Almost three-quarters of Venezuela’s newspapers have closed during five years of recession in the once-prosperous OPEC member country, according to the national journalism association, leaving El Nacional as the last independent national daily.
Press watchdogs warn that media freedom declined over the past year, which saw President Nicolas Maduro win a fresh six-year term in May at elections boycotted by the opposition.
Venezuela slid six places in Reporters Without Borders’ index of world press freedom to 143 place from 180 countries surveyed.
According to Venezuela’s Press Institute IPYS, the national telecoms regulator also closed 40 radio stations in 2017 citing irregularities in their licenses.
Maduro’s government says it treats all media outlets equally and there is freedom of expression. However, it has publicly said it wants more control over the media, which in the past was openly anti-government and welcomed a brief coup in 2002 against then-President Hugo Chavez.
The closures have left coverage increasingly in the hands of state-controlled radio and television outlets and pro-government newspapers like Ultimas Noticias, covering Maduro’s official activities while ignoring rising levels of malnutrition and disease.
“Only the debris of the bourgeois media is left,” Maduro said in a speech in June during the country´s national journalists´ day.
Venezuela’s Information Ministry did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the government’s treatment of the media.
A number of Venezuela’s new generation of online outlets also are increasingly facing difficulties. They are reporting website blockages, forcing them to find more creative ways to deliver news, such as audio summaries sent by WhatsApp.
“It’s a way of getting around censorship. Because we’re not going to just sit here moaning that they have blocked us,” said Cesar Batiz, who founded news site El Pitazo in 2014.
The Information Ministry did not respond to a request to comment on website blockages.
Venezuelan newspaper closures leave coverage in state’s hands
Venezuelan newspaper closures leave coverage in state’s hands
Amazon’s AWS reports outage after UAE datacenter struck by ‘objects’
- AWS confirmed sparks and fire after objects hit UAE data center causing disruptions to Emirate and Bahrain regions
- Full recovery expected to “be many hours away”
LONDON: Amazon’s cloud-computing facilities in the Middle East faced power and connectivity issues on Monday after unidentified “objects” struck its data center in the United Arab Emirates.
The objects had triggered a fire on Sunday that forced authorities to eventually cut power to two clusters of Amazon data centers in the UAE, with restoration expected to take several more hours, according to Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) status page.
Localized power issues impacted AWS services in both the UAE and neighboring Bahrain, according to the page. Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank said its platforms and mobile app were unavailable due to a region-wide IT disruption, although it did not directly link the outage to the AWS incident.
While Amazon did not identify the objects, the incident happened on the same day Iran fired a barrage of drones and missiles at Gulf States in retaliation for US and Israeli strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
A strike, if confirmed, on the AWS facility in the UAE will mark the first time a major US tech company’s data center has been knocked offline by military action. It could also raise questions around Big Tech’s pace of expansion in the region.
US tech giants have been positioning the UAE as a regional hub for artificial intelligence computing needed to power services such as ChatGPT. Microsoft said in November it plans to bring its total investment in the UAE to $15 billion by the end of 2029 and will use Nvidia chips for its data centers there.
“In previous conflicts, regional adversaries such as Iran and its proxies targeted pipelines, refineries, and oil fields in Gulf partner states. In the compute era, these actors could also target data centers, energy infrastructure supporting compute, and fiber chokepoints,” Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies said last week.
Microsoft as well as Google and Oracle — both of which also operate facilities in the UAE — did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.
AWS said a full recovery from the issues was expected to “be many hours away” for both UAE and Bahrain.
The outage had disrupted a dozen core cloud services and the company advised customers to back up critical data and shift operations to servers in unaffected AWS regions.
