Bush on his own terms
While President Bush and his senior aides continue to defend the legality of the wiretapping program he ordered after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, many legal scholars remain skeptical. According to the New York Times, legal and political analysts say the Bush administration has succeeded in framing the debate on their own terms. “It’s a very astute strategy,” UGA law professor Peter J. Spiro said in the article. “They don’t have much to work with legally, but they’re framing these justifications in constitutional terms to a public audience. That may serve them well.”

Political time machine
Today’s drama of the National Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping recalls another one of decades past, reports the New York Times. In 1975, a Senate committee revealed that the N.S.A. had intercepted citizens’ phone calls and telegrams, insisting the spying was authorized under the president’s constitutional powers. “You feel like you’re in an echo chamber, because the comments on both sides are so similar to 1975,” UGA political science professor Loch K. Johnson, said. “There are a lot of lessons from those times that are relevant today.”

Alarming art
While furor builds over the satirical cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad in Danish and European newspapers, lost is the fact that his likeness has long been portrayed in art without exciting alarm, says the Washington Times, which quoted UGA’s Islamic studies professor Alan A. Godlas: “The reason these cartoons sparked such a reaction has more to do with the tensions that were already there between the Islamic world and the West, and because in the age of the Internet, what goes on anywhere in the world is heard and seen everywhere,” he said.

Brave new biolab
The Scientist reports that the Department of Homeland Security is seeking locations to build a $451 million, 500,000 square-foot, high-security animal biolab to replace its 55-year old animal disease lab on Plum Island, N.Y. UGA professor of veterinary pathology Corrie Brown is quoted on why the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility is necessary. Globalization is causing worrisome agricultural diseases to move around the world more frequently, “so the diseases we used to think we could stop at our borders, we’re pretty sure we probably can’t stop them at our borders anymore,” she said.

No more mint
In a story discussing whether the 1,100-year-old and financially troubled Royal Mint should close, The London Financial Times quotes UGA economics professor George Selgin. The state-owned mint is “too costly to be kept going just for old time’s sake,” he said. “If Europe has no need for a monopolistic mint but can look to all the mints of world as potential suppliers of coin, why can’t Great Britain do the same?”