News Round up, Vol. 1

The once venerable, now borderline treasonous, New York Times, after having already published classified documents on NSA monitoring of international Al Qaeda phone calls to and from the US – which the media calls “domestic spying” for some odd reason – is now suing the Pentagon to obtain even more classified information, that they no doubt will publish. I’m sure the terrorists will be pulling for a NYT court victory in this case.

Here’s a news flash. Apparently, according to AP writer Pauline Jelinek, the “chaos” in Iraq is a result of poor planning on the part of the Bush administration. Really? So it’s not the result of good planning? I guess Pauline started her life working for the Redundancy Department of Redundancy.

Chikungunya fever, a painful and deadly illness spread by mosquitoes, is on the rise in Mauritius. The PM of Mauritius, Dr Navinchandra Ramgoolam, was quoted as saying that he was thankful for the junk science in the 1962 book, Silent Spring, and the demagoguery of militant environmentalists for eradicating the use of DDT, so that today, the people of his tiny tropical nation can suffer painful deaths. Oh wait, that wasn’t him, it was me. My bad.

Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian has moved to close the 15 year old National Unification Council and in doing so state the obvious fact that the Democratic nation of Taiwan has no desire to be absorbed by Communist China. This story can be summed up thus: Chen Shui-bian – “We don’t want to be commies”, Chinese President Hu Jintao – “Rattle rattle rattle, saber saber saber”, US State Department – “God dammit you two”.