Final salary vic­tims march for rights. Final salary scheme mem­bers who have lost up to half of their life sav­ings due to unfair wind-up rules are to hand in a protest in Down­ing Street. [BBC News | Front Page | UK Edi­tion]

What is are “wind-up rules?” The author of the arti­cle didn’t bother to explain.

Japan’s Koizumi: Reforms Need More Time [AP World News]

bq. Prime Min­is­ter Junichiro Koizumi insisted Fri­day there would be no finan­cial cri­sis in the world’s second-largest econ­omy, promis­ing tax cuts and plead­ing for time for reforms to work.

At least some­one is finally talk­ing about tax cuts, after ten years of repeat­ing the same mis­takes. The arti­cle doesn’t go into much detail, so I can’t tell if there will be mean­ing­ful tax cuts or just the sort of insignif­i­cant win­dow dress­ing that the Repub­li­cans like here in the US.

Groove 2.5 is out. Paresh Suthar report the release of Groove 2.5 . Just upgraded my main acount and expe­ri­enced no prob­lems. Finally i can start play­ing around with some of the exit­ing stuff Tim has been work­ing on using Groove Web Ser­vices. [Jeroen Bekkers’ Groove Weblog]

I’ll give this ver­sion a try. Hope­fully it will be more reli­able than the pre­vi­ous version.

I came across a weblog titled Where is Raed?, run by an Iraqi named Salam. It’s very infor­ma­tive to read the view­point of some­one who actu­ally lives in Bagh­dad and com­pare it to the pro­pa­ganda (both for and against war) in the US media.

An End to Kosher Pork?. Aside from Likud, the big win­ner in Tuesday’s Israeli elec­tions was Shinui (“Change”), which went from six Knes­set seats to… [Hit & Run]

bq. Shinui, which also sup­ports lower taxes and pri­va­ti­za­tion, describes itself as “a Lib­eral Party…in the Euro­pean under­stand­ing of the term.” Accord­ing to the party’s Web site, “Our polit­i­cal and social phi­los­o­phy can be summed up in our belief that the rights of the indi­vid­ual are supreme, and that all leg­is­la­tion must be mea­sured against that prin­ci­ple.” It adds, “We dif­fer very sub­stan­tially from the left in that we do not accept their Social­ist poli­cies.” An arti­cle in The Jerusalem Post calls Shinui’s rise the “revolt of the bourgeoisie.”

I’d never heard of this party before, so this came as a pleas­ant sur­prise. I read the Shinui web site, and it looks like they actu­ally do have some Social­ist poli­cies of their own, but not nearly as bad as Labour–which now has only four more Knes­set seats.

18 Afghan Rebels Die in Clash With U.S. At least 18 rebels were killed in the assault. The U.S. mil­i­tary believes the fight­ers are loyal to rene­gade war­lord Gul­bud­din Hek­mat­yar, a pow­er­ful Pash­tun strong­man who has vowed to link his forces with rem­nants of al-Qaida and the ousted Tal­iban régime.

[…]

While King said evi­dence pointed to Hekmatyar’s mil­i­tary arm, the Hezb-e-Islami move­ment, he gave no fur­ther details, and a for­mer high-ranking Tal­iban mem­ber ques­tioned that.

Obei­dul­lah, who goes by only one name, told The Asso­ci­ated Press that the fight­ing was being led by two ex-Taliban — Hafiz Abdul Rahim, the régime’s for­mer chief of the bor­der secu­rity, and Sir­a­jud­din, for­mer dis­trict chief of Shin­dand in west­ern Afghanistan.

[…]

Hek­mat­yar was a key guer­rilla com­man­der dur­ing the 1980s Soviet war in Afghanistan. Later, in the civil war that paved the way for the Tal­iban takeover, Hekmatyar’s men pounded the cap­i­tal, Kabul, with daily rocket bar­rages. He lived in exile in Iran dur­ing the five years of the Tal­iban rule, and returned after U.S.-led forces ousted the hard­line mili­tia. West­ern intel­li­gence agen­cies sus­pect he is get­ting money from Iran. [Yahoo! News]

Here’s an exam­ple of how much con­fu­sion can arise from the media’s refusal to call a ter­ror­ist a ter­ror­ist. After read­ing the arti­cle, I can’t fig­ure out if the fight­ing is with actual rebels, or with Tal­iban left­overs who are being labeled rebels, or what. It seems like the US sol­diers involved aren’t even too sure.

Pales­tin­ian Killed by Home­made Grenade [AP World News]

bq. An 18-year-old Pales­tin­ian man was killed when Pales­tin­ian mil­i­tants tossed a home­made grenade at a funeral pro­ces­sion in the south­ern Gaza Strip (news — web sites) on Mon­day, hos­pi­tal offi­cials said.

The youth, Said Mabi, was badly wounded by shrap­nel and died before reach­ing the hos­pi­tal, said Dr. Ali Moussa at Rafah hos­pi­tal. Mabi was part of a pro­ces­sion at the funeral of two Pales­tini­ans killed Sunday.

Dur­ing funer­als, Pales­tin­ian mil­i­tants rou­tinely fire auto­matic rifles into the air and call for revenge against Israel. It appeared the grenade was thrown as a show of strength and was not intended to harm any­one, wit­nesses said.

Although the arti­cle doesn’t say so, the Pales­tini­ans killed Sun­day were also ter­ror­ists. This episode high­lights the major prob­lem faced by the PLO–no mat­ter how hard they try, they’re just too stu­pid to win.

Abor­tion Is the Health of the State. Abor­tion pol­i­tics is futile because lib­eral democ­racy can­not resolve the kinds of ques­tions involved in the dis­pute. Those ques­tions are pre-political, hav­ing to do with what con­sti­tutes mem­ber­ship in the human race and with what rights accom­pany that sta­tus in our soci­ety. By sub­ject­ing the dis­pute to the “demo­c­ra­tic process,” both sides con­cede to the State and to the mass of vot­ers the author­ity to deter­mine who’s human and who isn’t. The prob­lem with this should be imme­di­ately appar­ent. Not only can one very eas­ily imag­ine the State and the masses mak­ing objec­tively wrong deci­sions, but also, given the fickle and arbi­trary nature of bureau­crats, the masses, and judges, a deci­sion that’s “right” today can be “wrong” tomor­row. Sub­ject­ing these kinds of fun­da­men­tal ques­tions to the demo­c­ra­tic process amounts to deny­ing the exis­tence of truth itself, or at least sub­or­di­nat­ing truth to power. This hap­pens to be the inverse of what the lib­eral state was orig­i­nally sup­posed to do, to uphold cer­tain pre-existing con­ven­tional and meta­phys­i­cal rights. [LewRockwell.com]

A very good arti­cle on why the polit­i­cal argue­ment over abor­tion is futile.

LewRockwell.com has two arti­cles by Lew Rock­well and Joseph Sobran on how they went from con­ser­v­a­tives to lib­er­tar­i­ans. Both are very inter­est­ing, and the Rock­well arti­cles has lots of infor­ma­tion on the his­tory behind the Lud­wig von Mises Insti­tute.

New pow­ers boost ‘dirty’ cash seizures. Seizures of crime related cash have risen sharply since tough new pow­ers were intro­duced, offi­cial fig­ures sug­gest. [BBC News | Front Page | UK Edi­tion]

I’d say this is an omi­nous sign for the UK. Let­ting cops take money from peo­ple who haven’t been con­victed of a crime (or even arrested) just leads to the cops arbi­trar­ily loot­ing any­one they like.