American Buddhist Net

On Sunday, RAW STORY ran video of a bombing in Gaza purported to be recent footage leaked from an exiled Palestinian blogger. We removed the video from the site early Sunday and issued a correction but the original was deleted in a database without the actual html file being removed, so the original persisted through Monday morning without our notice.

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Government censorship of the Internet should be resisted wherever it occurs. What they fear is not "vulgarity" but people getting real info and thinking for themselves. ABN
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Jan. 5 (Bloomberg) -- China, the world’s biggest Internet market by users, announced a nationwide crackdown on Web sites that it says spread pornography, singling out search engines including Google and Baidu for criticism.

China’s Ministry of Public Security and six other government agencies jointly opened a one-month campaign at a meeting today in Beijing. The central government announced the decision through an official Xinhua News Agency report posted on its Web site.

A vulgar tone on the Internet has seriously damaged the physical and mental health of youth, Cai Ming-zhao, deputy press chief of the State Council, said at the meeting. Participants asked all related government agencies to “strictly execute the law,” Xinhua said.

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(TibetanReview.net, Jan 02) — Apart from control through oversight and censorship, China is now engaging in proactive shaping and influencing of public opinion over the Internet to control the direction of public opinion. Its latest antic involves employing university students to monitor electronic bulletin-boards to steer discussions away from anti-party comments and discussions and also advanced the party line.

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By Elizabeth Woodworth

December 31, 2008 "Information Clearinghouse" -- -In a companion essay, I discussed the response of some articles in the mainstream press to the claim, made by some defenders of Israel, that Professor Richard Falk should be removed from his current position of UN rapporteur on human rights abuses in the Palestinian Territories -- a claim that was reflected in the refusal of Israel on December 14, 2008, to allow him to enter the country. I included in this essay a discussion of an article by reporter Joel Brinkley because, although it was published before Israel's action against Falk, it could be read as a defense of that action. Brinkley, who had previously worked for the New York Times, argued that Falk did not have the right "frame of mind" for his UN position. In the present essay, I will focus on Brinkley's argument for this charge, suggesting that it shows that he does not have the right frame of mind for his own current position as visiting professor of journalism at Stanford University.

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unseen footage 9/11

Science vs. Personal Attacks - The upHILL Battle for 911 Truth

Kevin Martin, the Chair of the Federal Communications Commission, called Ars Technica today to let us know that he has revised his proposal to roll out a free (and smut-free) wireless broadband service. In an effort to corral more votes, Martin has already circulated a new version of the plan, one that removes the controversial smut filtering requirement.

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The same thing happened at Ground Zero after 9/11--no photos, no videos, no independent investigators, and even those assigned by the gov't were severely restricted in what they could do. Why are independent observers not being allowed to take photos or water samples from this spill site? Transparency in government is the sine qua non of a free society. ABN
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...Although it exhibits a PR-friendly facade, TVA also refuses to let independent observers take pictures and water samples from the affected area. Two photographers who tried to capture the site on film were detained by TVA police and held in custody for about an hour before being released. The two, members of the Knoxville-based United Mountain Defense, said that they wanted to take water samples of their own, to have it independently tested.

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EPA: Rivers high in arsenic, heavy metals after sludge spill

The problem is we all know that once the censorship begins, it will grow and never end. Before long, the internet will be like cable TV with more channels. Parental controls are available from many companies and can be installed on any computer. ISPs will not be able to do better than that. "Culture Secretary" Andy is a stalking horse for political censorship down the road. I think that he should be forced to resign for these statements. In saying that, I do not mean to practice "censorship" myself, but simply to draw a clear line against cultural, technical, and political nonsense. If you want controls, buy and install them yourself in your own home. We do not need "the government" to do that for us. Yes, this story is about England, but that's too close for comfort, especially as Canada and Australia have also shown a willingness to fall for this sort of Big Brother hype. ABN
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Internet websites could be given cinema-style age-ratings under plans by the Government to limit access to "unacceptable" material, Culture Secretary Andy Burnham has warned.

In an interview with today's Daily Telegraph, Mr Burnham said "clearer standards" were needed as to what could be displayed online.

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This story from today's news shows why citizens have to stop politicos before they give themselves the power to determine what you are allowed to see and read. If you wait, it's too late. Do not trust them: Uproar in Australia over plan to block websites.

Vietnam has tightened restrictions on internet blogs, banning bloggers from raising subjects the government deems inappropriate.

Blogs should follow Vietnamese law, and be written in "clean and wholesome" language, according to a government document seen by local media.

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Wikileaks has released the secret internet censorship lists of Thailand's Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (MICT). The list was obtained by advisory board member CJ Hinke, director of Freedom Against Censorship Thailand.

