CHINESE BLOGGER HAO WU has been released:

Hao Wu, an independent filmmaker and blogger arrested by Chinese police in February, was released from detention Tuesday, according to his sister Nina Wu.

“Thank you, everyone, for your concern, but he needs some silence for now,” his sister wrote on her personal blog, adding that updates on him would be posted later.

Mr. Wu was unavailable for comment, and the terms of his release and his degree of freedom remain unclear. A person close to the matter confirmed that Mr. Wu was at home with family in Beijing.

Well, that’s good news as far as it goes.

ANOTHER CASE OF BEING ARRESTED FOR VIDEOTAPING THE POLICE:

Undercover officers with the New Mexico Department of Public Safety that were out Saturday night trying to bust drunks leaving bars arrested three men for videotaping them. . . .

The men’s attorney Paul Kennedy told KRQE News 13 that they were videotaping on a public street and there is nothing illegal with what they did.

“Every citizen has a first amendment right to videotape public officers in the performance of their duties on public property and that’s all that was going on here,” said Kennedy.

Deputy Director of the Special Investigation Division Jim Plagens spoke with KRQE News 13 regarding the arrest.

“These three individuals were arrested for obstruction of the administration of the liquor control act. To comment any farther at this point, I think would be inappropriate,” said Plagens

Kennedy plans on filing an injunction in state court and a civil rights lawsuit.

I think it should pretty much always be legal to videotape the police, and I think that police who arrest people for videotaping them ought to lose their jobs.

U.S. NEWS REPORTS that gun control is a political loser. Democrats seem to have caught on to that.

THE SUNLIGHT FOUNDATION is now announcing mini grants:

The Sunlight Network, our affiliated advocacy group, is announcing today a series of “mini-grants,” in the $1,000 to $5,000 range, for local or regional nonprofit organizations and non-affiliated groups that have innovative approaches to strengthening the relationship between Members of Congress and the citizens they represent. (Note that the website for the Sunlight Network is not yet live.)

We are particularly encouraging applications from existing small nonprofits, local or regional chapters of national organizations and groups of individuals. Grants are available to augment existing projects or to jumpstart new ones. Grants will be made available on a rolling basis starting July 15. Sunlight believes that open, honest, sincere representation is possible, and that engaged citizens can make it happen. These are grants designed to stimulate your action!

Follow the link for more information.

ADVICE TO BLOGGERS from Sister Toldjah. I’ve been getting requests to do a post like this myself lately, but I think this fills the bill as is.

UPDATE: More tips — plus links to lots of other blogging-tip posts — here.

BLASTS HIT COMMUTER TRAINS IN MUMBAI: Follow the link for a big roundup from Pajamas Media. It’s being continuously updated.

UPDATE: Indian blogger / journalist Amit Varma has much more. And here’s a new group blog devoted to the topic.

Hugh Hewitt:

Those killers and their allies would gladly deliver the same destruction on American trains, planes and in American buildings.

That they have not been able to do so within our borders since 9/11 is because of the success of law enforcement and intelligence agencies, a record made more difficult to maintain with every press revelation of methods and sources.

He seems pretty angry. [What do you expect from a “nutty but lovable crank?” — Ed.]

ANOTHER UPDATE: Daniel Berczik has heard from his daughter in Mumbai:

Caitlin is in Bombay. I have just spoken to her. She is reporting that the scene is in chaos and that there is She is making her way to her friend’s house where she is staying, but has become separated from him. She sounds okay, but rather shook up.

I can imagine. [LATER: Note that text messages are getting through where cellphone calls aren’t. This is common in disasters, and worth remembering.] And Gateway Pundit has photos and video.

More from Pratyush Khaitan. Plus, Bob Owens finds a moment of honesty.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Bill Roggio has more on Mumbai, including maps.

And Chester has poetry and questions.

MORE: Here’s a big roundup from Indian blog Varnam.

ANN ALTHOUSE HAS MORE on 9/11 denialist Kevin Barrett.

THE INSTA-DAUGHTER IS READING the All of a Kind Family books, and she just finished Madeline L’Engle’s Meet the Austins. Like the Henry Reed books I mentioned earlier, some of these are available new, and some are only available used. It’s been very cool, though, to be able to get these things used over the Internet, something that wasn’t possible until recently. I always hated ordering books via bookstores. She, of course, takes it for granted that any book she might want is readily available — and cheap — via the Internet. Why wouldn’t it be?

UGH: “Falling concrete slabs crushed a car inside one of the city’s troubled Big Dig tunnels, killing a woman and tying up traffic Tuesday with another shutdown in the massive building project that has become a central route through the city.”

UPDATE: More on the Big Dig’s problems, here.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Investor’s Business Daily says put the pork online:

Information is power, right? Transparency makes for good government, right? So why all the congressional foot-dragging over a bill to expose how our tax dollars are spent?

Sure, the question sort of answers itself. These are congressmen, after all, and even their party affiliation doesn’t curb their impulse to conceal as best they can all the grants and contracts for which their constituents ultimately must pay.

Unless you’re a maverick such as Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn. He’s pushing a bill to create a database where taxpayers, using popular search engines from home PCs, can easily find which companies and which nonprofits have been awarded their money.

Read the whole thing. I’m for it! (Via NewsBeat1).

UPDATE: A journalist reader who (tellingly) requests anonymity emails on the novelty of Coburn’s amendment:

It would highlight all the pork that sneaks out asgrants to non-profits, advocacy groups and professionals. That’s novel, because nearly all previous media discussions of pork focused on the pork delivered to industry via obvious, signed, published, announced contracts.

