Obama has UK spend over $8 million to monitor Julian Assange

"Obama is effectively rewriting the Constitution. The First Amendment has no exception for an embarrassed military or an embarrassed White House. What part of 'no' does President Barack Obama not understand?"

Julian Assange

WikiLeaks

The Brits are right at the side of Comrade Obama in creating an authoritarian state.

The Conservative Party government of Britain has spent over $8 million on monitoring the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where Julian Assange has been holed up for 20 months. His stay is having a knock-on effect on British taxpayers, reportedly costing them over $16,000 a day.

In response to a Freedom of Information request filed by the Huffington Post UK, the London Metropolitan Police revealed the financial consequences of Assange’s stay in the Ecuadorian Embassy. The WikiLeaks founder entered the Embassy in June 2012 in a desperate plea to avoid his extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over accusations of sexual assault reports RT News.


Conservative UK PM David Cameron is
acting as Obama's enforcer thug to crush
freedom of speech and of the Internet
and printed press.

London Police have maintained round-the-clock surveillance on the Ecuadorian Embassy since Assange’s arrival, which cost a total of 5.3 million pounds ($8.3 million) between June 2012 and December 2013. According to data released by the MET Police, around 900,000 pounds ($1.5 million) were paid out in overtime wages to officers.

If Assange stays in the Embassy building until 2022 – when the statute of limitations on his extradition request expires – it could cost the London police about 36.5 million pounds ($60 million), reports the Huffington Post UK.

Assange has essentially been imprisoned in the Ecuadorian Embassy as UK police have resolved to arrest him and extradite him should he set foot outside the building. Moreover, Assange believes that once in Sweden, the authorities would hand him over to the US, where he could potentially be tried for espionage in connection with the thousands of classified diplomatic cables divulged by WikiLeaks.

At the beginning of this month Swedish MPs urged prosecutors to visit Assange’s de facto home in Ecuador’s London embassy to question him, arguing that the whistleblower will not come to Sweden voluntarily.

"It is in the interest of everyone involved in this process that the prosecutor reaches a conclusion to either file charges or dismiss the case, and it is obvious that Assange will not come to Sweden," Staffan Danielsson, from the Center Party, said in a statement.

However, Swedish prosecutors have criticized MPs for overstepping the mark and interfering in the course of justice.

"The fact that an MP openly questions a prosecutor's decision- making in an individual case is remarkable," said Anders Perklev, the Swedish Prosecutor-General. "It violates the foundation of power division between the legislative and the executive authorities in Sweden."

Assange has been accused of rape by one woman and charges of sexual assault by another in connection with a trip to Sweden in 2010. The whistleblower denies the charges against him.

A British Police State
The so-called "Conservative" government of Britain has spent over $8 million, or $16,000 a day, to imprison Internet newspaper publisher Julian Assange inside the embassy of Ecuador on the orders of Comrade Obama.

US Calls Julian Assange 'Enemy Of State'

"The US military has designated Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as enemies of the United States - the same legal category as the al-Qaeda terrorist network and the Taliban insurgency. Declassified US Air Force counter-intelligence documents, released under US freedom-of-information laws, reveal that military personnel who contact WikiLeaks or WikiLeaks supporters may be at risk of being charged with "communicating with the enemy", a military crime that carries a maximum sentence of death.

Authoritarianism
Those who dare to tell the truth must flee to other nations or hide inside the
embassies of the few countries willing to defy the Anointed One.

China Censors Internet Reports Calling Beijing 'Unlivable'

Communist Internet Censorship

• A Communist Internet Big Brother is watching everything you do and say.  Do not think original thoughts and definitely do not tell the truth online.  Telling the truth tends to upset the proletariat masses.

Communist China's Internet censors last Thursday deleted online references to an official pollution report which described the capital city as nearly unfit for human habitation, while state media tried to limit the damage to Beijing's international image.

The English-language tabloid Global Times newspaper, which has close ties to the ruling Chinese Communist Party, quoted one of the report's authors as saying that the media had "exaggerated" its findings.

 

The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences report, released this week, ranked Beijing second to last in the environmental category in an index of 40 world cities reports Radio Free Asia.

