FDA Defeated in Federal Court Over Censorship of Truthful Health Claims

Health freedom has just been handed a significant victory by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, which ruled last week that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) violated the First Amendment rights of a nutritional supplement company when it censored truthful, scientifically-backed claims about how selenium can help reduce the risk of cancer.'

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Blurred Out: 51 Things You Aren't Allowed to See on Google Maps

Depending on which feature you use, Google Maps offers a satellite view or a street-level view of tons of locations around the world. You can look up landmarks like the Pyramids of Egypt or the Great Wall of China, as well as more personal places, like your ex’s house. But for all of the places that Google Maps allows you to see, there are plenty of places that are off-limits. Whether it’s due to government restrictions, personal-privacy lawsuits or mistakes, Google Maps has slapped a "Prohibited" sign on the following 51 places.'

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Press Still Silenced, Despite Family Court Reforms, say Lawyers

One year after ground-breaking reforms that were meant to open thousands of hearings to the media, more family courts are now more closed to public scrutiny, it is claimed today.

Media organisations and lawyers both say that the campaign to open up the family courts has largely failed.

Changes rushed through Parliament before the election was announced will also make it even more difficult than before to report on the family courts. They predict that as a result, even fewer cases than now will be reported and only then, giving the broad gist of proceedings, rather than any detail.'

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Clegg: Digital Economy Bill was a 'Stitch-up'

Clegg claims the way the bill was rushed through without proper debate is a "classic example of what's wrong with Westminster".

"It was rammed through after the election was called in the last dying days of the Parliament in something called a 'wash-up'," said Clegg. "It wasn't a wash-up, it was a stitch-up. A stitch-up between Labour and Conservative MPs who decided that you didn't deserve to have your representatives in Parliament properly looking at a bill which might have a very, very serious impact on the way that you use the internet."

"That's why we said it should have been scrutinised properly, it shouldn't have been rushed through in that way in the first place, at all".'

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Digital Economy Act: This Means War

'With the rushed passage into law of the Digital Economy Act this month, the fight over copyright enters a new phase. Previous to this, most copyfighters operated under the rubric that a negotiated peace was possible between the thrashing entertainment giants and civil society.

But now that the BPI and its mates have won themselves the finest law that money can buy – a law that establishes an unprecedented realm of web censorship in Britain, a law that provides for the disconnection of entire families from the net on the say-so of an entertainment giant, a law that shuts down free Wi-Fi hotspots and makes it harder than ever to conduct your normal business on the grounds that you might be damaging theirs – the game has changed.'

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The Truth is Out There For All to See But Not Necessarily on Youtube

If it’s anti-zionist or anti-Israel, you can be sure it will be removed. That is how YouTube operates. After all, they themselves are controlled by zionists so it seems natural for them to defend (by censorship) anything that is true about Israel today.

If it is pro Israel it is there to stay.'

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Kill the Messenger?

The Obama administration has apparently come up with a creative way to deal with the increasingly bleak news regarding the economic position of the United States in the world. It proposes to eliminate the office in the Bureau of Labor Statistics that collects and publishes the comparative data on employment, unemployment, manufacturing productivity and labor costs, among other things. You can find it right there on page 11 among the various programs that it has marked for termination.

Through this voluntary act of blinding, the Obama gang will manage to save all of two million dollars a year, which in Pentagon parlance hardly qualifies as “budget dust.” Lost will be a ready reckoning of how the country is measuring up on the world economic front, which might well be the intended purpose of the program’s elimination.'

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The Last Live Performance of Bill Hicks - With the Material That Was Banned From the Letterman Show

Terrorism Chiefs Don't Know What They've Censored Online

Police are shutting websites without keeping any records, hampering government efforts to address online extremism, it's been revealed.

The Terrorism Act 2006 granted powers for police to compel web hosts to shut down websites promoting terrorism. But the powers have never been used, and forces have instead persuaded providers to take down websites voluntarily, according to the security minister Lord West.

He told the Lords on Wednesday that he could not say how many websites have been censored because no records have been kept.

"When we passed the Act in 2006, we laid down a requirement to make such records, but it has not really been done," he said.'

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Royal Secrets Withheld Under Revised Information Rules

Members of the public and journalists will be banned from seeing the contents of secret documents on the Cabinet and Royal Family under measures quietly announced by Gordon Brown last week.

The Prime Minister's reforms on improving parliament contained a little-noticed plan to block Freedom of Information requests on Cabinet papers, even if there is a public interest case.

The blanket exemption, which will be seen as a retrograde step in access to information and transparency, also applies to documents relating to members of the Royal Family.

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Transparency in action!!!

