Leopard Poaching on the Rise, Group Warns

September 28, 2012, 7:24 am

By BETTINA WASSENER

When it comes to the poaching of endangered species, elephants, tigers and rhinos tend to be in the limelight. But a new report sets out to plug the information gap on a different species that is imperiled by a tide of demand related to rising affluence in Asia: leopards.

In India alone, an average of at least four leopards have been poached each week over the last 10 years, according to Traffic, an organization that monitors the trade in endangered wildlife around the globe and issued the report. That's more than 2,000 in one decade.

The estimate is based on a review of seizures of spotted leopard skins and other body parts. While most of the items seized were skins, other body parts, particul arly bones, are prescribed as substitutes for tiger parts in traditional Asian medicine, Traffic said.

“Even though reports of illegal trade in leopard body parts are disturbingly frequent, the level of threat to leopards in the country has previously been unrecognized and has fallen into our collective ‘blind spot',” said Rashid Raza, the lead author of the report, which was released on Friday in New Delhi.

There are no reliable estimates of how many leopards exist in India. The animals are notoriously wary of humans and are spread out over large areas, so tracking their numbers is difficult.

Yet the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which categorizes leopards as “near threatened” on its so-called red list of species, says that leopard populations have become extinct in some parts of the world and dwindled to tiny numbers in others. Although they dwell widely in the forests of the Indian subcon tinent, Southeast Asia and China, they are “becoming increasingly rare outside protected areas,” the organization says.

Divyabhanusinh Chavda, president of the World Wildlife Fund's India chapter, said that concerted national action was needed. “Without an effective strategy to assess and tackle the threats posed by illegal trade, the danger is that leopard numbers may decline rapidly, as happened previously to the tiger,” he said.

Government estimates put the number of tigers in India at little more than 1,700.

Iranian News Agency Claims Onion Report It Ran by Mistake Is Essentially True

September 30, 2012, 11:18 pm

By ROBERT MACKEY

Iran's Fars News Agency admitted on Sunday that its report, “Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad To Obama,” was copied entirely from The Onion, a satirical American publication the editors in Tehran mistook for a news source.

FNA Apologizes for Recent Mistake http://t.co/zEMJHedQ

- Fars News Agency (@FNA_Iran) 30 Sep 12

An editor at the Iranian agency, which is close to the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, said in the long, somewhat grudging apology: “The news item was extracted from the satirical magazine, The Onion, by mistake and it was taken down” from the agency's English-language Web site within two hours.

The unnamed editor went on to argue that the premise of the Onion report - that Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is more popular with white, rural Americans than President Obama - might even be accurate, if fictional. “Although it does not justify our mistake,” he said, “we do believe that if a free opinion poll is conducted in the U.S., a majority of Americans would prefer anyone outside the U.S. political system to President Barack Obama.”

The editor made no mention of the fact that, as The Lede explained on Friday, Fars and at least two other Iranian news agencies also published Persian-language versions of the Onion's story before it appeared in English.

He also did not acknowledge that there was anything wrong with the agency copying text from other publications without attribution. Large chunks of the apology itself appear to have been copied word-for-word from American news sites.

One passage, which rec ounts in detail other instances of news organizations mistaking Onion parodies for the genuine article, begins with text lifted from an Associated Press report on the confusion at Fars on Friday:

It's not the first time a news outlet has been duped by The Onion…. In 2002, the Beijing Evening News, one of the Chinese capital's biggest newspapers, picked up a story from The Onion that claimed members of Congress were threatening to leave Washington unless the building underwent a makeover that included more bathrooms and a retractable dome

A whole paragraph of the Fars apology - on an illustration in The New York Times last year that accidentally included a photo from The Onion - is copied straight from a report by the Web site Mediaite on the newspaper's correction:

The New York Times admitted they made the mistake of treating a fake creation from The Onion as something legitimate. Last week the Times printed an article documenting the history of the squeaky-clean teen magazine Tiger Beat, and included a retrospective of past magazine covers. Unfortunately (or humorously depending on one's perspective), in the collection they also included a parody cover created by The Onion, which featured President Obama.

Another sentence - “In February, Rep. John Fleming (R-La.), deleted a Facebook post in which he linked to an Onion article about Planned Parenthood that he did not realize was satirical” - comes from a Politico report last Friday on the Fars mishap.

The rest of the Fars apology is a long recitation of “goofs” made by BBC News journalists, compiled by The Telegraph, although none of them involved mistaking fiction for fact.

As Kevin Fallon noted in The Daily Beast on Saturday, others who have mistaken Onion stories for real news reports include: the editors and readers of the Fox News site Fox Nation - who fell for “Frustrated Obama Sends Nation R ambling 75,000-Word Email” - and a tabloid in Bangladesh, which translated “Conspiracy Theorist Convinces Neil Armstrong Moon Landing Was Faked” into Bengali, but did at least have the decency to attribute the report to The Onion News Network. The paper's associate editor explained later to Agence France-Press, “We thought it was true, so we printed it without checking.”

