company:the new york times

Liquidoc is an application to facilitate the creation of adaptive text. It’s inspired by the New York Times experiment with location-aware articles which shape themselves according to the user’s location.

The current version is a proof-of-concept of a more general interface to create texts which change and adapt to user provided variables. It was born at the J++ summit hackathon in June 2015, Stockholm.

▻https://github.com/jplusplus/liquidoc

#liquidtext #location

We are the propagandists: The real story about how The New York Times and the White House has turned truth in the Ukraine on its head - Patrick Smith
▻http://www.salon.com/2015/06/03/we_are_the_propagandists_the_real_story_about_how_the_new_york_times_and_the_

Ever since the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, reality itself has come to seem up for grabs. Karl Rove, a diabolically competent political infighter but of no discernible intellectual weight, may have been prescient when he told us to forget our pedestrian notions of reality—real live reality. Empires create their own, he said, and we’re an empire now.

The Ukraine crisis reminds us that the pathology is not limited to the peculiar dreamers who made policy during the Bush II administration, whose idea of reality was idealist beyond all logic. It is a late-imperial phenomenon that extends across the board. “Unprecedented” is considered a dangerous word in journalism, but it may describe the Obama administration’s furious efforts to manufacture a Ukraine narrative and our media’s incessant reproduction of all its fallacies.

At this point it is only sensible to turn everything that is said or shown in our media upside down and consider it a second time. Who could want to live in a world this much like Orwell’s or Huxley’s—the one obliterating reality by destroying language, the other by making historical reference a transgression?

Language and history: As argued several times in this space, these are the weapons we are not supposed to have.

Pourquoi Steve Jobs et Cie ont gardé leurs enfants éloignés des iPads

▻http://www.express.be/business/fr/technology/pourquoi-steve-jobs-et-cie-ont-garde-leurs-enfants-eloigns-des-ipads/207897.htm

http://www.express.be/pictures/lowres/technology/child_with_iPad.png

Les dirigeants de la Silicon Valley transforment le monde en un environnement totalement technologique, mais se montrent comme parents particulièrement réticents à l’égard de ces applications innovantes, écrit Nick Bilton, journaliste spécialiste de la technologie auprès du journal américain The New York Times. Bilton a en effet constaté que l’élite de la Silicon Valley contrôle de manière stricte l’utilisation de la technologie par leurs enfants.

▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvMNf0Po1wY

▻http://www.informaction.info/image-science-technologie-etude-de-linserm-sur-limpact-de-la-televisi

#enfants #écrans #ipads

Rumsey Taylor, Editorial Designer, The New York Times.
▻http://rumz.org

A Russian Smartphone Has to Overcome Rivals and Jokes About Its Origin - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/world/europe/a-russian-smartphone-has-to-overcome-rivals-and-jokes-about-origin.html
Vladislav Martynov, the chief executive of Yota Devices, with the latest version of its phone.
Credit James Hill for The New York Times

http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/05/17/world/RUSSIA2/RUSSIA2-articleLarge.jpg

The #YotaPhone prototype introduced in 2012 wowed international tech conferences with its novel two-screen design, with one face acting like a standard smartphone and the other like an e-reader.

The second screen supports various functions without draining the battery, such as keeping a boarding pass handy or tracking every ripple in the dollar-ruble exchange rate — a local fixation.

In late April, Mr. Martynov presided over a packed news conference to introduce a white version of the YotaPhone 2, hoping through that simple stroke to create the kind of cachet — and sales — that has so far proved elusive, even in Russia.
[…]
Young technology buffs in Moscow gave the latest YotaPhone mixed reviews. They called the white version expensive at about $800, not much less than an iPhone 6, and not cutting-edge given its older Android operating system. They were skeptical that the dual screen was more than a gimmick.

Mr. Martynov defended the cost and the technology, emphasizing the effort that went into creating the second screen, extending the battery life and making the whole thing easy to use.

Israel’s secret weapon in the war against Hezbollah: The New York Times -
Israel is turning to the media and diplomacy to head off an almost inevitable new round of confrontation with Hezbollah. Its message: Israel won’t be able to avoid attacks on Lebanon’s civilians so long as the Shi’ite militias use them as human shields.
By Amos Harel | May 15, 2015 | | Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.656516

In a prominent article on Wednesday, The New York Times reported detailed Israeli allegations about Hezbollah’s military deployment in Shi’ite villages in southern Lebanon. The paper cited a briefing by Israeli military officials as its source, added an evasive response from “a Hezbollah sympathizer in Lebanon,” and noted that the Israeli claims “could not be independently verified.”

The Times cited data, maps and aerial photographs provided by the Israel Defense Forces in regard to two neighboring villages, Muhaybib and Shaqra, in the central sector of southern Lebanon. The former, according to Israeli military intelligence, houses “nine arms depots, five rocket-launching sites, four infantry positions, signs of three underground tunnels, three antitank positions and, in the very center of the village, a Hezbollah command post” – all in a village of no more than 90 homes. In the latter village, with a population of 4,000, the IDF claims to have identified no fewer than 400 Hezbollah-related military sites.

