The decision by a Riverside County school district to pull dictionaries from school shelves because it includes the term oral sex has been generating national debate.

The Menifee Union School District took the action last week after a parent complained about the Merriam-Webster's 10th edition

This is the definition: Main Entry: oral sex Function: noun Date: 1973 : oral stimulation of the genital.

It's just not age-appropriate, school spokeswoman Betti Cadmus told the Press-Enterprise. It's hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we'll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature.

The district is predictably getting some heat

Update: Nutters Blown Away

31st January 2010. Based on article from latimes.com

A committee of parents, teachers and administrators has now decided to return the dictionaries to the fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms at Oak Meadows Elementary School just days after they were removed over complaints about entries detailing references to various types of oral sex.

The dictionary will go back to the classroom but the parents will be given the option to determine if they want their kids to have access to that dictionary, said Betti Cadmus, a spokeswoman for the Menifee Union School District in southwest Riverside County. Students will take permission slips home and parents who don't want them to use Webster's 10th Collegiate Edition can opt for alternative dictionaries.

Setting the stage for a showdown over free speech rights, a Minnesota resident  plans to fight St. Cloud officials' decision to fine him for posting offensive anti-Muslim cartoons last month.

The city attorney's office last week cited Sidney Allen Elyea with violating a city ordinance that prohibits posting written materials on utility poles.

Elyea has admitted posting the cartoons, telling police he did so to 'educate' city residents about Islam, said his attorney, Ryan Garry. The cartoons depicted images such as Mohammed engaged in bestiality and sodomy, as well as an Islamic crescent with a swastika inside it. They were posted in front of a mosque and a Somali-owned store.

The city's complaint states that the cartoons were placed in high-pedestrian traffic areas and were placed to target local Muslim citizens. The posters were designed to harass, and they had that effect.

Although some local residents pushed for Elyea to face criminal charges, prosecutors in Stearns and Benton counties declined to do so, saying the cartoons had to be considered free speech.

Garry agreed with Stearns County Attorney Janelle Kendall's description of the case as classic First Amendment issue. Garry said the city's ordinance is overly broad, too vague and amounts to discriminatory enforcement.

In an e-mail, Garry wrote, the government is not punishing my client for posting a piece of paper to a telephone pole, but rather punishing him for offering an opinion on a religious and political issue that they disapprove of and find offensive. I am not defending the content of my client's political and religious speech. However, the government should know that I will vigorously fight this case to the end to defend his right to say it.

Bob Pisano, the former head of the Screen Actors Guild, has been named interim chief executive of the Motion Picture Assn. of America as Dan Glickman exits his role five months sooner than expected.

The MPAA announced that Glickman was leaving April 1 to become president of Refugees International, an advocacy group that deals with refugee crises.

Our industry has been well served by Dan's efforts and advocacy worldwide, and we appreciate the job he has done on our behalf. He is a great humanitarian and will be very effective in his new role, said Bob Iger, chief executive of Walt Disney Co.

Pisano has been the MPAA's president and chief operating officer, based in Los Angeles, since 2005. Pisano takes over as interim CEO immediately, though Glickman will remain on the job. Pisano has been mentioned as a possible permanent replacement for Glickman. The MPAA said he would serve as its interim chief while the search continues for Glickman's replacement.

Researchers claim that the main protagonists of Hollywood movies often undermine accident prevention advice given to children.

Half the scenes examined in movies aimed at children showed unsafe practices including not wearing seat belts, breaking the green cross code and failing to wear helmets on bikes.

The mistakes could give children a false sense of safety they claim which could lead to bad habits and encourage dangerous activity.

Dr Jon Eric Tongren, the lead researcher at America's Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said the industry was improving but had a long way to go: The entertainment industry has improved the depiction of selected safety practices and PG-rated movies. However, approximately one half of scenes depict unsafe practices and the consequences of these behaviours are rarely shown.

Dr Tongren picked out two examples to highlight the problem.

In the 2003 Christmas movie Elf, the main character played by actor Will Ferrell gets knocked down by a New York City taxi while crossing the street. He bounces back up without a scratch – which Dr Tongren said gave a false view of what happens.

And in the 2005 comedy Yours, Mine and Ours, about a family with 18 kids, the children are wearing life jackets during a boat trip — but not the parents played by Dennis Quaid and Rene Russo.

The two films were among 67 popular movies from 2003 to 2007 examined in the study including Harry Potter. From those movies, the researchers found 958 scenes involving potential injury-prevention practices. 55% of the scenes involved children. Twenty-two scenes involved either a fall or a crash, but just three of those scenes resulted in an injury

The study, published in the journal, Paediatrics, found 44% of people in motor vehicles failed to wear seat belts; 65% of pedestrians did not cross at zebra crossings, 75% of cyclists failed to wear a helmet and 25% of boaters failed to wear life vests.

The DoD (US Department of Defense) claims unconvincingly that the new policy is necessary to conserve bandwidth but the new policy is simply censorship effectively preventing soldiers from presenting graphic images of the war or seeing disturbing images that may upend morale.

