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| The Times of India: red at the top | Hussain Ahmad In increasingly liberal India, sex sells – and no one is profiting more than the owners of the Times of IndiaWading through my friends' blogs, I stumbled into a discussion on obscenity in Indian media. Reading divergent positions on the issue, I found that the harshest barbs by some participants were directed at the Times of India for practising what they called soft-porn journalism.Intrigued, I raised the subject with some of my friends in India. Two of them, both journalists and fiercely liberal-minded, said they had stopped subscribing to the paper because it was a bad influence on their children. A colleague, who had previously worked with the paper in India, summed it up: "I know readers who have stopped buying the paper for this reason and those who buy it for the same."My experience, when I took a closer look, was enough to make me think of recommending the paper to those who are seeking to re-energise their sex life. In the section "other top news stories" on the paper's website, I found "Sensual massage for great sex", along with "Your best position for sex" and "Why women like to cuddle after sex" – of which the latter two were classified as the "most popular" stories.Two items in "Latest news" were very revealing: "Why girls kiss girls" and "Oral sex enough for women". I also had glimpses of models and actresses posing semi-naked, actresses in bed with so-and-so, stars baring all, etc.This should suffice to explain why many readers feel turned off. They don't expect a family newspaper to indulge in such excesses. No other mainstream English-language newspaper in the country pushes quite so hard at the boundaries of what is acceptable.As the oldest English-language daily in India (and now, with a circulation of 4m, the world's largest-selling English newspaper), the Times is a goliath in Indian journalism and commands great respect. It has set national agendas, and some of the country's most celebrated journalists have walked its corridors. The paper is a torchbearer of modern values, with an agenda of pluralism and social equity.Why should such a hallowed brand pander to voyeurism? The answer lies in the changing sexual mores of the country, and more importantly, in the crushing competition in the media sector.True, Indian sexuality has been breaking loose, egged on by the internet and visual media. We have regular reports and surveys on how sexual permissiveness has progressed each year; articles on Bollywood actors locked in steamy kisses; and sexy pictures of models in revealing clothes splashed even on the front pages. Many boundaries have been broken.If the Times has drawn ire, it's not because the change is too tardy, but because the paper has been pushing too hard. To many, haste, in matters of sex, is repulsive. Remember that ours is a country where sex education, even as an idea, is yet to be fully conceived.The Indian media scene has been remarkably vibrant in the past few years, with leading English dailies launching new editions in a spree of expansion. Whenever the Times has emerged from its lair in Mumbai and stomped into a new city, its competitors have watched in fear. The paper is known for its fiery marketing strategies, and has an uncanny knack of bulldozing its way to the top. "Soft porn journalism" is a weapon it has employed with stunning impact in this marketing war – primarily targeting young people, especially university students, who are discovering their sexuality.The paper has learned that both sex and news sell well but, together, form a potent mix that is unmatched. It is a formula that its competitors are loth to try.It is rumoured that this erotic journalism is not the choice of its editors, but management policy. The Times' co-owner, Samir Jain, once announced with uncharacteristic insouciance that editors are dispensable – and treated them accordingly. Indian journalists seethed, but the Times's roaring success hasn't yet given them a chance for revenge.Despite the moral brouhaha, the Old Lady of Bori Bunder, as the paper is nicknamed, will continue to have enormous sensuous appeal. After all, she is operating in the land of the Kama Sutra, and if kama becomes its marketing sutra, we can only blame that on the insatiable desire to sex up profits.NewspapersIndiaNewspapers & magazinesHussain Ahmadguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Audio slideshow In sound and pictures - how the Chilean miners were saved bbc.co.uk |
Taliban Influence Grows in North The Taliban's influence in northern Afghanistan has expanded in recent months from a few hotspots to much of the region, as insurgents respond to the U.S.-led coalition's surge in the south by seizing new ground in areas once considered secure. online.wsj.com |
Iraq war logs: military privatisation run amok | Pratap Chatterjee The Wikileaks logs provide ample evidence of private security contractors entirely unaccountable for lethal rogue actionsShortly after 10am on 14 May 2004, a convoy of private security guards from Blackwater riding down "Route Irish" – the Baghdad airport road – shot up a civilian Iraqi vehicle. While they were at it, the Blackwater men fired shots over the heads of a group of soldiers from the 69th Regiment of the US Army before they sped away heading west in their white armoured truck. When the dust cleared, the Iraqi driver was dead and his wife and daughter were injured.A terse, 57-word dispatch in the Iraq war logs published by Wikileaks is the first public evidence of the shooting, as recorded by the US military.The incident is one of several dozen "escalation of force" incidents involving private security companies in Iraq – which is military parlance for an unwarranted attack, almost all of which have never been previously reported. Blackwater, the company from Moyock, North Carolina, is responsible for about half of the attacks, closely followed by Erinys, a British private security company registered in the Virgin Islands, which seems to have an unusually high number of vehicle crashes.On my four visits to Iraq in the last seven years, I learned quickly to steer clear of the fast-moving vehicles belonging to these private security companies. The men – sporting identical reflective wrap-around sunglasses, bullet-proof jackets – would aim their high-powered assault rifles and shout "Imshi" ("Move") at any vehicle that came within a 50m perimeter. Sometimes, they would throw plastic water bottles to shock pedestrians into staying away.Easily the best-known private security company is Blackwater (recently renamed Xe), which rocketed to fame three years ago when four company security guards, escorting a convoy of US state department vehicles en route to a meeting in western Baghdad, opened fire in Nisour Square in Baghdad killing 17 Iraqi civilians. Yet, a query of the Iraq war logs for "Blackwater" or "Nisour Square" turns