News Cycle

At least 50 people have been killed and scores others injured after U.S. drones fired several missiles on what Washington calls insurgents’ targets in the troubled northwest Pakistan, accroding to PressTV, a news network funded by the Iranian government that broadcasts in English.

Western media, including the BBC, have identified the dead as Taliban militants.

The causalities occurred when three drones fired missiles on Tuesday afternoon at the funeral procession in the South Waziristan bordering Afghanistan, according to the Iranian report. The missiles hit the funeral of people who were killed earlier in the day during a similar strike in the volatile region, the report said.

At least eight people were killed and a dozen other injured in the first U.S. strike by an unmanned drone aircraft hit near Makeen village, 60 kilometres (37 miles) northeast of Wana, the main town in South Waziristan, the report said.

The Khaleej Times, an English language daily newspaper published from Dubai, United Arab Emirates,
has this report:

The attacks came hours after a militant leader who had defected from Pakistani Taliban head Baitullah Mehsud was assassinated by an “infiltrator” in the adjoining district of North Western Frontier Province.

A pilotless aircraft on Tuesday morning fired three missiles to target a hideout used regularly by Mehsud’s fighter in South Waziristan, a security official said on condition of anonymity.

“The missiles hit a Taliban markaz (centre) in the Makeen (area), killing at least seven Taliban,” the official said. Four more militants were injured and two vehicles were destroyed by the strike.

Later, as Taliban members were attending the funeral of their dead comrades, another suspected US drone fired four guided missiles at them.

“Our local sources are saying that 45 people have died and more than 60 are injured,” said the official.

“Almost all of those killed and injured are Taliban and a senior commander of Mehsud’s, Sangeen Khan is confirmed dead, while there are reports that Mehsud’s deputy, Qari Hussain, might also have died.

It seems that Taliban have suffered huge losses, its a major setback for them, he added.

Another intelligence official put the death toll at 50 and claimed that Taliban chief Mehsud himself was attending the funeral. “We are trying to confirm whether he died in the strike or managed to survive it.”

The first drone strike came around two and half hours after Taliban commander, Qari Zainuddin, who had defected Mehsud was shot dead in his compound in the town of Dera Ismail Khan, located adjacent to South Waziristan.

A crackdown against journalists and cyber-dissidents is continuing in Iran today, Reporters sans frontières reports. Iranian and foreign journalists are both being targeted by security police.

Among the latest arrests was that of a correspondent for Newsweek, Maziar Bahari, picked up at his home in Tehran on Sunday, Reporters sans frontières said.

“The authorities are using all possible methods to drive foreign journalists out of Iran, where they are unwanted witnesses to bloody repression,” the worldwide press freedom organisation said. “The arrest of the Newsweek correspondent is a clear sign of the regime’s determination to intimidate journalists whether Iranian or foreign, local or international newspaper correspondents.”

Reporters sans frontières says 26 journalist have been arrested since the protests have started.

“After demonising the foreign media, the authorities are trying to have it believed that Iranian journalists are spies in the pay of foreigners, confusing news reporting with spying”, it added.

The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that Iranian security agents arrested about 25 employees of Kalameh Sabz, the reformist newspaper owned by defeated presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, after raiding the paper’s offices on Monday evening.

Alireza Beheshti, the paper’s editor-in-chief, told the Farsi-language service of Deutsche-Welle that the agents, in plain clothes but armed, rounded up employees and confiscated computers at newspaper’s offices in Haft Tir Square, Tehran. He said the agents claimed to have a judge’s warrant but did not produce it.

The government has blocked Kalameh Sabz from publishing since June 14, CPJ research shows. The employees were believed to have been at the offices on Monday evening to pick up their pay, according to local news reports.

At the United Nations, Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, urged the Iranian authorities to respect fundamental civil and political rights, including freedom of expression, the right to inform the public and of free assembly.

Iran’s Interior Ministry today dismissed claims by the defeated candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi that certain irregularities took place in the June 12 election.

The Iran security services went to the home of Bahari, 41, early in the morning and seized his computer and video recordings. He had been interrogated on June 17 by the Guardians of the Revolution about one of his video recordings relating to the death of a demonstrator. His family said that they have had no news of him since his arrest, according to information obtained by Reporters sans frontières. Newsweek put out a statement yesterday strongly condemning his arrest and calling for his immediate release.

Elsewhere, Reporters sans frontières learned of the arrest at midnight yesterday at his home of Mostafa Ghavnlo Ghajar, a contributor to several newspapers and a specialist on foreign media on Radio Goftogo. Freelance journalist Fariborez Srosh was also reportedly arrested on June 16. He has been imprisoned in the past because of his work with Radio farda (Radio Free Europe).

Eleven days after the presidential election, 26 journalists are currently behind bars. With a total of 36 journalists now jailed, Iran is the world’s biggest prison for journalists, ahead of China and Cuba.

Patricia Murphy of Politics Daily had this little tidbit about how best to address Sen. Barbara Boxer:

At a sometimes contentious Capitol Hill hearing Tuesday, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee chairwoman, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), had a request for Army Corps of Engineers division leader, Brigadier General Michael Walsh.

During a terse exchange, as Boxer pressed Walsh on why key improvements have not been made by the Corps to the New Orleans levee system nearly four years after Hurricane Katrina, she asked, "Could you do me a favor? Could you say ’senator’ instead of ‘ma’am? It’s just a thing. I worked so hard to get that title. I’d appreciate it."

The general’s response? "Yes, Senator."

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News Cycle

File this under the “Huh, which side are you on?” department.

Josh Gerstein of Politico writes this afternoon that the Obama administration wants to save former Vice President Dick Cheney from the likes of Daily Show host Jon Stewart.

That was the thrust of arguments the Justice Department presented Thursday, as it sought to prevent the release of an interview Cheney gave in 2004 to Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald as part of his investigation into the leak of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson.

A Justice Department lawyer said releasing the records could leave Cheney open to attack by his political enemies, including late night talk show hosts. That, in turn, would make it harder for investigators to get cooperation from future presidents and vice presidents.

U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan didn’t decide immediately whether the summary and notes of the Cheney interview should be made public, but the judge said a declaration from former Justice Department official Steven Bradbury was inadequate to justify withholding the records.

The publisher of the Albany (N.Y.) Times Union says the newspaper has to trim up to 45 jobs from its payroll and cut 20 percent of the paper’s operational costs.

Albany Newspaper Guild President Tim O’Brien said today the union fight the job cuts in court.

Kathy Bowen of the Schenectady (N.Y.) Daily Gazette reports:

Guild members overwhelmingly rejected the company’s contract proposal Monday, and Publisher George Hearst said the consequence of the action is an impasse.

“We made our best and final offer. We have to move forward now and try to make smart decisions in how to lean-up the cost of the business,” Hearst said.

The jobs to be cut would be union and nonunion positions, including editorial and advertising staffers, he said. The company has rejected the idea of cutting salaries or imposing unpaid furloughs and will instead cut positions.

“We are going to ask the people who are left to step up and do more work. It wouldn’t be fair to cut their salaries too,” he said.

O’Brien said the union is concerned for long-term employees who are at the top of the company pay scale and close to retirement.

“If someone is close to but not yet 55, they could lose half of their pension if they are laid off now,” he said.

Under the proposed three-year contract that was rejected by guild members by a vote of 125 to 35, the company would have been allowed to outsource any job and lay off workers without respect to seniority.

O’Brien said the disregard for seniority was unacceptable, and still is.

“We believe that legally we will have a strong case if they go forward,” he said.

UPDATED at 5:20 p.m. Eastern, Thursday, June 18 with the Associated Press information on the positioning of missiles around Hawaii.

North Korea may fire a long-range ballistic missile toward Hawaii in early July, the Associated Press quoted a Japanese news report on Thursday.

U.S. military experts do not believe the North Korean missile has the range to strike U.S. territory, but that the threat in the near future is real.

The Associated Pres reported late Thursday afternoon:

The United States has positioned more missile defenses around Hawaii as a precaution against a possible North Korean launch across the Pacific, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday. “We do have some concerns if they were to launch a missile to the west in the direction of Hawaii,” Gates said.

Gates told reporters at the Pentagon he has sent the military’s ground-based mobile missile system to Hawaii, and positioned a radar system nearby. Together the systems theoretically could detect and shoot down a North Korean missile if it came to that.

“Without telegraphing what we will do, I would just say … we are in a good position, should it become necessary, to protect Americans and American territory,” Gates said.

The Japanese report also said that Russia and China urged the regime to return to international disarmament talks on its rogue nuclear program.

The missile is reportedly a Taepodong-2, believed to have the firing range of 3,500-6,000 kilometers (2,175-3,728 miles). But its actual range can be longer, the report said. The distance between North Korea and Hawaii is about 7,000 kilometers (4,350 miles).

It would be launched from North Korea’s Dongchang-ni site on the northwestern coast, said the Yomiuri daily, Japan’s top-selling newspaper. It cited an analysis by the Japanese Defense Ministry and intelligence gathered by U.S. reconnaissance satellites. The date is of the launch is not known, but the newspaper said it could come on the Fourth of July weekend.

In 2006, North Korea tested a test-fired a long-range missile on the Fourth of July, but it failed seconds after launch. The North also tested five smaller missiles that day in an exercise the White House called “provocative” but not an immediate threat.

The Associated Press reports also notes:

A spokesman for the Japanese Defense Ministry declined to comment on the report. South Korea’s Defense Ministry and the National Intelligence Service – the country’s main spy agency – said they could not confirm it.

Tension on the divided Korean peninsula has spiked since the North conducted its second nuclear test on May 25 in defiance of repeated international warnings. The regime declared Saturday it would bolster its nuclear programs and threatened war in protest of U.N. sanctions taken for the nuclear test.

U.S. officials have said the North has been preparing to fire a long-range missile capable of striking the western U.S. In Washington on Tuesday, Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said it would take at least three to five years for North Korea to pose a real threat to the U.S. west coast.

The BBC said today that Iran has widened electronic jamming of its services, as the country’s Revolutionary Guard ordered domestic websites and blogs to remove any material that might “create tension” amid post-election unrest. Reporters are not allowed to cover unauthorised gatherings or move around freely in Tehran – but there are no controls over what they can write or say, according to the BBC.

Both the BBC’s World News and Persian TV channels are now being jammed by “ground-based interference” in what one senior corporation insider told MediaGuardian.co.uk was akin to “electronic warfare”.

Iranian authorities also blocked access to Yahoo Messenger early today as the country intensified its crackdown on all means of communication following Friday’s controversial presidential poll.Menawhile, Reporters sans frontières said this afternoon in Paris that two more journalists have been arrested.

Saide Lylaz, a business reporter for the newspaper Sarmayeh, who had been very critical of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s policies, is arrested at his home in Tehran. His wife says she does not know where he has been taken.

It is reported that Mohamad Atryanfar, the publisher of several newspapers including Hamshary, Shargh and Shahrvand Emrouz, was arrested on 15 June and was taken to the security wing of Evin prison.

This brings the total number of Iranian journalists arrested to at least 13.

Reporters sans frontières announced it has established a hotline for Iranian journalists in danger. SOS Presse, a phone hotline for journalists – (33) 1 4777-7414 – is open every day round the clock and, with the help of American Express, a Reporters sans frontières official can be quickly reached. Collect/reverse-charge calls can be made.

Late last night, Aldolfatah Soltani, a lawyer who represents many imprisoned journalists and who is a member of the Human Rights Defenders Centre, was arrested on the orders of the Tehran revolutionary court and is probably taken to the security wing at Tehran’s Evin prison. Ten or so opposition activists, politicians and civil society figures have been arrested in the course of the day in Tehran and three other major cities – Tabriz, Ispahan, and Shiraz.

The Guardian also reports these details:

BBC’s Persian website has also been blocked by filters, although the corporation said people were finding a way to unblock them manually and that use of the site had been “massive”. It was receiving five videos a minute from people within Iran.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, an elite body answering to the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said through the state news service that Iranian websites and bloggers must remove any materials that “create tension”, or else they would face legal action.

This is the first public statement from what is the country’s most powerful military force since the crisis erupted.

Iranian reformist websites, as well as blogs and Western social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, have been vital conduits for Iranians to inform the world about protests over the bitterly contested declaration of election victory for the hardline president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

At least 20 websites affiliated to the defeated reformist candidate, Mir Hussein Mousavi, have been blocked, although some users can still update their profiles by using proxy sites.

“Before this we could bypass filtering by using proxy websites, the links for which were distributed daily among friends by email. But now the Iranian communication ministry has also begun to tackle proxy websites too,” one Iranian student said.

“But there is still a small number of people who update their Facebook and Twitter profiles by using special anti-filtering programmes installed on their PC rather than regular proxy websites. The problem is that many people don’t know how to use this software.”

President Barack Obama will unveil his proposal to further regulate the financial industry in his effort to avoid a repeat of the market meltdown we experienced last fall.

The New York Times has the 85-page proposal online. Stephen Labaton of the Times explains its reach:

The plan the president will formally announce on Wednesday would give the Federal Reserve greater supervisory authority over large financial institutions whose problems pose potential risks to the economic system. It would separately expand the reach of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to seize and break up troubled financial institutions. And it would create a council of regulators, led by the Treasury secretary, to fill in regulatory gaps.

In doing so, the plan seeks to give Washington the tools to police the shadow system of finance that has grown up outside the government’s purview, and to make it easier for regulators to head off problems at large, troubled institutions or take control of them if they fail.

