The ice disc is located on Vastitas Borealis, a broad plain that covers much of Mars' far northern latitudes.

The existence of the water-ice patch on Mars raises the prospect that past or present life will one day be detected.

It also boosts the chances that manned missions could eventually be sent to the Red Planet - because they would probably need accessible water to survive.

Paul Hackett is an Iraq vet running for Congress in Ohio in a special election coming up August 2nd.

Help him out at our ActBlue site here.

Some 200 cities in the West hit daily record highs last week, including Las Vegas at 117, and Death Valley soared to 129, the weather service said.

The blistering heat has caused numerous deaths this summer. In the Phoenix area alone, 24 people, most of them homeless, have died.

At least four deaths have been blamed on the heat in Missouri, including a woman found dead Sunday in a home without air conditioning. Four people have died of the heat in Oklahoma, two of them young children left in cars, and at least three heat deaths have been tallied in New Jersey.

Yahoo! Inc. on Monday will announce the acquisition of Konfabulator, a Macintosh and Windows application that allows users to run mini files known as Widgets on their desktop -- the same model used by Apple for its Dashboard application. Yahoo! company executives said they would also be giving Konfabulator away for free, completely doing away with the US$19.95 currently charged for the product.

Yahoo! said the reason they purchased Konfabulator was that they wanted an easy way to open up its APIs to the developer community and allow them easy access to the information on the Yahoo! Web site. In doing this, Widgets could be built without having to scrape sites in order to get information.

Gender: Female
Age: 22-40
Subway: 7th Ave. B/Q (Brooklyn)
Bag: Tote, WNYC or The Strand
Contents: iPod, New Yorker (opened to Fiction section), dog-eared copy of Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer.
Note: Possibly sensitive and militant, but in a decidedly non-terroristic, vaginal way. Suspicious footwear is Dansko clog, not shoe-bomb.

After much deliberation, Liz and Alyssa came to the conclusion that we should make Alice Horton’s recipe for cinnamon sugar donuts. After all, it was a cinnamon sugar donut that saved Liz from that alien back in ‘84.

Here are my editing criteria:

• Valuable Content - each book has to contain a lot of useful, practical information on how business works, how you can add value, and must explain why the material in the book is important to know. As a whole, the list must cover as much ground as possible, while providing a mix of both complimentary and conflicting viewpoints.
• Acceptable Time Commitment - no 1,000 page books here, although there are a few (good) textbooks in the mix for the more technical topics (accounting, finance, real estate). You should be able to get the key points of each book in a few hours, or by reading the chapter introductions and summaries of the textbooks.
• Reference Value - is the book going to be one you pick back up when you need information? How does the book re-read? Is this a book that is worth keeping for many years?

New York City will begin making random checks of bags and backpacks at subway stations, commuter railways and on buses, officials announced today in the wake of a second wave of bombings on the London transit system. The checks will begin on Friday morning. [...]

People who do not submit to a search will be allowed to leave, but will not be permitted into the subway station. [...]

"We're going to alert our passengers on the subways as well as the commuter rail lines that their packages are subject to inspection," he said. "It's a safety issue. People don't consider any measures that you take for safety to be an inconvenience. This is New York City."

The Race War has begun. Your skin is your uniform in this battle for the survival of your kind. The White Race depends on you to secure its existence. Your peoples enemies surround you in a sea of decay and filth that they have brought to your once clean and White nation.

Canada became the fourth country in the world to legalize gay marriage nationwide after a landmark bill was signed into law on Wednesday.

Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin signed the bill, and it was read in the House of Commons and Senate, making it law. The Senate voted late Tuesday to adopt the legislation to legalize gay marriage despite fierce opposition from Conservatives and religious leaders.

The bill grants same-sex couples legal rights equal to those in traditional unions between a man and a woman, something already legal in eight of Canada's 10 provinces and in two of its three territories.

The crisis was widely predicted after last year's poor harvests, following poor rains and locust invasions.

