Afghanistan's lower house of Parliament has passed a resolution seeking to bar television programs from showing dancing and other practices deemed un-Islamic.

The decision came just days after the private Tolo TV channel aired a dance number featuring men and women together on an Afghan film awards program.

The Information and Culture Ministry condemned the scene, saying dancing by men and women together was completely against the culture of the Afghan, Muslim society.

The parliamentary resolution, drafted by a commission for cultural and religious affairs, said dancers should not be shown on television, and un-Islamic scenes should be cut from Indian TV series broadcast in Afghanistan, said Din Mohammad Azimi, a lawmaker and member of the commission.

The resolution, which is not now legally binding and cannot be enforced, will go before the upper house of Parliament for consideration, Azimi said. It would also have to be approved by the president before becoming law.

Tolo TV's owner Saad Mohseni said the dancing on the awards show Friday was very tame by any standard and the women were dressed modestly.

For the past eleven years the organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), representing the 57 Islamic States, has been tightening its grip on the throat of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. On 28th March 2008, they finally killed it.

With the support of their allies including China, Russia and Cuba (none well-known for their defence of human rights) the Islamic States succeeded in forcing through an amendment to a resolution on Freedom of Expression that has turned the entire concept on its head. The UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression will now be required to report on the “abuse” of this most cherished freedom by anyone who, for example, dares speak out against Sharia laws that require women to be stoned to death for adultery or young men to be hanged for being gay, or against the marriage of girls as young as nine, as in Iran.

Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan saw the writing on the wall three years ago when he spoke of the old Commission on Human Rights having become too selective and too political in its work. Piecemeal reform would not be enough. The old system needed to be swept away and replaced by something better. The Human Rights Council was supposed to be that new start, a Council whose members genuinely supported, and were prepared to defend, the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Yet since its inception in June 2006, the Human Rights Council has failed to condemn the most egregious examples of human rights abuse in the Sudan, Byelorussia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China and elsewhere, whilst repeatedly condemning Israel and Israel alone.

Three years later Annan’s dream lies shattered, and the Human Rights Council stands exposed as incapable of fulfilling its central role: the promotion and protection of human rights. The Council died yesterday in Geneva, and with it the Universal Declaration of Human Rights whose 60th anniversary we were actually celebrating this year.

There has been a seismic shift in the balance of power in the UN system. For over a decade the Islamic States have been flexing their muscles. Yesterday they struck. There can no longer be any pretence that the Human Rights Council can defend human rights. The moral leadership of the UN system has moved from the States who created the UN in the aftermath of the Second World War, committed to the concepts of equality, individual freedom and the rule of law, to the Islamic States, whose allegiance is to a narrow, medieval worldview defined exclusively in terms of man’s duties towards Allah, and to their fellow-travellers, the States who see their future economic and political interests as being best served by their alliances with the Islamic States.

Yesterday’s attack by the Islamists, led by Pakistan, had the subtlety of a thin-bladed knife slipped silently under the ribs of the Human Rights Council. At first reading the amendment to the resolution to renew the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression might seem reasonable. It requires the Special Rapporteur: To report on instances in which the abuse of the right of freedom of expression constitutes an act of racial or religious discrimination …

For Canada, who had fought long and hard as main sponsor of this resolution to renew the mandate of the Special Rapporteur, this was too much.

Canada’s position was echoed by several delegations including India, who objected to the change of focus from protecting to limiting freedom of expression. The European Union, the United Kingdom (speaking for Australia and the United States), India, Brazil, Bolivia, Guatemala and Switzerland all withdrew their sponsorship of the main resolution when the amendment was passed. In total, more than 20 of the original 53 co-sponsors of the resolution withdrew their support.

On the vote, the amendment was adopted by 27 votes to 15 against, with three abstentions.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights died with the vote. Who knows when, or if, it can ever be revived.

I used to wonder what States who felt it necessary to kill people because they change their religion thought they were doing in the Human Rights Council. Now I know.

...Read the full article

Head of the screening department of the Nihon Ethics of Video Association (NEVA) Katsumi Ono was indicted last week on charges involving failure to screen two DVDs that did not comply with obscenity standards.

NEVA’s panel of scholars, former journalists and film experts screens adult videos produced by 90 Japanese production companies to determine if they comply with standards and regulations.

Ono was arrested, in the beginning of March, on suspicion of assisting the sale of the explicit DVDs after approving the videos. The movies, which were released in June 2006, were allegedly approved for sale without proper screening for potentially obscene content.

