8 Jan 2010 | Index Index, minipost, News, Uncategorized
Film-maker Dhondup Wangchen has been jailed for six years in China for making a documentary which featured the unvarnished political views of Tibetans.
In his film, Leaving Fear Behind, Wangchen interviewed 108 ordinary Tibetans giving them the chance to speak out about the country’s political situation.
Wangchen, 35, was sentenced in December but his film company claim that he was unable to file an appeal – the appeal period expired yesterday – because he was denied access to his lawyer. Read more here or here
8 Jan 2010 | Uncategorized
Oliver Kamm responds to my post on Anjem Choudary’s proposed march through Wootton Bassett, where I asked if previous attempts to stop provocative processions, such as Oswald Mosley’s attempt to march through Cable Street, were wrong:
Yes, those who tried to stop the British Union of Fascists from marching in the East End in October 1936 were wrong. The BUF had a democratic right to march in peacetime, and the attempt to stop them did them a power of good. Mosley was looking for a way to call it off anyway, so that he could get to Berlin and secretly marry Diana Mitford Guinness in Goebbels’s drawing room (which he managed to do two days later). Support for Mosley in the East End increased after the Battle of Cable Street, as did antisemitic violence. Thugs attacked Jews and their properties, in the so-called Pogrom of Mile End, a week later.
In the end, despite an appalling failure among leaders of the main parties in the 1930s (Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, Herbert Samuel and the ineffably foolish George Lansbury) to recognise the threat from the dictators, it was democratic politics that defeated Mosley and secured economic recovery, not opposition on the streets. When he was interned in 1940, Mosley was a permanently discredited figure.
Read the full post here
7 Jan 2010 | Uncategorized
Over at Skepchick, Rebecca Watson has been asking people who wrote to their MPs about libel reform to let her know what responses they got.
You can read the results here. if you’ve received a reply from your MP, let Rebecca know.
7 Jan 2010 | Index Index, Middle East and North Africa, minipost, News, Uncategorized
Yemeni security forces yesterday arrested Hisham Bushraheel, editor of the independent daily Al-Ayyam, along with his son Hani in the souther city of Aden. Acting on the orders of the prosecutor’s office, security forces entered the newspaper’s office and took both men into custody, flying them out to the capital Sana’a the same day. These arrests come on the back of the detention of another of Hisham Bushraheel’s sons, Mohammed, who has been in custody since Monday, when security forces began their seige of the newspaper’s offices.
Meanwhile, journalists from various media companies throughout Yemen had staged a sit-in protest in the Al-Ayyam compund in protest at the daily’s suspension since May 2009. Army and police forces had allegedly used live ammunition to quell increasingly vocal protests, and the Committee to Protect Journalists reported that two people were indeed killed along with nine injured. Authorities claimed the shots came from protestors and Al-Ayyam security guards, something the newspaper and it’s lawyer, Mohammed al-Amrawi, vociferously deny.
Read more here and here
