DXPG

Total Pageviews

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Google Debuts an Updated Nexus 7 Tablet

SAN FRANCISCO â€" Google revealed its latest Nexus 7 tablet on Wednesday, a day after Apple reported declining sales of the rival iPad.

The new Android tablet, which was widely expected, is a slimmer, faster, lighter, higher-resolution version of the first Nexus 7, introduced a year ago to good reviews and brisk sales. It accounted for more than 10 percent of Android tablets sold, according to Google, which held a news conference here to show the tablet and a new Internet TV device called Chromecast.

Google also announced a competitive milestone for its Play app store, which once lagged behind Apple’s App Store. Play now has a million apps, exceeding Apple’s 900,000. Google also announced a few new features of the Play store, like a gaming hub and textbooks.

The Nexus 7, though more expensive than the original, is less expensive than the rival iPad Mini. The Nexus 7 costs $229 to $349, depending on storage and Internet connection, while the iPad Mini costs from $329 to $659.

Apple reported on Tuesday that iPad sales were down 14 percent year over year, which some analysts attributed to its high prices in a market that is increasingly filled with lower-priced, similar-quality competitors.

The new tablet, which will be available July 30, has rear and front-facing cameras, virtual surround sound speakers, log-ins for multiple users and photo-realistic graphics that show the stubble on a gaming avatar’s face. It runs on the latest version of Android, Jelly Bean 4.3. Like the first Nexus 7, it is manufactured by Asus.

Sundar Pichai, the Google senior vice president who recently added Android to his portfolio of responsibilities, which also includes Chrome, said the tablet was evidence of Google’s commitment to both operating systems and to developing a consistent experience for consumers across devices.

Brian X. Chen contributed reporting from New York.



The Third Man on Snowden’s Reading List

The Russian lawyer Antatoly Kucherena speaking to the state-owned channel Russia Today on Wednesday after meeting Edward J. Snowden at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport.

As my colleagues in Moscow reported earlier, when Antatoly Kucherena emerged from the transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport on Wednesday after meeting Edward J. Snowden, the Russian lawyer helping the former intelligence contractor with his asylum request was asked to explain what was in the brown paper shopping bag he had left behind.

Mr. Kucherena, a Putin supporter who reportedly sits on the public council of the Federal Security Service, the successor to the K.G.B., told the press scrum that he had brought his client a change of clothes and English translations of books by three Russian authors â€" “Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Karamzin” â€" that might help the American to learn about the nation around the airport he has been trapped in for the past month.

Perhaps inevitably, journalists with a taste for the absurd wondered just what Mr. Snowden might learn about modern Russia from the first two authors, whose great works of fiction and drama portrayed human dilemmas a century before the era of Total Information Awareness.

Writing in The New Republic, Julia Ioffe observed, “Kucherena said he brought Snowden a copy of Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment,’ and some Chekhov ‘for dessert.’ It’s time, he said, for the young man to ‘learn about our reality.’ The reality that lies before Snowden, however, is not that of a Petersburg slum or a cherry orchard.”

A portrait of Nikolai Karamzin, the court historian of Czar Alexander I who died in 1826. A portrait of Nikolai Karamzin, the court historian of Czar Alexander I who died in 1826.

That left the question of what Mr. Snowden’s lawyer thought a would-be citizen might learn about life in Putin’s Russia by reading Nikolai Karamzin, the court historian to Czar Alexander I who began his 12-volume “History of the Russian State” in 1818.

Quite a lot, perhaps.

As the Harvard professor emeritus Richard Pipes explained in the introduction to his translation and analysis of Karamzin’s “Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia,” this conservative Russian thinker’s work offers a glimpse of a world in which “many Russians believed that autocracy was the only regime capable of providing the country with stability and assuring it of great power status: any alternative to it spelled chaos.”

Karamzin’s “Memoir,” Mr. Pipes observed, was written “for Alexander I in 1810-11 to discourage him from proceeding with his liberal reforms.” Mr. Pipes added: “Karamzin’s argument was purely pragmatic: history has shown that Russia thrived under autocracy and declined whenever the country departed from it. Proof of this contention he found in the collapse of the Kievan state and the resultant conquest of Russia by the Mongols, as well as in the so-called Time of Troubles of the early seventeenth century when the country disintegrated following the expiration of the Rurik dynasty.”

