No time for linking today.

The Voyager I spacecraft was approaching the “termination shock,” a turbulent region near the edge of the solar system. Lawyers at the Environmental Protection Agency announced that they were dropping lawsuits against 50 power plants for violating the Clean Air Act, because newly weakened enforcement rules have undermined the cases. The state attorneys general of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, which are downwind from many of the plants, promised to sue the polluters directly. The Federal Communications Commission decreed that after 2005 all digital television receivers must respond to a “broadcast flag” copyright mechanism to prevent unauthorized redistribution of movies and TV shows; computer scientists predicted that the mechanism will be defeated and that the copy protection will simply prevent legitimate uses. Bush alluded to the fact that the US has for sixty years supported dictatorships in the Middle East but said that, “in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.” The Department of Defense informed 43,000 additional reserve and national-guard troops that they should prepare for battle. The Bush Administration was looking to fill vacancies on local draft boards, although Pentagon officials denied that the government plans to reinstate the draft. Bush, surrounded by ten smiling white men in dark suits, signed a bill outlawing the rare abortion procedure known as “intact dilation and extraction.” He said that America “owes its children a different and better welcome.” [News flash, Georgey – abortion is not a welcome, it’s an unwelcome.] Federal judges in Nebraska and New York blocked enforcement of the ban.