by Editor on June 21, 2008
The Italian carmaker Fiat on Friday apologised to China for a television commercial (see below) starring United States actor Richard Gere that it acknowledged ”could disturb the sensibility of the Chinese people”.
The ad shows Gere, a long-time supporter of the Tibetan Independence Movement, drive the group’s new Lancia Delta model from Hollywood to Tibet, where he and a child dressed as a Buddhist monk plunge their hands into fresh snow.
The slogan that runs with the ad is ”The power to be different”.
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by Editor on February 8, 2008
Anglican Church leader Rowan Williams sparked open confrontation with the Labour government Thursday by suggesting that the introduction of some aspects of Islamic (sharia) law was “unavoidable” in Britain to promote social cohesion.
Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is also the head of the worldwide Anglican Church with more than 70 million members, said in a BBC interview that there needed to be a debate on whether the existing legal system could fulfil the demands of a “multi-faiths society.”
Responding swiftly to the call, a spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that while the application of sharia could be considered on a case-by-case basis, it was unacceptable that Islamic law should be used “as a justification for committing breaches of English law.”
“The Prime Minister believes that British law should apply in this country, based on British values,” said Brown’s spokesman.
However, Williams, known in Britain as the “thinking archbishop,” said an approach which simply said there was one law for everybody was “a bit of a danger.”
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by Editor on November 23, 2007
French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Friday claimed victory in the 10-day labour dispute over a pension reform as the strike called to protest the proposal appeared to be ending. “I promised this reform, and I have kept my promise,” Sarkozy said during a speech at the Elysee Palace. The French Finance Ministry has estimated that the strike cost France’s economy up to 4 billion euros (about 6 billion dollars).
The reform, which apparently deprives about 500,000 workers in the railway and energy sectors of some pension privileges, “could not be
postponed any longer,” Sarkozy said, and paid tribute to travelers and commuters who, he said, were “taken hostage” by the striking
workers. However, France-Info reported that most of the railway workers who voted to return to work were talking about a “suspension” of the strike, rather than a definitive end.
The end of the strike has been hailed as a huge success of Sarkozy by two heavyweights in the blogosphere: Glenn Reynolds and David Frum: the former today wrote of France’s Thatcher, citing an enthusiastic article on The New York Sun talking about “a first success of Sarkozy”; the latter today compared France’s president stance in this conflict to the firing of the airline controllers by Ronald Reagan in 1981. We fear that Reynolds and Frum are making a mistake.
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by Editor on August 25, 2007
The Chinese dissident blogger He Weihua has been confined in a psychiatric hospital in a detention his family blames on his criticism of the government, a press freedom group said Friday.
“It is unacceptable that the Chinese authorities use such methods to silence citizens who have just expressed their views peacefully online,” Reporters Without Borders said. “How can the authorities expect us to believe that a mentally ill person is capable of detailed investigative reporting?”
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by Editor on July 20, 2007
Italian Jewish leaders voiced satisfaction after the Vatican Secretary of State said that a Catholic prayer for the conversion of Jews could be eliminated from the recently re-introduced Latin Mass.
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, second only to the pope in the Vatican hierarchy, referred to recent polemics over the prayer on Wednesday, saying it could be removed and that this would “solve all the problems”.
Jewish organisations around the world expressed deep concern earlier this month when Benedict XVI brought back the Latin Mass which was largely abandoned by the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.
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by Editor on June 23, 2007
European Union leaders have reached agreement in Brussels on an outline of new guidelines to govern the 27-member bloc for drafting a new EU treaty to replace the bloc’s aborted constitution.
At dawn on Saturday they announced a compromise to delay until 2014 a new voting system that reduces Poland’s influence - the main stumbling bloc. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the drafting of the treaty will begin in coming months, with ratification by the end of 2007. She said the goal is to have the rulebook in place by 2009. The main obstacle had been Poland’s demand to keep its voting power - currently equal to that of Germany’s, even though its population is only half as large.
The new system - known as a “double majority” - will now be phased-in beginning in 2014 and fully implemented three years later.
Under this system, a 55% majority of EU countries with at least 65% of the bloc’s population will be required for a change to be approved.
Britain also got what it wanted: “The four essential things that we in the UK required in order to protect our position have all been obtained,” said Tony Blair at the end of his last EU summit as British prime minister.
“Those were first of all to make it absolutely clear that the charter on fundamental rights was not going to be justiciable in British courts or alter British law.”
Mr Blair also wanted to maintain national control over foreign policy, justice and home affairs.
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by Editor on June 8, 2007
Prosecutors have charged environmental activist Wu Lihong with extortion from industrial plants that he accused of polluting Taihu Lake in eastern China’s Jiangsu province, state media said on Wednesday. The prosecutors in Jiangsu’s Yixing city accused Wu, who was once nominated as one of China’s top 10 environmentalists, of extorting 55,000 yuan (6,875 dollars) by threatening to expose the plants’ pollution, the official Xinhua news agency said. The agency quoted prosecutors as saying Wu’s diary listed “blackmail targets and showed amounts of money he had planned to extort from each factory or enterprise.”
The Yixing court had not set a date for the trial of Wu, 39, who had fought for years against the pollution of Taihu.
Water supplies from the lake had to be cut to 2 million people in nearby Wuxi city in late May because excessive pollution had promoted the growth of a pungent blue-green algae.
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by Editor on May 25, 2007
The following are our news picks in the last 7 days:
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by Editor on May 18, 2007
The Spanish government is being denounced by Bloggers United for Cuban Liberty in a new advertising campaign aimed at educating the public about oppression in Castro’s Cuba.
The multimedia campaign, unveiled today, consists of bus shelter panels that target areas near the Spanish consulate and the Spanish
Cultural Center, both in Coral Gables, Florida. An online component, launching today, will steer readers searching for certain information about Cuba and Spain to BUCL.org.
“This effort marks the first of several coordinated activities aimed at exposing those countries, companies and institutions that aid and abet the Castro regime in oppressing the Cuban people,” said Henry Gomez, the spokesman for Bloggers United for Cuban Freedom. Gomez continues: “Spanish businesses are dealing directly with the Castro regime and are helping perpetuate Cuba’s totalitarian system by complying with that country’s unfair labor laws and enforcing an apartheid system in which Cubans are not allowed to use the same facilities as tourists. From the Spanish perspective, there is no reason to pursue change in Cuba, they are benefiting from exploitation of Cuban workers and would like to see the status quo perpetuated.”
The Socialist Spanish government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has been leading an effort to normalize relations between the European Union and Cuba. Those relations have been strained since the Castro regime’s crackdown on and jailing of 75 dissidents and independent journalists in 2003. In April of this year, Spain’s foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos visited Cuba and met with Raul Castro, while noticeably snubbing Cuban dissidents that had requested a meeting with him.
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by Editor on May 4, 2007
Three weeks ago, we wrote about Captchas, those barriers to site accessibility, preventing blind or visually impaired users from accessing a protected resource. But not only. These captchas also create barriers for the much larger number of people with learning disabilities involving text recognition (the visual perceptual problems often casually referred to as “dyslexia“). A reader of ours asked Blogsome: how can I disable visual captchas, allowing my visually impaired readers to comment on my Blogsome site? This was the answer. That is, the answer was: “Is there anybody blind, out there? Well, that is not our problem, sorry guys“. This is not the answer, dear Blogsome admin.
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