Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/151355361?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Sunday, October 23, 2011
UFC 137 interview: Mitrione wants to show he?s more than a heavy-handed striker
Next week at UFC 137, Matt Mitrione is back and he's facing his toughest test to date.
The former Big 10 defensive tackle and NFL veteran, has raced out to a 5-0 start, but now he faces another big puncher in Cheick Kongo. Mitrione doesn't sound like he's afraid to bang with the Frenchman, but also pointed out that he's been working on his ground game as well.
Listen to a very confident Mitrione with Kevin Iole and myself on ESPNRadio1100/98.9 FM's "The MMA Insiders" show. You'll be shocked to find out who "Meathead" from Season 9 of the "Ultimate Fighter" is training with now.
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Shock image threshold falls under internet pressure (Reuters)
PARIS (Reuters) ? The threshold for publishing gruesome images like those of Muammar Gaddafi's death is falling as the internet and social media make many of the editorial decisions that used to be left to a small group of professional journalists.
The shaky video footage of Gaddafi's last moments was such a dramatic end to Libya's months-long struggle against its former dictator that many television stations around the world rushed to broadcast much of what they received.
Newspapers followed up on Friday morning, some splashing graphic photos of the bloodied former Libyan leader across their front pages while others opted for pictures of victorious anti-Gaddafi troops or file shots of Gaddafi in his heyday.
Showing images of a person in the throes of death used to be a newsroom taboo, but even this is now giving way under the pressure of instant internet publishing and -- thanks to camera phones -- the increasing availability of strong news footage.
"Over the past 10 years, whatever your society's standards were, they're notching toward more gruesome images," said Kelly McBride, ethics expert at the Poynter Institute journalism training center in St Petersburg, Florida.
In many cases, she said, news organizations now deal mostly with the question of how to publish a graphic but newsworthy picture rather than whether they should run it at all.
"News editors are very aware that these images are available anyway," said Ivor Gaber, professor of political journalism at City University in London.
HISTORIC IMAGES
Steven Barrett, professor of communications at London's Westminster University, said there was no doubt the images would be used. "This was a momentous event in world history," he said. Showing it was "not just to boost ratings."
Showing the footage was especially important in Libya and the Middle East, since the lack of such photographic proof of Osama bin Laden's death prompted many people in the region to ask whether the al Qaeda leader had really been killed.
"I doubt the vast majority of Libyans, and possibly the populace in the region, will raise any objections to the images," said Hayat Alvi, professor of Middle East studies at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.
Many television stations in Europe and the United States prefaced their broadcast of the Gaddafi death videos with a clear warning that disturbing images were about to be shown.
The main stations in Spain and Belgium gave no warnings, while the German channel ZDF showed a few images in its main evening news broadcast and then said: "There are others we don't want to show -- it's a question of human dignity."
European and United States newspaper front pages on Friday morning showed even wider differences in the way the print media handled those images.
No major U.S. newspapers ran pictures of the dying Gaddafi on their front pages. Of the 424 newspapers surveyed by Newseum, a Washington journalism museum, only about two dozen had page one images of him near or after death.
By contrast, London's Daily Telegraph, Guardian and Sun splashed grim photos across their front pages. The Guardian website balanced that with an op-ed piece entitled "Even Muammar Gaddafi deserved a private death."
Milan's Corriere della Sera printed a photo of the dead Gaddafi, blood trickling down his bare chest. De Morgen in Brussels covered its tabloid front page with a shot of him in agony, near death, with the quote "the people love me."
German newspapers were more discreet than ZDF television, showing few bloody images of the former dictator. French front pages seemed evenly divided between discretion and disrespect.
Le Monde in Paris printed a small black-and-white photo on its second page of Gaddafi's half-naked corpse displayed in Misrata, while Madrid's El Pais displayed the same shot large and in full color on its front page.
RISING TOLERANCE FOR GRUESOME IMAGES
"Tolerance for gruesome images is going up because more people search for them on the internet than we would have expected," McBride said. "So when it's delivered to them by a publication, they don't have the same righteous indignation."
Still, she said, the main check on media from publishing shocking pictures is the backlash from their audiences.
"U.S. audiences have the least tolerance for graphic images," she said, despite the high level of violence they accept in entertainment films. "It's a weird paradox."
While all the media experts said editors had to consider a mix of factors when deciding whether to run an explicitly violent image, Barnett stressed the key factor in any ethical assessment was the editor's intent in publishing it.
"If it's just to gratify, to maximize shock and horror, it's unacceptable," he said.
McBride, who often gets urgent calls from editors on deadline asking for ethical advice, said she gives them a rough checklist of the issues to consider before publishing.
They should ask what the news value of the picture is, whether it will in any way harm to the publication's audience and whether the publication can find alternative material to publish with fewer ethical concerns.
"There is so much that changes from one story to the next that it's hard to write rules for how to treat these images," she said. "Newsrooms have to go through this questioning process and figure it out for themselves."
(Reporting By Tom Heneghan and Peter Apps)
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Saturday, October 22, 2011
Family Finance: Fee-wary customers switch banks | The Associated ...
Cory and Stephanie Heck are in the midst of doing what countless other Bank of America customers have threatened. In response to the bank's plan to charge $5 per month for using debit cards, they're switching banks.
"We work too hard to have to pay to access our money," said Cory Heck, 31, a Bank of America customer for about four years.
"For me, it's a customer service issue," said Stephanie, also 31, a human resources manager. "As a customer, they haven't treated us the way I would expect to be treated."
The Hecks are far from alone. A growing number of big bank customers, angry about new debit card usage fees, harder-to-avoid checking accounts fees and rising ATM surcharges, are taking their frustrations and their business elsewhere.
"They're coming over in big chunks," said David Glaser, vice president of National Capital Bank, a family run, two-branch community bank in Washington D.C. He estimated that 80 percent of the new accounts opened in the three weeks since news broke about the $5 debit card fees have been opened by customers of the Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America Corp.
And not all of those switching would even get charged the debit fee. "I had a woman bring me a quarter of a million dollars, Glaser said. "She would not have paid the $5 fee, she just didn't like the idea."
There's even a campaign, dubbed "Bank Transfer Day" that has more than 11,500 people pledging on Facebook to switch financial institutions by Nov. 5. Most say they are headed to credit unions.
That's the choice made by the Hecks. After they searched for options in their hometown of Royal Oak, Mich., they decided to become members of Genesys Credit Union.
Most credit unions are small, nonprofit membership organizations, that don't charge any fees or have low fees for their basic accounts. The Bethpage Federal Credit Union of Long Island, N.Y., is even offering a certificate with a lifetime "no fee guarantee" to its customers.
Bethpage President and CEO Kirk Kordeleski said it has opened more than 1,500 new accounts in the two weeks after the Bank of America debit fee was announced, greater than twice the normal pace. "People are literally walking into branches and cutting up their Bank of America cards."
Offering the no-fee guarantee was easy, said Kordeleski, because the credit union has always offered free checking. "Credit unions owned the free checking business in the 80s and 90s, because banks typically had a monthly fee at that time," he said.
Debit cards and overdraft fees played a big roll in changing the landscape. Banks were able to regain their earnings from monthly checking fees with steady fee income paid by the retailers for debit card transactions. And they changed policies to ratchet up overdraft fees as well.
Now that regulations are limiting overdraft charges and capping debit card transaction fees, banks are turning back to customers to cover the cost of maintaining their accounts. The availability of free checking accounts declined in 2010 for the first time since 2003, according to a recent report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
It's not the first time a popular movement has encouraged consumers to dump big banks. During the 2009 holiday season, The Huffington Post got behind the "Move Your Money" project, which used the image of the good-guy community banker played by Jimmy Stewart in the movie "It's a Wonderful Life," to encourage customers of the banking world's "Mr. Potters" to find alternatives.
That campaign got some traction, but didn't result in a significant number of defections.
"'Move Your Money' was good for credit unions, there's no question. But this seems to be a more visceral reaction this time," " said Bill Cheney, CEO of the Credit Union National Association, an industry group. "People aren't just doing it because they like credit unions, they're doing it because they're mad at their bank."
But are people angry enough to make the effort to switch accounts? Consider that they'd be leaving big banks offering wide ATM networks, mobile banking apps and other conveniences that smaller institutions may have trouble matching.
"Consumers are saying they're mad as hell," said Mark Schwanhausser, a financial services analyst with Javelin Strategy & Research. "The question in my mind is, whether they're at that stage of saying 'And I'm not going to take it anymore.'"
The fact is that switching banks can be a hassle. It takes time and effort to find new banks and compare their fees. And while it's easy enough to open an account online, switching often ends up requiring a visit to a branch. Then there's the need to shift direct deposits, electronic bill payments, automatic transfers and the rest of the details associated with modern banking.
"There's a lot more anger than there is action," Schwanhausser said.
His research has shown the more reliant customers are on online banking or mobile banking, the less likely they are to make the switch, even after they open a new account elsewhere.
Some banks and credit unions offer switch kits, that can help a customer through the process. A handful have even contracted a new service called "SwitchAgent" that does most of the work of switching preauthorized bill payments and direct deposits for the individual. But even that helping hand requires the customer to gather account numbers and other details to get it in motion.
"You can complain or you can change," Schwanhausser said, who called this a "Netflix" moment for the big banks. "The consumer is going to be forced to decide how important is convenience? How important is undoing this relationship I have?"
Source: http://www.sfexaminer.com/news/2011/10/family-finance-fee-wary-customers-switch-banks
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Video: Will Europe Get it Done?
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Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/44995592#44995592
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NJ candidate's 'whore-in-bedroom' advice panned
TRENTON, N.J. (AP) ? A political candidate in New Jersey is taking heat for tweeting that the way for a woman to keep her man is to be a "whore in the bedroom."
Republican state Senate candidate Phil Mitsch says he didn't mean to offend women. He says the comments were a version of advice given by others, including women.
Democrats attacked Mitsch for the tweet as well as others the candidate claims were doctored.
The state GOP has also withdrawn support, telling The Philadelphia Inquirer his comments made him unfit for office.
Mitsch's tweet read: "Women, you increase your odds of keeping your men by being faithful, a lady in the living room and a whore in the bedroom."
Even without the controversy, Mitsch was a long shot in solidly Democratic Camden County.
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Friday, October 21, 2011
Nikon J1 and V1 compacts now available for mirror haters everywhere
You heard that Nikon is releasing a couple of mirrorless compacts, right? Well, the ten megapixel J1 and V1 models are both on sale from today, sticking to their schedule despite the terrible flooding in Thailand that has already delayed a separate Nikon announcement scheduled for Tuesday as well as impacting heavily on Sony's camera production. The metal V1 is priced at $900 including a 10-30mm, f/3.5 max aperture kit lens. Meanwhile, the plastic J1 is going for $650 with the same glass and we've already subjected it to some full review scrutiny.
Nikon J1 and V1 compacts now available for mirror haters everywhere originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 Oct 2011 07:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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