9 posts tagged “stupidity”
Sunday, 15 June 2008
More confidential government files were found on a commuter train earlier this week, it has been revealed.
The Independent on Sunday says it was handed the documents, which cover fighting global terrorist funding, drugs trafficking and money laundering.
The files were found on the same day as the BBC was handed top secret papers on al-Qaeda. A Treasury spokesman said the government was "extremely concerned".
The Tories are calling for controls to protect secret official information.
The documents, about a meeting of financial crime experts, apparently include briefing notes for a meeting of the international Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to be held in 11 Downing Street next week.
The papers were found on train bound for London Waterloo on 11 June, the same day that another batch of papers relating to intelligence assessments of Iraq and al-Qaeda were handed to the BBC after being left by a senior official on a train.
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Our enemies don't even need to hack into our computers, they apparently just need to travel on public transport
 Keith Vaz,
Home Affairs Select Committee chairman  |
The Cabinet Office and the Metropolitan Police launched inquiries into the documents handed into the BBC - the latest in a series of blunders involving sensitive official information.
But Scotland Yard said it was not involved in investigating the latest case.
BBC political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg said it was uncertain whether the latest documents were also top secret.
The documents seen by the BBC should not have left Whitehall but it is not yet clear if the new files were permitted to have been taken out, our correspondent added.
"Some of the information is already on the public domain, but another lapse is deeply embarrassing for the government," she said.
A Treasury spokesman said: "We are extremely concerned about what has happened and we will be taking steps to ensure that it doesn't happen in the future."
Documents returned
The Independent on Sunday said it had returned the documents and would not be divulging any details contained in them.
The confidential files were said to include details of how trade and banking systems could be manipulated to finance illicit weapons of mass destruction in Iran.
They also discussed methods of terrorist funding and the potential fraud of commercial websites and international internet payment systems.
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The government needs to get a grip in order to protect this sort of sensitive information and the British public
Dame Pauline Neville-Jones
Tory shadow security spokesman |
Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, Keith Vaz, said people would be "alarmed" at this latest revelation.
He said that until an inquiry had established how the leaks happened, "no official no matter how senior, should be allowed to take classified or confidential documents outside their offices for whatever reason.
"Our enemies don't even need to hack into our computers, they apparently just need to travel on public transport."
Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, Conservative shadow security spokesman, said: "We've now had eight major breaches that we know of in six months.
"The government needs to get a grip in order to protect this sort of sensitive information and the British public."
She called for "cleared and trusted" supervisors appointed to "supervise handling of government information inside the machinery of government on a daily basis".
The FATF conference is due to begin on Monday at the QE2 Conference Centre in Westminster, opposite the Houses of Parliament.
The FATF was established by the 1989 G7 summit in Paris to spearhead efforts to counter the use of the international financial system by criminals.
It has since expanded to 34 members.
Wednesday, 11 June 2008
Police are investigating a "serious" security breach after a civil servant lost top-secret documents containing the latest intelligence on al-Qaeda.
The unnamed Cabinet Office employee apparently breached strict security rules when he left the papers on the seat of a train.
A fellow passenger spotted the envelope containing the files and gave it to the BBC, who handed them to the police.
The official was later suspended from his job, the Cabinet Office announced.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith now faces demands for an official inquiry.
Keith Vaz MP, chairman of the powerful Home Affairs select
committee told the BBC: "Such confidential documents should be locked
away...they should not be read on trains.
"I will be writing to the Home Secretary to establish an inquiry into the affair."
The Conservatives backed calls for an inquiry, with their security spokeswoman, Baroness Neville-Jones, describing the loss as the latest in a "long line of serious breaches of security."
Home Office minister Tony McNulty told the BBC he was awaiting the results of the police investigation.
'Damning assessment'
The two reports were assessments made by the government's Joint Intelligence Committee.
One, on Iraq's security forces, was commissioned by the Ministry of Defence. According to the BBC's security correspondent, Frank Gardner, it included a top-secret and in some places "damning" assessment of Iraq's security forces,
The other document, reportedly entitled 'Al-Qaeda Vulnerabilities', was commissioned jointly by the Foreign Office and the Home Office.
