Friday, February 04, 2011
Thursday, February 03, 2011
ABC News Reporter Threatened With Beheading
ABC News Reporter Threatened With Beheading
Attacks on Foreign Press Growing During Egyptian Uprising
By MARK MOONEY
Feb. 3, 2011—
A group of angry Egyptian men carjacked an ABC News crew and threatened to behead them today in the latest and most menacing attack on foreign reporters trying to cover the anti-government uprising.
Producer Brian Hartman, cameraman Akram Abi-hanna and two other ABC News employees were surrounded on a crowded road that leads from Cairo's airport to the city's downtown area.
While ABC News and other press agencies had been taking precautions to avoid volatile situations, the road to the airport had been a secure route until today. One of their two vehicles was carrying cameras and transmission equipment strapped to the roof, indicating they were foreign journalists.
Hartman says it was only through the appeal of Abi-hanna, who is Lebanese and a veteran ABC cameraman, that they were saved from being killed or severely beaten.
"We thought we were goners," Hartman said later. "We absolutely thought we were doomed."
Word of their harrowing ordeal came in a Twitter message from Hartman that stated, "Just escaped after being carjacked at a checkpoint and driven to a compound where men surrounded the car and threatened to behead us."
"The men released us only after our camera man appealed to the generous spirit of the Egyptian people, hugging and kissing an elder," he added in a subsequent tweet.
Minutes after receiving news that Hartman had been safely released, ABC News anchor Christiane Amanpour and her team were surrounded and interrogated by a threatening crowd in Cairo.
Wednesday, February 02, 2011
New gunfire erupts in central Cairo - CNN.com
Image by robertxcadena via FlickrNew gunfire erupts in central Cairo - CNN.comCairo, Egypt (CNN) -- Heavy gunfire reverberated in central Cairo before dawn Thursday as supporters and foes of embattled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak continued to face off at Tahrir Square, where chunks of concretes and Molotov cocktails were employed as weapons in the escalating crisis.
CNN personnel saw wounded people being carried into Tahrir Square, largely held by anti-regime demonstrators, through an entrance that leads to the nearby Egyptian Museum. Several ambulances entered and left the square shortly before 4 a.m. Thursday.
The source of the gunfire was not immediately known.
Voices were heard chanting a prayer after a day of violent street battles in central Cairo.
Sustained automatic weapons fire, including from what sounded like a heavy machine gun, echoed around the square, the epicenter of nine days of protests calling for Mubarak's ouster.
Anti-government demonstrators hunkered down behind makeshift barricades in the square and outside the nearby national museum against the onslaught, which demonstrators said included plainclothes police officers.
"They're coming in with weapons. They're spreading violence," human rights activist Gigi Ibrahim told CNN on Wednesday. "We've had peaceful protests here since Friday and no violence here. Only today were we faced with this really violent reaction."
The pro-government protesters were not impeded by the army when they entered the square, CNN's Ben Wedeman said early Thursday. Anti-regime protesters are now unhappy with troops, whose commanders had promised Monday not to use force against peaceful demonstrations, for standing by, he said.
Small fires burned in the square early Thursday, some spreading to trees and walls.
Egypt's health ministry reported three people were killed and 639 were wounded in Wednesday's clashes, according to the state television network. Reported fatalities in the previous eight days of demonstrations ranged as high as 300, but CNN has not been able to independently confirm the death toll.
In one surreal moment, whip-wielding Mubarak supporters thundered through the crowd astride horses and camels, and at least one man was pulled off his mount and beaten. A Mubarak supporter who spoke to CNN said the riders were pyramid workers who were protesting the negative economic impact of the crisis.
"What you are seeing is the demonstration of the real Egyptian people who are trying to take back their country, trying to take back their street," said businessman Khaled Ahmed, who described himself as "pro-Egyptian."
But some observers said the pro-Mubarak push Wednesday was likely orchestrated by a regime bent on breaking up peaceful demonstrations.
"These are tactics that are well-known in Egypt," Michele Dunne, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told CNN's John King.
Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution said the "rent-a-thugs" were likely sanctioned and paid by the government. This is meant to create an image of chaos so the government can move in to restore order, he said.
"Mubarak has -- now, certainly, with the violence today, but even before that -- lost the confidence of the overwhelming number of the Egyptian people," Kagan said.
As night fell, the sound of gunfire reverberated in Tahrir Square, the name of which means "liberation" in Arabic. People hurled verbal insults, Molotov cocktails, rocks and anything else they could find -- shards of metal, sticks, shoes -- at one another.
Desperate for more ammunition, they dismantled sidewalks and picked up chunks of cement to throw. They beat each other in what rapidly spiraled into utter mayhem.
Hundreds of injured people were treated by doctors and medical staff, who turned to volunteers for assistance.
CNN iReporter Hunter Moore, 26, helped treat the wounded. The U.S. schoolteacher said Tuesday's crowds at Tahrir Square were mostly peaceful. "It went downhill really, really quickly" on Wednesday, he told CNN.
It was unclear whether such confrontations were being repeated elsewhere. Other Cairo neighborhoods were calm, and rallies in Egypt's second-largest city, Alexandria, were largely peaceful.
Mubarak's opponents had stood shoulder to shoulder in Tahrir Square to call for his immediate resignation in a massive rally on Tuesday. The 82-year-old president's announcement that night that he would spend the remaining seven months of his current term working to ensure a "peaceful transition of power" failed to satisfy them, and they vowed to keep up the pressure on him to resign.
The crisis has paralyzed the Egyptian economy, as the government has closed banks, idled trains and shuttered schools. Markets are running short of basic food staples, and the situation is hurting the ability of ordinary citizens to join the demonstrations, opposition activist Ziad Aly told CNN.
"We can't get enough bread. We can't get enough food supplies," he said.
Vice President Omar Suleiman reiterated the government stance that the people have been heard, that they should go home and that they should stop demonstrating. Protesters should respect the curfew and "enable people to return to their jobs and their daily lives, and to allow schools and universities to reopen," he said in a statement.
The state-run television network, Nile TV, sought to portray the unrest as a "foreign conspiracy" fueled by international journalists, several of whom -- including CNN's Anderson Cooper -- were attacked during Wednesday's clashes.
Despite reports that shots had been fired, Nile TV's reporters denied any shooting had taken place or even that violence had broken out in Tahrir Square. The network also said that members of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood were heading to the square "to throw balls of fire and to start acts of riots and violence."
When asked if that were true, Mohamed Morsy, a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, said the action came from all segments of the Egyptian people, "not the Muslim Brotherhood only."
Morsy told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that the time for change is now, not when Mubarak's term ends.
"We need a new era, a new regime," Morsy said. "We have a constitution."
Asked whether Suleiman could lead the government until new elections, Morsy said the head of the country's supreme court should fulfill that role.
In Washington, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said an end to violence was "imperative."
"It is our hope that what we saw today, we won't see tomorrow or Friday or into the weekend," he said.
But Mubarak's government bluntly told outsiders to mind their own business.
"Our interactions within our country are Egyptian affairs and nothing more than that," Fo
reign Ministry spokesman Hossam Zaki said. Egypt "will continue to be a beacon of moderation and stability in our region," he said, but its people must settle their differences without "intervention from the outside."
Though Mubarak's concessions were large and remarkable for a man who has held a tight grip on power for three decades, it was too little, too late for many Egyptians.
"He is unfortunately going to continue the agony for another six or seven months," opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei said Tuesday night.
However, Mubarak supporter Waleed Tawfik told CNN that not all Egyptians agree that Mubarak should step down immediately.
"Change will not happen overnight. There's not a magical button for change. Change will take time," he said.
The Egyptian army can't sit on the sidelines too much longer, or it could risk unraveling, said a foreign policy expert.
The army needs to pick a course of action by Friday, when more mass protests are expected after prayers, Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told CNN's "Parker Spitzer."
The Egyptian crisis is among the aftershocks of the revolt in Tunisia that forced that nation's longtime strongman to flee to Saudi Arabia in mid-January. In Yemen, President Ali Abdullah Saleh -- who has been in office for 32 years -- said Wednesday he will not run for president nor hand over power to his son once his current term ends in 2013.
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
The New York Times vs. Fox News - Keach Hagey - POLITICO.com
Image via CrunchBaseThe New York Times vs. Fox News - Keach Hagey - POLITICO.comNew York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller has become the most prominent media figure so far to blame Fox News for the polarized discourse that has become such a hot topic in the wake of the Tucson shooting.
During an interview with Marvin Kalb in at the National Press Club in Washington Monday night, Keller expanded his complaint with Rupert Murdoch beyond the scope of the Wall Street Journal’s newspaper war with the Times, accusing Murdoch of poisoning the American discourse through Fox News.
