Archive for July 17th, 2011
Man maimed himself in DIY ‘sex change’ – News – The Star
A NORTH Derbyshire man who was desperate to become a woman carried out a DIY sex change procedure by slicing off his own testicles.
The 22-year-old from Chesterfield was so determined to undergo gender realignment surgery he decided to take the drastic measure himself without the usual anaesthetics.
He then discarded his testicles in the local Queen’s Park and astonishingly waited 24 hours before going to hospital.
The man told stunned doctors in Chesterfield Royal Hospital’s accident and emergency department that he had experienced ‘a lot less pain’ than he had expected.
via Man maimed himself in DIY ‘sex change’ – News – The Star.
Inside Al Qaeda’s hard drives – The Boston Globe
When we began our work, we already knew something about the group’s history. Al Qaeda in Iraq was formed in late 2004, after the start of the Iraq War, when the Jordanian terrorist abu Musab al-Zarqawi rebranded his organization under the Al Qaeda banner. His group, Jamaat al-Tawhid al Jihad, had existed since the 1990s, with the initial stated goal of toppling the Jordanian kingdom. But its agenda expanded over time to include discrediting the Iraqi interim government, driving US and coalition forces out of Iraq, and helping to build a broader extremist caliphate.
In other words, the group shared a number of Al Qaeda’s goals, but the name itself was a strategic addition by a lesser-known organization. Al Qaeda in Iraq was not established in a top-down manner by a mastermind flush with millions in capital, the way a company would open an office in a new city. It was more like a local restaurant taking the name of a multinational franchise operation, but with autonomy to adapt the menu to local tastes. The new affiliation coupled Zarqawi’s ruthless vision and ability to rally people to his cause with the Al Qaeda brand name and well-organized franchise structure. After 2004, the group soared in power and popularity.
Yet there was little top-down strategy from Al Qaeda central, and dialogue between the groups was minimal. The documents we examined made it clear that there was no start-up capital from the parent company, just permission to use its name.
And, contrary to speculation that Al Qaeda in Iraq was reliant on international donations, this wasn’t a source of funding either. The group was self-financing. In fact, the core organization of Al Qaeda in Iraq in Anbar province was so profitable that it sent revenue to associates in other provinces of Iraq, and perhaps even further afield. The group raised millions of dollars annually through activities such as simple theft and resale of valuable items such as cars, generators, and electrical cable, and hijacking truckloads of goods, such as clothing. And their internal financial record-keeping was diligent, with all the requirements of expense accounts in regular businesses. A central unit of Al Qaeda in Iraq’s hierarchy required operatives to keep records of even the smallest outlay and to turn over their “take” to upper-level leaders, who made the spending decisions.
Man says it’s too hot to fish || OnlineAthens.com
With the humidity stifling and the temperature soaring into the 90s, Bobby Kirk said this was not a good day for fishing.
Bobby Kirk leans on a hoe recently outside his vegetable garden behind his home south of Bogart.
“It was no good this morning. I never got a bite,” Kirk said, standing in the shade of his porch off Rogers Road, one of the few dirt roads left in Oconee County. “I reckon it was too hot.”
But the previous week, the 76-year-old man had caught the largest fish of his life — a 40 pound flathead catfish.
“I sold him for $40,” Kirk said as he chewed on a wad of J.D.’s Blend tobacco.
The Most Incredible Thing Fox News Has Ever Done – James Fallows – National – The Atlantic
Or at least the most amazingly brazen I can think of at this moment.
Via Erik Wemple of the Washington Post, the simply unbelievable Fox and Friends segment below. It’s about the News of the World hacking scandal.
To the good: they treat hacking as a problem and scandal. To the incredible/bad: they present their (now closed) UK sister publication News of the World as a victim of the hacking problem, rather than as a perpetrator.
via The Most Incredible Thing Fox News Has Ever Done – James Fallows – National – The Atlantic.
My Father Is an African Immigrant and My Mother Is a White Girl from Kansas and I Am Not the President of the United States by Ahamefule J. Oluo – Seattle Features – The Stranger, Seattle’s Only Newspaper
The men in my family love drugs. They love their meths and their cocaines (both cracked and uncracked), they love their pots and their heroins. They have deep and committed relationships with their drugs. I have always had a deep, committed, and loving relationship with my teeth, so I took a decidedly different route. My mother (never known for her eloquence) will call me and shout through the telephone: “Can you believe it!? Your cousin Kurt burgled again! Burgled!”
“Yes, Mother, I can, in fact, believe it.”
Asking whether you can believe that one of the men in my family committed a crime is like asking whether you can believe a member of the American Family Association has a “secret gay life.” It’s a classic story repeated through the ages, and only the most insignificant details change with each incarnation.
I have always been the overachiever in my family—the one who NOT ONLY got his GED, but also finished an ENTIRE YEAR of college. “He has his very own basement apartment!” my grandma proudly explains to her neighbor. “And he’s never stabbed anyone.”
Gaining the approval of my family has never been a concern of mine. In fact, it was not an idea I had given much thought to until one weekday morning when I was 16 years old and I spoke to my father for the first time in my life.
My father moved back to Nigeria one month after I was born. Neither I nor my sister Ijeoma, who is a year and a half my elder, have any recollection of him. Over the course of the next 16 years, we did not receive so much as a phone call from him, until one day in the spring of 1999, when a crinkled envelope bearing unfamiliar postage stamps showed up in the mailbox of Ijeoma’s first apartment. Enclosed was a brief letter from our father in which he explained the strange coincidence that had led to him “finding” us.* It was a convoluted story involving his niece marrying the brother of one of our mother’s close friends from years ago. As a postscript to the letter, he expressed his desire to speak to us and included his telephone number.
Roughly a week later, Ijeoma and I found ourselves, late at night, sitting on the floor of her sparely furnished apartment. We shared a pizza, sipped on a couple of beers bought for us by one of her 21-year-old coworkers, and talked about our childhood and our single mother who had no choice but to leave us home alone every night at the ages of 8 and 9 while she worked two jobs to support us.**
Ijeoma and I talked about all the years we’d wondered about our father and what it would have been like if he had come back from Nigeria in 1982 like he promised our mother. What would it have been like to grow up with a dad? Would I still have been so shitty at sports? Would I still have been so effeminate? Would I have still been called a faggot every day in middle school? Would I have known how to be a man? After we’d exhausted ourselves with thoughts of what might have been, we turned our attention to the more pressing matter of what was to happen tomorrow morning, when we would push 14 buttons on a telephone, wait a moment, and then, for the first time, hear the voice that we had only been able to imagine for 16 years
