News

7 March 2006

Muslims wrestle with identity in wake of cartoon outrage in Mozambique

MAPUTO, 7 March (IRIN) - A controversy over how to respond to the publishing by a local newspaper of the controversial cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, has highlighted differences within Mozambique's Muslim community. The independent weekly Savana last month reprinted 8 of the 12 cartoons that first appeared in the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten last year. Most Muslims in Mozambique were...

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7 March 2006

Yahoo's Kevin Sites to receive Daniel Pearl Award

LOS ANGELES – Kevin Sites, the veteran war correspondent who provides dispatches from armed conflicts around the world for Yahoo! News, was announced Tuesday as this year's recipient of the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism. Sites was chosen for his "style of work, the solitary commitment to truth, the selection of the newsworthy, the focus on the human faces, and the...

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7 March 2006

War correspondent Kevin Sites to receive Daniel Pearl Award

LOS ANGELES – Kevin Sites, the veteran war correspondent who provides dispatches from armed conflicts around the world for Yahoo! News, was announced Tuesday as this year's recipient of the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism. Sites was chosen for his "style of work, the solitary commitment to truth, the selection of the newsworthy, the focus on the human faces, and the...

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7 March 2006

Microsoft denies role in arrest of Chinese journalist

BEIJING (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. said on Tuesday it had no involvement in the case of a Chinese journalist charged with sending subversive e-mails abroad under a pseudonym using a Hotmail account. The indictment of Li Yuanlong, a 45-year-old reporter, follows accusations that Internet giant Yahoo Inc. provided evidence to Chinese authorities that led to the imprisonment of two journalists....

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6 March 2006

Azeri journalist was beaten for his work

March 6, 2006 -- The editor of Azerbaijan's opposition newspaper "Azadliq" says he believes an attack on one of the newspaper's reporters was linked to the work he was doing. Reporter Fikret Huseynli was attacked late yesterday. A spokesman for the opposition People's Front of Azerbaijan said assailants bundled Huseynli into a car, drove him to a dark alley and beat and stabbed him. The assailants...

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6 March 2006

Europe's Muslims divided in wake of cartoon furor

LONDON – As protests against the Danish cartoons fade, Europe's moderate Muslims are facing difficult choices about their faith, identity, and values. "The middle ground in Muslim communities is between a rock and a hard place," says Omar Shah, an Afghan-Danish commentator on Muslim affairs. "The moderate majority is having to decide where they stand." During a month of flag-burning protests in...

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6 March 2006

Popular website falls victim to a content filter

THERE are lots of ways to describe Boing Boing, the Web's obliquely subtitled "Directory of Wonderful Things," which draws millions of eyeballs to its relentless, stylistically minimalist scroll of high-weirdness each month. It is a site where, on Saturday morning, there were links to video games that "subvert post-industrial capitalism," federal legislation aimed at digital radio technology, a...

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6 March 2006

Chinese bloggers grapple with the profit motive

SHANGHAI, March 5 – Last October, a colleague persuaded Xu Jinglei, a Chinese actress and filmmaker, to start writing her own Web log. Now, five months later, Ms. Xu, 31, is the country's most popular blogger, and her runaway success has given rise to an online debate here about the economic value of blogs and who should profit from them. Ms. Xu's blog has already received more than 11 million...

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6 March 2006

Google wants the world's $800bn advertising industry

SOMETIMES it pays to think big -- really big. Just ask the chief executive of Google, Eric Schmidt. The company's share price has had a bumpy ride lately as Wall Street tries to digest the fact that Google is unlikely to carry on growing until it reaches the sky. This in itself is somewhat bizarre. In the final three months of 2005, Google made as much money as it did in all of 2003. How could it...

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5 March 2006

Blasphemous Ink

In the modern world, the twin liberal values of press freedom and religious tolerance can easily conflict with each other. In January, this tension between censorship and expression came to a head in Europe and the Middle East. The publication of cartoon depictions of the prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper set off a wave of protests, some turning violent. The newspapers and their supporters...

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