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Happy Gandhi Jayanti

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Tweets by Beat From the Seattle Police Department

By JENNIFER PRESTON

As my colleague Kirk Johnson reports, the Seattle Police Department has turned to Twitter to post police blotter items online for residents looking to keep up with police-related activity in their neighborhood.

The department divvied up the mostly automated 51 Twitter feeds by police sectors and beats to deliver incident reports at a local level.

As an example, residents in a sector called J2 in Seattle's North Precinct, learned over the weekend about an auto theft in their neighborhood and a “disturbance.”

But updates are not delivered in real time so residents won't necessarily know right away why there is a police cruiser with flashing lights on their block.

To protect crime victims and “the integrity of crime scenes,” the department noted in its announcement that the information on the Twitter feeds appears about one hour after a police officer gets the call from a dispatcher. The feeds also do not include information about sexual assaults or incidents involving domestic violence.

More newsworthy incidents are reported on the department's main Twitter, account, @SeattlePD and might even generate a blog post, as this report did about two men engaged in a fight apparently over drugs and a woman, using a curtain rod and a can of soup as their weapons of choice.

So, how are the reports being received? A look at the conversation on Twitter suggests - and this is probably a good thing for the city's law enforcement leaders - they are not generating tremendous excitement as most of the re ports are of minor incidents. Of course, it depends on what feed you are following.

The goal of the program is to push out information or provide a new version of the old police scanner.

But, as customer service and social media marketing directors at major brands have learned in recent years, it is vital that institutions listen as well as push distribute information. That remains a big challenge for the Seattle Police since beat accounts are automated and the main account is managed by the department's public affairs department.

Over the weekend, Jeff Wilcox, a Twitter user who lives in Seattle and is a software developer at Microsoft, posted on Twitter information about speeding motorcycles that the police department might want to know about. He copied @seattlepd.

But the Seattle Police Department clearly states on its Twitter accounts that anyone reporting information still needs to dial 9-1-1.



Analysts Say Video of American Held in Syria Might Have Been Staged

By ROBERT MACKEY
Analysts have questioned the authenticity of video posted on YouTube last week, apparently showing the American reporter Austin Tice in the hands of Islamist fighters in Syria.

Video posted on YouTube five days ago, apparently showing a missing American journalist in the hands of jihadist captors in Syria, might have been staged to discredit the armed opposition to the Syrian government, according to several analysts who viewed the clip on Monday.

The reporter, Austin Tice, left the United States Marine Corps last year and has been contributing freelance articles to two American newspaper companies, McClatchy and The Washington Post, and other outlets since he smuggled himself into Syria from Turkey in May. He last communicated with colleagues by e-mail on Aug. 13. An update he posted on Twitter two days earlier, about enjoying an alcohol-fueled birthday party with members of the Free Syrian Army, underscored that he was on good terms with the rebels he was reporting on at the time.

A State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, told reporters on Monday, “We have seen the video. We are not in a position to verify, A, whether it is him, or B, whether it represents an actual scene that happened or something that may have been staged.” She added: “There's a lot of reason for the Syrian government to duck responsibility, but we continue to believe, to the best of our knowledge, that he's in Syrian government custody.”

Mr Tice's parents, Marc and Debra Tice, confirmed that the man in the video was their son, in a statement that began: “Knowing Austin is alive and well is comforting to our family. Though it is difficult to see our eldest son in such a setting and situation as that depicted in the video, it is reassuring that he appears to be unharmed.”

As the McClatchy correspondent Hannah Allam explains, the brief video clip showing the reporter alive was uploaded to a new YouTube account last Wednesday, but seen much more widely on Monday after it was posted on Facebook by supporters of President Bashar al-Assad. James Ball of The Washington Post reports that the pro-Assad blogger who drew attention to the video on Facebook wrote that the images of the reporter being held by Islamists, rather than government forces, proved that “Western media is working against Syria.”

Analysts contacted by both McClatchy and The Post, and bloggers who have worked to authenticate video from Syria for the past 18 months, agreed that some details of the video did not ring true.

