Author: Trent
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Global Sludge Ends in Tragedy for Ivory Coast
NYT: Over the next few days, the skin of his 6-month-old son, Salam, bloomed with blisters, which burst into weeping sores all over his body. The whole family suffered headaches, nosebleeds and stomach aches. How that slick, a highly toxic cocktail of petrochemical waste and caustic soda, ended up in Mr. Oudrawogol’s backyard in a…
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'Prince of Marbella', arms dealer and possibly pure evil?
Syrian arms dealer Monzer al-Kassar, profiled in the Observer: Photographs furnish a stark reminder of just who Kassar is. One is of him shaking hands with Uday Hussain, Saddam’s brutal son, killed in the months after the invasion. Another photo shows the two men together with an Arab musician. Kassar says he met Uday when…
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Design Classic: Canon T90 SLR
My first real camera, Adam Richardson: There are few products that have had as profound an effect on their category as the T90 had on the modern SLR, not the least of which is the interface paradigm that it introduced and which is copied almost verbatim on every SLR (and many point and shoots) on…
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A Portrait of Bush as a Victim of His Own Certitude
NYT Book Review: Bob Woodward reports that when he told Mr. Rumsfeld that the number of insurgent attacks was going up, the defense secretary replied that they’re now “categorizing more things as attacks.” Mr. Woodward quotes Mr. Rumsfeld as saying, “A random round can be an attack and all the way up to killing 50…
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Memo Fueled Deep Rift in Administration on Detainees
NYT: In a nine-page memorandum, the two officials, Gordon R. England, the acting deputy secretary of defense, and Philip D. Zelikow, the counselor of the State Department, urged the administration to seek Congressional approval for its detention policies. They called for a return to the minimum standards of treatment in the Geneva Conventions and for…
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MWM
MWM: September 2006 // Full site RE-design // New navigation // New work in all disciplines Here.
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STATE OF DENIAL
Part one, excerpts of Bob Woodward’s new book, Washington Post: White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card was enough of a realist to see that two negative aspects to Bush’s public persona had come to define his presidency: incompetence and arrogance. Card did not believe that Bush was incompetent, and so he had to face…
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Al Qaeda Increasingly Reliant on Media
NYT: In recent years, Al Qaeda has formed a special media production division called Al Sahab to produce videos about leaders like Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri, terrorism experts say. The group largely once relied on Arab television channels like Al Jazeera to broadcast its videos and taped messages. Al Sahab, whose name means…
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Over 800 attacks every week in Iraq
Guardian: “It’s getting to the point now where there are 800-900 attacks a week. That’s more than a hundred a day. That is four an hour attacking our forces,” Bob Woodward told CBS television in an interview to be aired tomorrow night. The Pentagon’s latest quarterly report on Iraq, presented to Congress and posted on…
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Judge Accepts Plea Deal in Rhode Island Fire
More on the Great White fire at The Station, NYT: Speaking today in the courtroom of Judge Francis J. Darigan Jr., David Griffith, whose brother Scott died in the blaze, said that “all of us have been victimized a second time” by the plea deal. Judge Darigan acknowledged that many relatives found the agreement inadequate…
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Book Says Bush Ignored Urgent Warning on Iraq
NYT: The warning is described in Bob Woodward’s “State of Denial,” scheduled for publication on Monday by Simon & Schuster. The book says President Bush’s top advisers were often at odds among themselves, and sometimes were barely on speaking terms, but shared a tendency to dismiss as too pessimistic assessments from American commanders and others…
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Iraqi Journalists Add Laws to List of Dangers
NYT: Last month, more than 70 news organizations signed a nine-point pledge supporting the national reconciliation plan of Prime Minister Maliki, promising not to use inflammatory statements or images of people killed in attacks, and vowing to “disseminate news in a way that harmonizes with Iraq’s interests.” Days later, the police barred journalists from photographing…
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Iraq Contractor's Work Is Further Criticized
Washington Post: In a report released yesterday, inspectors found that the Baghdad Police College posed a health risk after feces and urine leaked through the ceilings of student barracks. The facility, part of which will need to be demolished, also featured floors that heaved inches off the ground and a room where water dripped so…
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Metal Skool
You’ve finally reached the end of the f*ckin’ internet, dude. This is the home of the greatest band in the world, Metal Skool. DO NOT BE FOOLED by pale imitations of other imitations. We’re the best imitators of the best music in the history of music, 80’s metal. We play songs by Whitesnake, G&R, Poison,…
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Dude, That Is So Not Funny
Wired: It worked. After making a splash on YTMND, the Lohan Facial, as it was dubbed, popped up on eBaum’s World. While YTMND includes author credits with each clip, eBaum’s World didn’t bother to give Lutz a shout-out. “What really pissed me off was that they placed their own watermark on it,” Lutz says, “as…
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A Digital Camera That Accepts Your Treasured Leica Lenses
NYT: Photo buffs know a few things for certain: it’s best to shoot with the sun behind you, red-eye can be avoided with the right flash, and Leica makes some of the most sought-after cameras. Its latest, the Leica M8, is a 10-megapixel digital camera built on Leica’s M system of lenses. Here.
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Kazakhs Shrug at ‘Borat’ While the State Fumes
NYT: Mr. Ashykbayev denounced Mr. Cohen’s performance as host of the MTV Europe Music Awards in Lisbon last fall, in which a skit mocked the imperial aura that surrounds Mr. Nazarbayev, the country’s president since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Mr. Ashykbayev suggested that Mr. Cohen was acting on behalf of “someone’s political…
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Kazakhstan fights back ahead of Borat film release
Guardian: Kazakhstan: land of superstition, religious intolerance, political suppression and goats. Wrong. Kazakhstan is actually a country of metals and machinery, an outward-looking, modern nation with a stable economy that attracts foreign investors to its cosmopolitan capital. The Kazakh government took the unusual step yesterday of publishing a four-page colour supplement in the New York…