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Friday, November 1, 2013

Egyptian Network Abruptly Suspends TV Satirist

Bassem Youssef, an Egyptian satirist and late-night talk show host whom Muslim Brotherhood partisans sought unsuccessfully to try for “insulting the president” during their year of rule, had his show abruptly suspended by network executives just minutes before broadcast on Friday. That came one week after he mocked the ultranationalism and pro-military fervor gripping Egypt during the season premiere of his weekly program.

The decision to suspend Mr. Youssef’s show, “The Program,” was announced on Friday night by the host of the program that is shown immediately before it, who read a statement by the management of the television channel CBC. The network quickly posted parts of the statement to Twitter.

This Arabic-language video shows the decision to suspend Bassem Youssef’s show being read on the air just minutes before Friday’s episode was scheduled to begin.

According to the statement, CBC’s board of directors decided to suspend the program after discovering that Friday’s episode, which was prerecorded, contained content that violated an agreement made by network executives, Mr. Youssef and his producers. The statement said Mr. Youssef would remain off the air while CBC “solved the technical and administrative problems specific to the program.”

It was not immediately clear what problems they were referring to or what agreement the network executives might have made with Mr. Youssef regarding the content of his show.

Last week’s episode was the first since the military ouster in June of President Mohamed Morsi, a frequent satirical target of “The Program.” His supporters in the Muslim Brotherhood fought back, opening an official investigation into Mr. Youssef for his gleeful mockery of the president. In one segment, broadcast last January and subtitled by Sam Heller, a researcher and blogger based in Qatar, the satirist used the threat of prosecution as the setup for a joke.

Video of a segment from a January 2013 episode of Bassem Youssef’s show, in which he made light of an investigation into whether he had insulted President Mohamed Morsi.

Viewers tuned in last week to see if Mr. Youssef would treat the country’s new military leadership to the same kind of skewering as the deposed Islamists. Instead they found him carefully walking a tightrope, refraining from direct criticism of the military chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, but instead mocking the pro-military, nationalist fervor that some have called “Sisi-Mania.”

David Kenner, a Cairo-based editor for Foreign Policy magazine, wrote about the apparent caution with which Mr. Youssef approached General Sisi in the season premiere.

In one segment, he took aim at the new fad of plastering Sisi’s face on sweets. A baker comes out bearing a Sisi cake and Sisi cupcakes â€" he also sells a plain loaf of “Rabaa” bread, named after the pro-Morsy sit-in outside Cairo’s Rabaa al-Adaweya Mosque.

“I’ll take a half kilo,” Youssef says, suitable impressed with the cupcakes. The baker’s eyes narrow in suspicion at the small size of the order. Do you really like Sisi, he asks?

Youssef, suitably chastened, gives in. “OK, OK, I’ll take all of it.”

Mr. Youssef uploaded a video of last week’s episode to his show’s official YouTube account, where by Friday evening it had been viewed more than two million times.

Video of last week’s season premiere, posted to YouTube by the show’s account.

Supporters of the military were outraged by the episode despite Mr. Youssef’s careful handling of the general and filed legal complaints against the show, prompting CBC to distance itself from both the satirist and the content of his program.

The show’s suspension set off a storm of criticism of the network as well as hand-wringing about the state of free speech in Egypt almost three years after the start of a revolution that was meant to bring with it greater freedom and dignity. Hisham Hellyer, a Middle East analyst with the Brookings Institution, lamented that the network was censoring a voice that had dared criticize the authorities, even if obliquely, and predicted that the move would only amplify Mr. Youssef’s standing in much the same way his brush with the law under Mr. Morsi did.

But it was not immediately clear on Friday if the show’s suspension was related to the political controversy surrounding its first episode or to something else. An Egyptian blogger who writes under the pseudonym The Big Pharoah speculated that the show might have been suspended not because of Mr. Youssef criticized the military, but because he criticized the television network airing his show. In a series of updates posted to Twitter, The Big Pharoah said that he had been at the taping of Friday’s episode and that it was focused not on General Sisi but on lampooning the country’s media, including CBC.



Descriptions of Chaos and Fear at Los Angeles Airport Shooting

As my colleagues Jennifer Medina and Timothy Williams reported, at least one terminal was evacuated, flights were grounded and several people were sent to the hospital with injuries after a shooting at Los Angeles International Airport on Friday, the authorities said.

On Twitter, witnesses and travelers described the scene. One of them, Bill Reiter, a Fox Sports columnist, said on his Twitter feed that an initial burst of panic was replaced by uncertainty, with no public announcements as to what had happened about an hour after the incident started.

Eric Kayne, a Houston-based photographer, posted images on his Twitter feed showing travelers being shuttled away to a secure area.

John Forstrom, another person who was at the airport, posted descriptions of people running away from the gunfire and of evacuations to other buildings in the airport.

â€" John Forstrom (@jforstrom) 1 Nov 13

Follow Christine Hauser on Twitter @christineNYT.



Descriptions of Chaos and Fear at Los Angeles Airport Shooting

As my colleagues Jennifer Medina and Timothy Williams reported, at least one terminal was evacuated, flights were grounded and several people were sent to the hospital with injuries after a shooting at Los Angeles International Airport on Friday, the authorities said.

