Monthly Archives: May 2022

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and digital art (including, I proudly admit, my own) are offering people the chance to tell their stories in innovative new ways. Cryptocurrencies have exploded, offering people around the world a new tool to use for investments and financial transactions, free from government control. And on the other side of the regulatory spectrum, even central banks are thinking about the future of digital currency and digital wallets. But with all this change, have we had the chance to stop and consider what this new digital reality will mean for the future of privacy?

The role of new digital realities and crypto will play in the future of privacy

In this latest episode of Garry on Lockdown, I discuss with Jaya Baloo, CISO at Avast, the status quo of security in cyberspace, and the role our new digital realities and crypto in particular will play in shaping the future of privacy. Although the episode was recorded before Putins second invasion of Ukraine began, this war (and the hybrid war combining conventional and cyber weapons that authoritarians have been waging against democracies everywhere for over a decade now) only reinforce how this story is more relevant now than ever before.

Our new virtual technologies are tools and, just like any other tools, they offer opportunities and progress, but also hurt, harm, and potential dangers to guard against. Just as work-from-home allowed people all over the world to keep doing their jobs while protecting themselves and their loved ones from a deadly pandemic, it also opened up a billion new points of attack and vulnerabilities in cybersecurity. Suddenly, the ransomware attacks youve only been reading about in the news may hit home when a cyberattack shuts down your local hospital, or infiltrates your email inbox. Billions of IoT devices flood the markets which consumers happily buy for cheap prices, uninformed about the security vulnerabilities they may come with.

Crypto can help solve security issues. At the same time, the rise of cryptocurrencies offers just as many new complications for firms and individuals trying to adapt to this new reality while doing good for the world. Ill admit that, like many of you, I too was skeptical of crypto at first, but the more I learned about the technology, the more I realized its importance, especially for those living under authoritarian governments.

Cryptocurrencies helping dissidents but also dictators?In fact, I was won over when experts at the Human Rights Foundation I chair showed me how cryptocurrency, free from government interference, can be a powerful tool for dissidents on the frontlines of freedom all over the world. If youre supporting a dissident in Venezuela, how can you get them the resources they need to speak out against a tyrannical regime? Whats the currency you use to avoid government seizures and persecution?

At the same time, just as dissidents use crypto to avoid government repression, some have asked me whether dictators may use crypto to avoid foreign sanctions. With Russias leading banks locked out by Western sanctions, are Russian oligarchs turning to digital cryptocurrencies?

Join Jaya and I as we discuss all this, and more, in the new episode of Garry on Lockdown.

Please note that this video was filmed prior to the onset of the war in Ukraine. The information presented in the video reflects the events taking place before February 24, 2022.

Read more from the original source:

The real exchange rate between crypto and freedom - Security Boulevard

Its a helpful shorthand, ready at the tip of the tongue for when discussing the rot that is overwhelming our culture. Woke that one syllable seems to describe the whole problem: the fixation with identity, the bad faith assumptions, the aggressive historical vandalism, combined with moral superiority and absolutism.

The word has been immensely helpful in allowing us to highlight the pattern of ideological creep that is threatening our institutions. Sometimes a phenomenon is just too big to explain in detail every time we call attention to its consequences. Research from Kings College London, released this week, showed how widely the usage of woke has spread, with a rising awareness of the term.

But there is also a danger inherent in the popularisation of woke. Increasingly, the word is becoming a casual short-hand for things that we dont like an insult to be thrown at whatever fresh politically correct lunacy has emerged from universities, politics or business.

Yet we are not dealing with another catchy political pejorative, such as wet or Leftie, but a revolutionary ideology that seeks a fundamental shift in the nature of Western civilisation, manipulating notions of freedom, democracy and citizenship. In sacralising identity categories such as race, gender and sexuality, wokeness brings about the segregation of society. It imposes itself on every community, telling each one that their bodily features must determine their status and disposition.

If you are white, it dictates that you have inherited racial privilege and must atone for your original sin by educating yourself. In practice, this means demonstrations of cultural self-loathing and self-flagellation, from admitting your privilege to not speaking about certain subjects because you, as a white person, apparently wont understand.

If you are black, you must accept that society is systematically structured against you, that white supremacy is woven into the fabric of how it is built, and that even the services that are there to protect you are, in fact, against your very being. The only adequate response is to wrap yourself into a racial silo, developing a sense of victimhood and viewing the world as a kind of race-based competition.

And if you are an institution, you must wholly buy into these perverse notions or risk being labelled institutionally racist, sexist or homophobic by your own staff as well as by campaigning organisations.

Our best universities, museums and even government departments come have under the command of a small group of activists. They are forced to support the silly causes that preoccupy the minds of overzealous students, such as trigger warnings. But, more gravely, they also accept that heinous notion that we are not all, in fact, equal.

We cannot afford, therefore, to let woke become a flippant term that our institutions can dismiss as typical name-calling. Nor can it become an all-pervasive insult from which every group can disassociate. Because eventually, even the most radical activists will denounce woke in an attempt to deprive it of all meaning.

Instead, the word should constantly remind us of a destructive onslaught against liberal society and the need for urgent action to counter it. Wokeness may be everywhere, but that doesnt make it any less serious.

Continue reading here:

'Woke' is more than an insult, it's a threat to our freedom - The Telegraph

The inauguration ceremony was held at the National Assembly at 11 a.m. and had around 41,000 people in attendance, including former presidents and the family members of deceased former leaders, parliamentary and government officials, diplomatic envoys and the invited public.

It is our generations calling to build a nation that espouses liberal democracy and ensures a thriving market economy, a nation that fulfills its responsibility as a trusted member of the international community, and a nation that truly belongs to the people, Yoon said.

The new president said many countries, including South Korea, are faced with multiple crises, including fast-evolving trade regimes, armed conflicts and wars, record-low growth, rising unemployment, polarization, internal strife. He believes freedom is the most important core value to overcome the challenges.

Freedom is a universal value, he said. Every citizen and every member of society must be able to enjoy freedom. If ones freedom is infringed upon or left uncorrected, this is an assault on everyones freedom.

By the presidential offices count, he used the word freedom 35 times in his inaugural address, the most of any word mentioned, followed by citizens and the public 15 times, each.

Individual countries must do so, but global citizens must also come together in solidarity to address these injustices if and when they arise, he said.

Hunger, poverty, abuse of power and armed conflict strips away our individual freedom and robs us of our inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, Yoon said. We, as global citizens who enjoy real freedom, must never turn a blind eye when freedom is attacked.

Yoon believes division and social conflict plaguing Korean society and threatening freedom and liberal democratic order can be overcome with rapid and sustainable growth.

Rapid growth will open up new opportunities, he said. It will improve social mobility, thereby helping us rid of the fundamental obstacles that are aggravating social divide and conflicts.

The president said it was critical that the nation achieved rapid growth and that it would only be possible through science, technology and innovation.

Science, technology and innovation -- they will protect our democracy, expand freedom and our inalienable rights to let our people enjoy a sustainable life of dignity.

He also called for the denuclearization of North Korea for peace on the Korean peninsula.

While North Koreas nuclear weapon programs are a threat not only to South Koreas security and that of Northeast Asia, the door to dialogue will remain open to peacefully resolve this threat, the president said.

If North Korea genuinely embarks on a process to complete denuclearization, we are prepared to work with the international community to present an audacious plan that will vastly strengthen North Koreas economy and improve the quality of life for its people.

Yoon believes North Koreas denuclearization will greatly contribute to bringing lasting peace and prosperity to the Korean Peninsula and beyond.

I solemnly pledge today that I will do my utmost to elevate Korea into a country that truly belongs to the people, he said. A country based on the pillars of freedom, human rights, fairness and solidarity; a country that is respected by others around the world. Let us embark on this journey together.

The new president began his presidential term midnight Monday by receiving a report from the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the situation room of the National Crisis Management Center located in the basement of the presidential office in Yongsan, central Seoul.

By Shin Ji-hye (shinjh@heraldcorp.com)

See original here:

Yoon stresses freedom, growth as he begins 5-year term - The Korea Herald

Anti-vaxxers, freedom movement are teaching their followers how to vote Get Access Code.

Enter your email address and Crikey will send a Verification Code

Enter the Verification Code sent to

to confirm your account.The Verification Code will expire in 1 hour.

Contact us on: support@crikey.com.au or call the hotline: +61 (03) 8623 9900.

