"Under the new plan, officials say, the 11,000 American forces in Afghanistan are changing their tactics. Rather than carrying out raids and returning to their bases, small groups will now remain in Afghan villages for days at a time, handing out various forms of aid and conducting patrols. By becoming a more permanent, familiar presence, American officials say, they hope to be able to receive and act on intelligence within hours. Such a technique helped them to capture Mr. Hussein.
'We're trying to transplant some of the lessons of the Saddam capture,' one senior official said. 'This is different territory, and our targets are presumed to be moving around. But one lesson we learned in Iraq is that, by analogy, there are only a limited number of places that someone like Saddam or bin Laden feel comfortable.'
Similarly, Task Force 121 and the Pakistani forces are focusing on Mr. bin Laden's support network, hoping it will crack as Mr. Hussein's did."

Attorney General John Ashcroft said that Saddam Hussein's use of "evil chemistry" and "evil biology" justified the war. [Associated Press] (...) The Bush Administration praised Pakistan after General Pervez Musharraf pardoned Abdul Qadeer Khan, the nuclear scientist who took the blame for selling nuclear technology to Iran, Libya, and North Korea; Khan claimed that no one in the government or in the military was aware of his activities. [MSNBC] Musharraf said that Khan "is still my hero; he is still high in the sky for me." [New York Times] North Korea agreed to resume talks with the United States. [New York Times] The Ohio sniper continued to shoot at cars, and [New York Times] Senator John Kerry continued to win primaries. [Washington Post]...

' To achieve common sense, the Web needs to go through the infantile process of self-discovery. The Web doesn't really understand itself. There's lots of information on the Web, but not much 'information about information,' also known as 'metadata.'
If you're a robotic search engine, you look for words in the text of a page, but ideally the page would have all manner of encoded labels that describe who wrote the material, and why, and when, and for what purpose, and in what context.
Hendler explains the problem this way: If you type into Google the words 'how many cows in Texas,' Google will rummage through sites with the words 'cow' and 'many' and 'Texas,' and so forth, but you may have trouble finding out how many cows there are in Texas. The typical Web page involving cows and Texas doesn't have anything to do with the larger concept of bovine demographics. (The first Google result that comes up is an article titled 'Mineral Supplementation of Beef Cows in Texas' by the unbelievably named Dennis Herd.)
Hendler, along with World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, is working on the Semantic Web , a project to implant the background tags, the metadata, on Web sites. The dream is to make it easier not only for humans, but also machines, to search the Web. Moreover, searches will go beyond text and look at music, films, and anything else that's digitized. 'We're trying to make the Web a little smarter,' Hendler says.
But Peter Norvig, director of search quality at Google, points out that the current keyword-driven searching system, clumsy though it may be and so heavily reliant on serendipity, still works well for most situations.
"Part of the problem is that keywords are so good," he says. "Most of the time the words do what you want them to do." '

"The earth beside this kind of highway is like no earth that ever was. Neither cultivated nor natural, it's beside-the-point, completely unnoticed, and slightly blurred from being passed so often and so fast. And yet plants still grow in it, luxuriantly --ailanthus, and sumac, and milkweed, and lots of others that know how to accommodate themselves to us. In the swampy parts, the common reed would take over the roadway in a blink if the traffic stopped.
The tangled brush and the reeds collect an omnium-gatherum of trash. I saw broken CDs, hubcaps, coils of wire, patient-consent forms for various acupuncture procedures, pieces of aluminum siding, fragments of chrome, shards of safety glass, Dunkin' Donuts coffee cups, condom wrappers, knocked-over road signs, burned-out highway flares, a highlighter pen, a surgical glove, nameless pieces of discarded rusty machinery, a yellow rain slicker with "Macy's Studio" on the back . . . Scattered through the grass and weeds for miles were large, bright-colored plastic sequins. Oddly, I knew where they had come from. Once, while on the bus, I saw a parade float -- probably from the Puerto Rican Day parade, held in the city -- pull up alongside and then speed by. A car must have been towing it, though I don't remember the car. The float was going at least seventy, shimmying and wobbling, banners flapping, and these sequins were blowing off it in handfuls and billowing behind."

