Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Third Quarter Cable News: Bad News for All Networks, But Hope for a Better CNN
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Friday, September 17, 2010
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Civil rights photographer Ernest Withers doubled as FBI informant | The Upshot Yahoo! News - Yahoo! News
Famed civil rights photographer doubled as FBI informant
By Michael CalderoneErnest Withers, a revered civil rights photographer who captured iconic images of Martin Luther King Jr. on the night King was shot in Memphis, actually played a different role the day before: FBI informant.
The Commercial Appeal, a newspaper in Memphis, just completed a two-year investigation that reveals how Withers provided the FBI with details about where King was staying and information on his meeting with black militants on April 3, 1968 — the day before the assassination.
Withers' spying, however, extends far beyond the slain civil rights leader.
The Commercial Appeal found FBI reports indicating that Withers collaborated for years with FBI agents monitoring the civil rights movement. Those FBI reports, the paper's Marc Perrusquia writes, "reveal a covert, previously unknown side of the beloved photographer."
Withers is certainly beloved in Memphis, where a namesake museum is scheduled to open next month.....
Famed civil rights photographer doubled as FBI informant | The Upshot Yahoo! News - Yahoo! News
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Editorial - Let the Students Profit - NYTimes.com
NYTimes Editorial
Let the Students Profit
Published: September 11, 2010
The Obama administration has proposed tough and much-needed regulations for lucrative for-profit colleges. Industry is predictably pushing back hard, with legions of high-priced lobbyists and organized letter-writing campaigns. The administration must hold its ground.The final rules, due out in November, must be strong enough to rein in businesses that have made an art of enrolling students who have no chance of graduating and stripping them of state and federal grants and loans. Besides ending such abuses of students, the regulations are needed to protect taxpayers, who foot the bill for waste and abuse in the college aid program.
Honest, well-run for-profits play an important role in educating students who may not qualify for traditional schools. Over the last decade, far too many institutions have been cited for saddling students with ruinous debt. A recent report from the Government Accountability Office found fraudulent or deceptive practices at all 15 of the for-profit colleges visited by investigators posing as prospective students.
Some college officials encouraged applicants to falsify financial aid forms; students were also pressured into signing enrollment contracts before they were allowed to speak to financial aid representatives who would clarify costs. The programs offered at the for-profits schools were substantially more expensive than comparable programs at nearby public colleges. In one example, a student who inquired about the cost of studying for a massage therapy certificate was told that $14,000 was a fair price, even though the local community college offered the same courses for $520.
....
Friday, September 10, 2010
Thursday, September 09, 2010
6 global warming skeptics who changed their minds - Yahoo! News
6 global warming skeptics who changed their minds
– Wed Sep 1, 10:15 am ETNew York – Climate change doubters have just lost one of their leading lights, as writer Bjorn Lomborg calls for a worldwide carbon tax. But he's not the first high-profile defector
With 2010 shaping up as the warmest year on record and unprecedented heat waves gripping the planet, global warming skeptics have suffered another blow with the defection of the "most high-profile" member of their camp, author Bjorn Lomborg. But Lomborg isn't the first doubter to accept the scientific consensus that human carbon emissions are warming the planet and need to be curtailed. Here, a review of several prominent cases:
1. Bjorn Lomborg, Danish academic
Lomborg made waves with his 2001 book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, which argued that global warming was no big deal, and fighting it would be a waste of money. This month, he's publishing Smart Solutions to Climate Change, which argues that a global carbon tax should be imposed to raise $150 billion a year to address global warming.
Before quote: "In 20 years' time, we’ll look back and wonder why we worried so much." (2002)
After quote: "We actually have only one option: we all need to start seriously focusing, right now, on the most effective ways to fix global warming." (2010)
2. Dmitri Medvedev, Russian president
....
6 global warming skeptics who changed their minds - Yahoo! News
Digital Domain - A Strong Password Isn’t the Strongest Security - NYTimes.com
Digital Domain
A Strong Password Isn’t the Strongest Security
By RANDALL STROSS
Published: September 4, 2010
MAKE your password strong, with a unique jumble of letters, numbers and punctuation marks. But memorize it — never write it down. And, oh yes, change it every few months.These instructions are supposed to protect us. But they don’t.
Some computer security experts are advancing the heretical thought that passwords might not need to be “strong,” or changed constantly. They say onerous requirements for passwords have given us a false sense of protection against potential attacks. In fact, they say, we aren’t paying enough attention to more potent threats.
Here’s one threat to keep you awake at night: Keylogging software, which is deposited on a PC by a virus, records all keystrokes — including the strongest passwords you can concoct — and then sends it surreptitiously to a remote location.
....
A Brief Refresher on the Taliban's Worst-Kept Secret | Mother Jones
Mother Jones
A Brief Refresher on the Taliban's Worst-Kept Secret
Wikileaks' papers are just the latest Afghan military shockers to surface. Remember Reagan and the Pakistani spooks?
Fri Jul. 30, 2010 5:31 PM PDT
The "most damning collection of data" in Wikileaks' massive trove of secret documents from Afghanistan are 180 files that show the Pakistani intelligence service helping Taliban insurgents in their fight against US forces. The documents are dark reading indeed: They describe Pakistani agents meeting directly with the Taliban, supporting commanders of the insurgency, and even training suicide bombers. But for anyone versed in the contemporary history of Afghanistan, they are hardly news. The Wikileaks data dump is just the tip of the iceberg; ISI black ops and double-crosses date back at least three decades. Pakistan's Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, is merely feeding a monster it helped create back in the 1990s—with the full knowledge of the United States. Indeed, in concert with the CIA, the Pakistani spy agency also helped create Al Qaeda, and continued to support it long after it had gone astray of US interests.
