Bush administation stands by Saudi blogger

Sur le même thème que "Bush administation stands by Saudi blogger"

A Children's Treasury of Funny Wire Photos From Bush's Trip to Saudi Arabia [Bush Does Saudis]

President George Walker Bush spent his Tuesday in Saudi Arabia (they finish Tuesday earlier over there because the sun comes at different times), and boy boy boy did he have a whale of a time. He got... [lien] [EN]

Bush and the Cowardly Terrorists

President Bush’s first official response to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto was to call it a “cowardly” act. Despicable, horrible, anti-democratic, ungodly, of course…for this particular murder we could exhaust the vocabulary of condemnation. But of all the possible negative adjectives, “cowardly,” seems one of the least appropriate. Why did Bush resort to that particular term of opprobrium? And what does it say about how we’re framing the “war on terror”? Bush routinely characterizes terrorist acts as cowardly. In October, 2000, Bush called the attack on a US destroyer in Yemen cowardly. On September 12, 2001, he called the attacks the day before cowardly. He called the 2002 Bali explosion cowardly. He (through the State Dept.) called the 2003 Mumbai bombings cowardly. [lien] [EN]

Obama v. Bush: Google counts

“George Bush”: 25M hits at Google (with the quotation marks) “George W. Bush”: 48M “Barack Obama”: 105M “Obama”: 248M “Bush”: 344M Wow, that seems screwy! The combined total for “George Bush” and “George W. Bush,” after 9 years of coverage (campaign and presidency), and including two George Bushes, is only about 75% of the number of hits for Barack Obama before he’s taken office? Either we’re really excited about Barack Obama or something’s gone wrong in my Google searches. Or, more likely, both. [Tags: google obama ] Categories: everythingIsMiscellaneous, politics [lien] [EN]

Bush’s empty talk on Middle East freedom.

One day after delivering an address in the United Arab Emirates about the need for the Middle East to live in “free and democratic” societies, President Bush traveled to Saudi Arabia to spend a day with King Abdullah at his ranch. Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh notes: What could not be found on Bush’s schedule was one Saudi [...] [lien] [EN]

Censorship! [Bloggers In Peril]

A young man in Saudi Arabia (he is delivering a kidney to his father—no joke!) reports that the site of Fouad al Farhan, the Saudi blogger jailed last year, is blocked. Along with Radar, Fleshbot, and Craigslist Casual Encounters. [Kidney and the Kingdom] [lien] [EN]

Turning to the bloggers

When I read something like today’s news that only 10% of American newspaper editors consider foreign news to be “very essential” to their coverage, I instinctively turn to the bloggers who I know will have something enlightening, thoughtful and sometimes profound to say. And that by itself says a lot about how news is changing. Of course, I did read that particular news in a newspaper, although I was referred there by a blog aggregator. So, I’m not saying that professional news media are unnecessary or add nothing. Not at all. But the news ecology in just a few years has become 100% mixed. Tags: news media participatory_media ethan_zuckerman Categories: blogs, everythingIsMiscellaneous, media [lien] [EN]

Bush on McCain's Campaign

At the White House press briefing today, spokeswoman Dana Perino offered a little perspective from the Bush camp on this year’s presidential race. Asked whether President Bush had “voiced any concern about what appears to be happening to John McCain’s fortunes in the last week or two,” Ms. Perino said: “The president is convinced that John McCain still has time to close up this race. And remember — he remembers when he was running in 2000 and how far he was down before the election, and he came back to win.” Actually, around this time, major polls showed Mr. Bush and then Vice President Al Gore in a dead heat, after debate performances seemed to help raise Mr. Bush’s standing from earlier autumn surveys. The difference this time around, of course. [lien] [EN]

