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Iran is putting its money where its mouth is when it comes to its controversial nuke program, emblazoning a new 50,000-rial (about $5.40) bank note with a nuclear symbol, the Associated Press reports. The orange, green and blue currency’s design shows the international nuclear symbol — electrons orbiting an atom — atop a map of Iran, and includes a quote from the Prophet Muhammad that’s sure to pump up the country’s atomic lab geeks: "Men from the land of Persia will attain scientific knowledge even if it is as far as the Pleiades."

Meanwhile, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution crowed about the country’s current state of affairs even as a Russian roadblock slowed Iran’s nuke push and talks with Washington over thorny regional issues got under way (or didn’t).

"The country is in excellent conditions and is stepping on the path of an extraordinary movement in the different scientific, social and cultural grounds, and the signs of this movement of the Iranian nation are evident in the world," said Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, according to an upbeat report from Iran’s Fars News Agency.

Hey, at least Syria and South Korea still want to be friends with Tehran.

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In yet another sign that the ink-stained wretch should be placed on the endangered species list, the world’s oldest newspaper has gone wholly digital. No longer will Sweden’s Post-och Inrikes Tidningar, which was founded in 1645, be printed on paper. Instead, its legal announcements will be published online only. "We think it’s a cultural disaster," said Hans Holm, who worked as the paper’s top editor for 20 years, in an interview with the Associated Press. "It is sad when you have worked with it for so long and it has been around for so long."

The paper, started by Queen Kristina to keep Swedes up-to-date on affairs of state, started out as a pamphetlike publication carried by courier and posted around the kingdom. By the time the paper killed its print version Jan. 1, distribution had fallen to about 1,000. Despite its shrunken circulation and its move to online-only publication, Post-och Inrikes Tidningar will retain its No. 1 rank as the world’s oldest newspaper. "An online newspaper is still a newspaper, so we’ll leave it on the list," said World Association of Newspapers spokesman Larry Kilman.

While the Post-och Inrikes Tidningar’s digital leap doesn’t quite fulfill a Wired News prediction for 2007 — that "a major newspaper gives up printing on paper to publish exclusively online" — it’s pretty close. And it’s only February.

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Science might soon serve up the ultimate sugary snack for drowsy cops and late-night truckers: a caffeinated doughnut. Molecular biologist Robert Bohannon, president of biotech company Onasco, has patented the power-packin’ pastry concept, and is looking for partners to produce caffeine-laced doughnuts, bagels and other items, according to a report on LiveScience. To Bohannon, the idea’s as simple and straightforward as dunking an old-fashioned buttermilk in a hot cuppa joe. "Some people get their caffeine buzz from soda, chocolate and other sources besides coffee," he said. "The Buzz Donut and the Buzzed Bagel lets them get the caffeine buzz by simply eating a delicious pastry item.

Want more info on doughnut manufacturing? Learn more than you need, including an alternate name for the tasty treats (olicook) and the difference between chemically raised and yeast-raised varieties, at Answers.com.

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Martin Luther King’s birthday is a good day to remember Tillie Olsen, whose 94th birthday would have been Sunday. A strong fighter for social justice and an excellent writer, Tillie died on January 1, 2007. I was lucky enough to know her and her inspiration lives on, challenging me to do better every day.

I met Tillie in a bathroom line at the San Francisco Book Festival about 10 years ago. I had just heard a panel titled something like Women of the Beat Generation and was about to leave, tired after a day of readings and talk about books.

I heard someone behind me say she had been in the cafe the night Ginsberg first read Howl. I turned to find a tiny, white-haired woman behind me and asked her to say more. She described how electrifying it was to hear that poem read aloud. She looked very familiar, and when I asked, she sweetly said, "I’m Tillie Olsen."

The upshot of that chance meeting was that I stayed that day to sit with Tillie for a panel by some Scottish writers, including James Kelman and Irvine Welsh. She had to leave before it was over to attend a friend’s 90th birthday party, so she approached the panel table to say hello before they began. The shout, "Tillie Olsen!" with a strong Scottish burr rang out over the room. Turns out, she was a much revered writer in their world and they were thrilled she was there to hear them speak. I snuck out with Tillie, and gave her a ride to the birthday party in the Marina.

