A top official in Peter Mandelson's European Union trade department has leaked highly sensitive commercial information in return for the promise of financial benefit.

In a six-month investigation, The Sunday Times tape-recorded Fritz-Harald Wenig, a trade director, passing secrets to undercover reporters posing as lobbyists for a Chinese businessman seeking insider information.

Wenig discussed the possibility of payment or taking a lucrative job with the businessman. He said he would decide further once he had provided "results".

He leaked the names of two Chinese companies likely to get special status if the EU imposes a protective tariff barrier against Chinese candle-makers. The information is potentially worth millions to those trading with these companies.

Even as EU border patrols search for some 70 migrants who went missing near Malta on Aug. 27, the people of the smallest EU state are becoming fed up with rising illegal immigration.

The 70 disappeared when they were swept off a flimsy craft which capsized after it left Libya, according to eight fellow travelers who managed to cling onto the vessel long enough to be rescued. It is one of the worst tragedies involving would-be immigrants in the Mediterranean -- yet the Maltese newspaper's online readers' forum offered little, if any, compassion.

Instead, anger was directed at the thousands of Africans who attempt to cross the waters to Europe. Readers' rage was also aimed at neighboring Libya, from where most of the would-be immigrants depart, and the European Union, which is perceived as turning a blind eye towards a mounting problem.

In the past eight months 2,200 would-be illegal immigrants landed on Malta, the smallest and most densely-populated European Union state. In contrast less than 1,700 arrivals were recorded for the whole of 2007. Given Malta's population of 400,000, it is as if 45,000 people had landed in Germany, Maltese government officials have said.

Rumors that the powerful ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party (SRS) was splitting were confirmed when its acting leader, Tomislav Nikolic, resigned all his party posts.

Nikolic resigned Saturday, Sept. 6, as the deputy of the party chief Vojislav Seselj, who has been on trial for war crimes at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) since early  2003, as well as the SRS floor leader in the Serbian parliament.

SRS said in a statement that Nikolic stepped down at the party leadership meeting Friday night. The outcome indicates that the extreme hardline wing within SRS, loyal to Seselj, overcame the moderates led by Nikolic.

Nikolic has led the SRS with apparently comprehensive loyalty since Seselj left Serbia to face trial in early 2003 -- yet under his leadership, the party toned down its belligerent rhetoric, softening its image slightly.

The EU must open the door to a rapprochement with Belarus and support reconstruction and peace in Georgia and Moldova if it is to counter Russia's growing assertiveness in eastern Europe, EU foreign ministers said.

"We should encourage Belarus to improve the way they conduct their elections and we should give them incentives. We need a process of rebuilding trust," Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski told DPA news agency from the ministers' informal meeting in Avignon, France, on Saturday, Sept. 6.

"It is a very good time to rethink our relations with Belarus. Belarus is sending desperate signals to the West," Lithuanian Foreign Minister Petras Vaitiekunas said.

Officially, Saturday's talks were set to focus on the EU's relationship with Russia and Georgia following their war in August.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has enlisted some of Britain's leading architects for one of his most daring projects. He wants to make Paris more like London.

Proposals now emerging reflect the French leader's admiration for Anglo-Saxon dynamism. They are likely to horrify Parisians.

As part of the master plan architects are proposing high-rise suburbs modelled on Croydon, south London, and an orbital railway to link them. They will encourage the middle classes to move out of the centre of Paris and ordinary working people to move in.

Professor Richard Burdett, design chief for the London Olympics and one of the experts working on the "Greater Paris" project with the Richard Rogers architecture practice, said: "The notion of mixing different types of people and activity, so that people are cheek by jowl, makes a city over time much more tolerant and resilient to change.

Germany's Social Democrats meet Sunday amidst a deep leadership crisis. But the party has agreed to announce Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier as its candidate for chancellor next year, say media reports.

Senior leaders in the Social Democratic Pary (SPD) have decided that Steinmeier will run against incumbent Chancellor Angela Merkel in next year's federal elections, according to reports on Saturday, Sept. 6, by the Berliner Zeitung and Spiegel Online.

The two Web sites reported, without citing sources, that Steinmeier's candidacy would be announced at Sunday's party conference.

Though the Social Democrats appear to have reached one important decision in selecting Steinmeier, their meeting comes at a time of deep internal divisions.

A row has broken out in France after a court postponed a trial, apparently because it was to take place during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan.

Critics say the decision is a breach of France's strict separation of religion and state.

The trial of seven men for armed robbery was due to start on 16 September in Rennes.

But last week the court agreed to a request from a lawyer for one of the accused to put it off until January.

There were warnings today that the taxpayer may face a multi-million pound bill after the loss of a computer disk carrying personal details of thousands of employees of the National Offender Management Service - many of whom are prison officers and probation workers.

Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, ordered an urgent inquiry after it was revealed that the hard drive was reported missing in July. He has also demanded to be told why he was not informed immediately of the loss.

EDS, a private contractor brought in to to overhaul IT infrastructure seven years ago, told the Prison Service in July this year that the hard drive had gone astray - a year after the missing disk had last been seen.

In a statement, Mr Straw said: "I am extremely concerned about this missing data. I was informed of its loss at lunchtime today (Saturday) and have ordered an urgent inquiry into the circumstances and the implications of the data loss and the level of risk involved.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus, an outspoken EU critic, once warned that his nation would dissolve in the European Union like a sugar cube in a cup of coffee.

Now that the Czechs are about to chair the European Union, the government has turned the cube into a sweetly subversive symbol of its scepticism toward the European Union.

The 30-second video, unveiled by Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek and his deputy for European affairs Alexandr Vondra, is meant to draw the public's attention to the six-month Czech presidency starting Jan. 1.

The clip, airing on nationwide television since Thursday, says nothing about Prague's agenda for the 27-nation bloc.

The European Union wants to work closely with the United States on resolving the crisis in Georgia, Italy's foreign minister said after meeting with US Vice President Dick Cheney.

"This Caucasian crisis won't be resolved if there is not an intense collaboration -- that Europe wishes for, that the United States wishes for, and we will carry out," Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini told reporters on Sunday, Sept. 7, following brief talks with Cheney.

 

Frattini also said he had informed the US vice president of the EU's plan to send civilian observers to the disputed territory in the Caucasus region to help enforce the French-brokered peace deal agreed by Tbilisi and Moscow.

 

At an informal meeting in southern France on Saturday, EU foreign ministers laid out plans for the bloc's observer mission, which could begin as early as next month. They also called for an international probe into the cause of the five-day war.

TSKHINVALI, Georgia: It is not easy for Ireya Alborova to root through the events that cracked this city in half, but one small bright memory stands out from 1989, when she glanced at the building across the street from her high school and spotted a flag.

It was a small Georgian flag, fixed in an attic window. Alborova was an unruly 15-year-old, preoccupied with her friends and her classes, and she took it in - a small piece of information - and kept walking. But now she thinks of it as the first signal of what was coming.

Most of the world now knows what happened: South Ossetians and Georgians began a drawn-out struggle to control this sleepy valley, where the main feature is a road that cuts through the Caucasian ridge into Russia. That flared into a global standoff last month, when Georgia pounded Tskhinvali, the capital of the enclave of South Ossetia, with rocket fire. Russian troops poured across the border in response.

But for Alborova's family, which is partly Georgian but wound up on the Ossetian side of the conflict, the crucial event took place during the last months of the Soviet Union, when the fabric of a multiethnic society tore apart with breathtaking speed. For the past 18 years, in a city encircled by Georgian positions, the family and its neighbors have been reliving the rifts and betrayals of that period.

Russia has won the support of six former Soviet nations over its war in Georgia during a meeting of member countries of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) in Moscow.

Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, said that the leaders of CSTO nations signed a declaration on Friday condemning an attack by Georgia which was aimed at regaining control of its breakaway province of South Ossetia.

Members of the group said they were "deeply concerned about an attempt by Georgia to solve the conflict in South Ossetia by force, which has led to numerous casualties among the civilian population and peacekeepers and entailed grave humanitarian consequences," the declaration said.

They hold down demanding jobs but still manage to have at least two children and enjoy the highest life expectancy in Europe. Meet the so-called "Super-Frenchies", the Gallic wonder women behind France's "bébé boom".

