Link Banana

I feel vaguely like I’ve heard this story before, but it’s interesting nonetheless:

Jane Novak, a 46-year-old stay-at-home mother of two in New Jersey, has never been to Yemen. She speaks no Arabic, and freely admits that until a few years ago, she knew nothing about that strife-torn south Arabian country.

And yet Ms. Novak has become so well known in Yemen that newspaper editors say they sell more copies if her photograph — blond and smiling — is on the cover. Her blog, an outspoken news bulletin on Yemeni affairs, is banned there. The government’s allies routinely vilify her in print as an American agent, a Shiite monarchist, a member of Al Qaeda, or “the Zionist Novak.”

The Economist is sounding the alarm about the troubling ease with which the extremely wealthy are stifling free speech worldwide by pressing cases in the most friendly countries. A few cases that have taken of Britian’s libel laws:

That followed a similar judgment last year against Rachel Ehrenfeld, a New York-based American author who has written about the support of some Saudis for Islamist terrorism. She was successfully sued in London by a Saudi for a book she had published in America that had sold only a handful of copies in Britain.

Obozrevatel (Observer), an internet news site that does not even publish in English. Like Ms Ehrenfeld, the defendants did not appear in court and judgment was entered against them in default. Damages will be set in a compensation hearing later this year. Schillings declined to comment, but a statement on its website reads: “By seeking redress in the courts of England, Mr Akhmetov will ensure that there will be a fair legal process.”

The Economist offers a handy guide for totalitarian bureaucrats looking to make it hard to speak against them. It’s a troubling and useful look at the state of media freedom around the world.

Despite the flourishing of alternative media, such as satellite television and internet blogs, that challenge once-impregnable state monopolies on the flow of news, governments keep finding new ways to suppress contrary views. Whereas the dictatorships of old snuffed out opponents or chucked them in jail, today’s softer incarnations achieve similar silence by subtler means. Hyper-regulation via catch-all laws, plus financial carrots and sticks, tend to replace cruder direct control.

This is good news, even if it’s only happening slowly.

Turkey’s government has taken on the issue of free speech and is expected as early as Friday to announce a weakening of a law against insulting Turkishness, an amendment that is considered a key measure of the democratic maturity of this Muslim country as it tries to gain acceptance to the European Union.

But while that law, called Article 301, is known to many in the West — Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist, was prosecuted under 301 — it is just one of many laws that limit freedom of expression for intellectuals in Turkey. The law under which Mr. Yayla was prosecuted, for example, dates from 1951 and is not even part of the penal code.

While the change in Article 301 is likely to stop the wanton application of that law, the single most common statute used against critics of Turkey’s official line, the government was unable to remove it from the books completely, as liberals here had wanted.