It was the beginning of a special friendship, but I was only in San Francisco part of the time, and I never spent as much time with Tillie as I wanted to. She lived at that time in a rent-controlled apartment in the Western Addition.

She walked fearlessly through her neighborhood (which could be a dicey one), and seemed to be on speaking terms with every homeless person in the area. She always kept a few dollar bills in her pocket. When somebody held out their hand, she would stop and take that hand in hers, holding it for a moment, and speak earnestly to the man or woman about how much she hated the system that put them on the street. And she would give a dollar, but it was never impersonal, never just a gesture to relieve guilt. She was not a rich woman by any means. She was a writer, after all.

Plenty of fascinating biographies detail the events and experiences that shaped her into such a person, but a few elements stand out:

* The daughter of Russian immigrant parents who fled the Russian revolution of 1905, she was raised Nebraska, where her father was active in Socialist circles.
* She joined the Young Communist League in her teens, and was jailed for leafletting meat-packing workers.
* She started writing after she became ill in jail from lung problems developed at the factory where she worked. That short stint of writing (the first three chapters of Yonnondio) was interrupted by the birth of her first daughter (an interruption that lasted for 20 years of raising four children). She worked as a waitress, secretary and Kelly Girl, in a laundry, a dairy equipment company and several factories to help support her family.
* She was involved in the San Francisco dockworkers strikes in the ’30s with her husband-to-be Jack Olsen, and was a longtime advocate for women’s voices.
* She was targeted by McCarthyites in the ’50s, accused of "tunneling" into the San Francisco school system through the PTA.
* World events such as the bombing of Hiroshima, the assassination of Allende and the effects of the Vietnam war deepened her commitment to "to write on the side of life."

Though she dropped out of school after the 11th grade, she enrolled in a creative writing program at San Francisco State when she was 41 and her youngest child entered school. She was deemed ineligible for the first fellowship she sought, but someone on the committee brought her story directly to Wallace Stegner and she was given a grant that allowed her to take a break from wage-earning jobs for eight crucial months to write.

Her writing focused on the women who spent their lives taking care of their families, who often had no opportunity to "leave a mark." Most famous for Tell Me a Riddle, she also wrote "As I Stand Here Ironing," Silences, Yonnondio and other stories.

She was in her 80s when I met her and very active. She was writing, traveling to conferences to talk with groups of women and constantly thinking of how she could help others.

When the Scottish writers came back to the Bay Area on a book tour the following spring, Tillie was on a deadline and she charged me with playing host to her Scottish friends (oh darn). I dragged James Kelman and Duncan McLean to the Cinco de Mayo parade, where we met up with my friends, Guatemalan poet Jose Tagua and painter and activist Fernando Romero (who served as translator that day for the free-flung conversation on politics, philosophy, writing and a whole lot else, between writers from countries a world away from each other). We wandered, sat at a sidewalk table at the Zuni Cafe and watched the street show of San Francisco pedestrians, sat on the ground at the Civic Center with the salsa rhythms swirling around us. The next morning, we attended services at Glide Memorial.

It was a fertile, inspiring experience. Even though she wasn’t there, it was Tillie’s rich world I was in.

Once I stayed in her apartment when she was away. I was between apartments and she of course offered her home to me. When I arrived to get a key and find out what she needed me to tend to, she was folding a sarong that she took everywhere with her so she could exercise every morning.

I stayed a few nights, and one night the doorbell rang. I didn’t feel comfortable buzzing anybody up, so I went down to the street door. A woman was outside, hopping from foot to foot. She wanted Tillie and I said she wasn’t home just then, asked if I could give her a message. She said, "It’s cold, I need some socks." I looked puzzled I guess, because she said, more insistently, "Tillie keeps socks for when it’s cold. Just throw me down a pair." I said I’d look.