Throughout southern Lebanon, Israel has identified thousands of Hezbollah facilities that could be targeted by Israel, according to the report by Isabel Kershner.

Israel, Kershner writes, is preparing for what it views as “an almost inevitable next battle with Hezbollah.” According to the IDF, Hezbollah has significantly built up its firepower and destructive capability, and has put in place extensive operational infrastructure in the Shi’ite villages of southern Lebanon – a move which, Israel says, “amounts to using the civilians as a human shield.”

Although Kershner’s Israeli interlocutors don’t claim to know when or under what specific circumstances war will erupt, they pull no punches about its likely consequences. In such a war, the Times report says, the IDF will not hesitate to attack targets in a civilian setting, with the result that many Lebanese noncombatants will be killed. That will not be Israel’s fault, an unnamed “senior Israeli military official” says, because “the civilians are living in a military compound.” Israel “will hit Hezbollah hard,” and make “every effort to limit civilian casualties,” the military official said. However, Israel does “not intend to stand by helplessly in the face of rocket attacks.”

The Times reports that Hezbollah, as part of the lessons it drew in the Second Lebanon War, in 2006, moved its “nature reserves” – its military outposts in the south – from open farmland into the heart of the Shi’ite villages that lie close to the border with Israel. That in itself is old news; Hezbollah began redeploying along these lines immediately after the 2006 war (as reported in Haaretz in July 2007.

In July 2010, Israel presented similar data to the local and foreign media, which revealed in great detail Hezbollah’s military infrastructure in southern Lebanon. The village that was singled out then was Al-Hiyam.

On all these occasions, Israel made it clear that in the event of a war it would have to operate in the villages, and that civilians would inevitably be harmed. In the current incarnation of warnings, as conveyed in this week’s Times report, the potential consequences of the situation are noted by two former senior officials of the defense establishment.

Maj. Gen. (res.) Amos Yadlin, a former director of Military Intelligence, is quoted as saying that the residents of villages in southern Lebanon do not have full immunity if they live close to military targets. Maj. Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror, formerly head of the National Security Council, asks why the international community is doing nothing to prevent Hezbollah’s arms buildup. A few years ago, at the instruction of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Amidror, as head of the NSC, presented similar aerial photographs and maps from Lebanon to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Why again now?

The question is: Why again now? The IDF says that the briefing by the senior officer, together with the information provided to the Times, is intended to reinforce the ongoing Israeli messages to Hezbollah and to the international community. The essence of those messages is that Hezbollah is continuing to violate UN Security Council Resolution 1701 by smuggling increasing quantities of arms into Lebanese territory and by deploying its forces south of the Litani River; that Hezbollah’s military infrastructure is an open book to Israeli intelligence and that the IDF can inflict serious damage on it when needed; and that, because Hezbollah chooses to shelter among a civilian population, strikes at its military targets will entail the non-deliberate killing of innocent persons.

An additional explanation for why these points were emphasized in the briefing to the Times lies in the spirit being dictated to the IDF by the new chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot. In his view, the army’s mission, under his leadership, is “to distance war.” This involves preparing the IDF as thoroughly as possible for the next possible confrontation – alongside an active effort, in the sphere of public diplomacy and to a degree even in the state-policy realm, to prevent war. This is the reason for the frequent emphasis on training as the IDF’s first priority, following a lengthy period of compromises and budget cuts in that sphere. Recent weeks have seen a fairly extensive series of training exercises by the ground forces, a trend that is slated to continue in the months ahead.

Proper management of the daily risks to Israel, most of which stem from possible indirect consequences of the region’s chronic instability, could reduce the danger of an all-out war. At the same time, a higher level of fitness and readiness displayed by the IDF could help deter Hezbollah – at present, the most dangerous and best-trained enemy Israel faces – from setting in motion a deterioration of the situation that would lead to war.

Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon also hinted at this, in a talk he gave at a meeting of officials from regional councils on Tuesday. Ya’alon warned that “Israel could unite all the forces in the region against it, if it acts incorrectly.” Israel’s approach, he said, consists of “surgical behavior based on red lines, and those who cross them know we will act.” Those lines include “violation of sovereignty on the Golan Heights, the transfer of certain weapons.”

Israel is apparently deeply concerned by Hezbollah’s effort to improve the accuracy of its rockets. The organization has in its possession vast numbers of missiles and rockets – 130,000, according to the latest estimates – but upgrading its capability is dependent on improving the weapons’ accuracy, which would enable Hezbollah to strike effectively at specific targets, including air force-base runways and power stations.

“There are some things for which we take responsibility and others for which we don’t, but we do not intervene in internal conflicts unless our red lines are crossed,” Ya’alon reiterated. In other words: Israel is upset at the smuggling of weapons by the Assad regime in Syria to Hezbollah, but understands that launching a lengthy, systematic series of attacks is liable to affect the delicate balance in the north, generate a confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah, and, as a consequence, foment a change in the civil war in Syria. Israel does not wish to see any such change, preferring a continuation of the status quo.

