News Desk : The New Yorker

Do the marches on the streets of Pittsburgh belong in a time capsule of the past (protesters compared the police response to Kent State, though this time no one was shot or died), the present (this is what happens at G-anything conferences these days) or the future (police used a “sonic weapon” to disperse the crowd)? There was a glimpse, too, of crises yet to come, with Obama and other leaders responding to the news that Iran was building what the I.A.E.A. called a “semi-industrial enrichment fuel facility.”

The best thing I see about the current deep recession is that these damnable masters of the universe are no longer celebrities. I hope it lasts, and we make much of people who create something other than marketing campaigns and buy-out deals.

Seen Through a Glass: Hey, Mister Kiely: which of your kids do you like best? Huh? Which one?

We’re in a strange moment in American history when a mouse-eating barefoot survivalist in the mountains of Arizona makes more sense than the chief investment strategist of Merrill Lynch. The Atlantic Online | May 2009 | Why I Fired My Broker | Jeffrey Goldberg

…We were building a brave new world where the Chinese made things out of plastic for us, the Indians provided customer support when these Chinese-made things broke, and we paid for it all just by flipping houses, pretending that they were worth a lot of money whereas they are really just useless bits of ticky-tacky. ClubOrlov: Social Collapse Best Practices. Caution: depressing.

I know you don’t want to see any pictures of George Bush any more but what about if it is pictures of him crying?

A Proud India Launches Its First Mission To the Moon - washingtonpost.com The probe launched Wednesday will not land on the moon but will orbit it. The mission will create a three-dimensional map of the lunar surface, looking for traces of water, uranium and minerals. Government to Take Over Airline Passenger Vetting - washingtonpost.com The Department of Homeland Security will require travelers for the first time to provide their full name, birth date and gender as a condition for boarding commercial flights, U.S. officials said Wednesday. eMusic Q&A: Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes - eMusic Spotlight I really felt this freedom to take chances and go somewhere that would have been more insecure in the past, and let it all out there. Part of that is the soul influence, the freedom that people Sly and Prince had. People that are basically — I don’t even know if this is a term, but “freak-funk." Bracing for a Storm - washingtonpost.com Several stalwarts of American business said their profits fell over the late summer months as the financial crisis heated up. Many are now bracing for the likelihood that the world is spinning into a prolonged recession.

That strange, ghostly drifting through the haziest phrases, as if she were cruelly condemned to search endlessly for her linguistic home. A Critic’s Notebook: Verbage: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Watching the transformation is like discovering that one’s favorite teddy bear has fangs and a taste for human flesh. Before long, I’ll bet we’ll see squads of Segway cops in full riot gear running down fleeing demonstrators at some future anti-globalization demonstration. Street Use: Guns on Segways

Talking Points Memo | Obama’s Is an Appalachia Problem, Not a Whites Problem

What people don’t understand about Appalachia is that we’ve heard all this ‘hope’ and ‘change’ stuff since the English kicked the Scotch-Irish out in the 1700s.

On The Media: Transcript of "Search is the New Black" (May 2, 2008)

And what we’ve seen with the Internet is that the digital divide was really, I think, more about a moment in time where there was a lag between early adopters and mass America. It’s become something that’s much more part of the fabric of everyday America, including black America.

Where we do see a divide on the Internet continues to be around sort of class and education, less so about race. Omar Wasow spoke with On the Media’s Bob Garfield about African-American media.

Alyssa described her project as an upgrade to traditional journalism. “The upgrade is empathy,” she said, with the severe humility that comes when you suspect you are on to something but are still uncertain you aren’t being ridiculous in some way. “You Don’t Understand Our Audience”: What I learned about network television at Dateline NBC by John Hockenberry. “In the end, perhaps the work that I was most proud of at NBC marginalized me within the organization and was my undoing.” via Graham Leuschke’s bookmarks on del.icio.us

I think sometimes when you see the writers marching up and down and laughing-–because that’s what we do, those of us who write comedy tend to laugh about horrendous situations-–I think sometimes that can look bad because it may look like people are taking it lightly. But no, it’s a horrible situation. Gothamist: John Oliver, Writer

The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us - New York Times:

Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. Fort Hunt’s Quiet Men Break Silence on WWII - Washington Post: “During the many interrogations, I never laid hands on anyone,” said George Frenkel, 87, of Kensington. “We extracted information in a battle of the wits. I’m proud to say I never compromised my humanity.”

