or event.

Ugandans upset over praise for former dictator:

Ugandan officials say they are offended that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has praised former dictator Idi Amin.

Officials including President Yoweri Museveni’s secretary Tamale Mirundi say Amin ruled brutally in the 1970s.

Chavez on Friday called the East African dictator a nationalist and a patriot.

Mirundi countered on Sunday with Amin’s record of torturing and killing opponents — including one of his wives.

James Kizza Baliruno said he was offended by the praise as Amin’s soldiers killed both of his parents in front of him when he was 4 years old.

Colonel Gaddafi demands ‘500 beautiful Italian girls’ to convert to Islam during Rome summit 

Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi asked an escort agency to supply 500 ‘beautiful Italian girls’ for a gala evening at which he tried to convert them to Islam, it emerged today.

The 67-year-old leader also requested that they ‘were aged between 18 and 35 years old, did not wear mini skirts or have plunging necklines but high heels were OK.’

The women, all glamorously dressed, were told to meet at a hotel in the centre of Rome, where Gaddafi is attending a summit on world food security, before being taken to the Libyan ambassador’s residence in the city.

The girls, a mixture of blondes and brunettes dressed in heels, stockings and three-quarter length coats, were seen queuing up to go through security checks.

Several of them were turned away after being told they were inappropriately dressed or they were too short.

Once inside – and after an hour’s delay – Gaddafi arrived in a white limousine to lecture the girls on the superiority of Islam.

Chavez asking Cubans to ‘bomb clouds’ amid drought:

Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez says he will join a team of Cuban scientists on flights to “bomb clouds” to create rain amid a severe drought that has aroused public anger due to water and electricity rationing.

Chavez, who has asked Venezuelans to take three-minute showers to save water, said the Cubans had arrived in Venezuela and were preparing to fly specially equipped aircraft above the Orinoco river.

“I’m going in a plane; any cloud that crosses me, I’ll zap it so that it rains,” Chavez said at a ceremony late on Saturday with family members of five Cubans convicted of spying in the United States.

Kremlin warns against wrecking Russia with democracy

The Kremlin’s chief political strategist warned in an article published on Monday that Russia risked collapsing into chaos if officials tried to tinker with the political system by flirting with liberal reforms.

Kremlin Deputy Chief of Staff Vladislav Surkov said it was clear Russia was falling behind in many areas of economic development and that the country could not simply continue being a “resource power.”

But in answer to calls from opponents for democratic reforms to liberalize the political system built under former President Vladimir Putin, Surkov warned that the resulting instability could rip Russia apart.

“Even now when power is rather consolidated and ordered, many projects are very slow and difficult,” Surkov was quoted as saying by the Itogi weekly magazine.

“If we add any sort of political instability to that then our development would simply be paralyzed. There would be a lot of demagoguery, a lot of empty talk, a lot of lobbying and ripping Russia to pieces, but no development.”

Libya leader Moammar Khadafy to United Nations: Abolish Switzerland!:

According to Swiss minister Christa Markwalder, when Khadafy comes to New York Sept. 23, he will ask the UN to dismantle Switzerland and parcel out the land to neighboring France, Germany and Italy.

The UN charter specifically states that no member can threaten the sovereignty of another, so the demand is unlikely to get far.

But it’s another sign of tension to come during the eccentric dictator’s visit. The Libya-Swiss kerfuffle began a year ago, when Khadafy’s trouble-making youngest son, Hannibal, was arrested in a Geneva hotel for beating two servants with a belt and a coat-hanger.

 He had previously had run-ins with cops in France and Italy and once was busted for driving drunk on Paris’ Champs-Elysees at 90 mph – the wrong way.

Libya retaliated with fury, recalling some diplomats, withdrawing $5 billion from Swiss banks, shuttering the Tripoli office of Nestle and threatening to cut oil deliveries. Two Swiss businessmen were barred from leaving the country until Libya received an apology for Hannibal’s arrest.

Photo With Kim Jong Il and Bill Clinton Tied to Journalists’ Release Spotlights Dictator Kitsch

This week the world’s eyes were on the extraordinary photograph of former President Bill Clinton seated next to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il—an official picture taken at the end of talks that led to the freeing of two imprisoned American journalists.

Mine, I confess, were elsewhere, continually diverted to the photo’s dramatic backdrop, an enormous mural of crashing seas and fluttering birds rendered in lurid greens and brilliant whites. On the one hand, a run-of-the-mill seascape, the kind of visual elevator music one finds in public spaces the world over, where the aim is to decorate but not offend.

Yet there was something about the picture that wasn’t quite right and that kept drawing me back to it. For one thing, there was its vast internal scale. The waves were bigger, even, than the figures posing for the photograph, and they so dominated the foreground as if ready to break out and drown the assembled dignitaries.

