Slum clearance, South Africa-style

  From The Sunday Times of London August 30, 2009 The needy little boy behind Ted the titan Dominic Lawson    As Edward Kennedy was laid to rest yesterday, accompanied by a further fusillade of eulogies, we were forcibly made aware, once again, of the American fixation with the idea of personal redemption. The British are a less forgiving people. While even the right-wing US press skated around the late senator’s appalling personal behaviour over many years, in this country even politically sympathetic newspapers published excoriating accounts, concentrating on the incident 40 years ago when the 37-year-old Ted Kennedy abandoned Mary Jo Kopechne to die alone in a car he had driven off a small bridge linking Chappaquiddick to Martha’s Vineyard. It was only in a British newspaper that the American author Joyce Carol Oates was able last week to publish the following (factually accurate) account: “Kennedy chose to flee the scene leaving the young woman to die an agonising death, not of drowning, but of suffocation over a period of hours. It was over 10 hours before Kennedy reported the accident, by which time he’d consulted a family lawyer. The senator’s explanation for this unconscionable, despicable, unmanly ... behaviour was never convincing.” As Oates might have gone on to remind us, Kennedy’s subsequent broadcast in which he sought to keep alive his political career was a staggering display of self-pity from which even his illustrious team of speechwriters could not preserve him; and although he paid $90,000 out of his own ample pocket to the parents of Mary Jo, her mother later recalled: “I don’t think he ever said he was sorry.” If the Kennedys are the nearest thing to a royal family in the United States, they have almost divine…

  
The Web will dismember universities, just like newspapers.   "Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges can’t survive."  

  From The Sunday Times of London

Spycraft: Inside the CIA’s Top Secret Spy Lab by Robert Wallace and H Keith Melton The Sunday Times review by Brian Schofield
During the second world war, American military technicians tried to improve their bombardment of the Japanese fleet by strapping cats to the underside of their bombs. In theory, as Tiddles plummeted towards the Pacific ocean from the belly of a B-52, the natural feline aversion to water would steer both puss and payload towards the warm, dry surface of the enemy’s warships. According to the co-authors of Spycraft, “Initial tests proved cats were ineffective and the concept died as quickly as the first test subjects.” Spycraft, the first complete history of the CIA’s department for clandestine military gadgetry, known as the Office of Technical Services (OTS), is packed with such nuggets of experimental enthusiasm. It’s a testimony to the comprehensiveness of this chronicle of bombs, bugs, poison pills and exploding cigars (and to Washington’s bureaucratic witlessness, which the authors capture in full) that this book took nearly two years to be cleared by security for publication. It emerges that America’s spyware history began sluggishly in the second world war — hampered by a belief that relying on technology and subterfuge was un-American, and best left to the more naturally sneaky British. There were some wartime successes, though, notably smuggling exploding coal to the French resistance, to blow up German trains. But as the cold war warmed up, America languished far behind the technocrats of Soviet Russia — the KGB had a bug inside the Great Seal of the United States, hanging on the wall behind the desk of the American ambassador to Moscow, and Russian dedication to fieldwork included cracking American diplomatic safes…

    Stimulus Plan Would Provide Flood of Aid to Education By SAM DILLON WASHINGTON — The economic stimulus plan that Congress has scheduled for a vote on Wednesday would shower the nation’s school districts, child care centers and university campuses with $150 billion in new federal spending, a vast two-year investment that would more than double the Department of Education’s current budget. The proposed emergency expenditures on nearly every realm of education, including school renovation, special education, Head Start and grants to needy college students, would amount to the largest increase in federal aid since Washington began to spend significantly on education after World War II. Critics and supporters alike said that by its sheer scope, the measure could profoundly change the federal government’s role in education, which has traditionally been the responsibility of state and local government. Responding in part to a plea from Democratic governors earlier this month, Congress allocated $79 billion to help states facing large fiscal shortfalls maintain government services, and especially to avoid cuts to education programs, from pre-kindergarten through higher education. Obama administration officials, teachers unions and associations representing school boards, colleges and other institutions in American education said the aid would bring crucial financial relief to the nation’s 15,000 school districts and to thousands of campuses otherwise threatened with severe cutbacks. “This is going to avert literally hundreds of thousands of teacher layoffs,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Tuesday. Representative George Miller, Democrat of California and chairman of the House education committee, said, “We cannot let education collapse; we have to provide this level of support to schools.” But Republicans strongly criticized some of the proposals as wasteful spending and an ill-considered expansion of the…