I’ve only had time for a very quick look around the New York Times’ newly launched City Room but it looks absolutely amazing. The site combines the resources of one of the world’s largest and best news-gathering organizations with new technology to provide just the kind of local news and reporting that people are crying out for. How long before other newspapers follow?

You’ve got to wonder where Venezuela is headed over the next decade with a man like Chavez at the helm and a growing army of thugs prepared to spring to his defense. This from the New York Times:

Visitors to the Alexis Vive Collective, one of the most radical of the pro-Chávez groups that thrive in the hillside slums of this city’s western fringe, can see the writing on the wall — quite literally — as they approach. The group’s headquarters are just past the murals of Jesus with an assault rifle and Che Guevara puffing on a cigar.

The collective, led mainly by university students in their 20s, leapt into the Venezuelan consciousness in recent weeks after its members were videotaped defacing the headquarters of Globovisión, the country’s only remaining opposition television network, amid an intensifying debate here over freedom of expression.

“We’re Marxist-Leninists,” Robert Longa, 30, the group’s chief spokesman, said nonchalantly in a recent interview, as if the Berlin Wall had never come down. “The counterrevolutionaries at Globovisión sprayed their own graffiti on the consciousness of the Venezuelan people. We felt we had to react to them.”

The collective is among the most prominent of more than 40 groups, many of them armed and organized around various schools of leftist thought, that function throughout 23 de Enero, a sprawling housing complex interspersed with makeshift hovels, said Alejandro Velasco, a historian at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., who specializes in Venezuelan leftist movements.

The decaying modernist rectangular apartment blocks, a Le Corbusier-inspired project built in the 1950s, have long been a breeding ground for subversion and are now considered a leading bastion of support for President Hugo Chávez.

Last month, the New York Times Nairobi Bureau chief Jeffrey Gettleman and two colleagues were arrested by Ethiopian troops while reporting on a separatist movement in the Ogaden region of the country. The Ethiopian soldiers confiscated all their equipment—computers, cameras, cellphones and notebooks.They were held for five days and interrogated at gunpoint during which time photographer Vanessa Vick claims she was kicked in the back. Today, the Times ran a front page story on the complex issues facing the Ogaden. The web report includes some fascinating video:

IN THE OGADEN DESERT, Ethiopia — The rebels march 300 strong across the crunchy earth, young men with dreadlocks and AK-47s slung over their shoulders.

Often when they pass through a village, the entire village lines up, one sunken cheekbone to the next, to squint at them.

“May God bring you victory,” one woman whispered.

This is the Ogaden, a spindle-legged corner of Ethiopia that the urbane officials in Addis Ababa, the capital, would rather outsiders never see. It is the epicenter of a separatist war pitting impoverished nomads against one of the biggest armies in Africa.

What goes on here seems to be starkly different from the carefully constructed up-and-coming image that Ethiopia — a country that the United States increasingly relies on to fight militant Islam in the Horn of Africa — tries to project.

In village after village, people said they had been brutalized by government troops. They described a widespread and longstanding reign of terror, with Ethiopian soldiers gang-raping women, burning down huts and killing civilians at will.

It is the same military that the American government helps train and equip — and provides with prized intelligence. The two nations have been allies for years, but recently they have grown especially close, teaming up last winter to oust an Islamic movement that controlled much of Somalia and rid the region of a potential terrorist threat.

The Bush administration, particularly the military, considers Ethiopia its best bet in the volatile Horn — which, with Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea, is fast becoming intensely violent, virulently anti-American and an incubator for terrorism.

But an emerging concern for American officials is the way that the Ethiopian military operates inside its own borders, especially in war zones like the Ogaden.

The BBC’s conclusion that it is failing to challenge a liberal bias within its own organization is hardly a surprise. But it is refreshing to see the corporation own up to its faults and weaknesses, even if it clings to the assertion that its “coverage of day-to-day politics is fair and impartial”. Imagine Fox doing the same:

The BBC has failed to promote proper debate on major political issues because of the inherent liberal culture of its staff, a report commissioned by the corporation has concluded.

The report claims that coverage of single-issue political causes, such as climate change and poverty, can be biased – and is particularly critical of Live 8 coverage, which it says amounted to endorsement.

It warns that celebrities must not be pandered to and allowed to hijack the BBC schedule.

After a year-long investigation the report, published today, maintains that the corporation’s coverage of day-to-day politics is fair and impartial.

But it says coverage of Live 8, the 2005 anti-poverty concerts organised by rock star campaigners Bob Geldof and Bono and writer Richard Curtis, failed to properly debate the issues raised.

Instead, at a time when the corporation was renegotiating its charter with the government, it allowed itself to effectively become a promotional tool for Live 8, which was strongly supported by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

[...]The report concludes BBC staff must be more willing to challenge their own beliefs.

It reads: “There is a tendency to ‘group think’ with too many staff inhabiting a shared space and comfort zone.”

A staff impartiality seminar held last year is also documented in the report, at which executives admitted they would broadcast images of the Bible being thrown away but not the Koran, in case Muslims were offended.

During the seminar a senior BBC reporter criticised the corporation for being anti-American.

More at the Daily Telegraph. (Via Mediabistro.)

I’m having trouble understanding the implications of what is going on in Gaza right now. Many New York newspapers chose today to be cheerful about the fact that with Hamas in control of Gaza, Israel finally had a target it could retaliate against. More death and destruction on both sides. Hardly something to be thankful for.

But I have also been very interested to know how this is playing out in the UK. I was very surprised yesterday when Radio 4′s Six O’Clock news chose to lead with a story about integration in Britain rather than the turmoil in Gaza. Then I read this today on a new British blog I recently discovered, Martin in the Margins:

What’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank is appalling, not only for the Palestinians caught in the middle of the fighting, but also for any hopes of a stable, secular Palestinian state. Apportioning blame for the current mess is complicated, but some think it’s simple: it’s all the fault of America and the west. Although UN diplomat Alvoro de Soto did mention Hamas’ ‘abominable’ charter, its links to Iran and its policy of suicide attacks on civilians, it was American policy that he highlighted in his recent report, and it was this that yesterday’s Guardian leader chose to focus on, as did the same day’s Channel 4 News.

Undoubtedly the current US administration (unlike its predecessor) has made little effort to advance Middle East peace, but is that laziness really the main cause of the current bloodshed between Fatah and Hamas? The Guardian blamed the boycott of Hamas by western nations, and Jon Snow on Channel 4 trotted out the familiar line about America and Europe ignoring the democratic will of the Palestinian people. But what were they supposed to do, faced with the election of a faction that spouts racist rhetoric and directly sponsors mass murder? I know the Nazi-Islamist analogy has been overused, but isn’t this rather like saying that Britain should have had dealings with Hitler as this would have been honouring the democratic wishes of the German people?

Once again, this eagerness to blame the west, rather than the actual perpetrators of violence, is a denial of the agency of forces in the Arab and Muslim world: in this instance, the active encouragement of Islamist movements such as Hamas by countries like Iran and Syria.