Imagine if the US media reported 50% of its coverage about 'good news stories'?
Amazing thought!
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April 22, 2007
50% Good News Is the Bad News in Russian Radio

By ANDREW E. KRAMER
MOSCOW, April 21 — At their first meeting with journalists since taking over Russia’s largest independent radio news network, the managers had startling news of their own: from now on, they said, at least 50 percent of the reports about Russia must be “positive.”

In addition, opposition leaders could not be mentioned on the air and the United States was to be portrayed as an enemy, journalists employed by the network, Russian News Service, say they were told by the new managers, who are allies of the Kremlin.

How would they know what constituted positive news?

“When we talk of death, violence or poverty, for example, this is not positive,” said one editor at the station who did not want to be identified for fear of retribution. “If the stock market is up, that is positive. The weather can also be positive.”

In a darkening media landscape, radio news had been a rare bright spot. Now, the implementation of the “50 percent positive” rule at the Russian News Service leaves an increasingly small number of news outlets that are not managed by the Kremlin, directly or through the state national gas company, Gazprom, a major owner of media assets.

The three national television networks are already state controlled, though small-circulation newspapers generally remain independent.

This month alone, a bank loyal to President Vladimir V. Putin tightened its control of an independent television station, Parliament passed a measure banning “extremism” in politics and prosecutors have gone after individuals who post critical comments on Web chat rooms.

Parliament is also considering extending state control to Internet sites that report news, reflecting the growing importance of Web news as the country becomes more affluent and growing numbers of middle-class Russians acquire computers.

On Tuesday, the police raided the Educated Media Foundation, a nongovernmental group sponsored by United States and European donors that helps foster an independent news media. The police carried away documents and computers that were used as servers for the Web sites of similar groups. That brought down a Web site run by the Glasnost Defense Foundation, a media rights group, which published bulletins on violations of press freedoms.

“Russia is dropping off the list of countries that respect press freedoms,” said Boris Timoshenko, a spokesman for the foundation. “We have propaganda, not information.”

With this new campaign, seemingly aimed at tying up the loose ends before a parliamentary election in the fall that is being carefully stage-managed by the Kremlin, censorship rules in Russia have reached their most restrictive since the breakup of the Soviet Union, media watchdog groups say.

“This is not the U.S.S.R., when every print or broadcasting outlet was preliminarily censored,” Masha Lipman, a researcher at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said in a telephone interview.

Instead, the tactic has been to impose state ownership on media companies and replace editors with those who are supporters of Mr. Putin — or offer a generally more upbeat report on developments in Russia these days.

The new censorship rules are often passed in vaguely worded measures and decrees that are ostensibly intended to protect the public.

Late last year, for example, the prosecutor general and the interior minister appeared before Parliament to ask deputies to draft legislation banning the distribution on the Web of “extremist” content — a catch phrase, critics say, for information about opponents of Mr. Putin.

On Friday, the Federal Security Service, a successor agency to the K.G.B., questioned Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion and opposition politician, for four hours regarding an interview he had given on the Echo of Moscow radio station. Prosecutors have accused Mr. Kasparov of expressing extremist views.

Parliament on Wednesday passed a law allowing for prison sentences of as long as three years for “vandalism” motivated by politics or ideology. Once again, vandalism is interpreted broadly, human rights groups say, including acts of civil disobedience. In a test case, Moscow prosecutors are pursuing a criminal case against a political advocate accused of posting critical remarks about a member of Parliament on a Web site, the newspaper Kommersant reported Friday.

State television news, meanwhile, typically offers only bland fare of official meetings. Last weekend, the state channels mostly ignored the violent dispersal of opposition protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Rossiya TV, for example, led its newscast last Saturday with Mr. Putin attending a martial arts competition, with the Belgian actor Jean-Claude Van Damme as his guest. On the streets of the capital that day, 54 people were beaten badly enough by the police that they sought medical care, Human Rights Watch said.

Rossiya and Channel One are owned by the state, while NTV was taken from a Kremlin critic in 2001 and now belongs to Gazprom. Last week, a St. Petersburg bank with ties to Mr. Putin increased its ownership stake in REN-TV, a channel that sometimes broadcasts critical reports, raising questions about that outlet’s continued independence.

The Russian News Service is owned by businesses loyal to the Kremlin, including Lukoil, though its exact ownership structure is not public. The owners had not meddled in editorial matters before, said Mikhail G. Baklanov, the former news editor, in a telephone interview.

The service provides news updates for a network of music-formatted radio stations, called Russian Radio, with seven million listeners, according to TNS Gallup, a ratings company.

Two weeks ago, the shareholders asked for the resignation of Mr. Baklanov. They appointed two new managers, Aleksandr Y. Shkolnik, director of children’s programming on state-owned Channel One, and Svevolod V. Neroznak, an announcer on Channel One. Both retained their positions at state television.

Mr. Shkolnik articulated the rule that 50 percent of the news must be positive, regardless of what cataclysm might befall Russia on any given day, according to the editor who was present at the April 10 meeting.

When in doubt about the positive or negative quality of a development, the editor said, “we should ask the new leadership.”

“We are having trouble with the positive part, believe me,” the editor said.

Mr. Shkolnik did not respond to a request for an interview. In an interview with Kommersant, he denied an on-air ban of opposition figures. He said Mr. Kasparov might be interviewed, but only if he agreed to refrain from extremist statements.

The editor at the news service said that the change had been explained as an effort to attract a larger, younger audience, but that many editorial employees had interpreted it as a tightening of political control ahead of the elections.

The station’s news report on Thursday noted the 75th anniversary of the opening of the Moscow metro. It closed with an upbeat item on how Russian trains are introducing a six-person sleeping compartment, instead of the usual four.

Already, listeners are grumbling about the “positive news” policy.

“I want fresh morning broadcasts and not to fall asleep,” one listener, who signed a posting on the station’s Web site as Sergei from Vladivostok, complained. “Maybe you’ve tortured RNS’s audience enough? There are just a few of us left. Down with the boring nonintellectual broadcasts!”

The change leaves Echo of Moscow, an irreverent and edgy news station that often provides a forum for opposition voices, as the only independent radio news outlet in Russia with a national reach.

And what does Aleksei Venediktov, the editor in chief of Echo of Moscow, think of the latest news from Russia?

“For Echo of Moscow, this is positive news,” Mr. Venediktov said. “We are a monopoly now. From the point of view of the country, it is negative news.”

I find it interesting how there is a segment of the western world who opines about Iraq being just about the oil as if that was an evil thing.

The reality is that energy is the ingredient that fuels globalization that brings people out of poverty and despair.

The other factor is that perhaps, and it isn't a guarantee, that these new discoveries might calm the Suuni region which lost power and create enough wealth for them to calm their own fears about being left out of the wealth circle from resources under their own ground.

This is only a possibility as they have a tradition of revenge and hatred which needs to be overcome.

======================
Iraq oil reserves estimate increased

Published April 20, 2007
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ASSOCIATED PRESS
Taking into account the untapped potential of Iraq's western desert, the war-torn country's oil reserves could be nearly twice as large as previously estimated, containing more than 200 billion barrels, a new analysis of Iraqi oil resources says.
The consulting firm IHS Inc., in a report released Wednesday, said there may be an additional 100 billion barrels of oil beneath the surface in the western part of the country. The report estimated the country's current reserve base to be 116 billion barrels.
The U.S. Geological Survey has been less optimistic about Iraq's untapped potential, estimating there exists an additional reserve base of 45 billion barrels.
The IHS report also said Iraq's daily production, which now stands at 2 million barrels per day, could rise to 4 million barrels a day if conflict subsides and new investments in oil infrastructure are made.
"Obviously the security side is a big question," said Ron Mobed, president and chief operating officer of the energy division of IHS.
In 1979, the country's best year, Iraqi oil production averaged roughly 3 million barrels a day. Iraqi officials had set a target of pumping and 3.5 million barrels a day by mid-2006, but that goal was not realized.
IHS said its experts performed a field-by-field analysis of Iraqi oil prospects and that it would release a detailed analysis of Iraqi oil reserves next month.
Englewood, Colo.-based IHS said it performed a year's worth of research, using its own experts and Iraqi oil engineers.