Its economy may not be much of a model, but the country is the envy of Europe when it comes to making babies. The latest statistics show that France's population went up by 300,000 in 2006 to 63.3m, the best birth rate in three decades.

With a fertility rate of two children per woman, France is approaching the level needed to replenish the population, compared with 1.91 children in Britain and 1.37 for Germany.

The numbers show the extent to which policies to promote childbirth, including cash payments and subsidised nannies, have paid off.

Abdullah Gul, the Turkish president, has been greeted by protests after arriving in Armenia to attend a football match in an attempt to improve relations between the two countries.

Gul's arrival on Saturday in Yerevan, the Armenian capital,  marked the first visit to the country by a Turkish head of state since Armenian independence in 1991.

The two countries have long argued over Armenia's attempt to have recognised as genocide a massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during the First World War.

Hundreds of Armenians lined the route of Gul's motorcade to protest against Ankara's refusal to consider the 1915-1917 atrocities as crimes against humanity.

Bardasar Akhpar, a demonstrator, said: "We are here because we want to tell the entire world that we do not forget the genocide of 1915.

"We will not welcome Gul nor any other Turk until they have recognised the genocide."

An unbridled building boom, which first turned much of Spain's once captivating coastline into a mile-wide belt of shopping malls, vacation homes and sunburned foreigners, has more recently spread deep into the country's heartland, endangered some of the most precious and diverse flora and fauna in Europe and sucked an already arid region dry of water.

Nearly 30% of Spain is in the process of becoming desert, according to a report by Adena, Spain's branch of the World Wildlife Fund...

Fueled by corruption, speculation and a hot market that only recently cooled, vast patches of regions such as Castilla-La Mancha are being swallowed up by enormous housing developments, often on land designated as national parks or as protected zones because of delicate ecosystems and near-extinct wildlife.

Trading on the London Stock Exchange was suspended for more than four hours on Monday after a computer fault led to the longest halt in cash equity trading for more than eight years.

A spokeswoman for the exchange said it was investigating "connectivity issues" and that the connection would be brought back in a controlled way. She gave no details on what had caused the problem.

The LSE - the world's second largest stock exchange - published a website offering live tracking of the problem.

Venezuela says it plans to hold joint naval exercises in its territorial waters with Russian forces in November.

A senior Venezuelan naval officer said four Russian ships would take part in the exercises, which would also involve Venezuelan aircraft and submarines.

Correspondents say the move is likely to raise concern in the US, whose relations with Russia have been soured by Moscow's recent conflict in Georgia.

Washington already has rocky relations with Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez.

People should consider eating less meat as a way of combating global warming, says the UN's top climate scientist.

Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), will make the call at a speech in London on Monday evening.

UN figures suggest that meat production puts more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than transport.

But a spokeswoman for the UK's National Farmers' Union (NFU) said methane emissions from farms were declining.

WE all must think anew about Russia. But this process will prove harder for some of us than for others. When I grew up in the late 1960s and early '70s, the Soviet Union had already begun to look like the Ottoman Empire on its last legs; the face of Soviet Communism belonged to Leonid Brezhnev, with his drooping cheeks and beetle brows and thick, square glasses.

What was there to fear from this pitiful giant? In my left-wing, antiwar, social democratic hothouse world, anti-Communism seemed almost as absurd as Communism. John Kennedy's call in 1961 to "bear any burden" in the struggle between two world systems was as remote to us as the sectarian debates of the 1930s between Trotskyites, Shachtmanites and so on.

We were, unlike an older generation of "cold war liberals," anti-anti-Communists. Fear of the spread of Communism had gotten us into Vietnam, and rationalized American support for right-wing dictators across the third world. That fear, to us, was thus a far more dangerous force in the world than the thing that we as a country were afraid of -- Soviet and Chinese expansionism.

"The war against Communism is over," declared George McGovern, our tribune, in 1972. Several years later, a much more centrist figure, President Jimmy Carter, would lament the "inordinate fear of Communism" that he said dominated public discussion of foreign policy. (That remark looked slightly less sage after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.)

