What's happening in Iraq? Today's New York Times offers conflicting stories. A page one article by Tim Arango reports:

residents of Mosul say that so far the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has handled the local population with a light touch. Some residents, hardened by their hatred of the army, spoke of the insurgents almost as if they were a liberating army. The militants, residents said, greet people at checkpoints and ask citizens if they are carrying a weapon, and if the answer is no, they let them on their way.

Many spoke of being able to move around the city more freely for the first time in years, after the militants unblocked roads that the army had shut down for security reasons and took down the blast walls that had become a permanent feature of nearly every major Iraqi city over the last decade.

Yet a dispatch inside the paper, also under Mr. Arango's byline, reports:

Some residents who remained in Mosul reported on Thursday that militants used mosque loudspeakers and leaflets to invite all soldiers, police officers and other government loyalists to go to the mosques and renounce their allegiance to the Baghdad authorities or face death. The occupiers also banned sales of alcohol and cigarettes and ordered women to stay home.

It's hard for me to understand how ordering women to stay home and threatening government loyalists with death amounts to a "light touch."

I understand it is a chaotic wartime situation and a developing news story and that Mr. Arango is probably operating on little sleep and at some considerable personal safety risk. But surely there's some editor in New York whose job it is to read all this coverage before it goes in the paper, to spot contradictions like this, and to ask Mr. Arango to explain or clarify them for the sake of readers who are trying to understand what is going on in Iraq and who look to the Times, with its staff of reporters there, to help them.

Times public editor Margaret Sullivan's crusade against the careless or sloppy or unjustified use of anonymous sources is going widely unheeded in the Times newsroom, to judge by what appears in the newspaper. The latest example comes in an arts section article about the National Academy Museum:

A former benefactor of the academy expressed concern that the changes would do little more than perpetuate an image of the institution — as an unstable place. "I don't see any long-range thinking about what to do," the former benefactor said.

This is a cheap shot, and in my opinion the paragraph should have been edited out. If the "former benefactor" is unwilling to speak with his or her name attached, how are readers supposed to assess the sentiments expressed, and how is the museum supposed to respond? The quote doesn't even include one of the usual fake explanations of anonymity. What would it have said? "The former benefactor, who insisted on anonymity because on some level he felt bad about publicly criticizing an institution that he once gave money to..."?

"Sharpton Warns Against Race-Baiting in New York Contest" is the headline over a New York Times article that makes no mention of Rev. Sharpton's own history of race-baiting and that seems totally un-tuned-in to any irony or humor in the headline. The reporter, Kate Pastor, lists on her Linked In profile a 2000 B.A. in American Studies from George Washington University with a "focus on race, class and gender."

Thanks to reader-participant-community member-watchdog-content co-creator C. for sending the tip.

The "Hard Cases" column in the Science Times lists "divine providence" among the reasons that could cause an elderly patient discharged from a hospital to have to be readmitted. Personally, I am a believer in divine providence, but it is a factor that is usually so absent from the explanatory framework on display in the Times news columns that I did a double-take when I saw it in the newspaper. It'll be interesting to see whether the Times starts applying it as an explanation in political news articles about election results, military analyses about the outcomes of wars, economic news articles about jobless statistics, and sports stories about horse races or baseball games.

A Times interview/profile of Israeli President Shimon Peres includes the following passage:

On Sunday, as Mr. Netanyahu lambasted the Palestinian leader for his "partnership" with Hamas, Mr. Peres and Mr. Abbas were shaking hands in a Vatican garden. It had been 21 years since his handshake on the White House lawn with Yasir Arafat after the signing of the Oslo Accords. That handshake led to a shared Nobel Peace Prize. Yet peace is hardly on the horizon.

The famous Arafat White House lawn handshake was not between Arafat and Mr. Peres but between Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, who also got a Nobel prize but who is strangely airbrushed out of this Times account. If Mr. Peres and Mr. Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn, no one paid much attention at the time; the Times coverage of the day made no mention of it.

A Times dispatch from Charlotte, North Carolina about a former mayor, Patrick Cannon, pleading guilty to "a single count of honest services wire fraud" in a deal with federal prosecutors somehow manages to omit Cannon's political party affiliation, leaving Times readers who suspect the newspaper of partisan bias to wonder if the paper would have omitted it if Cannon had happened to be a Republican instead of a Democrat.

Thanks to reader-participant-community member-watchdog-content co-creator C. for sending the tip.

