Pacific Views

Wandering around the web.

Some of the stories that have caught our interest today:

• Asia Times reports on how a call center in India is fielding inquiries from survivors of Hurricane Rita in Texas. The operators in Gujarat are providing Texans with information about safer locations and relief operations.

  The paper also reports that India-based call centers handled most of the calls from people in London and the rest of the UK after the terror attacks this past July.

• In the Washington Post, Dana Milbank has a wonderfully catty account of former FEMA director Michael Brown's testimony before the GOP panel looking into the Katrina fiasco.

  Brown displayed the command of facts that made him famous over the past month. He did not know how much FEMA had spent on communications, guessing, "a boatload of money." He had to ask members of his entourage how many MREs were in a trailer load. "I don't have a clue how many [people] were truly in the Superdome," he volunteered at one point. Asked whether he is still a federal employee, Brown said: "You know, I don't know." (He is.)

• Irish brewer Guinness will be offering a new version of its famous stout in Irish pubs for the next six months. The new brew is called, imaginatively, Brew 39. Like the world needs any flavor of Guinness Stout but the original. [Irish Independent]