The two videos contained scenes showing genitalia which were pixellated, but according to authorities, viewers could still make out body parts.

Reportedly, three other men have also been indicted in the incident.

YouTube has been slammed for censoring the eye-popping moment Barbara Windsor bursts her bra in Carry On Camping.

Forty years after it first hit cinema screens the clip has been BUTCHERED by website censors because is it TOO saucy.

Barbara was awarded an MBE for services in cinema and broadcasting in 2000 and is famous of the scene in which her bikini top twanged off into Kenneth William’s face.

Voted the best of 30 low-budget films made at Pinewood Studios, Carry On Camping! carries a PG certificate.

The clip received more than 4,000 hits after it was posted on YouTube, but now bosses at the US-based video clips web site have decided it breaks their guidelines on "explicit" scenes.

And the flash of boobs has been EDITED OUT by YouTube.

Fans of the film are angry at the censorship of their favourite scene and are demanding a re-think by YouTube.

One fan, Gary Williams said: Even back in 1969 it got past the censors. It wasn’t deemed offensive then so why is it being censored now?

Spokesperson for YouTube, Oliver Rickman said: YouTube has clear policies that prohibit inappropriate content on the site.

The young Sri Lankan filmmaker Thushara Peiris has been subjected to mob attack by hundreds of Indians including film producers, directors and technicians within an Indian Laboratory premises.

Director Thushara Peiris went to India with his maiden film Prabhakaran to make its Tamil copy and he was at Gemini Colour Laboratory in Chennai since March 20.

The procedure to pass a film through Indian Censor Board is not an easy task. We have to produce an English translation of the Sinhala version of the screenplay, then the Tamil version, cast list, their background details and so many other details, Thushara explained the harrowing experience he had in India.

While I was giving these details to the Censor Board some details of the film had been leaked and misinterpretation and misleading news had been spreading about the film labelling it as an anti Tamil and anti LTTE.

As Peiris was completing the final touches to the film on Tuesday, March 25, a mob who claimed they were film producers and technicians staged a protest in front of Gemin lab and in the evening as Thusara was leaving for his hotel had attacked him.

They demanded that the film be destroyed, Peiris said.

Following a severe assault and cut on his back Thusara's dress was torn into pieces by the violent Indian mob at Gemini Lab premises. Later as the media and the police were approaching the place the assailants who introduced themselves as film technicians had given him a shirt and forced him act as if nothing had happened.

However I was kept in a room in the laboratory and was not allowed to talk to the media, Thusara claimed. After the assault a meeting was summoned with the film technicians, police and officials of the Indian Censor Board and had demanded to watch the film to which Thusara had agreed. However Thusara was made to sign a letter stating that if it contained any scene against Tamils or terrorists it would not be allowed to be screened in India.

Without seeing the film they had labelled my film as a propaganda for Mahinda Rajapaksa government which it is not. It is a film I made about the suffering and misery faced by the youth in Sri Lanka and I want every Tamil to see it, the filmmaker said.

Update: Tamil Calls for Ban

3rd April 2008

The dubbed version (in Tamil) of  Prabakaran was screened in Chennai to the agitating Tamil activists. Around 30 Tamil activists from various Tamil groups and political parties viewed the film at a preview theatre in Chennai. After seeing the film, Tamil activists have alleged that the entire film demeans Tamils in general and their freedom struggle in particular.

The film portrays Sinhalese as innocent people and demonises Tamils as war mongering and violent people, Thol Thirumavalavan (leader of Dalith Panthers of India and known LTTE sympathiser) told BBC Tamil service: If this film is released it may trigger ethnic violence against Tamils. So we are going to ask the Tamil film producers council not to give permission to release this film in Tamil Nadu or anywhere in India. We are also going to ask the censor board not to clear this film to be screened in India. We are also contemplating filing a court case seeking a complete ban on the film.

A new book details the extent to which countries across the globe are increasingly censoring online information they find strategically, politically or culturally threatening.

Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering challenges the long-standing assumption that the internet is an unfettered space where citizens from around the world can freely communicate and mobilise. In fact, the book makes it clear that the scope, scale and sophistication of net censorship are growing.

There's been a conventional wisdom or myth that the internet was immune from state regulation, says Ronald Deibert, one of the book's editors: What we're finding is that states that were taking a hands-off approach to the internet for many years are now finding ways to intervene at key internet choke points, and block access to information.

Deibert heads The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. The Lab, along with Harvard Law School, the University of Cambridge, and Oxford University, has spent the last five years testing internet access in some 40 countries.

