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A FEW OF THE STORIES WE'RE READING WITH OUR MORNING COFFEE |
| Wednesday,
June 27, 2007 |
| CIA Releases Two Significant Collections of Historical Documents |
| Two significant collections of
previously classified historical documents are now available in the
CIA's FOIA Electronic Reading Room. The first collection, widely known as the "Family Jewels," consists of almost 700 pages of responses from CIA employees to a 1973 directive from Director of Central Intelligence James Schlesinger asking them to report activities they thought might be inconsistent with the Agency's charter. CIA/FOIA Intelligence experts and
historians comment on the documents. NYT (reg/req)
|
| Tuesday,
June 26, 2007 |
| Ditka
says NFL needs to take care of its gladiators |
| The hot-button issue was the subject of a Congressional hearing Tuesday with former players and members of league management squaring off on Capitol Hill. NYT (reg/req) |
| Sunday,
June 17, 2007 |
| The
General’s Report by Seymour M. Hersh |
| How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties. The New Yorker |
| Watergate at 35: Biographer of 'Woodstein'
Looks Back |
| Today, he’s on the road hawking
his new book on Hillary Clinton and getting A-list treatment because of
something he did 35 years ago. On this date, June 17, 1972, Carl Bernstein, then an unknown reporter who covered Virginia, was in the Washington Post newsroom because he hadn’t finished an overdue story. His editor was fed up and had ordered Bernstein to work the weekend that an odd burglary would be discovered at the Watergate hotel that would change his life forever. It was on this date that five men in business suits wearing surgical gloves and carrying sophisticated electronic gear broke into the Democratic national headquarters inside the Watergate complex. It was their second attempt. The burglars had gotten inside a few weeks earlier but the bugs they placed were defective, so they went back. This time police caught them around 2 a.m. Bob Woodward, 29, a cub of a reporter, was called that morning at his nearby apartment to work the break-in story. He eagerly went to the office to help. Woodward was the kind of young, hungry reporter that any editor loved. He never turned down a chance to work. Bernstein, on the other hand, was losing patience with the Post and they with him. At 28, Bernstein thought that after six years as a Metro reporter, he should be elevated to rock critic or covering the Vietnam War. In fact, the Post was closer to firing Bernstein for being lazy and unreliable than rewarding him. “Stories he didn’t particularly like, he waltzed around a lot, procrastinated, dawdled, found small crevices that somehow became big problems,” said Tom Wilkinson, Bernstein’s editor at the time of the break-in. “All the kinds of roadblocks, real and otherwise, that creative reporters can dream up.” There’s no doubt, though, that Bernstein knew a good story, and he quickly insinuated himself onto the Watergate break-in that day, getting a tagline along with Woodward and six other reporters for the first-day story. The byline for the nearly 2,000-word front-page story belonged to legendary Post police reporter Alfred E. Lewis. “I think Bart Barnes actually wrote it because Al never wrote his own stories,” Woodward told me in 2003. Even though nine reporters worked the story that Saturday, only Woodward and Bernstein showed up the next day to report on the strange story. Neither was thrilled to see the other. Editor & Publisher |
| The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer |
| It was an hour before midnight,
three hours into the night shift with nine more to go. At his
workstation in a small, fluorescent-lighted office space in Nanjing,
China, Li Qiwen sat shirtless and chain-smoking, gazing purposefully at
the online computer game in front of him. The screen showed a lightly
wooded mountain terrain, studded with castle ruins and grazing deer, in
which warrior monks milled about. Li, or rather his staff-wielding
wizard character, had been slaying the enemy monks since 8 p.m.,
mouse-clicking on one corpse after another, each time gathering a few
dozen virtual coins — and maybe a magic weapon or two — into an
increasingly laden backpack. Twelve hours a night, seven nights a week, with only two or three nights off per month, this is what Li does — for a living. On this summer night in 2006, the game on his screen was, as always, World of Warcraft, an online fantasy title in which players, in the guise of self-created avatars — night-elf wizards, warrior orcs and other Tolkienesque characters — battle their way through the mythical realm of Azeroth, earning points for every monster slain and rising, over many months, from the game’s lowest level of death-dealing power (1) to the highest (70). More than eight million people around the world play World of Warcraft — approximately one in every thousand on the planet — and whenever Li is logged on, thousands of other players are, too. They share the game’s vast, virtual world with him, converging in its towns to trade their loot or turning up from time to time in Li’s own wooded corner of it, looking for enemies to kill and coins to gather. Every World of Warcraft player needs those coins, and mostly for one reason: to pay for the virtual gear to fight the monsters to earn the points to reach the next level. And there are only two ways players can get as much of this virtual money as the game requires: they can spend hours collecting it or they can pay someone real money to do it for them. NYT (reg/req) |
| In
Health Care, Cost Isn’t Proof of High Quality |
| In a Pennsylvania government
survey of the state’s 60 hospitals that perform heart bypass surgery,
the best-paid hospital received nearly $100,000, on average, for the
operation while the least-paid got less than $20,000. At both, patients
had comparable lengths of stay and death rates. And among the 20 hospitals serving metropolitan Philadelphia, two of the highest paid actually had higher-than-expected death rates, the survey found. Hospitals say there are numerous reasons for some of the high payments, including the fact that a single very expensive case can push up the averages. Still, the Pennsylvania findings support a growing national consensus that as consumers, insurers and employers pay more for care, they are not necessarily getting better care. Expensive medicine may, in fact, be poor medicine. “For most consumers, the fact that there is no connection between quality and cost is one of the dirty secrets of medicine,” said Peter V. Lee, the chief executive of the Pacific Business Group on Health, a California group of employers that provide health care coverage for workers. NYT (reg/req) |
|
America
prepares for 'cyber war' with China
|
| China is striving to overtake
the United States as the dominant power in cyberspace, according to a
senior American general, in what is emerging as a new theatre of
conflict between nation states and a growing priority for the Pentagon.
