Unfree Media

                      Ribbon cutting spooks at the Joint Intelligence Resource Centre

THE US Army developed plans to destroy Wikileaks, the online whistle-blower organisation,  by resorting to the same computer hacking techniques that the Obama Administration and Google indignantly accuse China of engaging in.

Washington holds up Internet freedom as a fundamental principle of its foreign policy and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently declared that "Viral videos and blog posts are becoming the samizdat of our day." 

New feature film "Four Lions" debut from Brass Eye's Chris Morris, premieres at the Sundance film festival on Saturday. In this exclusive clip, we see how not to buy a dozen bottles of bomb-making bleach....

By Basildon Peta, Africa Editor

Zimbabwe remains without a single privately-owned daily newspaper or radio station, more than a year after a new unity government that promised to scrap draconian media laws and usher in media reforms  was inaugurated.

Restoring banned publications and opening up the airwaves were among the cornerstones of a Global Political Agreement (GPA) signed by President Robert Mugabe and then opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai in September 2008.

As the US State Department annual human rights review, put it last week:

The government continued to restrict freedom of the press (and) controlled the state-run media, including the two remaining daily newspapers, the Chronicle and the Herald. ...High-ranking government officials, including President Mugabe, used the state-controlled media to threaten violence against suspected critics of the government.