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Bottom-Line Business Pressures Hurting Press Coverage, Say Journalists. "Press Going Too Easy on Bush" survey finds. This and more in the annual State of the News Media report, paid for and sponsored by The Pew Charitable Trusts (non profit established by the children of Sun Oil Company founder Joseph N. Pew).
posted by stbalbach at 11:18 PM PST - 19 comments

Human Rights Watch Report: The Road to Abu Ghraib
Introduction, A Policy To Evade International Law:
Circumventing the Geneva Conventions, Undermining the Rules Against Torture, Renditions, “Disappearances” and so on and so on...
See also Human rights group finds Abu Ghraib cover-up
posted by y2karl at 9:57 PM PST - 23 comments

Factory Tours! Too cool. A site devoted to collecting and sharing publicly available tours of various production facilities: candy, breweries, cars, candles, power plants... Just the idea transports me right back to being a grade-schooler watching films about How Things Are Made. I am so there, dude.
posted by NortonDC at 9:21 PM PST - 15 comments

Terrorist incidents actually ROSE in 2003, but the State Department's "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report, issued April 29 (see Appendix G for an easy chart), said the exact opposite. Senior Bush administration officials immediately hailed it as objective proof that they were winning the war on terrorism. The report is considered the authoritative yardstick of the prevalence of terrorist activity around the world. Reports like this one were all over the news in April--will the fact that it was a lie be reported as widely? And can we trust anything this administration says anymore?
posted by amberglow at 6:37 PM PST - 44 comments

U.S. bioterrorism research leaps past defensive tactics - Scientists are now able to explore creating genetically engineered superbugs, plus the means to mass-produce and spread them ... 'If any other country set forth a program like this, U.S. intelligence undoubtedly would call it an offensive program,' said Edward Hammond, head of the Sunshine Project, a group in Austin, Texas, that tracks bioweapons and biodefense issues.
posted by eraserhed at 6:13 PM PST - 34 comments

A couple months back, there was a cool flash-based front-end to Google News that displayed topics and their relative importance based on size. Now comes another visualization that's a little bit more abstract, but can be used in the same way, to get "a picture" of what the world considered news on any given day (and it has archives). Slick stuff, rollover all the colored boxes to see topics and click to see archived data.
posted by mathowie at 4:28 PM PST - 9 comments

"The Ashcroft Fear Remix." (a potential summer mini-blockbuster)
[link goes to broadband and dialup option for Quicktime movie file]
posted by moonbird at 4:12 PM PST - 6 comments

Scientific American on Microsoft's new, gigantic attempt at a Palo Alto.
posted by Tlogmer at 4:02 PM PST - 9 comments

Kao-ani maker.
posted by hama7 at 3:59 PM PST - 9 comments

the death of lincoln. Originally from June 1865. "The murder of President Lincoln aroused a feeling of regret deeper than was ever before known in our history. Men and papers who had opposed his policy and vilified him personally, now vied with his adherents and friends in lauding the rare wisdom and goodness which marked his conduct and character." Hmmmm... sounds familiar.
posted by sunexplodes at 3:41 PM PST - 36 comments

Water woes, not wars, ended Angkor's empire, according to the Greater Angkor Project. Ecological failure and infrastructure breakdown brought down Cambodia's great city and Hindu civilization.
posted by homunculus at 3:29 PM PST - 7 comments

The average PC printer's ink costs more than 16 times as much as an equivalent amount of vintage 1985 Dom Perignon champagne.
posted by brookish at 2:10 PM PST - 36 comments

"No voting rights for YOU......boy!"- Florida's illegal purges of voter rolls to continue for 3rd national election? Election head resigns. While Florida refuses to release the "purge lists" to CNN, "The head of Florida's elections division resigned Monday amid reports he was feeling political heat over a push to purge thousands of suspected felons from the state's voter rolls." (Tallahassee Sun-Sentinel) " there has been little action (and worse, really) on Florida's agreement to reinstate illegally purged voters to Florida voting rolls that resulted from an NAACP lawsuit over the 2000 election ["Many voters said their votes didn't count or they were turned away from polls due to mistakes on voter lists, busy telephone lines at election headquarters, punch-card voting machine foul-ups and other problems...Statewide, the largest numbers of voting problems were found in precincts with high proportions of black and elderly voters." The NYT editorially acknowledged the scandal on February 15, 2004.]

