NPR: The NPR News Blog

June 29, 2007

Cats First Domesticated People in the Near East

Our last piece of the week comes to us from the journal Science.

Research now indicates that the common cat (well, humans think they're common -- we all know what cats think) first became domesticated in the Near (or Middle) East. Meanwhile, all the cats that nowadays tear up the curtains ... or walk across computer keyboards ... or lie on top of the TV, one paw hanging in front of the screen, have common ancestors that lived in the Near East about 130,000 years ago.

And, as we all already knew, it's really the cats who domesticated people. Well, in a way. The Washington Post's report notes that the study indicates we didn't go looking for cats, they "sort of domesticated themselves," as a researcher put it. They likely came to us because we had a food source -- rodents that ate the grain stored in humans' first agricultural settlements more than 9,000 years ago, NPR's Nell Boyce reports. Fortunately, cats continue to let us hang out with them.

My cat, Alibey, is actually from Turkey -- my wife found her on a Turkish island during a research trip and brought her back to America. I have no plans to tell Alibey all this news about the Near East as the home of all cats. She thinks she's special enough as it is.

If you see anything interesting this weekend, don't forget to drop us a line at newsblog@npr.org.

Paris, Who Ya Gonna Call? ... Crisis Busters!

You know, if bottled water is a perfect symbol of U.S. culture at this moment in our history, then so is this: the crisis management consultant. When I was growing up, my "crisis management consultant" was my grandfather, and most of the time, his role consisted of telling me this: "Use the common sense God gave you, boy." It worked pretty well, actually.

But this is the age of Paris and Lindsay and Rush and ... well, the list goes on. Big-time celebrities who get in trouble and worry about how it will affect their bottom line. They end up hiring people like Michael Sitrick.

On Thursday, Day to Day's Madeleine Brand interviewed Sitrick, who's known as the "attack dog image fixer to the rich and powerful." (I wonder if he has that on his business card.)

When trying to rescue the image of a celebrity in trouble, Sitrick is known for using "truth squads" to counteract what media outlets or others are saying about his clients. He also talks about something called the "wheel of pain" -- an expression that describes efforts to bring out "facts" the other side might not want to be public in an effort to rehabilitate a client's image. Most of the people in his firm are ex-journalists.

There's something a bit unsettling about listening to Sitrick talk about what he does -- and what that reveals about the nature of celebrity and the media these days.

12:56 PM ET | 06-29-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

Rethinking Bottled Water

It's not often that I read or hear something that almost immediately compels me to change something I've done for a long time. But that's what happened when I heard a report about the bottled water industry in America on All Things Considered on Thursday.

Robert Siegel interviewed Charles Fishman, a reporter for the magazine Fast Company, who says that Pepsi's Aquafina and Coke's Dasani are basically purified tap water. That's something I didn't know. No magical springs bubbling out of a picturesque hillside in some rural American forest, visited by locals for years. Just plain old tap water.

The companies say they put the tap water through an "energy-intensive reverse-osmosis filtration process," but, to me, that seems like basically the same stuff we get by running our tap water through a Brita filter.

Fishman wrote in his article for Fast Company:

A chilled plastic bottle of water in the convenience-store cooler is the perfect symbol of this moment in American commerce and culture. It acknowledges our demand for instant gratification, our vanity, our token concern for health. Its packaging and transport depend entirely on cheap fossil fuel. Yes, it's just a bottle of water--modest compared with the indulgence of driving a Hummer. But when a whole industry grows up around supplying us with something we don't need--when a whole industry is built on the packaging and the presentation--it's worth asking how that happened, and what the impact is.

Not to mention what all those empty plastic bottles that are tossed aside are doing to the environment.

I seriously may never buy a bottle of water again. It just doesn't make sense. It's back to the tap for me, with a reusable plastic bottle. How about you folks? What's your thinking now about bottled water?

Notes from the Debate: Lots of Love for Obama, Clinton

Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama signs autographs for supporters after the debate at Howard University on Thursday.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

(Note from Tom: All Things Considered editor Susan Feeney has sent us some thoughts from Thursday's Democratic presidential debate.)

You knew right off it was going to be a different kind of presidential debate at Howard University in Washington, D.C., on Thursday night when it kicked off with a warm-up act. The fantastic a capella quartet Soul Tempo sang the National Anthem. Then they slid into songs such as "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother" and "The Lord's Prayer," which they sang in the movie The Preacher's Wife.

The Democratic candidate event was moderated by PBS' Tavis Smiley with questions from three more journalists of color, including NPR's Michel Martin. They shined a bright light on issues often left in the campaign shadows: Darfur, HIV/AIDS among blacks, racial disparities in the criminal justice system, poverty and the right of Katrina evacuees to return to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

One flaw was a total absence of follow-up questions, which could have extracted more in-depth answers.

Credit the U.S. Supreme Court with ensuring a most poignant event. It was at Howard, Sen. Barack Obama noted, that Thurgood Marshall and his legal team hatched plans that led to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. "If it hadn't been for them, I would not be standing here today," he said.

It was a Democratic crowd and one that whooped for all the candidates. But its heart clearly belonged to Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Afterward, all the candidates posed and waved at the foot of the stage. Many were sought out for autographs and handshakes. But it was Obama and Clinton who were mobbed. After 20 minutes, it was just the two of them, glad-handing marathoners, still smiling and greeting frantic well-wishers.

Michelle Obama had joined her husband and also was signing as fast as she could. Clinton did not bring former President Bill Clinton, who surely would have tipped the balance. But he's a double-edged sword for her, and one she unsheathes selectively.

In the end, only the Obamas went the distance and outlasted Clinton on the front line. Finally, event staff cleared the Obamas from the stage.

- Susan Feeney

Al-Qaida Regrouping Along Pakistani Border

All too often, al-Qaida reminds me of that old Timex watch commercial: It takes a licking, but keeps on ticking.

The leaders of the terrorist organization have been forced to retreat into the mountainous regions of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. But despite the harsh conditions in the area, senior U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement officials say al-Qaida is "recruiting, regrouping and rebuilding," McClatchy reports. The "new sanctuary" along the border was made possible by last September's cease-fire agreement between the Pakistani government and pro-Taliban tribes in the province of Waziristan.

The threat from Islamic radicals there is more dangerous than from Iraq, according to intelligence officials.

The remote Pakistani region "is the real heart of the war on terror, and we're losing," said a U.S. intelligence official who, like most of his colleagues, requested anonymity because intelligence reports on the matter are highly classified and because their pessimism conflicts with the administration's public statements. "We took our eye off the ball when we went into Iraq."

TPMmuckraker has posted video showing retired Maj. Gen. John Batiste, a former division commander in Iraq who has become a critic of the war, warning the House Committee on Foreign Affairs this week about the dangers of focusing too much on al-Qaida in Iraq to the exclusion of other parts of the world. "I also believe we cannot attribute all the violence in Iraq to al-Qaida. There's a tendency now to lump it all together, and call it al-Qaida. We have to be very careful with that. ... Al-Qaida is a worldwide organization. It recognizes no national boundaries. And it's in areas where we ought to be focused," he said.

9:08 AM ET | 06-29-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

June 28, 2007

Thousands of Venezuelans March for Press Freedom

It seems that Venezuelans are not going to just sit on their hands when it comes to free speech. On Wednesday -- Press Freedom Day in Venezuela -- thousands of the country's citizens joined a march in Caracas to protest a government decision to close a TV station that had often been critical of President Hugo Chavez.

An Associated Press photo shows the throng of marchers as it moved toward the headquarters of Radio Caracas Television, which stopped broadcasting May 27 after the government refused to renew its license. Many journalists taped their mouths shut in protest of the government's actions.

The march occurred during the Copa America Soccer Tournament, one of the most important soccer tournaments in the world, which is being held in Venezuela for the first time. As the Gateway Pundit blog notes, having such a huge march happen during the tournament could turn out to be a major embarrassment for Chavez.

However, he wasn't there to see it in person. Chavez was on his way to Russia for a state visit.

4:38 PM ET | 06-28-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

Former Leaders of 'Ex-Gay' Ministry Apologize

There are few more controversial issues in America than gay rights. And wrapped up in that larger debate is the question of whether homosexuality is a lifestyle choice or determined at birth. Many religious groups tend to accentuate the former, while scientific research seems to be increasingly pointing to the latter.

In an example of how complicated the debate has become, the Los Angeles Times reports three former leaders of the ministry Exodus International apologized Wednesday for their efforts to convince homosexuals that their sexual orientation could be changed through prayer. They said those actions have led to a "wrenching human toll" for gays and lesbians the ministry worked to convert.

The Associated Press reports that the former leaders -- co-founder Michael Bussee, who left the group in 1979; Jeremy Marks, former president of Exodus International Europe; and Darlene Bogle, the founder of Paraklete Ministries, an Exodus referral agency -- said that, although they had acted sincerely in their years with the Christian group, they had become disillusioned with promoting gay conversion.

"Some who heard our message were compelled to try to change an integral part of themselves, bringing harm to themselves and their families," the three said in a statement.

Their message was timed to coincide with the opening of Exodus International's annual meeting in Irvine, Calif.

The Times reports that Exodus President Alan Chambers disagreed with the organization's critics and said his group has helped many people who want an alternative to living as a homosexual. The Orlando, Fla.-based group includes more than 120 ministries in the United States and Canada and more than 150 ministries overseas.

Right-Wing Show Host Repeats Obama Misinformation

Speaking of Barack Obama, a few examples in recent days show right-wing commentators are continuing to try to link him to Muslim extremism, including reviving a widely discredited rumor that he once attended an Islamic religious school, known as a madrassa.

That claim, which first appeared on the conservative site InsightMag.com in January, has been investigated by CNN, ABC and The Associated Press and found to be baseless. While Obama was living in Indonesia from the ages of 6 to 10, he attended a public school with both Christians and Muslims for two years and went to Catholic school for two years.

But that didn't stop far-right shock jock Michael Savage from repeating the allegation on his show Monday. The liberal Media Matters posted audio in which Savage, whose Savage Nation radio show has 8 million listeners weekly, says Obama was indoctrinated by Muslims at a madrassa and highlights his middle name, Hussein.

Meanwhile Monday, another conservative pundit used Obama's middle name to insinuate potential connections to Muslim terrorists. Ann Coulter, while commenting on a speech Obama had given about religion, told Fox News' Hannity and Colmes, "I do think anyone named B. Hussein Obama should avoid using 'hijack' and 'religion' in the same sentence."

In May, when a poll showed that Obama would beat many leading GOP candidates if he were the Democratic nominee for president, Coulter said the statistic may have been made up and that it "might help al-Qaida."

Poll Shows Surprise Leader among Democrats in N.H.

You'll never guess who's leading the pack of Democratic presidential contenders in New Hampshire in a new poll. No, it's not Barack Obama, who took the state by storm a few months ago. And Hillary Clinton falls back when this man's name is in the mix.

Let's just say that it's an inconvenient truth to the other Democratic challengers that the poll shows Al Gore is the most popular in New Hampshire. Yes, Al Gore, who has insisted he has no plans to run for his party's presidential nomination.

Without Gore in the race, the WHDH-Suffolk University poll shows 37 percent of Democratic voters supporting or leaning toward Clinton, compared to Obama's 19 percent. John Edwards and Bill Richardson are next at 9 percent each. But if Gore were to toss his hat in the ring, Clinton would lose about quarter of her support and Obama almost half. The Washington Times reports that Gore would lead 32 percent to 26 percent over Clinton if he decided to run in the state.

"Gore is the only Democrat, including Hillary, who can instantly melt the field," said David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, which conducted the survey.

He also points out that Gore would actually take more votes from Obama than from Clinton. "I think a chunk of Obama voters in New Hampshire are anybody-but-Hillary Democrats," Paleologos said.

The pro-Gore result comes a few days after the University of Wisconsin Survey Center's Badger Poll asked resident of that state for their impressions of both declared and undeclared presidential candidates in both parties. Gore and Rudy Giuliani had the most favorable scores for their respective parties.

June 27, 2007

Senior Dems May Try to Bring Back Fairness Doctrine

Last week, a liberal think tank released a report showing that talk radio programming is overwhelmingly conservative. Since then, lots of politicians and bloggers on the right have been crying foul over talk of bringing back the Fairness Doctrine, a federal policy killed in the 1980s that required stations to make an effort to give even consideration to opposing views.

The conservatives' reaction seemed over the top, considering only a couple Democratic congressmen were saying they wanted to revive the doctrine.

However, The Hill reports today that two senior Senate Democrats, Dick Durbin and Dianne Feinstein, are also saying they're interested in bringing the doctrine back to life.

If Democratic leaders are serious about pursuing it, that would confirm those conservative concerns.

One has to wonder what advantage the Democrats see in such a move. President Bush would likely veto any such bill if it ever hit his desk. It's the kind of issue that would unite the GOP base in a year of party unrest over Iraq and the immigration bill. And the demographic that listens to talk radio seems unlikely to swing massively to the left, even if it does hear more liberal points of view.

Then there's the fact that conservative dominance of talk radio didn't stop the GOP from losing control of Congress in the 2006 elections.

Still, Republican Rep. Mike Pence, who worked as a syndicated talk radio host in Indiana before winning election to the House, wants to keep the doctrine in the grave. He's introducing legislation that would codify the Federal Communications Commission's decision to kill it.

Cutbacks in Gas Allowance Spark Iranian Violence

Oil, oil, everywhere, and not a drop to pump. I wouldn't be surprised if Iranians are singing a similar ditty today.

The BBC reports that several gas stations were torched in Tehran after the government announced fuel rationing that limits private vehicles to about 26 gallons of fuel per month at the subsidized price of 38 cents per gallon.

Although the government had been warning for months that it might make such a change, Iranians were only given around two hours' notice before the new rules went into effect.

It's a hard concept to get one's head around. Iran, one of the top petroleum producers in the world, in the grips of a fuel crisis? But Iran imports 40 to 50 percent of the fuel it uses because it lacks refining capacity.

The Associated Press reports President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has come under growing criticism, even from former supporters, for dramatic rises in the past year in food, housing and oil prices.

The Missed and Won't Be Missed at 10 Downing Street

Cherie Blair speaks with the media as she leaves 10 Downing Street.

Carl De Souza/AFP/Getty Images

I guess she just couldn't help herself, standing there in the street outside the prime minister's residence, surrounded by the media, which her husband recently called a "feral beast."

Cherie Blair, who has always had a reputation for saying what's on her mind -- even when it got Tony in hot water -- turned to the TV camera nearest her and said, "Goodbye. I don't think we'll miss you."

Meanwhile, as the BBC writes, the now former Prime Minister Tony Blair will be enormously missed in the United States, both inside and outside the White House. For instance, at last count, ThankYouTony.com (a site where Americans can write thank-yous to Blair) had received 89,953 messages. The e-mails are "are printed on paper, and wire-bound into books of 250 messages. Message books are shipped to 10 Downing Street in London weekly."

Well, not to 10 Downing anymore, I guess. Perhaps now they'll address them to the Middle East, as it's been announced that Blair will be the new envoy representing the Quartet (the United Nations, United States, European Union and Russia) in that region.

1:26 PM ET | 06-27-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

Companies Seek to Promote Free Speech, Yet Still Do Business in China

In the past several months, Internet and telecommunications companies like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have taken some pretty intense heat for their interactions with governments in totalitarian countries. Critics say the companies have turned over information about users' activities that allowed these governments to track down -- and jail -- dissidents or have cooperated too much in government censorship.

So I read with interest Rebecca MacKinnon's post at her blog, RConversation, about her involvement with a process to establish "a set of global principles on free speech and privacy protection for internet and telecoms companies."

The list of companies who have joined the process is the real story -- it includes Vodafone and the three above, who "admitted publicly" to taking part earlier this year. (Interestingly, MacKinnon notes, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is not involved, despite its launch of MySpace in China, where it also has been criticized for too much censorship.)

