Frontline (PBS) report on Vice-President Cheney

See here...

Resource page on the"terror raids" from Peace Movement Aoteraora

A collection of links to news items, blogs and activist websites:

See links here

The New York Times on French Museum and the tattooed head

"French Debate: Is Maori Head Body Part or Art?

By ELAINE SCIOLINO
Published: October 26, 2007
PARIS, Oct. 25 — Since 1875, the mummified, tattooed head of a Maori warrior has been part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Natural History at Rouen in Normandy.
ut when Rouen’s mayor arranged recently to return it to New Zealand as an act of “atonement” for colonial-era trafficking in human remains, the national Ministry of Culture stepped in to block him.

The ministry contends that the head is a work of art that belongs to France and that its return could set an unfortunate precedent for a huge swath of the national museum collections — from Egyptian mummies in the Louvre to Asian treasures in the Musée Guimet and African and Oceanic artifacts in the Musée du Quai Branly."
Read more...

Microsoft versus the Euopean Union: 9 years later

From The New York Times

"Microsoft Is Yielding in European Antitrust Fight
By STEVE LOHR and KEVIN J. O'BRIEN
Published: October 23, 2007

Microsoft has given up its nine-year fight against antitrust regulators in Europe, saying yesterday that it would not challenge a court judgment from last month and would share technical information with rivals on terms the software giant had long resisted.

European regulators and some software groups in Europe hailed the deal as a breakthrough that should open the door to freer competition, especially in the market for the server software that powers corporate data centers and the Internet."

Read more...

See Wired Magazine on the same story

The Sunday Star Times inconsistant?

On its first page yesterday the newspaper annnounced some of the potential targets from alleged terrorism plots:

"US President George Bush was among those allegedly targeted in the threats recorded by police investigating the alleged Urewera terrorist training camps.
Prime Minister Helen Clark and National leader John Key were also discussed as potential targets by those under surveillance during the 22-month police Special Investigations Group operation.
Key has admitted he was briefed on the operation by the SIS but neither he, nor Clark, were yesterday willing to comment on the possibility they were potential targets...
he Star-Times, which broke the story on Fairfax Media's Stuff website last Monday, understands the police have seized more than 20 guns, including AK-47s and other military-style semi-automatic rifles, as well as stab and bullet-resistant clothing, camouflage netting, bomb-making recipes and an IRA manual."

Read more...

Yet in its opinion pages it declared that the country should really "wait and see" and not draw early conclusions (opinion piece not available online).

Journalism, politics and the French president

After refusing to publish any of the rather loud rumours about the French President's marital status, French newspaper, Libération catches up with the front page below.In English in the original.

Political responses to police actions against activists

So far, only one party has posted comments, the Green Party.

Green Party:

"Greens appeal to police to show more respect

Keith Locke MP, Green Party Human Rights Spokesperson

18th October 2007


The Green Party is shocked by stories of police heavy handedness when executing search warrants under the Terrorism Suppression Act.

“Just this morning we see a pensioner in Tauranga describing feeling violated after police raided his house while he was absent and left behind a smashed window, a broken door catch, mud and a trashed linen cupboard and shed.

“Surely police should repair the damage they caused, especially as he was not charged with anything?

“Police have gone over-the-top in several raids, unnecessarily offending many people,” said Mr Locke, the Party’s Human Rights Spokesperson.

“Tuhoe people are very upset at the excessive display of force in their community. The raids have often left a mess and smashed windows, with little apparent thought of an apology or rectification.”

Green Party Co-Leader Jeanette Fitzsimons says she was shocked to hear that police had raided the Taupo home of Eco-Show organisers Jo Pearsal and Bryan Innes."

Read more...

Continuous coverage of raids on stuff.co.nz

Pita Sharples in stuff.co.nz

"Race relations in New Zealand have been set back 100 years by police raids on Monday at alleged weapons-training camps in the Bay of Plenty, Maori Party co-leader Pita Sharples has told an Australian audience.

Sharples also questioned yesterday whether New Zealand security agencies might resort to planting evidence to justify their actions.

His criticism came yesterday as a Rotorua District Court judge denied bail to Tuhoe activist Tame Iti, one of 17 people arrested.

Sharples told a conference on restorative justice in Queensland that police had used "storm-trooper" tactics in raiding homes and making the arrests.

He said the justice system had "lashed out" at Maori. Maori sovereignty activists were among those arrested, as well as peace and environmental campaigners who police said were connected to the weapons-training camps found in rugged Bay of Plenty bush."

Read more...

See on-going coverage here

NZ Police arrest activists

Does not the title of the article the question answered under the picture?

