Brought to you by Rob Hinkley, with no warranty either express or implied. Currently featuring...
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Oct '03, Nov '03.
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May '03 - Aug '03.
The opinion section, in which Rob spouts off.
Photo albums containing, erm, photos.
The Miscellaneous section.
A quick and simplistic labelling of events.
contact: robert dot hinkley at btinternet dot com (my PGP key, and you can get PGP from here)
Masthead
Dec '02 - Apr '03
22 Apr 2003.
George Galloway responds to allegations that he was in the pay of Saddam Hussein (I don't know about you, but I'm shocked! Shocked and astonished!) by going into full Al-Sahaf mode: "This is all lies. Lies and illusions! No infidel scoundrel will ever succeed in making these baseless allegations stick to me. I will sue them for libel and surely I will win! In fact I am already victorious" sort of thing.

I am looking forward to the promised libel trial, which ought to be hugely entertaining.

Actually, which do you think is more contemptible: being an apologist for a murderous despot in exchange for money, or being an apologist for a murderous despot for free out of personal conviction? I'm torn.

17 Apr 2003.
I am in web browser user interface hell. Being the kind of whimsical guy that I am I use two different browsers: CrazyBrowser (an excellent wrapper for the evil IE) and Opera. They both support tabbed browsing, which I know some people hate but I really like. The problems arise because in CrazyBrowser double-clicking a page tab or keyboarding ctrl-W closes that page tab. In Opera shift-clicking a page tab closes a page tab, double-clicking a page tab makes that page leap off into its own window, while keyboarding ctrl-W closes all page tabs. Imagine the hilarious consequences, as I sprout windows by double-clicking page tabs in Opera, fruitlessly shift-click in CrazyBrowser and (horror!) do ctrl-W in Opera and have to start again as my browser session kills itself. Hey ho. Is "keyboarding" even a real verb? Apparently yes.
17 Apr 2003.
Oh marvellous. Anxious parents can now stifle the growth of their child's sense of independence and self-reliance by equiping them with tracking devices. I feel sure the marketing of these gadgets will in no way whatsoever play on parents' worst fears and end with the tag-line "If you don't buy this you're a Bad Parent and your child will get murdered by a psycho".
12 Apr 2003.
Marina Hyde denies that pundits were forecasting an American defeat or repeat of Vietnam in Iraq. I shall not linger on that point any longer than is required to point out that just a week before, in the same paper, James Fox had written up the "Iraq will be like Vietnam" case and that Scott Ritter and a variety of other pundits and commentators had been agreeing. No, I would like to concentrate on a revealing sentence in Marina's article about the reasons for her opposition to the war:
No, even had there been no civilian deaths, had it lasted 40 minutes, had bunting clogged the streets of Baghdad, it was always the threat of future US imperialism and the bitter fallout from those who'd feel alienated by it that concerned most people opposed to this war.
When I read that my brain reacted like one of those big computers in 70s movies do when someone feeds it bad data. You know the sort of thing: whirling tape spools, sparks, klaxons and smoke. Even if the war had been bloodless and the residents of Baghdad had put on a welcoming party for the Americans then the war would still be a Bad Thing because of the 'threat of future US imperialism'. Bzzzt. Does not compute.

Why didn't Marina just come straight out before the war started and say to the citizens of Iraq... "I do not give a fig for your welfare. That talk about wanting to prevent Iraqi civilian deaths is just so much camoflauge to cover my real position. I would prefer you to stay miserable and afraid under the rule of Saddam Hussein, because the alternative is that the Americans will score a victory and that must be avoided as it will ignite my paranoid fantasies. Sorry about the tyranny you're living under, which must be dreadful, but I'm sure you will understand that it's a price worth paying to keep America in her place."

Unbelievable. Simply unbelievable.

11 Apr 2003.
Stephen Kirkby writes to the Guardian wanting to know "Have I missed something? I had understood that decapitation of a ruthless leader's statue deserved a three month stretch."

Indeed. How well we remember the horror of the Thatcher years. Who can forget the closure of the steelworks and shipyards, Michael Foot and Arthur Scargill being fed feet-first into industrial shredders and how Tony Benn's eyes were gouged out? The constant fear, the chilling wait for the knock on the door that announced the start of a spell of flogging and electric shocks. The memories of the public executions still haunt me. A chill runs down my spine when I think of how my brother and I languished in jail when we said we didn't want to join the Young Conservatives. Rebellious Tory back-benchers having their ears cut off, Neil Kinnock being forced to watch as his wife was gang-raped in front of him: let us pray those days never return.