MacKinnon, a former CNN journalist who is now an assistant professor at Hong Kong University's Journalism and Media Studies Center, writes that the purpose of the principles is not to "impose Western values" on China. Instead, it's to seek a way to help companies in all countries conduct their business "while doing all they can to protect their users' interests against government encroachment globally."

MacKinnon writes that she wishes Yahoo! would apologize to the families of Chinese journalist Shi Tao and other dissidents jailed after the company turned over information about their Internet activities to the government. She says it's unlikely, but she notes that Jerry Yang, one of the company's founders and the new CEO, discussed some of the measures that Yahoo! is taking to protect free speech and privacy at a shareholders meeting earlier this month.

11:37 AM ET | 06-27-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

Japan Dismisses Call for Fresh Apology for Sex Slaves

Japan has brushed off a resolution by the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs that called on the country to issue a fresh apology for using sex slaves, known as comfort women, during World War II.

The BBC reports that the committee's resolution urged the Japanese government to "formally acknowledge, apologize and accept historical responsibility in a clear and unequivocal manner" for the coercion of young women into sexual slavery.

The sex slaves issue is increasingly becoming an obstacle in Japan's relationship with many countries in Asia and the West. In 1993, Japan did apologize for its treatment of women forced to be sex slaves for its soldiers during World War II. But a new, more conservative government shaded that apology, saying there weren't many women involved and there was no proof that the women were forced to become prostitutes. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe later apologized for those remarks, but it did little to placate critics.

Historians believe hundreds of thousands of women were forced to work as sex slaves in military brothels during the war.

June 26, 2007

Examining the Prosecution of a Former Ala. Governor

In a case that has held the attention of Alabama for more than two years, the sentencing hearing for former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman and former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy began today in Montgomery. Birmingham Weekly reports that about a year ago, a federal jury "found Scrushy and Siegelman guilty on charges of bribery, conspiracy and mail fraud. Siegelman was convicted also on an additional charge of obstruction of justice."

Siegelman, a Democrat, is fighting his possible 30-year sentence by alleging that his prosecution was engineered by White House strategist Karl Rove, the Los Angeles Times reports. And one former Republican attorney general and several Democrats think there may be reason to investigate his claims.

"From start to finish, this case has been riddled with irregularities. It does not pass the smell test," Grant Woods, a Republican former attorney general of Arizona, told the Times.

Scott Horton, a human rights and armed conflict lawyer who writes the No Comment blog for Harper's Magazine, has written a stinging critique of the case against Siegelman.

His piece reads like a "J'Accuse" of the political, legal and media establishments in Alabama. Calling it one of the darkest moments in Alabama justice since the trial of the "Scottsboro Boys" (the 1930s trial of nine black teenagers accused of raping two white girls), he claims that there are clear signs of Rove's fingerprints on the prosecution of the former governor. Horton also says that the politicization of the Justice Department was a key factor in Siegelman being prosecuted in the first place.

The Times story notes that White House officials say they can't talk about the case while it remains in court. And the U.S. attorney whose office brought the case, Leura Canary, whose husband is a Rove protege, called the allegation that her politics influenced the case "a ridiculous assertion." Canary recused herself from the case after Siegelman's lawyers complained.

What Will We Look Like in a Few Thousand Years?

An interesting piece in The New York Times science section today describes how new findings from decoding human DNA appear to show that we didn't stop evolving long ago, but, in fact, are continuing to evolve right now.

People have continued to evolve since leaving the ancestral homeland in northeastern Africa some 50,000 years ago, both through the random process known as genetic drift and through natural selection. The genome bears many fingerprints in places where natural selection has recently remolded the human clay, researchers have found, as people in the various continents adapted to new diseases, climates, diets and, perhaps, behavioral demands.

Some of the changes that look to have evolved more recently include the pale skin of Europeans -- perhaps around 7,000 years ago (a heartbeat in the evolutionary time scale) -- and the emergence of lactose tolerance in adults first in northern Europe about 5,000 years ago, but also possibly only about 3,000 years ago in part of Africa.

Who knows what we'll look like or be able to eat in another few thousand years?

Germany Bans Use of Military Sites for Tom Cruise Film

You can say what you want about Scientology, but there's one place where they just plain don't like it -- Germany.

The BBC reports that Germany has banned the makers of an upcoming Tom Cruise film from shooting at military sites there because Cruise is a Scientologist. The German government says Scientology is a cult that "masquerades as a religion to make money," according to the BBC. Scientology officials reject this description of their beliefs.

Scientology has been monitored in Germany in the belief that its activities are "directed against the free democratic order" in the country.
Its status there as a commercial enterprise has prompted repeated protests from the organisation.

In the movie, Valkyrie, Cruise will play Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, leader of the failed 1944 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler using a bomb hidden in a briefcase. The movie is set to premiere next year.

Von Stauffenberg's son also says he objects to the casting of Cruise to play his father because of the actor's belief in Scientology.

So, What's Really the Story with 'Bandwidth Shaping'?

Last week, we posted a piece about "bandwidth shaping" -- a method Internet service providers use to slow down users when demand is high. Sensing we might be looking at a tip-of-the-iceberg thing, I called BBC Internet expert Bill Thompson, a source for a piece we had linked to in the post (and systems administrator for a site used by British MPs), to learn more.

First, don't call it "bandwidth shaping," Thompson says. That's corporate speak. He says he calls it what it really is -- "throttling," the same as throttling back a train.

"It's like falling off a cliff" -- that's how fast your Internet connection can suddenly slow down these days, Thompson says, adding sometimes ISPs will slow down the whole network, not just heavy users, to handle peak periods.

Most Internet users haven't noticed that their connections are slower because they're not online a lot, he says. But it has attracted attention from early Internet adopters (who are apt to follow what's happening on the Web), gamers and other such folks who spend a lot of time online.

Thompson also reminded me that this isn't the first time online consumers have seen their bandwidth cut back. When companies started offering "unlimited access" instead of making customers pay for dial-up per hour, users flocked to those ISPs, and it created a problem. So ISPs redefined "unlimited" as a certain number of hours a day -- an attempt to pull back heavy users, whose accounts could be affected if they went over.

Thompson believes we could soon see the same kind of limited "unlimited access" descriptions applied to broadband connections.

How about you folks? Has anyone else noticed problems with their broadband connections of the sort we've been talking about? Has anyone heard from their ISPs about "bandwidth shaping"?

12:27 PM ET | 06-26-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

Baghdad: In Pictures by Iraqis

Since before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iraqi bloggers have often presented a view of life in their country that is darker than the one presented on American evening newscasts or cable network news shows. For instance, most American media outlets, for a variety of reasons (and many of them good ones), have largely refrained from showing pictures or films of the bodies of those killed in the fighting.

But using blogs and other tools like YouTube, some Iraqis have opened a window on daily life -- and death -- in a war zone.

Healing Iraq is one Iraqi blog I read regularly. Its author, Zeyad A., a former dentist turned blogger/journalist has been featured in publications like The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. Zeyad writes that he "had become frustrated with the negative media coverage from Iraq so I decided to start a personal blog to present the positive side which was not getting enough attention at the time."

And yet, over time, Healing Iraq has chronicled "Iraq's daily deterioration," as the Journal put it.

I would like to share two recent Healing Iraq posts. One contains several YouTube videos about the plight of Iraqi refugees, a subject Zeyad notes is seldom covered on American TV.

The other post contains pictures taken by residents of western Baghdad in the months of April, May and June. You should know that some are quite graphic, but as Zeyad writes, "they provide a glimpse of life in the Iraqi capital four years after the ... American invasion."

June 25, 2007

A Totally Subjective Top 10 Movies List

Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly star in Rear Window, directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Paramount Pictures/Archive Photos/Getty Images

After I posted an entry late Friday on the American Film Institute's top 100 films of all time, commenting that the list was just too subjective to be taken seriously, a friend at NPR challenged me to name my 10 favorite films and then ask you guys to send in your nominations.

So here goes. My top 10 desert-island films, in no particular order:

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back: Absolutely the best (and darkest) of the six-movie set.
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: The best trilogy in film, but this one gives the other two that feeling of magic.
Wings of Desire: Wim Wenders' version, not the dumb one with Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan.
To Kill a Mockingbird: Atticus Finch for president!
Rear Window: Hitchcock's best. But who could look out the back window with Grace Kelly in the room?
Three Kings: A great, flawed film about the first Gulf War.
Casablanca: More great lines per minute than any other movie ever made.
Toy Story 2: The only cartoon film with a message deeper than "buy our toys."
The Life of Brian: Brilliant, brilliant satire.
Apocalypse Now: I can still remember walking out of the theater with several hundred other people, all of us completely speechless.

Close but No Top Ten Cigar: When Harry Met Sally, It's a Wonderful Life, Bull Durham, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, A Clockwork Orange, Singin' in the Rain.

Now, over to you ...

Al Gore's 'Do What I Say, Not What I Do' Message?

When I saw An Inconvenient Truth, I walked out of the theater certain that the end was nigh. How could you not? For the 100-odd minutes of the documentary, former Vice President Al Gore sounded like a prophet who had showed up in Sodom and Gomorrah a couple of weeks before Lot and was trying to give a heads up.

And while the documentary argued persuasively that global warming is a serious problem that humanity needs to take action against, I wasn't so sure how people would react to Gore's "be afraid, be very afraid" approach.

So I was interested to read Slate's Emily Yoffe's take on Gore's message in today's Washington Post. She said she found herself put off by his relentless "gloom and doom." "An essential part of the global warming awareness movement is the belief that scaring us to death is the best way to spur massive change," she writes.

She also notes that for Gore, this seems to be a bit of a contradiction:

In his new book, "The Assault on Reason," Gore denounces what he sees as today's politics of fear. Yet his own campaign of mass persuasion -- any such campaign -- is not amenable to contradiction and uncertainty. It's about fright and absolutes. But just because something can be plotted on an X and Y axis does not make it the whole truth.

I'd love to get people's thoughts on this one.

General: Hearts and Minds Surge Needed in Iraq

The U.S. general in charge of working with the Iraqi population says the current troop surge is being jeopardized by the lack of an equivalent hearts-and-minds surge among the general population. In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Lt. Gen. Jack Stultz also said that cultural differences between U.S. and Iraqi soldiers were endangering the effort to train Iraqis to take control of security.

"You can't treat everyone as if they're an American soldier," Stultz said. "Everyone's culture is different." The Telegraph notes that British commanders have held this belief for a long time, but it's "remarkably frank" coming from an American general while the troop surge is under scrutiny.

In a May interview, the American Forces Press Service noted the general, who is on a four-year leave of absence as operations manager of Proctor & Gamble, tends to think as much like a businessman as a three-star general. This approach is evident in the Telegraph interview when Stultz talks about the need for U.S. troops to adopt a different approach with their Iraqi cohorts. He relates a story told to him by a major under his command:

"The Army Reserve soldier had a different perspective of how to handle the situation from the active army. He said, 'the first reaction working with the Iraqi soldiers from the active army was the traditional drill sergeant approach: just yell at the guy. ...'"
The general said the major had told him that "those of us in the Army Reserve who deal with the civilian population of America would never scream at a customer because I know he would just walk away".

"You've got to build trust with the local people, to say, 'Help us,'" Stultz said. "If we're going to turn around the situation, we need to have the local population identify [insurgents]."

1:15 PM ET | 06-25-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

Judge Takes Swipe at Handling of Domestic Spying

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, the former chief judge of a secret national security court, had some harsh things to say about the administration's handling of the recently halted domestic spying program at a meeting of the American Library Association on Saturday.

McClatchy reports:

Lamberth declined to say whether he believes the National Security Agency's wiretap program was illegal. But he said he has "never seen a better way" to conduct domestic spying than under the national security court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The court secretly approves warrants for wiretaps and searches in counterterrorism and espionage investigations.
"I've seen a proposal for a worse way," Lamberth said. "That's what the president did with the NSA program."

Lamberth said he had insisted from the beginning that information the NSA gathered from the domestic spying program not be mixed with intelligence collected under court warrants. He said he never had to rule on the legality of the president's spying program.

The Jurist reports that Lamberth said he understands the need to act quickly during national emergencies, but that the president's wiretapping program went too far. "We have to understand you can fight the war [on terrorism] and lose everything if you have no civil liberties left when you get through fighting the war," he said. Lamberth also said that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court "keeps [the executive] honest."

Warning to French Politicians: Beware 'Les Blogueurs'

There are two things you can be certain of in life: French male politicians like to have a mistress (or several, if time permits) and the British love to tweak the French about anything they can.

These truisms came together marvelously last week when two stories in London's Daily Telegraph detailed the latest marital woes of two top French politicians: President Nicolas Sarkozy and the woman he defeated for that office, Segolene Royal.

First, Sarkozy has been kept busy denying rumors about the breakup of his marriage to his wife, Cecilia (bloggers around Europe have written extensively about alleged affairs on both sides). Then a video appeared on YouTube that appeared to show the president looking a little tipsy at a press conference during the G-8 Summit. He later explained that he was merely "out of breath."

Then came news that Royal was splitting from her longtime partner and the father of her four children, Socialist Party leader Francois Hollande, after he had an affair. But the news didn't come from the traditional French media, which has always looked the other way at these sorts of things. It was the work of "les blogueurs." The Telegraph says bloggers may undermine the country's notoriously strict privacy laws.

Pierre Dominique, a Paris-based political commentator who regularly contributes to French websites, said: "This was a clear example of how blogs are gradually eroding French privacy laws. Important issues can be raised without fear of prosecution, and this can only be a good thing for democracy. Our political leaders have a terrible record in stifling important information about what they get up to."

By the way, the bloggers' work seems only to be upsetting the politicians. The voters couldn't give a hoot. More than 80 percent said they would still vote for a candidate if he cheated on his wife. Oh, the French!

June 22, 2007

AFI: 'Citizen Kane' Still Greatest Film of All Time

Finally this week, the American Film Institute has released a new version of its top 100 films of all time, and the winner is the same film that topped the list when it first appeared a decade ago -- Orson Welles' Citizen Kane.

Which makes sense with all those flashbacks and camera stunts that Welles practically invented. The only thing missing was bullet time.

And I'm sorry, I love The Godfather, but it's no Casablanca. I totally disagree with them switching places at two and three. DeNiro and Brando together couldn't carry Bogie's dinner jacket.

And Hitchcock's 1958 thriller Vertigo going from No. 61 to No. 9? ... What's up with that? How does a film move 50 places in 10 years? It just goes to show how subjective this list is -- it has all the authority of my kids picking their favorite ice cream flavor this week.

There is one change I heartily approve of. Dances with Wolves, which had been No. 75, disappeared from the list. Woo hoo! I still have nightmares about Kevin Costner in buckskin. OK film, but top 100 of all time? Not a chance.

We'll see you on Monday. Don't forget to e-mail us at newsblog@npr.org if you see something interesting.

Canadian Anglicans to Vote on Blessing Gay Couples

It's a move that could reignite the debate in the global Anglican community about whether the church should marry homosexuals.

On Saturday, the Canadian church's general synod will vote on whether to allow same-sex blessings. The Associated Press reports that bestowing a blessing is one step away from performing gay marriage. Gay marriage has been legal in Canada for four years.

The Victoria News reports that many Anglican ministers are split on the issue -- some say they may even leave the church if the blessing measure is approved.

CanWest reports that African bishops have threatened to throw the Canadians out of the Anglican communion if they approve the measure. However, a top Anglican official in Britain says, regardless of the outcome of the vote, Canada will not be expelled.

(Tom Update: After the discussion of blessing same-sex marriages went into the late hours of the evening, debate was suspended until Sunday. The gathering did defeat a resolution that would have required 60 percent of those voting to approve a same-sex blessing measure in order for it to pass. Any measure will now only require 50 percent of the delegates' vote for approval.)

(Tom Update II: The motion to allow Canadian Anglican dioceses to decide for themselves whether or not to bless same-sex unions was defeated Sunday. Although the lay delegates voted 78-59 in favor and the clergy voted 63-53 in favor, the bishops voted 21-19 against. As a result the motion was defeated, since it required approval by each of the three orders to pass.)

