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(A FEW OF THE STORIES WE'RE READING WITH OUR MORNING DECAF) |
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| The fate of more than 400 detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was thrown
into question when the Supreme Court rejected President Bush's plan to
hold military tribunals for foreign terrorism suspects.
In a 5-3 vote Thursday that brought a dramatic end to the court's term, the justices said Bush exceeded his authority by setting up the trial system without authorization from Congress. The justices said Bush's plan — which would not allow a detainee to see all the evidence against him or attend all court hearings in his case — lacked sufficient protections for detainees. The court said the plan violated the U.S. Military Code of Justice and the Geneva Conventions dealing with prisoners of war. USA Today |
| The Defense Department said that a ruling against military tribunals did not prevent the government from holding suspects indefinitely and without charge. NYT (reg/req) |
| The Supreme Court's Guantánamo ruling on Thursday was
the most significant setback yet for the Bush administration's contention
that the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath have justified one of the
broadest expansions of presidential power in American history.
President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney spent much of their first term bypassing Congress in the service of what they labeled a "different kind of war." Now they will almost certainly plunge into negotiations they previously spurned, over the extent of the president's powers, this time in the midst of a midterm election in which Mr. Bush's wartime strategies and their consequences have emerged as a potent issue. The ruling bolsters those in Congress who for months have been trying to force the White House into a retreat from its claims that Mr. Bush not only has the unilateral authority as commander in chief to determine how suspected terrorists are tried, but also to set the rules for domestic wiretapping, for interrogating prisoners and for pursuing a global fight against terror that many suspect could stretch for as long as the cold war did. What the court's 5-to-3 decision declared, in essence, was that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had overreached and must now either use the established rules of courts-martial or go back to Congress — this time with vastly diminished leverage — to win approval for the military commissions that Mr. Bush argues are the best way to keep the nation safe. NYT (reg/req) |
| The Supreme Court has pulled the rug out from under President George
W Bush in dramatic fashion with its verdict that he has no authority to
try terror suspects in military tribunals.
And in his first public appearance after the announcement - alongside Japan's Junichiro Koizumi - he showed how rattled he was by the news. "It was not always a given that the United States and America would have a close relationship," he said, trying to highlight the remarkable turnaround in relations between the US and Japan - not America - since World War II. And his annoyance showed a moment later when not just one but two reporters asked him about the ruling. He said he had not had time to take it in, finishing his answer to the second journalist with: "I'm sorry you wasted your question." BBC |
| Things got messy this week with the girlfriends on ABC's "The View."
What was supposed to be a carefully choreographed series of lies, told to save face, spare feelings and protect careers, devolved into a nasty catfight, leaving a veteran newswoman, Barbara Walters, in the position not only of having admitted lying, but of accusing her now-former co-host, Star Jones Reynolds, of lacking dignity for failing to lie about why she was leaving the show. LA Times |
| Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi will not become the first Japanese leader to address the US Congress. Instead, he's off to Graceland to see if Elvis has left the building. Koizumi's visits to a shrine that honors war criminals likely played a part in the Congressional snub, though most Americans seem indifferent to the controversy. Asia Times |
| Up. Down. Down. Up. The stock market's mood swings this year have been
giving mutual fund investors the jitters — and some have had enough.
The average stock fund had eked out a 0.1% gain for 2006 as of Wednesday — the most recent data available — vs. 0.7% for the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index with dividends reinvested. That sliver of a gain came at the cost of stomach-churning gyrations — price swings not seen since 2003. USA Today |
| A High Court judge who led an inquiry into the murder of an Asian teenager killed by his racist cellmate has delivered a devastating verdict on the state of Britain's prisons. The Independent |
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| The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President Bush overstepped his
authority in ordering military war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees.
The ruling, a rebuke to the administration and its aggressive anti-terror policies, was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, who said the proposed trials were illegal under U.S. law and Geneva conventions. The AP |
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| President Bush’s unprecedented use of “signing statements” to quietly
assert his right to ignore legislation passed by Congress – including its
ban on torture – first came to light in January due to some aggressive
reporting by Boston Globe reporter Charlie
Savage.
In April, Savage reported his astonishing discovery that Bush has claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws in all since he took office: "Bush is the first president in modern history who has never vetoed a bill, giving Congress no chance to override his judgments. Instead, he has signed every bill that reached his desk, often inviting the legislation's sponsors to signing ceremonies at which he lavishes praise upon their work. Then, after the media and the lawmakers have left the White House, Bush quietly files “signing statements” -- official documents in which a president lays out his legal interpretation of a bill for the federal bureaucracy to follow when implementing the new law. The statements are recorded in the federal register. . . In his signing statements, Bush has repeatedly asserted that the Constitution gives him the right to ignore numerous sections of the bills -- sometimes including provisions that were the subject of negotiations with Congress in order to get lawmakers to pass the bill. He has appended such statements to more than one of every 10 bills he has signed." Since then, a few major news organizations have taken note of this amazing story -- then let it drop. Most haven’t covered it at all. Up until this morning, not one reporter had asked the president, the vice president, or even the press secretary a single question about Bush’s penchant for signing statements. |
| Moose the dog, better known as Eddie in U.S. sitcom Frasier, has died aged 16 in Los Angeles, his trainer has said. BBC |
| The Bush administration plans to issue sweeping new rules on Wednesday
that will require states to move much larger numbers of poor people from
welfare to work.
The rules, drafted in response to a budget signed into law by President Bush in February, represent the biggest changes in welfare policy since 1996, when Congress abolished the federal guarantee of cash assistance for the nation's poorest children. Since then, the number of welfare recipients has plunged more than 60 percent, to 4.4 million people, from 12.2 million. Most of the decline occurred in the first years, before the 2001 recession. Federal and state officials say they expect the new rules to speed the decline in welfare rolls, which has slowed in recent years. The rules are far more than a bureaucratic application of the new law, passed after four years of partisan deadlock. For the first time, they set a uniform definition for permissible work activities and require states to verify and document the number of hours worked by welfare recipients. NYT (reg/req) |
| Opponents say it is an assault on English cultural heritage that will negatively impact the country. The Christian Science Monitor |
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| Thanks to the availability of cheap digital cameras and websites that
simplify photo-sharing, Americans have a new favorite pastime: creating
their own reality shows, featuring themselves — and anyone else they see
along the way.
While many, especially young people, think it's all fun, privacy watchers are eyeing the new trend, trying to gauge just how it will affect us legally and shape us socially. USA Today |
| A braided leather whip, a sniper rifle, six jars of fertiliser and
a copy of the "Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook" were among the presents
foreign leaders have given George Bush. They are clearly trying to tell
him something.
The inventory of official gifts from 2004, published this week by the state department reads like the wish list of the sort of paranoid survivalist who holes up in his log cabin to await Armageddon, having long ago severed all ties with the rest of the world. Guardian |
| Back in the 60's, when cognitive science was a popular amateur pursuit
and experimental protocols often involved multicolored buses, light shows
and infinitely long guitar solos, Richard Fariña, the brother-in-law
of Joan Baez, wrote a book called "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to
Me."
Although I read the book long ago, I remember very little of it (go figure), but I do recall puzzling over the title. Did it mean: I've been down so long there's nowhere to go but up? Or did it mean that after being down for so long, down itself started looking good? Now, 40 years after the book's publication, some professional researchers have written "With the Future Behind Them," an article in the journal Cognitive Science that sounds from the title as if it might be a sequel to Mr. Fariña's work. Not exactly. The paper is a lengthy discussion of the evidence that speakers of Aymara, an Indian language of the high Andes, think of time differently than just about everyone else in the world. They see the future as behind them and the past ahead of them. NYT (reg/req) |
| The transvestites first appeared in March when they raided Magazine Street like a marauding army of kleptomaniacal showgirls ... using clockwork precision and brute force to satisfy high-end boutique needs. New Orleans City Business |
| Unless you're reading this column from the deck of your yacht while
your first mate fetches up a pitcher of martinis, you probably won't get
an inheritance.
That's the conclusion of an AARP study that looked at how much boomers have inherited. As of 2004, only about 19% of boomers — born 1946 to 1964 — had received any inheritance. Of those, the median amount received was $49,000, adjusted for 2005 dollars. This is disquieting news for boomers who are counting on an inheritance to plug holes in their retirement savings. Those holes are getting larger all the time: A recent report by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College found that 43% of workers risk being unable to maintain their standard of living in retirement. USA Today |
| Scams, schemes and bureaucratic bungles after Hurricane Katrina have cost taxpayers up to $2 billion, including $250,000 a month to store about 10,000 empty mobile homes at an airfield in Hope, Ark. NYT (reg/req) |
| One of the largest space rocks ever known to come so close to Earth will be just beyond the Moon's orbit and visible to experienced backyard skywatchers with large telescopes. Space.com |
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| "Behold!" reads an official police notice on the waiting-room wall
at the Bethnal Green police station, in the East London borough of Tower
Hamlets. "Fear from people should not prevent one from saying the truth
if he knows it." It is a hadith saying of the Prophet Muhammad, stuck amid
a row of posters urging Britons to do their civic duty and report any crimes
they might get wind of. Tower Hamlets, which includes large Bengali and
Somali communities, is a majority-minority borough. Someone there apparently
felt that the hadith poster might help woo those for whom civic duty was
an insufficient spur. Today, Britain has more than a million and a half
Muslims. A million live in London, where they make up an eighth of the
population. They are not just the refugees and tempest-tossed laborers
of the developing world, large though those groups may be. London's West
End is full of Saudi princes and financiers, and journalists and politicians
from around the Arab world; its East End is home to erudite theologians
from the Indian subcontinent, along with some unhinged ones. In the 1980's
and 90's, a hands-off government allowed London to become a haven for radicals
and a center for calls to jihad. Culturally and politically (and theologically
and gastronomically), London ranks among the capitals of the Muslim world
and is certainly its chief point of contact with the United States and
the rest of the West. Since last July 7, when four young British Muslims
used backpack bombs to take their own lives and those of 52 others on London's
public-transport system, getting information out of the city's various
Muslim communities has become a desperate preoccupation of British law
enforcement.
Lord Carlile of Berriew, a Welshman who is Britain's independent reviewer of counterterrorism laws, has wide access to classified intelligence about terrorism plans. He is the last person you would expect to hype the dangers. For one thing, his party, the Liberal Democrats, has reaped electoral gains by opposing Tony Blair's war on terror, particularly Blair's belief that Iraq is a front in that war. For another, Lord Carlile has made a name for himself as a civil libertarian — a champion of legal underdogs from the terminally ill to the transsexual — and civil libertarians are the ones who have led the opposition to antiterror measures. "How serious is it?" he asked, sitting beside a conference-room table in his law chambers off the Strand on a sunny morning this spring. "Very. Complacency, tempting though it is, is the worst possible attitude. We've been fortunate we haven't had more attacks. There will be more." NYT Sunday Magazine (reg/req) |
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| A vocal collection of Americans, mostly on the political right, have an unshakable faith that such weapons exist. NYT (reg/req) |
| Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of "mad cow disease," has an incubation period of half a century, and could cause an eventual epidemic, British researchers report. HealthDay News |
| The top U.S. general in Iraq makes the most detailed allegations so far about Iranian support for extremists. BBC |
| ...Dr. Jay Chapman, a forensic pathologist who created the nation's
first lethal injection protocol, in Oklahoma in 1977, said that were he
to do it once more, he would not recommend the three-drug concoction now
in widespread use.
Instead, Dr. Chapman said, an overdose of one drug, a barbiturate — the method veterinarians use to end the lives of sick animals — would painlessly cause prisoners to lose consciousness, stop breathing and die. "Hindsight is always 20/20," he said. NYT (reg/req) |
| Shengda College in central China has a diverse curriculum, foreign
faculty members to teach English and a manicured campus, where weeping
willows shade a recreational lake.
