Police seize magic trick from preacher

Ugandan police are holding a Ghanaian preacher over a stage magic device they fear may dupe people into believing they have experienced miracles.

 

Customs officials seized the Electric Touch device -- which magicians use to give small electric shocks to volunteers -- from "Prophet" Obiri Yeboah at the airport last week, the state owned New Vision daily reported Tuesday.

 

The pastor heads one of many Pentecostal churches in Uganda, receiving large sums of money from congregations seeking miracle cures for diseases or help with financial problems.

 

The Electric Touch device is usually sold in magic shops alongside card tricks, magic coins and disappearing balls.

 

"With a simple touch, make a fluorescent bulb glow on and off at your command, make confetti move, charge a spoon and watch as it shocks a volunteer!" says one online magic shop selling the device.

"People could be duped to think it is a miracle," the New Vision quoted Civil Aviation Authority security chief Herman Owomugisha as saying.

 

Officials are worried about the proliferation of "miracle" churches in Uganda, many of which claim to cure HIV/AIDS.

 

Lula urges everyone to plant little "oil plants" to produce energy

Buoyed by the high price of oil, Brazilian President Ignacio Lula da Silva is trumpeting biofuels as an alternative. And now he says they could be a boon for the poor. And Lula, as quoted by Al Jazeera, seems to be taking a page out of Mao's little red book:

[E]veryone has the technology and the knowledge to dig a little hole of 30 centimeters to plant an oil plant that could produce energy, the energy they couldn't produce in the 20th century.

It's a sentiment that recalls one of Mao's famous exhortations during the Great Leap Forward—that every Chinese should smelt steel in his or her backyard. Lula's economics is not quite as bad as Mao's, but he's still full of it. Lula was responding to a recent report by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation, who are decidedly less enthusiastic. The rise of biofuels, the report makes clear, is no panacea for poverty.

In fact, Oil-exporting countries, net food importers, and the urban poor are all in for a rough ride thanks to biofuels. As gasoline starts to become so expensive that the world turns en masse to alternative fuels, oil-exporting countries in the Middle East will see their main source of revenue dry up. And since many types of biofuel are made from feedstock, the rising prices of crops such as corn will increase the cost of raising livestock and, ultimately, the price of food. Indeed, this is already happening, and it's bad news for the poor, who spend a significant chunk of their meager incomes on food. (It's also bad news for beer drinkers.)

So while Brazil's sugar producers may be cashing in on the ethanol boom, the hundreds of thousands of Brazilian favelados aren't exactly eager to ride the biofuel wave. After all, many of these people don't have yards in which to grow little "oil plants" ... nor running water, for that matter.

Terrorist Kidnappers Upset That Their Hostage Didn’t Thank Them

Even for an Islamic terrorist, this takes some gall:

 

“We used to give him everything he wanted,” Abu Zobayer… said.

“We spent £70 on his food every week. The Matouk restaurant [one of the best eateries in Gaza] got rich because we had to feed him.”

Johnston has said that he fell ill from the food he was served. Zobayer commented: “It’s not our problem that we gave him everything and he only ate a little.”

Although they did not torture him physically, the kidnappers seemed to have no concept of the psychological torture they were inflicting on the BBC correspondent.

“We had people with him all the time to try to help him to relax,” said Zobayer.

“We gave him a radio so that he could listen to his own channel. I myself sat with him to try to make him feel comfortable and feel that he will be released.”

 

This may sound horribly cruel, but I sometimes wonder if a more appropriate reaction to all these kidnappings wouldn’t be to just not engage with the enemy at all.  Instead, simply hunt down the terrorists and kill them.  Rescue the hostage if we can, but ultimately leave the kidnappers dead.

It would probably reduce the number of kidnap victims who came back alive, but if the kidnappers themselves got nothing but getting killed for the troubles the number of kidnappings would plummet, you’d think.

Certainly paying the ransom these thugs demand doesn’t do anything but encourage them to kidnap more people.

 

Jogging Is Right-Wing (Or So Say the French)

Newly elected French president Nicolas Sarkozy is an avid runner.

According to some French critics – and here, the term “critic” carries its most common contemporary meaning of “someone who feels obliged to offer a negative comment when no one else sees anything requiring any discussion at all” – the preceding sentence contains a very severe judgment. This article captures the flavor of the minicontroversy.

For these critics, running for health is right-wing, individualist, Anglo-Saxon. To feel the full weight of this judgment you must keep in mind that these are, for them, bad things.

M. Sarkozy is advised to walk, and not merely to walk but to stroll, to promenade. To promenade is to display oneself publicly in walking mode, in short to perform, something French intellectuals understand instinctively and, as a consequence, frequently mistake for seriousness. The contemplative mien, the slow but seemingly purposeful amble, et voilà! the philosophy.

