Monday, November 5, 2007

Yahoo! makes apology


An apology has been issued by a Yahoo! executive on the company's failure to inform US authorities about China's request for information on an internet user.

The information resulted in the imprisonment of the Chinese journalist Shi Tao, who has been sentenced to a decade behind bars. Executive vice president of the company, Michael Callahan, admitted to a House Foreign Relations panel last year that Yahoo! gave information to the Chinese government. Later, after learning why the request was made and the nature of the information in question, Mr Callahan did not tell US lawmakers.

He said: "I neglected to directly alert the committee of this new information, and that oversight led to a misunderstanding that I deeply regret and have apologized to the committee for creating." Next week Mr Callahan and Jerry Yang, Yahoo!'s chief executive are to appear before the House committee to answer more questions over the affair.

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