By Roger Cheng, Wall Street Journal technology blog, January 7, 2011

The U.S. needs to fix its primary education system, encourage talented immigrants and cut business taxes if it wants to maintain it lead in innovation, several top tech executives said Friday.

Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Xerox Corp. Chief Executive Ursula Burns gave the K-12 school system a “D-minus” and said fixing it is a priority. “We can’t pretend to be better than we are,” she said. She added that when it comes to preparing students out of high school to be productive workers, the U.S. is failing.

The executives, however, said that the college system remains the best in the world. But they also agreed that valuable foreign talent who come over to the U.S. to attend colleges end up going back home because the country no longer welcomes them....

By Sami Moubayed from Damascus, Asia Times Online, January 5, 2011

United States President Barack Obama's decision to bypass the senate and appoint Robert Ford as ambassador to Syria has bigger implications for the US than its Syrian interests in the Middle East. While Republicans say the appointment sends "the wrong message", Damascus has the ear of top Iranian and Iraqi officials, and clear influence in Lebanon, making it a significant broker in the Middle East peace process.

Here is coverage by Greewaldt with audio of his conversation with the young man.

http://www.salon.com/news/torture/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/20...

BBC News, January 5, 2011

Saudi Arabian officials have "detained" a vulture on accusations of being a spy for Israel, media reports say. The griffon vulture was carrying a GPS transmitter bearing the name of Tel Aviv University, prompting rumours it was part of a Zionist plot.

Note that in order to keep their readers fully informed on the general topic, BBC has also linked to a story from last month on that page:

Shark attacks not linked to Mossad says Israel
By Yolande Knell BBC News, Jerusalem, December 7, 2010
Israel has dismissed Egyptian claims that a series of shark attacks in the Red Sea could have been the result of a plot carried out by its foreign intelligence agency, Mossad.

Researchers have produced a lasting anti-cocaine immunity in mice by giving them a safe vaccine that combines bits of the common cold virus with a particle that mimics cocaine.

Guns again disrupt public school.

Just a follow-up story that is interesting to me. Pinal County Sheriff is actually investigating graft in the Maricopa County Sheriff's Department.

And there is the issue surrounding the lure of big money by drug cartels in the area and how some officers of the law are caught going for the bait.

By Anthony Shadid, New York Times, January 4-5, 2010

ZAKHO, Iraq — A Turkey as resurgent as at any time since its Ottoman glory is projecting influence through a turbulent Iraq, from the boomtowns of the north to the oil fields near southernmost Basra, in a show of power that illustrates its growing heft across an Arab world long suspicious of it....

Worth tens of thousands of US dead and wounded, seven years and a trillion or two trillion in treasure? The New Iraq brought to you by the GOP and War President George W. Bush, now emerges, a country depleted of professionals who have fled, Christians who live in fear or exile, and a government that includes a death squad/militia running radical cleric who is a very good friend of the repressive government of Iran.

BAGHDAD — Moktada al-Sadr, the radical cleric whose followers waged deadly warfare against American troops after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government in 2003, returned to Iraq on Wednesday after three years of voluntary exile in Iran.....

Dead fish and now this.  Wow is all I've got to say.  Just wow. 

http://www.longislandpress.com/2011/01/04/dead-birds-dead-birds-fall-in-louisiana/

Get ready for some talking heads to explode.  

Mark Ambinder on current but soon retiring, Chicago mayor Richard Daley's brother William as a serious contender for Obama's Chief of Staff, a post vacated by Rahm Emanuel who is hoping to become Chicago's next mayor.  Just another political trade off within the Chicago machine?

"Daley, who spends his days in a picturesque corner office in downtown Chicago as J.P. Morgan's Midwest chair, is close to several members of Obama's inner circle, including his former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who departed the job to run for the mayoralty vacated by Daley's brother Richard."

What a gift for Beck and Rush and Hannity and .....

Review of Man & Woman: An Inside Story. By Donald Pfaff.

THE trouble with books about the differences between men and women is that the authors are all too often partisan, or perceived to be. Any writer brave enough to take on this subject needs to be meticulous and unflaggingly sceptical in his or her approach.....

[....]

Mr Pfaff is the right man for the job. A neurobiologist at New York’s Rockefeller University, he has worked in the field for nearly half a century, focusing on how hormones affect the brain....