But many students paid the college's rich tuition — at $2,500 a year one of the highest in China — primarily because Shengda promised that their diplomas would bear the name of its parent, Zhengzhou University, a more prestigious national-level institution, and not mention Shengda at all. So when the graduating class of 2006 received diplomas that read "Zhengzhou University Shengda Economic, Trade and Management College," students erupted last Friday, ransacking classrooms and administrative offices, shattering car windows, scuffling with the police and staging one of the most prolonged student protests since the 1989 pro-democracy uprising that filled Tiananmen Square in central Beijing. The protest, still simmering on Shengda's now tightly guarded campus, reflects the reality that the country's exploding population of college students must grapple with petty fraud, substandard instruction and an intensely competitive job market. Students, a traditional bellwether of political volatility in China, have become a fresh source of unrest in a society already angered by land grabs, unpaid wages and environmental abuse. NYT (reg/req) |
| As they move forward, the Chinese working classes may also look backward in order again to find their own path to a new socialist society. Monthly Review |
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| Congress is debating a hike, but looks unlikely to approve one, despite a rising cost of living in America. Christian Science Monitor |
| Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials. NYT (reg/req) |
| The Bush administration and The New York Times are again at odds over
national security, this time with new reports of a broad government effort
to track global financial transfers.
The newspaper, which in December broke news of an effort by the National Security Agency to monitor Americans' telephone calls and e- mails, declined a White House request not to publish a story about the government's inspection of monies flowing in and out of the country. The Los Angeles Times also reported on the issue Thursday night on its Web site, against the Bush administration's wishes. The Wall Street Journal said it received no request to hold its report of the surveillance. The AP |
| Westerners and Muslims around the globe view one another across a chasm
of suspicion, according to a 13-nation survey released Thursday. Each side
blames the other for the friction.
The poll by the Pew Research Center found that many Americans and Europeans view Muslims as fanatical and violent. By wider margins, most Muslims in the Middle East and Asia see Westerners as selfish, arrogant and violent. USA Today |
| Every now and then, Blake Cater gets an appetite for a fight. There's
something about a brawl -- a punch-out, a good old-fashioned throwdown
-- that gets his adrenaline pumping. So with a few of his friends, he goes
into his back yard and has at it.
And invites the world to watch. Armed with a digital video camera, Cater and his friends tape their slugfests and post them on video-sharing Web sites, including Cater's Myspace.com page. The images tell a succinct, brutal story -- punches landing squarely on jaws, fists flattening noses, neck-straining headlocks followed by jackhammer storms of more blows to the face. Cater says no one has been badly injured -- hey, these guys are friends
-- although participants can usually count on some bloody lips, plenty
of sore knuckles and a few bruised egos. "I'm not in any way a violent
person,"
says Cater, 22, who lives in Burlington, N.C., "but I enjoy getting out
there and fighting when I can."
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| The world's leading scientists call on parents and teachers to give children "evidence-based" facts on evolution. BBC |
| Sgt. Ben Glaudi, the commander of the Police Department's Mobile Crisis
Unit here, spends much of each workday on this city's flood-ravaged streets
trying to persuade people not to kill themselves.
Last Tuesday in the French Quarter, Sergeant Glaudi's small staff was challenged by a man who strode straight into the roaring currents of the Mississippi River, hoping to drown. As the water threatened to suck him under, the man used the last of his strength to fight the rescuers, refusing to be saved. "He said he'd lost everything and didn't want to live anymore," Sergeant Glaudi said. The man was counseled by the crisis unit after being pulled from the river against his will. Others have not been so lucky. "These things come at me fast and furious," Sergeant Glaudi said. "People are just not able to handle the situation here." NYT (reg/req) |
| The southern part of the San Andreas fault is overdue for a large earthquake,
according to a study in the journal Nature.
This end of the fault has not experienced a major rupture for at least 250 years and is now primed for a release of the built-up tension. The study by geophysicist Yuri Fialko provides the most precise measurements yet of this accumulated stress. BBC |
| With the resistances in Iraq and Afghanistan both under new command, changes are being rung. In Iraq, al-Qaeda is using the contacts and expertise of Abu Hamza al-Muhajir to draw insurgent groups under one wing. In Afghanistan, Jalaluddin Haqqani has adopted a classic hide-and-seek approach to tackle occupation forces. Asia Times |
| The U.S. Army, aiming to make its recruiting goals amid the Iraq war,
raised its maximum enlistment age by another two years on Wednesday, while
the Army Reserve predicted it will miss its recruiting target for a second
straight year.
People can now volunteer to serve in the active-duty Army or the part-time Army Reserve and National Guard up to their 42nd birthday after the move aimed at increasing the number of people eligible to sign up, officials said. It marked the second time this year the Army has boosted the maximum age for new volunteers, raising the ceiling from age 35 to 40 in January before now adding two more years. Washington Post |
| Reclusive British modern art mogul Charles Saatchi, credited with creating the BritArt boom of the 1990s, has set up a virtual gallery on the Internet to let unknown artists from around the world showcase their work. Reuters |
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| Numerous federal and local law enforcement agencies have bypassed subpoenas
and warrants designed to protect civil liberties and gathered Americans'
personal telephone records from private-sector data brokers.
These brokers, many of whom advertise aggressively on the Internet, have gotten into customer accounts online, tricked phone companies into revealing information and even acknowledged that their practices violate laws, according to documents gathered by congressional investigators and provided to The Associated Press. |
| When scientists consider the possible effects of global warming, there
is a lot they don't know. But they can say one thing for sure: sea levels
will rise.
This rising water will be felt along the artificially maintained beaches of New Jersey, in the vanishing marshes of Louisiana, even on the ocean bluffs of California. According to a 2000 report by the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, at least a quarter of the houses within 500 feet of the United States coast may be lost to rising seas by 2060. There were 350,000 of these houses when the report was written, but today there are far more. NYT (reg/req) |
| Is youth really the happiest time of life?
Researchers who surveyed younger and older adults found that both believe that, as a general rule, happiness declines with age. But when it came to their own experience, the older adults described themselves as happier than the younger people did. The study, led by Heather P. Lacey of the Veterans Affairs Ann Arbor Healthcare System and the University of Michigan, appears in The Journal of Happiness Studies. The researchers asked 540 people, one group ages 21 to 40 and the other over 60, to assess their current state of happiness. They were also asked, depending on their age, to recall or predict how happy they were at 30 and again at 70. Most said that with age came decreasing happiness. But the findings from this study, as well as others that the researchers cited, suggested that there was little evidence to support that. "Beliefs about aging are important," the researchers write. "If younger adults mispredict old age as miserable, they may make risky decisions, not worrying about preserving themselves for what they predict will be an unhappy future. "Conversely, exaggerating the joys of youth may lead to unwarranted nostalgia in older adults, interfering with their appreciation of current joys," they wrote. NYT (reg/req) |
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| The gangland-style killings of five teenagers in New Orleans over the
weekend punctuated a troubling trend in the hurricane-ravaged city: Murder
is returning to normal faster than other facets of city life.
The deaths of the five teens brought the number of people killed in New Orleans to 52 this year, police Capt. John Bryson said Sunday. After months of nearly crime-free life that followed Hurricane Katrina, the murder rate is slightly below 2004, when New Orleans ranked No. 2 in the USA after Camden, N.J., for per-capita murders. "It's astronomic," said Peter Scharf, a criminologist at the University of New Orleans. "This criminal justice system here is on its knees." USA Today |
| A group of American military deserters publicly embraced their new
lives in Canada on Saturday with the support of "peace mom" Cindy Sheehan,
who said she wished the son she lost in Iraq was among them.
"I begged him not to go to Iraq," the anti-war activist said through tears at a rally in support of the former soldiers, who wore black T- shirts emblazoned with "AWOL." "And I wish he was standing up here with these people because he didn't want to go." Sheehan was making her second visit to Canada in support of sanctuary for those fleeing the U.S. military. The Canadian government has so far denied political asylum to U.S. soldiers who have sought it but appeals are pending. The AP [Related story: "Conscientious objectors in a volunteer army" ] |
| The father of Yasser Al-Zahrani, one of the Saudis who died in Guantanamo Bay recently, dismissed US claims that his son had committed suicide and said there were bruises on his son’s body, which arrived in the Kingdom on Saturday together with that of Manie Shaman Al-Utaibi. Arab News |
| It sounds like something from a science fiction film — a doomsday vault
carved into a frozen mountainside on a secluded Arctic island ready to
serve as a Noah's Ark for seeds in case of a global catastrophe.
But Norway's ambitious project is on its way to becoming reality Monday when construction begins on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, designed to house as many as 3 million of the world's crop seeds. Prime ministers of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland were to attend the cornerstone ceremony on Monday morning near the town of Longyearbyen in Norway's remote Svalbard Islands, roughly 620 miles from the North Pole. Norway's Agriculture Minister Terje Riis-Johansen has called the vault a "Noah's Ark on Svalbard." The AP |
| An environmental disaster is brewing in the heartland of Iraq's northern
Sunni-led insurgency, where Iraqi officials say that in a desperate move
to dispose of millions of barrels of an oil refinery byproduct called "black
oil," the government pumped it into open mountain valleys and leaky reservoirs
next to the Tigris River and set it on fire.
The resulting huge black bogs are threatening the river and the precious groundwater in the region, which is dotted with villages and crisscrossed by itinerant sheep herders, but also contains Iraq's great northern refinery complex at Baiji. The fires are no longer burning, but the suffocating plumes of smoke they created carried as far as 40 miles downwind to Tikrit, the provincial capital that formed Saddam Hussein's base of power. NYT (reg/req) |
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| Karl Rove's master plan was to make George W. Bush the William McKinley of the 21st century. Why didn't it work? NYT Magazine (reg/req) |
| Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia that "anyone can edit." Unless
you want to edit the entries on Albert Einstein, human rights in China
or Christina Aguilera.
Wikipedia's come-one, come-all invitation to write and edit articles, and the surprisingly successful results, have captured the public imagination. But it is not the experiment in freewheeling collective creativity it might seem to be, because maintaining so much openness inevitably involves some tradeoffs. At its core, Wikipedia is not just a reference work but also an online community that has built itself a bureaucracy of sorts — one that, in response to well-publicized problems with some entries, has recently grown more elaborate. It has a clear power structure that gives volunteer administrators the authority to exercise editorial control, delete unsuitable articles and protect those that are vulnerable to vandalism. NYT (reg/req) |
| The Iranian nuclear crisis is really a geopolitical struggle between Russia, China and the US for dominance over the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Basin. There could be no greater win on the global chessboard for the US than a change of regime in Tehran. Russia and China will do everything they can to stall this. Asia Times |
| Quiet as it is kept in political circles, Mexico, so much the focus
of the United States' immigration debate, has its own set of immigration
problems. And as elected officials from President Vicente Fox on down denounce
Washington's plans to deploy troops and build more walls along the United
States border, Mexico has begun a re-examination of its own policies and
prejudices.
Here at Mexico's own southern edge, Guatemalans cross legally and illegally to do jobs that Mexicans departing for the north no longer want. And hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from nearly two dozen other countries, including China, Ecuador, Cuba and Somalia, pass through on their way to the United States. Dense jungle makes establishing an effective law enforcement presence along the line impossible. Crossing the border is often as easy as hopping a fence or rafting for 10 minutes. But, under pressure from the United States, Mexico has steadily increased checkpoints along highways at the border including several posts with military forces. NYT (reg/req) |
| Chinese claiming Confucius for an ancestor can now use a genetic test
to prove a direct blood connection to the grandfather of Chinese social
mores, a state newspaper said on Friday.
