U.K. Firm Tells U.S. Workers to Remove Helmet Decals

I remember seeing plenty of workers for KeySpan, a big natural gas firm in the Northeast, sporting hard hats that were so covered with stickers and decals, you couldn't see the white underneath.

Not anymore. The Boston Globe reports that a month after the British energy giant National Grid PLC took over KeySpan, managers told employees that the decals and stickers — often depicting the American flag or carrying slogans like "Proud to be an American" — had to go, or they would be suspended.

Some workers have resisted the new rule. A spokesman for the company says it's a safety issue as well as one of appearance because the decals could cover cracks and wear in the hard hats.

Now, I'm not quite sure if these British owners realize what they have done. I lived in Boston for a long time, and I can tell you that Bostonians still don't take well to British rule. It wouldn't surprise me at all if some of those safety helmets wind up in Boston Harbor.

How do you feel about the hard-hat stickers? Should workers be able to express themselves on the job?

1:24 PM ET | 09-27-2007 | permalink | comments (5) | e-mail post

Liberal Professor Gets UC Irvine Job Back

Last week, we examined the controversy over the University of California, Irvine's, decision to withdraw its offer to prominent liberal legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky to head its new law school. Chemerinsky said he was told he wasn't being hired because he was too controversial, sparking protest from both the left and the right.

Well, there's nothing like a mountain of negative publicity to make a university chancellor change his mind. The Los Angeles Times reports that Chancellor Michael V. Drake and Chemerinsky announced today that they have reached an agreement that will allow the scholar to take the dean's post.

5:01 PM ET | 09-17-2007 | permalink | comments (0) | e-mail post

College Withdraws Job Offer to Liberal Professor

If the chancellor of the University of California, Irvine, was too worried about taking heat from conservatives to hire liberal constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky as the head of the college's new law school (as Chemerinsky says) ... well, it backfired. Chancellor Michael V. Drake, who decided to rescind his offer to Chemerinsky, is taking lots of heat from conservatives — and liberals, too — for the decision.

The Washington Post reports that Drake told Chemerinsky, who has criticized the Bush administration, that he was too politically risky.

According to Chemerinsky, the UC-Irvine chancellor told him on Tuesday that he "knew I was liberal but didn't know how controversial I would be." The chancellor also said "some conservative opposition was developing," and the University of California regents would have "a bloody fight" over approving him, Chemerinsky said.

Hugh Hewitt, the prominent conservative columnist and law professor, called the decision "clearly a boneheaded move." "Even though I agree with him on only about one out of 100 issues, I believe he is one of the top legal minds in the United States," he said.

Douglas W. Kmiec, a conservative constitutional scholar and law professor at Pepperdine University, wrote in an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times that it was "a betrayal of everything a great institution like the University of California represents."

In his own op-ed piece in the Times, Drake denied he withdrew his offer because Chemerinsky was too liberal. He wrote that it was "a management decision — not an ideological or political one."

One of the best lines came from John Jeffries, dean of the University of Virginia Law School. "It seems late in the day to notice [that] Erwin Chemerinsky is a prominent liberal. ... It's rather like discovering that Wilt Chamberlain was tall. How could you not know?"

3:04 PM ET | 09-14-2007 | permalink | comments (2) | e-mail post

Jailed Chinese Journalist Wins Golden Pen Award

This is probably not going to make Yahoo!'s public relations department very happy.

The World Association of Newspapers, while meeting in Cape Town, South Africa, awarded the prestigious Golden Pen of Freedom Award to jailed Chinese journalist Shi Tao. The newspaper association gave the award on June 4 -- the 18th anniversary of the Chinese government's crackdown on democratic protesters in Tiananmen Square.

Recently, we wrote about how the Chinese government used information supplied by Yahoo! to track down Shi as the author of an e-mail to overseas pro-democracy Web sites. Yahoo! officials have defended their actions, saying the company was complying with local laws when it handed over the information about Shi's e-mail account.

However, Shi's supporters see the company's decision as collaboration with a repressive government. The award's presenter said in his speech that giant Internet companies have a special responsibility: "They have an obligation to ensure that the basic human rights of their users will be protected, and they must carefully guard against becoming accomplices in repression."

Tao's mother, Gao Qinsheng, accepted the award on his behalf. Rebecca MacKinnon of RConversation, who was in Cape Town for the conference, said Goa told her that Yahoo! has not tried to help get Tao freed from his 10-year prison sentence.

2:28 PM ET | 06- 6-2007 | permalink | comments (0) | e-mail post

N.Y. Wants to Stop Violent Video Game Sales to Minors

Illinois tried and failed. Louisiana was stopped by the courts. California was also stymied. Now New York wants to try and stop the sale of violent video games to minors.

This week, the New York Assembly passed a bill that would make the sale of a violent video game to a minor a felony, punishable by as much as three to four years in jail. The bill also would require all game console makers to put a parental control V-chip in every console by December 2009. Most newer consoles, like PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's Xbox already have such a chip. But it would be a problem for PlayStation 2 and Nintendo's GameCube.

The bill comes on the heels of a similar one passed in the New York Senate a week ago. The two bills will now go into conference committee to iron out the details. New York Democrats and Republicans hope to get the new bill to Gov. Eliot Spitzer for his signature by June. Spitzer has already said he would support this kind of legislation.

But the initiative faces considerable opposition from the gaming industry and a history of failed attempts by other states. A representative of New York's Entertainment Merchants Association has already labeled the bills "ill-conceived."

J. Micah Grunert, writing at Neoseeker.com, anticipates that if the bill becomes law, the Entertainment Software Association will sue New York. The Associated Press reports that the politicians in Albany are aware their effort may be ruled unconstitutional but, as one Republican put it, wanted to try and do something rather than just "walking away from the issue."

3:45 PM ET | 06- 1-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Scientologists, BBC Reporter Square Off On YouTube

Video of a BBC reporter losing his temper with a Church of Scientology official while investigating the church's operations for BBC-TV's "Panorama" has been turned into what the reporter calls an "attack video" against him by the church. The video, which shows reporter John Sweeney screaming at a church official, has been widely disseminated by Scientology officials over the Internet, along with voiceover comments.

It's a pretty amazing display, and as one colleague said to me, it's really inexcusable -- reporters shouldn't lose their cool like that. (And YouTube being what it is, here is a parody of Sweeney's outburst, involving a man and his banana.)

But the BBC has shot back with a much longer version that provides more context to Sweeney's explosion. The Beeb has also put online the entire film Sweeney made for "Panorama."

In a posting on the BBC Web site, Sweeney talks about some of the harassment he claims occurred while he was researching the project.

It should be noted that the Church of Scientology has a well-documented history of hiring private investigators to probe (and some would say harass and intimidate) reporters writing about the organization. Church officials say they are just vigorously defending their constitutional rights.

In 1998, the Boston Herald reported that Scientology officials admitted they had hired a private investigator to find what the paper calls "derogatory information" on a Herald reporter who had done a series on the church. The Herald article lists several other situations dating back to the '80s where reporters were harassed or intimidated by Scientology members. (Here is a link to the story in the Herald archives, which are fee-based. The complete article, however, has also been posted at this anti-Scientology Web site.) These online tips for reporters on how to interview Scientology spokesmen and -women caution that they will try to make interviewers lose their tempers.

One of the focuses of Sweeney's piece is the church's attempts to keep its secret documents off the Internet, such as the story of "a tyrant named Xenu (pronounced Zee-new)" who 75 million years ago "ruled the Galactic Confederation, an alliance of 76 planets, including Earth, then called Teegeeack." Despite the church's attempts, the documents are widely available online.

(Tom's Note: I just wanted to add, since several comments below mentioned it, that the Church has prepared a longer response to the Panorama film. You can find it here.)

11:55 AM ET | 05-16-2007 | permalink | comments (38) | e-mail post

Pentagon Targets Military Lawyer Who Released Detainee Data

Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Dish writes today on how the Pentagon has gone after its own military lawyers "who have stood up to the illegal and sometimes criminal detainee policies of the Bush administration" in the war on terror. He suggests reading Scott Horton's piece Monday in Harper's Magazine on the government's prosecution of Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Diaz, currently underway in Norfolk, Va.

Diaz, Horton writes, is being prosecuted for sending a list of the detainees at Guantanamo -- inside a Valentine -- to the New York Center for Constitutional Rights in January 2005. The Pentagon under the leadership of Donald Rumsfeld wanted to keep the list secret. But as Horton points out, the administration had responsibilities under U.S. and international law to disclose the list.

So the names of the detainees were required to be disclosed. Their non-disclosure was a criminal act. A federal court compelled their disclosure. And now a Guantanamo JAG is being prosecuted for disclosing the names, with a claim that his action was "with intent to benefit a foreign nation." What is the matter with this picture?

In February, Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift wrote a piece for Esquire magazine in which he explained why he "sued my commander in chief and the secretary of defense on behalf of a Guantanamo Bay detainee named Salim Hamdan." Swift's action successfully challenged the Bush administration's use of military tribunals.

NPR reported last October that Swift was forced to resign under Navy rules of "up or out" after he was passed over for promotion. Swift said at the time that he didn't think he was being forced to retire in retribution for suing the Bush administration.

Finally, the Blog of Legal Times reports the Department of Justice today argued in front of a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit for even more restriction on lawyers' ability to talk to their clients at Guantanamo: "The government's proposed rules would mean the search of legal mail, limits on attorneys' initial meeting with detainees and prohibitions on what these lawyers could say to their clients."

4:37 PM ET | 05-15-2007 | permalink | comments (0) | e-mail post

Pentagon Drops YouTube, MySpace from Its Networks

The Department of Defense has decided to ban several popular social networking and video-sharing sites, including YouTube and MySpace, from its computers around the world. In a memo, General B.B. Bell named the two above sites and 11 others as being blocked by the Pentagon starting today.

The military says it is concerned that personal use of the sites on its computers is stealing bandwidth and hampering operations. The move means that military personnel overseas will lose key contact points with their families and friends back in the U.S. Soldiers may still access these sites via private ISPs, but that may be a little difficult to do in war zones, of course.

The British site The Register writes that closing down these access points to the Internet could actually do the Pentagon more harm than good.

Nonetheless, many analysts have seen this as at best a foolish gag on some of the most [pro-US] positive reporters from the Southwest Asian frontlines. Military bloggers and uploaders overall tend to be quite on-message from the DoD point of view, and now this support for the cause will be largely stifled. Others, of course, interpret the blocks as a straightforward case of censorship.

This move has, of course, drawn lots of attention in the blogosphere. Aaron Freeman and Sharon Rosenzweig at Incisity point out that U.S. troops in Iraq are supposed to be fighting for, "in addition to oil," freedom. That apparently doesn't count now, they say, adding that the bad guys will still have full Web access. That point is jumped on by The Jawa Report, which suggests that by not blocking videos made by jihadis, YouTube and its parent Google are "willfully providing aid and comfort to America's enemies."

3:46 PM ET | 05-14-2007 | permalink | comments (7) | e-mail post

You Can't Print That on a Soda Bottle

A Las Vegas-based beverage company has changed the name of a new product because of pressure from the Food and Drug Administration. Redux Beverages LLC, maker of the Cocaine Energy Drink, said its drink -- which contains lots of caffeine but no cocaine -- will get a new name, but the company will continue to fight to use "Cocaine" as a retail name.

"Obviously, we were forced to stop shipping the drink as 'Cocaine' for now, but we're not done fighting for our rights," said Jamey Kirby, founder of Redux, who added that a new name and label would be offered in the coming weeks.

"We've received tens of thousands of e-mails and phone calls from consumers expressing outrage and disbelief that the government can ban a perfectly safe product for no reason other than it has a racy name."

Kirby, rather tongue-in-cheek, noted that his company was trying to reach Yves Saint Laurent to warn him that his well-known perfume, Opium, might be in trouble.

So if you can't use a word like cocaine, will the FDA or some other government organization soon send out notices to any company whose name includes snow, horse, blow or any of the other drug terms you might find here?

6:00 PM ET | 05- 9-2007 | permalink | comments (0) | e-mail post

Petition Started for Egyptian Bloggers

On Thursday, we talked about the Egyptian government's arrest of bloggers representing both liberal and Islamist groups. Now, we see that Reporters Without Borders has an online petition for supporters to sign, asking the Egyptian government to release both liberal blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil Suleiman, better known by the pen name Kareem Amer, and Muslim Brotherhood blogger Abdel Moneim Mahmoud.

If you're interested in finding out more about the issue, visit here.

4:17 PM ET | 05- 4-2007 | permalink | comments (2) | e-mail post

Is free speech only for those you agree with?

The Christian Science Monitor is looking at an issue that's starting to attract a lot of attention in the blogosphere -- the arrest of Abdel Moneim Mahmoud, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and a popular blogger in Egypt. Mahmoud is just one of a number of bloggers from across the Egyptian political spectrum arrested by the government of Hosni Mubarak.

More attention to the case came after questions about equal treatment of bloggers were raised by Marc Lynch at Abu Aardvark in mid-April, and then picked up by Ethan Zuckerman in My heart's in Accra. In a post about "selective outrage," Lynch questioned why he hadn't seen Western bloggers and media pay as much attention to Islamist bloggers like Moneim who were arrested as to imprisoned liberal bloggers. "The issue," Lynch wrote, "is the persecution of youthful bloggers for their free expression of ideas and political activism" regardless of their political beliefs.

As Zuckerman points out, Moneim was active in the past supporting the rights, and protesting the arrests of, bloggers much more liberal than he is. He writes that the Muslim Brotherhood blogger has appeared with a liberal blogger "to highlight the problems of police brutality against activists in Egypt, and the two share a deep passion for the way technology can help enable social change." (A point also made in this minute-long YouTube video.)

Their point is that when Western bloggers only support activists whose views line up with their views, it reinforces the belief in the Arab world that democracy is only meant for the people who agree with a Western view of freedom.

Gary McGath, however, writes at The Blog of M'gath that Zuckerman misses the point. "There's no hypocrisy in agreeing that all bloggers have rights, but being selective about which ones deserve attention," he writes.

Here is more information on the campaign by bloggers in the Middle East, and increasingly in the West, to free Abdel Moneim Mahmoud.

Love to hear what you folks think about this one.

5:33 PM ET | 05- 3-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post