Smoking, Drinking, Tackiness, And A Short Lesson In Spelling

Smoking or...
How To Ruin A Cuban Cigar Box

Plaster a creepy photo of some dude on oxygen along with a warning about the evils of smoking (just wait until Fidel gets a load of this!) and you too can ruin a completely nice cigar box, plus scare the willies out of anyone who sees it. BTW, these alarming photos are not included in the warnings on cartons or packs of cigarettes - yet. What gives? VB's guess was that most people in Egypt smoke cigarettes (Cleopatras), and the government must have given up on trying to scare them (short of beating or shooting them), so why not just waste money on scaring rich folks who smoke Cubans instead. What a waste (time, money, resources....) Well, not exactly - see the article below for more.

A lot of people who buy Cubans, are probably going to be more annoyed by the fact that their wonderful cigar boxes, they use to store small, intimate objects (like we do), have been debased by a macabre photo.

Stark warnings: Egypt's fledgling anti-smoking campaign comes on strong

"Starting Aug. 1, cigarette labels in Egypt will be required to carry images of the effects of smoking: a dying man in an oxygen mask, a coughing child and a limp cigarette symbolizing impotence.

The photo of the limp cigarette comes with the warning that "long-term smoking has an effect on marital relations" — somewhat coyer than a version the European Union has recommended for its member countries, which states directly that smoking causes impotence and shows a discontented young married couple sitting apart in bed."

(VB could say more on this, but she thinks most people will scoff at this example too - the decline of the family can be directly related to cigarette smoking? Gee, and as an American, VB thought it was all due to gay marriage. Silly girl.)

"A month ago, the country's new tobacco control department was launched, though it consists of only two people in a closet-sized office with no telephones and an annual budget of just $12,500."

"Some Egyptians are convinced only light cigarettes lead to impotence. Earlier this year, the state-owned manufacturer, Eastern Tobacco Company, voluntarily put pictures of diseased lungs on some packs — but smokers just figured those packs were the ones that were harmful and switched to others, which some shopowners promptly started selling at a higher price.

"I've been smoking since I was 8 years old — I used to pick up cigarette butts from the gutter and smoke them," laughed Hussein Hassan Mahmoud, a wizened 60-year-old butcher with one eye clouded from cataracts, sitting outside his Cairo shop enjoying a cigarette.

Mahmoud goes through three or four packs of the local Cleopatra cigarettes a day, at about 50 cents a pack, and he scoffed when shown the new warnings. "People will just tear the labels off."

"I Drink Your Milkshake! I Drink It Up!"
(And VB's not too happy about it either.)
Below two photos:
Ain't nothin' like payin' to drink bottled contaminated water, when you can get super chlorinated water for free, right out of the tap! (And VB thought the taste of super fluoridated Ohio River water was bad!)

A couple of months ago, we instructed Awesome Daughter, who is back in the States, to throw out all bottles with the #7 in the recycling triangle. Some municipalities are now trying to outlaw the use of this #7 plastic. VB waited, thinking maybe Egypt would follow through, but no.... We are still receiving Nestle bottled water in #7 jugs. Mind you, the smaller bottles are not #7, just the ones everyone buys to outfit their water coolers.

From The Green Guide - "#7 Polycarbonate contains the hormone disruptor bisphenol-A, which can leach out as bottles age, are heated or exposed to acidic solutions. Unfortunately, #7 is used in most baby bottles and five-gallon water jugs and in many reusable sports bottles."

1. How to recognize the real thing. "Bisphenol-A is found in clear, hard, shatterproof plastics. Often, the letters PC (for polycarbonate) and/or the number 7 will be stamped in the little recycling triangle on or near the bottom of the container. But not every plastic stamped with a 7 contains BPAs; your biggest clue is to look for hard, see-through, unbreakable things."

(Hmm, you mean like that big plasic piece of shit VB has in her kitchen, and posted below?)

