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“I try to photograph everything. Every meeting that the president does,” Pete Souza told CNN’s John King on “State of the Union.”

On leave of absence from his normal post as an assistant professor of photojournalism at Ohio University’s School of Visual Communication, Souza is the chief official White House photographer for President Obama, meaning he has an all-access pass to the president’s most intimate and private moments.

“I look at my job as a visual historian,” Souza said on Sunday. “The most important thing is to create a good visual archive for history, so 50 or a hundred years from now, people can go back and look at all these pictures.”

Photography was and is an important love of my life…from my own early days.

Swine flu? Not in the Jewish state.

“We will call it Mexico flu. We won’t call it swine flu,” Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman, a black-garbed Orthodox Jew, told a news conference Monday, assuring the Israeli public that authorities were prepared to handle any cases.

Under Jewish dietary laws, pigs are considered unclean and pork is forbidden food — although the non-kosher meat is available in some stores in Israel.

One [Bronx] cheer for theocracy!

Re-created scene from the movie

How do you film a movie set largely in the Vatican when the Holy See itself has banned you from shooting within its walls? If you are the producers of Angels and Demons, the prequel to the church-baiting worldwide blockbuster The Da Vinci Code, you send in cameramen posing as tourists to take more than 250,000 photographs and shoot hours of video footage…

Special effects supervisor Ryan Cook told Italian film magazine Ciak: “The ban on filming put us in serious difficulty because we were not able to carry out the photographic surveys necessary to reconstruct the setting. So for weeks we sent a team of people who mixed with tourists and took thousands of photos and video footage.”

The move was necessary because leaders of the Catholic church, still smarting from The Da Vinci Code’s assertion that Christ married and fathered children with Mary Magdalene, had banned the film-makers from filming in or around any of Rome’s churches. Father Marco Fibbi, spokesman for the diocese of Rome, said at the time: “Normally we read the script, but this time it was not necessary. The name Dan Brown was enough.”

Angels and Demons director Ron Howard hinted in an interview in December on US TV show Shootout that his team had been forced into unusual measures by the ban. “We didn’t shoot at the Vatican officially. But cameras can be made really small,” he said.

Har!

Her other favorite program
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

The home secretary, Jacqui Smith, today ruled out building a single state “super-database” to track everybody’s use of email, internet, text messages and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter…

Instead the Home Office is looking at a £2bn solution that would involve requiring communications companies such as BT, Virgin Media, O2 and others to retain such personal data for up to 12 months.

Isn’t that a halfway George W. Bush kind of solution? Pay your Telco buds to do the spying?

Instead communications companies are to be required by legislation to ensure that all traffic data – who sent a text to whom at what time and from where – is collected and kept in Britain. They will also be asked to store additional third-party data crossing their networks including phone calls and internet use from outside Europe.

This goes far beyond the current data collected for billing purposes. The companies will also be asked to organise the data – for example, matching it where it relates to the same person so that the authorities can access it in a form that is immediately usable.

The British government doesn’t plan to be less creepy. Just outsource tasks to private contractors.

A twist has emerged in the story of Israeli citrus fruit reportedly sold in Iran in defiance of a ban on commercial dealings between the two enemy states. It has now been revealed the fruit, a type of orange-grapefruit hybrid marketed as Jaffa Sweetie, were not Israeli in the first place.

The Sweeties were brought to Iran from China, where faking the origin of goods is a common practice.

The discovery of apparent Israeli origin caused a stir in Iran. Outrage followed, distribution centres stocking the fruit were sealed and accusations were traded. Such is the infamy of dealing with Israel that an Iranian official went so far as to accuse the opposition of a “citrus plot”.

However, Tal Amit, the general manager of Israel’s Citrus Marketing Board, told the BBC the fruit had not originated in his country.

“First of all, it’s a bit annoying that somebody is using our brand name and registered trademark without our permission,” he said.

Principled boycotts are a time-honored political activity, of course. Grape boycotts supporting farmworkers, boycotts of South African fruit during the Apartheid era, come to mind.

Nothing more than hilarity comes from this event. Too many avenues of hypocrisy to spin.

The first netbook computer running the Google-backed Android mobile operating system on a low-cost ARM chip could become available to customers within three months, the maker’s co-founder said this week.

The Alpha 680, designed by Guangzhou Skytone Transmission Technologies Co. Ltd., is going through final testing now, Nixon Wu, Skytone’s co-founder, told Computerworld exclusively…

Prototypes actually made their public debut at an electronics trade show in Hong Kong the week before…

Used in billions of cellphones today, ARM processors are less expensive and more energy-efficient than even Intel Corp.’s power-sipping Atom CPU.

Android, meanwhile, is fast-emerging as a popular flavor of Linux for smartphones such as Google’s G1, attracting interest from software developers as quickly as Apple’s iPhone did.

Market experts predict that the combination of ARM and Android could help usher in an era of sub-$200 netbooks with 12-hour battery life and creative designs highly-tailored for different consumers.

It could also allow ARM/Android netbooks to wrest the netbook market from Intel’s Atom chips and Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system, which could weaken or break Microsoft and Intel’s grip on the PC market…

Barebones specs are what will enable the Alpha 680 to hit a $250 price, said Wu.

