Afghanistan and corruption

I don’t really like Afghanistan’s President Karzai. He obviously is willing to sell people out for votes and his government is corrupt enough that it might not make sense to back him. Still, I love this push back:
But Afghan officials have begun to push back, complaining the Americans are often overpaid, underqualified, and unfamiliar with the culture [...]

Protest in Puerto Rico

I heard via TPM that there’s a large strike going on in Puerto Rico: there are estimates of 100,000 or more people demonstrating against large job cuts by the government. There are a few things interesting about this.
The scale is comparatively quite large (more than 100,000 go to the demonstration and 200-300,000 are estimated to stay [...]

What is priority?

It seems that stimulus funds for highways are not being assigned according to the way they’re supposed to be:
The rules required that states give priority to counties considered “economically distressed.’’ Yet less than half the federal highway money announced so far is directed toward those high-unemployment, low-income areas, according to an Associated Press analysis of [...]

Bottled or Tap

There’s a long article in today’s Boston Globe Magazine that looks at  the increasing trend of people using tap water instead of bottled. It asks whether tap water is safe and asks some good questions with good suggestions, but ultimately I find it to be misleading. The best suggestion is to read your community’s report on [...]

Civil war over in Sri Lanka

The Tamil rebels in Sri Lanka have been defeated and its leaders have been killed. This is a good thing, the LTTE was a terrorist organization that cared more for its leaders than their supposed cause. Whether this is a very good thing will depend on what happens now, will the grievances of the Tamils be [...]

What’s going on in Sri Lanka?

I haven’t posted much about the situation in Sri Lanka, because I’ve been waiting for papers to try to explain things. For example, one of the reasons for the civil war was that the Tamil minority were discriminated against by the Sinhalesemajority (as usual, some of the core problems were brought about by colonialists–mainly the [...]

US or China provoke naval incident

On Sunday there was a confrontation between a US naval ship and Chinese vessels. I looked at articles in the NY Times and the Washington Post and neither really tried to explain the dispute. They just note that the US has protested harassment by the Chinese vessels in international waters and China says that the US ship [...]

More On ABC and Anthrax

ABC’s Brian Ross has responded to questions asked about his reporting early on in the Anthrax case:
He also described the last-minute scrambling before and after his initial October 26 report. “About a minute before we went on air the White House called and said it was not bentonite. That’s all they said,” Ross tells TVNewser. [...]

Bush: Anthrax From Al Qaeda or Iraq

The Bush administration pushed the Al Qaeda link for the anthrax attack even after the FBI told them there wasn’t one:
On October 15, 2001, President Bush said, “There may be some possible link” to Bin Laden, adding, “I wouldn’t put it past him.” Vice President Cheney also said Bin Laden’s henchmen were trained “how to [...]

Anthrax Case Closed?

It seems that FBI has decidedon the culprit in the Anthrax attacks of 2001, but some of his colleagues are waiting until more evidence is shown before being convinced:
Scientists, co-workers and people who for years have researched the anthrax investigation, only to encounter frustration, misinformation and false leads, say law enforcement authorities should lay out [...]

Poverty in the US

The Sabin Institute has a paper out about Neglected Diseases of Poverty (which I found via this). Here’s a bit from the press release:
Hotez notes that the common features of these neglected infections are their: 1) Highly disproportionate health impact on people of color and people living in poverty; 2) Chronic, largely insidious, and disabling features; [...]

Does This Make Sense?

I’ve seen weird reporting, but this article is quite weird. It’s an article about Republicans voting for Democrats in open primaries. Here’s the breakdown (go here for a better graphic, one that includes the percent of people voting Democrat who say they are Republican):
Iowa: Obama 44%, Edwards 32%, Clinton 10% (overall Obama 38, Clinton 29)
South Carolina:Obama 37%, [...]

Now What Did They Mean

Here are two little bits that show how presentation can be more important than what is actually said;

Jake Tapper (via Steve Benen) has the link to Bill Clinton’s comments about global warming and the economy where he says this:

“Everybody knows that global warming is real,” Mr. Clinton said, giving a shout-out to Al Gore’s Nobel Peace [...]

Caffeine and Pregnancy

Amanda at Pandagon links to and talks about this article in the NY Times about the link between caffeine and miscarriages. The Boston Globe had an article about the same study, but had a decidedly different slant. The Times article only looks at the one study and has the conclusion:
 Too much caffeine during pregnancy may increase the [...]

More on the Iran ‘Incident’

Silly me. In an earlier post, I had said I trusted the Revolutionary Guard of Iran less than the Pentagon when it came to the incident in the Straits of Hormuz. It now turns out that the incident was typical and only played up (with the requisite lying) to make a point (and I’m sure [...]

Kristol

William Kristol has his first column for the NY Times and I can see why he was hired to be on one of the top papers.  Ok, no I can’t. There are no new arguments or information in the column and he writes with cliches (of course, people who word hard are conservatives, Democrats are [...]

A Gullible Press

Via Pandagon, the last issue of the year for BMJ is a humor issue (it’s the December 21 issue if the link gets messed up)–look here for the editor’s explanation, it’s fairly funny. What’s interesting is that at least a few places have reported some of the articles as real:

This article looks at Sex, Agression, and Humor: responses [...]

Filibuster Record

It’s been obvious for a while, that Republicans would break the record for most filibusters in a session and now they have (or here for a graph or here for the report). And with the session only half over, they’re going to smash the record–woo hoo. The real question is if this will get reported:
This NY [...]

If We Say Nothing

Let’s see the NY Times has an article that says that four people in the White House staff knew about the CIA tapes before they were destroyed. The Bush administration doesn’t deny this, but makes a big deal about the subheadline:
Perino refused to comment on the substance of the article, but zeroed in on a [...]

Gore and the Internet

The old fable about Gore saying he invented the Internet comes up every once in awhile, so it’s nice to see this:
IN the 2000 election, Al Gore, then the vice president, was derided by opponents who claimed that he had said he “created” the Internet. But many of the scientists, engineers and technology executives who [...]