Yes, Stephen, you are missing something.

09 Apr 2003.
Well well, it's been quite a day. Cheering Iraqis greeting US forces as liberators and giving them flowers as they enter Baghdad. Statues of Saddam pulled down, ripped apart and beaten with shoes. I haven't felt quite this happy since 1989, when Ceausescu experienced his whistlestop descent from power in Romania. I have to say that this war seems to be going remarkably well for a bogged-down quagmire, and the Iraqis don't seem to be at all concerned that we're supposed to be acting in flagrant violation of "international law".
08 Apr 2003.
George Monbiot is grumbling about the Americans apparently planning to use teargas in Iraq, which would break some law or convention or something. I'm afraid I haven't read the whole thing because my attention always wanders from George Monbiot's articles after a while, but even the first few paragraphs contain muddleheadedness to marvel at:
"[Teargas, pepper spray etc] now seems to be the US government's chosen method for dealing with Iraqi soldiers sheltering behind human shields, when its conventional means of completing the capture of Baghdad have been exhausted. It makes a certain kind of sense, until two inconvenient issues are taken into account. The deployment of these substances would break the conventions designed to contain them; and the point of this war, or so we have endlessly been told, is to prevent the use of chemical weapons."
So even though tossing a teargas grenade into a bunker or house might well save lives (at least I suppose that's what he means by "makes a certain kind of sense") it is unthinkable because it would "break the conventions" on the conduct of warfare. The thought that perhaps this means we ought to change or ignore the conventions appears not to have entered his mind. After all, the whole point of the conventions is to reduce the suffering of noncombatants, which is precisley the reason for using teargas in this way. He also doesn't seem overly concerned that sheltering behind human shields in the first place violates a few conventions. I scanned on and found this later:
"Last week the US Marine Corps told the Asia Times that CS gas and pepper spray had already been shipped to the Gulf. The government of the US appears to be on the verge of committing a war crime in Iraq."
Oh, the horror! And he wonders why the US hasn't signed up for the International Criminal Court...
03 Apr 2003.
Arundathi Roy wrote an extensive screed in Wednesday's 'Guardian' about how awful we are for fighting this war. I would have put my reply up yesterday evening, but BTInternet's FTP server was kaput so I couldn't. Sorry.
01 Apr 2003.
A First World War war cemetery in France is defaced with graffiti. I am a mild-mannered man who is not given to violence, but I do hereby solemnly swear that if I ever encounter one of the ungrateful, disrepectful bastards who did this I will take pleasure in coldbloodedly battering them to a pulp. And if they're the one who wrote "dig up your garbage, it is fouling our soil" then I'll be especially thorough.
01 Apr 2003.
Erik Sorenson of MSNBC comes out with what may be the understatement of the war so far:
"When you give an interview to a guy in an army uniform who works for a dictator whose government we're at war with, it raises some real questions about your judgment."
Yeah, just a few. Especially when you are a famous western celebrity in Iraq and use the interview on Iraqi TV to praise the Iraqi Ministry of Information, tell everyone how well the war's going for the Iraqi army, how the Americans are doing dreadfully, how the American strategy is in shambles and drop big hints that all you need is a few more big photogenic killings of civilians and the Americans will pack up and run away home. Yeah, I'd say that's quite an error of judgement.
31 Mar 2003.
When Michael Moore gave his Oscar speech he was cheered by some but booed by many. But according to Michael he wasn't booed at all: those people you could hear booing weren't booing Michael. No, no, no. That is simply inconceivable. They were actually booing the people who had started booing Michael. They weren't conventional disapproving boos, but rather supportive meta-boos:
... a couple of men (some reported it was 'stagehands' just to the left of me) near a microphone started some loud yelling. Then a group in the upper balcony joined in ... But then the majority in the balcony - who were in support of my remarks - started booing the booers. It all turned into one humungous cacophony of yells and cheers and jeers.
Right. Uh-huh. That's what it sounded like to me, Michael.
28 Mar 2003.
Gah! I've just watched Gary Younge spend 15 minutes on Channel 4 ('J'accuse Uncle Sam') announcing that George Bush is 'crushing democracy' in America while pursuing war abroad. He interviewed the man who claims to have been arrested for wearing a 'No War' T-shirt. What he didn't mention was that the man was not 'arrested for wearing a T-shirt' at all, but was actually arrested because he refused to leave a shopping centre where he was pushing his opinion into people's faces by getting in their way: stopping them going about their business and harrassing them. But I suppose there's no point letting facts get in the way of a good polemic.
28 Mar 2003.
I've taken the "Are you a sad Sci-Fi fan?" test and scored 40 points:
No doubt about it, you bloody love space. You know the best way to disable a cyberman is by rubbing gold into his chestplate, you know the names of all the Ewoks, you know how to say "phasers to stun" in Romulan, but you can't remember where you live. You'll watch any old tosh as long as it's got robots in it, and you will end up married to a goth librarian with the Seal of Rassillon tattooed on her neck. We hope you'll be very happy together.
I must confess that I have absolutely no idea (honest!) what any of the Ewoks were called, but robots are great and any librarian with a Seal of Rassillon tattooed on her neck is very welcome to get in touch - my e-mail address is shown above. Does anybody not know how to disable a cyberman?
25 Mar 2003.
I feel I ought to say something about the war, seeing as how I've been very quiet lately. I feel it's going well. After just five days of fighting the Americans are within 60 miles of Baghdad, there have been few allied casualties, there have been few Iraqi civilian casualties, there is no massive flood of refugees, there is no (because there never was any plan for) 'carpet bombing of Baghdad'. I'm worried sick about the war, the death so far and the death to come is terrible, but is less terrible than the death metered out by the current government of Iraq. Now I'm tired and I'm going to bed.
19 Mar 2003.
It seems there's quite a little wiretap frenzy going on at the EU right now. I suspect the truth is that in the spirit of true European harmony every country has been spying on every other country.
18 Mar 2003.
