World News

I guess it easy for politicians to bask in support from fellow politicians about anti sex measures only to find that sexual entertainment is actually very popular with the public. I would guess for instance that more adults buy porn than go to church.

From The Irish Independent

A new tax on pornography is threatening to cost Silvio Berlusconi's government support in the forthcoming 2006 general election.

The tax will be applied to all hardcore pornography including films, magazines and sex shop merchandise, has been decried by libertarians as an intrusion into people's private lives.

It was driven through parliament by the 'post-fascist' National Alliance party earlier this month in a bid to raise revenues and trim Italy's budget deficit.

The Italian porn industry is estimated to generate income worth €1.1bn a year, meaning the 25pc tax could reap as much as €275m. Daniela Santanche, the National Alliance politician who steered the bill through the Chamber of Deputies despite opposition from doubtful members of Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, said she "rejoiced" when the tax was included in the budget. But the tax is proving unpopular.

This government promised to simplify and reduce taxes , said the veteran porn star, Jessica Rizzo. Instead it has invented new ones.

The controversy could hardly come at a worse time for Berlusconi, as increasingly pundits predict the 2006 election will be extremely close and that centre-left challenger, Romano Prodi, could well emerge as victor.

Based on an article from the BBC

Images of Queen Elizabeth II, George W Bush and Jacques Chirac apparently having sex have been removed from billboards in Austria. The posters, shown as part of a public arts project ahead of Austria's EU presidency, had provoked political ripples of interest.

The artists said they were withdrawing their work so as not to detract from that of others involved in the project.  Condemning what they described as "public censorship", the artists said the posters had been misunderstood. No-one had bothered "to engage with the artistic message" of the billboards, they added.

The posters were part of a series of 150 different images being flashed to motorists via billboards across Vienna. Artists from across the EU had contributed varied works to the display.

The image by Spanish artist Carlos Aires, showing the naked threesome wearing rubber masks of the Queen and two presidents, caused the most controversy.  But denying his works were meant to offend, Aires told Austria's APA news agency: "Pornography is in the eye of the beholder. I suddenly had this image of three decision makers who are having an orgy while everything around them collapses.

Another image, of a woman lying naked on a bed except for a pair of knickers bearing the EU flag, was also condemned as pornographic.

Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel was not able to ban the posters but had appealed to the independent artists' group running the project to withdraw some of them.

Opposition leaders and some of Austria's media complained the images demeaned women and had embarrassed their country as it prepares to take over the rotating EU presidency on 1 January.

From Indian Television

A draft of the broadcasting code being proposed by the government, in consultation with the industry, attempts to emphasise self-regulation and self-censorship by broadcasters.

What's the basic rationale in the draft for content regulation? It is for an industry-wide "self-regulation mechanism, which is dynamic and progressive" and is based on standards, principles, norms and processes evolved and implemented by the content regulator through "active compliance" of the member licensee /advertisers.

However, the draft codes now being examined by various constituents of the industry also makes it clear that all types of programming, including films, cannot be shown during any part of the day as there is a need to protect children from unrestricted viewing. Especially if the access cannot be controlled like in a DTH service.

The licensee's responsibility for sensitive scheduling of programmes may reduce a risk of offence to the minimum, the draft code says. Further, it adds that at certain times, parents will want to be confident that their children can watch television unsupervised without the risk of being exposed to unsuitable material. At other times, they can accept more challenging material and can reasonably be expected to take greater control over their children's viewing,

The draft, which has been prepared by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Ficci) on the request of a 30-member government-sponsored panel set up to structure content-related regulation, categorically states: The TV programmes should take care of the broadcast between 4 pm and 7 pm adhering to the all the programming guidelines. "

However, some exceptions have been proposed in time bands. For example, programmes that belong to a mature/adult genre, could be allowed to be aired on television from 7 pm to 4 pm (presuming children viewership is not high during this time) with disclaimer after editing scenes containing sex and nudity.

Programmes that belong to the adult genre, the draft code proposes, could be allowed to be aired on television from 10 pm to 6 am, with a disclaimer. Such (adult) programmes would be edited to fit the genre of adult movies for India (like snipping explicit sex scenes and nudity, full frontal and back nudity, scenes showing genitalia of animal or human or overt sexual situations), the draft code suggests.

Interestingly, it says that where the TV viewing is subject to access control (like DTH) or are available only on demand, programming suited for adults could be "allowed through the day."

It has been suggested that ads relating to some products or services like betting tips, betting and gaming, all tobacco products, private investigation and escort agencies, occult and magical remedies/medicines are "unacceptable."

Pointing out that the time available to prepare the draft was short, Ficci has clarified that it has been built upon the Ofcom regulations (of the UK) in context of the Indian laws and prevalent ground realities, while borrowing some improvements from TELA regulations and Indian precedents in other sectors.

From DNA

The Bombay high court on Wednesday restrained cable operators and service providers from showing any film with an ‘A’ (adults only) certificate on television.

A division bench comprising Justice RM Lodha and Justice DG Karnik passed the interim order on a public interest petition by social activist Pratibha Naithani.

The order relies on a provision in the Cable Television Network (Regulation) Act, which prohibits operators from showing any material “unsuitable for unrestricted public viewing”.

As per the order, which takes immediate effect, cable operators will have to block any film on any channel certified as ‘A’ or for a particular class or profession by the Central Board of Film Certification. In effect, only films with a ‘U’ (unrestricted viewing) certificate can be beamed into people’s homes.

In November 2004 the court had restrained satellite television channels from beaming movies or programmes without obtaining appropriate certification from the censor board.

Naithani’s lawyer MM Vashi told the court that despite the directive channels continue to beam adult films. Iqbal Chagla, who appeared for a satellite channel, said channels have complied with the order and now get the necessary censor certificate and show it before screening the film.

But Vashi pointed out that this “skewed” interpretation of the order defeats its purpose: How can a film that has been certified as an adult film be shown on TV, which is watched by the entire family, including children?

Chagla argued that policing what people can view in the confines of their homes amounts to a violation of their fundamental rights. There cannot be any blanket restriction. Will we now only see programmes suitable for children? he said.

Seven satellite television companies - Sony, STAR, Zee, MTV, Sun, Surya, and Vijaya - are party to the petition. STAR TV counsel V Tulzapurkar said the Cable TV Act only applies to the operators and not private satellite channels.

The court also pulled up the police for failing to act on complaints registered by Naithani. It was told that the Centre has set up a 30-member committee to frame fresh rules for television content, and to revise and harmonise the censorship guidelines and the Cable TV Act, advertising codes, and programming rules.

From the BBC

The trial of acclaimed Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk casts a shadow over the country's entry talks to the EU, a senior EU official has warned. Olli Rehn, who oversees Turkey's moves to join the EU, described the trial as a litmus test as to whether Turkey was committed to freedom of expression.

The writer has been charged with denigrating Turkish national identity. He faces trial for remarks about Turkey's killing of Armenians during World War I and Kurds in the 1980s.

Ankara denies the deaths can be classed as a genocide and accuses Pamuk of "insulting Turkishness".

The charges relate to a magazine interview earlier this year in which Orhan Pamuk said: One million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares talk about it. He could face up to three years in jail if convicted.

Rehn said the trial of a novelist who expressed a non-violent opinion casts a shadow over negotiations for Turkey's entry into the EU. He added that it presents an opportunity to set a positive precedent for the numerous other cases of free speech that are awaiting trial. It is not Orhan Pamuk who will stand trial tomorrow, but Turkey, Rehn said.

The EU officially inaugurated talks on Turkey's entry into the bloc in October this year. Days later, Rehn visited Pamuk in Istanbul, bought several of his books and declared he was a fan of the writer, the Associated Press news agency reports.

Human rights groups have urged the EU to ensure Turkey's laws on freedom of speech match those in western Europe before it admits the country into the bloc.

Pamuk is a passionate advocate of admitting Turkey into the EU. His books, including My Name is Red and Snow , have been internationally acclaimed for dissecting Turkey's vibrant, often strained, ties to Europe and Asia.

Dozens of other far less famous writers and academics are also facing charges under the revised penal code.

From The Telegraph

The trial of Turkey's best-known novelist Orhan Pamuk for insulting Turkey was suspended yesterday in a tense first hearing marred by violence inside and outside the Istanbul courtroom.

The ruling judge said the court prosecuting the award-winning novelist required approval from the ministry of justice in order to proceed.

Dennis MacShane, the Labour MP and former Europe minister said: The accusation of insulting the state is something you associate with dictatorial regimes, not with a modern European state.

Many European Union observers who came to show support for Pamuk said they had expected the presiding judge to dismiss the case against Turkey's best known writer and thereby end the damage it has caused to worldwide to Turkey as it seeks membership of the European Union. Instead, judge Metin Aydin agreed to prosecution demands that the trial be suspended until the ministry of justice delivered its opinion on the case that has been mired in legal ambiguities.

Confusion over how to proceed with the trial stems from the fact that Pamuk allegedly committed his "crime" before the introduction of a new penal code in June. The next hearing was set for Feb 7 and the hawkish justice minister Cemil Cicek praised the court for its decision. This is exactly what should have happened ," he said, blaming the Turkish media for "exaggerating" Pamuk's plight. The author faces up to three years in prison for "insulting the Turkish identity" in remarks made to a Swiss magazine in February.

Pamuk said: 30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in Turkey and no one dares talk about it. His comments referred to the Turkish army's brutal suppression of a Kurdish separatist rebellion over past decades and to the mass slaughter of Armenians by Ottoman forces between 1915 and 1917. The issues are among the most sensitive in modern Turkey and Pamuk's words triggered fury among millions of Turks.

The anger was in evidence yesterday. As Pamuk left the courthouse, dozens of ultra-nationalists shouted: "Traitor," "Turkey is ashamed of you!" "Shame on you!" and pelted his car with eggs. Pamuk was escorted by police in riot gear who used shields to push the crowd back. Some protesters kicked and lunged at his car.

Inside the courtroom witnesses said one woman swatted Pamuk with a folder. McShane was punched in the face and kicked in the legs by ultra-nationalists who shouted insults at other western observers. Pamuk, the best-selling author of My Name is Red and Snow and often mentioned as a Nobel Prize candidate, is charged under Article 301 of the revised Turkish penal code, which has been widely criticised abroad.

EU officials have warned that until the government thoroughly overhauls its criminal justice system, which was based on Italian fascism in the 1930s, overzealous prosecutors will continue to frustrate Turkey's efforts to become the EU's first predominantly Muslim member and accession talks launched on Oct 3 may even be frozen.

They've had two years of impressive reforms but now they are in clear regression, an EU diplomat said.

Based on an article from the Evening Echo

Turkey’s Justice Minister Cemil Cicek criticised EU officials today for pressuring Turkey to stop a freedom-of-expression persecution against renowned author Orhan Pamuk, but hinted that a court could drop the case.

The trial of Pamuk has emerged as a key test of Turkey’s relations with the European Union, which demands that the country do more to protect freedom of expression.

European monitors at the trial repeatedly stressed that Turkey must stop the trial if it is to push forward with its bid to become the bloc’s first Muslim member. The government, however, is also facing pressure from nationalists angered by Pamuk’s comments.

Cicek pointed out that the European Union had earlier pressed Turkish governments not to interfere with the judiciary. Foreign guests must show respect to Turkey’s values and institutions, Cicek said. [I for one show all due respect...ie none. Respect has to be earned]

A court on Friday halted the trial of Pamuk, Turkey’s best-known author, saying it needed approval from the Justice Ministry before the case could move forward. Cicek said the file from the court regarding the case reached his ministry this morning.

Pamuk, the country’s most prominent author, faces charges for insulting the Turkish Republic and “Turkishness” after telling a Swiss newspaper in February that 30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it .

For Pamuk to go into taboo areas of Turkish history was … a risk, Denis MacShane, Britain’s former minister for Europe and a member of the British parliament, wrote in an essay published in The Observer. But writers are there to take on the creeping tide of censorship that has been fuelled by religious fundamentalists and ultra-nationalists, wrote MacShane, who attended the trial as an observer.

This is not the Turkey which civilised Turks long for, wrote Semih Idiz, a columnist for the Milliyet newspaper. Our only relief is that the bullets fired in the past by those trying to silence others with despotism have been replaced with eggs.

Are they hoping that an acquittal will somehow justify the repression. The shame is in the law itself, not the way it is applied when an intense international spotlight is brought to bear.

Based on an article from The Guardian

Turkey's foreign minister acknowledged yesterday that charges brought against Orhan Pamuk, the country's best-known novelist, have tarnished Turkey's image, and said laws that limit freedom of expression may be changed.

...BUT... the government would rather wait to see the outcome of charges brought against Pamuk and dozens of other people before moving to amend them, Abdullah Gul said in an interview: Laws are not untouchable. If necessary we can change these laws. However, first we will see how these laws are interpreted.

European officials have criticised Turkey for putting Pamuk on trial and have called on the country to do more to protect freedom of expression.

Pamuk was charged under a law that makes insulting Turkey a crime, after he told a Swiss newspaper in February that 30,000 Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it.

Turkey, which started EU membership negotiations in October in a process that may take more than 10 years, has been under pressure from Brussels to grant greater cultural rights to Kurds.

Its broadcasting watchdog also announced yesterday that local television stations would be able to broadcast in Kurdish and other ethnic languages from the end of January. Turkish law was changed in 2002 to allow limited broadcasts in minority languages, but local stations wanting to broadcast in Kurdish had, until now, met bureaucratic hurdles.

Until 1991 it was illegal to speak Kurdish in Turkey.

From Yahoo News

The authorities in Kazakhstan, angered by a comedian's satirical portrayal of a boorish, sexist and racist Kazakh television reporter, have pulled the plug on his alter ego's Web site.

Sacha Baron Cohen plays Borat in his Da Ali G Show and last month he used the character's Web site www.borat.kz to respond sarcastically to legal threats from the Central Asian state's Foreign Ministry.

A government-appointed organisation regulating Web sites that end in the .kz domain name for Kazakhstan confirmed on Tuesday it had suspended Cohen's site. We've done this so he can't badmouth Kazakhstan under the .kz domain name , Nurlan Isin, President of the Association of Kazakh IT Companies, told Reuters. He can go and do whatever he wants at other domains.

Isin said the borat.kz Web site had broken new rules on all .kz sites maintaining two computer servers in Kazakhstan and had registered false names for its administrators.

Cohen, as Borat, hosted the MTV Europe Music Awards in Lisbon last month and described shooting dogs for fun and said his wife could not leave Kazakhstan as she was a woman.

Afterwards, Kazakhstan's Foreign Ministry said it could not rule out that he was under "political orders" to denigrate Kazakhstan's name and threatened to sue him.

Cohen, who is Jewish, responded to the legal threats on the www.borat.kz site in character, saying: I have no connection to Mr Cohen and fully support my government's position to sue this Jew.

In typical vein, he went on: Please, captain of industry, I invite you to come to Kazakhstan, where we have incredible natural resources, hard working labour and some of the cleanest prostitutes in all of Central Asia.

From Reporters without Borders

Reporters Without Borders condemned censorship by the Kazakh government, which has removed the right to use the .kz suffix from two websites it finds troublesome, including that of British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, or "Borat".

The worldwide press freedom organisation said it was concerned by the politicisation of the administration of domain names and has written to Franck Fowlie, ombudsman for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN,) that registers domain names, asking him to intervene.

Borat.kz carries sketches by Sacha Baron Cohen, who portrays a sexist and racist Kazakh journalist on the US cable channel HBO. The Kazakh web business body that manages the .kz  said the site had been shut because borat.kz was hosted outside Kazakhstan and false administrators‚ names had been given when it was registered.

The government decided last month to deny .kz to sites hosted abroad, an unjustified step that tightens political control over Kazakh online publications.

The role of bodies that manage the country code top-level domain names (ccTLDs) is above all technical. They are not qualified to censor the contents of sites , Reporters Without Borders said in its letter to Frank Fowlie. We find however that the Kazakh government sees to it that websites that mock or criticise it are rejected.

In this way, it infringes the principles set out by ICANN, which requires that the management of the ccTLDs should be fair and non discriminatory‚. We think that an intervention by your organisation would show that it was capable of defending free expression on the Internet, a key issue when you consider the stormy debates on the governance of the Internet that marked the recent World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) , the letter to the ombudsman said.

The opposition website Navi.kz was forced to give up its .kz at the end of October after a legal procedure that was stage-managed by the authorities.

In November, Reporters Without Borders put Kazakhstan on a list of "countries to watch" because of repeated violations of free expression on the Internet. See :

From Aftenposten

When it is elected in late January, Canada's next government will have to watch its step in cyberspace, there's a new watchdog on the block.

Online Rights Canada, dedicated to protecting citizens from invasions of privacy, excessive surveillance and such, was launched Friday with support from the Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa and the U.S.-based Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The group was founded partly in reaction to a bill, which died on the order paper when Parliament was resolved but is likely to be revived in the future. It would have allowed law enforcement agencies to obtain personal information without a warrant and forced communications providers to build surveillance back doors into the hardware that routes phone calls and Internet traffic.

The petition asks Canadian lawmakers to protect citizens' privacy rights when the new government convenes after the late-January election. Other important issues for ORC will include revisions to Canadian copyright law, access to information and freedom from censorship, the group says.

Online Rights Canada is designed to provide a home on the Internet for grassroots activism on digital issues, the new organization said. Canadians are realizing in ever-greater numbers that the on-line world offers tremendous opportunities for learning, communicating and innovating, but that those opportunities are at risk as a result of corporate practices, government policies and legal regimes that hinder on-line privacy and free speech, CIPPIC executive director Philippa Lawson said in a statement.

All of last year's legislation is back on the drawing board, EFF policy co-ordinator Ren Buchholz added. Canadians now have another chance to present a public-interest perspective on issues like copyright reform and increased government surveillance.

David Fewer, CIPPIC's staff counsel, says he expects ORC will evolve into a major resource for Canadians looking for opportunities to protect their on-line rights.

From Aftenposten

Porn laws relaxed - for now

Norway's Supreme Court cleared editor Stein-Erik Mattsson on pornography charges, ending Mattson's three-year long battle to modernize Norway's censorship practices. Importers are now gearing up to sell to Norway, but authorities may still try and keep it out.

Stein-Erik Mattson with his issue of 'Free' Aktuell Rapport, which dropped its price tag and censorship bars and started the legal process that ended Wednesday.

Mattsson flouted Norway's insistence on putting black censorship bars over images of 'genitalia in action that may offend' by printing up an uncensored but far from sensational magazine called Frie Aktuell Rapport. He not only gave it away, he sent a copy to every Member of Parliament and waited for trouble.

The long legal process that resulted nearly broke Mattsson. After first being acquitted, prosecutors appealed the verdict but the appeals court unanimously rejected the appeal. The Oslo district attorney then took the case to the Supreme Court, but having lost his job in the interim, Mattsson offered to pay his fine in order to put an end to the matter.

But he had no choice once the case was on the Supreme Court agenda. Instead, he made a convincing argument, showing judges a lengthy montage of film sequences passed by Norway's board of film censors on artistic grounds that was far more disturbing than run-of-the-mill sex without bits covered.

The Supreme Court couldn't stand watching it all, and agreed that standards had changed since the law's inception. After a collective assessment I have concluded that the threshold for what today is deemed to be offensive - and therefore punishable - cannot be said to have been transgressed, is how first-voting Supreme Court judge Ole Bjørn Støle ruled, and the decision was unanimous.

Mattson said the ruling finally upheld his view that he had done nothing wrong by showing 'regular sex', uncovered, and he sent his thanks to Socialist Left Party politician and porn hater Lena Jensen, for bringing the original complaint against him.

Norway's porn industry is ready to gear up for uncensored material, but doubts remain. We are waiting to push the button, first we just have to make sure exactly what is legal, said Finn Engnes, manager of Erotic Wholesales, who has so far specialized in importing sex toys, oils and lingerie. Engnes said he expects a green light and is already lining up producers from Europe and the USA.

Leif Aage Hagen, Norway's major player in the sex and porn industry in Norway, said he had been planning for this day for 30 years. A Norwegian version of the American "Hustler" will be launched as soon as possible, maybe already before New Year.

Film channel Canal + said they had no immediate plans to drop the black bars that obscure the action on their late night erotic films. We interpret the ruling to apply to the printed medium and not film. We conduct ourselves according to Norwegian law and so will not be changing our programming offering because of this ruling, said Canal + managing director Bjørn Stangjordet.

Meanwhile, politicians are ready to respond by introducing new and more specific legislation to keep porn at bay. Parliamentary members of the governing coalition signaled that they would push for a new examination of censorship legislation, and they can expect the enthusiastic support of the Christian Democrats.

From The Guardian

Italian porn stars were up in arms yesterday over plans by Silvio Berlusconi's government to introduce a tax on their work. The proceeds from the proposed new "porn tax" would go towards paying for working mothers to afford baby-sitters.

The measure - the brainchild of the formerly neo-fascist National Alliance - is due to be voted on in parliament next week. It is contained in the latest draft of Italy's 2006 budget, which emerged from committee late on Wednesday.

The porn tax would take the form of a 20% levy on the selling price or rental cost of pornographic videos and DVDs. A similar surcharge would be placed on payments for pornographic material delivered by television stations or over the internet.

Rocco Siffredi, Italy's most celebrated movie stud, said the government had "picked a fight with sex". He and other pornographic actors have threatened street demonstrations against the tax.

The Italian treasury estimates a porn tax could raise around €60m (£40m) next year. Daniela Santanche, the National Alliance MP charged with shepherding the budget through its committee stages, said that would allow the government to offer tax breaks for the cost of hiring baby-sitters. Parents would be allowed to reduce their taxable income by up to €2,150.

The baby-sitting bonus is one of several measures in the draft budget aimed at encouraging Italians to have more children. Italy has one of the world's lowest birth rates, and it is contributing to a growing imbalance between the working and non-working population that threatens its welfare system.

The porn tax won the backing of the cabinet on Wednesday.
 

Yet more customers for the mail order companies now based in the Netherlands. No doubt they will spend the new few days booking out company names with Italy in the name just like they have done with all the British sounding DVD suppliers.

From the BBC

Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti has pushed through parliament a new 25% tax on all hardcore pornography.

Previous attempts to raise new revenue by taxing pornography have failed.

Objections from the porn industry that they are already paying VAT and it is illegal to tax them twice have now been overruled by the minister.

Rome is desperate to find new revenue because it has to trim its budget deficit to meet EU rules. Moreover, the government cannot raise general taxation only months before a general election.

The new tax is similar to one imposed in France and will apply to all hardcore pornography, including films, magazines and merchandise sold in sex shops.

Tremonti says that, just like his French colleague, he is imposing what he calls an "ethical" tax.

The porn industry in Italy is estimated to be worth more than one billion euros a year.

The same applies to Thailand, I always prefer the pirate version over the official version. Apart from pirates of recent releases (which are filmed using a video camera), the real copies are simply superior to the local version. They strip off any regional encoding bollox; they do not suffer from the ludicrous local censorship which even pixellates fags, drinks & guns; and they have far more choice of original language, dubbing & subtitles.

From The Star

Heavy censorship to blame for brisk sales of pirated CDs. Movie lovers are inclined to buy pirated discs because strict censorship had made going to the movies less fun, the Dewan was told.

Deputy Home Minister Datuk Tan Chai Ho said many viewers had complained about heavy censorship by the Film Censorship Board: Some of the scenes do not even bridge with one another because of the censorship. He said it was important to organise more campaigns to urge the public not to buy pirated products, and added that this required the efforts of several ministries.

Datuk Mohamed Aziz (BN – Sri Gading) asked how the board categorised scenes which were “pornographic or sexually stimulating.” Is kissing pornographic or sexually stimulating? For an 18-year-old, watching a woman unzipping her clothes could be exciting; but us, we are more ‘steady’ when we view scenes like that.

Tan replied that movies were censored based on the storyline or theme, characters, dialogues and messages: We will ensure that movies are presented in a healthy and positive way based on the guidelines set by the Government.

From Ansa

A porn tax, an idea often discussed but never yet implemented, is being looked at seriously again as the Italian government's budget package is debated in parliament .

Daniela Santanché, the rightwing MP promoting the idea, said on Friday that she was studying two possibilities: higher taxes for producers of porno material or increased sales taxes on films, magazines and other products .

She said the new tax could be inserted into the 2006 budget, which parliament must approve this month, through an amendment if all the members of the ruling centre-right coalition agreed. Santanché gave no details of how much the proposed tax might rake in for state coffers .

Two years ago her National Alliance party proposed a porn tax as a way of providing 100 million euros in funding for scientific and technological research. It said the extra tax was justified because it targeted a "questionable" industry. In the end the proposal failed to garner sufficient support .

The Northern League party, one of National Alliance's coalition allies, put forward a similar proposal a year earlier but that too was voted down. According to a report released by the Eurispes research institute earlier this year, Italy's pornography industry now has an annual turnover of 1.1 billion euros .

That figure is said to be rising at a rate of about 10% a year, making the industry one of Italy's most resilient, even though experts note it is still far smaller than the German or Spanish ones.

From The Register

The proposed .xxx porn domain has been kicked into the long grass just days before it was due to meet final approval.

ICANN chairman Vint Cerf stunned an open meeting of the governmental advistory committee (GAC) in Vancouver late on Tuesday when he announced that the whole issue had been pulled from the Board meeting agenda - where it had been the first topic of discussion.

The reason given (this time) was that the GAC needed time to review a 350-page ICANN report on the domain's feasibility before it could provide its approval (or disapproval).

That's a red herring though. The report was completed on 31 August, and is mostly complimentary about the proposed domain. Not only that but all the issues surrounding the domain are already well known to everyone involved, and up until Cerf's sudden announcement, had been effectively given the green light.

ICANN has come under pressure to release the report and so provide adequate excuse for delaying .xxx's approval yet again. The people behind .xxx, ICM Registry, opposed its release, complaining that no other new domains had had their ICANN report released before they had been granted final approval and that they were being unfairly treated.

However, if rumours are to be believed, ICANN took a top-level decision to release the report and so provide a delay excuse, after EU commissioner Viviane Reding called the head of ICANN Paul Twomey direct and threatened to withdraw all the EU's representatives unless the issue was pulled. Twomey this morning denied he had had any communication with Reding over the issue.

If would certainly be an unusual decision on Reding's part, especially since the EU has been mostly supportive of .xxx. It is only Brazil and the US administration that remain opposed to the domain.

More likely is that the US government intervened but is desperate to avoid being seen to do so because of the ongoing Internet governance conflict, where the US government retains unilateral control of the Internet but claims never to apply it.

The Bush administration has been very effectively lobbied by the Christian right, and the US is desperate to make it look as though other governments are equally concerned about .xxx. The conspriacy theory is that by delaying .xxx, the EU puts a spotlight on the US' attempts to sway the course of the Internet.

Whether that's true or not, it still leaves one furious owner of ICM Registry, Stuart Lawley, who has sunk millions into the project and been consistently stymied at the last minute by unusual delays

From Aftenposten

A long-running battle to modernize Norway's censorship laws reaches its climax next week when porn  magazine editor Stein-Erik Mattsson presents evidence and arguments to the Supreme Court.

Mattsson, who published an issue of Frie Aktuell Rapport in the summer of 2002 with a lack of the black bars that Norwegian law demands be placed over depictions of active genitalia, has been trying to force a reexamination of the country's censorship laws.

Mattsson printed 13,000 copies of the magazine, which included depictions of hetero and homosexual acts, as well as an older Finnish couple in action. Besides handing the magazine out, he sent a copy to every member of parliament to provoke a reaction.

Eventually hit with a complaint and a fine, Mattsson refused to pay and has argued that Norway's sex censorship laws are outdated. He was acquitted in an Oslo court and also in an appeals trial, but authorities now want a decision from the Supreme Court.

On Tuesday Mattsson will present a 45-minute long film to the Supreme Court, but not a porn film per se, newspaper Dagsavisen reports. Mattsson's film will be a collage of sex scenes clipped out of films that have been approved by the National Board of Film Censors. All of these films show as many erect penises and sex organs in movement as the magazine I have been charged for, Mattsson told Dagsavisen.

The long legal battle has taken its toll on the editor, and he has lost his job. Mattsson recently tried to end the process by paying the fine, but found the case had already been scheduled for review by the Supreme Court. Now he is ready to fight on again: I hope the process ends here, but I am prepared to take this all the way to the human rights tribunal in Strasbourg. This is about freedom of speech.