The PooBahs Speak

Four of the nation’s top military strategists told Congress this week what modernization plans they’d scrap and how they’d change military priorities.

These aren’t the dried up formers who populate the news talk shows with punditry based on a limited rolodex of graying colleagues, but men who have been there and done that. The panel of experts included former military brass and Pentagon officials who are involved in policy-making today - giving their opinions greater weight than those from the cable channels.

The list included former 24th Infantry Division commander and Clinton-era Drug Czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey; former commandant of the Army War College and a man who knows military history better than the back of his hand, Maj. Gen. Robert Scales; former Reagan-era Pentagon official and oft-consulted GWOT critic Lawrence Korb and head of the Center For Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Andy Krepinevich.

Scales is heavily involved in current Army war planning and in the development of new counterinsurgency doctrine. Korb is someone the DoD often talks to for his counterpoints of the Iraq war. McCaffrey has a key to the Oval Office - often providing his insight to administration planners and the president. And Krepinevich had been involved in writing the Quadrennial Defense Review and works on a range of strategic planning for the Army and other services.

In a wide-ranging and fascinating hearing this week, the four told lawmakers what they’d do to change the current DoD modernization plans, realigning resources to areas they say will better position America for the conflicts of the future. Their views were sometimes in conflict, but overall, they were remarkably concurrent – and at times, quite radical.

Here’s a synopsis of their views:

Krepinevich:

(Written Testimony)

Take a “sizable number” of the current Army brigade structure and create irregular warfare units capable of counterinsurgency and humanitarian operations.

Create an “advisor corps.”

Create a Multi-National Security Transition Corps-Iraq (MNSTCI) “in a box” to quickly train indigenous forces to take over security in a counterinsurgency/guerrilla environment.

Build a “Joint Urban Warfare Training Center” that takes the current National Training Center adaptations to the next level.

Need to re-evaluate the Army’s nearly $200 billion Future Combat System program. “That’s an awfully expensive way to deal with irregular forces.”

McCaffrey:

(Written Testimony)

Disagreed with Krepinevich on creating counterinsurgency forces and “going light.” The U.S. may have to confront China at some point, he explained.

Didn’t think bringing U.S. forces back from bases in Europe and Okinawa was a good idea, but said since that’s a done deal, America needs to invest heavily in re-constituting its strategic airlift capability. He called the C-17 Globemaster III a “national asset.”

“I love the C-17 as much as the M-1 [Abrams] tank,” he said.

Thinks the future of FCS needs to be figured out by the beginning of 2009 or it should be turned into a semi-permanent R&D program.

Believes foreign language training is so important that the military should pick out service members “by threes and say ‘you’re going to 90 days of language training.’ ”

Said the U.S. needs to “properly” equip the Afghan and Iraqi army with modern gear. Quit pawning off “junk Soviet armor” and sell them equipment that can help them win, including a fleet of modern helicopters. The Iraqis are getting 70 helos which “aren’t enough for them to control the country,” he said. “We need a new ‘lend-lease’ for our allies.”

Korb:

(Written Testimony)

Extend the purchase of Los Angeles class subs, pushing them off into the future.

Cut down on nuclear weapons stockpile and modernization which will save the Pentagon money for other, more pressing needs. “We need to lead by example,” he said.

Stop spending so much money on ballistic missile defense. The program “is the least likely threat … we spend more on missile defense than on the entire Coast Guard,” Korb pointed out, adding that the Coast Guard deals with a much more realistic threat.

“I can’t understand FCS,” he said. The Army has done a poor job explaining what it will do and what it’s for. The Pentagon should slow down its development.

Marines do not need a new amphibious vehicle, he said, referencing the Corps’ troubled Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle program.

Stop V-22 production and buy more helicopters.

Set a specific withdrawal date to get out of Iraq to help motive the Iraqi army to shape up for its own defense.

Need to continue supplemental spending bills to bring equipment levels back up to meet current needs.

Scales:

(Written Testimony)

Scrapping the FCS program is “dead wrong” (Scales has been a longtime booster of FCS for the Army), though it “needs some tweaking.”

