Rumsfeld Sued for Alleged War Crimes

Alleging responsibility for war crimes and torture at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, a human rights group has filed a criminal complaint in Germany against US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top US officials.

Stem cells help paralysed woman walk - World - www.smh.com.au

"Seoul: A South Korean woman paralysed for 20 years is walking again after scientists say they repaired her damaged spine using stem cells derived from umbilical cord blood.
Hwang Mi-soon, 37, had been bedridden since damaging her back in an accident. Last week she walked again with the help of a walking frame at a press conference where South Korea researchers announced the results of their stem cell therapy."
Non-embroyonic again. GMB (note: link to Aussie newspaper requires sign in

Stem cell treatment successes: Incontinence in women

"For this particular study, the authors removed stem cells from the arms of 20 females, aged 36 to 84, who were experiencing stress incontinence. The stem cells were cultured, producing tens of millions of new cells, then injected into the wall of the urethra and into the sphincter muscle."
In the argument about lines of stem cells, one has to note that these stem cells were not embroyonic, but harvested from the mature client. GMB

Giving Thanks

The New Iron Curtain (washingtonpost.com)

"It can't be a coincidence that if the Ukrainian election is settled in Moscow's favor, it will mark the third such dubious vote in Russia's "sphere of influence" in the past two months, following the polls in Belarus and the separatist province of Abkhazia, not counting the irregularities that were belatedly uncovered in the election of Putin himself."
Putin: this is the guy Bush really took a shine to. Russia benefits hugely from oil at $50 a barrel. And our election is about equal treatment for gays under the law and a woman's right have a choice on bearing a child, oh yeah, and freedom from terror by "liberating" another county: and we voted wrong on all counts.

Find the Opinion Masquerading as Journalism

Here’s the lead from a NYTimes.com AP article entitled G.O.P. Candidate Leads Recount for Governor of Washington. I find the AP to be filled with opinion. Can you find the opinion masquerading as information in this paragraph?

Republican Dino Rossi came out ahead in the recount for Washington governor Wednesday by just 42 votes out of more than 2.8 million cast, and the Democrats are expected to demand yet another recount that could drag on past Christmas.

Be a clown, be a clown...

In the "I can't believe what I'm reading" catagory... Or more like, "There is humor in the news" catagory...

U.S. Rejects Ukraine Election Results

Powell Says Election Does Not Meet International Standards

Paranoia Runs Deep

The American Family Association is now convinced that Shark Tale, the animated DreamWorks sequel to "Finding Nemo" is really providing "an undercurrent of approval for homosexuality". Their reasoning is pretty weak. Any movie that has a theme of accepting other's differences could qualify as pro-homosexual propoganda using their reasoning. How can intelligent people focus their efforts in this way???

The More Things Change...

What might be the danger to the U.S. Economy of a shift in the valuation of the Chinese currency? Since China is a major supporter of our debt habit, it might not be too pretty.

What is the solution? Well it may well be... Revamping the tax code (or, more to the point, a tax overhaul to support saving and suppress spending) BUT, you suppress spending and you've got yourself a recession.

First-Class Stamp May Cost 41 Cents

WASHINGTON - It may soon cost more to mail a letter. A published report says the U.S. Postal Service is expected to seek approval for an increase in postage rates of at least ten percent early next year.

[more...]

Weekly Review (Harpers.org)

"A new poll showed that nearly one half of the U.S. population believes
that human beings did not evolve, but instead were created by God within the last 10,000 years, while only one third believe that the theory of evolution is accurate."

