Has a young Afghan journalism student been sentenced to death to intimidate his older brother, also a journalist?

From the Jan. 17 Tyee:

Apology

Mair column contained errors.

By David Beers
Published: January 17, 2008

TheTyee.ca

Regarding Rafe Mair's column published in The Tyee on Dec. 24, 2007.

The Tyee unreservedly retracts the statements as to the treatment of Messrs. Krieger and Murphy by the Province and by the Asper family made in that column. The statements were in error. We apologize unreservedly for making those statements. We sincerely regret any damage or harm that has been suffered by any of the individuals involved, including the Asper family.

I don't expect this next sentence was meant to be funny, but I did find it amusing on a certain level:

We also wish to use this opportunity to rescind any suggestion or recommendation to Tyee and Province readers that they cancel their Province subscriptions and instead spend the money on the Tyee or the Tyee Fellowship Fund.

David Beers is founding editor of The Tyee.

This earlier apology and correction (from Dec. 27;  also written by Beers) puts the matter into better context:

An opinion column by Rafe Mair, published on this site Dec. 24, 2007, stated that political cartoonists Dan Murphy and Bob Krieger were to be "let go" by the The Province newspaper.

In fact, while Murphy and Krieger were told by Province management that their cartoons would no longer be regularly published on the editorial pages of The Province, they were offered other positions at the newspaper as well as the option of leaving the employ of The Province with buy-out payments.

As soon as these facts came to the attention of the editors of The Tyee over the holidays, we corrected the Mair column. The Tyee subsequently removed the column from the site on Wednesday afternoon.

We apologize for any confusion or distress the column may have caused members of The Province's staff, management or readership.

CBC News publisher John Cruickshank explains his rationale for transferring the reporter that he named in a publicly released letter to the Conservative party but won't name in his blog posting.

From the BBC: (thanks, Mungo Says Bah!)

The poem appeared in a Burmese celebrity gossip magazine

The Burmese authorities have arrested a well known poet, who published a love poem with a hidden message criticising the country's military leader.

Poet Saw Wai's work - titled February the Fourteenth - was published in a Rangoon magazine, The Love Journal.

Taken together, the first words of each line read: "General Than Shwe is crazy with power."

Dissidents in Burma have used similar techniques before to get their messages past government censors. ...

Last year an advertisement was placed in one of Burma's main newspapers in the name of a Swedish travel company which contained the hidden message "Killer Than Shwe".

The company did not really exist.
 

From the NYT:

Students of how the Bush administration led the nation into the Iraq war can now go online to browse a comprehensive database of top officials’ statements before the invasion, connecting the dots between hundreds of claims, mostly discredited since then, linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda or warning that he possessed forbidden weapons.

The Center for Public Integrity, a research group that focuses on ethics in government and public policy, designed the new Web site to allow simple searches for specific phrases, such as “mushroom cloud” or “yellowcake uranium,” in transcripts and documents totaling some 380,000 words, including remarks by President Bush and most of his top advisers in the two years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

James E. O'Shea had always been seen as a Tribune Co. loyalist, which makes his forced departure from the L.A. Times and his final memo that much more remarkable:

From AP via globeandmail.com:

An Afghan court on Tuesday sentenced a 23-year-old journalism student to death for distributing a paper he printed off the Internet that three judges said violated the tenets of Islam, an official said.

The three-judge panel sentenced Sayad Parwez Kambaksh to death for distributing a paper that humiliated Islam, said Fazel Wahab, the chief judge in the northern province of Balkh, where the trial took place. Judge Wahab did not preside over the trial.

From The Globe and Mail:

Canada's most-wanted criminals are a step closer to getting exposure on national television - on a channel that longs to put them behind bars.

A controversial bid for a 24-hour cable service devoted to finding escaped convicts, parolees at large and abducted children was given a boost by broadcast regulators yesterday in a long-awaited ruling potentially worth millions of dollars.

Four lawyers in a Canadian Islamic Congress action against Maclean's magazine respond to Ezra Levant.

Ezra Levant holds forth on his encounter with an Alberta Human Rights Commission case officer over the complaint lodged against him over his decision to republish the Mohammad cartoons in the now-defunct Western Standard.

Old skool LAT columnist Bill Dwyre writing on Jan. 19:

Our society has a massive appetite for drama, and little for reality. We read about Britney Spears when we need to read about Afghanistan. And the media, which has the mandate -- and the constitutional right -- to lead us from this abyss, are all too often not doing so. Media, which once led public opinion, now all too often follow it.

