Pants dispute

Pants Dispute

A customer of Lloyds TSB Group PLC said one of its U.K. employees changed his password<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/hereford/worcs/7585098.stm> without permission.

Steve Jetley of Shrewsbury, England, told the BBC last week that he discovered his password had been reset when he could not use it to authenticate himself when calling a call center.

Mr. Jetley said he had previously changed his password to "Lloyds is pants" after getting upset with the company over a dispute about its travel insurance. ("Pants" is a derogatory term in the United Kingdom.) When he could not use that password, he called Lloyds and was surprised to find that it had been changed to "no it's not."

He said he tried to change the password again through the call center but was frustrated when the service representative would not allow him to use any phrase that seemed insulting to Lloyds.

"I asked if it was 'pants' they didn't like, and would 'Lloyds is rubbish' do?" Mr. Jetley told the BBC. "But they didn't think so. So I tried 'Barclays is better,' and that didn't go down too well, either." When he was told his password had to be one word, "I tried 'censorship,' but they didn't like that."

Lloyds told the BBC: "Customers can have any password they choose, and it is not our policy to allow staff to change the password without the customer's permission. The member of staff involved no longer works for Lloyds TSB."

Mr. Jetley said he has still not chosen a new password.



http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/hereford/worcs/7585098.stm

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political humor

Speaking of Sarah Palin, she said she's a life-long member of the National Rifle Association. Which may explain why she's in favor of shotgun weddings." --Conan O'Brien

Last night, President Bush addressed the crowd at the Republican Convention via satellite. The first ten minutes of Bush's speech consisted of him saying, 'Wait a minute, how can you can see me when I can't see you?'" --Conan O'Brien

Joe Lieberman, who ran in 2000 as a Democrat with Al Gore, remember he was the vice presidential nominee, spoke last night at the Republican Convention. A Democrat at the Republican Convention. That's like Bill Clinton speaking at a sexual abstinence rally." --Jay Leno


"Have you been watching the Republican Convention on the TV? Have you been watching it? I want to tell you something, and I made a mistake about this, the Republicans actually have a lot of ethnic diversity. They do. For example, uh, wait a minute, wait a minute, uh, Joe Lieberman? John McCain lasted five-and-a-half years in a POW camp in North Vietnam; even he couldn't get through Joe Lieberman's speech." --David Letterman

"You know, Sarah Palin likes assault rifles, has a collection of rifles, likes to shoot assault rifles. I'll say this for her daughter's boyfriend: the kid's got guts." --David Letterman

Say what you will about this Sarah Palin, women love this candidate. Am I right about that? ... As a matter of fact, last night at the convention, security had to restrain Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter." --David Letterman

Well here's some good news: the price of oil appears to be dropping. Energy analysts said $100 barrel of oil is on the horizon. To which President Bush said, 'That's where we should be drilling for oil: on the horizon.'" --Jay Leno

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Book Review: Israel vs iran

At each other's throats

http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12051467

Sep 4th 2008
From The Economist print edition

IF THIS murky tale of spies and their doings can be reduced to a single proposition it is this: Iran and Israel are locked in mortal clandestine combat and for the most part the Iranians, together with their allies in Lebanon's Hizbullah, are running circles around their flatfooted Israeli adversaries. That in itself lifts Ronen Bergman's book above the ordinary. Too many accounts of spying in the Middle East dwell on the high reputation of Israel's Mossad, a reputation which may just conceivably be out of date.

Mr Bergman is a respected investigative journalist working for Israel's biggest-selling daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth. His provenance matters because there are few other ways to know whether the tales he unfolds might be true. He claims they are based on thousands of documents, mostly classified, and over 300 interviews, a third of them with people who insisted on anonymity. So a lot of Mr Bergman's revelations need to be taken on trust.

