5 Apr 2011 | Americas, Mexico
The 1962 film Santoy las Mujeres Vampiro (Santo and the Vampire Women) was due to be screened for the first time last week at Mexico’s Guadalajara Film Festiva. Unfortunately, one wrestler’s relatives intervened and got the film pulled from the festival. Morality was cited as the reason for its removal. El Santo was an iconic wrestler known for wearing a silver cloth mask with his leotard and cape. He never showed his face in public. According to his son, who is now also a silver masked wrestler known as El Hijo del Santo (the Son of El Santo), his father never agreed to have the movie shown in Mexico because the vampire women appear topless. He said that it violated all forms of decorum.
The film was a classic “B” movie, which was made in Mexico for foreign audiences. The story is about a professor who recruits a professional wrestler to protect his daughter from vampires who want to kidnap her and marry her off to the devil. The movie was directed by Alfonso Corona Blake , who directed 27 Mexican films in the 1950s and 1960s.
El Santo performed from 1942, when he adopted his stage name, until 1984. He was one of the most famous wrestlers in Latin America. Mexican wrestling, called Lucha Libre, is acrobatic and more dramatic than the sport practised in the United States. Traditionally a lower middle class sport, wrestling has begun to attract more sophisticated fans in recent years. The most famous wrestler today is Mistico, a short nimble wrestler who also wears a mask and can do acrobatic turns like a circus performer. He is now scheduled to begin wrestling in the United States under the World Wrestling Entertainment brand.
5 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
The arrest, on suspicion of conspiracy to intercept voicemails, of the chief reporter and the former news editor of the News of the World occurred, with a certain elegance, on one of those days when the press gathers to congratulate itself at a “glittering gala dinner”.
The annual press awards of the Society of Editors even held out the prospect of a run-off for the top prize involving both the News of the World and its nemesis, the Guardian.
Among the obvious questions to be aired among the guests — many of whom have been insisting for years, with a most unjournalistic scepticism, that the phone hacking story would never go anywhere — was how the press might report this interesting and important legal development.
After all, the Sun, the Mirror, the Star, the Express and the Mail have all tried their best to keep the hacking story from their readers ever since it first broke in 2006. And when other papers have reported the affair — as the Guardian, the FT and the Independent all have — they have been dismissed as misguided or (hah!) politically motivated.
Now, it must be said, with people under arrest, tabloid editors have the option of abiding closely by the contempt of court restrictions — restrictions which when it suits them they so often interpret in the most flexible manner. So we are set to witness a rare example of the press glimpsing what it might be like to be its own victim, and acting accordingly.
I’m not about to break the contempt law here either, but it is clear by now that those restrictions alone will not be enough to keep the scandal, in its widest sense, under wraps. The same day, after all, saw a remarkable new twist in the dispute between the Metropolitan Police and the Director of Public Prosecutions over — essentially — who was to blame for prematurely burying the hacking affair in 2007. The DPP, Kier Starmer, released a long and detailed letter which appeared to contradict directly the claims on this point of Acting Deputy Commissioner John Yates.
As if that were not enough, the Met also appears to be heading towards an awkward libel trial over its assertion that a solicitor, Mark Lewis, had wrongly attributed to a police officer a claim that there may have been 6,000 phone hacking victims.
And perhaps most sensationally, the private legal actions for breach of privacy against the News of the World by the likes of Sienna Miller and Steve Coogan are not only growing in number, but are moving forward in a way that surely should alarm Rupert Murdoch’s London henchmen. All such cases are now to be dealt with by one judge, Mr Justice Vos, and he has thus far shown little sympathy for the newspaper.
In interim rulings last month Vos appeared to sweep aside a number of key points in the defence offered by the News of the World. To the suggestion that there was no concrete evidence to show private investigator Glenn Muclaire actually hacked the phones of Andy Gray (though he had accumulated all the means to do so, and had apparently tried), Vos replied that he was satisfied that “interception of Mr Gray’s voicemails was something that Mr Mulcaire was undertaking regularly”. As for the proposition that there was nothing to link the paper to these activities, the judge announced bluntly that he disagreed, and that Mulcaire was effectively a News of the World employee.
A few days ago we learned that James Murdoch was leaving London to move to the heart of his father’s empire in New York. Young James was at the helm of News International here from early 2008, so he carries the ultimate responsibility for sustaining over two years the claim that hacking was all a finished affair involving just one rogue reporter. If the time comes to hold James accountable — say, before a public inquiry — we can look forward to his return.
Listen to Brian Cathcart’s podcast on the phone hacking affair here
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London. He Tweets at @BrianCathcart
5 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
President Karzai of Afghanistan has called for the Obama administration to condemn the recent Koran-burning in Florida by Pastor Wayne Sapp. The symbolic immolation of the book led to riots that left 22 dead. Obama has obliged by describing it as an act of “extreme intolerance and bigotry”. But Karzai wants Obama to go further and “bring those responsible to justice”.
It is not clear what that would mean in the US. First Amendment free speech protection doesn’t discriminate on the basis of the content of speech short of its posing a direct threat to others. Offensive expression, including symbolic flag- or Koran-burning, is just as protected as liberal political speech-making.
To take the most famous example, the neo-Nazis who wanted to march through Skokie in Illinois in 1977, where many Holocaust survivors lived, had as much right to express their views as anyone else. Controversially, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sprang to the their defence.
In that case the marchers, having secured their free speech rights in court, were persuaded to protest elsewhere. Only last year Pastor Terry Jones also backed down from this threat to burn Korans on the 9/11 anniversary, though most experts agreed that if he had gone ahead with the burning on private property he would have been unlikely to have committed any crime.
But sometimes offensive protestors follow through and make their point as threatened in a way that triggers strong reactions. In the case of Pastor Wayne Sapp, that’s what happened, and with fatal consequences thousands of miles away in Afghanistan, where another group of intolerant people took violent and utterly inexcusable “revenge” on 22 people.
Free speech issues are rarely straightforward. Some people would like to think they are, but they aren’t. The key question is always where a society wants to draw the line, not whether there should be a line at all. But I believe strongly that explosive reactions on the part of the offended shouldn’t determine where that line is drawn.
Such a reaction would give the power to circumscribe the limits of everyone’s freedom to those who have the angriest voices, and are swiftest to resort to violence. Instead we need to protect the freedom to criticise religion and religions, both in words and symbolic actions, as a fundamental right.
Put simply, no idea or object should be sacrosanct from criticism or ridicule, and we should be clear that we condemn violence far more than we condemn the expression of offensive views. We do not want to go back to the Dark Ages of blasphemy laws, or modern equivalents of them.
5 Apr 2011 | Middle East and North Africa, News and features
Juliano Mer-Khamis used theatre to bring change to Jenin’s refugee camp. But he faced constant intimidation and threats. Daniella Peled reports
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