Caught in a Perjury Trap: “Occasionally I get emails from Washington folks who work on the Hill claiming to possess juicy insider digs on our public servants and their corporate paymasters. I usually delete said emails, as I don’t want to be responsible for propagating dirty rumors or false information that can’t be corroborated. I’d rather let Judith Miller and the New York Times do that. Nonetheless, in the past 24 hours I have been contacted by three separate Congressional Democrats in Washington, and a Justice Department official, first by email and later phone, who all say the same thing: Karl Rove is about to be indicted.” `–Joshua Frank (Counterpunch)

“Police say 100 people are expected to appear in court after being arrested during clashes in Edinburgh sparked by a protest against the G8 summit.

Demonstrators fought running battles with 1,000 police in the centre of the city, which was brought to a standstill for six hours.”

Thai teachers to be allowed guns: “School teachers in Thailand’s troubled southern provinces will be allowed to carry guns, the government has said. The move is one of a series of measures designed to keep education staff from leaving the violence-hit south. Many of the region’s teachers are thought to have either stopped working or demanded a transfer from the area.” (BBC)

“Can a man own a word? And can he sue to keep other people from using it?

Over the last few years, Leo Stoller has written dozens of letters to companies and organizations and individuals stating that he owns the trademark to ‘stealth.’ He has threatened to sue people who have used the word without his permission. In some cases, he has offered to drop objections in exchange for thousands of dollars. And in a few of those instances, people or companies have paid up.

‘If a trademark owner doesn’t go up to the plate each day and police his mark, he will be overrun by third-party infringers,’ Mr. Stoller, a 59-year-old entrepreneur, said in a telephone interview from his office in Chicago. ‘We sue a lot of companies.’

Mr. Stoller owns and runs a company called Rentamark.com, which offers, among other things, advice on sending cease-and-desist letters and Mr. Stoller’s services as an expert witness in trademark trials. Through Rentamark, Mr. Stoller offers licensing agreements for other words he says he owns and controls, such as bootlegger, hoax and chutzpah, and sells t-shirts and other merchandise through what the Web site calls its ‘stealth mall.’

He is currently in a legal dispute with Sony’s Columbia Pictures unit over a film that opens late this month. It is about elite Navy pilots and titled – what else? – Stealth.” (New York Times )

Deep Impact smashes all expectations: “Comet Tempel 1 has smashed into the Deep Impact probe, producing a blast of light that prompted the mission control room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, US, to erupt into cheers and applause.

Scientists and engineers jumped in the air, pumped their fists and hugged one another. Not only had their mission to deliberately collide with a comet for the first time succeeded perfectly, but the prospect of a damp squib – with the impactor passing right through a diffuse, rubbly comet – had fizzled away.” (New Scientist )

Homes of Calif. Lawmaker, Defense Contractor Raided: “Federal agents investigating the relationship between Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham and a defense contractor searched the congressman’s California home and the contractor’s home and yacht, the U.S. Attorney’s office said on Saturday.

Skip to next paragraph Reuters

Channing Phillips, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, declined comment on whether any materials were seized in Friday’s raids, saying that the search warrants were under seal.

The Internal Revenue Service, the Pentagon’s Defense Criminal Investigative Service and the FBI have joined the U.S. Attorney’s office in the investigation of Cunningham and Mitchell Wade, who until recently was chief executive of MZM, a Washington-based government contractor that provides highly classified intelligence work for the Pentagon.

The investigation began after news reports that Wade had purchased Cunningham’s home in Del Mar, California, in late 2003 for more than $1.6 million and then sold it months later at a loss of $700,000. Cunningham also was living rent-free on Wade’s boat at the Capital Yacht Club on the Potomac River.” (New York Times )

“Within hours after Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s announced retirement from the Supreme Court, members of conservative groups around the country convened in five national conference calls in which, participants said, they shared one big concern: heading off any effort by President Bush to nominate his attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales, to replace her.

Late last week, a delegation of conservative lawyers led by C. Boyden Gray and former Attorney General Edwin Meese III met with the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., to warn that appointing Mr. Gonzales would splinter conservative support.