Back upstairs, I rummaged around a bit and found in the spare bedroom a drawer full of thick cotton socks. I opened the window over the sidewalk, and tossed down a couple of pairs. The woman called, "Thanks!" She pulled off her shabby overshoes and put both those pair of socks on right then, and walked away without looking back.

When Tillie returned and I told her about that, she said "Oh, that was Doris (not her real name). She comes around when she gets cold. The socks seem to help."

I wondered how many socks Tillie had dispensed over the years. I thought about her kind heart and how just a small thing like socks made a difference. I thought how often we just tune out or ignore or look past someone in trouble on the street because it’s so overwhelming, so huge we don’t know what to do.

From then on, I could not walk past a homeless person without thinking of Tillie. I don’t always have a dollar, but when I do, I give it — with a little more warmth, a sense of connection. I always feel grateful that I have a warm home to go to and that I met such a warm woman, who had room for everyone in her heart. Her determination to write, but not at the expense of her family is a real testament to right action and hard-won creativity.

If there’s a heaven, Tillie is in it. I wonder if anybody needs anything in heaven. But if they do, Tillie will minister, with a pocket full of dollar bills and a drawer full of socks.

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Unpublished writings of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., are released today by Stanford professor Clayborne Carson. According to Carson, they reveal King’s faith as the basis of his social justice agenda.

Known as a civil rights leader, King noted that people often forgot he was a Baptist preacher. His sermons faulted a religion that allowed Christians to perpetuate slavery and segregation. "Too often has the church talked about a future good ‘over yonder,’ totally forgetting the present evil over here," he wrote in 1952.

An article profiling these writings appears in today’s San Francisco Chronicle. Excerpts: 

"Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and not concerned about the city government that damns the soul, the economic conditions that corrupt the soul, the slum conditions, the social evils that cripple the soul, is a dry, dead, do-nothing religion in need of new blood," King preached in 1962 to his congregation at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

——-

"King’s idea was that by acting nonviolently and by resisting peacefully, one is re-enacting Jesus’ way on Earth," (Duke Divinity School Professor Richard) Lischer said. "King’s followers didn’t carry guns. They didn’t kill people. They instead took a beating."

——

Jim Wallis, an evangelical speaker and author popular with the political left, believes King’s faith grew beyond the liberal theology of his youth and deepened as the civil rights struggle intensified.

"His theological liberalism was not an adequate foundation for what he would face later," Wallis said in an interview. "I would argue that the more deeply one moves in the struggle for social justice … personal faith becomes more important."

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A couple of New York Times stories this weekend raise privacy flags. One notes the Pentagon and the CIA are quietly requisitioning private citizens’ financial records in domestic spying, skirting regulations that deny them the authority to make such requests mandatory:

… it was not previously known, even to some senior counterterrorism officials, that the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have been using their own "noncompulsory" versions of the letters. Congress has rejected several attempts by the two agencies since 2001 for authority to issue mandatory letters, in part because of concerns about the dangers of expanding their role in domestic spying.

The military and the C.I.A. have long been restricted in their domestic intelligence operations, and both are barred from conducting traditional domestic law enforcement work. The C.I.A.’s role within the United States has been largely limited to recruiting people to spy on foreign countries.

Carl Kropf, a spokesman for the director of national intelligence, said intelligence agencies like the C.I.A. used the letters on only a "limited basis."

Government attorneys say the legal authority to use "national security" letters was strengthened by the Patriot Act, but goes back three decades. (Read more of the story at the Times.)

The other story notes a 10-word deletion in a new Army manual that may be used to assert the executive branch’s authority to wiretap without a court order:

The original guidelines, from 1984, said the Army could seek to wiretap people inside the United States on an emergency basis by going to the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, or by obtaining certification from the attorney general "issued under the authority of section 102(a) of the Act."

That last phrase is missing from the latest manual, which says simply that the Army can seek emergency wiretapping authority pursuant to an order issued by the FISA court "or upon attorney general authorization." It makes no mention of the attorney general doing so under FISA.

Bush administration officials said that the wording change was insignificant, adding that the Army would follow FISA requirements if it sought to wiretap an American.

