From the NYT:

Strong evidence is emerging that consumer spending, a bulwark against recession over the last year even as energy prices surged and the housing market sputtered, has begun to slow sharply at every level of the American economy, from the working class to the wealthy.

The abrupt pullback raises the possibility that the country may be experiencing a rare decline in personal consumption, not just a slower rate of growth. Such a decline would be the first since 1991, and it would almost certainly push the entire economy into a recession in the middle of an election year.

The Washington Post has an article on parkour that features some interesting background on David Belle, one of the stars of Banlieue 13, which I consider to be one of the more influential action movies of recent years.

Rent it if only to watch the chase scene involving Belle's character that opens the film. The man moves like a drop of mercury (here's the YouTube version, but it doesn't do the scene justice).

When B-13 screened at TIFF '05, the audience was told afterwards, No CGI, and no wires. And they roared!

From Clark Hoyt's column about the hiring of conservative William Kristol as an NYT op-ed columnist:

On Fox News Sunday on June 25, 2006, Kristol said, “I think the attorney general has an absolute obligation to consider prosecution” of The New York Times for publishing an article that revealed a classified government program to sift the international banking transactions of thousands of Americans in a search for terrorists.

Publication of the article was controversial — my predecessor as public editor first supported it and then changed his mind — but Kristol’s leap to prosecution smacked of intimidation and disregard for both the First Amendment and the role of a free press in monitoring a government that has a long history of throwing the cloak of national security and classification over its activities. This is not a person I would have rewarded with a regular spot in front of arguably the most elite audience in the nation.

Has it even (dare we say it?) "jumped the shark"? Or is Gawker like Saturday Night Live, in a trough period, but set to rebound?

From Reuters.com:

Male tailors in an Afghan province have been barred from measuring female clients for fittings following a new local ruling that resembles the restrictions the ultra-conservative Taliban imposed on the country when in power.

The decision was made by a council of Islamic clergymen in northeastern Takhar province recently, governor Abdul Latif Ibrahimi said.

"The male tailors have been told to stop measuring women," Ibrahimi told Reuters by phone on Saturday. "They need to be measured by female tailors."

While many Afghan women have excellent needlework and dressmaking skills, the overwhelming majority of commercial tailors are men.

Ousted in 2001, the Taliban's radical Islamic government banned male tailors from outfitting women. They also barred women from most employment and education and also forced them to wear an all-enveloping burqa while venturing outdoors.