M le president’s hobby reminds one, if one is old enough, of John F. Kennedy’s presidency, when he reinvigorated the President’s Council on Youth Fitness and appointed as its head Charles “Bud” Wilkinson, the football coach who had turned the Big Eight conference into “Oklahoma and the Seven Dwarfs.” In 1962 Kennedy came upon an executive order from the days of Teddy Roosevelt, in which that notoriously vigorous president questioned whether Marine officers were capable of walking 50 miles in 20 hours. From that discovery sprang a short-lived fad for such walks. The president’s brother, Robert Kennedy, completed one, as did (if memory serves) his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver and various other government figures. (The White House press secretary did not, but then his first name was Pierre.)

We learn from the newspaper that, the critics notwithstanding, this particular form of exercise is fairly popular in France. Once known as le footing, it later became le jogging and is now most fashionably known as le running. One’s heart surely goes out to the Académie Française, whose thankless and hopeless job it has been to protect innocent French people from such linguistic horrors as le drugstore and le weekend.

Interestingly – or not – my own evolution has been in the opposite direction, from the running when I was younger to the jogging I can just manage nowadays. Footing can’t be far in my future. If this means I am not cut out to be French, so be it. Still….

We had known, of course, that nothing in existence, or indeed in nonexistence, escapes the notice of the true philosophe. What strikes one now, therefore, is not the triviality of the matter presently under examination but the poverty and crudity of the categories available to these facile and lucid minds. I mean, right-wing? This is the kind of analysis for which one can get paid? Je suis just a little bit jealous.

Man's smelly feet trigger police raid

German police broke into a darkened apartment fearing they would find a dead body, after neighbors complained of a nasty smell seeping out onto the staircase.

The shutters of the apartment had been closed for more than a week and the mailbox was filled with uncollected mail. But instead of a corpse, they found a tenant with very smelly feet, asleep in bed next to a pile of foul-smelling laundry, police in the southwestern town of Kaiserslautern said on Sunday.

'Dracula's Castle' for sale

A Habsburg heir is hoping someone will take a bite of his offer Monday to sell "Dracula's Castle" in Transylvania. The medieval Bran Castle, perched on a cliff near Brasov in mountainous central Romania, is a top tourist attraction because of its ties to Prince Vlad the Impaler, the warlord whose cruelty inspired Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, "Dracula."

Legend has it that the ruthless Vlad — who earned his nickname because of the way he tortured his enemies — spent one night in the 1400s at the castle. The Habsburgs formally put the Bran Castle on the market Monday, a U.S.-based investment company said. No selling price was announced.

Bran Castle was built in the 14th century to serve as a fortress to protect against the invading Ottoman Turks. The royal family moved into the castle in the 1920s, living there until the communist regime confiscated it from Princess Ileana in 1948.

After being restored in the late 1980s and following the end of communist rule in Romania, it gained popularity as a tourist attraction known as "Dracula's Castle."

In May 2006, the castle was returned to Princess Ileana's son, New York architect Archduke Dominic Habsburg. He pledged to keep it open as a museum until 2009.

Habsburg, 69, offered to sell the castle last year to local authorities for $80 million, but the offer was rejected. On Monday, he put the castle up for sale "to the right purchaser under the right circumstances," said Michael Gardner, chief executive of Baytree Capital, the company representing Habsburg. "The Habsburgs are not in the business of managing a museum."

He predicted the castle would sell for more than $135 million but added that Habsburg will only sell it to a buyer "who will treat the property and its history with appropriate respect."

Habsburg said in a statement: "Aside from the castle's connection to one of the most famous novels ever written, Bran Castle is steeped in critical events of European history dating from the 14th century to the present."

According to a contract signed when the castle was returned, the government pays rent to Habsburg to run the castle as a museum for three years, charging admission. After 2009, Habsburg will have full control of the castle, Gardner said.

The government has priority as a buyer if it can match the best offer for the castle, he said.

Opposition lawmakers have claimed the government's decision to return the castle to Habsburg was illegal because of procedural errors. In recent years, the castle — complete with occasional glimpses of bats flying around its ramparts at twilight — has attracted filmmakers looking for a dramatic backdrop for films about Dracula and other horror movies.

Some 450,000 people visit the castle every year, Gardner said.

Milan Fashion Week June 26, 2007.

Quick quiz: You meet this guy at a party, and his first words are likely to be…

• “How did you cope with the power blackout? I myself had many problems.”
• “They tell me this hat pulls the whole outfit together…”
• “Help me get my $20 million out of Belgium, and we can split it.”
• “Well, to be honest, I don’t know why I walk at a 45-degree angle.”