Christian Bale is like a real life Batman, by which we mean, he’s a very wealthy man who can’t stop meddling in people’s business. First, he got bothered by some Chinese security while trying to visit some deaf bloke or something… and now, he’s mucking about with vagrants!

See, two tramps started having a scrap and Bale wasn’t having any of it!

Over Christmas (yeah, this is hot off the press!), the Batman star stepped in to break up a fight between two horrible pungent homeless men in California. Was he doing it for the good of those fighting? OF COURSE NOT.

See, the actor was shopping near his home in Brentwood, Los Angeles (hello stalkers! Yes indeed, Bale lives in Brentwood, LA, should you want to follow him around, dribbling on yourselves and fumbling in your trousers) when he spied two vagrants engaged in a heated altercation.

Alas, powered by meth or special-brew (or both if they had any class), the war of slurs escalated and Bale had to swoop in like some kind of nondescript superhero and intervene!

He told the odorous pillocks to take it elsewhere – away from all the non-stinky, home-having families that were enjoying the peaceful surroundings.

That’s right! Not a care for the gruesome life of a hobo! Nice, middle class people were dry-heaving and wanted to enjoy the sanctity of civilisation. They’re all idiots of course. They should’ve whipped out their smartphones and filmed it all. They would’ve had a YouTube smash on their hands, especially if they’d goaded one of the vagrants to try lamping Batman one.

An eyewitness said:

“I could not believe what I was seeing. It wasn’t clear what the people were arguing about – but it soon became apparent that their conversation was heading toward a violent incident.

A ‘violent incident’? Is that how people talk now? Anyway, they continued:

“One of the homeless guys cocked back his fist and was just about to strike the other man – but out of nowhere Christian Bale appeared and got in the middle of them! Christian acted like a referee and told the homeless men to take it elsewhere”

Insert your own ‘KAPOW!’ jokes.

Guess what tech fans! Those Chinese tinkerers have made another copy of an Apple trademark that’s bound to cause a stir, if not entirely offend fanboys and turtle neck wearers everywhere.

Having already found success with the SciPhone and a full sized replica Apple store, those crown princes of piracy, the Chinese, have now created THE ULTIMATE ACTION FIGURE, in the form of Apple founder Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs. ACTION figure. ACTION… Steve Jobs?

Girls have their Barbies, boys have their Action Men and now, the long forgotten subset of androgynous hipsters that swathe around Shoreditch coffee houses will have their own doll to play and sexually experiment with.

Naturally, being an Apple product (albeit a fake Apple product) it’s ludicrously expensive, costing a whopping £65, doesn’t work with flash and it can’t play any real games. Not that you’d want it to play games, no, this action figure is all about the way it helps you do your design work, isn’t it?

You smarmy tit.

Rather predictably, Apple haven’t responded to this trademark infringement well. After all, what was Steve Jobs if not another trademark for Apple to profit off of?

Apple issued a statement to the Daily Mail, saying:

“Mr Jobs has not consented to the use of his name and/or image in the product.”

NO SHIT SHERLOCK, HE’S DEAD! We’re no experts, but we’re pretty sure it’s never going to be the easiest thing in the world for a Chinese company to obtain the image licensing rights to a deceased technology behemoth.

Aside from stating the obvious in the Mail, Apple are believed to have started legal proceedings against the two companies behind the Steve Jobs iAction figure, InIcon and Dragon in Dream.

They’re also rumoured to be preparing a press statement for the Independent that will confirm that the Pope is indeed a Catholic.

What could be better than repeatedly smacking an A List celebrity about the head? It must be a great laugh! And that’s exactly what Chinese government-back guards did to Christian Bale when they saw his famous bonce.

They clearly couldn’t refuse the opportunity to beat Batman up. You can’t blame them really, can you?

Of course, the goons didn’t catch a bus to Bale’s house, especially to clobber him, rather, Bale was trying to visit a blind lawyer. Can’t get a decent lawyer in Hollywood Christian? What? This is some human rights issue or something?

The lawyer is called Chen Guangcheng and they’ve been illegally confined to their home in eastern Shandong Province. Now you know. See, ol’ Chenny has become something of a cause célèbre among China’s rights advocates, and quite a few people have been roughed up by government guards when they tried to break through the cordon around Mr. Chen’s village.