At the moment I am mainly waiting nervously for the war to start. Thursday night is the first available night after the expiry of the 48 hour deadline announced by Bush on Monday, but does that still count now that the ultimatum has been rejected? A minor flame skirmish provided a moment's levity in my otherwise morose day. There I was, trying to work out when the war would start and some anonymous coward comes along and accuses me of being an ignorant ghoulish moron. Honestly, what can you do?
17 Mar 2003.
Speaking about the death of the protester who was killed by a bulldozer yesterday, an organiser of the group she belonged to said in an interview "It's possible they [the protesters] were not as disciplined as we would have liked, but we're like a peace army. Generals send young men and women off to operations, and some die." Okay. So it's like the army - you accept that some may die on active service and that's a risk they take. So this means we will see an end to the "Murder!" accusations, no?
16 Mar 2003.
It had to happen sooner or later: a "peace protestor" runs in front of a bulldozer and is run over. Other reports say she was lying down or sitting down in front of it. Either way, and I know this will sound callous, I can only be impressed by the utter stupidity of her actions. Didn't her parents teach this woman the Green Cross Code (Stop. Look. Listen. Do not run in front of armoured vehicles)?
16 Mar 2003.
I was going to comment on Le Monde correspondent Marc Roche's outrage at Tony Blair daring to disagree with Jacques Chirac, but Russell Wardlow got there first and broadly covered the points I was going to make. It's particularly amusing to see Mr Roche make accusations of an "extraordinary anti-French tirade" (this, presumably) considering some of Chirac's own language, and to see that misgivings about the wisdom of adopting the Euro and ceding all economic control to Brussels are just examples of "petty British nationalism". I'd never thought of myself of as a petty nationalist before.
16 Mar 2003.
The wife of Abdullah El-Faisal, recently jailed for inciting murder, is interviewed in today's Telegraph. According to her the poor man's the victim of a terrible misunderstanding. "When he said 'How wonderful it is to kill a kaffir [non-believer]' he was quoting from holy scriptures." Oh well, that's okay then, I suppose incitement to murder can't possibly be bad as long as it's taken from holy scriptures. We also learn that El-Faisal "is not enjoying Belmarsh high-security prison". My heart bleeds.
16 Mar 2003.
The bag of potatoes I bought today carried just the sort of marketing message I can appreciate: clear, direct, honest and unambigous. None of this subtle trickery with symbolism or any teaser campaign nonsense, just straighforward "Buy more of our stuff: because it's great". From now on I feel sure I will eat more potatoes. eat more potatoes!
15 Mar 2003.
Sophisticated European types have been sniggering at the Americans for their simplistic jingoism because some restaurants have renamed chips from 'French fries' to 'freedom fries'. Yes, that's certainly an example of rather pompous self-importance, but not nearly half as impressive as the recent French law making it a criminal offence, punishable by up to 6 months in jail, to insult the flag or boo the national anthem. Meanwhile, the Americans continue to enjoy their quaint Olde-Worlde constitutional freedoms to insult flags and boo at will.
12 Mar 2003.
An amazing new study has revealed what nobody would have ever imagined: students sometimes drink too much and then wake up the next morning not being able to remember what they did the night before. It's hard to credit, but often their drunken behaviour was unwise, often including (gasp!) insulting people and spending money recklessly.
I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
10 Mar 2003.
Apparently, according to the BMA, the International Commission of Jurists and others, the use by America of CS gas or pepper spray during the war in Iraq would be "illegal". How bizarre. So if some American soldiers come across an Iraqi trench or pillbox it will be "illegal" for them to try and force a surrender by tossing in a tear-gas grenade. This leaves them the alternative of blasting the occupants to scorched pulp with an anti-tank rocket or asking the airforce to drop a 1000lb bomb on them, which is not "illegal". This must all make sense to somebody but it certainly doesn't to me...
For some reason I don't expect to see the following in the newspapers if the Americans choose not to use tear-gas:
Via Reuters - 30th March, 2003
Humanitarian And Legal Groups Express Relief At American Use of Lethal Force
A number of legal, medical and humanitarian groups including the International Commission of the Red Cross expressed relief last night that the American military forces in Iraq were not using painful and itchy chemicals and instead relying on conventional weapons.
Peter Herby, an arms and mines control specialist with the ICRC, said: "There was considerable concern within our organisation that illegal weapons such as CS gas or similar irritants might have been used. It is good to see that the US armed forces have listened to the concerns expressed by the Red Cross and others, and have instead stuck to the use of explosives and projectiles which have a conventional 'killing' or 'dismembering' effect."
"We welcome the decision to use overwhelming lethal force", said a British Medical Association spokesman, going on "This is far preferable to the rumoured Pentagon plans to use chemical irritants which could have caused really quite painful temporary inflamation of the nasal membranes".
The Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists released a statement saying "We are pleased to see the Americans using traditional-style weapons which kill and maim through the application of extreme heat, pressure, and razor-sharp red hot supersonic steel fragments. Thank goodness they have not deployed CS gas, pepper spray or even itching powder, as we feared they might."
05 Mar 2003.
It's officially springtime now: the daffodils outside my back door have started to open.
26 Feb 2003.
Someone wrote in to this evening's 'PM' program saying that the case of the pensioner held in South Africa "surely makes the case" for introducing national identity cards. Stuff and nonsense, I say. The fact that the unfortunate Mr Bond was arrested in South Africa rather suggests to me that he was already in possession of a proof-of-identity document: his passport. Quite what more use a British identity card would have been to South African police investigating crimes committed in the United States than a British passport was I cannot imagine. And the identity in question was not Mr Bond's: it was the fraudster's. The frauds had been committed in Mr Bond's name in the United States, apparently using stolen data and/or forged documents. So unless the Home Office is going to issue unforgeable cards (impossible) which will be correctly scrutinised during all high-value transactions (deeply unlikely), even those taking place in foreign countries (even less likely) an ID card would have helped Mr Bond not one iota.

