Well, today is John Howard’s birthday. For those outside Australia, he is our esteemed Prime Minister. To celebrate, here is a picture that I found taped to the coffee machine of the cafe I frequent at Uni. Happy 68th John! Enjoy it… it will be your last as PM.

Found an online version at Dave’s Planet, original artist unknown.

For the lastest on John Howard’s birthday, check out this article from The Age, celebrating and musing over what is left of Little Johnnie’s career.

Finally, and most importantly, ensure that your enrolement details are upto date here.

Internet censorship. It is a very topical issue to say the least. The attempts of the Chinese government, amongst others, to control what its citizens can view on the internet is well known (in the west anyway). My attempt to discover the amount of censorship on the Net in Cuba failed miserably… mainly because of the queue… be damned if I was going to spend my holiday standing in line, especially with Mojito’s to be drunk and cigars to be smoked!

Now, BEEZHOUSE.com has been a victim of censorship in the past. One of those large corporation type filtering sytems. In retrospect, may have been down to the fact that Oz had just posted about a guy who got busted fucking a goat. Then again, perhaps not! As you can see below, BEEZHOUSE.com is currently blocked at the moment in China. Without being in China, there is no way to know for sure, as sites “may [be] report[ed] as being ‘blocked’, while there are only technical reasons for their unavailability”. As our ClusterMap shows, we have been getting a number of readers over the last few months from China. However, as the BBC found out, “techincal problems” is widely regarded as euphemism for censorship.

I tried accessing the BBC News website but to no avail. A government official told me there must be what he called “a technical problem”. In truth, those “technical problems” are afflicting more and more information sites in China, for example the open source encyclopaedia Wikipedia, perhaps because it has fallen foul of the government’s recent declaration that news and information in today’s China should only be what it calls “healthy” and “in the public interest”.

The filtering systems used by the Chinese government are becoming more sophisticated, more refined and more extensive every year, involving an increasing number of local as well as foreign parties in their system. Both Reporters Sans Frontiers and Human Rights Watch maintain that Chinese censorship is some of the most elaborate and comprehensive in the world. Western companies have been accussed of aiding the Chinese government in its censorship. Only last month, Yahoo shareholders rejected plans for the company to adopt a policy that opposes censorship on the internet. Yahoo has been criticized by human rights groups since 2005 for its role in turning over some political dissidents’ e-mails. The materials were used to prosecute and imprison them. Yahoo, Google and Microsoft have all been accussed of “carrying out censorship for the Chinese government”.

Want to find out if your website is being blocked in China? Then check out this site, The Great Firewall of China, which provides real time testing of websites to see if they are blocked in China. The aim of the site is to make the censorship system transparent and keep open the discussion on censorship in order to prevent it becoming the norm across the Net.

Read more about Chinese censorship at the BBC website, here, here or here. Also of interest, NoLuv4Google.

Came across this one via Om ter saaist. Can’t quite remember how or why, since I don’t speak Dutch (or quite possiblely, Danish). Anyway, it’s not English… so I’ve got no idea what’s going on!

Random key words: Mao, Falungong, Tianammen Square, Human Rights, Organ Harvesting, Yao Ming, Yi Jianlian (over-rated).

This one also came from the Weekend Australian: Israeli President ‘a rapist and a pervert’

Now, it’s not really surprising to read a story regarding some form of sexual indecency between someone in public office and a female subordinate. My favourite moment involving the now resigned Israeli President Moshe Katsav is the press conference given by the Israeli Attorney-General, Menahem Mazuz. During this praticular conference, Mr Mazuz announced that all rape charges against the former President in several (!?!) different cases were to be dropped after a plea-bargain agreement.

Oh, and that “the ‘national interest’ would have been ill served by having an ex-president put on trial for rape”. Of course. I can see how it would be damaging to national well-being if a former (or even current) leader were to undergo trial for a felony. I mean, this isn’t Italy we’re talking about, right?

Just remember kids: “In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.”

Never a truer word was spoken.