News Middle East
www.english.aljazeera.net

An Iraqi journalist arrested after throwing his shoes at the US president has been tortured during his detention, his brother has said.

Muntazer al-Zaidi, who called George Bush "a dog" during his attack, was beaten by security guards after his arrest, Durgham al-Zaidi told Al Jazeera on Tuesday.

"We know that [Muntazer] has been tortured and his hand was broken. I asked them to go and check on him in the Green Zone [in Baghdad]," he said.

by Ramzy Baroud

by Pablo Ouziel

by Rory O'Connor

by Jim Miles

Two recent events have prompted the ideas behind this article – in truth, the whole history of recent events have prompted the following comments, but it is two in particular that gave the push to write them down.

by Danny Schechter.

No One Escapes the Greeders: Tears for the Rich, Contempt for the Poor

By Ramzy Baroud

It’s incomprehensible that a region such as the Gaza Strip, so rich with history, so saturated with defiance, can be reduced to a few blurbs, sound bites and reductionist assumptions, convenient but deceptive, vacant of any relevant meaning, or even true analytical value.

The fact is that there is more to the Gaza Strip than 1.5 million hungry Palestinians, who are supposedly paying the price for Hamas’s militancy, or Israel’s ‘collective punishment’, which ever way the media decide to brand the problem.

by Dahr Jamail
December 15th, 2008 | Extra! The Magazine of FAIR

The New York Times failed spectacularly in its coverage of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, helping lead the country into war and only much later (5/26/04) publishing a half-hearted mea culpa. As the near-apology acknowledged, the paper’s failure resulted in large part from its lack of skepticism regarding its sources, most notably exiled Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi.

by The Phoenix.

Can a Boston start-up reinvent foreign reporting?
In January, Philip Balboni and Charles Sennott will launch GlobalPost, a new Boston-based foreign-news-only service that will compete with the Associated Press and CNN.

No other newsroom figure boasts quite the same mix of romantic appeal and nobility of purpose as the foreign correspondent. Hunkering down in exotic locales, courting and defying danger, watching history unfold, then writing its first draft for the folks back home . . . What could be more enticing?

by Maria Tomchick & Geov Parrish
www.EatTheState.org

Welcome to our 13th annual selection of the year’s most over-hyped and underreported stories, separated into local and global categories. With the news business, especially newspapers, undergoing a not-very-slow collapse, and hard news coverage usually the first victim of tightening budgets, there was more underreported news than ever this year. Fear not, however. America’s addiction to trivial distractions can withstand any assault from economic hardship–or from reality.

2008’s Most Over-Hyped Stories

Global