The book highlights Saudi Arabia, Iran and China as some of the most aggressive nations when it comes to net filtering. They use a variety of technical techniques to limit what their citizens can see online. But they reinforce that filtering with other methods, such as net surveillance.

Surveillance is a huge deterrent, says The Citizen Lab's Nart Villeneuve. If you talk to dissident groups in these countries, they'll tell you that they're under surveillance, that they're concerned for their safety, and that it definitely influences their online behavior.

And even as human rights and internet rights groups fight to raise awareness about internet censorship, countries such as China have responded by getting smarter in what they block, and when they block it.

John Palfrey, director of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, points out that some countries are considering whether or not to bypass the World Wide Web all together by creating what amounts to their own local area networks. We are starting to see something more like the China Wide Web, the Pakistan Wide Web, and the Iran Wide Web.

The top UN rights body has passed a resolution proposed by Islamic countries saying it is deeply concerned about the defamation of religions and urging governments to prohibit it.

The European Union said the text was one-sided because it primarily focused on Islam.

The UN Human Rights Council, which is dominated by Arab and other Muslim countries, adopted the resolution on a 21-10 vote over the opposition of Europe and Canada. 14 countries abstained in the vote.

EU countries, including France, Germany and Britain, voted against. Previously EU diplomats had said they wanted to stop the growing worldwide trend of using religious anti-defamation laws to limit free speech.

The document, which was put forward by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, expresses deep concern at attempts to identify Islam with terrorism, violence and human rights violations.

Although the text refers frequently to protecting all religions, the only religion specified as being attacked is Islam, to which eight paragraphs refer.

The resolution notes with deep concern the intensification of the campaign of defamation of religions and the ethnic and religious profiling of Muslim minorities in the aftermath of the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001.

The EU said, International human rights law protects primarily individuals in their exercise of their freedom of religion or belief, not religions or beliefs as such.

The resolution urges states to take actions to prohibit the dissemination ... of racist and xenophobic ideas and material that would incite to religious hatred. It also urges states to adopt laws that would protect against hatred and discrimination stemming from religious defamation.

Turkey has banned access to Slide, a presentation application, for hosting supposedly offensive content.

Slide is one of the most popular applications on Facebook. According to the company's blog it was accused of harboring pictures and articles that are considered to be insulting to Ataturk. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk is the founder of modern Turkey, and insults against him are considered an attack on "Turkishness".

See full article from Google News

However, Turkey is restoring access to YouTube after the video-sharing website removed the videos that prompted the officials to block access in the first place.

The website said that it has removed the videos a prosecutor deemed insulting to Kemal Ataturk, Turkey's founding father, who established the country after collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

Update: IndyMedia Blocked

31st March 2008

Access to Indymedia Istanbul inside Turkey has been blocked by Turk Telekom.

Istanbul Indymedia (http://istanbul.indymedia.org) has been operating in Turkey since 2003. This initiative aims to organize its own information network without disregarding the information resources both in Turkey and abroad, and to make its voice to be heard by the masses in Turkey and abroad -despite that the internet is still a media tool which has a limited access for many people.

Indymedia can still be accessed in Turkey as follows:

• at http://istanbul.bbm.indymedia.org
• Access through http://anonymouse.org/anonwww.html
• By changing the DNS keys of your network connection to Open DNS servers

Update: Pandering to Turkishness

2nd April 2008

YouTube has removed several video clips that had prompted Turkish authorities to block access to the video-sharing Web site, a move the company believes will lead to a restoration of access soon.

In a statement in Turkish sent to The Associated Press, YouTube said the company reviewed the videos that led to the most recent ban on access and removed them because of their content, which violate YouTube's content policy.

A court in the capital of Ankara imposed a ban on access to the site at the request of a prosecutor who had argued the clips were disrespectful to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a war hero who founded Turkey from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.

Canada is often thought of as a land of bland consensus and multicultural harmony - the last place where you would expect to see a religious minority up in arms, and journalists accusing the state of gagging freedom of speech.

Yet in recent months, these have become fixtures of the country's public debate.

...Read full article

Failure to provide clear definitions in a new law banning online pornography will hamper its enforcement, the government is being warned.

Legislator Abdullah Azwar Anas of the National Awakening Party (PKB) said the government must clearly define the terms "immorality" and "pornography" contained in the law on information and electronic transactions passed by the House of Representatives on Tuesday.

The law criminalizes the use, transmission and provision of pornographic websites.

