Starting Points

Apr 2, 2010

CQ - Behind the Lines for Friday, April 2, 2010

By David C. Morrison, Special to Congressional Quarterly

Third time's the charm: Airliner attack while TSA is still directorless "could mortally wound a president's hopes for a second term" . . . Firewall: "The notion that terrorists have cyber-attack capabilities and are merely waiting to use them -- Osama bin Laden's birthday, perhaps? -- is silly" . . . What we're worried about this week: Nigerian driver crashes through airport security barriers and into parked airliner. These and other stories lead today's homeland security coverage.

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President Obama has signed off on new security protocols for people flying to the United States, establishing a system in which intel data, not nationality alone, will prompt extra scrutiny, The New York Times’ Jeff Zeleny relates. Since Obama scolded agencies for overlooking warning flags heralding the underpants bomber, the checking of visa applicants against watch lists has evolved into a burdensome ordeal, The Washington Post’s Edward Cody surveys — as the Post’s Tara Bahrampour sees returning U.S. Muslims “facing new complications” at ports of entry.

Homies: “If there’s no one in charge [at TSA] of preventing [an attack], when something does happen, it’s a political disaster that could mortally wound a president’s hopes for a second term,” Time Magazine’s Mark Thompson assesses. Drug smugglers have set booby traps — barbed wire stretched like clotheslines across trails — for Border Patrollers on border roads near Deming, N.M., The El Paso Times’ Daniel Borunda reports — while Tucson’s KOLD 13 News has DHS earlier this week transferring 10 ATVs, four motorcycles, 50 global positioning units and an assortment of tactical equipment to Mexico’s Secretariat of Public Safety.

Feds: CIA counterintel officers recently concluded that agency interrogators risk exposure to al Qaeda through Guantanamo inmates’ contacts with defense attorneys, The Washington Times’ Bill Gertz reports. The CIA “ceased long ago to be the ‘rogue elephant’ unmasked in congressional hearings in the 1970s. On the contrary, since 9/11 the agency has been accused less often of sinister misdeeds than of incompetence,” The New York Times’ Sam Tanenhaus essays. The Pentagon is implementing new safety measures since a gunman opened fire there last month, its security chief tells The Associated Press’ Monica Norton. The Nevada Capitol was locked down late Tuesday after the FBI advised the nation’s governors they would be receiving letters from an extremist group demanding their resignations, The Nevada Appeal’s Geoff Dornan relates.

State and local: DHS chief Janet Napolitano plans to hit Rhode Island today to assess damage from the worst flooding in 200 years, AP reports. Kentucky’s state auditor has found further questionable spending in a program that gives DHS grants to counties surrounding the chemical weapons-demilitarizing Bluegrass Army Depot, The Lexington Herald-Leader relates. Gov. Bill Richardson ordered more law enforcers to the New Mexico-Mexico border this week, following an Arizona rancher’s murder, The New Mexico Independent informs — and see The Washington Times: “Border violence threatening Americans.” The carnage in Mexico is worse now than the terror that enveloped Colombia during the 1980s and 1990s, The Texas Tribune, relatedly, has the state’s Public Safety director briefing lawmakers.

Cyberia: Federal spending for cybersecurity will reach $10.5 billion by 2015, a 10.5 percent increase from 2010, Homeland Security Newswire quotes from a Market Research Media study. In response to past cyber-attacks, the FAA is teaming with IBM on a system to secure commercial and private aviation networks from such threats, CNET News notes. “Mass indiscriminate computer attacks are giving way to highly targeted individual attempts in a new wave of professional cybercrime,” The Sydney Morning Herald relates. “Terrorists do not have the capabilities to launch cyber-attacks. They may eventually acquire them, but the notion that they have them and are merely waiting to use them — Osama bin Laden’s birthday, perhaps? — is silly,” James Lewis essays for U.S. News.

Bugs ‘n bombs: Looking at the indictment of Michigan cultists for plotting to use “weapons of mass destruction” against law officers, Slate wonders: “When did IEDs become WMDs?” On the bioterror front, “the government has done a pretty good job of protecting things, but a less adequate — and at times substandard — job of protecting people,” BioPrepWatch quotes an expert. Renewed DHS funding will allow Kansas State University food scientists to keep “educating current and future leaders in homeland security and food defense,” The Wichita Eagle relates — as Cattle Network has another grant supporting Texas A&M’s National Center for Foreign Animal and Zoonotic Disease Defense.

Know nukes: At Sen. Harry Reid’s request, DHS has canceled a mock “dirty bomb” terrorist attack exercise in Las Vegas, much dreaded by local innkeepers, The Christian Science Monitor mentions. “Asserting the right of first use [of nuclear weapons] is described as tough and realistic, but it is actually unrealistic,” Selig S. Harrison comments in a USA Today op-ed anticipating release of Obama’s nuclear posture review. Russia’s ambassador to the United States sees the Moscow metro bombings “as a grave warning that keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists means eliminating them completely,” a FOX News op-ed relays. An Iranian nuclear scientist, who disappeared last year under mysterious circumstances, actually defected to the CIA and been resettled in the United States, ABC News learns.

Close air support: A $20 million upgrade of the Colorado Springs airport’s checked bag inspection system “is focused on being more efficient and more private,” KKTV 11 News relates. A British Airways computer expert who allegedly offered himself as a suicide bomber is now slated to face trial next January, BBC News notes — while This Day reports a Nigerian man shouting “repent” while crashing his car through security barriers and into a parked airliner, and Gulf News has an elderly man desperate to go on hajj to Saudi Arabia jumping a New Delhi airport emergency gate.

Off track: “This week’s Moscow subway bombings raise several questions, but one of the most mysterious must be: Why hasn’t something like this happened here?” a Slate columnist probes — and see The Christian Science Monitor, again, on five ways to make mass transit safer. “Just as the Moscow bombers sent New York into a new round of terror jitters,” Gotham’s MTA removed weekend security details from the Queens Midtown Tunnel and the Verrazano Bridge, the Daily News learns — while CBS 2 News has 100 NYPD officers working a three-hour transit exercise Wednesday, supposedly planned before the Moscow blasts. This week, too, it was discovered that half of the NYC subway monitoring cameras were out of order, News.am briefs.

Over there: U.S. naval forces yesterday captured a “mothership” and five suspected Somali pirates after exchanging gunfire and sinking their boat, The Voice of America mentions. The Pentagon may provide surveillance drones and other limited military support for a Somali government offensive against al Qaeda-linked insurgents, AP reports — as AFP has Nigeria’s self-styled Taliban militant Islamist sect threatening to widen its activities beyond the borders. French authorities have left extradition proceedings against Canadian professor Hassan Diab “hanging in limbo,” The Ottawa Citizen has the accused terrorist’s defense attorney charging.

Courts and rights: An Algerian man in Ireland charged with making death threats against a Dearborn attorney is also implicated in an international plot to murder a Swedish cartoonist for his drawings of Muhammad, The Detroit Free Press reports. The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that lawyers have a constitutional obligation to advise clients of the collateral immigration consequences of a guilty plea in a criminal case, The National Law Journal notes. “Governments are using increasingly heavy-handed tactics to crack down on environmental activists,” most notably levying charges of “eco-terrorism,” Green Left growls. A senior CBP lawyer “and her parents will receive $152,000 from NYC after police and child welfare workers raided her home based on false info, the Advance advises.

Say bye-bye, Jack Bauer: For viewers, “24” (FOX Entertainment) “is part sum of all fears, part wish fulfillment in an age of shadowy enemies . . . [but] the show’s trademark clock is about to stop ticking, The New York Times leads. “Let’s face it. Jack Bauer is not necessarily somebody it would be great fun to sit around and have a beer with, but I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have with me [if] I realized someone had just slipped a small nuclear device into my carry-on luggage,” a FOX News contributor eulogizes — and see BuddyTV on “Jack Bauer’s Top 5 Human Rights Violations.” In a silver lining for bereft Bauer-holics, Kiefer Sutherland promises Hollywood Insider the series finale will tee up the “24”movie in the works at 20th Century Fox.

>Kulture Kanyon: “When last we left ‘V,’ the ABC remake of the ’80s miniseries . . . a vast fleet of Visitors’ spaceships was waiting to, presumably, swarm down on an unsuspecting Earth. Yikes — what’s the color for that emergency in the DHS playbook?” The Dallas Morning News curtain-raises. “Just like Hollywood, video game publishers capitalize on trends . . . Now there’s a new trend on the horizon, or message, if you’re a conspiracy theorist: Russia’s evil,” GameDaily essays. “It is hard for me, as a human being and a Middle Easterner, to portray these kinds of roles,” Arab American actor Said Faraj tells Aramica in re: the parts playing terrorists that has largely been his lot. Artist Robin Lasser presented a performance of her “Ms. Homeland Security” last Friday in Topeka, KTKA 49 News notes.

Nuclear Casual-Tea Party: “The National Rifle Association has unleashed a new campaign to allow all American citizens ‘their God-given rights to own an atom bomb!’” Glossy News notes. “The public is being bombarded with television, newspaper, movie and billboard ads pushing the new ‘right’ that the NRA feels should be passed through Congress. Already the FOX News channel has picked up the baton and is aggressively pushing for legalization of individual possession. Anyone challenging this new mandate has been ruthlessly booed down and hunted . . . People complaining about it have been told ‘Why do you hate America? Do you want only the terrorists to have atom bombs?’ Interestingly enough, the NRA appears to have bought the majority share of stocks in the first company to mass produce atom bombs for the general consumer . . . Once the personal possession atom bomb amendment is forced through Congress the NRA plans on pushing for the legal right to carrying concealed atom bombs on the street.

Source: CQ Homeland Security

Enduring army role in Swat spurs questions about Pakistan's civilian government - washingtonpost.com

Image by yumievriwan via Flickr

By Karin Brulliard
Friday, April 2, 2010; A08

MINGORA, PAKISTAN -- Officially, the military operation to purge the Taliban from Pakistan's Swat Valley ended last summer. But even as life in the lush region returns to normal, the army's footprint is everywhere.

The military is rebuilding roads, schools and libraries. It is buying computers for women's vocational institutes and solar-powered streetlights for villages. It is planting a million trees. The work has made soldiers hugely popular, but some wonder why the civilian government is not doing it.

"The mandate of the army was to clear the area and to hold the area for peace. To build should be done by the civilians," said Zia ud-Din, an educator and spokesman for the Swat National Committee, a civil society group. "How long will we depend on them?"

There are competing explanations for why the military remains in the lead. Some U.S. and Pakistani military officials say Pakistan's anemic civilian government is too corrupt and bureaucratic to build on military progress by improving services and quality of life. Others say the military is too accustomed to control and too enthralled with its popularity to cede any power.

Image by Edge of Space via Flickr

Pakistani officials say their objective is to prevent the rebels from regaining a foothold. Pakistan's successes over the past year in battling Islamist fighters in Swat and in the remote tribal area of South Waziristan have won the country high praise from U.S. officials. But at the same time, some American and Pakistani experts say the enduring military presence carries worrying implications, because it ties down forces needed to battle militants elsewhere and raises awkward questions about the country's efforts to emerge from a decade of military rule.

"They are carrying guns at the same time they are carrying shovels. It's sending the wrong signals," said Rifaat Hussain, a defense and security studies professor in Islamabad. "The civilians are completely dependent on the army."

To be sure, government offices in Swat are open, and they have reclaimed their chaotic bustle. Naeem Akhtar, a top civilian administrator, said officials have reduced a large backlog of court cases, surveyed 10,000 destroyed houses and shops, and plan to distribute $1 million in total compensation to families of victims or survivors of terrorist attacks.

"In the entire district, every nook and corner, the government is functioning," Akhtar said.

But security analysts say that keeping insurgents at bay requires the government not just to resume its functions but to improve them -- and that is the worry.

Outside the government complex on a recent day, Ehsan Ullah paced with a folder full of documents. He was injured in a bombing in February 2009, he said, and had spent months submitting paperwork for compensation, only to be shuffled from one office to another.

"Corruption, corruption, corruption, corruption, corruption," fumed the young man, waving a cellphone that he said he planned to sell that day to feed his family.

Usurping authority?

Of 401 schools bombed by militants or left dilapidated, half have been rebuilt. But it was the military, not the government, that rebuilt them while also providing temporary tents for other schools. By some estimates, the army has carried out 90 percent of the building and rebuilding projects -- a list so long that it took 20 minutes for Lt. Col. Akhtar Abbas, an army spokesman in the region, to recite.

The army has also set up mobile clinics in rural areas that have no government hospitals. At the occasional checkpoints in the valley, soldiers stand alongside police officers, and the army is working to enroll and train police recruits. With 50,000 soldiers in Swat, the military presence there is now larger than it was during the offensive.

The military says it will leave Swat when the provincial government asks. Ud-Din, the activist, said the continuing troop presence has created tensions, with provincial workers complaining privately that the army has usurped authority by "putting their noses into everything," in an effort to create dependency.

In South Waziristan, officials say they are prioritizing a rapid buildup of civilian institutions. Tariq Hayat Khan, the law and order secretary for the tribal areas, said the federal government had pledged -- though not yet fully delivered -- millions of dollars for a post-operation plan to prevent residents from "being mercenaries for the miscreants." It includes vocational schools, a buildup of community police and road construction.

But in both Swat and South Waziristan, there also appears to be widely felt apprehension about too quick a military drawdown. In the hectic city of Mingora, civil officials say the army is providing much-needed security and carrying out reconstruction projects that could not otherwise be funded. A senior Pakistani military official, for his part, was disparaging about his civilian partners. "Whenever we give them the job, they're not capable of doing it because of corruption," he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter frankly.

"They completed this in two months," Mohammed Saeed, a principal in the village of Shamozai, said of the military's reconstruction of his school and renovation of its furniture. "I think if it had been done by the government, it would have taken 10 years."

Never Offline – The Advantages of Generation Y | Zemanta Ltd.

Posted by bostjan, under zemanta on April 1st, 2010

: Image via Wikipedia

Reaching generations who are never offline, ever multi-tasking is significantly different from advertising tactics old-media ecosystem developed. Us startups are constantly being asked to reinvent the wheel, because old-guys don’t change fast enough. So we asked friends over at konstrukt.it who work daily on first-class strategies for online marketing and branding challenges, to write a guest blog post on what has actually changed and what is this new ‘audience’ thing everybody is asking us (the tech-guys) about.

First of all let’s get one thing straight about the fastest growing segment of today’s active population. There is the Generation Y and there are the Millenials. They share a lot of common consumer behavior which makes both more or less one group for all the marketing research. However there are certain ideological differences that profoundly divide the generations born after ’81 and the generation born after ’94. Let’s call it historical recollection – one generation never ever even touched a Spectrum or Commodore, and the other one saw the fall of the Berlin wall whose consequent changes in political geographies coincide with the world of information opening through a new door (or should we say windows . But for the argument’s sake lets’ use both segments that together comprise roughly 70 million people in US alone.

One thing is true, no matter how confusing the generational divides are, what we are facing here is a generation of multitaskers, who can juggle e-mail on their BlackBerrys while talking on cellphones while trolling online and really, and I mean really, don’t like to stay too long on any one assignment. The Y came of age just when internet started to fully open its flower and grew up with html fragments more or less running down their veins. Instinctively familiar not just with browsing the www but also with all the gadgets that accompanied the new age of digital information, Generation Y is the first trully 24/7 plugged-in generation.

Gen Y spends most of their time online. Minutes offline can seem pretty devastating even to non-geeks of this generation. They use the online landscape to build their worlds by nurturing contacts on social networks, by participating actively in the social media and keeping their inner information junkies happy by immersing themselves in data streams. Their biggest advantage is that they are absolutely native to the online habitat and are more than ready to take on new challenges that await the must-be-tech-savvy user in the future.

Image by Mike Rohde via Flickr

Due to all this Gen Y has a tendency to be information and text scanners. Reading a blog is just part of what they do while online and it is not improbable, that content will only catch their attention if it is rich enough. On the other hand of course this generation is able only to think in the language of rich content and as such it tends to produce more multimedia than any other generation beforehand. They crave their information inputs to be meaningful and present as many facets of particular problems in a glance as possible. They want the world to give them tools with which to work their way through the fields of knowledge and experience exchange, and desire a community with which to share their own.

They live to learn and share information and are afraid one one thing only: a dead end. Something that would cause their information stream to stop and reboot. Every piece of content they consume has to lead to the next one.

It is because generation Y wants this meaningful life and a solid learning curve backed with experience sharing and team participation, that they get along quite well with boomers ready to find their inner hippies again.

Bruce Tulgan, co-author of Managing Generation Y once said: “They’re like Generation X on steroids.” The high-performance and high-maintenance Generation Y is different. All researchers agree on that.

Global Voices Online » Malaysia: New Economic Model

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by Jude Chia

After months of creating anticipation for the ambitious New Economic Model (NEM), Malaysia's Prime Minister, Najib finally unveiled the first part of the plan detailing the future economic direction. It is a major development following a series of selective liberalization measures introduced by Najib since he became the Prime Minister in 2009, constantly projected to be eloquently driving a strong message in gradual economic liberalization and overhaul of affirmative action for ethnic Malay majority in order to make the country more competitive.

The effort is much lauded especially by policy makers in mainstream press, but the citizen media abounds with skepticism. Meanwhile Najib acknowledged the need to be more transparent about the timeline and implementation plan which will be announced later of the year. So the questions are still centered on two key aspects: Has the government finally gathered enough political will to change? Are there enough change agents to take up the ambitious initiative other than the PM?

South East Asian economies have always been characterized by large-state corporations, Najib has made a direct challenge to call for private-sector driven economy and reduce political patronage. How many will embrace such ideas? As Din Merican pointed out, Malaysia needs the drive of SMEs and entrepreneurs to turn this nation into high-income developed country.

These are the people who have been excluded from participation simply because they only have technical skills but no patronage and no intimate relationship with powerful decision makers.

Controversial writer, Raja Petra Kamarudin gave a colorful critique in Shakespearean metaphors, doubting the policy change will immediately constitute the change of heart of key implementers.

The New Economic Policy (NEP) has transformed into the National Economic Policy and now the National Economic Model. It is certainly a change of clothes. But is the wearer of the clothes the same? If so then it would be old wine in a new bottle.

The affirmative action, NEP has always been at the heart of debate. Najib promised to overhaul it into need-based rather than race-based. But some still reserve doubts about it. As Hafiz Noor Shams said:

Somewhere in the speech, the term market-friendly affirmative action appeared. I am not quite bought by that term. I rather hear the abolition of affirmative action but I am willing to give ground that need-based is far better than race-based affirmative action.

In a collection of interviews of economic policy experts, Stephanie Sta Maria highlighted polarized opinions on NEM. Professor Lim Teck Ghee from the Centre of Policy Initiatives described the framework as pure rhetoric.

The long-term time frame of the NEM is an excuse for inaction or delaying tactics. NEM has no short-term targets and I think it will suffer the same fate as the other ambitious policies before it.

University Malaya's Professor Edmund Terence Gomez also delivered a blunt critique that NEM is a fresh coat of gloss on old ideas.

Najib says that the affirmative action policy will now be need-based instead of race-based. But the aspects of its transparency and market-friendliness are clearly targeted at Bumiputeras (Ethnic Malays). And this is no different from the NEP.

Without a track record in making tough political choices and implementing changes, there is little surprise about the level of skepticism on NEM. While the intent of reform is clear but the end result is not, the job has just begun for the coalition government. Like balajoe27 articulated:

The fact is NEM is still in its infant stage – there are good items under the NEM but whether it turns out to be another one-sided policy by another name or it can be implemented effectively, it will remain to be seen.

Foreign Policy Association - Resource Library: Israel and Palestine - Two States for Two Peoples: If Not Now, When?

Source: FPA Features
Author: Boston Study Group on Middle East Peace

[DOWNLOAD PDF]

The Boston Study Group on Middle East Peace is comprised of professional and academic members with strong interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Some have been intensely engaged with this subject for decades. Others have closely followed the conflict within the context of their professional work in conflict resolution, international law and international relations, religion, and U.S. foreign policy.

The Group's principal contribution is the jointly written Policy Statement entitled "Israel and Palestine - Two States for Two Peoples: If not Now, When?" The Statement stands as a collegial, collective enterprise that represents a consensus view of the group.

Prior to drafting the policy statement each member undertook to research and write a background paper on one of the topics important to the statement.

[DOWNLOAD PDF]

Policy Statement of Boston Study Group on Middle East Peace

Palestinian Refugees
Herbert C. Kelman and Lenore G. Martin

West Bank Settlements and Borders
Henry Steiner

Jerusalem
Harvey Cox

The Challenge of Mutual Security
Stephen M. Walt

The Right Time, As Ever
Alan Berger

U.S. Presidents and the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Augustus Richard Norton

Timeline and Glossary of Israeli-Palestinian Conflict & Peacemaking
Everett Mendelsohn

Contributor Bios

Alan Berger, an editorial writer at the Boston Globe, has been writing about the Middle East and Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking efforts since 1982. He has interviewed many of the principals and policymakers. And has not yet lost hope.

Harvey Cox is Hollis Research Professor of Divinity at Harvard University. He teaches courses on religion and society in the Divinity School and in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, among them a course on the history, religion and culture of the city of Jerusalem. He has worked with the Middle-East Peace Program of the World Council of Churches, and has lectured at both Jewish and Palestinian institutions in Israel.

Herbert C. Kelman is Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Emeritus, and co-chair of the Middle East Seminar at Harvard University. He was the founding Director (1993–2003) of the Program on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. A pioneer in the development of interactive problem solving, he has been engaged for nearly 40 years in efforts toward the resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Lenore G. Martin is the Wyant Professor at Emmanuel College in Boston. She is co-Chair of the Middle East Seminar co-sponsored by Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Her publications analyze national security in the Gulf, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the larger Middle East and Turkey. She researches, lectures and travels throughout the Middle East and Turkey.

Everett Mendelsohn is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Harvard University. For more than forty years he has been actively involved in Israeli-Arab/Palestinian peace making first as chair of the Middle East program of the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers) and then as Chair of the Middle East Program of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' program on International Security. He is author/co-author of A Compassionate Peace: A Future for Israel, Palestine and the Middle East (1982, rev. ed.1989); Israeli-Palestinian Security: Issues in the Permanent Status Negotiations (1995).

Augustus Richard Norton is a Professor in the Departments of International Relations and Anthropology at Boston University, and Visiting Professor in the Politics of the Middle East at the University of Oxford. He served for a dozen years on the United States Military Academy faculty, and was a career Army officer, retiring as a Colonel. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and in 2006 was an adviser to the Iraq Study Group (“Baker-Hamilton Commission”). His most recent book is Hezbollah: A Short History (Princeton University Press, 2009). He has on-the-ground research experience in eight Middle East countries, including Egypt, Israel, Iraq and Lebanon, as well as Gaza and the West Bank.

Henry Steiner, Jeremiah Smith, Jr., Professor Emeritus at Harvard Law School, founded the School's Human Rights Program and directed it for 21 years. His writing addresses a broad range of international human rights issues. Steiner has taught courses and lectured in over 30 countries, including Israel, the West Bank-Gaza, and three Arab states.

Stephen M. Walt is Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine. His recent writings include Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (2005) and (with John Mearsheimer), The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007). His daily weblog can be found at http://walt.foreignpolicy.com.

[DOWNLOAD PDF]

Additional Resources:

Maps of Israeli Settlements

Source: Peace Now

Potential Land Swap Between Israelis and Palestinians

Source: Haaretz

Timeline Map

Source: Foundation for Middle East Peace

*The authors are responsible for factual accuracy and for the views expressed. FPA itself takes no position on issues of U.S. foreign policy.

Associated with: Middle East, Research and Analysis Links

Download Related Materials

Israel and Palestine - Two States for Two Peoples: If Not Now, When? (774K) [download]

Six ways Gmail revolutionized e-mail - CNN.com

Image by Gubatron via Flickr

Editor's note: Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of Mashable, a popular blog about social media. He writes a weekly column about social networking and technology for CNN.com.

London, England (CNN) -- Thursday marks the sixth birthday of Google's pioneering e-mail service: Gmail.