"The world wakes up when we see images on the TV and when we see children dying," Mr Egeland told the BBC's World Today programme. [...]

"The funding needs are sky-rocketing because it's a matter of saving lives," UN World Food Programme Niger representative Gian Carlo Cirri said.

"The pity is we designed a preventative strategy early enough, but we didn't have the chance to implement it." [...]

Mr Egeland said it would have cost $1 a day to prevent children becoming malnourished but it was now costing $80 a day to save a child's life.

Aid workers in Niger say that up to a quarter of Niger's 12 million people need food aid.

The UN has now received just a third of the $30m it had asked for, Mr Egeland said. [...]

He said the $30m requested for both short - and long-term aid "was nothing".

"Europeans eat ice cream for $10bn a year and Americans spend $35bn on their pets each year."

When a birthday party shows up after an erroneously posted closing time, the manager has food sent over for them from the kitchen at Eleven Madison Park. Amazing service.

The advantages of the couch format are multifold. Guests can not only be seen from head to foot, giving us a sense of their physical presence, their posture, and even their choice of shoes; they can also use the space however they want. They're free to hump the couch, as Al Green did in a Daily Show interview earlier this year, or jump up on it and make asses of themselves, like Tom Cruise on Oprah last May.

On the new Daily Show set, both desk and couch have been replaced by a large bean-shaped conference table in a drab grayish white, behind which both Stewart and his guest sit upright in rolling chairs. This setup gives the interview segment of the show a far more formal feel than before, like a Sunday morning public-affairs show or, worse yet, PBS's Charlie Rose, which I've always found to be the most visually (and often verbally) boring talk show on TV. As Stewart and the guest converse, we see them both only from the waist up, hands folded demurely on the table with their mugs and books between them.

By posting Content on any public area of MySpace.com, you automatically grant as well as represent and warrant that you have the right to grant to MySpace.com, an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, fully paid, worldwide license to use, copy, perform, display, and distribute such information and content to MySpace.com and that MySpace.com has the right to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such information and content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

[N]ow that Karl Rove, Bush's closest adviser, has been implicated in the leak, Bush's standard seems to have changed.

"If someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration," Bush announced today.

That's not very specific. And it's also not a real big concession.

In fact, even as the case continues to consume Washington, and even as more and more details about White House involvement in the leak continue to emerge from all quarters, Bush today continued the White House's public stonewall.

Uninstall Greasemonkey altogether. At this point, I don't trusthaving it on my computer at all. I would think that whoever is incharge of addons.mozilla.org should immediately remove theGreasemonkey XPI and post a large warning in its place advising peopleto uninstall it.

By the way, "Greasemonkey Hacks" is DEAD until we fix this. And I'mposting a big red blinking warning on every page of diveintogreasemonkey.org advising visitors to uninstall it, until all of these security holes are closed. This is why God invented the tag.

Basically, with my co-worker leaving, my boss comes up with the brilliant idea that the five of us should start getting together every two weeks to talk amongst ourselves about title info, etc… so we all are working with the same information…. Okay, I’ll say this once and then never again, but I have been telling her this FOR MONTHS!!!!!!!!! Regardless “her” bright idea was great - until she asked everyone else to leave except for me, and the two other girls I work with (one of whom is leaving in July) So, her second briliant idea, since she has no idea what we do anymore - is to ask us to first make a list of all of our current responsibilities. Warning bell starts humming here. That way we all have a clear idea of who’s doing what and that leads into the next part of the assignment. Meet amongst yourselves sometime in the next two weeks and discuss the workflow, what should change, who should take on what responsibilities, and come to her at our next meeting with a new heirarchy of responsibilities…. Okay BIG FAT RED WARNING BELL is screaming in my head now…. Why the fuck is this OBVIOUSLY excecutive decision being passed to a group of 27 year olds? A group, I should mention, that contains two completely self-absorbed, power hungry, egotistical sorority girls who already think they’re running the show by themselves?!?!?!?!?!?

