25 Jan 2011 | Uncategorized
Farewell Andy Gray, the former Scotland international with a penchant for dull jokes about women and the offside rule.
Gray has been sacked by Sky Sports after videos of him emerged on the Internet speaking off air: more than once, apparently, Gray had questioned assistant referee Sian Massey’s understanding of the offside rule.
After journalist James MacIntyre unearthed footage of Gray making a slightly off colour-joke today, the writing was on the wall for the former Everton star.
The reaction seems, so far, to be pretty unsympathetic. But one can’t help feeling queasy about the dismissal. Were Gray’s comments made on air? No. Has anyone at Sky Sports ever complained to human resources about Gray before? We haven’t been told. Will Richard Keys and others who took part in these conversations also be sacked? We’ll see.
But at the moment, Gray looks like a victim of Sky brand management. More worryingly, this adds to a culture where the internet has moved from a tool for popular free expression to a tool of citizen surveillance. Be careful what you say: it’ll probably end up on YouTube.
21 Dec 2010 | Americas, Mexico
The fight between the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico and liberal sectors of society continues.
A book “The Church against Mexico,” penned by 21 leading academics and writers hit the bookstores in early December after it was presented at the International Book Fair in Guadalajara.
According to the book, the church continues to attempt to destroy the secularism of Mexico. Most of the book authors live and work in Mexico City, where the leftist government of Mayor Marcelo Ebrard has promoted gay marriage and the adoption of children by gay couples, angering the conservative sectors of the Mexican Catholic church.
The book was the latest salvo from those liberal sectors. The book includes political cartoons showing how the power of the Catholic Church has dominated in Mexico for the last five centuries. Some of the book collaborations include cartoons showing the alleged links between the church and drug traffickers. Recently it was found that top leaders of the drug cartel Los Zetas had financed the building of one church in Pachuca, Hidalgo, a city located an hour from Mexico City.
The problema is that Mexico is still a very religious country, and the fight between liberal and conservative sectors over such policies as gay rights and abortion will only continue to get hotter. After the publication of “The Church Against Mexico”, the church replied through the Bishop of San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, Felipe Arizmendi, who said the church not only needed freedom of religion but also freedom of expression, so the church could defend its policies and beliefs.
Bishop Arizmendi also said if the church was against Mexico, “would the poor and the suffering turn to the church for comfort?” Bishop Arizmendi made headlines earlier this year, when he said that pedophile priests were “execrable” or scandalous, but that those violations occurred a long time ago and are not occurring in today´s church. The remarks were made after a group that promotes prosecution of pedophile priests announced that there were 65 Roman Catholic priests accused of child abuse living in Mexico. and that several of them were working for the Catholic churches in the country.
19 Oct 2010 | Events
Jonathan Ross, Brian Cox, Chris Addison, Aleks Krotoski and Simon Singh celebrate ‘the age of the geek’ in a unique charity project.
Jonathan Ross in costume in his shrine of comics, toys and gadgets; Professor Brian Cox and Gia Milinovich puzzling over how to fix their toaster; TV comic Chris Addison backstage, dreaming of space travel; tech journalist Aleks Krotoski smouldering in a sea of gadgets; writer Simon Singh reading his baby son a bedtime story of particle physics…
These are among the scenes featured in the GEEK CALENDAR, where British geeks are celebrating nerdishness in all its glory. And they are doing it for a very good cause: Index on Censorship, English PEN and Sense About Science’s Libel Reform Campaign.
The launch of the GEEK CALENDAR is this Thursday 21 October at 7pm at the Free Word Centre.
Please email: [email protected] for tickets.
9 Oct 2010 | Uncategorized
If more evidence was needed of the peculiar concept of justice now playing in Tunisia’s law courts, it was laid out for all to see this week, with one persecuted journalist’s lawyers walking out in protest at the judge’s handling of his case and another reporter – jailed on similarly trumped up charges – left seriously ill by lack of care in prison.
The authorities continue to use the courts as a means of repression against journalists, as the case of journalist Mouldi Zouabi, a journalist with independent Radio Kalima demonstrated this week.
After he was physically attacked in April, police decided not to charge the attacker. Bizarrely, weeks later they chose to charge Zouabi, the victim, with “violent behavior and committing actual bodily harm” against his assailant.
The case was referred to a higher court on 6 October, and he now faces up to two years in jail. His lawyers walked out of the last hearing in protest at what they say are multiple breaches of due process. Tunisia’s politicised judiciary is being used to silence free speech by giving credence to often ludicrous charges and suspect evidence, with dire effects on both journalists and their families.
This week there were renewed concerns for another victim of Tunisia’s politicized judiciary, Fahem Boukaddous, jailed for reporting public demonstrations against unemployment and corruption in the mining town of Gafsa in 2008.
Boukaddous, whose health has sharply deteriorated in prison, is serving a four year jail term following his conviction in March for “forming a criminal association liable to attack persons”.
“We are very concerned about Boukaddous who needs urgent medical treatment unavailable to him in prison,” said Aidan White, International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) General Secretary. “Boukaddous has already been denied his freedom as punishment for his independent journalism. Without immediate action his long term health is under threat.”
The International Freedom of Expression Exchange Tunisia Monitoring Group (IFEX-TMG), a coalition of 20 IFEX members, currently chaired by Index on Censorship, has raised repeated concerns about the lack of independence shown by Tunisia’s magistrates and the abuse of the system to target journalists like Mouldi and Boukaddous.
A recent mission by the IFEX-TMG to Tunisia concluded that for nearly a decade the Tunisian state has worked to prevent the establishment of an impartial and independent judiciary, “for the purposes of reinforcing its grip on public dialogue and limiting peaceful critical discourse”.
The state strategy came out in the open in July 2001, when Judge Mokhtar Yahyaoui called on the Tunisian president, in his capacity as Chair of the Superior Council of Magistrates, to recognise that obstructions to an independent judiciary were damaging freedom of expression and democracy in Tunisia.
The independent Tunisian Association of Magistrates (AMT) took a similar line, but when it called for a reform of the law to tackle the issue of judicial independence, its elected nine-member Board, including three women magistrates, were deposed and some reassigned against their will to new courts far away from their homes in Tunis.
The IFEX-TMG group has called on Tunis to cease political interference in the work of the Superior Council of Magistrates, supposed to impartially and independently run the country’s judicial system.
