The logical thing to do: Rabbis cleanse holy site sullied by porno pics (Itim News Service)

Rabbis and other concerned residents of Safed held a cleansing ceremony yesterday at the grave of a prominent Torah scholars, after the publication of nude photographs of a young woman at the graveside on a locally based Internet site. The rabbis circled the grave of Ba'al Arvei Nahal seven times and sounded the shofar (ram's horn).

The photographs, which showed the semi-naked woman holding a bottle in one hand and a book of Psalms in the other, caused uproar among the orthodox community in Safed and across Israel.

    

It Could Be Worse. Much Worse: Chronicle of SARS Foretold?

Yudel's Line: Something seemed familiar about the new SARS disease surfacing near China. Something seemed to tell me that a 4% fatality rate could be worse. Much worse.

The story was in a special Scenarios issue of Wired Magazine back in 1995. It doesn't seem to be online; here's an excerpt found on the National Public Health Leadership Development Network.

The Plague Years (adapted from WIRED Scenarios 1.01, January 1995)

2013. First outbreak of "Mao Flu" in Hong Kong: spread by aerosols (single 10 micron droplet enough to infect); incubation time of 10 hours, followed by six hours of increasing malaise fading into neurological disorder, as in rabies. Then massive internal clotting, organ dissolution, bloody vomiting and diarrhea, and hemorrhaging. But right up until the end, patients show marked frenetic energy. Mortality rate is 99.8 percent.

2014. Global travel precautions: attempts at sterilizing airports fail, followed by collapse of global air industry.

2015. UN-sponsored "Pandemicon" conference to address the Mao flu pandemic ends in disaster as world's most gifted bioresearchers are all infected and die.

2016. Mao flu now global; rapid onset decimates the population of health professionals attempting to fight the disease -- all the medical personnel in Africa died in the first six months; about 95 percent of personnel in Asia outside Japan and the "Asian tigers," and Latin America lost almost 90 percent of its medical personnel. In the developed world, only about one-third of the medical personnel succumbed.

2017. Cities empty out into the countryside; international commerce collapses; first "sterile enclaves" formed. Surviving junior bioresearchers and virologists contact each other from enclave to enclave using the Net/Web -- initial explorations of the Mao virus dynamics made possible by web-linked, immersive virtual reality biochemical modelling programs.

2018. "Hygienic Alliances" formed -- economic cooperation among various sterile enclaves. Health passports issued, although travel extremely rare.

    

Whatever Happened to the Democratic Party? Exit Poll (The New Republic)

"As the party's de facto leaders, Daschle, Gephardt, and McAuliffe signed off on the Democrats' failed strategy of de-emphasizing national security and the Bush tax cut in order to focus on traditional Democratic winners like education, health care, and Social Security. But they weren't making their decisions in a vacuum.

To a large extent, the Democratic leaders were relying on a small circle of influential Democratic pollsters and consultants--the people who formulate strategy in Washington and then turn around and advise House and Senate campaigns around the nation on how to implement it."

    

What Is Karl Rove Trying to Hide? Undercutting the 9/11 Inquiry (NYTimes Editorial)

"It's hard to believe that everything related to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks will not get the most thorough public scrutiny possible. But the federal investigative committee so reluctantly supported by the White House now seems in danger of being undermined. As the first hearings open in Manhattan today, committee members are chagrined to be going hat in hand to Congress for adequate financing. White House assurances led them to believe needed funds would be included in the supplemental war budget sent to the Capitol last week. But the commission's $11 million request was not there.

Reasonable people might wonder if the White House, having failed in its initial attempt to have Henry Kissinger steer the investigation, may be resorting to budgetary starvation as a tactic to hobble any politically fearless inquiry. The committee's mandate includes scrutiny of intelligence failures and eight other government areas.