A selection of headlines from Yahoo News, with commentary added for flavor:

Lebanon says to break blockade in 48 hours
Lebanon threatens to break the Israeli blockade of arms shipments to Hezbollah
if Israel doesn't meet a deadline set by U.N. Secretary-general Kofi Annan.

Productivity slows, wages post increase
Let no good news go unshaded by bad spin:  wages go up-hurray!  But, productivity continues to go up, too.  That should also be a Hurray! but that's not how the headline writer wanted you to react, is it?

US envoy says NKorea talks in bad way
No, the North Koreans aren't potty-mouths.  Well, maybe so.  But that's not what this AFP headline is trying to say.  The talks with North Korea over their nuclear weapons program are stalled.  What a surprise.

EU-Iran nuclear talks postponed
Another shocker.  Iran postpones talks.  Again.  It's almost as if they're stalling for time or something.  The U.N. should do something!

Germany says iran can't be allowed to harm U.N.
Actually, the U.N. does a pretty good job of harming itself without Iran's generous help to discredit the corrupt international organization.

Speaker warns Iraq has months to avert collapse
Buried in this story is the not insignificant event that command of the Iraqi armed forces would be transferred to the control of the elected Iraqi Prime Minister tomorrow.  Of course, this couldn't be the headline.  It's insufficiently dire.

A lesson in being careful what you post on the Internet--a thread tonight on the Free Republic conservative news/discussion site:

TIVO HYJACKED? (Recording cBS Evinging New)NOT VAINITY!

It's pretty hard to explain, but there are a number of lessons to learn from this sorry affair:

1) don't trust your wife with your TiVO password,
2) don't suspect that THEY have taken over your TiVO without checking possible alternate hypotheses,
3) too many capital letters typed together is a WARNING that you may be a bit OUT OF CONTROL, just a bit,
4) spell-checkers are your friends,
5) know not for whom the spork weasel zots, it zots for thee.

It may be essential to be a regular on Free Republic to understand the humor.   I just don't know.

Steve Irwin, the "Crocodile Hunter", was killed by a stingray barb to the heart yesterday.

A story, from Australia's Daily Telegraph:

The Australian reports that the footage shows that Irwin was swimming above a 2.5m stingray before it turned on him.

"The ray stopped and turned and that was it," boatowner Peter West, who viewed the footage afterwards, is quoted as saying in tomorrow's edition of The Australian newspaper. 

"Something happened with this animal and made it rear and he was in the wrong position at the wrong time and if it hit him anywhere else we would not be talking about a fatality," Mr West says in the report.

Walid Phares, at Counterterrorism Blog:

7) The Al Qaeda offer: Conversion or fire“
Azzam”’s mission in this tape was to deliver a message. His bottom line is this: We –the Jihadists- have you cornered everywhere and you are not going to win this war. His central message is typically Jihadic: “Surrender, convert or the fire:” Meaning war on Earth, all of it, and Hell fire after death.

The ugly face of World Problem #2.

Bob Weir, writing at the American Thinker:

I was chatting with a bunch of guys at a party one night. All but one of us knew each other pretty well. One guy, new to the group, began talking about Puerto-Rican women. He said something to the effect that they are inclined to recline, so to speak. The other guys looked away or quickly tried to change the subject.

"Really?" I said. "Well, my wife is Puerto-Rican; do you include her in that stereotype?"

The guy’s face paled with a mixture of fear and embarrassment. He began a pathetic attempt at an apology, but, feeling it was an experience he should remember, I frowned and waved it off as I, and others, meandered away toward another part of the room. Sure, I could have merely let it go, figuring the guy was a jerk. But, then he would not have learned anything about injecting his biases into a social context. I’ve always believed in the importance of challenging bigots in such situations, if only to instill in them that they never know whom they might be offending.

I'm slowly catching up with what happened in the world after being mostly "out-of-pocket" for the past week.

I found this delightful paragraph on Michael Totten's blog.

Zvika did seem to think the rocket parts were a little bit funny. He held them up for my camera with the same good cheer as a fisherman who just caught a seven pound bass.

He has pictures, too.

It's a heartening glimpse into the resilience of the human spirit, as well as another reminder about how intractable the whole Arab-Israeli problem remains.

