Tomorrow kite enthusiasts from around the country will converge on the National Mall for the 41st annual Smithsonian Kite Festival. Kite makers can can test their creations in a contest with rules and regulations you would expect in the nation’s capital:

By order of the Federal Aviation Administration, the weight of a kite must not exceed 5 pounds and altitude of flight must not exceed 500 feet. When informed that a Presidential helicopter is approaching, all kites must be pulled down immediately, and not re-flown until the all-clear announcement.

Kites have been a pastime since 3,500 years when they were invented in China. There is also some evidence that Malaysia, Indonesia and South Pacific islands developed kites for a more practical purpose: fishing. This clever technology mashup - still practiced today - enabled them to reach fish in shallows where there boats could not.

But fisherman weren’t the only ones to recognize the utility of kites - so did surfers. Kite surfing, also known as kite boarding, powers surfers through and above the water with a large inflatable kite usually attached to the user by a harness. Although the sport is only 13 years old, there are now more than 200,000 kite surfers around the world.

And if you’re more likely to pilot a large boat rather than a surfboard, you can just attach a Sky Sails to your ship. Cheaper than retrofitting large ships with sails and masts, these enormous kites can help reduce energy costs by taking advantage of ocean surface winds.

While the average five & dime kite is lucky to use all 500 feet of its discount cotton string, more serious kite enthusiasts upped the ante a few years ago. They started with a kite 30 feet in width, tethered it to a 3 inch thick Kevlar line and flew it to a record-setting height of 13,500 feet - more than two and a half miles in the atmosphere.

But recent research into using kites as a renewable energy source would shatter that world record.

Environmentalists were quick to hail wind turbines as a viable alternative to our reliance on fossil fuels, but bird lovers hated them. It seems that Don Quixote’s giants were swatting down some of their favorite feathered friends. So why not build the windmills farther from the ground?

Indeed there are several companies considering this. Treehugger reported that a Canadian company called Magenn has invented a wind-powered generator that is a cross between a kite and a helium balloon. Held aloft by helium 1000 feet in the air, winds cause the Magnus effect where “rotation increases, lift increases, drag will be minimized because of reduced leaning, and stability increases.” Electricity generated by these floating turbines is then sent to the ground via an electrical line.

Another idea takes windmills and attaches kites. The Italian company Kite Wind Generator uses kites 1000 meters in the troposhere that “are anchored to a revolving structure on a vertical axis, analogous to a giant merry-go-round, which conveys the energy… (to a) power-plant.”

And if kites pulling a merry-go-round isn’t innovative enough, imagine if Thomas Edison invented a kite today. Recent research proposed that flying electric generators (FEGs) could harness kinetic energy in jet stream winds. These winds more than six miles above the surface of the earth produce up to 100 times more energy than winds on the ground. According to the Washington Post, “just tapping into 1 percent of the energy in high altitude winds would be enough to power all of civilization.”

Of course, if none of these other kite-based solutions solve U.S. energy problems, President Bush can just go fly his What Would Jesus Do? kite.

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Chinese President Hu Jintao is visiting Moscow today to discuss increasing petroleum exports to China. That’s if he doesn’t first blow his budget on a hotel room in Moscow. The Russian oil boom has propelled Moscow to the top of the list of most expensive cities in the world. But the concentration of wealth in the former USSR capital belies the truth about the true state of the former Soviet Union.

Today the fifteen countries that once constituted this superpower stand at odds with one another in terms of economic opportunity, human rights, and development. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are soaring as members of the European Union and NATO. Estonia was ranked top in the World Liberty Index, with its Baltic neighbors not far behind. Meanwhile Turkmenistan’s eccentric (and recently deceased) President Niyazov spent his country’s resources cultivating world class repression, bested only by North Korea.

Elsewhere, oil resources elsewhere combined with a bungled move to private markets after the fall of communism have produced a kleptocracy across the former Soviet states. Outside of the Baltics, all of the former Soviet states now rank amongst the most corrupt countries in the world. On the bright side, communism does seem to have some positive lasting effects when it comes to equality. Five of the top ten most equal countries are from the former USSR.

Having shed the planned economy, these countries have all taken wildly different paths. But what if the USSR existed today? Statastic used several different development indicators and weighted them for each country based on population (one caveat: Russia constitutes 50% of the population of the former USSR). These statistics were combined into a new rating for USSR based on the latest survey data for various development indicators.

Taken as a whole, the USSR is not a very nice place to live 16 years after the fall of communism. Corruption in the USSR is comparable to that in Libya or Rwanda. The countries of the USSR today have less economic and individual freedom than the Democratic Republic of Congo. Even the USSR’s crumbling socialized medicine contributes to a mediocre score in the United Nations Human Development Index. Today the USSR ranks at the same level as its long-forgotten communist friend, China.
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Today is the 4th anniversary of the start of the War in Iraq. Four years must seem like an eternity for the families of those who’ve been deployed. But for the Americans sitting at home, flipping the channel away from the latest carnage in Baghdad, four years is little more abstract. Of course, for your beloved Fido, four years is one third of his life. And if you bought a pet rat at the start of the war, chances are it’s going to expire any day now. So Statastic decided to see which species could outlive this war if they were born on March 19, 2003.

