Demonstrators in Sudan called for the execution of British teacher Gillian Gibbons, who made the "mistake" of nicknaming a Teddy bear in her class Muhammad after her students held a vote.

But who do they speak for?

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From CP via CTV.ca:

Conrad Black pledged Friday he will return to professional life even if he is handed a jail sentence for fraud and obstruction of justice, saying any time behind bars would "compound the injustice'' of his criminal trial.

"Even on a worse case, I'll be back,'' Black said Friday in an interview with BBC Radio 4's Today program. ...

He has also pointed to the fact that he was acquitted of 12 charges, vowing to get rid of the remaining four on appeal.*

* I seem to remember Black being convicted on four of 13 charges. Tonight's CBC.ca story reported Black as being convicted on four of 13, so somebody is wrong.

"It has been my honour to show the shortcomings of the plea bargain system and the shortcomings of the corporate governance zealots,'' Black told the BBC.

Any time served behind bars, he added, would mean he is "merely participating in compounding the injustice, which will be the accepted fact of this case before too long.''

The BBC story: Conrad Black protests innocence

From the NYT:

Faced with its second mass protest by members in its short life span, Facebook, the enormously popular social networking Web site, is reining in some aspects of a controversial new advertising program.

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From the BBC:

The family of an Iraqi journalist - who he claimed had been killed by gunmen in Baghdad - have appeared on Iraqi television, apparently safe and well.

Dia al-Kawwaz, who lives in Jordan, said that several members of his family were killed by Shia gunmen on Sunday.

But a taped report on the US-owned al-Hurra TV showed his family, none of whom seemed distressed or injured.

Mr Kawwaz' sisters denounced his actions, saying there had never been any sort of threat against them.

One of his brothers-in-law suggested that he had made the story up for political reasons.

Here's the first post on this mess: Iraqi journalist claims his family's been massacred.

The "Totally Toronto!" station is giving hourly updates that Toronto Maple Leafs general manager John Ferguson hasn't been fired yet.

From the Guardian:

Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times, tonight issued a stark warning that the supply of reliable news reporting is dwindling despite the internet-driven worldwide information explosion.

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From the Nov. 28 Guardian:

A Turkish prosecutor is considering whether to prosecute the Turkish publisher of Richard Dawkins' bestselling atheist polemic, The God Delusion, on the grounds that it incites religious hatred.

The publisher, Erol Karaaslan, said today that he expected to be questioned on Thursday by an Istanbul prosecutor as part of an official investigation, and faces prosecution both as its publisher and translator. The book has sold some 6,000 copies in Turkey since it was published by his Kuzey publishing house in June. The inquiry apparently began after one reader complained that passages in the book were an assault on "sacred values".

From a Guardian story about a Conrad Black remote book signing in London on Wednesday, with sentencing looming a week from Monday:

Black admitted he would have to be "brain dead" not to be contemplating the four walls of a prison cell, although he refused to say whether he would attempt any more money-spinning LongPen signings from prison. As he sits by his Florida rose garden and awaits his fate, he joked he was seeking solace in Franz Kafka's The Trial.

"When I read it at first I thought it was a novel," he said. "Now I realise it's just journalism."

The BBC moved an alert saying Gillian Gibbons, a British teacher who named a Teddy bear 'Muhammad' in her class, has been sentenced to 15 days by a Sudan court.

After serving her sentence, she faces deportation.

Addendum

Here's the Guardian story and some commentary from Meera Selva:

Gillian Gibbons has fallen foul of the most ridiculous regime, which cannot seem to see the absurdity and injustice in even arresting, never mind charging, a teacher over the naming of a soft toy.

But this case is not, as is being portrayed, a confrontation between Islam and the west - it is about the hazards of living under a chauvinistic military regime with an all-pervasive secret service. ...

Selva said the regime of Omar al-Bashir needs the support of Islamists to survive. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood had been agitating for Gibbons to get the maximum sentence of six months in jail and 40 lashes:

Bashir now uses the concept of Arab supremacy rather than Islam, as a rallying call to prop up his own power base. This is the language he used in Darfur to incite militias to attack devout Muslim civilians, and is the language used to encourage suspicion and mistrust of foreigners.

The Sudanese government has conceded several points to the international community recently in agreeing to allow UN and AU troops into Darfur and southern Sudan, but the Sudanese are deeply uncomfortable with having foreign troops on their soil. In this climate, it is easy and tempting for the Sudanese politicians in Khartoum to whip up anti-foreign sentiment against a teacher to disguise their loss of sovereignty elsewhere. One can only hope they realise just how much damage is being done by their irresponsible actions soon and defuse this insane situation.

The portrait of Conrad Black painted in a defence document is distinctly at odds with the disgraced media tycoon's public persona.

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From AP via globeandmail.com:

The desire for greater control over how search engines index and display websites is driving an effort by leading news organizations and other publishers to revise a 13-year-old technology for restricting access.

