links for 2009-06-21

"According to the handful of survivors of the raid, Couture workers were first immobilized by gunshot wounds to the knees before being shot execution-style in the back of the head. PETA officials assured that no animals were harmed during the destruction of the complex. " Lol.

"I am rooting for them and fearing for them. Any real moderation of Iran’s leadership would have a hugely positive effect on the Middle East. But we and the reformers must have no illusions about the bullets and barrels they are up against." My one complaint with Friedman's analysis is his automatic assumption that the vote was "stolen" by the Iranian authorities, this has yet to be proven and may never truly be proven.

"Ethiopia has refused a request by Somalia for military support to fight insurgents, saying such an intervention would need an international mandate. The Somali authorities have been battling Islamist insurgents who control much of the country. The speaker of Somalia's parliament had earlier urged neighbouring countries to send troops within 24 hours. Ethiopian troops helped topple an Islamist movement in Somalia in 2006, but were withdrawn earlier this year." Somalia could very easily fall back fully into the militants hands.

"Several years before, the Missouri Department of Transportation had lost a long legal battle to try and prevent the Ku Klux Klan from adopting a highway on freedom-of-speech grounds. So the state decided to counter the Nazi group’s speech with more speech, in the form of another roadside sign. Officials are renaming the stretch of highway near Springfield that the organization cleans after Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who fled Nazi Germany and became a prominent Jewish theologian and civil rights advocate in the United States." That's a pretty good tatic by the state.

"But I'm beginning to wonder about Michael Graham. First, the Oral Roberts graduate and former comedian, now a right wing radio pundit made comments about how he would like to see President Clinton and his wife gunned down in a coffee shop. Now, from Think Progress, we learn that his homicidal rhetoric is both more intense and more eclectic." And you wonder why the right wing of the Republican party is going crazy.

"At least 44 people have died in a series of clashes between government forces and Taliban militants in north-west Pakistan, the military says. Those killed include 38 militants and six soldiers across North West Frontier Province, officials said. The worst violence was in South Waziristan, where the army said it was clearing the way for military convoys ahead a full-scale offensive.
The area is the stronghold of the Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud. The reports from the army are hard to verify because the region is inaccessible to the media." It's nice to see Pakistan working to clear out the Taleban, not so good to hear of people dying, though hopefully none are civilians.

"Zimbabwe's Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai has been forced to cut short an event where he was addressing Zimbabwean exiles due to jeering. Mr Tsvangirai was addressing more than 1,000 exiles, whom he urged to return home to rebuild the country, during an event at London's Southwark Cathedral. But his appeal was poorly received as questions were raised over assurances he made about the country's stability." Not so friendly crowd.

"The naked portrait once belonged to Napoleon's uncle, Cardinal Joseph Fesch (1763-1839) and was ensconced within the wood walls of Fesch's private library for nearly a century, before trading more hands within the Napoleon family." I doubt it, based upon the orginal Mona Lisa but probably not an da Vinci painting.

"To Mr. Zeiler there is no doubt that the days when diplomatic history dominated the profession are gone. Fewer traditional courses in the subject are taught, fewer articles are published in refereed journals, and graduate student training has changed. Nonetheless Mr. Zeiler is not as worried as some of his colleagues. The shift does not necessarily mean students aren’t learning the material, he noted, but rather that a new approach to teaching it has developed. The shift in focus began in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when a generation of academics began looking into the roles of people generally missing from history books — women, minorities, immigrants, workers. Social and cultural history, often referred to as bottom-up history, offered fresh subjects. Diplomatic historians, by contrast, generally work from the top down, diving into official archives and concentrating on people in power, an approach often tagged as elitist and old-fashioned." Old story for me.

"The consensus may be that single-sex schools offer an educational advantage for women, but as J. Courtney Sullivan’s “Commencement” presents it, the real power of a women’s college has little to do with what goes on in the classroom. This affable first novel about four friends who bond during their first week at Smith unfolds mainly in dorm rooms, dining halls, the Quad — anywhere the girls can freely inhabit the passion that is the central fact of their college years and that stays charged-up into their 20s." I think I need to read this book to make a real judgement call.

"An estimated 20,000 people have marched in London in support of the minority Tamil population in Sri Lanka."

"Mixed-income developments oriented toward families, with trendy shops, golf courses and Y.M.C.A.’s are emerging where bleak, uniform towers once stood. Displaced residents are receiving vouchers to move to private housing. And a landmark experiment in housing the urban poor in large government-run facilities that began under the New Deal is being undone. “We’ve realized that concentrating families in poverty is very destructive,” said Renée L. Glover, the executive director of the Atlanta Housing Authority. “It’s destructive to the families, the neighborhoods and the city.”" I for one think this is an awesome plan.

Hodgman was awesome.

"Stranger still are new accounts emerging from France describing how former president Jacques Chirac was utterly baffled by a 2003 telephone conversation in which Bush reportedly invoked fanatical Old Testament prophecy – including the Earth-ending battle with forces of evil, Gog and Magog – in his arguments to enlist France in the Coalition of the Willing." Oh my gosh, this is crazy.

"Things get trickier when Alix gets to Twitter" WSJ trying to control what their employees say on Twitter. I go with on company time and when discussing company related information be careful, everything else have fun and don't be stupid.

"So we've gone from commitments to eventualities, targets, and non-specific understandings. This just proves what the American people have known all along: You can't trust the insurance industry with health care reform. Why have these commitments gone soft? It's about profits. Every dollar of health care "waste" in the system, every dollar that goes somewhere other than to your health, that's a dollar more in the pockets of a rich hospital administrator or insurance industry CEO. For health care costs to come down, somebody's profits have to come down as well." Oh profits the end all, be all. I take the position that it is pretty stupid for a business designed to provide health care to be a for-profit system, the two are directly in conflict with one another.

