It would seem an odd, perhaps even absurd, announcement to make over a high school's public address system.

But at 11:15 each morning at the Stella K. Abraham High School for Girls on Long Island, the voice of Emi Renov, a 17-year-old junior, buzzes over the intercom, gently reminding her fellow students to refrain from gossiping for the next 60 minutes.

What was that? Was she kidding? Telling teenagers that they should not talk about other students behind their backs is like telling them not to try to get a driver's license.

Yet for one hour after Ms. Renov's announcement, her schoolmates make an honest attempt to avoid mocking one another's outfits or whispering the latest shocking rumor.

"Sometimes you have a really juicy story that you're just dying to tell," said Liron Eiger, a junior at the school, which is in Hewlett Bay Park, in Nassau County, and has 300 students.

The effort at Abraham is part of a national campaign at Jewish high schools to use religious teachings to raise awareness about the power of speech, for good and for ill.

Herb Peterson, who invented the ubiquitous Egg McMuffin as a way to introduce breakfast to McDonald's restaurants, has died, a Southern California McDonald's official said Wednesday. He was 89.

Man who used to be a woman claims to be five months pregnant

An American married man, who used to be a woman before having gender reassignment surgery, has sparked shock and disbelief after claiming to be five months pregnant with a baby girl.

Thomas Beatie, 34, from Bend, Oregon, has posted a photograph and article on US gay web magazine, The Advocate, describing his joy to be a pregnant man.

Beatie was born Tracy Lagondino, a lesbian living in Hawaii, where he was a prominent gay rights activist, campaigning to stop hate crimes and give same-sex couples the right to adopt.

After falling in love with his wife, Nancy Roberts, he underwent the sex-change because Hawaiian law bars same-sex marriages.

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Read on!

John McCain - Less Jobs More War

Tibetan monks disrupted an official news briefing at a temple in Lhasa on Thursday, shouting that Chinese authorities were lying about unrest in the Himalayan region, foreign reporters said.

The incident was an embarrassment to the Chinese government, which brought a select group of foreign reporters to Lhasa for a stage-managed tour of the city, where authorities say stability has been restored since violence broke out on March 14.

The government has also been saying security forces acted with restraint, in the face of international controversy over the unrest and China's response ahead of the Olympics in August.

In case you've forgotten what "restraint" means in Chinese:

The marches by monks in Lhasa turned within days into rioting in which non-Tibetan Chinese migrants were attacked and their property burned until security forces filled the streets.

Protests have spread to parts of Chinese provinces that border Tibet and have large ethnic Tibetan populations.

China says 19 people were killed at the hands of Tibetan mobs. The Tibetan government-in-exile says 140 died in Lhasa and elsewhere, most of them Tibetan victims of security forces.

It took thinking about taking someone's horse for somebody to think maybe something wasn't quite right here?

More than 100 people have been killed and hundreds wounded since the government launched its crackdown in the southern city of Basra on Tuesday. Clashes have split Iraq's majority Shi'ite community and shattered a ceasefire declared last year by Sadr.

FARMERS BRANCH, Texas -- Landlords in this Dallas suburb were asked to determine the immigration status of tenants, even though an ordinance calling for such checks was halted by a federal judge.

Three apartment complexes already suing Farmers Branch over a rule requiring verification of a tenants' citizenship or immigration status have asked a federal court to sanction the city. They are asking for fines and costs of the court filings.

"They have violated a standing order of a court," said attorney Bill Brewer, who represents the apartment complexes. - linkage

An Indian government request for access to encryption codes that would let it check e-mails from users of BlackBerry-enabled mobile phones is raising concerns whether the demand will damage privacy rights. Also in the firing line is the country's US$1.7 billion and growing e-commerce market, such as online banking and credit card transactions.

The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has requested access to BlackBerry algorithms ostensibly to monitor terrorist communications. The issue is being thrashed out in the run-up to the March 31 expiry date of BlackBerry's operating license.
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BlackBerry, a front-runner in offering portable Internet access, has an estimated 400,000 Indian users, among a worldwide subscriber base of 14 million, according to company data, and its users would include India's most powerful politicians, industrialists, media professionals, corporate executives and senior police officials - a treasure house also for political eavesdropping.
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Even so, India has given Research In Motion (RIM), which owns BlackBerry, and the country's telecom companies 15 days to enable monitoring of the contents transmitted on BlackBerrys or stop the service, the Press Trust of India reported this week.

Canada-based RIM was non-committal on whether with it will part with computer algorithms needed to decode BlackBerry messages. Srilata Venkatraman, general manager of RIM India, responded to Asia Times Online with a terse official statement that said, "RIM operates in more than 130 countries around the world and respects the regulatory requirements of governments. RIM does not comment on confidential regulatory matters or speculation on such matters in any given country."

Rajesh Chharia, president of the New Delhi-based Internet Service Providers Association of India, termed the government move as "ridiculous". He told local media that while routine check-ups "are fine with us" if questions of national security are raised, he was concerned about Internet service providers being "ridiculously" asked to reduce encryption from the global standard of 128-bit for online transactions to 40-bit. This makes e-security intrusions and fraud much easier. The RIM network uses the more advanced 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), prompting the government to ask for the encryption decoding algorithm.......

asia times

wonder what their deal is with nsa...or if this is a "test"?...whatever it is, the results are going to have far reaching effects.

lTMF'sA...the revolution will not be televised...Peace

An interactive version debuts online this week, a project of historical document archive site Footnote.com in conjunction with the National Archives and Records Administration.

The virtual version of the famous memorial - which is a pair of 246-foot black granite walls inscribed with the names of more than 58,000 American military casualties - is searchable.

Every name etched onto the real-world wall is viewable online and linked to the veteran's service record. Online visitors can add photos and describe their memories of the servicemen and women who died in the war.

Footnote.com Chief Executive Russ Wilding hopes the site will develop into an online community for veterans, family and friends to pay tribute and share their thoughts.

wired news

as an aside, yesterday was the 26th anniversary of the ground breaking for the memorial. it opened in november 1982.

lTMF'sA...the revolution will not be televised...Peace

Supplier Under Scrutiny on Aging Arms for Afghans

By C. J. CHIVERS

This article was reported by C. J. Chivers, Eric Schmitt and Nicholas Wood and written by Mr. Chivers.

Since 2006, when the insurgency in Afghanistan sharply intensified, the Afghan government has been dependent on American logistics and military support in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur.

With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces.

Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.

In purchasing munitions, the contractor has also worked with middlemen and a shell company on a federal list of entities suspected of illegal arms trafficking.

Moreover, tens of millions of the rifle and machine-gun cartridges were manufactured in China, making their procurement a possible violation of American law. The company’s president, Efraim E. Diveroli, was also secretly recorded in a conversation that suggested corruption in his company’s purchase of more than 100 million aging rounds in Albania, according to audio files of the conversation.

This week, after repeated inquiries about AEY’s performance by The Times, the Army suspended the company from any future federal contracting, citing shipments of Chinese ammunition and claiming that Mr. Diveroli misled the Army by saying the munitions were Hungarian.

The United States has outsourced the manufacturing of its electronic passports to overseas companies -- including one in Thailand that was victimized by Chinese espionage -- raising concerns that cost savings are being put ahead of national security, an investigation by The Washington Times has found.

The Government Printing Office's decision to export the work has proved lucrative, allowing the agency to book more than $100 million in recent profits by charging the State Department more money for blank passports than it actually costs to make them, according to interviews with federal officials and documents obtained by The Times. - linkage to Mooney Times