MISSING 727 UPDATE: StrategyPage has more:

July 7, 2003: Following-up on the June 13 report about the missing Boeing 727-200, a British newspaper carried Canadian pilot Bob Strother’s report that the plane was spotted on June 28 in Guinea’s capital Conakry. It had been repainted and given the Guinean registration 3XGOM, but at least the last two letters of its former tail-number, N844AA, were still showing. The plane was reportedly now owned by a member of West Africa’s Lebanese business community, used to shuttle goods between Beirut and Conakry. Since being sighted, the plane has again taken off into the unknown.

However, there is growing doubt amongst Africa’s pilots that this Conakry Boeing is the same aircraft as the missing 727-200.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Reader Jeffrey Lindermann notes:

It seems to me that, with our president in Africa, the missing 727 takes on added importance. Since 9/11, we all know how planes can be used as weapons. I presume security is tight, but I hope Bush’s security patrol is watching the skies.

Tom Clancy, call your agent. Of course, Clancy has been right before. . . .

“MEET IRAN’S FUTURE LEADERS:” A column introducing figures in the anti-Mullah opposition that’s worth reading in light of tomorrow’s planned pro-freedom protests in Iran.

Question: will major media cover those, or will they bury the story in an Eason-Jordan-like move to stay friendly with the mullahs?

Meanwhile, on the pro-freedom front, here’s more on the Hong Kong marches.

HERE’S MUCH MORE on something that I mentioned briefly earlier: the way in which Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bodybuilding experience might relate to his campaign strategy.

THE UNITED NATIONS IS ON THE JOB IN CAMBODIA — and Mark Steyn is doing a job on the U.N.

I GUESS IT WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME UNTIL THIS HAPPENED:

A new three-minute tape surfaced today on the al-Jazeera network featuring the voice of a man purporting to be Osama bin Laden, who is heard disputing the authenticity of a recent tape purporting to be Saddam Hussein.

“Do not believe the deceiver,” the voice attributed to bin Laden says of the voice attributed to Saddam. “The deceiver is not to be believed, but rather, disbelieved.”

Heh.

CROOKED TIMBER is a new group blog featuring a number of bloggers you probably know well. Check it out.

JOHN KERRY DANCES, BUT PRO-HOWARD DEAN BLOGGERS ARE CALLING THE TUNE! Cross a blogger at your peril:

• Just how testy are relations between the supporters of dueling Democratic presidential candidates Howard Dean and John Kerry? Darned testy, it seems.

Yesterday Dean-loving Web-logger Scott Moore, proprietor of the Points West site (www.pointswest.blogspot.com), savaged the Massachusetts senator for running campaign advertising on the site of Democratic nemesis Matt Drudge, the political equivalent of Satan..

“This frightening couple: John Kerry and Matt Drudge. Ewwwww, ick ,” Moore wrote. “[A] candidate for the Dem nod giving this right-wing nutbag DOLLARS raised in the Dem Primary to post banner ads on Drudge Report? Heck, Kerry might as well buy Drudge a bow and arrow decorated with Donkey Feathers.”

Yesterday Kerry spokesman Chris Lehane told us that ad was mistakenly placed on Drudgereport.com by Google, which has a contract with the Kerry campaign to direct ads to various Web sites based on their editorial content and audience. Drudge has published a great many items about Kerry, but none has been particularly flattering. After our inquiry, the ad was pulled. “Now Google will not post ads on Web sites without our approval,” Lehane said.

Heh.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING ARTICLE ON LAW PROFESSOR JOSEPH OLSON, the architect of Minnesota’s new Personal Protection Act, which makes it far easier for law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns:

Olson found himself looking for a summer job before he started classes. He got one with the Office of Economic Opportunity in North Carolina, a “Great Society” welfare program intended to improve the lives of rural blacks.

“I discovered that there were people in bedsheets that wanted to kill me,” Olson said. “There you are driving your car with Missouri license plates down lonely country roads in rural North Carolina. This would have been 1967. And remember, (Michael) Schwerner and (Andrew) Goodman and (James) Chaney were killed in Mississippi just three years before. All of us knew their names and what had happened to them.”

Back at his office, he related his alarm at being followed by strangers, and his co-workers expressed surprise that he didn’t have a gun.

“And that’s how I got my first firearm,” Olson said. A co-worker gave him a pistol, and Olson put it in his pocket and later replaced it with one of his own. He wound up using it.

“Twice,” Olson recalled. “They’d pull up behind you, turn on their bright lights, get right up, 20, even 2 feet off your back bumper. I’d take it out, hold it up in front of the rearview mirror, and wave it back and forth. The lights would turn off, and the car would back off.”

I’ve heard similar stories from people who worked in the Civil Rights era. When former Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver (who was a year or two behind me in law school) came to speak at Tennessee, an elderly black minister in the audience used the question-and-answer period to sing the praises of the Second Amendment, which he said was essential to the survival of the civil rights movement. Many of my colleagues found this surprising, but I didn’t.

UPDATE: Read this, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Matt Rustler has more on guns and the civil rights movement.

WITH BUSH IN AFRICA, suddenly everyone cares about Africa. Well, better late than never, I guess.

