A MILITARY COUP IN MAURITANIA: Gateway Pundit has a roundup.

UPDATE: Publius: “There are significant challenges that are posed to the Bush Doctrine by this situation.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s a blog post with an eyewitness account.

ORIN KERR looks at a John Roberts memo and observes: “It’s hard to read too much into this one memo, but to me it’s consistent with the idea that Roberts is less a committed political conservative than a committed judicial conservative of the Harlan/Frankfurter school.”

For lots more on Roberts, check out Patrick Ruffini’s ScotusWire, “an automated clipping service for the first blogged Supreme Court nomination in history.”

THIS WEEK’S GRAND ROUNDS is up!

GREG DJEREJIAN has thoughts on Euro-Jihadism and the response thereto.

And read this, too:

Let us be clear. Non-Muslims have obligations to their Muslim fellow citizens – to strive for equal opportunities for all, to accept the mainstream version of Islam as a part of society, and to reject the vile racism of the BNP and its like. But Muslims in turn have obligations: not simply to condemn terror, as one Labour MP put it, but to confront it.

And read these comments on the above.

There seem to be signs of change in Europe.

IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR A BLOGGER TO DONATE TO, consider Venomous Kate, who seems to have had a rather ugly accident.

TOM FRIEDMAN introduces some thinking that sounds familiar and welcome:

Mr. Rasiej wants to see New York follow Philadelphia, which decided it wouldn’t wait for private companies to provide connectivity to all. Instead, Philly made it a city-led project – like sewers and electricity. The whole city will be a “hot zone,” where any resident anywhere with a computer, cellphone or P.D.A. will have cheap high-speed Wi-Fi access to the Internet.

Mr. Rasiej argues that we can’t trust the telecom companies to make sure that everyone is connected because new technologies, like free Internet telephony, threaten their business models. “We can’t trust the traditional politicians to be the engines of change for how people connect to their government and each other,” he said. By the way, he added, “If New York City goes wireless, the whole country goes wireless.”

Mr. Rasiej is also promoting civic photo-blogging – having people use their cellphones to take pictures of potholes or crime, and then, using Google maps, e-mailing the pictures and precise locations to City Hall. . . .

“One elected official by himself can’t solve the problems of eight million people,” Mr. Rasiej argued, “but eight million people networked together can solve one city’s problems. They can spot and offer solutions better and faster than any bureaucrat. … The party that stakes out this new frontier will be the majority party in the 21st century. And the Democrats better understand something – their base right now is the most disconnected from the network.”

Indeed. I certainly agree.

I HAVEN’T BEEN ABLE TO WORK UP MUCH INTEREST in the Air America scandals, leaving that topic to those, like Michelle Malkin and Hugh Hewitt, who can. But Austin Bay has this bit right: If this were a right-wing radio network the Big Media would be all over the story.

TOM MAGUIRE OFFERS lots of Plame leads for enterprising journalists.

HERE’S A PODCAST INTERVIEW with Ray Kurzweil.

ARE THE BAD REVIEWS FOR CURRENT TV FAIR? “Maybe the techy methodology needs some time to kick in and work properly, so it might be unfair to judge them the way we would an ordinary TV show, where great effort would be put into making the debut show very strong. But they made the decision to draw attention to themselves before they started and they got the publicity they sought. They could have started small and built up their reputation slowly, but they wheeled out Al Gore, so they asked for it.”

Meanwhile, here’s someone who’s sticking up for F/X’s Over There.

MICHAEL YOUNG gives a failing grade to Juan Cole.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF EDUCATION is up!

IS SMALL THE NEW BIG? Sort of. My TechCentralStation column is up.

HERE’S THE LATEST INSTALLMENT in Noriko Takiguchi’s series on how to eat sushi.

Thanks to the large Japanese population around here (thanks to Denso, Matsushita, etc.) we have a lot of good sushi places, which fly their fish in from Japan and Hawaii. I’m happy to say that you can get excellent ceviche, too. I’m not so happy to say that the Insta-Daughter likes Toro, which is rather expensive.

I’M GLAD THAT SOMEBODY IS THINKING ABOUT THIS STUFF:

In the event of a flu pandemic or a bioterrorism attack, help could arrive via the U.S. mail or from the fire station down the street, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said Tuesday.

Leavitt, in an hour-long interview with Associated Press reporters and editors, said it’s clear that the system of delivering medicines in the United States is inadequate in the event of an emergency.

He said it was “in some ways an absolute certainty” that a flu pandemic would occur. “If it happens anywhere, there is risk everywhere,” he said. . . .

Leavitt said the federal government was looking to stockpile 20 million doses of a bird flu vaccine and another 20 million doses of Tamiflu, an antiviral medication to treat the disease.

I find this — and the thoughts about distribution — encouraging. (Via Michael Silence).

UPDATE: Reader Eric McErlain emails:

On your item this morning — the plans for the U.S. Post Office are more extensive than you might realize. About a year ago I was at a conference with an ex-NYC fire chief now working as a consultant with Giuliani’s firm. Aparrently, in case of any national disaster, the only organization with both national reach and enough vehicles to reach virtually every citizen is the postal service, and they are being factored into all sorts of preparedness planning.

Interesting.

APPARENTLY, they’re still smarting at The Guardian.

BLOGGER & JOURNALIST STEVEN VINCENT was murdered in Iraq. Tigerhawk has a roundup. More here. Vincent was the author of In The Red Zone: A Journey Into The Soul Of Iraq. Here’s his blog, of the same name.

IT’S A BLOG EXPLOSION:

The blogosphere is continuing to grow, with a weblog created every second, according to blog trackers Technorati. In its latest State of the Blogosphere report, it said the number of blogs it was tracking now stood at more than 14.2m blogs, up from 7.8m in March.

It suggests, on average, the number of blogs is doubling every five months.

Cool.

MICHAEL SILENCE would like some examples of hyperlocal blogging.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE:

Nanotechnology has been harnessed to kill cancer cells without harming healthy tissue. The technique works by inserting microscopic synthetic rods called carbon nanotubules into cancer cells.

When the rods are exposed to near-infra red light from a laser they heat up, killing the cell, while cells without rods are left unscathed.

Details of the Stanford University work are published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This report (reg. req’d) has more background, but notes that the results are rather preliminary:

One of Dai’s big challenges was to find a way to deliver the nanotubes to sick cells.

He knew that cancer cells have specific receptors. So his team coated the nanotubes with a certain kind of molecule, called folate, which latches onto folate receptors.

This strategy succeeded in delivering the folate-coated nanotubes inside cancer cells, bypassing the normal cells — like Trojan horses crossing the enemy line.

The approach is now being moved into animal trials. Dai and Dean Felsher, a researcher in the Stanford School of Medicine, have begun a collaboration using mice with lymphoma. The researchers hope to learn if shining a light on the animal’s skin will destroy lymphatic tumors, while leaving normal cells intact.

Let’s hope it works in animal trials. But there’s also this news:

A related approach is being attempted at Rice University in Houston. Jennifer West and her colleagues infused “nanoshells” into the bloodstreams of mice with cancer. The shells concentrated around the animals’ tumors. Then the team exposed the animals to a special light, causing the shells to heat up and cook the tumors but leave surrounding tissues unharmed. The immune system then eliminates the shells.

Months later, the animals were still cancer-free.

(Via Nanodot).

UPDATE: This is cool, too: targeted drug delivery to different parts of the body using nanotubes.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Oh, jeez, I’ve failed miserably in my duty to shill for the Foresight Institute. (Board members have that sort of a duty, right?) Anyway, here’s some news:

Foresight Nanotech Institute, the original organization in the nanotechnology field, has appointed commercial space flight pioneer, Dr. Peter Diamandis, CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation and CEO of Zero Gravity Corporation; venture capitalist and media expert, Ed Niehaus, Partner at Cypress Ventures; and nanotechnology leader and executive, James Von Ehr II, Founder and CEO of Zyvex Corporation, to its Board of Directors. All three will begin their term immediately.

I’ve known all three of them for years (Peter Diamandis for over ten years) and I think they’re a terrific addition to the Foresight Board, which is expanding along with Foresight itself.

HERE’S MORE on post-Garang developments in the Sudan.

INSTAWIFE UPDATE: The Insta-Wife saw her cardiologist today, and they did an EKG and downloaded the information from her ICD, which records its own EKG readings whenever her heart rhythms are funny. Turns out there wasn’t much recorded, because her heart rhythms are much, much better. That didn’t surprise me, because she’s been feeling much better, too.

That’s not because of the ICD. It will shock her heart out of a dangerous rhythm, or pace it out of one before shocking if it can, which is great, but that’s only after things go wrong. It’s because of the Tikosyn — a powerful and hard-to-prescribe anti-arrhythmic — which is dangerous enough in some people that you have to be hospitalized when you start it, but which has worked wonderfully for her, and without noticeable side effects after the first couple of weeks.

The drug has been a godsend for her, and I want to thank the folks at Pfizer for coming up with it. People are always bashing drug companies, but as I’ve written before, they do a lot more to improve people’s lives than most of the critics have ever done, or ever will do.

THIS IS GOOD NEWS:

An Air France passenger jet attempting to land at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport overran a runway by 200 meters Tuesday, bursting into flames and sending smoke billowing into the sky.

“There are no known fatalities” among the 297 people and 12 crew members who were on board, an airport spokesman said. About 14 people suffered minor injuries, said Steve Shaw, chairman of the Greater Toronto Airports Authority.

As they say: It’s a good idea to take a moment to look around the cabin and familiarize yourself with the location of the emergency exits nearest you.

UPDATE: All 309 Survive Plane Crash in Toronto.

TURNING TROLLS INTO A LUCRATIVE SOURCE OF REVENUE: Cathy Seipp is fining a commenter for idiocy.

PLAME UPDATE: Tom Maguire looks at the Judith Miller as source theory, and also notes gaps in the New York Times’ coverage.