October 2004

"The word 'hurriyyah' or freedom has no classical Arabic or Koranic resonances and I don't think it has played a big role in his previous statements."

"little people, nicknamed 'hobbits', who made tools, hunted tiny elephants and lived at the same time as modern humans who were colonizing the area"

the New Madrid fault line isn't as well known as the San Andreas, but some scientists think it's the more likely location for "the big one"...

"What I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns."

Australia is likely to increase copyright terms, but not retrospectively, so Gone With the Wind will remain in the public domain here

"we were going to hit all communications in Alabama -- civilian, police and military -- so that we could control them"

the 1996-2000 famine was "the worst disaster in the history of post-war Korea", taking "between 600,000 and 1,000,000 lives"

"What exists is a fascist state... not the Nigeria that the then young Chinua Achebe thought about in 1958, when Things Fall Apart appeared to a joyous horizon"

forget about the threat of "martyr-seekers" - what happens if Iran responds by closing the Straits of Hormuz for a week?

"singular they is becoming completely standard, at least among younger Americans, whenever the antecedent is of a sort that could in some contexts refer to either sex"

"an adherent of the Protestant Heresy, condemned most notably and definitively by the sixteenth-century Council of Trent, Bush has implicitly embraced an array of subordinate heresies"

"One chunk of the money -- $1.4 billion -- was deposited into a local bank by Kurdish leaders in northern Iraq but could be tracked no further"

the Poles don't like the paranormal, the Germans like erotica, the Italians like chick lit, and cowboys are right out

"Evicting someone from the home they've lived in for 20 years... needs to be done with a lot of love and a lot of wisdom" -- but only if they're Jewish

"I will swallow a lot of petty policy differences with Kerry to get a man in the White House with brains enough not to blow up the world and us with it"

"Despite the congestion elsewhere, Hong Kong and Singapore, the world's two biggest ports, have been able to cope with the extra volumes"

"not delivered due to automatic rules that have determined that the content of this message violates Halliburton's inappropriate email content policy."

"a collision course holds the risk of Israel losing international legitimacy and could lead to its isolation"

a separate North American louse clade, diverging 1.2 MYA, suggests there was direct contact between modern and archaic humans

"EO Wilson has argued that what's really vital to the ecosystem are the ugly bugs. Apes are more expendable."

"As has become painfully clear over the past year, Iraqis cannot count on anyone to help them except themselves"

as a Linux user (since 1993) who supports both Windows and MacOS, my experience is that the Macs are half as much work to support

repelled by the Australian Democrats' decision to preference Family First, I volunteered for the Greens

"After this mistake, who will ever believe Israel's 'photographic evidence' against the Palestinians - or the Syrians or Iranians?"

"The monument, which is in granite and weighs 16 tonnes, has been set up at the lab animals center of Wuhan University"

I wonder if there's a correlation between political opposition to the United States and free software adoption?

"most of the ~600 detainees at worst had supported the Taliban in the civil war it had been fighting against the Northern Alliance"

the Democrats have lost any remaining credibility by preferencing the Assemblies of God "Family First" party ahead of the Greens

"the old and car-less - mainly Black - were left behind in their below-sea-level shotgun shacks and aging tenements to face the watery wrath"