Later On

Interesting ruling reported by Michael Doyle in McClatchy:

In a highly unusual legal step, a federal judge has ordered the government to grant an attorney a security clearance so he can represent a disgruntled former narcotics officer in a lawsuit against a former CIA officer.

The judge’s order significantly boosts attorney Brian Leighton’s long legal battle on behalf of Richard Horn, a Drug Enforcement Administration veteran whose service ranged from California’s San Joaquin Valley to the Burmese jungles. More broadly, the new judicial order challenges the president’s customary monopoly in controlling access to secrets.

“The deference generally granted the executive branch in matters of classification and national security must yield when the executive attempts to exert control over the courtroom,” U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth wrote in an order issued late Wednesday.

Already impatient with the Justice Department’s handling of a case first filed in 1994, Lamberth gave officials 10 days to grant Leighton and other attorneys the security clearances needed to see “classified and/or privileged information.” In doing so, Lamberth underscored the key question involved.

“Does the executive branch have the exclusive right to determine whether counsel . . . have a need-to-know classified information within the context of litigation, or can that be a judicial determination?” Lamberth asked rhetorically.

Lamberth added that prior cases didn’t “directly answer” the question, which he called one of “a number of vexing legal and practical difficulties” raised in the course of the lawsuit brought by Leighton and Horn…

Continue reading.

Interesting report by Elizabeth Zavala and Mitch Mitchell in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

The Tarrant County medical examiner ruled Thursday that the death of a mentally ill man in April who was shocked twice by a Taser stun gun wielded by a Fort Worth police officer was a homicide.

It was the fourth time that a person shocked by a Taser has died in Fort Worth police custody since the department started using the devices in 2001, according to the Police Department.

But the death of Michael Patrick Jacobs Jr., 24, is the first that Medical Examiner Nizam Peerwani has ruled to be a homicide.

Jacobs was pronounced dead about noon April 18, an hour after he was hit by the Taser. His parents had called 911 because he was causing a disturbance at their east Fort Worth home, police have reported.

According to Peerwani’s report, …

Continue reading.

Interesting article in Science News by Janet Raloff, which begins:

Vast and diverse microbial ecosystems form within our guts. Trillions of bacteria strong, these communities help digest our meals, manufacture vitamins, kill pathogens, neutralize food-poisoning agents and boost our immune defenses. When antibiotic therapy or disease wipes out huge numbers of these intestinal squatters, bloating, diarrhea and more can ensue. Ewwwww.

Fortunately, medicine has developed starter cultures of beneficial germs to recolonize antibiotic-ravaged guts, to boost immunity and to sometimes act as a call to arms for other gut microbes. Because intentionally downing extra live germs doesn’t sound very appetizing, dietary supplement companies refer to these bacterial as probiotics — and even deliver some as part of the “live cultures” in a serving of yogurt.

But, as we reported last year, people have sickened or died after receiving probiotics. What role, if any, these bacteria played remains uncertain. Such events have, however, been giving some researchers and clinicians doubts about the safety of this ostensibly benign and "all natural" germ therapy.

A paper just published online in Nutrition Reviews now suggests a compromise tactic: Administer slain bacteria — microbial carcasses, if you will…

Continue reading.

From the Center for American Progress:

Earlier this year, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 without a single Republican vote in the House of Representatives and with the support of only three Republicans in the Senate. This stimulus bill, which included $552 billion in spending and $275 billion in tax cuts, has provided much-needed support to state and local economies across the country. Cognizant to this fact, conservatives have jumped on the chance to personally deliver stimulus money to their cash-strapped states and districts, while conveniently brushing past their original opposition. A two-faced approach to the stimulus debate has become routine for many Republicans, with many GOP lawmakers who are standing against the stimulus in Washington, D.C., but touting it when they travel home to their constituents.

CONGRESSIONAL HYPOCRITES: Several House Republicans who opposed the Recovery Act quickly returned to their districts to tout projects that it funded. Stimulus opponent Rep. Joseph Cao (R-LA) met with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin (D) and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood recently to solicit stimulus money for streetcar expansions and road repairs. Cao proudly boasted that he is looking "at federal monies that the state has and channeling more of that money to the district." Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) earlier this month asked for stimulus funds to be diverted into paying down the deficit rather than paying it out to states. But the same day he took credit for the construction site at Blue Grass Army Depot in Madison County, Kentucky — a project that was funded in large part by the Recovery Act. One of the most brazen acts of hypocrisy came from House Minority Whip Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), who has repeatedly claimed that the stimulus is "failing" to create jobs. Earlier this month, Cantor appeared at a job fair in Midlothian, VA, to demonstrate how he is working on "long-term solutions that will put…Virginia workers back on the path to financial stability." But scores of jobs advertised at the jobs fair were created by the stimulus, and Chesterfield County, where the fair was being held, will receive more than $38 million in stimulus funding over the next two years.

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The Semogue 730 Silvertip shaving brush is quite nice—comfortable handle, good knot, and loads of lather from The Shave Den’s Coffee shaving soap, which smells like an actual cup of coffee (black, no sugar). Three passes with the Elite Razor Gold-Laced White Quartz razor did a good job, but I noticed some lack of lubrication in the polishing pass, so I picked up the Hydrolast Cutting Balm and did an oil pass to perfect smoothness. A splash of Blenheim Bouquet finished the job in fine style.

33% of the way through the book. I just read this passage:

The god I’ve been describing is a god in quotation marks, a god that exists in people’s heads. When I said in chapter 5, for example, that Yahweh was strong yet compassionate, I just meant that his adherents thought of him as strong yet compassionate. There was no particular reason to believe that there was a god “out there” that matched this internal conception. Similarly, when I say God shows moral progress, what I’m really saying is that people’s conception of God moves in a morally progressive direction.

From the standpoint of a traditional believer, of course, this isn’t an inspiring thought. Indeed, all told, the worldview I’m laying out amounts to a kind of good-news/bad-news joke for traditionalist Christians, Muslims, and Jews. The bad news is that the god you thought was born perfect was in fact born imperfect. The good news is that this imperfect god isn’t really a god anyway, just a figment of the human imagination. Obviously, for the traditional believer, this is all bad news.

Then again, traditional believers come into the conversation with high expectations: that an ancient theology which took shape millennia before science started revealing the nature of the world should survive modern critical reflection unscathed. These days there are people who would call themselves religiously inclined, or at least spiritually inclined, who ask for less. They are born into a scientific world that seems to offer no particular sustenance to spiritual inquiry, and they would settle for evidence that this inquiry isn’t hopeless after all. They are a bit like Fyodor Pavlovich in The Brothers Karamazov. When told by his atheist son that there is no God and no immortality, he reflects glumly, “There’s absolute nothingness, then.” But then he presses on: “Perhaps there is just something? Anything is better than nothing.”

Is there something? Is there anything? Is there any evidence of something? Any signs that there’s more to life than the sum of its subatomic particles—some larger purpose, some deeper meaning, maybe even something that would qualify as “divine” in some sense of that word? If you approach the spiritual quest with hopes this modest—with the humble skepticism of modernity rather than the revealed certainty of the ancient world—then a rational appraisal of the situation may prove more uplifting. There may be, as Fyodor Pavlovich would put it, some evidence of something.

What might qualify as evidence of a larger purpose at work in the world? For one thing, a moral direction in history. If history naturally carries human consciousness toward moral enlightenment, however slowly and fitfully, that would be evidence that there’s some point to it all. At least, it would be more evidence than the alternative—if history showed no discernible direction, or if history showed a downward direction: humanity as a whole getting more morally obtuse, more vengeful and bigoted.

Or, to put the point back into the context at hand: …

You  can see why I find the book fascinating.

Via Scott Feldstein, this column by T.R. Reid in OregonLive.com:

As Americans search for the cure to what ails our health-care system, we’ve overlooked an invaluable source of ideas and solutions: the rest of the world. All the other industrialized democracies have faced problems like ours, yet they’ve found ways to cover everybody — and still spend far less than we do.

I’ve traveled the world from Oslo to Osaka to see how other developed democracies provide health care. Instead of dismissing these models as “socialist,” we could adapt their solutions to fix our problems. To do that, we first have to dispel a few myths about health care abroad:

1. It’s all socialized medicine out there.

Not so.

