] A man protesting the looming U.S. war on Iraq fell to his
] death from San Francisco's famed Golden Gate Bridge on
] Wednesday as he was hanging a banner, officials said.
]
] "He appears to have been hanging a banner of some kind,"
] said California Highway Patrol officer Timothy Willock.
] "We're not sure if he decided to jump or slipped while he
] was, you know, hanging the banner. That's unclear right
] now."

ABCNEWS.com : Iraq War Protester Dies in Golden Gate Bridge Fall

] 15 Iraqi soldiers guarding the border surrendered and
] crossed over to Kuwait this evening, officers here said.
]
] They are believed to be the first Iraqis to have
] surrendered, something the American Air Force has been
] actively encouraging by dropping more than 1 million
] leaflets in anticipation of a ground invasion.

Defections Come as U.S. and British Troops Prepare for War

] Masses of Iraqi soldiers are deserting and senior members
] of President Saddam Hussein's ruling family circle are
] defecting as the countdown to a British and US invasion
] reaches its final hours.
]
] In northern Iraq, on the border with Kurdistan, up to
] three-quarters of some Iraqi regiments have already fled.
]
] In the mainly Shia Muslim south, Kuwaiti border guards
] are having to turn Iraqi soldiers back - telling them
] that they must wait until an attack begins before they
] can surrender.

Mass desertions weaken Iraqi defences

] Two Iraqi helicopters fired machine guns and rockets into
] three Kurdish villages on the front line north of Kirkuk
] yesterday, in the first shots intended to kill in the
] coming war.
]
] ''There were two of them, one an attack helicopter and
] the other normally used for transport, attacking the
] villages where people herding cattle live," Mohammed
] Fateh, a local Kurdish military commander, said.
]
] Kurdish officers believe that the Iraqi helicopter attack
] on the three impoverished and half-ruined villages of
] Bashtapa, Girdalanka and Sherawa in the hills south-east
] of Qush Tappa was a desperate effort by the Iraqi army to
] raise the morale of its men and prove that its firepower
] is still to be reckoned with.

Saddam's troops fire the first shots of the conflict

] If the nation escalates to "red alert," which is the
] highest in the color-coded readiness against terror, you
] will be assumed by authorities to be the enemy if you so
] much as venture outside your home, the state's
] anti-terror czar says.

politechbot.com: 'Red alert' means New Jerseyans may not leave their homes

]Latent semantic indexing (LSI) is a promising information
]retrieval technique for searching and organizing large data
]collections. LSI finds patterns in unstructured data (documents
]without descriptors such as keywords or special semantic
]tagging), and can return relevant results for a query even when
]there is no keyword match.

]Data collections don't have to be in English, or even in any
]human language at all. We have had good success in searching
]protein databases with the technique, as well as chemical mass
]spectra.

I'm going to have to look this over in some detail later..

Projects: Latent Semantic Indexing

] The University of Toronto's Internet Censorship Explorer
] permits anyone with a Web browser to test the limits of
] certain national and organizational Internet-blocking
] schemes. Users simply enter a target URL and a country
] into a search field on the Censorship Explorer's website.
] The software then scans the ports of available servers in
] that country, looking for open ones. By using the foreign
] computer as a proxy server, ICE then attempts to visit
] the target URL from behind that country's firewall. The
] result is either the visible website or a "page blocked"
] message is then returned to the user.

Wired News: Does the End Justify the Means?

] In the run up to a conflict in Iraq, foreign news websites
] are seeing large volumes of traffic from America, as U.S.
] citizens increasingly seek news coverage about the coming
] war.
]
] "Given how timid most U.S. news organizations have been
] in challenging the White House position on Iraq, I'm not
] surprised if Americans are turning to foreign news services
] for a perspective on the conflict that goes beyond freedom
] fries," said Deborah Branscom, a Newsweek contributing
] editor, who keeps a weblog devoted to media issues.

] Dennis charged that, unlike much of the American press,
] the Guardian site presents both pro- and anti-war
] positions. In addition, the Guardian encourages its
] readers to debate the issues, through the site's talk
] boards and interactive features like live interviews with
] various experts.
]
] The only debate in the U.S. media is on the Web, Dennis
] said. "Weblogs are doing all the work that the U.S. media
] did in the past," he said. "That's an interesting
] development."
]
] In fact, a lot of the Guardian's U.S. traffic is referred
] by weblogs, especially Matt Drudge's Drudge Report, said
] Nielsen's Goosey.

Wired News: Media Watchdogs Caught Napping

] Dutch journalist Peter Tetteroo aims his camera out the
] window of his hotel room in Pyongyang to film a
] policewoman directing traffic. She's in constant motion,
] gesturing to vehicles coming from one direction, then
] pivoting crisply and signaling to vehicles coming from
] another direction.
]
] It all looks perfectly normal, except for one thing:
] There's no traffic. North Korea doesn't have very many
] cars, and none of them happens to be driving by. The
] policewoman's choreography is all a surreal charade.

Washington Post.Com: 'Welcome to North Korea': A Surreal, Sad Game of Charades

] Along with the usual reminders to hold the noise down and
] pay overdue fines, library patrons in Santa Cruz are
] seeing a new type of sign these days: a warning that
] records of the books they borrow may wind up in the hands
] of federal agents.
]
] The signs, posted in the 10 county branches last week and
] on the library's Web site, also inform the reader that
] the USA Patriot Act "prohibits library workers from
] informing you if federal agents have obtained records
] about you."
]
] "Questions about this policy," patrons are told, "should
] be directed to Attorney General John Ashcroft, Department
] of Justice, Washington, D.C. 20530."

I think this is an excellent way to get more support for the "Freedom to Read Protection Act" that was introduced last week. Something I'm fully in support of.

More information at this Memestreams Thread, too:

http://www.memestreams.net/thread/bid5340/

Libraries post Patriot Act warnings