Australians, here's how you can help.

You can donate through any Westpac branch to the Oxfam Community Aid Abroad Earthquake Tsunami Emergency Appeal.

Please quote BSB number 033 048 and Account number 213 583.

An earthquake centred just off Sumatra caused huge tidal waves over large parts of South and South East Asia, from India to Indonesia. Thousands are reported dead, and thousands more missing.

Benjamin Gilmour reports from Thailand

"As an Australian medic I, along with two other medical students who witnessed the tsunami were taken to the Ko Lanta hospital where we have worked since midday. I was involved in 2 unsuccessful resuscitations of drowning victims, and treated over sixty foreign holidaymakers with injuries, mainly multiple fractures, some severe such as skull factures and suspected spinal fractures.

There have been 3 confirmed dead on Ko Lanta with a number of missing local children. One family from Sweden with 10 children were swept from their longboat and sustained multiple abrasions and fractures but survived. We have evacuated 25 patents by military helicopter to the mainland. People are awaiting another wave and most are camping out on hilltops, not that any accommodation at beach level remains."

What about ships? There are very busy shipping lanes with oil tankers, container ships etc as well as fishing boats

Santa Free Zone !
A group of Germans are fighting to get rid of Santa saying he has become a symbol of USA and the commercial- isation of Christmas.

Thousands of stickers have been printed declaring whole areas in Germany and Austria "Santa Free Zones" and pamphlets have been handed out on street corners reminding people that the traditional bringer of presents is St Nicholas and not the red-suited, white-bearded immigrant from the Americas.

Bettina Schade from the Frankfurter Nicholas Initiative said: "We object to the material things, the hectic rush to buy gifts, and the ubiquity of the bearded man in the red suit that are taking away from the core meaning of Christmas."

Santa Claus is not a typical Christmas tradition in Germany or Austria - the overweight red-suited man only turning up in the last decade or so.

The first official day of Summer is here !

And to remind myself that the Northern hemisphere is the opposite way around, this is Kalluk, a 780-pound polar bear, playing with a snowman toy, 18/12/04, at the San Diego Zoo

Micheal Jackson Bombshell.

News is that prosecutors have a "smoking gun" piece of evidence against Michael Jackson in his child molestation case: Jackson's fingerprint and his accuser's fingerprint on the same page of a pornographic magazine.

Experts say the evidence will confirm his accuser's testimony and could nail down Jackson's conviction.

Police believe Jackson used pornography to seduce his young victim, the fingerprints could send the superstar to jail for years

A worker at Buckingham Palace has been sacked for trying to sell a Christmas pudding on Ebay.

Ben Church, 25, who worked as a property administrator at the palace, was dismissed after royal officials learned he had put the Fortnum & Mason pudding, a gift from Queen Elizabeth, up for auction.

A palace spokeswoman confirmed that an employee had faced disciplinary action over a Christmas pudding. "Someone was dismissed but we are not giving out further details," she said, adding it was a tradition of the queen to give every member of staff a pudding as a Christmas present."He has been sacked for committing a security breach."

How mean and petty

The Footballers have turned to magic Spells again !

This time a Romanian football team have asked a witch to see if they are cursed because of the bad results they had lately.

Team Universitatea Craiova is now on the 16th position - the last in country's first league and faces the lower rank. Normally this means that the team isn't playing as well as the other teams -- but apparently it's really be a magical occurrence.

Witch Mercedeza from Craiova knows better. "The team is not cursed. It only had bad luck but it will recover. Next season Universitatea Craiova will fight to be the champion." In Australia, we call it bad play, not bad luck.

The witch also said former Chelsea striker Adrian Mutu will marry his ex-wife but their marriage will not last. "Mutu used drugs for his own will. He will marry Alexandra but their relation will be short because Mutu will go on looking for other women", she added.

So there you go, Mrs Mutu .. don't say you weren't told

The best selling Christmas gift in Japan -- A pillow designed in the shape of a woman's lap.

The manufacturers insist the pillow provides healing and not excitement for customers.

Priced at around $100, the life-sized gift is also proving popular as an addition at office parties during the season. Apparently it was aimed at younger males but has also received significant interest from older men.

