DoJ search requests: Google said no; Yahoo, AOL, MSN yes.

Update: Earlier today, I asked a Justice Department spokesperson which search engines other than Google received requests to provide search records. The answer: Yahoo, AOL, and MSN were also asked to supply search records information, and all complied. Google did not, and that is why the DoJ asked a federal judge on Wednesday to order the company to do so.

Boing Boing: DoJ search requests: Google said no; Yahoo, AOL, MSN yes.

The Vatican newspaper has published an article saying "intelligent design" is not science and that teaching it alongside evolutionary theory in school classrooms only creates confusion.

Vatican paper article says 'intelligent design' not science

First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season."

This is probably more interesting, and timely, then Gore's speech.

Martin Luther King - Letter from Birmingham Jail

The American Constitution Society and the Liberty Coalition host a speech by Fmr. Vice Pres. Al Gore at the DAR Hall in Washington. Gore speaks about the limits of executive power, the issue of monitoring domestic communications and the authorization of the use of torture in the war against terrorism.

I still don't like Al Gore but every so often he gives good speeches. He gives a good rundown of how things are fucked up in our country today and blames everyone for it (but Bush especially).

C-SPAN: Fmr. Vice Pres. Gore Speech on Executive Powers

MINNEAPOLIS (Jan. 13) - Minnesota voters, who eight years
ago elected a former professional wrestler as their governor,
may find a self-proclaimed vampire on the ballot for the office
this year.
"Politics is a cut-throat business," said Jonathon "The
Impaler" Sharkey, who said he plans to announce his bid for
governor Friday on the ticket of the Vampyres, Witches and
Pagans Party.

AOL News - Vampire Seeks Job as Minnesota Governor

NEW YORK - For three years federal agents trailed Mohammed Yousry, a chubby 50-year-old translator and U.S. citizen who worked for radical lawyer Lynne Stewart. Prosecutors wiretapped his phone, and FBI agents shadowed and interviewed him. They read his books and notepads and every file on his computer.This was their conclusion:"Yousry is not a practicing Muslim. He is not a fundamentalist," prosecutor Anthony Barkow acknowledged in his closing arguments to a jury in federal district court in Manhattan earlier this year. "Mohammed Yousry is not someone who supports or believes in the use of violence.

;Still, the prosecutor persuaded the jury to convict Yousry of supporting terrorism. Yousry now awaits sentencing in March, when he could face 20 years in prison for translating a letter from imprisoned Muslim cleric Omar Abdel Rahman to Rahman's lawyer in Egypt.

Terror conviction raises legal concerns - washingtonpost.com Highlights - MSNBC.com

A new version of Apple's iTunes for Mac appears to communicate information about every song you play to Apple, and it's not clear if there's any way to turn this off, nor what Apple's privacy policy is on this information.

Boing Boing: iTunes update spies on your listening and sends it to Apple?

I guess you could say that this one falls into the "acquired taste" category of films. Slaughtered Vomit Dolls combines some of the better elements of Subconscious Cruelty and the August Underground movies. All of these movies are pretty nasty. Subconscious Cruelty is artful enough to make some of the nastiness look almost beautiful. There's no beauty at all in the August Underground movies as they seemed to take effort to make them as gritty and unappealing as humanly possible. I thought these films were a bit rough to watch, but neither really succeeded in really disgusting me. Subconscious Cruelty was too ambient, and the August Undergrounds reached a certain level of vile and scraped along that intensity throughout. Slaughtered Vomit Dolls has ebbs and flows. It's like drowning slowly in an ocean of your own vomit. Through the use of jump cuts and surreal sound effects the whole movie sort of has the feel of a bad hangover. The assault continues as you get to briefly know several prostitutes who get introduced in intertwined snippets, get dehumanized both mentally and physically, and get brutally mutilated with some better gore than I expected. This is edited together with cuts of one of the girls performing in front of the camera when she was little. The film slows down a bit to take a closer look at these and some other prostitutes who you can't help but to see a bit differently than you did before as most of them are treated as similar inhuman objects. Until finally, one of the prostitutes seems more human than the others. You start to understand what the cutter seems to get off on through a kind of a bizarre love story focused around human suffering. This plot is almost so understated that it really isn't important at all. It does get somewhat draggy assed and repetitive after awhile in a montage of sex, vomit and blood, but it ends well. Overall, it does several new things with horror which I thought were fairly effective (and I've sat through MANY of these fucking things.) Not for the feint of heart.

Slaughtered Vomit Dolls

Pope died at her home here at age 61 on Aug. 29, 2003. A towel had been placed around her neck to keep her cool on that 87-degree summer day. She wore a white gown while sitting in a chair in an upstairs room, in front of a television that played as family members went about their lives downstairs.
She remained there, according to her wishes, for almost 2� years.
"Don't show my body when I'm dead," Hamilton County's coroner, Dr. O'dell Owens, said Monday when explaining Pope's wishes. "Don't bury me. I'm coming back."

USATODAY.com - Woman's body sits in front of TV for 2 1/2 years

WASHINGTON - In the 50 years that Grant Goodman has known and corresponded with a colleague in the Philippines he never had any reason to suspect that their friendship was anything but spectacularly ordinary.  But now he believes that the relationship has somehow sparked the interest of the Department of Homeland Security and led the agency to place him under surveillance.Last month Goodman, an 81-year-old retired University of Kansas history professor, received a letter from his friend in the Philippines that had been opened and resealed with a strip of dark green tape bearing the words “by Border Protection” and carrying the official Homeland Security seal.

Homeland Security opening private mail - U.S. Security - MSNBC.com