Groundbreaking in some respects and controversial in others, Gmail radically altered our expectations of what a webmail client could be.

1. More space

Gmail launched with 1 gigabyte of free storage, an inconceivable amount at the time. For many e-mail addicts (myself included), this was reason enough to switch to Google's new service, putting pressure upon rivals Yahoo and Microsoft to upgrade their offerings or face a user exodus.

In June 2004, in response to Gmail's launch, Yahoo increased its storage limits from 4 megabytes to 100 megabytes. Hotmail, too, reacted to the Gmail threat by providing more storage: Some users saw their Hotmail limits increase from 2MB to 25MB.

In April 2005, Gmail raised the stakes yet again: Free storage was increased to 2GB, with a promise to increase the storage capacity available to users continually. In the same month, Yahoo Mail bumped its free storage up to 1GB. Hotmail played catch-up in late 2006, rolling out 1GB of free storage to users.

2. The perpetual beta

Love it or loathe it, Gmail popularized the use of the "beta" tag on many "web 2.0" products, indicating an early release that may contain bugs. The effect on Web development was at first a positive one: It became more acceptable to invite users to test the earliest versions of a product, and rapid development cycles became common.

And yet "beta" soon lost its sheen due to overuse: Not only did every Web startup co-opt the term to add "web 2.0 glitz" to a product, but Google itself devalued the term by leaving Gmail in beta for five years.

This extended beta period turned the "beta" label into a geek punch line of sorts. When Gmail left beta in July, Google conceded that "over the last five years, a beta culture has grown around web apps, such that the very meaning of 'beta' is debatable."

3. Conversation threading

Many e-mail clients now "thread" conversations on the same topic, but it was Gmail that popularized the concept.

Google says of the feature, "In other e-mail systems, responses appear as separate messages in your inbox, forcing you to wade through all your mail to follow the conversation. In Gmail, replies to replies (and replies to those replies) are displayed in one place, in order, making it easier to understand the context of a message."

It's a simple evolution that makes a huge difference.

4. Labels, not folders

Gmail's new way to sort e-mail seemed alien in 2004: Folders were replaced with "labels." If a mail was about both"art" and "design," a user could apply both labels rather than deciding which folder to place the message into.

Although this "tagging" concept was familiar to users of the bookmarking service Delicious, this new way to sort e-mail took some getting used to. Those who embraced it still swear it's the best way to organize your mail.

5. Archive, don't delete

Before Gmail, storage space was a scarce resource. Once you were done with a mail, you deleted it to save space. Gmail not only offered a massive amount of storage, but Google encouraged users to archive their e-mails for reference, rather than deleting them.

Google was so committed to this new paradigm that the "Delete" option was somewhat hidden. In early 2006, however, Google caved to pressure from users and added a more visible delete button.

6. Targeted ads

Considered a nuisance by some and a privacy invasion by others, Gmail scans your e-mails to deliver personalized ads in the sidebar. Whether the innovation was an advance or a step back is debatable: Before Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft served up distracting banner ads alongside e-mails.

While Google controversially chose to target its Gmail ads based on the content of your e-mails, these ads were at least text-based and more easily ignored than those that came before.

In what other ways did Gmail change your e-mail experience? Let me know in the comments.

Twitter: The Killer Box Office Predictor?

Image via Wikipedia

by Jolie O'Dell

Twitter can predict box-office takings better than other industry-leading data sites, according to research just released by HP. Between the sentiments expressed and the rate at which buzz builds, the microblogging service outperforms other forecasting mechanisms for the film industry.

When compared to industry favorite The Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX), Twitter trumps on predicting real-world outcomes.

The HSX is essentially a web-based game that utilizes virtual currency to predict the success (or failure) of a given film, actor, or director. But the virtual prices at which one sees filmic properties being traded on HSX strongly correlates to real-world box-office dollars – and players’ favorites can translate into professional accolades. For example, in 2007, HSX correctly predicted 82% of Academy Award nominees in major categories and around 88% of Oscar winners.

Image via CrunchBase

However, HP’s dissection of Twitter streams shows that the social site is more accurate than HSX at determining box-office revenue, even for pre-release movies, by 1-2 percent. This might not seem like a significant statistic, but when one considers the box-office take of a Hollywodd blockbuster, a percent or two can add up to millions.

Also, Twitter provides a free and open stream of data that’s fairly simple to grab and parse – something most competent social media analysts can appreciate. And in addition to simple charts showing URL mentions, retweets, and acceleration curves, Twitter also provides a rich bank of user-generated sentiment – emotionally weighted statements that further show whether users are recommending or slamming a particular movie to their friends.

These sentiments can forecast trends in sales, as well. One movie analyzed in this study, The Blind Side, had an “enormous increase in positive sentiment after release,” reads the paper. The film’s score jumped from 5.02 to 9.65 on HP’s scale. After a “lukewarm” first weekend, with sales around $34 million, the movie “boomed in the next week ($40.1 million), owing largely to positive sentiment.”

As the HP researchers note, “While in this study we focused on the problem of predicting box office revenues of movies for the sake of having a clear metric of comparison with other methods, this method can be extended to a large panoply of topics, ranging from the future rating of products to agenda setting and election outcomes. At a deeper level, this work shows how social media expresses a collective wisdom which, when properly tapped, can yield an extremely powerful and accurate indicator of future outcomes.”

Locked Up Far Away | Human Rights Watch

The Transfer of Immigrants to Remote Detention Centers in the United States

December 2, 2009

This 88-page report presents new data analyzed for Human Rights Watch by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) of Syracuse University. The data show that 53 percent of the 1.4 million transfers have taken place since 2006, and most occur between state and local jails that contract with the agency, known as ICE, to provide detention bed space. The report's findings are based on the new data and interviews with officials, immigration lawyers, detainees, and their family members.

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ISBN: 1-56432-570-9

Trail of Death | Human Rights Watch

LRA Atrocities in Northeastern Congo

March 28, 2010

This 67-page report is the first detailed documentation of the Makombo massacre and other atrocities by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in Congo in 2009 and early 2010. The report, based on a Human Rights Watch fact-finding mission to the massacre area in February, documents the brutal killings during the well-planned LRA attack from December 14 to 17 in the remote Makombo area of Haute Uele district.