The Web site Literally Unbelievable is dedicated to documenting instances of Onion parodies that are mistaken for real news on Facebook. As Glynnis MacNicol explained in a Mediaite report in 2010, a very large number of people expressed serious alarm about a YouTube clip headlined “Illuminati Warning: Martial Law Plans Revealed?” which appeared to show a Congressman describing dark plans for the American people during a speech. The video turned out to be from O-Span, The Onion's parody version of C-Span.

A YouTube copy of an Onion C-Span parody which alarmed some viewers.

Also on Sunday, a jury in Tehran found a Reuters editor guilty of anti-state propaganda, because a colleague incorrectly described a group of women studying the martial art of ninjutsu to stay in shape in a video report as potential “assassins” willing “to defend the Islamic Republic to the death.” The jury's finding is advisory and and a judge is expected to issue a final verdict in the case against the news agency's Iranian bureau chief, Parisa Hafezi, next month.

The Reuters bureau in Tehran has been closed since March, when the errors in the voice-over script for the television report on the female “ninjas” came to the attention of Iranian officials. Ms. Hafezi, an Iranian national, has been barred from leaving the country.

As Reuters explains, the bureau chief “formally leads Reuters' Iran operations, but is only responsible for the text stories written by the bureau, not the visuals, captions or scr ipts produced by the television journalists or photographers.” At Reuters and other television news agencies, the narration for television reports from many parts of the world is often added in London by relatively junior journalists.

Newswallah: Long Reads Edition

September 30, 2012, 6:11 am

By NEHA THIRANI

In Tehelka, Sai Manish writes about the mismanagement of natural disasters in the northeastern state of Sikkim. One year after an earthquake wreaked havoc in the state, a deluge has caused landslides, landing yet another blow of devastation. The author argues that the lack of timely government intervention has intensified the effect of such disasters. He writes:

Even after three days of floods and landslides due to incessant rains, the chief minister had no clue that people were holding on to dear life waiting for a response from their government. Finally, on 24 September, Chief Secretary Karma Gyatso flew over destroyed hamlets and severed towns. When asked about the CM, Gyatso shot off: “ Why should the CM come? What is his need when I am here?”

Mr. Manish notes that the haphazard distribution of funds without properly maintained records means that those in trouble do not receive the aid they are entitled to, while the government bleeds money.  Public ire is quelled by a combination of coercion and bribery. The author writes: “The tragedy is not just about missing persons or the damage that has been caused. The bigger tragedy is the sheer apathy of the government towards its people who have been suffering since last year's earthquake that jolted their world forever.”

In the latest issue of Open magazine, Hartosh Singh Bal analyzes the impetus behind the recent economic reforms introduced by the Congress Party-led coalition government. In the article titled “The Rebirth of a Prime Minister,” Mr. Bal contends that there were many political factors that played into the timing of the announcement of reforms. He writes that with Palaniappan Chidambaram holding the finance portfolio the task became easier, adding that with Mr. Chidambaram's predecessor, Pranab Mukherjee, the “approach to the Finance Ministry virtually left no room for the Prime Minister.”

Mukherjee enjoyed the confidence of the party and he was seen as someone who brought political pragmatism to the Finance Ministry. But he seems not to have realised that the country had changed since the 1970s, when he was first appointed minister. Attempts at policymaking through bureaucratic tinkering during his tenure in the end yielded neither economic nor political benefits.

The author takes the example of opening up of multi-brand retail to foreign investors saying that it was unlikely to have any immediate impact on the economy. “It is at best a signal of the Government's intent.” Mr. Bal argues that the government was anxious that the recent Coalgate scandal exacerbated the worry about corruption . By linking the reform to “pro-poor” programs, he says, the current government will be able to re-establish its popularity with the electorate.

In the article entitled “In Search of a Dream” the Economist postulates that stalwarts who laid the foundation of the Indian democracy failed to articulate a vision for the economy, which has cost the country dearly. The article argues that economists and analysts broadly agree on the measures required to solve India's current economic problems, but the “political elite” resist them, because of the “risk of being tipped out of power.” The piece gives the example of countries such as Brazil, Sweden and Poland who have successfully pushed through difficult economic reforms despite being democracies.

If the country's voters are not sold on the idea of reform, it is because its politicians have presented it to them as unpleasant medicine necessary to fend off economic illness rather than as a mean s of fulfilling a dream.

The piece draws a parallel between India and the late 19th century America, and says that it needs “its own version of America's dream.”

It must commit itself not just to political and civic freedoms, but also to the economic liberalism that will allow it to build a productive, competitive and open economy, and give every Indian a greater chance of prosperity. That does not mean shrinking government everywhere, but it does mean that the state should pull out of sectors it has no business to be in. And where it is needed - to organise investment in infrastructure, for instance, and to regulate markets - it needs to become more open in its dealings.