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Archive for Friday, January 11, 2002

World briefs

January 11, 2002

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Nicaragua

Engineer becomes nation's president

A 73-year-old industrial engineer who deflected a third attempt by the Sandinistas to retake power was sworn in Thursday as Nicaragua's new president.

Enrique Bolanos of the Constitutionalist Liberal Party became the third democratically elected president in Nicaragua since the Sandinistas peacefully handed over power in 1990, pressured by U.S.-backed Contra fighters.

At least 80 foreign delegates attended the inauguration in Managua's national baseball stadium.

Lawmakers from the opposition Sandinista National Liberation Front boycotted the event, however, after members of Bolanos' party showed up wearing the party's colors. The Sandinistas complained the act violated the national spirit of the inauguration.

Norway

DVD code-breaker charged with crime

Prosecutors filed criminal charges Thursday against a Norwegian teen-ager who drew Hollywood's anger by writing and distributing a program that unlocks copy-protected DVDs.

After a two-year investigation, authorities indicted Jon Lech Johansen in an important test of Norway's new computer crime laws.

Johansen's defenders call the prosecution a wrongheaded attack on intellectual freedom. Creating software that breaks copy-protection schemes, they argue, is not the same as using such programs to steal copyright material.

Johansen, who was 15 when he authored the software, has said he did so because only wanted to be able to play movies on his computer.

The movie industry had attempted to protect films recorded to DVDs with the Content Scrambling System.

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