The New York Times has the disturbing account about how a Nepalese man with an expired tourist visa was held for three months in solitary confinement for videotaping a building.
The man essentially got buried within the system, with little contact to the outside, and were it not for the extraordinary efforts of an FBI agent involved in his capture, he might have been imprisoned much longer.
One thing that continues to baffle me is how many so-called conservatives, who supposedly distrust broad, unchecked federal power, don’t join civil libertarians in protesting the abuses of individual rights in the “war on terror.” Apparently to these people, party unity is much more important than self-identified principles.

In an effort to placate hardline, anti-Castro, Cuban-American (Florida) voters, the Bush administration is severely tightening regulations on travel to Cuba. People can now only go there once every three years. Oh, and they can only spend $50/day on shopping.
Great policy for all those who still have relatives in Cuba. But that’s a small sacrifice to make for rules which are sure to break Castro’s decade’s-long reign.

This story fits in pretty well with what I wrote yesterday:

The networks spent considerable time and money flying in high-priced talent to cover the handover, which had been scheduled for tomorrow. But when U.S. officials decided that an earlier handover might minimize the chances of violence aimed at overshadowing the ceremony, the cloak-and-dagger stuff began. At 12:30 a.m. (8:30 a.m. Baghdad time), the Coalition Provisional Authority began calling journalists and telling them that they had half an hour to get inside the heavily guarded Green Zone for a background briefing by U.S. occupation chief Paul Bremer.
. . .
When about 30 journalists and photographers, including a Washington Post correspondent, arrived, they were not told anything about a transfer of sovereignty.
At 2 a.m., authorities took the reporters’ cell phones and placed them in brown envelopes to prevent them from calling their news organizations. The journalists were then told that the handover ceremony was about to unfold, but that the news was embargoed until 4 a.m.

In other words, journalists were bent because they were left out of the loop. And in their minds these events are largely about the journalists.
Oh, and that “surprise” handover really wasn’t that surprising:

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper said from Baghdad that he was not that surprised. “We’d been getting word that June 30 was just a date, more of a deadline,” he said. U.S. officials “had been very reluctant about the details. There was definitely a sense that it wasn’t necessarily a June 30 event.” The turn of events produced “an incredibly exciting day from a coverage standpoint,” Cooper said.

So since they got caught with their pants down, they had to hype the unexpected nature of the story. That’s how that after a fourteen month occupation, a two day change in the official phasing out became a big, big deal.

In case you missed it (and I’m sure most people did), Canada had elections yesterday. The liberal party won a plurality of the seats in Parliament, but did not win the 155 needed to maintain control. So Canada will have it’s first minority government in 25 years.
I’m not sure what, if any effect this will have outside Canada. Or even if anyone will notice. But I was watching the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation coverage (on C-SPAN) and noted a couple interesting things.
First, the CBC anchor noted that there were several close races which would go to automatic recounts. I sure hope they have a more orderly recount procedure there than we saw in Florida. No mention of Diebold machinery, however. So that’s another thing their election system has going in its favor.
Second, the pre-election polling–or rather the poll-based projections. We often hear complaints about the polling here, but in this case it was way off. In the days leading up to the election some media outlets speculated that the Conservative Party might win a majority of the seats. At this point during the returns they trail the Liberals by 38 seats. Oops.
From the TV analysis I gather that methodology was at fault here. Apparently, the media outlets took polls which showed Conservatives gaining x% of the vote. So they simply added that percentage across the board to some prior data base and accordingly concluded that the the Conservatives would win x more seats. Obviously votes don’t get neatly distributed across districts (or “ridings” as they’re apparently called up there) so that didn’t work.
Another quirky aspect of watching news from the land up north is bilingualism. I was watching a guy give a victory speech, roughly 80-90% of which was in English. But for some reason he sprinkled two or three French sentences every now and then. Why? I believe he was in Calgary, where English is the norm. Did he think that by throwing in a few lines every now and then, it would help keep the French TV audience glued to their sets? Do their translators need to take a breather from time to time? Odd.

The TV news is all over the “surprise” handover of Iraq two days early (though insiders started preparing for this a week ago). I think they are all miffed because they lost out on some planned programming and nifty graphics they had planned for the event.
I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that the only other people that are really playing this up are U.S. politicians. Interestingly, MSNBC has devoted more attention to Condi sneaking Mr. President a note during his meeting (as if Bush didn’t know this was going to happen) than it has covered the reaction of the newly “sovereign” Iraqi citizens themselves. Apparently, sovereignty isn’t such a big deal when you have car bombs sounding off and 150,000 foriegn troops roaming about your land.