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[Caro]

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Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com

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Cheney predicts progress in Iraq report
WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney said Tuesday a pivotal September report on the war in Iraq is likely to show "significant progress" — putting himself ahead of President Bush, who has refused to speculate on what the report will say.

The Heretik

The World

Attacks across Iraq claim 142 lives
BAGHDAD - Baghdad shook with bombings and political upheaval Wednesday as the largest Sunni Arab bloc quit the government and a suicide attacker blew up his fuel tanker in one of several attacks that claimed 142 lives nationwide.

U.S. officials: Militias main threat to Iraq
Despite President Bush's recent insistence that al Qaida in Iraq is the principal cause of this country's violence, senior American military officers say Shiite Muslim militias are a bigger problem, and one that will persist even if al Qaida is defeated.

‘Untouchable’ corruption in Iraqi agencies
(A) draft U.S. government report …, written by U.S. advisers to Iraq's anti-corruption agency, analyzes corruption in 12 ministries and finds devastating and grim problems. "Corruption protected by senior members of the Iraqi government," the report said, "remains untouchable."… The report said that "the prime minister’s office has on a number of occasions intervened on cases involving political supporters."
Just like our president.—Caro

U.S., Britain propose UN political role in Iraq
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United States and Britain proposed on Wednesday a greatly expanded political role for the United Nations in Iraq to try to heal the sectarian divide that has riven the country since the U.S.-led invasion.

Syrians support helping end Iraq war
WASHINGTON - Most Syrians favor working with the United States to seek an end to the Iraq war, yet also support financing Iraqi fighters and other Middle East groups the U.S. considers terrorists, according to a rare poll of Syrians released Wednesday.

Rice-Gates visit shows how much U.S., Saudi Arabia have drifted apart
JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates failed to bridge differences with Saudi Arabia Wednesday in a growing public dispute over allegations of Saudi support for insurgents in Iraq. Instead, the talks revealed how far the onetime close allies have drifted apart.

Canada says will change Afghan focus to training
CHARLOTTETOWN, Prince Edward Island (Reuters) - Canada's troops in Afghanistan will increasingly spend the last 18 months of their assignment training Afghan soldiers so they can operate effectively once Western forces leave, beleaguered Defiance Minister Gordon O'Connor said on Wednesday.

Russian sub reaches Arctic seabed in North Pole bid
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian submersible reached the bottom of the Arctic Ocean on Thursday in a mission to symbolically claim the resource-rich region by planting a flag on the seabed under the North Pole, Russian media reported.

The Nation

As U.S. income stagnates, Democrats reject free trade
WASHINGTON — The Democratic-led Congress won’t give President Bush the special authority he needs to negotiate future free-trade deals. The Senate is moving on retaliatory trade legislation against China. The House of Representatives won’t approve deals with three small neighboring Latin American countries. Global trade talks are near collapse. Washington's mood on free trade hasn’t been this negative in at least two decades, and a pullback is evident.
Hallelujah!—Caro

Democrats say additional money is needed for war
House Democrats said Tuesday that additional costs for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan that lawmakers will consider in September might be as much as $40 billion above the $145.2 billion supplemental request submitted by the White House in February. House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha, D-Pa., also said Democrats are contemplating a shorter-term funding measure, perhaps covering six months of the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.

Budget office says war costs may top $1 trillion over 10 years
The cost of military operations and diplomatic efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world could top $1 trillion over the next decade, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates provided to the House Budget Committee Tuesday.

House passes $20B water projects bill
WASHINGTON - The House overwhelmingly passed a $20 billion water projects bill Wednesday night despite a promised veto by President Bush, who complains the bill is laden with costly pet projects and shifts new costs onto the government.

Senate to vote on ethics package
WASHINGTON - The Senate is poised to decide whether lawmakers must disclose more about their efforts to fund pet projects and raise money from lobbyists, a move that reform groups say is overdue.

