Blog sprinkles

Phila of Bouphonia's Friday Hope Blog.

Prepare to be trampled in every Wal-Mart except New York?

The 401k pirates

Newspaper Narcissism

Pakistan's meltdown:

In the last few days, an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Pakistanis have fled to North West Frontier Province, just south of the military operation, according to U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees spokesman Ron Redmond, citing provincial government data.

Another 300,000 Pakistanis are on the move or expected to flee the fighting, he said Friday.

The massive displacement is a result of "more widespread" fighting between Pakistani forces and Taliban militants as well as people taking "advantage of the partial lifting of curfews to move into safer areas," according to a UNHCR news release.

Those fleeing the recent fighting are in addition to 555,000 previously displaced civilians who have fled their homes in Pakistan's tribal region and North West Frontier Province since August, according to the U.N. agency.

Oh look, Kyrgyzstan is having problems with terrorism too...

The threat posed by Islamic militant groups in Central Asia, especially in the Kyrgyz and Tajik portions of the Ferghana Valley, appears to be growing, according to the US State Department’s recently released annual report on terrorism.

The State Department’s 2008 Country Reports on Terrorism, released April 30, suggest that the membership in Kyrgyzstan of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a group that the State Department says advocates "the establishment of a borderless, theocratic Islamic state throughout the entire Muslim world," grew from 5,000 in 2006 to 15,000 in 2008.

Words used to describe President Barack Obama.

Maybe we should reconsider the death penalty?:

A cyber hacker who claimed to have stolen the medical records of more than 8.3 million residents of the state of Virginia is demanding 10 million dollars for their return, the Washington Post reported Thursday. The FBI and state officials have confirmed that they are investigating the incident.

The report came a week after someone managed to take over a Virginia Department of Health website that monitors prescriptions to track the sales of controlled substances. The hacker shut down the site and posted a ransom note online, claiming to have stolen and encrypted the data and threatening to sell the data to the highest bidder if authorities did not pay him by Thursday.

"Attention Virgina," the demand read, "In my possession right now are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their backups seem to have gone missing, too."

Abba returns!

Roland Burris doesn't leave!