God, family and country leap from the pages in the just-released diaries of former President Ronald Reagan, but the cover-to-cover theme in Reagan’s writings from the world stage is his wife, Nancy.

The 784-page “The Reagan Diaries,” edited by Douglas Brinkley, made its debut Monday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, a day before the $35 book’s national release. Nancy Reagan placed two of her late husband’s five maroon, leather-bound diaries in a display case.

Reagan wrote diary notations each night for his eight years as one of the 20th-Century’s most popular presidents, with the exception of a few days after he was shot by John Hinckley Jr. — “Getting shot hurts,” he wrote.

The turbulent sweep of the White House years provides unvarnished details of acrimonious moments with his kids — “Insanity is hereditary you catch it from your kids” — optimism after meeting Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (he refers to him as Gorby) and fears of war in the Middle East — “Sometimes I wonder if we are destined to witness Armageddon.”

Here is a chart of guerrilla attacks in Iraq since 2003 through April 2007. It is from a GAO document on Iraq,"GAO-07-677 Iraq Electricity and Oil," p. 34. The original is in .pdf format here.

I think it says it all. Note that all the activity related to the"surge" seems to have gotten the mayhem nearly back down to what it was in . . . July 2006, that veritable paradise of communal harmony.




See below for Tuesday's blog postings.

Labels: Iraq

A United Nations committee accused Japan of trying to whitewash its past practice of forcing women to become sex slaves for Japanese Imperial army soldiers, and urged Tokyo to help surviving victims.

The criticism by the U.N. Committee Against Torture comes after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe set off a furor by saying there was no proof the government forced thousands of women from Asia and elsewhere to work as prostitutes for front-line troops during World War II.

In a report issued Friday, the U.N. committee condemned what it called efforts to cover up history and urged Japan to address the "discriminatory roots of sexual and gender-based violations" and improve rehabilitation for survivors.

It said the victims suffered "incurable wounds" and are experiencing "continuing abuse and re-traumatization as a result of the state party's official denial of the facts, concealment or failure to disclose other facts, failure to prosecute those criminally responsible for acts of torture, and failure to provide adequate rehabilitation to the victims and survivors."

In a grove of evergreens on the edge an old insane asylum's grounds lie the bodies of 1,000 people who were once called inmates. They died at the Hastings Regional Center from 1888 to 1959, and a small gray stone marks each grave. There are no names, birth dates or death dates. Just patient numbers.

Now, mental-health advocates, historians and others are trying to get U.S. states to make the names public.

On Monday, advocates for the release were handed a blow when they learned that the state attorney general backed a policy by the state Health and Human Services not to divulge the identities, citing statutes protecting patient privacy.

Renschler's attorney, Thomas Burke, said he would continue to fight. "If I don't win in court, I'll get it going in the legislature. I'm not exactly someone who goes away," he said.

The number of patients buried at mental institutions across the nation runs into the hundreds of thousands, said clinical psychologist Pat Deegan of Byfield, Massachusetts, who advocates getting states to release the names.

No comprehensive list of states that have made the names public is available, but Texas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Washington, South Carolina, Maine and Wisconsin have done so.

Next month, a coalition of mental health advocacy groups will complete plans for a memorial garden at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., that will honor the nation's anonymous dead.

Although nearly three years have passed since the death of her husband, former President Ronald Reagan, former first lady Nancy Reagan is still healing emotionally, she told "Good Morning America's" anchor Diane Sawyer.

"I keep thinking of all those people who said time ... it'll be much better in time," Reagan said. "Well, not for me. If anything, -- it's gotten worse. ... I miss him more. I'm remembering more little things that we did together. It's harder."

[This is the story of one of an estimated 15,000 slaves in the US.]

Evelyn Chumbow was once a slave, but not in some distant country. She worked right here in the United States.

Chumbow, now 21, was brought to suburban Maryland in 1996 from her native Cameroon by Theresa Mubang. Mubang promised Chumbow's family that if 11-year-old Evenly came to America, she would have the prospect of a bright future and a first-rate education, as she had been a top student in her native country.

Instead, after she arrived, Mubang enslaved the child in her home, forcing her to work long hours and depriving her of the education she was promised, and never paid her a dime.