Also, naming the company you hate, as bluegirl did on June 29, couldn’t have helped.

But even without all that, we would have fired her anyway: She uses emoticons, constantly.

Typeweek starts today and runs through the 24th. As we first asked when we heard about it, you may be asking, "What is Typeweek?" The biggest part of the TypeWeek celebration is TypeCon, which runs from this Wednesday to Sunday, a full list of programs can be found here. The workshops cover everything type related, including graffiti font and font in flash!

For those who can't take the 9 to 5 hours this week to nourish their inner font-geek there's an alternative. FontHunt! It's a citywide typographic scavenger hunt open to the public. So grab your friends and digital camera and get going. FontHunt is a multi-day event and FontHunters can pick up their assignments at The One Club starting Tuesday, submissions are due in by the end of TypeCon on Sunday, July 24th.

What do Madonna and Katherine Harris have in common?

They both — it seems — have turned to the healing powers of Kabbalah water.

Harris, Florida’s former Secretary of State, who sparked worldwide controversy when she stepped into the 2000 elections and helped George Bush win, oversaw a program in which some diseased trees in Florida were treated with water provided by associates of the trendy Kabbalah Centre. The cure didn’t take.

An anonymous reader writes "In a recent video blog Billy West mentions that a Futurama movie is in production!" From the video: "Good news everyone...there's gonna be a Futurama movie, coming out on DVD, I think we're gonna start doing it soon. There were talks and I guess they're really happy about moving forward with it cuz the DVDs of Futurama sold really well, and then with a possibility of a second one."

[L]eave it to a group of college students to find a way to make sure their beer is always free. Well, at least the recipe they use to brew it is. A group of students at IT University of Copenhagen have produced what they claim is the first open-source beer.

The recipe and brand of their beer is published under a Creative Commons license, which means anyone can use the recipe for pleasure or profit.

The only catch: If you make money selling their unique beer, you have to give them credit and publish any changes you make to the recipe under a similar license.

For reasons that mystify scientists, ocean temperatures are rising, which is killing off the plankton. As a result, animals higher on the food chain are facing mass starvation.

"Something big is going on out there," said Julia Parrish, an associate professor in the School of Aquatic Fisheries and Sciences at the University of Washington. "I'm left with no obvious smoking gun, but birds are a good signal because they feed high up on the food chain." [...]

"This is somewhere between five and 10 times the highest number of bird deaths we've seen before," she said.

A play based on writer (and insanely rich Fresh Prince of Bel Air creator) Andy Borowitz's 1994 New Yorker Shouts and Murmurs piece "Pavlov's Brother" debuted at the Toronto Fringe Festival, where it was dubbed "serious and funny and heartbreaking and weird," which was meant as a compliment. [emdashes]

Small as it is, the painting has a powerful presence. It captures the eye from a distance, and commands, up close, something like complete attention. Holding the Christ child in her left arm, the Virgin looks beyond him with melancholy tenderness, while the child reaches out a tiny hand to brush aside her veil. Centuries of Byzantine rigidity and impersonal, hieratic forms are also brushed aside in this intimate gesture. We are at the beginning of what we think of as Western art; elements of the Byzantine style still linger--in the gold background, the Virgin's boneless and elongated fingers, and the child's unchildlike features--but the colors of their clothing are so miraculously preserved, and the sense of human interaction is so convincing, that the two figures seem to exist in a real space, and in real time. Candle burn marks on the frame, which is original, testify to the picture's use as a private devotional image. It is dated circa 1300.

XM Satellite Radio has agreed to buy WCS Wireless. "This essentially doubles the amount of capacity we've had available," said XM Chairman Gary Parsons. "This could mean we have a compelling business case [to get into video]." XM competes with Sirius Satellite Radio in the emerging pay-radio market. Sirius also recently announced an expansion into video.

A new type of television will provide a high-tech peace treaty for those endless family rows about who gets to watch what: the world’s first liquid crystal display that shows two completely different images depending on where you are sitting. [...]