Some Conservatives Fear Return of Fairness Doctrine

The sky is falling! The sky is falling! ... OK, maybe not. But a day after a report by the liberal think tank Center for American Progress and the Free Press organization said that talk radio features programming that is 91 percent conservative, fears of a return to the days of the Fairness Doctrine are rampant among some on the right.

The Fairness Doctrine, a federal policy that said broadcasters had to allow opposing views equal time on the air, was originally conceived in the '40s. When Congress tried to turn it into law in 1987, President Reagan vetoed it. It was after this veto that talk radio as we now know it was really born.

A spokesman for New York Rep. Maurice Hinchey tells The Washington Times that the Democrat is planning to reintroduce a bill that calls for a return to the doctrine, saying "The American people should have a wide array of news sources available to them." (Hinchey's proposal didn't make it out of committee last time.) In January, presidential candidate and Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich also said it was time to bring back the doctrine.

Libertarian Leanings writes that the failure of Air America shows that liberal talk radio is an oxymoron and that "audience reluctance to listen to the liberal drivel coming out of Air America is being translated to 'little free speech or free choice.' It smacks of desperation."

Bill Blocher, who comes down in the middle in the doctrine debate, concludes at The Ledger.com that liberals should forget about it and "get a life and find their audience where they live" -- on the Internet and Comedy Central.

Writing about the report on the Yahoo! opinion page, Blake Dvorak says that "behind this silliness is a very serious attempt to use the government to censor the airwaves."

Well, there's no Fairness Doctrine for the Internet, but we at the News Blog do like to give opposing views. So we turn to Tom Tomorrow at This Modern World, who notes that he's not holding his breath for the return of the doctrine, "but it's fun to listen to [Sean] Hannity and [Rush] Limbaugh desperately try to explain why 'equal time' = 'censorship.'"

Reports: Blair Plans to Become Catholic

British newspapers report that Tony Blair, the outgoing prime minister, has decided to become a Catholic and will travel this weekend to Rome to meet with the pope, where he may discuss his final preparations, according to sources in London and Rome.

The Guardian reports that Blair's decision could be officially announced either before or after he leaves office next week.

Blair's wife and four children are Catholics, and he has attended Catholic services for almost 30 years. Because of security concerns, Catholic Mass also has been held on Saturday evenings at Chequers, the prime minister's country residence.

Britain has never had a Catholic prime minister. This is almost surely the reason that his conversion has taken so long, The Daily Telegraph reports. Although there is no constitutional bar to the prime minister of the overwhelmingly Anglican nation being Catholic, it could have compromised the role Blair played in choosing Church of England bishops.

Religion also plays a much smaller role in Britain's political life than it does in the U.S. In one famous incident, The Guardian reports, Blair "dropped his wish to end a prime ministerial broadcast on the eve of the Iraq invasion with the words: 'God bless' on the advice of Alastair Campbell [his PR guru], who famously told him 'We don't do God.' "

Potential Breakthrough in Treating Brain Diseases

A team of American doctors and researchers have announced what could be a major breakthrough in the treatment of brain diseases, including Parkinson's disease, using the sometimes controversial gene therapy method. Parkinson's patients in an initial small study saw their mobility increase by as much as 65 percent in some cases after the new treatment, The Daily Telegraph reports.

The study, begun in 2003, was carried out on 11 men and one woman with an average age of 58, who had all had severe Parkinson's for at least five years and for whom current therapies were no longer effective. They were given injections of billions of copies of a genetically altered virus into part of the brain called the subthalamic nucleus ...
Three months after the injections, the patients had shown up to 30 per cent improvement. Several showed improvements of up to 65 per cent.

Scientist Live reports that the research team feels the new gene therapy method is in some ways superior to the deep brain stimulation method now used to treat Parkinson's patients because it's less invasive and would require fewer hospital visits.

The research team, lead by Professor Matthew During of the Weill Medical College at Cornell University, will report its findings in today's edition of the British medical journal The Lancet. The Associated Press reports that the scientists will use these initial positive results to conduct a larger test.

9:26 AM ET | 06-22-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

June 21, 2007

Officials Put an End to Free Food for Troops at Airport

For many of the soldiers on their way back to the U.S. from Iraq and Afghanistan, the treats they received from the troop greeters at the Bangor, Maine, airport were probably the first homemade food they had eaten in months.

But the cookies, brownies and whoopie pies are gone. The Associated Press reports that last month, airport officials informed the Maine Troop Greeters that they were enforcing a ban on the distribution of the food and beverages. Some of the greeters accuse vendors at the airport of pushing officials to close down the operation and force troops to buy things from them.

Airport officials say that no one complained to them -- they're enforcing the ban because of safety concerns about food prepared at home.

The Kennebec Journal did a story last year about the role the greeters (most of whom are elderly) play for the returning troops. Since 2003, about 500,000 troops have gone through the airport as they leave for or return from assignments overseas.

The Bangor Daily News reports that the greeters are willing to give up the food if it means they can keep their room, which is currently filled with memorabilia given to them by the troops. The greeters can still allow the troops to make free phone calls. The New York Times reports that airport officials will meet with the greeters Friday to devise an agreement about what kinds of food they can give the troops.

Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran...Version 2.0

Norman Podhoretz, considered by many to be a key thinker in the neoconservative movement, is praying that the U.S. will bomb Iran. He makes an appeal in the current issue of the magazine Commentary in a cover story entitled "The Case for Bombing Iran." As Think Progress writes:

Podhoretz's article appeals to President Bush, "a man who knows evil when he sees it" and who has been "battered more mercilessly and with less justification than any other in living memory," to carry out military strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities. U.S. diplomats are now pointing to the essay to pressure foreign diplomats to increase pressure on Iran.

In an interview, Podhoretz does admit that such an attack could unleash a tidal wave of anti-Americanism across the globe that would make present day sentiments look like a "lovefest." But he says it would be worth it to slow down Iran's nuclear program for five to 10 years.

But some folks disagree with this thesis. American Progress senior fellow Joseph Cirincione has argued that it would not slow down the Iranians' progress but speed it up, just as the Israeli attack on Iraq's nuclear reactor sped up that program in the '80s.

Would Rowling Really Kill Off Her Golden Goose?

July looks like it's shaping up to be national Harry Potter Month.

USA Today gives a preview of the coming Potter onslaught. On July 11, the fifth film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, will hit (and I do mean hit) theaters across America. Then 10 days later, at midnight, the last book, Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows, will take over the country's bookstores.

Some Potter fans are calling it a cross-promotional nightmare. Emerson Spartz, who founded the Potter fan site MuggleNet.com eight years ago, when he was 12, says, "I would think that both Warner Bros. and Scholastic would want to spread the buzz out for a longer period of time."

Oh, nonsense, I say. Won't make a philosopher's stone worth of difference. Both the book and the film will generate millions, dare I say, a billion or more dollars, for these companies and for author J.K. Rowling.

And this leads us to the question that has dominated Potter talk ever since Rowling hinted she might kill Harry off. Allow me to offer an answer:

It won't happen. Because (as we saw above) it's all about the Benjamins.

Harry Potter is an economic engine of a ferocious nature. I know this because I have four children who have read the books, seen the movies, bought themed Lego sets, wands, costumes, computer games, etc. They LOVE Potter. But if Potter were not to survive the final book ... I'm not so sure their attention would either.

I can see young and old fans not going to the final two movies if they knew of such an outcome, regardless of how noble it might be. And future fans hesitating. (Would Star Wars be as popular if Luke died in the final episode?) And all the peripheral marketing bits would suffer as well.

Rowling may still risk all by killing Harry (Arthur Conan Doyle tried the same tactic with Sherlock Holmes and it didn't work), but I can't see her walking away from her Golden Goose.

GOP Campaign Workers Target Romney's Religion

It seems that more than a few people working on GOP presidential campaign teams are taking every chance they can to diss Mitt Romney's Mormon religion, despite the actual candidates' opposition to such efforts.

The Boston Globe reports today that a member of John McCain's team in Iowa, attending a meeting of Republican activists in April, questioned whether Mormons were Christians, brought up an article that "alleges the Mormon Church helps fund Hamas, and likened the Mormons' treatment of women to the Taliban's," according to sources at the meeting. The worker didn't return The Globe's phone calls.

Earlier this week, The Washington Post reported that a field operative for Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback sent an e-mail to Iowa Republicans that contained numerous criticisms of Mormonism, including the familiar charge that it's not a real Christian religion.

Rudy Giuliani's campaign issued an apology earlier this month after the Latest Politics Blog reported that the director of Giuliani's e-campaign had sent another blogger a story from The Salt Lake Tribune that talked about Romney's campaign in light of a disavowed Mormon prophecy that a Mormon would one day save the Constitution.

McCain, Brownback and Giuliani have all denounced the actions by their workers and maintain that attacking personal faith has no place in American politics.

If it were only so. But as Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, says in the Globe story: "In some ways, [Romney's candidacy] is the best test of whether Americans have really put some of the old religious differences aside. And my guess is that they haven't."

Scantily-Clad Women Used to Promote Israel

When this idea first came up at the Israeli consulate in New York, somebody should have had enough common sense to put it in the "Just Asking for Trouble" file.

In an effort to boost Israel's image with 18-to-35-year-old men in the United States (or as the site Truthdig put it, "Israel reaches out to horny U.S. men"), the Israeli Foreign Ministry consulate in New York encouraged the laddie's magazine Maxim to create a feature called "Women of the Israeli Defense Forces" for its July issue. The pictorial features four former Israeli women soldiers posing in Tel Aviv while wearing -- not much.

The magazine, which The Guardian reports was first approached with the idea by the consulate, said it's "pleased with the results of our work together."

Women in the Israeli Knesset aren't so pleased.

Zahava Gal On, the leader of the Meretz party, said it was inappropriate for western countries to market themselves using half-naked women. "It is unfortunate that the New York consulate thinks that Israel's relevance will be expressed by the use of naked women who are treated as an object, and not as women of substance who exude achievement and success," she said.

The New York Post featured a picture of one of the young women on its front page with the headline "Piece in the Middle East." The Jerusalem Post notes that if Israel's beaches fill up this summer with "an unusually high number of leering, beer-guzzling young American men," people will know who to blame.

In fact, if all the consulate wanted to do was promote Israel to testosterone-riddled U.S. males, they might have achieved the same result by dressing four beer cans in IDF uniforms.

June 20, 2007

Kerry Asks Government Not to Deport Missing GI's Wife

Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry has sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security asking that immigration officials "cease and desist" with all efforts to deport the wife of Army Spec. Alex Jimenez, who has been missing in Iraq since his unit was attacked on May 12.

CBS/AP reports that authorities were alerted to Yaderlin Hiraldo's presence when Jimenez applied for a green card and legal residence status for her after their marriage in 2004 at his Army base in New York. The Boston Herald reports that the DHS delayed her case after her husband went to Iraq in 2006. So far, the government hasn't granted the hardship waiver her lawyer has requested.

State Dept. Takes Advantage of Attention from Jolie Film

There's nothing like appearing in a film with Angelina Jolie to help boost one's self-esteem. Or even an entire government agency's.

The State Department's little-known law enforcement and protection arm, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, is trying to parlay the depiction of one of its agents in the film "A Mighty Heart" -- about the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl -- into better public recognition of what it does. (Which is probably a good idea -- I had never even heard of it before today.)

The Associated Press reports that diplomatic security officials are focusing in particular on the real-life role of Randall Bennett, who helped capture Pearl's killers. Along with arranging media interviews for Bennett, the State Department has posted a three-part interview with him about the Pearl story.

Some people may question the agency's self-promotional efforts. But as Oscar Wilde once said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

TMZ Taken to Court over Link to Simpson Manuscript

This time, TMZ.com, the well-known Hollywood gossip site that played a key role in the recent Paris Hilton jail saga, might have gone too far.

TMZ itself is reporting that "The legal trustee who is in control of the OJ Simpson manuscript 'If I Did It' is upset at TMZ for publishing a link to the manuscript on its website and running a story with several excerpts."

Last week, a judge awarded the trustee the rights to sell the book and give the proceeds to the family of murder victim Ron Goldman. The judge also ordered the parties involved and their agents not to disseminate the manuscript, TMZ reports. But TMZ somehow obtained what it said was a copy, and it soon appeared on its Web site. Thousands of copies were downloaded, according to court papers filed today.

The lawyer for the trustee has asked that TMZ be held in contempt because it "blatantly and intentionally violated the automatic stay," the documents say. The trustee's lawyer also wants TMZ to show how it obtained the manuscript.

I smell a First Amendment case here. But if I worked at TMZ, I wouldn't be feeling totally comfortable, curled up with my copy of the Constitution. A number of recent legal decisions -- including in the cases of the CIA leak investigation and the investigation of leaked testimony that Barry Bonds gave in the probe of an alleged steroids ring -- show that judges aren't looking too favorably on reporters who say they need to protect their sources when their actions conflict with a court's order.

The Tennessee Waltz: Thompson vs. Gore in '08?

Just like deciding how much you believe the scale in your bathroom, judging the accuracy of a political poll can be tricky. But the conservative polling firm Rasmussen published one this week that shows actor and former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson leading the pack of GOP contenders for the party's presidential nomination.

Thompson has a 1 percentage-point edge over Rudy Giuliani, 28 percent to 27 percent. (The survey firm notes that the lead is "statistically insignificant," but that it's the first time anyone has passed Giuliani in its polling this year.) Thompson appears to be taking votes away from primarily Mitt Romney and John McCain in this poll. Hugh Hewitt of Townhall.org writes that the race is Thompson's to lose -- although, he notes, that's not the same as saying he's going to win.

Meanwhile, the Chattanooga Times Free Press daydreams about an all-Tennessee presidential race -- Thompson vs. Gore. But while Thompson just hasn't formally declared he's in the race, former Vice President and Tennessee Sen. Al Gore has repeatedly said he's not running for his party's nomination. However, a recent Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll showed Gore as Democrats' third-favorite choice, and a new Gallup poll shows him nearly tied with Barack Obama for second.

New Book Accuses Lance Armstrong of Doping

Lance Armstrong

Scott Wintrow/Getty Images

Like baseball star Barry Bonds, retired cyclist Lance Armstrong may never completely escape the whispered (or even shouted) allegations that he cheated his way to the top of his game. Now a new book goes even further, accusing Armstrong of being not just a follower in the world of doping, but a leader.

The book, From Lance to Landis: Inside the American Doping Controversy at the Tour de France, by Irish investigative journalist David Walsh claims that Armstrong's "all-consuming drive" to be the best led him down the road to using illegal enhancements -- in particular, the drug EPO -- to win seven Tour de France races in a row.

In an interview with Steve Inskeep on NPR's Morning Edition, Walsh says no one has told him "on the record" that they have seen Armstrong using drugs, but he also says there is "zero doubt" in his mind that Armstrong doped based on his research.

In the past, Armstrong has said the he doesn't like Walsh and that Walsh doesn't like him. In a preemptive strike against the book, Armstrong denied using performance-enhancing drugs to Sports Illustrated.

June 19, 2007

Vatican Issues 'Ten Commandments' for Drivers

I've often thought that it was only religious intervention preventing me from killing certain fellow motorists every day. Now religion really is intervening: The Vatican has actually issued a "Ten Commandments" for drivers.

They include: Don't drink, don't kill and don't turn left from a right-hand lane. All right, maybe that last one isn't in there, but it should be. The guidelines also note that a car should not be used as an "occasion for sin," including prostitution and dangerous passing. HA! I always knew those guys in muscle cars who swerved by in no-passing zones were going to hell.

The Vatican also advises prayer behind the wheel -- already normal practice for anyone venturing out on the roads in Boston or Washington, D.C., during rush hour.

Clinton Campaign Picks Winning Song

In a contest that attracted quite a bit of attention, Hillary Clinton's campaign has picked its song from the thousands of suggestions that poured in. And the winner is ... Celine Dion's "You and I."

OK, it's cool that she picked a song by a Canadian, but why not k.d. lang or Nelly Furtado if you want something by a Canuck chanteuse?

But forget the song ... We'll be hearing it so much in the next few months, we'll want to strangle Celine by the time of the first primary. What you really want to see is the little clip that Hillary and Bill Clinton made to introduce the song winner -- with its references to the final episode of "The Sopranos." Again, it made me laugh. Not bad for a politician.

Abu Ghraib Investigator: Senior Officials Knew of Abuses

Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba testifies during a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee in May 2004.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

The Army general who led the investigation into the abuses of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq tells Seymour Hersh in this week's New Yorker that U.S. officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, knew about the abuses before they became public and misled Congress about it.

Retired Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba also told Hersh that he was ostracized and eventually forced to resign after he issued a report that said the abuse at the prison, depicted in the now infamous photos, was "sadistic, blatant and wanton."

Taguba also wrote that military intelligence officers were "directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses." This, he claims, was at odds with the picture the administration wanted to present of a small group of low-ranking individuals gone bad.

A few weeks after the report became public, Taguba told Hersh, he was riding in a car in Kuwait with Gen. John Abizaid, then the head of Central Command. Abizaid turned to him, Taguba recalls, and said, "You and your report will be investigated."

"I wasn't angry about what he said but disappointed that he would say that to me," Taguba said. "I'd been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia."

The Washington Post reports that Lawrence T. Di Rita, Rumsfeld's former spokesman at the Pentagon, disputed several of Taguba's remarks. The White House also refuted the idea that President Bush may have known about abuses earlier than previously stated.

An editorial in USA Today notes that Taguba's story serves as a reminder that a proper Abu Ghraib inquiry, which might explain how abuses occurred at other U.S. facilities if no higher-ups were involved, remains to be completed.

Iraq Now Second on Most Unstable Countries List

It's not the kind of achievement that's going to have Iraqi leaders waving their hands in the air, chanting, "We're number two! We're number two!"

The Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine release their "Failed State Index" every year. At the top of the 2007 list, unsurprisingly, is Sudan, largely because of the Darfur crisis. But just behind at No. 2 (with a bullet, so to speak, according to survey officials) is Iraq. Last year, Iraq finished fourth. But it has declined in almost all of the 12 categories used to measure stability, The Washington Post reports.

"The report tells us that Iraq is sinking fast," said Fund for Peace President Pauline Baker. "We believe it's reached the point of no return. We have recommended -- based on studies done every six months since the U.S. invasion -- that the administration face up to the reality that the only choices for Iraq are how and how violently it will break up."

Iraq is now "ahead" of countries like Somalia and Zimbabwe on the list.

Here's the key question that arises from a ranking like this: One of the main selling points for the recent troop surge in Iraq was that it would enable the U.S. to hand the keys to the car over to the Iraqi government in the next few months. But in the current violent environment, how do you hand over control to the government of a country that by next year may rank as the most unstable in the world?

Underwear for the Ages

It's confession time. I'm not good when it comes to underwear. I tend to, well, keep it around longer than is probably necessary. My wife insists that I've had a couple of T-shirts and briefs in my drawer longer than I've known her -- which is about 15 years. But she's just exaggerating to make a point ... kind of.

So when I saw this piece at The Navy Times, I saw the answer to my problem. The Air Force Special Operations Command is working on creating a new kind of underwear -- including T-shirts, socks and a full-length model (for winter). The idea behind the new garments is that you can wear them for several days and they don't ... how shall I put this? ... stink. "I wore one of the T-shirts for three, four days," Dan Beal, a civilian working on the project, told the paper. "It wasn't like wearing a fresh shirt, but it wasn't bad."

Hmmm. "Wasn't bad" in a military context might be a tad riper than the normal civilian expects, but this project looks promising. The military calls it "austere environment undergarments" -- well, that describes how I live, for sure. And a lot of other guys, too.

But the project ain't cheap. The Navy Times reports Congress has set aside $2.2 million for testing and research since 2005 and the House has requested $2.7 million for 2008.

In a few years, after the military has figured out the proper smell versus weight ratio, the underwear may sell for about $20 a set. You'll be able to get both summer- and winter-wear sets. And then maybe my wife will stop making nasty remarks about my personal habits.

Is the NASCAR Primary Just Down the Road?

Now, sit back in your chair, close your eyes and imagine you're at the Daytona 500. (OK, even if you're not a NASCAR fan, play along with me here.) As the cars come around the final bend, trailing the pace car, you anxiously scan the pack, looking for your favorite driver. Could it be Jeff Gordon in the Ron Paul "Let's Get Out of Iraq" Chevrolet? Perhaps Carl Edwards in the John McCain "It's Not Amnesty" Ford? Or maybe Dale Earnhardt in his new Hillary Clinton "I Wouldn't Have Voted for the War Knowing What I Know Now" Chevy?

You laugh. But it's actually happening north of the border.

The Canadian Press reports that Canada's governing Conservative Party is now sponsoring a car in the Canadian NASCAR circuit. Its big blue "C" logo will appear on the hood of No. 29, a Dodge Charger driven by Pierre Bourque, an Internet media entrepreneur.

"The people who follow NASCAR are our kind of people. They're hard-working families, they're taxpayers who play by the rules. And those are the people that we're targeting," Immigration Minister Diane Finley told The Globe and Mail.

However, opposition parties point out that the decision to back a stock car, which gets about 2 to 5 miles per gallon on leaded fuel, doesn't exactly match the government's recent rhetoric about improving Canada's stance on global warming. One politician commented that it seems that the Conservatives have more money than sense right now.

But what an idea! American politicians are missing the, well, race car on this one. NASCAR is now the second-most-watched TV sport in America. Who will be the first big-name candidate to get his or her logo on somebody's front bumper?

June 18, 2007

Pakistani Official: Rushdie Knighthood Insults Muslims

Pakistani Muslims torch a British flag as they shout slogans during a protest in Lahore today to condemn the knighthood awarded to Salman Rushdie.

Arif Ali/AFP/Getty Images

Normally, when you get knighted, a lot of nice things happen to you. People take you out for lunch, you get to meet the queen, people call you sir -- all the time. But for novelist Salman Rushdie, whom Queen Elizabeth designated for knighthood this weekend, it seems it just means more trouble.

The Guardian reports that Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, Pakistan's religious affairs minister, told the country's parliament that, basically, the knighthood is an insult to Muslims.

"The west is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism. If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so unless the British government apologizes and withdraws the 'sir' title."

Rushdie has been a figure of contempt to many in the Muslim world since his book The Satanic Verses was published in 1988. They accuse him of including blasphemous references to the Prophet Muhammed and to the Quran in the work. Rushdie lived in hiding for many years after a religious fatwa called for his death.

As recently as 2004, Rushdie was forced to flee the city of his birth, Mumbai, India, because of threats against his life.

Ul-Haq later tried to explain his remarks by saying he was only talking about the kind of events that lead to terrorism, not inciting it. Meanwhile, a government resolution attacking the award was passed unanimously in Pakistan's lower assembly.

Muhammad Abdul Bari, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said Muslims in Britain would regard the award as the "final insult" from Tony Blair before he leaves office. (The queen makes most of the picks for these kinds of awards based on suggestions from the prime minister.)

Dealing with Va. School's Total 'No Touching' Policy

It's not too often that stories in the news affect me in a personal way -- as in, address a situation that I'm going to face -- but this one does.

Next year, my son, who just finished sixth grade, will attend Kilmer Middle School, which has a great reputation for scholastic excellence in Fairfax County, Va. Its reputation makes me happy. But today's Washington Post has a story about Kilmer's no-touch policy. And I do mean NO touch. This, I'm not so sure about.

All touching -- not only fighting or inappropriate touching -- is against the rules at Kilmer Middle School in Vienna. Hand-holding, handshakes and high-fives? Banned. The rule has been conveyed to students this way: "NO PHYSICAL CONTACT!!!!!"

The school says that the policy keeps "crowded hallways and lunchrooms safe and orderly, and ensures that all students are comfortable." The principal says she has seen handshakes used as gang signs. In a very culturally diverse school -- and that's sure true of the area where I live -- kids' families have different ideas of what's appropriate, school officials say.

I understand it's hard to make a policy work for 1,100 kids in such a diverse school, but there's a little too much "Another brick in the wall" mentality here for me. My son always has been physically demonstrative, and my wife and I have encouraged it. I feel odd telling him he can't pat a friend on the back, or poke a friend teasingly, or even shake hands with a new student or adult he's meeting at Kilmer.

I'm also not sure if a total ban is the best way to teach kids to respect other people's cultures. But, then again, I'm not teaching a class with so many kids from different backgrounds. We'll just have to wait and see.

No More Snap, Crackle and Pop on Saturday Mornings

Ah, the glory of "Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs." That, of course, was the name of the incredibly sugary cereal that Calvin would eat with Hobbes on Saturday mornings while watching cartoons on the boob tube. Calvin described the cereal as "tasty, lip-smacking, crunchy-on-the-outside, chewy-on-the-inside, and they don't have a single natural ingredient or essential vitamin to get in the way of that rich, fudgy taste."

But the days of advertising the Sugar Bombs' real-life counterparts on Saturday mornings seem to be coming to an end.

Kellogg Co. announced last week that it will cut the sugar, fat and sodium content of food it markets to children under 12: no more than 200 calories per serving, no trans fat and no more than 2 grams of saturated fat, along with limits on sugar, according to WebMD. Kellogg will market only the brands that meet the nutritional criteria. A third of the cereals it markets to children in the U.S. fall outside the standards, Kellogg says.

The announcement, part of the Children's Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative to fight childhood obesity, is the first really big shot fired in a race by companies like McDonald's and Hershey's to "beat a July 18 deadline to announce responsible-marketing pledges of their own at a government kids'-obesity forum," Advertising Age reports. But Elizabeth Whelan writes in the New York Post that Kellogg has sold out and that even presweetened cereal can be a good source of nutrition for kids.

Kellogg's new criteria produce some weird results. Rice Krispies, for instance, miss the cut because of sodium levels (Salt in breakfast cereal? Gross), but Frosted Flakes are OK. I can see that this will take a while for parents to figure out.

Does Your Internet Connection Seem Slow?

If you're noticing slowdowns while online, the culprit could be "bandwidth (or traffic) shaping." Most internet service providers don't like to talk about it, but it's the most recent way of dealing with people using a lot of bandwidth during peak periods.

When we old timers were on the 'Net back in the early '90s, we were mostly sending text e-mails or looking for text documents with Gopher. It all seemed very exciting at the time -- of course, we also thought Ross Perot was exciting. But these days, online users want to watch a YouTube video while accessing e-mail, sending instant messages and talking on the digital phone, all at the same time.

It's a lot for one little twisted copper wire to handle on a DSL connection -- but it can be a bigger problem for a cable company if 200 people in your neighborhood are all using the same fiber-fed broadband connection at the same time. Thus, we have bandwidth shaping, as Internet expert Bill Thompson explains in this BBC article.

"They do this because they have a limited capacity to deliver to 100 or 200 homes, and if everybody's using the internet at the same time then the whole thing starts to get congested. Before that happens they cut back on the heavy users."

Broadbandreports.com has posted an e-mail that a Time Warner customer says he received this month, detailing how his Road Runner service is going to handle bandwidth hogs.

So here's my question: ISPs are always trying to get you to pay extra for premium services so you can have more bandwidth. Does this now mean that by purchasing this kind of package, you open yourself up to being virtually slapped on the wrist for your 'Net habits?

June 15, 2007

Loose Lips Sink Lebanese Anchorwoman

For this week's last call, we turn to Lebanese TV.

I've been around radio and TV mics often enough to know that, just because you think you're not on the air, that doesn't mean your microphone has been turned off. I once accidentally turned on the mics of several CBC radio hosts while they were engaged in a rather spirited round of profanities, for instance. Only the actions of a quick-thinking engineer saved us all from disaster.

But a loose tongue -- and the worldwide effect of YouTube -- did prove disastrous for one Lebanese anchorwoman.

Reporting on the assassination of Lebanese parliamentarian Walid Eido, the anchorwoman, who thought her mic was off, wondered why it had taken so long to kill him and speculated about who would be next. The video clip of her comments and laughter made it to YouTube and sparked outrage around the world.

NBN, the station where she worked, announced today that they had fired her and a colleague for the comments.

We'll see you Monday. I'm off to enjoy Father's Day. Here's a humor piece I wrote for The Christian Science Monitor a few years ago about being a dad. All lessons learned still apply. Don't forget to e-mail newsblog@npr.org if you see a good idea.

How Much Power Did Bush Give Himself in Emergencies?

My father, who worked in politics for decades, once said to me, "Always be suspicious of anything a politician does that doesn't include a press release." Now, a new directive that President Bush signed quietly has raised questions on both sides of the political fence about how much unchecked power the president has given himself in times of emergency.

The directive Bush signed in May outlines a new plan for what would happen in the U.S. in the event of a "catastrophic" national emergency. Charlie Savage of The Boston Globe, one of the few reporters to write about the document, notes that the new plan -- which replaces a Clinton-era document -- moves disaster planning from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to officials inside the White House. (Savage is a great reporter who last year won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for his coverage of how Bush used signing statements to bypass provisions of laws he didn't like.)

The White House defended the lack of notice about the directive by saying that after the Sept. 11 attack, "the American public needs no explanation of such plans."

Savage reports that "specialists at both the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, and the American Civil Liberties Union said they have taken calls and e-mails from people who are worried about what the new policy may portend." The biggest concern seems to be that the document doesn't discuss "consulting Congress about when to invoke emergency powers -- or when to turn them off."

Homeland security and legal specialists point out that America has had a "doomsday response" dating back to the Cold War. But some legal experts say the White House needs to be more specific about two major points: What circumstances would trigger implementation of the plan, and what legal limits does the White House recognize on its own emergency powers?

California GOP Fills Key Post with Canadian, Eh

If you've got a really tough job to fill, and you just can't find the right American, there's only one thing to do -- hire a Canadian. Beauty, eh.

That's just what the California Republican Party has done. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the GOP hired Albertan Christopher Matthews for the post of state deputy political director "through a coveted H-1B visa, a program favored by Silicon Valley tech firms that is under fire for displacing skilled American workers."

Matthews was hired for the job by Michael Kamburowski, an Australian, who is the state GOP's chief operations officer. (Although Kamburowski is a permanent U.S. resident in the process of obtaining American citizenship, he can't vote either.) And with so much in the news these days about immigration, it didn't take long for critics to point out that it makes state GOP officials seem like a bunch of hosers -- saying they couldn't find an American for the job after many Republicans have been critical of businesses that say they need to hire Mexican immigrants because Americans don't want the jobs.

While, on one hand, it would be hypocritical of me to knock the choice -- I am, after all, from the Great White North myself (although I became an American citizen in 2000) -- on the other hand, it does seem a bit of a stretch to hire a Canadian to help run part of a political operation in a state (and country) where he or she can't even vote.

1:14 PM ET | 06-15-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

Navy College Professor: Iraq Will Plague U.S. for Years

Is the Iraq War lost?

Christopher J. Fettweis, an assistant professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, believes it is, and he argues its aftermath will create a new Vietnam-like syndrome in the American people. He writes in the Los Angeles Times:

The American people seem to understand, however -- and historians will certainly agree -- that the war itself was a catastrophic mistake. It was a faulty grand strategy, not poor implementation. The Bush administration was operating under an illusion, one that is further discredited with every car bombing of a crowded Baghdad marketplace and every Iraqi doctor who packs up his family and flees his country.

Fettweis believes that the aftermath of the war will throw "American politics into a downward spiral of bitter recriminations the likes of which it has not seen in a generation." (For his part, President Bush has long believed that history will vindicate his actions in Iraq.)

Fettweis' piece has generated an extraordinary amount of comment in the blogosphere.

For example, on the Veterans Blog at the Armed Forces Mutual Benefit Association site, Joe Dougherty calls Fettweis' piece "a very uninformed opinion" and says he hates to think that "he is spreading this rubbish around."

