News Roundup Archive

Thursday, September 6, 2012

USIP's Media, Conflict & Peacebuilding Roundup

United States Institute of Peace

 

Center of Innovation: Media, Conflict and Peacebuilding

Weekly News Roundup, August 30 - September 5, 2012

Media and Journalism

Internet and Social Media

What's New from PeaceMedia


Media and Journalism

Why Didn't CNN's International Arm Air Its Own Documentary on Bahrain's Arab Spring Repression?
In late March 2011, as the Arab Spring was spreading, CNN sent a four-person crew to Bahrain to produce a one-hour documentary on the use of internet technologies and social media by democracy activists in the region. Featuring on-air investigative correspondent Amber Lyon, the CNN team had a very eventful eight-day stay in that small, US-backed kingdom. By the time the CNN crew arrived, many of the sources who had agreed to speak to them were either in hiding or had disappeared.
See the full article (Guardian, Glenn Greenwald, 9/4/12)
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Smiles and Barbs for Clinton in China
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived here on Tuesday night to a barrage of unusually harsh coverage in China's official news media over what they called American meddling in territorial disputes in the region - and then a strikingly warm welcome from the country's foreign minister. Articles and editorials in China's official media, as well as comments by Chinese analysts, contained unusual bite on Tuesday, including personal criticism of Mrs. Clinton.
See the full article (New York Times, Steven Lee Myers and Jane Perlez, 9/4/12) *NYT sign-up may be required to view the full article
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Israeli Judge to Reporter - State Security Matters More Than Press Freedom
An Israeli court has ruled that state security is more important than freedom of the press and the public's right to know. A judge decided that national security trumped the rights of journalists because, without the former, there would be no state and therefore no newspapers. That was the conclusion to a case involving Uri Blau, a reporter who was sentenced to four months' community service under a plea bargain for possessing classified military documents.
See the full article (Guardian, Roy Greenslade, 9/4/12)
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Egypt Abuzz as Newsreader on State TV Wears Hijab
In what was called a first for Egyptian state television, a woman wearing a head scarf presented headlines in a newscast on Sunday, breaking with a code of secular dress that for decades effectively barred the wearing of Islamic head coverings. Under the secular authoritarians who preceded Mr. Morsi, state television functioned as a mouthpiece of the government.
See the full article (New York Times, Scott Sayare, 9/2/12) *NYT sign-up may be required to view the full article
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'Colors of Confinement': Japanese Internment Camp Photographs by Bill Manbo
Among items initially banned [in internment camps] were bombs, ammunition, implements of war, codes or ciphers, explosives and the humble camera. If anything, this is a testament to the incredible power of photography. Even one frame can change the tide of public opinion because photography has the power to add layers to our understanding of how events transpired and how people were affected.
See the full article (Washington Post, May-Ying Lam, 8/31/12)
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Filtered News is Good News During Tehran Summit
As leaders of the Nonaligned Movement were settling in for their two-day summit in Iran, capping off a week of events intended to showcase Tehran's global voice, they might well be remarkably unaware of goings-on in the country itself. That's because the country's media, dominated and heavily filtered by the state, has been ordered to forgo real news in favor of glowing reports on its international guests.
See the full article (RFE/RL, Frud Bezhan, 8/30/12)
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The Rise of Ad-Hoc Journalist Support Networks
Journalistic collaboration isn't just something that happens between newsrooms. Increasingly, journalists working outside of traditional news organizations are coming together to support each other in a range of ways, from offering safety advice when covering protests to sharing news tips, local resource recommendations and more. The lack of support and protection for journalists has made this one of the most deadly and dangerous times to be an independent journalist.
See the full article (PBS, Josh Stearns, 8/30/12)
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Internet and Social Media

Qatar's Al Jazeera Website Hacked by Syria's Assad Loyalists
The website of Qatar-based satellite news network Al Jazeera was apparently hacked on Tuesday by Syrian government loyalists for what they said was the television channel's support for the "armed terrorist groups and spreading lies and fabricated news". Al Jazeera took the lead in covering the uprisings across the Arab world, and Qatar, one of the Sunni-led states in the region, publicly backed the predominantly Sunni rebel movement in Syria against Assad's Alawite-led government.
See the full article (Reuters, Rania El Gamal and Erika Soloman, 9/4/12)
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Turkey Considers Temporary Social Media Ban
Perhaps India, where citizens cried foul after their government blocked hundreds of websites, was just the beginning. Turkey's Minister of Transport and Communication indicated his country can and might engage in similar censorship - though he downplayed its severity, saying he would only block sites like Twitter and Facebook for a few hours. Social media can cause "good things to happen," [he] said. "But it could also be used to provoke great masses and misguide them."
See the full article (Mashable, Kevin Collier, 9/4/12)
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Bradley Manning Trial Date Set for February 2013
A military judge presiding over the court martial of the WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning has set the date for what is likely to be the biggest whistleblower trial in US history. Judge Denise Lind set aside six weeks for the trial of the US soldier, between 4 February and 15 March. Manning faces 22 counts relating to charges that he leaked hundreds of thousands of secret US state documents, including war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq and diplomatic cables, to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.
See the full article (Guardian, Ed Pilkington, 8/30/12)
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Pentagon Fighting Taliban on Social Media Front
The U.S. military is ramping up efforts to counter the Taliban's growing presence on social media sites by aggressively responding to falsehoods and reporting violations of the sites' guidelines on violent threats, experts say. The Taliban and other militant groups issue statements and video to create a perception of chaos in the country and to undermine the legitimacy of the Afghan government.
See the full article (USA TODAY, Jim Michaels, 8/29/12)
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What's New from PeaceMedia