Then there was the picture’s bizarre disunity. Two opposing visions of nature are combined, a benign one (the luminosity and fluttering birds), and an angry, violent one (the heaving seas and crashing waves). Just as strange, the painting’s various elements seem at war with each other. For instance, the rhythm of the breaking waves leads our eye from left to right, yet at the bottom right-hand corner—just to the right of the woman in the official party wearing a white jacket—a flock of birds, facing to the left, abruptly halts and reverses that momentum. A more accomplished artist would have found a way to integrate the various elements more harmoniously and lead our eye around the canvas more smoothly.

Czech president compares EU to Soviet Union:

The European Union has turned into an undemocratic and elitist project comparable to the Communist dictatorships of eastern Europe that forbade alternative thinking, Czech President Vaclav Klaus told the European Parliament on Thursday.

Klaus, whose country now holds the rotating EU presidency, set out a scathing attack on the EU project and its institutions, provoking boos from many lawmakers, some of whom walked out, but applause from nationalists and other anti-EU legislators.

Klaus is known for deep skepticism of the EU and has refused to fly the EU flag over his official seat in Prague during the Czech presidency, saying the country is not an EU province.

He said current EU practices smacked of communist times when the Soviet Union controlled much of eastern Europe, including the Czech Republic and when dissent or even discussions were not tolerated.

Zimbabwe troops ‘eat elephants’:

Zimbabwean soldiers are being given elephant meat for their rations, a wildlife campaigner has told the BBC.

Jonny Rodrigues from the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force said that several soldiers had complained to him that was the only meat they were given.

Zimbabwe is believed to have some 100,000 elephants – more than its parks can sustainably hold and its economy is in freefall.

The defence ministry has not yet commented on the reports.

Mr Rodrigues said that the use of elephant meat began last June but has recently increased.

Citgo Suspends Free Heating Oil Program for Low-Income Residents

Citgo has suspended its free heating oil program for low-income residents, Citizens Energy Chairman Joseph Kennedy announced Monday.

Kennedy said the Venezuelan government’s Texas-based oil subsidiary cited falling oil prices and the world economic crisis for forcing the company to reevaluate all of its social programs, including the heating oil program aimed at 400,000 households in 16 states.

The program, started in 2005 with Citizens Energy, a nonprofit headed by Kennedy, sent 100 gallons of free oil a year to eligible households.

“It remains unclear how long this postponement, if it is one, will last,” Kennedy said in a statement on the Citizens Energy Web site. “All of us at Citizens Energy continue to do everything we can to advocate for a continuation of this vital assistance.”

Robert Mugabe: ‘Zimbabwe is mine — I will never surrender’

A defiant President Mugabe scorned the growing international clamour for him to step down, insisting yesterday that “Zimbabwe is mine” even as his regime struggled to contain a devastating cholera epidemic that has brought his already ravaged nation to the brink.

Mr Mugabe delivered the broadside, which included renewed attacks on Britain, before the party faithful at the annual conference of Zanu (PF).

“I will never, never sell my country. I will never, never, never, never surrender,” he said, referring to calls from the West and other African nations for him to resign. “I won’t be intimidated. Even if I am threatened with beheading, I believe this and nothing will ever move me from it: Zimbabwe belongs to us, not to the British.”

China?s prime potential enemies

China?s military preparedness and strategic deployment of weaponry take into consideration a whole range of potential enemies, an analysis of internal People?s Liberation Army documents has revealed.

In order of importance ? that is, the likelihood of actual military engagement ? those enemies are Taiwan, the United States and Japan (as potential defenders of Taiwan), India, Vietnam, Southeast Asia, Russia and NATO.

Chinese military journals consistently criticize the United States for seeking to isolate and contain China. The PLA?s indignation and frustration over this perceived U.S. interference is a reflection of its ambition to become a global hegemon, or at least a regional one.

As evidence of U.S. hostility, the military journals cite Washington?s sales of arms to Taiwan, its military alliance with Japan, its support of NATO?s eastward expansion, the stationing of a permanent force in Afghanistan, the expansion of its nuclear arsenal and its influence in restricting European arms sales to China. The journals claim that these U.S. actions all pose a direct or indirect threat to China?s national security.

Surveillance of Skype messages found in China

A group of Canadian human-rights activists and computer security researchers has discovered a huge surveillance system in China that monitors and archives certain Internet text conversations that include politically charged words.

The system tracks text messages sent by customers of Tom-Skype, a joint venture between a Chinese wireless operator and eBay, the Web auctioneer that owns Skype, an online phone and text messaging service.

