Soldiers From 2 Koreas Exchange Fire - Associated Press

Soldiers from North Korea and South Korea exchanged fire along their border overnight, but no one was hurt, a South Korean military official said Tuesday.

The shooting happened shortly before sunset when North Korean soldiers fired two bullets toward a South Korean guard post in the eastern part of the Demilitarized Zone, said Maj. Kim Tae-hoon of the Joint Chiefs of Staff office.

South Korean soldiers immediately fired back six rounds, Kim said.

The motive for the initial shots from the North was unclear, and the communist country has made no comment about them, Kim said.

The U.N. Military Armistice Commission, which supervises the cease-fire that ended the 1950-53 Korean War, will ask the North for an explanation of the incident, Kim said. The war did not end with a peace treaty, meaning the two Koreas are still technically in a state of conflict.
The two sides occasionally exchange fire across their land border and at sea.

Last October, North Korean soldiers fired a tracer bullet toward South Korean soldiers along the eastern part of the border and South Korea fired back, according to the South Korean military.
Navies of the two Koreas fought deadly skirmishes off their west coast in 1999 and 2002.
The latest incident came amid tensions over the North's recent missile launches, which prompted the U.N. Security Council to pass a resolution barring U.N. member states from missile-related dealings with the North.

The communist regime has been in a protracted standoff with the U.S. and other countries over its nuclear weapons program. It has boycotted six-way talks on its nuclear program because of U.S. financial sanctions over the North's alleged counterfeiting and money laundering.
North Korea agreed in September to abandon its nuclear program in return for security guarantees and aid, but no progress has been made to implement that accord.

More Rumors

When I recently saw Bill Clinton speaking on behalf of Joe Lieberman it hit me, the only way Lieberman can win the nomination is if every pedophile pollster in Connecticut starts driving a Hybrid.

Condi Rice is going to perform in Japan at the piano. The press entourage has taken to calling this Condi trip the Bukkate Express. You’ll never see Madeline Albright pulling up her double hemmed skirt up on a crowded bus for some drunken day laborers.

President Bush in his high school yearbook was voted most likely to go down on something that might choke him, but no one had any idea it would be a pretzel.

- Chris Mansel

Rumors

There is a rumor going around Washington that Karen Hughes has trained a miniature toy poodle to feed her raw liver. The story suggests an elaborate process aboard Air Force One particularly during campaign stops in rural areas.

Ann Coulter now shrugging off the plagiarism scandal has developed a Nicole Brown Simpson fixation and is chasing around every ex-jock politician she can find who can handle a knife despite crippling arthritis.

George Bush it is said is dismissing the label of Cowboy Politics and has set his sights on the exploits of John Voight in Midnight Cowboy and is remaking himself into a stud with the help of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and several of Condi Rice’s chatty girlfriends. A cover photo for Vanity Fair has been scheduled for the first of November.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert is in Bethesda Naval Hospital with cellulites. Apparently all that intense research into stem cells has taken their toll on Hastert. Reportedly the cellulites have been located ironically in his navel and amongst the dellulitis there has been found an embedded microphone with a serial number traced back to Joe Lieberman.

George Bush Sr., the first lord of the skulls was present at the funeral of Ken Lay. Recent reports have suggested that Ken Lay has faked his death but that rumor was put to rest when Bush Sr. dove into the coffin with lay for a photo opportunity as Barbara Bush while wearing a pin that said you can’t bury my beautiful mind took the flowers from the casket and shoved what she could into her pockets.

Katie Couric has sent out a decree saying she will not go into war zones. The head leaning, calf-exposing, morning after pill saleswoman Couric has come under the radar of Internet candor. Exposing her breasts to illegal Mexican workers who were mending the catacombs at Blackrock, otherwise known as CBS headquarters, the workers were inhabited by anecdotes Couric has yet to publish under the ghostwritten book entitled, “Let Your Thighs Be Your Guide.”


