Today I got something in my email purporting to be from CNN and pretending to be a CNN news alert, not that I could remember signing up for one. The story it wanted to give me was this:

Christina Aguilera in sex change operation

--and who wouldn't want to read about that, right?

Then it gave me a link for the full story. The link was this:

http://gambeatru.117.com1.ru/cnncurrent.html

The addy of the sender is this: ycips0@swigercoil.com. Does that look like CNN to you? Not hardly.

Okay, so the moral of the story is be careful what you click on and delete everything you dun recognise because there are a lot of asshats out there.

Belfast Telegraph
Sunday, 10 August 2008

Georgian officials say Russia has bombed a military airfield near Tbilisi's international airport.

The Interior Ministry says jet fighters have targeted the site.

Reuters correspondents working in the city report hearing three loud bangs.

Georgia also claims Russia has brought another 10,000 troops into the country and is preparing to attack at dawn.

Very first entry: August-9-1938

Explanation and introduction from: Orwell Diaries

‘When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page’, wrote George Orwell, in his 1939 essay on Charles Dickens.

From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries. The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.

What impression of Orwell will emerge? From his domestic diaries (which start on 9th August), it may be a largely unknown Orwell, whose great curiosity is focused on plants, animals, woodwork, and – above all – how many eggs his chickens have laid. From his political diaries (from 7th September), it may be the Orwell whose political observations and critical thinking have enthralled and inspired generations since his death in 1950. Whether writing about the Spanish Civil War or sloe gin, geraniums or Germany, Orwell’s perceptive eye and rebellion against the ‘gramophone mind’ he so despised are obvious.

Orwell wrote of what he saw in Dickens: ‘He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.’

What will you see in the Orwell diaries?

9 August 2008

Russia conducts 'extensive bombing raids throughout Georgia'

Russia and Georgia were effectively at war last night with fierce fighting near the capital of the breakaway region of South Ossetia and hundreds of civilians reported dead.

Many photos onsite - articles and photos will be available for approx. 2 weeks