Ex-New York Times editor disputed allegations after Vice reporter listed passages that resemble material from other publications
The former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson is facing allegations that she lifted material from other sources for her new book, Merchants of Truth.
Related: Merchants of Truth by Jill Abramson review – journalism’s troubles
Continue reading...From Bond girl to Gone Girl, Rosamund Pike’s versatility has seen her star in some massive blockbusters. Here, she talks about Syria, sleeping under the stars, and the perils of social media…
Rosamund Pike has an intoxicating effect on me. She is so mesmerisingly self-possessed, speaking gently, thoughtfully, in her own time, entirely unafraid of the silences, that it is only after I’ve replayed the interview tape at home and transcribed her soft voice that I realise how wildly luvvieish her claims are. It’s almost delicious. For example, the star of Gone Girl and the new film A Private War says that when, as a child, she sat watching her opera singer parents in their rehearsal room: “All I was really looking at was, do I believe it, do I not believe it? Whether I believed the performance, whether I believed that this was something that was real and human and true. I think all I’ve ever been interested in is truth.” Which she immediately follows with the claim that hers was not a highbrow family, thereby suggesting the existence of a whole raft of brows higher than a childhood spent searching for la verité in your mum and dad’s arias.
We have met up because she plays the war reporter Marie Colvin in A Private War, a film whose American release has gained an average score of 89% on rottentomatoes.com (ie very good reviews) and which is about to open in British cinemas. It is a breathtaking, stop-you-in-your-tracks movie with a lot of the action set during the current Syrian war and it is directed by the documentarist Matthew Heineman who blurs the lines between reportage and feature film.
Continue reading...News site says it wants to ensure its efforts are a ‘net positive’ for community, as some journalists doubt program’s effectiveness
Facebook’s controversial factchecking program has lost one of its major US partners. The news website Snopes.com announced on Friday it was cutting ties with the social network.
The departure of Snopes, which has collaborated with Facebook for two years to debunk misinformation on the platform, doesn’t come as a surprise. Numerous journalists working for Facebook’s factchecking initiative have said the partnership was failing to have an impact.
Continue reading...Syria ordered to pay $300m over death of Sunday Times journalist in ‘targeted’ shelling in 2012
The Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad has been held liable by a US court for the extrajudicial killing of the Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin and ordered to pay $300m dollars (£228m) in punitive damages.
In a judgment published on Thursday, the Syrian government was found to have targeted journalists deliberately during the country’s civil war in order to “intimidate newsgathering” and suppress dissent.
Continue reading...In 2004, the social network site was set up to connect people. But now, with lives increasingly played out online, have we forgotten how to be alone?
‘Thefacebook is an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges. We have opened up Thefacebook for popular consumption at Harvard University. You can use Thefacebook to: search for people at your school; find out who are [sic] in your classes; look up your friends’ friends; see a visualization of your social network.”
On 4 February 2004, this rather clunky announcement launched an invention conceived in the dorm room of a Harvard student called Mark Zuckerberg, and intended to be an improvement on the so-called face books that US universities traditionally used to collect photos and basic information about their students. From the vantage point of 2019, Thefacebook – as it was then known – looks familiar, but also strange. Pages were coloured that now familiar shade of blue, and “friends” were obviously a central element of what was displayed. However, there was little on show from the wider world: the only photos were people’s profile pictures, and there was no ever-changing news feed.
Continue reading...Marie Kondo may be the biggest name in decluttering, but Instagram is awash with cleaning experts with millions of followers
It may not be spring yet, but everybody’s cleaning. Or, at the very least, they are talking about it. It has only been a month since Tidying Up With Marie Kondo launched on Netflix, but the series, starring the Japanese organisation expert, has already become something of a phenomenon. It has sparked joy among some, and arguments about how many books you should have in your home among others (Kondo, controversially, caps her collection at about 30). It has also led to charity shops reporting a Kondo-related surge in donations as converts go on decluttering sprees.
Kondo, who shot to global fame in 2014 when her book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up was published in English, is probably the biggest name on the clean scene. However, she is far from the only person to have organised their way to celebrity. The past year or so has seen cleaning take on a new cultural cachet – particularly on Instagram. The social network is rife with hashtags such as #cleaningobsessed or #cleaningtime and people are amassing enormous followings with pictures of gleaming kitchen counters and sparkling floors. Fitness influencers and fashion bloggers step aside: it’s starting to look like bleach is the new black.
Continue reading...Ofcom says ex-MP breached impartiality guidelines on radio show when casting doubt on Russian role
George Galloway breached broadcasting impartiality rules when he used his radio show to cast doubt on Russian involvement in the poisoning of Yulia and Sergei Skripal in Salisbury last year, according to media regulator Ofcom.
The former MP used his weekly programme on TalkRadio to repeatedly criticise claims of Russian involvement in the incident. He mocked those who agreed with the UK government that the Kremlin was behind the novichok nerve agent attack on the former Russian security agent and his daughter.
Continue reading...British newspaper pulls article peppered with false claims about US first lady from its site
The Daily Telegraph has paid “substantial damages” to Melania Trump and apologised “unreservedly” to the US first lady after making a number of false claims about her life in an article.
The claims were made in a story entitled The mystery of Melania, which ran on the cover of last Saturday’s Telegraph magazine, but the newspaper has now said it included a number of errors about Donald Trump’s wife which should not have been published.
The piece promised to tell the truth on what it described as the “most private and enigmatic” of presidential wives after interviews with “White House insiders, Slovenian school friends and photographers”.
