China's Internet Youth Aren't Fooled By President's Visit

http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSTRE5AC0KV20091116
By Melanie Lee, SHANGHAI (Reuters)

U.S. President Barack Obama's call on Monday for Internet freedom in China met with wariness and cynicism from many Chinese Internet users, suggesting his effort to win over the country's youth has some way to go.

Some were intensely patriotic in their comments, citing China's status as the largest holder of U.S. government debt as a reason for Obama's polite overtures at a town hall-style meeting with students in Shanghai.

"The purpose of Obama's visit to China is to get China to help the U.S. economy's health. It's like a fox in a chicken coop," said one netizen XinDeGuiHui.

China has cut access to popular social networking sites Facebook since March and Twitter since July, citing the need for social harmony. The frontier region of Xinjiang has been unable to access any outside websites since deadly ethnic riots in July.


Full story at link

Wikipedia and Censorship

http://www.isgp.eu/miscellaneous/ISGP_deleted_from_Wikipedia_history_by_one_admin.htm
ISGP's problem with Wikipedia

One Single Admin Able to Wipe ISGP From Dozens of Wiki Pages
July 1, 2009

Extract:

"I noticed that the link to ISGP had been deleted. More amazing, it turned out that every reference to ISGP anywhere on Wikipedia had been deleted around the same time. At first I thought this was the result of the careless mistake in Davignon's biography. However, it turns out that this was not the cause.

"The cause turns out to be a Wikipedia admin nicknamed Will Beback. On June 29, at 20:41 (GMT), Beback apparently came across ISGP while editing Wikipedia's WWF page. This person, whose apparent internet information can be found below, decided to take a look at ISGP for less than five minutes. In response he decided it was his right to delete all references on Wikipedia to ISGP without spending one more second of fact checking."

IP 69.104.219.235
Host name adsl-69-104-219-235.dsl.irvnca.pacbell.net
Location Los Angeles, California
29th June 2009 23:41:43 No referring link
www.isgp.eu/index.html
29th June 2009 23:42:52 www.isgp.eu/index.html
www.isgp.eu/about.htm
29th June 2009 23:45:30 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1001_Club
www.isgp.eu/index.html
29th June 2009 23:49:43 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1001_Club
www.isgp.eu/organisations/1001_Club_members_list.htm
Total visit time 8 minutes and 0 seconds

Beback's incompetence

For a veteran Wikipedia admin, Beback doesn't seem to be a particularly bright light. Amazingly, he left the incorrect paragraph in Davignon's bio untouched. As of this writing, it's still there. Beback only deleted the source, which, ironically, would have shown that there's a serious mistake on Wikipedia.

Another interesting point is Wikipedia's 1001 Club article, in which the apparently nefarious influence of ISGP was first neutralized. This is the paragraph Beback deleted (except for the first sentence):

"The membership of the 1001 Club largely consists of managers of banks and multinationals from around the world. Examples from past and present include Sir Eric Drake of British Petroleum, Sir Val Duncan of Rio Tinto, Harry Frederick Oppenheimer and Sidney Spiro of Anglo-American Corporation, the British and French Rothschilds, Michel David-Weill of Lazard, Laurance and David Rockefeller, Henry Ford II, Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, Edmond Safra, Peter von Siemens, and Berthold Beitz of Krupp. Among the more remarkable members have been Salem bin Laden, Osama bin Laden's older half-brother; Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator of Zaire; BCCI founder and president Agha Hasan Abedi; Juan Carlos I King of Spain; early Zionist operatives as Louis Bloomfield and Tibor Rosenbaum; and the controversial businessman Nelson Bunker Hunt."

Beback deleted all the names, providing us with the following explanation: "trim unsourced list that includes living people". Excuse me, unsourced!? Oh, wait, of course this list is unsourced, as several minutes earlier Beback himself had deleted the links to photocopies of the membership list in which all these names could be found! The ISGP log shows Beback has been on the page where these photocopies could be found. Unless he's a hyperactive 12-year-old, it's incomprehensible to me how he could have missed this.

Related:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jo%C3%ABl_van_der_Reijden

http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/links.html

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=44209863651

http://current.com/1hhjm4c

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/wikipedia-and-the-art-of-censorship-462070.html

US Gets Pakistani Column Pulled Over Blackwater Report

Taken from here.

US Ambassador Pressed Pakistani Paper to Pull Column
by Jason Ditz, September 06, 2009

The United States embassy in Pakistan reportedly managed to get the weekly column of a top critic of US policy pulled from the major English-language newspaper in Pakistan “The News International,” following a secret letter from Ambassador Anne Patterson to the newspaper earlier in the week.

The US embassy confirmed sending the letter but would not discuss its content. The newspaper’s editorial team said they were open to publishing the column at a later date, and indeed the article, entitled “Targeting Pakistan and Silencing the Critics” was made available on their website. Still, Pakistani media are saying that the embassy’s ability to block an article it found objectionable from a long-time critic of US policy is a sign of the enormous power the US wields in the nation.

Dr. Shireen Mazari, the author of the article, was interviewed on Iranian state media regarding what she called US censorship, and appeared to be not particularly surprised by the turn of events, though she insisted all the claims she made in the article also appeared in Western media sources, including Deutsche Presse-Agentur. She also vowed to continue her criticism of US policy, insisting “the Americans can’t gag me in my own country.”

Though Ambassador Patterson’s specific objections have not been made public, and she told The News not to publish her letter of complaint, it is widely assumed that Dr. Mazari’s references to Blackwater contractors being used on Pakistani soil was the source of the most vociferous objections.

A member of the opposition Tehreek-e Insaf party, Mazari was the director of a top foreign policy think-tank funded by the Pakistani government, though she was eventually removed from the position after what many in the Pakistani media believe was growing US pressure and warnings from the embassy that so long as she held the position they would treat her comments as official policy.

Following the furore over Dr. Mazari’s column, the Pakistani government officially denied that any Blackwater personnel were in the country, and insisted rules were in place to prevent such a thing happening. The US embassy declined comment, but last month former CIA officials revealed that the company had in fact been providing security on a Pakistani air base from which CIA drones were flown.


September 7, 2009 -- US Ambassador Accuses Pakistan’s Jang Media Group of Endangering Americans
August 21, 2009 -- CIA’s Ties With Blackwater Run Deep
September 24, 2009 -- US Mulls Increasing Drone Strikes in Pakistan