Blog Heap of Links for the day 30 June 2009

Not a single American soldier was in sight. Gone, too, were the American helicopters whose buzz has for years defined Baghdad's background track. Left alone to protect the capital Tuesday were thousands of Iraqi troops and police manning checkpoints, with army tanks deployed at potential trouble spots and convoys of pickup trucks with machine guns roaming the streets.

Oklahoma State Rep. Sally Kern (R.) has proposed the "Oklahoma Citizen's Proclamation for Morality," an almost hilarious document but one that, nonetheless, deserves some scrutiny in the vicinity of the nation's capital; … [A long, boring, ill-parsed rant more sanguine than anything Kern produced by Laura Harrison-McBride, "DC Ethical Issues"]

A similar accident last week in Indiana crushed a pickup truck between two semis, killing a family of five.

China has indefinitely delayed enforcement of a requirement that PC makers preinstall Green Dam-Youth Escort software that experts believe would have screened not just Internet pornography but also some online political content.

Beijing postpones a requirement that PC makers preinstall Green Dam software for filtering Internet content. But it may be just a temporary reprieve. Read this blog post by Stephen Shankland on Politics and Law.

A Tulsa domestic dispute led to a chase involving a hatchet and one person being shot

Two former Tulsans, one of whom became caught up in the conspiracy theories swirling around the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, have been indicted in a 2004 Arizona bombing.... bombing was part of a wider conspiracy "to promote racial discord by destroying buildings, facilities and real property of both the government and businesses whose activities defendants believed conflicted with their goals."...

[10yo] Lindsey Baum, last seen walking from a friend's house six blocks away from her home in McCleary [Washington] Friday night,... [Mother] worried her daughter was kidnapped.... Lindsey has been upset over her parents' ongoing divorce and may have run away....

Family members have periodically called Althedia's phone number. At first, it was disconnected, but last weekend, something strange happened. "It rang five to six times and went to voicemail and said, you have reached Althedia Vaught, which is her name and it was her voice and she sounded real tired or drugged. We called back and a guy answered named David and he said he got the phone from Cricket and couldn't get that voicemail off there,"

Nearly all the victims, most of whom are female and younger than 19, reported eating raw cookie dough in the days before the onset of symptoms. Health officials still do not know how E. coli 0157, a bacterium that lives in cattle intestines, ended up in a product that seems so unlikely to contain it.

Solomon Alexander McCorvey, 19, faces charges of trafficking illegal drugs and concealing proceeds of drug transactions... 136 tablets of what is thought to be "ecstasy" and methamphetamine...

I just love the old hometown and continue to write down my memories of the place.

Republicans are raising questions about why the EPA apparently dismissed an analyst's report questioning the science behind global warming.

New research challenges the widely held belief that teens underestimate the dangers associated with risky behaviors because they think they are invincible. The study found that adolescents who engaged in risky behaviors such as drug use, fighting, and unsafe sex were more likely to believe that they would die young than those who didn't.

The net is rich with specialized search services... we surveyed some 50 specialty search services and picked out our favorites...

In a bid to turn file sharing into a legal business opportunity, Swedish software company Global Gaming Factory X AB (GGF.SK) said Tuesday it is acquiring file sharing web site the Pirate Bay for 60 million Swedish kronor ($7.8 million).

The top U.S. military commander in Iraq on Tuesday accused Iran of continuing to support and train militants who are carrying out attacks, including most of the ones in Baghdad... made the comments just after the U.S. relinquished security for Baghdad and other urban areas to Iraqi forces...

ODOT admits the scope of the IDL construction project made signage for it a challenge - but they believe once everything is in place - drivers will be able to understand what's ahead.

32-year-old Shawnee man has died after saving 8-year-old girl from drowning at the Chickasaw National Recreation Area in Murray County.

Universal chargers for cell phones are a good start. How about simplifying the rest of our tech lives.

The device is considered part of a new category of gadgets called mobile Internet devices, or MIDs, which are designed to fit into the market between a mobile phone and a laptop or Netbook computer.