Berkeley Bubble

This is disturbing:

Authorities found small traces of radiation on two British Airways 767 jetliners Wednesday, as investigators widened their search for clues into the poisoning death of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko.
Home Secretary John Reid disclosed the search following a meeting with COBRA, the government’s emergency committee. Reid said two planes had been tested so […]

Aside from the currency size ruling, here are two other important stories worth checking out:
The U.S. Supreme Court began hearing arguments in the Global Warming case today, though a few of the justices appeared to view the states’ arguments a bit skeptically.
The Times has an interesting article examining why African-Americans remain far less likely to […]

Check out the newbies at the California State Legislature looking up at the ceiling during their “boot camp” training session:

In the “no duh!” move of the day, Frist told everyone that he’s not running for President. Even in announcing that he was NOT running however, Frist still was trying to court the evangelical right wing of the party:

“In the Bible, God tells us for everything there is a season, and for me, for […]

A US federal district court judge ruled today that the government discriminates against the blind by not printing different denominations of currency in different sizes:
Judge James Robertson, in a ruling on a suit by the American Council of the Blind, ordered the Treasury to devise a method to tell bills apart.
The judge wrote that the […]

Hillary Clinton leads the pack of likely Democratic presidential contenders in the most recent CNN poll, released today, garnering 33 percent of people asked who they were “most likely to support for the Democratic nomination for president in the year 2008.” Obama is in second at 15 percent, and Edwards and Gore are at […]

This is a rather strange science story on Yahoo:

Influenza virus can live for decades and perhaps even longer in frozen lakes and might be picked up and spread by migratory birds.
Such frozen viruses could potentially become the source of new epidemics that sicken and kill generations after they were last seen, the researchers report in […]

Okay, okay, so the two rivers in Iraq are the Tigris and Euphrates.
But we can now firmly say that President Bush IS living in a state of denial:
On the eve of a high-profile trip to Jordan to meet Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki of Iraq, President Bush on Tuesday dismissed suggestions that Iraq has descended into […]

The chorus of calls for withdrawing troops out of Iraq continues to grow, as Republican Senator Chuck Hagel today called for the U.S. to pullout to avoid the “impending disaster” in Iraq, in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post–here’s more:
There will be no victory or defeat for the United States in Iraq,” Sen. Chuck […]

Today, Sunni mobs killed 21 men from two families in reprisal attacks after a week of escalating sectarian violence in Iraq, that saw Shiites kill 200 Sunnis on Thursday. Folks–no one from the mainstream media is willing to say it, but I will–Iraq is in a state of civil war:
Sunni gunmen stormed two Shiite […]