Tuesday

+ 'What has Bush done? Doubled the amount of educational aid budgeted for Africa. If you really want to shrink the Gap, you educate young girls . It is #1. Nothing else even comes close.'

+(Man, this post is newsy today - very little human/web interest. Sorry. Just the way it came out...)

+ True to form, Google's philanthropic arm, Google.org, will be funded and run unconventionally, allowing them greater freedom. They're starting it with a billion dollars.
> Official Google Blog post: About Google.org
+ al-Qaida's No. 2 leader wants his followers to be ready to fill the gap if we cut and run suddenly like we did with Vietnam.

+ Tom posts an interesting development: the Chinese are drinking more Western beverages, which means they're going to export more of the tea they grow, which is going to displace smaller economies like Sri Lanka and Kenya.

+ 25% of the new Afghani parliament will be female.

+ kottke writes:

Edward Jay Epstein on why Pixar should make nice with Disney again. Bottom line: Disney owns the sequel rights to all of Pixar's films and Pixar can't afford to do battle against Toy Story 3 or The Incredibles 2 in future summers.

Unfortunately, that sounds about right to me. Furthermore, I care about those sequels and and would rather have Pixar run them than Disney.