Some countries, such as Britain, New Zealand and Cuba, do provide health care in government hospitals, with the government paying the bills. Others — for instance, Canada and Taiwan — rely on private-sector providers, paid for by government-run insurance. But many wealthy countries — including Germany, the Netherlands, Japan and Switzerland — provide universal coverage using private doctors, private hospitals and private insurance plans.

In some ways, health care is less “socialized” overseas than in the United States. Almost all Americans sign up for government insurance (Medicare) at age 65. In Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, seniors stick with private insurance plans for life. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is one of the planet’s purest examples of government-run health care.

2. Overseas, care is rationed through limited choices or long lines.

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Well worth reading.

The Obama, like the Bush Administration, has been determined that, above all else, innocent victims of US torture should NOT have their day in court, and the the Federal government not pay any restitution. But some progress is being made on that front. Spencer Ackerman in the Washington Independent:

It’s not just Mohammed Jawad. In 2007, U.S. courts blocked Khalid el-Masri, a German citizen who was kidnapped and tortured by the CIA in Afghanistan in a disastrous case of mistaken identity, from suing the government. The American Civil Liberties Union has kept his case alive, and has found a new venue for it. From a newly released statement:

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has accepted a petition filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Khaled El-Masri, an innocent victim of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program. The U.S. government has two months to respond to allegations of kidnapping and torture summarily rejected by U.S. courts in 2007.

“The United States has an opportunity to reverse one of the most shameful legacies of the Bush administration and finally give an innocent victim of the extraordinary rendition program his day in court,” said Steven Watt, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program. “The State Department should fully engage in this process and comprehensively address the gross violation of El-Masri’s human rights, including his forcible disappearance and torture. To date, the United States hasn’t so much as acknowledged its involvement in El-Masri’s extraordinary rendition.”

And there’s more: Daphne Eviatar has this story in the Washington Independent:

Today’s news that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will hear the claims of kidnapping and torture filed against the United States by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Khaled El-Masri, an innocent German citizen and car salesman subjected to the Bush administration’s extraordinary rendition program in 2003, may not go over so well with the Obama administration.

That’s because the current administration announced earlier this week that it will continue the rendition program, albeit under the authority of a broader inter-agency team. But the administration has not ruled out sending terror suspects to countries that are known to torture them in custody.

A Justice Department release on Monday clarified that the U.S. government will obtain “assurances from foreign countries” that they’ll treat the prisoners humanely, and will “insist on a monitoring mechanism” to check up on the prisoner every once in a while, although it may provide some “advance notice to the detaining government.”

Whether or not that “trust me” approach is really worth trusting, given the similar assurances provided by the Bush administration, it does suggest that the Obama team may not welcome an Inter-American Commission inquiry into rendition.

Although the original El-Masri court case that Spencer referred to was brought against the Bush administration, more recent attempts to sue the government on behalf of innocent victims of extraordinary rendition have been similarly rebuffed by the Obama Justice Department, and on the same “state secrets” grounds.

As a result, not one victim of the Bush administration’s rendition program has had his day in court.

El-Masri, a German citizen, was …

Continue reading. As I’ve pointed out, any program with no due process, where the government simply kidnaps suspects and starts torturing, some of those tortured will inevitably prove to be innocent. Our government’s attitude toward those innocents is shameful.

An email from Sheri Fink of ProPublica:

"The floodwaters from Katrina had knocked out the power. Doctors and nurses were overstretched and overtired, patients were dying and the evacuation of many of the sickest seemed impossible. Injecting drugs was one answer that some members of the medical staff decided on. Were they trying to comfort those patients – or hasten their deaths?"

In a major two-year investigation, ProPublica’s Dr. Sheri Fink reveals, for the first time in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, the full story of what really happened to some of the patients who died at New Orleans’s Memorial Medical Center in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In heartbreaking detail, Fink looks into allegations that Dr. Anna Pou and others euthanized patients at the hospital. She reports: how more patients than was previously known were injected; how some were not on their deathbed at the time of the injections, exactly what was injected into some of the patients; which doctors were involved and how they came to their decisions; the horrendous, deteriorating conditions at the hospital; how the coroner and district attorney proceeded with their own investigations; and much more.

