OTTAWA (Reuters) –
Angry Canadian legislators accused the country’s spy chief on Monday of making a huge mistake by alleging some politicians were under the influence of foreign governments, with one parliamentarian demanding he name the “traitors to the nation”.

Richard Fadden, head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), prompted an uproar last month when he said in televised remarks that ministers in two of the 10 provinces were under “the general influence of a foreign government”.

Fadden also suggested China was one of the nations involved. The comments were widely seen as controversial as Canada encourages large-scale immigration and has a substantial ethnic and foreign-born population.

The House of Commons public security committee convened a special two-hour session to grill Fadden, who said that while he regretted his remarks had become public, he stood by them.

Legislators variously told Fadden he was incompetent and irresponsible, saying his words had triggered suspicions about countless politicians across Canada.

Read the whole hot breaking news

BRUSSELS – Chinese speakers will soon be able to tap out Internet addresses in their own language after the agency that runs Internet addresses says it will start accepting Chinese script for domain names.

Until recently, the suffix — the “.com” part of an address — had to use English characters, even though Chinese characters have sometimes been allowed for the rest of the Internet address.

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, agreed in a Friday meeting to start using Chinese characters for suffixes handed out by Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwan-based Internet registries. It started allowing Arabic earlier this year.

Read the whole hot breaking news

BRUSSELS – An online red-light district won a long battle Friday to set up a new .xxx Internet address after the global Internet oversight agency said it made mistakes in rejecting it three years ago.

The board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, says it will now start the process of registering “.xxx” by making checks on ICM Registry LLC, the company that wants to run it.

ICM’s founder Stuart Lawley says he thinks the new address could easily attract at least 500,000 sites, making it after “.mobi” the second biggest sponsored top-level domain name — or TLD, the name for Web address suffixes such as .com or .org.

Lawley expects to make $30 million a year in revenue by selling each .xxx site for $60 — and pledges to donate $10 from each sale to child protection initiatives via a nonprofit he has set up, the International Foundation for Online Responsibility, or IFFOR.

He already has 110,000 reservations, he says, and could get .xxx up and running within six to nine months after ICANN checks that ICM has the financial means and technical know-how to run it.

Read the whole hot breaking news

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon Thursday banned four reporters, including one from McClatchy Newspapers , from covering future military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba , charging that they’d violated ground rules by publishing the name of a former Army interrogator who was a witness at a hearing there this week.

The news organizations — McClatchy , the Toronto Star , the Toronto Globe and Mail and CanWest Newspapers of Canada — said they’d appeal the Pentagon’s decision and that their reporters hadn’t violated the ground rules.

Col. David Lapan , the director of Defense Press Operations, said the ban only affects only the individual reporters and that their organizations would be allowed to send others to future hearings. The banned reporters were Carol Rosenberg of McClatchy’s Miami Herald , Michelle Shephard of the Toronto Star , Paul Koring of Toronto’s Globe and Mail and Steven Edwards of CanWest Newspapers .

“We have been covering Guantanamo for years and we’ve always played by rules — and we did in this case as well,” said Mindy Marques , the managing editor of the Miami Herald . “We expect to sort this out and continue to cover this important story, as we have always done.”

At issue were news articles earlier this week that identified a witness at a hearing for Canadian detainee Omar Khadr as former Army Sgt. Joshua Claus . The Pentagon had asked reporters to identify him as Interrogator No. 1.

Read the whole hot breaking news