News organizations look at leak with different eyes
Times handles WikiLeaks disclosures more cautiously than Guardian, Al-Jazeera
By Alex Johnson
Reporter
WikiLeaks.org tried to coordinate coverage of its highly anticipated release of secret U.S. documents from the war in Iraq by sharing the material with a select group of news organizations weeks in advance, but it couldn’t coordinate what they actually said.
In the end, the shadowy, decentralized organization couldn’t even coordinate the release of its own documents.
Al-Jazeera, one of the news organizations that it had given the documents weeks ago, broke WikiLeaks’ embargo by publishing a six-minute video on its website late Friday afternoon. The New York Times, The Guardian of Britain and Le Monde, which also received the material under the embargo, followed swiftly with their extensive prepared reports.
Shakespeare & Company: The bookshop that thinks it’s a hotel
By Clare Dwyer Hogg Saturday, 23 October 2010
When William Burroughs wanted to research his book Naked Lunch, he was in Paris. So he went straight to the Rue de Bucherie on the Left Bank, through the doors of the bookshop Shakespeare & Company, and directly to the bookshelves of the American bookseller George Whitman. There, he found stacks and stacks of hefty medical tomes, along with just about every English language paperback of note you could want. Burroughs has long gone from this world, but Shakespeare & Company has not. It is still perched on the same cobblestones on the bank of the Seine, overlooked by the Notre Dame. And if Willy Wonka were to take time off from chocolate concoctions and open a bookshop, this is what it would look like.
USA
Curing the Ills of America’s Top Foreign Aid Agency
THE SATURDAY PROFILE
By MARK LANDLER
Published: October 22, 2010
A FEW days after Rajiv Shah was sworn in as the head of the United States Agency for International Development, he stopped by to see its rapid response center, a high-tech command post for disaster relief, which on that day stood empty and still.Twelve hours later, an earthquake devastated Haiti, and for the next two months the center became Dr. Shah’s round-the-clock home. A brainy, 37-year-old physician with little government experience, Dr. Shah suddenly found himself coordinating a desperate emergency relief effort under the gaze of President Obama.
In Arizona, a candidate faces a boycott backlash
Rep. Raul Grijalva should slide to reelection in a district where Democrats greatly outnumber Republicans, but his call for a boycott of his state over a harsh immigration law has made him a target.
By Nicholas Riccardi, Los Angeles Times
October 23, 2010
Reporting from Rio Rico, Ariz. – The contrast between the two candidates couldn’t have been starker. On one side of the stage slouched Rep. Raul M. Grijalva, 62, a four-term congressman and local Democratic icon, sporting a bushy moustache and wearing an open-collared shirt that he had changed into an hour earlier but already looked rumpled.On the other end sat Republican nominee Ruth McClung, 28, her yellow jacket matching her sensibly styled blond hair, carefully smiling at the crowd gathered here this week at a candidate forum about 15 miles from the Mexico border.
Europe
Swedish police hunt for gunmen targeting immigrants
Sweden’s third largest city was on alert on Friday following two more shootings police said could be the work of one shooter or several gunmen targeting people of immigrant origin.
Telegraph
“As citizens of Malmo, regardless of nationality or origin, we must have public safety in mind,” Aasa Palmqvist of the Malmo police told reporters on Friday.
Police this week said they were setting up a task force of up to 50 police officers to look into around 15 unsolved shootings in the southern city of Malmo over the past year which could be motivated by racism.
The crimes bear a chilling similarity to the case of an immigrant-shooting sniper in Stockholm in the early 1990s.
Police were cautious in drawing parallels between the two cases, but the Swedish press quickly picked up on the similarities, with the country’s two largest tabloids on Friday saying that police were searching for“a new laserman.”
Senate approves controversial pension changes
The Irish Times – Saturday, October 23, 2010
RUADHĂN Mac CORMAIC in Paris
THE FRENCH senate last night approved President Nicolas Sarkozy’s controversial pension reform, but trade unions vowed to maintain their campaign with further strikes and protests.After a long and acrimonious debate, which the government hastened to an end by invoking a rarely used constitutional clause, the upper house adopted the pensions Bill by 177 votes to 153.
The draft law, which raises the minimum retirement age from 60 to 62, is now likely to be definitively adopted by parliament early next week.
