April 25, 2024

Cameraman for British Network Is Killed in Cairo

The Sky News cameraman, Mick Deane, was working with a correspondent in Cairo, Sam Kiley, when he was shot. “Despite receiving medical treatment for his injuries, he died shortly afterward,” the network said in a statement. Sky News declined to elaborate on the circumstances, saying that an investigation was under way.

“In our attempt to show the world the horror at Rabaa today, we lost the heart of our team,” Tom Rayner, the Middle East news editor for Sky News, wrote on Twitter, making a reference to the site of a sit-in. He added: “I can’t find more words now. We love you Mick.”

Mr. Deane was the first Western reporter to die on assignment in Egypt since the Committee to Protect Journalists started keeping such records in the early 1990s. This summer two local reporters — Salah al-Din Hassan of a news Web site called Shaab Masr and Ahmed Assem el-Senousy of a Muslim Brotherhood newspaper — died there.

On Wednesday, Habiba Ahmed Abd Elaziz, a reporter for Xpress, a newspaper based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, was also killed; the newspaper said she “was not on any official assignment and had gone to her home country on annual leave.” Late Wednesday, The Associated Press reported that Ahmed Abdel Gawad of the state-run newspaper Al Akhbar was also killed.

Several other journalists were wounded by gunfire during the crackdown, including an unidentified A.P. photographer, who was able to resume work, and a Reuters photographer, Asmaa Waguih, who was shot in the foot. Reuters said Ms. Waguih was receiving treatment; a spokesman had no further details on her condition. In an e-mail, Stephen J. Adler, the editor in chief of Reuters, said, “We have the utmost respect for all the journalists who put themselves in harm’s way to bring us the news, video and pictures we see every day.”

It was not immediately clear whether the reporters were targeted. Several others, including the Cairo bureau chief of The Washington Post, Abigail Hauslohner, suggested that the security forces disregarded their status as witnesses, not protesters.

In a first-person account published on The Post’s Web site, Ms. Hauslohner said she and two of her colleagues were told by a police officer, “If I see you again, I’ll shoot you in the leg.”

Mike Giglio, a reporter for Newsweek and The Daily Beast in Cairo, said he was assaulted and arrested by the police despite it being evident to them he was a working journalist; once at a detention center, other officers apologized to him and insisted it must have been an accident.

“I think a big part of this is the product of the rabid information wars going on right now: Western journalists, and America in general, are being portrayed as enemies — by politicians, by anti-Morsi activists and in the state and private media,” Mr. Giglio said, referring to the ousted leader Mohamed Morsi. “People are being told not to trust the international press, because what it’s reporting doesn’t always fit with the government’s media narrative, and that narrative is extremely important to them right now. I think this is fueling intense paranoia and anger toward the international media in Egypt, and I think I saw an effect of that today, whatever else may have also been at play.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/15/world/middleeast/cameraman-for-british-network-is-killed-in-cairo.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The Times Shifts on ‘Illegal Immigrant,’ but Doesn’t Ban the Use

As the debate over a new immigration bill preoccupies Washington, a quieter debate over the use of the term “illegal immigrant” has stirred up the country’s newsrooms.

This month, The Associated Press announced it would eliminate the use of “illegal immigrant” entirely. The news agency wrote, “Except in direct quotes essential to the story, use ‘illegal’ only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant.”

On Tuesday, The New York Times updated its policies on how it uses the phrase “illegal immigrant” in its coverage. The newspaper did not go as far as The Associated Press, and it will continue to allow the phrase to be used for “someone who enters, lives in or works in the United States without proper legal authorization.” But it encourages reporters and editors to “consider alternatives when appropriate to explain the specific circumstances of the person in question, or to focus on actions.”

Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards, who oversees The Times’s style manual, made the announcement on Tuesday shortly after a group staged a protest in front of The New York Times headquarters and delivered more than 70,000 signatures to Jill Abramson, the executive editor of The Times, asking her to end the use of the phrase.

