Ed Webb's Public Library

"Moving Learning Games Forward: Obstacles, Opportunities, and Openness," by Eric Klopfer, Scot Osterweil, and Katie Salen of the Education Arcade, an MIT research division that explores games that promote learning through play, explains why educational games have seen an increase in popularity: mainly owing to the advances in consumer games.

A report from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, "Game Changer: Investing in digital play to advance children's learning and health," claims that on an average day, children as young as eight spend as many hours engaged in media activity as they spend in school. Seventy-five percent of American children play computer and video games, it says.

Some professors are currently pushing the edges of the risk continuum in this phase of the R2D2 model by using Twitter as a teaching tool. For example, students might be assigned to track the activities of a world-famous person who tweets.

The Israeli cabinet has decided to include some West Bank settlements in a national scheme that will entitle them to millions of dollars' worth of funds.

The Labour Party leader warned some of the new money might go to extremists.

<!-- E SF -->

On Friday a mosque in the West Bank was set on fire, and sprayed with Hebrew graffiti.

Labour leader Ehud Barak said: "I don't think that we need to award them a prize in the form of including them in the national priority map."

His five ministers in the coalition government voted against the plan. The other three right-wing parties in the coalition - Likud, Yisrael Beiteinu and Shas - voted for it.

played in the movie by British actor Mark Strong

Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around "as high as a kite", a government official has said.

"We accepted the proposal in principle," Foreign Minister Manochehr Mottaki told reporters at a regional security conference in Bahrain.

In what is almost certain to be a deal breaker, however, he spoke of exchanging the material in phases rather than all at once as is called for in the U.N. plan. He said Iran had offered to make a first shipment of 880 pounds (400 kilograms) of enriched uranium.

Carrying it out in slow stages would leave Iran in control of enough uranium to make a bomb.

Israelis know better than anyone else that the trick to developing a nuclear weapon as a small power is to drag out the process of diplomacy and inspections long enough to produce sufficient quantities of fissionable material. Israel should know: in the 1960s, it deliberately misled U.S. inspectors and repeatedly delayed site visits, providing the time to construct its Dimona reactor and reprocess enough plutonium to build a bomb. North Korea has followed a similar path, with similar results. And now, Israel suspects, Iran is doing the same, only with highly enriched uranium instead of plutonium.

Although many analysts question the rationality of the Iranian regime, it is in fact fairly conservative in its foreign policy. Iran has two long-range goals, achieving regional hegemony and spreading fundamentalist Islam, neither of which will be achieved if Iran initiates a nuclear exchange with Israel.

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali