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A federal appeals court on Tuesday allowed a former Army scientist to proceed with a libel lawsuit against The New York Times that claims one of the paper's columnists unfairly linked him to the 2001 anthrax killings. Steven Hatfill sued the Times for a series of columns written in 2002 by Nicholas Kristof that faulted the FBI for failing to thoroughly investigate Hatfill for anthrax mailings that left five people dead. In a 6-6 decision, with one judge not participating, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals failed to produce a majority of judges needed to grant a rehearing and...

Appeals court reinstates anthrax libel lawsuit Thu Jul 28, 2005 6:22 PM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A federal appeals court reinstated on Thursday a libel lawsuit by former U.S. Army scientist Steven Hatfill against The New York Times Co. over a series of columns that he said implicated him in the deadly anthrax mailings in 2001. By a 2-1 vote, a panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a federal judge's dismissal of the lawsuit that claimed that columns by Nicholas Kristof published in 2002 defamed Hatfill and caused him emotional distress. "At this stage of litigation,...

I think I know who sent out the anthrax last fall. He is an American insider, a man working in the military bio-weapons field. He's a skilled microbiologist who did not aim to kill anybody or even to disrupt the postal system. Rather, he wanted to sow terror. Like many in the bio-warfare field, he felt that the government was not sufficiently attuned to the risks of anthrax, so he seized upon the opportunity presented by Sept. 11 to get more attention and funding for bio-terror programs like those that have been his career. How do I know all this? ...

IT MUST BE stressful to be a Democrat. You never know what wars to oppose, what government bureaucracies to support, what lies to tell; everything changes everyday. Also, increasingly, it’s really hard to find friends. One reason for this may be Iraq, the country that was going to be just fine with Saddam, in which containment would do wonders, and in which there were no WMD because George Bush is a big fat stupid liar. All we heard from liberals for years was how risky and precarious and implausible elections were for that country, but now, like magic, the Left...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...

BRING BACK DDT  By Michelle Malkin   ·   January 08, 2005 11:02 AM  Bravo for New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who calls today for DDT to be sprayed in malaria-ravaged countries. Here's the intro: If the U.S. wants to help people in tsunami-hit countries like Sri Lanka and Indonesia - not to mention other poor countries in Africa - there's one step that would cost us nothing and would save hundreds of thousands of lives. It would be to allow DDT in malaria-ravaged countries.I'm thrilled that we're pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the relief effort, but the...

WHAT DO New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof and tabloid biographer Kitty Kelley have in common? They share a source. Not that Kristof admits it, of course. In his September 15 column, the Pulitzer Prize winner tells the dramatic story of Yoshi Tsurumi, who taught President Bush at Harvard Business school. What you won't find in the column is any mention of the fact that Kitty Kelley broke the Tsurumi story in her new book, The Family. Here is Kristof: One fall day in 1973, when Mr. Bush was a new student at Harvard Business School, he was wearing...

The former Army scientist identified by authorities as a "person of interest" in the 2001 anthrax attacks sued the New York Times Co. and columnist Nicholas D. Kristof yesterday, claiming the paper defamed him in a series of columns that identified him as the likely culprit. The lawsuit, filed by Steven J. Hatfill in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, said Kristof identified him as the anthrax killer to "light a fire" under investigators in their probe of the anthrax-spore mailings, which killed five people and sickened 17. He accused Kristof of hurling "false and defamatory" allegations and the Times of...

Nicholas Kristof wins the black belt as the leading Palestinian apologist and Israel hater in the history of The New York Times. This is no small accomplishment. Who else could make guys like me yearn for the return of Anthony Lewis and turn Thomas Friedman into an even-handed observer? Yesterday's column did the trick. Kristof put the blame on Israel for most of the troubles we have around the world, particularly in Iraq. The direct blame. Indirectly, he rapped President Bush for his "unbalanced" support of Ariel Sharon and called on John Kerry to stop blindly supporting Israel's "bloodstained" prime...

The New York Times -- unrelenting champion of the underprivileged, mighty battler against all corporate evils, and vehement opponent of Republican tax cuts for the "rich and powerful" -- lives by a far more self-serving motto:All the corporate welfare that's fit to collect.You won't see it reported on the Times' front page, so here's the scoop: The Gray Lady is a greedy leech, siphoning off millions of dollars in state taxpayer subsidies for private real estate development disguised as a public good. Now, the company stands to benefit from a federal tax-exempt bond program intended to help businesses devastated by...

Toogood Reports [Weekender, May 4, 2003; 12:01 a.m. EST]URL: http://ToogoodReports.com/ A Few Good Persons If you're goin' to fight for freedom, Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair, If you go to fight for freedom, April time will be a love-in there. Remember the song, "San Francisco"? As written by John Phillips and sung by Scott McKenzie, it was a big hit in 1967, a time when the city by the bay was famous for "flower children." "If you're going to San Francisco, Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair, If you're going to San Francisco,...

Baghdad’s Useful IdiotTimes columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote “The Stones of Baghdad” from Baghdad back in October, but it’s even more disturbingly relevant now. Blogger Dean Esmay went down the memory hole to dredge up the words Kristof (one hopes) would rather not have penned: “After scores of interviews with ordinary people from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south, I've reached two conclusions: 1. Iraqis dislike and distrust Saddam Hussein, particularly outside the Sunni heartland, and many Iraqis will be delighted to see him gone. 2. Iraqis hate the United States government even more than they hate Saddam,...

April 10, 2003, 7:45 a.m.Hall of ShameMedia recriminations after VB Day.By NR Staff o many pundits, pols, and, yes, celebs, said so many wrong — and downright silly — things about the war in Iraq, prewar. We knew that back then, but now that Baghdad has effectively been liberated by the U.S.-lead Coalition, we provide a handy snapshot of what was said by some of those who should be looking down and making their apologies. Included here are Maureen Dowd, Chris Matthews, and Barry McCaffrey, the latter one of the retired-general second guessers Vice President Dick Cheney dubbed “embedded...

The indictment of a former Florida professor on charges of being a Palestinian terrorist has cast a very different light on some past punditry. After flying to Tampa to interview him, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote last year that the University of South Florida's attempt to fire Sami Al-Arian shed light on "what kind of universities we desire, how much dissent we dare tolerate and how we treat minorities in times of national stress." He noted that the proceedings began after "Bill O'Reilly invited Mr. Al-Arian on his Fox News show and virtually accused him of being a...