Recently in Global News Category
Ace takes a Times headline about Obama's visit to troops in Iraq and uses it to lead into a fascinating and valuable analysis of perspective bias in the media. (Note how I made Ace the active subject of that sentence, rather than a passive responder to the headline.)
iowahawk: This Post Brought to You By the Green Movement
No satire this time. It's about the death of a Togolese boy that iowahawk sponsored for five years through Childreach: "Bakouma was one of approximately one million people who died of malaria last year. Almost all of them were like him: poor, young, and African. And almost all of those deaths could have been prevented through vaccines, insecticide-treated netting, and (gasp) DDT spraying.... [A]1996 DDT ban in South Africa, pushed by environmental groups, led to a malaria epidemic with over 60,000 cases reported in 2000. After DDT spraying resumed in 2001, infections dropped 80% in one year. Facing a mounting death toll across Africa the World Heath Organization and USAID have recently lent support to IRS using DDT, but its adoption continues to be opposed by environmental extremists relying on shoddy science and fearmongering."
Column One: The 'realist' fantasy | Columnists | Jerusalem Post
Why do foreign policy 'realists' insist on ignoring the very real threats voiced by the leaders of rogue states? "On Tuesday, Hamas legislators marked the Christmas season by passing a Shari'a criminal code for the Palestinian Authority. Among other things, it legalizes crucifixion. Hamas's endorsement of nailing enemies of Islam to crosses came at the same time it renewed its jihad. Here, too, Hamas wanted to make sure that Christians didn't feel neglected as its fighters launched missiles at Jewish day care centers and schools. So on Wednesday, Hamas lobbed a mortar shell at the Erez crossing point into Israel just as a group of Gazan Christians were standing on line waiting to travel to Bethlehem for Christmas.... This week North Korea's official news agency threatened to destroy South Korea in a 'sea of fire,' and 'reduce everything treacherous and anti-reunification to debris and build an independent, reunified country on it,' if any country dares to attack its nuclear installations."
Kausfiles : Sanitizing Mumbai?
Mickey Kaus on coverage of the Bombay terrorist attacks and the local constabulary's failures to respond to the attacks: "I'm used to a sort of Liebling-like hierarchy of news sources, with twitterers and bloggers being fastest, but maybe less reliable, while the grand institutions of the MSM weigh in later with more comprehensive and accurate accounts. But that's not what is happening with this Mumbai story. The 'fast' sources are telling you what happened. The 'slow' MSM sources are using their extra time to sanitize what's happened, to build euphemistic assumptions into their very reporting of the events themselves...."
London Banker: Systemic Risk, Contagion and Trade Finance - Back to the Bad Old Days
"The recent 93 percent collapse of the obscure Baltic Dry Index - an index of the cost of chartering bulk cargo vessels for goods like ore, cotton, grain or similar dry tonnage - has caused a bit of a stir among the financial cognoscenti. What is less discussed amidst the alarm is the reason for the collapse of the index - the collapse of trade credit based on the venerable letter of credit....
"The combination of the global interbank lending freeze with the collapse of the speculative, leveraged commodity price bubble have undermined both the confidence of banks in the ability of a far-flung peer bank to pay an obligation when due and confidence in the value of the dry cargo as security for the credit if liquidated on default. The result is that those with goods to export and those with goods to import, no matter how worthy and well capitalised, are left standing quayside without bank finance for trade....
"If cargo trade stops, a whole lot of supply chain disruption starts. If the ore doesn't go to the refinery, there is no plate steel. If the plate steel doesn't get shipped, there is nothing to fabricate into components. If there are no components, there is nothing to assemble in the factory. If the factory closes the assembly line, there are no finished goods. If there are no finished goods, there is nothing to restock the shelves of the shops. If there is nothing in the shops, the consumers don't buy. If the consumers don't buy, there is no Christmas."
(Via Crunchy Con.)
Giving Thanks to Those Who Serve - Kathryn Jean Lopez - The Corner on National Review Online
President Bush speaks to the 101st Airborne, the 160th Night Stalkers, and the Green Berets at Ft. Campbell, and reviews their record of achievements in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Spectator: Melanie Phillips: Is America Really Going to Do This?
"...on the big picture, [McCain] gets it. He will defend America and the free world whereas Obama will undermine them and aid their enemies. Here's why. McCain believes in protecting and defending America as it is. Obama tells the world he is ashamed of America and wants to change it into something else.... McCain understands that an Islamic war of conquest is being waged on a number of diverse fronts which all have to be seen in relation to each other. For Obama, however, the real source of evil in the world is America. The evil represented by Iran and the Islamic jihadists is apparently all America's fault."
Confessions of a politically correct journalist - Crunchy Con
What western reporters wouldn't tell their readers about the ugly realities of life in Africa.
"The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing." The American Physical Society's position on global climate change: "Even if mitigation were likely to be effective, it would do more harm than good: already millions face starvation as the dash for biofuels takes agricultural land out of essential food production: a warning that taking precautions, 'just in case', can do untold harm unless there is a sound, scientific basis for them."
Paul Greenberg :: Townhall.com :: Good News is No News
Why the media silence on the dismantling of al-Qaeda's last urban stronghold in Iraq? Even the New York Times has noticed and so has Barack Obama, in his own odd way: "Last year Barack Obama, who's now cinched his party's presidential nomination, was still arguing that the Surge would fail.... But don't look for any of his anti-Surge statements on Senator Obama's Web site, not any more. They've just been purged. And replaced by a new, more militant stance. To borrow a phrase from Ron Ziegler, Richard Nixon's hapless press secretary: 'This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.'"