"Napalm bombs, Molotov cocktails and military-style assault rifles were among an arsenal of weapons that prompted early morning police raids across the country yesterday. "

Read more...

NZ On Air Reports on Public Broadcasting in the Digital Age

From the NZ On Air website:
"NZ On Air commissioned a thinkpiece from analysts Russell Brown and Andrew Dubber seeking their perspectives on the changing broadcasting and media environment. 'We're All In This Together' provides helpful insights as NZ On Air considers future developments, and we hope its publication here will be useful to those also intrigued by the opportunities offered by new technology. Not all the writers' views are necessarily shared by NZ On Air but they are a cogent and thoughtful contribution to consideration of the issues."

See the report among other research material from NZ On Air

Covering Police "Terrorism" Raid

A few days after the police raids across the country the media are starting to ask the significance of the actions.

Here's Colin Espiner's views:

"Police ‘terror’ raids - blunder or brilliance?
Colin Espiner in On The House | 1:01 pm 17 October 2007

I’ve avoided posting anything on the arrests of activists around the country on Monday because - and this doesn’t happen often, I’ll admit - I’m at a bit of a loss to know what to say.Either the police have uncovered the sort of organised, militant, terrorist activity that New Zealand has so far been blessedly free from, or the cops have made a monumental blunder and trampled over the basic rights of Kiwis to protest and to speak out against authority and the government of the day.Neither answer is particularly palatable. I’ve always considered that New Zealand has its fair share of nutcases, fruit loops, and raving lunatics but that like Douglas Adams’ summation of Earth in The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, they were “mostly harmless”.

Indeed I’d thought people like Tame Iti, with his full moko and passionate belief in Maori self-determination, and the earnest, well-meaning, wet-behind-the-ears “activists” that inhabit the darker corners of Wellington’s Te Aro Valley actually added to the country’s social fabric rather than detracted from it. Even if they did occasionally annoy me by chaining themselves to buildings to prevent the construction of the capital’s much-needed inner-city bypass.

But police claims that these people had semi-automatic weapons and molotov cocktails, held secret training camps in the bush and planned to assassinate key public figures is another matter altogether. It’s deeply disturbing.

I don’t think I’m alone in not really knowing what to say at the moment. The media has been every which way, starting off with blazing headlines declaring police had uncovered “terror camps” and conducted “anti-terror raids” before quickly switching to sympathetic portrayals of wronged activists upset at having their door kicked in by police at 4am."

Read more...

Russell Brown gives some historical perspective:

"Te Qaeda and the God Squad | Oct 16, 2007 11:02
The Dominion Post today covers yesterday's police raids in part by harking back 30 years, to the Full Gospel Mission -- better known as the "God Squad" -- the millenarian religious sect whose apparent stockpiling of weapons at a compound in Waipara was a huge news story in 1977. It's a story with lessons for all sides of our new controversy...

Read more...

BBC Changes

From The Guardian:
"Day of reckoning for BBC: thousands of jobs axed and Television Centre to be sold
· Staff in news and factual programming hardest hit
· Director general's plans met with union anger
Owen Gibson, media correspondent
Thursday October 18, 2007
The Guardian

The BBC Trust yesterday unanimously approved plans to cut thousands of jobs, sell off its west London headquarters and reduce the number of programmes it makes by a tenth.

The radical overhaul immediately sparked a furious backlash from staff likely to strike within weeks, with feelings running particularly high in the news and factual divisions where job losses will run into four figures.

Chairman Sir Michael Lyons said he was satisfied the package put forward by the director general, Mark Thompson, during a four-hour meeting would "safeguard the core values of the BBC at a time of radical change in technology, markets and audience expectations".

http://media.guardian.co.uk/bbc/story/0,,2193436,00.html

Possible change to rules for media ownership in the US

From The New York Times:

"Plan Would Ease F.C.C. Restriction on Media Owners

By STEPHEN LABATON
Published: October 18, 2007

WASHINGTON, Oct. 17 — The head of the Federal Communications Commission has circulated an ambitious plan to relax the decades-old media ownership rules, including repealing a rule that forbids a company to own both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city...

Currently, a company can own two television stations in the larger markets only if at least one is not among the four largest stations and if there are at least eight local stations. The rules also limit the number of radio stations that a company can own to no more than eight in each of the largest markets.

The deregulatory proposal is likely to put the agency once again at the center of a debate between the media companies, which view the restrictions as anachronistic, and civil rights, labor, religious and other groups that maintain the government has let media conglomerates grow too large.

