Monthly Archives: May 2004

Dark Days: U.S. Soldiers Accused of Abusing Elderly Iraqi Woman

Politics

TURKISHPROTEST

Hooded Turkish protestors hold pictures of Iraqi detainees and anti U.S.
posters, during a demonstration in Istanbul, yesterday. The protest,
organized by Mazlumder, a pro-Islamic human rights group, condemned
the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. and British soldiers in Iraq

U.S. soldiers who detained an elderly Iraqi woman last year placed a harness on her, made her crawl on all fours and rode her like a donkey, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s human rights envoy to Iraq said on Wednesday. The envoy, veteran Labour MP Ann Clwyd, said she had investigated the claims of the woman in her 70s and believed them to be true.
In related news, the Washington Post has obtained 1,000 digital ‘travelogue’ photos taken recently by U.S. soldiers, including …

“photographs of naked men, apparently prisoners, sprawled on top of one another while soldiers stand around them … another of a naked man with a dark hood over his head, handcuffed to a cell door … and another of a naked man handcuffed to a bunk bed, his arms splayed so wide that his back is arched. A pair of women’s underwear covers his head and face.”

The full Washington Post story is available here. One distressing new photo shows Pfc. Lynndie England of the 372nd Military Police Company holding a leash tied around a naked man’s neck at Abu Ghraib prison.
Reuters has made available 227 Iraq-related photos in a captioned slide show presentation tracking the events in Iraq in the past week.

BBC Takes First Steps Towards TV On The Internet

Television

INTERNET-TV

Coming to a computer, a PDA or a cell phone near you: Internet TV!
According to a story in the New Zealand Herald, later this month the BBC will launch a pilot project destined to be the first step in a process that could lead to all television programmes, across the globe, being made available on the Internet.
Says Ashley Highfield, the BBC’s director of new media and technology …

“If we don’t enter this market, then exactly what happened to the music industry could happen to us, where we ignore it, keep our heads in the sand and everybody starts posting the content up there and ripping us off”


Highfield indicated that the quality of the programmes on offer will be so high that the experience of watching a show on a PDA will be similar to that of viewing an in-flight film on the seatback of an aircraft.

2004 Television Season Finales: You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

Television


Preparing for the final episode of Friends. Is life as we know coming to an end?

Zap2it.com (to your left, under Television) has put together a handy schedule of all of the 2004 season finales.
For instance, tonight is the last episode of Scrubs on NBC at 9:30 p.m. And, unless you’ve been hiding in a cave in Borneo, you are absolutely aware that Friends goes away — FOREVER — this Thursday. Read The Defamer’s (the web’s newest gossipy blog) spoiler-laden story on just exactly what’s going to transpire on the final show.

Media Matters: Connecting Progressive Websites

Media



There are a couple of new websites that are turning a critical eye on the right in America which VanRamblings would like to bring to your attention.
The first website is called Media Matters, edited by David Brock.
According to a story in the New York Times …

David Brock, the former right-wing journalist turned liberal, describes himself as once having been a rather large cog in the machinery of the conservative media. Now Mr. Brock is starting a new endeavor built to combat the very sector of journalism that spawned him, with support from the same sorts of people (Democrats) about whom he once wrote so critically.
With more than $2 million in donations from wealthy liberals, Mr. Brock will start a new Internet site this week that he says will monitor the conservative media and correct erroneous assertions in real time.

Also, say hello to Moving Ideas.org, formerly known as the Electronic Policy Network, a website which is “dedicated to explaining and popularizing complex policy ideas to a broader audience.” From its about page …

Our goal is to improve collaboration and dialogue between policy and grassroots organizations, and to promote their work to journalists and legislators … (by) post(ing) the best ideas and resources from leading progressive research and advocacy institutions … We hope to strengthen democratic participation by providing a more inclusive and intelligible debate about the issues that shape our world.

Two worthy additions to the new media dialogue on issues affecting us all.