As a trial run, we are offering ten invitations to news producers who’d like to use Newsdesk.org as a virtual hackerspace — for fundraising, collaboration, independent publishing, experimenting with software, and whatever else seems opportune.

The site is fully functional, with 501(c)(3) status and a suite of hosted online publishing services. There is no publisher or editor, and no cost for participation. Journalists are free to use the site as they see fit for their public-interest work. They would essentially share ownership of it with their peers, and would work collaboratively to make leadership decisions.

FAQ
So wait, there’s no editor?
What benefits and services does the site offer?
How would peer-led, collaborative news production really work?
Can you be specific about the technical and publishing resources?
Does it cost anything to participate?
Can we please update the logo and site design?
Am I eligible to participate?
What topics can I cover?
What sorts of fundraising can I do?
No, seriously, how is the site managed?
Who are you guys anyway, and why are you doing this?

More Information
Legal status
Thesis: Social Innovation & “New Forms of Organization”
Proposed timeline

So wait, there’s no editor?
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That is correct. Newsdesk.org is a platform only. It has no editor, no publisher, no copy desk, and no IT, development and marketing staff; participants must address their own needs for these services, and are encouraged to do so collaboratively as well.

In the hackerspace spirit, there are no leaders. Project governance is by consensus, within a practical framework of independence, mutuality and excellence in one’s work and peer relations.

Also, in that spirit, everything on this site should be considered a work in progress, fully open to comment, critique and meaningful editing by engaged peers.

What benefits and services does the site offer?
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Participants have access to a fully operational, hosted, nonprofit news platform, with an associated suite of communications and publishing resources, and a record of publishing quality public-interest journalism from 2000 to 2010.

Newsdesk.org comes with beneficial professional relationships that require care and attention. The site is a member of the Investigative News Network, won an SPJ Sigma Delta Chi award, and has been previously funded by the Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation and the Harnisch Foundation.

The website runs on the Investigative News Network’s open-source Project Largo theme and plugins, and is hosted and supported by INN. It also includes free Google Apps usage (including custom @newsdesk.org email addresses), Twitter and Facebook accounts, customizable subdomains, etc.

How would peer-led, collaborative news production really work?
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Well, probably much the same way you help out your colleagues every day — do some spot proofreading, pitch in on a critique session, mentor an intern — except without a publisher or managing editor telling you to get back to work on that Justin Bieber profile.

But seriously. Collaborative/open/shared production models work brilliantly in other productive and creative sectors — such as software and design — so why not for journalism as well?

With the freedom of a peer-to-peer production community comes responsibility as well:

• Participating journalists must do their own fundraising, quality control and promotions beyond what the platform may already offer.
• Relationships with partner organizations (such as the Investigative News Network) require care and attention.
• Participants must agree on a functioning set of site-management and quality-control protocols, and then live by them.
• Participants should actually want to volunteer for peer-support activities, similar to volunteering for membership on the board of their local SPJ chapter.
• Participants need to actually get along with each other in a peer context.

Assuming the foregoing works out, there are some interesting opportunities to develop.

• Productivity=Growth and Visibility. In our experience, the more Newsdesk.org is used to publish quality, engaging journalism, the more site traffic increases and the greater degree of engagement via article comments and social media. For example, when the site is regularly updated, it gets indexed by Google News, which greatly increases traffic. If you use Newsdesk.org well, it will flourish as a home for your work.
• Social Innovation: The Time Is Right. Successful social innovation in modeling a co-curation process can open the door for a massively scaled up level of participation.
• Low Costs and Open Opportunity. Hosting and technical upkeep of a high-functionality, high-traffic website is inexpensive as infrastructure investments go, creating a lot of practical opportunity for participants.

What specific technical and publishing resources would I have access to?
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Newsdesk offers a wide variety of resources to participants in support of their work, including:

• A personal publishing account on Newsdesk.org, including front-page privileges, and a public page with an image, professional bio and bibliography of content on the site (e.g. newsdesk.org/author/jasminmara/).
• Google Apps (nonprofit version), including a private @newsdesk.org email address running on Gmail, with IMAP, POP and webmail access; access to site stats, mailgroups, cloud-based document storage (Google Docs/Google Drive), forms, presentations, etc.; access to the site’s Google Analytics account
• Use of Newsdesk.org’s social media (Facebook and Twitter) and email newsletter, News You Might Have Missed.
• Private subdomains (yourlabelhere.newsdesk.org) to develop topics, regional coverage, to stage technology experiments, etc.
• Optional fiscal sponsorship under Newsdesk’s 501(c)(3) nonprofit parent, for grant seeking and soliciting deductible donations from individuals, and to provide an institutional affiliation for independent producers.

Does it cost anything to participate?
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No. There are no membership dues or fees for service. The sole, optional exception to this is for nonprofit fiscal sponsorship, which, again, is strictly optional, and not required for full participation.

Can we please update the logo and site design?
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Sure. Right now Newsdesk.org is sitting on a very basic design and logo template. Participants who want to get involved in such design issues should do so.

Again, everything on this site should be considered a work in progress, fully open to comment, critique and meaningful editing by engaged peers.

Am I eligible to participate?
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• At this time, in order to participate, you must be invited by someone already using the site. If you’d like to apply for an invitation — we have currently ten open invitations — please drop us a line.
• Participants can be individuals, teams and organizations doing important work that doesn’t have a home in commercial and institutional mass media.
• Participants are encouraged to collaborate in setting standards and intake protocols for individuals and organizations.
• There are no membership dues or fees for service. Participants have the option to use Newsdesk’s fiscal sponsorship services to support their fundraising activities, which applies a 7% administrative fee to all deductible funds received.

What topics can I cover?
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Pretty much anything you want, within the site’s public-interest mandate.

Newsdesk has historically covered “important but overlooked news and underserved communities,” from the local to the global. This has included investigations, enterprise and serial reporting, hard news, news features, photojournalism and aggregation. Essays and commentary remain a frontier.

Coverage is organized into three categories that define a very broad and very deep public-interest framework: Democracy & Human Rights, Culture & Economy, and The Sciences. All other topics are identified by tags under these three categories.

• Suggestion: Newsdesk.org’s sole ideological commitment should be to ethical journalism practice to advance transparency, accountability, open inquiry, civil discourse and informed participation in our democracy.
• Constraint: As a 501(c)(3), Newsdesk.org cannot endorse or oppose legislation or candidates for elected office. The limited exception to this rule involves legislation that directly affects Newsdesk’s interests as a nonprofit publisher.

What sorts of fundraising can I do?
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• Participants are free to fundraise for their work via any legal manner at their disposal.
• Optional fiscal sponsorship under Newsdesk’s 501(c)(3) parent, Independent Arts & Media (IAM), enables participants to apply for grants, cultivate individual donors, and do tax-deductible crowdfunding Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, etc.
• Fiscal sponsorship with IAM includes a 7% administrative fee to cover IRS compliance, bookkeeping and CPA costs.
• IndieGoGo has partnered with IAM to offer discounts and promotional services for deductible crowdfunding campaigns by its fiscally sponsored affiliates.
• Participants are encourage to fundraise individually for their own work, or collaborate with peers on larger projects.

No, seriously, how is the site managed?
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The Newsdesk Shareable Journalism Experiment takes its cue from hacker communities, such as Noisebridge in San Francisco, in which peers self-organize to create a well-resourced space for individual and shared productivity.

Key to the success of such hacker spaces is a collaborative ethos that preserves autonomy as well as ensures mutual responsibility. For journalistic purposes, here’s a rough paraphrase of the Noisebridge “tripartite” ethos:

• Excellence. Commit to excellence and vision in one’s work; in your peer relationships, “be excellent to each other” and collaborate generously.
• Do-ocracy. If you want it done, do it yourself! You do not need permission to publish, or to experiment with content, form, medium or practice.
• Consensus. If you are not sure of the excellence of something you want to do, ask yours peer what they think. Most “official” decisions — changes in infrastructure, design or management and quality-control protocols — would require peer consensus.

Can a group of journalism peers co-curate a website and nonprofit news platform like a group of hackers and makers run an open-source research lab? Perhaps! Their success, or lack of it, will affect Newsdesk’s viability as a home for their work.

Who are you guys anyway, and why are you doing this?
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Newsdesk.org was founded in 2000 as a home for nonprofit, commercial-free journalism. The site published new content weekly and daily through 2010, with a focus on “important but overlooked news and underserved communities.” This included the pioneering aggregation and analysis service, News You Might Have Missed.

Newsdesk.org had a wonderful ten-year run, worked with a wide variety of diversely talented writers and news producers, built an audience, raised money (we were in fact the roll-out partners for Spot.Us), and even won a fancy award.

It has been an honor! But the funding available for ad-free, public-interest journalism is greatly exceeded by the need for such coverage. Newsdesk.org lost its grant the same week it won the SPJ SDX award, and has essentially been lying fallow since then.

Given the site’s rich publishing history — and considering the unusual opportunities of “post-industrial journalism” (see below) — we are exploring this “hackerspace experiment” as an alternative to archiving Newsdesk.org’s coverage and selling the URL to the highest bidder.

If this project does not succeed, Newsdesk.org will be donated to a nonprofit, public-interest news publisher, a university, or some other entity engaged in education and/or advocacy for public-journalism.

What’s the project’s legal status?
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The Newsdesk.org URL is held in trust by Independent Arts & Media (IAM, artsandmedia.net), a 501(c)(3) organization founded in 2000. IAM has a mission to support people and projects that use media and the arts to build community and increase participation; fiscal sponsorship is the primary vehicle for activating media/arts productive capacity in and for underserved communities. In 2012, IAM managed more than $300,000 in deductible funding for more than a dozen community-focused media/arts programs.

Thesis: Social Innovation, Post-Industrial Journalism & “New Forms of Organization”
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“Post-Industrial Journalism” isn’t just an academic thesis — it’s our lived experience. For us and tens of thousands of journalists nationwide there is indeed “no such thing as the journalism industry anymore.”

The thesis authors, Clay Shirky, Emily Bell and C.W. Anderson, also call for “new forms of organization” to take advantage of “new opportunities for journalism.”

Let’s take that as a dare — a call for social innovation in the practice of journalism, and in particular for work serving the public interest.

The open-source and D.I.Y. movements have demonstrated that shared, non-hierarchical production platforms and processes can serve public need, nuture high quality work, and even change the world.

Maybe journalists can do that too.

Internet is a radically open and egalitarian medium, literally built upon peer-to-peer relationships — but this has not yet translated into real opportunity for professional journalists on a mass scale. It’s arguable that even musicians in the MP3 era are doing better than reporters, given the abundance of fan communities and promotional services for independent songwriters and bands.

The Mozilla Foundation may provide an intriguing precedent, demonstrating great success in facilitating, advocating for and preserving the integrity of open-source media technology. The question is if and how that can be translated over to journalism practice.

Should this experiment succeed, it could model a new type of stewardship mechanism for basic public-media infrastructure in the Internet era.

Proposed Timeline
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Q1 2013:

• Finalize site conversion to Project Largo.
• Finalize initial project documentation and spec sheets.
• Create a project FAQ for reporters and the general public
• Create a “design wiki” for participants to contribute to.
• Conduct initial outreach and invitations to potential participants.
• Host conference call to answer questions from invitees.
• Initial posting by invited participants can begin any time.
• GOAL: With regular postings by participants, get site indexed by Google News.

Q2 2013:

• Follow-up conference call for participants, if needed.
• Convene (via conference call and Internet shared documents) initial participants to discuss and develop initial site-management protocols.
• Site fully open for self-publishing and related uses by participants.
• Grant seeking and project development as appropriate.

Q3 2013:

• Consensus vote by initial participants on a charter, site-management protocols, or other founding document.
• Additional convening, conference calls, etc., as needed/appropriate.
• Formal project launch and promotion to journalism community.

• Download and print the 2011 San Francisco mayoral-candidate voter guide.

The document is a summary of research produced by University of California’s Hasting College of the Law and The San Francisco Public Press. The voter guide was produced by Newsdesk.org.

Please spread the word to other San Francisco voters, and thank you for your support of this nonpartisan voter resource.

• Download the voter-guide PDF (<400k)

Editor’s Note: Newsdesk.org is teaming up with Oakland Local and Spot.Us for a return to the West Oakland community covered in 2009′s award-winning “Toxic Tour” series.

Thinking about planting a garden this spring? Many West Oakland residents are doing the same — unaware that there is lead and cadmium in the soil and perhaps an old gasoline tank right under their driveway.

When the soil is contaminated, it’s hard for any neighborhood to improve its economic lot. With a history of mixed use zoning, dumping, and neglect due to decades of environmental racism, this neighborhood is working on cleaning up its toxic industrial legacy.

West Oakland Toxic Tour II – Right Beneath Our Feet

In partnership with Oakland Local, Newsdesk.org’s Toxic Tour project returns to West Oakland in 2011, to build on the stories, issues and community responses covered in 2009.

Toxic Tour I (mainly focusing on air pollution) was nationally recognized with a Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award for Excellence in Journalism for our hyperlocal, hard-hitting, and high-quality journalism.

This time, we’ll create a series of installments in the Summer/Fall of 2011. At least four articles (up to six, if funding goals are exceeded) will focus on contaminated land in West Oakland, and will combine text reporting with photography, audio and video.

An overarching map will also be created to bring together media from the articles with data from government and community sources. The whole series will also run on popular mobile devices.

Spot.Us funding will be combined with support already secured from the Society of Environmental Journalists to make this project a success. This series is being produced and distributed in partnership with Newsdesk.org.

QUALIFICATIONS

Lead Reporter: CB Smith-Dahl

CB Smith-Dahl is an award-winning filmmaker, photographer, and educator who has always put the community at the center of her work. She is a former Artist-In-Residence at LA’s Skid Row Housing Trust and has significant experience as a community researcher. In 1997, she founded Community Bridge Video, a company that specializes in participatory media. She is a Facebook regular and posts semi-regularly on Twitter as MsSmittyB. As Oakland Local’s Community Media Manager, she creates new media content for the site and teaches and engages youth and community members in useful new media skills. CB moved to West Oakland six years ago so that her children could be near relatives who have made Oakland and the Bay Area home for over 100 years.

Health Intern: Jackie Ho

Jackie Ho is a Health Education student at San Francisco State, a lifelong resident of East Oakland, and a new intern at Oakland Local.

Map Intern: Alberto Azurdia

Born in East Oakland, Alberto is a graduate of the Bay Area Multicultural Media Academy. In 2009-2010 he worked as one of the Youth Evaluation Team Interns — conducting qualitative assessments and mapping After School Programs supported by the Oakland Fund for Children and Youth. He currently a Freshman at San Francisco State, exploring possible majors.

Series Producer/Reporter: Amy Gahran

Oakland Local co-founder, Amy Gahran writes about mobile development, multimedia, environment, transportation, development and, of course, the emerging zombie beat. A mobile news guru, Amy is passionate about community training and speaking truth to power. Her background is as a journalist, editor, and managing editor mainly covering energy, environment, and business. For the last 12 years she’s been happily and gainfully self-employed, mostly helping organizations, institutions, and individuals wrap their brains around the internet. A new North Oakland resident, she sees the Town with fresh eyes. Her personal blog is at contentious.com and she twitters as amygahran.

Series Producer: Josh Wilson, Newsdesk.org

Josh is one of the co-founders of Independent Arts & Media, a San Francisco nonprofit organization that expands dialogue in our democracy by supporting independent media producers and culture makers. He also founded Newsdesk.org, a commercial-free journalism project covering “important but overlooked news.” He is a longtime producer, DJ and host at the award-winning community radio station KUSF-FM, and held various positions there, including Community Affairs Director and Program Coordinator. A professional journalist and editor, Josh has worked for SFGate.com, Meredith Corporation, and Wired magazine, and as a freelancer for the San Jose Mercury News, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and other publications. He is a 2010 WeMedia fellow, a 2009 Ashoka Changemaker finalist, a 2008 Writer-in-Residence at the Mesa Refuge on Tomales Bay (topic: “New Public Media”).

DELIVERABLES

Part One: A Developers Dream?

With Federal grants and private loans, Oakland’s Redevelopment Office is encouraging developers to come rehabilitate West Oakland’s brownfields. Do residents know what’s beneath their feet? Why aren’t they being offered the same funding to clean up the underground-tanks-next-door?

Part Two: Case Study of Community Response

Profile of a West Oakland activist and her community work. West Oakland residents are completing scientific surveys (that should have been done long ago by involved companies and government agencies). Participatory/community based research is working in West Oakland. What other grassroots efforts in West Oakland are addressing the pollution and public-health issue?

Part Three: The Morass We’re In

A nucleus of community activism, it’s no surprise that West Oakland has been fighting pollution for decades. What’s surprising is how many federally funded projects have stalled. We’ll profile 2 toxic (brownfield) sites in West Oakland and update what hasn’t happened (in contrast with 2 other sites – one in Emeryville and one in East Oakland)

Part Four: The Down Side of Greening Up

While many individuals and organizations are working to turn around West Oakland’s toxic legacy, there are some unintended consequences.

Does recycling = salvage work = pollution? Some companies are working to balance environmental concerns with slim profit margins.

At the same time, green cities like Oakland are touting the benefits of mixed use zoning. West Oakland has a historical residential/commercial/industrial patchwork. Is it possible to convert past planning mistakes into a model city?

The weather was just right — a perfect atmospheric inversion that captured the city’s unprecedented industrial and auto emissions, and on July 16, 1943, blanketed Los Angeles in its first recorded smog event. “Smogtown” authors Chip Jacobs and William Kelly talk with Hear in the City producer Sara Harris about the panic and placation that ensued. It’s the kickoff of HiC’s Toxic Tour series, “Air Check: petroleum and air pollution from a community perspective.”

With the support of Newsdesk.org and Spot.us, Hear in the City’s reporters will follow the path a barrel of oil from the place it’s extracted to where it’s refined and beyond. Your small donation to “Air Check” will help fund our continued investigation of all these issues.

Newsdesk.org’s award-winning, crowd-funded Toxic Tour project comes to Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco. We’re working with local news producers in each city to help develop and fund their work, and put neglected public-health issues “on the map.”

Newsdesk.org supports independent news radio.

The Coalition for Clean Air houses a wealth of information about quality in California. Here are some surprising assertions I encountered about Los Angeles recently on their site:

• By the age of two months, Los Angeles-area infants have already inhaled enough toxic pollutants to reach the EPA lifetime limit for cancer risk.
• 90% of Californians live in areas that fail to meet state and federal air quality standards.
• Breathing air in Southern California can reduce one’s life expectancy by one to two years.
• California is the fifth-largest producer of global warming emissions in the world.

Surely this is all true most U.S. cities — or is it? Los Angeles has some of the strictest emissions standards in the country. Yet here is no escaping air pollution. Some of us live in areas with worse air quality than others — you can check out your own local air-quality index on the federally funded Airnow.gov website — but nearly all of us living in Los Angeles are breathing sub-standard air.

Your small donation to “Air Check” will help fund our investigation of all these issues.

Newsdesk.org’s award-winning, crowd-funded Toxic Tour project comes to Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco. We’re working with local news producers in each city to help develop and fund their work, and put neglected public-health issues “on the map.” In the process we hope to create a new model for independent journalism.

I’m reading up on local history and air quality maps for our Air Check series on air pollution in Los Angeles. I’m knee deep in Smogtown: The Lung-burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles by Chip Jacobs and William Kelley. It’s written like the pair wishes they were really James Elroy, but it’s chock-full of archival research and unbelievable anecdotes about just how toxic the miasma called air was in Los Angeles before the oil companies and defense manufacturers were ever subject to regulation. And yes, back in the post WWII L.A., they actually used a contraption called a “smogometer” to analyze the air. You can visit the Smogtown website: http://www.lasmogtown.com/

Newsdesk.org’s award-winning, crowd-funded Toxic Tour project comes to Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco. We’re working with local news producers in each city to help develop and fund their work, and put neglected public-health issues “on the map.” In the process we hope to create a new model for independent journalism.

Questions? Please drop us a line via our contact form.

San Francisco designer Willo O’Brien and technologist Andrew A. Peterson worked closely with Newsdesk.org editor George Shirk to develop a new site, which sports plenty of social-media and self-promotional muscle, along with an elegant, clean design.

Article pages are uncluttered, with just two columns, and the entire site is completely free of advertising. This keeps the user experience focused on the reporting, plus relevant semantic and social content — from comments and crowdsourced referrals to tag clouds and topically related stories.

The site also automatically detects mobile devices and delivers content to them in a simplified format.

Over time, the site will be fine-tuned to increase functionality, and deepen each article as an informational and promotional resource for important but overlooked issues and underserved communities.

The new Web site source code is available for free to qualified independent journalists who want develop affiliate sites serving their communities. For details, please contact Josh Wilson, Publisher, at 415-321-4901, or via e-mail.

Worldwide, nearly half of all imprisoned media workers are online journalists or bloggers, according to a new study by the Committee to Protect Journalists that names Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Tunisia and Syria as leaders in online repression.

Cuba has also jailed and harassed a number of bloggers, reported the Miami Herald, including Pablo Pacheco, who has been behind bars since 2003.

And more repression there is expected, with dozens of bloggers becoming ever-more bold in their diverse critiques of the government. Restive Cubans have staged online protests against censorship, as well as risky in-person actions, marches and even a workshop series, the Bloggers Academy of Cuba, that educates would-be media makers in methods, technology and legal issues.

Al Jazeera reported that two video bloggers in Azerbaijan have recently been jailed for mocking the president there, while Agence France-Presse noted a U.S. House of Representatives resolution demanding that Vietnam free all of its political prisoners, including 18 bloggers.

In China, however, where censorship and repression is widespread, viral protests by millions of “netizens” are having surprising impact.

The Washington Post reported that online activism there has “prompted police to reopen closed cases, authorities to cancel unpopular development projects and … national leadership to fire corrupt local officials.”

Government repression — or the fear of it — has also not dissuaded bloggers in the Middle East, where the proverbial Arab Street is now on the Internet.

Statistics show Middle Eastern Internet use went up by more than 1,000 percent between 2000 and 2008 — from 3,284,800 users to nearly 48 million — while a Harvard University study estimates there are at least 35,000 blogs written in Arabic, and 70,000 serving Farsi-speaking residents of Iran and elsewhere.

Although Farsi spoken only by about 75 million people worldwide, the blog search-engine Technorati ranks it as one of the top ten blogging languages.

In Iran, Twitter helped drive protests over the disputed June elections there, serving as a type of global instant messenger.

But bloggers — seven of whom were jailed for their critique of the vote — provided the details and a place for discourse.

