Photo censored by media wimps

The skies won’t seem especially friendly to anyone taking off from Philadelphia International Airport if they notice what a suburban couple wrote on the roof of their home.

“(Expletive) U FAA,” the message reads, though one letter of the profane word is substituted with an underline. Below that it is a picture of a plane with a slash through it and the words “no fly zone.”

Homeowner Michael Hall and his girlfriend, Michaelene Buddy, are angry that jets have been flying over their house since last month, when the Federal Aviation Administration altered departures heading out of Philadelphia. Hall says he has to sleep with earplugs.

“Just doing it made me feel better, but I’d still like to say what I wrote directly to the idiot head of the FAA,” said Hall.

The county is suing the FAA. Should be resolved in a decade or so.

Albertsons store gives away pill bottles with candy inside | KTVB.COM | Boise, Idaho News, Weather, Sports, Video, Traffic & Events | IDAHO NEWS — Cripes.

FALLBROOK, CA – Parents are outraged after prescription bottles full of candy were given away to children at a California Albertsons.

The bottles were given to children as part of a promotion inside the store in Fallbrook, California, near San Diego. Parents say the bottles, which look like they are full of pills – were actually full of candy.

The real prescription bottles were labeled with “SavOn Pharmacy,” and filled with Hersheys Kisses.

The store says the promotion was a lapse in judgment by one of its vendors and has been stopped.

found by Aric Mackey

Wherever you turn in Davos, you see the World Economic Forum’s modest motto: “Committed to improving the state of the world.” Well, it needs it. So here’s one practical step: the G8 should be expanded to G14, adding China, India, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and Indonesia. Arbitrary? To be sure. Tactless? You bet. Deeply offensive to some important countries not on that list? Obviously – and they will cry havoc, foul and blue murder…

The dangers of climate change, nuclear proliferation, disease and poverty – not to mention the fragile state of globalised capitalism – demand a more credible and representative cast at the annual intergovernmental summit. As Asia rises, it is ever more absurd that the world’s unofficial top table has a seat for Italy but not for China. The current lineup at the world’s official top table, the UN security council, is not very satisfactory either, but it’s also more difficult to change. The G8, by contrast, is a club that can simply decide to invite new members to join…In principle, there’s no reason why this decision could not be taken at the next annual summit, this summer in Japan…

This reformed group of the world’s most powerful and important countries (power and importance being not quite the same thing) should propose collective actions on climate change, world trade, development, energy security, HIV/Aids and Africa – to take a shortlist from Germany’s G8 summit last year. It makes no sense at all to tackle an issue like climate change without the world’s largest growing carbon emitters, China and India, at the table – which is why leaders of five of my six proposed new members were invited to attend part of that meeting, as the so-called “outreach five”. So why not make it official?

Interesting proposal. Asking the heads of these states to act like “leaders” instead of “powers”.

CEO says “oops!”

The French bank Société Générale said Thursday that it had uncovered “an exceptional fraud” by a trader that would cost it €4.9 billion, and that it was raising about €5.5 billion in new capital to shore up its finances.

The company, one of the biggest banks in France, said in a statement that the fraud, equivalent to about $7.1 billion, had been committed by a trader in charge of “plain vanilla” hedging on European index futures.

During a conference call, the Société Générale chairman and chief executive, Daniel Bouton, said the bank had started legal proceedings against the rogue trader, whom he did not identify; he also said the trader’s whereabouts were unknown. The trader is “on the run,” officials said…

On the run? The dude probably can buy his own A380.

The trader’s actions were found to be a case of “isolated fraud,” the bank said, and officials said they were convinced the trader had acted alone.

Speaking at an afternoon press conference, Christian Noyer, governor of the French central bank described the trader as a computer “genius.”

At least he was a geek.

An Afghan court in northern Afghanistan sentenced a journalism student to death for blasphemy for distributing an article from the Internet that was considered an insult to the Prophet Muhammad, said the judge in charge of the court.

The student, Sayed Parwiz Kambakhsh, 23…was charged with directly insulting Muhammad by calling the prophet “a killer and adulterer,” the judge, Shamsurahman Muhmand, said in a telephone interview…

Kambakhsh is a student at the faculty of journalism in Mazar-i-Sharif and also works for a daily paper, Jahan-e-Naw, as a reporter. He was accused of downloading a controversial article and adding some of his own paragraphs about the ignorance of the Prophet Muhammad on women’s rights…

You have to ask after a while – does a theocracy, by nature, have to become intolerant?

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003. Not surprisingly, the officials with the most opportunities to make speeches, grant media interviews, and otherwise frame the public debate also made the most false statements, according to this first-ever analysis of the entire body of prewar rhetoric.

This fully searchable database includes the public statements, drawn from both primary sources (such as official transcripts) and secondary sources (chiefly major news organizations) over the two years beginning on September 11, 2001. It also interlaces relevant information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches, and interviews.

Folks at the Center for Public Integrity must have coffee umbilicals stretching over to the Library of Congress.

They certainly have the stubbornness and smarts needed to work their way through the stonewalls of official Washington.