If one asks current or former WikiLeaks associates what their greatest fear is, almost none cites prosecution by their own country. Most trust their own nation’s justice system to recognize that they have committed no crime. The primary fear is being turned over to the US. That is the crucial context for understanding Julian Assange’s 16-month fight to avoid extradition to Sweden, a fight that led him to seek asylum, Tuesday, in the London Embassy of Ecuador.
“It’s a little complicated, but we were expected to do somewhat unbalanced news, politically, in general.”Maine news anchor team resigns on air over ‘unbalanced news’ (via The Raw Story)
Shahid Khan: The New Face Of The NFL And The American Dream
This story appears in the September 24, 2012 issue of Forbes.
With sweat and smarts, Pakistan-born Shahid Khan built a $3.4 billion manufacturing juggernaut from the ruins of an Illinois auto parts maker. To celebrate, he just bought one of the worst teams in the NFL, with the pledge of a similar turnaround. Only in America, folks.
Driving down a dusty back road in Danville, Ill., Shahid Khan narrates the fall of American manufacturing. “The Allith-Prouty plant closed there. That was 1,400 jobs,” he says, pointing out boarded-up buildings on our left. Some 300 people used to work at the welding plant next door. “Gone,” he shrugs. Another 7,000 or so were lost when Hyster trucks closed shop.
As we pass more dilapidated warehouses and bulldozed dreams—800 jobs lost at the mill around the corner, 1,200 across the way—we seem like tourists in an industrial wasteland, the ruins of a manufacturing golden age, with crumbling Danville playing the role of Pompeii or Luxor, although those ruins might be better preserved, Khan notes with a rueful smile. “Around you, right now, I can count 30,000 jobs that just disappeared,” he says, shaking his head.With flowing black hair and the thick handlebar mustache of a man used to leaving a lasting impression, the 62-year-old Khan, driving a shiny white Grand Cherokee, is a swashbuckling contrast to the desolation around him. While Danville and the rest of the Rust Belt were deteriorating over the last 40 years, Khan was moving in exactly the opposite direction. The sole owner and CEO of Flex-N-Gate, he built one of the biggest automotive parts suppliers in North America almost from scratch from his headquarters just 35 miles away and now employs more than 13,000 people at 52 factories around the globe. Sales reached $3.4 billion in 2011. FORBES estimates his net worth at $2.5 billion, placing him in the top half of the soon-to-be-released 2012 Forbes 400.
An enormous accomplishment for anyone, it’s more like a Mars landing for a middle-class kid from Pakistan who flew into Illinois for an engineering degree at 16 and never left. Khan’s is the kind of only-in-America success story that has filled boats and planes with dreamers for the past 150 years, one that gives a face to an ironclad fact: Skilled, motivated immigrants are proven job creators, not job takers.
Khan’s American Dream continued this January, when he purchased the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars for $770 million. In so doing, he became the first ethnic-minority owner in a league synonymous with cheerleaders and tailgate parties, Thanksgiving grudge matches and that most secular of U.S. holidays, Super Bowl Sunday. Buying into the NFL, he says, was a statement about the opportunity America offers.
“Is he on The Island?” On the (lack of) professional consequences for sexual harassers
I used to have a very elaborate inside joke with a few other women in media. It was called The Island, and the narrative went like this: All of the editors we know to be sexual harassers or professional bullies are on a plane together, probably heading to some sort of “ideas festival,” when the plane goes down on a small island. There, they are forced to live out the rest of their days with only each other to harass. In their absence, the rest of us go on to remake the media industry into a creative, forward-thinking, gender-equitable paradise. Fin.
It was funny to picture this scenario, but also sort of a sad coping mechanism. We knew these dudes were too professionally powerful, too entrenched to really be held accountable for their behavior. The Island became a code for telling each other who was a good guy and who was a bad guy—which upper-masthead men actually wanted to mentor us, and which ones just wanted the thrill of having a cocktail with an attractive younger woman under the guise of professionalism: “Is he on The Island or not?” Or, “Watch out, that guy’s totally on The Island.”
And so today, even though I’m on deadline for about four other things (sorry, editors!), I can’t stop reading about all of the drama at The Oxford American.
Most of the time, sexual harassment is not easily verifiable, not obvious to outsiders. Sure, sometimes there are emails or—shudder—voicemails. Irrefutable proof. But mostly harassment is a series of seemingly minor infractions: a quick “joke” about your legs, lots of inquiries about your sex life, three compliments about your looks for every one compliment about your work, a creepy gaze, a lingering touch. Lawyers will tell you to keep a log—to write down each of these little incidents. But it can build up so quietly. You might have a bad feeling about a dude, but not quite be ready to call it harassment until it’s gone on for months. In other words, it creeps up on you. Creeps creep up on you. That’s how they do!
The reason these guys still have jobs? Because the (typically) young (typically) female people they’re harassing have a lot to lose. Because a public accusation would instantly turn into a “he said, she said” situation. Because this situation would become a defining aspect of the accuser’s professional life, very likely wrecking it. Because it’s much safer to talk about this with our peers—usually just our female peers—over drinks or in Gmail. This chat is off the record.
There’s a reason The Island was a private joke, never a dramatic op-ed that named names. But I agree that knowledge is power. And, among women in the profession, there are definitely men in media who are well known as creepsters. There are names that pop up again and again in those Gchat conversations.
I can’t help but think there’s a technological solution here. Some way of creating a private message board where users are vetted but anonymous, where women can take this knowledge about who belongs on The Island and share it without fear of retribution. Kind of a professional version of Don’t Date Him Girl, only… better. I know, I know: There’s a potential for abuse with anonymous accusations. But really, it’s 2012. It’s a collective embarrassment that this behavior is still so common, and it warrants a collective response—one that goes beyond a series of private conversations and inside jokes.