Just seven pages long but classified as "UK Top Secret", this latest intelligence assessment on al-Qaeda is so sensitive that every document is numbered and marked "for UK/US/Canadian and Australian eyes only", according to our correspondent.
According to reports, this document may have contained details of names of individuals or locations which might have been useful to Britain's enemies.
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MISSING SECRETS
November '07: Discs containing child benefit records of 25m people lost
December '07: Driving Standards Agency contractor loses records of 3m people
January '08: 600,000 details of would-be recruits lost by Naval officer
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However, it appears that in a serious breach of the rules, the papers were taken out of Whitehall by an unnamed official and left in an orange cardboard envelope on the seat of a Surrey-bound train from London Waterloo on Tuesday.
When a fellow passenger saw the material inside the envelope, they gave it to the BBC.
Not suspended
Reports suggest that the official, described as a senior male civil servant, works in the Cabinet Office's intelligence and security unit, which contributes to the work of the Joint Intelligence Committee.
His work reportedly involves writing and contributing to intelligence and security assessments, and that he has the authority to take secret documents out of the Cabinet Office - so long as strict procedures are observed.
Once the documents were reported missing, a full-scale search had been launched by the Metropolitan Police, amid fears that such highly sensitive material could have fallen into the wrong hands.
Our correspondent said that across several departments in Whitehall on Wednesday evening there is said to be "horror" that top-secret documents could have been so casually mislaid.
Inquiry
Any inquiry is likely to focus on the Cabinet Office, and the security procedures that made it possible for sensitive information to be allowed out of a secure environment.
A spokesman for the Cabinet Office said: "Two documents which are marked as 'secret' were left on a train and have subsequently been handed to the BBC.
"There has been a security breach, the Metropolitan Police are carrying out an investigation."
The spokesman declined to discuss the contents of the documents.
One Whitehall source sought to play down the impact of the breach: "The embarrassment of the loss is greater than the embarrassment of the contents of the documents.
"We don't believe there is a threat to any individuals in what was in these documents if they had got into the wrong hands."
A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: "We are making inquiries in connection with the loss of documents on June 10."
May 26, 2008
NEW YORK (AP) -- A man who was carrying a rusted pirate-style sword through Macy's flagship store in Manhattan is facing charges of criminal possession of a weapon.
Police say 29-year-old Lawrence Jackson was brandishing the curved sword while visiting Macy's Herald Square store Sunday with his girlfriend.
He told police he was carrying the sword because he is a member of a kickball team whose players often wear pirate-themed costumes. He maintains he was on his way to a game when he was arrested.
Shiver me timbers, mateys! What an ARRRRRsehole!
5/13/2008, 3:20 p.m. EDT
By JEFF KAROUB
The Associated Press
DETROIT (AP) — A lawyer representing a Muslim woman who sued a judge for dismissing her small-claims court case after she refused to remove her veil said he's prepared to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
"It's an unfortunate ruling," Nabih Ayad said of U.S. District Judge John Feikens' ruling Monday against Ginnnah Muhammad's claims that her constitutional right to freedom of religion and civil right to court access were violated.
Hamtramck Judge Paul Paruk requested she remove her niqab — a scarf and veil that covers her head and most of her face — during an October 2006 hearing.
"One could easily see the ... continuous litigants that are going to step into district court with this (veil) on," Ayad said Tuesday. "This issue is going to come up over and over again."
She was contesting a $3,000 charge from a rental-car company to repair a vehicle she said thieves had broken into. She offered to remove her veil before a female judge, but Paruk is the only judge in the district court in Hamtramck, a city surrounded by Detroit.
Feikens wrote that while Muhammad could not appeal Paruk's decision based on state law, she could have received state court review and filed a counter claim to the company's suit against her.
Ayad said state law also prevents cases under $3,500 from being filed in the state's general civil division.
"She can't file in state court," he said. "It is, basically, an appeal."
Ayad said Feikens' ruling circumvents the constitutional violations, and would appeal within 30 days.
"I feel the judge's ruling really left a citizen of this community feeling that her belief in the justice system has been stripped from her," Ayad said. "I always felt that this is a decision that ... has a very good chance of going to the appeals court, maybe even the Supreme Court."
