World headlines – 19 June 2008

In the latest wrap-up from news outlets and bloggers across the globe:

SEARCH MONITOR: TOWARD A MEASURE OF TRANSPARENCY
Nart Villeneuve Blog – Citizen Lab Occasional Paper #1, "Search Monitor Project: Toward a Measure of Transparency", (mirror) has been released today. This report interrogates and compares the censorship practices of the search engines provided by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! for the Chinese market along with the domestic Chinese search engine Baidu …

CHINA CUTS JAIL TERMS FOR POLITICAL PRISONERS - GROUP
Guardian – China has disclosed that it has reduced jail terms for some political prisoners, a U.S. human rights group said on Wednesday, calling the cuts a demonstration of the value of outside pressure …

OLYMPIC TORCH IN TOWN
BBC James Reynolds' Blog – There's one slogan that I've now memorized (I had no choice - I've heard it perhaps several hundred times today): "Ao yun jia you! Zhong Guo jia you!" (translation: "Go Olympics! Go China!") …

CIVIL RIGHTS LAWYER AND DISSIDENTS WERE BLOCKED FROM MEETING GERMAN FOREIGN MINISTER
Boxun – The famous civil rights lawyer Mo Shaoping and dissidents Liu Xiaobo and Ding Zilin were blocked by policemen from meeting the visiting Germany Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier …

CHINESE INTERNET RESEARCH CONFERENCE: GETTING BEYOND "IRON CURTAIN 2.0"
RConversation Blog - At last week's Chinese Internet Research Conference, much discussion of the "myths and realities" of the Chinese Internet revolved around images, metaphors, and paradigms …

CHINA'S RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT
Washington Post – Because of the world's failure to stop the butchering of 800,000 Rwandans, and other atrocities of the 1990s, the United Nations in 2005 adopted a principle known as the responsibility to protect …

KEVIN RUDD WILL ATTEND BEIJING OLYMPICS
SMH – Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, saying it is the right thing to do …

CHINA STEPS UP OLY08 CENSORSHIP: REPORT
SMH – Chinese authorities have stepped up efforts to censor dissenting voices in the run-up to the Olympic Games, human rights groups say …

"DOWN WITH THE DALAI LAMA" – WESTERN CRITICISMS
Blogging for China – Well, we are a little behind the curve here at Fool's Mountain. An article titled "Down with the Dalai Lama" was published by the Guardian a few weeks ago, and I was completely ignorant of it until the Chinese translation began to be passed around …