BBC assailed for refusing to carry Gaza appeal

LONDON: In more than 80 years as a publicly financed broadcaster with an audience of millions at home and around the world, the BBC has rarely been buffeted as severely as it has in recent days over its decision not to broadcast a television appeal by aid agencies for victims of Israel’s recent military actions in Gaza.

BBC executives made the decision late last week and defiantly reaffirmed it on Monday, citing their concern with protecting the corporation’s impartiality in the Arab-Israeli dispute.

The dispute stirs high passions here, and the BBC, like other news organizations, has struggled uneasily for years to strike a balance, even as some critics claim it has tilted heavily toward Israel and others claim it has favored the Palestinians.

The three-week Israeli campaign in Gaza that ended nine days ago had already elicited a fresh barrage of complaints about BBC bias, for and against Israel. But the decision to block the aid appeal had the effect of magnifying the protests, and their virulence.

The decision has met with angry criticism from Church of England archbishops, editorial writers and senior British government ministers, as well as sit-ins at the BBC’s London headquarters and its broadcast center in Glasgow

News planning sessions at the BBC have featured heated exchanges among editors and reporters, and BBC officials said Monday that they had received more than 11,000 complaints in the past three days.

A strong undercurrent in many of the protests has been that the BBC gave in to pressure from Israel or Jewish lobbying groups, which the BBC has vehemently denied.

A more common view has been that BBC executives, already wary because of a recent series of embarrassments unrelated to Middle East coverage, became so averse to controversy that they made an awkward extension of the concept of impartiality to a purely humanitarian issue.

But the BBC’s director general, Mark Thompson, denied Monday to reporters that he had been subjected to “arm-twisting” by pro-Israeli groups and said that the corporation had a duty to cover the Gaza dispute in a “balanced, objective way.”

“Of course, everyone is struck by the human consequence of what has happened,” he said. “And we will, I promise you, continue to report that as fully and compassionately as we can. But we are going to do that in a way where we can hold it up to scrutiny. It’s our job as journalists.”

The three-minute video, which was shown on several other channels in Britain on Monday night, was prepared by the Disasters Emergency Committee, an organization representing 11 relief agencies. Among them are many of Britain’s best-known charities, including the Red Cross, Oxfam, Save the Children, Help the Aged, Christian Aid and World Vision.

The committee has said the money it raises will buy food, medical supplies, tents, blankets and other necessities for those suffering in Gaza in the wake of the Israeli offensive and the military actions of Hamas, the militant Palestinian group that governs Gaza.

It asked broadcasters to show the appeal as a public service.

The BBC does not accept advertising but has shown humanitarian appeals on other issues in the past, including the conflicts in Rwanda, the Congo and Darfur.

Some of the sharpest criticism of the BBC’s decision on the Gaza appeal came from within its own ranks, from unions representing its newsroom staff and from retired editors and reporters.

Sir John Tusa, a former head of the BBC World Service, said the scenes of distressed children and families in Gaza captured in the video appeal were a matter of “common humanity.”

“Nobody, surely, in their right mind, can say that is being partial towards the victims, as if somehow they deserved the fate they got,” he said in a BBC radio interview.

“The thing that worries me,” he added, “is that there is now an overcomplication of regulation and compliance and policy, and that in the course of that, common sense, and, I regret to say, humanity, seem to have been left behind.”

The BBC was joined in its refusal to carry the appeal, and its contention that to do so would compromise the impartiality of its Middle East coverage, by Sky News, a broadcaster whose majority shareholder is Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

But three other broadcasters — the publicly owned Channel 4 and two private broadcasters, ITV and Channel 5 — accepted the appeal. After the BBC, ITV has the largest number of viewers for its main nightly newscast.

As shown on Monday night, the video focused heavily on the plight of Palestinian children — small boys and girls wounded and sobbing, being rushed into hospital emergency wards and, at one point, a parent clutching a tiny white shroud. Other scenes were of homes and apartment blocks collapsed into piles of twisted steel and rubble, and of a woman in black clasping her hands to her head as she surveys a bombed-out wasteland.