I would not have expected such an institutionalized and conservative offering from the editor/owner of Arthur Magazine. I love reading an interesting blog entry only to find it upstaged by an outstanding comment. Ah, civil discourse. The ARTHUR Blog > Nothing Left to Lose: What Happens When Music Becomes Worthless?

Penciled In: Intel, Racism Inside (via Anarchaia)

Freakonomics Blog: If Public Libraries Didn’t Exist, Could You Start One Today?

Given the current state of debate about intellectual property, can you imagine modern publishers being willing to sell one copy of a book and then have the owner let an unlimited number of strangers borrow it? (via librarian.net by Jessamyn)

Binary America: Split in Two by A Digital Divide - washingtonpost.com

Declare the Internet a public good in the same way we think of water, electricity, highways.

village voice > people > Savage Love by Dan Savage

I remember listening to the radio when Santorum said something obnoxious about gay couples: An anti-gay-marriage amendment was a homeland security measure, Santorum said, which makes gay couples terrorists. My son, who happens to be the same age as Santorum’s younger daughter (the one weeping and clutching a doll in that widely circulated photo), was in the room at the time, and he got pretty upset. So, yeah, we should all feel bad for Santorum’s kids – what kind of parent drags a sobbing child in front of the national media? – but let’s also feel bad for all the other kids that Santorum hurt.

The media is increasingly ignoring the true American family, and instead is putting the dramas of affluent families on Page One. It would be okay if they delivered these portraits with a sardonic wink, so that we might laugh at the foibles of the well-off. But there is no wink. Instead, we are asked to sympathize with people’s self-made problems, and these affluent-family issues are held up as representative of us all. Po Bronson’s column shows how media transmits the fears of rich and powerful parents to a mass audience who are then affected by their (natural, but inappropriate) emotional response with negative material consequences. I think media’s amplification of irrational fear can be seen absolutely everywhere. Even this blog!

The average American is 50 times more likely to die of accidental poisioning than due to terrorism. (source)

I was very concerned that when I grew up I would somehow be turned into this zombie who sat in front of the tv watching grown ups just talk.? What a horrible fate. I found out later this abominable program was called “the News.” I never watched it. Erin Pavlina’s Blog: Why I Never Watch the News I worry about the people I love who watch TV news. I think it’s emotionally and spiritually toxic.

It don’t work. It don’t work. It don’t work. It don’t work. It don’t work.

— Joseph Clark, as the state of Ohio tried to kill him by injecting poison into his bloodstream.

He is excitable, fast-talking and uses "fucking" more than any other adjective, with a hard-edged accent honed on Chicago's South Side.

The Guardian: The Reporter Whose Scoops Give the Bush Administration Sleepless Nights. Seymour Hersh hates to pay taxes "just so they can go and bomb more people."

Elephant Eats Scores of Cookies, Gets Sick. I clicked the headline because I thought the story might be a little funny, but it’s actually really sad.

We are very, very sorry for what we did to the Iraqi people.

Guardian Unlimited | 'If you start looking at them as humans, then how are you gonna kill them?'

Downloadable wallet guide to pesticides in produce

The Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Produce lists the 12 popular fresh fruits and vegetables that are consistently the most contaminated with pesticides and those 12 fruits and vegetables that consistently have low levels of pesticides. If you are concerned about pesticides in your diet, the handy wallet card can help you choose produce that lowers exposure to pesticides for you and your family.

If (like me) you can't afford to buy organic all of the time, check out this guide to which foods are more and less likely to deliver pesticides.

Washington Post: Patrols on Mass Transit Intensified but Scattered

At L'Enfant Plaza, Metro officers displayed their submachine guns for a phalanx of television crews from around the world. They walked through the station, sweat pouring onto their backs from beneath their bulletproof vests.