The Tax Foundation offers a useful debunking of a new report on corporate taxes that was issued by Citizens for Tax Justice and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. The report was the subject of a remarkably and disappointingly unskeptical column in the Times by Floyd Norris that ran under the headline "The Islands Treasured by Offshore Tax Avoiders." In addition to the points made by the Tax Foundation that were omitted from Mr. Norris's column, it's worth mentioning that CTJ and U.S. PIRG are both tax-exempt themselves.

A Times dispatch from Ramallah about the swearing in of a new Palestinian Authority government includes the following paragraph:

"Same thing, just different faces," scoffed a 47-year-old shawarma seller in Ramallah who gave his name only as Ibrahim.

Times reporters and editors had several options here. They could have interviewed more shwarma sellers until they were able to find one willing to be quoted by name. They could have killed the paragraph and run the article without it. Or they could have published the article as is, with the anonymous quote, which violates the newspaper's stated policy on anonymous sources. Looks like it's time for another edition of the Times public editor's anonymous source watch.

Yesterday's front-page Times article about the former Brooklyn district attorney, Charles Hynes, described an adviser to him, Mortimer Matz, as "nearly 90." Today's article is more straightforward: "Mr. Matz, 89,..."

According to a post by a Times editor on Twitter, the newspaper has created a "sin beat," which had its debut over the weekend in an article that led the Times' Sunday metro section. The article, which is accompanied on the Times web site by a ten-photo slide show, is headlined, "A Strip Club in Manhattan Proves That Vice Is Hard To Kill." The terms of the Times' deal for access to the club are described as follows:

The New York Times was introduced to the club by its owner's lawyer and was allowed to visit under the condition that Bliss's location would not be revealed and that both its clients and those who worked there would not be identified by their full names. In conversations with patrons and workers during four visits to the club over the course of a month, the reporter identified himself as being from The Times.

Readers can judge for themselves based on the result whether that is an anonymous source deal that it was worth the Times' taking, or whether it comports with the paper's stated policies on the use of anonymous sources. The article, despite the headline, describes something that seems more like a brothel than a strip club. My own view is that the space in the newspaper and the reporter's time — "four visits to the club over the course of a month"! — would have been better devoted to other matters.

The article also leaves several questions unanswered. Readers aren't told the name of the lawyer who made this introduction.

Then there is this paragraph:

By the early-morning hours, most men have stumbled home. The women dance together to the music, in front of the bar, on top of the bar. Tony counts his cash on a landing in the stairwell, jumping whenever the door opens. He pays the floor manager, another man who keeps time outside of the rooms and the man who accepts money at the door. He pays a few people hush money. He usually goes back to the South Bronx with a wallet stuffed with cash: $2,000 or $3,000.

Is this money declared as income to the IRS? The Times doesn't mention anything about how the place deals with its taxes. And who are the "few people" who are paid "hush money"?

The whole story is quite un-Timeslike.

If you haven't been following the flap over Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan's criticism of Michael Kinsley's New York Times book review of Glenn Greenwald's book, you are missing some delightful entertainment. The latest is Mr. Kinsley's response to Ms. Sullivan's criticism. Charles Lane has some thoughts at the Washington Post, too.

Mike Allen's Politico Playbook catches a typo in the lead front-page headline of the Times: "Tells West Point Cadets That Critics Misread His Cautious Reponse to World Crises." That should be "Response."

A column by Michael Powell in today's New York Times condemns Mayor de Blasio for appearing at a dinner of an Orthodox Jewish group, the Agudath Israel of America. Mr. Powell's column is flawed in at least two ways. He writes:

Rabbi Perlow offered a shower of condemnation for Reform and Conservative Jews, who he said were among those who "subvert and destroy the eternal values of our people." These movements, he said, "have disintegrated themselves, become oblivious, fallen into an abyss of intermarriage and assimilation."

"They will be relegated," he added, "to the dustbins of Jewish history."

This was a striking statement because a majority of the Jews in this city identify as non-Orthodox. The mayor himself proudly celebrates his own mixed-race marriage.