And there’s footage of Bale getting manhandled too! And boy, it’s dramatic as hell! Okay. It isn’t. Furthermore, it poses the question: Why didn’t the wealthy Hollywood actor buy a helicopter and just fly over the cordon?

It seems Bale wanted the drama of it all. You can see him getting a dead arm or something, while he mews:

“Why can I not visit this free man?”

Then, they get chased by a grey van. A GREY VAN! It’s just like Star Wars or something!

If you want to know more about Mr Chen, we advise reading a newspaper or a book or something. He’s a very interesting man, not that you care. You may skim read his Wikipedia page or something, right? But you don’t come to us for sensible discourse do you? Okay.

Mr Chen has a massive, massive wang. Better?

Wanking Hard or Hardly Wanking?

Folded

• The Spaghetti Western Orchestra – You have until 8.49pm BST to watch this wonderfully weird Proms performance. Do it.
• Hitchcock’s Cameos – In the first of too many Tumblr posts in this week’s ‘Creased or Folded?’, here’s some of Hitchcock’s cameos. He’s the Jon Favreau of the Golden Age.
• Photographs of China - Twitter’s very own @herrschweers lives in China and is keeping an ace photo-journal of his experiences.
• Film Noir - Get into Empire’s guide to becoming an expert in just ten films.
• Nature Photographs – It’s just photos of animals & trees & stuff. There’s not many jokes in that.

Creased

• Russia – How dare they delay this vitally important world record bid?!
• Space Debris – There’s too much! What’s to be done with our celestial junkyard?!
• Mabbs & Justice – Remember, when they pop up on BBC3, you heard it here first.
• Nadine Dorries – Just in case you’d forgotten.
• Squirtle – Anyone who has ever played Pokémon will be familiar with this little dude but sorry, this is just too damn creepy.

Follow hecklerspray on Twitter or like our Facebook page if anyone is still daft enough to use it or BUY ONE OF OUR STUPID T-SHIRTS OR WE’LL KILL EVERYONE YOU’VE EVER LOVED!

Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, ancient artifacts, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.

A college professor once told me that if China hadn’t had that one-child rule, America would be a Chinese speaking nation. His thought behind the statement was that one billion people having lots of babies couldn’t help but burst a nations flimsy borders. And where is the coolest place to immigrate? Well, anywhere first world really, but at the time he was thinking of the US.

I would like to take the time to tell that professor he was wrong – probably because he didn’t take all of China’s floating ghost cities into account. You can build one on the cheap – and they’d probably house as many babies as you could float into them.

China’s not only known for being America’s nightmare debt collector anymore. They’re expanding their portfolio considerably, it would seem. They’ve got monsters now – remember the one that washed up on the red beach recently? Now wasn’t that a spectacle to behold.

They’ve also got floating ghost cities that pop up all of the sudden, then disappear when somebody stitches up the hole that was ripped in space and time. We know what you’re thinking – holes don’t rip in space and time – but what about that couple that almost got sucked into just such a hole in the middle of their crappy motel room? Tell them these things don’t exist.

Whatever this thing is – we’ll let The Daily Mail explain it:

“Residents in a Chinese city have been stunned after a giant mirage of a ‘ghost city’ towered across the skyline. The apparition appeared earlier this month after heavy rainfall and humid conditions along the Xin’an River in Huanshan City in East China. Tall buildings, mountains and trees appeared to rise up through the ghostly mist that had descended over the river at dusk. There is usually nothing buy sky across the horizon.”

There are videos out there showing this fake city. It was up long enough for people to run home, grab their video cameras and write a super-cheesy musical score. Let us publicly state that the video really doesn’t do much for us. We don’t know what the area is supposed to look like otherwise, so we can’t ooh and aah at something that just looks like a regular town with high rise apartment buildings. If you could see the sun shining through a buildings, or if a plane flew through the middle of one unhindered, then maybe we’d be impressed. As is – not so much.

Still – if it is a mirage – there sure is a lot of detail. Windows, trees, flashing neon lights advertising communist girlie-shows. Surely mother nature couldn’t think of that stuff on her own.

The video, as pointless as it is, is here for your viewing pleasure.

Martial arts legend and screen icon Jackie Chan survived his own death yesterday, proving once again that he is definitely much harder than Ross Kemp.

But that really isn’t saying much.

Jackie Chan became a top trending topic on Twitter worldwide after rumours of his death began to circulate on the micro messaging site. Now, far be it from us to criticise the users of Twitter, but how stupid do you have to be to rely on it as your primary source of news about celebrity deaths?

Surely that’s what hecklerspray is for?

The dribbling morons who specialise in retweeting anything and everything they see, in some vain hope that people will care about what content they’re pissing into the vast ocean of pointless information, began spreading the news around almost immediately after the initial Jackie Chan RIP tweet was… erm… tweeted.

God forbid people would actually check to see whether a story was true before they spread it around, even we here in the hecklerspray bedsit took the time to consult our good friend Google for confirmation of Chan’s death, only to be disappointed by the news he was still alive and had also recently starred in some sort of bizarre remake of Vin Diesel’s opus, The Pacifier.

We’re putting this down to the fact that people want to be the first to break the news to you that someone famous has died. A few years ago this was done with text messages, we all remember receiving text messages informing us that Michael Jackson or Heath Ledger had died.

But no one cares about texting any more because we have Twitter, which is like texting only on a larger scale and infinitely more annoying. But because Twitter is instant you have to be quick, so those few seconds you spent Googling the facts could be the difference between being retweeted or having to retweet.

It was either that or an extremely bizarre viral campaign by Channel 5 in the UK, who were showing one of Chan’s more commercially successful films, Rush Hour, on their digital sister station 5* last night.

The best moment of this story came from the London trending topics on Twitter though, where Jackie Chan’s name appeared right next to the hashtag, #thingsblackfolksscaredof.

Come to think of it, Chris Tucker did look a little uneasy during Rush Hour…

Follow hecklerspray on Twitter or join our Facebook group or BUY ONE OF OUR STUPID T-SHIRTS!

Some say that Avatar will soon become the most popular movie of all time – but not if China has its way.

To China, Avatar is a threat. Chinese authorities have grown displeased at the central message of Avatar – which is either ‘the white man will save you, primitive savages’ or ‘all white men are evil’ or ‘nature is beautiful’ or ‘it’s fun to spiritually connect with horses by shoving your hair up their bum’ – and have started to ban it from cinemas.

But it’s too late. Avatar‘s cultural revolution will not be stopped. Now, switched on by Avatar, millions of Chinese people are furious that their government is standing in the way of their God-given right to watch 3D films that are too long and based on hacky Hallmark-style sentiments about woolly, ill-defined spiritualism. And this is how Communism ends.

If we could pick our dream job, it’d probably have to be ruler of China. Seriously, it’d be such a blast – unless we’re mistaken, it doesn’t seem to involve anything more than swanning around the place banning things willy-nilly. Why, in just the last few years China has banned Bjork for being outspoken about Tibet, Jay-Z for being vulgar, The Da Vinci Code for its religious subversion and Sharon Stone because Sharon Stone is a colossal braindead monkey-humper.

And now it’s the turn of Avatar, the film that literally everyone’s calling ‘quite pretty, but a bit too long and probably not as good as something like Spaceballs‘. There’s a possibility that within the next few weeks, Avatar will become – if not the biggest film in history – then certainly the biggest film about a blue Thundercat with magical hair poncing around an enchanted forest. But that hasn’t stopped the Chinese authorities from banning it.

Why? Are the Chinese authorities worried that Avatar‘s radical political message – that being nice to people is quite good – will kickstart a revolution? Were they worried about Avatar‘s pro-smoking agenda? Did they become concerned about intellectual property violations because Avatar‘s giant flying pike thing looked like something that came from one of China’s polluted lakes?

No. The truth is that China only screens 20 non-domestic films a year, and only then for no longer than 10 days at a time. Avatar simply came to the end of its state-regulated run and is being therefore replaced by a domestic movie, which is quite a boring reason, really. Sorry. Still, some Chinese people are awfully narked off about it, as The New York Times reports:

Liu Chang, a 25-year-old marketing coordinator, said protecting the domestic film industry would not make Chinese films more popular. “It is obvious that Chinese movies are not as good as those blockbusters,” she said as she waited for an afternoon showing of “Avatar” in Beijing. “We have to admit this.” The domestic film being released, “Confucius,” is loosely based on the philosopher’s life.

