Britain is a nation of quiz nights. During the long dark hours of the winter, folks here entertain themselves by going down to the pub and answering obscure questions about Henry VIII's sixth wife.
That being said, one of the more popular BBC programs, QI, devotes itself to debunking received wisdom, urban legends, and media spin by way of a rather twee quiz show. It's hosted by Stephen Fry, known to most Statesider folks as Jeeves in the P.G. Wodehouse series Jeeves and Wooster.

Yesterday, theIndependent published an article on Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, a journalism student who has been sentenced to death in Afghanistan with the full knowledge and acceptance of Hamid Karzai's government. This is his capital crime:

He was accused of blasphemy after he downloaded a report from a Farsi website which stated that Muslim fundamentalists who claimed the Koran justified the oppression of women had misrepresented the views of the prophet Mohamed.

Mr Kambaksh, 23, distributed the tract to fellow students and teachers at Balkh University with the aim, he said, of provoking a debate on the matter. But a complaint was made against him and he was arrested, tried by religious judges without – say his friends and family – being allowed legal representation and sentenced to death.

No. Scratch that.
Things that make you OMFG and bang your head against the wall until you get a nosebleed.
Robot bug stories are amusing. As someone who is part of the SWAT team as far as bugs go, DARPA would have to make a bug, well, cuter than a bug if they didn't want to end up with a squashed spot of very expensive microelectronics. Yeah, I know bugs are a vital part of the ecosystem, but not in my vicinity, thank you.
However, I read a sober article in Asia Times that was unamusing. Totally.
The author was Nick Turse and it was a piece about urban warfare, reprinted from Tomdispatch.com.

Playing tourist in Prague is delightful. It is a beautiful city with diverse, yet harmonious architectural styles, and a complicated history. Neither the Russians nor the Germans, to give them credit,  destroyed the city when they invaded, though both did their best to subjugate a proud and talented people.
I was particularly affected by the story of Alfons Mucha, who people of a certain age probably remember for the poster he designed for JOB rolling papers. In the '60s and early '70s, somebody you knew would have had one on their wall as a semi-subversive comment on smoking reefer. Even so,  you'd  think that it would be a stretch to consider art that decorative to be dangerous enough to warrant arrest by the Nazis.

My musically savy friend from the old Fort Worth neighborhood sent me this link to a benefit album put out by Tipitina's Foundation. These guys are doing good work in New Orleans:

To date the Instruments A Comin' Program has provided over $1 million in donated instruments to the next generation of New Orleans musicians. Through the help of Jimmy Glickman and the New Orleans Music Exchange, the Tipitina's Foundation is working tirelessly to insure that every child in New Orleans has the means to play music.

Rebuilding what has been destroyed is important to the physical welfare of New Orleans, but music is its soul. Below the fold, a way to help out both and shake your booties at the same time.

The Guardian put the article placed above the fold too, at least they had this morning UK time, when I was reading it over coffee. They recognise, if most American media do not, that the people showing up in Chicago are the new "important people" in the party, replacing the movers and shakers of the DLC.

The shift from the traditional campaign route to the internet was underlined last week when all the Democratic contenders shunned the Democratic Leadership Council meeting in Tennessee.

Kos himself should be feeling a little smug now, and those of us who really dislike the DLC and the effect they've had on politics should at least have a half smile.

GBI called it fuzzy math, but David Stockman, one of the architects of Reaganomics, has gotten himself in a hairy mess living by his own economic principles. According to the Independent, he finds himself facing fraud charges over the demise of Collins and Aikman, a car component company.

The justice Department has released an audit admitting that terrorism isn't that common and that they are using the laws passed after 9/11 to incarcerate people who aren't terrorists:

The report, released Tuesday by the Justice Department's inspector general, concluded that the department in most cases "could not provide support for the numbers reported or could not identify the terrorism link used to classify statistics as terrorism-related."
All but two of the 26 statistics reviewed from October 2000 through September 2005 were wrong. "These inaccuracies are important because department management and Congress need accurate terrorism-related statistics to make informed ... decisions," Inspector General Glenn Fine said in the report.

If Jeremy Clarkson says at the end of his most recent show, “Don’t go to America,” then we have lost the sympathies of even the most libertarian Brits.

The good thing about my 6:00 AM being your midnight so to speak is that all the news is dewy fresh. Here's both the bad and the good:
The bad news is that some person or persons unnamed have fired a rocket at our embassy in Athens. One of the things that Bushco is going to have to take into account is that his policies will cause a lot of problems in the soft target department. Unless we defend every embassy, consulate, and business abroad, things like this will happen. Paranoia feeds itself.
The good news is, that in a Beavis and Butthead way, this particular incident has played itself as farce. Unfortunately the New York Times has taken down their initial story, opting for the standard "act of heinous terrorism," but the earliest reports claimed that the rockets had landed in the third floor toilets, and no one was hurt.
Better news below the fold: