Global News Portal

Global News Feature--‘Extinct’ crow found again

2009-10-15T06:43:00.000-07:00

Ornithologists have discovered a critically endangered crow, known to science only by two specimens described in 1900, on a remote, mountainous Indonesian island. Global News Source

Global News Home

Global News Feature--Precious artifacts found on ancient vessel

2009-10-03T15:41:00.000-07:00

Chinese archaeologists have discovered more than 200 precious porcelain artifacts on an 800-year-old merchant ship in the southern province of Guangdong.

The 40-day trial excavation ended Saturday and a massive excavation would start next year, said Wei Jun, an archaeologist leading the excavation. The Nanhai (South China Sea) No. 1 ship from the Song Dynasty (960-1279) was loaded with an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 pieces of relics. Global News Source

Global News Home

Global News Feature--Did Early Humans Start Walking for Sex?

2009-10-02T17:16:00.000-07:00

The big news in the journal Science tomorrow is the discovery of the oldest human skeleton—a small-brained, 110-pound female of the species Ardipithecus ramidus, nicknamed “Ardi.” She lived in what is now Ethiopia 4.4 million years ago, which makes her over a million years older than the famous “Lucy” fossil, found in the same region thirty-five years ago.

Buried among the slew of papers about the new find is one about the creature’s sex life. It makes fascinating reading, especially if you like learning why human females don’t know when they are ovulating, and men lack the clacker-sized testicles and bristly penises sported by chimpanzees. Global News Source.

Global News Home

Global News Feature: Obama's Money Man Speaks His Mind

2009-10-01T06:25:00.000-07:00

He calls himself a "Jon Stewart Democrat," yet George Will raves about him. Austan Goolsbee, 40, is one of Barack Obama's top economic advisers, but the former University of Chicago professor doesn't suit up as a stodgy number cruncher.

He was once part of an improv comedy tour in college, has held his comedic own with Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and isn't afraid of speaking his mind. Asked about criticisms that the Obama administration is spending too much money, Goolsbee replies, "In the face of the stiffest recession since 1929, that is not when you try to tighten the belt. It is extremely dangerous to do that. That is exactly what Herbert Hoover did that got us into the Depression." Global News Source.

Global News Home

Global News OPINION: So Why Another News Site?

2009-09-30T19:07:00.000-07:00

The Editor is a news junkie, and, particularly, a "hard news" and a "breaking news" junkie. His health largely confines him to his apartment, the grocery and drug stores, and the social service agencies. The Internet is his lifeline and his portal on the world.

In his surfing he has become more and more dissatisfied with how the news is presented on the Web. Since news is new, search engines alone fail to give him adequate news access. You have to input search terms that you already know and the new is what you don't know yet. Global News Continues.

This 21st Century world permits no one traditional news outlet to cover it comprehensively. There is simply too much important news going on in too many places, and the most comprehensive of them--AP, Reuters, CNN,--do not even cover the world adequately when amalgamated together. Whole regions and whole ranges of stories are simply neglected by all of them, both individually and together.

The Web has the solution to this: RSS Syndication and News Aggregators. The most public, and the best, of these last is Google News. They bring to the problem the same talent for establishing relevance on the Web that brings them 3 out of 4 of all search queries day in and day out. But Google quite sensibly focuses on the limited range of the most popular news stories that can be placed conveniently on one webpage, and chooses to achieve variety of coverage by selecting among all the various news sources covering these stories and ranking them by immediate and real time readership popularity.

But there still remain three problems even with this. The very popularity of this aggregator itself tends to skew its own results by presenting one source at a time to hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of readers. So just appearing on the aggregator maintains the initial readership advantage of source number one.

Also, as the world becomes smaller conceptually, it remains just as large physically as it has always been, and broad ranging news coverage by an outlet's own correspondents is incredibly expensive. In America, virtually all city and metropolitan newspapers have been reduced to relying on those same major wire services, particularly AP, for any and all international coverage. So the same basic story in virtually the same written form appears over and over again on the aggregator with merely a different news masthead attached to it.

