Two sex offenders were gunned down in their Maine homes this weekend. The state has suspended the website that publishes offenders' pictures and addresses "as a precaution."

The Sopranos starts now. Tonight's episode: Live Free or Die, described as "Tony debates whether to give a top earner a second chance, and looks abroad to settle a local dispute." The dispute, of course, is the hit that Johnny S. got Tony to agree to do at his daughter's wedding last week. And we should find out about Vito's impending suicide after being outed as gay.

Update: Newsweek has a new article with the defense timeline, which matches the photos taken:

The accuser is dropped off at about 11:45, about a half hour after the other (second) stripper arrived. By midnight, according to a photo, the two are almost naked on the beige carpet in front of their visibly happy audience. But by 12:03, the mood has turned: in a photo, the women are standing and the second stripper appears to be reaching toward the guys, all of whom have lost their smiles. She slaps one of them for suggesting the alleged victim use a broom as a sex toy, according to Ekstrand. Then both women lock themselves in the bathroom, Ekstrand details. The partygoers get nervous about what the women are up to and start slipping money under the door asking them to leave, says Bill Thomas, a lawyer who represents one of the captains.

Get ready for the Natalee Holloway case to dominate cable the next few days along with the Duke Lacrosse players. There was a new arrest in Aruba this weekend . The name of the suspect is not in the news articles yet, but Fox News identified him this afternoon as 19 year old Godfried Van Cromvourt, a Dutch National.

Update: Dateline identified him as Gottfried Van Cromhout.

NBC's "Dateline" newsmagazine reported tonight that the man arrested is Gottfried Van Cromhout, a friend of former prime suspect and Dutch national Joran van der Sloot. Van der Sloot's lawyers denied their client knew Van Cromhout, according to NBC. A lawyer for the Holloway family told NBC's Dateline that Van Cromhout was involved with the island's beach patrol service.

Jason Leopold, writing at Truthout, says former Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, who has been cooperating with Fitzgerald in the Valerie Plame leaks investigation, has witnesses to support his claim that he told Libby in June, 2003 that Valerie Plame Wilson worked for the CIA.

Libby has claimed in his latest filing (see pages 15-16) that he doesn't remember the conversation, that it might not have happened, that Grossman may have confused him with someone else or that Grossman may be biased.

The Sunday Times (UK) reports if the U.S. or Britain attack Iran's nuclear sites, they have an army of 40,000 suicide bombers ready to take revenge:

IRAN has formed battalions of suicide bombers to strike at British and American targets if the nation's nuclear sites are attacked. According to Iranian officials, 40,000 trained suicide bombers are ready for action.

The group is called "Special Unit of Martyr Seekers in the Revolutionary Guards."

For those of you online today with thoughts to share, this space is for you.

The New York Times blasts Bush and Cheney on the NIE report leaks in the Valerie Plame investigation.

Since Mr. Bush regularly denounces leakers, the White House has made much of the notion that he did not leak classified information, he declassified it. This explanation strains credulity. Even a president cannot wave a wand and announce that an intelligence report is declassified.

To declassify an intelligence document, officials have to decide whether disclosing the information would jeopardize the sources that provided it or the methods used to gather it. To answer that question, they closely study the origins of the intelligence to be disclosed. Had Mr. Bush done that, he should have seen that the most credible information made it clear that the Niger story was wrong. (In any case, Iraq's supposed attempt to buy uranium from Niger happened four years before the invasion, and failed. The idea that this amounted to a current, aggressive and continuing campaign to build nuclear weapons in 2002 -- as Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney called it -- is laughable.)

The Times calls upon Patrick Fitzgerald to make public Bush and Cheney's 2004 interviews in the leaks investigation.

A new report by Human Rights Watch finds that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld may be criminially liable for torture of a Guantanamo detainee in late 2002 and early 2003. HRW says Rumsfeld could be prosecuted for his actions.

The report involves the alleged torture of Mohammed al-Quantani, which we reported on in depth here. Time Magazine published the full 83 page log (pdf) of his interrogation. Here are some of the things that reportedly were don to al-Quantani.

Intrepid reporter Murray Waas has new disclosures in the Valerie Plame investigation. Not only did Cheney authorize Libby to leak the information in the NIE report, he also authorized him to leak information in the still classified March, 2002 CIA debriefing of Joseph Wilson conducted after his trip to Niger.

Vice President Dick Cheney directed his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on July 12, 2003 to leak to the media portions of a then-highly classified CIA report that Cheney hoped would undermine the credibility of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, a critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, according to Libby's grand jury testimony in the CIA leak case and sources who have read the classified report.

The March 2002 intelligence report was a debriefing of Wilson by the CIA's Directorate of Operations after Wilson returned from a CIA-sponsored mission to Niger to investigate claims, later proved to be unfounded, that Saddam Hussein had attempted to procure uranium from the African nation, according to government records.

Murray also picks up on this nugget in Fitzgerald's April 5 filing (pdf):

by TChris

What a waste.

More than 31,000 California college students forfeited their shot at federal financial aid because of past drug convictions, newly released records show.

Why should a drug conviction prevent students from obtaining the financial assistance they need to improve their educations? Shouldn't society try to help them gain the tools they need to live productive lives?

While Congress recently "softened" the law, it should be jettisoned altogether.

by TChris

After the FBI arrested Hamid Hayat and his father Umer, President Bush declared that their arrests were part of the government's effort to "bust up these terrorist networks." Ten months later, as separate juries deliberate at the end of their trials, residents of Lodi are unconvinced that there was ever a terrorist cell in their midst. (Additional TalkLeft background is here.)

"I think people have gone 'Oh, it turned out not to be a big deal. It turned out not to be a terrorist cell,'" Mayor Susan Hitchcock said.

The government's fear-mongering was based on the word of -- you guessed it -- a less-than-credible informant.