The fifth-century BC social philosopher's ideas of filial piety and deference to elders influence Chinese society and politics even today. Now his countrymen can establish a genetic link in a test that will cost more than 1,000 yuan ($125), according to the Shanghai Morning Post. "We would like to help these unconfirmed claimants to test their DNA and to establish a Confucius-DNA database," it quoted Deng Yajun, a DNA expert from Beijing Institute of Genomics at the Chinese Academy of Science, as saying. How the scientists had obtained a sample of Confucius's DNA was not explained. "One of the most difficult things in the project is to confirm the blood connections of these numerous claimants," said Kong Dewei, one of the editors of the new family tree, who has the same Chinese surname of Confucius, "Kong" in Chinese. Association with Confucianism was fatal during the tumult of the Cultural Revolution, when "old China" and its traditions were condemned as reactionary by fervent Communist Red Guards. But since the 1990s, Beijing has been encouraging Confucianism as part of celebrating traditional Chinese culture -- and of pushing a message of obedience to those in power. Reuters |
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| Goofus as a slothful senior citizen? Gallant as a geriatric goody-goody?
It's true. Highlights, the magazine that has brought fiction, poetry, puzzles, cartoons, scientific nuggets, and quiet lessons on life to several generations of children, turns 60 this month. [Yesterday], the one billionth copy of the magazine [was] be printed in Clarksville, Tenn. At some point it will undoubtedly turn up in a dentist's office near you. The Boston Globe |
| Drugs or other evidence seized at a home can be used in a trial even
if police failed to knock and announce their presence, the Supreme Court
ruled Thursday in a major shift in its rulings on illegal searches by police.
The 5-4 decision in a Detroit drug case undercuts a nearly century-old rule that says evidence found during an unlawful search cannot be used. The decision also offers a sign that the court might be more apt to strengthen the hand of police with Justice Samuel Alito in the place of retired justice Sandra Day O'Connor. USA Today |
| Top editors from two of the newspapers whose reporters were expelled
from Guantanamo Bay today criticized the Pentagon for the action, calling
it "bad public policy" and a "panicked move."
Tom Fiedler, executive editor of the Miami Herald, and Rick Thames, editor of the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, said the decision to expel the Herald's Carol Rosenberg and the Observer's Michael Gordon, along with Carol Williams of the Los Angeles Times, was a clear denial of press access. "My argument would always be that it is in the interest of the Department of Defense to be as transparent as possible," Fiedler told E&P Wednesday. "Given the controversy that has surrounded the detention facility since its inception, if the government has nothing to hide there, it ought to allow free and broad access to the news media there. Particularly given the suicides on Saturday." Editor and Publisher |
| More than 1,000 journalists have visited Guantanamo Bay since the U.S.
military began locking up suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban militants there
4 years ago. But access has been severely restricted: Journalists could
not talk to detainees, they had to be accompanied by a military escort
and their photos were censored.
Now, the Pentagon has shut down access entirely — at least temporarily — expelling reporters this week and triggering an outcry from human rights groups, attorneys and media organizations even as the prison comes under renewed criticism for the suicides of three detainees last weekend. "Now is the time when the media is most needed," said Clive Stafford Smith, an attorney who has filed legal challenges on behalf of about 40 detainees. "The fact that right now, the most important time in the history of Guantanamo, they are being banned is un-American." The AP |
| Discoveries about genes are prompting fresh consideration of how much control people have over who they are. NYT (reg/req) |
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| In the aftermath of the three suicides at the controversial Guantanamo prison facility in Cuba last Saturday, reporters with the Los Angeles Times and the Miami Herald were ordered by the office of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to leave the island today. Editor and Publisher |
| A Charlotte Observer reporter and photographer have been sent home
from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, amid what the Pentagon calls a "controversy"
stemming from one of their reports.
Observer staffers Michael Gordon and Todd Sumlin were at the military prison on Saturday working on a profile of the jail's commander, Col. Mike Bumgarner of Kings Mountain, N.C., when three detainees hanged themselves. Charlotte Observer |
| Colleagues say departure of former speechwriter, who wrote most of president's public words over last 7 years, will leave huge hole in White House. The Washington Post (reg/req) |
| Glaciers grow or fade at such a stately, truly glacial pace that it
has long been possible to appreciate their dynamics only over the course
of more than one lifetime. Several research centers around the world have
been amassing images taken by generations of glaciologists to build a picture
of frozen places as the world warms. One archive of before-and-after photographs
of Alaskan glaciers has just been published [Muir Glacier, photographed
by William O. Field on 13 August 1941 (left) and by Bruce F. Molnia on
31 August 2004 (right)] at http://nsidc.org/data/docs/noaa/g00472_glacier_photos/images/pair_example_highres.jpg
National Snow and Ice Data Center via NYT |
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| The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there's an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth, world-renowned scientist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday. The AP |
| Preliminary figures indicate that, as a whole, law enforcement agencies throughout the Nation reported an increase of 2.5 percent in the number of violent crimes brought to their attention in 2005 when compared to figures reported for 2004. The violent crime category includes murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. The number of property crimes in the United States from January to December of 2005 decreased 1.6 percent when compared to data from the same time period in 2004. Property crimes include burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft. Arson is also a property crime, but data for arson are not included in property crime totals. Figures for 2005 indicated that arson decreased 2.2 percent when compared to 2004 figures. Federal Bureau of Investigation |
| The European Parliament has voted overwhelmingly in favour of a motion calling on the U.S. to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. BBC |
| The U.S. House is set to argue the future of the Iraq war - the No. 1 issue for voters - Thursday. The Christian Science Monitor |
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| Scientists have detected large amounts of carbon gas in a newly forming
solar system around Beta Pictoris, a nearby young star. The finding, detailed
in the June 8 issue of the journal Nature, explains why the star's planet-forming
debris disk is enshrouded in a thick cloud of gas. This is a mystery that
has vexed scientists for years. According to theory, the gas shouldn't
be there at all.
"The star's radiation should blow the gas away," said study team-member Aki Roberge of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. But carbon has specific atomic quirks that render it immune to most of the energy pouring out of the star as light. Like a ghostly fog that no wind can disperse, the carbon-rich gas encircling Beta Pictoris is oblivious to the gale-like solar radiation blustering through it. The new finding raises the possibility that in a few million years time, Beta Pictoris could be home to bizarre alien worlds that sound like something dreamed up by astronomers who've read too much science-fiction. "If carbon-rich worlds are forming in Beta Pictoris, they might be covered with tar and smog, with mountains made of giant diamonds," said Marc Kuchner, an expert on extrasolar planets also from Goddard. Kuchner, who was not involved in the study, said that "life on such a planet is not implausible, but it certainly would be exotic." USA Today |
| Three detainees at Guantanamo Bay apparently committed suicide amid
protests of the U.S. military prison by inmates, the Defense Department
said Saturday. They were the first reported deaths at the controversial
detention center where suspected terrorists have been held for as long
as 4 1/2 years.
Two men from Saudi Arabia and one from Yemen were found "unresponsive and not breathing in their cells" early Saturday, according to a statement from the Miami-based U.S. Southern Command, which has jurisdiction over the prison. Attempts were made to revive the prisoners, but failed. The AP |
| Organic meat is the fastest-growing segment of the organic food business, with many of the biggest conventional producers wanting a piece of the market. NYT (reg/req) |
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| 2,000 years ago the Roman Empire superimposed itself on countries in the Middle East, to the detriment of the indigenous population. So when an insurgent arose to challenge the invaders he was labelled a terrorist by the Romans and their Pharisee puppets. History and convenience have obliterated any ‘crimes’ that Jesus may have committed in the eyes of the authorities at the time, but I’m sure he did his fair share of smiting. The symbology of these times suggests that this is a prelude, that a further king will be sacrificed in some way; that Mars and Saturn together will strike at a head. Dance like you mean it, this is not a test or a drill. From now until Solstice it’s all a bit mental. By Steve Judd |
| As happened with the capture of Saddam Hussein and the "shock and awe"
bombing of Baghdad, some American news organizations yesterday covered
the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi with marked enthusiasm, verging on inappropriate
glee.
Perhaps the tone was set by the cheering and sustained applause by Iraqis at the Baghdad news conference announcing al-Zarqawi's death. But American television didn't have to follow that gung-ho lead to the extent that some channels did throughout the day. The 24-hour cable news channels and their Web sites were the worst offenders, though other news organizations shared that lack of proportion and restraint. The Baltimore Sun |
| While Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's death could erode his group's ability to carry out attacks, the insurgency he helped ignite will go on without him, according to officials. NYT (reg/req) |
| All decent people can take satisfaction in the U.S. military's killing of Abu Musab Al Zarqawi yesterday evening. Even by the grotesque moral standards of Al Qaeda, Zarqawi truly was a monster--someone for whom non-adherence to the most radical interpretations of radical Islamism represented a sufficiently worthy target for slaughter. That monstrosity is why President Bush rightly celebrated the military's successful deliverance of "justice" to Zarqawi. But it's also why, in a rather perverse sense, Zarqawi's death may in fact be a bad thing--carrying with it a potential downside for the United States and for Iraqis, and representing a windfall for Al Qaeda ... The New Republic (reg/req) |
| It's good news that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is dead. Any member of the
civilized world ought to cheer the demise of a terrorist who killed civilians
with bombings and beheadings.
But his death--brought about by a US air strike that was apparently ordered after a captured Zarqawi lieutenant disclosed Zarqawi's favorite hiding places--may not mean much in terms of bringing peace, democracy and stability to Iraq. The Nation |
| A new species of mini-dinosaur has been unearthed in northern Germany.
The creature was of the sauropod type - that group of long-necked, four-footed
herbivores that were the largest of all the dinosaurs.
But at just a few metres in length, this animal was considerably smaller than its huge cousins, scientists report in the journal Nature. The team thinks the Jurassic species evolved its small form in response to limited food resources on an island. BBC |
| As 20-somethings hire life consultants, some wonder what happened to building character through life experiences. The Christian Science Monitor |
| Scientists have recovered DNA from a Neanderthal that lived 100,000
years ago - the oldest human-type DNA so far. It was extracted from the
tooth of a Neanderthal child found in the Scladina cave in the Meuse Basin,
Belgium.
The study, reported in Current Biology, suggests our distant cousins were more genetically diverse than once thought. Their diversity had declined, perhaps because of climate change or disease, by the time early humans arrived in Europe about 35,000 years ago. BBC |
| As much as we may like to believe that mother animals are designed
to nurture and protect their young, to fight to the death, if need be,
to keep their offspring alive, in fact, nature abounds with mothers that
defy the standard maternal script in a raft of macabre ways. There are
mothers that zestily eat their young and mothers that drink their young's
blood. Mothers that pit one young against the other in a fight to the death
and mothers that raise one set of their babies on the flesh of their siblings.
Among several mammals, including lions, mice and monkeys, females will either spontaneously abort their fetuses or abandon their newborns when times prove rocky or a new male swaggers into town. NYT (reg/req) |
| One of the great vacation values for Americans the past decade, a cheap trip north of the border, has all but disappeared, thanks to the relentless, multi-year slide in the U.S. dollar. USA Today |
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| The fast-food industry's frantic race to cook up the first "better-for-you"
french fry appears to have been won by Wendy's.
The No. 3 fast-food chain on Thursday will announce plans to dump its cooking oil for a blend of non-hydrogenated corn and soy oil containing next-to-no artery-clogging trans fats. With the new oil — to be rolled out in the USA and Canada in August
— a large order of Wendy's fries will drop from 7 grams of trans fats to
0.5 grams. And a kids-size portion will drop from 3.5 grams to 0 grams.
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| Oil prices have dropped sharply to below $70 a barrel on news of the
death of the militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq.