Limey, half the world will be jailed if angry comments are criminalised like in Singapore

From the Bangkok Post

A Singapore blogger who described Malays and their Islamic faith as "the second Holocaust" is not going to jail but has been ordered to perform community service while on probation for two years, news reports said Thursday.

Unlike two previous bloggers who were jailed under the city- state's sedition law for their web diary comments, Singapore District Judge Bala Reddy's ruling was aimed at correcting Gan Huai Shi's "misguided dislike for the Malay community".

Gan, a 17-year-old student, caused a furore between April and July, when he posted his Internet remarks in the predominantly Chinese city-state, which includes 14 per cent Malays.

The judge suggested that Gan's probation officer should be a Malay who can "act as a positive role model" for the youth, whose hatred stemmed from the death of his baby brother 10 years ago. Then 7, Gan was with his mother trying to get a taxi to rush the 1-month-old infant to a hospital. They were unable to persuade a Malay couple to give up the cab. It took another 20 minutes before they flagged down a taxi, and the baby was pronounced dead on arrival.

In his ruling on Wednesday, the judge said that Gan's 180 hours of community service would take place at Malay welfare organizations. He also ordered Gan to undergo counselling and psychiatric evaluation to help him come to terms with the death of his brother.

From the Bangkok Post

Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is preparing to declare another "war" against pornography, which some nutters claim is a major cause of rising sexual abuse of youngsters.

The initiative is expected to be declared on Children's Day in early January.

Police and provincial governors nationwide will start cracking down on pornographic materials, VCDs, and the Internet next month, said government spokesman Surapong Suebwongle.

Meanwhile, he said, the government would give financial support to "creative media" with contents promoting morality and good conduct, produced by universities and non-governmental organisations.

Thaksin vowed to block all access to website pornography by year-end, although details on how the government will do so remain fuzzy.

Watana Muangsook, Thai Minister of Social Development and Human Services, told reporters that the prime minister had instructed him to find the means to block access to Internet porn by the end of December.

The minister will hold a meeting on November 30 with various Internet related authorities such as the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Ministry to discuss means of carrying out the prime minister's instructions.

Watana estimated that there are currently 800,000 foreign websites available in Thailand, of which one third carry pornographic images.

From Digital Spy

A Canadian government minister has called for 50 Cent to be banned from his country. The rapper is due to play seven venues in Canada, starting with Vancouver on December 3.

Dan McTeague, a shameful junior foreign minister, said he glorifies gun crime. This is not a question of censorship, he explained. BUT... This is a question of trying to protect impressionable young men.

50 Cent was involved in a gang shooting in 2000. The release of his semi-biographical movie Get Rich or Die Tryin' has been surrounded by controversy, with protests against its posters and a man shot outside a showing.

McTeague said: Under our laws he would be deemed criminally admissible.

From The Times

The European Commission has toned down plans to regulate the internet, but still wants websites showing television online to be subject to new regulations.

Viviane Reding, the Information Commissioner, has prepared a draft directive including the proposals, which is being circulated among the 25-member Commission for comments. A spokesman for Reding said that she intended to introduce a “liberal” set of proposals, although Ofcom, the British communications regulator, and some internet groups will be concerned that Brussels aims to regulate at all.

An Ofcom spokesman said last night that it would study the proposals once they became public, but he added: We have expressed concern about the regulation of internet content in the past. We believe that there are alternative and potentially more effective measures of regulating content on the internet short of direct regulation, such as self-regulation and user-empowerment.

Reding’s draft directive includes a distinction between “push content” and “pull content”. Push content is conventional broadcasting, which is “pushed out” to consumers over any medium, including the internet — and this will remain subject to heavy regulation.

However, it also brings into the net “pull content” — television clips on websites that are selected by consumers. It is proposed that this type of material be subject to three basic rules. Reding’s spokesman said: We believe that there should be a ban on the incitement to racial hatred and rules to protect minors, to be detailed by member states. If there is any advertising, that should be clearly identified as such.

However, the text portion of websites will remain exempt from regulation, meaning that newspapers and radio websites will not come under Europe’s jurisdiction, unless they use video clips to illustrate a story.

The new directive, which will have the force of law across the European Union when introduced, revises the 1989 Television without Frontiers legislation. That created a common framework for regulation, but it has become outdated amid rapid changes in technology.

From Payvand

The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders has created a list of countries it considers "enemies of the Internet." Heading that list are China and Iran. Regimes in Belarus, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan also are singled out as repressive governments who are trying to control the Internet in order to silence the political opposition.

Julien Pain heads the group's section on Internet freedom. He says the biggest threats to human rights in cyberspace are repressive governments: The most repressive regimes in terms of press freedom start trying to control the Internet, as well. It's the case in China. It's the case in Iran. Every dictator around the world is now trying to spy the web, track down dissidents on the Internet, and filter the web [to prevent the spread of uncensored information].

Reporters Without Borders presented a list of countries that are "enemies of the Internet" at the Tunis summit: The Chinese are, by far, the most repressive government in terms of Internet freedom [and] the most efficient at censoring the Internet. They have acquired technology from American companies which enable the Chinese authorities to censor very efficiently the Internet and to block access to every political voice which disagrees with the government's official position.

Pain says Iran and Belarus are on the "enemies" list because the governments there apply Internet censorship strategies similar to those used in China. In contrast are Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, whose approaches to the Internet Pain compares to those in Cuba or North Korea: Basically, there are two solutions to controlling the Internet. The first one is the Chinese one. You buy lots of equipment to control the Internet, but at the same time you try to develop this new media because it is important economically. And the other solution is the Cuban or North Korean solution. You don't even let people access the Internet.

Pain notes that in Iran, authorities for the past two years have been arresting people who post critical remarks about the government on Internet sites known as weblogs, or blogs: Iran is already censoring thousands and thousands of websites. And now it is trying also to control weblogs and bloggers because many political weblogs have appeared in recent years. What the Iranian government is trying to do now is prevent them from talking politics and prevent them from criticizing the government. That's why many, many bloggers went to jail in the past two years just because of a few posts on their weblog.

In Belarus, investigations into Internet usage is easier than in other countries because the servers that provide Internet access are controlled by state firms that willingly provide private information to police. Last summer, Belarusian authorities launched investigations into the Internet activities of a youth organization called The
Third Road after it posted political cartoons on its website ridiculing President Alyaksandr Lukashenka.

Third Road member Pavol Marozau notes that Belarusian law also forces anybody who wants to use the Internet at a computer cafe to register using their passport and home address. Belarusian computer cafes also have security programs that record all information about a visitor's Internet activity.

Pain describes Turkmenistan's government as a repressive regime that has prevented the Internet from developing. The Internet is accessible only to a minority of people in Turkmenistan. It is very similar to what is happening in Cuba where only government officials and a few businessmen can access the Internet freely. In Turkmenistan, if you don't work for a foreign company or if you are not a government official, you won't be able to access the Internet.

Uzbek President Islam Karimov has spoken positively about developing the Internet in his country. He says it would be impossible for his government to censor the Internet: I disagree with the opinion that information coming via Internet has a negative impact on the situation [in Uzbekistan]. Why? Because the Internet is like a huge supermarket where you go and buy what you need. Shutting the Internet down is a silly idea. It's absolutely impossible. Who tries to do so is a fool because an attempt brings no results.

But Pain says Karimov is only paying lip service to the concept of freedom of information on the Internet: For Uzbekistan, we know that President Karimov is making statements about how he wants to develop the Internet. But at the same time, he is also well aware of the power it has and the threat it could be to his own power. So he's been trying to control the Internet at the same time. The security services in Uzbekistan are very involved in controlling the Internet and putting pressure upon the ISPs -- the Internet service providers -- so that they block opposition websites.
.
Pain, director of the Internet Freedom section of Reporters Without Borders, spoke as well about the situation for Internet users in Kazakhstan: In Kazakhstan, many scandals were revealed on the Internet. That's why it is a very important [form of] media in Kazakhstan because President [Nursultan] Nazarbaev really realized that if he wanted to prevent scandals about corruption [from being] revealed he had to control the Internet. We've had many, many stories recently about websites which were harassed by the authorities [in Kazakhstan]. The authorities first just tried to sue the websites.

Pain also spoke about the situation for Internet users in Afghanistan: You can access the Internet quite freely now in Afghanistan. So there is no problem. The Internet in Afghanistan is not censored. People are using it more and more. And there are even people who have started blogging in Afghanistan. So it is very interesting information. In Afghanistan, a few bloggers are doing a good job trying to dig out and bring different kinds of information [to the attention of people]. It shows that the Internet in Afghanistan is developing well, even if, of course, it is a poor country.

  Italy added to the list of enemies of the Internet

Thanks to Alan

At least one major democracy, Group of Seven member to boot, has controls similar to Belarus on use of internet cafes. Italy requires a passport or identity card from users of internet cafes. ("Terrorism" is the excuse.)

Also their TV set up excludes dissenting voices particularly as the prime minister not only controls RAI, the equivalent of the BBC, but is also a media tycoon with a range of private channels. An example of conveniently silenced voices is Sabina Guzzanti ,a satirist booted off the TV and Viva Zapatero , a documentary film she  made.

From the Globe and Mail

A Vancouver gay bookstore has been given the go-ahead to argue in front of the Supreme Court of Canada that the government should fund its legal dispute with Canada Customs.

Yesterday, the top court granted Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium leave to appeal a lower-court decision that cut its funding lifeline for the legal fight. Jim Deva, a co-owner of Little Sisters, said fighting Canada Customs in court could cost the store $500,000 to $1-million, which he characterized as an impossibly high figure for a bookstore, or almost anyone else, to come up with.

The bookstore has been fighting Canada Customs because the federal agency blocked the importation of several books and magazines at the U.S. border, claiming they were obscene. The seized material included two series of Meatmen comic books and two books that depicted bondage and sadomasochism.

In July, 2004, a B.C. judge ordered the federal government to pay the bookstore's court costs, because it was an important constitutional case that touched the interests of all book importers, big and small. That ruling was seen as the first non-aboriginal application of a Supreme Court decision that said the government had to finance a B.C. native band's forestry dispute, because the band did not have enough money and there were key constitutional issues to be dealt with.

In February, however, the B.C. Court of Appeal reversed the lower-court ruling and killed the funding, saying that Little Sisters had assumed the role of "watchdog" over Canada Customs, but that the public had not appointed the bookstore to this role.

Now, the Supreme Court of Canada will hear an appeal of that ruling, and will likely provide some guidance on what kind of cases are important enough to get "advance funding," when the litigants can't afford to carry the costs.

Joseph Arvay, a lawyer for Little Sisters, said that if the bookstore had not been granted the chance to take its case to the top court, it would have had to give up the fight. There was no one who was willing to take up the challenge, and Canada Customs would continue to ban books at the border without any review by the courts.

Arvay said the case is important beyond the interests of his client or the bookstore. It has much broader implications for all citizens who believe that their Charter rights and freedoms are being infringed, and yet could not possibly afford the cost of litigation.

The decision creates a rematch for Little Sisters and Canada Customs at the top court. In 2000, the court criticized the agency for using arbitrary and inconsistent policies when seizing material the store was trying to import. The court did not strike down Canada Customs' powers to censor material, but said it needed to fix its procedures.

But changes implemented by the agency were done without consulting anyone in the book business or people with expertise in gay and lesbian sexuality, worsening the situation, Deva said. The agency adopted specific rules about what was not allowed into Canada, he said, but he questioned the logic behind the guidelines. Suddenly, out of the blue, the licking of boots was not acceptable, he said, as an example. If they had known more about that fantasy, and about that sexual act, perhaps they wouldn't have thought of it as dehumanizing and degrading.

If only...

"Adolf, your New Socialist chums are here to see you"....
"Sorry mum, I'm too busy playing CounterStrike"

Based on an article from The Guardian

The country's incoming government is seeking a complete ban on violent games. That's right, not just legislation that would prevent games from being bought by minors, but an outright ban on virtual killing altogether. Whether or not this ban actually will happen remains to be seen.

While the video game industry in the US. is currently dealing with legislation seeking to ban the sale of Mature video games to minors, and time limits are being imposed on  players by the Chinese government, things could be worse.

According to the Deutsche Welle, it appears that in Germany, as plans for the country's next four years are prepared, the powers that be would like an outright ban on all violent video games that simulate brutal killings. Apparently the government has a "vision of harmony" in which it sees Germany's youth growing up in a society completely free of violence.

The government is looking into ways of reducing child abuse and neglect and it wants to abolish violent games, such as the internationally popular CounterStrike . The first-person shooter has been a prime target for Germany ever since a student in the German town of Erfurt went on a rampage shooting 16 people before turning his weapon on himself—not unlike the events at Columbine and elsewhere in the U.S. that led people to blame games such as Doom or GTA for the tragedies.

Andreas Scheuer, a member of parliament for the conservative Christian Social Union, is in charge of youth protection. Scheuer said that violent video games have no place in Germany's bedrooms, according to Der Spiegel magazine. Scheuer added that although he recognizes that parents need to take responsibility for their children as well, he believes that some of the less media savvy parents need the government's assistance, and therefore a full ban should be implemented.

We're not entirely sure how the law works in Germany, but we're fairly certain that this sort of proposal would be quickly thrown out here in the states as a violation of the First Amendment.

Naturally the video game industry in Germany is vehemently opposed to any ban of its games. Olaf Wolters, manager of the German interactive entertainment software association, explained to Der Spiegel that the coalition's pact had some unfortunate vocabulary and that the game industry would like to work with Germany's incoming government to address its concerns: As far as we are concerned, there are no such things as killer games, but adult games.

It's one thing to prevent games with sex and violence from getting into the hands of children, but it's entirely another to propose an outright ban on said media. Imagine if the US. congress told Hollywood that they no longer could make R-rated movies or if the music industry had to make its recording artists remove any "explicit lyrics" from its CDs. This kind of censorship would likely produce mass protests and riots in our streets.

Based on an article from The Guardian

The European Union has made a formal complaint to the Tunisian government on the eve of a world internet summit in Tunis over heavy-handed police tactics.

The British ambassador to the UN, Nicholas Thorne, complained to the Tunisian foreign ministry yesterday afternoon of behaviour that was "not in the spirit of the summit" and warned that the eyes of the world were on them.

The complaint comes after a number of international organisations highlighted Tunisia's poor human rights record and questioned whether the country is a suitable location for a summit on the future of the internet. The summit has been designed to address crucial questions relating to global access to internet technology and information.

The argument itself surrounds a violent scuffle at the German cultural centre in Tunis on Monday morning, which involved the German ambassador to the UN and representatives of more than 30 local and international human rights bodies.

About 70 plainclothes police thugs physically prevented representatives from a number of non-governmental organisations from entering the Goethe Institut. They were meeting to review plans for an alternative "citizen summit" in the capital after their booking at a conference venue was cancelled at the last minute.

The police did not provide an official reason for their actions, according to the representative for the World Association for Community Radio Broadcasters and chairman of the Tunisian monitoring group, Steve Buckley, a Briton. We were physically pushed away from the institute. I saw one person frogmarched down the street and one colleague pushed over.

In an effort to quell the situation, German ambassador Michael Steiner, in town for the world summit, arranged to meet a group of just three representatives but, as they approached the building, they were again prevented by police from entering. When the meeting moved to a nearby coffee shop, the owner was told to eject the group or face closure.

The EU agreed to make its Tunis offices available and the meeting was held there with representatives of the European Union, the US and Switzerland. Despite the fact that the UN summit confers immunities to official participants, the meeting in question was outside its jurisdiction, the International Telecommunication Union said later.

From The Register

An extraordinary criticism of Tunisia’s approach to the Internet was fired at its president Zine Ben Ali at the opening ceremony of the World Summit in Tunis this morning.

Swiss president Samuel Schmid drew huge applause from the back of the room when he directly criticised Tunisia’s controlling Internet policies. It is unsupportable that the UN still has members that imprison their own citizens because of what they have written on the Internet or in the press. Everyone should be able to express their views freely.

Ben Ali shifted uncomfortably in his chair and refused to look at Schmid when he sat down next to him after finishing his speech. However, Schmid’s speech was followed up by even more direct criticism from Shirin Abadi from the International Federation for Human Rights. Certain governments that are not genuinely elected by their people do not reflect the people’s desire on Internet matters. It is important to make sure that non-governmental organisations are not manipulated by creating so-called NGOs that transmit false information on the situation prevailing in their country.

That was a direct reference to a diplomatic incident that happened in Tunis on Monday, when Tunisian police forcibly prevented local and international human rights organisations from meeting to organise an alternative "Citizen Summit". The German ambassador to the UN became involved, as did several World Summit participants who have immunity in Tunisia while the Summit continues. The trouble sparked an official EU complaint to the Tunisian foreign ministry yesterday afternoon.

Abadi went on to slam countries that suppress an author that expresses any criticism of their government - to which Ben Ali, acting as chair of the ceremony, shook his head.

The extraordinarily frank criticism followed Ben Ali’s own opening speech to the Summit in which he spoke at some length about his view of the Internet. Its content clearly irritated the other speakers. We look forward to the adoption of practical decisions and proposals to solve the questions put forth by the information society, These last few years have witnessed the emergence of some types of use that shake call into question the credibility of information. Some arouse racism, hatred, terrorism. Others disseminate allegations and falsehoods. "

He went on to describe how society would have to make individuals "commit to responsible use" of the Net, and how it was necessary to "set ethical standards". The current culture of the Internet, he argued, was not a true representation of the world’s people as a whole and how there was a "collective moral responsibility" to change this.

UN secretary-general Kofi Annan’s address was less directly critical but nevertheless made a strong statement. Freedom, he said, was the information society’s lifeblood. It is freedom that enables citizens everywhere to benefit from knowledge, for journalists to do their essential work, and citizens to hold government accountable. He added  that by having the conference in Tunisia it had in fact "put a spotlight on the issues here".

Suddenly it seemed that rather than the UN being wrong for hosting the event in Tunisia, it was Tunisia that had most to lose from the deal.

From The Register

The United States has won its fight to retain control over the internet, at least for the foreseeable future.

[Presumably because nobody wants the internet controlled by a body which has such repressive members as Tunisia]

The world's governments in Tunisia finally reached agreement just hours before the official opening of the World Summit this morning. In the end, with absolutely no time remaining, a deal was cut. That deal will see the creation of a new Internet Governance Forum, that will be set up next year and decide upon public policy issues for the internet. It will be made up of governments as well as private and civil society, but it will not have power over existing bodies.

The deal represents a remarkable victory for the United States and ICANN : only a month ago they were put on the back foot by an EU proposal that turned the world's governments against the US position.

But following an intense US lobbying effort across the board, the Americans have got their way. Countless press articles, each as inaccurate as the last, formed a huge public sense of what was happening with internet governance that proved impossible to shake.

Massive IT companies - again, mostly US and thanks to intense US government lobbying - came out publicly in favour of the status quo. And the EU representative, David Hendon, confirmed to us last night that in political and governments circles - at every level - the US had pushed home its points again and again.

A letter from US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice sent to the EU just prior to the Summit also had a big impact. Hendon said the UK's position was pretty much set by then, but that it may well have had an impact on other EU members. The exact wording of the letter has yet to come out but it is said to be pretty strong stuff.

And so without the EU forcing the middle ground, and with the US backed by Australia, the brokering - pushed in no short measure by chairman Massod Khan - was led by Singapore and Ghana. The result was that Brazil, China, Iran, Russia and numerous other countries were stymied.

The shift to an international body will still happen but it will now be at least five years down the line. The plus point of all this great theatre however is that the world, and its governments, are now infinitely more aware of how this internet thing really works

From Asian Tribune

New York based Committee to Protect Journalist (CPJ) has said that the decision of Nepal’s Supreme Court Friday of not issuing a stay order to the draconian media ordinance opens door to permanent censorship and has expressed fears that the decision could mean that journalists in Nepal are at the mercy of King Gyanendra.

King Gyanendra promised that his draconian measures against the press would be temporary. But this latest decision opens the door to permanent censorship , said Ann Cooper, Executive Director of CPJ, according to statement posted on CPJ website. If the Supreme Court does not protect the basic right to freedom of expression enshrined in Nepal’s constitution, then journalists are at the mercy of the King.

Shocking the independent media workers in the country, the Supreme Court Friday rejected a plea from Nepal’s biggest media group, Kantipur, to issue a stay order on the ordinance. The court remained silent on another petition seeking return of transmission equipment seized at gun point by security forces from Kantipur FM, a popular FM station, in Kathmandu in October. The court, however, said that other cases related to media be given top priority. There is another petition seeking the annulment of the ordinance. Ruling on the case is pending.

Following the court order on Friday, Kantipur FM has stopped news broadcasts. Apart from banning news broadcasts, the ordinance bars criticism of the royal family, imposes hefty financial and prison penalties for libel, bars independent media houses from subscribing to foreign news agencies, and bars cross ownership of media.

The CPJ statement has noted that the press has been under attack from the government since King Gyanendra seized absolute power in a coup on February 1. Emergency measures instituted at the time shut down the independent press and stopped private FM radio stations from broadcasting news, a primary source of information for many Nepalese. At the time, the king promised international allies and donors that actions against the press were temporary measures intended to aid in the fight against a Maoist insurgency.

For what?...who is harmed, what will it achieve? Another country that wants to see the return of concentration camps for its own people.

From The Nation

The Thai government is working on an anti-cyber crime bill which would carry a prospective penalty of five years in prison for possession and online distribution or posting of child pornography and a one-year term for hacking, whip spokesman Wattana Sengpairoh said recently.

Other offences included in the bill are the spreading of false information on websites which could cause public panic (five years in prison), superimposing sexual content on the images of real people or altering a person’s image to make it sexually provocative (three years) and producing or posting general pornographic material (five years).

Wattana said a regulation barring children from playing online games at Internet cafes would be included in the bill.

From the BBC

Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen is reported to be facing possible legal action over his spoof Kazakhstan TV host character Borat Sagdiyev. In his act, the British star best known for his Ali G character, has portrayed the central Asian country as a nation of drunks who are cruel to animals.

The Kazakh Foreign Ministry said it may move to prevent Cohen presenting the country in a "derogatory way".

The comments come after Cohen hosted the MTV Europe Music Awards in Lisbon. He adopted the Borat role for the appearance - a performance that included an arrival in an 'Air Kazakh' propeller plane flown by a pilot holding a vodka bottle. Cohen's Borat character first surfaced in the Ali G in da USA TV shows in 2003.

Kazakh foreign ministry spokesman Yerzhan Ashykbayev did not detail what form any action might take. But speaking to journalists at a news briefing in capital Astana, he said: We do not rule out that Mr Cohen is serving someone's political order designed to present Kazakhstan and its people in a derogatory way. He said Kazakhstan reserves the right to take legal action to prevent new pranks of the kind. Ashykbayev described the comedian's MTV appearance as utterly unacceptable, being a concoction of bad taste and ill manners which is completely incompatible with ethics and civilised behaviour .

From Adnki

Delta Global, an Iranian information technology company, has obtained a contract to censor more than 100,000 internet sites that have been deemed "obscene" by the Iranian authorities. Included among the "obscene" sites are even those of the Grand Ayatollah Hassan Ali Montazeri, Radio Free Europe and that of France's Asian Film Festival. All of the sites in Farsi, managed by the Iranian community abroad, as well as sites in other languages that supply information unacceptable to the government of Tehran, will be not available to websurfers in Iran.

Delta Global has also been tasked with partially blocking internet search engines such as Google.

According to a Tehran news agency Entekhab, Iranians are no longer able to carry out any searches on the internet using words such as ‘woman’, ‘sex’ or ‘love’.

From Christian Today

On Tuesday, the Beijing People’s Intermediate Court charged Cai Zhuohua, a house church minister, his wife and brother=in-law with “illegal business practices” and handed prison sentences of up to three years after police found a large number of Bibles and religious materials in a church warehouse.

Cai, who had been arrested since last September, was sentenced to three years in prison while his wife and brother-in-law for two and 18-months respectively. The court ruling for Cai and his two co-defendants came less than two weeks before President Bush’s Nov. 19-21 meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao.

This is not an acceptable result , said Bob Fu, president of the China Aid Association in a released statement. We urge President Bush to use his upcoming visit to China to address the serious religious persecution in this case.

During the trial, the defendants were accused by the prosecution of illegally printing 200,000 copies of the Bible, though there was no mention of how many actual copies there were when the verdict was announced, Reuters reported.

Yet in July, a Hong Kong newspaper funded by Beijing, Ta Kung Pao, quoted China’s director of the state bureau of religious affairs, Ye Xiaowen, as saying Cai illegally printed 40 million Bibles and other Christian writings, according to Reuters. Furthermore, Ye accused Cai of illegally selling over two million copies of the Bible instead of giving them away for free.

The prosecution could not find a witness to testify that my son received any money, Cai’s mother told Reuters after attending the hearing. But I’m not sad or angry because this is God’s arrangement.

In addition to the jail sentence, the court fined minister Cai US $25,000; his wife US$18,500; and her brother US $12,500.

Ye tried to suggest that the case is not religious persecution. Objectively speaking, religion is a point of penetration through which Western anti-China forces seek to Westernize and disintegrate China.

In China, the printing of Bibles and religious materials requires the approval of the State Bureau of Religious Affairs. Moreover, Bibles cannot be purchased publicly in bookstores.

Defense Attorney Gao Zhisheng, however, told AsiaNews, The books in no way were going to enter the market, they were to be given away free of charge to the church members. Trade transactions, whether legal or illegal, are not a question here. The court should not be used to oppress religion and religious freedoms, but the authorities are always using economics as a pretext to deal with religious and political issues, this happens far too much in China, where the court is being used as a tool. [Sounds a bit like our very own Video Recordings Act where we are not allowed to trade in any video that hasn't been approved by the state]

According to Reuters, the defendants are expected to appeal within the available timeframe of 10 days with eight lawyers and legal experts having offered their services to the defendants free of charge.

From The Guardian

Images of Paris's suburbs on fire shocked the world - but not the French, because France's media took it upon themselves to censor them

Jean-Claude Dassier, the director-general of the rolling news service LCI, effectively admitted censoring his own broadcasts of the riots. Speaking at a conference in Amsterdam, he said the prominence given to the rioters on international news networks had been 'excessive'.

What shocked observers most, however, was his admission that his decisions had been made for political reasons. Politics in France is heading to the right and I don't want right-wing politicians back in second, [let alone] first, place because we showed burning cars on television, Dassier told an audience of broadcasters.

This question of political bias, or a loyalty to 'the republic' that trumps or at least heavily influences journalistic values, has yet to be seriously discussed in France, though there has been a fierce debate over the way the riots were reported.

This week's Le Nouvel Observateur magazine asked: 'Television: too much restraint?' and contrasted the treatment of the rioting by international networks with that by France's own TV channels. Do you want to see images of violence, of cars or buildings burning in the night? Well, turn to the foreign channels like CNN or Deutsche Welle.

Other commentators noted the same phenomenon. One marker was how each channel treated the critical figure of the total numbers of cars torched overnight. From Monday, state-owned France 3 no longer gave the total at all.

It's a bit too Telethon, said Paul Nahon, the TV channel's director of news. The only thing missing was the giant indicator panel on the wall. Nahon said the decision had been taken to avoid fuelling the violence by tempting rioters to try and outdo the previous night's total. The power of the image means we've a serious responsibility and, besides, it's not a statistic that tells you very much, he said.

On Tuesday LCI followed suit, not least, Libération reported, because two cars had apparently been burnt specifically for their cameras.

At Radio France, however, senior editors decided to carry on broadcasting the number of burnt cars, though they decided to avoid giving any competitive tinge to the presentation of the statistics - for example by talking of them as 'the score'. At France 2, said Arlette Chabot, the channel's director of news, a global figure of cars burnt was given but was not broken down by town, and images of the destruction caused by the riots was favoured over the spectacular fires.

Prime Minister De Villepin himself chose TF1, the French privatised national channel that owns LCI, to make his critical address to the nation announcing the new curfew. His address took the form of an interview with France's best-known news presenter and lasted for almost half an hour. It was preceded by several 'good news' items about successful government initiatives in deprived suburbs. There was no specific request from the Prime Minister's office, sources said, but, according to one TF1 journalist, the order of the day was we must be positive .

Some of the bile being directed at the international networks is undoubtedly justified. Fox's announcement that 'Paris burns', a headline superimposed on an Eiffel tower backed by flickering flames, gave a completely false impression of events. Nor were the riots 'France's Katrina', as some US newspapers said.

