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Here's a link to the Al-Jazeera translation (thanks to William Gibson for pointing it out). Apparently it's a little closer to the meaning of the original Arabic than the other Net translations.

The portion released seems to contain a backhanded but solid endorsement for John Kerry. So one is immediately reminded of the responses reported by The Guardian to its Operation Clark County letter-writing campaign. Does Osama bin Laden read the newspapers, or does he merely depend on directions from his god? And now the editorial staff at LeMonde (obviously not reading English papers, probably also godless) have delivered the French kiss of death to Kerry's hopes.

The Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigade, in claiming responsibility for the Madrid train bombing, went for the other candidate:

"A word for the foolish Bush. We are very keen that you do not lose in the forthcoming elections as we know very well that any big attack can bring down your government and this is what we do not want.

"We cannot get anyone who is more foolish than you, who deals with matters with force instead of wisdom and diplomacy.

"Your stupidity and religious extremism is what we want as our people will not awaken from their deep sleep except when there is an enemy.

"Kerry will kill our nation while it sleeps because he and the Democrats have the cunning to embellish blasphemy and present it to the Arab and Muslim nation as civilisation.

"Because of this we desire you [Bush] to be elected."

But that was written way back in March, long before Operation Clark County, and by a group only loosly associated with bin Laden. I think that the more recent bin Laden effort is rather more cleverly designed.

Not at all - CNN is what we call Pentagon TV here in the rest of the world!

Al Jazeera (only an other kind of propaganda TV)
has probably more here:
Really Full Speech

For really objective information I would highly recommend you in the US:

www.occupationwatch.org
www.alternet.org



BTW: Al Jazeera had also more images of fallen childreen in Iraq as CNN showed you in the US clean video games or faked trailers.

-->This is the point Bin Laden made on you in his tape!

"A US Department of State official said Washington had asked the government of Qatar, where Aljazeera is based, to prevent the station from airing the latest Bin Ladin tape."

I tend to try to look up any news in things like:
http://english.aljazeera.net/ Aljazeera for a quite extreme view.
http://www.gulfnews.com/ GulfNews as example of moderate arab media a bit further away.
and many others as time and intrest permits.

-FL

That's pretty racist and arrogant of you, to assume you know that Shi'ites (not "shite") in Iraq are going to vote for theocracy. In fact, Iraq has a pretty long history of fairly secular rule. Many Shi'ite leaders in Iraq, such as Ayat Allah Ali Al-Sistani, have called for a democratic, non-theocratic government, and have called for would-be theocrats such as Muqtada Al-Sadr to stop their violent attacks on Americans and their fellow Iraqis.

What we do is provide security and technical assistance while all sides work together to find a way form a government which will protect the rights of ALL Iraqis, Kurd, Shi'ite, and Sunni. It won't be easy, but it can certainly be done. To say otherwise is to say that there is no hope for pluralistic societies anywhere, that all countries must henceforth be homogenous along racial, religious, or nationalist lines. I'm not that pessimistic.

And while it is far from certain what will shake out for the Kurds, they are not unalterably opposed to being part of a federated Iraqi state, so long as they are treated as equals and given ample room to control their own affairs.

Ah, just thought you were challenging the credibility of the source. On that note, about 5 minutes after posting this, I read another story that seems to downplay the whole thing. Looks interesting, but unlikely to be a nuke. None of the typical preparation appears to have been done for a nuke test, and it did happen Thursday. If it were a nuke test, I think N. Korea would have done a little bragging by now. N. Korea appears to have a lot of problems right now, not nukes.

Nice job! Only in four days! That is great.

However, as good as Gecko is, I find that there are sites that are so Microsoft specific (brain dead developers) that they would not render correctly in FireFox. However, some of those same sites render better in Konquerer than in Gecko.

An example is the Arabic Al Jazeera web site.

If you open in MS IE, all is well, because the developers wrote it with only MS IE in mind. If you try it with Firefox (I am using 0.9), then you get a blank blue space on the right, with no menus in it at all, and no menus on the left side too.

If you open it in Konqueror (the one that ships with Mandrake 10.0 Final), then the menus are visible. There are still some quirks (e.g. just moving the mouse over an article heading will trigger a download dialog), but it is way ahead of KDE's Gecko.

Incidentally, Al Jazeera's English web site is developed by a different company and does not suffer form these problems.

