Blog Heap of Links for the day 16 May 2009
Wars and Rumors
All the civilians who were trapped in Sri Lanka's northern war zone have escaped, military officials say. Army spokesman Brig Udaya Nanayakkara said some 50,000 ethnic Tamils had fled the area over the past three days. The military claims cannot be verified.
After more than 25 years, the civil war in Sri Lanka was over. The only question was whether it would end in an ordered fashion or a bloodbath.
Political Theater
Rick Strandlof, executive director of the Colorado Veterans Alliance and the man most colleagues knew as Rick Duncan, was front and center during the 2008 political campaigns in Colorado. ... Now, politicians are dealing with news that the man they believed to be a former Marine and war veteran wounded in Iraq by a roadside bomb, in fact, never served in the military — but did spend time in a mental hospital.
saying that she really meant only to criticize the Bush administration rather than career officials.
Digital Culture
We knew a Google outage had worldwide Internet impact, but do we know just how much? Here's an unsettling number to chew on over the weekend: the Google outage Thursday that brought down Google's search platform and many of its Web-based applications meant that 5 percent of Internet traffic went with it.
Repeal! Repeal! Repeal!
THE Obama administration's drug czar made news last week by saying he wanted to end all loose talk about a "war on drugs." "We're not at war with people in this country," said the czar, Gil Kerlikowske, who favors forcing people into treatment programs rather than jail cells. Here's a better idea — and one that will help the federal and state governments fill their coffers: Legalize drugs and then tax sales of them.
Spacecraft
Image of the solar transit of the International Space Station (ISS) and Space Shuttle Atlantis (50 minutes after undocking from the ISS, before return to Earth), taken from the area of Mamers (Normandie, France) on september 17th 2006 at 13h 38min 50s UT.
Being Human
This article is a list, including pictures, of the sixteen most horrific growths to appear on humans over the years