Censored

The Sudanese weekly Al-Maidan was not issued on February 10, 2009, because of official censorship, Abdul Qadir Muhammad, a reporter for the newspaper told CPJ in an e-mail. Muhammad wrote that the Sudanese security staff responsible for censorship omitted six articles and the banner headline on the front page and at least 10 articles in…

This week in the mountain Kingdom of Swaziland, the state-owned daily Swazi Observer reported that an official has apologized for summarily dismissing a female reporter from Parliament nearly two weeks ago. It was the latest in a controversy sparked by allegations of gender discrimination against Mantoe Phakathi, an award-winning journalist with the private monthly The…

Ever since Radio Kalima staffers launched their new station on January 26, Tunisian plainclothes police have done everything they can to suppress the newly launched satellite radio station: besieging the offices for several days, threatening a managing editor with a knife, and finally breaking into the building and confiscating the equipment.

Algerian police confiscated journalist Mohamed Benchicou’s new manuscript, The Journal a Free Man, from a printing plant in Blida, south of Algiers. In a statement posted on several news Web sites, Benchicou said security forces raided the printer and ordered the director to cease the printing job. The raid came a few days before Algeria…

New York, February 6, 2009–The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Israel to return confiscated news footage of its navy allegedly firing on and boarding a ship on Thursday. Journalists who were on board say they filmed Israeli soldiers assaulting a passenger, and that they were later beaten after their equipment had been confiscated, a…

Thailand’s Internet–once open and free–is fast morphing into one of Asia’s more censored cyberspaces. But a new group of concerned Thai citizens, known as the Thai Netizen Network (TNN), is bidding to turn back the tide of government censorship through advocacy and monitoring. 

The recent cancellation of a radio show hosted by prominent Argentine broadcast journalist Nelson Castro, a harsh critic of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s administration, sparked immediate controversy. Electroingeniería, the company that owns the Buenos Aires-based Radio Del Plata, announced on Friday that the news show “Puntos de Vista” (Points of View), which has been…

Although Israeli military operations have officially come to an end in Gaza, access for journalists has improved only marginally. Despite a December 31 ruling by Israel’s Supreme Court (on the fifth day of military operations) to allow eight journalists to enter Gaza each time the Erez crossing was opened, the government failed to implement the…

Dear Prime Minister Olmert: Since the Israeli military campaign began last month, international journalists have been denied independent access to Gaza. With the declaration of a cease-fire, we urge your government to immediately lift the ban and allow international journalists to independently report on events in Gaza.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has tried to create an image apart from his mentor Vladimir Putin. Medvedev claims to support civil liberties, vows to combat corruption, and likes to speak about press freedom. In his first State of the Nation address last fall, Medvedev said the Internet was a guarantor of press freedom in Russia.