Currently, Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and other top search companies voluntarily respect a website's wishes as declared in a text file known as “robots.txt,” which a search engine's indexing software, called a crawler, knows to look for on a site.

The formal rules allow a site to block indexing of individual web pages, specific directories or the entire site, though some search engines have added their own commands.

The new proposal, to be unveiled Thursday by a consortium of publishers at the global headquarters of The Associated Press, seeks to have those extra commands — and more — apply across the board. Sites, for instance, could try to limit how long search engines may retain copies in their indexes, or tell the crawler not to follow any of the links that appear within a webpage.

In the Dec. 5 issue of Frank, of all places:

... A funny thing happened on the way to rewriting Muldoon's past; it's impossible to do so without acknowledging Cameron, and what cannot be altered is that Globe and CBC reporters -- justifiably revelling in their great moment -- owe her a large debt. (Greg McArthur, the Globe's lead reporter on the Muldoon-Schreiber investigation, was eight years old when Cameron first started tracking this story in 1988). The revelations contained in Schreiber's affidavit, which triggered Prime Minister harper's decision to torch Muldoon, were first published by Cameron years ago.

Frank quoted from two Nov. 8 blog posts by Cameron: "Cash came in like it was falling from the sky" and "Stepping down to private life."

Some others:

Nov. 13 - "Turns out it was all my fault"

Nov. 11 - "How they spent the money"

You can find Cameron's book output listed here, but the two big ones on the Mulroney years are On The Take and The Last Amigo: Karlheinz Schreiber and the Anatomy of a Scandal (co-authored with CBC journalist Harvey Cashore).

On CTV's Question Period last Sunday, author William Kaplan had some kind words for several journalists' work on the Schreiber-Mulroney file -- and a notable exception.

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British teacher Gillian Gibbons' exercise in classroom democracy -- having her students vote on a name for a teddy bear; they picked Muhammad -- has her facing charges of insulting religion, inciting hatred and showing contempt for religious beliefs.

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From the Onion:

Perfectly Marketed TV Show Somehow Fails

NEW YORK—Executives found it "inconceivable" that a television program supported by 1.25 million promotional coffee-cup sleeves could perform so poorly.

Noah Barron, writing at Online Journalism Review, offers up nine cool suggested toys for online journalistos and journalistas this Yuletide season.

From the BBC:

British officials are trying to secure the release of a British schoolteacher arrested in Sudan for letting her pupils name a teddy bear Muhammad.

Gillian Gibbons, of Liverpool, may face blasphemy charges for insulting Islam's Prophet. A conviction could mean six months in jail, 40 lashes or a fine.

The Sudan Embassy in London said the situation was a "storm in a teacup", based on a cultural misunderstanding.

Hopefully this won't come to a nasty conclusion:

Dr Khalid al Mubarak, a spokesman for the Sudan embassy in London, said he was confident that Ms Gibbons would be cleared quickly.

He told BBC News: "We have Christian schools in the Sudan, we have Christian teachers who teach Muslim children, which shows a great deal of tolerance.

"The vice-president of our country is a Christian, we have many ministers who are Christian, and historically we became Christians round about the same time as England.

"Our relationship with Britain is so good that we wouldn't like such a minute event to be overblown." ...

Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, also said it appeared to have been a "quite horrible misunderstanding" and Ms Gibbons should never have been arrested.

There was no apparent intention to offend Islamic sensibilities or defame the honour and name of the Prophet Muhammad, he said.

Call me crazy, call me a Western cultural imperialist, but even if Gibbons did intend to be blasphemous, that wouldn't justify lashings and/or a prison sentence in my world.

The BBC reports that Saudi authorities say the female sexual assault victim sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in prison has confessed to an extramarital affair:

The woman was initially to be punished for violating strict gender segregation laws in Saudi Arabia, for riding in the car of a man who was not related to her when they were both attacked.

"The Saudi justice minister expressed his regret about the media reports over the role of the woman in this case which put out false information and wrongly defend her," the statement said.

"The charged girl is a married woman who confessed to having an affair with the man she was caught with."

Here's my first post on this topic.

From Reuters:

An Egyptian newspaper editor was sentenced to a year in jail on Monday for publishing a front-page photograph of an Egyptian television and film actress that was found to be indecent, court sources said.

The verdict against editor Hatem Mamdouh Mahran was the latest in a string of rulings that have handed jail terms to at least 12 journalists since September on charges ranging from defaming President Hosni Mubarak to misquoting the minister of justice.

The sources said Mahran's al-Naba weekly newspaper, known for testing conservative Egyptian sensibilities, had published a picture in January of actress Hala Sidky that prosecutors said "reveals a sensitive part" of her body. They did not say which part of her body.

Mahran, who was also fined 20,000 Egyptian pounds ($3,600) and granted bail of 5,000 pounds, said he would appeal.

