Friday, October 17, 2003
100 dead since major combat operations "over"
Three U.S. military police died in an ambush in the Shi'ite holy city of Kerbala and another American military policeman was killed by a bomb in Baghdad, the U.S. military said Friday.
Their deaths raised to 101 the American toll from hostile action in Iraq since President Bush declared major combat over on May 1. They came one day after a U.S. diplomatic victory with the U.N. Security Council's adoption of a resolution aimed at getting troops and cash for Iraq.
Story.
posted by chris at 3:41 PM
Several Children Left Behind . . .
. . . but we didn't need them anyway! Here is a nice and simple graphic comparison of what Bush said he would do in his "No Child Left Behind" program and what he actually did. It isn't pretty.
Thanks to the lovely Lindsey for finding this.
Update: The Washington Post has an article analyzing this very issue.
President Bush's No Child Left Behind education program -- acclaimed as a policy and political breakthrough by the Republicans in January 2002 -- is threatening to backfire on Bush and his party in the 2004 elections.
The signature education plan is pledged to improve the performance of students, teachers and schools with yearly tests and serious penalties for failure. Although many Republicans and Democrats are confident the system will work in the long run, Bush is being criticized in swing states such as West Virginia for not adequately funding programs to help administrators and teachers meet the new, and critics say unreasonable, standards.
posted by chris at 3:25 PM
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Thursday, October 16, 2003
No jobs for you, Iraq!
US sub-contractors are importing cheap migrant labour from south Asia to Iraq, despite high local unemployment and complaints from Iraqi contractors that they are being overlooked by the US-led administration in Baghdad.
US officials in the Iraqi capital say that six months into their occupation of Iraq, security conditions have forced companies to turn to south Asian labour to implement contracts, from prison-building to catering for US troops.
Recent weeks have seen unrest in several major cities, including the capital Baghdad, amid rising anger at Iraq's high unemployment rate.
"We don't want to overlook Iraqis, but we want to protect ourselves," says Colonel Damon Walsh, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority's procurement office. "From a force protection standpoint, Iraqis are more vulnerable to a bad guy influence."
US troops and some companies under contract to the US government nevertheless seem prepared to take the "risk".
Iraqis form the bulk of the workforce for reconstructing Iraq's prisons. General Janis Karpinski, who is overseeing the prison programme, says she has had "no single security incident" involving Iraqi contractors.
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The potential for ill-feeling nevertheless remains. "US contractors are importing labour and expatriating the benefits," says Hakim Awad, an Iraqi construction manager who queues for contracts outside Baghdad Airport every day. "Where's the benefit accruing to Iraq?"
Under a new Iraqi investment law, foreigners can own companies in full and export all the profits. US officials say they encourage firms to employ Iraqis but do not stipulate a minimum percentage for Iraqi employees.
More.
posted by chris at 3:07 PM
Fit 'N Delicious
Dallas-based Pizza Hut says it is selling a slice that has one-fourth less fat than its regular counterpart. The company plans to offer its "Fit 'N Delicious" pizza in most of their 6,600 U.S. locations by month's end.
Pizza Hut President Peter Hearl said the company is responding to changing consumer tastes and desire for healthier food alternatives with the new pizza and a four-serving prepared salad that will be available early next year.
The new model comes only in thin crust and can be ordered with chicken or ham - no sausage or pepperoni - and two vegetable toppings. Pizza Hut said it has 3.5 grams to 5 grams of fat per slice, 25 percent less fat than in a slice of the chain's regular thin-crust pizza.
That doesn't mean you can eat more of it.
posted by chris at 1:47 PM
Somehow, the message just isn't getting across
Bush told his senior aides on Tuesday that he "didn't want to see any stories" quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and if he did, there would be consequences, a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used told Knight Ridder.
posted by chris at 1:45 PM
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Wednesday, October 15, 2003
The "special" medicine
The Supreme Court, in a silent rebuff on Tuesday to federal policy on medical marijuana, let stand an appeals court ruling that doctors may not be investigated, threatened or punished by federal regulators for recommending marijuana as a medical treatment for their patients.
As a result, doctors in California and six other Western states where voters or legislators have approved marijuana for medical uses like pain relief may now discuss it freely with their patients without fear of jeopardizing their federal licenses to prescribe drugs. Advocates of medical marijuana greeted the court's action as a significant and surprising victory.
Time to visit the doctor.
posted by chris at 12:11 PM
Controlling the vote
The Independent investigates the sketchy nature of electronic voting machines:
Last November, [Georgia] became the first in the country to conduct an election entirely with touchscreen voting machines, after lavishing $54m on a new system that promised to deliver the securest, most up-to-date, most voter-friendly election in the history of the republic. The machines, however, turned out to be anything but reliable. With academic studies showing the Georgia touchscreens to be poorly programmed, full of security holes and prone to tampering, and with thousands of similar machines from different companies being introduced at high speed across the country, computer voting may, in fact, be US democracy's own 21st-century nightmare.
In many Georgia counties last November, the machines froze up, causing long delays as technicians tried to reboot them. In heavily Democratic Fulton County, in downtown Atlanta, 67 memory cards from the voting machines went missing, delaying certification of the results there for 10 days. In neighbouring DeKalb County, 10 memory cards were unaccounted for; they were later recovered from terminals that had supposedly broken down and been taken out of service.
It is still unclear exactly how results from these missing cards were tabulated, or if they were counted at all. And we will probably never know, for a highly disturbing reason. The vote count was not conducted by state elections officials, but by the private company that sold Georgia the voting machines in the first place, under a strict trade-secrecy contract that made it not only difficult but actually illegal - on pain of stiff criminal penalties - for the state to touch the equipment or examine the proprietary software to ensure the machines worked properly. There was not even a paper trail to follow up. The machines were fitted with thermal printing devices that could theoretically provide a written record of voters' choices, but these were not activated. Consequently, recounts were impossible. Had Diebold Inc, the manufacturer, been asked to review the votes, all it could have done was programme the computers to spit out the same data as before, flawed or not.
Astonishingly, these are the terms under which America's top three computer voting machine manufacturers - Diebold, Sequoia and Election Systems and Software (ES&S) - have sold their products to election officials around the country. Far from questioning the need for rigid trade secrecy and the absence of a paper record, secretaries of state and their technical advisers - anxious to banish memories of the hanging chad fiasco and other associated disasters in the 2000 presidential recount in Florida - have, for the most part, welcomed the touchscreen voting machines as a technological miracle solution.
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What, then, is one to make of the fact that the owners of the three major computer voting machines are all prominent Republican Party donors? Or of a recent political fund-raising letter written to Ohio Republicans by Walden O'Dell, Diebold's chief executive, in which he said he was "committed to helping Ohio to deliver its electoral votes to the president next year" - even as his company was bidding for the contract on the state's new voting machinery?
Why is it that this issue is only being seriously investigated by British journalists??
posted by chris at 12:07 PM
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