One stepped to the side to check a trash can. Another tried the knob on a door to make sure it was locked. A third looked for anything unusual near the fareboxes. They fanned out when they reached the mezzanine, some taking position next to escalators, others staring down at passengers and the rest sweeping the platform.

An astute bit of journalism points out that, in response to the London bombings, USA's first order of business was to get pictures of guns on our subway to the media. Images of security now stand in for the real thing. Are they going to shoot the bombs?

On The Media- White Noise

For most of history, journalists could afford to spend their time covering wars, famines, politics and business. The reason for this is that everyone knew where the white women were at - at home, probably in the kitchen, minding the kids.

Big Bird is not in favor of affirmative action. Bert and Ernie are not gay. Miss Piggy is not a feminist. "The Three Tenors," "Antiques Roadshow," "Masterpiece Theater," "Wall Street Week" and nature programs do not have a political agenda. "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" is biased in favor of boring, old, white guys who appear on painfully well-balanced panels. "Washington Week in Review" is a showcase for "Inside the Beltway," conventional wisdom, power-parroting, political-geekhead, Establishment journalism -- there is nothing liberal about it.

But there is a plot to politicize public broadcasting. It is plain as a pikestaff, and it is coming from the Right.

Molly Ivins: Destroying PBS

Chicago Tribune | Missing white female alert

Continual focus on, and reporting of, missing, young, attractive white women is a televised slap in the face to minority mothers and parents the nation over who search for their own missing children with little or no assistance or notice from anyone.

I have argued strenuously that bloggers rarely function as journalists — that, in fact, we are stronger standing outside the established media than we ever can be as junior reporters. However, all bloggers are publishers, and for legal purposes, should qualify as "the press". Consider "the press" this amendment was designed to protect. There was no establishment media at the time. It was, literally, some guys with printing presses, publishing pamphlets and the occasional newspaper. Journalism is a practice, not a professional title, and bloggers who add to the record of verifiable fact are clearly journalists. Whether this work is practiced online or on paper — or by one person with a notebook and a computer, or one person in a crowded newsroom — is irrelevant. A fact is a fact even when revealed by an amateur. Fiction is fiction, even when broadcast by an established news organization.

remembering rebecca :: april 2005

O'Reilly Network: Remixing Culture: An Interview with Lawrence Lessig

I was at the World Social Forum, but much of what was going on at the World Social Forum was related to Brazil's leadership in spreading free software and free culture. So the free software movement has exploded in Brazil, led in part by the government, which is increasingly using free software in its own work and requiring it for much of the government's coding work. The free culture movement is being pushed in Brazil largely because of the culture minister, Gilberto Gil, who envisions a future where an increasingly large proportion of the content in Brazil is made available to the world via Creative Commons licenses.

Now the strategy in both cases is to increase wealth in Brazil. The view of free software is that it's far better for Brazil if the technology industry is trained in the skills needed to build and modify and extend free software than if they're trained in the skills of how to implement a patch for the latest Windows virus. That's about technology self-sufficiency.

And in the free culture context, Brazil is eager to have their music spread broadly to increase the demand for Brazilian musicians. They have a project to create a huge archive of Brazilian music licensed under Creative Commons licenses, which will encourage people to get access to it and share it for noncommercial purposes and remix it.

It's perhaps the most exciting place in the world right now for these issues. They're extremely well-educated and committed people there. And the movement is fundamentally political. It's a mix of all kinds of people from Brazil--I mean, particularly young, but all sorts of young people. Men and women, people who have a technical background, people who don't--all of whom are demanding a cultural and technological future for Brazil that is not dependent on someone else. That's the essential feature in both the software and culture contexts. They want a future where they're not dependent on Microsoft and a future in which they're not dependent on rich copyright holders in the United States.

Detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were shackled to the floor in fetal positions for more than 24 hours at a time, left without food and water, and allowed to defecate on themselves, an FBI agent who said he witnessed such abuse reported in a memo to supervisors, according to documents released yesterday.

FBI Agents Allege Abuse of Detainees at Guantanamo Bay (washingtonpost.com)

"I just felt like the pace of progress at which they are comfortable moving is too slow," he says. "The audience can handle a quickened pace, and the country can't afford a slower pace."

...

NPR needs more creative marketing to reach underserved audiences, the host says. He takes the network to task for lacking a diverse staff. Even President Bush, he says, recognizes the symbolic importance of having a diverse Cabinet. "I'm not really sure that NPR has even gotten on base symbolically," Smiley says.

...

Some white listeners complained that Smiley's delivery, which diverges from the more reserved sound of most NPR hosts, is too loud and energetic.

Current.org | Tavis Smiley leaves NPR show, 2004

''The most difficult thing that I have had to do,'' he said, ``is fight a culture at NPR, a culture that is antithetical to the best interests of people of color.''

Tavis Smiley's Departure: A Loss to Blacks -- and NPR

This Magazine: The Rebel Sell

What we need to see is that consumption is not about conformity, it’s about distinction. People consume in order to set themselves apart from others. To show that they are cooler (Nike shoes), better connected (the latest nightclub), better informed (single-malt Scotch), morally superior (Guatemalan handcrafts), or just plain richer (bmws).

Poor Salvadorans Chase the 'Iraqi Dream' (washingtonpost.com)

Juan Nerio, a 44-year-old mason's assistant, was sick of living in a mud hut on the side of a volcano. When he heard that an American company was offering six times his $200 monthly wage, he signed up. Six weeks later he found himself holding an AK-47 assault rifle and guarding a U.S. diplomatic complex in Iraq.

...

"This is the equivalent of a poverty draft," said Geoff Thale of the Washington Office on Latin America, a rights and policy group in Washington. "The United States is unwilling to draft people, so they are recruiting people from poor countries to be cannon fodder for us. And if they are killed or injured, there will be no political consequences in the United States."

Act the Angel, Be the Brute

When The New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh spoke at Hampshire College in Massachusetts a few weeks ago, he told two stories about the mental damages of war. The first came from his reporting of the massacre at My Lai in Vietnam.

"There were 547 people killed in My Lai," Hersh said. "People don't know this, but the blacks and Hispanics shot into the air. It was the white rural farm kids who did most of the shooting. One rural mother said to me, 'I gave them a good boy, and they sent me back a murderer.'"

When he was reporting on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq, Hersh got another call, this time from a devoutly Catholic mother. When her daughter, young and newly married, returned from serving in the military police at Abu Ghraib, she immediately left her new husband and her family, cut off all contact with them, and started living alone. Every weekend she gets more big, black tattoos - enough so they now cover most of her body.

The mother said she began to understand what happened to her daughter when Hersh's Abu Ghraib stories started coming out. She began to clean out the files on her daughter's laptop and found one labeled "Iraq." It contained over 1,000 pictures.

"One of them was run in The New Yorker," Hersh said. "It was the one with the man with two dogs on either side, and they were coming to attack him. The whole thing was photographed. The dogs attacked. You can imagine what they bit. There was a lot of blood... This is something no mother should see, something no child should see. On that level, we're dealing with enormous atrocity."

Many people have told me that if [insert name of candidate] wins or there is a draft, they are going to leave the country. If you really mean it and are interested in getting a Masters degree in Computer Systems, you might consider a Masters program I am running. It focuses on operating systems, networks, distributed computing, parallel computing, grids, multiagent systems and other systems areas. Knowledgeable observers consider my group to be one of the top three systems groups in Europe.

Andrew Tanenbaum is the man behind the nerve-wracking electoral-vote.com.

Hurricane Risk for New Orleans: "if that Category Five Hurricane comes to New Orleans, 50,000 people could lose their lives. Now that is significantly larger than any estimates that we would have of individuals who might lose their lives from a terrorist attack. When you start to do that kind of calculus - and it's horrendous that you have to do that kind of calculus - it appears to those of us in emergency management, that the risk is much more real and much more significant, when you talk about hurricanes. I don't know that anybody, though, psychologically, has come to grip with that: that the French Quarter of New Orleans could be gone." (Nb. this excerpt from a fascinating 2002 American RadioWorks documentary does not refer specifically to Ivan.)

