SOUNDS LIKE THIS WAS AN EXTREMELY FORTUNATE ACCIDENT:

A North Korean missile shipment to Syria was halted when a train collision in that Asian country destroyed the missile cargo and killed about a dozen Syrian technicians.

U.S. officials confirmed a report in a Japanese daily newspaper that a train explosion on April 22 killed about a dozen Syrian technicians near the Ryongchon province in North Korea. The officials said the technicians were accompanying a train car full of missile components and other equipment from a facility near the Chinese border to a North Korea port.

A U.S. official said North Korean train cargo was also believed to have contained tools for the production of ballistic missiles.

Let’s hope for more lucky explosions where these two countries are concerned.

JOHN O’SULLIVAN looks at last week’s media goofs like the fake Iraq rape photos and general tendencies in reporting and observes:

Neither the media’s vaunted “skepticism” nor simple fact-checking on the Internet were employed by the papers. The fakes were, in the old Fleet Street joke, “too good to check.” As Mark Steyn argued Sunday, the journalists wanted to believe they were real. Indeed, it is worse than that — since the fraud was discovered and the Mirror editor fired, he has become a heroic figure in British circles hostile to Blair and the war.

Admittedly, reporters and editors make mistakes. But when all the mistakes are on the side of opposing the liberation of Iraq, and none of the mistakes favor the United States or Britain or Bush or Blair, it tells you something.

Namely, which side they’re on.

Try as one might, it’s getting hard to avoid that sort of inference. Not that they actively favor the terrorists, of course. They just view beating their domestic political enemies as more important.

UPDATE: Related thoughts from A.M. Rosenthal:

Since the latest torture story, many editors have failed to present background stories about the millions killed by Saddam.

They worry about being accused of minimizing the brutalization of Iraqi prisoners by Americans, if they recall in print the masses of people Saddam slaughtered.

These journalists are truly embarrassing.

But not, alas, embarrassed. (Via Jeff Jarvis.)

ANOTHER UPDATE: And here’s a question: Freedom of the press, as it exists today (and didn’t exist, really, until the 1960s) is unlikely to survive if a majority — or even a large and angry minority — of Americans comes to conclude that the press is untrustworthy and unpatriotic. How far are we from that point?

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: More on my fears about the future of press freedom here.

THE SARIN GAS FIND has been confirmed by further tests.

MORE EMBARRASSMENT FOR THE UNITED NATIONS:

The United Nations is investigating claims of sexual harassment made by a member of staff against Ruud Lubbers, the High Commissioner for Refugees.
In a statement, Mr Lubbers said the accusation had been made in April, and related to a meeting that took place in his office in December last year.

The New York Times said the claim had been made by an American woman who had worked for the UNHCR for many years.

A minor issue, on its own, though it’s likely to have some resonance given the pending publication of Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures, a book that paints U.N. peacekeeping efforts in a sufficiently negative light that Kofi Annan tried to suppress it.

BETTER ALL THE TIME: The latest roundup of good news on all sorts of topics, from The Speculist.

UNSCAM UPDATE: Thomas Lifson has some thoughts on what may be going on beneath the surface in the oil-for-food scandal.

LEADERSHIP CHANGES AT THE NANOBUSINESS ALLIANCE: Executive Director Mark Modzelewski is stepping down.

I hope that this will lead to a change in the NanoBusiness Alliance’s PR strategy, which as I’ve noted before both here and elsewhere seems counterproductive to me.

THE NEVERENDING WAR: Matt Welch wonders why the architects of Kosovo are so hard on Bush:

Of all the historical precedents that paved the way for President George W. Bush’s war against Iraq, the most directly relevant was Bill Clinton’s 1999 bombing of the rump Yugoslavia.

Like Gulf War II, the 78-day NATO air campaign in Kosovo was waged without the explicit authorization of the United Nations. (Of the two, the Iraq war had much more of a U.N. mandate, through Resolution 1441, which gave Iraq a “final opportunity” — one it did not take — to comply fully with all previous Security Council resolutions or else face “serious consequences.”) Like Iraq, Yugoslavia was a sovereign country that was bombed into submission for essentially internal infractions. Both wars were expressions of American exasperation at European impotence in the face of dictatorial slaughter.

