According to Alex Kraaijeveld on MALTS-L, Tullibardine is set to reopen at the end of this month (click to find Tullibardine bottles.)

In other news, Edward Teller is dead, 60 years too late.  (Too harsh?  Hardly.)

There is a good exclusive interview with Al Gore at washingtonpost.com.

From Canadian Stamp News:

Canadian investigators claimed their first big victory in the decade-old Nigerian Letter Scam [more detail] last summer after arresting three Toronto-area men charged with bilking foreigners out of millions of dollars.  The three-year joint task force investigation included the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police], FBI, and United States Secret Service.

Most of the 300 victims are American, but others live in Great Britain and Germany, investigators said.  Victims forked out as little as $52,000 after falling for promises of riches from an illegal money-laundering deal while one coughed up $5 million (U.S.).

Ironically, if any potential victim had been a stamp collector, one look at the envelopes [presumably placed by hand into mailboxes] should have provided a ludicrously-easy clue to something being wrong with the contents.  Of the handful of RCMP-seized letters franked with so-called Nigerian stamps, most were obvious fakes, likely colour photocopies produced in Canada.  The worst-looking one was a copy of a recent 50-Niara commemorative entitled Rock Bridge that had misregistered overly-light colours and perforations that appeared to have been made with a blunted sewing machine needle.

Note: Apparently there is a new variant specifically targeting Mormons.  The African correspondent is reportedly a Mormon who has been persecuted because of his beliefs.  The president of the BBB in the targeted area of the U.S. warns Americans that this is as much of a fraud as the standard Nigerian scam.  She writes, “It is just as bogus, no matter how many times it mentions God, country and church affiliation.”  Actually, that is a useful sentence to remember in general.

The title of an AP wire service despatch from today: Pentagon’s Damaged Façade Repaired.

They wish.

This week the Pentagon publicly appealed for help in “defeating difficult targets” – announcing a competition for ordinary Americans to come up with snappy ideas on ways of thwarting the terrorists.  “We’re open to ideas from just about everybody,” said Pentagon spokesman Glenn Flood….

Our current prime minister may have got wind of the Pentagon’s novelty competition for lateral ideas, because I’m sure I heard him saying that Britain will be contributing our very own Ground Force.  So the Americans are sending in thousands of highly armed marines and we’re contributing a BBC gardening programme.  Mind you, once the senior clerics in the Taliban are confronted with the bra-less Charlie Dimmock jumping about, the regime will probably cave in overnight.

                   - John O’Farrell writing for The Guardian, Answers on a postcard please, 27 September 2001

Stephen Jay Gould died today of cancer at age sixty.  Much sadness.

It took me four or five tries to successfully parse the article title Landmine claims dog UK arms firm.   Three words could be nouns or adjectives, one could be a noun or a verb, and two could be nouns, adjectives, or verbs.

On the Israeli siege of the West Bank, Mr. Terje Roed-Larsen, UN Special Co-ordinator for the occupied Palestinian territories, writes that the devastation left by Israeli forces is “horrific beyond belief. … [The Jenin camp] is totally destroyed, it looks like an earthquake has hit it. … We have expert people here who have been in war zones and earthquakes and they say they have never seen anything like it. … It is totally unacceptable that the government of Israel for 11 days did not allow search and rescue teams to come.” [emphasis added]

President Bush continues to describe Ariel Sharon as “a man of peace.”

Now is the time to make yourself aware of what is really going on.  Do not just accept the U.S. spin of this being a war against terrorism.  Contact our representatives, tell them that the U.S. cannot stand idly by, let alone fan the flames, as this genocide continues.

Reference: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid_1937000/1937387.stm

I wonder how this interesting chimera formed?  I have marked the spot that I suspect is the junction.

Gulf Vets Reporting More Problems

Thursday February 21, 2002 9:50 PM

WASHINGTON (AP) – Gulf War soldiers believed to have escaped exposure to a vapor cloud from an Iraqi chemical weapons depot are dying at nearly 10 times the rate of troops the Pentagon says were exposed, a Veterans Administration analysis indicates.

The Pentagon has said about 100,000 soldiers were exposed to deadly gases when the Khamisiyah chemical to defend itself, attacks that result in death and injury to civilians, or on Palestinian security forces “do not contribute to calming the situation or to improving security for Israelis.”

In Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon spoke confidently of having U.S. support.  “The United States understands us and the need to protect our citizens,” he said…

New Virus: Badtrans.B

This warning applies if you use Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express.

There is a new Windows virus, called Badtrans.B, spreading rapidly through email (I have been hit three times in the past 24 hours.)  The email subject of the infected message will be simply “Re:”.  The email body will be blank but the message will contain an attachment with a double extension: filenames will resemble Pics.zip.pif and Humor.mp3.scr.  When the message is opened, Outlook will launch the Internet Explorer (IE) parser to render the message.  IE versions 5.01 and 5.5 (but not 5.01SP2) contain an exploitable MIME bug allowing arbitrary code to be executed without prompting the user; this is the route of infection.

The virus has two main effects.  First, it will email infected messages, using its own MAPI code, to email addresses found in cached web pages.  Second (and more seriously) it will install a Trojan horse keystroke logger; the logger will be in effect when the title of the foreground window begins with ‘LOG’, ‘PAS’, ‘REM’, ‘CON’, ‘TER’, or ‘NET’ (for ‘logon’, ‘password’, ‘remote’, ‘connection’, ‘terminal’, ‘network’, etc.) and the keystroke log will be mailed to one of the creator’s (or creators’) email addresses.  The keystroke logging code is contained in %System%\Kdll.dll.

• More info on Badtrans.B from Symantec
• More info on the IE MIME exploit

From The Industry Standard:

Venture Financing

Kodeos Closes $12 Million First Round

Description: Fiber-optic communications optical subsystem maker secures first round funding led by Jerusalem Ventures and Highland Capital.

Zionist Chieftains to the rescue?

I used to live a few miles from Santee, a suburb northeast of San Diego.  The shooting: everything I think to write sounds trite.  “My sympathies go out to them.”  “How senseless.”  “Who could have done such a thing?”

So let me say this: let us hope for, and work to construct, a world in which eulogies for murdered children never get a chance to become trite.