–Ronnie Lovler/Newsdesk.org

Sources:

“Online social networks in Syria”
Global Voices, November 6, 2009

“For reporters without borders, press freedom is the price for democracy”
Global Voices Advocacy: November 7, 2009

“Bloggers jailed in Azerbaijan”
Al Jazeera, November 11, 2009

“Media Literacy 101″
Huffington Post: October 30, 2009

“Mapping the Arab blogosphere: politics, culture and dissent”
Berkman Center for Internet & Society, June 16, 2009

“U.S. House Demands Vietnam free bloggers”
Agence France-Presse, October 21, 2009

“China’s netizens holding officials to new standard”
Washington Post, November 9, 2009

“Arab winds of change”
The Guardian, October 22, 2009

“Cuba’s blogosphere has developed a sharper edge”
Miami Herald, November 10,2009

“Internet World Stats”

“Languages on the Web”
New Media Trend Watch, September 17, 2009

One such nation is South Korea, although a notable Korean, U.N. Secretary-General Ban

Ban Ki-Moon

Ki-moon, is working to end discrimination against those infected with HIV around the world — and in his home nation.

South Korea has deported 521 foreigners diagnosed with HIV since 2008, and requires foreign residents to take HIV tests annually, as well as if they want to extend a work or residency permit, reported OhMyNews.

As of 2007, there were 13,000 people living with AIDS in South Korea — and the number keeps rising each year, despite the ban and deportations; OnMyNews reported that the actual number of infected people there may be much higher, but that the stigma of HIV infection deters Koreans themselves from getting tested.

Other nations that require testing include Belarus, Cuba, Malaysia, the Republic of Moldova, Mongolia, and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Although South Africa has no HIV-related restrictions on entry, stay or residency, the

government there has deported hundreds of thousands of undocumented Zimbabwean workers who may infected with HIV, according to a report by the activist group Human Rights Watch.

The deportations amount to a “death sentence,” the group said. AIDS is widespread in Africa, medical treatment is often lacking, and Zimbabwe in particular is fraught with political and economic instability.

In China, laws are still on the books that prohibit the entry of HIV-positive travelers into the country, even though the Ministry of Health said in 2007 that it would lift the ban, reports China Daily.

President Obama has formally ended the 22-year-old U.S. ban on HIV-positive tourists entering the United States, but the change will not take effect until January 4, 2010.

Other nations that refuse entry to HIV-positive travelers include Armenia, Brunei, Iraq, Libya, Moldova, Oman, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Sudan, as reported by CBC News.

The Moscow Times reported that Russia is keeping a close eye on developments in the United States as it considers whether to stop requiring foreign residents to be tested for HIV.

–Ronnie Lovler/Newsdesk.org

Sources:

“GLOBAL: AIDS activists laud lifting of US HIV travel ban”
IRIN/Plus News: November 4, 2009

“U.N. urges nations to lift HIV travel ban”
Agence France Presse, November 1, 2009

“Returned to Risk: Deportation of HIV-Positive Migrants”
Human Rights Watch, September 23, 2009

“Ban congratulates US leader for lifting entry restriction based on HIV status”
U.N. News Center, October 31, 2009

“Visa rules ‘in need of clarification’”
China Daily, October 15, 2009

“Infected, Detected, Accepted?”
OhMyNews, October 12, 2009

“RIGHTS-US: NGOs Praise End to HIV Travel Ban”
Inter Press News Service, October 30, 2009

“Pressure Grows as U.S. Moves To Overturn HIV Travel Ban”
The Moscow Times, November 2, 2009

“Obama lifts HIV travel ban”
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, October 30, 2009

“Deporting HIV-Positive Migrants Threatens Lives, Global Goals”
HIV Travel Dot Org, September 24, 2009

“U.S. to end HIV travel ban in January”
Voice of America (U.S. Congress-funded), November 3, 2009