In one passage from the Pipes translation of the “Memoir,” Karamzin argues:

Autocracy has founded and resuscitated Russia. Any change in her political constitution has led in the past and must lead in the future to her perdition, for she consists of very many and very different parts, each of which has its own civic needs; what save unlimited monarchy can produce in such a machine the required unity of action?



With New Device, Google Tries Again on Internet TV

SAN FRANCISCO â€" Google is trying again to tackle the television.

On Wednesday, the company introduced Chromecast, a $35, two-inch stick that plugs into TVs and enables people to watch online video, listen to music and see images from laptops, tablets or phones on the TV screen â€" and to use their other devices as a remote control.

“We are closing the gap between TV and mobile devices,” said Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president for Chrome and Android, in an interview after a news conference in San Francisco. Nearly half of all peak Internet traffic in North America comes from YouTube and Netflix, he said, and people want to be able to watch those videos on the big screen.

Chromecast, unlike other gadgets that play online media on TVs, works with laptops, tablets and phones from companies other than Google, so iPhone loyalists, or people with both Android and Apple devices, can use it.

“We will not force you to have the same operating system on all your devices,” said Mario Queiroz, a Google vice president who leads development of Google’s TV products.

Tech companies, including Google, Apple and Amazon.com, often try to lock in customers by offering media accessible only through their services or devices. Still, Google can take its open arms philosophy only so far. As of now, Chromecast shows media from Google’s own properties, YouTube and Play, as well as Netflix. Technology called Google Cast enables any software developer to program its mobile apps to work on TVs. Google said apps from others, including Pandora, would be coming soon.

But noticeably absent are several of the most popular streaming services: Apple iTunes, Amazon.com and Hulu.

Mr. Pichai said that Google was talking to many partners and hoped that Hulu and Amazon.com services would be added. Apple is unlikely to join Google’s party.

“Historically, iTunes works only on Apple devices, so they have a different approach,” he said.

Chromecast, similar to Apple AirPlay, also enables people to mirror Web sites visible in their browser on their TV screen. So users could watch videos or look at photos on the big screen, and they could theoretically watch TV shows accessible online, as on HBO Go. But expect pushback. Mr. Pichai said that media companies had the ability to block their content from Chromecast, which major broadcast networks did with Google TV.

For consumers, Chromecast is hardly the final stop on the road to Internet-connected TVs that allow users to watch whatever they want whenever they want on any device they want. Instead, it is one more offering in an already fractured market. Tech companies have been trying many experiments to merge TV and the Internet, and in the process get a share of TV viewing and advertising.

Google has tried again and again to get onto TVs, but with little success. Google TV has been underwhelming. (It runs on Android, one of Google’s two operating systems. Chromecast runs on a stripped-down version of Chrome, its other operating system.) The Nexus Q, for streaming from Android devices, was dead on arrival.

Chromecast, though, could pave the way for Google’s grander TV plans. It is negotiating with TV channels for an Internet cable service, in which people would be able to access cable channels in a Web browser, according to people briefed on the talks. So Chromecast may be the first step in what Google hopes will be a cable alternative.

On the hardware side, Google is trying to do away with the annoying jumble of cords and clunky boxes that accompany most TVs. Chromecast plugs into an HDMI port on a TV, connects to power through a USB cord, and uses Wi-Fi. At $35, it is well below the price of other streaming media devices. Mr. Pichai said it was profitable for Google and retailers.

For services connected to Chromecast, like YouTube and Netflix, viewers see a small symbol to click to broadcast to TV. Chromecast pulls the video from the cloud. The laptop, tablet or phone is the remote control.



Today’s Scuttlebot: The Rise of Women C.O.O.’s and Unfriending Porn

Log in to manage your products and services from The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.

Don't have an account yet?
Create an account »

Subscribed through iTunes and need an NYTimes.com account?
Learn more »



LaHood Says Companies Must Wake Up to Distracted Driving

When Ray LaHood was transportation secretary, he wasn’t one to mince words about the risks of driving with a cellphone. But in an interview this week, just a few weeks after leaving the cabinet, he put a particularly fine point on his concerns, saying that car companies and technology companies must wake up to the deadly dangers their products can pose.

