UK TV censors Diana crash photo

UK TV station Channel 4's documentary Diana: The Witnesses In The Tunnel, broadcast on 6th June, included a notorious photograph of Diana receiving medical treatment at the crash scene.

Channel 4 broadcast the image, citing a public interest defence, despite a letter from Diana's children asking them to cut it. The UK tabloids have been predictably vitriolic in their criticism of Channel 4, though I can't see what all the fuss is about because Diana's face was obscured by a grey square.

The Sun published the photo with Diana's face obscured on its front page on 14th July last year in protest at Chi magazine, so how can they criticse Channel 4 for doing the same thing?

The source of the image is a French police report into Diana's accident, photocopies of which first appeared in the American TV documentary 48 Hours and the French book Lady Diana.

Ketel One

An advert by Ketel One, the vodka company, features an alphabetical list of "the 50 best films of all time", as follows:

• 2001: A Space Odyssey
  
• A Clockwork Orange
  
• American Graffiti
  
• Annie Hall
  
• Apocalypse Now
  
• Battleship Potemkin
  
• Ben-Hur: A Tale Of The Christ
  
• The Bridge On The River Kwai
  
• Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid
  
• Casablanca
  
• Chinatown
  
• Citizen Kane
  
• Dances With Wolves
  
• The Deer Hunter
  
• Dr Zhivago
  
• Dr Strangelove
  
• ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
  
• Easy Rider
  
• The French Connection
  
• Giant
  
• The Godfather II
  
• Gone With The Wind
  
• GoodFellas
  
• The Graduate
  
• High Noon
  
• It's A Wonderful Life
  
• Jaws
  
• Lawrence Of Arabia
  
• Midnight Cowboy
  
• My Fair Lady
  
• On The Waterfront
  
• One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
  
• Platoon
  
• Psycho
  
• Pulp Fiction
  
• Raging Bull
  
• Raiders Of The Lost Ark
  
• Rocky
  
• Schindler's List
  
• The Searchers
  
• The Silence Of The Lambs
  
• Singin' In The Rain
  
• Some Like It Hot
  
• Star Wars IV: A New Hope
  
• The Sound Of Music
  
• Taxi Driver
  
• To Kill A Mockingbird
  
• Vertigo
  
• West Side Story
  
• The Wizard Of Oz

It's populist and weighted towards Hollywood classics, so a few more foreign-language films would be nice (The Seventh Seal and The Seven Samurai, at least), but otherwise this is quite a decent list. Note that Ben-Hur is the William Wyler remake rather than the Fred Niblo version.

Coincidence

Coincidence is a small exhibition of observational photographs by Thai director Pen-Ek Rattanarueng, taken while he was filming on location in various countries. Many of the images capture incongruous advertising images, such as a poster for the film Mr Bean's Holiday. The exhibition is running from 16th May until 17th June at Siam Paragon; it's not advertised, but go to the 5th floor cinema box office and you'll see it.

MICT blocklist (facthai.wordpress.com)

FACT has published a full list of every website blocked by ICT Minister Sitthichai Pokaiyaudom.

As anyone who has followed Sitthichai's recent newspaper interviews will know, he has repeatedly asserted that MICT has blocked only a handful of websites. (He has also admitted that he does not actually read these websites before blocking them, and indeed that he hardly ever uses the internet at all.) FACT's publication of MICT's huge internal blocklist exposes Sitthichai's lies that only a few are blocked.

Most of the websites on the list are porn and gambling sites, and proxy servers, though the leaking of the list also reveals for the first time the full extent of political censorship online. Some CNN, The Age, and Seattle Post-Intelligencer news pages are on the list, though they are no longer archived online.

The most bizarre entry is marywoodschool.org, the website of Marywood School in California. This is a standard school website and contains no references to Thailand; in any case, the school has now been renamed Marywood-Palm Valley School, with a new (unblocked, and equally innocuous) website at mwpv.org.

Beat The Censors

FACT is distributing a CD titled Beat The Censors: Unblock ICT!, which contains proxy software to circumvent Thai web censorship.