Department of State launched a new Spanish-language website

The Bureau of Public Affairs released a new website in Spanish at spanish.state.gov. This site features a selection of information from state.gov, including About the State Department, Secretary of State, Background Notes, International Business Support and Western Hemisphere Affairs.

Two new reports from the 9/11 Commission

On August 21, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (aka 9/11 Commission) released two staff reports, on specific aspects of the issue.



The first one deals with "9/11 and Terrorist Travel", 234 pages, (8.3M, very large file because of scans of terrorists' visa applications.)



The second is a "Monograph on Terrorist Financing", 152 pages (601K).

Foreign Policy Attitudes Now Driven by 9/11 and Iraq

"For the first time since the Vietnam era, foreign affairs and national security issues are looming larger than economic concerns in a presidential election. The Sept. 11 attacks and the two wars that followed not only have raised the stakes for voters as they consider their choice for president, but also have created deep divisions and conflicting sentiments over U.S. foreign policy in a troubled time". This new survey was conducted by the Pew Reseach Center in association with the Council on Foreign Relations.

Reports fron think tanks, NGOs and government agencies

http://www.resourceshelf.com/docuticker/

This subsite of Gary Price's Resource Shelf is a great place to look for "annotated links to reports from think tanks, nonprofits and government agencies worldwide."

Ranking words

www.wordcount.org

This is kind of neat, and will be a boon for answering those pesky questions that we all know and dread, e.g. "what is the rank, in terms of frequency of usage in the English language, of the word 'libraries'?" (answer: 4061, of an archive containing 86800), or, what is the 23,923th most common word in English (answer: photon). Regrettably, many of the words that people might be expected to ask about, like lambent, rhodomontade and balanoid, are not yet included in the word count database.

Election site

The electoral college, political parties, and elections: Sites to help you through the voting process

C&RL News, July/August 2004Vol. 65, No. 7

by Beth Jane Toren

http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/crlnews/backissues2004/july04/elections.htm

Yahoo unveils local search

Yahoo has unveiled its local search engine at local.yahoo.com, to give local.google.com some competition. Search guru Chris Sherman gives it a good review in SearchEngineWatch