With their Web server down, contributors to the campus newspaper the Collegiate Times filed blog entries on their parent company's Web site beginning at 9:47 a.m. as they attempted to confirm information about two Monday morning university shootings, which left at least 22 people dead and many more injured. ABC reported 29 dead by Monday afternoon.

According to the student newspaper's blog, 20 students died in Norris Hall, a 72,375-square-foot building that houses the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics. The department focuses on materials, material systems, biomechanics, and computational methods, among other subjects.

Students and faculty communicated with each other during the crisis through instant messaging and e-mail. A student captured the sound of several gunshots on campus.

By the afternoon, the university had posted a podcast of statements from its president, Charles Steger. He said police were investigating the first shooting when they received reports of a second shooting. He said the school was shocked and horrified by a tragedy of "monumental proportions." He also said he felt a great personal loss.

Internet and telephone services across Asia were disrupted, hampering financial transactions, after earthquakes near Taiwan damaged undersea cables.

"The repairs could take two to three weeks," said Leng Tai-feng, president of Chunghwa Telecom Co.'s international business. The Taipei-based company, Taiwan's largest phone operator, said two of its undersea cables were cut.

A series of earthquakes, including a magnitude 7.1 tremor, struck Taiwan last night and today, killing at least two people and cutting power supplies. HSBC Holdings Plc said its online banking services were down, while Chunghwa said almost no calls could be made to Southeast Asia, causing disruption to companies including First State Investments in Singapore.

This morning, a member of Congressman Kingston's staff was in the House Staff Gym when the Rayburn House Office Building was put under lockdown due to alleged gun shots. Under guidance of law enforcement officials, the staffer was taken via ambulance to the hospital. She was not injured or shot, just a little shaken up under the circumstances.

We have been in contact with our colleague and she is doing well.

After relying heavily on fixed — and thus vulnerable — Web sites until early 2002, al Qaeda quickly switched to hiding its online operations within more legitimate bulletin boards and Internet sites offering free upload services or connecting through such popular social network sites as Orkut and MySpace.

Now on the run, bin Laden's organization is even more virtual, which often means more dependent on the World Wide Web to spread propaganda and plot operations.

It is also one of the main reasons why, despite the many blows that it received since 9/11, many analysts believe the organization's operational capabilities have not truly diminished.

Law enforcement officials in Europe report that the number of such Web sites went from a dozen on Sept. 10, 2001, to close to 5,000 today.

While only a handful are currently operated by al Qaeda officials or militants, they serve a crucial purpose by "spreading activation" and nourishing the outrage or the global Muslim community, therefore laying the groundwork for al Qaeda's fundraising and recruitment activities.

Charlie Hebdo carried the new cartoon on its front page, depicting the Prophet Mohammad burying his face in his hands and saying: "It's hard to be loved by fools".

Sales of the weekly were brisk in Paris. Inside pages showed the 12 cartoons that were first printed in Denmark and included an editorial explaining the decision to reprint them.

Du Bist Deutschland is the tag line of an enormous PR-campaign designed to help Germans feel good about being German. But a problem has developed. A photograph has recently been discovered of a 1930s-era Nazi conclave in which a banner emblazoned with the motto, "Denn Du bist Deutschland," meaning, "Cause Your Are Germany" is shown. This evidently has caused a major controversy, calling the continuation of the entire campaign into question.

Nowadays, milbloggers "get shut down almost as fast as they're set up," said New York Army National Guard Spc. Jason Christopher Hartley, 31, of upstate New Paltz, who believes something is lost as the grunt's-eye take on Tikrit or Kabul is silenced or sanitized.

Hartley last January was among the first active-duty combat troops demoted and fined for security violations on his blog, justanothersoldier.com.

Throughout last year, the Army, Marines, Air Force and Navy tightened control on bloggers by requiring them to register through the chain of command and by creating special security squads to monitor milblogs.

"The ones that stay up are completely patriotic and innocuous, and they're fine if you want to read the flag-waving and how everything's peachy keen in Iraq," said Hartley, who is back in New Paltz after two years stationed in Iraq.

Some critics of the censorship say it could be harder for American soldiers to publicly raise questions about the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the success or failure of the war effort, and the "stop-loss" policy that forces soldiers to remain after enlistment contracts expire.

But a complete milblog blackout may never succeed.

"Is it over? No way, as long as there are soldiers and the Internet. People will always be starting blogs and get shut down, and then someone else starts one," Hartley said. "In my generation, or younger, everyone's all about spilling their guts on the Internet."

Young people riding in vehicles smashed cars and store windows in suburban Sydney late Monday, a day after thousands of drunken white youths attacked people they believed were of Arab descent at a beach in the same area in one of Australia's worst outbursts of racial violence.

Sunday's attack - apparently prompted by reports that Lebanese youths had assaulted two lifeguards - sparked retaliation by young men of Arab descent in several Sydney suburbs, fighting with police and smashing 40 cars with sticks and bats, police said. Thirty-one people were injured and 16 were arrested in hours of violence.

Whilst last weeks events at Cronulla have now escalated into Cronulla and surrounding areas being a no-go area for any non anlgo-saxon, our Prime Minister doesn't believe that it's based on race. One couldn't be so out of touch with current events if they tried.

Its unfortunate and quite unsettling to see Australia, home to multiculturalism, degrade to gangs of people chasing man and woman with bottles and iron bars only because they differ in race to themselves. The initial events that sparked these events is of course unfortunate, but for it to come to what it is now is by no means just because of it.

We're down visiting the folks in London again and at about 06.05 we're awoken by a thunder like rumble, the house shaking and the loft entrance flying open. As you can imagine there's much shouting back and forth between the rooms as to whats going on, there's a car alarm going off outside and several of the lights have flicked on in the houses opposite.