What is undoubtedly true is that since the revolution of 1979 turned Iran into an implacable foe of Israel, the intelligence services of the Islamic Republic and the Jewish state have been at each other's throats. This has not prevented occasional collaboration. In the early 1980s (even before the infamous Iran-contra scandal), says Mr Bergman, Israel sold arms to revolutionary Iran as an operation known as "Seashell", in part to ensure that the war between Iran and Iraq would continue to weaken two enemies but also in a forlorn effort to win back some of the influence Israel had enjoyed in Tehran before the fall of the shah. For the most part, however, the two countries have been in conflict.

Since Iran is far from Israel, the deadliest arena has been Lebanon, where Iran has emerged the clear victor. The Israeli occupation of a "security zone" in southern Lebanon from 1982 to 2000 embittered the local Shia population, making it easier for their Iranian co-religionists to build Hizbullah into a potent political and military force. During that period, in Mr Bergman's telling, Israel failed miserably to penetrate the Shia organisation. Time and again, long before the war of 2006, Hizbullah surprised Israel with its feats of espionage, novel tactics and new weapons. By contrast, he says, Israel's efforts against Hizbullah looked more like those of a bumbling Inspector Clouseau than a James Bond.

To buttress these claims, the author gives plenty of chapter and verse, describing numerous specific Israeli operations, mostly failures, and naming and quoting some of their former commanders. He also offers a detailed account of the violent career of Imad Mughniyeh, the man he says was responsible for some of Hizbullah's most spectacular attacks, including the bombing of the American marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. A year later, this book claims, it was Mughniyeh who kidnapped William Buckley, the CIA's station chief in Beirut, and who oversaw his torture and death. David Barkai, an Israeli intelligence officer who spent years in vain pursuit of the Hizbullah man, recalls his quarry with respect: more than charisma as a leader, Mughniyeh was able to bring "artistry" to the "technology of terror".

Accounts of intelligence are fascinating when they allow recent hard-to-explain events to be re-interpreted in a new light. One example is the strange affair of Elchanan Tennenbaum, a colonel in Israel's reserves who was taken hostage by Hizbullah in 2000 and for whom Israel later traded a surprisingly large number of prisoners. The reason, says Mr Bergman, is that the colonel was privy to details of "the project", an advanced weapons system with many American components that was supposed to be decisive in a future war.

If Lebanon has been the main arena of conflict between Iran and Israel, the main issue between them has long been Iran's presumed quest for nuclear weapons. Here too Mr Bergman argues that the Iranians have consistently deceived and outwitted Israel and its Western allies. But this story is not yet over" and for those who want it there is reason to wonder whether Iran's defeat of Israeli intelligence has been quite as comprehensive as Mr Bergman claims. One example is the assassination" by Israel, according to Hizbullah" of Mughniyeh in Damascus in February, just as Mr Bergman's book was about to go to press. Another was Israel's discovery, and destruction in September 2007, of what appears to have been a secret Syrian nuclear reactor, which Mr Bergman claims Iran was helping to pay for.

But was Iran really involved? One of this reviewer's own intelligence sources says that Iran was not complicit in and seemed to know nothing about the Syrian venture. Another, who has reason to know about such things, doubts Mr Bergman's claim that a crucial tip-off came from Ali Reza Askari, an Iranian general who disappeared and is thought to have defected to the CIA. Still, spying is a rum business. Sometimes, as Winston Churchill said, the truth is so precious it must be protected by a bodyguard of lies. Not every juicy detail in this book is necessarily correct, and few can be easily verified. Mr Bergman's portrayal of Israel's confrontation with Iran will also strike some non-Israeli readers as excessively Manichaean. But it makes nonetheless for an enthralling read.

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political cartoons

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Caption contest

http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/07/open-caption-merrills-mortgages/

Read the user comments

My favorite is Thain promises that Merrill is adequately plaqued and will not have to re-plaque this year under any circumstances


Also the below signature

14.August 7th,
2008
8:15 pm The caption on “adequately plauqued” was hilarious! Fell off my chair laughing when I read that..