Need to continue to field “heavy” forces – 81 percent of military deaths are with dismounted infantry, mounted infantry face a 10 percent greater chance of survival when mounted.

The U.S. needs a “full spectrum force,” he added, saying if abandon FCS then you’re confining the military to purchase “old Cold War” gear.

Does not agree with Krepinevich’s “specialization” theory, saying troops trained in a variety of missions can do “full spectrum” operations. What’s important are “skills not structure. … Brigades don’t do that, people do that.”

Need to focus on officer and NCO education by creating a “soldier sabbatical” program that allows them to take time off from the service to go to graduate schools and study “alien cultures and the art of warfare.”

I hope this provides a little food for thought as Congress and the administration consider the 2007 supplemental and 2008 base budgets.

-- Christian

April 20, 2007 09:51 AM | Strategery
Latest Comments

`Cut down on nuclear weapons stockpile and modernization which will save the Pentagon money for other, more pressing needs. “We need to lead by example,” he said.`

Exactly.

Posted by: RJB1012 at April 20, 2007 11:14 PM

"Extend the purchase of Los Angeles class subs, pushing them off into the future." Oh my god oh my god! They said Los Angeles class, when they should have said Virginia class. You think being military men that they would have noticed that...

So how did everyone like my impression of DefenseTech over the Boeing sponsored poster?

Posted by: JH at April 20, 2007 05:50 PM

"Los Angeles class submarines? Does he mean Virginia? If you put it too far out in the future Electric Boat will go bust- the engineers will end up working on XBOX 3."

Yeah, and it's a shame that we let all the trireme carpenters go, too. I think the Republic will survive if we cut off the expensive life support that the submarine "industry" "requires".....

Posted by: sglover at April 20, 2007 04:31 PM

I should add that the badness of some of these ideas isn't really obvious to people who aren't very familiar with the Defense Department and its culture. Take the "advisor corps" idea. Sounds great, doesn't it? We'll take a bunch of super guys, and make them advisors! That'll fix the problem.

Except it won't. The Army tried this with AC/RC in the Nineties, and guys treated it as a death sentence when it was a temporary assignment - make it a permanent assignment, and it won't take people long to twig to the reality that it's taking ambitious guys away from the experience and contacts they need to be considered for command slots - and you'll be left with a foreign legion of throwouts, something that looks about as effective as any other portion of the military that's staffed by the B-Team - like Public Affairs, or Psyops, or Civil Affairs - any of THOSE strike you as notable success stories?

But it briefs well.

Posted by: Nanonymous at April 20, 2007 03:01 PM

The FCS/"Cold War gear" false dilemma is particularly embarrassing. So our choice is between old stuff and a program whose PMs still can't tell us when, if ever, it's going to deliver? Right, got it. When you read advice like that, you really realize why Rumsfeld tuned Shinseki out.

April 20, 2007
Ramla Journal
Defying a Clan Code of Silence on Unspeakable Crimes

By ISABEL KERSHNER
RAMLA, Israel — The Abu Ghanem women are buried just inside the main gate of the old Muslim cemetery, eight in the last seven years.

Reem eloped with a lover to escape an arranged marriage. Her brothers, one a pediatrician, are on trial for murder. Sabrin rests under a bare concrete slab with her name roughly scratched on by hand. She is said to have been killed by a cousin whom she refused to marry. Shirihan, 15, the youngest of the dead women, is also said to have rejected a marriage. Her stepbrothers are suspected of having killed her.

Others lie in crudely marked graves, covered with plain marble or a mound of earth marked with an oval of stones — all a few minutes’ drive from Israel’s gleaming new international airport, here in this hardscrabble town of 64,000 Jews and Arabs.

So-called honor killings among Muslims are a phenomenon across the Middle East, including in Israel, where Arabs, most of them Muslim, make up almost 20 percent of the population. The Israeli police and courts have caught and convicted some of the killers; unlike the laws in some Arab societies, Israel’s do not make allowances for such acts.