The clip shows the American captive, wearing a blindfold, clearly distressed as he tries to recite an Islamic prayer in Arabic to armed captors, before breaking off and exclaiming in English, “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus.” Close observers of video from Syria and of jihadist clips drew attention to the unusual clothes worn by Mr. Tice's captors, and the halting way they shouted expressions of praise for Allah, as if they needed to be prompted.

Joseph Holliday, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer who tracks Syrian rebel groups for the Institute for the Study of War in Washington told The Post that it seemed strange that the armed men around Mr. Tice were wearing what appear to be salwar kameez, traditional clothing worn in Afghanistan, which looked very clean. “It's like a caricature of a jihadi group,” he said. “My gut instinct is that regime security guys dressed up like a bunch of wahoos and dragged him around and released the video to scare the U.S. and others about the danger of Al Qaeda extremists in Syria. It would fit their narrative perfectly.â €

The video came to light the same day that Syria's foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, scolded other countries who “clearly induce and support terrorism in Syria with money, weapons and foreign fighters,” an address to the United Nations General Assembly.

In an interview with McClatchy, Murad Batal al Shishani, an analyst in London who monitors extremist groups, cast doubt on a comment on the pro-Assad Facebook page, which said that “the American journalist Austin Tice is with the Nusra Front gangs and Al Qaeda in Syria,” an apparent reference to Jabhat al-Nusra, a jihadist group. But, as Ms. Allam writes, that organization has “a sophisticated media wing that produces a Twitter feed and videos that are clearly labeled and edited.” It would be unusual for the group to have simply uploaded the clip to YouTube and waited for pro-Assad bloggers to draw attention to it, rather than using well-known, jihadist Internet forums.

Jenan Moussa, a report er for Al Aan TV in Dubai who has worked in Syria recently, wrote on Twitter that none of the fighters from that group she saw there wore Afghan-style clothing.

A Syrian activist who writes on Twitter as @THE_47th posted a link to another Web video, with a logo, titles, music and flashy editing, noting: “This is what a Jabhat Al Nusra capture video looks like, it is of 5 Yemeni Officers captured in Syria thought to be helping the regime.”

Video said to show five Yemeni soldiers taken prisoner in Syria by a jihadist group.

After viewing the video, Mr. Tice's family in Texas and senior editors at McClatchy and The Post called for his immediate release.

As he reported fr om Syria this year, Mr. Tice used social networks to stay in touch with his family, to publish his work and even to argue about coverage of the conflict with colleagues.

In a series of Twitter updates the week before he disappeared, Mr. Tice criticized a post on The Lede drawing attention to a spate of new reports from Western journalists who made it into rebel-held territory in August. “The way has always been open. This whole spin is an excuse for laziness,” he wrote. “Clearly the risk is real,” he added, “But idea that it's prohibitive of more/better coverage is a red herring. I see it as corporate overlawyering.”

Just weeks before he went missing, the former soldier wrote a manifesto of sorts on Facebook, explaining his decision to work in such a risky environment to family and friends, which was reproduced in its entirety by The Post in August. The message began:

It's nice and all, but please quit telling me to be safe.

Against my better judgment, I'm posting this on Facebook. Flame away.

People keep telling me to be safe (as if that's an option), keep asking me why I'm doing this crazy thing, keep asking what's wrong with me for coming here. So listen.

Our granddads stormed Normandy and Iwo Jima and defeated global fascism. Neil Armstrong flew to the Moon in a glorified trashcan, doing math on a clipboard as he went. Before there were roads, the Pioneers put one foot in front of the other until they walked across the entire continent. Then a bunch of them went down to fight and die in Texas ‘cause they thought it was the right thing to do.

Sometime between when our granddads licked the Nazis and when we started putting warnings on our coffee cups about the temperature of our beverage, America lost that pioneering spirit. We became a fat, weak, complacent, coddled, unambitious and cowardly nation. I went off to two wars with misguided notions of patriotism and found in both that the first priority was to never get killed, something we could have achieved from our living rooms in America with a lot less hassle. To protect careers and please the politicians, we weighed ourselves down with enough armor to break a man's back, gorged on RipIts and ice cream, and believed our own press that we were doing something noble.

