Wired reports on the hierarchy of content pirates, the people who know how to find the top-quality pre-release copies of Hollywood films and new albums. It’s an interesting look at this otherwise closed world, with its disguised servers, elaborate rules, amazing quality control procedures, and...

Washington Post describes why young Iraqi women are wearing the traditional Muslim head scarf, the hejab. They feel threatened by the insurgents, who are said to kill women who go about unveiled. These days, even Christians–who make up as much as a tenth of Baghdad’s population–say...

Reporter Abe Aamidor of The Indianapolis Star is doing a feature article on the popularity of ABC-TV’s “Desperate Housewives.” Love it or hate it, the show is popular. Does this show reflect the morals of suburban America, or is it driving them down? Is the show realistic? Or is it...

Radley Balko compiles the good news of 2004, and there’s a whole lot of it. It’s a nice read to brighten your day.

Just listened to Olbermann’s lead-in to the Tsunami disaster on his Countdown show. I don’t have the exact quote but he was comparing the U.S. government aid dollars for this disaster as being below the amount designated for the Presidential Inauguration. Don’t tell me El Keitho isn’t...

I googled those two words to see if the media was relating the South Asia disaster to the California coastline. The San Francisco Chronicle has its report. Here’s some practical advice for beachcombers: Whatever triggers a future tsunami, Californians need to remember at least one thing, says...

Reuters reports on how Argentina and Brazil scuttled FTAA talks. By now, the Bush administration had hoped, we’d all be one happy hemispheric family, trading with each other with reduced tariffs and expedited procedures. But the left-leaning governments in Brasilia and Buenos Aires, concerned that...

The New York Times reports that the UN official who reportedly said the U.S. and other countries were being “stingy” in their giving to the victims of the tsunami says that he’s been misquoted, and that he was really referring to the giving of the West over the past few years for general...

Ironically, the giant sucking sound Ross Perot talked about really exists–but it’s the sound of the U.S. economy sucking up money, goods and workers from other economies. It’s not that Washington is run by a cabal bent on stripping the Third World of its resources, nor that we are approaching...

Did the animals know a tsunami was on the way? Given how my dogs have reacted to storm fronts hours before they hit, it wouldn’t surprise me.