Ben Ali nephew's sentence doubled

Imed Trabelsi, center, as seen on April 20 at the palace of justice in Tunis on arrival in court on drug charges.Trabelsi was sentenced in May to a two-year termHe is still to be tried as part of cases filed against Ben Ali and his relativesThe former Tunisian president has been sentenced to 36 years in prisonThe ousted leader and his wife are living in Saudi Arabia and were tried in absentia

(CNN) -- The nephew of deposed Tunisian President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali found his sentence for a drug possession conviction doubled when he appealed it, state media said.

Imed Trabelsi was sentenced in May to two years in prison and a 2,000-dinar (about $1,440) fine for possession and consumption of drugs, Tunisia's official news agency said.

He appealed the ruling. On Saturday, the Tunis Court of Appeal upheld the decision and added two more years to the sentence: four years in prison and a 3,000-dinar ($2,160) fine, the TAP news agency said.

The report did not say why the court imposed the additional time.

Trabelsi is still to be tried as part of corruption cases filed against 114 Ben Ali relatives after the former president's ouster earlier this year, the news agency said.

Last week, a Tunisian court sentenced Ben Ali and his wife to 35 years in prison in absentia on corruption charges. The court also imposed a fine of 91 million dinars ($65 million).

Ben Ali and his wife, Leila Trabelsi, have been living in exile in Saudi Arabia since the January revolt that ended his 23-year rule and touched off a wave of uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East.

The pair faced a total of 93 counts stemming from the discovery of cash, weapons, jewelry and drugs in the presidential palace after the revolt.

Of those, 35 counts against Ben Ali and his inner circle -- including murder and torture -- have been referred to a Tunisian military court, the state news agency reported.

Ben Ali had ruled the North African country since 1987. Protests began to erupt in December after the self-immolation of a fruit vendor whose cart had been seized by police.

His fiery suicide touched off a firestorm among Tunisians fed up with corruption, high unemployment and escalating food prices. Ben Ali fled the country in mid-January after a revolt that left at least 300 people dead and 700 wounded, a top U.N. human rights expert said last month.

The former strongman's political party has since been dissolved by a court order, and parliamentary elections have been scheduled for July.

Earlier this month, Ben Ali said he has been unfairly portrayed and discredited by political opponents seeking to make a break with their country's past.

In a written statement released by one of his attorneys, Jean-Yves Le Borgne, Ben Ali said it was time to break his silence because he was "tired of being made a scapegoat" and is a victim of "injustice."

CNN

Did a Jerusalem court really sentence a dog to death by stoning? (The Christian Science Monitor)

Have you heard the one about the dog who walked into a rabbinical court?

Here's how the BBC reported it: A pooch made its way into a beth din in Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Mea Shearim. One of the judges, believing the dog to be the reincarnation of a now-deceased lawyer whom the court had cursed some two decades earlier, sentenced the dog to death by stoning, and ordered that the sentence be carried out by children. The dog escaped before the sentence could be carried out. Dog-lovers have filed a complaint against the court.

This story has it all. Religious zealots! Animal rights activists! Blood libel! Children! Ingredients that tend to nourish the more primitive regions of our minds and starve the rest. Best of all, it runs under 200 words and stars a dog.

The story's only deficiency is that it comes up short in the being-factually-true department.

RELATED: Top 10 political misquotations

As it turns out, the BBC, along with Agence France Presse, Time Magazine, and a handful other news outlets got the story from Ynet, the website for Yediot Ahronot, Israel's second-largest newspaper. Ynet's story says that the head of the court denied that such an incident had taken place, a detail that was left out of the original BBC, Time, and AFP stories. The paper is also alone in noting that there was no official ruling, just a rabbi telling kids to throw rocks at a dog.

Ynet didn't do any original reporting. They got the story from this in Behadrei Hadarim, a small Hebrew-language news outlet for Israel's ultra-Orthodox community. The Bhadrei Hadarim's reports that it got the story from someone who was present, but it doesn't bother to give that person's name.

Israel's third-largest paper, which doesn't have an English edition, also ran the story. They subsequently ran an apology, noting what the court said actually happened: A dog walked into a courtroom, and someone called the dogcatcher.

How did a story get from a single, unattributed source in a community news outlet to appearing on some of the world's most respected news outlets, with apparently nobody making any attempts to verify it?

After all, it's not the first time this sort of thing has happened. Just a few weeks ago, The New York Times, CNN, The Guardian, BBC, Agence France Presse, and Reuters all reported the discovery of dozens of bodies buried on a farm outside Houston. It turns out that police were investigating a tip from a self-described psychic, who not surprisingly turned out to be completely wrong.

"In the frenzied first 30 minutes of activity, one news organization after another built its wrong reporting upon the wrong reporting of others – The Times citing Reuters citing 'local media' citing, in some cases, nobody," writes media critic Bob Garfield on Mashable.

Garfield has a point: Repeating what has been said by other news outlets doesn't create knowledge. It just remixes it, sometimes with heavy distortion and amplification.

As budgets and news cycles shrink, piggybacking on other people's reporting, however sketchy, becomes inevitable. When this is done without verification, errors become increasingly frequent. So while "rabbi stones dog" may not be a true story, it's a useful cautionary tale for journalists, and that includes us. After all, you know what they say about those who live in glass houses.

RELATED: Top 10 political misquotations

Yahoo! News

Mubarak's security boss gets 12-year sentence

CAIRO (AP) — Former president Hosni Mubarak's top security official was convicted Thursday of corruption and money laundering and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

A protester with writing on his shirt "Execution, execution, for the killer of the youth" holds up his shoe as a gesture of contempt at a police van believed by protesters to be transporting former Egyptian Interior Minister Habib al-Adly, outside the court where he was sentenced in Cairo.

The conviction of former Interior Minister Habib el-Adly was the first against any of the some two dozen Mubarak-era Cabinet ministers and regime-linked businessmen who have been detained since Mubarak's Feb. 11 ouster. They include a former prime minister, speakers of parliament's two chambers and Mubarak's two sons, all suspected of corruption.

The court also fined el-Adly 15 million Egyptian pounds ($2.5 million) and ordered his assets confiscated.

El-Adly is separately facing allegations that he had ordered the deadly use of live ammunition against unarmed protesters during the 18-day uprising that toppled Mubarak. About 850 people were killed in the Jan. 25-Feb. 11 uprising, which was led by youth groups.

If convicted on that charge, el-Adly would face the death penalty.

Mubarak himself and one of his sons, one-time heir apparent Gamal, face the same allegations.

El-Adly and former prime minister Ahmed Nazif also face corruption charges related to awarding a contract for the supply of new car number plates for the entire country without going through legal procedures.

El-Adly served as Mubarak's interior minister for 13 years, a time during which his 500,000-strong security forces were blamed for some of the worst human rights violations Egypt had seen in decades. Anger over police brutality, particularly by members of the notorious state security agency, was a main motive for the uprising.

El-Adly is also blamed for the security vacuum created when police vanished from the streets of Cairo and other cities across the country on Jan. 28. The circumstances of their disappearance remain not fully explained to this day, but the effects of the vacuum it created are still felt.

Armed mobs of criminals and relatives have attempted over the last two days to free suspects from holding cells at four police stations, three of them in Cairo, a bustling city of some 18 million people.

All but one of the four attempts succeeded. In one jailbreak, the mob was able to free nearly 90 detainees from the Sahel police station in northern Cairo on Tuesday. Police have so far re-arrested 28 of the escaped suspects.

Also, authorities are continuing to hunt for thousands of inmates who broke out from several Egyptian jails during the uprising and soon after Mubarak's ouster.

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