Ratcheting up the risk

In recent weeks, the Arab media have been flooded with reports and conjectures about the imminent fall of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Israeli intelligence is voicing more cautious appraisals, to the effect that the war in Syria has not yet been decided. If the regime does fall, it’s likely that Hezbollah will greatly step up its efforts to smuggle out from Syria the advanced weapons systems that remain in its hands there. That scenario would ratchet up immensely the risk of a confrontation with Israel, as the latter is likely to launch a broad effort to disrupt the smuggling efforts, while Syrian rebel organizations intensify their pressure on Hezbollah and the Assad camp.

In any event, even without the war in Syria being decided, it’s clear that a confrontation of tremendous intensity is under way, in which all the parties involved are making immense efforts, and that the clash of the blocs in the Arab world over Syria, Lebanon and also in Yemen is overshadowing other issues, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that appeared so central in the past.

Israel is not alone in having to walk a thin line in the north. Hezbollah, too, is obliged to preserve a deterrent image: outwardly, in order to ensure that Israel does not act as it pleases in its backyard (which is apparently how Hezbollah perceived several assassinations and attacks on convoys that it attributed to Israel); and inwardly, to rebuff criticism within Lebanon that it is an emissary of Iran and is involving Lebanon needlessly in the war in Syria.

An occasional terrorist attack of limited scope, on the Golan Heights or in the Har Dov area near the Lebanese border, could serve its purposes. Nor is it certain that, from Hezbollah’s point of view, accounts have been settled regarding the events on the Golan Heights in January, when six Hezbollah personnel and an Iranian general were killed in an attack on a convoy that was attributed to Israel. Ten days later, an officer and a soldier from the IDF’s Givati infantry brigade were killed in the Har Dov area when their vehicle was struck by antitank missiles during a Hezbollah ambush.

Nevertheless, Israel is now a secondary front for Hezbollah. The organization’s main force is deployed in Syria, particularly in the fighting in the Kalamun Hills, on the border with Lebanon. Dozens of combatants from both sides are being killed there every day in battles being fought by the Syrian army and Hezbollah against the organizations of Sunni rebels. Even though Hezbollah tried to conceal its losses in Syria (the IDF estimates that more than 600 of its personnel have been killed), the casualty rate is now probably too high to keep secret.

Last week, a mass funeral was held in Beirut for Hezbollah fighters who have been killed in the Kalamun battles, among them, according to reports, a colonel. The Arab media are describing the campaign there as “battles of retreat and advance”: one step forward, two steps back. The two sides are deployed on adjacent ridges, and at this stage, neither is apparently able to gain a significant advantage.

The fighting at Kalamun, an important area because it is a corridor for the transfer of reinforcements and arms between the Assad regime and Hezbollah, is only a small part of the overall picture in Syria. Most of the attention lately has been devoted to the decline in Assad’s status and to speculation that he will ultimately have to flee Damascus under rebel pressure, and focus on defending the Alawite region in the north of the country. Concurrently, however, another important process is taking place. Iran is now the salient master of the Assad camp and is dictating the military strategy of the gradually collapsing regime.

Together with thousands of fighters from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and from Hezbollah, tens of thousands of members of Shi’ite militias are pouring into Syria to take part in the religious war against the Sunnis. Those combatants are more likely to heed the Iranian Guards than the Assad regime, which is rapidly losing its reserves of potential soldiers from among the Syrian population.

There’s an extra benefit here for Iran: Its involvement in the fighting affords it a presence in the northern Golan Heights, creating a type of border with Israel by means of which it can take action against Israeli targets.

In the civil war in Syria, Hezbollah is the spearhead of the Shi’ite armies, and Iran’s behavior is disturbing to all the Sunni Arab states. So much so that even U.S. President Barack Obama, when opening the conference of leaders of Persian Gulf states that he convened this week at Camp David, lashed out at Iran for the negative role it is playing in the wars in the Middle East.

#propagande #hasbara

streamtools
▻http://blog.nytlabs.com/streamtools

Streamtools is a new, open source project by The New York Times R&D Lab which provides a general purpose, graphical tool for dealing with #streams of #data. It provides a vocabulary of operations that can be connected together to create live data #processing systems without the need for programming or complicated infrastructure. These systems are assembled using a visual interface that affords both immediate understanding and live manipulation of the system.

▻https://camo.githubusercontent.com/7d5be9642de37daa92efd6d87235c5b9a599f610/68747470733a2f2f662e636c6f75642e6769746875622e636f6d2f617373

#Liban-Sud : #Israël menace de tuer de « très nombreux Libanais », selon le #New_York_Times ▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/world/middleeast/israel-says-hezbollah-positions-put-lebanese-at-risk.html?_r=1
▻http://www.lorientlejour.com/article/924765/liban-sud-israel-menace-de-tuer-de-tres-nombreux-libanais-selon-le-ne

#doctrine_dahiya

Seymour M. Hersh : The Killing of Osama bin Laden · LRB 21 May 2015
▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden

It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.

The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a ‘Pakistani official’ that Pasha had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable that they did [know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo – if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States.’

This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.