The situation both in Iraq and in Afghanistan is a lot more involved than mainstream media can fathom. And, if it could fathom what is going on, it would not be allowed to report it for obvious reasons, as this would further undermine the morale of the Western world. Troops and their families at home used to be able to at least write emails to each other via blog spots and troops were also allowed to access certain parts of the internet. This is now no longer possible.

Active duty personnel are no longer able to post material themselves or view what has been put online. The Defense Department ban on popular Web sites — including YouTube, MySpace, and several others — will only apply to Defense Department computers and networks, not to PCs that connect to personal ISPs through the DoD network; however, in most theaters of operation, Defense Department computers are the only ones available to service personnel.

China said remarks made by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticizing China's censorship of the Internet were unjustified and damaged bilateral ties.

In a speech in Washington, Clinton called on U.S. technology companies to resist censorship of the Internet and said perpetrators of cyber attacks such as those who targeted Google Inc. must face consequences. Clinton also said China's Internet controls could harm the Asian nation's development.

We are firmly opposed to these words and deeds which are against the facts and damage Sino-U.S. relations, Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said in a Chinese-language statement posted on the ministry's Web site. We urge the U.S. side to respect facts and stop using the issue of so-called Internet freedom to make unjustified attacks on China.

Clinton's long-planned address on Internet freedom laid out the Obama administration's view of an uncensored global Internet where everyone has access to the same information, and governments and corporations don't block knowledge or steal intellectual property.

Countries or individuals that engage in cyber attacks should face consequences and international condemnation, Clinton said. In an interconnected world, an attack on one nation's network can be an attack on all.

Clinton compared firewalls that governments in China, Uzbekistan, Tunisia and elsewhere have erected to keep out information to the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain that divided the West and the Soviet Union's sphere of influence during the Cold War.

Virtual walls are cropping up in place of visible walls, she said. With the spread of these restrictive practices, a new information curtain is descending across much of the world.

Google issued a statement praising Clinton's remarks. The company said it believes in unfettered access to information and will continue work with governments, human rights organizations and bloggers to promote free expression.

Google announced in their Official Google Blog:

Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident--albeit a significant one--was something quite different.

First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses--including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors--have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.

Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers.

We have already used information gained from this attack to make infrastructure and architectural improvements that enhance security for Google and for our users. In terms of individual users, we would advise people to deploy reputable anti-virus and anti-spyware programs on their computers, to install patches for their operating systems and to update their web browsers. Always be cautious when clicking on links appearing in instant messages and emails, or when asked to share personal information like passwords online. You can read more here about our cyber-security recommendations. People wanting to learn more about these kinds of attacks can read this U.S. government report (PDF), Nart Villeneuve's blog and this presentation on the GhostNet spying incident.

We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China's economic reform programs and its citizens' entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.

Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer

Update: Tank Man finally appears on Chinese Google

17th January 2010. Based on article from canadafreepress.com

Users on Google.cn's image search can now see the iconic picture of Tank Man, among other images from the massacre in the Beijing square in 1989.

Students and intellectuals protested communist rule for seven weeks in the square in 1989 in the face of a brutal security crackdown. Roughly 100,000 people are believed to have taken part in the protests - with up to 3,000 of those killed during the demonstrations.

Tank Man: One of the most iconic images of the Tiananmen Square massacre, that of a man standing alone and defenceless in a face off against four tanks, now appears on Google.cn

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation plans to file a complaint with three Florida citizens to the state Department of Health over the lack of use of condoms in adult film productions.

Michael Weinstein, president of the AHF, said the organization has decided to ramp up its efforts beyond California, where the bulk of porn is shot: In light of the tremendous growth of adult film production in Florida, particularly in Miami and in response to repeated threats from California producers who say they will leave California and take their productions — and jobs — to other states including Florida, AHF decided to expand our adult film worker safety campaign to include Florida.

This is why we are filing 'sanitary nuisance' complaints with Florida health officials — to press for the enforcement health statutes which we believe should require the use of condoms in all adult films produced in Florida.

Florida does not have designated occupational safety and health divisions like California, Weinstein noted.

Weinstein said that AHF will back its Miami complaints with evidence from 10 adult DVDs and streamed online videos filmed or produced in the Miami area in which many performers do not wear condoms. Two of the films cited include South Beach Cruisin' No. 2, a double-DVD film by Josh Stone Productions, and Barely Legal: Miami Girls, produced by Hustler Video.

James Cameron has generously prepared a little something special for the eager movie fans that watch his latest blockbuster, Avatar when it comes out on DVD.

Apparently, there is going to be an extended version of the scene in which human Jake Sully in his Na'vi body and the chief's daughter Neytiri have sex. The Na'vi are the native people of the planet Pandora.

While Jake and Neytiri's romantic coupling is alluded to in the theatrical release, the extended scene is said to be more graphic.

The scene was left out of the theatrical release so that the film could maintain its PG-13 rating.