Welcome to The Faster Times update. In today's edition, we bring you new abortion rules, the two best teams in MLB, why email is so important to Facebook, diamonds in the mall, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Enjoy!

In what might very well be an alarming precedent, Indiana has become the first state in the nation to successfully manage (at least temporarily) to defund Planned Parenthood. The new legislation put forth last Tuesday by Gov. Mitch Daniels (Republican, unsurprisingly) would cut off all Medicaid funding for the lately much maligned organization, while also requiring doctors to state to those patients seeking abortions that life begins at conception and that a fetus can feel pain around 20 weeks (neither of which, it should be noted, are considered to be fact). Performing any abortions after 20 weeks would now be illegal.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Philadelphia and Atlanta have the two best starting staffs 1-5 in the National League (Joe Blanton hasn’t been very good for Philly, and I will believe Ryan Vogelsong is better than Blanton (or Kyle Kendrick) over a full season when I see it). It is also not much of a stretch to say that Atlanta has one of the three best bullpens in the National League (with, again, the Giants, and probably the pre-fire-sale Padres), and that Philadelphia has, if not a great bullpen, then at least an adequate one, especially with the rise of the impeccably-named Antonio Bastardo and his impeccable lefty stuff.

The theme in board meeting after board meeting in recent months is driving repeat usage and retention. Whether the product is a mobile app, a social app, a mobile social app, a marketplace, an ecommerce business, or something else, everyone is looking at montly actives/total registered users and saying “let’s push that number up and to the right.” And I’m nodding my head in violent agreement. I asked one of the best product centric entrepreneurs I know why he thinks that Facebook does so well on that metric (monthly actives/total registered users) and he said to me “when I get an email from Facebook that a friend has tagged me in a photo, I click on it and go check it out every time.”

The thing about shopping for a diamond in a mall is that it’s incongruous. It smells like ice cream and leather inside. There’s a fashion event going on; the music is loud.

If Dominique Strauss-Kahn is found guilty, it will be a loss for the world. Thanks to recently returned Embassy Minister of Finance, Jean-Francois Boittin, I met Dominique Strauss-Kahn for a one-on-one meeting in 1998. Boittin, working single-handedly to correct my over-familiarity with Asia by a productive junket to Paris, said “You must experience Strauss-Kahn; there is no one else like him in France, and perhaps the world.”