"Disposable soft-drink and water bottles, and liquid medicine containers (like cough syrup bottles), are not polycarbonate and do not contain BPA. So, while everyone is rightly having a fit about disposable bottles for environmental reasons, it's only the rigid, refillable kind that you need to worry about for health reasons. Make it easy, and remember the numbers: Only drink from those with numbers 4 and 2 in their triangles, or if need be, 5 and 1. In our opinion, don't buy any with 3, 6 or 7 (not just for BPA reasons)."

(Oh, don't forget straws people. We consumers, [and the oil companies] can have our milkshake, and drink it too. ----

Why the Oil Industry Benefits from Bottled Water Sales

(Yum - and, oh so tasty!)





Just Plain Tacky
To my neighbors, and townsfolk in Connecticut:
How tacky can you possibly be naming a street, Wisteria Lane? Are you daydreaming, wishfully thinking, or what? Have you been watching too much TV, and entranced by Nicollette Sheridan's decolletage? What were you thinking!
Do you all need a good hard smack upside the head?
(YEP!)



A Short Lesson In Spelling
Finally, for those of you still learning how to spell, fuck is spelled F-U-C-K! (VB may be a bad speller, but she knows this one for sure.)
Even though, VB thinks we all got the message, what is LFC? (VB hopes it's not the florist down the road.)

Weekend News Roundup - "Egypt really is a logic-free zone"

EGYPT:
In the desert, where nothing really matters, and everything matters

"Egypt really is a logic-free zone," said Amr Shannon, the desert guide whose five-car caravan was released after an officer finally acknowledged the obvious.

"When you go to the sea, you get prepared; you will pack your towel, your bathing suit," he said in an interview in his apartment. "When you go skiing, you pack skis. Now you are coming to Egypt; get prepared for it as well. If you expect logic to prevail, you will find your intelligence insulted 200 times a day."

Reptile Smuggler Caught at Cairo Airport

Over the weekend, the Cairo airport police confiscated an entire suitcase packed with "at least" 250 baby crocodiles, chameleons, and snakes -- including (again, at least) one cobra. The passenger, a 22-year-old man from Saudi Arabia, claimed he had no idea it was illegal to bring reptiles in an ordinary suitcase on a commercial flight, adding that he was bringing the specimens to a Saudi university for experiments.

Egyptian woman held for female circumcision

CAIRO - Egyptian police are holding a woman who conducted a near-fatal circumcision on a young girl, a widely-condemned practice the authorities are trying to stamp out, the press reported on Friday.


The victim, Naglaa Khamis, went into a coma and suffered severe haemorrhaging after the removal of part of her genitals, but was saved after being taken to hospital by her parents.

Police took the woman who carried out the mutilation in Minya, south of Cairo, into custody.

Female circumcision can cause death through haemorrhaging and later complications during childbirth. It also carries risks of infection, urinary tract problems and mental trauma.

Religious leaders, usually silent on taboos relating to female sexuality, have also started to speak out against the practice, which many Egyptians believe is a duty under Islam and Christianity.

Egyptian girl dies during female circumcision

CAIRO -- A 13-year-old Egyptian girl has died during an illegal operation to mutilate her genitalia, the Al Masri Al Yom daily reported Saturday.

A government survey in 2000 said the practice was carried out on 97 percent of the country's women aged between 15 and 45 years of age.

Religious leaders, usually silent on taboos relating to female sexuality, have also started to speak out against the practice, which many Egyptians believe is a duty under Islam and Christianity.

After the death of Shaker, chief mufti Ali Gomaa declared female circumcision forbidden under Islam.

Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, the sheikh of Al Azhar university, the top Sunni Muslim authority, and Coptic Patriarch Chenouda III also declared it had "no foundation in the religious texts" of either Islam or Christianity.

SKYPE:
Last week I mentioned using Skype in a post about the new FISA (USA) wiretap law. Here's another way to use Skype: Learn a foreign language – over the Web

"Students are having these conversations all hours of the day and night outside of class," says Professor Sawhill. Her students have spoken in Arabic to their counterparts in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and in Spanish with students in Mexico. (Webcams are optional at Oberlin.)

Instructors say the conversations often spark students' interest in international issues, which they see as important at a time when Americans are accused of not being interested in the rest of the world.

