Site Outage
In order to ensure support for underlying technologies, our hosting company upgraded certain pieces of software (PHP, MySQL) and a slight change in how PHP works caused some of my software to malfunction.  We were down from Sunday morning to Monday afternoon.  We are now back up, running on PHP5, so if you missed us while we were gone, your wait is over.

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Saudi Justice
John Mauldin included the following text in a recent newsletter, asking that others spread the word: (More Information)

It seems that a 19 year old young lady in Saudi Arabia was gang-raped by six armed men. They got between one and five years in prison. Because she was in a car with a man who was not related to her, she was given a sentence of 90 lashes. Because she appealed and a higher court ordered another trial, the court then more than doubled the sentence to 200 lashes.

“A court source told the English-language Arab News that the judges had decided to punish the woman further for ‘her attempt to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media.’” Her lawyer had his credentials removed for defending her. This is simply barbaric. It is an affront to any civilized thoughtful person. Where are the protests? Are we to believe that the Saudi royalty condones such acts?