ICL recruits begin fight against bans with letter to PCB

Pakistan’s ICL recruits have finally restarted a legal process to fight the bans imposed on them by the PCB from playing domestic and international cricket. A letter has been sent by the legal firm of retired judge Fakhruddin G Ebrahim to the PCB on behalf of the players. Currently, however, the communication is not “a legal notice”, a board official said.

“No legal action is being taken just yet but we have received a letter from the firm,” the official told Cricinfo. “The letter asks us why we have banned them and under what rules.”

The board has not responded yet, though it is understood the issue will be brought up at the ICC executive board meeting due to take place in Perth on January 31. Only after a clearer picture emerges from there will they respond to the queries.

The move comes more than a year after a group of ICL players, led by Imran Farhat and Taufeeq Umar, first attempted to take the matter to court. They started the process towards the end of 2007 but it then petered out. The process has started again, said a prominent ICL player, because the environment is ripe for it.

“We tried doing it in 2007 but Nasim Ashraf [the then PCB chairman] had too many connections in the government of the time,” the player told Cricinfo. “Whenever we did something or tried, it would come up against a dead end because Ashraf would use his friends in power to stop proceedings. So we decided to just wait it out till the government changed. Now it has and so has the administration and we feel, from the comments they have made, that we can progress this time.”

The current board administration under Ijaz Butt has been far more ambiguous about the ban on the players than the one under Ashraf and seems far more willing to look for ways out of the situation. Pakistan has 19 players in the ICL – some of them, like Abdul Razzaq and Mohammad Yousuf, still good enough to play for the country.

Javed Miandad, the PCB’s director-general, has openly called for the bans to be removed claiming they hurt Pakistan and are only in place to appease BCCI interests. Butt, however, has been vague and often confused over the stance. He insists it is up to the ICC to resolve the matter and that the PCB does not want to ban the players.

“We don’t want our players to be banned because they have contracts with the ICL,” Butt said on a TV show two weeks ago. “But unfortunately we can’t do anything unless the ICC changes its stance on this issue.

“The PCB has not directly banned the players, We have banned them under the ICC rules,” he said. “The rules state that no tournament can be held without the home board’s permission and, in the case of the ICL, the Indian board [BCCI] does not recognise it as it runs its own league, the IPL.”

Board officials have been examining legal aspects of the case since before the letter was sent to fully brief Butt before he attends the Perth meeting. The letter has been sent on behalf of almost all of Pakistan’s 19 ICL players and Moin Khan, coach of the ICL’s Lahore Badshahs team, is believed to be handling the matter as a representative of sorts.

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Barack Obama’s site leading to Trojan

NEW DELHI, INDIA:The US Presidential campaign has created yet another opportunity to spread more malicious code, just ,a typical occasion for the malicious hackers behind the fake video codec social-engineering scams, says Websense.

Websense Security Labs ThreatSeeker Network has detected that malicious hackers have registered multiple bogus user accounts on My.BarackObama.com (an online community for citizens to rally behind President Obama), in order to spread malicious code around the Web. A My.BarackObama.com social-networking account empowers the user with tools to join groups, raise funds, and even create his or her own blog. The option to create your own blog is a common feature provided by most of the popular Web 2.0 social sites today, driven by user-generated content.

In the Obama campaign, malicious hackers created blogs on My.BarackObama.com with a fake YouTube image, enticing visitors to “Click here to see movie”, says Websense.

Clicking on the link led to a Web site using YouTube’s template for viewing online videos, filled with pornography.

Clicking on the video to view results in the Web site prompts the browser to download a supposedly required video codec, which is really a malicious Trojan .exe.

But the malicious campaign doesn’t end there. BarackObama.com is a highly visible, reputable, and popular Web site, with an Alexa ranking of 872 (at time of writing), with almost 9,000 other sites linking to it (according to Alexa). The malicious hackers have been spraying these BarackObama.com URLs all over the Web by injecting them onto blog comment forms, and various user-generated content management systems commonly used by Web 2.0 sites.