Yet the media and the foreign policy establishment are much more critical of Bush’s war than Clinton’s — even though Clinton’s is still going on.

What’s the difference? Read the whole thing.

MICHAEL TOTTEN WRITES that the case against war is immoral.

ERIC MULLER raises troubling questions regarding potential dishonesty by the Solicitor General on abuse of detainees. (More here.) I suspect that ignorance, rather than deception, is involved. But since this has the potential to make the Bush Administration look bad, I’m sure it will receive close scrutiny from the media.

ANUAK GENOCIDE WATCH is a blog monitoring genocide in Ethiopia.

NEWS COVERAGE AS A WEAPON: More provocative observations from The Belmont Club. (Via Tom Smith).

UPDATE: And here’s a report on a blogosphere-sponsored response.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And James Lileks has some related thoughts.

IRAQ, TERRORISM, AND WMD: Some interesting thoughts:

Bush’s pre-war point holds up: terrorists were operating in Iraq, and they did have access to Saddam Hussein’s powder keg. The constant claim that the war in Iraq is irrelevant to the war on terrorism is impossible to sustain when U.S. forces keep capturing terrorists Hussein harbored.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: There’s a new talking points memo for the antiwar crowd.

HUMAN RIGHTS, IRAQ, AND THE GERMAN MEDIA: An interesting post from Medienkritik.

THE MOBILE REGISTER is calling for Ted Kennedy to resign from the Senate, because of his comments over the war:

In calling for Sen. Kennedy’s resignation, we hasten to note, the Register editorial board applies the same standards it applied to Mississippi Republican Trent Lott, then Senate majority leader. In the wake of Sen. Lott’s racially inflammatory remarks related to the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, the Register editorialized that “the cause of an honest moral reckoning demands that he step down.”

In the wake of this latest entry on Sen. Kennedy’s record, the same moral reckoning, long overdue, should apply to the senior senator from Massachusetts.

Republicans were ashamed of Lott’s remarks, which they saw as a betrayal of their party’s principles. I’m not so sure that the Democrats feel the same way about Kennedy’s.

UPDATE: Randy Paul emails that he thinks this is unfair: “What Kennedy said was stupid, but it has no bearing on what the rest of us believe, just as what James Inhofe and Rush Limbaugh said has no bearing on what the rest of conservatives believe.”

I don’t see Kennedy as being as marginal as Inhofe, and he’s not an entertainer like Limbaugh — you don’t see me making a big deal of Randi Rhodes’ calls for Bush to be shot. Kennedy’s probably the single best-known Democrat out there, and if the Democrats are disassociating themselves from these remarks they’re doing it pretty quietly. It’s nice to see Randy doing so, though.

However, he also seems to think that associating people with the views of Ted Kennedy is “McCarthyism.” I thought McCarthyism consisted of associating people with the views of communists. I’m not sure I’d put Kennedy quite that far beyond the pale.

MORE: Oops, my mistake: Paul’s email was originally occasioned by another post, not this one, though I don’t think it affects my point.

THE ECONOMIC DOWNTURN is officially over.

I won’t argue.

VIA MY BROTHER, fisherman extraordinaire, a link to a discussion site frequented by rightish outdoorsmen who are generally OK with gay marriage. Excerpt: “I think gay marriage is kind of like rhinoceroses mating. It don’t affect me much and it ain’t something I necessarily want to watch but I’ll defend their rights to do so.”

As I’ve said before, the country is moving faster than the courts on this issue.

On the other hand, not everyone is as progressive as rightish outdoorsmen.

POLITICS AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH: Andrew Sullivan has a piece in Time on this subject, and the TaxProf blog wonders if the Church might be endangering its tax exemption by getting too involved in telling people how to vote. (Prof. Bainbridge is unhappy).

Being neither Catholic nor a tax professor, I don’t have very strong feelings on this subject. (I was raised Methodist; now I’m Presbyterian. Why the shift? I guess it was predestined. . . .) I will note, though, that some folks who are approving the Catholic Church’s political stances are normally quick to bristle when people worry that Catholic politicians are likely to base their votes on Church pronouncements. But when you talk, as some Bishops are doing, of denying Catholic politicians communion based on their legislative votes, it seems to me that you leave yourself open to such claims.

