georgia

Trailer Parks Decidedly More Terrifying Places After Today

Foster Kamer · 08/29/09 05:30PM

Not that trailer parks aren't already established as traditional American targets for tornadoes, domestic violence, and meth labs, they're crossing the threshold into killing grounds. In Georgia, a slaying left seven dead and two critically injured, with few details known.

No Magic 60 For Dems

Pareene · 12/02/08 02:54PM

Despite the best efforts of Young Jeezy, T.I., and Ludacris, the Democrats look to be stuck at 58 seats in the US Senate, two shy of the magic filibuster-proof majority. Georgia's runoff election between Senator Saxby Chambliss and challenger Jim Martin (pictured, above) is going on right now! And turnout seems to be low. Meanwhile in Minnesota, Al Franken faces some pretty damning math in his recount battle with Norm Coleman. Already, the age of Hope and Change is over!

Bad Senator's Bad Touch

Pareene · 12/01/08 05:51PM

Here's Saxby Chambliss, Georgia Senator, in a campaign ad for tomorrow's runoff election to decide whether he'll keep his seat, groping his granddaughter. Video attached, natch.

Which Foreign Dignitaries Did Sarah Palin Actually Meet?

Moe · 09/23/08 07:38PM

Sarah Palin increased her foreign policy experience by 475% today and the media wasn't allowed to hear any of it! Because Sarah Palin doesn't really speak to the media much/ever, so they have to follow her around and ask the photographers dispatched to capture the photo ops what they heard her say, as if she is just like her new pal Henry Kissinger and she is engaging in top-secret high-level diplomatic negotiations. Except… at the end of the meetings the ensuing media accounts don't have anything to write about, because nothing actually transpired, so the poor journalists are left to write about how she lipsynched that she "had a good time" meeting the emperor of Tokyo or whatever. So what's a bigger waste of time than following Sarah Palin around while she says nothing about meaningless meetings with foreign dignitaries? Making up fictional event-free meetings with foreign dignitaries for the sake of a pointless quiz to see if you can tell which ones actually (pointlessly) happened!Three of these meetings actually happened, according to the Times website. Three just happened the way I imagined they would were I a reporter assigned to watch various other foreign dignitaries harmlessly shaking hands and exchanging niceties with Sarah Palin before being ushered off to exchange more niceties and possibly a game recipe or two. Guess which is which! 1. Talking Georgia With Kissinger

Embattled Georgian President Panics, Eats Tie

ian spiegelman · 08/16/08 02:51PM

The fighting between Russia and Georgia took its toll on Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili. Footage of the embattled leader literally putting his necktie in his mouth and chewing on it while taking what was clearly a stressful phone call started making the rounds today. The BBC even used it to illustrate a story on the ceasefire, saying Saakashvili "chews over his next move." See for yourself after the jump.

3's a Trend: Another Journo Shot in Georgia

Pareene · 08/15/08 04:44PM

Sheesh. War sucks! Here's more journalists getting fired at in the line of duty—they all lived, we think!—followed by yesterday's clips of warzone violence. Update: The Committee to Protect Journalists writes with context:"That video you posted shows Turkish journalists in a car under fire—one of the three in the car was injured." Sadly, at least three journalists have been killed in Georgia since fighting broke out.

Georgia Prez: This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Pareene · 08/15/08 11:45AM

So. The Georgians sorta instigated this nutty war but the Russians were apparently looking for any old excuse to swarm in and take charge. The U.S. is stepping up the rhetoric but lord know what we'll actually do to stop the Russians from toppling the Georgian government. Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili is now waging a second war—a public relations war! He knows one of his better bets is to turn United States public opinion toward his beleaguered nation and against those terrible Russians, so he plays up how Western his country is all the time. They love America! Hot dogs! Johnny Cougar! In this clip, Saakashvili goes off on an incredible tangent about how Georgia once had amusement parks and Dolby Digital movie theaters (seriously!) but the Russians destroyed that, because they hate fun. How can anyone be against surround sound? Those filthy Russians!

Journos Shot in Georgia!

Pareene · 08/14/08 03:46PM

Ohh, Georgians. It will be hard to maintain your current favorable coverage in the US press if you do things like this. The attached clip shows a Fox News reporter running from gunfire from Georgian troops. The absoltely amazing thing is that as he's running from them he's still, like, totally on their side? They are exhausted and humiliated by those Russians (those baaad Russians!). Also who hasn't wanted to make a Fox News correspondent dance a little, right? Totally understandable! (For balance, the clip is followed by a clip of a Georgian journalist getting shot in the arm on-air by a sniper. Presumably a Russian sniper? Who knows. Fog of war!)

Online maps of Georgia handy for guerrilla warfare

Jackson West · 08/13/08 07:20PM

Google Maps can't always remember where in the world war-torn Georgia is, but the Googlers behind it did not in fact hide road maps of the country — they were never there to begin with, according to product manager Dave Barth. However, satellite imagery from the region is, which might have proved useful to South Ossetian and Georgian troops. (Russia, which is supporting South Ossetia's independence, has its own network of spy satellites.)Both satellite photos and topography would be just the thing for planning, say, an armored column advance or in identifying industrial and civilian targets for sabotage and terror, respectively. While the photos aren't current enough to track enemy movements, the detail at the lowest scale is certainly good enough for a sniper to find a roost near Josef Stalin's birthplace for instance. And if anyone needed road maps, then they could have just used Microsoft's more Caucasus-complete Live Maps. Just imagine what separatist guerrillas could have done with Street View!