And Paul M. Weyrich, a veteran conservative organizer and chairman of the Free Congress Foundation, said he had told administration officials that nominating Mr. Gonzales, whose views on abortion are considered suspect by religious conservatives, would fracture the president’s conservative backers.

The groundswell of opposition to Mr. Gonzales was just one sign of the conflicting forces suddenly swirling around Mr. Bush this weekend as he headed to Camp David to begin considering a replacement for Justice O’Connor, a decision his aides said would not be announced before he returned from a trip to Europe at the end of next week.

Senate Democrats demanded that he consult them before making a choice and appoint a pragmatist in Justice O’Connor’s mold.

Conservatives, flexing their muscles in a battle they have spent a decade preparing for, described the nomination as a test of Mr. Bush’s convictions and past promises, and his biggest opportunity yet to assure that the Bush presidency will leave a conservative stamp for a generation to come.” (New York Times )

New York Times news analysis: “The phrase has been used so many times over so many years to describe the Supreme Court that it is nearly a cliché. Yet the simple words capture an equally simple truth: to find out where the court is on almost any given issue, look for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

If you are a lawyer with a case at the court, pitch your arguments to her. If your issue is affirmative action, or religion, or federalism, or redistricting, or abortion, or constitutional due process in any of its many manifestations, you can assume that the fate of that issue is in her hands. Don’t bother with doctrinaire assertions and bright-line rules. Be meticulously prepared on the facts, and be ready to show how the law relates to those facts and how, together, they make sense.

And it is because Justice O’Connor has played such a pivotal role on the court for much of her 24-year tenure that her unexpected retirement is such a galvanizing event. Much more than the widely anticipated retirement of the predictably conservative Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, her departure creates an opportunity for President Bush to shape the court.”

“Robert Congel, a commercial real-estate developer who lives in upstate New York, has a plan to ”change the world.” Convinced that it will ”produce more benefit for humanity than any one thing that private enterprise has ever done,” he is raising $20 billion to make it happen. That’s 12 times the yearly budget of the United Nations and more than 25 times Congel’s own net worth.

What Congel has in mind is an outsize and extremely unusual mega-mall. Destiny U.S.A., the retail-and-entertainment complex he is building in upstate New York, aspires to be not only the biggest man-made structure on the planet but also the most environmentally friendly. Equal parts Disney World, Las Vegas, Bell Laboratories and Mall of America — with a splash of Walden Pond — the ”retail city” will include the usual shops and restaurants as well as an extensive research facility for testing advanced technologies and a 200-acre recreational biosphere complete with springlike temperatures and an artificial river for kayaking.” (New York Times )

The French Remake a U.S. Film: “I always thought Fingers felt like a French film, anyway,’ says James Toback, who wrote and directed it and who now, 27 years later, is enjoying the strange experience of seeing Fingers become French not just in feeling but in fact.

Jacques Audiard’s film The Beat That My Heart Skipped, which relocates Mr. Toback’s violent, willfully unstable psychodrama from 70’s New York to 21st-century Paris, has to be one of the unlikeliest remakes in the history of the movies, and not only because The Beat That My Heart Skipped, which opened Friday in New York and Los Angeles, is actually a strong picture in its own right. It’s also unusual in that the original film is not the sort of proven, marketable commodity that generally inspires (if that’s the word) the urge to remake: Fingers was a box-office flop in the United States, and although it attracted some critical enthusiasm in France, it quickly, Mr. Audiard says, ‘fell into a kind of purgatory’ – largely forgotten and rarely revived. And it’s practically unheard of for a French filmmaker to redo an American movie. Even the auteurs of the French New Wave maintained a reverential, hands-off attitude toward the work of their Hollywood idols; they contented themselves with homages, fleeting evocations of the manner, rather than the matter, of the movies they loved.” (New York Times )

Homes of Calif. Lawmaker, Defense Contractor Raided: “Federal agents investigating the relationship between Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham and a defense contractor searched the congressman’s California home and the contractor’s home and yacht, the U.S. Attorney’s office said on Saturday.

Skip to next paragraph Reuters

Channing Phillips, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, declined comment on whether any materials were seized in Friday’s raids, saying that the search warrants were under seal.

