Try Better Bait. I’ve been working my way through Google Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools, by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest, and finding it very worthwhile. This article is in a way a précis of its more relevant strategies for improving your searches. NY Times [thanks to Richard Homonoff]

We ignored world opinion calling for a UN mandate for our invasion of Iraq. Now that we are bogged down and it is conspicuously clear how much it would cost (in lives and dollars) to ‘nation-build’, we are talking out of the other side of our mouths NY Times and trying to bulldoze UN members into joining the effort they have previously opposed. It is not getting much of a reception, especially because it is clear we are crassly capitalizing on the anguish and frustration over the bombing of the UN’s Baghdad compound to rally the troops, and, furthermore, we are of course insisting that the efforts remain under ‘coalition’ command.

“A mandate which will force local agencies that receive federal funds to register and track homeless people has been called too invasive by privacy and community activists.

In an attempt to grasp the scope of the United States’ homeless problem, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is requiring local government and nonprofit organizations receiving grants for homeless programs to keep detailed files on their clientele. Data to be tracked ranges from Social Security numbers to HIV statuses to mental health histories.” Wired News

“As part of the What The World Thinks of America programme, 11,000 people in the UK, France, Russia, Indonesia, South Korea, Jordan, Australia, Canada, Israel, Brazil and the US responded to a poll asking their views and opinions on America.

The respondents were asked about their general attitudes towards America and US President George Bush.

The poll also posed a range of other questions on America’s foreign policy, military power, cultural influences and economic might.

Click on the links to view a comprehensive series of graphs illustrating the findings of the poll.” BBC News Drill down through the graphs and indulge yourself. Readers here probably won’t find many surprises. The respondents in the US have an overblown sense of our value and desirability to the rest of the world. Disaffection with the US in the political, military, economic and cultural spheres cuts across the world, including Eurocentric, Muslim and non-Muslim developing countries. The depth of the world’s contempt for George Bush and concern over the destabilizing, dangerous influence of American military might are dramatic.

Christopher Robin and the Milnes: “On this day in 1920 Christopher Robin Milne was born, an only child to A. A. Milne. Christopher also wrote, his first two books, Enchanted Places and The Path Through the Trees, being memoirs of his growing up and out from under the shadow of the fictional Christopher Robin. The first of these, written after both parents had died, has partly the tone of setting-the-record-straight, partly that of settling-the-score. Each day of writing, Milne said, was ‘like a session on the analyst’s couch’ in an effort to look both his father and Christopher Robin in the eye.” Today in Literature