I'm tired of pot-hollering-kettle media, sorry.
Activist for media freedom standing trial in China
"China tries scholar, journalist in closed hearings" by William Wan, Washington Post November 22, 2014
BEIJING — In a double-barreled attack on freedom of expression, Chinese authorities Friday put a prominent journalist on trial and denied the appeal of Uighur professor Ilham Tohti, a leading moderate Muslim voice.
Behind closed doors in Beijing, longtime journalist Gao Yu, 70, was tried on charges of leaking state secrets.
Meanwhile, across the country, in the restive region of Xinjiang, the hearing for Tohti was convened in a detention center on such short notice that his lawyer didn’t even get a chance to attend, and his appeal was ultimately rejected.
The two actions were just the latest in a government crackdown on dissenting voices. In the past year, numerous human rights activists have been arrested, including Chinese lawyer and activist Xu Zhiyong, who was sentenced to four years in prison Sunday for disturbing public order.
The case against Gao, an outspoken intellectual, began in April when she suddenly disappeared. The next month, state-run media confirmed she had been arrested for allegedly leaking state secrets to overseas media.
According to Xinhua news agency, Gao offered a secret document to an overseas website, and the document triggered wide attention from the public.
While the document was never publicly identified, many believe it refers to an order issued after President Xi Jinping took power called Document No. 9 — which pushes for Draconian responses against dangers such as media independence, democracy, civil society, and other Western values.
After Gao’s arrest, state-run television aired footage of her confessing to the crime, but her lawyer said she has retracted the confession, saying it was made in response to authorities’ threats toward her son. Gao’s son, Zhao Meng, was taken away by the police on the same day as Gao and released May 23.
After Friday’s trial, Gao’s lawyer, Mo Shaoping, said he and another lawyer, Shang Baojun, presented their legal argument, and Gao spoke as well.
‘‘It’s hard to make any predictions on the verdict, but we made a not-guilty plea,’’ Mo said. ‘‘We argued the evidence provided by the prosecutor was not reliable.’’
According to Chinese criminal article 111, people providing state secrets for overseas organizations can receive sentences of five to 10 years. More serious cases can earn more than 10 years.
Like Gao’s, Tohti’s case has also drawn sharp criticism from international human rights groups and foreign diplomats. He received a life sentence on charges of separatism in September.
His prosecution comes amid a new war on terror waged by the Chinese government against Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic group in Western China.
Tohti, an economics professor at a Beijing university, is known for speaking out for the rights of Uighur ethnic minorities. He was taken from his Beijing home in January by authorities on accusations of supporting secession in China’s tumultuous Xinjiang region.
In a phone interview, one of Tohti’s lawyers, Li Fangping, said only Tohti’s brother and sister-in-law were able to attend the sudden hearing at a detention house. Li said Tohti’s brother informed him the trial lasted about 50 minutes, and Tohti said the verdict was unjust.
Li said Tohti has requested to be transferred to a prison in Beijing because his wife and two little children remain there.
In a phone interview, Tohti’s wife, Guzelnur, said she hasn’t talked with him since his detention.
Another of Tohti’s lawyers posted a note handwritten by Tohti on Chinese social media.
‘‘I think the facts of my case are not clear . . . The facts can only be further ascertained by an open trial,’’ it read.
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Also see: China hit by second deadly mine blast in 2 days
Related: "The story of the Ventnor has its roots in the 1860s, when thousands of Chinese miners came to New Zealand seeking their fortunes. Most left their families behind, hoping to return to China as wealthy men. Many ended up dying in poverty."
That will get you all the way to England:
"British journalists find themselves under police surveillance" by Raphael Satter, Associated Press November 22, 2014
LONDON — Freelance video journalist Jason Parkinson returned home from vacation this year to find a brown paper envelope in his mailbox. He opened it to find nine years of his life laid out in shocking detail.
Twelve pages of police intelligence logs noted which protests he covered, whom he spoke to, and what he wore — all the way down to the color of his boots. It was, he said, proof of something he had long suspected: The police were watching him.
Parkinson’s documents, obtained through a public records request, are the basis of a lawsuit being filed by the National Union of Journalists against London’s Metropolitan Police and Britain’s Home Office.
The lawsuit, announced late Thursday, along with recent revelations about the seizure of reporters’ phone records, is pulling back the curtain on how British police have spent years tracking the movements of the country’s news media.
‘‘This is another extremely worrying example of the police monitoring journalists who are undertaking their proper duties,’’ said Paul Lashmar, who heads the journalism department at Britain’s Brunel University.
The Metropolitan Police and the Home Office both declined to comment.
Parkinson, three photographers, an investigative journalist, and a newspaper reporter are filing the lawsuit after obtaining their surveillance records. Parkinson, a 44-year-old freelancer who has covered hundreds of protests — some of them for the Associated Press — said he and his colleagues had long suspected that the police were monitoring them.
‘‘Police officers we’d never even met before knew our names and seemed to know a hell of a lot about us,’’ he said.
Several journalists said the records police kept on them were sometimes startling, sometimes funny, and occasionally wrong.
One intelligence report showed that police spotted Parkinson cycling near his then-home in northwest London and carried detailed information about him and his partner at the time.
Jules Mattsson, a 21-year-old journalist with The Times of London, says another record carried a mention of a family member’s medical history, something he says made him so upset he called the police to demand an explanation.
Jess Hurd, a 41-year-old freelance photographer and Parkinson’s partner, said she was worried the intelligence logs were being shared internationally.
‘‘I go to a lot of countries on assignment,’’ she said. ‘‘Where are these database logs being shared? Who with, for what purpose?’’
The revelations add to public disclosures about British police secretly seizing journalists’ telephone records in leak investigations. Several senior officers have recently acknowledged using antiterrorism powers to uncover journalists’ sources by combing through the records.
That's why the NSA can't find the perverts or the terrorists.
Some police contend that they are hunting for corrupt officers, a particularly salient issue in the wake of Britain’s phone hacking scandal, which exposed how British tabloid journalists routinely paid officers in exchange for scoops.
But they were theirs, so....
It isn’t yet clear how often the practice takes place, but the admission drew concern in Parliament and outrage from media groups.
Oh, now the mouthpieces are outraged.
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Being treated just like terrorists will do that to you:
"Britain plans to expand police powers with new anti terror legislation" by Steven Erlanger, New York Times November 25, 2014
LONDON — The British government said Monday that it would introduce legislation to give the police the power to seize the passports of British and foreign nationals suspected of traveling to participate in terror-related activities and would make it easier for security services to track suspects online.
The legislation would also make it illegal for British insurance companies to reimburse anyone who provided ransom payments to free hostages.
The United States and Britain discourage ransom payments to groups such as the Islamic State, which has released graphic videos depicting the execution of British and US hostages, sometimes citing the refusal of their countries to pay.
The home secretary, Theresa May, announced the legislation on Monday in London at the start of what the government calls “Counterterrorism Awareness Week.” She said that Britain had foiled some 44 serious terrorist plots since 2005, when suicide bombers attacked in London. May said that 138 people were serving sentences for terror-related offenses.
She added that 84 “hate preachers” had been barred from entering Britain, and an additional 133 people had been barred on national security grounds and because their presence in the country was “not conducive to the public good.”
May said that plots included efforts to blow up the London Stock Exchange, attack people on the streets, bring down airplanes, and murder a British ambassador.
Officials would not provide further details of any such plots, but on Sunday, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Bernard Hogan-Howe, said the London police had foiled “four or five” potential terrorist plots this year, compared with an average of about one per year “over the last few years.”
Hogan-Howe did not specify whether the plots were related to the conflict in Syria and Iraq. Some of the participants in the alleged plots this year have not yet been convicted, a spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Police said.
Mark Rowley, the Scotland Yard assistant commissioner, said last month that the police had made 218 terror-related arrests this year, and had charged 16 returnees from Syria with terrorist activity. On Monday, speaking at the same event as May, Rowley said the number of arrests had risen to 271 and that “so far this year, we have disrupted several attack plots.”
He said the major threat to Britain was now from “extremists homegrown, in our communities, radicalized by images and messages they read on social media and prepared to kill for their cause.”
A senior British official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that about half of all continuing counterterrorism investigations were related to people, mostly Muslim, who had traveled to fight in Iraq and Syria with radical jihadists or who were inspired by them.
Earlier this year, the terrorism threat level in Britain was raised from “substantial” to “severe,” the second highest, suggesting that an attack is “highly likely,” in response to the threats stemming from the Islamic State.
Officials have said that at least 500 Britons — though the number is thought to be closer to 600 — have gone to the Middle East to fight, and about half are thought to have returned to Britain.
May first raised the possibility of increased police powers at the Conservative Party conference in September.
The bill is expected to be put before Parliament on Wednesday, one day after the expected release of a report into the brutal murder last year of a young soldier, Lee Rigby, near his barracks in southeast London.
He was killed by two men who said they were inspired by jihad and Britain’s wars against Muslims in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
Rowley said Monday that “the tragic murder of Lee Rigby last year was a stark warning to us all about how real and local the threat is.”
Except it was all a great big fraud!
The report is expected to clear the security services of significant blame but raise questions about why they did not follow up on evidence that one of Rigby’s killers was becoming more extreme.
Any new security legislation will bring parliamentary scrutiny, with concerns that new police powers could diminish privacy and individual rights. The law would allow the government to cancel the passports of those suspects overseas, for instance, so they can return only on the government’s terms, and force companies to tell the police, if asked, who was using a particular computer or cellphone at a particular time.
Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary for the opposition Labor Party, was generally supportive of the legislation.
You can't question tyranny.
“More should be done to disrupt the travel plans of those planning to go out to fight,” she said, “and those returning should face criminal investigations and prosecutions,” as well as participating in deradicalization programs.
Maybe it would help if western intelligence agencies like MI-6 stopped stopped sponsoring them.
“Strong powers should always be balanced by strong checks and balances, should be proportionate to the threat, and effective at keeping Britain safe and protecting our democratic values,” Cooper said.
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