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Marie Henein near The Globe and Mail offices in Toronto on Sept. 24.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail

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Re Lets Try To Understand Vaccine-hesitant Health Care Workers (Nov. 12): Health care workers knowledge of medicinal failures, such as thalidomide and OxyContin, may factually justify their fears. Fine. But understanding would be incomplete while action is still required to treat a pandemic, where vaccination is the only realistic mass solution with a low probability of risk.

Consequently, subjective fears should not be a relevant criteria when the objective reality of a deadly pandemic is at play. If patients seeking health care are forced to put themselves in harms way, then I believe they are being knowingly sacrificed to the misunderstanding of medical reality by some health care workers.

I cannot morally or medically justify such a trade-off. Fear is understandable, but vaccination mandates should be an operational necessity.

Tony DAndrea Toronto

Re Poilievres Reappointment Is A Red Flag (Nov. 11): I think Pierre Poilievre is a good finance critic. He works hard to inform the public of the dire straits from a pattern of overspending by this government, particularly for working-class Canadians.

The Liberals have never met promises to reduce spending. An informed person should be reminding the public of the possible dangers.

Remember the fiscal debacle of the early 1980s, when Pierre Trudeau was prime minister and interest rates rose to over 20 per cent? A huge increase in unemployment and people losing homes was the result.

Justin Trudeau has stated that he doesnt look at monetary policy. That is scary to me.

Anne Robinson Toronto

I think Pierre Poilievre has failed to show any signs of maturing, his comments about the Bank of Canada being the latest example. Instead of thoughtful arguments and reasoned policy options, Mr. Poilievre often offers hyperpartisanship, sound bites and Twitter posts.

None of this gives me any reason to take him seriously, much less take the Conservatives seriously as a governing alternative.

Michael Kaczorowski Ottawa

Re Toronto School Board Rejects Marie Henein Book Club Event (Nov. 12): Im convinced that the stability of a nation rests on the incorruptibility of its judicial system and, presently, that systems greatest enemy is social media, where people can be condemned on rumour. Worse, judgments passed down after lengthy legal review can be lambasted and second-guessed.

By rejecting Marie Heneins book, I believe the Toronto District School Board is reinforcing judgment by social media. Everyone in Canada should read her section entitled Middles for lessons on the legal system.

Ms. Henein should be sought out to discuss the law with teenagers, rather than being prevented from doing so.

Bruce Sutherland Lt.-Col. (Retd); Calgary

As a survivor of sexual abuse, I side with the Toronto District School Boards choice to pull support from Marie Heneins presentation to a book club of impressionable high-school girls. No miscommunication this is a form of censorship, one I fully support.

Jian Ghomeshis trial is often presented as the nascence of the #MeToo movement. Sadly, I feel that his accusers found themselves on trial instead. In taking on his case then, there should be karma for Ms. Henein now.

Speaking on her life and immigrant experience, I have no doubt that Mr. Ghomeshis case would come into discussion. Under the guise of a noble profession, such a career-making case should forfeit access to a moralizing pulpit, particularly in retrospect and with such an impressionable audience in question.

#MeToo has evolved the legal profession seems to have some ways to go.

Marian Kingsmill Hamilton

What a shame that these girls do not get an opportunity to see an example of an immigrant beating all odds in the male-dominated world of criminal defence and rising to legal stardom. Marie Henein is exactly who these girls should be meeting. They should understand the legal system and hear from an exemplar in the field that there is a role for them in it.

I find it short-sighted and narrow-minded of the Toronto District School Board to censor Ms. Henein. It is the board that looks to be sending the wrong message to students not Ms. Henein.

Gilda Berger Toronto

Re More Schools Trying To Tackle Anxiety, Period Poverty By Providing Menstrual Products For Free (Nov. 9): Making menstrual supplies readily available to students at school would be an excellent move.

It is nerve-racking to have my period at school and wonder if I will have enough supplies to make it through the day. Periods can be uncertain due to the potential irregularity of menstrual cycles and factors such as stress. This causes worry over potential leaks or ruined clothes, and may interfere with education.

All schools should provide free menstrual products to prevent disruptions in female education and level the playing field.

Sarah Falk Woodland Christian High School; Cambridge, Ont.