Experts and politicians have been a little divided over the past four years about exactly how long this war would last. If Dick Cheney had been right when he notoriously predicted in March 2003 that it would be over in a matter of “weeks rather than months,” then the perishable dragonfly could have outlived this war. Or if Donald Rumsfeld’s most pessimistic estimation of a 6 month war had been correct, a monarch butterfly could have outflown the conflict.

We even had a chance of keeping your pet hamster alive if Ohio had tipped John Kerry’s way. He would have started withdrawing troops at about this time in 2005. Now it’s up to a new crop of Democrats to make promises, underbid one another on withdrawal timelines, and hope that the public notices that’s we’re 2 hamsters into this war when they got to the polls next fall.

Today’s statements from President Bush that “success will take months, not days or weeks,” indicate that this war will likely continue through 2008. Three Republican frontrunners [Giulliani, McCain, Romney] have all supported the president, proposing that we maintain or increase current troop levels. It seems that if Americans elect another Republican president, the War in Iraq may have the same life expectancy of the Tasmanian Devil it has come to resemble.

Unfortunately, the war has proven capable of outlasting our own species. More than 60,000 Iraqi civilians and 3,217 U.S. troops have died since the beginning of the war.

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Over the past several weeks, PBS Frontline has had a tremendous four-part series called “News Wars” about the current state of journalism in the United States. If you have no idea when Frontline airs, haven’t watched PBS since the days of Sesame Street, or don’t have a Tivo trying to make you smarter, do yourself a favor and watch the series online. And even if you don’t watch, visit their slick web site - they’re only getting 80,000 visitors a day (as opposed to the Daily Kos at half a million).

PBS among many others has been lamenting the decline in foreign correspondents at national and local newspapers. While on a fellowship at Harvard last fall, Christian Science Monitor journalist Jill Carroll studied the state of foreign journalism. She found that the number of foreign newspaper correspondents had decreased by more than a quarter between 2002 and 2006. Many of the familiar reasons are to blame such as the proliferation of blogs or the uptick in foreign news sources like Al Jazeera that can be called upon. But it also reflects ruthless, short-sighted cost cutting. As Frontline noted, whether your consider bloggers journalists or not 80% of the blogs aren’t producing original research. We depend as much on the newspapers as anyone.

So which cities are best served by their newspaper’s foreign desks? Using the data in Carroll’s working paper (no longer online, I’m afraid), I calculated the number of foreign correspondents per million residents of the metro areas served by the newspaper or newspapers. Although I did include the Washington Post and NY Times, this measure does not count newspapers such as USA Today or Wall Street Journal which have a national or international audience.

Big cities do well, but big cities do not necessarily devote more resources per capita to foreign desks. Although Philadelphia has the fourth most populous metro area, the Philadelphia Enquirer halved the number of foreign correspondents from 4 to 2 between 2000 and 2006. Dallas reduced its staff from 7 to 3 and Houston eliminated all 3 of its foreign correspondents over the same period. Freelance reporting is not picking up the slack. According to anecdotal accounts, freelance budgets for foreign news have been slashed at mid-sized papers across the country.

More surprising is that intellectual San Francisco lags far behind glitzy L.A. and that gritty Baltimore employs as many foreign correspondents per capita as Miami. One note is that the mid-sized market of Tampa/St. Petersburg is well served by the St. Petersburg Times. It not only boasts the largest circulation in Florida, it is also the only newspaper that has not cut its foreign staff in the last six years. One reason may be that it is run by a non-profit foundation and not by a company listed on the NYSE.

Today the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released a report estimating that 1 in every 400 Americans is homeless on an average night. This first annual comprehensive effort by HUD is an important first step in understanding homelessness in the U.S.

Of the 754,000 homeless, about 45% are do not find shelter each evening. The report also reveals the demographics behind homelessness: 65% are male, 45% are black, and a very high percentage of the homeless suffer from mental illness and/or substance abuse.

Perhaps the most surprising finding is the number of veterans who seem to be falling through the cracks. 18.7% of America’s homeless are veterans of war, and veterans are more than twice as likely to be homeless as those in the general population. With 141,000 homeless veterans in America, there are more troops living on our own streets than serving in Iraq.

In the wake of the uproar over the treatment of veterans at Walter Reed, perhaps we should look to the future homeless the Iraqi War will create. According to salon.com, more than 1 million have already served in our various wars on terror since 9.11.01. That means 6,000 of those who have served will be homeless in the future (see statastics below). Because veterans have a higher rate of homelessness, the war in Iraq will produce 3,000 more homeless than had we not gone to war.

Add the homeless to the casualties of war.

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Sources: Percent of homeless veterans, exhibit 3-5 (page 31) of HUD report; U.S. population of veterans: U.S. Census Bureau.