Becky is 14 weeks pregnant as of today, which means she’s officially in her second trimester — and little Baby Loy has officially graduated from “jumbo shrimp sized” to “lemon sized.” Here’s some of what BabyCenter.com says about Week 14:

Head to bottom, your baby’s 3 1/2 inches long — about the length of a lemon — and weighs about 1 1/2 ounces. Her body’s growing faster than her head, which now sits upon a more well-defined neck. By the end of this week, her arms will have lengthened and will be in proportion to the rest of her body. … You still can’t feel your baby’s movements, but her hands and feet (which are now half an inch long) are more flexible and active. Thanks to brain impulses, her little facial muscles are getting a workout as she squints, frowns, and grimaces. She can grasp now, too, and she may be able to suck her thumb.

As an aside, what’s the rationale behind using “her” instead of “him” in gender-nonspecific writing? I understand the objection that always using “him” is sexist and patriarchal, but how is using “her” any better? Is it, like, linguistic affirmative action?

P.S. Baby Gaga (which prefers the gramatically incorrect “their” to the politically incorrect “his” or “hers”) has more on Week 14: “[T]heir little body and limber limbs are coordinated enough for loads of complicated motions. In fact, their whole body is moving right now!—only their current size is still a bit too small for you to notice. … Your baby is also starting to develop the ability to move their eyes this week, although the eyelids still remain fused shut. What’s more, they can make all sorts of fun facial expressions as they practice squinting, frowning, and grimacing.”

President Bush commutes the jail sentence of I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, The Associated Press reports.

Visit CNN for the latest.

The U.K.’s Evening Standard reports:

Anti-terrorist detectives swooped on five members of the gang across Britain after gathering crucial clues from phones found in the two London car bombs.

The phones were meant to trigger a blast when they were called. The bombers twice called the car outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in Haymarket, and the one in Cockspur Street four times, but the bombs failed to detonate for technical reasons.

“Technical reasons,” eh? Wouldn’t it be great if it turned out the terrorists were trying to set off the bombs with newly purchased iPhones, but failed because they couldn’t activate them? ;)

Notre Dame just recently finished revamping Irish Online, its online alumni directory. As I was editing my information today, I noticed that they have added a feature where alumni can list their children’s names, and, if applicable, the year their children graduated from ND. Obviously this isn’t that surprising at a school with so many legacy students. So what did surprise me and prompt me to write this blog post, you ask? The form includes space for the names of up to 15 children! Only at an Irish Catholic school…

That’s how many Apple sold on the device’s opening weekend. Wow.

In other news, the replacement for my broken AirPort Express is ready for pickup at the Knoxville Apple Store. Hurrah!

Daniel Briere and Chris Drury are no longer Buffalo Sabres. Pout.

Remember when I demonstrated the laziness and gullibility of some journalists by showing that a Procter & Gamble front group, posing as an independent research “foundation,” had repeatedly hoodwinked major news outlets into running bogus stories about a “new” “scientific” “study” showing that redheads are going extinct — and the reporters didn’t catch it, even though the “new” study had been described in virtually identical terms (presumably copied from press releases) by media reports in January 2007, November 2006, March 2006, May 2005, August 2004, March 2004 and November 2003?

Well, it seems the same thing can happen with more significant news stories, like bogus reports of decapitated bodies in Iraq. On three separate occasions now, major media outlets (specifically, the AP, Reuters and the New York Times) have credulously parroted thinly sourced reports of gruesome mass beheadings near Baghdad, only to learn that nothing of the sort occurred. It’s a blatant propaganda effort by extremists hoping to incite more sectarian violence, and the MSM is falling for it — hook, line and sinker. Repeatedly.

Reporting from a war zone is hard, as NBC’s Karl Bostic noted in his blog post about the second of the three “bogus bodies” incidents last year. No question about that. And there’s lots of gruesome violence in Iraq these days, so reports of mass beheadings aren’t inherently unbelievable. But neither of those realities make it excusable to pass off unconfirmed urban legends and/or insurgent propaganda as news, especially when the very same reporters would doubtless cringe at the thought of treating their own government’s official statements with anything other than a healthy dose of skepticism. As well they should — but healthy skepticism (not to be confused with cynicism, of course) should apply to all sources of information, not just the ones associated with the Bush Administration.

Independent confirmation: learn it, live it, love it.