VIRGINIA POSTREL SAYS that I might be right about wi-fi after all. Hey, it could happen!

I’VE NEGLECTED SPACE ISSUES OF LATE. Sorry — I’ll try to do better. But in the meantime, visit this link-filled post by Joe Katzman.

MORE UNILATERALISM:

France is about to break another of the cardinal rules of the euro stability pact – allowing its accumulated national debt to exceed the limit of 60 per cent of GNP imposed on euroland members.

Since France and Germany are already breaching the ceiling on annual deficits (3 per cent of GNP), the euro stability pact risks looking like a fiscal dead letter by the end of this year.

Shocking disrespect for international agreements.

THIS IS INTERESTING: More evidence of the Administration turning up the heat on Saudi Arabia?

BRIAN CARNELL LOOKS AT a BBC story on guns in America, and pronounces it biased.

JUST REMEMBER: Red wine from California, Australia, or Chile works just as well.

UPDATE: Yes, I know — some wines purportedly have more good stuff in them than others. My advice: just drink more to make up the difference.

BBC CORRESPONDENT ANDREW GILLIGAN has been relieved of his reporting duties:

Andrew Gilligan, the BBC correspondent at the centre of the storm over allegations that the Government ‘sexed up’ intelligence to make a stronger case for war against Iraq, has been removed from reporting duties. . . .

BBC executives denied that Gilligan’s departure from day-to-day reporting on the Radio 4 Today programme was linked to revelations last week that he sent emails to two MPs on the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee suggesting questions they could ask Kelly that would be ‘devastating’ for the Government.

Then there’s this:

Far from unequivocally backing his reporter, Richard Sambrook, the head of news, told Mr Hoon that Gilligan was “a particular sort of journalist” and said the BBC was “thinking about an appropriate use of him”.

His admission – which is in stark contrast to the BBC’s robust public defence of the reporter – came after Mr Hoon summoned him to the Commons, told him the defence correspondent shouldn’t work on the programme, and complained: “Andrew Gilligan is essentially a tabloid journalist”.

Interesting. And this:

In a Guardian/ICM poll, 52% of respondents questioned the integrity of the corporation. The BBC needs to show that it is committed to telling the story in as straight and thorough a manner as it would any other, says Bennett. Radio 4, as the broadcaster of Today, is particularly worried that its image will be hit. . . .

Alastair Campbell gave a tantalising insight when he told Hutton how he turned to Birt for advice in brokering a deal. Birt, according to Campbell, said: “Everyone knows the Today story is wrong.”

This could be the problem:

But the BBC news hierarchy is enclosed and makes few external appointments. It is axiomatic that mistakes do not lead to sackings: the false report last year by the 10 O’Clock News that the owner of the Oryx company was helping to fund al-Qaida has not damaged careers.

Read it all. The BBC seems to have boxed itself in here. I should also note that all of these stories are from The Guardian, which is doing an excellent job of covering the BBC story despite what I have to assume is general ideological sympathy with the BBC’s slant.

UPDATE: Read this, from Blog-Irish, too:

Now lets see. Clare Short claimed that Iraq had “no doubt Iraq has rebuilt much of its military power since the 1991 Gulf War”. At her insistence, she had direct access to Intelligence information. Prior to the war, she did not oppose it on a claim that there was no WMD threat. She was concerned only about UN sanction, as Toynbee says most were.

She told the House of Commons “that there was a serious risk that the UN Food-for-Oil programme would collapse in the event of war. Oil fields could be set alight, chemical weapons released and the country split asunder” all of which we know, of course, has not occurred.

But despite these misgivings, Short thought that she was too important, the reconstruction of Iraq couldn’t get on without her. She struggled with her conscience and won and, humiliated by a chorus of condemnation from both left and right, resigned.

But people as important as Short don’t stay down. After exposing herself as an utter fool and fraud, she lept on the BBC bandwagon to demand an independent inquiry. Dr Kelly, a decent man with a lower tolerance for “embarassment” took his own life, cannon fodder in Clare’s war.

But now that the Hutton inquiry seems to be exposing BBC claims to be, as Toynbee so delicately puts it, “not true”, the Hutton inquiry does not matter. We should not allow it to distract us from “the real politics of this war.”

Whose politics would those be, Polly?

Indeed.

JEFF JARVIS is inviting people to subscribe to The Week.

GOOD NEWS:

A blind man can see again after being given a stem cell transplant.
Mike May, of California, had been blind for 40 years since an accident at the age of three where he lost one eye and was blinded in the other.

