Articles about Censorship – latimes

ENTERTAINMENT

December 19, 2013 | By Hector Tobar

This week, the Kids' Right to Read Project, a group that monitors book censorship, said the number of challenges to books reported to the group increased by 53% in 2013. Project coordinator Acacia O'Connor told Shelf Awareness that she could not explain the increase, but that many involved writers of color, including Sherman Alexie, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. (All three also appear regularly on American Booksellers Assn. lists of challenged books.) Whether or not patterns like this are the result of coordination between would-be censors across the country is impossible to say, O'Connor told Shelf Awareness.

ENTERTAINMENT

July 17, 2013 | By Julie Makinen

BEIJING -- Chinese authorities said Wednesday they would relax some restrictions on film, TV and radio productions, though the immediate impact of the changes was unclear and several prominent movie directors said they did not believe the reforms were game-changers. Chinese filmmakers will now be allowed to shoot ordinary content movies after only submitting a synopsis to censors rather than a full script, according to an announcement from the State Council, China's cabinet. But the finished products will still have to be screened for censors before they are approved to be played in theaters.

ENTERTAINMENT

June 26, 2013 | By Alexander Nazaryan

Eight years ago, a New York journalist named Peter Braunstein, then 41, forced his way into the apartment of a 34-year-old Manhattan woman by pretending to be a firefighter. He proceeded to drug the woman, a former colleague, and sexually assault her for more than 12 hours. Now, as he serves a lengthy prison sentence in upstate New York, Braunstein is apparently upset that corrections officials there are not allowing him to read Jaycee Dugard's A Stolen Life, the 2011 memoir of a young woman's kidnapping and 18-year imprisonment by a California couple, Phillip and Nancy Garrido, which ended in 2009.

WORLD

April 12, 2013 | By Janet Stobart, This post has been corrected. See note below.

LONDON -- The British Broadcasting Corp. faced a dilemma Friday: Would it play "Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead" when everyone knows the song has become a biting reference to the late Margaret Thatcher? The network's solution: turn the song into a sound bite. Amid divisive reactions to the death of the former prime minister on Monday, anti-Thatcher protesters have campaigned to bring the song from the 1939 film "The Wizard of Oz" to the top of the charts in time for a BBC program Sunday night that counts down the current top hits.

WORLD

January 9, 2013 | By Barbara Demick and David Pierson, Los Angeles Times

GUANGZHOU, China - Like wedding guests separated across the aisle, the protesters assembled on either side of a gated driveway at the headquarters of the embattled Southern Weekly newspaper. To the right, several dozen supporters of the newspaper staff waved banners calling for an end to censorship of the Chinese press. "Freedom!" they chanted. "Democracy!" "Constitutional rights!" To the left, beneath fluttering red Chinese flags and hoisted portraits of Mao Tse-tung, a battalion of mostly older men shouted into a microphone, trying to drown out their ideological rivals.

WORLD

January 8, 2013 | By Barbara Demick

GUANGZHOU, China -- Communist Party officials appear to have defused a potential crisis over media censorship in Guangzhou with a compromise that persuaded journalists at a maverick newspaper to publish Thursday as planned. The journalists at Southern Weekly, one of China's boldest and most popular publications, had threatened to strike in protest over a New Year's editorial on political reform that was watered down by propaganda officials. The exact terms of the deal were not released, but it appears that the journalists agreed to refrain from airing their grievances in public about Tuo Zhen, the propaganda chief for Guangdong province accused of the heavy-handed censorship that sparked the standoff.

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Articles about Censorship - latimes