Media News - Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Britain mulls plan to store all emails and calls

Britain is considering a massive government database to store the e-mails, Internet information, phone-calls and text messages of all residents to help security forces in the fight against crime and terrorism. At the moment, records of phone-calls and text messages are kept up to 12 months by telecoms companies in compliance with an EU anti-terrorism directive. But a new Home Office (Interior Ministry) proposal would see Internet service providers (ISPs) and telecoms companies handing over records containing billions of e-mails as well as Internet usage and voice-over-Internet calls, media reports said on Tuesday. Police and security services would be able to have access to the information after seeking permission from the courts. The Home Office said communication methods had changed rapidly during the past 15 years. ‘The changes to the way we communicate, due particularly to the Internet revolution, will increasingly undermine our current capabilities to obtain communications data and use it to protect the public,’ it said in a statement. The draft Communications Data bill is expected to be released later in the year, but the plan has yet to be discussed by ministers. It is likely to raise concerns about civil liberties and data protection, especially after recent scandals including the loss of child benefits information. (Reuters)

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UN war crimes tribunal charges prominent Kosovo journalist for contempt

The United Nations war crimes tribunal Tuesday charged a top Kosovo journalist with contempt of court, alleging that he has revealed the identity of a protected witness, the UN said. The journalist, Baton Haxhiu, reportedly revealed the name of a witness testifying against Kosovo's former guerrilla commander, later prime minister Ramush Haradinaj. Haxhiu, a former journalist and editor at Koha Ditore and the daily Express and a long-time contributor to Deutsche Welle, was arrested in Kosovo and was due to be transferred to The Hague-based tribunal. Haradinaj was acquitted earlier this year by a panel of judges of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) owing to lack of evidence in a trial marred by witness intimidation. Serbia, which has branded Haradinaj a terrorist who has tortured and murdered Serbs, described the verdict as a travesty of justice. Haxhiu is the third Kosovo Albanian to be charged with contempt of court in the past month. All three incidents were related to the Haradinaj case, in which the prosecution appealed the verdict. (DPA via Earth Times)

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Radio Liberty says Kazakhstan blocking its website

Prague-based Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has accused Kazakhstan of blocking access to its website which it said was deliberate interference in its news reporting. Media watchdogs have long criticized the Central Asian state of silencing independent media in a country where mainstream television and newspapers almost never criticize state policies. RFE/RL said its Kazakh site had been blocked since April 11 due to what it initially thought was technical problems. RFE/RL said its Kazakh-language website, www.azattyq.org, has been blocked along with the English-language page. Kazakh officials could not be immediately reached for comment. Kazakhstan's fragmented opposition, as well as human rights groups, have accused President Nursultan Nazarbayev of tightening his grip on power over past years and turning the local press into an obedient mouth-piece. Most liberal-minded Kazakhs have turned to the Internet as their last venue for political debate, but a number of opposition news websites remain shut for local users. The government has not made any public remarks on this. The same blocking technique was used in 2006 on www.borat.kz, a website run by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen who angered Kazakhstan through his alter ego Borat, a racist, sexist and boorish Kazakh TV journalist. (Reuters via ABC News)

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Tiscali founder buys former party paper

L'Unita, once the mouthpiece of the mighty Italian Communist party (PCI), was Tuesday bought by an internet billionaire. The deal testified both to the paper's scant appeal and the growing power of a tycoon who has sometimes been described as the left's answer to Silvio Berlusconi. Renato Soru, the founder of the international broadband operator Tiscali, entered politics five years ago. He has since been elected governor of Sardinia and joined the leadership of Italy's main opposition, the Democratic party. Details of the deal were not immediately available, but L'Unita's outgoing proprietor said the daily would become the property of a foundation established by Soru. Press reports had earlier valued the company at EUR 20m. In recent years, L'Unita was a shadow of its former self. It was founded in 1924 by the Marxist revolutionary Antonio Gramsci as a paper ‘for workers and peasants’. At its height in the mid-1970s, it was selling up to 250,000 copies. Its contributors included the novelist Italo Calvino. The appearance in 1976 of a more independent left-of-centre daily, La Repubblica, began a slow decline accelerated by the fall of the Berlin wall and the dissolution of the PCI. Today, L'Unita's circulation is thought to be below 50,000. Staff are hoping the web-savvy Soru can give L'Unita a new lease of life on the internet. (The Guardian)

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Google releases Google Health for medical records

Google Inc on Monday unveiled Google Health, a long-anticipated U.S. health information service that combines the leading Web company's classic search services with a user's personal health records online. The password-protected service, which can be found at www.google.com/health/, stores a user's basic medical history and gathers relevant information connected to their health conditions. One feature includes a link to help users find doctors by location or specialization. The ‘virtual pillbox’ notifies patients when they need to take medications and warns of potential drug interactions. The service includes links to major U.S. pharmacies, doctors' groups and medical testing labs. Patients would control access to their records, Google said. Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president for search services and user experience, said the company would store personal health information on computers that are separate from the company's other endeavors and had created an additional layer of security. The site would allow patients to schedule appointments, refill prescriptions, receive diagnostic results online, and instantly add their doctors' email addresses to a list of contacts. (Reuters)

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Photo mix-up in Austrian tabloids

Austria's tabloid newspapers are facing tough new regulation after they published a picture of a child who was allegedly killed by her father with an axe – only to find they had the wrong girl. Instead of pictures of seven-year-old Natalie Steinbauer, who is said to have been murdered by her father last Tuesday in Vienna together with four other family members, three Austrian papers – Heute, Österreich and Kronen Zeitung – printed a picture of a different girl that attends the same school. The story they were illustrating with the wrong girl's picture is about The second girl is not in the same class as Natalie, and is still alive. In the three papers, stories about the multiple killing were accompanied by the pictures purporting to show Steinbauer's seven-year-old daughter. As a result of the mix-up, the Austrian government has pledged to rush through tough new laws governing the press that will include higher fines for breaches of editorial standards. Austria's newspaper market has been livened up of late by the arrival of the tabloid freesheet Heute and the aggressive daily Österreich. These are competing with the more established Kronen Zeitung, which has a daily circulation of around 4m. The intense competition that has followed has been visible in the battle for exclusives in the recent incest scandal in Amstetten, which may lead to further punishment for Austrian newspapers for breaches of media and privacy laws. (The Guardian)

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