Month: February 2013

Iran's Censors Tighten Grip

Iran hasn’t been shy about its bids to monitor, filter and block content on the Internet. Now it has taken the next leap, turning online censorship into an institution.

In the past week, the government has announced it has formed a high council dedicated to cleansing the country’s Internet of sites that threaten morality and national security, launching what amounts to a centralized command structure for online censorship.

The Supreme Council of Cyberspace, created by decree last week by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, includes heads of intelligence, militia, security and the powerful Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as media chiefs.

In an annual report released Monday, the group Reporters Without Borders ranked Iran the No. 1 enemy of the Internet in 2012.

“We have identified and confronted 650 websites that have been set up to battle our regime—39 of them are by opposition groups and our enemies, and the rest promote Western culture and worshiping Satan, and stoke sectarian divides.” Mr. Shahriari said the council would also “focus and facilitate positive aspects of the Internet, like business and trade.”

“We will fight back and continue posting our opinions but our resources are very limited compared to what the Revolutionary Guards can do,” said a female student activist in Iran.

In Our Time: The War of 1812

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the War of 1812, the conflict between America and the British Empire sometimes referred to as the second American War of Independence. In June 1812, President James Madison declared war on Britain, angered by the restrictions Britain had imposed on American trade, the Royal Navy’s capture of American sailors and British support for Native Americans. After three years of largely inconclusive fighting, the conflict finally came to an end with the Treaty of Ghent which, among other things, helped to hasten the abolition of the global slave trade.

Although the War of 1812 is often overlooked, historians say it had a profound effect on the USA and Canada’s sense of national identity, confirming the USA as an independent country. America’s national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner began life as a poem written after its author, Francis Scott Key, witnessed the British bombardment of Fort McHenry during the Battle of Baltimore. The war also led to Native Americans losing hundreds of thousands of acres of land in a programme of forced removal.

Iran's nuclear ambitions stalk presidential election

Intriguingly, many of the potential contenders so far have one thing in common – they have been involved in the international negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme.

Hassan Rohani, who was the country’s chief nuclear negotiator from 2003 to 2005, is the latest politician to tacitly acknowledge that he is intending to stand. Rohani told reporters in early January that it was time for a “new tone” in Iranian nuclear policy and that President Ahmadinejad had been too “confrontational”.

Ali Larijani, the current speaker of parliament, is another possible candidate with a nuclear past. In 2005, he succeeded Mr Rohani as Iran’s nuclear negotiator, but his moderate and pragmatic stand also put him at odds with the president and he resigned after two years.

Another name in the hat is Saeed Jalili, Iran’s current chief nuclear envoy. A tough negotiator who lost a leg during the Iran-Iraq war, Mr Jalili is keeping silent about his intentions.

Ali Akbar Salehi, the current foreign minister and former head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI).

Read more at BBC

A Look Inside the Astonishing Black Panther Murder Trial of 1970-71

These drawings are the only known visual record of the 1970-1971 trial of New Haven, Conn., Black Panther Party members for the murder of fellow Panther Alex Rackley. Suspecting that Rackley was a police informant, Panthers shot and killed him in 1969. Those who pulled the trigger admitted their guilt. The question at stake in the trial was whether Panther leaders Ericka Huggins and Bobby Seale were involved.

Robert Templeton, a sketch artist and painter, received a commission from CBS News to document the trial. The courtroom was technically closed to artists and photographers, so he had to hide his work.

HugginsAndOthersFinal

A Midcentury Travel Guide for African-American Drivers Navigating Jim Crow

As historian Cotton Seiler points out, the Green Book flourished during a time when cars were getting cheaper, and travel by automobile was becoming more common. For black drivers, however, freedom of the road had its limits. These travelers had to navigate segregated accommodations, couldn’t join AAA, and received disproportionate levels of attention from the police and local racists.

Fastest Courtship in the West: How LBJ Won Lady Bird

Lyndon Baines Johnson and Claudia Alta “Lady Bird” Taylor conducted their courtship at breakneck speed. They met in Texas in September 1934 and were engaged by November. The pair was married on Nov. 17, 1934, and remained together until LBJ’s death parted them in 1973.

LBJ, smitten, proposed marriage on their very first date. Lady Bird held back, heeding the voices of her relatives, who counseled caution. In the letter below, dated early November 1934, she wrote to her suitor: “Everybody is so constantly urging me to ‘wait two or three months,’ ‘wait-wait,’ ‘two months isn’t long enough to have known the man you’re to marry.’ ”

Much of their courting took place via mail, as LBJ was in Washington working as a congressional aide, while Lady Bird remained in her hometown (Karnack, Texas). LBJ’s letters were honest and surprisingly sentimental. On Oct. 24, 1934, he wrote to her:

Have been intending to tell you everyday about a little orange comb I carry in my billfold. It is the only thing I have from my little girl at Karnack and when I get lonesome and blue or happy and ambitious I always get pleasure when I look at the little comb and think …just think.

The LBJ Library has just opened a new Web exhibit where you can read more courtship letters between the two Texans.

Ahmadinejad wants to be first Iran astronaut

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said he is ready to take the risk of becoming the first human being sent into space by Iran, national media reports.

“I’m ready to be the first Iranian to sacrifice myself for our country’s scientists,” the official IRNA news agency quoted him as saying on the sidelines of an exhibition of space achievements in Tehran on Monday.

My thoughts: farewell Mr. President. Earth would be better without ya.

Happy 100th Birthday, Rosa Parks

We know instinctively that not everything we come to believe as history is true. But we want it to be.

We want to believe that a timid seamstress sat down on a city bus in December, 1955 and refused to give up her seat to a white man because she was just too tired.

We want to believe that she was a solitary heroine who single-handedly desegregated public transportation in Montgomery, Ala., overnight.

And we want to believe that she spent the rest of her days comfortably, secure in the knowledge that her meek, nonviolent approach to injustice made all the difference.

Except, as is too often the case with revisionist history, we would be wrong.

Video: They Chose China

Oscar nominated filmmaker Shuibo Wang aims his camera at the astonishing story of 21 American POWs who, after the Korean War ended, chose to live in China instead of returning the USA.

Using rare archival footage, excerpts from American and Chinese TV programs, as well as period and contemporary interviews, They Chose China chronicles the fascinating history of this group of young Americans who were hailed in China as “peace fighters” and denounced in America as “turncoats” and “traitors.”

U.S. media claimed that these young POW’s had been “brainwashed” by the Chinese communists. The film shows conditions inside these Chinese camps, featuring never-before-seen footage, plus contemporary interviews with some of the camps’ Chinese translators, instructors, lecturers, and officers.

How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York

How the Other Half Lives together with its sequel Battle with the Slum reveal through Riis’s sensationalist prose and photography the appalling living conditions in the Lower East Side of turn-of-the-century New York City.

Full text here

PC not his forte. I’ve heard more flattering depictions of my peeps:
Thrift is the watchword of Jewtown, as of its people the world over. It is at once its strength and its fatal weakness, its cardinal virtue and its foul disgrace.

Penury and poverty are wedded everywhere to dirt and disease, and Jewtown is no exception. It could not well be otherwise in such crowds, considering especially their low intellectual status.
He is as ready to fight for his rights, or what he considers his rights, in a business transaction—synonymous generally with his advantage—as if he had not been robbed of them for eighteen hundred years. One strong impression survives with him from his days of bondage: the power of the law. On the slightest provocation he rushes off to invoke it for his protection. Doubtless the sensation is novel to him, and therefore pleasing.
Bitter as are his private feuds, it is not until his religious life is invaded that a real inside view is obtained of this Jew, whom the history of Christian civilization has taught nothing but fear and hatred.

As scholars, the children of the most ignorant Polish Jew keep fairly abreast of their more favored playmates, until it comes to mental arithmetic, when they leave them behind with a bound. It is surprising to see how strong the instinct of dollars and cents is in them. They can count, and correctly, almost before they can talk.