- Anne Krapu

(Note: All images from Google Images, except for screen shots of FirstShowing.net, MetaFilter, and PDF of AF Instruction 35-101.)

Posted by Watsonblogs at 10:51 AM | Permalink

Here's a happy little addendum to my literature on media consolidation: Rupert Murdoch's News Corp just announced today that it has withdrawn its bid to buy Newsday from the Tribune Company. News Corp already owns two major papers and two tv stations in the New York market, not to mention hundreds of holdings in different media all over the world. The likely buyer is Cablevision, a cable and broadband provider based mostly on the East Coast.

Posted by Jessica Kerry at 01:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (115)

This New York Times article tells the tale of a 90 year old daily newspaper, The Capital Times of Madison, Wis, which stopped its printing to live online only. The Capital Times is a perfect example of the death of written press: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/business/media/28link.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

The article itself does not address future steps of news media to incorporate blogging/ open-source news. Perhaps the most interesting section of the article is the link in the upper left hand corner which allows the reader to link up to BlogRunner- self described as "a service from The New York Times that automatically monitors news articles and blog posts and tracks news events as they develop across the Web." What are your thoughts on this attempt by the NY Times? Is this trangressive journalism or not at all? Perhaps BlogRunner keeps the blog peace but does not reach further towards an open-source news.

Either way, it is an interesting article and an interesting attempt by the NY Times to incorporate blogging on the issue of "dead news". I wonder if the NY Times put the link in this article on the death of one paper's printed life because they know that the life of the (future) news is in the hands of these bloggers. Your thoughts?

Posted by Meaghan Casey at 04:34 PM | Permalink

I just wanted to flesh out a little bit what Professor Santos said towards the end of class yesterday. He mentioned that this generation is exposed to brutality and gruesome violence in the media in the form of entertainment (he mentioned "The Saw") and it seemed to me that he hinted that this exposure makes a YouTube video of a beheading more palatable, or at least more familiar. I see his point in that we are already accustomed/desensitized to gore and violence and even pay money to see it as entertainment. But the YouTube beheading video is still incredibly horrific because unlike "The Saw," the beheading video has the element of Truth. We were having trouble defining what truth is earlier in class, and we were talking about how all "wars are stories" as if there is no Truth so much as multiple perspectives. But I think that the difference between "The Saw" and the beheading video might actually help us capture the essence of what Truth is: truth is the fact that outside of the media, these wars, violence, and beheading are still very real and physical. Because it lacks truth, "The Saw" and any Hollywood film can be incredibly gruesome and neither have the same effect as the beheading video nor make the beheading video more familiar. It is thus truth that makes the beheading video (and war in general) a new and horrible experience each time we stumble into it.

Posted by Julia Hellman at 04:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Posted by Marie-Claude Hamel at 10:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Came across this article in TIME the other day and think it's worth checking out...
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1720100,00.html
It's a nice supplement to the vBlog that Julia, Will, and I posted today and definitely relevant to the class in general. Enjoy!

Posted by Ben Mishkin at 03:46 PM | Permalink

There was an interesting blogpost by Andrew Romano in February on the Newsweek website that I thought might interest everyone. One of the issues it addresses is the use of the Gotham font in creating the Obama "brand." Romano interviews Michael Bierut, who is featured elsewhere on the Global Media site and in the film Helvetica, and Bierut offers some very interesting insights into Barack Obama's campaign design.

http://www.blog.newsweek.com/blogs/stumper/archive/2008/02/27/how-obama-s-branding-is-working-on-you.aspx

"I think he's using design in a way to make him look as normal, as comfortable, as inevitable as a brand can look in American life. Those are really deliberate, interesting choices. Whether or not a sans serif font like Gotham looks more "American" than a Swiss font like Helvetica, that's in our imaginations to a certain degree. I think it's much more incontrovertible that he's actually using the seamlessness of this branding to convey a candidacy that's not a dangerous, revolutionary, risk-everything proposition--but as something that is well-managed and has everything under control." - Michael Bierut on the font used in the Obama campaign

