NPR: The NPR News Blog

August 31, 2007

A Web That Can Accommodate More Than Itsy Bitsies

As we prepare to take off for the Labor Day weekend and enjoy the traditional end of summer, we'd like to leave you on a note of utter revulsion. That is, unless you like spiders. (Ick.)

A worker at a park in Texas has found a HUGE spider web — we're talking hundreds of yards here — that's home to millions of the creepy crawlies. It has scientists fascinated and park workers determined to protect it from human hands.

But has anyone stopped to consider that maybe this is just a clever marketing ploy for Rob Zombie's Halloween?

We'll be back on Tuesday. Send any good leads to newsblog@npr.org.

- Erica Ryan

Iraqis Questioned After Speaking Arabic on Plane

African-Americans have a term for it: DWB ("Driving While Black"). It basically means that they were stopped by police for no other reason than the color of their skin.

Arab-Americans also have a version: FWM ("Flying While Muslim"). And its variation, FWA ("Flying While Arab"). If you look Muslim or Arab, and you fly, you can be immediately suspect.

Tuesday's American Airlines Flight 590 from San Diego to Chicago was delayed after passengers heard people on board speaking Arabic. The Associated Press reports that it turned out "six Iraqi men on board work for a defense contractor and were reportedly taking the overnight flight home after a job at Camp Pendleton training Marines headed for Iraq."

The men were quickly questioned and released, but by then it was too late for the plane to leave, which meant everyone had to wait until the next morning.

"We were hired for this government. We can prove ourselves. We are good people, not a bad people," Dave Alwatan, an Iraqi and a U.S. citizen, told the media. "How can we be bad if we are helping our people here — American people? Why are we getting treated like that?"

Good question. Now, I understand that people are nervous these days, but would terrorists trying to take down a plane really begin speaking Arabic to each other when others could hear?

Then again, as Rhonda Roumani wrote for Beliefnet, the fear of FWA can make even Arabs suspicious of each other.

NBC Universal Says It Won't Renew Deal with iTunes

"Save the cheerleader, save the world." But it doesn't look like anything will save the deal between iTunes and NBC Universal, the owner of shows like Heroes, The Office and 30 Rock.

Daily Tech writes that NBC is tired of the almost iron-like grip that Apple likes to keep on, well, pretty much everything it touches. In this case, it's the pricing model used to distribute music and video on iTunes.

NBC Universal feels that it should ... have the ability to package content together. Apple on the other hand has stood its ground with regards to pricing and contends that packaging video content would lead to confusion for buyers and decrease demand.

NBC Universal is currently the top provider of videos on iTunes, making up 40 percent of the site's downloads. You'll still be able to get the shows you like until the end of December, but after that, well, you'll have to go back to watching the cheerleader get saved on regular TV.

There is always the chance of an 11th-hour agreement. But right now, it looks like NBC is not playing Apple's tune ... or, should I say, iTune. But it is a familiar one for Apple. In July, Universal Music Group decided not to renew its long-term contract with Apple over similar pricing concerns.

Iowa Judge Strikes Down Same-Sex Marriage Ban

Judging from the reaction, an Iowa county judge's decision to strike down the state's decade-old ban on same-sex marriage seems to have caught most conservatives in the state by surprise.

Only Polk County, Iowa, is affected by Judge Robert Hanson's ruling. But couples from across the state can come to the county and apply to get married. One gay couple has already applied for a marriage license and five more have made inquiries. There is a three-day approval process after the application is made.

The Associated Press reports that Hanson ruled that "the state law allowing marriage only between a man and a woman violates the constitutional rights of due process and equal protection."

"Couples, such as plaintiffs, who are otherwise qualified to marry one another may not be denied licenses to marry or certificates of marriage or in any other way prevented from entering into a civil marriage ... by reason of the fact that both person comprising such a couple are of the same sex," he said.

Polk County Attorney John Sarcone says he will appeal the decision to the Iowa Supreme Court and ask for an immediate stay of Hanson's order so no gay couples can get a marriage license.

State Republican lawmakers have vowed to take action and pass a constitutional amendment against gay marriage. They want Gov. Chet Culver to add the gay marriage debate to a special legislative session he has said he might convene to deal with the date of the Iowa caucuses. Otherwise, the lawmakers say they will take it up when the regular session starts in January.

(Update: Two men were married in Des Moines this morning after a judge waived the three-day waiting period for them. However, Hanson stayed his ruling about two hours later.)

August 30, 2007

Helping Students Deal with On-Campus Drinking

During much of the '90s, I lived in university housing at a big school on the East Coast. My wife was finishing her degree and was an "assistant senior tutor" assigned to monitor students in the residence where we lived. That made me a tutor by default. And one of my jobs became what I called "the alcohol patrol."

