Ethan Bronner referred your query to me, the foreign editor. Here is my comment: Mr. Bronner's son is a young adult who makes his own decisions. At The Times, we have found Mr. Bronner's coverage to be scrupulously fair and we are confident that will continue to be the case.

Nearly two weeks later, the NYT's Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, stated in his column that he too believed that Bronner should be reassigned.  Executive editor Bill Keller disagreed.

The Angry Arab, whose prior comments can be found here, here, and here, was unconvinced by Keller's explanation:

If only one reporter for the New York Times would, for purposes of an experiment, announces that he/she has a son who has joined Hamas or Hizbullah forces, we would like then to see if Bill Keller would make the arguments that he has made regarding Ethan Bronner's son. I mean, Mr. Keller. Who are you kidding?

Arab-American blogger Suleika Jaouad sees the case as not being about Bronner, but as part of a larger issue:

This disturbing imbalance in the Times' reporting on the conflict raises some serious ethical questions about Zionism in the US media. Journalist Philip Weiss, on his blog Mondoweiss, lists a few of them: how deep does it go, and will anyone ever look into it? And on from that, Why are so many of the MSM reporters on Israel/Palestine Jews with intimate ties to Israel? When do [Arab-Americans] get to cover this story?

Palestinian writer Ali Abunimah, who is a co-founder of Electronic Intifada, raises an interesting question to that effect on Twitter:

Abunimah expands on that question on Mondoweiss, then takes it a bit further.  Like Jaouad, he sees the problem as going beyond the case of Ethan Bronner and toward the question of equality.  After clarifying his belief that being Jewish does not pose a conflict of interest in reporting on Israel (”So anyone who says that being Jewish automatically leads to pro-Israel bias is wrong”), he brings up the example of Palestinian Times journalist Taghreed El-Khodary, saying:

Yes, recently they have had Taghreed El-Khodary in Gaza […] But here is a crucial point: El-Khodary is allowed to report only on Palestinians. Neither she nor any other Arab reporter is allowed to report on Israeli Jews. While Jews/Americans may report on Palestinians, the converse is not true. Why is this? It must be — I assume — because there is an inherent, perhaps unacknowledged assumption that an Arab/Palestinian is or will be automatically biased against Israelis/Jews. Whereas, we are supposed to accept that in no case is a Jewish reporter who identifies with Israel biased even when his son has joined an occupation army that is raiding Palestinian refugee camps and communities dozens of times per week. Seriously?

To what can we attribute this double-standard? I am afraid it smacks of racism.

In this podcast he explains why transparency and accountability projects tend to focus on federal rather than state and local governments and points us to one innovative project in Brazil in which bloggers ‘adopt' local politicians.

Following the censorship of Fatma Arabicca and Sofiene Chourabi's blogs, two other blogs had been censored. One of them is the Free Jailed Tunisian students , seen in the following screen shot:

The second blog blocked is Nocturnal Thoughts . The censorship of the latter created a wave of protests on the Tunisian blogosphere.

Ghodwa Nahrek(Tomorrow I will illegally immigrate) wrote:

Matrka(Hammer) blogged saying:

Samsoum blogged under the title Ammar does not like thoughts and thinkers especially those who blog about their nocturnal thoughts saying:

Below is the video presentation of the government project:

Viktor Arsovski of IT.com.mk, providing an overview of the reactions to the unveiling of the government's plan, reported [MKD]:

Citizens use social networks, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube to comment, criticize, ridicule, and, to a smaller extent, praise the future look of Skopje in 2014. Makfax posted the video “Visualisation of the Skopje center in 2014″ yesterday, on February 4th. In just one day it attracted over 16,000 views and over 380 comments.

Right-wing blogger Alek Careca expressed a view held by many of his ideological brethren:

Personally, I am impressed and fascinated. Skopje will have one of the most beautiful city centres.

However, Mr. Arsovski rightly notes that most of the reactions express disagreement for aesthetic reasons and/or due to the huge costs of the project, especially since the mayor of Centar Municipality has recently stated [MKD] that “the worst of the economic crisis is over, we have enough money for monuments,” whose total cost is estimated to be at least 17 million euro.

Volan, a blogger with background in economics, could only note that this development is not a joke [MKD], even though it looks like one. Nenad Jovanovic quoted his grandmother [MKD], who used to say:

Son, never underestimate the power of stupidity and kitsch.

The portal Okno published a compilation of comments [MKD], following up on earlier articles dealing with this and the related phenomena, whose authors spoke about the burden of living in such “interesting” times [MKD] and ironically noted [MKD] that in the future Macedonia would be able to compete with Easter Island:

Inspired tourist guides will explain to visitors from world over that this extinct civilization, in the midst of transitions and world crises, spent its meager resources on building monuments and other stoned works in order to leave traces in time that would bear witness of its defiance to the damned neighbors and other foreign clergy-fascist fiends.

Faced with the absurd, tweets (#Skopje2014) and Facebook posts often use humor as an antidote.

For instance, Interpreter published a lucid poem titled “Two Thousand and Fourteen” [MKD], while FlavrSavr compared the video to the Caesar IV game trailer [MKD], saying that in this version…

…the difference is that journalists and other traitors [referring to smear tactics used by government supporters for all who express criticism] will have to play the role of gladiators.

Twitter users also spread the statement by Ramadan Ramadani [MKD], a representative of the Muslim community, who demands inclusion of a mosque in the plan - or exclusion of the new church:

The main square of the capital of Macedonia belongs to all the citizens and is not a field for playing [FarmVille].

A history buff used Wikipedia to compare the “vision” to make the grand national capital through massive and costly rebuilding to similar failed ambitions from the past.

The author of the blog Psycha… the edge of logic proposed [MKD] that the dome that the government plans to add to the Parliament building should be turned into a planetarium. Macedonia has only one such facility, built in the early 1970s and not renovated since, which suffers from neglect [MKD] due to lack of funds for maintenance.

Members of a grassroots group who got beaten up last spring called for a spontaneous protest against the government's unresponsiveness [MKD] to the citizens' reactions. The protest is scheduled to take place this coming Saturday, at 2 PM, on the “unoccupied portion of the main square.”