Wired has removed three news items from its site, claiming that a freelance writer named Philip Chien contacted a “space historian” named Robert Ash (Ash says he isn’t). Further, it appears that Chien fabricated sources named Ted Collins and Robert Stevens. Interesting. I wonder if “psloss” is another Chien fabrication. If that forum thread can be believed, it looks like Chien killed his contact base. If so, perhaps this is why he resorted to making up sources.

This week’s East Bay Express includes a lengthy piece by Anneli Rufus about Cody’s. The literary blog Dibs, of course, all over this last month (and Flares Into Darkness’s post is quoted as “one blogger” in Rufus’s article). But Rufus’s article doesn’t add much to the conversation that hasn’t been said already. There are some insinuations as to Andy Ross’s motivations about opening the San Francisco store (along with some quotes from Ross himself), with some memories of what Cody’s used to be (or what people believed it to be). But for a purportedly investigative article, there’s little here beyond conjecture. No efforts to obtain documents, no tough questions directed at Ross about his net worth and why he expanded when the banks continually turned down his loan. It’s almost as if Rufus stole Dibs’s angle, spent an afternoon wandering around Berkeley interviewing people and then banged out this piece for an easy payday. And they call blogs the leeches.

New York Times: “A federal prosecutor may inspect the telephone records of two New York Times reporters in an effort to identify their confidential sources, a federal appeals court in New York ruled yesterday. The 2-to-1 decision, from a court historically sympathetic to claims that journalists should be entitled to protect their sources, reversed a lower court and dealt a further setback to news organizations, which have lately been on a losing streak in the federal courts.”