But a posting on the liberal Daily Kos agrees with Fettweis, writing "Iraq was a war that didn't have to be. Now [it's] going to take a massive effort to avoid another war at home."

I Want a Guy Just Like the Guy Who Married Dear Old Mom

Ah, Father's Day. The day when the children who we spend so much time, effort ... and money ... raising, reward us dads with showers of affection and attention. Basically, they let us sleep in on Sunday.

But I've learned that there is a better way to determine how your children feel about you. At least, how your grown-up daughters feel about you. Just take a close look at that guy she's with. (Yeah, I know, you never trusted him from the get-go.)

Women who get along really well with their dads are more likely to seek out guys who look a lot like them. But if that father-daughter connection isn't strong, or if it's a negative one, then they will probably will go after somebody who doesn't look like dad at all. Those findings are from a study that's being published in the July issue of the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour.

Apparently, if you're a good dad, that gets imprinted in your daughters' brains, so they look for a guy who looks like you, thinking, "That old guy did a good job with kids, maybe this guy will, too." But that's about as far as it goes, say the researchers.

"If the guy was a carbon copy of your dad, that would be creepy ... If somebody feels too much like family, you can't see them in a romantic way," explains [Lynda Boothroyd, co-author of the study and psychologist at Durham University in the United Kingdom]. "But a certain degree of familiarity, combined with (the mate) being different in other respects, is actually very, very attractive."

June 14, 2007

A Video Mrs. Obama Might Not Want to Watch

Watch Obama Girl insert herself into the Obama campaign.

YouTube

The most risque thing I had ever seen in politics -- until today -- was when a candidate for Liberal Party leader in Nova Scotia had a bevy of girls dressed a la Robert Palmer's video for "Addicted to Love" standing behind him, complete with fake guitars, during his speech to the convention. He lost.

But now he's got some competition: Obama Girl, a rather comely young woman singing in this YouTube video about her love for Barack Obama in a way that leaves little about her intentions to the imagination.

If I ever ran for politics and somebody made a video like this about me, I don't think I would ever let my significant other see it.

BarelyPolitical.com also offers some, er, interesting deleted shots from the video. Obama Girl even has her own MySpace page and blog ... of course.

But Obama Girl is just make-believe, a gimmick. ABC News reports that the song was performed by Leah Kauffman, a student at Temple University in Philadelphia, who wrote the lyrics with advertising executive Ben Relles and the music with Rick Friedrich. Actress and model Amber Lee Ettinger lip-synched for the video.

As Frank James observes at The Swamp, just imagine if YouTube had been around in the days of John Kennedy and Bill Clinton's presidencies.

U.S. May Investigate British Arms Deal with Saudi Arabia

Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan

Patrick Kovarik/AFP/Getty Images

British Prime Minister Tony Blair is having one heck of a last month on the job.

He got raked over the coals in Britain for his "feral beast" speech about the media on Tuesday. And The Guardian has been reporting that British arms company BAE Systems made secret payments to a Saudi prince as part of a huge arms deal -- payments that reportedly were made with the knowledge and assistance of the British Ministry of Defense.

Now The Guardian reports that Washington sources say it's "99 percent certain" that the U.S. Department of Justice will launch a criminal investigation of the company under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The newspaper had reported that a U.S. bank was used for the secret transactions.

The sources say US officials were particularly concerned by the allegations in the Guardian that UK Ministry of Defence officials actively colluded in the payments. One said: "The image of all these Bob Cratchits in Whitehall sitting at their high stools processing invoices from Bandar has been a startling one to us."

Bob Cratchits ... ouch. It also could be a tricky investigation for the White House, considering the well-documented close ties between Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the man at the center of the payments scandal, and the Bush family.

Bandar says all the money went to the Saudi government and not to him personally, and that The Guardian reports are "a pinnacle of slander and lies."

The Times of London reports that British officials in Washington are "collectively holding their breath" to see if the U.S. will investigate.

Blair told the British House of Commons this week that he was "perfectly happy to take responsibility" for a government office's decision to end a past investigation of BAE's Saudi deal. That may be something that he comes to regret later if new investigations reveal the deal to be as unseemly as it now appears.

3:16 PM ET | 06-14-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

A Flip of the Coin for Laura Bush

First lady Laura Bush

Volker Hartmann/AFP/Getty Images

Unlike the old days of our Mixed Signals blog, it's not my bailiwick to write about stuff that happens in-house here at NPR. But this story is so delicious, my boss gave me permission to pass it along.

NPR, like most media outlets, can be a pretty competitive place. We have a lot of good shows and good journalists here, and often they want to work on the same story when a great one comes along. This happened Wednesday when we learned that we could have an interview with first lady Laura Bush. Both of our flagship shows, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, wanted it.

Well, there were senior management meetings, surveys on audience ratings and demographics were consulted, negotiations between shows lasted into the wee small hours ...

OK, I just made that up.

Actually, it was a coin flip. Chris Turpin, executive producer of All Things Considered, called tails, and thus was another great moment in NPR journalism decided. (The show plans to talk to her sometime next week.)

You oughta see how we pick who gets to go work in Baghdad ...

Tight Vote Looms on Mass. Gay Marriage Amendment

Back to the legal theme, an important vote could happen today in my old home state of Massachusetts.

A proposal to allow residents to vote on an amendment that would decide the future of gay marriage in the state is hanging by one, maybe two votes, according to The Boston Globe.

If pro-gay marriage forces are able to find the two votes to defeat the amendment that would put the issue to voters in 2008, it would mean that gay marriage is here to stay in the Bay State. And with House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi, Senate President Therese Murray and Gov. Deval Patrick -- all strong supporters of gay marriage -- pushing very hard, gay marriage proponents are feeling pretty good about their chances.

The Globe also says, however, that if it looks like they can't get those votes today, the legislative leaders will delay a vote on the amendment until later this term. The amendment has to be approved by 50 of the state's 200 lawmakers in consecutive legislative terms before it can go on the ballot. Anti-gay marriage forces won the first round last year, getting 62 votes. But the November election saw several anti-gay marriage proponents defeated, and pressure from the leadership has shifted several other votes.

The decision could have national ramifications. If the amendment goes on the 2008 ballot, it would likely mean the return of gay marriage as a hot potato in the presidential election. If the amendment is defeated, it means that gay marriage supporters can try to build on their success.

The state's Constitutional Convention starts at 1 p.m. EDT. We'll keep an eye on what happens.

(Tom's Update: The proposed constitutional ban on gay marriage was defeated by a vote of 151-45 today. This means that the amendment will not be on the 2008 ballot in the state. "In Massachusetts today, the freedom to marry is secure," Gov. Deval Patrick told reporters after the vote.)

And Now, a Man Dressed in a Crocodile Suit

OK, I know that TV naturalists are always trying do something, well, dangerous to get ratings. (I can just hear the producers saying, "Mr. Corwin, can you pick up that extremely deadly snake in your bare hands one more time?")

But getting dressed up as a crocodile in a look-a-like suit smeared with hippo dung (the latest in croc fashion, I guess) to get close to an almost 20-foot example of the real McCoy?

That's what zoologist Brady Barr did for a TV special for National Geographic, The Daily Telegraph reports. "People may think I'm mad," he says, "but this is the only way I can get close to the creatures without scaring them. Trouble is, I'm more scared than the crocs."

Well, I would hope so. Barr, who lives near Washington, D.C., says he hates being compared to the late Steve Irwin, also known for his crocodiling ways. But one has to note that when you're crawling into a den of wild crocs in Africa to attach a monitoring device to one of their tails, you risk becoming the latest naturalist to die on the job. (The link to The Daily Telegraph above includes a short video of Barr sneaking up on the crocodiles. Rather him than me.)

9:25 AM ET | 06-14-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

The Amazing Disappearing Watch Trick

Watch the exculpatory watch video.

YouTube

OK, I'm back in the blogging saddle today after my day in court, where I went as a witness against the guy who took my wife's purse out of our car about a month ago. Many thanks to JJ Sutherland for manning the fort while I was gone. I can't blog about the court stuff yet, but as I was pondering my own situation Wednesday, I saw this story about what looked like a fellow victim of crime: President Bush.

Those cheering crowds that greeted him in Albania last week appeared to be after more than his smiles and waves. A clip of an Albanian TV news segment, appearing on YouTube, seemed to show that, as Bush pressed the flesh, a hand grabbed his arm and stole his wristwatch.

The wristwatch is clearly visible on Bush's arm as the segment starts, but then at about 56 seconds into the video, a hand grabs Bush's arm and the watch disappears.

But NBC offered a video, filmed by its own crew in Albania (and also available on YouTube), that shows Bush removing the $50 Timex and putting it in his pocket. (Bush has even shown it to photographers since then to prove he still has it, calling the speculation "ludicrous.")

The reputation of the people of Albania, it would appear, is safe.

9:19 AM ET | 06-14-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

June 13, 2007

A Pearl Among Swine

Watch Paul Potts Perform

YouTube

OK, maybe I've been away for too long, and ordinarily my cynicism is worn on my sleeve, but I find this absolutely amazing. On "Britain's Got Talent," a spinoff of "America's Got Talent," they have discovered something truly remarkable. Which is surprising in a show judged by Simon Cowell of "American Idol" and featuring, according to the the Scottish newspaper The Daily Record:

"A piano-playing pig, a monkey puppet miming to Michael Jackson and a flaming knife-wielding Scot dressed as a Native American..."

It's the kind of show that seems to be one more sure sign of the apocalypse. As Cowell himself says in the show, "It says a lot about the world today when I'm enjoying a monkey puppet more than Michael Jackson."

But it also says a lot about the world when you see a pudgy Welsh cell phone salesman with bad teeth open his mouth and out comes something magical and moving. Leave all prejudgment at the door.

- JJ Sutherland

Seriously, It Just Keeps Giving

Watch Seth Rogan and the cast of "Superbad" talk about Paris Hilton.

DoubleViking

OK, I honestly wasn't going to do any more Paris today, but then men's entertainment site DoubleViking had to post this video of actor Seth Rogen's take on the whole controversy.

The best part is at the end.

- JJ Sutherland

4:12 PM ET | 06-13-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

They Still Walk Among Us, 60 Years On

Maj. Jesse Marcel from the Roswell Army Air Field with debris found 75 miles northwest of Roswell, N.M., in 1947.

U.S. Air Force/AFP/Getty Images

It all began in Roswell, N.M.

In 1947, a rancher found some strange debris while checking on his sheep. On July 8, a military press release said a crashed "flying disk" had been recovered. Of course, the military quickly changed its tune, saying it was just a weather balloon.

Since then, Roswell has become ground zero for alien enthusiasts, conspiracy theorists, supposed abductees, and just about everyone else who thinks that the truth is out there. This year, from July 5-8, that truth will feature a band with an alien drummer, a costume parade, a carnival, skateboard and BMX stunts, oh, and, of course, those conspiracy theorists and supposed alien abductees. It's all part of the "Amazing Roswell UFO Festival."

Some of my favorite scheduled talks: "UFO Secrecy & The Death of Marilyn Monroe," "Nephilim Stargates and the Return of the Watchers" and what seems to be a great pairing on Saturday morning: "Why The American Government Must and Will Tell The American People The Truth About UFOs," followed shortly by "Why The American Government Will Never Tell The American People The Truth About UFOs."

I am so in.

- JJ Sutherland

Paris Hilton: A Story that Keeps on Giving

I don't know about you, but I just cannot get enough of the Paris Hilton story. This was one hotly debated when I was in Baghdad a few weeks back. I mean, sure, we're covering a war, but there are the important stories. Perhaps Paris was thinking of me when, a few days ago, "She also said she was 'shocked' by the attention her case has received and suggested the public and media focus on 'more important things like the men and women serving our country in Iraq,'" according to The Associated Press.

Maybe she's just in Tony Blair's "feral beast" camp, but I can't seem to recall the last time Paris signed up for a USO tour, myself. Or a visit to the wounded. Or a fundraiser for strapped military families. Or any evidence she's even thought seriously about it. If she says it's important, you'd a think a little attention might be paid.

And Tuesday, allegations of Paris receiving special treatment surfaced again. Apparently, her parents went to visit her in jail and walked right past a line of people waiting to see their loved ones in lockup. One woman even says her visit with her husband was cut short so the Hiltons could see their daughter.

This is a story that just keeps on giving. The rich really are different from you and me.

- JJ Sutherland

Living in "Snitchtown"

Forbes has a cool package this week on 21st century cities. It talks about slums, defends sprawl, a whole bunch of stuff. But the piece I really found interesting is titled "Snitchtown" by Cory Doctorow. For those of you who don't know, he's one of those really smart, prolific guys that you almost want to hate because of it. He's the co-editor of BoingBoing, writes science fiction books, teaches college courses, is active in the Electronic Frontier Foundation, etc.

His piece in Forbes argues that there is a basic social contract to living in cities:

The key to living in a city and peacefully co-existing as a social animal in tight quarters is to set a delicate balance of seeing and not seeing. You take care not to step on the heels of the woman in front of you on the way out of the subway, and you might take passing note of her most excellent handbag. But you don't make eye contact and exchange a nod. Or even if you do, you make sure that it's as fleeting as it can be.
Checking your mirrors is good practice even in stopped traffic, but staring and pointing at the schmuck next to you who's got his finger so far up his nostril he's in danger of lobotomizing himself is bad form--worse form than picking your nose, even.

That makes sense to me. I was riding the subway this morning and sat next to a large man. The seats were small enough that we were pressed up against each other, leg to leg, which in almost any other circumstance would have been uncomfortably intimate. But we successfully ignored each other's presence: I with my newspaper, he with his Spanish Bible. We were in separate realities, a shared social convention that lets us ride the train each day.

But I disagree with Doctorow when he argues that closed-circuit television cameras violate this agreed-upon social contract:

Ubiquitous and demanding, CCTVs don't have any visible owners. They ... occur. They exist in the passive voice, the "mistakes were made" voice: "The camera recorded you."

Doctorow goes on to point out that these cameras are anything but effective: everyone ignores them, criminals go uncaught and the cameras only serve to violate our privacy. While I also think the cameras accomplish very little, I guess I see the nature of privacy itself changing. With recording equipment and storage getting cheaper and cheaper, it's inevitable that basically just about everything you do will be caught by some recording device and be available on the Web. Some folks are even trying to do it themselves, a trend that some are calling "Life Caching" -- storing everything you do, see and listen to.

Privacy, in my mind, will soon be protected not because it's not being recorded, but because everything is being recorded by everyone, including you. Your privacy will exist in plain sight, along with everyone else's, and be just as lost in the morass of information. Call it the "Purloined Letter" theory of privacy.

- JJ Sutherland

Samarra Mosque Bombed Again

The destroyed shrine of the Askariya mosque is seen today in the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad.

Getty Images

(Note from Tom: JJ Sutherland is filling in for the rest of today. See you tomorrow.)

Everyone pretty much agrees on when Iraq's civil war began. In February of last year, al-Qaida types blew up the famous golden dome of the Askariya mosque in Samarra. It's one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam, serving as the mausoleum for the 10th and 11th imams. (I'll forbear the lecture on the imams and just point you to this Wikipedia article.)

After that bombing, the sectarian killings went wild for a year. Fifty to 100 bodies a day turned up on the streets of Baghdad alone. They were bound, blindfolded and shot in the head. Many of them showed signs of torture, the electric drill being a favorite. It was this kind of mass sectarian bloodshed that really sent the country over the edge for a while.

And today, the mosque was bombed again, and, understandably, people are freaked. I just got off the phone with NPR's Jamie Tarabay in Baghdad. She says that the two minarets of the mosque, the most remarkable things remaining standing, are gone. A curfew has been put in place in Baghdad; no one knows for how long. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki went on TV and said that everyone responsible for protecting the holy shrine has been arrested.

And that's one interesting question: Exactly how was this allowed to happen, as there were numerous security forces tasked with protecting the mosque?

Jamie says that Baghdad is incredibly tense. The first reaction of everyone was to go home and hunker down, fearing the worst. One Sunni mosque has already been set on fire. She says a massive gun battle broke out in the city between two ministerial convoys; it's not known exactly who they were, but it's being seen as a sign of just how on edge everyone is.

