Eat your greens!

Paul Eagle, from the Amnesty UK Business Team, kindly came down to Blackheath on Tuesday night and gave a talk about the Business & Human Rights campaign. Here are the notes from the evening, pasted straight from our newsletter.

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I’ve been reading Amnesty’s new report on the internet and freedom of expression in China. The specific focus is the complicity of Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft in human rights abuses in China by facilitating and sanctioning government censorship.

The full report is available from the Amnesty UK website (you have to scroll down a bit to find a link to the PDF). It’s worth reading if you’re interested in business ethics and this whole Web 2.0 thing.

• Google self-censor their Chinese search engine, but at least inform users that censorship has occurred.
• Microsoft censor MSN Spaces in China by restricting the terms that users can use in their account names, space names or photo captions. A Chinese pro-democracy blog was also shut down by Microsoft in December 2005 – removing it not only from the web in China, but from the web as a whole.
• Yahoo! are the company most strongly criticised in the report. Yahoo!’s disclosure of private account information to the Chinese authorities has led to the convictions of two journalists. Both are considered prisoners of conscience.
  
  Update: make that three people in jail.

From the Royal Astronomical Society press list today:

On the evening of 3 March the Moon will move directly behind the Earth in a total lunar eclipse. This is the only eclipse visible from the UK this year.

The Moon will begin to move into the lighter part of the shadow of the Earth (the penumbra) at 2016 GMT and from that time it will take on a yellowish tint. It will enter the darker core of the shadow (the umbra) at 2130 GMT. The total eclipse starts at 2244 GMT when the Moon is completely immersed in the umbra. Totality will end at 2358 GMT, the Moon will move out from the umbra completely at 0111 GMT (on 4 March) and the eclipse will come to an end when the Moon leaves the penumbra at 0225 GMT.

Although fairly common, total lunar eclipses can be spectacular events. Normally the Moon does not disappear completely but is lit by sunlight scattered through the Earth’s atmosphere and takes on a beautiful brick-red hue. At the time of the eclipse, the Moon will be in front of the stars of the constellation of Leo and from the UK it will be high in the southern sky.

NASA/JPL released new pictures of Saturn from the Cassini mission today, including views from high above, and below, the ring system. See the full set on their web site.

The mpeg movie of a ring crossing is well worth watching, if you have the time to download it.