On May 21, 2002, Ashcroft's Justice Department began a suit against Florida counties "for purging Black voters from voter rolls and other violations of civil rights" Now, four years after the 2000 election, illegally "purged" Florida voters will not be notified until it is "too late to have their rights restored for this election - or are turned away on Election Day", reports the Tampa Tribune. "The vast majority of them are black and would be likely to vote Democratic." It's difficult for convicted felons to regain the right to vote in Florida, but many on the "purge" lists were not (in 2000) and still are not felons at all. [ note : Greg Palast - busy of late - must be most credited with blowing this story wide open. See here here, here.....]
posted by troutfishing at 2:02 PM PST - 46 comments

Microsoft is giving away a nifty piece of software. It's the beta of Expressions 3 by Creature House, something I used to use back in my Mac days but hadn't heard anything about in a long time. Apparently MS bought Creature House last year. I downloaded it (after filling out a somewhat arduous survey/profile thingy) and think it a nice drawing program. Both Mac and Win versions are posted.
posted by bz at 1:57 PM PST - 30 comments

Republican Survivor The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has created a cartoon "Republican Survivor." Read the profiles of the contestants. You can vote them out after each "episode." The National Republican Committee says that they are just "Playing with cartoons." But I think it's friggin hilarious.
posted by aacheson at 12:22 PM PST - 3 comments

Bush has a new running mate: Zombie Reagan. From the FAQ: What are some other advanatages of adding Zombie Reagan to the ticket? He will demonstrate America's resolve to continue the battle against terrorism. Instead of retreating to an undisclosed location, for instance, Zombie Reagan will be on the front lines, eating illegal combatants.
posted by mathowie at 12:11 PM PST - 42 comments

Cyburbia - the urban planning portal. (Check out the photo gallery.)
posted by PrinceValium at 11:34 AM PST - 1 comments

Going to see a movie? Be sure to get the Maoist Internationalist Movement's perspective first. Harry Potter: "This Disney-esque fantasy film deserves not to be banned under the dictatorship of the proletariat." Yaaay!
posted by furiousthought at 11:27 AM PST - 9 comments

Tidal Attraction
Strange, delicate, and sometimes delicious, tidepool creatures never cease to fascinate – until they’re gone. Steinbeck knew all about this enchanting world.
posted by Irontom at 10:50 AM PST - 4 comments

3 museums, The Science Museum, The National Railway Museum and The National Museum of Photography, Film and Television have collaborated to develop a website. It is a thing of rare magnificence.
posted by Fat Buddha at 10:18 AM PST - 7 comments

Photoblogging becomes international There are photoblogs from China, Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Israel. How about photoblogs by languages: Persian, Chinese, and Malay.
posted by hoder at 9:57 AM PST - 5 comments

Scientology extends a tentacle into public schools. Just as adults can have a hard time getting drug treatments without a heavy dose of Jebus, now the Scientologists are trying to cut in earlier and give school kids a heavy dose of L. Ron via the drug prevention program Narcanon, provided free to schools.
posted by badstone at 9:48 AM PST - 31 comments

Tricksy those hobbitses What happens when two girls bilk LotR fans, trick the celebrities, and leave a volunteer holding the bag? Continued fan outrage and careful tracking.
posted by FunkyHelix at 9:45 AM PST - 19 comments

'The Cream of Sketch TV' is finally available on DVD. "Simply put, SCTV is the greatest television sketch comedy ever. Period." So says the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and who's gonna argue? Apparently a keystone of their creative success was being moved by their producers to Edmonton, where there was nothing else to do and the executives didn't want to make the trek. As someone who remembers the show as a late-night UHF-channel oddity before NBC picked it up and repackaged it (which is what's on the DVD), I have only one objection: Where's the love for Ha-harold Ramis?
posted by soyjoy at 9:44 AM PST - 20 comments

Want to know who's going to win the election? Their methodology is questionable, and I'm not sure about the value of their accuracy claims, but if you think of politics as a blood sport, this is your running scoreboard. Too bad it's only parliamentary-style elections.
posted by GhostintheMachine at 9:43 AM PST - 1 comments

Hot Links is a visually appealing link blog portal. Featuring links from local heroes Andy Baio (waxpancake), and Tom Coates (barbelith).
posted by riffola at 6:50 AM PST - 7 comments

Last Son of Krypton was released in 1978 as a tie-in to Superman! The movie. It was written by Comic Book Supremo Elliot S! Maggin, and based on Maggin's own treatment for a Superman film. Despite being badly written, and having a completely different plot to the film, the book was extremely successful.
[Bonus Materials: The original novel ; The unofficial novel; Elliot S! Maggin Interview; A review]
posted by seanyboy at 3:59 AM PST - 9 comments