Word: iran
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...notion of unfettered access to communications is so uncontroversial as to seem almost trite, but it is a revolutionary demand in countries such as Iran and China where it threatens the regimes' hold on power. That's the reason that one third of the world that has any access to internet sees a version censored by their governments. Declaring a kind of soft war on this new information curtain being drawn across the "new iconic infrastructure of our age", the U.S. is now committing itself to actively undermining censorship. In China, that means going up against some 50,000 government...
Could the show be a paradigm for the country's general, if not pathological, sense of social and political captivity? The closest rival Lost has in Iran is Prison Break, a TV series that had only a moderate following in the U.S. Before that, there was Jewel in the Castle, a melodrama from South Korea about a young girl working as an indentured cook in the royal kitchen of an ancient monarch who manages to free herself after a lifetime of struggle. But Lost and its mysteries appeal even more strongly to Iranians. "In Iran, people are drawn to stories...
Perhaps it's just good entertainment. Another secret to Lost's success in the Islamic Republic is that it's family-friendly. Unlike in the U.S., the television in Iran tends to be in its own room, away from the dinner table. Families generally sit together to watch shows - veritable home cinemas. (Iranians are notorious film buffs, their love affair with movies stretching back to the birth of cinema itself. The first films were brought to Iran in 1900 by the monarch Mozaffar al-Din Shah, just five years after the Lumière brothers premiered their light machine...
Lost came out in a time in Iran when watching a show at home with family and friends was more exciting than anything going on outside. The 2009 presidential election and subsequent rise of the opposition Green Movement changed that. Nonetheless, innumerable Iranians will see the final season of Lost through to the end. "People are very excited about Season 6. They have waited long enough for it," says Ghazaleh. The executive producers of Lost have already promised viewers that not every single mystery will be answered. It remains an open question whether the various plot points of Lost will...
...tougher" could just be discrete events. Rather than read too much into the intensity of recent rhetoric about Clinton's speech and the arms deal, we should watch to see whether, in the coming weeks, China goes along with or tries to block American efforts to put pressure on Iran...