I don't watch much TV, but I tend to watch Fox more than other networks. The only show I watch form the above list is 24. I'll miss X Files sorta, though it hasn't been good since the 5th season on a regular basis, IMHO.

The case has stunned art experts because paintings destroyed by Mireille Breitwieser, 51, include works by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Corneille de la Haye and Watteau. No less puzzling, Breitwieser's son, Stephane, 31, who is in jail in Switzerland, made no effort to re-sell the 60 paintings and 112 art objects that he has admitted stealing.

"I have never heard of anything like this before," said Alexandra Smith, operation manager at the London-based Art Loss Register, which records and tracks stolen art. "I think he was just an eccentric kleptomaniac who loved 17th and 18th century art. A lot of people expect works of art to be well protected with alarms and clamps, but he clearly worked out that most are not, so he took what he wanted."

Only people living within a mile or two of a beekeeper have much chance of seeing the industrious, golden-bodied insect at work on a flower. For everyone else, this icon of the garden and orchard might as well be extinct.

In the garden this means a scant harvest of cucumbers, squash, pumpkins and other vegetables requiring insect pollination, as well as feeble flowering and fruiting of many ornamental trees and shrubs. Wildflowers are not reseeding themselves as they should.

Most important, one-third of food crops need insect pollination, of which the honeybeeis by far the most consistent and reliable source.

Even commercial beekeepers, who take extraordinary measures to ward off pests and disease, are in trouble. During the winter of 2000-2001, Maryland was among East Coast states hit particularly hard by drought and mite-related causes. While a federal program has helped to restock the hives, winter losses generally remain far higher than in pre-mite times. Wild bees remain scarce; longtime beekeepers are calling it quits, and too few new ones are taking their place.

Which is why beekeepers from California to Virginia are scratching their heads at the Bush administration's proposal to close three of the four Department of Agriculture bee research laboratories, including the first, opened in the 1890s in Chevy Chase and moved to Beltsville in 1939. [link]

After a little while, the atmosphere took on a bit of a dark turn. Lots of images of law enforcement agency websites, some american flags with an angry eagle bursting through, and possibly darkest of all, a Britney Spears fan site. The theme continued as Clay Shirky was discussing "maps and non-player characters" and the downward gothic spiral expanded...

It became obvious that the crowd could be viewed as a living organism, with its own cycles of activity and rest. The chaotic effect of random images plastering themselves on my screen gave me a unique point of view-- it was a sort of mental feedback (much like audio feedback, even with the accompanying headache, only this headache was in some bizarre fourth dimension.)

By the end, the dark forces had definitely descended. I was treading on some very dark back waters of the collective geek subconscious... Think Evil Dead and PDAs in Washington DC. I had definitely descended into a sort of techno hell, the sixth circle of hades, where the damned are only given t-shirts after they listen to a short marketing presentation.

President George W Bush put US security agencies on alert last summer after receiving intelligence reports that Osama Bin Laden was planning to hijack American aircraft.

[...]

However, Mr Fleischer said the information received by the president dealt with conventional hijackings - not the use of planes as missiles to attack buildings.

Of course we trust our government -- particularly our illustrious leader -- implicitly now, so he doesn't really have to explain anything, does he? And there's nothing mysterious about shrub and cheney chatting with the Taliban last summer. Or the fact that an invasion of Afghanistan was plotted for October months before 9/11 either.

The scientists looked for events producing two sharp signals, one as it entered Earth, the other as it emerged again. They found two such events, both in 1993. The first was on the morning of October 22. Seismometers in Turkey and Bolivia recorded a violent event in Antarctica with the power of several thousand tons of TNT. The disturbance then ripped through Earth on a route that ended with it exiting through the floor of the Indian Ocean off Sri Lanka just 26 seconds later - at a speed of 900,000 mph.

The second event took place on November 24, when sensors in Australia and Bolivia picked up an explosion starting in the Pacific south of the Pitcairn Islands, traveling through the Earth, and reappearing in Antarctica 19 seconds later.

According to the scientists, both events are consistent with an impact with strangelets at cosmic speeds. The team of geologists and physicists says, "The only explanation for such events of which we are aware is passage through the earth of ton-sized strange-quark nuggets."

[...]

Just a single pollen-size fragment is believed to weigh several tons.

Meanwhile broadband sales (partially spurred by the file-sharing boom) and record sales are plummeting. As the Dinosaurs of Hollywood stare around dumbly, wondering how they can still make people pay extortionate prices for content.

Of course, file-sharing has stopped dead.