Mr. Corbett said in a statement that editors had spent months deliberating the updated style change. He said he shared these changes “with key reporters and editors over the last couple of weeks.” He said he recognized how sensitive this issue is for readers.

This nuanced approach to the term “illegal immigrant” was far from what the protesters who appeared outside of the Eighth Avenue entrance to The Times building had sought. Four protesters held signs that read “No Human Being is ‘Illegal’ Drop the I-Word.”

Fernando Chavez, son of the Mexican-American activist Cesar Chavez, flew in from Northern California for the protest to represent the views of his mother, Helen Fabela Chavez.

He said the widespread use of “illegal immigrant” represented one of the few times his mother had “displayed an opinion” about an issue. “It dehumanizes the individual and it’s counterproductive,” he said of the phrase.

Among the protesters was Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who emphasized that he wanted Tuesday’s protest to remain civil. He revealed that he was living undocumented in the United States in an article that ran in The New York Times Magazine in June 2011 after his former employer, The Washington Post, decided not to run the story. Since then, he has spoken publicly about being undocumented. He is producing a documentary on the topic.

“I have a lot of respect for The New York Times,” Mr. Vargas said. “The New York Times published my essay after that Washington Post rejected it.” But he said he felt that The Times needed to make some changes. “The New York Times needs to get with the times.”

Last fall, when Mr. Vargas spoke at a San Francisco conference held by the Online News Association, he started to challenge the use of the term illegal immigrant in the news media. Shortly afterward, he also exchanged e-mails with Margaret Sullivan, The Times’s public editor, about the phrase. She wrote in an Oct. 2, 2012 article, “I see no advantage for Times readers in a move away from the paper’s use of the phrase ‘illegal immigrant.’ ”

Since then, discussions have circulated throughout the news media about the use of the phrase. Julia Preston, The Times’s immigration reporter, said in a blog post written by Ms. Sullivan in September that the paper needed “a little more flexibility.” But she said “we should use the term at times — it is accurate.”

The changes announced by Mr. Corbett to the stylebook suggested caution when looking for alternatives to “illegal immigrant.”

” ‘Unauthorized’ is also an acceptable description, though it has a bureaucratic tone,” Mr. Corbett said. ” ‘Undocumented’ is the term preferred by many immigrants and their advocates, but it has a flavor of euphemism and should be approached with caution outside quotations.” The stylebook also calls for special care to be taken with those who have a complicated or shifting status, like those brought to the United States as children.

“Advocates on one side of this political debate have called on news organizations to use only the terms they prefer,” Mr. Corbett said. “But we have to make those decisions for journalistic reasons alone, based on what we think best informs our readers on this important topic.” He added: “It’s not our job to take sides.”

Some of the protesters outside The New York Times represented people with complicated immigration statuses themselves. Mikhel A. Crichlow, the 27-year-old co-chairman of the International Youth Association, said he appeared on Tuesday because he was undocumented and could not work in the field he trained in, which is architecture. Mr. Crichlow said he moved to New York City 12 years ago when the city’s Department of Education recruited his mother from Trinidad and Tobago to work as a schoolteacher. While Mr. Crichlow’s mother is in the country legally and about to qualify for her green card, Mr. Crichlow has become too old to remain here legally.

“The ‘illegal’ word conjures up the wrong associations for people,” Mr. Crichlow said. “I’m not authorized to work because of my status.”

Mr. Vargas said he had mixed emotions about The New York Times’s updated policy.

“The New York Times can’t have it both ways,” he said. “But at the end of the day, the bottom line is I am for reporters, including reporters at The New York Times, to be as descriptive and contextual as possible.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/24/business/media/the-times-shifts-on-illegal-immigrant-but-doesnt-ban-the-use.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Disruptions: Disruptions: Stuck With a Carrier for the Long Haul

Consumers cannot easily switch carriers and keep their actual phones.Andrew D. Brosig/The Daily Sentinel, via Associated Press Consumers cannot easily switch carriers and keep their actual phones.