The 1,203 newly blocked websites are located in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Vietnam.

Every blocked site has the internally noted reason of "lese majeste" -- criticizing the King -- however, it is obvious that many sites were blocked for quite different reasons. It would appear, in fact, that the judiciary did not examine most sites before issuing orders but instead rubber-stamped government requests.

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If we were a rational people, we would have done this years ago. There is nothing more valuable to society than the truth, and investigative journalism is one of the few ways we ever get to glimpse it.

I don't know. To me, right now, it all looks pretty hopeless, which is proof of the First Noble Truth, which is not hopeless, if you know what I mean. ABN
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Rob Kall

While the Federal Reserve and Congress are bailing out corporations so big we can't allow them to fail, let's talk about bailing out the newspaper industry, or at least, journalism – an element so essential to our democracy and the honest, efficient running of our government that we can't afford to be without it either.

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Good piece. Don't let the title fool you. ABN
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Today’s net neutrality tempest - Google: are they or aren’t they? - is a marketing mistake with grave public policy implications. The mistake was law professor Tim Wu’s: creating a new label when a perfectly good one is already there.

“Net neutrality” is another term for “common carrier,” first used for US telecommunications over 150 years ago. If advocates would just use “common carrier” instead of “network neutrality” we could quickly put this debate behind us.

Instead, by making “network neutrality” something new, controversy is created in what should be a settled area: common carrier status for communication infrastructure. Common carrier simply means that carriers handle all comers at a set fee, instead of auctioning access to their network.

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China appears to have banned a number of foreign websites, including the BBC's Chinese language news site and Voice of America in Chinese.

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The Rudd Government is continuing to encounter ISP resistance to its plans for a trial of Internet filtering technology, with SA-based national operator Internode and Perth's iiNet refusing to have anything to do with it, and Optus saying it will participate only in a strictly limited way.

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Hollywood star Patrick Swayze has hit out at reports he's losing his battle with pancreatic cancer, insisting he's responding well to treatment.

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No objections and much good may come from this, but I am still going to remain wary of this thing turning into an end-run on free speech. I am fine with it having no porn, but isn't there a big chance that unpopular speech will be censored as well? Of course there will be work-arounds for the tech savvy, but the danger is that too many people will be restricted once again in what they can see and read. ABN
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Outgoing Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin is pushing for action in December on a plan to offer free, pornography-free wireless Internet service to all Americans, despite objections from the wireless industry and some consumer groups.

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The National Institutes of Health and a nonprofit advocacy group, Common Sense Media, have another reason for President-elect Barack Obama to keep urging parents to “turn off the TV.”

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Jenna Jameson now has a 9-to-5 job. Fully one quarter of employees who use the Internet visit porn sites during the workday, according to October figures from Nielsen Online; that's up from 23 percent a year ago. And hits are highest during office hours than at any other time of day, reports M. J. McMahon, publisher of AVN Online magazine, which tracks the adult video industry.

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Italian bloggers are up in arms at a court ruling early this year that suggests almost all Italian blogs are illegal. This month, a senior Italian politician went one step further, warning that most web activity is likely to be against the law.

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The Digital Youth Project, a MacArthur-funded three year, 22 case study, $3.3 million ethnographic study of what kids are doing online, has wound up and published its results. The project was undertaken by the eminent sociologist Mimi Ito and her talented colleagues (including the incomparable danah boyd) and is the largest and most comprehensive study of young peoples' internet use ever undertaken in the US.

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GAZA CITY, Gaza -- Israel has banned foreign journalists from entering Gaza to cover the deteriorating humanitarian situation there as the country 's complete closure of the territory enters a third week.

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Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.

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The case of US v Lori Drew is viewed in legal circles as landmark internet law, but as outlined in government documents with its neighbourhood feuds and a teen's suicide, it reads more like a plotline for a made-for-TV drama.

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A book criticial of the religion of Scientology has been pulled from British bookshops and the UK branch of online retail site Amazon due to "legal reasons".

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...As Chinese citizens increasingly use the Internet to get news, share videos, vent frustrations and expose abuses of power, leaders are being forced to react publicly to their concerns. Government officials are also adapting traditional media-control techniques to the information age - including sending out news releases and approving articles on topics that once would have been completely suppressed.

"They've learned that they come off looking better if they're somewhat more transparent, somewhat quicker to respond," says Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who has studied protest in China. "They're learning spin control."

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SAN DIEGO — Over the last two years, some of this city’s darkest secrets have been dragged into the light — city officials with conflicts of interest and hidden pay raises, affordable housing that was not affordable, misleading crime statistics.

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