Photo Pur­ports to Show Baby Bomber. Israel’s army released a pho­to­graph pur­port­ing to show a Pales­tin­ian baby dressed like a sui­cide bomber with ammu­ni­tion belts and explo­sives strapped to its body and a head band of the Islamic mil­i­tant group Hamas. [AP World News]

Despite the use of “pur­ports” in the title, the arti­cle says that even the Pales­tini­ans believe it’s real. This pic­ture is some­thing to keep in mind any time some politi­cian from Amer­ica or Europe talks about peace with the Pales­tini­ans as a pos­si­bil­ity. I doubt if even the Ger­mans ever dressed their babies as con­cen­tra­tion camp guards.

A Trea­tise on Marxism-Leninism: Marx’s Later Days. With Marx’s early days behind us, it is now time to turn to his later days. For those who were wait­ing until we could meet Engels, your wait is over. Sec­tion One: Fore­word and Chap­ter I [kuro5hin.org]

The con­tin­u­a­tion of the ear­lier joke biog­ra­phy of Karl Marx. Com­plete with nasty com­ments from Com­mu­nists with no sense of humour.

Free Samuel Wak­sal. Poor Samuel Wak­sal. Back in Decem­ber, the Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion struck a grave blow to his com­pany, ImClone Sys­tems, by deny­ing it the right to mar­ket a poten­tial can­cer treat­ment it had developed.

Then two weeks ago the FBI arrested him (and the Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion sued him) for let­ting rel­a­tives know about the FDA

Our friends the Saudis hold Amer­i­can women hostage, and the State Depart­ment shrugs. [Opin­ion­Jour­nal]

This is another exam­ple of the government’s habit of bend­ing over back­wards for coun­tries which are openly hos­tile to us. Saudi Ara­bia is an enemy which spon­sors ter­ror­ism, just as Pak­istan is an enemy which cre­ated the Taliban.

Be Inc. com­pletes takeover of Palm.. The Reg­is­ter: Be Inc. com­pletes takeover of Palm. [Hack the Planet]

The “takeover” in ques­tion is basi­cally the same sort of thing that hap­pened when NeXT, Inc. took over Apple. Hope­fully the end result will be bet­ter for Palm.

Fabien Petit­co­las: MP3 stegano­graphic tool.  [Script­ing News]

It’s Windows-only, no Mac ver­sion. Still, it’s a good idea.

Arafat: Bush Is Not Refer­ring to Me. Yasser Arafat was asked Tues­day if he was the man in ques­tion when Pres­i­dent Bush called for a change in the Pales­tin­ian lead­er­ship. [AP World News]

Appar­ently Arafat didn’t offer any the­ory as to who else Bush might have been talk­ing about.

Afghans Resent U.S. Treat­ment. In one raid, U.S. forces storm a home and arrest the owner, only to release him hours later. In another, sol­diers tie the hands of female sus­pects, break­ing a strict local taboo against touch­ing women. [AP World News]

This is hardly surprising–it’s been obvi­ous almost from the begin­ning that the US was headed down the same road as the Rus­sians. There’s prob­a­bly still time to repair the dam­age by giv­ing up on treat­ing Afghanistan as a con­quered ter­ri­tory, but I don’t think there’s much chance that any­one in Wash­ing­ton will do that.

An Inter­view with the Mother of a Sui­cide Bomber. “When the oper­a­tion was over, the media broad­cast the news. Then Muhammad’s brother came to me and informed me of his mar­tyr­dom. I began to cry, ‘Allah is the great­est,’ and prayed and thanked Allah for the suc­cess of the oper­a­tion. I began to utter cries of joy and we declared that we were happy. The young peo­ple began to fire into the air out of joy over the suc­cess of the oper­a­tion, as this is what we had hoped for him.”

“After the mar­tyr­dom [oper­a­tion], my heart was peace­ful about Muham­mad. I encour­aged all my sons to die a martyr’s death, and I wish this even for myself. After all this, I pre­pared myself to receive the body of my son, the pure shahid, in order to look upon him one last time and accept the well-wishers who [came] to us in large num­bers and par­tic­i­pated in our joy over Muhammad’s mar­tyr­dom…” [Mid­dle East Media Research Insti­tute]

Any­one who thinks that it’s pos­si­ble for Israel to make peace with the Pales­tini­ans any time soon should read this. Note that this evil crea­ture has other sons, and a his­tory of asso­ci­a­tion with ter­ror­ists. Since she’s so eager for her and her remain­ing chil­dren to be mar­tyrs, per­haps the IDF ought to send a heli­copter gun­ship around to her home to oblige her.

This is a trans­la­tion of an arti­cle printed in an Ara­bic news­pa­per from Lon­don, Al-Sharq Al-Awsat.

In Praise of Irrev­er­ence [Lud­wig von Mises Insti­tute]

This arti­cle has a lengthy series of Mark Twain quotes on gov­ern­ment. They mostly still apply today, although some of them are too kind to apply to mod­ern politi­cians, or warn of dis­as­ters that hadn’t hap­pened then, but have now.