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May 26, 2006

Court of Appeals upholds unconstitutionality of Patriot Act's National Security Letter provision

A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday on two challenges to the National Security Letter provision of the USA Patriot Act filed by the American Civil Liberties Uniion. Two different lower courts found the provision to be unconstitutional, and the ACLU argued that recent amendments to the law have made it even less democratic.

Using the NSL provision of the USA Patriot Act, the FBI can demand a range of personal records--email messages, visited websites, library records--without seeking court approval. In addition, the law puts an automatic gag on anyone whose records are gathered by the FBI.

One of the cases brought to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals is from New York, and concerns an anonymous Internet Service Provider who challenged the NSL provision after the FBI demanded records. The other case was from Connecticut, where librarians challenged the provision for not permitting them to disclose their identities.

In 2004, Judge Victor Marrero struck down the NSL statute, and the Court of Appeals upheld his decision. Wrote Judge Richard Cardamone:

A ban on speech and a shroud of secrecy in perpetuity are antithetical to democratic concepts and do not fit comfortably with the fundamental rights guaranteed American citizens.... Unending secrecy of actions taken by government officials may also serve as a cover for possible official misconduct and/or incompetence.

Judge Cardamone added that national security concerns “should be leavened with common sense so as not forever to trump the rights of the citizenry under the Constitution.”

The court also lifted the gag that was put on the Connecticut librarians.

Explaining Inaction on Global Warming

Here's a thought as to why Congress does—and will continue to do—nothing about trying to avert catastrophic global warming:

Cass Sunstein, a law professor and political scientist at the University of Chicago, raises the provocative question of why America has responded in such diametrically different fashion to terrorism (panic) and global warming (postponement).

In a paper released this month by the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, Sunstein notes that presidents and legislators are willing to squander money to avoid being blamed for something.

"Every politician has a strong incentive to take steps to prevent terrorist attacks," Sunstein writes. "If such an attack occurs 'on his watch,' the likelihood of political reprisal is high ... By contrast, it is far less likely that there will be a climate change 'incident' on the watch of, or easily attributable to, any current politician."

Except… except… politicians in other countries, particularly in Europe, face the same dilemma and they all take global warming fairly seriously. Why is that? Perhaps it's true that the structure of our political system is a reason why Congress does absolutely nothing about climate change, but the more immediate problem is the particular politicians in charge right now—namely, conservative ideologues bought and paid for by business groups that are allergic to any and all environmental regulations. Not that Democrats are much better, mind you. It's just silly to overlook the foremost obstacle to any sort of sensible climate change policy.

At any rate, Paul Krugman had an interesting column today noting that the amount of sacrifice involved in averting global warming wouldn't be huge, according to the "broad consensus" among economists. At worst, reducing carbon emissions to sustainable levels would reduce GDP growth by two-tenths of a percentage point over the next twenty years. That's a lot of money, but hardly crippling, and there would still be a lot of economic growth to spare. And my hunch is that the actual "pain" involved would be much less severe. Anti-regulatory types have always predicted that this or that environmental law would destroy industries and lead to mass unemployment and make everyone poorer and unhappier. They've usually, if not always, been wrong.

Why Not Metric?

Via Rob Farley, "Dean Dad" wonders why the United States never adopted the metric system (although you see weird exceptions crop up all the time, like with 2-liter Coke bottles). Indeed, it's a real problem. I doubt it has a large economic impact on the country—a calculator will convert back and forth between the two systems, so I doubt manufacturers and engineers care very much—but it's certainly absurd to force everyone to remember that there are 1,760 yards in a mile and so forth. But apparently inches and yards are "manly" units of measurement, and that's why we have them:

Looking back, I sorta remember the backlash against metric occurring as part of the backlash against an inchoate sense that America was in decline. In the late 70’s, there was a weird, curdled-populist anger that manifested itself in CB radios and Proposition 13 and Ronald Reagan…. Anyway, the metric system at that time came off as a sort of effete, Euro-Modernist import, shoved down the throats of Real Americans by the same smug coastal elites who got all self-righteous about banning smoking and conserving energy.

Two of Ronald Reagan's early acts as president, as it turned out, were to overturn a law encouraging schools to teach kids the metric system, and to disband and defund the U.S. Metric Board. But then in 1988, apparently, there was a change of heart and Congress decided to require all federal agencies to go metric. The military, meanwhile, has long relied solely on the metric system, because when lives are on the line no one wants to be racking their brains wondering how many quarts to a gallon. But no one wants to force the rest of the country to follow suit. We'd have to throw out all our measuring cups, after all.

