Sunday, November 11, 2007

This new, occasional feature, reported by bloggers around the globe, will weave together the hottest stories on the Web.

PAPER TIGER?: The South China tiger is alive again in the wild -- at least in the Chinese blogosphere. On Oct. 12, the state-run New China News Agency reported that a farmer had spotted one in central China's Shaanxi province and captured it on film. It would have been the first sighting in the wild in more than 20 years. The government released one picture. The day after it hit the Internet, bloggers began speculating that the "tiger" was actually a paper model doctored with Photoshop. Some accused officials of using fake photography to promote tourism, and the ensuing firestorm pushed the national media to investigate possible fraud. The farmer and the Shaanxi Provincial Forestry Bureau insist that the photo is real but have not produced evidence of its authenticity. And, as skeptical netizens noted, the farmer received a sizable reward from the forestry bureau, which is responsible for sustaining endangered species and for promoting tourism. Whether or not the tiger is bogus, the furor shows that "the government agency's credibility is on the edge of extinction in China," as one blogger wrote.

-- Xiao Qiang is the director of the China Internet Project at the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. He blogs at chinadigitaltimes.net.

FLAGGED ON FACEBOOK: In the same year that YouTube popularized presidential debates in the United States, Facebook is driving the mounting tension between secularists and conservatives in Turkey. One million Turks have joined Facebook since the social networking site, which was initially limited to universities, opened itself to the public in September 2006. Members of the "Turkey" group receive an average of five or six invitations each day to political groups of all kinds, most of them nationalist. Tech-savvy activists designed programs that put nationalist messages on their Facebook "Walls," where friends write comments about one another. A group that encourages users to post a Turkish flag in place of their own photograph already has 100,000 members. But the nationalists aren't the only ones to have mastered the virtual world. A new liberal party uses Facebook almost exclusively to reach out to young people.

-- Mustafa Domanic is a financial analyst who lives in Istanbul and London. He blogs at foreignsight.blogspot.com .

VIRTUAL JUSTICE: If you want to understand the importance of the Internet in Iran, consider the death of 27-year-old medical student Zahra Bani Ameri in a Hamadan prison. Iranian Revolutionary Guards charged with enforcing Islamic law arrested her on Oct. 12 when they found her walking in a park with her fianc¿. The crime? Carrying on a "non-Islamic" relationship. The next day, Bani Ameri was dead. According to the guards, she hanged herself in her cell.

But fellow university students and other activists wrote online that Bani Ameri's brother, who spoke with her while she was in custody, said that she sounded normal -- not like someone who was about to commit suicide. Web sites dedicated to women's rights asked: Why did officials change Bani Ameri's autopsy report to declare that she was a virgin? Could she have been raped while she was under arrest? Since the story exploded on the blogosphere, Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer who won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize, agreed to represent Bani Ameri's family in the lawsuit it has filed against the government.

-- Roozbeh Mirebrahimi is an Iranian journalist who lives in New York. He blogs at shabnameha.wordpress.com.