The law only briefly states providers and transmitters of information or pictures with immoral content could face a maximum sentence of six years in prison or a fine of up to Rp 1 billion (US$107,000).

Abdullah said although the terms immorality and pornography were still debated between feminist activists and conservatives, there needed to be an exact parameter upon which the two disputing groups could agree.

I think nudity certainly falls within the category of pornography, he said. The lawmaker said the government had a one-year period to draft regulations to enforce the law and publicize it before it is implemented.

National Commission for Child Protection chairman Seto Mulyadi said clear-cut definitions of immorality and pornography were important to avoid controversy over the new law.

I think pornography includes pictures or information that can arouse sexual desire. It doesn't necessarily mean nudity. In many cases, nudity can serve as an educational object, let's say for example in biology class, or as an artistic object.

Information and Communications Minister Muhammad Nuh told Reuters members of the public had asked the government to block sites with violent and pornographic content, out of concern about their negative impact as more Indonesians gain access to the Internet. Nuh's office has made available software to block websites with adult content. The software can be downloaded from the ministry's website.

It plans to begin blocking all adult sites from April 1.

A court sentenced a prominent Turkish human rights campaigner to six months and 20 days in prison for insulting the army in a newspaper interview two years ago.

Legal action was taken against the campaigner, Eren Keskin, after a complaint by the Turkish general staff after she told the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel that the army had undue influence on politics, the judiciary and state institutions.

Ms. Keskin was found guilty under a provision in the penal code that forbids “insulting Turkishness.” In the 15-minute hearing, Ms. Keskin said she stood by her statement but denied any intent to insult the army, adding, It was meant as political criticism. She said she would appeal the verdict.

Indonesia's parliament has passed a bill criminalising those who access internet sites containing violent or pornographic material.

Anyone found guilty of the new offence could be jailed for up to three years, or have to pay a heavy fine.

The legislation allows the courts to accept electronic material as evidence in cases involving internet abuse.

It passed with wide majority support from all 10 factions in the chamber.

I think we all agree there's no way we can save this nation by spreading pornography, violence and ethnic hostility, said the Information Minister, Mohammad Nuh.

The intention is to start implementing restrictions on sites containing banned material next month, using special software.

People in China are able to access English language stories on the BBC News website in full, after years of strict censorship by Beijing. The BBC News website has been blocked for almost a decade.

The Communist authorities often block news sites such as the BBC in a policy dubbed the "great firewall of China".

But BBC staff working in China now say they are able to access news stories that would have been blocked before.

However, the firewall remains in place for Chinese language services on the website and for any links in Chinese.

Beijing has never admitted to blocking access to BBC news stories - and there has been no official confirmation that the website has been unblocked.

Technology experts say such a development would not be possible without the approval of internet service providers - which are under strict supervision by Beijing.

Typically fewer than 100 people read BBC stories from Chinese computers - but on Tuesday that figure jumped to more than 16,000.

The Chinese authorities had promised to give foreign journalists more freedom in the run-up to this summer's Olympic Games. But analysts say that recent outbreaks of unrest in Tibet have made this promise more difficult for Beijing to uphold.

Fairfax Media is counting the cost of a small "inappropriate" item in its Sunday Star-Times glossy magazine which led to four pages being literally pulled before the paper reached newsstands.

Fairfax hired casual staff in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch to remove 4 pages from about 200,000 magazines.

The offending item is believed to have been on the editorial page with a link to a sex website, associated with article in the magazine about the erotic author Suzanne Portnoy [described in the original article as a porn queen]

Executive editor Paul Thompson said: We have our editorial standards and they are well known. My view was that this content clearly crossed the line and we could not let the magazine be distributed containing that material.

Fouad Mourtada, the 26-year old IT engineer who has been arrested on February 5th, 2008 and sentenced to three years in prison and a fine of $1350 for creating a fake Facebook profile of King Mohammed VI’s younger brother, Prince Moulay Rachid, has been released.

According to a source close to Help Fouad campaign, Fouad got a full royal pardon.

Update: Losing YouTube

7th June 2008

A Moroccan in Washington D.C. broke the news that YouTube had been blocked in Morocco. He remarked that It's quite saddening to see such a thing happening in Morocco;a country that has made giant steps in freedoms and socio-economic reforms in the span of short 8 years.

In an effort to prolong the trial of two Turkish converts to Christianity accused of denigrating Islam and Turkishness, three gendarme soldiers were summoned to testify before the Silivri Criminal Court in northwestern Turkey as witnesses for the prosecution – which has yet to provide any evidence for its case.

Turan Topal and Hakan Tastan, who were searched, detained and then charged in October 2006 under Turkey’s controversial Article 301 restricting freedom of speech, have been on trial for 18 months.

The state prosecutor had called for the Christians’ acquittal last July, noting that the youthful plaintiffs in the case had given contradictory testimonies and no credible evidence had been produced to prove the charges. But the new judge assigned to the case in November accepted prosecution lawyer demands to call another dozen witnesses to testify.

The three soldiers from the Silivri Gendarme Headquarters testified separately to their involvement in searching the defendants’ homes and office on October 11, 2006, when they said they found a large number of Bibles and Christian documents, as well as several computers.

One of the soldiers said that at the time of their court-ordered investigation, military intelligence officers had shown them an organizational chart, listing names of alleged leaders of the detained Christians’ group, which is accused of conducting illegal religious activities.

Although the Christians’ trial in Silivri is officially held in “open” court, the current judge has refused to admit any Turkish or international press to observe the last two hearings.

301 Changes ‘Shelved Indefinitely’

A senior member of the European Parliament declared last month that the European Union was losing patience with Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) over its failure to change the restrictive Article 301.

“We’re preparing a report for the European Parliament which will be voted on in April,” Joost Lagendijk told the BBC on February 11. If nothing has moved by then on freedom of expression, the report will be negative.

Turkey’s prime minister, justice minister and president have declared repeatedly over the past two years that amending the law was both needful and “high on their agenda.” But last week AKP deputy Nihat Ergun admitted that although a revised draft of Article 301 was completed, it had been shelved indefinitely.

Reportedly this reflects accommodations to the opposition Nationalist Movement Party, which supported the AKP’s recent constitutional amendment to allow headscarves on university campuses but opposes making any changes to Article 301.

Access to a total of 294 Web sites has been blocked in Turkey since November of last year following the establishment of an Internet bureau within the Department of Telecommunications.

Telecommunications Director Fethi Simsek, in an interview with a correspondent from Anatolia, said 294 Web sites have been permanently shut down for reasons such as obscenity, encouraging people to gamble and for insults directed at Turkey's founder Atatürk and the Turkish nation since last November.

Simsek said most of these Web sites were blocked for violating Article 226 of the Turkish Penal Code on obscenity, Article 227 on prostitution, Article 228 on gambling, Article 13 over the sexual abuse of children and Article 190 on the use of drugs.

Wikileaks has released 35 censored videos relating to the Chinese suppression of dissent in Tibet and has called on bloggers around the world to help drive the footage through the so called "Great Firewall of China".

The transparency group's move comes as a response to the the Chinese Public Security Bureau's carte-blanche censorship of youtube, the BBC, CNN, the Guardian and other sites carrying video footage of the Tibetan people's recent heroic stand against the inhumane Chinese occupation of Tibet.

Wikileaks has also placed the collection in two easy to use archives together with a HTML index page so they may be easily copied, placed on websites, emailed across the internet as attachments and uploaded to peer to peer networks.

Censorship, like communism, seems like a reasonable enough idea to begin with. While 'from each according to his ability and to each according to his need' sounds unarguable, the world has learned that these words call forth a power elite to administer them with coercive force. Such elites are quick to define the needs of their own members as paramount. Similarly 'from each mouth according to its ability and to each ear according to its need' seems harmless enough, but history shows that censorship also requires an anointed class to define this "need" and to make violence against those who continue talking. Such power is quickly corrupted.

See full article from the Guardian

Earlier this week the Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, sent a formal letter of complaint to the Chinese embassy in London calling for access to the Guardian website to be restored and "henceforth unfettered".

Chinese authorities can censor online content internally using either an outright block on a specific website address, or using filtering technology that restricts access to individual online articles containing key words such as "Tibet" and "violence".

It has not been clear which technical restrictions the Chinese authorities have been using against international news websites.

However, according to reports from several internet users in China, the censorship appears to have become less draconian this week compared to the weekend, when the worst of the unrest in Tibet was taking place.

Videos on the Guardian website that had previously been inaccessible can now be viewed in China and users in major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guilin have been able to access a range of online news stories on Tibet.

One Chinese technology blogger said that while access has improved it does not necessarily mean that the authorities have relented: Suppose there is less access from Chinese readers once they felt the site is hard to access. The censorship system will turn to other hot sites with higher sensitive hits automatically.

China has succeeded in blocking the flow of news about its crackdown on Tibetan protesters.

While China has traditionally exerted strong control over traditional media outlets such as television, radio and newspapers, this week's developments are notable for the country's effective control of YouTube, blogs and other Internet communications.

While Western news outlets are getting information out to the rest of the world, many Chinese remain in the dark. The Wall Street Journal reported that Baidu.com, China's largest search engine, turns up no news in a search for "Tibet" (the fifth most popular search term on Baidu Monday), while searches for "Tibet riot" produce hits to pages that have been removed.

In addition, China's major Internet portals, Sina and Sohu.com, are devoid of news of the uprising and repression. And Chinese Internet video sites Tudou.com, Youku.com and 56.com, the Chinese equivalents of YouTube, are similarly vacant.

Observers are not completely sure how China is blocking all the news, the Journal reported. In some cases, entire domains are blocked; in other cases, only certain pages. While editors of state-run media frequently avoid controversial topics, independent Internet companies also cooperate with censorship; they are required to monitor user-supplied content Relevant Products/Services and delete pornography, as well as a list of forbidden topics.

The censorship raises a challenge to the much-vaunted claim that the Internet views censorship as network damage and routes around it, a claim no less a technology luminary than Bill Gates repeated last month: I don't see any risk in the world at large that someone will restrict free content flow on the Internet. You cannot control the Internet.

Reporters Without Borders has urged heads of state, heads of government and members of royal families to boycott the 8 August opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games because of the Chinese government’s mounting human rights violations and the glaring lack of freedom in China.

China has not kept any of the promises it made in 2001 when it was chosen to host these Olympics, the press freedom organisation said. Instead, the government is crushing the Tibetan protests and is imposing a news blackout, while Hu Jia, a tireless human rights campaigner, is facing a possible five-year prison sentence at the end of a summary and unfair trial.

Politicians throughout the world cannot remain silent about this situation. We call on them to voice their disapproval of China’s policies by announcing their intention not to attend the opening of the Olympic Games. Britain’s Prince Charles has already said he will not go to Beijing on 8 August. Others should follow suit.

Calling for a complete boycott of the Olympic Games is not a good solution. The aim is not to deprive athletes of the world’s biggest sports event or to deprive the public of the spectacle. But it would be outrageous not to firmly demonstrate one’s disagreement with the Chinese government’s policies and not to show solidarity with the thousands of victims of this authoritarian regime.

Around 100 journalists, Internet users and cyber-dissidents are currently imprisoned in China just for expressing their views peacefully. Journalists have been banned from visiting Tibet since 12 March and have been expelled from neighbouring provinces. The crackdown on protests by Tibetans is taking place behind closed doors.

Chinese journalists continue to be subject to the dictates of the Publicity Department (the former Propaganda Department), which imposes censorship on a wide range of subjects. The government and party continue to control news and information and have authoritarian laws to punish violators.

One new Russian bill proposes tighter state control over Russian online news sites. Another restricts foreign ownership of internet service providers (ISPs). And a new government decree compels ISPs to allow the authorities to read their clients' e-mails, write RFE/RL.

According to Oleg Panfilov, a free press advocate who heads the Moscow-based Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, the Russian authorities have been wary of the internet's growing importance for years.

They are afraid. This fear of the internet emerged about four years ago when the Kremlin saw how it became the main source of information during the Orange Revolution, Panfilov, who himself writes a popular blog on the website "LiveJournal," says.

A decree from the Information Technologies and Communications Ministry, made public on 26 February, requires all telecommunication companies and ISPs to allow the Federal Security Service (FSB) unrestricted monitoring of all communications - phone calls, text messages and e-mails. Telecoms and ISPs are also required to install, at their own expense, equipment allowing the FSB to monitor communications at any time without the provider's - or the user's - knowledge.

Separately, a provision in a new bill on investment working its way through parliament would forbid foreigners from acquiring majority stakes in ISPs without express government permission.

Insiders say the legislation is likely to face strong opposition from within the industry. I don't think it is very realistic to pass such a law, because there is a strong lobby against it. There are already a lot of companies that have a high level of foreign shareholders, Aleksandr Militsky, who runs a website that monitors ISPs, tells RFE/RL's Russian Service.

Robert Amsterdam, an attorney on jailed former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky's international defense team and the author of an influential blog on Russian affairs, says the emerging trend toward greater state control reflects an entrenched Kremlin view that managing the media is an important aspect of defending national security.

