State Control

Thai authorities, using the emergency decree, have recently shut down 26 more community radio stations in nine provinces, media reports said. The Nation said six more stations were pressured to discontinue their operations. The English-language newspaper also reported that 35 people working for these stations, like radio hosts, station managers and executives, are facing lawsuits for allegedly...

The provisional government in Kyrgyzstan has taken over all of the country’s TV stations and is busy nationalising them. Osh TV, an Uzbek language station based in Osh, the capital of southern Kyrgyzstan, is a case in point. The government has acquired a controlling interest in its shares and has arbitrarily fired its director, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. All of the country’s...

Al-Mawkif, an opposition weekly belonging to the Progressive Democratic Party in Tunisia has apparently been censored, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Rachid Khechana, Al-Mawkif editor-in-chief, told CPJ that 10,000 copies of the newspaper’s Friday edition disappeared from newsstands, apparently confiscated by security agents. Although a small number of...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called on the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to place Kazakhstan’s poor press freedom record on the agenda for its summit planned for later this year. Kazakhstan, the OSCE chair, is scheduled to host the summit in its capital, Astana. A meeting of the foreign ministers of the 56 OSCE member states at the Ak-Bulak resort...

For the first time in 19 years, the Turkmen government will allow the establishment of private newspapers, the BBC has reported. President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov was also quoted in the official media as saying new parties could also be formed, but that it should not happen too soon. The ex-Soviet state has seen some liberalising reforms in recent years. But critics say the changes are only...

The Security and National Intelligence Service in Sudan has barred publication of the daily Al-Intibaha. Authorities suspended the newspaper last week because of the newspaper’s supposed role “in strengthening separatist tendencies in the south and the north,” a security official told local reporters. The suspension stemmed from a July 4 article by Editor-in-Chief El-Tayeb Mustafa that criticised...

Turkmen authorities have refused to allow husband-and-wife journalists Annamamed Myatiyev and Elena Myatiyeva to travel to the Netherlands, where Myatiyev needs to undergo an operation for a detached retina, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). They were prevented from flying on June 28. Myatiyev and his wife were told they were banned from leaving the country when they tried to fly from...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called on authorities in Gaza to allow three pro-Fatah Palestinian papers published in the West Bank to be allowed entry into the territory. The newspapers say they were told they had to sign an agreement stating they would not criticise the government before they’d be allowed to distribute in Gaza. The West Bank-printed newspapers had been banned...

Restrictions on movement of media persons in the wake of curfew in Srinagar and certain other parts of the valley were on Sunday lifted by the Jammu and Kashmir government which issued fresh curfew passes to them. Media persons can perform their official duties, an official spokesman said. He said there was no gag order on the media but "we were only enforcing the curfew strictly". Newspapers...

The Pentagon on Thursday reversed its ban on a Miami Herald reporter from covering military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and said the reporter can return to the naval base there to cover a hearing next week, the newspaper has reported. In an email sent Thursday, Bryan G Whitman, the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, said that Carol Rosenberg "will be...