Middle East
It was the Gaza assault’s worst atrocity. Now the truth may finally be told
By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem Saturday, 23 October 2010
Israeli military police are investigating whether an air strike which killed 21 members of the same family sheltering in a building during the Army’s Gaza offensive in 2008-9 was authorised by a senior brigade commander who had been warned of the danger to civilians.
The new turn in the enquiry has cast a fresh spotlight on what is widely thought to be the worst single incident involving civilian casualties during Operation Cast Lead, the missile attack on a building in the Zeitoun district of Gaza City, where around 100 members of the extended Samouni family were taking refuge on the morning of 4 January, 2009.
A Day in Hell
Iraq, Nov. 23, 2006
By Friederike Freiburg
The war never sleeps, including this Thursday.It’s seven minutes past midnight, and US soldiers are on an operation in the northwestern Iraqi city of Haditha. They apprehend two men that intelligence reports say are insurgents. The men are then taken to a nearby operating base for interrogation. “No casualties or damages reported,” the military report of the operation reads. That’s all. No other details about the men or the operation.
The log of the event at 0:07 hours is classified as secret — just like the 359 other logs that were filed on Nov. 23, 2006, in the US Army database. They cover routine operations such as the arrest, but also attacks in which hundreds of people will be killed.
Asia
China detonates regional goodwill
JOHN GARNAUT
October 23, 2010
BEIJING: In May 1986 a diminutive veteran of the long and brutal Japanese occupation of China, the then Communist Party chief Hu Yaobang, leaned forward in his oversized armchair and told the Australian prime minister Bob Hawke how he was changing the course of history.”There can be no peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region unless China and Japan are friends,” said Hu, after detailing his profound initiatives to build a base for future good relations between the two former enemies.
Japan’s middle school girls devour novels using their phones
A new genre of fiction, popular with Japan’s middle school girls, is capitalizing on the popularity of smart phones – cellphone novels, most often romantic comedies.
By Yuriko Nagano, Correspondent / October 22, 2010
Sales of smart phones and electronic reading devices are strong as ever here, and one literary genre in particular continues to capture the heart of middle school girls.Keitai shosetsu (cellphone novels) have found a steady teen following. Popular themes are romantic comedies in school settings. The novels can be read on tiny digital screens by accessing websites that publish the stories. The most popular ones are printed into books.
Nippan, Japan’s largest publication distributor, reports that the keitai bestseller in the past year was “Koisuru Akuma” (“Devil in Love”).
Africa
AU seeks air, naval blockade of Somalia
EDITOR
THE African Union (AU) is calling for a naval and air blockade of Somalia as well as more troops and aid to fend off piracy and terrorism in the struggling Horn of Africa nation.
The AU’s Commissioner for Peace and Security, Ramtane Lamamra, yesterday sought Security Council approval for the blockade. He also called for far more international aid and a contingent of 20,000 troops, up from the current level of 7,100.
Associated Press (AP) reported that Lamamra said the international community’s policies of “limited engagement” and “half measures” are insufficient to deter pirates off the country’s coast and the al-Qaeda-linked Al Shabab Islamist rebels who control much of Somalia.
An offensive launched by Somali government troops recently killed about 15 people as the weak, United Nations (UN)-backed government attempts to win back control of areas held by militants.
According to AP, the government stated that the offensive, which began last Sunday, has recorded some early successes, with militants fleeing from at least one town near the border with Kenya.
Somalia’s Ministry of Information said 11 al-Shabab militants and one government soldier have been killed in the fighting. A witness said at least three civilians died. There was no way to independently verify the casualty figures.
Africa sees lag in funds for UN peacekeeping
JOHN HEILPRIN | NEW YORK, UNITED STATES – Oct 23 2010
A report Friday from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon emphasised the increasing role of AU peacekeeping. Whether the missions are led by UN or AU forces, African conflicts — many a legacy of colonialisation and long-simmering divisions like those in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo — occupy about 70% of the Security Council’s usual monthly agenda.Behind the recurring theme of ever-increasing cooperation among UN and AU operations, African leaders and AU officials disclosed their uneasiness with a system that, in their view, often leaves their troops unable to do their jobs properly.