Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations

Today throughout the US celebrations will be held to honor Martin Luther King Jr. who was murdered 1968 in Memphis. Many things have changed since the march to Washington and his famous speech in 1963, but with the deterioration of civil rights throughout the world’s leading nations latest since 9/11 it is good to be reminded that there was a time not so long ago when people stood up for their rights and did not indulge in indifference to such changes.

A video of his famous speech is available online in full length (link below)…

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Politics: Transparency International releases 2006 CPI

Global civil society organization Transparency International has today released their annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) for 2006.
Again the CPI points to a strong correlation between corruption and poverty, with a concentration of impoverished states at the bottom of the list.
The 2006 CPI ranks 163 countries by their perceived levels of corruption, as determined by expert [...]

Internet: Reporters without Borders 2006 List of “Internet Black-Holes”

To initiate their 24-hour online demo against Internet censorship the international campaign organization Reporters without Borders has published their 2006 list of “Internet Black holes” - countries that censor and don’t provide free access to the Internet.
Everyone is invited to connect to the Reporter without Borders website between 11 a.m. on 7 November and 11 [...]

Russia: Activities of more then 90 NGOs suspended

Yesterday Russia has suspended the activities of more the 90 foreign non government organizations (NGOs) including Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders and Human Rights Watch, saying they failed new registration requirements recently introduced with a controversial law.
The law that was signed by President Putin earlier this year allows authorities to ban financing of specific [...]

FBI DNA database: Next Generation combined DNA Index System now on its way

Timing couldn’t have been worse - with the Military Commissions Act of 2006 just signed out- the U.S. Dept. of Justice announced that the FBI has today awarded a contract to develop the NGCODIS (next-generation combined DNA index system) to a group of providers.
Unisys together with IBM, government service provider iSYS LLC and two [...]

Military Commissions Act: Yay, Nay who voted what?

Those of you American citizens that would like to know who is so freely giving away your civil rights should check the BORDC website.
Currently only the Senate voting record is online but the house voting from yesterday should be available soon.

More on the Military Commissions Act of 2006: UK’s highly popular website The Register [...]

The Economist: On issues with US voting machines

In his last edition top European business and political magazine The Economist has an interesting brief article on US voting machines.Crash and re-boot, that’s how the article is titled, is looking into how the wrong kind of voting machines could bring chaos to the mid-term elections. Even the Economist that rarely is using stronger [...]

China: Censors open some access to Wikipedia (Access chart)

After having blocked access to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia for almost a year completely, China has now started to open up some parts of it.
With the help of bloggers and Wikipedians across China Andrew Lih has created a chart of Wikipedia reachability from within China.
The English language version (en.wp) is now widely accessible while [...]