 

 

"The pollution index nears extreme levels, and is near a level that is no longer livable for human beings," the report concluded.

 

In the overall ranking, Tokyo, London, Paris, New York and Singapore took the top five places, while Shanghai and Beijing ranked 21st and 31st respectively, based on factors such as economic vitality, social stability, culture, urban management, ecology, and city space.

 

The Chinese government has announced a series of measures aimed at combating pollution, including the smog problem, which is known colloquially as "airpocalypse," including a 10 billion yuan (U.S. $1.65 billion) anti-pollution fund announced by China's cabinet, the State Council, this week.

 

The fund will offer rewards to local governments that clean up their act, and is targeted at reducing harmful particulate matter air pollution like PM 2.5.

 

China’s smog has brought large swathes of the country to a standstill, particularly in the north, forcing airports to cancel thousands of flights, schools to close and reducing visibility on city streets.

.

Beijing plans to shutter hundreds of polluting factories under new pollution rules that come into effect on March 1, official media reported.

 

 

The Devastating Effects of Pollution in China

We went to the single most polluted place on earth, the coal-mining

town of Linfen in Shanxi Province, China, where kids play in dirty rivers

and the sun sets early behind a thick curtain of smog.

 

 

 

 

China's toxic smog problem

Dangerous smog blankets many Chinese cities. CNN's David McKenzie

speaks with one man benefiting from it.

 

 

 

 

 

Little hope

 

But Zhengzhou-based environmental activist Cui Cheng said he didn't place much hope in a government that was so frightened of a scientific report.

 

"If they get so worried about an article written by experts, as if all hell is going to break loose, then there's not much hope they'll be able to fix the smog problem," he said.

 

He said the new guidelines were still only on paper.

 

"I feel there is still too little in the way of a truly strategic shift in the industrial economy," Cui said.  He called on the government to release further evidence detailing measures taken to reduce the smog.

.

"For example, exactly how much the oil industry has invested in cleaning up, and what the results of that were, and how much smog they now currently contribute," he said.

 

"They must give people some answers."

 

 

 

Exodus

 

The widespread pollution and food safety scandals may be behind a mass exodus of China's millionaires to cleaner lands.

 

Mainland Chinese applicants made up 91 percent of applications for Australia's investment visa scheme since it was launched in 2012, recent reports said.

 

And Canada is wading through a backlog of 57,000 applications for similar emigration papers from people in China.

 

A Beijing resident who gave only his surname Zhao said many ordinary Chinese would also like to leave.

 

"Put it this way; I've been planning to emigrate for a long time now, because I can't stand it any more," Zhao said. "It's like living in the middle of poison gas."

 

He described the scene outside his home in the suburb of Tongzhou as a bluish haze made up of industrial emissions.

 

"It's definitely not fit for human habitation," Zhao said. "There's no doubt at all about that."

 

He said had become visibly worse two years ago. "Now it's really, really serious," Zhao said. "And it's continuing to get worse."

 

Northern pollution

 

Around 600 million people are affected by air pollution and smog days that plague northern China, according to a July report from China's State Development and Reform Commission.

 

And a recent report by the American National Academy of Sciences found that residents of northern China could be losing five years of life expectancy compared with those in the south, which until recently has enjoyed better air quality.

Bing censoring search results for users in the U.S.

Microsoft Censors Your Searches

• American English and Chinese language queries for terms such as ‘Dalai Lama’ return radically different results on the Microsoft search engine for Bing and Yahoo.
• In censoring searches by the public, Microsoft is acting as an agent of the Chinese Communist Party.

Microsoft’s search engine Bing appears to be censoring information for Chinese language users in the US in the same way it filters results in mainland China.

Searches first conducted by anti-censorship campaigners at FreeWeibo, a tool that allows uncensored search of Chinese blogs, found that Bing returns radically different results in the US for English and Chinese language searches on a series of controversial terms.

These include Dalai Lama, June 4 incident (how the Chinese refer to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989), Falun Gong and FreeGate, a popular internet workaround for government censorship reports the UK Guardian.

