This was posted today on The Obeserver's sight regarding the British spellings in the memo they posted regarding the US spying on delegations from other nations in order to be able to better influence their voting:

CLARIFICATION from MARTIN BRIGHT, The Observer

"There seems to be some confusion over the Anglicised (or Anglicized) spelling in our reproduction of the email online and on the front of the newspaper. This was done for editorial reasons to standardise (standardize) spelling throughout the newspaper. Following the many queries from the United States we would like to make it clear that the original document had American spelling and this will be corrected on the online version of the email".

If you've been curious about how the "Flash Mind Reader" trick works, Snopes has the answer here.

If you're not familiar with Snopes, it is one of - if not the - best sites on the web for finding out the truth behind all those e-mails that seem to circulate forever.  You know the ones - lists of "amazing but true" facts (that may not be true after all), promises that if you forward a message to "x" number of people you'll get something free, petitions, "news" stories, the infamous "friend of a friend" stories, and general urban legends.  I cannot recommend this site too highly!

From American Politics Journal via the Subversive Intellectual Society:

Something I've been thinking about a bit.

Since September 11, there has been a significant focus on airport and airplane safety.  The Transportation Security Administration has been formed to help screen passengers, and we're now going to be testing a system of checking bank records and credit reports (among other things, potentially) to ensure that everyone getting on an airplane is "safe" for flying.

Concern about air safety is certainly valid, and we do need to try and prevent terrorists from being able to take over our planes and crash them into buildings, or whatever else the may have in mind.

What bothers me, though, is that when you look at air travel in general, there is still a greater risk that a plane will crash from mechanical malfunctions or human error as opposed to being taken out by a terrorist act.  Yet despite all of the airplane crashes we've had over the years, we've never had the kind of focus on making aircraft themselves, and the personnel and crew who maintain and fly the planes, safer, that we now have about the possiblity of terrorism.  There's no denying that what happened was one of the most horrific acts ever commited - but in terms of overall safety issues, there are greater dangers than terrorists that aren't being given anywhere near the same kind of consideration.

By the same token, following the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, even though we knew it had been commited by white supremacists, using a rented Ryder truck and a bomb made from fuel and fertilizer.  Did we, as a country, establish any kind of systems to help identify potential white supremacist terrorists?  Did we take any steps to make sure that fertilizer and fuel wouldn't fall into the wrong hands?  A rented vehicle was also used in the first World Trade Center bombing, but we don't seem to have put any procedures in place to help make screen who we allow to rent trucks.

It just seems curious to me that so much effort is being made to prevent terrorism aboard airplanes, but we have never done so much to prevent accidents due to other causes, or terrorism that takes different forms.  It suggests that there may also be another agenda at work, though I'm not sure what - and I hate feeling like I'm getting more cynical and suspicious all the time.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo makes an interesting observation about the ramification of Turkey's rejection of our proposal to station troops in their country:

But if you want some evidence of this administration's diplomatic incompetence, consider this. We publicly sold out the Kurds to get this deal. We really should have made sure we had a deal before we tipped our hands to the Kurds about the price we were willing to pay for it.

Now we have no deal and no Kurds. I don't think we should have sold out the Kurds regardless. But if we were going to do so we should have been clearer with ourselves about who we were in bed with, the Turks or the Kurds.

Atrios at Eschaton is reporting on a memo leaked to The Observer (a British newspaper) that indicates that the US is engaged in significant surveillance efforts to try and learn how to influence the votes of several countries in their quest to gain "approval" for the invasion of Iraq.

There is a copy of the memo here, and I have to admit that I'm not sure from reading the memo that I understand where the Oberver gets its conclusions from.  Also, as someone noted in the comments section at Electrolite on this same article, the memo - as published by The Observer - has many "British" spellings, as opposed to the "American" spellings one would expect from an American official.  Obviously, this is not conclusive proof of anything - the Observer has a good reputation for accuracy, and there are possible explainations for the spelling.  Another commenter at Electrolite noted that British papers routinely change the spellings of American documents to the way the Brits write the words, or the author of the memo may, for whatever reason, make use of British forms of various words, despite being American. (I bring this up because I, myself, have a very odd tendency to British spellings - especially words like honour, favour, colour, etc., and I was born and raised in the states, and I figure I can't be the only American who does that).

MetaFilter discussion here.

The Observer's response to some of the concerns that have been raised can be found here.