In another inscrutable move by their state-controlled media, the North Korean government altered a widely published photo of Kim Jong Il’s elaborate funeral procession. Curiously, they chose to remove an errant group of men who appear to be filming the production.
The original photo, below:
And the altered version:
The North Koreans may have been better off, rather than trying to fix the feng shui of the crowd, applying their Photoshop skills to the 1970s Lincoln limousines — apparently the finest hearse the Hermit Kingdom has to offer.
7:02 p.m. | Updated The New York Times mistakenly sent an e-mail on Wednesday to more than eight million people who had shared their information with the company, erroneously informing them that they had canceled home delivery of the newspaper.
The Times Company, which initially mischaracterized the mishap as spam, apologized for sending the e-mail. The people who received the message represented a cross section of readers who had given their e-mail addresses to the newspaper, said Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times Company.
“We regret that the error was made, but no one’s security has been compromised,” she said.
The e-mail urged recipients to consider continuing their subscriptions to The Times at 50 percent off for 16 weeks. The message sent off a flood of Twitter reactions and calls to The Times. The Times’s official Twitter feed sent this message: “If you received an e-mail today about canceling your New York Times subscription, ignore it. It’s not from us.”
Those comments raised questions from some recipients about whether hackers had access to their credit card and personal information, a misimpression that Ms. Murphy said the company was working to correct.
She said the e-mail had been sent by a Times employee and not Epsilon Interactive, a third-party service the company uses to communicate with subscribers.
Late Wednesday afternoon, The Times sent an e-mail to recipients of the erroneous note explaining the error. A notice also appeared on NYTimes.com.
“It’s in our interest now to make sure people understand the correct situation,” Ms. Murphy said.
Listen, errors happen, but why did the Times rush out with a report that was inaccurate? And as for the special offer, the Times isn’t honoring it.
Damon is in the news for this quote about President Obama:
“I’ve talked to a lot of people who worked for Obama at the grassroots level,” he said. “One of them said to me, ‘Never again. I will never be fooled again by a politician.’
“You know, a one-term president with some balls who actually got stuff done would have been, in the long run of the country, much better,” he added.
Balls. If a Republican said this, the media would go nuclear. But not for Matty. Here’s how USA Today cleaned up the comment:
“I’ve talked to a lot of people who worked for Obama at the grass-roots level. One of them said to me, ‘Never again. I will never be fooled again by a politician,’ ” says Damon, who has been critical of the president in the past. “You know, a one-term president with some (nerve) who actually got stuff done would have been, in the long run of the country, much better
USA Today need to grow a pair and quote him accurately.
Here’s a plausible campaign scenario under SOPA. Imagine you are running for Congress in a competitive House district. You give a strong interview to a local morning news show and your campaign posts the clip on your website. When your opponent’s campaign sees the video, it decides to play hardball and sends a notice to your Internet service provider alerting them to what it deems “infringing content.” It doesn’t matter if the content is actually pirated. The ISP has five days to pull down your website and the offending clip or be sued. If you don’t take the video down, even if you believe that the content is protected under fair use, your website goes dark.
The ability of any entity to file an infringement notice is one of SOPA’s biggest problems. It creates an unprecedented “private right of action” that would allow a private party, without any involvement by a court, to effectively shut down a website. For a campaign, this would mean shouldering legal responsibility for all user-generated posts. As more issue-based and political campaigns utilize social media to spread their message and engage supporters, a site could be targeted not only for the campaign’s own posts but also for well-meaning comments from supporters.
The Columbia School of Journalism announced yesterday that Al Jazeera English won one of 14 duPont awards, awarded for excellence in a range of journalism disciplines. Poynter reports:
The duPont award recognized excellent reporting by “Fault Lines,” AJE’s weekly documentary program that primarily examines the United States’ role in the world; the winning program highlighted the struggles and slow recovery in Haiti six months after the earthquake.
Al Jazeera does indeed deserve praise for some of its journalism, which seems to be relatively unbiased coverage with an impressive global reach, including in somewhat neglected areas such as Africa and Central Asia (e.g., they had a bureau in Kabul before 9/11).
But the network is also frequently accused of anti-American bias (despite its funding from an American ally, the Emir of Qatar) — and it doesn’t seem like calling their program on America’s role in the world Fault Lines will help defuse that.
Scandalous! The New York Times has published a recipe for a roasted beef tenderloin and suggests you cook the roast until it reaches an internal temperature of 120 degrees Fahrenheit, a full 25 degrees below the government suggested temperature of 145 degrees.