Posted by Amy M. L. Tan at 11:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Tomorrow at 3, the Cable Car is going to be screening the Terror's Advocate for the French Film Festival. The film looks sort of like a French/continental equivalent to 'The Trials of Henry Kissenger' [note the runtime, but also the different narrative style] http://http://www.cablecarcinema.com/index.cfm?p=movie&id=L%27Avocat%5Fde%5Fla%5Fterreur
http://http://www.thetrialsofhenrykissinger.com/trials.html

For those of you who would rather get your weekend global media fix from home, here's a link to a sweeping mini-doc about the ills of globalization from the Children of Men DVD special features.
http://http://youtube.com/watch?v=s_yDI-Wg0Tw&feature=related

Or better yet, Les Blank's mini-doc on Werner Herzog eating his shoe, discussing images, and promoting Errol Morris' first feature film "Gates of Heaven". http://http://youtube.com/watch?v=-ymyiRXCszc

have a great weekend!

Posted by Phillip Gara at 11:15 AM | Permalink

Andrew O'Hehir of Salon.com on what Gibney's torture documentary makes him want to do after seeing the film: "I wanted to get stinking drunk in some dead-end bar (not the actual ones available on 23rd Street, where the drinks come in funny colors and cost $14) and scream at strangers, tell them that if this country had any f***ing stones we would drag these people out of Washington, strip them of their citizenship and their clothes, and drive them white-baby naked across the Rio Grande to fend for themselves in the Sonora desert."

I don't even know how to respond to that, except... Bravo Alex Gibney!.....?

Full review here: http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2007/04/30/tribeca_2/index.html

Posted by Joe Posner at 07:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today's HI2 lecture was on the decolonization of the post-WWII world. Our professor mentioned Vietnam and China and the proxy wars that occurred in both those states, but said nothing about Korea. I leaned over to a classmate and said something along those lines. He laughed, turned to me and said, well, I'm sure nobody's want to talk about Korea after one of yours shot up a university. First off, I was furious that he would say something so thoughtless, but I was also extremely puzzled about the ethnicization of the Virginia Tech tragedy.

I first noticed this when reading a BBC article on Tuesday titled "Virginia massacre gunman is named." The subtitle went on to say, "Police have named a student who shot dead at least 30 people at a US university on Monday as Cho Seung-hui, a 23-year-old South Korean." I found this particularly interesting since, upon further reading, I learned that Cho had immigrated (legally) to the US when he was 8 and been raised in suburban Washington DC. Subsequent articles such as "Koreans shocked and saddened" added to my confusion.

Perhaps I haven't read enough about the situation, but I couldn't understand why this man's nationality, that for all intents and purposes was American, was so important. Is it more comforting to the families and victims for the perpetrator to be a foreigner?

Posted by Ann Kidder at 12:36 PM | Permalink

I was reading Time Magazine yesterday and noticed a short section on countries where Big Brother has ganged up on our beloved YouTube by demanding censorship of certain videos and subjects. It doesn't mention anything about the US government censoring, but I wonder how long it will be until the US government starts demanding that certain videos are kept off the web (or if that has already happened). I know that there have been a couple of movies that friends have recommended to me, but by the time I have looked them up they are "no longer available" because of copyright issues. Is the honeymoon period of YouTube and true free speech already over?

See the newsclip: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1609803,00.html

Posted by Miriam Altman at 01:06 PM | Permalink

I figured this would make Eugene happy — below is the text of George Orwell's "You and the Atomic Bomb," originally published in the Tribune in London, conveniently copy-pasted from Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

You and the Atomic Bomb
by George Orwell, October 19, 1945

Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected. The newspapers have published numerous diagrams, not very helpful to the average man, of protons and neutrons doing their stuff, and there has been much reiteration of the useless statement that the bomb "ought to be put under international control." But curiously little has been said, at any rate in print, about the question that is of most urgent interest to all of us, namely: "How difficult are these things to manufacture?"

Such information as we--that is, the big public--possess on this subject has come to us in a rather indirect way, apropos of President Truman's decision not to hand over certain secrets to the USSR. Some months ago, when the bomb was still only a rumour, there was a widespread belief that splitting the atom was merely a problem for the physicists, and that when they had solved it a new and devastating weapon would be within reach of almost everybody. (At any moment, so the rumour went, some lonely lunatic in a laboratory might blow civilisation to smithereens, as easily as touching off a firework.)

