During my long ago college days, I remember looking through an annual index of Pravda editorials, and laughing to myself at the calculatedly aggressive phrasing of what was, after all, a government mouthpiece. Has the day really come when Pravda (literal translation truth, ironical as it long seemed) tells us stuff our own newspapers might forget to mention?

Don't get me wrong, the American media do some amazing stuff. I think it was in the American media I learned how the military has been trying to use access to information and the front lines to manipulate them. All the same, if this is true, I wish I had heard it here first.

Of course the media did mention some fighting in Afganistan where an American died, but I didn't know we had 10,000 troops there. Is this story of a ground war heating up correct?