Many freshmen come to college unprepared to deal with the pressure of campus drinking. And I mean, there is a lot of pressure — almost every "unofficial" student event seems to involve alcohol. Universities try to deal with it in a variety of ways, but kids tend to find ways around the rules. Because beer is too hard to hide, the underage kids I encountered tended to slip pints of liquor under their coats, meaning they often drank way more than they could handle.

Several times I found over-intoxicated freshmen who I had to take the campus infirmary.

That's why I was interested in Karen Grigsby Bates' piece on Day to Day about Choose Responsibility, a program headed by a former college president that advocates "a legal drinking age of 18 years old, administered through a graduated, licensed-to-drink program." Through my personal experience, I have seen how having a drinking age of 21 can encourage binge drinking in college.

Another option schools are using is "drinking education." While it would be incredibly difficult to stop college students from drinking altogether, programs like AlcoholEdu can help them understand the consequences of alcohol both personally and academically ... before a tutor has to scrape them off the bathroom floor.

New Study Shows Renters Are in Trouble Too

I'm actually working from home today. I'm moving into a new house, and in between posts I'm packing boxes. But I'm not buying — I'm renting. Until my house in Massachusetts sells and I save enough for a reasonable down payment ... and the housing market picks itself up off the floor ... renting is my only option.

Apparently, I'm not alone. As more and more owners lose their homes to foreclosure in the housing crunch, increasing numbers of people are going to need to rent.

The Center for Housing Policy issued a study today that shows a quarter of renters are shelling out more than half of their income to landlords. And the market is likely to get worse for middle- and low-income people as more former homeowners move back to renting or as people who might have gone from renting to buying decide to stay put. The two worst places in the country to rent are side-by-side: Anaheim and Los Angeles.

Sam Eaton of Marketplace tells Day to Day's Alex Cohen that rents are likely to increase by about 4 percent this year and next. And renting is not just getting harder in big cities — Denver and Indianapolis are two medium-sized cities being hit hard.

Eaton says this is only the calm before the storm. As more people default on loans, experts are saying that 2008 is going to "a pretty bad one."

IAEA: Iran Slows Uranium Enrichment

In what it calls a "significant" development, the International Atomic Energy Agency says Iran has slowed enrichment of uranium and increased cooperation with the agency — meaning Iran could be cleared of suspicions that its nuclear work in the past was part of a plan to build nuclear weapons.

Bloomberg reports that IAEA officials in Vienna say that it's the first time that they've agreed with Iran on a plan to resolve the outstanding issues that triggered sanctions from the United Nations Security Council.

But the development probably won't satisfy Iran's biggest critic, the United States, Bloomberg reports.

Today's report "is good news in itself, but I doubt it will be welcomed wholeheartedly by the UN Security Council," Ali Ansari, a professor of Iranian history and an associate fellow at the Chatham House international affairs institute in London, said in a telephone interview. "Washington will say Iran is being manipulative, giving a little to avoid sanctions in the short term.''

The United States is expected to press for a third round of sanctions next month. But Iranian officials have threatened to pull out of the agreement with the IAEA if the sanctions go ahead.

When 'Witness Protection' Is Really a Misnomer

"Witness protection," eh? Perhaps it might be better called the "We'll help you hide out for a few months, and then you're on your own" program.

That's the feeling I had after listening to Scott Shafer's All Things Considered report on San Francisco's witness protection program. Witness protection is an idea that TV and movies have turned into a cultural touchstone. (For instance, it was one of the options bandied about when people were debating what might happen to Tony at the end of The Sopranos a couple of months ago.)

But in real life, only 14 states offer this kind of deal for potential witnesses. (The federal program covers all the states but only covers federal crimes, and it has problems of its own.) And as Shafer reported, "...the programs don't literally protect anyone. There's no round-the-clock surveillance, and no fancy safe house; witnesses are simply moved out of the place where the crime occurred into a safer location."

The San Francisco program lasts three months after a criminal is convicted and then "the witnesses are basically on their own." Efforts are being made to improve the program — California is doubling the funding available for witness protection next year to more than $6 million.

But I can see why people might be reluctant to talk if witness protection often isn't.

Report on Iraq Conflicts with Administration Assessment

This could make it a little harder for the president to get that extra $50 billion for the war in Iraq.

The Washington Post has obtained a draft of a report that the Government Accountability Office will present Tuesday to Congress, and it ain't pretty. According to the Post, the GOA report, entitled Securing, Stabilizing and Rebuilding Iraq, says that the Iraqi government has "failed to meet all but three of 18 congressionally mandated benchmarks for political and military progress."

