Key Posts Category
Just So You Know, Yes, The BMA Are Damned Liars: Smoking In Your Car Is Fine
AS Dizraeli pointed out there’s lies, damned lies and statistics. However, it is in fact possible to people to come out of the other side of statistics and start shouting damned lies at us: pretending they are statistics.
There is now strong evidence that smoking in vehicles exposes non-smokers to high levels of second hand smoke which is known to be damaging to heath, the BMA said.
Because of the small enclosed space inside a car, smoking creates 23 times more toxins than found in a smoky bar, it was claimed.
Now when I say that this is a damned lie I’m not talking about people playing with statistics or anything. I mean that it’s a flat out, untrue, known to be untrue, statement.
It’s also a damned lie that they’re waving around to try and ban anyone from smoking in their own cars.
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Posted: 16th, November 2011 | In: Key Posts, Money | Comment
Reserved Helen Flanagan Leaves Coronation Street Under A Basque: Photos
SO. Why is Helen Flanagan quitting Coronation street? She tells Hello! that she’s nothing like Rosie Webster, the would-be glamour model and minx:
“I like that she’s confident, whereas I’m reserved and shy.”
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Posted: 16th, November 2011 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts | Comment
Kerry Katona Is Not Having Sex With Susan Boyle, A Paving Slap Or OK! Magazine – Yet!
MOST often, Kerry Katona uses her weekly OK! diary to tell readers what man she is not dating. This week, Our Kerry changes tack:
“KERRY’S SHOCK CONFESSION – “I AM ATTRACTED TO WOMEN, BUT I HAVEN’T SLEPT WITH ONE YET”
This is:
“Kerry Katona’s shock lesbian confession”
It is now not only men that be afeared, as Kerry opens up her loins to both sexes.
One imagines that when Kerry has spent the next few weeks listing women she likes the look of but has not humped (Susan Boyle, Demi Moore, Pippa Middleton) , OK! will bring new confessions. Look out for:
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Posted: 16th, November 2011 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts | Comment
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 Premiere Photos: Los Angeles Red Carpet – (Kristen Stewart And Taylor Lautner Shake A Leg
THE Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 Premiere Photos are brought to you by Kristen Stewart’s leg, Taylor Lautner’s teeth, Ashley Green’s cleavage and Robert Pattinson’s eyebrows of bemusement…
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Pete Doherty’s Christmas Carol Panto: WIth Cold Turkey And Amy Winehouse’s Ghost
HAVING outlived Amy Winehouse, pop f**kwit Pete Doherty is seeing ghosts. The Sun tells readers:
JUNKIE rocker Pete Doherty has fled to Paris because he says the ghost of Amy Winehouse is haunting his London flat.
It is a well known fact that ghosts cannot stand Paris, City of Lights.
He told pals the 27-year-old’s spirit visited him three or four times at the pad close to where she died in Camden in July.
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Posted: 15th, November 2011 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts | Comment
Peter Roebuck’s Suicide Dive: Sun Buries Neil Manthorp’s Flawed Genius With Nudge And Wink
PETER Roebuck committed suicide. The Somerset cricketer who became a journalist “dived six floors to his death from a South African hotel room after he was questioned by police over an alleged sexual assault against a young man he met on Facebook“.
So says the Times, using the word “dived” to add drama to a story that need no embellishment.
The man who says he went to room 623 of the Southern Sun Newlands Hotel is aged 26. He is Zimbabwean.
South African newspaper, The New Age, quoted a source as saying that Mr Roebuck allegedly tried to seduce the Facebook friend and to have sex with him against his will. Police say they confronted Mr Roebuck at about 9pm on Saturday with the intention of making an arrest.
The praise for Roebuck has ben fluid. But this is an open investigation. In 2001, Roebuck was given a suspended jail sentence after pleading guilty to common assault against three 19-year-old South African men whom he had put up in his Somerset home while coaching them. Roebuck had caned them for what he claimed was slackness.
Judge Graham Hume Jones told Roebuck at his trial that his action had been “inappropriate”. He said: “It seems so unusual that it must have been done to satisfy some need in you. You used your position to abuse these boys and humiliate them.”
Roebuck was sentenced to four months in jail for each count, with the sentences suspended for two years, at Taunton Crown Court.
But he could write…
The Sydney Morning Herald reports:
It was just after 9 o’clock on Saturday night when Roebuck, 55, rang [ABC commentator Jim] Maxwell – who was also staying on the sixth floor of the Southern Sun Hotel, Newlands – to ask him to hurry to his room.
On arrival, Maxwell found two policemen and Roebuck stunned by news that a 26-year-old Zimbabwean man had accused him of sexual assault.
Peter Lalor adds:
Maxwell, a friend of Roebuck for more than 30 years, found him in a distressed state asking if he could contact his student friends and a lawyer.
The police asked Maxwell to leave the room. “I asked the detective if he could give me his phone number so I could speak with him later and he followed me into the hall,” Maxwell told The Australian last night. “That left him (Roebuck) with just one person and I think that is when he jumped.”
Maxwell went down the corridor to fellow ABC commentator Drew Morphett’s room and they heard the detective speaking on the phone saying “there is a complication” and “jumped out the window, I think he is dead”.
The Sun loads the words against Roebuck:
Bachelor Roebuck, 55, arranged to meet the handsome 26-year-old from a poor Zimbabwean family after making an online offer to help him through university.
But the unidentified victim called cops, claiming he was cornered and sexually assaulted at a hotel in Cape Town, South Africa.
Saturday’s assault was said to be so serious he requested counselling. A source close to the case said: “The young man is not gay and is not a sex worker. He needs money to go to university. He contacted Roebuck after a friend said he might sponsor him. But he said Roebuck pounced on him. It has left him traumatised. He got away but was so shocked it took days for his girlfriend to talk him into going to the police. Roebuck was about to be arrested when he jumped from the window.”
The New Age reports:
But when The New Age queried an indecent assault charge laid at Claremont police station and spoke to Capt Malusi Mgxwathi on Sunday, Mgxwathi said: “This is the same man who committed suicide at the hotel.”
The New Age source – who on Sunday spoke on condition of anonymity – said Roebuck jumped to his death when he was informed that a complaint of a sexual nature had been made against him by a friend whom he met on Facebook.
Roebuck 55, who arrived in Cape Town from Pietermaritzburg earlier last week, allegedly met the 26-year-old male a few days ago.
The pair later met at the hotel, where they were allegedly meant to discuss a possible university sponsorship for the male Zimbabwean.
The New Age source said Roebuck allegedly tried to seduce the Facebook friend and have sex with him against his will.
The man reportedly went to Claremont police station and laid charges of indecent assault against Roebuck. When police confronted Roebuck in his hotel at about 9pm on Saturday, with the intention of effecting an arrest, the British man allegedly asked to be allowed to change his clothes. In the process he managed to move close to a window and jumped out.
SHOCK. Bewilderment. Grief. These were just some of the emotions palpable in the sprawling student digs Peter Roebuck had set up for students who said he was like a dad to them and who had given them hope when, in most cases, there had been none. The house close to the University of KwaZulu-Natal Pietermaritzburg campus in the suburb of Scottsville was where Roebuck spent six months of each year. ”When he was here, we would eat meals together. He would spend time with us together and he would regularly speak to us separately,” said Dennis Chadya, 24. ‘Peter touched lives on a grand magnitude,” said Prosper Tsvanhu, on a cricketing scholarship at the university – thanks to Roebuck.
”I was playing in Zimbabwe but nobody wanted to play with us. My coach recommended me to Peter. He managed to organise the cricketing scholarship for me at the university and has been helping me with food and accommodation. Peter gave in many ways. He was a mentor. A father figure. He seemed to have this moral compass and moral obligation to assist others. He was concerned about everyone’s well-being. He was terribly concerned about the situation in Zimbabwe and felt people must not just complain. They should do something. That is what he was doing. He touched so many lives.”
Neil Manthorp knew Roebuck (do read it all):
I first met him when he was still playing first-class cricket and our paths crossed in press boxes and commentary boxes on a regular basis for the next 23 years.
For a long time, like many of his colleagues both on and off the field, I was intimidated by his eccentricities. We naturally fear or avoid what we don’t understand – human instinct. But I didn’t avoid conversation, far from it. I just avoided debate on the basis that I didn’t stand a chance and preferred to defer to his vastly superior knowledge.
Then, almost a decade after we first met, he was travelling around South Africa during Australia’s 1997 tour of South Africa looking more and more dishevelled. Nobody ever saw him at the ‘usual’ hotels and he brushed off my queries about his accommodation with a casual “oh, just with friends.”
We had just moved into a house we really could not afford and furniture was not only second hand but sparse. Still, I invited him to stay and he gladly accepted. He wore tracksuit pants the first evening which must have been at least 20 years old and a sleeveless Somerset sweater that was filthy, and smelly. My wife asked, understandably, when it had last been washed. He looked down at his chest and then up to her before replying, nonplussed: “But, it’s a cricket sweater…?” Evidently they were not intended to be washed. That night she put the entire contents of his duffle bag in the washing machine…
We had a new puppy at the time and we were battling to train it. The only decent piece of furniture we had was a beige sofa. The puppy fell in love with it and, if it wasn’t trying to jump on it, it was chewing the legs off it. He sat down on it and the puppy jumped on him. I removed the dog and asked our guest not to encourage it. This request was infinitely more difficult to comprehend than washing a dirty sweater – and impossible to comply with. So the dog stayed. It was a bit like having two dogs, actually. One was only a little bit better house-trained than the other.
One was a stubborn animal with a sense of mischief which seemed to revel in the attention it got from doing something naughty, and the other was a six-month old Ridgeback puppy.
Such are the facts…
Posted: 15th, November 2011 | In: Key Posts, Sports | Comment
Odd And Unsettling Erotic Images Of The Day
Posted: 14th, November 2011 | In: Key Posts, Photojournalism | Comment (1)
Suicidal Jerry Sandusky’s Sympathetic Judge Leslie Dutchcot Worked For Accused Penn State Child Rapist’s Children’s Charity
ALLEGED Penn State child rapist Jerry Sandusky has been granted unsecured bail. It has been deemed that the man whose alleged sex crimes went unreported by Joe Paterno, his former superior at Penn State, is not a flight risk. District Judge Leslie Dutchcot says Sandusky must be be freed on $100,000 unsecured bail.
This went against the prosecutors who wanted Sandusky to be placed on electronic tag and bailed at $500,000.
This is the same Sandusky quoted thus in the grand jury report:
“I understand. I was wrong. I wish I could get forgiveness. I know I won’t get it from you. I wish I were dead.“
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Posted: 14th, November 2011 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comments (2)
Scare Story: Daily Mail’s Lauren Paxman Says Lucy Hinks’ Waking Coma Was Caused By The Cervical Cancer Jab
SCARE Story of The Day: The Cervarix vaccine. The Daily Mail’s Lauren Paxman has news of Lucy Hinks:
Lucy Hinks is unable to walk or talk after having injections at school
Parents warn others to check on potential side effects of Cervarix vaccine
The statements are delivered as fact:
Girl, 13, left in ‘waking coma’ and sleeps for 23 hours a day after severe reaction to cervical cancer jabs
The news is clear: the jabs have made Lucy Hinks ill. Only, they might not have.
You might suppose Paxman is the victim of the Mail’s sub-editors, for whom everything is bad. But she states:
A schoolgirl has been left in a ‘waking coma’, too exhausted to open her eyes or speak, after having a cervical cancer vaccine.
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Posted: 14th, November 2011 | In: Key Posts | Comments (6)
Pension Funds To The Rescue! Raiding Private Capital To Build Public Assets
PENSION funds to the rescue! This is being greeted with glee over in leftyland:
Ministers are finalising a radical plan to boost investment in UK infrastructure and stimulate the economy, with proposals to pool the vast assets held in British pension funds and use them to back an ambitious programme of road and house building.
Pension and insurance funds are to be encouraged to invest up to £50bn in improving infrastructure, including private and social housing, power stations, super-fast broadband and motorway toll roads.
Hurrah!
Those huge pots of private capital are to be mobilised to build the public assets and infrastructure we need! Take that capitalist bastards!
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Posted: 14th, November 2011 | In: Key Posts, Money | Comment (1)
Gifs Of The Day: Silvio Berlusconi’s Doggy Style
Posted: 14th, November 2011 | In: Gifs, Key Posts | Comments (2)
X Factor Monday: Kitty Brucknell’s Dead Sexy In Wootton Bassett And Amelia Lily Dyes
IT’S X FACTOR Monday in the ITV’s show’s in-house tabloid – the Sun. The front-page headline tells us:
X factor chaos goes on – watt a shambles
This is the post-Frankie Cocozza X Factor, where everyone sings like an over-confident coked-up teenager with Nookie Bear eyes. As Lucy Connolly reports:
AXED Amelia Lily was favourite to WIN X Factor last night after an astonishing comeback — ending a shambolic week for the ITV show.
