The Mind Trap

Politically Incorrect Italian Wins Award in Iran

Corriere Della Sera: An Italian cartoonist has won a prize in the Iranian newspaper Hamshahri competition aimed at getting back at the infamous Mohummad cartoons by ridiculing the holocaust. His reason? "I thought the subject proposed by the Iranians was particularly stimulating. It gave me the chance to express my thoughts without feeling that I was taking a stance on one side or the other. You see, I'm neither rightwing nor leftwing, let that be clear. But I do adore everything that's politically incorrect."
Some of the cartoons are here.
The winner is here.
There's an article about the unauthorized entry of a Leunig cartoon here.

Journos Come and Journos Go

By now you've probably heard that Reuters has opened a news bureau in the MMORPG Second Life..."As strange as it might seem, it's not that different from being a reporter in the real world," said Adam Pasick, who will be reporting as an avatar called "Adam Reuters". "Once you get used to it -- it becomes very much like the job I have been doing for years." The coverage is available here.
The virtual world is getting to the point where people care about it, so it's worth reporting on. But on a far more serious note, there is still a lot of repression of journalists in the physical world, and the United States is one of the main offenders. For example, NYT columnist Nicholas D. Kristof writes about the case of Sami al-Hajj, who was arrested in Afghanistan nearly five years ago for the crime of being a cameraman for Al Jazeera, a news station the Bush Administration doesn't like because it reports things other than White House press releases. The article is a good read if you care about the freedom of the press...and you should.

Free Speech, Libel And The Internet Age

BBC: Here's a good article by "internet law professor Michael Geist", who illustrates the problem with the legal position of free speech on the internet...one issue is defamation, see the great example using "Sharman Networks and Hemming suing P2Pnet last spring, claiming that an article and accompanying comments posted by readers of the site were libellous".