He contrasted American life to the current struggle in Syria, where “Every person in this country fighting for their freedom wakes up every day and goes to sleep every night with the knowledge that death could visit them at any moment.”

He concluded:

No, I don't have a death wish â€" I have a life wish. So I'm living, in a place, at a time and with a people where life means more than anywhere I've ever been â€" because every single day people here lay down their own for the sake of others. Coming here to Syria is the greatest thing I've ever done, and it's the greatest feeling of my life.

And look, if you still don't get it, go read Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. That book explains it all better than I ever could.



Image of the Day: Oct. 1

October 1, 2012, 11:11 am
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

In Delhi, Banerjee Shows National Ambitions

By NIHARIKA MANDHANA

Ratcheting up the pressure on the central government, the West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee organized a rally in Delhi on Monday as part of a series of protests to demand a rollback of the government's new economic policies.

“These policies will destroy the lives of the common man,” Ms. Banerjee said to a crowd of a few thousand people gathered at Jantar Mantar. “They will punish the ordinary people of this country.”

The rally, held in the political capital of the country rather than in West Bengal, home to Ms. Banerjee's traditional support base, marks a strategic step in the regional leader's attempts to make inroads into the country's national political scene, analysts say, after she left the governing United Progressive Alliance to protest the new measures.

“She is positioning herself as an important national leader,” said C.P. Bhambhri, a political analy st. Much like other regional leaders, like Mulayam Singh Yadav of Uttar Pradesh and Narendra Modi of Gujarat, who are widely believed to harbor ambitions for national positions, including the prime minister's office, Ms. Banerjee too is projecting her party's relevance outside of West Bengal, said Mr. Bhambhri.

This strategy appeared to play out at the rally on Monday, where workers of the Trinamool Congress, Ms. Banerjee's party, chanted, “We have won Kolkata; now it is Delhi's turn.” Ms. Banerjee announced a 48-hour dharna, or protest, in Delhi on Nov. 19 and 20 and an ambitious tour of other Indian states, including Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana and states in southern India.

Clad in her trademark white-and-blue cotton sari and rubber slippers, Ms. Banerjee portrayed herself as a “clean” leader, untainted by allegations of corruption that have plagued senior Congress leaders and unafraid to take on the central government. “She is not only the tigress of Bengal, but of the whole country,” said Sharad Yadav, a leader of the Janata Dal (United) Party, at the rally.

On Monday, she expressed solidarity with farmers, factory workers, vegetable vendors and other poor people in the country. “I am not in politics for any personal gain,” she said, “but only to serve the people of this country.”

With the weakening of the Congress Party, Ms. Banerjee, with a small but significant block of 19 parliamentary seats, has emerged as an important leader. She is boosting her national profile, observers say, with an eye on the 2014 elections, when neither the Congress nor the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party is expected to win a majority.

While Ms. Banerjee is popular among the rural poor in Bengal, she has, in recent years, earned a reputation for being an intolerant and mercurial leader. Politically, she remains unpredictable, analysts say. “She is fickle minded. She is temperamental,” said Mr. Bhambhri. †œBut she is also very, very clever.”

In the run-up to Monday's rally, she led a scathing Facebook campaign against the government: “Reforms are meant to usher development for the people,” a post said. “Now-a-days, the trend is, whenever any anti-people decision is taken, it is taken in the name of reforms.”

Earlier this month, the embattled Indian government introduced several economic policies aimed at revitalizing India's stalled economy, including a controversial measure that would allow foreign investment in India's retail sector and pave the way for foreign retailers like Walmart to set up shop in India. This move was met with widespread protests by other politicians, led by the Trinamool Congress, who argued that small Indian shop owners and vendors would be squeezed out.

The government also announced a rise in the price of diesel and a cap on the number of subsidized gas cylinders, measures widely criticized as “anti-poor.”

The Co ngress Party, however, has dismissed Ms. Banerjee's attacks. “After Mamata Banerjee came to power in West Bengal, there is no industrial development and no jobs were created,” the union minister V. Narayanasamy said in a televised interview on Sunday.

