Religious Persecution in India

Persecution in Venezuela

The White House is watching you…

Porto Alegre, August 6, 2009

by Luís Henrique Vieira

This blog could not run out of the most important issue of the blogosphere today.

No one could ever imagine a situation like this. Yes, it is happening. It is happening in the most important democracy in the world. It is happening in the term of the most popular president of the world.

It is there in the website of the White House to check with anyone’s eyes: “There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care.  These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation.  Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov“. (http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Facts-Are-Stubborn-Things/)

Watch out, Barack Obama, you are not the owner of the USA or the world. It seems you think you are.

Equal friends?

Chávez backers protest TV station in Venezuela

Associated Press

CARACAS, Venezuela – Government supporters protested Monday outside the studios of Globovision, the only television station stridently against Hugo Chávez remaining on the open airwaves.

The protesters, riding motorcycles and waving the flags of the radical pro-Chávez party, tossed tear gas canisters at the station. The channel said some assailants fired shots at the studios in Caracas, and it broadcast video showing clouds of tear gas outside the building as employees ran for cover.

Globovision’s director, Alberto Federico Ravell, condemned the violence and urged Chávez to control his backers.

Justice Minister Tareck El Aissami also condemned “this violent action against a television channel” and said authorities were investigating.

The action came two days after 34 radio stations targeted by the Chávez government were forced off the air in what critics say is a campaign to muzzle his foes.

And, on Monday, one of Chávez’s leftist allies, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, announced that many radio and TV frequencies there will revert to the state over what he called irregularities in their licenses. He gave no specifics.

Globovision is facing multiple investigations that could force it off the air.

The craziness of Ahmadinejad

The craziness after the forced reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not suprise at all. For those who paid attention in his government it was a certain occasion that Ahmadinejad would steal the election.

This is the kind of guy who never recognize a mistake or the possibility to be wrong. The peaceful outrage of iranian people, according to the state TV, resulted in 7 people died. It is just the beggining.

N. Korea Convicts 2 U.S. Journalists

By Blaine Harden
The Washington Post

TOKYO, June 8 — A North Korean court sentenced two U.S. journalists to 12 years in a labor camp Monday, as the government of Kim Jong Il continued to ratchet up tension with the United States and its neighbors.

Laura Ling and Euna Lee, television reporters detained in March along North Korea’s border with China, received harsher sentences than many outsiders had expected. But several experts in South Korea predicted that talks will begin soon to negotiate their release.

The U.S. government said it was “deeply concerned.”

The five-day trial of Ling and Lee was held in Pyongyang’s Central Court, the top court in North Korea. Outside observers were not allowed.

“The trial confirmed the grave crime they committed against the Korean nation and their illegal border crossing,” the official Korean Central News Agency said. It said the court sentenced “each of them to 12 years of reform through labor.”

The “grave crime,” however, was not explained. The reporters had earlier been accused of unspecified “hostile acts.” Legal analysts in South Korea said the North Korean court may have sentenced the women to the maximum of 10 years of hard labor for hostile acts and added on two years for illegal entry.

The detention and sentencing of the two journalists has coincided with — and become entangled in — a series of provocative acts by North Korea that this spring have angered its neighbors, its historical allies and much of the world.

The heavily armed, secretive state — in the throes of a succession process, as the country’s ailing leader prepares to hand power over to his youngest son — launched a long-range missile in April, detonated a nuclear bomb in May and has renounced the truce that ended the Korean War.

On Monday, North Korea warned fishermen and boat captains to stay away from the country’s east coast, Japan’s coast guard said. The North is planning to launch several medium-range missiles from the region, according to reports in the South Korean press.
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The U.S. government, which last year lifted some sanctions against North Korea and delivered large amounts of food aid, has become increasingly exasperated by the North’s behavior. President Barack Obama, who came into office saying he was prepared to meet personally with Kim Jong Il, said Saturday that “we are going to take a very hard look at how we move forward on these issues.”

Led by the United States and Japan, the U.N. Security Council is considering new sanctions against North Korea for exploding a nuclear device in defiance of a U.N. resolutions.

If the sanctions are approved, North Korea threatened Monday that it would retaliate with “extreme” measures. “Our response would be to consider sanctions against us as a declaration of war and answer it with extreme hard line measures,” the North’s official Rodong Sinmun newspaper said in a commentary.