“I think the effect of Fox News on American public life has been to create a level of cynicism about the news in general,” Keller said. “It has contributed to the sense that they are all just out there with a political agenda, but Fox is just more overt about it. And I think that’s unhealthy.”
Keller has made similar comments interviews before, telling NPR in September that Murdoch’s “major impact in American media has been Fox News” and that “that impact has been to introduce a level of cynicism into the public debate.” But on Monday he went further.
“We have had a lot of talk since the Gabby Giffords attempted murder about civility in our national discourse, and I make no connection between the guy who shot those people in Tucson and the national discourse,” Keller said. “But it is true that the national discourse is more polarized and strident than it has been in the past, and to some extent, I would lay that at the feet of Rupert Murdoch.”
Fox News did not reply to a request for comment.
These comments were a one-two punch for Keller, allowing him to indirectly smear a business competitor while going directly after one of the Times’s loudest critics. (Fox News’s top-rated star, Bill O’Reilly, calls the paper part of the “far left” and has called its editorial page editor a “dishonest loon.”)
Ever since Murdoch declared war on the New York Times by launching a New York metro section of the Wall Street Journal last April, the normally staid Times leadership has gamely played the part of Murdoch’s dueling partner.
It welcomed its competition with a sarcastic leaked internal memo reminding the Journal editors that the Dodgers now played in Los Angeles. A few months later, Keller told Vanity Fair that the Times leadership was breathing a sigh of relief that the Journal’s effort turned out to be “so amateurish,” saying, “you had the sense that the emperor has no clothes.”
The Journal, meanwhile, fought back by including a photograph of Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.’s chin in a an article about feminine-looking men.
The volleys had the old-fashioned, cartoonish quality you’d expect from a big-city newspaper war. There was a sense that it was all good fun.
And indeed, Keller has proven to be more of a pugilist than his predecessors, ready with the snarky quote when necessary. (“I read the Journal little less now,” he told Vanity Fair. “I find that I can skim it in a way that I couldn’t before.”)
In part because of this, the Times’s damaging investigative reporting on the News Corp-owned News of the World phone-hacking scandal, which continues to resound through the media and political worlds in the UK, raised a few eyebrows, including some at News Corp.
After the Times published its story, Bill Akass, the managing editor of The News of the World, objected, accusing the Times of using its journalism to attack a business rival.
”It stretches credulity to believe the decision to devote such resources to investigate an old story was an impartial act, uninfluenced by competitive rivalry,” he said.
The Times’s public editor, Arthur Brisbane, devoted a column to the charges, in which Keller defended the story, saying he and the other Times editors knew that the paper would use “this dubious argument” as its first line of defense.
”It was at least in the back of our minds that because Mr. Murdoch has declared war on The New York Times, a story centered on one of his newspapers had to bend over backwards to be seen as fair,” Keller told Brisbane. “In my view, the process was thorough and scrupulous.”
A few Times insiders wondered whether an earlier incarnation of the Times would have charged ahead on the story so forcefully, since the accusations that the Times was acting in its business interest would be hard to avoid.
But in an email to POLITICO last fall, Keller pointed to the Times’ long history of aggressive media reporting, which was tough on Murdoch before he declared war on the Times.
A 2007 two-part series took a hard and not always flattering look at Murdoch’s attempts to break into the Chinese market and lobby for favor on Capitol Hill, for example. And a January 2010 profile of Fox News chief Roger Ailes made news with a quote from British PR guru Matthew Freud, Murdoch’s son-in-law, saying, “I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to.”
With Keller’s comments on Monday, he put himself squarely in Freud’s camp, and among those who regard Fox News as the barbarians at the gate.
But there have been times when Ailes’s news judgment bested Keller’s, by his own admission. The most famous of these was the ACORN scandal, which Fox News covered early and often and the Times all but ignored in the early days.
The episode prompted a column from public editor Clark Hoyt containing mea culpas from both Keller and Times managing editor Jill Abramson.
Abramson said the Times had been “slow off the mark” on the ACORN story, and blamed “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” She and Keller said they would assign an editor to monitor opinion media – particularly, we can assume, of the right-wing variety — and brief them on any scandals that they should be paying attention to.
Jon Stewart Advises Embattled Egyptian President Mubarak: Let’s Go Exile!
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Mess O'Slightly-to-the-Left O'Potamia - Egyptian Protests | ||||
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