Elina Shatkin
Turning swords into plowshares is all well and good, but MI6 has a better idea: turning bombs into cupcakes. In a slick bit of counter-terrorism that also reads like the plot of a Kate Hudson rom-com,* the British spy agency got hold of Al Qaeda's first English language publication, Inspire Magazine (awwww, isn't that cute?), and replaced a bomb-making recipe with a cupcake recipe from The Ellen Degeneres Show, reports the Washington Post.
Thanks to Operation: Cupcakes Not Bombs, would-be terrorists who went to download 67 pages of instructions for how to “Make a bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom” (again with the cutesy names, big bad worldwide terrorist org), ended up learning how to make mojito, rocky road and caramel apple cupcakes. Is there any ideology the power of capitalism and cupcakes can't undermine?
From WaPo:
“The hacked pipe-bomb PDF on Inspire's site was available on Archive.org before it was replaced by the message “The item is not available due to issues with the item's content.”
If we give into our fears and stop baking, haven't the terrorists already won?
*As veterans of 13 Going on 30, Sweet Home Alabama, Uptown Girls and countless other such films, we have a nuclear-strength tolerance for chick flicks, and even we can't bear to watch Something Borrowed.
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