The Obama administration won’t initiate Executive Branch investigations of the Bush administration officials in order to prosecute them; but that hardly precludes some sort of lustration process—say, in Congress, with grants of immunity—that documents their misdeeds and leads to prosecutions outside the US.
Next up: Switzerland.
AFP (“Swiss Fear More Pressure on Bank Secrecy after Obama Victory,” 10 Nov ’08):
Switzerland is likely to come under further pressure from the United States over its prized system of banking secrecy after the election last week of Barack Obama, key sector players predicted. The newly-elected US president, who formally takes office in [...]
Wilson (op-ed), “The Swill Is Gone,” NYT, 29 Sep ’08):
In China, journalists have known of the poison milk for months, but weren’t allowed to spread the news because of the Olympics.
MacLeod, “Many Chinese Doubt Food Scandals Will End,” USA Today, 7 Oct ’08:
The current scandal, which involves more than one-third of China’s producers of milk [...]
Martin Miller (“Is Campaigns’ Path to the Heart a Proper One?”, LAT [11 Aug ’00]), on Windy Smith’s cameo at the 2000 RNC:
“What the nation witnessed was the passing of the torch,” said JoAnn Simons, president of the Atlanta-based National Down Syndrome Congress. “Individuals with disabilities don’t necessarily need people to speak for them.”
More (“Tugging [...]
McClatchy’s (Raleigh–Durham) News and Observer (Vollmer, “German Authorities Look into Allegation That RTP [Research Triangle Park] Maker’s Pesticide Harms Environment,” 26 Aug ’08) reports that
[a] German prosecutor is investigating Werner Wenning, Bayer’s chairman, and Friedrich Berschauer, the head of Bayer CropScience, after critics alleged that they knowingly polluted the environment. The investigation was triggered [...]
A large Australian eBay seller, EBS International Pty Ltd, skipped town with “thousands of dollars”—an understatement, given almost thirty pages of furious feedbackers out hundreds of AU$ each. In the resulting brouhaha, PayPal has come up with what it calls a “one-off process”: offering users compensation only if they sign (and fax) a statutory declaration. [...]
Slide 3 of ANSI’s “Standards and Conformity Assessment Bodies of the United States” (PPT, version 2006-07-21):
Explanation:
The primary purpose of the chart is to attempt to portray, in high-level, block diagram form, the entities of the standards and conformity assessment systems of the United States, their and primary inter-relationships and relationships to international and regional organizations—on [...]
That’s the filename of a map published by the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 11 Aug. The MFA’s statements of 1–14 Aug ’08 offer a clear, blow-by-blow picture of how Georgia saw the unfolding situation as it escalated into an invasion. The full text of all the MFA’s statements with related images is below; [...]
NYT, Myers+ Shanker, “U.S. Ties With Russia Being Reassessed, Bush Aides Say” (14 Aug ’08):
Russia’s military offensive into Georgia has jolted the Bush administration’s relationship with Moscow, senior officials said Thursday, forcing a wholesale reassessment of American dealings with Russia and jeopardizing talks on everything from halting Iran’s nuclear ambitions to reducing strategic arsenals to [...]
From Peter Arnett’s ’97 interview with bin Laden:
REPORTER: Mr. Bin Ladin, if the Islamic movement takes over Saudi Arabia, what would your attitude to the West be and will the price of oil be higher?
BIN LADIN: We are a nation and have a long history, with the grace of God, Praise and Glory be to [...]
The NYT has an “interactive” piece—an aggro Flash thing that takes its inspiration from OSX’s Dock—about development of the Olympic torch from 1936 to the present.
Three alternate/additional designs for the Mexico City ’68 torch can be found at the site of Olympic Museum. Here’s a clearer detail of Type B:
That is the considered opinion of the Société pour l’administration du droit de reproduction mécanique des auteurs compositeurs et éditeurs (SDRM) on the subject of the USSR’s national anthem. SDRM just billed the filmmaker Jean-Christophe Soulageon a bill for EUR1000 because someone whistled seven seconds of the commie anthem “L’Internationale” in his 2004 film Insurrection [...]
He starts talking at 0:18.
(lined and unlined)
On October 23, 1990 an armed militant group fighting for the rights of minority Tamils expelled the entirety of the Muslim population of the north [of Sri Lanka] from the province at gunpoint. They were given only a 48-hour ultimatum to leave the Northern Province or to face death at the hands of the militants. [...]
A gaggle of campaigners (NAI, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Michael Zimmer, etc) push Google to add a link to its privacy policy on its home page, and Google’s refusal sparks snark: for example, “Larry Page, the company’s co-founder, didn’t want a privacy link ‘on that beautiful clean home page,’ said one executive at a Google competitor” [...]
“For now, enjoy the first world map with constant-scale natural boundary”:
Chuck Clark writes:
The art historian Erwin Panofsky, in his book Albrecht Durer, called this “prototopology,” which means merely that the map, when properly folded, resembles the object.
(Strange Maps)
That’s the title of a paper delivered at Appropriate Healthcare Technologies for Developing Countries 2008 (program here) by Michael Dobson MRCP, FRCA, University of Oxford, UK, Robert Neighbour C.Eng, F.I.E.T., Diamedica Ltd, UK.
Abstract: The anaesthetic standards committees of the ISO are dominated by representatives from equipment manufacturers. The standards produced are such that their main [...]
Scott Paul at the Washington Note:
On the very worst day, I couldn’t see clearly from one side of Tienanmen Square to the other. That was a Friday, which is important because, according to locals, that is the day of the week on which the clouds are seeded to clear out the pollution. I was told [...]
Dr. Thomas Fingar, Deputy Dir of Nat’l Intell for Analysis and Chairman of the Nat’l Intel Council, in his 25 June ’08 testimony before Congress (114K pdf):
Elsewhere, developing countries—particularly major greenhouse gas emitters—may demand that the WTO Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) be amended to allow for the production and development [...]