Russpundit

While Americans are heading for Mars, we are just launching new spaceships.

Russian Soyuz spaceship went into the Earth orbit from Baikonur launching site, on Monday morning. The team consists of Russian Gennady Padalka, American Michael Fincke and Dutchman Andre Kuipers.

On Wednesday, Soyuz TMA-4 is to dock at the International Space Station (ISS), Russian media reported.

Padalka and Fincke are to spend half a year in space. They are to prepare the ISS for the docking of the first European cargo spaceship Jules Verne. The works for the launch of this ship will be finished in 2005, experts were quoted by Russian media as saying.

Dutch physician Kuipers from the European Space Agency is to hold more than 30 experiments on the orbit. He will return to Earth in 11 days, along with Russian astronaut Aleksander Kaleri and American Michael Foale who have been in orbit since October.

Good luck, guys!

Thanks to Oleg Tkachenko, my favorite RSS-reader RSS Bandit now has Russian interface.
BTW, I recommend to try this reader - it is very comfortable, nice looking and stable. Requires .NET.

Amazon launches its search engine - A9. John Battelle writes about it here and here. Also read an interview with Udi Manber in Business 2.0 - it is in public area.
Interesting.

Gmail quickly became the hottest thing in the Net. Yes, for first - this is the biggest free mail opportunity - 1Gb of storage. But it is not the biggest problem for those who were concerned with the privacy - mail messages will be indexed and relevant ads will be displayed while reading the message.
BTW, this is not the first mentioning of the mail indexing. If you remember - first notes about it appeared in January.
Blog of Topix.net describes the background of Gmail service and there is an interesting comment - "Of course, the paranoid part of me wonders if Google is going to become Skynet with all that power". One of my friend even wrote an article on this sentence. And I`ve played a bit with a picture. Do you like it?

I`ve read a lot last days about SuperComp of Google and creation of the new operating system but must admit - I think that most of rumours around Gmail and Google are just a multyplying of essenses. It seems like most authors of these articles never heard about Occam`s Razor.
Look - year ago Google bought Applied Semantics, a little firm which developed a contextual ad platform. Since that time Google creates just more and more contextual ads - in quantity as long as in quality. Adsense - for example. Gmail - as a second one. Don`t forget about Frequent Searcher program and Desktop Search. I think that in the near future we will see a desktop application which will show relevant ads right on our desktops while browsing websites even without Google ads. Why not? It won`t be Apocalypse. Not yet.

Jeff Jarvis makes an excellent roundup of Iraqi blogs, as usual.
He is citing sad words of an Iraqi blogger:

A whole year has passed now and I can't help but feel that we are back at the starting point again. The sense of an impending disaster, the ominous silence, the breakdown of most governmental facilities, the absence of any police or security forces, contradicting news reports, rumours everywhere, and a complete disruption in the flow of everyday life chores.
All signs indicate that it's all spiralling out of control, and any statements by CPA and US officials suggesting otherwise are blatantly absurd.

Talking Points has first hand impressions from Iraq:

I refer to this entire mess as the second Intifada of Iraq. The first Intifida was last August in Fallujah when US soldiers killed 15-17 Iraqis and Fallujah fell into revolt...
General Kimmet is wrong if he thinks that he will destroy the Badr brigade or Sadr Army as a military organization because there isn't really one ... he will disperse them into small, highly armed teams of friends and ... voila! Al Qaeda-Iraq or Hezbollah-Iraq will be borne in numbers we will not be able to control. Since the ICDC [the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps] seem to have run off and joined the opposition in Nasiriyah it may reflect the true loyalties of the new Iraqi army and Police. No one is going to cross their family, tribe or religious community for the Americans.

UPDATE: Command Post points to a NY Post article linking al Sadr, Hezbollah and Iran.
UPDATE #2: Sean-Paul Kelley has more on Iran-al Sadr link.

Hats off to Instapundit with its brand new layout. Great look and new options - including font size switcher and new mobile version.
Congratulations, Mr. Reynolds!

U.S. Backs Off Bin Laden Capture Forecast:

KABUL, Afghanistan - The U.S. military pulled back Saturday from an earlier prediction that Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) would be captured this year, even while preparing its largest force to date for operations along the Pakistani border where the al-Qaida chief is suspected to be hiding.
Catching bin Laden and other top fugitives remains a priority of the expanding American operation in Afghanistan, a spokesman said, but the growing mission is "not about just one or two people," a spokesman said.
"We remain committed to catching these guys. It's pretty much ... just about everything that we do here," Lt. Col. Matthew Beevers said.
But he declined to make any new predictions of when the fugitives might be behind bars.

Meanwhile, independent Russian analytics group "Ramzaj" claims (rus), that it has an information about one of highly intensively guarded prisoners of Guantanamo, meant that bin Laden was caught two years ago, but U.S. administration kept it in secret, planned to use him as an ace in future. It is amusing, isn`t it?

Command Post has a redacted text of U.S. Presidential briefing from August, 6th, 2001 called "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.".
Jeff Jarvis comments the text:

Condi Rice was right. It is a document giving background and history and no clear call to action, nothing that could have prevented September 11th.
I'm no Bushie but I'm sick of the attempt to find an enemy within with the enemy is clearly without.

Salam Pax continues his blogging:

Dear US administration,
Welcome to the next level. Please don't act surprised and what sort of timing is that: planning to go on a huge attack on the west of Iraq and provoking a group you know very well (I pray to god you knew) that they are trouble makers.

Oh and before I forget.........Help please.

Welcome back, Mr. Anderson. You`re at war again.

Another blogging tool for my Palm T3 - mo:Blog.

Supports most popular blog APIs - Blogger, MT and MetaWeblog API.
Multiple blog accounts
Upload files (if supported by blog API)
Download list of blogs/categories
Build-in HTML editor
Signatures (default or blog specific)
Support for snippets (code templates)
Save text in editor on exit

Very interesting one. What is not mentioned but worth to note - it correctly handles any text, including cyrllic. Very good.

Happy Easter everyone!

As soon as I am an atheist - I`m watching "Jesus Christ Superstar" with Ted Neeley as Christ and Carl Anderson as Judas and deciding whether I`ll go to the cinema to watch "The Passion of the Christ" or no.