One of Ours

Wall Street Journal reporters plan to withhold their bylines from stories for two days this week as contract negotiations with their employer, Dow Jones & Co., turn increasingly rancorous.

The Independent Association of Publishers Employees, a union representing U.S. reporters at the Journal, called on its members Monday to withhold their bylines from stories in Wednesday and Thursday editions of the paper.

[...]

Lauricella said the byline strike, the first in the history of Dow Jones, was being called because the company had threatened to stop negotiating with the union and to impose a "punitive" contract, he said.

"It came to this because Dow Jones continues to refuse to negotiate in good faith," Lauricella said. "The company is demanding we take benefits cuts and paltry wage raises that will leave us behind the [rise in the] cost of living."...

The success of a host of euroskeptic and populist parties on both sides of the former Iron Curtain suggests that disillusionment with Brussels has reached a new and more concrete level than before, analysts said Monday.

"These elections have brought to the fore a new political divide in Europe - the pro and anti-European divide, which transcends the traditional left-right gap," said Jean-Philippe Roy, professor of political science at Tours University. "If politicians don't take this new phenomenon into account the disconnect between them and the voters will grow ever wider."

The most resounding triumph came in Britain, where the U.K. Independence Party, which is calling for the country's withdrawal from the European Union altogether, won 17 percent of the national vote and 12 seats in the European Parliament, four times as many as in the last election five years ago...

Just about every flight engineer and crew chief has noticed over the course of flying across this place called Afghanistan these past months that a large percentage of the children have no shoes to wear and of course, almost all of the girls are shoeless.

So my esteemed friends of the blogosphere, in the spirit of Chief Wiggles and minding the words of the infamous Steve Miller Band, I announce the beginning of Operation Shoe Fly in an effort to shoe the children, with no shoes on their feet. If you can collect the shoes, used or new, boys' and girls' (age 14 and under), and send them to me, my crewdogs and I will fly them out to the Afghani kids who so desperately need them.

Please send your shoes to:

Operation Shoe Fly
B Co, 214th Aviation Regiment
Bagram, Afghanistan
APO AE 09354-9998

About a month ago, I was watching Al-Iraqyia TV. They were hosting a spokesman of the coalition and the secretary of the Muslim Sunni Cleric Council Harith Muthanna Al-Dhari. They were talking about the revolt in Falujah. That guy was an extremely anti-American fanatic cleric and he didn’t even try to hide his feelings...

[...]

[reporter]-Is it true that Fallujah harbor most of the ex-Baathists and Saddam followers and that these are the bulk of the so-called resistance?

[Al-Dhari]-No, that’s absolutely not true. We were always against Saddam and his regime.

-Come on Saddam named Al-Anbar as one of the "white governorate"” because its people didn’t take part in the uprising in 1991, and you have had many pro-Saddam demonstrations since the 9th of April there!

-Now that's not true and let me tell you something you may not know. First there were only two demonstration supporting Saddam after he was caught and that’s how they happened: Soon after Saddam was captured, a reporter from one of the Arab satellite channels, and I don't want to mention its name, came downtown, gathered a bunch of teenagers, handed each one of them $20US and gave them some pictures of Saddam. He then asked them to shout and dance and made a great report out of it. The same thing happened again in exactly the same manner!...