corrente

We suggest this be filed under the "Department of No! They Would Never do That Here...Would They??"

(via AP via Jackson MS Clarion-Ledger)

China said Sunday it is imposing new regulations to control content on its news Web sites and will allow the posting of only "healthy and civilized" news.

Only "healthy and civilized news and information that is beneficial to the improvement of the quality of the nation, beneficial to its economic development and conducive to social progress" will be allowed, Xinhua said.

"The sites are prohibited from spreading news and information that goes against state security and public interest," it added.

Online dissidents who post items critical of the government, or those expressing opinions in chatrooms, are regularly arrested and charged under vaguely worded state security laws.

Earlier this month, a French media watchdog group said e-mail account information provided by Internet powerhouse Yahoo Inc. helped lead to the conviction and 10-year prison sentence of a Chinese journalist who had written about media restrictions in an e-mail.

Authorities in Shanghai have installed surveillance cameras and begun requiring visitors to Internet cafes to register with their official identity cards.

Hey, we hated the evil Commie Ruskies, but when they were beating us in the space race we announced we had to teach math the way they did (many of us never recovered from the tribulations of set theory) in order to compete better. We hated the Japanese when they were making cheap economical cars and beating the pants off Detroit's steel stegosauruses (stegosauri?) (maybe that should not be phrased in the past tense) and from them we learned to site auto plants in crappy nonunion southern states in order to compete better.

Now that its the evil Commie Chinese who we are supposed to be learning from (and who coincidentally have a death grip on our national testicles via holding great whacking chunks of our hot national debt) I'm sure we will be looking to the East for wisdom in other matters too. And people wonder why I look distrustfully at Yahoo News....