Kaizar’s posterous

I hope NewsTrust matures to a point where it could implement a virtual version of these (via mobile app or browser plugin).

Dubai: "You stay at 5-star hotels, pray at 5-star mosques"

the New York Times doesn’t completely buy the study’s conclusions. A spokesman told Yahoo! News that the paper “has written so much about the waterboarding issue that we believe the Kennedy School study is misleading.”

However, the Times acknowledged that political circumstances did play a role in the paper's usage calls. “As the debate over interrogation of terror suspects grew post-9/11, defenders of the practice (including senior officials of the Bush administration) insisted that it did not constitute torture,” a Times spokesman said in a statement. “When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves. Thus we describe the practice vividly, and we point out that it is denounced by international covenants and in American tradition as a form of torture.”

The Times spokesman added that outside of the news pages, editorials and columnists “regard waterboarding as torture and believe that it fits all of the moral and legal definitions of torture.” He continued: “So that's what we call it, which is appropriate for the opinion pages.”

Clearly, the Times doesn’t want to be perceived as putting its thumb on the scale on either side in the torture debate. That’s understandable, given traditional journalistic values aiming for neutrality and balance. But by not calling waterboarding torture — even though it is, and the paper itself defined it that way in the past — the Times created a factual contradiction between its newer work and its own archives.

Also, I love to see reporting like this from Yahoo.

editorial "required reading," if you will, personalized news, social recommendations, and audience popularity. Those are the four components that make up a news reading experience, and I think Google News will evolve to accommodate all of those.

The notion that we hacks should be instinctually hostile to the powerful, blunt in our questions, unsparing in our challenges, rude in our inquiries, and uninterested in getting to know anyone in power - that we should be much more skeptical precisely because we are so close - this seems almost archaic in late-imperial DC. In my view, that's why the public has come to despise the press in a populist age. Because the public rightly sees us as part of the establishment problem, not a means to its accountability. (One reason the United States so easily became a nation of torture, for example, is because Washington journalists, again with certain glorious exceptions, could not bring themselves to think of their friends and sources as war criminals.)

My almost foolproof measure of intellectual honesty is the ability to paraphrase the arguments of another such that the other recognizes his or her view in the paraphrase.

(Afghanistan)