Bob Hicok: Flight

I've been on this flight. I think everyone who flies has been. I remember how incredibly beautiful it all was, a miracle, as I lean against the bulkhead where 8 inches on the other side is 600 mph air, and I am 7 miles over the earth and there is music. Before they made us afraid of the sky. gmb

Flight

I'm in a plane that will not be flown into a building.
It's a SAAB 340, seats 40, has two engines with propellers
is why I think of beanies, those hats that would spin
a young head into the clouds. The plane is red and loud
inside like it must be loud in the heart, red like fire
and fire engines and the woman two seats up and to the right
resembles one of the widows I saw on TV after the Towers
came down. It's her hair that I recognize, the fecundity of it
and the color and its obedience to an ideal, the shape
it was asked several hours ago to hold and has held, a kind
of wave that begins at the forehead and repeats with slight
variations all the way to the tips, as if she were water
and a pebble had been continuously dropped into the mouth
of her existence. We are eighteen thousand feet over America.
People are typing at their laps, blowing across the fog of coffee,
sleeping with their heads on the windows, on the pattern
of green fields and brown fields, streams and gas stations
and swimming pools, blue dots of aquamarine that suggest
we've domesticated the mirage. We had to kill someone,
I believe, when the metal bones burned and the top
fell through the bottom and a cloud made of dust and memos
and skin muscled across Manhattan. I remember feeling
I could finally touch a rifle, that some murders
are an illumination of ethics, that they act as a word,
a motion the brain requires for which there is
no syllable, no breath. The moment the planes had stopped,
when we were afraid of the sky, there was a pause
when we could have been perfectly American,
could have spent infinity dollars and thrown a million
bodies at finding the few, lasering our revenge
into a kind of love, the blood-hunger kept exact
and more convincing for its precision, an expression
of our belief that proximity is never the measure of guilt.
We've lived in the sky again for some years and today
on my lap these pictures from Iraq, naked bodies
stacked into a pyramid of ha-ha and the articles
about broomsticks up the ass and the limbs of children
turned into stubble, we are punch-drunk and getting even
with the sand, with the map, with oil, with ourselves
I think listening to the guys behind me. There's a problem
in Alpena with an inventory control system, some switches
are being counted twice, switches for what I don't know —
switches of humor, of faith — but the men are musical
in their jargon, both likely born in New Delhi
and probably Americans now, which is what the flesh
of this country has been, a grafted pulse, an inventory
of the world, and just as the idea of embrace
moves chemically into my blood, and I'm warmed
as if I've just taken a drink, a voice announces
we've begun our descent, and then I sense the falling.


Bob Hicok
Poetry
Volume 185, Number 2
November

BBC NEWS | Europe | Ukraine's key election 'rigged'

"International observers and the opposition said the first round was a step backwards for democracy in the former Soviet republic of 48 million people, alleging widespread fraud and intimidation."

Well, they don't have 200 years of democracy like we do.

"outrageous and almost literally unbelievable"

From TPM

Some things, like the DeLay Rule, are outrageous but not that surprising.

But what I'm about to describe is outrageous and almost literally unbelievable.

As you've probably heard, the congress is pushing through a big omnibus spending bill this weekend. And at the last minute, Republican leaders tried to slip in a provision that would give certain committee chairman and their staffers unlimited access to any American's tax return, with none of the standard privacy protections applying.

Alan (the Whore) Greenspan Sounds Alarm

"Greenspan again recommended that U.S. policymakers try to cut the record federal budget deficit, which would reduce the government's borrowing needs and effectively increase national saving.
Additionally, he said, 'finding policies that would elevate the personal saving rate from its current extraordinarily low level . . . would also be helpful,' he said."
He can't seem to say anything about taxes... 4 years of complete silence on the subject. In response to a question about "let them eat cake", Alan could only say "I really wish I had said that!"

A message Sen. John Kerry

This from TalkingPointsMemo

"Regardless of the outcome of this election, once all the votes are counted -- and they will be counted -- we will continue to challenge this administration. This is not a time for Democrats to retreat and accommodate extremists on critical principles -- it is a time to stand firm.

I will fight for a national standard for federal elections that has both transparency and accountability in our voting system. It's unacceptable in the United States that people still don't have full confidence in the integrity of the voting process.

I ask you to join me in this cause."

That's a passage from a message Sen. John Kerry will be sending out to supporters later this afternoon.

Running 'key to human evolution'

Long-distance running may have been a driving force behind evolution of the modern human body, scientists say.


More from the BBC.

The Continuing Issue of the Vote

Two articles today worthy of reading on the continued controversy of the election and vote counting.

Here

and

Here

America's True Colors

And the cartogram is even better.

America's True Colors