Headline from today's NY Times: Fearing Virus, Alabama Quarantines Tractors.

Ariel Sharon's first act as prime minister will be to advocate the re-legalization of torture.

DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME: A Florida boy aged 14 is sentenced in Florida to life without parole for killing a 6-year old girl when he was 12, copying wrestling moves learned from tv. When you heard that a kid was sentenced to life, you did automatically assume that he was black, didn't you? Well, you'd be right. And I know this because another kid whose trial shouldn't have been televised was. Nobody seems to have asked Governor The Body for his opinion.

Next to that story on the front page of today's NY Times is the face of another kid, who was at one of those shot-up high schools, appeared on every talk show he could get on (his mother wouldn't allow him to talk to Geraldo or Larry King), and is
suffering from withdrawal of media attention three days later. If
you want to write a think-piece about the relationship between tv & violence, those 2 stories would seem to be related.

There is a Christian group here in California I believe called Snowflakes, whose job is to convince Christians to adopt embryos created for IVF but not used. Nice sense of proportion, guys.