The central government can't be like that, he said. “The center has to march forward for the purpose of fulfilling the wishes and aspirations of the people.”



Hyderabad Erupts in Violence Before United Nations Conference

By VIVEKANANDA NEMANA

The Hyderabad police clashed with protesters who were demanding a separate Telangana state in a massive rally a day before a major international conference opened in the city on Monday.

Nearly 100,000 demonstrators gathered near the city's Hussain Sagar Lake on Sunday afternoon, calling on the central government to create a state for the Telangana region of Andhra Pradesh, which activists say has been marginalized. The protesters threw stones at the police, who fired back with tear gas shells and water cannons. Near Osmania University, student protesters also fought with police.

The police say 25 officers were injured, but the number of civilian injuries remains unclear, although no fatalities have been reported. A number of businesses, over two dozen vehicles and two local train stations were seriously damaged, according to local media reports.

Hyderabad is hosting the United Na tions conference on biological diversity, which began Monday, an event that officials hoped would elevate the city's international profile. The Andhra Pradesh government spent 4.5 billion rupees ($85 million) on the high-level summit meeting, much of it on improvements like repaving roads and repairing bridges.

Convention organizers declined to comment on whether the demonstrations would affect the conference. Telangana demonstrations have shut down Hyderabad twice in the past, once in December 2009 and again in March 2011.

Although the government allowed the demonstrations, organized by the Telangana Joint Action Committee, the Hyderabad Police commissioner Anurag Sharma said Sunday night that the organizers broke their promise that the march would be not be violent. “We believed that they would be peaceful and made all the arrangements for parking and routes,” Mr. Sharma said at a news conference. “But the protesters violated the conditions.”

Mr. Sharma said his department would ensure security for delegates attending the convention.

Transportation authorities canceled 37 trains and a number of buses coming into Hyderabad on Sunday, angering Telangana groups. M. Kodandaram, a leader of the Telangana Joint Action Committee, said in a rally on Sunday evening that the cancellations amounted to a government conspiracy to thwart the demonstrations by making it more difficult for marchers to enter Hyderabad.



Bollywood\'s Oscar Obsession

By MAYANK SHEKHAR and HEATHER TIMMONS

This year, India's submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film is a two-and-a-half-hour, chaotic musical about a deaf and mute boy called “Barfi,” which has been widely criticized for liberally borrowing scenes from a host of other films.

The film, while well reviewed by many critics in India, is also being flogged by some film fans as an embarrassing pastiche: It appears to have lifted scenes from sources as diverse as “The Notebook,”  “Singin' in The Rain,” Jackie Chan's “Project A,” Takeshi Kitano's “Kikujiro,” and Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton comedies.

Anurag Basu, the film's writer and director, has called the references “inspiration” in interviews, likening his work to that of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. But “inspiration” is a generally accepted euphemism for “knockoff” in Bolly wood, and many worry the movie is unlikely to impress Oscar judges on the lookout for more original works.

As the hype before Hollywood's biggest awards ceremony heats up, Bollywood has again boiled over in relentless debate: With well-received original titles like “Gangs of Wasseypur” made in India this year, was the right film put forward for the Oscars? Does “Barfi” stand even a tiny chance of winning? And why does Bollywood care so much, anyway?

This annual Oscars media ritual is particularly odd, given that since the Best Foreign Language Film category was created in 1956, no Indian film has ever won the prize. Even among other Oscar categories, only four Indians have held the golden statuette, all for films directed by British filmmakers.

For decades, Bollywood didn't care about the Oscars, the filmmaker Karan Johar explained in a recent interview. Interest really started with the submission of “Lagaan,” a colonial-era tale about a plucky village cricket team, which unexpectedly became a nominee for Best Foreign Language Film in 2002. “While no one had predicted so, it finally got nominated, opening up hopes for many,” he said.
The only other Indian films that were even Oscar nominees were “Salaam Bombay!” in 1989, directed by Mira Nair, who is based in New York, and Mehboob Khan's classic Bollywood saga “Mother India” in 1958.