Update, 27 Feb 03: I reply, on the 'PM' letters slot.

24 Feb 2003.
Saw this sign in Winchester at the weekend, which I thought was amusing in a slightly pedantic way.
16 Feb 2003.
Oh, lordy, is my finger not on the pulse of popular opinion. I wonder, is the Peace in our time guy well-meaning and deluded, or deliberately poking fun?
Jan 2003.
I seem to be listening to a lot of Elvis at the moment. "Uh-huh... it's a-one for the money, a-two for the show..."
Super stuff.
What a tragedy the CIA faked his death like that to cover up his having been kidnapped by the space aliens.
Dec 2002.
Got an Espion digicam from my brother for Christmas. I find it slightly scary that the End User License Agreement for the driver software is longer than the instructions for the camera itself.
Dec 2002.
The nominations are open for the Today programme's "one in, one out" Christmas poll. I propose a straight swap: Update: Abu Hamza made it onto the shortlist for expulsion, but was beaten by the Blairs.
Dec 2002.
The original UK Home Office "Entitlement Card" (cough) consultation paper from July 2002 can be found here (3,443 kBytes PDF format). For some reason the version up at the Home Office site has swollen to an enormous 13,000 kBytes.

My response to the consultation, in MS Word format or in Star Office SDW format (same document; just different file formats). I wonder whether anyone has actually read the proposal and thought "What a great idea; that's just what we need"? Oh heavens, consultation replies are two-to-one in favour so far. Of course that could mean they've received 500 compelling arguments against and 1000 cigarette packets with "If you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear" scrawled on the back in green crayon.

