GO HERE to see how you can help save Amina Lawal from being stoned to death.

BRITISH SUICIDE BOMBERS:

TWO British citizens were responsible for the suicide bombing of a pub in Tel Aviv early yesterday that killed three civilians and wounded 46 others.

A hunt was under way for one of the bombers, who did not detonate his charge and was believed to have it still in his possession. He is thought to have fled the scene when he saw his accomplice being blocked by a security guard.

Israeli police released an image of the passport of the dead man, Asif Mohammed Hanif, who detonated his explosives at the door. He was born on 2 August, 1981, in Bhowanj, Pakistan. The passport photograph of the wanted man, Omar Khan Sharif, born on 13 March, 1976, in Derby, was also released.

The security guard was seriously wounded as were another five people.

Reports in Jerusalem said the bombers were members of al-Qaeda or Hezbollah.

The British turned a blind eye to Islamic fundamentalism in Britain for a long time. This is the fruit of that policy.

ANATOLE KALETSKY WRITES:

Today is May 1, the International Day of Labour. It seems appropriate, therefore, to devote this column to the triumph of global capitalism. For if there is one social principle on which all economists, historians and politicians must now surely agree, it is that capitalism has done more than any other human construct to benefit working people around the world.

He’s right, of course. Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, the real question is whether the lovely Lily Malcolm will find the right special someone under her cherry tree.

MISSING TOURIST UPDATE: According to this report, they’ve been found:

ALGIERS, Algeria (AP) — Thirty-one European tourists who vanished in the Sahara Desert are being held hostage by terrorist groups, a ranking Algerian official said Wednesday.

The official said the tourists had been located by the Algerian army. Some 5,000 Algerian troops and 300 local guides were brought in to track down the tourists. . . .

No one has claimed responsibility for the disappearances, and there has been wide speculation about who might be behind them.

A name that regularly surfaces in the press is Mokhtar Benmokhtar, an Islamic insurgent thought to be a trafficker in arms, vehicles or cigarettes in the vast desert region between Algeria, Niger, Mali and Mauritania.

Interesting. I think there’s more involved in this region than mere cigarette smuggling. I think someone’s trying to set up a shadow state.

HOORAY FOR THE ALABAMA LEGISLATURE: They’ve managed to render their obscenity law illegal — and they did it knowingly!

COLIN POWELL IS FLOATING THE IRAQI OIL-TRUST IDEA:

“It is under consideration, we’re looking at that,” Powell told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee. “It’s a concept that applies in the case of Iraq at least for consideration.”

Absolutely. I’m glad somebody’s thinking about it.

ORSON SCOTT CARD IS WORRIED: What if everything goes right in Iraq? No, really, he has a point, sort of.

SEVERAL PEOPLE have emailed me this story from AlterNet about a “Patriot Act” raid. It seems a bit odd to me: 5 NYPD officers come in with drawn guns — but then they’re followed up by “officers of the INS and Homeland Security Department.” I’m no expert on how federal raids are conducted, but I’ve never heard of one conducted in this fashion. The feds generally have their own guys with guns.

Does anyone know if this M.O. makes sense?

These questions aside, the raid seems heavyhanded, but not dreadful. (Certainly not as bad as this pre-911 raid, which wasn’t even especially famous.) It’s hard to know more, since the story has few specifics, and we never learn what the feds were looking for.

UPDATE: Orin Kerr is skeptical — there was a raid, apparently, but this account raises doubts:

The idea that the author was told that he was “being held under the Patriot Act” sounds particularly unlikely to me. I can’t find a section of the Patriot Act that could conceivably apply to this.

It’s not impossible, of course, that a cop would claim to be acting under a law that, in fact, offers no such authority.

TRAFFIC FOR THIS MONTH is a hair above last month (which had one more day) at about 3.5 million pageviews. I suspect that it’ll be lower next month. And given that this traffic peak came about because of war, that’ll be just as well.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING INTERVIEW WITH NANOTECHNOLOGY PIONEER ERIC DREXLER about various claims regarding nanotechnology safety.

(Via NanoDot).

SLATE’S DAVID EDELSTEIN has a fascinating review of a documentary about the National Spelling Bee by Jeff Blitz, called Spellbound.

I was in the National Spelling Bee, and the documentary sounds like it rings true. I’ll have to order a copy when it becomes available.

MORE ON THE JOHN LOTT –STANFORD LAW REVIEW ISSUE: There’s an update here.

ALPHECCA’S WEEKLY CHART OF MEDIA BIAS ON GUNS is up.

JUDGE GILBERT MERRITT, THE JUDGE I CLERKED FOR, is going to Iraq to offer advice on setting up a real judiciary there. He’s a thoughtful guy with a lot of experience in this sort of thing, and I think this bodes well.

