SYRIA IMPLICATED in death of Hariri:

A United Nations report that accuses Syrian and Lebanese officials of orchestrating an intricate plot to kill former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri is expected to bring a swift call for action from the UN Security Council. Reuters reports that both Syria and Lebanese President Emile Lahood are trying to distance themselves from the UN investigation.

Read the whole thing, and here’s the report.

UPDATE: Publius has much more:

The Mehlis report was released today, and it was the historic bombshell that everyone knew it would be. It implicated Syrian and Lebanese intelligence chiefs and military generals, all the way up to members of Assad’s family. The commission was also extended up until December in order to allow for further investigations into more recent developments and leads. And, speaking of those leads, Mehlis deleted the names of some of those suspected of conspiring in Hariri’s murder for reasons not yet known.

The unredacted report is here. Publius observes:

It makes for incredible reading. In fact, it reads like a spy/conspiracy novel, because that’s exactly what it is. A real life, high level conspiracy.

Exposed.

MORE: Read this, too:

The last-minute alterations made to the Detlev Mehlis report on the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri may have been made under pressure by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Israel Radio reported Friday afternoon.

A diplomatic source reported that Annan had an interest in removing the name of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s brother and brother-in-law, along with other important Syrian officials, from the list of suspects in the Hariri killing.

Assad’s brother and brother-in-law had previously been implicated in having involvement in the Hariri assassination.

Annan, according to speculations, was concerned that the harsh report could cause political instability in Syria, perhaps even leading to an overthrow of the Assad regime, and thus preferred a watered-down version of the report.

Oh, yeah, we wouldn’t want that. Are there any tyrants Annan won’t cover for?

ANDY BOWERS has a podcast roundup.

UPDATE: Here’s a podcast interview with Chris Peterson of the Foresight Institute regarding nanotechnology, etc.

YES, BLOGGING HAS BEEN LIGHT today. I’m on travel. Thank Verizon EVDO that I’m blogging at all!

Or curse ’em, whatever . . . .

TOM MAGUIRE: How covert was Valerie Plame?

A NOT-SO-MAGNIFICENT obsession?

LARRY KUDLOW:

The White House’s economic policy is drifting off course. . . . Why haven’t they come out in favor of the House GOP effort to increase mandatory spending cuts and seek a three-percent across the board discretionary cut as per Marsha Blackburn and others? It would get them $500 billion or $600 billion in 10-year savings estimates. Why didn’t the White House signal help for Senator Coburn’s “Bridge to Nowhere” pork-barrel spending cut?

Why, indeed? Here’s more reaction to the Coburn Amendment disgrace. (Via Andrew Roth, who also observes that: “Using 2005 numbers, by voting down the ‘Bridges’ amendment, the Senate let the country know that it was unwilling to defund 2 out of 13,997 pork projects today. That’s 0.0142887762 percent.”)

ORIN KERR offers more evidence of a Miers tipping point.

BILL STUNTZ looks at the upside of the Miers nomination. “Harriet Miers is to the Supreme Court what Dan Quayle was to the vice presidency: a sign of rising standards.”

SO WHEN I GO TO AMAZON I keep seeing ads for the Philips Heartstart Home Defibrillator, to the point where I’m wondering if they’re trying to tell me something. (It has to be me, as the Insta-Wife already has one built-in.) Now I’m also getting ads for this gadget.

Okay, actually I suspect that some sort of Amazon cookie-tracking, preference-establishing algorithm has figured out that we have someone in the household with heart issues. But it is a bit creepy, somehow.

There’s an article in the latest Popular Mechanics — not on their website yet — saying that the home defibrillators really do save lives. As they get cheaper and more ubiquitous, it’s likely to make a real difference. A lot more people die from sudden cardiac death, where a defibrillator will save them but nothing else much will, than is generally realized. Likewise, inexpensive blood pressure monitors mean that — since you don’t have to go to a doctor — more people will track their blood pressure. Just another way technology is empowering ordinary people.

UPDATE: Maybe they’re not as tricky as I thought. Ryan Kelley emails:

Hey Glenn. Amazon knows I’m 29, shop for athletic items on their site, and have never bought any medical supplies off Amazon and yet I get that ad almost everytime I visit. No way they’re keying on me off their demographic shopper models.

Amazon looks like they’re pushing it more then they pushed the Segway. Let’s hope this marketing push is more successful.

