ALGERIAN TOURIST UPDATE: They’re free — and notice who turns out to have been holding them:

Islamic extremists freed 14 European tourists on Monday, six months after they were kidnapped by an al-Qaida-linked group in the Sahara Desert. . . .

Algerian authorities say the kidnappers are linked to the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, generally seen as the less bloody of two main Islamic extremist movements behind a more than decade-long insurgency in Algeria.

The Salafist group has been linked to the al-Qaida terror organization.

I hope somebody pays close attention to what else is going on in that area.

MATT WELCH IS FACT-CHECKING ARIANNA HUFFINGTON’S ASS: And said fact-checking reveals her to be, well, pretty much a complete, lying hypocrite.

UPDATE: Read the comments, where some people are suggesting she’s just an airhead. But note this key bit:

Either she voted for it or she didn’t. If she voted for it, then she lied to Paul Begala about not having done so. If she didn’t vote for it, then she was being deceitful in 1994 about the virtues of Prop 187. Unless of course, she is willing to admit that she often votes against good policies. In which case, I’m not sure she should be governor.

Not that her chances are especially good anyway.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Matt Welch has more Arianna now-and-then over at his blog. Heh.

I’LL GIVE UP MY WORDPERFECT when they pry it from my cold, dead hands. Here’s another reason why.

UPDATE: This post from The Comedian points out that .pdf format isn’t as secure as some seem to think.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Matt Sitar notices something:

Your link to The Comedian highlighted a rather peculiar omission from the BBC article about Word. Both links mention the sniper letter from the Washington Post, but the BBC article failed to mention that the document was released in PDF format. As the UK government is planning to move to Acrobat (according to the article), this would seem an important detail.

Yeah, it would.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT, thankfully unsuccessful this time, is reported by Eugene Volokh.

GOOD NEWS ABOUT SMALLPOX SHOTS:

THE VACCINE HAS been assumed to offer its best protection for from three to five years.

However, according to a paper scheduled for the September edition of the journal Nature Medicine, lab tests can detect immune response in 90 percent of vaccinated people for many years, some for up to 75 years.

It’s still not clear just how much protection old vaccinations offer, but it seems likely that they provide some benefit for a long time.

THE MULLARCHY OF IRAN, WHERE A SERIAL KILLER CAN BE A HERO:

When the drought ended and the rains came, Saeed Hanaei believed that it was a sign from God that his killing spree had divine approval. “I realised God looked favourably on me. That he had taken notice of my work,” Hanaei said. With 12 prostitutes already dead by his hands, Hanaei carried on his “work” and strangled at least four more women after luring them to his house in the Iranian city of Mashhad. . . .

The case provoked a debate between reformers who condemned the authorities for failing to catch him earlier and some conservatives who shared the killer’s disgust with a rise in prostitution.

“Who is to be judged?” wrote the conservative newspaper Jomhuri Islami. “Those who look to eradicate the sickness or those who stand at the root of the corruption?” Such sentiments are expressed by the killer’s merchant friends at the Mashhad bazaar, one of whom says with a laugh: “He did the right thing. He should have continued.”

Don’t expect me to shed a tear for these guys if they wind up hanging from lampposts. Any more than I am for this guy.

UPDATE: I’m reminded of this story from Paris. Is there a pattern here?

ANOTHER UPDATE: A couple of readers point out that at least this is “controversial” in Iran, while in most Arab countries it wouldn’t be.

HERE’S SOME GOOD NEWS:

KABUL, Aug. 18 (Xinhuanet) — Afghanistan’s economy saw a marvelous growth of 30 percent in the first year after the Taliban’s ouster, mainly due to the return of refugees and an end of lingering drought, a spokesman said on Monday.

“According to reports by the Finance Ministry and the central bank, the economic growth in last fiscal year was over 30 percent,” presidential spokesman Jawed Ludin told reporters at a routine press conference here.

The British weekly Economist has also reported a similar growthof the Afghan economy based on its independent estimates, he said.

(Via Bill Quick).

ALGERIAN TOURIST UPDATE: A reader emails that the AP wire is reporting their release. I can’t find a link on it yet.

FIFTH COLUMN?

The leader of a Muslim charity in the United States has been sentenced to 11 years in jail after being convicted of fraud. Syrian-born Enaam Arnaout, 46, admitted diverting thousands of dollars from his Benevolence International Foundation to Islamic militants in Bosnia and Chechnya. . . .

US District Judge Suzanne B Conlon said there was no evidence Arnaout supported terrorism, although she said his alleged links to Bin Laden raised suspicions.

During the investigation, US Attorney General John Ashcroft said documents found in Arnaout’s charity’s Bosnia office tied him directly to Bin Laden, and Arnaout admitted having met the al-Qaeda leader.

It’s not entirely clear what’s going on here, though there was obviously fraud involved at the very least.

UPDATE: This is troubling, too. Either these guys are guilty, which is troubling, or they’re not, which is troubling in a different way.