That context is especially useful now. I explored the Taliban's history in my 2005 book The Five Unanswered Questions About 9/11, which asked, did US 'allies' help make the attacks possible?" Most of what follows is adapted from that book.
....
A Brief Refresher on the Taliban's Worst-Kept Secret | Mother Jones
Scents that men and women like and dislike | Yahoo! Green
Scents that men and women like and dislike
Scents that men and women like and dislike | Yahoo! GreenWednesday, September 08, 2010
Report: Castro says Cuban model doesn't work - Yahoo! News
Report: Castro says Cuban model doesn't work
HAVANA – Fidel Castro told a visiting American journalist that Cuba's communist economic model doesn't work, a rare comment on domestic affairs from a man who has conspicuously steered clear of local issues since stepping down four years ago.
The fact that things are not working efficiently on this cash-strapped Caribbean island is hardly news. Fidel's brother Raul, the country's president, has said the same thing repeatedly. But the blunt assessment by the father of Cuba's 1959 revolution is sure to raise eyebrows.
Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, asked if Cuba's economic system was still worth exporting to other countries, and Castro replied: "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore" Goldberg wrote Wednesday in a post on his Atlantic blog.
He said Castro made the comment casually over lunch following a long talk about the Middle East, and did not elaborate. The Cuban government had no immediate comment on Goldberg's account.
....
Tuesday, September 07, 2010
Texas state board says arson investigators used flawed science - CNN.com
Texas state board says arson investigators used flawed science
July 23, 2010 8:56 p.m. EDTJuly 23, 2010 8:56 p.m. EDT
(CNN) -- A Texas state board said Friday that arson investigators used flawed science but were not negligent in an investigation that led to a controversial 2004 execution.
The panel also said that investigators did not commit misconduct.
Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in 2004, 13 years after a fire killed his three daughters. Prosecutors argued that Willingham deliberately set the 1991 blaze -- but three reviews of the evidence by outside experts have found the fire should not have been ruled arson.
The last of those reports was ordered by the Texas Forensic Science Commission, which has been looking into Willingham's execution since 2008. A September 2009 shake-up by Texas Gov. Rick Perry kept that panel from reviewing the report.
The panel also said that investigators did not commit misconduct.
Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in 2004, 13 years after a fire killed his three daughters. Prosecutors argued that Willingham deliberately set the 1991 blaze -- but three reviews of the evidence by outside experts have found the fire should not have been ruled arson.
The last of those reports was ordered by the Texas Forensic Science Commission, which has been looking into Willingham's execution since 2008. A September 2009 shake-up by Texas Gov. Rick Perry kept that panel from reviewing the report.
....
Texas state board says arson investigators used flawed science - CNN.com
Heavy Drinkers Outlive Nondrinkers, Study Finds - Yahoo! News
Heavy Drinkers Outlive Nondrinkers, Study Finds
The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment | The New York Review of Books
In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel. In response, he unwittingly produced the most damning indictment of the organized American Jewish community that I have ever seen.
The philanthropists wanted to know what Jewish students thought about Israel. Luntz found that they mostly didn’t. “Six times we have brought Jewish youth together as a group to talk about their Jewishness and connection to Israel,” he reported. “Six times the topic of Israel did not come up until it was prompted. Six times these Jewish youth used the word ‘they‘ rather than ‘us‘ to describe the situation.”
That Luntz encountered indifference was not surprising. In recent years, several studies have revealed, in the words of Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the University of California at Davis, that “non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less attached to Israel than their elders,” with many professing “a near-total absence of positive feelings.” In 2008, the student senate at Brandeis, the only nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored university in America, rejected a resolution commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Jewish state.
....
The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment | The New York Review of Books
Repossession hell: 5 extremely 'wrongful' foreclosures - The Week
Repossession hell: 5 extremely 'wrongful' foreclosures
The Pittsburgh woman says her bank "accidentally" took everything she owned—including her pet parrot. Hers isn't the first story like that
posted on March 19, 2010, at 12:00 PM
A Pittsburgh woman is claiming that Bank of America wrongfully foreclosed on her home, and in so doing ransacked her possessions, cut her power lines, padlocked her doors, and confiscated her pet parrot. Angela Iannelli, 46—who was away when repo men allegedly made off with her beloved blue macaw, Luke—says she's still "afraid to set foot in her house" and has filed a civil suit against BoA (the bank reportedly admits the foreclosure was a "mistake"). (Watch an ABC report about Angela Iannelli's foreclosed home.) Here, four more individuals claiming wrongful repossession nightmares:
Wedding dress and all?
Last December, Nilly Mauck, 31, says she came home to find her décor brutally simplified. Mauck claims contractors assigned to repossess condo No. 1156 mistakenly carted off all the furnishing and possessions in No. 1157 — her Las Vegas apartment of two years — everything from immigration records to her wedding dress. Though she's demanded "$100,000 to $200,000" in compensation, the Realtor has offered only $5,000. Mauck says she's seeking legal advice and learning "to live with the clothes on her back."
Repossession hell: 5 extremely 'wrongful' foreclosures - The Week
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