See? What are you Chinese idiots complaining about? You might be missing out of a breathtaking 3D epic that looks set to go down in history as one of the most-watched movies in all of history, but you’re getting a biopic about a beardy old bloke who babbles about etiquette quite a lot. That sounds amazing. Honestly, you Chinese morons don’t even know you’re born.

Follow hecklerspray on Twitter

You know Chinese Democracy? The just-released album by Guns N’ Roses that was titled to deliberately upset the Chinese government?

Well, you’ll never guess what it’s just done. A newspaper published by the Chinese government’s ruling Communist Party has got upset with the title Chinese Democracy, and accused Guns N’ Roses of ‘turning its spearpoint’ on China.

Not that the Chinese government has any real reason to worry about Guns N’ Roses’ spear – based on historical evidence we’d say that Axl Rose is going to spend the next 15 years polishing the spear to within an inch of its life, then get Shaquille O’Neal to do a rap about the spear, then build everybody’s expectations of the spear to the extent that it’ll be a horrible letdown to anyone who actually sees the spear. And then instead of stabbing anyone with it, he’ll just go and have a wank anyway.

Some said this day would never come – after a wait of approximately 350 years, more false starts than you could possibly count and the still-unexplainable employment of a man called Buckethead who always had a bucket on his head, Chinese Democracy by Guns N’ Roses has finally been released, to the clear delight of the thirtysomething middle-management family men who made up the band’s angry young fanbase back when they were popular.

It’s been a labour of love for Axl Rose, a man who made it his own personal mission to create a semi-decent album that’s swaddled in so many overdubs, whooshy sound effects and random one-word dips into befuddling comedy Transylvanian accents that listening to it all the way through feels like scuba-diving through week-old trifle.

The weight of expectation around Chinese Democracy is so immense that it’ll never sell enough copies to justify the years and years of work ploughed into it. Unless, you know, the biggest country in the world is stupid enough to take the bait and get wound up about an album title that’s been common knowledge since the mid-1990s.

Which, hey, it has. AP reports:

In an article Monday headlined “American band releases album venomously attacking China,” the Global Times said unidentified Chinese Internet users had described the album as part of a plot by some in the West to “grasp and control the world using democracy as a pawn.” The album “turns its spear point on China,” the article said.

We can’t help feeling that China might be overreacting a little bit here. Look, something tells us that Axl Rose probably wouldn’t be able to grasp and control the world using democracy as a pawn if he wanted to. It took the poor sod about 15 years to come up with an album that sounds like the mediocre soundtrack to a documentary about monster trucks, for crying out loud. The sun will have expanded and swallowed Earth up by the time Axl’s even decided with shoes he’d like to wear for grasping and controlling the world using democracy as a pawn.

But still, at least China has got all this anti-Guns N’ Roses sentiment out of its system now. And with that it can begin concentrating on something a bit more relevant, like the hints of racism in that Chinaman sketch by hot new up-and-coming comedian Benny Hill.

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

It wasn’t so long ago that Sharon Stone offended all of China by saying each and everyone of them looked delicious, or something, and would no doubt be scrumptious when mashed down into a cracker-topping paste.

She then drew up blueprints for a restaurant that would use this as its niche. We told her this was a foolish concept, as nobody would come to a restaurant that only served crackers with mashed Chinamen on them. She said we misunderstood, and that she would use a wide variety of crackers to offer her patrons several palatable options.

And that was the line she used to sell us 20% of her stock. If all goes well, we’ll be able to retire several months ahead of schedule. We actually can’t remember if any of that was true or not. What is true though is that 1,000 Chinese people are on the verge of sueing Stone for one billion dollars worth of stir fried beef and broccoli for her ‘Karma’ comment a while back.

Or did they just want a billion in cold, hard cash? We’re pretty sure it was the latter.

After China got hit by an incredibly violent people-killing, building-destroying earthquake a few months ago, Sharon Stone said it seemed like Karma. Her inference was that the universe was hitting China with a little deadly wrath for the poor treatment of Tibetans.