Those facts, by the way, all come from this handy metric timeline. I also was going to point out that when I lived in Ireland, all the speed limits were oddly designated in miles, but apparently that's no longer true as of 2005. Right now the only other countries that haven't officially adopted the system are Burma and Liberia, so the United States is in good company I guess.

May 25, 2006

Don't Forget "Kenny Boy"

Enron's Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were both found guilty today on multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy. What a pity. Since this is ostensibly a political blog, I guess it's worth bringing up the political angle here—via Digby—namely, Lay's close ties with the president:

[T]he reality, as established by a wealth of historical record and recent disclosures, is that Lay and Enron were instrumental in Bush’s rise to power – and Bush played an important behind-the-scenes role in advancing Enron’s aggressive deregulation agenda, which helped the energy trader ascend to its lofty perch as the seventh-biggest U.S. company.

The Bush-Lay coziness earned the Enron chief a nickname from Bush as "Kenny Boy." But more importantly for Enron, Bush pitched in as governor and president whenever the energy trader wanted easier regulations within the U.S. or to have U.S. taxpayers foot the bill for loan guarantees or risk insurance for Enron's overseas ventures.

But for some reason, major media outlets were never much interested in this story. Can't imagine why it didn't get David Broder all hot and bothered...

Press Corps Salivates Over Hillary's Marriage

At the risk of being redundant, it's probably worth emphasizing something in Atrios' post here. The other day—maybe it was Monday or Tuesday—the New York Times decided that the best use of its resources and space would be to send a reporter out to interview fifty people in order to find out if the Clintons were still having sex or not. And now David Broder, the so-called "Dean of the Washington Press Corps" has this to say:

But for all the delicacy of the treatment, the very fact that the Times had sent a reporter out to interview 50 people about the state of the Clintons' marriage and placed the story on the top of Page One was a clear signal -- if any was needed -- that the drama of the Clintons' personal life would be a hot topic if she runs for president.

Ah, so Broder can tut-tut the article and distance himself from it by simply pointing out that this sort of thing is "bound to" come up and "the drama of the Clinton's personal life would be a hot topic if she runs for president." Note the passive construction, as if to say it's not his fault. Maybe it's Clinton's fault. But look, who's going to make it a hot topic here? Why, Broder and his fellow Washington journalists. If Broder thought Hillary Clinton's sex life was out of bounds or entirely irrelevant, he could just say so. But no. Instead he declares it inevitable. Nothing Broder can do. It's a cute racket.

And speaking of cute, it's simply adorable how Broder starts his piece by noting that when Hillary Clinton spoke at the National Press Club, he and his cohorts were more interested in salivating over "the state of her marriage" than listening to the boring details of her (quite decent, if a bit conservative) energy policy. Clinton actually had to apologize for making the speech too, as Broder calls it, "wonkish." Yeah, heaven forbid she hurt their little heads with details about stuff that actually matters.

UPDATE: Garance Franke-Ruta's take on this is very much worth reading.

Raiding Jefferson's Office

I've been trying to figure out whether there was actually a problem or not with the FBI raid on William Jefferson's offices. Certainly the raid on a member of Congress' office was unprecedented. And certainly Republican leaders such as Denny Hastert and John Boehner are up in arms about it, calling it a separation of powers issue. But does that make it illegal? Or, for that matter, wrong?

On the legal front, Orin Kerr says that, seeing as how the FBI got a warrant from a judge, and seeing as how Jefferson had refused to comply with Justice Department subpoenas for documents relating to the bribery investigation, the raid was probably constitutional, despite the Constitution's Speech and Debate clause declaring that members of Congress be exempt from arrest and questioning while in session. (The clause seems to be there precisely to prevent the executive branch from harassing legislators, the sort of thing you see dictatorships around the world doing all the time.)

On the other hand, Mark Kleiman says we really shouldn't be looking forward to a time when the FBI starts policing members of Congress and regulating corruption, especially since the Justice Department seems to be going after things that are nominally legal. Now granted, if Congress has no interest in policing itself, then someone has to do it, but it's not clear that law enforcement organization with a "deserved reputation for playing dirty" is the agency to do it. After all, these sorts of raids are certainly prone to abuse:

In particular, now that the precedent has been established, what's to keep the Bureau from raiding the offices of Congressional Democrats in leak investigations? Finding a judge to sign a search warrant is trivial, especially in any case with the "national security" label.

