USA

Matt Vincent of the Montana Standard has written a piece that is funny, sad and ironic as anything. Saturday morning reading at its finest.

Mongrel calls Berkeley Pit home for 16 years introduces us to the long term environmental catastrophe of open pit mining with an astounding honesty, permissible perhaps because in this story, it is a dreadlocked dog bearing the impact.

Incredible. Villages of people affected by these same phenomena, and only "The Auditor" gets special treatment.

The New Yorker has something of a literate puff piece on Hillary Clinton qua politician. Here's a little insight into the mechanics of being a Democrat (or Liberal, or politician, really):

After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a group of black students on campus were threatening a hunger strike if the Wellesley administration did not address their demands. It was the kind of situation in which, as a classmate recalled, “Hillary would step in and organize an outlet that would be acceptable on the Wellesley campus.

After 30 years, Steve Jobs still has the ability whip lot of people (well, journalists and geeks, anyway) into a frenzy of anticipation and speculation. The famed reality distortion field is stronger than ever. Why, I remember being a junior high kid compulsively reloading the MacWeek web site in a beta version of Mosaic on similar occasions. And "why?" is indeed the operative question. There's no rational reason to get riled up about this stuff, excepting perhaps that shiny things are neat. Oooh, shiny.

According to the Times of London, the US is making a move to take over leadership of the UN's Peacekeeping forces. The report speculates that this is part of a strategy for getting US troops out of Iraq.

Here's Dana Carvey doing Tom Brokaw covering Gerald Ford's death in 1996.