The US Dept. of Agriculture official guide: “Hijacking is extremely rare, but it does happen. It is well to consider how you should react if you end up being in the wrong place at the wrong time…”

If this is true, Jason Leopold of truthout has a scoop, in reporting that Fitzgerald told Rove attorneys he had 24 hours to get his affairs in order. As of this posting, any other references on the web to a Rove indictment are just citing Leopold. If Rove is served, can a Presidential pardon be far behind?

Update, also from Leopold:

Rove informs White House He Will Be Indicted: “Karl Rove told President Bush and Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, as well as a few other high level administration officials, within the last week that he will be indicted in the CIA leak case and will immediately resign his White House job when the special counsel publicly announces the charges against him, according to people knowledgeable about these discussions.” (truthout)

The Age [thanks to acm] takes an in-depth look at modafinil — the first eugeroic (“good wakefulness”) drug, which puts us on a new threshold in psychopharmacology. This drug promotes quiet wakefulness and seems to allow the body to get away with prolonged sleep deprivation seemingly without paying the price, and its enormous popularity makes the intended recipients — patients with medical conditions disturbing wakefulness, such as narcolepsy — a minute proportion of its actual users.

Although the ‘balance’ in the article consists of the comments of only one nay-sayer, I agree in finding it hard to understand how such a core biological necessity as restorative sleep, which has been rigidly conserved in evolution, can be cheated substantially without any biological or psychological consequences.

We think this medication is a dopamine reuptake blocker, but why it does not appear to induce the jangly tension that other dopaminergic stimulants such as the amphetamines do, why it does not induce tolerance (the need for larger and larger doses to produce the same effect over time) and dependency (a withdrawal reaction and rebound symptoms after it is stopped) with prolonged use, as do other dopaminergic drugs, is not at all clear. Of course, it has not been used long enough by a large enough number of people for us to be confident that its long term effects are already apparent. Yet, as the author puts it, we are too far down the path to the “24-hour society”, in which wakefulness is cool and sleep is not, to stop this juggernaut, its coming competitors and its flipside companions, the newer better sleep aids.

Targeting Myspace and social networking sites (CNET News ). Schools and libraries would have to render the sites inaccessible to minors under a new bill (backed by Dennis Hastert and so having a high likelihood of passage), the Deleting Online Predators Act. As Declan McCullagh points out, not only sites that let users create public “Web pages or profiles” but those that offer discussion boards, chat rooms or email services. It could target any weblog that allows public comments and discussion, for example.