Many Tibetans, no doubt, agreed. PETA did not.

Neither did China – and neither did some New York lawyer who’s possibly looking for a way to pay off law school real quick-like. Fox News specifies:

“The Basic Instinct star was recently served with legal papers announcing attorney Ming Hai’s intention to sue her for harming Chinese people when she suggested the catastrophic quake last May was ‘karma’ for the regime’s occupation of Tibet. ‘For the families who have lost their loved ones or lost limbs or suffered severe injuries, your … statement and act has caused extreme emotional distress’, Ming wrote, citing the controversial comments Stone made at the Cannes Film Festival.”

Hai has over a thousand Chinese people standing at the ready to publicly announce Stone really hurt their feelings, and only a paycheck with a one followed by several thousand zeros could mend their hearts. Those ones and zeros, of course, would all have to be translated into Chinese characters.

If Ming was smart, he’d strengthen his case all the more by including all members of the western world in with the emotional distress thing. After all, it was them who primarily had to look at Stone’s woo-woo halfway through Basic Instinct.

We know two people who still stay up nights because that thing hovers in front of them whenever they close their eyes – and one of them is our grandma.

No word yet as to whether the Chinese have plans for the one billion dollar payout they intend to seize from an old lady in a foreign nation’s court.

They should probably use it to build something like giant pool skimmers for their sky – and fast! After all, we heard their atmosphere is so thick you could bump your head on it – and that is not something you want your Olympic visitors to go home remembering.

That Dalai Lama and Robert Smith are a lot alike. More alike than you probably appreciate.

The Dalai Lama and Robert Smith both have their own websites, both find an umbrella necessary during monsoon season, both say “let’s go to bed” when they’re sleepy, and both of them are distancing themselves from Sharon Stone.

So, the Sharon Stone thing might be true for the Dalai Lama, but we’d wager Robert Smith would do the same, given the chance.

We’d all do the same, given the chance.

The Dalai Lama is a wise leader, both politically and spiritually, and being the reincarnation of Buddhist masters comes with great responsibility, and right now that responsibility is to stop messing around and finally de-skankify Buddhism.

We’ve all seen it coming, really. After associating with Hollywood in even the mildest degree, there can’t help but be a nasty skanky build-up in one’s religion. So, the Dalai Lama is going for the jugular and starting with the mother of all skanks: Sharon Stone.

You already know, but just to fill in our mother who doesn’t get to read hecklerspray as often as most mothers do, the whole Sharon Stone brouhaha derives from when last month at the Cannes Film Festival, when Sharon Stone took it upon herself to declare that the earthquake in China that killed 70,000 people may be karmic punishment for their treatment of Tibet. In the same interview, Sharon Stone had also squawked that the Dalai Lama and her are grand old friends.

But the Dalai Lama? Yeah, he’s not so sure about all that jazz. At a recent press conference in Sydney, the Dalai Lama seemed to delicately distance himself from his supposed BFF. He said:

“…yes, I’ve met that lady. Of course from a Buddhist viewpoint, every event is karma. Tragedy in Tibet, tragedy in Burma (Myanmar), tragedy in China, all this is karmic … but her particular sort of comment — that I don’t know.”

Our special Dalai Lama translation correspondence course tells us that the Dalai Lama’s statement in pseudo-street terms means, “get away from me, you psycho beast, and take your backasswards nonsense ideas with you”.

Maybe being banned from China and having the Dalai Lama back away from Sharon Stone slowly, cautiously, like a man dipped in steak juice backing away from a deranged panther, is karma’s way of punishing Sharon Stone for, um, well everything, actually. We’ll let you choose which reason is your particular favorite.

That Sharon Stone, eh? You can’t take her anywhere – primarily because she’ll start jabbering on like a tit about how the Chinese earthquake was karma.

One place you especially can’t take Sharon Stone is this year’s Shanghai Film Festival. Following her remarks that the recent Chine earthquake might have been some sort of cosmic payback for its occupation of Tibet, Sharon Stone’s invitation to the festival has been revoked.

Undeterred, Sharon Stone has decided to hold her own Sharon Stone Film Festival in her basement, and everyone’s invited – except for the Chinese, people who look a bit Chinesey, people who know all the words to Domo Arigato, Mr Roboto and anyone who doesn’t want to watch Catwoman, Sliver, Basic Instinct 2 and Police Academy 4 on a never-ending loop. She probably shouldn’t buy too many nibbles.

