[Now about the Brooklyn Bridge offer?] The U.S. housing market has started to recover from the most far-reaching crisis since the Great Depression, data released Thursday show.

Sales of previously occupied homes rose for the third month in a row in June, the National Association of Realtors reported. That hasn't happened since early 2004, during the boom.

With bipartisan support, a resolution has been introduced in the House of Representatives to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Pig War.

The name, age, sex, and size of the pig has long been forgotten but the dispute its death triggered is the reason the border is where it is today between Washington state and Canada.

The pig was part of a herd owned by the Hudson's Bay Co., a British outfit. An American farmer shot it in the summer of 1859.

Killing livestock on the frontier was a serious offense. The farmer offered to pay restitution. Hudson's Bay wanted $100, an exorbitant sum back then. The farmer balked. Both countries sent in troops, with weapons were locked and loaded.

"I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played," [but I'll comment on it anyway] Obama said while taking questions after a White House news conference.

Cambridge authorities dropped disorderly conduct charges against Henry Louis Gates Jr. on Tuesday.

Today, kids are still way ahead of the grownups who supposedly control their school and home networks. In my informal interviews, I've discovered again and again that kids are a bottomless well of tricks for evading network filters and controls, and that they propagate their tricks like crazy, trading them like bubble-gum cards and amassing social capital by helping their peers gain access to the whole wide Web, rather than the narrow slice that's visible through the crack in the firewall.

I have to admit, this warms my heart. After all, do we want to raise a generation of kids who have the tech savvy of an Iranian dissident, or the ham-fisted incompetence of the government those dissidents are running circles around?

OBAMA: Hello, everybody. Good afternoon, everybody.  Today, I want to start by addressing three issues, and then I'll take your questions.  First, I'd like to say a few words about the situation in Iran. The United States and the international community have been appalled and outraged by the threats, the beatings and imprisonments of the last few days. I strongly condemn these unjust actions, and I join with the American people in mourning each and every innocent life that is lost.  I've made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran and is not interfering with Iran's affairs.  But we must also bear witness to the courage and the dignity of the Iranian people and to a remarkable opening within Iranian society. And we deplore

One philosophical abstraction that seems to befuddle most people is "anarchy." To those challenged by complexity �" such as radio talk show hosts and cable-TV "newscasters" who are convinced that all political opinions can be confined to the categories of "liberal" and "conservative" �" the word anarchy evokes an unfocused fear of uncertain forces. Images of bomb-throwing thugs who smash and burn the property of others are routinely conjured up by politicians and the media to frighten people into an extension of police authority over their lives. "Disorder" and "lawless confusion" are common dictionary definitions of this word.