Maybe that's a pretty outlandish concern, but it's not impossible. And more realistically, what's to stop a vindictive administration from getting the FBI to investigate bribery charges on various Senators and members of Congress for political gain? After all, corruption is a pretty strong accusation, and can certainly damage or weaken a sitting member of Congress, even if it's totally false. That's not to say that Jefferson's innocent or that the FBI is simply being vindictive in this case, but there are definitely issues to worry about.

Baghdad described as lacking fundamental services and utilities

Three years after the United States invaded Iraq, Baghdad is still lacking basic services for its citizens. Water treatment plants that were to have been repaired after the war meet 60% of the city's needs, and the sewerage pipes are clogged with garbage. During the past six months, more than 300 garbage collectors have been killed, and people are tossing their garbage into the streets.

A well-off Iraqi man who live in Karrada told the San Francisco Chronicle that he gets power four hours a day, and that running water is available for one hour, between 1:00 and 2:00 in the morning. He says he stays up late and collects as much water as he can in plastic jugs.

In the poor part of Baghdad, the resident live in shelters made of corrugated metal, concrete, and rusted oil containers.

May 24, 2006

Lobbyist Donations As High As Ever

The midterm elections this fall will supposedly be all about the "culture of corruption" in Washington, wherein noble-minded reformers—most of them Democrats, presumably—will rail against lobbyists who are perverting and distorting government. So far, though, lobbyists are just carrying on as usual. Public Citizen released a report today looking at donations by lobbyists and their PACs—in 2006, lobbyist donations to members of Congress are on pace to be about 10 percent higher than they were in 2004 (totaling $34 million), which were in turn 90 percent higher than they were in 2000 (totaling $18 million).

Interestingly, Jack Abramoff is only the 30th-ranked lobbyist donor. And not surprisingly, most of the money goes to members of the Senate and House appropriations committees, which ultimately decides how federal money gets spent. Supposedly this is different from the actual bribery that took place when Duke Cunningham was sitting on the House appropriations committee, but the dividing line here seems pretty hazy.

Importing Nurses

Nathan Newman raises an interesting issue here. Democrats in Congress offered an amendment to the immigration bill currently being debated that would allow an unlimited number of foreign nurses to enter the United States, on the grounds that there's a nurse shortage in this country.

That sounds like a good idea, but here's the problem: won't it cause an even more disastrous nurse shortage in developing countries, perhaps causing collapses in health care systems around the world? That already seems to be the case in the Philippines and India. On the broader issue, the New York Times ran a good piece a while back on the "brain drain" developing countries face when all their skilled workers leave for OECD countries. It can cause "a vicious downward cycle of underdevelopment." Not good for them, and it's hard to know what to do. Restrict immigration of skilled workers? Screw the poorer countries?

Now Newman's solution to the nursing issue seems unexceptionable—train more nurses in the United States, since there are currently more people who want to become nurses than spots in nursing school. On the other hand, for those worried about keeping health care costs down, it's much cheaper to "outsource" nursing education to the Third World, where education costs are naturally lower. Ideally, perhaps, the United States would do more to help develop the poorer countries that are sending us all their cheap labor, but that would involve more drastic changes than anything being contemplated in Congress right now.

May 23, 2006

Zogby poll shows interest in new Septmber 11 investigation

A recent Zogby poll found that over 70 million Americans distrust the official explanation of the September 11 attacks. 42% believe there has been some kind of coverup; 45% believe that Congress on an international tribunal should investigate the attacks again.

An August, 2004 poll showed that nearly half of New Yorkers believed that U.S. officials consciously allowed the attacks to happen, and 2/3 of New Yorkers want a new investigation of the events.

The report of the September 11 Commission left much to be desired in terms of White House culpability, and omitted information about the collapse of WTC Building 7.

William Jefferson and Corruption

By all accounts, William Jefferson, the Louisiana Democrat caught taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, should resign. That's certainly what the DailyKos people are demanding. And in the interest of showing zero tolerance for congressional corruption, I'd agree. On the other hand, part of me wonders if maybe he should just stick it out and brazenly proclaim his innocence. That seems to have worked pretty well for Bob Ney and Jerry Lewis. No, okay, resign it is.

