Brian 2

International - Today a Turkish court made a ruling ordering the country’s telecommunications company to block youtube.com because a video on the site insulted the country’s founder, the president, the prime-minister, and the army. This is the second time the country has banned the site. The first was when a video was deemed as insulting to the country’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, but the ban was lifted when the videos were taken off the site. The site could still be accessed today, so it is not certain when the ban will come into effect. Turkey is not the only country to ban Youtube. Among others are Thailand and Morocco. A Moroccan official blamed the inaccessibility of the site on a glitch, and could not explain why that was the only site affected.

Opinion – If a country can’t even allow free speech and criticism of public figures by means of Youtube (which is fairly well policed by Google) and a single video, then it most definitely deserves the criticism it censors. I once read a quote from the author Salman Rushdie that said something along the lines of: the deification of public figures is an Eastern disease. This certainly is the case in this story.

International – A new Catholic Bishop, Joseph Li Shan, was appointed as Bishop of China’s state-controlled Catholic Church in ceremony at China’s 400year-old Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. Over the past half-century, China and the Vatican have struggled to reach compromise on the issue of who appoints Bishops. In this case, as in many other cases, China appointed a Bishop who was approved by the Catholic Church. This is expected to ease tensions between China and the Vatican.

Opinion – What struck me about this story it that I thought Communistic China was an atheistic state, and it surprises me that there has been a longstanding Catholic church in China (even though it’s no surprise to me that it’s state run). Why then is a protestant state-run church not allowed in China? I suppose it may be on the issue of evangelism, but I really don’t know. It at least seems good to me that there is some sort of Christianity allowed in China, but I’m not sure whether it would be better to have a Christian church that is controlled by an atheistic government or to have no Christian churches at all.