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Mapes is right that the purported 30-year-old memos by Bush's long-dead squadron commander have not been proven to be forgeries, but is that the standard for broadcasting a serious charge? The documents have not been proven real, either, and endless debates about superscript and proportional spacing are not likely to change that.
In the same week that Mapes's "Truth and Duty" was published, Judith Miller was forced out of the New York Times after years of controversy. Miller, too, had lost the support of her news organization -- her executive editor, while praising her past contributions, had accused her of misleading the paper in the Valerie Plame leak investigation -- and her take-no-prisoners style had alienated many of her colleagues.
Unlike Mapes, Miller finally acknowledged, more than a year after the fact, that her stories on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction had been wrong. But she expressed no regrets about this, saying matter-of-factly that "if your sources are wrong, you are wrong." There was "lingering fury" toward her, Miller told CNN's Larry King, because some of her stories "had turned out to be based on faulty intelligence."
Not that Miller was a passive conduit. When the Army unit with which she was embedded in 2003 was ordered to pull back from its search for illegal weapons, Miller wrote military officials: "I intend to write about this decision in the NY Times to send a successful team back home just as progress on WMD is being made." The order was later rescinded.
Miller deserves credit for her willingness to go to jail rather than testify about her conversations with I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Yet she continues to defend her decision to leave jail 85 days later and testify, despite criticism that this undercut her original stance. She has accused editors at the paper of "unsubstantiated innuendo" and "ugly" and "inaccurate" criticism -- a turbulent end to a career in which she was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team.
April Oliver, a former CNN producer, also wound up at war with her ex-bosses. She sued the network in 1999 over its retraction of her story alleging that U.S. soldiers used lethal nerve gas in Laos during the Vietnam War. Oliver and a second producer were fired, and correspondent Peter Arnett reprimanded, when CNN and Time apologized for the "Operation Tailwind" story.
Just as Mapes has denounced the independent CBS inquiry co-chaired by former attorney general Richard Thornburgh, Oliver assailed CNN's outside investigation, headed by attorney Floyd Abrams, as a whitewash. One of Oliver's sources, retired Adm. Thomas Moorer, later denied the story. Oliver wound up suing another of her sources, retired Maj. Gen. John Singlaub, who in turn sued her and the news outlets. Oliver, who eventually settled her suit against CNN, told The Washington Post Magazine that the military had "gotten to" some of her sources.
Perhaps the saddest case involved Gary Webb, a San Jose Mercury News reporter who suggested in a 1996 series that the CIA knew a drug ring linked to the Nicaraguan contras had been selling crack in Los Angeles. When the "Dark Alliance" series caused an uproar, the Mercury News editor concluded after a review (and critical pieces in other major newspapers) that it "fell short" of the paper's standards. Webb, who called the findings "bizarre" and "nauseating," left the paper after being demoted. He committed suicide last year.
Recognizing demographic trends, a few years ago many Republicans seemed interested in reaching out to minority voters and tried to make them feel welcome in the Republican Party.
Those days seem to be long gone, and the new strategy adopted by the Republicans appears to be one of creating fear of those minority groups, vilifying them and doing everything possible to suppress their votes.
President Donald Trump's efforts to demonize a group of desperate people seeking asylum and calling them invaders is the most recent example, but you can go back to when he first announced his candidacy in 2015 if you need more evidence.
You can also look at concerted efforts to stop minority votes from counting in states like Kansas, North Dakota and Georgia for additional proof.
Recently, the president even sent out a tweet that seemed to have the intent of intimidating people so they would not vote, rather than encouraging them to vote.
This strategy of hatred, intimidation and suppression might pay dividends in the short run, but it is ultimately doomed to failure.
It might take a generation or two, but eventually the Republican strategy of being the party of exclusion rather than inclusion will come back to haunt them.
I just hope that one of the most divisive and hate-filled presidents in American history, and other Republican leaders such as Gingrich and McConnell, are around to see this failure.
Let's make America America again, as we seem to have lost it.
