Asia

China's General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) has voiced its support for journalists' rights of supervision after police in an east China county wrongly issued an arrest warrant for a journalist, official news agency Xinhua has reported. "News organisations have the right to know, interview, cover, criticise and monitor events regarding national and public interests. Journalistic...

An editor and several journalists of Shanghai's National Business Daily were attacked Friday by men claiming to work for a shampoo maker whose products have been alleged to contain toxic chemicals, the newspaper said. The newspaper's spokeswoman Xu Yuanyuan said police detained a man claiming to be a sales manager for BaWang International and three others after the attack at the newspapers' office...

An Indonesian search team on July 30 recovered the body of reporter Ardiansyah Matra’is in a river in the small town of Merauke, on the southern tip of Papua province, according to news reports and the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AIJ). Matra’is, who had been missing for two days, worked as a stringer for the national television broadcaster Anteve, before joining local broadcaster Merauke...

Two employees were injured in an arson attack Friday on the offices of the Voice of Asia Network in the heart of Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo. The fire destroyed the studios of the group’s Siyatha TV station, but the network’s three radio stations have been able to remain on the air. The Associated Press, quoting a spokesman for the company, said a dozen men, armed with assault rifles and gasoline...

The police of Suichang County in east China's Zhejiang Province cancelled a detention warrant for a journalist who was accused by a public company of defamation Thursday morning, state-owned Xinhua news agency has reported. The police of Lishui City, which administers Suichang, ordered the county's public security bureau to cancel the detention warrant for Qiu Ziming, a reporter of Economic...

There has been an escalation of violence against journalists in Pakistan during the past few weeks with three murder attempts (two in Bajaur, in the Tribal Areas, and one in Hyderabad) and a severe beating in Hyderabad. The home of Din New TV reporter Imran Khan in Bajaur was the target of a Taliban grenade attack on July 7 that injured eight members of his family including his mother. Khan...

Control of media that are affiliated to or support the Red Shirt movement has been reinforced considerably since a state of emergency was imposed in Bangkok and many other provinces. A TV station, radio stations, websites and newspapers have been censored, banned, forcibly closed or prosecuted. Most of these media supported the Red Shirt demonstrations, sometimes issuing forceful calls for...

Six women and children were seriously injured late Monday after a group of unidentified attackers threw grenades and opened fire on a home connected to television correspondent Zafarullah Bonari, according to Pakistani journalists. Bonari, who works for ARY One World Television and Al-Jazeera, was not in the home at the time. The attack, reported initially by the Tribal Union of Journalists, came...

Muhammad Syaifullah, the Borneo bureau chief of the leading Indonesian daily Kompas, was found dead Tuesday in his home in Balikpapan, on the island of Borneo, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. The cause of death is not yet known. The police said that his body was found in front of a TV set, that there was froth around his mouth and that the muscles of his face were contracted...

A Chinese court in the restive western region of Xinjiang has given a Uighur journalist and website manager 15 years in jail for endangering state security by speaking to foreign journalists, his employer said on Friday. Uighurbiz.net, where Gheyret Niyaz worked as an administrator, posted a notice saying he had been sentenced at a hearing on Friday, quoting his wife who was in the court. "Gheyret...