  Recent analyses of the WMAP data seem to indicate the possible presence of
large-angle anisotropy in the Universe. If confirmed, these can have important
consequences for our understanding of the Universe. A number of attempts have
recently been made to establish the reality and nature of such anisotropies in
the CMB data. Among these is a directional indicator recently proposed by the
authors. A distinctive feature of this indicator is that it can be used to
generate a sky map of the large-scale anisotropies of the CMB maps. Applying
this indicator to full-sky temperature maps we found a statistically
significant preferred direction. The full-sky maps used in these analyses are
known to have residual foreground contamination as well as complicated noise
properties. Thus, here we performed the same analysis for a map where regions
with high foreground contamination were removed. We find that the main feature
of the full-sky analysis, namely the presence of a significant axis of
asymmetry, is robust with respect to this masking procedure. Other subtler
anomalies of the full-sky are on the other hand no longer present.