Read the story.

Additional online-only features at ProPublica include a schematic of the hospital that shows the layout and how difficult it was to get around, a timeline of what was happening when, photos and details on many of the people involved and a portions of a video interview with the Dart Center about how she got the story.

Very good article in Salon.com by Gene Lyons, which begins:

So yet another Bush administration Cabinet-level official has petitioned to get his conscience and reputation back. This time, it’s Tom Ridge, former secretary of Homeland Security. The one-time Pennsylvania governor admits in a new book that he felt political pressure from the White House to issue bogus terror alerts before the 2004 presidential election.

Big surprise, right? By 2004, anybody who didn’t grasp that crying wolf was the Bush/Cheney administration’s basic game plan was probably also astonished last January when the "Texas cowboy" who’s never been seen on a horse chose a Dallas mansion over his beloved ranch. Golly, who’s doing all that brush-cutting?

Indeed, the most fascinating aspect of the Ridge revelations has been a flame war that’s broken out between establishment Washington pundits and less-reverent bloggers. The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder started it by observing in smug inside-the-Beltway fashion that he and like-minded colleagues were actually right to be wrong about fake terror warnings.

People who smelled a rat, see, "based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence." Whereas, sober-sided thinkers like him credited the Bush administration’s good intentions.

Confronted with ample contemporaneous evidence of Bush administration flimflams by Salon’s Glenn Greenwald and the scholarly Marcy Wheeler of Firedoglake.com, Ambinder apologized for the "gut hatred" part. But he alibied: "Information asymmetry is always going to exist, and, living as we do in a democratic system, most journalists are going to give the government the benefit of some doubt, even having learned lessons about giving the government that benefit."

Yeah, sure. Purely with regard to terrorism and national security, by 2004, Bush/Cheney had already gotten caught deceiving the public about having "no warning" before the 9/11 attacks, not to mention about Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. If skepticism was still inappropriate, would it ever be warranted?

Yet people who found the timing of terror alerts suspect, such as then-Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, were dismissed as crackpots.

It was much the same after former Secretary of State Colin Powell confessed …

Continue reading.

Beltway punditry is really amazing. Glenn Greenwald examines an interesting case today:

The New Republic, 2004, endorsing Joe Lieberman for President:

But one day, Joe Lieberman’s warnings in this campaign will look prophetic. And the principles he has espoused will once again guide the Democratic Party. It will be the work of this magazine, to whatever small degree possible, to hasten that day.

TNR‘s Jonathan Chait, in The Los Angeles Times, 2006, viciously condemning those who mounted a primary challenge against Lieberman (an "anti-Lieberman jihad"):

[T]he anti-Lieberman campaign has come to stand for much more than Lieberman’s sins. It’s a test of strength for the new breed of left-wing activists who are flexing their muscles within the party. These are exactly the sorts of fanatics who tore the party apart in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They think in simple slogans and refuse to tolerate any ideological dissent.

TNR‘s Chait, last month:

A few weeks ago, Senator Dianne Feinstein announced that she and other Senate Democrats harbored reservations about President Obama’s plans to overhaul the health care system. . . . The reaction from the left was swift and, by the standards of such things, furious. Which is to say, not very furious. . . .

I have a suggestion for something that would be productive: run a primary challenge against her. . . . The possibility of a primary challenge could [also] balance out [Sen. Evan] Bayh’s incentives, thus aligning them more with those of the national party. . . . Primary electorates consist of a small, highly partisan subset of the electorate, and the prospect of submitting themselves to a partisan loyalty contest terrifies centrists like Bayh.

TNR‘s Chait, this week:

But if health care reform fails, liberals need to understand who to blame and how to fix it. They need to start knocking off Democrats like Conrad and Joe Lieberman, who seem to be trying to kill health care reform, even if this temporarily costs the Democrats some seats. . . . If health care reform can’t pass now, then a filibuster-proof Democratic majority isn’t worth having. At that point you have to consider blowing up the party and waiting a decade or two to rebuild a new one that’s able to address the country’s actual needs.