IMPORTANT. PLEASE HELP.
So a queer friend of mine wrote an anonymous article about her time as an intern at an Australian
newstabloid paper called The Herald Sun in her local uni magazine. It criticizes it’s ethics and details her experience and you can read it here, then another Australian newspaper wrote a response article which you can read here.That was all fine, she remains anonymous and all it does is show they’re ignoring the blatant transphobia and homophobia and don’t understand sexism among many other things.
Here’s where it get’s fucked. VEXNEWS wrote this article supposedly “naming and shaming” her. It’s obviously homophobic, they slut shame her and basically you should just read this piece of rubbish.
Would you please read these links and make your way over to VEXNEWS and leave a comment about the importance of them CHECKING THEIR PRIVILEGE and whatever else enrages you (trust me, there’ll be a lot).
Holy fuck, that’s an actual newspaper? Quote from the Editor in Chief in the comments “She is a selfish, nasty, vicious snitch” It’s literally like reading some MRA dudebro crying on his blog after being called out.
(Source: boundunbound)
Julian Assange’s right to asylum
June 20, 2012The evidence that the US seeks to prosecute and extradite Assange is substantial. There is no question that the Obama justice department has convened an active grand jury to investigate whether WikiLeaks violated the draconian Espionage Act of 1917. Key senators from President Obama’s party, including Senate intelligence committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, have publicly called for his prosecution under that statute. A leaked email from the security firm Stratfor – hardly a dispositive source, but still probative – indicated that a sealed indictment has already been obtained against him. Prominent American figures in both parties have demanded Assange’s lifelong imprisonment, called him a terrorist, and even advocated his assassination.
For several reasons, Assange has long feared that the US would be able to coerce Sweden into handing him over far more easily than if he were in Britain. For one, smaller countries such as Sweden are generally more susceptible to American pressure and bullying.
For another, that country has a disturbing history of lawlessly handing over suspects to the US. A 2006 UN ruling found Sweden in violation of the global ban on torture for helping the CIA render two suspected terrorists to Egypt, where they were brutally tortured (both individuals, asylum-seekers in Sweden, were ultimately found to be innocent of any connection to terrorism and received a monetary settlement from the Swedish government).
Perhaps most disturbingly of all, Swedish law permits extreme levels of secrecy in judicial proceedings and oppressive pre-trial conditions, enabling any Swedish-US transactions concerning Assange to be conducted beyond public scrutiny. Ironically, even the US State Department condemned Sweden’s “restrictive conditions for prisoners held in pretrial custody”, including severe restrictions on their communications with the outside world.
Assange’s fear of ending up in the clutches of the US is plainly rational and well-grounded. One need only look at the treatment over the last decade of foreign nationals accused of harming American national security to know that’s true; such individuals are still routinely imprisoned for lengthy periods without any charges or due process. Or consider the treatment of Bradley Manning, accused of leaking to WikiLeaks: a formal UN investigation found that his pre-trial conditions of severe solitary confinement were “cruel, inhuman and degrading”, and he now faces capital charges of aiding al-Qaida. The Obama administration’s unprecedented obsession with persecuting whistleblowers and preventing transparency – what even generally supportive, liberal magazines call ”Obama’s war on whistleblowers” – makes those concerns all the more valid.
No responsible person should have formed a judgment one way or the other as to whether Assange is guilty of anything in Sweden. He has not even been charged, let alone tried or convicted, of sexual assault, and he is entitled to a presumption of innocence. The accusations made against him are serious ones, and deserve to be taken seriously and accorded a fair and legal resolution.
But the WikiLeaks founder, like everyone else, is fully entitled to invoke all of his legal rights, and it’s profoundly reckless and irresponsible to suggest, as some have, that he has done anything wrong by doing so. Seeking asylum on the grounds of claimed human rights violations is a longstanding and well-recognized right in international law. It is unseemly, at best, to insist that he forego his rights in order to herd him as quickly as possible to Sweden.
Assange is not a fugitive and has not fled. Everyone knows where he is. If Ecuador rejects his asylum request, he will be right back in the hands of British authorities, who will presumably extradite him to Sweden without delay. At every step of the process, he has adhered to, rather than violated, the rule of law. His asylum request of yesterday is no exception.
Julian Assange has sparked intense personal animosity, especially in media circles – a revealing irony, given that he has helped to bring about more transparency and generated more newsworthy scoops than all media outlets combined over the last several years. That animosity often leads media commentators to toss aside their professed beliefs and principles out of an eagerness to see him shamed or punished.
But ego clashes and media personality conflicts are pitifully trivial when weighed against what is at stake in this case: both for Assange personally and for the greater cause of transparency. If he’s guilty of any crimes in Sweden, he should be held to account. But until then, he has every right to invoke the legal protections available to everyone else. Even more so, as a foreign national accused of harming US national security, he has every reason to want to avoid ending up in the travesty known as the American judicial system. -Glenn Greenwald
“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.” - George Orwell
Journalism Today: We Must Cut the Thing that Makes Us Money - First Draft
“…Look, right now very, very few newspaper “company” executives have any idea what the fuck they’re doing, and instead of letting newspapers do what they’re good at and break even or make small profits, they’re determined to flail around and blither about “new technologies and changing tastes” and make excuses for killing off their product. I do not get it anymore. I used to think this was just about money, and while newspapers make money they don’t make ENOUGH money, but what’s happening to the Times-Pic is destroying something that made unexpected amounts of money last year, so someone please explain to me why you’d want to mess with that.
“I work on the Internet. I like the Internet. I think the Internet has been awesome for journalism. But that doesn’t mean the Internet has to be the only thing we do. If people like a paper and read a paper, buy a paper, and if people advertise in a paper, why not have a fucking paper? …”
