| UK: Brussels Concerned by BSkyB Monopoly by Daniel Dombey and Matthew Garrahan, Financial Times October 1st, 2003 Mario Monti, Europe's competition Commissioner, on Wednesday turned his sights on British Sky Broadcasting, when he revealed plans to put forward a fresh set of objections to the satellite broadcaster's 1.02bn contract with English football's Premier League. |
| US: Recording Industry Targets 12 Year Old for File Sharing by Frank Ahrens, Washington Post September 10th, 2003 The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the music industry's trade group, is targeting what it calls "major offenders" of peer-to-peer digital song sharing, which it considers to be a violation of copyright law. Federal law allows penalties of up to $150,000 per copyrighted work, or, in other words, per song. |
| US: NGOs in the US Firing Line by Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service June 26th, 2003 Having led the charge to war in Iraq, an influential think-tank close to the administration of US President George W Bush has added a new target: international non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is setting its sights on those groups with a "progressive" or "liberal" agenda that favors "global governance" and other notions that are also promoted by the United Nations and other multilateral agencies. |
| US: Nation's Ethnic Media Wary of FCC Changes by Macrelo Ballve, Pacific News Service May 26th, 2003 In barrios, inner-city communities and immigrant enclaves nationwide, ethnic media reporters cover stories often ignored by mainstream newsrooms. Now, with a media deregulation plan being formulated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), critics fear that ethnic media's civic role may be undermined. |
| US: FCC Chairman Refuses to Delay Vote Associated Press May 16th, 2003 Michael K. Powell, the Federal Communications Commission chairman, rejected today a request from two commissioners to delay a decision on overhauling rules governing ownership of newspapers and TV and radio stations. |
| US: FCC Close to Easing Media Caps by Dan Fost, San Francisco Chronicle May 12th, 2003 The Federal Communications Commission is moving closer to easing its media ownership caps, including regulations that now limit how many television stations a network may own, or whether a company can own a newspaper and a television station in the same city. |
| US: Bush Top Gun vs. S.F. Activist by Zachary Coile, San Francisco Chronicle April 24th, 2003 WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration's top Supreme Court lawyer urged the high court Wednesday to toss out a San Francisco consumer activist's suit against Nike Inc. because it could discourage corporations from defending themselves in public against their critics. |
| US: Mobilizing the Hip-Hop Generation by Jesse Alejandro Cottrell, WireTap April 23rd, 2003 To anyone who watches MTV all day -- where P. Diddy, Ja Rule and Nelly dominate the screen flashing fancy cars, gold chains and an entourage of scantily clad women -- political empowerment and hip-hop may seem like conflicting terms. But hip-hop has been political in nature since its birth in the youth subculture of the Bronx during the late 1970s. Unfortunately what started out as a gritty portrayal of what was really happening on the streets has been perverted in less than two decades into a seemingly endless supply of high-paid corporate clowns rapping about little more than the fact that theyre rich. Today, mainstream hip-hop is worse than apolitical -- it has become a tool to oppress and distract an entire generation of youth, especially youth of color |
| IRAQ: Amid Allied Jubilation, a Child Lies in Agony, Clothes Soaked in Blood by Robert Fisk, The Independent/UK April 8th, 2003 They lay in lines, the car salesman who'd just lost his eye but whose feet were still dribbling blood, the motorcyclist who was shot by American troops near the Rashid Hotel, the 50-year-old female civil servant, her long dark hair spread over the towel she was lying on, her face, breasts, thighs, arms and feet pock-marked with shrapnel from an American cluster bomb. For the civilians of Baghdad, this is the real, immoral face of war, the direct result of America's clever little "probing missions" into Baghdad. |
| Socially Conscious Investors File Amicus Brief with Supreme Court in Nike v. Kasky Domini Social Investments April 7th, 2003 Domini Social Investments LLC today announced that it has filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court that supports San Francisco activist Marc Kasky in his effort to hold Nike accountable for its statements concerning the company's use of sweatshop labor. |
| USA: INS Roundups Put Nation's Growing Ethnic Media in Bind by Sandip Roy, Pacific News Service December 30th, 2002 As editor of the San Jose-based Farsi monthly Pezhvak, Shahbaz Taheri says he strives to be a bridge between Iranian immigrants and American society. Now he fears he helped deliver some of his readers to jail. |
| AUSTRALIA: Libel Case Could Change Internet Future by David Fickling and Stuart Millar, The Guardian December 11th, 2002 Once it was heralded as the last bastion of freedom of speech, a realm which transcended national law and the whims of the courts. But last night the internet was facing up to a harsh new reality after Australia's supreme court ruled that a local businessman could sue a website for libel in Melbourne even though it was based in the United States. |
| US: Copyright Bill Gives Power to People by Michael Grebb, Wired.com October 4th, 2002 WASHINGTON -- With talk of preemptive war all the rage on Capitol Hill, it seems that such posturing has extended into the world of digital copyright law. |
| US: Recasting the Web, Info Commons to Cash Cow by Karen Charman, Extra! August 26th, 2002 If the Bush administration lets large media conglomerates and local telephone companies have their way, the Internet as we know it -- that free-flowing, democratic, uncensored information superhighway -- could soon be a thing of the past. |
| Mexico: Legislation Strikes Blow Against Privatization, Secrecy by Dan Jaffee, CommonDreams.org April 28th, 2002 In less than 24 hours this past Wednesday, big advances for three major pieces of legislation indicated that Mexico -- for 20 years the ''model student'' of so-called free market policy reforms, and long noted for high levels of government secrecy and corruption -- may be charting a new, more independent course. At a moment when the Bush administration is chilling domestic dissent, restricting the free flow of information and promoting corporate deregulation, Mexico appears poised to do virtually the opposite. |
| US: Osama's Mama - Corporate Hip-Hop Promotes War by Kevin Weston, Pacific News Service November 5th, 2001 The night the United States began bombing Afghanistan, I was listening to a Bay Area hip-hop/R&B station, KMEL. KMEL is owned by Clear Channel, one of the largest radio conglomerates in the country. |
| US: Media Giants Lobbying to Privatize Airwaves by Jeremy Rifkin, The Guardian (London) April 28th, 2001 Imagine a world in which a handful of global media conglomerates like Vivendi, Sony, BskyB, Disney, and News Corporation own literally all the airwaves all over the planet and trade them back and forth as 'private electronic real estate'. A strategy is beginning to unfold in Washington DC to make that happen. |
| US: 2001 Goldman Prize Winners Fight Greed Environment News Service April 23rd, 2001 The Goldman Environmental Prize for North America goes this year to Akre and Wilson. Winners in five other geographic areas are honored too with the world's largest prize for environmental activists. |
| USA: New Report Examines Commercialism in Schools by Constance L. Hays, New York Times September 14th, 2000 From exclusive soft-drink contracts to computers displaying continuous advertising, corporate marketing in public schools is rising sharply. But few states have laws in place to address the phenomenon, and most decisions on commercial arrangements in schools are made piecemeal by local officials, according to a report from the General Accounting Office scheduled to be released today. |
| Canada: Raffi Says No to Ads for Kids by Raffi Cavoukian, Toronto Globe & Mail June 19th, 2000 Throughout my 20-plus years of making music for children, the core value at the heart of my work has been respect for the young child as a whole person. I have not accepted any offers to do commercial endorsements because I believe it's wrong to use one's popularity to sell products to a vulnerable audience. |