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CANNES, France - Two directors from countries with tough film censorship brought bold and probing movies to the Cannes Film Festival on Friday one exploring China's social problems, the other delving into the mysteries of the human heart.

Jia Zhangke's "A Touch of Sin" depicts facets of fast-changing China the government prefers to avoid: corruption, greed, violent crime and the growing gap between economic winners and losers.

"The Past," by Academy Award-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, is an unsparing tale of domestic upheaval, set in and around Paris and made with a largely French cast.

Both films are competing for Cannes' top prize, the Palme d'Or and both have been cleared for release in their homelands, where filmmakers often fall foul of restrictions.

Iran's Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance has approved "The Past" for screening, and "A Touch of Sin" is due to open in China in the fall.

The two directors are pleased their films will be seen at home, but they gave very different descriptions of working in settings where official censorship is an everyday reality.

"I'm someone who is deeply attached to my creative freedom, and I always do my utmost to ensure I don't indulge in any form of self-censorship," said Jia, who has explored China's rapid transformation throughout his career from early underground films such as "Unknown Pleasures" to documentaries to the Venice Film Festival prize-winning 2006 feature "Still Life."

Farhadi, though, said the effect of censorship was more insidious.

"One can try to free oneself of the past, but the past doesn't let you do that," he said both a theme of "The Past" and an observation of his own situation.

"There are two kinds of censorship," he told reporters. "You have official censorship which works in a certain way. But there is also self-censorship. You impose it on your innermost self."

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Iran's Asghar Farhadi and China's Jia Zhangke talk cinema and censorship in Cannes

Heidi Stevenson - Fake Measles Epidemic and Censorship
Heidi Stevenson has recently wrote a blog post were she claims that the Welsh Measles Epidemic is faked. In this video Nega talks about the data she presents...

By: powerm1985

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Heidi Stevenson - Fake Measles Epidemic and Censorship - Video

ASIC has been revealed as the agency behind the blocking of a Melbourne education website, using a hitherto-unused internet censorship power.

An inept regulator exercising a hitherto-unused internet censorship power has been revealed as the source of the accidental blocking of a Melbourne education website.

IT industry news site Delimiter has revealed that Australian Securities and Investments Commissionwas behind the blocking of the Melbourne Free University website and more than 1000 other sites in early April when it sought to block a website suspected of engaging in fraud, using a power under s.313 of the Telecommunications Act.

The reason for the blocking of the site in April has remained a mystery, but Delimiters Renai LeMay pursued the issue and eventually unearthed from Broadband Minister Stephen Conroys office the fact that a broad power under the Telecommunications Act had been used.

Under s.313, a carrier or carriage service provider must:

give officers and authorities of the Commonwealth and of the States and Territories such help as is reasonably necessary for the following purposes: enforcing the criminal law and laws imposing pecuniary penalties; assisting the enforcement of the criminal laws in force in a foreign country; protecting the public revenue; safeguarding national security.

ASIC in effect used this power to censor the internet, in the course of which over 1000 sites unconnected to the target site were blocked, including Melbourne Free University, which was told nothing by authorities or its ISP about why.

ASIC is one of Australias most inept regulators, with a string of courtroom defeats marking its efforts to enforce corporate law. Despite its record of bumbling, last year ASIC used the Joint Committee on Intelligence and Securitys inquiry into data retention to demand an expansion of its power to intercept internet and phone communications.

ASICs use of the s.313 power opens the possibility of a de facto internet filter scheme with less oversight than the filter originally proposed by Stephen Conroy in the governments first term. As LeMay correctly notes, a filter comprised of individual requests from a variety of regulators asserting they are enforcing criminal laws or safeguarding national security is harder to monitor or hold to account. As Melbourne Free University discovered, it is also very difficult for businesses and organisations accidentally blocked to discover who has blocked them or why.

In Tuesdays budget, the government announced its abandonment of the internet filter scheme would enable a saving of several million dollars. It has been replaced with a voluntary filter scheme limited to sites identified by Interpol. That filter is a minimal one compared with both to the original Conroy proposal, which would have targeted a broader range of allegedly illegal content under Australian laws, and the one available via s.313, which is driven purely by the internal interpretations by regulators of what is enforcing criminal law or safeguarding national security.

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Bumbling ASIC heralds new internet censorship era

Censorship documentary

By: valerie rojas

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Censorship documentary - Video

CENSORSHIP IS WRONG! FIGHT IT! PROTECT YOUR RIGHTS!

By: GrilsPower1

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CENSORSHIP IS WRONG! FIGHT IT! PROTECT YOUR RIGHTS! - Video