Free Republic

Three freshmen on the UCLA men's basketball team were arrested after allegedly shoplifting in the Chinese city of Hangzhou just days ahead of their scheduled season opener, according to ESPN. The sports network, citing a source with firsthand knowledge, said LiAngelo Ball, Cody Riley and Jalen Hill were released on bail after being questioned about stealing sunglasses from a Louis Vuitton store near the team hotel. ESPN's LA-based reporter Arash Markazi is covering the team from China.

GOOD HOPE, La. - Near this speck on the map southwest of New Orleans, where an oil refinery spouts flames into the sky and alligators are said to lurk in the green canals, sits something that is causing consternation across Louisiana: a camp for out-of-state workers cleaning up after the flood. The camp, operated by a New York company called LVI Services, is not much to look at: a row of tractor-trailers crammed with bunks, a long line of portable toilets, a couple of R.V.'s and three tents with striped roofs. Gun-packing guards wear black T-shirts reading, "Police." It is...

DISASTER has a way of bringing out the best and the worst instincts in the news media. It is a grand thing that during the most terrible days of Hurricane Katrina, many reporters found their gag reflex and stopped swallowing pat excuses from public officials. But the media's willingness to report thinly attributed rumors may also have contributed to a kind of cultural wreckage that will not clean up easily.

One of President Bush's surrogates went before the N.A.A.C.P. last week and apologized for the Republican Party's reprehensible, decades-long Southern strategy. The surrogate, Ken Mehlman, is chairman of the Republican National Committee. Perhaps he meant well. But his words were worse than meaningless. They were insulting. The G.O.P.'s Southern strategy, racist at its core, still lives.

LIVE 8, that extraordinary media event that some people of good intentions in the West just orchestrated, would have left us Africans indifferent if we hadn't realized that it was an insult both to us and to common sense. We have nothing against those who this month, in a stadium, a street, a park, in Berlin, London, Moscow, Philadelphia, gathered crowds and played guitar and talked about global poverty and aid for Africa. But we are troubled to think that they are so misguided about what Africa's real problem is, and dismayed by their willingness to propose solutions on our...

……The administration has prevented any official inquiry into whether it hyped the case for war. But there's plenty of circumstantial evidence that it did. …….And then there's the Downing Street Memo - actually the minutes of a prime minister's meeting in July 2002 - in which the chief of British overseas intelligence briefed his colleagues about his recent trip to Washington. "Bush wanted to remove Saddam," says the memo, "through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." It doesn't get much clearer than that.