Astoundingly Poor on other continents, too

A non-LatAm OT, courtesy of kind reader and always entertaining mailer 'JR'. Let's not beat around the bush, let's just get the BBC to tell it as it is:

The Associated Press (AP) news agency has accidentally published internal notes about the arrest of film director Roman Polanski instead of a story.

The document details an exchange of messages between reporters about Mr Polanski, who was held in Switzerland and faces extradition to the US.

In the note, one reporter asks if his colleague can "do some more probing" and speculates that Switzerland was under pressure from the US.

AP swiftly filed a replacement article.

The mistake came to light on 27 September, with the headline "Swiss arrest Polanski on US request in sex case".

But rather than a conventional news story, the post contained basic information as to when the press conference would start, and then continued, saying the reporter would "push out another writethru [sic] with some more background details before press conference", while a colleague wondered if the Swiss were under "intense pressure" and whether they wanted "to throw the US a bone".

Sent in error, the copy was picked up by the Google News service, as well as being automatically posted to a number of yada yada continues here

Bolivia and the slaves of Santa Cruz: Anyone got an Italian phrasebook handy?

Excuse-for-a-hack and racist apologist John Enders is put to shame by this BBC report. This is exactly the same place that the dumbass working for the Miami Herald pretended to report about, but somehow totally missed the racism and feudalism of the people he held up as the shining bastion of free markets and capitalism.

Here below is the first part of the report (click through for the rest, it's only fair on the Beeb). But watch out for the name of the person the BBC interviewed to give the ranchers' side of the story, a certain Eliane Capobianco. Capo? Bianco? Whatever could it all mean? LOL!

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Outrage at 'slavery' in Bolivia

A senior UN official recently described as "unacceptable" the alleged forced labour of indigenous people by landowners in Bolivia. The BBC's Andres Schipani reports on the contentious issue of "slavery" from the eastern province of Santa Cruz.

Teresa Barrio was born on a patch of scrub on a Bolivian plantation. This is where she has lived and worked. This is where she expects to die. But she has no affection for this place.

The 65-year-old grandmother knows little of other people's lives but she knows her own has been harsh: toiling in fields for a pittance, sleeping in a mud hut, losing sight in one eye and losing five of seven children to disease.

There is no cash in the pockets of her ragged skirt, nor, she says, does she feel free to leave the vast farm where she has worked hard all her life.

"All my life I've been here and at the end of it I have nothing and have nowhere else to go," she says.

Her hamlet of 13 Guarani families - all workers on the plantations near the town of Camiri in Alto Parapeti region in the eastern province of Santa Cruz - built a school but ranchers destroyed it, she says

"They didn't want us to learn, they want things to be like they always have been," Teresa's granddaughter, Deisy, says.

Beside the ruins is the replacement school - five desks beneath a blue tarpaulin draped from an algarroba tree.

Over the past two years, Bolivia's government and several indigenous groups, have been giving a controversial name to Teresa's type of existence - slavery.

CONTINUES HERE