With two weeks to go until the start of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Sri Lanka, the government’s anti-media policies remain a pressing topic. There are two links below to statements by media support groups today relating to the government’s wrongful and heavy handed response to a media workshop held in Colombo this…
The New Express’s campaign to get Chen Yongzhou, 27, released from police detention last week attracted international attention, including CPJ’s. Chen had been picked up October 18 on “suspicion of damaging commercial reputation” with a series of stores alleging financial mismanagement and corruption at Zoomlion Heavy Industry Science and Technology Co., China’s second-largest heavy equipment…
Bangladesh’s Supreme Court has hardened the sentence against Abdul Quader Molla, a top Islamist of a key opposition party, from a life term to death for his role in mass killings committed during the country’s war of independence from Pakistan in 1971. But what caught my eye in particular was that Molla was also convicted…
Mhamed Krichen/CPJ Board memberThere seems to be no end to American surprises when it comes to Al-Jazeera. The latest was revealed by Der Spiegel, the German weekly news magazine, which reported the U.S. National Security Agency hacked into our internal communications system, according to documents provided by Edward Snowden, the former NSA security analyst.
China’s Internet has changed fundamentally since Shi Tao was given a 10-year prison sentence in 2005. Shi’s case was a marker of sorts— the first high profile sentencing in China for online activity. The government says 40 percent of the population is online as of December 2012. That’s 564 million people. In 2005, penetration was…
Ali Chishti, who writes for The Friday Times, has gone public in Islamabad with details of his abduction and beating last Friday, August 30. Chishti is making the rounds of TV talk shows describing how he was picked up in Karachi by uniformed police driving a police vehicle, blindfolded, switched to another police vehicle, taken…
Another Philippine journalist was killed in a drive-by shooting on Wednesday, bringing to at least six the total slain in the country this year. In none of the cases have police determined whether they were killed because of their work as journalists or for other reasons. The investigations into the cases appear to have gone…
The government of Balochistan, the troubled southwestern province of Pakistan, registered a case against national television news channel ARY on Monday, August 26, after it aired a video clip of the destruction of the residence of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammed Ali Jinnah. The case was filed under Pakistan’s Anti-Terrorist Act of 1997, claiming that airing the…