Besieged by hundreds of lawsuits accusing clergy and employees of abusing the faithful, the Catholic Church has responded with a muscular display of legal power. Where once the church tried to quietly settle cases, according to church and plaintiff lawyers, it is now pursuing an aggressive litigation strategy, hiring high-powered law firms and private detectives to examine the personal lives of the church's accusers, fighting to keep documents secret and engaging in new tactics to minimize settlements.

[...]

In Joliet, Ill., according to the Daily Southtown newspaper, which obtained a deposition transcript, a diocesan attorney confronted a 22-year-old former altar boy who accused a local priest of sexual abuse. The attorney portrayed the man as being gay, a liar and an alcoholic.

Do you, the diocesan lawyer asked at one point, blame yourself for the abuse?

In Boston, archdiocese lawyers countersued a 6-year-old boy and his parents, accusing them of negligence for trusting the Catholic priest, the Rev. Paul R. Shanley, who allegedly molested him.

1931 Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, under the auspices of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Investigations, infects human subjects with cancer cells. He later goes on to establish the U.S. Army Biological Warfare facilities in Maryland, Utah, and Panama, and is named to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. While there, he begins a series of radiation exposure experiments on American soldiers and civilian hospital patients.

1945 "Program F" is implemented by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). This is the most extensive U.S. study of the health effects of fluoride, which was the key chemical component in atomic bomb production. One of the most toxic chemicals known to man, fluoride, it is found, causes marked adverse effects to the central nervous system but much of the information is squelched in the name of national security because of fear that lawsuits would undermine full-scale production of atomic bombs.

1970 United States intensifies its development of "ethnic weapons" (Military Review, Nov., 1970), designed to selectively target and eliminate specific ethnic groups who are susceptible due to genetic differences and variations in DNA.

1975 The virus section of Fort Detrick's Center for Biological Warfare Research is renamed the Fredrick Cancer Research Facilities and placed under the supervision of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) . It is here that a special virus cancer program is initiated by the U.S. Navy, purportedly to develop cancer-causing viruses. It is also here that retrovirologists isolate a virus to which no immunity exists. It is later named HTLV (Human T-cell Leukemia Virus). [Undernews again]

ROBBER BARONS TO MEET NEAR DC

ONE OF THE key gatherings of the world's robber barons - the Bilderberg conference - will take place May 30 at the Westfields Marriott in Chantilly, Virginia, ground zero of the military-industrial-spook complex including the home of various intelligence agencies and headquarters of Dyncorp, mercenaries in the service of American empire.

The locale, however, is the most déclassé in some time, as the Bilderbergers are used to meeting at castles and big estates. The last time this particular subset of the grotesquely empowered met near Washington was when they came to colonial Williamsbug in 1962.

The meeting follows an April gathering in DC of the Bilderbergers' Junior League, the Trilateral Commission, which has about three times as many members. The Bilderbergers claim they are a private group but no little sum of public monies will be spent on keeping them that way at Westfields Marriott, so don't plan to audit the sessions. Most of the media pretends that they don't exist and when they do mention them it is usually to call their critics "conspiracy theorists."

In fact, it is the sort of people who go to such conferences and the media that protects them who most believe in conspiracies, which is why they so often meet in small groups behind closed doors. They were raised on the great man theory of history and consider themselves the contemporary incarnation of that theory -entitled to cause pain and misery to millions to demonstrate their entitlement.

And like other secret fraternities, they are always interested in new blood of the right sort. Thus it was, according to Marc Fisher in the Washington Post, that it was Vernon Jordan "who first introduced then-Gov. Clinton to world leaders at their annual Bilderberg gathering in Germany in 1991. Plenty of governors try to make that scene; only Clinton got taken seriously at that meeting, because Vernon Jordan said he was okay."

In fact, one needs no conspiracy at all to assure that members of the Council on Foreign Relations or staffers of the Washington Post or members of the Bilderberg conference will behave a certain way. Given their educational and cultural provenance it is extraordinary when they don't. But to understand this requires a little feel for social history and anthropology, which is alien to their assumption that that their words and actions are the fruits of their intellectual imagination rather than the predictable product of elite education and acculturation.