If dating were like the cellphone industry, you would have to sign a contract when you entered a relationship stating that you would remain monogamous for two years, even if you wanted to break up. That’s what cellular carriers have pulled off by successfully lobbying for a recent government ruling that you cannot take the phone you paid for and switch to another provider.

It’s the latest reminder that owning a cellphone on one of the biggest United States providers can sometimes feel like an unhappy relationship. Time and again, in the minds of many customers, these companies take advantage of us and there isn’t much we can do about it.

Srinivasan Keshav, a professor at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, who studies mobile computing, has found that cell carriers make more than a 4,000 percent profit on text messages. Sending a megabyte of text messages over the cell network costs customers roughly $1,500. What does it cost carriers? Close to nothing, as texts piggyback on other data transfers, including voice calls. The carriers combined make billions of dollars a year in fees on texting alone.

Then there was ATT’s decision in mid-2010 to kill unlimited data plans on smartphones for new customers. As Felix Salmon of Reuters wrote at the time, “ATT prefers to make life harder for its customers, if that’s going to give it a little bit more money.” For those who kept their unlimited plans and use larger amounts of data, like me, ATT sometimes slows the data connection on its network.

As my colleague David Pogue wrote in 2009, carriers force people to listen to a 15-second message with instructions on how to leave a voice mail message before they can actually leave one, and charge them for that time. Let’s be realistic, if you don’t know how to leave a message in 2013, you probably don’t know how to use a phone. Phone companies have also hidden some charges in our bills in the past, disguising them as government fees, even though the money went directly to the phone companies.

CTIA, the wireless industry trade group, defended the latest move by wireless companies, saying that prohibiting people from taking their phones with them, a practice known as unlocking, would help protect carriers’ investments in subsidizing new handsets, and ultimately benefit customers.

“What we’re trying to do is good for customers — it is just not immediately apparent to them yet,” said Jot Carpenter, CTIA’s vice president for government affairs. He said cell carriers were trying to solve two issues: stopping people from selling stolen unlocked cellphones and helping keep down the cost of handsets by ensuring that phones that have been subsidized by carriers return their investment.

But members of Congress, the Obama administration and the Federal Communications Commission see it differently. Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, introduced a bill this month to overturn the ban on letting customers unlock their phones. The White House has said it is “common sense” for people to be allowed to do so. Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C.’s chairman, said the ban “doesn’t pass the common-sense test.”

Harold Feld, senior vice president at Public Knowledge, a nonprofit company that focuses on information policy, compares the phone companies to airlines, which have reduced the cost of flights but now charge passengers to check bags, board early or eat a meal. “The difference, though, is that with airlines, once you are finished with that flight, you can choose to never fly with them again,” he said. “With phone companies, you’re locked in with a two-year contract.” Of course, there are other plans that don’t require a contract.

Consumers cannot easily fight these sleights of hand because in 2011 the Supreme Court said customers could no longer file class-action suits against their cellular carriers. Mr. Carpenter of CTIA said that if customers were unhappy, they could easily switch providers. “There’s a tremendous amount of choice and competition in the industry,” he said.

So will anything change? “The F.C.C. could push the industry to end a lot of these practices tomorrow,” Mr. Feld said.

Until then, consumers will have to decide whom they prefer for their monogamous but not always pleasant relationship.

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com
Twitter: @nickbilton

A version of this article appeared in print on 03/18/2013, on page B7 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Stuck With a Provider Over the Long Haul.

Article source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/disruptions-stuck-with-a-carrier-for-the-long-haul/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Missing Al Jazeera Reporter Dorothy Parvaz Is Freed

Her fiancé, Todd Barker, told The Canadian Press news agency that she had called him “out of the blue” as she cleared customs after flying into Doha from Iran on Wednesday and had told him she was “treated very well, she was interrogated, but she’s fine.”

“When you don’t hear from someone you love for 19 days,” he was quoted as saying, “you don’t know if they are dead, don’t know if they are alive, you don’t know if they are being tortured.”

News of her release emerged a day after Tehran said it was pursuing unspecified information about Ms. Parvaz. It was not clear what considerations had prompted her release, and Iranian officials made no immediate comment on the development.

