Die BBC ehrt den beliebtesten Massenmörder aller Zeiten gleich zwei, drei, viele Male.

Johan Norberg hat übrigens eine bessere Idee: “Why don´t someone find out the exact dates Cuban social democrats and other advocates of democracy were executed by Che, and then we can celebrate them instead?”

Atlantic Community, ein neues Online Magazin für transatlantische Themen, hat 14 Think Tanker aus zehn europäischen Staaten zu den amerikanischen Plänen für den Irak interviewt.
Die Ergebnisse:
1. European Analysts Want America to Stay in Iraq
While the American public and policy debate revolves largely around exit strategies and “redeployment,” European policy analysts believe that American troops should remain in Iraq for the foreseeable future. A sudden withdrawal or public announce-ment of a timetable was considered dangerous by a majority of those questioned. This means European expert opinions are very different from popular sentiment in Europe. Besides, I find it newsworthy, because it indicates that Europeans still believe that the US is able to stabilize Iraq, while more and more Americans doubt whether the US can end the civil war and the insurgency…

In 1918, long before George Jetson commuted to Spacely Space Sprockets, the U.S. Patent Office issued Felix Longobardi the first patent for a vehicle capable of both driving on roads and flying through the air. But given all the impractical prototypes built since Longobardi’s original whimsy, history suggests that any vehicle design combining these two modes of transport will be a commercial failure: aero-auto hybrids always seem to result in a compromise that serves both functions poorly.

Now a group of MIT alums believe that they are on their way toward overcoming this problem. Founded in 2006 and called Terrafugia, their startup, based in Woburn, MA, recently produced the first automated folding wing for a light sport aircraft. (A light sport aircraft is a type of airplane deemed by the Federal Aviation Administration to be easier...

Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1998 with the observation that there has never been a famine in a nation that has a democratic form of government and a free press. A similar relationship exists for natural disasters: Deaths associated with natural disasters are lower for nations with democratic forms of government and the associated higher national income, or Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In general, the World Bank’s Democracy Index, a measure of how strong a democracy is, and a nation’s GDP are stronger predictors of a natural disaster’s humanitarian impact (as measured by deaths) than either the size of the event or the population density in the area of the disaster. Global increases in democracy and GDP may therefore partially explain the apparent paradox of the generally decreasing death toll associated with...

Extra 3 ist wieder mal grandios: Ein Interview mit der rechten Hand des Teufels darüber, wie Lafo seine Seele verkaufte und die Erklärung, worunter die afghanischen Frauen wirklich leiden - hier.

Sehr geehrter Herr Präsident,

wir, Iranian National Front – Europe, möchten Ihnen unser tiefstes Besorgnis über das Politikum um U21 Nationalspieler Herr Ashkan Dejagah zum Ausdruck bringen. Sie haben zu Recht angekündigt, dass Sie die Nichtteilnahme eines deutsch-iranischen Nationalspielers an einem Länderspiel aus Gründen der Weltanschauung nicht hinnehmen. Im Fall von Herrn Dejagah handelt es sich keineswegs um die persönliche Weltanschauung von ihm. Es geht viel mehr um Restriktionen und Regelungen, die die herrschende Regierung im Iran seit 28 Jahren seinen Bürgern und Bürgerinnen diktiert.

Herr Dejagah genießt doppelte Staatsbürgerschaft und ist offenbar im Besitz von zwei Reisepässen. Alle iranischen Reisepässe sind grundsätzlich mit einem Vermerk, der eine Einreise in „das besetzte Palästina (Israel)“...

The decision by the government to distribute Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth has been the subject of a legal action by New Party member Stewart Dimmock.  Although a full ruling has yet to be given, the Court found that the film was misleading in 11 respects and that the Guidance Notes drafted by the Education Secretary’s advisors served only to exacerbate the political propaganda in the film.

In order for the film to be shown, the Government must first amend their Guidance Notes to Teachers to make clear that 1.) The Film is a political work and promotes only one side of the argument. 2.) If teachers present the Film without making this plain they may be in breach of section 406 of the Education Act 1996 and guilty of political indoctrination. 3.) Eleven inaccuracies have to be specifically drawn to the attention of school...

In 1988, the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, proclaimed ice cream to a be public-health menace right up there with cigarettes. Alluding to his office’s famous 1964 report on the perils of smoking, Dr. Koop announced that the American diet was a problem of “comparable” magnitude, chiefly because of the high-fat foods that were causing coronary heart disease and other deadly ailments.

That was a ludicrous statement, as Gary Taubes demonstrates in his new book meticulously debunking diet myths, “Good Calories, Bad Calories” (Knopf, 2007). The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly. The evidence against Häagen-Dazs was nothing like the evidence against Marlboros.

It may seem bizarre that a surgeon...