"While the Baghdad security plan was intended to reduce sectarian violence, U.S. agencies differ on whether such violence has been reduced," it states. While there have been fewer attacks against U.S. forces, it notes, the number of attacks against Iraqi civilians remains unchanged. It also finds that "the capabilities of Iraqi security forces have not improved."
"Overall," the report concludes, "key legislation has not been passed, violence remains high, and it is unclear whether the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion in reconstruction funds," as promised.

And there's a dig at the White House in the report as well. Future assessments from the administration would be more useful, the draft suggests, if "they backed up their judgments with more details and 'provided data on broader measures of violence from all relevant U.S. agencies.'"

Interestingly, the Post says the person who provided the draft said it was being passed on from a government official who was afraid it would be "watered down" before it was officially released.

(Tom's Update: Well, there you go. The Associated Press is reporting that the Pentagon has asked for changes to be made in the GAO report before its final release, asking that some of the negative assessments be revised. A Pentagon spokesman said that "policy officials 'made some factual corrections' and 'offered some suggestions on a few of the actual grades' assigned by the GAO.")

August 29, 2007

Is Bacn Filling Up Your Inbox?

I love bacon. But it's not all good for you, and I'm not talking about the fat content.

NPR.org's Eric Weiner has a great piece about "bacn." (No, that is not a typo.) Don't know what bacn is? Bacn is, well, spam that you want (a concept that sends shivers down my spine, truth be told). Think bank statements, specials on pizza from your local store, notices from your kids' school or even news updates from NPR. It's stuff you want, but it can still slow you down and clog your Internet arteries, just like spam.

Bacn, like spam, can be annoying, but it's a specific kind of annoyance. Like pornography, you know it when you see it. An e-mail from your wife is not bacn — that's personal. An e-mail from Nigeria offering to send you $3 million is not bacn — that's spam. Bacn is everything in between, the "middle class of e-mail," [Tommy Vallier, a Canadian blogger] says.

There is also "FakinBacn" — spam that poses as bacn.

I'm getting a stomachache. But there may be a cure in the advice of Bruno Giussani, who's described as "a popular Swiss blogger" (that's a phrase you don't see too often). As Giussani says, you can just use e-mail filters to put your bacn into various folders in your e-mail program. Giussani doesn't think it's a big deal: "So five or six geeks meet at a conference, start tossing names around, and then pretend to have identified a new trend."

In the end, it all leads to various existential questions: If you leave bacn in your inbox too long, does it spoil? Does Weight Watchers send out low-fat bacn? And wouldn't Canadian bacn be ham?

The Voices of Those Who Couldn't Save New Orleans

Before Katrina, New Orleans was my favorite American city to visit. And when the storm hit two years ago today, I remember thinking that things would be fine, based on the reactions of the cable news outlets. (I distinctly recall one national TV reporter sounding almost disappointed that nothing catastrophic seemed to be happening.)

Then the levees broke.

In the past week or so, there have been lots of stories highlighting the efforts to rebuild New Orleans. But the voices that have remained with me are those of the people who tried and failed. Residents who really wanted to stay and rebuild or people born there who returned to put New Orleans back together again — and just couldn't do it.

On Tuesday, Morning Edition featured a commentary by Matt Roberts, who had moved to the city to teach high school English because he wanted to make a difference. But he has decided to quit — it was just too much for him. His description of feeling like a quitter is bracing.

And All Things Considered aired a commentary by freelance reporter Eve Troeh, who says she was the poster girl for New Orleans last year. But she felt her blinders start to come off after a friend was murdered in her home and other friends were mugged. Then she was attacked one night this summer. Now, she's left.

The stories of the great progress some people have made in just two years are amazing. But when you listen to Roberts and Troeh, you realize that two years, after all, is really not all that much time — and that things don't seem all that much better.

Study: Cramming Works for SATs, But Not Long Term

I always suspected this was true, but now there is scientific research showing that you can study too much for nothing. I just wish someone had told me that in college.

Cognitive Daily reports on a new study about studying by University of South Florida psychologist Doug Rohrer and Harold Pashler of the University of California, San Diego. The two researchers had groups of students study vocabulary in different ways. Here's a good description from the blog on the Web site of the Association for Psychological Science, which published the research in one of its journals.

So what did they find?

Well, cramming actually makes sense if you're studying for something with a lot of questions on stuff you might not need to know forever, like the SATs. The research showed people could retain stuff like that really well for about a week, and then it kind of disappeared from their brains. At four weeks, the advantage that the crammers had over the non-crammers had totally disappeared.

If you want to study for something that you need to know over a long period of time, like medicine or law, let's say, then cramming is not a good idea. Instead, building in breaks between studying helps students retain knowledge over a much longer period of time. If you really want to remember something, "massing knowledge" is your worst option.

This may explain why I can't remember a thing from my college physics or calculus courses.