- Chris Mansel

Tales More Sinister

(Dedicated to Bob Kincaid, my political mentor)


The Inquisition was more than a hearing on the hill, more than an evening beating pollsters stupid with fuel bills and credit card receipts. No, it was the preset for the rule of law we now enjoy and watch its prejudicial heresay construct a means of governing that could have leveled the Vatican back when the rape of young boys was seen as a means to an end.
Brutality then and now is where we are, the glory of terrorizing civilians on a par with the cardinals undressing in pools of smoldering steel to garner the praise of attrition. Property or the names of those willing to engage in the vilest of activities as to shame the Marquis De Sade himself into retiring to Venice and taking up yachting. Heretics they called those who sought the truth whether it be religion or political truth. These days however we have the Patriot Act and we have that gnarled up bunny rabbit of the Down Syndrome George W. Bush. A man who would have donned a robe before the Yale society even existed. He would have marched around more than the figure of an owl set aflame among the likes of Ronald Reagan and Walter Cronkite.
These days the Inquisition is carried out on the Internet where a priest in Wisconsin can email a pedophile in the roofing business about a certain public toilet on a local highway. The internet provider complicit but not served papers under the right orderly law of freewill and crude public scrutiny, the same kind of thinking that allows the profit motive of corporations to disallow knowledge of information in their own quarterly stock report if they have taken the time to lobby and grovel in an office twice the size of your living room.
The Patriot Act owes as much to brief orders of martial law as it does the Thousand Year Reich and its view of emblems in storefront windows. It’s a cruel and dumb world we live in they would have you to believe but the same ignorance that will drive dedicated television viewers to the polls will also draw and tenderize their hindquarters to the fire and lose the ability to criticize the coals.


- Chris Mansel

Ape Your Own Skin

Sad is the day when Ken Lay is laid away or so Vice President Dick Cheney led reporters to believe. Once in the vice president’s residence he began to crush his scrotum in a top desk drawer. Screaming at the top of his lungs, “Soft on crime, soft on crime!” His wife swigging from a bottle of rare moonshine sent to her by a man in Malaysia who had sent a raving review of her soft-core porn novel in old English text demurrers, “ Dick, slap that old cock all you want it won’t bring back your little bitch. Maybe if you screwed me once in a while rather than humping the American dream with your whore Rove.” She turns to walk back up the stairs by the front entrance and added, “Karl called earlier and said Gitmo was going to turn into a turkey shoot.”


- Chris Mansel

Truth

"If we really cared about human rights we would have gone into Rwanda and not Iraq."


- Robert Baer

Mansel Report / Closed

I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.

- Georges Bataille

The caution tape covering the end of the tunnel has been burned away. The throat of American politics is gushing blood and television elects and impeaches. The political landscape is riddled with land mines that could erupt without warning. All it would take for these mines to erupt is one simple admission of the truth.
I’m disgusted and I am tired. The smell of death that is written all over the nation is only getting worse and I feel in the next year and a half will see some horrific changes. So as far as the Mansel Report is concerned the shotgun is taped to the door handle so any rattling of the door will ensure a last breath.



- Chris Mansel

The Merciless Grenades of the Far Right

If anything you can give a bit of praise to the victor when they have outfoxed the bloody smear on the nose of the hound who has been treed by the fox. The far right has established a new and convenient way of throwing the country off track as to enable them to out flank democracy and goodness. You may not have noticed it but recently the far right has announced that the only way to fix the mess that they are in is to lose the house and allow the democrats to be in charge. Oh how the charge of the light brigade has been inducted into the Iraqi war tent of oil fires.
The tactic and it was a masterful one is this. Throw as many scandals, wrong doings, and general law breaking as you can at the press and general public and as the ramparts are cleaned and sorted deposit in your war chest the scorn of your attackers and reap the rewards when the attackers come to power. Misinformation has reached the level of assassination, break-in’s, and bloody war fronts all rolled into one.
The evidence is clear. The architect of this horrific but successful ploy is Karl Rove. His second in this duel is Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch is currently courting Sen. Hillary Clinton. Who does the far right enjoy bashing more than the Clintons? Once Sen. Clinton is in office they will begin the offensive. Their plan I am sure is for Hillary to be in office for one term, after that term has expired they no doubt plan to install a candidate for another eight-year stay in the oval office.
When fear comes in at you hard and swift, stand tall and grace despair with strength and darkness. Now you know their ploy, so get to work.