That’s Amelia Lily, Cocozza’s old flame who Kelly Rowland told to dye her hair pink before kicking her off the show. Anyhow, she’s back. Among a gang of singers releasing swine flu over the face of music, Amelia Lily’s the nation’s favourite.
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Posted: 14th, November 2011 | In: Key Posts, TV & Radio | Comment
Occupation Is All The Rage At The Zuccotti Park Carnival
THE fashion world has fully embraced the Occupy movement. Walking through Zuccotti Park in Manhattan’s financial district – where it all kicked off nearly two months ago – it is not hard to see why. Here, anti-corporate activists engage in yoga workshops, drum circles, live blogging, composting and other activities du jour. Many protesters dress up in suits. This is ironic. And in New York, irony is hip.
There’s a carnival-like atmosphere in Zuccotti Park, a sense of community has developed, a sense that occupation is so “right-on”. It’s a hipster hangout – with some anarchic youth, homeless dudes, and ageing hippies thrown in.
Scattered around the park are placards declaring war on everything from banking to fracking. But all the sloganeering rarely translates into anything substantial, and when the protesters are asked to clarify what their demands are, they respond in the most vague and disparate ways. But that, apparently, is the beauty of this protest movement in which there are no leaders and no overarching agenda.
The shallowness of the protests could explain why the fashionistas are so into it.
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Posted: 14th, November 2011 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comment
Charlie Bite My Finger, Please: How Cute Kids Make A Mint On YouTube
WANT to turn your kids into star without the bother of stage school photos, agents and talent? Well, YouTube Will pay you big money for video of your children giggling, crying, or giggling and crying. You either contact them to become a partner, or else they spot your video going viral and call you. Typically, 1,000 views earns the video owner 60p.
Says Kevin Allocca, manager of YouTube trends:
“A tiny percentage of the videos that are uploaded to the site get up to the four or five million views. What they all have in common is the speed at which they are shared.”
This Is How:
Charlie Bit My Finger:
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Posted: 13th, November 2011 | In: Key Posts, Technology | Comment
Jay Z Moves From Occupy All Street To Occupy Hall Street And Occupy Gall Street
JAY Z, the man who once Occupied Glastonbury and showed the wet canvas-dwelling cider drinker how to urban rock has been making a play to own Occupy Wall Street. Jay-Z has been flogging “Occupy All Streets” T-shirts at $22 a toss. It’s clever stuff. He’s changed one letter to brand it as his own and. Other logos overlooked were:
Occupy Ball Street (for the basketball community)
Occupy Call Street (for derivatives traders)
Occupy Fall Street (for fans of post-punk Manchester-rooted pop)
Occupy Gall Street (for cheeky bastards who try to profit from an anti-greed movement)
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Posted: 13th, November 2011 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts | Comment
Sorority Girls: Picking Which One To Hate Most Is Tricky
SORORITY Girls is the Channel 4 shows featuring five big-toothed American girls setting up a sorority house – Sigma Gamma – in…Leeds. These cultural missionaries will create the UK’s first Sorority.
The fivesom with the plan to colonise the UK (first Leeds, then Wakefield!) are:
Amelia – big white teeth and the biggest peal necklace outside the San Fernando Valley
Arianna – big even white teeth on an orangey backdrop
Devan – teeth that follow you round the room and most probably ask you what your life goals are
Dominique – shiny white teeth and “in charge of making sure our British girls are well mannered at all times”
Hannah – pearl earrings, pearl necklace and pearly whites. Girl most likely to say, “You betcha!”
The girls are not only defined by their pearls. They have quotes to hand your hat on (and yourself with – pass the pearl rope):
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Posted: 13th, November 2011 | In: Key Posts, TV & Radio | Comment
Ashton Kutcher’s Refreshingly ‘Dishonest’ Sympathetic Backstory: Stringing Demi Moore Along
ASTON Kutcher “is working so hard to court Demi, 49, that he accidentally wrote a tweet making light of sexual abuse“. Yep, it was not his lack of research, stupidity nor alleged cheating on Moore with “hot-tub ready” slappers that caused him to cheer for an alleged child abuser and Joe Paterno, a man some might call an enabler – it was his love for Demi Moore. Before that clanger Kutcher’s twitter feed was mostly famous for broadcasting a photo of his Demi Moore’s bottom.