Taking a break from spreading false claims about voter fraud, fringe and conspiracy groups are trying to teach their followers about the electoral system.

Online anti-vaccine, conspiracy figures and groups are trying to organise and teach their followers to use the Australian electoral system to elect fringe and extreme minor parties in the 2022 election.

There are a large number of conspiracy-peddling candidates running in the 2022 federal election. Despite being distrustful of government, many who took part in the so-called freedom movement have been eyeing off a tilt at Parliament as a way of overturning laws and decisions including the approval of the COVID-19 vaccines and emergency pandemic powers and pursuing recriminations against politicians.

Squeezing the most out of the dwindling number of people who are still paying attention to the movement is crucial to the prospects of any of these candidates. Thats why many of the biggest names in these fringe groups have taken a break from promoting claims of electoral fraud to run campaigns or promote content they hope will give them the best chance of getting up.

Already a subscriber? Log in to keep reading.Or, register your email address for a FREE 21-day trial.

Cam Wilson

Associate Editor @cameronwilson

Cam Wilson is Crikey's associate editor. He previously worked as a reporter at the ABC, BuzzFeed, Business Insider and Gizmodo. He primarily covers internet culture and tech in Australia.

Insert

" + _localizedStrings.redirect_overlay_title + "

" + _localizedStrings.redirect_overlay_text + "

Here is the original post:

Anti-vaxxers and the freedom movement are trying to teach their followers how to vote - Crikey

There are many ways of getting freedom wrong. For ways of getting it right, my best advice is to turn to the mainline of American authors from the cusp of the Civil War through the turn of the century. For them, freedom is not the survivalists barren fortress-building, the hedonists plot to escape the world and its obligations, or the gunmans drive to violate that world. Its not the power to accumulate cash or cultural capital. So how did they define this most American of words?

Walt Whitman saw freedom as release, the oneness of death that unites us all. Here was a riposte to easy patriotism, since death precedes all politics, and lies much deeper in us. For Frederick Douglass freedom was a concrete goal, the escape from slavery. Henry James described the freedom that comes with an educated awareness. Mark Twain carved his way through a frontier freedom that was spirited and raw. Edith Wharton outlined the shallow conventional life that can prevent you from being free, turning you into one of lifes victims.

At the start Henry James hated Walt Whitman. Mr. Whitman is very fond of blowing his own trumpet, James snickered in his review of Drum-Taps, Whitmans book of Civil War poetry. Whitman, James charged, was aggressively careless, inelegant, and ignorant, and constantly preoccupied with [him]self.

But James changed his mind about Whitman. Edith Wharton describes him later in life reciting Whitmans Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, crooning it in a mood of subdued ecstasy till the fivefold invocation to Death tolled out like the knocks in the opening bars of the Fifth Symphony.Hard as it is to imagine Henry James on his bike careening through the English countryside (yet its truehe was a fanatical cyclist), it might be harder still to imagine him intoning the plaintive words of Whitmans he-bird yearning after its mate in Out of the Cradle:

Unembarrassed as always, Whitman poured his soul into the he-birds chant, and James, with Wharton at his side, abandoned his usual high-starched quizzical manner to join in the poets throbbing.

Whitman charms us with his huzzahs and his many oddnesses. Hankering, gross, mystical, nudeso runs the poets self-portrait in Song of Myself. How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat? he asks. Nutrition, like all else under the sun, and like Walt himself, is a mystery, worth puzzling over.

When Whitman is somber, he haunts us. He notices a child wondering what is the grass? and muses an answer that channels Isaiahs astounding metaphor, all flesh is grass: And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Song of Myself turns dim and reflective as Whitman speaks lines that could have come from his reluctant inheritor T.S. Eliot:

We live in a world of the dead, Whitman is saying. Through this gesture, he skews death toward life, making it the most capacious form of our existence, the beautiful secret word that releases us. The sea, he writes in Out of the Cradle (the climactic passage that Wharton refers to), lispd to me the low and delicious word death, / And again death, death, death, death, / Hissing melodious ... Since our being is not just ego and consciousness but something that thrums beneath us as a force of union, To die is, as Whitman wrote in Song of Myself, different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Whitman was a healer during the war, and he lovingly tended to wounded young soldiers as poignantly described by Mark Edmundson in his recent book on Whitman, Song of Ourselves. The poet was marked forever by his experience of the camps of the wounded, these butchers shambles, as he described them:

Whitman remembered too the darkest hour of the Union, the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861. Whitman was among the crowds in the streets of Washington, many despondent but others taking satisfaction in the Confederate victory. Half our lookers-on secesh of the most venomous kindthey say nothing; but the devil snickers in their faces, Whitman wrote, and he added:

Whitman saw in Lincoln the indispensable man, unswervingly dedicated to union, the foundation and tie of all, as Whitman called it. But for the ex-slave Frederick Douglass, who tried to sway Lincoln toward a more anti-slavery posture, the president was a less essential and prepossessing figure. In his address at the unveiling of the Freedmens Memorial in 1876, which depicts Lincoln freeing a slave, the lion-maned Douglass bluntly proclaimed,

Douglass in his speech then depicts Lincoln as a Moses who was slow coming down from Sinai, bound as he was by the iron laws of politics:

To Douglass, Lincoln was not a sacred symbol or a saint but a flawed if necessary leader. Instead of waiting for Lincoln to emancipate him, Douglass achieved his own freedom, not just by escaping to the North but by expunging all traces of the slave in his psyche. Each memory of slaverys scars was painful to him. In his 1845 autobiography Douglass, who was soon to become the most celebrated orator in America, recalls the singing of slaves making their way to the Great House Farm, their masters home plantation. While on their way, Douglass writes, they would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness ... These songs show the horrible character of slavery as nothing else can, Douglass sayspresumably including gory scenes at the whipping postbecause the slaves cannot completely reject the masters values. They too are proud of the Great House Farm.

If Douglass were to keep listening to the slaves music, his soul would be tarnished, his will made weak. His idea of freedom, wedded to a blunt Christian honesty, is not musical but moral. Here, Douglass turns his back on the blues, which comes out of the field songs he portrays. With hard-earned irony, the blues makes terms with misery and even finds exultation in pain. We admire Douglass heroic conceptionbut sometimes we still want to hear the blues.

William Dean Howells once asked Mark Twain, Why [do] we hate the past so? Twain responded, Its so humiliating. Twains Huckleberry Finn magically turns every humiliation into a game, from the threats Huck endures at the hands of his drunken murderous Pap to the ritual demeaning of Jim by Huck and Tom Sawyer at the books end, when they fool Jim into thinking he is not yet freehijinks that sour the conclusion for some readers.

Many of Huck Finns glories are hard-edged, like the feud between the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords, a frightening piece of satire from Twain showcasing the brutal consequences of gentlemanly honor. And theres the cold-blooded killing of a reckless blowhard named Boggs, celebrated by townsfolk in the old-fashioned equivalent of a Twitter frenzy. Twain loves to dissect con men, like the Duke and the Dauphin, but their antics turn pathetic quickly. Stand up for the stupid and crazy, Whitman said, presaging the Beats, but in Twains work, the stupid and crazy tend to be scoundrels. The best part of Huck Finn is what everyone says it is, the scenes of Huck and Jim lying on their raft:

Its likely that soon Huck Finn, felled by the ideology of anti-freedom, which presents itself as a shield against harm, will no longer be taught in our schools. Yet it will always find readers, because of passages like the one Ive just quoted.

Henry James was Twains opposite number. Where Twain pretends to be rude and untamed, James is judicious and evasive in his manner. Both were great experimenters, forecasting the modernist adventures of the 1920s that I will talk about in my next article in this series.

James is our great novelist of renunciation, which is not usually considered an American virtue. In his most accessible masterpiece, A Portrait of a Lady, which, like Huck Finn, was first published in the 1880s, James seduces the reader into thinking that this will be a story about imagination and freedom, not renunciation, but in the end his heroine, the inimitable Isabel Archer, gives up romantic love.

All James novels feature an electric-wire sensibility. His characters are constantly alert, and at times quivering with alarm. James portrays an exhilarated awareness piqued by danger, whether the danger is the specter of social ruin, being tricked into or out of love, or being shown up in front of the internal jury that rules on the legitimacy of ones self-image. This darting psychomachia is a heightened form of life, a virtual reality. No one misses a move.

James knowing style, with its precision which may occasionally seem preening or archly tut-tutting, is easily parodied. But it allowed James to let loose his energies and be superbly creative. This style, oblique and cutting, was his invented personal signature, and astoundingly enough, it was the way James spoke, too.

The young lady of the Portrait, Isabel Archer, is drawn so that every reader will fall in love with her. She is quick, alive, and open, and above all free, with an Americans hunger for new experiences. The leisurely opening of James novel acquaints us with Isabels capacious and acute way of looking at the world. She had an immense curiosity about life and was constantly staring and wondering, James writes. Her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movements of her own soul and the agitations of the world. Still more charmingly, Isabel, James remarks, had an unquenchable desire to think well of herself. She had a theory that it was only under this provision that life was worth living.

Isabel gives herself proper credit, the first prerequisite of freedom. But she steps into a trap. James, as usual, has something up his sleevea nightmare marriage.

The Portrait of a Lady contains a puzzle to thwart readers: Why does Isabel choose to marry the serpentlike connoisseur Gilbert Osmond, a louche American expat, instead of the most wholehearted and simpatico of her suitors, Caspar Goodwood? (A solid name, that, made for gripping firmly in hand.)

Goodwood is simply too plain, too much there, unlike the chiaroscuro Osmondhe gives Isabel nothing to figure out, no material to work on. As the critic Robert Pippin remarks, when Goodwood makes his final try for Isabel, after her marriage to Osmond has collapsed, he is the same earnest boy he always was, only more assertive. Pippin notes, There is something pathetic and paradigmatically American in Goodwoods claim: Why shouldnt we be happywhen its here before us. When its so easy?

When they embrace, Isabel senses Goodwoods hard manhood like a flash of lightning (James added this sensational phrase when he revised the novel for the New York edition of his works). Yet she rejects a relationship with him. She didnt and doesnt love Goodwood, but is merely excited by him, and excitement is not enough.

At the end of the Portrait Isabel narrows the circle of her interest, which has earlier been so ample and free-swinging. By facing her fate, instead of fleeing it with Goodwood, Isabel survives. She returns to Rome, the site of her marriage to Osmond, perhaps to confront him or to rescue Osmonds daughter Pansyonly the all-seeing author Henry James knows for sure, and hes not telling us.

James Isabel has her dark double in Edith Whartons Lily Bart from The House of Mirth. Where Isabel wants to see and experience beauty, Lily aspires to be a beautiful object, admired like a jewel in its setting. She could not figure herself as anywhere but in a drawing-room, diffusing elegance as a flower sheds perfume, Wharton writes. Yet despite the shallowness of her dream Lily does not seem at all trivial to usa miraculous achievement on Whartons part.

Lack of money haunts Lily and finally does her in, with a directness matched only in Dreiser. Her grand desperation and tragic death are set off against the fine sensitivity of Laurence Selden, the man who should have married her but who instead remains a mere observer of her career. Selden is kind to her, as is, surprisingly, the Jewish social climber Rosedale. Wharton began writing Rosedale as an antisemitic caricature, but then turned him into a mensch. But kindness is not enough. Lily is simply unequipped for life, shortsighted and full of wrong instincts. She had never learned to live with her own thoughts, Wharton notes piercingly about Lily.

James advised Wharton to do New Yorkand she did. Her unsparing account of the citys ruthless upper classes in The House of Mirth and an even more brutal novel, The Custom of the Country, shows how money, personal appearance, and sexual availability imprison young women. For Lily there is no way outbut Selden the aesthete memorializes her from the sidelines. In the end, disquietingly, Selden congratulates himself for having loved Lily, almost as if savoring the fact of her ruin.

For James Isabel, freedom meant conceiving the world so that doing what you like and doing what you ought become one and the same. Its the noblest combination imaginable, but there is something childlike about it. Lily Bart in The House of Mirth represents the crashing of such dreams into the hard reality of the American drive for success. Freedom is a way of shaping the self, which Isabel can achieve and Lily cannot.

See the rest here:

American Freedom Is Greater Than Slavery and Ends in Death - Tablet Magazine

Some cryptocurrencies have always been fairly volatile, with values soaring or plunging within a short space of time. So for the more cautious investor, stablecoins were considered the sensible place to go. As the name implies, they are designed to be a steadier and safer bet.

At the moment though, that stability is proving hard to find. The value of one of the most popular stablecoins, Terra (also known as UST), has fluctuated wildly in the last few days, before dropping dramatically and is yet to recover.

Before the crash, Terra was in the top 10 cryptoassets, with a value of over US$18.7 billion. At the time of writing, this had collapsed to less than US$7 billion.

Investors have taken to social media to lament this development. Some spoke of lost life savings and the devastating impact of the currencys collapse.

And they are right to be worried. The impact of volatility in the stablecoin arena should not be underestimated and could destabilise the entire sector.

For in theory, stablecoins are supposed to offer the transactional benefits of more traditional cryptoassets (such as Bitcoin) but with a predictably stable worth.

Many stablecoins are backed by other assets (typically the US dollar) or commodities (often gold) and involve the stablecoin provider buying and then holding the equivalent amount of their chosen asset to ensure the coin remains stable. So while the value of the underlying asset might increase or decrease, the value of the stablecoin should at least remain at a consistent ratio with whatever underpins it.

But algorithmic stablecoins like Terra work differently. Terra holds no reserve asset or commodity, and instead is meant to hold its value using an algorithm, which is designed to maintain a balance between the stablecoin and a partner coin (a more traditional cryptocurrency).

In this case Terra is tied to a partner coin called Luna and the value of Luna has crashed. Its value is now less than US$0.06 having been trading at around US$82.00 just seven days earlier. In a climate where the value of Terra and Luna are both drastically declining, the algorithm cannot solve the issue of decreasing faith in the paired currencies and the stabilisation feature simply does not work.

As a result, fear kicks in and more people sell, just like a traditional bank run, where there is mass withdrawal of funds and sudden drastic loss in value. Stablecoins backed by assets tend to avoid this, due to the long term steady value of their peg which builds consumer confidence.

But they have issues too. Tether, a coin pegged to the US dollar, has had bumps in the road amid questions over whether the company which issues the coins hold the reserves it claims to have. And in recent days Tether too has seen its value fall.

All of this undermines the basic premise of these coins that they will remain stable. Customers choose to buy them to either shield against volatility in traditional crypto markets until they rise again, or to use them as a more traditional account (like a regular bank account) and take advantage of the benefits they offer with regard to speed, cost, and ease of international transactions.

But investors with their funds in Terra have seen their savings drop by around half. The fact it has still not stabilised does little to alleviate worries. In simple terms, the potential for a cryptocurrency crisis is very real.

This is why the approach of governments worldwide needs to change. While plenty has been said about regulation in the UK and the US, there has been little meaningful action.

If they fail to act, it will be difficult to advocate the use of stablecoins if they continue to expose consumers to the very volatility and risk they are supposed to avoid.

The time for allowing the sector freedom to innovate seems to have passed. Regulation is essential to offer consumer protection, and ban excessively risky practices if the potential of stablecoins is to be realised. That potential is something that many feel could revolutionise the global economy, speeding up transactions, reducing costs and increasing transparency.

But allowing the sector the opportunity to innovate should not come at the expense of peoples savings. If withdrawals persist, it will test both the stability of a particular stablecoin, and more broadly, whether the entire sector has a future. One stablecoin struggling is bad news. But two or more could be catastrophic for customer confidence.

Matthew Shillito is Lecturer in Law at University of Liverpool.

This article first appeared on The Conversation.

More:

A stablecoins collapse shows the time for allowing the sector freedom to innovate has passed - Scroll.in

Last week, newscame into the limelight that press freedom in India has decreased dramatically asIndia slid in the index of press freedom. This report was released by an organisation called Reporters Without Borders, a non-profit and non-governmental organisation without any accountability, with the World Press Freedom Index (WPFI).

This episode is not the first time and neither would it be the last time that such a report was released, and India was demoted from it. It started with a rank of 80 in the inaugural WPFI report in 2002: Indias position fell to 122 in 2010, 131 in 2012, 140 in 2019, and 142 in 2020, followed by 150 in 2022. This report aims to evaluate the level of freedom enjoyed by media in 180 countries.

During the UPA era, Indias ranking, according to this index, was falling consecutivelyand silence prevailed in most of the quarters which are vocal right now. Such reports are not even taken seriously in many countries right now.

Like all surveys, this survey also has some methodology to access the parameters, and in a nutshell, it is anything but faultless.

First, the organisation didnt mention the number of participants it surveyed before giving such a label. Although it would not be unfair to assume that the sample size would be tiny, typically consisting of an elite class ofjournalists, activists, and social scientists to decide how much freedom people enjoy. In the past, the entire WPFI 2020 report was prepared by questioning just 150 correspondents and 18 NGOs, with each one answering all 83 questions related to each country. The results prepared from this method will not surprise anyone about how much connection theywould have with reality.

Second, the questionnaire contains many questions that cant be directly associated with the fact that the government is suppressing the freedom of the press. For example, one question is, Is the news media able to achieve financial stability?" Now, the answer to this question can be anything but the reasons are multiple. It can also bethat the finance department of the media is facing some issues, or the media has taken a debt in expansion which cant be repaid because of the margins shrinking.

Another question is, Are journalists threatened or influenced by corruption?" The answer would be tricky in this case. It can also happen that the journalists are affected by corruption by big corporate to publish against the government. Or replace the big corporate with some non-accountable organisation or individual. The question can still be answered without the government being held responsible.

Also, there are questions like, Are journalists frequently convicted because of their work, whether for press offenses or for common law crimes?", Are laws against terrorism, separatism and/or extremism used against journalists?" and so on. This places journalists as the unquestionable people, particularly given that they can also be prone to be criminals but receive much more media coverage when taking action, increasing theavailability bias and triggering the elites to think theyre in danger.

Third, the bias of any organisation can be known from the issues on which it takes the stand. In February 2022, Rana Ayyub, whose book was dubbed as fiction by the apex court, was being investigated for purportedly committing financial fraud beneath afundraiser and the RWB wanted the investigations to be stopped. It was not the first time that the RWB showed this bias, though.

It is not the case with only this organisation that such blatantly shabby observations are published and taken seriously. A few years back, Thomson Reuters Foundation released a ranking of countries based on womens safety in which India was declared as the most dangerous country for women. The irony in the report was that Afghanistan and Somalia were safer than India when it came to womens safety! As usual, it was prepared by asking opinions from a small lot of feminists, humanists, activists (add some fancy ists here) across the globe.

Coming back to the point, there may be political or economic attempts of intimidation that one cant ignore while analysing the whole picture and giving a conclusion, but the surveys using such an outdated methodology and blatant bias will not help the cause either.

Harshil Mehta is an analyst who writes on international relations, diplomacy and national issues. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.

Read all the Latest News , Breaking News and IPL 2022 Live Updates here.

Follow this link:

The Press Freedom Index is Prepared With Bias and a Flawed Methodology - News18

KYIV, May 8 (Reuters) - Irish rock group U2's frontman Bono and his bandmate The Edge performed a 40-minute concert in a metro station in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv on Sunday and praised Ukrainians fighting for their freedom from Russia.

"Your president leads the world in the cause of freedom right now ... The people of Ukraine are not just fighting for your own freedom, you're fighting for all of us who love freedom," Bono told a crowd of up to 100 gathered inside the Khreshchatyk metro station. He was referring to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, pressing towards Kyiv before withdrawing its forces from near the capital at the end of March to concentrate its firepower on eastern Ukraine.

Register

U2 rock band frontman Bono and Ukrainian serviceman and frontman of the Antytila band Taras Topolia sing during a performance for Ukrainian people inside a subway station, as Russia's attack on Ukraine continues, in Kyiv, Ukraine May 8, 2022. REUTERS/Valentyn Ogirenko

Read More

"I am grateful to [Bono, U2] for supporting our people and drawing even more attention to the need to help our people," Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address.

Russia, which calls its action in Ukraine a "special military operation", continues to carry out missile strikes across Ukraine. However, some life has returned to Kyiv even though air raid sirens sound regularly. read more

Bono rallied the crowd between songs during his performance.

"This evening, 8th of May, shots will ring out in the Ukraine sky, but you'll be free at last. They can take your lives, but they can never take your pride," he said.

Register

Reporting by Sergiy Karazy and Oleksandr Kozhukhar; writing by Tom Balmforth and Lidia Kelly; editing by Susan Fenton and Himani Sarkar

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Read the original here:

U2's Bono gives 'freedom' concert in Kyiv metro - Reuters