Günter Tembrock, a young scientist at the Zoological Institute only wanted to try out a new tape-recorder when he took his microphone to a Berlin garden back in 1951. There he captured the voice of a wild tawny owl as it ‘chatted’ with two caged birds inside his office. That was the start of the Animal Sound Archive, a scientific documentation of animal voices as an expression of their behaviour. Today, the Animal Sound Archive at Humboldt University in Berlin is, with 110,000 samples, one of the oldest and largest collections of animal sounds in the world. It contains 1,800 species of birds, the world’s largest collection of mammal-sounds, 150 species of arthropods, and various fish, amphibian and reptilian species. It even has the only recording ever made of a mole. The unique archive is housed in Berlin, but the recordings have become globe-trotters. Audio-installations in museums and zoological gardens around the world make use of them, and rare animal voices can be heard in the digital edition of Germany’s well-known Brockhaus encyclopaedia. What’s more, the voices of six endangered species can even be downloaded as mobile phone ring tones as part of an unusual environmental protection campaign called ‘Nature is Calling,’ which is sponsored by the German government, writes Deutsche Welle.
Find out what it sounds like
Listen to the more than 11.000 digital recordings of animals here: http://tsa.engelhardt-media.de/content_80_en.html
LibriVox is the largest of several emerging collectives that offer free or inexpensive audiobooks of works whose copyrights have expired, from Plato to ‘The Wind in the Willows.’ The results range from solo readings done by amateurs in makeshift home studios to high-quality recordings read by actors or professional voice talent. At its worst, a free audiobook can sound like a teenager reading aloud in high school English class. At its best, it can offer excellent sound quality and skilled narration infused with a passion for the text. In between is a world of competent readings, sometimes spiced with affected accents, mumbled words and distant car horns and reflecting all manner of literary interpretations. LibriVox celebrated its anniversary on August 10, around the same time it surpassed the 100-book mark. It also offers more than 200 recordings of short stories, plays, speeches, poems and documents like the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence. LibriVox’s founder, Hugh McGuire said ‘the principles of the project are to be totally non-commercial, totally ad-free, totally volunteer and totally public domain.’ Readers can volunteer at librivox.org. (The New York Times, International Herald Tribune,August 28, 2006)
US authorities have arrested a New York man for broadcasting Hizbollah television station al-Manar. Javed Iqbal, 42, was arrested on Wednesday because his Brooklyn-based company HDTV Ltd. was providing New York-area customers with the Hizbollah-operated channel, federal prosecutors said in a statement. It did not say how long Iqbal’s company had been providing satellite broadcasts of al-Manar, which the US Treasury Department in March had designated as Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity, making it a crime to conduct business with al-Manar. Iqbal has been charged with conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the statement said. Federal authorities searched HDTV’s Brooklyn office and Iqbal’s Staten Island home, where Iqbal was suspected of maintaining satellite dishes, the statement said. The US Treasury Department froze US assets of al-Manar in March, saying it supported fund-raising and recruitment activities of Hizbollah, a Shiite Muslim group backed by Syria and Iran that has been at war with Israel in southern Lebanon. (Reuters via Media Network Weblog, August 28, 2006)
Paul Salopek, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, was charged with espionage and two other criminal counts in a Sudanese court Saturday, three weeks after he was detained by pro-government forces in the war-torn province of Darfur.
Salopek, 44, who was on a freelance assignment for National Geographic magazine, was arrested with two Chadian citizens, his interpreter and driver. If convicted, they could be imprisoned for years. Salopek was on a scheduled leave of absence from the Tribune when he and the two Chadians, Suleiman Abakar Moussa, the interpreter, and Idriss Abdulraham Anu, the driver, were detained Aug. 6. All three were officially charged Saturday with espionage, passing information illegally and writing “false news.”
Source: Tim Jones. Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0608270353aug27,1,1785295.story?coll=chi-news-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true
A suicide car bomber attacked Iraq’s largest newspaper on Sunday, detonating his vehicle inside its fortified compound in downtown Baghdad and killing two people and wounding 20 others, the executive editor and government officials said. The bombing was part of a violent day across Iraq in which explosions and gun battles killed at least 52 people, including an American soldier.