That surprises me — it doesn’t strike me as a mass-market item. But maybe it’ll at least save some lives.

LOADS OF AVIAN FLU STUFF at TCS, for those who are interested.

HURRICANE PREPAREDNESS IN CUBA: Some firsthand blog reporting, with photos.

THE BELMONT CLUB remembers Nuremberg and has thoughts on trying Saddam:

I wrote earlier that any trial of Saddam Hussein would automatically bring in recent history as a co-defendant. I guess that the “internationalists” feel they are the only ones with the moral authority to judge the former President of Iraq. To the question ‘what law applies’, their answer will be the ‘international law’ they have been at pains to construct. Any law but those of who at all events have disqualified themselves from the power of judgment by removing Saddam Hussein by force. Yet the “internationalists” cannot hold themselves entirely blameless. Implicit in Saddam’s trial is another question: ‘how did such a monster carry on for so long in the face of an international system that pretends to civilization’? And would Saddam, even now, be gassing Kurds and throwing living human beings into woodchippers if any but those whose moral qualifications are now doubted not acted against him?

Shooting Saddam on sight would have been fine with me, and the “internationalists” — who, often, were on Saddam’s payroll — hardly have standing to complain. But in fact Saddam is being tried by the Iraqi people, his longtime victims, and they have far more standing to do so than any international body whose chief moral claim is a longstanding history of ineffectualness.

IT’S THE SMELL OF TEXAS HOME COOKIN’ — and I don’t mean that beef stuff they pass off as barbecue.

UPDATE: The barbecue-related hatemail pours in: “The culinary delight that is Texas barbecue obviously exceeds your otherwise good taste. May your in-box overflow until you take those hateful words back.”

Actually, that beef stuff is pretty good. It’s just not, you know, actual barbecue.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Josh Wills emails:

You and I disagree on many things (though we were all on the same page with the Coburn amendment), but your affront against Texas barbecue cannot stand. I’m assuming you (mistakenly) believe that ham soaked in vinegar qualifies as “real” barbecue? I’ll be keeping an eye on you from my new blog, pulledporkbusters.blogspot.com.

No, that would be those North Carolina apostates. Real barbecue is pork (as reader David Ruddell writes: “If it ain’t pork, it ain’t barbecue. ‘Nuff said.”), but in a tomato-based sauce. Other approaches are amusing, and sometimes tasty, diversions, but they’re not barbecue.

MORE: Boy, the Texans are hopping mad. John Kluge emails:

Just because you hillbillies in Tennessee don’t have the money to raise cattle the way we do here in Texas, doesn’t mean you know how to barbeque. I grew up in Kansas City and have my share of time in Memphis and Chicago and used to be an apostate about barbeque until I moved to central Texas and saw the light. There is no piece of meat of any kind made in the world that can exceed a piece of brisket from the Kretz Market in Lockhart, Texas. They were making barbeque there when people in Tennessee were still living in trees and eating pig guts.

Ahem. First, there’s nothing wrong with chitterlings. Second, there wouldn’t be a Texas if it weren’t for Tennesseans, something all literate Texans realize, and give thanks for, every day.

Meanwhile, reader Brian Erst is advocating a big-tent approach:

Barbecue is a big tent, open to good people of all persuasions. Don’t you remember the 11th Commandment “Thou shalt not speak ill of barbecue”?

I should think that everyone in this great nation of ours can agree on the Holy Trinity of Barbecue – Smoke, Meat and Fat. Everything else is just the lovely melange of spice and tradition that makes regional America great. Claiming there is only one true ‘cue leads us further down the path of the strip malling of America. While I like the option of getting a consistent cup of joe at Starbucks, I’d be sad if the funky coffeehouse with Jazz on Saturday afternoons down the street closed shop because Starbucks was the only “true” coffee.

I come from a town that is sadly deficient in true barbecue (Chicago – they boil ribs!), so I own my own smoker and have made pork butt, ribs, brisket, chicken and more. I’ve made gallons of sauce, from tangy tomato-based ones, sharp vinegary ones, Asian-inspired sauces with blood orange and ginger and a dozen more. While I will always have a special place in my heart for slow smoked pork, covered in my secret rub and brushed with my favorite homemade sauce, I love all barbecue – because barbecue is what makes America great.

Perhaps I should make an across-the-nation barbecue tour, just out of fairness.