Bush Sells War Optimism, but Not Everyone Is Buying

You really have to give President Bush credit: He stays on message. Regardless of what is happening, he doesn't seem to waiver in his depiction of the war in Iraq — that the latest strategy (currently, the surge) appears to be working and that momentum is on the American side.

That's the message he gave to the American Legion convention on Tuesday. It's almost the same message he gave the group last year as well, when he said, "America has a clear strategy to help the Iraqi people protect their new freedom and build a democracy that can govern itself and sustain itself and defend itself."

But The Washington Post reports that the message was greeted with more skepticism this year. A few months after last year's speech, U.S. officials acknowledged that sectarian violence had spun out of control and that the strategy to increase security had collapsed. That has some vets wary this time. "His credibility went way down" after past predictions fell short, said Dave Rehbein, a Vietnam War-era veteran at the convention.

Recent upbeat assessments by visitors to Iraq have helped bolster the president's message, but some analysts say Bush has a tendency to oversell that may hurt him.

"The history of this presidency has been to over-promise and under-perform," said Anthony H. Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The resulting expectations have often led Americans to feel like we are failing. From what I have seen to date, we are repeating the process."

Well, it looks like we'll soon get a chance to see what Congress thinks about the momentum. On the same day Bush spoke to the Legion, a White House official told the Post that the president plans to ask Congress in September to give him an additional $50 billion to fight the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

August 28, 2007

Magazine's Terrorism Index Catches Attention in Israel

Here's a tidbit that didn't get much attention in the United States but "raised eyebrows" in Israel, according to The Jerusalem Post.

Last week, Foreign Policy magazine published its Terrorism Index, which surveyed American foreign policy experts from across the political spectrum on various U.S. national security issues. One of the questions asked the experts to choose the country that least serves U.S. national security interests.

Russia led the list at 34 percent. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were next. But tucked away in fourth place was Israel at 14 percent.

One diplomatic official in Jerusalem, while acknowledging that 14% is a considerable minority, said he was still worried by the trend. "Considering the closeness and importance of our ties with Washington, this is something we need to watch," he said.

In the past, the Post articles notes, that kind of argument only seemed to come from far-right voices like former presidential candidate and TV pundit Pat Buchanan or far-left ones like outspoken MIT professor Noam Chomsky. But after John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard University argued in a paper last year that the U.S.-Israel relationship needs to be rethought, the idea is beginning to make its way into the mainstream of American intellectuals.

And the debate will likely deepen when Mearsheimer and Walt's book comes out next week. It argues that, with the end of the Cold War, Israel is a strategic liability for the United States.

We're an Overweight Nation of Skinny Celebrities

Wow. As a nation, we are really packing on the pounds.

A new report by the Trust for America's Health said obesity rates climbed in 31 states last year. They did not decline anywhere. Mississippi's population has the highest percentage of obesity — more than 30 percent of residents fall into that category. Washington, D.C., has the highest rate of overweight kids.

And all this despite the warnings we've received from health officials about how all this extra weight will kill us, the efforts by food manufacturers to cut back on trans fats and sugars in food and the endless infomercials pitching weight-loss programs, exercise equipment and weight-reducing pills.

I think Brenda Wilson's report on Morning Edition today caught the real problem. It included a question from a reporter in Mississippi who wondered if making kids exercise more will change the culture of a state where people eat "fried catfish five times a week" and the last official in charge of the state's health department weighed 300 pounds.

Poverty is part of the problem. When you don't have the income, it's harder to buy the foods that have higher nutritional value. But as the report shows, obesity is a problem in states with high and low average incomes. I keep thinking of the speech Bruce Willis' raccoon character gives in the animated film Over the Hedge, describing how people worship food.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times recently wrote about how the problem of women celebrities being too thin is getting worse, not better. There is even an acronym for these waifs: MAWs (for "model, actress, whatever"). They have taken the idea of "you can't be too thin" to ridiculous extremes.

We seem to be truly a messed-up nation when it comes to weight. From one extreme to the other.

Gul Finally Elected President of Turkey

Newly elected Turkish President Abdullah Gul

STR/AFP/Getty Images

A new president has been elected in Turkey: Abdullah Gul, the former foreign minister and a devout Muslim with a background in political Islam. His election is a victory for the pro-Islam government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

But Gul's election is not likely to sit well with Turkey's strong secularist military.

"Our nation has been watching the behavior of those separatists who can't embrace Turkey's unitary nature, and centers of evil that systematically try to corrode the secular nature of the Turkish Republic," Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, chief of the military, said in a note on its Web site Monday. The BBC reports that although the statement on the military's Web site did not name anyone, analysts believe it was aimed at Gul. The Turkish military has ousted four governments since 1960.

