Sting leads the Police last night at the Garden. (Robert E. Klein for the Boston Globe)

Email|Print| Text size – + By Jonathan Perry Globe Correspondent / November 12, 2007

The last time the Police played Boston Garden, on April 12, 1982, Larry Bird was in his third season with the Celtics. Michael Dukakis was about to win re-election as governor, and Ronald Reagan was in the White House.

The vision of the Police - three bleached-blonde virtuosos darting though their polyglot mix of New Wave pop hooks and skittering, reggae-accented grooves - was something even their most hopeful fans were convinced they might never again witness after the band broke up in 1984. (The trio did play a June 10, 1983, show at Sullivan Stadium in Foxborough). But the Police have reunited - for now - and they're in the midst of a world tour.

For those who swore they'd never see it, last night's trenchant, sold-out performance at TD Banknorth Garden marked the group's third Boston concert in four months, following a pair of robust summer shows at Fenway Park, where improbable, and once-impossible, dreams apparently do come true. One hundred minutes, nearly two dozen tunes, and two encores began with a kinetic "Message in a Bottle" that was a transportive reminder of the days when the Police were a brash young band with as much promise as peroxide. They're older now (singer-bassist Sting is 56, guitarist Andy Summers is 64, and drummer Stewart Copeland is 55) but the music remained fresh - as lean and sinewy as Sting's T-shirted torso. The frantic "Can't Stand Losing You" and "So Lonely" rode Summers' spiky guitar hooks with racing, libidinous urgency. (Summers, playing with workmanlike understatement, nevertheless turned in a blustery, blistering solo on "Driven to Tears," his best of the night). Copeland was a picture of fierce focus throughout, a syncopated shopkeeper of all manner of percussion; surrounded by cymbals, deftly tapping out the "thousand rainy days" of "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" in double-time with marvelous efficacy. Sting, a supremely confident, relaxed presence onstage, was in fine, flexible voice - his preening, choked sob and killer reggae record collection intact. The only concession he made to not hitting his once-preternaturally high registers - jarringly lowering the key of the chorus of the oddly muddled, tepid "Don't Stand So Close to Me" - cost the song. But coming back to the Garden after 25 years, anyone's bound to be a bit rusty. Even Larry Bird might miss an occasional three-pointer after all this time.

Yahoo, a leading internet company, has settled lawsuits brought against them in the case of two jailed Chinese dissidents, Shi Tao and Wang Xianoning, that Yahoo helped to land in prison. Yahoo helped the Chinese government to identify democracy dissents that used the internet to further their cause, including the two dissidents whose families they settled with today.

Yahoo has denied that they purposely helped the Chinese to find and jail the dissidents. However, under questioning before Congress, Yahoo's Chief Executive Jerry Yang admitted that Yahoo had provided the information to the Chinese government. Yang blamed the incident on a bad translation of the government's request. It was discovered that the translation originated at Yahoo's Chinese offices and was done by native Chinese employees. For this reason Yang's explanation has wrung hollow with several US Congressmen, including one who called Yang, and Yahoo General Counsel Michael Callahan, moral pygmies.

Obviously Yahoo hopes to correct the damage done by their actions by buying off the families of Shi Tao and Wang Xianoning. Both men were sentenced to 10 years in prison after Yahoo turned over their email messages to the Chinese. What is clear by Yahoo's complicity in the jailing of the men and the settlement of the lawsuits is that the company is far more interested in making money in China than there are in protecting the privacy and rights of Yahoo users.

Boycott Yahoo. There are many other search engines and email providers that will not violate your privacy

Christian Berthelsen, The Los Angeles Times, November 12, 2007 Baghdad- Ahmad Chalabi sits in the conference room of his compound in the Green Zone preparing to meet with Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the No. 2 U.S. military officer in Iraq. Sunlight streams over expensive Persian carpets and modern Iraqi furniture. Chalabi wears a sober charcoal suit, but there's a touch of the dandy in his lime-colored polka-dot tie. Chalabi professes not to even know what the meeting is about. The general, he says nonchalantly, requested it. As advertised, an imposing figure sporting fatigues and a shaved head strides through the door a few minutes later. "Thank you for seeing me," Odierno says. Ahmad Chalabi, it would appear, is back. Read More Here

Max Brantley, Salon, November 13, 2007 The Pony Express has reached us here in the Arkansas backwoods with the latest journals from the big cities. So the country correspondents have taken a break from hand-setting lines of type to read the Beltway boys and girls rave about our former governor, Mike Huckabee. "Easy to like," wrote Newsweek's Jonathan Alter. "Who Doesn't Heart Huckabee?" said the headline over Gail Collins' column in the New York Times. And those are restrained commentators. If you Google the names Ronald Reagan and Mike Huckabee in tandem, I understand you get better than 600,000 hits. OK. I exaggerate. I have a phone and a computer (and it's 208,000 hits). But you'd think from national press comments that our friendly state is unreachable by phone or Internet. Do national commentators do homework? Or is a smiling, shoe-shining parson all it takes to generate such fluff? Come to Arkansas. You'll have to look hard to find a long-term political analyst who'd subscribe fully to the national media narrative about the latest man from Hope -- fresh face, funny, nice. Mike Huckabee is fresh to you, maybe. Funny? If barnyard humor is your shtick of choice. Nice? Well, he did do some good things in his 10 years as governor, but ... read on. Before we begin, though, a word of warning to any reporters who might want to repeat, on air or in print, any of the facts recounted below. Huckabee does not take kindly to journalists who practice journalism. Read More Here