Posts Tagged ‘News’

Thanks Google for Telling Me Adam Gadhan Has Bad Skin

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

Who cares if he has been arrested or not? Google AdSense tells me Adam Gadhan has bad skin. That’s the real story.

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New Sub Species of Monkey: Mura Saddleback Tamarin

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

New Tamarin Monkey Species Found in AmazonThe small gray and brown tamarin monkey which weighs 213 grams (0.47 pound) guy was named Mura’s saddleback tamarin in honor of the Mura tribe.

Not an alien life form in a sewer, but much cuter.

Read more on the tamarin:

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Enemy Combatants Don’t Surf

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

Palau Map

Palau Map

The Guantanamo beat and News of the Weird collided last week when it was announced that the likely destination of 13 soon to be released Uighur “non-terrorists”/”possible nationalist separatists”/”guys we mistakenly imprisoned for seven years” is the island nation of Palau.  This move, of course, has nothing to do with any upcoming U.S. aid package to Palau, a small cluster of islands administered by the U.S. until 1994.

While the opinions of China (‘hey, let us get a crack at ‘em’), the Palau tourist industry (’shit.’) and the U.S. (‘anywhere but a swing state’) were duly recorded by journalists, absent from any of the news reports was mention of how the Uighur ex-suspecteds (let’s start calling them ‘mistainees’) felt about moving to a tropical paradise.

Carnival Cruise ads aside, it is not the dream of every human to sweat glamourously near a vast blue ocean.  Xinjiang, the region that the Uighur people come from, is more of a mountains, snow, camels and roasted meat on a stick kind of place.  For context, the Toronto Star reports: “Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the most remote city from any sea in the world.”

Palau sounds like kind of a tough sell to that crowd.  Factor in that the type of guys who head down to Taliban-run Tora Bora to learn how to shoot an AK just might like their Islam flavored conservative, the bikini beaches and being nearly only Muslims for hundreds of miles around might not be considered pluses.

This is all speculation of course.  A decent barometer would be to check in with Uighur ex-detainees in Albania, Sweden and Bermuda but reports seem decidedly mised, depending on who’s telling the story.  Foreign Affairs reports that they will be at least hooked up with some time in Palau’s fine community colleges.  I smell a wacky fish-out-of-water college movie brewing.

And then there’s this clip, which I will take advantage of the flimsiest reason to post:

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