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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates: From the clusters of plasma screens that adorn the red-tinted walls of al-Arabiya, one of the Arab world's most influential news channels, the battles of the Middle East aired on an hourly bulletin: more carnage in Iraq and a standoff over Iran's nuclear program. At the small, cluttered desk of Nabil Khatib, another struggle, perhaps no less important, was underway...

Bhutan has for the first time got a private-run weekly newspaper -- clear signs of the Himalayan kingdom transforming itself from monarchy to democracy. The first edition of the Bhutan Times hit the stands on Sunday and recorded a total sell-out hours after it was published. "With freedom of the press comes great responsibility," Bhutan's Prime Minister Lyonpo Sangay Ngedup was quoted as saying by...

I wasn't there, but by most accounts last week's gathering of the nation's newspaper editors in Seattle was a real downer. The talk from the ballroom to the barroom was about the dimly seen future of newspapers. Rosy Scenario was not on the program. David Shribman, editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, wrote from Seattle: "Criticized on the left, besieged by the right, squeezed by dropping...

Independent media in the countries of the former Soviet Union have come under further assault over the course of the last year, Freedom House said in its annual report. The political, legal, and economic environments in most of the non-Baltic former Soviet countries remain distinctly inhospitable to independent journalism, Christopher Walker, the organization’s director of studies, wrote in an...

ALMATY, Kazakhstan -- Reporters Without Borders condemned Friday the beating of Kenzhegali Aytbakiyev, a Khazak journalist, of the opposition weekly Ayna-Plus on 23 April. Aytbakiyev told the Paris-based media watchdog group that he lost consciousness for about three hours after being pushed to the ground and repeatedly kicked by a group of about 10 people. After coming round, he managed to...

PRAGUE, April 28, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- "Today, there is such a situation that the [Uzbek] government has put all of the media under its control. After the events in Andijon, the authorities understood that the independent press is, one could say, their main enemy," says Galima Bukharbaeva, an Uzbek journalist who fled the country because of her independent reporting after the May 2005 violence in...

New York, April 27, 2006 - The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by the arrest of Al-Jazeera TV's Cairo bureau chief, and the separate detention of three print journalists, by Egypt's state security prosecutor. Hussein Abdel Ghani, head of the Qatar-based satellite channel in Egypt, was arrested yesterday on charges of propagating false news while covering the aftermath of Monday's bomb...

(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders has condemned a decision by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) on 25 April 2006 to block four Baluch nationalist websites for carrying "misleading information." The move comes two months after the PTA blocked access to 12 websites displaying the controversial Mohammed cartoons. "Only a judge should be able to order the filtering of an online...

The International Press Institute (IPI), the global network of editors, media executives and leading journalists, strongly condemns the ongoing campaign of harassment and intimidation against two journalists in Yemen and the hostile climate of fear that the independent press are forced to work in. Abed Al-Mahthari, editor-in-chief of the independent weekly Al Deyar, remains in hiding after...

(FMM/IFJ/RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and the Sri Lanka Free Media Movement (FMM) have all voiced outrage about the lack of progress in the investigation into the murder a year ago of Tamil journalist Dharmeratnam "Taraki" Sivaram, the editor of the Tamilnet news website and columnist for the "Sri Lankan Daily Mirror" newspaper. The...