CQ stands by falafel story

Wired News publishes CQ’s insistence that their reporting on this falafel fiasco was right all along.

Like you, we take the issues of national security and civil liberties very seriously, which is why Jeff Stein thought it important to write about the domain management program. His sources described to him the intelligence-gathering program that involved the sales of Middle Eastern food in some detail, and we had no reason to believe that those sources inaccurately portrayed it when the column was published. After conferring further with them upon receipt of your letter, Mr. Stein and Congressional Quarterly stand by the column.

The FBI’s San Francisco office was given repeated opportunities by Mr. Stein to respond to his column before it was published, and declined. An FBI spokesman in Washington did respond, choosing neither to confirm nor deny the existence of the program, and his comments were included in the column. An after-the-fact denial is of less use to readers than one that could have run with the column, but, in the interest of fairness, we will publish it with Mr. Stein’s next column.

Cyrus on The World — TODAY!

Dear Friends,

I’ve been informed that my radio piece on the return of President Ahmadinejad’s blog will be airing today.

Will be available on any of these stations (and their Internet streams):

New York – 3 pm Eastern – WNYC – 820 AM – www.wnyc.org
Washington, DC – 8 pm Eastern – WAMU – 88.5 FM – www.wamu.org
Los Angeles – 12 pm Pacific – KPCC – 89.3 FM – www.kpcc.opg
Boston – 4 pm Eastern – WGBH – 89.7 FM – www.wgbh.org
San Francisco – 2 pm Pacific – KQED – 88.5 FM – www.kqed.org

Will be available on The World’s site tonight and here if you miss the broadcast.

Update: Audio is here.

Cyrus on NPR — TODAY!

I’ve been informed that my radio piece on MC Hammer’s DanceJam.com will air on Morning Edition today!

It will be available on any of these stations (and their Internet streams):

New York – 5 am to 9 am Eastern – WNYC – 820 AM – www.wnyc.org
Washington, DC – 5 am to 10 am Eastern – WAMU – 88.5 FM – www.wamu.org
Los Angeles – 2 am to 9 am Pacific – KPCC – 89.3 FM – www.kpcc.opg
Boston – 6 am to 9 am Eastern – WGBH – 89.7 FM – www.wgbh.org
San Francisco – 3 am to 9 am Pacific – KQED – 88.5 FM – www.kqed.org

Or listen on NPR’s site here.

Lemme know if you hear it!

I will also be posting the unedited 45-minute interview with MC Hammer later today.

Map spies!

Paul Boutin astutely observed that the NYT buried the lede when it said that there are no less than 16 American spy agencies.

My favorite?

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — in other words, map spies!

Speaking of maps and puzzles, check this:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The only surviving copy of the 500-year-old map that first used the name America goes on permanent display this month at the Library of Congress, but even as it prepares for its debut, the 1507 Waldseemuller map remains a puzzle for researchers.

Why did the mapmaker name the territory America and then change his mind later? How was he able to draw South America so accurately? Why did he put a huge ocean west of America years before European explorers discovered the Pacific?

“That’s the kind of conundrum, the question, that is still out there,” said John Hebert, chief of the geography and map division of the Library of Congress.

Estonian prime minister opens San Jose trade office

How come no one told me that the prime minister of Estonia, Andrus Ansip, was in San Jose last week?

Anyway, he was there to open up a new “tech embassy” downtown. (I’m assuming that this is the first of its kind anywhere in the world.)

SJBJ:

“Silicon Valley changed the world, Andrus Ansip told a small gathering of reporters and city hall officials Friday afternoon. “All of our companies would like to cooperate more with the companies in Silicon Valley.”

Estonia has been scouting the valley for two years. The prime minister officially opened an office of Enterprise Estonia, located in the U.S. Market Access Center on Market Street in Downtown San Jose. The one-person office will be headed by Andrus Viirg.

Estonia is an emerging technology center, aided in part by its proximity to Scandinavian tech centers. Skype, a software program that enables Internet phone calls, was created in Estonia, and has a big presence in Tallinn and Tartu, the two largest cities in Estonia. The company is now owned by San Jose-based eBay Inc.

Of course, Ross Mayfield got to dine with Mr. Ansip. (I’m so jealous.)

I’ll be making my pilgrimage down there to the “one-man office” sometime this week, hopefully.

Who’s Afraid of Barack Obama?