Not a category which excites me – except as a viable access point for folks wanting portable affordable computing in the West. Wu makes it pretty clear his prime focus remains coming up with barebones computing for rural Asia.

Farmers are to be allowed to leave dead livestock in their fields in parts of Europe – to help starving vultures.

MEPs voted for a change in the law after the hungry birds, most often found in Spain, had been spotted as far away as Brussels, scavenging for food.

The move allows farmers to leave dead livestock in their fields – providing it is deemed safe and hygienic.

Vultures are capable of stripping a dead cow or sheep carcass in a matter of hours. Environmentalists describe the birds as “nature’s cleaners”. But many vultures have been starving to death since European rules aimed at tackling mad cow disease forced all dead livestock to be cleared away.

This forced the birds to embark on some rather long-haul trips – one was even spotted recently perched on top of a bus shelter in Brussels.

The EU works so hard at keeping every European’s house, land and life so fracking tidy it’s a wonder an ant can find work hauling grains of bread away from a picnic!

An Oklahoma City man who announced on Twitter that he would turn an April 15 tax protest into a bloodbath was hit with a federal charge of making interstate threats last week, in what appears to be first criminal prosecution to stem from posts on the microblogging site.

Daniel Knight Hayden, 52, was arrested by FBI agents who identified him as the Twitter user CitizenQuasar. In a series of tweets beginning April 11, CitizenQuasar vowed to start a “war” against the government on the steps of the Oklahoma City Capitol building, the site of that city’s version of the national “Tea Party” protests promoted by the conservative-leaning Fox News.

“START THE KILLING NOW! I am willing to be the FIRST DEATH!,” read a tweet at 8:01 PM that day. “After I am killed on the Capitol Steps, like a REAL man, the rest of you will REMEMBER ME!!!,” he added five minutes later. Then: “Send the cops around. I will cut their heads off the heads and throw the[m] on the State Capitol steps.”

Hayden’s MySpace page is a breathtaking gallery of right wing memes about the “New World Order,” gun control as Nazi fascism, and Barack Obama’s covert use of television hypnosis, among many others…

Hayden’s penultimate tweet at 12:49 AM on April 15 returned to the subject of his martyrdom. “Locked AND loaded for the Oklahoma State Capitol. Let’s see what happens.”

The FBI arrested him at his home later that day, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Oklahoma City, which otherwise declined to comment on the case.

Is anyone surprised? I checked out the scraggly crowd who showed up for the local Teabagger demo. It was a mix of Posse Comitatus types along with those I refer to as professional True Locals, e.g., unless you can show 10 generations going back to Spanish Colonial days you shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

No doubt there were a few nutballs truly deserving the title.

Hon Lik used to light up first thing in the morning. He smoked between lectures at the university where he studied Oriental medicine, between bites at lunch, in the lab where he researched ginseng health products. He’d usually burn through two packs by dusk and smoke a third over dinner and drinks with colleagues.

One of the strangest gizmos to come out of China in recent years, Hon’s invention, the electronic cigarette, turns the adage “where there’s smoke there’s fire” on its head.

It doesn’t burn at all. Instead, it uses a small lithium battery that atomizes a liquid solution of nicotine. What you inhale looks like smoke, but it’s a vapor similar to stage fog. (Take that, smoke-free bars!) It even has a red light at the tip that lights up with each drag.

“It’s a much cleaner, safer way to inhale nicotine,” said Hon, blowing curlicues of e-smoke as he showed off the cigarette in his Beijing office. (He says he doesn’t smoke anymore, except for such demonstrations.)

Hon got his first patent on the e-cigarette in 2003 and introduced it to the Chinese market the next year….

This year, it’s planning a big push in the United States. A disposable e-cigarette called the Jazz ($24.95 for the equivalent of five packs) is due to hit 7-Elevens in the Dallas-Fort Worth area shortly. Many rival versions, all made in China, are making their way to the U.S., sold mostly over the Internet by small marketing firms….

Buyer beware.

On the other hand, I am somewhat bemused by countries barring these products until they are demonstrated to be safe… like traditional cigarettes, one supposes.

MSC Melody on a quieter day
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Capt Ciro Pinto said six pirates in a speedboat approached his Melody ship and opened fire, but then fled after security men fired in the air. He said his crew also sprayed water on the gunmen when they tried to climb aboard using a ladder.

No-one was hurt in Saturday’s incident. Some 1,500 people were on the vessel…

Capt Pinto told the BBC that the pirates tried to hijack his ship late on Saturday, about 290km north of Victoria in the Seychelles.

“One white small boat with six people on board approached the port side of the ship and started shooting.”

The captain said the pirates fired some 200 rounds of shots on the vessel. He said “our security started shooting in the air… and also we started spraying some water” to beat off the attackers.

Capt Pinto said the pirates were forced to give up after about five minutes of shooting and a high-speed chase.

I know all the experts [and insurance companies] say you should just roll over and surrender. Somehow, I don’t think a cruise ship with hundreds of passengers is likely to endure the same treatment by nutball pirates as an oil tanker.