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23 Oct 2010 23:17

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Politics: Nate Silver confirms: Dems favored to lose House, keep Senate

  • 80% Republicans’ chances of winning back the House of Representatives, according to polling guru Nate Silver
  • 18% chance that they’ll win the Senate source
Posted by Seth Millstein • 0 Comments • Permalink

23 Oct 2010 23:02

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Biz, Offbeat: Surely, this qualifies as governmental overreach

  • cute Two young entrepreneurs, aged 4 and 6, decided to sell pumpkins outside their home in Idaho to raise money for sports.
  • callous Officials from the Idaho State Tax Commission busted the kids for running a business without obtaining proper permits. source
Posted by Seth Millstein • 0 Comments • Permalink

23 Oct 2010 22:43

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World: Massacre at Mexican party; second in last year

  • 13 dead in shooting at Mexico border city source
Posted by Seth Millstein • 0 Comments • Permalink

23 Oct 2010 19:41

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Biz: Citibank’s multifunction credit card design misses the point

  • The new credit card?For the most part we’ve been using the same credit technology for 60 years, at least in the U.S. That magnetic stripe has proven pretty durable. So Citibank is introducing multi-button cards like these starting next month, which (among other things) will allow you to tie multiple accounts to the same card.

    What’s the point?Sorry, but we think that the design of the cards shown here is downright laughable, and technologies like Visa’s Paywave and Square are both out in the wild already and way more useful. We want less, not more, complication at the checkout. The new credit card isn’t a multifunction monster. It’s a cell phone. source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

23 Oct 2010 19:20

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World: A few key facts revealed in Wikileaks’ latest document leak

  • 15k the number of new civilian casualties Iraqi Body Count added to their list in the wake of Wikileaks’ latest data dump – the total number is over 122,000
  • 680 Iraqis were killed in often-violent “escalation of force” encounters near military checkpoints; some victims included pregnant women and the mentally ill
  • 80% the share of civilian deaths in the overall death count, according to Iraq Body Count – around 150,000 deaths, including over 3,000 by friendly fire
  • » Did the U.S. hide torture? The most controversial fact revealed in the reports, barring the release of the reports themselves, appears to be the U.S. military’s complicit role in hiding torture. It’s something that UN representative Manfred Nowak is straight-up calling out the Obama administration for. “There is an obligation,” he said. “to investigate whenever there are credible allegations torture has happened – and these allegations are more than credible – and then it is up to the courts on the one hand to bring the perpetrators to justice and also on the other hand to provide the victims with adequate reparation for the harm they have suffered.” Other human rights groups have pinpointed the British government for similar reasons.
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

23 Oct 2010 18:49

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World: Julian Assange: Wikileaks leader’s quirks add to his work’s appeal

  • They called me the James Bond of journalism. It got me a lot of fans, and some of them ended up causing me a bit of trouble.
  • Wikileaks founder Julian Assange • Making a pretty frank admission about his whole legal situation in Sweden, where he’s wanted on rape and molestation charges. Assange brought an even larger set of documents to the public eye Friday, revealing 391,832 secret documents yesterday, a leak more than five times as large as the recent Afghan War documents leak, which led to Bradley Manning’s detainment. Regarding Manning, who Assange has been matter-of-fact about in the past, he had something much weightier to say: “We have a duty to assist Mr. Manning and other people who are facing legal and other consequences.” Assange is a complex figure, perhaps one of the most interesting news figures around. And in his own weird way, he’s an essential part of the news right now. Even if some of his styles are questionable, some of the best journalism comes from these experimental methods. Ten years from now, Christian Bale should be all over this role. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

23 Oct 2010 18:27

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U.S.: Boeing manager uses “basic physics” to save guy’s life in car crash

  • scary Bill Pace, an 80-year-old man who recently had a minor heart attack, passed out behind the wheel on a Seattle expressway, mainly due to poor blood circulation.
  • heroic Duane Innes, a manager at Boeing,  used his engineering background to intentionally crash into the car, saving Pace’s life by causing his vehicle to stop. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 

23 Oct 2010 18:06

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Culture: Point to “Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things” in NPR spat

Aziz Ansari: Born Muslim. He wears clothes, but not the kind that raised Juan Williams’ eyebrows. He’s not alone, as the “Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things” Tumblr proves. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

23 Oct 2010 15:58

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Politics: NPR realizes Juan Williams’ firing not handled very well

  • I got the impression that [management] felt they had acted rashly and without deliberation. When [Schiller] made the psychiatrist crack, it just made matters much, much worse.
  • An NPR employee • Discussing the feeling they and many of the other staffers had about Juan Williams’ firing earlier this week. In the wake of the firing, which president Vivian Schiller even admitted was poorly-handled, the radio network is in fear that conservatives will choose not to donate to member stations, or worse, that Republicans in Congress will use the situation as an excuse to cut federal funding to member stations, which are much more reliant on it than the mothership. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 6 Comments • Permalink
 
 
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