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BBC Scotland have a video of a French announcer at Edinburgh’s Haymarket Station who is proving to be a hit with female commuters.

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Without Chuck Berry we wouldn’t even be here. Laura Barton on The Guardian’s Music blog asks, “Who is the world’s greatest lyricist?” But you have to spend time with the comments to get right down to it.

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Lhasa locked down for procession of the Olympic torch. A one-minute video from Tibet, lest we forget . . .

Now, as China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen is once again serving as a laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of this vast social experiment. Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range — a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.)

Please sign the petition to build support throughout Africa and round the world. Stopping the arms is a concrete step leaders can take to help bring justice to Zimbabwe. Add your name below now – http://www.avaaz.org/en/no_arms_for_zimbabwe/5.php

The Chinese ship, An Yue Jiang, was turned away from South Africa and is heading for Angola in the hope of docking there, Mozambique’s transport minister said on Saturday.

Mozambique did not allow it to enter its waters.

“I hope this will be the case with all the countries because we don’t want a situation which will escalate the (tension) in Zimbabwe more than what it is,” Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa, who is also chairman of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) regional grouping, told reporters.

The 300,000-strong South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU) refused to unload the weapons because of concerns Mugabe’s government might use them against opponents in the post-election stalemate.

Google playing dirty with employees.

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Say my religion is peaceful or I will kill you.

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Sugar has long been a popular drug consumed and even sold in schools world-wide. But concerns over health, obesity and the risk of diabetes have led some schools in California to institute a ban on sugary snacks. In response to these candy sales bans, some students are starting to deal candy bars on the “underground market” at a marked up price. . .

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Writing and Rebellion is the title of this piece from Ward Six:

That is, writing as a form of rebellion. All three of us seemed to regard it as such, although for all of us the sentiment appeared personal, rather than as a kind of doctrine. One of us grew up in a religious southern black family; another in working-class Spanish Harlem; another in white, middle-class suburbia, and in a way, each of us, in our work, was and is reacting aggressively to the world around us.

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A Chinese ship docked in Durban harbour late on Wednesday carrying three million rounds of ammunition for small arms, 3,500 mortar bombs and mortar tubes, as well as 1,500 rocket-propelled grenades. All destined for Zimbabwe. This at the same time as the Zimbabwean government has accused the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, of treason by plotting with Britain to overthrow the President, Robert Mugabe.

June

by Shi Tao

My whole life

Will never get past “June”
June, when my heart died
When my poetry died
When my lover
Died in romance’s pool of blood

June, the scorching sun burns open my skin
Revealing the true nature of my wound
June, the fish swims out of the blood-red sea
Toward another place to hibernate
June, the earth shifts, the rivers fall silent
Piled up letters unable to be delivered to the dead

Translated to English from Chinese by Chip Rolley

Shi Tao, a journalist and the author of this poem was imprisoned by the Chinese Government after forwarding to an overseas website a document from Chinese government censors warning their media not to report on the 15th anniversary of the June 4 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment and 2 years’ deprivation of political rights. Although he remains in prison his poem is free and is following the Olympic torch around the world.

International PEN, the worldwide writers’ organisation, are campaigning for the release of around 40 writers currently imprisoned in China. Shi Tao is one of them.

“The Olympics are a force for good.” Not always! The 1936 Olympics, held in Nazi Germany, were an astonishing propaganda coup for Hitler. It’s true that the star performance of Jesse Owens, the black American track-and-field great, did shoot some holes in the Nazi theory of Aryan racial superiority. But Hitler still got what he wanted out of the Games. With the help of American newspapers such as the New York Times, which opined that the Games put Germany “back in the family of nations again,” he convinced many Germans, and many foreigners, to accept Nazism as “normal.” The Nuremburg laws were in force, German troops had marched into the Rhineland, Dachau was full of prisoners, but the world cheered its athletes in Berlin. As a result, many people, both in and out of Germany, reckoned that everything was just fine and that Hitler could be tolerated a bit longer.

She explains how the sponsors of the Beijing Games, including Samsung Electronics and Coca-Cola, try to justify their involvement (lots of cash for their shareholders – naturally). She reports on the pompous remarks of the chairman of the International Olympic Committee in the face of protesters at the lighting of the Olympic flame.

Applebaum then goes on to dismantle many of the fallacies used to justify these “peaceful games” taking place in the capital of one of the world’s worst and most repressive regimes.

She shows how boycotts have been used successfully in the past, including the case of South Africa, and how the Olympics are an ideal place for demonstrations.

But the bottom line is that no one involved in the preparations for this year’s Olympic games believes that this is about sport or athletes, or that Beijing will be an innocent display of sporting prowess. We’ve all recognised, right from the beginning, that the 2008 games are about Chinese politics and an attempt to have them legitimized by the international community.

I’m not going to China.

When asked to comment on China’s curbs on the freedom of expression, from banning books to jailing writers, Enright spoke broadly of the prevailing power of literature in overcoming the debilitating effects of censorship on society.

“There was no way that when I was growing up that the tide of Irish writing was going to be stopped by something even as powerful as the Catholic Church,” she said, citing the uncompromising writing of Edna O’Brien and John McGahern.

“By conviction I’m against censorship in general and also in a pragmatic kind of way I think it doesn’t work,” she added.

The eyes of the world are on China ahead of the Olympic Games and a range of issues are of concern. Individuals with contrary opinions to the Chinese state are jailed, internet and media censorship is rife, and the ruthless suppression of Tibet continues.

The Icelandic singer Bjork shouted “Tibet! Tibet!” during a recent Shanghai concert, and the Chinese government immediately announced tighter controls over foreign singers and other performers. Film director Steven Spielberg resigned as artistic adviser to the Olympics due to Beijing’s policy toward Sudan’s Darfur.

The international writers’ association, PEN, is campaigning to free nearly 40 jailed Chinese writers before the Olympics, some of whom had been sentenced without trial.

But it seems that most western governments are so enamoured by the possibilities of the massive Chinese market, that their protests against the next super-power’s abuses of human rights are weak and ineffective.

So far I’ve read 1½ books on the Cybook and I have to say it makes for very comfortable reading indeed, I haven’t experienced any sort of eyestrain whatsoever: the screen isn’t really white, but more grayish in colour (like a newspaper) and the resulting contrast between the black letters and gray background is rather nice. Still, as a first-time e-book reader I found it somewhat strange to read without being able to feel how I’m progressing through the book.

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TechCrunch examines the Chinese and Australian way:

The Australian Government has announced that they will be joining China as one of the few countries globally that broadly censor the internet.

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America’s Business Week has an interesting article by Candice Choi on the print-on-demand industry:

On-demand publisher Lulu.com has churned out 236,000 paperbacks since it opened in 2002, and its volume of new paperbacks has risen each month this year, hitting 14,745 in November.