PUT YOUR FAITH IN THE BIOMETRICS: As the FBI apologise for throwing a lawyer into prison for 17 days on the basis of pisspoor fingerprint technology they thought linked him to the Madrid bomb (and, hey, being a Muslim convert couldn't have helped), we're asking: how is all this biometric data collection meant to help, exactly?

 
WHAT WITH ONE THING AND ANOTHER, IT'S A TUG OF PEACE: Paul McCartney has been thinking about Iraq, and, about a year and a half after the Rest of the Entire World, he's decided it's a "new Vietnam". In an interview with Spanish media:

"He added that the ideals of the allied nations to restore democracy in Iraq and find weapons of mass destruction were "good arguments." But, he said, the WMD had clearly not been found and the conflict continues to worsen.

Except, of course, there was never any mention of "restoring democracy" at the time, and the arguments about the need to find those lorries stacked full of botulism and anthrax and to ensure that Saddam wasn't harbouring enormous levels of cooties weren't good ones - they were clearly pisspoor arguments that children of three could see through. Even Richard Perle on this morning's Today has more or less given up trying to pretend that there was any real WMD basis to the war, employing some odd "ah, but if he'd had the weapons we were saying he'd had, it could have been real nasty" double speak. Incidently, Perle was also hilarious on the attempts to reverse engineer the 'freeing the Iraqi people' justification for war - he started to go on about how nobody had a problem with the Allies taking on Hitler to save the Jews, until John Humphrys pointed out that, erm, the Second World War was triggered by the invasion of Poland and the end of the holocaust was a happy by-product; then when asked if we really did go to war to help the Iraqi people, when will we be going into Sudan, Perle sucked his teeth and explained that, you know, America's losing its appetite for wars of liberation, what with all the flack they're getting for this one in Iraq...

But back to McCartney - does he really believe that WMD has been "not found"? Rather than "wasn't there in the first place?"

 
EVERY LITTLE LESS HELPS THE BOTTOM LINE: So, Tesco are planning to cut sick pay as an "experiment." We've just sent them the following:

As a Tesco customer, I want to express my disgust and misgivings at your announced new policy of not paying your staff for the first three days of sick leave.

Disgust, because your company makes enormous profits, and I've always believed you to be quite a positive employer - I'm guessing this penny pinching measure is only intended to target the people who make your profits possible, or will your directors find their pay docked if they're unfortunate enough to have a snuffle or a sniffle?

Misgivings, because the likely effect of telling people on low incomes that they'll lose their pay if they take a day off sick is going to be presenteeism. If people can't afford to be off sick, they'll turn up for work when they're ill - and to be honest, the thought of your delicatessen and vegetable counters being staffed by people with heavy colds, breathing germs over the produce isn't much of an encouragement to shop at your store. It makes me think that Waitrose will be a better option in future.

If you've really got a problem with staff taking sick days when they're not actually sick, why net get Dotty in with her big book of 'how to tell if people are lying' from your TV commercials? Surely she could clear up any malingering?

 
MISSING THE POINT: Surely standing up and saying "The pictures can't be genuine because they don't have a truck like that in Iraq" is so far from the point - it's not "They can't be genuine because our troops wouldn't behave like mindless thugs", is it?

 
ANOTHER REASON TO CHOOSE APPLE: While Microsoft and IBM execs are giving cash to Bush, Steve Jobs is helping out Kerry.

 
IT'S OUTRAGEOUS... HAVE YOU GOT THE URL?: This comes from the BBC report on the Berg website being pulled:

"The graphic images of 26-year-old Nicholas Berg's death prompted shock and outrage the world over.
They also prompted thousands upon thousands of people to log on to the internet so they could see for themselves the entire event in all its horror. "

"I, for one, am fairly disgusted, but once I've had a chance to go online, I shall be totally disgusted."

 
WHY WOULD THE US NOT BE KEEN ON BRITISH REPORTERS VISITING?: This is from Slate:

Last week a British reporter was detained by immigration officials and then expelled from the United States for traveling here without knowing that the visa rules had changed. More precisely, she didn't know that a decades-old unenforced rule was suddenly being enforced against friendly tourists long accustomed to entering the country without a visa at all. Elena Lappin, a freelance journalist from the United Kingdom (who has written for Slate), was stopped at Los Angeles International Airport, subjected to a body search, handcuffed, frog-marched through the airport, and then held in a cell at a detention center overnight—all because she dared travel to the United States without a special journalist visa. There has been a rule on the books since 1952 requiring foreign journalists to obtain special "I visas," but foreign journalists say it was invariably ignored by Immigration and Naturalization Service officials who required only that citizens of friendly countries apply for a visa waiver, an exemption allowing most residents of 27 enumerated countries to visit the United States for business or pleasure for up to 90 days without jumping through any INS hoops.

 
I DON'T THINK WE'RE IN BETA ANYMORE: So this might be a soft-launch, then. Now, if we can just work out why the mailing list version posts everything twice...

 
IF YOU HAVE A PROBLEM... IF NO-ONE ELSE CAN HELP YOU... AND IF YOU CAN FIND THEM...: Maybe you can buy up the A-Team: