Showing posts with label Agence France-Presse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Agence France-Presse. Show all posts

Saturday, April 5, 2014

OMG!!! They got PORK in the school cafeteria...

France 24 is the duly digitized version of one of the most venerable news-gathering institutions of all time.

And it sucks.

Whereas they once led the world 'o news with ground-breaking stories, they are now reduced to breaking stories like this.

Far right mayors may insist on pork in school cafeterias.

Apparently this may offend Jews or Muslims.

This is a story?

I'm guessing the Jews or Muslims will deal with this controversy the way they always have; by not buying the pork!

It's really simple!

Where is the story?

And that's where we're at with what used to be one of the prime news-gathering institutions in the world of news...

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Syria's ship of state listing dangerously

Here's how we know this.

The Syrian Arab News Agency is more or less the official government propaganda outlet.

What's interesting about this story is that it appears that the Assad government is relying on Agence France-Presse for its intelligence on the rebels. Note the reference to AFP a few paragraphs in.

I'd read the story about that particular smuggler on AFP's English language service France 24 before I saw it at SANA.

This is a government that was so sure of itself that it offered to do the out-sourced torture for Britain and Canada and the USA. A police state so confident that it knew it had every possible source of opposition well in hand.

Now they rely on foreign media to find out what's going on in their country.

Is this a good thing?

If you listen to the official nonsense emanating from London and Paris and Washington you'd be tempted to think so. After all, Assad is an evil tyrant who slaughters his own people while he's not busy doing our out-sourced torture for us, and we've been telling him for a year and a half he has to go.

So good riddance.

But then what?

As the Doha debacle this week showed, there is no such thing as a unified Syrian opposition. They've come up with a Christian communist who is going to direct the Salafist rebels on the ground in Syria?

Good luck with that.

If the Assad government collapses, there will be 10 million Syrian refugees fleeing the country instead of half a million, and the country will be the proxy battlefield for the war between the US and Iran for the next twenty years.