News Bits

[tangaroa]

• NASA released a satellite photo of the Aral Sea, a lake the size of Ireland that was one of the largest bodies of water in Central Asia. It's gone. Consider also Lake Chad in Africa which has shrank to almost nothing.
• The United States has promised not to recognize the result of the Presidential election in Honduras. This is the routine election that is scheduled for every four years and seems to be taking place in a normal manner. The position of the U.S. raises the question of what demands the U.S. will make of Honduras after the election, after the maximum Constitutional limit on deposed President Manuel Zelaya's term has expired.
• Absent from nearly all reporting of the Constitutional crisis in Honduras -- including my own -- is the fact that Honduras had a Vice President, Aristides Mejia, who was deposed and expelled along with Zelaya. No one calls for Mejia to be restored to office. I suggest the possibility that he might be innocent of constitutional crimes and foreign influence to explain the worldwide lack of interest in him. Also: There is a warrant for Mejia's arrest for involvement with a no-bid contract, and the warrant was issued through Interpol.
• The AFL-CIO reports a significant decline since ten years earlier in the standard of living of workers under the age of 35 in the United States.
• Recently deceased U.S. Senator Edward "Teddy" Kennedy once gave a speech advocating separation of church and state to students at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. The link goes to a PDF of the speech.
• At least three U.S. church leaders have openly prayed for U.S. President Barack Obama to die. One of the three, Pastor Steven Anderson of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Arizona, had called for Obama's death in a sermon shortly before a member of his congregation appeared armed at an Obama speech, which makes that incident less about gun rights and more about whether the gun owner was crazy enough to potentially use his weapon.
• San Francisco network administrator Terry Childs has been in jail for 14 months for doing his job. His supervisors insisted he announce the root password for all the city's routers to a room full of people who did not need to know, many of them non-city employees, and he refused. This came at the end of a longer workplace dispute which Infoworld's Paul Venezia covers in as much detail as I've seen anywhere, and the supervisors had him jailed for it.
• California's governor and about a quarter of its Legislature are listed as co-hosts for a dinner for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim Brotherhood front organization. This is probably a case of being told that putting their names here would be good for community outreach and not vetting who the organization was. The linked article calls the organization a "Hamas front" because more readers will know who Hamas is. Hamas and CAIR are more like sister organizations branching off the same root.
• The U.S. National Center for Science Education grades the states' school curricula for how well they treat evolution, geology, and other sciences that dispute the ancient Bronze Age mythology that some people insist on believing.
• Kentucky's legislature issued a law requiring state security offices to post signs declaring "dependence on Almighty God as being vital to the security of the commonwealth". Thankfully, a judge ruled this unconstitutional.
• Here is the U.S. health care debate in one sentence: Nobody knows what's in the bill, so the argument on both sides boils down to whether or not you trust the Democrats.