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Source: The Guardian.com Kevin Rawlinson 'Miskiw was a news editor at the paper, an influential job that required him to coordinate its news coverage and to be responsible for its news reporters. He was also responsible for bringing the convicted phone hacker Glenn Mulcaire to the paper. “You were in a bubble at the News of the World, where the objective was very simple: just get the story. Just get it. No matter what, no matter how. That is what was expected of you.  “And, if you did not and you did not do it once, or twice, or three times, and you failed, you would be out of the door,” he said. Along with the paper’s former chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck, Miskiw was jailed for six months in July 2014 after pleading guilty to conspiracy to intercept voicemail messages. The pair served 37 days each in total.'

Source: Channel 4 News Hany Al Moliya never imagined he'd become a refugee until members of his family were murdered in Syria and he found himself in a camp in Lebanon. Video

The Guardian , by  Chris Johnston 'The algorithms used by  Facebook  to filter news posts have an effect on the information seen by users – but not nearly as much as the choices made by users themselves. That is the finding of a study published on Thursday titled “Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook” in  Science  Express  by researchers working for the social network. Lazer describes the finding as important, and one that required “continued vigilance”.  “A small effect today might become a large effect tomorrow, depending on changes in the algorithms and human behaviour. Ironically, these findings suggest that if Facebook incorporated ideology into the features that the algorithms pay attention to, it would improve engagement with content by removing dissonant ideological content.” '

The Guardian , by William Davies 'A great deal of neuroscientific research into the roots of sympathy and reciprocity supports this. Optimists might view this as the basis for a new political hope, of a society in which sharing and gift-giving offer a serious challenge to the power of monetary accumulation and privatisation. But there is also a more disturbing possibility: that the critique of individualism and monetary calculation is now being incorporated into the armoury of utilitarian policy and management. One of the key insights of behavioural economics is that, if one wants to control other human beings, it is often far more effective to appeal to their sense of morality and social identity than to their self-interest.' 'The most valuable trick, from a marketing perspective, is how to induce individuals to share positive brand messages and adverts with each other, almost as if there were no public advertising campaign at all. The business practice known as “fr...

Source: The Guardian  (for the full article). As Oxford’s  Simon Wren-Lewis  noted, on the very same day that the Centre for Macroeconomics revealed that the great majority of British economists disagree with the proposition that austerity is good for growth, the Telegraph published on its front page a letter from 100 business leaders declaring the opposite. Why does big business love austerity and hate Keynesian economics? After all, you might expect corporate leaders to want policies that produce strong sales and hence strong profits. I’ve already suggested one answer: scare talk about debt and deficits is often used as a cover for a very different agenda, namely an attempt to reduce the overall size of government and especially spending on social insurance. This has been transparently obvious in the United States, where many supposed deficit-reduction plans just happen to include sharp cuts in tax rates on corporations and the wealthy even as they take away health...

Source:  Rupert Neate  ( @RupertNeate)   in New York: For the Observer Financial analysts and restaurant consultants reckon that McDonald’s main problem is that it has largely ignored the changing tastes and ideals of its core American customers – and thus backed itself into the stickiest of corners. Easterbrook will find it hard, they argue, to catch up with the new wave of hipper, rival fast-food chains such as Shake Shack, Panera Bread and Chipotle, while at the same time staying cheap and fast enough to satisfy its remaining loyal customers. ohnson said McDonald’s’ biggest challenge is winning over the most fought-over demographic: millennials (people who became teenagers around the year 2000). “These are the people having kids right now. They have a whole different value equation, it’s not just about price and quality.  “It’s about morality and ethics and wanting a healthy lifestyle,” she said.  “They’re not dieting, they’re making lifestyle ...

Source: Channel 4 News American photojournalist Stanley Greene has documented conflict, violence and human disasters across the world for over 25 years. Channel 4 News asked him to capture the battle for Number 10.XXX Report and photographs: Stanley Greene Assistant Producer: Katie Arnold Producer/Director: Girish Juneja Photographs of Stanley Greene in Aleppo: Alessio Romenzi From Chechnya and Afghanistan, Rwanda and Somalia, Stanley Greene has consistently captured the realities of war with a unique editorial style that has earned him many accolades, including five World Press Photo awards. So during this tightly fought election campaign here in the UK,  Channel 4 News  embedded him with the four main English parties to document the battle for Number 10. His black and white photo essay airs on tonight's programme at 7pm. We caught up with Stanley to see what he made of the British elections.

Source: The Guardian,  Samuel Gibbs Facebook tracks the web browsing of everyone who visits a page on its site even if the user does not have an account or has explicitly opted out of tracking in the EU, extensive research commissioned by the Belgian data protection agency has revealed. The issue revolves around Facebook’s use of its social plugins such as the “Like” button, which has been placed on more than 13m sites including health and government sites. Facebook places tracking cookies on users’ computers if they visit any page on the facebook.com domain, including fan pages or other pages that do not require a Facebook account to visit. When a user visits a third-party site that carries one of Facebook’s social plug-ins, it detects and sends the tracking cookies back to Facebook - even if the user does not interact with the Like button, Facebook Login or other extension of the social media site. An opinion published by Article 29, the pan-European data regulator work...

Source: The Conversation 23 August 2013, 5.29am BST Hard Evidence: how biased is the BBC? 'Welcome to Hard Evidence, a series of articles that looks at what the data say about some of the trickiest public policy questions we face. Academic experts will delve into the available research evidence to provide an informed analysis of current affairs you won’t get from politicians or vested interests. First up, Mike Berry uses his research to tackle a question as old as broadcasting itself: is the BBC really impartial? If you are a reader of the right end of the British press you will be familiar with stories claiming that the Corporation has a liberal, left-wing bias. Only last week the Daily Telegraph  reported  a new study had found that the BBC “exhibits a left-of-centre bias in both the amount of coverage it gives to different opinions and the way in which these voices are represented”. Other critics have accused the BBC of having a  pro-EU  and ...

Source: The Guardian,  Stuart Heritage Wednesday 11 February 2015  12.58 GMT http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/feb/11/jon-stewarts-10-best-moments

The Contradictory Vaudeville Of Post-Modern Politics Video ADAM CURTIS, BBC: So much of the news this year has been hopeless, depressing, and above all, confusing. To which the only response is to say, 'oh dear'. What this film is going to suggest is that that defeatist response has become a central part of a new system of political control. And to understand how this is happening, you have to look to Russia, to a man called  Vladislav Surkov , who is a hero of our time.  Surkov is one of President Putin's advisers, and has helped him maintain his power for 15 years, but he has done it in a very new way.  He came originally from the  avant-garde  art world, and those who have studied his career, say that what Surkov has done, is to import ideas from conceptual art into the very heart of politics.  His aim is to undermine peoples' perceptions of the world, so they never know what is really happening.  Surkov turned Russian politics int...

Who’s the true enemy of internet freedom - China, Russia, or the US? Evgeny Morozov, The Guardian.com However, Russia, China and Brazil are simply responding to the extremely aggressive tactics adopted by none other than the US. In typical fashion, though, America is completely oblivious to its own actions, believing that there is such a thing as a neutral, cosmopolitan internet and that any efforts to move away from it would result in its “Balkanisation”. But for many countries, this is not Balkanisation at all, merely de-Americanisation. US companies have been playing an ambiguous role in this project. On the one hand, they build efficient and highly functional infrastructure that locks in other countries, creating long-term dependencies that are very messy and costly to undo. They are the true vehicles for whatever is left of America’s global modernisation agenda. On the other hand, the companies cannot be seen as mere proxies for the American empire. Especially after the ...

Who pays for us to browse the web? Be wary of Google’s latest answer Evgeny Morozov , The Guardian.com Google has quietly la unched a new service, Google Contributor, and it’s based on an intriguing proposition: for a small monthly fee, you won’t see any ads on the websites of its partners. The fee, naturally, is split between Google and those sites – but only if they are actually visited. As Google puts it, this is all “an experiment in additional ways to fund the web”. More on Google Contributor Do we really read/watch/consume advertising? The imagined community argument may be useful if one wished to challenge these views.