But IRNA, an official Iranian news agency, said in a separate dispatch on Wednesday that an Iranian envoy had delivered a message from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the Qatari ruler, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, seeking closer ties with the Doha government.

Ms. Parvaz disappeared upon arrival in Syria last month on an assignment to cover antigovernment protests. Her whereabouts remained unknown until Syrian officials acknowledged a week ago that they had sent her to Iran because, they said, she had traveled to Syria on an expired Iranian passport.

On Tuesday, Iran said Iranian-born Ms. Parvaz, 39, who holds American, Canadian and Iranian citizenship, had committed “several offenses,” including traveling without a valid passport. Iranian passport-holders may enter Syria without a visa, The Associated Press reported, but American and Canadian nationals do require visas. Iran does not recognize multiple nationalities for its citizens, The A.P. said.

Syria and Iran routinely restrict access by journalists and few foreign reporters have been allowed to travel openly to Syria since an uprising began in March.

Up until Wednesday, Ms. Parvaz had had no known communication with her employer, friends or family.

On its English-language Web site on Wednesday, Al Jazeera quoted its own spokesman as saying Ms. Parvaz “has been in contact with her family and we are with her now to find out more about her ordeal over the last 18 days.”

Before her release, Mr. Barker, a lawyer working in Luxembourg, said Ms. Parvaz had not contacted her family since she was sent to Iran, and that he assumed she had been detained.

“In other cases involving journalists detained in Iran, the journalist has been allowed to speak with family relatively quickly after being detained,” Mr. Barker said. “I urge Iranian officials to allow Dorothy to contact her family.”

On Tuesday, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast, had offered no detail on Ms. Parvaz’s precise whereabouts. He also did not say whether Ms. Parvaz had even been detained. But he called her case “important.”

At a Tehran news conference, which was reported by Iran’s state-run press, Mr. Mehmanparast called on journalists to “avoid problems” by following the rules. The authorities in Iran and Syria, close political allies, have little tolerance for antigovernment protests in their own countries and both restrict outside press coverage.

Al Jazeera had said earlier that Ms. Parvaz appears to have been in Iranian custody since May 1, when Syria deported her. But the news organization, which is based in Qatar, said it had received no official word on her location or condition from Iranian authorities despite repeated requests. Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, said on Saturday that he had “no information” regarding Ms. Parvaz, according to IRNA.

Iran had at least 34 reporters in custody at the end of last year, more than any other country besides China, according most recent available numbers from the Committee to Protect Journalists, a press advocacy group.

Al Jazeera said Ms. Parvaz was an experienced journalist who joined the broadcaster in 2010. “She graduated from the University of British Columbia, completed a masters degree in Arizona and held journalism fellowships at both Harvard and Cambridge,” the broadcaster said. “She previously worked as a columnist and feature writer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.”

Alan Cowell reported from London and J. David Goodman from New York.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=4e2770c7e211c70a6df24ba10bb81798

Economix: The World Economic Order, Circa 2025

Color China Photo, via Associated Press

With China overtaking Japan as the world’s second-largest economy last year, there can be no doubt that emerging markets are becoming increasingly powerful.

A new report from the World Bank predicts that by 2025, China, along with five other emerging economies — Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Korea and Russia — will account for more than half of all global growth, up from one-third now.

The report, “Global Development Horizons 2011 — Multipolarity: The New Global Economy,” also anticipates that the dollar will be joined by the euro and the renminbi as dominant international currencies. The Chinese government is already easing currency controls and has taken other steps to help the renminbi become a fully convertible reserve currency, which would make it easier for foreign companies to finance projects in China.

Hans Timmer, director of development prospects for the World Bank, said in an interview that despite the current sovereign debt crises roiling Europe, the euro remained a strong and viable currency. “With all the problems they have had in the past 10 years, they have been successful,” Mr. Timmer said. “A big part of global reserves is denominated in euros. There is more borrowing going on in euros. As a reserve currency, dollars are still dominant, but countries are drifting away from the dollar into the euro.”