What does Mayor de Blasio's "mixed race marriage" have to do, at all, with Rabbi Perlow's condemnation of intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews? Does the Times columnist think it is racist for Jews to oppose intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews? If so, the Times columnist may wish to be aware that Conservative Judaism and many Reform rabbis also oppose intermarriage, in part on the grounds that studies show children of intermarriage are less likely to remain Jews, which is important if (apparently unlike Mr. Powell), you place a high priority on the continuation of Judaism and the Jewish people. A difference between Jews opposing intermarriage and anyone opposing interracial marriage is that the opponents of intermarriage generally favor a conversion to Judaism for the previously non-Jewish spouse, while the opponents of interracial marriage have no conversion option. Most people who aren't Nazis don't think of Jews as a "race," and some Jewish readers, including this particular one, will have their hackles raised by the Times columnist injecting the word "race" into the question of continuing the Jewish people, which includes Ethiopian Jews, pale-skinned Jews, and swarthy Jews.

Another way the column is flawed is that it describes Rabbi Perlow's remarks as an attack on Reform and Conservative Jews. In fact the remarks — you can view a YouTube here — were primarily a criticism of a movement called Open Orthodoxy. There was also criticism of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, which is an Orthodox institution. The comment about Reform and Conservative — Rabbi Perlow didn't even mention the words Conservative or Reform — was by way of an introduction, almost an aside.

The rest of the column makes clear that Mr. Powell regards Orthodox Jews as nothing more than a bunch of child-molesting sponges of taxpayer dollars, which is a remarkably crude condemnation of a large group of diverse individuals. Mr. Powell tries to paint the Orthodox Jews as bigots for opposing intermarriage, but if there's anyone here whose prejudices could use some self-examination it's not the Orthodox Jews but the Times columnist.

A front-page New York Times article about deaths attributed to a General Motors ignition switch defect turns out to be a case study in using slanted language about drug and alcohol use. The Times writes that two accident victims "had experimented with various recreational drugs."

The words "experimented" and "recreational" make the drug use sound less serious, and make the victims seem more sympathetic to Times readers than they would if they had been hard-core drug users, addicts, or junkies. Why does the Times describe the drugs as "recreational" rather than "illegal"? Contrast this with the Times condemnatory attitude toward tobacco use (a recent editorial spoke of the need to "drive home the message that the availability of this lethal consumer product should be curtailed as much as possible and that tobacco use is socially unacceptable.") To the Times, tobacco use is lethal and socially unacceptable, while drug use is "recreational" or experimental or, for that matter, medicinal. The distinction seems driven less by science than by the cultural biases of the Times reporters and editors, or by the ancillary ideological goals of making cigarette companies and car manufacturers alike look evil.

Lower down in the same Times story comes this passage:

In fighting lawsuits and in its public statements, G.M. has pointed to other factors that could have been responsible for the deaths. "All of these crashes occurred off-road and at high speeds, where the probability of serious or fatal injuries was high regardless of air bag deployment," the company said in February, when it had acknowledged only six deaths tied to the defect. "In addition, failure to wear seatbelts and alcohol use were factors in some of these cases."

In fact, The Times found, alcohol was listed as a factor in just four of the 10 accidents that the newspaper identified — including one in which the drunken driver was actually driving another vehicle that crashed into the defective G.M. car.

The word "just" in the phrase "just four of the 10 accidents" is a biased word. Four of ten seems like a lot to me. But for whatever reason, the Times doesn't want to go after the alcohol manufacturers the way it is going after the tobacco companies and General Motors. Instead it runs article after article in the food and magazine sections glorifying the products — "Learning to Love Beer Cocktails," "20 Summer Wines for $20," and so on. Again, it seems driven less by science — alcohol related deaths amount to a much greater number each year than deaths resulting from faulty GM ignition switches — than by the cultural biases of Times reporters and editors.

A news article from Washington in today's Times reports:

China and the United States, the world's two largest economies and greenhouse gas polluters, are locked in a stalemate over global warming. While today China pollutes more than the United States, Chinese officials insist that, as a developing economy, China should not be forced to take carbon-cutting actions. China has demanded that the United States, as the world's historically largest polluter, go first. Chinese policy experts say that Mr. Obama's regulation could end that standoff.

It's not clear from the sentence whether the description of the United States as "the world's historically largest polluter" is China's or the New York Times'. It's not clear to me how one would attempt such a ranking. If you look at carbon dioxide emissions per capita, America ranks below Kuwait, Brunei, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Trinidad and Tobago, Bahrain, Aruba, and Luxembourg. In terms of pollution generated per unit of GDP, the Soviet Union "generated 1.5 times more pollution than the USA," according to an article in the journal Global Environmental Change. And there are other kinds of pollution, like water pollution, that have not been carefully measured over history. Before tossing around pejorative labels directed at America like "world's historically largest polluter," the Times might want to consider defining its terms and citing its data sources.