From the BBC:

An Iraqi journalist who lives in Jordan has said that 11 members of his family have been killed by Shia gunmen in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.

Dia al-Kawwaz said his two sisters, their husbands, and seven children were shot at the family home on Sunday.

The police in Baghdad have not confirmed the attack, but one officer told the BBC the killings had occurred.

Mr Kawwaz edits a website that has been critical of the Iraqi government and the US military presence in Iraq.

He has lived outside Iraq for more about 20 years.

From the BBC:

A BBC journalist working in Bolivia has been killed in a car crash to the south of the main city of La Paz.

Lola Almudevar was travelling in a taxi in the early hours of Sunday as she made her way to Sucre to cover ongoing political unrest in the city.

The taxi collided with two trucks which had already crashed. ...

Clotilde Fernandez, the wife of the taxi driver, and three men, including the two lorry drivers, were also killed in the crash.

Eduardo Garcia, a Spanish reporter working for Reuters who was travelling with Ms Almudevar, was seriously injured.

Three Bolivians were also hurt.

Saskatchewan and Winnipeg have both figured in some of my most nightmarish Grey Cup memories.

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Your once-in-a-generation Grey Cup win has been delivered!

The Saskatchewan Roughriders won Grey Cups in 1966, 1989 and ... just now. :)

They beat the Winnipeg Blue bombers 23-19 (CFL quarterback-turned-TSN analyst Danny McManus predicted the score, but got the result wrong).

I said two weeks ago I would cheer for the 'Riders in the playoffs, closing the post with, "May the team with the best fans win!" As it happened, the team with the second-best fans lost.

One thing you can say about 'Riders fans is they have supported the team through every crest and trough of the sometimes stormy seas that flatlands franchise has sailed. I don't know how many Toronto Argonauts fans drive round trips of eight hours or more from the Ontario equivalents of places like Leader and Prince Albert to catch a game. However, I'm willing to make the following guess: Not many.*

* About 1,000 people came out to Regina's airport at 1:30 a.m. to welcome the team back after it beat B.C. in the Western final on Nov. 18. That would be equivalent to almost 13,000 Torontonians showing up to welcome the Argos. Eric Tillman, the 'Riders GM, said recently that about two dozen fans showed up when the Argos returned after winning the 2004 Grey Cup.

I heard one story about a guy flying to T.O. from Vietnam to be there for the 'Riders Cup appearance. One of my old friends from my Saskatchewan days came up from Charlotte, N.C.

I genuinely hope the 'Riders fans enjoy the party tonight and in the coming days.

But mostly, I hope my beloved Edmonton Eskimos climb out of the toilet and start winning again, so the natural order of the universe can be restored.

However, methinks 'Riders fans should make plans to attend the 2020 Grey Cup. I got a feeling about that one ...

You might also want to see Grey Cup traumas past.

From the NYT:

Facebook, the popular social networking site, has become a full-fledged platform for communicating, sharing and advertising. ABC News is betting that it will become a platform for political coverage, as well.

ABC News and Facebook have formally established a partnership — the site’s first with a news organization — that allows Facebook members to electronically follow ABC reporters, view reports and video and participate in polls and debates, all within a new “U.S. Politics” category.

To underscore their collaboration, the two organizations will announce today that they are jointly sponsoring Democratic and Republican presidential debates in New Hampshire on Jan. 5, three days before the primary election there.

“Through this partnership, we want to extend the dialogue both before and after the debate,” said Dan Rose, Facebook’s vice president for business development.

The announcements are another sign that news organizations are looking to capitalize on the potential power of Facebook, which began as a database of college friendships, and other social networking sites. Media companies like The New York Times and The Washington Post have produced pages for use on Facebook and some newspapers, magazines and television stations have recently invited users to join special pages that are set up to follow reporters’ political coverage. But ABC’s new relationship is intended to be deeper.

Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes, a book about the 1988 race for the White House, stressed the notion of presidential contest as ordeal. It also promoted the formula that great candidate = great president.

Wrong, says Mark Halperin, senior political analyst for Time magazine.

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The decline and fall of a uniquely American pursuit can be attributed to a number of factors - The Internet, the rise of poker, expensive gas and larceny.

From the NYT commentary by L. Jon Wertheim, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated:

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From the BBC:

Controversy never far behind

Controversial Bangladeshi feminist writer Taslima Nasreen has been moved out of the western Indian city of Jaipur to a location in Delhi.

Ms Nasreen had flown from Calcutta to Jaipur on Thursday after violent protests by Muslims.

But she has now been transported to the Indian capital, Delhi, for her safety.

On Wednesday, police in Calcutta used tear gas and baton charges to control crowds calling for her Indian visa to be cancelled.

Rioters blocked roads and set cars alight. At least 43 people were hurt. More than 100 arrests were made.

Critics say she called for the Koran to be changed to give women greater rights, something she denies.