Americas Censorship News

A few easily offended Argentines got wound up by a joke during the filming a Top Gear special.

Locals took offence at the H982 FKL number plate on a Porsche driven by Jeremy Clarkson, believing it was a reference to the 1982 Falklands conflict.

Argentina's ambassador to the UK, Alicia Castro, complained about the joke but the complaint was turned down by the BBC. Now she has resumed her torade against the joke by writing to the BBC Trust expressing discontent with how the number plate fiasco was handled. She claimed Clarkson's behaviour fell well below BBC's editorial values and standards and called for a fresh investigation.

In an interview with the Radio Times Richard Hammond said:

In society as a whole, we love to be offended and have a scapegoat. But at Top Gear we're the first to put our hands up and say we pitched it wrong. We have apologised. We're not in the business of genuinely upsetting or offending anyone. We're in the business of entertainment, and if it fails to entertain, it's wrong. If the public says we stepped over the line, then we have.

The firing of a longtime editorial cartoonist at El Universal newspaper for drawings critical of Venezuela's government caused a protest from former colleagues against the censorship of opposition viewpoints.

Cartoonist Rayma Suprani's firing this week reflects the country's increasing censorship, according to a statement issued by staff at the newspaper:

We're sorry that (Rayma) is no longer with us and we see (her firing) as one of the major costs that the new ownership is paying for trying to adapt to an editorial line favourable to the government.

Suprani sent a message over social media saying she was let go because her cartoons made the Maduro government uncomfortable. Her last sketch, published on Sept. 17, showed two medical charts one atop the other. One was labelled Health and tracked a patient's normal heart beat. The other was labelled Venezuela's Health and showed a flat line.

The Dominican Republic government commission that oversees public performances is banning a Sept. 13 concert by Miley Cyrus on morality grounds.

The commission said in a statement that it took the action because Cyrus often:

Undertakes acts that go against morals and customs, which are punishable by Dominican law.

Meanwhile Moralist campaigners in New Zealand claim that Miley Cyrus' show is porn and the promotion of substance abuse dressed up as pop music. The singer is set to play an Auckland show in October.

Family First's Bob McCroskrie hyped the show saying that reviews of the Bangerz tour indicated that it featured foul language, highly sexualised imagery, and normalised drug use. He suggested:

Parents should save their money, protect their children and expose them to the far more positive messages of celebrating their achievements, their personality and their uniqueness.

But Cyrus has hit out at the whingers, saying her show is empowering and brings happiness to her fans.

Religious extremists have succeeded in forcing the organizers of Myanmar's Human Rights Film Festival to withdraw the screening of a documentary about a friendship between a Buddhist and a Muslim.

The second Human Rights, Human Dignity film festival was to have featured the 20-minute documentary The Open Sky , which was singled out by extremists as part of a Muslim conspiracy to dominate Buddhist-majority Myanmar. The film made by young film students depicted the unlikely friendship of a Buddhist woman and a Muslim woman amid the communal violence which gripped the town of Meikhtila last year.

Min Htin Ko Ko Kyi, one of the organizers of the film festival, explained that The Open Sky was withdrawn from the event to avoid further conflict and hatred among the Burmese.

An article criticizing the film went viral on the Internet when the film festival opened on June 15. It accused global Muslim groups of funding the film to promote Islam. It also accused human rights groups of being biased against Buddhists.

The organizers then received threats via social media, warning that angry Burmese would destroy the movie theater and kill the director if the documentary was shown to the public. The commenters also warned that they would start another riot in protest to the event.

United States Ambassador Derek J. Mitchell, one of the sponsors of the event, condemned the online threats made against the festival organizers. This narrow, fearful mindset runs contrary to everything this festival is about. Everyone who values the meaning of this event must oppose the use of threat and intimidation to suppress speech and censor artists.

Sports brand Adidas have accepted a request from Brazil's miserable tourism board to ban two T-shirts it marketed ahead of this year's World Cup because they make jokey reference to Brazil's well established sex industry.

One shirt shows a bikini-clad woman with open arms on a sunny Rio de Janeiro beach under the word-play Looking to Score. The other has an I love Brazil heart resembling the upside-down buttocks of a woman wearing a thong bikini bottom.

The shirt designs touched a nerve in Brazil, where people often complain about foreign stereotypes of Brazilian sensuality, even when there is an underlying truth to it.

They also irked Brazil's government, which is campaigning aggressively to shed the country's reputation for sexy fun.

For the last month, Venezuela has been caught up in widespread protests against its government. The Maduro administration has responded by cracking down on what it claims as being foreign interference online. As that social unrest has escalated, the state's censorship has widened: from the removal of television stations from cable networks, to the targeted blocking of social networking services, and the announcement of new government powers to censor and monitor online. Last night, EFF received reports from Venezuelans of the shutdown of the state Internet provider in San Cristo'bal, a regional capital in the west of the country.

The censorship began early last week when the authorities removed a Columbian news network , NTN24, from Venezuelan cable, and simultaneously published a reminder that TV stations could be in violation of a law that forbids the incitement or promotion of hatred , or foment citizens' anxiety or alter public order.

Venezuelan Internet users on a variety of ISPs lost connectivity last Thursday to an IP address owned by the content delivery network, Edgecast. That address provided access to, among other services, Twitter's images at pbs.twimg.com. A separate block prevented Venezuelans from reaching the text hosting site, Pastebin .

No official explanation for the loss of access to these general purpose communication platforms was given by either the government or the ISPs (the country's largest ISP, CANTV , is government-owned).

William Castillo , the director of CONATEL , the country's media regulator, later claimed that Internet censorship was necessary to fight off online attacks. He said that his organization had blocked several links where public sites were being attacked.

Last week also saw the Venezuelan government prepare more systematic monitoring and blocking online. The country's official gazette published last Thursday the details of a new government institution , CESPPA ( The Strategic Center for Security and Protection of the Country ). Among its broad powers, CESPPA can unilaterally classify and censor any information it sees as a threat to national security. Its structure includes two new Directorates: the Directorate of Information and Technology Studies, which will be in charge of processing and analyzing information from the web ; and the Directorate for Social Research, intended to neutralize and defeat destabilization plans against the nation . The Center will also provide for a network of situation rooms to be placed in all public institutions (the state ISP, CANTV, is defined as a public institution).

When first announced in October, CESPPA was criticized for being an unconstitutional attack on press freedom. With its new details revealed, it's clear that it will also have a wide mandate to monitor and control all online communications in the defence of the state.

Even before CESPPA can flex its new powers, however, the Venezuelan government appears to have taken the most drastic step yet against its citizens' free expression online. Starting late Tuesday night, reports reached EFF of the shutdown of CANTV's Internet access in areas of San Cristobal, the capital of the state of Tachira , and one center of the protests. Venezuelan technologists have been organizing online to spread information about bypassing censorship and restoring connectivity via the Twitter account @accesolibreve .

With shifting excuses for increasingly heavy-handed Internet controls, the government is undermining its own legitimacy abroad and among its own citizens. The censorship and blackouts must end.

A few from Chile' s Jewish community are 'outraged' over a Palestinian soccer club's jersey that depicts all of Israel as part of the number one on the back of the team's football shirts.

Club Deportivo Palestino of Chile released its new jersey that includes the number "1" in the shape of Israel and the Palestinian territories, supposedly implying all of the land is Palestinian, The Associated Press reported.

The president of Chile 's Jewish Community, Gerardo Gorodischer , is demanding an apology from the club and asking Chile 's soccer association to pull the jerseys.