According to the report, the fast-growing developing countries will continue to outpace those in the developed world — mainly Europe, Japan, Britain and the United States. The emerging economies will grow at an average pace of 4.7 percent a year between now and 2025, while the developed countries will grow at an average of 2.3 percent.

For developing countries to keep up growth rates, the report’s authors write, they will have to innovate their own technologies and improve productivity.

Mansoor Dailami, the lead author of the report, said there was growing evidence that developing countries were beginning to invest in research and development that would lead to new technologies. He pointed to data showing that of the top 1,000 companies investing in research and development in 2009, 114 of them were from emerging economies. He also cited an increasing number of patents and scientific articles generated by researchers in developing countries.

Another key driver of growth for emerging economies, which have grown exponentially by offering cheap labor and low-priced consumer goods to developed countries, will be the ability to get their citizens to spend more on domestically produced goods and services.

Mr. Timmer said the evolution toward domestic consumer spending would come naturally. In China, for example, the demographics of the population is shifting toward older age, which in turn tends to force savings rates — currently high in Asian countries — down.

“Elderly people don’t earn, but they do spend,” Mr. Timmer said. “So from a macroeconomic perspective there is more consumption relative to earnings.” He added that with rising income levels in emerging countries, consumers would naturally begin spending more on domestically produced goods. And maturing economies develop larger service sectors, which tend to be locally staffed and financed.

Mr. Timmer said that the United States needed to view the shift in economic power as an opportunity rather than a threat. “There will be increased future opportunities for the U.S. increasingly to export more advanced products and more luxury products into those new emerging countries,” he said.

He added that it was also a matter of perspective. “There is a lot of cross-border investment between Europe and the U.S. going into Europe and coming out of Europe,” he noted. “And those are win-win solutions for all the companies involved. That is a picture that is very well understood by companies and governments, but when you talk about relationships with emerging economies, suddenly people are afraid.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=86a277d8c00374ff9514aae37597d94e

DealBook: In Galleon Case, Spotlight on Rajat Gupta

Throughout Raj Rajaratnam’s trial, which could go to the jury as soon as Monday, there has been an elephant in the courtroom: Rajat K. Gupta.

Mr. Gupta, once one of the world’s most respected businessmen, is not being tried here nor has he been charged criminally. Yet hardly a day has passed when the jury in Mr. Rajaratnam’s trial — the government’s biggest insider trading case in a generation — does not hear about Mr. Gupta, the former head of the consulting firm McKinsey Company.

Jurors listened to a wiretap on which Mr. Gupta, a former director at Goldman Sachs, tells Mr. Rajaratnam, who ran the Galleon Group hedge fund, about the bank’s secret board discussions.

Rajat K. Gupta, who has been named a co-conspirator.Alessandro Della Bella/Keystone, via Associated Press Rajat K. Gupta, who has been named a co-conspirator.

They heard a tape of Mr. Rajaratnam boasting to a colleague that a Goldman director had tipped him off to the bank’s earnings ahead of a public announcement. On another recorded call, Mr. Rajaratnam told his trader that he had received word that something good was going to happen at Goldman.

Prosecutors also presented phone bills and trading records establishing that Mr. Rajaratnam traded Goldman stock soon after his phone calls with Mr. Gupta.

Still, Mr. Gupta is not mentioned in the government’s indictment of Mr. Rajaratnam. The United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, which has been investigating Mr. Gupta’s role in the case for at least three years, has named him a co-conspirator of Mr. Rajaratnam’s but has not charged him criminally.

Instead, federal prosecutors have built their formal charges against Mr. Rajaratnam around five cooperating witnesses who have pleaded guilty to engaging in insider trading conspiracies with the defendant.

Legal experts say there are myriad reasons for prosecutors conducting a criminal investigation to indict some co-conspirators while not charging others.

“What drives these decisions is the strength of the evidence against each individual co-conspirator as well as tactical considerations,” Anthony M. Sabino, a law professor at St. John’s University, said.

