Palestine won a victory in its climb to full UN membership today when it was admitted as a full member to UNESCO, the organization’s cultural body, in “a highly divisive move" opposed by the United States, Germany, and other nations, the AP is reporting. "Huge cheers went up in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization after delegates approved the membership in a vote of 107-14 with 52 abstentions,” according to the AP. But the United States is threatening to withhold the $80 million it contributes to the agency’s budget over the vote. "Existing United States legislation appears to mandate the cutoff of money to the United Nations or any of its agencies if they grant ‘full membership as a state to any organization or group that does not have the internationally recognized attributes of statehood,’ and more legislation along the same lines has been introduced. Read more.
How does it end? The dictator dies, shrivelled and demented, in his bed; he flees the rebels in a private plane; he is caught hiding in a mountain outpost, a drainage pipe, a spider hole. He is tried. He is not tried. He is dragged, bloody and dazed, through the streets, then executed. The humbling comes in myriad forms, but what is revealed is always the same: the technologies of paranoia, the stories of slaughter and fear, the vaults, the national economies employed as personal property, the crazy pets, the prostitutes, the golden fixtures.
Politico reported late on Sunday that Herman Cain was twice accused of “inappropriate behavior” by women who worked with him when he ran the National Restaurant Association in late 1990s.
The story, which gives few details of the incidents, says that in both cases the women were given financial settlements and left the company. The settlements included non-disclosure agreements. Politico claims it has seen documents spelling out the accusations and the terms of the settlements and has identified both women, but will not name them. However, it does leave clues that will surely lead other news organizations to the women, or guesses as to the women might be. Read more.
In 2002, Google began scanning the world’s 130 million or so books in preparation for the “secret ‘books’ project” that eventually became Google Books. In 2004, they began offering access to these scans, displaying the irritatingly-named “snippets” of books in their search results. And in no time at all, they were getting sued by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers for copyright infringement. These lawsuits, plus two more that were filed subsequently against Google, resulted in a six-year rollercoaster ride that, like all good roller coasters, exhilarated, terrified and rattled all the participants, and ended by thumping their quaking bods to a halt, last March, in very nearly the same place from which they’d started out.
The 16 nations for which Queen Elizabeth II is nominally sovereign have voted one for the ladies. “Centuries of British royal discrimination came to an end Friday after Commonwealth leaders agreed to drop rules that give sons precedence as heir to the throne and bar anyone in line for the crown from marrying a Roman Catholic," Reuters (along with the AP) reports. The royal rule change means that from now on, daughters won’t be placed behind their younger brothers in the line of succession to the British throne and members of the royal family won’t lose their spot in line if they marry a Catholic. Read more.
Read more.Army National Guard Maj. Shannon McLaughlin, her wife Casey, and other service members will file a suit in Boston today that challenges the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act,reports The Washington Post. The suit also includes “five other troops and two career Army and Navy veterans,” and their lawyer tells The Post that it is intended to address federal code that doesn’t let gay spouses access basic benefits like “military identification cards, access to bases, recreational programs, spousal support groups and burial rights at national cemeteries.” The lawyer for the troops, Aubrey Sarvis, put it simply to the newspaper: “What Shannon and Casey are seeking is the same treatment that their straight counterparts, who are legally married, receive every day without question and take for granted.”
New figures released by the Department of Commerce show the U.S. economy saw what were deemed modest gains in the third quarter, at a rate of 2.5 percent. “That was a big acceleration from the 1.3 percent pace in the April-June quarter and matched economists’ expectations,” wrote Reuters in a brief analysis. Read more.
Look: people are frustrated. And that frustration has expressed itself in a lot of different ways: it expressed itself in the Tea Party; it’s expressing itself in Occupy Wall Street. I do think what this signals is that people in leadership,whether it’s corporate leadership, leaders of the banks, leaders in Washington — everybody needs to understand that the American people feel like nobody’s looking out for them right now.