Coburn’s amendment is particularly noxious because it allows much easier oversight of the pork handed out to our peers, our fellow professionals, not those distasteful businessmen working in weapons companies, the road-building industry, etc. Our professional pork includes grants for diversity training, anti-smoking campaigns, peace promotion, voter registration, ad nauseam. . . .

I’m guessing there will be less media support for this aspect.

PATRICK HYNES compares the states of the Republican and Democratic parties.

SOWING CELLS AND GROWING ORGANS:

The field of tissue engineering is large in this endeavor, with researchers like Dr. Atala exploring a basic approach. To repair or replace parts, they seed a biodegradable scaffold with cells and insert it into the body, where the cells, if all goes smoothly, mature into functioning tissue. . . .

In the long term, the scientists hope, patients may no longer have to wait on the national transplant list “for someone to die so they can live,” as Dr. Atala puts it. Organs could be tailor-made for people.

A more immediate goal is to improve upon a multitude of smaller therapies: transplantable valves for ailing hearts, cell-and-gel preparations for crushed nerves, injections of skeletal muscle cells for urinary continence or new salivary gland tissue to rescue radiation patients from dry mouth.

“The reason this technology works: It’s not really surgery,” Dr. Atala said. “We’re just priming the pump” by putting the appropriate cells into the appropriate place and asking the body to do the rest.

Bring it on.

“SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FRISCH:” Protein Wisdom is back up, and Jeff Goldstein gets a good line out of it.

PAMELA HAS PHOTOS AND VIDEO from yesterday’s protest at The New York Times over leaking of national security secrets.

UPDATE: Here’s a report from the New York Sun, and here’s a roundup of coverage from CBS Public Eye.

It’s amusing to see Bill Keller dismissing this as political — as if all the other protests that the NYT itself covers don’t have a political agenda, too.

MICKEY KAUS mocks self-referential bloggers.

UNSCAM UPDATE: Claudia Rosett continues to blog on the Tongsun Park trial. Excerpt:

Today, yet another witness testified about yet more cash. This time it was $100,000, not in an envelope, not in a bag, not in a sack, and definitely not in anyone’s underwear — but this time in a “small, medium-sized suitcase.”

The extent to which corruption is an ordinary part of international-organization business hasn’t gotten nearly the attention it deserves.

GOOD NEWS / BAD NEWS: Good news — Bush looks like he’ll finally veto a bill.

Bad news: It’s a stem-cell research bill.

PHOTOS from the “Free Gilad” protest in front of the Syrian Mission in New York.

UPDATE: More pictures, and video, here.

A BIG LOSS FOR DENNIS HASTERT AND WILLIAM JEFFERSON:

WASHINGTON – An FBI raid on a Louisiana congressman’s Capitol Hill office was legal, a federal judge ruled Monday.

Chief U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan said members of Congress are not above the law. He rejected requests from lawmakers and Democratic Rep. William Jefferson (news, bio, voting record) to return material seized by the FBI in a May 20-21 search of Jefferson’s office.

In a 28-page opinion, Hogan dismissed arguments that the first-ever raid on a congressman’s office violated the Constitution’s protections against intimidation of elected officials.

Jefferson’s theory of legislative privilege “would have the effect of converting every congressional office into a taxpayer-subsidized sanctuary for crime,” the judge said.

Indeed. (Via Ed Morrissey who has more.)

UPDATE: Another story here. Full opinion, worth reading, here.

MEXICAN ELECTION UPDATE: Michael Barone sees a NAFTA pattern.

John Fund says we could learn a lot from Mexican anti-fraud measures. And Dick Morris and Ellen Gann say it’s a defeat for Chavez and Castro.

IT’S THE 81ST ANNIVERSARY OF THE SCOPES TRIAL: Here’s an interesting roundup from Nick Gillespie at Hit & Run, including a Bewitched angle I didn’t know about.

For those interested in the subject, I recommend Ed Larson’s A Summer for the Gods. It’s a useful corrective if all you know comes from Inherit the Wind.

Plus, here’s a documentary film on the trial, featuring Larson, along with me, John Siegenthaler, Arthur Miller, and various others. You might also want to read this post from Jim Lindgren. And here are some Smithsonian photos of the trial.

NO GREAT LOSS: “Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, responsible for modern Russia’s worst terrorist attacks, was killed Monday when a dynamite-laden truck exploded in his convoy, Russian officials said. . . . Basayev, 41, was behind some of Russia’s worst terror attacks, including the seizure of a Moscow theater in 2002 in which dozens of hostages and militants died, the 2004 school hostage taking in Beslan that killed 331, and the seizure of about 1,000 hostages at a hospital in Budyonnovsk that killed about 100.”

To borrow a phrase from the BBC, may he rot in hell.

BILL HOBBS REMAINS UN-SILENCED.

WHY JOE LIEBERMAN must be defeated. “If the LeftNet cannot elect a candidate of its own choosing in a Democratic Primary in one of the most liberal states in the Union, then they can’t win elections, period.”

UPDATE: Marc Danizger writes in the Washington Examiner that he doesn’t like Lieberman, but that trying to get rid of him is a big mistake. “Why are the leading progressive blogs pushing so hard for something that will objectively set back their ostensible goal — Democratic victory in ’06 and ’08?”

LIKE ME, JASON COYNE WENT FROM A PASSAT TO A TOYOTA HYBRID: He got a Camry Hybrid and posts a blog review here.