The 4:44am news update.

• Stratford Festival puts 30 performances 'on hold'. That kind of sucks. Does anybody want to go? I'm sad they cancelled West Side Story though, that's the one I'd most like to see. Yea, I said it -- I like West Side Story. What? What?
• Obama unveils presidential pooch. For some reason, at first I didn't feel this was newsworthy. Apparently, the BBC, the Guardian, The CBC, The Star, The Globe and the Times all did. Clearly I missed something.
• 'Twitter revolution' Moldovan activist goes into hiding after using tweets and text messages to organize a 20,000 strong government protest that eventually over ran the Moldovan Parliament building.
• Taliban execute eloping young lovers in Afghanistan. Well this is just depressing. Terrorists might bomb our buildings, and behead our journalists. But capping folks for being in love, well, you gotta be one coldheartedmuthfuckaifyaknowhwatimsayin.
• Education Standards Likely to See Toughening. You know, this might be the first Obama policy I fundamentally disagree with. Essentially he's just throwing more money at the problem, but personally I'm not a big proponent of standardized testing. It just doesn't seem to provide any inherent learning skills, if that makes any sense. Then again, I don't remember anything I learned in university, so maybe it's just me.
• Pirates attack second US vessel. Does nobody else find it kind of awesome that pirates are suddenly relevant news items again? Sure, they've upgraded from cannons and swords to RPG's and AK's, and instead of "Blue Beard", dudes is probably named !Xobli and all. But still. Also, why has nobody thought of sending in ninjas to free these ships and crews yet? It's so natural. Like, if I was fighting Cowboy Pirates, I'd send in a elite team of Native Indians. Easy. You just have to know your opponents weakness, y'know?
• Home births 'as safe as hospital'. This one's interesting. Apparently a huge study in the UK reveals low-risk mothers are essentially just as safe giving birth at home with a trained mid-wife as at a hospital. The reason it's kind of neat to me is because I didn't even realize being a midwife was still a proper and viable career choice. I mean, I noticed it when browsing McMaster's undergraduate programs, but I had to webcrawler (pre-google-era!) it just to figure out what the hell a midwife was. For some reason, it doesn't seem like a very happy job. I'd imagine it's a lot of yelling, crying and I guess some baby delivering. But, really, if you're the husband, do you ever want to sleep in that bed again after seeing child birth? I wouldn't. Ew.