Pakistani Democracy

For Terri Schiavo will not have died a natural death. She will have been put to death by the state. The coroner's report should read: This was a state-sanctioned killing of a woman because she was brain-damaged, and the method of execution was by starvation and denial of water. These are methods most of us would protest if imposed on the Beltway snipers.
http://www.wnd.com/
for Jonathan

He further testified that, as company commander, he had more important priorities on the high-profile mission than saving the Iraqi, including searching for two escaped passengers and maintaining the safety of his men.
http://www.cbsnews.com/

The legislation, which takes effect Jan. 1, applies only to illegal immigrants 19 and older. Immigrants of any age still will be eligible for emergency aid, such as disaster relief and pregnancy tests...It's very disappointing," said Arlington County Board member Walter Tejada (D), who serves as chairman of the Virginia Latino Advisory Commission, which Warner established two years ago. "It serves no other purpose but to fan the flames of anti-immigrant sentiment . . . and that is simply wrong."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/

Pakistan's ambassador said yesterday the U.S. push for democracy is forcing countries around the world to re-examine their governmental and human rights practices and that Pakistan too will be strongly affected.
http://washingtontimes.com/

Suppose, however, that someone did defend a view about abortion, same-sex marriage, or some other contentious matter by appealing to religious considerations. Why should this be considered unacceptable? The problem, in the view of many liberals, is that religious considerations are matters of faith, where "faith" connotes in their minds a kind of groundless commitment...
http://www.techcentralstation.com/

Mac Hackers

So what are hackers using for their “weapon of choice”? Well according to Tim O’Reilly from O’Reilly Books, and Paul Graham, author and programmer, it’s the Mac OSX...All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks...
http://www.surf-bits.com/

"We know pretty much definitively that Longhorn is the next version of the Windows client," Gartenberg said. "Everything else goes downhill from there."
http://news.com.com/

Minutemen vs. MS-13

James Gilchrist, a Vietnam veteran who helped organize the vigil to protest the federal government's failure to control illegal immigration, said he has been told that California and Texas leaders of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, have issued orders to teach "a lesson" to the Minuteman volunteers. "We're not worried because half of our recruits are retired trained combat soldiers," Mr. Gilchrist said. "And those guys are just a bunch of punks."
http://washingtontimes.com/

Rice, in an interview with Washington Post editors and reporters, said she was guided less by a fear that Islamic extremists would replace authoritarian governments than by a "strong certainty that the Middle East was not going to stay stable anyway."
http://story.news.yahoo.com/

The West Side Club

Schiavo continues the process of dying by starvation and dehydration, a method of capital punishment most would consider criminal if done to a pet. This was the method used at Auschwitz to murder Father Maximilian Kolbe...
http://www.wnd.com/

This is the West Side Club, a Manhattan bathhouse where both HIV-positive and HIV-negative men come to enjoy the steam and engage in anonymous and often unprotected sex with other men. According to an HIV/Aids practitioner whose clients are frequent visitors, it may also be where the so-called Aids superbug, whose existence was revealed last month, was first transmitted.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Anti-Americanism makes strange bedfellows. The Arab Islamists despise America because it’s all lap-dancing and gay-phone sex; Europe’s radical secularists despise America because it’s all born-again Christians hung up on abortion...For example, it is a fact that the most religious nation in the West is also the most powerful militarily, economically and culturally. Is that a coincidence?
http://www.steynonline.com/

One of the tunnels was 200m (600ft) long and went beyond the security fence of Camp Bucca
http://news.bbc.co.uk/

"liberte, egalite, fraternite"

A string of lawsuits and a fierce debate over its digital library project have turned Google into a symbol of cultural imperialism in France. Is it all mere coincidence, or does the land of "liberte, egalite, fraternite" have it in for the company whose mission is so decidedly global?
http://service.spiegel.de/

http://www.neopets.com/

Today, DVForge, Inc. announced the Mac OS X Virus Prize 2005, where the company is openly challenging all of the computer coders of the world to go after the $25,000 cash prize that they are offering to the first person to successfully create and deploy an "in the wild" active virus for the Mac OS X operating system...The 'small number' of Macs has nothing to do with the lack of virus incidents. It is the architecture of Apple's operating system that protects its users from these bugs.
http://macdailynews.com/