As advertising increasingly migrates from newspapers to the Internet, the newspaper industry has undergone a wave of upheaval and consolidation. That has put new pressure on regulators to loosen ownership rules. But deregulation in the media is difficult politically, because many Republican and Democratic lawmakers are concerned about news outlets in their districts being too tightly controlled by too few companies."

Read more...

Freeview update

From stuff.co.nz:

What you need to get Freeview
By WILL HARVIE - The Press | Tuesday, 2 October 2007

Read more...

And on TVNZ's new channel, TV6:

" Officially, it's branded TVNZ6, but even company executives call it TV6 in conversation. It is the new channel launched on Sunday and only available on Freeview.

TV6 does some "public-service television", which cynics will label as earnest and dull. "A lot of these shows nobody else will do.

"They're not commercially viable," says Eric Kearley, TVNZ's general manager of digital services.

But it will also import quality TV from overseas.

TV6 breaks the day into zones. Kidzone – children's programming mostly for pre-schoolers – runs from 6.30am to 4pm; Family – wholesome TV content suitable for all ages – runs from 4pm to 8.30pm; and Showcase – Kiwi and overseas shows for grown-ups – runs from 8.30pm to midnight. "
Read more...

Google and Youtube

From The New York Times:

Google to Put YouTube Videos on Its Ad Network
By MIGUEL HELFT
Published: October 9, 2007

"SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 8 — Google is taking the first steps toward turning its powerful advertising network, which places ads on hundreds of thousands of Internet sites, into a system for distributing content — and more ads — across the Web.
The Internet search giant is expected to introduce a service on Tuesday to allow Web sites in its ad network to embed relevant videos from some YouTube content creators. A Web site or blog specializing in hiking, for instance, might choose to embed hiking videos from YouTube.
The service, which represents the first major combination of a Google product with YouTube, will give video creators wide distribution beyond YouTube via Google’s network, known as AdSense. Since the videos will be surrounded by ads, the service is another way for Google to cash in on the huge number of video clips stored on YouTube.
Read more...

See also The Guardian on the same story...
"Google has begun allowing advertisers to "embed" clips from YouTube into their promotional messages, a sign of the search company's strategy to make money from its video streaming arm."

File sharing and lawsuit

From the New York Times
Labels Win Suit Against Song Sharer
By JEFF LEEDS
Published: October 5, 2007

"In a crucial legal victory for record labels and other copyright owners, a federal jury yesterday found a Minnesota woman liable for copyright infringement for sharing music online and imposed a penalty of $222,000 in damages...
The verdict represents at least a symbolic victory for the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group that has coordinated the music labels’ expensive legal campaign, which has recently suffered some highly publicized setbacks...
The lead plaintiff was Capitol Records, a label owned by the EMI Group. The three other major record companies — the Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and the Warner Music Group — also had songs involved in the suit against Ms. Thomas."
Read more...

Facebook and software development

From The New York Times:

"Facebook, based in Palo Alto, Calif., opened its service to outside developers this spring, inviting them to create tools for the site and to try to profit from them. Since then, more than 4,000 “applications” have flooded onto the site, spicing it up with games or whimsical programs called widgets that let you turn your friends into virtual zombies and more practical tools that let users display images of their favorite books, music, movies and wine on their profile pages.

The wave of attention from users and developers has sent estimates of Facebook’s value soaring into the dot-com stratosphere. Last month, there were reports that Microsoft was considering a $500 million investment that would value the three-year-old company at up to $15 billion.

Now it appears that such exuberance has infused the expanding Facebook universe, even though no one has yet proved it is possible to build a profitable business with sustainable revenues on the site. Some developers report earning tens of thousands of dollars in advertising with the applications they have created. Yet their applications are mostly running ads promoting other Facebook applications — a situation that recalls the earliest Gold Rush miners, who earned a living selling shovels to other miners. And developers must cover the cost of hosting the applications on their own Web servers."

Read more...

Myanmar and the Internet

From The New York Times:
In Crackdown, Myanmar Junta Unplugs Internet
BY SETH MYDANS
Published: October 4, 2007
BANGKOK, Oct. 3 — It was about as simple and uncomplicated as shooting demonstrators in the streets. Embarrassed by smuggled video and photographs that showed their people rising up against them, the generals who run Myanmar simply switched off the Internet.

Until last Friday television screens and newspapers abroad were flooded with scenes of tens of thousands of red-robed monks in the streets and of chaos and violence as the junta stamped out the biggest popular uprising there in two decades.

But then the images, text messages and posts stopped, shut down by generals who belatedly grasped the power of the Internet to jeopardize their crackdown.