The leading secularist opposition party did not take part in today's vote and has said it will not participate in any presidential ceremonies.

When Gul ran for president earlier this year, the military produced a similar warning on its Web site, part of a campaign against him that led to a constitutional crisis. After a parliamentary boycott prevented Gul from being elected, Erdogan called for general elections, and his party was returned to power with 47 percent of the vote.

The victory, combined with the way Turkey's election system works, gave him the opportunity to nominate Gul again. Gul has repeatedly said he would uphold the country's secularist constitution.

Reports: Taliban Agree to Release S. Korean Hostages

It looks like there might be some good news out of Afghanistan. The Associated Press is reporting that the Taliban have agreed to release the remaining 19 South Korean missionaries who they have been holding captive since July. The Taliban have already killed two of the male hostages and released two women.

The New York Times adds a cautionary note, however, reporting that it is not yet clear if the reports from Seoul and elsewhere are accurate.

AP reports that as part of the deal, South Korea has pledged to end all Christian missionary work in Afghanistan and to keep a promise to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan by the end of the year.

Then again, if true, South Korea didn't agree to anything new. The Seoul government had already said it would pull its 200 non-combat troops out by year's end and would stop missionaries from "causing trouble" in countries where they are not wanted.

The South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo notes that the agreement does not mean that the hostages will be released immediately. Negotiations will continue with the Taliban. The paper quotes a government spokesman who mentions one potential reason that the Taliban were ready to deal — it was just getting too inconvenient to hold so many people for such a long time.

Internet Jumps on Story of Craig's Restroom Arrest

This is the kind of story that must give GOP leaders nightmares. It's getting a lot of play on the Internet, for sure.

Republican Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho pleaded guilty this month to disorderly conduct after he was arrested in early June by an undercover police officer in the Minneapolis airport. Roll Call, a newspaper that covers Capitol Hill, reported that the plainclothes officer was investigating reports of sexual activity in a men's restroom.

According to the arrest report, "Craig entered a bathroom stall next to the police investigator, placed his bag against the front of the door and tapped his foot in a gesture commonly used to try to pick up men in public toilets," Reuters writes. The arresting officer, quoted by Roll Call, said he recognized this as a signal "used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct."

NPR's Brian Naylor reports that Craig, who was fined and put on probation, issued a statement Monday saying that he had complained to the police at the time that they had misconstrued his actions, that he made a mistake when he pleaded guilty to the charges and that he should have talked to a lawyer first. No kidding.

This is not the first time that Craig has had to deal with allegations of this sort. In 1982, he denied rumors that he was under federal investigation as part of a probe into allegations that lawmakers on Capitol Hill were having sex with pages. He was not implicated or charged in that investigation.

And in 2006, Craig called allegations from a gay rights advocate that he had engaged in homosexual behavior "completely ridiculous."

August 27, 2007

Iraq's Sectarian Death Toll Doubles from Last Year

The surge in Iraq is working, according to military and administration officials. Some experts who have visited Iraq also say they see signs of progress. But then again, to paraphrase a former president, it might depend on what your definition of "is" is.

Over the weekend, The Associated Press released some eye-opening figures on the rate of deaths from sectarian violence in Iraq — it's about double last year's rate. The figures — which AP considers conservative and do not include insurgents' deaths — show that Iraq is suffering an average of 62 war-related deaths a day. In 2006, it was 33 a day.

Also, the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization says that, as of the end of July, 1.14 million Iraqis have been displaced by the violence. On Jan. 1 of this year, it was 447,337.

However, the figures do show that Baghdad now accounts for 52 percent of all civilian and police war-related deaths in the country, down from 76 percent in January. What that seems to show is that insurgents and al-Qaida fighters who have been pushed out of Baghdad by the surge are taking their deadly business to other parts of the country. This appears to be particularly the case in the north, where the death toll has risen this year.

Meanwhile, senior U.S. military figures, who insist violence is down, are also warning that we can expect major assaults in the next few weeks because of three factors: the report to Congress on the situation in the country; the start of Ramadan; and the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Political Animal blog offers this comment: The military is "simultaneously trying to suggest that the surge is responsible for the recent seasonal decline in fatalities and preemptively insisting that no one should blame the surge when seasonal deaths go back up in the fall."

I think it's going to be another long fall in Iraq this year.

Could the Idea of Civil Unions Be 600 Years Old?

You know how it is with history. We keep doing the same things, again and again. Now, a new study suggests unions between people of the same sex might be another thing to add to the list.

A new study in the Journal of Modern History "reviews historical evidence, including documents and gravesites" and finds that civil unions may have existed in France as long as 600 years ago. The term "affrerement" — roughly translated as brotherment — referred "to a certain type of legal contract, which also existed elsewhere in Mediterranean Europe." While they were often used for members of the same family when parents left the same property to two brothers who continued to live together, they were also used between men of the same sex who weren't related.

