Northern Alliance factions are reported to have been fighting amongst themselves for the last two days.
Error messages from the MPW C compiler. My favorite: "a typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program". [via Borklog]
Volcano and Aurora in Iceland: beautiful shot of an aurora over the erupting Hekla volcano in 1991.
World Trade Center steel is being sold to India and China for recycling at $120/ton. [via dangerousmeta]
Wired is reporting that Galileo, a European GPS-like system which I've mentioned here a couple of times, has been shelved after U.S. pressure. [via Hack the Planet]
Argentina is forcing the conversion of dollar denominated bank accounts to pesos at the official conversion rate of 1.4 pesos/dollar, sparking protests that President Duhalde has broken an inauguration pledge to let people keep their dollar accounts.
Rush Limbaugh says he's gotten his hearing back. There is, unfortunately, no truth to the rumor that he traded his voice for it.
A chess player at the 17th Open International Tournament in Nice was caught cheating. He was apparently using a Novag Sapphire chess computer hidden in his raincoat.
Tactics of Deception: Shades of Truth in a Time of War
No one has accused Rumsfeld of misleading the press or misrepresenting events on the ground. But post-mortems on previous American wars routinely found that the government exaggerated its successes and minimized its setbacks in its public presentations; indeed the tendency to embroider has been documented back to the Civil War.
Remember the reports of Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda members being airlifted out of Kunduz as the city was surrounded by the Northern Alliance? The flights General Franks said he didn't know anything about at the time and that Rumsfeld said we would shoot down if we saw them? According to Seymour Hersh's article in this week's New Yorker, Bush authorized the flights at Musharraf's request and ordered an air corridor set up for them. I guess he hadn't gotten around to telling Rumsfeld and Franks yet. I'm sure that's it. After all, Rumsfeld won't lie to us.