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James Inhofe, idiot Senator from Oklahoma, nicely personifies the GOP approach. Zaid Jilani at ThinkProgress:

One of the most vociferous opponents of health care reform has been Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), who previously promoted blocking reform because it would be a “huge gain” for the GOP. The Oklahoma-based Express-Star reports that Inhofe told a town hall crowd yesterday that he will vote against health reform legislation without even reading it or knowing what’s in it:

At a town hall meeting Wednesday Sen. Jim Inhofe told Chickasha residents he does not need to read the 1,000 page health care reform bill, he will simply vote against it.

“I don’t have to read it, or know what’s in it. I’m going to oppose it anyways,” he said.

He went on to tell the crowd we are “almost reaching a revolution in this country” due to opposition to health reform. Inhofe is not alone in saying he will vote against any health reform bill. Last week Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) told Fox News that he doesn’t think a “single Republican” will vote for health care reform.

Spencer Ackerman in the Washington Independent:

Michael Cohen brings out a speech I tried and failed to YouTube: Ted Kennedy’s September 2002 warning against invading Iraq. The whole thing is worth reading, but this part is particularly haunting:

The President’s challenge to the United Nations requires a renewed effort to enforce the will of the international community to disarm Saddam. Resorting to war is not America’s only or best course at this juncture. There are realistic alternatives between doing nothing and declaring unilateral or immediate war. War should be a last resort, not the first response. Let us follow that course, and the world will be with us — even if, in the end, we have to move to the ultimate sanction of armed conflict.

The Bush Administration says America can fight a war in Iraq without undermining our most pressing national security priority — the war against Al Qaeda. But I believe it is inevitable that a war in Iraq without serious international support will weaken our effort to ensure that Al Qaeda terrorists can never, never, never threaten American lives again.

It’s easy to forget what the antiwar side actually vocalized back then, since it was caricatured so heavily. More prescience:

Even with the Taliban out of power, Afghanistan remains fragile. Security remains tenuous. Warlords still dominate many regions. Our reconstruction effort, which is vital to long-term stability and security, is halting and inadequate. Some Al Qaeda operatives — no one knows how many — have faded into the general population. Terrorist attacks are on the rise. President Karzai, who has already survived one assassination attempt, is still struggling to solidify his hold on power. And although neighboring Pakistan has been our ally, its stability is far from certain.

Janet Raloff in Science News:

Some of us skip breakfast to grab a few more zzzzzz’s or forego lunch while running errands. When the hunger siren goes off, all too often we reach for a snack — sometimes even the ones poured into a glass and served up with a straw. Vitamins, mineral capsules and other dietary supplements can fortify the body with nutrients that don’t always make it into busy lives fueled by not-so-balanced diets.

But how do we know what’s in those supplements? That was the topic of a Science News cover story six years ago. And the simple answer then, as now: We don’t. This can be especially true for supplements that aren’t compounded from discrete, well-defined chemicals, such as alpha-tocopherol or magnesium citrate.

As a new paper once again demonstrates, what is marketed as a botanical extract can be — and all too often is — quite variable. In some cases, it may be worthless.

David Heber’s team at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine focused on pomegranates.

In animal studies, consumption of this fruit, and especially its juice, has been linked with slowing the development of atherosclerosis. In one three-year Israeli study conducted in volunteers with atherosclerosis, people who drank 50 milliliters of pomegranate juice daily experienced a 20 percent drop in systolic blood pressure and a beneficial reduction in the thickness of their carotid artery walls. Moreover, oxidation of their “bad” cholesterol (the low-density-lipoprotein type) — which is a pivotal step in fostering artery-clogging plaque — dropped dramatically. Those who had been drinking a placebo beverage attained no such heart benefits.

But pomegranates tend to be a very seasonal fruit, at least in North America. And their juice is not only very tart but pricey. Much nicer — and less expensive — would be pills that delivered pomegranate’s benefits. And so the pom supplement industry was born.

For its new study, Heber’s team bought 27 different pom supplements: a mix of capsules, tablets and soft gels…

Continue reading.