The bombing of Al-Sabah, a national newspaper financed by the Shiite-led Iraqi government, also destroyed more than a dozen vehicles and caused the collapse of a quarter of the building where journalists and printing-press operators work, said the executive editor, Falah al-Mishaal. The attack occurred around 8:30 a.m., as guards carrying automatic assault rifles grew suspicious of the vehicle after it had been cleared to enter the newspaper’s parking lot, Mr. Mishaal said in an interview. Before the bomber could be killed, he blew up his vehicle, sending at least two parked cars through the building’s wall.
“Tomorrow we will return to work again,” Mr. Mishaal said.
Source: Paul von Zielbauer. The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/28/world/middleeast/28iraq.html
An Israeli air strike on a car in Gaza City during a security operation has injured a Reuters news agency cameraman and a local journalist. At least one rocket hit the car as the cameraman was filming, knocking him unconscious, while the second man received serious leg wounds.
The Reuters car was clearly marked all over as a media vehicle. The Israeli army said the car had not been identified as press and expressed regret that journalists had been hurt.
Israeli ground forces backed by helicopters were conducting an operation inside the Gaza Strip on Saturday evening, near the Karni crossing. “During the operation, there was an aerial attack on a suspicious vehicle that drove in a suspicious manner right by the forces and in between the Palestinian militant posts,” Israeli army spokeswoman Capt Noa Meir said. “This car was not identified by the army as a press vehicle. If journalists were hurt, we regret it.”
According to the Associated Press, the white sports utility vehicle was emblazoned with the Reuters logo and had “TV” and “Press” written on it in English, Arabic and Hebrew.
Source: BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5289984.stm
Kyodo News, Japan’s major news agency, said Thursday it will open a bureau in Pyongyang on September 1, the first Japanese news organisation to establish a bureau in North Korea. The bureau chief of Kyodo’s China General Bureau will concurrently serve as head of the Pyongyang office. There will be no full-time staff dispatched from Japan at the beginning at the Pyongyang base, which will have locally recruited staff. But if needed, reporters will be sent to the North from other areas. (Japan Times, August 25, 2006)
The New York Times has announced the appointment of its first perfume critic, in what the paper describes as a breakthrough for olfactory journalism and a wake-up call for a secretive, hype-driven industry. There are a couple of websites devoted to fragrance and a scent columnist at a Swiss newspaper but, as far as the New York Times is aware, Chandler Burr, a journalist and author, will be the first full-time perfume critic for an English-language newspaper. Burr’s column, Scent Strip, in the paper’s style section, will assess old and new perfumes for men and women as well as the occasional scented candle, and rate them from zero stars to four stars. In his first column on Sunday he says he will describe one fragrance as smelling like ‘fresh insecticide’, although he says he gives another from the same company a three-star rating. He argues that the industry as a whole will benefit because the column will enliven public interest. Burr said he would focus on the perfumers working behind the scenes for big-name companies, just as restaurant critics follow chefs, and promised to dig beneath the advertised ingredients and look at the chemical make-up of perfumes. (Media Guardian, August 25, 2006)
A Chinese researcher for The New York Times was acquitted Friday of state secrets charges but was convicted of fraud and sentenced to three years in prison, one of his defence lawyers said. Zhao Yan, 44, was detained in 2004. The government has not released details of the charges, but the case is believed to stem from a Times report on then-Chinese leader Jiang Zemin’s plans to relinquish his post as head of the military. Zhao’s case was dismissed in March in an apparent effort to minimise strains with Washington before President Hu Jintao visited the United States. The charges were later refiled and Zhao stood trial in June. Zhao could have been sentenced to up to 10 years in prison if convicted of ‘disclosing state secrets to foreigners.’ Free press activists have criticised a case as an attempt by Chinese authorities to intimidate reporters. Zhao’s lawyers have complained that authorities violated Chinese regulations by failing to release him after the case initially was dismissed. (AP, ABC News, August 25, 2006)
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s most prominent son, Saif al-Islam, said on Sunday the north African country lacked a free press and its political system was not as democratic as he would like. His comments, in a two-hour speech to 15,000 youth activists in the town of Sirte, were among the most critical expressed by Islam, who has emerged as his father’s most trusted representative although he holds no government position. Speaking to loud cheers, Islam criticised an array of alleged ills in Libyan public life, from the greed of ‘fat cats’ in state institutions to the poor state of the health and education sectors, and called for a range of reforms. ‘Our real situation, speaking frankly, is that we have no free press,’ he said, referring to the country’s media, all of which are state owned. (Reuters via International Journalists Network,August 24, 2006)
