Former President Banana’s Sodomy Trial Underway   By Rex Wockner International News Report

America Online Canada and its gay-content provider, Kiosque, have reneged on their contract to run ads for the popular gay-male erotica site www.chisel.com.

"Once home office in the U.S. saw the site they began to construct roadblocks," said Chisel owner Doug McClelland. "AOL invoked a rule that no adult material can be within three clicks of one of their pages and that no nudity or graphic language could appear on the link ads. Kiosque was required to interpose an additional page between the public and the hard stuff to meet the three-clicks rule and Chisel's banner ad on Kiosque's cover was toned down to an innocuous description: 'Travel, News, Live Interactive, A&E, People! (you must be over 18).'"

Prior to the final shutdown, AOL's "censorship" had reduced traffic to Chisel from AOL to 1,500 hits a month, McClelland said. The Kiosque site itself receives around 65,000 visits a month, he said. "Now when you enter AOL keyword 'Chisel' you get the message 'Sorry, Chisel is no longer available on AOL,'" McClelland said. "Thank you, Big Brother."
 

President Banana’s Sodomy Trial Underway

The gay-sex trial of former Zimbabwean President Canaan Banana is underway in Harare. Banana, 62, faces 11 charges of sodomy, attempted sodomy and indecent assault on seven aides, a cook, a gardener and a bodyguard. 

The flood of alleged victims came forward after the bodyguard murdered a fellow cop for allegedly having teased him with the nickname "Banana's wife."

Prosecutors will call 40 witnesses during the month-long trial, including Vice-President Simon Muzenda.

Banana has dismissed the charges as "a mortuary of pathological lies and a malicious vendetta of vilification and character assassination."

Rex Wockner's weekly international news reports dating back to May 1994 can be searched at http://www.wockner.com. The reports in their original form are archived at http://www.qrd.org/qrd/www/world/wockner.html, which also archives Wockner's Quote Unquote column and some of his longer gay-press articles.