Another form of scam preys on the desire of many people in the third world to immigrate. The United States has a Diversity Visa lottery program (USA DV Lottery) to encourage people underrepresented countries to immigrate.

The following fake email impersonates US officials and claims that the recipient won in the lottery and asks for fees via Western Union.

Here is the text of the email scam:

Contrary to all what Dries has been saying, the webmaster is not dead! It is alive and well, and here is the video to prove it!

A 37-year old man was jogging in Vancouver, B.C. while having an iPod strapped to his bidy and the speakers in his ears. When an adjacent tree was struck by lightening, the lightening jumped and struck him.

The result was disastrous. Not only was the man thrown off 2.4 meters from the tree, but he suffered ruptured ear drums, dislocated jaws, and first and second degree burns on his chest, where the iPod was strapped. The burns were up his ear channel as well. His feet had burns and his sneakers were blown up as the electric shock exited his body to the ground.

On May 15, 2007, there were tornadoes in Southern Ontario.

Yesterday, June 8, 2007, Environment Canada issued torando warnings for the areas around Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge, and Wellington county.

Indeed, two probable tornadoes were reported. Environment Canada is investigating, specially the Mildmay area south of Walkerton.

When studying history, we often look for literature, archeology, events, and the like. Seldom do we consider food and recipes to be a topic of history.

However, there are several sites that have recipes from olden days. Some of them have a nice collection of recipes from Islamic countries, most notably Iraq and Andalusia.

These recipes go back all the way to the 10th century, when Baghdad was the seat of the Islamic Caliphate, in the Golden Age of Islam in the East. The Andalusian recipes go further into the 15th century, just before the fall of Granada.

Last year Gabor Hojtsy posted on Drupal's development mailing list about Ohloh, a site that inspects and reports Open Source software projects.

Al-Qaeda's ideologue, and second in command, Ayman Al-Zawahiri has a video tape out where he spells out the short and long term goals of Al-Qaeda.

Short term: the West

As I always thought: the goals are local to the Middle East, and does not target the West as a primary goal. Rather, he sees that Western governments are interfering with what is an internal struggle that Al-Qaeda (and other militant groups) would have won on their own against the despotic regimes in the region.

The bulk of web hosts are still on PHP4, despite PHP5 being out for years. PHP5, and specially PHP5.2, offers a lot of features that make developing in PHP far better than being held back with PHP4's feature set.

So, a bunch of activists in the Drupal community started talking to other PHP based applications to say enough is enough, and push for more adoption of PHP 5.2 by web hosts and projects alike.

Go ahead and Digg the story, and click the banner below for more information.

Sumac is a a family of plants from the genus Rhus. In some Middle Eastern countries, the drupes of Sumac are crushed and dried to yield a reddish sour coarse powder. This is used to garnish salads and dips because of its color.

What is both funny and sad is when one Iraqi blogger back in November 2003 posted a
recipe for Sumac salad. One aggravated American emailed him to say: