Shareholder democracy

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Well, well. What a surprise. Yahoo! shareholders reject call for greater internet freedom

Yahoo! shareholders have rejected a plan that called for greater freedom of access on the internet in countries such as China.

At the search engine’s annual general meeting in California, just 15.2pc of shareholders supported the motion to oppose restrictions on access to websites. A second resolution to create a corporate board committee on human rights was also rebuffed, winning just 4pc of the vote.

Public companies don’t do ethics for the same reason that my cats pay no attention to exhortations to be nice to mice and fledglings. At best, companies obey the (local) law. Everything else is posturing for PR purposes. That’s why it was naive to expect Google to do the right thing in China.

The fatwa of the land

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From today’s International Herald Tribune…

CAIRO: First came the breast-feeding fatwa: It declared that the Islamic restriction on unmarried men and women being together could be lifted at work if the woman breast-fed her male colleagues five times. Then came the urine fatwa: It said that drinking the urine of the Prophet Muhammad was deemed a blessing.

At first, I thought this must be another one of those tasteless Western jokes. But no.

For the past few weeks, the breast-feeding and urine fatwas have proved a source of national embarrassment in Egypt, not least because they were issued by representatives of the highest religious authorities in the land.

“We were very angered when we heard about the Danish cartoons concerning our Prophet,” wrote Galal Amin in the newspaper Al Masry Al Yom, referring to the 2005 publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that caused an international uproar. “However, these two fatwas are harming our Islamic religion and our Prophet more than the cartoons.”

For many Muslims, fatwas, or religious edicts, are the bridge between the principles of their faith and modern life. They are supposed to be issued by religious scholars who look to the Koran and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad for guidance.

While the more sensational pronouncements grab attention, the bulk of the fatwas involve the routine of daily life. In Egypt alone, thousands are issued every month…

Strange things, religions.

Gordo in Oxford

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From TimesOnline…

I can report that he has developed a new “hugging” gesture, which he undoubtedly thinks shows inclusivity. Indeed, Gordo signalled how cool and modern he was when he announced: “MySpace is the biggest youth club in the country.” He looked thrilled as he said the words “My Space” and did the hugging gesture. Go for it, daddy-o.

Gordon is 56. This makes him closer to the My Pace-maker generation than anything else, but he simply ignored this fact. Usually his speeches are “me, me, me” affairs. Yesterday, he dusted off the “we”. He simply lopped 30 years off his age. Who needs a facelift when you can do that? “We’re part of a generation,” he said repeatedly for, like Botox, it’s addictive.

The speech was all about, well, Africa. Yes, I know we were in Oxford, but it’s a “My Generation” kind of thing. Why talk about boring old Britain when you can talk about Mozambique, Tanzania or Nigeria. There was a wonderful moment where he noted: “I was in Nigeria and I was at this school and Bono turned up as well, quite by chance!” (Does that happen to you too? Amazing, isn’t it?) Gordon and his generation are going to be very busy though not, that I can figure out, here.

He was asked, briefly, about the War on Terror and extending the 28 days’ detention without charge. He let rip with a passionate defence of our civil liberties. He did allow that 28 days might have to be extended but the only figure he mentioned was 35 days. Even this terrible seven-day increase would, of course, require rigid safeguards…

Nice piece by Ann Treneman. Thanks to Rex for finding it.

Memory Mapping

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Here’s an interesting idea. Flickr allows one to select sections of an image and add an annotation to the image corresponding to the selected portion. Someone who’d been an undergraduate at Cambridge has taken an aerial photograph of the city and annotated it with his memories of various locations. Given his memories, I wonder if that was a particularly wise thing to do, but the idea is intriguing and ingenious.

Thanks to Brian for the link.