Tony Auth on the ICC

Beattie on vouchers

The NY Times has an article today about a web site called www.donorschoose.org.

It matches donors with NYC public school teachers who have projects they want to get help funding — class trips, art projects, etc. It’s a very cool idea.

Mr Topp’s bottom lands him in Greek police cell

At least for the economy, if not for sidewalk congestion due to slow-moving people.

Sales of the Fodor’s New York City guides, which are usually trounced by books about Italy and the Caribbean, now top the company’s 440-book list.

I read this after installing the newest Microsoft “security update” unfortunately. I’ve now agreed for Microsoft to connect to my machine and “fix” stuff whenever they feel like it.

If you caught our recent coverage of the Windows Media Player trio of security holes you may have followed a link to the TechNet download site for a patch, or you might have activated Windows Update. If you did the former (though, oddly, not if you did the latter), you would have been confronted with an End User License Agreement (EULA) stating, most ominously, that:

“You agree that in order to protect the integrity of content and software protected by digital rights management (‘Secure Content’), Microsoft may provide security related updates to the OS Components that will be automatically downloaded onto your computer. These security related updates may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and use other software on your computer. If we provide such a security update, we will use reasonable efforts to post notices on a web site explaining the update.”

Not so comforting, coming from a company that accidentaly distributed virus-infected software recently.

Great column by Arianna.

To the ever-growing mountain of evidence that corporate kingpins live in an entirely different world from the rest of us, we can add the latest revelations about the gargantuan loans CEOs receive from their companies: the $408 million WorldCom loaned to former boss Bernie Ebbers a month before thousands of employees began getting their pink slips, the $3.1 billion Adelphia Communications loaned to John Rigas and his kin, the $162 million Conseco loaned to Stephen Hilbert, the $88 million Tyco loaned to Dennis Kozlowski and the millions upon millions in less ostentatious — but no less outrageous — raids on company coffers by senior executives across the corporate landscape.</p>

…

WorldCom — which defaulted on $4.2 billion of its own loans yesterday — is charging Ebbers 2.3% on the $408 million he owes.</blockquote>

what search strings caused people to find your site, I give you:

Disturbing Search Requests

1. Boondocks comic strip
2. Pedophiles against gay rights

In Alabama this weekend:

An evangelist who was asked to sing at his wife’s uncle’s funeral claims he had a revelation from God that led him to insult mourners and say that the dead man was damned.

Orlando Bethel said he spoke words that “the Lord revealed to me.” Preaching over a microphone at the Greater Pine Grove Baptist Church, he told some 100 mourners they were “fornicators” and “whoremongers.” He said the deceased, Lish Devan Taylor, had gone to hell.