‘When your version comes out – if you do it – people in Pakistan will be tremendously grateful,’ Durrani told me. ‘For a long time people have stopped trusting what comes out about bin Laden from the official mouths. There will be some negative political comment and some anger, but people like to be told the truth, and what you’ve told me is essentially what I have heard from former colleagues who have been on a fact-finding mission since this episode.’ As a former ISI head, he said, he had been told shortly after the raid by ‘people in the “strategic community” who would know’ that there had been an informant who had alerted the US to bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad, and that after his killing the US’s betrayed promises left Kayani and Pasha exposed.

(pas encore lu)

The NYT’s $150 million-a-year paywall (août 2013)
▻http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_nyts_150_million-a-year_pa.php

But for now, the pile of paywall money is still growing and for the first time, the Times Company has broken out how big it is: More than $150 million a year, including the Boston Globe, which after finally tweaking its faulty paywall strategy is reaping the benefits. Digital subs there hit 39,000, up 22 percent from the first quarter and 70 percent from a year ago (but overall revenue is still collapsing, down 7 percent).

All in all, the Times Company is taking in roughly $202 a year in revenue per subscriber.

To put that $150 million in new revenue in perspective, consider that the Times Company as a whole will take in roughly $210 million in digital ads this year. And that $150 million doesn’t capture the paywall’s positive impact on print circulation revenue. Altogether, the company has roughly $360 million in digital revenue.

“A malignant ‘nativism’ threatens post-apartheid democracy (in #South_Africa)”
▻http://africasacountry.com/a-malignant-nativism-threatens-post-apartheid-democracy-in-south-af

Africa is a Country editorial committee member Dan Magaziner and I published an oped on The New York Times about the current (briefly subsided) violence by South Africans against other black.....

#ACADEMY_PAGE #xenophobia

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: This would never be in the New York Times or the Washington Post
▻http://angryarab.blogspot.fr/2015/04/this-would-never-be-in-new-york-times.html

Les deux Nasrallah: trop bien !

This would never be in the New York Times or the Washington Post
The only people who are protecting us are the resistance of Hezbollah,” Nasrallah said. “The only one standing with the army is Hezbollah. Let’s not hide it anymore.” “They accept us as we are,” Nasrallah said. “They do not impose on us anything. When there’s an occasion, they come to our children’s birthdays. The people here accept that Hezbollah comes and helps.” One of the minor ironies in this profoundly divided country is that the chief of the Christians of Ras Baalbek and the head of Hezbollah share the same last name. The Christian Nasrallah, a big and bearded man, even looks strikingly like the Muslim one, Hassan Nasrallah.”

They Have ‘Propaganda,’ US Has ‘Public Diplomacy’–and a #Servile Private Sector
▻http://fair.org/home/they-have-propaganda-us-has-public-diplomacy-and-a-servile-private-sector

The #New_York_Times headline (4/15/15) paints a dire picture:

“Turmoil at Voice of America Is Seen as Hurting US Ability to Counter Propaganda”

But wait a second–isn’t Voice of America itself a propaganda outlet? Not in the New York Times stylebook, apparently. The piece, by Ron Nixon, describes VOA as “the government agency that is charged with presenting America’s viewpoint to the world.” Later on, the Times refers to what it calls “America’s public diplomacy.”

The US’s enemies, on the other hand, have “sophisticated propaganda machines that have expanded the influence of countries like China and Russia and terrorist groups like the Islamic State.” The difference between “propaganda machines” and “public diplomacy” is never explained in the article, but the former appears to be what “they” do while the latter is what “we” do.

#Etats-Unis #propagande #chiens_de_garde

Richard Engel has to account for those statements in this propaganda video for the Free Syrian Army
▻http://angryarab.blogspot.fr/2015/04/richard-engel-has-to-account-for-those.html

But there is more to his account: he claims that he has witnessed several killings by the Shabbihah: the first time when they were kidnapped and the second time when they were rescued. He yesterday told the New York Times that he now retracts his earlier statement about seeing bodies, which here he said that he saw. But he also said that he saw killing and an attempt at burning a “rebel” with gasoline but that they ran out of gasoline. He has to explain all that. I also noticed that he said in this detailed account that he knew right away that they were “shabbihah” even before they identified themselves and said that they will “kill your women and children” in order to keep Bashshar in power.

RETOUR SUR UN MENSONGE MEURTRIER

Review: Judith Miller’s ‘The Story: A Reporter’s Journey’
APRIL 7, 2015►http://www.nytimes.com

In late 2002 and through 2003, Judith Miller, an investigative reporter at The New York Times, wrote a series of articles about the presumed presence of chemical and biological weapons and possible nuclear matériel in Iraq. Critics thought the articles too bellicose and in lock step with the George W. Bush administration’s march to war. They all included careful qualifiers, but their overwhelming message was that Saddam Hussein posed a threat.

Ms. Miller’s defense of her work then was straightforward: She reported what her sources told her. She has now written a book-length elaboration of that defense, “The Story: A Reporter’s Journey.” The defense is no better now than it was then.

“The Story,” as anodyne a title as one could imagine, briefly sketches Ms. Miller’s early life before devoting itself to a more detailed description of her career. She came from a troubled home in Nevada and grew into an intrepid young woman who, she writes, liked adventure, sex and martinis.