The discovery draws more attention to the Chinese government’s Internet monitoring and filtering efforts, which created controversy this summer during the Beijing Olympics. Researchers in China have estimated that 30,000 or more “Internet police” monitor online traffic, Web sites and blogs for political and other offending content in what is called the Golden Shield Project or the Great Firewall of China.

The activists, who are based at Citizen Lab, a research group that focuses on politics and the Internet at the University of Toronto, discovered the surveillance operation last month. They said a cluster of eight message-logging computers in China contained more than a million censored messages. They examined the text messages and reconstructed a list of restricted words.

The list includes words related to the religious group Falun Gong, Taiwan independence and the Chinese Communist Party, according to the researchers. It includes not only words like democracy, but also earthquake and milk powder. (Chinese officials are facing criticism over the handling of earthquake relief and chemicals tainting milk powder.)

Russia in legal bid to ban “extremist” U.S. cartoon

Prosecutors in Russia want to ban the award-winning satirical U.S. cartoon South Park, calling the series “extremist” after receiving viewer complaints, a spokeswoman said on Monday.

South Park, a cartoon aimed at adults and featuring a group of nine-year olds in a Colorado ski town, has courted controversy from its 1997 debut, parodying celebrities, politicians, religion, gay marriage and Saddam Hussein.

Basmanny regional prosecutors office spokeswoman Valentina Titova said investigators filed a motion after deciding an episode broadcast on Moscow television station 2×2 in January “bore signs of extremist activity.”

Big Summer Sell-Off Hits the Russian Stock Market

Russia?s stock market is suffering its worst correction in nearly a decade as sliding oil prices, political attacks on private companies and instability after last month?s war in Georgia spook investors.

On a bad day globally for stocks, Russia?s markets took an exceptional fall Friday. The Russian Trading System index lost 7.6 percent and recovered later to close down 4.45 percent after rumors circulated that the government would use state oil money to halt the decline. A Russian central bank official said the bank had sold large amounts of foreign currency a day earlier to shore up the ruble, which has fallen to its lowest level in about a year as oil and share prices decline.

 Stock analysts saw similarities between the current sell-off in Russian equities and the financial crisis of 1998, when retreating oil prices, a default on sovereign bonds and a devaluation of the ruble caused a 57 percent loss in the RTS market from the third quarter of that year to the next September. By contrast, the RTS index, which hit a record in May, has lost 38 percent over the comparable period.

Stalin’s mass murders were ‘entirely rational’ says new Russian textbook praising tyrant

Stalin acted ?entirely rationally? in executing and imprisoning millions of people in the Gulags, a controversial new Russian teaching manual claims. Fifty-five years after the Soviet dictator died, the latest guide for teachers to promote patriotism among the Russian young said he did what he did to ensure the country?s modernisation. The manual, titled A History of Russia, 1900-1945, will form the basis of a new state-approved text book for use in schools next year. It seems to follow an attempt backed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to re-evaluate Stalin?s record in a more positive light.

Jailed Cuban punk rocker to stand trial Friday:

Cuba has ordered jailed punk rocker Gorki Aguila, an outspoken critic of Fidel Castro and the communist government, to stand trial on Friday for “social dangerousness,” a charge that could carry up to four years in prison. Authorities arrested the 39-year-old lead singer of Porno para Ricardo at his Havana home on Monday, shortly after the band had completed work on a new album. Cuban law defines “social dangerousness” as behavior contrary to “communist morality,” and police use it to detain offenders before they have a chance to commit a crime. Performing songs with angry lyrics that poke fun at or openly insult Fidel Castro and his brother Raul, who became Cuba’s president in February, Porno para Ricardo is banned from official Cuban airwaves.

Monks Storm Media Tour in China

Fifteen Tibetan Buddhist monks interrupted a state-sponsored media tour of a restive region of western China on Wednesday, demanding the return of the Dalai Lama and yelling that they had no human rights.

In the second such incident in as many months, the monks, carrying a banned Tibetan flag, burst out of a building at the Labrang monastery in the town of Xiahe, in the northwestern province of Gansu, and rushed across a plaza to a group of 20 visiting Chinese and foreign journalists.

“The Dalai Lama has to come back to Tibet. We are not asking for Tibetan independence, we are just asking for human rights. We have no human rights now,” one monk told the reporters in Chinese.

Cuban circus juggling act vanishes on Mexican tour

Eight Cuban acrobat jugglers disappeared before a performance at a festival in central Mexico last week, presumably to defect to the United States, organizers said on Friday.

The six men and two women, the entire juggling and high-flying acrobatics act of Havana-based Circuba, arrived in the Mexican state of Queretaro last week for an annual festival of musicians, actors and artists from around the world.