News bits...

[tangaroa]

• Blogger turned journalist Mike Stark finds Republican representatives in the U.S. Congress refusing to comment on the baseless accusation, popular among Republican voters, that President Obama was not born in the United States. The slander has stuck around even though Obama has released a copy of his birth certificate and records of his birth announcement were found in old copies of two local newspapers. Proper respects to Congressman Trent Franks for being aware of this and saying no to the nonsense. CNN's Lou Dobbs has been promoting the Obama foreign birth nonsense and World Net Daily condemns all other media for not recognizing the "truth" of it.
• Nigerian jihadists have launched coordinated attacks on police stations in the northeastern districts of Borno, Bauchi, and Kano. Additional coverage from Agence France Presse.
• Nick Kristof reports on a Pakistani sex slave who is trying to press charges against her abusers.
• FARC has somehow acquired anti-tank missiles that Sweden sold to the Venezuelan army over 20 years ago. Also, Venezuela has cut diplomatic ties to Colombia and declared a trade embargo on that country after Colombia agreed to an expansion of the U.S. presence there.
• Historian Barry Rubin describes the civil war within Islam as the authoritarians attempt to seize the name of Islam for themselves.
• Steven Emerson reports on Hizb-ut-Tahrir, an Islamic supremacist group which condemns inter-faith dialogue. See also more information about the group.
• Romanian science schoolbooks teach Creationism.
• A paper which supposedly disproves anthropogenic global warming does this "by removing the trend from the data and showing that there is no trend after doing that."
• There is an interesting church-state case in Dearborn, Michigan where a wrestling coach was fired by a Muslim principal after a student converted from Islam to Christianity, apparently under the influence of one of the coach's evangelical Christian assistants. There is enough room in what we don't know for either or both sides to be in the wrong.
• Frederick Clarkson accuses Obama of filling U.S. government posts with Christian theocrats.
• Jerry Falwell's Liberty University has asked the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, in response to AU asking the IRS to revoke Liberty's exemption after the school revoked its recognition of the school's Democratic Party Club.
• Americans United complains about the U.S. government spending money for religious purposes overseas, although as regards the mosques in Iraq, there is a secular strategic purpose in rebuilding a foreign country's pre-existing religious centers that were destroyed in a war.
• The latest Harry Potter movie includes scenes of teenagers drinking alcohol, which is something that American puritans are supposed to be outraged by even though it is presented in a normal and unremarkable way that will go over the heads of children.
• MSNBC hired former Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean to host an episode of its news program Countdown which is usually hosted by Keith Olbermann. This raises a question of political bias in a news source, but Countdown is one of few significant American news sources which are not biased against the Democrats and the left in general. In the absence of a perfect world, having one source be biased in the opposite direction of the usual bias is better than having only bias in the one direction.
• Republicans are complaining that Democrats want them to vote on a weighty health care reform bill before having an opportunity to read it. The formerly named Conservative News Service quotes John Conyers dismissing the notion of reading the bill before voting on it. Also, Republicans are accusing the Democrats of censorship by forbidding them from using Congress's free mail service to send the public a chart detailing the complexity of the new health care system. Ironically, the Republicans' chart is not that complicated. It just has a lot of things in it. See also: Ezra Klein answers reader questions on the U.S. health care system.
• This is nonpolitical but it addresses our concept of humanity: Boingboing discusses a test comparing chimpanzee learning behaviours with those of human children.