Re International Student Recruiting Machine (Nov. 6): The rising cost of living, exploitation by employers and landlords, surging unemployment and a devastating pandemic have amplified problems faced by international students in Canada.

Indian youth are lured by pop culture, word of mouth and glittering social media from kith and kin who have migrated to Canada. They are pessimistic about achieving their goals and providing a good lifestyle for themselves and their families at home.

Many of my friends have migrated to Canada. Now their dreams have changed because it becomes a matter of survival in a new country. Study is at the back seat. Priorities change.

What solutions can the Canadian government offer? It should lower fees to study in Canada. It should invest in foreign talent with scholarships. Accommodations at subsidized rates are also a need of the hour.

More sensitive approaches from employers and landlords would also pave way for happier employees and renters.

Jaspreet Singh Patiala, Punjab, India

Re Walk This Way (Letters, Nov. 10): From a letter-writer who slows down to 90 kilometres an hour on the way to the cottage, to another who doesnt drive to the cottage if its raining, to yet another who hasnt owned a car or ridden in one for more than 25 years, there is competition over who contributes the least to climate change.

I have them all beat: I dont go anywhere.

T.M. Dickey Toronto

Letters to the Editor should be exclusive to The Globe and Mail. Include your name, address and daytime phone number. Try to keep letters to fewer than 150 words. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. To submit a letter by e-mail, click here: letters@globeandmail.com

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Letters to the editor: Nov. 15: 'This is a form of censorship, one I fully support.' Toronto school board rejects Marie Henein book club event, plus...

The best measure of the artist Ai Weiwei was made not by any critic but by an interrogator working for Chinas state security forces. It came 51 days into his imprisonment in 2011 on trumped-up tax evasion charges. The agent understood that I wasnt an evil person, Ai relates in his autobiography, just a troublemaker. Everything I did was basically a form of dadaism, the agent told him. Cultural subversion was my speciality.

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The artist first became a nail in the eye, a spike in the flesh, gravel in the shoe of the Chinese Communist party when he orchestrated the gathering and publication of the names of 4,851 children who died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Their deaths, Ai writes, were a direct consequence of corruption and the unsafe construction of school buildings.

Were Ai to have kept this politicking confined to the gallery, the state security services might not have been so determined in their persecution of him. Indeed, we hear little about the conceptual work that initially made his name: the 1,001 Chinese nationals, from all walks of life, who became a living artwork at the Documenta exhibition in Kassel in 2007 are afforded just a few paragraphs; his later installation of 100m ceramic sunflower seeds in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in 2010 even less. Art Ai regards as a safe haven, a language that was less confrontational. Instead, the artist has increasingly turned to documentary-making to highlight the governments corruption and censorship, as well as embracing blogging and social media with bravado. Politics, he says, is a kind of readymade artwork.

The earthquake is not the only cause Ai has taken up. He has highlighted labour abuses in the construction of the 2008 Beijing Olympics stadium he helped design; sold a pack of baby formula at auction to call attention to its high levels of toxic melamine; and campaigned against the cat-meat trade. In 2009 the artist was beaten and his team locked in their hotel rooms after they travelled to Chengdu in Chinas southwest to support a fellow activist on trial.

Ai clearly relishes the publicity these confrontations afford him and he makes no huge effort to ingratiate himself with the reader. In 1994 he produced The Black Cover Book, a compendium of artworks and texts distributed under the radar of the censors. Though it did catch the attention of the police, spooking his collaborators, Ai sounds disappointed when he reveals they did not directly interfere. After Chengdu he says he was determined to see how far I could go. His arrest followed shortly after, sparking international condemnation (in 2015, when the UK issued only a limited visa to allow him to visit his show at the Royal Academy in London due to his criminal record, home secretary Theresa May intervened to extend it).

Given that AI is not shy of controversy, there are some strange omissions. He does not address the criticism levelled at him after he recreated the photograph of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee pictured dead on a beach, with himself in the position of the drowned boy. Nor does he mention his support for Julian Assange. Early in the book, in a paragraph concerning self-criticism sessions in 1940s China, he writes how ideological cleansing continues in the modern west under the influence of politically correct extremism but leaves the point hanging.

Ais rebellion has its roots in his fathers turbulent life. He writes that he was never emotionally close to Ai Qing, who was a famous poet. Yet it is evident that his fathers persecution, first under the Nationalists in the 30s and then as a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, had a profound effect on Ais character.