There was no indication that Mr. Gupta would play any role in Mr. Rajaratnam’s case in the months leading up to the trial. But in early March, a week before jury selection, the Securities and Exchange Commission sent shock waves through corporate America when it filed a civil administrative proceeding against Mr. Gupta. The agency accused him of leaking boardroom discussions to Mr. Rajaratnam from both Goldman and Procter Gamble, where he also served as a director before resigning last month.

“The S.E.C. allegations are totally baseless,” Gary P. Naftalis, Mr. Gupta’s lawyer, said at the time. “Mr. Gupta’s 40-year record of ethical conduct, integrity and commitment to guarding his clients’ confidences is beyond reproach.”

Mr. Gupta’s sudden fall from grace has stunned the business world. An Indian from Kolkata and a graduate of the Harvard Business School, Mr. Gupta is the most prominent executive ensnared by the government’s wide-ranging investigation into insider trading at hedge funds.

As global managing director of McKinsey, Mr. Gupta, 62, was a trusted adviser to chief executives including Jeffrey R. Immelt of General Electric and Henry R. Kravis of the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts Company. A prominent philanthropist, he held a senior advisory post at the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation.

Over the past decade he grew close to Mr. Rajaratnam, a large financial supporter of the Indian School of Business, a highly regarded graduate school that Mr. Gupta helped start. Around his retirement from McKinsey in 2007, he went into business with Mr. Rajaratnam, founding a private equity firm. Mr. Gupta also invested with Mr. Rajaratnam.

It was during that period —a nine-month stretch in 2008 — that the government wiretapped Mr. Rajaratnam’s cellphone. Those recordings helped the government bring charges against 26 people, 20 of whom have pleaded guilty.

Federal prosecutors appear to have weaker evidence against Mr. Gupta than against some of Mr. Rajaratnam’s other co-conspirators. For instance, two cooperating witnesses — Anil Kumar and Rajiv Goel — are on multiple wiretaps swapping tips with Mr. Rajaratnam.

In Mr. Gupta’s case, federal prosecutors played only one wiretap on which Mr. Gupta divulged Goldman boardroom discussions to Mr. Rajaratnam. On a July 2008 call, Mr. Gupta told Mr. Rajaratnam that the bank’s board was contemplating a purchase of Wachovia or the American International Group.

Prosecutors did not present evidence, however, that Mr. Rajaratnam traded on this tip.

Certain rules could also prevent prosecutors from using against Mr. Gupta two of the most incriminating wiretaps played during the trial, legal experts say.

In one call, Mr. Rajaratnam tells a colleague, “I heard yesterday from somebody who’s on the board of Goldman Sachs that they are going to lose $2 per share.” In the other, Mr. Rajaratnam says to his trader, “I got a call saying something good is going to happen to Goldman.”

Because these conversations were between Mr. Rajaratnam and his employees, a judge could declare them inadmissible hearsay evidence, meaning it is too indirect or speculative to be used against Mr. Gupta.

But prosecutors could try to use the conversations against Mr. Gupta under what is known as the co-conspirator exception to the hearsay rule. The theory is that Mr. Rajaratnam’s statements about Goldman were made in furtherance of the suspected conspiracy between Mr. Rajaratnam and Mr. Gupta.

Without those two statements by Mr. Rajaratnam referring to tips about Goldman, prosecutors would be forced to rely on circumstantial evidence — like phone bills and trading records — to establish Mr. Gupta’s guilt.

In the S.E.C.’s civil case, the agency has a lower burden of proof than federal prosecutors do in a criminal action. An S.E.C. administrative judge is also not subject to hearsay rules.

In an unusual twist, Mr. Gupta sued the S.E.C. last month contending that an administrative proceeding unfairly had barred him from a jury trial in federal court. Mr. Gupta would have more protections there than he does in an administrative proceeding, including the right to review the S.E.C.’s evidence. A judge has not yet ruled on the issue.

If the S.E.C. prevails, a judge could impose financial penalties on Mr. Gupta and bar him from serving as an officer or director of a public company.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=c31454fb3157453737a8776297d1e4f0