"As part of what it calls an "informational website," the company has hired an outside PR company to make a series of videos sounding the alarm about a government-sponsored health insurance option, known as the public plan. Obama has consistently maintained that a government-run plan, absent high-paid executives and the need for profits, could be a more affordable option for Americans who have trouble purchasing private insurance. The industry argues that creating a public insurance program will undermine the marketplace and eventually lead to a single-payer style system." Ahh yes because creating a national health care insurance system on the same basis as tone hones already in place all be it not run by the insurance companies is a single payer system, logic is so hard.

"But now banks, eager to get Washington out of their hair, are pushing to undo those investments as quickly — and cheaply — as possible. If the Obama administration acquiesces, billions of taxpayer dollars could be left on the table. At issue are so-called warrants that the government received from the banks last autumn, when the financial world was teetering. Like options, warrants give their owners the right to buy stock at a set price over a certain period of time, in this case, 10 years. Now, with many banks itching to return their bailout money, the warrants are raising some thorny questions. What are these investments worth? Should the government drive a hard bargain, or let the banks off easy? Should it maximize profit for taxpayers, or minimize pain for banks?" I vote for the administration to get as much money as legally possible.

"Bingaman said that decisions on providing royalty relief as part of lease sales should be left up to the Interior secretary, which he noted was the policy before the Energy Policy Act of 2005." Just rewrote the law to what it was pre 2005. I still don't understand how prevent oil companies from paying royalties on land use will remove incentives. For one oil companies already enjoy some of the best tax breaks out there for any business.

"REAL ID and PASS ID have the exact same purpose – to create a nationally uniform identity system. A card or system that is one of many options for proving identity or other information is not a national ID if people can decline to use it and still easily access goods, services, or infrastructure. But if law or regulation make it very difficult to avoid carrying or using a card, this presses it into the national ID category." Rewording it but still the same result.

"“Tears in the Darkness” is authoritative history. Ten years in the making, it is based on hundreds of interviews with American, Filipino and Japanese combatants. But it is also a narrative achievement. The book seamlessly blends a wide-angle view with the stories of many individual participants."

"Nulo — Spanish for null and void — is drawing support from disgruntled Mexicans who say the country’s politicians are focused more on their own power games than on the people they are supposed to serve. So, instead of urging voters to throw their weight behind any of the real candidates vying to be elected mayors, governors or members of Congress on July 5, Nulo’s backers are calling on Mexicans to nullify their ballots — and vote for no one at all. Mexico was essentially a one-party state until 2000, when the Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI, finally lost its grip on the presidency. But a sense of frustration has developed in recent years as more choices on the ballot have not, in the minds of many Mexicans, translated into a more responsive government." This is so cool.

"Why would a mother burn her child, even for religious reasons? How messed up must you be to put religious beliefs over common sense and human decency? If you think this mother did something unspeakable and deserves all sorts of punishments, how is this different from the Bible story in which we’re told to admire Abraham for being willing to kill his son Isaac?"

"EFF is looking for more evidence about the chilling effect of the export restrictions on digital tools of free expression. In addition, it seems time for the Obama administration pro-actively clarify that the Web 2.0 free speech tools do not require affirmative licensing under the export regulations." Same issue Facebook is facing with it's TOS that could potentially violate US law.

"A new report conducted by the Human Impact Partners and released by the National Partnership shows that passing the Healthy Families Act, which would let employees at firms with at least 15 employees earn up to seven paid sick days a year, would have a profoundly positive effect on public and individual health." No duhhh.

"Just a few years ago, some broadcasters and movie studios argued that this transition couldn't happen without a DRM mandate — a legal requirement for devices to obey the broadcast flag and apply DRM restrictions to free, over-the-air broadcasts. And they said they would hold up and obstruct this transition unless they got their way. We and our colleagues said no; we said that entertainment industries already have too much control over our living rooms. It's six years later and these threats have all fallen flat. This week, CBS will broadcast dozens of popular programs, like CSI, Without a Trace, Survivor, and The New Adventures of Old Christine, in high definition via over-the-air broadcast. So will all the other major networks. Digital TV also continues to feature popular movies with no DRM." Haha, good job EFF.

"The Obama Administration's decision to support Bush-era concealment policies has forced the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Public Knowledge (PK) to drop their lawsuit about the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). EFF and PK had been seeking important documents about the secret intellectual property enforcement treaty that has broad implications for global privacy and innovation." I still don't understand how a copyright law is 'National Security' issue?

"In the original reexamination request, EFF and Rick Mc Leod of Klarquist Sparkman, LLP, showed that the method Ideaflood claimed to have invented was well known before the patent was issued. In fact, website developers were having public discussions about how to create these virtual subdomains on an Apache developer mailing list and on Usenet more than a year before Ideaflood filed its patent application. The open source community's public record of the technology development provided the linchpin to EFF's patent challenge." Another stupid and ridiculous patent busted by the EFF.

"EFF is proud to stand with the Gray Lady in calling for the repeal of the FAA, and hopes that more editorial boards will join in the call. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, for one, pledged last year when the FAA passed that the Senate would revisit the issue this Fall as Congress considered whether to renew USA PATRIOT Act provisions that are set to expire. House Speaker Pelosi has also said that FISA may have to be revisited during the PATRIOT debate, and we aim to turn that "may" into a "must"." I'm with the EFF.

"A New York Times reporter who was kidnapped by the Taliban has escaped and made his way to freedom after more than seven months of captivity in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. David Rohde, along with a local reporter, Tahir Ludin and their driver, Asadullah Mangal, were abducted outside of Kabul on Nov. 10 while Mr. Rohde was researching a book." Good to hear.