Now as Matt Yglesias says, it's a bit daft to try to equate this Jefferson scandal with the Tom DeLay and Duke Cunningham scandals and suggest that "both" parties have the same problem with corruption. DeLay, of course, was House Majority Leader. Sort of a big deal. Duke Cunningham sat on the House Appropriations Subcommittee for Defense and quite literally whored out defense contracts to the highest bidder. In both cases, as with the other GOP cases now under investigation, government was up for sale. Policy was up for sale. It's the sort of thing that can adversely affect millions of people. Jefferson... was something of a two-bit crook trying to get rich quick. Bad stuff, and if there are other corrupt Democrats throw those bums out too, but it's not quite the same thing.

Meanwhile, though, check out this Washington Post article about how all sorts of members of Congress are outraged that the federal government would raid Jefferson's home, just like that:

Republican leaders, who previously sought to focus attention on the Jefferson case as a counterpoint to their party's own ethical scandals, said they are disturbed by the raid. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said that he is "very concerned" about the incident and that Senate and House counsels will review it.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) expressed alarm at the raid. "The actions of the Justice Department in seeking and executing this warrant raise important Constitutional issues that go well beyond the specifics of this case," he said in a lengthy statement released last night.

"Insofar as I am aware, since the founding of our Republic 219 years ago, the Justice Department has never found it necessary to do what it did Saturday night, crossing this Separation of Powers line, in order to successfully prosecute corruption by Members of Congress," he said. "Nothing I have learned in the last 48 hours leads me to believe that there was any necessity to change the precedent established over those 219 years."

Hilarious. If the Bush administration wants to wiretap ordinary citizens without a warrant, or break the law to retrieve phone records, eh, Hastert and Frist will happily go along with it. Who needs privacy? But if it's their constitutional rights at stake, then lordy, the madness ends here. Granted, there might be legitimate concerns here—in the abstract, no one wants the executive branch to be able to harass legislators willy-nilly, although I don't know the finer points of law on this issue—but the unintended irony is a bit obnoxious.

Meanwhile, Justin Rood wonders if Republicans are simply complaining right now because they're afraid that the FBI might be coming for them next. Could be.

Hope is Still the Plan

Newsweek's Michael Hirsh is trying to figure out what the Bush administration is planning to do about Iraq. Best of luck to him. I gave up this game long ago, mainly because the administration doesn't even seem to have a plan, apart from muddling through and perpetually hoping that in six months time, things will get magically better. And that still seems to be the case:

So the very best that can be hoped for in Iraq, probably for many years to come, will be a non-bloodbath, a low-level civil war that doesn’t get worse than the current cycle of insurgent killings and Shiite death-squad reprisals. This is bad, but it could be much worse. Containment, says one Army officer involved in training in Iraq, is at least "doable." He adds: "The only real question is: How do we keep Iraq from becoming a permissive environment for terrorists."

People will keep killing each other, sure, but at least it won't be some unspecified really large number of people killing each other. That's the plan. Although there still seem to be some technical problems:

The U.S. military is already gearing up for this outcome, but not for "victory" any longer. It is consolidating to several "superbases" in hopes that its continued presence will prevent Iraq from succumbing to full-flown civil war and turning into a failed state. Pentagon strategists admit they have not figured out how to move to superbases, as a way of reducing the pressure—and casualties—inflicted on the U.S. Army, while at the same time remaining embedded with Iraqi police and military units. It is a circle no one has squared.

Er, perhaps that's because it can't be done? It seems awfully hard for the military to stay out of the way and avoiding getting its soldiers killed and continue trying to influence events on the ground in Iraq. Pentagon strategists seem to agree. Really, no one seems to know what to do anymore. On the bright side, Ralph Peters says that this year more Americans will die in highway accidents than get killed in Iraq so I guess we can all clap our hands now...

May 22, 2006

We're Still #1... in Infant Mortality

Last Mother's Day, Save the Children released some statistics noting that infant mortality rates in the United States were ridiculously high compared to other "developed" countries, especially if you just look at infant mortality rates among African-Americans or Native Americans.

