It is now being widely reported that the corruption investigations begun two years ago have finally resulted in an indictment on conspiracy charges (also available as a PDF) against Tom DeLay himself. If convicted, the penalty will be six months to two years in prison, and up to a $100,000 fine. The current Republican struggle seems to be to make sure that he is treated better than everyone else going through the legal system when he is fingerprinted and photographed.

I have long held that the metric of whether or not a country has an independent government is whether it successfully takes actions that its nearest controlling neighbor doesn't like. To my great astonishment, Iraq is actually showing signs of this, condemning the U.S. for detaining thousands of Iraqis (and perhaps not incidentally, a number of journalists attempting to provide independent news coverage) without charge or even any statement about what they are suspected of, and attempting to change the U.N. resolution giving U.S. troops immunity from Iraqi law.

The university newspaper, the Daily Reveille, was particularly atrocious today. The front page featured "Science vs. Spirit", with the subtitle "Katrina was God's cleansing for some, just weather for others".

Cryptome is pulling together information on Yahoo executives following a report by Reporters without Borders on how Yahoo helped the Chinese government track down and convict Shi Tao, a journalist for the daily Dangdai Shang Bao (Contemporary Business News), for leaking a government memo.

Privacy International is calling for a boycott of Yahoo as a response.

Reporters Without Borders has reported about journalists that have been attacked by police in New Orleans for documenting abuse:

Peter Fimrite, a reporter for the San Fransisco Chronicle, has also written a first-hand account of being held at gunpoint... apparently just for being outside at night with a cell phone, trying to find signal.

I started seeing a very strange untruth being pushed in a number of blogs: that everyone thought that New Orleans was going to be fine until late Tuesday night. I originally spotted the reference over at Maggi Katzen's blog while looking for a cat picture she had posted. That led me to find that statement repeated at Scribal Terror, and the incorrect timeline posted at the much more famous Captain's Quarters.

The first bus full of refugees from New Orleans to arrive at the Reliant Astrodome in Houston was not the result of FEMA work... but the work of an 18- or 20-year-old man (the stories are somewhat conflicting) named Jabbar Gibson. It was covered both in the Houston Chronicle and by Houston's Newschannel 5, (Update: that page has been removed, possibly out of standard expiration policies, so I have set up a mirror) but there is quite a remarkable difference in tone between the two. Although described as "renegade refugees" by the Houston Chronicle, the survivors are otherwise treated sympathetically by the article... but their escape was described as "an extreme act of looting" by Newschannel 5, which then went on to point out:

Pictures have been floating around for several days now (first seen by myself at Pecunium's LiveJournal) of a pair of images published the same day on Yahoo News. The first was from the Associated Press, describing the black man in the picture as a looter:

The other picture, from the Agence France Presse, depicting a pair of lighter-skinned people described as "finding bread and water":

Like almost everything else associated with Cleveland (certainly excluding one very notable exception), I remember the Cleveland Plain Dealer with a vague sense of distaste. (This is more a result of bad personal experiences than any commentary on the quality of the newspaper.) One of their writers just received another Pulitzer prize as a commentary columnist, so they're doing something right.

It's also somewhat notable that she's a female feminist, discrediting those who sometimes imply that such women aren't suited to be writers.

Link credit to Rox Populi.

I came across an old article in the Washington Post (registration required: try logging in as wp@resonant.org with password wp123) documenting what percentage of people using different news sources believed things well known to be false. Fox News came out on top, by a large margin. I don't know whether to laugh that it got noticed, or cry that it was immediately forgotten or ignored.