Oh really? (Read more of the story at the Times.)

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First Jeff Bezos built the internet’s biggest shopping mall. Now the Amazon.com CEO wants to conquer space. Bezos’ aerospace company, Blue Origin, has released pictures and a video clip of a November 2006 test launch of its Goddard vehicle.

In the video, the white, truffle-shaped spaceship rises in a smoky cloud worthy of a ’60s sci-fi flick to a height of almost 300 feet, then descends gracefully back to Earth.

Bezos called the launch "useful and fun" in a message on the Blue Origin website that revealed the launch to the world. "My only job at the launch was to open the champagne, and I broke the cork off in the bottle," Bezos wrote. (Perhaps he should have tried a saber).

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Several United Airlines employees say they watched a flying saucer hover over Chicago’s busy O’Hare International Airport for several minutes last November. Descriptions vary slightly, but everybody seems to agree the silent UFO sat in the sky for several minutes just before sunset Nov. 7, then shot up through the sky, leaving a noticeable hole in the dense cloud layer.

The Chicago Tribune digs into the story, interviewing United employees and even going as far as filing a Freedom of Information Act request, which prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to change its tune. (Originally the FAA denied having any information on the incident, the Tribune reports.) While several United workers swear they saw something strange — and one reportedly "experienced some religious issues" over the incident — the official FAA line is that a "weather phenomenon" caused the sighting.

"That night was a perfect atmospheric condition in terms of low (cloud) ceiling and a lot of airport lights," FAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory told the Trib. "When the lights shine up into the clouds, sometimes you can see funny things."

O’Hare controller and union official Craig Burzych, who didn’t spot the UFO, did spy a little bit of humor: "To fly 7 million light-years to O’Hare and then have to turn around and go home because your gate was occupied is simply unacceptable," he said.

(Via Coast to Coast A.M.)

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A shower of fireworks over Harbor Bridge christen a new year as a million onlookers celebrate in one of the first major cities to usher in 2007.

A bomb scare in Bangkok, Thailand, caused police to disperse the revelers gathered in Central World Plaza.

But in Japan, hordes of people climb Mount Fuji to see the first sunrise of the new year from the heights. The country’s major Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines will likely get 95 million visitors over the first three days of 2007. People there offer prayers for peace, health and prosperity. Hope those prayers work — could be that’s a better way to start the year than with a hangover.

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The godfather of soul, James Brown, died on Christmas in Atlanta. Friday, he participated in a Christmas toy giveaway; was hospitalized Saturday. He cancelled a few midweek gigs, but by Sunday he was pushing his doc to approve a Saturday night show in New Jersey and a New Year’s Eve gig at B.B. King’s club in New York City.

But he won’t make the gig this time. The "Minister of Super Heavy Funk" is gone, but not forgotten.

The New York Times called his music "sweaty and complex, disciplined and wild, lusty and socially conscious." "His music proved far more durable and influential than countless chart-toppers," said the Times. "His funk provides the sophisticated rhythms that are the basis of hip-hop and a wide swath of current pop." (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/arts/music/26brown.html)

The Associated Press published a moving tribute to Brown Christmas afternoon, praising his "scratchy, husky voice, defined by its piercing shrieks and guttural groans." The writer opined: "James Brown didn’t own the most beautiful pipes in the world," … but "that raw emotion characterized every aspect of his career, from his vocal style to his frenetic dancing. Brown was an explosive force who managed to redefine and reimagine music with the sheer power of his one-of-a-kind sound." (http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/J/JAMES_BROWN_APPRECIATION)

Brown transformed 20th-century music and sold millions of records. He never had a No. 1 hit, even though he topped rhythm-and-blues charts in the 1960s and 1970s. According to his agent, Brown’s argument to convince his doctor he needed to get back out on stage by Saturday night: “I’m the hardest working man in show business, and I’m not going to let them down.â€�

In his autobiography, he said, “I taught them everything they know, but not everything I know.â€� So much we’ll never learn from the mighty Brown, a true force of nature in music. 

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