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The BBC "News Fixing" Scandal and Dead Babies
The Independent just announced that British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) would be running an apology worldwide for airing documentaries produced by a public relations firm. The anticipated apology resulted from last year's reporting in The Independent on this pecuiar BBC practice. A special committee investigated and confirmed the news fixing process.
"The BBC will today apologise to an estimated 74 million people around the world for a news fixing scandal, exposed by The Independent, in which it broadcast documentaries made by a London TV company that was earning millions of pounds from PR clients which it featured in its programming." The Independent, Feb 11
Sweet! The PR firm got a big payday from its clients, the nation of Malaysia for example, to produce the client-friendly documentaries. Then, the firm sold the documentaries to BBC for a nominal fee. The client state gets the publicity it wants, packaged for maximum effect, and BBC gets low cost content.
Is Wordpress Free, Priceless or Both?
By Melanie Lamport
Or How Wordpress Doesn’t Make Money
“WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.” Matt Mullenweg Click here to watch a video about the inventor with the cherubic face of the Wordpress blogging software.
WordCamp is the name given to a series of community sponsored blogging events centered on discussions relating to the WordPress blogging platform.
Matt Mullenweg travelled to India for the WordCamp event in 2009. Someone surprised Matt with the “money” question. “How Does WordPress Make Money if you give it away free?
Matt, slightly rattled, first tried to say that his company, Automattic, is profitable.
But everyone at the camp had their high school diploma so Matt came up with the following seven “thought provoking-answers from How Does Wordpress …..” [My comments are in [] and are based on the research into Wordpress by Mark Evans]
Matt’s answer 1 [from How Does Wordpress ….], Blog Hosting – WordPress offers blog hosting services at $500 per month to big publishers like Om Malik, All Things D and CNN’s Political Ticker among others. They use WordPress.com’s server infrastructure to host your blog, and therefore the performance will obviously be great, but unlike other web hosting services WordPress VIP Hosting doesn’t accept everyone who applies so good luck.
[So only the creme de la crumb of VIPs get to pay $500/month. Everyone else has to suffer the embarrassment of getting it for free.]
Matt’s answer 2, Google AdSense - Free blogs hosted on WordPress.com may sometimes carry Google ads but these ads may only appear if all the following three conditions are met:
1. The visitor is not using Firefox browser.
2. He has logged out of his WordPress account, if he has one.
3. The referring source is not a WordPress powered blog. So a person reaching abc.wordpress.com from xyz.wordpress.com won’t see any Google Ads.
Even with all these conditions, the revenue generated from serving Google AdSense ads on WordPress.com hosted blog may still be significant as they do around a billion page views per month.
[This is unmitigated “Adnonsense,” and false because in 2009 they only got 482 million views. You would think the owner of the site would know how many page views he gets.]
Murdering Khader Adnan
by Stephen Lendman
Adnan's a political prisoner hunger striker against gross Israeli repression and injustice. Two previous articles discussed his case and grave health condition after 55 days without food.
Irish republican/British MP Bobby Sands lasted 66 before expiring at age 27. Global marches, strikes and riots followed his death.
In France, many towns and cities named streets after him. Iran renamed Winston Churchill Street Bobby Sands Street. New Jersey's legislature passed a resolution 34 - 29 honoring his "courage and commitment."
Labor Pains: A Fable for Our Times
by Walter Brasch
Once, many years ago, in a land far away between two oceans, with fruited plains, amber waves of grain, and potholes on its highways, there lived a young man named Sam.
Now, Sam was a bright young man who wanted to work and save money so he could go to school and become an electrician. But the only job open in his small community was at the gas station. So, for two years, Sam pumped gas, washed windshields, checked dipsticks and tire pressure, smiled and chatted with all the customers, gave them free drinking glasses when they ordered a fill-up, and was soon known as the best service station attendant in town.
But then the Grand Caliphs of Oil said that Megamania Oil Empire, of which they all had partial ownership, caused them to raise the price of gas.
The French have called it a “water occupation” against the Palestinians… Now Britain helps the water thieves
Stuart Littlewood
There are few crimes more despicable then stealing your neighbour’s water.and polluting what’s left, then watching him and his children suffer thirst, disease and ruin.
Most of us would want nothing to do with the perpetrators of such evil.
British Water describes itself as the voice of the water industry. It talks about best practice and corporate responsibility, and lobbies governments and regulators on behalf of its members. No doubt it does a good job.
Brits, Obama Push World War Against Russia and China
by Jeffrey and Michele Steinberg
Feb. 7—If there were any doubt that the real targets of the Syria regime-change campaign being waged from London and Washington are Russia and China, last week's confrontation at the United Nations Security Council should have erased any last confusion.
On Feb. 4, Russia and China cast their second vetoes of a Security Council resolution demanding the removal of President Bashar al-Assad from power. While the final wording of the resolution did not include a call for foreign military intervention, as was the earlier case with Libya, the essence of the draft, nominally introduced by Morocco, but actually drafted in London, Paris, and Washington, was that Assad had to go.
Act Up Against ACTA
by Stephen Lendman
ACTA's worse than SOPA and PIPA. Net Neutrality and free expression are threatened. In October 2007, negotiations began secretly.
At issue is establishing a new intellectual property enforcement treaty - the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). If adopted, fundamental freedoms will be lost. Privatized online censorship will rule. Internet actors will be copyright enforcers. Offenders will face harsh criminal sanctions.
Israeli Political Prisoner Khader Adnan Near Death
by Stephen Lendman
Thousands of Palestinian political prisoners languish in Israeli prisons. Virtually daily, more arrests are made. Those incarcerated face torture, appalling prison conditions, and other forms of abuse.
Some react in response. Khader did his way by refusing food for multiple reasons, including:
● his rights and identity were violated;
● his lawless arrest and abusive detention; and
● Israel's illegal administrative detention system.
Addameer: Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association calls him a "prisoner at risk."
Russia's White Revolution
Eric Walberg
All the meticulous plotting to avoid Ukraine’s Orange Revolution resulted in -- Russia’s very own coloured one. But Russia is not Ukraine.
Russia’s electoral scene has been transformed in the past two months, without a doubt inspired by the political winds from the Middle East and the earlier colour revolutions in Russia’s “near abroad”. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s casual return to the presidential scene was greeted as an effrontery by an electorate who want to move on from Russia’s political strongman tradition, and to inject the electoral process with ballot-box accountability.
How about an international award for hypocrisy?
By Alan Hart
Arising out the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish chemist who invented dynamite, the Nobel Prize is universally recognized as the most prestigious award in the fields of peace-making, economics, chemistry, physics, medicine and literature. How about an international award - without the gold medal, the diploma and the money - for hypocrisy?
Such an award could be called the Lebon Prize (reversing Nobel).
If there was such an award, the statements of European and American leaders in the immediate aftermath of Russia and China’s veto of the Security Council resolution to end the killing in Syria suggest two most obvious nominees for it.
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