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2011年7月5日星期二

European Union to Send Food Aid to North Korea

在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中,找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件,或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中,找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件,或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。

BRUSSELS — Responding to the growing threat of a humanitarian crisis in North Korea, the European Union announced on Monday that it will provide about $14.5 million in emergency aid to feed more than some 650,000 North Koreans.

The bloc’s executive body, the European Commission, said that after its experts witnessed evidence of a developing crisis last month during a mission to North Korea, it negotiated an agreement with the North Koreans about how to monitor the delivery of assistance.

“Increasingly desperate and extreme measures are being taken by the hard-hit North Koreans, including the widespread consumption of grass,” the European Commission said in a statement.

The severity of the situation prompted a switch of tactics by the commission. In 2008, it stopped sending humanitarian aid to North Korea in favor of offering financing for longer-term development projects.

“The purpose of this aid package is to save the lives of at least 650,000 people who could otherwise die from lack of food,” Kristalina Georgieva, a European commissioner, said in the statement. “Our experts saw severely malnourished children in hospitals and nurseries where no treatment was available.

“North Korea’s chronic nutrition problem is turning into an acute crisis in some parts of the country.”

Former President Jimmy Carter and two other former presidents, Mary Robinson of Ireland and Martti Ahtisaari of Finland, and former Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway traveled to North Korea in April and issued grave warnings about the food situation there. (All four are members of the Elders, an independent group of world leaders established by Nelson Mandela.)

Mr. Carter was particularly concerned about the refusal of the United States and South Korea to send humanitarian assistance to the North, saying their deliberate withholding of food aid amounted to “a human rights violation.”

Mr. Carter, 86, who was not traveling as an official American envoy, had been invited to North Korea for meetings with senior political and military officials.

Mrs. Robinson echoed Mr. Carter’s concerns about what she called the “very serious crisis” over food supplies in North Korea because of a harsh winter, severe flooding and an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. She said the withdrawal of American and South Korean food shipments had aggravated a dire situation, which had become, she said, “a matter of life-and-death urgency.”

The United States recently sent a team of experts to evaluate food and hunger conditions in North Korea. But the Obama administration has not yet decided about a resumption of food shipments.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said recently that “North Korea must address our serious concerns about monitoring.” Integral to any agreement to restart American aid deliveries, she said, would be “our ability to ensure and monitor that whatever food aid is provided actually reaches the people who are in need.”

After his trip in April, Mr. Carter said North Korean officials had guaranteed to make changes to the aid-distribution system so that Western governments and donors could track their deliveries and be certain that their aid was not being diverted to the military or the ruling elite.

The European aid will be distributed through the World Food Program, which has been used by the United States and other countries and donors. Ms. Georgieva said it would be strictly monitored, from the point of delivery at ports to when it reached recipients.

“If at any stage we discover that the aid is being diverted from its intended recipients, then the commission will not hesitate to end its humanitarian intervention,” she said.

According to the European Commission, its experts found that in North Korea the state-distributed food rations had been more than halved in recent months. Two-thirds of the population depends on the rations, it said.

The per-person ration, which had been 400 grams of cereals per day, about 14 ounces, was reduced to 150 grams, about 5.3 ounces, in June. That is a fifth of the daily average nutritional requirement, according to European experts. Most of the rations consist of corn.

“Food assistance will reach children under 5 who have already been hospitalized with severe acute malnutrition,” the commission said in the statement. “Children in residential care will also be fed, as well as pregnant and breast-feeding women, hospital patients and the elderly.”

The food shortages have been caused by years of economic mismanagement and underinvestment, and have been made worse by poor weather and a reduction of food imports from China and South Korea. The next main grain harvest is in October.

Initially, the North Koreans had planned to import 353,000 tons of grains, but that target was reduced to 220,000 tons, of which about half has been secured so far, European experts said.

