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A documentary film on the crackdown on Buddhist monk-led protests in Myanmar in September 2007 has been shortlisted among the nominations for next year’s Academy Awards.
The documentary, Burma VJ, directed by Danish Anders Ostergaard, was released in 2009 and has been shortlisted for the 2010 Academy awards by the US Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Burma VJ is one of 15 films listed in the Documentary Feature category, which will advance in the voting process for the Academy Awards.
The documentary highlights the risks journalists and dissidents in military-ruled Myanmar took during the September 2007 protests, later dubbed the Saffron Revolution. It has already won about 33 film awards including the World Cinema Documentary Film Editing Award, Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award, and has been nominated for EFA Documentaire 2009 - Prix Arte.
Toe Zaw Latt, chief of the Democratic Voice of Burma’s Thailand Bureau, which contributed around 80 percent of the video clips used in the Burma VJ, told Mizzima News that, “Now, the plight of people in Burma is not only highlighted in the international media but also in film. It also fulfilled our commitment to increase awareness on the media blacked out country at the international level.”
The film is based on the story of Joshua, an “undercover” reporter for the Oslo-based Democratic Voice of Burma,
Equipped with a small handycam he reported from the streets of Yangon during the September 2007 uprising, and smuggled out the footage, which was broadcast back into Myanmar via satellite by the international media such as the CNN, BBC and Aljazeera.
Strange, somewhat contradictory reports about Rupert Murdoch’s comments about whether or not the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is too sensitive appeared in Australian media over the weekend.
Firstly, Murdoch’s flagship Down Under paper, The Australian, part of the News Ltd organisation, ran a headline on Saturday saying, “Rudd too sensitive for own good: Murdoch.”
The subsequent article said, “News Corporation chairman and chief executive Rupert Murdoch has described Kevin Rudd as too sensitive to criticism while pouring scorn on the Prime Minister's belief that Australia can play an outsized role in shaping events internationally.”
The Australian added, “Following public spats between Mr Rudd and editors at News Limited newspapers, including The Weekend Australian, Mr Murdoch has hit back.
"’He's oversensitive and too sensitive for his own good,’ Mr Murdoch told The Weekend Australian.
"I've said that to him, sympathetically. Politicians all over the world are paranoid about editorials and in their own interest they would be better employed reading something else, or albeit more laidback about it."
But also on Saturday the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that Murdoch “…told Sky news the Prime Minister is not necessarily more thin-skinned than any of his predecessors.”
The ABC reported “News Corporation head Rupert Murdoch says Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is more outspoken in criticising the media than his predecessors.
“Mr Rudd has not been shy about suggesting News Limited is running a vendetta against him.
“In the past he has criticised the media organisation's coverage in several stories, including scrutiny of the Education Revolution and the OzCar affair.”
Meanwhile, The Australian reported, “Mr Rudd has accused News Limited of running vendettas against him and his government, citing things such as The Australian's scrutiny of the government's ‘education revolution’ and other stories, such as the Godwin Grech fake email affair, first reported in some News Limited papers, but not The Australian.”
One of Myanmar’s leading media-savvy politicians who was caught up and jailed in the 2004 government purge has died in jail.
Win Aung, a former Myanmar foreign minister and one of ex Prime Minister General Khin Nyunt’s aides, died on Wednesday morning November 4 in Yangon infamous Insein Prison. He was 65.
Fluent in English, Win Aung was said to be media savvy with foreign journalists and willing to give regular interviews with foreign media, including Time Magazine.
“I am a democratic person myself,” Win Aung told Time in 1999. “I would like my children and myself to live under a real democratic situation.”
Before his removal from the foreign minister post, he wrote religious and political articles under the pen name of Sithu Nyein Aye.
His younger son, Thaung Suu Nyein, is now editor-in-chief of a leading Yangon-based weekly, 7 Days News Journal.
Win Aung was one of the first senior government officials to become a victim of the 2004 purge of reformists.
Win Aung was arrested in September 2004, a month before a government crackdown on powerful Military Intelligence officers and several political leaders including the Prime Minister Khin Nyunt.
The junta originally announced Win Aung and his deputy Khin Maung Win’s retirement following news that he had told senior officials at an Association of Southeast Asian Nations Ministry meeting in Jakarta in July 2004 that Prime Minister Khin Nyunt was in political trouble.
“He is in a dangerous position,” Win Aung was quoted as saying. “Khin Nyunt may have to flee the country. If that happens, I will have to flee with him.”
After his arrest, Wing Aung was detained under house arrest for two years. In 2006, he was sentenced to a 7-year jail term on charges of misuse of authority. He was detained in Insein Prison until he died.
U Myat ‘Sonny’ Swe, deputy ceo of the Myanmar Times newspaper was also arrested during the same purge and he is still in prison where he is serving a 14 year sentence for alleged newspaper censorship avoidance..
