Secrecy

After being arrested by Israeli secret service agents "on suspicion of having arranged a television interview with Mordechai Vanunu in violation of state gagging orders," British journalist Peter Hounam was released today. Hounam was in Israel working on a BBC documentary about Vanunu, a former nuclear technician turned whistleblower. In 1986, Hounam's reporting "helped to reveal Israel's nuclear secrets," after Vanunu came forward with weapons programs information.

"EPA decisions now have a consistent pattern: disregard for inconvenient facts, a tilt toward industry, and a penchant for secrecy," said longtime Environmental Protection Agency official Eric Schaeffer, who quit the agency in protest in 2002. He was responding to a new decision to exempt wood products plants from controls on emissions of formaldehyde, a chemical linked to cancer and leukemia.

"Despite budget crunches, poor air quality, maintenance backlogs and other problems, the public is not likely to hear any bad news from staff of the National Park Service (NPS)," BushGreenwatch.org writes.

China's "censorship orders are totally groundless, absolutely arbitrary, at odds with the basic standards of civilization, and as counter to scientific common sense as witches and wizardry," wrote Beijing journalism professor Jiao Guobiao in a recent article that has been widely circulated by Internet in Beijing despite, not unpredictably, being banned by the Communist Party's propaganda department. "Such explicit outbursts of dissent are still rare in China, reports Joseph Kahn. "But Mr.