This news was almost inevitable: Jerry Yang, the chief executive of Yahoo, was finishing a regularly scheduled company board meeting Thursday night when his assistant interrupted him with an urgent phone call. It was Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, and his message was curt. He did not call to negotiate. Microsoft would…
Showing all posts tagged censorship
Rupert embraces the inner terrorist in us all
Rupert Murdoch’s Australian website, news.com.au, conducts an “investigative report” into “the hidden war on Australia” – the stories are titled “online jihad” – and discovers these startling facts: A special investigation by NEWS.com.au infiltrating these global networks has identified jihadi references to the “embarrassing collapse” of the Howard government and cites Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s…
Spread only good propaganda
Keep a blogger locked up at home long enough with nothing but Chinese state TV and an internet connection to keep them occupied and they’re bound to subvert something eventually. The case of imprisoned Chinese blogger Hu Jia is symtematic of the Chinese government’s fear of the online medium. After all: Chinese President Hu Jintao…
Welcome to Beijing
This is China, 2008: Any attempt to use the Beijing Olympics to discredit China or force it to change policy is doomed to failure, the leading Communist party newspaper insisted in a commentary piece yesterday. Let nobody believe that human rights will improve before the August Olympic Games. Tragically, the opposite is occurring.
The narrowing circle
Yet another example of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad taking his country in the wrong direction: Iran’s most important women’s magazine, Zanan, (Women) has been forced to close after 16 years of publication, after being accused of painting a “dark picture” of Iran. Zanan’s founder Shahla Sherkat is considered a prime example of Islamic Iranian feminism. She…
Nuclear beware
Wikileaks continues to reveal the issues ignored by the mainstream media: Following an announcement this week that the infamous Japanese Monju fast-breeder nuclear reactor would be reopened, activists in Japan have leaked suppressed video footage of the disaster that lead to its closure in 1995. The infamous sodium spill, an accident that long ago earned…
Karzai’s fundamentalist regime, courtesy of us
The case of the Afghani journalist sentenced to death for allegedly downloading a suspect article online is far more complex than we are being told, writes Afghan blogger Sanjar: This is a power game, Karzai government has been critical of media for awhile, this incident allowed the religious scholar to rampage a journalist. In big…
Who said the Taliban ever left?
This is what “liberation” looks like in Afghanistan: The Afghan Association Blog Writers (Afghan Penlog), a community established by a group of Afghan activist bloggers, has expressed deep concern for a young journalist Sayed Parwiz Kambakhsh who was condemned to death by a local court. He has been a reporter for Jahan-e Naw (New World)…
210 million and counting
According to a report by the China Internet Network Information Center, there were 210 million internet users by the end of 2007, an increase of 48 million in the previous six months.
Why bother?
The pure futility of it all: A Turkish court has again blocked access to the popular video-sharing Web site YouTube because of clips allegedly insulting the country’s founding father, according to reports Sunday. It was the second time Turkey banned the site because of clips deemed disrespectful to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. It is illegal in…