Finally, no single webpage can contain all the important stories.

Now you are probably asking, "Who can read more than that?" But, if you think about it, everybody actually reads very little news, but they scan quite a lot of it, choosing to read a little of it based on interest. What the Editor wanted, then, was the maximum variety of headlines to scan.

Other website owners, particularly political bloggers, have noticed these failings also and have put together larger and far more wide-ranging sets of stories on multiple pages. But even here, what has resulted are homepages which started out resembling 3 ring circuses, and have ballooned into multiple sets of 3 ring circuses, full of links to stories on the innumerable other pages of the site and with no ringmaster to keep them sorted out for the reader's convenience.

These new news-and-opinion home pages are simply unscanable with any degree of efficiency or comfort, because they are too full of competing content. And wading through the links to get to the real stories was wasting a tremendous amount of the Editor's time.

So he installed his own aggregator on his laptop, and began sifting through the hundreds of different news sources in English available on the Web, comparing the coverage of each, eliminating those who were mere duplicates of better sources, and finally achieving what he desired: the maximum number of different headlines to scan in about 20 minutes that ranged the farthest distance across the globe. He also discovered that the most time efficient way to view these was to treat the headlines of each feed as a set of news pages to be scanned in sequence.

This was a dreadful amount of work to do, and still is a fair amount of work to maintain. But he has persisted because he has become better informed about current events than he ever has been in his life.

It struck him one day that there surely must be others like him searching for a source to give them the same type, range, and variety of news. So he started this blog to present to all the fruits of his endeavors and, as with all news sources, to bring himself some advertising revenue for his trouble.

He knew what he wanted for the site--simplicity and readability--and he knew that what he could realistically expect to achieve was a list of links to the most differentiated news feeds which can be scanned one at a time. They are over on the left of this page under the heading Global News Feeds.

There are only 25 of them. The Editor has always been a fast scanner, and he has found this number to be the maximum he can conveniently scan through in 20-30 minutes. By setting such a limit, the site itself becomes a pleasure to navigate, since you don't have to massively and intensively scan and sort through the site on your way to finding the place to scan and sort through the stories.

Such was the initial concept of Global News Portal and everything has been done to get you, the reader, to the good stuff in as little time as possible.

But there is more that the Editor wished to offer. The initial research into feeds that brought the widest variety of Global coverage led him to discover that, truly, not all coverage is created equal. And some sources tell their stories in depth better than they present breaking news and better, as well, than everybody else. So Global News Portal also provides a list of those 25 sources that the Editor turns to when he wants more than just headlines to scan.

These are the Global News Sources that you see on the left. If you really want to know why they have been chosen you must sample them for yourself. However, these sources are chosen not just for quality, but also to provide you with the same highly differentiated variety of coverage as the feeds.

These two link lists take up very little space and this presented a grand opportunity to apply the same concept to the top ranked news and opinion blogs on current events, and to a select few opinion makers, of all political persuasions, that the Editor himself enjoys.

Since, hopefully, most of the readership here gets out and around more than the Editor does, the site also provides a few little conveniences like driving direction, a running news ticker, a marvelous World Clock which is also an entertaining statistical Almanac, and so forth.

So here you have Global News Portal, a blog from a man who couldn't find what he really wanted to read on the Internet, and decided to create it and share it.

Enjoy.

Global News Home Page

Google Wave to be released to 100,000 testers Wednesday

2009-09-30T06:20:00.000-07:00

(CNN) -- Google Wave, a product that promises to revolutionize online communication, will go out to about 100,000 beta testers Wednesday. Google Wave hopes to replace e-mail as the main way people communicate online.