Yet among the Abu Ghanem clan here in Ramla — where family honor can be tainted by a woman’s desire to go study at a university or her use of a telephone — the bloodletting has carried on. Some women’s advocates have accused the police of a dismissive attitude toward Arabs, while a Jewish district police official speaks of the “ambivalence” of Israel’s Arab citizens, who do not always want to cooperate with investigations “for nationalist or local reasons.” So far, the Abu Ghanem cases have ended without convictions, the police say, mainly because relatives maintained a conspiracy of silence and washed all the evidence away.

Then in January, after the last killing, of Hamda Abu Ghanem, 18, female relatives decided to speak up. Twenty of them.

The most incriminating testimony came from a witness the police identify only as Y for her protection. She came forward to say that she had heard shots, then saw someone she believed to be Hamda’s brother Rashad, 30, fleeing Hamda’s home. The police found traces of gunpowder on the brother’s clothes.

Hamda’s mother said her daughter, who had hoped to be a nurse, had done nothing wrong although she had been beaten by her brother a few months earlier and complained to the police, possibly setting off the brother’s anger. According to the police, Hamda had refused to marry a man her family had arranged for her as a husband.

“In most cases we manage to bring circumstantial evidence to court, but it’s not enough to convict for murder,” said Superintendent Yigal Ezra, a Jew who is the head of investigations and intelligence at the Ramla police station. This time, he believed, there was a solid case.

But Y, the police said, had refused the police protection they offered, and in late February she disappeared. Now, with Rashad Abu Ghanem’s trial under way, it is still unclear whether she is in hiding, has been abducted or is dead. Without her, the case could fall apart.

“It won’t be easy to convince the judge to convict a man of murder without the witness appearing,” said the defendant’s lawyer, Giora Zilberstein. Mr. Abu Ghanem denies killing his sister, Mr. Zilberstein said.

Police officials concede that if the court fails to convict him, the likelihood of witnesses coming forward in future cases would be slim.

Ramla was once an entirely Arab town, but most of its residents fled or were exiled during the 1948 war. The Abu Ghanem clan, which is Bedouin, arrived in the 1950s, settling on the edge of Ramla and in the nearby town of Lod.

The meeting between traditional desert culture and modern urban living has not been particularly successful here.

“They all use drugs,” Amama Abu Ghanem, the mother of Hamda and Rashad, said of the clan’s criminal, controlling core, an observation echoed by the police.

While many of the Abu Ghanem seem to live on welfare, Mrs. Abu Ghanem washes dishes at a no-frills wedding hall in the town center. Some of the cut-price stores here have signs in Russian, to cater to the more recent arrivals. Ramla is about 80 percent Jewish today.

Mrs. Abu Ghanem said even if her son, who she says has an illegitimate child with a 17-year-old Jewish woman in another town, had not killed her daughter, she did not want him back. “Give me 10 years for my soul to dry out,” she said.

Mrs. Abu Ghanem, 52, had nine children before her husband left 16 years ago to move in with a new wife in an apartment below hers. He now has 11 more children, none currently in school though education is supposed to be compulsory from age 5.

A reporter and photographer were angrily shooed away from Mrs. Abu Ghanem’s apartment by her eldest son, Muhammad, who said the family did not need more scandals. “They are still in shock about Hamda,” Mrs. Abu Ghanem said, sitting in the apartment of the second wife.

Aida Touma-Suliman of Women Against Violence, an Israeli group that works in the Arab sector, said 8 cases of honor killings were reported in Israel last year, 11 the year before. Yifrach Duchovny, the commander of the Coastal Plain district police, said there were 17 cases in Ramla and Lod in the past five years.

Ms. Touma-Suliman blames years of neglect by the local police and social welfare services. But she acknowledges that even Jewish women at risk of domestic violence can be reluctant to go to the police, and Arab women are all the more so, given the political history and tensions between Arabs and Jews.

Superintendent Ezra keeps a package of black body bags on the shelf behind his desk, below a tray for outgoing mail.

“They’re not there for nothing,” he said grimly.

“These are clever girls who write diaries and poems,” he said of those he has helped find refuge. “But once they are no longer minors, they often say they’re going back home. We say, ‘You’ll end up in one of those.’ ”

"He who never made a mistake, never made a discover"