Actually this is about the story that the US has been spying on Maliki [dog bites man]

HARRISBURG, Penn. -- Sen. Barack Obama made his first appearance on Fox News's conservative talk show "The O'Reilly Factor" and was pressed on his foreign policy views.

According to excerpts released by Fox, host Bill O'Reilly questioned Obama on two issues that Republicans view as vulnerabilities, his opposition to the troop surge in Iraq and his willingness to talk even with U.S. adversaries.

"I think that the surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated," Obama told O'Reilly of President Bush's decision last year to increase troop levels. "It's succeeded beyond our wildest dreams."

But he added, "The Iraqis still haven't taken responsibility. And we still don't have that kind of political reconciliation."

Obama May Delay Rescinding Giveaways for Super Rich

Honestly I didn't think I read this right, but....I did.

Obama said:

he would delay rescinding President Bush's tax cuts on wealthy Americans if he becomes the next president and the economy is in a recession, suggesting such an increase would further hurt the economy.

and even further:

Even if we're still in a recession, I'm going to go through with my tax cuts

This is trickle upon economics, a supply-side Reagan philosophy that is not proven to work.    Where is it written that running these budget deficits and giving tax cuts to the super rich helps the economy?

Their own Congressional Budget Office has said these tax cuts failed to stimulate the economy.  

The short-term effects of EGTRRA and JGTRRA in stimulating aggregate demand in the economy have largely dissipated by now, and the supply-side effects of those policies are uncertain but are probably small

Canada's prime minister on Sunday triggered an early election, dissolving Parliament in a bid to bolster his party's grip on power in a vote next month that will be the country's third national ballot in four years.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper says he expects the Oct. 14 vote to produce another minority government but recent polls show the Conservatives could win the majority they need to rule without help from opposition parties.

Analysts said Harper's party has a better shot of winning now than if they had waited until being forced into a vote later when the Canadian economy might be worse off or after Canadians could be influenced by the U.S. presidential election results.

Hong Kong voters headed to the polls Sunday in lower numbers, with the city's pro-democracy parties scrambling to avoid heavy losses and several high-profile politicians facing potential defeat.

Despite warm sunshine in the afternoon, official figures showed only about 45 percent of registered voters cast their ballots, down from the nearly 56 percent turnout in 2004.

The vote was expected to provide a barometer for pro-democracy parties in the former British colony in the face of growing Chinese patriotism, with results expected early Monday.

Only 30 of the 60 legislative seats were being chosen by the city's 3.37 million registered electors. The remaining 30 "functional constituencies" represent various business and industry interests chosen by select electorates.

OPEC ministers headed for Vienna on Monday to wrestle with the issue of falling oil prices, with analysts expecting them to agree to trim output to help keep crude above 100 dollars a barrel.

The question facing the oil producer group, which is to hold a policy meeting Tuesday, is when, not if, to cut its oil production target as crude prices slide in the face of weakening global economic growth, analysts say.

Most observers expect the 13-nation cartel to agree to reduce its output informally before waiting until later, possibly at a scheduled gathering in December, to alter its official output target.

The informal cut will be achieved by members, mainly powerhouse Saudi Arabia, agreeing to cut their excess production above their OPEC quota, which would remove oil from the market but not amount to a formal change in policy.

Since Pakistan shares also a border with Iran, its role as a US ally becomes even more important. With Pakistan being largely Sunni, one would think that not a great deal of sympathy exists between the people of these two countries, but quite contrary, according to this Asia Times story from May last year, large portions of the Pakistani population would not support any US attacks on its Shia neighbors.

What I found most interesting though in the above quoted AT article were the last 4 paragraphs, where the author, M K Bhadrakumar, a former Indian Foreign Service diplomat, is suggesting that the real issue for America in the US-Iran-Pakistan politics triangle is, surprise surprise, natural resources and their distribution, as in pipelines and US access to them:

...there is a sideshow to these happenings that is no less profound. US intelligence operatives must be laughing all the way to Washington that they could manage with such ease what their suave diplomats (and wily Congress members) have had a hard time achieving in recent years - arresting Islamabad and New Delhi from finalizing the $7 billion Iran-Pakistan-India gas-pipeline project. In geopolitical terms, the project holds the definite potential to forge a unified Asian energy market, with deep implications for US energy security.

