News bits

[tangaroa]

• Yemen repulsed a rebel assault on the city of Saada, claiming to have killed over 150 rebels while losing only two soldiers. The government claims that the rebels attacked during a cease-fire and had about 70 armored vehicles. The lopsided casualty count suggests that the government had advance information on the attack.
• Two British citizens face criminal charges for insulting the prophet Mohammed.
• The U.S. and Pakistan disagree on which entities are the enemy in their war against the Taliban movement.
• The Family Research Council presented Bill O'Reilly with the Media Courage Award for contributing to the assassination of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller. This award for Media Courage was presented to O'Reilly in a private ceremony closed to the press, but Angelina Wilson of the Guardian was able to get in somehow.
• Honduras's deposed ex-President Manuel Zelaya has snuck back into the country and has taken asylum in the Brazilian embassy. Addendum: Zelaya accuses Israel of firing radiation beams at him. Honduras has declared a curfew, worsening its public relations during a food shortage that is hitting all of Central America.
• Spain's second largest newspaper El Mundo promoted Europe's most notorious Holocaust denier David Irving as an "expert" "historian" on the Second World War. In response to Israeli disfavor of the newspaper's choice to give Irving a pedastal and a spotlight, El Mundo deputy editor Juan Carlos Laviana accused Israel of trying to suppress the paper's freedom of speech.
• The ACORN non-scandal is falling apart, as the ACORN representative accused of assisting an underage prostitution ring actually called the cops on them, and another ACORN representative accused of doing nothing about the prostitution instead claims to have tried to get the actress playing a prostitute to a women's shelter. Recall from earlier that the ACORN non-scandal got major press from the mainstream media after Glenn Beck promoted it, and Media Matters graphs the disparity between the coverage of the ACORN non-scandal and all scandals and alleged scandals involving Jack Abramoff, Blackwater, and Halliburton. I call this a non-scandal because only a few people in a few regional ACORN offices were ever accused of anything, with none of the evidence suggesting that any of the accusations would reach above the local level. Unfortunately, the ACORN workers in the videos have lost their jobs just for being accused of wrongdoing on scant evidence. This is what McCarthyism was like.
• Glenn Beck praised a Constitutional provision to limit Congress's power to regulate the international slave trade. He mistook it for an anti-immigration provision.
• Solomonia has another collection of links pointing out the huge holes in the Goldstone report, and yet another collection. These are heavier on opinion pieces than the previous collections. Also, a draft of the State of Israel's official response to the report has leaked onto the Internet, and a shorter Israeli response has been printed in the Boston Globe.
• Toronto police seized 400 firearms from registered owners, some of whom had allowed the registration to expire or had "stored them improperly". The moral of the story: Do not register your firearms.
• A suicide bomber who killed African Union troops in Somalia turns out to have come from Seattle in the United States.
• NFL player Plaxico Burress was sentenced to two years in prison for reckless discharge of a firearm.
• A U.S. census worker was lynched in Kentucky. It is easy to blame this on right-wingers given the incitement towards this behaviour on Fox News and A.M. radio, but the police say there's a good chance he was killed by drug dealers for stumbling upon a pot field or meth lab.
• Saudi Arabia's monarchy is commissioning a technology university that will not be under the control of the religious right. The kingdom surely hopes that an oasis of relative liberalism in the country will attract and inspire the novel thinking that scientific advances often rise from.
• Volokh's site has an interesting argument on whether lawmakers should read the laws that they vote for. David Post raises the question, Orin Kerr adds additional thoughts, and Jonathan Adler argues in favor of lawmakers reading legislation.
• Greg Laden writes that the life of a civilized person is far less complex than the life of a primitive hunter-gatherer. A few commenters make the side argument I would make, that advanced civilizations as a whole are more complex while allowing the individuals within them to lead simpler lives.
• Here is a good collection of information about global warming.