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The risk has never been greater | Murdering with impunity: the dramatic rise in the slaying of reporters COMMENTARY More journalists were killed in 2009 than ever before and most were deliberately targeted. The majority of victims since 1992 have been beat reporters doing their job -- not investigative reporters or ones who died in combat. In Afghanistan, outright homicides account for 59 percent of journalists killed since 1992. In Iraq, 63 percent of journalists killed since the US-led invasion in 2003 were murdered. 
| Let the Bush-era tax cuts expire…all of them COMMENTARY The lame-duck Congress is debating whether to keep the personal income tax cuts for the wealthy and the middle class or only for the middle class. Bob Giles suggests that President Obama take charge and announce that he would veto any extension, for anyone. It would be a call on Americans to sacrifice, as they have in past emergencies. And income tax rates wouldn't be any higher than they were under Bill Clinton.
| Making ourselves at home in the Persian Gulf COMMENTARY| November 321, 2010 The U.S. military is digging in, hardening, improving, and expanding its garrisons in and around the Persian Gulf at the very moment when it is officially in a draw-down phase in Iraq.
| An interview with Roxana Saberi COMMENTARY The journalist and author, accused of being a CIA spy and imprisoned in Tehran for more than 100 days, discusses what life is like for ordinary Iranians. She describes a rich, alert citizenry, connected via the Internet and other means despite decades of government suppression.
| Teaching judges a lesson in Iowa COMMENTARY Three state supreme court justices, under fire for ruling that a ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, were ousted by voters Tuesday. Will such extreme action have any bearing on Iowa’s premiere position as a presidential bellwether state?
| Is this the year the polls go wrong? COMMENTARY Sooner or later there’ll be a blunder, writes the noted journalist/polling expert Phil Meyer. If it happens in 2010, the problem could be lack of interviews with cell-phone only households. We’ll know soon enough.
14,000 settlers then, 300,000-plus now | After all this time, can 'facts on the ground' be overcome? COMMENTARY| September 273, 2010 In 1980 Ariel Sharon took two Washington Post reporters on a day-long tour in his Land Rover and, map in hand, hilltop by hilltop, told them they were looking at what would be “irreversible facts on the ground.” Now, with West Bank settlements at the crux of Israel-Palestinian negotiations, Bill Claiborne, the Washington Post’s Jerusalem bureau chief at the time, looks back on that prophetic interview.
George Wilson’s column | Not spending $1 trillion on Afghanistan? COMMENTARY President Obama reportedly said he’s not about to spend a trillion dollars on Afghanistan. George Wilson recommends that he take a look at a new Congressional Research Service report, or at the writings of Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes.
Any lessons for today’s reporters? | The press and unintended consequences in Afghanistan COMMENTARY A veteran correspondent looks back on the Afghanistan-USSR war and glorified press coverage of the mujahedeen, the forerunners of the Taliban. Some were extremely anti-Western even then. Would history be different had there been more balanced reporting?
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