Stevens threatens to block ethics bill
Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, whose home back in Alaska was raided by federal investigators Monday in a wide-ranging corruption investigation, has threatened to place a hold on the Democratic-drafted ethics legislation just passed by the House and expected on the Senate floor by week’s end.

Senate near vote on kids' health bill
WASHINGTON - A bipartisan measure to add 3 million lower-income children to a popular health insurance program headed for a final Senate vote after a much broader and more expensive version passed the House over stiff Republican opposition.

Rumsfeld denies cover-up in Tillman case
WASHINGTON - Ex-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other former Pentagon brass denied a cover-up and rejected personal blame Wednesday in the public deceptions that followed Army Ranger Pat Tillman's friendly-fire death in Afghanistan in 2004.

Missteps found in awarding Katrina deals
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration has shown little progress — and in some cases backtracked — on its pledge to do a better job in awarding contracts to small, Gulf Coast businesses for Hurricane Katrina work, a congressional analysis shows.

Bush invokes executive privilege for Rove in attorney firings
Ratcheting up the stakes in a legal battle with Congress, President Bush on Wednesday ordered White House adviser Karl Rove and a senior political aide to refuse on grounds of executive privilege to testify before the Senate on the firings of nine U.S. attorneys.

Run It By Alberto
Just to make you feel better, the White House plan to 'reform' FISA takes the oversight for domestic surveillance away from the FISA court and give it to the highly trustworthy Alberto Gonzales.

Tancredo says threat of attack on holy sites would deter terrorism
OSCEOLA -- Followers of radical Islam must be deterred from committing a nuclear attack on U.S. soil, Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo said Tuesday morning, saying that as president he would take drastic measures to prevent such attacks. "If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina," the GOP presidential candidate said.
Click through to listen to the audio.

Media

Ware: Surge Is Undermining ‘The Very Government That America Created’
CNN Baghdad correspondent Michael Ware, who spoke live on a night scope camera while embedded with troops responded to “the vice president’s evaluation” of progress in Iraq, calling it “sleight of hand.”… Ware also responded to Brookings Institution analysts Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack’s recent New York Times op-ed offering a sunny appraisal of progress in Iraq, calling the report “very one dimensional.”
Click through to watch the video.—Caro

With O'Hanlon and Pollack, media once again neglect to ask about military protection and control of Iraq itinerary
O'Hanlon and Pollack wrote that they had recently returned from Iraq, where they "spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel." But only one interviewer, CNN's Wolf Blitzer, asked either O'Hanlon or Pollack about the circumstances of their visit. Blitzer asked, "(D)id you have the freedom to say, 'I want to go here, I want to go there'? Who organized, in other words, the stopovers, the visits that you were having?"

Reporting on Giuliani health care plan, NY Times ignored obvious question: How much?
(R)eporter Marc Santora gave no indication that he asked Giuliani the cost of his plan or otherwise tried to determine it. By contrast, when Democratic presidential hopefuls Sen. Barack Obama (IL) and former Sen. John Edwards (NC) unveiled their respective health care proposals, the Times noted that the campaigns provided cost estimates, and it reported those estimates.

Post Tosses Around Meaningless Budget Numbers
Yeah, what else is new. Does anyone know how much $53.8 billion in cigarette taxes is over ten years? (0.16 percent of projected revenue, an average of $16 per person.) How about cost saving of $157 billion in Medicare over the next decade? (It's around 3 percent of the projected Medicare budget over this period.) And we wonder why the public has no idea of where their budget dollars are going.

