Josh Marshall is doing real reporting on his weblog, connecting the dots between assertions of Iraq’s attempts to procure uranium from Africa, and the appearance of the now infamous fake Niger documents. The short version is that shortly after the CIA demanded that references to the uranium from Africa be expunged from a Bush speech, an Italian journalist recieved the fake Niger documents from one of her sources and then was instructed by her editor to deliver them to the US embassy. The speculation is that the documents (which are now known to be fake) were produced by either pro-war elements in the the US itself or Israel. Obviously this is a real conspiracy theory, but given that the documents are certainly fake, and the timing, it looks like conspiracy might be the right answer here.

I’ve been paying attention to the SCO case, but haven’t been writing about it much. In recent days, SCO appears to have gone completely over the edge, and has basically decided that the GPL is invalid and furthermore has been behaving as though that’s the case. Groklaw has the best continuing coverage.

I want this prediction to be accurate so badly that it hurts.

Some time ago I mentioned that wireless phone companies have been charging customers in advance for number portability. Here’s some documentation. The companies have already taken in $629 million to pay for number portability, even as they fight it tooth and nail. It looks like number portability is inevitable at this point, but if these companies had succeeded in thwarting it, do you think that we’d have gotten our money back?

I’ve been following China’s Three Gorges Dam project (with dread) for years. Today, the Guardian has an update on how China has been affected by the dam now that it is partially complete.

Looks like part of the cuts that the conference committee has made to the Iraq spending bill include cash allocated to restoring wetlands. I assume this was the funding that would have restored the wetlands that were the former home of the marsh Arabs in Iraq, which were destroyed through water diversion projects as a reprisal for their resistance to Saddam following the Gulf War. That’s a shame. On the other hand, they have eliminated the Senate requirement that half of the reconstruction money be granted to Iraq as a loan. I’m not opposed to loaning money to Iraq as opposed to giving it to them outright, but if we’re going to do that, we should let Iraqis decide how to spend it.

Juan Cole has posted the most depressing weblog entry I’ve read in recent memory. In short, an Islamic newspaper in England claims a professor of Islamic Law who was working for the Bush administration produced a report predicting that Iraq’s eventual government will be Islamic, unwilling to recognize Israel, and hostile to the west (also known as the United States). Of course, I’m reporting this fourth hand, so who knows what the real story is. The professor in question, Noah Feldman, teaches at NYU, and wrote a book called After Jihad about encouraging democracy in the Muslim world.

Jim Romenesko posted a devastating letter about Fox News. Read it before the link goes away.

I love a good blogger on blogger legal fight. This non-lawyer says that Luskin has no case, being a public figure and all.

Gary Wolf gives his opinion on the worst Wired feature ever. I won’t spoil the answer. The whole weblog entry is a trip down memory lane for dedicated Wired-watchers. I’ve been a member of the Well for a long time, and Wired had a big presence on the Well even before the magazine was published (some of the planning was done in a private conference there). Needless to say, on the Well, every issue of the magazine was picked over to an absurd degree in the pre-Conde Nast days. Oh how I remember the howls of outrage over the stories that Wolf critiques. Those were the days.