Daily Rotten Archives January 27, 2004 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 Self-immolation captured on film Malaysia Star | Submitted by: Nicolai "An asylum seeker died nine hours after he set himself ablaze in front of stunned onlookers outside a United Nations refugee agency here yesterday. Fifty-year-old Gulam Hassan Anwari, who claimed to be an Iranian, torched himself in a desperate bid to draw attention to his failed business dealings, minutes after getting out of a taxi at the office of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in Jalan Bukit Petaling at about 11.10am... As Gulam torched himself, the shocked crowd of some 20 to 30 people stood rooted at the spot, and the young woman who had accompanied him became hysterical." Read article... and This article... Mauritania still force-feeding its girls BBC | Submitted by: Queeebec "Obesity is so revered among Mauritania's white Moor Arab population that the young girls are sometimes force-fed to obtain a weight the government has described as 'life-threatening'... 'I make them eat lots of dates, lots and lots of couscous and other fattening food,' Fatematou, a voluminous woman in her sixties who runs a kind of 'fat farm' in the northern desert town of Atar, told BBC World Service's The World Today programme... 'When they are small they don't understand, but when they grow up they are fat and beautiful,' she said. 'They are proud and show off their good size to make men dribble. Don't you think that's good?'" Read article... Bush unconcerned with finer details of Iraqi WMDs San Francisco Chronicle | Submitted by: Never Again "President Bush said Tuesday he has 'great confidence' in the intelligence community despite a finding that Iraq did not have the weapons of mass destruction that the White House cited as justification for waging war. Bush said he had no misgivings about going to war against Iraq but he refrained from saying - as he once did - that weapons of mass destruction would be discovered... retired chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay said he had concluded, after nine months of searching, that deposed Saddam did not have stockpiles of forbidden weapons. Confronted with Kay's statement, administration officials declined to repeat their once-ironclad assertions that Saddam had them." Read article... Bush and Blair avoiding electronic data trails Glasgow Herald | Submitted by: Katie "Downing Street has come up with a strategy to curb embarrassing internal e-mails by replacing electronic messages with sticky notes. The method has already been adopted by the White House. Staff at No 10 are to be encouraged to leave messages for each other on Post-it style notes that can be torn up and destroyed without a trace. The move follows a barrage of highly embarrassing electronic mails, written by some of Tony Blair's closest aides, that came back to haunt the government... The idea of using 'yellow stickies' is thought to have been borrowed from the White House, which has long been wise to the problems of rogue e-mails." Read article... Clinton sent an email to John Glenn and that's it BBC | Submitted by: jheisel "President Bill Clinton sent a grand total of two e-mails during his White House years, according to the Clinton Presidential Foundation... Of the two Mr Clinton sent, one was a test to see if the president could push an e-mail button. The other was addressed to astronaut-turned-politician John Glenn, according to the foundation's president... The head of the Clinton Presidential Foundation, Skip Rutherford, said the former president - who relished the chance to speak to voters - did not make time to send e-mails." Read article... Giant payday for Holocaust guinea pigs BBC | Submitted by: TimTyler "Thousands of victims of Nazi medical experiments have received a symbolic pay-out after giving accounts of World War II atrocities. The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany said nearly 1,800 survivors had helped provide new information about Nazi activities. It said they had each been paid $5,400 from Holocaust court funds. [Cha-ching!] ... 1,778 living Jewish victims of Nazi medical experiments were identified. Their stories included references to about 178 different types of medical experiments in more than 30 camps and ghettos, according to the conference. The list, including Doctor Josef Mengele's experimentation on twins and dwarves, also referred to injections to change the colour of people's eyes, sterilisation, injections with poisons and germs, amputations and unnecessary removal of organs, often without anaesthesia." [$5,400 assuming 4% compound interest over 60 years equals a starting principal of $513.33. Sweet!] Read article... World's least authoritative bioethicist The Scotsman | Submitted by: sykoscout "John Harris, a member of the Human Genetics Commission, told a meeting at Westminster he did not see any distinction between aborting a fully grown unborn baby at 40 weeks and killing a child after it had been born. Harris, who is a professor of bioethics at Manchester University... did not believe that there was any 'moral change' that occurred between when the baby was in the womb and when it had been brought into the world... In the past, Harris has spoken of the need to allow people to buy and sell human organs as a means of increasing supplies for transplant operations. He also recently expressed support for the sex selection of babies for social reasons." Read article... Kid murderer set free CBS News | Submitted by: I Choose The Matrix "Lionel Tate, the teen who killed a 6-year-old playmate and became the youngest defendant in the nation to be locked away for life, was released Monday after three years behind bars... Circuit Judge Joel Lazarus earlier ordered Tate freed without bail, a month after an appeals court threw out the boy's conviction because his mental competency was not evaluated before trial. Tate, 16, has since struck a plea bargain that will mean no further time in prison. Supporters have rallied from the Vatican to the United Nations to free Tate since he was convicted of first-degree murder in the death of 6-year-old playmate Tiffany Eunick three years ago. Tate was 12 when he punched, kicked and stomped the 48-pound girl to death in 1999. Tate had claimed he accidentally killed the girl while imitating professional wrestling moves he had seen on television." Read article... British Army veteran allegedly pimps out child whores The People | Submitted by: Professor Bodmas "Captain Richard Clarke is an outstanding officer who has acted with courage in every war involving the British Army in recent years... The Sandhurst-trained officer is masterminding a plot to smuggle girls as young as 13 from Africa and hire them out as sex slaves to perverted pals in his regiment and lusting civilians. Clarke, a commander in the Royal Logistic Corps who played a key role in the Iraq war, leads a sordid double life as a pimp who craves and sells under-age girls." Read article... More allegations of horndoggery Daily Record | Submitted by: Professor Bodmas "Roderick Bryce-Stafford, of the Royal Scots, offered to perform a gay sex act on another captain and a signaller. He also tried to blackmail two women soldiers into sex... Bryce-Stafford asked his male clerk to let him catch him having sex with his girlfriend, so he could blackmail her into letting him join in. He told another couple he would keep watch if they wanted to have sex. Bryce-Stafford offered to perform a sex act on the man, a signaller. The woman, Corporal Nicola Smillie, gave evidence at the court-martial in Colchester, Essex... And the captain performed a sex act on himself in front of two male soldiers behind the camp cookhouse." Read article... Gates spins pitiful track record as security asset ZDNet | Submitted by: santorum / Frothy, PA "Bill Gates took a side-swipe at rival operating systems on Monday, as he reiterated the importance of security for Windows; in particular its next version, which is codenamed Longhorn... 'A high volume system like [Windows] that has been thoroughly tested will be by far the most secure,' Gates told the audience at the Developing Software for the future Microsoft Platform conference... Noting the large number of major virus epidemics during the past two years, Gates said that in some ways 'hackers are good for maturation' of the platform, because they have forced the company to develop new inspection techniques for the code." [Absolutely, fucking hysterical.] Read article... Jerry Lewis partially deflates E! | Submitted by: Crazy Quagga "Rubber-faced funnyman Jerry Lewis is 50 pounds lighter... Lewis lost the pounds after weaning himself off prednisone, a steroid drug he had been taking since 2001 for pulmonary fibrosis, a chronic lung ailment. The comedian was discharged from an undisclosed Las Vegas hospital January 16 after a three-month stay to kick the habit... The entertainer's face had become distorted as a side-effect of the steroids - at one point, Lewis' weight ballooned to 242 pounds." [Dead Pool players, take note.] Read article...