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Tá quase saindo o 10, mas como são raras as avaliações feitas por gringos saiu até no Slashdot.

O aquivo de sons da British Library conta com música, história oral, sons da natureza, etc. Há preciosidades com Sir Arthur Conan Doyle contando como criou o Shelock Holmes, a voz da Florence Nightingale gravada em 1890 e os tambores da ilha de Mabuiag, gravados pela primeira expedição antrológica britânica em 1898. De acordo com a reportagem no Guardian, já são mais de 4 mil horas em 12 mil ítens no catálogo.

Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, said: "Sound recordings represent a massively untapped resource in the field of education. They are relevant to all subjects and we are delighted that this programme will bring wide access to rare, historic and hugely valuable sound resources. This partnership demonstrates the British Library's commitment to the sector and we are delighted to work with Jisc to deliver it."

A opinião é do Krugman no New York Times. O colunista traça paralelos além das comparações politicas e comenta as consequências econômicas das ações da turma do baby Bush.

A fiscal comparison of George Bush's and Lyndon Johnson's policies makes the Vietnam era seem like a golden age of personal responsibility. At first, Johnson was reluctant to face up to the cost of the war. But in 1968 he bit the bullet, raising taxes and cutting spending; he turned a large deficit into a surplus the next year. A comparable program today — the budget went from a deficit of 3.2 percent of G.D.P. to a 0.3 percent surplus in just one year — would eliminate most of our budget deficit.

By contrast, Mr. Bush, for all his talk about staying the course, hasn't been willing to strike anything off his domestic wish list. On the contrary, he used the initial glow of apparent success in Iraq to ram through yet another tax cut, waiting until later to tell us about the extra $87 billion he needed. And he's still at it: in his press conference on Tuesday he said nothing about the $50 billion-to-$70 billion extra that everyone knows will be needed to pay for continuing operations.

A Air America, a alternativa da esquerda aos talk shows da direita americana com duas semanas de vida, saiu do ar em Los Angeles e Chicago (veja Alternet). Pode até ser um complõ da direita, mas de qq modo as coisas da Air America são meio sem graça... Apesar de eu gostar da Garofalo e do Franken, os programas simplesmente não são engraçados e batem na direita com mesmo formato leviano usado pelos conservadores.

O assassinato do diplomata iraniano, Khalil Naimi, enviado para negociar com o Sadr gera uma curiosidade inevitável: por que um membro do eixo do mal estaria ajudando os EUA a estabilizar o Iraque? O Asia Times cita o editor de internacional do Liberation para explicar a delicada posição do Irã nessa confusão.

Jean Pierre Perrin, chief of the foreign desk at the leftist French paper Liberation and a former correspondent of the French news agency AFP in Tehran, commented: "Iran's main adversary is not Washington but the two traditional enemies of the Iranian political Shi'ism: the exacerbated Arabian nationalism that carried to Iran the hardest strokes under Saddam Hussein and the imported Islam Wahhabite of Saudi Arabia that always sees in Shi'ism a 'plot of the Jewish on the one hand and the other groups that are currently engaged against the Americans in the Sunnite regions of Iraq'."

Mesmo ajudando os EUA, o Irã internamente continua com o discurso de membro do eixo do mal.

Tehran's attempts to help the US out of its troubles in Iraq (even if for self-serving reasons) have not dulled the rhetoric coming out of Tehran. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, leader of Iran, told the country's state-run, conservative-controlled television: "The United States accuses other countries of intervening in Iraq and of inciting the Iraqis, but it is very clear that the crimes of the occupation and their insulting behavior with regard to the young and the women are at the origin of the reaction of the Iraqis, Shi'ite or Sunni."

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