In their annual examination with the flexible retrospectoscope, medical experts last week took on the case of Abraham Lincoln at the 13th Historical Clinicopathological Conference, sponsored by the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the Veterans Affairs hospital.

Previous exercises have sought to diagnose illness or determine cause of death of famous people with incomplete medical records. They include Alexander the Great (typhoid fever complicated by Guillain-Barre syndrome), Ludwig van Beethoven (syphilis) and Edgar Allan Poe (rabies, a diagnosis now generally discredited). This year's attempted not to solve a mystery but rather to address an extreme hypothetical -- what might have happened to one of the country's greatest presidents if time travel were possible....

U.S. occupation troops forced their way into the offices of the Antiquities Department with its chief denouncing the move as “a violation.”

In a statement to Azzaman, Abbas al-Hussaini, said the raid was the second in a week. Earlier a force of four U.S. military vehicles had forced its way into the department’s offices.

“This action is a violation of the Iraqi ancient heritage,” Hussaini said.

I have no idea what book wears the crown of longest nonfiction title ever published. Whoever holds the record, it is about to be challenged by Vincent Bugliosi, whose new work, “Reclaiming History,” a cellular-level re-examination of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, clocks in at 1,612 pages. That’s not a typo. One thousand six hundred and twelve pages. Plus notes. On a CD-ROM. Bugliosi, best known as the prosecutor of Charles Manson and a co-author of the best seller “Helter Skelter” three decades ago, writes that his new offering, if chopped into books of 120,000 words each, would fill 13 full volumes. Note to editor: You owe me big time.

This is an awfully easy book to mock. When a 13-volume-length study of the Kennedy assassination is published, one expects it to be the life’s work of an Arthur Schlesinger or a Robert Caro. Bugliosi’s career suggests a poor man’s Alan Dershowitz, a peripatetic lawyer who cranks out a book every few years on the tabloid topic of the moment; his interests have run to tomes on O. J. Simpson and Paula Jones. None have exactly roiled the national conversation. Worse, his research originated with an imaginary trial of Lee Harvey Oswald on British television in the halcyon days of the 1980s. Bugliosi prosecuted. Judge Wapner should’ve presided. Gerry Spence mounted the defense, lost, then vented to Arsenio Hall. Or maybe it was Pat Sajak.

Not Bugliosi. He decided to start a book. Now, 21 years in the making, it has finally arrived. How on earth does one justify such an endeavor? Surely, you must be thinking, Bugliosi cracks the case. Here, finally, is concrete proof that Kennedy was killed by the C.I.A. or the Mafia or aliens from Planet Z. But no. It turns out Bugliosi spent 21 years coming to the same conclusion Gerald Posner reached in his 1993 book “Case Closed,” the same conclusion reached by the much-maligned Warren Commission: Oswald acted alone. Let me repeat: Twenty-one years. 1,612 pages. Oswald. Alone.

So this is where one expects the reviewer to savage Bugliosi for all those wasted years and pages. Well, I can’t do it. The fact is, the darned book is pretty good. Putting aside its ridiculous length, I have to say “Reclaiming History” is in spots a delight to read. Bugliosi is refreshing because he doesn’t just pick apart the conspiracy theorists. He ridicules them, and by name, writing that “most of them are as kooky as a $3 bill.” Bugliosi calls the dean of conspiracy buffs, Mark Lane, “unprincipled” and “a fraud.” He quotes Harold Weisberg, the author of eight conspiracy-themed books, admitting that after 35 years of research, “much as it looks like Oswald was some kind of agent for somebody, I have not found a shred of evidence to support it.”

Related Links

Alan Brinkley: Conspiracy? (A review of David Talbott's Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, which argues that JFK was killed by a conspiracy.)

Two intelligence assessments from January 2003 predicted that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and subsequent U.S. occupation of Iraq could lead to internal violence and provide a boost to Islamic extremists and terrorists in the region, according to congressional sources and former intelligence officials familiar with the prewar studies.

The two assessments, titled "Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq" and "Regional Consequences of Regime Change in Iraq," were produced by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) and will be a major part of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's long-awaited Phase II report on prewar intelligence assessments about Iraq. The assessments were delivered to the White House and to congressional intelligence committees before the war started.

Mongolian warlord Genghis Khan was notorious for his sexual as well as his territorial conquests. But the extent to which he captured women's hearts has now been revealed with research suggesting that he has 16 million Asian descendants.

