On this day half our globe will be able to watch the tiny black dot of the planet Venus moving across the disc of the sun. Given a cloudless sky, all you'll need is a sun filter to follow the spectacle for several hours by your naked eyes.

在眾多爭議面前表示不作自辯的余秋雨，近日終于打破沉默，將在《收獲》今年第4期推出他的最新長篇“記憶文學”《借我一生》，首次披露許多鮮為人知的曆史真相，真切敘述自己的人生曆程。

這部讓余秋雨在寫作中“常常淚流不止”的作品，著重于他成為當代文化學者的成長史，其中包括余秋雨對自己人生經曆的一系列描繪與思考。特別值得一提的是余秋雨對自己在“文革”中的一段經曆并沒有回避，從戲劇學院，到軍墾農場，再到《朝霞》事件……他都一一作了回顧，澄清了許多曆史疑點。

據悉，《借我一生》將在7月初亮相，屆時，讀者除了更深入地了解余秋雨的生活和思想，還將再次領略他充滿激情的文體實驗與創造。

All NGOs and all expatriate workers have now left Badghis, most of them at the weekend, when an Italian NGO compound was attacked with grenades in the provincial capital.

Among the museums that refused China's request were the Louvre in Paris, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Prado in Madrid.

• If you can't be kind, at least have the decency to be vague.


• The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing in the right place, but also to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.


• If you think there is good in everybody, you haven't met everybody.


• If you can smile when things go wrong, you have someone in mind to blame.

For a week, national politics took a pause. So did an increasingly bitter presidential campaign.

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The nation wants a timeout, and Ronald Reagan's death gives us a timeout to rediscover in this week what holds us together instead of what pulls us apart," says Kevin Starr, a historian at the University of Southern California.

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"Mourning does not necessarily express grief," says Barry Schwartz, a sociologist who has written on the Lincoln and Kennedy funerals. "It need not necessarily even express sorrow, but it is a social obligation."

Indeed, to many watching on television or in sweltering Washington waiting lines, the ceremonies that end Friday are a reminder of the power of presidential rituals to bind a nation together, at least for a while.

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While the bitter divisions in American politics circa 2004 do not reach Lincoln-era levels, they are much more pronounced than in Reagan's day. Florida's long ballot count, disputes over gay marriage and abortion, and widening gaps over the Iraq war have split the nation at every level, from the courts to the makeup of Congress. More than half of Americans now believe the country is on the wrong track.

"This grief for Ronald Reagan is not somber. It's not the grief of an interrupted life that attached itself to President Kennedy. It's more of a public civic mourning: This man had a good life, and we're celebrating that life and what it's essential message is: That of the fundamental validity of American civilization," says California historian Starr.

A 5.2-magnitude earthquake centered off the coast of Baja California shook San Diego on Tuesday afternoon, but there were no immediate reports of damage or injury.

The temblor struck abut 3:28 p.m. and was centered about 60 miles west of Tijuana, Mexico, said Deborah Hedges, a spokeswoman for seismologists at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

1. Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again.


2. All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism.


3. In the 60's people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.


4. Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.

In the video released by the militants, Kim Sun-il, a 33-year-old translator working for a company that supplies the US army, screams: "Korean soldiers, please get out of here. I don't want to die. My life is important"

Apple and BMW AG (BMWG.DE) said in a joint statement that the adapter, priced at $149, would work in BMW's 3 Series, Z4 Roadster, X3 and X5 SUVs and the Mini Cooper, and will be powered by the car, not the iPod's battery.

Drivers plug the iPod into a cable in the car's glove compartment and then can control the iPod using the standard buttons on the steering wheel, the companies said.

China's auditor general has found that money for Olympic projects has been siphoned off from China's 2003 budget, the state-run media reported.

Since 1999, the General Administration of Sports has appropriated 131m yuan ($13.2m) earmarked for the Beijing 2008 Olympics organising committee.

The bulk of this - 109m yuan - was spent on building homes for the organising committee's staff, the auditor general's report found.

In Chongqing, southwest China, only 0.3% of total poverty relief funds ended up in the hands of farmers, the auditor's report has found.

Hotmail users will see storage for free accounts increase to 250 megabytes, from 2 megabytes, later this summer.Users also will be able to send larger attachments, up to 10 megabytes.

Vice President Dick Cheney blurted out the "F word" at Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont during a heated exchange on the Senate floor, congressional aides said on Thursday.

The incident occurred on Tuesday in a terse discussion between the two that touched on politics, religion and money, with Cheney finally telling Leahy to "f--- off" or "go f--- yourself," the aides said.

Cheney, who is president of the Senate, then ripped into Leahy for the Democratic senator's criticism this week of alleged war profiteering in Iraq by Halliburton, the oil services company that Cheney once ran.

Leahy and other Democrats have called for congressional hearings into whether the vice president helped the firm win lucrative contracts in Iraq after the U.S.-led war that toppled Saddam Hussein.

While it is unclear how this could have happened, the paper carries quotes from medical experts who say there are human characteristics to the animal.