The RNC is coming to town, and area sex workers are ready to accommodate the demand:

The on-again-off-again prostitute with streaked pixieish hair looks less like a hooker than a bartender at Galapagos—which made her ideal for one politically charged client last year. He’d asked her to show up at his apartment wearing a black hoodie with patches and no perfume or deodorant. "I said, ‘Do you want me to dress like a protester?,’ and he said, ‘Yeah.’ He tied me down, spanked me, and wanted to yell at me a lot. He said, ‘You bad girl! You smashed the Starbucks!’ He was a very conservative Wall Street banker, and he basically wanted to fuck the movement."

New York Times: Swift Boat Veterans for Truth Connections and Contradictions infographic.

I had a conversation with Kerry. It was pretty disheartening. I asked how he felt about civil liberties. He said, "I’m for ’em!" That’s great, but how do you feel about Section 215 of the Patriot Act? He said, "What’s that?" I said, it basically says any privately generated database is available for public scrutiny with an administrative subpoena. He says, "It says that?" I say, "You voted for it!"

Reason: John Perry Barlow 2.0: The Thomas Jefferson of cyberspace reinvents his body -- and his politics.

what's in rebecca's pocket?

I am volunteering at the Democratic National Convention this week. I'm looking forward to it: I've never been to a political convention before. From what I know of my schedule, I likely won't have time to update my weblog during the next week. While my duties will leave me little time to post here, the tradeoff should be access to events and areas which would, were I credentialled, be off limits.

U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General: Special Reports — why is 2001 missing?

LA Weekly: Jesus and the Patriots by Judith Lewis.

No version of Jesus, be it the "radical egalitarian" who emerges from Dominic Crossan's Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography or the mystic described in The Gospel of Thomas, said anything about what constitutes a marriage. According to Crossan, Jesus was an itinerant Mediterranean peasant who considered the family an instrument of oppression, a microcosm of political hierarchy, and he sought to destroy it. ("From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three," he foretold in Luke 12:52.) The real Jesus is frightening, revolutionary, inimical to the economic doctrines upon which we base our lives. Churches, which as Emerson observed, "are not built on His principles, but on His tropes," are wise to have little to do with Him. Governments should have even less. And the less churches and governments have to do with each other, the better for Jesus' reputation.

But if presidents and legislators can't be persuaded to see Jesus this way and give Him up altogether, then perhaps they can at least start taking the words he allegedly handed down in the Gospels a little more seriously. DeLay, for instance, might be compelled to examine his desire to further slash welfare according to Mark 10:21, "Give to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven." Kansas Republican Senator Sam Brownback could rise up and shout, "Woe unto you who are rich!" And ultra-pious Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma would respond wisely to Bush's assertion that the atrocities at Abu Ghraib were the actions of a "few bad apples" with the Lord's words from Matthew 7:18: "A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit."

Virginia lawmakers are expected to move swiftly to correct legislation which mistakenly bestowed the right to a weekend day off to millions of Virginians.

Churchgoers Get Direction From Bush Campaign (washingtonpost.com) Am I the only one who missed this?

The Bush-Cheney reelection campaign has sent a detailed plan of action to religious volunteers across the country asking them to turn over church directories to the campaign, distribute issue guides in their churches and persuade their pastors to hold voter registration drives.

Campaign officials said the instructions are part of an accelerating effort to mobilize President Bush's base of religious supporters. They said the suggested activities are intended to help churchgoers rally support for Bush without violating tax rules that prohibit churches from engaging in partisan activity.

"We strongly believe that our religious outreach program is well within the framework of the law," said Terry Holt, spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign.

Please tell me this is not really happening.

We All Lose if Cops Have All the Power, says Larry Dudley Hiibel.

