News and Media

According to my brother, who lives in Kingwood, a suburb of Houston, FEMA has totally mishandled it response to a major disaster. Sarah Palin and the Wall Street crisis seem to be overshadowing what could be the disaster after the disaster.  From the Houston Chronicle:

It didn't take long for the finger-pointing to begin.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency came under fire Sunday as emergency workers were left undernourished and dozens of trucks of water and food had yet to be set up at distribution centers around Houston and surrounding communities.

And no sooner had the agency — widely condemned for its glacial response to suffering after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 — drawn sharp criticism as its leaders and spokesmen began to say it was someone else's fault.

Earlier in the day, a FEMA spokesman said delays in setting up staging points to hand out needed provisions had been caused by blocked roads.

By the evening, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said it was the fault of state officials who handed his department the "unexpected challenge" of having to prepare distribution points in addition to delivering supplies. … [Read more]

JERUSALEM (AFP) — Israel was to free 199 Palestinian prisoners Monday in a goodwill gesture to president Mahmud Abbas as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was due in the region to give a push to US-backed peace talks.

The release was scheduled for 9:30 am (0630 GMT), just hours before Rice's arrival on her 18th visit in two years.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proposed the release earlier this month, saying that it would bolster the Western-backed Abbas, whom he has met on a roughly fortnightly basis since the talks were formally relaunched in November.

Prison authorities said on Sunday that the prisoners had undergone routine medical examinations, met with Red Cross representatives and would be freed at the Beituniya checkpoint near the West Bank's political capital of Ramallah.

The prisoners will then be taken to Abbas's presidential compound for an official celebration, according to Ashraf al-Ajrami, the Palestinian minister of prisoner affairs.

"Our reception of the prisoners tomorrow will be like a national wedding," Ajrami told reporters in Ramallah on Sunday.

Those due to be released include two of the longest-serving Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, for whom Israel has made a rare exception to its policy of not freeing those implicated in deadly attacks on its citizens. … [Read more]

WASHINGTON: As the Bush administration was fine-tuning its plan to invade Iraq, Senator Joseph Biden Jr. helped draft a proposed resolution that emphasized the need for diplomatic efforts to dismantle Saddam Hussein's weapons programs but gave President George. W. Bush the authority to use military force as a last resort.

A voting system used in 34 states contains a critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point, the manufacturer acknowledges.

The problem was identified after complaints from Ohio elections officials following the March primary there, but the logic error that is the root of the problem has been part of the software for 10 years, said Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as Diebold.

The flawed software is on both touch screen and optical scan voting machines made by Premier and the problem with vote counts is most likely to affect larger jurisdictions that feed many memory cards to a central counting database rapidly.

Riggall said he was "confident" that elections officials through the years would have realized votes had been dropped when they crosschecked their tallies to certify final elections results and would have reloaded cards so as not to lose votes. Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has said no Ohio votes were lost because the nine Ohio counties that found the problem caught it before primary results were finalized. … [Read more]

Now I know how the others feel. Having written extensively about talk radio's right wing shock jocks and the hate speech they regularly use to tar opponents -- equating liberals with terrorists, homosexuals with child rapists and the Mafia, and political and media figures with the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan (even calling on air for assassinations, as Michael Reagan, son of the late president, did last month) -- it was only a matter of time until the smear merchants took aim at me. … [Read more]

The United States has a big problem: although we maintain a strong scientific establishment, competitive with the rest of the world in many fields, we also have some of the most backwards proponents of superstitious nonsense in both our electorate and at the highest levels of politics. It is an embarrassment to host laboratories that are at the forefront of scientific research in the same country where presidential candidates are discussing whether Earth is really 6,000 years old as some Bible scholars say, or whether they believe in evolution. … [Read more]

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.

On a clear spring afternoon in Harare in mid-May, South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, paid a call on Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's beleaguered dictator, six weeks after Zimbabwe's tumultuous elections on March 29 in which opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai claimed a clear victory over Mugabe. Mbeki had been largely silent as Zimbabwe descended into chaos. In mid-April, while Mugabe's handpicked Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) refused to release the final vote count, and Mugabe's War Veterans marched through the streets in an intimidating display of force, Mbeki had stood hand in hand with Mugabe outside the presidential residence in Harare and denied that the country was in "crisis." … [Read more]