Mayan priests will purify a sacred Guatemalan archaeological site to eliminate bad spirits
after President Bush visits next week — via The Pagan Prattle
Sweden’s government has presented a bill to give its defence intelligence agency powers to monitor any e-mail or phone call into or out of the country. The National Defence Radio Establishment currently listens in on military communications and needs a court order for any other surveillance. The government says conversations within Sweden would remain untouched
Serbian vampire hunters have acted to prevent the very remote possibility that former dictator Slobodan Milosevic might stage a come-back — by driving a three-foot stake through his heart — via The Pagan Prattle
Access to YouTube has been suspended in Turkey following a court order. The ban was imposed after prosecutors told the court that clips insulting former Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had appeared on the site. According to Turkish media, there has been a virtual war
between Greek and Turkish users of the site, with both sides posting insulting videos
The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalises the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned
The Chinese government began blocking access to the popular blogging site LiveJournal on Friday, cutting off its citizens from the roughly 1.8 million blogs the service hosts. SixApart, the company behind LiveJournal, says there are 8,692 self-reported Chinese bloggers on the site, a number that’s likely low since it’s based on information volunteered in user profiles. China has blocked the site before, for no clear reason — then unblocked it again just as mysteriously, without any concessions from the company. The timing of the block coincides with the National People’s Congress meeting in Beijing, says Xiao Qiang, a Chinese dissident and founder of the China Digital Times. According to Xiao, the event is often accompanied by stepped up security and a worsening of China’s notorious internet censorship policies
The US Department of Transportation (DOT) has banned Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Internet Explorer 2007 from its offices, and is considering switching its operations to Macs and PCs running Novell’s SuSe Linux. The DOT enacted the ban in mid-January because certain applications essential to the agency’s function can’t run on Windows Vista
The Canadian parliament has voted against renewing anti-terror laws that had been introduced after 11 September 2001. The rejected laws included provisions to hold terror suspects indefinitely, and to compel witnesses to testify, and were in some sense Canada’s version fo the Patriot Act. The laws were voted down in the face of claims from the minority Conservative government that the Liberal Party was soft on terror, and despite the fact that Canada has faced active terrorist cells in their own country. The anti-terror laws have never been used, and it was viewed that they are neither relevant, nor needed, in dealing with terrorist plots. Hopefully more countries will come to the same conclusion — via Slashdot
Official figures reveal that UK agencies monitored 439,000 telephones and email addresses in a 15 month period between 2005 and 2006. The Interception of Communications Commissioner is seeking the right for agencies to be allowed to monitor the communications of Members of Parliament as well, something which has been forbidden since the 1960s
While the US continues to hash out concerns over the Real ID Act, which aims to create a national ID by standardising state driver’s licenses, China has already implemented a massive online ID database, which they say will help prevent fraud. Anyone can now send a text message or visit the country’s population information centre’s web site, to check if the name and the ID number of a person’s identity card match. If they do match the ID card-holder’s picture also appears, said the Ministry, adding that no other information is available to ensure a citizen’s privacy is protected. Completed at the end of 2006, China’s population information database, the world’s largest, contains personal information on 1.3 billion citizens. Giving public accessing to the database is also designed to correct mistakes if an individual discovers that their name, number and picture don’t match — via Slashdot
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Defence and the Army that seeks more information on a military web censorship unit called the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell (AWRAC) after the DOD failed to answer the EFF’s Freedom of Information Act request in an expedited fashion. AWRAC’s existence was revealed last October in an Army News Service piece that described the unit. The AWRAC team monitors hundreds of thousands of web sites each month and contacts webmasters and bloggers about any security concerns
If you’re worried about what your neighbours think of you why not follow Malaysia’s lead and ban the journalists who are intent on asking those tricky questions
Germany has ordered the arrest of 13 suspected CIA agents over the alleged kidnapping of one of its citizens. Munich prosecutors confirmed that the warrants were linked to the case of Khaled al-Masri, a German national of Lebanese descent. Mr Masri says his case is an example of the US policy of extraordinary rendition
— a practice whereby the US government flies foreign terror suspects to third countries without judicial process for interrogation or detention — via Warren Ellis
Wolves in the northern Rockies will be removed from the endangered species list within the next year a move that would open the population up to trophy hunting. Federal officials are expected to announce the plan Monday. The agency also will finalise removal from the list of a separate population of wolves in the Great Lakes region
Maine overwhelmingly rejected federal requirements for national identification cards, marking the first formal state opposition to controversial legislation scheduled to go in effect for Americans next year. Both chambers of the Maine legislature approved a resolution saying the state flatly refuses
to force its citizens to use driver’s licenses that comply with digital ID standards, which were established under the 2005 Real ID Act. It asks the US Congress to repeal the law
Governor CL Butch
Otter said he will support public hunts to kill all but 100 grey wolves in the state once the federal government removes the animal from Endangered Species Act protections, and that he hopes to shoot a wolf himself
This New Year’s Eve, at midnight on the dot, hundreds of millions of pages of US government secrets will be revealed. Or at least they’ll no longer be official secrets — it may actually take months or more for the National Archives and Records Administration to make those pages available for public consumption
Former US President Gerald Ford, who was swept into office after the Watergate scandal and later pardoned Richard Nixon, died at age 93
The DMCA-like amendments to the New Zealand Copyright Act passed their first hurdle in parliament, with an overwhelming 113 to 6 vote to pass the Bill to the Commerce Select Committee for further discussion. The detail-oriented can read the full debate (or rather lack of debate), and one enterprising New Zealand legal blogger has an excellent series of posts on the Bill, its background, and its implications. New Zealanders interested in fighting this legislation have until the 16th of February 2007 to make submissions to the Select Committee, before the committee makes its recommendations and sends the Bill back for a second reading — via Slashdot
The Tasmanian government hopes it can drive down the cost of broadband in the state after a strong response to calls for companies to help manage fibre optic cables
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