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I was abducted, hauled from one country to the next, and tortured in medieval ways -- all orchestrated by the United States government."

he was tortured and abused by Pakistani intelligence officers in the presence of a British intelligence agent.

Morocco on a CIA flight

"We chose the medium of animation to try to get viewers to recognize the humanity of the residents of Gaza,"

Rabbis affiliated with the Israeli army urged troops heading into Gaza to reclaim what they said was God-given land and "get rid of the gentiles" — effectively turning the 22-day Israeli intervention into a religious war, according to the testimony of a soldier who fought in Gaza.

Sarit Michaeli of the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem thinks that the public release of the testimony helped spur the investigation. "There have been many cases where we have asked the advocate general to look into cases, and they drag their feet until it gets into the media."

By visiting Prime Minister Erdogan, Obama is overtly reaching out to what Americans would call "moderate" Islamists. Going to non-Arab Turkey also appears to be an effort to separate US relations with Muslim countries from US policy toward the Arab world.

Half of all Indonesians and about 80 percent of Egyptians and Turks believe the goal of US policy is to expand Israel's borders. Few buy US claims that it supports a Palestinian state.

Earlier this month, newspapers here in Cairo carried front-page photographs of Clinton being kissed by Israeli President Shimon Peres during her visit to Jerusalem. Arabs saw in that a clear message. Ditto what she said – and did not say – about Gaza, Israeli settlements, Hamas, and human rights in Egypt. Many Arabs fear it's Condoleezza Rice redux. The Israel lobby's success in torpedoing Obama's nominee for head of the National Intelligence Council – widely reported here – underlines the perception of business as usual.

Spence said he plans to become a "human surveillance machine" to explore privacy issues and whether people are "sleepwalking into an Orwellian society."

Spence, who jokingly calls himself "Eyeborg," told reporters at a media conference in Brussels that the camera hidden in a prosthetic eye — the same pale hazel color as his real one — would also let him capture more natural conversations than he would with a bulky regular camera. "As a documentary maker, you're trying to make a connection with a person," he says, "and the best way to make a connection is through eye contact." But Spence also acknowledged privacy concerns. "The closer I get to putting this camera eye in, the more freaked out people are about me," he said, adding people aren't sure they want to hang around someone who might be filming them at any time

if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility

Reading, as Robinson puts it, "is an act of great inwardness and subjectivity." "The soul encountered itself in response to a text, first Genesis or Matthew and then Paradise Lost or Leaves of Grass." With Protestantism and printing, the quest for the divine voice became available to, even incumbent upon, everyone.

The world was now understood as an assault on the self, and with good reason.

To those who Twitter, the reporter who investigates a story before offering it to the public must also seem tediously ruminant. On Twitter, the notes become the story, devoid of even five minutes of reflection on the writer's way to the computer. I can see that there are times —an airplane landing in the Hudson, a presidential election in Iran—when this type of impromptu journalism becomes a necessity, and an exciting one at that. Luckily, reporters still exist to make sense of information bytes and expand upon them for readers—but for how much longer? I worry that microblogging cheats my students out of their trump card: a mindful attention to the subject in front of them, so that they can capture its sights and sounds, its smells and tactile qualities, to share with readers. How can Twittering stories from laptops and phones possibly replace the attentive journalist who tucks a digital recorder artfully under a notepad, pencil behind one ear, and gives full attention to the subject at hand?

I went home after the lecture and—hypocritically, I admit—updated my Facebook status and my blog to declare how much I despise Twitter.

Twitter serves as a source of links to longer news stories.