Attacks on Stephen Hawking, transparency for Manning, Obama's new lobbyist chief | Glenn Greenwald

Debates over Israel and activism in defense of transparency and journalism heat up this week

I'm traveling rather extensively this week - the last week of travel I have for quite some time, thankfully - so here are several brief items worthy of note:

(1) As the Guardian was the first to report, the physicist Stephen Hawking withdrew from "a conference hosted by Israeli president Shimon Peres in Jerusalem as a protest at Israel's treatment of Palestinians." The resulting attacks on Hawking were...