About 15 percent of Iraqis have left their homes. Since the upsurge of violence following the bombing of a Shiite holy site in Samarra 14 months ago, the flight has been large and constant. It now reaches a rate of up to 50,000 people per month.

... withstanding the surge of Pentecostal Protestantism in Latin America ...

"The government is doing more slogans than action."

Afghan patience is wearing dangerously thin, officials warn.

"I had the support of the guys in the S&M and leather bars ..." he said. The objections came from other sectors of the gay population ... "It was like Sunnis and Shiites," he said.

"If your focus is on how faith-based organizations are getting earmarks, I’m your guy."

As for whether people will think he has a fetish, he said he can’t help that. "I just have no way of dealing with that," he said with a laugh. "People will think what they’re going to think. I understand that."

"This is the destiny of traitors," the gunmen yelled as they shot their victims.

"The number of threats is not decreasing. They are only transforming and changing the guise. As during the Third Reich era, these new threats show the same contempt for human life and claims to world exclusiveness and diktat."

The danger of not understanding the lessons of history is matched by the danger of using simplistic historical analogies.

"You’ve got these two basic liberal values on a kind of collision course."

"Let other federal agencies, as more than a dozen already do, cover the ‘bugs and bunnies.’ But let our spies be spies," Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, wrote Thursday in a Wall Street Journal op-ed article.

The idea that the soul must be cleansed through pain, prevalent in Tolstoy’s era, unsettles most of the cla... [ Read More (1.0k in body) ]

As a follow-up (idea-wise) and contrast (weather-wise) to the great pictures from Banff, [2] posted recently, here's a slide show of selected photos from my just-completed trip to Oahu.

Don't expect to see big game here, but you will see some birds, including albatross, and a wild cockatoo.

Photos from Oahu, 2007

You can't get to the end of the day without hearing somebody say "back in the day."

Back in the day, there were boards. Bulletin Board Systems. BBS's. No Net, no Web, no cyberspace, nothing.

Back in the day, I was in Jersey. I don't know if it was the center of the BBS world; it was probably the ass-end of it, like it was of everything else. But it felt like the center.

He should know. Back in the day, when he was struggling to make it as an actor in New York, he did it for $3 an hour.

After graduation, he left town and spent several years in Nashville.

Back in the day, it was a tent city.

Along the way it lost that status, but back in the day it was a biggie.

"I used to party with him back in the day, apparently," said Tom.

Back in the day, he was literally "the man with the plan" ...

The great thing about Nashville back in the day was that the old guys hung out where the young guys were.

"It used to be a pretty good organization back in the day. We're going to start putting things back together," he remarked.

"I don't want a bunch of old heads talking about how great things were back in the day."

Back in the day 2600 hertz was the frequency that AT&T put on all of their long distance lines ...

I'm not saying it was better back in the day when Ma Bell was our only choice. Well, actually, ...

He's reluctant to look back. He doesn't want to fixate on "back in the day" whimsy. But this was special, so ... [ Read More (0.9k in body) ]

The American military has installed an elaborate system of barricades and checkpoints ... the enclaves created by this system, which American commanders frequently call “gated communities" ...

In a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed ...

"If your country was occupied by Iraq, would you fight?" he asked. "Enough said."

Their plans may have been dreamy. But at least, they had plans.

American officials readily acknowledge that they have entered an uncertain marriage of convenience ...

"The relationship ... is like a Catholic marriage ..."

She smiled much of the time, but also shifted in her seat, clenched her jaw muscles and fiddled with her hair.

She declared her atheism as a girl, and later, her intolerance for pretension. (“I have had enough of these dinners where people say ‘I think’ all the time,” she wrote. She wanted to know.)

Officials are wondering if the longtime reliance on him has begun to outlive its usefulness.

Basically, the company was willing to bet $500 or $750 that if he heard the same drug pitch all day, by the end of the day he’d be so brainwashed that he could not possibly prescribe any other drug but ours.

... at the end of the day, he almost always did the right thing.

In May, London-based Hip Hop artist M.I.A. revealed that she was denied a visa to come work with American music producers on her next album. News reports indicate that the Sri Lankan-born artist was excluded because government officials concluded that some of her lyrics are overly sympathetic to the Tamil Tigers and the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

American Civil Liberties Union : U.S. Government Increasingly Blocking Entry at the Border Because of Ideology, ACLU Says

From the starred review at Publishers Weekly:

"The social dimension turns out to be as essential as the scientific," Gawande writes —— a conclusion that could serve as a thumbnail summary of his entire output.

For a recent discussion with the author, check out this podcast from Scientific American's Science Talk, a weekly program which explores the latest developments in science and technology through interviews with leading scientists and journalists.

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

I assume this article is one of those pre-obits they've been sitting on for years.

He was overwhelmed by what he saw at a Houston supermarket, by the kaleidoscopic variety of meats and vegetables available to ordinary Americans.

The irony is killing me:

Under a government decree that took effect April 1, only Russian citizens can sell vegetables at any of Russia’s 5,200 markets.