A family of feline squatters has moved into a foreclosed home in Lake Elsinore. Residents of the Tuscany Hills development first noticed the bobcats about a week ago.
With real estate values plummeting and foreclosed homes sitting empty, a family of bobcats apparently decided the time was right to pounce.

So last week, they slipped out of the parched foothills of Lake Elsinore and into a spacious, vacant home in well-groomed Tuscany Hills.

Residents of the development got their first look Aug. 27 when the feline squatters -- at least two adults and three kittens -- lolled atop a wall outside the Spanish-style house.

Someone called 911, reporting mountain lions. Four police cruisers showed up and officers ordered everyone inside. But soon they were out snapping photos along with the neighbors.

Bobcats are not known to attack humans, said Monique Middleton of Animal Friends of the Valley, which provides animal-control services.

Children exposed to pesticide in womb twice as likely to be overweight, refuting idea of sole personal responsibility.

Pollution can make children fat, startling new research shows. A groundbreaking Spanish study indicates that exposure to a range of common chemicals before birth sets up a baby to grow up stout, thus helping to drive the worldwide obesity epidemic.

The results of the study, just published - the first to link chemical contamination in the womb with one of the developing world's greatest and fastest-growing health crises - carry huge potential implications for public policy around the globe. They undermine recent strictures from the Conservative leader, David Cameron, that blame solely the obese for their own condition.

A quarter of all British adults and a fifth of children are obese - four times as many as 30 years ago. And so are at least 300 million people worldwide. The main explanation is that they are consuming more calories than they burn. But there is growing evidence that diet and lack of exercise, though critical, cannot alone explain the rapid growth of the epidemic.

In Spain, the country with more land under vines than any other, it is harvest time for wine growers.

Ten years ago, most wineries would start gathering in their grapes during September. However, climate change has caused the temperature to rise and now grape varieties are ripening up to a month earlier.

Climate change is now a threat to the industry in Spain and a challenge for wine makers worldwide.

"More merlot?" shouts a guide - almost an order rather than a question - to his group of tourists as he passes glasses of red liquor at a tasting in the Torres winery, in Penedes, near Barcelona.

London: A "comedy brain cell" that responds to humour has been discovered by scientists.

Clips of The Simpsons, Seinfeld and cartoons were shown to epilepsy patients and their brain reactions monitored.

A particular cell "sparked" when watching the clips, and reignited when the programmes were recalled. Funnier programmes created a bigger reaction.

The advance in understanding the neuroscience of comedy is reported in the journal Science.

Patients in America had electrodes implanted into their brains to help find where their seizures started. They were then shown 48 comedy clips.

DARMSTADT, Germany (Map, News) - The European deep space probe Rosetta successfully completed a flyby of an asteroid millions of miles from earth, but its high resolution camera stopped shortly before the closest pass, space officials said Saturday.

Rosetta caught up with the Steins asteroid, also known as Asteroid 2867, just after 8:45 p.m. (1845 GMT) Friday in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The probe came within 500 miles (805 kilometers) of the asteroid - which turned out to be slightly larger than scientists expected.

Officials at the European Space Agency were not sure exactly what caused the camera to balk.

"The software switched off automatically," Gerhard Schwehm, the ESA mission manager and head of solar systems science operations told The Associated Press. "The camera has some software limits and we'll analyze why this happened later."

What is Bike-Sharing?
If you at all familiar with the Zip Car model of car-sharing, then you should already undersand how bike-sharing works. Essentially, in a bike-share program bicycles are made available at special kiosks or racks that are strategically placed around a city. Users can access the bikes 24 hours a day, either by inserting a credit card or by paying an annual fee for a membership card. The bikes can then be returned at any of the stations in the city. While the details of the program vary by city, the basic concept has caught on and spread like wildfire. In fact, there was even a bike-sharing program in place at this year's Democratic National Convention!

Bike-Sharing Goes GLobal
Especially as gas prices rise and the concept of livable cities becomes more popular, cities around the world have begun to embrace bike-sharing as a way to improve quality of life, meet greenhouse gas reduction targets, increase tourism, and so on. Paris, Barcelona, Washington, D.C., Montrealand Mexico City have all implemented such programs, while New York City, Portland and others are in the planning stages.

