Kids love asses. They'd be laughing more than anyone else.

I've been to India recently and $250 seems like a hell of a lot of money for anything, relatively speaking. Are you sure all of this money is gong directly to building an outhouse? Perhaps I'm completely wrong here, but in a country where people live off $2 per day, I wonder if somebody's creaming a little something off the top.

I was in Varanasi recently & saw the space invaders, but I was more distracted by the huge swastikas painted everywhere.

Swastikas are Hindu symbols, so I reckoned with 300 million gods, there's a good chance that one of them is represented by the space invaders symbol.

Argh, again with the Daily Mail links.

Spooky - I just had the exact same Bowie track playing in the background when I clicked on the link.

Still though, at $3M for 6M tracks - that's 50 cents per track, which actually seems a bit high.

I wonder if they'd take $2,999,998?

I predict the missile will miss, and both the satellite and anti-satellite missile will come down in China.

I also predict that in completely unrelated developments, within a year China will be selling spy satellites and anti-satellite technology at knock down prices.

Man, if Greeks still dressed like that I'd definitely eat a lot more kebabs.

Just saw mother & daughters interviewed on UK tv. The facts as originally reported seem correct. Mother was taken ill & after a few hours the girls were taken away, strip searched, interviewed and placed in an orphanage. Mother wasn't told where they were & was given an incorrect telephone number. British consulate was never called by the staff & the mother was sent a letter to her UK address advising her that she's being investigated for child abuse.

I'd guess somebody's got their wires crossed - this sounds more like a disease control measure.

Such a system has been in place in Europe for quite a while. Every time a cow is even moved to another field it's logged. You can go into a supermarket or butchers shop and pick up a steak in the knowledge that the entire life history of that animal is known.

If say, a cow is discovered to have BSE they can easily track down the location of every animal that has ever been in contact with the infected one.

I have to agree with some of the above posters. I've been to the U.S. on a few short trips in the past & I'd really love to explore it in more detail, but I simply can't consider traveling to a country where I'll be treated as a criminal on arrival.

Hopefully all this madness will pass in time & I'll be able to make that trip someday in the future.

NO!!!! If they give now, those bastards will overrun the country with their damned terrorist tea parties:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4878878.stm

I've read that cat injuries increase with altitude up until the seventh floor. After that the cats seem to have more time to think about the situation, relax and land better and so injuries actually decrease in floors higher than the seventh floor. Presumably there's a limit to this - throwing them off the space shuttle probably wouldn't work.

Not to mention the millions who died in gulag camps industrialising the USSR to the point where it could start sending dogs into space.

I doubt any nation would have passed up the chance to be the first to put a living creature into space. My guess is that the spin doctors in the US used the event to cast the Russians as cruel dog killers, when the truth is they were just pissed that they didn't do it first.

Photography was also banned in the recent Robodock festival in Amsterdam which you posted about a few times. A truly pointless exercise - and really out of sorts with the general relaxed attitude in this city.

I've traveled around a bit in Iran and I don't recall ever seeing a single falafel. It's really something you're more likely to find in Arab countries.

So what's the FBI shop-a-terrorist email address?

I think the best strategy is to report people to the authorities at every available opportunity. Report everyone you know, or don't know. Swamp the bastards with useless information. Then who knows what will happen - perhaps they might have to come up with some new method of detecting terrorists. Perhaps a system using that new fangled 'evidence' stuff I've heard so much about.

It's interesting that most of the commenters here are talking about the death in custody while ignoring the fact that the woman was arrested for making a scene. Obviously it's hard to know exactly what went on without more information, but a few years ago somebody shooting their mouth off would simply have been thrown out of the airport - these days we just accept that people can get arrested for making a scene. I guess she was lucky not to be tasered first.