I wonder which side of the "50% positive" ledger this falls on.

From Gorby's view, it seems to be a bit of both:

"I express the very deepest condolences to the family of the deceased on whose shoulders rest major events for the good of the country and serious mistakes," former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev told Interfax.

But if you go to the article linked above, then it's clearly negative:

“When we talk of death, violence or poverty, for example, this is not positive,” said one editor at the station who did not want to be identified for fear of retribution. “If the stock market is up, that is positive. The weather can also be positive.”

So, to counterbalance, I offer you a pair of happy stories -- first from April 6, and then from today:

Martha Stewart Picks Space Pal's Menu

Martha Stewart, the apostle of the cozy and the quaint, came Friday to the bleak space town of Baikonur to watch a billionaire friend blast off for the international space station.

Stewart, who parlayed her vision of gracious living into a business empire, is a longtime friend of Charles Simonyi, a software engineer and developer of Microsoft Word who paid $20-25 million for a 13-day trip to the international space station.

He will lift off Saturday, aboard a Soyuz space capsule with two Russian cosmonauts.

Billionaire Space Tourist Back on Earth

An American billionaire who paid $25 million for a 13-day trip to outer space returned to Earth on Saturday in a space capsule that also carried a cosmonaut and a U.S. astronaut, making a soft landing on the Kazakh steppe.

The capsule carrying Charles Simonyi, a Hungarian-born software engineer who helped develop Microsoft Word and Excel, touched down after a more than three-hour return trip from the orbital station, a spokesman said at Mission Control outside Moscow.

Simonyi looked ecstatic after rescuers removed him from the capsule, which lay askew on the bleak grassland. He smiled and grinned as he spoke with the support crew. He then bit enthusiastically into a green apple -- a traditional offering for space crews touching down in Kazakhstan, which is famous for the fruit.

It's a good thing the capsule comes down in Kazakhstan, or that apple would have been a Russian potato.

Boris Yeltsin Is Dead

Gray matter is the new black of the hip social scene.

In the New Dating Scene, the Attraction Is a Beautiful Mind

McCain is the hell-raiser who hides an introspective bent behind his pose as a cocky flyboy.

The problem was reported to the government last week by a farmer in Illinois who stumbled across the data on the Internet.

"I was bored and typed the name of my farm into Google to see what was out there."
She was able to identify almost 30,000 records in the database that contained Social Security numbers.
"I was stunned," she said. "The numbers were right there in plain view in this database that anyone can access."

"Tom is not afraid to stick to his guns."

"Instead of having turned to Washington for answers and solutions, y’all have turned to the person next to you."

"Some women just don’t have the get up and go."

The toll is visible in Hollandale, a tired town in the impoverished Delta region of northwest Mississippi.

Jamekia Brown, 22 and two months pregnant with her third child, lives next to the black people’s cemetery in the part of town called No Name, where multiple generations crowd into cheap clapboard houses and trailers.

So it took only a minute to walk to the graves of Ms. Brown’s first two children, marked with temporary metal signs because she cannot afford tombstones.

"We were a little late to the game. We should have been out there making these arguments, making the case more forcefully before people began framing the debate for us ... and in false terms."

In military terms, the American initiative to the Russians on missile defense will include an invitation "toward fundamental integration of our systems."

In Russia, how can anyone predict the future when it’s so hard to predict the past?

Why had historians not used these papers before? ... What really happened doesn’t fit any fashionable academic dogmas.

See also Parts I, II, III, IV, and V.

"I stared as one -- and then the other -- of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased."

In 1985, when I graduated, a Wall Street recruiter actually told me that, with a last name like Georgiopoulos, I’d have trouble getting an investment banking job.

When we talk to our children about sex, about alcohol and drugs, or about the dangers of the Internet, we give them limitations and warnings. But when it comes to the subject of work, we tell them that they can be whatever they aspire to be; that they should aim high, work hard and dream big. What we rarely do is tell them how hard some days are. Or that along the road, they might have to compromise, or detour, or backtrack. To warn them would be to discourage them. Or so our thinking goes.

At times, the software industry appears to be racing downhill while still trying to build its car.

"It was just a big fireball coming at me."

As he has waged battles big and small, he can be heard bellowing, "Tom!" several times a day.

"One block from Vox Pop!" he exclaimed. "You know Vox Pop?"

There is probably no better guide to where the court is headed than in a careful inventory of where Justice O’Connor has been.

"It’s understandable that you would look at someone’s twitter ..."

"The hardest-hitting, cruelest, most affecting collection of sound and image this side of Buñuel"

The established physics of Washington: rapidly diminishing support in one’s own party times the number of instances in which one has failed to convincingly explain away accusations of incompetence or malfeasance equals the certainty of rapid resignation.

Romney is fond of PowerPoint and terms like "strategic audits" and "wow moments."

"I’m not a big-game hunter," said Mitt Romney, campaigning in Indianapolis. "I’ve made that very clear. I’ve always been a rodent and rabbit hunter. Small varmints, if you will."

See also Parts I, II, III, IV, and VI.