OsiriX

http://homepage.mac.com

The precious right to keep and bear arms

In its most basic form, this divide separates Europeans who are actively embracing a market-based economy from those who cling to a heavy-handed brand of regulation for trade, labor, farming, and competition, with the added baggage of big state-owned businesses.
http://www.iht.com/

At least 80 insurgents have been killed by Iraqi special forces backed by US troops in a raid on a training camp near the city of Tikrit, officials say.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/

Shopkeepers and residents on one of Baghdad's main streets pulled out their own guns yesterday and killed three hooded terrorists who were shooting at passers-by, giving a rare victory to civilians increasingly frustrated by the violence bleeding Iraq.
http://washingtontimes.com/

AAPL $60 target price

Apple Computer could substantially increase its share of the personal computer market by year's end, all thanks to the company's iPod music player. This prediction was made by analysts at Morgan Stanley. a New York-based financial services company. The report also upgraded Apple's stock to overweight and set a price target of $60 per share.
http://www.eweek.com/

Is Apple planning a high-definition video network? We definitely cannot attest to the reliability of Mac OS Rumors as a, um, rumor site, but they’re reporting that Apple is working on some sort of high-definition satellite TV network.
http://www.engadget.com/

Utopian Elites, and fellow college students...

Symantec has claimed that Mac OS X users are at risk from malware attacks, and that this risk will only get worse. The questions is: Why are they telling us this?
http://comment.zdnet.co.uk/

Enterprising hackers have discovered that because the new motion sensor returns reasonably accurate measurements to Mac OS X, it can be used to do some cool tricks...
http://www.wired.com/

If a tree falls in Texas, what's it worth?
http://www.dallasnews.com/

Consequently, some utopian elites forgot the free-market origins of their own riches and why they had the freedom and leisure to be so censorious of their own culture. Maybe they were guilty over our bounty. One way of enjoying an upscale American lifestyle, while simultaneously feeling pretty terrible about it, is to castigate the history and global conduct of the United States in the abstract — without ever giving up much in the concrete.
http://www.victorhanson.com/

21st Century Switcher

http://lowendmac.com/

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/

going to church in China

How did the term "OK" originate, and do other languages have an equivilent?
http://ask.yahoo.com/

An I-400 and I-401 were captured at sea a week after the Japanese surrendered in 1945. Their mission — which was never completed — reportedly was to use the aircraft to drop rats and insects infected with bubonic plague, cholera, typhus and other diseases on U.S. cities.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/

Fresh from meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did something on Sunday the Chinese might consider a little undiplomatic: She went to church.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/

Big Bad Wolfowitzy

An Iranian serial killer convicted of kidnapping and murdering 21 children was publicly flogged and hanged on Wednesday before thousands of spectators in this small Iranian town
http://news.bbc.co.uk/

President George W Bush has nominated US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz as the next head of the World Bank...The list of candidates rumoured to be in the running included Carly Fiorina, the recently ousted boss of giant computer firm Hewlett-Packard.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
!?!? she was ousted for a reason...

The world's first purpose-built hydrogen-powered bike...
http://news.bbc.co.uk

To French children, Americans are a race apart – strange misshapen monsters staggering from across the ocean to devour anything in their path...American behemoth approximates that of the dinosaurs of old: immense bodies, tiny brains, doomed to extinction. After which, the natural leaders of the world will resume their rightful role – or, failing that, the wiry little Chinamen.
http://www.steynonline.com/

A couple of years back, I went to hear Paul Wolfowitz. I knew him only by reputation — the most sinister of all the neocons, the big bad Wolfowitz, the man whose name started with a scary animal and ended Jewishly.
http://www.steynonline.com/

Even America’s media naysayers have suddenly noticed that they can hardly hear their own generic boilerplate about what a Vietnam quagmire the new Iraq is over the sound of raven-tressed Beirut hotties noisily demanding Lebanon’s freedom in the streets of Beirut.
http://www.steynonline.com/

Tighter gun ownership laws are pushing South Africans to buy crossbows, spears, swords, knives and pepper sprays to protect themselves from violent crime.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/
thanks natalie...

