No Questions Asked

The best reporters are being kicked aside in this business leaving us with gossip mongers and reporters who don’t know the basics, don’t know how to pursue facts and do not know how to report the news.

Here’s a nice short video of the paper’s last days.

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/

Two recent news stories illustrate how little compassion we have for the men and women we send to war and our elderly.

As Soldiers stream home from Iraq and Afghanistan, the biggest charity inside the U.S. military has been stockpiling tens of millions of dollars meant to help put returning fighters back on their feet, an Associated Press investigation shows.

Between 2003 and 2007 - as many military families dealt with long war deployments and increased numbers of home foreclosures - Army Emergency Relief grew into a $345 million behemoth. During those years, the charity packed away $117 million into its own reserves while spending just $64 million on direct aid, according to an AP analysis of its tax records.

Tax-exempt and legally separate from the military, AER projects a facade of independence but really operates under close Army control. The massive nonprofit - funded predominantly by troops - allows superiors to squeeze Soldiers for contributions; forces struggling Soldiers to repay loans - sometimes delaying transfers and promotions; and too often violates its own rules by rewarding donors, such as giving free passes from physical training, the AP found.

And yesterday a bankruptcy judge allowed Delphi Corp. (formerly part of General Motors) to stop paying health insurance for its retired salaried employees

More than 1,600 retirees sent letters to the judge in the days leading up to the hearing begging him to deny Delphi’s motion.

Delphi salaried retirees hired before 1993 and their survivors currently receive health insurance benefits until the age of 65 when they become eligible for Medicare. Under the changes Delphi has requested, those retirees will be responsible for paying the full cost of their health insurance, which could amount to more than $1,000 per month for a retiree and spouse.

The mystery of Ireland’s worst driver

 Details of how police in the Irish Republic finally caught up with the country’s most reckless driver have emerged, the Irish Times reports. He had been wanted from counties Cork to Cavan after racking up scores of speeding tickets and parking fines.

However, each time the serial offender was stopped he managed to evade justice by giving a different address.

But then his cover was blown.

It was discovered that the man every member of the Irish police’s rank and file had been looking for - a Mr Prawo Jazdy - wasn’t exactly the sort of prized villain whose apprehension leads to an officer winning an award.

In fact he wasn’t even human.

” Prawo Jazdy is actually the Polish for driving licence and not the first and surname on the licence,” read a letter from June 2007 from an officer working within the Garda’s traffic division.

“Having noticed this, I decided to check and see how many times officers have made this mistake.

“It is quite embarrassing to see that the system has created Prawo Jazdy as a person with over 50 identities.”

A picture of an armed sheriff moving through an American home after an eviction due to a mortgage foreclosure won the top prize in the World Press Photo competition

Jury members said the strength of the photo by Anthony Suau for Time magazine was in its opposites - it looks like a classic war photograph, but is simply the eviction of people from a house.

Picture: REUTERS

The winner in the General News Singles category, by Brazilian photographer Luiz Vasconcelos, was another eviction scene showing a woman holding her naked child while being pushed away from her home by a line of riot police

Picture: REUTERS

Carlos Cazalis, a photographer based in Mexico, has won the first prize of the Contemporary Issues Stories category with this photo of a homeless person in Sao Paulo, Brazil

Picture: REUTERS

Walter Astrada won first prize in the Spot News Singles category for his picture of a Kenyan boy screaming as he sees a policeman with a baton approaching the door of his home in the Kibera slum of Nairobi

Picture: AFP/GETTY

Carlos F Gutierrez has won the first prize of the Nature Singles category with this photo of Chaiten volcano eruption, Chile

Picture: REUTERS

More here (hit the next arrow, top right to view more images).

Nice NY Times article on how we can teach children to sift through information on the Internet and to decipher fact from fiction. Kudos to the librarians who are helping to educate, enlighten and use the latest tools to teach children how to read between the lines.

In Web Age, Library Job Gets Update

It was the “aha!” moment that Stephanie Rosalia was hoping for.

A group of fifth graders huddled around laptop computers in the school library overseen by Ms. Rosalia and scanned allaboutexplorers.com, a Web site that, unbeknownst to the children, was intentionally peppered with false facts.

