The Maine nurse saving lives in the Mediterranean

In this week's Maine Sunday Telegram I profile Tim Harrison, a veteran Medecins sans Frontiers nurse from Union, Maine who has spent decades saving lives in some of the most dangerous and unstable parts of the world. Now he's on an MSF rescue ship off the coast of Libya, saving thousands of migrants fleeing war, torture, and sex trafficking in their home countries, which are spread across the Eastern Hemisphere.

European governments, for their part, tried to shut them down, refusing scheduled refueling stops or even threatening prosecution (because the rescuers don't return migrants to Libya, the lawless country they are fleeing from in overloaded rubber rafts.)

Details in the story.

The Intelligence of Beasts

Animal cognition studies have long focused on primates, in part on account of the assumption that the smartest creatures sharing Earth must be the ones most closely related to us. But, as my feature in the new issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education reveals, that's started to change.

Recent years have seen remarkable discoveries in regards to the mental abilities of dogs, dolphins, crows, elephants and other species not closely related to ourselves. That's changed how researchers think about the evolutionary pressures that foster higher intelligence and, for some, how they think about our place in life's great pecking order. The piece -which ran in the Chronicle Review section -- is freely available online.

Chronicle subscribers may enjoy my previous story on canine intelligence research, filed from Hungary in 2005.

Things to Watch and Read, March 22 edition

I'm still hiding out in my secret lair with a book manuscript, but a few things of interest crossed my desk over past few days.

Tea Party Bigots at the Capitol: The freedom-loving "Tea Party" folks who showed up at the U.S. Capitol to protest the health care bill reportedly shouted the "n" word at black civil rights hero John Lewis (D-Ga.), spit on Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), and screamed "faggot" at Barney Frank (D-Mass.)

"I heard people saying things that I have not heard since March 15, 1960 when I was marching to try and get off the back of the bus," James Clyburn (D-S.C.) told the Huffington Post. Later that day, someone threw a brick through the window of Rep. Louise Slaughter's district office in Pine View, New York.

What's next: tarring, feathering, and burning down houses? That'll keep health care affordable.


The Hungarian "race": The Hungarian-American lobby sent out a press release with instructions for their constituency on how to declare themselves racially Hungarian on the U.S. 2010 Census, apparently believing the write-in campaign will increase leverage on lawmakers.

I'm not sure that Hungarian-Americans share a common policy position on events in their ancestral home: someone whose family fled the Nazi takeover may have different feelings about, say, the rise of a far-right party with its own jackbooted militia, than someone who fled the Soviet invasion in '56. But what if ancestral memory really does trump independent thought? To hedge my bets, maybe I'll declare my race to be "Anglo-Franco-Irish-Dane-Scot" and give the politicians something to puzzle over in the next redistricting effort.


Timbuktu Claims the Blues: My Monitor colleague, Scott Baldauf, has an interesting piece on how Timbuktu, Mali, the famous terminal of trans-Sahara caravan trade, asserts itself as the birthplace of the blues, preempting the American South.


Editor who Needs An Editor: For those in Maine wondering what's wrong with the former newspaper of record, the Portland Press Herald, here's another clue. Owner/editor Richard Connor -- whose possessions also include the Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal -- appears to have no idea how to research and write something as simple as a personal opinion piece.

His contribution on health care in yesterday's Morning Sentinel is a case in point: a rambling and unfocused piece that features an uninterrupted 500-word block of quotes from a Gorham innkeeper to make the rather obvious point that insurance premiums vary by state. The innkeeper has some theories as to how to improve the situation, but rather than examine their merits, Connor veers off into some fuzzy ruminations about his companies' health care costs (replete with undigested statistics) before arriving at a perfect non-argument: what's done is done, so "it’s time for all of us to get on with our lives."

This is why directors shouldn't act in their own movies: there's nobody around who can tell them when when they're making an ass of themselves.

Things to watch and read, the March 10 edition

I've been hunkered down with my book manuscript of late, giving public officials in Eastern Europe and Portland, Maine a much needed break from my pedantic questioning. But I still procrastinate from time to time -- this early morning for instance -- and occasionally find things worth sharing. This week those include:

How to Make a [BBC] News Report: Spot-on satire from a BBC-4 comedian. If only U.S. news reports were structured as intelligently as the ones he's mocking. [Update: For comparison, here's an Onion parody of the much stupider CNN structure.]

If Harvard and Disney Had a Showdown, Who Would Win? Disney, apparently, by a long shot. Today's New York Times has a disturbing report about how Harvard has retaliated against the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood after the non-profit advocacy group won a major victory over Disney for erroneous claims about the merits of the conglomerate's "Baby Einstein" videos. Sure looks shameful, and Harvard ain't talkin'.

Wikileaks on Life Support: Wikileaks, a non-profit clearing house for leaked internal documents exposing corruption, malfeasance, and criminal behavior, has been in crisis this year for lack of money and is trying to raise funds. My colleague Andrew Marshall has some background over at his informative Qwerty 2009 blog.

A Better Shit Bag: As Nick Wadhams writes from Nairobi, many people in the developing world have no indoor plumbing and "go" in a plastic bag, which is then usually thrown out on the street. Now a Swedish organization, PeePoople claims to have a better bag. (No, it's not satire.) Puts America's problems in perspective, perhaps.

Synchronized Olympic Pee Breaks: During the gold medal hockey game between the US and Canada last month, residents of Edmonton, Alberta weren't going to miss any action just to go to the bathroom. The water utility there published an amusing graph of the unusual water use pattern that evening and the correlations with events in the game, which you can see over at The Vigorous North.

My coffee is cold; must be time to get back to work....