If you haven't read Soj's Flogging the Simian Blog, you should. Indeed, if you are not the sort of person for whom buying a coffee or getting a meal at McDonalds is a major economic decision, you should give her money, so she can continue her good work. The only person I know of with a similar knack for finding scoops is Seymour Hersh. Soj is a one woman CIA for the public, currently based in Romania (although she worked in a Florida police station as a transcriptionist for a while, and as a U.S. intelligence analyst before that). Simply put, she discovers three (if not a dozen) impossible to learn through the American mainstream media things before breakfast almost every day. She discusses her methods here.
If you listen to National Public Radio, which provides fine coverage of the stories that it does cover, you will notice that its international coverage is immensely overweighted with coverage of what the President had for breakfast, Russia and Israel. All of those, except the first, deserve throrough coverage. But, unlike the British Broadcasting Company, NPR does not provide through coverage of international happenings in Africa, in Asia, and in parts of Europe that are not home to U.S. soldiers. Soj's daily briefing, in a herculean effort, fills much of this gap.
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