Rod Liddle, writing in The Times of London (via Instapundit):

We are not born with a gene that insists we become Muslim or Christian or Rastafarian. We are born, all of us, with a tabula rasa; we are not defined by the nationality or religion or cultural assumptions of our parents. But that was the mindset which, at that time, prevailed.

This is how far we have come in the past year or so. When an ICM poll of Britain’s Muslims in February this year revealed that some 40% (that is, about 800,000 people) wished to see Islamic law introduced in parts of Britain, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality responded by saying that they should therefore pack their bags and clear off. Sir Trevor Phillips’s exact words were these: “If you want to have laws decided in another way, you have to live somewhere else.”

Problem 1:  Us-vs-Them-ism.  Call it tribalism, nationalism, racism, whatever.  Any time you divide the world into Us and Them, you're asking for trouble.  Unfortunately, that's how we evolved to view the world.

Problem 2:  The Expert Syndrome.  Any time you find someone who's absolutely convinced you should live your life some other way than what you're doing right now, you've got conflict.  Religious zealotry, health-nuts, safety nazis, the list goes on and on.  "I know better than you, and you should be forced to do things my way."  Both halves of that statement are also how everyone evolved to view the world.  The first half (I know better than you) isn't that harmful in and of itself, it's the second half (you should be forced to do things my way) where things fall apart rapidly.

There.  I've pretty much identified the basic problems with the world today.  Somebody needs to go out and fix them.  Actually, everybody needs to go out and fix them.

Michael J. Totten is a blogger-journalist who sticks his nose in where others don't go, to talk to the real people on the ground in the Middle East.  You know, what journalists used to do, before press releases and fabricated photos and videos became acceptable news matter.  He's in Israel now, talking to members of Israel's Peace Now movement.  (What, you didn't know that Israel had a "peace now" movement?  Well, go read the entire story on Totten's web site.  Here's a taste:

Yehuda told me he recently spoke to an Egyptian via email about an anti-Hezbollah article published in Lebanon.

“This guy came up with all of the regular tradition anti-Israel positions that we’re familiar with,” he said. “I responded to this guy and said ‘You’re living in the past. There are things that happened sixty years ago, and if you’re going to relate to them like they happened yesterday then we’re not going anywhere.' I, as an Israeli, don’t have a problem admitting that a tragedy befell the Palestinians in 1948. And this guy, first of all, couldn’t believe that an Israeli would actually admit that something happened to the Palestinians. And in a very course and dogmatic way, just wasn’t going to cut me a break.”

“The Arab Nationalists say Israel has no role to play in the Middle East and that we’ll have to leave,” Amichai said.

“What do you do with this?” Yehuda said. “It’s not reasonable to expect Jewish people to just roll up and go away or disappear. But on the other hand, a true injustice was done to the Palestinians. Between those two poles, you have all sorts of people coming up with all sorts of statements, theories, and whatnot. And it’s all obviously useless. Nothing has led to anything. All we see is military confrontation. When the first Zionists came to Palestine, Palestine was a feudal society. And you have a big clash between concepts that have nothing to do with religion or anything of that nature. The fact that the Arab-Israeli conflict is degrading into a religious conflict is a tragedy beyond description. It never really was.”

Israel is often thought of, in the West, as an unhinged fanatically right-wing country, like the U.S. on speed. Israel is far more ‘European,’ though, than it is ‘American.’ If Israel were not constantly under fire and constantly embroiled in conflict with eliminationist enemies, Israel would resemble a Jewish France or even Sweden of the Levant. The country was founded by democratic Labor Party socialists, and only rather recently has become more capitalist and complex.

Mark Teahen, third base, Kansas City Royals.  He's as hot as any hitter in baseball right now.

From the KC Star:

"In a way," Teahen said, "the game has slowed down a little bit. The other thing is I’m just able to focus more. I’m not as distracted with all of the distractions of the big leagues. I think I’ve found a comfort zone where it’s not as distracting this year."

His contribution Tuesday was a single, two doubles and a two-run homer in four at-bats. He boosted his average to .295, stole two bases and scored two runs, including the eventual winning run -- which he virtually manufactured on his own in the sixth inning:

A hustle double and a stolen base that turned into a run when it forced a bad throw by catcher Victor Martinez.

"He had about as good a game," manager Buddy Bell said, "as you can have."

Maybe Teahen-hood will rub off on some of the other young Royals.  It's baseball.  There's always hope.