News bytes

Craig Murray – the UK’s former ambassador to Uzbekistan and now critic of the “war on terror – is facing hurdles in publishing his forthcoming book. The letter from the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office is a shameless attempt at censorship and intimidation.

– Dick Cheney accidentally misses his intended target – himself.

– Uri Avnery explains the power of Israel’s Kadima party.

– While an Australian Federal MP doesn’t seem to know the difference between Papua New Guinea and West Papua and the Australia’s Greg Sheridan believes the Indonesian military doesn’t engage in war crimes in West Papua, it is worth reading the 2003 report by Yale University that reveals the extent of the devastation by the Indonesian military in the Indonesian province:

“Although no single act or set of acts can be said to have constituted genocide, per se, and although the required intent cannot be as readily inferred as it was in the cases of the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide, there can be little doubt that the Indonesian government has engaged in a systematic pattern of acts that has resulted in harm to-and indeed the destruction of-a substantial part of the indigenous population of West Papua.”

UPDATE: A leading Chinese blogger explains the ways in which Microsoft is censoring material in China.

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