Asia

Reporters Without Borders has condemned a ban on the online publication China Development Brief and warned diplomats and investors in China of a growing censorship of socio-economic news, preventing any reliable assessment of the real state of the country. The Beijing Statistics Bureau and the Public Security Bureau on 4 July ordered the site’s founder Nick Young to halt publication. The...

The private print media in Burma is outpacing its public counterpart and registering enormous growth. Yet, instead of encouraging cooperation in the business of informing and entertaining news-thirsty readers, the government is practically choking these independent outlets, says a Mizzima News report. There are unwritten rules that have been practised by the junta since the 1962 coup that ended...

Farida Nekzad began receiving menacing calls on her mobile phone a half hour after arriving at the funeral of a fellow female journalist assassinated by gunmen. “Daughter of America! We will kill you, just like we killed her,”’ she quoted the man on the phone as saying even as Nekzad was mourning Zakia Zaki, the owner of a radio station north of Kabul. Zaki’s maimed body lay nearby, part of her...

The mother of a Chinese journalist thrown in jail after US Internet giant Yahoo provided user information to the Chinese government arrived in Washington Thursday to campaign for her son’s release. “There is a lot of international concern, it is not an isolated case now,” Gao Qinsheng told AFP after meeting her American lawyer and the Washington representative of Reporters Without Borders, a press...

Yahoo shareholders have vetoed with an overwhelming majority the company's proposed Chinese anti-censorship policy. This comes close on the heels of the mother of jailed Chinese journalist Shi Tao announcing plans to continue with the lawsuit against Yahoo. Proposals to set up a human rights committee with the task of reviewing Yahoo’s policies around the world, specifically in China, were also...

Female journalists are increasingly being treated as soft targets by groups wanting to get their message of violence and control across. Two Afghan reporters and an Iraqi journalist who received numerous death threats for their work covering sectarian violence were killed last week, in a string of attacks against women journalists in conflict areas. Sahar Hussein Ali al-Haydari was brutally

The head of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has condemned the brutal murder of two prominent female journalists in Afghanistan. Koïchiro Matsuura decried the “cold-blooded killing Zakia Zaki, founder of one of the first community radio stations run entirely by women in Afghanistan, radio Sada — e — Sulh (Peace) in Jabul Seraj.” He noted that the murder...

A jailed Chinese reporter accused of leaking state secrets has joined a U.S. lawsuit claiming Yahoo Inc. helped the Chinese government convict dissidents, his mother said Sunday. Shi Tao, who was sentenced in 2005 to 10 years in prison, is seeking compensation from the Sunnyvale, California-based Internet company, claiming Yahoo Hong Kong and Yahoo China provided information to the Chinese...

Amid government measures reinforcing censorship of television and telecommunications, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has appealed to President Pervez Musharraf to heed the appeals of Pakistan's journalists, the public and the international community to respect press freedom. "Gen Musharraf, it is not yet too late to rescind the new electronic media ordinance and to put an end to the arbitrary...

A newspaper in southwest China has sacked three of its editors over an advertisement saluting mothers of protesters killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. A young clerk with no knowledge of the Tiananmen massacre allowed a tribute to victims to slip into the classifieds page of the Chengdu Evening News, a newspaper in south-west China, the South China Morning Post reported. The tiny ad on...