Sunday, 10-1-06: The Idaho Supreme Court ruled that an initiative proposal allowing people in Sun Valley to grow, sell and use marijuana can move forward. The city rejected the petition, but now it has to be voted on. It turns out that top House Republicans knew for months about the emails Mark Foley was sending to pages. They kept it secret, and let him remain the head of the caucus on childrens' issues. In local news, last Friday in Vancouver a man named John Loveless was talking on CB radio, and using an echo device. A listener named Kenneth Eichhorn wanted to come over and fight. They met at a mall, and Loveless shot Eichhorn to death. Loveless came home crying and saying to his girlfriend he'd shot somebody. He's in jail now. Monday, 10-2-06: A baby girl dangling by one hand from a third-floor balcony in Denver fell. She was caught by a neighbor named Mary Bussey who was waiting underneath, and was unharmed. This is wild. The leading cause of infant mortality in the US is now premature birth. It causes more than a third of infant deaths. An eighth of the 4 million kids born each year in America are preterm. Wednesday, 10-4-06: Yesterday President Bush called for an end to a destructive way of fishing, bottom trawling. Spain, Russia and Iceland are opposed. The southern winter just ended, and the hole in the ozone over Antarctica was larger than last year. It isn't expected to wane for decades. Two Americans won the nobel prize in physics for measuring the oldest light in the sky. Smoot and Mather were the chief architects of COBE, a NASA satellite observatory. This spacecraft could catch light from 380,000 years after big bang. Until then, the universe was opaque to light, so nothing earlier can be seen. It was "a magnificent confirmation of the big bang." Sea lice that thrive in salmon farms near the Pacific Coast are killing up to 95% of the wild juvenile salmon that pass their way, researchers in Canada say. Adult salmon can tolerate parasites, but juveniles can't. Housing prices in a third of American metropolitan areas are slumping after a five-year boom, and the areas that are expected to slump the most are California, Florida, and a strip on the East Coast from southern Maine to Washington DC. As if torture weren't enough, the diet in Guantanamo is making the prisoners fat. They're fed 4200 calories a day, well above the 2000 to 3000 recommended. One detainee has almost doubled his weight to 410 pounds, up from 215. Thursday, 10-5-06: The average American home now has more TV sets than people. There are 2.73 televisions and 2.55 people. And the avwerage home has a set turned on for 8 hours 14 minutes a day. Iraqi authorities have suspended an entire brigade of policemen, for "suspected connections" to death squads. Actually, they're suspected of being death squads. They'll be "retrained." In addition, since June the Ministry of the Interior has fired 1700 officers for "corruption." As someone who has lived in the third world, I find it incredibly amusing that the Bush administration thought the way to victory in Iraq was to punch the tar baby harder. The depth and antiquity of corruption in Asia is beyond most Americans' ability to imagine.... Friday, 10-6-06: The most comprehensive international scientific study ever done of violence against women was just released. WHO found that rates of partner violence ranged from a low of 15% in Japan to a high of 71% in Ethiopia. It's about 25% in the European Union, and the same in the US. Violence by intimate partners is widespread all over the world, in developing and developed countries, and in rural or urban areas. Most partner abuse is hidden, and only a fraction is reported to authorities. Half the women surveyed said it was the first time they'd spoken to anyone of the abuse. Wow! Saturday, 10-7-06: French authorities seized more than a hundred tabs of Ecstacy from Jimmy Buffet's luggage earlier this week. Customs officials at the St Tropez's airport spotted the pills. Buffet was detained, though not arrested, and he was fined $380. St John Vianney died in 1859. When his body was dug up in 1904 because of his impending beatification, it was found not to have decayed. His heart and body have been encased in separate glass reliquaries for more than a century in France. This weekend, his heart is being brought to the US for the first time, to help Long Island's Cure or Ars chruch celebrate its 80th anniversary. Thousands of worshippers are expected. The Pentagon says it will investigate a Marine's sworn statement that guards from Guantanamo bragged of routinely beating the detainees there. "Everyone in the group laughed at the others' stories of beating detainees," the sergeant wrote. "Other guards also told their own stories of abuse towards the detainees" that included hitting them, denying them water and removing privileges for no reason. Remember what happened in the famous Zimbardo prison experiment?...