Results tagged “censorship”

Incendiary British anti-war MP George Galloway was scheduled to speak at a Toronto Coalition to Stop the War event tonight. On March 20, though, he received a letter from Robert J. Orr, Immigration Officer for Canada in London, England, informing him that the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) had made a "preliminary determination" that he was inadmissible to Canada on grounds of national security, raising national furor over what his Toronto lawyer, Barbara Jackman, termed an abrogation of the right to freedom of speech. Meanwhile, Alykhan Velshi, senior aide to Jason Kenney, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, took the liberty of calling Galloway an "infandous street-corner Cromwell who actually brags about giving 'financial support' to Hamas," a man who "I'm sure ...has a large Rolodex of friends in regimes elsewhere in the world willing to roll out the red carpet for him."

Attention drivers intending to head out of the city for a relaxing weekend drive: if a bill before the Ontario legislature is passed, you may have to keep your brand new Model T off country roads on Saturdays and Sundays. According to The Star, "the two days selected were picked on as Saturday is market day, when the country roads are very busy with farmers' conveyances, and Sunday was chosen as the 'day of rest.'" Fear not drivers, as the proposed law does not apply to urban areas and "the bill is so drastic that it is hardly probable it will pass the House."

Do you use Skype? Are you...in China right now? Oh, good. Because researchers at University of Toronto's Citizen Lab revealed yesterday in a report [PDF] that chat messages sent over Skype's Chinese service, TOM-Skype, were being actively monitored, censored (for keywords like "democracy," hah), and stored on publicly-accessible servers, where the Citizen Lab researchers got their hands on them. Skype said today that they were "extremely concerned" about the practice, and had no knowledge it was going on. Stay classy, China! [via Boing Boing]

On Wednesday, Condoleezza Rice gave a press conference about the South Ossetia war, taking the opportunity to gently chastise Russia on behalf of the American government for not ending military operations in the region. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, like many other news organizations, had a live feed from the White House to televisions across Canada during the conference—that is, until the feed got knocked out mid-question, just as a reporter was comparing Russia's moves in the past week to the United States' just after September 11.

Photo by sevennine from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.