The patient arrived in critical condition last month at the Bagram Air Base hospital in Afghanistan, with what American military doctors at first thought was an all too typical war injury: metal shrapnel from an improvised bomb lodged in his head.

The rest at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/10/world/asia/10military.html?hp

I just can't hold back today. My morning news gorge begins with Yahoo! news and today I just can't take it: every other section has a story that speculates on some event that may or may not happen, whose outcome fits someone's political agenda, and the news outlet was just too lazy to fact-check the assertions contained in the story.

AP and Fox seem to be the leader in this form of story crafting, but all the news outlets are guilty of it, and it drives me crazy.

Theodore Dalyrmple has written an excellent essay in The New English Review on the dynamics of online comments.

I have long been intrigued by the potential value of comments to original stories, and revolted by what passes for discourse in most public media venues. I've toyed around with comment rating and filtering systems to play with the idea that perhaps there are mechanical methods of filtering the sapphires from the gravel, but so far have only come up with a couple of "solid" ideas.