Thursday morning roundup

In Yemen, too, brave girls who have had enough, together with journalists, are catalyzing social change. Unlike in the tragic story I posted yesterday about India, at least in Yemen, the legal system worked.

A genocide is a genocide, regardless of whose country has the better paid lobbyists.

Documents left on floors to be picked up by journalists can be interesting.

The vote to censure Marion Barry reflects a paradigm shift in DC politics. Robert McCartney says it all in the closing lines of his column: "We can only hope that such enthusiasm for accountability and high standards will have real impact and ultimately spread to all parts of the city's government."

Political accountability is not the only kind lacking in the metro region: apparently, area dog owners aren't great about cleaning up after their dogs.

Project Runway comes to Wii.

Who knew: advertising on Facebook can be creepy.

What about Facebook isn't creepy?

I'm not on Facebook, because I don't need to know what my "friends" are doing every minute of the day, and I don't need anyone to know what I'm doing at the same frequency. I resent that I can't turn off e-mails from Facebook--it's one thing to get them from friends, and quite another to be invited to join not only by people you don't even know, but by people you've interacted with once. No, I don't want to be "friends" with a contractor I invited to offer an estimate for the gate. Linked In at least gives you the option of saying, 'I don't know this person.'

Google ads are too absurd to be creepy, but Picasa's facial recognition tool is cutting it close. Still, it was funny when it asked me to identify a statue of Buddha. I wondered whether, had I complied, it would have applied the formula to other pictures of statues of Buddha.