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Zhang Ping, a senior editor of China's Southern Metropolis Weekly, recently penned several columns under a pseudonym about Chinese censorship of the situation in Tibet. One his pieces, "How to Find the Truth About Tibet," reflects on how both official and self-censorship among the Chinese media prevents Chinese readers from knowing the full story about Tibet, and laments that readers then focus their ire on perceived Western biases rather than agitating for more press freedoms. Here's an excerpt:

If the netizens [hyping inaccurate reports by foreign media] genuinely care about news values, they should not only be exposing the fake reports by the western media and they should also be challenging the control by the Chinese government over news sources and the Chinese media.  There is no doubt that the harm from the latter is even worse than the former.  When individual media outlets make fake reports about real events, it is easy to correct because just a few meticulous Chinese netizens can do the job.  When media control is exercised by the state authorities, the whole world is helpless.

There was a predictable nationalist-inspired backlash against Zhang, with Web forums labeling him a traitor and worse. Now, he's been fired.

Just after he was sacked, Zhang wrote a blog post titled, "My Cowardice and Impotence," in which he struggles with the work journalists are forced to produce in a place with so few press freedoms.

I am afraid of other people praising me as a brave newspaperman, because I know I am full of fear in my heart. I did write some commentaries on current affairs, and edited some articles that exposed the truth. I lost my job and was threatened for speaking the truth. However, to be honest, these were exceptional cases. They were my miscalculations. In my various media positions in the past decade, what I’ve practiced most is avoiding risk.

Self-censorship has become part of my life. It makes me disgusted with myself. Some of my peers are proud of their censorship skills, and like to show it off to employers. I have similar skills, and I am using them everyday. But I am deeply uncomfortable with it. I feel ashamed about it, just like an executioner knows that he is good at killing.[...]

[T]he media industry is different. I participate in telling lies to the public whenever I cancel a good news story, whenever I delete a sentence of truth, if we regard the media as a public good.[...] Even if I don’t have the courage and capacity to do more than I can do now, I should at least live honestly and conscientiously, and be aware of my cowardice and impotence.

FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images

It was to be the marquee event of the Olympic torch's tour around the world. In a triumphant show of Chinese prowess and technological know-how, the torch was to ascend to the highest point on Earth and powerfully symbolize China's dramatic entry on the world stage.

Instead, as Agence France Presse puts it, the torch's trip up Mt. Everest, which could begin as early as this weekend, has "descended into farce":

[L]ast-minute changes this week by Beijing Olympic officials called for a rapid and tightly controlled two-to-three day trip through riot-hit Tibet to Mount Everest base camp. The changes raised concerns among journalists about the health impact of ascending too quickly to the camp's elevation of 5,150 metres (16,900 feet). After foreign media requested further information on the safety concerns, Beijing Olympic Games organisers set a sudden Thursday morning payment deadline for air tickets to the Tibetan capital Lhasa. The situation descended into farce when the Olympic official tasked with collecting payments refused to accept the fees from organisations including AFP and other international news agencies as he headed to the airport to purchase the tickets. 'I'm sorry, it is too late. I am going to the airport now,' said Xu Xianhui, a Beijing Games media official. It was not immediately clear if the refusal to accept payment was part of an official government decision to keep reporters out of Tibet. Xu said the payment of some foreign media organisations had been accepted but declined specifics. Olympic organisers were asked to explain the refusal but did not immediately reply."

Officials in Beijing also announced that foreign press would not be allowed to cover the climbing team's departure from Everest Base Camp, scheduled for tomorrow.

Moreover, medical experts say the trip from Beijing (at sea level) to Base Camp should not be made in less than one week in order to allow for acclimatization. Accordingly, several news agencies pulled their reporters from the assignment due to the potential for serious health complications. Authoritarianism through bureaucracy is an art form in China.

The move is hardly surprising, considering that the reporters hoping to cover the torch's climb up Everest were to be the first allowed to enter Tibet in a month or so. Scattered reports of continued protests are still leaking out of Lhasa, despite a near-complete ban on media coverage. And Beijing is clearly paranoid that the torch's trip there will spark more uprisings. Earlier this week, an American mountaineer was kicked off Everest by officials keeping watch over the mountain after a "Free Tibet" banner was discovered in his gear. Oh, and Tibet won't be reopened to tourists next month as planned, either.

Does anyone else see a pattern developing here? At this point, it seems appropriate to ask whether the Beijing Games can even be taken seriously. So, can they?

From Shanghaiist comes this disturbing story of a young American attacked by a mob of angry Chinese outside a Carrefour store in Zhuzhou, Hunan Province, on Sunday night:

Last night [Sunday, Apr. 20] around 7pm my friend was attacked by a mob of about 150 people outside the Carrefour in Zhuzhou, Hunan.... When leaving Carrefour some of the crowd started shouting at him and he tried to say he didn't have anything to do with the Olympics, but 3 men started to push him and then he was hit in the back of the head at least 3 times. He started to run, and the mob chased him. He jumped into a cab, but the mob surrounded the car and started shaking and rocking it. The cab driver was shouting at him to get out. Then they started hitting the car. The crowd was shouting "kill him! kill the Frenchman." He called the Field Director while in the back of the car. The cab driver abandon the car when he saw police coming. Two police made there way though the mob and managed to drive the cab away. The Field Director alerted.... The police got him another cab and he took it from Zhuzhou to the field director's home in Changsha. He spending the night here in Changsha and is likely leaving China as soon as possible.

The French supermarket chain has been under siege in China over the past week. And it's hardly alone. A similarly disturbing, though less violent, episode took place last week right here at home -- at Duke University -- when a 20-year-old freshman from China who had tried to encourage dialogue between Chinese student demonstrators and a smaller group of Tibetans found her personal information published on the Internet. Hundreds of thousands of angry and threatening posts appeared on Chinese Web sites. Back in China, the student's parents were threatened and had to go into hiding.

It's all part of an increasingly scary rise in nationalism on the mainland. According to the IHT, Beijing has encouraged such nationalistic fervor to run amok by easing up on restrictions on online forums in recent weeks. If true, that news is disturbing. Because in just a few months, 500,000 foreign tourists will begin arriving in China for the Olympics. What kind of welcome are they going to receive?

(Hat tip: Passport reader hdp)

China Photos/Getty Images

I remember when the first McDonald's opened in Moscow in 1990. There was something powerfully symbolic about seeing tens of thousands of Russians lined up to get a taste of America. It meant communism was on the way out. Capitalism had won. And Muscovites were waiting hours in the cold to get a "Big Mak" just to prove it. The store needed 27 cash registers and seating for 700 just to accommodate the crowds. Young Russians left jobs at coveted scientific institutions in order for the chance to earn 1.5 rubles an hour making fries for Ronald McDonald. Take that, Mr. Gorbachev.

Put bluntly, the whole thing felt like a victory. Eighteen years later, the conduct of U.S. companies with regard to the Beijing Olympics offers a different feeling indeed. Here's the slogan Coca-Cola (a company which is in bed with the Beijing Olympics to the tune of between $75 and $90 million) is using in its Chinese marketing: "Red Around the World." Yeah, you read that right. The slogan comes in the form of a jingle that makes up the centerpiece of Coke's Olympics-specific marketing efforts in country.

Now, call me McCarthyite if you want, but this rubs me the wrong way. We're talking about a country that, just a few years ago, was aggressively forcing down U.S. military aircraft and currently maintains one of the most robust -- if not the most robust -- spying platforms against the West. Now Coke, an American icon if ever there was one, is publicly envisioning the spread of "red around the world?"

Andres Kieger, Coke's director of marketing in China, says the color red isn't all that bad. "This isn't meant as a patriotic song," he says. "It is meant as an emotional song. Red is the color of a lot of good things." Presumably he was referring to Coke cans and not the nationalistic symbols of, say, Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany. Had someone at Coke bothered to check, say, Wikipedia, they would have found multiple entries explaining that, politically at least, red is the color of communism. The phenomenon dates to the Russian Revolution, when red symbolized the bloodshed of the working class in the fight against capitalism. For the more artistically inclined, the folks at the Guggenheim explain here.

I'm all for the forces of capitalism and target-specific marketing. But somehow, kowtowing to Beijing by trumpeting the spread of Communist red just doesn't feel like a victory to me.

Once again, Hillary's campaign is running up against what may be its most formidable adversary: Bill Clinton.

First, he flubbed big time last week by reviving -- and inaccurately describing -- the Bosnia sniper controversy. And now, just when Hillary wants to be seen as tough on China, comes an LAT piece yesterday that Bill's foundation has taken an undisclosed sum from a Chinese company accused of helping the government censor the Internet and crack down on Tibetan activists.

Alibaba, which owns Yahoo! China, asked Bill to speak at a 2005 executives' conference in China. In lieu of his usual speaking fee, often as high as $400,000, Bill asked for an undisclosed donation to his foundation. Last month, Yahoo! China's homepage ran "Wanted" posters of Tibetan activists the government accused of spreading unrest. Rebecca MacKinnon wrote recently of experiments she ran on Chinese search engines: Yahoo! China's was censored the most.

On the campaign trail, Hillary has gotten out in front of her opponents on the Olympics issue by calling on Bush to boycott the opening ceremony, "absent major changes by the Chinese government." But it certainly doesn't play well for her position when her husband's foundation receives large checks from a company so closely aligned with Beijing.

STR/AFP/Getty Images

Chinese security guards and Turkish police arrest an Uighur Muslim protestor during the Olympic torch ceremony, on April 03, 2008. A group of some 200 Uighur Muslims demonstrated against China before the Olympic torch ceremony near one of Turkey's most famous touristic destinations. Turkish police kept demonstrators away from the site where athletes planned to begin running with the torch through the city.

China said yesterday it had restored order to the heavily Tibetan areas of Western China. Now, it turns out, that claim may have been a bit of an exaggeration. London's Times is reporting from Sichuan that as many as 1,000 paramilitary police opened fire late last night on a group of several hundred monks and other protesters, killing eight and wounding dozens:

Chinese paramilitary police have killed eight people after opening fire on several hundred Tibetan monks and villagers in bloody violence.... Witnesses said the clash – in which dozens were wounded – erupted late last night after a government inspection team entered a monastery in the Chinese province of Sichuan trying to confiscate pictures of the Dalai Lama.

Here's the background:

Officials searched the room of every monk in the Donggu monastery, a sprawling 15th century edifice in Ganzi, southwestern Sichuan, confiscating all mobile phones as well as the pictures. When the inspectors tore up the photographs and threw them on the floor, a 74-year-old monk, identified as Cicheng Danzeng, tried to stop an act seen as a desecration by Tibetans who revere the Dalai Lama as their god king. A young man working in the monastery, identified as Cicheng Pingcuo, 25, also made a stand and both were arrested. The team then demanded that all the monks denounce the Dalai Lama... At about 6.30 p.m., the entire monastic body marched down to a nearby river where paramilitary police were encamped and demanded the release of the two men. They were joined by several hundred local villagers, many of them enraged at the detention of the 74-year-old monk Cicheng Danzeng, who locals say is well respected in the area for his learning and piety. Shouting 'Long Live the Dalai Lama,' 'Let the Dalai Lama come back' and 'We want freedom,' the crowd demonstrated until about nine in the evening. Witnesses said that at around that time, as many as 1,000 paramilitary police used force to try to end the protest and opened fire on the crowd.

Watch for more trouble when the Olympic torch comes to London this weekend.

AFP/Getty Images

India's foreign minister has given the Dalai Lama, who heads the Tibetan government in exile in Dharamsala in northern India, a warning: Don't mess up our relationship with China. Here's Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Indian TV:

India will continue to offer [the Dalai Lama] all hospitality, but during his stay in India, they should not do any political activity, any action that can adversely affect relations between India and China".

Tibet expert Robert Barnett recently told FP that Delhi is increasingly distancing itself from the Tibetans in order to solidify its ties with Beijing.

FP: Will India find it harder to tolerate the Tibetan government in exile?

RB: India is clearly moving in the direction of distancing itself from the exiles. Some people think it's preparing for the death of the Dalai Lama, and then it will distance itself even more. There were indications of a sea change after the Dalai Lama received the Congressional Gold Medal in America last October. The Indians issued an order, presumably under pressure from China, that their cabinet ministers were not allowed to meet him or receive him upon his return. This was seen as very unusual. I don't want to suggest some major realignment, but the indications are very much that India is maintaining ambiguity but showing that it largely wants to engage with China. That said, it hasn't taken any irreversible steps yet in terms of the Tibetans.

Another question to my mind is, What happens to Dharamsala when the Dalai Lama dies? What's received little analysis in recent weeks is Beijing's long-term strategy of waiting out the Dalai Lama in order to control his succession. Traditionally, Tibetan Buddhism's No.2 figure, the Panchen Lama, helps determine the next Dalai Lama, believed to be a reincarnation of the former. But the Panchen Lama named by the Dalai Lama in 1995 was arrested by the Chinese and hasn't been seen since (he was 6 years old at the time of his arrest). China then named its own Panchen Lama, a teenager who just so happens to be a big fan of Chinese nationalism. How that succession issue shakes out will be of enormous importance, and how China handles it will determine to what extent the recent protests are a sign of things to come.

Facebook has become Shaitan incarnate for many preachers in Saudi Arabia, not least of all because six in 10 users of the social networking site in the country are women. This apparently makes Saudi men nervous. Influential cleric Sheikh Ali al-Maliki, for instance, has derided Facebook as a "a door to lust" and warned against "the accession of women to it."

Now, it appears, some Saudi men are taking matters into their own hands. London's Daily Telegraph reports:

A young Saudi Arabian woman was murdered by her father for chatting on the social network site Facebook, it has emerged. The unnamed woman from Riyadh was beaten and shot after she was discovered in the middle of an online conversation with a man...."

Shocking, but then again we're talking about a country that arrests American women for sitting with their male colleagues at the local Starbucks.

John Moore/Getty Images

Tomorrow, nearly 6 million of the world's poorest billionaires will head to the polls to elect Zimbabwe's next president. Which could be same president the country has now.

Yet Freedom House Deputy Executive Director Thomas Melia yesterday described the atmosphere in Harare, the nation's capital, as one of "nervous hopefulness" at an event co-hosted with the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). That's because this is shaping up to be the 84-year-old Robert Mugabe's toughest election since he took over as president in 1980.

The tide may have turned against Mugabe in rural areas that he and his party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), used to be able to count on for support. Thousands now rally for rival party MDC, largely without the kind of politically targeted violence that took place last year against Morgan Tsvangirai, who has been the party's leader since 1999.

If elected, Tsvangirai promises to make desperately needed reforms including improvements to the health sector, better food security, and the creation of new jobs (admittedly, it's hard to do worse on these fronts than Mugabe has). Tsvangirai has also proposed desperately needed reform of the economy and vowed to create a new currency within the first six months of his presidency. The value of Zimbabwean dollars it plummeting so quickly these days that it is being issued with expiration dates.

In addition to Tsvangirai, a new opposition candidate has recently thrown his hat in the ring. Although some think his candidacy will split the opposition vote and end up helping Mugabe, he is more than just the Ralph Nader of Harare. Simba Makoni, ZANU-PF party member and former finance minster, has presented himself as an alternative to Tsvangirai, and there are rumors that his ties to the ruling party could be helping him to build a secret coalition of powerful supporters. His candidacy could be laying bare fissures within ZANU-PF and hurting Mugabe's hold on the party.

The two opposition candidates announced yesterday that they would form a united front in the event of a runoff. But if Mugabe and his supporters have anything to do with it, they'll never get that far. Multiple incidents of attempted election rigging have been cited, including the printing of 9 million ballots for a registered 6 million voters. Investigations have also determined that recently deceased Ian Smith, the last white leader of what was then known as Southern Rhodesia is still on the ballot. Add to this allegations of planned intimidation at the polls and a new gerrymandered voting district system (click here for an interactive map outlining other deleterious election conditions), and it seems a foregone conclusion that Mugabe will be declared the winner.

The real question isn't whether Mugabe tries to steal the election -- his attempts to do so are glaringly obvious -- it's whether his fellow Zimbabweans, party leaders, military elements, and civil servents will agree to help him do so yet again. While he seems to still be able to get folks to rallies, it's possible that the time has come when the bribes simply aren't enough to keep him in power.

You might very well assume that most Chinese people are angry about the Great Firewall of China. But if this new poll highlighted by Pew researcher Deborah Fallows is accurate, you are dead wrong:

[I]n a new survey, most Chinese say they approve of internet control and management, especially when it comes from their government.

According to findings from the fourth and most recent of a series of surveys about internet use in China from 2000 to 2007, over 80% of respondents say they think the internet should be managed or controlled, and in 2007, almost 85% say they think the government should be responsible for doing it.

One major reason for this overall finding, I'd have to think, is that 93 percent of respondents say that "much of internet content to be unsuitable for children."

When asked which online content they thought should be controlled, more internet users targeted the most offensive or annoying content: 87% of internet users would control or manage pornography; 86% violent content; 83% spam or junk mail; 66% advertisements; 64% slander against individuals.

But what about political content? Actually, a growing number of people think that is a problem, too:

Since 2005, the percentage of users who say that online content about "politics" should be controlled or managed jumped from 8% to 41%, by far the biggest increase of any items tested.

[Guo Liang, deputy director of the Research Center for Social Development, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences] said that the explanation for this increase probably lies in the spate of widely publicized incidents of fraud, blackmail, sensationalism, and other abuse of Chinese citizens via the internet. The Chinese word used for "politics" in this survey, zhengzhi, is not confined simply to political rights or competition for political control but may be understood to include larger questions of public morality and social values.

There are plenty of other fascinating findings in Pew's report, so read the whole thing.

NBC Sports Universal Chairman Dick Ebersol says viewers of the network's coverage of the XXIX Olympiad shouldn't expect a lot of superfluous reports on political protests and whatnot. NBC is planning 3,600 hours of television and Internet coverage of the Games, but Ebersol says NBC Sports will cut to news about unrest "only if it interferes with the competition or hinders athletes from getting to the competition." It's a policy that is not dissimilar from that of the Chinese state media, which spent all of yesterday pretending that the protests in Athens never happened.

As Anne Applebaum points out in today's Washington Post, we always expected this kind of "see no evil" behavior from the Olympics' corporate sponsors. But the media? There was always the danger that, with the Games being covered primarily by sports reporters ill-equipped to handle the complexities of modern day China, the political angle would be under-covered or simply ignored. Which is why this comment by Ebersol is concerning:

I believed in July of 2001 and believe today that the I.O.C. gave the Games to Beijing because it was really important for them to take place for the first time in the largest nation in the world. As it relates to the mysteries of China, including human rights, I believe giving the Games to China shines a light on a part of the world that wouldn't otherwise exist.”

China's human rights record is hardly a "mystery." Check out the U.S. State Department's country report on the subject, which lays out Beijing's dismal record in no uncertain terms.

All of this talk of shining a light on China reminds me of the way corporations -- automakers, banks, oil -- talked about doing business in apartheid South Africa back in the 1970s. Their pretense was the same one that NBC and the Beijing Games' corporate sponsors are employing today: that engagement encourages change from within. A quarter of a century later, in 2002, the victims of apartheid filed multi-billion dollar class-action lawsuits against IBM, Ford, Citigroup, British Petroleum, and other multinationals for collaborating in a crime against humanity. At least some firms, such as BP, defended their South African operations by arguing that they demonstrated to white South Africans that integration and profits can go hand-in-hand.

In the face of Beijing's quashing of political dissent, what will NBC and the other corporations that have gotten into bed with Beijing be able to say in defense of themselves? NBC paid nearly $900 million for the right to broadcast the Olypmics and China is already censoring its coverage. If that isn't enough to dispel any "mysteries" of authoritarianism, what is?

A U.S. State Department issued "fact sheet" for Americans traveling to this summer's Olympic Games contains this little gem:

All visitors should be aware that they have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public or private locations. All hotel rooms and offices are considered to be subject to on-site or remote technical monitoring at all times."

The warning was issued last week. Chinese officials today said visitors have nothing to worry about, and that their surveillance efforts are "in accordance with international norms." Personally, if I were going to China for the Olympics, I wouldn't worry too much about the hotel rooms. I'd just be sure to leave my BlackBerry at home.

Milos Bicanski/Getty Images

This morning's Olympic torch-lighting ceremony in Greece was disrupted by protesters from the Paris-based media rights groups Reporters Without Borders. The bad publicity was exactly the kind of thing that Beijing was hoping (unrealistically) to avoid in the run-up to this summer's games, but also highlights a growing debate in France over whether the country should take action to voice its disapproval of China's human rights record.

RSF (the organization's French acronym) has proposed that France boycott the Games' opening ceremony. A poll published in today's Libération newspaper and sponsored by RSF found that 53 percent of respondents liked the idea of President Nicolas Sarkozy skipping the event. A separate poll in the sports magazine L'Equipe had nearly identical results. Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said he found the idea "interesting" last Tuesday but then quickly backtracked several hours later:

There are a lot of good ideas that can't be put into practice [...] When you're dealing in international relations with countries as important as China, obviously when you make economic decisions it's sometimes at the expense of human rights," he added. "That's elementary realism."

Sounds like somebody got a talking to. This isn't the first time that Kouchner's idealism has taken a back seat to his boss's more pragmatic priorities, and it raises some questions over whether the left-wing, former head of Doctors Without Borders is only in Sarkozy's government as liberal-internationalist window dressing. Sarkozy, for his part, has offered to make France a facilitator for negotiations between China and the Dalai Lama. It's a start, but as the protests inevitably grow throughout this spring, it's going to get harder to stick to the middle ground.

Update: Speaking on Tuesday, Sarkozy would not rule out the possibility of boycotting the ceremony, saying, "All options are open and I appeal to the Chinese leaders' sense of responsibility." Perhaps he's keeping an eye on the polls.

China is barring news organizations from taking live video of Tiananmen Square during the Olympics.

The headline of the day is that China is blocking YouTube. The far scarier news, however, is that China is also blocking access to both CNN and the BBC. Not on the Internet (although that's happening, too). On the airwaves. Reports BBC World Editor Mark Pruszewicz, via a blog post:

As a presenter began reading the introduction to a report on events in Tibet, screens in China showing BBC World would suddenly go black. It wasn't consistent - some reports would go out unmolested one hour, only to be taken off air the next."

CNN Bejing Bureau Chief Jamie FlorCruz confirms the same:

The news of the day was unpalatable to the Chinese censors, so most of CNN’s reports in the mainland were blacked out."

It has become tempting in recent years, thanks to endless Western media coverage of Internet controls, to think of censorship in China as merely a game of cat and mouse between clever netizens and Communist Party bureaucrats. In fact, media censorship in China remains very real and very rampant. It's not just about blocking YouTube. As FlorCruz notes, CNN reporters have been allowed into Tibet just twice in the last 10 years. Explains McClatchy's Tim Johnson, from an undisclosed location in Sichuan province:

None of us can enter Tibet, which is off limits to foreign reporters without a permit. I know of only one foreign journalist, James Miles of The Economist, who had the good fortune to be in Lhasa as events unfolded over the past few days.... We foreign reporters all take precautions. We have to switch vehicles often. Some of us swap out SIM cards in our mobile phones, or just turn them off. That way, authorities cannot triangulate mobile phone signals and figure out our locations."

In bidding for the Olympic Games, China promised the International Olympic Committee improvments on human rights and media freedoms. Just before the Tibet protests, Beijing's media minders had began touting increased freedoms for reporters. But if their behavior over the last week is any indication, they were never too serious about that at all.

FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) recently reached a shocking conclusion: Blogging is a "legitimate form of personal expression."

In the run-up to the Olympic Games, we've all heard about the Chinese government's restrictions on bloggers' freedom of expression, but not as many people seem to be aware of the blogging bans the IOC itself has imposed on Olympic athletes. In 2004, for the Athens games, athletes and coaches were not permitted to write firsthand accounts or maintain online diaries (a.k.a blogs). Posting personal videos and photos online was banned, too, unless permission was obtained first.

The IOC's brilliant rationale for gagging the athletes then: Protecting the interests of companies holding broadcasting rights comes first. (As if an athlete's blog is a direct competitor to an NBC sports commentator.)

This year, though, the IOC seems to have finally seen the light. Sort of. In Beijing, athletes can blog, as long as they follow some simple rules:

• No blogging about other competitors
• No videos, photos, or audio clips of sporting events and opening, closing, and medal ceremonies
• No ads or mention of sponsors (blogs can't be used for commercial gain)
• No domain names with words similar to "Olympics"
• No infringement of copyright agreements
• No information that could compromise security and staging of the events

My hunch is that as the Internet evolves and people become more tech savvy, some of these rules will prove tough to enforce. People will find ingenious ways to evade them; even at earlier Olympics, athletes are reported to have blogged "illegally." The IOC will learn sooner or later that trying to control people's online activities is a task of Olympic proportions.

Buried in the WSJ's interview with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf today was this little gem:

WSJ: Now you have two well-known figures from the 1990's, Mr. Sharif and Mr. Zardari, back in very powerful positions. Are you confident that the problems Pakistan had in the 1990's won't crop [up]again?

Mr. Musharraf: I hope not. There's the National Security Council, as I said. The other check is the freedom of the media. I would like to take all the credit for that. Whatever the media says, it is I who gave them the private television channels. Back in 2001, there used to be one -- Pakistan Television. Today, there are over 50 channels operating. The media should exercise a check over the government.

All the credit? For Pakistan's lousy "Not Free" rating from Freedom House's Freedom of the Press rankings? Or how about for American freelancer Nicholas Schmidle's expulsion from Pakistan last month a few days after he wrote about the Taliban in the frontier provinces? How about the fact that foreign journalists are essentially barred from reporting in half the country?

Musharraf specifically cites Pakistan's private television channels, apparently as levers of freedom he has bequeathed to the country. But he shut down most of those same channels during the recent emergency period; riot police tore up the offices of one of the most popular channels; and popular TV journalists have been put on "forced leave" or made to sign codes of conduct once they were allowed back on air. So, yes, Musharraf is right when he says "[t]he media should exercise a check over the government." But journalists have to be allowed to operate without censorship first.

Because you are liable to be arrested, blindfolded, harshly interrogated, spat upon, and beaten into unconsciousness, only to wake up and face 5 years in jail. That's the fate of 26-year-old Moroccan computer engineer Fouad Mourtada, who in a statement said:

I actually created this account on January 15, 2008. It remained on line a few days before somebody closed it. There are so many profiles of celebrities on Facebook. I never thought that by creating a profile of his highness prince Moulay Rachid I am harming him in any way. I, as a matter of fact, did not send any message from that account to anyone. It was just a joke, a gag.

His trial starts next week. 

Remember those controversial Danish cartoons from 2005 that depicted the Prophet Mohammed and aroused so much anger in the Muslim world? At least 50 people were killed in the ensuing worldwide riots. Well, the cartoons were republished in Europe today by Danish, Swedish, Spanish, and Dutch newspapers to emphasize freedom of speech and to protest an alleged plot to kill one of the cartoonists. This time, Danish Muslim groups seem to regard the reprinting as an internal, domestic issue and don't plan on internationalizing it. But I can't help thinking, here we go again.

The first time around, the publisher of the cartoons explained his motives in this New York Times op-ed:

By treating a Muslim figure the same way I would a Christian or Jewish icon, I was sending an important message: You are not strangers, you are here to stay, and we accept you as an integrated part of our life. And we will satirize you, too.

We'll see what the second round brings.