Everyone, including radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, is calling for restraint, and some members of his Mehdi Army actually went out to protect Sunni mosques in the southern city of Basra. But it remains to be seen whether the death squads will once again go out in force.

As a good Iraqi friend of mine says often when he tells me of the latest attacks there, "The fun never stops."

- JJ Sutherland

11:31 AM ET | 06-13-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

Reports Slam Actions of U.S., Israel and Palestinians

A newly leaked report by the former UN envoy to the Middle East criticizes many of the main actors in the region, including Israel, the Palestinians, the United States and the United Nations itself.

The "End of Mission Report" by former UN envoy Alvaro de Soto, a Peruvian diplomat, is a condemnation of the actions of the United States and Israel in particular. The Guardian, which received a copy of the confidential document, reports that de Soto warns that U.S. pressure has "pummeled into submission" the United Nations' role as an impartial negotiator in the region.

Reuters, which also saw the document, reports that while de Soto sharply criticized the Islamist Hamas movement for its charter advocating the destruction of Israel and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas for ineffectual leadership, he said Israeli policies seemed "perversely designed to encourage the continued action by Palestinian militants."

But de Soto also took aim at his bosses at the UN for their attitudes towards the U.S. and Israel: "... a premium is been put on good relations with the U.S. and improving the UN's relationship with Israel ... I don't honestly think the UN does Israel any favors at all by not speaking frankly to it about its failings regarding the peace process ..."

Meanwhile, Ha'aretz reports that a new Human Rights Watch report condemns the Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah, accusing them of committing "serious violations of international humanitarian law, in some cases amounting to war crimes" in the violence that has spread in Gaza in the past week.

The group also criticized Islamic Jihad and the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades for using a jeep bearing the letters "TV" to attack an Israeli outpost, calling it a "serious violation of the laws of war."

(Note from Tom: OK, folks, I'm signing off for a while. I have to go to court today. (I didn't do anything wrong -- I'm a witness). JJ Sutherland will be guest blogging today.)

9:56 AM ET | 06-13-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

June 12, 2007

Blair: Online Media Damaging British Political Life

Outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair slammed journalism on the Internet today, saying that, compared to traditional journalism, online news "can be even more pernicious, less balanced, more intent on the latest conspiracy theory multiplied by five."

While Blair admitted that he had contributed to the deterioration of his relationship with the British media by "spinning" too much in his early days as prime minister, The Daily Telegraph reports that Blair now believes that senior figures in public life have become "totally demoralized" by what he sees as the completely unbalanced nature of reporting.

Blair also backed the idea of an online journalism regulator and said he wanted the distinction between comment and news to be reasserted.

Martin Kettle of The Guardian says Blair's speech is "a pretty truthful account of some of the problems in the way politics and the media interact in Britain in the early 21st century."

But Emily Bell, also of The Guardian, says Blair needs to fix himself first and that he just doesn't get the Web or the British media. Bell writes, "The people who are, in my limited experience, most hostile to the idea of the democratizing effect of the web are journalists and politicians, both sets much keener on central [control] and power than they would care to admit."

'Enhanced Interrogation Techniques' a la Monty Python

Now and then, you find something online that just begs to be seen by a wider audience.

The subject of this YouTube video is a sobering one: "enhanced interrogation techniques." But it's sent up in a way that shows how silly a theme can become when it's repeated again and again. (Hat tip to my buddy Deborah Bloom for sending this my way.)

Once you've finished annoying that guy in the cubicle next to you with your laughing, you can find a more serious take on the subject in a 2005 ABC News story that looked at the methods reportedly used by the CIA.

The Candidate's Guide to Manipulating YouTube

So, your candidate has made a serious flub while giving a speech. It's been captured on video by your opponent. Suddenly, you find that the video is making the rounds on YouTube. What do you do?

Why, you "flood the zone," adding dozens and dozens of other videos about your candidate that will confuse YouTube users, who can be counted on to have a "slight case of undiagnosed ADD (attention deficit disorder). If they don't find what they're looking for seconds after the search has begun, they'll tire and give up the search."

That's the advice from GOP consultant David All, who offers "Five Essential Tips for the YouTube Campaign Trail" on his Web site. Other All advice includes making sure your campaign has a two-camera strategy: one for your opponent, to get everything he or she says on tape, and one for your own candidate, so you can add context to a clip being used against him or her.

However, Ben Smith at Politico argues that while All's advice about flooding the zone might work on YouTube's site, it won't affect the blogs and other Web sites that link directly to a damaging video.

For instance, it wouldn't help much for a video linked to on several blogs and Web sites that shows former Sen. Fred Thompson in a campaign debate several years ago in Tennessee. In the clip he states that, while he supports many of the limitations that states have placed on abortion, the federal government and the courts should not use abortion as a political football or turn women and their doctors into criminals. It will be interesting to see how Thompson's yet-to-be-officially-declared campaign will deal with the video's appearance and its potential effect on his standing with conservatives.

11:37 AM ET | 06-12-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

What to Read Before You Go to War

If you're curious to see what Marines being sent overseas are reading, the Small Wars Journal blog offers this list, courtesy of Lt. Gen. James Mattis, commander of the Marine Corps Forces Central Command, of what's required and recommended.

The list offers a variety of viewpoints. Those who prefer a neoconservative flavor will find books and articles by writers like Max Boot, Robert Kaplan and Bernard Lewis, who argue it's important to see America as an empire and discuss what that means for its position in the world. They also warn about what they see as a clash of civilizations between the West and Islam.

For a more nuanced view of Islam and the Middle East, the list includes Amin Maalouf's The Crusades Through Arab Eyes and John Esposito's What Everyone Needs to Know about Islam. Also listed is former NPR reporter Sarah Chayes' The Punishment of Virtue, which details why she believes the U.S. made a tragic blunder in Afghanistan by not having a concept of how to create a civil society after a military invasion.

There is also plenty of good material about heroism and warfare, as well as tactical manuals that make for heavy but absorbing reading.

If I could add books to the list, I would include Michael Herr's haunting Vietnam-era Dispatches, the best war book I've ever read. And then there's But Not for the Fuehrer by Helmut Jung, a former German solider whose 2004 book offers an eye-opening look at why ordinary soldiers commit terrible atrocities.

So let's open this up for discussion. Any other books you folks would like to see on such a list? Or recommendations for ones that are already there?

June 11, 2007

Multimillionaire: Environmental Hero or 'Heritage' Thief?

After writing about U.S. diplomacy in the last post, here's a look at how an individual American is being received for his "good deeds" in South America.

Douglas Tompkins is a man who changed the way America dresses -- not once but twice, according to a 2004 U.S. News & World Report story. As a ski bum, he started The North Face, and after selling that business in 1968, he helped his then-wife, Susie, start the Esprit clothing label.

The Associated Press reports that Tompkins has used his wealth to buy huge areas of land in Chile and Argentina, saying his purpose is to protect it. In Argentina, for instance, he bought half a million acres of the Esteros del Ibera, a marshland full of wildlife. He has left the area untouched and says he eventually plans to turn it over to the government as a land sanctuary -- the same promise he made about his land in Chile. (The government there gave his land sanctuary status in 1995.)

But local politicians, business leaders and even farmers are complaining that he has stolen their land and heritage. Conservative Chilean senator Antonio Horvath asked in an article in the New Statesman earlier this year how Americans would feel if Horvath bought a huge section of land in Florida and then told Floridians they couldn't go there. "I think the U.S. would kick me right out of there."

Tompkins told AP that he intends to keep his promise and return the land to both governments to be preserved. He will, however, hold onto it for now "as a very good example of what private conservation can do." Maybe the locals would appreciate Tompkins more in the meantime if he offered to help them start their own brand of brightly colored, easy-to-wear clothing...

State Department Gets New Public Diplomacy Strategy

It took 18 months and some prodding from other agencies, but the State Department finally has a new strategy for communications and public diplomacy. The new plan is intended to help State Department diplomats around the world provide a unified message about U.S. policies and programs, something critics say has been lacking.

The new strategy identifies a need for the U.S. to take advantage of every medium to get its message across, including using blogs and other social media. It also says that the U.S. has to get diplomats as much airtime as possible in as many places as possible to talk about American policies and not be reticent about doing it.

Rena Pederson of the State Department told me more than 30 groups that work in diplomatic communication had a hand in creating the plan, which is intended to be a "living document" that will change as needs change. She also said the document was kept short so it would be used regularly in the field.

J. Michael Waller at PoliticalWarfare.org (who provided the original link to the document, which Pederson confirmed is authentic), gives the new plan a "gentleman's C." Waller, the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Professor of International Communication at the Institute of World Politics, notes that in grad school, anything below a B- is a failure, but he adds he might change his grade after rereading the document.

However, Price Floyd, a former State Department media director, quit recently after 17 years because he thinks the department's approach has been misguided. Floyd told On the Media that the department needs to spend less time on public relations and more time on two areas in particular: "good deeds," like the kind seen after the earthquake in Pakistan, and arranging exchanges to bring people to the U.S. and send Americans abroad. (The new plan does stress the need for more exchanges of this kind.)

The Bush administration has often been accused of setting aside diplomacy in favor of a military approach. This new plan could mark a major change in the way the administration views the use of soft power to rebuild America's image, which has deteriorated in many places around the world.

1:44 PM ET | 06-11-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

Real Madrid Says It Wants Beckham to Forget L.A.

David Beckham, the newest "savior" of U.S. soccer, is more in demand these days than a ticket behind home plate at Fenway for a Red Sox-Yankees playoff game.

The English soccer player, whose decision to join the Los Angeles Galaxy of Major League Soccer generated all kinds of headlines in January, is making them again as he prepares for what will be his final game with Real Madrid of Spain.

The president of Real Madrid, Ramon Calderon, alarmed American soccer fans when he suggested that Beckham's contract with Los Angeles includes an escape clause and said that he would do everything possible to convince Beckham to remain in sunny Spain. Alexi Lalas, president of the Galaxy, said that's baloney and that Calderon should just focus on this weekend's Real Madrid game, in which the team will play for the league championship.

To me, it all feels like a way to remind people that Beckham is coming to America. Beckham and his wife, Victoria, seem to want to be L.A. royalty so bad it oozes out of them. (Actually, Beckham, who has been enjoying a career resurgence as of late, might get to be real royalty, if rumors of his potential knighthood are true.)

11:34 AM ET | 06-11-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

In the Video Gaming Battle, Microsoft May Have Just Blinked

Believe it or not, moms have just become the prime targets for the video gaming world.

Bloomberg reported over the weekend that Microsoft, following the lead of Nintendo, has decided to focus more on moms and the "casual gamer" -- basically, anyone who isn't a 15-to-34-year-old male whose sole desire in life is to destroy as many aliens, spaceships, enemy soldiers, etc., as possible, without eating or going to the bathroom for days at a time. Microsoft might even drop its price on the Xbox.

Why this shift in marketing? Because nothing focuses the mind of a business executive like the success of a rival. It's not just the wireless Wii that has vaulted Nintendo to the top of the gaming world: it's Nintendo's decision to go after all those casual gamers.

Nintendo has been particularly successful with its sports-oriented games. Using a wireless Wii stick and physical actions to control what's happening onscreen has enabled family members who might not have the thumb-button coordination of younger members to hold their own. The result is that its console outsells both Xbox and Sony's PlayStation 3 (which is in serious trouble) by large margins.

As a parent of four kids who love their PlayStation 2, I cheer Nintendo's effort to create games that appeal to the entire family. Albert Penello, director of Xbox global platform marketing, said he realizes his company also needs to start reaching out to this demographic or risk being "pigeonholed as a hard-core machine." If that fear of being pigeonholed means my family can eventually get more use out of an Xbox than our PS2, I would be more than happy to switch.

June 8, 2007

Last Curtain Call: Grey's Star Not Coming Back

As we wrap things up for the week, we note that actor Isaiah Washington has made his final curtain call on ABC's very popular "Grey's Anatomy."

TV Guide broke the story Thursday night that Washington would not be asked back for the show's next season.

Washington made headlines several months ago when he used an anti-gay slur while denying to the media that he had used the word to insult a fellow cast member. Washington later apologized and said he was going to seek counseling.

Following the announcement that he wouldn't return, Washington issued a statement saying he was "mad as hell and not going to take it any more" -- the famous line uttered by Peter Finch's character in the award-winning film "Network."

Personally, I think if Washington had followed the advice of fellow cast member Katherine Heigl, he might have been OK. "He just needs to stop talking," she told Access Hollywood at one point.

We'll be back on Monday. Remember, if you see anything interesting, e-mail us at newsblog@npr.org.

Reports: Saudi Prince Got More Than $1 Billion in Deal

The BBC and The Guardian report today that a British arms company secretly paid more than $1.5 billion over a decade to Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan in connection with a defense contract with the Gulf nation that was the largest in British history.

The reports claim BAE paid the money with the knowledge of British Defense Department officials -- despite their denials that they knew of such an arrangement. The payments were written into the arms contract in secret annexes, described as "support services," according to BBC TV's Panorama.

The Guardian reports that a series of payments was channeled through a U.S. bank in Washington to an account controlled by Bandar, who was the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. for more than 20 years. Bandar has denied that the payments were improper and said that BAE acted lawfully at all times.

The War In Context blog writes that Americans need to pay attention to this story because: " ... BAE North America has directors including the likes of 9/11 Commission co-chairman, Lee Hamilton. With its open access to the Pentagon, BAE should be seen as a supra-national corporate entity that can strut through the corridors of political power with supreme confidence ... BAE is certainly one of the big winners in the war on terrorism."

Last November, The Times of London reported that the Saudi government told British officials that if the Serious Fraud Office continued to investigate the arms deal, it would stop cooperating with British intelligence on terrorism issues and would end the deal, meaning the loss of thousands of British jobs. The Blair government stopped the investigation. The head of the SFO told The Guardian today that he also had made the decision to withhold information about the payments to the prince from an international anti-corruption investigation "to protect national security."

Gates to Replace Head of Joint Chiefs

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates says he will recommend Adm. Mike Mullen, currently the chief of naval operations, to replace Marine Gen. Peter Pace as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The Associated Press reports that Gates was originally going to recommend Pace for an additional two-year term but felt it would result in a "divisive Senate confirmation focusing on the Iraq War." Gates said he had talked with leaders of both parties and said the confirmation process for Pace would be about the past and not the future.

NPR reports that Mullen has served as naval chief of staff since 2005.

1:46 PM ET | 06- 8-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

Inquiry: CIA Had Secret Jails in Poland, Romania

A special inquiry has found the U.S. was imprisoning and interrogating some of its top terrorism suspects in jails in Poland and Romania between 2003 and 2005, and that top European leaders knew about it.

The Daily Telegraph reports that Dick Marty, who led the Council of Europe's inquiry, accuses Polish and Romanian authorities of being aware "at the highest levels" of secret CIA detention cells and says leaders of Germany and Italy tried to cover up their existence.

Marty's report notes, "What was previously just a set of allegations is now proven: large numbers of people have been abducted from various locations across the world and transferred to countries where they have been persecuted and where it is known that torture is common practice."

Marty, who says he has proof of his accusations, wrote that the U.S. picked Romania and Poland because they were "economically vulnerable, emerging from difficult transitional periods in their history, and dependent on U.S. support for their strategic development." Reuters provides a full brief on Marty's report.

Poland and Romania have repeatedly denied these allegations. But the European Union today called for leaders of the countries to "hold urgent, independent investigations into the allegations and ensure any victims were compensated."

Tom Update: The BBC reported this afternoon that the CIA has dismissed the Council of Europe report that alleged it ran secret prisons in Europe. The CIA called the report " biased and distorted, and that the agency had operated lawfully." President Bush admitted last year that the prisons existed overseas, but he did not say where the prisons were located.

Those Magnificent Men and Their Wireless Machines

It is the dawn of "WiTricity."

