#censorship

#censorship

The State Department is instructing its staff to reject visa applications from people who worked on fact-checking, content moderation or other activities the Trump administration considers "censorship" of Americans' speech. The directive, sent in an internal memo on Tuesday, is focused on applicants for H-1B visas for highly skilled workers, which are frequently used by tech companies, among other sectors. The memo was first reported by Reuters; NPR also obtained a copy.

Horses, a disturbing indie horror game, was set to launch yesterday on several digital storefronts, but in the past week, many of those retailers have refused to list it, including Steam, the Epic Games Store, and most recently, the Humble Store. It's a move that has sparked controversy online, with many decrying it as unjust censorship of the game's adult themes.

Santa Ragione said Epic notified the studio of its decision just 24 hours before the game was released on Tuesday, despite approving Horses for sale on the Epic Games Store weeks earlier. "Once again, no specific indication of problematic content in the game was given, only broad and demonstrably incorrect claims that it violated their content guidelines," the studio wrote in an FAQ. "Our appeal was denied twelve hours later without further explanation."

Caltrain is refusing to report to the public when people are killed by trains on their tracks. They've imposed a news blackout on the deaths. They don't want any mention of suicides in the news out of fear it will result in copycats. They say that whenever a suicide is mentioned in print, the risk of another person taking their life increases, especially among teenagers.

"I pair a photograph of a Palestinian girl from the 1950s, displaced and waiting for food aid from UNRWA, with a looping GIF sent to me by one of my best friends in Gaza. It shows the last meal she has left, and her desperation to feed ten family members with what little remains," says Glorianna. Next to the image, a WhatsApp message reads '[12:36, Gaza/2025] Yousef: I'm okay but losing weight because of famine and starvation.'

I found myself shedding tears in front of his 1784 history painting The Oath of the Horatii -an allegory of the virtues of fidelity and sacrificing oneself to a greater cause, produced by a future Jacobin on the eve of the French Revolution as an endorsement of Republicanism. Looking back, I wonder if I was not only lamenting the withering of civic ideals (and of post-Reagan civics education) in America, but also mourning David's conviction that visual art matters in the making of the world.

do your due diligence regarding where your game is allowed to be distributed and to inform us of any territory where it cannot be.

I think about all freedoms. So when you say free expression, free speech, or freedom of information or Article 19, all of those concepts are linked together, I immediately think of all human rights at once. Because what I have seen during my current or past work is how that freedom is really the cornerstone of all freedom. If you don't have that, you can't have any other freedom.

Alibaba Cloud is not inherently a security threat, but its ties to China and the legal environment create potential risks that Western companies must carefully evaluate. For low-risk applications (e.g., serving customers in Asia), it may be a viable option. For high-sensitivity operations, most security-conscious organizations opt for cloud providers based in allied countries with strong rule-of-law protections (e.g., AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud).

Hosted by Nina West, the show features legendary drag artists Lexi, Bosco, Shea Coulee, Jewels Sparkles, Crystal Methyd, Suzie Toot, Brooke Lynn Hytes, and Lydia B. Kollins. Related: Florida attorney general harasses wine bar for violating a drag ban that judges already blocked Related: Judges forced a Florida Pride drag show indoors at the last minute Florida's anti-drag law, which threatens the business licenses of venues that allow children into "adult live performances," has been blocked in court.

Given the current circumstances, if I do not suspend this edition of the film festival, anyone involved in the festival whether directors, forum participants, associated staff, volunteers, or even audience members could potentially face threats or harassment, he said in a statement. This situation places me in a difficult ethical position. As both an organiser and an individual, I have no intention of putting anyone in danger, whether such danger is real or fabricated as a means of intimidation.

The decision by Indiana University administrators to allow the Indiana Daily Student newspaper to resume occasional publication is a victory for the advocates of free expression on campus. The Student Press Law Center, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and the American Association of University Professors, along with student newspapers across the country, spoke out loudly in defense of Indiana student journalists.

The EC also said it preliminarily found that both Meta and TikTok violated their DSA obligation to grant researchers adequate access to public data. "The Commission's preliminary findings show that Facebook, Instagram and TikTok may have put in place burdensome procedures and tools for researchers to request access to public data. This often leaves them with partial or unreliable data, impacting their ability to conduct research, such as whether users, including minors, are exposed to illegal or harmful content," the announcement said.

Books about sex, science, and politics were among the works selected for "Banned in Boston (and Beyond)," a Houghton Library pop-up exhibition that coincided with the American Library Association's Banned Books Week. "I think you'll find very few librarians for whom the freedom to read and the freedom of access to information isn't a very important topic, and that's a reason I really wanted to do something about this subject," said John Overholt, who organized the exhibition. "Because it means a lot to me."

In case you've missed it, Jim Rodenbush, the director of student media and an adviser to the Indiana Daily Student, was fired this week. This decision came after disagreements between the paper and the university's leadership about what information gets published in the special print editions of the newspaper. The university insisted that no news content would be in the print edition. Instead, breaking news would be on the IDS's website.

One of the things that disgusts me is a statement made by Kevin Bakhurst not too long ago when somebody said, there's no comedy on RTÉ at the moment. And he went, 'Oh, well, you know comedy, it's hit and miss'. And basically that was an admission of total defeat. And I'd never heard a head of a TV station saying that before that they actually gave up on making comedy.

"Everything seemed to be going according to plan," Herrmann said.

The most extraordinary thing about Chinese director Lou Ye's An Unfinished Film (2024) is how ordinary it is, considering the attention it has garnered globally. In semi-documentary style, the 106-minute flick follows a film crew as they try to resurrect a 10-year-old project, and find themselves quarantined at a hotel near Wuhan, China, in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

The poster showed the lead actor holding a bottle of beer and smoking a cigarette; unsurprisingly, the board nixed both elements and rejected the compromise of erasing them while leaving smoke still trailing out of the star's mouth. In the end, the buyer was provided with an image of the hero on a motorcycle with his love interest, a misleading visual he declined to convert into a bait-and-switch display standee.