For the underlying link between the turmoil at the Times and the outing of Valerie Plame, between the possibility that Messrs Rove, Libby and others may end up in court and history's judgement of this Bush presidency, is none other than "the WMD boil". Mr Keller concedes that by waiting until May 2004 (15 months after the invasion), he fostered the impression that the Times - despite its reputation as America's supreme newspaper of record - was more concerned to shield its reporters from embarrassment than telling the truth. "Had I lanced the WMD boil earlier," he tells the ombudsman, "our critics might have been less inclined to suspect that this time [in the Miller affair], the paper was putting the defence of the reporter above the duty to its readers." Objective souls at the White House - assuming such a breed exists - must today have thoughts along similar lines. But not only does yesterday's broadside from the Times's ombudsman, like Ms Dowd's, take Mr Keller and Mr Sulzberger to task for leaping to Ms Miller's defence without first demanding from her the facts. The ombudsman also berates the editor for waiting so long before publishing a mea culpa for the erroneous WMD reporting.
In fact, Ms Miller has surely already written her last story for the newspaper. But how secure is Mr Keller in the editor's chair? To be fair, the original mess did not occur on his watch. Mr Keller only took the helm in July 2003, two months after the war ended, and at a time when his first priority was to heal the wounds inflicted by the Jayson Blair affair. Then she delivers a coup de gr? to her long-time colleague: "Judy told the Times she ... intends to return to the newsroom 'hoping to cover the same thing I've always covered, the threat to country'." But if that were to happen, Ms Dowd tells her readers, "the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands".
Nothing quite resembles the atmosphere just before a hurricane. Nato forces deployed.* 2002: Ibrahim Rugova elected president* March 2004: 19 people are killed in worst clashes between Serbs and ethnic Albanians since 1999.* October 2004: President Rugova's Democratic League wins elections.* October 2005: UN Security Council gives green light for final status talks to begin.. "Liam Lawlor used to breeze into the Dail like he was his own dual carriageway," a veteran Dublin political journalist reminisced. "He was a big man - big presence, burly, with the coat flapping "He was a wide-boy, not particularly clever He'd always know your name He knew everybody, it was always hail fellow well met But he was a bad guy.". Austria's Social Democrats expanded their majority in local Vienna elections yesterday, winning 49 percent of the vote in a poll that also saw the xenophobic Freedom Party do better than expected. Observers paid close attention to the election, seen as a last litmus test ahead of national elections next year. The Social Democrats' gain of 2 percentage points was below pollster's predictions, but Mayor Michael Haeupl said he was satisfied."We expanded our majority and I am happy about that," he told Austrian state television ORF.The People's Party - which leads the national government - placed second with 18.8 percent, a gain of 2.3 percentage points.The rightist Freedom Party lost 5.2 percentage points to garner 14.9 percent of the vote, a result still seen as a success for the party because it exceeded pre-election polls. Former Freedom Party leader Joerg Haider and several other prominent members left the group earlier this year to form a new more centrist party, the Alliance for Austria's Future.The Freedom Party campaigned with slogans such as "Liberated Women instead of the Mandatory Headscarf," and "German instead of 'Don't Understand'." Its leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, said he considered the result "almost a political miracle."The Alliance for Austria's Future won just 1.1 percent of the vote, failing to reach the 5 percent threshold to participate in the bodies that govern the Austrian capital.
