From the Daily Sun, Nigeria’s King of the Tabloids:
The young man, who was arrested for impersonating the Super Falcon’s captain, Miss Perpetua Nkwocha, has revealed that he duped people because he wanted to see his siblings through secondary school.
Also, he said he engaged in nefarious activities because he discovered that human beings love lies!
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From the BBC:
Television journalists were travelling with Russian forces who captured a group of rebel fighters sheltering in the village of Alkhan-Kala.
Mr Yandiyev, dressed in camouflage, can be seen in the footage standing injured near a bus.
He is questioned by a Russian general who eventually shouts: “Take him away, finish him off, shoot him, damn it!”
Mr Yandiyev was then led away and has not been seen since.
General Alexander Baranov, who was seen on camera sending him off to be shot, has since been promoted and awarded a Hero of Russia medal.
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From CJR:
Anderson Cooper followed up this past Monday with a similar report, telling viewers that “we found ourselves with other foreign reporters taken on a guided tour by Hezbollah … They only allowed us to videotape certain streets, certain buildings.”
“This is a heavily orchestrated Hezbollah media event. When we got here, all the ambulances were lined up. We were allowed a few minutes to talk to the ambulance drivers. Then one by one, they’ve been told to turn on their sirens and zoom off so that all the photographers here can get shots of ambulances rushing off to treat civilians … These ambulances aren’t responding to any new bombings. The sirens are strictly for effect.”
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From PDN:
Getty Images photographer Spencer Platt says photographers in Beirut have been scrambling to the scene of explosions whenever they hear them, but doing so isn’t easy because Hezbollah is keeping photographers at arms length. “They’re very suspicious of our motives,” he says, explaining that they suspect there are Israeli spies among the Western journalists. Moreover, Platt says, Israeli aircraft are targeting cars in some places, so if you go on certain roads, “There’s a high probability that you’ll be attacked.”
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Corey Arnold, 30, is a Freelance Photographer and Alaska Crab Fisherman. During October, January, and February you will find him working and photographing aboard the f/v Rollo in the Bering Sea. The rest of the year he lives in Norway or San Francisco and spends the working hours photographing for exhibitions, art projects, books, magazines, bands, and advertisments. Recently, Corey has been focused on making pictures aboard fishing and whaling vessels in Northern Norway and Alaska (His so-called “life project”) You might have seen him as a deckhand aboard the f/v Rollo in the Discovery Channel’s emmy nominated series “Deadliest Catch”. He is also the co-founder and editor of Fisk Magazine, a new international “Cultural” fishing magazine which will launch in September 2006.
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From the New York Times:
The crisis in Darfur, long neglected, finally burst into the world’s consciousness. Congo remains largely forgotten. It is hard to understand why. Four million people have died in Congo since 1998, half of them children under 5, according to the International Rescue Committee. Though the war in Congo officially ended in 2002, its deadly legacy of violence and decay will kill twice as many people this year as have died in the entire Darfur conflict, which began in 2003.
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From the Daily Sun, Nigeria’s King of the Tabloids:
Too young to fathom out what actually occurred to him, Ndubuisi who had passed out during the incident came around to ask the grim question: What happened to my leg? Up till date, he is yet to know what exactly had happened to his leg, hence he continues to ask questions.
Moved to tears, his father, Emmanuel said the boy simply said: “ Daddy a lorry broke my leg, why not tell the doctor to repair it fast I want to go to school tomorrow.” Emmanuel replied that the doctor would do that immediately- a vein assurance.
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From the Washington Post:
The very setup of the U.S. presence in Iraq undercut the mission. The chain of command was hazy, with no one individual in charge of the overall American effort in Iraq, a structure that led to frequent clashes between military and civilian officials.
On May 16, 2003, L. Paul Bremer III, the chief of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-run occupation agency, had issued his first order, “De-Baathification of Iraq Society.” The CIA station chief in Baghdad had argued vehemently against the radical move, contending that, “By nightfall, you’ll have driven 30,000 to 50,000 Baathists underground. And in six months, you’ll really regret this.”
He was proved correct, as Bremer’s order, along with a second that dissolved the Iraqi military and national police, created a new class of disenfranchised, threatened leaders.
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From the Guardian:
Only 45 people turned up on Friday at Milan’s Civic Arena for a performance by the 51-year-old singer and songwriter. The venue has a capacity of 12,000.
Geldof refused to go on stage once he realised the dismally small number of people waiting to hear him perform. Before taking a taxi back to his hotel to pack his bags, he stopped to placate those who had turned up by signing autographs and having his photograph taken.
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NYT Magazine:
The counterfeiting of American currency by North Korea might seem, to some, to be a minor provocation by that country’s standards. North Korea, after all, has exported missile technology in blatant disregard of international norms; engaged in a decades-long campaign of kidnapping citizens of other countries; abandoned pledges not to pursue nuclear weapons; and most recently, on July 4, launched ballistic missiles in defiance of warnings from several countries, including the United States.
But several current and former Bush administration officials whom I spoke with several months ago maintain that the counterfeiting is in important ways a comparable outrage. Michael Green, a former point man for Asia on the National Security Council, told me that in the past, counterfeiting has been seen as an “act of war.” A current senior administration official, who was granted anonymity because of the sensitivity of relations between the United States and North Korea, agreed that the counterfeiting could be construed by some as a hostile act against another nation under international law and added that the counterfeits, by creating mistrust in the American currency, posed a “threat to the American people.”
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From wallspankers.com:
This is a brand spankin’ new project headed by MWMgraphics and Knuckle Sandwich Press. The idea is pretty simple and we have been meaning to make it happen for years. It is a collaborative endeavor that entirely relies on participants submissions and “spanks”. Spanking refers to slapping stickers up (an incredible current worldwide phenomenon).
As a graffiti head, designer, illustrator, and sticker fan, I wanted to create a place where friends, fam and new acquaintances could share their Black and White designs with the world.
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From the BBC:
One of the Islamist leaders, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, urged all gunmen not allied to the UIC to surrender their weapons.
“Any attempt to fight the Islamic courts is pointless. We are committed to put Mogadishu under one leadership,” he said.
“Any group that tries to fight the Islamic courts will be destroyed. The Islamic courts have overcome the infidel stooges.”
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Photos by Paolo Pellegrin from MagnumPhotos:
Last October’s earthquake in Kashmir was the worst natural disaster in Pakistan’s history. The tremor killed more than 80,000 people and injured hundred of thousands.
Eight months after the catastrophy, some 3 million people still remain homeless. The relief operation has been ongoing and massive: helicopters have flown more than 27,000 sorties into the Himalayan region in northern Pakistan, where the 7.6-magnitude quake was centered. They’ve dropped off some 30,000 tons of provisions–food, medicine, blankets and tents. Still, the reconstruction of the 600,000 homes in the region has barely begun, and all the villages in the quake zone, one of the poorest and most remote in the world before the disaster, have sunk even deeper into poverty.
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From PDN:
Leroy was part of a generation of photojournalists who made their names in Vietnam – some others include David Burnett, Don McCullin, Gilles Caron, Larry Burrows, Tim Page and Dirck Halstead – by taking advantage of the access afforded to journalists there.
“We rode in military planes, did helicopter assaults during operations, walked with units, everywhere, anytime,” Leroy recalled in a 2002 interview with PDN. “We were not subjected to censorship. It was unprecedented, and it will never be repeated again. We have now entered ‘the brave new world’ where disinformation and censorship are being implemented and access reduced to photo opportunities.”
In the same interview, Leroy described her how she traveled to Saigon at age 21, with a Leica and $150 and no combat experience. “I had never heard a gun fired in anger before, and I spoke three words of English,” she said.
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Lucian Read, from Digital Journalist:
The battalion and company limped out of Fallujah heroes–a fistful of Bronze Stars, a Navy Cross. That Navy Cross was one of only eight since the war began. If the First Sergeant who earned it had died they probably would have given him The Medal. I took the photo that helped to bring him the recognition. In the image, two young Marines carry a grim older Marine from a house, his arms around their shoulders, lap and legs covered in blood, pistol still at the ready as he nearly bleeds to death. He saved Nicoll’s life when he took the blast from the grenade. Then he gave up his tourniquet as he bled from 50 places. Books have been, are being written about it. The picture is now on posters wherever two or three Marines gather together, an example for generations of Marines to come.
To the Marines, I am that guy who took that picture. A year and a half later, my pictures of these same Marines run under the words “shame, massacre, bloodbath.”
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From the Daily Sun, Nigeria’s King of the Tabloids:
When you said shit business is serious business, could you please expatiate on that?
Yes, what I mean is that every human-being on earth excretes. Man, woman, children etc and no one would want to stay there after doing it. So, if you decides to pack the shit and you are not serious you won’t do it, it’s a serious business because it is not something that smells nice, if you don’t do it with passion or won’t want to be identified with it, you can’t do it because it is not a job anybody can wake up to tell the whole Nigeria he does. So I am passionate about it, it’s a serious business. Something that 120 million Nigerians will wake up to do everyday must be a serious business.
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From The Guardian:
The Chechen rebel leader who claimed responsibility for the Beslan school massacre and the Moscow theatre siege has been killed, Russian media reported today.
Russia’s Itar-Tass news agency reported that Shamil Basayev, who led the most violent wing of the Chechen separatist movement, had been killed overnight in the Russian republic of Ingushetia, to the west of Chechnya.
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