Ms. Rosalia, the school librarian at Public School 225, a combined elementary and middle school in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, urged caution. “Don’t answer your questions with the first piece of information that you find,” she warned.

Most of the students ignored her, as she knew they would. But Nozimakon Omonullaeva, 11, noticed something odd on a page about Christopher Columbus.

“It says the Indians enjoyed the cellphones and computers brought by Columbus!” Nozimakon exclaimed, pointing at the screen. “That’s wrong.”

It was an essential discovery in a lesson about the reliability — or lack thereof — of information on the Internet, one of many Ms. Rosalia teaches in her role as a new kind of school librarian.

Ms. Rosalia, 54, is part of a growing cadre of 21st-century multimedia specialists who help guide students through the digital ocean of information that confronts them on a daily basis. These new librarians believe that literacy includes, but also exceeds, books.

“The days of just reshelving a book are over,” said Ms. Rosalia… “Now it is the information age, and that technology has brought out a whole new generation of practices.”

Some of these new librarians teach children how to develop PowerPoint presentations or create online videos. Others get students to use social networking sites to debate topics from history or comment on classmates’ creative writing. Yet as school librarians increasingly teach students crucial skills needed not only in school, but also on the job and in daily life, they are often the first casualties of school budget crunches.

We forget that journalists are true heroes. Here’s to all the reporters who risk their lives in pursuit of the truth. It is interesting that journalists in Sri Lanka and other countries resist censorship more fiercely than those in “democracies” like the US.

They stormed into the building at about two o’clock in the morning.

A group of heavily armed men, their faces covered, they smashed windows, broke down doors and tried to blow up the control room at the Sirasa TV studios on the outskirts of Colombo last month.

This is the other side of Sri Lanka’s war - a violent crackdown on dissent.

Inside the control room there are shards of glass and bits of debris on the floor. The walls and ceiling are covered in thick black grimy soot.

There are TV screens burnt out of shape, and recording equipment and wires lying in mangled heaps.

On one wall three plastic buttons - red, yellow and green - have melted in the heat. The plastic has leaked down the wall like bits of bubble gum.

The government has categorically denied any role in this attack, but someone is trying to silence the critics.

‘Climate of fear’

I have been shown around by the station director, who for understandable reasons is cautious.

“As to why this happens, you just don’t want to say,” I suggest.

He looks at me, he looks at my colleague, he looks at the floor, and he gives a slight smile.

I nod and turn away. His silence speaks volumes. Some things are too sensitive to discuss.

Two days after the attack at Sirisa TV, a prominent newspaper editor Lasantha Wickramatunga - a feisty government critic - was shot dead as he drove to work.

At least nine journalists have been killed in Sri Lanka in the past three years.

Lasantha’s brother Lal now runs the newspaper. He shows me Lasantha’s empty office - left as it was on the day he died.

“There is a climate of fear. More than the fear is the uncertainty of where it will strike next,” he says.

The government has strongly denied any involvement in this murder as well.

But in a posthumous editorial, which gained widespread publicity around the world, Lasantha Wickramatunga was chillingly certain about what would happen to him.

“When finally I am killed,” he wrote, “it will be the government that kills me.”

‘Fighting for the country’

Lasantha’s wife, Sonali Samarasinghe, is one of at least 10 journalists who have fled from the country in the wake of his murder. Reporting has become a perilous business.

Others have been assaulted or threatened. JS Tissanayagam, a Tamil journalist, has been in custody for nearly a year.

But the government’s position is clear. There is a war on, and the country comes first.

“People seem to be scared of you,” I say to Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa. “Should they be?”

“This is wrong propaganda,” he replies. “The only thing I have done is fight the terror.”

“I have only two groups - the people who fight terrorism and the terrorists.”

“Does that mean,” I ask, “that you think dissent or criticism during a time of war is treason?”

“Yes,” he says. “We are fighting to save our country - the sovereignty of our country.”

Sri Lanka will mark Independence Day this week with a huge military parade on Galle Face Green in the heart of Colombo.

For many it will be a celebration of victory, of a civil war almost won.

But for anyone who disagrees with prevailing official opinion, these are dangerous times.

Some of it is about internal political rivalries, but much of it is not. It is about the freedom to express an alternative view.