Make Love not Spam now a nasty Trojan

Virus writers have begun distributing their wares in emails that pose as Lycos's abandoned "Make love not spam" screensaver.

The fake screensaver emails contain an attachment with a RAR SFX archive that has embedded key logger Trojan inside, antivirus firm Sophos warns. Infected emails come in emails with subject lines such as "Be the first to fight spam with Lycos screen" and an attachment called "Lycos screensaver to fight spam.zip".

Upon successful installation, the key logging Trojan (Mdropper-IT) sends a message to an Indonesian email address confirming its status. The screensaver file, rather than displaying the Lycos screensaver, displays a blank screen.

"Make Love Not Spam" was designed to bombard spam websites with requests, so increasing their bandwidth charges without - in theory - shutting them down. Security firms criticised Lycos's use of "vigilante tactics" especially when two of the targeted websites became unavailable. Several major internet backbone providers and ISP blocked access to Lycos' www.makelovenotspam.com website over concerns over its questionable legality.

Lycos denied it was doing anything wrong, much less creating a DDoS attack platform, but it suspended screensaver downloads after spammers began redirected traffic back to makelovenotspam.com.

This won't necessarily stop people falling for the VX ruse, unfortunately; fake Lycos screensavers will likely become a staple of social engineering tricks for weeks to come


December 3
Lycos Europe appears to have taken down its controversial MakeLoveNotSpam site - temporarily, at least. The site now displays a graphic and the words "STAY TUNED." References to the site have also been removed from the Lycos Europe home page, where it was prominently featured, monitoring firm Netcraft reports.

Lycos this week released a screen saver that bombards spam websites with data to increase their cost of running such sites. But according to Netcraft the campaign has already knocked out some sites completely.

Lycos so far maintains that it has been careful to avoid completely shutting down the sites it targets as such distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) are considered illegal in many European countries and the US.

Lycos has also shifted IP addresses from 83.241.136.230 to 213.115.182.123, which are both hosted by Starring, a Swedish advertising agency which is apparently working with Lycos Europe on the site.

The IP transfer is almost certainly the result of spammers redirecting traffic back to www.makelovenotspam.com, which means Lycos unintentionally launches a denial-of-service attack against its own anti-spam campaign web site.

To prevent further attacks by users, several major internet backbone providers and ISP’s are now blocking access to the Lycos web site, including Global Crossing's worldwide network.


DECEMBER 1st :
Lycos's vigilante attack on spammers has been hit by a vigilante attack. Spammers are suspected.

Lycos is offering a screensaver which, once downloaded, would launch a Distributed Denial of Service attack against spam websites. A DDoS attack makes constant requests to a specific part of a website until it gets overloaded and falls over. Such attacks are illegal in most countries. Security firm FSecure advises people not to download the program because of legal concerns.

The "makelovenotspam" campaign was launched yesterday but within hours the front page was replaced with the message "Yes, attacking spammers is wrong. You know this, you shouldn't be doing it. Your IP address and request have been logged and will be reported to your ISP for further action."

At the time of writing the site - www.makelovenotspam.com - was unavailable.

Lycos told ZDNet that no attack had happened. Chief spin doctor Malte Pollman said: "This is a hoax. We have obviously reached our goal and are getting to the spammers. On our servers we don't have any logs of an attack." The company also denied it was launching denial of service attacks - just that it was reducing bandwidth to five per cent.

The world's tiger population has plummeted by 95 percent from the start of the 20th century to as few as 5,000.

I must say that again, it seems too awful to say out loud. There are roughly 5000 tigers left in the world !

Why am I surprised ? In Asia, tiger skins can sell for $15,000 while in Vietnam a skeleton, the bones widely believed by gullible men to be an aphrodisiac, can fetch as much as $25,000.

Photo : A Sumatran tiger cub greeting a sibling at Taronga Zoo in Sydney October, 2004. (Will Burgess/Reuters)

Canadian authorities have arrested US president George W. Bush in Ottawa.

He has been charged with several offences under Canada's War Crimes Act. Vice-President Dick Cheney has mobilized the American military and all border crossings between the two nations have closed.

Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin has urged for calm in a short radio and television broadcast to the Canadian people immediately after the arrest. Under Canadian law, even a non-citizen can be charged for crimes committed outside of Canada once that individual enters the country

The arrest claims that President Bush has been "party to the crime of torturing prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib."

