Ben Slade

New York Times - By Jeremy W. Peters - Sep. 07 (News Report) - In most businesses, not knowing how well a particular product is performing would be almost unthinkable. But newspapers have always been a peculiar business, one that has stubbornly, proudly clung to a sense that focusing too much on the bottom line can lead nowhere good. Now, because of technology that can pinpoint what people online are viewing and commenting on, how much time they spend with an article and even how much money an article makes in advertising revenue, newspapers can make more scientific decisions about allocating their ever scarcer resources. Such data has never been available with such specificity and timeliness. The reader surveys that newspapers relied on for decades took months to produce, often leaving editors with stale data. Looking to the public for insight on how to cover a topic is never comfortable for newsrooms, which have the deeply held belief that readers come to a newspaper not only for its information but also for its editorial judgment. But many newsrooms now seem to be re-examining that idea and embracing, albeit cautiously, a more democratic approach to serving up the news, particularly online.

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Huffington Post - By Micheal Moore - Sep. 07 (Opinion) - Did you know that back when I was a kid if you had a parent making a union wage, only one parent had to work?! And they were home by 3 or 4pm, 5:30 at the latest! We had dinner together! Dad had four weeks paid vacation. We all had free health and dental care. And anyone with decent grades went to college and it didn't fucking bankrupt them. (And if you ever used the F-word, the nuns would straighten you out in ways that even you couldn't bear to hear about).

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Associated Press - By Jay Lindsay - Sep. 06 (News Report) - The fight over whether the country's first offshore wind farm should be built off Cape Cod moves this week to a Boston hearing room, where the project's future turns on one question: Is the price of the electricity produced by the spinning turbines a good deal? On Tuesday, hearings begin at the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities, which will decide whether utility National Grid's 15-year contract to buy half the turbines' power is good for ratepayers. Teams of lawyers will present and cross-examine witnesses over 12 days of hearings that have been previewed in hundreds of pages of written testimony. The hearings, the latest battlefield in a decade-long fight over Cape Wind, is unprecedented for the DPU. It's the first long-term power deal the agency has considered since passage of a 2008 law that requires utilities to find more renewable sources of energy. "There so much animosity," said DPU executive director Timothy Shevlin. "So it's not really routine."

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New York Times - By Sheryl Gay Stolberg - Sep. 06 (Breaking News) - The president’s initiative would create jobs quickly by emphasizing long-term transportation projects like roads, rail and airport runways.

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BBC News - Sep. 05 (Breaking News) - Armed Basque separatist group Eta says it has decided not to carry out "armed actions" in its campaign for independence, the BBC learns.

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The Politico - By Jennifer Haberkorn - Sep. 05 (News Report) - A handful of House Democrats are making health care reform an election year issue — by running against it.

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GlobalPost - By Jon Jensen - Sep. 05 (Special Report) - The sheikh’s voice, amplified through a distorted megaphone perched just outside the mosque, booms and echoes off the neighborhood’s worn buildings and throughout its narrow alleyways. It’s a bit too loud, according to the Egyptian government, especially considering that the other estimated 4,000 mosques in Cairo all perform the same adhan at slightly varying times with different voices.

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New York Times - By Clifford Krauss, John M. Broder - Sep. 04 (Special Report) - “If we are unable to keep those fields going, that is going to have a substantial impact on our cash flow,” said David Nagel, BP’s executive vice president for BP America, in an interview. That, he added, “makes it harder for us to fund things, fund these programs.”

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Wall Street Journal - By Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow - Sep. 04 (Editorial) - Ignorance of nature's ways led people in ancient times to postulate many myths in an effort to make sense of their world. But eventually, people turned to philosophy, that is, to the use of reason—with a good dose of intuition—to decipher their universe. Today we use reason, mathematics and experimental test—in other words, modern science.

