CAIRO, 22 March 2008 - Here's some advice: If you want to smuggle dozens of luxury cell phones of legally dubious acquisition, don't wrap them up in a blanket and try to walk through a customs inspection station. You will probably be caught. According to the Al-Madinah newspaper yesterday, a young man disembarking a flight from Jeddah at the Cairo International Airport was caught using this not-so-clever method of smuggling phones that officials suspect might have been stolen. The phones - all of them high-end luxury kinds - were found clustered in a couple of blankets the man was trying to carry through customs. Apparently it didn't occur to the fellow, whose nationality was not reported, that customs inspectors are paid to go through your belongings, which could very well involve unfolding blankets.
White House Press Secretary Needs a Primer
JEDDAH, 22 March 2008 - The video that hit the Internet this past week is probably one that White House Press Secretary Dana Perino would rather see buried and forgotten. During a press conference recently, Perino portrayed herself as probably not the best US spokesperson to be using during times of war. Instead of further comment, let us simply reflect on her words: "Some of the terms I just don't know," she said during a press conference earlier this week. "I haven't grown up knowing. The type of missiles that are out there: Patriots and SCUDS and cruise missiles and Tomahawk missiles. And I think that men just by osmosis understand all of these things, and they're things that I really have to work at - to know the difference between a carrier and a destroyer, and what it means when one of those is being launched to a certain area." As you might imagine, Perino's apparent (and, to her credit: completely honest) cluelessness on the difference between a Navy aircraft carrier and a Navy battleship has become the talk of the town in Washington for the past few days. Foreign Policy Magazine openly questioned where she's the right, um, man for the job. This isn't the first time Perino has been so honest and yet also so alarmingly ignorant. In December on the popular radio program, NPR's "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me", Perino admitted that she once panicked when a reporter asked a question and referred to the Cuban Missile Crisis. "I was panicked a bit because I really don't know about... the Cuban Missile Crisis. It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I'm pretty sure."