I have seen a few other sites with this problem (incorrect rendering in FireFox), and they are always .asp web pages, pointing to a Microsoft centric mentality of the developers.

Nice job! Only in four days! That is great.

However, as good as Gecko is, I find that there are sites that are so Microsoft specific (brain dead developers) that they would not render correctly in FireFox. However, some of those same sites render better in Konquerer than in Gecko.

An example is the Arabic Al Jazeera web site.

If you open in MS IE, all is well, because the developers wrote it with only MS IE in mind. If you try it with Firefox (I am using 0.9), then you get a blank blue space on the right, with no menus in it at all, and no menus on the left side too.

If you open it in Konqueror (the one that ships with Mandrake 10.0 Final), then the menus are visible. There are still some quirks (e.g. just moving the mouse over an article heading will trigger a download dialog), but it is way ahead of KDE's Gecko.

Incidentally, Al Jazeera's English web site is developed by a different company and does not suffer form these problems.

I have seen a few other sites with this problem (incorrect rendering in FireFox), and they are always .asp web pages, pointing to a Microsoft centric mentality of the developers.

I don't think you're going to find any single source that's never been accused of bias. There's just too many viewpoints out there-- and any source that tries to go straight down the middle of the road, like CNN, tends to be pretty dry.

So, my solution: Read a lot. I mean, a lot, and, by exposure to many viewpoints, you'll be better off when it comes time to form your own opinions.

If you're asking about specifics, I try to take in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Drudge Report, Slate, Salon, Al-Jazeera, the International Herald-Tribune, and the Guardian. Of course, all of the above have their strengths and weaknesses.

If you don't want to spend the time on all of those, though, I recommend Slate. It leans slightly left, but has good analysis from both sides of the aisle.

Read, read, read. Don't assume you're getting the whole story from a single source.

If you want a break from the Olympics, I know a news site that has virtually nothing on them at all...

So far, Islamic game software has been rather lame. There's Come to Salah, but it's a "memorize the Qur'an" edutainment product. Something edgier is needed to sell to the Arab street.

What's needed is Diplomacy with the graphic quality of Tropico. You're a dictator trying to play off the religious fanatics against the moderates while dealing with neighboring warlords, US-backed enemies, and ambitious relatives. Try to suppress the imans, and you get a rebellion; give them power over education, and soon few of your people have any useful skills. Start a war to divert attention from your domestic problems, and run the risk of losing. Fail to follow the precepts of the Prophet and the people turn against you.

It must be playable in Internet cafes. That's your market.

The islamic world does have a sense of humor.

I switched recently from MS IE to FireFox 9.0, and Thunderbird.

I have never seen a popup ad since, and spyware is almost non-existent.

I have also switched my wife's computer to FireFox.

I even switched at work as well, and briefly tested Outlook Web Access from Mozilla, and it worked fine.

At work, I found two other people who switched on their own about the same time I did, after all the exploits in MS IE were publicized. I am talking to a third person about switching his mom because of spyware problems.

I am also talking to another development group that are doing ActiveX plugins for MS IE for a client, and advising them of the pitfalls and the headaches they are getting the client into.

It is not all rosy though, there are issues:

• FireFox does not display the side menus on some web sites. For example, check Al Jazeera front page in MS IE and in FireFox, and see all the stuff that it misses (at least it does not miss the marquee on the top, yuck!). By the way, Konquerer on Mandrake 10.0 renders the same web site far better than FireFox. Kind of strange.
• FireFox bookmark operations (adding a bookmark, organizing, ..etc.) take forever to complete. I am talking minutes! Don't know why.
• Thunderbird is a memory hog on my 128MB machine. I do not run my email program all the time anymore. Only when I need to check or write email. I do not know if it is memory leaks or its usage is too much. Anyway, the switch from Outlook Express is worth it, because the mail format is no longer hostage to Microsoft .dbx format, and I can copy the mail files to my server (which I do every week), and then grep in them for the info I need from the command line.

Overall, I am happy with FireFox from the functionality, features, and usability points of view. Can't say the same about Thunderbird due to the bloat and slowing my machine to a crawl.

And while Bobby was just playing a chess match, the Feds were shipping huge amounts of arms to their favorite players in the region, the separatist Bosnian Muslims. As the Guardian newspaper in England documented :

...the Pentagon had incurred debts to Islamist groups and their Middle Eastern sponsors. By 1993 these groups, many supported by Iran and Saudi Arabia, were anxious to help Bosnian Muslims fighting in the former Yugoslavia and called in their debts with the Americans. Bill Clinton and the Pentagon were keen to be seen as creditworthy and repaid in the form of an Iran-Contra style operation - in flagrant violation of the UN security council arms embargo against all combatants in the former Yugoslavia.

The result was a vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling though Croatia. This was arranged by the clandestine agencies of the US, Turkey and Iran... Initially aircraft from Iran Air were used, but as the volume increased they were joined by a mysterious fleet of black C-130 Hercules aircraft.

Just as the trial of Slobodan Milosevic is exposing the fact that most of the claims used to justify the US's Kosovo war were bogus, maybe poor Fischer's inevitable trial will expose the lies told to justify the Bosnian war.

Now that it's been revealed that al-Qaeda members were fighting for the Bosnian Muslims, maybe the USA will acknowledge their mistaken policy, apologize to poor Bobby, and let him go.

Yeah, right. Being an Empire means never having to say you're sorry.

First of all, to say that "Yugoslavia" caused the Bosnian war is as meaningless as saying that the United States caused the (U.S.) Civil War.

The Bosnian war started because some leaders of the Bosnian Muslims-- who as a people had historically been pro-Yugoslav-- wanted to secede from Yugoslavia and start their own Islamic state, and to impose Islamic law on all the people living there-- including the ethnic Serbs and Croats who made up a majority of the population. This was all detailed in their president Izetbegovic's "Islamic Declaration". Along with taking advantage of all the usual Muslim suspects-- including Osama's right-hand man al-Harbi-- who flocked there to fight the jihad, the Bosnian president also recreated a WWII-era SS Division to help in the fight.

A history lesson, since falcon5768 and probably others need it: hundreds of thousands of Serbian civilians were murdered in concentration camps during WWII, when they were on the Allied side while the Bosnians and Croats were allied with the Nazis. Memories are long in that part of the world, and Islamic law is not much fun either-- so is it any wonder that not just Serbs but moderate Muslims like took up arms to prevent the secession of Bosnia, or at least keep their own land out from under the thumb of Izetbegovic and his cronies?

I am confused why you say that the Bosnian war "DID kill US and UN troops". What US or UN troops were in the region? And as for the "mass slaughter" of Muslims at Srebrenica, the story is now starting to leak out that it's not so clear-cut as that-- most of the bodies have never shown up, and many of the dead turned out to be the troops of Muslim warlord Nasr Oric, who would use the UN-protected "safe areas" as a base from which to launch raids involving beheadings of prisoners... sound familiar?

The most laughable part of your post (and, by extension, the US's case against Bobby Fischer) is when you go on about how the sanctions were meant to prevent the world from contributing to the war. Of course, as the Guardian newspaper in England documented (much later after it was no longer inconvenient for the facts to come out), the US government was violating the embargo all along:

...the Pentagon had incurred debts to Islamist groups and their Middle Eastern sponsors. By 1993 these groups, many supported by Iran and Saudi Arabia, were anxious to help Bosnian Muslims fighting in the former Yugoslavia and called in their debts with the Americans. Bill Clinton and the Pentagon were keen to be seen as creditworthy and repaid in the form of an Iran-Contra style operation - in flagrant violation of the UN security council arms embargo against all combatants in the former Yugoslavia.

The result was a vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling though Croatia. This was arranged by the clandestine agencies of the US, Turkey and Iran...

The reason you, and so many other people, hold this inaccurate and deluded view of the Bosnian war, is attributable mostly to the really top-notch propaganda war waged in the U.S. and U.K. media, making the Bosnian Muslims out to be the wonderful, multicultural good guys and the Serbs the baddies. It doesn't matter that so much of the lies have now been exposed-- like

Perhaps you want "someone" not "something", but what if you don't agree with them? Frankly that's the part of problem with conventional media - biased, corporate-bought, dumbed-down pundits acting as gatekeepers.


Which is why individual news sites should not be singled out for higher ranking. Rather, sites that fit within a classification should be given higher ranking for general reliability. Ignoring the not-so-recent scandals in which journalistic integrity was violated, these are the sites with the most relevant information about our times.

And to be clear, I don't imagine the "news channel" classification as being limited to the NYT, SFChron, SJMerc, etc. I also see it applied to Al-Jazeera, CND.org, Lima Post, and even LCI.

Ok, maybe not that last one...

Bottom line, there is no such thing as "balanced" news. You have to get your news from multiple sources and balance it yourself. Hence why I listen to CSPAN (for speeches in my car),G Gordon Liddy (also in car for a whacked-out perspective), NPR (internet - for a very professional, polished and left-leaning perspective), CNN.com (for the details - rather moderate), and yes, Foxnews.com when I want the right slant (as annoying as their hosts are). If it is a story about the middle-east, I will often read Al Jazeera's English site as well (very insightful).

Speaking of that... it is funny how this Al Jazeera story fails to mention that the Isreali victems were a three-year-old child and his father when a Hamas-claimed rocket impacted near a kindergarden.

So is Foxnews "fair and balanced"? - Absolutely not. For me though, it is fair and balancing.

Bottom line, there is no such thing as "balanced" news. You have to get your news from multiple sources and balance it yourself. Hence why I listen to CSPAN (for speeches in my car),G Gordon Liddy (also in car for a whacked-out perspective), NPR (internet - for a very professional, polished and left-leaning perspective), CNN.com (for the details - rather moderate), and yes, Foxnews.com when I want the right slant (as annoying as their hosts are). If it is a story about the middle-east, I will often read Al Jazeera's English site as well (very insightful).

Speaking of that... it is funny how this Al Jazeera story fails to mention that the Isreali victems were a three-year-old child and his father when a Hamas-claimed rocket impacted near a kindergarden.

So is Foxnews "fair and balanced"? - Absolutely not. For me though, it is fair and balancing.

I like the way it's reported here!

Once the rocket's fuel was spent, SpaceShipOne kept going up for about three minutes to reach 104km, a height at which it lost speed like a spent bullet.

haha! "like a spent bullet"... Only the Arab world would use such an analogy so freely. :)

• Contain images of child abuse, anywhere in the world.
• Contain adult material that potentially breaches the Obscene Publications Act in the UK.
• Contain criminally racist material in the UK.

This last is a major issue. It's similar to the "hate speech" issue on college campuses. It would be a great excuse for, say, blocking Aljazeera. (They have cool anti-American cartoons, in Flash. Some of them are anti-white-people.)

Again: invading a country for regime change is NOT ALLOWED in international law.

Wow! That shows just how effective continuous FUD can be. I'd forgotten that and I wrote a piece on this very issue a couple of months ago.

Yes, this is an even greater reason for the mendacity. Just to add to your point, the same applies to Blair. In fact, he si being charged with with war crimes. It's had little attention in the British press however. I'm not aware of anyone proesecuting Bush though.

interesting link
link
link

Getting information from as far a political spectrum as possible is a very good idea. Yet, I found that only paying attention to American media will still be very limiting. In order to understand what information influence the opinion of European leftists you also may want to sample sources such as the Guardian. I also find it rather instructive to monitor the infamous Al Jazeera in order to understand what kind of reporting influences the public opinion in Iraq and other Arab countries.

Where do you get your information from?
A google for US oil demand finds this page which says, "The average of US petroleum imports reached 10.6 million bpd in 2001, to complement a total US oil demand of 19.6 million bpd." Were you confusing total demand with imports?

I do not think this does the trick.

But even if it did, it is a classic case of "Microsoft is the only platform that exists" when developing a web site. Myopia, and just shows the point I made in my original post.

Anyway, the site is Al Jazeera. Try it yourself.

The center part should render fine on any OS/Browser combo that supports Arabic (Windows with Opera and Windows with FireFox, Linux with Konquerer do show it correctly).

However, when the menu on the left and on the right will not show unless you are on IE. Some parts of the page use ActiveX as well (Yuck!)

Why not do what they do in Iraq and torture and humiliate prisoners of war, in contravention of the Geneva Convention?

Be sure to check out pictures of the female US soldier who enjoys pointing at genitalia of naked abused and tortured prisoners.

Well, take a look here.

Is this still war on terror, or is it just terror?

Is this still war on terror, or is it just terror?

It looks like the parent link is a copycat site, like aljazeerah.info

Which raises the issue, what is censored now? Anything? I can already visit Al Jazeera to see all the bloody babies and anti Bush views I might care to read.

The barrier to individuals broadcasting news isn't censorship, it's credibility. The problem is, no one person's view constitutes "the news," even if they were there firsthand. Reporting news well requires access to the places and key figures, that's what news agencies offer.

• -Deplores Israeli refusal to obey UN
• -Concerned at provocation by Knesset members and by security force (violation of Islamic sanctuaries)
• -Israeli incorporation of Jerusalem

You're telling me that Israel has ALWAYS respected Muslim holy places? How do you explain this? Israeli forces storm Al-Aqsa mosque with photos. This wasn't even a week ago. Or should I also point out Ariel Sharon's unwanted visit to the Temple mount in 2000, triggering the latest intifada?

• -Deplores Israeli refusal to obey UN
• -Concerned at provocation by Knesset members and by security force (violation of Islamic sanctuaries)
• -Israeli incorporation of Jerusalem

You're telling me that Israel has ALWAYS respected Muslim holy places? How do you explain this? Israeli forces storm Al-Aqsa mosque with photos. This wasn't even a week ago. Or should I also point out Ariel Sharon's unwanted visit to the Temple mount in 2000, triggering the latest intifada?

Least qualified? Not by comparison to some other recent presidents.

Education != qualifications
I'm stunned that you would even posit such broken metric for "qualification". There's no amount of formal education that can teach you how to be the president. Being a good politician is a "soft skill" that can't really be taught. Bush has a rapport with the people... but that's about all I can say for his qualifications.

Out of the above list, I think looking at vacation days taken during presidency is a much more interesting comparison of qualifications.

>Bush squandered the greatest chance for peace in our time by calling all of the world "Evil"

It was 3 countries, and those countries are either state sponsors of terrorism, genocidal regimes, or rogue nations pursuing WMD. If that's not evil, I'd love to see how you define "good."

I think both commentaries above are specious. There's been some good that's come out of Bush's finger-pointing. Many of those rogue nations have given up their WMD programs. However, it's not clear whether Bush's rhetoric has harmed the US in more intangible ways: there are a lot more people who hate the US now. I'm way more worried about terrorists than WMDs.

If those "rules" include reining in WMD proliferators and demolishing terrorist states, screw the opposition; The Right Thing (TM) isn't always the easy or popular thing. If finding and killing terrorists before they can strike is wrong, I don't want to be right.

I would agree with you if I thought that anything Bush has done has netted us positive results. There are some small victories, but the overall picture looks much, much, grimmer than prior to 9/11. Going after terrorists isn't a bad idea, it's just that Bush's methods are questionable. Bush has fumbled on execution time and time again.

Taking down rogue nations is only good if it somehow improves our situation. News flash here: "terrorists don't respect borders". If you take down Iraq, they just move to the next country that's willing to give them safe harbor.

You have to treat the disease, not the symptoms. Terrorism is a symptom, not a disease. Killing terrorists doesn't work. There will always be more terrorists to recruit to fill their places. You have to remove the reason why these people feel so much hatred towards us - yes, there is a reason! There has to be.

>Not to mention the fact that he wants to hold Americans without trial or due process indefinitely

If they're terrorists, they have almost no rights. To be considered lawful combatants and thus entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention, you must meet four conditions: have a responsible chain of command (autonomous terrorist "cells" don't qualify), carry weapons openly, have a distinctive uniform or insignia, and follow the laws of war... Al-Queda meets NONE of these (the commentary I cited above is interesting... I recommend reading it).

This is one of the most egregious developments in the erosion of our civil liberties. I don't care if those people being held are terrorists or not. They deserve a speedy trial. Holding someone for two years without even charging them is a horrible crime - it goes against everything this country was founded on. In addition, it's well known that most of the detainess in Guantanmo Bay aren't terrorists. How would you feel if you were put in prison for two years for no good reason? and you didn't even have a charge against you? and there was no trial date set for you? and most people acknowledged that you shouldn't be there?

On a en even more disturbing level, this gives the Bush administr

This article doesn't hold much weight for me, on the very same day that I read in AlJazeera.net English that Microsoft are porting a load of their Office software to Hindi. Proprietary software manufacturers like MS *are* in fact porting their software to lots of different languages. Some, like Magix, even seem to only offer software in other languages like German (yuch)!

Yet another example of what I'm talking about.

I think it's rather naive to say you get your news from NY Times, AP, Slashdot, etc. rather than biased sources like Fox. ALL news sources of some degree of bias. If you think a news source is un-biased, that just means you agree with whatever bias they demonstrate.

Well said. I almost coughed up my coke when I read the grandparent's assertion that he is getting unbiased news and then proceeds to list a number of American-centric news sources.

Ranger96 is right: all news has some bias. The only thing you can really do is to read news from several widly different sources. And consider including some non-US sources of info such as Al-Jazeera and the BBC. I'm sure someone will complain that Al-Jazeera is nothing more than a hate-mongering rag but the fact of the matter is that a large portion of the Arab world listens to it. If you want to understand the world, you'd better know what other people are reading because it will shape their worldview.

The most interesting comparison to me is to see what stories are not covered by a news outlet.

That's true but the only way you find out about these articles is through the 'activist' websites of the issue that got ignored. And let's face it: those aren't exactly unbiased sources of info either. I think what you have to do is get as much info as possible and then use some good old fashioned critical thinking to figure out what's REALLY going on. And that's admittedly pretty tough.

GMD

Dont talk bullshit the statistics clearly states the israelis are the most vicious in the area when it comes to violations. They deny any kind of basic human rights, not even clean water is given to the palestinians.

israeli violations

basic statistics

wounded statistics

economic losses statistics

main site

Security and economic prosperity is reached throught being fair and not oppressing. The israel state cant even be fair to arabic israeli citizens with israeli passports because they are an appartheid state and doing ethnic cleansing which unfortunatly mainstream media in the west does not wish to take up. The israeli arabs are not allowed to certain parts of israel because they are of arabic heritage and the zones are "arab free". Thats an apartheid state not a democracy. And if they treat their own citizens that badly how do you think they are treating those that they occupy?

No, you are wrong.

Interesting reasoning though.

The Iraqis are grateful. If you can't see this then you are truly blind.

Yup. So grateful that they've been killing American solders at a rate of roughly 1 per day

Go read the coverage over at Aljazeera. No, the reaction in the Middle East has not been 100% positive, but overall there was definitely a positive reaction. Quoting from Aljazeera:

In the Iraqi capital, celebratory gunfire rang out, radios played festive music, drivers honked their horns and passengers on buses and trucks chanted "They got Saddam, they got Saddam!"

Yes, there is definitely an element that resents the US occupation and wants us out NOW. But there is also an element that believes they are better off now. I doubt any Iraqi loves having the American army there, but many of them like it better than having Saddam still in charge.

And to answer your other point, I don't think the US went in there for purely altruistic reasons. We went in there primarily to (hopefully) increase our own security. But, I do think deposing a cruel dictator was a secondary purpose and did figure into the decision. It's just that it's not the only thing that figures into it.

When stories like this break, I always read al-Jazeera in English to get the other view of the story.

If the news of the West and al-Jazeera coincide in their analysis, as is (mostly!) the case here, then it's fairly safe to say that the news are true. Most of the time, the stories diverge, and you're left to draw your own conclusions.

Why is the parent 2, Interesting, not -1, Idiotic?

Use the BBC or Al-Jazeera.

If you are Dutch, then Piet Hein is a national folk hero. If you are Spanish or Portugese then he was a rapacious Dutch pirate stealing colonial income.

If you're Canadian, then the Brig the Sir John Sherbrooke was a warship, if you were American, a pirate ship. Vice-versa for the Syren.

As with acts of war anywhere, perspectives can differ even amongst folks supposedly on the same side.

The evening "News" is so corporate owned and supported that I don't really consider it a reliable source for information.

Agreed. Here is an interesting experiment to try. Find a major news story, preferably on Iraq or Afganistan. (It can be something else, but Iraq and Afganistan will yield more results.)

Check the story first on CNN

Then check the subtle changes in perception on the same story from these sites:

BBC NEWS
Globe and Mail

Then note the radically different opinions on:

Aljazeera
Antiwar

Note, I am not asking you to agree with any of the above opinions, or websites. Just begin to notice the different perceptions you can gain insight to on news stories on the net. This kind of insight cannot be gathered by watching local news, like NBC, CBS, or even the "most trusted" views of CNN.

This bug is particularly troublesome. It looks like the latest version of Mozilla hasn't addressed the problem. Any plans to make it possible to copy/paste data from the many Arabic and Hebrew sites?