Posts, September 2004:

Algerian tries to crash Norwegian airplane: An Algerian asylum seeker went on a rampage on a local Norwegian plane yesterday. He attacked the pilot with an ax and tried to crash the plane. When pilot Stein Magne Lian regained control of the plane, they were only [...]

Lessons from the American trench war: Per Egil Hegge reports from the vicious trench war of American politics: If you enter a large American book store, you'll find a mountain of books which explain how Democrats and liberals are liars. Right nearby, you'll find an equally [...]

Three years and counting: I almost forgot that I had a three year blog anniversary on Wednesday. Something changed on September 11th, 2001. At first I thought it was the world. Now I realize that the world is what it has always been, with [...]

Does Kerry prefer Saddam over chaos?: This AP article by Jennifer Loven came up in the spin thread, where Kevin McDonnell called it an attempt to "respin a Kerry spin which Bush essentially un-spun, while accusing Bush of spinning!" LGF calls it a "nakedly biased editorial [...]

Review - All the President's Spin: George W. Bush is not a liar. I believe we've established that. He doesn't go on TV and make things up. Does that mean that Bush is trustworthy? Yes, it does - in a bipolar world, where the alternatives present [...]

ESAG to air TV ads in Norway: The European Security Advocacy Group has been cleared to send three anti-terror ads on TV2, Norway's largest commercial broadcaster. The ads will air in the first week of October, and the message will be similar to that of the newspaper [...]

Railway terror alert in Norway: The Norwegian security police announced today that several men of "Iranian-Iraqi appearance" were observed in April filming a railway tunnel and a train near Oslo. The sightings were of two different groups of people, on two different days, so this [...]

NRK's PFU defense: The Norwegian news media regulates itself through its own ethics watchdog, PFU. I'm not enthusiastic about PFU. It's a non-optimal solution to the problem of media power. We'd be better off with more diversity of opinion and more amateur media, [...]

Dagbladet confused about causation: The American war on terror has "lead to more global terrorism", according to "numbers from the Terrorism Center Research". Writes Dagbladet, under the headline More terror with Bush: Terrorist attacks since the American war on terror began have been more [...]

Islam, democracy and Norway: Dag Herbjørnsrud writes in Aftenposten that Islam's incompatibility with democracy has been exaggerated. The fact is that half of the world's 1,4 billion Muslims - 700 million - live in countries with democratically elected governments. This according to Freedom House's [...]

The end of a taboo: It takes time to go from no debate to a mature debate, from taboo to open discussion. It's a bit like introducing democracy. You can't just give people the right to vote and expect a Russia to become a Norway [...]

The essence of Islam: Irfan Khawaja has written an article at secularislam.org in response to the discussions last month about Islam bans and anti-Islamic thinking. He dismisses the whole debate as a "ludicrous pseudo-debate", and finds the arguments some people offered for wanting to [...]

Beslan siege ends: Julie Wilhelmsen at NUPI explains why Islamist Chechen terrorists took an entire school as hostages this week. It is difficult to explain terrorism, but this is clearly an act of revenge after Russia went into Ingushetia. They've carried out arrests [...]