(2005-05-17) — Newsweek magazine, which sparked deadly riots in several countries with an erroneous report about U.S. military guards flushing a Koran down a toilet, today announced that in addition to regretting and retracting the story, it had fired two unnamed journalists.

“We have terminated a reporter and an editor, who requested anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the situation,” said Newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker. “The journalists were high-ranking individuals who have never been named in media coverage of this story.”

Mr. Whitaker denied that the firings involved reporters Michael Isikoff or John Barry who wrote the item for the magazine’s May 9 issue.

“The American people have come to trust Newsweek for credible and ethical journalism,” he said. “We believe that our swift and severe punishment of these undisclosed persons will demonstrate that we continue to merit that trust.”

(2005-05-17) — As many as 25 people died and dozens more were injured during riots in Afghanistan today which erupted over what one Muslim cleric called “the U.S. media’s desecration-by-mispelling” of the name of Islam’s most holy book.

Indeed, American editors have failed to reach consensus on how to render the holy book’s name. Some spell it with a ‘K’ others with a ‘Q’ and — perhaps most offensive to Muslim sensibilities — some insert a meaningless apostrophe in the middle of the word.

“They’re mocking our religion and our God by using a wide variety of spellings for the holy book,” said the unnamed imam. “Journalists and editors are the stormtroopers of America’s war on Islam. They’re trying to humiliate and intimidate us with alternate and phonetic spellings, sowing seeds of doubt about the book Allah gave to the Prophet. We will fill the streets with the blood of the infidels and anyone else who gets in the way.”

The latest casualities followed the deaths of 17 people in weekend riots over an inaccurate story in Newsweek magazine about a report that U.S. military guards had flushed a Koran down a toilet at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

The cleric, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue, denied that the latest uprising on the Arab street was simply part of the ‘regularly-scheduled annual riot season‘.

“Our previously-scheduled generic riots have been preempted by these special, issue-oriented violent mobs,” he said. “Americans have nobody to blame but themselves for inflaming the passions of these peaceful religious people.”

(2005-05-16) — An unnamed former top government official told a Newsweek magazine reporter that his story, about a U.S. military guard at Guantanamo prison flushing a Koran down a toilet, was “a slam dunk,” according to the latest apology from Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker.

The magazine’s uncorroborated, single-source, hearsay report of the Koran desecration sparked riots in several Muslim countries, killing at least 15 and injuring perhaps 100.

While the magazine has apologized publicly to the riot victims and their families, Mr. Whitaker told the New York Times, “We’re not retracting anything. We don’t know what the ultimate facts are.”

For those unschooled in professional journalistic ethics, Mr. Whitaker explained that a retraction demands a higher standard of evidence than an ordinary news item.

“You don’t just rush to press with a retraction until you nail down the facts,” he added.

Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff said his anonymous source is now unsure where he got the Koran-flushing information, which was broadcast across the Arab world by Al-Jazeera and others.

“If there’s a bright side to this story,” said Mr. Whitaker. “At least our anonymous sources are safe, unharmed. And of course, our advertisers now know that Newsweek has great credibility in the Arab world, despite the bad feelings that Muslims have about America in general.”

In an effort to help in the grieving process, the magazine’s publisher said that immediate family members of the dead would receive a free 90-day trial subscription to Newsweek.

“If they’re done grieving after 90 days, they can write ‘cancel’ on the invoice and pay nothing,” he said. “Otherwise we’ll just bill their credit cards in three easy installments at a substantial savings off the newstand price.”

(2005-05-13) — An overnight poll of Maverick voters shows widespread support for Maverick Sen. George Voinovich’s opposition to President Bush’s nominee for U.N. Ambassador.

Maverick voters, those who support Republican candidates in hopes that they’ll scuttle Republican initiatives, universally praised Mr. Voinovich for bucking the White House on John Bolton’s nomination.

“This is why we sent Voinovich to the Senate,” said one unnamed Maverick voter. “We elect Republicans to limit the power of Republicans. It’s the heart of our Constitutional system of checks and balances.”

(2005-05-13) — A joint news conference appearance by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, has set off “an electrifying buzz” at Democrat National Convention headquarters about the possibility of a Clinton-Gingrich ‘08 ticket.

“It’s the ultimate tolerance ticket,” said one unnamed DNC source. “It’s the perfect illustration of our Democrat commitment to the big-tent principle.”

Mr. Gingrich, who engineered the Republican takeover of the House in 1994, downplayed talk of a White House bid, but acknowledged that he and Sen. Clinton “see eye-to-eye on a surprising number of political ambitions.”

(2005-05-13) — The Pentagon today ordered a contingent of Marines to occupy the Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs, CO, to protect Air Force cadets from aggressive proselytizing by evangelical Christians on a campus where more than 90 percent of cadets identify themselves as Christian.

The move comes after a Yale Divinity School study of the Academy showed “challenges to pluralism,” including evidence that about half of cadets had heard derogatory religious comments and jokes, and that some Christians were treating evangelism as if it were “some sort of Divine command.”

The Marine unit will patrol the Air Force campus to protect “the most vulnerable among us from the assaults of religious zealots,” an unnamed Pentagon spokesman said.

“These cadets may some day risk their lives to defend our liberty,” said the source. “Therefore we must protect them now from the consequences of the Constitutional loophole that allows freedom of religious expression.”