BBC’s John Humphrys criticised for putting ‘Brexit solution’ to Irish minister
Ireland has dismissed the suggestion that the best solution to the Brexit impasse might be for the country to quit the EU and join the UK.
Related: Leo Varadkar: Brexit has undermined Good Friday agreement
Continue reading...Marzieh Hashemi tells Guardian she was denied halal food and had hijab removed while held as ‘material witness’
An American newscaster for the Iranian government’s Press TV network, who was detained by the US government without being charged, has complained of mistreatment as she was held as a material witness in a criminal case.
Related: US releases American journalist working for Iranian state TV after uproar
Continue reading...Staff discussed what to do with high-spending children before deciding to refuse refunds
Facebook has settled a class action lawsuit that had accused it of allowing children to run up huge bills on their parents’ credit cards as part of a concerted effort to maximise revenues.
Court documents obtained by the US-based Center for Investigative Reporting, initially sealed as part of a lawsuit filed in 2012, revealed Facebook staff discussed what to do with the “whales”, as they referred to the high-spending children, before deciding to refuse refunds.
Continue reading...Investigation comes as Saudi efforts to normalise relations with west move on to Davos
A UN expert on executions is to travel to Turkey next week to lead an “independent international inquiry” into the death of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi Arabian journalist killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October.
Agnes Callamard, the special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said she would evaluate the circumstances of the crime and “the nature and the extent of states’ and individuals’ responsibilities for the killing”. She will report on the findings from her five-day visit to the UN human rights council in June.
Continue reading...Clampdown on stars being paid for endorsing products without disclosing firm rewards them
More than a dozen celebrities, including Alexa Chung and Ellie Goulding, have pledged to change the way they label social media posts after Britain’s competition watchdog clamped down on the practice of stars being paid for endorsing products without disclosing they were being rewarded by the company.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it had secured formal commitments from 16 celebrities to state clearly if they have been paid or received any gifts or loans of products which they endorse.
Continue reading...The Oscars have no host, Rihanna turned down the Super Bowl, and the White House dinner will be MC’d by a historian. What’s behind the sudden demise of entertainment’s biggest jobs?
The loss of the Oscars’ latest host is, on the one hand, just another mishap to add to the list. From 2016’s #OscarsSoWhite to 2017’s wrong delivery of the best picture award, the ceremony now seems like a particularly slow bloopers reel. Yet the loss of Kevin Hart – who quit after old homophobic tweets resurfaced – is also a sign of something else. The fact that no one has replaced him, and that it’s difficult to think of many people who could, or would, reveals a much deeper malaise: a scary loss of nerve across showbiz’s top-tier events.
Within weeks, the Super Bowl half-time show will air. In the past, the American football final has been an epic showcase for the likes of Madonna, Prince and Beyoncé, a 20-minute, legacy-defining megamix. This year, though, with Rihanna and Cardi B having turned it down in solidarity with the activist NFL player Colin Kaepernick, we will be left with the hardly epochal sounds of Maroon 5.
Continue reading...As newsprint sales fall and tourists demand keychains, the city of Barcelona is trying to keep alive the old social culture that revolves around street kiosks
For generations, the day in Spain has begun with picking up the paper from the newspaper kiosk and then reading it over breakfast in a bar. These two urban institutions – the kiosk and the bar – have been the twin pillars of any barrio, or neighbourhood.
“You have a close relationship with your clients,” says Máximo Frutos, who owns a kiosk and is vice-president of the city’s news vendors association. “I have copies of the house keys for around 15 people in the barrio, in case they lose theirs. It’s not like any other business.”
Continue reading...Carlos Fernando Chamorro goes into exile citing President Ortega’s media crackdown
Nicaragua’s best-known journalist has gone into exile after armed police raided and ransacked his newsroom in what experts called the latest chapter of the country’s slide into autocracy under President Daniel Ortega.
Carlos Fernando Chamorro, the editor of Confidencial, a combative newsletter and website and a member of one of Nicaragua’s most influential families, announced his decision on Sunday.
Continue reading...A collection of vintage ski and winter sports posters up to a century old – some worth thousands of dollars – is about to be auctioned in New York. The resorts advertised range from Europe’s Alpine jewels to the mountains of Canada, and all offer fun in the outdoors
Continue reading...Web users report that images have been blurred on Netflix-like iQiyi’s TV shows
Editors of television programmes streamed on China’s Netflix-like iQiyi site appear to be blurring the earlobes of male actors with earrings, according to web users in the country.
Doctored images of male actors on a show called Sisters Flower Shop alongside earlier footage where they were sporting earrings have been posted online. In another show, I, Actor, the earlobes of the actor and singer Jǐng Bórán also appear to have been edited.
Continue reading...Exposés by Ahmed Husein, who died in Accra, had also lifted lid on corruption in judicial system
A Ghanaian journalist who helped expose corruption in African football has been shot dead in Accra.
Ahmed Husein was part of a team led by award-winning journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas, whose investigation led to the resignation of the head of the Ghana Football Association.
Continue reading...Press TV’s Marzieh Hashemi, born Melanie Franklin of New Orleans, was detained after arriving in St Louis, broadcaster said
A prominent American anchor on Iranian state television’s English-language service NEWhas been arrested in the US on undisclosed charges, according to her employers at the state-backed TV channel Press TV..
Marzieh Hashemi, born Melanie Franklin of New Orleans, appeares on the English-language news channel backed by the Iranian government which regularly promotes the worldview of the Middle Eastern state to an international audience.
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