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Reporter Laura Lynch was with them.

She’s covering the story for The World and the CBC.

The law was passed in November 1800 prohibited Parisian women from “dressing like a man” unless she received permission from the local police.

Host Marco Werman talks with New York Times’ Paris-based Elaine Sciolino, who credits the new Socialist government under President Francois Hollande with the law’s revocation.

Scoliono says the there had been attempts to modify the law in 1892 and 1909 that would have allow women to wear trousers if they were holding a bicycle handlebar or the reins of a horse.

Last May, a 37-year-old politician, Cecile Duflot, attending a cabinet meeting while wearing jeans, was criticized.

Sciolino called pants a safer choice for Parisian women than wearing a skirt. She said many times, women who wear skirts to work are sexually harassed.

Read the Transcript
The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: Mali is clearly on the minds of the French these days, but there’s another story that might be stirring political passions even more in France, and that is who’s allowed to wear the pants in Paris? A 200-year-old law preventing Parisian women from wearing trousers has been struck from the books. You need to go back to November 1800 when a woman was prohibited from dressing like a man, unless she received permission from the local police. Elaine Sciolino is a Paris-based correspondent for The New York Times. So Elaine, this is one of those they never just got around to changing it laws. Parisian women have been wearing pants for years and quite well, I might add. Why now though? Why this change now?

Elaine Sciolino: We have a socialist government now and it’s trying to do the right thing for women. Right now you’ve got a bill going through the parliament to legalize gay marriage and I think this is just a side issue that kind of got caught up in this wear the–France’s minister of women’s rights finally just said look, we should make it impossible to arrest a woman for wearing trousers in Paris.

Werman: Now, I know President Hollande made a great effort to include a lot of women in his cabinet. Did any one of them kind of bring this up and say hey, listen, as long as we’re here can we talk about this pants law?

Sciolino: Well, it’s interesting because a lot of the women in the cabinet go to work in pants anyway and one of the ministers was criticized for coming to the first cabinet meeting wearing pants. You have another minister who always wears flouncy skirts. And we also had a bit of a controversy over the weekend with the marathon gay marriage debate, where some of the women came in, Mon Dieu, wearing blue jeans, which is really a no-no, but they were let in anyway.

Werman: They don’t have casual Saturday or Sunday in France?

Sciolino: They don’t, not in the national assembly. Even the guys, all the guy deputies had to come in in ties.

Werman: Now I gather other attempts have been made to overturn the law. Why did they fail in the past?

Sciolino: Well, back in 1892 the law was modified so if a woman was riding a bicycle or riding a horse she could wear her pants, but it kind of was–it took a long time to change public opinion. If you can believe it, as late as 1972 a guard prevented Michele Alliot-Marie, who has been a defense and foreign minister, prevented her from entering the Assembly building because she was wearing pants. So what she said, “Sir, if my pants bother you I’ll take them off right now.” So it got her into the–got her in. The other thing you should know is you know, I’ve done a lot of research on the subject and I’ve gone to actually two, as a serious observer of striptease, and I went to a striptease class. And what you will learn in striptease 101 is don’t both coming in pants because you’ll never get them off. You really have to wear a skirt.

Werman: Right, so that’s a lesson you’re directing or targeting at whom, Elaine?

Sciolino: Well, that’s for you to figure out, Marco. You know, if you have women who on their vacations to Paris want to come and take a striptease class, they should pack a skirt.

Werman: Roger, you write in a recent article to explain that pants for women are a safe choice as compared to skirts. Explain what they mean by that.

Sciolino: Well, this is really a serious as well as a frivolous subject because sexual harassment is still quite rampant in France, and this issue came to the fore when there were sex scandals in France, most notably one involving Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund. And in some government offices even, women do not want to come to work in a skirt because if they come dressed in a lovely skirt, they’re going to get remarks and maybe even get touched, which is something that would never be approved of or acceptable in the United States.

Werman: Well, it’s a seemingly anachronistic story with surprising relevance today.

Sciolino: Absolutely.

Werman: Elaine Sciolino with The New York Times in Paris, good to speak with you, thanks.

Sciolino: Lovely to speak to you, thank you.

Copyright ©2012 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

But getting convictions in such cases is often difficult.

The World’s Gerry Hadden examines why it’s so hard to prove wrongdoing when it comes to betting on soccer.

But it’s hardly all bad news for European backers of green energy. Consider this:

In the three months ending January 31st, wind power was the single largest source of electricity in Spain for the first time ever, according to the Spanish Wind Energy Association. In January alone, the association says, Spanish windfarms produced more than 6 terawatt-hours of electricity.

That’s more than a quarter of the country’s power, according to BusinessGreen. That outranks coal and nuclear power and, according to the association, it’s enough to cover the electricity consumption of the majority of Spanish households.

Note: The above text has been corrected to reflect the correct units for the quantity of electricity produced in January, 2013. It is more than 6 terawatt-hours, not 6 terrawatts.

He churns out three sex-filled spy thrillers a year and sells millions of copies.

What’s interesting is that a number of his terrorist and espionage plot twists have actually happened in real life — well after they appeared in book form.

Marco Werman speaks with New York Times reporter Robert Worth who recently profiled Gérard de Villiers for the Sunday New York Times Magazine.

Read the Transcript
The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman. This is The World. The spy novel is a tricky genre to master, but the formula for success is simple: keep drama taut and the history accurate. One French spy novelist though is eerily accurate, sometimes anticipating history before it’s made. He’s Gerard de Villiers. The 83-year-old has cranked out nearly 200 installments in his SAS spy series. The James Bond of the series is Austrian prince and CIA agent, Malko Linge. The books have sold in the millions across the French speaking world. From the covers they look like the spy version of a bodice ripper, but it turns out intelligence officials around the world often dip into them for informal briefings on global hotspots. Robert Worth wrote a profile of de Villiers for The New York Times Sunday Magazine. He says the key to the author’s success is that he uses the tools and the sources of good journalism to create his mass market spy thrillers.

Robert Worth: About six months ago a French friend recommended that I read one of his recent ones. And it was after I did that, I was impressed with it and then I started talking to friends that work in the French diplomatic service. And I was amazed to find that they had all read him although in a somewhat chimp-faced way.

Werman: Well the narratives, I mean you can understand why they would be compelled to read them in a recent book called “Les Fous de Benghazi” (the crazies of Benghazi as in Benghazi, Libya) recounts the madness around a clandestine CIA post in Benghazi, but I guess also foretells the attack on the US consulate last September where Chris Stevens, the ambassador, and three others Americans died. Where does de Villiers get his intelligence?

Worth: Well he starts off with each book, according to what he told me, in Paris talking to people in the French intelligence service and related area, maybe diplomats, whatever, he researches that way what’s going on in the country. And he actually, you know, he’s been doing this for 50 years, so he keeps his eye on a whole range of countries. And when something interesting comes up he kind of gets himself briefed. Then he goes to the country and he talks to again, French diplomatic and intelligence people there. And many of these people he’s known for decades and so they’re willing to talk to him. And he’s usually only in the country for maximum two weeks, and then he comes back and puts it all together with remarkable speed.

Werman: Are French intelligence officers so generous with their information with everybody?

Worth: No, definitely not. I think it’s partly though that it’s fiction. You know, it’s less risky, but also because the characters in his books generally oddly enough are not French and so you know, if they give him information it’s gonna come out of somebody else’s moth in the book, which gives them a bit of cover. And also though there is a kind of cult of Gerard de Villiers, all these guys have been reading him for years, and years and years. And so you know, I think it’s kind of fun to become part of the story.

Werman: So government officials say they don’t read them, but they do. Did de Villiers ever get into trouble for how much he knows?

Worth: No, not to my knowledge.

Werman: Wow, that’s incredible. Did you find that extraordinary?

Worth: I sure did and that’s why I thought it was a funny story. And again, he’s really kind of an unusual person. He’s, nobody has precisely the position he does in the sense that he’s known these files for many, many, many years. He’s known the players and they feel that they can trust him.

Werman: You met him at his apartment in Paris. What’s he like?

Worth: I found him very charming. He’s 83 years old, but he has a lot of energy and he seems sharp as a tack. He knows these countries very well. He’s very interesting to talk to if you follow him at least. He’s got strong opinions, somewhat cynical. It’s funny, he’s in many ways very French, and yet I think his style is you know, it’s very, when he talks you know, French intellectuals trend to have a lot of, they’re voluble, they go on and on about ideas. He’s very to the point. I mean he’s very factual, brisk and a very nice, morbid sense of humor. He’s also though a great raconteur. He has all kinds of incredible stories about you know, things he’s encountered in his travels.