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ISBN: 1-56432-614-4

Ukrainians Likely Support Move Away From NATO

Cover of Ukraine: A History

Ukrainians Likely Support Move Away From NATO

Apr 1, 2010

The Rising Stars of Gossip Blogs - NYTimes.com

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By ALEX WILLIAMS

IT had all the elements for the perfect tabloid gossip item — a clash between star financial journalists, big egos and a surprise ouster that had Wall Street buzzing: Henry Blodget, the well-known disgraced-analyst-turned-financial-pundit and co-founder of the much-read blog, The Business Insider, stunned the financial community last week by firing John Carney, the star managing editor of the site’s Clusterstock blog, reportedly because of philosophical differences over the site’s coverage.

The news, which was quickly picked up by the Reuters financial blogger Felix Salmon, who subsequently sparked an online spat of his own with Mr. Blodget, did not break in a gossip column like The New York Post’s Page Six or in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, which in a previous era might have owned this story. Rather, the scoop came from a 25-year-old Village Voice gossip blogger and University of Utah dropout named Foster Kamer.

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Surfing the Web after business hours one evening, Mr. Kamer ran across speculation about Mr. Carney’s job status on a Twitter post by Gawker Media’s owner, Nick Denton. After 90 minutes of phone calls to sources within the financial journalism subculture, Mr. Kamer nailed down the item and posted it on the Voice site.

The lines between “reporter” and “blogger,” “gossip” and “news” have blurred almost beyond distinction. No longer is blogging something that marginalized editorial wannabes do from home, in a bathrobe, because they haven’t found a “real” job. Blogging now is a career path in its own right, offering visibility, influence and an actual paycheck. As more gossip action in a variety of fields moves online, young writers who might have hungrily chased an editorial assistant job at Condé Nast a few years ago now move to New York with the dream of making it as a blogger — either launching their own blog into the big time, à la Perez Hilton, or getting snapped up by a prominent blog network like Gawker Media or MediaBistro.

And although the better-known newspaper gossip columnists still churn along, among them Richard Johnson and Cindy Adams of The New York Post, and George Rush and Joanna Molloy of The New York Daily News, much of the action has moved online, with the up-and-coming players having little in common with legendary predecessors like Walter Winchell and Liz Smith. While Ms. Smith, 87 and still active, toiled in journalism for nearly 30 years before getting her own by-lined column (working first, among other things, as a typist, proofreader and radio producer), some of the newest notables in gossip are still in their 20s and only a few years removed from the days when they blogged from their college dorm rooms about fraternity hazing mishaps and the quality of the cafeteria food.

The following are profiles of nine emerging gossip bloggers, whose names came up in interviews with influential blog entrepreneurs, fellow bloggers and other journalists as potential future stars of the online world. The list, by no means exhaustive, represents a cross-section of New Yorkers covering varied beats — entertainment, fashion, real estate, finance —for a variety of prominent blog networks. Some, like Sara Polsky of Curbed and Lilit Marcus of The Gloss, are relatively new to the business, but recently installed in a position of prominence by Web star-makers like Lockhart Steele, who runs Curbed and Eater, or Elizabeth Spiers, a founder of Gawker in 2002 who has introduced a number of successful blogs since then. Others, like Fred Mwangaguhunga of MediaTakeOut.com, are popular niche players who are quickly crossing into the mainstream.

ERIN CARLSON: Editor, Crushable

If you’re starting a high-profile blog in the already saturated, and fiercely competitive, celebrity-gossip category, you had better have an edge. And Elizabeth Spiers, who debuted Crushable last month for the Canadian company b5media, says she has a plan to differentiate her new blog from the competition, including heavyweights like Perez Hilton, who happens to have been a roommate years ago, and new sites like Bonnie Fuller’s Hollywood Life. Go young.

Crushable, run by the 29-year-old Ms. Carlson, a former Associated Press entertainment reporter, seeks to leave the bulk of the Brangelina coverage to the other guys and focus more on a Teen Vogue-ish 15-to-25-year-old female market. So look out for more news on more hunky young stars like Matt Bomer of “White Collar” and Cory Monteith of “Glee,” as well as tweens like Lourdes Leon, Madonna’s 13-year-old fashion designer daughter.

Ms. Carlson seems well-pedigreed for her job. At The Associated Press, she reported the story of the $14 million sale of photos of the Brad-Angelina twins, and last year, the story of Sean Penn’s split from his wife, Robin Wright Penn.

NOTABLE SCOOP: Reported this week that the rumored relationship between Rob Kardashian and Angela Simmons, which some gossips had speculated was a Kardashian family publicity stunt, was real, according to a source.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: None yet. It’s early.

TOMMYE FITZPATRICK: Editor, Fashionologie

Short indeed is the list of fashion influencers whose journey to that tent in Bryant Park took a detour through a biomedical-engineering course load at Duke University. But that’s what Ms. Fitzpatrick, now 25, was mired in when she started Fashionologie in her dorm room in 2005 as a kind of study break. In five years, she has managed to distance herself from the infinite number of would-be Anna Wintours blogging from their bedrooms and actually made the industry insiders take notice. Fashionologie now attracts 1.5 million page-views a month, and has seen a 45 percent increase in visits over the last year, according to Ms. Fitzpatrick, and is being linked to established fashion sites like Refinery29 and The Cut at New York Magazine.

While primarily a news aggregator and style curator, as opposed to a gotcha-style gossip columnist, Ms. Fitzpatrick, is driving traffic while providing plenty of original content of late. In competition with rival sites like Fashionista, she reports from the front lines at the shows in Paris, London and Milan, and interviews designers like Alexander Wang and Riccardo Tisci for Givenchy. She routinely mines online fashion forums for tips, sources and insider arcana (when Vogue’s André Leon Talley joined Twitter, you read about it in Fashionologie).

NOTABLE SCOOP: She recently reported that Alexander McQueen had done final fittings on a substantial part of his fall collection before his death.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: Posted one item recently describing a Twitter account supposedly belonging to Anna Wintour’s daughter, Bee Shaffer. But when she noticed that it linked to one purporting to be be her mother’s, which had only one tweet (“those poseurs got to stop”), she determined it to be bogus and quickly removed the item.

