News Scraps
IRS regulations and the federal tax code combined have more than 11 million words.
According to a report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a press watchdog group affiliated with Columbia University, U.S. media coverage of the 2004 Presidential election was three times more likely to be negative about George W. Bush than John Kerry: 36 percent of stories about Bush were negative; just 12 percent of stories about Kerry were. . . . Kerry on his failed Presidential bid: "I won the youth vote. I won the independent vote. I won the moderate vote. If you take half the people at an Ohio State football game on Saturday afternoon and they were to have voted the other way, you and I would be having a discussion today about my State of the Union speech."
According to a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll, 40 percent of Democrats favor Hillary Clinton as the party's Presidential nominee in 2008, making her the top choice. John Kerry trails at 25 percent. . . . The same poll found former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani to be the top GOP choice, with 34 percent of Republicans hoping he'll run for President in 2008. Arizona senator John McCain is second at 29 percent. . . . McCain on a Hillary Clinton Presidency: "I am sure that Senator Clinton would make a good President. I happen to be a Republican and would support, obviously, a Republican nominee, but I have no doubt that Senator Clinton would make a good President."
Travel spending in 2004 returned to pre-9/11 levels. According to Smart Money, Americans spent over $520 billion on domestic travel last year. . . . Tighter restrictions on carry-on items have resulted in a 50 percent drop in sales of Swiss Army knives.
The New York Times reports that more Africans have moved to the U.S. since 1990 than arrived in the previous two centuries, including the 500,000 Africans brought here as slaves.
A University of Massachusetts Medical School study suggests that a mother nursing her child experiences a greater high than someone on cocaine.
A FOX News/Opinion Dynamics poll found that 77 percent of Americans think it should be legal for the Ten Commandments to be displayed on public property.
During a speech at Columbia University, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz complained about Columbia's anti-Israel bias: "This is the most unbalanced university I have come across when it comes to issues related to the Middle East."
London's English National Opera is planning an opera about the life of Muammar Qaddafi. Featuring music by British group Asian Dub Foundation, the piece will feature
a rapper as the Libyan dictator. One of the libretto's authors stated that the piece will examine Qaddafi's efforts to "update the Koran with democratic, radical proposals."
China's party newspaper Renmin Ribao reported that the Chinese government shut down nearly 50,000 Internet cafes last year. Reasons for closing the cafes included failure to block Web sites with "harmful cultural information."
Russian scientists invented a pill that will, in their words, "prolong drunkenness and enhance intoxication."
The U.S. economy is at least 20 years ahead of the European Union's, and it will take decades for Europe to catch up, according to the European small business association Eurochambres. . . . An E.U. study found that London is the richest part of the European Union. Londoners' purchasing power is more than three times the E.U. average, and almost ten times that of the E.U.'s poorest area, Lubelskie, Poland.
The Turkish government is changing Latin names of some animals in order to remove references to Kurdistan and Armenia. The red fox vulpes vulpes kurdistanica will now be vulpes vulpes, and the sheep orvis armenia will be known as oris orientalis anatolicus. The old names threatened Turkish unity, stated Turkey's Environment and Forest Ministry.
