Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Oldfield

It just never stops...

*Kenya, in addition to the usual problems of a developing African nation (poverty, tribal frictions), has recently endured the rise in power of the Mungiki, which is a secret society that is "part Sicilian Mafia, part Chicago street gang, with a little of the occult sprinkled in." Police say the members aim to destabilize the country in the midst of the current political campaign by devil-worshipping acts of violence (skinning heads, drinking human blood from jerrycans). A district commissioner in Nairobi said the Mungiki had threatened her with genital mutilation. The gang originated in the 1990s much as organized crime in the U.S. did, by taking over such urban enterprises as bus transit and garbage collection.
*Once-classified reports obtained by the Associated Press in May revealed that three times in late 2005 and early 2006, the U.S. Department of Defense issued espionage alerts regarding newly designed Canadian 25-cent pieces, which the Pentagon warned may contain embedded transmitters capable of eavesdropping, and which perhaps were given purposely to U.S. contractors working in Canada. Some time later, according to the reports, the Pentagon learned that the coin's coating was not a film-and-mesh transmitter but merely a covering to preserve the limited-issue coin's unique design.!!!!!