Continue reading "You and the Atomic Bomb" »

Posted by Sonia Saraiya at 03:44 PM | Permalink

YouTube may appear to be the all-power source of free information, but that is not so everywhere in the world, it appears. Thailand banned access to the site to its citizens because of a video posted that negatively depicts the country's monarch. The Communications Minister claims that the government asked YouTube to take the video off the site, and when YouTube didn't accomodate its demand, the country banned the entire site. Apparently, not even YouTube can offer complete freedom of the press to all. View the article here: http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSBKK17066320070404

Posted by Miriam Altman at 06:35 PM | Permalink

Is the schedule JDD posted two weeks ago what we're following this week? i.e. is the following schedule in place of our usual class and screening time?

Wednesday, April 4

7:30pm – 9:00pm
“Anxious Cinema: Surveillance as Narrative Form”
Lecture by Thomas Levin
Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute

Thursday, April 5
7:30pm-9:00pm

Screening of “The Hungarian Passport”
Post-screening discussion led by Sandra Kogut
MacMillan Hall, Starr Auditorium, Room 117

Posted by Daniel Bowman at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

According to the BBC, Apple and EMI are taking the "locks" off of the music files they sell —in other words, they're getting rid of the copy-protection that currently restricts what you can do with the files you buy. The non-copy-protected songs will be available for a slightly higher "premium" price of $1.29 and will be theoretically of higher quality.

This is pretty exciting for me, and maybe for some of you, too. To me, it's a sign that industry is actually rethinking how they view copyrights, and like some analysts in the article suggest, other companies are soon going to follow suit. I'm not entirely sure if I agree, to be honest, but the times, they are a changing. Anyway, the struggle to make money off of the Internet continues, and I wonder what will be next.

Posted by Sonia Saraiya at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Once again, Hollywood has manage to piss people off with its "distorted" and "irresponsible" portrayal of Persians in 300, which has led to uproar from Iranian ex-pats in North America and even officials in Tehran. "Iranian officials have joined the angry protests and some are seeing it as part of a wider campaign against Iran". This is "'psychological warfare' against Tehran," according to the cultural advisor to President Ahmadinejad. A Farsi blogger has even set up a "Google-bomb" which redirects Goggle searches for 300 to a site which offers a more favorable depiction of Iran culture. I guess we'll have to see for ourselves...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6455969.stm

Posted by Alex Seitz-Wald at 01:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In light of our continuing observation of the YouTube Effect...

Viacom will sue YouTube for $1bn

Entertainment giant Viacom Media says it will sue web search engine Google and its video-sharing website YouTube for $1bn (£517m).

As well as more than $1bn in damages, the legal action seeks an injunction to prevent what Viacom calls "massive intentional copyright infringement".

I would be sad to see this democratic movement on YouTube get quashed by an enormous corporation. Will this case be the future of the Internet? Stay tuned...

Posted by Sonia Saraiya at 02:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Jessica Chermayeff's and Ann Kidder's vblog of Deborah and Duncan's talk about The War Tapes.

Posted by Ann Kidder at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

...but maybe a Youtube star

Perhaps a little off topic, but some interesting research on our generation and insight on why things like Youtube and MySpace are so popular.

http://www.latimes.com/news/la-me-esteem27feb27,0,2402764.story?track=mostviewed-homepage

Posted by Alex Seitz-Wald at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

ABC news special, "To Iraq and Back," on Bob Woodruff, co-anchor of World News Tonight, airs tonight...

Nytimes article today reads, "His injury was a huge story and a milestone in the public’s perception of the war; it was already all too obvious that soldiers, American and Iraqi, were wounded and killed by roadside bombs and ambushes every day. But the explosion that injured Mr. Woodruff and, to a lesser extent, Doug Vogt, a cameraman, dramatically brought home how vulnerable all Americans, even visiting anchors, are over there."

This reminded me of what Deborah talked about last week about the disconnect between the American public and the soldiers in Iraq. The article implies that the American public is desensitized to news of soldiers dying everyday, but when a reporter or cameraman gets injured is when the public feels "vulnerable." Reports on the war are often limited to explosions/attacks with a dead or injured number attached and a comment from an officer. Portraying the soldiers as an entity or a number in effect dehumanizes the indivual soldier and desensitizes us as an public.