Google X

http://labs.google.com/googlex/

Osama the Pop Star

Saving the Marriage: Conservatism and Libertarianism
http://www.techcentralstation.com/

Bernie Ebbers, the former boss of WorldCom, has been found guilty in a federal court in New York of a massive fraud, and faces up to 85 years in jail. Prosecutors will hope that this points the way to convictions in other big fraud cases, not least the upcoming Enron trials
http://www.economist.com/
That picture is just sad.

Piper Jaffray expects Apple Computer to gain share in the personal computer market over the next two to three years.
http://www.forbes.com/

New study findings suggest that yogurt may be another weapon in the battle against bad breath.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/

Inclosia Solutions has developed a process it calls Exo overmolding that can be used to add fabrics, leather or metal to PC enclosures. While the Exo process has been used to bring leather covers to small electronics products, such as Microsoft's leather IntelliMouse, Inclosia is now starting to design and make laptop enclosures.
http://news.com.com/

New York is filled with wanna be pop stars, but one raven-haired beauty has a name that already grabs international attention. Her name is Wafah Binladin and she is Osama bin Laden's niece.
http://service.spiegel.de/

El pobrecito Pinochet

The reconstruction of post-war Iraq is in danger of becoming "the biggest corruption scandal in history", Transparency International has warned.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/

A quarter-century after its first traumatic confrontation with the Shiite world, when the U.S. Embassy was seized in Iran, the United States is moving on several fronts to support, recognize or hold out the prospect of engagement with Islam's increasingly powerful minority.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/

U.S. Banks Found To Have Helped Pinochet
http://www.webpronews.com/

The symbols of Syrian power began coming down in parts of Lebanon on Tuesday, as Syrian military intelligence agents emptied their offices in Beirut and Tripoli and workers took down an imposing portrait of Syria's president in the capital's seaside boulevard. Lebanese citizens quickly hoisted their national flag - red and white with a green cedar tree in the middle - near the sites.
http://www.nytimes.com/

Mara Salvatrucha

"MS is not a gang, it's an army," said Officer Frank Flores, a gang expert with the Los Angeles Police Department, who says MS-13 membership numbers in the tens of thousands nationwide. "Within the United States, these guys pose as much a threat to the well being of ordinary citizens as any foreign terrorist group."
http://nytimes.com/

Yes, they pal around at football games, give each other playful shoves after ceremonial appearances, and tease each other on the golf course. But not too long ago, these two traipsed across the country with contrasting alpha-male bravado, challenging each other with "Let's get it on!" in a bitter presidential campaign.
http://www.cbsnews.com/

As a result, millions of working stiffs are living in a cubicle world.
http://ask.yahoo.com/

Indian Gold

The secretary of State is displaying an affinity for quick action and a dislike for nuanced talk...Two weeks later, Rice called off her trip to Cairo because of Nour and what the Bush administration views as the Egyptian government's sluggish efforts to push for democratic reform in the region. Under international pressure, the Egyptians released Nour on bail Saturday.
http://www.latimes.com/

UN, Richard Holbrooke, who offered Annan some job-saving tips at a secret meeting in December. "The UN," he was quoted as saying, "cannot succeed if it is in open dispute and constant friction with its founding nation, its host nation and its largest contributor."
http://service.spiegel.de/

The historic heart of Paris could be closed to all except residents' cars within seven years, the town hall said yesterday
http://www.guardian.co.uk/

The construction of cellular relay stations last fall along the Chinese side of the border has allowed some North Koreans in border towns to use prepaid Chinese cellphones to call relatives and reporters in South Korea, defectors from North Korea say...To crack down on home viewing of imported videotapes, the North Korean police developed the strategy of encircling a neighborhood in the evening, cutting off electricity, then inspecting players to find videotapes stuck inside...
http://www.nytimes.com/

The world's major oil companies are dusting off their Baghdad Rolodexes as Iraq's political factions move closer to forming a new government.
http://washingtontimes.com/

Indians are the world's biggest gold consumers, with more than half the country's savings tied up in physical assets. Particularly among the very poorest, Indians are prone to spending much of their income to acquire the metal, locking up their assets in the resulting hoards. Economists say such a high rate of hoarding constrains the Indian economy, which is short of capital.
http://www.iht.com/

Proof of What We All Knew

U.S. media coverage of last year's election was three times more likely to be negative toward President Bush than Democratic challenger John Kerry, according to a study released Monday.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/

A California judge struck down the state's laws banning gay weddings, saying that measures defining marriage as between a man and a woman are unconstitutional.
http://www.bloomberg.com/
Nothing like screwing the vote of the people...
http://primary2000.ss.ca.gov/

Condi 2008

A judge on Friday ordered three independent online reporters to divulge confidential sources in a lawsuit brought by Apple Computer, ruling that they were not protected by the First Amendment because they published trade secrets.
http://www.wired.com/

"I like clothes — I always have," she said to laughter, answering a question. "You know, when I was 5 years old, my poor father would go off to work on his sermon on Saturday — he was the Presbyterian minister — so he would go off to work on his sermon. And my mother and I would go shopping. Shopping is fun."
http://www.washtimes.com/

Beyoncé Knowles also advertises L'Oréal sprays, gels and mousses. To transform her naturally kinky black hair into straight, artificially brown shiny hair, she'll need relaxers that break down sulfur compounds and then use oxidants to rebuild them. If the singer were to massage only a fraction of the amount of the product she's advertising into her hair, her head would turn into something like a small chemical hazardous waste dump.
http://service.spiegel.de/

One of the plaintiffs in the suit, Susan M. Wozny of Laramie, Wyo., who is not Mormon, said that when she visited the site in August, she was repeatedly asked by Mormon guides about her religious affiliation and was barred from an area of the trail.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/

http://www.lauraingraham.com/

Horrible News Coverage

A man apparently enraged by a Bush-Cheney sticker on a woman's sport utility vehicle chased her for miles and tried to run her off the road while holding up an anti-Bush sign, police said...Fernandez said she is a registered Democrat who voted for President Bush in 2004.
http://www.cbsnews.com/

You can barely find any news on the following story as of Thurs. 5:25PM. Fox says 59/79 passengers; BBC says a "few"
A spokesman for a group of unarmed Iranian protesters holed up on a Lufthansa jetliner at Brussels airport said Thursday they are on a hunger strike and are prepared to die for their cause to see the overthrow of the Iranian government.
http://www.foxnews.com/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/

Terror in the Grip of Justice

The brouhaha is over how May 8, 1945, the day Nazi Germany capitulated, should be remembered. Local officials of a wealthy Berlin district just passed a motion stating that victims of Nazi oppression are not the only ones who should be memorialized and honored. Regular German soldiers and civilians who were killed as well as women who were raped by the advancing Soviet army, too, should be remembered, they declared.
http://service.spiegel.de/

This is Terror in the Grip of Justice, the latest television hit in entertainment-starved Iraq where it is too dangerous to venture out at night and street life ends at last light. It is also the latest weapon in the Government’s propaganda war against the insurgents
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/

Pakistan has admitted in the past that Khan, dubbed the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, smuggled nuclear secrets to North Korea, Iran and Libya, but has not given specifics as to what he supplied. "He has given centrifuges to Iran...
http://story.news.yahoo.com
But Iran doesn't want to develope a nuclear weapon.

Cupcakes and Sugar Plums

"If we vote for this, can we all call you 'Cupcake?' " Republican Rep. Peggy Hamric asked Dunnam. "As long as I can call you 'Sugar Plum,'" Dunnam replied.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/

"Free spirits, the ambitious, ex-socialists, drug users, and sexual eccentrics often find an attractive political philosophy in libertarianism, the idea that individual freedom should be the sole rule of ethics and government."
http://www.techcentralstation.com/

Nearly a third of American schoolchildren say they do homework while engaging in another activity, such as talking on the phone, surfing the Internet or watching television.
http://washingtontimes.com/

My Dream

Melvin Benzaquen, a New York car restorer, and Thom Greenwald, a musician and computer engineer, have begun installing Apple's new compact desktop computer, the Mac Mini, in cars
http://www.nytimes.com

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dash-mac/

great DVD bill

A bill that would let parents and children filter the curse words, sex scenes and violence out of movie DVDs moved closer to approval by Congress on Wednesday.
http://abcnews.go.com/

