The Agriculture Ministry is not in charge of Gundam and other random news

Am sharing some amusing news bits I stumbled upon in the course of surfing for mining-related articles. Enjoy!

• Wikipedia's one of the best things about the web. I heart Wikipedia! But so did six employees from Japan's Department of Agriculture, who apparently hearted it so much that they spent more office hours on Wiki entries on billboard typos, movies, and Gundam than on administrative concerns. See this: Japan bureaucrats chided for shirking work, editing Wikipedia

• Russia tests the 'dad of all bombs'. The thermobaric device tested by Russian military is said to be 'non-nuclear' and therefore 'environmentally-friendly'. So politically chic at a time when the "in" thing is to proclaim that one will be "going green" to save the earth. The catch: It's still a bomb--a weapon of mass destruction that can be used indiscriminately in wars of aggression by countries such as the United States in Afghanistan.
  

• Prince Harry killed in Iraq. Or at least, that was what a sculptural piece by Daniel Edwards portrays. At first I thought this was novel. Then I realized that the artist was the same guy who did the Paris Hilton Autopsy and the "Suri Cruise poop" sculpture. Then things began to get a wee bit predictable.

• In its blatantly misogynist query of whether the US is ready for a woman president, American political satire series 'The Daily Show' casts former Philippine President Corazon Aquino as a slut. That was done in rather poor taste. It is true that land-owning elites under the Aquino administration used her agrarian "reform" law to consolidate their dominance over large tracts of land (as the bloodshed in Aquino's very own Hacienda Luisita poignantly demonstrated). It is true that the "peace process" of the post-dictatorship regime was used by the status quo as a veneer for more political persecution and human rights violations. But 'slut' is such an infantile expletive, one that fails to articulate the atrociousness of Aquino's record of political compensation.