His father, Brigadier General Thien Swe, who was head of the unit in charge of censoring the private enterprise Myanmar Times newspaper, was also jailed. Reports of his prison sentence vary, but it is around the 130 years mark.
All persons jailed were part of a moderate (by Myanmar standards) political push which crumbled when the Prime Minister Khin Nyunt released Aung San Suu Kyi in 2003. On her release she began campaigning vigorously through the country, prompting the Depayin massacre of her supporters on the night of May 30, 2003.
This marked the end of Aung san Suu Kyi’s freedom, and the beginning of the brutal end of the reformist push led by Khin Nyunt and the upper echelons of military intelligence.
Public broadcaster Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s managing director Mark Scott has outlined sweeping changes for the future of the corporation’s international broadcasting operations, calling for the unification of its radio and television arms into one strong unit.
Scott said a fully funded plan to combine the ABC’s two international broadcasting arms, Australia Network and Radio Australia, into one strong unit, such as the BBC or CNN, could spearhead a more vigorous approach to broadcasting in the region that met the demands of this new era of globalisation.
This would include five additional news bureaux, bringing in a total of 14 bureaux in Asia, the Pacific and India, more than either CNN or the BBC
[ Click here to read more ]
Radio Australia launched its much-delayed re-introduced service to Myanmar on October 26, with the commencement date of a Myanmar-language component to be announced shortly.
This follows a statement by the Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd on August 12 this year , when, while decrying the continued detention of Aung San Suu Kyi, he announced that the government and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation have “agreed to Ms Suu Kyi’s previous request to have Radio Australia resume broadcast service” to Myanmar
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Two people from Thailand’s securities industry have been arrested on suspicion of spreading rumours by posting information about the King’s health on websites that allegedly caused a sharp drop in the Thai stock market last month.
The Bangkok Post reported that Thiranant Wipuchanin, 43, was arrested at Suvarnabhumi airport yesterday after returning from a trip to Vienna.
She was charged with an offence covering the posting of false information which causes damage to national security and alarms the public
[ Click here to read more ]
Western Australian author, poet, lecturer, journalist, editor, and lawyer Hal G.P Colebatch wrote a stirring article headlined The Saigon Media Slaughter in The Australian newspaper on Friday.
Colebach said, “It is a graphic demonstration of the political skew in Australian culture that the killing of a group of journalists, probably but not quite certainly, by anti-communist Indonesian troops at Balibo in Timor in 1975 has been the subject of ongoing agitation, including two books, a recent film and countless articles, ever since as well as demands for reparation and the punishment of the guilty.’
He adds, “Meanwhile, the killing of a group of Australian journalists by communist Viet Cong in the Cholon district of Saigon during the 1968 Tet Offensive has been almost completely forgotten
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Some interesting points emerged from a Washington Post article last week on the decline of American newspapers.
The Post said, “Almost without exception, the circulation gainers are the nation's smallest daily newspapers, which tend to focus almost all of their limited resources on highly local news that is not covered by larger outside organizations. Also, these papers tend to have a lock on local ad markets.”
It added, “Online, newspapers are still a success – but only in readership, not in profit. Ads on newspaper internet sites sell for pennies on the dollar compared with ads in their ink-on-paper cousins
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An information leaflet from the Myanmar government’s Ministry of Information promoting the annual Traditional Performing Arts Competition has an irksome misspelling of a word that has irritated and embarrassed the military leadership.
The Irrawaddy Journal reports that the misspelling of one Myanmar word occurred in the title of a play meant to honour the Tatmadaw (military). Instead of ‘Sons as Valuable as Treasure,’ the title reads, ‘Sons Who Make Their Parents Suffer.’
The information leaflets have been distributed to a wide audience, including the generals
[ Click here to read more ]
An unprecedented attempt by British oil trading firm Trafigura to prevent the Guardian reporting parliamentary proceedings has collapsed following a spontaneous online campaign to spread the information the paper had been barred from publishing.
The Guardian reports that Carter-Ruck, the law firm representing Trafigura, was accused of infringing the supremacy of parliament after it insisted that an injunction obtained against the Guardian prevented the paper from reporting a question tabled last Monday by the Labour MP Paul Farrelly.
Farrelly's question was about the implications for press freedom of an order obtained by Trafigura preventing the Guardian and other media from publishing the contents of a report related to the dumping of toxic waste in Ivory Coast
[ Click here to read more ]
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Comment by JJ McRoach
on AUSTRALIAN MAN CONVICTED OF CHILD PORN OVER DRAWINGS OF THE SIMPSONS HAVING SEX
Watching the Media
There have been and still are big protests against this, but the government seems result to move on this.
Therefore any doodlings of cartoon characters that could be regarded as children should be kept to a minimum, otherwise you could get arrested and jailed. Good luck