Senior British journalists might well discuss problems associated with the idea that showing the violence might exacerbate it, but they would never say anything overtly political. They would not even think it, 'said Purvis. There is a far stronger sense that French TV is a part of a corporate state. It is much closer to the government than the BBC, for example, and that inevitably filters down to the newsroom.

Based on an article from the Netscape News

A Malaysian city is introducing a curfew for online gamers supposedly in a bid to stem a rise in the number of addicts.

Politicians decided to take the action after being approached by a worried mother whose son had gone missing. The teenager was found in a cyber cafe where he had been playing for 48 hours.

The authorities in Subang Jaya, near the capital Kuala Lumpur, say that from next year they will close down net cafes which allow patrons to play games late at night.  Under rules due to come in next year, cyber cafes will have to set up different areas for gamers and for other internet users. Gaming areas will need a separate entertainment licence and will be required to close at midnight, even at weekends.

Local lawmakers say they plan to deploy teams of officers to check on popular internet spots. Those found playing games after midnight will be told to leave, while cafe owners who ignore the rules face having their licences withdrawn.

Based on an article from the Netscape News

China's media watchdog has launched a monitoring system to step up suppression of supposedly illegal websites with sexual and violent content.

The General Censors of Press and Publication has already issued warnings to 53 websites that provide downloads for games, the communist party mouthpiece People's Daily reported Tuesday. The 14 games included Lives filled with the blessing of sex, Love the sisters and Artificial young girls, it said.

The move was launched in a bid to safeguard the order of the Internet, purify the web environment and to protect the physical and mental health of the youths, the report said.

The media watchdog will issue warnings to any websites found to have "unhealthy" content and will punish those that do not delete the material within 24 hours, it said. Regular offenders will have their licences revoked and risk having their websites closed down, it said.

China has stepped up its policing on the Internet in recent months in a bid to stem what it sees as an unhealthy influence on the young. Although the campaigns mainly target sites that contain sex and violence, those with sensitive religious and political content are also often banned.

The Chinese government announced revised Internet rules in September that require Internet operators to re-register their news sites and police them for content that can "endanger state security" and "social order." Any content that "harms national security, reveals state secrets, subverts political power, (and) undermines national unity" is also banned.

The regulations further prohibit posts that instigate illegal gatherings, formation of associations, marches, demonstrations or disturb social order.

From the BBC

Anticipation over Junior and Zeca's kiss had Brazil glued to the TV. Would they or wouldn't they?  Brazil came to a virtual standstill on Friday night to find out the answer to the question that had obsessed the country: Would the soap opera America deliver the country's first televised homosexual kiss?

In the event, it did not.

But in the wake of a TV programme that reportedly drew a larger audience than the last World Cup final, no-one is willing to take the blame for disappointing viewers.

Marcos Schechtman [the director] and I made the scene - it was recorded , America screenwriter Gloria Perez told Globo newspaper. We fought for it and I cannot deny that I was frustrated that it wasn't shown. The actors also were [frustrated]. After all, they had staged it with much enthusiasm.

Perez said the management of Globo TV had cut the scene. I do not want to be made responsible for this. When Marquinhos [Marcos Schechtman] and I decided that we would have the scene, the broadcaster said it would assume [responsibility]. It is an injustice to say that I didn't want to show the kiss.

But Globo TV had denied having cut the scene, saying it had broadcast all the episodes it had received, the Diario de Sao Paulo reported. Globo TV says there never was one with a gay kiss.

Perez said she was surprised by how well the homosexual relationship between the two men, Junior and Zeca, had been received by the public. Even heterosexual men, who tend to be more conservative, wanted the kiss. Everyone wanted it. I was very happy about it because it showed that things were changing in Brazil.

Brazilian media reported that Gloria Perez's web page was bombarded with messages, mostly expressing disappointment. What happened to the kiss? They lied to the viewers, one read.

From 365 Gay

Hundreds of gays have locked lips in a mass protest in front of Brazil's capitol. The demonstrator's were protesting the censoring of the country's first televised gay kiss from Brazil's most heavily watched soap opera.

After weeks of hyping the kiss on the show "America", between two of its best looking male stars,. a record audience turned in but the long awaited kiss never appeared.

The producers blamed the Globo network for chopping it. The network claimed the kiss was never in the show. Then, two days later Globo owned up and admitted that it had cut the scene.

Brazil's gay community was enraged at the "moral censorship". After the mass kiss-in the leaders of the demonstration were invited to meet with the Speaker of Brazil's lower house.

The protestors said the meeting allowed them to lobby for a law to allow same-sex marriages. Legislation to permit gay marriage has been introduced in the Congress but has been tied up in committees for years.

The demonstration received widespread television coverage in Brazil, and could not have come at a better time for US-based Viacom. Its Logo TV is launching in Brazil next week - the first gay TV network in South America. Logo premiered its Mexican version of the network a week ago.

From the BBC

An alliance of investors and researchers is pledging to monitor technology companies that do business in countries with shaky human rights reputations, and is asking the companies to proclaim their commitment to freedom of expression.

Twenty-five investment groups, representing about $21 billion in assets in the United States, Europe and Australia, are signatories to a joint investor statement on freedom of expression and the Internet , an initiative spearheaded by the media watchdog Reporters Without Borders.

The statement comes after several instances in which technology companies have been criticized for cooperating with governments, notably China, in order to secure strong market positions.

As shareholders, we need to feel confident that our companies are not complicit in human rights abuses, directly or indirectly, and that they're not collaborating to effectively quell Internet traffic, to harm their own good reputations and to reduce their long-term growth opportunities, said Dawn Wolfe, social research and advocacy analyst for Boston Common Asset Management, one of the participating investment funds.

Although China and other countries have come under fire for limiting what their citizens can see or post on the Web, China also is a particularly sought-after market, for the potential its vast population offers.

Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. have been accused of helping the government there censor news sites and blogs. And in a recent case, Reporters Without Borders criticized Yahoo Inc. for allegedly helping the Chinese government trace the private e-mail account of a Chinese journalist who was later imprisoned for providing state secrets to foreigners. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo has defended its move, saying it is obliged to comply with Chinese regulations.

Julien Pain, head of the Internet Freedom Desk for the watchdog group, said Reporters Without Borders had tried to enter into dialogue with technology companies, without much success. He said he hoped bringing in some of the companies' shareholders would encourage them to do more. I don't know if it's going be successful in the end. What we want is to raise the issue. We want them to discuss this issue and engage in some thinking about it.

Cisco, the world's biggest maker of computer networking equipment, was the main equipment provider for ChinaNet, which serves the vast majority of China's Internet users. Reporters Without Borders and others have questioned whether Cisco helped the Chinese government come up with ways to monitor Internet use.

Cisco has denied participating in any kind of censorship, and has said the products it sells in China are the same sold around the world. On Monday, Cisco released its first Citizenship Report, which outlines the company's business practices and social investment programs.

More information about the statement and participants can be found at: www.rsf.org

From All Headline News

Russian MPs have issued a final threat to TV stations to scale back on violent shows like The Simpsons if they want to avoid censorship. [avoid censorship? they sound pretty censored to me already]

State Duma deputies overwhelmingly voted for a motion warning television channels to cut down on the amount of violence they show. First Deputy Speaker Lyubov Sliska said it was a "yellow card" for the channels.

A 417-1 landslide vote approved the resolution, initiated by Sliska and fellow United Russia member Farid Gainullin. It asks for television companies to more strictly adhere to a voluntary code of conduct signed in June by the chief executives of six leading national channels to avoid promoting a "cult of violence and cruelty".

MP Yelena Afanasyeva stated, The experts gave just the result we feared. They found The Simpsons were crammed with violent and aggressive episodes. These cartoons also introduce antagonism between children and parents.

The new push in the legislation came after The Simpsons was given a hard-core adults-only rating and blamed for corrupting Russian schoolchildren and degrading family values.

From The Scotsman
From CNET News

The Chinese authorities have blocked a pro-democracy web-log after it was nominated for a freedom of expression award. The blog, Wang Yi's Microphone, dealt with "sensitive subjects" and was maintained by a teacher from Sichuan province, the Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders said.

Dissidents have been arrested under vaguely worded security laws for posting items critical of the government. Reporters Without Borders said Wang's blog was ordered to close by authorities in Hainan province, home of the site's host company, Tianya.

The site was nominated for a Best of the Blogs award in the freedom of expression category by the German international radio station Deutsche Welle. On its website, the radio station described Wang as an "anti-government Chinese intellectual" who used the blog to fight for justice. It gave no details.

Reporters Without Borders said one of Wang's most recent posts dealt with a campaign by peasants in Guangdong province to remove a village chief accused of corruption.

Libya has sentenced a blogger to a year and a half in prison after he criticized the government in his online articles, according to Human Rights Watch.

The jailing, which the rights group reported Thursday, is one of several recent crackdowns on bloggers by authoritarian governments. The group also confirmed Friday that Egyptian authorities have detained a university student who had criticized the government and Islamic fundamentalism in his blog in what may be the first such case in the country.

In the Libya case, a court in Tripoli convicted blogger Abd al-Raziq al-Mansuri on charges of illegal handgun possession earlier this month, Human Rights Watch said. But al-Mansuri and his family, which has denounced his arrest and sentence, say it's an attempt to silence dissent.

The gun charges are a ruse, Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. The authorities went after al-Mansuri because they did not like what he wrote.

The arrest came after al-Mansuri published some 50 articles on the U.K.-based Web site akhbar-libya.com, in which he criticized Libyan society and government. The arrest was carried out by the Internal Security Agency, who confiscated his computer, papers and compact discs and questioned him about his articles, he told Human Rights Watch. In a search of al-Mansuri's home the next day, agents found an old pistol belonging to his father, the rights group said.

In Egypt, authorities have detained Abdolkarim Nabil Seliman, a 21-year-old law student who wrote critically of the government and of Islamic fundamentalism in a blog. Human Rights Watch confirmed reports of Seliman's arrest that have been circulating among other Egyptian bloggers, but the organization said it's unclear whether blogging is the reason for the arrest.

Just before his arrest, Seliman, who attends the prestigious Al-Azhar University, had railed in his blog against Muslims who rioted at a Christian church in Alexandria. His family told the Associated Press that police had confiscated some of his books and printed copies of his blog articles.

From The Daily Journal

The critically acclaimed film Se-cuestro Express , about violent street crime in Caracas, has become a box office smash in Venezuela while sparking a raging political controversy that could get it yanked from theaters and possibly land its director in jail.

Secuestro’s gritty depiction of the class-driven kidnappings common throughout Latin America has been denounced by Venezuela’s vice president as a “miserable” movie that unfairly puts his country in a negative light.

Since its summer release in Caracas, the Miramax-distributed movie has generated two lawsuits, including one that calls for pulling it from circulation to delete a specific scene culled from news footage during a public rebellion against the Chávez regime.

A second lawsuit accuses director Jonathan Jakubowicz of fomenting illegal drug use and vilifying the nation’s armed forces and its president, charges that carry a penalty of up to 10 years in prison. Those cases are pending before Venezuela’s high court.

In October, the Venezuelan film board rejected Secuestro Express as its entry in the Academy Awards’ foreign film category. Supporters of the crime drama cried foul, particularly when a less popular and less critically respected film, 1888 , was endorsed by the film board for Oscar consideration.

Director Jakubowicz said: It’s really chilling that this is the message they are sending to our future artists. Because even if they haven’t banned the film, they’re engaging in a kind of indirect censorship. How will future Venezuelan artists feel about expressing their opinions when [authorities] want to put us in jail even though we never attacked them, or even spoke ill of them at any time?

Venezuelan officials say, however, that the government has never officially taken a stand against Se- cuestro Express , and has never tried to censor or suppress it. The harsh critique from Vice President José Vicente Rangel represented his opinion, they say, not a government crackdown.

Still, skeptics suspect politics played a part in Venezuela’s Oscar submission because the film board that makes the selection is a government agency and its head, Juan Carlos Lossada, was appointed by President Chávez. But Lossada, in a recent phone interview from Caracas, rejected that speculation.

At the moment, though, the loss of a possible Oscar nomination might be the least of Jakubowicz’s worries. In one suit against him, the filmmaker is accused of violating the penal code, the drug laws and the so-called armed forces law, because his film allegedly encourages drug use and heaps scorn on the country’s military and president, according to the director’s attorney, José Antonio Báez Figueroa.

The case has been filed by a private attorney in Venezuela, where, unlike the United States, a private party, not just a prosecutor, can initiate legal actions based on penal code violations. The complainant, representing the Venezuelan people, is a celebrated lawyer known for his participation in controversial government-related cases.

The other suit is a defamation case involving a former Chávez government official who appears briefly as part of news footage spliced into the movie’s menacing opening montage. The official, Rafael Cabrices, is shown firing a weapon from a bridge during a massive street demonstration in 2002 that led to the temporary ouster of Chávez.

To this day, the incident symbolizes the country’s deep political divisions. Some consider Cabrices a hero for defending Chávez’ so-called “Bolivarian revolution.” Others call him a criminal who shot directly at demonstrators, several of whom died that day on Caracas streets.

Cabrices’ lawyer alleged that the use of the footage damaged his client’s reputation by linking him with a film about violence and delinquency. Cabrices unexpectedly died of a heart attack Aug. 31, but the attorney is pressing forward with the case on behalf of Cabrices’ survivors. It was at Cabrices’ memorial service that Vice President José Vicente Rangel publicly panned the kidnapping drama as a falsification of the truth, a miserable film with no artistic value that [focuses] on the most base and vulgar parts of society.”

The suit asks that Secuestro Express be removed from theaters until Jakubowicz deletes the scene with Cabrices. After the prosecution lost in lower courts, both cases are awaiting rulings on their legal merits from the higher court. Báez, the filmmaker’s lawyer, does not give them much chance of success. But if they prevail, it would open legal doors for banning the film and seeking prison time for the director, he said.

From Pravda

Russia has been waging a longstanding war against pornography for many years. State and public figures of all levels release regular statements, in which they demand one should finally put an end to pornography in Russia, although things remain where they started. X-rated films and scenes appear on the air of federal TV channels, they can be seen in motion picture episodes and on the pages of a whole variety of specific newspapers and magazines.

The federal service for law control in the field of mass communications and the protection of cultural legacy has recently held a work session devoted to the struggle against the growing quantity of pornographic materials in mass media. Members of the discussion decided to address to the State Duma and the government of Russia with a suggestion to give a precise definition of so-called erotic publications and restrict their distribution. In addition, it was offered to establish a special department, which would make its conclusions about the presence of pornographic scenes in motion pictures, TV programs, etc.

The participants of the session believe that the absolute "erotic mess" in the Russian television and press has been caused with imperfect laws. One of the employees of the above-mentioned service said that erotic publications for teenagers exist only in Russia in spite of the fact that they are registered as entertaining magazines.

It is hard to say if the session of the law control service in the field of mass communications is going to bring any practical results. All previous attempts to ban pornography in films failed on account of the fact that Russia does not have a special law on pornography. Furthermore, there is no precise definition to distinguish erotic arts and pornography, for example. A special US law on the matter, for example, strictly stipulates, which parts of the human body can and can not be shown on TV.

Russia could probably learn from the experience of several European countries, in which authorities keep the pornographic industry under control and where the porn business knows its place.

Professor Kirill Razlogov believes that Russian law-makers ought to impose specific economic and legal restrictions on pornographic products: They have special movie theatres in the West, for instance, whereas pornographic magazines can be found only in sex shops or special quarters, in which sex industry feels at home. People come to those places on purpose, they know what they need to get there, but they will never bump into a news stand filled with porn magazines somewhere downtown, for example. In addition, Western states impose higher taxes on pornographic production too.

According to professor Razlogov, it is rather hard to draw the line between pornography and erotica, because these two phenomena are not stagnant: My institute regularly conducts research works regarding the definition of pornography for this or that product. We often proceed from esthetical qualities. Explicit scenes can be found in masterpieces too, although the high artistic value of such works of art does not allow us to categorize them as pornographic. This can be particularly said about such outstanding movies as Nagisa Oshima's In The Realm of the Senses or Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris.

As for Russian television, adult films cannot be aired on TV before 11:00 p.m. It is important for experts to approach "erotic issues" with single criteria. It can be possible to demonstrate pornographic products on commercial TV channels, at nighttime. Kirill Razlogov is certain that this problem should not be left to local or municipal authorities.

From the Bangkok Post

Last year a worldwide survey of press freedom by the respected Reporters Sans Frontieres placed Thailand at 57th, behind Bosnia, nine African countries and East Timor. Last week, RSF reckoned Thailand was not doing even that well. It ranked Thailand 107th among all countries.

Confirmation of this lowly ranking, if any were needed, was supplied by the Thai PM's Office minister and media expert Suranand Vejjajiva speaking on Radio Thailand. Suranand, just back from a trip to China, told the radio service he praised the Chinese system of media control extensively, and apparently had not a word to say about the official protection of press freedom in Thailand. Suranand said he was strongly impressed with China's "state-of-art technology system'' which is used to monitor citizens, control the media and block access to thousands of internet websites which the Chinese find inconveniently democratic, including several in Thailand.

According to Suranand, some media "make problems for society'' and he signed an agreement with China to cooperate on this issue. Suranand made no attempt to defend his country's democratic system and constitutional protection of free speech and press. Instead, he publicly agreed with the statements of his hosts, who represent a dictatorship with no pretence of press freedom. He agreed with the Chinese that the government should play a more important role in examining the members of the press who trigger problems to the society . That seems a good reason to downgrade Thailand's press freedom and harm Thailand's image yet again.

Such words, cooperation with unsavoury dictators from Burma to Beijing, and steady anti-media pressure are the reasons Thais and foreigners rate Thai press freedom so low. Even before he became prime minister, Thaksin's Shin Corporation purchased iTV and cut down its news coverage. The government has shut down critical political talk shows on the airwaves, sued or passively supported massive lawsuits against media, including this newspaper. It has cut off critical websites despite bland assurances by Suranand that only pornography is targetted. The latest intimidation is an order to state agencies to investigate 600 community radio stations.

The climate of harassment is well known. Last year, police in the South invited reporters to a news conference on the Tak Bai homicides, then locked them in the room and demanded notes, photos and video footage. Thaksin has claimed several times that the press is hurting the image of the country by certain news coverage or commentary. On the contrary, it is clear the government is harming the country's image abroad by creating an environment of badgering that has caused a huge loss of respect for Thai media independence. And it is using state agencies, including security forces, to help.

The remnant of free press which exists in Thailand owes nothing to the government. Many countries, including South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia and East Timor are lucky. They take it for granted their media will continue to be more free, and thus more credible and responsible. In Thailand, government continues to erode that freedom.

...then realisation that it does not make any difference to perceived social problems whatsoever. However it does distract people from the shitty consequences of political mismanagement of the unrest in South Thailand

From the Bangkok Post

'Inappropriate content' to be cleansed from cyber space

The Information and Communications Technology Ministry has plans to make cyber space free from 'inappropriate content', beginning next month, under a scheme known as Cyber Clean.

Kanawat Wasinsungworn, assistant to the ICT minister, said yesterday the ministry expects to sign an agreement with webmasters and website owners on Nov 7. ICT ministry representatives, cyber inspectors and website operators met on Wednesday to discuss the details.

Kanawat said Cyber Clean had drawn positive feedback from the 50 favourite websites. The Cyber Clean icon would appear on the participating websites. If web users spot improper language or images or any content deemed a threat to national security, they could click the Cyber Clean icon.

The website contents, IP address, URL and pictures will be copied and sent to cyber inspectors for examination. The webmaster would be served a warning if the contents were determined improper.

CAT Telecom would be responsible for coordinating with overseas websites.

Kanawat said Cyber Clean would target only pornographic content. There were no plans to interfere in political web-boards.

He denied having proposed that internet users be required to give their ID numbers before posting messages on web-boards: I've never said anything about it. And there's no way we'll force people to do it.

A source said that some website owners had suggested that internet users be required to give their ID numbers before connecting. It was suggested this would prevent cyber crime and deter users from posting improper messages.

Letter in the Bangkok Post

Two big projects incubating deep within the United Nations should give pause to anybody who values political and personal freedom.

The United Nations is busy trying to regulate two key pillars of free expression: content and the means to communicate it. In this case, that means popular culture and the Internet.

One project is the longstanding goal of the Convention on the Protection of the Diversity of Cultural Contents and Artistic Expressions. That Orwellian mouthful is cover for a proposed policy to use governments to prevent individuals worldwide from gaining access to whatever culture and art they prefer to see and hear.

Although it is being done under the guise of protecting the people of developing countries from the influence of first-world - namely American - culture and art, many first-world governments, including France and Canada, have been enthusiastic supporters. They see it as a way to protect their national identities, as defined by their governments and frozen in time.

The rationale for this policy turns logic on its head. Canada's Heritage Minister Liza Frulla said her government's efforts are driven by an "unshakeable commitment" to protect and promote Canada's cultural diversity. But to Frulla, protecting cultural diversity seems to mean exposing her nation's people to less culture, not more: We have to be able to identify ourselves as Canadians, to be able to present ourselves and to be able to sustain our creativity , This is a fundamental right.

Indeed, it is the fundamental right of any Canadian, or anybody anywhere, to present his or her culture and sustain his or her creativity. But governments have no right to step in and make those judgments on behalf of free people. Under such a policy, the Canadian who sees herself as a citizen of the world and wants to be exposed to as many different cultural expressions as possible, even American, is simply out of luck.

Still, with overwhelming support in the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO), the culture policy seems destined for approval this week. Only the United States and Israel stand opposed. The United States won't have to comply directly with the policy's edicts if our government does not ratify the agreement, but artists here who value a worldwide audience for their works still could suffer.

The latest draft of the policy is vague enough to justify pretty much any governmental intervention. It says, for example, that parties to the agreement may take "all appropriate measures to protect and preserve" their countries' culture once they deem it "in need of urgent safeguarding."

Already, South Korea has said it intends to use the protocol to justify policies limiting the number of foreign films that can be shown in movie theaters. You can expect other governments to try to block the sale of recorded movies, books and music to their citizens. Although such barriers might run up against free-trade agreements, the stamp of approval from UNESCO for cultural regulation could be a counterweight in any litigation from people seeking to sell, buy or exchange artistic works.

Will U.N.-sponsored thought control prove futile in the age of digital communications? One would think that with access to the Internet, people all over the world will eventually find a way to obtain any kind of art or cultural expression they like, even those their governments have deemed unacceptable. That's where the other United Nations project comes in.

The Working Group on Internet Governance has been toiling for years on a policy to shift control of the Internet from the United States, where the 'Net was created and nurtured, to an international body.

The group's mission and its papers deal with everything from technical questions about Internet domain names and languages to consumer protection and privacy. The latest document makes a passing reference to protecting human rights. But you have to wonder what that means when among the Working Group's members are delegates from Cuba, China, Iran, Russia and Singapore - where oppressive governments have used force and imprisonment to stop free expression.

Now that the U.N. is moving actively to justify restrictions on free expression and to take over the technology that promises to level historic barriers to communication, perhaps even those who have looked the other way for too long will recognize that the only way to truly protect cultural diversity is to allow every person on the globe the freedom to think, write, hear and express themselves in whatever way they like.

I never really understand why some mean minded people seek to deprive their fellow man of the enjoyment of sexual entertainment.

But one thing that is for sure, countries that pander to these nutters are shitty places to be. All the best and most civilised countries in the world allow a good measure of tolerance to what people choose to do in their bedrooms.

Letter in the Bangkok Post

At long last, social problems are gaining the attention of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Speaking on his weekly ''Meet the People'' radio programme last Saturday, the prime minister said he would launch a ''D-Day'' against social problems on Dec 1. The month-long campaign will target pornographic materials now available in shops, roadside stalls and on the Internet. Internet cafes which promote online gambling and sexual encounters will also be eliminated.

This is a rare departure from his previous policies, which targetted narcotic drugs, mafia figures, corruption, poverty and the ongoing violence in the deep South.

However, Prime Minister Thaksin is still singing the same tune by threatening to remove government officials if they fail to tackle social problems in areas under their jurisdiction. The fact is that gambling and pornography have long existed in Thai society. A large number of people know where to find pornographic materials, which are also available on the Internet. These things are happening every day right under the noses of law enforcement officials, who seem to be turning a blind eye to them.

The prime minister's declaration of the new war on pornography is a good start and it deserves public support. If left unsolved, this problem will escalate. If the minds of our young people are poisoned by these materials, the country's future will be in jeopardy.

The problem, however, cannot be solved by a month-long campaign. We have seen this kind of short-run campaigns before and they all ended up in failure. When government officials lower their guard, those intent on selling drugs and doing illegal activities will spring into action. The same is true with the proliferation of pornographic materials in Thai society.

To be effective, the campaign must be carried out continuously by law enforcers. And it must be complemented by a nationwide campaign to raise public awareness about the dangers of this problem. School and religious institutions must join hands in the fight against this scourge, while the family institution must be strengthened so that our young people will not stray onto the wrong path.

Editorial from The Nation

Thailand takes an embarrassing but hardly surprising tumble in a new index ranking media freedoms. There is plenty of bad news for Thailand in Reporters Without Borders’ fourth annual World Press Freedom Index, which ranks media independence in 167 countries.

Thailand has fallen drastically from 59th to 107th place. Thailand edges out neighbouring Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines, but can’t manage to outrank increasingly authoritarian Cambodia.

Thai media freedom advocates aren’t surprised with the dismal news. Once lauded for its relatively free-wheeling media, now Thailand is embarrassed by countries that have recently won their independence or have recovered it. Indonesia, with Aceh opened up for journalists thanks to peace accords, has overtaken Thailand and is now in 102nd place. The index also contradicts the frequent argument by leaders of poor and repressive countries that economic development is a vital precondition for democracy and respect for human rights. The top of the index is heavily dominated by rich countries, but several very poor ones are among the top 60, such as Benin (25th), Mali (37th), Bolivia (45th), Mozambique (49th), Mongolia (53rd), Niger (57th) and East Timor (58th).

The free-fall of Thailand’s rating is a shame. It confirms that the international community has taken note of what initially looked like a subtle way to control the Thai media. On the surface, things have seemed fine. There have been no cases of journalists being murdered or arrested because of their work. Columnists can still lambaste the powers that be. Newspapers can still take strong editorial stands against the government or its policies.

And media umbrella or advocacy groups have been relatively united, active and firm. All these only serve to magnify the question “Why?” How come a country that once had the reputation for having one of Asia’s freest media has turned into a case study for press control? Why are we edging closer to the pathetic likes of Burma (163rd) and North Korea (dead last) and losing touch with South Korea (34th) and Taiwan (51st), which are getting closer to the European democracies?

A plausible answer can be that political interference with the media has evolved with time, and the changes must have been internationally recognised. No longer do we judge freedom solely on how many journalists have been murdered or arrested.

In the changing world, financial measures can be as effective as guns and death threats. The staggering criminal and civil lawsuits filed by this government, its politicians as well as politically connected businesses are one example of how state and legal powers can be used to suppress freedom of speech. The Thaksin government’s selective use of its advertising budget is also known to be an efficient tool to counter critical news organisations, in addition to the fact that a lot of investments by the media industry require government approval.

Reporters Without Borders compiled this index of 167 countries by asking its partner organisations (14 freedom of expression groups from around the world) and its network of 130 correspondents, as well as journalists, researchers, legal experts and human rights activists, to answer 50 questions designed to assess a country’s level of press freedom. The nations receiving the highest ranking once again are northern European countries Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Iceland, Norway and the Netherlands, where robust press freedom is firmly established. The top 12 countries are all European.

Prime Minister Thaksin is unlikely to take this index seriously. Just when it was made public last week, he launched a new stinging attack on the press. He surely will continue to claim that newspapers here are free to criticise him and thus the complaints about interference and the lack of freedom are absurd. But the truth he has tried to avoid is that the existence of vocal media here is owed mainly to a die-hard spirit which has survived in spite of him.

Based on an article from South China Morning Post

A coalition of 17 nutter groups yesterday called for a boycott of several Chinese newspapers and magazines over what they labelled "sleazy" content.

The publications targeted included Next Media's Apple Daily, New Media Group's Oriental Sunday Magazine, Sing Tao News Corporation's East Week and the Oriental Press Group's Oriental Daily News.

Fifteen representatives from the groups, going under the name the Anti-Pornographic and Violent Media Campaign, protested outside the headquarters of Next Media, New Media Group and Sing Tao News Corporation, tearing up their publications.

They submitted a petition signed by the groups, including the Professional Teachers' Union, the Society for Truth and Light, Education Convergence and the Hong Kong Council of Social Service. All except Next Media declined to receive the petition.

Lam Keung, a spokesman for the campaign, accused the media of poisoning young minds. You see naked women in nearly all of the Chinese magazines under vulgar titles that draw attention to their bodies, Lam said. The public should stop buying these publications to rid the market of them.

Jess Chan Yin-ping, a representative of the Society for Truth and Light, urged the government to revise the Control of Obscene and Indecent Articles Ordinance.

Under the ordinance, pornography is defined as a visual depiction of a person appearing in a sexual manner or context or appearing to be engaged in explicit sexual conduct. Images of the genitals, anal region and bare female breasts are also defined as pornography.

A spokesman for Apple Daily said they respected different views held by their readers and the public:  Different people have different perceptions of obscene articles. If the Apple Daily has contravened the ordinance in any sense, the Obscene Articles Tribunal would have taken action.

Based on an article from New Zealand Herald

Computer Games may be sold in New Zealand with a certificate from the Australian Censors. Some such games have an unrestricted certificate in Australia but are restricted in New Zealand.

The crazed New Zealand Chief Censor Bill Hastings says a check on eight violent games approved for unrestricted sale in Australia, and therefore also in New Zealand, resulted in six being restricted to older age groups under New Zealand law. Only two were allowed to stay unrestricted here.

Australian censorship ratings have applied in New Zealand since 1994. Local censors only reclassify games restricted in Australia.

But the check on the eight unrestricted games showed New Zealand law on violence is much closer to the law in Germany than to Australia. German censors restricted all eight games to at least 12-year-olds and over. On the other hand, New Zealand was slightly more liberal on a game with sexual content, Leisure Suit Harry. It was rated R20 in Australia, R18 in Germany and only R16 here.

Hastings plans a larger survey of all games given M ratings in Australia, allowing them to be sold with no legal restriction but not recommended for children under 15.

I want to do a much more comprehensive study on how identical titles are rated in Australia, New Zealand and some benchmark countries such as the UK or Germany, to see whether we should keep Australia rating our unrestricted games."

The eight violent games and Leisure Suit Harry were referred to him by Internal Affairs Department inspectors, so it was possible they were unusual.

If there were only a dozen of them it probably was not a big worry, but if there were more, he would consider recommending a law change to require all games rated M in Australia to be reclassified.

From Christian Today
From Juicee News Daily

At the end of last month, the government in Iran had confiscated over 3,000 satellite dishes in an effort to clamp down on “trouble makers” in Tehran, the country’s capital. In its endeavour, Iran has also arrested more than 12,000 “social polluters” and hundreds have been sentenced in recent weeks.

Although it is illegal to own a satellite dish in Iran, many people in Iran have satellites that allow them to view the world outside of country. Among the satellite stations viewed by Iranians is SAT-7, a Christian satellite television for the Middle East and North Africa. They’re trying to prevent sources of information coming into the country that the government considers to be anti-their government and we just happen to be one of those channels , said SAT-7’s Debbie Brink.

Satellite confiscation is one among a series of new government policies implemented to restore an "Islamic Government." On Aug.3, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was sworn in as President of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Ahmadinejad, a former Revolutionary Guard, promised to restore an "Islamic government" in Iran.

The Iranian president's new policies include nominating military officials for 18 of the 21 positions for his cabinet members and enforcing laws against Islamic women who are improperly veiled and young Iranians with anti-government ideals.

In addition, Iran has banned movies from Western nations which are seen to promote immorality, violence, drug usage, alcohol consumption, secularism, liberalism, anarchy and feminism.

Western films are widely shown in the Islamic Republic, though they are higly censored so as to remove any scenes of drug taking (including alcohol) or Women dressed in clothing deemed too revealing. Also, despite a State ban on satellite TV many Iranians watch foreign movie channels.

Many believe this new ban is a gesture to the hardline conservatives who backed Ahmadinejad in the recent Iranian presidential election, and some fear for how it will be enforced. In theory home-made films will not be affected, for the law only refers to foreign movies, but some analysts say it could cause nervousness and might tempt some Iranian directors to apply self-censorship, and Al Jazeera points out that these films already undergo a censorship process.

From San Luis Obispo

Every time journalist Ana Karina Villalba enters a Radio Magica studio to do her afternoon show, she sits in front of a photocopy of the many provisions of Venezuela's harsh new media law.

Whenever a guest says anything that may be interpreted as inciting violence or has sexual content, she reminds the guest of the law and its punishment. And every time that happens, her boss reminds her that the station could be shut down.

No one has been thrown in jail or fined yet because of the 10-month old law. But it has clearly forced the media to censor itself, especially when reporting on controversial President Hugo Chavez and his leftist policies.

The Venevision TV station, who once broadcast hours of verbal attacks on Chavez and videos of often-violent street protests against the president, is now jokingly known as the Disney Channel because its news lack bite and its programming is littered with cartoons.

And the Globovision station has hired a full time lawyer to deal only with the media law. It tries strongly to avoid broadcasting violent images, such as anti-Chavez street protests, before 11 p.m. And it quickly cuts off callers during its highest rated program, Hello Citizen, if they begin to make accusations against public officials that the show cannot immediately substantiate.

The law is very imprecise and gives the government a lot of leeway to interpret what we do, said Villalba who has long been known for her sharp tongue and criticism of the government. It's like you're playing monopoly, and they don't tell you the rules, and then they throw you in jail.

The "law of social responsibility" was approved in December by the Chavez-controlled legislature ostensibly to protect children from violent and sexual content in the media, even though the Venezuelan media was not known as being particularly violent or salacious when compared to the rest of Latin America.

But the president has regularly attacked private media outlets here almost since he took power in 1999, and some officials of his government have even charged that TV news coverage of the anti-Chavez street protests was bad for young children. His outbursts have been interpreted by some of his supporters as a green light to verbally and physically attack members of the media.

But while the new law, extensive in coverage but vague in content, claims to promote freedom of expression, it also condemns coverage of virtually anything to do with sex or violence before 11 p.m.

One of the pieces of the law posted in front of Villalba at Radio Magica, for instance, prohibits sexual images and sexual sounds. Another prohibits images and sounds in the programs and advertisements that directly or indirectly refer to the consumption of alcohol.

In one daytime cooking program on the Globovision station, producers had to remove a bottle of wine from behind the cook. And during impromptu interviews at social events, cameramen must be careful not to include any alcoholic drinks or cigarettes that his subjects may be holding in their hands.

Politics are just as tricky because the law prohibits images or graphic descriptions ... that promote, apologize for, or incite violence. The broad nature of this clause has left news directors and owners scratching their heads or simply getting rid of controversial personnel to avoid problems..

Villalba and some of her colleagues say the point of the law is not to sanction but to strike fear in the critics of the government so they do not take any chances with their programming or content.

They don't need to fine you, because everyone is already petrified . she said.

From Reporters without Borders

Reporters Without Borders today accused the Iranian government of seeking to increase its control of the Internet in recent measures that have included contracting an Iranian company, Delta Global, to set up a new online censorship system.

While developing a woefully oppressive model of Internet management, Iran is participating actively in international talks about Internet governance that are being held as part of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), the press organisation said.

These new measures point to an ideological hardening in the Iranian government and a desire by the new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to centralise authority, Reporters Without Borders said. They also show that factions exist within the conservatives, as the latest website to be banned, Baztab.com, is run by supporters of the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.

We are also worried by statements coming from the company that seems to have been given the job of managing Iran’s Internet filters , the press freedom organisation added. If what this company’s chief executive turns out to be correct, online surveillance and censorship is to be stepped up. This is very bad news for Iranian bloggers and Internet users.

The head of Delta Global, Rahim Moazemi, told the local news agency ISNA in late September that his company had won a government contract for the management of the Internet control and censorship system. He said he wanted to put an end to the anarchy of the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) by centralising the filtering system. He also claimed that Delta Global’s technology was capable of blocking access to all the tools used to get round censorship.

Iranian filtering currently uses the “smart filter” technology developed by the US company Secure Comuting, which claims the Iranian authorities never paid to license this software. Iranian Internet censorship is not homogenous and varies according to the ISP used, of which Iran has several hundred. So a website may be accessible in one city and blocked in another.

Access to at least four websites that include coverage of Iranian women’s issues - www.womeniniran.org, http://irwomen.com, www.iftribune.com and www.womeniw.com has been blocked since the start of September.

A court meanwhile on 12 October “provisionally” banned the news website Baztab.com although it belongs to former Revolutionary Guards commander Mohssen Rezai, a supporter of Ayatollah Khamenei, and is supposed to be backed by the Iranian intelligence services.

Baztab published reports that were embarrassing for the president. The site’s editor, Foad Sadeghi, said it was banned as a result of a complaint by the secretariat of the High Council for National Security about its articles on the nuclear negotiations that are currently under way.

The ban points to internal struggles within the conservative camp, between President Ahmadinejad’s supporters and those still loyal to Ayatollah Khamenei. It seems that the president, with the support of the military, is trying to take control of the internal state apparatus and impose his mentor, Ayatollah Mesbah, as Khamenei’s successor.

During the preparatory meetings for the WSIS (which is to take place in Tunis on 16-18 November), Iran called for a “new model” of Internet governance that would put an end to the existing US hegemony.

From The Nation

The government will launch a crackdown on pornographic material, offensive cartoons and Internet websites that contain inappropriate material, the government spokesman said yesterday.

Surapong Suebwonglee said more than five million websites from around the world feature rape in their content, causing widespread alarm among relevant authorities. There are also games about rape , he said after he raised his concerns at the Cabinet meeting yesterday.

He said Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is now planning to supervise the crackdown on pornography and has already demanded to see clear results from relevant authorities by December.

Surapong said the crackdown would target pornographic material, cartoons and websites. He believed technological systems must be in place to block pornographic websites operated overseas, while relevant officials would nail down and arrest operators of the offending sites in Thailand.

With sincere effort from all relevant parties, the severity of the problem should dramatically drop, he said.

From Vietnam Net

Last May, the Ministry of Culture and Information’s Cinema Department submitted a draft-law on cinema, which has still not been passed due to great controversy.

Despite ten years preparation, many saw the new law as cursory and illogical, the most controversial issue being the law that film directors must be university graduates. While some participants agreed with the stipulation, others opposed violently.

People’s Artist Dang Nhat Minh: We should focus on the law’s target, which I think must be to develop Vietnam’s cinema, make good products, participate in the international cinema industry, and encourage private films and investment from foreigners and overseas Vietnamese.

The draft law did not mention investors, producers, directors, publishers, or cinema managers. Among, the most important roles would be investor and producer, but they did not appear at all in the draft. In addition, directors and scriptwriters must be offered an open law to create, and their responsibility and authority with the investor and producer stipulated in more detail.

One problem that frequently concerns cinema professionals is censorship. It is a barrier holding back the industry’s development. The law must provide more detail on taboos or limited objects, such as superstition, depravity or government secrets.

From the Bangkok Post ( A bit rich from a country with it's own content filtering set up)

It should come as no surprise that the Internet in Burma, a country in the iron grip of a military cabal for decades, is heavily filtered and carefully monitored. But a new report from the OpenNet Initiative once again raises tough questions about the use of filtering technologies, often developed by Western companies, by autocratic governments bent on controlling what their citizens see on the Web.

OpenNet Initiative is a human rights project linking researchers from the University of Toronto, Harvard Law School and Cambridge University in Britain,

Burma employs one of the most restrictive regimes of Internet filtering worldwide that we have studied , said Ronald J Deibert, a principal investigator for the OpenNet Initiative and the director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto. Burma now joins several nations, including China, Iran and Singapore, in relying on Western software and hardware to accomplish their goals, Deibert said.

Microsoft, Cisco and Yahoo, for example, have all come under fire recently for providing technology or otherwise cooperating with the Chinese government to enable it to monitor and censor Internet use.

In the case of Burma, the regulations and customs are quite clear. The Digital Freedom Network, a human rights group based in New Jersey, notes that among things forbidden by Burma's Web regulations, introduced in January 2000, are the posting of any writings directly or indirectly detrimental to the current policies of the government. The rules also forbid any writings detrimental to the interests of the Union of Burma.

As with their six previous reports, OpenNet researchers combined a variety of network interrogation tools and the cooperation of a volunteer in Burma who remains anonymous as a safety precaution , the report noted, to test the accessibility of various Web sites.

Sites like Hotmail, which offer free e-mail services, were routinely blocked, forcing Burma's citizens to use one of the two officially approved (and easily monitored) Internet service providers for their e-mail. And of 25 sites dealing with Burmese political information and content, from freeburmacoalition.com to burmalibrary.org, a full 84% were blocked.

There's a cat-and-mouse game going on between states that seek to control the information environment and citizens who seek to speak freely online, said John Palfrey, the director of Harvard Law School's Berkman Centre for Internet and Society and a researcher with the OpenNet Initiative. Filtering technologies, and the way that they are implemented, are becoming more sophisticated.

Not surprisingly, repressive governments have been eager buyers of those technologies. The OpenNet study suggests that Burma, which has long been under American sanctions, including the 2003 Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act, has recently migrated from an open-source filtering technology to a proprietary system called Fortiguard, developed by Fortinet in Sunnyvale, California.

That upgrade, which appears to have taken place as the OpenNet researchers were conducting their analysis, may have made censorship even more efficient and widespread than reflected in the new survey.

For its part, Fortinet says that it uses a two-tier distribution model , according to company spokeswoman Michelle Spolver, meaning that the company sells all of its products to resellers, who sell to end-users. Our intent is to fully comply with the law, and Fortinet does not condone doing business with US-embargoed or sanctioned countries , Spolver said.

Yet the Fortinet system appears to be hard at work in Burma. The Burma state has put out a Web page talking about it, we've procured a block page that has hallmarks of Fortinet's system, and have heard from people on the ground that it's being implemented, Palfrey said.

...as do video games...

From The Telegraph

Playing violent video games does make people more aggressive, according to new research.

Scientists monitored the brain activity of volunteers as they played such games, and their research reinforces fears that the scenes of extreme aggression portrayed on screen can lead to copycat behaviour in real life, particularly among youngsters.

In the new study carried out by Michigan State University, 13 men were observed playing a latest-generation violent game. Each participant's play was recorded and his behaviour was analysed in conjunction with his brain pattern. René Weber, a senior researcher on the project, said there was a link between playing a "first-person shooting game" - where events are seen from the viewpoint of the game's central character - and brain activity that was considered characteristic of aggressive cognitions.

There is a neurological link and there is a short-term causal relationship. Violent video games frequently have been criticised for enhancing aggressive reactions such as aggressive cognitions, aggressive affects or aggressive behaviour. On a neurobiological level we have shown the link exists.

Weber and his fellow researchers used a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This enables scientists to determine which parts of the brain are activated by different sensations, including sight and sound.

The "brain mapping" can be monitored by setting up an advanced MRI scanner in a special way so that increased blood flow to the activated areas of the brain shows up on a screen. The researchers monitored male volunteers aged between 18 and 26. Eleven of the 13 men displayed effects that were considered to be caused by the virtual violence.

Video gaming is a multi-million pound industry in Britain and it is estimated that up to 90 per cent of secondary school children regularly play a game.

Although only 1.6 per cent of games are rated as being suitable only for adults, they represent eight per cent of the market. Selling such a game to a child is punishable with up to six months in prison or a £5,000 fine. On average, participants play video games for 15 hours per week and started playing at the age of 12.

The full report on the research will appear in the January 2006 edition of Media Psychology.

Prof Mark Griffiths, an expert in computer games from Nottingham Trent University, welcomed the American study: I am all for more research into this fascinating area. It's another piece of information that helps complete the jigsaw into the biological side of human behaviour. However, although interesting, I do not think that this alone proves that there is definitely a link between watching violent video games and people being aggressive or violent in their actual lives.

There are too many other of what we call 'conflicting and confounding variables' - people may also be affected by such things as the amount of violence in their lives or the violence they watch on television. We need more research before we draw up definitive conclusions.

From Advocate.com

Arab gays defy laws, venture into open

When Ahmad Mahfouz told his mother he is gay, she took him to a psychiatrist, thinking he had a disease that could be cured by antidepressants. When that didn't work, she urged him to date a woman. He ignored her advice. So now, whenever she sees me, she beats me with anything she can lay her hands on: a metal hanger, leather belt, her shoes.

More Arabs are coming out as gay, or at least coming to terms with their sexuality, even though in some countries they face laws that can land them in jail or are confronted by extremists who beat them up because Islam condemns homosexuality. On top of that, homosexuality is widely seen as a disease spread by the United States and Israel to corrupt Arabs and undermine their religious faith.

In Lebanon, gays can find refuge at the cramped one-room office of Helem, which says it's the first Arab nongovernmental organization openly fighting for gay rights. Helem was set up last year despite a vaguely worded law that punishes "unnatural sexual intercourse" with up to one year in jail. Lebanon, with its mixed population of Muslims and Christians, has a history of religious pluralism and exposure to the West. But elsewhere, gays are on their own.

Egyptian authorities use criminal articles against debauchery and prostitution to prosecute gays. They have entrapped, arrested, and tortured hundreds of men thought to be gay, says a report by New York City–based Human Rights Watch. It says police agents snare gay men through Internet personal ads and that at least 179 men have been prosecuted for "debauchery" since the start of 2001. Hundreds of others have been harassed, arrested, and often tortured without charge, it says. Among them are 52 men rounded up in 2001 in a police raid on a boat-restaurant on the Nile and accused of taking part in a gay sex party. A court acquitted 29, 16 were convicted and freed pending their appeal, and a few were jailed for a year.

Saudi Arabia, which enforces a puritan Islamic code, also keeps gays under pressure, according to Human Rights Watch. On March 10, it said, authorities detained more than 100 men at a party in the city of Jiddah, sentencing many of them in closed trials without legal counsel to up to two years in prison and 2,000 lashes, usually meted out 50 at a time depending on medical examinations.

Human Rights Watch said the offenses weren't spelled out, but a Saudi news report claimed the men allegedly were "dancing" and "behaving like women." Last year another Saudi daily, the English-language Arab News, said 50 men were arrested for allegedly attending a gay wedding in the holy Muslim city of Medina.

In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Palestinian vigilantes at one point were treating gays as unforgivingly as they do informers and drug or gun dealers. This has even led to cases of Palestinian gays finding sanctuary in Israel, where homosexuality is tolerated. Gay Palestinians have said it's easier to find common ground with Israeli counterparts because both can relate to being oppressed. In June 2001, a handful of Palestinians joined thousands of Israelis in Israel's Gay Pride Day.

There have been no recent prosecutions of gays in Lebanon, but men have been beaten up for looking effeminate or fired for being gay, said Georges Azzi, a gay man who is the only paid employee at Helem, the rights center. He said his group tries to raise awareness by speaking at colleges. There are now more gay-friendly bars, and in May the International Day Against Homophobia was observed for the first time in Lebanon.

Based on an article from China Tech News

A Finnish man and his Indian girlfriend were arrested in India after neighbors complained that they were playing pornographic movies with the volume turned up too loudly, a police officer said Wednesday.

Exhibiting pornography and possessing pornographic materials are illegal in India. If convicted, the two could face three months in prison and a fine.

The two were arrested Monday night at the Finnish man's home in the town of Gurgaon, a center of India's information technology and outsourcing business, the officer said on condition of anonymity.

Aside from arresting the couple, officers also seized a television and CD player, he said.

The couple, who were not identified, were granted bail Tuesday. No date has been set for the hearing, said the police officer.

Based on an article from China Tech News

Reporters

China's Ministry of Information Industry has released a notice on its website requiring all concerned telecommunication enterprises to ensure that by October 30 they are able to monitor and suppress supposedly illegal information and content that is spread via mobile phones.

The Ministry of Information Industry's Notice on Further Strengthen the Spreading and Ordering of Unhealthy Information on the Mobile Communications Network says that pornographic and "superstitious" [meaning religious or refering to banned organisations like Falungong] content are rampant in the mobile communications network.

Those companies who fail to suppress illegal information or continue to spread "unhealthy information" may face severe punishment. The ministry notice also says that companies should police themselves and strengthen their internal procedures. The rules are applicable to words, voice, graphic and video information spread via fixed phone and other telephone terminals.

From Reporters Without Borders

Reporters Without Borders today called on the Internet Services Unit (ISU), the agency that manages Web filtering in Saudi Arabia, to explain why the weblog creation and hosting service blogger.com has been made inaccessible since 3 October, preventing Saudi bloggers from updating their blogs.

Saudi Arabia is one of the countries that censors the Internet the most, but blog services had not until now been affected by the ISU’s filters , the press freedom organisation said. The complete blocking of blogger.com, which is one of the biggest blog tools on the market, is extremely worrying. Only China had so far used such an extreme measure to censor the Internet.

Reached by Reporters Without Borders, the ISU recognised that it had blocked access to the Google service, blogger.com, but did not give any reason. Blogger.com is the point of entry to the management interface for all the weblogs hosted on this tool. In other words, this is the webpage bloggers need to access to update their blogs. According to our tests, names under the blogger.com domain (for example, www.myblog.blogger.com) are not however being filtered. This means that Saudi Internet users can still access the blogs hosted on this service.

The Saudi authorities acknowledge blacklisting more than 400,000 websites. A very wide range of sites are affected, including political organisations, non-recognised Islamist movements and publications containing any kind of reference to sexuality.

The ISU (www.isu.net.sa) is the agency in charge of the Saudi Web censorship system. It manages the gateway used by all local ISPs and is thus able to control all Internet data exchanges. However, it just carries out instructions issued by the Saudi security services and does not itself decided what must be censored. The ISU offers an online form and e-mail address (abuse@isu.net.sa) that allows Internet uses to report what sites they would like to see blocked. Hundreds of such requests are received each day and are dealt with by a team assigned full-time to the job. The ISU’s filtering system uses technology acquired from the US company Secure Computing.

From the Navhind Times

Looking at laying down a widely-debated policy for regulating content on television channels and films, the government has formed a committee, comprising representatives from the industry and social organisations, which would give its recommendations by this year-end, the information and broadcasting secretary, S K Arora said today: We have constituted a 30-member committee which will have ten representatives each from the entertainment industry, social organisations and government, and expect it to submit the report in the next three months.

The I&B secretary, who heads the committee, said against the exhaustive guidelines laid down by international regulators like Ofcom in the United Kingdoms and Federal Communications Commission in the United States, India just had about 2-3 page guidelines.

The committee will look into CBFC and programme and advertising guidelines and its mandate also includes looking at international experiences, Arora said, pointing out that while FCC had over 100-page guidelines, Ofcom’s ran over 300 pages. [doesn't stop Ofcom's guide being a contradictory bag of worms though]

Asked whether the government could also look at allowing adult channels in India, especially in view of the growth of the DTH platform which was an addressable system and had option of pay channels, he said this issue would be part of the mandate of the committee.

Arora also said there was a need to check the rapid onslaught of foreign channels, or those being uplinked from a road, into India. It could be a threat for the domestic industry, he said, pointing out that of the 350-odd channels currently operating in India, only 164 were being uplinked from the country.

From the Houston Chronicle

The Internet hasn't dawned easily in Syria — or across the rest of the Arab world, where a virtual war is raging in nearly every country. In Egypt, opposition movements have used the Internet against President Hosni Mubarak, posting street maps to guide people to anti-government demonstrations. Bahraini bloggers are battling the Information Ministry to keep their freewheeling debates alive, and to keep themselves out of prison. In Libya, Tunisia and Syria, too, online politicking has landed people in prison.

For autocrats such as Syrian President Bashar Assad, technology presents a troubling blend of possibility and danger. They eagerly court its economic and educational benefits but struggle, often with a Luddite's bewilderment, to crack down on its use as a mighty political tool.

Arab governments appear determined to censor cyber-critics and silence unwelcome online voices. They've jailed bloggers, blocked Web sites and asked Internet cafe owners to spy on their customers. But it's not working.

Online forums have been embraced by Islamists and the Arab world's underground gay communities alike. The Internet has turned into a virtual debate hall crammed with lengthy screeds, cutting language and calls for rebellion. A colorful repository for the angst of the bulging Arab youth population, the Web is impolite, anonymous and raw — in short, a revelation.

The new Arab computer devotees have little in common, but they band together for their Internet freedom. They dodge government eyes with encryption and proxy servers. They organize online campaigns against media law and revolt against restrictions on Internet cafes.

It's a cat-and-mouse game, said Gamal Eid, an Egyptian lawyer who specializes in Internet restrictions in the Arab world. You try to use the back roads, and the regime tries to do the same.

Ayman Abdel Nour knows a thing or two about cat-and-mouse. The Syrian government has been trying to silence him for more than a year, ever since he wrote a particularly acidic piece on ruling Baath Party officials and posted it on his Web site. It wasn't long before the tart-tongued economist awoke to find the site, all4syria.org, smothered by a white screen and a warning: "Forbidden."

The government gives herself the right that she's more mature than you , an indignant Abdel Nour said on a recent morning as sunlight flooded his apartment in Damascus, the Syrian capital. She will decide for you which site you can see and which is forbidden.

A 40-year-old gadfly and childhood friend of President Assad, Abdel Nour had been courting trouble for months. His writings call for the dismissal of officials, citing them by name and listing their shortcomings. He castigates Syrian intelligence and scoffs at the Baath Party, even though he is a member. By his count, his vitriol reaches 15,200 readers every day.

They (government officials) are very much angry because they don't have any qualified people or intellectual people to respond or explain or defend, Abdel Nour said. So they just stand there taking bullets, with nothing to respond. They've never had this situation before.

From Breitbart

The European Union insisted Friday that governments and the private sector must share the responsibility of overseeing the Internet, setting the stage for a showdown with the United States on the future of Internet governance.

A senior U.S. official reiterated Thursday that the country wants to remain the Internet's ultimate authority, rejecting calls in a United Nations meeting in Geneva for a U.N. body to take over.

EU spokesman Martin Selmayr said a new cooperation model was important because the Internet is a global resource. The EU ... is very firm on this position.

The Geneva talks were the last preparatory meeting before November's World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia. A stalemate over who should serve as the principal traffic cops for Internet routing and addressing could derail the summit, which aims to ensure a fair sharing of the Internet for the benefit of the whole world. At issue is who would have ultimate authority over the Internet's master directories, which tell Web browsers and e-mail programs how to direct traffic.

That role has historically gone to the United States, which created the Internet as a Pentagon project and funded much of its early development. The U.S. Commerce Department has delegated much of that responsibility to a U.S.-based private organization with international board members, but Commerce ultimately retains veto power.

Some countries have been frustrated that the United States and European countries that got on the Internet first gobbled up most of the available addresses required for computers to connect, leaving developing nations with a limited supply to share.

They also want greater assurance that as they come to rely on the Internet more for governmental and other services, their plans won't get derailed by some future U.S. policy. Policy decisions could at a stroke make all Web sites ending in a specific suffix essentially unreachable. Other decisions could affect the availability of domain names in non-English characters or ones dedicated to special interests such as pornography.

From The Telegraph of India

Filmmakers are questioning the proposed guidelines for entries to film festivals and national film awards.

The information and broadcasting (I&B) ministry set up a committee on February 2 to formulate the guidelines. Film personalities Shyam Benegal, Rahul Roy, Manmohan Shetty, Jabbar Patel, Asha Parekh and D.V.S. Raju were appointed to it along with Prof. Dipankar Gupta and ministry official Afzal Amanullah. The panel held a series of meetings, with the last one on July 7 when the members made some suggestions.

Some of the proposals were:

• All Indian and foreign films would be eligible for exemption from certification in all film festivals, including those with ticketed shows
• There would be a redress mechanism for entries that are rejected
• The ministry would retain the right to exempt films from censor board certification. There could be three main grounds for denial of exemption: a threat to national security;  threat to law and order; offense to human sensibilities

However, some committee members raised objections and all three suggestions had dissenting notes attached. The members were expecting the ministry to circulate the minutes and carry the debate forward. But they now reveal that this was not done and the draft guidelines were prepared without taking into account the dissenting notes. The draft guidelines, the members say, include the grounds for denial of exemption. But the suggestions to throw exemption open to all films and have a redress mechanism for rejected entries have not been accepted.

According to Roy, the main fear is that concrete guidelines will never come out and the ministry would follow an “ad-hoc” policy. They will grant exemption to some and reject the others. This is dangerous. We are insisting on liberal guidelines because we want certain institutional safeguards against government control and censorship.