Chinese authorities shut down blogs, Internet forums and social media sites such as Twitter in an apparent attempt to stem online political discussion ahead of today’s 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
As in past years, dissidents were rounded up and shipped out of Beijing and foreign media reports on the protests and continuing calls for an investigation into the events of June 3 to June 4, 1989, have been blocked.
‘INTENSIFIED CLAMPDOWN’
However, the cut-off of Internet sites marks a new chapter in the authorities’ attempts to muzzle dissent, one that testifies to the burgeoning influence of such technology among young Chinese in an authoritarian society where information is tightly controlled.
“There has been a really intensified clampdown on quasi-public discussion of awareness of this event,” said Xiao Qiang (蕭強), an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California-Berkeley and the director of Berkeley’s China Internet Project.
“It’s a discussion about where China is now and where China can go from here. So the authorities are making a major crackdown to block user-generated sites such as Twitter and show there is no right to public discussion,” he said.
MESSAGE BOARDS
China has the world’s largest online population and Internet communities have proven increasingly influential in spreading word of events to everything from student protests to group shopping excursions.
People are going outside the normal, controlled channels to set up communities online, spreading information about campus unrest and other activities that the government considers to be potentially subversive.
Government Internet monitors have closed message boards on more than 6,000 Web sites affiliated with colleges and universities, apparently to head off talk about the 1989 events, the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said.
Numerous blogs maintained by edgy government critics such as avant-garde artist Ai Weiwei (艾未未) have been blocked and the text-messaging service Twitter and pictures on photo sharing site Flikr could not be accessed within China yesterday.
Video sharing site YouTube has been blocked within China since March.
“We understand the Chinese government is blocking access to Flickr and other international sites, though the government has not issued any explanation,” said Jason Khoury, spokesman for Yahoo, which owns Flickr.
“We believe a broad restriction without a legal basis is inconsistent with the right to freedom of expression,” Khoury said.
Officials from Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the