During that time he had some ability to perceive light, but could not make out form or contrast.

He said he had no visual memories from his early childhood

The operation transplanted corneal and limbal stem cells into his right eye.

Interestingly, his brain has had trouble processing the images, though he is doing better with time. (Via Samizdata).

TERRORIST BOMBING IN INDIA: Hawken Blog is following it.

UPDATE: Shanti Mangala has more links.

DANIEL DREZNER ON LARRY SUMMERS — He says I was wrong to say that Summer’s biggest prolem is ideology. He says the real issue is power, which is probably true (but read the comments to his post for suggestions that the two overlap a lot, which I think is also true). He also says:

Those dumb enough not to recognize Summers’ smarts are headed for a great fall. The next few years are going to be fun for those who write about Harvard.

Read Drezner’s whole post, which is very interesting.

WE ARE NOT MARXISTS AT THE BBC: And don’t listen to those capitalist imperialists who say otherwise!

IS NASHVILLE TENNESSEAN COLUMNIST LARRY DAUGHTREY behind the times, or ahead of them? He calls Frank Cagle an “internet columnist and former spin master for Van Hilleary.” (Hilleary was the GOP candidate for governor in the last election).

Now Frank Cagle does have a website, FrankCagle.com (in fact, his blog predates InstaPundit, and was one of the models I drew on when I started), but he also has a regular column in the Knoxville News-Sentinel, and a talk radio show. So why the dis? I would say that somebody needs to show Daughtrey how to use the Internet, but he’s obviously found Frank’s page. So somebody show him how to use a newspaper!

WHAT THEY’RE DOING INSTEAD OF CHASING TERRORISTS AND MURDERERS: Launching bogus kiddie-porn busts. Lame:

One of the jurors’ first actions was to send out a note suggesting that they didn’t understand the law under which Grady had been charged. And then, after considering more than a year’s worth of evidence — photos and testimony and thousands of pages of documents — the twelve jurors returned their verdict in less time than it takes to watch most movies.

James Grady, they agreed, was not guilty. Of anything.

A free man for the first time in almost twelve months, Grady had lunch with his lawyers and then went home to live in his mother’s basement.

In examining how this massive child-porn ring evaporated into thin air, one thing stands out: how little law-enforcement authorities understood the law.

But this is what happens when you chase headlines instead of, you know, criminals. As Jesse Walker notes:

It turns out the teens on Grady’s website all had their clothes on, and all their pictures were taken with both the models’ and their parents’ permission. It’s entirely possible that the photographer understood the law better than police and prosecutors did.

But will any of these guys lose their jobs, or suffer public humiliation?

They should.

BEN HAMMERSLEY IS BLOGGING FROM KABUL now.

JIM BENNETT’S LATEST COLUMN IS ON IMMIGRATION AND THE CALIFORNIA ELECTION, and contains this observation:

Many restrictionists argue that the high numbers we experience now are so high that we will not be able to adequately assimilate and integrate them into American society, thus setting the stage for inter-group strife and the degradation of civil society.

I tend to think they state the problem the wrong way around. It is rather the strength of our assimilation policy that determines how many immigrants we can welcome. Certainly America welcomed a higher percentage of foreign-born during the height of the immigrant boom in the years before World War I, and successfully assimilated them. This should be an existence proof that we can, given the right circumstances, do the job again.

However, this does not mean that the economic reductionists who make every social issue a matter of employment figures and economic benefits can assume that assimilation will be automatic. A closer look at the experience of 1890-1920 shows that America experienced many of the problems with immigration that we do again today: public health challenges, concerns about integration into civil society and the sharing of democratic discourse and values with people who had no previous exposure to such things, and rising levels of crime and corruption in high immigration areas.

As a response to these challenges, many reformers and activists of that era expended much effort on integrating immigrant groups, fighting the crime, poverty, and corruption that came with them, and in promoting an assimilationist agenda. This effort was in the end successful, culminating perhaps in the successes of World Wars I and II, where Americans of every immigrant group, including nationals of the states with which America was at war, gave a high degree of support to the war effort, and receiving in return a genuine acceptance from the general population.

The point is, and this is a point now usually ignored, that it was neither automatic nor effortless to assimilate these people.

Unfortunately, multi-culti pieties make it hard to even talk about these issues.

LIGHT BLOGGING THIS MORNING — but be sure to check out the Winds of Change war news roundup, which even notes a new Iraqi blogger.

Meanwhile Mickey Kaus has the Arnold recall covered.

UPDATE: Oh, and the Oxblog / Josh Marshall feud continues.

I’M NOT SURE WHAT I THINK ABOUT THIS STORY:

U.S.-led occupation authorities have begun a covert campaign to recruit and train agents with the once-dreaded Iraqi intelligence service to help identify resistance to American forces here after months of increasingly sophisticated attacks and bombings, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.

These guys know a lot of useful stuff, but we can’t trust them. It’s not as obvious a risk as using them for guards, as the U.N. did, but it’ll be a real challenge to handle them well. The record of doing this with Germans after World War II was rather poor — the “Gehlen Organization” of ex-Nazi intelligence officers was heavily penetrated by the Soviets and probably did more harm than good.

CHIEF WIGGLES HAS MORE, and you should be reading it.

INDYMEDIA — Independent, free speech, except when it isn’t. Or something like that.

HERE’S A SURPRISINGLY UPBEAT STORY ON IRAQ FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES:

American soldiers, without helmets or flak jackets, attended graduation ceremonies of the Diwaniya University Medical School. At ease with the Iraqi students and their parents, the American marines laughed, joked and posed in photographs. One by one, the students walked up to thank them, for Marine doctors had taught classes in surgery and gynecology and helped draw up the final exams.

“We like the Americans very much here,” said Zainab Khaledy, 22, who received her medical degree last Sunday. “We feel better than under the old regime. We have problems, like security, but everything is getting better.”

Such is the dual reality that is coming to define the American enterprise in Iraq, a country increasingly divided between those willing to put up with the American occupation and those determined to fight it. While the areas stretching west and north from Baghdad roil and burn, much of the rest of the country remains, most of the time, remarkably calm. . . .

Rather than fight the Americans, most Iraqis appear to be readily accepting the benefits of a wide-ranging reconstruction.

The two faces of the occupation give American policy makers something to take solace in and something to worry over. Four months into the occupation, the rebellion against American forces, though fierce, is still largely limited to the Arab Sunni Muslim population and its foreign supporters and confined to a relatively limited geographic area.

That last point is one that quite a few bloggers — including some blogging from Iraq — have been making, but that the mainstream media have tended to miss. Nice to see the Times getting it right.

ANOTHER BOMBING IN IRAQ:

A crude bomb constructed from a cooking gas cylinder exploded outside the residence of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Said al-Hakim in the holy city of Najaf today, slightly wounding the leading Shiite Muslim cleric in the neck and killing three of his bodyguards.

Senior religious officials were quick to blame the attack on members of the deposed Baath Party trying to use violence to foment schisms within the Shiite community

Well, that’s interesting. Of course, this bit is entirely predictable:

They also criticized the American-led occupation for failing to provide better security.

As Mark Steyn points out — see below — whatever happens, it’s always America’s fault.

MARK STEYN:

Well, that’s the luck of the draw at the UN, where so far this year Libya, Iraq and Syria have found themselves heading up the Human Rights Commission, the Disarmament Committee and the Security Council. The UN’s subscription to this charade may be necessary in New York, but what’s tragic is that they seem to have conducted their affairs in Baghdad much the same way. Offers of increased U.S. military protection were turned down. Their old Iraqi security guards, all agents of Saddam’s Secret Service there to spy on the UN, were allowed by the organization to carry on working at the compound. And sitting in the middle of an unprotected complex staffed by ex-Saddamite spies was Sergio Vieira de Mello, the individual most directly credited with midwifing East Timor into an independent democratic state. Osama bin Laden (or rather whoever makes his audiocassettes) and the Bali bombers have both cited East Timor as high up on their long list of grievances: the carving out, as they see it, of part of the territory of the world’s largest Islamic nation to create a mainly Christian state. Now they’ve managed to kill the fellow responsible. Any way you look at it, that’s quite a feather in their turbans.

Read the whole thing. And read this Ralph Peters column, too:

An active-duty U.S. Army officer, Lt.-Col. Jack Curran, was in charge of local medevac operations. Weeks before the truck-bomb attack, he, too, recognized the vulnerability of the hotel compound. Diplomatically, he asked if his pilots and medical personnel could “practice medevac ops” at the U.N. headquarters. “Just for training.” With the security officer’s help, he got permission.

As a result, there had just been two full, on-site rehearsals for what had to be done after the bombing. Thanks to this spirited, visionary officer, our helicopters and vehicles knew exactly how to get in, where best to upload casualties and where a triage station should be set up.

