Somalia’s governing council has voted to institute Islamic law (sharia). There are also stories tonight about the effects of Islamic law in Afghanistan and Algeria. Despite the protests of Islam’s apologists, the Muslim world is becoming more radical, not less. Thanks to Barry Rubin, C. Cantoni,...

The most significant story of the day asserts that the American financial system is effectively insolvent. I’ve been asserting similar things for a while now, but had become concerned that such views were turning me into a crank. I even had Dymphna put me on a 24-hour Crank Watch, to make sure tha...

Two separate news stories tonight seem ominous when juxtaposed. In the first, unemployment rate among Turkish youth has exceeded 25%, which is a guarantee of some form of street riots, revolution, etc. Secondly, Turkey is responsible for a cryptographic device which will be used by NATO military com...

I've been reading a lot of history lately. In part, this is because history, to me, is proving far more exciting than anything I have been reading in literature or seeing on film. Perhaps this is something unique to me, because I have a natural love of trivia and detail. Perhaps not, though; the sam...

The overwhelming evidence of global warming continues to accumulate — as does the level of ice and snow in Greenland’s central ice cap, which increases at a rate of about two inches a year. Shhh! Don’t tell Al Gore… Thanks to Abu Elvis, Barry Rubin, C. Cantoni, heroyalwhyness, JD, Lexington,...

Tonight’s most important stories are about the war in Gaza. Hamas is threatening to assassinate Livni and Barak, but that looks like a sign of desperation to me. The most interesting aspect of all this is how well Israel is doing on the media front. For once, the USA is not the only country blamin...

The most important news of the day obviously comes from Mumbai. There are eight or ten articles about the terrorist attacks here; go to the South Asia section and keep scrolling. It’s still early days in this story, and information keeps flooding in. I’ve collected a lot of it, and hope to take ...

I spent a bit of time today rewriting the script for the news feed, and added some additional features. Not only are the news items grouped by category, the headlines are now hotlinks to the named anchors for the text of each news item. However, this latter feature will only work once you have click...

Very few will take a stab at this, so I will give it a go, and see what Sen. McCain's view on the armed forces were prior to 9/11. We must remember that this was in the heady downtime that Sen. McCain helped by getting a 'peace dividend' of cutting US force size and support, while President Clinton ...

Last week was really full of hard work for us. The response to Smashing Texture Contest was impressive and overwhelming. We have received over 740 e-mails from over 600 participants, resulting in far more than 2000 photos. The result, however, is not just literally zillion of textures, but truly bri...