SCARBOROUGH — When teams try to defend championships, they often have to battle complacency along with all the opponents who want to knock them off their throne.
That hasn't been a problem for the York High School field hockey team. How could it be when only six of 19 players returned from last season's Class B champions?
The Wildcats (16-1) captured their fifth Western Maine title in the last six years with a 2-1 victory over rival Wells on Monday at Scarborough High School. York will attempt to defend its state crown on Saturday in Yarmouth against Eastern Maine champion Gardiner (17-0).
With so many fresh faces on its roster, York doesn't have the look of your average defending champion. After all, this is a new journey for most of the Wildcat players.
"As young as some of them are to this whole experience, they've been able to handle it well," York coach Barb Marois said. "I'm just so excited for this group, because you never know when the season starts where things are going to lead. Especially when you graduate so many and there's such a big turnover, but they've come through."
One of those new players, sophomore Cari Posternak, scored the eventual game-winning goal in Monday's regional final. Senior Stephanie Lomasney also scored for the Wildcats, who took a 2-0 lead and held off a late Wells charge.
Lomasney wasn't sure if York could maintain its lofty status among Maine's top programs, but she's been pleasantly surprised by how quickly her younger teammates learned the ropes.
"I thought it was going to be really hard, but I was wrong," said Lomasney. "You have to work with the new players, because you're not used to how they play. Our team values are still the same though. How we play is the same, so the transition hasn't been that hard."
The ease of that transition can be credited to Marois and her assistant coaches, Mona Blais and Laurie Coffenberry. Knowing she had a younger team, Marois moved some of her veteran players to different positions at the start of the season.
"The girls who have played and been through this are really stepping it up," said Marois. "They're kind of strategically placed around the field so that I've got a couple on the forward line, a couple in the midfield and a couple in the back. And the girls around them are responding."
Junior Shelly Potter is the only true defender that returned from last year's team. Juniors Emily Garry and Catie Keenan are new starters, and Marois moved Chelsea Morley from midfield to back in order to give that unit more experience.
York is especially young in the cage, with freshman goalkeepers Amanda Kasbohm and Olivia Drew serving as the last line of defense.
"Every team has a different personality, and I think that's the fun thing about coaching," Marois said. "It's not boring, because it's never the same. Every year is new, even more so this year just because there are so many newbies."
Those fresh faces will get their biggest test of the season on Saturday against unbeaten Gardiner. The younger players have heard plenty about last year's championship team. Now they have a chance to win one of their own.
"There's a certain expectation now I think with the program, and they know that they have to work for that," Marois said. "It doesn't just happen, it's something that you have to work for."
Thousands march against increasing instances of sexual harassment of female protesters.
Thousands of men and women have marched in Egypt against the sexual harrassment of female protesters.
More than 20 women were sexually assaulted last month during the second anniversary of the so-called "Arab Spring" protests that led to the downfall of Hosni Mubarak, former president.
But sexual violence is nothing new in Egypt, one study estimates that more than 80 percent of women have experienced it at least once.
Al Jazeera's Hoda Abdel-Hamid reports from Cairo.
ARSENAL fans have noticed something unusual about Tottenham's new stadium.
Mauricio Pochettino's side will finally play a first-team game at their new stadium on April 3 after months of anticipation.
Tottenham's U-18 side competed at the new venue on Sunday, giving fans their first glimpse of their new home.
But in the aftermath of the clash, Arsenal fans think they have spotted something unusual about one of the stands.
A number of Gunners supporters noticed some similarities between Arsenal's 'Clock End' at the Emirates Stadium and the new South Stand at Tottenham's new ground.
"When you see your neighbour's driveway and you ask the builders to do the same," tweeted one Arsenal fan, after sharing side by side pictures of the two different stands.
"Arsenal have a clock end, Spurs have a c*** end," added another.
"I'm convinced they're obsessed by us. What we do they follow," a third wrote.
"Exactly the same design but the Emirates got a trophy room," one said.
"You know what they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," a fifth added.
