Sir David King, a former chief scientific adviser, writes in the Guardian to urge prime minister to fill ‘leadership vacuum’ David Cameron must end his silence on climate change and “step up to the plate” to provide international leadership, the former government chief scientific adviser Prof Sir David King says on Wednesday. Writing in the Guardian, King also reveals that after his declaration that global warming was a greater threat than global terrorism in 2004, then US president, George Bush, asked Tony Blair, then prime minster, for to have him gagged. King’s warning made headlines around the world at the time. “But I refused to be gagged, and that statement and others spurred the UK to develop a leadership role on climate change among the international community,” King writes. He argues that the UK’s 2008 Climate Change Act – the most ambitious legally binding emissions targets in the world – along with actions such as its early engagement with China on global warming put the UK at the forefront of global negotiations on climate action in the runup to the UN summit in Copenhagen in 2009 . This summit, attended by scores of world leaders, failed to reach a global deal, and subsequent summits have been far less prominent. “There is, again, a leadership vacuum among heads of states on this issue, just as there was in the early 2000s. Will David Cameron step up to the plate, please? Prime minister, will you take your stated credentials as [wanting to lead] the ‘ greenest government ever ‘ into the global arena?” writes King, who is now director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University, where a world forum on “valuing ecosystem services” opens today. Downing Street was unable to provide a comment, but a spokesperson at the d Department of Energy and Climate Change said: “From the top down, the coalition has no intention of letting up in its efforts to get a legally binding agreement. [Energy and climate change secretary] Chris Huhne, with the prime minister’s full backing, played a crucial role at the UN climate conference in Cancún to get agreement on the overall goal of limiting climate change to two degrees, to establish a new climate ‘green fund’ and to take further action to reduce deforestation.” A Liberal Democrat source in government also pointed out that deputy prime minister Nick Clegg , the deputy prime minister, had emphasised climate change issues during recent visits by Barack Obama and China’s premier, Wen Jiabao . Green party MP Caroline Lucas said: “I share Sir David King’s deep disappointment at the prime minister’s lack of personal engagement in the international climate negotiations process. It is astonishing that Cameron has yet to make a single statement on his commitment to securing an international climate change agreement.” Cameron has had to intervene repeatedly to ensure his coalition’s green commitments were not derailed, including in a fierce cabinet battle over the UK’s target of a 50% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 . He also had to face down Treasury objections to the government’s green investment bank and, most recently, has contended with a mutiny among his MEPs over European emissions targets. The prime minister has made high-profile speeches defending the UK’s relatively high level of international aid spending , – one of very few areas ring-fenced from cuts – but he has yet to make any similar intervention on climate change. Phil Bloomer at Oxfam , which praised the government’s stance on international aid, said: “If David Cameron wants to lead the greenest government ever, he must urgently take on the international leadership needed to inject fresh life in the UN talks, so the empty climate fund is filled and poor communities can protect themselves from the impacts of climate change.” King praises the government’s domestic action on climate change. “My cynicism about pre-election statements was squashed with the announcement that the UK will cut its CO 2 emissions by 50% by 2025,” he writes, noting that policies on the green investment bank, on improving home energy efficiency , and on reforming the electricity market to deliver low-carbon electricity provide “excellent opportunities for the radical transition to a low-carbon economy”. He says the UK is once again “setting the bar high for other countries”, but adds: “There has been no statement at all from the government about the need for collective action on the critical issue [of climate change].” Barry Gardiner MP, who is Ed Miliband’s special envoy on climate change, said: “If Cameron had spent a quarter of a billion pounds tackling climate change instead of bombing Gaddafi , he could have transformed Britain’s energy infrastructure to meet our 2025 targets, protected a million hectares of rainforest from deforestation, or fitted solar [panels] to 100,000 homes. It is clear that he thinks Libyan oil is a bigger priority.” Friends of the Earth ‘s senior parliamentary campaigner Martyn Williams said: “The need for bold leadership on climate change is more urgent than ever but the prime minister and leader of the opposition rarely speak out on climate change, and this has created a dangerous vacuum. Urgent action is needed to avoid a climate disaster and reap the huge financial opportunities that would be created by building a low-carbon future.” Climate change Carbon emissions David Cameron Green politics Liberal-Conservative coalition Nick Clegg Damian Carrington guardian.co.uk
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Journalist pens tempered mea culpa saying he was after ‘intellectual’ rather than ‘reportorial’ accuracy in interviews Johann Hari, the journalist at the centre of a row over quotations from interviews, has defended his actions in print but said sorry for an “error of judgement”. The award-winning Hari said he did have “something to apologise for” after being accused of plagarism by journalists and bloggers who condemned his practice of sometimes using quotes which he presented as being made to him in interviews , when they were in fact taken from older articles or the interviewees’ own books. In Wednesday’s edition of the Independent he called accusations of plagarism against him “totally false” and denied producing “churnalism” but said he had lessons to learn. “I’ve thought carefully about whether I have been wrong here. It’s clearly not plagiarism or churnalism – but was it an error in another way? Yes. I now see it was wrong, and I wouldn’t do it again.”. Hari’s article is yet to be published on the Independent’s website. In a blog entitled Interview Etiquette on Tuesday Hari defended his methods, saying he only ever substituted quotes with the writer’s own previous writings that expressed the same sentiment expounded in the interview, but more clearly. In the Independent, he wrote: “I have sometimes substituted a passage they have written or said more clearly elsewhere on the same subject for what they said to me, so the reader understands their point as clearly as possible. “The quotes are always accurate representations of their words, inserted into the interview at the point where they made substantively the same argument using similar but less clear language.” He added: “I did not and never have taken words from another context and twisted them to mean something different.” Hari pointed out that in 10 years of interviews he had not received a single complaint from the people he had interviewed. “It depends whether you prefer the intellectual accuracy of describing their ideas in their most considered words, or the reportorial accuracy of describing their ideas in the words they used on that particular afternoon,” he further argued. “Since my interviews are long intellectual profiles, not ones where I’m trying to ferret out a scoop or exclusive, I have, in the past, prioritised the former. “That was, on reflection, a mistake, because it wasn’t clear to the reader.”. Hari was lambasted on Twitter by readers and fellow journalists who called his professional ethics into question. The controversy also spawned a array of jokes, in which famous historical moments were recounted to Hari, as though in an interview. In his article, Hari thanked those who had helped him realise that “an interview is not just an essayistic representation of what the person thinks; it is a report on an encounter between the interviewer and interviewee”. He concluded: “I’m sorry, and I’m grateful to the people who pointed out this error of judgement. I will make sure I learn from it.” The Independent Newspapers Newspapers & magazines Alexandra Topping guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …“Brian Stelter, Media Columnist for the New York Times, joins the Real Time Conversation on the What’s Trending live show. The journalist discusses the state of journalism and where it is heading. We also cover the difference between old-school journalists and the new school of reporting, print versus multimedia and “”paywalls”” for online content. (July 28, 2011) “
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Security forces and demonstrators clash in Cairo after former interior minister’s trial is put off without explanation Clashes between protesters and security forces engulfed Cairo once again on Tuesday night, as the fiercest street battles since the fall of Hosni Mubarak left dozens injured. Fighting began after the fall of darkness following earlier protests by relatives of those killed during this spring’s uprising. Armed central security police showered Tahrir Square with tear gas canisters and fired bullets into the air as several thousand demonstrators amassed and called for the resignation of Egypt’s de facto head of state, Field Marshall Mohamed Hussein Tantawi. Some members of the crowd tore up paving stones and threw them towards police lines. The Guardian witnessed successive volleys of tear gas launched into the square and surrounding streets by government forces, including towards areas where ambulances had congregated to treat the wounded. Injured protesters, mostly with head wounds and gas inhalation, were carried to safety on the shoulders of fellow demonstrators. “Mubarak was nothing – this is the revolution,” said one man caught by tear gas. The Interior Ministry blamed a group of “thugs” for the unrest, claiming that they had disrupted an event held earlier in the day to commemorate the martyrs of the revolution and went on to attack the ministry headquarters. Protesters vociferously denied that suggestion, insisting that the police had attacked unarmed relatives of the martyrs – an account seemingly backed up by unverified videos posted on YouTube. The violence came after the trial of the former interior minister, Habib al-Adly, on the charge of unlawfully killing pro-change protesters had been delayed by a judge this week, with no reason given to the public. “People are saying that we’ve replaced one Habib al-Adly with another,” said Mostafa Hussein, a 30-year-old activist in Tahrir. “They believe the Interior Ministry has returned to its former incarnation under the Mubarak regime.” Also on Tuesday an administrative court ordered the dissolution of Egypt’s 1750 municipal councils, a form of local government that was almost entirely controlled by the old ruling NDP party and was a key tool of control for Mubarak’s dictatorship. Revolutionary activists have long demanded that the councils be disbanded, pointing out that in ‘elections’ held in 2008 over 99% of open seats were awarded to Mubarak allies. However it is not yet clear whether the interim government will implement the judicial ruling. Almost 1,000 people are believed to have died in the year’s 25 January revolution, in which Mubarak’s black-suited central security troops were beaten off the streets by a mass uprising. Since the resignation of the former president, Egypt has been run by the armed forces who have promised a swift transition to a democratic civilian government. But many fear that the pace of change has been too slow, accusing generals of hijacking the revolution and failing to hold members of the old regime to account. “For those that had loved ones killed in January – and indeed all those who lived through that time – just the sight of the Amin al-Markazi [central security forces] on the streets is a provocation in itself,” a doctor who had been treating the injured told the Guardian. “People are shouting ‘our revolution is being stolen’. The situation is very tense.” In the early hours of the morning Tahrir Square remained shrouded in gas with the battle continuing. Activists took to Twitter and other social media sites to call for medical supplies and people to join the gathering. Egypt Arab and Middle East unrest Middle East Africa Jack Shenker guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …The media would have you believe Michele Bachmann is a “flake”— see here for examples —but Mark McKinnon says anyone who buys into that is in for a big surprise. “Bachmann is not crazy, but the media are if they continue to view her as such,” he writes at the…
Continue reading …News Corp. is hoping to part with struggling social network site MySpace this week, and will likely lay off more than half of the remaining staff of 500, according to a person familiar with the matter. The company is looking to cut a deal tomorrow or Thursday in order to…
Continue reading …Michele Bachmann’s Praise of John Wayne and Why Our Corporate Media Will Never Say Why It’s Really Ridiculous
June 28, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media After all of us had a bit of fun with Michele Bachmann’s gaffe on John Wayne this week , I think it’s important to point out why even if she got confused over where John Wayne was born and where serial killer John Wayne Gacy carried out his serial murders, the issue that our corporate media refused to address is the fact that she was praising John Wayne as some role model that Republicans should be emulating in the first place, and her saying “That’s the kind of spirit that I have, too” and completely ignoring how ridiculous propping that man up as some bastion of conservatism is to begin with. That is if you want to actually look at how he actually lived his life and not the myth that’s been propagated in our media about him and that Michele Bachmann apparently decided to embrace. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald wrote a really excellent book back in 2008 which I bought and thoroughly enjoyed reading shortly after it came out titled Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics . If you want to read more, go buy it but I’m going to share a bit of the preface here that explains in very clear terms why any praise of John Wayne as we heard from Bachmann should be ripe for mockery, but since it’s our media that’s been more than happy to participate in continuing that myth about Wayne and others that Greenwald addressed in his book, we’re never going to hear any of them talk about this. If we do I’ll be pleasantly surprised, but I’m not holding my breath. Rough transcript of some of Glenn’s opening to his book below the fold. For the past three decades, American politics has been driven by a bizarre anomaly. Polls continuously show that on almost every issue, Americans vastly prefer the politics of the Democratic Party to those of the Republican Party. Yet during that time, the Republicans have won the majority of elections. This book examines how and why that has happened. The most important factor, by far, is that the Republican Party employs the same set of personality smears and mythical, psychological, and cultural images to win elections. These myths and smears are amplified by the right-wing noise machine and mindlessly adopted by the establishment media. Right-wing leaders are inflated into heroic cultural icons, while Democrats are demonized as weak and hapless losers. These personality-based myths overwhelm substantive discussions and consideration of the issues. Time and time again, Americans vote Republican due to their perceptions that right-wing leaders exude such admirable personality traits as courage, conviction, strength, wholesome family morality, identification with the “regular guy,” an affection for the military, fiscal restraint, and a belief in the supremacy of the individual over the government. Ronald Reagan, the wholesome “Everyman” rancher, and George W. Bush, the swaggering, conquering cowboy rode to victory on the basis of the cartoon imagery and marketing themes that defined them. […] The sheer pervasiveness of this political deceit is somewhat new, but the deceit itself goes back decades. As examined in Chapter One, one of the earliest pioneers of this manipulative right-wing marketing was John Wayne. Wayne was a draft dodger during World War II, staying home in Hollywood, getting rich by playacting as a war hero in one film after the next while his acting peers were off fighting in combat. Wayne then spent the rest of his life preening around as a swaggering, uber-patriotic tough guy—cheering for one war after another and viciously castigating war opponents as cowards and subversives. With the enormous gap between his self-righteous moralizing rhetoric and the way he actually lived his life, John Wayne proved himself to be one of the first right-wing Great American Hypocrites. He tirelessly crusaded for wholesome American morals and publicly condemned any perceived deviations. Yet Wayne’s personal life was a never-ending carousel of adultery, divorces, new wives, shattered families, pills, booze, and unrestrained hedonism. Maybe one of these days someone in our media will ask Bachmann why a draft-dodging, fake war hero adulterer, divorcee, drunken, pill popping hedonist like Wayne is someone she’d like to emulate, but I’m not counting on that happening any time soon.