The author of the report can't prove it one way or another conclusively but says the evidence seems to point to, well, something that looks remarkably like homosexual civil unions. Which would only prove, as the French say, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Pundits Say It Was Time for Gonzales to Go

Now that Alberto Gonzales has given his three-weeks' notice, pundits on the left and right are weighing in on his resignation. Although they differ on the reasons why, most write that his resignation is a good thing.

Ed Morrissey at the conservative Captain's Quarters blog writes that it was "far past time" for Gonzales to go. Although Morrissey contends nothing illegal was done in the firing of federal prosecutors, he writes that "Gonzales and his team made it into a royal botch-up anyway." Morrissey says Gonzales should have resigned "after telling people publicly that the attorneys had performance issues when their reviews showed that they had performed well."

Conservative Michelle Malkin is glad Gonzales is gone. But, she writes, if White House officials are thinking of replacing Gonzales with Michael Chertoff, it means they've learned nothing from the recent "shamnesty debacle" about illegal immigration. (Chertoff was roundly criticized by conservatives for his efforts to push for the president's legislation.) Malkin argues in favor of a golden oldie for AG: "If they want the best qualified, most experienced AG candidate who is serious about enforcing all of our laws, including our immigration laws, and who is best equipped to serve in a time of war, the choice would be obvious: John Ashcroft."

Liberal blog Daily Kos comments that if the Democrats had not won control of Congress in 2006, Gonzales would still be in office.

Shaun Mullen at The Moderate Voice writes that Gonzales, who "leaves in shambles a Justice Department that he willingly helped the White House to transform into a branch of the Republican Party" has one great accomplishment in office ... He made Janet Reno and Ashcroft look good.

Troops Told Not to Follow New CIA Interrogation Rules

Top military lawyers have told U.S. senators that President Bush's new rules for CIA interrogations of suspected terrorists could allow violations of the Geneva Conventions, The Boston Globe's Charlie Savage reports.

Savage reports that the Judge Advocates General of all military branches believe "a July 20 executive order establishing rules for the treatment of CIA prisoners appeared to be carefully worded to allow humiliating or degrading interrogation techniques when the interrogators' objective is to protect national security rather than to satisfy sadistic impulses."

After the meeting with the senators in late July, the top JAG for the U.S. Army, Maj. Gen. Scott C. Black, told lower-ranking soldiers in a note that Bush's order applies only to the CIA and not to the military. Black told them that the standards of the Geneva Conventions are still their standards.

In an e-mail to Savage, the Justice Department said the president's order follows the Geneva Conventions.

However, law-of-war specialists zeroed in on a particular section of the new order for criticism. The new order forbids "willful and outrageous acts of personal abuse done for the purpose of humiliating or degrading the individual." The key phrase is "for the purpose," according to the experts. Many believe it creates an "escape clause" for interrogators that would allow abusive treatment if done for "national security."

Attorney General Stepping Down

The New York Times is reporting that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will resign today, according to a senior administration source.

NPR's Ari Shapiro has a timeline of events leading up to this morning's anticipated announcement.

CNN reports that administration sources say the top choice for Gonzales' replacement is the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff.

(Tom's Update: Gonzales confirmed this morning that he submitted his resignation to President Bush and it was accepted. He will step down as attorney general on Sept. 17.)

August 24, 2007

Model-Turned-TV Anchor's Show Lasts One Episode

Friends, couch potatoes, remote control freaks, lend me your TVs. I come here not to praise Anchorwoman (because that would seem darn near impossible) but to bury it. And I mean way deep.

The much ballyhooed Fox reality show about Lauren Jones, a former model and wrestler who becomes a news anchor at a local channel in Texas, drew a tiny rating of 1.0 in the 18-49 demographic, according to Broadcasting and Cable ... proving that being an anchor is not just about the hair, teeth and, er, other attributes.

Apparently, Rupert Murdoch's folks had seen enough. Literally. The show was immediately canceled, bringing back painful memories of Emily's Reasons Why Not, the ABC series that also only lasted one episode. If you're REALLY interested ... or looking for a way to cure insomnia ... you can watch the "lost" episodes of Anchorwoman on Fox's Web site or Fox On Demand.

But this could also be a lesson for the journalists who jumped the gun and spilled a lot of ink while hand-wringing over the show. Turns out that it wasn't the "nadir" for women journalists that some people said it would be.

It was just a bad TV show.

OK, that's all for this week. If you see or hear anything interesting, don't forget to send it along to newsblog@npr.org.

'Jihad: The Musical' — Terrorism as Musical Comedy

Watch Jihad: The Musical's big number, "I Wanna Be Like Osama."

