The slow death of one of Morocco's sole independent publications, Le Journal Hebdomadaire, came to its inevitable conclusion this past week. The proximate cause for the magazine's closure was financial: A Moroccan court declared the magazine's publisher's bankrupt, and seized its assets on Wednesday. But the underlying reason for the magazine's end was political: It had been one of the few Moroccan publications that dared to touch some of the country's most taboo subjects, from criticizing the monarchy to the issue of the country's over the Western Sahara. The magazine's co-founder, Aboubakr Jamaï, contends that his finances were crippled by the Moroccan government's pressure on advertisers to boycott the publication.  Jamaï's finances have been in disarray since a Moroccan court ruled against him in a defamation case in 2006, which ordered him to pay a punitive judgment of $354,000.

Aida Alami, a (former) journalist at the magazine, wrote an extraordinary account of its last days -- and unique place in Morocco's public sphere -- for the Huffington Post. To quote her directly:

Even if "Le Journal Hebdomadaire," is something that will be talked about in the past, no one can deny what it has done for the country. Many people have called us traitors because we were too critical. I think it's the opposite, we are all people who loved their country enough to never sell out. We gave our readers the best we could and kept them informed like no other news team.

I spoke with Ms. Alami yesterday to get more details about the closing of her newspaper. We had what was, frankly, a depressing conversation about the state of the free press in Morocco. Alami will still be a journalist -- just not for one of Le Journal's tamer competitors. "There is nowhere I could work within the Moroccan press," she said.

Patrick Barry noticed this very interesting passage from the U.S. intelligence community's annual threat assessment:

We judge that, unlike al-Qa'ida, Hizballah, which has not directly attacked US interests
overseas over the past 13 years, is not now actively plotting to strike the Homeland. However, we cannot rule out that the group would attack if it perceives that the US is threatening its core interests.

He then compares it to the Director of National Intelligence's assessment in 2007 (Hezbollah's "self confidence and hostility toward the US...could cause the group to increase its contingency planning against US interests"), in 2008 (Hezbollah has "expressed the desire to use cyber means to target the United States"), and 2009 (Hezbollah "continues to be a formidable terrorist adversary with an ability to attack the US Homeland").

It's worth pointing out that Hezbollah hasn't changed appreciably since 2007; the only thing that has shifted is the U.S. assessment of the party. And it's a little strange to point out that Hezbollah won't change its plans unless the United States is "threatening its core interests."  That is undoubtedly true, but of course the U.S. government is a threat to Hezbollah's interests. The only question is how serious the U.S.-backed challenge to Hezbollah's status as Lebanon's preeminent armed force is; ever since the country was seized by a widespread, if largely contrived, spirit of reconciliation following May 2008, the answer is "not very." However, when the next political crisis arises, expect Hezbollah to find its way back on the list of threats to the United States.

Despite having served for years as a distinguished Pakistani diplomat, Akbar Zeb reportedly cannot receive accreditation as Pakistan's ambassador to Saudi Arabia. The reason, apparently, has nothing to do with his credentials, and everything to do with his name -- which, in Arabic, translates to "biggest dick":

In Saudi Arabia, size does count.

A high level Pakistani diplomat has been rejected as Ambassador of Saudi Arabia because his name, Akbar Zib, equates to "Biggest Dick" in Arabic. Saudi officials, apparently overwhelmed by the idea of the name, put their foot down and gave the idea of his being posted there, the kibosh.

According to this Arabic-language article in the Arab Times, Pakistan had previously floated Zeb's name as ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, only to have him rejected for the same reason. One can only assume that submitting Zeb's name to a number of Arabic-speaking countries is some unique form of punishment designed by the Pakistani Foreign Ministry -- or the result of a particularly egregious cockup.

The territorial issues surrounding the village of Ghajar are probably understood well by only a few hundred Americans -- and, truth be told, the village's history is not known all that much better in Lebanon. Nevertheless, there have been three stories on Ghajar in major U.S. publications in the past week: The Wall Street Journal released their article last Friday, the New York Times published their piece today -- and, of course, Foreign Policy produced the best article on Ghajar, which we put out last night.

This is curious because Israel administers the village as a military zone -- foreign correspondents need the IDF's permission to enter the village, and are escorted by the Israelis as they do their reporting. It is one of those issues where Israel is able to shape pretty easily what media accounts, if any, come out of the area.

So, why would the Israelis open the floodgates to Ghajar reporting at this time? As you'd know by reading our article, Israel is currently in negotiations with the United Nations and Lebanon over returning the northern part of the village to Lebanese sovereignty, while the area would be administered by soldiers from the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). Those talks have currently hit a few snags: Israel is leery of the precedent set by a deal which would place Israeli citizens under international control. By letting reporters interview the village residents, who oppose the deal because they want to be reintegrated with Syria, not Lebanon, the Israelis could be attempting to gin up public pressure which will give them a reason to drag their feet further on negotiations.