Now for a long time, many critics of these numbers have suggested that it's all a mirage, a trick of accounting, supposedly caused by the fact that other countries don't try to save as many babies as we do and hence count all those extra deaths as stillbirths. But over at Alas, a Blog, Ampersand looks at this claim and finds that it's quite wrong; the United States really does have a much higher infant mortality rate than other industrialized countries. Whether that's because of our inequitable health care system or environmental factors or pervasive poverty is up in the air, but there's no question that the problem exists.

The Origins of Anti-Litter Campaigns

I've never known anyone who was objectively pro-litter. Litter's awful. It's disgusting. We're all agreed. But it seems that the nationwide anti-litter campaign, which began in the 1950s, was a bit less pure in its origins. According to Heather Rogers' Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, the entire anti-litter movement was initiated by a consortium of industry groups who wanted to divert the nation's attention away from even more radical legislation to control the amount of waste these companies were putting out. It's a good story worth retelling.

After World War II, the story goes, American manufacturers were running at full blast, and needed American consumers to keep buying more and more junk if they wanted to maintain their profit margins. And since there's an upper limit to how much junk a given family genuinely needs to own, manufacturers had to figure out how to convince consumers to keep throwing their existing stuff out, so that they would buy new stuff.

In part, that meant companies had to ensure that in a few short years consumer goods would become either unfashionable (advertising can do that), or obsolete (simply stop offering customer support for anything a few years old), or broken (like the non-replaceable batteries in iPods that wear out after two years). Giles Slade describes some of these strategies in his book, Made to Break, and they're techniques that have existed for decades now. But another way to ensure that factories could keep churning out junk was to introduce "non-renewable" packaging for products—for instance, the aluminum soda can—that could be produced, trashed, and then produced again.

The problem is that all of this endless—and needless—manufacturing creates a lot of garbage and pollution that generally wreaks havoc on the earth. (Packaging currently accounts for one-third of all trash in the United States today.) And eventually people wised up to this fact. In 1953 Vermont passed a law banning "throwaway bottles," after farmers complained that glass bottles were being tossed into haystacks and being eaten by unsuspecting cows. Suddenly, state legislatures appeared poised to pass laws that would require manufacturers—and the packaging industry in particular—to make less junk in the first place. Horrors.

So that's where litter comes in. In 1953, the packaging industry—led by American Can Company and Owens-Illinois Glass Company, inventors of the one-way can and bottle, respectively—joined up with other industry leaders, including Coca-Cola and the Dixie Cup Company to form Keep America Beautiful (KAB), which still exists today. KAB was well-funded and started a massive media campaign to rail against bad environmental habits on the part of individuals rather than businesses. And that meant cracking down on litter. Within the first few years, KAB had statewide antilitter campaigns planned or running in thirty-two states.

In essence, Keep America Beautiful managed to shift the entire debate about America's garbage problem. No longer was the focus on regulating production—for instance, requring can and bottle makers to use refillable containers, which are vastly less profitable. Instead, the "litterbug" became the real villain, and KAB supported fines and jail time for people who carelessly tossed out their trash, despite the fact that, clearly, "littering" is a relatively tiny part of the garbage problem in this country (not to mention the resource damage and pollution that comes with manufacturing ever more junk in the first place). Environmental groups that worked with KAB early on didn't realize what was happening until years later.

And KAB's campaign worked—by the late 1950s, anti-litter ordinances were being passed in statehouses across the country, while not a single restriction on packaging could be found anywhere. Even today, thanks to heavy lobbying by the packaging industry, only twelve states have deposit laws, despite the fact that the laws demonstrably save energy and reduce consumption by promoting reuse and recycling. (A year after Oregon passed the first such law in 1972, 385 million fewer beverage containers were consumed in the state.) And no state has contemplated anything like Finland's refillable bottle laws, which has reduced the country's garbage output by an estimated 390,000 tons. But hey, at least we're not littering.

So it's a nifty judo throw, as far as it goes. I'm guessing that much the same thing is behind industry promotion of recycling. Again, no one can be "against" recycling. It's very good. But of the three suggestions in the phrase "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle," the last is the practice least effective in curbing the manufacturing of junk. And that's exactly why, during the environmental movement's peak in the 1970s, the industry-funded National Center for Resource Recovery—which was founded by none other than Keep America Beautiful—lobbied state and national legislators to favor recycling as the means to address concerns about rising tides of garbage. It beat forcing people to "reduce" or "reuse."

