MORE HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES IN SYRIA. Where’s Mary Robinson on this? Oh, right.

CHIRAC WANTS TO CUT TAXES, despite heavy opposition from the EU. See, I told you there was hope for France.

GRAY DAVIS SCANDAL UPDATE: This article from the Christian Science Monitor surveys Davis’s many fundraising scandals, and says it’s hurting him in the polls. He may wish he had the $10 million that he spent on anti-Riordan ads back now. . . .

A “DESPERATE” PAKISTAN IS READY TO NUKE INDIA, according to this article in The Times of India. This seems dubious to me, as (1) Pakistan’s nukes and delivery systems probably won’t work that well; and (2) India will annihilate Pakistan in such an event.

And who, exactly, is this desperate? Not Musharraf, who has nothing to gain from this. Perhaps some Ladenites in the Pakistani high command might desire this outcome for apocalyptic-dumb Ladenite reasons — but if Pakistan still has that many Ladenites in its high command, I’d be very surprised.

MEDPUNDIT HAS A lengthy discussion of smallpox vaccination, and more-or-less joins the call for mass vaccination on the grounds that the CDC’s “ring vaccination” approach won’t work in a biowar setting.

UPDATE: The dreaded Blogger Archive Bug has appeared. Just go to the main Medpundit location. Scroll down if necessary.

MICHAEL RUBINS SAYS that Mary Robinson should be investigated as a war criminal. He’s got the goods.

UPDATE: Reader William Sjostrom writes from Ireland with this observation:

In a decade in this country, I have endured countless smug lectures from Irish intellectuals on how much more reasonable their political system is than America’s. So, it gives me huge, immature, and vindictive pleasure to note that Sinn Fein, the closest thing Ireland has to a Nazi party (virulently nationalist, racist, although they deny that part, and anti-foreign, dedicated to the wildest dreams of socialism, and very big on using baseball bats on their opponents) got 6.5% of the first-preference votes, and 5 out of the 166 seats in the Irish parliament, in the Irish general election on Friday.

Perhaps someone can explain why the Wall Street Journal describes Sinn Fein as left-wing, whereas LePen is right wing.

I wait for Mary Robinson to denounce extremism in her own country.

Wait all you want, but don’t hold your breath while you do.

HMM. I TAKE BACK ALL MY CRITICISM of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy. New evidence has appeared to suggest that they’re clearly on the right track.

MICKEY KAUS JUMPS ON a blogger-inspired antiterrorist scheme.

ACCORDING TO THIS REPORT, Syria is pressing Hamas to step up suicide attacks. Hmm. Put them on the list for “regime change.” Oh, wait — they’re already there! Guess they’re not really our friends, huh?

THE HOLLINGS BILL gets criticized even by self-described copyright protectionist Roger Parloff:

I have frequently sided with the protectionists in the digital copyright showdowns to date. I thought Napster was illegal, for instance, and think the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which prohibits disseminating software designed to strip copy-protection off the files of copyrighted works) is sensible and constitutional. But certain lines must not be crossed in the quest to secure creators’ digitized intellectual property. Sen. Hollings’ bill transgresses those lines by a country mile.

Though my guess is that creators can adequately protect their digital wares without legislation of this sort, if events should prove me wrong, the Hollings legislation should still be defeated. If controlling digital property requires government intervention on this scale, then there should be no such control. Digital technology will have rebuffed the legal system’s attempts to tame it, anti-protectionists will have won the war, and it will be time for protectionists like me to raise the white flag. We can’t imperil everyone’s freedom and prosperity in a quixotic quest. The game has to end somewhere.

Indeed. (Via Overlawyered.Com).

THE ROBERT MUSIL / TED BARLOW FEUD continues apace. Here’s a link to the latest installment, which links back to the one before, and so on.

JUDGING BY HOW MANY OF THEM ARE SHOWING UP IN MY EMAIL, the Klez worm is still spreading. I get a couple of copies every time I check my email now, it seems. Norton catches it with no problem — though the new version won’t let me set it to autodelete this stuff, so I have to click on a button every time, which kind of sucks.

I’VE USED THE ANALOGY between blogs and 18th century coffeehouses when talking to reporters on several occasions, but none of them has seemed very interested in it. Doug Turnbull, however, has an excellent post on the subject.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT OVER THE WEEKEND, I had a link to a post by “Cranky Professor” Michael Tinkler that sheds some interesting light on the likelihoood that Michael Bellesiles’ claims are true.

JOSHUA CLAYBOURN has some interesting thoughts on why you should want SNL to stay as unfunny as possible.

SYLVIA HEWLETT’S BOOK “Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children” has gotten publicity all over the place, but it’s still not selling. Publicity is useful for selling books, in that it’s hard to sell them without it, but it’s what we lawyers call a “necessary but not sufficient condition.”

Why isn’t it selling? Apparently, women find it depressing.

UPDATE: Reader R.Z. German writes:

Maybe women aren’t reading it because they disagree with the data, the analysis and the conclusions.

One point that hit me & my 40-ish friends: Hewlett is still painting women as passive victims of society & corporate America. Absurd. The choices we all face are tough, and books that either serve to inspire guilt over choices we made or anxiety over choices to be made may not be what women (and men) want to read. My thoughtful friends recognize that decisions about career, family etc, were hard to make the, and are hard to change 20 years later, but that there is fulfillment, happiness, etc, in either path

(or a hybrid betwixt the two).

Yeah, there’s a whiff of 1987 about the whole enterprise, it’s true.