WikiLeaks, Julian Assange's whistle-blowing organization, has announced that it is publishing a series of documents it is calling "The Global Intelligence Files," which includes over five million e-mails from the Texas headquartered "global intelligence" company Stratfor, according to a statement the organization made Sunday night.
Gopnik reviews biblical scholar Pagels' new book, “Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation,” which makes a strong case that the Book of Revelation was mostly political,
By Evan Osnos, Letter from China @ newyorker.com, Feb. 24, 2012
[....] I've heard of vote-buying in local Chinese elections, but this is an impressive new standard: nine thousand yuan—that’s more than fourteen hundred dollars—is several months’ salary for many Chinese workers. “Last fall,” Yang went on, “when we elected the Party secretary, I got enough out of it to buy an iPad.”
Trillin's three scenes are great fun, but I'm really posting this because I adore the illustration for the article and don't know where else to put it:
By Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight @ nytimes.com, Feb. 24, 2012
On Thursday, I warned you to be cautious about assuming that Mitt Romney had retaken the lead from Rick Santorum in Michigan until we saw some concrete evidence for it. Today, it looks like we have some. [....]
Note: he has changed his forecast pretty drastically; right now he has Mitt at 67% chance to win and Santorum at 33%; yesterday he had Santorum at 38.4% and Mitt at 36.8%.
By Richard Perez-Pena, New York Times, Feb 23/24, 2012
More than 30 percent of American adults hold bachelor’s degrees, a first in the nation’s history, and women are on the brink of surpassing men in educational attainment, the Census Bureau reported on Thursday.
By Julian Borger and Peter Beaumont, The Guardian, 23 Feb. 2012
The UN has accused the Syrian regime of "crimes against humanity" – including the use of snipers against small children – and has drawn up a list of senior officials who should face investigation, reportedly including President Bashar al-Assad. [....]
By Doug Sanders in London, The Globe and Mail, Feb. 23, 2012
On Wednesday morning, Canada’s Speaker of the House Andrew Scheer was in the midst of a very Canadian debate over whether to allow babies in the House of Commons.
That evening he got a taste of the far more grownup world of Britain’s Parliament.
WASHINGTON -- Former Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold, whose lone vote against the Patriot Act made him a hero among civil libertarians, said he has no problem with the killing of U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in a drone attack in Yemen last fall.
By Vladimir Putin, ForeignPolicy.com, Feb. 21, 2012
[....] It is no surprise that some are calling for resources of global significance to be freed from the exclusive sovereignty of a single nation. This cannot happen to Russia, not even hypothetically [....]
Editor's note: A longer version of this article appeared in the Russian newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta.
By Amanda Lee Myers, Associated Press, Feb. 21, 2012
She has been dubbed the "trailer park Mata Hari," an attractive ex-stripper recruited by the feds to befriend identical twin brothers accused of a white-supremacist bombing and to get them to admit to the crime.
By Benjy Sarlin and Evan McMorris-Santoro, TPM, Feb. 21, 2012
[....] many have started to hit the panic button, and they’re doing so in a way you probably wouldn’t have expected from the GOP, which still counts evangelicals among its strongest and most reliable base vote. Nevertheless, the freakout is evident from the Romney-allied Drudge Report homepage right through to radio host Laura Ingraham’s national airwaves.
Rick Santorum, conservatives and his opponents started to say Tuesday, is just too dang extreme.
By Pallab Ghosh, Science correspondent, BBC News, Vancouver, Feb. 19, 2011
Dutch scientists have used stem cells to create strips of muscle tissue with the aim of producing the first lab-grown hamburger later this year. The aim of the research is to develop a more efficient way of producing meat than rearing animals.
At a major science meeting in Canada, Prof Mark Post said synthetic meat could reduce the environmental footprint of meat by up to 60% [....]
In Focus with Alan Taylor @ TheAtlantic.com, Feb. 17, 2012
41 photos with captions of protests in China in 2011.
....According to research by the Chinese Academy of Governance, the number of protests in China doubled between 2006 and 2010, rising to 180,000 reported "mass incidents." The uprisings are responses to myriad issues, primarily official corruption, government land grabs, Tibetan autonomy, and environmental problems...