Instructors like Coffey say language exchanges via Skype have the potential to fling wide OPEN the doors of cross-cultural communication.

"What's happening now is that people are just getting their feet wet," she says. "As time goes on, just like e-mail, this will be at the forefront of all of our methodologies."

CENSORSHIP:

Backlash Over Book on Policy for Israel

“The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” is not even in bookstores, but already anxieties have surfaced about the backlash it is stirring.

“Now that the cold war is over, Israel has become a strategic liability for the United States,” they write. “Yet no aspiring politician is going to say so in public or even raise the possibility” because the pro-Israel lobby is so powerful. They credit the lobby with shutting down talks with Syria and with moderates in Iran, preventing the United States from condemning Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon and with not pushing the Israelis hard enough to come to an agreement with the Palestinians. They also discuss Christian Zionists and the issue of dual loyalty.
“One of the points we make in the book is that this is a subject that’s very hard to talk about,” Mr. Walt said in an interview from his office in Cambridge. “Organizations, no matter how strong their commitment to free speech, don’t want to schedule something that’s likely to cause controversy.”

Overall Mr. Mearsheimer said he thinks the response to their views will be “less ferocious than last time, because it’s becoming increasingly difficult to make the argument in a convincing way that anyone who criticizes the lobby or Israel is an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew.” Both Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt pointed to the growing dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq, criticism of Israel’s war in Lebanon and the publication of former President Jimmy Carter’s book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” as making it somewhat easier to criticize Israel openly.

CIA, FBI computers used for Wikipedia edits

The changes may violate Wikipedia's conflict-of-interest guidelines, a spokeswoman for the site said on Thursday.

The program, WikiScanner, was developed by Virgil Griffith of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and posted this month on a Web site that was quickly overwhelmed with searches.

The program allows users to track the source of computers used to make changes to the popular Internet encyclopedia where anyone can submit and edit entries.

It violates Wikipedia's neutrality guidelines for a person with close ties to an issue to contribute to an entry about it, said spokeswoman Sandy Ordonez of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia's parent organization.

However, she said, "Wikipedia is self-correcting," meaning misleading entries can be quickly revised by another editor. She said Wikimedia welcomed the WikiScanner.

WikiScanner can be found at wikiscanner.virgil.gr/

Who else has been editing information related specifically to them thus creating a conflict of interest? FOX News.

ENERGY:
China, Filling a Void, Drills for Riches in Chad

China is investing heavily in poor African countries like Chad, raising Western concerns.

To some critics, the answer is clear. “China’s no-strings-attached approach is problematic, particularly if its effect, if not its intent, is to undermine others’ efforts to change situations on the ground,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “Often what is happening,” he added, “is underwriting of repression.”

But Limassou Saleh, a community organizer in Bongor, said he was deeply skeptical. “Chad is maybe the most corrupt country in the world,” Mr. Saleh said. “We have a long history of human rights violations, of lack of transparency, of exploitation. China has a reputation for corruption. They are one of the worst human rights abusers. They have no record of transparency. What would we want with a country like that? Only to make our own problems worse.”

Murray's Illinois mine has 2,787 violations since 2005

Crandall Canyon mine owner Robert Murray is fond of saying he cares deeply for his workers and "takes their safety to bed every night."
But his record at one Illinois mine in particular might cause some lost sleep.
Murray's Galatia mine in southern Illinois racked up at least 2,787 violations and more than $2.4 million in proposed fines from the Mine Safety and Health Administration over a two-year span, according to government records. That includes more than $1.4 million in proposed fines already this year.

In June, in a hearing before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Murray angrily defended his company's safety record when it was challenged by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.
"My employees are important to me and I take their safety to bed every night," Murray said, waving his finger at Boxer. "My safety record today is one of the best in the coal industry."

How did Robert Murray, the owner of Murray Energy get away with so many violations while the government turned a blind eye? From the Saturday Gazette-Mail, a West Virginia Newspaper:

Along the way, Murray has also become a major political player. Murray Energy ranks among the coal industry’s major donors to federal candidates. Since 1996, Murray has contributed nearly $1 million, most of it to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Murray has also not hesitated to make use of those political connections.

In May 2002, two U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration officials were transferred after they clashed with Murray over inspections at the company's Maple Creek Mine in western Pennsylvania.

Later, West Virginia Public Broadcasting reported that Murray warned MSHA officials in Morgantown that the same thing would happen to them if they didn't let up on inspections at his Powhatan No. 6 Mine in Belmont County, Ohio.

"Mitch McConnell calls me one of the five finest men in America, and the last I checked, he was sleeping with your boss,” Murray told the MSHA officials, according to meeting notes cited by public broadcasting. McConnell, a Republican U.S. senator from Kentucky, is married to U.S. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, whose department includes MSHA.

After that meeting with Murray, MSHA Morgantown district manager Tim Thompson was transferred.

This song came out in 198 when Number One Son wasn't even born, yet. He's now a sophmore in college, taking a semester off to intern with a political campaign. He's nineteen, and the song is twenty years old. The message still rings true. Great video, except some ass in the audience is waving a BP flag. I wonder if Little Lord Brown took a trip to Sweden with one of his rent-a-boys and attended this concert. Big Robert Murray says about his workers that he, "takes their safety to bed every night."

Really, I don't know how these people can sleep, much less live with themselves.

Midnight Oil - Beds are burning live Hultsfred -94

Weekend News Roundup

The Weekend News Roundup is a bit lengthy this week. A few Cairo neighborhood pieces; Egypt's water shortage (and crocs); book reviews: one on a book mentioned previously, and others include two about India's Independence, comparing the decision to partition to what is happening in Iraq, with a mention of one of my favorite books, A Peace to End All Peace; then of course the censorship spot (my fave: "Innovative Approach To Censorship" of how a Saudi Sheikh can put the screws to a major British publishing company - I' d like to see him try that in the U.S.,) plus, the usual censorship march in some Middle East countires, and from Putin (I liken him to Darth Vader and his deathly neck pinch); and my newest pet peeve, the recent  U.S.wiretapping law. Phew!

Egypt Today Magazine has a section describing all the different neighborhoods of Cairo, including mine Welcome to the ‘Burbs

With all the perks of big city life — but without the noise, congestion and concrete of Mohandiseen — Maadi is a haven for suburbanites.

Then there's the commentary in Al-Ahram News about Gated communities, By Salama A Salama.

Luxury real estate is not the answer to our problems. If anything, it will heighten the sense of social injustice and political exclusion that is growing all around us. This new lifestyle can only worsen the situation where political extremism and political oppression combine to destroy the social fabric of our country. We need to have a strategy for investment. We need a strategy that takes into account the social and political repercussions of investment. We cannot let businessmen and contractors tell us how to live.

Under the "Book" section, US author offers simplistic, sincere view of Egypt, critiques a book of an expat's view of Cairo, somewhat dissing it since the book's author lived in Maadi. After reading the above commentary and World's Apart, below, I don't think Maadi is that far removed from the rest of Cairo. We're not "gated"; we don't have a golf, tennis, and pool club at our disposal; we do see beggars - mothers with infants begging for money for food (putting their pursed hands up to their mouths); we have continual brownouts and blackouts; but fortunately, so far, we've been lucky with the water situation (except in February when the Metro flooded); and we do have access to the Metro. We may be a "suburb" but in the States we'd be called an "inner ring suburb" meaning that we are just a step outside the "inner city." The next article describes the differences in how the rich and poor have been dealing with the recent water shortage currently going on here in Egypt, Worlds apart

Residents of Daqahliya fought each other with sticks and stones to fill their water containers last week in scenes which, say the residents of one village, grow increasingly chaotic as the water shortage drags on.