NYT:

Part of the Republicans’ difficulty in countering Mr. Obama, should they have to, is their own cynical racial politics. For the most part, race has been the dog that hasn’t barked in this campaign despite the (largely) white press’s endless fretting about whether the Illinois senator is too white for black voters and too black for white voters. Most Americans aren’t racist, most Republicans included. (Those who are won’t vote for the Democratic presidential candidate even if it’s not Mr. Obama.) But the G.O.P., by its own doing, is nonetheless saddled with a history that most recently includes “macaca” and Katrina, Mr. Bush’s appearance at Bob Jones University in 2000 and the nonexistent black population of its Congressional delegation.

As the Republican leadership knows, this record is an albatross, driving away not just black voters but crucial white swing voters, too. Ken Mehlman, the former G.O.P. chairman, and Mr. Rove, as recently as in that Newsweek column, have implored their party to reach out to minorities. So have Newt Gingrich and Jack Kemp. But not even conservative leaders of this stature could persuade their party’s top 2008 presidential contenders to show up for a September debate moderated by Tavis Smiley for PBS at the historically black Morgan State University.

It’s not because those no-shows are racists; it’s because they are defensive and out of touch. With the notable exception of Mike Huckabee, most of the party’s candidates have barricaded themselves from African-Americans for so long that they don’t know how to speak to or about them. As sure-footed as these Republicans are in attacking the Clintons and Streisand — or in exchanging fire with Al Sharpton and hip-hop moguls — they are strangers to the mainstream multiracial and multicultural America exemplified by an Obama or an Oprah.

An Obama candidacy would force them to engage. Or try to. A matchup between Mr. Obama and Mr. Giuliani, who was forged in the racial crucible of New York’s police brutality nightmares of the 1990s, or between Mr. Obama and Mitt Romney, who was shaped by a religion that didn’t give blacks equal membership until 1978, would be less a clash of races than of centuries.

Time:

The speech mixed inspiration and contempt, passion and outrage, autobiography and attack. It balanced language that both harkened back to the rich, poetic phrases of Martin Luther King (he cited King’s reminder about “the fierce urgency of now”) and the less subtle patois of contemporary politics — his boast that “when I’m your nominee, my opponent won’t be able to say that I supported this war in Iraq; or that I gave George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran,” was a deft jab to the very center of Hillary Clinton’s weaknesses in the Democratic primary. Unless you think he got to the center of her weaknesses here: “Not answering questions because we’re afraid our answers just won’t be popular just won’t do it.” Or maybe here: “Telling Americans what they think they want to hear instead of telling the American people what they need to hear just won’t do it.” And yet he ended on a soaring note: “In this election — at this moment — let us reach for what we know is possible. A nation healed. A world repaired. An America that believes again.”

Pacific Solution to be abolished

One of the best things about the fact that Kevin Rudd was elected as Australia’s new Prime Minister is the scrapping of the “Pacific Solution” — an ominously-named plan that processed refugees seeking to come to Australia on offshore sites, including Nauru.

The Age:

Under the policy, which was introduced following the Tampa crisis in the lead-up to the 2001 federal election, asylum seekers intercepted before they reach the Australian mainland are processed at camps on Nauru and Manus Island, in Papua New Guinea.

A recent report by Oxfam Australia and refugee advocacy group A Just Australia said the “flawed system” fuelled mental illness in refugees, failed to uphold Australia’s commitment under international law and squandered money.

T-Pain rocks Billboard, and cellphone ringtones?

Big ups to NPR’s Nate DiMeo for this awesome story explaining ringtones and the tech behind T-Pain, a rapper that I’d never heard of. Apparently he makes up for one in three of this week’s Billboard Top 10 tracks.

Listen to the piece here. (No, seriously. This piece works best as a piece of audio.)

The money (har) quotes:

“It’s his signature vocal sound, maybe more so than his actual voice, that has become one of the defining sounds in the radio this year. [SONG] It’s that sound. [SONG] That little robot sound when he says he’s going to buy you a drink.”

“Early historians of early radio speculate that one of the reason that singers like Bing Crosby became so popular was that their crooning tones sounded particularly good coming through the primitive speakers that people had in their living rooms. Today, some in the music industry think that T-Pain’s signature vocal sound, [CLIP] sounds particularly good through that tiny speaker in your pocket.”