And yet, they still don't like us

Sunday Times article:

AN AMERICAN airstrike targeting Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Al-Qaeda mastermind, was prompted by “wrong information” and killed Pakistani villagers including five women and five children, according to senior Pakistani officials.

The attack took place in the early hours of Friday, when CIA-operated Predator drones circled the village of Damadola in the Bajaur area in northwest Pakistan before launching four Hellfire missiles at a mud-walled compound. Three houses were razed to the ground and 22 people died. (Sources disagree as to the exact number of missiles fired and people killed - see Wikipedia article for several other links - but they seem to agree on the women and children. Although DNA testing hasn't been completed, reports so far indicate that al-Zawahiri was probably not among those killed.)

Those who've been following closely will recall that we also killed al-Zawahiri in another attack eight days previously, and again back in 2004, although AFAIK he still hasn't been killed quite as many times as Saddam.

Now *there's* an evocative turn of phrase

Via james_nicoll, Colleen Doran in a somewhat depressing article about sexual harassment in the comics industry:

I had two other incidents, one with a guy who was in the small press who was a real nut job and another who had worked briefly at Marvel in the 1970s, and was desperate to get a mainstream career again...

I ended up settling out of court with that guy, and the other guy was taken care of by Harlan Ellison.

Close encounter of the avian kind

Found & rescued one of these fellows (rainbow lorikeet) this afternoon:



It was on the ground just outside my work, and while I couldn't see any obvious injuries it wasn't able to fly more than a short distance at a time. It didn't want to be caught, and I wasn't well equipped to catch it without hurting it; eventually I had to chase it into a corner (yay for random modern architecture with previously-functionless sticking-out bits of metal) and get a couple of passing co-workers to bring me a box. Eventually managed to herd it into the box, not without a considerable effort and some very angry avian states, and then took it. I hope it'll be all right; it managed a burst of about 10 meters at one point while I was catching it, so it shouldn't be too badly injured. At any rate, it's got better odds at the vet than it would on the ground; that part of campus is home to quite a few feral cats, and one of them came out to start its evening prowl while I was catching the bird.

Incidentally, they're even prettier close-up :-)