Posted by Yeye Zhang at 10:54 AM | Permalink

Did anyone else watch the second episode of Frontline's News War series last night (Tuesday)? It dealt largely with the recent press leaks of secret government security programs, such as the CIA prison system and the NSA wiretapping program. The question posed was whether the right of freedom of the press trumps national security concerns of the government. In these cases I felt confident that the New York Times and Washington Post did the right thing in exposing these programs of questionable constitutionality. But, in a more abstract sense, I find the power of the press somewhat troubling. At one point, an official was asked if the press had an appropriate role as a check or balance in the United States. The official responded that the press should not fulfill that role because it is not elected. He said the legislative and judicial branches are the checks and balances, not the press. This resonated more profoundly when the editor of the Washington Post said that he has withheld a number of articles from publication for national security concerns over the past 30 years. While I'm pleased that he has been sensitive and conscientious so far, it's troubling that an unelected editor has that kind of power and knowledge to affect national security - that an unelected person is making those kinds of decisions.

The problem is, obviously, negotiating the balance between national security and freedom of the press (as well as other constitutional rights). I don't think the government is mistaken in saying that the recent press leaks have harmed our national security. However, the important thing is deciding whether national security was harmed to a degree unacceptable for the national interest, and whether that national security came at an unacceptable price. When a journalist uncovers a government action of questionable merit, he/she should report it to the public so that the public can decide. But, if in reporting it and making it known, it harms national security, there's no undoing it if the public decides it is ok. What would a more appropriate role for the press be? Reporting questionable government activities having to do with national security solely to the legislature or the courts?

So far I haven't felt like the press has made a mistake yet - it has responsibly reported things the government should not be doing in the war on terror. However, it seems like the conventional checks and balances should be more involved in this process.

Thoughts?

If you missed the show, you can watch it online here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newswar/view/

Posted by Daniel Bowman at 09:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Building on the "truth in media" theme we've been dealing with, I wanted to return to what is "true" in Deborah Scranton's film. I saw two kinds of authenticity: the soldier's voice and the soldier's reality. I dealt with this a little in a question I asked in class, dealing with the level of control over the camera the troops had while in combat, but I want to outline it a little more clearly. The sequences and shots where I felt the soldier's voice was coming across most clearly were the light-hearted, joking scenes, the scenes where they notice something funny or poignant in the middle of all the chaos - for example, the shot of the little boy who walks around the courtyard, in his own little world, in the middle of a war zone. It is these scenes that I think the soldiers had the most control over what they were broadcasting, what they wanted to show. So in a way, these are the sequences most accurately depicting the voice of the soldiers, what they wanted to depict.

On the other hand, there are the combat sequences, where the camera is unacknowledged. First and foremost, the soldiers want to survive. They could care less what is going on the camera, they have very little control over what is depicted. But in a sense, this is their reality, it's what it's like to be in Iraq in a combat situation. In showing both the light-hearted shots and the heavier combat sequences, I think Scranton appropriately shows both sides in her attempt to present the story of the infantry soldiers of Iraq - their reality and their voice. I was interested in whether the soldiers had input on the editing process because I was wondering if they preferred to show one type of shot or the other. Judging by the answers in class today, it seems they had some control over their own footage and they were pleased with the end result.

Posted by Daniel Bowman at 09:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