Now the New York Post reports.
“He’s been in a bubble. He works 12-hour days, is trying to save his marriage and is involved in the management of close to a dozen Internet companies, so he didn’t really know what he had done until it was too late. He feels terrible.”
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Posted: 12th, November 2011 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts | Comment
How Frankie Cocozza Was Fixed Up With Stringfellow’s Worker And Dogging Fan Becca Hills And Katherine Holland
X FACTOR renegade Frankie Cocozza, the cocky, untalented Brighton teenager with a head like a windswept camel’s hump, remains on the Sun’s front page. The latest news is that Frankie Prankie wanted a treesome with “students Becca Hills and Katherine Holland“.
These would be “student” Becca Hills, of Ashford, Kent, who works at the Stringfellows Nightclub. On Facebook, she described her job as:
“Polishing helmets with Katherine Holland”
Her philosophy is: “Sex, Sex Sex”
And her “favourite sports” are: “Dogging”
This is also the same “student” who told the Sun:
“Some stuff happened between us, it’s a bit embarrassing to talk about.”
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Posted: 12th, November 2011 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts | Comment
John Lewis Advert Splits The Country: Is The Rabbit In The Box Decapitated Or Alive And Fluffy?
FORGET the Poppy Day debate in which the Daily Mail and David Cameron try to split the nation between the good who wear a new poppy and embroider them on their football kits and the scum who do not, and know what the true schism is centred on this John Lewis advert. Which team are you on?
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Posted: 11th, November 2011 | In: Key Posts, The Consumer | Comment (1)
Petra Ecclestone’s Wedding Only Cost £12m And Featured Not One Unicorn: Bernie Confesses To German Court
RICH goings on in Munich, Germany, where F1 action figure Bernie Ecclestone reveals that his ex-wife Slavica invested “in excess of £12 million” on their daughter Petra’s wedding to James Stunt.
He says he and his former beau argued over the £4,000-a-bottle Château Petrus wine, the stuff the wedding guests would sip as they listened to Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Black Eyed Peas, ate caviar, calamari, ravioli, lamb chop and chocolate pudding, and pissed away in the luxury toilets hand stitched by British craftsmen.
In a bid to prove that he had not misused the terms of an offshore trust in order to avoid inheritance tax for his aforesaid wife and daughters Petra and handbag collector Tamara Ecclestone, 81-year-old Bernie offered:
“Here’s a little bit of a demonstration of what really happens. My younger daughter got married and I thought as father of the bride I should pay for the wedding. But when it was suggested how much they would be spending on drinks, I thought it was absurd and I managed to upset my daughter and my wife. Then she spent in excess of £12 million on my daughter’s wedding, which I did not know about until afterwards.”
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Posted: 11th, November 2011 | In: Key Posts, Sports | Comment
Buy Michael Jackson’s Death Bed: Fans Bid For Killed Singer’s Air, Sheets And Drool (Photos)
THE contents of Michael Jackson’s rented house in Holmby Hills, Calif, are up for auction: the beds, the boys and any doctors you can find cowering in a rabbit hutch can all be yours … for a fee.This is all teh actual stuff Jackson might have touched or even breathed on just before he died.
You might care for upholstered chairs bearing a smudge of what might be Jackson’s makeup, the blackboard carrying a note from one of his children, and – get this – the actual queen-size bed where Jackson died. Yep, queen-sized. You’d imagine something more magisterial for the King of Pop.
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Posted: 11th, November 2011 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts | Comments (5)
Frankie Cocozza’s Cocaine Joy: X Factor Reject’s Amazing Role Model Sex
FRANKIE Cocozza: Anorak’s at-a-glance look at the X Factor rebel with the terrible voice, camel’s hump hair and ability to score with girls and drugs dealers. Today: cocaine at 16, sex at 12 and loads more to come…
The Sun (front page): “SHAMED FRANKIE’S CONFESSION – MY SIX NIGHTS ON COKE”
And…
“I’ve bedded six girls since show began”
This is an “EXCLUSIVE”.
