Shorts: Racist Nobel Winner?, Bombing in Manilla, Teacher Nabbed, China Olympics 2008

• Apparently you can be really really smart - as in winning the Nobel prize in 1962 for deciphering the double-helix of DNA - but still be really dumb as well. Case in point is Dr. James D. Watson winner of the aforementioned prize who also apparently likes to infer that black people aren’t as smart as white people - and are problem workers too. Hmmm….so much for those museum appearances. But he is trying to apologize and says his comments were not read as he intended them to be. It seems even Nobel winners can get tongue tied..


• The news coming out of the capital Manilla isn’t looking any better with police saying that they’ve found traces of plastic explosives tied to the mall explosions. As of right now there are eight confirmed deaths along with seventy wounded and general alerts have been issued for the rest of the city as well as the international airport.


• Christopher Paul Neil, a Canadian teacher was just picked up for sexually abusing underage Southeast Asian children (he posted some of the pictures on the Internet which helped with his arrest). Hopefully this will be a wakeup call to other people like Neil that Southeast Asia isn’t a place you can go and get away with molesting underage children and treat them like disposable paper plates and get away with it.


• You knew this was going to start sooner or later - the politicizing of the Olympics in China ‘08 - and it’s already starting to get heated with warnings being thrown out on both sides including organizations like the Human Rights Watch. This is going to be one of the most interesting Olympics in years.