READER JAMES SMITH EMAILS FROM BAGHDAD regarding this AP story:

I’m now working in the public affairs office in Baghdad for the CPA. Got here three weeks ago. Fascinating experience. I thought I’d forward you a good example of reporting that starts with the premise that everything is the fault of the Coalition and ignores facts simply to prove that point. Here is a humble fisking of an AP story now on the wire, which I fear will become yet another myth unless you dispell it on your blog. Feel free to use any or all of my commentary below. I think you’d agree that flaw five is truly weird.

Click “More” for the rest. I suggested that the CPA start a blog of its own, allowing it to “Fisk” stories directly, but I thought I’d reproduce this email just as an example of how this sort of thing could work. Why not?

(more…)

JAMES MORROW:

THEY SAY THAT COCAINE is God’s way of telling you you have too much money. I suppose blogging is His way of telling you you’ve got too much time on your hands.

I can quit any time.

CLAYTON CRAMER has some interesting history regarding Cruz Bustamante’s associates.

UPDATE: David Neiwert says that charges against Bustamante are overstated, “though Bustamante himself would probably do everyone a favor by clearing it up definitively.”

IN WHAT’S EITHER A COINCIDENCE, OR BRILLIANT MARKETING, the copy of one of my regular tool catalogs that showed up in the mail on Saturday had home generators splashed across the cover. Paul Boutin has more on these.

I’ve never bought one, even though the idea of making my own electricity seems, well, very cool. One reason is that they’re somewhat dangerous — in fact, during the little-noted but massive Memphis power outage last month, the son of an acquaintance was asphyxiated when the people he was staying with ran a generator — indoors. Don’t do that!

The other is that you need a big honking generator to really run things like air conditioners or heat. I’d like one of those automatic start-up, tri-power (natural gas lines, backed up by propane, also capable of running on gasoline) versions, with about 15-25 kilowatts. I could’ve had one, too, if I hadn’t bought a car.

Short of that, well, I’ve got flashlights, and a big UPS to run the DSL modem and the wireless node for hours. But the generators Paul points out are kinda slick-looking. . . .

In the meantime, I’ve got more thoughts on self-reliance over at GlennReynolds.com.

UPDATE: Noted survivalist Amy Langfield has suggestions for what you ought to keep in your blackout kit.

LYNN KIESLING HAS A COLUMN ON DEREGULATION AND BLACKOUTS:

First, the “deregulation” that has occurred in electricity has primarily been in opening up wholesale markets for power generators and their customers (i.e., utilities), enabling people in Manhattan to continue consuming power (and clamoring now for more regulation) without Con Edison having to build more power plants on the island itself. The existence and growing vitality of wholesale electricity markets has created substantial value in the past decade, through encouraging generation where it is cheapest and sales of power to where it is most needed.

But this limited amount of market liberalization has left the industry in an awkward place. Generation is largely governed by market processes, but transmission and retail distribution remain heavily regulated.

Read the whole thing. And visit her blog.

SUSANNA CORNETT points to an interesting anti-agricultural-subsidy blog by The Guardian, and has some thoughts on the future of blogging generally.

SPINSANITY HAS TWO POSTS, here and here, about Bush critics playing “fast and loose” with the facts. Molly Ivins appears. That’s no surprise — Ivins’ claim to accuracy is about as well-founded as her claim to humor. but so does Clinton arms-control official Peter Zimmermann, who gets busted for making false claims about what Bush said regarding Saddam’s nuclear capabilities. Conclusion: “critics of the administration’s truthfulness need to be just as honest with the public as they ask the president to be.”

STUART BUCK WRITES: “300 SAMs. Headed for America. Found only because a Hungarian bureaucrat randomly happened across them.”

On the other hand, this happened almost two years ago, and nothing since. Perhaps this suggests that the Homeland Security campaign is going better than I’m giving it credit for.

FUNNY, I got less spam during the blackout, too.

THIS may well be true. That’s okay — I can live with being replaced by a robot.

ZSA ZSA SADDAM: One word: Heh.

I AGREE WITH DOCTOR FRANK on the important question of modulation in songwriting.

And, by the way, you should go to Dr. Frank’s and just start scrolling if you have the least interest in music or record production.

THOSE NAUGHTY NORTH KOREANS. Earlier I posted on German businessmen busted for selling them nuclear bomb-making supplies. Here’s more:

MUNICH, Aug. 15 — The French cargo ship Ville de Virgo was already running a day late when it steamed into Hamburg harbor on April 3, its stadium-size deck stacked 50 feet high with cargo containers bound for Asia. . . .

But within hours after the ship departed, the story of the manifest began to unravel. German intelligence officials discovered that the aluminum was destined not for China but for North Korea. The intended use of the pipes, they concluded, was not aircraft production, but the making of nuclear weapons.

Then there’s this:

The US State Department lauded Taiwan’s government yesterday for forcing the North Korean freighter Be Gae-hung to unload a batch of controlled chemicals before allowing it to leave Kaohsiung Harbor for North Korea.

State Department Deputy Spokesman Philip Reeker said during a regular press briefing that the chemical, identified as phosphorus pentasulfide, could have been used to make chemical weapons if transported to North Korea.

Question for the day: Remember those three freighters that Saddam loaded up with mysterious-but-probably-nasty stuff before the war? What ever happened to those?

SOME QUOTES FROM BASRA that are worth reading.