Civil rights leaders today hailed the Academy’s chaplain for “blowing the lid off this scandal,” comparing the rash of proselytizing with the Academy’s 2003 investigation that documented 150 victims of sexual assault among female cadets and led to the replacement of the school’s top commanders.

“What good is it to protect cadets from sexual assault,” said the Rev. Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, “if you’re still going to leave them vulnerable to hearing the gospel of Jesus Christ. It’s a brutal rape of religious tolerance.”

(2005-05-12) — According to a new poll by the Democrat National Committee (DNC), the trial of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s former campaign finance director, David Rosen, is “insignificant and uninteresting to 97 percent of all Americans.”

The DNC-New York Times survey consisted of one question with two possible answers. The poll showed that among the two percent of Americans who had seen news coverage of the case, 97 percent chose: “It’s a yawner — nothing to see here folks.”

The other three percent selected the alternative choice: “I’m a rabid right-winger so blinded by my hatred of the Clintons that I can’t reasonably answer the question.”

“It’s just not newsworthy,” the unnamed pollster said. “It’s nothing but a former First Lady who won a Senate seat with the help of a fundraising team which misstated expenses by more than 100 percent in order to dodge campaign finance laws, and worked with a former convict to produce a lavish star-studded Hollywood gala in tribute to President Bill Clinton as a way of getting the former president to support an internet venture started by the creator of Spider-Man. See, I almost dozed off while describing it to you. No wonder it fails to capture the attention of Mr. and Mrs. America.”

Indeed, a hypothetical movie script based on that scenario wouldn’t “make it off the pile,” according to producer/director Rob Reiner, who appeared on the program of the gala event.

“To capture the public’s interest,” said Mr. Reiner, “you need intrigue, risk, betrayal, suspense, high stakes, high-powered characters and celebrities. But we all know that Hillary Clinton — our nation’s next president — was not involved in any way, shape, form or fashion. So, it’s just an ordinary tale of a clumsy associate who made an honest mistake. It’s kind of like [Clinton administration National Security Adviser] Sandy Berger accidentally taking classified documents from the National Archives. Oops. Yawn. Now, let’s move on.”

The fact that Sen. Ted Kennedy’s brother-in-law helped the prosecution as an FBI informant “simply adds to the tedium of this whole boring affair,” Mr. Reiner said.

A spokesman for Sen. Clinton, D-NY, said, “It’s time to heal the nation’s wounds and move on to the people’s business of enacting our visionary Democrat plans for Social Security and foreign policy. And the Senator is still not even starting to think about whom she’ll appoint to key cabinet posts.”

(2005-05-11) — A federal appeals judge today approved United Airlines’ effort to have a federal agency take responsibility for $3.2 billion of its employee pension obligations during the next five years, and opened the door for a possible Social Security bailout as well.

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) already bears responsibilty for paying pensions to more than one million Americans from 3,479 failed pension plans. The Guaranty Corporation, while not directly funded by taxpayers, now pays benefits to about 518,000 retirees using investment income from employer pension-insurance premiums as well as funds from failed pension plans.

Wilma Ponzi, spokesman for the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), said, “We celebrate this latest move by the courts to tear down the wall that has sadly divided capitalism from socialism. We encourage the Bush administration to seek a similar rescue for Social Security.”

Under the AARP-supported plan, Mrs. Ponzi said, the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation would sell bonds to the U.S. Treasury backed by the federal government’s debt to Social Security.

The pension bonds would be backed by the “full faith and credit” of the United States goverment, she added.

(2005-05-11) — The Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week will likely approve the nomination of Under Secretary of State John Bolton as the new ambassador to the United Nations, but aides to the Senate panel said today the confirmation will be “born of sheer terror.”

“The Senators are intimidated by Bolton,” said one unnamed legislative aide. “When faced with a threat like this, there are two natural responses — fight or flight. The hearing room has been raging sea of adrenaline. The Senators can’t take another day of Bolton’s blunt talk and penetrating stare.”

While experts predict a party-line vote to confirm, even the Republicans on the committee privately express eagerness to escape what they called “the shadow of the mustache.”

President George Bush said he’s eager to see his nominee go to work at the United Nations, “because, as Teddy Roosevelt said of the presidency, the U.N. Ambassadorship is ‘a bully pulpit’.”

(2005-05-10) — In the same week that General Electric announced its Ecomagination campaign aimed at reducing pollutants from GE products and facilities, The New York Times today said it would launch its own green initiative dubbed ‘Ecojournalism’.

While today marks the public launch of ‘Ecojournalism’, a spokesman for the Times said the paper had quietly begun rolling out the program during the past several years.

Among the earth-friendly practices at the New York Times:

• Reducing journalistic credibility to make substantial cuts in circulation, resulting in conservation of tons of newsprint paper.

• Reporting more stories without leaving New York, even when news happens in other states or countries, to reduce the Times’ role in producing jet airliner emissions.
• Reporting critically on President Bush’s plan to open a small portion of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil drilling, thereby helping America maintain its dependence on Saudi oil, which keeps prices high, discouraging fuel combustion and thus reducing pollutants
• Refusing to ‘burn bridges’ with unnamed sources by disclosing their names to law enforcement officials. While the amount of emissions from bridge burning has not been measured scientifically, any reduction in burning must benefit the environment.

“Since the rest of the nation’s newspapers traditionally follow the Times’ lead,” the unnamed spokesman said, “the impact of Ecojournalism [pronounced ‘echo-journalism’] measures should be significant, allowing humans perhaps an additional five years of life on earth before global warming snuffs us out.”