21 Nov 2010 | Asia and Pacific, China
Wangyi09’s twitter feed stops abruptly at 7:45AM on October 28. According to human rights groups, the Chinese rights activist, whose real name is Cheng Jianping, was detained later that day for a satirical tweet she had posted on October 17 which mocked anti-Japanese protesters by urging them to destroy the Japanese pavilion at the Shanghai Expo. Her husband-to-be, Hua Chunhui, also a rights activist, said the day she was grabbed by police was to have been their wedding day. (more…)
17 Nov 2010 | Uncategorized
Following last summer’s decriminalisation of gay sex in India, the transition from legalisation to widespread acceptance has not been seamless. Bollywood has tackled this taboo directly with last week’s release of Dunno Y Na Jaane Kyun. It is the first Indian film to show a gay kiss, and its director claims that it is also the first to offer a realistic perspective of a homosexual relationship.
The crew started filming last year following June’s welcome ruling and the first draft arrived in the editing room seven months ago. The opposition that has met the film’s director, Sanjay Sharma, and leading man Kapil Sharma, may reflect the fact that full decriminalisation of homosexuality still relies on the judgement passing through the Supreme Court.
Firstly, despite the director’s expectation that his film would escape significant sanitisation, the censors were quick to swoop. Kapil Sharma has said, “the censor board has cut 50 per cent of the kissing and love-making scenes between me and my screen-partner. They’ve also cut the shots of back nudity. Just a glimpse of the butt is there.”
There have also been expressions of regret and self-censorship amongst some of the cast, although Sharma insists playing gay was worth it. Yuvraaj Parasher who plays Kapil’s gay lover has been ostracised and disowned by his family, and some cast members seem to have distanced themselves from the project during the build up to its release.
The BJP, the ever outraged right wing Hindu nationalist party, have been making their fury known. Members of its zealous youth wing have laid siege to Sharma’s house and he has received numerous threats from individuals and organisations. In October, these threats caused a delay in the film’s release date.
And it transpires that a number of cinemas have got cold feet about screening the film. On Monday, several multiplexes in Mumbai announced they will not be showing it because the film is not compatible with the values of the family audiences they wish to attract.
Although the acting has not met with universally positive reaction, the film is not without its supporters in India, especially amongst gay activists. It is due to be released in Britain next year.
11 Nov 2010 | Uncategorized
A long time ago, when I worked for a glossy magazine, I was asked to try a Rodial product in order to tackle my “problem area”. Tummy Tuck –– 100 quid for 125 ml –– claims it is “clinically proven to reduce the abdominal area by up to 2 centimetres in 8 weeks.” I thought it was total bollocks but I doubt I even hinted at that in print.
One thing you work out early on in magazines is that you don’t criticise advertisers. That’s why the big brands feature so prominantly in most fashion magazines. Advertising in magazines ensures a quid pro quo of favourable coverage.
So I was interested to hear about Rodial’s latest exploits:
One of Britain’s leading consultant plastic surgeons has been threatened with libel action by the manufacturer of a £125 ‘Boob Job’ cream for speaking out about her doubts of its effectiveness. Dr Dalia Nield of The London Clinic was quoted in an article in the Daily Mail on 1st October 2010 saying that it was ‘highly unlikely’ the ‘Boob Job’ cream would increase a woman’s breast size. The manufacturer, Rodial Limited had claimed that the cream, reported to be a favourite of Scarlett Johansson, can increase breast size by 2.5cm. Dr Nield said the company had not provided a full analysis of tests on the cream and that if its claims that fat cells moved around the body were true it could be potentially dangerous. Rodial Limited has threatened Dr Nield with libel action. Dr Nield stands by her comments.
The libel campaign brings together stange bedfellows: Claire Coleman a freelance journalist who occaisionally covers a beauty beat for Grazia, Sunday Times Style and the Daily Mail tweeted an appeal for fellow beauty journalists to sign the Libel Reform petition pointing out the case is going the make it harder to get expert comment for features.