The Web application from Google Inc. combines elements of e-mail, chat, Wiki documents, blogs and photo-sharing sites to create a form of Internet communication called a "hosted conversation," or a "wave." Global News Source

Global News Home

Global News Feature--Rethinking Stocks' Starring Role

2009-09-29T07:12:00.000-07:00

For at least a generation, financial professionals have urged mutual-fund investors to put more money in stocks than in bonds. The logic: Stocks power a portfolio, while bonds provide some protection.

Now some pros are questioning that conventional wisdom. After last year's stock crash, and ahead of a potentially weak economic recovery, they're arguing that bonds and alternative asset classes such as commodities deserve more weight. Global News Source

Global News Home

Global News Feature--Wild Rose Country to bloom in poppies?

2009-09-28T06:02:00.000-07:00

OTTAWA–The opium poppy used for painkillers could soon be a cash crop in southern Alberta. Matching parched prairie farms with Canada's first commercial poppy crop is an idea contained in a briefing note for Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz. Global News Full Source

Global News Home

Global News Feature: For some families, work is in another city — or hemisphere

2009-09-27T13:41:00.000-07:00

Bob Handshy talks with his wife, Rebekah, every day — about the weather, the kids' school projects, the new bathroom floor.

He chats with the kids. He plays Hangman with his son, Jace. He tells the children "Be good" and "I love you" and "Good night."

He just does it from 1,900 miles away. Global News Source

Global News Home

Global News Feature--Africa: Great Leap Forward on Free Healthcare

2009-09-26T03:04:00.000-07:00

Providing free healthcare to millions of women and children in some of the world's poorest countries has come a step closer, with the unveiling on 23 September of a US$5.3 billion financing package by British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. Global News Full Source

Global News Home

Global News Feature: The coyote-wolf hybrid has made its way to the Northeast

2009-09-24T06:50:00.000-07:00

Bigger than coyotes but smaller than wolves, their howl is high-pitched and their diet includes deer and small rodents. They are coywolves (pronounced "coy," as in playful, "wolves"), and they are flourishing in the northeastern United States, according to a study published today in Biology Letters. Global News Full Story

Global News Home

Global News Feature: Chess legends Kasparov, Karpov face off

2009-09-23T02:44:00.000-07:00

MADRID, Spain (CNN) -- Chess legends Garry Kasparov and Anatoli Karpov faced off again in Spain on Tuesday, 25 years after their epic first world championship battle in Moscow, in what organizers are calling a "historic revenge match. Global News Full Source:

Global News Home

Global News Feature: The 50 best things to eat in the world, and where to eat them

2009-09-22T06:32:00.000-07:00

From cake, steak and tapas, to oysters, chicken and burgers, Killian Fox roamed the world to find the 50 best things to eat and the best places to eat them in, with a little help from professionals like Raymond Blanc, Michel Roux, Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray Global News Full Source:

Global News Home

Global News Feature: For President, Five Programs, One Message

2009-09-21T06:11:00.000-07:00

No one shifted an armchair, moved a flower arrangement or asked an unexpected question. President Obama gave five back-to-back television interviews broadcast on Sunday that were as tightly choreographed — and eerily similar — as the multiple Magritte bowler-hatted men milling in the remake of “The Thomas Crown Affair.” Global News: Full Source

Global News Home

Global News Feature: Report: More troops needed for Afghan war success

2009-09-21T05:54:00.000-07:00

By ANNE GEARAN
AP National Security Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The situation in Afghanistan is growing worse, and without more boots on the ground the U.S. risks failure in a war it's been waging since September 2001, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan says in a confidential report...Global News Full Source:

Global News Home

Global News Opinion: Getting Acquainted I

2009-09-20T11:46:00.000-07:00

For several years after the 2004 election The Editor ran a Left-leaning political blog under his own name, the one at the bottom of all these posts. Sheer writer's fatigue, and worsening illness, resulting in his total disability put a stop to it. You will see his opinions here, but only once a week.

