12 Apr 10 | Index Index, minipost, Uncategorized
Chinese human rights activist Hu Jia, has been denied medical parole by Chinese officials. His wife, Zeng Jinyan appealed for his release to Beijing authorities last week citing concerns for his husband’s health, he may have liver cancer. According to Zeng’s blog, the authorities telephoned Hu’s mother this morning rejecting the plea. The caller claimed Hu, who was believed to be in hospital, has since been moved back to prison, and that his liver problem was the result of a “blood tumour”—not meeting the conditions of medical parole. Despite authorities have also refused Zeng’s request for a written report of Hu’s health. Hu Jia, winner of the Sakharov Prize, has been imprisoned since 2008 for testifying via video link to the European Parliament about China’s human rights record, and his sentence is due to end June 2011.
09 Apr 10 | Index Index, minipost, Uncategorized
Two of China’s most important state television networks, China Central Television (CCTV) and Beijing Television (BTV) confirmed on Tuesday that the government have issued new guidelines to stop journalists using English acronyms during broadcasts. Terms such as GDP and WTO are to be substituted for their Chinese equivalents in an attempt to maintain the purity of the Chinese language.
08 Apr 10 | Index Index, minipost, Uncategorized
The prominent Chinese human rights lawyer and activist Gao Zhisheng, who had been missing for over a year, gave his first interview to the Associated Press yesterday.
During the interview, Gao refused to discuss the suspicious circumstances surrounding his disappearance and reappearance, or comment on his treatment by Chinese authorities. Gao has previously written an open letter detailing graphic accounts of torture whilst under arrest in China, as well the treatment of his wife and children whom he claims had been starved whilst under captivity. The abandoning of his political activism now, says Gao, is due to concern for his family, currently residing in the US, whom he hopes to be reunited with one day.
06 Apr 10 | Uncategorized
Shadows in the Cloud, a report released on Monday by the Munk School of Global Affairs in Toronto, recoumts the activities of Chinese internet hackers and the interception of their stolen documents over a period of eight months.
Some of the high-level classified information recovered by the investigation included documents pertaining to Indian national security and its diplomatic relations with various countries, NATO travel plans in Afghanistan, as well as a year’s worth of the Dalai Lama’s personal email correspondence. Unlike the GhostNet publication of March last year, which only showed malicious trojan viruses sent from China to specific targets, Shadows in the Cloud managed to recover the stolen data, proving the dangerous threat posed to international security by such operations. IP tracking managed to locate some of the hackers to Chengdu, but as is often the case such networks operate throughout the whole country. Although the attacks cannot be proven to be politically motivated, Nart Villeneuve, one of the main researchers of the group, has commented that given the sophisticated level of the operations, and the fact that the stolen documents correlates “with the strategic interests of the Chinese state”, it is plausible that some of the stolen data “may have ended up in the possession of some entity of the Chinese government.”
Ron Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski, two of the leading members of the research group, has recently written an article on Cyber War for Index on Censorship, as well as another article on internet espionage published on Monday.
