Bunch of stuff in from the blogs, most of it bad.
The Guardian reports reports that Benyamin Netanyahu's nephew is facing a full court martial, because he refuses to server in the army. Israel has compulsory military service, and the only reason the Israeli military recognise for being a conscientious objector is being ultra-orthodox. According to them, a soldier is one who fights against adversity; Mr Ben-Artzi is waging a struggle against joining the army; therefore, he demonstrates the quality of a solder, so cannot possibly be a pacifist. It's almost Catch-22 in its absurdity. Thanks to Yoz for the link.
Meanwhile, Andrew Conway has a number of links on Bush's increasing stranglehold on the US media. In a nutshell: US newspapers have a fixation on being "balanced" and "papers of record", so if they have a story critical of the government, they need a government response, or they won't run it. So the government decides not to comment, and thus kills the story. Oh, and the Pentagon plans on not accrediting journalists who are doubtful about the war, controlling journalists' satellite phone and other methods of getting information out of Iraq, and bombing independant methods of transmission if they're being used to transmit information it doesn't like. And it's not too fussed if it bombs journalists while it's at it.
Meanwhile, via the comments in a previous entry, comes a savage indictment of the herd mentality of the US news media: they're so afraid of having their credentials withdrawn that they submit supine, pre-approved questions to scripted news conferences, and Bush ignores the ones he doesn't particularly like anyway. Feh.
