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Alhurra, the U.S. government-funded Arabic news channel, paid former Bush and Clinton administration officials, lobbyists and high-profile Washington journalists tens of thousands of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money to appear on the network as commentators, according to interviews and a review of company records.
A number of payments went to people tied to the White House and the Republican Party. Chad Kolton, a former spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence and Federal Emergency Management Agency; Trent Duffy, President Bush’s former deputy press secretary; Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, a former aid to Vice President Cheney and former CIA spokeswoman, and Terry Holt, the spokesman for Bush-Cheney 2004, were among those paid to appear.
More from Ken Silverstein:
Commentary — July 25, 2012, 2:20 pm
Washington Babylon — September 29, 2010, 11:37 am


Ratio of the number of cicada eggs per square mile of southern New Jersey to the number of stars in the Milky Way:
Jeffrey Lockwood, University of Wyoming (Laramie)/American Museum of Natural History (N.Y.C.)

A Singaporean company unveiled Kissenger, a pair of plastic lips mounted on a large plastic egg, which transmits real-time interactive kisses to a distant lover. “I am not interested in the sexual uses for it,” said the device’s inventor. “We’ve taken several steps to minimize the creepiness.”

The practice of sexualized eyeball licking was causing conjunctivitis in Japanese sixth graders.