YouTube blocked in China

  BEIJING, China  — China has blocked the popular video-sharing Web site YouTube but did not offer a reason for the ban.

A general screenshot of YouTube, which was blocked in China as of Wednesday.

 Google, which owns YouTube, said it began noticing a decline in traffic from China about noon Monday.

By early Wednesday, site users insider China continued to encounter an error message: “Network Timeout. The server at youtube.com is taking too long to respond.”

“We do not know the reason for the blockage and we are working as quickly as possible to restore access to our users,” said Scott Rubin, a spokesman for Google, which owns YouTube.

It’s not the first time users in China have been unable to access the site. In March 2008, China blocked YouTube during riots in Tibet.  Watch more about the decision »

At the time, protesters burned vehicles and shops, some advocating independence from China, and others demonstrating against the growing influence of the Han Chinese in the area.

The subsequent crackdown left 18 civilians and one police officer dead, according to the Chinese government. Tibet’s self-proclaimed government-in-exile put the death toll from the protests at 140.

Many in the country speculated the latest ban may be an attempt to filter access to footage that a Tibetan exile group released. The videos show Tibetans being kicked and beaten, allegedly by Chinese police officers after the riots.

“Though there is much footage of the protests taking place throughout Tibet last year that were splashed across the world, the following is rare footage of police beating of protesters, the suffering and death of a captive, and paramilitary presence in Lhasa (the Tibetan capital), which managed to make its way to the outside world,” the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India, said of the videos.

Xinhua, China’s state news agency, accused the supporters of Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, of doctoring the video to “deceive the international community.”

China, with 298 million Internet users, has routinely blocked access to Web sites it considers politically unacceptable, including the Voice of America and The New York Times. The Chinese government has also censored television broadcasts during coverage of issues such as its policy in Tibet and Taiwan.

The Chinese government did not directly address whether it has blocked YouTube.

“China is not afraid of the Internet,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang on Tuesday. “We manage the Internet according to law … to prevent the spread of harmful information.”

YouTube, which allows users to upload and share videos, has been banned periodically in other countries as well. Bangladesh, Pakistan, Thailand and Turkey temporarily shut off access to the site after users uploaded content the countries’ governments considered politically embarrassing.

World economy ‘to shrink in 2009′

 

The world economy is set to shrink by between 0.5% and 1.0% in 2009, the first global contraction in 60 years.

In its gloomiest forecast yet, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) says that developed countries will suffer a “deep recession”.

The global economic body says “the prolonged financial crisis has battered global economic activity beyond what was previously anticipated”.

Just two months ago, the IMF predicted world output would increase by 0.5%.

  But in its report drawn up for the G20 group of finance ministers, the IMF now says that the whole world economy will shrink, and predicts that the advanced economies will suffer a decline in output of between 3% and 3.5% in 2009, and barely grow in 2010, with growth of between 0% and 0.5%.

The IMF says this will happen despite a big fiscal stimulus from many G20 countries designed to boost growth.

It says that the G20 as a whole is adding 1.8% of GDP ($780bn) to boost growth this year – but that the EU is lagging behind with only 1%.

And it warns that the UK is building up the biggest fiscal deficit amongst all the G20 countries, which will amount to 11% of GDP by 2010.

US banking losses revised upward

 

The US banks lost $32.1bn (£22.3bn) in the last quarter of 2008 – even worse than the $26.2bn originally reported, US federal regulators say.

The revised data by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) included higher charges for an accounting item known as goodwill impairment.

The FDIC said it was the industry’s first quarterly loss in 18 years.

The FDIC also lowered the industry’s net income for the whole of 2008 to $10.2bn from $16.1bn.

On Friday, the agency updated its earlier report for the October-December period.

The FDIC said it revised the data because of “substantially higher” charges for goodwill impairment.

Goodwill is an asset on a firm’s balance sheets, which helps to determine of what it is worth beyond the tangible, including the added value from the potential for future success.

The FDIC did not provide the names of the institutions which accounted for the largest losses.

In the last quarter of 2007, the US banking industry posted a $575m (£399m) profit.

Last month, the FDIC said there were 252 banks in trouble at the end of 2008 – a rise from 171 in the third quarter.