There's been a lot of public discussion of late of the Associated Press's Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fournier's changes in style rules. Out with "just the facts," in with opinion and perspective. Or so the story goes. The changes that are afoot at the AP appear to be part of a broader trend, influenced - in part - by the internet, the medium itself and the competition from bloggers.

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Fmr. Chief Guantanamo Prosecutor Says Military Commissions “Not Justice”

As the first military tribunal conducted by the United States in more than half a century is scheduled to take place next week in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, we speak with Air Force Colonel Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo.

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Led by conservative judges, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has just affirmed the Bush administration’s “enemy combatant” doctrine, a doctrine that allows President Bush and his military forces to designate anyone anywhere in the world as an “enemy combatant” in the so-called war on terrorism and treat him accordingly. While the case that the Court was deciding involved a foreigner, Ali al-Marri, the Court’s reasoning applies to American citizens as well.

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One of the hallmarks of the Cold War was that whenever the USSR invaded another country, they claimed that they were "invited" by that country's government to enter and keep the peace. When the Warsaw pact nations invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, the USSR declared that the 500,000 troops were invited into the country in order to "preserve socialism." On December 24, 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, again claiming that the Prime Minister Amin had invited them in to preserve his legitimate government. On December 27, Amin was shot by Soviet forces.

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Unless governments act to end the human rights abuses fuelling the spread of HIV, little progress will be made towards addressing the global epidemic, 400 AIDS and human rights organizations said today. The coalition called on organizers of the biannual International AIDS Conference, which opens in Mexico City on August 3, 2008, to make human rights a central theme of the world’s largest gathering on HIV/AIDS.

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Last Sunday, the New York Times carried an article about a 31-year-old Iranian dissident, Ahmad Batebi, who successfully escaped imprisonment in Iran, where he was being tortured. Making his way through Iraq and ultimately arriving in Washington, D.C., Batebi taunted his former captors with a photograph of himself in front of the U.S. Capitol.

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An American photojournalist who was embedded with the Marines in Fallujah has been barred from the Marine Corps because of graphic photographs showing Marines killed in a suicide bombing last month.

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This is not the icing on the cake of the Bush Administration. That’s still to come.

Rather, the sticky mess we’re mired in–as Feds ponder ingredients of their soon-to-come Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailout on top of the IndyMac fiasco, second largest bank failure in American history, not to mention the Bear Stearns bailout–is only the latest layer in a tall leaning cake historians will someday deconstruct like archaeologists at a dig to try and figure out how we could’ve allowed such a chef as George W. Bush in the kitchen to begin with.

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Senator Obama published a sketch of a plan for Iraq in the New York Times today, and it's about the same as his plan has always been, clearly superior to Bush or McCain and yet horribly muddled, vague, and militaristic, until he gets to the highly encouraging last few lines.

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ISLAMABAD JULY 13/08 - Over the past few days the Americans have hit the Pakistanis at the border and are increasing threats of hot pursuit. Some of the peace deals between frontier forces and militant groups are holding. In other areas, the Taliban have besieged Pakistani troops, kidnapped soldiers and others, and killed them in ambushes.

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Why Not?

IF YOU want to understand the policy of a country, look at the map - as Napoleon recommended.

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One of the amusing things about liberals and conservatives is how they sometimes lock themselves in their own little conservative-liberal paradigm and carry on a silly debate over the causes of America’s economic woes.

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A new book by award-winning journalist Douglas Blackmon uncovers the forgotten history of neo-slavery imposed on hundreds and thousands of African Americans that continued well after the Civil War and persisted right up to the 1940s. Using extensive archival sources,

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Any remaining pretense that the Republican Party is the party of free markets has been blown to smithereens in the election season. Even the lip service to free enterprise has become scarce, as the major candidates threw their arms around flagrantly statist economic proposals.

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Those who think that the election of Barack Obama will save the nation from its many foreign-policy/civil-liberties woes got smashed and dashed with a cold dose of reality. Flip-flopping in the finest political tradition, Obama voted in favor of President Bush’s wiretap/immunity bill, after promising to filibuster it before he secured the Democratic Party nomination.

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Are They the Answer to a Messed Up World?

I'm a baby boomer, one brought up on the idea that if something was wrong, you organized to correct the injustice.  We tried to pass this habit on to the younger generations who followed us.

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