“We are deeply concerned by the reported sentencing of the two American citizen journalists by North Korean authorities, and we are engaged through all possible channels to secure their release,” State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said early Monday.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Sunday the charges against “these young women are absolutely without merit or foundation.”

The verdict cannot be appealed and is final, officials in Seoul have said.

But there is a widespread expectation, at least in South Korea, that the journalists will be released when the North Korean government decides the time is right to talk again to the United States.

In the past, North Korea has released Americans who have entered the country illegally. The government also has a history of brinkmanship, turning confrontation and bluster into negotiations that reward it with food, fuel and other concessions.

“The verdict does not mean much, since they will get released,” said Andrei Lankov, an expert on North Korea who teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. “Unfortunately, right now the North Koreans want to keep tensions high, so it will take many months and perhaps a year or more before the Pyongyang authorities will decide that it’s time to make some friendly gesture to Washington.”

Other North Korean observers were more hopeful of a quicker resolution.

“Now that they are sentenced, we can think and talk about making arrangements for their release,” said Han Seung-soo, a former South Korean foreign minister. “It is ironic but with the sentencing we now have something more tangible to negotiate about.”

Ling and Lee were working for Current TV, a cable and Web network co-founded by former vice president Al Gore, when they were detained March 17 by North Korean soldiers along the border with China. The reporters were working on a story about North Koreans who flee the country, but the circumstances of their arrest are not clear.
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The State Department last week did not rule out the possibility that Gore may fly to North Korea to negotiate the reporters’ release. A spokeswomen for Gore contacted by the Associated Press declined to comment.

Ten years ago, Bill Richardson, then a member of Congress and now governor of New Mexico, traveled to Pyongyang to negotiate the release of an American who got drunk and swam across a river into North Korea. Richardson, too, said last week that he did not expect negotiations to begin for the journalists’ release until after their trial ended.

“The sentence can be seen as an indication that North Korea is now expecting a very prominent envoy to come for the negotiations over their release,” said Hong Jung-wook, a lawmaker from South Korea’s ruling party.
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In appearances last week on U.S. television, the families of the women broke months of silence and offered public apologies to the North Korean government for whatever acts the journalists may have committed.

“If at any point the girls went into North Korea, then we apologize on their behalf,” said Lisa Ling, who noted that she had recently received a telephone call from her sister Laura in Pyongyang and that she sounded “extremely scared.”

Laura Ling suffers from an ulcer, her sister said. Lee has a four-year-old daughter.

Both women have been allowed to telephone their families in the United States, which is highly unusual in a state that seals away political prisoners in concentration camps, sometimes for life, without any contact with relatives.

Ling and Lee have been visited three times by the Swedish ambassador, and have been allowed to send and receive letters through him. The United States does not have diplomatic relations with North Korea.

The women have told their families that they have been treated “fairly” while in North Korea.

Despite the sentence to “reform through labor” analysts said that Ling and Lee would probably not be sent to a labor camp where they would work with other North Korean prisoners.

There are believed to be about 200,000 political prisoners in North Korean camps, where former inmates say conditions are often brutal, hunger is widespread and attempts to escape usually result in a public execution.

“They are very unlikely to be sent to a real prison, since there they would learn too much about things outsiders are not supposed to know,” said Lankov, who has written several books about North Korea and studied there as a student from what was then the Soviet Union. “I am pretty sure that the authorities will keep them in relative comfort, in conditions far better than the average prison, but still perhaps tough for the average American.”

Writer of book against Obama got arrested in Kenya

The american writer of a book against Barack Obama was arrested last tuesday (10.09) at Nairobi (Kenya), where he wanted to present his work. “Jerome Corsi was arrested and is at the moment on the building of the service of imigration”, a police´s source said to the international news agencies.

Corsi was going to present his book at a hotel in Kenya. Obama´s father borned at Kenya. Corsi announced that he will expose “the secret relations between Barack Obama and kenyan leaders”. 

The kenyan police said that the arrest has no conexion with the book. “Like any other person, we should check the documents”, said an official.

EU starts kind of censorship

Porto Alegre, September 4, 2008

by Luís Henrique Vieira

The EU (European Union) parliament took the initiative against “gender stereotypes” in advertising and “to regulate” the protrayal of women in the media in general to “promote balanced and balanced portrayal of women by the media”. The new was told yesterday by the blog Ranting Kraut. Check the text from the source transcripted below.

MEPs vote to confront sexist advertising

 

LONDON – The European Parliament is calling on member states to tackle the issue of gender stereotypes in advertising through public information campaigns.

An EU report, drafted by the institution’s Women’s Rights Committee, was adopted by a large majority in the European Parliament today.

 

It pushes for education initiatives to be introduced that will “combat the structurally embedded stereotype images of women and men we find all around us.”

The report argues that gender stereotypes are used in advertising to the “financial gain of big business” and that women have “suffered” by being “represented as objects.” 

It also calls on member states to monitor ad campaigns and to remove “stereotyped and degrading” images of women from advertising while introducing regulatory measures to “promote balanced and diverse portrayals of women by the media”.

The report recommends especially close policing of the use of nudity and noticeably thin women in ad campaigns. 

Report author Eva-Britt Svensson also highlighted digital media as being of particular concern, especially the portrayal of women in the majority of video games and their supporting advertising.

Transcripted from http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/843614/MEPs-vote-confront-sexist-advertising/

U.S. Journalist Arrested in Nigeria

by Will Connors – The New York Times

LAGOS, Nigeria — An American documentary filmmaker and his translator working in the volatile Delta region of Nigeria have been arrested and accused of spying, according to Nigerian government officials and media watchdog groups.

Andrew Berends, a New York-based freelance journalist who was working on a film about the oil-producing Delta region, was arrested on Sunday and held for 36 hours before being released. Mr. Berends’s passport and equipment were confiscated, and he was made to report back to the State Security Service early Tuesday morning. His translator, Samuel George, was also arrested.

“When you come to a security area with no clearance it’s against the rules,” said a military spokesman, Major Sagir Musa, who confirmed that Mr. Berends had been arrested and handed over to the security service. “He had no security clearance. It is for his own safety. If something happens to him it’s an embarrassment to the security agencies. It’s not normal times in the area right now. The S.S.S. will investigate him and once they are satisfied they will release him, God willing.”

Mr. Berends contacted both Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists Monday night, and both advocacy groups condemned his detention.

“Berends was arrested just for doing his job and no other reason,” Reporters Without Borders said in a statement Tuesday. “It is absurd for the authorities to think that, by arresting him and his interpreter, they can conceal the economic and ecological disaster unfolding in the Niger Delta.”

Despite its oil riches, the Niger Delta is a desperately poor and increasingly lawless part of the country where wealth is siphoned away by corrupt officials. Militants demand a greater share of the area’s oil resources and claim to be fighting on behalf of the impoverished residents, but also appear to be engaging in many criminal and opportunistic acts of violence. Hundreds of foreign workers and wealthy Nigerians have been kidnapped for ransom, and oil theft is rampant.

Several other foreign journalists and filmmakers have been detained while working in the region in recent years. In April, four members of a Seattle-based film crew were arrested while filming in the Delta and held for six days on spying charges. In May, a CNN journalist was detained while in the main Delta city of Port Harcourt and questioned by the S.S.S. for five days before being released.

“The government probably knows the fellow’s real mission and that it has nothing to do with espionage, but they want to do it to discourage others from coming to report on the situation on the ground,” said Chris Alagoa of the Niger Delta Peace and Security Secretariat, a community organization in the region. “They shouldn’t report on things that aren’t true, but if they’re reporting objectively on the situation, the world and the Nigerian people have a right to know the truth. Hounding journalists and filmmakers who want to inform the public is in bad taste.”

While Nigeria has a significantly freer press than most other Africa nations, gathering information in the tumultuous Niger Delta is particularly difficult.

“We have one of the freest presses in Africa, but there are rules,” said Nwuke Ogbonna, Information Commissioner for Rivers State, of which Port Harcourt is the capital. As for Mr. Berends, he said, “He may have engaged in actions that are not in the national interests of this country. Whether that means spying or entering off-limits areas I can’t say. It’s for the security agents to determine whether this means he was spying.”

Mr. Berends had visited Nigeria on several occasions and had been in the country since April on this particular trip. He often ventured into the creeks of the Delta to film in local villages affected by oil drilling. Two weeks ago, Mr. Berends said he had nearly finished his work and was planning on returning to New York this month.

Chávez sends military to close radio-stations

Porto Alegre, August 22, 2008

The president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, sent soldiers to confiscate equipments from the radio-stations Rumbera Network and Llanera, both from Guarico. The radios now cannot broadcast. Chávez is acting in this state because the governor Eduardo Mannuit is a dissident from his government and his party, the PSUV (United Socialist Party of Venezuela). According to Chávez, the radios have political use.