[New York Times]
The Food and Drug Administration today approved over-the-counter sales of the “morning-after” contraceptive pill to women 18 and older, resolving one of the most contentious issues in the agency’s 100-year history.

[MSNBC]
A federal judge has ruled that a Bush administration plan to allow commercial logging inside the Giant Sequoia National Monument violates environmental laws.

[The Raw Story]
A new Zogby poll reveals that 92% of Americans, spanning every party and democraphic group, believe that the public has the right to view and verify the counting of votes.

[Think Progress]
Bush says at press conference that U.S. is not leaving Iraq as long as he is President.

[Newsvine]
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff wants the authority to spy on and detain more Americans: It's not like the 20th century, where you had time to get warrants.

[New York Times]
Lamont beats Lieberman! Lieberman denies validity of democratic government, indicating that he knows better than the voters what is good for them: For the sake of our state, our country and my party, I cannot, I will not let this result stand.

[Cato Institute]
How much of a threat is terrorism really? And how afraid should we be?

[USA Today]
Congress wants to let the President federalize the National Guard.

[EFF Deep Links]
The Convention on Cybercrime is a sweeping treaty that has been waiting in the wings of the Senate for nearly three years. Now the administration is putting pressure on the Senate to ratify it. If it does, it would mean the U.S. would enforce not just our own, but the rest of the world's bad Net laws.

The treaty requires that the U.S. government help enforce other countries' "cybercrime" laws—even if the act being prosecuted is not illegal in the United States. That means that countries that have laws limiting free speech on the Net could oblige the F.B.I. to uncover the identities of anonymous U.S. critics, or monitor their communications on behalf of foreign governments. American ISPs would be obliged to obey other jurisdiction's requests to log their users’ behavior without due process, or compensation.

UPDATE: The Senate has ratified the treaty.

[News.com]
The Spanish-American War has been over for more than 100 years, and now so is the tax imposed in 1898 to help fund it. All phone companies selling long-distance phone service are now legally required to eliminate the 3 percent federal excise tax on long-distance service, which had been established in 1898 as a luxury tax on wealthy Americans who owned telephones.

[The Washington Times]
House Republicans take a small step back toward sanity: fries and toast are once again "French."