Lt Gen Robert Elder, commander of the 8th Air Force, said that all of
America's foes, including Iran, were looking at ways of hacking into US
networks to glean trade and defence secrets. But efforts by China set it apart. "They're the only nation that has been quite that blatant about saying 'we're looking to do that'," said Gen Elder in Washington. Gen Elder is to head a new cyber command centre being set up at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, already home to about 25,000 military personnel involved in everything from electronic warfare to network defence. The command's focus is to control the "cyber domain", which the Pentagon now sees as critical to everything from communications to surveillance to infrastructure security, and just as important as "kinetic war". His remarks follow last month's annual report by the Pentagon on China's military power which said China regarded computer network operations as critical to achieving "electromagnetic dominance" early in a conflict. The Telegraph |
| Tuesday,
June 12, 2007 |
| Mr.
Wizard dies at 89 |
| Don Herbert, who explained the
wonderful world of science to young baby boomers on television in the
1950s and '60s as "Mr. Wizard" and did the same for a later generation
of youngsters on the Nickelodeon cable TV channel in the 1980s, died
today. He was 89. Herbert died at his home in Bell Canyon after a long
battle with multiple myeloma, said Tom Nikosey, Herbert's son-in-law. A 1940 graduate of LaCrosse State Teachers College who served as an Army Air Forces pilot during World War II, Herbert worked as an actor and model before launching his weekly science show on NBC in 1951. Broadcast live from Chicago the first three years and then from New York, "Watch Mr. Wizard" ran for 14 years. The show won a Peabody Award, three Thomas Alva Edison Awards, four Ohio State University awards and two Emmy nominations. LA Times |
| Groundbreaking
Research Has Scientists Talking With Apes |
| The Great Ape Trust in Des
Moines, Iowa, is home to seven bonobos -- a close relative of the
chimpanzee -- and three orangutans. But if you think Iowa might be a
strange place for them to live, don't say it out loud … these apes
understand English. ABC News |
| Obstacles
to peace: Water |
| The BBC News website is publishing a series of articles about the attempts to achieve peace in the Middle East and the main obstacles. Today, Martin Asser looks at the central issue of water. BBC |
| Web
Sites Listing Informants Concern Justice Dept. |
| The Justice Department is urging federal courts to make fundamental changes in access to electronic court files. NYT (reg/req) |
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| Chinese archaeologists studying ancient rock carvings say they have evidence that modern Chinese script is thousands of years older than previously thought. BBC |
| Deep-sea explorers said Friday they have mined what could be
the richest
shipwreck treasure in history, bringing home 17 tons of colonial-era
silver
and gold coins from an undisclosed site in the Atlantic Ocean.
Estimated
value: $500 million.
A jet chartered by Tampa-based Odyssey Marine Exploration landed in the United States recently with hundreds of plastic containers brimming with coins raised from the ocean floor, Odyssey co-chairman Greg Stemm said. The more than 500,000 pieces are expected to fetch an average of $1,000 each from collectors and investors. ''For this colonial era, I think (the find) is unprecedented,'' said rare coin expert Nick Bruyer, who examined a batch of coins from the wreck. ''I don't know of anything equal or comparable to it.'' Citing security concerns, the company declined to release any details about the ship or the wreck site Friday. Stemm said a formal announcement will come later, but court records indicate the coins might come from a 400-year-old ship found off England. The AP |
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The Christian Science Monitor |
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| Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton announced Thursday that she's joining forces with one of the Senate's most skilled parliamentary infighters to try to rescind President Bush's authority to wage war. USA Today |
| The growth in greenhouse gas emissions can be curbed at
reasonable
cost, experts at a major UN climate change conference in Bangkok have
agreed.
Boosting renewable energy, reducing deforestation and improving energy
efficiency can all help, they said.
This is the third report this year from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and aims to set out the costs and benefits of various policies. BBC |
| Should it be attacked by the U.S. or the Israelis, Iran's main and probably most effective response may well prove to be military action of a different sort - retaliation by the widespread use of terrorism, assassination and sabotage. Deep-cover networks across the world might already be in place for this eventuality. Asia Times |
| Stepping into the rancorous national debate over global
warming, the
U.S. intelligence community has launched an examination of the security
threats that could be triggered by rising temperatures, officials said
Thursday.
The review was announced by the nation's intelligence director as congressional Democrats and Republicans sparred over whether it was appropriate for the beleaguered U.S. spy services to spend resources studying threats posed by the environment. LA Times |