Dan Xavier posted a detailed response to my recent post making fun of Adrian Flanagan, who is attempting to be the first solo sailor to complete a vertical circumnavigation of the globe.

It is a form response he has been posting in response to a blog post written by P.J. Gladnick over at NewsBusters. Gladnick picked up the same story I did, referencing a Moscow News Weekly article headlined Global Warming is Here. The Russian article, dated 16 August 2007, was an Agence France-Presse wire service piece penned by Nick Coleman. It appeared under the headline Drip, drip of global warming spells change in northern Russia, and was published on 25 July 2007 on various alarmist sites, such as stopglobalwarming.org and Terra Daily.

Besides for the general theme that Russia’s northern ice is melting because of climate change, the article contains the line:

Contacted by AFP he [Flanagan] said that the ice looked set to recede at least as far as in 2005, which was a record year.

Gladnick’s article was the “false story” Flanagan linked to on his own blog, explaining:

After a badly written piece for a French news wire service, a false story has started circulating through the Internet.

Gladnick clearly took the AFP report at face value, as I did, and thought the Herald Sun report on his lack of progress to be pretty funny. The AFP’s articles and photographs are usually published on Yahoo! News. The search result that appeared most promising, however, has been removed. This isn’t the first time that an embarrassing AFP item mysteriously vanishes from Yahoo! News. I also have no faith in its ability to get the facts straight when it involves pet advocacy issues such as global warming.

Xavier’s explanation suggests that the AFP is indeed where the false connection with global warming originated, and that neither he nor Flanagan harbour the same faith.

Perhaps I should have guessed that the mainstream media — as opposed to a clearly experienced sailor — would be the gullible party in this story.

Om Malik reports on a Facebook development that worries some privacy advocates.

Access to the profile information of a user of Facebook, a hyper-popular social network, has traditionally been limited to other Facebook members, and then restricted further by a fairly comprehensive set of privacy controls. Soon, however, Facebook will permit anyone to search its database and find people by name. The information provided will be limited, and users can opt out on their privacy settings page. However, once found, a searcher can send messages or “poke” someone, which, if the recipient responds, could reveal much or all of their profile.

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This just in from ZDNet:

British billionaire Richard Branson said on Wednesday he was hoping to trace missing adventurer Steve Fossett through a satellite mapping service offered by Google.

Branson told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. he was worried that Fossett, who disappeared over the Nevada desert after taking off in a small plane late on Monday, had not activated the aircraft’s emergency tracking beacon.

“I’m talking with friends at Google about seeing whether we can look at satellite images over the last four days to see whether they can see which direction he might have been flying and whether they can see any disturbances anywhere that they can pin from space,” he said from Barcelona, Spain.

Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Laureate, former Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, and recipient of the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism, the Gandhi Peace Prize and the Magubela Prize for Liberty is devoting his time to the more serious pursuits of happiness.