He can no longer sustain the pace of daily blogging, and has come to believe that the besetting curse of the politics of our time is the disconnection of political opinions from the realm of evidence, genuine news, and fact. Hence the focus of this blog is on news, not opinion; fact, not free-floating political fantasy; evidence and not argument. And he seeks a like-minded readership--of whatever political views--who wish to ground their thinking in evidence, genuine news, and fact.
But for the sake of truth in packaging, The Editor will take the next several weeks or so giving a broad outline of his opinions, which are still Left-leaning. He does not believe they will matter very much to the functioning of this blog, but he wants anyone who wishes to apply a discount of his political biases to the coinage offered here to be free to do so.

All such things must start with the last Presidential administration and George W. Bush. The events of the past 10 years have made the 20th Century not only history, but ancient history.
We are what we are today largely because of the Bush Presidency. Political figures from the 1990's--Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Al Gore, Jimmy Carter--all appear slightly quaint even when they remain active on the political stage. Their photographs are a trifle sepia toned, as it were.
So what does The Editor think of the Bush Administration? His frank opinion of the last Administration is that its philosophy was explicitly anti-American: GWB consistently asserted either directly or through his staff that the President of the United States had the powers of an absolutist king and that the office was essentially above the law. As an educated American citizen [and not a "subject"] The Editor rejects that categorically and he did every thing he could to get the man who asserted it out of public office. As we all know, he failed and only time was able to do what he wished to do. We are massively the worse off for it.

The Bush Administration philosophy of government was precisely the equivalent of Louis XIV’s L’etat c’est moi. This seemed to pass most people by. All anyone from the Bush White House had to do was wave around the word “democracy” and his partisans, at least, were satisfied. But the record is perfectly clear. The Bush White House said that and they meant it. Repeatedly, openly, and blatantly. And they acted on it. Repeatedly, openly, and blatantly. They were the greatest internal threat to real American freedom since John Adams and the Alien and Sedition Acts.
Moreover, I think that the last occupant of the office of President not only lost the “War On Terrorism” but also made it impossible for anyone else to undo the damage. Osama Bin Laden is still around and sending open messages to President Obama. His organization has essentially diffused across the entire Muslim world with no more hope now of being eradicated than America has hope of getting rid of the English Sparrow.
Afghanistan is slowly slipping back into the control of the Taliban, Iraq’s future is still open to question once we cease to prop it up with our troops, and Iran still possesses the same nuclear capability that it openly had when GWB was so hot to destroy phantom Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.
We have fought the two longest shooting wars in America’s history, together and side-by-side. We are still doing it. We have lost the decisive strategic presence in the Middle East that GWB’s father managed to shrewdly arrange for us in the early 90’s. And we have never recovered the same state of military readiness that GWB inherited in 2001.
All of this was simply and solely the result of a concatenation of bad military decisions by the Bush Administration. Period. At every step of the way, if there was a wrong choice, he made it. The first wrong choice was the gullible belief peddled to him by the neo-Conservatives that the world’s biggest military force would permit him to succeed in doing absolutely anything he wanted to internationally.
Just like the President could do absolutely anything he wanted to domestically, because the office was above the law.
Finally, we very nearly lost the entire banking system of the United States and maybe that of the whole world on his watch. Why? Well, for once, not due solely to him. But he was just as much the champion of markets being freed from government regulation and therefore from reasonable safeguards as any of his fellow Republicans.