FOSTER KAMER: Staff writer, The Village Voice news blog, Runnin’ Scared

Mr. Kamer may cite The Village Voice’s co-founder, Norman Mailer, as a personal inspiration, but online he comes off a bit like a Wi-Fi era hybrid of J. J. Hunsecker and H. L. Mencken, delivering missives on the news media, politics and New York culture in an acerbic, knowing tone — even by Gawker alumni standards —sometimes at lengths that call to mind Op-Ed essays more than gossip items. The former weekend editor at Gawker and assistant editor at BlackBook.com, he seems to know everyone and everything about the tight-knit — some might say incestuous — New York online-gossip subculture. The big figures in that subculture consider Mr. Kamer a rising force. “He’s supremely talented,” said Mr. Steele, when asked his opinion on which rising stars to focus on for this article. “He qualifies as a must-include.”

Mr. Kamer, who started at The Voice last month, wasted little time afflicting the comfortable. An off-color wisecrack about James Dolan in a recent item about the media mogul’s rumored purchase of the Gothamist blog may have cost his paper more than $20,000 in advertising revenue; the IFC Center, a Dolan property, recently pulled a $400-a-week ad from The Voice, Mr. Kamer claimed in his blog. The square-off inspired Gawker’s Adrian Chen to joke in a recent item that his former colleague “has been busily blogging the Village Voice to financial ruin.”

It might be a reasonable price to pay for alternative weekly if Mr. Kamer can help The Voice, struggling for an identity along with most alternative weeklies in the Internet era, end up with its biggest gossip must-read since James Ledbetter in the ’90s.

NOTABLE SCOOP: The John Carney story.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: At Gawker, he ran an item about a University of Minnesota journalism professor excoriating the traditional news organizations for ignoring the Jon and Kate Gosselin story. The story, picked up from The Huffington Post, turned out to be a satirical piece written by the humorist Andy Borowitz.

STEVE KRAKAUER: Television editor, Mediaite.com

No one thought the world needed another media gossip site when Dan Abrams, a former general manager of MSNBC, started Mediaite.com last July. But at least he brought in a credentialed team — including the well-known media blogger Rachel Sklar — to help him elbow his way into a crowded market. At 26, Mr. Krakauer is not only the site’s youngest editor, but also a seasoned reporter in his own right. He honed his skills as an assistant editor at MediaBistro’s influential TVNewser site, which became an industry staple under former editor Brian Stelter, now a New York Times media reporter.

He is already starting to break a steady stream of scoops, like his posts that reported that ABC was planning a major layoff in February, or the story last October that Fox News’s 3 a.m. show was getting better ratings than CNN’s 8 p.m. primetime show — a fact that Fox later worked into an advertising campaign. Some in the news media are starting to take notice. Last year, Rush Limbaugh quoted Mr. Krakauer’s TVNewser podcast with Terry Moran, the co-anchor of ABC’s “Nightline,” in his radio show. The Hollywood site The Wrap listed him along with Ryan Seacrest and The Los Angeles Times media reporter, Joe Flint, on its list of “50 TV Insiders to Follow Right Now” on Twitter last fall.

NOTABLE SCOOP: His post in February about the NBC cafeteria’s fried chicken menu in honor of Black History Month had Wanda Sykes joking about it on Jay Leno that night.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: Last August, reported that Fox News’s Twitter account had been hacked and littered with nasty comments about Sarah Palin and Bill O’Reilly — a juicy scoop, except that the account was a hoax.

BESS LEVIN: Editor, Dealbreaker

Success is often just being in the right place at the right time. So it was perhaps fortuitous that Bess Levin’s former co-editor at this sharp-fanged financial gossip site, John Carney, left it for Ms. Levin to run solo in the fall of 2008, just as blood was starting to flow on Wall Street. Since then, Ms. Levin has elbowed her way into an exclusive and still heavily male club, becoming a must-read not only for $250,000-a-year-bonus investment bank drones wondering which boss’s head is about to roll, but also among the corner-office types themselves. Financial powerhouses like JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, as well as hedge fund managers like Steve Cohen, Dan Loeb, and Ken Griffin, have been known to visit the site.

In February, Dealbreaker was named one of the 10 best Wall Street blogs by The Wall Street Journal’s David Weidner, who wrote that “Dealbreaker is full of Wall Street snark and has a potty mouth to boot.” Of the 10, Ms. Levin’s was only one of two written by a woman (though a few are anonymous), and certainly the only one by a woman who was 25 and never worked on the Street.

NOTABLE SCOOP: After BusinessWeek published a profile of Mr. Cohen in 2003 that referred to, but did not show, party invitations that his wife sent out of the prominent but discreet hedge-fund manager dressed up in a king costume, the invitations entered into Wall Street lore, sight unseen. Ms. Levin finally dug up an image of the regal invitation and ran it last November.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: Published an “unfounded rumor” that a major hedge fund’s prime brokers were threatening liquidation at the height of the financial mess in late 2008. It turns out the rumor was indeed “unfounded,” so she quickly removed it under pressure.

LILIT MARCUS: Editor, The Gloss

The Gloss, a fashion and beauty site that also focuses on career, dating, women’s issues and culture, is another new site in the growing b5 media stable that was overseen by Elizabeth Spiers, a challenge of sorts to Jezebel.com. Ms. Marcus, 27, is its highly regarded editor. Before taking over at Jewcy.com, an irreverent blog about Jewish issues and culture, in 2008, Ms. Marcus founded SaveTheAssistants.com, a forum that gave beleaguered assistants a place to sound off anonymously about their jerk bosses, like the one who stole a book from his assistant and gave it to his girlfriend. The site grew out of her grueling experience as an administrative assistant for a media company.

The site, which she later spun off into a book, attracted attention on National Public Radio and CNN.com, which compared the tales on the site with those on “The Office”: “Bosses like Michael Scott do exist and employees have to deal with them every day,” the article reported. “The good news is they don’t have to commiserate alone.” Even though Ms. Marcus has never named the company that inspired the site, its management still threatens to sue her, she said. “There’s a saying where I come from: ‘if they’re shooting at you, you’re doing something right,” the North Carolina-bred Ms. Marcus said. “I think about that a lot as a gossip writer.”

