The New York Times' City Room blog March 27 notes the ruckus raised by NYC's tabloids upon hearing that the Port Authority has dropped the name "Freedom Tower" for the monstrosity going up at Ground Zero in favor of the more prosaic "World Trade Center 1" (NY Post front-page hed: FREE DUMB TOWER). Noted City Room:

This time it is none other than neocon whiz kid and former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith, along with Justin Polin, a sidekick from the Hudson Institute, who favorably invoke the Sufis in a New York Times op-ed about Pakistan March 30. How frustrating that the attack on sufism by Pakistan's neo-Taliban receives practically no coverage in the international media—until war propagandists seize on it for their own cynical purposes...

Having already dropped the "enemy combatant" nomenclature, the Barack Obama administration has now formally abandoned the Bush-era phrase "Global War on Terrorism." The new term is the dryly clinical and antiseptic "Overseas Contingency Operation." Is this an improvement—or a switch from a hubristic and bellicose rallying cry to an Orwellian euphemism? From the Washington Post, March 25:

President Barack Obama broadcast a speech to the people and leaders of Iran early March 20, offering greetings for a Persian new year holiday of Nowruz, stressing the potential for peaceful cooperation. A video of the speech was distributed to news outlets in the region, subtitled in Farsi:

Protests in China's Tibetan regions continue to be met with harsh repression one year after the Lhasa uprising—now reported on only by the Tibetan exile media. Chinese police in Nyarong County, Sichuan Province, arrested three Tibetans March 12 and paraded them in a marketplace after they pasted protest letters in front of a local government office and hoisting of Tibetan national flag in a school, according to a report on the Tibetan exile government website. (Phayul, March 16)

The Irish Times notes March 14 that when former ambassador Chas Freeman was picked last month to chair the National Intelligence Council (NIC), few US newspapers reported the appointment. Freeman's withdrawal last week was front page news, however—because of his blistering parting shot at the "Israel Lobby" he claimed had brought him down. The case opens a window into the intra-elite paleo-neocon wars still playing themselves out in the Barack Obama administration.

On the eve of the international London Conference on Anti-Semitism, Venezuelan Jewish community leader Sammy Eppel, director of the human rights commission of B'nai B'rith and columnist for the Caracas daily El Universal, accused President Hugo Chávez of leading a state-sanctioned campaign against the country's Jews. Eppel said the campaign of anti-Semitism that hit world headlines with this January's Venezuelan synagogue attack actually began with a raid on a Jewish school in Caracas in 2004. The police were looking for weapons and explosives, but he pointed out that the raid coincided with a high-profile visit to Iran by Chávez. "It was, if you like, a gift for Ahmadinejad, to say that 'this is how I treat my Jews,'" Eppel said.

An analysis this week by the Council for Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), "Venezuelan Synagogue Vandalizing Takes New Turn: The Culmination of a Number of Anti-Semitic and Anti-Israel Incidents," accuses President Hugo Chávez and his government of creating a climate that fostered the Jan. 31 attack on the Tiferet Israel Sephardic temple in Caracas.