The Fed is the big winner in this proposal, but blogger Matthew Goldstein asks, who will the Fed be accountable to in this new order?

Now this is not meant to knock the job the Fed has done in the current financial crisis. In many respects, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke should be applauded for showing a willingness to improvise and come up with creative solutions for trying to limit the damage to the banking system and the economy. But throughout the crisis, Benanke & Co. have shown an utter disdain for transparency and full disclosure.

A good illustration of this is the contracts the NY Fed signed last fall with investment advisor Blackrock to manage the distressed assets the Fed acquired from AIG, the hobbled insurance giant. The contract between the NY Fed and Blackrock for managing the CDOs that AIG insured and the Fed took off the banks’ hands is 37 pages. But a good number of those pages are blank –- some 13 page to be exact.

And what is spelled out on these blank pages? Oh, just a few minor details like the fees paid to Blackrock, the firm’s potential CDO conflicts and the firm’s key personnel managing the assets. To be clear, this information isn’t totally secret. All this information has been disclosed to the NY Fed. It’s just that Fed officials have seen fit to keep this information secret from the public.

But if you’re counting on this veil of secrecy to be lifted by the Obama administration when it unveils its regulatory overhaul plan on Wednesday —- think again. The architect of the financial regulatory overhaul is Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who just happened to head the NY Fed when these contracts with Blackrock were signed.

Over the next five years, newspapers will lose $13 billion on the weight of dropping about 32 percent of its advertising revenue as digital technologies become increasingly widespread, according to the PricewaterhouseCoopers Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2009-2013 recently released report.

The report expects print advertising to fall the most from $36.7 billion in 2008 to $24.3 billion in 2013. Online advertising revenue is anticipated to decline over the next two years. PWC expects online ad revenue to grow to $3.7 billion in 2013 — a 2.5% increase when compounded annually from 2008.

The global entertainment and media market as a whole, including both consumer and advertising spending will grow by 2.7 percent compounded annually for the entire forecast period to $1.6 trillion in 2013. Initially, the report said, the industry should expect to see a 3.9 percent drop in 2009 and a mere 0.4 percent advance in 2010, with a period of much faster growth during the remaining period to 7.1 percent in 2013.

The report said PreicewaterhouseCoopers is expecting that this recession will last longer than previous ones because of a steeper downturn, and that the impact on consumer spending will be much steeper than in the past. However the economic downturn does not change the underlying drivers for digital migration and will more likely influence their pace and power and hence the timing of industry change. In short, making it more difficult to hide from the digital migration, the report said.

During the period under review, the switch to digital will drive divergences in revenue performance between different segments and geographies. Change will impact the managing of brands, characters, titles and talent across distribution platforms supported by new commercial models.

Marcel Fenez, global leader entertainment and media practice officer for PricewaterhouseCoopers, said, “In some ways this could be called ‘the perfect storm.’ Inside every cloud is a silver lining and in this case, a digital one. Companies who grasp the opportunities which are appearing in this fast changing marketplace and are agile enough to adapt their business models will be able to take full advantage of the potential and new revenue models as they emerge.

“In previous years we have talked about the Net Generation and how their demands are driving the industry towards new business models,” Fenez said. “Interestingly, in this “income elastic” climate where spending power has to stretch even further than before, this younger generation is now exerting influence over older generations who are, in turn, taking a growing interest in new and emerging platforms. End-user spending through digital/ mobile platforms accounted for 23.4 percent of the overall consumer/end-user/ access market in 2008 and we expect this to account for 78 percent of total growth during the next five years.”

Iran’s brutal crackdown on journalists and information that began after the announcement of the disputed presidential election results is continuing and getting worse as journalists are being rounded up and arrested, reports Reporters sans frontières, whose press release and report are the sources of this post. Additional censorship measures have been adopted as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tries to suppress media coverage of fraud allegations.

“Independent sources of news and information find it very hard to make their voice heard now in Iran because of the censorship,” Reporters sans frontières said. “The authorities are tightening their grip on all news media and means of communication that could be used to dispute Ahmadinejad reelection ‘victory’. They are doing everything possible to limit coverage of the consequences of the election fraud.”

The advocacy agency reiterates its appeal to the international community not to recognise the results of the presidential election first round held on June 12.

“A democratic election is one in which the media are free to monitor the electoral process and investigate fraud allegations but neither of these two conditions has been met for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s supposed reelection,” the agency said. “We urge the international community, especially European countries, not to recognise the results announced by the authorities as long as the electoral process is subject to censorship. An election won by means of censorship and arrests of journalists is not democratic.”