- Chris Mansel

Flashing The Hash at the Watergate (part six)

Once Karl Rove had hit a stopping point in his mind he shoved the two women into the wet grass and began taking photographs of them. As they writhed in some kind of illicit blessing of Ronald Reagan, Rove began kicking at them in his sock feet. Agents had circled the area and had re-directed tourists away. As we tried to inch closer and closer we noticed a startled Juan Williams, the regular Fox news contributor getting out of a SUV. One thing was unusual however the SUV had diplomatic plates.
Jack and I at seeing Juan Williams stood up and walked gingerly towards the scene. We had had several conversations in secret with Williams and whenever he saw us around town he would begin trembling, as he had been a bit too honest for his parties good. He had detailed one night how the party had during the 2000 election attempted to impregnate several Gore staffers by force.
We knew that if we could get a photo of Williams alongside Karl Rove kicking two half undressed women in Arlington National Cemetery we could get Williams to open up about the tree house in the White House as he has been long rumored to be the one with the apple in his mouth.
Rove was in ecstasy. He didn’t get the warning that Williams was approaching as agents had told him. As the women were beginning to scream now, the agents didn’t notice us either. As we got closer we could hear Rove’s ranting, “We’ll call this HR 666! Yea, take that Bay Buchanan betrayer of the chair!” The harder Rove kicked the women the louder they would chant, “Four more years, four more years!”

- Chris Mansel

I Am A Witness. What can I do?

This article is from the (RED) edition of The Independent, guest-edited for 16 May 2006 by Bono. Half the revenue from the edition will be donated to the Global Fund to Fight Aids.