The cold front that is to end summer at last arrived at the Western border, but has not yet reached me.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

interesting prophecies about the next 5000 days of the internet...

not too geeky!

It's a fine line between homage, parody, and consumer opportunism. Jess Walter

I've asked the author to post it as a diary over here, we'll see... it would be worth reposting in full.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

jerryasher writes "In a leaked memo, NASA Administrator Mike Griffin discusses 'the jihad' to prematurely terminate the Shuttle and what that means for the International Space Station. One implication: there may come a long interval when only our Russian Allies are aboard the Space Station. Add that bit of irony to your new cold war kit and then wonder why Griffin discusses why we wouldn't sabotage the Space Station, and how and why the memo got leaked in the first place."

who will control space 20 years from now?

who are the 'greys'?

It's a fine line between homage, parody, and consumer opportunism. Jess Walter

Posted by timothy on Sunday September 07, @04:57PM
from the billy-connolly-in-fido dept. ruphus13 writes with a story about the open-source centric Willow Garage project (last mentioned on Slashdot early last year), which is making progress in creating helpful humanoid robots for household use. From the article: "PR2 is the mobile hardware design for Willow Garage robots, featuring stereo and laser sensors ... Senior citizens are a big part of the target audience that Willow Garage is aiming for. "All industrialized countries are facing aging populations that require assistance and care to remain independent into old age. By 2020 close to 20 percent of the US population will be over 65," the project leaders say. "These numbers are even higher in Western European and Asian countries." Willow Garage is aiming to produce several types of assistive robots." The PR2 robots are capable of performing critical tasks like cleaning rooms and bringing beer from a refrigerator."

no, i said the pabst, not the budweiser!

damn software...

It's a fine line between homage, parody, and consumer opportunism. Jess Walter

In certain Diluvian elephants that were the terminal members of dying collateral lines, the tusks reached enormous lengths, completely out of proportion to the skull and body, clearly exceeding by far the optimal size relationship. Furthermore, since in the mammoth these teeth curved sharply upward and in the the American Elephas columbi begin to spiral backward and inward, they could no longer serve their orginal purpose ... They had become a heavy burden, an impediment, for these animals.

Otto H. Schindewolf
Basic Questions in Paleontology
1950

lol!

It's a fine line between homage, parody, and consumer opportunism. Jess Walter

Mickey Rourke's true-to-life portrayal is tipped for an Oscar and raises the game at lacklustre festival

They saved the best for last. Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler won the 65th Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion last night. It premiered only one day before, giving what critics agreed was an otherwise lacklustre Venice a powerful sting in the tail.

Mickey Rourke, swaggering in oversize shirt and tie, with straggly blond locks draped over his face, went on stage to watch Aronofsky - whose previous film, The Fountain, flopped at Venice - receive the award. Rourke stars as a wrestler 20 years past his prime, girding himself for one last comeback, then after a heart attack trying to come to terms with the mess he has made of his life.

The story was close to the bone for Rourke, who was once a professional boxer and whose off-set excesses have condemned him to professional oblivion for the past 15 years. "I have splinters in my ass from sitting on the bench so long," he told the BBC.

   By Chet Hayes

    September 5, 2008 1:58 PM | Link to this

    This morning I called Westmoreland's office:

    Them: Good morning, Congressman Westmoreland's office.

    Me: Good morning, I would like to make a public comment.

    Them: Yes, sir, what is your comment?

    Me: I would like to compliment Congressman Westmoreland on his comments yesterday about Barack Obama. We need more people like him to call a spade a spade. You crackers in Georgia must be very proud.

    Them: [long pause] Sir, there's no need to be insulting.

    Me: I'm sorry, but how did I insult you?

    Them: There is no need to call me a cracker.

    Me: I've never heard that term used in a derogatory sense. It is important to note that the dictionary definition of "cracker" is "a thin, crisp biscuit." That's what we meant by cracker when we used it in the city where I grew up.

    Them: Well, that's not how you meant it.

    Me: Oh, so what you're saying is that you don't like being called names. Now you know how it feels.

    Them: [another long pause] Sir, I have to take another call.