A French start-up called Netvibes is trying to take on the likes of Yahoo and Google by offering internet users a better way to organise news, information and other web-based services. The site, at www.netvibes.com, is being billed as easier to use than RSS feeds and more flexible than MyYahoo or Google’s home page. Recently infused with EUR 12m of venture capital, the community-built site encourages users to tinker with information from different sources to create their own personal home page, tracking numerous sites at a single glance. The elements combined on a page could include news headlines, an eBay auction or e-mail account, or functions like currency converters or language translators borrowed from different websites. To Tariq Krim, founder of Netvibes, the site is part of a trend toward empowering users to adapt the internet to their needs. In addition to writing modules with the simple programming tools provided by Netvibes, users have been enlisted to help translate much of the site’s content. (International Herald Tribune,August 24, 2006)
In the past few months, trade groups that represent music publishers have used the threat of copyright lawsuits to shut down guitar tablature sites, where users exchange tips on how to play songs like ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,’ ‘Highway to Hell’ and thousands of others. The battle has many similarities to the war between Napster and the music recording industry, but this time it involves free sites like Olga.net, GuitarTabs.com and MyGuitarTabs.com and even discussion boards on the Google Groups service like alt.guitar.tab and rec.music.makers.guitar.tablature, where amateur musicians trade ‘tabs’ - music notation especially for guitar - for songs they have figured out or have copied from music books. On the other side are music publishers like Sony/ATV and EMI. So far, the Music Publishers’ Association and the National Music Publishers’ Association have shut down several websites or pressured them to remove all of their tabs, but users have quickly migrated to other sites. The publishers, who share royalties with composers each time customers buy sheet music or books of guitar tablature, maintain that tablature postings, even inaccurate ones, are protected by copyright laws because the postings represent ‘derivative works’ related to the original compositions. The tablature sites argue that they are merely conduits for an online discussion about guitar techniques and that their services help the industry. (The New York Times, International Herald Tribune,August 22, 2006)
First it was the typewriter, then the teleprinter. Now a US news service has found a way to replace human beings in the newsroom and is instead using computers to write some of its stories. Thomson Financial, the business information group, has been using computers to generate some stories since March and is so pleased with the results that it plans to expand the practice. The computers work so fast that an earnings story can be released within 0.3 seconds of the company making results public. ‘This is not about cost but about delivering information to our customers at a speed at which they can make an almost immediate trading decision,’ said Matthew Burkley, senior vice-president of strategy at Thomson Financial. ‘This means we can free up reporters so they have more time to think.’ Burkley said the computer-generated stories had not made any mistakes. But he said they were very standardised. ‘We might try and write a few more adjectives into the program,’ he said. (Financial Times via Ifra Executive News,August 22, 2006)
A free newspaper hit the streets of Copenhagen last week, the first salvo in an emerging war among free dailies in Denmark. At least three others will be launched this year.Hawkers started handing out copies of the tabloid Dato at key traffic points in the Danish capital, and copies will also be distributed directly to homes in Denmark’s major cities starting this week.
The newspaper, which means “date” in Danish, is being published by Berlingske Officin AS, which also publishes several other newspapers including one of Europe’s oldest dailies, Berlingske Tidende. Berlingske Officin’s parent company has agreed to be bought by Mecom Group PLC, a media investment company in Britain.
Rival media company JP/Politikens Hus AS plans to launch its own free newspaper, 24timer, today while Metro International SA will introduce a free afternoon newspaper next week in addition to the free metroXpress daily it already distributes in the morning. In addition to metroXpress, Denmark already has another free daily newspaper called Urban. In all the relatively small market could in a few months host seven free newspapers in major cities.
