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Marvin Kalb on PBS about the state of the media, Middle East, Bush, etc.. "If somebody says something to you and you have a requirement to go on the air live, you are apt to say what that person just said to you before you've had a chance to check on what the person said. All of these things now create a rushed tumult, which is very noisy and which sort of goes for news today, but in my judgment, isn't news, it's noise.
posted by semmi at 11:42 PM PST - 1 comments

eu seeks closer ties to iran This approach has got to be better than calling states 'evil'. This is the same as the US keeping links with China, a less than perfect regime, and one that could be called a sponsor of terrorism. " Mr Patten told the BBC: "It can't seriously be anybody's idea of a good way of promoting stability in the region to think that we should isolate and cut Iran off for ever." He said there should be recognition of the strength of the reform movement and be aware that there were other elements which were far less friendly to the West. "If you don't talk to the reasonable people, you fetch up with fewer reasonable people to talk to." it's been over a decade since i was in Iran (1992) and the reformers/moderates ahve gained very significant ground since then. The Axis of Evil speech did tremendous harm for moderate Iranians, as it seemed to justify the hardliners stance on the west. your thoughts.....
posted by quarsan at 10:51 PM PST - 13 comments

Play with the Osbournes I did a few searches for this nifty app and turned up nothing, which is kind of hard to believe, what with all the hype behind this popular MTV show. I'm not sure about you, but I love the Osbournes... not so much for the well-rounded parenting advice I can garner from it, but for the sheer entertainment value.
posted by crankydoodle at 10:24 PM PST - 3 comments

Teleportation finally? Not quite "beam me up scotty" yet, but a definite surge forward. The mechanics of it aren't quite sophisticated enough yet to handle humans, but this does make quantum computers close to reality.
posted by Espoo2 at 6:21 PM PST - 12 comments

The Gay Right. Richard Goldstein argues (accurately, I think) that the Right has come to dominate gay and lesbian politics. Even when I don't agree with them, I've always enjoyed reading Andrew Sullivan and Norah Vincent -- but where are their progressive counterparts?
posted by MikeB at 6:19 PM PST - 21 comments

With teeny tiny xGB hard drives like the Archos line available, why do PDAs/handhelds have such small memory capacity? The gorgeous new Sony Clie has a mere 16 MB to its name, and most PocketPCs top out around 64MB. When do you think we'll see handheld devices that really parallel the capabilities of a desktop computer?
posted by Zettai at 5:16 PM PST - 26 comments

Tired of Fantasy Baseball/Football/Basketball? Then it's time you tried Fantasy Fugitive Recovery!

"Fantasy Fugitive Recovery (FFR) is an internet game similar to other sports. You pick a roster and are awarded points based on your players performance. In FFR, the aim of the game is to pick five escaped convicts from the master list and gain points based on if your escapees are captured."

Anyone want to start a league (ehh, prison system?) with me?
posted by Yelling At Nothing at 4:49 PM PST - 3 comments

The audiogalaxy/RIAA suit has been settled, with the result being that all content on the audiogalaxy system is now "opt-in" by the original artist/copyright holders only with the rest filtered out (earlier story of the initial filing).
posted by mathowie at 4:25 PM PST - 24 comments

Ever dream of owning a Bookstore? Essay Contest! $250 and 250 words could win this thriving Used Bookstore in Roseburg, Oregon. A very cool, very busy store with a customer base of well over 10,000 people. Someone is going to win and it might as well be one of us.
posted by Mack Twain at 4:09 PM PST - 18 comments

Ottawa Citizen publisher fired for criticizing Chrétien.
CanWest Global keeps it real for the little guy once again by continuing to silence dissident voices. The Citizen's own coverage of the sacking is, unsurprisingly, scant on details.
posted by poorhaus at 2:11 PM PST - 11 comments

Matt Taibbi, co-founder of the eXile, Moscow's most caustic and painfully funny newspaper, has relocated to Buffalo, NY (?) to work his journalistic mojo there. That is, if he's not arrested over this editorial.
posted by GriffX at 1:54 PM PST - 10 comments

2nd Degree Murder Verdict Thrown Out in SF Dog Mauling Case. Though Superior Court Judge James Warren said Knoller and Noel are "the most despised couple in this city," he said the evidence did not support a murder conviction because Knoller had no way of knowing her dogs would kill someone when she left her apartment that day.
posted by Danf at 1:47 PM PST - 12 comments

APOD turns seven. The Astronomy Picture of the Day hit the seven-year mark on Sunday (full archive list here). Simple and consistent in design, (possibly a record-holder for longest consistent design of an updated site) it's still maintained by astronomers Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell.
posted by kokogiak at 1:12 PM PST - 10 comments

15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense From Scientific American..."Opponents of evolution want to make a place for creationism by tearing down real science, but their arguments don't hold up. Besieged teachers and others may increasingly find themselves on the spot to defend evolution and refute creationism. The arguments that creationists use are typically specious and based on misunderstandings of (or outright lies about) evolution, but the number and diversity of the objections can put even well-informed people at a disadvantage. To help with answering them, the following list rebuts some of the most common "scientific" arguments raised against evolution. It also directs readers to further sources for information and explains why creation science has no place in the classroom." Creation "science?"
posted by martk at 12:57 PM PST - 89 comments

Fire at Internet Cafe 'forces' Chinese government to close all 2400 Beijing cafes. This one has to rank up there with the line from the Good Old Days in which missing Soviet leaders were often described as 'having a cold.' I can't wait for the 2008 Happy Fun Olympics.
posted by mathis23 at 12:36 PM PST - 7 comments

