Rental car tracking spurs suit… again. Budget Rent-a-Car is apparently tracking its customers in Arizona with GPS, using the data they collect on routes driven and speeds over those routes to impose extra charges without their customers’ foreknowledge. A Connecticut rental agency which created a furor by doing the same thing was ordered by a state consumer protection agency to refund fines it had levied on renters who had been speeding. Arizona Daily Star [via Slashdot]

Stars, stripes and terror searches on Fourth of July: “…(A)ter an increase in intercepted al-Qaeda communications in recent days, President Bush’s national security advisers considered raising it to orange.

That, in effect, would have cancelled the July 4 festivities by mobilising the Armed Forces and restricting access to public events.

Instead, it has resorted to security measures that are only marginally less draconian; as Americans gear up for a defiant celebration of their founding principles, they are surrounded by reminders of the threat to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…” Times of London

… and its discontents: “Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz talks about the corporate looting spree and Bush’s woeful mismanagement of the economy.” Salon

“The failings of contemporary medical practice are best confronted from the rational basis of scientific medicine, not by a retreat into the mystical traditions of alternative health,” says Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick in another of his eminently wise sp!ked columns.

“It seems what we think we know about lefties is not right at all.” National Post

US maps out Iraq invasion A document leaked to the New York Times has detailed the logistics of a possible all-out invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. BBC