May I say without guile, I am as sick of messianic rock stars as the next man, woman and child. I am also tired of average work being given extra weight because it's attached to something with real gravitas, like the Aids emergency. So I truly try to tread carefully as I walk over the dreams of dignity under my feet in our work for the terrible beauty that is the continent of Africa. I'm used to the custard pies. I've even learnt to like the taste of them. But before you are tempted to let fly with your understandable invective, allow me to contextualise. Not for the sake of my vanity, but for the sake of people who are depending on you - the reader - to respond to the precariousness of their lives.
Picture this: a village where the disappearance of a whole generation has left children to bring up children (the Lord of the Flies syndrome).
I'm a witness to this. What can I do?
Or this: my new friend Prudence, who even if she had access to anti-retroviral therapies would not have shared them with her now dead sister or best friend Janny, because her fellow activists were more important to keep alive.
Why? Because picture this: most activists and trained nurses cannot afford the drugs available to us in any corner chemist.
I am a witness to this. I have watched these brave and beautiful souls who are fighting a forest fire of a pandemic with watering cans, knowing they will not see the light of a day when their work will be honoured. I have been a witness to their conversations around canteen tables, deciding who will live or die, because they do not have enough pills to go round. I've seen Zackie Achmat refuse his medications until he won his action against the South African government, forcing their hand on universal access. What a witness he was. And so I testify.
These firefighters deserve fire engines with sirens and low-flying aircraft with bellies full of of rain. At the very least, they deserve their situation to merit the classification of an emergency. Code Red, like Hurricane Katrina or the tsunami in south Asia, which swept away a hundred and fifty thousand lives. These were natural catastrophes. Africa loses a hundred and fifty thousand men, women, and children every month to Aids, a wholly avoidable disaster, a preventable, treatable disease.
Colin Powell describes the tiny little virus HIV as the most lethal weapon of mass destruction on the planet. So forgive us if we expand our strategy to reach the high street, where so many of you live and work.
We need to meet you where you are as you shop, as you phone, as you lead your busy, businessy lives. Those of us who campaign on these issues feel we have made a dent on the pop consciousness with Live Aid and 8, Red Nose Day, Comic Relief and Make Poverty History. But we are still losing the battle: 9,000 new infections every day across the developing world.
There will be those that think that RED is the worst idea they've ever heard.
On the far right, we will hear the usual carping about it being Africa's own fault (the same warped logic that would pass by a drunk driver's car accident). This despite the fact that the largest increasing group of HIV-positive people are monogamous married women. We'll hear the "Africans can't take pills because they don't have watches to tell the time" line. Even though Africans have the best record of us all at sticking to their drug regimens.
On the far left, we will meet "better dead than RED", a reaction to big business that is not wholly unjustified. But given the emergency that is Aids, I don't see this as selling out. I see this as ganging up on the problem. This emergency demands a radical centre, as well as a radical edge. Creeping up on the everyday. Making the difficult easy.
Product RED cannot replace activism. For anyone who thinks this means I'm going to retire to the boardroom and stop banging my fist on the door of No. 10, I'm sorry to disappoint you. We have to keep our marching boots on and hold our leaders to account for the promises they have made to Africa - and get them to promise more. The incredible movement we saw gathering around last year's G8 is what will, in the end, win the day. But for too many people, that day will be too late. Right now, people you will never meet, who will never be able to thank you, are depending on you for the life-saving drugs which buying this paper will buy. For those people, my motivation or our (RED) motivation is irrelevant.
May I say without guile, I am as sick of messianic rock stars as the next man, woman and child. I am also tired of average work being given extra weight because it's attached to something with real gravitas, like the Aids emergency. So I truly try to tread carefully as I walk over the dreams of dignity under my feet in our work for the terrible beauty that is the continent of Africa. I'm used to the custard pies. I've even learnt to like the taste of them. But before you are tempted to let fly with your understandable invective, allow me to contextualise. Not for the sake of my vanity, but for the sake of people who are depending on you - the reader - to respond to the precariousness of their lives.
Picture this: a village where the disappearance of a whole generation has left children to bring up children (the Lord of the Flies syndrome).
I'm a witness to this. What can I do?
Or this: my new friend Prudence, who even if she had access to anti-retroviral therapies would not have shared them with her now dead sister or best friend Janny, because her fellow activists were more important to keep alive.
Why? Because picture this: most activists and trained nurses cannot afford the drugs available to us in any corner chemist.
I am a witness to this. I have watched these brave and beautiful souls who are fighting a forest fire of a pandemic with watering cans, knowing they will not see the light of a day when their work will be honoured. I have been a witness to their conversations around canteen tables, deciding who will live or die, because they do not have enough pills to go round. I've seen Zackie Achmat refuse his medications until he won his action against the South African government, forcing their hand on universal access. What a witness he was. And so I testify.
These firefighters deserve fire engines with sirens and low-flying aircraft with bellies full of of rain. At the very least, they deserve their situation to merit the classification of an emergency. Code Red, like Hurricane Katrina or the tsunami in south Asia, which swept away a hundred and fifty thousand lives. These were natural catastrophes. Africa loses a hundred and fifty thousand men, women, and children every month to Aids, a wholly avoidable disaster, a preventable, treatable disease.
Colin Powell describes the tiny little virus HIV as the most lethal weapon of mass destruction on the planet. So forgive us if we expand our strategy to reach the high street, where so many of you live and work.
We need to meet you where you are as you shop, as you phone, as you lead your busy, businessy lives. Those of us who campaign on these issues feel we have made a dent on the pop consciousness with Live Aid and 8, Red Nose Day, Comic Relief and Make Poverty History. But we are still losing the battle: 9,000 new infections every day across the developing world.
There will be those that think that RED is the worst idea they've ever heard.
On the far right, we will hear the usual carping about it being Africa's own fault (the same warped logic that would pass by a drunk driver's car accident). This despite the fact that the largest increasing group of HIV-positive people are monogamous married women. We'll hear the "Africans can't take pills because they don't have watches to tell the time" line. Even though Africans have the best record of us all at sticking to their drug regimens.
On the far left, we will meet "better dead than RED", a reaction to big business that is not wholly unjustified. But given the emergency that is Aids, I don't see this as selling out. I see this as ganging up on the problem. This emergency demands a radical centre, as well as a radical edge. Creeping up on the everyday. Making the difficult easy.
Product RED cannot replace activism. For anyone who thinks this means I'm going to retire to the boardroom and stop banging my fist on the door of No. 10, I'm sorry to disappoint you. We have to keep our marching boots on and hold our leaders to account for the promises they have made to Africa - and get them to promise more. The incredible movement we saw gathering around last year's G8 is what will, in the end, win the day. But for too many people, that day will be too late. Right now, people you will never meet, who will never be able to thank you, are depending on you for the life-saving drugs which buying this paper will buy. For those people, my motivation or our (RED) motivation is irrelevant.


