If you’re a juvenile court judge charged with hearing child neglect cases, it’s probably not a good idea to leave your 4-year-old alone wandering the streets at night:

Fulton County Juvenile Court Judge Nina Hickson issued a public apology Monday as two more inquiries began regarding her leaving her 4-year-old daughter home alone while she ran a late-night errand.
. . .
Hickson, a 43-year-old single parent, acknowledged in a two-page written statement that she made a mistake in leaving her daughter, Wesley Victoria, home alone to make a dash back to Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport to claim a piece of luggage.
“I, of all people, should have known better,” the judge said.
Hickson said she and her daughter had returned home from a trip about 10:45 p.m. and she thought her daughter was safely asleep for the night when she decided to go to the airport.
But a passer-by found the girl wandering on an East Point street, looking for her mother, and called authorities.
East Point police contacted Atlanta police, who returned the girl to her mother.

I hadn’t seen much on the German cannibalism trial lately. I’m not sure if they took off for some holiday cheer or if I just haven’t been looking closely enough. Anyway, the trial is still in progress. From recent testimony I learn that in corners of the Internet where I’ve never ventured, there’s some nifty cannibalism forums:

Inspector Isolde Stock said that Mr Meiwes’ email correspondence with members of “cannibal forums” would fill two lorries if it were printed out.
“We downloaded over 3,000 pictures of gay and heterosexual sex, torture scenes and violence from Meiwes’s computer and two PCs,” she said.
. . .
Mr Meiwes estimates that there are at least 800 active participants in cannibal forums, and says he was in contact with at least 400 of them. Experts say the real number is probably much higher.
“There are several hundred people with cannibalistic tendencies in Germany alone, and many thousands around the world,” said Rudolf Egg, a criminologist in the German central criminal service.
Only a tiny proportion of those entering cannibal chat-rooms were willing to follow through and meet in real life.

That’s probably good. Because if all of them followed through and engaged in their cannibalism, there wouldn’t be many people left to chat with.
Just what does one share in a cannibalism forum anyway? Recipes?
In this case it seems to have been fantasies:

The judge read out selections of Mr Meiwes’ email conversations with J�rg, another correspondent, describing their sexual and cannibalistic fantasies.
“Did you kill any young men over the holidays?” J�rg asked in January last year.
“It was the only thing I didn’t do over the holidays. Do you think I have slipped out, that I want to kill a young man and eat him?” Mr Meiwes replied.
“No, there is nothing sexier than to be killed like a pig,” replied J�rg.
To satisfy another correspondent, whose fantasy was to be killed and eaten by a woman, Mr Meiwes set up a new email account and pretended to be a woman.

That’s the Internet for you. If you can’t trust someone in a cannibalism forum, just who can you trust these days?

The media has been all over one of the pressing issues of our time–the fact that Britney Spears’ “sacred” marriage lasted only two days.
Given this overwhelming demonstration of commitment, I’m lead to wonder: could Spears’ endorsement of President Bush similarly be in jeopardy?

Spears answered, “Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that.” She declared that she trusts President Bush, but when asked about the president’s political future, Spears told Carlson that she doesn’t know if he’ll get re-elected.

Karl Rove has some restless nights ahead of him.

This CNN piece asks if other search engines produce better results than Google. One site it highlights is Vivisimo.
There’s no easier way to assess a search engine than to try it out, so I gave both the ultimate test: the Resonance search.
Turns out Google is better in raw search power:
Google: No. 9.
Vivisimo: No. 11. (average rank of three searches).
What sets Vivisimo apart from many other search engines is that it also groups results into subject clusters, which may help one wade through a bunch of irrelevant hits. But it’s not always helpful. For instance, in my test search I wasn’t sure which category my desired hit was listed in. When that’s the case you’re just as well off scrolling through the entire list.

We’re No. 1!

Teenagers in the United States have higher rates of obesity than those in 14 other industrialized countries, including France and Germany, a study of nearly 30,000 youngsters ages 13 and 15 found.
Among American 15-year-olds, 15 percent of girls and nearly 14 percent of boys were obese, and 31 percent of girls and 28 percent of boys were more modestly overweight.
. . .
The heaviest countries, based on data from 15-year-olds, also included Greece, Portugal, Israel, Ireland and Denmark.

The reason: poor diet and insufficient exercise.

U.S. teens were more likely than those in other countries to eat fast food, snacks and sugary sodas and were more likely to be driven to school and other activities, contributing to a more sedentary lifestyle, said co-author Mary Overpeck of the U.S. Maternal and Child Health Bureau.