June 30

The Devil wears Prada Anne Hathaway plays here a young writer eager to win respect from the editor (Meryl Streep) of a Vogue-like fashion magazine.

Red China or Green? Thomas L. Friedman is now in Peru, meditating at the Chinese impact in today's Latin America. While at home China is starting to be aware of the huge ecological issues that came with its rapid development, it is not concerned at all about these issues in countries from Latin America and Africa, where it looks for natural resources suppliers. China gets green at home while remaining red abroad.

That is why one of the biggest environmental challenges in the world today is how to turn Red China into Green China — not just at home, but abroad, says Thomas L. Friedman.

Google Launches Payment Service, Competing With PayPal Ritz Camera, Timberland and Starbucks are among the companies adopting the Google Checkout, the new service launched yesterday will compete with eBay's PayPal system.

Online advertisers that support Google Checkout will get a small shopping cart icon by their ads at the search engine. Those companies also will get a break on the fees they would normally pay Google to use the shopping service.

Will the Allen-Webb race be content-free? The Senate race in Virginia should not descend into puerility - that's the opinion expressed in one of the editorials of today's Washington Post.

Ask Virginians to name the top 20 issues facing the state or the nation, and it's a good bet that the physical desecration of the flag and the patriotic bona fides of candidates for public office will not make the cut. Are Virginia voters really going to be subjected to five more months of blah, blah, blah about which candidate is the greater patriot or the more despicable coward? It's hard to imagine a more irrelevant debate or a campaign that would serve the public so poorly.

And it's the birthday of Gone with the Wind !