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"Newsweek magazine acknowledged Sunday that there were errors in a story reporting that U.S. interrogators had desecrated the Koran while attempting to extract intelligence from Muslim prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. The report led to a series of violent anti-American protests and at least 14 deaths in Afghanistan. In its issue set to hit U.S. newsstands today, Newsweek said its source for the story backed away from an assertion that investigators had concluded that military personnel had flushed a Koran down a toilet. The finding was supposedly included in an upcoming report.
Newsweek apologized and expressed regret about the violence that followed the story. But the magazine defended its reporting and said it was continuing to investigate allegations that U.S. personnel had desecrated the Muslim holy book. "We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst," Mark Whitaker, Newsweek's editor, wrote in a separate note in today's issue." (Los Angeles Times 5/16/05) "Newsweek yesterday abruptly retracted its collapsing claim that GIs flushed a Koran down the toilet, after the magazine got blasted by the White House — and sparked riots that killed at least 17 in the Muslim world." (New York Post 5/17/05)
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"In the first case of its kind since the Nuremberg trials, an international court [convened in Tanzania] convicted three Rwandans of genocide for media reports that fostered the killing of about 800,000 Rwandans, mostly of the Tutsi minority, over several months in 1994. A three-judge panel said the three men had used a radio station and a newspaper published twice a month to mobilize Rwanda's Hutu majority against the Tutsi, who were massacred at churches, schools, hospitals and roadblocks. The court said the newspaper "poisoned the minds" of readers against the Tutsi, while the radio station openly called for their extermination, luring victims to killing grounds and broadcasting the names of people to be singled out." (New York Times, 12/04/03)
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