I hadn't been argumentative; I wasn't picking a fight. Basically, when Deputy Dove demanded my papers — and he didn't ask for them, he demanded them — I didn't say, "Hey cop, I'm not going to give you nothing." I just asked why he wanted them. "What have I done?" I asked. If he'd explained what he was doing there, perhaps it could have been settled on the spot. But his position was that he wanted the papers first.

Here's why this was so important to me: I don't believe that the authorities in the United States of America are supposed to walk up to you and ask for your papers. I thought that wasn't lawful. Apparently I was wrong, but I thought that that was part of what we were guaranteed under the Constitution. We're supposed to be free men, able to walk freely in our own country — not hampered, not stopped at checkpoints. That's part of what makes this country different from other places. That's what I was taught.

Who waits in line at the Clinton book signing in midtown Manhattan? Salon answers the question. (Free day pass, blah blah blah.) By far, the best person profiled is the precocious 10-year-old who came all the way from Westport, Conn.:

And then there was Matt Lloyd-Thomas, who said he was 13, though he was really 10, because the lady at the door had said that the age limit for kids to get signatures was 12. His younger sister, Sophia, who was really 7 and a half, was posing as 12.

"We've just been passing the time, reading," said Lloyd-Thomas, whose skin was brown with suntan and a couple of freckles. "My sister's been bugging me the past few hours. Once the rain started there wasn't much we could do because it was really quite wet and you couldn't sit down." They'd had to wake up at 4, which Matt admitted was hard. But the whole trip had been his idea. "I was listening to NPR one afternoon and they said that President Clinton would be signing books in midtown Manhattan, so I said that's pretty close, why don't we go in?" So Matt, Sophia and their mother, Beth -- all from Westport, Conn. -- came to New York last night and stayed at an uncle's place. "I think it's pretty cool to have a book signed by a former president," said Matt of his reason for marshaling his family into action. But then, Matt is also a kid who a year ago persuaded his whole third-grade class -- some of them Republicans -- to send letters to President Bush asking him not to send troops into Iraq. His mother said that lately he's taken to giving PowerPoint presentations on the benefits of voting for Kerry over Bush. "You know, his father and I are both Democrats but not that involved," she said, shaking her head slightly. "Matt is very much his own thinker." What did he think of the president he was about to meet -- a man who was first elected before he was even born? "Well," began Matt thoughtfully, "not in his personal decisions but politically, I think Clinton was a very good president, especially since he was interested in what was going on in this country more than in foreign affairs." But what about those pesky personal decisions? "Well, I was only 6 at the time, and I didn't really enjoy politics," he said. "But I think that lying about a personal affair is one thing. Lying about weapons of mass destruction or lying about connections between Iraq and al-Qaida -- which affects a lot more people -- is a lot worse." "My sister thinks I'm a news junkie," confided Matt, who said he skims the Times but mostly relies on NPR's "Morning Edition" for his news. Sophia, in a Nantucket lifeguarding sweatshirt and looking very, very, very bored, nodded silently. "We're going to the American Girl Cafe after this," said their mother. "So that they both get something they like out of this trip."

Silicon Valley (Version 2.0) Has Hopes Up says the New York Times. Among the optimists is a member of a startup company producing products for the “Web log” market:

"It feels like we're 12 months, 18 months away from the equivalent of the Netscape I.P.O.," said Andrew Anker, a former venture capitalist who this month became executive vice president at Six Apart, a start-up based in Silicon Valley that aims to help businesses publish Web logs, or blogs.

In 2000, according to the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, 55 percent of the region's major freeway miles were snarled in traffic during commuting hours, compared to less than 40 percent in 2002, the latest year with data available.

"The bleeding has stopped," said Alex Resnik, a part-owner of Spago Palo Alto. No longer do "three youngsters in their late 20's spend $3,000 on dinner," he said with a frown, but the restaurant is starting to do a brisk business again in wines that sell for $60 a bottle.

I love space as much as the next monkey, but I have no idea why this private ascent into space is such a big deal. To me, it heralds an age of unaccountable space polluters, shitty space meal service, and, quite likely, low earth orbit space ads. Will my daughter remember a time before the giant Pepsi logo in the sky eclipses the sun twice a year at sunset?

