Academy Award-nominated Gasland documentarian Josh Fox was arrested Wednesday while attempting to cover a public congressional hearing on the controversial oil extraction process “fracking.” Fox was apparently not properly credentialed to cover the meeting and House Republicans ordered him arrested after he refused to stop filming the proceedings. Democracy Now has the transcripts of how it all went down.
H/T The eXiled
Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.Upwards of 400 people were arrested on Saturday at a massive Occupy protest in Oakland–including at least six journalists. Mother Jones‘ Gavin Aronsen was among those arrested, despite presenting police with a valid press pass. His story shows that Oakland Police seemed to have learned absolutely nothing from their previous clashes with protesters, that drew worldwide criticism and helped galvanize the Occupy movement.
As soon as it became clear that I would be kettled with the protesters, I displayed my press credentials to a line of officers and asked where to stand to avoid arrest. In past protests, the technique always proved successful. But this time, no officer said a word. One pointed back in the direction of the protesters, refusing to let me leave. Another issued a notice that everyone in the area was under arrest.
I wound up in a back corner of the space between the YMCA and a neighboring building, where I met Vivian Ho of the San Francisco Chronicle and Kristin Hanes of KGO Radio. After it became clear that we would probably have to wait for hours there as police arrested hundreds of people packed tightly in front of us, we maneuvered our way to the front of the kettle to display our press credentials once more.
Nicholas Kristof is something of an expert on sex trafficking. The Pulitzer Prize journalist has covered the issue extensively in both his reporting and his book Half the Sky: From Oppression to Opportunity for Women Worldwide. So his criticism of Village Voice Media for aiding human traffickers through their Backpage.com sex ads has a special resonance.
In his latest column for the New York Times, Kristof writes of the Backpage.com sex ads:
It is a godsend to pimps, allowing customers to order a girl online as if she were a pizza.
Lauren Hersh, the ace prosecutor in Brooklyn who leads the sex-trafficking unit there, says that of the 32 people she and her team have prosecuted in the last year and a half — typically involving victims aged 12 to 25 — a vast majority of the cases included girls marketed through Backpage ads.
“Pimps are turning to the Internet,” said Hersh. “They’re not putting the girls on the street so much. Backpage is a great vehicle for pimps trying to sell girls.”
Just hours after tecca.com senior editor Taylor Hatmaker posted her thoughts today regarding some controversial remarks made by Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) CEO Gary Shapiro in a BBC News report, Shapiro has piped up in her article comments.
In the BBC report by Matt Danzico, Hatmaker is one of several female journalists who voices her discomfort with the ongoing use of anachronistic, scantily clad “booth babes” on the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) convention floor. In her post today, she explains why she found the separate BBC report remarks by Shapiro (pictured) offensive, to which the CES exec has responded in the article comments. He writes:
I am sorry. I would welcome your input on how you think I should have responded or should do so in the future. My use of the word “cute” to the [BBC] journalist was aimed at his comment (deleted in the editing) about “booth babes” being part of the technology industry…
Blackouts by sites like Wikipedia and Reddit in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act seem to be having some effect. One Senate co-sponsor of PIPA and two House co-sponsors of SOPA pulled their names from the proposed legislation today.
The LA Times has the story:
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) withdrew as a co-sponsor of the Protect IP Act in the Senate, while Reps. Lee Terry (R-Neb.) and Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.) said they were pulling their names from the companion House bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act. Opponents of the legislation, led by large Internet companies, say its broad definitions could lead to censorship of online content and force some websites to shut down.
In a posting on his Facebook page, Rubio noted that after the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously passed its bill last year, he has “heard legitimate concerns about the impact the bill could have on access to the Internet and about a potentially unreasonable expansion of the federal government’s power to impact the Internet.”
That all said, the bills still have 39 co-sponsors left. An important procedural vote is still on the books in the Senate next Tuesday. It’s way too early to get excited.
It’s official. Actors in Los Angeles city limits will now be required to wear condoms while performing sex scenes in porn shoots. The LA City Council passed the controversial measure by a 9-1 vote yesterday. Needless to say, the porn industry was not pleased.
“We want to work with government to find solutions to real problems, but are determined never to submit to a City Council—or a county, state or federal government, for that matter—that believes it can impose its will on us in direct violation of our rights as consenting adults,” Adult Video News chief executive Theo Sapoutzis said in a statement. “This is an act that cannot go unchallenged.”
Could this be the issue that finally sparks a San Fernando Valley secession from LA? Stranger things have happened.
In protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), a number of websites are turning themselves off on Wednesday. The two bills, which are meant to stop copyright infringement of media on the internet, are strongly supported by the film, television, and music industries. But the legislation, which gives the U.S. Government the power to censor entire websites, has been widely criticized as infringing upon freedom of speech – an issue a little closer to our hearts than Hollywood’s bottom line.
Several major internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Tumblr, AOL, Twitter and Yahoo have all come out against the legislation. But it is Wikipedia’s decision to go dark for a whole day that has drawn the most attention to the issue. The “Wikipedia blackout” has been widely reported by the media, and is currently trending on Google and Twitter.
The English-language Wikipedia will go dark for a 24-hour period, beginning midnight, Eastern time for all of Wednesday, January 18. Reddit, Boing Boing, Imgur, and MoveOn will be joining Wikipedia’s protest by temporarily shutting down tomorrow.
The power of the people online is of course not just about getting Bank of America to drop an ATM monthly service fee or Verizon to back away from a proposed payment transaction levy. It’s also about freedom of rightful artistic expression.
LA writer-director The Pen is trumpeting a victory in his fight against YouTube censorship, as well he should. After rallying supporters to protest the service’s decision to ban a one-minute clip from his movie The Last War Crime featuring waterboarding, which was taken down on the generic grounds that it contained “nudity, pornography, or other sexually provocative content,” thousands of protest emails were sent to YouTube. Now, writes the filmmaker on his movie’s official website, the service has quietly put the promotional clip back up:
We just got word from one of our own participants that YouTube had surreptitiously reinstated the clip overnight. We heard it that way because YouTube did not even give us the courtesy of a notice this had happened, though they sure were able to find our email address to send the original kill notice.
John Buffalo Mailer, son of Norman Mailer, who co-founded the Village Voice in 1955, has joined the campaign calling for Village Voice Media to shutter its adult ad section because it can, and has, served as a tool for child sex trafficking. He writes:
While I understand firsthand the financial difficulties facing all print publications today, the fact of the matter is that Village Voice is making money from selling advertisements that others have used to buy and sell minors for sex.
Unfortunately, like those on both sides of this battle, the junior Mailer ignores the fact that adult women are sex trafficked too, making us wonder if anyone cares about sex slaves once they turn 18.
Read John Buffalo Mailer’s full statement after the jump.
Read more
Journalist Yasha Levine was arraigned late last week on “failure to disperse” charges for attempting to cover the police crackdown on OccupyLA. He was sent home with “no charges filed.” But that doesn’t mean his case was dismissed.
According to my attorney, “no charges filed” was shorthand for “no charges filed today.” Which means that there is no reason that charges couldn’t—and wouldn’t—be filed a little while later, like next week or next month. And judging by the threatening letter I received from the City Attorney’s office, that looks like a definite possibility.
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