Werman: Your conversation with him about his book La Liste Hariri (the Hariri List) was pretty revealing. It’s a novel that revolves around the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri and the details of that plot, which were a mystery to many people. How accurate were they in the book?

Worth: Well, he always goes beyond what’s factual and what he knows just to make it a better plot. But the elements that are factual that he puts in are pretty remarkable. I mean he, everybody has presumed for a long time that Syria was behind it, but the trouble was that the Syrians covered their tracks. The international tribunal investigating it has made certain accusations. They were in the process of just starting to put these out when he published this book. And his information tracks with what they have, but he has an awful lot more about the way that Syria worked with Hezbollah to put this together. Now, it’s the kind of thing where much of this cannot actually be confirmed, but you know, people who I have talked to in Lebanon who I believe know much more than they can actually publicly say, have said the same king of things that he wrote about. I was kind of amazed to discover that not only do some diplomats read him, but that some people I’ve been friends with for years who just didn’t happen to mention it have been reading de Villiers. These are mostly European journalists, but some of them say they literally treat it as kind of a briefing you know, before they go to a country to get up to speed.

Werman: Everybody’s dirty little secret. We heard earlier in the program from a reporter on the latest in Mali in West Africa, a former French colony, and France seems to now have successfully routed Islamic militants there. It’s a kind of story ripe for a de Villiers treatment if he hasn’t done one yet. What do you think de Villiers’ books say about the close and even intimate ties still between France and its former colonies?

Worth: Well, you guess it. He’s been there already. He published the book several months ago, called Panique a Bamako.

Werman: Oh.

Worth: I can’t say that it actually anticipates what happened with the French military involvement in Mali, but it’s certainly all the themes are there. It’s about you know, Jihadi groups there and–it’s actually more of course about the Americans and what they’re trying to do you know, behind the scenes maneuvering to sort of potentially find out what’s going on with these Islamist groups and how to fight them.

Werman: And for those ties with France and its former colonies there’s something I don’t know, that just feels something very cozy there between de Villiers and all these countries out there.

Worth: Absolutely, I mean I think France has been very, very concerned about what was going on in Mali for long before the Americans got to that level of concern, and I think that’s why he went. I mean you read it in French newspapers, I mean ever since it happened last March, the Islamists took over Northern Mali. I think that’s why he went and he had plenty of contacts there. It’s really an issue he’s been following for a long, long time.

Werman: Has the CIA ever commented on Malko Linge and this series of books?

Worth: Not to my knowledge. I did speak with a former CIA officer who knows de Villiers and got to be friends with him. I think it was the early ’90s in Paris. And it was kind of funny to–I asked this guy a series of questions about various people who were you know, important or interesting. And he told me some stories and stuff. And on several occasions at the end of this story I said, “Well how did you meet that interesting person? ” “Oh, de Villiers introduced me.” And this guy mentioned to me as I cited in the story that he recommends de Villiers to CIA analysts.

Werman: Robert Worth with The New York Times profiled the French spy novelists, Gerard de Villiers. Thanks very much for telling us about him.

Worth: It’s a pleasure.

Copyright ©2012 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Evidence of a number of wounds were found on Richard III’s skeleton but the face area was largely unmarked, apart from a sliced cheekbone.(Photo: University of Leicester and Jeff Over)

In Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” the king was described as a hunchback with a withered arm, who murdered his own nephews in his climb to the throne.

Who can forget Sir Laurence Olivier’s version of the Shakespearean drama, in which Olivier, playing the murderous king, cries out as he faces his certain death?

“A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”

History says he met his demise in the Battle of Bosworth, in 1485.

Now, after scientists announced they’ve found and identified Richard III’s bones, new questions are emerging about the king and his true nature.

Anchor Marco Werman speaks with novelist Anne Easter Smith about the differing views of King Richard III.

Read the Transcript
The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH-Boston. Researchers in Britain say they’ve solved a 500-year-old mystery. They say the bones they unearthed from beneath a parking lot in the English city of Leicester are those of King Richard III. The medieval monarch died in the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. He was known to be buried in Leicester, though the exact location was lost to history. But some dogged research led to the skeleton and DNA from a very distant living relative of the king led to a positive ID. Now a lot of what we think we know about the old king comes from Shakespeare. His Richard III was a hunchbacked, scheming, brutal tyrant. To refresh our memory, here’s Adam Long, a founding member of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, with a now updated version of the play.