up nothing, at first.In this failure to identify what is probably the most notorious carnage of Iraqi civilians, the strengths and weakness of the military reporting process (and, by association, Wikileaks) become startlingly clear. Had the media not reported this incident, there would be no way to identify the company or the location in which this massacre took place. Initially, I wondered: was it possible that the soldier who recorded the incident made a mistake or that the record was erased?Eventually, I tracked down the incident by trying a few other methods. It is easy to see why I missed the record: there is no mention of the company, or the location, and even the death toll is incorrectly recorded as nine, suggesting that the Pentagon casualty record is incomplete.Human rights investigators know this problem only too well. Media reports are often incomplete and government reports are sometimes deliberately vague. They are just a starting point from which painstaking research is needed to build up a true picture of what has happened.Quite possibly, there were many more incidents in which civilians were injured, or even killed, which were never reported. Some of the reports may have been altered before they were entered into the military system. But given the other records that I found, at the very least, Wikileaks has revealed that Blackwater and other private security companies are guilty of many more injuries and killings than the media have previously reported.Today, there as many as 40,000 armed private security contractors working in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to data collected by Commission on Wartime Contracting staff during the first quarter of 2010.Some of them are ill-paid ex-soldiers from countries like Sierra Leone who make just $250 a month; others are former US soldiers, who are paid $500 or more per day. These men are often doing the very same jobs that soldiers once did – like guard duty – but with a lot less accountability.Until quite recently, these men with guns were untouchable: they were protected from any kind of prosecution by Coalition Provisional Authority Order No 17, issued by Paul Bremer, the US diplomat charged with running Iraq after the 2003 invasion.For example, Andrew J Moonen, a Blackwater employee, who has been accused of killing a guard assigned to an Iraqi vice-president on 24 December 2006, was spirited out of the country and has never faced charges in Iraq. Nor have the five men accused of opening fire in Nisour Square: Donald Ball, Dustin Laurent Heard, Evan Shawn Liberty Nicholas Abram Slatten and Paul Alvin Slough. Lawsuits in the US have also failed.Blackwater and Erinys were not the only ones who acted with seeming impunity. Perhaps the most egregious incident occurred on 28 May 2005, when the US Marines came under fire from four white Ford pickup trucks and a grey Excursion sports utility vehicle "recklessly driving through Fallujah traveling west – and firing sporadically at vehicles".The shooters worked for Zapata Engineering, one of five companies originally hired under a $200m contract to supervise the destruction and storage of US military ammunition worldwide. They were paid well for this work: each company manager earned an average of $275,000 a year, under their contract.Eventually, one of the Zapata vehicles ran over a spike strip in the road near a guard house under the control of the US Marines. The Marines placed 19 Zapata employees under arrest.At the time, Lawrence Peter, the director of the Private Security Company Association of Iraq, told my colleague David Phinney at CorpWatch: "I can say without a shadow of a doubt that there is no company named Zapata that is a licensed private security company under the terms of CPA Memorandum 17. I do not know under what legal authority those men thought they were operating, but it was not in keeping with the law of Iraq nor consistent with what professional, responsible and law-abiding private security companies are doing here."But Iraqis cannot tell which of these companies are licensed and which are not. Technically, they could complain to the military or raise the matter with yet another private military company named Aegis Defence from Britain, which was in charge of monitoring the movements of fellow private security contractors, under a $293m contract issued in June 2004. Yet Aegis hardly inspired confidence – one of their employees caused an uproar when he uploaded a video of security contractors shooting at Iraqis, with an Elvis Presley soundtrack to match.Things got even worse when the Washington Post published an article about yet another security company named Triple Canopy, in which team leader Jacob C Washbourne was quoted as saying: "I want to kill somebody today."Today, the Pentagon says that the random shootings are a thing of the past. In May 2008, an Armed Contractor Oversight Bureau (ACOB) was set up (pdf) by the US government in Iraq. Unfortunately, there is no website or any other public way to contact this important body.Perhaps the most worrying news about private military contractors came on 18 August 2010, when the New York Times revealed that the US government was planning to double the number of private security contractors in Iraq:"Defending five fortified compounds across the country, the security contractors would operate radars to warn of enemy rocket attacks, search for roadside bombs, fly reconnaissance drones and even staff quick reaction forces to aid civilians in distress, the officials said."It's not just Iraqis who are worried. At a hearing in congress on 23 September 2010, Michael Thibault, co-chair of the commission on wartime contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan and a former senior Pentagon auditor, said that he was troubled by the fact that the state department had very little experience to oversee this civilian surge in Iraq:"(I)t is not clear that it has the trained personnel to manage and oversee contract performance of a kind that has already shown the potential for creating tragic incidents and frayed relations with host countries."Courtesy Wikileaks, we now know that many more deadly shootings have taken place by these unregulated private security contractors than we knew of before. Given this new knowledge, it is time that we demand an inquiry into the privatisation of the military. Right now, the prime facie evidence is that it has considerably increased the number of unnecessary violent incidents, while reducing military discipline and accountability and costing taxpayers a bundle.Iraq: The war logsUS militaryUnited StatesIraqWikiLeaksUS foreign policyPratap Chatterjeeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
China Seeks Emergency Talks Over Korean-Peninsula Tension Beijing calls for emergency consultations among the six-party-talks members in the wake of North Korea's shelling of South Korea's Yeonpyeong Island feedproxy.google.com |