Free Republic

It's as if they think it's 1991 -- or even 1961. Drudge is currently linking to a "trash talk" story at Ynetnews.com about how, with a microphone still on, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "is a liar." U.S. President Barack Obama's response, also audible, was: "You're fed up with him, but I have to deal with him every day!" That's not necessarily the most disgraceful aspect of the story. What follows after the jump, which explains why the story is just coming out now, is at least as reprehensible:

A DRUG gang has threatened to kill foreign journalists who report on the violence between rival cartels and security forces along the US-Mexico border, media and US officials have said. Mexico's cocaine smuggling Gulf Cartel has allegedly planned to hire gunmen to kill foreign journalists working in the crime-torn Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo, on the border with Texas. In response, two Texas-based newspapers have pulled their reporters from the city. The US government condemned the threats and said it would try to protect US journalists working in Mexico. "We will work with authorities in the United States and in...

A Question Of Naming NamesJournalists' Secrecy At Issue in Scandal By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff WriterSunday, October 5, 2003; Page A01 There are at least six people in Washington who know the answer to the city's most politically charged mystery in years. And they're not talking.That's because they're journalists.Whether they should maintain their silence -- and whether they might be legally compelled to break it -- lies at the heart of a burgeoning debate about media ethics and the whispered transactions with government officials that shape the daily flow of news and opinion. Columnist Robert Novak, who sparked a...

Journalists grilled over theft of Iraqi treasures Dominic Timms Friday April 25, 2003 The Guardian US officials have begun a detailed investigation into journalists and soldiers returning from Iraq - dubbed "Operation Iraqi Heritage" - after a Fox News employee was charged with smuggling a cache of Iraqi paintings and bonds out of the country. Benjamin Johnson, a satellite engineer for the Fox News Network, was stopped and searched at Dulles International Airport in Virginia yesterday. US custom officials found 12 Iraqi paintings and an undisclosed number of Iraqi bonds - in effect blank cheques that can be cashed with...

Witness to war crimes: must a reporter testify?Tracy Sutherland, Brussels WHEN the former BBC war correspondent Martin Bell was asked to testify at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague in 1999, he saw it as his civic and moral duty to comply. The case was against Tihomir Blaskic, head of the Croatian defence force in central Bosnia during the Bosnian war, who was accused of planning the systematic persecution of Bosnian Muslims in 1993. Bell was called to testify in defence of Blaskic: "I testified in his defence because I thought then and think now that he was...