Lesson number one of being a celebrity is that tit-tape is your friend. Lesson number two, though, is that you should probably avoid gloating about a natural disaster that’s hit another country and caused thousands of deaths. And if you do, you should probably avoid doing it right after it’s happened. And if you do that, you should probably avoid doing it directly into the camera of a news crew that come from the affected country.

Sharon Stone probably forgot about that particular lesson when she told a Chinese entertainment channel that the recent Chinese earthquake was karma for its continued occupation of Tibet. She must have skipped straight to lesson number three: that adorable little puppy dogs are cute.

But, whatever made her blurt out such a lot of uneducated nonsense, it seems as if Sharon Stone’s career in China might be well and truly over. Despite releasing a sincere-sounding apology for her comments, Christian Dior has dropped Sharon Stone from its Chinese ads and all Sharon Stone movies have been banned from China’s largest cinema chain.

And that’s not all, because now Sharon Stone has been told that she’s no longer invited to this year’s Shanghai Film Festival. The Associated Press reports:

The backlash in China against Sharon Stone continued Wednesday as the Shanghai International Film Festival said the American actress was not welcome at this year’s event. Stone, who walked the red carpet in Shanghai last year, will not be invited back soon, Shanghai International Film Festival spokeswoman Tang Bing said Wednesday. The Hollywood actress previously impressed festival organizers with her charity work and her appearance last year, and her comments came as a surprise, Tang said.

It’s a shame that Sharon Stone’s invitation to the festival has been revoked, because it means she’ll miss out on some of the most up-to-the-minute movies in China – movies like Sharon Stone Is A Twat, I Hate Sharon Stone, Why Won’t Sharon Stone Shut Up and the potential blockbuster Ancient Vagina Lady Makes No Sense.

Still, this Chinese anti-Stone sentiment won’t last forever, especially if Sharon works hard to improve her image in the country by helping with the earthquake relief effort. Time is the greatest healer after all. Well, time and knowing when it’s not an appropriate time to blather on about your kindergarten-level grasp of spirituality, but this is Sharon Stone we’re talking about, so let’s not ask too much of her.

We like to voice our opinion. If there’s something we don’t like, we will act. As a matter of fact it happened last week. We successfully got the local café to stop using bacon that had been dropped on the floor in sandwiches.

Whilst our campaign was a small victory, someone had to try and do something better. And it was only bloody Bjork, who went out of her to try and make a difference to someone. However, in stark contrast between ourselves and the Icelandic pop queen, she didn’t really do much good. Instead of helping, she fucked off the whole of China and consequently the government there now wants to stop foreign artists entering the country.

Well done Bjork! 

China is known for a lot of interesting cultural aspects. For instance, its terracotta army that will sort you out if you step out of line, its big fuck-off wall, its numbers 16, 33 and 56 which can be found at any tasty Chinese takeaway establishment, its knock-off designer goods from the likes of Rebook, Neek, Louise Vitton and Kalven Cleen and its job of hosting the upcoming Olympic games where America will win everything. 

However, one of the biggest aspects of China is its rather rocky relationship with Tibet. We won’t bore you with a full-blown history lesson but, in a nutshell, China owns Tibet’s ass. A lot of people see China’s control of Tibet as slightly wrong and various campaigns have started and ended to free the country. On the other hand, China deems any talk of this subject as a big no no. In its eyes, Tibet is quite happy being under the thumb of China.  

Amongst other things, China is very strict on its own media and bans any public opinion on such hot topics as Tibet. Likewise, the country rarely lets western bands in to play in case they breach the censorship laws. Despite this, the Chinese government recently asked Bjork to come and entertain a few people. It went slightly tits up. 

At a recent gig in Shanghai, the singer and part-time airport fighter simply set the following: 

“Tibet, Tibet.” 

It may not seem like much, but it was enough to offend the government. The ministry for culture in China said Bjork “broke Chinese law and hurt Chinese people's feelings” and pledged to:

"Further tighten controls. We will further tighten controls on foreign artists performing in China in order to prevent similar cases from happening in the future. We shall never tolerate any attempt to separate Tibet from China and will no longer welcome any artists who deliberately do this."  

