Current Affairs

For our "everybody's suing everbody over everything" files:

It's one thing for presidents to lie, but when the culture of deceit starts filtering down to dentists, we need to start being worried:

You probably think the world should be made safe for children. Sill you -- the world should be made safe from children:

HAVING large families should be frowned upon as an environmental misdemeanour in the same way as frequent long-haul flights, driving a big car and failing to reuse plastic bags, says a report to be published today by a green think tank.

The simultaneous existence of two separate sets of circumstances does not prove a correlation, so we should want to see a lot more evidence before we accept this possible link:

I don't want to hear any more answering-machine captures of celebrities calling their young daughters pigs. I don't want to see any more videos of celebrities crawling on the floor in a drunken stupor. When the Alec Baldwin tape surfaced, I didn't think too much about it. He's not one of my favorite movie personalities, and his angry outburst merely reinforced what I already thought about him. But then the video of David Hasselhoff surfaced, and it was such a creepy invasion of privacy that it made me think some more about Baldwin, too.

What? A poor, defenseless butterfly that the brutish federal government won't protect?

A butterfly found only at a popular Nevada recreation area is thriving and new efforts to protect its habitat are enough to keep it off the threatened or endangered species list, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said.

When it comes to smug, holier-than-thou liberals, nobody can hold a candle to Bill Moyers. But smugness has a blind spot, or at least a little willful amnesia:

In his public television special Buying the War, Bill Moyers decries the tendency of the media to help the White House sell war to the public.

Moyers should know. He was quite a salesman in his day.

Some sore losers at Oxford put forth this question for debate:  "This House regrets the Founding of America." Relax -- you don't have to pack; the motion was soundly defeated. And, in this coverage, a British correspondent covering the U.S. for the folks back home comes up with one of the more eloquent defenses of the American idea I've read lately:

I still think this is a big mistake:

Indiana lawmakers are leading the way in a renewed push for a federal shield law that would protect journalists and their confidential sources.

In twin bills introduced Wednesday, Sen. Richard Lugar, R

Go ahead, blame this one on my light bulbs:

Mars is being hit by rapid climate change and it is happening so fast that the red planet could lose its southern ice cap, writes Jonathan Leake.

Scientists from Nasa say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period.

Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena.