Beketov’s fate is a graphic illustration of the dangers of working as a journalist in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. His story is depressingly typical: according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Russia is now the third most dangerous place in the world to work as a reporter, after Iraq and Algeria.
reports the Guardian
from the nytimes:
North Korea said this week it would be expelling South Korean officials and some business managers from the park in Kaesong, just north of the border, on December 1 in anger at South Korean President Lee Myung-bak’s policy to get tough on Pyongyang.
“On the afternoon of November 28, they will cross the Military Demarcation Line and pull out to the South,” Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon told a news briefing, referring to government workers stationed at the industrial park.
According to the New York Times, the Chinese government reacted angrily on Monday to what it called a slanderous United Nations report that alleges systemic torture of political and criminal detainees. The government said the authors were biased, untruthful and driven by a political agenda.
The report, issued Friday by the United Nations Committee Against Torture, documented what the authors described as widespread abuse in the Chinese legal system, one that often gains convictions through forced confessions.
The report recounts China’s use of “secret prisons” and the widespread harassment of lawyers who take on rights cases, and it criticizes the government’s extralegal system of punishment, known as re-education through labor, which hands down prison terms to dissidents without judicial review.
The Associated Press reports:
China’s border police have significantly beefed up their presence at the base of Mount Everest amid rising visitor numbers and increasing cases of theft, prostitution and gambling, state media reported Tuesday.
The influx of people to the area has brought increased crime to the north face of Everest, and Chinese authorities last year pledged to boost the police presence following reports of thefts of food, oxygen tanks and climbing gear.
No real surprise here, Chinese authorities call new album “venomous” and block access to band’s website.
Russian warships approached Venezuela Monday for upcoming joint maneuvers — Moscow’s first military presence in the region since the Cold War — as Washington closely monitored the situation.
Venezuelan defense officials said the ships, including the nuclear-powered cruiser Peter the Great and destroyer Admiral Chabankenko, would arrive on Tuesday reports the AFP.
Audiences at the 11th Pyongyang International Film Festival clearly enjoyed themselves this fall during screenings of Western dramas and comedies, occasionally even erupting into riotous laughter.
The festival, which ran from Sept. 17 to 26 and screened more than 100 films from at least 45 nations, including China, Russia, France and Italy (though not the United States, Japan or South Korea), offered a rare chance for ordinary North Koreans to get a glimpse of the outside world.
Pilotless “drone” aircraft deliver a silent, deadly payload that has proved effective in killing militants, but has also killed civilians when intelligence goes awry or in “collateral damage, reports the Guardian.
In Pakistan, strikes were infrequent – every few months – until August, when there was a sudden and dramatic increase in the drone attacks. Since then there have been at least 20 strikes – more than one a week – possibly in a stepped-up attempt to kill Osama bin Laden before George Bush leaves office on January 20 next year.
For the first time in their at-times turbulent history, a ship from the Chinese Navy visited Vietnam. The Chinese naval training ship Zheng He arrived at the Vietnamese central Tien Sa port in Danang yesterday Chinese state media reported.
Vietnam has hosted a number of foreign navies in recent years including ships from the United States.
Vietnam and China fought a short-lived border war in 1979.
While it doesn’t pertain to Cuba per se, this excellent article in the New York Times takes a look at the current socialist salon being created by Hugo Chávez’s socialist government in Venezuela.
In hotel corridors where oilmen in business suits once hatched deals over glasses of whiskey, delegates in Birkenstocks and guayaberas discussed Marx and Antonio Gramsci, the leftist Italian writer. Such meetings have become a staple of life in Caracas, with Mr. Chávez’s government flush, at least for now, with petrodollars that can be used to attract sympathetic members of the chattering classes the world over.
Officials here have organized international encounters for philosophers, women’s rights advocates, the government spokesmen of nonaligned countries, poets and, in September, specialists in body painting.