This headline does not, in fact, refer to the Bush Administration’s conduct vis-a-vis the Iraq war (as accurate as it may be). Instead, according to Wikipedia, it is “a common name for a bug present in the function IsTextUnicode of Microsoft Windows, which causes a file of text encoded in Windows-1252 or similar encoding to be interpreted as if it were UTF-16LE, resulting in mojibake.”
In other words, when you type “Bush hid the facts” in a new Notepad document, save it, close it, and reopen it, the characters “畢桳栠摩琠敨映捡獴” inexplicably appear instead. A rather strange error, and certainly one that will unnerve conspiracy theorists! Try it out for yourself, if you’re using Windows NT, Windows 2000, or Windows XP (the error doesn’t occur in other versions of Windows). According to Wikipedia, other text strings that have similar effects include “this app can break”, “acre vai pra globo”, and “aaaa aaa aaa aaaaa”