Scientists traced a genetic trail believed to originate from the ruthless leader, who established the biggest empire the world as ever seen.

The work, conducted by Russian and Polish scientists, continued an investigation started three years ago.

With the death on Tuesday of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the Baptist minister and founder of the Moral Majority, and the announcement on Thursday that Paul D. Wolfowitz would resign from the presidency of the World Bank, two major figures in the modern conservative movement exited the political stage. To many, this is the latest evidence that the conservative movement, which has dominated politics during the last quarter century, is finished.

But conservatives have heard this before, and have yet to give in. Weeks after Barry Goldwater suffered a humiliating defeat in 1964 to Lyndon B. Johnson, his supporters organized the American Conservative Union to take on the Republican Party establishment. After failing to unseat Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976, Ronald Reagan positioned himself for the 1980 election. The conservatives dismayed by the election of Bill Clinton spent the next eight years attacking him at every opportunity. And after failing to win a conviction of Mr. Clinton following his impeachment, Republicans, far from retreating into caution or self-doubt, kept up the pressure and turned the 2000 election into a referendum on Mr. Clinton’s character.

A faculty group defending the accuracy of works by embattled University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill misrepresented sources or relied on books the authors themselves have since repudiated.

"That's just blatant distortion to make their point," said Russell Thornton, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose book was quoted in defense of Churchill.

University of Oklahoma professor Circes Sturm, who was also quoted, said she has since changed her views on a piece of federal Indian law Churchill is accused of distorting. Churchill was among her sources.

Scientists will outline dramatic evidence this week that suggests a comet exploded over the Earth nearly 13,000 years ago, creating a hail of fireballs that set fire to most of the northern hemisphere.

Primitive Stone Age cultures were destroyed and populations of mammoths and other large land animals, such as the mastodon, were wiped out. The blast also caused a major bout of climatic cooling that lasted 1,000 years and seriously disrupted the development of the early human civilisations that were emerging in Europe and Asia.

'This comet set off a shock wave that changed Earth profoundly,' said Arizona geophysicist Allen West...

The theory is to be outlined at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Acapulco, Mexico. A group of US scientists that include West will report that they have found a layer of microscopic diamonds at 26 different sites in Europe, Canada and America. These are the remains of a giant carbon-rich comet that crashed in pieces on our planet 12,900 years ago, they say...

The scientists point out that archaeological evidence shows that early Stone Age cultures clearly suffered serious setbacks at this time...Their disappearance at this time has been a cause of intense debate, with climate change being put forward as a key explanation. Now there is a new idea: the first Americans were killed by a comet.

It was not just America that bore the brunt of the comet crash...The disintegrating comet would have plunged into these ice sheets, causing widespread melting...

The comet theory, backed by observational evidence collected by the team, has excited considerable attention from other researchers, following publication of an outline report of the work in Nature.

Lori White thinks high school students should study a variety of religions, including Christianity. But the Bible curriculum used in Odessa, Texas, and a growing number of other schools, she says, is aimed at instilling faith, not knowledge.

''It's a curriculum that proselytizes,'' says Ms. White, whose son graduated from Odessa's Permian High School last year.

The text used in Odessa high schools, developed by the nonprofit National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, represents as fact that the Bible was a"foundational text" in the framing of the U.S., that the King James Bible"remains one of the...most-loved books in the history of the world," and that"the sun went black" when Jesus was crucified. Critics say that such statements represent the views of some believers, not necessarily scholars.

In recent years, many prominent educators have urged U.S. public schools to teach the Bible as part of literature or culture classes, contending that students need to understand the book's influence on literature, history and current events. More schools are starting to offer such classes, in some cases with a push from their state legislatures. Georgia last year passed a law providing money to encourage high schools to offer Bible electives. This month, the Texas House of Representatives almost unanimously approved a bill, now in the state Senate, that would offer training to teachers leading classes on the Old and New Testaments.

Related Links

5-17-07: ACLU, some parents sue over Bible classes in Ector County (Midland Reporter-Telegram)

Moreno v. Ector County Independent School District Board of Trustees -- Complaint (ACLU)

National Council on Bible Curriculum news

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez demanded Pope Benedict apologize to Indians in Latin America for saying this month in Brazil that the Roman Catholic Church purified them.