We aren't just talking celebrity scandal sheets, weekly shoppers and sports-talk radio.

Last week, a Los Angeles bureau executive of the Associated Press, no less, put out a memo to staff that said they were to pay more attention to developments about Britney Spears. The message was: She is news.

No she isn't. She is titillation. She is a troubled young woman whom we cover with delight, rather than empathy. She is web hits, the current fool's gold of the newspaper industry.

Cliff Arnall, a Welsh seasonal disorders specialist, inspired by a commission from a British travel company, has claimed for the past few years that the Third Monday in January is the most depressing day of the year.

I call bullshit on that.

This morning, I saw enough extra light on the horizon at 6:50 a.m. to make me think the corner has been turned.

When I lived on the Prairies, I usually found just the teeniest extra bit of heat in the sun (so long as I was out of the wind) at this time of year. Again, that would raise my spirits, knowing that spring was, at most, six months away. :^)

From CP:

The CBC says it has transferred an Ottawa reporter to Toronto after she fed questions to a Liberal MP during the Mulroney-Schreiber hearings in December.

The public broadcaster says reporter Krista Erickson's actions were ``inappropriate'' and violated CBC policies.

The broadcaster says Erickson acted on her own in providing questions to a Liberal MP and there was no bias in the news coverage.

I'd link to the CBC.ca story, but ... :)  However, the Corpse did send out a news release. CBC Radio covered the story 24 minutes into its 6 p.m. newscast as a voicer.

Jonathan Kay posted the following at the N-P's comment blog:

As for Ms. Erickson, she deserves to be able to get on with her journalistic career. What she did was wrong: Even if collusion between politicians and journalists is hardly unheard of in Ottawa, it is plainly inappropriate for a reporter with the national broadcaster to involver herself in a case with such partisan overtones — especially since the nature of her participation specifically involved trying to link a former Conservative PM with the current Harper government. Still, there was no evidence that she had malicious motives. Rather, she seemed to be trying to advance a juicy story line — which is, after all, what many of us journos are  trying to do.*

* Including some from his own shop! Check this out. 

Having gotten caught, the CBC's obligation to the Conservative Party and the Canadian public was to serve up the reporter's name and promise it won't happen again. The Ceeb has done that. And so we can all put Pablo-gate behind us.

When I was a young boy, we made regular trips to B.C.'s Okanagan Valley where my great-uncle and aunt lived.

At a certain age, no trip would be complete without a trip into Kelowna to see Ogopogo, the friendly mythical serpent of Lake Okanagan.

Through the miracle of the Web, someone saw my comments about Ogopogo at Three Squirrels in a Pressure Cooker.

Cheryl was kind enough to send along some of her family photos which shows to me that the Ogopogo of my youth is not the Ogopogo of today. Thanks, Cheryl!

He's an NYT reporter. She's an NYT videographer. They're both in Iraq.

From the NYT:

The top editor of The Los Angeles Times has been forced out for resisting newsroom budget cuts, executives at the paper say, marking the fourth time in less than three years that the highest-ranking editor or the publisher has left for that reason.

The Associated Press has prepared an advance obituary for Britney Spears -- you know, in case a piano falls from the sky and squashes her dead.

Given the propensity for a certain proportion of today's young stars to live hard, should news organizations be prepared for their possible demise?

From the BBC:

At a short ceremony led by (Hrant) Dink's close friends and family, crowds of people marked his murder at 1457 (1257 GMT) on 19 January 2007 with a moment of silence outside the offices of the Agos newspaper (in Istanbul).

	You are here for justice today - a scream for justice rises from your silence Rakel Dink Obituary: Hrant Dink Dink murder divides Turks
	The murder triggered widespread anger and shock in Turkey

Dozens of carnations and candles were laid at the spot where the 53-year-old died. ...

The murder of Mr Dink triggered widespread anger and shock in Turkey, and caused massive crowds to take to the streets, chanting: "We are all Armenians, we are all Hrant Dinks."

Mr Dink was a hate figure for extreme (Turkish) nationalists and had received death threats before he was killed.

He was well-known for writing articles about the mass killing of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks in 1915.

From The Globe and Mail:

The Montreal newspaper La Presse will appeal a judgment ordering two of its reporters to answer questions about who leaked them a damaging document about terror suspect Adil Charkaoui.

So the two sides in the Toronto Star's negotiations settled without a real knock-down fight. Did someone give in on wage and benefit concessions, and will everyone now have to be a multimediaist?

From CP via CTV.ca:

Contract talks between Torstar Corp. and the union representing staff at Canada's largest circulation newspaper continued past a Friday midnight deadline.