While Ms. Marcus and Ms. Spiers acknowledge the inevitable Jezebel comparisons, they also bristle. The site, which focuses on fashion and beauty as much as the latest from the feminist writer Cynthia Ozick, aims to be lighter, Ms. Spiers said. “The Gloss is more playful, it’s funnier,” she said of her site, which relies heavily on fashion and beauty as well as stories about bigger women’s issues. “Jezebel is more Ms. Magazine. The Gloss is not a humor site, but humor is one of its key components.”

NOTABLE SCOOP: A recent Gloss item about tensions between Tinsley Mortimer and her sister-in-law Minnie Mortimer, a fashion designer, was picked up by Page Six.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: It’s early, and no major strike-throughs yet, although the site did take some heat from fashion bloggers for not doing more to get the other side on a recent post about an alleged sexual overture by the photographer Terry Richardson toward one of his models.

FRED MWANGAGUHUNGA: Founder, MediaTakeOut.com

A Columbia Law-educated former corporate lawyer from Hollis, Queens, whose previous professional apogee was founding a high-end laundry and dry-cleaning service, Mr. Mwangaguhunga came to blogging in his third decade of life, a little late to qualify as a prodigy. But that doesn’t seem to have held him back. In four years, his site, which focuses on the urban culture industries, now attracts a following of five million unique visitors a month; traffic grew by 125 percent last year alone. His items are routinely picked up by sites like TMZ.com, enhancing his reputation — which he is perfectly happy to encourage — as the Matt Drudge of African-American entertainment.

And lately, mainstream journalists and sites are starting to pay a lot more attention. Mediaite.com, the media gossip blog, called him one of the top online blog editors of 2009 and explaining: “The site, which covers black celebrity gossip, boasts an enormous readership and regularly breaks big stories. To wit: they called Lady Gaga’s decision to pull out of Kanye West’s tour a day before it was reported elsewhere, and — if this can be called a scoop — they were the first to run the infamous nude Rihanna pictures.” Meanwhile, the site’s first post about Chris Brown’s assault on his former girlfriend attracted 100,000 hits in its first few minutes, Mr. Mwangaguhunga said.

Last year, The New York Beacon, a newspaper that focuses on African-American issues, praised his “significant reach in the vastly ignored urban community.” And Mr. Mwangaguhunga himself seems supremely confident about his site’s future: “If done properly, I don’t see any reason why MediaTakeOut can’t be as popular as TMZ.”

NOTABLE SCOOP: That news about Lady Gaga.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: Announced the birth of the N.F.L. player Vince Young’s daughter, before paternity tests showed that the child was not his.

MAUREEN O’CONNOR: Weekend and night editor, Gawker

Talk about coming of age in the Internet era. Ms. O’Connor, 25, has never had a journalism job that even remotely involved a print product, having started at Princeton blogging for the IvyGate, a popular gossip blog about the Ivy League. “Our bread and butter was the scandals and follies of Ivy League students and faculty — hazing bloopers, secret societies, campus controversies,” said Ms. O’Connor, who tracked campus stories like that of Aliza Shvarts, the Yale art student who stirred a national controversy with her hoax project supposedly involving aborted fetuses, during her time there.

After graduation, Ms. O’Connor landed a job at Tina Brown’s Daily Beast as a home-page editor, and then, in November, started as weekend editor for Gawker, the Nick Denton site that has been the launch pad for nearly a whole generation of blogosphere stars, including Choire Sicha and Jessica Coen, who served the online managing editor for New York Magazine before recently returning to Jezebel, a Gawker Media blog.

Ms. O’Connor is off to a strong start at Gawker. Her lengthy obituary of the heiress Casey Johnson — “among the first celebutantes to decamp to Hollywood in search of 21C fame,” she wrote — attracted 100,000 hits in January.

NOTABLE SCOOP: In January, she began an “investigation” into the White House budget director Peter Orszag’s hair — a rug or a barber’s misfire, you be the judge — that became a fleeting Internet meme in its own right.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: Took Fox News to task over a typo in a chyron (a term for the graphics at the bottom of a TV screen) identifying former the Arizona Congressman J.D. Hayworth as a “congresswoman.” Too bad Ms. O’Connor misspelled the word chyron in the post.

SARA POLSKY: Editor, Curbed

Curbed, the real-estate blog that attracts two million page views a month, is a something of an addiction for many in a town that is (still) addicted to real estate, even after the crash. Ms. Polsky, 24, is its newest voice, an understudy to longtime editor Joey Arak and Lockhart Steele, the site’s founder, who is one of the most influential blog personalities in town, and thus a star-maker of sorts. Ms. Polsky, whose prior experience consisted of a year as an editorial assistant at Real Deal magazine, is up against stiff competition. The field is dominated locally by older, established real estate professionals, like Jonathan Miller of the Matrix, who is the head of a major appraisal company,; and Douglas Heddings of TrueGotham, a long-time broker. Even Jonathan Butler of chief competitor Brownstoner used to run a hedge fund. The big rivals are generally “written by people who are in the industry,” she said. “They can write about how brokers work, or what the statistics say. We have more of a laypersons’ approach.” But unlike bloggers of old, this Harvard graduate is not above old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting, like the time she trekked out to Greenpoint in November to watch a developer silence the gavel at a major auction of new condominium units when early sales on units priced up to $599,000 started selling in the $200,000s. Like the best bloggers, Mr. Steele said, “she’s got the jaundiced eye, that I’m always looking for, but it’s not knee-jerk negativity.”

NOTABLE SCOOP: Polsky posted an item about the townhouse in TriBeCa that was once designated by John and Yoko’s as the “embassy” for their conceptual country of Nutopia, hitting the market for $3.25 million; the item got picked up by Beatles fan sites around the world.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: No whoppers, but mistakes happen, like the recent item where she mistakenly identified the firm behind the renovation of the developer Adam Gordon’s Jane Street town house.

Apr 2, 2010

Table of Contents

Contributor Bios

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The Transfer of Immigrants to Remote Detention Centers in the United States

Apr 1, 2010