Adam Long: Here’s the greatest story you ever heard,
About a king named Richard the Third,
An ugly hunchback with stature diminished,
Rudely stamped, deformed and unfinished.
Started out as a prince who was almost unknown,
Not even hardly in line for the throne,
And a big-headed brother made poor Richard glummer,
Turning discontented winter into glorious summer.
Little Richard was bitter and fuming and steaming,
The poisonous hunchback was plotting and scheming
And seething and ready to pop his cork.
He would steal the throne from that son of York.
And so in pursuit of satisfaction
Richard put his murderous plan into action,
Sent Clarence to the Tower quite easily
With a misunderstanding over the letter G.
Then he wooed Lady Anne, Warwick’s youngest daughter,
Though he’d killed her husband and killed her father.
Two murderers carried out Richard’s wishes,
Killed Clarence, who dreamed of jewels, skulls, pearls, and fishes.
The crown was so close he could reach out and pluck it.
Then old King Edward the Fourth kicked the bucket.
And soon poor Edward the Fifth was dead.
That sneaky old Richard just lopped off his head.
He beheaded Lord Rivers, Sir Thomas, Lord Grey,
Heads were flying every which way.
He killed Lord Hastings I forgot to mention,
When Hastings objected to his ascension.
Then they made Richard king and he was feeling groovy.
It was worse than a Quentin Tarantino movie,
He was killing children, killing all day,
Lord Buckingham fled but got killed anyway.
Somebody had to stop that hellion.
Richmond invaded and led the rebellion
With his shining armor and his battle cry.
Some ghosts told Richard, “Despair and die!”
Richard fought like a fiend in the face of that force
And he called for a horse, his kingdom for a horse.
But Richmond was mighty and killed Richard Three,
And that is the fate of all tyrants, you see.
Richard lost his crown and his throne and his jester,
And wound up buried in a car park in Leicester.
Thus Richard spent his winter of discontent
Buried beneath three feet of cement.

Werman: Very good. Remember the story now? That was Adam Long of the Reduced Shakespeare Company updating his version of Richard III. The discovery of the king’s bones beneath that car park in Leicester could spark some historians to rethink his story. Anne Easter Smith is a novelist and self-proclaimed Ricardian. Richard III has appeared as a character in many of her novels. She says how he came to be buried in Leicester was quite dramatic.

Anne Easter Smith: After the Battle of Bosworth he was flung over a horse and taken back to Leicester stark naked, all his wounds showing, and Henry gave him over to the monks of this church, and then they buried him. And then the monastery was destroyed so we lost track of where Richard was really buried.

Werman: Now most of us know Richard III from Shakespeare’s drama, where he’s described as a hunchback with a withered arm who murders his nephews to usurp the throne. Is that a fair depiction of the king?

Smith: Absolutely not. Shakespeare was writing for the Tudors and he was borrowing Tudor historians’ accounts of Richard, who had necessarily written them to denigrate the king, because Henry VII had really come in and taken his crown. They said he had been two years in his mother’s womb and come out with a full head of hair and full head of teeth, and Shakespeare put that in his play.

Werman: So you see Shakespeare’s writing as kind of revisionist history.

Smith: It’s propaganda for the Tudors, is what it is.

Werman: The murders of the nephews, though, that’s still unsolved, correct?

Smith: Yes, and unfortunately finding his bones is not going to help that in any way. We have no idea what happened to them, if they were murdered, or if they were spirited away somewhere, we really don’t know.

Werman: So the skeleton seems to indicate that he actually had quite a severe case of scoliosis, so that kind of takes the hunchback thing away, but he still probably walked with a pretty substantial bent, right?

Smith: What they’re saying is that it would mean that he had one shoulder higher than the other, but that he was not deformed, because a lot of people were writing about him and there was nothing mentioned about deformities. He was apparently quite good looking, not very tall, looked like his father, gray eyes and dark brown hair. And in fact, a portrait that was done of Richard round the end of the 15th century, today, when they were going to be restoring it, they were x-raying it to see where exactly lines were and things to restore it, and they found that somebody had painted on a hunchback. The original did not have one.

Werman: So is that kind of the visual artist’s version of Shakespeare, working again for the Tudors, kind of propaganda?

Smith: That’s right. And of course, you know, Shakespeare was like our TV today, our TV and movies. People flocked to see the plays and they just believed what they saw. It would be like somebody who’d never read anything about JFK’s death going to see Oliver Stone’s JFK and thinking, oh, this is truth.

Werman: For you, Anne, what kind of King was Richard III? Not in Shakespeare’s view, but what kind of king was he?

Smith: He reigned for only two years but he was very concerned about the justice system, and he enacted a couple of statutes that still stand today, one of them to do with improving bail, for people who didn’t have a lot of money. And he also took away taxes that Edward had brought in to fill his war chest.

Werman: So now his bones can be laid to rest. Do you know where that’s going to be, and will be get Catholic last rites? He was a Catholic king.

Smith: I think he’s going to be buried in Leicester Cathedral and I would think he would be given a Church of England burial. I just don’t know that they would give him a Catholic burial there.

Werman: Novelist Anne Easter Smith telling us about Richard III, her favorite obsession. Anne’s upcoming novel, Royal Mistress, featuring King Richard comes out in May. Anne, thanks very much.

Smith: Very much my pleasure. Thank you, Marco.

Werman: We have pictures and video of Richard III’s bones and the parking lot excavation. Check those out, plus listen again to Adam Long’s Reduced Shakespeare version of Richard III. That’s all at TheWorld.org.

Copyright ©2012 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

The Israeli government has wasted no time in responding by taking the encampments down. But some activists see potential in the new tactic.

On Saturday morning, dozens of Palestinians gathered on a hillside in the West Bank village of Burin, outside the Palestinian city of Nablus. They were there to put up a cluster of tents and metal shacks. They gave the area the name, Al-Manatir. The Arabic word means something like guard post, which is a reference to the Jewish settlements up the hill from here and the frequent clashes between settlers and Palestinians.

The new outpost in Burin didn’t last very long though.

Palestinians say Jewish settlers showed up and started throwing rocks. Then, Israeli police and soldiers arrived and they used sound grenades, tear gas and pepper spray to disperse the protesters. The Israeli military says Palestinians threw stones at Israeli soldiers and that several were arrested. The tent camp was also torn down.

“Yes, the Israelis came and demolished the tents,” said Walid Eid, a 61-year-old sheep herder from Burin who took part in the tent protest over the weekend. “But at least we had a feeling of success for about two hours.”

Walid Eid is a farmer and sheep herder in the Palestinian village of Burin, outside the city of Nablus. (Photo: Matthew Bell)

Another villager, Ghassan Imran described himself as a 40-year-old father and a nurse who works in a hospital in Nablus. “Palestinians need to continue mounting protests like this one,” he told me during a visit to Burin.

“This is our land,” he said. “We have to stop the settlers from encroaching on our village. This protest was a victory.”

The Burin tent protest was the fourth in a recent string of similar demonstrations. Others have taken place outside of Jerusalem, Hebron and Jenin.

During an interview in his Ramallah office, Palestinian politician and activist Mustafa Barghouthi said the protests are aimed at stopping the expansion of West Bank settlements, and rescuing the chance for establishing a Palestinian state.

“We decided that instead of always being reactive to what the army does and what the settlers do, we should be pro-active and build villages on our own land, privately-owned Palestinian land,” Barghouthi said.

“We started in Bab al-Shams, in the area called E-1 around Jerusalem, and they came and kicked us out. So, our slogan was, ‘if they destroy our village, we’ll build another one. And another one. And another one, til we are free of this system of discrimination.’”

In a sense, the Palestinians are taking a page out of the playbook of the Jewish settlers themselves. Settlers have built dozens of “unauthorized outposts” across the West Bank that are considered illegal under Israeli law. The government has pledged to dismantle the outposts, but very few have been evacuated.

Barghouthi doesn’t like this comparison, however, “because you cannot compare between someone who is stealing the land from somebody else and building on it and a person who is building on his own land. These are two completely different methods.”

“But by being pro-active, we are countering the Israeli facts on the ground with Palestinian facts on the ground.”

So, how far will these new protests go? For one thing, none of them has managed to create long-lasting facts on the ground. Though they have generated a lot of media attention.

Nathan Thrall, an analyst of Palestinian politics with the International Crisis Group, said the tactic is a smart public relations move.

“I expect that more of these will pop up across the West Bank. But I also think we should be somewhat cautious about stating that their consequences would be far-reaching,” Thrall said.

Thrall added that the demonstrations don’t seem to have caught on with the Palestinian public in general, at least not yet. And he said the Palestinian Authority is also ambivalent about supporting any kind of protests that could spark violence.