It was an economic philosophy unsupported by anything but windy generalities like, “The boon for the consumer, choice, is the bane of the producer.” and “Rules and regulations stifle the up and comers.” Both of these are true in some cases but not true in others. And they used them more often as a substitute for thought than as a stimulus of it. Republicans have attempted to run the country on such glittering generalities, unchecked by observation or by thought. And their attempts to do this over the past 28 years have utterly destroyed the country I grew up in.
When markets consist of relatively evenly matched producers playing on a level field, then, yes, “Rules and regulations stifle the up and comers.” But most markets do not stay that way for very long unless rules and regulations are in place. Money markets do not regulate themselves. Period. Left to themselves they generate wild speculative bubbles that burst and leave all but a handful the poorer for it. Period. We’ve just watched it happen.
GWB did everything he could to change the law to permit people to invest their Social Security in the Stock Market. God help us if he had succeeded. I don’t think that any action by anyone could have prevented a banking collapse and another worldwide Great Depression if so many ordinary Americans had lost so much retirement capital at the same time. They could have lost almost all of it, had their Social Security been invested in this market.
The Editor would also remark that the Bush Administration took especial care to make sure that our fine ex-President never even heard a dissenting view or saw anyone who held one. His rallies were packed to the gills with his cheerleaders, and no one else, and even his motorcades were carefully routed away from the “free speech zones” where people who opposed him were forcibly confined.

This is a much smaller issue, though still anti-American. It contrasts most unfavorably with the recent example of President Obama and those Democratic public officials who cared enough about “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” to personally attend such assemblies and attempt to give an accounting of their views in the so called Town Meetings about the reform of health care.

The behavior of the partisans opposed to “Obamacare” in those Town Meetings was not very close to rational debate on the proposal’s merits. And “Obamacare” itself has more in it of angry rhetoric than rational argument. Nor did that fine South Carolina representative shouting “You lie!” in the halls of Congress during President Obama's recent speech there contribute materially to the rationality of the debate.
As far as I can see, these things are deliberate and essentially intended to make rational debate on issues impossible. And I think they have been so at least since the Soreloserman taunts of the election of 2000, if not further back than that.
But despite having to deal what what was essentially bad faith, those Democratic officials did not seek the cozy insulation from dissent sought by GWB. For this they deserve everybody's gratitude, though The Editor does not think that they will exactly receive it.
Those who think little of government will do it badly and those who's concern for "democracy" starts with their mouth and ends with their ears simply cannot run our country very well.
One of the most destructive things about the past ten years is that everybody seems to have forgotten how representative government is supposed to work, largely because the President and the Congressional majority party really didn’t want it to work, and stopped it from working virtually every chance they could.

Thank heavens. Had they actually understood how to govern America, the agenda they espoused would have eroded our institutions and our lives beyond repair.
So The Editor opposed the Bush Administration for real reasons of eight years of flat out bad public policy, reprehensible government philosophy, military failure, and chronic political failure to advance even the agenda of his own Party despite the nearest thing to absolute philosophical control of all three of the branches of Government this country has ever seen. Franklin Roosevelt did not have this. Lyndon Johnson did not have this. And they are the only ones who even come close.

So make of it what you will.

Global News Home

Global News Feature: Naked man, 91, holds drunken intruder at gunpoint

2009-09-20T07:31:00.000-07:00

LAKE WORTH, Fla. (AP) -- Authorities said a naked 91-year-old man was able to hold a drunken intruder at gunpoint until deputies arrived. Robert E. Thompson jumped out of bed early Saturday when his dog starting growling and attacking the intruder. He said he got his revolver and went out back to let the guy know how he felt about Global News Full Source:

Global News Home

Global News Opinion: The Beginning

2009-09-20T06:43:00.000-07:00

Good morning. This is the beginning. The Editor visits blogs and comments on them. One such blog is The Anchoress at First Things, one of the powerhouses of political blogging. Over there, in the midst of a commentor's tussle, The Editor asked another poster in the media business if he knew of any independent source providing the sort of comprehensive world coverage that The Editor himself was able to build with RSS and careful bookmarking of major news organization sites. The poster essentially evaded the question.

Giving the matter some thought, The Editor decided to make the kind of site he wanted, since he couldn't find it. There are news sources all over the net. There are also operations that claim to be news sources but are actually mere aggregations of bloggers writing political opinion read largely by commentors of the same political opinion. There are also a very few true independent news analysis sites that have real news. But no site that gives you the news as you can get the news for yourself on the Net, with hard work and clear thought.

There is now.

Global News Home