Digg in Bed With Russian Menace!

Pareene · 08/12/08 11:19AM

Click to viewTake a look at the front page of crazy-huge crowdsourced web aggregator Digg today and you'll see a totally different portrait of the war in Georgia than you'd find on the front of the New York Times. It's not the scary specter of Russia asserting its dominance over the region and thumbing its nose at the West, gambling that we won't respond with force. It's not tanks rolling toward a soverign nation's capital in the hopes of overthrowing its pro-American leader. No, it is, as usual, a conspiracy by George W. Bush and the Mainstream Media to confuse and deceive you. A false story propagated by those terrible, biased gatekeepers. Also-Russian tanks are fucking awesome!!!! Why the hell would typically nerd-news and cute photo-obsessed little Digg take such a counterintuitive view of a war being waged on the other side of the globe? Three simple reasons.

Why You Should Be Concerned About This Georgia Thing

Pareene · 08/11/08 05:26PM

This link to a ridiculously slanted Russian news story about the war in Georgia has 1,194 Diggs, but please don't pay it any mind. Pravda.ru is a joke, a web-only repository of mistranslated hilarity and boob pictures unrelated to any print publication. Russian newspapers can still be oppositional and independent—it's the TV Putin controls. We should probably worry less about wacky Engrish propaganda and more about the return of the Cold War! Russia's intention just might be to actually topple the democratically elected, adorably pro-American government of Georgia. (They say they won't go to Tbilisi, but they also said that about Gori!) George W. Bush's intention is to not get involved and hope a ceasefire happens soon. That funny little dance he did is not so cute anymore! If it spreads to Ukraine, what then? NATO gets involved at some point. That's a big problem. A big problem called the Cold War! Then what? Then we get President McCain. Because he's still stuck in the Cold War. And Obama dithered and hemmed and hawed in his response to this mess, while McCain said he would personally go to Moscow and deck that paper-hanging sonuvabitch Putin (more or less). Which is dangerous crazy rhetoric. And what does America like to hear during times of international instability in far-off places? Dangerous crazy rhetoric! Also fun to ponder right now: Russia's growing friendship with Iran, Georgia's oil reserves. Surprisingly, Dealbreaker of all things has a terribly informative roundtable on the entire situation that will allow you to sound reasonably intelligent at a cocktail party until you finish your third cocktail and find yourself unable to pronounce any of the names involved. And finally, if the John Edwards scandal had been reported on by the MSM back in 2007, none of this would've happened.

Claim: Russian hackers behind spam crime ring took over Georgia's national websites

Nicholas Carlson · 08/11/08 11:20AM

Before the Russian army pushed past the borders of breakaway republic South Ossetia and invaded Georgia's interior, Russian hackers took over Georgian government websites last Friday, taking control over a central government site as well as the homepages for the ministries of foreign affairs and defense. Researcher Jart Armin told Britain's Daily Telegraph he blames the attacks an organization called the Russian Business Network, which the Telegraph describes as a "a network of criminal hackers with close links to the Russian mafia and government."That's an understatement. The Russian Business Network is infamous for operating botnets, distributing malware, and stealing private information. But its usual targets are businesses, not nation-states. A year ago, Brian Krebs wrote in the Washington Post about RBN's exploits, which included an attack on the Bank of India. The Estonian government blamed the RBN for three days of attacks on its Web sites in April. Armin, the security researcher says Georgia's hacked sites are now routed them through servers in Russia and Turkey that are "well known to be under the control of Russian Business Network and influenced by the Russian Government." The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia has moved its website to Google's Blogger — itself a notorious hotbed of spam, but at least one that's hosted on a theoretically more secure network.

Cyber Terrorists Attack Russian News Agency

ian spiegelman · 08/10/08 04:40PM

Hackers brought down the website for Russia's state-sponsored news agency, RIA Novosti, for several hours today with a series of cyber attacks. This in the wake of three days of fighting between Russia and Georgia. "'The DNS-servers and the site itself have been coming under severe attack,' said Maxim Kuznetsov, head of the RIA Novosti IT department." It's hard to imagine why in the world anyone would want to cripple good ol' RIA Novosti's news-spreading capabilities. Oh, in unrelated news, here is the rest of the Kremlin-backed article.

No End To The Inflammatory Obama Illustrations

Hamilton Nolan · 05/21/08 03:28PM

The Roswell Beacon, a small paper in Georgia, ran this cover (which is not a spoof) last week to illustrate a story about how area "White Supremecy [sic] Groups" have been making threats against Barack Obama. The story itself is pretty straightforward, but the cover now has wild-eyed liberal types upset. But the Beacon's publisher has vowed to stand up to "liberal blogger thuggery"! Honestly, this one's not so bad. At least they didn't put it on an overpriced sweatshirt. Larger picture after the jump.