bah!

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/13/politics/13GITM.html?hp

</>One senior Defense Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity said critics in the United States and abroad had greatly misunderstood the situation at Guantánamo and the need to detain so many people without charging them.

"We feel very much like we are in an active war," said the official, asserting that the civilian law enforcement model in which people are prosecuted for crimes or set free did not apply. "What we're doing at Guantánamo is more understandable in the war context," the official said.

Cool!

http://sacbee.com/state_wire/story/8260120p-9190734c.html

(this is the whole article:)

If anyone's ever promised you the sun, the moon and the stars, tell 'em you'll settle for BPM 37093.

The heart of that burned-out star with the no-nonsense name is a sparkling diamond that weighs a staggering 10 billion trillion trillion carats. That's one followed by 34 zeros.

The hunk of celestial bling is an estimated 2,500 miles across, said Travis Metcalfe, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

"You would need a jeweler's loupe the size of the sun to grade this diamond," said Metcalfe, who led the team that discovered the gem.

The diamond is a massive chunk of crystallized carbon that lies about 300 trillion miles from Earth, in the constellation Centaurus.

The galaxy's largest diamond is formally known as a white dwarf, or the hot core of a dead sun.

Astronomers have suspected for decades that white dwarfs crystallized, but only recently were able to verify the hypothesis.

A paper detailing the discovery has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters for publication.

hmm....

I am going to have to check this out:

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/02/08/grand_old_policy?mode=PF