An important letter sent by Reporters Without Borders: The Hon Kevin Michael Rudd Prime Minister Parliament House Canberra ACT 2600 Australia Paris, 18 December 2009 Dear Prime Minister, Reporters Without Borders, an organisation that defends free expression worldwide, would like to share with you its concern about your government’s plan to introduce a mandatory Internet…
Showing all posts tagged China
From the crazy file: Beijing has to stop Israel bombing Iran?
If true (and it’s impossible to know with anonymously-sourced stories), Israel is like a wild child that nobody can seemingly control (despite the fact that Washington pays to keep the lights on): U.S. President Barack Obama has warned his Chinese counterpart that the United States would not be able to keep Israel from attacking Iranian…
Australia snubs Tamil refugees
My following article is published in US magazine The Nation: Sri Lanka’s brutal war against the Tamils, a native ethnic group that has suffered legal, economic and political discrimination for more than half a century, has come at a huge domestic and global cost. Human rights in the Sinhalese-dominated nation are consistently violated, with journalists,…
What it means to advocate the ”˜Sri Lanka model’ for Israel/Palestine
My following article is published on US website Mondoweiss: It is easy to frame the conflict in Israel and Palestine as inherently unique. In many ways it is – decades-old occupation, US-supported racial discrimination and failure of Western journalism to hold the powerful to account – but other struggles have eerie similarities. This year Sri…
Holding any criminal state to account, no matter how influential
This is truly fascinating and potentially important news. I have not read this in any mainstream news source: In an unprecedented decision, a Spanish judge has indicted five high-ranking Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials for their role in crimes of torture and genocide committed against Falun Gong practitioners. Among the defendants is former CCP head…
The Chinese community are the “Jews of Asia”
A friend in Malaysia sent me this curious article from a local publication. Large sections of the piece are quoted below, but it highlights yet again the power and pull of the Middle East in Asia and the ways in which Israel is viewed, largely negatively: I am one of the privileged few to have…
Madness predicted in the Middle East with Israel keen to attack Iran
This story in the Washington Post is revealing. America is essentially saying it has no issue with Israel bombing Iran and it can’t stop her, anyway. Who the hell runs the show over there? Two weeks before President Obama visited China, two senior White House officials traveled to Beijing on a “special mission” to try…
Twitter is so not Beijing’s bag
China, we are listening, can you hear us? When Barack Obama told students in Shanghai last week that he had never used Twitter, there were two responses. In the west, surprise from some of his 2.6 million followers. And in China, reportedly, a surge in queries on Google China: “What’s Twitter?” On the mainland, it…
The ghost of Bill Gates in the shadow of helping the Communist Party
My book The Blogging Revolution thoroughly examines the complicity of Western multinationals such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo in assisting online censorship in oppressive regimes. Nicholas Kristof in his blog on the New York Times discovers how shocking this situation has become. Lesson for the day; never trust the word of corporate executives (especially when…
When causing chaos moves to the online world
A new way to wage war and guess who is at the forefront? Warning of a “cyber arms race,” top web security firm McAfee says that China, France, Israel, Russia and the United States have developed cyber weapons. “McAfee began to warn of the global cyber arms race more than two years ago, but now…