US war reporter under fire

The Age (Australia): A reporter for The New York Times, Judith Miller, is the target of claims that she and her newspaper have been the vehicle for White House and Pentagon "propaganda" over Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction.

I'm not surprised.

Iranian blogs give voice to taboo topics

Christian Science Monitor: Proliferating Iranian weblogs give voice to taboo topics.

NICOSIA, CYPRUS -- In a recent entry, LadySun -- the handle used by a feisty online diarist -- takes aim at the strict dress code for women, grumbling about a guard who wouldn't let her into a hotel, "cuz I wasn't wearing socks!!"

It is easy to see why she is celebrated by her fans as the "emotional voice of Iran's Generation X." Whether the subject is partying or politics, football or feminism, she writes with feeling, and often humor.

A proliferating form of alternative expression in the Islamic Republic, such online journals are a fascinating insight into a closed society, airing issues that may be taboo in public and revealing the underground lives of many young Iranians.

Great stuff. I previously wrote about the proliferation of Persian bloggers last November. Something to keep an eye on as the unrest in Iran continues.

Internet primary tomorrow

Wired News has a story on tomorrow's "Internet primary." MoveOn.org will endorse any candidate who receives more than 50 percent of the vote. It's getting some buzz -- MSNBC TV just did a short segment on it.

My prediction: Former Gov. Howard Dean will win in a cakewalk.

The trend toward 'dayparting'

Editor & Publisher has a piece on "dayparting" -- the curious term for promoting softer news and arts & entertainment offerings on a news site at night.

If you visit azcentral.com after 6 p.m. MST, you'll find a racier, more entertainment-driven home page, with hard news corralled into a small holding pen. It's part of The Arizona Republic's rollout of azcentral@night, a far funkier version of the paper's daytime Web site. The goal of the Republic, and a growing number of other newspapers, is to boost their audiences at night, when their Web servers get pretty lonely.

A new era on errors

Some good fallout from the Jayson Blair scandal at the NY Times. The Boston Globe's ombudsman reports a large increase in the number of readers calling in to report mistakes (with the paper making due note of such errors). And the Globe's editor, Martin Baron, and other editors are drafting an ethics policy -- a set of rules for daily news gathering.

That's all to the good. Thanks to Hylton Jolliffe for the pointer.

The High Court's affirmative action rulings

I've begun linking today to news outlets other than the NY Times for breaking news. We'll see whether the links remain live for longer than the Times' 7 day threshold.

Reuters: Dems blast Bush, hail affirmative action ruling. Good line from Howard Dean: Dean said Bush could not get full agreement on his racial policies from "the most conservative Supreme Court since the Dred Scott decision."

I haven't read the 5-4 and 6-3 decisions yet (with different majorities in both cases), but from the result, I think the court got it right, for a change, in both cases.

Apple takes wraps off G5s

Wired News: Apple Computer introduced on Monday its new G5 computer chip, a breakthrough design by IBM that can handle twice as much data at once as traditional PC microchips.

Supremes OK library censorship

AP in SFGate:

A divided Supreme Court ruled Monday that Congress can force the nation's public libraries to equip computers with anti-pornography filters.

The blocking technology, intended to keep smut from children, does not violate the First Amendment even though it shuts off some legitimate, informational Web sites, the court held.

Meantime:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Online Policy Group (OPG) today released a study documenting the effects of Internet blocking, also known as filtering, in U.S. schools. The study found that blocking software overblocked state-mandated curriculum topics extensively -- for every web page correctly blocked as advertised, one or more was blocked incorrectly.

The tale of two elected leaders

William Safire in today's NY Times has an interesting column on political goings-on in Venezuela and California, where the elected leaders of both nation-states are in danger of being ousted.

He wants to see Venezuela President Hugo Ch·vez go, but able to run in another election. As for Gov. Gray Davis:

Californians should suffer Gray Davis for three more years, voting like grown-ups not as penance for their mistake last year, but to uphold the principle that election results are final for a fixed term and officeholders should not be removed merely when ratings fall.

Absolutely right.

Biotech is not the enemy

My old employer, the Sacramento Bee, is all over the massive protests in Sacramento today at the international Ministerial Conference and Expo on Agricultural Science and Technology, a conference hosted by the US to showcase farm technology and scientific know-how. The Bee's coverage includes a story on the massive protest roiling downtown, the protest march, an overview of the conference, and a look at biotech's role in addressing world hunger.

While I know some well-intentioned individuals who participate in these protests, I think they're wildly offbase. I have friends who are biotech scientists, and they're always befuddled and a little sad at the enormous amount of misinformation being spread about genetically modified crops -- a scary phrase unless one looks under the surface at what's really going on.

Science (yes, including researchers at Monsanto and other multinational corporations) has begun producing scores of fruits and vegetables that are more plentiful, nutritious, disease-free, insect-resistant, drought-tolerant, better-tasting, longer-lasting. Science has begun breeding a variety of cassava that produces its own natural insecticide by borrowing traits that other plants have evolved naturally to ward off pests, thus greatly reducing the use of toxic chemical pesticides.

Science has modified foods in the laboratory to stand up against the withering heat and drought of sub-Sahara Africa. Science has endowed strains of alfalfa and yams with genetically endowed antigens that provide immunity to cholera, which kills 10 million children a year. Edible vaccines promise to be the safest, most affordable way to immunize children in the developing world against disease. Biotech has begun to enhance the nutritional values of fruits and vegetables as well as genetically fortifying new strains of millet and rice with high amounts of iron and lysine, a move that could prevent hundreds of millions of people from contracting anemia, goiter and impaired sight due to inadequate diets.

Iíve eaten genetically modified tomatoes and other foods ñ and, you know what? You probably have too. Watchdog groups and government perform a valuable function in making sure agricultural biotech does not endanger the public health or the food chain. But the protesters today aren't interested in science but only in their half-formed belief systems.

Science and politics are almost always a bad mix, whether itís the Bush administrationís skewing the scientific research for its own political ends on global warming or the leftís embarrassing antics in Sacramento today.