The screen has been designed so that the two angles are well within the bounds of normal viewing behaviour. At about 3ft from the screen, two people sitting just a foot apart would see different pictures. And in each case, the image would occupy the full screen.

That would make a big difference to video games, since if two people were playing they could both see the full screen rather than have to put up with the present arrangement of splitting it in half.

As the technology was unveiled yesterday, Sharp said that it had readied its factory in Mie prefecture to begin mass-production of the screens by the end of this month at the rate of 200,000 units per month, and will be selling the screens on to other companies such as Sony and Panasonic to develop new products using the technology. The first working versions of the TVs should be in Japanese stores in time for Christmas and cost around 50 per cent more than a normal LCD screen.

Visually impaired fans of Harry Potter will be able to buy Braille and large print copies of the next book at the same time as sighted readers.

The Royal National Institute of the Blind is taking orders for Braille copies of the novel, out on 16 July.

Normally, visually impaired readers have to wait months or even years for books to come out in other formats.

Making Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince available to everyone at the same time is a publishing first.

Author, JK Rowling, said: "I'm delighted to be part of a publishing initiative that gives blind and partially sighted children and adults the same reading opportunities as sighted book lovers."

The RNIB says more than 95% of books are never published in a format that is accessible to blind people.

Dear Red States,

We're ticked off at the way you've treated California, and we've decided
we're leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we're taking the other
Blue States with us. In case you aren't aware, that includes Hawaii, Oregon,
Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and all the Northeast.
We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to
the people of the new country of New California.

To sum up briefly:

You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states. We get stem cell research
and the best beaches.
We get Elliot Spitzer. You get Ken Lay.
We get the Statue of Liberty. You get OpryLand.
We get Harvard. You get Ole' Miss.

We get 85 percent of America's venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get
Alabama.
We get two-thirds of the tax revenue, you get to make the red states pay
their fair share.
Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian
Coalition's, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single
moms.

Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and anti-war, and
we're going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need
people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They have kids they're apparently
willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don't care if you
don't show pictures of their children's caskets coming home.
We do wish you success in Iraq, and hope that the WMDs turn up, but we're
not willing to spend our resources in Bush's Quagmire.

With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80 percent of the
country's fresh water, more than 90 percent of the pineapple and lettuce, 92
percent of the nation's fresh fruit, 95 percent of America's quality wines
(you can serve French wines at state dinners), 90 percent of all cheese, 90
percent of the high tech industry, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all
living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools,
plus Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT.

With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88
percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92
percent of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes, 90
percent of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern Baptists, virtually
100 percent of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University,
Clemson and the University of Georgia.

We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.

Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Red states believe Jonah was
actually swallowed by a whale, 62 percent believe life is sacred unless
we're discussing the death penalty or gun laws, 44 percent say that
evolution is only a theory, 53 percent that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and
61 percent of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals
than we lefties.

By the way, we're taking the good pot, too. You can have that dirt weed
they grow in Mexico.

Sincerely,
Nuevo California

The number of high-speed Internet lines in the United States increased 34 percent, to 37.9 million lines, last year, the Federal Communications Commission said yesterday, as price wars between Internet service providers made fast connections increasingly affordable.

The veteran rockers have seen their album sales rocket by an astonishing 1,300% since Saturday - but they don't want a penny of it.

Guitarist Dave Gilmour said he does not want to profit from the show - and any extra cash should be given away. [...]

"If other artists feel like donating their extra royalties to charity, perhaps then the record companies could be persuaded to make a similar gesture and that would be a bonus.

"This is money that should be used to save lives."

OK, this one really bugs me. Learn where spaces go in relation to other punctuation. Whenever you have a comma, there is always exactly one space and it's always after the comma and never before it. Thank you. [...]

Please do not use cover letters that you copied out of a book. If you write "I understand the position also requires a candidate who is team- and detail-oriented, works well under pressure, and is able to deal with people in departments throughout the firm" then at best people will think you're a bullshit artist and at worst they will think that you were not born with the part of the brain that allows you to form your own thoughts and ideas.