With very little experience, she joined the Washington bureau of The Times in 1977 as a reporter, a prized assignment, largely because the newspaper was facing a lawsuit accusing it of sex discrimination, she writes. The chapter describing this is titled “The New York Times, the Token.” She was very raw and her early work showed it. An editor told her she was sloppy and unprofessional. She learned professionalism fast enough that in 1983 she was posted to Cairo, one of the first women to head an international bureau for The Times.

Correspondents in Cairo are typically charged with covering the whole of the Arab world, from West Africa to Iraq. Sometimes, non-Arab Iran is thrown in just for fun. This is an impossible if enthralling job and, in Ms. Miller’s telling, she fell hard for it. It was “thrilling” and “exhilarating,” she writes.

Ms. Miller recounts longstanding friendships with, among others, King Hussein of Jordan, who failed in an attempt to teach her water-skiing.

She was one of the earliest mainstream journalists to report on growing radicalization within Islam. She was also one of the earliest to report on the difficulties that could be imagined when the new radicals crossed paths with another emerging problem — the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. This became a subject she would return to throughout her career.

Ms. Miller devotes several chapters, by far the most given to any subject, to her coverage of Iraq. She had missed the first Persian Gulf war, she writes, stranded in Saudi Arabia. She fought hard to be included in coverage of the next one. The string of exclusive articles she produced before the Iraq war had the effect of buttressing the Bush administration’s case for invasion.

She had built her career on access. She describes finding, cultivating and tending to powerfully situated sources. She writes that she did not, as some critics of her prewar reporting supposed, sit in her office and wait for the phone to ring. She pounded the pavement. And an ambitious reporter with the power, prestige and resources of a large news organization behind her can cover a lot of road.

Opponents of the Iraq invasion and media critics of her reporting accused her of being a secret neoconservative thirsting for war. Whatever her actual politics, though, the agenda that comes through most strongly here is a desire to land on the front page. She rarely mentions an article she wrote without noting that it appeared on the front page or complaining that it did not.

During the war, she writes, she was the sole reporter embedded with the military team charged with finding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. It failed, meaning so had she. Ms. Miller concedes that the Bush administration’s case for war was built largely on Iraq’s presumably ambitious weapons program. In describing what went wrong with one particular claim, she offers a defense that is repeated throughout the book: “The earlier stories had been wrong because the initial intelligence assessments we reported were themselves mistaken — not lies or exaggerations.”

The New York Times fired her for being wrong. So, why are you giving gravitas to her “mea non culpa” book? She was wrong then.
Ms. Miller’s main defense is that the experts she relied upon — intelligence officials, weapons experts, members of the Bush administration and others — were wrong about Mr. Hussein’s weapons. She acknowledges being wrong but not making any mistakes. She quotes herself telling another reporter: “If your sources were wrong, you are wrong.” This is where she gets stuck.

Journalists, especially those who have a talent for investigative work, are taught early to write big, to push the story as far as possible. Be careful; nail the facts; be fair, but push hard. Nobody pushed harder than Ms. Miller. In this case, she wound up implicitly pushing for war.

A deeper critique of her own reporting, and through that example a critique of the entire enterprise of investigative reporting, would examine its inherently prosecutorial nature. Investigators — journalistic or otherwise — are constantly trying to build a case, to make things fit even when they don’t obviously do so. In the process, the rough edges of the world can be whittled away, nuance can become muddled in the reporter’s head, in the writing, or in the editing.

The final section of “The Story” deals with Ms. Miller’s role in the Valerie Plame affair, her refusal to identify a source (for an article she never wrote), her jailing because of that refusal, and finally her forced resignation from The Times in 2005. As she describes it, she wasn’t simply abandoned but thrown overboard. This seems partly because of politics and institutional embarrassment, but also partly because of her personality. Almost every investigative reporter is in some way difficult to deal with. Ms. Miller was no exception. She offended colleagues on the way up, she says, and they delighted in her failure when she fell down.

To Ms. Miller’s credit, this is not a score-settling book, although Bill Keller, the executive editor who she says forced her out of The Times, gets walked around the block naked a couple of times and competing reporters receive just-for-old-times’-sake elbows to their rib cages.

That doesn’t mean she has made peace with the end of her career at The Times. It was a devastating exile for a proud and influential reporter. Cast out of the journalistic temple, she says she felt “stateless,” and from the evidence here she remains a bit lost. This sad and flawed book won’t help her be found.

THE STORY
A Reporter’s Journey
By Judith Miller
381 pages. Simon & Schuster. $27.

Terry McDermott, a former national correspondent for The Los Angeles Times, is the author, with Josh Meyer, of “The Hunt for KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.”❞

Secret Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (#TPP) - Investment Chapter
▻https://wikileaks.org/tpp-investment

The TPP Investment Chapter, published today, is dated 20 January 2015. The document is classified and supposed to be kept secret for four years after the entry into force of the TPP agreement or, if no agreement is reached, for four years from the close of the negotiations.

