Why journalists need a broader education, Part 34,567,276:

The European-built Huygens descended through the dense atmosphere and touched down on the largest and most intriguing moon of Saturn on Friday.

On board is a $12 million spectrogram built by scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder that will analyze electroviolet light.

Emphasis mine.

My email correspondent who sent me this informs me that it was a republication of an article by the noted NYT science reporter John Noble Wilford.

Based on a discussion with my friend who is a scientist on the descent imager, Wilford wrote his piece without the idiocy, which was added by a reporter at the Denver Post, who was no doubt trying to provide a

That’s the only way to describe the coverage of the story of the kid who was indicted yesterday for conspiring to assassinate the president as part of an Al Qaeda plot. When I heard about this on the radio in the car, a big part of the story was apparently that he was a valedictorian of a Virginia high school. I guess that this was supposed to indicate some kind of disconnect; how could such a seemingly all-American boy do such a thing?

Well, as Paul Harvey says, here’s the rest of the story. The “high school” was a Saudi-funded madrassa. (Do such institutions even have valedictorians, in the sense that we would recognize them?)

Why wasn’t this part reported? Fear of CAIR?

[Via LGF]

[Update at 9:33 AM EST]

Ed Morrissey has more.

Dan Darling has some disturbing news from the Middle East, that could amount to a casus belli with Baby Assad’s regime:

To bring it down to the bottom line, this means that a Palestinian terrorist group that is trained, harbored, and financed by Bashar al-Assad’s regime is complicit in the deaths of US and Iraqi soldiers. If this can be confirmed, it would seem to indicate that Syrian involvement in the assassination of Rafik Hariri would be the least of al-Assad’s (or Khaddam, if we want to be more up-front about these things) problems.

What’s more disturbing, as he points out, is that it’s not being covered in the media here.

In some ways, this is like the Eason Jordan affair. This is either true, or not. If true, it’s a huge story that the media should be digging into. If false, then it’s a huge story that they should be debunking. Either way, they remain asleep at the switch.

[Update at 9:20 AM EST]

Jim Robbins says that Assad is a uniter, not a divider. Not that that’s a good thing, in his case. At least not for him…

[Another update, at 10 AM EST]

From this article by David Ignatius in today’s WaPo:

The leader of this Lebanese intifada is Walid Jumblatt, the patriarch of the Druze Muslim community and, until recently, a man who accommodated Syria’s occupation. But something snapped for Jumblatt last year, when the Syrians overruled the Lebanese constitution and forced the reelection of their front man in Lebanon, President Emile Lahoud. The old slogans about Arab nationalism turned to ashes in Jumblatt’s mouth, and he and Hariri openly began to defy Damascus…

…”It’s strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq,” explains Jumblatt. “I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.” Jumblatt says this spark of democratic revolt is spreading. “The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it.”

This from a man who has long expressed anti-American sentiments.

[Via Jim Garaghty]

[One more at 3:30 PM]

The Syrian plot continues to thicken:

Iraqi state television aired a video Wednesday showing what the U.S.-funded channel said was the confession of a captured Syrian officer who said he trained Iraqi insurgents to behead people and build car bombs to attack American and Iraqi troops.

The video also showed an Iraqi who said the insurgents practiced beheading animals to train for decapitating hostages.

If true, why is this not a clear act of war against both Iraq and the coalition?

Pat Oliphant has a cartoon that shows angry bloggers, with battle axes and other midieval weapons, storming the castle gates.

So, even the old war horse of a political cartoonist is becoming blog savvy, eh?

Well, not exactly. If he were really familiar with the blogosphere, he’d be aware of this Cox and Forkum cartoon from early last week (which is much better, and heavily linked by bloggers). And rather than being embarrassed by his slow response, hopefully he’d have come up with something more original.