The Internal Revenue Service, the Pentagon’s Defense Criminal Investigative Service and the FBI have joined the U.S. Attorney’s office in the investigation of Cunningham and Mitchell Wade, who until recently was chief executive of MZM, a Washington-based government contractor that provides highly classified intelligence work for the Pentagon.

The investigation began after news reports that Wade had purchased Cunningham’s home in Del Mar, California, in late 2003 for more than $1.6 million and then sold it months later at a loss of $700,000. Cunningham also was living rent-free on Wade’s boat at the Capital Yacht Club on the Potomac River.” (New York Times )

Junk Faxes To Become Legal Again? “Congress is about to do for junk faxes what they recently did for spam: Make it LEGAL as long as a qualified advertiser puts an ‘opt out’ notice on the faxes!

They call it the Junk Fax Prevention Act, but as you can see from the bill text and testimony at the link at the bottom of this page, it will do just the opposite… it will legalize the sending of junk faxes from qualifying advertisers.

The way they are doing this is to allow unlimited faxing of ads (until you get sick enough of it to complain and your complaint meets certain requirements) if you have an ‘Existing Business Relationship,’ but the definition of an EBR is so loose that it will be trivial for junk faxers to establish an EBR with virtually any business or consumer. A spammer can establish an EBR with your company just by visiting your website, calling your phone, or sending an email (provided someone replies, even an auto-responder). That gives them the right to LEGALLY send advertising to your fax machine.

Not only that, the current bill creates a never-ending EBR, so they can junkfax you forever until you opt out. So someone who spoke with you 20 years ago can legally send you junk faxes as soon as this bill passes. And, like spam, once you’ve opted out, you’ve just proven that it’s a real fax number and you look at your faxes…now your number is more valuable to sell to others.” (The J-Walk Blog )

“BitTorrent and its creator, Bram Cohen, should be just fine. Some services that use BitTorrent to promote infringing file sharing for commercial gain, like the now defunct Suprnova.org, are most likely in trouble. The difference in results points to one fortunate aspect of today’s decision. The Court’s holding focuses on “bad actors,” not “bad technology.”” — Mark Schultz, Assistant Professor, Southern Illinois School of Law (Eric Goldman’s Technology and Marketing Law Blog)

Relax and let a flip-book do the screaming: “Road Rage Cards™ is just what you need if you really want to make a statement.

The printing is large and easy to read from a distance. The cards are tabbed and arranged by topic, so you can find the right message fast.

The book includes a variety of uncensored and censored messages (for those with slightly smaller balls). We’ve included a message for just about every annoying driver you’ll encounter (43 messages in all), and we’ve also included some blank pages for you to write your own messages!”

“Make a ‘SORRY’ Sign: According to a regional survey conducted by Drs. Arnold P. Nerenberg and R. Jerry Adams, over half of drivers in the USA suffer from road rage. The average number of incidents per road rager is 27. That means that most of us will encounter road ragers many times in our lives. Road rage can lead to injuries or even death. The U.S. Highway Safety Office has testified to Congress that tens of thousands of accidents each year can be linked directly to aggressive driving, including road rage, and is now a leading cause of death for young children.

A road rager can become upset because you accidentally cut in front of him or her, or other reasons that were not intentional. A key factor in reversing the process is an apology. Over 85 percent of road ragers said that they would drop the matter if the other ‘careless’ driver simply apologized. Instead, road ragers claim, the ‘careless’ driver seems to be unconcerned about what they just did and, therefore, needs to be taught a lesson. In a car, only one method is effective in conveying an apology: A sign.”

“On the 4th of July, a NASA spacecraft will blast a hole in Comet Tempel 1. For the last five billion years of our planet’s violent history, Earth has been walloped by comets. These small bodies and their asteroid cousins whacked Earth often in its early years, knocking the stuffing out of our young world. As the solar system matured, impacts happened less often—but they have never ceased. Earth bears its scars in the form of weathered craters and extinct species.

This 4th of July is payback time. For the first time in history, Earth gets to strike back. The weapon: a NASA spacecraft named Deep Impact. The target: a 10-mile wide comet named Tempel 1.