"Cambodia: Country of Scars" - Link TV
This documentary about a train voyage through Cambodia features meetings with passengers on the roof and in compartments full of hammocks. It was only a short time ago that Cambodia lost a quarter if its citizens under the Pol Pot regime. The country was completely closed off from the world, and trains had stopped running. Now, there is a daily connection between the capital and the Thai border.
See the full video
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USIP's Science, Technology & Peacebuilding Roundup

United States Institute of Peace

 

Center of Innovation: Science, Technology and Peacebuilding

Weekly News Roundup, August 30 - September 5, 2012

Table of Contents


Seeds of Peace
Army Colonel Brian Copes and the Indiana Army National Guard headed off to war with a pitchfork, not a rifle. As commander of the 1-19th Agribusiness Development Team in Afghanistan in 2009, Copes' team deployed to Khost province, abutting Pakistan in far eastern Afghanistan. Their mission: to work with local farmers, U.S. civilians and international groups. In this interview, Copes discusses the challenges associated with agriculture in a war zone.
See the full article (TIME, Mark Thompson, 9/5/12)
Click to read "Peace Talks - What Afghan Elders Told Jim Marshall," a USIP Olive Branch Post.
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29 Dead in 8 Days as U.S. Puts Yemen Drone War in Overdrive
29 dead in a little over a week. Nearly 200 gone this year. The White House is stepping up its campaign of drone attacks in Yemen, with four strikes in eight days. And not even the slaying of 10 civilians over the weekend seems to have slowed the pace in the United States' secretive, undeclared war. The U.S. has two separate drone campaigns underway in Yemen - one run by the CIA, the other by the military's Joint Special Operations Command.
See the full article (Wired, Noah Shachtman, 9/5/12)
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Chinese Telecoms Gear Maker Huawei Calls for Cybersecurity Cooperation, Promises No Spying
Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei Technologies Ltd. has issued a report on cybersecurity that includes a pledge never to cooperate with spying in a fresh effort to allay concerns in the United States and elsewhere that threaten to hamper its expansion. Suspicions that Huawei might be controlled by China's Communist Party or military have slowed its expansion in the United States. The company denies it is a security threat.
See the full article (AP, 9/5/12)
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Eastern Congo's Poor Left Counting the Cost of Conflict-free Gadgets
Our insatiable demand for electronic devices is keeping brutal militia groups in business, goes the now familiar story, and cleaning up the mineral trade is the key to peace. If the "conflict minerals" story has put eastern Congo on the international agenda, it has done so at a significant cost, argues Columbia University professor Séverine Autesserre. In exchange for attention, the issue has diverted attention from other key issues: poverty, corruption, land conflicts, the reform of local institutions.
See the full article (Guardian, Claire Provost, 9/3/12)
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Secrecy Surrounding 'Zero-day Exploits' Industry Spurs Calls for Government Oversight
The sophisticated [Stuxnet] tool relied on computer code to take advantage of then-undiscovered security flaws, open the way into the Iranians' software and deliver a payload. But the use of such tools, known as "zero-day exploits," is not reserved exclusively for the intelligence community. Instead, through a little-known and barely regulated trade, researchers around the world are increasingly selling the exploits, sometimes for hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece.
See the full article (Washington Post, James Ball, 9/1/12)
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Report on Iran Nuclear Work Puts Israel in a Box
For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the International Atomic Energy Agency on Thursday offered findings validating his longstanding position that while harsh economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation may have hurt Iran, they have failed to slow Tehran's nuclear program. If anything, the program is speeding up. But the agency's report has also put Israel in a corner, documenting that Iran is close to crossing what Israel has long said is its red line.
See the full article (New York Times, Jodi Rudoren and David E. Sanger, 8/30/12) *NYT sign-up may be required to view the full article
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Apple Rejects App That Tracks U.S. Drone Strikes
It seemed like a simple enough idea for an iPhone app: Send users a pop-up notice whenever a flying robots kills someone in one of America's many undeclared wars. But Apple keeps blocking the Drones+ program from its App Store - and therefore, from iPhones everywhere. Apple called the bare-bones application that aggregates news of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia "not useful."
See the full article (Wired, Christina Bonnington and Spencer Ackerman, 8/30/12)
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The Perfect Crime: Is Wiper Malware Connected to Stuxnet, Duqu?
Mysterious malware that reportedly attacked Iran's oil ministry in April shared a file-naming convention almost identical to those used by the state-sponsored Stuxnet and Duqu operations, an indication it may have been related. Researchers have spent months searching for evidence that links Wiper to the operation, which reportedly was sponsored by the US and Israeli militaries to disrupt Iran's nuclear program.
See the full article (Ars Technica, Dan Goodin, 8/29/12)
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