Blogging about the case she said “This isn’t just about one doctor, one cream, and one litigious company, it’s about big brands trying to control what you hear about them, and it’s worryingly Orwellian.”
Former Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris commented: “This sort of libel threat is an unacceptable form of bullying of clinicians and researchers on a matter where the public interest demands the maximum possible scientific and media debate, and it is why radical libel reform is both vital and urgent. The cases we hear about — where doctors and scientists, and the newspaper or journal, stand up to the threat of costly and uncertain court action – are only the tip of the iceberg because most will simply be forced to retreat in the face of a libel suit.”
In the beauty industry, where its already hard to get the truth, this case is going to make it even harder.
8 Nov 2010 | Uncategorized
Morocco’s on-again off-again ban on the Al Jazeera satellite news channel is apparently on again. The kingdom is famously touchy about certain issues — last year it banned a magazine for publishing an opinion poll about King Mohammed II’s popularity. The poll actually showed a 91 per cent approval rating, but the palace felt it was disrespectful to even ask the question.
This time around, there doesn’t seem to be one specific incident that prompted the latest Al Jazeera ban. Communications minister Khalid Naciri, in announcing the ban, said the channel’s editorial line, “systematically tarnishes Morocco’s image,” whatever that means, and accused it of “transmitting a caricature of Moroccan reality.”
One news report quoted an anonymous Moroccan government official as saying the regime was reacting “to the way Al Jazeera handles the issues of Islamists and Western Sahara.” The 2003 Casablanca bombings prompted a sweeping crackdown on fundamentalist Muslim groups that continues to this day. Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony, was annexed by Morocco in the mid-70s and remains home to a vibrant separatist movement.
Turkey has once again banned YouTube after the site refused to remove footage linked to a political sex scandal. Access to the site had already been blocked since 2008 over videos that made fun of Turkey’s venerated founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. That ban was lifted just last week, but within days a new 30-month ban was levied over a video showing the country’s main opposition leader Deniz Baykal in a romantic hotel room tryst with a female staffer. Baykal resigned in May over the scandal. Here’s a link to a (safe for work) excerpt from the video in question.
From the self-censorship file, Egypt’s most prominent modern novelist, Alaa Aswany, is working to PREVENT one of his books from being made available in Hebrew. An Israeli research center translated The Yacoubian Building (an excellent read by the way) against Aswany’s will in the interest, they said, of “expanding cultural awareness”. Aswany, like many Egyptian writers and intellectuals, wants no part of what he considers “normalisation” with Israel until there’s a fair resolution to the Palestinian issue. Aswany, by the way, recently announced he was giving up writing his regular column in the independent daily Al-Shorouk. The reason: the government, as part of its ongoing press crackdown, was raiding and shutting down unrelated businesses owned by Shorouk owner Ibrahim Al-Muallem to pressure him to tone down criticisms by Aswany and other columnists. Also worth reading is the Guardian’s always perceptive Brian Whitaker, here he points out one of the ways Egypt’s government controls information: by monopolising statistics.
In Libya, the government has shut down the weekly Oea newspaper. Coverage of the incident in a Qatari newspaper (in Arabic here) pins the ban to a recent editorial that, “claimed that the government had failed to handle the problem of corruption”. The twist: the paper is partially controlled by Said Al-Islam Qaddhafi, son of the Libya’s leader Col. Muammar Qaddhafi. The paper was already banned for six months earlier this year and only resumed normal publication in July.
Courtesy of the +972 blog, here’s a useful guide to the political line of the major Israeli newspapers, for those seeking to unravel the often bewildering complexities of Israeli politics.
In Lebanon, the country’s General Security office censored a five-minute scene from a recent play. The scene in question dealt a little too flippantly with Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. The play’s Shia writers claim they meant no disrespect to Nasrallah and say they are mystified by the decision. Lebanon is known as a bastion of comparative liberalism in the Middle East, but the General Security office in the Ministry of Interior still has broad powers to ban works of art that could upset the country’s delicate political sensitivities.