BONO

Flashing The Hash at the Watergate (part five)

Any member of the press core will tell you that if you shove the head of a baby into an airsickness bag and pop the bag immediately you will completely unsettle anyone near you. The mother will confess immediately every cock she had ever sucked and whether or not she saw what she had seen and testified what she had testified to in a case against a politician. This has been done in the case against the Bush administration. We saw the tale and we were there to report it.
Jack Random and I armed with cameras, starkly open and brutal honesty, we traveled to the tomb of the unknown soldier where we had been told Karl Rove held private conversations as tourists watched two guys in dress uniform flip around rifles in peace time and during war. Rove would appear we had learned with a hat pulled down over his misshapen ears. So there we sat waiting for Rove to appear when we noticed a representative from the Fox network we had photographed once on the balcony of a hotel in Maryland. He watched as he exposed him self to a group of Catholic priests. The Priests stood motionless in the tourist bus windows.
Waiting for Karl Rove had gotten to be a favorite pastime for Jack and I. We would sometimes pay someone to tip off the Secret Service that he had seen a photograph of one of them transporting illegal aliens into the streets of San Antonio and watch as the agent shoved the tipster against the wall. We didn’t do it too often as it usually cost us a couple thousand dollars and once it took the promise of an introduction to a certain celebrity who enjoyed urine in more than a relieving manner.
As Jack listened again to the tape from the hotel I saw a couple of tourists taking a few steps backwards. I watched closely as two agents opened one of the men’s shirts to reveal a listening device. I grabbed the camera from around Jack’s neck as he cussed me loudly. The agent took notice of Rove arriving in a sedan flanked by two women.
The man with the listening device made an attempt to punch the agent in the face and the agent was beating him senseless immediately. Every tourist eyes’ went right away to the noise. Rove and the two women made their way past the tomb to section thirteen of Arlington National Cemetery. As they walked we strolled quietly by the violent outburst of several agents now subduing the individual. By the time we were in the wet grass of the cemetery they had the man down to his underwear.

- Chris Mansel

Ashes In A Pan

Dried and deposited the past holds a vacancy in any knowledgeable portion of truth. If Ambrose Bierce were around today is revised edition of The Devil’s Dictionary would have to include a special pop-up section dedicated to the way the Bush administration processes information. Maggots could pull bodies from burning wreckage better than the truth can leak out of this gestalt collection of butchered body parts lounging in the west wing.
Weapons of mass destruction, invasion of privacy, male penis envy just pick a topic for this hinterland. The doors were hardly nailed open from Scott McClellan’s exit before new Fox contributor Tony Snow hoofed in on a sow’s ear to determine the cameras position in the press briefing (outside if you are wondering.)

- Chris Mansel

The Bizarre But True Love Between Lou Dobbs and Bill O’Reilly

The full figured, mainlined, arm banded, soft serve full fuck beast that is television news has finally struck its final blow against censorship and has allowed the likes of Lou Dobbs to rant away nightly on the pleasure of racism, border control, and the right of every wealthy American to own dogs worthy of gutting stock market analysts within an inch of Rupert Murdoch’s door. Secretly its known that Dobbs receives daily phone calls from the offices of Bill O’Reilly that are so obscene as to riddle the minds of the inhabitants of Echelon listening station the world over. It’s aid that O’Reilly spent his last raise in pay on his own satellite to relay the calls to Dobbs. On the cover of Lou Dobbs new book he is standing with his crotch in full view sources say so as to enable O’Reilly to view the full cardboard standup while he is on the air so he may manipulate him self in torrid ways.


- Chris Mansel

Flashing The Hash at the Watergate (part four)

As we left the bar we saw a group of Secret Service running to the salon located in the Watergate. We followed behind them to see a drunken Scooter Libby rubbing mud on his face and screaming about a free facial. Karl Rove was standing across the room from Libby talking into his cell phone. The Secret Service stormed into the room and Libby twirled the chair around at them and grabbing the terrified makeup attendant he started spitting on her neck and rubbing it in and screaming in a voice reminiscent of Truman Capote, “Isn’t it pretty, isn’t it pretty!”
The agents tackled the lady and Libby and began kicking them both. Rove sat down at the front desk and began flipping through the call caddy and copying down the names. One agent turned to secure the area and noticed us photographing the scene. The agent grimaced and started toward us but he slipped in the blood pouring from the woman’s forehead.
We ran down the hallway and were almost out of the hotel when Jack suggested we head for the conference room Rove had just left. We ran across the lobby and through the door. Down the stairs we met by a cleaning crew. We flashed our I.D.’s and took the garbage bag from them for inspection. They could have cared less why we needed it or for our identifications.
Back in the car I eased into traffic as Jack fished through the bag. He began laughing hysterically when he found a list of congressmen who had participated in the Duke Cunningham hooker scandal. Rove had the names circled and beside several of the names were amounts of money and personal phone numbers. One name in particular hit us more than others, Matt Drudge.


- Chris Mansel

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