Obviously, the Chinese have not yet developed tiny police officers who can fly into people's heads and control what comes out of their mouths. So it was highly possible Bjork would say something that could ruffle a few aromatic duck feathers. And, unlike Bono, Bjork has admitted that she wasn’t a part time politician and was simply expressing human emotions. Just coincidentally in China where the subject of Tibet is a wee bit iffy. If she had been slagging off kebabs at an English gig, we may have reacted in a similar way to the Chinese. 

And Bjork’s punishment for her wrong doings? A warning of being banned in China if she does it again. Whilst that’s nothing too extreme, it is important to note that the country wants to tighten the influx of foreign artists due to her actions. Just in case they say Tibet.

This ultimately means that the population of China will never see the likes of Keane, Scouting For Girls and The Feeling grace their country. Actually, that’s not such a bad deal. Where can we sign up for citizenship?

Read more: 

China to crack down on pop stars - BBC

'One World One Dream' is China's slogan for the 2008 Olympics which, on the face of it, makes their government seem no more harmful than Bono.

And if Bono rang you up and said he wanted you to be artistic advisor for one of his gigs promoting this ‘One World One Dream’ ideal and he’d pay you a lot of money for it, so much so that the shame of working with U2 was totally rescinded, you’d no doubt quickly jump on board and put on one hell of a 3D laser-fest.

But what if it turned out that Bono, on his days off, in acquiescence to his idyllic showmanship, was financially supporting genocide in Darfur? And what if it turned out that, in the past, in an effort to reach this ‘One World One Dream’ ideal, he had ritualistically executed somewhere between 40 and 90 million of his own fans who didn’t quite ‘get it’? And what if he had scared the Dalai Lama away from his peaceful Tibetan home and into a friendship with Richard Gere? Would you still be happy to dazzle the world with your laser-show?

Of course, that’s all hypothetical; Bono doesn’t have any of those atrocities on his head; he has a whole host of his own to worry about. But the Chinese Government has apparently been funding the Darfur genocide and Steven Spielberg is the man it has hired to advise the artistic development of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, much to the annoyance of UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and human rights activist/actress Mia Farrow.

 According to Mia Farrow:

"It has been nearly a year since Mr. Spielberg contacted President Hu about Beijing's role in the Darfur genocide. Given the deteriorating situation on the ground, we hope that Mr. Spielberg will waste no more time – and officially distance himself from the Games."

However, Andy Spahn, a representative for Mr. Spielberg, insists the director is doing all he can to help stop the atrocities in Darfur – even spearheading the campaign led by George Clooney and Don Cheadle to bring the world's attention to the crisis. Spahn told the New York Post:

"Steven left the set of his Indiana Jones movie to fly to New York to meet with the Chinese delegation. He is totally committed to stopping the genocide in Darfur."

In September 2004 US Secretary of State Colin Powell acknowledged the situation in Darfur to be ‘genocide’, before he and his government proceeded to do little to nothing about it. UN Coordinator Mukesh Kapila has said that it is "the world's worst humanitarian crisis," and he and the UN have gone on to write a number of very aggressive letters. So, amidst all this, how dare Spielberg work hand-in-hand with China. He hasn’t faced such uproar since he was asked to defend the plot of War Of The Worlds – and he had a bloody futile case then.

One way of looking at it is that there are very few countries in the world that don’t have a history with similar depravity – apart from maybe Finland. The US, after all, has had its fair share of embarrassing moments, with the Native Americans, the slave trade, Vietnam, Iraq and Justin Timberlake to name but a few.

Even in dear old England we’ve done some shit in Ireland that’ll never make it into our secondary school history syllabus. So would it not – in Mia's eyes – be a similarly offensive act to work in conjunction with the games if they were held in LA or London? Perhaps Spielberg is just taking in the bigger picture and is working with China to improve relationships and move into a better future for us all?

What do you think: A supporter of genocide, or merely a man of progression? Leave your comments below.

To find out more on the crisis in Darfur, visit www.miafarrow.org.

Read more: 

SPIELBERG + FARROW ROW OVER DARFUR – Contactmusic