Michigan attorney general spokesman Rusty Hills said the AG's office was pleased by the ruling.
Assistant state attorney general Margaret Nelson, who represented Paruk, argued during last month's hearing before Feikens that the case should be dismissed because his decision wasn't based on religion. She said he needed to "fully observe" Muhammad to properly determine the facts.
"It was a temporary, necessary, limited action (that had) only incidental impact on the practice of her religion," Nelson said.
The state said the case was a contract dispute between Muhammad and Enterprise Rent-A-Car. The company countersued her later in October 2006 and ultimately won a judgment of $2,083. Muhammad has appealed that decision in Wayne County Circuit Court.
Feikens wrote the U.S. Supreme Court has found that governmental actions that substantially burden a religious practice must be justified by a compelling interest. But the high court later modified the standard, explaining the right to free exercise of religion doesn't relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a valid and neutral law that is generally applied.
Feikens wrote that determining if Paruk observes a valid and neutral policy would require a detailed examination of how he manages his courtroom. And, Feikens wrote, that kind of review would "increase friction in the relationship between our state and federal courts."
"I find, therefore, that respect for the relationship between our state and federal courts weighs heavily against exercising jurisdiction over Muhammad's declaratory judgment action for violation of her right to free exercise of religion," the opinion said.
May 13, 2008 1:08 PM EDT
DETROIT (AP) -- A federal judge in Detroit has dismissed the case of a Muslim woman who sued a judge for demanding she remove her veil in court.
The judge ruled Monday against Ginnnah Muhammad's claims that her rights to freedom of religion and court access were violated.
Judge Paul Paruk requested she remove her veil during a 2006 hearing in the town of Hamtramck. She was contesting a $3,000 charge from a rental-car company to repair a vehicle she said thieves had broken into.
Paruk told her he needed to see her face to judge her truthfulness and gave her a choice: Take off the veil or have the case dismissed. She kept it on and sued the judge last year alleging he violated her religious and civil rights.
Stupid cow.
by Claire Sibonney
Thu May 8, 2008
TORONTO (Reuters) - An attendant at a Canadian restaurant who was sacked for giving a bite-sized doughnut, worth 16 cents, to an agitated toddler was given her job back on Thursday after the case received wide media attention.
Nicole Lilliman, a single mother, said she was dismissed from a London, Ontario, outlet of the Tim Hortons coffee and doughnut chain after video cameras captured the 27-year-old giving a Timbit to a toddler.
"It was just out of my heart, she (the toddler) was pointing and going 'ah, ah...' I should have gone to my purse and got the change, but it was busy," Lilliman told the Toronto Star newspaper.
Tim Hortons said on Thursday that the firing was a mistake.
"It was the unfortunate action of one manager who unfortunately made an overzealous decision, and thankfully we were able to rectify the situation," said company spokeswoman Rachel Douglas.
Douglas said the company, a Canadian icon with stores on virtually every high street across the country, told Lilliman that she could have her job back, and Lilliman had accepted.
A single Timbit sells for 16 Canadian cents (16 U.S. cents), but most shoppers buy boxes of 10, 20 or 40 of the deep-fried goodies, which come in a variety of flavors.
Douglas said Tim Hortons had received a number of complaints. "Thankfully we're able to go back to them and say we were able to fix the situation," she said.
It is my sincerest hope that "manager who unfortunately made an overzealous decision" lost its job and won't be asked back.
Friday, May 2, 2008
FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) -- Charles Ray Fuller must have been planning one big record company.
The 21-year-old North Texas man was arrested last week for trying to cash a $360 billion check, saying he wanted to start a record business, authorities said. Tellers at the Fort Worth bank were immediately suspicious - perhaps the 10 zeros on a personal check tipped them off, according to investigators.
Fuller, of suburban Crowley, was arrested on a forgery charge, police said. He was released after posting $3,750 bail.
Fuller said his girlfriend's mother gave him the check to start a record business, but bank employees who contacted the account's owner said the woman told them she did not give him permission to take or cash the check, according to police.
