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Poets are a big deal in Iran, and Forugh Farrokhzad was one of the biggest. In the 1960s, her modern, highly personal work won wide acclaim and brought her the poetry equivalent of rock stardom she cut records, made films, and even today is known popularly by her first name.

When Farrokhzad was killed in a car crash in 1967, thousands of fans thronged to her funeral. But after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, her work vanished, banned for a decade, and since then heavily censored by the government.

Bijan Khalili knows plenty aboutFarrokhzadand Iranian censorship. Banned books are a specialty of his. For 36 years he has owned Ketab Corporation, a Persion bookstorein Los Angeles. It started as a simple service to exiles who had fled Iran's revolution, leaving their books behind. But as post-revolutionary censorship took hold in Iran, selling books untouched by Iran's censors became a daily act of defiance.

Reading books is a human right, he says.

No book, songor film gets legally published in Iranwithout permission from Iran's Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Government censors have the power to demand changes or major cuts or to ban works outright.Among taboo topics are criticism of Islam or Iran's Islamic regime, acknowledging the Holocaust, and interactions between unmarried and unrelated men and women. Kissing and dancing scenes in the Harry Potter books were changed or excised in Iranian editions. Khalili says censors force cookbook writers to remove references to wine, or adapt the recipe for a nonalcoholic ingredient.

George Orwell's 1984 is a book Khalili knows well. When he fled Iran, he took a suitcase stuffed with books, among them the classic Orwell dystopia, as well as books by Dostoevsky, Victor Hugo,and the Persian poets Hafez and Omar Khayyam. In 1981, when Khalili opened Ketab, which means book in Persian, his suitcase full of books stocked the store's first shelf.

Today, it's much bigger, but the store on busy Westwood Boulevard, in theIranian exile neighborhood known as Persian Square, still has an old-time feeling. The spacious, quiet rooms are filled with tall stacks of books on spirituality, sociology, politics, history there's even a shelf marked books prohibited in Iran. And between the stacks, people are reading whatever they want.

For Iranians raised with censorship, it's amazing. Browsing in the business section, I meet Ali, who recently moved to the US from Iran.

This ...just blows your mind, because you do not expect such a thing to be here. You can find the most illegal books in the bookshelves here, he says.

Ali asked me to use only his first name over fear of retaliation against his family back home for talking openly with a reporter about books.If you know more about what's going on around you you will have more knowledge, he says. The knowledge is the power.

If knowledge and power are a tug-of-war in Iran, books are a rope. But Iranian readers are pulling hard on their end, with the help of exiles like Khalili. Because Ketab isn'tjusta bookstore. It's also one of nearly a dozen Persian publishersoutside Iran helping writers bypass censorship to get their books out to the world. (See below for a list oftop-selling titles at Ketab Corporation.)

Some writers secretly publish uncensored books inside Iran, but it's risky. Often, writers in Iran will contact publishing houses abroad instead. Iranian readers who can crack the government firewall can access e-books online. There's also a thriving black market in pirated books published abroad.

Khalili says he's pleased his books are smuggled into Iran and reproduced, even if it takes a big bite out of sales. But Khalili is proud of his contribution to the fight against censorship. I'm proud that I help some Iranian to beknowledgeable about whatever happened, or whatever is close to truth, he says.

The truth, he believes, could someday set Iran free. If we are being successful to break that ban, and that censorship, I believe the Islamic regime era will be ended very soon, he says.

Ending censorship for good still feels a long way off. But Ketab books havereached at least one unexpected bookworm: Iran's government.

Ketab books on taboo topics like gender equalityand political prisoners have somehow, mysteriously,made it from Los Angeles to the collection of Iran's National Library.

And who knows? Maybe someone is reading them.

Here isa selection of top-selling titles at Ketab Corporation in Los Angeles:

Link:
Step inside a Los Angeles bookstore that takes on Iran's censors - PRI

Published time: 9 Aug, 2017 22:53 Edited time: 10 Aug, 2017 08:55

Julian Assange is offering the Google engineer fired over a controversial memo, deemed to be in breach of the companys diversity code, a job at WikiLeaks.

The WikiLeaks founder and chief tweeted, Censorship is for losers, before adding that there was a job for fired Google software engineer James Damore at his whistleblowing organization.

Damore came under fire after an internal memo he wrote, arguing that women are underrepresented in tech not due to bias, but because of inherent psychological differences from men, was published online.

EntitledGoogles Ideological Echo Chamber,it suggests that the companys political bias has created the effect of shaming into silence.

This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed, and the lack of discussion brings about the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology, the memo says.

We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism, Damore adds, suggesting that men have a higher drive for status and women have a higher agreeableness, leading to difficulties in salary negotiation.

READ MORE: Gender gap is natural, Google employee says in 10-page internally viral memo

The memo caused a media storm over the weekend with many branding it sexist.

On Tuesday, Damore confirmedhe had been let go by the company in an email which stated the reason for dismissal was perpetuating gender stereotypes.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees Monday that parts of Damore's memo "violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace."

Assange posted a series of tweets criticizing Google for firing someone for politely expressing their ideas.

He included a link to an extract from his 2014 book, When Google met WikiLeaks, in the tweets.

