Censored

Sri Lanka's military barred foreign journalists Thursday from covering weekend elections in the east that are seen as a test of confidence in the government, which seized the region from Tamil Tiger rebels last year, the Associated Press (AP) has reported. Maj Gen. Palitha Fernando said any foreigner not registered as an election observer cannot be in Eastern province during the polls. An...

Press freedom organisations have called on the Burmese government to allow journalists to travel to the country to report on the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Wednesday expressed concern at reports that the country’s military government has refused to issue journalist visas to foreign reporters who have requested to enter the country to...

Moroccan authorities have stopped the pan-Arab satellite TV news station Al-Jazeera from broadcasting a daily news programme covering the Maghreb countries from its studios in the Moroccan capital Rabat. Al-Jazeera’s Rabat bureau received a fax Tuesday from the National Agency for Telecom Regulation (ANRT) saying the frequency it used for broadcasting the Maghreb programme was being withdrawn...

The Burmese junta, which has appealed for international aid to cope with the impact of Cyclone Nargis, has barred foreign journalists from entering the country and expelled one BBC reporter, news agencies have reported quoting state media. BBC Asia correspondent Andrew William Harding was stopped by Myanmar (Burma) immigration officials at Yangon International Airport from entering the country May...

Pakistan's information ministry has forwarded letters from two Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) supporters to an English newspaper and asked it to print them to rebut an article criticising party leader Asif Ali Zardari, the Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) has reported. “In what is really unheard of, the press officer of the information ministry forwarded two letters of unknown PPP supporters to The...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has delpored deplores the Tunisian government’s apparent censorship of the opposition weekly Al-Mawkif. Over the past month, Tunisian authorities have prevented distribution of four successive issues of Al-Mawkif, published since 1984 by the opposition Progressive Democratic Party (PDP). Rachid Khechana, editor of Al-Mawkif, told CPJ that plainclothes...

The Arabic Charter on Satellite has claimed another victim. Nilesat, an Egyptian government-owned satellite transmission company, stopped carrying the London-based Al-Hewar Television channel on April 1 without warning or explanation. The station remains accessible to viewers on the Atlantic Bird satellite system, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). In a letter...

The Yemeni government has cancelled the licence of independent weekly newspaper Al-Wasat. On Saturday last, Information Minister Hassan al-Lawzi ordered the newspaper’s licence terminated because the paper had damaged relations with Saudi Arabia, and violated technical provisions of the press law, according to local journalists and official press accounts. A Yemeni government spokesman who asked...

The Zimbabwean police has arrested two unaccredited foreign journalists at a hotel in the capital Harare. The police issued a statement Thursday saying that the reporters had been covering the country's election without any accreditation. Pulitzer Prize-winner Barry Bearak, a New York Times correspondent based in Johannesburg was arrested Thursday evening. The identity of the other journalist has...

Egypt has ordered the confiscation of a special edition of German magazine Der Spiegel about Islam that the government said insults the Muslim prophet Mohammed, Egypt's state news agency MENA said. Information Minister Anas el-Feki said the decision "comes in the context of defending Islamic values and standing firmly against those who try to insult the prophet, the Islamic faith, and religions...