The conference solemnly declared internally and externally that Kim Jong Il was reelected as general secretary of the WPK with unanimous will and wishes ... His reelection to the supreme post of the WPK, organizer and guide of all victories of the Korean people, is the highest glory and happiness of millions ...

Frederick Forsyth, bestselling author of thrillers like The Day of the Jackal and The Dogs of War, was in the West African state of Guinea-Bissau last year when the president was assassinated.
His presence there, he now believes, led suspicious US intelligence forces to launch a cyber-attack on his wife's computer. ...
Forsyth still writes a column for the Daily Express and says he thought he had better tell them what was going on in Guinea-Bissau. He does not use computers or mobile phones but borrowed a phone and dictated 1,000 words of copy.
"Unfortunately, the American intelligence services listened to it and wasted my wife's computer screen and totalled all her lunch dates," he claims.

So we can't regulate these products as medicines because they'd end up being banned, but we'll let them be called medicines anyway? It gives me a headache just trying to think down to the level of the person who wrote this stuff.

HOMEOPATHS in Oxford have hit out at county health bosses after they ruled out treating patients with alternative and complementary medicines. ...
[Homeopath Steven Cartwright said] "There is as yet no explanation as to how homeopathy works"...

Even though we’ve been using in our clinics and mobiles our homeopathic malaria complex (MalariX) for these last 10 years to not only treat, but also prevent, malaria, we never have been able to track the results simply because it takes money. In the beginning of 2009, however, we were given a generous donation and I was able [to] initiate the steps to pull together a proper study on the product.

<Scene: The England dressing room, after unambiguous defeat by Germany.>
COACH: That was a-terrible game! Why you no a-scoring the goals?!
ROONEY: I couldn't help it, my feet wouldn't move quickly.
COACH: Why ees this? I ask the doctor. Doctor! Doctor!
<Enter the TEAM DOCTOR from 17th Century, wearing frock coat and powdered wig.>
COACH: Doctor, why Rooney's feet move so slowly like he-a-saying?
DOCTOR: Alas a clear case of Sludginess Of The Blood, sir.
COACH: Sludginess of the blood?
DOCTOR: Yes, sir. A not uncommon affliction induced by breathing the Rareified Airs of mountainous regions. This imbalances the Essential Humours and causes the liver to make a Very Great Excess of blood, which perturbs the Whole Organism and can cause Clogging Of The Pipes just as Mr Rooney describes. In extreme cases sufferers have been known to burst.

...risible kangaroo court ... a tragedy and a travesty... monstrous injustice ... sinister travesty ...

By proceeding against Dr Singh, and not the Guardian, and by rejecting the offer made by the Guardian to publish an appropriate article refuting Dr Singh's contentions, or putting them in a proper prospective, the unhappy impression has been created that this is an endeavour by the BCA to silence one of its critics...

Discarded paper table “linen” and rayon underwear are bought by chemical factories to be converted into candy.

The MOD has been served with a Freedom of Information Act request relating to what it knows about "worringly big sea monsters": Dear Ministry of Defence, Are there any abnormally large, or dangerous sea monsters hundreds of metres under the sea that haven't been revealed to the public? Being a marine biologist, it would be in the best interest of the public as our lives could be at risk. And the MOD hasn't responded as promptly as it should have done... what are they hiding?

He has made several other wooden machines, but calls this latest one his crowning achievement.

But an Old Bailey judge ruled that, as the sale of traditional Chinese medicines was totally unregulated, there was no evidence that she knew of the potential harm. A charge of "administering a noxious substance so as to endanger life or inflict grievous bodily harm" was therefore thrown out.
"Everybody accepts that you didn't know you were breaking the law," he told Ms Wu.

The Register of Chinese Herbal Medicine, which represents more than 450 practitioners, said the case highlighted "the urgent need for the statutory regulation of herbal medicine in the UK".

I was accused once of being the enemy of the Enlightenment. I felt rather proud. I thought, ‘Hang on a moment’. The Enlightenment started over 200 years ago. It might be time to think again and review it and question whether it is really effective in today’s conditions, faced as we are with huge challenges all over the world. It must be apparent to people deep down that we have to do something about it.

• We now have an idea what colour a species of feathered dinosaurs were; white and orange stripes.
• After an heroic 10 month battle to free itself from a patch of soft sand, the Mars rover Spirit is stuck for good and will be used as a static monitoring station. Its sibling robot Opportunity is still mobile nearly 6 years after its warranty expired.
• The Kepler planet-hunting space telescope found its first five new planets around other stars a few weeks ago.

• Climate models ignore water vapour, which is a far more important greenhouse gas than CO2.
• Emissions from people burning fossil fuels are too small to change the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
• Volcanoes produce by far the greatest amounts of CO2.

• Water vapour is important and behaves differently than CO2, and climate models do not ignore it.
• Emissions from burning fossil fuels are sufficient that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere (whether measured in New Zealand, Hawaii or the South Pole), has risen over the last 120-ish years to a higher level than has been seen for at least the last 650,000 years. CO2 concentrations for the last thousand years measured from bubbles trapped in ice is summarised here; steady at 280 parts per million from 1000AD until 1880, since which it's gone up to over 380 ppm today.
• As for volcanoes being by far the largest emitters of CO2, the US Geological Survey have the following to say:

  Our studies show that globally, volcanoes on land and under the sea release a total of about 200 million tonnes of CO2 annually. ... while 200 million tonnes of CO2 is large, the global fossil fuel CO2 emissions for 2003 tipped the scales at 26.8 billion tonnes. Thus, not only does volcanic CO2 not dwarf that of human activity, it actually comprises less than 1 percent of that value.

  My emphasis. Volcanoes only produce "by far the greatest" amount of CO2 if your definition of "by far the greatest" includes "less than 130th as much as burning fossil fuels".

he claimed that CO2 levels are too negligible to cause warming, that water is a greater greenhouse glass and that in any case plants absorb excess CO2.
An article published on the New Scientist’s website yesterday provides a wealth of scientific evidence against such claims. Ball also made some less decipherable comments that insects’ and spiders’ natural emissions were more damaging to the climate than fossil fuels.

A police force has defended spending £20,000 investigating a man's death after his ghost was said to have told psychics that gangsters had forced him to drink petrol and bleach. ... An inquest this week recorded a verdict of suicide after hearing there was no evidence of foul play. However the coroner, Peter Brunton, queried the murder inquiry held after mediums tipped off police, suggesting that the words "lion, a horse and a man called Tony Fox" were significant. "There was a great deal of communication between the mediums and the police," he said. "A great deal of effort was expended in following these leads up."

When it comes to psychics, my stance is hardcore: they must die alone in windowless cells