Two key oil prices, for July delivery of US light sweet crude and UK Brent, fell to $69.54 and $68.35 respectively. BBC |
| Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's older brother says the family had anticipated
the death of the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader for some time.
"We anticipated that he would be killed for a very long time," Sayel al-Khalayleh told The Associated Press on Thursday in a telephone interview from Zarqa, the poor industrial town that al-Zarqawi called home and from which he derived his name. "We expected that he would be martyred," he said, in a low voice, signalling his grief over the death of his brother, whose real name is Ahmed Fadhil Nazzal al-Khalayla. "We hope that he will join other martyrs in heaven." Aljazeera + Agencies |
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| Half a century ago, Hitler's monumental chancellery in Berlin disappeared
completely. Now, though, it has been digitally recreated. A new animated
film provides a unique look inside the center of Nazi power ...
When they were in power, the Nazis were careful not to allow such intimate images of the Reich Chancellery, then located in the heart of Berlin, to reach the public. But now -- some 50 years after the last remnants of the building, designed by Hitler's private architect Albert Speer, were demolished -- a new, animated video has emerged full of sharply focused and detailed images of the ambitious project -- a digital tour through Hitler's grandest building. Christoph Neubauer, 34, spent much of the last three years assembling his virtual visit. The video, called "Albert Speer's Neue Reichskanzlei," hit the shelves of German stores earlier this month and almost immediately triggered a scandal. During one presentation, the video's creator was berated by the audience and accused of having created a video sure to be an instant hit among the neo-Nazis -- a film for the right wing to revere. Spiegel |
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| A new retirement study provides further evidence that a growing number
of Americans are at risk of a diminished standard of living once they stop
working.
The Center for Retirement Research's new retirement-risk index, released Tuesday, shows 43% of working households were in danger in 2004 of having too little income to fund their retirement. But the study probably understates the proportion of retirees at risk. Its projections assume that people retire at age 65, cash in on their home equity through a "reverse mortgage" and exchange their assets for a stream of income by buying an immediate annuity. Yet many people retire before 65, according to the center, and don't necessarily buy immediate annuities or take out reverse mortgages. Nor does the research take in account the "wild card" of health care costs — and how these expenses will affect retirees' standards of living, says Alicia Munnell, director of the center at Boston College. USA Today |
| Several European countries colluded with the U.S. in the transport of terror suspects, a report concludes. BBC |
| The British government's apparent support of CIA rendition flights is "massively damaging" in the battle against international terrorism, a former Foreign Office minister says. The Guardian |
| U.S. officials believe Canadian arrests over the weekend and three recent domestic incidents in the United States are evidence the U.S. will soon be hit again by a terrorist attack. Privately, they say, they'd be surprised if it didn't come by the end of the year ... CBS News |
| For more than seven decades, civilized nations have adhered to minimum
standards of decent behavior toward prisoners of war — agreed to in the
Geneva Conventions. They were respected by 12 presidents and generations
of military leaders because they reflected this nation's principles and
gave Americans some protection if they were captured in wartime.
It took the Bush administration to make the world doubt Washington's fidelity to the rules. NYT Editorial |
| New ethical debate has arisen in the United States over the Pentagon's
decision to rein in the role of doctors in the interrogation of terror
detainees.
William Winkenwerder, the assistant secretary of Defense for health affairs who approved the new policy, said the policy makes a distinction between medical personnel who care for the health of detainees and "behavioral science consultants," who assist interrogators. UPI |
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| There's a name for it — hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia — fear of the numbers 666. Gannett News Service |
| A Netherlands-based Evangelical organisation has called on Christians
in 21 countries to hold a 24-hour prayer vigil against Satanic forces to
mark so-called Devil's Day.
Some fear the date 06/06/06, which falls on Tuesday, signifies 666, the Biblical number of the Devil, and will usher in calamities and even the end of the world. Agence France-Presse |
| Labor and delivery units in several Chicago-area hospitals are expected to be quieter than usual today. That's because moms-to-be don't want their babies branded with the birthday 6-6-06. Chicago Sun-times |
| Determined to win the Cold War, the CIA kept quiet about the whereabouts
of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in the 1950s for fear he might expose
undercover anti-communist efforts in West Germany, according to documents
released Tuesday.
The 27,000 pages released by the National Archives are among the largest post-World War II declassifications by the CIA. They offer a window into the shadowy world of U.S. intelligence — and the efforts to use former Nazi war criminals as spies, sometimes to detrimental effect. The war criminals "peddled hearsay and gossip, whether to escape retribution for past crimes, or for mercenary gain, or for political agendas not necessarily compatible with American national interests," Robert Wolfe, an expert on German history and former archivist at the National Archives, said at a news briefing announcing the document release. The AP |
| Millions of overweight baby boomers are on the fast track to becoming
disabled senior citizens, a possibility that could have dire repercussions
for them and for the nation's already overburdened nursing home system,
leading obesity and aging experts say.
"Obesity will have a big impact on increasing disability in this country in the coming years unless the epidemic can be halted and turned back," says Richard Suzman of the National Institute on Aging. USA Today |
| To you, that angry, horn-blasting tailgater is suffering from road rage. But doctors have another name for it — intermittent explosive disorder — and a new study suggests it is far more common than they realized, affecting up to 16 million Americans. The AP |
| The use of potent antipsychotic drugs to treat children and adolescents for problems like aggression and mood swings increased more than fivefold from 1993 to 2002, researchers reported yesterday. NYT (reg/req) |
| That once-venerable bastion of British journalism, The Times of London,
has decided to grace the rebellious colonies with a daily U.S. edition,
starting today.
The 218-year-old Times, whose traditional luster appears to have faded somewhat since its purchase in 1981 by tabloid king Rupert Murdoch, will be sold initially in just two states, New York and New Jersey, although anyone will be able to order a subscription. Baltimore Sun |
| Four journalists have lost their bid to reverse a judge's order to
either disclose their confidential sources or face $500 per day in fines.
The US Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up the reporters' cases to examine whether a generally recognized "reporters' privilege" against revealing sources should extend to a civil lawsuit brought by former nuclear-weapons-lab scientist Wen Ho Lee. The action marks the second time in a year that the justices have let stand a judicial order seeking to force members of the media to renege on professional pledges of confidentiality made to government officials to obtain information for their news reporting. The Christian Science Monitor |
| Internet search engine Google has released a web-based spreadsheet
application, on a limited test basis.
Spreadsheets are software applications with a grid of rows and columns and calculating capabilities, which allow users to input or organise information. California-based Google said its free, web-based application can be shared by up to ten users simultaneously. The dominant stand-alone spreadsheet is Excel from Microsoft, and Google's move could put the two on collision course. BBC |
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| Air pollution in Pakistan's major cities is among the highest in the
world, economic planners have warned.
Dust and smoke particles are "generally twice the world average" and "five times" higher than the developed world, the Pakistan Economic Survey found. BBC |
| China's drive for economic growth is in direct conflict with efforts to safeguard the environment, the government warned on Monday, and degradation is worsening despite official efforts to curb pollution. Reuters |
| The next time a Katrina-like hurricane strikes, it could be the Big Apple, not the Big Easy, that finds itself underwater. The New York area hasn't experienced a hurricane since 1985, and Manhattan a direct hit since the 1800s. Yet forecasters say because we're midway through a roughly 25-year cycle of warm waters in the Atlantic Ocean, conditions are ripe for a major hurricane to hit the north-east coast of the US within the next few years. New Scientist (preview) |
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| A looming doctor shortage threatens to create a national healthcare
crisis by further limiting access to physicians, jeopardizing quality and
accelerating cost increases.
Twelve states — including California, Texas and Florida — report some physician shortages now or expect them within a few years. Across the country, patients are experiencing or soon will face shortages in at least a dozen physician specialties, including cardiology and radiology and several pediatric and surgical subspecialties. LA Times |
| Publishers, editors and writers are grappling with the Web's ability to connect readers and writers more quickly and intimately. NYT (reg/req) |
| We may not be entirely human, gene experts said on Thursday after studying
the DNA of hundreds of different kinds of bacteria in the human gut.
Bacteria are so important to key functions such as digestion and the immune system that we may be truly symbiotic organisms -- relying on one another for life itself, the scientists write in Friday's issue of the journal Science. Reuters |
| As we head to the beach this summer, we know we should bring along
some sunscreen.
But now researchers say that a good dose of exercise might also help protect you from skin cancer. Rutgers University cancer researcher Allan Conney found that hairless mice that work out get fewer skin tumors when exposed to ultraviolet rays. As he reported in the journal "Carcinogenesis," mice with running wheels in their cages had 32 percent fewer UV-induced tumors than mice without running wheels. "You shine UV light on them, they had fewer skin tumors than the animals without runwheels," Conney says. "Voluntary exercise inhibited UV light-induced skin cancer." Discover |
| The U.S military said Saturday it had found no wrongdoing in the March 15 raid on a home in Ishaqi that left nine Iraqi civilians, mainly children, dead. But, as with the apparent massacre in Haditha, will a military "coverup" in this case soon come undone? Editor and Publisher |
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| Few people understand that one of the most notorious individuals in British history may have contributed to the lineage of our current president. Aleister Crowley, a.k.a., "The Great Beast 666" -- the infamous practitioner of "sex magick" whose motto was "Do What Thou Wilt" -- came to know a great many remarkable people, including the maternal grandmother of George W. Bush. "Know," in this case, may be taken in the Biblical sense. Evidence points to the disturbing possibility that he was the true father of Barbara Bush, the former First Lady and mother to George W. Bush. Cannonfire |
| Strong Democratic sentiment pushes President George W. Bush to the top of the list when American voters pick the worst U.S. President in the last 61 years. Quinnipiac University |
| After five years of "war on terror" and a staggering expenditure of lives and money, there remains in the West an indefinable yet definite sense of anxiety that somehow the war has gone terribly wrong. Mark Perry and Alastair Crooke explore the intellectual foundations of the confrontation in order to address this anxiety. Asia Times |
| A third set of allegations that U.S. troops have deliberately killed
civilians is fueling a furor in Iraq and drawing strong condemnations from
government and human rights official.
"It looks like the killing of Iraqi civilians is becoming a daily phenomenon," the chairman of the Iraqi Human Rights Association, Muayed al-Anbaki, said Friday after video ran on television of children and adults slain in a raid in Ishaqi in March. The AP |
| Parts of New Orleans had been sinking much faster than previously thought before Hurricane Katrina hit last August, new research suggests. Subsidence may explain why some levees were easily breached by floodwaters, the study in the Nature journal says. It argues some very low-lying areas of the US city should not be rebuilt, describing them as "death traps". BBC |
| A new report suggests restaurants should dish food and fight fat at
the same time, meaning menus with more fruits and vegetables, smaller portions
and better nutritional information.
With burgers, fries and pizza the Top 3 eating-out favorites in this country, restaurants are in prime position to help improve people's diets and combat obesity. At least that's what is recommended in a government-commissioned report being released Friday. The AP |
| A U.S. state is to enlist web users in its fight against illegal immigration
by offering live surveillance footage of the Mexican border on the internet.
The plan will allow web users worldwide to watch Texas' border with Mexico and phone the authorities if they spot any apparently illegal crossings. Texas Governor Rick Perry said the cameras would focus on "hot-spots and common routes" used to enter the U.S. BBC |
| As Germany prepares play host in the arena where Jesse Owens stood up to Hitler, concerns are growing over hate towards non-white players. USA Today |
| Fifty-five million years ago the North Pole was an ice-free zone with
tropical temperatures, according to research.
