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      The Guardian view on Evan Gershkovich’s year behind bars: Moscow should free him now | Editorial

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 2 days ago - 18:38 · 1 minute

    The Wall Street Journal correspondent is not a spy. He is a journalist, and should be released immediately from his Russian jail

    Evan Gershkovich , a Wall Street Journal reporter, has spent nearly a year in a Moscow prison, awaiting trial for a crime he did not commit. Mr Gershkovich was arrested last March in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg and jailed on espionage charges. He is not a spy. He is a journalist, and should be released immediately. Hostage diplomacy lies behind his incarceration. As the US ambassador to Russia, Lynne Tracy , said, Mr Gershkovich’s case “is not about evidence, due process, or rule of law. It is about using American citizens as pawns to achieve political ends”.

    Vladimir Putin indicated in February that a prisoner exchange could lead to the release of Mr Gershkovich. There have been high-profile prisoner swaps in the past. In December 2022, Moscow traded a US basketball star convicted of a drugs offence in Russia for a Russian arms trafficker. But a journalist’s detention to secure the release of a Russian hitman would underscore Russia’s retreat into a Soviet past. In 1986 an American journalist, Nicholas Daniloff , was arrested and charged with espionage. He was let go after two weeks when the US released a Soviet diplomat accused of spying. Mr Gershkovich has been inside for nearly 12 months.

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      Alan Titchmarsh’s jeans blurred by North Korean TV censors

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 3 days ago - 09:04

    Footage of green-fingered BBC presenter obscured from waist down to hide ‘symbol of US imperialism’

    His calm demeanour and wholesome vocation have apparently endeared him to one of the most authoritarian regimes in the world. But there is something about Alan Titchmarsh that North Korea’s censors can’t quite forgive – his jeans.

    The green-fingered broadcaster and author of raunchy novels has been a fixture on state television since 2022, albeit with the addition of a blurred effect from the waist down.

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      Elon Musk’s improbable path to making X an “everything app”

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · 4 days ago - 11:00

    Elon Musk’s improbable path to making X an “everything app”

    Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | NurPhoto / Getty Images)

    X used to be called Twitter, but soon it will become "the Everything App," and that day is "closer than everyone thinks," X CEO Linda Yaccarino promised in one of her first X posts of 2024.

    "Nothing can slow us down," Yaccarino said.

    Turning Twitter into an everything app is arguably the reason that Elon Musk purchased Twitter. He openly craved the success of the Chinese everything app WeChat, telling Twitter staff soon after purchasing the app that "you basically live on WeChat in China because it’s so usable and helpful to daily life, and I think if we can achieve that, or even get close to that at Twitter, it would be an immense success,” The Guardian reported .

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      Users shocked to find Instagram limits political content by default

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · 7 days ago - 17:50

    Users shocked to find Instagram limits political content by default

    Enlarge (credit: Instagram )

    Instagram users have started complaining on X (formerly Twitter) after discovering that Meta has begun limiting recommended political content by default.

    "Did [y'all] know Instagram was actively limiting the reach of political content like this?!" an X user named Olayemi Olurin wrote in an X post with more than 150,000 views as of this writing. "I had no idea 'til I saw this comment and I checked my settings and sho nuff political content was limited."

    "Instagram quietly introducing a 'political' content preference and turning on 'limit' by default is insane?" wrote another X user named Matt in a post with nearly 40,000 views.

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      Edward Bond obituary

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Tuesday, 5 March - 17:00

    One of the most important British dramatists of the 20th century who was unafraid of taking on the establishment over censorship

    The battle to remove censorship from the British stage was fought primarily at the Royal Court theatre in London during the mid-1960s. The plays of Edward Bond, one of the most important British dramatists of the 20th century, who has died aged 89, were an essential part of that story and that struggle.

    Bond had submitted plays to George Devine’s recently established English Stage Company at the Royal Court in 1958 and, as a result, was invited to join the theatre’s Writers’ Group. His first performed play, The Pope’s Wedding, was given in a production without decor on 9 December 1962, and Devine then commissioned a new play, which Bond submitted in September 1964.