The battle lines formed earlier this year when Icelandic conglomerate 365 Media Scandinavia shocked the Danish media industry by announcing it would issue a free newspaper, Nyhedsavisen, to some 500,000 homes in Denmark.
24timer
Click to enlarge
Centrum Aften
Swiss scientists have unveiled a new technology that could lead to video displays faithfully reproducing a fuller range of colours than do current models. The invention, based on fine-tuning light using microscopic artificial muscles, could turn into competitively priced consumer products within eight years, the scientists say. ‘State-of-the-art displays such as LCD displays can only reproduce a limited range of colours because the three mixing colours red, green and blue are determined during the time of production,’ said Manuel Aschwanden, a nanotechnology expert at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. Aschwanden and colleague Andreas Stemmer believe such limitations can be avoided by changing the fundamental colours themselves, not just their brightness. The research appears online in Optics Letters, a journal of the Optical Society of America, and will also be published in the journal’s September 1 issue. (UPI,August 18, 2006)
The book in which German Nobel literature laureate Günter Grass, 78, conducts an anguished exploration of his Nazi past and reveals his Waffen SS membership has almost sold out within two days, the publisher said Thursday. The company, Steidl Verlag, said 130,000 of the 150,000 first copies of Peeling the Onion had been shipped to booksellers and a second impression ordered from the printers. The book officially went on sale Wednesday, two weeks before the date originally planned. The Vatican meanwhile declined comment on a passage in the book where Grass describes philosophical chats in a US internment camp in 1946 with ‘my chum Joseph,’ a youth the same age as Grass. The writer believes the youth was Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. (DPA, Expatica Germany,August 18, 2006)
The prospects of surfing the internet and receiving e-mail at 35,000 feet took a knock on Thursday as Boeing said it will wind down its service for offering internet access on board planes. Although the market may get a boost with newcomers LiveTV LLC and AirCell developing offerings, cost pressures on airlines make it unlikely that on-board internet access will be widely available soon. Upgrading an airplane for internet service is a complex task, and with fuel prices high, airlines are more focused on keeping costs down rather than offering new, expensive perks. After six years, Boeing said on Thursday it would shut down its loss-making Connexion unit, which allowed airlines to provide high-speed internet service to passengers. The satellite-based service, for which Boeing failed to find a buyer, was too costly, and few airlines signed on. The company said it would take charges of up to USD 320m (EUR 249m) to wind down the service, which analysts estimate attracted just over 1,000 users a day and cost as much as USD 150m (EUR 116m) a year to run. (Reuters,August 18, 2006)
The Dubai-based media group Al Aquariya said it was launching a new satellite TV channel called ‘With you, Lebanon’ as a sign of support for the war-ravaged country. It was due transmitting at 0500 GMT August 13, the exact time that a UN-agreed ceasefire is due to come into effect. Al Aquarya, whose director general Mohammed Saleh is Lebanese, said the new venture would support the reconstruction of Lebanon. The group already has a satellite channel specializing in property. The group said the new channel would cover reconstruction, humanitarian projects ‘and the return of refugees to their homes’. It said it also hoped to encourage Arab and international investment in rebuilding the country. (AFP, Middle East Times,August 16, 2006)
EU troops in Congo have had to resort to distributing newspapers among a sceptical population wondering what they are doing in their country. The EU force, known as EUFOR, on Monday gave out the first edition of its own information newspaper, known as La Paillote after the straw huts which often serve as open air pubs. The newspaper, which will appear every Monday and has a print run of some 55,000, is to try and counter the widespread belief among Congolese that the troops are there to support the current president Joseph Kabila. The EU sent around 2,200 troops to the region to oversee elections at the end of July but drew criticism from local politicians for its weak mandate, the fact that it was not present in the troubled eastern part of the country, and the fact that many soldiers were stationed in neighbouring Gabon. (EU Observer,August 16, 2006)
