BBC Q1 show host Fry cancels Japan trip over A-bomb/The FBI Has Been Violating Your Liberties in Ways That May Shock You/Government is in Sabotaged i

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BBC Q1 show host Fry cancels Japan trip over A-bomb survivor joke
LONDON — The BBC's QI comedy quiz show host Stephen Fry has canceled his business trip to Japan due to strong Japanese reactions to his controversial comment in December about a double atomic bomb survivor as the unluckiest man in the world, BBC officials said Thursday.
Fry was due to visit the country for his forthcoming series “Planet Word” about language.
In the program broadcast on Dec 17, the host drew laughs from the show’s personalities and the audience by jokingly introducing the late Tsutomu Yamaguchi as the unluckiest man. Yamaguchi survived both the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and died at 93 in January 2010.
But the backlash created by a light-hearted discussion of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - which led to a BBC apology - has meant the planned trip has now been shelved.
The BBC said “the strength of feeling” in the country led to the change of plan.
Given the protest from the Japanese Embassy in London against the remark, the British broadcaster and a television production agency jointly offered an apology in January.

Source Japan’s Today
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The FBI Has Been Violating Your Liberties in Ways That May Shock You
As Congress seeks to renew the Patriot Act, new information exposes egregious FBI violations.
February 3, 2011 |




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Last week, Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-VT, introduced legislation to extend the Patriot Act past its February 28 expiration date to December 2013. Though the extension once again saves some of the most nefarious, First-Amendment trampling provisions of the act -- roving wiretaps, secret access to third-party records, the hunting of targets unafilliated with foreign powers -- Leahy released a statement assuring us that the new extension will increase citizen protections.
“It will promote transparency and expand privacy and civil liberties safeguards in current law,” he said in a statement. “It increases judicial oversight of government surveillance powers that capture information on Americans. This is a package of reforms that all Americans should support.” The expanded bill would require the Department of Justice to issue public reports and generally expand oversight.
But will token rights-preserving provisions matter if the FBI refuses to comply?
Over the last decade, the FBI has been found to violate the Constitution countless times under the guise of the Patriot Act, including a 2007 scandal that led FBI head Robert Mueller to publicly apologize for the preponderance of security abuses, misconduct and violation of civil liberties on his watch. We’ve known since its enactment in 2001 that the Patriot Act, with its gross expansion of law enforcement power and murky reporting requirements, was just a rulebook waiting to be spoiled.
But according to a new report released by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the FBI’s violations go far beyond what has been reported.
Since July 2009, EFF has been involved in litigation with seven different federal agencies for ignoring EFF’s requests for information submitted in 2008. In December 2009, the CIA, NSA, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Department of State were ordered by the Court to comply with EFF’s requests under the Freedom of Information Act, though it did not receive the complete papers from the FBI until October 2010.
The resulting 2,500-page document consists of FBI reports to the citizen-run Intelligence Oversight Board during the years 2001-2008. Consistently, documents released from the IOB reveal investigations of abuse that often have not been reported to Congress or the Department of Justice as required. But EFF’s analysis, pored over for several months, illuminates exactly how, when and why these investigations happened, and the results are shocking.
First, the numbers: EFF found that, since 9/11, the FBI has been responsible for up to 40,000 violations. Most often, said violations included bucking guidelines for internal oversight, abusing the National Security Letters and trampling on the Fourth Amendment. This, in tandem with the IOB’s weakened capacity for oversight under President George W. Bush, has resulted in nothing short of disaster. In 2008, Bush revoked the IOB’s right to refer violations to the Attorney General, and eliminated the agency’s requirement to report quarterly to the IOB. As EFF found, "The FBI’s disregard for its own internal oversight requirements and the Bureau’s failure to timely report violations to the IOB undermined the safeguards established to protect civil liberties violations from occurring." While the Obama administration restored a few of those changes, it still has not provided the proper transparency needed for a true citizen-protective oversight board or fully disclosed its makeup.
Some of the more egregious abuses, according to EFF’s report:
• Private entities such as phone companies, banks and Internet providers assisted the FBI’s National Security Letters abuse with alarming frequency, turning over information without valid legal justification in more than half of all case.
• Between 2001-2008, the average time between when a violation was committed, and when it was reported to the IOB, was 2.5 years.
• During that same time frame, the FBI was found to have submitted false or inaccurate documents to courts, used "improper evidence" to obtain subpoenas, and accessed password-protected documents without a warrant.
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Survey: New generation of migrant workers face old problems [China]
Author: Lan Tian, China Daily
Dated: 13 Jan 2011
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Government is in Sabotaged in Bangladesh

After 3 decades where the present ruling government fighting to recover the previous mistakes for the democracy in our view third party using the name of opposition taking to victimize the people’s of Bangladesh, where suffering the nation. From all party’s leader, governments and ordinary public, media, administration are even in these victim. No political party is company that would use such names to earn life and to kill life silently.But two biggest party showing finger one to another. We thin then where was the fault of Dictator Former President (!) Mr. HM Ershad. We the people’s of Bangladesh must have to take right decision for the next second for doing movement.

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