Dowbrigade

U.S. President George W. Bush holds the hand of four year-old Baron Mosima Loyiso Tantoh after presenting the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington May 30, 2007. REUTERS/Larry Downing (UNITED STATES)

Ah, the blindness of privilege. Even when he tries to show the compassionate [...]

As Ivy League-educated pediatrician Robert P. Lindeman sat on the stand in Suffolk Superior Court this month, defending himself in a malpractice suit involving the death of a 12-year-old patient, the opposing counsel startled him with a question.
Was Lindeman Flea?
Flea, jurors in the case didn’t know, was the screen name for a blogger who had [...]

Three of the top Berkman denizens were rewarded for their brilliant ideas, but more than that, for their ability to transform their ideas into concrete programs that actually improve people’s lives in the real world…
The future of journalism is in your hands.
That was the message yesterday as the John S. and James L. Knight [...]

The Boston sports world, an all-consuming caldron of angst, emotion and eternal hope cruelly dashed, is awash in ranting and raving about tonight’s NBA Draft lottery. Not even the draft itself, mind you, but the lotto-like pingpong ball extravaganza, raised, in an example of rabid hype promoted into an actual event, somehow, to the [...]

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez demanded Pope Benedict apologize to Indians in Latin America for saying this month in Brazil that the Roman Catholic Church purified them.
Chavez, who regularly clashes with the Catholic Church in Venezuela but had not directly criticized the Pope before, accused the Pontiff on Friday of ignoring the “holocaust” [...]

WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of senators and President Bush agreed yesterday to a potentially historic deal on an immigration bill that would give 12 million undocumented residents the chance to become legal Americans while beefing up border security and cracking down on employers who hire illegal workers.
The measure would also lift an immigration backlog [...]

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) – Israeli planes pounded Hamas targets and rival Palestinian factions exchanged bursts of automatic weapons fire outside Gaza City’s Islamic University on Friday, as a volatile mix of Israeli strikes and Palestinian infighting plunged Gaza deeper into chaos.
The fighting largely died down later in the day after Fatah and [...]

(May 18, 2007) — More than two years after their grim work began in Rochester, four human-tissue recovery workers and three local funeral directors have been charged with taking bones, skin and other material from corpses without obtaining consent.
A 179-count indictment unsealed Thursday focused on the cases of 36 people who died in 2005 and [...]

According to the New York Times, the US is trying to turn Afghanistan into another Colombia – that is, convert a warlord based, heavily armed narco-insurgency into a warlord-based, heavily armed narco-democracy. They have even imported Colombian troops and advisers into Kabul to show them how it’s done. From the front page of the [...]

WASHINGTON — Lieutenant Daniel Zimmerman, an infantry platoon leader in Iraq, puts a blog on the Internet every now and then “to basically keep my friends and family up to date” back home.
It just got tougher to do that for Zimmerman and a lot of other US soldiers. No more using the military’s computer [...]

Brookline – A 19-year-old who allegedly posted ads on the Internet for “erotic massage” was arrested last week and charged with prostitution at her mother’s Coolidge Corner day care facility.
Police made the bust May 6, after catching an ad on www.craigslist.com that promised the services for $175 for a half-hour or $225 for an hour.
Vibeke A. [...]

Dear Cadets of Monty Tech:
Greetings from Baghdad, Iraq. I’m 1st Lt. Ryan Patrick Jones, US Army, and I was in your shoes not long ago. I graduated from Monty Tech in 2001 from the house carpentry program. When I was a student, there was no junior ROTC program, but if there was, I would have [...]