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Friday, Apr 19, 2002

organ grinders

"When elements of the Venezuelan military forced president Hugo Chavez from office last week, the editorial boards of several major U.S. newspapers followed the U.S. government's lead and greeted the news with enthusiasm."

wright of way

"In this week's Nation, political scientist Richard Falk contests the standard view that Israel's offer at Camp David was eminently fair. But Falk's argument, embedded in a larger critique of American foreign policy, doesn't get deeply into the nuts and bolts of the issue. If you want to see Camp David from Arafat's point of view, a better place to look is a New York Review of Books piece that appeared back in August and was co-authored by Robert Malley, special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs in the Clinton administration. Malley was at Camp David and found Arafat's behavior there intensely frustrating, but he doesn't buy the interpretation that is favored on the right�that Arafat's rejection of the deal amounts to rejection of a two-state solution."

duogooders

"SAN FRANCISCO--U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and database billionaire Larry Ellison were named this year's most notorious American violators of personal privacy by leading advocacy groups on Thursday."

copychatter

"The purpose of this project is to capitalize on the distributed nature of digital information systems to collect, organize and distribute graphic and audio materials associated with music copyright infringement cases in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century on. This documentation, especially for cases over twenty-five years old, is difficult to obtain and has never before been systematically collected or published in print or electronic format. Our goal is to accumulate and publish a complete collection of music copyright infringement opinions, comments about the musical works they consider, and graphic and sound files of relevant portions of these works"

the answer man

got a question? googles got the answer for a price.

Thursday, Apr 18, 2002

spies like us

"Imagine a huge $30-billion conglomerate. It operates in one of the few businesses that might genuinely be described as cut-throat. Its competitors have changed dramatically, and so have its products and technologies. But its structure is the same as when it was founded, in 1947. Nobody leads this colossus (there is just an honorary chairman) and everyone exploits it. Demoralised and bureaucratic, it has just endured its biggest-ever loss. The response: the firm has been given even more money, and nobody has been sacked."

hugos there

"Early on Sunday, April 14th, President Hugo Ch�vez of Venezuela returned to Miraflores, the Presidential palace in Caracas, after having been in military custody for nearly forty-eight hours. A coup against him had failed, in part because other Latin-American leaders refused to grant legitimacy to the businessmen and military leaders who attempted to impose a new government on Venezuela. Chavez, a controversial populist whom the Bush Administration has criticized for "high-handed" tactics and for his friendship with Fidel Castro, was profiled in this article by Jon Lee Anderson in the September 10, 2001, issue of the magazine."

check mates

"Primates -- the mammals from which humans evolved -- emerged on Earth much earlier than had been thought, originating perhaps 85 million years ago during the age of the dinosaurs, according to a new analysis."

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