Bob Hepburn, a spokesman for Torstar, said at midnight that talks were going on beyond the deadline.

Both the union and the newspaper's representatives were silent about what was being discussed behind closed doors at an undisclosed downtown Toronto location.

“I can't comment on any of the negotiations at this point,” Mr. Hepburn said earlier Friday. “There is a media blackout and we've made agreements with the union not to discuss negotiations or any points in the negotiations.”

A Globe and Mail article looks at why companies may have to get broken up under the new media concentration rules announced this week by the CRTC.

From AP via CTV.ca:

This image released by Golfweek magazine shows the cover of the Jan. 19, 2008 issue. (Golfweek / AP Photo)

Golfweek magazine replaced the editor responsible for illustrating the current cover with a noose and apologized Friday for its depiction of a Golf Channel anchor's use of "lynch" in a comment about Tiger Woods.

"We apologize for creating this graphic cover that received extreme negative reaction from consumers, subscribers and advertisers across the country," Turnstile Publishing Co. president William P. Kupper Jr. said. "We were trying to convey the controversial issues with a strong and provocative graphic image. It is now obvious that the overall reaction to our cover deeply offended many people. For that, we are deeply apologetic.

Turnstile is the parent company of Golfweek.

If you've been paying attention, this isn't a particularly newsworthy story, but the Mother Jones cover story on the environmental cost of China's attempt to live the American Dream is a sobering wrap-up of what that country is paying -- not to mention the planet as a whole.

From The Globe and Mail:

Newsroom and advertising employees at the Toronto Star, Canada's largest newspaper by circulation, have given their union a mandate to call a strike as early as midnight if negotiations with parent company Torstar Corp. break down today.

Both sides were careful to suggest yesterday that the talks being mediated by retired Ontario Superior Court Judge George Adams could continue into next week if progress is made on several contentious issues.  ...

From RSF:

Reporters Without Borders is very worried about the pressure being placed on the authorities by conservative religious leaders in the case of Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, a young journalist in the northern province of Balkh who has been detained since late October 2007 on charges of blasphemy and defaming Islam. The Council of Mullahs says he should be sentenced to death.

"The calls for the death penalty for Kambakhsh highlight the growing influence of fundamentalist groups on intellectual debate," the organisation said. "The blasphemy charges are an ill-disguised attempt to hide the desire of the local authorities to restrict press freedom."

This Washington Post series first ran in late September, but it's worth revisiting given the bad week that Canadian soldiers seem to be having in Afghanistan.

Go to Canadian Tire and look at the back of the package of (in my case) wood screws for a refresher course. Here, generally speaking, are the three steps:

1. Create a starter hole, if necessary

2. Rotate the screw with the appropriate tool so it screws into the wood

3. Stop when it reaches the appropriate depth

I wish I were making that up, but I'm not.

From globeandmail.com:

Bad news for Coco and Blinko -- children don't like clowns and even older kids are scared of them.

The news that will no doubt have clowns shedding tears was revealed in a poll of youngsters by researchers from the University of Sheffield who were examining how to improve the decor of hospital children's wards.

The study, reported in the Nursing Standard magazine, found all the 250 patients aged between four and 16 they quizzed disliked the use of clowns, with even the older ones finding them scary.

"As adults we make assumptions about what works for children," said Penny Curtis, a senior lecturer in research at the university.

"We found that clowns are universally disliked by children. Some found them quite frightening and unknowable."

Jack Handey, who came to fame through his "Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey" bit for Saturday Night Live, once said this about clowns:

To me, clowns aren't funny. In fact, they're kinda scary. I've wondered where this started, and I think it goes back to the time I went to the circus and a clown killed my dad.

Howell Raines, who left the NYT in disgrace after the Jayson Blair affair, will be writing a media column for Conde Nast Portfolio.

For some living in the region where the Rust Belt meets Appalachia who lost blue-collar manufacturing jobs and had them replaced with low-paying retail or service ones, economic reality means moving in with relatives or even their elderly parents.

From Time's Bill Saporito:

Yeah, it's true about me and steroids. I have to admit it now. Even though the Mitchell report didn't have a section on sports writers, ask yourself this: the Senator's staff spends months to produce a 400-plus page report documenting his investigation of steroid abuse in Major League Baseball, and within 24 hours a relatively small group of journalists produces 400,000 pages of newspaper stories, wire service copy and website reports. And just how do you think that gets done? Let me tell you, dear innocent reader, there's only so much coffee a laptop-toting journo can drink in a day.