Sgrena, who works for the communist daily Il Manifesto, tried to distance herself from the ambush hypothesis Tuesday. "I never said that they wanted to kill me, but that the mechanics of what happened are that of an ambush,’’ she told state TV.
http://www.iht.com/

"I'm pleased to announce that the Department of Defense and I have formulated a plan for a speedy withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq," Bush announced Monday morning. "We'll just go through Iran."
http://www.theonion.com/

Linux Creator Using Apple Hardware

Torvald's response came quickly and succinctly. "My main machine these days is a dual 2GHz G5 (aka PowerPC 970) - it's physically a regular Apple Mac, although it obviously only runs Linux, so I don't think you can call it a Mac any more ;)" he said.
http://hardware.silicon.com/

Sony Innovation?

Consumer electronics giant Sony has unveiled a range of MP3 players which use flash memory to store songs.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/

The rapid pace of developments has surprised even Bush advisers and silenced or even converted some skeptics in Washington less than two months after the president opened his second term with an inaugural address setting the goal of "ending tyranny in our world."
http://story.news.yahoo.com

Last week, Republican Senator Richard Lugar warned Europeans there would be "dramatic consequences" and even mapped out a trade war scenario: If French, British or German firms cooperate too closely with Chinese firms and in that process resell American technology, Congress could, in an emergency, ban the export of American technologies to the EU.
http://service.spiegel.de/

From Bryan-College Station, Texas, to Madison, Wis., America's college towns are producing more than diplomas — they have become job machines.
http://abcnews.go.com/

Terrorist organizations may be trying to place spies inside U.S. intelligence agencies in order to spy on American counterterrorism efforts
http://www.cbsnews.com/

embarrassment

ive never just posted an introspective but i thought it would then make it easy for me to communicate to many with this one post. sooo... im in the school library and im actually reading articles and im getting into one that i think i might put on the blog. i have my earbuds in because ive been walking around with my ipod all day. so while im reading, i go over to itunes and start playing a little aphex twin. for those that arent familiar with his music, aphex twin is supposed to be ambient but the song that is playing is basically just electronic noise. theres no melody, no ryhme or reason... just experimental crap.. aka noise. so im kind of getting into it, it makes for for decent background music. then i realize that my earbuds arent plugged into my powerbook at all! they were still plugged into my ipod and i had been jamming to this obnoxious crap for the better part of the time its takes to read a NYTimes article. of course since i was reading, just staring at my screen... i didnt notice all the dirty looks that im sure i got in the lovely periodicals section where about 50 people in my immediate vicinity are trying to study. anyway.. it made me lauGH... heres the article i was reading...

"John Bolton will be a U.S. ambassador who aggressively pursues the U.S. national interest at the United Nations, which includes fundamental reform of the U.N., and bringing the U.N. kicking and screaming into the 21st century," he said. "The White House has chosen someone who will be tenacious and aggressive in pursuing the president's goals."
http://nytimes.com/

Playero / Reggaeton

"As a fighter who at 16 years old took up arms against the Russian occupation, then the Taliban, I am now ready to take up the big fight against drugs. It is another holy war. I'm proud to take it on with the help of the international community," said the soft-spoken Daud, 35.
http://www.iht.com/

World Papers Ponder Mideast Change and Bush’s Call for Greater Democracy
http://www.worldpress.org/

Editor's Note: The following is a translation of a March 6, 2005, article by journalist Giuliana Sgrena, reprinted here with permission from the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto.
One in particular showed much attention to my desires. He was incredibly cheerful...The car kept on the road, going under an underpass full of puddles and almost losing control to avoid them.
http://www.cnn.com/
"I think that the happy end to the negotiations may have bothered them. The Americans are against this type of operation," she told Corriere della Sera newspaper Monday. "For them, war is war. Human life is worth little."
http://reuters.myway.com/

U.S. and Austrian lawyers have filed a lawsuit demanding Thailand, U.S. forecasters and the French Accor group answer accusations they failed in a duty to warn populations hit by December's Tsunami disaster, a lawyer said Monday.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/

