News bits...

[tangaroa]

• The Birther Controversy of 1891
• A few weeks ago the CIA and U.S. Congress were in a big uproar about a program to track and potentially assassinate al-Qaeda members. We were told that there were secret aspects of the program that made the new CIA director Leon Panetta cancel the program as soon as he heard about it. Now we know more: the CIA was paying the Blackwater mercenary outfit to run the program.
• The situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating with not enough boots and brains to deal with it. There is better news to the south where most Pakistani war refugees have returned to what's left of their homes, but many more remain homeless.
• The BNP shows why people call it the British Nazi Party.
• Tom Ridge says that Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft pressured him to raise the Homeland Security warning level just before the 2004 election. Every time the color changed, Bush's approval ratings had spiked (and my faith in humanity dropped). The timing of the alerts often coincided with Bush Administration scandals.
• Texas high schools are required by a new law to offer an elective course in Biblical studies.
• The U.S. Seventh Circuit declares that states have the right to require firearms registration.
• A man in Kissimmee, Florida was jailed for three months in 2005 when an officer mistook Chiclets breath mints for cocaine. He is now suing the city.
• Not News: An Israeli man praising his country was heckled. News: by someone who yelled "Heil Hitler!" at him. [Should've been on] Fark: the heckler was wearing an Israeli Defense Forces t-shirt.
• Saudi businessman Khalid bin Mafouz has died. He had been accused by a few authors of being a major financial supporter of international terrorism, with Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillame Dasque's "Forbidden Truth" calling him "the banker of terror", but he never faced trial on such charges and the accusations were never proven to my satisfaction. He was best known for suing his accusers in British court where truth is not a defense against libel and the courts assume jurisdiction over anything published anywhere in the world because it could potentially be imported.
• McDonald's Japan has an ad campaign which features a nerdy white guy who massacres the Japanese language. Is it racism? If maybe a little, how funny does something like that have to be acceptable?
• The electronics retailer Best Buy fired two employees who tried to stop a pair of thieves. A manager who helped the two lower-ranking employees was not fired.
• Neo-Nazi hate radio host Hal Turner was an FBI informant who reported the IP addresses of people who made death threats against public officials on his blog.
• August 23 is the 80th anniversary of the Hebron Massacre, the first strategically significant violent incident in what would become the Arab-Israeli conflict.
• A 60 Minutes report from 2006 describes how U.S. hospitals bill the uninsured at much higher rates than usual. The two issues of hospitals of overbilling the uninsured and insurance companies underpaying hospitals have not gotten much attention in the health care debate.