the buzz log

This weekend, comments from the CIA chief on Dick Cheney cause a stir, Iran erupts in violence after a presidential election, and a dropped pop-up sends baseball fans searching for video of a monumental error. Just a few of the more popular stories on Yahoo! Buzz...

Panetta on Cheney
In a Jane Mayer profile of CIA head Leon Panetta in next week's New Yorker, Panetta addresses Dick Cheney's scathing criticism of the Obama administration's national security policies. Panetta, who wrote a short but blunt broadside against torture in the Washington Monthly before he took the CIA job, told Mayer: "I think [Cheney] smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue. It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point." Ladies and gentlemen on the left, ladies and gentlemen on the right, start your engines...

Iran election ignites violence
Iran has erupted in protest after supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi, the main challenger to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, took to the streets to voice their displeasure with what they consider to be a tainted election. The official tally showed Ahmadinejad gaining more than 62 percent of the vote, to roughly 34 percent for Mousavi—results that some analysts consider unlikely. Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad supporters are also out in force. Coverage on the Web and on Twitter, which is playing a major role in the protests, is copious. Yahoo! News, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, CNN, and Al Arabiya are just some of the sources people are turning to for ongoing coverage.

The Pop-Up
When is a dropped pop-up not just a dropped pop-up? When it lets the winning run score with two outs in the ninth of a seesaw battle between the NY Mets and NY Yankees, participants in a heated crosstown rivalry. The fact that the ball was thrown by Francisco Rodriguez, baseball's top reliever, and hit by Alex Rodriguez, baseball's reigning drama king, added to the excitement. And if Luis Castillo ever had a hankering to boost his search numbers, this probably wasn't the way he wanted to go about it. Queries for the Mets' second baseman—the perpetrator of the muff—have surged, with fans looking for video of the play, which probably would have been made by most competent Little Leaguers. Castillo explained his torment the day after.

Also buzzing this weekend...

• The Los Angeles Lakers are NBA champions. 
• Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu's conditional endorsement of a Palestinian state drew a lot of attention.
• David Carradine was a top search this weekend. The actor's funeral was held  Saturday.