"They are always behind us. Copy and paste club," another tweeted.
Speaking on the pitch at half-time, Spurs boss Pochettino said: "We all feel the same, so excited.
"I got the same feeling when we left White Hart Lane on the last day, we were crying and now in the first day in the new stadium we feel the same emotion.
Sky Sports News reporter Jeremy Langdon, who was at the venue on Sunday, said: "The friendliness and the new Spurs fan ambassadors stood out as they helped supporters get in.
"There are very visible bag searches and lots of security. The onus is on having small and clear bags to speed access.
"Inside, the stadium itself is incredible and now the second biggest Premier League venue.
"The sweeping curves are spectacular and pleasing on the eye. And the high and tight steep stands are surely what a proper football stadium should be. There are echoes of the old White Hart Lane here."
Tottenham legends will take on a number of Inter Milan heroes at the new stadium on March 30.
LIVERPOOL snatched a crucial win over Tottenham to go back to the top of the Premier League.
TOTTENHAM boss Mauricio Pochettino is not occupying his usual dugout position for his sides game at Liverpool.
Did you see Callum Hudson-Odoi’s face when he DIDN’T get on for Chelsea?
For the next three weeks, according to gaming industry estimates, nearly 40 million Americans will gamble more than $2 billion on the outcome of a tournament featuring the nation’s best unpaid basketball players.
The tradition starts Sunday evening, with the unveiling of the 68-team NCAA tournament field, and will continue this week in offices across the country. Come Thursday at noon Eastern, when games tip off in earnest, sports bars will fill and Internet streaming capabilities will strain as bettors keep track of their wagers on an event run by a nonprofit organization vehemently opposed to gambling.
The NCAA men’s basketball tournament bracket pool is an inimitably American tradition that encapsulates all that is complicated, contradictory and, some say, hypocritical about the cultural and financial heft of sports in our society.
Many have attempted to explain the cognitive dissonance necessary to understand the bracket pool’s place in a country where betting on sports is mostly illegal, but perhaps none have done better than 11-year-old Max Kohll of Omaha.
In 2012, Kohll ended up in the principal’s office after he was caught with brackets and cash at his elementary school. In an interview with the local newspaper, the befuddled fifth-grader, whose mother had approved of her son’s first foray into gambling and even paid his $5 entry fee, tried to explain what he’d learned.
Kohll’s confusion is understandable. Even the people who put on the NCAA men’s basketball tournament have long struggled with the widespread, condoned gambling that fuels much of the interest in their annual spectacle.
Over the years, not everyone involved in staging the tournament has taken such a dogmatic stance. Former University of Kansas athletic director Bob Frederick, who once chaired the tournament’s selection committee, in 1995 tried to explain why he thought tournament pools aren’t really sports gambling.
Which, some might note, is essentially the definition of sports gambling.
It wasn’t always this way. Before the 1980s, the word “bracket” appeared in newspapers mostly in reference to tax classifications, and the only office pools anyone wrote about involved National Football League games and required participants to understand the vagaries of the point spread. Then, in 1979, the NCAA basketball tournament leapt in national prominence, thanks to the championship game between Magic Johnson’s Michigan State Spartans and Larry Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores, still the highest-rated television broadcast in the event’s history.
Nationally televised broadcasts always have fueled betting interest on those sporting events, said gambling historian David Schwartz, and in 1985, the NCAA added an accelerant: The tournament expanded that year to 64 teams, a number that allowed for a geometrically enticing, aesthetically pleasing bracket.
“The pureness of the 64-team, single-elimination bracket allowed everyone to participate, because it was really, really simple,” said Tim Otteman, a Central Michigan University assistant professor who has studied the tournament and problem gambling.
If newspaper coverage is any indication of cultural permeation, the March Madness office pool exploded from niche practice to national tradition in about a decade. A search of a database of U.S. newspaper archives found zero stories referring to tournament office pools before 1980, 23 stories in the 1980s, 760 stories in the 1990s, and more than 3,000 in the 2000s.
