In his address to the nation on Sept. 13, President George W. Bush singled out progress in Anbar Province as the model for U.S. success in Iraq.

The president's claims echoed those made earlier in the week by General David Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, in his congressional testimony. And they raised a question worth examining: Do U.S. military alliances with Sunni tribal leaders truly reflect a turning of hearts and minds away from Anbar's bitter anti-Americanism?

The data from our latest Iraq poll suggest not.

What they're saying in Anbar - International Herald Tribune

An Apple software update is disabling iPhones that have been unlocked by owners who wanted to choose which mobile network to use.

nasty Apple

BBC NEWS | Technology | Apple iPhone warning proves true

On Sunday, Ukrainians will go to the polls to elect a new Parliament. In a snap election called only a year and a half after the last one, voters will be faced with a familiar choice: either President Viktor Yushchenko's bloc, that of his erstwhile political ally Yulia Timoshenko, or Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich's Party of the Regions. Many in the West believe that this contest is merely a rerun of the Orange Revolution, when the Yushchenko-Timoshenko team prevailed against Yanukovich in what was seen as a bloodless coup against the old regime.

But they are wrong. The latest public opinion polls suggest that Yanukovich will be returned to power, inevitably prompting officials in Washington and European capitals to wonder, "Who lost Ukraine?"

The wrong question - International Herald Tribune

Computers in the European Union should be sold without a bundled operating system, according to this submission to the European Commission. It says that the bundling of Microsoft Windows with computers is not in the public interest, and prevents meaningful competition in the operating system market.

ok here's a piece of heresy for you
would a market place full of competing OSs none of which had market dominance be good for computing?
no common platform
no standard API
would open standards and interoperability (which sounds wonderful) become reality or would we face a fragmented market with software vendors having to write x number of versions to run on a variety of OSs
now we have (please correct me if wrong software expert i am not) windows, macs and linux (solaris) and that's it
my question is basically
how practical is it to write one piece of software with an interface layer to plug into x OSs? (this is a genuine question not rhetorical because i'm genuinely interested in the answer)

Globalisation Institute - Brussels' most popular think tank website - Unbundling Microsoft Windows

The creation of modern India and Pakistan entailed the uprooting of more than 12 million people. Bangladesh was itself ripped from Pakistan. The creation of Republika Srpska, an entity you probably have never heard of, was a consequence of the fragmentation of Yugoslavia, which did not exist before the 20th century and did not make it into the 21st. Countries come and countries go. It is time -- isn't it? -- that Iraq went.

i'm not so much recommending this article - just is frankly ordinary - as tracking a meme

Richard Cohen - Iraq's Inevitabilities - washingtonpost.com

I applaud the thousands of people, many of them poor, who traveled from around the country to protest in Jena, La., last week. But what I’d really like to see is a million angry protesters marching on the headquarters of the National Republican Party in Washington.

i've been reading Bob Herbert's OpEds in the NYT for a couple of years now and i've never read one where he's so angry
crikey if you can make someone as fundamentally decent as Bob Herbert this angry then you've really fucked up

The Ugly Side of the G.O.P. - New York Times

Fifty years ago this week, all eyes were on Little Rock, Arkansas, where nine black students were trying, for the first time, to desegregate a major Southern high school. The town of Grand Forks, North Dakota, with fewer than 150 blacks, hardly figured to be a key front in that battle - until Larry Lubenow talked to Louis Armstrong.

The day Louis Armstrong made noise - International Herald Tribune

Blackwater USA, the private security company involved in a Baghdad shootout last weekend, operated under State Department authority that exempted the company from U.S. military regulations governing other security firms, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials and industry representatives.
...
"The Iraqis are trying to establish their own authority. And if they do this, they can show the world that Blackwater is not untouchable. And that the U.S. is not the ultimate authority in their country."

Where Military Rules Don't Apply - washingtonpost.com

You have to hit the bottom of the well, where you feel as if you have nothing

Drowning in the depths of agony

You must reach point where you have cried so much that there is no physical way to weep anymore

When it seems you can no longer feel anything

You have hurt so much that your whole body is numb

There comes a point where your body is an empty shell hollowed out by grief.....

Let the cycle take its course

Pretend that it isn’t happening

Blame someone or something

Promise you can do it differently if given the chance

Go through the what ifs feeling desperately alone

Make the choice to move forward

Find something still beautiful in the world that is worth the effort

Place the first brick and keep building

Let go of everything and everyone that is holding you under water

Assure yourself that you can make it on your own

Nothing can take away your choice to go on

Build it bigger, stronger and taller this time

Make it harder for someone to knock it down again and throw you into the well

Rebuilding The Wall

Newly discovered snapshots donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum provide a stunning counterpoint to what up until now has been the only major source of preliberation Auschwitz photos.

In the Shadow of Horror, SS guardians frolic - International Herald Tribune