U.S. NEWS has a covers story on problems with the Secret Service. That’s a theme that InstaPundit has sounded with some reqularity (Here’s an example). The story seems pretty good, though it doesn’t really address the increasingly thuggish behavior of Secret Service agents on the protective detail.

Any organization that receives little public scrutiny will inevitably become corrupt and inefficient.

WARP DRIVE: Reader Ray Heasman emails that it’s well on the way. Er, okay.

I’m, ahem, skeptical. But I’d love to be wrong.

THE SPOONS EXPERIENCE has some advice for spotting phony news reports. I hope it’s being read by Chinese newspaper editors everywhere. Er, well, everywhere in China, anyway.

THE LONG-LOST ASPARAGIRL has reappeared, with an x-rated explanation of what (or should I say who?) has been keeping her from from blogging these past weeks.

A CAR BOMBING AT THE U.S. CONSULATE IN KARACHI killed seven (not counting the bozo with the bomb) and injured 45. No Americans were killed, though. Al Qaeda is being blamed, as you might expect.

STILL MORE ON VENEZUELA from El Sur (and scroll from this post). The good news: the U.S. role is apparently being handled better. The bad news: a delegation from the Carter Center is on its way.

OOPS. My Sobran link below knocked the Midwest Conservative Journal offline for a while today due to bandwidth problems. He’s moving to a more reliable site: Blogspot! Well, compared to Tripod, it may be.

Christopher, call Stacy.

SUMAN PALIT has some thoughts on document management and nuclear war. A 12-year-old boy and NASA are involved, too.

BTW, I’m posting this via the home wireless network. A firmware upgrade in the wireless card fixed the laptop’s problem. The upstairs desktop still has issues, alas. But we’re working it, as Ken Layne would say.

THE SOUTH AFRICAN GOVERNMENT’S effort to seize control of the Internet in that country has been foiled. The goal was feared to be censorship, but the .za domain administrator has moved the primary zone file offshore. The folks on Slashdot seem (mostly) to think he’s a hero.

South Africa isn’t distinguishing itself in the cause of freedom lately — from its silence on Mugabe to Mbeki’s AIDS policy (or lack thereof) to Mandela’s suckup to Libya. And now this. Not very impressive.

UPDATE: Neither is this.

JOURNALISTS WRITING ABOUT WEBLOGS: read this.

ABDULLAH AL-MUHAJIR has had his habeas corpus petition denied — though pretty much the only quotes in this story come from his lawyer. It would be nice to know what the judge said.

Still, he’s had his day in court for the moment — more proceedings next week. So you can’t exactly say he’s being held incommunicado, or outside the law. Perhaps Volokh will have more observations later.

ALEX WHITLOCK admirably addresses a contradiction that I’ve often observed regarding teen mothers.

VENEZUELA UPDATE: Reader Jorge Schmidt forwards this Miami Herald article saying that Hugo Chavez is facing a “storm of coup threats” as “wary Venezuelans hoard food, guns.” He also sends this email report:

I just received an email from Venezuela that confirms today’s story in the Miami Herald. It also conveys the sense of unreality and imminent violence permeating the country. Here it is, translated and redacted to protect the identity of my correspondent:

“Dear [me], the stuffed animals arrived Tuesday. Yesterday I operated on the frog to make it look more like the old one, [baby] did not totally reject it, but also does not totally accept it. The elephant I will not operate because [baby] likes it like that, perhaps not to sleep with, but to relax with. I can’t tell you how much we appreciate you having sent them. Everything here is very tense, everything is expected, we live on the verge of a nervous breakdown, everyday we expect a military coup, it’s been discovered in the past weeks that the government has embezzeled around 11 billion bolivares . . . I don’t even know how many zeroes those are . . . so I have milk and diapers and [husband] and my dad are armed with various weapons and ammunition . . . the gun shops have run out of rifles . . . they seem like bakeries . . . well, I have to go, we’re closing for lunch.”

It seems more and more likely that there will be extreme violence down there soon. I should add that about a month ago, in the wake of the April 11 non-coup, government officials suggested that, in order to reduce tensions around the country, private ownership of firearms should be banned.

Sounds more like they should ban government ownership of firearms, especially after what happened during the last round of protests, but you tend to hear such noises out of a government that’s insecure, or that has tyrannical tendencies, or both. There’s more reportage over on El Sur.

TONY PIERCE OFFERS helpful math advice for flagburners.

MORE THOUGHTS on the McVeigh / Padilla connection.

FILE SHARING ISN’T HURTING THE MUSIC INDUSTRY — but this expert wonders why.

VERY COOL STORY BY NOAH SCHACHTMAN at Wired — it appears that we’ve discovered a planetary system like ours, a “mere” 41 light years away.

Well, it’s not clearly like ours, but it’s more like ours than others we’ve found. It does seem to be clear that planetary systems are common, which suggests that earthlike planets are likely to exist. Start working on that warp drive!

IF YOU’RE INTERESTED IN THE SUBJECT, YOU PROBABLY ALREADY KNOW, but Amy Welborn is giving the Dallas Bishops’ meeting saturation coverage, even to the calls for all the Bishops to resign. And Andrew Sullivan has an essay.

CYNTHIA MCKINNEY UPDATE: Bill Quick reports that Georgia Democrat Zell Miller is supporting Cynthia McKinney’s opponent.

THE VOLOKH CONSPIRACY is taking over, well, everything.

JOE SOBRAN GETS FACT-CHECKED to within an inch of his life.

IN CALIFORNIA, high government officials like Attorney General Bill Lockyer see prison rape as part of the official punishment process. But now there’s a move to do something about it.

I’M A KNIGHT OF THE LAW! Pardon me for a while — I’ll be out shopping for my golden spurs.

KRUGMAN WATCH: With Andrew Sullivan vacationing, others have stepped in, accusing Krugman of material nondisclosure.

CHARLES OLIVER LINKS to this article about Texas Senate candidate Ron Kirk’s alleged links to terrorism — or, more accurately, that claims:

U.S. Senate candidate Ron Kirk is employing an anti-Israel activist who has defended terrorist groups and is friends with American Taliban John Walker Lindh. The Review has also learned that Kirk has received numerous campaign donations from individuals linked with terrorism and anti-Semitism, one of whom also violated U.S. export laws by shipping sensitive technology to Libya and Syria.

I don’t know anything about The Austin Review and can’t vouch for it. Some of these charges sound unlikely, but then again, so did the notion of Caribou Coffee having links to the Muslim Brotherhood.

I know next to nothing about Kirk, other than that somebody doesn’t like him. His website shows that he has support from the Texas Democratic establishment, and his OpenSecrets record doesn’t show anything obviously odd (though individual donor names aren’t available).

It’s certainly possible to make too much of these things: in a six-degrees-of-separation world, nearly everyone can be found to have “links” of some sort, which is why I don’t like that word. If the Kirk allegations are true — or for that matter if they’re not — no doubt we’ll hear more on the subject soon.