Bollywood's Oscar obsession could be linked to the fact that the industry's own awards ceremonies are increasingly eyed with suspicion. The Filmfare Awards and the state-sponsored National Film Awards have both been around since 1954. But the Filmfare Awards, once considered truly independent, are now widely seen as vanity prizes, doled out to popular stars to get them to appear at the awards ceremony.

Dimple Kapadia's performance at the 1993 Filmfare Awards added fuel to the rumors: When presenting the prize for best actor, she famously walked up to the s tage and made the announcement without even opening the sealed, “secret” envelope. The trophy went to Anil Kapoor (later seen in the U.S. television show “24” and films like “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Mission: Impossible â€" Ghost Protocol”). The actor Aamir Khan, widely considered the favorite that year, publicly resolved to never attend any Indian film awards ceremonies again. He has kept his word.

Bollywood is also inundated with new film awards that have sprung up with the growth of satellite television. The ceremonies entice the industry's biggest stars to appear with either cash or promises of an award, with an eye toward television viewers.

“No one takes film awards seriously in the Indian film industry,” the filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt said in an interview.

“Now there are awards after awards â€" IIFA, Zee, Stardust, Screen, Producers Guild. They're essentially marketing tools designed to boost viewership and ratings,” on the telev ision channels, he said.

Winning a Bollywood film award these days has little to do with how good an actor's performance is, or a filmmaker's skill, some industry veterans say.

“Over the years, the various popular Indian film awards did turn into ‘please-all affairs,' since the presence of stars became all the more important for each of them,” said Rauf Ahmed, former editor of Filmfare magazine, which gives out the award carrying its name.

India's Oscar entry process is also notoriously opaque, which may just add to the intrigue. An independent jury set up by the Film Federation of India chooses the best Indian film of the year for the Oscars' foreign picture category, long before the start of Bollywood's awards season. But just who is on the 11-member jury and how they choose the films remains a mystery, many Bollywood players say.

Neither Mr. Bhatt nor Mr. Johar, among Bollywood's leading producers, is part of the F.F.I., nor do they know anyt hing about the Oscar entry process. “If I had to pitch my own film for an entry, I wouldn't know how to go about it,” Mr. Johar said.

Movies that would seem likely candidates to represent India sometimes are not even considered. The director Shoojit Sircar, whose film “Vicky Donor” was both critically feted and a box-office hit in 2012, said, “I got a rude shock to learn that my producers had not even sent my film for consideration.”

The federation's Oscar picks have often raised eyebrows in the past. At least two of the choices â€" “Indian” in 1996 and “Jeans” in 1998 â€" have bordered on the ridiculous. In 2007, the federation was dragged to the Bombay High Court on charges of favoritism over their entry, Vidhu Vinod Chopra's “Eklavya: The Royal Guard.”

Supran Sen, the secretary general of the federation, was unable to provide much more detail about the organization when contacted. According to the rules, she said, the federation cannot disclose the names of any jury members aside from the chairwoman, Manju Borah, who is a filmmaker from Assam.

“Barfi,” for its part, has already been a box-office success in India, and won critical acclaim for its lead actors - so whether it gets any attention from Oscar judges may not even matter. Domestic box-office receipts are likely to reach 1 billion rupees, or $19 million, a figure considered the gold standard for blockbusters in Bollywood, and unusual for an original (or, in this case, somewhat original) film. Most movies in the “100 crore club” are usually remakes of south Indian films like “Ghajini,” “Singham” or “Bodyguard” or sequels like “Don 2” or “Housefull 2.”

And some in Bollywood predict India's Oscar obsession is about to be turned on its head. “It isn't Indians who need the Oscars, it is the Oscars that need India,” Mr. Bhatt said. “The big boys of Los Angeles have forever been eyeing India's 1.2 billi on fanatic consumers of movies.”

U.S. studios like Warner and 20th Century Fox have set up shop in India to produce films for domestic markets. “Barfi,” in fact, is produced by UTV, which is a Disney-owned company.



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