MORE: The Blogger Formerly Known As SKBubba emails:

There are three things you don’t discuss in casual conversation: politics, religion, and barbcue. But you are correct. Barbcue is pork. Pulled. With red sauce. That stuff in Texas is “roast beef.”

Indeed. Mike Hendrix is living proof!

ED MORRISSEY notes a flood of bad news for the Miers nomination, and suggests an escape route.

JAMES GLASSMAN:

Still, don’t expect much soon in the way of European economic transformation. This is the life they have chosen — one in which, they believe, the state relieves them of the stress of a market society. But the price is very high. Surveys show rampant European unhappiness and pessimism. European birth rates have fallen so sharply that populations are headed for steep declines. Why? Sadly, couples don’t place a high priority on bringing children into the paradise they’ve created.

But Europeans will have to find their own path. My concern is with Americans. Is it inevitable that, as we grow more prosperous, we will become more like Europe — losing initiative, insisting that our governments coddle us?

I worry that we are beginning to see the initial signs of just such a turn for the worse.

The good news is that people have been saying this for decades. The bad news is that to a significant degree they’ve been right.

JOHN FUND writes on the bizarre twists of the Miers nomination, while the WSJ editorializes that the White House is walking the nominee into a crossfire.

AMERICAN EXPRESS HIRES BLOGGERS: This is an interesting model.

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON IS STALKING TIM RUSSERT. Tom Maguire is helping.

Maguire also notes that more than a few reporters are still searching for a clue.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: This article in Salon on military nanotechnology is pretty good, though it shares the arms-controllers’ rather narcissistic view that America’s actions determine whether there will be a nanotechnology arms race or not. In fact, I think the Chinese, to name just one nation, will move as fast as they can regardless of what we do. Nanotechnology — offering an opportunity to unsettle a one-sided ratio of military power overnight — is likely to appeal more to a challenger like China.

What’s more, our experience with biowarfare illustrates that arms-control approaches can actually make things worse. That’s not to understate the problem — just to note that solutions aren’t simple.

UPDATE: On a less scary — but significant — note, there’s this report:

Researchers at Rice University have created a “nanocar” measuring just 4 x 3 nanometers. It is slightly wider than a strand of DNA — a human hair is about 80,000 nanometers thick. The car has a chassis, axles and a pivoting suspension. The wheels are buckyballs, spheres of pure carbon containing 60 atoms apiece.

So much for those who claimed that such precise nanoscale structures weren’t possible.

U.N. POINTING AT SYRIA over the Hariri assassination. Gateway Pundit has a roundup.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Here’s an interview with Sen. Tom Coburn regarding his anti-pork efforts, by Jed Babbin on Hugh Hewitt’s show. Here’s an excerpt, where he responds to Patty Murray’s threats:

JB: Well, does that bother you, Senator? I mean, are you worried so much about Oklahoma projects?

TC: No. I don’t ask for any projects. I ran on a platform of saying the biggest problem we face in our country is financial and economic, and cultural in Washington, that if we don’t change that, I promised you I will not earmark a thing until the budget is in surplus.

JB: Wow.

TC: So I don’t have any earmarks. So I don’t have any…you know, there’s no power over me to withhold earmarks, because I have none.

JB: Well, how tough is it going to be, though, to undo this culture of pork? I mean, the porksters are all around you. I mean, we’re not naming names, but you’re outnumbered there pretty solidly, so…

TC: Look, when the American people want things to change, they will change. Just as like in 1994, they changed?

I don’t think the Senate Republican leadership wants an 1994 rerun, now that they’re in the majority. Also scroll down or read this post.

UPDATE: Andrew Roth has a statement from Coburn and this update:

The Senate did accept three Coburn amendments. One amendment required that all earmarks be included in the bill’s conference report. This amendment helps lift the veil of secrecy that conceals the process of inserting special projects into appropriations bills. Similar amendments have been attached to the Agriculture, Military Construction and Department of Defense Appropriations bills.

Another amendment limits the amount HUD can spend on conferences to $3 million. Last year the Department spent $13.9 million on conferences.

The other Coburn amendment that was accepted requires the Community Development Block Grant Program run by HUD to cease violating a law that requires them report on their rate of improper payments.

The first of these is of some significance.

DAVE KOPEL DECLARES a major civil-rights victory in Congress.

WRITING UNDER A PSEUDONYM, one of my students won an award from Project Censored.

A MIERS TIPPING POINT? And scroll down for more.

FUNNY, HE DOESN’T LOOK NEO-CONISH.