After ConWebWatch caught NewsMax in the act of changing wire service news copy to make it more pro-conservative and anti-liberal, the incidence of it declined. When NewsMax dumped Moonie-owned UPI for the venerable Associated Press, it seemed to stop completely, limiting its bias to headlines and subheads.

Former Labour MP George Galloway has accepted libel damages from an American newspaper over a story which alleged he took $10 million to support former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
Galloway, one of Britain's most outspoken anti-war campaigners, sued the Christian Science Monitor over an article headlined "Newly found Iraqi files raise heat on British MP" .

The controversial anti-war MP George Galloway demanded a government inquiry today after a US newspaper which falsely accused him of accepting $10m from Saddam Hussein apologised and paid undisclosed damages.
The article in the Christian Science Monitor was based on documents given to a journalist by an Iraqi general. But tests showed that the documents, dated between 1992 and 1993, were in fact only a few months old.

"The general who passed on these documents is known. I want the British embassy to launch an investigation to find out why he did it, on whose behalf, and what other documents he has forged. They are very elaborate documents and were not cooked up in someone's kitchen. It is a systematic conspiracy."

Mr Galloway also launched high court libel proceedings against the Daily Telegraph after it made similar claims last April that he was in the pay of Saddam Hussein.

What's happening in Syria has all the hallmarks of a classic, 1950s-era, Cold War-style CIA coup d'etat scheme.
First, on March 7 a gaggle of demonstrators-no more than 20 to 30, according to The New York Times on March 8-was squelched by Syrian police, who arrested not only the demonstrators but swooped up a "junior diplomat from the American Embassy," says the Times. "The United States government protested the detention of the American diplomat to the Syrian government, a spokesman for the embassy told The Associated Press." Now the question is: what was a "junior diplomat" from the United States doing there in the first place. Could he have been from the CIA? (Syria is wondering the same thing.)

And finally, on March 14 The New York Times gave prominent coverage to Kurdish riots in northeastern Syria, which spread to Damascus. Jalal Talabani, the longtime asset of U.S. and Israeli intelligence, now a leading force in Iraq's new make-believe government, has close ties to Syrian Kurds, and it strains credulity to think that the Kurdish unrest in Syria is spontaneous.