COINCIDENCE? Slate reports that Qwest will restate its earnings, and the story is free of the annoying Qwest slide-over ad that has defaced so many Slate offerings of late. Hmm. Maybe they’re worried Qwest won’t be able to cover its bills?

WHO’S KILLING NONCOMBATANTS? Howard Fienberg looks at the numbers.

JOHN R. BRADLEY UPDATE: Bradley is the guy who wrote the Arab News piece that Salon’s Eric Boehlert touted as “nailing” James Taranto and Best of the Web. Joshua Trevino has been checking up on Bradley’s bona fides with the Lonely Planet people, for whom Bradley claimed to have written the Lonely Planet Guide to Saudi Arabia. Not exactly.

UPDATE: Don’t miss this lengthy discussion in which Bradley is participating over at the LGF website.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Oops. Bradley has cut and run, leaving behind a racial epithet for us to remember him by.

And we will. I wonder: can this be for real? Or is Bradley really a mole (CIA? Mossad?) tasked with discrediting the Arab News? If so: Great work, dude! You rock. I wonder if Boehlert’s in on the act? It sure went off smoothly. . . .

A GUIDE TO WRITING U.N. REPORTS, shocking zoning standards in the “international community,” and a firsthand account of the “Arab Street” — in Geneva. All on Innocents Abroad.

PIRATES OF THE 21ST CENTURY! James Rummel has some interesting information and links.

Er, and I should clarify that these are, you know, real pirates who kill people, rape people, steal ships, and so on — not just people who copy CDs onto their computers.

TONY ADRAGNA SAYS IT’S ROPE-A-DOPE on the Homeland Security bill, and Bush wins either way.

I hope the bill craters. It won’t do anything to stop terrorist attacks, just create another layer of congealing bureaucracy.

IS TAPPED REALLY ON HIATUS? Or is this the start of something more sinister?

MICKEY KAUS is responding to his critics, and matching their charity and restraint with his own.

N.Z. BEAR’S BLOGGING DYSTOPIA SET IN 2014 reminded me of this piece by Charles Dunlap on the American military’s “coup of 2012.” What makes Dunlap’s piece especially interesting is that it was published in Parameters, the journal of the Army War College. Dunlap once told me that publishing it had not been “career enhancing.” (He and I have never met, but we were both in the same issue of a law review once, and have maintained tenuous phone and email contact over the years.) But he’s the kind of guy you want in the military.

OKAY, TO OPEN AN EDITORIAL LIKE THIS TAKES CHUTZPAH:

Amid all the justifiable rejoicing over the rescue of the nine miners who had been trapped underground in a Pennsylvania coal mine, it’s worth asking what they were doing underground to begin with. And the answer to that question involves two names that wouldn’t ordinarily come to mind when it comes to mining coal: Senator Lieberman of Connecticut and a 30-year-old rock star named Kevin Richardson, a member of a group called the Backstreet Boys.

Don’t be silly. Those were the first names that came to my mind. . . .