Continue reading …Michele Bachmann’s Praise of John Wayne and Why Our Corporate Media Will Never Say Why It’s Really Ridiculous
June 28, 2011 No CommentClick here to view this media After all of us had a bit of fun with Michele Bachmann’s gaffe on John Wayne this week , I think it’s important to point out why even if she got confused over where John Wayne was born and where serial killer John Wayne Gacy carried out his serial murders, the issue that our corporate media refused to address is the fact that she was praising John Wayne as some role model that Republicans should be emulating in the first place, and her saying “That’s the kind of spirit that I have, too” and completely ignoring how ridiculous propping that man up as some bastion of conservatism is to begin with. That is if you want to actually look at how he actually lived his life and not the myth that’s been propagated in our media about him and that Michele Bachmann apparently decided to embrace. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald wrote a really excellent book back in 2008 which I bought and thoroughly enjoyed reading shortly after it came out titled Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics . If you want to read more, go buy it but I’m going to share a bit of the preface here that explains in very clear terms why any praise of John Wayne as we heard from Bachmann should be ripe for mockery, but since it’s our media that’s been more than happy to participate in continuing that myth about Wayne and others that Greenwald addressed in his book, we’re never going to hear any of them talk about this. If we do I’ll be pleasantly surprised, but I’m not holding my breath. Rough transcript of some of Glenn’s opening to his book below the fold. For the past three decades, American politics has been driven by a bizarre anomaly. Polls continuously show that on almost every issue, Americans vastly prefer the politics of the Democratic Party to those of the Republican Party. Yet during that time, the Republicans have won the majority of elections. This book examines how and why that has happened. The most important factor, by far, is that the Republican Party employs the same set of personality smears and mythical, psychological, and cultural images to win elections. These myths and smears are amplified by the right-wing noise machine and mindlessly adopted by the establishment media. Right-wing leaders are inflated into heroic cultural icons, while Democrats are demonized as weak and hapless losers. These personality-based myths overwhelm substantive discussions and consideration of the issues. Time and time again, Americans vote Republican due to their perceptions that right-wing leaders exude such admirable personality traits as courage, conviction, strength, wholesome family morality, identification with the “regular guy,” an affection for the military, fiscal restraint, and a belief in the supremacy of the individual over the government. Ronald Reagan, the wholesome “Everyman” rancher, and George W. Bush, the swaggering, conquering cowboy rode to victory on the basis of the cartoon imagery and marketing themes that defined them. […] The sheer pervasiveness of this political deceit is somewhat new, but the deceit itself goes back decades. As examined in Chapter One, one of the earliest pioneers of this manipulative right-wing marketing was John Wayne. Wayne was a draft dodger during World War II, staying home in Hollywood, getting rich by playacting as a war hero in one film after the next while his acting peers were off fighting in combat. Wayne then spent the rest of his life preening around as a swaggering, uber-patriotic tough guy—cheering for one war after another and viciously castigating war opponents as cowards and subversives. With the enormous gap between his self-righteous moralizing rhetoric and the way he actually lived his life, John Wayne proved himself to be one of the first right-wing Great American Hypocrites. He tirelessly crusaded for wholesome American morals and publicly condemned any perceived deviations. Yet Wayne’s personal life was a never-ending carousel of adultery, divorces, new wives, shattered families, pills, booze, and unrestrained hedonism. Maybe one of these days someone in our media will ask Bachmann why a draft-dodging, fake war hero adulterer, divorcee, drunken, pill popping hedonist like Wayne is someone she’d like to emulate, but I’m not counting on that happening any time soon.