Date Good Things Bad Things
02 Apr 2003 Good doggy, clever doggy! Doggy wanna biscuit? Not having got the desired verdict the first time around, Hollywood prosecutes Jon a second time.
25 Mar 2003 'Unilateral' American action in Iraq now includes Poland, too. And Ukraine. Anxious parents: use your child's mobile phone to spy on their movements! Yet another technical solution to a social problem.
14 Mar 2003 Some much needed cold water is poured on the 'cyberterror' hype. Three die in senseless latrine suffocation disaster. What a way to die.
13 Mar 2003 Construction of huge new X-ray microscope-type thing begins. I do like the way it requires such big machines to manipulate tiny subatomic particles to let us look at structures which are just a handful of atoms wide. Oh God NO! A remake of 'The Italian Job'? Set in Los Angeles? NO! Surely this must win the prize for Worst Remake Ever (at least since the Sylvester Stallone version of 'Get Carter').
04 Mar 2003 Amusing lack of sanity-checking in gas company billing software. BT's Dept of Harebrained Panaceas excels itself.
25 Feb 2003 Laugh: it's funny. The answer to every social ill: more surveillance.
Michael Moore's 300 page rambling diatribe has somehow become Book Of The Year.
23 Feb 2003 More fossil finds cast light on our distant ancestors. Apparently in France it's a criminal offence to insult the president, and the 'Sun' could run afoul of the law over its "Chirac is a worm" edition. Now, while I believe that the 'Sun' is a disgraceful, embarrasing and idiotic scandalsheet I fully defend their right to be disgraceful and embarrasing idiots. I mean, honestly, a criminal offence of "insulting the president"?
I was in Waterstones yesterday and noticed that David Icke has a new book out. The thought that huge numbers of people will buy it filled me with deep despair, but then I cheered up when I realised that the world would be a duller place if a man who spends his time warning us of a shadowy conspiracy by shape-changing alien lizards were to fade into obscurity.
21 Feb 2003 A better chance of life on Europa? Buggy-riding OAPs terrorise town.
19 Feb 2003 Heh heh. Jacques Chirac gets a well-deserved toasting following his patronising rant about Eastern European countries daring to express an opinion without consulting him first. Silly lawsuit time again. Yahoo! sues! tea! company! We can't have consumers getting confused between packets of tea and a provider of internet services now, can we?
Magician announces intention to perform a mighty feat of cheese endurance. Prawn-fishing is bad. Oh, but prawns are so good to eat...
13 Feb 2003 Pixar build huge new rendering facility to keep us all supplied with lovely graphics. Oh no! Some B-list singer I'd never heard of is too scared to come to this country. Hang on. One less B-list celeb in the country... that's a good thing.
06 Feb 2003 I found my mug in the kitchen at work today. It's been missing for ages, and I'd given it up for lost. John Cleese has been awarded thousands of pounds in damages because someone said he isn't very funny anymore.
02 Feb 2003 The internet might receive its very own patron saint. If advertising (boo) and cats (yay!) can have a patron saint then why not the Net? Within 24 hours of Columbia breaking up, some idiots are already spouting shadowy conspiracy theories and Nostradamus-predicted-it nonsense.
01 Feb 2003 My car's repaired and working properly again. Bloody hell. The space shuttle's just broken up on re-entry.
29 Jan 2003 Networked robot spiders in space! Broken cylinder head gaskets.
28 Jan 2003 Petty 'Barbie Girl' lawsuit thrown out of court. Your computer can kill you. Quick, flee now while you still have a chance.
23 Jan 2003 Cats regain ability to scratch Hollywood stars and moguls. John Cleese totally overreacts to bitchy newspaper article.
Crank.net has updated with a bumper crop of crackpottery. Linux users to be beset by lawsuits?
16 Jan 2003 Wireless internet comes to rural Bangladesh. Nosy Inland Revenue employees snooping at people's data out of personal curiosity.
Is the future of banana cultivation under threat?
14 Jan 2003 New moons of Neptune discovered. Comet probe grounded.