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Newsweek - By Fareed Zakaria - Sep. 04 (Editorial) - Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat? Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden’s terror network has been unable to launch a single

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Time - By Michael Scherer - Sep. 04 (Special Report) - This shift in perception — from Obama as political savior to Obama as creature of Washington — can be seen elsewhere. When Obama arrived in office in January '09, his Gallup approval rating stood at 68%, a high for a newly elected leader not seen since John Kennedy in 1961. Today Obama's job approval has been hovering in the mid-40s, which means that at least 1 in 4 Americans has changed his or her mind. The plunge has been particularly dramatic among independents, whites and those under age 30. With midterm elections just nine weeks off, instead of the generational transformation some Democrats predicted after 2008, the President's party teeters on the brink of a broad setback in November, including the possible loss of both houses of Congress. By a 10-point margin, people say they will vote for Republicans over Democrats in Congress, the largest such gap ever recorded by Gallup.

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Southern Poverty Law Center - Sep. 03 (News) -

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New York Times - By James Risen, Mark Mazzetti - Sep. 03 (News Report) - Blackwater Worldwide created a web of more than 30 shell companies or subsidiaries in part to obtain millions of dollars in American government contracts after the security company came under intense criticism for reckless conduct in Iraq, according to Congressional investigators and former Blackwater officials.

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Washington Post - By Eugene Robinson - Sep. 03 (Opinion) - According to polls, Americans are in a mood to hold their breath until they turn blue. Voters appear to be so fed up with the Democrats that they're ready to toss them out in favor of the Republicans -- for whom, according to those same polls, the nation has even greater contempt. This isn't an "electoral wave," it's a temper tantrum. It's bad enough that the Democratic Party's "favorable" rating has fallen to an abysmal 33 percent, according to a recent NBC-Wall Street Journal poll. It's worse that the Republican Party's favorability has plunged to just 24 percent. But incredibly, according to Gallup, registered voters say they intend to vote for Republicans over Democrats by an astounding 10-point margin. Respected analysts reckon that the GOP has a chance of gaining 45 to 60 seats in the House, which would bring Minority Leader John Boehner into the speaker's office. My guess is that with a decided advantage in campaign funds, along with the other advantages of incumbency, Democrats will be able to mitigate these prospective losses -- perhaps even relieving Nancy Pelosi of the hassles of moving. But there's no mistaking the public mood, and the truth is that it makes no sense. In the punditry business, it's considered bad form to question the essential wisdom of the American people. But at this point, it's impossible to ignore the obvious: The American people are acting like a bunch of spoiled brats.

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FactCheck - By Viveca Novak - Sep. 03 (News) - In Wisconsin and Kentucky House races, the Democrats are attempting to mislead voters into believing the Republican candidates support the privatization of Social Security — despite evidence to the contrary. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is up with an ad attacking Republican Sean Duffy in Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District, but the spot mischaracterizes Duffy’s position on [...]

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Los Angeles Times - By Hector Tobar - Sep. 03 (Editorial) - Today, more than eve, the cities in our Latin American past and the cities of our U.S. present are separated by powerful barriers. But it wasn't always that way. Once, a young Mexican postman of limited means could take his girlfriend on a trolley across the border for a strawberry soda. Or he could walk to the El Paso train station with his wife and begin an American family, entering a country where no one yet thought of building walls to keep people out.

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Robert Reich's Blog - By Robert Reich - Sep. 03 (Opinion) - What passes for business reporting in the United States is too often a series of breathless reports about the stock market. When the Dow rises precipitously, as it did today (Wednesday), the business press predicts an end to the Great Recession. When the stock market plummets, as it did last week, the Great Recession is said to be worsening.

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Vanity Fair - By Todd Purdum - Sep. 02 (Investigative Report) - How broken is Washington? Beyond repair? A day in the life of the president reveals that Barack Obama’s job would be almost unrecognizable to most of his predecessors—thanks to the enormous bureaucracy, congressional paralysis, systemic corruption (with lobbyists spending $3.5 billion last year), and disintegrating media. Inside the West Wing, the author talks to Obama’s top advisers about the challenge of playing the Washington game, ugly as it has become, even while their boss insists they find a way to transcend it.

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Miller-McCune - By Melinda Burns - Sep. 02 (Special Report) - Better-educated police officers resort less often to using force, research shows. Research shows that police officers with a college education resort to using force less often. Weighing in on a long-simmering dispute, a recent study for the Police

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NPR - By Jacob Goldstein - Sep. 02 (News) - In a speech yesterday, Christina Romer, departing chairman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, wasn't shy about how much economists don't understand about the nation's economy.

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