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At Michael J. Totten's Middle East Journal, Mr. Totten has a heartbreaking post on the situation in Lebanon.

Former DNC Press Secretary Terry Michael has a good column in The Washington Times calling for an end to the drug war. You can read more from Mr. Michael at TerryMichael.net.

Overkill, Radley Balko's paper on paramilitary police raids, is available for sale at the Cato Institute's site. It is also available as a free download. Mr. Balko also has put together an interactive map showing the locations of botched paramilitary raids on American homes and businesses.

At Reason, Ron Bailey tells of an appalling invasion of medical privacy by the New York Department of Health and Mental hygiene:

In January 2006, the city's health bureaucrats began implementing a surveillance program that will eventually include nearly all of the city's 530,000 diabetics. In the current issue of Science, Columbia University professor of sociomedical studies Amy Fairchild, writes, "If New York comes to serve as a model, public health surveillance will take on a radical new form, entailing a reconfiguration of the relation between public health and medicine."

New York's radical new surveillance system requires mandatory electronic reporting of the glycosylated hemoglobin A1c values of all diabetics tested by all city laboratories to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOH).

(entire article here, link via Hit & Run)

Jennifer, one of my favorite commenters at Hit & Run and Grylliade, finally has her own blog, Ravings of a Feral Genius.

Finally, I don't know what's funnier, this satirical editorial from The Onion, or the fact that an uptight anti-choicer took it seriously. (link via Hit & Run)