| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : MAY 3, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| TECHNOLOGY & YOU
Web Destinations The fight between NATO and Yugoslavia over Kosovo is the first big international military crisis since the World Wide Web became a mass phenomenon. A tour of some sites dedicated to the Kosovo war reveals both the strengths and weaknesses of the Web as a source of information on breaking news. NATO's bilingual English-French official site, www.nato.int, offers a broad range of information, including the maps and aerial photos used in daily briefings and videos of damage-assessment films. Of course, much of the world's attention has been focused on efforts to aid the hundreds of thousands of refugees driven from their homes. InterAction, a coalition of private relief organizations, offers a comprehensive list of organizations involved in Kosovo relief efforts on its Web site, www.interaction.org. The site also provides answers to frequently asked questions about the crisis and efforts to help refugees as well as guidelines for those who want to donate goods or volunteer their services. You can get detailed information on the refugee situation in the Kosovo region (and other world trouble spots) from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (www.usaforunhcr.org). The site includes a detailed map, updated daily, on the flow of refugees from Kosovo to neighboring countries and provinces. It has long been said that in war, truth is the first casualty, and the Web, with its shaky reputation for veracity, hardly offers an exception. You have to be especially careful to make sure that a site really is what you think it is. Sometimes, the confusion is innocent. For example, www.nato.org is actually a private site, registered in the Virgin Islands, dedicated to supporting relief efforts. A disclaimer on the page states that it is ''not affiliated with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.'' Don't expect to find such forthrightness at www.kosovo.com. You'll probably become suspicious when you read the second sentence on the home page: ''Kosovo is to Serbs what Jerusalem is to Jews.'' Kosovo.com, despite its official-sounding name, belongs to a Canadian company called Yunet and takes a distinctly pro-Serbian view of the conflict. The similarly named www.kosovo.org, run by the New Jersey-based Kosovo Society, is on the other side--and equally given to propaganda. In addition to claims of atrocities even more gruesome than those reported by NATO authorities, it describes Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia, as an independent republic occupied by Serbia. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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