In addition to forgery, Fuller was charged with unlawfully carrying a weapon and possessing marijuana, Fort Worth police Lt. Paul Henderson said.
Officers reported finding less than 2 ounces of marijuana and a .25-caliber handgun and magazine in his pockets, police said.
Fuller couldn't be located for comment by The Associated Press on Friday because there were no phone listings for him in the Fort Worth area.
Bush Fixes Economy Whines About Congress
Dorkus
W. Dildo had a press conference today, in his garden. He is very rich
and has an entire hospital to attend to him and bombs anything that
makes him confused and no matter what crime he does, he never gets sent
to prison, so he is exactly like ordinary poor Americans like you. Bush
Junior has heard about how maybe the "economic" is a problem, so he
told those losers who still have to act like he's important — you know,
the White House correspondents — that he "figured out" what was wrong
and guess what, it's Congress, which has Democrats.
"The average person wants to know whether or not we know that they're paying higher gasoline prices and they're worried about staying in their homes," Bush said. Yes, that's a bunch of jumbled nonsense with a slight relation to the subject, so Consumer Confidence immediately plunged to its lowest level in nearly six years and consumer sentiment plunged to its lowest level in 26 years and inflation rose again and home prices are falling faster than ever with "no sign of the bottom" and the number of Americans who can even dream of affording a little vacation in the next six months fell to a 30-year low.
Said Bush Junior: "I repeatedly submitted proposal to help address the problems. Time after time, Congress chose to block them."
Nobody has any idea what he's talking about, or even cares about how he thinks he "repeatedly submitted proposal."
Congress and the White House did agree to send everybody in America a little bit of money, and those checks will start arriving this week. Many people plan to "splurge" by spending their Economic Stimulus money on the heating bill, or a 50-lb. sack of rice, or half a tank of gas.
Bush Says Congress Blocking Progress [CNN]
Too stupid to learn how to speak Yankistani let alone English, but can make $$$ hand over fist while we move and change jobs so we can afford gasoline.
Wonkette's so lovely.
Men who explain things
He kept us waiting while the other guests drifted out into the summer night, and then sat us down at his grainy wood table and said to me, "So? I hear you've written a couple of books."
I replied, "Several, actually."
He said, in the way you encourage your friend's 7-year-old to describe flute practice, "And what are they about?"
They were actually about quite a few different things, the six or seven out by then, but I began to speak only of the most recent on that summer day in 2003, my book on Eadweard Muybridge, the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life.
He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. "And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?"
So caught up was I in my assigned role as ingenue that I was perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that another book on the same subject had come out simultaneously and I'd somehow missed it. He was already telling me about the very important book -- with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.
Here, let me just say that my life is well-sprinkled with lovely men, including a long succession of editors who have, since I was young, listened and encouraged and published me; with my infinitely generous younger brother; with splendid male friends. Still, there are these other men too.
So, Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, "That's her book." Or tried to interrupt him anyway.
But he just continued on his way. She had to say, "That's her book" three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a 19th century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn't read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless -- for a moment, before he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing.
I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that's eaten a cow, or an elephant turd on the carpet.
Yes, it's true that guys like this pick on other men's books, and people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered.
Men explain things to me, and to other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. Some men. Every woman knows what I mean. It's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's unsupported overconfidence.
This syndrome is something nearly every woman faces every day, within herself too, a belief in her superfluity, an invitation to silence, one from which a fairly nice career as a writer (with a lot of research and facts correctly deployed) has not entirely freed me. After all, there was a moment there when I was willing to believe Mr. Very Important and his overweening confidence over my more shaky certainty.
More extreme versions of this syndrome exist in, for example, those Islamic countries where women's testimony has no legal standing; so that a woman can't testify that she was raped without a male witness to counter the male rapist. Which there rarely is.
Credibility is a basic survival tool. When I was very young and just beginning to get what feminism was about and why it was necessary, I had a boyfriend whose uncle was a nuclear physicist. One Christmas, he was telling -- as though it were a light and amusing subject -- how a neighbor's wife in his suburban bomb-making community had come running out of her house naked in the middle of the night screaming that her husband was trying to kill her. How, I asked the physicist, did you know that he wasn't trying to kill her? He explained, patiently, that they were respectable middle-class people. Therefore, her-husband-trying-to-kill-her was simply not a credible explanation for why she was fleeing the house yelling that her husband was trying to kill her. That she was crazy, on the other hand....