– Former Bear Stearns employee who got let go


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I want to be phelps

Swimming sensation Michael Phelps has an Olympic recipe for success - and it involves eating a staggering 12,000 calories a day.

By comparison, the average man of the same age needs to ingest about 2,000 calories a day.

Phelps lends a new spin to the phrase "Breakfast of Champions" by starting off his day by eating three fried-egg sandwiches loaded with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise.

He follows that up with two cups of coffee, a five-egg omelet, a bowl of grits, three slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar and three chocolate-chip pancakes.

At lunch, Phelps gobbles up a pound of enriched pasta and two large ham and cheese sandwiches slathered with mayo on white bread - capping off the meal by chugging about 1,000 calories worth of energy drinks.

For dinner, Phelps really loads up on the carbs - what he needs to give him plenty of energy for his five-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week regimen - with a pound of pasta and an entire pizza.

He washes all that down with another 1,000 calories worth of energy drinks.


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Economists

.... At Christmas 1984, _The Economist_ sought predictions on four
trends in the British and world economy over the next decade. Participating
in the poll were four multi-national company chairmen, four Oxford
students, four finance members drawn from  the Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development and four garbagemen (called "dustmen" in the
U.K.).
       In the final tally, the dustmen tied with the company chairmen. The
Oxford students and the finance ministers were miles behind.
       On the question of the value of the pound against the U.S. Dollar,
which was $1.20 in 1984, the dustmen came closest to the pound's current
value of $1.60. The experts had predicted that the pound would drop below
$1.00 (U.S.).
       The refuse shifters also came closest to predicting the current
price of a barrel of oil, down from $29 a barrel in 1984 to $17 today.
Experts predicted that the price would rise to about $40.
       The dustmen and the company chairmen were in almost a dead heat in
correctly forecasting that Singapore's gross domestic product would
overtake that of Australia. The others thought it would never happen.
       Business experts have tended to downplay the success of the garbage
collectors in the ten-year forecast, but the dustman's union is making the
most of the triumph of the working man. A union official commented to the
_Manchester Guardian_: "It proves that the Chancellor of the Exchequer
doesn't need six wise men. He just needs to talk to the dustman-in-the-
street."


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Who snubbed Jessie Owens

Every four years, when the Summer Olympics [Images] hit the headlines, some media outlet or the other mentions the great Jesse Owens and his victories at the 1936 Berlin Games. Inevitably, the story of his famous snubbing by Adolf Hitler [Images], when the murderous Nazi dictator refused to shake Owens by the hand, is brought up.

There is just one thing about the story -- it is pure hogwash from beginning to end. And digging up the truth reveals some interesting facts about the United States.

So, what exactly happened in Berlin in 1936? Hitler and his goons were bent on leaving a good impression by crafting the most magnificent spectacle seen till then. (How many people realise that the relay of the Olympic torch from Olympia in Greece to the host country was dreamt up by the Nazis? There was no such 'tradition' before 1936.)

Hitler was at the stadium on the first day of the track and field competition on August 2, 1936. When the German athlete Hans Woellke won the shotput gold medal, the delighted dictator called him into the presidential box to congratulate him in person.

Henri de Baillet-Latour, then president of the International Olympic Committee, politely informed the German dictator that he could either receive all the athletes or none at all; congratulating only German athletes, he said, violated the Olympic spirit. Hitler, who was at his charming best, actually apologised for breaking tradition, and said he would refrain from singling out athletes of any nation.

This was the origin of the famous 'snub'. Did Adolf Hitler actually insult the famed American athlete? The answer comes from the man best qualified to answer that, Jesse Owens himself.

'When I passed the Chancellor he arose, waved his hand at me, and I waved back at him. I think the writers showed bad taste in criticising the man of the hour in Germany [Images].'

Interestingly, Owens did not say that in 1936, he wrote that in 1970, in the book The Jesse Owens Story, at a time when Hitler's monstrosities had been public knowledge for a quarter of a century.

Yet his concern for the truth was great enough that he acknowledged that it was Hitler who arose first to acknowledge the athlete.

So who did 'snub' Jesse Owens? Once again, Owens speaks for himself:

'Hitler didn't snub me -- it was FDR who snubbed me. The president didn't even send me a telegram.'

The 'FDR' mentioned in the quote is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then president of the United States. 1936 was an election year, and Roosevelt, who was running for re-election, simply did not want to be seen shaking a black man's hand. That might have cost him valuable votes in the southern states.

I am sure American journalists knew the truth. But they did not acknowledge that President Roosevelt, an icon of the liberal media, was such a racist that he could not spend a few minutes in the company of a black man. It made a better story to pin the story on Hitler, who, ironically, had publicly acknowledged Owens.

Owens also said that he was treated far better in Germany than in his own country. At a dinner held for all the victorious American athletes in New York, Owens and the other black athletes were ordered to ride in the freight elevator, used for transporting luggage, because the elevator for guests could not be used by blacks! He was denied all recognition by the American system, and reduced to stunts like running against horses; when he got too old for that, the great athlete worked as a janitor. In 1966 he had to endure the pain of filing for bankruptcy.

The story of Jesse Owens is hardly unique in American sport. A young Muhammad Ali ( then named Cassius Clay) was reputedly refused service in a whites-only restaurant; humiliated, he threw away the gold medal he had won at the Rome Olympics. Later, he refused to be drafted during the Vietnam War, famously declaring, 'I ain't got no quarrel with the Vietcong, they never called me a nigger.'

The United States has travelled some way since the days of Roosevelt and Owens. In those days, there was a white man in the White House and a black man doing the hard yards out in the stadium. Today, there is a serious chance of a black man sitting in Roosevelt's chair, while a white man is winning accolades for his octet of gold medals.

Sadly, some things never change. In 1936, the press allowed itself to be seduced by Nazi propaganda; sift through the archives, and there is no shortage of admiring reports about the economic and social development of Germany under the Hitler regime. In 2008, there seems to be the same unquestioning admiration for Communist China as for Nazi Germany.

I cannot help reflecting that his athletes achieved one of the aims that Hitler set for them. Germany won 33 gold medals and 89 in all, handily beating the 24 gold medals that fell to the United States (56 in all). When you see the determination with which the Chinese are setting out to beat the United States in the gold count, you cannot help wondering if this dictatorship too will follow the Nazis in other areas too.

Tailpiece: I have long since despaired of Doordarshan's commentators -- why can't we simply get the foreign feed? -- but the national broadcaster hit a new low with the Beijing [Images] Games. Even its technical standards have slipped, with comments from the harassed engineers clearly audible over the air, not once but just about every day. And then there was the time that we saw the men's badminton championship match while the audio feed related the tale of the women's diving finals. Simply horrible!

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Good news for men

Want to live a little longer? Get a second wife. New research suggests that men from polygamous cultures outlive those from monogamous ones.

After accounting for socioeconomic differences, men aged over 60 from 140 countries that practice polygamy to varying degrees lived on average 12% longer than men from 49 mostly monogamous nations, says Virpi Lummaa, an ecologist at the University of Sheffield, UK.

Lummaa presented her findings last week at the International Society for Behavioral Ecology’s annual meeting in Ithaca, New York.

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JLo on Phelps

Poor Jennifer Lopez. The new mom is training for a triathlon, but everyone is too busy watching the Olympics to notice.

Lopez, who appeared on "Good Morning America" Aug. 18 to discuss her preparations for the Malibu Triathlon, was overheard saying after the segment that she "couldn't understand why everyone is talking about that swimmer," according to a GMA source. "She couldn't come up with (eight-time gold-medal winner Michael) Phelps' name, and then she yammered on about how she was the one training for a triathlon just six months after giving birth, and how that was the big story right now, not 'the swimmer.' "

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