And no warnings on the dangers of undercooked meat?
Keep running with scissors you Old Gray Lady. It suits you.
Piers Morgan told the committee investigating the U.K. phone-hacking case on Tuesday that he did not have direct knowledge of the practice during his time as a tabloid editor in Britain, but refused to discuss other aspects of his tenure.
“I would say the average editor is aware of about 5 percent of what his journalists are up to at any given time,” Morgan said during testimony via video from Los Angeles.
The CNN host and former Daily Mirror editor acknowledged that private investigators were used by the paper. What were they used for?
“I don’t know, because I was never directly involved,” Morgan — seated at a table flanked by two bottles of Evian and a small stack of books — told the committee. “This was dealt with through the news desk or features desk … Certainly all journalists knew they had to act within the confines of the law. This was enshrined within their contracts–I didn’t have concerns.”
Morgan also dismissed the idea that passages in his 2006 book “The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade” prove he knew about phone-hacking activity while he was an editor.
“Is it a record of 100 percent historical import?” he said. “I would say, ‘No.’”
So his defense is that he a) didn’t know what was going on and b) when he wrote about what was going on, it wasn’t 100% accurate? The rest here.
Republicans muscled a budget through the House of Representatives in April that they said would take an important step toward reducing the federal deficit. Introduced by U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the plan kept Medicare intact for people 55 or older, but dramatically changed the program for everyone else by privatizing it and providing government subsidies.
Democrats pounced. Just four days after the party-line vote, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee released a Web ad that said seniors will have to pay $12,500 more for health care “because Republicans voted to end Medicare.”
Rep. Steve Israel of New York, head of the DCCC, appeared on cable news shows and declared that Republicans voted to “terminate Medicare.” A Web video from the Agenda Project, a liberal group, said the plan would leave the country “without Medicare” and showed a Ryan look-alike pushing an old woman in a wheelchair off a cliff. And just last month, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sent a fundraising appeal that said: “House Republicans’ vote to end Medicare is a shameful act of betrayal.”
Mitt Romney read Letterman’s “Top 10″ list last night, which should really help him with conservative voters who were worried he wasn’t goofy enough to be President of the United States. Mission Accomplished, sir!
A marathon debate today in the House of Representatives on the Stop Online Piracy Act wasn’t derailed by procedural questions, even though not one hearing had been held on how the law would actually work.
It wasn’t derailed by questions about SOPA’s substance, even though legal scholars and technologists have said it could suppress free speech by virtually deleting Web sites accused of copyright infringement.
Instead, today’s markup of SOPA in the House Judiciary committee was derailed by a snarky post on Twitter.
The tweet in question came from Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), a pro-gun, anti-abortion conservative who wrote that: “We are debating the Stop Online Piracy Act and Shiela Jackson [sic] has so bored me that I’m killing time by surfing the Internet.”
It seems life as missionary in France wasn’t as rough on Romney as he’s suggested. From The Telegraph:
US election 2012: Mitt Romney’s life as a poor Mormon missionary in France questioned
Much of Mitt Romney’s life as a Mormon missionary in France was not as poor or arduous as he has claimed, say those who knew him at the time.
It was a rare reflection by Mitt Romney on his life as a young Mormon, offered as proof to struggling Americans that despite being born into privilege and amassing a $250 million fortune, he too had known hard times.
But the Republican presidential hopeful spent a significant portion of his 30-month mission in a Paris mansion described by fellow American missionaries to The Daily Telegraph as “palace”. It featured stained glass windows, chandeliers, and an extensive art collection. It was staffed by two servants – a Spanish chef and a houseboy.
Although he spent time in other French cities, for most of 1968, Mr Romney lived in the Mission Home, a 19th century neoclassical building in the French capital’s chic 16th arrondissement. “It was a house built by and for rich people,” said Richard Anderson, the son of the mission president at the time of Mr Romney’s stay. “I would describe it as a palace”.
Tearful as he described the house, Mr Anderson, 70, of Kaysville, Utah, said Romney aides had asked him not to speak publicly about their time together there.
Establishment Republicans are dumping on Newt all over the place. NATIONAL REVIEW came out last night with an editorial, Buckley’s magazine, it used to be conservative. They didn’t recommend anybody, just not Newt — no way Newt — they implied Romney, of course, but they didn’t endorse him…they ruled out Perry and Bachmann…it was just anti-Newt.
As reported yesterday by Patrick Brennan, MSNBC tried to connect Mitt Romney to the KKK for saying, “keep America American.” NBC has since sprung into action as it attempts to backtrack from the story:
