From the BBC: One of the first people thought to have been killed by gunfire in the Americas has been found in a burial plot near Lima in Peru, scientists have said. A skull bearing a gunshot hole was discovered amongst the remains of 72 bodies in a suburb of the capital. Archaeologists believe the bodies were those of ancient Incas killed by Spanish conquistadors 500 years ago. See? This

Speculation is, he could be angling for a presidential bid as an independent — though the only people likely to vote for him are non-smoking, trans-fat-free urbanites who like their taxes high and their government big. Meaning “moderate” Democrats — suggesting that a Bloomberg candidacy would almost certainly help Republicans, given that Bloomberg, despite winning his Mayoral race as a Republican candidate, is about as likely to embrace “conservatism” as

Flipping through the channels last Thursday or Friday, I paused for a moment to watch a bit of ESPN’s early-round coverage of the US Open Championship. But alas, ESPN had made the (insane) decision to put Chris Berman in one of the tower analysts chairs — which is the sports equivalent of asking, say, Don Imus to give Al Sharpton’s eulogy. Only without the money lines about pomade, Jews, and

Well, according to Michael Moore — following on the heels of such foreign policy and engineering luminaries as Rosie O’Donnell, Charlie Sheen, and Howard Dean — it might have been. And at the very least, additional (read: non-Republican-tainted) inquiries need be conducted to get to the bottom of this troubling mystery. Of course, in Moore’s defense (and in his favor), an administration that so pointedly ignores a national health care

In a particularly strained bit of analogizing, Andrew Sullivan compares the preconditions for democracy in Iraq with the current crisis in Gaza in order to argue that the neocon agenda is trapped by its own internal inconsistencies — and that the best way forward is for the US to leave Iraq: [The unrealistic conviction that they could ever “impose” democracy on Iraq] is surely the self-contradiction at the heart of

Jeralyn Merritt, on the Nifong disbarment: Guilt sells in America, Innocence doesn’t. The Duke case is an exception in that for once the media and the public are focusing on innocence and wrongful prosecutions. We need to apply what we’ve learned from the Duke/Nifong case and make sure there is an Innocence Commission in every state. Jeralyn is largely correct; but what we shouldn’t forget is that there were those

In the comments to this post, Topsecretk9 shares an excerpt from a 1992 Atlantic Monthly piece, “Tales From the Bazaar: As individuals, few American diplomats have been as anonymous as the members of the group known as Arabists,” in which the trajectory of the term “Arabist” itself is discussed, and in which the venerable Joseph Wilson makes a notable appearance. I’ll share several excerpts that I found particularly interesting: In