Slashdot Mirror

There's a call to rename every French paper "Charlie Hebdo" tomorrow in protest.

http://www.lalibre.be/actu/int... (in French)

The story originated from a site called www.thespoof.com!

CNN isn't the only agency to publish this one. Here's a Belgian paper which published it, and even mentioned that they found it on www.thespoof.com:

http://www.lalibre.be/actu/international/article/618724/un-crocodile-de-quatre-metres-cache-dans-un-sac-a-la-base-d-un-accident-d-avion-au-congo.html

(I guess they can excuse themselves because there's the language barrier.)

Of the two reported accusations (rape and assault), investigation of the rape accusation has now been cancelled:

google translation:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=fr&ie=UTF-8&sl=fr&tl=en&u=http://www.lalibre.be/actu/international/article/604038/wikileaks-le-parquet-annule-l-avis-de-recherche-visant-assange.html&prev=_t

Original (in French):
http://www.lalibre.be/actu/international/article/604038/wikileaks-le-parquet-annule-l-avis-de-recherche-visant-assange.html

Are you still reading newpapers? On the Web? Do you prefer watching news?

Personally, I m only reading newspaper on the web (http://www.lemonde.fr http://www.liberation.fr/ http://www.lalibre.be/ http://www.lesoir.be/ and less http://www.lefigaro.fr/ http://www.letemps.ch./ Even if people describes me to be more on the right (for Belgium, translate as communist in the USA :) ), i prefer leftish newspaper. But I like to be able to read different point of view and then make an opinion about myself. Still i find the quality of the writing to be weaker than before. If you now a subject well, you see obvious errors.

Now, i still buy 2 papers every month : "le monde diplomatique" (in http://mondediplo.com/) and "foreign affairs" ( http://www.foreignaffairs.com/) both are very interessing and they are following high standard, I also read the Economist from time to time. I wouldnt want to read them on the web because each article is quite dense and asl myself to focus on it. I would like to have the same depth into classical newpaper but alas :(.

I think Democracy needs Journalism. In democracy, voters must vote for the best candidate. And how would you do without knowing? I think that both Education and Information need to be analyse in the light of how good they are to Democracy

To come back to the proposition, I think is not neccesaraly wrong, this could allow some smaller publication to exist and that will bring more diversity where before the News Conglomerate were tending to uniformity.

So what's next? A federal investigation (and potential death penalty) just for goatsing up a small town's website?

(Yep, even TV. And yep, they even did showed that glaring goatse on screen. Pixelated, but still clearly recognizable...)

Maybe not everything is as easy as it would seem at first. "robots.txt" is opt-out, not opt-in, as has been remarked in previous posts on this matter. When concerning spam, everybody on slashdot will reject 'opt-out'. Well, I can understand that some news company might feel the same for Google News usage of their content. Sure, this time, they could reject them. Then Microsoft Live will come. They could reject it. Then thousands others, and you'll have a real problem, not being able to reject/select those that you wish, and those that you don't, and still allowing individuals to access the site.

In addition, I could imagine that if communication is as bad inside those Belgian newspapers as it is in a lot of companies, the IT wasn't aware of what the legal department did. Some of the incoherent moves made by those newspapers seem to show that (If I remember well, they had Google ads here http://www.lalibre.be/)

Also, it's been explained at least on one "official blog" of one of those newspaper (in French: http://blog.lesoir.be/blog-du-sel/?p=14#comment-15 ), that at first Google didn't want to negotiate with them, at all, before being sued. Well, now, they took notice.

Being the mega-corp that it became, I could imagine that Google wanted to ignore a small country. Nobody like arrongants people, and the nice "do no evil" Google seems from day to day to turn slowly into a arrogant mega-corp. I suppose that's a consequence of being on the stock exchange, and having to justify yourself to stock holders.

Except that majijuana is not criminal in Belgium anymore

Breaking news (10 january 2002) :

The individual usage by adults whose consumption is not considered problem (that is out of control) and which does not cause social nuisance (confusions of the neighborhood or on the public highway, consumption in the presence of minors or on the public highway...) will not be pursued.

source : this site or this article

Belgian on-line media is also covering the events :

Le Soir (in french)
La Libre Belgique
De Standaard (in dutch).

Also in french :
Le Monde

-DZM