MEMBERS OF THE US BILDERBERG STEERING COMMITTEE: United States of America: Paul A. Allaire, Chairman, Xerox Corporation; John S Corzine, Chairman and CEO, Goldman Sachs & Co; Marie-Josee Drouin, Senior Fellow,
Hudson Institute Inc; Louis V. Gerstner, Chairman, IBM Corporation; Richard C. Holbrooke, Former Assistant Secretary for European Affairs; Vice Chairman CS First Boston; Vernon E. Jordan, Jr, Senior Partner, Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Field, (Attorneys-at-Law); Henry A. Kissinger, Chairman, Kissinger Associates Inc; Former Secretary of State; Jack Sheinkman, Chairman of the Board, Amalgamated Bank; Paul Wolfowitz, Dean, Nitze School of Advanced International Studies; Former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy; Casimir A. Yost, Director, Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University.

According to documents unearthed by a nonprofit government watchdog, the United States military has proposed the development of biological weapons that would violate international treaties and federal law. In fact, they may have already developed some of these illegal, treaty-busting bioweapons. Using the Freedom of Information Act, the Sunshine Project has recently pried loose some damning documents from the Marine Corps, which seems to be overseeing this area of research.

Exhibit A is a 1997 proposal from the Naval Research Laboratory to create genetically engineered bacteria and fungi that will corrode and degrade enemy matériel, such as roads, runways, vehicles, weapons, and fuel.

Then we have the document from Armstrong Laboratories at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas. The flyboys propose much the same thing as the navy?engineered microbes that can destroy enemy equipment, including explosives and chemical weapons. [U]

The head of China's central bank said recently that 25 percent to 30 percent of all bank loans were not being repaid.

On Thursday, the credit-rating agency Standard Poor's estimated that the situation might be twice that bad, with half of all loans classifiable as nonperforming. And the agency found signs that the banks were busily making matters worse.

The first and most prominent to go was Mary Robinson, the former Irish president whose work as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has been acclaimed by human rights groups across the world. Officially, she retired after a one-year renewal of her contract. In fact, the U.S. ferociously lobbied against here reappointment. UN officials and Western diplomats also said she was "difficult to work with" -- the usual euphemism for not willing to be dictated to. Most human rights activists see this as precisely her strength in an organization where not rocking the boat seems to be genetically engineered into many officials.

The U.S. could not forgive her for her stands on the Middle East issues or for her endorsement last year of the results of the UN's Durban Conference on Racism, which both the U.S. and Israel walked out of. The rest of the world stayed and adopted a toned-down document, and subsequently Washington began its campaign to force Robinson out.

"I'm smiling," he said. "It's like being the first plaintiff to get a victory against the cigarette companies."

Wollersheim, who ran a small photo business, joined Scientology in 1969 and later became a recruiter. He signed a "billion-year" contract to serve the church but says that he ended up being punished in a "thought reform gulag," consigned to the hold of a ship docked off California for 18 hours a day. The ship was part of a mini-navy assembled by L. Ron Hubbard, the science fiction writer who created the church in the early 1950s.

Because of Scientology practices, "Wollersheim's mental condition worsened to the point he actively contemplated suicide," a California appeals court said in 1989. "The church's conduct was manifestly outrageous."

Wollersheim,who suffered from a bipolar disorder, was forbidden to seek medical help under Scientology policies, he says. He quit the church after spending $150,000 on Hubbard's "mental health" regimes, and by 1980 had filed suit. In 1986, a jury awarded him $5 million in compensatory damages and $25 million to punish the church for what jurors called intentional and negligent "infliction of emotional distress."

The total was reduced on appeal to $2.5 million. But Scientology officials vowed they would pay "not one thin dime for Wollersheim," and members were rallied to chant that slogan at hearings.

I don't know if you can have good or bad reasons for killing someone, but here the motive verges on the bizarre.

It turns out that Mr Fortuyn may have been shot six times in the head and chest by a man who said in an interview a couple of years ago that as a boy he'd objected to fishing with worms because it was cruel to both worm and fish.

Now - a vegan animal-rights campaigner - he has a strong objection to factory farming, so he decided to assassinate a politician whose party had scarcely even formulated a policy on the issue.

"Agents are good because your agents are designed to represent the behavior of observed social actors, individual firms or departments," says Scott Moss, director of the Centre for Policy Modeling at Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom. "You can design an agent to impart their behaviors in an way in which they interact with other social entities. You cannot do that with conventional economics or social science, and it can inform the range of options or range of possibilities on a given initiative that policy makers might take."

For example, if there are several competing potential changes that policymakers can institute in the U.S. social security program, researchers can take all existing information about the individuals and institutions affected by the government's program - retirees, the federal treasury, those who care for the aging, portions of the society that rely upon the spending of the retired, and others - and design a program where all the observable reactions that each individual agent can have are programmed into the software-based society.

Other 2 are The Shop Around the Corner and Scrooge (A Christmas Carol, 1951).