This city is located right along the coast of the Mediterranean in the northwest corner of Libya.

Less than a year and half ago this city was engulfed by Libya’s civil war.

It was a bloody but relatively recent chapter in its long history.

This 2,000 year old Roman city was an once an important trading post on the Mediterranean.

The ruins of Roman temples and theaters in this city are some of the best preserved from the ancient world.

The answer is Sabratha.

Journalist Robert Draper traveled to Libya for National Geographic. He writes in the February issue of the magazine that “for decades Libyans lived under a dictator who twisted their past. Now they must imagine their future”.

He tells The World about some of those Libyans he met including a female Muslim surgeon in Benghazi, and a police chief in Misrata. Both he says face daunting challenges:

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Correa is targeting TV, radio and newspapers with lawsuits, fines and insults. All this from a president who offered political asylum to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in the interests of freedom of expression. Now press freedom groups describe Ecuador as one of the hemisphere’s most restrictive nations for the media.

“There was more press freedom under Ecuador’s military dictatorship in the 1970s than there is today under the democratically elected government of Rafael Correa,” according to veteran journalist Miguel Ribadeneira, who heads one of Ecuador’s largest radio stations.

“This government is the worst.”

Since he was first elected in 2006, President Correa has complained about sloppy, unprofessional journalism. He claims many of the country’s newspapers, television and radio stations are dominated by corrupt elites who try to undermine his left-wing government.

“Many in the media have crossed the line into political activism, and that has prompted a political response from the president,” said Patricio Barriga, a government spokesman.

Correa is an ally of Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s ailing president, who has clashed with the Venezuelan media during his 14 years in power. But critics say Correa has moved even faster than Chavez to muzzle the press.

Correa’s government has shut down more than a dozen radio stations. TV stations are often forced to broadcast government propaganda. When a Quito magazine published an editorial that Correa didn’t like, it was fined $80,000. And in a slander case against El Universo newspaper, a judge awarded President Correa a whopping $40 million.

Meanwhile, the president has instructed his ministers to speak only to state-run outlets, like Radio Ecuador, which belongs to one of South America’s most extensive state media operations. Correa often uses this megaphone to savage independent journalists.

In a televised appearance, Correa ripped up a newspaper in front of a delighted audience.

“We must demand that the corrupt media stop trying to trick us,” he said. “Under our revolution, you the people are in charge and we will not bow down to these scoundrels.”

Correa’s campaign has turned many here against the media. Last year, there were 173 acts of aggression against journalists, including more than a dozen physical attacks and threats. That’s a 50 percent jump from the year before.

Jose Velasquez, the news manager at the private Teleamazonas TV station, says lawsuits against the media are also on the rise.

“Since the president is so aggressive with the journalists, that empowers a lot of people. People will say: ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, you are corrupt so I am going to sue you too.’”

Velasquez says he’s been hit with at least two or three lawsuits per month. Part of the problem, he says, is that Correa is thin-skinned.

Inside the newsroom of the Quito newspaper El Comercio. (Photo: John Otis)

“He doesn’t take criticism well. I mean journalists, we question people. We question situations. And he just doesn’t like that. He’s not used to it. He’s not used to someone saying: ‘You might be wrong.’”

In the absence of a strong political opposition, the media appear to have become Correa’s whipping boy. So, to avoid the government’s wrath many media outlets refrain from publishing hard-hitting stories.

“We are now seeing a movement towards self-censorship,” according to Eric Samson, who works for the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders. He says even mundane subjects are sometimes off limits.

“Weeks ago this channel chose not to talk about bulls, because bullfighting was prohibited. And they said: ‘We don’t want any problem with the government. They are against bullfighting, so we are not going to talk about that.’”

Even at El Comercio, Ecuador’s most influential newspaper, journalists have grown gun shy.

“Due to the fear of lawsuits,” said reporter Santiago Zeas, “every word that goes into the paper comes under extra scrutiny.”

And that, he says, has produced the only upside to Correa’s war against the press: It has forced Ecuadorian journalists to become more thorough and accurate.

“The Colombian Melting Pot 1960 to 1985″ is the subtitle of this CD.

It’s a sensational and eclectic collection.

The three tracks I want to highlight are:
“El Caterete” by Wganda Kenya
“Quiero Mi Gente” by Abelardo Carbono
“Sabrosón” by Roberto de la Barrerra y su Piano