YouTube

Years ago, my brother and my sister and I wrote, produced and performed a satirical look at our hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The great thing about satire is that there are no sacred cows. We tried to offend everyone we could think of, in a funny way, of course.

But even I might think twice before creating a musical about terrorism. Not the producers of Jihad: The Musical, though. The satirical musical comedy is playing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and is billed as a "madcap gallop through the wacky world of international terrorism." It's already drawn protests, of course, from people who don't get the joke.

Which is great for the show because, as Oscar Wilde once said, "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."

And uneven reviews, I'm afraid. Some folks loved it; others thought it was stupid.

It seems most reviewers actually wanted the show to be a little more offensive than it is. Alan Chadwick of the Evening Standard described it this way: [The protests were] reminiscent of the furore surrounding Monty Python's Life Of Brian, which the show resembles in style and tone if not quality. But Zoe Samuel and Benjamin Scheuer's knockabout musical comedy — in which a naive Afghan flower-seller finds himself co-opted into becoming a suicide bomber — no more causes offense or offers a Jihadi blueprint than The Producers advocated Nazism, or The Sound Of Music nunneries."

In his piece for All Things Considered, Rob Gifford says the real target of the show seems to be terrorists and the rightwing media in America who — a song in the play claims — can't live without one another.

Well, you can judge for yourself. The link to Rob's piece includes a couple of the toe-tapping numbers (including a tune sung by a Frenchman called "Turned and Ran," a joke that, I confess, is getting a little old). And here's a YouTube video of the big number, "I Wanna Be Like Osama." Pretty catchy, actually.

But you're not going to want to be singing it to yourself as you walk around, OK?

Boy, Is It Hard to Sell a House These Days

Today, Morning Edition's Your Money segment looked at just how hard it has been to sell a house in America this summer.

I know this story. I'm living it.

When I moved to Washington in late spring to take this job, I had to put my house in Milton, Mass., (just south of Boston) on the market. It's a great place — four bedrooms, big yard, two-minute walk to the subway — in a community that a magazine just named the seventh best place to live in America. My real estate agent figured it would go in a jiffy.

Hardly a sniff all summer. Alcatraz gets more offers.

Just like the Cascones, the family featured in Jason Beaubien's Morning Edition piece, we've had to knock down the price on the house ... which is very hard to do because it makes you feel like a loser. And Ken Fears, an economist at the National Association of Realtors, says that it's likely even more concessions on price will be needed nationally before the worst is over. Ouch.

OK, time for a big pity party. Anybody else have a house horror story to tell?

FDA: It's Time to Tell the Truth About Sunscreens

I am the whitest guy on the planet. I am day-glo, all-Canadian white. In the summer, I never attempt to tan; I just try to neutralize the blue. One of the most humbling experiences of my life was when a group of smiling Turkish children danced around on a Mediterranean beach several years ago calling me "Uncle White" — they told my wife, who speaks Turkish, that they had never seen anyone so pale before.

In the old days, before SPF 45, I kept completely covered up at the beach. I looked like a mugger on holiday — pants, hoodie, ball cap pulled low. But sunscreen freed me to be able to entertain small children on foreign beaches.

So I was interested to find out that government regulators, under pressure from Congress, have proposed, as the Los Angeles Times reports, new "truth in labeling" rules for sunscreen to "give consumers clearer, more complete information on protection against cancer-causing ultraviolet rays."

Seems that the sunscreen industry, which is worth $450 million a year, has only been testing for one type of ultraviolet radiation — UVB, which can burn the skin. But, as NPR's Patricia Neighmond reports on Morning Edition, it turns out that UVA rays, which tan the skin, can also cause cancer. So the Food and Drug Administration says it wants to change the rules to force manufacturers to test for both.

And forget all that waterproof stuff. The FDA says it doesn't believe those claims are accurate. Lotions would also carry warnings that they alone offer "no guarantee against the sun's rays, and that consumers should also stay out of the midday sun and consider wearing hats and long sleeves," the Times writes.

Ah! The return of my mugger look.

How the 'Phishers' Almost Got Me

It was that close — I was one mouse click away from possibly having my identity stolen. I had entered my user name into what I thought was my online bank account. Then at the last second, I happened to glance at the URL of the site I was visiting. It was not my bank's Web address, even though it looked just like my bank's home page. I realized that I was being scammed. I closed the browser window and thanked my lucky stars.

"Phishers" will do anything to steal the information they need to get into your bank account or into your credit cards. They almost got me because I wasn't paying attention one day and got careless.

Morning Edition's John Ydstie talked to me today about my "escape" and what people need to do to reduce their chances of falling into the evil clutches of these thieves.

