In These Times back issues from January 2008:
The Boy Who Cried WMD
Jan 01, 2008; ... THERE GOES THE Axis of Evil. On Dec. 3, news broke that 16 U.S. intelligence agencies had concluded that Iran had halted its nuclear arms efforts in 2003. You would think the report-known as the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)-would give Bush pause in his push for another war. Youd ...
JUST THE FACTS
Jan 01, 2008; ... 162 Number of goods featured in the Dec. 2 issue of T (the New York Times Style Magazine) on which the editors put a price tag. 2.39 Millions of dollars it would cost to buy these 162 fashionable items. 110 ...
QUID PRO QUO
Jan 01, 2008; ... THE QUID: As assistant secretary for health affairs at the Department of Defense, William Winkenwerder Jr. oversaw all healthcare for the military. When he retired from the post in April, it didn't take long for him to find new work in the private sector: On June i, Logistics Health ...
letters
Jan 01, 2008; ... Virtually Political Thanks for a nice overview and critique of the Internet politics fad in Jessica Clark's "iPower to the People" (December 2007). One aspect of it all that makes this old new-leftist skeptical is that it seems solely concentrated on presidential elections. I'll start ...
Note from Editor & Publisher
Jan 01, 2008; ... Dear Reader, Here's to you, from all of us! Thank you for being part of the In These Times community. Through your subscription and through your tax-deductible contributions, you provide the financing that publishes this magazine. By so doing, you support In These Times' ...
No New Year Resolutions?
Jan 01, 2008; ... SEC proposes curbing shareholder power THE U.S. SECURITIES & Exchange Commission (sec) has proposed changes that could prevent many shareholders from raising issues of social and environmental corporate responsibility. Over the past few decades, shareholder resolutions have ...
RoboCop in Iraq
Jan 01, 2008; ... IMPROVISED EXPLOSIVE DEVICES, Or IEDs, have killed 1,678 U.S. military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan since July 2003, according to Georgiabased Iraq Coalition Casualty Count. The death toll could have been much higher without the help of 5,000 IED-detecting robots that, according to CBS ...
act now
Jan 01, 2008; ... PANTIES FOR PEACE Despite international pressure and massive demonstrations, Burma's military leaders have shown little progress toward democracy. So activists have gotten creative: A Thailand-based group called Lanna Action for Burma launched a campaign called "Panties for Peace," which ...
Bike-Sharing Is Caring
Jan 01, 2008; ... WHILE WORKING THE graveyard shift in a University of Virginia computer lab 13 years ago, Paul DeMaio had dreams of the open road. On a whim, the avid cyclist and environmentalist entered "public bikes" into a search engine and discovered images of Bycyklen, Copenhagen's then-new bike-sharing ...
Dropping Out of Electoral College
Jan 01, 2008; ... A STANFORD UNIVERSITY COMPUTER scientist named John Koza has formulated a compelling and pragmatic alternative to the Electoral College. It's called National Popular Vote (NPV), and has been hailed as "ingenious" by two New York Times editorials. In April, Maryland became the first state to pass ...
appall-o-meter
Jan 01, 2008; ... 3.3 A Different Kind Of Credit Crunch A riot broke out the Saturday after Thanksgiving at a Wauwatosa, Wis., Kmart store, but it was no mere case of Christmas shopping frenzy. Rather, word had spread that, thanks to a computer error, everyone who applied for a Kmart credit card was ...
Acid-Mining Michigan
Jan 01, 2008; ... The wild and picturesque Salmon Trout River in Michigan's Upper Peninsula is home to the last breeding coaster brook trout on the south shore of Lake Superior. This native fish is awaiting classification to endangered species status by the Department of Fish and Wildlife. But the Upper ...
Beware the Credit-Industrial Complex
Jan 01, 2008; ... My daughter is a freshman in college and is learning a lot, including how to manage her money. Recently, she got a powerful initiation into the predatory practices of banks-a lesson more and more of us are learning each month. She made a miscalculation and thought she had more in her account ...
Come on Cosby, Stop Hatin'
Jan 01, 2008; ... DEEPENING CLASS CONFLICT Within the black community has produced some interesting symptoms. Every Saturday, black protesters march around the Washington, D.C. home of Black Entertainment Television President and CEO Debra Lee, demanding that the network stop airing what they call ...
Catch-22 in the 21st Century
Jan 01, 2008; ... When I visited my client Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi at Guantanamo on Sept. 25 and 26, he brought with him two letters that he had been working on since summer. The letters, written in Arabic, were six pages and one page in length. The sixpage letter described the torture he had endured since bounty ...
