The Onion – America’s Finest News Source has some funny one-liners on the Palin hack:
The son of a Tennessee state representative hacked into Gov. Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! e-mail account. What do you think?
“This is outrageous. Clearly it’s the responsibility of the government to infiltrate people’s e-mail accounts, not rogue private citizens.”
“I’m sure it won’t be long before they crack McCain’s elaborate system of cans and strings.”
Cans and strings…hilarious.
The Deutsche Welle tells a strange story about a man who refused to stop riding without a ticket:
From October 2006 to February 2007, he was caught riding the train without a ticket 102 times, often several times on the same day. The court, fed up with imposing fines and suspended sentences, finally decided to get tough and gave him a 22-month holiday behind bars.
Throwing himself upon the mercy of the court was likely not an option this time. It is not as if the man was riding ticketless due to a lack of financial means. According to his own statement, he repeatedly dodged fares “pretty much out of boredom.”
Boredom as a defense? Maybe something was lost in translation. Wonder if tried to argue how ticket sales should be made more entertaining.
Nice to see the Smart car finally getting back to its roots. It was invented in Switzerland and meant to be a high-efficiency vehicle, but ten years later they are just beginning to incorporate the efficiency into models:
The diesel version has a fuel consumption of only 3.3 litres per 100 kilometres with a carbon dioxide emission figure of only 88 g/km.
After running a test with 100 electric-powered Smarts in London, the car maker also announced the mass production of Smart electric-drive for 2010.
Strange how the inventor wanted a hybrid so many years ago, but Daimler refused and marketed it as a compact vehicle only.
On its tenth birthday the Smart finally appears to fulfil the destiny marked out by its inventor Hayek. Daimler has just announced that from October 2008 all the petrol-engined 45 kW/61 hp and 52 kW/71 hp Smart fortwos would be fitted standard with micro hybrid drive (MHD) and fuel-saving start-stop systems.
It took ten years and Toyota executive leadership to make the obvious obvious to Daimler. Talk about conservative.
The news in the Deutsche Welle is that Germany has been warning the US for a year about market failure and the need for tighter regulation:
Merkel said that she had tried to win support for greater transparency and regulation on international markets at the G-8 conference last year, but that governments including the US did not heed her.
They do not mince words in Germany about Bush’s so called “drunken” leadership:
On Sunday, Sept 21, US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson called for other nations to set up similar rescue plans.
He did not provide further details, but US financial authorities have been working closely with their counterparts in Europe and Japan over the past 10 days to prevent a collapse of the interwoven global financial system.
[…]
“The Americans can’t make Germany accountable for their failure and their arrogance,” Poss [deputy parliamentary head of the Social Democratic Party (SPD)] said. “A similar rescue package is neither planned nor needed in Germany,” he added.
The article also points out that the current package proposed by Bush will actually lead to greater crisis during the McCain administration:
“I have doubts whether that method is really the most clever one,” Michael Meister, deputy parliamentary leader of Chancellor Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Party (CDU) told business daily Handelsblatt.
Meister suggested that the $700 billion bailout by the US government could lay the fundaments for the next crisis. He compared it to the massive slashing of interest rates by the US Federal Reserve in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept 11, 2001 which he said had sowed the seeds for the current turbulence in capital markets.
I have seen some analysts already starting to suggest that disasters are all part of the underlying plan of the Bush administration. More market failure and more crisis creates the ideal condition for consolidation of power as well as an argument for extreme measures. After they failed to deregulate and privatize social security through normal legal means, they are hoping to declare an emergency and force a big sell-off to “save” America from the disaster they created.