4 April 2008

Stories from 4 April 2008

China: Nude Chat a Crime?

  4 April 2008

Liu Xiaoyuan commented on a recent conviction of a nude chat case by Zhejiang provincial court. The convicted were charged with “distributing obscene object for making profit”. The blogger argued that internet nude chat is a body performance, not an object that can be distributed [zh].

China: Create Your Own Facebook

  4 April 2008

yangzhiping taught readers how to create their own social network site with open source [zh]. Zoula followed the advice and created his own facebook.

China: Price Control Can't Help

  4 April 2008

Kaie argued that the Chinese government's policy on the price control won't be able to help the poor as the biggest consumer group is the middle upper class. The government should find ways to improve the the income and social security of the lower class [zh] for relieving the burden...

China: Money Talk

  4 April 2008

Zhang Yi-fang from mindmeters reposted two emails that explained the stock market performance in China and the U.S.

China: Wikipedia Unblocked

  4 April 2008

williamlong said that the English wikipedia has been unblocked and the Chinese version can be visited with https [zh]. More websites are expected to unblocked before the Olympics.

Afghanistan: Two Young Men Stoned to Death

Mohammad Fahim reports that two young lovers were stoned to death in the southern province of Afghanistan after they decided to leave their village and start new life, but were caught by the Taliban fighters, who found them guilty of adultery and sentenced them to death.

Bulgaria: What Can Force a Minister to Resign?

The deputy director of Bulgaria's special division for combating organized crime has been arrested on charges of corruption and contacts with organized crime groups. The minister of the interior is facing similar accusations - but is unwilling to resign. Yavor Mihaylov writes about a Bulgarian blogger who has launched a short story contest, hoping to get an answer to this question: "What has to happen so that we could see a minister tender his resignation?"

Russia: More on Litvinenko's Poisoning

Sean's Russia Blog “revisits” Aleksandr Litvinenko's poisoning case and, among other things, recommends reading a piece the New York Sun by Edward Jay Epstein: “The article’s value is in his questioning of the accepted and unchallenged assumptions about the British investigation, the chain of events, Litvinenko’s movement around London, the...