We see more and more evidence each day that our democracy is in jeopardy and we’re just a stone’s-throw away from being under the rule of a dictatorship. Just another case of the “decider knows best” I suppose.

Undue Influence

Former surgeon general Joycelyn Elders on what happens when politics trumps science in the office of the nation’s top doctor.

Former surgeon general Richard Carmona testified that he faced intense political pressure from the Bush administration. Left: Joycelyn Elders, who held the office in the Clinton administration, asks, ‘If all he is going to do is be the president’s mouthpiece, what does the country need with a surgeon general?’

July 12, 2007 - On Thursday, President Bush’s nominee for surgeon general, Dr. James Holsinger, faced blunt questioning at his Senate confirmation hearing about how he would react if he were pressured to put politics before science. “I would resign,” Holsinger said.

If history is any indication, he’s likely to be tested on that promise. Earlier in the week, three former surgeons general-including Dr. Richard Carmona, the most recent occupant of that august office-testified before Congress that he felt intense political pressure. Carmona, who left office in July, said that the Bush administration had delayed his reports and changed his speeches on controversial issues such as smoking and stem cells. “Anything that doesn’t fit into the political appointees’ ideological, theological or political agenda is ignored, marginalized or simply buried,” he testified. That came as no surprise to Joycelyn Elders, who served as surgeon general from 1993 to 1994 under President Bill Clinton; she was asked to step down after her comments about masturbation’she called it “a part of human sexuality, and is part of something that perhaps should be taught”’stirred up a political controversy of their own.

(Mary Carmichael, Newsweek)

Full article at MSNBC.com

NEW YORK: Undeterred by skeptics and hoping modern technology can help solve a 70-year-old mystery, a group of investigators embarks this week on a new attempt to discover whether famed aviator Amelia Earhart may have crash-landed and died as a castaway on a remote South Pacific island.

The expedition by 15 members of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, known as TIGHAR, will be the group’s ninth visit to the atoll known as Nikumaroro, located about 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) south of Hawaii.

They were to fly from Los Angeles to Fiji on Thursday and board a chartered motor sailer for a 1,000-mile (1,600-kilometer), five-day trip to the uninhabited, 2 1/2-mile (4-kilometer) -long island near the intersection of the equator and the international dateline.

Once there, the group was to spend 17 days searching for human bones, aircraft parts and any other evidence to show that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, reached the island on July 2, 1937, crashed on a reef at low tide and made it to shore, where they possibly lived for months as castaways, written off by the world as having been lost at sea.

The conditions during the search will be punishing, with the explorers forced to contend with dense jungle vegetation, 100-degree (40 Celsius) heat, sharks that reside in a lagoon in the middle of the island and voracious crabs that make it necessary to wear shoes at all times.

More at the International Herald Tribune

Spiegel takes a look at what German commentators are saying about George Bush after yesterday’s speech and the secret report on Al Queda renewed strength.

A resurgent al-Qaida. A continuing lack of success in Iraq. Not much is going right for George W. Bush. The American president, German commentators argue on Friday, has no options left when it comes to the failure of Iraq.

A resurgent al-Qaida. A continuing lack of success in Iraq. Not much is going right for George W. Bush. The American president, German commentators argue on Friday, has no options left when it comes to the failure of Iraq.

Not much is going right in Iraq these days.

Europeans have never been terribly impressed with United States President George W. Bush’s grasp on reality. Indeed, it has long been accepted by many on the continent that Bush’s War on Terror is a farce and his invasion of Iraq a failure. Two announcements that hit the headlines on Thursday merely served to reinforce that anti-Bush image.

The first was an assessment by US counter-terrorism analysts saying that the terror group al-Qaida is “considerably operationally stronger than a year ago” and has “regrouped to an extent not seen since 2001.” In other words, despite the years of hunting down the group in the mountains of Afghanistan and elsewhere, al-Qaida is back. President Bush, not surprisingly, used the report as evidence in support of his anti-terror strategy.

“The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq were the ones who attacked us in America on Sept. 11,” he said. “That’s why what happens in Iraq matters to security here at home.”

The second titbit from Thursday was Bush’s own Iraq progress report. In the assessment, a requirement imposed by Congress following mid-term election losses by Bush’s Republican Party, Bush claimed that progress was made on eight of 18 benchmarks. A further eight were deemed wanting and two were inconclusive. Shortly after the report was delivered, the US House of Representatives passed a bill calling for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq by April 1, 2008.

Read the rest at Spiegel

By DAVID KOENIG
Associated Press Writer

DALLAS - A government investigator has accused the Federal Aviation Administration of covering up mistakes by air traffic controllers at one of the nation’s busiest airports and sometimes shifting the blame to pilots.

The problems at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport included planes that flew too close together and a controller who did not notify a colleague when a plane was cleared for takeoff.

The allegations came from the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, an independent investigative agency responsible for protecting government whistle-blowers. The office’s report renewed accusations that were made in 2005 but, according to the investigator, never fixed.

“The message needs to get out that we have a cavalier attitude about safety,” special counsel Scott Bloch said Thursday in an interview, citing a “culture of laxness” at both the FAA and the air traffic controllers’ union.

The FAA insisted that all controller errors are reported correctly and said inspectors had recently visited the airport.

Bloch warned that if safety violations were persistently ignored, “eventually you’re going to have an air crash.”

read more at YAHOO! NEWS