When the EU Blogs
http://www.techcentralstation.com

The Caribbean is a traditional laboratory for new music and dance styles. Salsa, merengue, and reggae were all brought to life somewhere within its shores. But what happens when you combine them, throw in a hypnotic drum track, and put earthy and often sexually explicit rap lyrics over the top in street-Spanish?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/

baby with his heart on the outside

Mr Clinton had "rather pleasant feelings" about the current president, he said, adding that as a father, he found this "enormously gratifying".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/

For every Caucasian child in the United States, there are at least 200 families in line, waiting two to three times as long as they would if they adopted a black baby, according to Adoption Link.
http://abcnews.go.com/

Texans are known for doing things in a big way. But the state is planning a futuristic highway system that's gargantuan even by Texas standards: 4,000 miles of expressways, mostly toll lanes. The Trans-Texas Corridor, almost a quarter-mile wide, would carry...
http://story.news.yahoo.com/
http://www.keeptexasmoving.com/

A computer hacker gained access to internal admissions records at Harvard, Stanford and other top business schools, then helped applicants log on and learn their fate weeks ahead of schedule, officials said Thursday.
http://abcnews.go.com

Prototype of hydrogen-fueled laptop battery demoed...The company outfitted an IBM ThinkPad laptop with a fuel cell that is 6 millimeters thick.
http://www.macsimumnews.com/

German and Chinese Democracy

Where China will go from here is anyone’s guess. For Sun, political reforms seem to be an eventuality for China. His prediction is that the next 10-15 years will see a “voluntary retreat of the Communist Party” into a system where public disagreement, and opposition is voiced within the Communist Party itself...For most Chinese political experts, the question is not “if” China will have political reform, but “how” and “when?” Many, like Sun, are just waiting for the Chinese government to take that “first major step.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/

The Nazi regime was not brought to an end by sit-ins in front of the Adolf Hitler's Chancellery. It was the Russians, Americans and British who -- through a high price paid in the currency of both military and civilian casualties -- brought Hitler's massive war machinery to its knees. Bombs and grenades brought democracy to us Germans... Bush's approach -- using tanks and guns to force democracy down the world's throat -- rightly triggers some serious opposition: Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo. How can a country that tolerated torture and created legal vacuums and advocate democracy and human rights with a straight face?
http://service.spiegel.de/

Apple --> Microsoft?

It's ironic that a company as innovative as Apple Computer could have such a regressive view of the changing world of American media.
http://www.forbes.com/

Legisladores de Georgia aprueban período de espera para aborto
http://espanol.news.yahoo.com

The US Air Force has lifted a 20-month ban that prevented aerospace and defence group Boeing from bidding for its satellite-launching contracts.
http://news.bbc.co.uk

The world as we knew it is now in flux, and in one of greatest transformations since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Middle East is slowly rejoining civilization. In response, Europe snores, awakening only to chastise the United States, which alone set off the chain reaction of liberty.
http://www.victorhanson.com/

We all know about racism, about whites discriminating against blacks. The prevelance of "colorism" — black on black discrimination, is less known, but it's an open secret in the black community.
http://abcnews.go.com/

Ever since man picked up a rock to kill dinner, hunters have been technology pioneers. These days, they've got more gadgets than ever to choose from.
Heat sensors will spot wounded game in dense brush, remote-controlled cameras can scout game trails. There are motorized duck and deer decoys, electronic duck and coyote calls and even holographic archery sights.
http://abcnews.go.com/

German pathologist Gunther von Hagens, who has made an international name for himself with his exhibitions of plasticized human cadavers, is raising eyebrows with his plan to open a corpse processing plant in Poland. Worse yet, it has emerged that his main deputy, his father, served as a Nazi SS officer.
http://service.spiegel.de

H.264

Checking out a new iPod now applies to more than shopping trips or web browsing. This week the South Huntington Public Library on Long Island, New York, became one of the first public libraries in the country to loan out iPod shuffles.
http://www.wired.com/

A variety of equipment using H.264 for video encoding is likely to hit the shelves between 2005 and 2007. It has already been selected as the video encoding scheme for next-generation Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD optical discs, as well as for terrestrial broadcasting to mobile phones.
http://www.macsimumnews.com/

Chinos

Chinos pierden tierras y casas con avance del capitalismo
http://espanol.news.yahoo.com