You know, traditionally, what held this country together was this notion that if you work hard, if you;re playing by the rules, if you’re responsible, if you’re looking out for your family, you’re showing up to work everyday and doing a good job — you got a chance to get ahead, you got a chance to succeed. And right now, it feels to people like the deck’s stacked against them and the folks in power don’t seem to be paying attention to that.
…We are working every single day to figure out how do we give people a fair shake, and how do we make sure that everybody’s doing their fair share. Then people won’t be occupying the streets because they’ll have a job and they’ll feel like they’re able to get ahead. And part of my job over the next year is to make sure that if they’re not seeing it out of Congress, then at minimum they’re seeing out of their President somebody’s who’s going to be fighting for them.
”—President BARACK OBAMA, reacting to the national Occupy Wall Street movement, on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno. (via inothernews)The public-interest journalism on which democracy depends is under enormous financial and technological pressure.
Computer scientists help journalists deal with these pressures by developing new interfaces, indexing algorithms and data extraction techniques.
According to a new Congressional Budget Office report released on Tuesday, since 1979 the average, after-tax income of the top one percent of American households has risen 275 percent. Meanwhile, for the poorest one-fifth of the country, it’s gone up just 18 percent. And for the biggest slice of “middle class” America – the three-fifths of homes between the top and bottom 20% – incomes have risen just 40%. Read more.
How far removed from the real world do you have to be to think publishing, with no warning, a graphic image of a dead or
dieingdying person covered in blood is fine? Newsweek’s Tumblr even calls the posting of the grotesque image “a necessity in an age of media-driven rumors”.No, Newsweek, it fucking isn’t. Unless you think your readers are knuckle dragging, celebrity-masturbating, morons. Are your Tumblr followers people unable to understand something without you pushing an image of a corpse in their face?
I can only assume the people in charge of the Tumblr feeds for both Newsweek and The Atlantic live in some corner of an office, detached from the real world in some kind of bubble. The kind of bubble where reason and logic, common sense and common decency become warped by deadlines, hits, spin and hype.
I hate the internet sometimes.
Link here, warning: graphic.
Edit: I should probably point out the reason I name Newsweek and The Atlantic specifically is because they’re the two publications I follow on Tumblr who posted the image.
Edit 2: Newsweek have posted a video of “Muammar Gaddafi’s corpse being kicked through the streets of Sirte”. And I kid you not, they say “We’re posting it because many others have”. That is not a good reason.
Edit 3: The Guardian’s website has the image on its front page. Anyone going online to read the news in the UK will have that image unavoidably shown to them. Am I completely out of touch with what’s acceptable?
NEWSWEEK:
We didn’t mean to offend anyone with what we published here yesterday regarding Gaddafi’s death. We chose to do so because those images bear witness to the historical events that unfolded in Libya as the months-long rebellion overran the remaining walls of a fallen dictatorship.
These images, while graphic, were broadcast on multiple TV networks (CNN and al-Jazeera to name two) and led the front-pages of newspapers around the world. If we abstained, would that be “the high-road?” Or would we be missing out on covering a slice of history, and failing to convey the whole story to you guys? Keep in mind: we aren’t chasing deadlines on tumblr.
Occasionally the photographs and videos coming out of the Arab Spring uprisings just straight up suck. From them, we’re reminded of the absolute brutality of humanity. But, at the end of the day, Gaddafi, Ben Ali, Mubarak are out of power. That’s a direct result of the prevalence of camera phones, and the very fact people like you were able to witness the violent crackdowns on protesters in nearly real-time. It’s only fair that goes both ways.
NWK nails it. I’ll add that, after much conversation in the office about how to present this content, we took our cue from other news organizations and, when a few Tumblr followers mentioned their concern with us posting graphic images with no warning, switched to posting images in-text, with a warning, so they had to be expanded in the dashboard. That said, this criticism is welcomed. If you have issues with the way images and videos are presented here, please feel free to Ask Us Anything or shoot me a note here. - JK