What Caught My Eye Today

Torture - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi bluntly accused the CIA of misleading her and other lawmakers about its use of waterboarding during the Bush administration. "They mislead us all the time," she said. Asked whether the agency had lied, Pelosi said yes. What's this? A spy agency being accused of subterfuge? It's a world gone mad, I tell you. Pelosi also vehemently disputed Republican charges that she was complicit in the use of waterboarding, and she suggested the GOP was trying to shift the focus of public attention away from the Bush administration's use of techniques that she and President Barack Obama have described as torture. Pelosi has been the target of a campaign orchestrated in recent days by the House Republican leadership, which is eager to undercut her statements as well as stick Democrats with partial responsibility for the use of waterboarding — a kind of simulated drowning — in the Bush administration. Pelosi renewed her call for a so-called truth commission to investigate the events in the Bush administration that led to the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques. So let me see if I've got this straight. Pelosi is on a witch hunt trying to punish a guy who is no longer in power for doing something that the new guy has banned. In what can only be described as retaliation, Republicans are attempting to defend past transgressions by saying Democrats, like Pelosi, were fully aware of what was going on and did nothing to stop it. Which, in turn, motivates Pelosi even more to prove that the Republican administration was at fault. Forget the fact that this probe will probably bear out if Pelosi knew about what was going on or not. Did you follow all that? Me neither. Still, I guess this is a far better use of Congress's time than say, oh I don't know, fixing the battered economy.

Body Parts - This story is just plain creepy. A man was convicted of carving up cadavers donated to UCLA's medical school and selling the parts to unsuspecting medical research companies in a $1.5 million scheme. Prosecutors said he bought the donated torsos, cut them up and kept them frozen in a rented warehouse until they were sold to companies that didn't know they had been improperly obtained. I suppose you can give this whack job credit for ingenuity, but boyfriend certainly doesn't get any bonus point in the brains department. Here's his defense. He thought the sales were authorized by the university. Of course they were. Why wouldn't a university authorize the sale of body parts and allow the dude who was supposed to transport them to pocket the proceeds? At the risk of stating the obvious, Einstein is now serving a four year prison term in the state penitentiary.

Space Shuttle - A pair of spacewalking astronauts overpowered a stubborn bolt and successfully installed a new piano-sized camera in the Hubble Space Telescope, the first step to making the observatory better than ever. The newly inserted wide-field and planetary camera — worth $132 million — will allow astronomers to peer deeper into the universe, to within 500 million to 600 million years of creation. The old one was installed in December 1993 during the first Hubble repair mission and has taken more than 135,000 observations. A camera the size of a piano? I wonder what type of film that takes? I'm guessing something a bit larger than 35mm. And how about the size of the roll. 135,000 pictures. A standard roll of film takes about 24 exposures right? That's like 5600 rolls of film. (Yeah, yeah, I know. They use digital photography these day, but if I went down that path I couldn't have made that crack about the 5600 rolls of film could I?)

North Pole - British explorers in northern Canada to measure the thickness of floating Arctic sea ice ended their expedition short of reaching the North Pole due to an early summer ice melt. That sort of defeats the purpose of measuring the ice doesn't it? The explorers had planned a three-month journey to the North Pole, during which they measured the thickness of floating sea ice to provide data to scientists studying the impact of global warming in the region, but stopped after 73 days. Information the team gathers could contribute to a better understanding of global warming, which is believed to be the main culprit in the rapidly melting polar ice cap that is freeing up new sea routes and untapped mineral resources on the ocean bottom. That's all well and good, but I'm thinking the bigger story here is that they had to cut short their expedition because they ran out of North Pole to explore. It's melting away too fast. I'd say that's a pretty good indicator that global warming is having some impact on the region.

Cycling - Day 6 of the Giro D'Italia is in the books. Levi Leipheimer’s chance of winning the Giro d’Italia keeps getting better. Lance Armstrong keeps losing time. Leipheimer finished in the main pack in the sixth stage, with the race crossing into Austria. The Montana rider remained fourth overall, 43 seconds behind the overall leader. For the third consecutive stage, Armstrong was dropped from the lead group. This time, the seven-time Tour de France winner was undone by a steep downhill run. Armstrong lost 1:15 and dropped from 22nd to 25th overall, 4:13 behind. Bear in mind the dude is coming of a 3 1/2 year retirement and a shattered collarbone in March. Leipheimer has a long list of accomplishments. He finished second to teammate Alberto Contador in last year’s Spanish Vuelta, was third in the 2001 Spanish Vuelta and 2007 Tour de France and took the bronze medal in the time trial at the Beijing Olympics. "Things haven’t changed for me," Leipheimer said. "I think maybe just more people are paying attention now because of Lance." Armstrong does tend to have the affect on things. Still, I wouldn't count out a stage victory for Armstrong sometime in the next couple of weeks.