Finally the New York Times condescends to cover the story everyone’s been talking about.

At least it does clear up one thing: the question wasn’t mistranslated, the questioner misspoke and said Mr Clinton when he meant to say Mr Obama.

Tee hee, they must be thinking in Pyongyang.

We suspected their choice of Bill to pick up the imprisoned journalists was to needle Hillary, and she certainly seemed needled at her latest press conference in Africa when someone asked not for her views but his.

UPDATE Here’s the video. Some reporters are saying it was a translation cock-up and when the questioner asked her what was President Obama’s view it was relayed to her as President Clinton!

Were the two reporters jailed for crossing the border lured into a trap by the North Koreans? The Sunday Times thinks so.

Laura Ling’s sister on the Today show.

Here’s what we wrote yesterday about the Bill Clinton mission to North Korea coming just two weeks after Pyongyang’s attack on his wife:

It looks suspiciously like an attempt by the North Koreans to humiliate Hillary by demanding to deal with her husband. Little do they know it’ll just make her look good because the MSM will play it as Hillary deploying her great asset.

Maureen Dowd is suspicious too. “Maybe,” she writes, “it was some clever North Korean revenge plot, giving the limelight to Daddy to punish Mommy.”

But the MSM is in full cheerleading mode. The Associated Press: “Score one for the tag team.”

And the New York Times manages to note that a) the North Koreans asked for Bill, and b) they asked for him around the time of the Hillary spat, without joining the dots.

Or rather it draws the opposite, innocent conclusion about North Korea’s motives: “Mr. Clinton’s trip to Pyongyang came just two weeks after North Korea issued a harsh personal attack on Mrs. Clinton . . . The episode evidently did not stop consideration of sending her husband as an envoy.”

A big, big win for the Clintons and for the Obama ethic of diplomacy and engagement.

Hillary’s take on North Korea a few weeks ago was that they were just looking for attention and like any good mom we should ignore them.

Having Bill turn up to secure the release of the two journalists is hardly ignoring them.

Whose idea was this exactly? It looks suspiciously like an attempt by the North Koreans to humiliate Hillary by demanding to deal with a “proper” politician in the shape of her husband.

Little do they know it’ll just make her look good because the MSM will play it as Hillary deploying her great asset. Here’s some early video.

The first hint of a crack between them, which we thought when she was appointed was going to provide us with almost daily entertainment.

Almost more intriguingly, absolutely no follow-up to the Washington Times story in the rest of the press apart from Greta van Susteren on Fox, despite the White House and State Department reaction being a no comment rather than a denial.

How’s Hillary doing? Stunningly, according to this puff piece from USA Today (via ABC News) which has some interesting nuggets all the same.

‘It turned into Hillary v Biden and she crushed him,’ is how the issue of more troops for Afghanistan is described.

And we’re told she’s not interested in running again because this job ’scratches a different itch’. Hmm.

A sign of the times? The Clintons’ boy goes down to defeat in Virginia.

Terry McAuliffe, the ultimate party insider, finds running for office is not as easy as it looks.

UPDATE Dylan Loewe’s readable piece in The Guardian concludes: ‘In the end, knowing the Clintons is no longer enough.’

It’s called Renegade: The Making of a President and is the first “insider gossip” look at the Obama presidential campaign. Wolffe is an ex-Newsweek man.

Politico has the highlights here, which it has to be said aren’t that exciting… the tension between Obama and Bill Clinton, for example, is old news now.

UPDATE Anne Schroeder has picked out some throwaway lines in the book about the Obamas’ marriage. Now that’s more like it.