WTF?

The Washington Post: When the State Department recently asked the CIA for names of Iranians who could be sanctioned for their involvement in a clandestine nuclear weapons program, the agency refused, citing a large workload and a desire to protect its sources and tradecraft. Frustrated, the State Department assigned a junior Foreign Service officer to find the names another way — by using Google. Those with the most hits under search terms such as “Iran and nuclear,” three officials said,…

One would think that one of our most valuable embassies in the Arabic-speaking world would have more than 0.6 percent of its staff fluent in the language of the host country, wouldn’t you think? Nah, that’d make too much sense. Reuters: WASHINGTON, Dec 6 (Reuters) – Among the 1,000 people who work in the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, only 33 are Arabic speakers and only six speak the language fluently, according to the Iraq Study Group report released on Wednesday.…

The New York Times: Cheating is not unheard of on university campuses. But cheating on an open-book, take-home exam in a pass-fail course seems odd, and all the more so in a course about ethics. Yet Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism is looking into whether students may have cheated on the final exam in just such a course, “Critical Issues in Journalism.” According to the school’s Web site, the course “explores the social role of journalism and the journalist from…

BBC: Iranian women have been warned to be on the look-out for cameras hidden in places where they undress, such as fitting rooms, gyms and swimming pools. The chief of Iran’s police, Esmail Ahmadi Miqadam, said some shop owners were fitting spy cameras themselves. Iranian authorities want to stop a wave of secretly-filmed pornographic DVDs hitting markets and internet sites. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been championing a drive to banish unwanted Western cultural influences from Iran. Last year, Western and…

Slate decided that four Borat-related articles wasn’t quite enough, so here’s (no joke), No. 5: “The Real Kazakhstan: What does Borat get right and wrong about his native land?” Best line? Borat claims that traditional Kazakh wine is made from fermented horse urine. I have tried Kazakh wine, and I can tell you it is definitely not made from fermented horse urine. It just tastes that way.

The Associated Press; October 12, 2006: By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 8:09 p.m. ET TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) — A teenager who put her bra on a car antenna before it flew off and led to a highway accident will be charged with littering, a prosecutor said. Emily Davis, 17, of Bowling Green, told investigators she took her bra off while her friend was driving on Interstate 75. James Campbell, who was driving behind the girls, said he swerved to…

E&P: [Dexter] Filkins, one of the longest-lasting and most-honored reporters in Iraq, said that many situations lately have become even too dangerous for Iraqi reporters to report on. He described the current climate as “anarchy,” and, when asked if the country was already involved in a civil war, he said, “Yeah, sure.” Asked what advice he had for a reporter from a small paper going to Iraq now without the kinds of money and backup that the Times was able…

I dreamt that I had to go rescue a female journalist who was across the Cuban border. (Somehow my brain didn’t remember that Cuba is an island.) And in the dream, the border was on a rolling hill type environment (not unlike, say, Napa Valley) with a pair of black metal fences marking each border. There were large posts with horizontal bars connecting them, but with enough space to squeeze through, between the lower bar and the ground. I slid…

In trying to get my email domain (cfarivar.org) to point to this site, my email has been down for several hours. If you need to email me, use cfarivar [at] sonic [dot] net. And I can only communicate with my host via web-based messages. Argh.

Go read this article about asshole extraordinaire and scum of the earth Joe Francis, the founder of the “Girls Gone Wild” empire. Bravo to Claire Hoffman of the L.A. Times for doing such a fantastic piece of journalism. L.A. Times: Eventually, Szyszka [an 18-year-old girl recruited at a Chicago night club for a GGW video] says, Francis told the cameraman to leave and pushed her back on the bed, undid his jeans and climbed on top of her. “I told…