The government is to seek parliamentary approval for the pardoning of more than 300 World War One soldiers executed for military offences.

Many of those who were executed are now thought to have been suffering from 'shell shock' when they refused to fight.

good

ePolitix.com - WW1 soldiers to receive pardons

I'm always pleased when I see healthy page views for our business stories - but there are exceptions.

Take this story: "MSN 'to charge user fee'" says the headline, and for a few weeks it has steadily moved up the ranks of our daily statistics. On Sunday it was the most-read business story, and on Monday and Tuesday it featured in the top five.

The hitch: It was written five years ago - on 25 February 2001.

this was the third was emailed story according to the bbc news front page today 16 August 2006
except this story is itself date stamped 8 March 2006, 12:26 GMT

BBC NEWS | Business | Thousands fall for Hotmail prank

While American politicians and generals in Washington debate the possibility of civil war in Iraq, many U.S. officers and enlisted men who patrol Baghdad say it has already begun.

Army troops in and around the capital interviewed in the last week cite a long list of evidence that the center of the nation is coming undone: Villages have been abandoned by Sunni and Shiite Muslims; Sunni insurgents have killed thousands of Shiites in car bombings and assassinations; Shiite militia death squads have tortured and killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Sunnis; and when night falls, neighborhoods become open battlegrounds.

"There's one street that's the dividing line. They shoot mortars across the line and abduct people back and forth," said 1st Lt. Brian Johnson, a 4th Infantry Division platoon leader from Houston. Johnson, 24, was describing the nightly violence that pits Sunni gunmen from Baghdad's Ghazaliyah neighborhood against Shiite gunmen from the nearby Shula district.

As he spoke, the sights and sounds of battle grew: first, the rat-a-tat-tat of fire from AK-47 assault rifles, then the heavier bursts of PKC machine guns, and finally the booms of mortar rounds crisscrossing the night sky and crashing down onto houses and roads.

The bodies of captured Sunni and Shiite fighters will turn up in the morning, dropped in canals and left on the side of the road.

"We've seen some that have been executed on site, with bullet holes in the ground; the rest were tortured and executed somewhere else and dumped," Johnson said.

[nicked from digg]

Iraqi civil war has already begun, U.S. troops say

By now, even the most dedicated “values voter” is aware that an orgy of plunder and predation grinds merrily on in the capital, yet if polls are to be believed, the Democrats can persuade almost nobody to switch their vote on that basis. That’s because, while they have many nice slogans on the subject, Democrats offer no larger theory of corruption, no way to help voters understand what is essentially Republican about the pillage currently being visited on our national government.

I suggest the Democrats turn their eyes to the conservatives’ beloved 19th century, an era that is relevant again in all sorts of startling ways. The reigning economic faith of our time, they will find, is merely a souped-up version of the Victorians’ understanding of the market-as-nature. Again Americans thrill to the exploits of the great tycoons, and gradually we are becoming reacquainted with pervasive inequality, the wrenching “social issue” of our great-grandparents’ time.

This is why I nominate Matthew Josephson’s 1938 masterpiece, “The Politicos: 1865-1896,” as the volume of history with the most to teach us about the present. The book is valuable for its surface qualities alone — its painstaking reconstruction of forgotten scandals, its glimpses of antique slang and high-flown oratory, its remarkable cast of politicians, like the “Easy Boss” Tom Platt and the “Plumed Knight” James G. Blaine, all of them household names once but today as obscure as Ozymandias.

Still, contemporary readers will feel the sharp poke of recognition with nearly every chapter. Then, as now, empty accusations of treason were standard rhetoric. Reformers were routinely taunted as effeminate — in the manner that conservatives today bandy about terms like “effete,” “French-looking,” and “girly man.” Roscoe Conkling, the sarcastic voice of New York finance, famously laughed off a crusading editor as a “man milliner.”

And, of course, there was corruption, the unending outrage of money- in-politics. Both parties bid for the favor of big business, and both did a considerable amount of business themselves, as the roll call of forgotten scandals attests: the Whiskey Ring, the Post Office Ring, the Credit Mobilier scheme, and the Grant administration’s ceaseless “saturnalia of plunder.” But “The Politicos” is not merely a catalog of money-in-politics, it is a study of the logic and development of money-in-politics, from the crude grasping of the “spoilsmen” in the 1860’s to the final union of politics with business in the 1890’s, when industries and even individual corporations effectively sent their own representatives to the United States Senate.

Matthew Josephson was a man of the left, but “The Politicos” is not a reassuring tale of liberal triumph. The figure who towers over this dialectic of graft as it roars to its consummation is the greatest of 19th-century political comman... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

A Distant Mirror - New York Times

Coming soon to a theater near you.

Inspired by Steven Blush's book "American Hardcore: A tribal history" Paul Rachman's feature documentary debut is a chronicle of the underground hardcore punk years from 1979 to 1986. Interviews and rare live footage from artists such as Black Flag, Bad Brains, Minor Threat, SS Decontrol and the Dead Kennedys.

Don't give me "The Clash" and claim you're punk. We're talking hardcore, right here!

American Hardcore: The History of American Punk Rock 1980 - 1986

I think being a punk in China and therefore an anti-social element is quite dangerous in and of itself. Just as liking jazz in Eastern Europe during communism was dangerous.

The scene seems split on the most basic issues.

I've never known "a scene" not to be
since when was a "scene" about intellectual coherence or even artistic coherence
clashing memes mixing and swirling, breeding and hybridising is what makes a "scene"

RE: China's Punks Look to Rock

Intel has released open-source software to give Linux full-fledged support for 3D graphics, a move that could give its graphics chips a leg up over rivals.

good
[nicked from digg]

Intel aims for open-source graphics advantage | CNET News.com

Democratic leaders expressed strong support today for Ned Lamont, who won a narrow victory in Connecticut’s Democratic Senate primary last night over the incumbent, Joseph I. Lieberman, and said the election result showed that Mr. Lieberman was too close to President George Bush.

ahh the foretold civil war in the Democratic Party end of Round 1
ding
so the Democrats fight amongst themselves and the Republicans win or survive the elections 2006 and win 2008
lets sit back and watch the fight except DOH I support the Democrats
is this what it feels like, in microcosm, to be an Iraqi. You see the civil war coming, there's nothing u can do and despite everything u feel an allegiance to one side and want to see the other side lose

OH THE IRONY

Day After Win, Lamont Gets Strong Support From Leaders - New York Times

pics from Washington Post
Punks in China
global culture
they would feel at home in my local pub and certainly not look out of place

China's Punk's Look to Rock - Washington Post

Alexander Raggio says he was 16 when he learned one of his relatives was gay, and watching that person's struggle gave him a grim introduction to discrimination against gays.

He carried those feelings into West Point, and in his senior thesis argued that the military's policy banning gays is not only wrong, but harmful to the Army.

The Pentagon may not agree, but the U.S. Military Academy gave him an award for the paper.

[nicked from digg]

Northwest Florida Daily News: West Point thesis challenges military's gay policy, wins award