In March, Putin established a new federal agency to regulate media and the internet and oversee content. A month later, authorities used loopholes in the law to shut down the Siberian online publication Novy Fokus for failing to register as a news organization despite the fact that Russian law does not explicitly require online news sites to register.

Vladimir Slutsker, a member of the Federation Council, the upper house of Russia's parliament, is now seeking to make registration mandatory. Slutsker recently told the daily "Kommersant" that legislation was needed to stop "irresponsible journalists from spreading rumors and hiding behind anonymous websites."

If Slutsker's bill becomes law, Russia's popular blogs and news sites would need to apply for licenses and be subject to the same regulations as print and broadcast media.Analysts have labeled Slutsker's bill impractical given the sheer volume of websites and the difficultly tracking them, adding that the time when the authorities could realistically control the internet is long gone.

Some Russia watchers say the Kremlin isn't interested in Chinese-style controls. Amsterdam points out that Russia's media control strategy - which allows for opposition newspapers like "Novaya gazeta" and radio stations like Ekho Moskvy - is more sophisticated than that: They don't have to control 100% of it. One of the things that the survival of 'Novaya gazeta' and [radio station] Ekho Moskvy shows is that they are very happy for liberals to talk to liberals. They just don't want liberals talking to anybody else. Amsterdam adds that a combination of intimidation, selective use of libel laws, cooptation, and other means has been very effective in controlling the print and broadcast media.

And there are indications that such time-proven mechanisms can be of use to the authorities in the modern media environment as well. Recent charges against blogger Savva Terentyev for allegedly "inciting hate" against police officers through his "LiveJournal" posts serve as one example. Terentyev faces a possible US$4,000 fine or up to two years in prison.

Photo sharing site Photobucket has quickly u-turned on a decision to ban pictures that show babies in nappies. The company originally removed such images from its site because they depicted "nudity", which it said threatened the safety and security of its users.

However, within hours of being contacted by CNET News.com, Monica M. Massad, the content moderation manager at Photobucket decided to republish the removed pictures.

My team has reviewed the images that were tossed in your account and it was determined that the images that were removed from your account should not have been removed. We have the images available to restore and are currently in the process of restoring them. Please accept our sincere apologies for the error, said Massad in an e-mail.

It is true that we reviewed our content moderation guidelines to make sure it was in line with Photobucket's terms of service and it made us more strict on child nudity, however, we were over-censoring in this case and are working to rectify that, she added.

The original ban started when US-based Good Mama Diapers sponsored a photo contest on Photobucket and posted hundreds of photo submissions on the site. On Wednesday, Jessica Thornton of Good Mama Diapers logged on to the site and noticed they were all gone.

Thornton e-mailed Photobucket customer support to find out what happened. She got a reply saying that the site recently changed its content moderation policies regarding images of children and that the photos violated the new policy, which prohibits content that contains nudity.

While we understand that in a family album type of setting, these images are innocent, we must remove the content because of the nudity and believe that this restriction is in the best interest of childrens' safety .. This policy applies to all accounts, public or private. We ask that you keep these images on your personal computers and not host them on Photobucket.com, the Photobucket e-mail said.

The Thai Information and Communications Technology Ministry is to ‘hack and crack' foreign websites deemed offensive to Thailand's revered institutions.

A March 15 report in Krungthep Turakij newspaper (www.bangkokbiznews.com) quoted a source at the ICT that the ministry could pursue legal proceedings only with websites registered in Thailand, and is now planning a ‘hack and crack' programme to hack offensive websites hosted abroad and delete their contents, because the legal process would take too long.

This approach may be somewhat illegal, but sometimes it might be worth it, if [the websites] are really unacceptable, the source said.

One website registered abroad has been found to advertise merchandise including calendars, dolls, bags, hats, glasses, watches, trousers and underwear, all with a logo of the Buddha meditating on a lotus, with the face of a dog. It was reported to have upset some Buddhists.

The Technology Centre has found that the website has its server in California, USA, and the centre has twice asked the ICT Ministry in writing to shut down the website, but it is still online. The centre has also asked the Foreign Ministry's Information Department to address the problem through diplomatic means.

If within one month the problem is still not solved, I will ask for cooperation from ‘internet cop' Pol Col Yanapol Yangyuen, Commander of Office of Technology and Information Cases under the Department of Special Investigation, to shut it down, said Booncherd. He added that his centre has cooperated with relevant agencies in shutting down 5 similar websites which made commercial use of Buddhist symbols.

Iran has banned nine lifestyle and cinema magazines for publishing pictures of "corrupt" foreign film stars and details about their "decadent" private lives, the student ISNA news agency said.

The publications were banned by the press commission watchdog for publishing photographs of corrupt foreign artists and details about their decadent lives.

The most significant magazines banned are Donya-ye Tasvir (World of the Image), Sobh-e Zendegi (Morning of Life), Talash (Effort) and Haft (Seven). The commission also gave warnings to 13 other publications.

Such magazines regularly print articles and pictures of foreign film stars, as well as of Iranian actresses in the kinds of loose headscarves and tight-fitting clothes that are frowned upon by the Islamic authorities.

The latest issue of Donya-ye Tasvir carried articles about several Hollywood female stars including Naomi Watts, Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman, all accompanied by pictures.

In Tehran there are only a handful of cinemas which offer a selective screening of foreign movies, which are subject to heavy censorship of any scenes where actresses are scantly dressed.

People all over China are Twittering that Youtube is blocked. A quick ping through a network utility does show 100% packet loss, indicating that a block is likely in effect:

There were some videos uploaded to Youtube already about the demonstrations in Tibet, but this block will definitely throw a wrench anyone's plans to upload more. Chinese video sharing sites, which have been told to censor this kind of sensitive content, are all still up and running.

See full article from FACT Thai

Turkey has again blocked access to the popular video-sharing Web site YouTube in response to a video clip deemed insulting to the country’s revered founding father, state-run media said.

A court in the capital of Ankara ordered the ban at the request of a prosecutor who had argued the clip was disrespectful to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who died seven decades ago, the Anatolia news agency said.

It was not clear how long the ban would last.

HRinfo has denounced decisions announced by the Jordanian Ministry of the Interior increasing restrictions on Internet cafés in Jordan by installing cameras to monitor users of these cafés. HRinfo also emphasized that these procedures are a real retreat from freedom to use the Internet and the right to exchange information.

The Jordanian Ministry of the Interior has recently issued new instructions for monitoring Internet cafés, which are widespread throughout Jordanian cities, obliging Internet café owners to install cameras at the front of their businesses in order to facilitate identification of Internet users.

In addition to the cameras, HRinfo notes that the new security measures oblige Internet café owners to register the users' personal data such as their names, telephone numbers and time of use, as well as the IP number of the café and data on the websites explored by the users.

The newly-announced policies on organizing the work of internet cafés also include obliging internet cafés owners to install censorship programs to prevent access to websites containing pornographic material, or those offending religious beliefs or promoting the use of drugs or tobacco.

HRinfo denounces these decisions, which violate the right to exchange information and the privacy of Internet users, and calls on the Jordanian government to reconsider such arbitrary decisions which would lead Jordan to join the ranks of those countries which are hostile to freedom of access to Internet.

Reporters Without Borders is making a new version of its Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents available to bloggers.

The handbook offers practical advice and techniques on how to create a blog, make entries and get the blog to show up in search engine results. It gives clear explanations about blogging for all those whose online freedom of expression is subject to restrictions, and it shows how to sidestep the censorship measures imposed by certain governments, with a practical example that demonstrates the use of the censorship circumvention software Tor.

The leaders of authoritarian countries are becoming more and suspicious of bloggers, these men and women who, although not journalists, publish news and information online and who, worse still, often tackle subjects the so-called traditional media dare not cover. In some countries, blogs have become an important new source of news. It is to protect this source that Reporters Without Borders has updated its handbook.

India's Supreme Court has described a legal case in which Hollywood actor Richard Gere is accused of obscene behaviour as "frivolous".

The court judge said this is the end of the matter and that Gere was free to enter India.

Last year, arrest warrants were issued for Gere after he embraced and kissed Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty during a public appearance. Kissing in public is widely considered taboo in India.

In 2007, a court in the western state of Rajasthan ordered the arrest of Gere for sweeping Shetty into his arms at an Aids awareness event in Delhi.

Gere plans to visit India soon and his lawyer had appealed to the court to stop the arrest warrants against him.

The judges said the court believed that such complaints (against celebrities) were "frivolous" and filed for "cheap publicity". The complainants have brought a bad name to the country, the court said.

Kundiawa police have stopped people showing movies in town to prevent children from seeing explicit sexual scenes, violence and criminal activities and hearing obscene words on Television shows.

The move by police is also to stop children from missing classes after lunch as a result of watching movies.

Provincial police commander Chief Insp Joseph Tondop told The National that he personally visited all the movie houses in town to advise operators against showing movies during the day and also at night.

Tondop said operators ignored the labelling on the cassettes or CDs