Deep Impact is going to shoot an 820-pound projectile into the rocky, icy nucleus of Comet Tempel 1. The 23,000 mph collision will form a big crater, and Deep impact will observe the stages of its development, how deep it gets and how wide it becomes. Researchers expect a plume of gas and dust to spray out of the crater. Deep Impact will measure its composition and record what the billowing plume does to the comet’s atmosphere. In all, Deep Impact should be able to peer into the new crater for almost 15 minutes before the craft speeds away, continuing, like its cometary quarry, to orbit forever around the Sun.” (NASA)

“When Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 split after being catastrophically disrupted in July 1992, it remained pretty bright for several months, fading considerably about a year after the split. This impact will not be nearly as disruptive, so my guess is that it will continue to brighten for a day or so, then fade over the next several weeks. But since this type of experiment has never been done, we really do not know.”

“Now that Time Inc. has turned over documents to federal court, presumably revealing who its reporter, Matt Cooper, identified as his source in the Valerie Plame/CIA case, speculation runs rampant on the name of that source, and what might happen to him or her. Friday night, on the syndicated McLaughlin Group political talk show, Lawrence O’Donnell, senior MSNBC political analyst, claimed to know that name–and it is, according to him, top White House mastermind Karl Rove.” (Editor & Publisher)

“Sandra Day O’Connor, a widely respected and moderate justice, has resigned from the Supreme Court. Now, in anywhere from a few hours to a few days President Bush will nominate a replacement—and what happens next will either destroy or protect our most basic rights for decades to come. This is an absolutely critical moment for our senators to hear directly from the people—and our message is clear: PROTECT OUR RIGHTS!

We’ve launched an urgent petition to take your voice straight to your senators in this critical time to show Congress, the president and the media that the American people are engaged and ready to fight for our rights. Please sign today.” (MoveOn)

“On Wednesday, Steven Spielberg’s apocalyptic thriller War of the Worlds invaded movie theaters worldwide. But the director had already moved on. That night in Malta, Mr. Spielberg quietly began filming the most politically charged project he has yet attempted: the tale of a secret Mossad hit squad ordered to assassinate Palestinian terrorists after the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.” (New York Times )

“Hurricanes can trigger swarms of weak earthquakes and even set the Earth vibrating, according to the first study of such effects.” (New Scientist)

“His philosophy inspired a generation, then drifted out of fashion. Now, 100 years after his birth, the life and work of Jean-Paul Sartre are once again highly relevant – and bitterly controversial.” (Independent.UK)

“Some people think we are witnessing an autism epidemic. However, according to a new report published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, there are three good reasons not to believe in this so-called epidemic.” (American Psychological Association)

“It turns out that mothers were giving sound advice when they told their children to avoid swimming right after eating, but not for the reasons they thought.” (MedPage)

“It may be easy to dismiss Tom Cruise’s recent outbursts against psychiatry as the ravings of an egomaniacal celebrity. Comedians have certainly had a field day with Cruise, a fervent disciple of the Church of S*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*y, ever since he scolded Brooke Shields for taking prescribed medication to treat her postpartum depression and lectured Matt Lauer, host of the ‘Today’ show, that psychiatry was a ‘pseudoscience’ and antidepressant drugs were worthless because there is ‘no such thing as a chemical imbalance.’ ‘No?’ wisecracked Lewis Black on ‘The Daily Show,’ watching a video clip of Cruise berating Lauer, ‘Then what do you call what’s happening to you right now?’

But the Church of S*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*y’s war on psychiatry is no joke. For decades, s*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*ists have maintained that the very notion of mental illness is a fraud. They base this belief on the views of s*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*y founder L. Ron Hubbard, who proclaimed that psychiatry was an evil enterprise, a form of terrorism, and the cause of crime. Now, they’re attempting to enshrine their contempt for psychiatry in laws across the country. This is the last in a four-part series chronicling the suddenly higher profile of the Church of S*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*y.” (Salon)

Stranger than fiction: “L. Ron Hubbard’s ‘D*i*a*n*e*t*i*c*s’ is a fantastically dull, terribly written, crackpot rant — it’s also the founding text of s*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*y. So, what does it actually say? This is the second in a four-part series chronicling the suddenly higher profile of the Church of S*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*y.” (Salon)