cedar sprig's blog

I did the blogging thing last semester. Good stuff, that, but very time consuming. I was trying to do a combination news-research blog, with whatever news I thought was interesting enough to spend an hour of research and an hour of writing on. The ones I spent the most time on never garnered much attention, and I guess the rest of them tended to be dry as well. This semester I'm writing in the 'real world', which is very exciting and quite a bit more rewarding than the blogging was. Of course, I'm also learning about writing (none of which I'm using right now, of course), which gives me a bit more focus on what I need to work on. I have no time to speak of, so I'm not even going to entertain the notion of trying to do a news blog again.

  Just...go...read the "whole" article. It really does show the importance of checking your sources.

 I think I'm going to go read up on snopes.com now...

The airplanes are going to be busy this summer. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal today, few travelers seem intimidated by higher ticket prices and cut-backs. After all, flying is still cheaper than driving. The management at terminals has adapted to time-delaying security procedures, which means that even the longer lines don't clog up in such a nightmarish way. In fact, it looks like management of airflight in general has improved. As a matter of economy, the industry has had to cut back on total number of flights. The result: fewer planes are crowding the runways and fewer flights have to be delayed or cancelled. (Though we'll see what happens if the expected popularity of personal jets fills the runways back up again.)

In a new attempt at compromise, President Bush proposed a five-point plan to deal with illegal immigration. Aside from adding 6,000 security guards to the US/Mexico border, the plan is relatively lenient.

"The vast majority of immigrants are decent people, but they are beyond the reach and protection of American law," Bush said. His unusually diplomatic comment prefaced the five objectives of the plan, which comes at a time when Congress is considering how to revise immigration laws.

Israel and Palestine continue to work on their mutual destruction, judging from current events--six Palestinians were killed today, in response to an attack, last month, that killed eleven Israelis.  Nothing new there. What is a little out of the ordinary is the controversy over a bit of Israel law that has just been extended. The Israel Citizenship law was amended in 2002 to prevent Palestinians from moving into the country as spouses of Arab Israelis. Since there are over a million Arabs who are citizens of Israel, almost 20% of the total population, the amendment affects a lot of families. All the more so because there are a lot of close family ties between Israel Arabs and the 3.8 million Palestinians living in West Bank and Gaza.

As Iran pushes forward with its uranium enrichment program, which most outside nations fear will lead to nuclear weapon capacity for the country, there's a lot of talk and bluster. The UN flutters its hands and the EU has just put forward a set of concessions to tempt Iran into behaving, but no compromises have been reached yet.

When the 2000 International AIDs Conference was held in Durban, a city of South Africa that is plagued with the disease, the discussions gave a clear verdict: if anything was to be done about the AIDs epidemic, traditional healers had to be involved. Since 80% of South Africans--South Africa suffers from the worst of the AIDs epidemic--go to traditional healers, it makes sense to try to reach them that way. The problem is that traditional medicine holds almost no resemblance to what Western doctors are used to. A healer gets advice on how to treat a patient through the spirits of ancestors, and disease is considered a result of witchcraft, or breaking a social taboo.

Yet another study has been cited as "proof" of global warming. The report, "Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere", appears to have pushed weather stats from the last 50 years around, until it came up with the conclusion it wanted. Which was that yes, of course there has been a significant rise in temperature. Never mind that the data is so shaky that even scientists involved in the study complained about it. Indeed, the main point of the study seems to really be that we need better measurements of the atmosphere. Weather balloons and satellites are subject to all sorts of error, which reduce the quality of data. Global warming was just tossed in to raise the paper's profile.