Salman Rushdie will be speaking at the Dallas Museum of Art. The venue is, well, an interesting one I suppose but, the real hook to the story is this small catch – the airlines won’t fly him –

Salman Rushdie has apparently been denied a flight to Dallas, where he is scheduled to speak tomorrow night to 800 people at the DMA for Arts & Letters Live. Mr. Rushdie is apparently too dangerous to board an airplane. Well, he’s not dangerous, he’s a pussycat, but you get my meaning.

But, luckily, the spirit of volunteerism is alive and well –

Salman Rushdie will make it to Dallas tonight for his Arts & Letters Live appearance, courtesy of the indefatigable editor of Texas Monthly who already had a plane flying in from New York to Austin bringing some celebrities for the Texas Film Hall of Fame awards. Turns out he had an extra seat.

So instead of being sandwiched in the center seat between a crying baby and smokaholic, Rushdie will share a private plane with Lauren Bacall, Marcia Gay Harden, and Dennis Quaid. Note to Mr. Quaid – think carefully before speaking of Padma.

(hat tip – Virginia Postrel’s Blog) Continue reading →

The Times of India, whose Web edition is rife with inaccuracies, cut ‘n paste stories and jingoism, has pressured a media critic into shutting down his blog by threatening to sue for libel (thanks, H.):

… when one of the few noted [Indian] media critics, Pradyuman Maheshwari, criticized the Times of India on his Mediaah Weblog recently, the Times looked to squash him with a seven-page legal threat for libel. The threat worked, and Maheshwari decided to close his site, as he has a day job running the daily Maharashtra Herald in Pune…

“… if this goes where I think it’s going, it should go down in history as ‘The Great Indian Blog Mutiny,'” Gupta told me via e-mail. “The Times of India has simply shown how far they’ve come from being a respectable newspaper to being a common school bully…”

One of the ToI’s most criticized practices is selling front page space to PR firms for their clients’ publicity shots. The newspaper allegedly auctions off this space without disclosing that it’s pay-for-placement:

Maheshwari says much of what upset the Times was his criticism of its MediaNet initiative where businesses can actually buy photos and profile stories in the Times’ editorial section — what it calls “edvertorials.”

Here’s an example in the Bombay Times, a tabloidish paper owned by the ToI:

A McDonald’s spokesperson on the front page picture of Malaika Arora posing to announce McDonald’s home delivery service in Bombay Times dated April 12, 2004: “Yes, the photograph was paid for.”

Here’s a mirror of the offending posts and the ToI’s legal threat.

To follow up on my previous two posts [1,2] regarding the Justice Department battling the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority, the New York Daily News provides us with the latest [thanks for the tip Ankur K.]:

The Transit Authority may be cracking down on workers wearing turbans, but the agency is ignoring secular headgear – everything from Russian-style winter hats to Mets caps to do-rags, a federal survey has found.

Conducting surveillance at subway stations, bus stops and terminals, the Justice Department, which has accused the TA of discrimination, spotted 208 TA employees blatantly violating dress-code regulations, the Daily News has learned.

The offenders wore hats that were not issued by the TA and lacked the agency logo.

The TA, meanwhile, has penalized a Sikh worker who wears turbans and Muslim employees clad in head scarves called khimars.

“These observations confirm that the TA has gone [and continues to go] out of its way to selectively enforce its uniform policies against a handful of Muslim and Sikh employees, while ignoring rampant and easily observable violations by a large contingent of its employees,” a Justice Department lawyer wrote to the TA late last week.

To give credit where credit is due, I want to point out that this is more than likely the same Civil Rights sub-division of the Justice Department that I last week criticized for its position with regards to the Salvation Army.

Continue reading →

A Canadian judge declared today that two men were not guilty of murdering 331 people who died when bombs exploded in 1985 aboard an Air India plane over the Atlantic, and at Tokyo’s Narita Airport:

Spectators in the courtroom, including dozens of victims’ relatives, gasped when the verdicts were read. Some started wailing…The defendants — Ripudaman Singh Malik, 58, and Ajaib Singh Bagri, 55 — were immediately removed from the courtroom. Malik sat impassively while the verdict was read, wiping his beard with a scarf. Supporters slapped his son on the back. [AP/S.F. Gate]

British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Ian Josephson explained that the two-year trial of Canada’s worst case of mass murder had failed to produce credible witnesses. The bombings stood as the largest terrorist strike before Sept. 11, and are believed to have been retaliation by Sikh separatists for a deadly 1984 raid by Indian forces on the Golden Temple in Amritsar.

The decision stunned Canada’s Sikh community, which reacted to the verdict with surprise and dissapointment:

“Who did it?,” Mr. (Sarwan Singh) Rahawa asked. “Who put the bombs on the plane? This is not fair for those families whose loved ones are lost.”…“There should be a public inquiry. Every Canadian has the right to an answer. Something went wrong. Everyone’s disappointed after 20 years,” he concluded. [Globe and Mail]

AP/S.F. Gate: Indian-born Sikhs cleared in plane bombs
Globe and Mail: Decision stuns community

Continue reading →