“Finally they realized that this was their biggest enemy, and they took it down,” said Aung Zaw, editor of an exile magazine called Irrawaddy, whose Web site has been a leading source of news over the past weeks."

Read more...

The Shock Doctrine: A Short Film by Alfonso Cuarón and Naomi Klein

Alfonso Cuarón, director of Children of Men, and Naomi Klein, author of No Logo, present a short film from Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.


See Naomi Klein's site

Bush and Blogosphere

From The Washington Post:

President Reaches Out to a Friendly Circle in New Media

By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 16, 2007; Page A07

The day after his prime-time speech on Iraq, President Bush sat down for a round-table interview not with traditional White House reporters but with bloggers who focus on military issues, including two participating by video link from Baghdad.

Judging from some of the accounts of the Friday meeting, the president offered up little news. Here is what one of the 10 bloggers, Ward Carroll of Military.com, described from his notes as some of Bush's most notable comments:• "This strategy is my strategy."

• "I'm defining a horizon of peace."

• "I don't mind people attacking me. . . . That's politics . . . but I do mind people impugning the integrity of our generals."

Still, the hour-long meeting in the Roosevelt Room offered Bush another opportunity to break through what he sees as the filter of the traditional news media, while also reaching out to the providers of a new source of information for soldiers, their families and others who follow the conflict in Iraq closely.

"More and more we are engaging in the new-media world, and these are influential people who have a big following," said Kevin F. Sullivan, the White House communications chief."

Read more...


And read a commentary from Harper's Magazine:

The Bush Administration has utterly botched the war, but it does demonstrate “intelligent, razor sharp” planning when it comes to putting on media lovefests.

Investigative Journalism, the USA and Iran

This is a new article by Seymour Hirsh who has been at the forefront of investigative journalism and Irak in the last few years and in the last two the American strategy in its relation with Iran.

Shifting Targets
The Administration’s plan for Iran.
by Seymour M. Hersh October 8, 2007
"In a series of public statements in recent months, President Bush and members of his Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to an increasing degree, as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran. “Shia extremists, backed by Iran, are training Iraqis to carry out attacks on our forces and the Iraqi people,” Bush told the national convention of the American Legion in August. “The attacks on our bases and our troops by Iranian-supplied munitions have increased. . . . The Iranian regime must halt these actions. And, until it does, I will take actions necessary to protect our troops.” He then concluded, to applause, “I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities.”"

Read more...

Myanmar and the internet

A student in the Tuesday lecture raised the issue of the internet being utilised in the current unrest in Burma. Here is a discussion of one example of it. Read the article.

Amnesty International on China and Internet Censorship

"Amnesty International first reported on the issue of freedom of expression and information in November 2002. In the report State control of the Internet in China, Amnesty cited several foreign companies - Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Nortel Networks, Websense and Sun Microsystems - which had reportedly provided technology used to censor and control the use of the Internet in China. Following the publication of the report, several companies dismissed allegations that their company's actions might be contributing to human rights violations in China. Cisco Systems denied that the company tailors its products for the Chinese market, saying that "[I]f the government of China wants to monitor the Internet, that's their business. We are basically politically neutral." Microsoft said it "focused on delivering the best technology to people throughout the world", but that it "cannot control the way it may ultimately be used."
... In January 2007, Amnesty joined a multi-stakeholder initiative with academics, socially responsible investment firms, other experts and companies including Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! to develop a set of voluntary principles to promote and respect human rights on the Internet. Amnesty welcomes the companies' commitment to the initiative and hopes that our participation in it will help establish a strong set of human rights principles for the industry. Additionally, we continue to support legislative efforts like the Global Online Freedom Act, as the companies' current and past practices remain of serious concern."

Read more...

Google & Privacy

Here are some links to reports and discussions of Google in relation to privacy.

Two that have appeared this week:

- privacy concerns and Google's acquisition of advertising company, DoubleClick: Stuff,
c/net news, a Techworld blog that discusses it in relation to conglomeration

- 'StreetView' and Canadian privacy laws: here and here

Here is a BBC report on Google in China.

Here is the discussion of the dispute with the US govt from silicon.com

And this is a link to googlewatch.org, a website that publishes critiques of google's technology, practice and monopoly.

One week in stuff.co.nz's "technology" section

These are the articles utilised in the discussion of how technology is framed in relation to "danger" in one week on stuff.co.nz (in Lecture 11).

Parents worry about web but don't stop kid's use

Facebook predators are 'tip of the iceberg'

Experts doubt EU plan to block bomb recipes on web

MP3 players get blame for deafness

Girls use website to trade sex for drugs - police

Cybercriminals 'acting like pros'

Adult TV on mobiles attacked