Freedom Of Speech

Grover Cleveland High School Principal Bob Marks has his limits. On Thursday, it was the labeled diagram of a vagina splashed across the front page of the student newspaper's Valentine's Day issue. Flustered teachers rushed to confiscate the publication, but with some copies already in circulation and the Reseda campus in an uproar, it quickly became a hot read for the school's roughly 3,700 students. And some of the contraband issues made their way home, getting a quick reaction from parents.

Television ads promoting movies are not the normal business of politics or the courts, but they are this month because conservative activists are seeking a wide audience for "Hillary: The Movie." David N. Bossie, who made a name for himself as a relentless investigator of the Clintons during the 1990s, has released a 90-minute documentary on the New York senator.

A Saudi Interior Ministry official, Maj. Gen. Mansour Turki, said popular blogger Fouad Farhan had been detained and was being questioned. The Saudi English daily Arab News said Farhan had "violated non-security regulations." Farhan is one of the few bloggers who uses his real name. His blog headline reads: "Searching for freedom, dignity, justice, equality, shura and all the rest of lost Islamic values." Shura is Arabic for public consultation.

Incensed when a government official hailed the conservative newspaper Kayhan as a paragon of dissent, a 20-year-old who lives in Southern Iran logged on to a popular website. The praise for the state-controlled daily was "the biggest political joke of the year," Ali wrote in a message posted on his profile. "I can't believe what a stupid nation we have and what a stupid president we have and that people are still following him."

It's the height of election season, and Pakistani television audiences might expect the airwaves to be crackling with live campaign coverage, argumentative talk shows and sharp-tongued political commentary. Instead, two weeks before this country's most hotly contested parliamentary vote in years, broadcast outlets operate under a stringent code of conduct imposed by President Pervez Musharraf during a six-week period of emergency rule that ended this month.

The California Supreme Court ruled Monday that shopping malls cannot stop protesters from urging a public boycott of the stores, even if the demonstrators are on mall property. The 4-3 decision upholds a 27-year precedent protecting free speech rights at shopping centers, even if the malls are privately owned. The case started in 1998, when the pressroom union was embroiled in a contract dispute with the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper.

With a presidential election scheduled for March, the Zimbabwean government Monday announced changes to security and media laws that it has used in the past to suppress demonstrations and close independent newspapers. Analysts quickly countered that the measures would not ensure a free and fair vote unless the election was delayed in order for newspapers to reopen and for the other reforms to have an effect.

Park Yong-shik is as bald now as he was 27 years ago when he was one of South Korea's most popular television actors, playing bad guys and funny guys, from shoemakers to Buddhist monks. He was 34 and enjoying the best years of his career when Gen. Chun Doo-hwan came to power in a military coup, rigged an election to become president and, among other autocratic acts, made it clear that the actor who looked a lot like him would never again be seen on TV.

She was a sales clerk in a WH Smith bookshop at Heathrow Airport, and when she wasn't ringing up newspapers, paperbacks and chewing gum, she was penning militant poetry on the backs of used sales slips. "The desire within me increases every day to go for martyrdom," Samina Malik, a slight, soft-spoken 23-year-old, wrote on one receipt.

All but unnoticed by most of the news media, a criminal case working its way to trial in a federal courtroom in Alexandria, Va., could create perilous new restrictions on both Americans' political speech and the right of their free press to report national security issues. The constitutional implications of these proceedings are alarming enough on their own.