He also said that voice-recognition systems for cars â€" like those that let people compose texts using voice commands while driving â€" do not meet his standard for safety. The car industry has been making a big push into those technologies, asserting that they are a safer alternative than using a hand-held phone, but some safety advocates disagree.

Mr. LaHood, who called distracted driving “an epidemic” and made fighting it a centerpiece of his tenure, said that he wanted to see the tech and car industries consistently warn consumers about the risks, just as beer companies have done with drunken driving.

“We need to get that same kind of commitment from the tech industry,” he said. “They’re not there yet, and neither are the car companies.

“They have to be part of the solution,” he said.

For now, Mr. LaHood said, they are often part of the problem in two ways: by building technology for cars that takes drivers away from the task of driving, and by glorifying the idea that it’s fashionable, even important, to be connected all the time. The devices, he intimated, can be as alluring as alcohol. (Previously, the head of the National Transportation Safety Board compared the lure of the devices to cigarettes, saying people have to control their impulses to answer the phone behind the wheel).

“The problem in America is our cellphones are, in a sense, like alcohol. We’re hooked on them and can’t put them down when behind the wheel of the car, when we’re driving,” Mr. LaHood said. “We’re hooked on these devices and can’t put them down, anyplace, anytime, anywhere.”

It’s a comment that shows how vexing safety officials have found the problem of distracted driving. Polls show that drivers know using a cellphone behind the wheel is a risk, but that they do it anyway.

Mr. LaHood, echoing other safety advocates, argued that there were lessons to take from successful past efforts to change people’s safety behavior, particularly the push to reduce drunken driving and to increase seat belt use. The lessons, he said, involve having tough laws, tough enforcement of those laws and public service messages that reinforce the legal risks. Also, he said, “we must have personal responsibility.”

The responsibility of car companies, he said, should not be to create a cool factor around dangerous technologies. He said some of the latest generation of in-car entertainment systems in fancier cars might be available to only more affluent consumers, for example, creating a sense of aspiration for all drivers who want to stay connected.

“It’s expensive technology, and only people of means can afford it,” he said, “but it lends legitimacy to everyone else who can only afford a BlackBerry or cellphone to say: ‘if you’re putting it in the car for these folks, then I can use mine.’”

Mr. LaHood said he would like to see tech and car companies disable the functions that are not directly related to driving when the car is in motion. “If somebody is trying to dial a number, even if it’s voice-activated, they’re obviously distracted from what they’re supposed to be doing, and in many instances, people are driving 50 or 60 miles per hour,” he said.

Mr. LaHood, 67, said he was very proud of steps his office had taken to address distracted driving, including pushing for rules to ban federal employees from texting while driving during work hours, and setting up pilot programs to test heavy enforcement of laws prohibiting hand-held phone use by drivers.

Distracted driving “wasn’t in anybody’s lexicon,” he said. “We’ve come a long way, but we have a long way to go.”



Daily Report: Apple Earnings Beat Expectations Despite Weaker Sales in China

The news from Apple on Tuesday was not particularly good â€" revenue flat, profit lower, iPad sales down. But investors did not seem to mind, at least in the short term, sending the company’s shares about 4 percent higher in after-hours trading. Strong iPhone sales helped beat the expectations of Wall Street, Brian X. Chen reports.

But Apple’s earnings report on Tuesday highlighted some of the challenges the company faces as it continues to expand overseas, where gaining a foothold is increasingly vital for the company. Apple’s growth has slowed in the most recent quarters, as its devices have largely saturated the United States and some top markets in Europe.

China has been especially problematic for the company. Overall sales of Apple devices in China fell 4 percent compared with the same quarter last year. And in Hong Kong, Apple’s sales were down about 20 percent â€" a trend that Timothy D. Cook, the company’s chief executive, found puzzling.

Apple may face a challenge in China, but the tech industry’s other two giants, Microsoft and Google, have their struggles, too. Microsoft posted a profit of almost $5 billion for the quarter, missing expectations of analysts, thanks in part to disappointing sales of its Surface tablet and an industrywide decline in sales of personal computers. Google also posted a profit, of $3.23 billion, but still missed analysts’ expectations as its desktop search business continued to slow and ad prices shrank.

Mr. Cook told investors to stay optimistic about Apple in China. About half a million people there are creating apps for iOS, Apple’s mobile software system for iPhones and iPads, he said. Sales of the iPad in greater China were up 8 percent and up 37 percent in mainland China, he said.

