The success of Hamas in the Palestinian elections is the latest election result to temper earlier claims by pundits that a spin-off benefit of the invasion of Iraq would be the flowering of Western-friendly Middle East democracies. Numerous columnists pondered on what they dubbed the "Arab spring." "So what happened to the Arab spring?

"The Internet may be new, but not the issue of whether an American corporation should do business with bad people," writes Richard Cohen. He argues that the claims of Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Yahoo and other tech companies that they are assisting the Chinese government's attempts to censor information online because they must "comply with local laws" ring false. "The law in China is what the Chinese leaders say it is," Cohen counters.

The U.S. Army is looking for "guiding PR" for its biometrics operations in Virginia and West Virginia. "Biometrics encompasses technology like iris, face and hand scanning and voice recognition, along with traditional fingerprint identification, usually for security applications.