Even getting a restraining order -- a fairly new legal tool -- requires acquiring the credibility to convince the courts that some guy is a menace and then getting the cops to enforce it. Restraining orders often don't work anyway. Violence is one way to silence people, to deny their voice and their credibility, to assert your right to control over their right to exist. About three women a day are murdered by spouses or ex-spouses in this country. It's a leading cause of death among pregnant women in the U.S. At the heart of the struggle of feminism to give rape, date rape, marital rape, domestic violence and workplace sexual harassment legal standing as crimes has been the necessity of making women credible and audible.
I tend to believe that women acquired the status of human beings when these kinds of acts started to be taken seriously, when the big things that stop us and kill us were addressed legally from the mid-1970s on; well after my birth, that is. And for anyone about to argue that workplace sexual violence isn't a life-or-death issue, remember that Marine Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach, age 20, was apparently killed by another Marine in December while she was waiting to testify that he allegedly raped her twice. The burned remains of her body and her fetus were found in the fire pit in his backyard in January, and he was arrested last week in Mexico. Being told that, categorically, he knows what he's talking about and she doesn't, however minor a part of any given conversation, perpetuates the ugliness of this world. Several years ago, I objected to the behavior of a couple of men, only to be told on both occasions that the incidents hadn't happened at all as I said they had, that I was subjective, delusional, overwrought, dishonest -- in a nutshell, female.
Most of my life, I would have doubted myself and backed down. Having public standing as a writer of history has helped me stand my ground, but few women get that boost, and billions of women are out there on this 6-billion-person planet being told that they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives, that the truth is not their property, now or ever. This goes way beyond Men Explaining Things, but it's part of the same archipelago of arrogance.
Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't. Not yet, but according to the actuarial tables, I may have another 40-something years to live, more or less, so it could happen. Though I'm not holding my breath.
A few years after the idiot in Aspen, I was in Berlin giving a talk when a writer friend invited me to a dinner that included a male translator and three women a little younger than me who would remain deferential and mostly silent throughout the meal. Perhaps the translator was peeved that I insisted on playing a modest role in the conversation, but when I said something about how Women Strike for Peace, the extraordinary, little-known antinuclear and antiwar group founded in 1961, helped bring down the communist-hunting House Committee on Un-American Activities, Mr. Very Important II sneered at me. The House committee, he insisted, no longer existed in the early 1960s and, anyway, no women's group played such a role in its downfall. His scorn was so withering, his confidence so aggressive, that arguing with him seemed a scary exercise in futility and an invitation to more insult.
I had written a book that drew from primary documents and interviews about Women Strike for Peace. But explaining men still assume that I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge. A Freudian would claim to know what they have and I lack, but intelligence is not situated in the crotch -- even if you can write one of Virginia Woolf's long mellifluous musical sentences about the subtle subjugation of women in the snow with your willie. Back in my hotel room, I Googled a bit and found that Eric Bentley in his definitive history of the House Committee on Un-American Activities credits Women Strike for Peace with "striking the crucial blow in the fall of HUAC's Bastille." In the early 1960s.
Dude, if you're reading this, you're a carbuncle on the face of humanity and an obstacle to civilization. Feel the shame.
The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled many women -- of my generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan and Bolivia and Java, not to mention the countless women who came before me and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the revolution, or even the category called human.
After all, Women Strike for Peace was founded by women who were tired of making the coffee and doing the typing and not having any voice or decision-making role in the antinuclear movement of the 1950s. Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being. Things have certainly gotten better, but this war won't end in my lifetime. I'm still fighting it, for myself certainly, but also for all those younger women who have something to say, in the hope that they will get to say it.
Rebecca Solnit is the author of many books including "A Field Guide to Getting Lost," "River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West" and "Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities." A longer version of this article appears at Tomdispatch.com.
It's rarely possible for me to wait until I'm out of earshot before laughing at pillocks like these; I'm wired for immediate snickering if not insulting them outright.
