Free Republic

The city of Berkeley, California, is updating its municipal code to exclude gendered words like “manhole” and “manmade” in favor of more inclusive language, according to a new ordinance. The City Council voted Tuesday night to adopt the new ordinance eliminating “gender preference language” in its code. “Manholes” will now be called “maintenance holes,” “firemen” will become “firefighters,” “manmade” will be “artificial” and all instances of “men and women” will be replaced by “people.” Gendered pronouns, such as “he” and “she” will also be replaced with “they.” “There’s power in language,” the bill’s primary author, Berkeley City Council member Rigel...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...