Hi. I'm Newley Purnell. I cover technology and business for The Wall Street Journal, based in Hong Kong. I use this site to share my stories and often blog about the books I'm reading, tech trends, sports, travel, and our dog Ginger. For updates, get my weekly email newsletter.
BBC:
A former Khmer Rouge commander convicted over the 1994 murder of three Western tourists has been captured in Cambodia, officials have said.
They said that Chhouk Rin – who had been on the run for nearly a year – was detained in the north of the country.
Chhouk Rin was given a life sentence in 2002 for involvement in the abduction and killing of the three backpackers from Britain, Australia and France.
No word as to whether or not he’d been holed up with Gary Glitter.
Everyone’s favorite search engine appears to marching steadily toward its goal of indexing every piece of digital content in the universe.
Welcome to Google Base:
Google Base is Google’s database into which you can add all types of content. We’ll host your content and make it searchable online for free.
Examples of items you can find in Google Base:
• Description of your party planning service
• Articles on current events from your website
• Listing of your used car for sale
• Database of protein structuresYou can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle and Google Local.
Because, you know, when you gotta have a working database of protein structures like yesterday man, it’s great to be able to turn to Google.
UPDATE: The Google Base subdomain I linked to above is only intermittantly available at this point; Google’s expected to make the official announcement and make the service go live later today. More info here.
BBC:
Taiwan has responded to bird flu fears by starting work on its own version of the anti-viral drug, Tamiflu, without waiting for the manufacturer’s consent.
Taiwan officials said they had applied for the right to copy the drug – but the priority was to protect the public.
Tamiflu, made by Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche, cannot cure bird-flu but is widely seen as the best anti-viral drug to fight it, correspondents say.
Bird flu has killed at least 60 people in Asia since December 2003.
CNN:
Rosa Parks, who helped trigger the civil rights movement in the 1950s, died Monday, her longtime friends told CNN. She was 92.
Parks inspired the civil rights movement when she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1955.
I thought it necessary to break my my radio silence to bring you this breaking news: Taiwanese airline Eva, in a quest to achieve ultimate Asian cuteness, has just christened a Hello Kitty jet. You heard it here first.
All’s well in Boston. Regular posting to resume tomorrow or Monday.
I’m leaving this afternoon for a weekend in Boston. Coming back Sunday night. Posting will be light or nonexistent until Monday.
Until then, ponder the fact that I have inspired someone to start blogging in the United Arab Emirates (evidence in the blogroll). A scary thought, no?
CSM:
SOCHI, RUSSIA – At first glance, the view from Sochi’s Black Sea shore looks almost perfect: sparkling blue sea, a broad band of beach backed by palm trees and green hills, a range of snow-capped mountains in the distance.
Then a freight train rumbles down the beachfront within a few feet of sunbathers – and the idyll shatters.
The legacy of hamhanded Soviet planners is only one of many obstacles facing tour operators as they try to entice Western travelers to post-Soviet Russia.
Though it is the world’s largest country, with natural wonders, unique architecture, and famous art museums, Russia places almost last among European lands as a tourist destination.
American Dan Schorr is blogging from Pyongyang, North Korea; he’s there for the Arirang Games.
(Via BB).
When he was all of nineteen years old, Truman Capote wrote a novel that is only now being published; he said he’d destroyed it. The current New Yorker has an excerpt from the book illustrating that Capote’s genius for stylish prose manifested itself at an early age indeed:
Broadway is a street; it is also a neighborhood, an atmosphere. From the time she was thirteen, and during all those winters at Miss Risdale’s classes, Grady had made, even if it meant skipping school, as it often did, secret and weekly expeditions into this atmosphere, the attraction at first being band shows at the Paramount, the Strand, curious movies that never played the theaters east of Fifth or in Stamford and Greenwich. Since she had turned seventeen, however, she had liked only to walk around or stand on street corners with crowds moving about her. She would stay all afternoon and sometimes until it was dark. But it was never dark there: the lights that had been running all day grew yellow at dusk, white at night, and the faces, those dream-trapped faces, revealed the most to her then. Anonymity was part of the pleasure, but while she was no longer Grady McNeil, she did not know who it was that replaced her, and the tallest fires of her excitement burned with a fuel she could not name.
(Emphasis mine.)
“Capote,” a new biopic I mentioned earlier, opens next weekend.
(Via Maud Newton.)