Ai Qing joined the Communist party in 1941 and was intimate with its leading lights, including Mao Zedong, whom he found thoughtful and composed, and widely read cracking the occasional joke. Yet he soon fell foul of the leaders purges. It is in the recollections of Weiweis teenage years in a region nicknamed Little Siberia that the autobiography is at its most vivid and revealing. Living in a dug-out pit, the boy foraged for firewood to keep warm, his father forced to clean latrines in which faeces would freeze into icy pillars.

Father would always light a cigarette and size up the work as though admiring a Rodin sculpture. The nicotine rush would bolster his courage in addressing the task ahead, he writes. Ai Qing suffered this persecution stoically, he notes: I have to admit I lack that level of forbearance. When Ai Qing was eventually politically rehabilitated, he professed himself at peace, but for his son those humiliations have cast a long shadow. He expresses an impatience with the timidity of my fathers generation.

Despite these mixed feelings, 1000 Years of Joy and Sorrow is ultimately an elegiac tribute to his fathers professional and personal legacy. He quotes from Ai Qings poems, reproducing several of them in full. One of his fathers earliest works, written in Paris, describes his fellow exiles loving freedom, hating war / In a fury over these things / In anguish over them / Working up a sweat / Tears in their eyes. Ai now lives in Portugal, and, for all his pragmatic understanding of arts limits in the face of totalitarianism, rejecting his fathers belief that poetry was inseparable from the future of democratic politics, art nonetheless remains for him a signifier of social health. Censorship, Ai writes, is the cruellest form of violence.

1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows by Ai Weiwei, translated by Allan H Barr, is published by Bodley Head (25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows by Ai Weiwei an assault on the censors - The Guardian

Dove Camerons open bathrobe selfies came with a risk today, although the 25-year-old didnt take her chances when it came to staying inside Instagrams no-nudity guidelines. Posting to social media at the start of the week, the former Disney star stunned fans with a sexy lingerie-and-bathrobe look, with the photos quickly gaining likes from those 44 million followers.

Showing off her new dark brown hair as she ditches the blonde, the We Belong singer sizzled with her robe slipped down off her shoulders and worn open at the top underwear beneath it added more pop, although it was here that Cameron inserted a digital heart emoji to protect her modesty.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK SEPTEMBER 12: Dove Cameron attends the 2021 MTV Video Music Awards at Barclays Center on September 12, 2021 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. (Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for MTV/ ViacomCBS)

Snapping herself while backed by glossed-white tiles, Dove rocked her dark hair in a ponytail as she wore heavy eye makeup, although eyes may well have been farther down. The Powerpuff Girls star was flaunting her cleavage in a balconette and sheer cream lace bra, one boasting thick black straps, plus a plunging neckline. Doves gallery brought out a fair amount of skin, but the Flawless Beauty ambassador ensured her heart emoji kept the nipple out of it.

Dove also showcased her snake finger tattoo and upper ear piercings, alongside her plump pout. The Emmy winner kept her caption short, using only two dance-like emoji. The post gained over 600,000 likes in under an hour, including one from actress Lili Reinhart. More after the snaps, where you can check out the gallery with a swipe.

Dove, who made headlines for showing her raw side in an honest post on World Mental Health Day this year, continues to be a talking point for prioritizing her mental health, even admitting that her self care isnt always pretty. In summer 2020, an interview with Byrdie saw the star admit that internet-friendly trends are hard to achieve in fact, she straight-up isnt following them.

I would love to be one of those people that says: I wake up every morning at 5 a.m. And then I stretch, and then I fill my belly with lemon water. But Im not. I wake up anywhere from 8 a.m. to noon. Im really, really bad, she revealed. The interview came ahead of the actress split from boyfriend of nearly four years, Thomas Doherty.

Also revealing shes happy to seek professional help, Dove continued:Im such a manic creature. I feel like certain things can feel meditative for me. I definitely go to therapy, but I wouldnt necessarily say that it makes me feel great every time.

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Dove Cameron forced to censor open bathrobe photos - Champagne and Shade

Oakland News Now

video made by the YouTube channel with the logo in the videos upper left hand corner. OaklandNewsNow.com is the original blog post for this type of video-blog content.

Government censors in Democratic Republic of the Congo banned seven pop songs last week, most of them critical of president Felix Tshisekedi and his party.