A sediment core excavated from 400m (1,300ft) below the seabed of the Arctic Ocean has enabled scientists to delve far back into the region's past ... "This time period is associated with a very enhanced greenhouse effect," explained Appy Sluijs, a palaeoecologist from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, and the lead author on one of the papers. "Basically, it looks like the Earth released a gigantic fart of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere - and globally the Earth warmed by about 5C (9F)." BBC |
| Employers and consumers are paying billions of dollars more a year for medical care to compensate for imbalances in the nation's health care system resulting from tight Medicare and Medicaid budgets, according to Blue Cross officials and independent actuaries. NYT (reg/req) |
| The British are coming again, this time not clad in red coats or sporting
Beatle haircuts but bearing cameras, microphones and notebooks.
This invasion is of the journalistic kind as British news media enter the American market or seek to raise their profile here. The most recent example is the BBC World division of the British Broadcasting Corporation, which starts a campaign today to introduce Americans to a 24-hour news network on cable television that seeks to compete against CNN and Fox News Channel. The campaign, with a budget estimated at close to $1 million, is promoting the arrival of the BBC World News network on American cable. The Cablevision Systems Corporation recently added the network to its digital lineup in metropolitan New York. The campaign, by BBDO Worldwide in New York, part of the Omnicom Group, is aimed not only at potential viewers but also at Madison Avenue, to stimulate demand for commercial time, and at other cable system operators, to persuade them to offer BBC World News to their subscribers. "We hope very much this is the start of a series of deals," said Richard Sambrook, chief executive at BBC World in London, who is working with Discovery Communications on American distribution for BBC World News. The United States "is the only region in the world where we're not available on a 24-hour basis," Mr. Sambrook said. Until now, he added, the only exposure Americans have had to BBC news was a daily, 30-minute program carried by local PBS stations. (The BBC America cable network that BBC World distributes to 49.4 million American homes offers only entertainment programming.) NYT (reg/req) |
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| The Pakistani Interior Minister, Aftab Khan Sherpao, has said that the U.S. has agreed to release eight more Pakistani nationals detained at Guantanamo Bay. BBC |
| U.S.-led troops in Iraq are to undergo ethical training after an alleged massacre of civilians at Haditha. BBC |
| A pregnant Iraqi woman in labour and her cousin were shot dead by U.S. forces as they rushed to hospital along a closed road, police and relatives say. BBC |
| Humiliation and periodic roughing up have prompted some U.S. Muslims to avoid traveling as much as possible. NYT (reg/req) |
| Fascinating work on genetics and mate preferences has shown that each of us will be attracted to people who possess a particular set of genes, known as the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), which plays a critical role in the ability to fight pathogens. Mates with dissimilar MHC genes produce healthier offspring with broad immune systems. And the evidence shows that we are inclined to choose people who suit us in this way: couples tend to be less similar in their MHC than if they had been paired randomly. The Sunday Times |
| Some questioned whether President Bush's bid to join talks with Iran over its nuclear program was an offer intended to fail. NYT (reg/req) |
| Here's a curious trivia tidbit from U.S. history: In 1786, Thomas
Jefferson and John Adams took leave from their Europe-based diplomatic
duties and traveled to Stratford-upon-Avon to visit the home of William
Shakespeare. Not much was recorded of the occasion, but one fact of their
pilgrimage to the Bard's birthplace stands out: At some point during the
tour, the two American statesmen brandished pocketknives, carved a few
slivers from a wooden chair alleged to have been Shakespeare's, and spirited
them home as souvenirs.
By Rolf Potts |
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| Comic book heroine Batwoman is to make a comeback as a "lipstick lesbian" who moonlights as a crime fighter, a DC Comics spokesman has confirmed. BBC |
| Americans unquestionably believe that homosexual men and women should have equal job opportunities, but a much smaller majority says homosexuality is an acceptable alternative lifestyle; in fact, fewer than half consider it morally acceptable. Along with other groups, younger adults (those under 40 years old) are widely tolerant of these positions, signaling a possible cultural shift in progress. The Gallup Organization |
| Al Gore has made his sharpest attack yet on the George Bush presidency,
describing the current US administration as "a renegade band of rightwing
extremists".
In an interview with the Guardian today, the former vice-president calls himself a "recovering politician", but launches into the political fray more explicitly than he has previously done during his high-profile campaigning on the threat of global warming. The Guardian |
| A military investigator uncovered evidence in February and March that
contradicted repeated claims by marines that Iraqi civilians killed in
Haditha last November were victims of a roadside bomb, according to a senior
military official in Iraq.
Among the pieces of evidence that conflicted with the marines' story were death certificates that showed all the Iraqi victims had gunshot wounds, mostly to the head and chest, the official said. NYT (reg/req) |
| Italian archaeologists digging in the Roman Forum have found a well-preserved
skeleton of a woman who lived 3,000 years ago.
The astonishing fact about this discovery is that it dates back to at least 300 years before the traditional date of the founding of Rome, 753 BC. BBC |
| Archaeologists are searching what could be the first tomb uncovered in the Valley of the Kings in 84 years. NYT (reg/req) |
| Karl Zinsmeister, the new chief domestic adviser to President Bush,
while embedded as a reporter with the 82nd Airborne in Kuwait in 2003,
declared that "many of the journalists observable in this war theater are
bursting with knee-jerk suspicions and antagonisms for the warriors all
around them. A significant number are whiny and appallingly soft."
Zinsmeister, editor-in-chief of the American Enterprise Institute's magazine, wrote the article for the National Review, and it appeared on March 28, 2003. He was appointed to the top adviser post last week. On Tuesday, in a separate matter, The Washington Post revealed that Zinsmeister now acknowledges that he erred in taking a newspaper profile of himself, altering quotes and text, and then re-posting it on another Web site without noting the changes or asking for approval. Today, the Post carried an editorial on the incident, quipping that the White House only wishes it could do what its latest hire did: take a pencil to newspaper copy. "Imagine how convenient it would be for the administration if it could do this with all reporting," the Post mused. It also coined a new word: Zinsmeistered. Editor & Publisher |
| The US "intelligence community" of 16 known civilian and military agencies is a vast, bureaucratic landscape of fierce turf wars, power grabs, mini-empire building, squabbling, coups and purges. Yet the value of this community - which costs untold billions of dollars and continues to grow - and its "intelligence" is simply taken for granted. Asia Times |
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| To the untrained eye, Bonanza Creek forest is breathtaking, a vibrant
place alive with butterflies and birds, with evidence of moose and bear
at every turn. But look through forest ecologist Glenn Juday's eyes, and
you see a dying landscape.
Since the 1970s, climate change has doubled the growing season in some places and raised state temperatures 6 degrees in the winter and 3.5 on average annually since 1950, says Juday, a professor at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. Drought is stressing and killing spruce, aspen and birch trees. Alaska has emerged as the poster state for global warming, the climate effect attributed to higher concentrations of "greenhouse" gases — mostly carbon dioxide created by burning fossil fuels — that capture the sun's heat in the atmosphere. USA Today |
| Al-Qaeda believes that it and its allies can only defeat the US in a "long war", one that allows the Islamists to capitalize on their extraordinary patience and their enemies' lack thereof. In this war, al-Qaeda envisions a "decisive stage" at which the mujahideen will develop semi-conventional forces. The recent large-unit action by the Taliban in southern Afghanistan may be a foretaste of this. Asia Times |
| How are twentysomethings ever going to win back health benefits and pension plans when they learn to be grateful to work for nothing? NYT (reg/req) |
| With the slaying of two CBS journalists, the number reaches 71 -- and counting. This tops even World War II, when 69 died. In addition, 26 support workers have been killed and 42 journalists kidnapped. Editor and Publisher |
| A secret U.S. plan to attack Chinese nuclear weapons sites more than four decades ago prompted Mao Zedong to temporarily abandon efforts to improve living standards, Xinhua news agency reported on Tuesday. Reuters |
| The most common and seemingly harmless invasive procedure in medicine — a routine blood draw — is not always harmless. NYT (reg/req) |
| The internet will this year overtake national newspapers to become
the third biggest advertising medium by spend, according to authoritative
forecasts.
By the end of 2007, internet advertising will close the gap on regional
newspapers, the number two medium, but will still be well short of television,
the biggest outlet in the £12bn-a-year media advertising market.
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| A stock ticker symbol or company name that is easy to pronounce may be a significant factor in short-term increases in stock price, according to a report published online yesterday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. NYT (reg/req) |
| The longtime White House correspondent talks about secretive presidents, Scott McClellan versus Tony Snow and why there's no such thing as a rude question. NYT Sunday Magazine |
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| A military investigation into the deaths of two dozen Iraqis last November
is expected to find that a small number of marines in western Iraq carried
out extensive, unprovoked killings of civilians, Congressional, military
and Pentagon officials said Thursday. NYT
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Probe Finds Marines Killed Unarmed Iraqi Civilians The Los Angeles Times |
| In a bid to challenge Google's (GOOG) growing domination of the Internet, auctioneer eBay (EBAY) joined forces with Google rival Yahoo (YHOO) on Thursday. The alliance brings text-based advertising to eBay from Yahoo and eBay's PayPal payment program to Yahoo. USA Today |
| The tropics - the globe's most torrid climate belt - have widened during
the past 27 years, expanding toward the poles by an average of about 140
miles, according to new research.
If the trend continues through the end of the century, it would drive rain-bearing storms toward higher latitudes, deprive heavily populated southern Europe of much-needed winter rain and snow, and expand the world's subtropical deserts, atmospheric scientists say. The Christian Science Monitor |
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| One of Romania's most popular tourist attractions, Dracula's Castle, has been returned to its ancestral owners 60 years after being seized by communists. BBC |
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| The coming economic changes are going to have profound implications for the capitalist and consumer society that we currently inhabit. Saturn opposing Neptune from Leo to Aquarius is hard enough when it comes to solidifying resources, but when both are squared by Jupiter in Scorpio, all hell can break loose, especially financially. Expected areas of change are the Chinese and Japanese economies, the state of the US dollar, and other economies that are primarily factory or engineering based. When? Well, the end of August to mid September seems ripest followed by a completely new beginning at end October. By Steve Judd |
| New-home sales rose last month, but failed to keep up the robust growth pace of March. The home sales numbers, along with a second government report yesterday that showed a steep decline in orders for durable goods, were seen as pointing to a softening economy. NYT (reg/req) |
| U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney could be called to testify in the CIA leak case involving ex-chief of staff Lewis Libby, a U.S. prosecutor said Wednesday. BBC |
| The United States government, not any court, is the best judge of whether to keep programs such as its controversial effort to eavesdrop on citizens a secret, an assistant attorney general said on Wednesday. Reuters |
| Elmar Brok, a German member of the European Parliament from the conservative Christian Democratic Union party visited the United States prison camp at Guantanamo, Cuba earlier this week. In an interview with Spiegel Online, he says conditions have improved but the general problem has not been solved: people are being locked away indefinitely and without trial. Spiegel |
| New Orleans, still down and out from last year's assault by Hurricane
Katrina, is the U.S. city most likely to be struck by hurricane force winds
during the 2006 storm season, a researcher said on Wednesday.
The forecast gives New Orleans a nearly 30 percent chance of being hit by a hurricane and a one in 10 chance the storm will be a Category 3 or stronger, meaning sustained winds of at least 111 miles per hour (178 km per hour), said Chuck Watson of Kinetic Analysis Corp., Savannah, Georgia a risk assessment firm. "Given the state of the infrastructure down there and the levees, gosh, that's just not good news. But that's what the climate signals look like," Watson said. Reuters |
| What public good is advanced by encouraging voting by those who cannot understand the nation's political conversation? George Will writes in The Washington Post (reg/req) |
| The last census showed "multigenerational households" growing faster than any other housing arrangement. NYT (reg/req) |
| The U.S. Treasury said Thursday it would end the federal excise tax on long-distance calls, a fee originally assessed in 1898 to pay for the Spanish-American War. MarketWatch.com |
| Recently posted: Two reporters at ABC News said that the Feds were
gathering their phone records.