Continue reading …Michele Bachmann’s Praise of John Wayne and Why Our Corporate Media Will Never Say Why It’s Really Ridiculous
June 28, 2011 No CommentClick here to view this media After all of us had a bit of fun with Michele Bachmann’s gaffe on John Wayne this week , I think it’s important to point out why even if she got confused over where John Wayne was born and where serial killer John Wayne Gacy carried out his serial murders, the issue that our corporate media refused to address is the fact that she was praising John Wayne as some role model that Republicans should be emulating in the first place, and her saying “That’s the kind of spirit that I have, too” and completely ignoring how ridiculous propping that man up as some bastion of conservatism is to begin with. That is if you want to actually look at how he actually lived his life and not the myth that’s been propagated in our media about him and that Michele Bachmann apparently decided to embrace. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald wrote a really excellent book back in 2008 which I bought and thoroughly enjoyed reading shortly after it came out titled Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics . If you want to read more, go buy it but I’m going to share a bit of the preface here that explains in very clear terms why any praise of John Wayne as we heard from Bachmann should be ripe for mockery, but since it’s our media that’s been more than happy to participate in continuing that myth about Wayne and others that Greenwald addressed in his book, we’re never going to hear any of them talk about this. If we do I’ll be pleasantly surprised, but I’m not holding my breath. Rough transcript of some of Glenn’s opening to his book below the fold. For the past three decades, American politics has been driven by a bizarre anomaly. Polls continuously show that on almost every issue, Americans vastly prefer the politics of the Democratic Party to those of the Republican Party. Yet during that time, the Republicans have won the majority of elections. This book examines how and why that has happened. The most important factor, by far, is that the Republican Party employs the same set of personality smears and mythical, psychological, and cultural images to win elections. These myths and smears are amplified by the right-wing noise machine and mindlessly adopted by the establishment media. Right-wing leaders are inflated into heroic cultural icons, while Democrats are demonized as weak and hapless losers. These personality-based myths overwhelm substantive discussions and consideration of the issues. Time and time again, Americans vote Republican due to their perceptions that right-wing leaders exude such admirable personality traits as courage, conviction, strength, wholesome family morality, identification with the “regular guy,” an affection for the military, fiscal restraint, and a belief in the supremacy of the individual over the government. Ronald Reagan, the wholesome “Everyman” rancher, and George W. Bush, the swaggering, conquering cowboy rode to victory on the basis of the cartoon imagery and marketing themes that defined them. […] The sheer pervasiveness of this political deceit is somewhat new, but the deceit itself goes back decades. As examined in Chapter One, one of the earliest pioneers of this manipulative right-wing marketing was John Wayne. Wayne was a draft dodger during World War II, staying home in Hollywood, getting rich by playacting as a war hero in one film after the next while his acting peers were off fighting in combat. Wayne then spent the rest of his life preening around as a swaggering, uber-patriotic tough guy—cheering for one war after another and viciously castigating war opponents as cowards and subversives. With the enormous gap between his self-righteous moralizing rhetoric and the way he actually lived his life, John Wayne proved himself to be one of the first right-wing Great American Hypocrites. He tirelessly crusaded for wholesome American morals and publicly condemned any perceived deviations. Yet Wayne’s personal life was a never-ending carousel of adultery, divorces, new wives, shattered families, pills, booze, and unrestrained hedonism. Maybe one of these days someone in our media will ask Bachmann why a draft-dodging, fake war hero adulterer, divorcee, drunken, pill popping hedonist like Wayne is someone she’d like to emulate, but I’m not counting on that happening any time soon.
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Click here to view this media Tom Petty may be taking legal action to make sure Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann stops using his songs at her campaign events. “NBC News: @TomPetty unhappy with Michele Bachmann’s use of ‘American Girl’ and in process of issuing [a cease and desist] letter,” Matt Ortega reported on Twitter only hours after hours after Bachmann used the popular song to kick off her campaign. NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell confirmed that report Monday night. “And details matter, and when Bachmann left the stage here, her campaign played the Tom Petty hit song, ‘American Girl,’” O’Donnell said. “Turns out Petty isn’t pleased. His manager says they will ask the Bachmann campaign not to use that song.” Petty also issued a cease and desist letter to then-Governor George W. Bush for illegally using “I won’t back down” at his rallies. “The impression that you and your campaign have been endorsed by Tom Petty, which is not true,” music publisher Wixen Music Publishing Inc. told the Bush campaign . To make matters worse for Bachmann, former RNC Online Communications Director Liz Mair made this observation about the use of Petty’s tune: “Isn’t that what the kidnapped politician’s daughter was singing in ‘Silence of the Lambs?’ Mair appears to have since deleted that tweet. It’s been a tough campaign roll out for the Minnesota Republican. On Sunday, Fox News’ Chris Wallace asked if she was a “flake.” And prior to Monday’s official announcement that she was seeking the presidency, Bachmann confused actor John Wayne with serial killer John Wayne Gacy.
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