Le New York Times en a parlé
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/business/trans-pacific-partnership-seen-as-door-for-foreign-suits-against-us.html

The chapter in the draft of the trade deal, dated Jan. 20, 2015, and obtained by The New York Times in collaboration with the group WikiLeaks, is certain to kindle opposition from both the political left and the right. The sensitivity of the issue is reflected in the fact that the cover mandates that the chapter not be declassified until four years after the Trans-Pacific Partnership comes into force or trade negotiations end, should the agreement fail.

At least 54 Colombian girls sexually abused by immune US military: Report
Mar 23, 2015 posted by Adriaan Alsema
▻http://colombiareports.co/more-than-54-colombian-girls-sexually-abuses-by-us-military-report

Colombian Report on US Military’s Child Rapes Not Newsworthy to US News Outlets
▻http://fair.org/blog/2015/03/26/colombian-report-on-us-militarys-child-rapes-not-newsworthy-to-us-news-outlets

Yet here we are, over 72 hours since the Colombian and foreign press first reported on the allegations, and there’s a virtual media blackout in America over the case. Nothing on CNN, nothing on MSNBC, nothing in the New York Times or Miami Herald. Nothing in Huffington Post. Nothing in Fusion or Vice. Why?

As UK authorities and NATO officials stress the importance of clamping down on “false Russian” narratives in the media, perhaps our own media could stop providing a shining example as to why such anti-Western narratives are so often the only outlet for certain ugly truths.

#Nicholas_Kristof Discovers #Angola
▻http://africasacountry.com/nicholas-kristof-discovers-angola

The New York Times’s white savior extraordinaire is at again! The man we love to hate to write about has discovered Angola, and Isabel dos Santos (never mind that much had.....

#AFRICA_IS_A_COUNTRY #JOURNALISM #White-Savior

New York Times published piece about Netanyahu’s racism, then rewrote all of it
▻http://mondoweiss.net/2015/03/published-netanyahus-rewrote

On March 17, the day of the 2015 Israel election, Prime Minister Netanyahu warned Jewish Israelis that Arabs were voting “in droves” (alleging, in a conspiratorial manner reminiscent of white supremacists in the US Jim Crow South, that “Left-wing organizations are busing them out”). Second-class Palestinian citizens voting is supposed to be a very bad thing in Israeli democracy.

The New York Times published an article about the incident—and more generally about Netanyahu’s bigoted, jingoistic, far-right tactics to attract more votes—titled “Netanyahu Expresses Alarm That Arab Voter Turnout Could Help Unseat Him.” The piece was written by Isabel Kershner and Rick Gladstone. At least, for the moment, that was the case.

Several hours later, the NYT published a rewrite of the article—a rewrite not just of parts of it, but of all of it. According the the website NewsDiffs which tracks edits to “highly-placed articles on online news sites,” between 5:13 pm and 9:08 pm on March 17 100% of the article was re-written to mostly erase the focus on Netanyahu’s racism.

#flagrant_délit

Chart of the Day: More large companies are run by men named “John” than by women
▻http://feministing.com/2015/03/03/chart-of-the-day-more-large-companies-are-run-by-men-named-john-than-by

http://assets.feministing.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-03-at-9.52.17-AM.png

Inspired by a recent report that calculated that there are more men named John, Robert, William or James than there are women on the boards of large companies, an economist at the New York Times has applied this index to a variety of institutional contexts.

#sexisme

The Times Errs on Iran Weaponization « LobeLog
▻http://www.lobelog.com/the-times-errs-on-iran-weaponization

A recent piece in The #New_York_Times purports to explain why #Iran has not been clear about its nuclear bomb aspirations. The article tries to link this alleged silence to the successful agreements in the P5+1 negotiations that have begun again in Switzerland. However, the article is based on misconceptions, innuendo, and technical ignorance.

#manipulations

What Was Missing From Coverage of Netanyahu’s Speech
▻http://fair.org/blog/2015/03/05/what-was-missing-from-coverage-of-netanyahus-speech

Reading the lead stories on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress about Iran in five prominent US papers–the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today (all 3/3/15)–what was most striking was what was left out of these articles.

None of them mentioned, for example, that Israel possesses nuclear weapons. Surely this is relevant when a foreign leader says that it needs the United States’ help to stop a rival state from obtaining nuclear weapons: The omission of the obvious phrase “of its own” changes the story entirely.

Another thing largely left out of the story is the fact that Iran has consistently maintained that it has no interest in building a nuclear weapon. There was one direct statement of this in the five stories–the New York Times’ reference to “Iran’s nuclear program, which [Iranian] officials have insisted is only for civilian uses.” The Washington Post alluded to the fact that Iran denies that it has a nuclear weapons program, referring to “a program the West has long suspected is aimed at building weapons,” Iran’s “stated nuclear energy goals” and “the suspect Iranian program.” Elsewhere the military nature of Iran’s nuclear research was taken for granted, as when the LA Times said that the issue under discussion was “how to deal with the threat of Iran’s nuclear program.”

