A Netherlands court sentenced five Somali men June 16 to five years each in prison for trying to hijack a Dutch Antilles-flagged ship last year, the first ruling of its kind in Europe as the continent moves to crackdown on East African offshore piracy. The men were the first to go to trial in a European court on charges of piracy in the waters off East Africa, which has been a beehive in recent years for hijacking-for-ransom incidents against oil tankers and other cargo vessels. The ships traveling through that region often hail from European states, whose governments have come under pressure from the shipping industry to do more to combat the piracy, which is almost always committed by men from the poor and lawless state of Somalia. The ruling comes after another Dutch court earlier this month approved the extradition to Hamburg, Germany, of 10 other Somali men suspected of piracy. Prosecutors there are expected to charge them with hijacking a German container ship in April. Somali men accused of piracy are also awaiting trial in France and Spain.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704289504575312540079746542.html?mod=fox_australian

The address is no longer 500 Pearl. For now, at least for town cars, it’s 200 Worth Street. Shortly after 9/11, new security measures were enacted in the area surrounding the federal courthouse in downtown Manhattan, which happens to be a short walk from Ground Zero. One new measure shut down Park Row, a street that runs behind the Daniel Patrick Moynihan courthouse and underneath the plaza adjacent New York’s police headquarters. The move served as a source of consternation not only to Chinatown-area residents nearby, but to others searching for the courthouse itself. There’s been no alternative address for drivers to feed into their GPS mapping system, until now. In a concession to the information age, the Southern District has given the courthouse a second street address, so the town cars can easily drop off their fares on Worth Street, which isn’t closed for security reasons. http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/06/16/news-you-can-use-manhattan-federal-court-gets-a-new-address/?mod=djemlawblog_h

Follow-up on palindromes and semordnilap/reversgrams/heteropalindromes
"Now won" is both a palindrome and a reversgram. See list of reversgrams at:
http://www.quote-puzzler.com/info/heteropalindromes5.asp

Making a name for yourself can be a tall order for a new attorney, but last summer Philadelphia personal injury lawyer Justin Bieber faced a different problem. The recent graduate of Widener Law School was just embarking on a marketing campaign to drum up work when Justin Bieber, the Canadian teen heartthrob, became a singing sensation. It wasn’t long before Attorney Bieber was inundated with traffic that was, shall we say, not client-related. “I started getting 50 to 60 friend requests a week on Facebook, and all of these messages that said, ‘I love you’ or ‘I love it when you sing’ or ‘You’re not Justin Bieber,’ ” he said. So what’s a personal injury lawyer to do? His marketing advisers suggested he start going by his middle name, “Matte,” but Bieber balked at the idea. He’d been going by Justin since before teen Bieber had been born. So they went with Justin Matte Bieber instead. http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/06/16/attorney-has-name-to-make-u-smile/?mod=djemlawblog_h

Ambigrams are exercises in graphic design that play with optical illusions, symmetry and visual perception. Some ambigrams feature a relationship between their form and their content Ambigrams have been referred to by other terms, including: 'vertical palindromes' (1965), 'designatures' (1979), and 'inversions' (1980) and by the brand name 'FlipScript'. There are no universal guidelines for creating ambigrams, and there are different ways of approaching problems. A number of books suggest methods for creation (including WordPlay and Eye Twisters ). Computerized methods to automatically create ambigrams have been developed. The earliest, the 'Ambimatic' created in 1996, was letter-based and used a database of 351 letter glyphs in which each letter was mapped to another In 2007, the 'Glyphusion generator', was developed. It uses a database of more than 200,000 parts of letters, and has two lettering styles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambigram

In this season of toss it-on-the-grill, get a char and finish cooking fast, there's a basic rule of thumb that's good to remember. The slower you cook proteins the more juiciness, tenderness and flavor you get. So sear over high heat, but cook low and slow, whether it's a steak, a piece of fish, or an egg.
The Splendid Table June 2010

Words related to weather
aeolian or eolian (ee-O-lee-uhn) adjective
Relating to or caused by the wind. After Aeolus, god of the winds in Greek mythology. As keeper of the winds, he gave a bag containing winds to help with Odysseus's sailing.
virga (VUHR-guh) noun
Rain or snow that evaporates before hitting the ground. From Latin virga (rod, streak).
El Niño or El Nino (el NEEN-yo) noun
A weather phenomenon characterized by unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific. From Spanish El Niño, literally "The Boy Child", referring to Baby Jesus as El Niño phenomenon is noticed near Christmas. El Niño, which occurs every three to seven years, is marked by warm sea surface temperature along the coast of Ecuador and Peru in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Its effects on weather are observed around the globe. A counter part is La Niña "The Girl Child" in which unusually cold ocean temperatures are observed in the Equatorial Pacific.
pluvial (PLOO-vee-uhl) adjective
Of or relating to rain, especially much rain. From Latin pluvia (rain), from pluere (to rain). Ultimately from the Indo-European root pleu- (to flow), that is also the source of flow, float, flit, fly, flutter, pulmonary, and pneumonia. A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg