Tag Archives: Thomson Reuters

Fadel Shana and flechettes

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Reuters has released a video (see below) show­ing what appears to be the Israeli tank fir­ing the round that — it’s claimed — killed cam­era­man Fadel Shana.

The first thing to note is the dis­tance that Shana is from the tank, prob­ably a Merkava 4 with a 105mm gun fir­ing flechette rounds. Flechettes?

Flechettes are razor-sharp 3.75mm darts released from can­nis­ters that explode in mid-air and spray thou­sands of them in an arc some 300 metres long and 90 metres wide.

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) gen­er­ally fires them in 105mm tank shells. Accord­ing to Jane’s Defence Weekly, the IDF is using a mod­i­fied ver­sion of US-supplied M494 105mm APERS-T rounds, acquired in the 1970s.

Accord­ing to the Israeli Supreme Court:

the use of the flechette is restric­ted to areas [Hebrew. gizra, is closer to “sec­tor”, imply­ing a more closed, delin­eated area] in which the danger to inno­cent civil­ians is not actual, and only against those sus­pec­ted of activ­ity that endangers IDF sol­diers or Israeli citizens.

If my maths is right — big if, and if it was a flechette — that gives an arc with an area of nearly 13,500 square metres (the pitch at Wemb­ley is 7,140). That is a large space for every­one within it to be sus­pec­ted of activ­ity endan­ger­ing Israeli sol­diers or cit­izens. Rid­ing a bicycle or film­ing for Reu­ters or just being a kid wouldn’t quite seem to do it.

Of course, Hamas reg­u­larly sends unguided Katy­usha and Qas­sam rock­ets into densely pop­u­lated parts of Israel (today’s lis­ted here) in the hope of killing who­ever hap­pens to be under­neath when they go off.

We hope, of course, that the IDF is more dis­crim­in­ate in its counter-butchery.

And hope is prob­ably the right word if you are lob­bing a couple of Wembley-sized pitch-fulls of death over a couple of kilometres.

Is every­one beneath a ter­ror­ist? Using flechettes implies either reck­less­ness with regard to civil­ian cas­u­al­ties or neg­li­gence or well…just not really giv­ing a damn about who hap­pens to be under­neath at the time.

It doesn’t exactly guar­an­tee the “sur­gical” pre­ci­sion which mil­it­ary types (of all nation­al­it­ies) like to ascribe to their work. Just the usual crime of guilt by vir­tue of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now press play…

Lawyers: the necessary brake on media innovation?

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Marc Andreessen remarked recently a pro­pos the inter­net and the media, that most car com­pan­ies didn’t emerge from horse car­riage making.

Admit­tedly that sum­mary mis­rep­res­ents the long period of devel­op­ment of a whole host of automobile-related tech­no­lo­gies: fuel pro­cessing, engine devel­op­ment, machine tools.

Reu­ters boss — and former law­yer — Tom Glo­cer has another take, that I would sub­scribe to:

When you think of innov­a­tions in the music industry like the ori­ginal Nap­ster or Kazaa or the phe­nom­enal rise of You­Tube, one under­stands why it is not Uni­ver­sal Music or NBC which blazes the trail.

In the con­tent world, it must be admit­ted that a fair num­ber of start-ups adopt a legal pos­i­tion that could be best described as “we will worry about copy­right infringe­ment when we are suc­cess­ful.” Indeed, that is pre­cisely what is going on now as Google is reg­u­lar­iz­ing YouTube’s con­tent relationships.

Since I prac­tised law for many years I offer this defence of my former col­leagues: don’t blame the law­yers for once. If a product man­ager at NBC called upon the for­mid­able GE legal depart­ment and presen­ted a busi­ness plan that was based on ripping-off copy­right until the ser­vice was so pop­u­lar, fear­ful con­tent own­ers would no longer com­plain, he would be laughed out of Fairfield.

Big com­pan­ies with strin­gent com­pli­ance policies and now Sar­banes Oxley con­trols to attest to are just not going to take these risks. Nor should the junior product man­ager just not con­sult the law­yers for fear that he will get the “wrong answer.”

We must recog­nize that there are often legit­im­ate struc­tural reas­ons why most chal­lenges to the estab­lished order come from out­side the firm. This is also not a bad thing as it quite nat­ur­ally serves as a check on the dom­in­ance of large organ­iz­a­tions — per­haps far more effect­ively than anti­trust policy.

Arguing against Nick Davies

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Flat Earth News by Nick DaviesBritish writer Nick Dav­ies is an inspir­a­tion to a lot of young journ­al­ists, and rightly so (you can read more of his writ­ing on social issues here). But now he has moved from cov­er­ing drugs and crim­inal justice to report on journ­al­ism. And in doing so, he com­mis­sioned some research to back up his cri­ti­cisms and ana­lysis. Con­tinue read­ing →

Is quitting Reuters hurting CNN?

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On the one hand, they’re put­ting money into aggress­ive expan­sion of the news­gath­er­ing base (good stra­tegic move), on the other — people are start­ing to notice their expos­ure. Take this from Fol­low The Media:

It was 1100 CET (0500EST) and hav­ing heard on the radio of bomb­ings in Algi­ers FTM switched on CNN Inter­na­tional to see what was going on. But instead of a news­cast there was just a minute or so of old head­lines, abso­lutely noth­ing about Algi­ers, and then it was onto yet another repeat of the network’s inter­view with the Nobel Peace Prize Laur­eates. Switch to BBC World, and they’re all over Algi­ers, their strap line is quot­ing Reu­ters say­ing there are large num­bers of dead and injured, and they are talk­ing live on-air to someone in Algiers.

Makes one ques­tion how there could be so much dif­fer­ence in start­ing up on the day’s biggest story. Could it be that BBC sub­scribes to more news agency sources than does CNN? As a viewer it seems we get what the news net­work pays for.

Should CEOs be bloggers or bosses?

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Reuters CEO Tom Glo­cer thinks it is no longer either/or. He writes on blog­ging, Face­booking etc:

…it could be argued, I sup­pose, that ima­gin­a­tion and exper­i­ment­a­tion should be left to more junior or younger staff, and the chief exec­ut­ive should only per­form “ser­i­ous” duties like strategy for­mu­la­tion and order­ing people around.

I think this is a lousy and dis­con­nec­ted way to lead. I believe that unless one inter­acts with and plays with the lead­ing tech­no­logy of the age, it is impossible to dream the big dreams, and dif­fi­cult to cre­ate an envir­on­ment in which cre­at­ive indi­vidu­als will feel at home.

This does not mean that the CEO needs to pro­gram a third-party app on Face­book, but I believe it is ulti­mately more use­ful in under­stand­ing busi­ness con­cepts like viral mar­ket­ing, crowd-sourcing or fed­er­ated devel­op­ment to use a live example rather than wait for the Har­vard Busi­ness Review art­icle to appear in three years time.