Satire banned in Brazil ahead of presidential election Brazil's comedians and satirists have been banned from making fun of candidates ahead of the nation's presidential election in October Read Article   

   After reporter's subpoena, critics call Obama's leak-plugging efforts Bush-like
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 30, 2010
The Justice Department's decision to subpoena a New York Times reporter this week has convinced some press advocates that President Obama's team is pursuing leaks with the same fervor as the Bush administration. James Risen, who shared a Pulitzer Prize for disclosing President George W. Bush's domestic surveillance program, has refused to testify about the confidential sources he used for his 2006 book "State of War: The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration." "The message they are sending to everyone is, 'You leak to the media, we will get you,' " said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. In the wake of the Bush administration's aggressive stance toward the press, she said, "as far as I can tell there is absolutely no difference, and the Obama administration seems to be paying more attention to it. This is going to get nasty." Kurt Wimmer, a Washington lawyer who helped win White House approval for a proposed federal shield law, called the move against Risen "disappointing" after "we had positive discussions with the Obama administration" on the need to give journalists a legal foundation for protecting their sources in most cases. In the Risen case, Attorney General Eric Holder had to approve the subpoena under Justice Department procedures. The subpoena, disclosed Thursday by the Times, comes two weeks after the administration obtained an indictment of a former top National Security Agency official, Thomas Drake, for allegedly providing classified information to a Baltimore Sun reporter. Law enforcement officials, who declined to be identified discussing pending investigations, said the close timing of the two cases was coincidental and that the administration is not mounting an intensified effort to crack down on leakers. "As a general matter, we have consistently said that leaks of classified information are something we take extremely seriously,'' said Matthew Miller, chief Justice spokesman, who declined further comment. Joel Kurtzberg, Risen's lawyer, said the subpoena focuses on his reporting on covert CIA attempts to combat alleged nuclear weapons research by Iran. In one book chapter, Risen wrote that the CIA sent a Russian defector to Vienna in 2000 to provide an Iranian official with plans for a nuclear-bomb-triggering device -- one with a deliberate technical flaw -- along with a solicitation for payment. Risen depicted the operation as giving Iran valuable information. "We will be fighting to quash the subpoena," Kurtzman said. "Jim is the highest caliber of reporter and adhered to the highest standards of his profession in writing Chapter 9 of his book. And he intends to honor the promise of confidentiality he made to the source or sources." The Times said in a statement that Risen and his publisher, Simon and Schuster, are handling the matter because the subpoena does not involve material published by the paper. "Our view, however,…

  How Facebook beats MySpace In the battle of the social networks, the site that allows us to do what comes naturally is the one that people will prefer Comments (53)     Jenna McWilliams guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 23 June 2009 18.30 BST Article history
With news that Facebook has for the first time overtaken MySpace in users and that MySpace has responded by sacking nearly a third of its workforce, people are asking the obvious question: Since these sites serve approximately the same purpose – facilitating social networking among online-friend networks – what is MySpace doing wrong? Or, more accurately, what is Facebook doing right?The answer is simple: Contrary to popular opinion, people aren't attracted to dazzling new technologies. They're attracted to dazzling new technologies that support the practices they're already engaged in. Facebook knows how to offer an unobtrusive tool and then get out of the way. MySpace, by emphasising the features of the site itself, misses this point entirely.Though online social networking tools are new, the practice of social networking is as old as neighbourhoods. The Gutenberg press, the locomotive, the telephone, the fax machine, the internet – a rich variety of revolutionary innovations are linked to the innate human tendency toward social behaviour.While both Facebook and MySpace, the world's most popular social networking sites, support the human social tendency, they have done so by paths that have attracted very different audiences. Their slogans make the difference in approach clear. Facebook's promise is that it "helps you connect and share with the people in your life". The point here is that you already have a social network. Facebook exists only to support communication with the people in it.Compare this to the MySpace slogan: "A place for friends". The difference is subtle but significant. While Facebook is a tool intended to support communication and networking, MySpace is a thing, a place, a new hangout site – a kind of virtual alternative to the mall beloved by teenagers.If a virtual mall is what you want, then MySpace offers exactly that. Users can customise pages with music, images, colours and fonts. A MySpace page thus becomes a space for public performance and an extension of the user's identity.But here's the thing: We don't need another hangout place. We have that already. It's called the internet. What we need is a site that allows us to showcase the results of all that hanging out, a place to collect and display what we've gathered in all our time spent browsing the online shelves. That's what Facebook offers.In contrast to MySpace, Facebook offers little by way of variation: blue border, white background, a list of friends' status messages down the middle. With a few minor exceptions, a Facebook page is a Facebook page is a Facebook page.And users like it that way. For proof, think back to the outrage users expressed when Facebook touched…

George Will's global meltdown The venerable Washington Post columnist's climate change denial is taking its toll on his newspaper's credibility
Dan Kennedy guardian.co.uk,
Article history Perhaps George Will's mother told him there would be days like these.On Sunday, during his regular turn on ABC News' This Week, the conservative commentator tried to tell a joke about global warming, an issue that has earned him considerable disdain and ridicule over the past couple of months. "I think it's a climate-change thing," he said, apparently referring to the Obama administration's signals that it may back away from cap-and-trade legislation. Or maybe it was the budget in general. It was hard to tell.He plunged ahead."That is," he continued mirthlessly, "we're going to keep the planet from warming by having all these dollars going back and forth. It will block the sunlight. Every dollar that comes in, I gather they're going to somehow shuffle out to people and make good the increased energy prices, right? You can't stop laughing."Except that he didn't laugh. Nor did anyone else.When last we left Will, a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, he had written two dismissive commentaries about global warming that he based on his own demonstrably false reading of the scientific evidence. For that he earned a full-throated defenceknuckle-rap from the Post's ombudsman, Andrew Alexander. from the Post's editorial-page editor, Fred Hiatt, and a polite but firm Since then, things have gotten worse for Will, as he has faced a virtual insurrection from his reality-based colleagues at the Post.Will's humiliation began with his ill-advised decision to hazard yet a third column on global warming. On April 2, he wrote: "Reducing carbon emissions supposedly will reverse warming, which is allegedly occurring even though, according to statistics published by the World Meteorological Organization, there has not been a warmer year on record than 1998."Trouble is, the scientific case for human-caused global warming, already compelling, only grows stronger with each new study. And journalists at the Post have had enough of Will's disingenuously selective reading of the evidence.On April 7, the Post's Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan reported that the Arctic ice cap was melting even more rapidly than scientists had predicted. They added this for good measure: "The new evidence ... contradicts data cited in widely circulated reports by Washington Post columnist George F Will that sea ice in the Arctic has not significantly declined since 1979."And in case anyone missed the message, Washington Post science editor Nils Bruzelius told blogger David Roberts that the swipe at Will was his idea.Also on April 7, Post weather blogger Andrew Freedman devoted an entire dispatch to Will's columns, calling them "a case study in how one can cherry pick scientific data to fit their own agenda." And he took on Will's 1998 fixation, writing that – as scientists have observed repeatedly…