“Over the arc of time, China is a huge opportunity for Apple,” Mr. Cook said, “so I don’t get discouraged over a 90-day kind of cycle with economic factors.”



Paltalk Tries to Take Advantage of Its Prism Notoriety

Internet companies have done everything in their power to distance themselves from Prism, the N.S.A.’s secret Internet spying program. Except for one.

Paltalk, the least well-known company in Prism, is also the only company seemingly proud to be included.

For Paltalk, a video chat service, its 15 minutes of fame came at an opportune time. The 14-year-old company happens to be in the middle of a makeover and a sales pitch, with a new tablet app this week and more changes on the way.

While other companies worried that Prism might hurt their brands, Paltalk reported a surge in usage after the leak, which it attributed to people learning about the company for the first time. And in a pitch made to reporters about the new apps, it reminded them of the company’s inclusion in Prism.

“It might have made people talk more about us,” said Wilson Kriegel, Paltalk’s chief operating officer, who is overseeing its rebranding. “But it deters from what we’re trying to do in the market.”

Still, it is unlikely that Paltalk would have earned a mention on The Colbert Report without Prism. “Folks, you know what that means,” Mr. Colbert intoned. “We are this close to figuring out what Paltalk is.”

For those who still don’t know, here is your answer.

Paltalk’s biggest selling point is that it allows an unlimited number of people in group chats, unlike Skype, Google Plus and other services. Most use it to chat with people they don’t necessarily know about topics like karaoke, sports or dating. Paltalk makes most of its money from people who upgrade to the subscription version. It also earns revenue from selling virtual goods and ads.

But it had never moved beyond its identity as a mid-1990s chat service.

So Jason Katz, Paltalk’s founder and chief executive, hired Mr. Kriegel in December to bring the product up to date, make more money and try to sell the company. That’s similar to the role Mr. Kriegel played at Omgpop, the gaming company sold to Zynga.

The makeover includes the new tablet apps, which are attractive and easy to use. People can choose topics they want to discuss or friends they want to talk to and add video feeds with the swipe of a finger.

Paltalk is also building an improved Web site to replace the downloadable client and updating its mobile apps. It is trying to tap into more high-quality content, because it is more interesting to advertisers than people making meaningless comments while listening to music together. It is providing the software to other companies who could use it to host their own video chats or to import videos into Paltalk for online discussion. And it has enabled users to link their Facebook or Google Plus accounts to Paltalk.

Like Chatroulette, the infamous video chat site, the open nature of Paltalk means there is a fair amount of not-suitable-for-work material on the site. Mr. Kriegel said in an interview that Paltalk had parental controls, filtering tools and systems for flagging inappropriate content, as well as 300 people who monitored chat rooms.

Paltalk’s 5.5 million monthly active users are split among the United States, Europe and the Middle East, which might explain the government’s interest in monitoring some of its foreign users.

Mr. Kriegel, like spokespeople for the other Internet companies, said Paltalk had never heard of Prism or provided the government with direct access to its servers. Unlike the other companies, it has no full-time compliance people tasked with responding to government requests. Instead, when it gets requests, which he said is not often, it hires an outside law firm and pulls people off their day jobs to track down the data.

Paltalk does not store or record chats, Mr. Kriegel said. But he said he did not know whether it could enable the government to monitor chats in real time.



Video of Clashes in Brazil Appears to Show Police Infiltrators Among the Protesters

Supporters of Brazil’s protest movement and the police in Rio de Janeiro spent much of Tuesday arguing online over which side was to blame for violence at a demonstration the night before, at the start of a papal visit.

While neither side was able to produce definitive proof of who instigated the clashes on Monday near the governor’s palace in Rio, shortly after Pope Francis left the area, an examination of video recorded by witnesses, protesters and the police did appear to show undercover officers â€" called infiltrators by the protesters and intelligence agents by the authorities â€" at work.

A central piece of evidence in the arguments presented by both sides was 40 seconds of video released by Rio’s military police that showed a man near the front line between the two sides lighting and then hurling a Molotov cocktail which exploded with a loud bang near officers in riot gear.

Video released by the military police in Rio de Janeiro recorded as a standoff between protesters and officers turned violent on Monday night.

Although the police provided the video to the newspaper O Globo, and issued an invitation to the public via Twitter to watch what the department described as images of the protester who started the confrontation by throwing a Molotov cocktail at officers, within hours, the clip was mysteriously removed from YouTube.

Late Tuesday, the police uploaded a different video clip to YouTube that captured a loud bang at some stage in the clashes outside an Esso station on Rua Pinheiro Machado near the Guanabara Palace. But that video was recorded from so far behind police lines that it offered no view at all of the person who threw the explosive.

Video posted on YouTube by the police in Rio on Tuesday, said to show the early stages of clashes the night before.

Asked to explain the disappearance of a video promoted by the department online, a police spokeswoman, Vanessa Andrade, suggested in an e-mail to The Lede that the clip had been removed from YouTube by hackers acting in defense of the protesters.

Brazilian bloggers who support the protests advanced a very different argument: that the masked man caught on video throwing the improvised explosive was, in fact, an undercover police officer who had acted as an agent provocateur to give the authorities an excuse to break up the demonstration by force. Attempting to prove this theory, one blogger produced an annotated YouTube clip that mixed the police video with another view of the same area recorded later on Monday.

An annotated YouTube video mixing images shot by the police with those recorded by other witnesses to clashes in Rio de Janeiro on Monday night.

According to the theory advanced in the annotated video, the bomb-thrower pictured in the police video, wearing a T-shirt with a bulky design on the front, was identical to a man caught on video later, retreating behind police lines and pulling off his T-shirt, alongside a second man also suspected of being an undercover officer.

Other bloggers, including Lucio Amorim â€" a marketing consultant who captured stunning Vine video of street protests in Rio last month â€" pointed out that another video clip recorded by a witness to Monday’s demonstrations showed the same two men passing unmolested through a crowd of uniformed officers.

Video of two men dressed like protesters retreating through police lines away from the scene of Monday’s clashes in Rio.

Looking closely at the two videos, there appears to be little doubt that the two men shown at the end of the annotated clip also appear in the other video (the action from about the 46-second mark of the first clip seems to exactly match what unfolds about 20 seconds into the second), and the men do seem to be treated by the uniformed officers much more like colleagues than protesters.

The red wall that appears in the background of this video is the outside of Fluminense Football Club‘s historic Estadio Presidente Manoel Schwartz ground, where the pope also made an appearance on Monday night, just before the clashes began. Two New York Times journalists who were present when the clashes started said that the Molotov cocktail and the first volleys of tear gas came shortly after the pope left in his helicopter.

A third video clip, recorded by a witness armed with a better camera, appeared to offer even better evidence that the two men retreating from the protesters’ side were most likely undercover officers.

Video recorded on Monday night in Rio showed two men in civilian clothes being allowed to pass through a crowd of uniformed police officers after displaying identification.

In the third clip, a close view from a reverse angle, the two men were briefly stopped by a uniformed officer who seemed to take them for protesters before one of them pulled out some form of identification and said “It’s the police, dude.”

Ms. Andrade, the police spokeswoman, said the police force in Rio “has never denied that its intelligence has agents accompanying the demonstrations with the goal of obtaining information and predicting movements. This information is important for the decisions of our commanders.” She insisted, however, “These intelligence agents only work with observation. To imagine that a police officer would throw a Molotov cocktail at his professional colleagues, putting their lives at risk, is something that surpasses the limits of good sense and reveals a sordid conspiracy used to justify the criminal violence of these vandals.”

The police in Rio are of course far from alone in sending undercover officers to infiltrate protest movements. The New York Police Department has done so for years, as my colleague Jim Dwyer reported eight years ago.

Although the video evidence strongly suggests that those two men were undercover officers, there appears to be no proof that either of them was the bomb-thrower. A close look at still frames of the original police video next to frames from the two other clips seems to show that while the man who hurled the Molotov cocktail was wearing a black T-shirt with a white design on the front, the man who retreated through the crowd of officers later wore a black T-shirt with a red design.

A screenshot from video released by the police in Rio de Janeiro showed a masked man moments before he hurled a Molotov cocktail at officers.PMERJ via Globo A screenshot from video released by the police in Rio de Janeiro showed a masked man moments before he hurled a Molotov cocktail at officers.
A still frame from video recorded on Monday night in Rio de Janeiro showed a man suspected of being an undercover police officer carrying a large backpack. A still frame from video recorded on Monday night in Rio de Janeiro showed a man suspected of being an undercover police officer carrying a large backpack.
A still frame from video recorded by a witness to clashes on Monday night in Rio de Janeiro appeared to show two undercover officers in jeans and T-shirts retreating behind police lines. A still frame from video recorded by a witness to clashes on Monday night in Rio de Janeiro appeared to show two undercover officers in jeans and T-shirts retreating behind police lines.

Although the other man suspected of being an undercover officer is bare-chested in these three clips, he appears to have been wearing a black T-shirt with a white pattern on its side, rather than front, in more video of the clashes posted on Facebook by supporters on the protest movement.

That Facebook video, recorded as the police chased after and ultimately captured one protester, seems to show the same undercover officer taking part in the arrest before pulling off his T-shirt and using it to cover his face as witnesses started to take his picture.

The blogger Lucio Amorim later shared a photograph on Facebook that appeared to show the same man pulling off his T-shirt just after the arrest.

An image of a Brazilian man suspected of being an undercover police officer taking off his T-shirt after assisting in the arrest of a protester in Rio on Monday. An image of a Brazilian man suspected of being an undercover police officer taking off his T-shirt after assisting in the arrest of a protester in Rio on Monday.

Part of that same scene, the arrest of the protester after he ran from the officers and was knocked down with a shot from a stun gun, was also captured in video recorded by another witness from a bridge above the road.

Video of Monday’s clashes in Rio showed the arrest of a man accused by the police of throwing a Molotov cocktail at them.

A blogger named Felipe Buarque released perhaps the most useful overview of the clashes, a 12-minute video that captured everything from the first loud bang outside the Esso station to the dramatic arrest of the protester near the bridge. Protesters eagerly pointed to Mr. Buarque’s video, calling it evidence that the man who was detained by the police was not the bomb-thrower.

Video of Monday’s clashes in Rio posted on YouTube by a blogger named Felipe Buarque.

The man in that video, whose arrest was also recorded by TV Globo, was identified by the police as Bruno Ferreira. Ms. Andrade, the police spokeswoman, told The Lede that Mr. Ferreira was “accused of having thrown the Molotov cocktail that left two officers with burns on their bodies.” Mr. Ferreira, however, was not wearing a black T-shirt with a white design on it, but a green jacket with a zipper. He was “released by the justice system on Tuesday night for lack of material evidence,” Ms. Andrade explained.

Perhaps sensitive to how badly their reputation can be damaged by video evidence of what takes place at protests, the police took aggressive steps Monday night to limit the number of cameras at future demonstrations by bashing the head of at least one world-renowned news photographer, and arresting two members of the activist media collective known as Mídia Ninja.

As our colleagues Simon Romero and William Neuman reported last month, Ninja “a Portuguese acronym for Independent Journalism and Action Narratives, has been circulating through the streets with smartphones, cameras and a generator held in a supermarket cart â€" a makeshift, roving production studio.”

On Monday night, the Brazil-based journalist Dom Phillips reported, the police detained Filipe Peçanha, a Ninja cameraman who goes by the nickname Carioca, as he was streaming live video of the protest.

Inevitably, video of his arrest was also captured from another angle on another camera. (In both clips, a man standing next to the citizen journalist, wearing a light blue shirt and talking on a phone, looked to be one of those identified by protesters as potential infiltrators.)

The arrest of a Filipe Peçanha, a member of the activist media collective Mídia Ninja, on Monday night.

In a statement to The Lede, the police spokeswoman Ms. Andrade said, “The goal of detaining people on Monday night was to identify who had incited the disorder.” The police Twitter feed seemed to confirm that the authorities make no difference between activists documenting protests and vandals inspiring disorder: “Two protesters who transmitted the protests live were arrested for inciting violence.”

Another Twitter update warned that “Whoever posts multimedia material on the Internet that encourages violence” is guilty of “vandalism and criminality.”

Video of Mr. Peçanha’s subsequent release showed protesters adapting soccer chants in celebration.

Protesters in Rio celebrated the release of a citizen journalist on Tuesday.

In an odd twist, hours after police officers at the demonstration battered the Agence France-Presse photographer Yasuyoshi Chiba in the head, the Rio police Twitter feed offered one of his photographs as proof that it was the officers who were the real victims of Monday’s violence.



Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)