A sweeping new bill in Russia can return censorship rights to Russia’s KGB successor, the Federal Security Service, if passed, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has said. Amendments to the country’s administrative code and the law on FSB activities would give the security agency the right to summon journalists for questioning and demand that editors remove articles that “aid extremists”...
State-owned Internet service provider Kazakhtelecom has blocked access to the independent news portal Respublika and the website of its sister publication Respublika-Delovoye Obozreniye, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Access to both news portals, which often criticise Kazakh authorities for corruption and human rights violations, has been blocked today for all clients of...
Indian policemen on Monday gave Gowhar Bhat, a reporter for the Greater Kashmir daily, a beating on a street in Srinagar, the capital of the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Led by Sub-Inspector Javaid Ahmad of the Kothibagh district police station, the policemen attacked Bhat while he was covering a People’s Democratic Party demonstration. “I...
Russian journalist Arkady Lander, editor-in-chief of independent newspaper Mestnaya (Local) has been brutally attacked in the southern city of Sochi, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Two unidentified men attacked Lander at his apartment as he returned from a grocery store at around 3 p.m. on Monday, the independent Caucasus region news website Kavkazsky Uzel reported...
Hang Chakra, editor and publisher of the opposition-aligned Khmer Machas Srok daily newspaper in Cambodia has been released from prison, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). He was granted a royal pardon on April 13 after serving nine months of a one-year sentence on a “criminal disinformation” conviction over a series of critical articles on alleged high-level government...
A court in the western city of Ural ordered on April 21 a local newspaper, Uralskaya Nedela (Ural Week) and one of its reporters, Lukpan Akhmedyarov, to pay 20 million tenges (136,000 dollars) in damages to an oil industry company, especially as the size of the award could force the weekly to close, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). In an article headlined “Hidden invitations to tender...
Moscow’s Savyolovsky district court on April 21 ordered French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche (JDD) to pay 250,000 rubles (6,000 euros) in damages to the pro-Putin youth movement Nashi for a September 2009 article about Nashi’s activities, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Nashi has also sued the French daily Le Monde, the British daily The Independent, and other media. The youth...
Three Nigerian journalists were killed in two separate incidents over the weekend. Muslim rioters killed two reporters working with a local Christian newspaper on Saturday, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Also on Saturday, court reporter Edo Sule Ugbagwu, from the private daily The Nation was shot dead at his home by two gunmen, according to local journalists. "Reporting...
Tunisian journalist Zuhair Makhlouf, contributor to Tunisian news website Assabil Online, was recently assaulted, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). In a telephone interview, Makhlouf told New York-based CPJ that eight plainclothes police officers arrived at his home at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday and informed him that he was under arrest. Makhlouf said he asked them to show him an...
Soldiers stormed the building of 14 October, a national media company based in Al-Ma’ala, in the southern Yemen province of Aden, on the evening of April 21 in order to seize the latest issue of Al-Tariq, a daily newspaper it publishes, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). The building remained surrounded until Thursday morning. “What happens in Yemen is hallucinating,” Paris-based RSF...
