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… notes Bassey Etim at The New York Times‘s The Lede blog today (of James Risen’s A1 Times piece today, “U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan.”)
Etim writes that Risen’s piece has “become one of the most commented [on] nytimes.com pieces of the year, with more than 600 published comments” — over 1,000 now– and that “for most who commented on the article, trust for American motives in the Middle East appears frayed by the Iraq war and mixed results in Afghanistan.”
Some commenters have questioned the timing of the story (Risen notes in the piece that “the Obama administration is hungry for some positive news to come out of Afghanistan”) and the newsiness of this news, issues also raised by Blake Hounshell at FP and The Atlantic’s