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.