A U.S. government-funded medical information site that bills itself as the world's largest database on reproductive health has quietly begun to block searches on the word "abortion," concealing nearly 25,000 search results.

Called Popline, the search site is run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland.

On Thursday, a search on "abortion" was producing only the message "No records found by latest query."

"We recently made all abortion terms stop words," Dickson wrote in a note to Gloria Won, the UCSF medical center librarian making the inquiry. "As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now."

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has confirmed that international media will have "access to uncensored internet" during the 8-24 August sportsfest in Beijing and that TV transmission of the games will not be subject to a delay.

Verbruggen concluded: "BOCOG [The Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad] is progressing well with all of its operations and we are confident that our Chinese friends will put on a great Games for the athletes of the world.

A New York judge has ruled that the act of making files available for download does not constitute copyright theft. The ruling is likely to knobble thousands of pending cases brought against file sharing networks and individuals by the content Mafiaa.

The whole "making available" argument, which the RIAA has successfully used in a number of cases, one of which resulted in one poor geezer having to cough up $220,000, seems to have been shot down in flames.

Since 2004 we've been wondering when people would get around to realizing that just because a ringtone is on a phone, it doesn't change the basic economics (which are even worse, as the industry kept trying to push the price of ringtones higher to "save" the industry). With users finally realizing that they can transfer songs they have elsewhere onto their phones as ringtones, the desire to pay huge fees just to prop up the recording industry just isn't going to work any more.

Gottfried Svartholm Warg, one of four founders of The Pirate Bay, said Monday that "record companies can go screw themselves" in response to a music-industry demand for $2.5 million in damages.

However, Svartholm Warg (pictured) claims that the $2.5 million figure, which the labels most likely reached by multiplying the number of times the albums were traded by their retail price, is too high. He said that when presented with the claim, he and Pirate Bay's three other developers "mostly laughed at it."

Sony BMG, a company known for enforcing its intellectual property rights, is now facing the other end of an Intellectual Property related lawsuit.

PointDev, a small software company, mandated a bailiff to raid one of Sony BMGs owned building in January this year. The raid revealed that four of the Sony BMGs owned servers contained the pirated software.

It appears as though the company discovered this when an IT department employee requested assistance for the use of a product called Ideal Migration. When technical support looked into the case, they discovered that the key used to activate the software was a pirated version.

Sony told La Province to not report on the ongoing investigation. Clearly, Sony is not happy that this case was made public at all.

Mozilla Lab's push is to blur the edges of the browser, to make it both more tightly integrated with the computer it's running on, and also more hooked into Web services.

Early examples of this intelligence include the "awesome bar," which is what Mozilla calls the new smart address bar in Firefox 3. It offers users smart URL suggestions as they type based on Web searches and their prior Web browsing history. He's looking to extend on this with a "linguistic user interface" that lets users type plain English commands into the browser bar.

Riot police have taken to the streets of several cities in Mexico to ... defend emo kids?

A series of attacks on dyed-hair, eye-makeup-wearing emo kids began in early March when several hundred people went on an emo-beating rampage in Queretaro, a town of 1.5 million about 160 miles north of Mexico City.

"They're organizing to defend their right to be emo," wrote Daniel Hernandez of LA Weekly on his personal blog, which has provided stellar coverage of the whole affair.

In a brief filed earlier this month, the RIAA called the $298,995 figure "excessive" and said that it should be drastically slashed to something along the lines of $30,000.

The RIAA stands accused of racketeering, fraud, deceptive business practices, and a host of underhanded tactics such as seeking to directly contact Andersen's then-eight-year-old daughter under false pretenses.

"Defendants like Ms. Andersen... should be allowed to defend themselves as aggressively as the RIAA prosecutes claims against them," Lybeck counters.

Beijing's Weather Modification Office will track the region's weather via satellites, planes, radar, and an IBM p575 supercomputer.

Then, using their two aircraft and an array of twenty artillery and rocket-launch sites around Beijing, the city's weather engineers will shoot and spray silver iodide and dry ice into incoming clouds that are still far enough away that their rain can be flushed out before they reach the stadium.

Finally, any rain-heavy clouds that near the Bird's Nest will be seeded with chemicals to shrink droplets so that rain won't fall until those clouds have passed over.