The Telegraph has a round-up. Dish fave:
Qualcomm, an American wireless telecommunications research and development company, is behind viral Internet videos which surfaced this week appearing to show incidents of severe butterfly attacks in various locations across the USA.
The videos confront witty reports that their own prototype of Mirasol display is responsible for triggering aggression from the insects.
An update. The murderer was a Mormon … and a schizophrenic:
Thomas, 28, had become a priest in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and he used that authority to baptize Seidman, 70, a mentally handicapped hospital worker whom Thomas had met at Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital in Delaware County.
But as "Brother Thomas" became more deeply involved in the church, schizophrenia began to take hold. "He was really over the top. He was always trying to proselytize me, but it didn't make sense to me," Seidman's brother, Lenny, said of Thomas. "There seemed to be something crazy about it."
There's speculation that money was behind the murder. But if Thomas only wanted the money, surely he was aware that brazenly murdering his beneficiary on Biblical grounds would lead him directly to jail. It seems a toxic brew of mental illness and religious fanaticism caused this horrible crime.
Paul Woodward takes issue with David Dayen's doubt about the armed rebels:
Are we supposed to distrust any uprising in which Facebook doesn’t play a prominent role? Or is the fundamental reason for mistrusting the Libyan rebels because they fairly swiftly armed themselves after hundreds of unarmed demonstrators had been killed? …
The fact is that peaceful protest movements can be crushed. The partial successes in Tunisia and Egypt says less about the indomitable force of people power, than it says about the extent to which the autocratic leaders in each of those countries were constrained in how far they could go in violently suppressing their own people while still retaining Western support. … Gaddafi knew from the moment the uprising burst forth, that he wasn’t going to get any protection from the West and thus he did not fear condemnation for his brutality. That’s why he has shown no restraint in his fight for survival. It would be ironic if he now found he was being offered a lifeline by those who oppose Western intervention in Libya.
A reader makes an obvious point:
Let's say Qaddafi leaves today. Libyans are probably going to continue to fight, because there won't be a consensus about what the new state should look like. Even if people agreed on what the state should look like, who will run it would be a very contentious issue in a society where tribal loyalties run deep.
That's exactly what happened in Iraq. We caught Saddam and executed him, and then we had all kinds of trouble with Sadr and other people. Sadr hated Saddam and was glad to see him go, but that didn't mean he liked us or that he'd support the new US-backed government. It was naive to think that capturing Saddam would end the resistance. And it's naive to think that the departure or capture of Qaddafi, which appears to be imminent, will end the fighting in Libya.
It's also naive to think that Libyans will be able to settle deep political differences peacefully in the total absence of any institutions or political traditions that would help them to do it.
The important thing in Washington, however, is to maintain total amnesia about the recent past for fear it might impede people's careers and credibility. Remember: this is a town where the advocates for the Iraq fiasco have paid no political price and ignored every significant lesson. This is a town where Paul Wolfowitz is as respected as ever, where Bill Kristol remains influential, and where no senior former officials ever acknowledge a single mistake (see the auto-biographies of Bush and Rumsfeld).
(Photo: Libyan rebels prepare before leaving Ajdabiya to the front line near the oil town of Brega, as the West backed off from arming the rag-tag fighters and pushed for a political solution instead, on April 1, 2011. By Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images)
"Next time, Obama should make himself count to one million before he sets absolutists goals like 'Gaddafi must go,' and 'We must protect civilian lives,'" – Les Gelb.
In his piece we also find the following:
Of course, there is the new concern about providing arms to the rebels. The United Nations mandate for doing this is ambiguous, at best, and many nations argue that this would be an uncalled-for intervention in what many believe to be a civil war rather than a genocidal one. The White House and its coalition partners respond that it certainly would have been genocidal if they had failed to intervene.
On what conceivable grounds can Qaddafi's vile violence agains civilians be called "genocidal." His goals are to suppress revolt among large numbers of Libyans, the most ornery of which are in the East of the country. I see no evidence of racial or ethnic targeting. If the word "genocide" is going to be used to describe any mass suppression of revolt, it loses its meaning.
The situation in Syria continues to smolder:
Several deaths have been reported as anti-government protests got under way in several Syrian cities after Muslim prayers on Friday, activists have said. Protest marches against Baath Party rule demanding freedoms broke out in cities in the north and south, including the flashpoint city of Daraa. … Al Jazeera's Rula Amin, reporting from Damascus, said at least four people were killed in the afternoon after government forces started using live fire against the protesters in the Douma suburb.
The rallies, taking place for the third week in succession after Friday prayers, come two days after Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, labelled them a foreign conspiracy. Assad defied expectations during his first public address since the protests began that he would announce sweeping changes.
Witnesses in Daraa, a southern town that has been one of the main focal points of rising dissent, said hundreds gathered after leaving a mosque shouting "death rather [than] humiliation" and "national unity".
Enduring America has tons more footage from today.
A reader is confused:
Is this an April Fools' prank?
Andrew Gelman isn't surprised that the Tea Party has lost its punch in Washington:
[W]hat it takes to mobilize voters in an election is not the same as what it takes to win votes in Congress, or even what it takes to scare members of Congress into thinking they might lose the next election.
To put it another way, the Tea Party voters did their job, just as the Obama voters did their job two years earlier. They expressed their preferences and changed the government. Now it’s the politicians turn to do their jobs, which is not to follow the wishes of their more extreme supporters, but to govern in a way such as to earn majority support in two years.
Pleasanton, California, 12 pm
Enough to make a shift to fiscal sanity a very heavy load:
According to our poll the public estimates that the government spent five percent of its budget last year on public television and radio.
It's 0.1 percent. But the public does grasp the share of public funding going to social security. They just don't want to touch it.
The Dish 