Google has issued letters to media organisations asking them to refrain from using its name as a verb. In order to ‘protect its trademark’, and prevent it becoming a generic term, the search firm has sent letters to publishers advising them on its proper use. Google’s letter includes helpful examples of appropriate and inappropriate use of the company’s trademark. For example: ‘I used Google to check out that guy I met at the party’ is fine, but ‘I googled that hottie’ is not. Similarly, it’s OK to say: ‘He ego-surfs on Google to see if he’s listed in the results’ but not ‘He googles himself.’ The key distinction is whether Google is used to describe searching in a general, non-specific sense. ‘With constant generic use, trademarks can lose their special status and their proper name capitalisation,’ said Google in the letter. ‘It has happened to once-trademarked products including yo-yo, trampoline and nylon. Trademark lawyers call it ‘genericide’.’ More
Europe will see the official launch of a new international television channel in September when EUX.TV will begin with daily broadcasts. The new broadband channel will present, free-of-charge, political and general news about Europe and the European Union from a cross-border, pan-European perspective. The new channel is a hybrid medium that combines a 24/7 television channel with an innovative website that includes news and timely information about the EU. The channel will include a daily news programme covering the main European news developments at the European institutions and in national capitals. For its news coverage, EUX.TV draws experienced international print and broadcast journalists working from Brussels and other European cities. The team is led by Raymond Frenken, the former Europe Correspondent for international business channel CNBC Europe who has founded the channel. The channel will be available for free on the web via www.eux.tv. It can be seen on tv-sets everywhere via an internet connection, and is available as a digital channel on cable networks. (EUX TV press release,August 15, 2006)
Free newspapers have established a strong readership across Europe, but in Germany, ‘newspaper wars’ have scared off competition. Now another publisher is trying to carve out a niche. The latest offering, Business News, was launched last week and will be available in eight German markets. The paper was released by publisher Holtzbrinck Verlag, which also puts out business daily Handelsblatt, Berlin’s Tagesspiegel newspaper and business weekly Wirtschaftswoche. The makers of Business News are being cautious in the paper’s infancy in order. The paper was launched during the summer vacation with a circulation of just 80,000 copies. The paper is only distributed to offices, 1,000 so far. (Deutsche Welle,August 14, 2006)
Iran’s president has launched a Weblog, using his first entry to recount his poor upbringing and ask visitors to the site if they think the United States and Israel want to start a new world war. Analyst Saeed Laylaz said the site, available in Persian, Arabic, English and French at www.ahmadinejad.ir, may be seeking to win support from abroad. ‘Do you think that the U.S. and Israeli intention and goal by attacking Lebanon is pulling the trigger for another world war?’ the president asks visitors to the site, offering them the choice to vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’. But he admitted his opening blog, which runs to more than 2,300 words in the English version, was too long. ‘From now onwards, I will try to make it simpler and shorter,’ he wrote. (Reuters, ABC News,August 14, 2006)
Most newspapers have built their long-term growth strategies around the Internet. But a Santa Monica company is betting that an old piece of new technology, the CD-ROM, will help papers bridge the gap to the digital age.
In recent months, IMedia International Inc. has reached agreement with two of the nation’s largest newspapers to distribute within their Sunday editions CDs chock-full of movie previews, music samples, video games, comics, celebrity interviews and advertisements.
“This brings sight, sound and motion to the newspaper,” said IMedia Chief Executive David MacEachern.
It also could bring additional advertising dollars — and perhaps hard-to-reach younger readers — to newspapers at a time of declining readership. IMedia and its partners — the Dallas Morning News and the New York Daily News so far — hope that newspaper readers will pull the discs from their Sunday papers and insert them in their computers to enjoy the freebies. That would allow the partners to sell as much as 700 video and “banner” advertisements on each edition of the CD.
Source: James Rainey, The Los Angeles Times
The Tibetan exile government has launched its own Internet television station – Tibetonline.tv.
Opening of Tibetonline.tv was initiated by Tibetan Government which already had experience of Internet broadcasting of various events – from solemn public prayers about longevity of His Holiness Dalai Lama to everyday sessions of the Assembly of Tibetan Deputies.
Tibetonline.tv. will provide most of its airtime to speeches and philosophic lectures of Buddhist spiritual leader both in India and abroad, Tibetan Culture and Information Center reports.