The catch is that recycling can probably only do so much to limit garbage production. As Rogers' book points out, many materials can't be recycled too often before it gets junked, and a vast amount of material marked for recycling simply gets trashed anyway, or is sent overseas to be dumped. Recycling certainly has very considerable upside, not least of which is that recycled stuff requires vastly less energy to create than making new junk from scratch, but it's only a partway solution to reducing the 230 million tons of trash generated by this country each year, if that's what people think should be done. A longer-term solution is to stop creating so much junk in the first place. Essentially, though, that's what ideas like litter prevention are meant to obscure.

Prisoners, absolved of charges, still at Guantanamo

Since the opening of the Grantanamo prison, 38 of the 759 prisoners have been deemed "no longer enemy combatants." Right now there are four men at Guantanamo who have been cleared of all charges, but who have no idea when they will be released.

Many of the men who have been cleared of charges were rounded up by profiteers on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border and sold to U.S. or Northern Alliance forces, according to The Washington Post. The going prices were rumored to be $25,000 for each Arab, and $15,000 for each Afghan. Some were Arabs who "stood out," and some were arrested by the Pakistani police.

No Security Guarantees for Iran

Every now and again when I (or some other lily-livered appeaser) suggest that the Bush administration sit down and try to negotiate with Iran over its nuclear program, someone points out that the United States already is talking to Iran, and already has offered lots of good things in exchange for disarmament. But that's not quite right. As the AP reported yesterday, Condoleezza Rice has categorically ruled out offering "a guarantee against attacking or undermining Iran's hard-line government in exchange for having Tehran curtail its nuclear program."

It's obvious that this is the one thing of value we can really offer Iran. The United States has already shown a propensity for abandoning all common sense and invading countries in the Middle East for no good reason. Absent guarantees that we won't do that again, it's not totally irrational that Iran wants a nuclear deterrent. Now granted, there's now nearly enough trust on either side at the moment for security guarantees to be very plausible. And maybe they wouldn't work. Nevertheless, so long as neither side is making any sort of move towards this eventual goal, all the various offers and counter-offers being floated in the press are simply charades.

Does the Border Need Securing?

This is several weeks old, but Peter Beinart's column on immigration and national security made a very good point. Every single politician in Washington, pro-immigration or no, claims that we need to secure our border with Mexico so that "terrorists" don't sneak in. That's one of the stated rationales that restrictionists offer for wanting to build a wall and militarize our border, but even people like Ted Kennedy argue that our porous Mexican border "directly threatens national security."

Yet as Beinart notes, potential terrorists are really, really unlikely to make the dangerous trek across the hot desert to enter the United States through the Mexican border, especially when they can just do what they've always done and walk in through the even-more-porous Canadian border. Or they can do what the 9/11 hijackers did and simply enter the country on student visas. Whatever the solution might be—Beinart suggests national ID cards—it's not a Berlin-style wall along the southern border.

Meanwhile, if someone wanted to sneak, say, some sort of nuclear device into this country, why go through Mexico? They could always just ship it in a cargo container, seeing as how our ports are totally unsecured and the ruling party in Washington has time and time again scotched proposals to pay for more security. Normally when this topic comes up I encourage everyone to read John Mueller's essay on how the threat of terrorism is fairly overblown (at least unless we do something crazy in response—like militarize our southern border), but even those who want to obsess about it should at least note that the Mexican border ranks relatively low on the list of our security concerns.

More Signs of Coral Bleaching

Since we're always looking for an excuse to hock our oceans package, I figured I'd link to this New York Times story about how rising ocean temperatures are threatening coral reefs in Florida. During outbreaks of coral bleaching, "which are directly tied to rising ocean temperatures and reach their height in the warmest months, vast fields of coral shed their gaudy colors, turn bone-white and die." It's becoming an increasingly common phenomenon of late; about 16 percent of the world's reefs were damaged by bleaching due to El Nino in 1998.

Sadly, the story doesn't really explain why anyone, apart from snorkelers, should care about coral reefs. But apart from being pretty and making for cool photos, they're quite valuable: helping shelter regions such as Florida from hurricanes and the like and sustaining fisheries and other crucial ecosystems. They're kind of a big deal. I notice that the Times also seemed to tiptoe around probably links between coral bleaching and global warming, which is rather odd seeing as how the lead sentence promised to take up just that very topic.