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.

Why does it seem like I'm the only blogger outside of Indiana to write with any detail about the early Sunday morning tornado, which killed at least 22 people in Indiana, including 17 in one community? I've been unable to find a major blog with any significant writing on the latest natural disaster in America.

The Turk was a wooden cabinet on wheels, atop which sat a chessboard and a life-sized wooden mannequin dressed in Turkish style. This mysterious contraption would play against, and often defeat, human opponents. In truth the Turk was a clever illusion: the cabinet concealed a human chess expert who moved the Turk's arm and played the games.

There are no up-front fees to use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service. Instead, Amazon Mechanical Turk collects a 10% commission on top of the amount you (the "Requester") have paid someone to complete your Human Intelligence Tasks ("HITs"). The minimum commission charge is $0.005 per HIT.

The message is entertainingly bizarre but the concept is terrific. Companies use an API to submit tasks requiring mundane but human intelligence to Amazon; people abroad willing to work for peanuts (but more than they'd make otherwise) use Amazon to complete these tasks, and Amazon gets a small cut rather than the extortionate overhead taken by the eight million outsourcing "firms" (I use the word 'firm' loosely) that e-mail me inappropriately every time I post a job on Craigslist.

"I don't have enough information to comment on the case," says Edward Parmelee, a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's cyber crime squad in Jackson. "But (her blog) certainly could have been a factor.

"Blogging, in a sense, is the equivalent of hanging out at the mall. You can be talking to friends, but there could also be someone standing behind you listening to your conversations. Providing personal information for anyone in the world to go online and read increases the potential for something bad to happen."

Adds Robert Mahaffey, criminal investigator for the Mississippi Attorney General's cyber crime unit: "The Internet is the wild, wild West of the 21st century, and it should be viewed that way."

One of the problems with blogging, Parmelee says, is that "youngsters can get lured into a false sense of anonymity by sitting behind a computer screen ... they don't see the creepy old guy in the yellow raincoat who is out to do them harm."

The wind began battering the building hard around 11 a.m. The tower rocked and groaned. I heard a noise behind me, like the crackling of a large paper bag being crumpled. The wind had broken the outside pane of glass to my editor's office. We were only a thin pane away from having glass flying through the newsroom.

Four-blocks worth of track and railing from the elevated Metro Rail has fallen down about 30 feet and onto the road at N.W. 12 Avenue outside Jackson Memorial Hospital.

At that same fire scene, a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media... obvious members of the media... armed only with notepads. Her actions (apparently because she thought reporters were encroaching on the scene) were over the top and she was told. There are automatic weapons and shotguns everywhere you look. It's a stance that perhaps would have been appropriate during the open lawlessness that has long since ended on most of these streets. Someone else points out on television as I post this: the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history.

Scientists at Louisiana State University say their computer models now suggest as many as 80,000 people may have perished. Pray that number turns out high by a factor of 100.

The Times-Picayune is evacuating it's New Orleans building.

Water continues to rise around our building, as it is throughout the region. We want to evaucate our employees and families while we are still able to safely leave our building.

Our plan is to head across the Mississippi River on the Pontchartrain Expressway to the west bank of New Orleans and Jefferson Parish. From there, we'll try to head to Houma.

Our plan, obviously, is to resume providing news to our readers ASAP. Please refer back to this site for continuing information as soon as we are able to provide it.

WWL-TV studios are being evacuated as rising water is coming into the station. The French Quarter is taking on water and water is expected to rise in the city for the next few days.

Meanwhile, the British stand above the growing turmoil, refusing to challenge the Islamists' claim on the hearts and minds of police officers. This detachment angers many Basrans. "The British know what's happening but they are asleep, pretending they can simply establish security and leave behind democracy," said the police lieutenant who had told me of the assassinations. "Before such a government takes root here, we must experience a transformation of our minds."

In other words, real security reform requires psychological as well as physical training. Unless the British include in their security sector reform strategy some basic lessons in democratic principles, Basra risks falling further under the sway of Islamic extremists and their Western-trained police enforcers.

Both Blogcn and Bokee have filtering systems that prevent users from writing about taboo topics. A Blogcn user, for instance, who tries to write "Falun Gong" will find the term converted to gibberish on screen. If a forbidden phrase makes it past the filter, the company might get a call from the police demanding that the offending post be removed. "We can immediately fix it," says Hu, who adds that he has gotten only "four or five" such calls in the past two years. It's not just Chinese companies that cooperate with the censors. A joint venture operated in China by Microsoft Corp.'s MSN blocks words such as "democracy" in the subject lines of blogs on its site. Microsoft says it simply is complying with Chinese laws and norms. And China's censors can intercept traffic from overseas services such as the one that hosts Muzi Mei's blog. For instance, San Francisco-based Six Apart, which is home to some Chinese-language blogs, has been blocked from the mainland twice. "China would be an opportunity for us if a Western company could go in and have a dialogue, but right now that's not the case," says Anil Dash, a Six Apart vice-president.

Take, as a case study, the most instantly iconic photo to emerge from the bombings: a hazy picture of a man in a crowded, eerily lit subway tunnel, holding a handkerchief to his mouth. That picture was taken on a camera phone by Adam Stacey, by no means a professional photographer, who happened to be on the subway train that was hit in a tunnel outside the Kings Cross tube station. Stacey instantly beamed the image to his friend Alfie Dennen, who runs moblog.co.uk. Dennen published the snapshot with a Creative Commons license permitting anybody to reprint it provided Stacey received credit for the photo. From there the image was picked up by picturephoning.com and then Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that is edited by its readers, followed by Sky News, the Associated Press and finally the BBC and the Guardian newspaper. It has since been everywhere.

What happened Thursday is not done happening yet, nor will it be for a very long time. But one lesson that may already be gleaned is this: it is no longer newspapers, as the old maxim goes, that write the first draft of history. Cable news may offer instant images, but it has always been the role of the written word, meaning newspapers, to capture fleeting events and distill them into historical record. But by the time the first editions of print newspapers hit newsstands Friday morning, citizen journalists had already written that first draft, and in some respects the second and third draft, online. Factoring in Wikipedia's coverage of Thursday's terror, you might even say today’s papers are finally getting around to offering history’s 2,801st draft.