From China’s Xinhuanet: Iraq’s Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan on Wednesday “accused the United States of being the world’s ‘No. 1 terrorist country’ which has committed terrorism against Iraq for more than a decade, the state-run Iraq TV reported.” ‘The U.S., through its continuous aggressions against Iraq, reveals its ugly face and becomes the Number One terrorist country in the world,’ Ramadan told a visiting Spanish delegation which came to

“French girls can now get the morning-after contraception pill for free in pharmacies, without a prescription or parental authorization,” the AP reports. “In a decree published Thursday in the Official Journal, the government said pharmacists must speak briefly with the young women before giving them the pill to make sure they are using it correctly and in the right time frame. All girls under age 18 are eligible for the

“A 13-year-old boy was planning to blow up his junior high school, police said Thursday after seizing five small homemade bombs and bomb-making material from his home,” Fox News reports. The seventh-grader at George Junior High School will remain in custody for at least another 10 days as he undergoes a psychological evaluation, police said. His name was not released. The boy was arrested Wednesday after other students said he

Michael Mallinger, writing in The National Review, says that, after years of bullying, Greenpeace is now on the defensive. A taste of his critique of the organization: Greenpeace poses as a group interested in promoting better ecology based on scientific analysis. But its real mission, as American University professor Paul Wapner explains in his book Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics, is ‘to manipulate values, norms, and modes of discourse;

Weighed down by his own snobbery, Yves Saint Laurent retired this week, Reuters reports. “‘I have nothing in common with this new world of fashion, which has been reduced to mere window-dressing. Elegance and beauty have been banished,’ Saint Laurent, 65, was quoted by the weekly Paris Match magazine as saying in an exclusive interview.” Saint Laurent’s departure does not spell the end of the label, which was taken over

“Between April and November 2001, the number of murders in the Metropolitan Police area [London] committed with a firearm soared by almost 90% over the same period a year earlier,” the BBC News reports. Armed street robberies rose, in the same period, from 435 to 667 in 2001 – an increase of 53% – while overall in the capital there were 45,255 street robberies and snatches last year, against 32,497

…CBS MarketWatch’s David Callaway, who writes, “The Enron debacle won’t be President Bush’s Whitewater. It will be much worse.“ Don’t expect to see either Bush or Vice President Cheney directly linked to the financial shenanigans that brought Enron down. They won’t be. This is not about finding a smoking gun, as much as some Democrats might wish it were. What it is about, and what the public will get to

“China is expected to have between 75 and 100 long-range nuclear missiles pointed at the United States by 2015, roughly quadruple the current number, according to a CIA report released Wednesday,” The Washington Post reports. Many of those intercontinental ballistic missiles will be on mobile launchers, helping China maintain a nuclear deterrent against the vastly larger U.S. missile force, says the report, titled “Foreign Missile Developments and the Ballistic Missile

For whatever reasons (bandwidth?), publishing to Blogger has been impossible today. We were able to add posts this morning, but — with the exception of a five minute window (in which time, I posted the URL to this mirror site) — we’ve been unable to post all afternoon or evening. What’s so distressing about this is that some sites using Blogger have been uneffected by the bandwidth “problem.” In fact,

from the February 2 Reason (print edition): “To attract new recruits for traffic police, British officials planned a TV commercial extolling their good works. To film the spot, they cordoned off part of a major highway at rush hour, backing up traffic for miles in several directions”…