"English publishers like book jackets that look one way, American publishers like them another way. Americans grumble about British book jackets, English people talk about how unimpressive American Book Jackets are. Russian book covers don't like like anyone else's book covers, nor do Japanese or Polish or Croat. The Finns tend to be unimpressed by Norwegian book covers, while the Swedes look down on the Danes. Meanwhile, the French struggle with one of the problems of French Publishing, which means that a book of worth and quality should have no image at all on the cover, merely the author's name and the book title; a picture means that the book is a potboiler, and not fully respectable."

"The suspicion that the same group of writers, known as the Underground Literary Alliance, had anonymously attacked his friend Heidi Julavits prompted the novelist Dave Eggers to write a review last August calling Ms. Julavits's first novel "one of the best books of the year."
Mr. Eggers, whose memoir, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," made him a literary celebrity, chose to post his review as "a reader from St. Louis, MO." But the review appeared under the name "David K Eggers" on Amazon's Canadian site on Monday, and Mr. Eggers confirmed by e-mail that he had written it.
"I've done that one or two times before, when I like a book and the reviews on Amazon seem bizarre," Mr. Eggers said. "In this case I just tried to bring back some balance."

" A funny thing happened the day I went to interview Paul Auster in New York. Well, I say funny, but that's perhaps too strong a word. And yet later, looking back, it did take on a kind of humour; an Austerian humour. Something, anyway, that I think would make Auster laugh. It was a beautiful day and, since I had a few hours to kill before making my way over to his home in Brooklyn, I walked downtown to Union Square and into the five-storey Barnes and Noble bookshop, a bibliophiles' heaven. I wasn't looking for anything in particular, certainly not for books by Auster.

Still, as I browsed, some impulse made me go up to the fourth floor, to where works of fiction are alphabetically housed, and inch my way along the shelves to the letter A. There, between Austen and Balzac, between Atwood and Ballard, at the point, in other words, where you would expect to find Auster... Not a thing. A gap. For a moment, I have to say, this shook me. But then, as I pondered the meaning of this absence, it began to take on the aspect of some fantastic joke. Of course, it was right. That the man who has made his literary identity out of the search for his own identity. The man who has turned the problematic question 'Who am I?' into the solution, 'I am the man who is asking that question.' That he would not be in the place where you would expect to find him. What could be more apt? It was then that I saw the sign. A small card, and on it these enigmatic words: 'If you are looking for Paul Auster, ask downstairs.' This was even better. A trail. Because wasn't this the whole purpose of my trip to New York, to seek and to find Auster. Wasn't I, in some small measure, playing the detective, the seeker after truth; not unlike Auster's own metaphysical detective Quinn in his wonderful The New York Trilogy. I ran, almost jumped, down the four escalators.

'I am looking for Paul Auster,' I shouted at the girl behind the counter. 'Which one?' she asked. I was ready for this. 'The real one,' I replied. She pointed behind her. There, arrayed on a long shelf, were all of Auster's books, and next to them the books of Dashiell Hammett, and next to those the books of William Burroughs. 'People steal them,' she said. So here, then, was the all-too plausible solution to my little mystery. Money. No mystery at all, in fact. Just a neatly constructed plot of cause and effect. In the confrontation between fiction and reality, reality had once again won hands down. "

"FAIRFAX (AFP) - Le sénateur John Kerry a remporté mardi un doublé éclatant dans les primaires du sud des Etats-Unis, asphyxiant encore un peu plus tous ses rivaux démocrates dans la course présidentielle.
Quant à l'ancien général à la retraite Wesley Clark, après avoir obtenu une décevante troisième place mardi dans ces deux élections primaires, il a décidé de mettre fin à sa campagne pour l'élection présidentielle aux Etats-Unis."

