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Monday, March 24, 2014

Belgian Paper Apologizes Over Racist Images of Obama Used in Satire

The Belgian newspaper De Morgen apologized on Monday to readers offended by a satirical feature published two days earlier that used racist images of President Obama mocking his strained relationship with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.

The editors of the Flemish daily explained that the premise of their “admittedly tasteless joke” was that the Russian president had submitted an op-ed article about Mr. Obama that featured two racist caricatures â€" one photograph captioned to suggest that the first African-American president of the United States was a drug dealer, and a second, digitally altered, to give the president and Michelle Obama the faces of apes.

According to a partial translation of the Morgen editorial from the Belgian state broadcaster VRT, the editors argued that their mistake was in assuming that the context of the images, in a regular satirical section of the paper, would make it clear to readers that no offense was intended, but when the images circulated online that context was lost. When “you consider the fragment apart from its context, which is a properly worked out satirical section, then you don’t see the joke but just a picture evoking sheer racism,” the editors wrote. “That was a risk we didn’t consider enough beforehand.”

“We wrongly assumed,” they added, “that racism is no longer acceptable, and that in this way it could be the subject of a joke.” The editors went on to suggest that they had overlooked the fact that the racist trope of comparing African-Americans to apes is still common.

Absolving themselves of the charge of harboring racist intentions, the editors concluded with an apology to anyone who was offended. “In this case, we plead guilty of bad taste,” they said. “We continue to be on the side of those that are battling any form of racism.”

The newspaper also suggested that the backlash to its failed satire was stronger outside Belgium because racism is more of a problem in other countries, including in the Netherlands, where the news site Joop published a copy of the full-page satire, showing the fictional Putin op-ed article beneath a stream of fictional tweets from Mr. Obama in Flemish.

Chika Unigwe, a Nigerian-born writer who lives in Belgium and had drawn attention to the image on Twitter, was unimpressed by the apology.

Follow Robert Mackey on Twitter @robertmackey.



Video of Witness to Landslide in Washington State

Paulo Falcao de Olivera, a witness to the landslide that killed at least eight people, described the scene.

Paulo Falcao de Olivera was driving on State Route 530 north of Seattle to pick up his children two days ago when he watched as a huge landslide buried the road right in front of him.

“I just saw the darkness coming across the road,” he said in an interview on video uploaded by a former television journalist, Mark Horner. “Everything was gone in three seconds.”

As my colleague Kirk Johnson reports from Arlington in Washington State, emergency officials said on Monday that they had collected 108 names of people who were unaccounted for and who may have been in the area at the time of the landslide, which left at least eight dead.

The Washington State Patrol released aerial video of the area where a landslide buried homes and a stretch of state highway in mud and debris.

At a news conference on Monday, Travis Hots, a fire chief from Snohomish County, said that emergency crews were still treating the scene as a rescue operation. But he warned there was little hope that crews would find survivors.

“The situation is very grim,” Chief Hots said. “We’re still holding out hope that we’re going to be able to find people that may still be alive. But keep in mind we haven’t found anybody alive on this pile since Saturday in the initial stages of our operation.”

Aerial photo of the mudslide and backup of Stillaguamish RiverAerial photos from the Washington State governor’s office.

Among those missing was Summer Raffo, 36, a farrier who was on her way to an appointment at a barn when the landslide hit. The Seattle Times reported that her family members, including brothers, nephews and a sister, rushed to the scene and spent five hours looking for her before emergency crews forced them to turn away.

“You can’t imagine the devastation until you see it yourself,” Ms. Raffo’s brother, Dayn Brunner, 42, told The Seattle Times. “There were bodies everywhere, cars cut in half.”



Video of Witness to Landslide in Washington State

Paulo Falcao de Olivera, a witness to the landslide that killed at least eight people, described the scene.

Paulo Falcao de Olivera was driving on State Route 530 north of Seattle to pick up his children two days ago when he watched as a huge landslide buried the road right in front of him.

“I just saw the darkness coming across the road,” he said in an interview on video uploaded by a former television journalist, Mark Horner. “Everything was gone in three seconds.”

As my colleague Kirk Johnson reports from Arlington in Washington State, emergency officials said on Monday that they had collected 108 names of people who were unaccounted for and who may have been in the area at the time of the landslide, which left at least eight dead.

The Washington State Patrol released aerial video of the area where a landslide buried homes and a stretch of state highway in mud and debris.

At a news conference on Monday, Travis Hots, a fire chief from Snohomish County, said that emergency crews were still treating the scene as a rescue operation. But he warned there was little hope that crews would find survivors.

“The situation is very grim,” Chief Hots said. “We’re still holding out hope that we’re going to be able to find people that may still be alive. But keep in mind we haven’t found anybody alive on this pile since Saturday in the initial stages of our operation.”

Aerial photo of the mudslide and backup of Stillaguamish RiverAerial photos from the Washington State governor’s office.

Among those missing was Summer Raffo, 36, a farrier who was on her way to an appointment at a barn when the landslide hit. The Seattle Times reported that her family members, including brothers, nephews and a sister, rushed to the scene and spent five hours looking for her before emergency crews forced them to turn away.

“You can’t imagine the devastation until you see it yourself,” Ms. Raffo’s brother, Dayn Brunner, 42, told The Seattle Times. “There were bodies everywhere, cars cut in half.”



In Egypt, One Step Up and 529 Steps Back

As my colleague David Kirkpatrick reports, a court in the Egyptian city of Minya sentenced 529 people to death on Monday after a hasty mass trial that included no defense, convicting them of murder for the killing of a police officer during rioting by Islamists last summer after the military deposed President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The verdict, which Amnesty International called “grotesque,” came just hours after what had seemed to be a slight easing of the crackdown on dissent in Egypt, with the release on bail of a prominent government critic, the activist blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah.

Video recorded Sunday in Cairo showed the activist blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah greeting his family after his release on bail.

There was a palpable sense of joy in video of Mr. Abd El Fattah â€" rushing from the gates of a detention center in Cairo into the arms of his family â€" posted on YouTube late Sunday by Mahmoud Salmani, an activist working to put an end to trials for civilians in military courts. The next morning, the anguished screams of family members of those sentenced to death in Minya could be heard in a news report.

Later Monday, Mr. Abd El Fattah, who had three months of pretrial detention on charges of encouraging protests against the military-backed government, drew the attention of his 565,000 Twitter followers to another blogger’s comment, calling the two decisions by the Egyptian judiciary, “1 step forward, 529 steps back.”

Follow Robert Mackey on Twitter @robertmackey.



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