Says Frankie:
“I will regret this for the rest of my life. I was an idiot, it was stupid. It wasn’t very role model-like.”
Adding:
‘”I can’t see into the future so I can’t say that I’ll never do coke again.”
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Posted: 11th, November 2011 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts | Comments (6)
Penn State Students Support Child Rape: The Cult Of Paterno
TO Penn State, where winning sports coach Joe Paterno, 84, has been sacked for his alleged part in a sex scandal. It is alleged that Paterno did not prevent a ten-year-old boy from being raped by his colleague, Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky, 67. In all, Sandusky is alleged to have molested eight boys from the mid-1990s until the late-2000s. Sandusky also ran The Second Mile, “a children’s charity he founded in 1977 that reaches 200,000 kids in this state each year through programs and camps“.
In 2003, after allegations were made, Leslie Wilson, assistant director for programs at Second Mile said:
“I am just overwhelmed at how hands-on Jerry is, and I think he is more involved now than I think he ever was… He has his hands in every event and you can see his real passion for what he believes in, he takes everyone in as family…. I can go on all day about how I feel about Jerry as a person because he is so great for the kids. It’s like he was put on this earth to work with kids. I don’t know if I have ever met another man that was as caring and as compassionate with children as he is.”
Mr Paterno is not implicated in the child abuse allegations. His alleged crime is to have failed to notify the authorities. He says:
“This is a tragedy. It is one of the great sorrows of my life. With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more.”
It is alleged that the school was wilfully ignorant of the alleged crimes. As such, University President Graham Spanier has also been dismissed.
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Posted: 10th, November 2011 | In: Key Posts, Sports | Comment (1)
Did Mel Gibson’s Talented Sperm Show Laura Bellizzi Around A Gated Community? (Photos)
GRAB hold of your hair plugs and prepare to ull hard: Star Magazine claims Mel Gibson is said to have impregnated Laura Bellizzi (aka Laura Patricio) another of his less than immaculate conception.
You will know Bellizzi from her fine work on reality TV show Secrets of Aspen.
Aspen’s social scene is a hive of scandal and intrigue – and Laura is definitely the Queen Bee. She may spend the off-season in Newport Beach, California, but when Aspen’s in season, Laura’s in town — shaking things up and making friends and enemies in equal numbers. This season she’s back in town with big plans to launch a skiwear line. Twice divorced, Laura is the proud mother of three overachieving daughters, but “mom” isn’t the first thing you think of the first time you lay eyes on this stunning beauty. When Laura sets her sights on anything – from another woman’s man to a business opportunity — heaven help anyone who gets in her way.
She and Mel might be suited:
With that said, my actions on the show aren’t always aligned, and aren’t always going to be aligned with my declared faith of the one thing that I am – I’m a Christian, and I believe in God and I do my best, even though I’m not perfect, each day, to seek, find, and fulfill his purpose for my life.
A Bridgette Willis tells Rumor Fix:
“In fact, it was not long at all after she and Mel met that she became pregnant with his child. I don’t know if the baby was planned but I know Laura has told me that she and her parents are just so happy!”
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Posted: 10th, November 2011 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts | Comment
The Adventures Of Tintin Censorship: Belgian Detective Upsets British And Lebanese Racism Police
MORE often than not these days the name Tintin is followed by “racist”. Sure enough, in Tintin in the Congo, written in 1930 by the Belgian George Remi, Africans are depicted as submissive and simple minded. They often come across as not half as clever as Tintin’s companion, the dog Snowy. To contemporary sensibilities the cartoon character’s derring-dos in Africa are expressions of deep bigotry and typecasting.
Now, with the release of Steven Spielberg’s 3D-animated film The Adventures of Tintin: The Secrets of the Unicorn, the cartoon racism debate has intensified again, with renewed calls for censorship and bans. British stores recently moved Tintin in the Congo from children’s shelves to adult graphic novel sections, and the publisher Egmont has wrapped the book in plastic and added a warning sign about its “offensive” content.
Over in Lebanon, there have been some strong reactions to Tintin, too. But here the cartoon has been deemed as unpalatable for very different reasons. In one cinema, Spielberg’s name was blocked out from film posters. Apparently, Lebanese movie-goers need to be shielded from knowing that a Jewish man has been involved in the film they’re about to see.
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