TENNESSEE’S STATE LEGISLATURE is looking at some truly dreadful DMCA-like legislation. But grassroots opposition is growing. Bill Hobbs has more.

SOME THOUGHTS ON SPACE SETTLEMENT, over at GlennReynolds.com. And scroll down for some reader email on Star Trek, in a post that I neglected to plug over here.

Of course, why should you listen to me, when I only rate the three of freakin’ clubs? I mean, you’d think that one of the Four Horsemen of the Ablogalypse would rate at least a face card. But I’m not bitter.

JUAN PAXETY NOTES that two can play the frivolous-Belgian-complaint game. Except that I’m not sure that he’s being frivolous.

ALL SORTS OF PEOPLE have been weighing in on Norman Mailer’s latest remarks, but fellow novelist Roger Simon has it nailed:

Talk about white boys who still need to know they’re good at something–how about NM and political analysis? Mailer continues to see everything as sports–fills the article with stale athletic references–as if, unconsciously, he were still in competition with Hemingway. (I doubt Hemingway, wherever he is, thinks much about Mailer.) That is also probably part of the reason he personifies the war in Iraq as Bush’s affair. There always has to be some kind of human adversary for Norman. Issues are not the point because they are not, never have been, Mailer’s forté. He prefers the boxing match and the ready opponent on the other side. But this time it’s interesting, despite the fact he’s writing in the London Times, Mailer didn’t dare take on the real heavyweight in town — Tony Blair. I guess even Norman knows when he’s over his head.

It was another novelist, Pietro Di Donato, who once said that for all their tough talk, Mailer and Breslin couldn’t punch their way out of a paper bag. Nowadays, that’s true even with regard to their rhetorical skills.

SMALL WISDOM FROM PRINCE CHARLES: My TechCentralStation column, inspired by Prince Charles’s comments on the dangers of nanotechnology, is up.

UPDATE: And note this post by David Appell on how disappointing it is when even science writers aren’t ashamed of ignorance about basic scientific facts.

ORIN KERR has your 2002 wiretap roundup, just in case you were wondering.

VIRGINIA POSTREL WRITES THAT BILL MCKIBBEN ISN’T “BRAVE:”

This is an abuse of language. McKibben’s book may be sincere, forceful, impassioned. It may be well written. But it is not brave. It will offend absolutely no one who matters in Bill McKibben’s world. To the contrary, it will reinforce the righteous self-image of those who promote his career. By writing this book, McKibben can count on attention and praise. That doesn’t make him a coward. But neither does it make him brave–or the reviewers brave for praising him.

But if you say it often enough, maybe no one will notice.

What really interests me is that people think that they’ve made a moral argument against genetic engineering when they say that the idea “sickens” them. The idea of sodomy “sickens” some people, too. So does the idea of interracial marriage.

So you feel ill. Why should I care? After all, pompous, empty-headed moralizing sickens me, and nobody’s stopping that.

ROBIN GOODFELLOW WRITES that America is ready for a political axis-shift.

THE ELF-AQUITAINE SCANDAL REACHES INTO SOME ODD PLACES:

One of the largest private shareholders in BNP Paribas , the French bank that holds more than $13 billion in Iraqi oil funds administered through the United Nation’s oil-for-food program, is an Iraqi-born businessman who once helped to arm Iraq in the 1980’s and brokered business deals with Saddam Hussein’s government, according to public records and interviews.

The involvement of the businessman, the British billionaire Nadhmi Auchi, raises questions about how carefully the United Nations has vetted the bank in its continuing role as repository of oil-for-food funds. . . .

Earlier this month, Mr. Auchi was arrested and released on bail in London pending a court hearing next week on fraud charges involving the French oil giant TotalFinaElf. French prosecutors have accused Mr. Auchi of helping channel bribes to Total’s executives, a charge Mr. Corker denies.

We keep hearing about Halliburton, but it seems to be TotalFinaElf that’s at the center of all the really shady stuff.

UPDATE: Reader Kathleen deBettencourt emails with an excellent suggestion:

The United States should propose that a full audit of the Oil for Food program be conducted by an international team of independent auditors immediately. This proposal should be done in open session. It will be very illustrative to see who objects.

Indeed.

DANNY PEARL: Killed because he knew too much?

PARIS (AP) – Islamic extremists killed Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl because he had discovered dangerous secrets about their ties to the Pakistani intelligence community, according to an investigation by a respected French writer. . . .

Levy believes that Pearl was about to complete an article revealing that the al-Qaida terror network was close to acquiring nuclear weapons from supporters inside Pakistan’s scientific establishment.

“Pearl’s conclusion, like my own, was that in Pakistan there are atomic scientists who are also committed Islamic extremists,” Levy said in an interview with Paris Match magazine published Wednesday.

That wouldn’t surprise me at all.

HOWARD VEIT has some thoughts on why celebrity anti-Americanism seems particularly offensive.