On Thursday October 27, 2005, Bouna Traore and Zyed Benna, French teenagers from the outskirts of Paris, were electrocuted while hiding from the Police in an electric substation. An official denial from the police was not enough to stop a night of rioting: the police spent the night clashing with groups of young people from the banlieue. That first night, 27 people were arrested. In the eleven nights since, the rioting has spread to more than thirty cities, from discontented community to discontented community all over France. Thousands of cars have been destroyed. Many public buildings have gone up in flames, including schools, stores, and police stations. More than one-thousand arrests have been made

And yet, the police are unable to control the rioters who, in a country where guns are illegal, shoot live ammunition at them. Every night, as the sun sets, France erupts in flames. In cities like Paris and Lyon, but also in smaller cities like Avignon, small communities like Valréas and Carpentras. Why is this happening? Why are rioters saying that it will not end until there are two dead cops?

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In defiance of court orders [1], the current U.S. administration refuses to release additional torture pictures and videos. The justification proffered is that the material on the photographs is so graphic that it would fuel additional hatred for the United States and put U.S. troops in harm's way.  However, one is inclined to suspect a larger political motive for their actions.

[1] Kate Zernike, "Government defies an order to give up Iraq abuse photos," New York Times, July 23, 2005.

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As reported by several sources, Bush has nominated John G. Roberts, Jr. to replace Sandra Day O'Connor as Associate Justice on the Supreme Court, the highest federal court in the United States.

While he's not as ardently conservative as some of Bush's previous judiciary nominees have been, his short case history leaves him cast in a slightly unpredictable light. He led the anti-trust case against Microsoft and supported the law criminalizing flag burning. He argued against Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that incepted the legality of abortion, but has publicly stated that the ruling is "the settled law of the land", and he won't try to change it because of his personal viewpoint. Other instances prove fairly odd, ranging from civil rights of 12-year-old girls with french fries in the subway to clergy-led prayer at public school graduations.

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`The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,' said the voice-over, `in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.'

William Gibson, Neuromancer - 1984

It was still very much a 300 baud universe when I jacked into Gibson's future for the first time. In 1984 there were very few systems I could connect to with the surplus CAE acoustic modem I had access to, and almost all of them were a forbidden long distance telephone call away. My borrowed deck suffered from sensory deprivation and just like a person, it hallucinated. It hallucinated games.

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A tale of a modern day soldier, killed in action. A hero to some, a enemy soldier to others, some words about the death of Pat Tillman.

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The Supreme Court of the State of New York of New York County¹ ruled yesterday that

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Already embattled with his ties to the Iraqi Oil for Food scandal, and what some term as the 'Food for Sex' scandal, Kofi Annan has dodged the latest bullet. Well, dodged only in the sense that specific allegations against him was removed at the last minute before passing.

The UN staff union passed a resolution sharply critical of the world body's senior management but expressed support for beleaguered Secretary General Kofi Annan.

An earlier draft of the resolution had strongly worded language about no confidence in senior staff of the United Nations, which has been buffeted by scandals over the past few months.

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There are some interesting, and telling, differences between the CNN translation of Osama bin Laden's speech, and Aljazeera's.

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Early in 2002, this website published an excellent article which documented the activity among the various ice shelves on the perimeter of the Antarctic. At that time, there had recently been several significant calving events, rendering vast, floating islands of ice. Also discussed was the complete collapse, in 1999, of an ice shelf known as Larsen B, which was formerly the largest ice shelf on the Antarctic peninsula - the northernmost and warmest part of the continent. The disintegration of the Larsen B shelf was called a "profound event", because it was thought to be stable. Fortunately, when massive icebergs are calved from ice-shelves, and even when they collapse and disintegrate completely, there is no resulting rise in sea level. It turns out though, that these same ice shelves serve a surprisingly important role in "holding back" the glaciers and land-locked ice on Antarctica which, if released into the ocean, would raise the world's sea level an estimated 20 feet (7m).

Now it's much clearer just how important that role is.

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There's troubling news (FT subscription reqd, alternate copy here) coming from Japan, where the Kyoto protocol on Greenhouse Emissions was born in 1997. It seems that the Japanese aren't going to be able to meet their emissions targets specified in the agreement in time. Indeed, unless they buy a "large quantity" of emissions credits from other countries, they're not going to be able to meet their commitment at all.

Taishi Sugiyama, a climate expert at the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry in Japan, said emissions were rising 1 per cent a year due to a larger-than-expected impact from vehicles and households. That made it impossible to cut real domestic emissions by the required 16 per cent within a few years, he said.

Is this the last nail in the coffin for the Kyoto protocol? And if so, which way do we go when it's buried? Was GWB right to pull out, and where would John Kerry take us, in either case?

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