On The Media |
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| Major phone companies are bracing for legal action for their roles in an NSA surveillance program. Christian Science Monitor |
| The web should remain neutral and resist attempts to fragment it into
different services, web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has said.
Recent attempts in the U.S. to try to charge for different levels of online access web were not "part of the internet model," he said in Edinburgh. He warned that if the U.S. decided to go ahead with a two-tier internet,
the network would enter "a dark period".
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| Humans can threaten species with extinction in many ways, including overfishing, pollution and deforestation. Now a pair of studies points to a new danger to the world's biodiversity: humans may be blocking new species from evolving. NYT (reg/req) |
| Americans are growing increasingly skeptical of the FDA's ability to ensure drug safety and efficacy, a WSJ.com/Harris health-care poll shows. Wall Street Journal |
| Market turmoil from India to New York reflects investors' concern about rising inflation and interest rates. Christian Science Monitor |
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| What would it cost U.S. taxpayers to put millions of illegal immigrants on the path to citizenship? Two widely differing estimates are drawing attention to the costs of federal benefits that low-skilled immigrant workers could be entitled to. Wall Street Journal |
| A Defense Department investigation of Pentagon-financed propaganda efforts in Iraq warns that paying Iraqi journalists to produce positive stories could damage American credibility and calls for an end to military payments to a group of Iraqi journalists in Baghdad, according to a summary of the investigation. NYT (reg/req) |
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| Russia's parliament gave initial approval on Wednesday to a draft law that will punish government ministers for saying "dollar" when they could have used the word "rouble" instead. Reuters |
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| Employees at mortgage giant Fannie Mae (FNM) manipulated accounting
so that executives could collect millions in bonuses as senior management
deceived investors and stonewalled regulators at a company whose prestigious
image was phony, a federal agency charged Tuesday.
The blistering report by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, the product of an extensive three-year investigation, was issued as the government-sponsored company struggles to emerge from an $11 billion accounting scandal. The AP |
| Independent provinces operating as self-contained military units, a switch to asymmetrical warfare and stockpiling in expectation of guerrilla warfare: these are just some of the measures being taken by Iran's military in case of a U.S. strike. The U.S., in the meantime, is marshaling an alliance of Iran's Arab neighbors in the intensifying diplomatic face-off with Tehran.Asia Times |
| Could it be that Washington is using Iran's nuclear program as a pretext
to take control of 'all of the oil fields of the Middle East and Asia?'
According to this op-ed article from Iraq's Arabic-language Azzaman
newspaper, American motives are suspect, and in any case, Iran's regime
will soon crumble on its own.
via WatchingAmerica.com |
| A new front is about to open in the battle against terrorism. Next month, a hand-held device that looks a bit like a vacuum cleaner will undergo a trial on the London Underground. The idea is that it takes air samples from around people's bodies, revealing whether there is any trace of explosive materials. The device is one of the first attempts by Britain's new anti-terror force to develop technology that can detect terrorists before they strike. The Herald |
| Doublespeak by nations like the United States and Britain has undermined their own war on terrorism and increased human rights violations from Colombia to North Korea, Amnesty International said on Tuesday. Reuters |
| An international human rights group has criticised Israel for allowing its security forces and settlers to perpetrate abuses against Palestinians with no fear of being brought to justice. Aljazeera |
| Are U.S. politicians stuck in the Cold War, treating Russia as an adversary
when to do so is self-defeating? According to this op-ed article from China's
Communist Party-controlled People's
Daily, the hypocrisy and short-sightedness of American policy was
recently exposed by Vice President Cheney, who criticized Russia, and days
later embraced dictator and human rights abuser Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan.
via WatchingAmerica.com |
| With Bush's job-approval ratings skidding as low as 30% in national polls, there are more places where a presidential appearance could hurt Republican candidates. Wall Street Journal |
| A teacher who took his class on a school trip to a historic cathedral was arrested for giving unlicenced tours. Ananova |
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| Oklahoma, Mississippi and the Mountain states have set the pace in
increasing the imprisonment of women, while several Northeastern states
are curtailing the practice, according to a new report detailing sharp
regional differences in the handling of female offenders.
The report, released by the New York-based Women's Prison Association, is touted as the most comprehensive state-by-state breakdown of the huge increase in incarceration of women over the past 30 years. Overall, the number of female state inmates serving sentences of more than a year grew by 757% between 1977 and 2004, nearly twice the 388% increase for men, the report said. The AP |
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| I wonder what it is like to have to bargain over the telephone for
the life of your husband, your wife, or your child.
It is hard to imagine the anguish, waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for the anonymous voice to name an impossible ransom, and waiting again, to see if a lower price for the life of your loved one is acceptable. The family of the man who runs a big shop in the area where we live, may soon be finding out - if they are lucky. A few days ago, a convoy of 4x4 vehicles pulled up outside the shop. Armed men got out and went in. They seized him, and drove him away. Nobody knows if they were from a party militia, or off-duty policemen, or just well-organised gangsters. It is the kind of random thing that happens probably dozens of times a day here. Unless it is somebody very prominent, it does not even get reported. BBC |
| The Bush administration has censored photographs of the wounded, body
bags, and flag-draped coffins. Imagine its fears over large numbers of
Americans viewing Jon Alpert and Matthew O'Neill's new documentary, Baghdad
ER.
Airing Sunday, May 21, at 8:00 PM on HBO, Baghdad ER examines the 86th Combat Support Hospital which the filmmakers chronicled for two months. One nurse, Specialist Saidet Lanier, describes life at the field hospital this way: "This is hard-core, raw, uncut trauma. Day after day, every day." Initially, military officials were enthusiastic about the heroic portrayal of this medical staff which has – along with other trauma teams – somehow managed the highest survival rate for wounded soldiers during any war at a stunning 90 percent. But the Pentagon's enthusiasm has soured. Many suspect it is for the simple reason that the truth will further erode the already radically diminished support for this war. Because despite the fact that Baghdad ER is widely hailed as a non-partisan tribute to both soldiers and medical personnel, as HBO president Sheila Evans told the New York Times, "Anything showing the grim realities of war is, in a sense, antiwar." The Pentagon hasn't questioned the accuracy or authenticity of the film.
Pentagon spokesman Paul Boyce told the Washington Post, "We believe [it]
is a very thorough representation of the professionalism of the military
medical community, and reflects the ethos of our soldiers." And yet, after
initially saying 300 military officials would attend the premier in Washington,
DC, only about 40 showed up and none were high-raking officers.
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| The Taliban have a new military head, Jalaluddin Haqqani, a part of Afghanistan's folklore for his exploits against the Soviets. Armed with fresh funds, arms and a steady supply of jihadis trained in Iraq, his forces this week launched their biggest attack in the country since the Taliban were ousted. And such is Haqqani's pull, warlords and others previously neutral are flocking to his cause. Asia Times |
| The closing panel at E&P's 2006 Interactive Media Conference and Trade Show on Friday featured three longtime industry figures discussing the future of newspapers in an online world, with several hard truths hammered home. Editor & Publisher |
| Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media, responds to e-mails from readers about the emerging threat to in-depth journalism as the advertising newspapers use to keep themselves solvent moves to the net - "... I fear the day when we might not have a New York Times to tell us of illegal spying on citizens, or a Sunday Times (London) to tell us of the Downing Street memo, or a Washington Post to tell us that our government is running secret prisons around the world. When governments refuse to investigate themselves -- and go out of their way to hide their mistakes (and worse) -- we need serious journalism more than ever." BBC |
| The children of baby boomers are the new debtor class. Buckling under
a heavy weight of debt, new workers step into an economy of low-wage and
contingent work, a combination that makes the basics of adulthood increasingly
unattainable.
“We grew up in the Regan era where everything was fake, voodoo economics, and we’re not seeing the connections,” says Anya Kamenetz, author of Generation Debt: Why Now Is a Terrible Time to be Young. “I don’t think we can continue treating people as disposable, not providing them with health care or the means to save.” In These Times |
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| Four Guantanamo prisoners tried to commit suicide on Thursday and several
others attacked guards who rushed in to halt one of the attempts, a camp
spokesman said.
Three took overdoses of prescription medicine they had apparently been hoarding, and the fourth tried to hang himself, said Cmdr. Robert Durand, a detention camp spokesman. None of the suicide attempts succeeded, he said. "At this point, I have no idea of motive, no idea of any co-ordination and no idea of any intended message," Durand said. Reuters |
| The UN Committee against Torture's call for the closure of Guantanamo Bay shows that international voices are increasingly being raised against the institutions set up by the United States in its "war on terror", and not just against the treatment of prisoners in them. BBC |
| The U.S. should shut any secret prisons abroad and its camp at Guantanamo, the UN committee on torture says. BBC |
| Deaths run like water through the life of the Bahjat family. Four neighbors.
A barber. Three grocers. Two men who ran a currency exchange shop.
But when six armed men stormed into their sons' primary school this month, shot a guard dead, and left fliers ordering it to close, Assad Bahjat knew it was time to leave. "The main thing now is to just get out of Iraq," said Mr. Bahjat, standing in a room heaped with suitcases and bedroom furniture in eastern Baghdad. In the latest indication of the crushing hardships weighing on the lives of Iraqis, increasing portions of the middle class seem to be doing everything they can to leave the country. In the last 10 months, the state has issued new passports to 1.85 million Iraqis, 7 percent of the population and a quarter of the country's estimated middle class. NYT (reg/req) |
| The former executive editor of Maxim is heading the launch of Shock, a new photo-driven magazine he describes as "Life magazine for the new millennium." The idea is to give people "an uncensored view of the world around them," says Mike Hammer, also former editor-in-chief of Stuff. The debut issue of Shock features photos of a rotting human head, deformed victims of Chernobyl, a woman who set herself on fire and an article on "KKK Kids," children growing up in white-supremacist households. Wall Street Journal |
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| The quick fix may involve sending in the National Guard. But to really
patch up the broken border, President Bush is preparing to turn to a familiar
administration partner: the nation's giant military contractors.
Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, three of the largest, are among the companies that said they would submit bids within two weeks for a multibillion-dollar federal contract to build what the administration calls a "virtual fence" along the nation's land borders. NYT (reg/req) |
| Up to 100 people die as Afghanistan sees some of its heaviest fighting since the Taleban were ousted in 2001. BBC |
| The incoming Italian prime minister, Romano Prodi, today described
the US-led invasion of Iraq as a "grave mistake" that had encouraged global
terrorism.
Mr Prodi, who narrowly won last month's general election, said he would consult with US-led forces in Iraq over Italian troop withdrawal. Guardian |
| Moderate stress during pregnancy does not harm the unborn child but can instead aid its later advancement, US research suggests. BBC |
| The already formidable US arsenal is being expanded, again, with such things as compact super-precision bombs that could reduce "collateral damage", of inanimate objects as well as people. But also due for testing is a 600-ton - that's right, ton - pack of conventional explosives. Some say the test will be rigged to fail, justifying "more reliable" nuclear bombs. Asia Times |
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| In a new court filing, the prosecutor in the CIA leak case revealed
that Vice President Dick Cheney made handwritten references to CIA officer
Valerie Plame — albeit not by name — before her identity was publicly exposed.
The new court filing is the second in little more than a month by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald mentioning Cheney as being closely focused with his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, on Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, who is married to Plame. The AP |
| In the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the vice president argued that domestic telephone calls and e-mail should be intercepted without warrants. NYT (reg/req) |
| Organised gangs are so ubiquitous in Brazilian jails that many experts believe criminals virtually run the country's prison system. BBC |
| The promise of blasting thrill-seeking tourists into space is fueling
an unprecedented rush to build snazzy commercial spaceports.