Limbaugh: Democrats are "PR spokespeople for Al Qaeda"
On the July 31 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Rush Limbaugh claimed that Democrats have "aligned themselves with the enemy" in Iraq and went on to assert: "The enemy kills more soldiers, their spokesmen here in the U.S. are the Democrats. When we kill more of the enemy, the Democrats are silent and they say nothing." He continued: "But when we have reports of, you know, another IED, or pictures of a car on fire -- then the Democrats assume the role of media PR spokespeople for Al Qaeda."
They screechier they get, the more they alienate the public.—Caro

Publisher: WSJ's journalism will stay honest under Murdoch
Gordon Crovitz says the Journal's same standards of accuracy, fairness and authority will apply to the paper, regardless of ownership. "Some of the criticism of News Corp. has suggested that honest journalism cannot be done with an owner whose political views are often considered to be conservative," writes the publisher. "This reflects a bias of its own that I hope readers of all political views will reject."
Think about how pitiful it is that they think they have to say this.—Caro

From print to Web – a sea of change
Our local paper, the Detroit Free Press, has an opening for a “Community Conversation Editor.” The description is described in these not-so-subtle terms: “The job is critical to the Detroit Free Press' future.” Even more revealing is that when the newspaper described itself, it barely mentioned the word “newspaper” but instead called itself the state’s leading news source.

Journalists: Mobilize your public
Jim Colgan, a producer at the Brian Lehrer show at WNYC in New York, tells me that they started a little bit of a networked journalism (crowdsourcing …. whatever) project: “We’re getting our listeners to count the number of SUVs out of all the cars on their block, and we’re getting an overwhelming response (236 contributions so far).” That’s a simple thing but that’s the beauty of it: Lots of people can join together to create something bigger. I talked with Jim a few weeks ago and he wanted to find a way to mobilize his show’s other asset — besides Brian — to do something together. And it worked.
I think this is one of the reasons for Josh Marshall’s success at Talking Points Memo. He involves his readers in research projects.—Caro

Technology & Science

Schools become virtual zoos
Katie Peterson's fourth-graders knew all about why toucans have rounded beaks and the sparrows in their backyards have pointy beaks. They read about it in their textbooks. They wrote reports. They even did an experiment in which they found that chopstick "beaks" are great for picking up seeds, but two spoons are better if all you have to eat are slippery gummy fish (stand-ins for worms).
Device wakes man with severe brain injuries
CHICAGO (Reuters) - A man with severe brain injuries who spent six years in a near-vegetative state can now chew his food, watch a movie and talk with family thanks to a brain pacemaker that may change the way such patients are treated, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.

Gene Variant Linked to Lou Gehrig's Disease
Discovery might lead to promising treatments, experts say

Sounds Like ... Apes Play Charades
When humans play charades, the game's ban on talk often reduces players to wild gestures in a frustratingly minimalist form of communication. Still, skillful players get the point across eventually. Apes can't talk at all, of course. But now scientists have found that orangutans rely on the same kinds of strategies seen in charades when they try and get their point across.

Birds Help Trees Soar
Majestic trees owe a sizeable chunk of their sky-high stature to tiny birds. Birds boost tree height up to 33 percent by munching on pesky parasites that can literally suck the life out of the tall-growing plants, a new study shows.
Just another example of cooperation in cancer.—Caro

NASA's 'Phoenix' will dig for water, life at Martian pole
WASHINGTON (AFP) - NASA on Saturday is to launch space probe Phoenix on a nine-month journey to Mars' arctic region, where it will dig through ice for clues to past or present microbial life on the red planet.

Environment

Ethanol Demand Sparks Popcorn Debate
Ethanol producers, fed up at claims that using corn for fuel is causing steep price hikes for corn-based foods, say no way and point to some simple math to prove their point. Popcorn producers have an equally simple theory to argue the other side.

Cities go hi-tech to shade their streets
Four East Coast cities are using satellite mapping to set environmental goals and plant more trees.

Brown Clouds Add to Global Warming
Pollution-filled "brown clouds" over the Indian Ocean could warm parts of the lower layers of Earth’s atmosphere as much as greenhouse gases do, a new study finds.

China Blames Climate Change for Extreme Weather
China blamed global warming on Wednesday for this year's weather extremes, which have led to more than 700 deaths from flooding and left more than seven million with little access to water.

For more headlines, visit MakeThemAccountable.com.

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