A Chinese language search for the Dalai Lama (达赖喇嘛) on Bing is lead by a link to information on a documentary compiled by CCTV, China’s state-owned broadcaster. This is followed by two entries from Baidu Baike, China’s heavily censored Wikipedia rival run by the search engine Baidu.

The results are similar on Yahoo, whose search is powered by Bing.

Search results on Bing for ‘Dalai Lama’ in Chinese.
Photograph: Guardian

Running the same search in English on Bing generates a list headed by the Dalai Lama’s own website then links to his Wikipedia page and news reports, including one from Phayul.com, a pro-Tibetan independence website. The English search results page also shows images of the Dalai Lama, unlike the Chinese search.

Search results on Bing for ‘Dalai Lama’ in English.
Photograph: Guardian

Google, by contrast, generates broadly similar results for both English and Chinese searches. For Dalai Lama in Chinese it offers two Wikipedia pages as the top results followed by a series of news reports, one from Tibet.

A search on Bing in Chinese for Bo Xilai (薄熙来), the former high-flying Chinese government official now serving life imprisonment for corruption, shows equally different results. The top search result is again Baidu Baike. Wikipedia is the third entry. There are no western reports on the politician on the front page. In English the search is topped by Wikipedia, then by stories from the New York Times, BBC and Financial Times.

A Google search in Chinese starts with the Wikipedia page and then several news articles chronicling his downfall from sources including the BBC and Voice of America.

China heavily censors the internet for its own citizens, blocking website content and monitoring the internet access of individuals. Major US firms including Twitter are blocked, while others including Google have clashed repeatedly with the authorities over censorship.

The information was first collected by censorship blog Greatfire.org. Author Charlie Smith said he had originally discovered the discrepancies while checking for information on his own website, FreeWeibo.com, a site for anonymously searching Chinese social media.

“The first thing we noticed was our index page was not showing up. It specifically did not show the homepage. But it was in Google,” he said.

“It’s a bit crazy. Any Chinese person who is searching in Chinese from overseas is being treated as if they have the same rights as a resident of mainland China. So we won’t show them the accurate search results if they search for Dalai Lama. What you get is state controlled propaganda,” he said. “Except they don’t tell you the results have been censored. If you were in China they would at least tell you that.”

“We thought there had been a mistake so we wrote to Microsoft and they said ‘no comment,’” he said.

Microsoft did not return calls for comment from the Guardian.

Bing accounts for a small percentage of search in China but has been building up its web services in the country. Microsoft is in the middle of hiring 1,000 new employees to build up its services in China.

Islamist Turkey Passes Internet Censorship Bill

Demonstrators hold placards during a protest against Internet censorship in Istanbul.

Fighting Fascism

The Islamist Turkish government is frightened to

death of Internet freedom

The Islamist dominated Turkish Parliament adopted late Feb. 5 a new Internet bill that has been harshly criticized for implementing measures that could potentially further restrict access to the web.

The measures were adopted by the General Assembly after a tense session during which opposition MPs blasted the bill as "censorship."

The bill includes controversial arrangements such as granting the president of the Directorate of Telecommunication (TİB) the authority to block access to sites and pages on his own initiative, in the event of appeals concerning violation of the right to private life. Such a decision would not require approval from a court reports the Turkish Weekly.

 

Among the sites blocked or fined under the existing law were video sharing services YouTube and Vimeo, blogging tool Wordpress and several online media outlets.

 The new arrangements have also caused serious concerns as they would mandate data retention of between one and two years.  (That way the government and spy on you retroactively.)

 

Clashes in Turkey over Internet censorship

 

 

 

 

 

 

Turks Marching for Internet Freedom

 

 

When you came to power you talked of enhancing democracy in Turkey – now you are trying to implement fascism,” opposition MP Hasan Oren charged.

 

"This is against the constitution,” fellow opposition legislator Umut Oran said. “Bans like this exist in times of coups and have not been able to conceal any corruption."

 The government maintains that the draft bill is designed to “protect the family, children and youth from items on the Internet that encourage drug addiction, sexual abuse and suicide.” It says similar laws exist in Western countries and rejects comparisons to China, notorious for its drastic censorship of the Internet.