So drop by the website of Ugandan band Afrigo, and listen to the song Today for Tomorrow, which is an ode to the virtues of privatization. And, heck, buy a couple of their CDs. They’ll appreciate it.

And they’ll make better use of your money more than Justin Timberlake will, I expect.

MICHAEL BARONE OBSERVES:

The Democrats’ problem is that at least 70 percent of voters do not share their contempt for Bush and find it off-putting. Outside a Bush fundraiser last week one protester’s sign read, “France was right.” That is not a winning slogan in an American election.

Not hardly. Karl Rove must be hoping for more of those signs.

IS HARRY POTTER THE Atlas Shrugged of the 21st Century? Or just libertarian propaganda?

THE VAGINA MONOLITHS:

Some researchers have claimed the stone circles were used as a giant computer; others that Stonehenge was an observatory for studying stars and predicting the seasons; and a few have even argued that its rings acted as a docking pad for alien spaceships.

Now a University of British Columbia researcher who has investigated the great prehistoric monument for several years has announced he has uncovered its true meaning: it is a giant fertility symbol, constructed in the shape of the female sexual organ.

I wonder what he’d make of this?

ON SODOMY AND LIBERTY: Over at GlennReynolds.com.

And speaking of MSNBC and sodomy, Michael Savage has been fired. I never caught either his TV or his radio shows, though I rather doubt I missed anything.

UPDATE: Robin Roberts notes:

I found him devoid of thought myself. But wasn’t the cancellation of Phil Donahue’s show called a huge act of censorship by many Democrats? I expect the double standard will go unnoticed.

Indeed. It’s not censorship in either case, of course, as Eugene Volokh points out.

In a related vein, Tim Blair notes a different contradiction on the part of those shouting “censorship:”

(Incidentally, the free speech advocates at the Sydney Morning Herald who are so furious at the Ken Park ban might ask their management why this site is blocked at their workplace. Do I have to show up at Balmain Town Hall and read to the poor journalists?)

Of course, the SMH bans access to Tim Blair because its staff would otherwise become too demoralized and humiliated to write. And we couldn’t have that.

JAMES MORROW WRITES that Bush’s Africa policy is confounding the left.

Sure looks like it to me.

UPDATE: The Kikuchiyo News thinks so, too. The photos are good.

HEH.

EUGENE VOLOKH ISN’T VERY IMPRESSED with one proposed justification for sodomy laws. Me either.

BIAS AT THE BBC? Check out these headlines.

CHIEF WIGGLES, blogging from Iraq, says that media coverage is far more negative than the reality.

Meanwhile LT Smash weighs in on President Bush’s “bring ’em on” statement.

A VERY INTERESTING POST ON COLLEGE PROFESSOR SALARIES now, and a hundred years ago, from Brad DeLong.

THE NAVY IS LOOKING INTO DISPOSABLE RAY GUNS — hey, where do I get one of those?

MARKETING ADVICE FOR STARBUCKS, from American Digest.

MICHAEL DEMMONS thinks he’s the first gay blogger to be legally married. Best wishes, Michael.

BUSH’S AFRICA POLICY IS GETTING PRAISE FROM UNLIKELY SOURCES: Richard Gere and Bob Geldof:

Even liberals have credited Mr. Bush with doing more than his predecessor to help Africa. In May, Live Aid founder Bob Geldof said Mr. Bush is far more committed than Mr. Clinton to fighting AIDS and famine on the continent.

“Clinton talked the talk and did diddly squat, whereas Bush doesn’t talk but does deliver,” said Mr. Geldof, an Irish musician and activist who in 1985 staged the world’s largest rock concert to combat starvation in Africa.

“You’ll think I’m off my trolley when I say this, but the Bush administration is the most radical, in a positive sense, in the approach to Africa since Kennedy,” he said.

In February actor Richard Gere lashed out against Mr. Clinton’s record during an AIDS benefit attended by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York Democrat.

“Senator Clinton, I’m sorry, your husband did nothing for AIDS for eight years,” Mr. Gere said from the podium, although Mrs. Clinton had left the room. Mr. Clinton later belittled Mr. Gere for the remark. . . .

Mr. Foote, of the Constituency for Africa, said the president’s trip will build on the accomplishments of Mr. Clinton.

“Clinton opened the door and broke some new ground when he went to Africa,” he said. “But in terms of the content, there wasn’t much delivered.

“While Clinton said, ‘Yes, in fact, Africa matters, and we ought to give it some thought, ‘ he really was playing to the African-American community,” he said. “When you say Africa matters, you’ve got to beef up the team, and he didn’t do that.”

“The Bush team looked at the continent, understood what they needed to do and did it,” he said. “I mean, that’s Bush’s hallmark; he sizes the situation up and then he’s ready to move.

“He’s handled it a lot more substantively,” Mr. Foote said. “Clinton gave us a bone, and Bush put some meat on the bone.”

It’s funny that Bush’s behavior here hasn’t gotten more attention from mainstream media. I guess it’s because it doesn’t fit the heartless-Republican stereotype.

WEBLOGS AS A WAY OF REDUCING EMAIL? Boy, it sure hasn’t worked that way for me. . . .

COMING SOON TO A CD NEAR YOU: Ed Driscoll writes on the Ronco Voice-o-matic and the future of pitch-correction in recording.