Chavez, who regularly clashes with the Catholic Church in Venezuela but had not directly criticized the Pope before, accused the Pontiff on Friday of ignoring the "holocaust" that followed Christopher Columbus's 1492 landing in the Americas. "With all due respect your Holiness, apologize because there was a real genocide here and, if we were to deny it, we would be denying our very selves," Chavez said at an event on freedom of expression.

In a speech to Latin American and Caribbean bishops at the end of a visit to Venezuela's neighbor Brazil, the Pope said the Church had not imposed itself on the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Indian leaders in the region were outraged by the comments.

Archaeologists working in Honduras have discovered an entombed human skeleton of an elite member of the ancient Maya Empire that may help unravel some longstanding mysteries of the vanished culture.

The remains, seated in an upright position in an unusual tomb and flanked by shells, pottery, vessels, and jade adornments, suggest a surprisingly diverse culture and complex political system in the influential Maya city of Copán around A.D. 650.

Located at the western edge of modern-day Honduras near the border with Guatemala, Copán, was one of the most important Maya sites, flourishing between the fifth and ninth centuries A.D.

Deep-sea treasure hunters said Friday they have recovered what could be a record haul of gold and silver coins from a colonial-era shipwreck -- but their failure to provide many details has set off a galleon-sized controversy over their claims...

"There is no such thing as $500 million on any wreck in the world," said Robert Marx, a veteran treasure hunter. "Anybody who says so is...lying."

George Bass, an archaeologist at Texas A&M University who specializes in shipwrecks, said... "Very often, it's exaggerated because of course they need to get financial backers," he said...

A spokesperson for [Odyssey Marine Exploration] stressed that because it is publicly traded, it can not distort the value of its discovery. "If we were to inflate the value of a find like that, we would be in serious trouble" said Laura Barton, vice president of communications.

Since September, the company has filed a series of motions in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida for a summary judgment giving it the rights to an "unidentified, shipwrecked vessel."

Related Links

Odyssey's 'Black Swan' press release

Hoard of treasure 'found on wreck off Cornwall' -- may be the 'Merchant Royal,' sunk 1641 (Telegraph)

Treacherous seas, a mystery wreck (Guardian)

"This is not my day job." So begins Michel Barsoum [professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Drexel University] as he recounts his foray into the mysteries of the Great Pyramids of Egypt. As a well respected researcher in the field of ceramics, Barsoum never expected his career to take him down a path of history, archaeology, and "political" science, with materials research mixed in...

The widely accepted theory-that the pyramids were crafted of carved-out giant limestone blocks that workers carried up ramps-had not only not been embraced by everyone, but as important had quite a number of holes...

[A]fter extensive scanning electron microscope (SEM) observations and other testing, Barsoum and his research group...found that the tiniest structures within the inner and outer casing stones were indeed consistent with a reconstituted limestone. The cement binding the limestone aggregate was either silicon dioxide (the building block of quartz) or a calcium and magnesium-rich silicate mineral.

The stones also had a high water content-unusual for the normally dry, natural limestone found on the Giza plateau-and the cementing phases, in both the inner and outer casing stones, were amorphous, in other words, their atoms were not arranged in a regular and periodic array. Sedimentary rocks such as limestone are seldom, if ever, amorphous.

The sample chemistries the researchers found do not exist anywhere in nature. "Therefore," says Barsoum, "it's very improbable that the outer and inner casing stones that we examined were chiseled from a natural limestone block."

Salon has a report by a political scientist who, in his searches through the Coalition Provisional Authority's Consolidated Weekly Reports, found all sorts of additional information buried in the documents. Turns out the CPA wasn't keeping close enough of an eye on the Microsoft Word's track changes capability."Presumably, staffers at the CPA's Information Management Unit, which produced the weekly reports, were cutting and pasting large sections of text into the reports and then eliminating all but the few short passages they needed. Much of the material they were cribbing seems to have come from the kind of sensitive, security-related documents that were never meant to be available to the public," author Pete Moore wrote.

Related Links

The secret Iraq documents my 8-year-old found (Pete Moore, Salon)

The views of Iraq you weren't supposed to see (Coalition Provisional Authority document)