Visitors who double-click on this downloaded .exe will be infected with a Trojan. At the time of this writing, the malicious code has almost a 35% detection rate by the major anti-virus vendors (SHA-1: 7e1e623cdae2aba83aecaa2380133b3ccb4f1193). We acknowledge that this has been mentioned before, but now that President Obama has officially been sworn in, and with the new administration’s efforts to “expand and deepen this online engagement”, we can be sure that the frequency and intensity of malicious campaigns aimed at anyone seeking to engage with the President online will only increase. The malicious hackers will also seek new ways to abuse Web 2.0 functionality on any of the new administration’s online properties.

Just prior to the inauguration, US-CERT reported increased spam and phishing sites aimed at luring anyone searching for information on the historical event. We are monitoring this threat, and the ThreatSeeker Network can confirm the US-CERT report. Here are two screenshots of more malicious activity centered around the Presidential Inauguration.

SAG win makes Slumdog come as Oscar hit

Los Angeles: Slumdog Millionaire, the rags to riches tale of a Mumbai slum dweller, emerged as favorite to win the best picture Oscar after winning the top prize at the 15th Screen Actors Guild awards on Sunday.

Slumdog, which involves a host of amateur young actors in Mumbai’s slums, won for best ensemble cast on a night where Hollywood actors traditionally tend to honor their own. The SAG win followed four Golden Globes earlier this month and a Producers Guild Award on Saturday.

“It was overwhelming enough to be nominated. But to win this is unbelievable,” said Anil Kapoor, who plays the cynical quiz master in the independent movie. “It is the children who have done it, not us.”

“It is historic where India is concerned,” Kapoor said, telling journalists of his excitement at meeting Angelina Jolie at the SAG awards dinner.

But the night did not belong entirely to Slumdog, which came away with just one prize and had to share the limelight with the late Heath Ledger, Sean Penn, Meryl Streep and Kate Winslet in four other films.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which has a leading 13 Oscar nominations, came away empty-handed on Sunday, as did Frost/Nixon which recounts journalist David Frost’s interviews with disgraced US president Richard Nixon.

David Poland, editor of Movie City News, said: “People admire Benjamin Button but they don’t love it. It is big and the acting is beautiful but it doesn’t hit them emotionally.”

Sean Penn won the best actor award for playing slain San Francisco gay rights activist Harvey Milk in Milk. Veteran Meryl Streep was a popular best actress winner for her role as a vindictive nun in the Catholic Church abuse drama Doubt.

Neither Milk nor Doubt has featured strongly in the awards season so far, but Penn’s win set up a tight-two way Oscar race with Mickey Rourke, who won a Golden Globe for his comeback role in The Wrestler.

Milk has played well in Los Angeles, where the gay community was dismayed by a November 2008 referendum that banned same sex marriage in California. “This is a story about equal rights for all human beings,” Penn said in his acceptance speech.

Streep paid tribute to other strong performances by women in the past year, adding, “There is no such thing as the best actress. There is no such thing as ‘the greatest living actress’,” referring to the accolade often bestowed on her. Ledger, who died at age…

Los Angeles: 28 a year ago, added a SAG award to his haul for playing the Joker in Batman blockbuster, The Dark Knight.

Sunday’s award, greeted by a standing ovation, makes Ledger a virtual shoo-in in February to join Peter Finch as the only two actors to win Oscars after their death. Finch won in 1976 for Network. British actress Kate Winslet won the best supporting actress award for her role as a German woman with a hidden Nazi past in The Reader.

Winslet, who is also Oscar nominated for her performance, said it was the most challenging part she had ever played. “Playing Hanna Schmitz was such a blessing, even though it made me completely insane,” Winslet said.

SAG also handed out awards to television actors. Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin and the cast of 30 Rock swept the TV comedy awards, while Mad Men, set among advertising industry players in the early 1960s, won for best TV drama ensemble cast.

British actor Hugh Laurie won best actor in a TV drama for his cranky doctor in House, Sally Field won for best actress in a drama for Brothers and Sisters and Laura Linney and Paul Giamatti won best actress and actor in a TV miniseries for John Ada