When the school board in Odessa, the West Texas oil town, voted unanimously in April to add an elective Bible study course to the 2006 high school curriculum, some parents dropped to their knees in prayerful thanks that God would be returned to the classroom, while others assailed it as an effort to instill religious training in the public schools.

Yuck.

Bible Course Becomes a Test for Public Schools in Texas

King Fahd, the absolutist monarch of Saudi Arabia who guided his desert kingdom through swerves in the oil market, regional wars and the incessant, high-stakes scrimmage between Islamic tradition and breakneck modernization, died today, the Saudi royal court in Riyadh said. He was 82, according to his official Website.

Saudi Arabia's King Fahd Dies; Abdullah Named New Leader

IN THE WAKE of Hot Coffeegate author Steven Johnson, the man behind "Everything Bad Is Good For You", has written an open letter to Senator Hillary Clinton, the woman largely behind launching the avalanche that has buried Take Two, Rockstar and half the gaming industry up to its neck in trouble. We’ll let the letter do the talking.

Heh.

A bit of Hot Coffee for Senator Clinton's mind

There is probably no more infuriating sight for drivers than their car attached to a tow truck. But some motorists, prosecutors and lawmakers think some towers are going a little too far.

In one case here, a church's pickup was towed from its own parking lot; in another, a 4-year-old boy was towed away in his mother's car after she went inside her apartment for a few minutes to drop off groceries and a younger child.

Tow Trucks Prowl, and Authorities Crack Down

Satellite digital radio has captured the attention of consumers and investors with its billions spent and millions of paying subscribers. But a quiet digital revolution has hit the AM and FM dials as well: more than 450 stations in the United States now broadcast one or two digital channels alongside analog ones. At least 2,000 of the more than 12,000 stations in the country are committed to adding the format.

Yay.

Digital Terrestrial Radio Finally Getting Deployed

Microsoft's chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, made a concerted effort Thursday to persuade financial analysts that the world's largest software publisher will again become a growth stock.

Folks were saying years ago that Microsoft's business model effectively required them to keep growing and growing ...

Microsoft Makes Its Case That It Is a Growth Stock

In a break with President Bush, the Senate Republican leader, Bill Frist, has decided to support a bill to expand federal financing for embryonic stem cell research, a move that could push it closer to passage and force a confrontation with the White House, which is threatening to veto the measure.

Wow... science can trump orthodoxy sometimes. Or so it would seem. I wonder if there's more to this story...

Veering From Bush, Frist Backs Funding for Stem Cell Research

Hot Coffee. Everybody's getting some this summer.

I'm not talking about the beverage, rather the on-screen sex in the videogame "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" that has triggered a Federal Trade Commission probe and inflamed the passions of the U.S. Congress.

It seems like a lot of prudes have been really pissed off about
GTA for a long time but until now haven't really been able to do much about it since it was clearly labeled, etc. But now that Rockstar has actually done something wrong, all of these people are pouncing on the opportunity to make them pay. I saw another article somewhere mentioning a class-action lawsuit that's brewing, now.

'San Andreas' Rocks the 'Righteous'

With Congress poised for a final vote on the energy bill, the Environmental Protection Agency made an 11th-hour decision Tuesday to delay the planned release of an annual report on fuel economy.

But a copy of the report, embargoed for publication Wednesday, was sent to The New York Times by a member of the E.P.A. communications staff just minutes before the decision was made to delay it until next week. The contents of the report show that loopholes in American fuel economy regulations have allowed automakers to produce cars and trucks that are significantly less fuel-efficient, on average, than they were in the late 1980's.

Not really news but still pretty poor.

E.P.A. Holds Back Report on Car Fuel Efficiency

While Amazon is best known for selling new products, an estimated 23 percent of its sales are from used goods, many of them secondhand books. Used bookstores have been around for centuries, but the Internet has allowed such markets to become larger and more efficient. And that has upset a number of publishers and authors.

In 2002, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers sent an open letter to Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon.com, which has a market for used books in addition to selling new copies. "If your aggressive promotion of used book sales becomes popular among Amazon's customers," the letter said, "this service will cut significantly into sales of new titles, directly harming authors and publishers."

The RIAA/MPAA mess we're in right now is going to be nothing in 10 years when you can buy a plastic printer for under $1000 and bootleg GI Joe figures at home.

Reading Between the Lines of Used Book Sales