A world away, in Qatamiya Heights, one of Cairo's many new up-market suburbs, residents were upset when water began to trickle from their taps. Then it was cut completely. But unlike the villages in Daqahliya water did not need to be trucked in. Instead residents headed for the supermarkets, buying box after box of bottled water. Maged Raouf, who has just moved into the area, has sent his children to stay at a relative's house until the water returns. "I can't possibly continue to pay this much for bottled water every time I have a shower". The facilities at his gym, he says, have become his de facto bathroom for the time being.

And, in Only in Egypt! a rather unfortunate result of the water shortage.

CAIRO -- A regularly updated collection of weird and whacky news items from Egypt.

Morning shower soils employee's reputation

EGYPT'S RELENTLESS summer heat and water shortages recently proved too hot to handle for one hapless, hygiene-conscious employee.

A 27-year-old man whose un-air-conditioned home's water supply was often erratic, making bathing a rare luxury, had made it a habit of reaching his work premises early in the morning, so as to avail himself of the on-site showers.

However, on one such occasion, while enjoying a refreshing soap-and-lather, the man realized he had left some other bath essentials in his work desk. Hoping to grab them and return unnoticed to complete his wash, he set forth frothy-but-otherwise-unadorned on his quest.

Unfortunately for the would-be bather, his boss had opted for an early start that morning, too, and was not amused to see his nude employee fumbling for bath oils in the middle of the office space.

The employee was docked five days wages from his total salary, and an official investigation into the affair was ordered by his superior. (Al Ahram)

BOOKS:
Against the Current
By LISA FUGARD
Published: August 5, 2007

In 1998, Rosemary Mahoney set out to row the Nile on her own.

Mahoney rows from Aswan to Edfu — a three-day journey — in Amr’s boat with Amr following in his felucca. She then takes a taxi to Luxor, where mobs of Europeans soak up the sun in skimpy attire and young Egyptian men work as gigolos. The inevitable conversations about sex — with Ahmed, a male prostitute, and Adel, a lawyer — are surreal, lurid and terribly sad. The freedom of being able to talk to a Western woman in an open way soon dissipates, and we see men who are frustrated and bored, struggling against the strictures of Islamic culture.

FIRST CHAPTER
‘Down the Nile’

“[T]hough in Egypt the assumption of the veil at puberty was officially a matter of individual choice, many Egyptian women wore the hijab . . .”

US author offers simplistic, sincere view of Egypt

What also discredits some of her remarks is that she lived the Cairo's Maadi neighborhood, where a lot of Westerners isolate themselves. Indeed, many of them find it similar to Washington, DC - an observation Eck, herself, makes. This limits the reader to seeing only one of Egypt's many faces, whereas the book aims to cover Egyptian society in its entirety.

Many Westerners in Egypt, or "expats," as Eck calls them, don't move around a lot, let alone socialize, outside Maadi. They live in a Western community in a Westernized neighborhood, as if they had brought the West with them to Egypt. This, in turn, keeps them from experiencing true Egyptian society and culture, and this was a defect in the memoir. Eck mainly concentrates on her life in Maadi, where she spent most of her stay, outside of a few months in Alexandria.

Nonetheless, from her Maadi base, Eck still offers valuable insight into the "expat" community she mingled with: "Expat women lead interesting lives. Since most have young children, they do volunteer work, ride, go out to lunch, shop, and take golf lessons while their children are in school ... Some [expat] women have their own car and driver. Everyone seems to have a maid at least three times per week. Others have a nanny and/or a cook. If they live in a villa rather than an apartment, they may have a gardener, and their own security guards or bawwab."

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: August 10, 2007

In this stunning memoir, Ms. Lagnado gives us a deeply affecting portrait of her family and its journey from wartime Cairo to the New World.

In “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit” Ms. Lagnado — an investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal — gives us a deeply affecting portrait of her family and its journey from wartime Cairo to the New World. Like André Aciman in his now classic memoir, “Out of Egypt” (1994), she conjures a vanished world with elegiac ardor and uncommon grace, and like Mr. Aciman she calculates the emotional costs of exile with an unsentimental but forgiving eye. This is not simply the story of a well-to-do family’s loss of its home, its privileges and its identity. It is a story about how exile indelibly shapes people’s views of the world, a story about the mathematics of familial love and the wages of memory and time.

