A US study by the Pew Research Center finds that pre-election polls favor Republican candidates when the pollster only calls landlines, and not cell phones. The gap appears to be growing as more people abandon land lines for cell service. [S]upport for Republican candidates was significantly higher in samples based only on landlines than in dual frame samples that combined landline and cell phone interviews. The difference in the margin among likely voters this year is about twice as large as in 2008. And then there's Skype. This calls to mind the 1948 US presidential election, in which polls (and pundits) predicted a...

Contrarian reader Andrew Bourke is reconsidering a trip to Disney World after seeing this video of Transportation Safety Agency screeners in Chattanooga Tennessee manhandling an upset three-year-old. (If you can't see the video, try this link.) The San Francisco Chronicle explains: A TSA employee gave Mandy the pat down and she started screaming and kicking her legs...

Get ready for Opt Out Day: For those using Flash-impaired Apple products, try here. From the clever Taiwanese animators, Next Media. Hat tip: This week in Google....

Quebec designer Kamel Makhloufi has pixelated the Iraq War body count: blue pixels for U.S. soldiers; green for Iraqi; grey for enemy, and orange for civilians. The image on the left sorts by nationality; on the right by time....

Where do refugees come from? Where do they go? Which countries produce the most refugees? Which countries take the most in? Christian Behrens, a German designer who studied at Concordia, answers those questions visually with a series of interactive infographics that grew out of a Potsdam University of Applied Sciences class project on mapping global tendencies. Based on the annual Refugee Report of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, the graphic lets us look at refugee flows from several different perspectives. Which country took in the most refugees in 2008? The US? Nope. Canada? Not even close. Pakistan tops the list, at...

Growing discomfort with the military commission trial of Canadian child soldier Omar Khadr, the only western national still held in the US detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has apparently propelled the US government to seek a plea bargain in the case. The presiding military judge delayed the trial this week in anticipation of a possible deal. Why now? The Toronto Star's Michelle Sheppard reported Thursday that Omar Khadr's pending trial "has caused discomfort among some of Obama’s advisers, who are concerned about the fact that he was 15 at the time of the alleged offence." Friday's edition of the New York Times,...

.. .. Chiquita Brands International, successor to the United Fruit Company, a cartel whose imperialist policies in Latin America gave life to the term banana republic (coined by O. Henry), has revealed the winners in its contest to replace the company's iconic fruit sticker. Here are Contrarian's favorites: . . . ...

Salon's Glenn Greenwald digs out a prescient morning-after column by Hunter S. Thompson of all people, published on 9/12/2001: The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare...

That was the manifesto of my favorite Yippe, Abby Hoffman. Now you can steal it online....