Going beyond political speech

At heckler Wang Wenyi’s hearing, the federal prosecutor said (according to the Reuters paraphrase), “Wang had gone beyond political speech and that the verbal attack was personally directed at Hu.” Political speech can’t be directed towards an actual person?

A CIA employee from its inspector-general’s office has been fired for leaking details of the secret prisons in Eastern Europe to the WaPo (which got a Pulitzer for the story). So we can take that as an official confirmation, right?

Iraq seems finally to have a new prime minister, Jawad al-Maliki, who is exactly in the mold of Jaafari: a sectarian Shiite who the Sunnis will never trust, who spent most of his adult life in exile outside Iraq, mostly in Iran. What’s not to love?

And in Afghanistan, Karzai named a new cabinet, mostly a reshuffle of the old cabinet, including removing all but one token woman (minister of women’s affairs). He tried to get the parliament to vote on them as a slate, but they refused, and rejected several of his choices, including, you guessed it, the woman, and also the minister of culture, who is accused of not censoring enough culture.