Freyburg

Newsweek has a pretty good, if opinionated article about the state of mind of Marines in Iraq, who may have been responsible for the massacre of civilians in Haditha earlier this year. They excel at waging war, but they’re a little shakier on the peace-keeping side of things.

Surely a question we’ve all been asking. Pretty interesting article in the NYT about the furious pace of construction in Qatar, home to Al Jazeera and apparently a lot of luxury resorts.

Could be, says Steven Levy, who profiles China’s emerging programming prowess in Newsweek. Levy wrote the excellent Hackers, a chronicle of the early years of computing at MIT and Stanford, so I’m prepared to take him at his word.

According to Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, there are challenges ahead for the world’s hyperpower, but a combination of entrepreneurialism and immigration will keep the US on top for the foreseeable future.

After the civilian massacre in Haditha, the U.S. Army is re-evaulating the heavy-handed tactics of the Marine Corps dealing with the Iraqi insurgency. Shades of Vietnam, at least in terms of violence and futility.

The New York Times has a long report on how the Iraqi insurgency is attacking oil facilities and running a smuggling network, netting them millions.

And on the home front, apparently a bunch of would-be terrorists were busted in Toronto yesterday, with a couple of tons of explosive and some as-yet undisclosed plans to blow something up. Eep.

NOW, a program on PBS, has a bunch of predictions about where the Internet will be and how we’ll use it by 2016. None of this stuff is earth shattering hand-wavinesss the likes of which Wired loves to ladle out in hot digital spoonfuls, but it’s fairly interesting regardless.

Superman Returns, due June 28th, is a sequel to the first Superman film, with all the necessary respect for the source material that comes with such an undertaking. John Williams isn’t doing the music (which is a pity, as the original’s score is some of his finest work), but John Ottman, the composer for the new film, will be including elements of the original music in his score. Here’s some samples to whet your appetite until the end of the month.

Last year, Sony trotted out Connect, a software package/online music store meant to compete with the massively successful iTunes Music Store. But like most recent Sony projects, it was a complete and abject failure, as chronicled by Cnet.