Entirely absent from these articles was the fact that not only does Iran deny wanting to make a nuclear bomb, the intelligence agencies of the United States (New York Times, 2/24/12) and Israel (Guardian, 2/23/15) also doubt that Iran has an active nuclear weapons program. Surely this is relevant to a report on the Israeli prime minister engaging in a public debate with the US president on how best to stop this quite possibly nonexistent program.

#MSM #manipulations

Israël se précipite vers la prochaine guerre à Gaza
par Gideon Levy - traduction ►http://www.sayed7asan.blogspot.fr
▻http://www.palestine-solidarite.org/analyses.gideon_levy.260215.htm

(...)
La situation de Gaza est désastreuse, épouvantable. Aucune mention n’en est faite dans le discours israélien, et certainement pas dans la campagne électorale la plus minable, la plus creuse qui se soit jamais tenue ici. Il est difficile de le croire, mais les Israéliens ont inventé une réalité parallèle, coupée du monde réel, une réalité cynique, insensible, enfouie dans le déni, alors que tous ces malheurs, la plus grande partie étant de leur propre fait, se déroulent à une courte distance de leurs maisons. Les nourrissons gèlent à mort sous les décombres de leurs maisons, les jeunes risquent leur vie et franchissent la clôture frontalière juste pour obtenir une portion de nourriture dans une cellule israélienne. Quelqu’un a-t-il entendu parler de cela ? Est-ce que quiconque s’en préoccupe ? Quelqu’un comprend-il que cela conduit à la prochaine guerre ?

Salma n’a vécu que 40 jours, comme l’éternité d’un papillon. C’était un bébé de Beit Hanoun, au nord-est de la bande de Gaza, qui est décédé le mois dernier d’hypothermie, après que son corps frêle ait gelé sous le vent et la pluie qui ont pénétré dans la hutte de contreplaqué et de plastique où elle vivait avec sa famille, depuis que leur maison a été bombardée.

« Elle a été gelée comme de la crème glacée », a déclaré sa mère au sujet de la dernière nuit de la vie de son nourrisson. Le porte-parole de l’UNRWA, Chris Gunness, a raconté l’histoire de Salma la semaine dernière dans le journal britannique The Guardian. Mirwat, sa mère, lui a dit que quand elle est née, elle pesait 3,1 kg. Sa sœur Ma’ez, âgée de trois ans, est hospitalisée pour des gelures.

Ibrahim Awarda, 15 ans, qui a perdu son père dans un bombardement israélien en 2002, fut plus chanceux. Il a décidé de traverser la barrière entre Gaza et Israël. « Je savais que je serais arrêté », a-t-il déclaré au journaliste du New York Times à Gaza la semaine dernière. « Je me suis dit, peut-être que je vais trouver une vie meilleure. Ils m’ont donné de la nourriture décente et m’ont renvoyé à Gaza. »

Ibrahim a été détenu pendant environ un mois dans deux prisons en Israël avant d’être rejeté vers la destruction, la misère, la faim et la mort. Trois cents habitants de Gaza se sont noyés dans la mer en Septembre dernier, dans une tentative désespérée de quitter la prison de Gaza. Quatre-vingt-quatre habitants de Gaza ont été arrêtés par les Forces de défense israéliennes dans les six derniers mois après avoir tenté d’entrer en Israël, la plupart d’entre eux seulement pour fuir l’enfer dans lequel ils vivaient. Neuf autres ont été arrêtés ce mois-ci.

Atiya al-Navhin, 15 ans, a également tenté d’entrer en Israël en Novembre, juste pour échapper à son sort. Des soldats de Tsahal ont ouvert le feu sur lui, il a été traité dans deux hôpitaux israéliens et est retourné à Gaza en Janvier. Maintenant, il est couché dans son domicile, paralysé et incapable de parler.

Quelques 150 000 personnes sans-abris vivent dans la bande de Gaza et environ 10 000 réfugiés sont dans les abris de l’UNRWA. Le budget de l’organisation a été dépensé après que le monde ait totalement ignoré son engagement à contribuer à hauteur de 5,4 milliards de dollars à la reconstruction de Gaza. L’engagement à négocier la levée du blocus sur Gaza – la seule façon d’éviter la prochaine guerre et celle d’après – a également été rompu. Personne n’en parle. Ce n’est pas intéressant. Il y a eu une guerre, des Israéliens et des Palestiniens y ont été tués pour rien, passons donc à la prochaine guerre.

Israël fera de nouveau semblant d’être surpris et offensé – les cruels Arabes l’attaquent à nouveau avec des roquettes, sans raison.

““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““

Israel is galloping to the next war in Gaza - Opinion - Israel News | Haaretz
►http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.644219

http://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.636402!/image/2696604427.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_474/2696604427.jpg

Israel is heading to the next violent eruption with the Palestinians as though it is some sort of natural disaster that can’t be avoided.
By Gideon Levy | Feb. 26, 2015

The next war will break out in the summer. Israel will give it another childish name and it will take place in Gaza. There’s already a plan to evacuate the communities along the Gaza Strip border.

Israel knows this war will break out, it also knows why – and it’s galloping toward it blindfolded, as though it were a cyclic ritual, a periodical ceremony or a natural disaster that cannot be avoided. Here and there one even perceives enthusiasm.

