Today's WaPo has this lengthy feature on Bono and his humanitarian politicking. It's a Style section piece, tending to puffery. But there's some interesting information here which (even for those of us who mostly missed him as a musician) makes clear that he has to be taken seriously. Like the fact that he has 75 full-time staffers...
Three recent examples: ° A Seattle girl allegedly knocks off her roommate in Perugia (lurid sex involved). ° A school shooter in Finland got some pointers from someone similarly inclined in Pennsylvania (you're only a chat room away). ° A glamourous British couple's daughter goes missing in Portugal (foul play suspected). Not sure what to make of this, other than as another incident of...
Details here — this on the claims filed by the families of Chinese dissidents jailed on evidence coughed up by Yahoo to Chinese authorities. The settlement terms weren't disclosed, but Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang issued an apology to the families and money is changing hands. The issues posed here aren't going to go away (and Yahoo isn't the...
It's probably not necessary for most readers of the blog, but my advice would be to save your $17.82. John Bolton's Surrender Is Not an Option is predictably devoid of perspective and makes for dull reading. Bolton has a massive chip on his shoulder (all the way back to his youth as a scholarship kid in high school...
I don't think so but some people do. Here's a bill that would fix the well-known operative flaws of the WPR. The measure corrects the WPR's failure to include attacks on US armed forces and citizens outside the United States among those situations in which the President can unilaterally initiate hostilities (compare the bill's section 3 to the...
The World Tourism Organization, that is. There's this interesting story in today's NY Times about how global warming may affect tourism, and what the WTO is doing about it (why, meeting in Davos, of course). And it's more than those ski slope operators in Pennsylvania that one has to feel sorry for. With air travel as a...
First there's this screed in Human Events, now this editorial from the more mainstream conservative mouthpiece National Review accusing Bush of being in the thrall of transnational progressives ("tranzis," for short). Coming out against ratification of the Law of the Sea Treaty, NR asks: why the Adminstration support for it?Well, it seems to be part of a pattern. That...
The International Carbon Action Partnership was launched yesterday in Lisbon. The effort comprises an initiativeto create an international forum of governments and public authorities that are engaged in the process of designing or implementing carbon markets. ICAP will establish an expert forum to discuss relevant questions on the design, compatibility and potential linkage of regional carbon markets. The forum...
Okay, so it’s not easy to connect these dots, and I certainly wouldn’t pretend to have a generalizable theory here. But there’s a plausible story to be told in John Yoo’s ascent and the pretty clear damage done by his post-9/11 work at the Office of Legal Counsel. One can take Jack Goldsmith’s critique of Yoo’s OLC work...
This episode brings into pretty clear relief the potential downside of congressional foreign policymaking (front-page story today in the NY Times; you can find the resolution here). I'm surprised that the Bush Administration hasn't made some sort of constitutional argument against the measure. It might be a tough one to make, but that's hardly stopped this Administration from...
Careful readers of the blog will have noticed the addition of a "linkroll" on our left sidebar several weeks ago. (Hat tip to Gordon Smith for the idea.) The feature allows us to point readers to selected items of interest (no aspirations to comprehensive coverage) that we might not get to in our regular posts. We'll hope sometimes...
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (who ever thought we'd be nostalgic for the INS?) rolled out its revamped naturalization test with great fanfare yesterday, and managed to get some pretty extensive media play with it (fronted in the NY Times, for instance). But as I wrote when a pilot version was rolled out late last year, there isn't really...
