US Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Elizabeth Jones was asked to comment on Gingrich’s recent harsh criticism of her department’s Middle East diplomacy.

Gingrich called on Tuesday for dramatic change at the State Department, which he accused of backing Middle East dictators and undermining the policies of President George W. Bush… AFP/Yahoo! News [via truthout]

N Korea talks over: Powell

“They should not leave this series of discussions that have been held in Beijing with the slightest impression that the United States and its partners and the nations in the region will be intimidated by bellicose statements or by threats or actions they think might get them more attention or might force us to make a concession that we would not otherwise make,” he said. news.com.au (Need I translate? Only the U.S. is permitted to attempt to intimidate with such bellicose threats, since we’re the only superpower.)

No weapons detected at 80 sites on top 100 list: “…And the White House appeared to be trying to scale back expectations that weapons of mass destruction will be found.” Star-Ledger (Newark)

Annan Labels Coalition ‘Occupying Force’: ‘U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called Thursday on the U.S.-led coalition to respect international law as the “occupying power” in Iraq, drawing immediate ire from U.S. officials.

“I hope the coalition will set an example by making clear that they intend to act strictly within the rules” governing occupations, Annan told the U.N. Human Rights Commission.’ Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Corporate Vultures Swoop Into the Killing Fields: “Iraq is going to hell. Shiites are killing Sunnis, Kurds are killing Arabs and Islamists are killing secular Baathists. Baghdad, the cradle of human civilization, has been left to looters and rapists. As in Beirut during the ’70s, neighborhood zones are separated by checkpoints manned by armed tribesmen. The war has, however, managed to unite Iraqis in one respect: everyone loathes the United States.” — Ted Rail

Programmers can stop Internet worms. Will they?

Building a brick wall for worms seems like an obvious improvement, but to make it work, de Raadt’s team had to rethink the entire way the operating system allocates and uses memory. It changes the way programs are compiled, and it slows down the computer’s performance (by only a few percentage points, de Raadt claims). Worst of all, it requires other techies to rewrite parts of mission-critical applications, update operating systems, and possibly reinstall the operating system on every one of their company’s computers in order to put the fix into place.

Such an upgrade could cost thousands of dollars for a small company, millions for a big one. Not to mention that any engineer knows that fixing one bug can introduce another, and “don’t break my applications” is an IT manager’s prime directive. That’s why no one’s bothered to stop buffer overflows—not even as an option—for the past 15 years. But the cost of refusing the cure keeps getting higher. In 1988, the Morris worm knocked out only a few geek enclaves. This past January, Slammer grounded airline flights, put 911 callers on hold, and shut down 900 computers at the Department of Defense.

That kind of threat led the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to underwrite a $2.3 million grant to OpenBSD in 2001 as part of a search for crack-proof computers. But DARPA withdrew its funding last week, allegedly because of an interview with the Globe and Mail in which de Raadt veered from explaining his team’s new code to call the war in Iraq an oil grab. Slate

“…(T)he political crisis that erupted in China this week—the sacking of two officials for covering up the extent of SARS, the government’s admission that it had mismanaged the emergency, and its subsequent apology for doing so—taught China-watchers two lessons about Hu Jintao: He controls more of the Chinese Communist Party than many had previously believed, and he controls less of China than you may have thought.” Slate

Is it ‘the real thing’?

A Derbyshire company is launching a range of “Muslim-friendly” drinks as part of a backlash against American brands including Coca-Cola.

The Qibla Cola Company claims its products are an alternative for people who “reject injustice and exploitation” and as a means of protesting against what it calls the “colonial” administration of President Bush.

Its decision to launch a range of drinks comes months after a French company launched Mecca Cola in a bid to cash in on anti-US sentiment among Muslims. Guardian/UK

“As Iraqi Shiite demands for a dominant role in Iraq’s future mount, Bush administration officials say they underestimated the Shiites’ organizational strength and are unprepared to prevent the rise of an anti-American, Islamic fundamentalist government in the country.” Washington Post

“Sometimes the Sun’s magnetic field goes haywire and the effects are felt

right here on Earth. Using a supercomputer and data from NASA’s Ulysses

spacecraft, scientists are beginning to understand a curious event two

years ago when the Sun sprouted two north poles.” NASA

“Julie Bargmann’s on a mission: Can a tough girl from New Jersey teach the EPA how to make Superfund sites live and breathe again?” Metropolis

Junko Chodos: “In a society that does not allow for the existence of individuality, the effort to become an individual invites persecution. Although this sort of persecution is not as visible as political persecution it is nevertheless fatal to one’s spiritual being, so the persecuted person becomes an exile. One usually goes into this sort of exile only after a sustained battle against the cultural system in which one’s whole life is wrapped up. The battle is painful. Wounded and bleeding, one becomes an exile. These people I call “spiritual refugees”; I consider myself one of them.” CrossCurrents

A Security Strategy Doomed to Failure: “Whatever the merits of the case for war against Iraq, the terms of debate about the Bush administration’s larger strategy are flawed. The new emphasis on WMD has not been accompanied by any serious public discussion of the differences among such weapons. A security strategy that fails to acknowledge those differences and their consequences for U.S. foreign and military policies is doomed to failure—in Iraq and elsewhere.” — Owen R. Cote, Jr., Boston Review

Also: Stakes high for White House in arms search: Too early for criticism, administration insists. DenverPost In other words: ‘Just you wait.’ I have said repeatedly that, if clandestine arms are found, the sociopathic dysadministration will announce their ‘discovery’ when it is coincidentally most politically opportune to deflect mounting denunciation.

“Isn’t more information always better?” asks Gerd Gigerenzer.

…Gigerenzer provides an alternative to the view of the mind as a cognitive optimizer, and also to its mirror image, the mind as a cognitive miser. The fact that people ignore information has been often mistaken as a form of irrationality, and shelves are filled with books that explain how people routinely commit cognitive fallacies. In seven years of research, he, and his research team at Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, have worked out what he believes is a viable alternative: the study of fast and frugal decision-making, that is, the study of smart heuristics people actually use to make good decisions. In order to make good decisions in an uncertain world, one sometimes has to ignore information. The art is knowing what one doesn’t have to know. The Edge

To this day, the authorities want us to believe that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold showed absolutely no signs of being violent before they and others unknown (and officially unacknowledged) committed the Columbine massacre, the bloodiest school shooting in US history.

We’ve already seen that just two months before the killings, Harris turned in a graphic short story about a massacre as a school assignment.

The three documents below are from Harris’ juvenile diversion file. They were sent to The Memory Hole by Randy Brown, a Columbine parent and a member of the Columbine Records Review Task Force. In them, Harris tells the authorities that he has homicidal and suicidal thoughts, and his parents reveal that their son has suicidal thoughts. The Memory Hole

Jazz great Nina Simone dies at 70: “Nina Simone, the jazz great whose rapsy, forceful voice helped define the civil rights movement, died Monday at her home in France, according to her U.S. booking agent. She was 70.

Though she remained a top concert draw in her later years, she was quite frail… At a 2001 concert at Carnegie Hall, she had to be helped to the stage, and was later seen sitting backstage in a wheelchair.” AP/Salon I listen all the time to a compilation CD I made from my scratchy Simone LPs on the very day I first learned how to burn CDs. From the joyousness of ‘Here Comes the Sun’ to the plodding, inexorable anguish of ‘Just Like a Woman’, Simone’s jazz chops were not at all trivialized by covering pop tunes, which coinhabit the Simone heights for me with ‘I Need a Little Sugar…’ and ‘Mississippi Goddamn’.

Also: Nina Simone: The End of an Era. BBC