Saturday, February 01, 2003 :::
 
Some sad news on this Saturday afternoon: All 7 astronauts aboard the shuttle Columbia perished in an explosion over Texas, on their way to land at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Just a few days ago, one of the astronauts, Israel's first ever astronaut, made the statement that the Middle East "looks so peaceful" from space. While it seems very unlikely that this was an act of terrorism and not just mechanical failure, many news outlets are at least considering the possibility that the explosion might have been caused by a terrorist. It seems to me that for any tragedy that now occurs involving an explosion or a crash, the issue of terrorism will at least be raised in the media. Talk about a country on the edge. My condolences to the families of those who died on the Space Shuttle Columbia.

::: posted by Andrewski at 1:08 PM

Monday, January 27, 2003 :::
 
Berkeley's own Republican publication The Patriot gets even more national exposure, featured in a story in this week's Time Magazine. Fellow Berkeley blogger Devora Liss gets quoted. The article, undoubtedly, will get The Patriot zillions in contributions from wealthy, Time-reading conservatives the whole country over. Unfortunately, I can't find an online copy of the article, but if you'd like to see it I reccomend picking up a copy of this week's Time (with the CIA on the cover).

::: posted by Andrewski at 7:28 PM

 
Happy Monday! We have a new blog on the Berkeley beat- Berkeley Pundits, by Andrew Ratto and Sean Kennedy. A sidebar link is forthcoming.

I enjoyed Andy Katz's inside skinny on Berkeley City Council meetings in today's Daily Cal. Katz lends himself well to journalism, and I thought the article read like a gossipy friend who knows all the dirt on everyone in the room. This is a good thing. I look forward to future articles from Katz.

Also, if anything should get the public riled up about strict new anti-immigration legislation (i.e., Ashcroft's tightening of borders and the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2001), it should be the story of UC Berkeley Math Professor Mehmet Erdogon, who is apparently stuck in Turkey because someone with his name has a criminal record. I'm sure Professor Erdogon is not the only innocent individual who is being held up by the fact that he's in a country we consider threatening. The fact that we're keeping a math professor out of our own country, but the FBI still asks us to be on the lookout for terrorists who may have slipped past, just goes to show that the War on Terrorism is sliding into the same sort of futile aggravation as the War on Drugs. November 2004 can't come quickly enough to change our course.

::: posted by Andrewski at 5:02 PM