The security services have moved into the offices of newspapers where they are reading articles and censoring content. Mehdi Karoubi, one of the candidates, referred to the censorship in a press release. “I cannot even publish my release in my newspaper Etemad Meli,” he said.

The newspaper’s front page shows a photo of Ahmadinejad at a rally with columns left blank because of editing by the censors. The newspaper Velayat in the province of Qazvin (north of Tehran) has been suspended for publishing a cartoon of Ahmadinejad.

Even governmental news sources have been targeted in the crackdown. Four interior ministry officials have been arrested for given results that were different from those announced by Ahmadinejad’s allies, Reporters sans frontières said.

Four pro-reform newspapers have been closed or prevented from criticizing the official election results following a warning from Tehran prosecutor general Said Mortazavi. Kalameh Sabaz, a daily owned by opposition presidential candidate Mirhossein Mousavi, had its distribution blocked and it was forced to change a front page announcing Mousavi’s victory. It has not been able to publish any issue since June 13.

Eleven Iranian journalists have been arrested since June 12. Reza Alijani, Hoda Sabaer and Taghi Rahmani were arrested on June 13. Alijani and Rahmani were released yesterday evening. Freelancer Kivan Samimi Behbani, the former editor of Nameh (“The Letter”), an independent monthly closed in 2005, and Ahamad Zeydabadi were also arrested and then released.

Abdolreza Tajik was arrested at midday yesterday at the headquarters of the newspaper Farhikhtegan by three men in plain-clothes. A member of the Human Rights Defenders Centre, Tajik has worked for many Iranian publications that have been closed by the authorities, including Bahar (closed in 2001), Hambastegi (closed in 2003) and Shargh (closed in 2008).

Five of the journalists arrested in the past few days are still detained. They include Said Shariti, the editor of the news website Nooroz, who is being held by the police, and Mahssa Amrabadi of the daily Etemad Melli. She was arrested at her home yesterday by intelligence ministry agents who came with a warrant for the arrest of her husband, fellow-journalist Masoud Bastani. He was not at home at the time.

Two women journalists working at the Mousavi campaign headquarters were physically attacked on June 12. The Mousavi campaign news centre was ransacked on June 13 by Ahmadinejad supporters, who destroyed its computers. The Qalam News agency operated out of this centre.

There is no word of about 10 other journalists who have either been arrested or gone into hiding.

Iran is also fighting against the Internet, controlling and blocking all news websites likely to challenge Ahmadinejad’s announced victory. Ten or so pro-opposition websites have been censored. Most of the world is getting its news out of Iran from Twitter and other Internet sites.

The censored websites include www.entekhab.ir/ (inaccessible since June 11), www.ayandenews.com/ (inaccessible since June 12), teribon.com/, the pro-reform sites khordadeno.com/, aftabnews.ir/index.php and ghalamesabz.com/, norooznews.ir (the news website of the pro-Mousavi Islamic Participation Party) and www.ghalamsima.com/ (which also supports the Mousavi campaign). And the women’s rights website www.we-change.org/ has been blocked for the 20th time.

The international websites YouTube and Facebook are hard to access, the journalism agency reports. The mobile phone network is being jammed. The service of the leading mobile phone operator, which is state controlled, has been suspended since 10 p.m. on 13 June. The SMS messaging network has been cut since the morning of June 12, preventing use of Twitter.

The blockage of the foreign media has been stepped up. In addition to the blocking of the BBC’s website, the Farsi-language satellite broadcasts of the VOA and BBC – which are very popular in Iran – have been partially jammed. The BBC reported that their Farsi broadcasts have been the target of significant jamming “coming from Iran” since 12:45 Greenwich Mean Time on June 12, and that the jamming has been getting steadily worse.

The authorities yesterday ordered the Tehran bureau of the Arab satellite TV news station Al-Arabiya closed for a week after it broadcast video of the first demonstration following the announcement of Ahmadinejad’s reelection.

Foreign journalists have been prevented from covering the demonstrations, some have been notified that their visas will not be renewed, and some have been the victims of police violence. A member of a TV crew working for the Italian station RAI and a Reuters reporter were beaten by police in the capital. A BBC TV crew was threatened by police at one point, but demonstrators chased the police away. The correspondents of the German TV stations ARD and ZDF were forbidden to leave their hotel on June 13. Reuters reports that its journalists are banned from leaving their office or taking pictures.

Two Dutch TV journalists working for Nederland 2 were arrested and expelled. Reporter Yolanda Alvarez of the Spanish television station TVE was deported together with her crew today.