Have you ever fallen victim to a scam? Any suggestions on how to avoid them?

August 23, 2007

Mother Teresa's Spiritual Crisis at Center of New Book

Mother Teresa in April 1995.

AFP/Getty Images

She was easily one of the most recognizable women in the world. She was seen as a living saint by many. And she was a particular inspiration to Catholics.

But a new book about Mother Teresa, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, based on the many letters she wrote to her spiritual counselors and confessors over an almost 50-year period, show a spiritual life that was, as she described it, dry, dark and lonely.

Three months before she accepted her Nobel Peace Prize, she wrote to a spiritual confidant: "Jesus has a very special love for you ... [but] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand."

It's not uncommon to hear of religious people going through periods of doubt. For instance, Father James Martin, in a commentary on All Things Considered, says Mother Teresa's spiritual struggles remind him of his own during a recent retreat.

But Mother Teresa's extensive spiritual crisis is surprising for a woman of her influence ... and ammunition for her critics. Time quotes well-known atheist Christopher Hitchens (who also wrote The Missionary Position, a scathing attack on Mother Teresa), who says, "She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person, and that her attempted cure was more and more professions of faith could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself."

But in the same piece, the Rev. Matthew Lamb, chairman of the theology department at the conservative Ave Maria University in Florida, said Come Be My Light — compiled and edited by the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk — will one day rank with "St. Augustine's Confessions and Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain as an autobiography of spiritual ascent."

NIE: Iraqi Leaders 'Unable to Govern Effectively'

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki must be sensing a pattern in U.S. reaction to his government: Tuesday he was down, Wednesday he was up, so he's due for another down day, right?

Today, the negative reaction comes in the form of a National Intelligence Estimate. The Associated Press reports that the intelligence analysts who wrote the 10-page document (the consensus judgment of the CIA and 15 other U.S. intelligence agencies) doubt he "can overcome sectarian divisions and meet benchmarks intended to promote political unity." The document also says Iraq's security services, while performing better, are still not ready to operate without help from U.S. forces.

The silver lining for the Iraqi prime minister is that the report also says that any attempt to replace him right now could "paralyze the government."

Meanwhile, papers around the Middle East tend see the Bush-al-Maliki relationship in two ways: Either Bush is trying to set al-Maliki up to be a scapegoat for failed policies in Iraq, or al-Maliki is to blame for not being able to unite the factions in his country.

'Something Freaky' in Baltimore: Rangers Get 30 Runs

Take me out to the football game, take me out to the crowd...

That's what the box score of the first game of a double-header Wednesday between the Texas Rangers and the Baltimore Orioles resembled. Texas got four touchdowns and a safety, and Baltimore got a field goal — 30 to 3. But in the land of baseball, Texas' 30 runs broke the previous record of 29 for the most scored by an American League team.

Baltimore Sun sports reporter Roch Kubatko notes that Baltimore now falls to 0-1 in games decided by 27 runs. As Marlon Byrd, who hit one of two Texas grand slams, said after the game, "This is something freaky." (If you want to know more about what it's like to see so many runs scored in just one game, Day to Day's Alex Chadwick talked to Dallas Morning News sports writer Evan Grant.)

The last time a major league team got that many runs in a game was in 1897, when the Chicago Colts (now the Cubs) scored 36 against Louisville in the National League. Did players even use gloves back then?

No doubt this will start a debate about the need for a mercy rule in baseball.

Google Adds Space to Its List of Offerings

Space. The Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Google. Its mission — to boldly go where no online site ... OK, maybe NASA was there first.

Anyway, I digress ... The folks at Google, working together with astronomers, are giving you THE UNIVERSE. Really. As an addition to Google Earth (the feature that allows you to get an up-close and personal look at almost every spot on the planet), you get to whirl around and look out into space. And not just the randomized dots that they generated on Star Trek to make it seem like you were traveling at warp speed.

They are, as The Baltimore Sun described them, "digitized photos — a million of them — stitched seamlessly together from some of the world's most complete sky surveys." One hundred million individual stars and 200 million galaxies. That's a lot of space.

It is wicked cool and one day will be a great way to plan the family's next visit to Wolf 359 or Epsilon Eridani. And, just like Google Earth, you can create a version with your own stuff in space. You know, for Valentine's Day, give your loved one a real star with her face on it; don't just name one after her.

Sky at Google Earth is available on the newest versions of Google Earth, which can be downloaded for free at http://earth.google.com.

Is Vietnam the Right Comparison for Iraq?

President Bush took a big chance Wednesday and drew comparisons between the situation in Iraq and the situations that the United States has faced over the years in Asia, such as in Japan in World War II and in Korea and Vietnam.

But are those appropriate analogies? All Things Considered talked to four scholars to find out.

Francis Fukuyama of