In this cartoon from The Times, Peter Brookes plays on the word 'leak'. Obama is shown trying to plug the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, a much bigger leak labelled 'Afghanistan' has just exploded behind him.
EXPLANATION
For weeks, we've been hearing about the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. In this context, a leak can be defined as "an amount of liquid, gas, etc that is escaping from an object by means of a crack, hole, or other fault". Yesterday, however, a different sort of leak hit the headlines, when whistleblower website WikiLeaks published more than 90,000 classified war documents, painting a largely bleak picture of the war in Afghanistan. In this case, a leak is the making public of information, especially secret information, for example by showing it to the press. Leak is also a verb: The story was leaked to the media by a disgruntled employee. So, Obama now has two types of leak to deal with.