Today, stories about the popularity and financial impact of the office pool are a staple of annual March Madness news coverage, along with stories marveling at the tournament’s spiraling television revenue (1980: $9 million, 1990: $64 million, 2000: $228 million, 2010: $634 million).
And while the tournament office pool is outlawed in much of the country, it is a crime roughly equivalent to driving 60 mph in a 55-mph zone.
“Technically, it is a violation of state and federal law, but it’s so socially accepted that I’ve never heard of a situation where there’s been punitive action taken by a law enforcement agency over an office pool,” said Steven Silverman, former public defender and managing partner of Silverman Thompson Slutkin White, a Baltimore-based law firm.
Although the regular pick-all-the-games office pools are mostly tacitly condoned by law enforcement, there have been situations in which police have broken out the metal bracelets for organizers of the gambling contests.
In 1992, police in East Greenwich, R.I., arrested Robert S. Plain, 18, on a misdemeanor charge of possession of gambling paraphernalia. The crime? Plain, a high school senior, had been passing out brackets in homeroom.
These stories of youngsters betting on the tournament concern Otteman, the Central Michigan professor. He contends that brackets are the “gateway drug” of sports gambling, giving children the first rush that can lead to addiction. Otteman credits the NCAA’s anti-gambling publicity and education campaigns, but he is still bothered every year when the organization, on its Web site, provides printable brackets that are inevitably used for gambling.
The stance likely won’t change. On Tuesday, in a federal courtroom in Philadelphia, attorneys for the NCAA will continue the fight to keep sports betting illegal. A hearing is scheduled that day in a case between the NCAA, professional sports leagues and the state of New Jersey, which has been trying to legalize sports betting for years.
Meantime, on Monday morning, many federal employees will be reminded that their standards of conduct prohibit them from participating in any gambling activity while on duty or on government property. And if they have ESPN, they can watch live later this week as President Obama fills out his bracket.
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A unique method of embalming a human body, which rivalled that used to preserve Lenin, was developed by an unknown laboratory assistant in Siberia 70 years ago - and then lost.
A body mummified using the special method is on display at the Medical Academy in the city of Omsk. It looks in almost the same condition as when it was first prepared in 1933.
Russian Centre TV said that while it took a whole team of scientists to develop the revolutionary technique that preserved Lenin's body after his death in 1924, Andrey Romadanovsky, a self-taught laboratory assistant, came upon his own method alone and unaided.
The identity of the Siberian mummy is not known, but it could be that of one of the institute's staff who volunteered his body for scientific experiments, the TV said.
Unlike Lenin's body, which has lain in the mausoleum in Red Square where the air pressure and temperature are kept constant, the unknown mummy in Omsk lies in a simple glass sarcophagus which protects it only from dust.
"And yet the body looks almost the same as in 1933 when it was embalmed. Even all the inner organs are intact", the TV said.
It is known that Romadanovsky used a combination of formalin, alcohol and glycerin to create his embalming fluid. But the TV said the secret was in the combination and no one had been able to reproduce it.
Lenin's body has needed constant attention to keep it in good condition. His face and hands would be soaked twice a week with a special solution. And once a year, the mausoleum would be closed and his whole body immersed in the solution.
The work is still undertaken by the special research institute set up to discover how to preserve the founder of the Soviet state "for all eternity".
All the staff in the museum in Omsk have done to protect their mummy is sprinkle some moth powder around it.
Lenin's body lay in the mausoleum as a symbol of inspiration for generations of communists. Thousands of people from around the Soviet Union would queue for hours each day to view the body.
Today, the permanent guard of honour has been removed and the number of visitors has fallen dramatically.
There have been many calls in recent years for his body to be removed from the mausoleum and buried.
Unlike the team of specialists which embalmed Lenin, Romadanovsky received no payment for his discovery and he died in obscurity in Omsk - along with his formula.
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg has announced that his solar-powered drone aircrafts have begun test flights over the UK with the first flight already complete.