The bill also comes as the government faces massive graft allegations and strong criticism for having undertaken works on a judicial bill that increased the executive’s grasp over the judiciary. Many leaks of alleged corruption evidence have been posted online in recent weeks.
.

 The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said the new powers for the TİB mean it would be able to "gather communications data about all Internet users without any legal limits or restrictions," with users "never ... able to know when and how this information is gathered."

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) also released a statement warning that the measures on will further undermine press freedoms if it passes into law, describing the move as a "slide into Internet authoritarianism" in a country that is the "the leading jailer of journalists worldwide."

Reporters Without Borders said the aim is "to reinforce cyber-censorship, government control of the Internet and surveillance."

The Turkish Industry and Business Association (TÜSİAD) was also critical, saying the proposals "conflict with the principles of checks and balances" and would increase censorship and deter investors.

Last week, Umut Oran, deputy leader of the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), was ordered by the TİB to remove a parliamentary question from his website.

The question, which the media was also told to not report on had referred to purported recordings of phone calls involving the prime minister, his son and a minister.

Also see RT News

Democrats ban free speech in Wisconsin city

 

Freedom to Speak Out Made Illegal

• Leftist Loons in Campbell, Wisconsin are directly attacking the 1st Amendment rights of anti-Obama protesters to free speech.  They’ve enacted a ban to prevent a Conservative group from gathering on a pedestrian bridge where the public would be able to see their message.

Two tea party protesters have sued the town of Campbell in federal court challenging an ordinance that prohibits signs on a pedestrian bridge across Interstate 90.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court on behalf of Greg Luce and Nicholas Newman, names the town as well as police Chief Tim Kelemen and Officer Nathan Casper.



The ordinance, passed in October, violates Luce and Newman’s rights to free speech and free assembly, their attorneys argue in the complaint. The plaintiffs also are seeking a temporary injunction to stop enforcement of the ordinance reports the La Crosse Tribune.

Tea party supporters first used the overpass on Aug. 6 as part of a national movement calling for the impeachment of President Barack Obama. Citing public safety, the town board passed two ordinances banning the display of “signs, flags, banners, pennants, streamers, balloons” within 100 feet of the bridge.

Four protesters received $132.90 citations for holding flags and a large wooden cross on the overpass during a Dec. 8 protest.

According to the complaint, Luce took part in an Oct. 24 demonstration in which protesters wore T-shirts that together spelled “IMPEACH” on one side and “OBAMA” on the other. He left when threatened with citation by police.

Newman stood on the overpass three days later holding an American flag and was issued a ticket for violating the ordinance.

Erin Mersino, trial counsel for the nonprofit Thomas More Law Center, which supports “America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and moral values,” said the ordinance in effect bans the expression of ideas in what would traditionally be a public forum — a sidewalk.

“It’s amazing that the government has overreached in this fashion,” she said.



Freedom of Speech - Always a Radical Act.

Alan Dershowitz Says IRS attack “Smacks of Selective Prosecution”

Alan Dershowitz

Wake up and smell the Fascism

• A few select Liberals are starting to speak up about the Obama/IRS Fascist crackdown on the Bill of Rights guarantee of freedom of speech.
• Question of the Day - Where the fuck are the Republicans?  The GOP leadership should drag the press corps to the steps of the FBI headquarters.  Speaker Boehner should then aim a bullhorn at the building and demand to know why the FBI Director refuses to interview the Tea Party groups attacked by Obama's IRS.  But you first need to believe in something in order to get passionate, and the GOP believes in almost nothing.

Alan Dershowitz may be phasing out his days as a Harvard law professor. But that doesn’t mean he’s stepping off the pedestal.

His latest topic of concern: Dinesh D’Souza.  Dershowitz thinks the federal campaign fraud charges against the conservative filmmaker and author are an example of “selective prosecution.”

Weighing in on the case Friday in an interview with Law Blog, Dershowitz was withering in his opinion of the Manhattan U.S. attorney office’s prosecution of D’Souza, who pleaded not guilty last week to making illegal campaign contributions to a Republican U.S. Senate candidate in 2012 reports the Wall Street Journal.

“The idea of charging him with a felony for this doesn’t sound like a proper exercise of prosecutorial discretion,”  Dershowitz said. “I can’t help but think that [D'Souza's] politics have something to do with it. . . . It smacks of selective prosecution.”

The professor, though, said he has a high regard for Manhattan U.S. attorney Preet Bharara, whose office under his watch has won corruption convictions against nearly a dozen Democratic lawmakers in New York. “I’m a big of supporter. I think he’s doing a great job, but this is a mistake,”  Dershowitz said.

A spokesperson for Bharara’s office did not have an immediate comment.

D’Souza’s polemical 2012 film “2016: Obama’s America” — which is highly critical of the nation’s Democratic president — ranks among the highest grossing documentaries of all time.

SHOCK - Ukraine threatens to outlaw praying to God

"Nobody can forbid people to pray. Only

Satan does not want people to pray."

The Ukrainian government has threatened to outlaw the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church for holding prayer services for opposition protesters occupying Kiev's central square.

The culture ministry on Monday sent a letter to the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, accusing its priests of "breaking the law" by holding religious services outside a place of worship.

The Church's priests, along with those of the Orthodox Church loyal to the Kiev Patriarchate, hold open-air religious services several times a day on Kiev's Independence Square, known locally as the Maidan reports Agence France-Presse.

"The breach of this law could lead to legal proceedings to put an end to the activities" of the Church, said a scanned version of the letter published by the opposition news website Ukrainska Pravda.

The Ukraine is split by language and culture.
See our recent article:
'Hang the Commie' - A Revolution in the Ukraine

The square has been occupied since late November by protesters who are challenging President Viktor Yanukovych's U-turn on a landmark pact with the European Union in favour of closer ties with Russia.

Two tents erected on the square are used as places of worship, where protesters pray, go for confession and even have their children christened.

"For the first time since the independence of Ukraine, we have been put on our guard. We have de facto been warned that they could deprive our Church of its legal status," Shevchuk told reporters on Monday.

"We thought that the prosecution of priests was a thing of the past."

The government warning has sparked anger among believers.

"It is illegal, it is immoral. Nobody can forbid people to pray. Only Satan does not want people to pray," said Pavlo, 52, as he came out of one of the tents on Tuesday.

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, also known as the Uniate Church, follows Orthodox traditions but is loyal to the Vatican. It was banned in the Soviet era but has become the third largest confession in Ukraine since the country's independence in 1991.

The Church now has around 5.5 million followers in Ukraine, around 12 percent of its population of 46 million, most of them living in the western regions. There are also around 1.5 believers in Ukrainian diasporas in Europe, the United States and Australia.

Buckwheat attack in Ukraine parliament

Opposition deputies throw buckwheat at deputy Viktor Pylypyshyn who they accuse of pandering for votes by giving pensioners "food sets" of buckwheat and cooking oil before the elections to secure their votes.

The parliament's speaker, Volodymyr Rybak, was forced to open the parliamentary session from a regular deputy's seat as opposition lawmakers continued to occupy the podium.

Crowds carry a flag of imprisoned Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.

Islamist Turkey Cracks Downs on Internet Freedom

Turkish Doctor Association denounces state violence against protesters.
See Islamic Invitation Turkey.

A Turkish Islamic Police State

Now the Islamist Turkish government is tightening

its grip on the Internet.

Turkey is seeking to increase control over internet access at a time when the government is also tightening its grip on the country’s legal institutions in response to a corruption scandal.

 

A legislative proposal put forward by the ruling AK party would give the transport and communication minister the power to block websites deemed to infringe privacy, as well as compelling internet service providers to retain information of their customers’ movements on the net.

The measure, attached to an omnibus bill, increasing its chances of passage, would also require ISPs to restrict access to proxy sites, which can allow users to circumvent censorship reports the Financial Times.

Turkey already has internet filters intended to protect children and made 1,673 requests for Google to remove material from the web in the first six months of last year – more than three times any other country – although most of its requests were turned down.
 

But some critics have alleged that the legislative initiative is part of a general trend in which the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister, is concentrating more power in the wake of a corruption investigation that has targeted a host of figures connected to the government, including four former ministers and Mr Erdogan’s own son, Bilal.

“These are politically motivated measures to curb the free flow of information on the internet even further in Turkey,” said Yaman Akdeniz, a law professor at Istanbul’s Bilgi University. “Looking at the current political climate, it is primarily for controlling the leaking of videos and WikiLeaks kind of documents.”

Last week, the government proposed legislation that would increase the justice ministry’s powers over the council that supervises Turkey’s judges and prosecutors - a move that the council’s acting chairman said, on behalf of a majority of its members, was unconstitutional and violates the separation of powers. Violence broke out at a discussion of these measures on Saturday, with a ruling party MP aiming a kick at a senior judge’s head. On Sunday,  Erdogan criticised the judge who was attacked in the brawl, calling him not a lawyer but a “militant”.

An Islamist Internet Attack
A slow motion Islamist Revolution has been going on in Turkey for many years.  Hundreds of military officers have been jailed, press freedom crushed and Islamism re-introduced.
See our story Islamist coup in Turkey is going at full power

The government has also removed hundreds of police officers from their posts in the weeks since the corruption inquiry began on December 17.  Erdogan has attacked the probe as a “judicial coup” and a “modern coup, staged by friends” – a reference to the movement of Fethullah Gulen, a preacher and former ally who has broken with the AKP and has many followers in the police, prosecution service and judiciary.
.
While AKP officials says Gulenists in Turkey’s legal institutions are using the investigation as part of a feud against Mr Erdogan, the massive shifts of personnel in the police and among the prosecutors handling the case have made it harder for it to progress or for new lines of inquiry to be opened.

With hostilities intensifying between the AKP and the Gulenists, expectations had been growing that further revelations of alleged corrupt behaviour could be leaked on the internet. In recent years, a number of recordings involving high profile figures in Turkish public life have mysteriously appeared on the web.

However, the new legislative proposal on the internet could allow the government to shut down access to such videos.

Ankara’s push for greater powers has also raised concerns in Washington and Brussels. “The US supports the desire of the Turkish people for a legal system . . . where no one is above the law and where allegations against public figures are investigated impartially,” said Jen Psaki, state department spokeswoman, last week in the Obama administration’s latest expression of exasperation with Erdogan. “We’ve expressed our concerns about some of the events that are happening directly, publicly and privately, and we’ll continue to do that.”

Police tear gas & water cannon Turkish secularists

Turkish police use tear gas and water cannons to try to break up a demonstration by tens of thousands of pro-secular protesters, but the march to mark the founding of the Turkish republic went on in defiance of a government ban.

The celebration of the founding of the Turkish republic has in the past few years become a symbol of the divide between Prime Minister Recep Erdogan's elected, Islamic-leaning government and its opponents who fear the country's secular traditions are in danger. 

Police have arrested a number of journalists, in a crackdown
on an alleged "seditious" secularist network.

A Greater Islamist Turkey
The map above was distributed "accidentally" to students by the Turkish Department of Education.  The map shows an enhanced Greater Turkey absorbing the nation of Cypress, along with parts of Iraq, Iran, Georgia, Armenia, Bulgaria and Greece.  (for more)

Internet Porn Filters Backed By Conservatives

One man's "porn" in another man's freedom.

Conservative Internet Porn Filters

• The British Conservative Party is on a rampage to tighten Big Brother's grip on the free flow of Internet information and images with special "filters" under the control of government.
• Adults are to be treated like children as the parent (government) decides for them what photos or words they will be allowed to see.
• Using "think of the children" is a convenient way to block a lot of content the British government doesn't want its citizens to see, with no public consultation whatsoever.

British Liberal Democrats have triggered fury by vowing to overturn David Cameron’s plans for Internet porn filters.

Child safety experts and MPs called the move ‘irresponsible’ and warned it would undermine attempts to "protect" children from hardcore pornography.

Lib Dem party president Tim Farron said the Government should enshrine the ‘digital rights of the citizen’ and halt requirement for ‘filters, lists or controls on legal material’ reports the UK Daily Mail.

Farron said filters were ‘misconceived, ineffective and illiberal’. A motion set to be adopted at the party’s spring conference will say ‘families and individuals should decide how they wish to use them’.

He warned ‘essential sites’ on sex education and gay rights were being blocked, while porn was slipping through filters.

‘Our motion is designed to strengthen Lib Dem ministers’ hands in challenging this nonsensical policy, which has yet to be brought before the House of Commons,’ he said.

Conservative MP Julian Smith said: ‘Tim Farron is clearly putting his Lib Dem leadership ambitions ahead of our children’s protection. (The usual "Think of the children" bullshit.)

Helen Goodman, Labour’s media spokesman, said: ‘It’s typically irresponsible of the Liberal Democrats to oppose this protection.

Labour has pledged to bring in mandatory filters if the coalition’s voluntary approach is found to have failed.

The government's filter, which comes into full effect this month after a year of lobbying, will block far more than dirty pictures. That was always the intention, and in recent weeks it has become clear that the mission creep of Internet censorship is even creepier than campaigners had feared.

In the name of protecting children from a rotten tide of raunchy videos, a terrifying precedent is being set for state control of the digital commons says the UK Guardian.
.
One of Britain's biggest Internet providers, claimed that the Internet has no "social or moral framework". Well, neither does a library. Nobody would dream of insisting a local book exchange deployed morality robots to protect children from discovering something their parents might not want them to see. Online, that's just what's happening, except that in this case, every person who uses the Internet is being treated like a child.

Cameron's porn filter looks less like an attempt to protect kids than a convenient way to block a lot of content the British government doesn't want its citizens to see, with no public consultation whatsoever.
,

Frightened of Freedom

A British Big Brother is to control what Internet 

images and words you will be allowed to look at.

 

53,000 Books Burned by Muslims in Lebanon

Assailants set alight the Saeh library belonging to Father Ibrahim Surouj on Friday night, destroying
two-thirds of the 80,000 books and manuscripts it stored.
(File photo: AFP)

An Attack Against Thought Itself

While some moderate Muslims spoke out against this

terrorism, the protest was a fairly small one.

Hundreds of Lebanese took to the streets of the northern city of Tripoli on Saturday to protest the torching of a decades-old library owned by a Greek Orthodox priest.

The demonstrators held up banners that read "Tripoli, peaceful town" and "This is contrary to the values of the Prophet," in reference to the Muslim Prophet Mohammad.

Assailants set alight the Saeh library belonging to Father Ibrahim Surouj on Friday night, destroying two-thirds of the 80,000 books and manuscripts it stored, a security official told Agence France-Presse News.

The attack came a day after "a pamphlet was discovered inside one of the books at the library that was insulting to Islam and the prophet Mohammad," the official said at the time.

Sa’eh library owner Father Ibrahim Surouj

Later, however, "it became clear the priest had nothing to do with the pamphlet," said the same source.

"Then on Friday night, the library was torched," he added.

The attack left the shelves and walls of the library charred.

But the Greek Orthodox priest forgave those responsible for the attack, in a statement aired on television on Saturday.

.

The library is located in the historic heart of Tripoli, Lebanon's second city and scene of frequent Syria-related violence pitting Sunnis against members of the minority Alawite community, to which Syria's President Bashar al-Assad belongs.

Sectarian violence involving the city's Christians has been extremely rare in recent years.

But Friday's incident comes amid a backdrop of growing religious radicalism in Lebanon related to the war in neighbouring Syria.

Future Movement bloc MP Mohammad Kabbara voiced on Saturday March 14 coalition’s condemnation of the burning of a library owned by a Greek Orthodox priest in Tripoli.

“The torching of the library is [akin to] targeting the cultural image of the city,” Kabbara said on Saturday following a meeting of the Tripoli Declaration Committee.

The Future parliamentarian expressed March 14 officials’ and Tripoli figures’ solidarity with the owner of the library, Father Ibrahim Surouj, and stressed the importance of coexistence in Tripoli.

“Evil hands appear to be refusing to leave Tripoli alone to enjoy stability and evil minds want to accuse the city of terrorism in all possible means.” Kabbara said adding “March 14 condemns and deplores the attack that only indicates the immoral character of the perpetrators.”

Also see Yalibnan.com

Lebanon arrests Saudi terrorist behind Iran Embassy bombing

The Religion of Peace™
Freedom of religion, of speech and of thought do not exist under Islam.