A commenter named George posted this comment:

Louis Des Branges has published a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis and it is correct. See:

1) http://www.math.purdue.edu/~branges/apology.pdf

2) http://www.math.purdue.edu/~branges/riemann-hecke.pdf

Just last night I was thinking about how math must have advanced since I got my master’s in 1968—41 years later, I wonder what a master’s degree in math covers—do students start much further along, with more of what I learned being covered in undergraduate courses? Maybe I should sign up for some graduate math courses and see what’s going on these days.

Via Lifehacker.com:

Earlier this month (on 7 August) Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post called out the GOP on its tactics in fighting healthcare reform:

As a columnist who regularly dishes out sharp criticism, I try not to question the motives of people with whom I don’t agree. Today, I’m going to step over that line.

The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they’ve given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They’ve become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.

There are lots of valid criticisms that can be made against the health reform plans moving through Congress — I’ve made a few myself. But there is no credible way to look at what has been proposed by the president or any congressional committee and conclude that these will result in a government takeover of the health-care system. That is a flat-out lie whose only purpose is to scare the public and stop political conversation.

Under any plan likely to emerge from Congress, the vast majority of Americans who are not old or poor will continue to buy health insurance from private companies, continue to get their health care from doctors in private practice and continue to be treated at privately owned hospitals.

The centerpiece of all the plans is a new health insurance exchange set up by the government where individuals, small businesses and eventually larger businesses will be able to purchase insurance from private insurers at lower rates than are now generally available under rules that require insurers to offer coverage to anyone regardless of health condition. Low-income workers buying insurance through the exchange — along with their employers — would be eligible for government subsidies. While the government will take a more active role in regulating the insurance market and increase its spending for health care, that hardly amounts to the kind of government-run system that critics conjure up when they trot out that oh-so-clever line about the Department of Motor Vehicles being in charge of your colonoscopy.

There is still a vigorous debate as to whether …

Continue reading. I agree that the GOP has simply abandoned any pretense of being interested in governing or in finding solutions to national problems—the GOP is now interested only in trash-and-burn politics.

Today, Pearlstein has more on the GOP’s direction:

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to "clean" coal: coal-fired power plants dump mercury emissions into the air, from which it settles into lakes, ponds, streams, forestland, and the like. The coal companies don’t care: their goal is to maximize profits, and it’s cheaper to pollute than to clean up their plants. Marion Nestle at Food Politics:

My book, What to Eat, has a chapter on the mercury-in-fish dilemma.   Do we follow dietary guidelines to eat more fish or do we worry about the amount of toxic methylmercury those fish might have?

The U.S. Geological Survey and Department of the Interior have just released a report that will not make this dilemma easier to resolve.     Fish in every one of 291 streams sampled throughout the country are contaminated with mercury.  According to the press release, the good (well, slightly better) news is that “only” a quarter of the samples exceeded federal guidelines for people eating average amounts of fish.

Where does the mercury come from?  “Coal-fired power plants are the largest source of mercury emissions in the United States — but 59 of the streams also were potentially affected by gold and mercury mining.”

The remedy seems pretty obvious: let’s insist that coal-burning power plants and mining operations clean up their emissions.   How about right now!

Good news:

Try doing a search for [Hamlet] on Google Books. The first few results you’ll get are "Full View" books — which means you can read the full text. And, because the book is in the public domain, you can also download a copy of Hamlet in PDF form.

Starting today, you’ll be able to download these and over one million public domain books from Google Books in an additional format. We’re excited to now offer downloads in EPUB format, a free and open industry standard for electronic books. It’s supported by a wide variety of applications, so once you download a book, you’ll be able to read it on any device or through any reading application that supports the format. That means that people will be able to access public domain works that we’ve digitized from libraries around the world in more ways, including some that haven’t even been built or imagined yet.

We founded Google Books on the premise that anyone, anywhere, anytime should have the tools to explore the great works of history and culture. We began digitizing these books because we thought it was important for people to be able to find and read them, and we want them to be able to do so anywhere — not just when they happen to be at a computer. This feature takes us one step closer towards realizing that goal by helping support open standards that enable people to access these books in more places, on more devices and through more applications.

To find out more, check out our post on the Google Books blog.

Posted by Brandon Badger, Product Manager