What's to limit this policy in the future? If a school district reverts to racially segregated classrooms, does a divorced black mother have no standing because the father prefers that policy? If — in direct violation of Supreme Court precedent — a public school district starts teaching the biblical account of Creation, is a scientist prohibited from challenging that practice because the other parent is a fundamentalist Christian?

And what if a mother agrees with her daughter's teacher that it's proper to start off every school day by having the class stand up and say that it's fine to treat atheists (like the girl's father) as second-class citizens? Wait a minute: that's precisely the case that, after tens of thousands of hours invested over six years, the Supreme Court simply dismissed last week.

The New York Times Op-Ed Contributor: Pledging Allegiance to My Daughter — Michael Newdow was the plaintiff in Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow.

General Granted Latitude At Prison (washingtonpost.com)

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq, borrowed heavily from a list of high-pressure interrogation tactics used at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and approved letting senior officials at a Baghdad jail use military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns, sensory deprivation, and diets of bread and water on detainees whenever they wished, according to newly obtained documents.

The New York Times > Washington > As Ashcroft Warns of Qaeda Attack, Some Question Threat and Its Timing

The Bush administration said on Wednesday that it had credible intelligence suggesting that Al Qaeda is planning to attack the United States in the next several months, a period in which events like an international summit meeting and the two political conventions could offer tempting targets.

But some intelligence officials, terrorism experts - and to some extent even Mr. Ashcroft's own F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III - offered a more tempered assessment. And some opponents of President Bush, including police and firefighter union leaders aligned with Senator John Kerry, the expected Democratic presidential candidate, said the timing of the announcement appeared intended in part to distract attention from Mr. Bush's sagging poll numbers and problems in Iraq.

The questioning of hundreds of Iraqi prisoners last fall in the newly established interrogation center at Abu Ghraib prison yielded very little valuable intelligence, according to civilian and military officials.

The New York Times > Washington > Prison Interrogations in Iraq Seen as Yielding Little Data on Rebels

we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge.

The New York Times > International > Middle East > From the Editors: The Times and Iraq

Newsday.com: U.S. military arrests war's 'bargaining chips'.

In a little-noticed development amid Iraq's prison abuse scandal, the U.S. military is holding dozens of Iraqis as bargaining chips to put pressure on their wanted relatives to surrender, according to human rights groups. These detainees are not accused of any crimes, and experts say their detention violates the Geneva Conventions and other international laws.

washingtonpost.com - Amy Goodman Live Online

One recent guest we had from Guyana was talking about globalization. As I moved onto another discussion, on the US elections, she said she wanted to be a part of that too. I asked "why?" She said, "The whole world should get to vote for the president of the United States."

In the face of the atrocities committed by US Soldiers guarding prisoners in Iraq, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has banned cameraphones. Banned cameraphones! This harkens directly to his testimony before Congress last week when he lamented the new digital world that allows anyone to effortlessly beam information from where ever they are. Restated: We're very truly sorry we got caught. We'll take steps to ensure we get away with this from now on.

Jeffrey Veen: Ringtones and Torture Pictures Want to be Free

"Cicadas are the sound of summer, of that year when you were young," said Professor Thompson, happy that he was no longer being asked to fit the end of "Friends" into some cultural gestalt.

The New York Times > New York Region > Cicadas Respond to Their 17-Year Cue

Ehrlich Calls Multiculture Idea 'Bunk' (washingtonpost.com).

These kinds of comments from leadership, from people who are in high-level positions, are really fueling an environment that is very dangerous and negative. It says it is okay to consider people who are different as something less.

Which echoes what Zagg has said about the racism inculcated in our troops and our culture flowing from the very top. It's not difficult to see, once you know what to look for.

The New York Times > National > Prisoners: Mistreatment of Prisoners Is Called Routine in U.S. "Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern, according to corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates."

Appearing Friday in the Rose Garden with Canada's prime minister, President Bush was answering a reporter's question about Canada's role in Iraq when suddenly he swerved into this extraneous thought:

"There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren't necessarily -- are a different color than white can self-govern."