Starbuckling A writer from the NY Post calls Starbucks HQ and says a reader told them that the company's "collapse into cool" ad campaign was too close a reference to Sept. 11 (the campaign posters featured a dragonfly; perhaps the reader misconstrued it as an airplane). As a result, Starbucks pulls the ad, and just to cover its ass said it "had intended no link between the image of the beverages and the terror attacks." Is the company just making a cautious PR move, or is this going too far?
posted by risenc at 12:26 PM PST - 27 comments

In 1997, Scott Shuger created for Slate.com what would quickly become the wildly popular column "Today's Papers." The column was innovative in its brief and snarky discussions about that day's headlines on all the major news dailies. The differences between each paper's choice of stories covered, and the variances from paper to paper in their coverage of those same stories was illustrative in a fashion we now take for granted around here on MeFi. Shuger died suddenly over the weekend in a scuba mishap and is remembered here by his colleagues at slate.com.
posted by BentPenguin at 11:19 AM PST - 8 comments

The Umbrella Sail at Last a Reality! Technofetishists will love this fabulous collection of Popular Mechanics covers going back to 1902. Who'd have thought a weaving machine could be so beautiful? Futuristic cityscapes, bizarre weapons, new-fangled sports and surprisingly delicate and artful scenes are just a few of the pleasures in the year-by-year archive. The mag's male-dominated world can get kind of, um, gay, but it's hard to imagine a better display of the joys and fears (especially the fears) of our monkey fascination with technology.
posted by mediareport at 11:17 AM PST - 40 comments

A Generous Brazilian Helping Of Cartier-Bresson's Photographs: His work is so vital it's unusually monitor-friendly. This 1999 Brazilian website includes many hard-to-find photographs, interestingly divided by location(Europe, America, India). There's also a nice selection of his classic images on Photology.com's commercial site and an avaricious but compelling set of portraits of writers here, courtesy of a Eastman Kodak-sponsored exhibition. [As far as I can tell, they're all copyright-cleared. Bring your old Leicas out...and despair!].
posted by MiguelCardoso at 10:09 AM PST - 14 comments

"Suicide by Cop" Not a Crime?
"A gunman unleashed a furious swirl of violence on an East Village street early yesterday, shooting three people and holding patrons of a crowded wine bar hostage" - New York Times

"I wouldn't characterize this as a crime" - Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly.

No? OK, Chief, what is it then?
posted by nobody_knose at 9:08 AM PST - 21 comments

"There he was, right in the middle of my Throat-searching radar" John Dean unmasks Deep Throat, sort of, in his Salon e-book. Who do you think it is?
posted by kirkaracha at 9:06 AM PST - 19 comments

All about Tati.
posted by Spoon at 8:30 AM PST - 18 comments

Is Israel rebuilding a Berlin wall ? Some people remember the moment of happiness when the Berlin wall was finally destroyed. Is this new wall a symbol of a new cold war era ?
posted by elpapacito at 7:31 AM PST - 22 comments

Most Valuable Object in the World The Supreme Purple Star - as it is being called - is a deep purple diamond, turning to crimson when rotated in the light. Diamonds come in a rainbow of colors and are called "fancies" in the trade. Some are beautiful, others less so. This one is the only one of it's kind, and has been pronounced "priceless". The speculation, of course, is that the owner is looking to sell it.
posted by Irontom at 7:01 AM PST - 20 comments

Ebert gushes: After seeing Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report," my mind was churning with amazement and curiosity. Talking to Spielberg and his star, Tom Cruise, I found myself not an interviewer but simply a moviegoer, talking the way you do when you walk out of a movie that blindsides you with its brilliance.
posted by kliuless at 6:12 AM PST - 41 comments

Now I've seen it all: The Islamic-Christian alliance (with wholehearted Bush support) "We look at them as allies, not necessarily as friends," said Austin Ruse, founder and president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, a New York-based organization that promotes conservative values at U.N. social conferences. "We have realized that without countries like Sudan [Iraq, Iran and Libya], abortion would have been recognized as a universal human right in a U.N. document."

Liberal Western activists and governments, added Mokhtar Lamani, a Moroccan diplomat who represents the 53-nation Organization of Islamic Conferences at the United Nations, had offended the religious and cultural sensitivities of Islamic countries by proposing that a final conference declaration include explicit references to the need to protect prostitutes, intravenous drug users and "men who have sex with men" from contracting AIDS.

The Bush administration led the coalition in blocking an effort by European and Latin American countries at the U.N. children's meeting last month to include a reference in the final declaration to "reproductive health care services," a term the conservatives believed could be used to promote abortion.

"This alliance shows the depths of perversity of the [U.S.] position," said Adrienne Germaine, president of the International Women's Health Coalition. "On the one hand we're presumably blaming these countries for unspeakable acts of terrorism, and at the same time we are allying ourselves with them in the oppression of women."
posted by magullo at 6:08 AM PST - 17 comments

U.S. Soccer needs you now. The US soccer team has not been this far in the World Cup since 1930. Where is the sea of red, white and blue? Watching mundane sports...like baseball. (match results in link. from sts)
posted by lostbyanecho at 5:37 AM PST - 47 comments

Home Depot stops doing business with federal government. Home Depot Inc., the nation's largest hardware and home-improvement chain, has told its 1,400 stores not to do business with the U.S. government or its representatives. [snip] Most of Home Depot's managers interviewed by the Post-Dispatch shared the confusion. All the managers contacted declined to be quoted, but most said they didn't know what was behind the company's refusal to sell to the federal government.
posted by percine at 3:14 AM PST - 7 comments

One of the teams in the Mexico vs. USA World Cup game made history. As of before the game, the USA has never won a knockout game of the World Cup - Mexico had never won a knockout game of the World Cup when not in Mexico. Click the article to see which team made history - or if you don't want it spoiled, don't click at all!
posted by twiggy at 1:33 AM PST - 28 comments