Hope this is scary enough for you, my pumpkin carving skills remain fairly basic. This pumpkin display (one of last year’s Halloween photos) is actually much nicer.

This is a developing story, just off the wires:

The Dutch human rights activist Abdullah al-Mansouri has reportedly been sentenced to death in Iran. His son Adnan al-Mansouri says he received the news from a Syrian human rights organisation. He says his father, who was born in Iran, could be executed within 48 hours.

The details remain murky, but Amnesty International has confirmed that the Syrian organization mentioned is legitimate. More later.

Update by MvdG:| MORE ›

Some things are more important than politics and international affairs. The Red Sox winning the World Series is one of them. I lived in Boston for many years and wondered whether the drought would ever end. It took 86 years — from 1918 to 2004 — for the Sox to again be baseball’s champions. It took only three years for it to happen again.

Kate McMillan of the well-known Canadian blog ‘Small Dead Animals’ has written a fascinating piece about the upcoming elections in her home province, Sasketchewan. In it she explains how huge economic potential can be throttled by a decade old psychosis:| MORE ›

Before and after the Israeli strike. A nice clean-up job by the Syrians.

A senior U.S. intelligence officer:

It’s a magic act — here today, gone tomorrow. It doesn’t lower suspicions, it raises them. This was not a long-term decommissioning of a building, which can take a year. It was speedy. It’s incredible that they could have gone to that effort to make something go away.| MORE ›

The hyper-security that is now the norm for regular passenger travel is an unleashed beast that knows no bounds. Quite recently I pointed to some disturbing incidents, but now it appears the entire information structure built around stepping on a flight is to undergo some drastic changes according to this blog (h/t Sullivan):

All travellers in the U.S. will be required to get government-issued credentials and official clearance before every flight, both within the United States as well as internationally.| MORE ›

Paul Kedrosky, a San Diego based tech-blogger, suggests we are witnessing the first disaster that uses the full slate of Web 2.0 offerings.  The Google Map mashup indeed is very instructive.

Sometimes it seems politicians will do anything to receive a few extra votes. In the same week in which yet another rightwing-populist movement was founded in the Netherlands, the Freedom Party ( PVV, led by Geert Wilders, who is mostly known for his crusade against Islam and his Mozart-like hairstyle ) tried to grab the headlines with an offensive aimed at a sandwich containing vegetables and halal kebab.| MORE ›

The feverish media atmosphere generated by the potential Turkish invasion of northern Iraq is on its way to reaching almost Cuban Missile Crisis proportions. Even Prime Minister Erdoğan has chastised certain Turkish media outlets for the manner in which they have covered the events of the past week. Having sold a lot of newspapers due to the most recent deaths and abduction of many out-numbered Turkish conscripts, there is little doubt that this type of media coverage will continue to carry the legacy of William Randolph Hearst for at least another few weeks.| MORE ›

Friday evening, while protesting something they probably know very little about, a collection of white, middle-class college kids (also known as Anarchists apparently) marched through the upscale neighborhood of Georgetown here in Washington, DC. Protesting the corporatey corporations doing their corporatey stuff, these spoiled children began hurling bricks at storefront windows, in order to smash the state and such.

Unfortunately, they also managed to smash some poor young woman’s skull open (see pic above).| MORE ›