IT SEEMS TO ME THAT THIS WOMAN’S NEIGHBORS need to be reading this woman’s blog.

I WONDER WHAT ORGANIZATION THESE MEDIA REPRESENTATIVES work for?

Coalition soldiers questioned two news media cameramen and a reporter after a roadside bomb exploded near a Coalition convoy two kilometers north of Mosul June 3.

The media, who were at the scene prior to the attack, told soldiers at the scene they had received a tip to be at that location prior to the attack and they had witnessed the explosion.

Nice of them to pass along the warning. . . .

UPDATE: Interesting contrast between the behavior of media folks and ordinary IRaqis.

STRAT SPEAKS OUT is local-blogging the G8 summit.

INTERESTING LETTER FROM MARK TWAIN to an American expatriate worried about his country’s reputation:

Is it France’s respect that we are going to lose? Is our unchivalric conduct troubling a nation which exists to-day because a brave young girl saved it when its poltroons had lost it – a nation which deserted her as one man when her day of peril came? Is our treacherous assault upon a weak people distressing a nation which contributed Bartholomew’s Day to human history? Is our ruthless spirit offending the sensibilities of the nation which gave us the Reign of Terror to read about? Is our unmanly intrusion into the private affairs of a sister nation shocking the feelings of the people who sent Maximilian to Mexico? Are our shabby and pusillanimous ways outraging the fastidious people who have sent an innocent man (Dreyfus) to a living hell, taken to their embraces the slimy guilty one, and submitted to indignities Emile Zola – the manliest man in France?

Ouch. Read the whole thing.

HENRY COPELAND: Take this, blog-skeptics!

A SHORTAGE OF TROOPS FOR THE OCCUPATION: In 1946.

“BLOG-BRANDING?” Or is it brand-blogging? Anyway, Nike has a blog now, set up by Nick Denton (of course). Jeff Jarvis thinks this is important.

For purposes of historical accuracy, though, I should note that it’s not the first attempt by a major brand to use blogs — though I hope it works out better than Dr. Pepper’s infamous “Raging Cow” blog campaign. Since it’s not phony and lame, like “Raging Cow,” it probably will.

UPDATE: A reader notes this IBM/Lotus blog by Ed Brill, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Some interesting background on IBM from Asparagirl.

MORE: Reader Chris Schmidt writes:

Wanted to give you a quick update on your IBM/Lotus blogs post. Late last year, IBM released a number of services to its employees. One of the better ones is the ability to start a blog within the internal network. There are 620 active blogs (2+ posts) from all around the world currently. It’s still in a pilot form, but it and other recent applications make me think that IBM is starting to ‘get it’. The company is working hard to get us to come together. Many of the projects I’ve seen recently have people distributed throughout the country as opposed to everyone in one place. Whether it’s for a good cause or not, it’s much easier to ping complete strangers for information.

Interesting. And cool.

MORE STILL: And, of course, I shouldn’t forget the many Microsoft blogs!

THIS seems like a positive development: “Iraqi police have captured a top aide of al-Qaeda suspect Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the US-led coalition says. . . . Mr Baziyani, who was arrested on Saturday, is said to be providing information to coalition authorities.” It’s especially positive that he was captured by Iraqi police.

HUGH HEWITT is back from his blog hiatus, and he’s making up for lost time. Just keep scrolling.

KOFI DOESN’T WANT YOU TO READ THIS BOOK: My copy just came. Meanwhile here’s a review:

The controversial volume, due out next week, charges that some UN officials demanded that 15 per cent of their local staffs’ salaries go directly to them instead; that Bulgaria sent freed criminals to serve as peacekeepers; and that incompetent UN security had cost lives.

Their first-person account of a decade in UN service also includes candid details of drug use – particularly a marijuana cocktail called The Space Shuttle — and casual sex. It says UN staff in Cambodia resembled “the jet set on vacation”.

“Almost a million civilians (whom) our peacekeepers were supposed to protect died in two genocides,” Andrew Thomson, one of the authors, said.

It certainly seems consistent with reports like this one from the Atlantic Monthly, and with what I’ve heard from friends and acquaintances who have done this kind of work. My guess, though, is that the sex-and-drugs angle, which is relatively minor, will get the most attention, while the corruption and failure to protect innocents — which is a huge UN failing, amply demonstrated in many other reports — will be ignored.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Thanks for the link to the book. I’ve travelled a bit in SE Asia, including Cambodia and Laos, and in both places have heard a lot of complaints from locals about the UN – in Cambodia, UN “peacekeepers” are popularly credited with introducing and widely spreading AIDS. A combination of poorly disciplined troops, little HIV testing and relatively high pay compared to the locals meant that the money the soldiers received was enough to support veritable harems of local girls. They weren’t shy about spending it, and the results have been pretty tragic. In Laos, the more generalised complaint about NGO’s was that, of the money they spent, very little went to the local economy – rather it disappeared into the pockets of westerner workers as salary. Since these could live very cheaply in-country, most of the cash wound up going right back to their home countries.

Yes, that’s the sort of thing I’ve heard, too.

AS I MENTIONED EARLIER, Slate’s new “Kerryism of the Day” feature is no better than its lame and sometimes dishonest “Bushism of the Day” feature. Now Eugene Volokh observes:

It’s remarkable, then, how bad the editing in the Kerryisms really is. The Kerryisms author strips away necessary material, not just the “pointless embellishments.” In the process, he substantially changes the original author’s meaning; this often leads to the result’s conveying something the original author doesn’t want to convey(something authors rightly hate). At the same time, the Kerryisms author often omits other edits he should be making. And he makes all these mistakes with a smug, self-satisfied tone that leads the errors to just be more annoying.

Read the whole thing. A perverse thought: I wonder if all the traffic following the links from Eugene’s critiques isn’t what’s keeping these features alive?

OUCH:

Let me get this straight–the Pope is criticizing Bush for recent “deplorable events”, that is the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal, which came to attention a few months ago and is not only being investigated but prosecuted, whereas the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal has lasted decades (under the current pope’s watch)? centuries? a millenia before being investigated by the institution.

Indeed.

UPDATE: Then there’s this:

Cardinal Bernard F. Law, who was forced to resign as leader of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston after a long and painful sexual abuse scandal involving clergy members, was chosen by Pope John Paul II on Thursday to head a basilica in Rome. . . .

The appointment angered the cardinal’s critics and others who see it as a reward. . . .

The appointment could be financially lucrative for Cardinal Law. His predecessor in the job, Cardinal Furno, received a 10,000 euro monthly stipend, or about $12,000, said a former Vatican official who is a friendly acquaintance of Cardinal Furno. Cardinal Furno lived in a palatial apartment alongside the right flank of the basilica that is reserved for the archpriest, said the former official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Not very impressive. (Much discussion in the comments here).

ANOTHER UPDATE: Hmm. This blog entry claims there’s no pay for the position. That’s not what the story says, but it could be wrong, I suppose.

RADLEY BALKO has an interesting column on fitness and health insurance.

YESTERDAY I MENTIONED the NBC miniseries Uprising, and a couple of readers also recommend another one called Escape from Sobibor. I’ve never seen it, but I seem to recall that my late publisher, Fred Praeger, liked it. A former Austrian track star, he escaped from a concentration camp himself, though I believe it was Buchenwald. From this experience he kept a lifelong passion for physical fitness — I remember going to the gym with him in Boulder when I was out there on a visit, and he was lifting more than me despite being well into his 70s.

THIS LOOKS LIKE MORE GOOD NEWS on the employment front: “Unemployment rates declined in all four regions and in more than half the states in April, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Over the year, unemployment rates declined in all regions and in 47 states.” And there seem to be lots of actual new jobs being created.

UPDATE: Steve Verdon has some thoughts, and Bill Hobbs observes:

The fact is, the Bush Boom is now creating jobs at a faster clip than the job growth John Kerry promises if he is elected president. . . . In fact, at a rate of 238,000 new jobs per month so far this year, the economy would create 11,424,000 jobs over four years. John Kerry is promising his economic policies would create only 10 million jobs in his first term.

The Bush people should hope that people take note.

ANOTHER UPDATE: They’re doing more than hoping. They’ve got a new commercial out, which you can see online here. That was fast!

FELLOW PHOTO-BLOGGING LAW PROFESSOR ANN ALTHOUSE has posted a lot of cool photos from Manhattan.

THE BBC SPIKING NEGATIVE STORIES on the antiwar movement?

Say it ain’t so! Here’s the full story, from the New Statesman, and here’s a key bit:

Just before the war against Iraq I began to receive strange calls from BBC journalists. Would I like information on how the leadership of the anti-war movement had been taken over by the Socialist Workers Party? . . .

The anti-war movement wasn’t a simple repetition of the old story of the politically naive being led by the nose by sly operators. The far left was becoming the far right. It had gone as close to supporting Ba’athist fascism as it dared and had formed a working alliance with the Muslim Association of Britain, which, along with the usual misogyny and homophobia of such organisations, also believed that Muslims who decided that there was no God deserved to die for the crime of free thought. In a few weeks hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, would allow themselves to be organised by the opponents of democracy and modernity and would march through the streets of London without a flicker of self-doubt. Wasn’t this a story?

It’s a great story, I cried. But why don’t you broadcast it?

We can’t, said the bitter hacks. Our editors won’t let us.

Radio silence was imposed on the sinister and in many ways right-wing behaviour of the far left and has continued into the campaign for this month’s elections.

(Emphasis added.) This sort of thing hasn’t gotten much more coverage in the United States. But given the BBC’s troubles, I hope its editors’ biases will get more attention in Britain.

UPDATE: LT Smash offers a report on the American version of this phenomenon.

JOANNE JACOBS has the Spelling Bee news covered.