DANG, I SLEPT THROUGH THE EARTHQUAKE last night. Fortunately, SKBubba was awake and has the scoop.

MISSING TOURIST UPDATE:

The tourists have been separated into two groups and are being held in canyons and gullies near the town of Illizi, which lies near the Libyan border some 900 miles south-east of Algiers, a senior security official told the French newspaper Le Monde yesterday.

The 15 Germans, 10 Austrians, four Swiss, a Dutchman and a Swede who, while travelling in seven different groups, have gone missing since mid-February, are being held by rebels led by local Islamist leader Emir Ammari.

Well, that doesn’t solve the problem, but it does dispel some of the mystery.

MINNESOTA JOINS THE GROWING NUMBER OF STATES with “shall-issue” hangun-carry laws, meaning that citizens who qualify must be issued permits, with no discretion (traditionally a source of corruption and cronyism) left to authorities.

JERRY POURNELLE thinks patience will be the key in reconstructing Iraq:

The central question in a democracy is, can you afford to lose the election? If you try and fail, is loss total? Will you be jailed, your property confiscated, your family jailed or killed? If the consequences of loss are enormous, then you don’t let the ballot box be the final decision. Nor should you.

The first thing we must do is assure the losers they can afford to lose, and that we will be there to protect them.

I think that Rumsfeld has figured this out. But how many others have?

THE SECRET OF WEALTH (no, really) — just start here and scroll up.

DON’T SNIFF THE MYSTERIOUS WHITE POWDER: Well, this story isn’t really that funny:

An Egyptian merchant-marine sailor met “someone” in Cairo and was given a suitcase. He traveled to Brazil to join his ship, which was loading bauxite intended for Canada. He was supposed to deliver the suitcase to “someone” in Canada, but being curious about the suitcase he opened it while in Brazil, and shortly thereafter died from anthrax. Like as not, having found the legendary white powder he suspected it was drugs, and took a sniff to see.

I don’t know if he really sniffed it — another account I saw suggested that he died of intestinal anthrax — but this is a rather serious worry.

UPDATE: Here’s more, suggesting that worry is appropriate.

GERHARD SCHROEDER’S POLITICAL STAR isn’t exactly rising:

Chancellor Gerhard Schröder issued a veiled threat yesterday to resign if his party refuses to back his “Agenda 2010” package of reforms, intended to slim down the welfare state and give desperately needed impetus to the German economy.

It doesn’t have anything to do with the war, but it indicates why Schroeder was desperate enough to try distracting people with anti-Americanism.

UPDATE: It’s not just Schroeder who’s making this threat. (Via Tim Blair).

HERE’S AN UPDATE ON arrested Iranian blogger Sina Motallebi.

JUST WATCHED A TAPE of the PBS Newshour piece on weblogs that I mentioned earlier. I thought it was pretty good, and certainly better than yet another InstaPundit piece would have been. They interviewed a number of bloggers, showed a number of blogs, and featured Joan Connell who was — until last week — my editor (only she was called a “producer”) at MSNBC. It was actually the first time I’d ever seen her, since we’ve interacted entirely by phone and email.

The focus was on the blogosphere, not on particular blogs, and that was good — because the blogosphere is smarter than any individual blog or blogger.

I taped the piece because the InstaWife, InstaDaughter, and I went to a carnival tonight. Bumper-cars, shooting galleries, and Ferris wheels. And caramel apples. It was lovely.

UPDATE: There’s RealAudio here.

KEVIN DRUM CASTS DOUBT ON MEDIA ORIGINALITY: But you have to see the photo to appreciate it.

I’M NOT SURE THAT BERKELEY HAS REALLY BEEN LIBERATED YET, but this is surely evidence that American columns can operate at will even in the heart of the city.

UPDATE: Here’s more from the L.A. Times. Excerpt:

BERKELEY — Borrowing a page from this city’s radical traditions, a boisterous band of 200 college Republicans demonstrated Saturday in the bastion of American liberalism, staging a pro-Bush administration rally on the UC Berkeley campus and leading a flag-waving procession down Telegraph Avenue.

As street vendors and merchants looked on in disbelief, delegates attending a state college Republican convention here marched two blocks to People’s Park, site of a widely publicized protest incident in 1969, where they chanted “Bush! Bush! Bush!” and sang “America the Beautiful.”

By Berkeley standards, it was a minuscule procession played out on a balmy Saturday afternoon on a mostly deserted campus. But to the hardy corps of young Republicans, uniting under the theme “Behind Enemy Lines,” it was a highly symbolic event. Even grizzled political warriors said they were impressed by participants’ moxie. Longtime Berkeley professors said it represented a political drift to the right at California’s pioneer state university.

“I never dreamed in my lifetime that I would see this,” said a buoyant Shawn Steel, former state Republican Party chairman from Rolling Hills.

Well, it’s a man-bites-dog story, for sure. Or maybe a man-bites-geezer story:

The difference is clear at the Free Speech Movement Café, an elegant coffee shop funded by a wealthy 1964 graduate at the base of the new Moffitt Undergraduate Library. One of the walls of the cafe is covered with an enlarged photograph of a Free Speech era sit-in. Almost all of the faces in the photo are white. Recent classes entering Berkeley, however, have been largely Asian, accounting for more than 40% of the entering freshman class.

“As a general rule,” said Leonard, “the increase in Asian Americans has pushed the student body more toward the center politically.”

In fact, Leonard said, opposition to the campus conservatives is more likely to come from the faculty or aging leftists in the surrounding community. “I get the sense the community is much more into protest than the campus,” Leonard said. “There is a culture of protest in the Bay Area that is steadily getting grayer and older.”

It seems to be that way everywhere.

