State Control

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has urged Taiwan's National Police Agency (NPA) to stop asking media personnel for information about protesters at a recent public demonstration. According to the Association of Taiwan Journalists (ATJ), an IFJ affiliate, members of the Taiwan police have reportedly asked media workers to provide photographs of demonstrators who participated in the...

Russian prosecutors are launching inquiries across the country against news media reporting on the financial crisis in a bid to stem growing concern about its impact, Moscow-based business newspaper Kommersant reported on Wednesday. "It's not censorship. We're just checking how reliable the information is," a press official from the prosecutor general's office was quoted as saying by Agence France...

Radio Galkayo, a privately-owned station in the northeastern somalian city of Galkayo, has started functioning again and its director, Hassan Mohamed Jama, has been released after three days in detention. Jama has nonetheless been ordered to report to a Galkayo court at 9 a.m. on Thursday, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). The police of the autonomous northeastern territory of...

The Sudanese police Monday arrested 70 journalists in capital Khartoum where they had gathered to present a memorandum to lawmakers asking them to revise the Press and Media Law and to make it conform to the interim constitution. Scores of journalists rallied outside parliament condemning the censorship which flouts the freedom of expression supposed to be enshrined in Sudan's interim constitution...

The police has shut down Radio Galkayo and arrested journalist Hassan Mohammed Jama, the director of the radio station in the Mudug region of Puntland, the National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ) has reported. The commander of the Puntland police in the region, Colonel Abdirisak Ismail, who is known as Darwish, along with a team of well-armed police officers raided Radio Galkayo at 2:00 p.m....

Zambia's members of Parliament (MPs) have called for the regulation of media organisations through the use of statutory instruments as opposed to self-regulation because of the alleged biased media coverage of the just ended presidential by-election. According to a report in the Zambia Daily Mail of November 14 and the live broadcast of Parliament Radio which Media Institute of Southern Africa...

Two publications in Pakistan's Sindh province, the daily Islam and the weekly Zarb-e-Momin, have been banned for the alleged offence of spreading "anti-state feelings". Although the order was made by the Sindh provincial government under an article of the Criminal Procedure Code dealing with forfeiture for spreading "anti-state feeling", the action appears to have been initiated by the Federal...

China has agreed to relax controls on financial news providers in an out-of-court settlement of a dispute with the United States, the European Union and Canada. The deal ends Chinese state news agency Xinhua's role as a regulator and the requirement for foreign suppliers of financial information to act through an agent, and provides protection for confidential business information. Calling it a...

The National Communications Council (CNC), the media regulatory body in Guinea, has ordered the management of Familia FM, a community radio station in Conakry, to cease transmission for allegedly broadcasting information that the CNC claimed could "disturb the public peace" of the country. The Media Foundation for West Africa's (MFWA) correspondent reported on November 4 that following the...

The Indian embassy in Sweden has denied visas to journalists for writing critical reports about social issues in the country, including trafficking of women in Mumbai and changing gender roles in India. Freelance journalist Ulrika Nandra and foreign correspondent of daily Göteborgs-Posten, Marina Malmgren, are two of the Swedish journalists whose visa applications have been rejected, according to...