McGovern Still on the Antiwar Path
Jan 01, 2008; ... The old antiwar horse is still kicking. In 1972, South Dakota Sen. George McGovern (once a World War II bomber pilot) won the Democratic presidential nomination on an antiwar platform. In 2007, he's still got game. In March 2007, McGovern called on Vice President Dick Cheney to ...
HANGING HATE
Jan 01, 2008; ... Backlash against the Jena Six case sparks an epidemic of public nooses THE NOOSE, THAT SYMBOL of American racism associated with the Jim Crow South, is making a comeback. Following the notorious Jena, La., incident, a rash of noose-related hate crimes has surfaced around the country, at ...
LIGHTS! CAMERA! COLLECTIVE ACTION!
Jan 01, 2008; ... The Writers Guild of America strikes to secure a piece of the pie in the Digital Age Starting on Nov. 5, 2007, America's television and movie writers left their solitary desks for the collective sidewalks of Los Angeles and New York, carrying placards ranging from the prosaic ("Writers ...
Corporate Potluck
Jan 01, 2008; ... Dietitians and their company sponsors make strange buffet fellows FOR THREE DAYS EARLY this fall, the Pennsylvania Convention Center was home to corporate entities such as PepsiCo, Hershey's, Taco Bell, Crisco and McDonald's. They weren't there to count calories but to rub bellies with ...
Empire's Architecture
Jan 01, 2008; ... Should it ever be finished, the U.S. embassy in Iraq will stand as a colossal monument to the Bush administration's failures PANIC SHOT THROUGH THE State Department and White House earlier this summer when the American architecture firm Berger Devine Yaeger posted computer-generated ...
The Fog of War Crimes
Jan 01, 2008; ... Who's to blame when 'just following orders' means murder? A MARINE SQUAD WAS ON a dusty road in Iraq, far from home. Suddenly, a deadly roadside bomb explodes the early morning calm and kills a lance corporal and wounds two other Marines. The mission: tend to the wounded and find those ...
Resister In Exile
Jan 01, 2008; ... When I met Haifa Zangana in Naperville, Ill., 40 miles southwest of Chicago, the former political prisoner under Saddam Hussein's Baath regime was working on a column but was having computer problems. The interview appeared to be a needed distraction. Zangana, who writes regularly for the ...
Bad Cop, Badder Cop in Brazil
Jan 01, 2008; ... Bad Cop, Badder Cop in Brazil Does every Brazilian love a fascist? That's the question raised by the new film Tropa de Elite, which is on its way to becoming one of the country's most popular movies of all time. The protagonist in Tropa de Elite, or "elite squad," is a cop who ...
King of the Crop
Jan 01, 2008; ... FILM King of the Crop Two buddies from Yale trek to northern Iowa, buy an acre of farmland, start growing corn and make a documentary about the experience. Sound like a trite tale of East Coasters playing Midwest farmers? It could be, if not for the filmmakers' sincerity and ...
Rocking Lolita in Tehran
Jan 01, 2008; ... MUSIC At A 2001 rock concert in Tehran, Iran, members of the alternative rock band O-hum wore jeans and T-shirts. Some of them had mop tops. The lead singer jumped around with his bright red guitar as young girls screamed and boys climbed onto the stage before jumping off and body ...
art space
Jan 01, 2008; ... David A., 16, created the drawing at left while detained at Chicago's Cook County Juvenile Detention Center, where he has been awaiting trial for the last year-and-a-half. David is part of the Free Write Jail Arts and Literacy Program, which provides daily arts and writing workshops, as ...
The Revolution Will Not Be Designed
Jan 01, 2008; ... DESIGN IN October 2005, amid ample media buzz, Stanford University christened its Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. Known as the "d.school" (rhymes with B-school), the institute proclaims itself the home of an interdisciplinary vanguard that is set to unlock the potential of "design ...
Warning: Drug Ads Can Make You Sick
Jan 01, 2008; ... JANE'S FAMILY IS suffering from plagues of biblical-lite proportions. Her teenage son is unruly and easily distracted. Her daughter has menstrual cramps, is 12 pounds overweight and shy. Her husband sleeps fitfully and has occasional heartburn and irregularity-not to mention that his libido is ...
INSIDE THE Beast: Lifelines, Lifetimes and Timelines: Hoisting Ourselves Up the Fossil Chain
Jan 01, 2008; ... What follows is a transcript, obtained by In These Times, of a keynote luncheon attended by 300 oilmen. The luncheon was part of GO-EXPO, Canada's largest oil and gas conference, held in Calgary, Alberta, in June. It speaks for itself. S. K. Wolff, a policy analyst at the National ...