To be fair, it was not a highly lucrative football game CBS censored. Rather, it was an ad put out by the players’ union opposing the lockout the owners are threatening. I guess anything from a labor union — even a labor union representing a bunch of highly paid celebrities — may count as taboo [...]

Last week, Russian Ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, told the organization that the computer worm Israel and the US devised to ruin Iran’s nuclear program could have led to a catastrophe with the Bushehr nuclear plant like Chernobyl. Russia said on Wednesday that NATO should investigate last year’s computer virus attack on a Russian-built nuclear [...]

The NYT has one of the most stunning headlines of the day. Losses at Afghan Bank Could Be $900 Million The story tells a story of Afghanistan’s own “Too Big to Fail” problem that offers opaque descriptions of precisely what caused the problem, but waits until the 17th and 18th paragraph to explain the real [...]

Spencer has a useful catalog of all the war toys Egypt buys with our military aid. Whatever Egypt’s military does next, chances are they’ll do it with American weapons.Al-Jazeera showed M1A1 Abrams tanks carrying Egyptian soldiers through Cairo in what its correspondents called “a show of force.” Those iconic American tanks have been co-produced in [...]

In a press briefing on Friday, Robert Gibbs said several times the Administration would be reviewing its aid to Egypt in the upcoming days. Q    You say these legitimate grievances have to be addressed.  I’m wondering:  Or what?  What can the President do if these matters are not –MR. GIBBS:  Well, look, first and foremost, [...]

Three weeks ago I woke up and started organizing my thoughts to write this post. I had no more than written the title when news started coming in hot, first on Twitter and then local news channels, that Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords had been shot in Tucson. In a strange dichotomy, it was both an event [...]

Well, perhaps not quite. When Mona Eltahawy explicitly described what many of us learned from Jane Mayer–Hosni Mubarak’s appointed Vice President, Omar Suleiman, has a long history of cooperating with us in accepting and torturing people rendered to Egypt–and when Wolf asks whether this went on in the Bush Administration (it dates back to the [...]

There are now four versions of the cooperation between WikiLeaks and its journalistic “partners:” Vanity Fair, NYT, Guardian, and Spiegel. A comparison of them is more instructive than reading any in isolation. For example, compare how the NYT and Spiegel describe the three things the State Department asked journalistic partners not to publish during the [...]

In a press briefing on the situation in Egypt (and probably his last briefing ever), Robert Gibbs made a stunning, but important statement. We believe in the basket of individual freedoms includes the freedom to access the Internet and the freedom to use social networking sites. Gibbs did not say (and none of the reporters [...]

As Siun noted yesterday, Mohamed el Baradei issued a statement critical of US support for Hosni Mubarak in advance of returning to Egypt (and, as of now, being put under house arrest). Of course, you in the West have been sold the idea that the only options in the Arab world are between authoritarian regimes [...]