The Federal Aviation Administration is reviewing proposals from New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas to be gateways for private space travel. Depending on how environmental reviews and other requirements go, approval could come as early as this year and the sites could begin preparing to ferry space tourists soon afterward. The current spaceport boom recalls the mid-1990s, when the first spaceport fad generated hype but no real construction. Finally, technology may have caught up with starry-eyed plans. The AP |
| Grapefruit is known to increase the rate at which some drugs - including
cholesterol and blood pressure medications - enter the blood stream.
It was thought the flavonoids that make grapefruit taste bitter were to blame. But a US study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition suggests other chemicals - furanocoumarins - are key. BBC |
| In recent years, a number of American thinkers, led by Joseph S. Nye
Jr. of Harvard, have argued that the United States should rely more on
what he calls its "soft power" — the contagious appeal of its ideas, its
culture and its way of life — and so rely less on the "hard power" of its
stealth bombers and aircraft carriers. There is one problem with this argument:
soft power does not necessarily increase the world's love for America.
It is still power, and it can still make enemies.
America's soft power isn't just pop and schlock; its cultural clout is both high and low. It is grunge and Google, Madonna and MoMA, Hollywood and Harvard. If two-thirds of the movie marquees carry an American title in Europe (even in France), dominance is even greater when it comes to translated books. The figure for Germany in 2003 was 419 versus 3,732; that is, for every German book translated into English, nine English-language books were translated into German. It used to be the other way around. A hundred years ago, Humboldt University in Berlin was the model for the rest of the world. Tokyo, Johns Hopkins, Stanford and the University of Chicago were founded in conscious imitation of the German university and its novel fusion of teaching and research. Today Europe's universities have lost their luster, and as they talk reform, they talk American. Indeed, America is one huge global "demonstration effect," as the sociologists call it. The Soviet Union's cultural presence in Prague, Budapest and Warsaw vanished into thin air the moment the last Russian soldier departed. American culture, however, needs no gun to travel. NYT Magazine |
| In several dozen nondescript office buildings around the world, thousands
of hourly workers bend over table-top scanners and haul dusty books into
high-tech scanning booths. They are assembling the universal library page
by page.
The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages. It is a familiar hope, in part because long ago we briefly built such a library. The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 B.C., was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world. At one time or another, the library held about half a million scrolls, estimated to have been between 30 and 70 percent of all books in existence then. But even before this great library was lost, the moment when all knowledge could be housed in a single building had passed. Since then, the constant expansion of information has overwhelmed our capacity to contain it. For 2,000 years, the universal library, together with other perennial longings like invisibility cloaks, antigravity shoes and paperless offices, has been a mythical dream that kept receding further into the infinite future. Until now. NYT Magazine |
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| Disclosure of secret phone-data collection program recharges ongoing
debate on liberty vs. security in the war on terror. Opponents say program
may violate Constitution or federal law, but defenders see no danger.
USA Today |
| With news reports exposing the National Security Agency's previously
secret spying on the phone conversations of tens of millions of Americans,
what is the status of the U.S. Department of Justice probe of the Bush
administration's authorization of a warrantless domestic wiretapping program?
The investigation has been closed. That's right. Even as it is being revealed that the president's controversial eavesdropping program is dramatically more extensive – and Constitutionally dubious -- than had been previously known, the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) has informed Representative Maurice Hinchey that its attempt to determine which administration officials authorized, approved and audited NSA surveillance activities is over. The Nation |
| If the National Security Agency is amassing a database of phone records,
one way to use all that information is in ''social network analysis,''
a data-mining method that aims to expose invisible connections among people.
Social network analysis has gained prominence in business and intelligence circles under the belief that it can yield extraordinary insights, such as the fact that people in disparate organizations have common acquaintances. Companies can buy social networking software to help determine who has the best connections for a particular sales pitch. The AP |
| Soldiers and their parents said troops injured at Fort Sill, Okla., were punished with physical abuse and medical neglect. NYT (reg/req) |
| An alligator killed a woman whose dismembered body was found floating in a canal in Florida, a US medical examiner has concluded. BBC |
| Starting this summer, there will be a lot more organic food on supermarket
shelves, and it should cost a lot less.
Most of the nation's major food producers are hard at work developing organic versions of their best-selling products, like Kellogg's Rice Krispies and Kraft's macaroni and cheese. Why the sudden activity? In large part because Wal-Mart wants to sell more organic food — and because of its size and power, Wal-Mart usually gets what it wants. NYT (reg/req) |
| A comet is delighting astronomers with a marvellous night-time display as it makes a near pass of the Earth. BBC |
| If Iran's nuclear program were the core of its problem with the US, why did Washington reject a 2003 proposal by a worried and concession-minded Tehran to negotiate? Iran's advances were spurned because it stood in the way of the neo-conservative vision of a new Middle East. The Bush administration decided to play hardball, and Tehran responded in kind. Asia Times |
| A group of scientists has discovered that women are attracted to men who are fond of children. In years gone by, that announcement might have qualified for one of the late Senator William Proxmire's Golden Fleece awards for pointless scientific research—except that what this particular group of scientists has shown is that women can tell who is and is not fond of children just by looking at their faces. The Economist |
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| The spy agency, with the help of three major telecom firms, has been collecting data on the domestic calls of millions of Americans since shortly after 9/11. Sources say the NSA is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity. USA Today |
| Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, put himself on a collision course
with Tony Blair last night when he insisted Guantanamo Bay should be shut.
The UK's most senior law officer said the controversial US prison camp for terror suspects should be closed "as a matter of principle." BBC |
| The U.S. has rejected the UK government's calls for closing down the Guantanamo Bay prison camp for terror suspects. BBC |
| New evidence from Canada and Alaska suggests that climate change, rather than human hunting, may have played the key role in a great die-off of mammoths, horses and other large North American mammals that began more than 10,000 years ago. Washington Post (reg/req) |
| An Islamist militia battling for the Somali capital, Mogadishu, reportedly makes significant advances. BBC |
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| Iraq's president says sectarian violence killed more than 1,000 people in Baghdad in April, more than 30 a day. BBC |
| Americans have a bleaker view of the country's direction than at any
time in more than two decades, according to the latest New York Times/CBS
News poll. Sharp disapproval of President Bush's handling of gasoline prices
has combined with intensified unhappiness about Iraq to create a grim political
environment for the White House and Congressional Republicans.
Mr. Bush's approval ratings for his management of foreign policy, Iraq and the economy have fallen to the lowest levels of his presidency. He drew poor marks on the issues that have been at the top of the national agenda in recent months, in particular immigration and gasoline prices.NYT (reg/req) |
| President Bush suggested Wednesday that he'd like to see his family's
White House legacy continue, perhaps with his younger brother Jeb as the
chief executive.
The president said Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is well-suited for another office and would make "a great president." The AP |
| Nearly half of U.S. children under 5 are minorities. Shift is likely to affect trends in work, education. Washington Post (reg/req) |
| How much do you think Osama bin Laden would pay to know exactly when
and where the President was traveling, and who was with him? Turns out,
he wouldn't have had to pay a dime. All he had to do was go through the
trash early Tuesday morning.
It appears to be a White House staff schedule for the President's trip to Florida Tuesday. And a sanitation worker was alarmed to find in the trash long hours before Mr. Bush left for his trip. It's the kind of thing you would expect would be shredded or burned,
not thrown in the garbage.
There on the floor next to a big trash truck was a thick sheaf of papers with nearly every detail of the President's voyage. “I saw locations and names and places where the President was going to be. I knew it was important. And it shouldn't have been in a trash hole like this,” he said. Hopkins works in sanitation. He's an ex-con, and he's worried about fallout from talking to us, so he's asked us not to say exactly where he's employed. But he also felt it was his civic duty to tell somebody about what he'd found. USA9.com |
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| Details emerge of a letter from Iran's leader to U.S. President Bush, as Iran crisis talks end in discord. BBC |
| The only way for a president to transform the news media’s view of him is to provide more of the commodity they crave the most—access. For decades, smart presidents (and candidates) have understood that most reporters can be bought off cheap with a little face time. They won’t become pussy cats—and some will go out of their way to prove their independence. But it is much harder to twist the knife into someone who has just called you by name in a small group and listened patiently to your long-winded question. Newsweek |
| Handling a gun stirs a hormonal reaction in men that primes them for
aggression, new research suggests.
Psychologists at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., enrolled 30 male students in what they described as a taste study. The researchers took saliva samples from the students and measured testosterone levels. They then seated the young men, one at a time, at a table in a bare room; on the table were pieces of paper and either the board game Mouse Trap or a large handgun. Their instructions: take apart the game or the gun and write directions for assembly and disassembly. Fifteen minutes later, the psychologists measured saliva testosterone again and found that the levels had spiked in men who had handled the gun but had stayed steady in those working with the board game. NYT (reg/req) |
| One of the main anti-dairy arguments is that drinking milk from another
animals isn't natural. "Like other mammals, we're not designed to drink
milk past weaning, which is why many people stop producing lactase, the
enzyme that breaks down lactose, a milk sugar, after infancy," Dr Flemming
points out.
This is why 10 per cent of Europeans, 90 per cent of Asians and 65 per cent of Africans are lactose intolerant. Unable to digest milk sugar, they suffer symptoms such as bloating, cramps, nausea and diarrhoea - unless they cut out dairy products completely. The Independent |
| Britain is perceived as one of the most loutish countries in Europe,
according to a new survey published today, just a month before the start
of the World Cup in Germany.
The poll, taken in six European countries including the UK, found that 76% of respondents thought Britain had a "big or moderate problem" with antisocial behaviour - a higher percentage than for any of the other countries involved. Guardian |
| Meteorites that have fallen to Earth contain some of the most primitive
stuff of life, a new study has found.
Contrary to popular belief, they are packed with ancient carbon-rich (organic) molecules that were essential for life to get started on Earth. BBC |
| Two dim dwarf galaxies are the Milky Way's newest-known galactic companions, astronomers studying a vast swath of the sky reported on Monday. Reuters |
| Bottlenose dolphins can call each other by name when they whistle, making them the only animals besides humans known to recognize such identity information, scientists reported on Monday. Reuters |
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| The U.S. bans drilling for oil and gas in coastal waters, but nearby, Cuba is letting China and other countries do so. NYT (reg/req) |
| This is a story of love and lust, betrayal and principle, and ultimately one of tragedy, for Oppenheimer and his family, and for the world. Having entrusted him with the development of the first atomic bombs, the US government then turned on Oppenheimer, deeming him a security risk. Oppenheimer died an outcast from the US, and today's nuclear danger exists because no one would listen to him. Asia Times |
| More than half of newspaper journalists in a recent survey believe
an unethical or unprofessional incident occurred in their newsroom within
the past five years, while seven out of 10 said they had been accused of
bias in the past 12 months, according to a
study released today by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern
University.
But at least 70% of those polled more often pointed to "factors beyond their control" as the cause of such poor ethical perceptions, rather than their own newspapers' actions. More than 30% of respondents, meanwhile, noted problems with sources
-- anonymous or not -- providing misleading or inaccurate information,
with the same percentage seeking legal advice on such stories.
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| 120 years ago, pharmacist John Pemberton concocted the blend of water, sugar, coca leaves and kola nuts into a sweet syrup called Coca-Cola. It went on sale in Jacob's Pharmacy in Atlanta on 8 May, 1886. How much do you know about the brand? BBC |
| Berkshire Hathaway said there is a small chance it could make a big acquisition soon. We picked 15 potential targets. NYT (reg/req) |
| President Bush's approval rating has slumped to 31% in a new USA TODAY/Gallup
Poll, the lowest of his presidency and a warning sign for Republicans in
the November elections.