Stop the Press! This is what Israeli Democracy Looks Like

Last Tuesday, prominent Israeli journalist Amira Hass was arrested by Israeli authorities upon entering Israel from Gaza. Hass, a correspondent for the daily Ha'aretz, had been living and working in Gaza for months, reporting on the lives of Palestinians and revealing many devastating truths about the brutalized and besieged community.

Journalists are forbidden to enter Gaza, upon orders from the Israeli military. Clearly, where there are reporters, there may be reports. Where there are reports, there may be knowledge. And when there is knowledge, especially about the Israeli policy of constant aggressive oppression of the Palestinian people, there is sure to be outrage. Truth and dissent are the eternal enemies of history's oppressors, therefore it is no surprise that Israel wishes to suppress knowledge and publicity of its own indefensible actions.

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Monsanto Forced Fox TV to Censor Coverage of Dangerous Milk Drug

I know from personal experience how satisfying it is to catch some nasty multinational corporation telling lies about the safety of their product--especially when that company is Monsanto, the world's largest maker of genetically modified (GM) foods. So I could only imagine the excitement of investigative reporters Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, who had caught a Monsanto executive on film repeatedly lying about GM bovine growth hormone (rbGH or rbST).

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Media Disinfo: Viet Nam, Iraq, and "The Wires"

It is a sad and dangerous development when supposedly objective news media yield to national pressure to slant the news in favor of the government.

This routinely happens in dictatorships at all times but it can happen in democracies as well, particularly in time of war. It was no surprise that, during the rape of Nanking, a correspondent for a Japanese daily paper wrote home giddily about a nauseating contest by two crazed officers to see which of them could be the first to behead a hundred Chinese prisoners! During the Second World War the Japanese press reflected government policy, and if the government was mad so was the press. Later, when Britain entered the war, a BBC broadcaster named George Orwell lied through his teeth to conceal the systematic bombing of German civilians by the RAF, and he wasn’t the only one.

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North Korea Clamps Down On Mobile Phones To Stop News Of Food Crisis

North Korea is clamping down on mobile phones and long distance telephone calls to prevent the spread of news about a worsening food crisis, according to the United Nations investigator on human rights for the isolated communist country.

In a report to the UN General Assembly, Vitit Muntarbhorn, a Thai law professor who has never been allowed to visit North Korea, said that its government is using public executions as a means of intimidating the population, and using spies to infiltrate and expose religious communities.
His report came two days after the World Food Programme said that two thirds of North Koreans do not have enough to eat, in the country’s worst crisis since as many as three million people died of famine a decade ago.

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D-notice Slapped On MoD's History Of Censorship, Secrecy And The Media

There is a long tradition of the military suppressing news that it considers detrimental to national security by slapping a D-notice on it.
But when the D-notice committee decided that the time was ripe to publish its own official history, nobody imagined that it would fall victim to its own system.

The history of the D-notice committee has, in effect, had a D-notice slapped on it by the D-notice committee.

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You couldn't make it up could you !

The 10 Big News Stories The Mainstream Media IGNORED

The daily dispatches and nightly newscasts of the mainstream media regularly cover terrorism, but rarely how fear of attacks is used to manipulate the public and set policy. That's the common thread of many of the unreported stories last year, according to an analysis by Project Censored.

Since 1976, Sonoma State University has released an annual survey of the top 25 stories the mainstream media failed to report or reported poorly. Culled from worldwide alternative news sources, vetted by students and faculty, and ranked by judges, the stories may not have been overtly censored. But their controversial subjects, challenges to the status quo or general under-the-radar subject matter might have kept them from the front pages. Project Censored recounts them, accompanied by media analysis, in a book published annually by Seven Stories Press.

"This year, war and civil liberties stood out," Peter Phillips, who has been director of the project since 1996, says of the top stories. "They're closely related and part of the War on Terror that has been the dominant theme of Project Censored for seven years, since 9/11."

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EU Internet Proposals Raise Civil Liberty Fears

Civil liberty groups claim the new "telecoms package" due to go before the European Parliament in September will result in the loss of individual freedom on the internet, and breach the fundamental principles of human rights in Europe.
The French and Swedish pressure groups say the new powers will allow national governments to force internet service providers (ISPs) to hand over private information about their customers to the police. They claim three of the 800 amendments to the legislation will take away immunity enjoyed by the ISPs in regard to the material passing through their networks. At worst, the sorts of measures flowing from the legislation in the telecoms package could include a "three strikes and you're out" sanction to stop users illegally downloading songs or films from the internet.
Martyn Warwick, editor of Telecom TV, a specialist online television channel, said: "[It's] like suing the Post Office for not knowing what's in all the letters and parcels it delivers.

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