That's what a team of Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists are calling a power source that they have figured out how to use to wirelessly turn on a light bulb more than 7 feet away.

I love the story of how this invention came to be: The team leader, Professor Marin Soljacic, got the idea while standing in his pajamas, staring at his cell phone.

As he told the MIT News:

"It was probably the sixth time that month that I was awakened by my cell phone beeping to let me know that I had forgotten to charge it. It occurred to me that it would be so great if the thing took care of its own charging." To make this possible, one would have to have a way to transmit power wirelessly, so Soljacic started thinking about which physical phenomena could help make this wish a reality.

From small needs are great inventions created. This could mean the end of cords for laptops, cell phones, iPods, you name it.

It Seems That We'll Always Have Paris in the News

Paris Hilton arrives at a Los Angeles courthouse in May.

Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images

Even when they try to put Paris Hilton in a place where we can't really hear from her for a mere 23 days, she still turns it into a mega press event.

OK, so, the entire planet knows that Hilton went to a Los Angeles County jail on Sunday night, several days before she had to start serving a 23-day sentence for driving under the influence, apparently because she just decided to get it over with.

So Paris goes to the Big House. Well, it wasn't very big. And authorities kept her in a special unit for fears some of the other young ladies serving time might, er, make her life not so "simple." (This also cut down on the number of people Larry King could interview later.)

Then out of nowhere Thursday, we hear that she has been released from jail by the sheriff's department because of an unspecified medical condition (congestive boredom would be my guess) and was told she had to wear an ankle bracelet for the next 40 days and stay at home.

Some people defended this action. Allison Margolin, a defense attorney in L.A., wrote a commentary in the Los Angeles Daily News that said that Hilton had not received preferential treatment -- most low-level offenders only serve about 10 percent of their time before being released. I would not want to be her answering service today.

It looked like Paris had gotten away with it again -- but not so fast. People (and more importantly, the media, talk shows in particular) reacted more like the Unabomber had been freed -- they were furious. Local officials, realizing this made them look worse than a bad suit on Arnold Schwarzenegger, started condemning the sheriff department's decision.

Now, the judge who put her in jail wants her back in court today at 9 a.m. so he and Paris can have a little legal heart-to-heart.

Have faith, dear readers, we still might get our 23 days of Paris-free life yet.

(Update: Sure enough, the judge ordered Hilton back to jail this afternoon. Read more.)

June 7, 2007

Al-Hurra Fails in Bid for Additional Program Funding

Al-Hurra, the U.S.-run Arabic satellite channel designed to promote American values in the Middle East, felt the pinch this week -- a congressional panel denied its request for additional funding for new programming.

Joel Mowbray -- an outspoken critic of Al-Hurra's news director, Larry Register, for allowing spokesmen for Hamas and Hezbollah on the satellite channel -- writes at the conservative Power Line blog that this "sharp blow" came even though the funding request had been backed by Karen Hughes, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. Mowbray suggests that only Register's resignation will satisfy the congressional panel that oversees the channel's budget.

Jeb Koogler at the Moderate Voice blog takes issue with Mowbray's criticisms of Register and Al-Hurra, which he calls misleading. He says Mowbray makes it seem as if Al-Hurra "was successfully promoting democracy and supporting human rights until new, corrupt leadership suddenly made it all go astray." But that's not the case at all, Koogler writes.

A more accurate critique of the network would point out that al-Hurra has always been a failed venture at public diplomacy, it has never gained a sizable viewing audience, and it has never furthered the causes that we wish it would. Criticizing the new leadership as soft on Arab autocrats and Islamic extremism is to miss to point: that's the way it's always been.

It wasn't all bad news for Al-Hurra. A congressional staffer working for the House Foreign Operations Appropriations subcommittee said while it turned down the $14 million request, it approved $2.2 million for live streaming of Al-Hurra on the Web, as well an additional $2 million to hire a firm to provide English transcripts for some programming.

However, The Associated Press reports that the federal Broadcasting Board of Governors will ask for an outside review of Al-Hurra programming. The review will be carried out by "a university or other academic institution with experience in Middle Eastern affairs and journalism."

5:12 PM ET | 06- 7-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

Crime Novelist Fights Online Stalker in Court

The Internet can be a scary place sometimes. Ask the 18-year-old pole vaulter from California who has become an Internet celebrity based on one picture of her at a meet. Or people who have had their identities stolen. It's even scary for well-known people like crime novelist Patricia Cornwell.

The Boston Globe reports that her problem started in 2000 when Cornwell, then living in Richmond, Va., sued Leslie R. Sachs, who was putting stickers on his own books that hinted Cornwell copied his idea and plot. When a judge told him to remove the stickers, he "started a campaign of attacks, using various websites, against Cornwell and those he accuses of conspiring with her against him, including 'the infamous rogue judge' ... his own former lawyer, the Bush administration, the FBI, the media, unidentified thugs, US corporations, and the legal profession."

This week, another judge ordered Sachs to stop his online attacks.

Sachs, who is now in Europe, said in an e-mail to the Globe, "Even if you have to write phoney [sic] and biased articles to keep your job ... even if you feel you must kiss up to USA corporate gangsters to remain employed -- why are you taking such sadistic and Heinrich-Himmler-like pleasure in abusing a victim of those criminals?" Cornwell, who now lives in Massachusetts with her wife, is trying to get Internet service providers and search engines to help her counteract Sachs' attacks.

Cornwell's case is particularly unnerving because it shows how someone can use the Internet to defame a person and yet remain beyond the reach of authorities.

3:18 PM ET | 06- 7-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

Creationist Museum Director Sued by Australian Group

Last week, Kenneth Ham launched a $27 million museum designed to highlight the views of creationists. Now, he's being sued in Australia by the evangelical organization he helped set up and that helped him enter the U.S. evangelical movement two decades ago.

The Australian reports that the conflict revolves around a three-year power struggle between the Brisbane-based Creation Ministries International and Ham's U.S.-based group, Answers in Genesis -- in particular, over the Aussie organization's production of a creationist magazine that has 35,000 U.S. subscribers.

A report prepared for the Australian group by former New South Wales chief magistrate Clarrie Briese accuses the American organization of "unbiblical/unethical/unlawful behaviour" toward the Australian ministry, which Briese says was intended to force the Australian organization into bankruptcy.

Bartholomew's Notes on Religion blog offers some notes on the conflict. Ham and his organization have made no public comments on the lawsuit.

(Tom Update from Friday: Sometimes bad luck takes on a life of its own. Ken Ham's creationist museum has removed a short-film exhibit about Adam and Eve because the guy playing Adam has a rather risque past. The Associated Press reports that Eric Linden said he only playing a role.

"For the Creation Museum, I did what I did as an actor. It doesn't necessarily mean I believe in evolution or a believe in creation," Linden said. "I'm hired to get a point across. On the flip side, if I was hired to play a murderer, that doesn't mean I'd go out and kill somebody. It's make-believe."

Ironically enough, many of Ham's critics have made the same remark about his entire museum.)

Does Latest Al-Qaida Message Signal U.S. Attack?

The man who led the CIA hunt for Osama bin Laden from 1996 to 1999 believes that al-Qaida has signaled to the United States that it is about to launch another attack.

In an article for the Jamestown Foundation, where he is now a senior fellow, Michael Scheuer looks at the role of Adam Gadahn -- the American from California now known as Azzam al-Amriki (Azzam the American). Scheuer believes that Gadahn, while only a member of the al-Qaida media committee (who knew they even had one), has become the third most important public spokesman for the terrorist group, especially in its occasional messages meant for the American public.

Scheuer sees Gadahn's most recent video message, delivered not in the strident tones of bin Laden, but in the slang and catchphrases of an American, as a blunt warning from al-Qaida that time is up for Americans.

Gadahn's words also have a note of finality about them, as if he is saying there will be no more warnings from al-Qaida, and the choice for Americans is between surrender and domestic attack. Again, this is out of character for the rhetoric of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, and it suggests that they ordered Gadahn to make a last-warning to Americans before al-Qaida attacks inside the United States.

But Gadahn's "warnings" are just a list of "implacable demands" that al-Qaida knows will never be met. Scheuer compares them to the type of demands the Austro-Hungarian Empire made of Serbia in 1914 just before it attacked.

June 6, 2007

In 1492 ... the Polynesians Had Already Gotten Here?

OK, so we know that the Vikings were here before Columbus. And some believe the Chinese were here before Columbus. And now, thanks to some leftover chicken bones, researchers think the Polynesians were here before him, too.

LiveScience reports that chicken bones dating back to about a century before Columbus came to America were discovered at an archaeological site called El Arenal on the southern coast of Chile. Researchers believe the bones match a kind of chicken found in the Polynesian islands in the South Pacific.

"Chickens could not have gotten to South America on their own - they had to be taken by humans," said anthropologist Lisa Matisoo-Smith from the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Polynesia was first settled by sailors from mainland Southeast Asia about 3,000 years ago. But researchers aren't really sure which island the New World explorers might have come from -- the DNA sequence found in the chickens matches that of chickens found on several islands.

Experts: JFK Plot May Not Have Been Quite So 'Chilling'

We've seen this happen before. Authorities line up before a microphone and tell the assembled media throngs that a serious terrorist plot has just been averted. Words like "chilling," or "catastrophic" or "unthinkable devastation," are often used.

But on closer examination, it turns out to be not quite the chilling plot first imagined.

Now, some experts are questioning if the alleged plot to blow up fuel lines at New York's JFK International Airport was quite as dangerous as federal prosecutors made it out to be.

Newsday talks to Michael Greenberger, director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland. While Greenberger says the authorities were absolutely correct to pursue those accused of the plot, he also believes that "there's a pattern here of Justice Department attorneys overstating what they have."

In this case, none of the accused had any military training or had attended a terrorist training camp (hallmarks of those who actually carry out terrorist attacks from Timothy McVeigh to the London bombers). The plot was not close to being operational. And the man accused of being the mastermind, Russell Defreitas, is looking less like a criminal genius and more "hapless and episodically homeless," Newsday reports. (Anthony Kaufman of Huffington Post wonders why the headline for the story wasn't "Bombers not smart enough to blow up JFK.")

Steven Simon, a terrorism expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, points out that hyping these arrests creates a problem, especially when the true story begins to emerge, because it creates the false impression that "the adversary is just a bunch of losers who do not have to be feared."

Even New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg downplayed the threat. When asked Monday about the alleged plot, he basically told people to "get a life." He added, "You have a much greater danger of being hit by lightning than being struck by a terrorist."

Jailed Chinese Journalist Wins Golden Pen Award

This is probably not going to make Yahoo!'s public relations department very happy.

The World Association of Newspapers, while meeting in Cape Town, South Africa, awarded the prestigious Golden Pen of Freedom Award to jailed Chinese journalist Shi Tao. The newspaper association gave the award on June 4 -- the 18th anniversary of the Chinese government's crackdown on democratic protesters in Tiananmen Square.

Recently, we wrote about how the Chinese government used information supplied by Yahoo! to track down Shi as the author of an e-mail to overseas pro-democracy Web sites. Yahoo! officials have defended their actions, saying the company was complying with local laws when it handed over the information about Shi's e-mail account.

However, Shi's supporters see the company's decision as collaboration with a repressive government. The award's presenter said in his speech that giant Internet companies have a special responsibility: "They have an obligation to ensure that the basic human rights of their users will be protected, and they must carefully guard against becoming accomplices in repression."

Tao's mother, Gao Qinsheng, accepted the award on his behalf. Rebecca MacKinnon of RConversation, who was in Cape Town for the conference, said Goa told her that Yahoo! has not tried to help get Tao freed from his 10-year prison sentence.

2:28 PM ET | 06- 6-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

How Our Political Brain Works

It would seem that our brains don't let a pesky thing like reason get in the way of a partisan political belief.

With presidential debates in full swing, The Frontal Cortex, a blog run by Jonah Lehrer (an editor-at-large for Seed Magazine), looks at a study about the way our brains deal with the contradictions of our favorite politicians.

The study led by Drew Westen of Emory University (an occasional commentator on All Things Considered), first released as a paper in January 2006, used MRI technology to image the brains of voters during the run-up to the 2004 election. Researchers showed each of the participants a statement made by either George Bush or John Kerry, followed by a contradictory statement or action they had made.

Then, they watched the way the voters' brains reacted. While a Bush supporter was typically quick to believe that Kerry would contradict himself, when confronted by a similar action by Bush, the brain would try and find a way around this contradiction. Reason was abandoned, and it was the emotional circuits in the brain that lit up. (Kerry supporters did the same for him.) Leher notes:

The voters were literally censoring their cognitive dissonance. Instead of using their reasoning faculties to logically analyze the facts, they use reason to buttress their opinions. Once they arrived at a favorable (and irrational) interpretation of the evidence - it supported their prior convictions - they experienced a subtle rush of pleasurable emotion, as their internal reward circuits were activated. Self-delusion felt good.

Great. Not only do we delude ourselves about politics, we actually enjoy doing it.

If you're interested, you can read more in Westen's new book, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.

Post-Debate Debates: How Did the GOP Candidates Do?

As someone who was raised Catholic and spent years listening to nuns warn me about divine retribution, the high point of last night's GOP debate was the lightning strike while Rudy Giuliani was trying to answer a question about his abortion stance, and his subsequent glance skyward. And then John McCain and Mitt Romney, on either side of the former New York mayor, slowly backing away when a second boom of thunder interrupted him. Perfect comic timing.

In case you missed the debate, Althouse "simulblogged" the entire evening, as did David Weigel at Reason's Hit and Run blog, so you can see each candidate's answer to each question. Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters felt it was another good night for Giuliani and a bad one for McCain and CNN. He thought the audience asked better questions than the professional journalists.

Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas really ticked off Tom Tomorrow of This Modern World with the way he answered a question about the Iraq war from a woman whose brother had died there. Frank James at the Chicago Tribune's The Swamp blog said all the candidates acquitted themselves reasonably well, including Rep. Ron Paul and former Gov. Tommy Thompson. And only Paul, he notes, was willing to directly address the issue of why the GOP lost so heavily in the 2006 elections: the war in Iraq. Paul was also the only candidate who said directly said he would not pardon Scooter Libby.

Roger Simon of Politico said Romney was the best in the debate, with Giuliani second and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (playing for veep status, according to Simon) in third.

The real loser in last night's debate, however, was the president. As CNN reports, the candidates from his own party were taking open shots at him on almost every issue.

June 5, 2007

Book Asks: Is Prince Charles Harry's Real Dad?

This August will mark the 10th anniversary of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and we can expect to see lots of books, magazines and TV shows about her. But few may ask so controversial a question as the one posed by American writer Christopher Andersen in After Diana: William, Harry, Charles and the Royal House of Windsor.

Along with the bombshell question about Harry's parentage (Andersen speculates Harry's father could be Diana's lover James Hewitt, who Andersen alleges was her lover far sooner than others have written), Andersen also tells USA Today that Harry will be sent to Afghanistan instead of Iraq and suggests that Prince William and Kate Middleton will get back together -- their breakup only a ruse to get the media off her back.

In 2002, Hewitt publicly denied that he is Harry's dad. But in this excerpt from the book, carried in the New York Daily News, Andersen claims that Harry has had his doubts about his parentage.

Meanwhile, William and Harry went public Monday with their opposition to a plan by Britain's Channel Four to air photos taken the night their mother was killed in a car accident in Paris. Some of the photos, used in a documentary, show her being treated in the car at the scene of the crash. Channel Four has said it will use the photos Wednesday night as planned.

Remark about Thompson's Wife Sparks Outcry

Actor and former Sen. Fred Thompson has been generating a lot of attention as he gears up for an expected run for the Republican presidential nomination. But it's his wife, Jeri, who's the focus of a new online controversy.

RedState takes MSNBC's Joe Scarborough to task today for comments he made about Jeri Thompson. Scarborough was talking to Congressional Quarterly's Craig Crawford when he asked if Thompson's wife "worked the pole" -- which many blogs have taken as a reference to stripping. The two men went on to imply that Fred Thompson is only married to his wife because he's a TV star, with Crawford saying "that's what a Hollywood career will do for you." (Thompson is 65, his wife is 40.)