I think, also, that Jonah Goldberg is wrong to suggest that tax exemptions for religious institutions are constitutionally required. Taxes that discriminated against religious entities would be unconstitutional, but I believe that tax exemptions are a matter of legislative grace, not a constitutional entitlement.

UPDATE: John Murphy emails: “Generations of Democrat politicans have held forth from Black churches without a peep from the IRS. Are we on track for another double standard?”

Well, the IRS isn’t peeping now, and isn’t likely to. Just some tax professors.

ANN ALTHOUSE has several posts I was going to link to, but I can’t make up my mind. So just go and scroll — it’s everything from Tennessee v. Lane to Barbara Ehrenreich to the Sopranos to gay marriage.

DON’T GET COCKY: Bill Hobbs collects various links to discussion of economic models saying that Bush will win in the fall.

This is interesting, I guess. But didn’t a lot of the standard predictors make the 2000 elections out to be a shoo-in for Gore?

UPDATE: Tyler Cowen has some thoughts on whether these models will be more or less accurate this time around.

MY EARLIER POST about films in law school classes led to requests for more. Trouble is, I don’t show films much.

However, some years ago I did use Talk of the Town as a dialogue on legal realism versus legal formalism — which is, in fact, its subject. (Someone once told me that Fred Rodell was involved in it somehow, though there’s nothing about that in the credits.) It’s a good movie, but as I say, the amount of class time that movies take up makes me reluctant to use them much.

UPDATE: My former colleague Peter Morgan used to show The Verdict in his Legal Ethics class, and ask the students to spot all the ethical violations, and felonies, committed by the Paul Newman character. It’s a rather large number. And reader Scott Holmes emails that he wishes he’d seen A Civil Action before going into law practice as a personal injury lawyer: “I thought this movie showed most accurately what brutal frustration one faces as a trial lawyer. If I taught, this would be shown on my first day of class.”

And reader Daniel Phillips emails:

You may want to refer people interested in movies for law school classes to TaxProfBlog (Prof. Paul Caron). I had him this semester, and he is well known around school to show movie clips (usually just a minute or two) to reinforce his point and make a dull subject more interesting. One example: when we were studying deductions for work clothing, we went over a case with one of the girls from Fleetwood Mac. She claimed a deduction for clothing based on her excessive sweating, she could only wear it once. Prof. Caron then showed a clip of her performing.

Now there’s a treat!

CAMPUS LIFE: When I was at the library yesterday I picked up a copy of U. Magazine, a freebie mag that’s been distributed on campus for years. In between the articles on the Blue Man Group, spam management, and computer games was one by Air Force ROTC cadet Gloria Lin of Washington University answering some questions she often gets about serving in the military. Excerpt:

Why would you want to do that?

Five years ago I didn’t have a strong, solid answer. I only knew it was something I wanted to do, but now I can say with conviction that it’s important to me to have this opportunity to give back, to serve my country and its people.

What if you die?

Well, everyone dies, and dying for my country is a pretty good way to go if you ask me.

But you’re a girl.

Thank you for noticing.

You’re Chinese. What if we go to war with China? Whose side would you be on?

This is a simple answer: Obviously the United States. The thing is, I may be of Chinese descent, but up until a few years ago I had never set foot on mainland China before. I was born in America and that’s where I grew up.

There’s much more, and I found it all pretty interesting.

UPDATE: Bill Hobbs sends a link to the article — I hadn’t realized it was on the web.

SOME INTERESTING THOUGHTS on nanotechnology nomenclature and its regulatory importance.

MILTON FRIEDMAN IS BEARISH ON THE EUROZONE: Me too, though his credentials are a lot better.

UNSCAM UPDATE: A Canadian connection:

The oil-for-food tap has never been turned off. The Post says there are “several hundred million” from the program sitting in three banks in Jordan. Someone is drawing the money from these accounts, but “no one knows whom.” . . .

At the United Nations, it’s not only a global world; it’s the proverbial small one.

You know, the United States should seriously consider a policy of making outright bribes to foreign leaders. It seems to work.