It doesn’t matter who the prime minister is and who the defense minister is – there’s no difference between the candidates as far as Gaza is concerned. Isaac Herzog and Amos Yadlin are saying nothing of course, and Tzipi Livni is boasting that thanks to her no port was opened in Gaza. The rest of the Israelis aren’t interested in Gaza’s fate either and soon it will be forced to remind them again of its disaster in the only way left to it, the rockets.

Gaza’s disaster is dreadful. No mention of it is made in the Israeli discourse and certainly not in the most dumbed down, hollow election campaign there’s ever been here. It’s hard to believe, but Israelis have invented a parallel reality, cut off from the real one, a callous, unfeeling, denying reality, while all this adversity, most of it of their own making, is taking place a short distance from their homes. Babies are freezing to death under the debris of their homes, youths risk their lives and cross the border fence just to get a food portion in an Israeli lock up. Has anyone heard of this? Does anyone care? Does anyone understand that this is leading to the next war?

Salma lived only 40 days, like the eternity of a butterfly. She was a baby from Beit Hanoun on the northeast of the Gaza Strip, who died last month of hypothermia, after her tiny body froze in the wind and rain that penetrated into the plywood-and-plastic hut she has been living in with her family, since their house was bombed.

“She was frozen like ice cream,” her mother said of the last night of her infant’s life. UNWRA Spokesman Chris Gunness wrote about Salma last in week in the British newspaper the Guardian. Mirwat, her mother, told him that when she was born she weighed 3.1 kilograms. Her three–year– old sister, Ma’ez, is hospitalized due to frostbite.

Ibrahim Awarda, 15, who lost his father in an Israeli bombardment in 2002, was more fortunate. He decided to cross the fence between Gaza and Israel. “I knew I’d be arrested,” he told the New York Times reporter in Gaza last week. “I told myself, maybe I’ll find a better life. They gave me good food and then threw me back.”

Ibrahim was held for about a month in two prisons in Israel before being tossed back to the destruction, squalor, hunger and death. Three hundred Gazans drowned in the sea last September, in a desperate attempt to leave the prison Strip. Eighty-four Gazans were arrested by the Israel Defense Forces in the last six months after trying to enter Israel, most of them just to flee from the hell they live in. Nine more were arrested this month.

Atiya al-Navhin, 15, also tried to enter Israel in November, just to escape his fate. He was shot by IDF soldiers, treated in two Israeli hospitals and returned to Gaza in January. Now he’s lying paralyzed and unable to speak in his home.

Some 150,000 homeless people live in Gaza and about 10,000 refugees in UNRWA shelters. The organization’s budget was spent after the world totally ignored its commitment to contribute $5.4 billion to rebuild Gaza. The commitment to negotiate lifting the blockade on Gaza – the only way to avoid the next war and the one after it – has also been broken. Nobody talks about it. It’s not interesting. There was a war, Israelis and Palestinians were killed in it for nothing, let’s move on to the next war.

Israel will again pretend to be surprised and offended – the cruel Arabs are attacking it with rockets again, for no reason.

Reading The Greek Deal Correctly
►http://www.socialeurope.eu/2015/02/greek-deal

❝Finally, in the run-up to these talks did the Greek side fail to realize that they had no leverage, giving – as Cassidy writes – all the advantages to Schäuble once “he realized that Varoufakis couldn’t play the Grexit card”? In truth the Greeks never had any intention of playing any cards, nor of bluffing, as Varoufakis wrote in The New York Times and as I had written two days after the election, in Social Europe:

“What leverage does Greece have? Obviously, not much; the heavy weapons are on the other side. But there is something. Prime Minister Tsipras and his team can present the case of reason without threats of any kind. Then the right and moral gesture on the other side would be to … grant fiscal space and to guarantee Greek financial stability while talks are underway. If that happens, then proper negotiations can proceed.”

That appears to be what happened. And it happened for the reason given in my essay: in the end, Chancellor Merkel preferred not to be the leader responsible for the fragmentation of Europe.

Alexis Tsipras stated it correctly. Greece won a battle – perhaps a skirmish – and the war continues. But the political sea-change that SYRIZA’s victory has sparked goes on. From a psychological standpoint, Greece has already changed; there is a spirit and dignity in Athens that was not there six months ago. Soon enough, new fronts will open in Spain, then perhaps Ireland, and later Portugal, all of which have elections coming. It is not likely that the government in Greece will collapse, or yield, in the talks ahead, and over time the scope of maneuver gained in this first skirmish will become more clear. In a year the political landscape of Europe may be quite different from what it appears to be today.

Digital Archive No. 13 – Social History of the #Gambia
▻http://africasacountry.com/digital-archive-social-history-of-gambia

Earlier this week, the Arts Beat of the New York Times ran a story announcing the British Library’s expansion of the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP). This announcement coincides with the ten.....

#AFRICA_IS_A_COUNTRY #THE_DIGITAL_ARCHIVE #Endangered_Archives_Programme #TECH/WEB
▻http://www2.matrix.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Gambia_broadcast.mp4