October 12, 2002

The New York Times has an article on some of the difficulties in determining who should receive the Nobel Prizes for physics, chemistry and medicine. Some of the problems are limit of three people per awards who must be living are also discussed. Most importantly, there is just so much good work being done that narrowing it down to at most three people a year is very difficult. This latter problem is of course a happier one than no work being suitable for the Prizes. 7:35:48 PM

CNN notes that Twentieth Century Fox may delay the November release of the movie Phone Booth in which randomly selected man is pinned down in a phone booth under the crosshairs of a deranged sniper. The movie stars Colin Farrell as the victim and Kiefer Sutherland as the sniper. The article lists three other cases this year in which movies were delayed because of their similarities to Sept 11th or the summer’s highly publicized child abduction cases. 7:20:44 PM

Newsweek has a disturbing excerpt from historian Michael Beschloss’s book The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler’s Germany 1941-1945. The excerpt states that it was US President Franklin Roosevelt who decided against ordering Allied air forces to bomb Auschwitz or the railroads leading to it. Whether or not this would have helped is debatable as the Nazis certainly used other methods to murder large numbers of Jews. But if true, not making an attempt at all to stop the killings is a dark stain on FDR as a man and as a leader. 7:12:04 PM

Sheikh Ikrema Sabri the mufti of Jerusalem rejected Israel’s invitation to Jordanian engineers to fix the structural problems in the Temple Mount that he probably had a hand in creating through poor construction work. 7:11:32 PM