Prime Minister Martin released a written statement indicating that "proceedings have commenced against President George W. Bush under the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act (s. 9(3))."

Full Story

An autistic boy featured in a government calendar is facing deportation

12-year-old Rophin Morris was chosen by the Federal Government to appear in a calendar marking the International Day of People with Disabilities but now must leave Australia because he is disabled.

Indian-born Rophin and his parents have recently had their application for permanent residency turned down by the Department of Immigration because he is autistic.

The family is currently in Australia on bridging visas.

His father, Jude Morris, who brought his family here 10 years ago is pleading to be allowed to stay. "On one hand my son is being honoured and on the other the Department of Immigration is refusing us a visa and asking us to leave the country because my son has a disability."

Nice touch of irony !

Ever thought about the practice of piercing ? Do you worry about your children piercing their tongues ?

I wonder what the mother of Elaine Davidson thinks. Elaine holds the record for the most pierced woman in the world with 2,520 piercings. Does she sleep with a special pillow ? How does she wash her face ? How does she eat with a large hole in her tongue ?
OK I'm old-fashioned, but this is NOT on my list of 100 things to do before I die..
(photo.AFP/Nicolas Asfouri)

100 things to do before you die.

A thinktank of British scientists has come up with a new way of quickening the national intellect - a brain-taxing spin on the old formula of 100 things to do before you die. The group, which includes the evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, astronomer Sir Patrick Moore, neuroscientist Susan Greenfield and the inventor James Dyson, urges us all to take samples of our own DNA, measure the speed of light with chocolate, and solve the mathematical mystery of the number 137.

The list, compiled by New Scientist magazine, suggests booking to see Galileo's middle finger (preserved in Florence) or ordering liquid nitrogen to make the "world's smoothest ice-cream" at home.

More complicated options include joining the 300 Club at the South Pole (they take a sauna to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, then run naked to the pole in minus 100 F) or learning Choctaw, a language with two past tenses - one for giving information which is definitely true, the other for passing on material taken without checking from someone else.

Full Article on 100 things to do before you die

Quick Tip
Extract your own DNA by spitting gargled salt water into diluted washing-up liquid and slowly dribbling ice-cold gin down the side of the glass. Spindly white clumps which form in the mixture are, basically, you

Austrian bosses set up a CCTV system to catch a thief and found the culprit was a mouse.

The animal had been using the money to make its nest and developed a liking for 50-euro notes which it stole and chewed into tiny pieces once safely back in its lair.

A spokesman for the firm said: "Money was often left in the open although the room was locked, cash was still stolen. The video surveilance system recomended by the police was a last resort."

Romania's blind car thief has crashed another stolen vehicle into a tree for the second time in one month.

But this time Alin Prica managed to drive the stolen car 25 miles before crashing into a tree. His friend, also blind, sat in the passenger seat telling him in which direction to drive.

Earlier this month, Prica stole a car and managed to drive it for almost a mile by himself before smashing into a tree and knocking himself out. He said at the time: "I just wanted to prove to myself that I could do anything I wanted - despite my handicap. I only crashed because I was not sure of the way home."

I wish I shared his self confidence.

Please stop urinating on the bridge.

The Ampera bridge in Palembang, Indonesia, slopes at an angle and is in danger of collapse because of people urinating on one of its steel pillars.

The local highway and bridge department, warns that "... one of the main support piers has been weakened by urine as it is a popular spot for locals to relieve themselves."

Postal services can sometimes be slow but Germany has set a new record by delivering a letter 286 years late.

The letter from a Lutheran church official in the town of Eisenach was sent to officials in the nearby town of Ostheim in 1718, authorising them to pick a new clergyman after the death of the former holder of the office.It was delivered by mistake to a different Ostheim near Frankfurt, and ended up in the town archives.

Karl Schneider, 73, a local historian from Ostheim-vor-der-Rhoen which should have received the letter almost 300 years ago uncovered the mistake while discussing archive material with a colleague from the other Ostheim where it was mistakenly sent. Schneider matched the letter with names and events in his own town's history, and the letter was finally delivered Wednesday.