The North Korean government has promised unrestricted access for random checks related to the aid, the commission said. While distributing the European aid, the World Food Program will pay 400 visits per month to warehouses, institutions caring for children, hospitals and distribution sites.

Stephen Castle reported from Brussels and Mark McDonald from Seoul, South Korea.


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2011年5月11日星期三

European Court Rejects Bid to Limit News on Celebrities

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, on Tuesday struck down a legal bid to strengthen the privacy protections for public figures. At the same time, individuals have been turning to the Internet to circumvent British reporting restrictions that protect these figures, turning Twitter into a sort of WikiLeaks for celebrity tell-alls.


In the Strasbourg decision, the European court rejected a bid by Max Mosley, former president of the governing body of Formula One auto racing, to require news organizations to notify the subjects of articles before publication. The court said such a requirement would have had a “chilling effect” on freedom of speech.


The lawsuit stemmed from a 2008 article in The News of the World, a racy British tabloid, with the headline “F1 boss has sick Nazi orgy with 5 hookers” and was based on video shot secretly by one of the participants.


Mr. Mosley, a son of Oswald Mosley, former leader of the British Union of Fascists, sued The News of the World, saying the paper had not bothered to check the story with him before publishing. A British court called the article a flagrant invasion of Mr. Mosley’s privacy and fined the paper £60,000, or nearly $100,000. The court said there was no evidence of Nazi behavior in the sex session and thus no justification for publication.


When confronted by tabloids with similar exposés, or simply with allegations of garden-variety extramarital affairs, many British celebrities have gone to court to secure injunctions against publication. In some cases, these injunctions even bar newspapers from acknowledging the existence of the court order.


Even before the European court ruling on Tuesday, however, such injunctions were being undermined by a force that is arguably more powerful than British privacy law: the Internet.


Since the weekend, Twitter has been abuzz with speculation about public figures who may have obtained such court orders. An unidentified user of the service posted six short messages in which he or she listed well-known soccer stars, actors and others who had supposedly received injunctions preventing the press from reporting on suspected affairs.


By Tuesday evening, the Twitter feed had attracted about 80,000 followers.


British newspapers have been lobbying against the use of these injunctions, denouncing them as one of a number of perceived threats to freedom of speech in Britain, along with the country’s tough libel laws.


“Highlighting the perceived evils of British privacy and defamation law certainly seems to be paying off for Fleet Street,” said Amber Melville-Brown, a media specialist at the law firm Withers in London.


The government recently introduced legislation to overhaul the defamation laws. On Tuesday, officials said they were considering changes to the privacy laws, too, in an effort to bring them into the digital age.


“We are in this crazy situation where information is available freely online that you are not able to print in newspapers,” Jeremy Hunt, the British culture secretary, said. “We are in a situation where technology, and Twitter in particular, is making a mockery of the privacy laws that we have, and we do need to think about the regulatory environment. It should be Parliament that decides where we draw the line on our privacy law.”


While Internet forums like Twitter, under European Union law, have generally not been held accountable for the information posted on them, individuals can be sued for comments that are libelous or that invade others’ privacy. But Twitter, like many other big Internet companies, is based in the United States, putting it outside British jurisdiction.


“People blogging and reporting online are subject to the same laws,” Ms. Melville-Brown said. “It’s just a question of enforcement.”


In his case before the European court, Mr. Mosley, the former president of the International Automobile Federation, argued that British media laws violated the European Convention on Human Rights by failing to protect him from intrusions into his private life. He sought a requirement that newspapers and other media give the subjects of their articles a chance to respond before the papers appeared on the newsstand.


The court rejected Mr. Mosley’s claim, saying there were already sufficient privacy protections in place in Britain.


“Although punitive fines and criminal sanctions could be effective in encouraging prenotification, that would have a chilling effect on journalism, even political and investigative reporting, both of which attracted a high level of protection under the convention,” the court wrote. “That ran the risk of being incompatible with the convention requirements of freedom of expression.”


Mr. Mosley said he planned to appeal the decision to the Grand Chamber of the Strasbourg court.


 

European Court Rejects Bid to Limit News on Celebrities

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, on Tuesday struck down a legal bid to strengthen the privacy protections for public figures. At the same time, individuals have been turning to the Internet to circumvent British reporting restrictions that protect these figures, turning Twitter into a sort of WikiLeaks for celebrity tell-alls.


In the Strasbourg decision, the European court rejected a bid by Max Mosley, former president of the governing body of Formula One auto racing, to require news organizations to notify the subjects of articles before publication. The court said such a requirement would have had a “chilling effect” on freedom of speech.


The lawsuit stemmed from a 2008 article in The News of the World, a racy British tabloid, with the headline “F1 boss has sick Nazi orgy with 5 hookers” and was based on video shot secretly by one of the participants.


Mr. Mosley, a son of Oswald Mosley, former leader of the British Union of Fascists, sued The News of the World, saying the paper had not bothered to check the story with him before publishing. A British court called the article a flagrant invasion of Mr. Mosley’s privacy and fined the paper £60,000, or nearly $100,000. The court said there was no evidence of Nazi behavior in the sex session and thus no justification for publication.


When confronted by tabloids with similar exposés, or simply with allegations of garden-variety extramarital affairs, many British celebrities have gone to court to secure injunctions against publication. In some cases, these injunctions even bar newspapers from acknowledging the existence of the court order.


Even before the European court ruling on Tuesday, however, such injunctions were being undermined by a force that is arguably more powerful than British privacy law: the Internet.


Since the weekend, Twitter has been abuzz with speculation about public figures who may have obtained such court orders. An unidentified user of the service posted six short messages in which he or she listed well-known soccer stars, actors and others who had supposedly received injunctions preventing the press from reporting on suspected affairs.


By Tuesday evening, the Twitter feed had attracted about 80,000 followers.


British newspapers have been lobbying against the use of these injunctions, denouncing them as one of a number of perceived threats to freedom of speech in Britain, along with the country’s tough libel laws.


“Highlighting the perceived evils of British privacy and defamation law certainly seems to be paying off for Fleet Street,” said Amber Melville-Brown, a media specialist at the law firm Withers in London.


The government recently introduced legislation to overhaul the defamation laws. On Tuesday, officials said they were considering changes to the privacy laws, too, in an effort to bring them into the digital age.


“We are in this crazy situation where information is available freely online that you are not able to print in newspapers,” Jeremy Hunt, the British culture secretary, said. “We are in a situation where technology, and Twitter in particular, is making a mockery of the privacy laws that we have, and we do need to think about the regulatory environment. It should be Parliament that decides where we draw the line on our privacy law.”


While Internet forums like Twitter, under European Union law, have generally not been held accountable for the information posted on them, individuals can be sued for comments that are libelous or that invade others’ privacy. But Twitter, like many other big Internet companies, is based in the United States, putting it outside British jurisdiction.


“People blogging and reporting online are subject to the same laws,” Ms. Melville-Brown said. “It’s just a question of enforcement.”


In his case before the European court, Mr. Mosley, the former president of the International Automobile Federation, argued that British media laws violated the European Convention on Human Rights by failing to protect him from intrusions into his private life. He sought a requirement that newspapers and other media give the subjects of their articles a chance to respond before the papers appeared on the newsstand.


The court rejected Mr. Mosley’s claim, saying there were already sufficient privacy protections in place in Britain.


“Although punitive fines and criminal sanctions could be effective in encouraging prenotification, that would have a chilling effect on journalism, even political and investigative reporting, both of which attracted a high level of protection under the convention,” the court wrote. “That ran the risk of being incompatible with the convention requirements of freedom of expression.”


Mr. Mosley said he planned to appeal the decision to the Grand Chamber of the Strasbourg court.