Censored

Pakistan's decision on May 8 to not allow foreign broadcasters to continue to do live transmissions from Abbottabad must be rescinded immediately, New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has demanded. "It is reckless for Pakistan to interfere with the flow of information from the site of what is one of the world's most important news stories. Falling back on...

Journalists Federico Rosaldo, Jesús Coa and Jorge Álvarez chose to resign from their positions at the Líder radio station on April 27, rather than comply with an order issued by the station's owner, Santiago Ortiz. Ortiz had instructed the journalists to stop criticising presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori. The incident occurred in Arequipa, southern Peru. The journalists co-presented a morning...

Officials in Ethiopia hijacked a local UNESCO-sponsored World Press Freedom Day event, installing government-backed journalists as speakers and nixing independent journalists slated to speak. There was no discussion, as originally planned, of this year's global theme on new media and the Internet at the Tuesday forum, according to local sources and news reports. The programme for the event at...

The BBC and the Associated Press Television News (APTN) censored satirical coverage of Friday’s royal wedding in London by The Chaser, an Australian comedy team. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) was forced to cancel The Chaser’s alternative coverage of the wedding after the BBC threatened to withdraw its feed from the national broadcaster if it did not stop the programme. The BBC was...

Responding to restrictions and attacks on its staff, Al-Jazeera has suspended its operations inside Syria indefinitely, the Qatar-based news network told the Committee to Protect Journalists today. Damascus has subjected Syrian employees of Al-Jazeera to sustained pressure to resign from the widely viewed satellite news channel, the station's Public Liberties and Human Rights Section told CPJ...

A dozen community radio stations linked to the opposition “Red Shirts” were shut down in a major police operation on April 26 in Bangkok and the surrounding provinces, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). An exact list of the radio stations raided by the police is not yet available. “Coming just a few months before general elections, this crackdown is very...

Iranian authorities used force to contain demonstrations a week ago in the southwestern province of Khuzestan and banned news coverage of the bloody clashes that took place. Both the national and international media were prevented from covering the incidents. The crackdown has continued this week with several arrests of netizens and media contributors, according to Paris-based press freedom group...

A bombing in the Minsk metro on April 11, which killed 13 people, has prompted a new round of official warnings to the Belarus news media similar to previous attempts to intimidate and silence them, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has said. “We urge the government to stop the almost daily harassment and threats against journalists who are just trying to do their job...

Many opposition and news websites have fallen victim to distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) in the run-up to Saturday’s election in Malaysia’s eastern state of Sarawak (on the island of Borneo), which is posing a challenge to Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud’s 30-year-old rule of the state. “It is sad to see that election campaigns and freedom of information do not go together in Malaysia...

New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists has called on authorities in Ethiopia to ensure that broadcasts of the German state-funded station Deutsche Welle, which had been jammed, be allowed to air freely. Local journalists confirmed a report by the Bonn-based international broadcaster that its programs were inaudible in Ethiopia last week until Friday. The management of...