“Hundreds of people are thronging a hospital in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata to see a patient holding a piece of his own skull that fell off.

..[T]he skull’s inner covering and the membrane which helps produce bone was miraculously unaffected, allowing fresh bone to grow.” (Yahoo! News)

“Two former AT&T employees say the telecom giant has maintained a secret, highly secure room in St. Louis since 2002. Intelligence experts say it bears the earmarks of a National Security Agency operation.” (Salon)

The Newbie’s Guide to Detecting the NSA: “AT&T customers aren’t the only ones apparently being tapped. ‘Transit’ traffic originating with one ISP and destined for another is also being sniffed if it crosses AT&T’s network. Ironically, because the taps are installed at the point at which that network connects to the rest of the world, the safest web surfers are AT&T subscribers visiting websites hosted on AT&T’s network. Their traffic doesn’t pass through the splitters.

With that in mind, here’s the 27B Stroke 6 guide to detecting if your traffic is being funneled into the secret room on San Francisco’s Folsom street.” (Wired)

Greg Palast writes about how Iraq was the twilight of the neo-cons: “Wolfowitz and his neo-con clique— bookish, foolish, vainglorious—had their asses kicked utterly, finally, and convincingly by the powers of petroleum, the Houston-Riyadh Big Oil axis.

Between the neo-cons and Big Oil, it wasn’t much of a contest. The end-game was crushing, final. The Israelites had lost again in the land of Babylon. And to make certain the arriviste neo-cons got the point, public punishment was exacted, from exile to demotion to banishment. In January 2005, neo-con pointman Douglas Feith resigned from the Defense Department; his assistant Larry Franklin later was busted for passing documents to pro-Israel lobbyists. The State Department’s knuckle-dragging enforcer of neo-con orthodoxies, John Bolton, was booted from Washington to New York to the powerless post of U.N. Ambassador.

Finally, on March 16, 2005, second anniversary of the invasion, neo-con leader of the pack Wolfowitz was cast out of the Pentagon war room and tossed into the World Bank, moving from the testosterone-powered, war-making decision center to the lending office for Bangladeshi chicken farmers. “The realists,” crowed the triumphant editor of the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, “have defeated the fantasists!”

So much for the Big Zionist Conspiracy that supposedly directed this war. A half- dozen confused Jews, wandering in the policy desert a long distance from mainstream Jewish views, armed only with Leo Strauss’ silly aphorisms, were no match for Texas oil majors and OPEC potentates with a combined throw weight of half a trillion barrels of oil. ” (Tikkun via TCRNews, thanks to walker)

An ‘Ask MetaFilter’ thread: “What are some catchy, popular songs that have a tempo of about 100 beats per minute? Why is this health-related?

I help teach CPR (specifically ACLS and BLS for those in the know) at the medical school where I work. The latest (2005) American Heart Association guidelines specify a rate of 100 compressions/minute when doing CPR on all patients. One of the most effective ways to accomplish this is to do compressions while humming to the beat of a familiar song. One good choice is ‘Another One Bites The Dust’; however, given the emerging practice of having family members present during resuscitation, it might be inappropriate at times. ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ is another song with a similar tempo that might also be inappropriate at times. So what are some other songs with this tempo that people delivering CPR can use to pace their compressions? The best answers will find their way into our training.”

“…[T]he dates that truly made a difference aren’t always the ones we know by heart; frequently, they’ve languished in dusty oblivion. The 10 days that follow — obscure as some are — changed American history. (In some cases, they are notable for what didn’t happen rather than what did.)” (New York Times )

Soon to be a thing of the past? “For the first time, the U.S. Mint has said pennies are costing more than 1 cent to make this year, thanks to higher metal prices. ‘The penny is going to disappear soon unless something changes in the economics of commodities,’ says Robert Hoge, an expert on North American coins at The American Numismatic Society.” (Yahoo! News)