With wide-ranging estimations of between 20 and 100 million Muslims living in the mainly western provinces of the People's Republic of China, one is less surprised at the recent attack on police in the Xinjiang province town of Kashgar. But read about the PRC's boast of busting Islamic terror groups on July 15 and you start seeing the picture of an ongoing struggle that seems to be coming to it's media culmination as 08-08-08 looms.
In Russia even more than in America, Kosovo rhymes with I told you so. Many Americans don't realize that the former Serbian province of Kosovo, which broke away in 1999 after US-led NATO forces bombed Serbia for 78 days, helped set the stage for the recent conflict between Russia and neighboring Georgia.
One cannot help but be amused over the negotiations taking place between President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki over how long U.S. troops will be permitted to stay in Iraq and whether occupation troops will be subject to Iraqi law in the interim.
Silver Medal, Gold Pride… and the 2008 Beijing OlympicsI woke up Sunday morning to a promising Pacific Northwest day as the closing of the Olympic Games was just taking place in Beijing. Sixteen hours behind, or – setting Greenwich aside – perhaps eight hours ahead, my curiosity was focused on one thing: the results from the US-Spain basketball game which had taken place a couple or three hours before. And accustomed as I am to get news live, and most preferably unfiltered, I marched right to the digital pages of Marca, Spain's most read sports daily.
The U.S. missile defense program, which contributed to the deterioration of U.S.-Russian relations that helped generate the Russian-Georgian conflict, has benefited from that conflict and may cause a further downward spiral in the relationship between these two great powers.
I remember the first time I heard gun fire and grenade blasts when visiting my family in the embattled Himalayan region of Indian occupied Kashmir, IOK. Yet, I first became cognizant of what those bullets could do when my aunt was killed in the embattled state of Kashmir in 1992.
If Russia exited Georgia — as it should — and the Bush administration dropped its wish to expand NATO to Russia’s border — as it should — there would still be an issue to be dealt with: the secessionist ambitions of the majority in South Ossetia — the Georgian military response to which was the immediate cause of the current war. They are the forgotten party in the current conflict.
While media watchdogs and bloggers probe contemporary news media for signs of bias -- from every angle, on virtually every issue -- perhaps the most important of journalists’ biases is ignored: their routine acceptance of society’s technological fundamentalism. This devotion to the industrial world’s core delusion shows up not just in stories about science and technology but in the assumptions about science and technology that underlie virtually all reporting in the corporate commercial news media in the United States.