If you follow international affairs, you probably know that there are two important conferences in London this week -- one to coordinate the NATO effort in Afghanistan, and the other to develop a strategy to combat the resurgent terrorist threat in Yemen. But there's a third London conference occurring this week that you may have missed, which grapples with a truly international issue: aliens.

This past Monday and Tuesday, Britain's Royal Society held a conference, which included representatives from NASA, the European Space Agency, and the U.N. Office for Outer Space Affairs, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program. The scientists attending the conference set goals which were every bit as ambitious as stabilizing Afghanistan's government or solving Yemen's myriad problems: Professor Michael Mayor used his address to pledge that 2010 would be the year that astronomers would find the first Earth-like planet outside of our solar system.

The conference centered on where we might find extraterrestrial life -- and whether, much like Wile E. Coyote chasing the Roadrunner, mankind would be fully prepared for the consequences of making "first contact." Dr. Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State University, suggested that we may not have to look to the stars to find alien lifeforms: He has advanced the theory that aliens might exist right under our noses. Davies has suggested that, as less than 1 percent of bacteria have been studied in-depth, we may already live alongside alien microbes that do not share an earthly origin.

In a week of conferences about war, it is good to hear that one, at least, raised the possibility of peaceful co-existence.

LUIS ROBAYO/AFP/Getty Images

I was surprised to see a UPI headline today reading, "ElBaradei Rules Out Presidential Bid." I had just spoken with the former IAEA Director General last Thursday, and he had given no indication that was the direction he was leaning -- if he had wanted to break that sort of news, he should have given me the scoop!

But then I saw the source: "ElBaradei...told news magazine Foreign Policy that Egypt lacks the measures needed to hold a fair election."

What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is an egregious case of mis-quoting. ElBaradei's full quote reads:

I don't want to be president of Egypt! I have a lot of plans other than being president of Egypt. You can understand that after having this thankless job for 12 years, that I wanted to have some time to do other things that I like to do, including spending time with my family -- we have a house in the south of France, and I also have a granddaughter. However, this issue is coming to me by default; a lot of people are saying that they want me to be engaged in domestic politics -- they want me to run for president of Egypt.

What I've said is that I would not even consider running for president unless there is the proper framework for a free and fair election -- and that is still the major question mark in Egypt.

I think the meaning of this is fairly clear. He is saying that he doesn't want to be president, on a personal level, but he is still saying that he'll run -- under certain conditions.

What ElBaradei did was give a very literal answer to my question: Why do you want to be President? Which, for the record, was inspired out of my curiosity to see whether the question would trip him up in the same way that it confused Ted Kennedy in 1979. It didn't -- but it still managed to trip up UPI.

SAMUEL KUBANI/AFP/Getty Images

Reports out of Yemen indicate that one of Yemen's most wanted, Qassem al-Raymi, was killed in a Yemeni airstrike today. As is often the case, Gregory Johnsen has the best English-language bio of al-Raymi in town: He was the long-time deputy to Nasir al-Wuhayshi, the head of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and reportedly trained in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, where he met Osama bin Laden.

A few obvious caveats: This isn't the first time that newspapers have reported al-Raymi's demise -- until AQAP confirms it, there is going to be a lingering question mark over the event. Second, whether this was really a "Yemeni airstrike," rather than a U.S. drone strike, is going to be the subject of much debate in Washington D.C. and Sanaa in the days to come. I fully concede that I have no inside knowledge of what actually occurred in the far-flung regions of northern Yemen where this attack took place. However, given what we know about the relative capacity of U.S. airpower and the Yemeni air force, I'd bet my money that a U.S. drone pilot in Virginia pulled the trigger.

Many thanks to Gregory Johnsen for weighing in on the article that I wrote about Yemen's "most wanted" terrorists. Without the research that he has done on al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) over the years, it would have been literally impossible for me to write the piece.

Johnsen takes issue with two of the names on my list: Anwar al-Awlaki and Hizam Mujali. I'm willing to concede to his superior expertise with Mujali, but I'd like to defend the inclusion of al-Awlaki on the list. He's certainly in a different category than the other candidates on the list, who are all tacticians of armed jihad. But his propaganda for the organization makes him as valuable to al Qaeda as any trigger-puller. From the U.S. perspective, the prospect that al-Awlaki could continue to publicly rail against the United States after maintaining contacts with three of the 9/11 hijackers and Major Nidal Malik Hasan is especially abhorrent. It amounts to another piece of evidence that praising the murder of U.S. citizens, even from within the United States, carries no consequences.

From the Yemeni perspective, however, I understand why al-Awlaki wouldn't be at the top of anyone's hit list: He's just another anti-West cleric preaching to a nation that takes many of his beliefs as conventional wisdom. The "danger" posed by al-Awlaki is really a microcosm for the larger cognitive dissonance between the United States and the Yemeni government over al Qaeda: The United States sees the organization as the primary threat to stability because it is the primary danger to them in the country, while the Yemeni government had to have its arm twisted to admit that al Qaeda is a priority among all the other pitfalls currently facing the country.