What has struck me about YouTube since I started to use it was that this relatively new medium was quickly received by an audience that not only accepted video as a means of transmission, but YouTube as a subsection of digital media that has its own aesthetic and cultural diction, just like film and TV. I’m tempted to attribute this nonchalant acceptance to the media saturated world that we live in already, that something like YouTube would be considered part of a natural progression and accepted as such, instead of being considered a digital novelty item. In addition to WebCam videos, which are pretty direct in their operation, YouTube also hosts animations and videos that are edited by non-professionals. And because of copyright issues that YouTube (Google purchase), videos produced professionally (usually for TV or film screening) are fleeting and illegal files and usually unreliable in quality. The left over videos, made by “amateurs” are usually homemade, that is, made with a relatively low cost camera and low cost graphics/simple editing if any.
Stretching this conception of these videos as homemade, I think it would be appropriate to address YouTube as a platform for folk art, and the videos as folk art objects. According to Wikipedia, folk art is “a wide range of objects that reflect the craft traditions, and traditional social values, or various social groups. Folk artis generally produced by people who have little or no academic artistic training and use established techniques and styles of a particular region or culture.” Here’s how I read this definition: the object referred to is the YouTube video, whether this video is an “original” (produced by the person who posted it) or an appropriation (i.e. ripped from TV, film, website, DVD, etc.). I’m aware that this definition implies a history of this craft within the social/cultural group that employs it in folk art, but if 50 years is the amount of time something moves from being ‘modern’ to ‘historical,’ and if I’m taking a class right now discussing in great detail the history of photography/film (which the format of YouTube videos follows, that is, the classic editing of film) then these videos do in fact “reflect traditional social values.” American social values do lie with the photographic image as something that embodies a specific moment in time, taken from a specific point, both as aesthetic and scientific instrument. Ok, maybe I’m getting a bit theoretical, so I’ll move onto M dot Strange.
This article not only focuses on the audience he wrangled via YouTube, and the support that implies (but doesn’t necessitate), but that now M dot Strange is using YouTube as a platform for his own film school teachings. Staying with my folk art theory above, this could be seen as a gesture to pass on his own method to this folk art platform. Teaching his own style of the craft.
An interesting question raised by this argument is “what culture or social group does this folk art represent?” I’m aware with the term Global Village, and I shy away from it for this argument because it seems an easy way to generalize the interactions facilitated by the Internet. Perhaps this folk art represents a social/cultural group not based geographically but on a more personal level, such as personality qualities or sense of humor or interests that can stretch in meaning as these videos are transmitted beyond their concept. Wow, this is long. Anybody read it and have any ideas?
And, short bio: Art:Sem concentrator, senior. My interests wax and wan, right now I'm really interested in YouTube, traveling to SE Asia, classic Westerns, and video and digital media. I'm from Los Angeles.

Posted by Lily Kerrigan at 12:07 PM | Permalink

New York Times
May 5, 2006

U.S. Uses Iraq Insurgent's Own Video to Mock Him

By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and DAVID S. CLOUD

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 4 — The videotape released last week by the terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi showed him firing long bursts from a machine gun, his forearms sprouting from beneath black fatigues, as he exuded the very picture of a strong jihadist leader.

But in clips the American military released on Thursday and described as captured outtakes from the same video, Mr. Zarqawi, head of the Council of Holy Warriors, cut a different figure.

In one scene, Mr. Zarqawi, the most wanted terrorist in Iraq, appears flummoxed by how to discharge the machine gun in fully automatic mode. Off camera, one aide is heard ordering another, "Go help the sheik." A man walks over and fiddles with the weapon so Mr. Zarqawi can fire it in bursts.

Another sequence shows Mr. Zarqawi handing the weapon off to other aides and striding away, revealing white jogging shoes beneath his black guerrilla attire. One insurgent later appears to grab the machine gun absent-mindedly by its scalding-hot barrel and drop it.

In an effort to turn Mr. Zarqawi's own propaganda against him by mocking him as an uninspiring poseur, the American military released the selected outtakes at a news briefing in Baghdad. A senior military spokesman said that American troops had discovered the tape among a trove of information captured last month in Yusufiya, a town just south of Baghdad regarded as sympathetic to the insurgency.

Documents found in that raid also laid out a plan to "cleanse" Shiites from Sunni-dominated areas in Iraq and to provoke sectarian warfare, according to the American military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch.

Intelligence and military officials in Washington said that Mr. Zarqawi, who was once thought to be roaming across western and northern Iraq, was tracked to Yusufiya after tips indicated that his men had been behind the downing of an Apache helicopter near there in early April.

During an early morning raid on a suspected safe house in the town just south of Baghdad on April 16, soldiers killed five occupants and captured five more in a fierce gunfight. The officials said they were later told by Iraqis captured in the raid that Mr. Zarqawi was only blocks away at the time.

General Lynch added that in several raids in the area, soldiers killed at least 31 foreign fighters, possibly destined to become suicide bombers.

