Thanks to the WSJ’s James Taranto to pointing out this hilarious Reuters quote:
“I saw the fire brigade vehicle rushing to the area at top speed. Somehow its brakes failed and hit one police vehicle and coalition vehicles, then the Americans started firing,” said Reuters correspondent Noor Mohammad Sherzai.
Why so funny? The byline of the article: By Noor Mohammad Sherzai.
Great obituary from The Economist:
THERE were usually several versions of any story involving Bob Denard. To explain how he came to be found, in the early hours of November 26th 1989, standing over the blood-soaked and pyjama-clad body of the president of the Comoros Islands, there were three alternatives. One: Mr Denard had shot him. (He denied it in court; though he had been in the same room, and very close to him, he had not pulled the trigger.) Two: the palace bodyguard had burst in wildly, filling the president with bullets. (“Inexplicable,” Mr Denard agreed, but true; “an accident arising out of a general state of madness.”) Or perhaps—mad theory three—an army commandant had fired off an anti-tank missile by mistake, which had crashed through the window of the presidential bedroom.
The French courts never worked it out, and in 1999 acquitted Mr Denard for lack of evidence. His long dark history as a mercenary in Africa, from 1961 onwards, had blurred everything about him. His name was Bob Denard, or Gilbert Bourgeaud, or Colonel Bako, or Mustafa M’hadjou. The wound that made him limp had come from a bullet in Congo, or perhaps in Algeria. His fascination with all things military sprang from a boyhood in the French resistance in the Médoc, or alternatively from his first entranced sighting of the shiny helmets, boots and guns of the German troops invading his village. He had been cashiered from the French navy, at 16, for running riot in a Saigon whorehouse or for burning down a restaurant. Fact or fiction: few knew for sure.
Interesting WSJ article on a Hong Kong newspaper that’s pushing the boundaries of free speech in China.
Late last month, Hong Kong media magnate Jimmy Lai’s reporters were among the first in the world to sneak into tightly controlled Myanmar to cover brutal crackdowns on antigovernment demonstrators. His Apple Daily newspaper ran their stories and photos of bloodied monks on the front page for three days, and pointed the finger at China to stop the violence.The next week, Apple’s cover moved onto other priorities: A British teenager’s belly-button ring had gotten lodged inside her body, and Apple had front-page photos, diagrams and interviews with local starlets about their own belly-button rings.
Mr. Lai, long a combative agitator for press and political freedoms in China, has remade Hong Kong’s media landscape by pairing two unlikely subjects — democracy and sex. His Next Media Inc. publications frequently provoke Beijing and have stoked antigovernment rallies in Hong Kong, in political reports often interspersed with racy photos or consumer reviews of local strip clubs and saunas.
The Journal translated two front pages from the paper. Very interesting. The first pages shows pictures of the Burma crackdown that I’ve seen nowhere else.
This is hilarious. A bunch of 9/11 nutjobs infiltrated Bill Maher’s live talk show. Maher’s reaction is rather funny. Apparently they took aim at him because of his radical view that the Twin Towers were not destroyed by controlled detonation.
Yeah, I need to build a Cylon Jack-O-Lantern too. Of course, the LED lights can be used to build one of these too.
Great article on the bitter rivalry between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali:
Joe Frazier hasn’t fought Muhammad Ali in 32 years but he spars with him every day. They are both old men now, broken by difficult lives and too many years spent fighting for their paychecks. They have paid dearly for the prizes they won with the biggest price extracted from each by the other.Although both would be diminished as fighters if they had never crossed paths, for Frazier neither time nor shared infirmities have softened his heart. He always has been a hard man and there is no harder place inside him than the spot still occupied by Ali. It’s a large spot where the bruises remain even after all these years.
That’s why there was always only one picture of boxing’s greatest legend hanging in Frazier’s Gym at 2917 North Broad St. in a rundown section of Philadelphia that few tourists visit. It was the one of Ali flat on his back, Frazier standing over him with both pain and triumph on his face.
That’s how Frazier wants to be remembered — in that moment after he sent Ali to the floor in Round 15, the final round of the first fight of their tragic trilogy. The rest he’d just as soon forget. Or rewrite. Ali taunted and tortured Frazier outside the ring far more than he did inside it, and he did a lot of damage inside it to Frazier. He marginalized him in a way
I tend to idolize Ali — he was a man of great character who stood up for his beliefs. But, I should remember the good with the bad. His treatment of Frazier was deplorable.
Interesting article from the Christian Science Monitor on the concept of journalism “crowdsourcing”:
Mayhill Fowler wrote a significant Web-only political story this week that took the temperature of the Democratic electorate. More remarkable than her conclusion – that Democrats are more undecided and less Iraq-focused than polls suggest – is the whopping 17 reporters in nine states who filed on-the-ground accounts to contribute to it.The cornucopia of contributors, surpassing what most news outlets could ever afford, cost virtually nothing. That’s because the reporters are volunteers, including Ms. Fowler, a Californian, who at age 60 has embraced beat reporting on Barack Obama.
“I looked through all the information that people sent in and I came up with what I thought were the significant things we discovered in these 14 cities on Saturday,” she says. Her story was published online by Off the Bus, a project boasting 1,500 citizen journalists and affiliation with The Huffington Post, a liberal website.
“Until [this] post, there’s nothing really on the Obama campaign that I think we’ve brought that the mainstream media can’t. It’s this kind of joint effort that really is the thing,” she adds.
Collaborative citizen-reporting projects like this one are sprouting across the political landscape of Election 2008. Thousands of volunteers are adding muscle to efforts by professional reporters and campaign staff to leave no stone unturned – and no skeletons in the closet. But to drive volunteer interest, many of these “crowdsourcing” efforts draw more energy from partisan fervor than traditional journalism’s impartiality, say experts.
Read the rest.
So, the case of an Illinois judge who won a libel suit last year has been settled out of court. A shame because we need one of these cases to go to the Supreme Court to combat this worrisome trend:
Since 1986, judges have won eight of 11 cases in which they have sued news media, according to the Media Law Resource Center in New York. Dozens of other cases brought by judges were dismissed before trial, said center staff attorney David Heller.
In New York Times v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court set the bar for libel of a public official incredibly high — “actual malice.” Since then, the news media have enjoyed wide latitude in the coverage of public officials, except for one group. Apparently, free speech is good for everyone, unless you’re criticizing sitting judges.
The Boston Herald had to pay a judge $3 million in June after losing it’s libel battle in state courts. The paper hasn’t said whether it will appeal to the federal courts. Hopefully, it will.
Restricting speech at Google. These types of reports aren’t new.