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      Judge mocks X for “vapid” argument in Musk’s hate speech lawsuit

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 1 March - 16:58

    Judge mocks X for “vapid” argument in Musk’s hate speech lawsuit

    Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto )

    It looks like Elon Musk may lose X's lawsuit against hate speech researchers who encouraged a major brand boycott after flagging ads appearing next to extremist content on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.

    X is trying to argue that the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) violated the site's terms of service and illegally accessed non-public data to conduct its reporting, allegedly posing a security risk for X. The boycott, X alleged, cost the company tens of millions of dollars by spooking advertisers, while X contends that the CCDH's reporting is misleading and ads are rarely served on extremist content.

    But at a hearing Thursday, US district judge Charles Breyer told the CCDH that he would consider dismissing X's lawsuit, repeatedly appearing to mock X's decision to file it in the first place.

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      Mary Poppins’ UK age rating raised to PG due to discriminatory language

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Monday, 26 February - 09:37

    British Board of Film Classification lifts it from U certificate almost 60 years after film was first released

    Mary Poppins has had its age rating lifted to a PG by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) almost 60 years after it was first released.

    The film’s rating has been upgraded from U – which signifies no material likely to offend or harm – to one advising parental guidance due to the use of discriminatory language, the Daily Mail reported .

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      The Guardian view on Julian Assange: why he should not be extradited | Editorial

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 18 February - 18:30 · 1 minute

    Sending him to be tried in the United States would be an unacceptable act against the WikiLeaks founder – and against journalism

    It is not a secret that Julian Assange can divide opinion. But now is a time to put all such issues firmly to one side. Now is a time to stand by Mr Assange, and to do so on principle, for the sake of his freedom – and ours. There can be no divide over the attempt by the United States to have the WikiLeaks founder extradited from Britain to face charges under the US Espionage Act, which reaches a critical stage in London this week . The application embodies not just a threat to Mr Assange personally. It is also, as this newspaper has consistently argued over many years, an iniquitous threat to journalism, with global implications. It poses the most fundamental of questions about free speech. On these grounds alone, Mr Assange’s extradition should be unhesitatingly opposed.

    In 2010, WikiLeaks published revelatory US government documents exposing diplomatic and military policy in the Afghan and Iraq wars. Four years ago, during the Trump presidency, the US justice department issued a WikiLeaks-related indictment of 18 counts against Mr Assange. It charged him with multiple breaches of the 1917 Espionage Act, a statute that originally clamped down on opposition to America’s entry into the first world war. In recent years, though, the act has mainly been invoked against leakers.

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      Meet the modern-day censors, wielding their purse-strings over artists and their work | Sonia Sodha

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 18 February - 09:00 · 1 minute

    The ominous warning from Arts Council England over controversial statements reveals the dangers bureaucrats pose to free expression

    Who determines whether a play can get staged? In the unnamed authoritarian regime that serves as the dramatic backdrop for A Mirror , the answer is unequivocally the state. In this play-within-a-play – the premise is an illicit production put on under the pretence of a wedding – the ministry of culture signs off on the creative works that citizens are permitted to see; unluckier playwrights are sent off to the camps. Other forms of censorship are available too, including the civil servant all too happy to steer writers into replicating state-sanctioned narratives.

    The production isn’t subtle but it does force the audience to confront what it’s like to live in a society with so little artistic freedom of expression. “Every mode of censorship depicted in A Mirror is practised somewhere in the world today,” Kate Maltby, deputy chair of the Index on Censorship, writes in its programme; billions of people live in countries where creating dissident art can land you in jail. But free expression is a spectrum; decisions over who gets state subsidies instil huge power in bureaucrats; and any artist worth their salt is highly sensitive to any whiff of being told what they can and cannot say. A row that broke out last week illustrates just how much free expression in the arts remains a live debate in the UK.

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