13 Jan 2003 Phew. Good beats Evil on the web by 115,000,000 search results to 10,700,000. Misinterpreted satirical cartoon sparks protests, gets newspaper suspended. D'oh!
12 Jan 2003 Death penalties commuted. Death penalty imposed.
Yet more distant quasars found. You can never find too many distant quasars, that's what I always say. British Army forced to deploy cooks as front line troops due to short-staffing. Damn, that's demeaning. Oh well, I suppose every para is a rifleman first and foremost...
09 Jan 2003 Mrs. Beckham set to back down in silly trademark battle with football club? Yet another innovative use for the DMCA: stop people refilling their printer toner cartridges.
This could be either good or bad. Part of me thinks it's good because anything which gets people studying sciences instead of made-up subjects like Social Policy has to a good thing. But part of me (the snide, nagging, more realistic part of me) sees a slide toward teaching the "social context" of science, ending in the curriculum consisting of the Politics Of Nuclear Power and the Social Impact Of Genomics being taught by a starry-eyed Social Policy graduate instead of a hard-headed Mad Professor with scorched eyebrows teaching the important stuff like what nuclear reactions really are and how genes really work.
08 Jan 2003 Miss Moneypenny is set to fight Ken over the new London Access Tax. Moneypenny vs Ken Livingstone: now that's a fight I'd pay good money to watch. Man prosecuted in Germany for comments made while participating in discussion-board spat. Yes, this does affect you: laws on online "hate-speech" are being harmonised across the EU as part of efforts to save us from the big bad spectre of scary cybercrime.
Rare moss gets down to some good old-fashioned luvvin'. School opts for technology-laden sledgehammer to crack the dinner-distribution peanut. Top quote: "trained technicians will be able to scan up to 12 students per minute during lunchtime". Great.
Einstein seems to be right, despite what his detractors may say.
07 Jan 2003 Jon Johansen found Not Guilty. Nuclear war is still a bad thing, apparently.
06 Jan 2003 Miles-wide greenhouse with kilometre-tall chimney planned to turn excess sunlight into electricity. Advertisers plan to proactively monetise my eyeballs with singing and dancing posters.
03 Jan 2003 Kiwi techies lobby for a place of their very own, a .geek.nz second level domain. Man plugs his book on the BBC, complete with gullible patient who thinks his treatment has made her pick better lottery numbers.
31 Dec 2002 Whisky saves woman from poisoning. Boy attacked by drunken elk.
27 Dec 2002 Roast pheasant. Paper party hats.
23 Dec 2002 Christmas TV: yet another showing of "Thunderball". Christmas TV: yet another "Only Fools And Horses" festive special.
21 Dec 2002
Red Cross bans Christmas (sort of). Bah, humbug etc. Actually I think their ban on certain symbols and decorations is insane, but I'm always on the side of the Wicked Witch Who Bans Christmas.
  		Gah! More standard-issue "biometrics will save us from crime" nonsense. The truth is not so simple. The BBC article even quotes a voice biometrics expert saying that computer-synthesised speech can be amazingly lifelike (and it will only get better). So what, precisely, is stopping someone from using a synthesised voice to scam the recognition systems? Give your synthesiser a few recordings of Alice and violà, instant Alice impersonation.
Clampdown on "psychic" con artists.
19 Dec 2002 Encountered a "protected" CD from EMI for the first time today and found that CDEx (or at least v1.40 beta 6 running on WinNT) effortlessly ripped it to mp3. So until they update their top secret state of the art technology I can buy their CDs with confidence that I'll be able to use them. Nestlé, purveyors of vile coffee and dodgy baby milk, sues the government of Ethiopa for $6M. I almost get the feeling that they want a consumer boycott.
18 Dec 2002 Beer and wine don't increase risk of lung cancer. Phew. crank.net hasn't updated in ages.
17 Dec 2002 Elcomsoft found Not Guilty. Drunken rampaging elephants trample villagers (not for the first time).