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Someone else who thought his smartphone gave him a technological edge. Michael Piggin, an English teen who used his smartphone to download the old Mujahideen Poisons Handbook, a bowdlerized copy of Maxwell Hutchkinson’s The Poisoner’s Handbook, has had England’s heavy artillery called out and arrayed against him in court. A Porton Down chemist was called […]
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Control Room, now streaming on Hulu, takes viewers back to 2004 and the rise of al Jazeera as the Arab world’s first top rank Western-style news organization covering Iraqi Freedom. Relevant 13 years later, the original is from 2004 because Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and a couple other American toady nations have […]
Early in the week I received an e-mail query about the old Mujahideen Poisons Handbook. Many readers will remember it as a .pdf pamphlet that figured prominently the US government’s and media’s received wisdoms passed out on al Qaeda and its capabilities with regards to weapons of mass destruction. A historian was asking where to […]
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“All advertising is good advertising,” said the Ford exec upon hearing of The Ultimate Mowing Machine article. The latest issue of al Qaeda’s rubbish magazine, Inspire, is apparently out. You can read about it here at a terrorism watch site. Its best bits look to be material only good for black comedy. Like the feature […]
Rosary peas — the source of abrin. Number of fatalities from abrin poisoning in the last decade: zero. Jesse Korff, a nineteen-year old from LaBelle, Florida, today pleaded guilty to a murder conspiracy involving abrin and ricin and the smuggling of those poisons. He stands to be sentenced to life in prison. From this blog, […]
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Protein stained analytical gel electrophoresis of a pure ricin standard versus pellet from ground castor seed, submitted in a recent US case. Bigger. The above scan shows why no one has made pure ricin from recipes found on the net during the entire span of the war on terror. And it puts to the lie […]
Today’s laugher — in addition to the usual ads for counterfeits — comes from a review of Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker’s book, Counterstrike. Readers will recall DD crashed their New York Times coming out party on ricin bomb plots a week or so ago, putting something of a crimp in their major scoop. Once […]
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Here’s a news story from a marginal source that just leaves one speechless. Scrabbling around in the underbrush for anything that will grab eyeballs, the reporter for something called “io9” whose motto is “We come from the future” does the poisons found in foods thing. This was a subject of great interest to the neo-Nazi […]
The e-mail dump from HBGary Federal, carried out by the Anonymous hacking group, has most famously exposed corporate plots to attack and discredit WikiLeaks, Glenn Greenwald and ThinkProgress. Perhaps less publicized was Ars Technica’s story on the corporate development of malware for the US government. The publication introduces the story: On November 16, 2009, Greg […]
The alleged ‘publication’ of al Qaeda’s English-language Inspire .pdf brought on a media convulsion notable for its collective amnesia. The publication itself was, outside from the first three pages, a negligible download. The contents page continues an established tradition of clumsy and/or unintentionally funny bits re the much repeated article (which does not exist in […]