Text of press release by Paris-based media freedom organization Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF) on 12 March, subheadings as published The fight for free access to information is being played out to an ever greater extent on the Internet. The emerging general trend is that a growing number of countries are attempting to tighten their control of the Net, but at the same time, increasingly...

The Turkish courts banned YouTube in May 2008, and now a new protest campaign launched by the editorial team of the Milliyet newspaper is drawing attention to how long the country has been prevented from using the website. The initiative, which was was launched on February 19, is not the first campaign of this type. But it's notable because previous protests came from the blogosphere and, as a...

Via Global Voices, Yoani Sánchez, a Cuban blogger, writes of a friend caught with a British number saved in his mobile phone under the name "Twitter". "No one can save you from fifteen years," threatened the officer, while asserting that sending an SMS to someone with such a strange name who lived so far away was a crime of enormous proportions. He didn't know that our...

My impressions of Monday's meeting at the Bush Institue are somewhat pointillistic. I've ended up having interviews and conversations throughout that have kept me from blogging the blow by blow. And personal events have meant that this summary isn't posted until 48 hours after the end of the conference. Still, there were fascinating ideas expressed, so here's my set of impressions, rather than a...

The George W. Bush Presidential Center at Southern Methodist University won't be breaking ground till November, but its policy arm, the Bush Institute, has already had a busy spring. Shacking up in SMU's Collins Center, it hosted its first events last month, covering education leadership, literacy in Afghanistan and natural gas - an impressive programming pace, but none ventured too close to the...