FIRST CHAPTER

“On the first Thursday night of every month . . . Om Kalsoum, the Nightingale of the Nile, the greatest singer Egypt had ever known, broadcast live from a theater in the Ezbekeya section . . .”

EXIT WOUNDS
The legacy of Indian partition.
by Pankaj Mishra

In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, Churchill had been loudest among the reactionaries who were determined not to lose India, “the jewel in the crown,” and, as Prime Minister during the Second World War, he tried every tactic to thwart Indian independence. “I hate Indians,” he declared. “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” He had a special animus for Gandhi, describing him as a “rascal” and a “half-naked” “fakir.” (In a letter to Churchill, Gandhi took the latter as a compliment, claiming that he was striving for even greater renunciation.) According to his own Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery, Churchill knew “as much of the Indian problem as George III did of the American colonies.”

Remembering Partition

The parallels with contemporary Iraq are far from exact. The British Empire ruled India for nearly a century and, at the end, drew the boundaries that spawned decades of conflict; they should have felt an obligation to keep the place from collapsing before they departed. India was also a real country before the British colonized it, whereas Iraq was a colonial contrivance from the outset. (For the amazing story of how the British invented Iraq, and messed up the Middle East for all time to boot, see David Fromkin's A Peace To End All Peace.)

MUSLIMS IN AMERICA:
American Muslims Reimagined

Why comics? "I love the medium." Wilson responds. "I can't say enough good things about it. I call it 'the beautiful medium' because it's the only genre of storytelling in which the past, present and future are available to the reader as one image--I make use of that in Cairo, a novel about five very disparate characters and a genie whose stories are interwoven against the backdrop of modern-day Cairo. Outsiders is more overtly political of the two, because it deals with the hotly contested Transboundary Aquifer System in the northern Sahara."

Universities Install Footbaths to Benefit Muslims, and Not Everyone Is Pleased

By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: August 7, 2007

As the nation’s Muslim population grows, issues of religious accommodation are becoming more common, and more complicated.

Nationwide, more than a dozen universities have footbaths, many installed in new buildings. On some campuses, like George Mason University in Virginia, and Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Mich., there was no outcry. At Eastern Michigan, even some Muslim students were surprised by the appearance of the footbath — a single spigot delivering 45 seconds of water — in a partitioned corner of the restroom in the new student union.

“My sister told me about it, and I didn’t believe it,” said Najla Malaibari, a graduate student at Eastern Michigan. “I was, ‘No way,’ and she said, ‘Yeah, go crazy.’ It really is convenient.”

TRAVEL / PETS:
Think Your Dog Is Smart? Its Collar May Be Even Smarter

By ANNE EISENBERG
Published: August 5, 2007

Collars with Global Positioning System units, motion sensors or other additions help owners keep track of their pets the high-tech way.

EGYPT:
Gone crocodile hunting on the Nile

The Egyptian media is abuzz over a rare reptile sighting in Cairo. Our reporter joins the chase.
By Jill Carroll

Word is, the crocodile – or alligator – has swum downstream to the northern Cairo neighborhood of Maadi.

OIL:
Ghana aims to avoid the 'oil curse'

"

What most people don't understand about oil is that, not only does the money not filter through to the majority of the population, but it's much worse than that," says Nicholas Shaxson, an oil analyst at the London-based Chatham House think tank and the author of "Poisoned Wells," which examines how the resource affects countries. "It actively makes most people poorer."

Why 'peak oil' may soon pique your interest

World oil production peaked in 2005, says one expert, and that presents serious problems in the future

For years, many in the oil industry viewed the peak oil forecasts by Simmons as odd. Now his position has a lot of company. Several websites publish sophisticated material on the issue. There's the Oil Drum (www.theoildrum.com), featuring "Prof. Goose" and "Gail the Actuary." Those pseudonyms hide a full professor at Colorado State University and an actuary in an Atlanta suburb. There's also the Energy Bulletin (www.energybulletin.net). The site's coeditor, Bart Anderson, say it receives 11,000 visits a day. Peak oil enthusiasts, he says, have now divided into a majority seeing life after an oil crunch and those he calls "doomers."

