Pravda buries the lead:

Allies [of departing White House counsel Gregory Craig] also note that he oversaw the successful confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and praised him for trying to keep Obama in synch with some of the ideologically liberal ideas he promoted in the campaign.

McClatchy called their shot on this "Rahmian act of public humiliation" back in September.

More from McClatchy. Say, why aren't Pravda and Izvestia covering this?

McClatchy:

In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.

Goldman's sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation's premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.

Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk.

[cross posted at NPR Check]

On Friday I was staying late at work and before leaving heard this promising start to a story on All Things Considered:

"This week, we've been reading a vivid narrative in the New York Times by the journalist David Rohde. He was held captive for seven months by the Taliban. He was moved frequently from house to house all over remote parts of Pakistan. And one detail in this story made us particularly curious."

Holy cow! I thought, NPR is going to allude to the three rather stunning observations contained in Rohde's articles which Glenn Greenwald so aptly wrote about a few days ago:

Pravda has what looks like a fine report today on AIDS programs in Washington, DC. Here's how they describe it:

About this Investigation
Over ten months, the Washington Post analyzed the spending, services, and finances of every specialized AIDS organization funded by D.C.'s HIV/AIDS Administration from 2004-2008, an estimated 90 groups, building a database from tax returns, audits, lawsuits, real estate records, D.C. Council records, and corporate and police reports. The Post also obtained grant agreements, invoices and government correspondence for about 60 of these groups. The newspaper interviewed dozens of people with HIV or AIDS patients, their families and service providers, and visited more than a dozen offices across the city.

The largest possible sum at issue seems to be $25 million, since that's the total sum available to non-profits, where the problems seem to be concentrated.

So, one question:

McClatchy:

The committee also heard from women such as Peggy Robertson of Colorado, who read a letter from her insurance company. Robertson testified that because she'd already given birth via cesarean, when she tried to get an individual policy in Colorado, her insurance company considered it a pre-existing condition and wouldn't insure her unless she could prove she'd been sterilized.

That "put me on the edge of my chair," said the chairwoman of the committee, Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., calling it "offensive and morally repugnant."

"No one in the United States of America, in order to get health insurance, should ever be coerced into getting sterilized," Mikulski said.

McClatchy:

Sex trade is thriving in Costa Rica

Translation:

Economic crisis forces women to sell their bodies in Costa Rica

The happy double entendre talk--"a stimulus effect on Costa Rica's famous sex-tourism industry", "popular prostitution hot spots", "Costa Rica's position as an international hub for prostitution" eventually gives way (perhaps the reporter got his rocks off and decided to do his job) to some harsh realities:

Why I love McClatchy:

Today, I arrived at the embassy with half an hour to spare before my appointment. I couldn't enter until my escort arrived, so I passed the time talking with a Peruvian guard -- in his broken English and what little Spanish I remembered from high school.

"Are you press?" he asked.

When I confirmed that I was a journalist, he lowered his voice and looked around to see if his American supervisor from Triple Canopy was watching the interaction.

RL calls, so maybe somebody else can unpack this detailed article on California's health exchange experiment (via McClatchy, bien sur).

Visual politics, ya know (via McClatchy, by the way).

[Do read the comments. --lambert]