China will boost its military spending by 12.6 percent this year, as the nation readies to prevent any eventual move by Taiwan to declare independence.
http://story.news.yahoo.com

Each year 4 million babies around the world die in the first month of life. More than half the deaths could be avoided with simple measures such as cutting umbilical cords with sterile blades, prescribing antibiotics for pneumonia and keeping newborns warm.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/

Under intense global pressure, the United States dropped its demand that a new U.N. declaration on women's equality make clear there is no international right to abortion.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/

Dubai Capitalism

"We believe," said Bush, "that the voice of the people ought to be determining policy, because we believe in democracy ..." Who, one wonders, is feeding the president his talking points? Is he unaware that the Iranian people, even opponents of the regime, believe Iran has a right to nuclear power and should retain the capacity to build nuclear weapons?
http://www.wnd.com/

A judge and a lawyer working for the special tribunal that will put Saddam Hussein on trial have been shot dead, Iraqi officials revealed today.
http://www.guardian.co.uk

Britain’s Court of Appeal ruled Wednesday that a teenage pupil’s human rights were violated by her school’s ban on a form of traditional Muslim dress.
http://www.iht.com/

In the past four months, six Muslim women living in Berlin have been brutally murdered by family members. Their crime? Trying to break free and live Western lifestyles. Within their communities, the killers are revered as heroes for preserving their family dignity. How can such a horrific and shockingly archaic practice be flourishing in the heart of Europe?
http://service.spiegel.de/

The countries lining the Persian Gulf in the Middle East are filthy rich and relatively free of Islamist fundamentalism. And it's not just oil. Gigantic building projects mostly geared toward the tourism industry are becoming the region's -- and particularly Dubai's -- forte. And terrorism is so far leaving the region alone.
http://service.spiegel.de

One of Afghanistan's most notorious warlords is to serve as chief of staff to President Hamid Karzai with responsibility for the country's armed forces.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Save the Texas Commandments

The U.S. Supreme Court, hearing arguments on whether a 6-foot-tall Ten Commandments monument can remain on the Texas state Capitol grounds, debated when government may acknowledge the role of religion in public life.
http://www.bloomberg.com/

The US Supreme Court has abolished the death penalty for those who commit murder when under the age of 18.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
After a decade of relative quiet, the U.S. Supreme Court has in the last several years fundamentally reshaped the American capital justice system.
http://www.iht.com

In my case, I've met in America, mostly on campuses and among students, one too many Europeans, Chinese, Indians, Mexicans, Arabs, or Koreans who after becoming a naturalized US citizen or a legal resident alien, begin praising the country they under no circumstance wish to return to while damning the country that they most certainly will not leave under any circumstance.
http://www.victorhanson.com/

A former diplomat for a Communist country and his wife, who claim that the Central Intelligence Agency broke a promise to support them for life in return for spying for the United States, will have to suffer in secret, the Supreme Court said in effect today.
http://www.nytimes.com/

Martha Stewart faces reality with TV show
http://www.msnbc.msn.com

After weeks of legislative brinksmanship and behind-the-scenes negotiations with federal officials, Republican leaders in Utah said on Tuesday that they would delay action on a bill that has attracted nationwide attention as a bellwether challenge to President Bush's signature education law.
http://nytimes.com/

The American Civil Liberties Union, along with Human Rights First, has filed a lawsuit against US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, charging him with violations of the U.S. Constitution and international law prohibiting torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment.
http://service.spiegel.de/

Apple I

A new book tackles modern computers in a uniquely hands-on way -- by getting the reader to build a replica of one of the most famous personal computers of all: the Apple I.
http://www.wired.com/

Apparently, the widespread success of the Apple iPod in South Korea is ticking off some Korean consumer electronics companies, who are taking out newspaper ads trying to encourage a patriotic boycott of the iPod in favor of South Korean-made portable media devices.
http://techdirt.com/

Computer enthusiasts have worked out how to reprogram Apple's iPod music player with their own code using an ingenious acoustic trick. They adapted the component that generates clicks - or "squeaks" - as a user scrolls through the on-screen menu in order to extract vital information from the latest generation of the device. This allowed them to install an alternative operating system and make their iPods run games and other new programs.
http://www.newscientist.com/