Planet Abell

Deborah Howell, a pioneering journalist who served in the sadly shrinking ranks of newspaper ombuds during a three-year tenure at the Washington Post, died in a road accident while vacationing in New Zealand . Howell, 68, worked for both Minneapolis newspapers, ran one of them as it won two Pulitzer Prizes, and then became the Washington bureau chief for the Newhouse Newspaper Group and editor of Newhouse News Service — where her staff also won a Pulitzer. (Newshouse News is owned by Advance Publications, which is also the parent company of Condé Nast Digital, my employer). "I don't think I've ever met anyone with as much passion for news and as much creativity and as much of a feeling for what it takes to be a great editor," Steve Newhouse said in an interview with Minneapolis Public Radio . We never met, but I knew of Deborah Howell professionally; when she wrote an amusingly scathing piece about a WaPo opinion column which argued that women may actually be weaker a...

F or those of us only just recovering from the Halloween scariness of belligerent children demanding tributes and threatening to create havoc if denied, here is today's shocking news: Don Rumsfeld didn't like the media and wrote as many as 60 memos a day to uparmor his E-Ring bulwarks against assaults emanating from fronts at home and abroad. They call the flurry of these memos "snowflakes," but they are more like acid rain. Neither Europe nor the United Nations understands the threat or the bigger picture, Rumsfeld complains. In other words, the people who, prior to 9/11, had suffered close to 100% of all the world's worst terrorism just don't get it. It's probably just a media plot to deny Rumsfeld's heirs the chance to cash in on a " Write It When I'm Gone " windfall. But since the post-resignation release of his classified memo arguing for "a major adjustment" in Iraq because the war wasn't going well didn't do much...