"LONGVIEW, Texas (AP) Leila LeTourneau returned from work late Monday to find crude oil covering her home's floors and spilling from the toilets, bathtub and sinks. " ['Leila LeTourneau est rentrée du travail Lundi soir pour découvrir que du pétrole brut recouvrait les sols de sa maison et jaillissait des toilettes, de la baignoire et des éviers"]

"'Why do I do this?' he says. 'The only answer I can come up with is that somehow I think that by living my life as a writer, I am living my life to the fullest. Even if I have a day when I sit there crossing out sentences, tearing up pieces of paper and have advanced not one jot, I can still stand up from my chair and say, 'Well, I've given it my best'. And if you can say that at the end of every working day, you feel like there's some reason to go on living.'"

' Notes from the Road is a project in experimental travel writing.
Because Notes from the Road is a travel site, not a travel guide site, we do not try to provide our readers with all-encompassing information on what to see and do around the world. For independent travelers, that sort of information is easy to come by on a number of excellent sites and books. Notes from the Road is about subjective travel; the kind of real world of random things and real people. '

' An often overlooked vestige of the urban experience, the fire escape is often seen (if seen at all) as nothing more than an eyesore - an unpleasant side effect of living within the confines of a city.
But through the lens of a camera, the fire escape becomes something more. A fascinating assemblage of geometry, light and shadow, it becomes an object of beauty. It is to this aspect of the fire escape that escaperail.com devotes its energy.
Started in chicago, a city known for great fires, escaperail.com hopes to document the fire escape in all it's forms, all over the world. As the fire escape is no longer a part of modern architecture, this documentary project takes on a certain sense of urgency. '

' Janet Jackson exposing her breast during the Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday night has proved to be the most-searched event in the history of the Internet. '

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Le sénateur John Kerry, favori de la course à l'investiture démocrate pour l'élection présidentielle de novembre, a creusé encore un peu plus l'écart face à ses rivaux samedi en remportant les caucus de deux nouveaux Etats, le Michigan et Washington.

Vainqueur de neuf des 11 primaires ou caucus ayant déjà eu lieu depuis le lancement de la course à l'investiture le 19 janvier dans l'Iowa, le sénateur du Massachusetts est porté par une vague qui menace de balayer ses cinq adversaires.

' On June 17th, every year, the family goes through a private ritual: we photograph ourselves to stop a fleeting moment, the arrow of time passing by. '

"Perfidious Frenchman (or Frenchwoman) is a Hollywood cliché which is going to stay, at least until American foreign policy shifts. In the meantime, French can retaliate only by giving 'Palme d'Or' and other prestigious festival to 'Elephant', 'Bowling for Columbine' or any other film which explicitly portrays modern America as hyper-violent, backward, barbarous or evil."

" Listen as the wind blows from across the great divide
voices trapped in yearning, memories trapped in time
the night is my companion, and solitude my guide
would I spend forever here and not be satisfied? "

" The decision by Steven P. Jobs, chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios, to walk away from his partnership with Michael D. Eisner and the Walt Disney Company is the clearest indication yet that Mr. Jobs is becoming the personification of the digital media mogul. "

" Pour la première fois, l'Organisation mondiale de la santé a évoqué une possible transmission du virus de la grippe aviaire d'homme à homme, après le décès de deux soeurs au Vietnam qui auraient pu être contaminées par leur frère. L'OMS avait averti que si le virus rencontrait dans un même organisme un virus de grippe humaine, une pandémie mondiale pourrait tuer des millions de personnes. "

" This collection of stories from the Southeastern Native American region covers mythology and folklore from the Creek, Hitchiti, Alabama, Kosati, and Natchez. The Creek (including the Alabama, Hitichi and Kosati) originally lived in northern Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. The Natchez resided in Louisiana. "