Zimbabwe’s ministry of Media, Information and Publicity has ordered the state-controlled Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) and public newspapers to stop reporting on ministers from the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T), until Morgan Tsvangirai and his party reverse its decision to withdraw contact with ZANU PF, led by President Robert Mugabe.
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This is a guest post by Sarah El-Richani
Although Beirut is generally regarded as an oasis of freedom in a largely repressed region, the continuing censorship of the arts there is threatening to tarnish this image. While the press and TV, particularly after the Syrian withdrawal in 2005, report freely, an antiquated prior-censorship tradition has left the arts to the mercy of the gendarmes.
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This is a guest post by Orlando Figes
It is hard to get a firm handle on the latest development in the Kremlin’s “history wars” — its militant campaign to censor all but the most positive assessments of the Stalin period. The arrest of Mikhail Suprun, a history professor in Arkhangel’sk, for collecting personal data on German POWs and Soviet Germans in the Gulags of the Arctic North is unprecedented and, on the face of it, so extreme and absurd that there may be something more to it than meets the eye. But it is an alarming development. For two reasons.
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Three lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual sites have been blocked by the Turkish telecommunications authority. The sites were deemed to incite or encourage suicide, child abuse, drug-use and obscenity. Galibe.com, haydigayri.com and shemaleturk.com, which have a combined membership of 225,000, argue that they were given no advanced warning of the action.
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