One will be able to find a vast collection of feature and documentary films about Tibet and Dalai Lama in the Tibetonline.tv archive. There are also videos of his lectures at various conferences and forums. Tibetonline.tv viewers will be able to watch a documentary about the life of Buddhist religious leader “Compassion in Expulsion”, Dalai-Lama’s speech at the Nobel Award ceremony, a big public prayer in Sakyamuni’s enlightenment place - Bodh Gaya- and a lot more. The news volumes will be gradually increasing from weekly to everyday.
The website can be viewed from inside the Great Firewall, Mainland China, though for how long, who knows. My bet is a couple of days.
Go there: Link
Reporters Without Borders voiced horror as the toll of journalists killed in Iraq since the start of the war in March 2003 reached 100 with the discovery yesterday of the body of Adel Naji Al Mansouri, who was shot after being kidnapped in front of his Baghdad home the day before. The Iraq war is now by far the most deadly conflict for reporters.
“One hundred journalists and media assistants killed in three years is appalling,” the press freedom organisation said. “No armed conflict since the Second World War has been so deadly for the press. The Iraqi government must do everything possible to identify and punish those responsible for these atrocities. It is unacceptable that nothing has yet been done to shed light on these increasingly commonplace murders and that no measures have been taken to protect journalists in Iraq.”
A 20-year-old Iraqi citizen, Mansouri was the Baghdad correspondent of the Iranian TV station Al Alam. He was kidnapped and then shot as he was returning to his home in the west Baghdad district of Al Amiriyah. He had moved his wife and daughter away from Baghdad after receiving death threats that were probably linked to his work as a journalist.
Reporters Without Borders today also condemned an attack on Ali Al Yassi, a journalist with the Arabic-language satellite TV station Al Hurra, who was badly beaten by police yesterday in Baghdad.
The organisation is investigating the cases of journalists Abdul Wahab Abdul Razeq Ahamad Al Qaisie and Riyad Atto, whose bodies were also found yesterday. The editor of the Iraqi magazine Kol al Dounia, Qaisie was kidnapped on 20 July. Atto was the editor of a newspaper based in Talafar, north of Baghdad.
In addition to the 100 journalists and media assistants killed since 2003, two are missing and three others are currently held hostage.
From Commitee to protect Journalists:
CPJ has kept detailed data on journalists killed on duty as part of its mission of defending press freedom worldwide. Here is a tally of several major conflicts, as compiled by CPJ staff.
Journalists killed in conflicts:
• Algeria (1993-96): 58
• Colombia (1986-present): 52
• Balkans (1991-95): 36
• Philippines (1983-87): 36
• Turkey (1984-99): 22
• Tajikistan (1992-96): 16
• Sierra Leone (1997-2000): 15
• Afghanistan (2001-04): 9
• Somalia (1993-95): 9
• Kosovo (1999-2001): 7
• First Iraq war (1991): 4 (All were killed after the official end of the war but died in the conflict in the immediate aftermath.)
Deadliest year in these wars: 1995 in Algeria, when 24 journalists were killed.
EARLIER CONFLICTS
CPJ does not have statistics on wars prior to 1981, but other groups have compiled lists of journalists killed. Please note that groups use different criteria in classifying deaths. For example, a group might categorize a death in a plane crash as being killed on duty. Here is a selection of some of the major conflicts.
• Central American conflicts: Freedom Forum, a nonpartisan foundation dedicated to free press, lists 89 journalists killed for the years 1979-89.
• Argentina: Freedom Forum lists 98 for the years 1976-1983.
• Vietnam: Freedom Forum lists 66 journalists killed covering the conflict in Vietnam from 1955-1975. The Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, which surveyed the years 1962-75, lists 71 journalists killed.
• Korean War: Freedom Forum lists 17 journalists killed.
• World War II: Freedom Forum lists 68.
• World War I: Freedom Forum lists 2.
With Cuban leader Fidel Castro ailing after 47 years in power, CNN said Thursday it had hired his estranged daughter, Alina Fernandez, as a network contributor.
