Apparently the National Post has decided to acknowledge the obvious and admit they didn’t use due diligence: Newspaper apologizes for anti-Iran report.

The National Post ran the piece on its front page Friday along with a large photo from 1944 that showed a Hungarian couple wearing the yellow stars that the Nazis forced Jews to sew to their clothing.

The story, which included tough anti-Iran comments, was picked up widely by Web sites and by other media.

“Is Iran turning into the new Nazi Germany? Share your opinion online,” the paper asked readers Friday.

But the National Post, a longtime supporter of Israel and critic of Tehran, admitted Wednesday it had not checked the piece thoroughly enough before running it.

“It is now clear the story is not true,” Douglas Kelly, the National Post’s editor in chief, wrote in a long editorial on Page 2. “We apologize for the mistake and for the consternation it has caused not just National Post readers, but the broader public who read the story.”

Another planted story to confuse the situation and drum up anger against Iran.

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The Chelsea Flower Show is taking place, which is a great spring trip to Britain if you ever have the opportunity.

Has anyone heard why James Wolcott is down? The site was up on Monday, but has been blank yesterday and today. Has he had an attack of Corrente, disappearing into the ether to reappear later?

I forgot: U.S. study sees no marijuana link to lung cancer.

I beginning to believe that the Feds have just lost another slam-dunk case, the Representative William Jefferson [D-LA] bribery case.

Steve Bates has a few posts on the case, and mentioned my thinking in his latest post, concerning the search of Jefferson’s Congressional office.

All Things Considered covered the Republican reaction to the office search including a heated Tom DeLay reaction to what the FBI did. I think this may be an indication of the level of fear among Republicans that they may not be able to hide evidence in their offices anymore. [Update: Mustang Bobby found out why Denny Hastert is upset.]

Following that, ATC did an analysis piece comparing Jefferson’s situation to the Abscam probe of the 1980s. This FBI sting cleaned a number of crooks out of Congress using the same techniques that are in use here.

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Those evil liberals at All Things Considered decided to ask experts about Data-Mining a Mountain of Phone Calls .

Since this is an open source, I’m free to talk about some things I’ve avoided getting into before.

Problem one: the current “watch list” is almost a half million names and some of those names [Edward Kennedy, David Nelson] are not exactly unique. The lack of standardized transliteration between Arabic and English means one name could be on the list multiple times because of spelling variations. The same individual may have more than one name in the Middle East, e.g. Mahmoud Abbas is also known as Abu Masen. This means there is no way of knowing how many people the list represents.

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