The personal pronoun "I" is always capitalized. All sentences must end in a period. If your cover letter looks like this I will not even look at your résumé:

i m interested in your summer job.
here is my resume
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it!

And while I'm on it, anonymous email accounts and AOL accounts just don't send a good message. They won't exactly disqualify you since so many people use them, but crazydood2004 at hotmail.com does not really impress me as much as name at alumni.something.edu. Do you really need to know if I Yahoo!? Do you really want to advertise Yahoo! SiteBuilder, a competitor to one of Fog Creek's products, when you're actually applying for a job at Fog Creek?

Indeed's basically Google for jobs -- simple interface, accurate responses, and quick load times. It remembers your searches and suggests related searches, without requiring a login...best of all, it offers RSS feeds and email updates on saved searches. Since it aggregates all the job boards out there, including the bigs, the industry-specific, and internal job boards, there's no reason not to make it your first stop if you're looking for a job. While I'm not looking for work, I've been pushing it on my friends and family, with good results, and more than one "wow".

Do you worry that this might be a rebound romance for either of you?

"I've never met anyone like Tom," Holmes replies, her beautiful green eyes focused on nothing in particular. [...]

Do you feel that, with more relationship experience, you get better at resolving conflicts?

"Meeting Tom—I'm just exhilarated. He makes me laugh, we have fun, we understand each other, everything is so aligned. I feel so lucky and so—like I've been given such a gift, such a gift, you know?" She pauses. "And it's just really amazing." [...]

Is there anything you guys don't have in common?

"You know, we appreciate each other."

Has it been a challenge to make his kids feel comfortable?

"They're just exceptional people." [...]

Anyone who has seen photos from the couple's June tour of European capitals in support of their summer movies will recognize the tall, cold-eyed Jessica Rodriguez, a third wheel at all of Holmes's recent public appearances. Rodriguez, 29, was described to me as Holmes's "Scientologist chaperone," and it was clear that she would be on hand during our interview despite my protests. Polite and restrained but alert to troublesome questions, Rodriguez chimes in only to offer an amen following one of Holmes's rhapsodies. ("You adore him," Rodriguez says after the actress explains that she can't keep her hands off Cruise.) But she rises from her chair when Holmes is asked how she feels about the widespread disbelief in her new union.

The explosions came a day after London was awarded the 2012 Olympics and as the G-8 summit was getting under way in Scotland.

Coincidence? Almost certainly.

UPDATE

[link]

Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick said the initial estimates were of 150 seriously injured and "many more" walking wounded. Police also said two people had died at Aldgate.

Ania Lichtarowicz, from BBC News, said a doctor who had been treating people in Tavistock Square said at least 10 people had died.

In other developments:

- The officer in charge of policing the G8 summit said many of the 1,500 Metropolitan Police officers in Scotland would be urgently redeployed to London

- New Olympics minister Tessa Jowell said celebrations to mark the homecoming from Singapore of the successful London Olympic bid team have been cancelled

- Pope Benedict said the blasts were "barbaric acts against humanity" in a message to the Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor

- Mobile phone services across London were jammed with all major networks reporting problems as people tried to contact relatives and friends. A spokeswoman for Vodafone said the emergency services were being given priority.

One artist who had no gigs to cancel but apparently needed to be associated with the incident was Omarion.

Inexplicably, the former B2K singer's publicist released a brief statement just hours after the bombings. "T.U.G./Sony Recording Artist Omarion was in London during the tragic bombings that struck this morning," the statement read. "He would like his fans to pray that he has a safe trip and a safe return home. He appreciates your support."

The R&B singer, in London for Live 8, was uninjured in the bombings, leaving many to question the appropriateness of the statement.

Asked by a Reuters reporter why anyone should pray for him, the musician's rep responded: "He wasn't hurt or anything, but just the fact that he was there and all that."