Fernandez, who was 3 when Castro took power and had sporadic contact with him, left Cuba disguised as a Spanish tourist in 1993. She moved to Miami, where she is a radio host and the author of Castro’s Daughter: An Exile’s Memoir of Cuba.
Her father has temporarily handed over power to his brother Raul and remained out of the public eye after undergoing surgery for intestinal bleeding.
Fernandez will provide commentary and expertise about Cuba as the story about her father’s health, and a potential succession of power, continues.
“At this critical point in history as a Cuban, it’s important for me to draw the world’s attention to the situation inside Cuba, as we reflect on its future,” she said. “CNN is a global network, which can reach the largest population available.”
At a momentous moment in Cuban history — with long-time strongman Fidel Castro in a sickbed and transferring his power to his brother — foreign journalists are being shut out of the Communist island.
Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa reported Thursday that more than 150 foreign journalists trying to enter Cuba with tourist visas have been turned away at the Havana airport since the government announced Castro had internal bleeding and faced “complicated surgery.”
Journalists need a work visa to work legally in Cuba, and a spokesman of the government-controlled International Press Center told dpa there would be no exceptions.
“Across the whole world there is currently great interest (in Cuba), but nowhere on the planet can a journalist report with a tourist visa,” the agency quoted an unnamed press center representative as saying.
The representative told the agency that no journalists have been expelled from the country, and none are being denied information. Castro, however, in a statement issued in his name Tuesday said that information about his health is a “state secret” that could be exploited by the enemy U.S. government, writes Editor & Publisher.
Three international news agencies rejected challenges Tuesday to the veracity of photographs of bodies taken in the aftermath of an Israeli air strike in Lebanon, strongly denying the images were staged.
Photographers from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse all covered rescue operations Sunday in Qana, where 56 Lebanese were killed. Many of their photos depicted rescue workers carrying dead children.
A British website, the EU Referendum blog, argued chicanery may have been involved by citing time stamps that went with captions of the photographs.
For example, the website draws attention to a photo by AP’s Lefteris Pitarakis time stamped 7:21 a.m., showing a dead girl in an ambulance. Another picture, stamped 10:25 a.m. and taken by AP’s Mohammed Zaatari, shows the same girl being loaded onto the ambulance. In a third, by AP photographer Nasser Nasser and stamped 10:44 a.m., a rescue worker carries the girl with no ambulance nearby.
The site suggests these events were staged for effect, a criticism echoed by right-wing U.S. radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh when he directed listeners to the blog Monday.
… The AP said information from its photo editors showed the events were not staged and the time stamps could be misleading for several reasons, including websites using such stamps to show when pictures are posted, not taken. An AFP executive said he was stunned to be questioned about it. Reuters, in a statement, said it categorically rejects any such suggestion.
Source: David Bauder, The Associated Press via Yahoo! News
A freelance journalist and blogger was jailed on Tuesday after refusing to turn over video he took at an anticapitalist protest here last summer and after refusing to testify before a grand jury looking into accusations that crimes were committed at the protest.
The freelancer, Josh Wolf, 24, was taken into custody just before noon after a hearing in front of Judge William Alsup of Federal District Court. Found in contempt, Mr. Wolf was later moved to a federal prison in Dublin, Calif., and could be imprisoned until next summer, when the grand jury term expires, said his lawyer, Jose Luis Fuentes.
Earlier this year, federal prosecutors subpoenaed Mr. Wolf to testify before a grand jury and turn over video from the demonstration, held in the Mission District on July 8, 2005. The protest, tied to a Group of 8 meeting of world economic leaders in Scotland, ended in a clash between demonstrators and the San Francisco police, with one officer sustaining a fractured skull.
A smoke bomb or a firework was also put under a police car, and investigators are looking into whether arson was attempted on a government-financed vehicle.
Mr. Wolf, who posted some of the edited video on his Web site, www.joshwolf.net, and sold some of it to local television stations, met with investigators, who wanted to see the raw video. But Mr. Wolf refused to hand over the tapes, arguing that he had the right as a journalist to shield his sources.
Source: Jesse McKinley, The New York Times
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