The video outtakes and the plans to drive out Shiites, among other documents, were found in the house, General Lynch said, confirming an account first reported in Army Times.

Mr. Zarqawi, a Sunni, long ago declared war on Shiites, whom he considers apostates. The captured documents disclosed at the carefully orchestrated news briefing described a plan to "reduce the attacks on Sunni areas" and instead "be dedicated to cleansing them, calmly, of spies and Shias," according to the American military's translation.

The goal, they said, is to "move the battle to the Shia depths and cut off the paths from them by any means necessary to put pressure on them to leave their areas."

The captured documents further suggested a strategy, perhaps temporary, of shifting the terrorist group's firepower away from attacks on American forces in Sunni regions to attacks in the capital.

"We will leave or reduce our operations against them in our areas for the near future, and will perform our work against them in the areas of Baghdad itself, as well as the surrounding areas," the military's translation said.

General Lynch said that even as Mr. Zarqawi was "zooming in on Baghdad, we're zooming in on Zarqawi, and it's focused now in Yusufiya, in the areas around Baghdad."

"Zarqawi's center of gravity for his operations are in Baghdad," the general said. "We believe it's only a matter of time until Zarqawi is taken down. It's not if, but when."

But the military has made such predictions before, only to have Mr. Zarqawi slip away from them. Moreover, officials' view of Mr. Zarqawi as the main architect of violence in Iraq is more convenient than the possibility that much of the mayhem is committed not by foreign jihadists but by Iraqi-born Sunni Arabs — who can easily find shelter in the cities and villages along the Euphrates.

Questioned on Thursday about how much insurgent activity is actually directed by Mr. Zarqawi, General Lynch acknowledged that "there's no pure science here."

"So for me to give you some mathematical formula that says this many belong to Zarqawi, and this many belong to the Iraqi rejectionists, and this many belong to the Saddamists, I can't do," he said.

The torture and killing of young men believed to be the latest victims of sectarian violence have continued unabated in the capital.

On Thursday, at least 9 Iraqis were killed and 44 wounded when a suicide bomber attacked a crowd of people outside a courthouse in Baghdad. The attack followed the discovery a day earlier of the bodies of about three dozen men dumped around Baghdad. All had been tortured and shot in the head.

Several reports also said several civilians were killed in Ramadi by American forces on Thursday. The military said it killed eight insurgents there after marines were attacked by rocket-propelled grenades and machine-gun fire. Two American soldiers were also killed Thursday morning by a roadside bomb in south central Baghdad.

Mr. Zarqawi and his organization have taken responsibility for scores of car bombings, beheadings and other atrocities, many of which have been videotaped, posted on the Internet and shown on Arab satellite television channels.

The selected outtakes released late Thursday were not shown on the most popular Arab channels, Al Jazeera and Arabiya, although Arabiya mentioned them in a newscast later. But they were broadcast on state-run Iraqi television.

In releasing the outtakes, the American military sought to show that Mr. Zarqawi is a phony who cannot even fire a basic infantry weapon without help and who walks around the desert in comfortable Western jogging shoes.

"What you saw on the Internet was what he wanted the world to see," General Lynch said. "Look at me, I'm a capable leader of a capable organization, and we are indeed declaring war against democracy inside of Iraq, and we're going to establish an Islamic caliphate."

"What he didn't show you were the clips that I showed, wearing New Balance sneakers with his uniform, surrounded by supposedly competent subordinates who grab the hot barrel of a just-fired machine gun," he said.

"We have a warrior leader, Zarqawi, who doesn't understand how to operate his weapon system and has to rely on his subordinates to clear a weapon stoppage," the general said. "It makes you wonder."

Richard A. Oppel Jr. reported from Baghdad for this article and David S. Cloud from Washington.

Posted by michael peart at 11:29 PM | Permalink

Although I am sure that eveyone knows this I just wanted to make sure... If you use Firefox or Safari or any RSS enabled browser, the GlobalMedia Blog is set up to use this new and very cool browsing system. Just bookmark the main website on your tool bar (or just normal bookmarks) and you are set to go.

Oliver

Posted by Oliver Ward Schulze at 01:25 AM | Permalink