Musician M.I.A‘s video for her new single Born Free has been banned from Youtube just days after it was released. The controversial video, directed by Romain Gavras, shows American police rounding redheads, and subjecting them to brutal violence. Critics have suggested the explicit video is a publicity stunt for M.I.A and the director, whose debut feature film Redheads, is based on the same premise.
The newly elected President of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa, appointed Mervyn Silva as the deputy minister for media and information on Friday. Silva is a politician with a notorious reputation for physically and verbally attacking journalists and other members of the press, including one incident in December 2008 where he and a large group of men stormed a television station and assaulted its news director. The appointment angered Reporters sans frontières, it asked “In what country do you appoint an arsonist to put out fires?”
An amendment to laws on guarding state secrets could force communication providers to cooperate with the country’s security apparatus over the leaking or distribution of state secrets. Telecom operators and internet service providers will have to ‘detect, report and delete’ information about such secrets. This could force providers to copy the example of Yahoo. The company famously supplied the Chinese government with the private details of journalist Shi Tao after he leaked sensitive documents in 2007. Tao was arrested.
International human rights monitors are to investigate the murders of journalists in Honduras. Since the beginning of March, seven reporters have been shot dead in the country. A delegation from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will travel to Honduras in May to determine whether the murders were related to their work. There have been suggestions that the killings may be connected to organised crime in the country.