Animala bin Laden

Terrorism is a great word. After all, it can be used to describe just about any infraction of the law you like. Just look at Uzbekistan. There, President Islam Karimov decided that demonstrators marching against poverty were terrorists and had his soldiers mow them down with gunfire. But even in the United States, the word has taken on new life. The FBI on Wednesday announced that the nation's top domestic terrorism threat comes from ... drum roll please ... animal rights activists.  In other words, crimes often perpetrated by such activists such as arson, rescuing animals from labs and making harassing phone calls now fall under the growing umbrella of "terrorism."

"There is nothing else going on in this country over the last several years that is racking up the high number of violent crimes and terrorist actions," FBI deputy assistant director for counterterrorism John Lewis told reporters. He didn't say if the animal rights criminals would be packed off to Afghanistan of Guantanamo to be dealt with appropriately.

Seeing the News in Color

News, as most of us receive it, comes either in soundbites or headlines. But how would the news look if it could be visually represented? That's the idea behind two recent news tracking projects. Newsmap  takes news stories from Google News and creates a visual hierarchy. The goal is to show what stories are thought of as important. And, as the Web site says, "It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news, on the contrary it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it." Buzztracker , meanwhile, takes the Google News feed and maps it, highlighting the geographical location of each story showing the world's hot news spots. It also has a long archive, letting you see the history of certain locations in the news over time.