The excerpt, entitled, Google is not what it seems, outlines Assanges understanding of the relationship between Google and the US State Department.

READ MORE: Putting people at risk': Assanges lawyer criticizes new documentary on WikiLeaks founder

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'Censorship is for losers': Assange offers fired Google engineer job at WikiLeaks - RT

Trump supporters Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson better known as Diamond and Silk took to Twitter on Thursday to accuse YouTube of censorship and a violation of their 1st Amendment rights (yeah, we know) after the company demonetized a reported 95% of the duos videos:

The pair thinks it might have something to do with their being Trump supporters and conservatives:

YouTube responded with instructions the pair could follow to appeal the decision:

Coincidentally, Hardaway and Richardson met with officials at the Commerce Department on Monday to discuss ways in which to grow their business and build their brand. From Gizmodo:

YouTube stars Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardsonbetter known as Diamond and Silk, respectivelywere invited to the Commerce Departments headquarters this week, apparently to discuss ways in which they could expand their business. The pair runs a political blog aimed at promoting President Trump and denigrating his critics.

The Commerce Department revealed Diamond and Silks visit in a photo posted on the departments official Twitter account, which said the duo had met with the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) to discuss how to grow their business and build their brand.

A spokesperson for the department later told Gizmodo that the tweet was deleted out of an abundance of caution as the department was not clear it had received permission to post the photo:

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Diamond and Silk accuse YouTube of 'censorship' after company demonetized '95%' of their videos - Twitchy

San Francisco Examiner

Lyft drivers fear censorship after internal email about speaking to press San Francisco Examiner Scott Coriell, a Lyft spokesperson, wrote that censorship wasn't the intent, and that's not something we would ever do. In a statement Coriell forwarded from Lyft, the company said drivers are free to speak to the press, and there are no ... and more »

Original post:
Lyft drivers fear censorship after internal email about speaking to press - San Francisco Examiner

Photo by Flickr user Turinboy (CC BY 2.0)

The Egyptian authorities have continued to block websites, this time targeting the site of a human rights group as well asa columnist's blog.

Over the weekend of August 5, the government blocked the website of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI), which documents and reports on human rights violations in Egypt and across the Arab region.

In August 6statement published on Facebook, the rights group slammed Egyptian authorities for the measure, while pledging to continue its work in support of human rights in the region:

The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information in spite of this attack, which is a mockery of the Egyptian law and constitution by the authorities, who are supposed to respect and uphold the law remains committed to its mission to defending freedom of expression, human rights in the Arab world, exposing the violations in this part of the world, and speaking up for the victims, which is a role that now comes at a very high price more than ever, yet it also became more important than ever before.

[] ANHRI confirms that it will seek all technical means to overcome the blocking and will not give in to it, and insists that it will continue to do its role.

ANHRI is the first website belonging to a human rights group in Egypt to be censored, since authorities blocked21 websites more than two months ago, including the independent news site Mada Masr,the Arabic-language edition of the Huffington Post, and the website of the Qatar-based AlJazeera network, for allegedly supporting terrorism.

In addition to ANHRI, the blog of columnist and human rights researcher Ahmed Gamal Ziada is no longer accessible in Egypt. Ziada has been using his blog to disseminate the columns and articles he writes for websites and media blocked in Egypt. Now the blog he set up to bypass the censorship machinery of the Egyptian government has itself been targeted. The blog-publishing service Blogger, which hosts Ziada's blog, remains accessible.

A former photojournalist, Ziadaspentnearly 500 days in prison after he was arrested in December 2013 by Egyptian security forces while covering a student protest and taking footage of police beating two students.His articles mainly address politics and the human rights situation in Egypt.

On Facebook, hereflected on the government's blocking of his blog and what it means to him:

: 1 . 2 .

* .

The [tactic] of blocking blogs is very old, but it is a precedence in the era of [President] Abdelfattah al-Sisi, and apart from the fact that the blocking of the blog may not be of importance to the world, it does matter to me for two reasons:

1) They have made me feel that Iam indeed under siege; an arrest, an attempted murder, national security summons, blocking [my] blog in addition to every single website I worked for.

2) They have proved that I was not writing for nothing, in other words, my words have an impact even if it is for a small audience.

I want to mention that the blog was an archive for me. I started using it to post articles to bypass censorship. But, now that they have blocked it, and [shown] that they fear [its] words, I can still change the link or create a second blog. The brave continue till the end.

From May 24 to August 6, Egyptian authorities blocked 133 websites, according to the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression (AFTE), which conducted technical tests on the networks of various Internet Service Providers (ISPs) including Orange, Vodafone and Etisalat. AFTE also documented the blocking of services aimed at bypassing internet censorship and browsing the internet privately,known as Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). The association reported in its research:

On Monday the 12th of June, we noticed the beginning of blocking websites that provide VPN services. Such practice points to the intent of the Government to continue blocking and filtering the content that Egyptian users could access.

What makes the situation worse, is that these blocking decisions are taken behind closed doors and without a due process that gives Egyptians the possibility to challenge them in court. Now the question is how far is the Egyptian government willing to take its internet censorship campaign and who is it going to target next.

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Rights Group Website and Columnist's Blog Become Latest Targets of Egypt's Censorship Campaign - Global Voices Online