The survey of 1,013 adults, taken Friday through Sunday, shows Bush's standing down by 3 percentage points in a single week. His disapproval rating also reached a record: 65%. The margin of error is +/- 3 percentage points. USA Today |
| C-Span demanded that video sites YouTube.com and ifilm.com remove clips of a Stephen Colbert comedy speech it broadcast and is selling online. NYT (reg/req) |
| The news blackout in Chicago on Stephen Colbert's controversial keynote speech at the White House correspondents dinner a week ago ended on Sunday when the Sun-Times packaged a review by its TV critic with an edited transcript of the performance on the cover of its Controversy section, under the headline "The Mocking Of The President 2006." The Beachwood Reporter |
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| Recent disclosures of fraudulent or flawed studies in medical and scientific
journals have called into question as never before the merits of their
peer-review system.
The system is based on journals inviting independent experts to critique submitted manuscripts. The stated aim is to weed out sloppy and bad research, ensuring the integrity of the what it has published. Because findings published in peer-reviewed journals affect patient care, public policy and the authors' academic promotions, journal editors contend that new scientific information should be published in a peer-reviewed journal before it is presented to doctors and the public. That message, however, has created a widespread misimpression that passing peer review is the scientific equivalent of the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. Virtually every major scientific and medical journal has been humbled recently by publishing findings that are later discredited. The flurry of episodes has led many people to ask why authors, editors and independent expert reviewers all failed to detect the problems before publication.NYT (reg/req) |
| 1. USA Today, 2,272,815, up 0.09 percent
2. The Wall Street Journal, 2,049,786, down 1 percent 3. The New York Times, 1,142,464, up 0.5 percent 4. Los Angeles Times, 851,832, down 5.4 percent 5. The Washington Post, 724,242, down 3.7 percent 6. New York Daily News, 708,477, down 3.7 percent 7. New York Post, 673,379, down 0.7 percent 8. Chicago Tribune, 579,079, up 0.9 percent 9. Houston Chronicle, 513,387, down 3.6 percent 10. The Arizona Republic, 438,722, down 2.1 percent 11. Newsday, Long Island, 427,771, down 2.7 percent 12. The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., 398,329, up 0.9 percent 13. San Francisco Chronicle, 398,246, down 15.6 percent 14. The Boston Globe, 397,288, down 8.5 percent 15. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 365,011, down 6.7 percent 16. Star Tribune of Minneapolis-St. Paul, 362,964, down 2.9 percent 17. The Philadelphia Inquirer, 350,457, down 5.1 percent 18. Detroit Free Press, 345,861, up 0.04 percent 19. The Plain Dealer, Cleveland, 343,163, down 1.6 percent 20. St. Petersburg Times, Florida, 323,031, down 4.4 percent |
| The major nightly newscasts and newspapers continue to grapple with
the need to "get younger," from the "CBS Evening News' " planned makeover
and the obscene drift of primetime magazines in television to shorter stories
and increased page one "pop culture" coverage in top dailies. Beyond reaching
the young adults advertisers covet, the concern is that the next generation
needs to develop the news-consuming habit.
Seldom mentioned, however, is the fact that cable news is equally geriatric. Indeed, Fox News Channel and CNN are two of only three leading basic networks (the other being the Hallmark Channel) whose median viewer age is over 60. Headline News rings in next at 59.9, and MSNBC is still on the rickety side at 57. Variety |
| The Australian Taxation Office has issued a list of deductible items
for the sex industry Friday that included adult toys and lingerie.
Prostitutes, strippers and lap dancers can deduct the costs of condoms, lubricants, gels and oils against tax, according to a fact sheet released this week on the office's Web site. The AP |
| Sigmund Freud, one of the crucial authors and thinkers of the 20th
century, was born in Moravia in 1856, and taken to Vienna as a child by
his Jewish father and mother. Only a few professions were open to Jews
in 19th-century Vienna, one of them being medicine. Freud consequently
received a medical degree in 1881, and then wrote on hysteria. He would
become the founder of modern psychoanalysis, among his many other achievements.
Freud died in England in 1939, after being ransomed from the Gestapo subsequent to the Nazi takeover in Austria. It is now exactly 150 years since his birth and two-thirds of a century since his death, and there is still no general agreement on the nature of his achievement. Yet 20th-century literature truly begins with Freud. Wall Street Journal |
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| ...Ericsson's conclusions, if accurate, would seem to have broad applications.
Students should be taught to follow their interests earlier in their schooling,
the better to build up their skills and acquire meaningful feedback. Senior
citizens should be encouraged to acquire new skills, especially those thought
to require "talents" they previously believed they didn't possess.
And it would probably pay to rethink a great deal of medical training. Ericsson has noted that most doctors actually perform worse the longer they are out of medical school. Surgeons, however, are an exception. That's because they are constantly exposed to two key elements of deliberate practice: immediate feedback and specific goal-setting...NYT Sunday Magazine (reg/req) |
| Young girls in Liberia are still being sexually exploited by aid workers
and peacekeepers despite pledges to stamp out such abuse, Save the Children
says.
Girls as young as eight are being forced to have sex in exchange for food by workers for local and international agencies, according to its report. BBC |
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| Anyone who's ever taken a preschooler to the doctor knows they often cry more before the shot than afterward. Now researchers using brain scans to unravel the biology of dread have an explanation: For some people, anticipating pain is truly as bad as experiencing it. The AP |
| As foreign buyers shun the American currency, it could be harder to finance the United States trade deficit. Christian Science Monitor |
| American workers are regaining something they've lacked for five years:
the upper hand in negotiations with their employers.
Through the last recession and much of the ensuing recovery, there were more workers looking for jobs than employers looking to hire them. As a result, wages grew more slowly than prices. That dynamic seems to be changing, according to a range of economic data. Washington Post (reg/req) |
| Senator Biden's 'third way' – divide Iraq in order to save it – gets little support. Christian Science Monitor |
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Washington Post (reg/req) |
| The US has defended its treatment of suspects detained in the war on terror, telling a UN committee that it considers the use of torture as wrong. BBC |
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| An important wind circulation pattern over the Pacific Ocean has begun
to weaken because of global warming caused by human activity, something
that could alter climate and the marine food chain in the region, new research
suggests.
It's not clear what climate changes might arise in the area or possibly beyond, but the long-term effect might resemble some aspects of an El Nino event, a study author said. The AP |
| As the Taliban and al-Qaeda go from strength to strength, using the Pakistani tribal areas as a base, the US wants President General Pervez Musharraf to once and for all bomb them out of existence. The Pakistani army now has a blueprint for such an attack. But the Taliban have their own blueprint: it starts with Afghanistan, and ends with a global call to jihadis to eliminate the "Crusader and Zionist-backed Musharraf". Asia Times |
| An attempt to spread Saudi Arabia's oil wealth through mass share ownership has ended in tears for many ordinary Saudis after a stock market crash.Reuters |
| If you think there's something different about the address above the
entrance of KRON television headquarters, the fortresslike building at
1001 Van Ness Avenue, you're right. The number 552 has been added.
The reason? A station exec's astrologer advised that 1001 was a bad number for business. SF Weekly |
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| A USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday found Bush's approval rating at 34%, two points under his previous low. He also received the lowest ratings of his presidency on his handling of the economy, energy and foreign affairs. He tied his previous low on Iraq: 32%. |
| Iraqi Prime Minister Jawad al-Maliki has changed his name to Nuri al-Maliki, incidentally taking the first name of strongman Nuri al-Said, who ruled for 28 years. Maliki faces a job today, however, that is more difficult and challenging than anything his namesake ever experienced. And he simply does not have the tools or the authority to stop the chaos. Asia Times |
| The wholesale vegetable markets stood quiet. The perfectly manicured lawns of Los Angeles' rich and famous went untended. Traffic on the freeways was strangely quiet during the rush hour. BBC |
| Probably to no one's surprise, Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central's
"Daily Show," hailed the performance of his stablemate Stephen Colbert
at Saturday night's White House Correspondents dinner. Colbert's lampooning
of the president and the press has generated a good deal of praise and
criticism.
"It was balls-alicious," Stewart said. "Apparently he was under the impression that they'd hired him to do what he does every night on television"--that is, make fun of conservatives, public officials and the press in the guise of an O'Reillyesque talk show host. "We've never been prouder of him, but HOLY ----," Stewart added. He also described the annual dinner as "where the President and the press corps consummate their loveless marriage." Colbert then followed Stewart, on his own show, "The Colbert Report," describing the "honor of appearing" at the bigd inner. He said the room was full of "power players" so he "fit right in." "Best of all, I got to meet my main man, President Bush," he said, and even had a chance to shake his hand. "He has very soft hands," Colbert revealed, "which was surprising. He must wear gloves when he is clearing brush." Colbert made fun of his mixed reception at the dinner, re-running the tape of one of his jokes with the audience barely reacting. He described this as "very respectful silence," and said that actually the crowd loved him. "They practically carried me out on their shoulders," he said, "even though I wasn't ready to go." E&P |
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| Federal and state governments are seeking to add millions of DNA profiles
to anti-crime databases by including genetic information about people who
are charged — but not yet convicted — of crimes.
The trend is being driven by families of victims of unsolved crimes, but privacy advocates say searching profiles of persons not yet convicted is unfair. The arrestee-testing laws generally permit a person's DNA to be taken after he or she is charged with a felony. If a defendant is acquitted or the charges are dropped, the profile is expunged from the database and the biological sample is destroyed. As long as the profile is in the database, it can be matched to other crimes. USA Today |
| The Gangster Disciples, Latin Kings and Vice Lords were born decades
ago in Chicago's most violent neighborhoods. Now, their gang graffiti is
showing up 6,400 miles away in one of the world's most dangerous neighborhoods
-- Iraq.
Armored vehicles, concrete barricades and bathroom walls all have served as canvasses for their spray-painted gang art. At Camp Cedar II, about 185 miles southeast of Baghdad, a guard shack was recently defaced with "GDN" for Gangster Disciple Nation, along with the gang's six-pointed star and the word "Chitown," a soldier who photographed it said. Chicago Sun-Times |
| A proliferation of people who falsely claim to have won military medals
is prompting calls for tougher laws to punish the impostors.
The Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation reports that there are 113 living recipients of the award, the nation's highest military honor, but an F.B.I. agent who tracks the fakes says impostors outnumber the real winners. NYT (reg/req) |
| Today's immigration debate presents U.S. politicians with a classic
trade-off: What helps in the short-term could hurt -- badly -- in the long-term.
Hispanic immigrants face a similar trade-off in Monday's Great American
Boycott, which calls on immigrants and immigration supporters to skip work.
As the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll makes clear, most Americans approach the nation's immigration predicament with realism and tolerance. Some 61% favor allowing the 11 million illegals already here to remain in the U.S. if they pay taxes and pass background checks; 35% want to deport them. That means President Bush is solidly in the mainstream with his call for a guest-worker program. And it shows he and top adviser Karl Rove are on the right side strategically in their effort to court the nation's swelling Hispanic electorate and win long-term support. But they also have a short-term problem: The president's adversaries on this issue are the ones who feel most passionately about it. Among those calling immigration a top priority, majorities favor deporting illegal immigrants and building a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border. They are disproportionately conservative Republicans, who on nearly all other issues are Mr. Bush's political base. Wall Street Journal |
| A demonstration by thousands of Mexican workers Friday to promote union solidarity turned into a protest against America's vast influence on the nation's economy, with many protesters saying they will take part in a boycott of all things "gringo" on Monday. The AP |
| One of New York's most famous landmarks, the Empire State Building, is celebrating its 75th birthday. BBC |
| "United 93" has provoked intense reaction from critics. Many reviewers praised the film's affecting storytelling and visual craft, as well as its attempt to pay tribute to the victims of 9/11. But several critics called the film a draining "thrill ride" and questioned whether it should have been made at all. Here is a sampling of their impressions: Wall Stret Journal |
