There is going to be a change with the Salon. We are doing a test-drive to see how it will work out, if I post the Salon in the evening. After almost 3 years of doing the Breakfast thread and then the Salon, I want my mornings back. I would appreciate more leisure and most of all, not having to start out the day with negative news. Posting the Salon in the evening has come up as a solution. So we will see how it works out.

 Also, it might help to avoid double postings of news links. I usually had not the time to check the open thread for news links before doing the Salon. It also looks like lots of news discussions have moved to the OT lately. So maybe with the evening opening of the Salon that can be solved too.

Outrage as French judge annuls Muslim marriage over bride's virginity lie - Times Online

The annulment of a young Muslim couple's marriage because the bride was not a virgin has caused anger in France, prompting President Sarkozy's party to call for a change in the law.

The decision by a court in Lille was condemned by the Government, media, feminists and civil rights organisations after it was reported in a legal journal on Thursday. Patrick Devedjian, leader of the ruling Union for a Popular Movement, said it was unacceptable that the law could be used for religious reasons to repudiate a bride. It must be modified "to put an end to this extremely disturbing situation", he said.

The case, which had previously gone unreported, involved an engineer in his 30s, named as Mr X, who married Ms Y, a student nurse in her 20s, in 2006. The wedding night party was still under way at the family's home in Roubaix when the groom came down from the bedroom complaining that his bride was not a virgin. He could not display the blood-stained sheet that is traditionally exhibited as proof of the bride's "purity".

[Murdoch Alert]

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Please notice my Learning English diary.  Please drop by an give me the benefit of your experience.

Thank you.

We now return to our regularly scheduled Open Thread, already in progress.

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Och nu den svenska kocken bakar en Alaskan älg jägare. Bonk! Bonk! Bonk!

27001

When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. — John M. Keynes

Well, we're sitting here watching Christopher discover that he can manipulate objects ... of course, that means stuffing them into his mouth, but what can you do?

Saw this on americablog:

Mark Bittman: What's wrong with what we eat

My pc has suddenly decided to once every couple of minutes put out some sound, like there's a crossed line or breakthorugh on the intertubes.

And it seems to be a thing called FX, which is some Fox nonsense. I've run norton to no effect, so I think something else is sitting on my system. Also tried task damager, no use.

Any idea where I look and how to expunge.

keep to the Fen Causeway

EconoSpeak: Debunking Skill-biased Technical Change

Debunking Skill-biased Technical Change

David Card, who always does excellent work, and John DiNardo published a nice work on the subject. Here is their conclusion:

133-40: "Since the late 1980s, a consensus has emerged that the decline in real wages for low-skilled workers in the early 1980s and the subsequent slow recovery of these wage levels are explained by skill-biased technological change. In this chapter, we have argued that the evidence underlying this consensus is remarkably frail.

Hey LEP!  You need to pick the theme for next week's photoblog and let us all know!

Ad astra per aspera

Perhaps the Sunday OT is a good place to say, i'm not sure who captured my account login last night, but it did seem like fun on a slow night.  i stand by everything whoever that was wrote.

Skennah Kowa

Independent - Robert Fisk - So al-Qa'ida's defeated, eh? Go tell it to the marines

So al-Qa'ida is "almost defeated", is it?.........

Am I alone in finding this stuff infantile to the point of madness? As long as there is injustice in the Middle East, al-Qa'ida will win.........

Yes, we've bought ourselves some time in Iraq by paying half of the insurgents to fight for us and to murder their al-Qa'ida cousins. Yes, we are continuing to prop up Saudi Arabia's head-chopping and torture-practising regime - no problem there, I suppose, after our enthusiasm for "water-boarding" - but this does not mean that al-Qa'ida is defeated.

Because al-Qa'ida is a way of thinking, not an army. It feeds on pain and fear and cruelty - our cruelty and oppression - and as long as we continue to dominate the Muslim world with our Apache helicopters and our tanks and our Humvees and our artillery and bombs and our "friendly" dictators, so will al-Qa'ida continue.  

keep to the Fen Causeway

Are you any good at finding miniature train stations too?

Ad astra per aspera

The new version of Salon is at this moment being uploaded.  If any of you have predictors, or inside info on what will happen tomorrow please be sure to post.  Your keystrokes will be rewarded.

Skennah Kowa

LAT - Robert Sheer - Indefensible Spending

What should be the most important issue in this election is one that is rarely, if ever, addressed: Why is U.S. military spending at the highest point, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than at any time since the end of World War II? Why, without a sophisticated military opponent in sight, is the United States spending trillions of dollars on the development of high-tech weapons systems that lost their purpose with the collapse of the Soviet Union two decades ago? ......................

Since the 9/11 attacks, the United States has been on a madcap spending spree on wars and weapons having little, if anything, to do with combating terrorism, nothing to do with the imaginary threat from China and everything to do with sustaining an enormously bloated defense industry threatened with extinction because of the demise of the communist enemy. The fact is, the end of the Cold War was a welcome development for everyone except for those in the military-industrial complex whose profits and jobs, as President Eisenhower famously warned, are rooted in every congressional district. ..................

But then came what defense industry lobbyists and their many allies on both sides of the aisle in Congress came to treat as the gift of 9/11, offering dramatic imagery of a new global enemy. Fortunately for those who profit from a permanent war economy, few in government or the media were inclined to challenge the enemy bait-and-switch game that unfolded. The defense industry and the Pentagon bureaucracy that services it were all too happy to accept whatever war they could embrace, even if the new "global war on terrorism" that President George W. Bush launched was to be fought against an enemy armed primarily with weapons that could be purchased for a few dollars at Home Depot.

h/t cabdrollery

keep to the Fen Causeway

I just finished my first book since Christopher was born. That's ten weeks now. (Not counting books of photographs, which you don't exactly read.)

So.  If y'all had four days to kill in France, what would you do?  I mean, Paris is a given, but can I do more than just Paris in four days?  Without bankrupting myself, that is, remember I do get paid in American play money.

Much to my shame (and to the astonishment of most of my friends) I've never been to France, other than a few brief stops at Charles de Gaulle airport.  Yes, I've been to Baghdad and Goma, but not Paris.  Sigh.

Also -- any ETers who might be in or near Paris in roughly two weeks feel like having lunch?

So it looks like about 380,000 people voted in the Puerto Rico primary (Clinton now at 68/32 with 72% in).

Drew, you remember the old days (last friday-ish) when Hillary Clinton's campaign was talking about 2 million people voting? And state officials said it would probably be more like about 500,000-600,000?