With impressive speed, the U.S. Army medevaced 135 U.N. employees and Iraqi civilians from the scene, saving more lives than will ever be known for certain.

U.S. Army Reserve engineers and Army mortuary personnel moved in to do the grisly, demanding work of rescuing any trapped survivors and processing the dead.

Now that the damage is done, the U.S. Army’s welcome. A company of our 82nd Airborne Division took over external security for the site last week.

But what were the first complaints we heard from the media “experts”? That the U.S. Army was to blame, because it failed to provide adequate security.

In fact, we offered the U.N. armored vehicles. They told us to take a hike. U.N. bureaucrats put more trust in the good will of terrorists and Ba’athist butchers than they did in GI Joe.

But when the U.N.’s own people lay bleeding, they were glad enough for our help. As one U.N. employee, speaking from inside the Baghdad compound, put it to me, “It was a proud day for the U.S. Army.”

Funny this wasn’t more widely reported.

ONE THING THAT WE’VE LEARNED SINCE 9/11, and again during the Great Blackout, is that the cellphone network isn’t just a luxury for rich guys and soccer moms anymore: it’s a vital part of emergency infrastructure.

Unfortunately, we’ve also learned that it isn’t up to the job:

Less than two years after the cellular network faltered following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the cellular system — which the wireless industry promotes as a safety net during emergencies — choked again.

The system broke down as a flood of nervous callers overloaded the network for some carriers; there wasn’t enough capacity to handle the excess calls. Complicating matters, many cellular sites, which depend on electricity, had inadequate backup power.

Cell-phone carriers say the electrical outage was an event they couldn’t possibly foresee.

I don’t think that’s much of an excuse, and I think that cell-phone technology is mature enough that it’s fair to start expecting the kind of robust reliability that we’ve seen from landline services. This is too important to ignore.

No backup power? Puhleez. Well, okay “inadequate” backup power, as the story illustrates. Still, the cell network is vitally important, and yet it still has the reliability standards of a rich man’s toy, which it hasn’t been for a long time.

Of course, it’s not just cellphones. Backup power for traffic lights — at least at key intersections — would help deal with the traffic problems often associated with disasters, and even an hour or so of that would help clear the worst of the traffic.

There will be more about this in my TechCentralStation column this week.

UPDATE: Reader Ari Ozick emails:

Your note on Cell Phones and emergencies was right on target. It may surprise you to know that even in Israel, we have the same problems with our cell phone networks. When a terrorist attack happens, you can’t get a line on the 3 major networks for a good 15 minutes to a half hour. The fourth network, which is much smaller, currently can handle the overload, because it’s system doesn’t carry as much capacity as the other three regularly do.

The cell phone saturation in Israel is much more then that of the United States, and yet almost everyone I know keeps a telecard (good for a certain amounts of credit on a public phone, sort of like carrying a few quarters in your pocket) in their wallets, so that if they are out during an attack or an emergency and the cells are down, they can still call loved ones and reassure them.

Hmm. It seems that we should be sure not to let payphones die out, since they’re more reliable than cellphones. It also seems that we should educate people not to immediately call loved ones to “reassure” them when other folks may need something more concrete than reassurance.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Steve Sandvik emails:

I work in power generation, and I think that although this is a big black eye for the power industry (especially transmission), the difference in response and apparent level of concern between the cell phone industry and the power industry is very enlightening. They’re selling themselves as part of your disaster response toolbox, but they don’t want to pay for it.

That’s right. I’ve noticed that power workers have a sense of mission that cellphone people definitely lack.

MORE: A reader emails that Verizon wireless was up throughout the blackout, unlike other companies. Bravo!

STILL MORE: Solar-powered traffic lights are apparently feasible, at least in sunny San Antonio. Read this, too.

MORE STILL: Steven Den Beste, who knows a lot more about cellphones than I do, has a post on this subject. He says it’s a difficult problem — though I think regulation could ensure enough excess capacity to address the situation. But to the extent I’m wrong it’s yet another reason to keep those payphones around, I guess.

HERE’S A NICE ARTICLE ON WEBLOGS from the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Here’s another in The Bulletin, and here’s one from the Philadelphia Inquirer.

UPDATE: Meanwhile Cory Doctorow is writing that the Internet may elect the next President. Well, maybe.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And bloggers are already snarking. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. . . .

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Oh, and here’s a profile of Dodd Harris from a while back that I neglected to mention earlier. But better late than never!