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Note from Zennie62Media and OaklandNewsNow.com : this video-blog post demonstrates the full and live operation of the latest updated version of an experimental Zennie62Media , Inc. mobile media video-blogging system network that was launched June 2018. This is a major part of Zennie62Media , Inc.s new and innovative approach to the production of news media. What we call The Third Wave of Media. The uploaded video is from a YouTube channel. When the YouTube video channel for Al Jazeera English International News uploads a video it is automatically uploaded to and formatted automatically at the Oakland News Now site and Zennie62-created and owned social media pages. The overall objective here, on top of our is smartphone-enabled, real-time, on the scene reporting of news, interviews, observations, and happenings anywhere in the World and within seconds and not hours is the use of the existing YouTube social graph on any subject in the World. Now, news is reported with a smartphone and also by promoting current content on YouTube: no heavy and expensive cameras or even a laptop are necessary, or having a camera crew to shoot what is already on YouTube. The secondary objective is faster, and very inexpensive media content news production and distribution. We have found there is a disconnect between post length and time to product and revenue generated. With this, the problem is far less, though by no means solved. Zennie62Media is constantly working to improve the system network coding and seeks interested content and media technology partners.

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Government censor in DR Congo outlaws critical songs - Oakland News Now

You would think that kind of money would buy some tolerance and open-mindedness, perhaps a nod toward academic freedom. Kids at Middlesex walked out of class last week, to protest what they called their schools weak leadership.

Tolerance and open-mindedness seem to be at the heart of an MIT initiative launched Monday. Dubbed Real Talk For Change, the more than 200 community conversations offered through an online portal, realtalkforchange.org, are aimed at, as my colleague Meghan E. Irons put it in her story about the new initiative, fostering conversations that will help prompt future community dialogues about the lived experiences of everyday Bostonians, particularly those in marginalized communities.

But what about marginalized scientists?

Last month, MIT canceled a prestigious lecture by Dorian Abbot, a University of Chicago geophysicist. Abbots lecture was about science, not his well-publicized opposition to the way universities are increasing diversity on campus, views that have drawn the ire of his critics.

Robert van der Hilst, head of MITs Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences department, was unmoved by those, especially scientists, who complained that canceling Abbots lecture flew in the face of academic freedom.

As van der Hilst sees it, for all the talk about academic freedom, MIT has the freedom to pick who they want to speak on campus.

Indeed they do. But that ignores the real point: Should scientists empirical views on science be censored because of their unrelated, subjective theories on politics or social policy?

No, of course not, said Harvey Silverglate, the Cambridge civil libertarian who with co-author Alan Charles Kors sounded the alarm 23 years ago with their book The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on Americas Campuses.

This phenomenon, of shutting down speech on campuses, is not new; its just getting worse and worse, Silverglate said.

He contends that elite schools like Middlesex and universities like MIT are run by midlevel bureaucrats who are afraid of their own shadows. The great marketplace of ideas is being shut down by midlevel bureaucrats.

Silverglate also finds it ironic that Abbot is a tenured professor at the University of Chicago, where in 2014 the university adopted the so-called Chicago Principles, which protect the right of faculty and students to engage in speech that some might consider offensive.

According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, 82 colleges and universities have adopted the Chicago Principles or something akin to them, including Boston University, Suffolk University, Brandeis University, and Smith College.

The first university to adopt them after Chicago, Princeton, invited Abbot to speak there after MIT canceled his lecture. The speech took place last Thursday, when Abbots speech at MIT was originally scheduled.

In introducing Abbot, Princeton professor Robert P. George said, We believe that one of the enduring principles in our tradition of civic life, civic liberty, is free speech and academic freedom. And that is why we are hosting Dr. Abbots lecture.

More than 30 years ago, when he was an undergraduate at MIT, Adam Dershowitz challenged MITs policies on censorship, which became a case study in The Shadow University. He was brought up on disciplinary charges, which were ultimately dropped.

But, even as he went on to get his masters and PhD at MIT and became an engineer, the university continued to censor speech.

He agrees with Silverglate that censorship at MIT and other universities where you would think academic freedom would be jealously guarded has gotten worse, not better in the intervening years.

Things should have changed by now, he said.

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at kevin.cullen@globe.com.

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The cost of censorship - The Boston Globe