In Britain, Douglas Low, director of the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre (www.odac-info.org), foresees a "crisis coming up" with a real shortage of oil. In June, he notes, the world used 1.5 MB/D more crude than it produced. He expects much higher oil prices in the future.

CENSORSHIP:
Mr. Know-It-All: Bannable Blog Behavior, Scam Bait, MySpace Geezers

Is it OK to ban someone from posting comments on my blog?

Innovative Approach to Censorship

Imagine this scenario. Two reputable American scholars write a book about how certain ostensibly charitable organizations are financial pass-throughs for radical terrorist groups. The book, which is amply documented, is published by a major academic press in Great Britain. Soon after the book appears, a wealthy Saudi sheik sues the publisher (not the authors) for libel. The publisher, evidently fearful of the cost and burden of litigation, promptly announces that it is withdrawing the book from circulation. It requests that all copies of the book be returned by booksellers and libraries so that the book may be pulped, destroyed, never read by anyone. The publisher issues a statement of apology, acknowledging serious (but undefined) errors in the book, and makes a financial award to the sheik, who pledges to give the money to UNICEF (the sheik is a multi-billionaire).

Syria To Crackdown Tougher On Web Sites

Already, Damascus has stopped blogspot from being used in the country and plans on making it difficult for users to have comments pages on their blogs.

"It is hard to believe that Syria would want to close down all websites with comment sections. Already all Blogspot blogs have been blocked in Syria. They can still be read through Bloglines or any other RSS feed, but the comment sections are not so easily accessed," Joshua Landis, Co-director at the Center of Peace Studies, University of Oklahoma, wrote on his blog.

Iranian journalist sentenced to death in closed trial

MEXICO: Journalist shot and wounded after corruption reports

Abuses Belie China Pledge on Rights, Critics Say

Iran: Another Reformist Paper Closed

Russia stretches 'extremism' laws

For example, any speech deemed "extremist" that occurs during a broadcast can lead to a media outlet being warned, and then shut down, by authorities. "The practical outcome of this rule is that radio and TV stations will simply stop having live debate and talk shows," says Dickmann.

Russia: Top Court Upholds Ban on Party
By JOSHUA YAFFA
Published: August 8, 2007

The Supreme Court upheld the Moscow City Court’s ban of the National Bolshevik Party as an extremist organization. The small fringe party has gained notoriety for its vocal and theatrical antigovernment demonstrations. The group’s leader, the writer Eduard Limonov, said in a telephone interview that he did not expect the latest ruling to affect its activities, including participation in the Other Russia coalition, a loose movement of anti-Kremlin forces that includes the former chess champion Garry Kasparov. “They will not shut us up,” Mr. Limonov said. “We have no fear.” He said the party would appeal the ruling to the European Court of Human Rights.

MY CURRENT PET PEEVE: THE NEW WIRETAPPING LAW
A Gateway for Hackers

The Security Threat in the New Wiretapping Law
U.S. communications technology is fragile and easily penetrated. While advanced, it is not decades ahead of that of our friends or our rivals. Compounding the issue is a key facet of modern systems design: Intercept capabilities are likely to be managed remotely, and vulnerabilities are as likely to be global as local. In simplifying wiretapping for U.S. intelligence, we provide a target for foreign intelligence agencies and possibly rogue hackers. Break into one service, and you get broad access to U.S. communications.

AT&T Tells Court That Secret Wiretapping Destroys Privacy (in 1927)

The function of a telephone system in our modern economy is, so far as reasonably practicable, to enable any two persons at a distance to converse privately with each other as they might do if both were personally present in the privacy of the home or office of either one. […]

The wire tapper destroys this privacy. He invades the "person" of the citizen, and his "house," secretly and without warrant.[…]

[…]It is better that a few criminal escape than that the privacies of life of all the people be exposed to the agents of the government, who will act at their own discretion, the honest and the dishonest, unauthorized and unrestrained by the courts.