Reporters Without Borders issue alarm over police violence against media professionals in Greece

Reporters Without Borders issue alarm over police violence against reporters in Greece, a photo by Teacher Dude's BBQ on Flickr.

Following a series of attacks on photographers and other journalists covering anti-government protests in Athens, Reporters without Borders has issued an alarm over the Greek police's treatment of reporters. Below is an extract from their damning report on lack of press freedom in the country.

"Working conditions during demonstrations are nowadays rather like in a war-zone, which is both surprising and deplorable in an EU member-state. press photographers and camera-operators are by far the worst affected. Few protesters make a distinction any longer between media owners and journalists just trying to do a job.


Photojournalists and camera-operators are scapegoats for all the bitterness and violence. to the police, they are undesirable witnesses of often harsh and illegal repression. “Our images show that the police don’t know how to do their job,” says Aristotelis Messinis, a photographer in Athens for the french agence France-Presse news agency. “We show up their poor training and their abuses and excesses.


The police also consider the pictures taken of them as an invasion of their privacy. It’s weird but true. For activists and extremists, we’re a similar problem, as undesirable witnesses of their activities that don’t belong in such demonstrations. To them, the media is an arm of the government, so they attack us."

en.rsf.org/IMG/pdf/greece_2011_eng.pdf

The new Mastercard Freedom Card - Inspired by the US State Department

The new Mastercard Freedom Card - Inspired by the US State Department, originally uploaded by Teacher Dude's BBQ.

"The website of MasterCard, the international credit card, has been hacked and partially paralysed by hackers, in apparent revenge for the payment network's decision to cease taking donations to WikiLeaks.

A group of online activists calling themselves Anonymous appear to have orchestrated a DDOS ("distributed denial of service") attack on the site, bringing its service at www.mastercard.com to a halt for many users."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/08/mastercard-hackers-wikileaks-revenge

North Korea sends messages of support and congratulations to UK for capturing political hooligan, Julian Assange

If the USA and UK are going to act like totalitarian regimes they could at least learn from governments that do not pretend to protect freedom of speech.

Trafigura / Carter - Ruck enter the Oxford English Dictionary

The next few months will prove to be an interesting time as far as oil trading company Trifigura and the law firm Carter-Ruck are concerned. After their failed attempt to gag the Guardian from reporting the proceedings of the British parliament, a legal action unprecedented in modern UK legal history, it seems that the Oxford English Dictionary is likely to have a number of new entries to next year's edition. Let me humbly suggest a couple of examples;

Main Entry: ¹ Cluster - ruck

Pronunciation: \ˈkləs-tər - ˈrək\

Function: noun

Usage: often attributive

Etymology: derived from legal firm of Peter Cluster - Ruck

Date: 2009

1 : a collision of several unfortunate incidents happening all at once

2 : awful legal advice leading to public ridicule.

RUBAR , adj

Main Entry: ¹Ru-bar

Pronunciation: \"ru-bər\

Function: adjective

Usage: often attributive

Etymology: Rucked Up Beyond All Recognition. Prob derivative FUBAR.

Date: 2009

1 : a situation caused by excessive use of legal measures in order to obtain a dubious result which reflects badly on those involved.

2 : lack of judgement leading to PR disaster.

Trafigurated, adj

Main Entry: ¹ tra-fi-gu-rat-ed

Pronunciation: \ˈtra - fi - grə - atəd\

Function: adjective

Usage: derogatory

Etymology: derived from oil trading company Trifigura

Date: 2009

1 : to be publicly held to ridicule due to overweening arrogance

2 : to be in dire straits as a result of previous choices.

Carter - Ruck gag Guardian

Carter - Ruck gag Guardian, originally uploaded by Teacher Dude's BBQ.

"Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations."

Check out Twitter which is doing brisk business on the #trafigura trend.

Guardian gagging order backfires on Trafigura

The Streisand effect is when in trying to ban something you, in fact amplify it and bring it, inadvertently to a wider audience. Named after singer Barbra Streisand it is of course is not a new tactic as record companies from the 70's knew. Getting a record banned on radio or TV was great for business and often guaranteed top 10 sales.

In the latest example of the phenomenon is brought to us by Trafigura, an oil trading company based in London which has been trying to gag media coverage worldwide of illegal toxic waste dumping in the Ivory Coast. Despite repeated claims by the company that the waste was completely harmless Trafigura agreed to pay $100 million to 31,000 victims affected by exposure to toxic oil residues dumped just outside the country's capital, Abidjan. Since then Trafigura through it's legal representatives, Carter-Ruck has been waging a campaign across the globe to stop exposure of the incident. This has included law to gag media outlets in the UK, US, Norway and Holland. The latest round has included action against the Guardian newspaper which as it says in today's edition,

"Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations."

If Trafigura and Carter-Ruck hope to keep the lid on this story then I think they have sadly underestimated the new media landscape that the internet is in the process of creating. Such attempts to bury a story now produce exactly the opposite results as Trafigure already knows, finding itself at the centre of a web based maelstrom. Whatever happens in courts today the deaths and injuries caused by the toxic waste in landfills in Abidjan is likely to fill front pages for days to come.

In the time it took to write this artilce over 5000 new tweets tagged #trafigura have appeared on Twitter and has become one of the top trending topics on the micro-blogging service.

Barclays Bank Über Alles

"Barclays Bank obtained a court order early today banning the Guardian from publishing documents which showed how the bank set up companies to avoid hundreds of millions of pounds in tax.

The gagging order was granted by Mr Justice Ouseley after Barclays complained about seven documents on the Guardian's website which had been leaked to the Liberal Democrats' deputy leader, Vince Cable.

The internal Barclays memos – leaked by a Barclays whistleblower – showed executives from SCM, Barclays's structured capital markets division, seeking approval for a 2007 plan to sink more than $16bn (£11.4bn) into US loans."

Barclays gags Guardian over tax

Copies of the original memos outlining how the bank avoided paying tax to the British government can be found and downloaded from Wikileaks.

UPDATE

Unfortunately, the Wikileaks site has been taken down by the Australian government but you can still find the memos here at www.techcrunch.com.