What does such careless talk say about the mind of this administration? Note that the clearly implied antecedent of the pronoun "ours" is "Americans." So the president seemed to be saying that white is, and brown is not, the color of Americans' skin. He does not mean that. But that is the sort of swamp one wanders into when trying to deflect doubts about policy by caricaturing and discrediting the doubters.

George Will: Time for Bush to See The Realities of Iraq (washingtonpost.com). Will goes on to conclude, somehow, that a) Bush is not racist and b) people who practice the Muslim faith cannot self-govern, but I thought it was a quote worth sharing.

There are some things going on here that I can't live with.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | US military in torture scandal

The New York Times > Technology > Rich to Get Richer if Google Goes Public

The current prediction is that Google, if it decides to sell shares to investors this year, would probably end up with a market value of $20 billion to $25 billion by the end of its first day as a publicly traded company.

A $25 billion market value would instantly make Google worth more than Lockheed Martin, the big military contractor; Federal Express, the package delivery service; or Nike, the sports clothing maker.

Mary McGrory, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post and, before that, The Washington Star, died April 21, 2004. She was 85.

In a First for Mammals, Mice Are Created Without Fathers (washingtonpost.com)

Lacking any paternal genes, all the mice born this way were females. But they are not clones, because each is a genetically unique animal developed from its own egg.

The feat does not suggest that men will soon become irrelevant for human reproduction. The extreme genetic manipulations used by the team are for now, at least, technically and ethically infeasible in humans.

The experiments produced far more dead and defective baby mice than normal ones.

As a defiant Mordechai Vanunu headed out of prison on Wednesday after 18 years, flashing the victory sign and declaring he was proud of what he had done. Mr. Vanunu, 49, appears to be as widely reviled today as he was in 1986, when he was kidnapped by Israel's intelligence service in Rome after giving a detailed interview on Israel's clandestine nuclear program to The Sunday Times of London.

The New York Times > International > Middle East > Vanunu, Disdaining Israel, Is Freed to Chants vs. Cheers

NPR : Justices Hear Arguments in Guantanamo Detainees Case

The Supreme Court hears arguments in the case of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The detainees have requested a ruling on whether U.S. courts can review challenges to their incarceration. The Bush administration argues foreign prisoners picked up on the battlefield and held outside U.S. borders do not have the right to access the courts. NPR's Nina Totenberg reports.

On April 28, the Supreme Court of the United States will hear oral arguments in two cases that New York Times reporter David Stout noted are likely to result in rulings of "profound importance, drawing the lines between the powers of courts and the administration and, perhaps, affecting the civil liberties of Americans in ways not yet imagined."

The justices will hear the cases of two American citizens, Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla, who have been held as "enemy combatants" in Defense Department prisons on American soil indefinitely, incommunicado, without charges, and without the continual Sixth Amendment guarantee of access to a lawyer.

The Village Voice: The Hidden Supreme Court by Nat Hentoff: How many of you can recognize the nine most powerful Americans?

Aljazeera.Net - Falluja siege in pictures (warning: photos of children killed by US)

hello, 28!

The firing of the mellifluous Edwards, my morning companion through all these years, portends bad things. The telling sign was not just that he was axed as the program's host but that no one can tell you why.

Poynter Online - “USA Today Scandal A Threat To White Privilege, Mediocrity” in which Dr. Ink asks will Jack Kelley’s sins be visited upon other white journalists?

In the 21st century, having leaders who don't really think the Earth is warming is a little like having leaders who don't really think the Earth is round.

<a title=“Boing Boing: Send-up of “Respect Copyright” PSAs” href=“http://www.boingboing.net/2004/03/18/sendup_of_respect_co.html">Boing Boing: Send-up of “Respect Copyright” PSAs

I don't know why anyone would ever steal a movie. Unless of course it's to avoid this commercial which we now play in front of every single movie you could possibly go to, telling you you're bad for stealing even though you just spent $11 to see some movie and instead you have to sit there and listen to me whine at you and accuse you of being a thief.