In the Chinese Horoscope, 2011 is the year of the rabbit. In the lead up to New Year’s Day on Thursday (3 February), a subversive “Happy Chinese New Year” video is making the rounds. (more…)
Interesting news ahead of a Court of Appeal hearing on security for costs in the Hardeep Singh case. In October High Court judge Lady Justice Smith granted Indian national Sant Baba Jeet Singh ji Maharaj the right to appeal in his libel case against journalist Hardeep Singh.
Ahead of the hearing, scheduled for tomorrow, Jeet Singh’s solicitors Ford & Warren wrote to the Court of Appeal to inform it that they are now in the process of making an application to come off the court record as acting for Jeet Singh.
The case centres on an article that Singh wrote in August 2007 for the Sikh Times, a British newspaper, in which he claimed that Jeet Singh was an “accused Cult leader” whose teachings were not in line with mainstream Sikh doctrine. The article also connected his followers with conflict in UK temples. The claimant — a self proclaimed “Holy Man” — has never visited the United Kingdom.
In May 2010 a High Court judge threw out the case brought against freelance British journalist Hardeep Singh. Mr Justice Eady ruled for a permanent stay with no right to appeal. Eady’s judgment held that secular courts should not make a judgment on a religious dispute.
The claiment’s application for appeal was granted on the limited basis that there are arguable issues in Singh’s article that do not tread on the forbidden area of doctrinal dispute.
As protests in Egypt continue into their seventh day and police return to the streets, at least six journalists were arrested in Cairo earlier today. They were released after about three hours later, amidst unconfirmed reports that the United States had demanded their release. Equipment seized during the arrests was not returned to the correspondents. Al Jazeera reported that six of their journalists had been arrested, including Dan Nolan, the network’s United Arab Emirates’ correspondent. ‘Unsure if arrested or about to be deported. 6 of us held at army checkpoint outside Hilton hotel. Equipment seized too. #Egypt #jan25’, he tweeted just after midday BST on Monday. Activists also raised the alarm over the whereabouts of blogger Wael Ghonim, who works for Google Middle East. Ghonim has not been heard from since Thursday, 27 January. Only a day before, he voiced his anger over the government’s censorship of social media. Access to the internet has been mostly blocked, but activists and journalists have continued to get the word out via landlines and satellite phones.
As Egypt enters a seventh day of open revolt against the rule of President Hosni Mubarak, the country’s internet access continues to be largely shut down. That extended closure is one of the clearest signs that Mubarak still sees this as a fight he can win.
The longer the internet shutdown continues, the more and more mysterious the government’s thinking becomes. The last week has proven not only that the protesters don’t need Twitter and Facebook access to challenge the system but also that the world’s media don’t necessarily need it to bring details, images and even videos of this mass revolt to the world.
Each day brings new evidence of the complete futility of the gesture. Prominent local bloggers and online activists are simply calling friends overseas to tweet details on their behalf, the flood of journalists entering the country are almost all coming in armed with Thuraya satellite phones and Bgan receivers that enable you to get online from anywhere.
At this point, it’s likely that the main victim of the government’s online blockade will be the Egyptian economy. The country’s banks and stock market were shut down on Monday and the overall economic damage from the government’s decision to cut Egypt off from the world is something that will be hard to measure for a while.
Yesterday I met up with a prominent blogger and digital activist who blogs and tweets under the name of Sandmonkey. He gleefully told me that cracking the internet blockade was becoming an international cause célèbre for the international digital expression community. There were plans afoot, he said, for a group of “hardcore open source guys from Germany” to arrive here with satellite phones and all the equipment they needed to set up a local internet network completely beyond the reach of the authorities.
“They’re going to bypass the whole system,” he told me.