THE WAR IS FINALLY OVER, and it’s an unconditional victory, according to Rand Simberg.

I like the reference to “bunkum-busting.”

ANOTHER WALL HAS FALLEN, this one in Cyprus. Christopher Hitchens writes:

I wish I’d been there to see it, having so often traversed this grim border in both directions as a journalist, but I was able to get cell-phone reports from my former sister-in-law, Manto Meleagrou, who was one of the first to make the trip. The sense of exhilaration and liberty was extraordinary, as if people indefinitely confined in a cramped cell had suddenly been allowed to stretch and exercise. And also as if a “no talking” rule in a barren jail had suddenly been relaxed: Conversation that had been impossible for decades was suddenly and volubly resumed.

Germans were Germans on either side of the wall, while Cypriots are either Greek-speaking and Orthodox or Turkish-speaking and Muslim. One of the few benefits of British colonialism is that English is widely spoken on both sides, and the temper of both communities is also heavily secular, but there has been enough mutual distrust in Greek-Turkish history for demagogues to work on. Nonetheless, Manto and others told me that they were greeted very warmly by the Turkish Cypriots and that the local police and army seemed to have taken the day off. The same was true reciprocally: Turks venturing south were embraced by former friends and by new ones. . . .

The fraternization among Cypriots — a people long written-off as hopeless victims of “ancient hatreds” and tribal feelings — is of course mainly a compliment to themselves. Those of us lucky enough to know the island are well aware that the majority is immune to fascistic rhetoric and maintains a long tradition of courtesy and coexistence. However, it must be emphasized that the idea of a democratic, open, law-governed society, represented in part by the “pull” of the European Union, does now constitute an alternative pole of attraction and a challenge to traditional, confessional, and nationalist modes of thought. And this has implications across the region.

Along with the slow but now unstoppable movement among the Palestinians for a democratic “civil society” approach to their common problems and their long battle for statehood, this sudden development in Cyprus shows that there is indeed a “wind of change” blowing in the Middle East.

I hope he’s right. It does often seem to be the case that “ancient tribal hatreds” stem from modern demagoguery more than actual longstanding history.

JOHN LOTT HAS RESPONDED to the Ayres/Donohue post below. I’ve added his email as an update, which you can read here.

HERE’S AN UPDATE ON WHAT’S GOING ON WITH SGTSTRYKER.COM.

MISSING TOURISTS UPDATE:

ALGIERS, Algeria (AP) Algerian authorities found a vehicle in the Sahara desert that likely belonged to a German couple who are among 31 European tourists missing in the north African country, a security official said Sunday.

The discovery may provide one of the most important clues into the disappearances since the Algerian military began searching in mid-February, the official said on condition of anonymity.

The four-wheel drive vehicle was “practically buried under sand” near the remote town of Illizi, 930 miles southwest of the capital, Algiers, he said. Its battery had been removed.

Interesting.

THE PBS NEWSHOUR FOLKS emailed to tell me that there will be a program on weblogs on tonight. You’ll have to check your local listings for the time, but it should be around halfway through the program.

Originally, this was supposed to be a program about InstaPundit, but I persuaded them that InstaPundit had been done to death, and suggested that they branch out to some newer faces, which I gather they’ve done.

A transcript, etc., will appear here at some point after the show airs.

HERE’S MORE ON AN INSTAPUNDIT STAPLE: scandalous problems at the FBI crime lab.

The AP reported this month that FBI lab technician Jacquelyn Blake quit while under investigation for failing to follow required scientific procedures while analyzing 103 DNA samples over the past couple of years, and a second lab employee was indicted for allegedly providing false testimony.

Inspector General Glenn Fine expanded the Blake inquiry to examine the FBI lab’s broader practices in DNA cases. The FBI has been cooperating, the government officials said.

I wonder how many people were wrongly convicted? I feel pretty sure that some have been.

Here is an oldy-but-goody post on this, and here is another.

DAVID PLOTZ HAS A SURVEY OF IDEAS, all of which seem pretty good to me, on how to rebuild civil society in Iraq.

One useful thing to remember: unlike Russians, Iraqis had a civil society, more or less, as recently as 35 years ago. Iraq is more like Eastern Europe than Russia in this regard: there are still plenty of people who can remember a different way of living.

Here, by the way, is something I wrote on the subject a few weeks ago. And Jeff Jarvis has been all over this question (with special attention to the role the Internet can play) — just keep scrolling.

HERE’S MORE ON SARS and its impact on China.

DANIEL DREZNER POINTS OUT that there’s good news from Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, Roger Simon wonders if Tariq Aziz was our guy all along.

TALKLEFT is operational again. So is The Daily Kos, which unbeknownst to me was down for the same reason. SgtStryker, on the other hand, seems to be only halfway back. At the moment, I can see the template, but no entries.

PETER OBORNE WONDERS:

It is worth pondering this contradiction, made sharper by the military victory in Iraq. It raises two fascinating questions. Why do British armed forces, with their meagre £25 billion budget, always deliver? But why do the NHS and the education system, though in receipt of unlimited amounts of public money, continue to fail? To put the problem in another way: how come the simple British squaddie — though underpaid, overworked and forced to carry out his or her duties in conditions of appalling danger — always rises to any challenge? But how come so many British schoolteachers, rather better paid, with far shorter hours and long holidays, endlessly whinge and — as the teachers’ union conference demonstrated yet again — block even quite sensible reforms?

But it’s the paragraph after this one that demonstrates just how big a challenge Blair faces.

NOAM CHOMSKY AND HOWARD ZINN deconstruct The Fellowship of the Ring movie. I’m pretty sure this is a parody, but, really, how can you tell the difference?

THE GUARDIAN reports on Internet Satire sites and gives Scott Ott’s ScrappleFace a lot of attention.