Reuters, December 10, 2003, 4:36 PM EST (09:36 PM GMT).

Nearly seven months after the fall of Saddam Hussein and the victory of the forces of the coalition against the Iraqi troops, the controversy over the "second Gulf war" makes an unexpected come back. In a very unusual act of political defiance, the Norwegian Nobel Committee and its five members awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 2003 to...France!

Some rumors, immediately contradicted by a Nobel Committee's spokesperson, gave last week the French President Jacques Chirac and his Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin as possible winners. The spokesman of the White House commented that rumor by the single word "ridiculous".

The Nobel Committee did not explain what motivated the choice since its statutes do not allow to disclose such information, but in another very strong act, it issued during the evening a press release explaining that the Nobel Committee is completely independent and that it denies any government to interfer with its choices. While no reason was officially provided, this warning is probably linked to the intense lobbying done last week in Norway against France by US political and industrial representatives on behalf of the Bush administration.

In his speech, right after the King Harald V of Norway gave him the Prize, the French ambassador Louis Amigues said that "this war was useless, war is a failure". He regretted that the US decision to start the war "put the United Nations in the background at a time we need more global consensus for the benefit of all". The American and British embassadors showed their disagreement remaining seated while the other attendees were standing up, applauding L. Amigues.

All praise the University of Buffalo!!!

Do not blog when you are above 39.5° of fever. And thanks Mike.

...is out. Available from Mozilla.org home page. Just one important detail: the announcement there says that dynamic image and table resizing is enabled in Composer; that's incomplete: it's enabled in HTML email too....

USA, country of the freedom of speech and freedom of press, country that tells the other countries that they don't have a real freedom of speech nor freedom of press. Well, not really. Shame, shame, shame.

The China International Forum on WWW scheduled for april is postponed sine die. I bet this is because of the SARS disease. This is not a 1st of April joke, unfortunately...

It's 2:34am and I'm coding. A geek's life... In the background, the tv is running. Kubrick's Clockwork Orange just finished on Arte and I switched to Sonya Rykiel's fashion show on Tf1... The clothes are really superb but the models are so thin that they give the impression they could break at each step! These girls could be pretty with ten more kilos but they really look like anorexic packs of bones with only the skin around.

That's a very common disease in our geeks' world when people from the marketing and product management start influencing it: "here's the PRD, now I need your LOE for the DRD to pass it to PM so they could give a NOK". Hum. And you guys still wonder why I prefer coding ?-)

" After a brief announcement, employees were handed a folder with a separation agreement, information about insurance, stock options and finding another job - and an AOL software disc. "; Associated Press, 2003-mar-28.

" I am not looking for a boyfriend because my computers are enough for me and I don't have time for a real person! ", z33w