On Twitter, witnesses and travelers described the scene. One of them, Bill Reiter, a Fox Sports columnist, said on his Twitter feed that an initial burst of panic was replaced by uncertainty, with no public announcements as to what had happened about an hour after the incident started.

Eric Kayne, a Houston-based photographer, posted images on his Twitter feed showing travelers being shuttled away to a secure area.

John Forstrom, another person who was at the airport, posted descriptions of people running away from the gunfire and of evacuations to other buildings in the airport.

â€" John Forstrom (@jforstrom) 1 Nov 13

Follow Christine Hauser on Twitter @christineNYT.



Activists Accuse Walmart of Condoning Torture of Pigs by Pork Suppliers

As part of a campaign to put pressure on Walmart, Mercy for Animals, an animal rights organization, released harrowing video this week documenting what activists call the torture of pigs by workers at a Minnesota pork farm that supplies the retail chain.

The extremely graphic, distressing video, which also includes explicit language, was recorded by an activist who worked undercover at Rosewood Farm in Pipestone, Minn. The video shows workers slamming piglets into concrete floors until they die, castrating them without painkillers, and roughly beating and cursing at sows. But the more egregious abuse, activists say, is standard industry practice: keeping sows in restrictive gestation crates for their entire lives.

The activist who recorded the video, who did not want to give her name because she is working on another undercover investigation, told The Lede in a telephone interview, “They had thousands of sows that were confined into these tiny gestation crates that were barely larger than their own bodies.” She added that she often found the animals “screaming and banging their heads against the cages,” and “lying in their own excrement, unable to turn around.”

Luke Minion, the chief executive of Pipestone Systems, which owns the Rosewood Farm and others, said in an interview that he fired one employee and reassigned another as a result of the activists’ investigation. “There are things depicted on the video that are not defensible nor are they our policies,” Mr. Minion said. “We want to be better than what’s on that video.”

Mr. Minion, a trained veterinarian, also said that castrating piglets and docking their tails without anesthesia is normal procedure and defended the gestation crates, which he called “individual maternity pens.” The crates, he said, “are an appropriate option.”

He added, “We who raise the livestock ought to be able to keep that choice.”

Mercy for Animals reported a worker at the farm to the police, but the Pipestone County attorney declined to file charges after an investigation by the sheriff’s office.

Despite expressing concerns about the video evidence gathered by the activists, Walmart has yet to agree to a change in policy. “We think the animal handling in this video is unacceptable â€" we are currently conducting our own review of the situation,” said Danit Marquardt, a Walmart spokeswoman. She called gestation crates a more “complicated issue,” and said that Walmart is working toward “an industrywide model that is not only respectful of farmers and animals, but also meets our customers’ expectations for quality and animal safety.”

Matt Rice, Mercy for Animals’ director of investigations, told The Lede that the retail chain was targeted because “Walmart is the largest pork retailer in the country and they’re virtually alone in their continued support for gestation crates.” While Mr. Rice acknowledged that a “majority of pork producers” still use gestation crates, he insisted that their impact on the animals was brutal. After years in a cage that is just two feet wide, he said, pigs begin to “exhibit stereotypic neurotic behavior, such as biting the bars of their cages and smashing their heads against the bars.” The investigator at the Pipestone farm said the farm manager told her that the sows “go so crazy that they start eating their babies.”

In an angry statement calling Mercy for Animals “a front group for the Humane Society of the United States,” the National Pork Producers Council said America’s pork producers “don’t need questionable undercover videos produced by organizations with political agendas to remind them of their commitment to animal care.”

Similar undercover investigations have led to changes in factory-farming in the past. After the Humane Society released distressing video in 2010, showing caged pigs at a farm operated by Smithfield, the pork-producing giant recently acquired by a Chinese company, the company agreed to phase out the practice.

A graphic video report produced by the Humane Society in 2010 on conditions inside a pork-producing plant.

Nine states in the United States have banned the use of these pens, which are outlawed in the European Union, and about 60 companies - including McDonalds, Burger King and Costco - have begun to demand that suppliers stop using gestation crates.

Gov. Chris Christie recently vetoed a bill to ban the crates in New Jersey, a move that may be a sign that Mr. Christie has his eyes set on certain voters in a possible 2016 run for president, Politico reported this week.

As my colleague Natalie Angier reported, a study published in 2009 revealed signs of intelligence in pigs that make them seem more closely related to humans than we might otherwise think. The researchers found that domestic pigs “can quickly learn how mirrors work,” learn to follow a friend that is good at finding food - or ditch a follower trying to mooch - and, if offered, will gladly accept a drink while watching television.

The Mercy for Animals video was edited into a report narrated by the actor James Cromwell, who played the kindly farmer who rejects killing his pig in the film “Babe.” At the very end of the report, the actor suggests that viewers “can help stop animal abuse, by leaving pork off your plate and adopting a vegetarian diet.”

Jeff Johnson, an assistant professor of philosophy at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, has delved into the ethics of meat-eating for the Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society. In an interview this week with a Fox News station in Minneapolis, Mr. Johnson suggested that the practices shown in the Mercy for Animals video raised ethical questions for animal-loving consumers.

“If we wouldn’t want these things done to our cats and our dogs,” he asked, “how can we be O.K. with them being done to pigs or cows or chickens?”

Robert Mackey contributed reporting.



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