Chinese won’t let blogger travel

Rebecca MacKinnon reports that the Chinese government has refused to let citizen journalist blogger Zhou Shuguang (known as Zola) travel outside the country. This is not the first time he’s faced the Chinese authorities. This time, he twittered it as it was happening. Rebecca posts: “I just communicated with Zola online. I asked him how he’s feeling - he said he’s tired but he feels ok, isn’t stressed.” She is concerned, however, as we all should be. [Tags: zola blogging Zhou_Shuguang china ] Categories: blogs, digital rights, peace [lien] [EN]

Accountable bloggers and journalists

[Note 5 hrs after posting this: Ethan Zuckerman has just put up a superb post on this topic. I suggest you read that instead of this.] Jillian York of the Berkman Center explains the current confusion about the NY Times’ rather casual suggestion (in a blog post), based on an accusation in a tweet from Omid Habibinia, that Hossein Derakhshan (aka Hoder) has been an agent for the Iranian government, basically ratting out pro-democracy bloggers. The NY Times has now gone meta on the accusation, saying it only reported it because it’s a sign of the discord and distrust, etc. etc. But it’s still a dangerous charge to propagate. Jillian wants to know why we’re blaming the NY Times blogger and not Habibinia. I’ve got enough blame in my backpack for both. But I do think that since the NY Times trades on its credibility. [lien] [EN]

Saudi public ‘leery of Bush.’

President Bush touched down in Saudi Arabia today, the last stop on his Middle East trip. The AP notes that despite Bush’s “close ties to the kingdom’s ruling family,” he is viewed with “deep unpopularity among ordinary Saudis.” A recent poll found that only 12 percent of Saudis view Bush positively — “lower than Iran’s [...] [lien] [EN]

Here We Kyoto Again: AP Lets False Claim That Bush ‘Pulled Out’ Stand

In a post earlier this evening, Lynn Davidson at NewsBusters chronicled the myraid errors in a March 31 Reuters “Factbox” relating to the Kyoto Protocol. Among the errors Davidson noted was the wire service’s claim that “The United States ….. came out against the pact in 2001″ — implying, but not actually stating, that the US government was perfectly happy with Kyoto until mean old George W. Bush came along. This is, of course, patently untrue. The error made by Erin Gartner of the Associated Press in covering Chelsea Clinton’s appearance at the University of North Carolina on behalf of her mother’s presidential bid was more obvious. It is just the latest in a long line of direct or attributed misstatements the AP has let stand about the treaty’s history in the US (HTs to Captain Ed at Hot Air and Instapundit). [lien] [EN]

Relief and Dismay in Saudi Rape-Victim Case

Advisors to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia may have thought that pardoning “the girl from Qatif” would quiet critics at home and abroad who were outraged by the way she was treated by the fundamentalist-Islamic Saudi justice system. But from many quarters, the pardon, reported in a Saudi newspaper on Monday, seems to be renewing the criticism and calls for reform. A bit of back story: This is the now-notorious case of a 19-year-old woman, recently married, who, having been seen sitting in a car with a man to whom she was not related, was abducted and repeatedly raped by seven men. The assailants were prosecuted (for kidnapping, not rape), but so was the woman, known publicly only as the Girl From Qatif, and the man she was with, for the Saudi crime of “illegal mingling. [lien] [EN]

Arab Bloggers Under Pressure as Bush Visits the Middle East

Much of the Arab blogosphere is abuzz this week. Not about President Bush's current [lien] [EN]

Bush, Putin and What Russian Bloggers Think

MOSCOW – President Bush and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — “two old war horses,” as Mr. Bush put it on Friday at the NATO summit – are meeting for talks this weekend in Russia. How can the two reach compromises, given the many tensions that have arisen in their relationship? We put that question to the Russian blogosphere, seeking the opinions of Russians about the options for the two leaders, who are both ending their second terms. The comments were collected on the Russian-language blog that is operated by the Moscow bureau of The New York Times. The blog, on the LiveJournal platform, received more than 125 responses to our query. Here is a sampling: lepestriny: “Personally, I believe that the Russian Federation and the United States, together with the European Union. [lien] [EN]