RedState describes Scarborough's comment as his "Imus" moment -- which is appropriate, I suppose, because he made it while auditioning to fill the time slot left by Don Imus' ouster for his remarks about the Rutgers women's basketball team.

Apparently, the conversation about "working the pole" began when the show's traffic and weather reporter mentioned she used it as an exercise routine to stay in shape, and the topic continued into the talk with Crawford. Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters writes that this mitigates the comments a bit, but he is "still mystified why Scarborough thinks that Jeri's appearance requires some lecherous reference."

Mary Katharine Ham writes at TownHall.org that Scarborough is "guilty of acting like an obnoxious, lecherous morning-show jock instead of a respectable political commentator, but he doesn't seem to be guilty of calling Jeri Thompson a stripper out of the blue."

William Dyer of BeldarBlog defends both Thompson and his wife in a post entitled "Fred Thompson and Jeri Kehn: Trophy wife, trophy husband?" Omri Ceren of Mere Rhetoric predicted in April that these kinds of comments would be made about Jeri Thompson because of the couple's age difference.

Bill France Jr. Turned NASCAR into a Juggernaut

You probably don't know his name, or even what he did. But Bill France Jr., who died Monday, was without a doubt one of the most powerful men in American sports. NBC's sports czar Dick Ebersol called him a "true giant."

France was the chairman of NASCAR from 1972 to 2003. He turned a rural, almost entirely Southern pastime into America's second-most-watched sport. Only football draws more TV viewers. France also helped NASCAR find national sponsors and new venues beyond its original base.

France ruled NASCAR as a benevolent dictator, not backing down when his decisions were challenged, as a driver noted in a USA Today story.

"His personality came at a time when it was what our sport needed," veteran driver Jeff Burton said. "He ain't a waffler or a guy who does anything half(way). Part of leadership is having the guts to make a decision and then having the guts to stand by it. That's what he did on a lot of occasions."

NASCAR is a family business for the Frances. France's father, William Henry Getty France, founded NASCAR in 1948 and ran it until his son took over in 1972. After Bill France Jr. resigned in 2003, his son, Brian, took over as NASCAR chairman.

1:44 PM ET | 06- 5-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

Let's Get Married For, Oh, The Next Two Hours

Iranian women activists are furious with the country's interior minister, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, for telling a religious conference this week that one way to deal with teenage hormones in a country where extramarital sex is illegal is to have them practice "temporary marriage."

Temporary marriage, known as "sigheh," is a contract between a man and a woman that allows them to be married for a specific period of time, from an hour to 99 years. While Sunni Muslims consider it illegal and the same as prostitution, temporary marriage is allowed under Shia Islam. Iran started promoting it as an alternative to "living in sin" about 15 years ago; however, the practice is considered improper by society.

While temporary marriage may work for Iranian men, it can be a real problem for women. The activists point out that young women who enter into these arrangements often find it much harder to marry when they are older. Also, as the BBC reports, "There are already tens of thousands of children from temporary marriages whose fathers will not acknowledge them."

Ron Paul: Internet Star But Likely Not GOP Nominee

Texas Rep. Ron Paul

Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images

As the Republican Party prepares for another presidential debate tonight in New Hampshire, the GOP candidate drawing much of the attention online is Texas Rep. Ron Paul. Put his name into the blog search engines at Technorati or Google, or look for him on Facebook, and you'll find hundreds of mentions, as well as blogs devoted to his every utterance and appearance.

But realistically, what are his chances to get the Republican nomination? Based on the history of similar candidates, not all that good. Colin Delany at techPresident explains why Paul is an "online natural, but doomed candidate."

According to Delany, Paul is popular online because:

The Web loves libertarians.
The other candidates are a disappointment.
A pre-existing base of support. (techPresident calls Paul's service in Congress and his 1988 run for president as a Libertarian his secret weapon.)
The Web loves a purist.

But Delany says that like other one-time "hot" candidates such as Howard Dean and Ralph Nader, Paul will not be president.

Running for president gives a niche candidate a powerful platform for putting out opinions (hello, Kucinich), but they tend to be in niches in the first place for a reason. I don't know whom the Republicans will select as their '08 standard-bearer, but I know who it won't be: Ron Paul.

June 4, 2007

It's Not Another Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury

Once they were hippies and flower children. Now, they are homeowners and shopkeepers. And they don't like what's happening to Haight-Ashbury.

The Los Angeles Times reports on the tension in the San Francisco counterculture neighborhood over its newest residents: gutter punks -- "homeless kids with dirty dreadlocks and nose rings, lime-green mohawks and orange spray-painted faces, who panhandle with cardboard signs that riff on their lifestyles." Boing Boing points out some interesting quotes:

"I used to be a hippie. I wore beads and grew my hair long," [64-year-old Arthur Evans] said. "But my generation had something these kids do not: a standard of civilized behavior."

And this one:

"I'm sick of stepping over gangs of kids, only to be told 'Die, yuppie!' A lot of us were flower children, but we grew up," said Robert Shadoian, 58, a retired family therapist. "There are responsibilities in this world you have to meet. You can't be drugged out 24/7 and expect the world to take care of you."

This year will definitely not be another Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury. I guess sooner or later everybody forgets how they started.

Federal Grand Jury Indicts La. Congressman

Democratic Rep. William Jefferson will finally get his day in court ... even if he didn't want to have one.

A federal grand jury has indicted the Louisiana congressman on 16 charges, including soliciting bribes, money laundering, wire fraud and obstruction of justice. He also is charged with bribing a Nigerian government official.

CBS News reports that the indictments are the latest development in a 16-month investigation into allegations that Jefferson accepted $100,000 from a telecommunications businessman. Federal investigators found $90,000 in his freezer almost two years ago.

Jefferson has denied any wrongdoing and was re-elected last November, despite the bribery allegation hanging over him.

Jefferson's case is an odd one because of the events leading up to the indictment. When Jefferson's Capitol Hill office was raided by the FBI, he was defended by none other than then-GOP Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters says Hastert's "inane attempt" to defend Jefferson might have even hurt Republicans in the 2006 elections and delayed the indictment against Jefferson.

Current Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi did remove Jefferson from the Ways and Means Committee, but, under pressure from the Congressional Black Caucus, she tried to appoint him to the Homeland Security Committee. The Democrats backed down when Republicans threatened a floor vote on his appointment.

Jeff Crouere, who hosts a PBS show in Louisiana called "Ringside Politics," wrote recently at the PoliticsLA.com blog that Jefferson's case will not improve the state's "well-earned reputation" for corruption: "... Jefferson's continued presence in Congress will be a reminder to everyone that Louisiana political corruption is alive and well. Our state's corrupt past and present is one of the reasons Louisiana always finds itself in such a precarious position."

Evangelicals Battle Publicly over Abortion

In another sign that conservatives might have a hard time rowing together in the next general election, Christian evangelicals appear to be airing their disagreements with each other in a public manner not seen in more than a decade.

The Washington Post reports that, "in a highly visible rift in the anti-abortion movement," a coalition of evangelical Protestant and Roman Catholic groups recently launched newspaper ads and Internet postings attacking Focus on the Family's James Dobson, one of America's leading evangelicals.

Using rhetoric that they have reserved in the past for abortion clinics, some of the coalition's leaders accuse Dobson and other national antiabortion leaders of building an "industry" around relentless fundraising and misleading information.

The ads accuse Dobson of misrepresenting the Supreme Court's recent ruling upholding the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which had appeared to be a victory for anti-abortion supporters. But the ruling has reopened a schism between those who want to put limits on abortion incrementally and those who want to see it gone all at once. (It also seems to have galvanized abortion-rights supporters.)

The disagreement has caught many supporters and bloggers by surprise. Jill Stanek at the Pro-Life Pulse blog writes that the two camps can't afford to "launch a war against one another." Bruce Tomaso writes in the DallasNews Religion blog that if the groups attacking Dobson find someone who is more "staunchly anti-abortion," he hopes they take out another ad to let us know who.

'Stray Rod' Gets Last Laugh on Boston Fans

For New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez, it must have seemed like a nightmare: the idea of coming to Boston the same week that media outlets across the country showed a picture of him with an attractive blonde who was not his wife.

And the Boston fans, true to their nature, were merciless. They chanted a variety of insults at him, calling him "Stray Rod" and jeering every time he came to the plate. They screamed "mine" every time a pop-fly came his way (following a similar incident involving A-Rod earlier in the week). On Friday night, another group of fans wore identical masks depicting a blonde woman.

And then Sunday night, when it counted the most, A-Rod belted a home run off Boston star reliever Jonathan Papelbon to give the Yankees a 6-5 victory.

As Bob Ryan of the Boston Globe wrote, A-Rod had the last laugh, "athletically speaking."

New Vehicles for Marines May Need Even More Armor

The Marine Corps has ordered 1,200 more of a type of vehicle with a good record of protecting troops against the improvised explosive devices used in roadside attacks in Iraq. However, the new vehicles, known as Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs, might not be enough to give the troops the protection they need.

On Sunday, The Washington Post reported that insurgents in Iraq are using bigger and better bombs that have increased the number of U.S. troops killed as opposed to wounded in roadside attacks. Last week, USA Today reported that Pentagon documents show the MRAPs may not be able to withstand these new types of explosives, known as explosively formed penetrators, and may need additional armor.

Because of the MRAPs' success against the improvised explosive devices, the Pentagon documents suggest insurgents can be expected to use significantly more of the explosively formed penetrators. The military has tested armor that can withstand the new explosive, but it will add to the cost of the vehicles.

The Marine Corps Times reports that the military has plans to order 23,200 MRAPs by 2010. The Marines' latest $623 million purchase from a subsidiary of Navistar International means that 1,700 of the vehicles have been ordered since 2003.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently called the effort to get more MRAPs into the field the military's highest purchasing priority.

But Jason Sherman of InsideDefense writes that the military's "mad rush" to get as many of the MRAPs in the field as possible "could stall due to short supplies of key industrial resources such as manpower and steel, which may prompt the Defense Department to divert key commodities away from other weapons programs, according to defense officials and documents."

9:59 AM ET | 06- 4-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

June 1, 2007

The Week's Last Call

OK, folks, time for last call. We'll be back on Monday. If you see anything interesting over the weekend, shoot me an e-mail at newsblog@npr.org.

And now, my last tidbit for the week.

Seems that Lindsay Lohan, et al., may have pushed the envelope (marked "underage drinking binge") too far. I mean, didn't you find it interesting that so many underage celebrities were regularly stumbling drunk as sailors on shore leave from all these trendy Hollywood clubs?

But now Lohan's most recent adventure in Boozeville has finally forced the state to do something about the problem. The Los Angeles Times reports that this "wave" of reports of underage drinking has prodded the California Alcohol Beverage Control Board to increase undercover surveillance of these clubs. As a result, the board wants to close down Mood, one of the hottest of the Hollywood clubs, for 15 days for serving alcohol to minors.

A friend of the bar owner said Mood is being "unfairly targeted" and that everybody does it. Well, as they like to say on cop shows ... Tell it to the judge.

4:56 PM ET | 06- 1-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

N.Y. Wants to Stop Violent Video Game Sales to Minors

Illinois tried and failed. Louisiana was stopped by the courts. California was also stymied. Now New York wants to try and stop the sale of violent video games to minors.

This week, the New York Assembly passed a bill that would make the sale of a violent video game to a minor a felony, punishable by as much as three to four years in jail. The bill also would require all game console makers to put a parental control V-chip in every console by December 2009. Most newer consoles, like PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's Xbox already have such a chip. But it would be a problem for PlayStation 2 and Nintendo's GameCube.

The bill comes on the heels of a similar one passed in the New York Senate a week ago. The two bills will now go into conference committee to iron out the details. New York Democrats and Republicans hope to get the new bill to Gov. Eliot Spitzer for his signature by June. Spitzer has already said he would support this kind of legislation.

But the initiative faces considerable opposition from the gaming industry and a history of failed attempts by other states. A representative of New York's Entertainment Merchants Association has already labeled the bills "ill-conceived."

J. Micah Grunert, writing at Neoseeker.com, anticipates that if the bill becomes law, the Entertainment Software Association will sue New York. The Associated Press reports that the politicians in Albany are aware their effort may be ruled unconstitutional but, as one Republican put it, wanted to try and do something rather than just "walking away from the issue."

Is the Conservative Coalition Broken?

Conservatives appear to be in full revolt against President Bush over the immigration bill.

Former Reagan speech writer and Wall Street Journal contributing editor Peggy Noonan says the Bush White House has "torn the conservative coalition asunder," and this development has "implications not only for one political party but for the American future." Writing that conservative supporters of the president have felt like "sufferers of battered wife syndrome" for at least the last three years, Noonan says conservatives are now being called unpatriotic for their opposition to the immigration bill.

Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.

Mary Katharine Ham writes at Townhall.org about how a solicitor from the Republican National Committee slammed the president and the bill during a phone call to her friend. This comes the day after The Washington Times reported on its Web site that the RNC fired all 65 of its staff telephone solicitors a week ago -- a decision the fired employees say was likely hastened by a 40 percent drop in contributions from small donors, who are also apparently in rebellion over the immigration bill. The RNC said it fired the phone folks because of outdated technology.

A posting at RedState actually posits the idea that the Bush administration is a "sleeper cell" planted by the Democrats.

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin reports that Steve Moore of the pro-immigration bill Wall Street Journal has accepted a challenge to debate the editors of the anti-immigration bill National Review. Bill Bennett, a columnist and former education secretary under Reagan, likely will moderate. No word yet on when the smackdown will happen.

You Call that a Monster?

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water ... another sighting of the Loch Ness Monster is reported.

Gordon Holmes of Yorkshire took this video of some kind of creature swimming in Loch Ness. "I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw this jet black thing, about 45 feet long, moving fairly fast in the water," Holmes told The Associated Press. His video made Nessie supporters more excited than New York Yankees broadcaster Suzyn Waldman when Roger Clemens returned.

AP reports that Nessie watcher and marine biologist Adrian Shine of the Loch Ness 2000 center has seen the tape and plans to study it over the next few months. I guess he has time on his hands.

After viewing the video, I have to say I'm a bit disappointed. I would expect Nessie to be a bit more, well, fearsome looking. The creature in Holmes' tape looks like a big snake or eel. More yucky than scary.

'Awakening' Movement in Iraq Battles al-Qaida

Residents of western Baghdad, tired of al-Qaida in Iraq's attempts to control their area, rose up against the terrorist group Thursday and called in U.S. troops to help them. The Associated Press reports that a member of the district council said people were tired of the random gunfire that kept them indoors and threats that prevented students from taking final exams.

The incident in Baghdad is not an isolated one, Bill Roggio notes in his The Fourth Rail blog at Military.com. Sunni anti-al-Qaida tribes, community leaders and even insurgent groups are increasingly coming together to battle al-Qaida in what is called the "Iraq Awakening" movement. Sheik Abdul Sattar al-Rishawi in the Ramadi region of Anbar province created the model for the Awakening movement. AP reported in April that 200 Sunni sheiks in Anbar joined together in Iraq Awakening to oppose al-Qaida.

At Pundit Review, you can hear an interview with Michael Yon, an independent journalist in Hit, Iraq, who talks about the success of the movement.

Al-Qaida has reportedly not taken the threat lightly. The Kuwait News Agency reports that al-Qaida gunmen attacked and seriously wounded a tribal chief who had been working with the Awakening movement and his wife.

The Marine Corps Times reports that coalition officials, while pleased to see the trend, said they have seen "too many false dawns" to publicly declare the movement a "turning point." "We're naturally cautious people," said a senior British coalition officer. "We don't do excitement."

(Tom's Update: Just saw this story from Agence-France Presse. Sunni tribal fighters from the Anbar region have gone to Baghdad to join the fight against al-Qaida in the Amiriyah neighborhood of western Baghdad.)

9:38 AM ET | 06- 1-2007 | permalink | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

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